‘I'm Corporal Antonio Locatelli, from Padua, sir. I'm in the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Regiment. I was wounded in an air raid on Tobruk: internal injuries and a cracked skull. It's affected my memory. Nearly all my mates were captured later. I'm at the Rest and Leave Centre.’
‘Good enough. Cassola?’
‘I've been promoted, sir: Corporal Aldo Cassola, I am; from Naples. I'm in the Ariete Armoured Div, wounded at Nibeiwa, and my arm's still in a sling. Unconscious for two days, I was, sir: blown up when the tank brewed up, you see. I'm suffering from amnesia, too, sir, like Corporal Lewis... Corporal Locatelli. And I've lost most of my mob, as well, sir: killed or captured.’
Taggart laughed. ‘You've both got good safeguards against getting into conversation with anyone who could catch you out on details. Good. And Lance Corporal Kulick?’
‘I'm a Lebanese importer, sir, just come from Algeria and Tunisia. That's why I don't know my way about Tripoli well. I'm going to buy a ready-made European suit, sir. As an Arab business man, I'd convincingly wear both kinds of clothes. But if I want to talk to the sophisticated type of locals, I need to show that I'm Westernised.’
‘Where will you change clothes?’
‘I'll go to a hammam, a bath house; what Westerners call a Turkish bath. I'll put my Arab gear in a suitcase and leave it in a hotel cloakroom until I need it.’
‘You don't think you'll pick up enough in the bazaars, dressed as an Arab?’
‘In a city the size of Tripoli, sir, there's a big com-munity of Westernised Arabs who know what's really going on behind the scenes. They speak Italian, they have friends in high places, they do black market deals with the connivance of Italian civvy officials and Army brass hats. The bazaar teahouses are full of rumours, but the hotel bars and lounges are where the reliable gossip circulates.’
Stuart said ‘I'm sorry I can't come with you, Kulick. If my French were better, I could pass myself off as a colonial Frenchman from Algeria. But, even so, I don't speak any Arabic but Egyptian; I don't know the Algerian dialect: I'd be suspect. And I don't know anything about business: as a schoolmaster, with a naval officer father, I haven't had any commercial experience or heard business shop talk.’
Kulick was looking at Stuart with an air of discomfiture.
Taggart saved him from having to reply.
‘That's all right, Angus. Kulick will be all right on his own.’ He looked at the other two impersonators. ‘Don't get into trouble, Cassola. No fights, understand?’
Cassola grinned. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Keep an eye on him, Corporal Lewis.’
‘Do my best, sir. It's the women I'm more worried about. As long as Cassola doesn't start singing Neapolitan ballads, we'll be all right. Once he gets started on that stuff, they flock round him like...’
‘Flies round a honeypot; or a lump of horse manure.’ Taggart gave Cassola a cold glare. ‘Don't try to be either, Cassola. No charming the girls, no picking fights with the biggest men you can find. I'll personally castrate you, if you make a balls of this by getting into trouble.’
‘Oh, I wouldn't like that, sir.’
Cassola was a villain, thought Taggart, but it was hard not to be amused and disarmed by his cheerful acceptance of his own roguery.
***
The sentries, relieved every hour, reported no movement all night. The working parties from the fort had ceased their work of ground clearance an hour after sunset. As the sun rose, the gates of the fort remained shut. No patrols were setting out to search the hills, so there could be no great alarm from rumours of a British presence. The squads with mattocks and flame-throwers were being allowed to rest: no doubt they had come straight from the battle zone.
The three men who were going into Tripoli were astir long before first light, and by the time the sun was high enough to begin warming the day, they were concealed near the roadside. When lorries began to pass, Lewis and Cassola emerged from hiding to thumb a lift into the town. Later, Kulick, in Arab guise, appeared and waited for a bus.
