CREDERE, OBBEDIRE, COMBATTERE
“Believe, obey, fight.”
In the European quarter, pastel villas can be glimpsed with
CIVILIAN
painted on their courtyard walls. Roadsides out of town are littered with wrecked lorries and gun tractors. We detour to the harbour, reckoning that’s where the loot is. There’s a handsome hotel with its loggia blown in. Broken-up cabin chairs pave a street; water taps don’t work. There’s no power. On lawns before cottages lie gashed-open mattresses, trampled lamps, punched-through wicker.
On the main drag beside the prefettura stands the shell of a cinema. A Tom Mix western is playing in German. We probe down jacaranda-lined lanes. Punch spots some kind of cloister: a convent, abandoned and unransacked. Maybe the enemy have spared it out of respect for the sisters. We break open the iron gate by backing the tailboard into it and enter, standing by all guns. Punch parks beneath a statue of the Virgin. I send him and our new fitter Jenkins to find us a kitchen with some grub or a garden where we might dig up the odd carrot or potato. Collie takes Oliphant and Miller, our Yorkshire-born medical orderly, to check some buildings at the back. If there’s an infirmary we’ll grab dressings and medicine. I stay with Grainger and the others on the trucks. We’re wary. I watch Miller disappear into a courtyard off a colonnade. “Watch for booby traps!”
He reappears almost at once, waving us forward. With Collie and Oliphant, we poke into the court. At the base of a wall lies a tangle of bodies. The stucco behind them has been stitched by bullets.
“Italians,” says Miller. He checks the corpses while the rest of us cover rooflines and lanes of approach.
“Looters, you reckon?” asks Oliphant.
Collie thinks they’re deserters. “More likely blokes who tried to piss off.” The men’s boots have been taken, probably by native youths; the corpses are all in stocking feet.
“That’s enough,” I say. “Move out.”
The convent’s refectory and infirmary have been rifled. Sacks of grain sag, knifed open; wine bottles and china have been smashed; contents of cabinets strewn over the floor, paraffin poured over them. We locate the sacristy; Punch searches through lockers. “What the hell are you looking for?” Jenkins calls.
Punch surfaces with a bottle. “Blood of Christ,” he grins.
Towns are hell on discipline. We’ve only been here an hour and we’re already turning into tourists and pillagers. Time to clear out. I get us started up one of the wadi roads that lead to the good Italian-built bypass. Packs of Arab urchins swarm about our vehicles, begging for cigarettes and chocolate.
Abandoned farms and villas dot the hillsides out of town. The place looks like Italy. On hilltops you see red-tiled roofs and whitewashed walls. Everything is deserted. The farms are fortified compounds, with iron gates and pillboxes with gun embrasures.
Turning up the Martuba track, Collie spies a sedan approaching from the east. I get both our trucks off the road, sited to engage it. The car sees us and brakes in the middle of the road, five hundred yards out. Collie puts the binos on it.
“I’ll be damned,” he says.
“What?”
“Journalists.”
Through my new German glasses I see pink faces and war correspondent uniforms.
“What are they doing?”
“Arguing.”
I have Grainger stand and wave a tin hat. Immediately we spot white handkerchiefs. The reporters have had us in their sights too. “Canadian! South African!” they shout as their saloon pulls up on the road alongside us. The vehicle turns out to be an ancient Humber, loaded with newspaper and radio correspondents joy-riding out from Eighth Army at freshly liberated Tobruk.
“Are you buggers daft?” calls Punch. “The Jerries are only five miles up the road!”
The newsmen pile from three of the four doors (only the driver, a local, stays put), shaking our hands and declaring their delight at running into us. Each then makes for a different quadrant of the roadside, where he unbuttons and looses an exuberant stream. It’s four in the afternoon and they’re all pie-eyed. The Humber is a taxi. One of the correspondents hired it this morning, we are told; his colleagues piled in, determined not to let him beat them to a story. When the gang encountered no enemy, they kept pushing west. Now here there are, sixty miles in front of the forwardmost Allied outpost. I ask if any of them carries a weapon.
“Just this,” says one, hoisting a half-bottle of brandy.
