by John Harris
When I’d lagered the vehicles in the hollow and watched them being immobilised I’d known that, to all intents and purposes, I was safe from all but air attack. So long as we remained alert we were well able to withdraw in good time before the enemy could come down on us. Morena had chosen his spot well and it was just a matter of remaining wide-awake.
But on my right flank was Qalam, a flea-bitten Arab village we’d passed through some days before – full of flies and grunting camels and surly obsequious men and women outside the tumbledown houses – and on my left was the Qalam Depression. It was a great empty hollow in the desert, running roughly from north-west to south-east, a bare sandy bowl below the floor of the desert, surrounded by high limestone cliffs and littered with rocks, and broken up here and there by rock falls or small wadis. One of the wadis led off to the ruined village of Qatu and at the other end of the track that ran through the Depression was Qahait, where several hundred Arab fighting men were waiting with machine guns and mortars and a few lorries handed over by the High Command. Any big movement round the end of the wire would have to pass by the Depression, and someone in Intelligence, trying to do a Lawrence of Arabia, had persuaded Sheikh Ghad of the Qalami to come in against the Axis with the promise of further support from a couple of cousins and all their followers, too. They’d been trained up by the Australians and, on paper, looked useful, but it was an unexpected arrangement, because, for the most part, the war in North Africa was a private affair between the Allies and the Axis, with the Arabs lifting anything that was not locked up or pegged down. But Ghad had been educated in England and he didn’t like the Italians, and he was still young enough to enjoy a bit of fun. To all intents and purposes, the set-up was sound, but to me it was an uneasy situation because I wasn’t sure how much I could trust Sheikh Ghad. I’d been far less impressed with him than the man who’d come up from headquarters in the Delta to swear to his trustworthiness.
But there wasn’t much I could do about it. I’d been told to wait there and that I’d receive my instructions when it was time for them to be sent. There were others behind me, it seemed, doing the same thing.
Trying hard to look unconcerned, I walked across to where the wireless operator was listening to the muted bleep-bleep of the set.
‘Traffic’s still growing,’ he said in answer to my raised eyebrows. ‘It’s getting bloody crowded, in fact.’
‘I hope it won’t get so crowded they can’t contact us,’ I commented.
Almost as I spoke, the set began to bleep louder and the operator dropped the paper-backed novel he’d been browsing through, dog-eared from weeks of being kicked around inside a jeep, and reached for his pencil.
‘Us,’ he said shortly.
From time to time he tapped his key in response, then his hand flickered as he sent off the letters that indicated the signal had been received and understood.
We decoded the message together in the shade of the little shelter we’d rigged up, and the wireless operator looked round at me, puzzled. I said nothing, though, and, picking up the sheet of buff paper, I stepped into the glare of the sun.
Morena was standing alongside a sand-coloured jeep with ‘Daisy’ painted on the radiator. ‘Daisy’ was Morena’s wife and it was something of a joke that he should carry her name about with him wherever he went. He had his head in the bonnet, tinkering with the petrol pump, and as he heard the shuffle of my feet in the sand, he looked up, lifted his head and slammed the bonnet down.
‘Trouble?’ I asked.
Morena shook his head, his face expressionless. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘Just making sure we don’t get any. That’s all.’
I flicked the message in my hand. ‘Visitors,’ I said. ‘We’re expecting visitors.’
A flicker of concern crossed Morena’s face. ‘Jerry?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. Our lot.’
He raised his eyes. ‘When?’ he asked.
‘He’s nearly here.’
‘Is that why we’ve been waiting here?’ he asked, and I nodded.
‘End of the line,’ I said. ‘He’s been passed on from one group to the next. We’re the last.’
‘Must be someone important. Who is it? Churchill?’
The bleeping from the wireless had died away now and it had become quiet again, so quiet we both seemed to hold our breath at the silence. The shadows were lengthening beyond the dunes as the sun sank lower, and the brilliant whites and silvers of midday were taking on a golden glow now; and over the whole wide desert beyond the hollow there was no hint of movement.
Morena made an awkward, half-embarrassed gesture towards it. ‘Gets you, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘I’ll miss it when it’s all over,’ I agreed.
