A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “Stew tells me you hit your target,” Dalgleish said to him.

  “Bashed it. Silly buggers were lined up on parade! We shot about five hundred.” Barton’s attempt at a modest smile came out crooked and gleeful. “Couldn’t miss!” he said. “I got all mine in the belly-button.”

  “So they got a rich, warm feeling inside,” Doggart said.

  “I didn’t hit my target,” Dalgleish said. “Duff intelligence, Fanny.”

  “Don’t worry about it, sport. Plenty more where that came from.” Barton gave him a map. “Six more lovely targets. I don’t care who hits which, or how, or when, as long as you’re all back for lunch.” Nobody moved.

  Patterson said: “Another strafe before lunch?”

  “That’s the general idea,” Barton said, “and if you get it right we’ll do two more this afternoon.”

  Everyone watched his face and tried to guess whether or not he was joking. In their static silence, the slap and creak of the mess tent roof in the desert breeze was suddenly loud. Barton enjoyed their attention and his genial grin told them nothing.

  * * *

  Schramm was on the phone when Hoffmann and Jakowski came into his office.

  Balsa-wood models of enemy aircraft hung on threads from the ceiling. Hoffmann blew softly and made them turn. Jakowski reversed a chair and straddled it.

  Schramm cut short the call and hung up. “No news,” he said. “I’ve checked with every intelligence officer I know, up and down the coast. Nothing.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Jakowski said. “No patrol activity at all? That’s unbelievable.”

  “No incoming activity. Three patrols are going home.”

  “You’ll never catch them,” Hoffmann said. “Once they’ve finished raiding, they go flat out for Cairo.”

  Jakowski rested his arms on the top of his chair and frowned at Schramm’s telephone. “I’ve been working around the clock to put this new unit together. My men believe they’re going to hunt down the enemy and hammer him. If I tell them we haven’t even got a target, their morale will fall like a stone.”

  “Give them a week’s hard training in the Sahara,” Hoffmann suggested.

  “They don’t need training. They’re seasoned soldiers. They need action.”

  “Look,” Schramm said. “I can only tell you what I know—three SAS patrols are going home. What I don’t know is how many patrols might still be hiding in the Jebel.”

  “Might? Why do you say—”

  “Because military intelligence is not an exact science. We lost track of a couple of British patrols last month. Maybe the trucks broke down. Maybe they all died. Maybe they linked up with another patrol. Who can say?”

  “I don’t believe the enemy has stopped raiding,” Jakowski said. “Not after such success. Why should he?”

  “Perhaps his patrols need a rest,” Hoffmann said. “After all, he’s got other ways of making a nuisance of himself.”

  “Yes? What?”

  Schramm picked up a teletype print-out. “Ground-strafing our troops at the southern end of the Front. Camps, supply dumps, vehicle parks have been getting sprayed every ten minutes. The generals are livid. They want standing patrols of 109s.”

  “Not a hope,” Hoffmann said. “Standing patrols just drink fuel and wear out pistons.”

  “Strafed,” Jakowski said. “By what?”

  “An aggressive squadron of Curtiss Tomahawks,” Schramm said.

  “Based where? It must be an advanced airfield.”

  “We don’t know. We’re looking.”

  “It could be a diversion,” Jakowski said. “While these Tomahawks are hammering on the front door, another patrol sneaks in through the back. Yes?”

  “Well,” Hoffmann said, not at all convinced but not wishing to discourage him. “Just stay away from any Tomahawks.”

  “Stay away?” Jakowski sprang to his feet. “Why? They’re vulnerable, aren’t they? If you can find their location, I can smash them. All I need is a map reference.”

  “Good God!” Hoffmann said, quite startled. “That’s a brave idea.”

  “It’s no more than what the enemy has been doing to us. Get me that location and I’ll strafe the strafers, and then raid the raiders.” He strode out, looking pleased.

  “What a fire-eater,” Schramm said.

  “He likes to make things hot, doesn’t he?” Hoffmann said. “He’s going to the right place for that.”

