The Thirty Days War

by John Harris

  The AVM’s meeting to deal with the problem was attended by the usual departmental officers, together with the station education officer, who had spotted the movement from his roost on top of AHQ.

  ‘How big are the guns?’ Verity asked.

  ‘The Royal Artillery artificer says they’re 18-pounders,’ the education officer said. ‘He had a look at them with field glasses. Very common in the last bunfight. Not too big but big enough.’

  ‘Any ideas, anybody?’ the AVM asked.

  ‘There are boats,’ Boumphrey pointed out. ‘One seaplane tender belonging to the station rescue unit, and two belonging to the cruising club.’

  ‘Are they big enough?’

  ‘I doubt if the club’s boats are powerful enough with the river in flood after the rains but the seaplane tender’s all right. They were built to deal with bad weather and tested on Plymouth Sound. They’ll stand up to heavy seas, and ours copes well with the river even in flood.’

  ‘It must be a long time since it was used,’ Group Captain Vizard pointed out.

  ‘Nothing wrong with the clockwork, sir. She’s got two Perkins diesels.’

  ‘There are four guns,’ the education officer said. ‘There, there, there and there.’ His finger moved over the map. ‘They’re only about a hundred yards back, set on patches of high ground behind the Dragoons’ old camp among the reeds and marsh grass so you can’t see them from ground level. So far they’ve done no more than fire a few shots to get the range but if they start getting ambitious they could fire over open sights.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult to find in the dark,’ Boumphrey pointed out. ‘Bisha’s under the only bunch of palms on that stretch of river until you come to the left-hand turn northwards.’

  ‘Who’s going to do the job?’ the group captain asked.

  Verity was willing to have a go at the guns with his levies but he had only been in Kubaiyah a short time and wasn’t sure of the ground, while his men, mostly used on guard duties, weren’t much wiser. The Loyals, new to the station, knew nothing at all of the lie of the land.

  ‘Better let me look after the river,’ Boumphrey said quietly. ‘I know it well. As president of the cruising club and former CO of the rescue unit, I ought to. I’ve explored the other side too. Bird watching. Pelicans, snake-necked darters, pigmy cormorants, kingfishers, coots. That sort of thing. There should be no trouble getting there. The river runs this way.’ His hand moved across the map from left to right to indicate a west-to-east flow. ‘If we board the boat from the jetty north of the cantonment, cross immediately then shut down and allow the river to take us down, we could end up just about where we want to be without using the engines again until the last minute. Should inject quite an element of surprise into the proceedings. Of course, I ought to have someone with me who knows something about artillery.’

  ‘How about Sergeant Porlock of the Gunners,’ the armament officer suggested. ‘He’s been complaining that he’s sick of cleaning up those two old howitzers when everybody else’s doing the fighting. Would he go?’

  It didn’t take long to discover that Sergeant Porlock not only would go but would be very annoyed if he didn’t.

  ‘I can settle their ’ash in no time,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a few chaps with a bit o’ savvy who’ll do as they’re told, o’ course. But that’s all.’

  ‘Who’re you going to use to do the dirty work?’ Colonel Ballantine asked Boumphrey. ‘I can ask for volunteers from my chaps.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Boumphrey gave him his gentle smile. ‘I prefer my boys. I know them and they know me.’

  It was decided that while Boumphrey and his Belles were attending to the guns across the river, Jenno’s cars, plus a group of volunteers from the Loyals, should take advantage of the confusion to do the job originally intended for the Mounted Legion on the south-western end of the escarpment, while Verity would continue as originally planned to the north-east. Jenno would knock out the Irazhi cars outside the perimeter, and would then lead the Loyals up on to the escarpment. Colonel Ballantine would co-ordinate the defences and provide men to guard the gates until the raiders could return.

  There was only a small gate in the wire to the north of the camp, leading to the river and the little jetty where the rescue tender was moored, among the dhows abandoned since the fighting and the bumboats normally used by the camp labourers to bring earth and stones for repair work in the camp. With its black hull and the red, white and blue RAF roundel, it looked neat and efficient.

