A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “Turn here,” Jakowski ordered.

  The column bumped over the broken edge of the road. A broad, shallow gully pointed roughly southeast, which should take them into the desert, where Jakowski hoped to find evidence of the British raiding patrols. Even if he didn’t find evidence, his men would get valuable experience of searching the desert. At best, of course, they would intercept a raiding party and wipe it out.

  The gully forked, and forked again. It deepened too: they were still in the edge of the foothills of the Jebel and these wadis had been scoured out by the flash-floods of a hundred thousand years. It was possible to pick a path down the middle and after forty minutes Jakowski was reasonably pleased with their progress when a harsh metallic twang made him jump. Bright metal showed through the camouflage paint two feet in front of his driver. They were being shot at. “Stop!” he shouted. They stopped.

  The order took a full minute to work its way back up the column. Long before then, Jakowski’s driver was spraying machine-gun fire against the right-hand side of the wadi. It made a furious, stuttering racket that echoed and reechoed. The trouble was he couldn’t see what he was firing at. All the dust raised by the vehicles behind him was drifting forward, thickened by exhaust fumes. He aimed from memory, upward at where the skyline had been. The gunner in the truck behind joined in; the infection spread; gunners throughout the column were sprinkling little bursts amongst the invisible rocks, believing they must be under attack because everyone else was firing. Meanwhile Jakowski, thinking hard, realized that the bullet could as easily have come from the left as from the right, and he ordered the driver to hit that side, too. He swung the gun, rattled off fifty rounds into the drifting haze, and looked to Jakowski for fresh orders. “Cease fire,” Jakowski said glumly. He walked to the next truck and shouted at them to stop. “You,” he ordered. “Go back and tell all those idiots to cease fire.” The man set off, moving very carefully and shouting very loudly.

  The dust drifted away. The air cleared. No attackers were to be seen. Everything was silent. The drivers had switched off their engines: overheating came fast in this temperature. The column sat in the wadi like a parade waiting in a side street.

  Jakowski found the nearest lieutenant and told him to see what damage had been done. While that was happening, he climbed the wall of the wadi and looked at the terrain. It told him nothing. It was all hillocks and ravines, and the hillocks were all lumps and bumps, dotted with rocks, spotted with thorn-bushes, fringed with silvery grass. Everything else looked gray-brown. It looked dead: baked to death. Nothing moved except the grass, and that had a constant, nervous shimmer, as if flinching away from the hot wind.

  The lieutenant was waiting below. Jakowski scrambled down.

  “One bullet-hole, sir,” the lieutenant said. “In the canvas. Driver swears it’s new, I’m not so sure. No casualties.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes sir.” He thought: Now the old bastard’s pissed-off because nobody got killed. Can’t win, can you?

  “We must have fired off five thousand rounds,” Jakowski said bitterly. “Just for one lousy sniper. And I bet he was out of sight before we even started.”

  The lieutenant said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “For God’s sake, let’s get out of this bloody dump.” Jakowski waved at his driver to start up.

  “One truck has a puncture, sir,” the lieutenant said quickly. “They’re mending it now.”

  “Get the other officers,” Jakowski ordered. “I want them here. Now.”

  The lieutenant returned with two captains and two lieutenants. Jakowski led them down the track, out of earshot of the troops. His driver strolled over to a friend, who said: “What’s happening?”

  “They’re getting pissed on from a great height,” the driver said.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting pissed on, in this heat. Bloody old Jacko can piss on me every hour on the hour, if he likes.”

  Jakowski said to his officers: “Leadership and discipline. Remember? One smelly Arab takes a pot-shot at us and everyone goes berserk. We must have wasted ten thousand rounds on these damn rocks.”

  “I honestly thought we were under attack, sir,” a captain called Rinkart said. “It certainly sounded like it.”

  “Those were all our guns, you bonehead.”

  “We couldn’t tell that, sir,” said the other captain, whose name was Lessing. “Not in all that dust.” Jakowski gave him a hard, wide-eyed stare. One of the lieutenants murmured: “The fog of war.” Jakowski switched the stare to him. “Figure of speech, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  “Fog of intelligence,” Jakowski barked. “From now on, nobody opens fire unless I give the order.”