Taggart, watching them through field glasses, had a few moments of doubt; almost of remorse. If they were caught, he would have sent them to their deaths. Sent, for he had detailed them. They had not volunteered. On the other hand, he had no doubt that they would have gone willingly if offered an option. He did not feel so uneasy about Kulick as about the other two. Kulick was big, calm and sensible; and he seemed to fit more naturally into the environment, in Arab clothes, than the other two: who might be stopped by Military Police for any of the many reasons for which military policemen the world over do stop junior N.C.Os, and asked to identify themselves and justify their absence from duty.
It was all very well, also, for Corporal Lewis to assure him that he would keep Cassola out of trouble. Lewis was no slouch with the girls, himself. Smooth and handsome, always as impeccably groomed and turned out as that other ram, Sergeant Randall, he was more convincing as Cassola's partner in an amorous escapade than as a restraint.
He stayed until he saw the first two picked up by a military lorry, and Kulick board a bus. It was too late to have doubts. He made his way back carefully to a point from which he could watch the fort.
MacIntosh, on the way, made one of his frequent unsolicited observations. ‘That's mebbe the last we'll being seeing o' those two bint-chasers, sir.’
‘You're likely to disappear without trace, yourself, if you annoy me by talking a lot of balls, MacIntosh.’
‘Och, it only needs some lassie to crook her finger at either of yon, sir, and they'll decide to settle down and wait for the rest of the Army to arrive in Tripoli. After all, once we've taken El Agheila, we'll advance like a dose o' salts and be in Tripoli in a couple o' days.’
‘That's the theory. General Wavell would be delighted to know you have such confidence in his strategy.’
MacIntosh grinned broadly. ‘Och, sir, he's no' a bad general for a Sassenach. What we need out here's a brigade of Jocks. We'd have been in Tripoli the noo.’
‘And no need to send those two whom you've just maligned into temptation.’
All the same, Taggart thought, the little devil has confirmed my uneasiness.
They lay on a hilltop, below the skyline of the forward slope, and watched the work on the slopes of Jebel Asad continue. Taggart timed the duration of each flame-thrower: 20 seconds. They looked heavy and awkward. He remembered his rage on seeing the Germans use these cruel weapons when his battalion was holding an entrenched sector north of the Maginot Line. It was horrifying to watch men reduced to carbonised ashes in a few seconds.
The tall captain with an arm in a sling whom he had seen arrive came out and went round the fort with another officer, inspecting the work. He pointed here and there, evidently to particular clumps of under-growth. But there seemed to be no urgency about the work or his manner.
Taggart reassured himself that if there had been a report about the Valentias, it was not being taken seriously. He left Stuart to keep an eye on the fort and set out, with Gosland and Troop Sergeant Major Vowden, Corporal Owen and the two runners, to make a circuit of the objective and plan the details of the forthcoming assault.
***
Captain Pennati arrived at the fort in a mood that had softened with every kilometre that he travelled westward. The loathed desert was behind him. With luck, he would never return to it. He yearned for an end to the campaign. A swift British victory seemed assured. He would cheerfully endure a short period as a prisoner, if an end to the fighting in North Africa shortened the war significantly.
The fort was set in a harsh landscape; but he was among the hills there. There would be no sandstorms. There was some plant life, and there were trees, to make welcome splashes of green against the grey and ochre rocks, the red earth and the shale. Well though the Italian Army fed in the field — too well, in his opinion, which softened officers and men — he would ensure that here, close to a supply depot and with means to fetch extra produce from some local village, or Tripoli,
they fed royally.
He would show that slovenly lot of base troops and their superiors at Headquarters how the job of garrisoning the place should be tackled: hence the immediate start on clearing the surrounding under-growth and denying as much concealment to an attacking force as possible.
That the fort would come under attack, he did not doubt. He was realistic, sceptical and cynical enough to put little faith in the El Agheila bottleneck as a serious impediment to the Allies' advance. At the rate that the British, Australians and Indians were carving their way through the retreating defenders, they would be upon him in a very few days' time. He must make at least a token defence. He knew the depth of the contempt in which the British held his nation. He, at least, could do something to dispel a little of it.
