The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  ‘Oh, well,’ Houston said, with the philosophical disgust of the private for the staff. ‘That’ll be another general they’ll have to pull the plug on. Bang goes my leave and all that beer and skittles and all those white silken bodies on black silken sheets I was dreaming of dallying with.’

  Sollum was choked with vehicles, we heard, as the frightened men headed hot-foot for Egypt. The German attack on the British line had cut off 150 Brigade ‘box’ and the German transports were streaming through the gaps to replenish their tanks, and what Houston called ‘The Gazala Gallop’ was in full swing. Tobruk was cut off again and there was black smoke billowing from the blazing oil tanks and spreading like a pall across the sky. The Eighth Army was pulling back again.

  The armoured brigades had taken a terrific punishment from the German 88s and all over the desert there were circles of burnt-out vehicles and broken weapons and littered bodies half covered with sand, and long columns of exhausted prisoners streaming towards the west. Petrol and oil and ammunition were going up in flames and, back towards the Delta, they were burning code-books and maps; and the dusty sand, criss-crossed everywhere by tracks, was smeared with blood.

  The messages we received, however, were short and told us none of this, but we all knew what they meant. We’d seen it all before – the men crouched in ditches, their mouths open and yelling as they stared up at the sheen of silver wings above them and the bombs coming down like bunches of grapes out of the sky; and the transport pulled off the road in long straggles, tanks canted sideways, the crews staring with strained eyes towards the west; and the Military Police trying to sort some order out of the chaos to keep the vehicles moving so that they couldn’t be caught by the dive bombers and smashed while they were huddled in great groups, perfect targets for the enemy.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ Morena said, apparently unmoved by the news of the disaster.

  ‘’Ere’s to the next time,’ Leach said with heavy humour. ‘They know about as much about war in Cairo as my backside.’

  ‘“What did you do in the war, Daddy?”’ Houston said with a wry grin. ‘“I picked up the clangers, son, that the general dropped. They didn’t know the difference between a bear’s arse and the Taj Mahal.”’

  There were a few more jeers as they began to collect their belongings and a few more uncomplimentary things said about the staff. But there was no panic. We all knew the drill. It was hell-for-leather for Cairo again now, until the army could find somewhere to make a stand. We’d been doing it on and off, backwards and forwards, for two years, and nobody was very alarmed. We didn’t foresee any difficulties.

  The word was going round rapidly, and I saw Houston kick the sand over the fire and empty the contents of the home-made stove and pick up his beloved hot-water container. Leach grasped the mortar and prepared to heave it back into the lorry, brushing aside Gester as he moved forward to help.

  ‘When do we leave?’ Morena asked.

  I flicked the message paper. ‘We don’t,’ I said. ‘We stay here. We have to wait for the Paymaster to come back.’

  Morena lifted his eyebrows but said nothing, and I cocked a thumb towards the north.

  ‘With things going wrong,’ I said, ‘he might not make it. He might have to come back. We’ve got to see that he does.’

  Morena nodded.

  ‘He’s got a lot of money with him,’ I explained.

  He nodded again and walked across to the others. His hands jerked once or twice, because Morena never wasted words, and I saw Houston look round at him and put down the little stove, and Leach, his thick legs apart, slowly lower the mortar to the ground, staring at Gester as he did so. Nimmo, who had climbed into the driving seat of his jeep, slowly climbed out again and reached for a cigarette.

  Then Houston’s voice came across the silence as he straightened up. ‘Don’t look so bloody egg-bound, Tiny,’ he said to Leach. ‘It should be an honour to die for England, home and beauty.’

  Leach stared, uncomprehending.

  For a moment Houston stared back at him, then he scowled, the nervousness showing in his manner. ‘Oh, up your kilt, Leach,’ he growled sourly, and shuffled off with dragging feet to replenish the tea container.

