by Shaun Clarke
‘No, it’s not,’ Red said. ‘Here, let me show you.’
Crawling out of the swirling sand, he took a position between Marty and Tone, sitting upright with his back against the rear wheel of the Chevrolet, and showed them how to do the job with a towel thrown over the weapon resting on the lap and the separate components being cleaned, oiled and reassembled unseen, as they had been trained to do in recruit training. This process, though causing more frustrated swearing, was repeated time and time again until Marty and Tone got it right and the weapons were clean.
They were just about to relax by lighting a cigarette and having a brew-up when Red glanced to the front of the column and saw Bulldog shimmering heat waves, using ‘Advance’.
‘Shit, we’re off,’ Red said. ‘Let’s go!’
After the disbelieving Marty and Tone had scrambled urgently back into the Chevrolet and taken up their positions at the guns front and rear, Red followed the other vehicles across the desert, driving recklessly through clouds of boiling sand. Again, though Marty had covered his face with his shemagh, he felt that he could not breathe properly and a few times was Bellamy, distorted in the hand signal for convinced that he was going to throw up. In the event, he managed not to do so until, after precisely one more hour, Bulldog Bellamy stopped the column for another wearying, frustrating check of the vehicles and weapons.
This tedious procedure was maintained every hour on the dot, greatly lengthening the time of the journey and causing a dreadful amount of exhausting work. Eventually, however, when the fierce heat had started to diminish and the sun was sinking fast, turning into an immense crimson ball that seemed to be dripping blood along the hazed horizon, they stopped in the middle of what seemed like a boundless wasteland covered with breeze-blown, drifting sand. There they were told to make camp for the night.
‘Thank God for that,’ Marty said as the vehicles spread out and braked to form the loose, semi-circular protective formation known as a laager. ‘Another ten minutes of that and I think I’d have died.’
‘Damned right,’ Tone mournfully agreed. ‘Pure hell on earth, that was.’
But they didn’t get a rest that easily. First, they had to raise individual shelters by tying the top ends of waterproof ponchos to the protuberances of the vehicles and the bottom ends to small stakes hammered into the ground. A groundsheet was spread out on the desert floor beneath the triangular poncho tent. The sleeping bag was then rolled out on the groundsheet and the bed was completed. Next, with the poncho tents raised, hollows had to be dug out of the ground just beyond the camp, for use as toilets. When these were completed – and enthusiastically used – the men were allowed to have a supper consisting of sandwiches, known as ‘wads’, and a cigarette. They could not have a brew-up in case the flames of the portable hexamine stoves were sighted by the enemy; instead, they had to content themselves with cold water from their water bottles.
By now absolutely exhausted, burnt by the sun, and made even more uncomfortable by the fine layer of sand that was stuck to his skin by his sweat, Marty finished his wads and cigarette, then crawled into his shelter with a great deal of relief, hoping to enjoy a good night’s sleep. He was just about to put his head down when Red Lester kicked his booted foot a couple of times and said, ‘Sorry, mate, but you and Williams have to take turns on watch – one man at a time on each vehicle – and, as I’m off for a consultation with Sergeant Bellamy and the other NCOs, I’m designating you to first watch, four hourson, four hours off.’
‘You’re kidding me!’
‘No, I’m not. Now get out of that sleeping bag and get your arse up on the front seat behind your machine gun. Waken Williams four hours from now and make him take over, but don’t bother me, thanks. As a corporal, I have greater responsibilities and need more sleep than you do. Have a good night, mate.’
Grinning wickedly, Red turned away and headed across to Bellamy’s Chevrolet, which was parked at the far side of the laager with a trooper already up on watch, surveying the darkening desert from behind his Boys anti-tank rifle. Groaning in disbelief and despair, Marty wriggled out of his sleeping bag and clambered up onto the Chevrolet, taking his position behind the Browning machine gun just as the sun sank below the horizon to plunge the whole desert into eerily moonlit darkness.
‘Cor blimey!’ Marty whispered to himself, awed by the lunar landscape before him.
Nevertheless, despite the unreal beauty of the nocturnal desert, his watch made for an interminable, sometimes nerve-racking four hours, with his heavy eyes often deceiving him and his thoughts, slipping in and out of near-sleep, ranging from the erotic to the fearful. One minute he was recalling his single evening in the Savoy Hotel with Lesley (her sweat-slicked belly, her hardening nipples, the incredible softness of her inner thighs as she clamped them around his hips, her closed eyes as she attempted nervously to smile and let him move deep inside her), the next he was staring intently at the moonlit plain, at veils of swirling dust and sand, the shadows of clouds crossing the moon, and imagining that the Germans were coming towards him under cover of darkness. Frequently he heard the faint rumble of heavy bombers high above as Allied aircraft headed for the Western Desert. Occasionally, too, he saw flashes of light on the dark horizon where the bombs were exploding.
