A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  Di Marco shook him awake. “We are crossing the border between Libya and Chad,” he said.

  Schramm looked out of a window. Brown desert stretched to the horizon. “Should I care?” he asked.

  “Now look out the other side.”

  Schramm did, and saw mountains that climbed like cathedral spires. They were dangerously, suicidally close. The peaks were several thousand feet above the Heinkel: he had a sick feeling that a breeze could blow the aircraft against those sheer sides at any moment. Then he took a breath and looked harder. The mountains were a mile away.

  Di Marco suggested he sit in the cockpit. The view was even more stupendous from there: everything was bigger, clearer, more jagged, more magnificent. Schramm looked at the map and identified the Tibesti Mountains. They reared out of the desert like a gesture of defiance, pushing up and up, until the empty wasteland of sand was left a huge and giddy distance below.

  The pilot let him enjoy the view. When it was behind them he said, “My backside’s numb. You take her for a bit. We’re halfway. She’s trimmed to fly hands-off. Just sit here and look confident. Steer one-nine-five and don’t touch any of the knobs.”

  * * *

  The man with the stomach wound was Walters. They buried him in the scrub. The ground was hard, so his grave was just a scrape in the soil with a lot of rocks heaped on top. “Rest in peace,” Lampard said, and that was enough. Nobody was in a mood for funeral rites. The faint noise of German military vehicles kept their nerves on edge; and occasionally the crash of mortar shells reached them from some distant and futile attempt at flushing out.

  Lampard itched to get on and get out. They had thirty-odd miles to go. He disliked this wadi: it was too broad, too shallow; there was nowhere to put look-outs; the scrub was so thin that a shufti-kite would spot the jeeps; he felt exposed. But they could not move. Davis’s jeep had a puncture. What’s more, all the spare tires were holed. It would be madness to go on when a wheel couldn’t be changed in a hurry. Reluctantly, Lampard agreed.

  “Time for some grub, too,” Davis suggested. Lampard agreed to that. Hunger didn’t add to efficiency. Everyone had bully, biscuit and water. The men examined the jeeps as they ate, and found damage caused either by the racketing drive across the Jebel or the attacks by the CR42s; it didn’t really matter which. Springs had cracked or snapped, a jerrican of petrol was bullet-holed, the steering on Lampard’s jeep was buckled, Davis’s jeep was trickling oil. It could all be patched, but patching took time. Lampard watched them work.

  “In case I haven’t said it,” he said, “I want you to know that we put on an absolutely brilliant show last night.”

  Nobody replied, perhaps because everyone was still eating, perhaps not. Lampard went away and cleaned his tommy-gun.

  At last Davis came and told him the jeeps were as ready as they ever would be.

  “Good. These blasted flies are all over me.”

  “Wog flies,” Davis said. “Not English. Don’t know how to queue.”

  The branches got thrown off the jeeps and the engines were started. They had traveled perhaps fifty yards when a shufti-kite came dribbling over the skyline and they had to swerve under cover again.

  It was a Fieseler Storch, as slow as a bicycle. They sat motionless while it made lazy S-bends, all down the valley. “Now go away and bother someone else,” Lampard said. Instead it circled. Five minutes later it was still circling. “What’s it found?” he wondered. “What’s so important?”

  Davis volunteered to go and see. While they discussed this, the Storch flew away. “Still worth a recce,” Davis said. “You never know what’s waiting down there. NAAFI van, panzer division, herd of elephants, could be anything.”

  Lampard sent him, on foot, with one other man. Half an hour later the man returned. “It’s a bloody great German wireless truck,” he said. “Big radio mast. Sarnt Davis thinks the shufti-kite was reporting to it. He reckons the krauts in the truck are in charge of the search.”

  “Take me to him,” Lampard said.

  They found Davis hiding in the collapsed stonework of an old well.

  “We could destroy that thing in ten seconds,” Lampard said, “but then the Hun would turn up and destroy us in five minutes.”

  They had to wait for two roasting, fly-tormented hours until the truck dismounted its aerial and drove off. “My God, this war can be boring,” Lampard grumbled.

