Killing Rommel (22 page)

27

MIDDAY: PUNCH AND I find Collie and the Lancia. Both have been swept a mile down the wadi. Collie is suffering from exposure but he revives fast with the sight of his comrades and the warmth of the two dry blankets we have brought from the fire. He has survived the night under dirt and brush in an actual foxhole, having evicted the foxes. As for the Lancia, it lies upright, buried to its axles in smooth mud, with two tyres intact and two shredded.

I send Punch back to collect Marks and the others and to salvage what he can from the wreckage of Collie's truck. The vehicle itself is past repairing. By mid-afternoon all who are fit have made two trips, recovering three jerry cans of fuel and an armload of hoses, belts and fittings. The patrol assembles round the Lancia. A freezing rain has started; about three hours of daylight remain. We dig the vehicle out and manhandle it on to dry ground. Chocolate-coloured sludge sluices from every runway. “Kick her over, Skip,” says Grainger. For the hell of it, I try. She fires immediately! I find myself weeping. Others jig and pound one another's backs. The engine stalls, but nobody cares. If she'll spark once, she'll do it again.

The party passes the night in a freezing huddle, then turns-to at first light. For tools we have only two fixed spanners and a single adjustable. No screwdrivers, no socket or plug spanners, no Allen keys, calipers or points. We have no tools to pull the head or replace it, no gaskets or material to fabricate them from, no tyre irons, no levers, no pump and no spare inner tubes, valves or wheel braces to remove or replace wheel nuts. We have motor oil and petrol. We have water.

The most pressing issue is care for the wounded. Oliphant's knee is looking worse; Collie's burns, which have re-opened in the flood, are tormenting him; Marks' condition continues to deteriorate. The Lancia has to carry them. Grainger will be our navigator. He estimates Bir Hemet at seventy miles south by west. Walking and trucking the wounded, we might make it in three nights. But to navigate you must know your starting position; we can only guess at ours. The desert we must cross is cut by
balats
and seasonal mudflats that we'll have to square round, with no map and no means of shooting the stars or sun. It will take incredible luck to strike our objective, and if we overrun it we'll have no way of knowing. Even if we get there, nothing guarantees that Nick Wilder's patrol will be waiting.

I think this but don't say it.

Everyone else, I imagine, is thinking it too.

All day the men toil, first disconnecting, flushing and drying all fuel, air and water lines; laboriously reconnecting their clamps using a bayonet point for a screwdriver; then cleaning and reassembling all pumps. Two desert foxes watch from a nearby outcrop. Their coats are the colour of sand, their brushes thin and scruffy. Half a dozen times the cry of “Aircraft!” sends us scurrying. The foxes never budge. Each time, the enemy planes pass over.

We decide to name the spot Two Foxes. We'll put it on the map when we get back. This cheers us considerably.

The law of the Perversity of Physical Objects continues to frustrate us. Everything that can go wrong, does. During the flood the backing plate of the Lancia's differential has cracked open, exposing the innards, caking the gear train with sand and mud, and of course draining all fluid. Somehow Punch succeeds in sealing and rebolting it. But what can we use for lubrication? From a spiny cactus, we scrape the inner goo. Banana skins have been known to serve; perhaps this will too. Meanwhile Oliphant has taken the carburettor apart, picking out sand and sludge speck by speck. Jenkins works on the brake lines.

By nightfall we've sorted out everything but the tyres. Only two still hold air. Grainger supplies a trick he used on tractors back home: stuff them with brush. It works. Except now, removing the right front wheel housing, Grainger discovers the axle is broken. We have no spares. By now it's too dark to work. Suddenly our spectating foxes rise on their haunches and trot away. We hear growls in the distance.

Diesels.

Combat Group 288 returns.

We net the Lancia and deploy ourselves into a perimeter. The Germans approach in two parties, scouring the wadis as they go. Clearly our pursuers know we can have fled in only one direction and can have got only so far. We can see the beams of their torches and headlights, discovering Collie's truck a mile back up the wadi. Is the game up? Is this it at last?

Darkness saves us, followed by a fresh downpour. Our fellows crouch miserably, hearing the enemy hastening to rig their own shelters and bivvies. The foe pitch camp parallel to ours and a quarter of a mile out on to the flat, safely clear of the flood zone.

They haven't spotted us.

For the moment we're safe.

