“Does that mean you’ll be free this evening?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Wizard, darling. I can’t wait to see you. Shall I fetch you this afternoon? What’s the earliest I can see you?”
“I’m having my hair done this afternoon.”
“Don’t waste time. I want to see you as early as I can. Your hair always looks marvellous.”
“I am seeing my hairdresser this afternoon, Geoffrey, because this is the day I always have my hair done.”
“I’ll meet you in town, then.”
“She comes to the hospital and does several of us.”
“When can I see you, then?”
“Come and have a drink at six. I’ll leave a message with the bauwab at the nurses’ home that I’m expecting you.”
“Can’t I really see you earlier?”
“This line is so bad ... I’ve got to go now.”
She hung up.
Denton returned to the ante-room for coffee. Presently Critchley joined him, looking pleased.
“O.K.?”
“Jean’s asked me to pick her up at six.”
“You look so dejected, I thought she’d turned you down.”
“When are you seeing Audrey?”
“I’m not. Some wingless wonder of a wing commander in Equipment, with a job in Cairo, is!”
“Bad luck.”
“Not to worry. I’m maleesh. I’ve fixed up with Celia. You remember Celia, don’t you?”
“The little blonde job. ‘Who is Celia, what is she?’ ”
“She’s a certain poke, that’s what she is.”
Despite his own disappointment, Denton could not help laughing. “That goes without saying if you’re devoting time and money to her. Where and when are you meeting her?”
“Shepheard’s for lunch.”
They picked up Butler from the sergeants’ mess and went into the city, dropped him at a senior N.C.Os’ club and found hotel rooms for themselves.
A bath, several drinks, a good lunch and a nap, followed by another bath heightened Denton’s impatience to get to Jean and increased his annoyance at the wasted hours.
*
Jean was already in the drawing-room when he arrived. He went quickly towards her but instead of coming forward to meet him she moved to the other side of a low table and bent down to help herself to a pistachio nut.
She’s shy, Denton thought. And every bit as stunning as I’ve been picturing her all these months.
There was another visitor, a sallow major, and Denton wondered which of the nurses he had come to take out. He looked at Denton with a smirk and Denton thought that he probably smirked rather a lot. The Major had an incipient third chin, his tunic bulged at the waist and a roll of fat overlapped the back of his collar. He wore his mousey hair in an unfortunate quiff and reeked of brilliantine and eau de cologne. His lapels bore the badge of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. One pudgy hand clutched a fly whisk and the other preened his moustache. He looked about 35.
“This is Luke Norland,” Jean said from the other side of the table.
“How d’you do?” Denton was not affable.
The major offered his hand without rising from his chair and Denton ignored it. The major dropped his hand and flourished his whisk at an imaginary fly.
Jean began fussing with one of the servants about drinks and Denton perforce asked “How long have you been out here?”
“Two months.”
With that quiff and whiff, he can’t be a regular: not even in the R.A.O.C., Denton told himself. Bound to be a Territorial.
“T.A.?”
“Actually, yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m at H.Q.”
“And no intention of moving, no doubt.”
The major flushed and his close-set eyes looked angry. Jean flushed even more deeply than he.
“Luke’s a very experienced administrator. He’s a director of his family’s brewery.”
So he had a private income as well as a major’s pay; and an assured and prosperous future as well as being as safe from death or injury as any man could be.
“How lucky for him.”
“And how are things in the desert?” The major didn’t look or sound as if he cared.
“The air is clean. We aren’t always: we have to make do with a gallon of water a day, often enough.”
“How insanitary.”
“You’ll never know, will you?”
Major Norland laughed. Jean, bright pink, went to sit on the arm of his chair. She fiddled with a ring on her finger and then rested her hand on her thigh. Denton saw the big sapphire and diamonds.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate us? Luke and I are engaged.”
*
Denton telephoned Creon Lefkaris from the hospital.
