‘This what we’re after, sir?’ said the sergeant.
‘Yes. This is it,’ said Brewer. He could not help a long sigh escaping him as he made out the outlines of the new Messerschmitt. He clamped down on his nerves with the stolidity that he owed partly to a childhood on an Ohio farm and partly to a long association with the British. ‘Roll her out,’ he said.
There was a faint breath of wind, more from ahead than across. Over there the machine guns still spoke and the trench mortars still called up their fountains of flame. Brewer climbed in, his torch in his hand; the controls were much the same as in the earlier models he had studied.
‘Okay,’ he called to the waiting men.
The shattering roar of the engine sounded loud even through the din of the fighting, but Brewer forced himself to sit still and let the engine warm up for as long as he dared take the chance. Then from across the field he suddenly saw the flashes of firing, points of flame stabbing the night. Coe had not been as lucky as he had, and it was time to go. Further delay would be dangerous.
He pushed open the throttle, and the little machine began to hurl itself over the field, bumping madly on the unevennesses of the turf. He pulled back, and the Messerschmitt left the ground, climbing like an express lift. As he banked and turned he saw under his elbow the red stars of the signal from the sergeant’s pistol which would call off the attack and send the expedition dashing for the coast again. He himself was over the coast before the stars had burned themselves out. He twirled ineffectively at the unfamiliar radio-telephone, imagining the orders which Marjorie would be issuing from the Operations Room which would allow a Messerschmitt to descend, uninterfered with, on a British airfield.
Mr Austin Brewer laid down Jim’s letter and looked at his wife.
‘He doesn’t have much to say, does he?’ he said, although even then he was careful not to show any bitterness before Isabelle.
‘Let’s see what Harry has to say,’ said Isabelle, with the brightness that was part of her.
They opened the letter and read it between them.
Dear Mom and Dad:
The big news this week is that old Jim has been gonged for the DFC.
‘Gonged?’ said Isabelle, with sudden fright in her eyes.
Austen was shaken too, before his memory came to his rescue. ‘The DFC is the Distinguished Flying Cross,’ he said. ‘Harry must mean that Jim’s been recommended for it.’
Of course we’re all pleased as hell about it in the squadron, although old Jim’s just what you’d expect and keeps his hand over the ribbon half the time.
Maybe Isabelle had a mother’s instinct that there was further important news in the letter, and she skimmed over the next line or two, until something else held her attention.
Poor Johnny Coe, the boy from Fresno that I’ve often mentioned, is a prisoner and wounded, we don’t know how badly yet.
Isabelle’s eyes met her husband’s again; she was thinking of some other mother to whom that news would mean so much more. Then she read on.
They’re going to put all us boys from America together in an Eagle Squadron. Old Jim will be flight-lieutenant. But your letters will go on finding us, although our address will be changed.
That meant something to Austin, but nothing to Isabelle, who gave the item of news the attention it merited from a mother. She turned the page.
And I’ve been wounded. You mustn’t worry about me, because it’s not serious, honest it’s not. Just a bullet or two in my right leg. I wouldn’t let them cable the news to you because I knew you’d worry until my letter came. Honest, it’s not bad. I’m going to be married to a nice girl who does war work round here as soon as they let me out, so you can see I’m not bad.
Love from Harry
‘Wounded!’ said Isabelle as she finished reading.
‘He says it’s not bad,’ said Austin with a bluffness that he hardly hoped would deceive Isabelle.
‘You know what Harry’s like,’ said Isabelle. She remembered Harry as a little grubby boy. ‘He wouldn’t say. Not if it was ...’
The tears were beginning to come now. She held the letter in her hand and bowed her head on her husband’s shoulder. It is a far cry from an air marshal’s breakfast egg to a woman weeping in an Ohio farm, but the chain was complete; so far.
An Egg for the Major
The major commanding the squadron of light tanks was just as uncomfortable as he had been for a number of days. For the officer commanding a light tank there is a seat provided, a sort of steel piano stool, but, in the opinion of the major, it had been designed for men of a physique that has no counterpart on earth. If one sat on it in the normal way, with that part of one which Nature provides for sitting on a stool, one’s knees bumped most uncomfortably on the steel wall in front. And contrariwise, if one hitched oneself back and sat on one’s thighs, not only was the circulation interfered with to an extent which led to cramps but also the back of one’s head was sore with being bumped against the wall of the turret behind. Especially when the tank was rolling over the desert, lurching and bumping from ridge to ridge; on a road one could look after oneself, but it was weeks and weeks since the major had set eyes on a road.
