by Jana Petken
“Is it true that General Rommel is under the Italian Supreme Command?”
“Yes, but he takes no notice of the pizza-lovers half the time.” Uwe drew on his cigarette as though it were a straw in an empty glass.
Wilmot had come over from Italy with a brigade of German paratroopers and a division of Italian paratroopers. Apparently, thousands of men were rushed to North Africa at short notice to reinforce the gaps. “We didn’t get any training when we arrived. All they gave us were a few lectures by experts in tropical medicine, plus a couple of chats with officers who’ve been here for a while. The lecturer told us what to expect from the effects of heat and sand and insects, but they didn’t tell me I’d be shitting myself every five minutes.”
“You got more information than we did when we arrived,” Uwe grumbled. “Did they tell you about desert blindness?”
“No, they didn’t.” But Wilmot had come to know the phenomenon well. It was a strange phenomenon; between dawn and 0900 and between about 1600 and dusk, the reconnaissance patrols could identify enemy or friend from about eighteen hundred metres. However, when that shimmering mirage of full sun hit them, they couldn’t see more than thirteen hundred metres.
“I suppose that’s why we travel a lot at night and when there are raging sandstorms … because they’re good for the eyes, aren’t they?” Wilmot chuckled at his own sarcasm.
“That’s the main reason, but we also use that time to commandeer or blow up allied tanks that have been left on the battlefield. More than half our transport and tanks are gifts from the allies.”
General Rommel had what Wilmot described as bouts of restless energy that were contagious. Unlike any officer Wilmot had previously served under, Rommel was hands-on and always wanted to know what was happening at the sharp end. When he was not at the helm of his command car, Greif, he was reconnoitring the ground and enemy positions from the cockpit of a tank. He sought to combine the infantry with the guns and tanks so that all weapons were on the battlefield together, fighting as an integrated whole. Rommel had spoken to Wilmot once. He’d said, Good morning, Obergefreiter, as he’d walked amongst his men.
“What do you think of Rommel?” Wilmot asked after a long but comfortable silence.
Uwe shrugged, noncommittedly. “The men like him, but some of the staff officers think he’s reckless. I remember when we were trying to take Tobruk. He told my colonel to attack. My colonel answered back that he’d already lost fifty percent of his men. Rommel didn’t care, and shouted, ‘And is that any reason not to go forward? Attack!’
Uwe’s eyes swept the area. “I was there, and I know what I heard. My colonel yelled back, ‘My men will attack over my dead body!’ I thought Rommel was going to shoot the man in the face and me along with him.”
Not sure if he wanted to hear any more intimate details of conflicts between officers, Wilmot changed the subject with a rhetorical question. “Know what I like about this place? There are no Gestapo or SS sticking their noses in and causing trouble for us. For the first time since I’ve been in the military, I don’t feel as though I’m being spied on or being asked to carry out duties I don’t agree with. It’s just fighting here – there’s something pure and honourable about it…” Interrupted by a heaving, grumbling stomach, he then said, “Uwe, will you excuse me a minute? I need to see to something.”
Wilmot’s baggy shorts fell to his ankles. He squatted behind a decent size rock next to the gun trailer and sighed with relief. “Come on, come on, little buggers,” he urged himself in a singsong, lilting tone. The noise of rumbling aircraft engines grew deafeningly loud, as did the accompanying sound of whistling shells dropping from an angry sky. He craned his neck, then leapt to his feet and was immediately blown off them, as a massive explosion erupted close to the 88 mm gun.
As he ran, head bowed into a torrent of fire that hit the German and Italian tanks and the men still digging in, Wilmot saw there was nowhere to hide, no Axis response to this latest attack, and no escape route whatsoever. He tripped, looked down his length and saw he had lost his shorts entirely and was butt-naked from the waist down.
