1. I want to do something as heroic as possible
2. I can’t attempt anything that is going to involve much talking, particularly if it means talking into a microphone
3. If I can’t fly a Spitfire myself, I wouldn’t want to be the man who just oils the propeller for someone else to fly it. For this would make me miserably jealous
4. I don’t really like being a member of a team. I’m happiest on my own
5. Does being nervous mean you won’t be any good in battle, that you will go all to pieces?
6. I don’t think it does
7. And I’m jolly well going to prove that it doesn’t
To what extent did such thoughts point towards the Royal Engineers? Certainly to some extent they did, but equally certainly instinct and chance came into it. I did not know and I could never have guessed how unerring was that instinct, nor how, as a Sapper Officer with 56 (London) Division, I was to find exactly what I was looking for.
5. Flowers in the Sand
The Division sailed from England at the end of August. By the end of November we were established at Kirkuk in Iraq. We travelled by sea via Freetown, Cape Town and Bombay to Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf and thence by rail via Baghdad; and it was of course a thrilling and a memorable journey.
As with most of us it was the first time I had been abroad. Flying fish, coconut palms, date palms, Indians, Arabs, deserts and scorpions: I was meeting them all for the first time. This in itself was exciting enough. But, even more exciting, I was feeling myself part of something very much bigger than myself whose adventures I was about to share. There had been a party of Gunner Officers in our carriage on the train to Liverpool; two Lieutenants from the Royal Fusiliers had shared our cabin on the Nieuw Holland; at Cape Town the Divisional Commander himself had come aboard for a brief visit and I had caught a glimpse of him, a tall, stern, imposing figure. Royal Fusiliers, London Scottish Rifles, London Irish Rifles, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, The Queen’s Royal Regiment, Royal Artillery, Royal Corps of Signals: Company after Company after Company, each with its own special skills, its own history, its own traditions, thousands of men from all over Britain, all wearing the insignia of the Black Cat on their sleeves, all part of 56 Division, a Division that was setting out on a journey that would take it into who knew what countries through who knew what battles before it once again set foot in England: thus was the voyage out. And when, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, we heard on the wireless that ‘powerful reinforcements’ were about to reach Eighth Army in Egypt, we thrilled with pride. This was us!
But we were wrong. Iraq wasn’t Egypt. Paiforce2 wasn’t Eighth Army.
The enemy we had come to fight was further away than ever. And on top of all this it was raining.
Four hundred miles can make a lot of difference. At Basra the desert sun had scorched down on our new solar topees, the desert sand had scorched up from beneath our feet – they said you could fry an egg on it – and desert flies, hovering in between, had accompanied every forkful of food on its way from mess tin to mouth. At Kirkuk it was English weather again, cold, grey and wet, and we were back in battledress. It was a bit of an anticlimax.
Why had we come to this desolate spot? For no very exciting reason that we could discover. Perhaps to guard the oil wells. Perhaps just to be handy in case we were needed. So what would we be doing while we waited? Train. Get acclimatized. Make ourselves comfortable.
Comfortable? We looked around. To the east, nothing. To the south, nothing. To the west, nothing. To the north – ah, yes: two things. An oil refinery and a line of mountains. With no other features on the landscape it was hard to judge distances. The refinery might have been anything from one to six miles away. As for the mountains, either they were distant and so surprisingly clear or they were near and so surprisingly small. In either case they were surprisingly regular, like the teeth of a saw. We looked at the ground. Flat as a board, baked hard by the summer sun, now beginning to liquify under the winter rain: mud. We sniffed the air. A strange, sickly, sulphurous smell: oil. Mud and oil: these were to dominate our lives for the next four months.
We were lucky. We were Engineers and therefore skilled at making things. We used the mud to make bricks. We used the oil to fuel our cookers, disinfect our latrines and mark out our football pitch.
We could call on bricklayers and carpenters, welders and tinsmiths. Our Company Commander had been a Civil Engineer and our Second in Command an architect. Indeed not only were we Engineers. We were the Field Park Company.
