“Is there any chance that I can be flown out?”
“We can’t ask for that. I am afraid you are not important enough to your own people.”
“The only wish I have now is to go back arid return to bombing Germany. Viviane’s death has shown me where my duty lies. That is not meant to sound pompous or priggish. The shock has brought me to my senses. And now that my presence is known to the enemy, I am a danger to your group.”
Laurent and the priest looked at each other.
Father Deferre said, presently, “They would come for Roger if he were important enough. Why not have a coded wireless message sent to England? Say that Roger has distinguished himself in many battles with the Maquis. That he has made a brilliant escape and is badly wounded, in imminent danger of capture; which would mean large-scale executions in the area.”
“You can’t make me out to be a hero, Father...Laurent...please...”
“You are a hero.” Laurent rose to take his leave. “And it is the only way we can get you out.”
Alone in his hidey-hole that night, Roger calculated the next full moon and wondered if a Lysander really would come for him.
He had to go back now. Cowardice had kept him here. All his fine reasonableness and ratiocination about staying to help the Maquis, to be with Viviane whom he loved, of being unfit to make the journey across Spain, had not succeeded in deluding himself. There was at least that much to be said for him, he reflected. But he wilted at the prospect of a hero’s return.
Seven nights later, with his left arm in a sling, he was helped up the ladder into the rear cockpit of a Lysander, with a young woman whom he recognised. It was she who had arrived clandestinely on the night when he had been in the party that welcomed one of the aircraft in. She looked pale and ill and underfed. He was in the presence of a genuine heroine, he knew, and the thought kept him silent and morose all the way home to England.
SIX
Christopher and Malahide sat on the verandah of Shepheard’s Hotel, drinking gin slings.
“Nobody looking at you would think you were just starting four days leave in Cairo, the Paris of the Middle East, Chris. They’d think you were just finishing leave and fed up about having to go back into the bundu, you look so bloody mournful.”
Christopher made a sweeping gesture. “Well, it does depress me to see the Short Range Desert Group looking so damn pleased with themselves. Any brown they’ve got on their knees didn’t come from the desert. It’s the genuine swimming pool at the Gezirah Club variety. The Gabardine Swine.”
Thus were known the officers who had cushy jobs at base and, instead of the usual khaki drill, wore uniforms tailored from gabardine. There were always too many of them in evidence, not only at Shepheard’s but also everywhere else in Cairo.
“You’ve been taking life too bloody seriously for too long, sport.”
“Being booted back nearly four hundred miles, the last three hundred in a week, changed my views rather.”
“I’d noticed!”
“This war used to be good fun...good sport, anyway. I look back on the old days on shipping strikes and flogging a Beau around over the Western Approaches and the Atlantic with bags of nostalgia; for one good reason: I was never made to feel humiliated. Even getting shot down wasn’t a disgrace. But retreating all this way...it would disgrace a Portuguese pox-doctor’s clerk.”
“Steady on, sport. It’s not as if Desert Air Force had been beaten by the Luftwaffe. It’s Eighth Army that’s been beaten by the Afrika Korps. No fault of ours. No disgrace to us.”
“It comes to the same thing. I think the situation’s too damn serious to leave to the generals! We’ve still got air superiority, despite everything. The Air Force ought to be running this campaign.”
“We are; unofficially. Tedder” (the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief) “and Mary Coningham” (Air Officer Commanding Desert Air Force) “Have each got more brains than all the bloody generals put together.”
Coningham, a famous Great War fighter pilot, was a New Zealander and his nickname a corruption of Maori.
“You’re right. But I think this new chap commanding Eighth Army knows what he’s doing.”
“Montgomery? Yeah, he’s quite a bottler; as Pommie generals go.”