It isn’t funny. The safety of these swashbucklers has now become my responsibility. I order them to follow us off the road, where they and we are less likely to get jumped by the Luftwaffe. Except one of our fellows has in the meantime blabbed about the massacre in the convent. The correspondents want to see it. I forbid this. The dean of the outfit turns out to be Don Munro of the CBC. I’ve heard of him. He is known as an outstanding reporter. “What,” I ask, “are you doing with these mad bandits?”
I can’t turn our guests loose unescorted; they’ll wind up captured or shot. If I order them back to Tobruk, they’ll just wait till our trucks are out of sight, then carry on as they please. We certainly can’t keep them with us. From our beards and vehicles they know who we are; if we offer up the first clue about where we’re heading, the story will be on the air by tomorrow’s tea.
In the end we invite them to supper. They’ve got a quarter-wheel of Reggiano cheese, liberated from an ice locker, with prosciutto and sweet sausage. “It’ll go bad,” Munro says, “if we don’t enjoy it.”
I’ll give the reporters this: they know how to booze. Even without women, they crank up a spirited binge. I won’t let them take over an abandoned farm, as they wish; it’s more bad discipline. Instead I make them camp with us in the hills, in a position we can defend, with no fires after nightfall. From them I extract a promise that in return for our protection tonight they’ll return to Tobruk tomorrow. When the sun goes down, our guests’ bravado wears off. They’re happy to huddle beneath our trucks and let us stand watch over them.
The correspondents turn out to be decent fellows. One of them, a South African named Van der Brucke, has a VC from the Great War. He was a cavalryman, his companions tell us. He owns his own newspaper now in Durban and could have happily stayed there, he says, filing stories off the wire.
“But I couldn’t do it. The thought of boys like you out here haunted me.” Collie and Punch have gathered; something about the veteran draws them. He was a major, he says. Collie invites him to stay on. “We could use you.”
It’s a jest, of course, and the South African knows it. He chokes up anyway. “I’d die happy alongside men like you.” He tells me I’m a good officer but too slack. “You should’ve lit us up back there on the road.” How did I know, he asks, that he and the others weren’t German agents?
Later I share a mug of tea with the Canadian, Munro. He’s sober now and a bit chastened. He wants to help. He makes me spread out my map and, shielding an electric torch with the wing of his jacket, walks me over it. “Monty expects no fight at Tripoli,” he says. “The place can be flanked via the Jebel Nefusa; Rommel might make a demonstration, but he’ll fall back to here.” Munro taps a spot west of Medenine in Tunisia. “The Mareth Line.”
“Stop a second,” I say. “Let me fetch my sergeant and a couple of others.”
When Collie, Punch, Oliphant and Grainger arrive, Munro continues. He tells us about the Mareth Line. It was built by the French in the last war to keep the Italians out of Tunisia. No one knows exactly how many defensive emplacements it’s got, how big its guns are, or how deep its minefields. “But it’s serious business. Forty miles end to end, blocking the gap between the sea and the mountains. If Rommel digs in behind that line with 15th and 21st Panzer divisions, 90th Light Division, with the Italian Ariete and Centauro armoured divisions and the Folgore paratroopers—not to mention the reinforcements in armour and aircraft that Hitler is sure to ferry over in such an emergency—a raft of our fellows are going to get
their tickets punched trying to push him out.”
Munro can tell from our expressions that this is news to us.
“Look,” he says, “we all know who you fellows are and why you’re here. I was having a beer with your boss Guy Prendergast the day he sent Tinker and Popski out after you. No one knows where Wilder and Easonsmith went last month, so I assume they’re with you or you with them.”
We’re impressed.
“I can see from your faces,” Munro says, “that you don’t yet have orders for the Mareth Line. But you will.”
On the map he indicates the rugged country south of the Mareth Line—the Jebel Nefusa—and southwest the Grand Erg Oriental, an unmapped sand sea as vast as the Egyptian. “Monty can’t wade into that mess head-on. Some lucky bastards are going to get the job of scouting a way round for him. A left hook. That’s Tinker and Popski’s job now, is my guess.”