  ‘Will it be big enough for all the people you’re taking?’ Jenno asked.

  ‘I’m going to lash one of the bumboats alongside and tow her across,’ Boumphrey said. ‘And I’m only taking one troop. Otherwise we’ll be getting in each other’s way.’

  ‘What about back up?’ Colonel Ballantine asked. ‘How many of my chaps will you need to support you?’

  ‘None, thank you.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘With all due respect to your chaps, they’re a bit noisy when they move about. Those boots they wear. I shall have the rest of my boys lining the opposite bank, with instructions to knock out anything that moves.’ Boumphrey smiled. ‘If I don’t include them all, they’ll probably shoot me.’

  As they got down to details it was decided that six men to each gun would be ample.

  ‘Together with four other men,’ Boumphrey suggested. ‘Sergeant Porlock and three armourers, to do the dirty work. My chaps will deal with the guns’ crews and Porlock and his experts will deal with the guns.’ He looked at Porlock. ‘How do we go about killing these guns?’

  ‘A shell in the breech, one up the spout, and a length of cord to the trigger.’

  ‘Sounds complicated for amateurs.’

  ‘I’m not an amateur, sah!’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You could always do it with a block of guncotton and a primer detonator.’

  ‘We’d blow ourselves up and you can’t be in four places at once.’

  ‘OK, sir.’ Sergeant Porlock sighed, deciding that the RAF were a right lot of dimwits. ‘We take out the breech blocks and chuck ’em in the river.’

  As dusk approached the different groups began to muster at their jump-off positions.

  The river was still blue and startling as a kingfisher’s wing. The yellow grass on the far bank was leaning in the breeze, and through his binoculars Boumphrey could just see the roofs of the village of Bisha, a poor place, its black walls dusty and collapsing. There were a few reed huts on the sandy bank and a ferryboat for donkeys and camels. As the horizon melted to dust in the south, the village seemed to float above a gathering mist.

  ‘That’ll help,’ Boumphrey said, his eyes on the land where he could see a flock of mixed goats and sheep moving among the shallow undulations.

  With darkness, the Loyals, who were to hold the gates through which the raiding groups were to debouch, began to fill sandbags and throw up small fortifications behind which they stationed machine guns. Slit trenches were dug to contain the men who were to hold the gates in the event of a rush.

  Verity’s levies marched smartly with swinging arms across the airfield to the perimeter fence. They were excited and eager to go and all the doubts that had been entertained about their loyalty had long since been dispersed. Behind them Jenno’s armoured cars growled into position, followed by a half-company of the Loyals. Nobody was kidding himself that the noise they made couldn’t be heard by the Irazhis on the escarpment. They could only hope that they would put it down as some attempt by the RAF to strengthen their defences and wouldn’t expect the gates to be opened and raiders to roar through.

  At the other side of the cantonment, beyond the hangars where the work of preparing the aircraft for the next day was in progress, beyond the polo field where the remaining serviceable Audaxes and Harts were being checked and the holes in their fuselages and wings patched, Boumphrey and the Mounted Legion gathered near the cruising club’s jetty. With the end of daylight the shel
ling had dwindled to an occasional bang and it was quiet enough to hear the movement of the river which was still running swiftly after the winter rains. The dark-eyed men in pink keffiyehs, excited and grinning with anticipation, were wearing their black robes to make them difficult to see in the darkness.

  Boumphrey wore his ordinary uniform of khaki drill shirt with long trousers, over it his harness, belt and revolver. On his other hip he carried a side pack containing a Very pistol and cartridges, but, because the operation was to be carried out entirely by the Mounted Legion, on his head he wore the yellow keffiyeh which marked him as their leader. His men were quick to notice the headdress and, as he moved among them, white teeth showed and soft voices spoke to him.

  ‘Greetings, Beni Ifry,’ they said, addressing him by their version of his name. ‘In the name of God, the merciful, the loving kind, tonight we shall do them mischief.’

  ‘The stars are out, Beni Ifry,’ another one said. ‘Behind the stars we see God and He watches our movements.’

