“Come on, Roger...silly bugger...don’t hang around.”
The Lysander left the ground as Roger began to run. He could see German troops running towards them.
Devonshire fell flat and hosed them with his Bren. Several dropped. Hit or taking cover? Who could tell? Up and running again, Devonshire panting under his burden. Bullets whipping past. Covering fire as they pounded across the bridge.
Where was Viviane? She rose from a shadowed hollow and swung her arm. An egg shape floated through the air. It hit the ground in the midst of a dozen pelting Germans. The grenade exploded. Men fell, shouting and groaning, one screaming like a stuck pig. More grenades burst, more German soldiers came at the double from two directions. Devonshire was at work with his Bren, Roger fired bursts with his Tommy gun.
They retreated through the trees.
Where was the girl passenger? Where was the man who had accompanied her?
A whistle blew and Roger wheeled towards it. He found Laurent, his two sons, Viviane and Perrine. Devonshire came trotting up.
“They killed three of the others,” Laurent said quietly. “The other two are looking after the girl and the man who just arrived. Nothing to worry about.”
Viviane took several deep breaths. Her breast pressed momentarily against Roger’s upper arm. She said “They are still looking for us. We can get some more of the bastards before we have to clear out.”
“All right.” Laurent was calm and matter-of-fact.
They went back towards the edge of the wood. Viviane and one of Laurent’s boys tossed some more grenades. There were more shouts and groans. Devonshire gave the enemy some more treatment with his Bren. The same results. Roger emptied three drums of Tommy ammunition. The Stens rattled away. The air reeked of burned cordite. Dead Germans lay around, the odour of their uniforms and their persons heavy on the clean night breeze.
It was time to pull out.
An hour and a half later they were in the farm again, after a cautious approach and a signal from Laurent’s daughter that it was safe to come in.
They sat around in the kitchen drinking marc and talking excitedly. Viviane’s eyes shone, she kept licking her lips. Roger sat next to her. Her lips and her fingers trembled with excitement. She kept tossing her hair back with a nervous, restless movement of her hand. Under the table, Roger placed a hand on her thigh and slid it down to the inner side. She closed her knees, trapping it, and gave him a sidelong glance.
“You’d better stay here tonight, both you girls,” Laurent said.
Viviane looked at him. “In the barn?”
“The cellar would be safer.”
She smiled wryly at Roger and shrugged.
He said “I couldn’t stand being locked in, below ground, myself.”
She nodded. “I’d rather take my chance on getting home.”
Laurent frowned. “The roads will be thick with Boches. You’d best stay here.”
“Then I’d rather burrow into the hay.”
Perrine said “The cellar for me. It’s much safer.”
“As you like. But I’m going to hide in the barn and make a break for it if I have to.”
“Sid and I sleep in the barn. We’ll take care of you.”
“Do you?” Viviane looked at Roger with feigned surprise. “All the better, then.”
In the loft, Devonshire moved his palliasse as far as he could from Roger’s. But to go beyond earshot of the rustling of the straw in Roger’s palliasse, the ecstatic yelps and impassioned threshing of limbs, he would have had to remove himself outside the barn altogether. The sounds of shared frenzy did not keep him awake for long. He fell asleep feeling sure that a Lizzie would be coming for them in a few days.
Viviane’s moist lips whispered into Roger’s ear. “I always get stirred up like this after a fight with the Boches. My husband was in a tank regiment...the bastards burned him and his crew alive in June nineteen-forty. I was twenty...he was twenty-three...we’d been married four months...my only purpose now is to kill or maim as many of the swine as I can...and this is what it does to me.”
Roger slept, convinced that he had found the ideal solution to all his problems of how to fight the rest of the war.
THREE
Christopher Fenton, woken at dawn by the duty runner, huddled into his blankets for one more minute of warmth. The desert nights were cold, even in May. His flimsy camp bed was comfortable. The low tent gave an illusion of cosiness.
He heard the ground crews running up the engines of the three Beaufighters on dawn patrol. He rubbed his chin. No time to shave before he took off. He hated being scruffy, but there was little one could do about it in the Western Desert, living sometimes on only a quart of water a day, never more than a gallon per man for all purposes.