“Or ours soon?”
“All I’m saying is don’t start counting the days till you’re sipping John Collinses on the terrace at Shepheard’s. You lads’ll be out here till the show’s over.”
Next morning we give Munro our mail to deliver to Eighth Army. I have twenty-seven letters for Rose. Munro promises to phone her in Haifa, if not look her up in person, and assure her that I’m well.
The last thing that happens on our way out of town is we capture an Italian. More accurately, the fellow accosts us where the Derna road joins the Martuba bypass and won’t take no till we accept his surrender. He’s about forty, obviously an unwilling conscript, barefoot now and terrified, which leads Punch to speculate he’s a deserter who somehow escaped a firing squad. By signs the fellow assures us he’s an expert Fiat mechanic, but when we hoist the bonnet on Te Aroha IV, his eyes pop as if he’s never seen an engine in his life. At noon we halt and signal Cairo for instructions. Get rid of him, they say. They also tell us the attempt on Rommel’s life at Benghazi is off, as is our assignment of reporting on enemy traffic on the settlement roads. Instead we are to rendezvous in three days with Nick Wilder and Major Mayne at Bir el Gamra in the Jebel southeast of Benina. We will receive new orders there.
We drop the Italian off three miles from an Arab encampment with a quart bottle of Pellegrino and a forage cap stuffed with cheese and ham. “Bloody hell,” says Collie, watching the fellow recede over our tailboard, “that’s the sorriest excuse for a soldier I’ve ever seen.”
Book Five
Benina
22
WE’RE MOVING, lights out, down the new bitumened road that runs from Benina to the Benghazi–Solluch rail line. It’s night and raining. Two thousand yards north, Nick and Major Mayne’s trucks and jeeps are advancing to raid the Axis air facility at Benina. My two trucks—with Collie, Grainger, Marks and Jenkins on one; myself, Punch, Oliphant and Miller on the other—are prowling towards an L-junction, where we will set up to cover their withdrawal. Already I can feel the whole show running queer.
Benina is an airfield and repair facility. Round the port of Benghazi are other satellite fields including Regima and two at Berka.
GHQ has determined that the most effective use of our joint patrols’ remaining firepower will be not against enemy personnel—i.e., Rommel—but against his aircraft and aircraft workshops. This is the type of job the SAS and LRDG are set up for. So our orders have been changed to raid Benina.
As for our two-truck party, mine and Collie’s, we have crossed from Derna in three nights, brazening it out on the good metalled road past Beda Littoria and D’Annunzio, descending the escarpment at Maddalena, then following the El Abiar railway cross-country southwest towards Benghazi on the coast. The second scarp, above the city, drops down within five miles of Benina, which is visible in daylight across a plain that would be planted in season with maize and melons but is now mud, criss-crossed by sloughs and silted-up irrigation ditches.
Rain is heavy and cold. With no roof or windscreen, we’re drenched. Temperature has plunged to the forties. The guns are soaked, even under their canvas covers. I’m driving. The steering wheel with its grip ridges is handleable, but the steel pedals of the brake and clutch are both slick beneath my soles.
We’re waiting to hear the first explosions. I’ve got a bad feeling. Rotten luck has plagued this operation since we started. Half a day out of Derna, Te Aroha IV began flooding and stalling; for two nights we’ve fought shorts in the electrical system, and the patches and bypasses we’ve rigged are not being helped by this rain. We’re on our second and only spare propeller shaft, whose splines are already chattering. The list of ills for Collie’s truck is just as long. At the same time our medical orderly, Miller, has come down with a fever of unknown origin. He’s keen, but his hearing has been seriously impaired by the malady; he keeps drifting off mentally; twice he has called men by the wrong name, though he knows them as well as brothers by now. Collie has not fully recovered from his burns; he can hold himself together during the day, but at night his body-warmth flees so fast that I can’t call on him to stand a watch; all he can do is wrap up in everything he owns and endure till the sun rises. The rest of us are afflicted by all the predictable ailments and inflammations of skin, bowels and stomach that assault men who’ve been too long away from fresh vegetables, clean sheets and decent medical care.
