by Gavin Lyall
He thumbed the safety catch on the Tommy-gun for the thousandth time, which was silly because none of them ever put it on when carrying the gun. It was too stiff and awkward, and the trigger pull was heavy enough for safety anyway…
A second engine roared, dropped to a rumble, then in a blaze of headlights the cubist shape of a scout car came up the slope from its hiding place in the piazza stables.
De Carette darted forward into the mouth of an alley, then lifted the gun.
"Grenades!" Tyler roared.
Of course. He reached into his haversack. Pull out the pin, glance around the corner, toss it down the lane as the lever whanged away.
The grenades went off almost simultaneously, the blast bouncing off the close walls and hitting de Carette like a slap on the ears. A cloud of dust erupted in the narrow lane, but through it he saw the flare of the scout car's twenty-millimetre. The K guns hammered back, and screaming nails of light bounced every way off the scout car, jamming the narrow lane with noise, flashes, dust and madness.
The undamaged scout car ground past the alley, the jeep's engine revved furiously, and the two vehicles charged into each other head-on with a noise like a gigantic gong. Or maybe he was only remembering it that way, because it signalled' the end of all the other noises.
In the silence, Tyler ran forward and dropped a grenade into the open turret of the scout car. Somebody in there screamed and heaved into view, then the grenade went off beneath him with a hollow bang, and he collapsed out of the turret and slid down into the lane. He didn't need shooting.
Neither did Gunner. At the last instant, the last shot from the scout car had exploded in his chest. He was a shrunken, shortened object wrapped around the steering-wheel by the impact, and de Carette was glad that the starlight made him colourless.
The jeep wasn't going to move again, its bonnet steaming and crumpled.
"Right," Tyler said. "Yorkie and Lecat get the stuff unloaded. Henri, down to the stables with me."
There might have been a clever back way to the piazza, down through the alleyways, but they hadn't time to find it. War is not having time to be clever, being forced to meet things head on. As Gunner had.
The Volkswagen was still in place, and nothing moved. Tyler ran around the left-hand side, between the palms and the pond, and fired a short burst against the stable wall, just to provoke a reaction. Nothing reacted. And there was no radio in the stables.
"Damn," Tyler said. "All for not much. I'd rather have Gunner than… Damn."
"Listen," de Carette said, and Tyler became very still. At first there was just a whimpering sound from one of the windows around the piazza, the first reminder that this was a living village, and certainly no longer a sleeping one. But the villagers were letting the Europeans settle their quarrels by themselves. At the end of it, there would always be some loot.
Then Tyler heard the distant sound of motors.
Yorkie came staggering into the piazza, supporting Lecat with one hand and dragging a load of haversacks, water-bottles and gear with the other.
"They're coming back, Skipper. I could see flights."
"How many?"
"There's two of'em."
One vehicle they might ambush, but two… particularly if it was a truck of infantry.
"Over the wall." Tyler decided. "And no shooting. You know the way, Henri."
As de Carette helped Lecat back towards the alley, Tyler opened the engine of the Volks and yanked out the whole handful of high-tension leads, then threw them in the pond. When he joined them at the wall itself, he was carrying a heavy Jerry-can marked with a white cross, the sign for drinking water.
They lowered Lecat over the wall and dropped down beside him. The vehicle lights were just coming out of the track onto the flat plain around the village. A scout car and a truck, which stopped well before the gate, obviously suspicious.
Yorkie simply lifted Lecat onto his back and started running. De Carette and Tyler snatched up all the rest and followed. They dodged behind the village and into the soft dunes. There they collapsed, panting.
After a few minutes there was a burst of firing, somebody shooting at a villager or just a ghost. Some shouting, then silence.
"Nobody's going to come looking for us in the dark," Tyler said. "Back around to the other jeep."
They had less than two hours to dawn and took most of it in helping Lecat through the tangle of hummocks and dunes. They had to bring him to the jeep, not vice versa; it was parked at what they believed was just out of hearing of the village – a long way on a desert night – they daren't bring it closer.