Harry Malahide, his navigator, appeared from the adjacent tent. First Harry’s head, then a steaming mug of tea.
“Here you are, mate.”
“Thanks, Harry, you’re a magician.”
Christopher blessed the Australian addiction to strong tea at all hours of the day. It was one of the many Aussie characteristics he had come to value in the past several months that Malahide had been flying with him. He had learned not only from him but from many other Australian pilots, navigators and air gunners with whom he had served the sterling qualities which they brought to air fighting.
Malahide replenished his stock of tea in the most unexpected places. The first Arabic word he had learned was “shai”. Thus equipped, and able also to count from one to ten in the language, he would bargain fiercely in any bazaar. In the desert, water was boiled by filling a tin with sand, pouring water on it and applying a match. Malahide was never without a beer bottle of petrol.
When Christopher had drunk his tea he brushed his teeth, using the dregs in the mug rather than waste water. He put on shirt, shorts, stockings and suede desert boots bought in the Cairo officers’ shop for the equivalent of 24 shillings. Around his neck he wore a paisley patterned blue silk square: not, as in England, to keep his neck warm, and prevent stiffness from constantly turning his head, searching the sky for enemy aircraft. In the desert, that was a secondary purpose. The chief one was to have a scarf handy to pull over the mouth and nose in the sudden sandstorms that blew fiercely at this time of year.
He and Malahide trudged through the sand to the three waiting aircraft. The squadron had recently been equipped with the Beaufighter Mk VIC, to replace their old Mk Is. The latter had been locally modified to fit a Vickers K machine-gun in the rear cockpit for the navigator. This was a modification which had made Flying Officer Malahide very happy. The Mk VIC had a Vickers GO, which was even better.
Christopher and Malahide, with some other new crews from the United Kingdom, had reached the squadron in a mood of great optimism despite recent setbacks.
Throughout 1941, Britain had rejoiced in the successes of the British and Commonwealth army in Libya. Then General Rommel had arrived to take command, with a German army to reinforce the Italians, and the situation had quickly changed.
However, although Rommel had already driven the Allied army back by the end of 1941, it was still half-way across Libya. But he struck again in January 1942 and by 4th February had thrust the Allies back another 250 miles; two-thirds of the way to the Libyan-Egyptian frontier.
But there they held their ground, with their right flank anchored on Gazala, on the coast 30 miles west of Tobruk. Their front, the Gazala Line, stretched south to Bir Hacheim, 50 miles deep in the desert, held by the 1st Free French Brigade under General Koenig.
When Christopher arrived in this theatre of war, Western Desert Air Force was harassing the enemy night and day in preparation for an attack by General Auchinleck which would thrust the Afrika Korps far to the west, right across Libya’s eastern province of Cyrenaica to its border with Tripolitania and even beyond. This onslaught was planned for the beginning of June.
There was every reason to expect victory in the forthcoming battles. Although officers
of Christopher’s rank were not privy to the secret details of the strength that the British Eighth Army would put into the field, he saw enough every day to convince him that this time the Allies would regain the upper hand.
The facts were that Western Desert Air Forces had about 580 aircraft: 380 fighters, 160 bombers and 40 reconnaissance machines. The German and Italian Air Forces had 530: 350 fighters, 140 bombers, 40 for reconnaissance. However, 120 of the Luftwaffe fighters were Messerschmitt 109s, which were faster and better armed than the R.A.F’s Hurricane IICs and Kittyhawks. There were no Spitfires yet in the desert. The few that had reached Egypt were used for high-level photographic reconnaissance.
On the ground, Eighth Army had 850 tanks with another 420 in reserve. The enemy had only 560, of which 230, Italian tanks, were obsolete and 50, German ones, were of the light type. British artillery outnumbered enemy by three to two. The new British six-pounder anti-tank gun was also 30 per cent better than the Germans’ 50 mm.
