A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  When they had finished eating, Lampard collected his second pint of tea (the one with the reward of rum in it) and took Sergeant Davis aside. “What went wrong?” he asked.

  Davis cleaned his mess tin in the sand. He held it up to the fading, spilled-paintbox light so that he could see into the corners. He murmured, “Dear, dear.” He cleaned it again, checked it again, turned it upside-down and banged it with his hand to shake the last few grains loose. “Difficult to know where to begin,” he said.

  Lampard slowly walked away. Twenty paces. Davis counted them. He turned and walked back. Nineteen paces. “You lost a pace somewhere,” Davis said. “My old drill sergeant wouldn’t have liked that. He’d have sent you back to find the bloody thing.”

  “Suppose we start again.” Lampard sipped his tea. “What went wrong?”

  Davis was ready this time. “Not for me to say, sir. But I can tell you what happened. One of those wop armored cars got around the salt marsh somehow, and it clobbered us.”

  “Why didn’t you see it coming?”

  “I’ve wondered about that myself. Two reasons. One is, as soon as their cars came out of the oasis and started firing, we decided to pull back. So we weren’t watching them all that closely, especially as we had a bit of trouble turning the wireless truck. The other reason is the armored car that hit us didn’t come flying across the bog. It came sneaking up a little wadi on the other flank.”

  Lampard folded his arms and let his heavy head sink until his chin would go no further while he absorbed this information. “What next?” he asked. His voice was so gruff it was almost a growl.

  “Next . . . Well, next the Eye-ties fired a burst and hit the wireless truck. Hit the tires, front and rear, so I knew that was that, and we decided to get out quick. That was when Mr. Waterman got upset about leaving his code books in the truck, so he went off to get them, and while he was inside the truck the Eye-ties gave it several squirts and I reckon they hit the petrol tank. Like putting a match to a gas-ring. Whoosh! Up she went.”

  The sun had almost gone. The temperature was falling in a rush; soon it would be time for a woolen cardigan. “It must have been an extremely small wadi,” Lampard said.

  “Big enough.”

  “What I mean is, there was no reason to expect an attack from that quarter.”

  Sergeant Davis said nothing. Enough light remained for Lampard to see the look in his eyes: a look that said Not for me to say, sir.

  “On the other hand,” Lampard said, “on this sort of job there’s always reason to expect an attack from any quarter.”

  Davis said nothing in the same expressive way.

  “On the other other hand,” Lampard said, “no risk, no win. And we did get the Storch.”

  “So we did,” Davis said. “We got the Storch.”

  Normally everyone sat around for an hour or two, talking, maybe listening to the BBC. Not now. After driving all night and all day they wanted only sleep. A couple of fitters worked on their vehicles for an hour or so, but by eight p.m. they too were wrapped in their blankets. Nothing moved in the desert; it was as still and silent as the sky. For the best part of twelve hours the members of the patrol slept like dead men, which in some cases was good practice.

  Soon after dawn, Gibbon saw Dunn stowing his blankets in the truck, and walked over. “You’re a clever chap, Mike,” he said quietly. “Maybe you can explain what we were supposed to be up to, yesterday.”

  Gentle flattery from Gibbon put Dunn on the alert. “What d’you mean?” he asked. He knew what Gibbon meant.

  “Of course, I’m only the bloody silly navigator,” Gibbon said. “What do I know about the art of war? It seemed to me yesterday that we were in the wrong bloody place at the wrong bloody time, risking the whole bloody patrol for the sake of a twopenny-ha’penny target that wasn’t worth five rounds rapid. But of course I could be wrong.”

  “We did hit the plane,” Dunn said.

  “Bang goes tuppence-ha’penny,” Gibbon said. “Yippee.”

  “It’s not as simple as that.”

  Gibbon twitched his nostrils. Bacon was frying. “Burned pig!” he said. “Nothing like it, is there?”

  “That’s not very funny,” Dunn said.

  “Nobody ever caught the pig laughing,” Gibbon said, “so I’m sure you’re right.”

  They walked to the fire and watched the cook at work. Lampard joined them. “Ah, bacon!” he said.

  Gibbon cleared his throat. “I was just thinking about yesterday’s little battle,” he said.