There are four Companies of Engineers in a Division: three Field Companies (one to each of the three Brigades) and the Field Park Company. The Field Companies do the work; the Field Park holds the stores and equipment. Field Companies live in their Brigade areas; the Field Park lives where it likes. In addition there is a Headquarters under the CRE, a Lieutenant-Colonel, which is usually to be found somewhere near Divisional Headquarters. In other words we were five quite separate groups living in five quite separate camps and going about our five quite separate businesses. I say all this so that those who are not expert in military matters will see how the Divisional Royal Engineers in one respect at least offered me the sort of environment I was looking for. I liked to feel myself part of the whole Division, yes, indeed: this satisfied an emotional need. But I did not like to be one of a large group of officers. And as a subaltern in the Field Park Company I was not. For there were only four of us.
We lived together (in the sort of comfort that only a professional architect could have designed and professional builders built) a little like the members of a Victorian family, close, happy, yet respecting our differences in age and rank. And we remained a united and happy family for over a year. Our Commander was Major Lake, a Territorial Officer, married, in his early thirties, reserved and meticulous. Second in Command was Captain Bertram, also married and with a young family, older, much more sociable. My fellow subaltern was Lieutenant Nelson, a Scot, efficient but aloof. I was closest to Bertram, who was to me something between elder brother and father – a relationship so firmly cemented during the war that it still survives. Lake steered the Company along efficient if unadventurous lines. Bertram added the occasional zest to relieve the boredom.
And of course there was boredom. I was the Bridging Officer in charge of the Bridging Section. In those days we carried Folding Boat Equipment, which is a sort of junior version of the better known Pontoon Bridge and was used for crossing rivers, and Small Box Girder, used for narrower gaps where a single span was possible. I was the Bridging Officer – yet I never built a bridge.
Bridges were built by the Field Companies. We merely supplied them with the equipment they needed. The best I could hope for was to be allowed to accompany it and watch them use it. But mostly I stayed at home waiting for it to come back to us, battered and in need of repair. Then I would set my Sappers to work to repair it, fitting patches over splintered wood, stitching torn canvas. It was work I could have done myself, and I longed to do it, to hold a chisel again. But it was their work, not mine, not an officer’s. Mine was to walk up and down, up and down, seeing they did it properly.
I envied the Field Companies and I envied my own Sappers. A more enterprising officer would have gone to his OC and said: ‘Please, sir, I am bored. My men are bored. Couldn’t we sometimes do something a little more interesting?’ But I was not yet very enterprising. Nor, I think, would I have found in Lake a sympathetic listener.
On one occasion the Engineers moved north into the mountains on the Persian border to practise bridging ravines and they took my Small Box Girder with them.
‘Please, sir, can I go too?’
‘No, Milne,’ said Lake. ‘An officer’s place is with the largest part of his command. That is the rule.’
So I stayed behind, silently furious.
Dreary and monotonous, then, was the landscape all around us; and dreary and monotonous was my work. So all the more wonderful were those rar
e occasions when I was able to escape with my Section and be alone with them and enjoy a little independence and do something a little different in surroundings a little less drab.
Once it was to the Little Zab, the river where my Folding Boats were being used. More often it was to the range of mountains that lay behind the oil refinery. To my delight they were small and near. Their nearness made them accessible; they were perhaps no more than four or five miles away. Their smallness took nothing from their beauty, merely replaced awe and majesty with friendliness and intimacy. I preferred it this way. They were miniature mountains, toy mountains, and you could ramble and scramble happily among their tiny crags. Never mind what we did there; to be there on our own was all I asked for. When I first met them they were absolutely bare: bare rock on their summits, bare earth between. This very bareness was part of their charm: the charm of extreme simplicity and austerity. On a clear day it was a world of two colours only, pale brown and pale blue. Then, as the months went by, was added a third colour, the palest flush of green.