  * * *

  They did another strafe before lunch, but only part of a strafe in the afternoon. Half the Tomahawks were being repaired: guns had jammed, engines misfired, controls failed to respond, bits of aircraft had been blown away by ground fire. When the remaining Tomahawks landed, most of them were suffering too. Barton scrubbed the fourth strafe. “Too bad,” he said to the adjutant. “Just when the boys were getting into the swing of things.”

  “A bit rough on the kites, though,” Kellaway said. They were sitting on the sand on the shady side of his orderly room, which was a tent.

  “Well, they’re rough old kites. They were clapped-out when we got them, weren’t they? The sooner we bash ’em to bits, the sooner we get given something better.”

  “Did Baggy Bletchley promise that?” Kellaway asked.

  “Sort of.” Kellaway grunted. Barton looked sideways. “Have you heard something?” he asked.

  “Just a rumor, Fanny. Don’t get your hopes up. Hurricanes galore, so it said. All brand-new. Mark Fives.”

  Geraldo strutted past, came back for a closer look at Kellaway’s left boot, pecked it once and went on his way.

  “Hurricanes would be nice,” Barton said. “Spitfires would be even nicer.”

  A brisk westerly wind had sprung up and the tent canvas bellied against their heads.

  “Funny thing about camel dung,” the adjutant said.

  Prescott came over to them, leaning into the wind and holding a big buff envelope with both hands. Spurts of dust fled from his feet at every step. He sat next to Barton, glad of the shelter of the tent. “If I’m interrupting anything special I’ll buzz off,” he said.

  “Uncle was about to tell a funny joke about camel dung,” Barton said. His eyes were half-shut.

  “I just passed Billy Stewart,” Prescott said. “He’s killing flies again.”

  “As long as he’s happy. What you got?”

  “Signal from Group.” Prescott gave him the envelope. “Tomorrow’s targets.”

  “Filthy habit,” the adjutant said. “And he never washes his hands.”

  “Schofers reckoned Billy was mad,” Prescott said. “But then, Schofers thought you were all a bit cracked.” He scratched his stubbled jaw and stared at the hazy, wobbly horizon. “Mind you, Schofers wasn’t exactly normal, was he? Anyone who plays himself at chess, and loses, has to be a bit peculiar.”

  “We had a chap like Billy when the squadron was in France,” the adjutant said, “only in his case it was butterflies. Chased butterflies all over the aerodrome. Chap was a Hindu—white man, not an Indian, got converted in India—and according to the Hindu faith when you die you come back as something else, and because this chap’s brother-in-law had snuffed it he was convinced he would come back as a butterfly, if only he could find the right one.”

  “Wait a minute,” Prescott said. “Who was convinced? The brother-in-law, or your chap?”

  “Our chap,” Kellaway said.

  “Who was also a brother-in-law,” Barton pointed out sleepily. “He was the brother-in-law of the other brother-in-law.”

  “I expect they were both convinced, in the circumstances,” Prescott remarked. “I mean to say, if you’re dead and you find you’ve turned into a butterfly, there’s not much point in arguing the toss, is there?”

  “Nobody would listen to you anyway,” Barton said. “Not if you were a butterfly.”

  That seemed to end the discussion. They sprawled in the windy heat and allowed their various preoccupations to drift through their minds. Prescott thou
ght about his girlfriend Susan, back in England, and wondered whether or not she was looking after his car, a Bull-nose Morris he’d won in a poker game shortly before he got posted overseas. Susan had a wonderful body and a brain still in its original wrapper that she was saving in case she needed it when she got old. He had told her what to do. The car was in her father’s garage, resting on wooden blocks to save the tires, and every other month she should run the engine for a few minutes to keep the rust at bay. It was the first car he had owned. She’d forgotten. He was convinced she’d forgotten. Not her fault. Cars weren’t important to her. Prescott thought of her delightfully curving body and forgave everything. Then he thought of the Bull-nose Morris rusting into a corroded hulk and his shoulders hunched. Bloody women.

  The adjutant was thinking of the latrines and his sister and his will, more or less simultaneously. His sister had just married, big surprise, she was five years older than he was and he’d assumed she’d given up the hunt. Now somehow she’d snared this barrister fellow. Amazing. So she was taken care of, which was more than you could say for the blasted latrines; he could smell them without even trying. Kellaway had a keen nose, which could be a curse as far as latrines were concerned. Bloody pits hadn’t been dug deep enough. So she wouldn’t need his money now, would she? He’d have to change his will. Maybe endow a scholarship at his old school. The Kellaway Scholarship. That had a nice ring to it. Yes. What a stink.