But Marks' state is getting desperate. Fever racks him. He thinks the voices from the German camp are ghosts of lost mates. He calls their names. Punch muffles him with a hand over the mouth but Marks, made frantic by this, gurgles louder and thrashes, trying to work free. Collie crosses swiftly to him, presses one palm over Marks' mouth and cracks him hard with the other fist—a solid shot, right between the eyes. Marks gags, blinks, then comes to himself. He shuts up. Collie cradles him, gently as a babe. “My old man used to work that trick on me all the time.”

Rain abates, succeeded by a cold northerly gale. Our pursuers have set up their camp snug and tight. We can see the light of their fires, hear their laughter and smell their potatoes and sausages frying. I have assigned men in pairs to warm Marks with their bodies. When Grainger and my turn comes, our companion is shivering convulsively. Grainger's eyes search mine.

Shall we surrender?

The enemy may have a doctor or a medical orderly; for certain they have vehicles that can carry Marks to aid. They are not monsters; they will help.

Is this war?

War is formations of armour, men and machines clashing in action. That's not this. We're just frightened, freezing men struggling to keep a comrade alive. “Marks…” I say.

“Don't do it,” he answers.

Grainger and I press him more tightly between us. “Don't be such a damn hero,” says Grainger.

There are moments for which no amount of training can prepare one. A man's life against a notion of honour. Who am I, at twenty-two years old, to make such a decision, to risk everything a man possesses or ever will possess, his wife, his children, their lives and future, against an abstract principle whose merit I am no more capable of gauging than he?

Two days ago I was moments from reaching for my sidearm when Jenkins dared broach the prospect of showing the white flag. Now I don't care. Victory or defeat will come willy-nilly, determined by forces far greater than our meagre mob. What matters now is this good man's life. I can save him with a simple shout into the dark. And if I don't? Shall we bury Marks at dawn, to join Standage and Miller, to be followed tomorrow by how many others of thirst or starvation, including myself?

But I can't do it.

“Can you hang on, Marksy?”

At dawn, our pursuers break camp. They perform a desultory search of the wadi, finding nothing, then form up round their lieutenant for final orders before departure. Shall I hail them? I see them plainly from my perch on the slope.

I let them go.

Our fellows emerge like foxes from their dens. We look like death. Collie's eyes meet mine. He has been thinking the same thing. Are we fools?

Hot water and biscuits do nothing to restore us, but Grainger overnight has hatched a ploy to get the Lancia moving again.

“Strip the front axle and rig a sledge in its place. A couple of logs lashed together will do, like the tail skid of an airplane. Then run in reverse. It won't be pretty,” he says, “but it'll carry the wounded and water.”

No one congratulates Grainger. His comrades just touch his shoulder or clap him lightly on the back as they get to work.

We rig a platform that Marks and Oliphant can be carried on. Collie wedges himself into the passenger seat. Punch drives. The advantage of having only the Lancia is that we're less likely to be spotted from the air. We keep two men up front on lookout for 288 and one in the rear scouring the sky. We walk for an hour, rest for fifteen minutes. After three hours, we stop for a bite and the last cig. Bir Hemet, if we reach it, will be the morning after next.

By mid-afternoon we have crossed the
balats
and entered a stony belt scored by limestone ridges in spectacular shapes. At one point our tyres crunch over a sward of shells, relics of some ancient sea floor.

We're seeing Arabs now—small groups at first, then longer trains on foot and camel. They're miles off and come no closer. The pan has become dead level between distant ranges of hills. Surely the tribesmen have seen us. But they make no move to approach. When we strike in their direction, they withdraw. Are they only being cautious, or do they harbour evil designs? The Germans will surely have posted rewards for our capture, or threats of reprisal for furnishing us aid.

All day our party struggles towards the range of hills in the distance. This will be the Gilf Atar, the highland we must get round to strike the track to Bir Hemet. When we find solid going, we send the Lancia ahead, as fast as it can go. This is only three or four miles per hour but it cheers us. The hills crawl closer. By dark, the Lancia has reached them.

When the rest of us in the walking party straggle in two hours later, Marks, Oliphant, Collie and Punch are resting snugly in a cave above the ruins of a Roman cistern with good water in abundance. I call the men round. Bir Hemet may be as close as forty miles. Shall we leave the wounded here with the weapons and the less strong men, while two or three of the ablest strike for the RV tonight on the Lancia?

We're debating this when three tribesmen appear on the plain below, on foot, leading a train of four camels. They return our hails; apparently they are heading for this same cave. Up they come. When Punch asks whether they have goat's milk or eggs to sell, the tallest, a striking fellow, asks, “Inglesi?”