Although, on paper, Rommel had nine divisions under his command and Auchinleck had only six, this gave a distorted picture of their true strengths. Four of the former were only Italian; and not motorised. The fifth Italian division was under strength. Although the Germans’ fighting qualities had won the respect of the Allies, the Italians were regarded with derision.
Although the Gazala Line was being sewn with minefields and strong points were being built, it was only at the northern end that the fortified positions were close enough to give each other fire support. At the southern end the last two defensive “boxes” at Sidi Muftah and Bir Hacheim were 16 miles apart. The Line, in fact, because it lacked density and depth, was better suited to be the jumping-off point for an attack than the bastion of a defence. But, as it was precisely an attack which General Auchinleck — and Lieutenant General “Strafer” Gott, commanding 13 Corps, which held the Line — intended, this did not dismay Christopher when he saw it from the air that morning in May at dawn.
On 1st June the Eighth Army would lunge forward from the Gazala Line and fling the Axis forces far to the westward.
Christopher was still a novice at the kind of operations on which his new squadron was engaged. He had been used to flying over the North Sea, attacking enemy vessels with a Beaufort; or over the Atlantic in a Beaufighter, seeking the enemy fighters and enormous Focke-Wulf Condors which preyed on Coastal Command aircraft on anti-U-boat patrols. Now his task was to strafe enemy ground forces. He had not yet been made a section leader. This morning he was flying with his flight commander, Squadron Leader Tasker; known as “Tusker” on account of his two enormous canine teeth and protruding incisors. The latter caused him to spray spittle when he spoke.
Tasker was distinguished by a close-cropped dolichocephalic skull which gave him somewhat the appearance of a convict. What could be seen of his hair suggested it was gingery. His skin was fair and mottled. He suffered abominably from sunburn and prickly heat. He also drank too much of his water ration to permit him to pay much attention to personal hygiene. One avoided being down-wind of Tusker Tasker. Even on a good day, when he had spared a little water on his body, he tended to be unbearably gamey.
He was tall and emaciated. The squadron fostered the legend that he harboured an enormous tapeworm, for his appetite was phenomenal. He had joined the R.A.F. as an apprentice, qualified as an engine fitter, become a sergeant pilot, and been commissioned in the summer of 1940. He was now 27 years old. He fully intended to retire as at least an air commodore. Although he had never been heard to express this ambition, it was not difficult to divine what was in his mind. No one doubted that he would succeed. So far he had acquired a D.F.C. and a D.F.M. His angry, porcine eyes suggested that he would do desperate deeds to ensure that he added a D.S.O. to them; and more besides.
Malahide had summed him up to Christopher during their first week on his flight.
“Bloody Tusker scares the shire out of me. He’s the type that’s after a V.C. And most people who get V. Cs die in the process. I don’t want to be following him when he wins his.”
“Don’t worry, Harry. We won’t! I wouldn’t follow anybody blindly.”
Except, Christopher had mentally qualified, James. His confidence in his elder brother was unbounded. Regret that he had not succeed in staying on Hurricanes and progressing to Spitfires still gnawed at him. To fly a Spit on a squadron commanded by James would be the fulfilment of the hope he had had at the beginning of the war and in which he stubbornly persisted; despite the fact that it had become more unlikely as his Air Force career developed.
An errant gust of breeze brought a rancid whiff which announced that Squadron Leader Tasker was at hand. The third pilot was a veteran flight sergeant called Lamb, who had a big moustache and a droll Yorkshire sense of humour. He had learned to fly in the R.A.F. Volunteer Reserve before the war, when he earned his living as a travelling salesman for a West Riding woollen mill owned by an uncle. His work took him to France and — given his broad Yorkshire accent —he had the unexpected accomplishment of speaking French very well. A scent popular in Britain in those days was “Soir de Paris”. Flight Sergeant Lamb’s name for his flight commander was “Sueur de Paris”. Christopher was about the only member of the squadron to whom he had not had to explain that “sueur” was the French for “sweat”. Christopher had warmed to Lamb from the moment he heard the witticism; and because he turned out to be an exceptionally able pilot.
Tasker held an open map. The others, holding their breath, gathered around him and his navigator.
