by Alan Evans
4 The Desert
The four Swordfish, Ethel among them, lifted off from Dekheila in the early morning. The rumoured move had come to pass. Air Commodore Collishaw, commanding the Royal Air Force in the western desert, had asked the Navy for the assistance of its Swordfish in attacks on ships supplying the Italian army in Libya. He was desperately short of aircraft.
The Swordfish headed westward over the sea as far as El Daba then followed the line of the railway that ran along the coast through Fuka to Ma’aten Bagush. The railway continued for another twenty miles to Mersa Matruh, and the metalled coast road for a still further eighty miles to Sidi Barrani, but the four Swordfish landed before noon at the R.A.F. field at Ma’aten Bagush.
Ward and Tim walked over to the mess, were made welcome and settled in. Later that afternoon Ward looked at his watch and said, “The ground crews will be in any time now. Think I’ll stroll over and meet them.”
“Hang on a second and I’ll come with you.” Tim Rogers was sharpening one of his pencils, paring the shavings into an ashtray. He used a big claspknife with a wooden handle that fitted comfortably into his palm. The blade was six inches long, slim and wickedly sharp.
Mark stared at it, “Where did you get that?”
“Bought it in Alex.”
“Bit big, isn’t it?”
Tim explained, “I kept losing the small ones.”
“It looks like something the doc would use for an amputation.”
Tim stood up and closed the knife, put it in his pocket.
“You wouldn’t want an observer without a decent pencil, to do his navigation.”
“All I want is an observer who can navigate, and one of these days I might get one.”
Tim sniffed. “All I want is a pilot who doesn’t get nasty great holes in our nice aeroplane.”
They walked out to the field and Tim said, “Here she comes now.”
The ancient Victoria transport lumbered in and bumped down creakily on the strip. It was loaded with tools, spares for the four Swordfish, and the ground crew of fitters, riggers and armourers. Laurel and Hardy climbed out with the others, all of them grousing and swearing, sweating in the heat.
Mark asked, “Everything all right?”
Laurel grumbled, “Lovely trip, sir, thanks. Regular joy ride with my arse on a tool-box.”
Hardy stretched thick arms, “Ethel go O.K., sir?”
“Fine, thanks. She handles very sweet.”
Hardy nodded and edged past, looking around and muttering, “Join the Navy and see the world.”
“I’m not in the Navy,” Laurel peered at the desert shimmering beyond the strip. “And the world around here is always the bloody same.”
Mark grinned. Their morale was high. “Well, a change is as good as a rest.” He remembered he had said that to Katy.
Each day they flew anti-submarine patrols while they waited for an Italian convoy, but without a sighting. In the evening they would sit in the mess, making one glass of beer last till lights out because they were flying the next day. Tim argued with the others about cricket and Mark let his thoughts drift back to Katy Sandford in Alexandria. Until someone said, “It looks as though Cunningham will have to do a Nelson.” Mark frowned. The man’s meaning was as clear to him as to the others: if the Italian Fleet would not come out of Taranto then Cunningham would have to attack it in harbour, as Nelson had attacked the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen. Except that instead of ships he would use torpedo-bombers: Swordfish.
But in the following dawn as he sat in Ethel’s cockpit and her engine thundered before take-off, his thoughts were not of Taranto. He stared past the spinning propeller, feeling the slipstream beat morning-cold on his face as the first trace of red on the eastern horizon lit the desert, and thought of Katy. She would still be asleep in the cool, quiet apartment in Alexandria, to wake to peace and a day without fear. It was a warming thought.
“Stand to! C’mon, baby! Stand to!”
Katy woke to Bert’s whisper, his long arm hooking over the tail-board of the eight-hundredweight truck to shake her. The driver had made a space just big enough for her on the truck’s floor, with rations and stores piled around. She could not see them now, saw only the black cut-out that was Bert’s head standing above the tail-board against the night sky. “O.K.” She whispered back at him, “Cut it out.” His hand stopped its tugging and was withdrawn, his head disappeared.