He had no intention of being killed or allowing his men to suffer needless casualties, but he was not going to surrender without a fight.
There was also his Colonel to consider. The fellow had been very decent: got him a Silver Cross. He owed something in return. The old boy would gain credit for good work done at the fort, as senior officers always earned rewards from the labours of their juniors. When the Colonel came to inspect the company, there would be much to impress him. After the ground had been cleared, he would set up targets at various distances: by firing at them, the company would learn the precise ranges. He would leave markers — splashes of white paint on the rocks — to be a permanent guide to the riflemen.
He studied the terrain and assessed the means by which a large enemy column advancing from the east would approach.
I am an excellent hotelier, he told himself, and I intend to be respected by my comrades and enemies alike as an efficient soldier. The first British troops who show themselves here are in for a surprise.
The message that that incompetent oaf from whom he took over had given him: enemy aircraft suspected of having landed on the eastern edge of the range! An air search being made. The British were not fools. They knew all about the importance of not over-stretching lines of communication. They could not possibly sustain a large advance force so very far ahead of their Front. What would be the point of it, anyway? If the main force were held up, by some miracle, it would leave the advance force cut off. If the advance continued with its present rapidity, there was no need to send an advance force.
Just the same, to keep his men occupied and alert, he would send out patrols when the ground clearance and the range-finding were done.
That takes care of my military problems, he reflected, but the pressing personal one remains. I wonder if the Colonel would allow me a few hours off to dash into Tripoli? One of the girls would surely be off duty. At the worst, I could always find out which is the best brothel in town.
When he returned from inspecting the working parties, he found a signal awaiting him. Agedabia, 50 kilometres in the El Agheila direction from Beda Fomm, had fallen during the night.
It couldn't be long now, surely, before the first enemy infantry came over the hills and into sight among his methodically marked rocks: where the splashes of white paint would tell his men the range and enable them to pick the enemy off as though they were targets in a shooting gallery.
***
The first sight of Tripoli, a beautiful, leafy, white city beside a blue sea, was intoxicating after many weeks of a Scottish winter among bare mountains, a spell in the desert and now the lonely hills.
Their Italian blood ran strong and warm in Lewis and Cassola when they set eyes on the place. It was an ancient city that breathed romance. There were pretty girls in abundance among the people strolling the pavements. There were cinemas, dance halls, cafés. Both men, wearing the insignia of distinguished formations (distinguished in Italian eyes, at least), received admiring glances and smiles; particularly Cassola, with his arm in a sling.
All their conversation was in Italian: Cassola's with a strong Neapolitan accent, acquired from his parents and the rest of the family who had their origins in the teeming, malodorous alleys off the Via Roma; Lewis's a smoother dialect rooted in the north-east and its respectable lower middle class.
Whatever the differences in their speech, their interests were in accord. The comments they made had entirely to do with the parade of succulent young women.
‘We won't get much information out of any of them,’ Lewis said. ‘Let's go into the next decent bar we see and have a good cup of coffee.’ He had shed his English habits with the change of language and the memory of Army tea was repulsive; grateful though he had always been to drink it.
‘Hang on,’ said Cassola, ‘there's no hurry. We might as well see if there's one where the girls hang out of a morning. No harm in chatting to a pretty bird over a cup of coffee.’
‘All right. But remember: we're not here to pick up birds. We haven't the time.’
‘What's the matter with you: you leave your balls behind in Scotland, or something?’
‘Listen, I could do with a good screw just as much as you. But the only chance is meeting some young wife whose husband has been at the Front so long that she's frantic for it.’
‘Well? We might just have the luck.’
‘All right. But not at the expense of the job we came to do.’
They went into a large cafe where middle-aged and elderly people were seated at tables, a few young women in pairs and threes among them. They took stools at the counter and while their coffees were being poured they surveyed the room.
‘Those two in the corner are giving us the come-on,’ said Cassola.
‘So I noticed.’
‘Pity to waste it.’