  Boumphrey smiled and patted shoulders as he moved to the river bank where the marine fitter who attended to the tender’s diesels was bent with the coxswain over the open hatches.

  ‘All well?’ Boumphrey asked.

  The coxswain looked up. Ever since the beginning of the crisis, he and the other motorboat crew had been digging trenches, humping sandbags and generally working as labourers, and he was glad to get back to doing the job he knew best.

  ‘We had ’em running earlier, sir,’ he said. ‘They’ll not let us down.’

  Ghadbhbhan was addressing the Mounted Legion mustered along the river bank roughly opposite where the guns would be. He had them standing in rows and was letting them know in no uncertain terms what was expected of them.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘This night you will behave as soldiers or I shall want to know why. Opposite you, across the river, will be the Irazhi. It will be your duty to kill any you see. But–’ he glared at the lines of men ‘–you will be careful. Beni Ifry will be across there, too, and you will not shoot him. Is that understood? If he is hurt, I shall ask questions and I shall find out who was the cause.’ He marched up and down the lines. ‘Now, let us make sure that we look like soldiers. Most of you would not do credit to a whorehouse. Tighten that belt! Adjust that girdle! Up with that rifle! Beni Ifry will be proud of us when we return or I shall want to know the reason why. You may not realise it but tonight’s operations depend on us. No matter how good the men Beni Ifry takes with him, they are nothing without our fire power and our skill as soldiers.’

  It was all good stirring stuff and, even though Ghadbhbhan was educated enough and intelligent enough not to believe it himself, his men did and that was sufficient.

  As they marched away to take up their positions, Boumphrey stepped aboard the tender. It was facing upstream and, on the riverside, the coxswain and deck hand had lashed one of the shallow-draft native bumboats with mooring ropes and springs so it could be towed alongside. It was a heavy boat built of strong timbers and big enough to carry a group of heavily armed men.

  By this time, night had come with all the grandeur of the marshlands. The chrome yellow sky had turned hotter and hotter, those reeds which stood out against it like black cross-hatching, those to the east still glaring orange. Then gradually the water became purple below a bright half-moon and, as the last of the light went, it was dappled by brilliant silver slots, while the stars burned splendid and still in a sky crossed by two long streamers of black cloud. Boumphrey stared at it thoughtfully, listening to the susurration of the moving reeds.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have everybody aboard.’

  His men climbed nervously from the tender to the boat lashed at its other side. They were landsmen who lived about as far from the sea as you could get, and they didn’t look forward to the trip across the river. But Beni Ifry had ordained it so they kept their thoughts to themselves. As they settled down, squatting on the bottom boards and sniffing at the dirty water that soiled their robes as it swilled backwards and forwards in the bilges, they clutched their rifles, uneasy but eager to prove what they could do. They were all men of warrior tribes and so far in the siege of Kubaiyah they had done nothing more than sit humiliatingly in trenches or squat behind barricades of sandbags and count the shells that landed in the cantonment.

  As they settled down, Sergeant Porlock and his armourers climbed aboard the tender. They were strapped into harness with revolvers, and for his own entertainment, Porlock had brought along guncotton and detonators. The fact that if he were hit by a bullet he could go up and carry everybody else with him didn’t worry him too much. He had served in the artillery in the first war and he was well aware of the chances.

  ‘Right,’ Boumphrey said. ‘I think we’re all aboard. Let go, Corporal, please.’

  Seven

  As the deck hand shoved the boat away from the jetty with his foot, the nose swung out and was caught by the current. The coxswain allowed it to turn of its own accord, then, as the boat faced directly across the river, he opened the throttles.

  ‘Not too much, Corporal,’ Boumphrey warned. ‘Let’s keep it as quiet as we can.’

  The river was running fast and the man at the wheel had to head slightly upstream to keep them from drifting with the flow. A light breeze was whipping up wavelets and an occasional thin snatch of spray whipped over the bow and sprinkled the men squatting in the boat lashed alongside. Though they said nothing, their eyes moved uneasily and there were low moans as the boat seesawed up and down alongside the tender.