Nick and Major Mayne’s journey has been as ill-starred as ours. Mayne’s outfit were jumped by Macchi 202s two days ago, descending the escarpment east of Solluch. The planes shot up three of his four vehicles. Casualties are two dead and two wounded, and though both injured fellows have been patched back to fighting trim, the loss of a pair of good men is devastating in such a small and tightly knit unit.
As for Nick Wilder, a sandstorm separated his patrol from Mayne’s the day they set out. Groping blind, one truck has pitched headlong down a forty-foot wadi. Illness and mechanical breakdowns have stripped T1 of another 30-hundredweight and four other men. By the time my Chev and Collie’s link with what’s left of Nick’s and Mayne’s outfits at Saunnu oasis, our new rendezvous and fallback point, the combined force is down to nine vehicles, four of which are jeeps, and twenty-two men.
Our outfit is creeping down the dark tarmac now, seeking the L-junction. The road turns left there, according to the map—towards the airfield. Nick’s trucks took this route thirty minutes ago. When they’ve lit the field up, they’ll bolt back this same way. Our job is to cover their withdrawal.
But where’s the L? It’s supposed to be half a mile but we’ve covered twice that and seen nothing. We pass a sign COLONIA ESPARZA. It’s on our maps, just past the junction. Have we overshot it?
Suddenly from the west: an explosion. We strain, waiting for the fireball. It never comes. A second blast goes up and, moments later, a third. We’re expecting alarms and searchlights. But there’s nothing.
“What the hell’s going on?”
We keep going. Another mile. There’s the road-crossing. I roll through and turn left; Collie’s truck follows.
But the junction is a T, not an L. There’s no T on the map. Collie and I meet each other’s eyes. The night is freezing but we’re both sweating. Are we lost?
“Kill the engines,” I say.
We listen. Nothing. Suddenly the whole airfield goes up. Yellow fireballs wallop skywards, followed by massive, ground-shuddering explosions. We can hear machine-gun fire and see green and red tracers zinging in all directions. More minutes pass. Suddenly headlights appear, speeding towards us from the direction of the airfield. Our two trucks have taken up positions flanking the road, partially covered behind sand berms. We’re expecting Nick’s jeep and trucks to come racing out of the darkness.
Instead we hear the growl of diesels and the whap-whap of steel tracks on the tarmac. Three tanks churn past, an Italian M-13 and two Mark III Panzers. They don’t see us. They turn right and rumble off, down the road we came in on. They’re the first tanks I’ve seen since Cairo. I’m astounded at how huge they are and how terrifying. As soon as they pass, Collie and
Grainger scurry to me. We can hear more diesels and see more headlights approaching.
“This road,” says Collie, “is starting to lose its charm.”
We reverse farther back from the junction, seeking a spot from which we can cover all approaches but that won’t leave us so visible. The trucks haven’t gone fifty yards before my rear tyres nearly plunge into a six-foot-deep irrigation ditch. We’re in melon and maize fields. I can see no way round the ditch. It’s too deep to cross. We probe along its verges, seeking a culvert or crossover, but the muck we’re driving through builds up so thickly on our tyres that we have to halt and scrape it off with spades. We can see headlights approaching from east and west. Suddenly a voice in Italian challenges us from the darkness.
Punch cocks the Browning. At once we hear the frantic overturning of mess tins, punctuated by furious Latin profanity.
“Fire!”
Punch lets loose. It’s a thousand to one, hitting anything in this ink, but as always the din of the gun vaults us sky-high with adrenalin. When Punch cuts his burst, we can hear footfalls receding into the distance.
“That’ll give the Wops some exercise,” says Punch.
We inch back towards the road. On the airfield, more bombs are going off. The buildings are hangars and repair facilities. The explosives will either have been detonated on delay-fuses, so that Nick’s and Major Mayne’s trucks may be fleeing or long gone by now, or both raiding parties may still be on the field, planting explosives as they go.
Either way, we can’t stay here. The Italians we have just stumbled upon may have a radio to call for help; they may signal by Verey flare or even recover their nerve and come back to snipe at us or to lob the wicked little grenades they call “red devils.”