Katy wriggled out of her sleeping-bag. She had slept in her clothes, matching khaki shirt, trousers and socks, had only to pull on her boots and drag a thick sweater over her head. She picked up her hat and the heavy overcoat that had been wrapped around her sleeping-bag, clambered over the tail-board and dropped to the ground.
The desert was dark, quiet and bitterly cold. She shivered as Bert helped her into the overcoat. The hat, wide-brimmed and with a chin-strap to hold it in place against the wind, .she clapped on over her blonde hair. She had got Bert to hack her hair off short the first night they were in the desert. She could still feel sand in it now, gritty.
The black humps of vehicles loomed all around her. There was a company of infantry, 120 men carried in fifteen-hundredweight trucks, a troop of four twenty-five-pounder field guns and six Rolls-Royce armoured cars. She and Bert had come with them through a hole in the wire two nights before. This was a fence, ten feet wide, of thickly meshed, staked barbed wire, erected by Mussolini’s .army along the border between Libya and Egypt, intended to stop Libyan Arabs getting out. It had never stopped the Arabs and now British infantry and engineers had cut a hole through which the vehicles passed into Libya.
They had spent two days in patrolling, seeking out the enemy, trying to find his positions, strengths and weaknesses, his convoys. Their orders were to harass the enemy and so they sought a target. They had found one the previous evening; a fort, seemingly lightly defended.
The vehicles were close-ranked now, in laager. In the day they had been widely dispersed as they moved, with gaps of four or five hundred yards between them. That way they were less likely to suffer casualties if attacked from the air, and it saved them from driving in the sand cloud thrown up by the next vehicle ahead. Each driver still got a fair amount of sand.
A cautious reconnaissance had located and assessed the fort, then at nightfall the vehicles had closed in warily behind the leader in six columns, only a few yards separating the columns from one another, each vehicle from that ahead. They were out of sight and sound of the Italians in the fort. The tight-packed phalanx turned off the route they had followed through the day and drove into the desert for nearly a mile, then halted as darkness closed in, and formed a laager. This attack would be mounted at dawn. The field guns and soft-skinned trucks stood in the interior columns, with armoured cars and infantry on each side and closing front and rear. That was a laager.
And this now was “stand to”, in the last cold minutes before first light. Men moved quietly, low-voiced, to take up defensive positions with rifles and Brens around the outside of the laager where sentries had patrolled all night. Katy watched the preparations, what she could see of them, shivered and huddled inside her overcoat. What the hell was she doing here? She had never realised the desert could be so cold. The sky was dark but clear and frosted with stars that looked like a million specks of glinting ice.
She waited through the first light and the false dawn and then suddenly on the eastern horizon a band of red shafted sunlight. Starters churned, then engines burst into life and she climbed into the front of the eight-hundredweight beside Bert and the driver. The columns moved forward behind the lead vehicle of the commander with its flag on the wireless aerial, then fanned out. The laager broke up as each vehicle returned to its daylight, dispersed position.
This was a dangerous time, when the low, level sunlight shone into a man’s eyes and you did not know what enemy awaited you. But this morning was quiet. An armoured car patrol had gone out before first light and found no sign of enemy tracks.
The
eight-hundredweight halted beside another. They were stubby vehicles, smaller versions of the fifteen-hundredweights used by the infantry sections. The driver sat in front under a canvas tilt with room beside him for another man, or one thin man and a slim girl. There were no doors; a canvas curtain at each side, waist-high, kept some of the sand out when they were on the move. The canvas-covered rear of this one held rations, kit and water. The other eight-hundredweight, Jamie Dunbar’s, carried the wireless and its operator.
They all got down, except the wireless operator. Jamie walked over, his greatcoat flapping open and showing the corduroy slacks, khaki shirt and sweater beneath. On his feet were old suede shoes. He had told a staring Bert: “Most comfortable footwear in the desert, old boy. Most of the chaps wear them.” That meant officers; the other ranks wore ammunition boots.
Jamie said now, “Morning all. We’re just having a quick brew while the old man takes a look from the ridge. Then I expect we’ll be off.”