Another blast took Wilmot’s legs from under him, and he tumbled to the ground, his bum and manhood aired but forgotten in the turbulence. His ears were in excruciating pain, and he was deaf, dizzy, and feeling as though he were underwater where everything he saw rippled or swam towards him. The whirling sand, stones bouncing on the ground, and swaying bodies of men who were being blown to ribbons swam together in his vision with the giant fireball stretching the length of the tank lines, jerking unnaturally back and forth in convoluted patterns – bizarre – in the rampageous events unfolding, he heard nothing but the sound of his own heartbeat pounding inside his brain.
As he lay twisted on the ground, he raised his head and through half-shut eyes saw Uwe’s blackened torso, his detached legs lying a metre away from where he lay.
“Aww, Jesus Christ … no ... no,” Wilmot groaned. Had he lost his legs as well? He tried to look down the length of his body, but he could only rise enough to see that his shirt had been ripped open and his bloodied chest was exposed. He lay back, dazed and exhausted. His legs were still there, as were his arms. It wasn’t a total surprise, for he couldn’t imagine them flying off his body without him noticing.
The ground shook again, and a massive volcanic eruption of dirt and stones flew into the air and battered Wilmot’s head and body. It was raining fucking rocks! He felt like a man from ancient times being stoned to death. Around him, men were being punished by a hail of bullets from an angry sky crowded with Allied PS 40 Warhawks and Spitfire fighter planes. The bastards were showing no mercy.
When a stone as sharp as a knife slashed his cheek, Wilmot’s head whipped to the side. He felt nothing; no pain, no sound, no fear. This is it, he thought. This is the end, and it’s not as bad as I imagined it would be.
Chapter Seventeen
“Lie still, Obergefreiter, or I’ll knock you out myself.”
Wilmot squeezed his eyes shut, trying to be brave as a needle and thread went in and out of the tender, damaged skin on his face. He had tried to see what was going on more than once, but both times his eyes were hit by a brilliant white light that made his sore head thump even harder. He was alive. He knew that because no dead man would feel the agony he was experiencing. His backside was bouncing and banging off a hard surface while someone was pawing at his face – the only one he had. Panicking, he lifted his better arm and swatted the air with it. “Stop it,” he croaked.
“Give him more morphine,” the Oberarzt told his Sanitätssoldat.
The doctor waited until his medical assistant had injected the morphine then said, “We’re going to have to keep him under while I stitch up the face wound. Tell the driver if he’s not more careful, I’ll end up suturing this man’s nostrils closed – better still, ask him to pull over…”
Late in the afternoon, Wilmot’s eyes flickered and eventually opened to a dimly lit space in the back of a canvas-covered truck. A few minutes earlier, he had come out of a dreamless sleep, and since then, his delicate eardrums had been battered with the sound of enemy aircraft buzzing overhead and ubiquitous vehicles and tanks punishing their engines on the hard, stony ground.
He covered his ears with his hands and groaned with pain as another explosion rocked the truck.
A man shouted, “Where am I? Aww, for fuck’s sake, someone tell me where I am! Take me home … I want to go home!”
Wilmot finally managed to rise to a sitting position and wriggle his painful backside to the canvas wall of the vehicle, where he rested his back. He looked down. Thank God someone had dressed him in a pair of shorts. He didn’t want to be known as the man who was caught with his pants down.
“Where am I?” the man was still shouting.
He’s in a bad state, Wilmot thought. The poor sod’s eyes were covered with bandages, as were his head, arms, and hands. He looked desperate, clawing at the air as if searching for so
mething … comforting hands, probably.
“You’re in the back of a truck,” Wilmot shouted to the man above the exterior noises. “We’re on the move.”
Wilmot pressed the back of his head against the truck’s soft covering, flapping in the wind. Exhausted by the effort it had taken to sit up, he wondered just how seriously injured he was. Someone had removed his shirt while they replaced his shorts. Blood was sticking to the thick black hairs on his chest and staining his skin, but when he touched the area, he felt no pain or bumps or cuts. His forearm, however, was bandaged.
His hand tentatively brushed the part of his face that was stinging and hot. It was covered with a linen strip and taped at the edges near his nose on one side and hairline on the other. Even through the morphine, he felt his pulse pounding through the wound. He knew it was a deep gash; he would have an ugly scar for the rest of his life. He remembered being battered by stones that had flown like bullets. He’d passed out, and his next memory was of being in agony while his face was being stitched up. That was when he knew he’d not been captured by the enemy; he had vaguely heard someone swearing and giving orders in German and had glimpsed the Wehrmacht doctor’s epaulettes.