  * * *

  Every time they started up Barton’s Kittyhawk it fired for ten seconds and died. Dirty petrol. They washed the carburettors and cleaned the fuel lines but still the airplane would not come alive. They would have to drain the tanks, filter the petrol and start again.

  Barton got fed up with potting at the wrecked Hurricane and he went in search of scorpions to shoot, turning over stones with his boot while he held the rifle ready. He found none and gave up. He noticed a butterfly. It was a Painted Lady, the only sort of butterfly the squadron saw in the desert, a delicate little creature whose wings were mottled a pale buff and red. Presumably it was migrating across the Sahara, a task so huge it was scarcely credible. Barton chased it and tried to shoot it down. He ran a hundred yards and exhausted his ammunition before he gave up, cursing. The Painted Lady fluttered south. It looked good for another thousand miles.

  “What the hell’s wrong with him?” Prescott asked Skull. “Has he gone doolally too?” They were sprawled in the shade of the canvas roof of the mess.

  “He’s normal. Fighter pilots exist in one of two states: torpid or rabid. Right now Fanny is rabid. He’s quite harmless as long as you don’t go near him. Excuse me.” Skull got up and strolled over to Barton, who was cleaning the rifle. “Decorations,” he said. “Have you done anything about recommending anybody?”

  “Piss off. None of your business.”

  Skull converted his sun-umbrella into a shooting-stick and perched on it. “The bravest pilot I ever knew should have got a DSO and probably a Victoria Cross,” he said. “Instead he got nothing, because his CO got killed before he put in any recommendations. No CO, no gong.”

  “I’m not going to get killed.”

  “Pip deserves something. Even I know that.”

  Barton shut one eye and squinted down the barrel. “You do it,” he said. “Make a list.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Fanny. I wasn’t there. You were.”

  “That’s right, I was.” He oiled the breech and worked the bolt. “Well, I don’t remember seeing anything special. A few blokes got the chop, but that’s not unusual, is it?” He aimed at the sky and squeezed the trigger. “Giving them gongs isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “It might acknowledge their courage.”

  “Brave because they got the chop? Don’t talk balls. You don’t need courage to get killed. You need to be unlucky, that’s all.”

  “I see. The squadron gets virtually wiped out and it’s just bad luck.”

  “You’ve got it, Skull! Well done!” Barton tossed the rifle high in the air and caught it. “At last you’ve got it. Half of war is luck and the other half is cock-up. I had an uncle got killed at Gallipoli. Now what difference did Gallipoli make to anything?” He stared Skull straight in the eyes. “None. None! All those big brave Anzacs got the chop at Gallipoli and it didn’t change anything, not in the slightest! Of course, nobody knew that at the time.” Barton scratched his stubbled chin. “My uncle didn’t get a medal when he got killed,” he said. “He was very annoyed about that, my uncle was.”

  “This isn’t Gallipoli,” Skull said.

  “I’ll recommend everyone for a DSO,” Barton said. “Satisfied now?” He walked away before Skull could answer.

  * * *

  Schramm liked flying the Heinkel. Even overloaded with fuel she was still responsive and her great sail of a rudder made for good stability. He had no need to change the throttle settings. He just kept her on course, checked the gauges now and then, and when a lump of hot air came bubbling up he did his best to anticipate the bumps
and hollows they flew through.

  From seven thousand feet—presumably the most efficient cruising height—the ground looked bleak and baked. The foothills of Tibesti had been rust red. An hour’s flying changed the color to a bleached yellow and the texture to an infinity of ripples. Later still, the ground looked as if it had been trampled by the tiny hooves of a mighty herd: for as far as Schramm could see, it was imprinted with a pattern of crescent shapes, all pointing in the same direction. He realized these must be dunes, millions of dunes. He had once suggested driving over this terrain. He breathed deeply and felt hugely grateful to di Marco.

  Two hours after Tibesti, five hours after Defa, six and a half hours after Berka, the pilot relieved him. “Many thanks,” the man said.

  “My pleasure. She was a perfect lady.”

  “That was the easy bit,” the pilot said.

