Killing Rommel (21 page)

24

THE ESCARPMENT LOOMS over our heads three hundred feet—not much compared with the mighty coastal cliffs at Sollum and Halfaya, but still damned daunting in the dark with four trucks at the breaking point and men pressed beyond exhaustion. Worse is the cold and wet. The face of the escarpment is like all others in the Jebel—limestone and marine conglomerate, sediment of some ancient sea. Wadis and ravines furrow the cliff, which steps back from base to summit, so that from the bottom you can't see the top. This is good; it means the slope should provide inlets and traverses that our vehicles can take advantage of.

Nick sends Punch and me in the Lancia north along the base of the scarp, seeking a way up. “Don't dawdle,” he says. Half a mile out, Punch spots a natural ascent. I scramble ahead on foot with a spade and a torch; Punch churns at my heels in creeper gear. The Lancia bucks uphill by leaps and lurches. The scream of the winding engine seems as if it must carry for miles. The trail starts as a camel track, narrows to a goat path, then a trace, then nothing. It ends. Back down we go, with me at the wheel in reverse and Punch guiding by shouts. Already the brakes are overheating. I do the last forty feet free-wheeling, bouncing back on to the plain with Punch diving clear amid a storm of profanity.

We try three more tracks till we have to stop to spare the clutch a hundred feet from the top. “This has to be the one,” declares Punch. We don't have the strength to try another. As we start down, red streaks flash across the cliffline; we hear thuds overhead; stones and shingle begin tumbling from above. My first thought is it's wild goats, even wolves.

“That's a bloody gun,” says Punch.

We can see tracers now and the pinpoints of muzzle flashes, far out on the plain below. The enemy haven't halted with nightfall; they've been trailing us, probably by our engine noise.

Back in camp, every man is on his feet with the trucks revved and ready. In the minutes it has taken Punch and me to get back, the enemy have found our lie-up and opened fire with a 20mm and two more MGs. At least three vehicles are out there in the dark, one of them an armoured car. “How far,” Nick says, “to this trail of yours?”

Of course we can't find it. I have marked the site by a limestone notch. Now this landmark refuses to show itself. Tracers, ball and incendiary continue streaking overhead and thumping into the cliff face. Nick calls us together. His idea is to duck our pursuers by bolting back the way we came. But it's too risky, he says, for all four trucks to try. “Who's game for the scarp?”

I look to Collie.

“Hell with it,” he says. Meaning aye.

It violates protocol to split a patrol with only one wireless, but if we stick here together we're done for and there's no chance of four trucks getting up this cliff under fire. Whoever gets away first sends help for the others. “Luck,” says Nick again. Again we touch hands all round.

Nick's trucks fake a runaway north, firing as they go, then cut their guns and beat it south into the dark.

Punch and I find a track that looks like our road and start up. The next five hours are surely the longest of my life, and that of every man in Collie's truck and the Lancia. As soon as we forsake the shelter of the cliff base, the Germans can hear our engines. As the moon ascends they can see us too.

The 20mm they're shelling us with is a Pak anti-aircraft gun, as big as a Breda. It fires cannon shells, not bullets. We start up the cliff with the Lancia in the lead, Punch driving. Oliphant and I scratch ahead on foot; Collie protects the space between the trucks. The trail takes us sixty feet up with no problems, then cuts back to another driveable slope. We can hear the growl of diesels approaching; our pursuers are bringing their guns up slap to the base of the scarp. By now every man we've got except the drivers is out in front with spades and mattocks. Dense brush chokes the route; we hack it away, road-building as we go. Fortune spares us momentarily when a twist in the track puts a shoulder of the slope between us and the 20mm. We're in dead ground. But now we hear the enemy troopers fanning out below, seeking an angle on us from the flank. They've loaded their belts tracer/ball/incendiary; we can see and hear the rounds, in crisp professional bursts, painting the cliff above us. A hundred and fifty feet up, a driveable chimney opens before us, but to get to it, the trucks have to negotiate a sharp zig-zag ascent across a shelf no wider than the trucks themselves and with a 150-foot drop. Punch tries it in the Lancia with me outboard, hanging over the fall. As the Lancia's tyres dig, they tear the ledge away beneath. I can see the shingle spilling below my heel and hear the flat stones banging and clashing as they avalanche down the face. “No good! We'll have to go up this next bit in reverse.”