Three people were in the truck with him: the noisy one who looked like an Egyptian mummy, an unconscious man with a face the colour of a Scotsman’s arse and smelling like the devil’s breath, and a Sanitätssoldat, wearing the medical corps’ red cross armband on his shirt sleeve. He sat on the floor with his bloodied head resting on his chest and his legs at contorted angles. No one would feel comfortable sleeping like that. He was dead.
The truck swerved as an almighty explosion struck somewhere close by. The canvas cover ripped and kept tearing into strips until it looked like a display of ribbons fluttering in the wind. Wilmot coughed as the familiar war-stench of petrol, cordite, and gunpowder filled his nostrils and mouth. Burning vehicles that had been further up the column were littering the road ahead, blocking the truck’s path and that of the long line of vehicles behind them. Twice, he clung on when the ground vibrated, and he thought they were going to lurch onto their side.
The unconscious man on the floor rolled about and bashed his head against the bottom of the bench seats. Wilmot, in terrible pain, got on the floor and pinned the man down while the mummified man screamed with impotence, as he too fell off the narrow ledge onto Wilmot’s sore backside.
Pain engulfed every part of Wilmot’s body. It felt to him as though a steel scrubbing brush was shredding the skin on his face and a crate of potatoes was resting on his arse, but he couldn’t lift the man’s dead weight off him or take his weight off the man below him. He squeezed his tear-filled eyes shut as another explosion rocked the ground near the truck and lifted it into the air…
“Hello … hello, can you hear me?”
Wilmot opened his eyes to the blinding glare of late afternoon sun until the person speaking to him blocked it with his body.
“I’m alive?”
“You are.”
“Did the other men with me survive?”
“The driver and one wounded man. The others are dead.”
Wilmot was tearful as he was lifted and put onto a stretcher, then carried into another vehicle. Its thick canvas roof and sides were comforting. The brightness had gone, although it was stiflingly hot. Beside him, other injured men were groaning, and Wilmot’s sweaty, blood-soaked body added to the already rancid stench captured by the truck’s covering.
A medical assistant knelt over Wilmot, replacing the bandage on the latter’s cheek. A drying cut above the medic’s eye caught Wilmot’s attention, but the man was ignoring it or didn’t know it was there.
“Are they still bombing us? Am I badly wounded? When I was hit on the ridge, I saw my men getting strafed by enemy aircraft. I’m Obergefreiter Vogel from the 90th Light Infantry Division … did my men make it out?” Wilmot’s barrage of questions poured out of his mouth, stopping abruptly when he realised … he had no memory of what had happened between falling unconscious on the ridge and waking up on the first truck. Had hours passed or days?
The medic tied off the new bandage and went into his pocket, bringing out a packet of cigarettes. He tapped the pack, lit the cigarette that popped up, and offered it to Wilmot.
“Thanks … I needed this,” Wilmot said.
Without answering any of Wilmot’s questions, the medic left him to begin checking the other five injured men.
Wilmot watched the man at his work and was suddenly hit by a surge of emotion. Before he could stop it, a throaty sob left his mouth. Paul shot into his mind, then Max, Hannah, and even Frank Middleton. He loved them all so damn much. He’d do anything to see them again, to be a family. He sniffed and gulped painfully as the age-old question came to him: Did any one of them think about him at all?
The medic came back to Wilmot’s side, rested his back against the truck’s soft wall, and exhaled a long breath. He was about the same age as Wilmot. His sun-kissed golden-coloured hair was matted with blood, his face was white with sand, and his half-closed, haunted eyes fought to stay open.
“You’re lucky. The others are either dead, or they won’t make it,” the man sighed.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’ve lost a lot of men. Two … three thousand, maybe. The enemy planes stopped coming after us half an hour ago, and their tanks are no longer firing. We’re in the clear; for a while, at least.”