‘Often thought I’d like to come back. Have a look round. Appreciate it without worrying whether a Stuka’ll be up in the sun.’
I nodded. ‘It’ll be nice to sleep at nights,’ I said, ‘without having one ear open all the time for tank tracks.’
After two years we were all beginning to grow weary of the desert, with the sucked-in cheeks and dark rings under the eyes that you got from too many nights of half-sleep or sitting up watching the north for lights or the hum of engines.
Morena offered me a cigarette and we leaned against the jeep, idly studying a map I’d produced – something we’d got into the habit of doing in our spare moments, so that it was firmly imprinted on the mind for the times when we might not have the chance to get it out and look at it. Behind us were the trucks, surrounded by mines that could take care of any intruders. In the hollow, Leach, absurd in Ward’s shorts which he’d ‘borrowed’ and forgotten to give back, was lifting the mortar about as though it were a featherweight, bulky as a brewery horse as he bent over it. Once, for a joke, in the ‘Build’ column of his identity form I’d written ‘Colossal’ – a touch of humour authority had never appreciated, and which had been promptly changed to ‘Large’. He was slow and awkward, with stiff, humourless jokes that nobody laughed at, which could change in a moment to surly ill temper.
Houston, his bootlaces trailing, handed him a cup of tea – a ragbag sparrow of a soldier whose socks always needed darning or whose shirt was always torn, a dry little man with a sharp humour who was completely unaware of his sloppiness.
It was always Houston who was first out of the lorry and filling the two halves of the old petrol-tin stove we carried – one half containing the sand on to which he poured petrol, the other half the water for the tea. Always it seemed to be Houston’s job to provide the tea, and, though he regularly lost his equipment and even other people’s, the one thing he never lost track of was the tea. He was a thin, slightly built little man with a big nose that stuck out from under the Arab head-dress he wore.
‘Have a glass of aphrodisiac,’ he said as he passed over the mug. ‘Vintage,’ forty-two. Chilled, but not iced.’
Leach stared at him, uncomprehending, his mind heaving over slowly.
‘You being funny?’ he asked.
‘For Christ’s sake, yes!’ Houston said waspishly, edgy with waiting. ‘But don’t strain your brain, mate, I’ll write it down and you can get out your Child’s Guide To Funny Bits and look it up.’
‘One of these days I’ll flatten you,’ Leach growled, but Houston merely grinned and skipped away, conscious of his own superiority in spite of Leach’s strength.
I watched them moving around among the other men going about their business, and I was still staring at them when I saw the sentry we’d posted suddenly retreat from the lip of the dune above and come down towards us, his feet kicking up puffs of sand as he scrambled down to the hollow. Immediately everyone stopped what he was doing and hands began to reach out towards weapons.
The sentry stopped in front of me, cocking a thumb towards the east. ‘Jeep, it looks like,’ he said shortly, and I turned and followed him up the slope.
As I went, I saw Ward climb into the truck behind the Bren and move the cocking handle,
and Houston bending quickly to lace up his boots. Morena moved among the others, not speaking, simply indicating things with little flicks of his fingers. Everyone knew what he meant. They’d all done everything before. Houston stood ready to kick sand over the fire, and Leach bent over the mortar, his heavy face set, ready to grab it up and run with it if it were needed. The wireless operator looked up as Nimmo tapped his shoulder, and kept his eyes on me, waiting for any signal that might spell danger and the need to send out an urgent message to the north.
But the dust-cloud that the sentry had seen was a jeep and I could see the Pay Corps sign on it through my binoculars. The man driving it was a captain with the sort of guardee moustache all officers in the desert liked to cultivate in those days. There was an Arab wearing khaki trousers and an Arab head-dress and cloak in the front of the vehicle with him, and in the rear two Military Policemen.
I gave the washout sign to Morena and he turned and gestured with the flat of his hand. Leach’s straining muscles relaxed and Houston bent and poured the dregs of the tea into his mug. Nimmo lit a cigarette and the wireless operator’s tense expression vanished as he picked up his paper-backed book again and started thumbing through it.