He left off thinking about the sort of shape a man should be who has to pass his days in a light tank, and gave the order for the tank to stop. He climbed out through the steel door with his compass to take a fresh bearing. Out in the desert here an army had to navigate like a ship at sea, with the additional difficulty that inside the steel walls, with the spark coils to complicate matters, a compass was no use at all. The only thing to do was to get out of the tank, carry one’s compass well away from its influence, and look over the featureless landscape and mark some patch of scrub, some minor rise in the ground, on which one could direct one’s course. He walked stiffly away from the tank, laid the compass level, and stared forward. This was perhaps the five-hundredth time he had done this, and he had learned by long experience the difficulties to be anticipated. There was never anything satisfactory directly ahead on which he could direct his course. There would be fine landmarks out to the right or left where they were no use to him but nothing straight ahead. He would have to be content with some second best, the edge of that yellow patch on the brown, and he knew very well that it would appear quite different when he got back into the tank again. Furthermore, it would appear more different still when they had travelled a little way towards it - there had been times long ago, when the desert was new to him, when he had found at a halt that he was more than ninety degrees off his course. He was far more experienced now; five months of desultory warfare and now this last tremendous march across the desert had accustomed him to the difficulties.
Experience taught him to empty his mind of the hundreds of previous landscapes which he had memorized, to concentrate on this one, to note that yellow patch whose edge would be his guiding mark for the next ten miles, and to look back and absorb the appearance of the country in that direction as well. Then he went back to the tank, decided against the piano stool, slammed the door shut, and climbed up onto the roof before giving the word to start. On the roof he could lie on the unyielding steel to the detriment of hip and elbow, anchoring himself into position by locking his toe round the muzzle of the machine gun below him. After a while his leg would go to sleep at about the same time that his hip could bear it no longer; then he would have to change over; three changes - two turns with each foot and hip - would be as much as he could stand, and then it would be time to take a fresh bearing and go back to the piano stool and the other problem of which part to sit on.
He lounged on the steel roof while the tank pitched and rolled under him; it was as well to keep that foot firmly locked below the gun muzzle to save himself from being pitched off. It had happened to him sometimes; everything had happened to him at one time or another. The wind today was from ahead, which was a mercy; a gentle following wind meant that the dust of their progress kept pace with them and suffocated him.
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br /> He looked away to the left and right, and he could see a long line of great plumes of dust keeping pace with him as the other tanks of the squadron ploughed their way across the desert. The major was an unimaginative man, but that spectacle never failed to move him. That long line of dust plumes sweeping across the desert had menace and sinister beauty about it. They were like high yellow clouds, and at the base of each a little dot, a nucleus, as it were, sometimes concealed from view by the inequalities of the ground, and every cloud indicated the presence of one of the tanks of his squadron. There were other clouds behind, when the major turned his gaze that way; they showed where the stragglers were trying to regain their places in the line after some necessary halt. The ones farthest back were the ones who had had track trouble or engine trouble. There could be no waiting for them, not in the face of the orders which the wireless brought in, insisting on the utmost speed in this dash across the desert.
Already in the major’s mind the total of days already consumed in the march was a little vague. If he set his mind to it, he could have worked it out, but he felt as if he had done nothing all his life except lead this squadron across the desert. Something enormous and of vital importance was happening to the north, he knew - Sidi Barrani and Tobruk had fallen, but his command had been plucked out of that attack and sent off on this wide flanking sweep, and were already a little in the dark about the situation. These Italian maps were of no use at all. They showed things which simply did not exist - he could swear to that from bitter experience - and, in consequence, the major did not know within twenty miles where he was. But somewhere ahead of him there was the sea, across the great hump of Northern Africa which he was traversing, and beside the sea ran the great road which Mussolini had built, and he knew he had only to arrive on that road to start making things unpleasant for the Italians. What the situation would be when he did arrive he could not imagine in the least, but the major had absorbed the philosophy of the desert, and left that problem to be solved when it arose, wasting no mental effort on hypothetical cases which probably would have no resemblance to the reality he would encounter sooner or later.
The squadron was moving on a wide front, impressive on account of the distant plumes of dust, but even so, the width of the front was nothing compared with the immensity of the desert. They had marched five hundred miles so far, and a thousand miles to the south of them the desert extended as far as the plains of the Sudan. Sometimes the major would allow his imagination to think about these distances, but more often he thought about eggs. Tinned beef and biscuits, day after day, for more days than he could count, had had their effect. Nearly every idle thought that passed through his mind was busy with food. Sometimes he thought about kippers and haddock, sometimes about the green vegetables he had refused to eat as a little boy, but mostly he thought about eggs - boiled eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs - mostly boiled eggs. The lucky devils who were doing the fighting in the north were in among the villages now which Mussolini had peopled with so much effort; they would have a hen or two for certain, and a hen meant an egg. A boiled egg. For a day or two, eggs had formed a staple topic of conversation when he squatted at mealtimes with the gunner and the driver, until the major had detected a certain forbearing weariness mingled with the politeness with which his crew had received his remarks about eggs. Then he had left off talking about them; in this new kind of war, majors had to be careful not to become old bores in the eyes of the privates with whom they lived. But not being able to talk about them made him think about them all the more. The major swallowed hard on the choking dust.
The sun was now right ahead of him, and low towards the horizon; the sky around it was already taking up the colours of the desert sunset, and the brassy blue overhead was miraculously blending into red and orange. To the major that only meant that the day’s march was drawing to a close. Sunsets came every day, and eggs came only once a year, seemingly.