He paused to stare at Wilmot’s face. “It’s not pretty, Obergefreiter Vogel. The skin on your cheek must have been hanging off you like a flap, but at least an Oberarzt had time to suture it before your medical truck was hit. You’ve got some shrapnel in your arm, and your lower back is black and blue.”
The man remembered my name, Wilmot thought. “Will I be going home to Berlin?”
The man laughed. “I doubt it. You’re not wounded badly enough for that.”
“Shame.”
******
Ten days later, in a hole under a netted roof in another part of the bleached wilderness, Wilmot enjoyed a can of peaches, courtesy of the New Zealanders they had captured near the ridge that now was so far away. He sat beside Günter, the annoying soldier who had been digging the gun hole days earlier; he was one of the few men who had made it off that hill alive. For once, Wilmot was glad of the annoying Schütze’s company. The man made it his mission in life to know what was going on. He was always lurking about and eavesdropping on conversations between officers. He’d make a great spy, Wilmot thought.
“Ten days, Obegefreiter, ten days it’s taken for us to be able to eat and shit in peace. I dread to think where we’d be now had the Allies succeeded in cutting off our retreat. That damn word sticks in my gullet – retreat – running away, more like. I imagined us marching into Alexandria by now. Did you think we were going to make it there?”
“We don’t get paid to think, Günter. We get paid to fight until we die or win.”
Wilmot shielded his eyes with his hand and looked over to where the prisoners were sitting under the baking sun. “How many Allied soldiers did we capture?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but the quartermaster reckons there’s over two hundred of them. He wasn’t happy being told he’d have to feed them. Did you know we got their commanding general as well?”
“No.” Wilmot was more concerned about the loss of two Afrika Korps commanders. General Walther Nehring had been badly wounded in an air raid, and General Georg von Bismarck, commander of the 21st Panzer Division, had been killed by a mine explosion. The men were always jittery when high-ranking commanders got hit.
“Ach, it’s all pointless when you think about it,” Günter complained. “We didn’t take a kilometre of ground on that El Alamein Line, and we lost nearly three thousand men and twenty-two tanks. If you ask me, we should call it quits here and get ourselves to Russia to finish off the Russkies.”
What the hell do you know about Russia and the Russians? Wilmot threw the man a filthy look and sai
d, “Go make yourself useful, Schütze. Your break is over.”
Günter picked up his rifle, muttered something to himself, and left, leaving Wilmot to contemplate the last terrifying ten days.
I’m a lucky bastard, Wilmot thought as he stretched out his legs. Again, he’d made it out alive when many of his comrades hadn’t. He recalled the man he’d been talking to on the El Alamein Line just before their world had exploded. He’d died, yet he’d been running only a few paces behind Wilmot. How was it possible that Uwe … yes, that was his name … lost both legs, but he, Wilmot Vogel, the man who always managed to survive when everyone around him kicked the proverbial bucket, got away with a cut to his cheek and a few bits of shrapnel in his arm? The men on the truck with him had died when the vehicle was struck from the air, yet here he was, sitting on his backside eating peaches. I’ve got a guardian angel on my shoulder, or something magical is watching over me … something keeping me on this earth. I’d like to say thank you, whatever … whoever you are. And whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.
He got up to search for more food before the greedy pigs among them got all the good stuff. The landscape was littered with vehicles: tanks and armoured cars, trucks, tankers, half-tracks, and Volkswagen Kübelwagens. Most would need fixing before they moved on. Allied Spitfires had consistently flown overhead for days, but all had been quiet for the last two days, and German reconnaissance pilots had reported that the Allied column had halted ten kilometres to their rear.
Wilmot was glad of the break, as were the men snoring under their netting or eating captured food supplies, as he had been doing. He’d seen severely wounded men being evacuated, and a glimmer of hope had shone for a few hours as he had waited to be medically assessed. He was disappointed when a doctor removed some of his sutures and then told him, ‘You’re fit for duty. Try not to get sand in your wounds. Come back in two days to have the remaining sutures out and the wound cleaned and reassessed. That will be all.’