  “We’ll never hear it,” Lessing said. “Not over the noise of the engines.”

  “Red signal flare,” Jakowski said. The officers looked at each other. “I take it we did bring signal flares,” he said heavily. His nostrils twitched like a rabbit’s.

  Rinkart said: “I think I saw a box being loaded, but God knows which truck they’re in.”

  “Find them,” Jakowski told a lieutenant. “Meanwhile I’ll give the signal to open fire by sounding the horn of the vehicle I’m in. A loud continuous blast on the horn. Think you can hear that? Short blasts mean cease fire.”

  “What if we get fired on, sir?” Lessing asked. “And you don’t hear it?”

  “Use your initiative.”

  The drivers restarted their engines, all except one of the water-tankers, which whined and kicked but would not start. Major Jakowski ordered it to be towed. The column moved on. After a mile it began to leave a thin trail of water. The air was so full of dust that nobody noticed.

  * * *

  God got the blame for the first casualty.

  Major Jakowski knew all about the Tariq el ’Abd; his map clearly indicated those stretches which had been sown with thermos mines (by the German army, so the map ought to be accurate); and he kept well to the north of it until he met a camel track that crossed his path. It was a broad, well-trodden track, and several vehicles had followed it too. He turned right. By now his column was out of the broken foothills and into something that looked like real desert. The heat was cooking up mirages. A palm grove shimmered. A rock apparently as big as a hotel trembled in the distance. Jakowski was not fooled.

  It was about ten or twelve miles before they reached the Tariq. They saw it from a long way off. On the bare and barren desert, the skeleton of a camel stood out like a monument. A dozen skeletons littered the Tariq.

  Jakowski put down his binoculars. “Go easy,” he told the driver.

  Further on, the tire tracks and the camel tracks all converged. “This must be the place to cross,” he said. “Go where they went. Exactly where they went.”

  The last vehicle in the column, several hundred yards away, was a food truck, packed high with cases of tinned stuff plus three soldiers. Two were veterans of the Afrika Korps, Oskar and Bruno, aged twenty-two or twenty-three; the third was a recent replacement, aged twenty. His name was Caius. Oskar and Bruno were whiling away the time by educating Caius. “You don’t want to worry about those British Commandos, kid,” Bruno said. “They’re not so bad.”

  “Right,” Caius said. He hunched his shoulders.

  “Well . . .” Oskar spat out a date-pit. They were all eating from a box which Oskar had discovered was broken open after he kicked it hard. “Depends, doesn’t it? Some aren’t so bad. I mean, I personally don’t believe that story Sergeant Nocken told.”

  Bruno picked his teeth with his tongue. “You mean the one about the British Commando who tore off the stormtrooper’s arm and beat him to death with it? That story?”

  “No, no,” Oskar said irritably. “He had witnesses for that, didn’t he? I mean the story about the little Commando who stood on the oberstleutnant’s feet and screwed his head round and round until it . . . You know.”

  “Well, it’s possible,” Bruno said. “Don’t you agree it
’s possible, kid?”

  “No idea,” Caius said, and looked away. He really didn’t know, and he didn’t want to think of it. He had heard of men, infantrymen, who had gone all through the last war without having to fire a single shot at the enemy. Not one.

  “I suppose it’s no different from taking a stiff cork out of a bottle,” Oskar said. The truck moved. “Off again,” he said.

  “Anyway, what I meant was the Arabs are a bloody sight worse than the Commandos,” Bruno said. “You want to watch out for the Arabs, kid.”

  The first three vehicles made the narrow crossing over the Tariq without difficulty. Then the driver of the breakdown truck paid too much attention to the NCO standing in front and waving him on. He made a bad gear-change and stalled the engine. It restarted promptly enough, but the driver was angry with himself and he punished the engine by over-revving it. The wheels spun and dug twin pits in the sand. Hot rubber smoked. The NCO shouted. The driver whacked the gear-lever into neutral and cursed.

  “Brilliant,” the NCO said. “Now see if you can get it out backward.”