It takes an hour for the trucks to get round the corner. We can hear German troopers below us, scrambling up the slope on foot. A burst or two from our guns and they think better of that notion. I post Oliphant and Grainger with the Vickers on a shelf where they can give our pursuers a welcome if they keep trying. Up we labour with the trucks. At one point, when the track has half sheared away, we find ourselves with a sand-channel spread across thin air and two men on spades bracing each extremity. The trucks inch into the dead end, then reverse up the slope above. We do this four times, climbing the next sixty feet. Each time we destroy the trail behind us so the enemy can't get vehicles up after us. By now the Germans have set up camp two hundred yards out on the flat and are pasting the hillside with everything they've got. We can hear them clearly. “Come down, friends!” a voice calls in crisp upperclass English. “We have hot broth for you!”

We've reached a shelf notched back from the face, safe for the moment.

“Who are you bloody buggers?” shouts Punch.

“Two Eight Eight Combat Team. Show sense, men, don't throw your lives away!”

Another hour carries us within thirty feet of the summit. Here the trail falls away completely. A twenty-foot chasm gapes. No way round. Do we blow the trucks, continue our flight on foot? Dawn is four hours off; the summit will be plastered by planes at first light. There's only one hope: fill the void with brush, then bridge it with sand-channels.

“There's another way,” says Jenkins. “Show the white flag.”

Curses greet this. But Jenkins, who is no coward, is past caring. “They won't kill us. So we're in a camp? Who cares?”

“That's enough,” I say.

I can see Jenkins is about to make an argument for his case, which in truth is not without merit. In tank clashes throughout the desert campaign, Allied and Axis crews have routinely put their hands in the air when their machines were knocked out and they were cut off from aid. Little if any shame has attached to this. Generals on both sides have hoisted the white hanky; tales are legion of soldiers giving themselves up at one hour, only to have their captors surrender to them in the next when the tide of battle turns.

Tonight is different, though. The idea of giving in, embraced even for a moment, will sap our will and break us before morning. “We'll have no more of that,” I tell Jenkins.

Whether it is something in my voice or eye, I can't say. At once, however, Jenkins backs off. He apologises.

“Forget it,” I say. “Get back to work.”

All hands plunge into the chore of hacking brush and tying it into fascines. I have trained in this technique at Bovington. It's how tanks cross ditches. We bundle tamarisk and acacia into dense kindling-like rolls, then bind the mass with chains and ropes. The job takes hours. Throughout, my mind works. How, after Jenkins' lapse, can I restore the men's trust in him and his belief in himself?

At last the fascines have been wedged into place, sand-channels lashed across the top. The crews stare at their handiwork. A man would have to be mad to drive across this rickety span.

“Jenkins,” I say, “show us the way.”

Jenkins understands. So does everyone. This is not to punish but to redeem.

He mounts the running-board and slips behind the wheel. “Tally-ho!”

And across the gap he zips, as slick as a fox over a fence. The Lancia scurries to solid ground, halts to dig in, then hauls Collie's truck across with the tow chain. In a gang we bowl the fascines back down the slope so our pursuers can't use them to follow us once we're gone. On the summit, Collie and Punch pound Jenkins' back in congratulation. Oliphant and Grainger climb up from their rear guard post. We can hear the enemy below, still wooing us to surrender.

Collie stands at the brink with the Vickers. “Who wants a go?” He means shoot down.

No takers.

The men are too tired and too relieved to find themselves still alive and uncaptured.

25

WE HAVE HOPED that the summit will prove easy going, but from the first fifty yards the trucks find themselves entangled in dense acacia and tamarisk. Both plants are tough and pulpy, impossible to hack through without keen axes, so that the men have no choice but to open what slender breaches they can with spades and their own shoulders, then bowl through by the push of the trucks. Progress is heartbreakingly slow, made even more frustrating because the man-high brush keeps us from seeing more than a few yards ahead. Again and again the trucks plunge into unseen creases. Even a shallow trench, a 2-footer, produces a frame-walloping crash that hammers our already battered tie-rods, steering boxes, axles, sumps and undercarriages. Blunder into one of these pits sideways and the whole truck careens, necessitating a mad rush by all hands to save her from upending. To compound our ills, both Collie's truck and my Lancia now begin torturing us with minor breakdowns. Collie's engine overheats; we spend twenty minutes checking radiator, belts and hoses before discovering the stuck-closed thermostat. We pull it out and chuck it entirely. Next, the water pump fails on my Lancia; it has to be patched together, at the cost of half an hour.