“Geoffrey! My dear fellow, I couldn’t be more pleased. Cyrene will be quite delirious. Hurry over here. Come and stay. Oh, you shouldn’t have taken a hotel room. There’s always a bed for you here. We’ve got some people coming to dinner. You know them all. Cyrene will find a partner for you. We’ll go out and beat up the town a bit after dinner. Hurry, old boy.”
Twenty minutes later they were shaking hands and Creon was saying “I was afraid this would happen. I’ve see Jean around the town with that frightful man with the quiff. Don’t worry. Cyrene has found you a charming partner. She’s French and a grass widow: her misguided husband has gone off to join the Vichy French Army in Algeria. Simone is a great admirer of the Free French ... that chap General de Gaulle and all that. I don’t think you’re going to need your hotel room tonight, Geoffrey.”
Denton did not. His night with the grass widow did much to assuage the deep hurt Jean had inflicted on him but did not repair his wounded feelings.
There were too many memories of Jean, too greatly cherished for the past few months, to be obliterated by a few hours of casual adultery. All the occasions on which they had been alone together stood separately in his memory, yet were fused into a many-threaded pattern of which she was the centre and on which he had dwelt with delight and depended for consolation while they were apart. In his dangerous and, in a way, disordered, life he had reverted constantly to his memory of her with delicate sensuality and with love. Now he knew that her flirtatious looks had been in reality full of deliberate calculation. He, had become another carelessly discarded provider of entertainment, admiration and safe titillation in her selfish progress towards security and what passed at her social level for wealth. There were too many longing and, despite everything, grateful thoughts pendant from the word “together” which formed in his mind in association with her name or with her image, for him to be able readily to dismiss his feelings for her.
He returned to the arid, monastic clutch of the desert and the insidious corrosion of time and combat with another layer of scepticism added to the accretion of disillusion and disappointment that had already accumulated during the years since he first became aware of his mother’s fatal illness.
Six
The capture of Sidi Barrani was completed in a succession of sandstorms. It ended with the taking of 40000 prisoners and 400 guns. The Italians who fled before the British and Commonwealth troops took refuge in Bardia, a fortress town on the coast 50 miles west of Sidi Barrani as the crow flys and 75 miles along the road that curved beside the bay. Bardia was a few miles on the Libyan side of the frontier.
General O’Connor’s ground forces had to call an enforced halt for three weeks while they awaited the arrival of the 6th Australian Division from Palestine before they were in sufficient strength to go forward.
The squadron moved forward also, to another desert airstrip, Sidi Himar, west of Sidi Barrani. Suddenly the life they led in the desert acquired a bizarre new flavour. With such an abundance of captured material in British hands, Italian motorcycles and vehicles of all kinds appeared at every Army and Air Force unit. The troops “liberated” articles of enemy apparel made of better clot
h than British Service issue. They particularly favoured Italian headgear.
Army officers had for some time been dressing in unorthodox style: corduroy slacks, suede desert boots, khaki or grey (Indian Army) pullovers, coloured neck-cloths. Warfare in the Western Desert had a unique style which extended to what the fighting men wore. It now embraced their transportation. Wing Commander Nash had commandeered a sleek Lancia saloon. Squadron Leader Fry had an Alfa-Romeo sports car which some rich young Italian officer had taken with him on campaign. Denton and Sergeant Butler each had a solo motorcycle. Critchley had one with a sidecar: the latter intended to convey female passengers, of course; if he could find any.
On Christmas Day the squadron held improvised dirt track races. Virtually every pilot, observer and air gunner had a motor cycle of some kind and so had many of the ground N.C.Os and the sharper aircraftmen. Critchley detached his sidecar so that he could compete. Everybody had drunk a lot of beer and captured Chianti and there were so many spills that in some races no one survived to cross the finishing line.
On Boxing Day they resumed operations, which meant constantly dropping bombs on Bardia and other targets further west. The weather curtailed the effort considerably and there was little reaction from enemy fighters.