This was not a line of conversation which Malahide was keen to follow. He had hoped to leave the war behind for four days. The change in Christopher’s attitude during the past ten weeks since the retreat had halted at Alamein was worrying him. The exuberance, daring, courage and determination were still there; but Christopher flew now without his old careless light-heartedness. There were no more aerobatics or playful beat-ups of their own troops. Every sortie was grimly purposeful. Flying had become almost a chore instead of a pleasure. The reversal in the battle that had started on the Gazala Line had shocked everyone, but Malahide saw the signs that it had affected Christopher more deeply than any other experience. In the four weeks between the launch of Rommel’s attack and the taking up of new positions on the Alamein Line, Christopher had attained his twenty-first birthday and had, in the real sense, entered man’s estate.
Malahide jerked his head towards four WRNS ratings who were passing the hotel.
“Get an eyeful of those sheilas. Two of ‘em are beaut.”
Christopher looked. “On leave from Alex. Waste of time, Harry. They know they’re rarer than rubies. We’ve only got four days. No Wren is going to drop her bloomers in four days. I’m not saying they’re impregnable, but they all play hard to get. We’ve got to get organised with local talent.”
“Well, you’ve got the introduction. Get cracking. Show some initiative.”
Christopher took a letter from a breast pocket of his bush shirt. His mother had written to say “If you have a chance to spend some leave in Cairo and are at a loose end, do look up Alison Meynell. Her husband is on the High Commissioner’s staff.”
Mrs Meynell was a school friend of Sheila Fenton’s with whom she exchanged letters two or three times a year. Christopher had met Mrs Meynell twice as a boy when she and her husband had stayed with his parents. He remembered her as lively and attractive. He went to telephone.
“Well?” Malahide asked when he returned.
“We’re in luck. We’re invited to dinner. Apparently she’s throwing a biggish party so it’s no problem to fit us in and ‘a couple of jolly gels to make up the number’.”
“Jolly?” Malahide raised his eyebrows.
“It might mean anything. Keep your fingers crossed.”
“I hope jolly girls don’t keep their legs crossed, sport.”
“Use your initiative, as you’re so fond of saying.”
“This is Cicely,” Mrs Meynell said.
Christopher smiled at the tall, golden-haired girl with the dark blue eyes and bare sun-tanned arms. Twenty-seven? She wouldn’t have much time for him. Every senior Gabardine Swine in town must be laying siege to her. Wedding ring, dammit. No chance at all. You’ve let me down, Mrs Meynell.
“And this is Eileen.” Who was looking politely pleased with her introduction to Malahide. Another blonde, with the same even Gezirah tan and blue eyes of a different shade.
Cecily asked the number of their squadron. Christopher told her.
“Beaufighters, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“My husband was on: Blenheims. He was killed two years ago. We came out in ‘thirty-eight, just after we were married. I decided to stay on and make myself useful here. Doubt if I could have got a passage home, anyway.”
Eileen said “My husband was flying Gladiators, on...Squadron. He was killed in Greece last year. We came out in ‘thirty-nine.”
The girls both worked at General Headquarters and shared a flat.
On the day after Christopher and Malahide returned from leave, Christopher was standing outside his tent with his shirt off when he heard an exclamation of surprise behind him. He turned to see Squadron Leader Tasker.
“Looks as though y
ou did have a good leave, Christopher. Your back’s a mass of scratches. Long nyles, aye? It’ll be uncomfortable in the cockpit in this August ‘eat.”
“Well worth it, sir.”
“What about you, Harry?”
“Mine didn’t scratch, sir. But she complained about my ears sticking out and scratching the inside of her thighs.”
Already, trying to recall Cecily to mind, Christopher found that her image was blurred. His few days in Cairo were difficult to remember in detail. The leave he had so much wanted had been no more than a scrawl in the sand which had been quickly obliterated by the khamseen, the desert wind.
He liked Cecily well enough. She had been kind as well as uninhibitedly passionate. No doubt she would give him a warm welcome if he returned to Cairo. But he would much rather know that he would never see Cairo again and that his next leave would be spent in Derna, which was nearly 600 miles west of Alamein, or in Tripoli itself.