  The driver tried to reverse and merely lengthened the pits. Eventually, by rocking the truck back and forth he lengthened them so much that he could charge forward and smash his way up and out of trouble.

  A couple of men shoveled sand back into the holes. Waste of time. The next few drivers, determined not to make the same mistake, went hard and fast into and out of the crossing, and made the holes worse than ever. Soon they merged into one sharp dip. The harder the trucks hit it, the deeper it got. And vice versa.

  “Extremely cunning, your Arab,” Bruno said. “I mean, take those things they carry water in.”

  “Goatskins,” Oskar said.

  “He knows that. He’s not stupid. You’re stupid. He’s very intelligent. He’s got brains written all over his face.”

  Caius ducked his head to hide a blush. He was very conscious of his boyish good looks and what’s more Bruno had been wrong: Caius hadn’t known that Arabs carried water in goatskins.

  “Last time we took Tobruk,” Oskar said, “I saw a New Zealander with brains written all over his face. He couldn’t have been very clever, because they were his brains.”

  Bruno waved this reminiscence away. “Question is, how do they do it?” he said. “How do the Arabs get the goat out of his skin without slitting him up the belly?” He raised his hands in wonder at this native trick.

  “That’s why you never want to get caught by the Arabs, kiddo,” Oskar told Caius. “They’ll do the same to you.”

  “Very clever fellow,” Bruno said, “your average Arab.”

  “I heard they pour ants down your throat and let them eat you up,” Oskar said. “Those desert ants, they’ve got jaws like crabs.”

  “I had crabs once,” Bruno said. “They had jaws like sharks.”

  Caius said suddenly: “I had a shark once. It had jaws like . . . like . . .” He couldn’t think of a good ending. “Like nutcrackers,” he ended. The others laughed. “Any Arab gets a grip of you, kid,” Oskar said, “he’ll crack your nuts and eat the meat too.”

  Major Jakowski tried not to show his impatience. It was common sense to halt the column on the southern side of the Tariq until all the vehicles had crossed. Forty vehicles couldn’t be rushed, not with that hole in the middle deepening with the whomp of every wheel. He wanted to get on fast, but he didn’t want his men to think he was the sort of commander that always nagged and moaned, never smiled or joked. He walked over to the two captains, adjusting his walk to a saunter. They were looking at the sky.

  “It’s not going to rain,” Jakowski said lightly.

  “We were wondering whether we ought to disperse the vehicles, sir,” Rinkart said. He was dark, almost swarthy, with a stocky build. As far as Jakowski could tell, thick black hair grew all over him. All the same, Rinkart had a sharp brain and he was good in battle: Jakowski had taken the trouble to check his records. “Whoever he is, he’s seen us,” Rinkart said. “He’s been circling for five minutes.”

  “Where?” Jakowski could see nothing. Rinkart pointed at the speck in the blazing blue. Jakowski searched and still saw nothing, but he didn’t admit it. “If he’s Luftwaffe, they already know we’re here,” he said, wiping his eyes. “And the RAF wouldn’t send one plane this far.”

  “They might if it’s a Beaufighter,” Lessing said. He didn’t look like a soldier: too tall, too slim, his voice slipped too easily into a drawl and he had an actorish way of standing, all the weight on one leg and the hand propped high on his waist. Yet he too had a fine combat record. “If that’s a photo-reconnaissance Beaufighter, Cairo will know all about us in a couple of hours.”

  “We shan’t be here in a couple of hours,” Jakowski said. “Further south it’s like an autobahn three hundred kilometers wide.”

  Another truck came roaring and bucking through the gap.

  “I’d be happier if we weren’t all bunched-up like this,” Rinkart said.

  “No point in dispersing now,” Jakowski said. The last truck was making its approach.

  “You’re lucky, you are,” Bruno said. “The Arab men won’t harm you. Not you.”

  “Why?” Caius asked.

  “Because their women will want you.”

  “Blond,” Oskar explained. “Highly prized by Arab women, a tasty young white blond boy.”

  “Lucky me,” Caius said. He wished they would stop.