Naturally, he was convinced that he was always awake. In fact, he often jerked awake after having fallen into a brief, fitful sleep. When, four hours later, his watch period was up and he was able to waken the quietly grumbling Tone to take his place, he crept back into his sleeping bag to sleep like a dead man.
Unfortunately, Marty felt that he had hardly slept at all when jerked awake at first light by Sergeant ‘Bulldog’ Bellamy’s gravelly bellowing. Wriggling back out of his sleeping bag, feeling absolutely shattered, he made his forlorn way to the holes dug in the sand outside the camp, attended to his toilet, then washed as well as he could with a pan of lukewarm water and carbolic soap. Then, since it was daylight, he was at least allowed to ignite his portable hexamine stove and have a crude fryup of bacon, sausage and eggs, with bread toasted against the flames of the burning hexamine blocks and, thank God, a proper brew-up.
When the breakfast was finished and the utensils had been cleaned and packed away in the Bergen rucksack, he and some of the others were detailed to pour petrol over the temporary latrines and then set it on fire, burning everything up. This seemed an odd thing to do in the middle of this vast desert, but none of the newcomers thought to question the necessity of it as they hurriedly dismantled their shelters, rolled up and repacked their groundsheets and ponchos, removed all signs of the camp, and loaded their kit into the Chevrolets in preparation for another drive into the desert.
Before that, however, they were ordered by Bulldog Bellamy, bellowing as always, to gather around their LRDG instructors, in the already fierce heat of the early morning, for lessons in how to maximize the use of their precious water.
‘The first method,’ Red Lester cheerfully told Marty and Tone, demonstrating each step with the aid of a toothbrush, stroprazor and metal container, ‘is to clean your teeth.’ He mimicked cleaning his teeth with the toothbrush. ‘Spit the tiny amount of water in your mouth out into the container.’ He spat into the metal container, making nauseating gargling sounds. ‘Use that to shave with.’ He pretended to swish his razor around in the container, supposedly filled with water, though actually holding only his gob of spit. ‘Then put it into the radiator of your vehicle.’ He pretended to unscrew the radiator’s cap, pour the contents of the container into the radiator and screw the cap back on.
Beaming with satisfaction while Marty and Tone started sweating in the rising heat, he continued enthusiastically, ‘Now! Here’s how you make an improvised filtering system out of old food cans.’ So saying, he poured a handful of sand into an empty food can, then unbuttoned his short pants, pulled out his cock and urinated on the sand in the can.
‘Aw, Jesus!’ Tone groaned in horror. Acknowledging Tone’s disgust only
with an even broader grin, Red finished urinating, tucked his cock back into his pants, buttoned up, then turned to the other opened can that he had previously sat upright on the bonnet of the Chevrolet. After punching a series of holes in the bottom with the tip of his fighting knife, he placed the can, bottom downward, on top of the first opened, empty can. He then threw a couple of handfuls of sand and small stones into the top container, until they formed a layer over the punched holes in the bottom. Finally, he poured his sand-filled urine from the metal container into the can, onto the layer of sand and stones, letting it drip through to the lower can.
‘ Voilà!’ he exclaimed, spreading his hands triumphantly. ‘Now the dirty water can be recycled and used again.’
‘Fucking wonderful,’ Tone whispered, looking disgusted.
‘Of course,’ Red continued, removing the filter from a captured Italian gas mask and placing it over the opening in the top can of his improvised filtering system, ‘you can also use one of these instead of the layer of sand and stones. So, when you’ve picked up your inadequate water-bottle ration, you clean your teeth, swill your gob out with the water, then spit the water into the filter and let it run back into the can.’ ‘I could puke at the very thought,’ Marty told him.
‘If you do,’ Red responded deadpan, ‘just remember to put your puke through the filtering system for a bit of recycling. That’s the LRDG way.’
‘Move out!’ Sergeant Bellamy bellowed, signalling the command with a downward wave of his right hand as his own Chevrolet moved out of the laager, its tyres churning up clouds of sand.
‘Here we go,’ Red said, clambering in behind the steering wheel and revving the engine as Marty and Tone hurried back on board. ‘Another day in paradise.’
They spent that morning learning to drive the Chevrolets across smooth, hard wastelands, up and down deep wadis and steep sand dunes, and across rocky ground that alternated dangerously with patches of soft sand and gravel. They also learned to fire on the move the weapons fixed to the vehicles, always aiming slightly ahead of the target, making allowances for the distortions of direction and distance created by the brilliant sunlight and the ever-shifting sands.
This wasn’t as easy as Marty had imagined it would be, since the Chevrolets moved at an erratic speed, sometimes held back by soft sand, other times racing free without warning, and because they were constantly bounced from side to side by loose stones and potholes. Also, he was frequently blinded not only by his own sweat and scorched by the sun’s fierce heat, but also found himself being scorched by the heat that came off his roaring machine gun. The heatwaves rising up from the machine gun’s barrel also distorted the targets, which usually were palm trees or dried-out desert plants. To make life even more difficult, when going through soft sand the vehicles often became bogged down and had to be dug out – so the men learned the hard way just what the sand mats and channels fixed to the vehicles were for.