The race is against daylight, not only to outstrip the Macchis and Messerschmitts that our friends in 288 will surely have called down on us for first light, but also to put miles between ourselves and the German armoured cars and motorised infantry working round the escarpment (which we know they will be doing because in their place we surely would) to beat us to the other side. They can't come over the summit unless they find another way up, so thoroughly have we wrecked our ascent behind us—and if they do somehow, they'll be thrashing through the same brush that's frustrating our progress. Suddenly, more bad luck. After a mile or two of terrific labour, we hear the strangling sound of Collie's engine sucking dry. We've burned miles of fuel, just mounting the scarp. I call a pow-wow. “All right. Who's got what?”

In the desert every vehicle holds out its secret cache of juice. Punch and I have a full jerry can tucked behind the spare wheel. Collie coughs up another. Oliphant contributes two litres, stashed amongst his POL tins. We pool this reserve and press on.

Every man is exhausted. Nobody speaks. Yet our spirits remain strong. I discover a new capacity in myself. Without a word I can sense my comrades' state of mind. I feel the group's breaking point, individually and collectively, and my own as well. Have I at last become a commander? The elements of time, terrain and weather—I seem to know, almost without thought, whether they will be working for or against us. I can gauge how long machines can carry on before they fail, or men before they crack. And I can sense their reserves, and my own, beyond that point. I can even, I realise with gratification, perceive the wider field—the theatre, the campaign, the war itself. As our patrol hacks its way across the summit plain, I grasp, despite the real and immediate peril to ourselves, that the greater enemy is on the run. Rommel himself and all of Panzerarmee Afrika are withdrawing before Montgomery's advance. This will do us of T3 patrol no good, of course, if we are killed or captured.

Still, I am at peace. Never have I felt so fully used or so at one with my companions. Not a patch of glory attaches to our endeavours in this hour. We crawl like beetles, marking progress not in miles but feet. Nor am I “leading” in any way that the military manuals would recognise or commend. I'm just slogging miserably beside the others. But we are one, each giving his all. I catch a second wind, and I feel my brothers-in-arms catch theirs too.

By first light we have reached the western fall of the escarpment, which remains thankfully in deep shadow. Collie's brakes have packed up, so we simply wrestle the truck down the slope, tow-chained to the Lancia, whose own drums have worn to bare metal and screech every yard of the way. By eight, we have reached the bottom and snugged the trucks down in the deepest wadi we can find. The fellows weave brush and netting into masterpieces of camouflage, then collapse, all except the lookouts I post in one-hour aircraft watches. All day, enemy Storches and 110s scour the area but fail to spot us. At last with dark we give way to sleep. Surely nothing else can go wrong, at least till morning.

26

I HEAR a roar and feel the earth break apart beneath me. Something cold and fierce jerks me awake. A gale howls. Am I dreaming? I hear Punch shout from up the slope, but his words are torn away in the wind. Then I see the flood.

The shock wave of air preceding it bowls me off my sleeping perch. In an instant, the foliage I have used as a mattress is sucked away, along with my Thompson, blankets and tarpaulin. Collie's truck is lifted like a toy. It shoots past me upside-down and is swept from sight in the dark.

I'm half-naked, scrambling frantically up the face of the wadi. Directly below, I hear the Lancia cartwheeling away on the surface of the flood. Oliphant and Collie have been sleeping in it. Jenkins too. I can't see them. I'm climbing hand over hand. The torrent howls, inches beneath my heels. It's tearing the bank out from under me. Punch catches me by one arm. Boulders and rafts of brush boom past beneath our feet. I realise that this is a flash flood. That's why there's no rain. Storms in another part of the Jebel have produced this torrent while we, here, have remained dry and unalerted.

In minutes the worst is over. It's remarkable how quickly your courage returns, the instant you know you're safe. Punch, Grainger and I have clambered on to a solid shelf. With each second, the fury-sound of the waters recedes. The torrent, whose depth has been twenty feet, shrinks to ten, five, then a very rapidly moving three or four. We are high, if not dry. Sections of slope continue to fall away beneath us into the still-churning flood. “Collie! Oliphant!” We cry our comrades' names into the dark.