  Schramm stood behind di Marco, whose lap was full of charts and notebooks, slide-rules and dividers, and plugged into the intercom. “Where are we?” he asked.

  Di Marco showed him. “Lake Chad is the next landmark. You see? It’s about the size of Luxembourg. We should cross the eastern tip of it and then pick up this river, the Chari, which flows into Lake Chad. We fly up the Chari. The Chari goes through Fort Lamy. The airfield is on the left.” He made it sound as if he were telling a stranger in town how to find the public library.

  The crescent dunes changed to flat scrub, nothing but acacia from horizon to horizon. The acacia gave way to palms. Schramm began to feel hungry, but he felt it was the wrong time to say so. They were steadily losing height: when the palms thinned out and the country became more like wooded parkland, he saw cattle grazing on every side.

  Lake Chad came up precisely when and where di Marco had calculated it should. It was a glittering blue, fringed with hundreds of islands of intense green. Waterbirds in their thousands took off and swirled in clouds of flickering white and pink. After the aridity of the desert it was like a huge, costly, choreographed welcome. Black men standing in fishing boats waved. Nobody in the cockpit spoke.

  The river Chari was twice as wide as an autobahn. Its banks were lined with grass huts, all arranged in neat rows according to the tidy mind of some French colonial administrator. Fort Lamy was in sight. Di Marco put his charts away and moved down to the bomb-aimer’s position. Schramm took his seat. “On schedule,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  “That was the easy bit,” the pilot said.

  * * *

  As they walked back to the jeep, Lampard and Davis discussed what next.

  Davis was all for lying up until nightfall and then driving the last thirty miles to base camp. It might take most of the night, but they had plenty of time. They could move slowly and continuously, and there would be no shufti-kite to worry about.

  Lampard wanted to go now. If they drove in the dark it would have to be without headlights. Too many Hun patrols were out looking for them. So they’d probably miss the track, drive into rocks, bust the jeeps. And they’d certainly get lost.

  Davis said he was sure he could navigate from here to base camp in the dark.

  Lampard said the trouble with night-driving was you couldn’t see the ambush until it was too late.

  After that they walked in silence.

  Lampard called everyone together. “The good news is that Jerry is obviously rather annoyed by our raid on Barce,” he said. “The bad news is the Jebel is now swarming with enemy patrols. However, the good news is the Jebel is a very big place, with ten thousand wadis, and they can’t search them all, or even a fraction. Now, we can either wait here until dark and crawl back to base, or we can make a dash for it with our eyes wide open. My decision is to make a dash for it. We go now.”

  As they dispersed, Connors said to Blake, “The bad news is I got the pox. The good news is you can have it if I get killed.”

  “Charming,” Blake said. “Fucking charming.”

  Lampard led. Battered as they were, the jeeps were remarkably quick and surefooted and he made them go fast. At the same time he showed proper caution. When he came up against a blind bend or a narrowing defile he stopped and sent a man ahead to recce. Davis approved.

  They were moving southwest, against the grain of the Jebel. It meant making a series of long zigzags. Often they crossed the marks of half-tracks: the enemy had been here recently. Twice they saw foot-patrols on distant skylines. Lampard quickly put the jeeps out of their sight and hoped for the best. After an hour they had covered fifteen miles. Now they were over the high ground of the Jebel and the gradient was helping them. No sign of the shufti-kite.

  The landscape was starting to look familiar, and when he recognized the mouth of a wadi, Lampard knew they were less than a dozen miles from base camp and a brew-up. This was a good wadi: scoured smooth by flash-floods which had rolled all the boulders against its walls. Furthermore, there were no tire tracks in the sand. Lampard accelerated. The sooner they got in, the sooner they got out. Halfway through the wadi his jeep took a bend and nearly hit a pair of German trucks speeding in the opposite direction. Before he could shout, a fire-fight was raging.