The ridge was half a mile away and extended across their front for maybe a mile. It was a rocky outcrop rising gradually to some fifty feet. Jamie said, “They won’t see us from the fort.” Katy knew the fort was a mile or more beyond the ridge but she had not seen it. A truck was stopped at the foot of the ridge and two tiny figures lay at the top of it. One of them was the “old man”, a major of twenty-eight.
The two drivers, still in greatcoats, huddled around a stove made from half a petrol tin, punctured like a brazier around its sides and half-filled with sand doused with petrol that now burned under a kettle. The petrol tins were flimsy affairs that leaked much too easily, but they made good stoves.
Katy turned her back on the vehicles and the men. She was well aware that most of them had been out in the desert for months and she — hat, overcoat, trousers and boots notwith-standing — was the first woman they’d seen in all that time. She stared out at the desert, not dunes of sand here but a plain of rubble and powdered rock, scattered here and there with clumps of low, dry scrub.
“Cup o’ char, miss.” Powell, the driver of her truck, was offering the enamel mug, steam rising from it like smoke, and she cupped it in her hands. As he turned away he apologised, “Well, only half a cup, really. Got to watch the water, you know.”
She did know. After three days in the desert, rationed to a gallon of water a day, she knew only too well. That gallon was not hers to do with as she liked. The driver, Bert and herself had first to meet the needs of the eight-hundredweight out of their rations, and in the daytime heat of the desert its thirst was demanding. What was left must serve for washing and drinking. Her daily wash had to be carried out with no more water than was now held in the mug. Yesterday she had seen Jamie shaving in the last half inch of his tea. Shaving daily was King’s Regulations.
Bert said, “I suppose we correspondents aren’t too welcome — the water we use.”
Jamie chuckled, “More welcome than the padre when he comes up. At least you brought some whisky.”
Jamie. Katy had watched him since leaving Alexandria. Bert had muttered, “One thing: he’s a natural soldier, that’s for sure.” Jamie might seem casual but in reality he was quick, efficient, tireless, a far cry from the elegant client of Pastroudi’s and the Cecil. But whether there, or here in the desert, he was not the irresistible male she remembered from two years before and had come eagerly seeking. Now she wondered if that person had only been fashioned from her own desires and imagination.
“Here we go!” Jamie had been watching the ridge and had seen some signal there. He limped across to his truck. The stove had been doused with sand and loaded on board. Katy and Bert crowded in beside Powell and he started the eight-hundredweight, put it in gear.
Bert asked her, “Got your camera handy? You’ll need it today.”
Katy nodded, opened her overcoat to let him see the Rolleiflex camera on its strap around her neck but still wrapped in one of her spare shirts to keep out the all-pervading dust. She had found it necessary to spend an hour or more each day crouched in the back of the truck, after it was at rest and the dust had settled, cleaning dust from the camera with a little artist’s paintbrush, brought along with blessed foresight. Now she steadied herself with one hand on the dash as the truck rolled forward over the rocky and uneven surface. All the vehicles were on the move, and the guns were being brought into action, unhooked from their towing trucks and hauled up onto their round steel platforms from which they fired. The armoured cars were nearer the ridge and heading to pass around one end of it, the fifteen-hundredweight trucks of the infantry bouncing after them.
Jamie led his little party straight to the ridge and halted the two trucks at the foot of it. He jumped down and waved a beckoning hand at Bert and Katy. They followed him as he climbed the ridge with quick strides, still limping a little but keeping ahead. They joined him, panting, where he stood just below the crest. Higher up the ridge and twenty yards to their left was the major. The artillery observation officer lay beside him, binoculars at his eyes and compass by his side. His truck with the wireless link to the guns stood just below where he lay. Katy stared back to where the guns were lined out a mile away, waiting for fire orders.
Jamie said, “Have a shufti.”
“What?” Katy blinked. He was offering his binoculars. Bert explained, “The British Army’s been stationed all over the empire for the last two-hundred years and a lot of their slang comes from local languages. I think shufti is Arabic. ‘It means look’.”