  We sat there until dark, smoking in the shadow of the trucks and talking in undertones. Someone was singing softly – ‘I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle-Jangle-Jingle’ – then Morena interrupted softly on his mouth-organ with ‘The Strawberry Blonde’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’, songs we’d been singing for months because we never managed to hear many others. The singer stopped and they all listened to Morena. A typical regular, his mouth-organ was part of his equipment, and, sergeant or no sergeant, he’d played it up and down the desert ever since 1939.

  After a while I walked to the top of the dunes. Houston, who was supposed to be on lookout, was crouching in a hollow looking for his cigarettes, and angrily I tore a strip off him.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s the point of being up here if you don’t use your eyes?’ I snapped.

  Houston didn’t seem to mind the reprimand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I can hit a man at a mile.’ He patted his rifle.

  ‘That’s a lot of bloody good if you don’t see him before he sees you.’

  Houston shrugged and we stared together over the empty desert. I was still simmering with rage.

  ‘Expect Jerry’s out there looking this way,’ Houston said unexpectedly. ‘Just like us. Doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a desert rat or a broken palm on your lorry. You’re all in the same boat.’

  I looked at him quickly. Houston was a crafty little man skilled at drawing attention away from his own failings, and I got to my feet quickly, and walked back down the slope.

  They were all beginning to fish blankets out of the vehicles now, all except Leach, who took pleasure in living hard. He had scraped a hole for his hip and had laid down uncovered, his head near the wheel of his vehicle.

  I stretched out on the sand, thinking, half asleep but with my brain still alert for the clatter of tank tracks. My mind refused to leave the problem of the Paymaster and, as the stars began to prick the sky, cold and clear and aloof, I began to suspect that something had gone wrong somewhere and, with the knowledge, the old edgy feeling of the desert began to creep over me.

  I’d waited for daylight many a time like this, staring at the eastern horizon until it took on the pale greenish-yellow tinge of dawn, watching for the blurred contours of low hills to emerge against the brightening heavens, while the imperceptible increase in the light and then the advancing sun gave the country form and colour, breaking it into humps and ridges and grass-crested dunes. I’d held my breath many a time in the utter silence, aware of the absence of any sound or movement, always startled and surprised by its immensity, until it was broken in the first hint of daylight by a drowsy bird-call from a grass tuft in a valley somewhere, a sleepy query piped from a patch of camel-thorn, and the fluttering of movement in the stillness as some tiny creature stirred in the sheltering twigs.

  I’d half expected the Paymaster’s jeep to appear over the horizon soon after sun-up the next morning, but the desert remained empty and bare and glaringly white, its colour reflecting in the flat planes on the rocky face of Leach who was crouched on top of the dunes staring to the west. There was a muttering round the fire among the lorries and Nimmo’s voice raised in protest against Houston’s cooking – ‘You’ve burnt the bloody bacon again!’ – and a brief argument as someone accused him of swiping his washing water.

  Nobody said anything to me, however, and I said nothing to anyone else, but by mid-morning I was beginning to grow worried.

  Morena seemed to sense what was in my mind.

  ‘Thinking of sending off a jeep?’ he asked. ‘Just for a look?’

  It was phrased like a question, but I knew it was Morena’s tactful way of suggesting that what I had in mind was a sound idea, and I nodded, grateful for the tip.

  ‘Think we’d better send two?’ Morena w
ent on. ‘To cover the tracks.’

  ‘Nimmo,’ I said. ‘He’s a good corporal. He can take Houston and Leach and Ward.’

  Morena hitched up his shorts and half turned.

  ‘You’d better go with the other jeep, Wop,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay behind here.’

  Morena nodded. ‘OK,’ he said.

  They began to throw the gear into the jeeps and they were ready quickly, though, as usual, Houston held them up when he couldn’t find his gear.

  ‘Jump to it, you bloody idler,’ Morena snapped, and Houston nodded, grabbed his kit and, with his book of strip-pictures sticking from his pocket, scuttled for the jeep, his head-dress cock-eyed and flapping in his face.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said as he climbed aboard. ‘If you’ve got anything unpleasant to say, say it unpleasantly.’ He flailed with his arms to make room for himself. ‘Leach, you bastard,’ he ended. ‘You’ve got my belt on!’