Lewis's manner changed and he became authoritative. ‘Don't forget those stripes on your arm aren't real. I'm telling you, Aldo, no fooling around.’ He turned to the woman behind the bar. ‘Have you got a husband or son away at the Front, Signora?’
‘Two fine boys. One was taken prisoner at Sidi Barrani.’
‘The tenth of December. There was hard fighting.’
‘Were you there?’
‘Yes. Lucky to be here, I suppose. What are your sons in?’
‘The one who was taken prisoner is in the Fourteenth Infantry. My other is in the artillery. I see your friend was wounded. What are you doing here?’
‘We're both convalescing. I was wounded at Tobruk.’
‘That was a long time ago. Poor boy, you must have been badly hurt.’
‘A cracked skull and internal injuries, Signora. Tell me, what are people saying about the war, here? We'll hold the enemy at El Agheila: I hope everyone knows that?’
‘We're all good patriots, my boy: of course we are confident.’
Her eyes and weak smile denied the words.
‘It seems to us that there are too many so-called soldiers who never leave Tripoli. Some of us have to do all the fighting, while others do none. It's time reinforcements came from home.’
‘They say a troopship is due in soon. That might make life a bit easier for you brave lads who have borne the brunt of the battles.’
‘That's good news. Tell me, where is a good place for a meal that a corporal can afford?’
‘Come back here at lunch time: I'll look after you. I'll make sure you get big portions and aren't charged the full price.’
‘You are an angel, Signora. Hear that, Aldo?’
Cassola's attention was mostly on the female customers. He looked round at the woman behind the bar.
‘Very kind. Thank you, Signora.’ Then, with his usual cheek, ‘I hope the food is good.’ But his smile robbed the words of offence.
‘You're a cheeky young devil. You remind me of my younger son; the one who was captured.’ She wiped away tears.
‘Don't grieve, Signora: he's safe there, at least. My pal and I have to go back into the fighting line soon.’
‘Poor, dear boys. Never mind, I'll look after you like a mother if you come and see me at about one-o'clock.’
They left the café and wandered among the shop windows and cinema posters, the
pleasant avenues and the bazaars. They ate ice cream at a street stall and chatted to the elderly owner. They went into a bar for a beer, and when four other soldiers entered they asked them if they had heard that a troopship with strong reinforcements was about to dock.
Yes, the others said, that was the buzz. And about time to, and where had the two corporals been recently?
These other four said they had seen action from Sidi Barrani to Beda Fomm.
‘The battalion's been pulled out for a rest. All except C Company.’ This raised a laugh.
‘What's the joke?’ asked Cassola.
‘C Company is the Colonel's favourite. Admittedly, the C.O., Captain Pennati, is the best company commander we've got. But he's just a bit too good. C Company have been sent to garrison Fort Jebel Asad, while the rest of us are in cushy barracks here.’
‘This captain's a tough man, is he?’ Lewis asked. ‘You'd think he was a Regular, the way he carries on. Yes, I'll give him his due, he's a tough one. Comes from the South Tyrol; a real hard mountain man.’
‘And his company is the best?’
‘No: ours is! But the Colonel treats C Company as though they were.’
‘They must be,’ Cassola said, ‘or they wouldn't have been sent to garrison the fort.’ His tone was challenging.
The four soldiers looked at one another and at him. Their good humour seemed suddenly to have deserted them.
One, the biggest, said ‘You're lucky you've got your arm in a sling. I'd have taught you some politeness, if not. You've impugned the honour of B Company: ours.’
Cassola went and stood close to him, glowering up into his face.
‘Don't let a little thing like a wounded arm stop you. I'll take you on with one hand.’
The other three laughed and one jeered ‘That's a safe challenge that you wouldn't make otherwise: Beppo, here, would take you apart.’
Lewis pulled Cassola back. ‘Pay no attention to him, chaps: he was badly blown up at Nibeiwa and he's still a bit...’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Come on, Aldo.’ He took Cassola away.
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