Of all my memories of Iraq this is the one that comes back to me unbidden year after year. During all the time I was abroad I was looking for reminders of England. Now that I am back in England my reminders come often from abroad. An early spring day, in late February, perhaps, the sky a palest blue, the bare hillside clothed still in its bleached winter grass: it is Iraq, not England, that I see.
We left Kirkuk in March, my feelings akin to those of the previous August when we had marched through Liverpool from the station to the docks. We left to begin a journey of epic proportions, a journey that can stand comparison with any in history. For it can proudly claim to be the longest approach march ever made by an army in all the annals of war. We left Kirkuk in March. Four weeks and 3200 miles later we were engaged in the final battle against the Germans in Tunisia. We paused only at night to sleep and for a few days near Cairo and again near Tripoli to rest, to repair our vehicles, to collect certain additional items of equipment, and to get ourselves into tropical kit. A few miles north of Enfidaville, with barely time to stretch our cramped legs or wash the dust off our bodies or shake it out of our clothes, the Division went into action.
Measure it by purely military, purely logistical standards and the journey was remarkable enough. Thousands of men, hundreds of lorries, trucks, guns, yes, even bridging equipment, travelling along desert roads, south to Baghdad, then following the oil pipe line across the sand to the hills at Mafraq in Transjordan; then down the steep descent to the Jordan valley; through Palestine, lush with orange groves, resonant with Biblical names, to Tulkarm where we learned our final destination. On again, green gradually giving way to brown until, after passing Beersheba, we were back once more in the desert, the Sinai Desert, soft sand, wind-blown and a sandstorm waiting for us to show us how it was done. Over the Suez Canal and into Egypt, where we paused and took the opportunity to pay a quick visit to Cairo and glance at the Pyramids. Then on, following the coast road so familiar to the soldiers of Wavell and of Rommel, past undistinguished settlements that had lived their private lives in a thousand years of obscurity and whose names had then been suddenly trumpeted round the world: el Alamein, Solum, Tobruq, Benghazi. . . . Then, after a few days at Azizia near Tripoli, to the final lap: Ben Gardane, Gabes, Sfax, Sousse and ultimately, for 563 Field Park Company, a salt marsh just south of Enfidaville.
But of course it was more than just a succession of staging posts, more than just a Grand Tour, more than just being part of one of the largest caravans ever to cross the desert: it was the feeling that we were not just on the move but moving in the right direction – oh, so important, this – moving simultaneously towards the war and towards home. Home. When I had left England it was with the certainty that I would never return. Now, although there was still an undefeated army between me and Cotchford, I was facing in the right direction, moving in the right direction, and my thoughts could fly ahead of me. And so in my letters I could write about my home-coming, as certain now that I would one day see Cotchford again as I had before been certain that I would not.
Yet even this was not all that the great journey had to offer. It was for me something at once intensely beautiful and intensely dramatic, and I saw it through two pairs of eyes, the eyes of a soldier and the eyes of a traveller. War and peace side by side, each with the power to move and inspire.
I could feel wonderfully military – the Great Commander – as I led my Section of Bridging lorries out on to the road to take their place in the mighty convoy. But at the same time I could notice here and there the minute, fragile swords of grass that had suddenly begun to prick through the bare earth. At one of our wayside halts in Transjordan I found a tiny anemone, the brightest crimson, like a drop of blood. I picked it and pressed it and sent it home in a letter. At the top of Solum Pass my soldier’s eye was awed by the sight of a great column of German vehicles, battered and burnt, strung out along the roadside, while my traveller’s eye was held by the sea. There it lay, a thousand feet beneath us, looking exactly as Tennyson had once seen it.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. . . .
It did exactly that.
Then on to Benghazi where, next to the corpse of a German tank, I found a lark’s nest bubbling over with young life. War and peace, side by side, the one however devastating never able to obliterate the other. So it was then. So it was always to be.