“We’ll ‘ave a shufti around this area ‘ere.”
Tasker put a grimy forefinger and blackened nail on a spot 25 miles behind the enemy line and 35 from the squadron’s airstrip.
“Anything special to look out for, sir?” Lamb asked. “Veekles. Jerry’s got bugger-all veekles. If we can prang any, it’ll sod ‘im up proper.”
“Any armoured vehicles been seen around there, sir?”
“All types of veekle movements reported during the night by the brown jobs. Cyme in on the wahlis.”
Wireless reports from the Long Range Desert Group were a most reliable source of information.
“We’ll stay down at two ‘undred foot.”
They separated to climb aboard their aircraft. Christopher’s ground crew, like most of the squadron’s other ranks, wore items of captured enemy uniform. The sight still amused Christopher. His fitter had a long-peaked Afrika Korps cap on his head. His rigger sported an Italian forage cap. It was all part of the special Desert Air Force and Eighth Army mystique. Some of these men had been out here two years or more and they wanted everyone to know it. Newcomers did not decently show similar fine feathers. It was a fraternity of proud veterans, despite recent reverses, and the first feature of the desert atmosphere that Christopher had noticed was the family spirit.
He climbed through the hatch in the floor of the Beaufighter, squeezed through the narrow, cluttered access way to the cockpit, to his seat with the back folded down on top of his parachute, and took his place. Once in his seat, there was ample room. He loved the Beaufighter with a healthy, comradely man-to-man affection and he was always perfectly happy when flying one.
The huge twelve-feet-nine-inch propellers on either-hand flailed the air. The aircraft shook with power. Tasker looked to right and left, at Lamb and Christopher. He raised his hand and taxied forward. They followed him.
The propeller wash flung back sand-laden dust. The three aeroplanes surged forward, leaving a minor sandstorm in their wake. They climbed westward and in a few seconds levelled off at 200 feet.
To the north of them a formation of eight Marauders was on its way to bomb supply and ammunition dumps, vehicle parks and camps harbouring German and Italian troops far behind the enemy line. To the south, formations of Blenheims and Wellingtons were on their way back from the same sorts of target and from bombing the front line troops. One of the purposes of these ceaseless attacks was to prevent the enemy sleeping, to disturb their res
t: so that when the big assault was launched on 1st June they would be too dazed by fatigue to fight with stamina.
The desert’s surface was a shifting pattern of greys and yellows, of shadows which would disappear two hours after the sun had risen except where the flat surface was broken by dunes. Small clumps and occasional bushes of camel thorn were scattered about the sand where it lay flat or undulated gently. The loose sand which winds had blown into dunes was totally barren. There were places where the ground rose into ridges and escarpments two or three hundred feet high. The sun’s rays, falling at the acute angle of very early morning, cast long shadows across the hollows beneath them.
The three Beaufighters flew over artillery positions and lagers of lorries, armoured cars and tanks, over troops in foxholes and picquets in sandbagged observation posts. Now and again faces looked up at them and sometimes an arm waved, but everybody was too busy about his own business to look at every friendly aeroplane that passed overhead. At this hour, checking weapons and eating breakfast were the two prior concerns. Breakfast and dinner were the two staple meals of the desert fighting man’s day, whether in a foxhole or on an airstrip. Porridge, bacon or sausage, biscuits, margarine, jam and tea for the one; tinned meat and vegetables — M & V — or bully beef, biscuits, margarine, jam or cheese and tea for the other. At lunch and teatime they fended for themselves with biscuits, cheese and tea.
Beyond the Allied line the detritus of the January battles lay littered in rusting heaps: burned-out tanks, lorries, jeeps, armoured cars, scout cars, ambulances. Smashed guns. Rifles, steel helmets, packs, haversacks, ammunition boxes, shell cases. Most of what was usable had been scavenged by Arab tribes passing on foot or riding horses and camels: weapons, binoculars, cameras; the watches and personal possessions of the dead. In many places graves were marked by hummocks of sand, perhaps with a rough cross made from a packing case, sometimes a helmet.
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 60