He mistrusted the planners since the bitter miscalculation and disappointment at Gazala. All that guff about the superiority of the British tanks in numbers, armament and protective armour, had proved totally misleading. He hoped General Montogomery would prove cleverer than his predecessors.
For his part, he wanted only that the Air Force should be strong enough and active enough to do what apparently the ground forces could not.
He had read the signal from Churchill to Tedder which had been promulgated in Orders many weeks earlier, and was cynical even about that. Churchill was, after all a politician; and all politicians were dishonest to some degree. It was true that the man was a great patriot: but even that admirable quality had its defects. When Horatio Bottomley — who certainly should know a villain when he saw one — said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he had perhaps come closer to defining the purpose of Churchill’s oratory and prose than most people cared to admit.
“I am watching with enthusiasm the brilliant supreme exertions of the Royal Air Force in the battle now proceeding in Egypt. From every quarter the reports come in of the vital part which your officers and men are playing in the homeric struggle in the Nile Valley. The days of the Battle of Britain are being repeated far from home. We are sure you will be to our glorious Army the friend that endureth to the end.”
Bully for Winston Churchill. Congratters to Tedder. But what “glorious Army?” The to-and-froing across the desert had already earned the title “the Benghazi Handicap”. And the end to which the friendly Desert Air Force endured might easily turn out to be a victory for Rommel.
Christopher was impatient to get down to work. If he had been offered another few days’ leave he would have turned it down. He said so, and Malahide reflected that his pilot was indeed a much changed young man.
There was some mail awaiting their return to the squadron. Christopher looked up from one of his letters.
“James was on the Dieppe show. He doesn’t say so, but I get the impression it was a bit of a shambles: not in the air, hut in the sea assault and the fighting ashore.”
Another of Churchill’s palliatives for the Russians, no doubt, who were pressing for a second front in Europe, Christopher reflected. Or perhaps it was meant to impress the Yanks.
It was Rommel who needed to be impressed.
Flying south from Alamein, leading a section, Christopher crossed over the First South African Division and then, five miles on, the Fifth Indian, with their left flank anchored on the Ruweisat Ridge, a high escarpment running ten miles east and west. The colour of the desert changed from pale yellow to ochre. The ground became stonier. South of the Ruweisat Ridge the New Zealand Division box stretched beyond the Alam Nayil ridge, another east-to-west elevation, some two miles long, to the edge of the Qattara Depression.
Here, a huge area 60 miles wide and twice as long had been scooped out of the desert floor like a dried-up sea. Its sides were as steep as cliffs and its bottom looked like a brown lake through which islands of sandstone protruded. In the distance the surface of the Depression shone green with a coating of slime. There was no life down there. The only sign of man was the occasional wreckage of an aeroplane.
Christopher led the section westward towards the enemy lines. The Libyan Plateau, which intruded 200 miles into Egypt, rose ahead. He turned northward towards the coast and the positions of the Ninth Australian Division, which covered Eighth Army’s right flank from the South Africans’ sector to Tell El Eisa, ten miles forward of Alamein. Then he took the section westward again along the always active coastal strip along which came the enemy’s reinforcements.
Light flak came spurting up to discourage them. They weaved through it towards a moving cloud of dust. When they were half a mile from this, tracer began to lick at them as the machine-gunners in the convoy of armoured cars and lorried infantry opened fire. After a few days away from the battle zone, Christopher had a strange momentary feeling of fear that was entirely new to him. Until now he had always felt the tension drain away as soon as he was airborne. When he engaged the enemy it was always in a mood of excitement that was, in its own paradoxical way, pleasurable; or, since the retreat from the Gazala Line, with sheer anger.
Fear was replaced by anger now, but it was not directed so much against the Afrika Korps as against the posturing slackers who infested Cairo. The clerks and commercial travellers and shop assistants dis-guised as temporary officers, with their affectations of desert boots, fly whisks and mispronounced few words of Arabic. Why the devil should he submit to being fired at on their behalf when there was no reason of health or age why they should not be in the fighting line themselves?