“Oh.” Katy faced forward, accepted the glasses. There was the fort, as far away as the guns, but in front of her. It reminded her of Beau Geste, square, white, with a tower at each corner. There was a cluster of buildings like sheds, outside it and about a hundred yards to its right.
The observation officer called an order down to his signaller at the wireless. Jamie said in a conversational tone, “The idea is for the armoured cars to go in first and shoot the place up with their machine-guns. The infantry will chase along behind them and when they’re close under the walls they’ll be out of the enemy’s sight. Then they blow the gate and go in. The gate is in the right-hand wall, facing those sheds.”
Bert grunted and peered through his old binoculars. Katy felt warm now because the sun was well up. She peeled off the overcoat as she watched, let it fall and started working with her camera. With the sun had come flies and she flapped them from her face with one hand between taking pictures. The Rolls-Royce armoured cars were rocking around the end of the ridge now and heading towards the fort. They looked to have been left over from an earlier war, standard limousines converted by having armour-plate riveted around them and a round turret clapped on top. Each carried a single machine-gun in the turret.
One of the twenty-five-pounders fired from the rear and seconds later Katy saw the puff of dust and smoke as the shell burst short of the fort. The observation officer called down a correction. When the gun fired again she did not see where the shell went but Jamie said, “Over.” The observation officer called another correction.
The infantry trucks were swerving and lurching over the rock-strewn ground as they followed the armoured cars. Every vehicle trailed its plume of brown and grey dust that merged with the brown and khaki camouflage paint so vehicle and dust became one.
Bert asked, “What about mines?”
“Remembering the one that bust my knee?” Jamie grinned. “Our engineers were out last night. They marked a route and it connects with the one the Italians marked for themselves. Doubt if you’ll pick out the markers in all that dust but the trucks are following them.”
The guns of the twenty-five-pounder troop slam-banged! as one, and Katy saw flame and smoke erupt from the walls of the fort. Jamie murmured, “Won’t do much damage but it should keep a few heads down.”
Katy thought the scene was unreal: the flat banging of the guns; the cars and trucks like toys swerving across the desert; the white fort. A flame glowed and died on one of the fort’s towers and Jamie said, “Hello!
They’ve got a gun into action.” One of the infantry trucks had turned onto its side and was smoking. Small figures spilled from it but became indistinct as the gathering clouds of dust and smoke hid them, - the vehicles, and eventually everything but the towers of the fort.
The twenty-five-pounders stopped firing and the observation-post officer stood up, brushed dust from his corduroy trousers and lit a cigarette. Machine-gun fire rattled in the distance. There was a sudden thump! and Jamie said, “Sounds like they’ve blown the gate.”
Bert muttered, “Is that a white flag? Looks like it.”
There was a flagstaff on one of the towers and the flag flapped from it on the same wind that swirled the dust and smoke around it. Jamie said laconically, “Probably a damask table-cloth. The Italians like their comforts.”
There was no more firing.
Katy thought, Was that it? Finished? It seemed it was and she heaved a sigh of relief.
Bert asked, “Did you get any pictures?”
“Sure. Tele-photo.”
He grinned at her, “Thought you might have forgotten.” “I’m not an amateur.”
Jamie circled his hand in a “wind-up” signal and his driver started the engine of his truck. Bert said, “Guess I’ll go down with Jamie and take a look. Why don’t you hang around here with Powell and I’ll see you later.”
Katy shook her head, “I want to go along.”
Bert tried to override her: “What for? You’ve seen it. So take it easy now and —”
Katy broke in determinedly, “I want to take pictures. That’s my job. Isn’t it?”
Bert looked at her thoughtfully, “Well — O.K. But they might not let you use them.”
“Why not?”
“Could be they’d upset some people.”
“Why?” She guessed at what he hinted, that there were things he did not want her to see. But this was her job for now, and while it was, she would do it.
Bert saw the stubborn set of her face under the wide-brimmed hat and he lifted a hand to wave at Powell in their truck, “O.K., O.K. Let’s go.”