It was also parked rather carelessly, close to the track, because they had assumed they'd be back to it well before dawn. They were almost there when they heard it drive away.
For a moment, de Carette feared Tyler was thinking of a second attack on the village. But then they staggered back into the dunes, away from where the jeep had been parked because that would be the first place the Germans would come looking in daylight.
The day began with a pale light, like the first jet of a gas burner flaring across the stars. Streamers of red appeared overhead and then the bloodshot sun itself, bringing light but no warmth. They felt safe to light cigarettes and Tyler poured out one cup of water for each, in turn. They only had one cup with them.
"We're going to have to do some walking," he said.
"To Zella?" That must be 600 miles, more than the depth of France from the Channel to the Riviera.
"No. We'll head north."
"John, in the north is Rommel."
"We won't go that far. If we can get around west of the salt marsh, to Nefta, we'll find something. There was a rumour 1st Army had got as far as Tozeur, so they could be further by now. That's only about a hundred and twenty miles."
Instinctively, de Carette's mind began breaking the distance down into day's marches: rations, water, bivouac times… and it was all meaningless.
"John – we have soldat de la premiиre classe Lecat with us."
"Ask him if he'd rather surrender. It has to come from you."
De Carette turned reluctantly to the young soldier, very young indeed behind the patchy beard and pain-weary eyes. He already knew what the answer would be.
They began to walk. They walked very slowly, if possible along the troughs between the crescent dunes, which lay in roughly north-south lines and curved liked arches laid flat on the landscape. Sometimes they had to climb over a dune, where it was soft, deep and slippery, like wading through flour. The slightest breath of wind skimmed the sand off the crest of the dunes and drifted it into their eyes. Only Yorkie and Lecat has sand-goggles, but they were passed round in rotation.
Lecat always needed one man to help him along, since he'd abandoned the plank crutch when they first rescued him. Who needed a crutch to ride in the back of a jeep? One man carried most of the haversacks, a Tommy-gun and the water Jerry-can, which made him awkwardly lopsided like a heavy suitcase does. The third was resting from a bout with Lecat and just carried a gun, a haversack of grenades and a few odds and ends.
After two days they simply threw away the Tommy-guns, which weighed around twelve pounds, and the grenades which were a pound and a half each, leaving themselves with just two pistols. It-was ridiculous to pretend they might be a fighting force any longer.
Without Lecat, they could have marched over twenty miles a day. With him, they were managing five, at best seven. And just being forced to move so slowly was more tiring than a natural pace.
It was Yorkie who mentioned it first. "If t'Frenchie had been captured, Skip, ah reckon he'd be in t'ospitai by now, being fixed up fine. You do 'ear that Jerry runs good 'espitбis."
"He is a Frenchman," de Carette said coldly.
"He's one of us," Tyler said, that finished it. But Lecat wasn't really one of them. Armies are made up of tiny groups – platoons, patrols, squadrons, troops – with the fierce loyalty of shared experience and danger. Even to de Carette, Lecat was s
till outside the LRDG family.
They walked mostly by night and lay up by day. It was nothing to do with being seen: out in the sand, neither friend nor enemy would find them because nobody bothered to look. They were in a place that was impassable to vehicles, and in the desert war such a place was a nowhere. But the nights were too cold for sleeping without the greatcoats and tents they had lost with the jeeps, and the days often too hot to move far without sweating and getting thirsty. They usually found a bush and lay down in its thin shade, staying still even when they weren't sleeping, because movement wasted energy…
On the fifth night, they found the German airman. From his badges Tyler identified him as a pilot Oberfeldwebel; he must have parachuted or crash-landed somewhere in the Grand Erg, and then started walking with just his water bottle and maybe a few bars of chocolate. How long he'd been there, they couldn't even guess. Drifting sand had half buried him, but in that dry air there was no corruption. The face had mummified into something three thousand years old, rigid dry skin stretched back from the teeth. The teeth were clenched onto the stem of a dead bush.