  Lampard stretched and yawned and waited.

  “Hot stuff,” Gibbon said.

  “Just a skirmish.”

  “I bet the Italians claim a major victory. Big British attack repelled with heavy casualties.”

  “No doubt. But it was still just a skirmish.”

  “No heavy casualties?”

  That made Lampard look sharply at Gibbon. “You know the score,” he said. “We had a spot of bad luck.”

  “Ah, is that what it was?” Gibbon asked. “A spot of bad luck?”

  Dunn said: “For Christ’s sake, shut up, Corky.”

  “Just trying to put myself in the picture, Mike.”

  Lampard snorted to blow some flies off his beard. “I bet I could find a fuel dump in Jalo Oasis at night,” he said. “And an ammo dump. How about it, Corky? You and me in the jeeps with a couple of chaps. You navigate and I steal some fuel, and then we go marauding around the Jebel. Are you on?” Lampard slapped his hands and infuriated the flies.

  Gibbon tried to think of a good reason why not, and couldn’t. He was saved by Sergeant Davis. “The tires won’t stand it,” Davis said.

  “Oh well,” Lampard said. “Another time, perhaps.”

  Davis was right. They had to mend six punctures to cover the remaining two hundred kilometers to Kufra, which was a big, sprawling, well-found oasis with plenty of stores, including new tires. Kufra was an SAS base, so Lampard was able to radio HQ in Cairo and report his arrival. Cairo ordered the patrol home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  More Bright Breasts

  “Ping-pong is not an Olympic sport,” Henry Lester said. “What you’ve got here in the desert is a ping-pong war. That’s why the public don’t buy it. It’s not box-office.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Henry,” his wife said. “Put a sock in it and eat your ice cream.”

  They were in the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo, having dinner with a mixed bunch of journalists and army officers, and all night Lester had been trying to provoke a winnable argument. He was forty-one, shortish, chunky, with a receding crewcut, and he represented a Chicago newspaper whose readers like to be told just what the hell was going on in the world, short and sharp, without a lot of tap-dancing and blowing bubbles. So Lester held short, sharp, strong opinions about almost everything. “I’ll say this for Cairo,” he said. “They make good ice cream, and that’s the only single, solitary thing to be said for the place.”

  “Glad you enjoy it,” said a lieutenant-general called Saxon. “Just remember you wouldn’t be sitting here at all if the British Army hadn’t stopped Graziani’s attack in 1940.”

  “Ping!” Lester said. “Wavell counter-attacks, gains a thousand miles. Pong! Rommel arrives, the British lose it all. Ping! Auchinleck attacks, he gains a thousand miles. Pong! Rommel attacks and wins half of it back. Ping! Did I forget anyone?”

  “Only a few dead men,” said a brigadier named Munroe. “A few hundred thousand, that is, counting both sides. Pity they’re not here to argue with you, isn’t it?”

  He was next to a lanky, gray-haired Reuters man, Shapiro. Shapiro said: “Somehow it seems worse, out in the desert. I mean, you look at the bodies and you think: They died for what? For that? That sand?” He shrugged.

  “Casualty figures don’t matter any more,” said Saxon. “Not since the last war.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Lester said. “Tell me you don’t really mean that.” Saxon shrugged.
/>   “Arrows on maps,” Shapiro said. “Joe Public opens his newspaper and he sees arrows on maps, and he thinks, ‘Hey, that’s the same as this time last year. And the year before. What’s goin’ on out there?’”

  “An extremely difficult war,” Munroe said. “That’s what’s going on.”

  “Which you make more difficult for yourselves by keeping everything so damned secret,” Lester said. “I talked to more generals and admirals and air marshals in Poland and in France than I’ve ever seen here.”

  “Poland and France fell rather quickly,” Saxon said. “As I recall.”

  “Yes, but Henry’s got a point,” Shapiro said. “You’re never going to win here unless you get big reinforcements. You’re fighting Rommel and you’re also fighting London and Washington. You’ve got to get your Western Desert back on the front page.”

  “They’ve had victories here,” Mrs. Lester said. She was sick of the subject.

  “We have indeed,” Munroe said. “We’ve won plenty of tank battles, for instance.”