  “If you call having to perform twelve times a day being lucky,” Oskar said.

  “Seven days a week,” Bruno added.

  “That’s what they want from you,” Oskar said. “All day long. Dawn to dusk. If you can’t deliver the goods, they get nasty.”

  “You’ve insulted them, you see,” Bruno said. “Out come the knives. Off come your sweetbreads.”

  The truck swayed as it put on speed. It lurched and bounced so hard that all its load rose up and crashed down. “Jesus Christ!” Oskar said. He had spilled the dates. At once there was a second crash, more muffled than the first, and Caius fell forward so that his face was in Bruno’s lap. Bruno shoved him upright and he fell again, sideways. One boot struck Oskar on the knee. He began to curse, but stopped when he saw Caius’s hands. They were trembling vigorously, as if trying to shake off something wet and distasteful. After twenty seconds they stopped and lay still.

  The doctor’s examination was brief.

  “First, he’s dead,” he told Jakowski. “Second, the only damage I can find is a small hole in the back of the skull. No exit wound, so it almost certainly wasn’t a bullet.”

  “Dig a grave,” Jakowski told Captain Lessing. Lessing, standing with his arms crossed, aimed a finger at a small rise. Men were already digging there. “Ah,” Jakowski said. “Good.”

  Captain Rinkart joined them. “Several men heard an explosion. One says he saw a little spurt of flame near the truck as it hit that damn hole. So it looks like a thermos bomb went off.”

  Jakowski said: “I thought those bloody things were safe unless you tampered with them.”

  “That’s the theory,” Lessing said.

  “If it was lying near the crossing,” Rinkart said, “we’ve been tampering with it. Every time a truck hit that hole the vibration gave it a good hard shake.”

  Jakowski sat on his heels and looked at the calm young face. “His war didn’t last long, did it?” he said.

  “It’s only a skull,” the doctor said. “A man’s skull is quite thin. It won’t keep out fragments of shrapnel traveling at high velocity.”

  “An act of God,” Jakowski said.

  One of the lieutenants took charge of the burial party. He read out the short funeral service from his field service manual and when he came to the dead man’s name he mispronounced it. Bruno and Oskar looked at each other. Typical. Buried the wrong man.

  “Put plenty of rocks on him,” Lessing advised. “The vermin in these parts are very persistent.”

  Ten minutes later the column began to m
ove south. Oskar saw some dates lying on the floor of the truck and he kicked them over the tail-gate. Let the vermin enjoy them instead.

  * * *

  “Cleopatra had the right idea,” Elizabeth Challis said in her high, clear, expensive voice. “One has only one true love in one’s life. When that love dies, one’s reason for living goes.” She trailed her fingers in the Nile.

  The other hand held her glass. Jack Lampard, sitting opposite, put an inch of wine into it, and said: “But think what a tragedy that would be for us poor men. Without beauty such as yours to worship, we might as well all go back to the desert and simply kill each other.”

  They were in a felucca, at night, sailing past Zamalek Island, where the Gezira Club’s lights blazed. Somebody’s band was playing a foxtrot, “Dinah.” The music rose and fell with the breeze.

  “I’m sorry,” Lampard said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Incredibly crass of me, in the circumstances.”

  “Tais toi,” Elizabeth Challis said. “I’m not a porcelain doll, you know.”

  “Gerald was frightfully brave at the end.” Lampard ate a few strawberries and drank some wine. “Of course I wasn’t with him, I was nearby, still fighting off the fearful foe, but they told me he spoke of you.”

  She turned her splendid head on its splendid neck, straight off the cover of The Tatler, and looked at him. My stars, Lampard thought. The face that sold a thousand tubs of Pond’s skin-cream.

  “They say he said he didn’t want you to mourn his passing,” Lampard said. He tried to see the look in her eyes, but the little lantern in the boat cast too many shadows. “I mean, not excessively.”

  “Dear Gerald.”

  “He was never a man to think first of himself.”

  “He made the supreme sacrifice.” She sipped a little wine and uttered soft, appreciative noises with her lips. “What a frightfully good year this Chablis was.”