“We’ll be getting fat and lazy,” Denton said to his crew one morning when ops were cancelled on account of a severe sandstorm. They were feeling complacent about their missions when they did fly. The enemy had been so thoroughly routed at Sidi Barrani and they had seen them surrender in such vast numbers with so little resistance, that they had no respect for the Italians at all.
Everyone in North Africa had been through a period of great anxiety during the four months following the surrender of France and the ignominious retreat of the British Expeditionary Force. They felt useless so far from a homeland which they could do nothing to defend. Even the bomber crews wished they could go back and fly against the Luftwaffe and had enormous admiration for the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots who were doing so. When the Battle of Britain was over and the Luftwaffe defeated, and German plans for an invasion of Britain were finally thwarted, the Western Desert Air Force were eager to show what they, in their turn, could do. But their fighting in the desert seemed easy compared with what the home squadrons had to face.
The Italians had put up a feeble fight — with a few exceptions such as some very tough Bersaglieri and a couple of C.R. 42 pilots whom the squadron had encountered — before turning tail. The R.A.F. took no particular pride in beating the Regia Aeronautica; it was too easy.
On 3rd January 1941 the battle for Bardia began. It was won in three days. The British and Commonwealth forces took 45000 prisoners, 462 guns and 129 tanks.
They did not stop in their sweep forward. On 21st January the Army opened the assault on Tobruk and it fell on the next day. This time the Italians lost 30000 prisoners, 236 guns and 87 tanks. The Army was now 80 miles deep into Libya and the squadron shifted again; to a featureless patch of desert known as Bir Rawit.
Three months earlier, in October 1940, the Italians had made the mistake of invading Greece. They were not doing well. Creon Lefkaris and his friends had made light of it to Denton. They seemed not to be alarmed by the threat to their country.
“All Italians are poltroons,” Creon had said. “All Greeks are natural fighters.”
His wife had amplified. “A nation of tenors, waiters and dancing masters. We’ll soon throw them out. If they ever manage to set foot across our frontier.”
Denton was not as sanguine as his Greek friends. It seemed to him that Hitler was bound to make a grab at the Balkans eventually and that would mean sending his own troops to take Athens and occupy the country.
While the Allied forces in North Africa were fighting around, and in the air above, Tobruk, Churchill was trying to persuade the Greek Government to allow British tanks and artillery to land in their country and help to drive out the Italians and to resist the Germans if they came. Rumours of this offer circulated in the Western Desert and Denton felt uneasy when the squadron heard from its Intelligence officer that the Greek Prime Minister had refused help; on the grounds that it was likely to provoke an immediate German invasion.
There was scant time, however, to fret about what might happen in Greece. The Allies were going full pelt across Libya. After Tobruk was taken the squadron found itself flying daily over the red earth and green vegetation of the Jebel Akhdar in support of ground forces thrusting towards Benghazi, 270 miles further along the coast and to Beda Fomm, almost 100 miles beyond Benghazi. Beda Fomm was captured first, by a force which took a short cut. By 7th February the Allies were in possession of both objectives and the squadron was based on a desert airstrip known prosaically as Landing Ground 117, 50 miles south of the southern edge of the Jebel Akhdar. The Allied forces had captured so many more men, guns and tanks that the Italian Army in North Africa was effectively extinct. The way was open to Tripoli and complete conquest of Libya.
In the intoxication of repeated successful missions against the enemy and a territorial gain that was more obvious to those who flew over it than to the land forces which had to traverse it more slowly, Denton had not given a thought to Jean MacGregor for many days. There was ample satisfaction in the fighting men’s achievements to compensate for private disappointments and defeats, even though they still had a feeling that they had not had a very hard task in rolling up the Italian ground and air forces.
Some awards were gazetted. Denton and Critchley each got a D.F.C. and Sergeant Butler a D.F.M. Compared with the pride Denton felt in his decoration, losing Jean MacGregor was trivial. His relationship with her he now saw as a tense, insecure time and he looked on it in recollection as a badly focused and fading film full of curious shifting phases of harsh light and romantic shadow which left him almost unmoved. There was a lingering ache. It had become more one of annoyance that he had not been forceful enough to get her into bed than of sorrow over a lost love.