“English, mate!” cries Punch. He begins blathering the names of every officer and patrol leader who might have crossed this patch of desolation, Wilder, Easonsmith, Mayne, Tinker, finally getting to Vladimir Peniakoff. Popski.

At this, all three tribesmen light up. They know Popski. They love Popski. It was their honour, they report, to have broken bread with Popski two nights past.

Book Six

Wilder's Gap

28

TWENTY DAYS LATER I'm standing at attention in borrowed khaki drill trousers and tunic before a staff colonel and two majors at Advanced Headquarters Eighth Army, now at Marble Arch on the Gulf of Sirte, having been flown via Zella from Jalo oasis. Tinker, Popski and Nick Wilder have been brought in from other quadrants. Tinker and I are interviewed together before even being permitted to file our reports to LRDG, then ordered immediately into hospital.

My bowels have been running liquid for the past two weeks. Amid far greater exigencies, I have simply endured the inconvenience, reckoning that my system will restore itself as soon as it acquires a few fresh vegetables. Now a friendly South African doctor gives me the diagnosis: pneumonia.

“You're a sick fellow, Chapman.” He shows me my chart:

Bacterial pneumonia (acute); bruised ribs and sternum; numerous ulcerated desert sores; possible malaria; possible worms.

I am stacked in a tent ward and pumped full of chalk and penicillin. My temperature, which the orderly won't tell me but which I read later on my chart, is 104. I have lost all my kit at Jalo, including the rucksack with my diary and Stein's manuscript. Where am I? What has happened?

After Popski's Arabs find us at the cistern cave, they lead us to rendezvous with Tinker's T2 patrol at Bat el Agar, a complex of caverns west of the line of
balats
. Popski is there. Nick Wilder, he tells us, has got clear of our friends from Combat Group 288. His trucks are on their way to Landing Ground 125, an emergency evacuation strip in the desert south of Msus. Another LRDG patrol, under Lieutenant Bernard Bruce, appears that evening. Bruce is a wonderfully bawdy chap, who stands somewhere in line to become Lord Elgin and must, by the dictates of title protocol, file his reports not as “Lieutenant” but as “Lieutenant the Honourable.” He takes Marks aboard a truck evacuating his own wounded to Jalo oasis, now in British hands, from which an air ambulance will fly the men to hospital in Benghazi, also under a newly hoisted Union Jack. The rest of us will have to sit tight; Bruce can spare no other transport. “Besides, thanks to your efforts,” he declares, “the desert is lousy with Jerry patrols.” We can file reports, though. I put in Collie, Punch and Grainger for mentions in despatches.

For ten days our group lies up in caves out of the rain, waiting for transport to get clear. I have never been sicker. The Arabs succour us—generously, considering their own poor state—on eggs, dates and sour goat's milk with wild thyme, none of which I can keep down. Every ounce of fluid flushes from my body, leaving me limp as a stalk and burning with fever.

Collie nurses me through frightful dreams. I see Stein, dead on his sand-channel, and my mother in her barge. I see the Italians we massacred. This apparition is so real, complete with the stink of cordite and the banging of the guns, that my comrade has to shake me for seconds even after I'm awake. I'm seeing Standage and Miller too, our own dead. I keep apologising to them. They brush me off. “It's nothing, Chap,” they say.

Each night we move camp. Popski's Arabs guide us. My guts are in a twist the whole time. We can travel only in darkness, which is freezing, with wet gales that knife through every blanket and rag you bundle round yourself. We slog afoot or on trucks for what feels like hours, only to end up in another dank grotto stinking of goat droppings and camel dung. Every cell in my body aches. Never have I been more excruciatingly aware of this physical envelope that is the flesh. How I long to escape it! How can one be so cold and so hot at the same time?

On the tenth night, three trucks of a patrol led by a Lieutenant Birdwood (who himself is absent, recce-ing west) arrive and take us out. Collie, Punch and I are piled together on to the bed of their fitter's truck. The sergeant in command is named Chapman like me. There's a dressing station at Jalo, he tells us, under Captain Lawson. Chapman turns out to be a BBC buff; he has all the latest news. Eighth Army has taken Derna and Benghazi. Hurricanes of the RAF and the Royal South Africans are flying now out of Benina, the field where we shot up the Italians only, what…twenty days ago? Rommel's Panzers have evacuated Msus and Solluch and are pulling out of Antelat and Agedabia. All of Cyrenaica is in British hands. It's 10 December, Christmas is coming!