  Fanny Barton wasn’t so much thinking as remembering.

  He was remembering the ranks of German soldiers breaking and running, still in lines as they ran, ragged lines that were ludicrously slow although the legs and arms raced like clockwork toys. He remembered the simple joy of squeezing the pistol-grip on the joystick and seeing the rows of running men fall as if they had tripped over their own feet. They were always two hundred yards ahead, always falling. He heard the machine guns’ racket, he felt their recoil, he saw in the edge of his vision the flames at the gun-ports, but the big impression was one of magic. The bullet-stream was a magic force like a great invisible bow-wave that constantly surged ahead and flattened any little obstacles. Strafing wasn’t like ordinary battlefield killing. Strafing was fun and Barton enjoyed it, and then enjoyed remembering how much he enjoyed it, over and over again. The memory was so rich that it made him sleepy, as if he’d done a long hard day’s work. Again his mind replayed the image of the falling men. Magic.

  “Aren’t you going to open that?” Prescott said. He meant the envelope.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Barton murmured.

  A scrap of paper blew across the landing-ground, hustled along by the west wind, with nothing to stop it between here and Egypt. In a couple of months, Barton thought, some poor bloody wog might pick up that bit of paper in Cairo and find himself reading Standing Orders that blew off the wall of some Luftwaffe unit outside Benghazi a fortnight ago. If he could read. If he cared. If he didn’t get knocked down by a British army three-ton truck, like a lot of dozy gyppoes did. They wandered into the road without looking and rapidly got converted into a pound of raspberry jam. It happened all the time, Barton had hit an old fellah one night on the road to Alex; no point in stopping, the chap was obviously stone dead. Bloody idiots.

  Something began bothering Barton. “This bloke who chased the butterflies,” he said. “I don’t remember him, Uncle, and I was with the squadron in France almost from the start.”

  “Not this war, Fanny,” the adjutant said. “The last one.”

  “Oh.” Fanny lost interest. Uncle’s flying had been with the Royal Flying Corps, in airplanes that had too many wings and the same top speed as a Bugatti. Also no parachute. Loonies, the lot of them.

  “Come to think of it, he might have been a Buddhist,” Kellaway said.

  “How about the butterfly?” Prescott asked. “Could it have been a seagull?”

  “Unlikely,” Kellaway said. “Seagulls are Church of England. Well-known fact.” He went to get the latrines sorted out before he caught dysentery and his sister inherited everything.

  * * *

  Henry Lester and Ralph Malplacket agreed to have lunch and pool their information about the prospects for newsworthy military excitement.

  They went to the Chinese restaurant in the Prince Albert Hotel. This was Lester’s idea. None of the other correspondents ate there and he wanted to keep Malplacket to himself. “I guess you know your way around this town,” he said. “I mean, in our line of business, who you know is what you know. Isn’t that right?”

  “Actually, I’ve only been out here a week,” Malplacket said. He poured tea for them both.

  “Still, you don’t get a chauffeured Bentley for nothing,” Lester said, with a small smile of admiration.

  “That, alas, belongs to the ambassador’s wife. I only borrowed it. Now she has it back.”

  Dishes were placed before them: roast Canton duck, prawns with straw mushrooms, chicken with bamboo shoots, crispy noodles, water chestnuts, beansprouts, fried rice.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Lester said.

  “Not really. I don’t need a Bentley to take me to the right people. You see, before I left London, father gave me a list of names of valuable contacts, chaps in high places who keep their ear to the ground. Blanchtower used to be political adviser to the Governor-General. Even wrote a book about Egypt.” Malplacket took out a sheet of paper and unfolded it.

  Lester read it carefully. “I expect you know them,” Malplacket murmured.

  “I heard of them. Some, anyway. When was your father here?”

  “1932.”

  “That explains it. Everyone on this list has died or gone home, bar two. One of those is permanently drunk and the other’s a recluse.”