When darkness came, they halted; each tank where it happened to find itself, save for the outposts pushed forward in case the Italians should, incredibly, be somewhere near and should have the hardihood to attempt operations in the dark.
The driver and the gunner came crawling out of the tank, dizzy with petrol fumes and stiff with fatigue, still a little deaf with the insensate din which had assailed their ears for the whole day. The most immediate duty was to service the tank and have it all ready for prolonged action again, but before they did that they washed their mouths round with a little of the precious water taken from the can which had ridden with them in the tank all day. It was at blood heat, and it tasted of the inside of a tank - indescribable, that is to say. But it was precious, all the same. There was always the possibility that their ration of water would not come up from the rear; and if it did, there was also the chance that there had been so much loss in the radiators during the day that no water could be spared for the men.
Once, long back, there had been a heavenly time when the day’s ration had been a gallon a head a day. That had been marvellous, for a man could do simply anything with a gallon a day; he could shave, wash his face, sometimes even spare a little to wash off the irritating dust from his body. But the ration, now that they were so far from the base, was half a gallon, and a man, after a day in a tank, could drink half a gallon at a single draught if he were foolish enough to do so. Half a gallon meant only just enough water to keep thirst from coming to close quarters; only the most fussy among the men would spare a cupful for shaving, and the days when the radiators had been extra thirsty, so that the men’s rations were cut in half, were days of torment.
The major and the gunner and the driver settled down in the desert for their supper. Long habit had blunted the surprise the major had once felt at finding himself, a field officer, squatting in the dust with a couple of privates, and, fortunately, long habit had done the same for the privates. Before this campaign opened they would have been tongue-tied and awkward at his presence. It had not been easy to reach adjustment, but they had succeeded - as witness the way in which, without saying a word, they had caused him to leave off talking about eggs. He was still ‘sir’ to them, but almost the only other way in which his rank was noticeable in their personal relationships was that the two privates both suspected the major of being the guilty party in the matter of the loss of one of their three enamelled mugs. They had not ventured openly to accuse him, and he remained in ignorance of their suspicions, taking it for granted that the gunner - a scatterbrained fellow - had been at fault in the matter.
It was an infernal nuisance being short of a mug; two mugs among three of them called for a whole lot of organization, especially in the morning, when they had to clean their teeth, and sometimes to shave and sometimes to make tea - and the gunner liked his strong, and the driver liked his weak, and the major was the only one who did not want sugar in it. If ever the three of them were to quarrel, the major knew it would be over some difficulty arising out of the loss of the mug. Yet he did not see nowadays anything odd about a major worrying over the prospect of a disagreement with a couple of privates over an enamelled mug.
And tonight he was additionally unlucky, because the rations for the day were a tinned meat and vegetable concoction that he particularly disliked. But the gunner and the driver were loud in their delight when they discovered what fate had brought them tonight. They ate noisily and appreciatively, while the major squatting beside them made only the merest pretence of eating and allowed his thoughts to stray back to memories of dinner at the Berkeley and the gargantuan lunches at Simpson’s in the Strand. And also of eggs.
It was dark now, and cold - before supper was over the major had to reach out for a blanket and wrap it round his shoulders as the treacherous desert wind blew chilly. The stars were out, but there was no moon yet and the darkness was impenetrable. There was nothing to do now except sleep. The major chose himself a spot where the scrub grew not too thickly, and where the rock did not jut entirely through the thin skin of earth which overlaid it.
He spread his blankets over his fleabag and crawled in with the dexterity of long practice without disturbing the arrangement. The bit of tarpaulin stretched from the side of the tank to the earth kept off the dew, if there should be any, and the joints that had suffered on the steel piano stool and on the steel roof snuggled gratefully against the more kindly contact of the earth. And long habit was a help.
He awoke in the middle of the night with a shattering roar in his very ear. The driver had his own system of keeping his beloved motor warm enough to start. He slept only under two blankets, and when the cold awoke him he knew that it was necessary to warm up the motor. He would crawl out of bed, start it up, allow it to run for five minutes, and then switch it off. That meant that the light tank was always ready for instant action, but the major had never been able to acquire the habit of sleeping through the din of the motor. The only habit he had been able to form was that of cursing to himself at the driver, feebly, half awake, and then of turning over and completing his night’s sleep. The gunner, on the other hand, slept stolidly through the whole racket, snoring away stubbornly - the major suspected him of dreaming about eggs.
Before dawn they were up and doing. Two inches of sand in the bottom of a petrol tin made an admirable wick; petrol soaked into it burned with an almost clear flame and heated the water for their tea in a flash. They had grown cunning lately and brushed their teeth after breakfast, using the remains of the tea for the purpose; that gave them an additional two swallows of water apiece to drink at the midmorning halt for filling up. The motor started, shatteringly noisy as usual. Then they were off, the long line of tanks heaving and rolling over the desert, the familiar plumes of dust trailing behind them, the familiar weary ache beginning to grow in the joints of the major as he settled himself on the piano stool.
Gold From Crete Page 11