Rommel himself, Chapman says, has withdrawn all the way to his old defensive box at El Agheila, which, we will learn at Jalo, he vacates on the twelfth. Combat Group 288 serves as his rearguard; our old friends are blowing bridges and mining wadis as Panzerarmee Afrika falls back on Tripoli.

The whole show is a blur to me. The front has shifted so far west so rapidly that the next likely action, I am told, will be not another Rommel counter-offensive but a head-on Allied assault, either against prepared Axis positions at Wadi Zem Zem east of Tripoli, or farther west across the Tunisian frontier at the natural and manmade barrier of the Mareth Line. This is the old French skein of fortifications that Don Munro and the war correspondents told us about when we ran into them at Derna.

I'm too sick to visualise the campaign map. All I know as Sergeant Chapman transports us to Jalo is that I have to evacuate my bowels every quarter of an hour; the truck halts once every two. I have a quart dixie for a bedpan and part of a wet Arab newspaper. Downpours continue to drench us; Collie, Punch and I have no cover but what loose tarpaulins we can wrestle over our shoulders in the wind. Punch is sicker than I am. Every time he relieves himself, I follow suit; when I do, he does. How we hate this desert! What wouldn't we give for a dry room and a warm squat!

The brick through all this is Collie. Despite his own ills, he stands over us. We call him Sherlock for the stolid imperturbability with which he lights his Hound of the Baskervilles pipe upside-down in the wind.

What do I know of Collie? Home again in New Zealand, if fortune bears him safely there, you could not pick him out from twenty others in a pew at the Anglican church or tinkering with his Norton on a weekend rideabout. But he is a hero. A bulwark of the Empire. By rank this patrol may be mine, but he is its backbone and beating heart. He respects me. To him I am “Sir,” “Skip,” “Lieutenant.” He won't call me “Chap,” though I have asked him to more than once and would take no offence if he did. If we meet for a pint when this mess is over, he'll still call me Skip and take his leave with the same awkward, half-embarrassed gait.

In real life, I would never meet such a man either socially or professionally. Yet here we are closer than brothers. I consider it one of the signal honours of my life to serve beside him. No man could ask for finer.

At Jalo, our group is separated. Collie, Punch, Grainger, Oliphant and Jenkins will stay here with Doc Lawson; I am put on a Valentia and flown to Zella, then on a Bombay bomber to Marble Arch, Eighth Army HQ, where excitement and novelty carry me through a two-hour debriefing, of which I remember nothing and after which I faint on a bench outside the tent and must be hurried to hospital on a stretcher.

I lie for a day and night in a ward comprising four conjoined tents, part of a greater tent hospital that sprawls across acres of desert alongside the Via Balbia. The ward is theoretically for British and Commonwealth officers only, but so great is the number of casualties flooding in, Axis as well as Allied, that the MOs have stopped screening. Litters bearing the maimed and dying of both sides are set down under tent flies out of the rain or simply parked, stacked three and four high, in the ambulances and lorries that bring them. Under canvas, space is so tight that cots are butted together in islands of four with walkways round the peripheries. In the first twenty-four hours, three Afrika Korps officers occupy in succession the bed adjoining mine. The first two are lieutenants named Schmidt—I note this from the white three-by-five cards (Allied cards are blue) that the orderlies pin to their blankets. Or maybe the admitting clerks call them Schmidt the way we'd say Tommy Atkins, and gift them with the honorific of
Leutnant
so they'll require less paperwork when they move on. At any rate, neither Schmidt can speak; both are too far gone.

The third officer is named Ehrlich, which means “honourable.” He and I converse in German and English; he is a schoolteacher and ski instructor from Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. He explains the difference between an
Oberleutnant,
equivalent to a British captain, and an
Oberstleutnant,
a lieutenant-colonel. I forget which one he is. He's a battery commander, like Stein. His pelvis has been shattered by .303 machine-gun rounds from a strafing Hurricane. “My guts are soup,” he says. He gives me his wallet and paybook, which he asks me, in a whisper, to deliver to his wife when the war is over. With our meals come four-cig packs of Capstans and four-pellet boxes of chewing gum called Beechies. Ehrlich gives me his from breakfast. “I shall be dead before luncheon.”

While he naps, an orderly comes in and says an officer of the Cameron Highlanders has been looking for me. A minute later the tent flap opens and Jock walks in. He asks what I've got. I tell him pneumonia.

He grins. “Good enough.”