  “Ah.” Malplacket ate a prawn. “Blanchtower sometimes shows a curious sense of humor.”

  They ate in silence for a while.

  “Look here, old chap,” Malplacket said. “This is my first experience of seeking large publicity for anything. Hitherto my main concern has been to avoid attention at all costs.”

  “Yes? Tell me more.”

  “Can’t, I’m afraid. Sworn to secrecy. Awfully dull, anyway, and no use to you. I seem to have spent half my life sitting in European cafes, waiting for blokes who never turned up. Jolly rough on the kidneys, I don’t mind telling you, but it’s not exactly headline material, is it?”

  Lester helped himself to more noodles.

  “Therefore I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to knowing where one goes to find the news,” Malplacket went on. “If I need a pound of coffee I usually go to Fortnum and Mason’s. Now that I need a juicy chunk of war my instinct is to go to the War Department. But you say the powers that be are rather tightlipped at present.”

  “Verging on lockjaw,” Lester said.

  “But doesn’t the army employ information officers, or the like?”

  Lester thought about explaining and quickly abandoned the idea. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you come with me next time? See for yourself.”

  “That’s very kind. It does seem rather strange, to have a war and not brag about it. The army is costing Britain an absolute fortune, you know. Absolute fortune! Blanchtower showed me the figures before I left: the noughts just went on and on and on. Hard to believe all that money isn’t buying a spot of action somewhere.”

  * * *

  There was no time to recruit volunteers. On General Schaefer’s authority, Major Jakowski took one hundred and fifty men from a reserve regiment of German infantry and led them into the desert in a convoy of forty vehicles, which was ten more than Schaefer had promised, but Jakowski decided he needed the extra margin of safety. The desert was big and he planned to be away for at least two weeks, maybe three.

  “Leadership and discipline,” Jakowski told the men when they assembled, back-lit by the orange glow of dawn. He was standing on the tail-gate of a truck and wearing a soft cap with goggles pushed up onto his forehead, just like Rommel. “Leadership and discipline can defe
at anything and anyone, and that includes the Sahara desert and the British raiding parties.” He spoke quietly but firmly. “You and I, we’re going to secure this territory with the same guts and determination that have made Germany the master of most of Europe and half of Russia. Leadership and discipline will always beat pirates or cowboys or outlaws, which is what the enemy raiders are. So far the desert has been their shelter. No longer. From now on the desert is our property and the enemy our prisoner.”

  Jakowski’s delivery was good but his timing was bad. These troops had all had experience of battle. As they dispersed to their vehicles, one soldier said to another: “He talks as if we’ve won before we’ve started.”

  “Not worth going then, is it?” said the other man. “Will you tell him, or shall I?” But they spoke cheerfully. After the sweat of training exercises and the grind of guard duties and the tedium of kit inspections, this was an adventure. With extra rations, too.

  The column barreled briskly along a good road that skirted the western edge of the Jebel el Akhdar. Most of the vehicles were short-wheelbase canvas-topped trucks, Fiats or Mercedes with the odd Ford, each armed with a heavy machine gun mounted on a swivel; moreover, Jakowski had chucked General Schaefer’s name about pretty freely in the motor parks around Benghazi and he had collected a heavy breakdown truck (with a big winch), a petrol bowser, three supply trucks to carry food, three water-tankers, a radio truck, an ambulance, a command vehicle in which to hold briefings, and a small mobile bakery. After he took the bakery he had doubts; but then he told himself that a hundred and fifty men would need a lot of feeding. And certainly when they saw it, the men were pleasantly surprised. Fresh bread in the desert was a great luxury.

  By eight a.m. the column had rounded the Jebel el Akhdar and the road was turning into a track. It had been much battered by the tank-treads of both sides, and some of the tanks lay about, fire-blackened, holed, capsized. “They remind me of the pieces moved to the sides of the board in a game of chess,” Major Jakowski said to his driver, who nodded. They looked to him more like a damn good reason to stay out of panzers, but you couldn’t tell an officer that. He wiped his hands on his trousers. The palms were sweating so much that they kept slipping on the wheel. If it was this hot now, what would it be like at noon?