  They disappeared over the horizon, trailing a cloud of dust, and the rest of us made tea and waited, all of us uneasy and expecting the Mark IVs to appear over the rise to the west at any moment.

  By mid-afternoon, with the hollow breathless in the heat, I began to be worried that I’d lost Morena, too, and I was beginning to wonder how it would look in my report – eight men gone, and two jeeps, to say nothing of the Paymaster. I moved uneasily round the hollow, making sure that everything was ready for a quick getaway, nervous and unhappy and weighing up the chances, certain that something had gone sadly wrong. Food was growing short now and water was only for the radiators, and everyone had begun to suspect that the staff had boobed again.

  ‘The bastards have forgotten us,’ I heard one of the men mutter by the fire. ‘I bet nobody knows we’re still here.’

  Privately, I was inclined to agree with him. All my instincts told me he was right. The whole business seemed to have gone haywire, and now, with two jeeps missing, I was wondering how much longer I dared hang on. Then, with the desert turning to beaten gold as the heat began to go out of the day, I saw them returning, one behind the other, coming out of the sun; two jeeps only, covered with dust, their passengers wearied, the sweat on their faces coated in a grey-yellow mask of muddy dust that cracked as they grinned wearily at us.

  They came to a stop alongside us, the heat from the engines striking at my face as I walked forward.

  ‘Where’s the Paymaster?’ I asked.

  ‘The silly bastard got himself clobbered,’ Nimmo said. ‘Trust the Pay Corps. We found them all right – right on track for Qahait. In the Depression. Morena found a place to hole up at the top where he could watch the desert and he sent the rest of us down to look for ’em while he prepared to take on Rommel if he came. We found ’em.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just at the bottom of the Depression. They were dead.’

  ‘All of ’em?’

  ‘Every last one of ’em. The Paymaster, two Redcaps and one Arab. It must have been those Messerschmitts. They’d hit the petrol tank and it had brewed up.’

  The death of the Paymaster didn’t mean much to me. I’d grown too used to finding burned-out wrecks with untidy bundles hanging half out of the seats or lying in a huddle alongside to have any sentiment about death. The face of the man you found was never the face of the man you’d swapped yarns with or shared a mug of tea with. You just did what you could to bury him, putting him as far down as the rocky earth would allow and piling stones on top to keep out the wild dogs. After that it was just a question of ‘Do you remember old So-and-so?’ over a beer when some anecdote brought up the dead man’s memory.

  ‘You brought their – equipment back?’ I chose the word carefully because not many of the men with me had overheard the Paymaster’s enthusiastic and indiscreet remarks about the bullion he’d been carrying for Sheikh Ghad.

  Nimmo gave me a sharp look. He’d heard and he knew what I was talking about.

  ‘There wasn’t any,’ he said. ‘It had gone.’

  ‘What about the till? Didn’t you bring the till?’

  ‘There wasn’t any till.’

  ‘Christ, it filled the back of the jeep!’

  ‘Well, it had gone. Ask anybody.’

  I saw Houston nodding, and Leach and Ward just behind solemnly agreeing, their faces blank. Morena stood to one side, listening, his face expressionless.

  ‘Must have been those black bastards from Qahait,’ Nimmo went on. ‘They must have moved up the Depression and they must have got there before we did.’

  ‘Did you see ’em?’

  ‘Not a sign.’

  I glanced towards the north. Up there the desert was a scrap-heap of burned-out wreckage and there was a steady stream of traffic flowing back under a hanging dust-haze towards Egypt. The Naafis were going up in orange flowers of flame and the field cashiers and the padres and the correspondents and all those other assorted hangers-on who could please themselves when to leave had long since vanished. The tents were coming down and the desert was littered with drifting scraps of torn and charred paper; and the thin-skinned vehicles were moving back beyond the check-point, hiss-hissing as they passed, lurching and rolling, gleaming ghostly in the moonlight as the endless procession went on day and night, dim faces staring ahead; while the Grants drew off the road, ready to cover the retreat with those big guns of theirs that would only traverse fifteen degrees so that they had to travel in reverse at five miles an hour to get them to bear at all – all there was between Rommel’s Mark IVs and Cairo.