Critchley seemed able to unearth women from beneath clumps of camel thorn. Whenever he had an opportunity he used to disappear on his combination in the direction of an Italian colony on the slopes of the Jebel Akhdar, where he reported a satisfactory number of Italian widows and grass widows, unmarried schoolteachers and nurses. He and Denton shared a tent and when he had been out on one of his escapades, Denton woke to a variety of scents adhering to the clothes he had worn.
While the squadron waited to resume their advance to Tripoli they enjoyed a period of unparallelled euphoria. It ended abruptly a week after the fall of Benghazi.
Wing Commander Nash came into the mess at lunch time with the two flight commanders, the adjutant and the Intelligence officer at his heels in an ominous procession.
The mess consisted of a marquee with tarpaulins for a floor. The officers ate at a trestle table at one end and used the other end, where there was a rough bar with a scattering of canvas chairs, as an ante-room. They were sitting around sipping soft drinks, reading their mail and a few newspapers that had arrived. Nash dragged off his head-dress and fiddled with his worry beads, so they all knew something momentous must have happened. He told the barman to go away for ten minutes, then turned to face the officers.
“I have a disappointment for you. The powers that be have decided not to press on to Tripoli. It appears that the new Greek Prime Minister has agreed to accept British reinforcements. Churchill has a bee in his bonnet about the Balkans. He’s decided to divert some of us from here to Greece instead of continuing to chase the Italians right out of Libya. To compensate for the disappointment, there’s some news which may please you. As you know, two Blenheim squadrons went to Greece last November. Now we’re going back to the Delta to re-equip preparatory to going to Greece ourselves. You needn’t think you’ll be missing anything by leaving North Africa. If Jerry does have a crack at Greece, and I’m sure he will, things there are going to be pretty hot. And when we’ve got that situation all wrapped up we’ll come back here to finish
whatever remains to be done. Which won’t take long.”
At that time none of them had heard of a German general named Erwin Rommel. Nor, if any of them had, would he have been aware that on the day before the Allies took Benghazi, Hitler had sent for General Rommel and ordered him to go to Libya in command of two mechanised divisions to rescue the Italians from their plight. Hence their C.O’s prediction that it would not take long to complete the conquest of Libya.
At mention of returning to the Nile Delta to re-equip, everyone had looked pleased. The fleshpots of Cairo beckoned. Despite the fact that they quickly tired of the meretricious atmosphere when they did go there and were irritated by the multitude of attitudinising base wallahs leading their comfortable lives in safety, and showing no signs of wishing they could be where the fighting was, there was nobody who would have volunteered to stay in the desert.
The squadron were further pleased to be going to Greece, which at least was part of Europe and would make them feel closer to home. They were also flattered to be part of a small air contingent which would be in the thick of the action if the Germans landed there.
None the less, they were as disappointed as Teddie Nash that they were not going to forge ahead and see the immediate end of the Libyan campaign.
When the C.O. had finished what he had to say, Critchley grinned at Denton.
“The Greek bints are wizard, from what I’ve seen of them in Cairo. And we won’t have to ride fifty miles on a motorbike along bumpy tracks to get at ’em.”
“You’d better be careful. Greek men are jealous. And they use knives.”
“All the ones who are any good will be busy fighting, not keeping a jealous eye on their bints.”
*
When the squadron arrived in Greece there were already four R.A.F. squadrons there, three with Blenheims and one with Gladiators. Two more fighter squadrons followed Wing Commander Nash’s Blenheims. All three of the fighter squadrons were re-equipping with Hurricanes, with the result that they were flying both types of aircraft. This paucity of Hurricanes was not encouraging and mixed squadrons were not in keeping with the dignity and pride of the Royal Air Force. They gave a wrong impression of penury and unpreparedness.
The Eagle's Cry Page 9