  There was neither time nor space for tactical subtlety or skilled maneuver. It was simply a matter of who fired first and who fired longest. The two pairs of Vickers Ks in the second jeep swamped the first German truck, killed the driver, killed the troops, sent the truck headlong into the stone wall of the wadi. As that happened the second German truck turned the corner and a machine-gunner on its cab found the jeep and sprayed it very thoroughly. The jeep had no protection, no armor, nowhere to hide. Sergeant Davis, Trooper Connors, Blake the fitter, all died. This was completed in a matter of a few seconds.

  Lampard had overshot the action. In his desperation to reverse he found the wrong gear, bashed a wheel against a rock, found reverse, sent his jeep sprinting backward. There was a very brief point-blank battle between the double pair of Vickers Ks in his jeep and the machine-gunner in the second truck, aided by a dozen rifles. The German soldiers had been well drilled: they got off a useful volley of shots and the machine-gunner fired over their heads. But the Vickers Ks erupted with a blast of two hundred bullets in five seconds. They had been designed to destroy airplanes. They wiped out the second truck. It was a mismatch, the dream of every soldier, to find the enemy exposed and out-gunned and to overwhelm him, kill him ten times over, give him not the fraction of a chance. The fight was over in the time a man might hold his breath. The echoes bounced from wall to wall of the wadi like a ball game. The second truck caught fire. Its fuel tank exploded with a gentle, almost apologetic, boom.

  The mismatch had not been complete. Of the three men with Lampard in his jeep, one—a gunner called Sharp—was dying, hit by a bullet in the chest. Another, Menzies, had a broken jaw, smashed by a spinning ricochet. He was in great pain; he could barely spit out the fragments of teeth that threatened to choke him. Trooper Smedley was untouched, although the hole in his cheek had started to bleed again. Lampard had been largely protected by the gunners alongside and behind him. A bullet had struck his right ear and left it flapping; blood coated his face and neck. The jeep would not start.

  While Menzies and Smedley carried Sharp away, Lampard ran back and looked at Sergeant Davis’s jeep. The three men in it were sprawled or twisted in the uncomfortable attitudes of most battlefield corpses. He took their identity discs. This was a messy business: it left his hands sticky with blood. Already the flies had begun to feast. It would be a great day in fly history. He spread pieces of clothing over the dead faces. “Rest in peace,” he said. This jeep would not start either. The shimmer of spilled petrol hung around its broken tanks.

  Menzies and Smedley were kneeling beside Sharp. His chest was a mass of sodden field-dressings and his eyes were almost closed. Lampard kneeled and gripped Sharp’s hand. Tiny pink bubbles kept forming and breaking and reforming at Sharp’s mouth. The bubbles got smaller and fewer, and he died. Lampard took his identity disc. “Rest in peace,” he said. �
��The jeeps are kaput. We’ll have to walk. Bring water and a weapon.”

  * * *

  Fort Lamy seemed like a very pleasant town. The streets were broad and lined with shade trees. Schramm saw a square with a fountain playing. A restaurant had tables outside it. The food in Fort Lamy would be a lot better than in Benghazi: trust the French to export the best part of their culture to the colonies! “Nice place to sit out the war,” he said.

  “If there’s just one fighter with loaded guns here you won’t be going home to Barce,” the pilot said.

  “Relax. They arm the Hurricanes in Egypt.”

  “So you say.” The pilot was nervous. He had never made such a low, slow approach to a target in broad daylight. He could see people down there pointing up at him. If the airfield had just one anti-aircraft gun it could scarcely miss.

  “Left a little,” di Marco said. He had already seen aerodrome buildings ahead. The pilot adjusted.

  “Tell me when you want a smoke marker,” he said. By dropping a marker he could discover the wind strength and direction.

  “Not necessary,” di Marco said. Smoke from chimneys was rising almost vertically. He lay face-down in the nose, looking through the bomb-sight.

  Schramm saw the Hurricanes before the Heinkel crossed the boundary. They were lined up, wingtip to wingtip, as if on parade. He counted twenty-three. “Left, left,” di Marco said. “More . . . more . . . more . . . No, that’s not good. We’re off-target. Make another approach, please.”

  As they flew over the Hurricanes, Schramm realized that there was no flak, no tracer, and nobody was taking off. The whole scene was placid. A few men looked up. One ran.