  ‘You were a bloody long time,’ I said. I was worried sick now and growing more and more nervous, but Nimmo only shrugged.

  ‘We buried them,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t easy. It was rock. Here!’ He held out a fistful of identification discs. ‘I searched around a bit in case we found the box lying about. Even up the Depression, in case some of those black bastards were still around. We didn’t find the box, but we found some pictures. In a cave.’

  I looked up angrily. ‘You weren’t looking for bloody pictures,’ I said sharply, still with one eye over my shoulder looking for the Mark IVs. I’d been there too long and I was anxious to get back to the safety of our own lines.

  Nimmo grinned at me, untroubled by my anger. ‘Take it easy,’ he advised. ‘We found a place where the bombs had disturbed the rocks. There were a lot of old drawings in there. We might have made an archaeological discovery of some sort. I took some bearings just for safety, then we piled the rocks back and shovelled a lot of sand over ’em. I thought somebody might like to know.’

  I stared at him for a long time. Not far away the desert was being pulverised to dust under the thousands of moving wheels and the tramp of thousands of boots, until it was deep and floury and coated the hair and the clothes and caked in crusts on the lips of exhausted men. All the way back to Alex there were bodies lying under blankets and the smell of death and wounds, and the bewildered look of driven animals was on the faces of all the living as they struggled back through the wreckage of an army to where they could form some sort of defence and make a stand. The very thought of it made me jumpy.

  My own little party had packed up everything long since and there was nothing left in the hollow now except the empty tins and the ashes of the fire and the churned-up sand. But there was a long way to go and half of Rommel’s army was between us and safety.

  I half turned, gesturing wearily. Somehow, I felt I hadn’t the stomach for it.

  ‘Let’s make tracks,’ I said. ‘We’re not playing kiss-in-the-ring. We should have gone three days ago.’

  Within ten minutes we were heading east, passing through the derelicts of earlier skirmishes, scouting carefully towards the Delta, one jeep far to the rear watching behind us all the time, another well in front and to the north, on the lookout for Germans.

  Sometimes birds flew overhead, part of the great migratory flocks, and occasionally we saw gazelle – small animals which did not drink but sucked up the dew and the moisture from chance shrubs – and once a jer
boa from which the Eighth Army had taken its name, a long-legged desert rat that preyed on the exhausted birds that fell to the sand.

  But for two days no other living thing, except the humps of vehicles to the north just below the horizon, miraged until they looked like battleships, so that we crept quietly along behind the dunes, uncertain whether they were German or not, and not in the least anxious to find out. We were miles behind the army and, thanks to the orders that had kept us waiting for the Paymaster, in a hopeless position. There was no one to see us home, not even anyone to direct us or tell us how the retreat was going.

  When we stopped we crouched exhausted over our mugs of tea, one man sprawled on a ridge of sand staring northwards, the others not talking, their faces drawn and strained, Gester’s mouth twisted bitterly at the thought of yet another defeat, Houston moving nervously, not much to offer now in the way of humour. Morena grew more silent by the hour and Leach’s heavy face grew more grim. I kept seeing their eyes on me as they muttered, not questioning now, but as though they were praying quietly that I was good enough to get them out of it.

  Wondering whose were the half-baked orders that had kept us waiting longer than we ought to have waited, I was half-sick with worry but curiously never afraid, though occasionally we heard firing and at night we saw green and red Very lights. Then, at last, we almost ran flat out into a large group of Italian scout cars – the ones we’d seen beyond the horizon. Fortunately, they seemed more nervous then we were and I decided to bluff it out and we roared down on them, yelling and firing with all we’d got, and trying to kid them there were dozens more vehicles behind us below the horizon.