They trudged on silently through the dunes that had an unearthly silvery beauty under the waxing moon. The landscape was so simple, so infinite, and there was no sound except the hiss of sand in the wind. They could be on another planet, where all that was asked of you was that you walk slowly through a silent black-and-silver loveliness for ever.
The sun spoiled it, coming up quickly and complicating their life with colour and heat and changes of wind, so that they had to hunt for a scrap of shade and dole out the small ration of water that was still cold after the night. The days were annoying, restless, unnecessary.
They were wearing out. They were dying.
"If one of us went ahead, Skip," Yorkie said, "like he could tell them where to find us. I mean the rest of us. I'd have to be one of those who stayed, I know. But…"
"You don't know," Tyler said wearily. "It's at least forty miles before we get out of this sand and go west for Nefta. That would be another four or five days supposing 1st Army's got that far. But even then they couldn't send a vehicle down here to pick you up. In any case, we're in enemy territory, give or take."
That day they hadn't found a bush, and were crouching in the lee of a crescent dune, carefully lighting one cigarette from another, and smoking them in rotation. Absurdly, they had fewer matches left than cigarettes.
"We walked into this," de Carette said, "so we must walk out of it."
"Lecat didn't walk out of it," Maxim said, after de Carette had been silent for half a minute. "Professor Tyler says in his book that his leg went bad and he died of that."
De Carette sipped his wine and, blinking as if he had just woken up, gazed around the cool-warm room that was not hot or cold, and at the bright sky and the snow peaks outside.
"It was not his wound, not that. He was a peasant boy, from l'Auvergne – so naturally they had sent him to Africa. Naturally." De Carette chuckled to himself, without humour. "That is the way of the Army. John and I talked to him, we learned about his widowed mother, his older sister who might become a religieuse, the work on the farm that he had been taken from… he talked enough. He was not dying from that leg. We shot him."
Maxim nodded and waited.
"We needed the water, and the time. After that, we could walk thirty kilometres a day. It took us only a few days more to Nefta."
"And Yorkie's real name was Etheridge?"
"Yes, but I did not know until after. So always I think of him just as Yorkie."
"Did you ever meet Gerald Jackaman?" Agnes asked.
"The young man from Algiers? He was visiting the Americans at Tebessa, and he came down to debrief us, when we contacted 1st Army."
"Who actually shot Lecat?" Maxim asked.
"Who would have done it if you had been in command, Major?"
For a long time, as they wound down the hillside road, Agnes said nothing. Then: "So that's why Etheridge wrote to Jackaman. He was the first one they'd told lies to. I wonder if he'd suspected something all these years since."
"He seems to have accepted Etheridge's letter without asking any questions."
"Yes… So, they shot somebody on their own side, a poor wounded French boy. It haunts them all their lives, and one of them even changes his name, emigrates and dies of drink. I don't know… I wouldn't have thought that by the fourth year of the war soldiers would be that sensitive." She sounded disappointed. "Do you believe him?"
"As far as he went."
"How much further was there?"
"They didn't just shoot him. They ate him."
28
"Are you quite sure?" George asked.
"It has to be. You have to forget all the Beau Geste stuff about water being the only thing that matters in the desert. Those three went for well over a week, mostly through soft sand, and that's like snow. It isn't much warmer, either, in January: the temperature can go below freezing. If you're moving in that sort of cold, you're really burning fuel. I'm not saying they'd have died of starvation; they'd have died of thirst because they were too starved to do anything but sit down and drink up their water."
George put his cup and saucer down with a clang and stared around the room, looking for comfort. There was little to find. He had moved into the family set of rooms in Albany when he got the Downing Street posting and it became impossible to commute from Hertfordshire. Annette had done what she could to brighten the tall gloomy rooms with fresh paint and new lampshades, but she daren't change the furniture any more than George's mother or grandmother had dared. Coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time gate, back seventy-five years to the days when the Empire was built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.