Thus day after day we snaked our way across the desert. The desert! O evocative word! What a flood of memories it brings back! Monotonous? Barren? Mere sand? No! Varied and beautiful and inspiring almost beyond belief!
At times it was absolutely flat and hard, so that, standing on it, I seemed to flow out across its surface and to possess it right to the very horizon. As I marched over it, the hard sand beneath the heel of my boot sent pulses up my leg, and my boot became, not something I wore, but a part of my body. Boot and leg were one and the pulses coming up from them gave them strength. I could have marched to the rim of the world, so strong did I feel.
Elsewhere the sand was soft and rounded like the human form, like someone asleep. Watching it you could sense its breathing, and at the wind’s caress it gently stirred.
Elsewhere again it was a desert not of sand but of stones, a desert of giant marbles of all sizes but uniformly round and brown. Some were the size of tennis balls, some as big as footballs, some even bigger. I rolled one over to see what lay beneath it.
And elsewhere again the desert was a vast and dazzling garden.
How fortunate we were! For eleven months of the year the desert lives up to its name. Then comes spring and for a single month it is ablaze with flowers. This was the very month of our great trek.
And so it was seldom that we did a day’s journey without at some point coming upon clusters of flowers, waiting beside the road, waiting, so it seemed, to watch the procession go by and to wave and cheer its passing. Drifts of flowers and the trailing debris of war: now the one and now the other, and each in its way deeply moving to one who was seeing both for the first time. Then, as we approached our journey’s end, came the distant but ever-growing sounds of war. And thus we reached our salt marsh, where, to the banging of guns could be added the singing of the little black crickets that dodged in and out of the heather-like scrub that flourished in the sand.
North of Enfidaville our infantry battalions were hurling themselves at the enemy. South of Enfidaville the Field Park Company sat down to wait. Well, at any rate we had all arrived, and that was a considerable achievement. My bridging lorries had been old when they left England. They had been landed at Suez and had crossed the desert to Kirkuk in November. And now, hammered once again by the rough desert roads, choked by the all-enveloping desert dust, they had just endured an even longer journey. Some of them were very, very lame, but at least they could all move.
Did anybody want any of them? Happily, they did.
On the main road beyond Enfidaville a bridge had been blown up by the Germans. It w
as a bridge over a wadi, and to cross the gap a Box Girder would be needed. It was to be built as soon as it was safe to do so, and meanwhile my lorries were to go forward and wait in readiness.
‘Please, sir, may I go with them?’
‘No, Milne,’ said Lake.
‘Please, sir!’
‘No, Milne. You remember the rule. An officer’s place is with the larger part of his. . . .’
How easily I might once again have submitted! How nearly I did! And what I would have missed if I had! But I was growing up at last. I had been on the leading rein quite long enough. I was beginning to want my freedom. An officer may be in command of a considerable number of men but his independence may be very limited. He commands but he is also commanded. A Sapper Officer is fortunate in that although he is given orders he is seldom supervised. How he carries them out is his own affair. Up to this point I had needed supervision. Please, sir, what shall I do? And Lake had told me. Now I no longer wanted to be told. In any case I was feeling my way towards my own rule, one that was to become my guide from then on. An officer’s place is where the work is most exciting.
So I stood firm and in the end I was allowed to go. And thus it was I had a seat in the front row of the dress circle when the curtain went up on the last Act.
A roll of drums. . . . a crescendo of sound. How else can you attract an audience’s attention, still their murmurings, bring them, tense, to the edge of their seats, breath held, eyes staring? Not drums here in North Africa, of course. Aircraft. Bombers. High up in the sky. Coming from behind us. Flying, calm, unhurried, majestic, towards the enemy’s lines, to the hills where they were entrenched. Then a sudden spurting of brown smoke from the hills, a line of smoke where the bombs had fallen, and a few seconds later a long, low roar. The smoke hung like a cloud, then drifted and thinned and vanished. . . . All eyes were on the hills.
The Path Through the Trees Page 5