The Pay Corps captain was a Welshman with a high voice, and I sent out Nimmo to guide him through the mines. There were a few jeers at the Redcaps because all soldiers jeer at Military Police on principle, and the men with me had been in the desert too long to have much love for anybody but their own friends.
‘Oh, Mother, look!’ Houston indicated the smart uniforms. ‘Soldiers! Real ones! Is it right, mate,’ he asked one of the Redcaps, ‘that you lot take a bath once a month whether you need it or not?’
There was a guffaw, and one of the Redcaps, a young sergeant who looked as though he’d just left school, blushed and made an embarrassed hostile gesture.
‘You want to watch out, chum,’ he said. ‘I know you. I’ve seen you before, back at base.’
‘Not me,’ Houston said innocently. ‘I don’t know you from a bar of soap.’
The moustached captain was staring round him with narrowed eyes, obviously disapproving of the banter, frowning at the dusty men in the hollow, all of them bleached to the colour of the fine sand.
‘Christ, it’s like a bloody fortress in here,’ he said.
‘We need a lot of guns,’ Nimmo said coolly, his eyes glowing with the instinctive dislike of the front-line soldier for the base operator. ‘We do a lot of fighting.’
The captain stared at him for a second as though he weren’t in the habit of talking casually to corporals, then he turned to me.
‘They told me I’d find you here,’ he said. ‘They said you’d see me before I saw you.’ He glanced at Nimmo. ‘You did,’ he added. ‘It’s a good job we weren’t Jerries.’
‘It’s a knack,’ Nimmo said insolently. ‘You learn it when you live out here all the time.’
The captain checked his map references with me and gestured towards the south.
‘How long to Qahait?’ he asked.
‘Best part of a day,’ I said.
‘Christ, as much as that?’
‘Straight on and through the Depression. It’s a village at the other end to the south. Bit of a dump, but you’ll find it all right. The road leads straight through to it.’
The captain grinned. ‘Sheikh Ghad’s going to be glad to see me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got their pay. In coin.’
‘In coin?’
‘Pound notes wouldn’t be much good to Sheikh Ghad, would they? It’s in sovereigns. Ten thousand of ’em, each worth three quid a time – silver dollars, napoleons and maria theresas, to say nothing of a bloody great bagful of diamonds.’
I saw Nimmo’s eyes flicker, glowing quickly and full of evil, then he caught the captain’s stare on him and turned away and lit a cigarette.
‘Nice and portable,’ the captain went on. ‘And legal tender anywhere. Ghad’s promised a lot more men later, so there had to be plenty of it. Fraser fixed it. You’ve met Fraser?’
I nodded. Yes, I’d met Fraser, a spare-looking New Zealander who’d been an archaeologist like Lawrence and had spent all the war so far doing intelligence work.
‘There’s enough to buy all the Arabs in Libya and Cyrenaica,’ the Pay Corps captain went on. ‘They drove a hard bargain. I just hope it does some good. Rumour has it that Ghad’ll just bolt for the south as soon as he’s got it. They’re saying in Cairo that Fraser’s pulled a boner this time and picked a wrong ’un. Still’ – he shrugged – ‘that’s not my affair. My job’s just to see that we deliver it intact to him.’
He patted the iron box in the back of the jeep between the MPs.
‘Glad to get rid of it,’ he said. ‘Bit of a responsibility. That’s why we’re travelling light. So nobody’ll notice us. Hope to meet Ghad tomorrow.’
‘Hope you’re lucky,’ I said.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
I jerked my head towards the north. ‘That lot,’ I said. ‘The chances are it’ll move down here before long.’
The Welsh captain grinned. ‘Don’t let that worry you,’ he said. ‘They’re moving west. They say in Cairo that this time it’s for keeps.’
‘I hope they’re right.’
‘Don’t you think they are?’
‘Doesn’t feel right. We shouldn’t be here.’
He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘You’ve got the heebie-jeebies, son,’ he said. ‘Been out in the desert too long.’
I didn’t reply. I had my own way of feeling things, just as the men around me had, and it came as no surprise to hear that the frailer flowers in Cairo felt differently.