"You are absolutely certain they couldn't have taken enough food?" Sir Anthony Sladen asked. They were seated around one end of a vast dining table, George and Sladen on opposite sides, Maxim and Agnes at the top, in the witness box.
Maxim shook his head. "There were three men marching for something like eleven days and a fourth who lasted five or six – de Carette wasn't precise about the dates. But that's nearly forty days' rations. George – you've been in the Army. You know what a day's rations looks like, what it weighs."
"It's a long time since my Army days."
"It's a long time," Agnes said, "since you helped Annette carry in the groceries from the car."
George scowled at her. Sladen gave a cool smirk.
"They must have grabbed up some food from the last jeep," Maxim said, "but nothing like enough."
"Oh Lord." George shook the heavy silver teapot and got a sludgy sound. "Does anybody want any more tea?"
Nobody did.
"Tell me, Major, " Sladen leant his forearms precisely on the table; "why nobody, in all these years, has spotted what must be something of a, ah, discrepancy in Tyler's own book?"
"He's vaguer about the time factor than de Carette. He makes the whole march through the sand a poetic affair, trudging on under the moon, days and nights blending into one-"
"The St.-Exupery touch. I'm sorry."
"He even hints they may have got to Nefta a few days early and rested before contacting 1st Army. The shorter he can make the march, the smaller the food problem. But the big worry that he writes about is whether he'd get a court of enquiry: he'd lost all his vehicles and weapons and nine British soldiers, never mind one Frenchman."
"It could have been a real worry," George reflected. "A court of enquiry wouldn't settle for the poetic approach."
"What actually happened to this town – Ghadames, was it?" Sladen asked. "I'm sure you know, Major."
"A Free French unit under Colonel Delange came up from the south-east and took it at the end of the month. I don't think there was any shooting, the officers really had deserted."
"Thank you." Sladen and George looked at each other across the table. The afternoon dimmed in the Ropewalk outside, as quietly as in a
country churchyard. It was a jolt to remember that the Piccadilly traffic was only a hundred yards away.
"So we have one desert town liberated," George said ruminatively. "At least two German vehicles destroyed, plus one Stuka, half a dozen or more soldiers dead – all for the cost of one patrol. About the same as a heavy bomber getting shot down. Not too bad an exchange, for those days. But also one French soldier, cannabilised. And a third of a century later, in comes the bill for that"
Sladen nodded in sombre agreement.
"Thank you, Harry," George said, but his voice was still heavy. "You've done just what you were appointed for: saved us a nasty scandal. I'll have to advise the Headmaster to drop Tyler."
"I wouldn't have thought he can do that off his own bat," Sladen said quickly. "But I'll be recommending the same thing to the committee."
Maxim stared from one to the other, disbelieving. "But all this happened around the time I was born."
"It doesn't matter if it happened as part of the banquet before Waterloo."
"But if you really want an agreement with the French, and Tyler's the only one who can get it…"
"Major, " Sladen said, "if there is even a hint that our chief negotiator had, ah, eaten a part of one of their countrymen…" He had a lot of difficulty in saying that.
"Suppose he promised to sick him up again?" Maxim said coldly.
"Bon appйtit" Agnes murmured.
Sladen sat up straight as if somebody had pinched his bottom. George looked from Maxim to Agnes, honestly appalled. "Where do people like you two come from? I have never heard any two remarks in my life…"
"You're getting your colour back, duckie," Agnes said.
George sat throbbing and steaming a little.
"Wars are messy things," Maxim said.
"Thank you, Major." Sladen gazed at him as he would at a broken sewer. "If we put out a press release saying that wars are messy things, that should avert any slight agitation our cross-Channel friends might feel. I trust you'll let us quote you?" He stood up. "George, I'd better get back to the pit-head. We'll liaise very soon on this. Give my love to Annette. I can find my own way…" his voice faded into the glum twilight as he stalked through to the next room.