  “See one burning tank, you’ve seen ’em all,” Lester said.

  “I’ve seen fifty burning tanks. Theirs, not ours.”

  “Me too,” Shapiro said. “I took pictures but they were no good. All smoke. Black on black.”

  “That’s a frightful shame,” Saxon said, “but we don’t actually destroy the enemy in order to make attractive illustrations for the world’s press. If you had been in Sidi Barrani when we took it, you would have seen . . .” He paused. “Well, perhaps it’s better not to pursue that theme at the dinner table. Suffice it to say that the scenes were unforgettable.”

  “I believe you,” Lester said. “The trouble is, Sidi Barrani has changed hands so often, it’s a joke.” Saxon drank his coffee and studied the dregs. “You think I’m being unfair, don’t you?” Lester said. “The fact is, people in England make jokes about Sidi Barrani. And it’s even worse in Chicago. In Chicago they think Sidi Barrani’s one of the chorus in The Desert Song.”

  “That’s certainly box-office,” Mrs. Lester said. “I saw it three times.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Munroe said. “You don’t want tank battles and you don’t want Sidi Barrani. What do you want?”

  “First choice?” Shapiro said. “A storming advance, a massive victory, and no ping-pong.”

  “That may take a little time to arrange,” Saxon said. “Second choice?”

  “Action!” Lester said. “Gung-ho slam-bang excitement. Hollywood’s making a monkey out of the Nazis, it’s easy, Errol Flynn does it every week. Why can’t you?”

  “Because it’s not the same as victory,” Munroe said comfortably.

  “No,” Shapiro agreed, “but it’ll do until victory, comes along.”

  “Otherwise the public is really going to lose interest,” Lester said.

  “You know, there are other wars,” Saxon told him. “You’re not obliged to stay here. Go to Russia. Go to the Pacific. Go to China.”

  “I did. I spent two years covering China. Lousy war. Did you know the Chinese have twenty-six ways of spelling dysentery?”

  Saxon said: “Is your husband always as dissatisfied as this, Mrs. Lester?”

  “Henry was born miserable. He came down the birth canal shouting for Customer Complaints.”

  “They were closed,” Lester said. “Typical incompetence. I couldn’t even reach my lawyer! Can you believe it? Half-past four in the morning, here I am, stark naked and held against my will in this squalid hospital, and my lawyer doesn’t answer his phone!”

  “Nothing went right after that,” his wife said. “Nothing.” The others smiled. She didn’t. It wasn’t funny to her any more. “Dance with me, Sydney,” she said appealingly to Shapiro, “or I’ll have the Mafia break both your legs.”

  “Well, if you’re going to use flattery . . .” he said, and led her to the dance floor.

  * * *

  The patrol got four days’ leave.

  All of them spent a lot of it in water. They had dreamed and daydreamed about water all the time they were in the desert: rivers, streams, cloudbursts, running taps, blue-green swimming pools ten feet deep. Fire hoses spouting. Spring showers. Mountain lakes. The spray from watering-cans. Melting ice. There were countless ways to dream about water when the temperature was a hundred and twenty, when the ration was eight pints per day and you felt you were sweating nine pints an hour. During their leave in Cairo the members of the patrol caught up on their fantasies and wallowed in the stuff.

  After that, they ate and drank. Rommel’s Afrika Armee was waiting beyond the border, but Egypt was technically neutral and there was no rationing in Cairo. The patrol gorged itself on fresh fruit: melons and pomegranates, peaches and grapes, oranges and figs, cherries and pears and plums. Not dates. They’d seen enough of dates. Above all, they ate ice cream. There were places in Cairo that sold ice cream that was such a silky, swift-melting masterpiece of chilled flavor that even the passing thought of it in the depths of the Sahara made a man salivate. The patrol ate a lot of ice cream. Also many plates of egg and chips. Forget Harris. You couldn’t beat egg and chips.

  At night they drank. The officers drank, in the main, gin and tonic; the other ranks drank beer. Most got drunk but none got dangerously drunk. The worst thing that could happen to a soldier in the SAS was to be kicked out: “returned to unit,” as the official phrase had it. Nobody got drunk enough to risk that.