The Welshman didn’t stay long, just long enough to share some of the greasy bully beef and tepid peaches we lived on, just long enough for the Military Policemen to have their legs pulled unmercifully by the hardened set of villains round the fire, then they climbed back into the jeep, watched by the half-circle of dusty, sun-bleached men.
‘Qalam, here we come,’ the Welshman said, with a forced attempt at good humour.
His smile wasn’t reflected in the bearded faces around him.
‘Hope you enjoy it,’ Houston muttered. ‘Send a signal, operator. Here come the soldiers, weary and footsore from doing nothing by numbers.’
The captain heard him and his face went taut, but he had realised by now that he wasn’t talking to base soldiers and, embarrassed by the silence after Houston’s remark, he made a valiant effort to be one of them, going on with dogged cheerfulness that was so artificial it was painful.
‘They reckon the Lost City’s down in the Depression somewhere,’ he said.
‘Which lost city?’ I asked.
‘You know – the one they always talk about. People have seen it. But only people who were lost themselves. They were always coming back to look for it but they never found it.’
‘How’d they know it was lost, then?’ Nimmo asked disconcertingly.
The captain frowned, but went on gamely. ‘They say it’s got white walls and a door shaped like a bird. They say it’s full of sleeping people.’
Nobody showed any enthusiasm for the story and, his voice trailing away lamely, he let in the clutch hurriedly and set off through the mines, guided by Nimmo.
‘He’s got it wrong,’ Houston said in a solemn voice, staring after them. ‘He’s thinking of Sleeping Beauty.’
We stood on top of the dune watching the jeep move away, then, as the Welshman waved and began to accelerate, Nimmo turned and came back.
‘Hope they enjoy the trip,’ he said.
Nobody moved for a long time, all eyes watching the disappearing jeep as though it were the last frail link with civilisation. Nimmo lit a cigarette with that slow deliberate manner of his, his eyes squinting towards the west and the disappearing cloud of dust. Houston, his face shaded by the linen folds of the head-dress he wore, sipped a mug of cold tea. Leach stood like a great rock between them, his craggy face expressionless, two great han
ds like shovels hanging down by his sides.
The jeep had been gone some time when we heard the Messerschmitts go over. We saw them first high in the brassy blue of the sky like tiny silver fishes, then the glint of the sun on them as they banked and came down.
‘They’ve seen something,’ Nimmo said in a flat unhurried voice, staring upwards, the sun glinting on the red-gold of his hair.
Nobody said anything. We’d taken all the precautions of camouflage, even to tying clumps of scrub to the vehicles and smearing the windscreens with oil and scattering dust across them to stop them reflecting the sun, and nobody moved. Nobody ever moved until we were certain.
Then we saw the Messerschmitts were going overhead, slightly towards the south, towards some point beyond us, and we all drew breath again as they disappeared beyond the curve of the ground.
Morena’s face was hard, a set of square, flat planes in the sunshine.
‘What are they after?’ he asked, in that unemotional stolid way he had.
‘Looking for the ice-cream man,’ Houston said. ‘They heard his bell.’
Leach stared at him, his eyes puzzled, and he started to say something. But then he changed his mind and stared up with the others at the disappearing aircraft.
‘Haven’t seen Messerschmitts prowling about like that down here for some time,’ Nimmo commented. ‘Something’s in the wind.’
‘Probably after some soft-skinned stuff down there,’ I said. ‘We’ve probably been using Qahait as a dump. Perhaps they’ve seen ’em. Perhaps they’ve seen Sheikh Ghad.’
The Messerschmitts were out of sight when we heard the faint rattle of guns and the thump-thump-thump of bombs and felt the echo of the blast in the air, as though someone kept slamming a door.
‘Somebody’s bought it,’ Morena grunted.
That evening we got the expected messages from the north. At first they were only rumours, springing from the wireless operator, with his secret knowledge of the private means of wireless operators all the world over, of sending messages that headquarters never learned of. Somebody had made the mistake of splitting up the armour, it seemed, so that the superior numbers of the British had been cancelled out, and it had been found that the fifty- and seventy-five-millimetre guns of the Germans had a greater range, and suddenly, instead of being on the defensive, Rommel was attacking and the retreat was on.