  Boumphrey reassured them. ‘Not far now,’ he said.

  ‘It’s as well, Beni Ifry,’ a voice came from the shadows. ‘My stomach doesn’t like it.’

  With the engines running sturdily, the tender chugged quietly across the river. Boumphrey’s thoughts were busy. Though he had trained his men well, this was the first time he had ever led them into any kind of danger and he wasn’t sure how they’d behave. His impression was that they wouldn’t let him down but he couldn’t take bets on it because they were largely an unknown quantity.

  He wondered what Prudence Wood-Withnell was doing and tried to understand his own thoughts about her. He was happy in her company and knew she was happy in his, but he was also aware that she wasn’t what he’d dreamed of as an adolescent with ideas of romance. In those days his thoughts had run on the lines of film stars and he had suffered agonies when a pretty girl on whom he had set his sights had jeered at his advances. If nothing else, it had brought him sharply down to earth and he was far from unaware that most of the women he’d met in the Lafwaiyah Club had not regarded him as worth a second glance. They never fell over themselves for his favours as they did for the satanic-looking Jenno, whose dark sardonic good looks seemed to attract them like flies by their very suggestion of evil. Boumphrey couldn’t imagine anyone like Christine Craddock wishing to disappear into the darkness with him as she had with Jenno.

  A slash of spray wet his face. He wiped it away with his hand, suddenly aware of what he was about to do. But he couldn’t imagine merely sitting back and allowing the Irazhi to take over the camp. Quite apart from the fact that Ghaffer al Jesairi was known to be a bit of a dirty dog, an opportunist politician who had repudiated the treaty between his country and Britain and gone for the side of the Nazis. Anybody who supported Hitler, in Boumphrey’s eyes, was a dirty dog and, like Hitler, devoid of any of the qualities of a gentleman.

  But, above all, what had sustained Boumphrey through all the dangers and excitements of the past two days was the fact that if the camp fell, not only Prudence but all the women and children would be subject to the indignities of being made prisoners. Boumphrey had grown up in an age when the Victorian idea of the British showing the world how to behave was still strong, and many of the books he had read as a boy had featured the rescue of besieged civilians by the manly figures of British soldiers carrying the flag. Always, it seemed, to the top of a hill.

 
His mind had been filled with stories of Waterloo and Balaclava, when the Light Brigade – quite naturally in the eyes of Boumphrey – had destroyed itself to bring about a victory. Nobody at Boumphrey’s school had bothered to tell him that Balaclava had not been a victory despite the Light Brigade’s sacrifice. He had read about the sieges of Lucknow, Chitral, Ladysmith, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Kut-el-Amara, just down the river.

  He had lived on episodes of high adventure and the doings of daring young soldiers and, despite the defeats in Norway and France and the Balkans, he was still full of Britain’s good name and military pride, that strange emotion the country had evoked from what were all too often a string of disastrous defeats. Though young soldiers no longer postured proudly before tattered Union Jacks, the emotion that such pictures had roused in Boumphrey still remained strong within him. He would have objected fiercely if he’d been told he was old-fashioned, but his sense of honour was far stronger than his sense of self-preservation and he simply could not imagine allowing the women and children in Kubaiyah to become prisoners while there was still breath in his body and the strength in his limbs to prevent it.

  Besides – the thought pleased him in view of what her father had said of her – the siege had proved what he’d always thought; that there was more to old Prue than met the eye. She hadn’t said a word to him of what she’d done but the station medical officer had been loud in his praises of his civilian helpers and had even singled her out by name for a special word.

  He could see the opposite bank now, a dark line against a paler sky, broken here and there with stunted trees, high tufted reeds and the masts of occasional dhows. There was no sound, no light, no sign of life.

  ‘Let’s turn downstream now, Corporal, please,’ he said. ‘And just enough engine to make her manoeuvrable. Keep well clear of the bank, and call out as the river bends.’

  A few minutes later, the corporal turned. ‘Right-angled bend, sir. To the south.’