  Sex—which, in the desert, quickly receded in the face of such heavy competition as survival and combat—emerged again in Cairo as a major preoccupation. However, very few of them took a chance on the prostitutes who were making a killing out of the war. This had little to do with any high moral tone in the SAS but a lot to do with avoiding being returned to unit. Those with an irresistible itch for sex simply scratched it and then went for another swim, another dish of ice cream, another plate of egg and chips.

  Captain Lampard—unlike many of his fellow-officers—did not rent a flat or a house in Cairo; he preferred to live in his tent in the SAS camp just outside the city. He spent the first morning of his leave writing a report of the raid on Barce and subsequent events. He left it with the adjutant’s office to be typed up, took a shower, changed into a fresh lightweight uniform, signed out a jeep, and set off to call on some old chums in a part of British Army Headquarters known as Department SU. Here they had the safe if mournful task of recording the names of those who had fallen in battle, or laid down their lives, or made the supreme sacrifice, or even—modern war being a mechanical and impersonal affair—been killed. Someone with an eye for symbolism had brought back from Benghazi an Italian road sign which said SENSO UNICO, meaning one-way street, and stuck it on the department’s door. It soon got taken down, but the name stuck. Lampard was heading for Department SU.

  * * *

  “There you go,” said the Army Censor. “Best I can do, I’m afraid.”

  Henry Lester took the typewritten pages from him and flicked through them. Almost at once he felt a stoniness in his stomach. He recognized the sensation and he hated it. Even after two years of reporting this war he was still not immune to its horrors. He shuffled the pages into a bundle and fanned himself with it. He had expected losses, you always got some losses, but this was a massacre. Blue pencil ran from end to end. Whole paragraphs were wiped out. The bastards hadn’t censored his story, they’d carpet-bombed it. “I can’t send this,” he said.

  “That, of course, must be your decision.”

  “It won’t mean a damn in Chicago.”

  “Possibly not. I’ve never been to Chicago.” That sounded as if it might possibly be construed as a somewhat harsh comment, so the Army Censor added: “I must say I did enjoy your little reference to the Poles.”

  “So why kill it?”

  “Ah . . . policy, old chap, policy.”

  Lester felt his heart begin to pound. That piece about Polish troops had cost him two days’ research. “I want to see your boss,” he said.
>
  “Colonel Knibbs? I’ll try, but . . .” He picked up the phone.

  Lester waited an hour and ten minutes outside the Chief Censor’s office while, inside, a foul-tempered argument simmered and occasionally boiled over. At last, two disgruntled officers, both much-decorated and deeply sunburned, came out and Lester was shown in. Colonel Knibbs, tall and thin with half-moon glasses propped on his forehead, was standing by the window, drinking tonic water from the bottle as he looked down at the crowded street. “If you were to shut your eyes and chuck ten bricks out of this window,” he said, “I bet you’d hit one enemy agent on the head. Possibly two.”

  “Can I quote you?”

  “Alas, no.”

  “No.” Lester sat down but the seat was hot, so he found a cool one. “Looks to me like I can’t say anything.” He held up his censored story by the corner, letting it dangle like a small dead animal.

  “Well, you certainly can’t send that. It amounts to an explanation of our loss of Benghazi.” Knibbs spoke sharply.

  “None of which will come as a surprise to Rommel.”

  Knibbs finished his tonic and let the bottle drop into a waste basket. “Let me tell you what those two officers were so angry about, Mr. Lester,” he said. “They got out of Benghazi before it fell. Now, there were many reasons why Rommel was able to take Benghazi so easily, and most of them are in your excellent but doomed report. Superior armor, shorter supply-lines, poor British communications, and so on. But, as I’m sure you know, everyone in the desert listens to the BBC news, and the morale of our men was considerably damaged when some idiot in London announced on the BBC that Benghazi was indefensible, that as a battleground it was impossible to hold.”

  “Yeah, I heard something about that,” Lester said.

  “Those officers heard all about it. They were desperately trying to organize a confused jumble of men who were tired and hungry and who had lost half their weapons, and who were getting bombed by the Luftwaffe every twenty minutes and shelled by the Italians every ten, and to put the tin hat on it, every hour on the hour the BBC came in loud and clear saying Benghazi hadn’t got a hope.”