Now the rain comes, a frigid, drenching deluge in which the three of us hunker, mute and shivering. The scale of the calamity overwhelms us. What can we do?

Flood depth has dropped to three feet, still a wickedly lethal torrent. Our first imperative is to find any of our companions still alive and bring aid to those who have been hurt. Jenkins appears, preceded by a shout; then Oliphant, sluicing down the face, as mud-sodden and frozen as we are. His left knee is hurt but he claims it's nothing serious. We take stock of our resources: two coats and three blankets; one .303 Enfield with no ammunition but the six rounds in the single magazine that happened to be in the rifle when the flood struck; two one-litre water bottles. I've still got my rucksack, which I had lent to Punch to use as a pillow; it holds a shirt and a pair of trousers, along with Stein's manuscript and the remnants of my much-thumbed reading materials. The patrol's pooled resources now consist of two tins of sardines, half a handful of boiled sweets, a fountain pen and two bayonets. Grainger still has his watch. We have no map, no tea, no electric torch, no Verey pistol. We are missing two men.

An hour has passed since the flood. Time is 0320. Our party starts downstream, spread out in a skirmish line, calling Collie's and Marks' names. Snakes glide across the knee-high surface. They are as frightened of us as we are of them. Though the waters have receded to wading depth, the volume of the flood has produced pockets of quicksand. Into these we sink again and again; a cry and we haul one another out. A quarter of a mile down, we come upon Marks, alive, but with both legs so battered from the pummelling he has taken in the flood that he cannot stand, although it turns out no bones are broken. He's also taken a blow to the skull, possibly from a log or boulder, which has peeled the scalp back in a flap the size of a man's hand, exposing the bare bone. The wound bleeds profusely. Marks is in shock and shivering convulsively. We carry him on to dry land and warm him between our bodies, taking turns. Jenkins, who has replaced Miller as our medical orderly, gently draws the flap of scalp back into place and binds it down with a web belt. “If we can find one of the trucks,” he says, “it'll have a first-aid box with thread and a needle.” Jenkins volunteers to stay. I leave him with Oliphant to keep Marks warm; the rest of us push on.

A hundred yards downstream we find Collie's truck. The vehicle lies on its left side, sunk so deep that the only parts visible are the rear axle and the tyre mount behind the driver's door. Everything else is submerged in muck and brush, which has built up so thickly and in such a jumble, it's a miracle we discover the truck at all. I climb aboard via the axle. Every item of kit that was in the truckbed—guns, ammo, petrol and water tins—has been carried away. We call Collie's name. Nothing. The first-aid box remains in place. I send Oliphant back to Marks and Jenkins with it. Punch, Grainger and I push on along the wadi bottom.

Daylight. We still haven't found Collie. Back at the wreck of the truck, Oliphant and Jenkins have got Marks settled out of the wet, swathed in what clothing and blankets they've been able to retrieve. Jenkins has stitched Marks' scalp, but the poor fellow tosses miserably, shivering and semi-conscious. Oliphant's injured knee has swollen; he can barely hobble. We scratch out a camp above any potential flood line. When Marks recovers enough to speak, he can't stop apologising. He begs to be left behind; he can't stand the thought, he says, of his condition's putting his mates in danger. “Shut the hell up,” Grainger commands him in a voice exquisitely tender.

I call a council. “No one's leaving anyone,” I say. We have found two jerry cans of petrol and a tin of matches; between them it's enough to get a fire going, even of soaked driftwood. The risk of smoke has to be taken; we'll freeze to death without a blaze to dry our clothes and blankets. We have no billy and no tea. Punch produces two almost-dry cigarettes; we get one lit and share it amongst all. “No hogging it, you blokes!” It is the most satisfying smoke any of us has ever had.

The final fallback plan imparted by Nick Wilder before his departure was to rendezvous at Bir Hemet on the track to Augila oasis. I go over this now with the men. “We'll rest for the morning and dry out our kit. Punch and I will keep looking for Collie. In the afternoon we'll take one shot at digging out the truck. If it's hopeless, we'll sleep the night and start on foot to RV with Wilder's patrol as planned.”