He felt the heavy punch of his guns’ recoil. Sand thrown up by the vehicles forced its way into the cockpit. The sun disappeared and the air around him was a thick, swirling yellow haze. The tang of cordite was in his nostrils. The gritty fog which surrounded him was torn by a myriad trails of bright, varicoloured sparks from the Spandaus. Fires flickered and spread, casting a red glow through the cloud of dust. Explosions sent flames leaping high and blasts of air brushing aside the suspended sand to give brief views of burning trucks and armoured cars, of running men with their clothes alight, of charred bodies lying on the ground.
Action closed the gap in continuity. By the end of the day it was as though he had not been away at all. The pattern of his life re-established itself. Twice, three times, perhaps four times, a day the sorties went on, always the same. A new spirit, a renewed confidence began to be felt. These continued air attacks against every movement the enemy made, against every new dump or fortification revealed by photographic reconnaissance, must soon lead to an offensive that would drive Rommel back far beyond Gazala. Since Montgomery took command, the Headquarters of Eighth Army and Desert Air Force were so closely integrated that everyone who fought in the air or on the ground felt that he was part of one harmonious and homogeneous force.
Sometime after midnight on 30th August, Christopher woke with a start to the sound of bomb bursts and gunfire. He and Malahide collided as they dashed out of their tent. The Bofors and Hispano cannon which defended the airfield were lacing the sky with tracer shells. Flares cast their brilliance across the darkness. Stukas were diving, releasing their bombs and soaring away again. Heinkels were racing across the scene with searchlight beams following them while they dropped their incendiaries and high explosives. A few fires burned among the widely dispersed aircraft. The raid was over in a few minutes.
Christopher stood among a crowd of others, looking towards the west. The horizon was lit by the muzzle flames of heavy artillery. The grumble of the big guns could be heard. Rommel was attacking again.
On his first sortie the following morning Christopher found the enemy halted with their forward elements only eight miles from where they had started. The British tanks were holding them while Rommel desperately changed direction from east to north and could find no way through.
For five days Christopher functioned like an automaton. While Eighth Army encircled the Germ
an and Italian columns, Desert Air Force ceaselessly pounded them. Waking hours became a blur of activity and events which in retrospect Christopher could not easily separate. Into the warp of Rommel’s three-pronged attempt to penetrate the Allied line between Alam Nayil and the Qattara Depression, and capture Alam Haifa Ridge, the defenders wove the woof of their complex pattern of encirclement and dismemberment. For Christopher’s squadron these were six days of rising still heavy with sleep, of flying low over the desert to strafe the enemy foxholes in the teeth of heavy machine-gun fire, of snatching a few minutes now and then to gobble dry bread with bully beef or hard cheese, to try to absorb the latest situation reports into a tired brain before forcing a weary body to take to the air again, until finally darkness descended and there was time for a hot meal before reeling off to bed.
When the enemy, after so heavy an attack, withdrew after only a week’s fighting, no one doubted that when Desert Air Force and Eighth Army launched the counter-attack nothing would check it until the enemy were finally driven to surrender.
*
The wings were assembling over Beachy Head for a Circus over France. James detested these operations for two reasons. It was a painful twisting of a knife in the unhealed wound of his anxiety about Nicole to fly over the landscape in which she was living. And the turmoil of four or five formations, each comprising 36 aircraft, some wings orbiting clockwise and others anti-clockwise, all at low level, was fraught with a high risk of collision.
He led his squadron at the rear of the Morfield Wing, circling to starboard, with his eyes constantly shifting from the other 24 Spitfires ahead of him to each of the other three wing formations as they swirled over the high chalk cliffs with only a few feet of clearance between the cockpit canopies of one and the bellies of another.
The Polish Wing were on this morning’s Circus and he watched them sweep in from the east. Tightly packed together, as though tied wingtip-to-wingtip for a Hendon Air Display, they made no concessions to anybody, ever. They bored straight ahead or held their impeccable orbit and expected everybody else to clear out of their way.
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 67