Invariably, the nose of the Chevrolet would be tipped far forward, the axle buried deep in the sand. Getting it out was arduous work that would have been impossible without the sand mats and channels. The former were woven mats; the latter were five-foot-long metal channels that had originally been used in the First World War as the roofing for dugouts.
First, the men had to unload all of their kit from the vehicle to make it lighter. After laboriously digging and scraping the sand away from the vehicle’s trapped wheels, they pushed the sand mats, or trays, under the front wheels and the steel sand channels under the rear wheels. When these were firmly in place between the wheels and the entrapping sand, the vehicle, with its engine running in low gear, could then be pushed forward onto a succession of other sand mats or channels until it was back on firmer ground.
It was a sweaty, back-breaking, exhausting business that had to be done at least every couple of hours and was maintained throughout that long day of relentless desert driving and navigation. Thus, by late afternoon, when Bulldog Bellamy had again ordered the men to form a protective laager with their vehicles and make camp for the night, Marty, who prided himself on his endurance, felt physically shattered.
Rest did not come immediately, however. Again, the men had to check, service and clean both the vehicles and their personal weapons; then they had to camouflage the vehicles with hessian nets covered with sand and stones. With those tedious, time-consuming tasks completed, they still had to raise their individual shelters, either on sticks hammered into the ground or tied to their vehicles, then roll out their groundsheets and sleeping bags. Finally, as before, they had to dig holes just outside the camp to be used as latrines.
As the stop was taking place about two hours before last light, Captain ‘Paddy’ Kearney, who had previously appeared out of nowhere in his personal Chevrolet to check the progress of the training exercises, gave permission for fires to be lit, so long as they were extinguished before darkness descended. Using his portable hexamine stove, a grateful Marty was finally able to have a hot meat consisting of bully beef, tinned M and V (meat and vegetables), dehydrated potatoes and herrings in tomato. By the time he had finished eating, cleaned his utensils and let out his previous meal by squatting over one of the fly-covered holes in the ground, he was so exhausted that he practically staggered back to his shelter, where again he slept the sleep of the dead. At least slept like the dead for four hours on, four hours off, alternating his watch periods with his equally exhausted friend, Tone Williams.
As usual, Marty and the others were up at first light the following morning to go out on another exercise patrol, this one on foot because they were going to be trained in unorthodox forms of desert navigation.
It was murder. They hiked for hours and stopped, about every hour, only to learn one of the various LRDG methods of making their way across what, in a real patrol, could be hundreds of miles of relatively featureless terrain. After being trained in the proper use of a compass and sextant, they were shown how to make an improvised compass by stroking a sewing needle in one direction against a piece of silk and suspending it in a loop of thread so that it pointed north; by laying the needle on a piece of paper or bark and floating it on water in a cup or mess tin; or by stropping a razor blade against the palm of the hand and, as with the sewing needle, suspending it from a piece of thread to let it point north.
By last light they had learned that while in the featureless desert maps were relatively useless, they could, nevertheless, get a sense of direction from a combination of marked oases and drawn contour lines. They also learned how to find local magnetic variations, when not recorded on a map, by pointing the compass at the North Star and noting the difference between the pointer and the indicated North. Lastly, while the sun was still up, they were shown how to ascertain direction by planting a three-foot upright in the desert floor, marking the tip of its shadow with a pebble or stick, marking the tip of the shifting shadow fifteen minutes later, and joining the two with a line that would run from east to west, thus revealing north and south as well. This was known as the ‘shadow stick method’.
Normally, when darkness fell, bringing the blessing of cool air, they would have made camp for the night. In this instance, however, even as most of the men were already looking exhausted, the relentless Sergeant Bellamy, after conversing with Captain Kearney, who had again materialized out of nowhere in his personal Chevrolet, made the march even deeper into the desert. There they were taught to navigate by the timing of the rise and fall of the moon; and by the position of certain stars or constellations. Only then, when two of the men had collapsed from exhaustion and one from sunstroke, were they allowed to commence the long march back to the base camp. They arrived back just before midnight and went to bed without eating.
The fourth, seemingly interminable, day was taken up with more lessons in desert survival, including the avoidance of dehydration, sunstroke and sunburn; the locating and utilizing of artesian wells; the hunting and killing of desert gazelles for food; desert camouflage and the digging of shallow �
��scrapes’ and other laying-up places (LUPs); treatment for the bites of poisonous spiders, scorpions and snakes, or illness caused by lice, mites, flies and mosquitoes; the use of stretched condoms to keep dust out of weapons; the construction of a desert still to produce drinkable water from urine; and how to avoid drowning when trapped in a wadi during a flash flood.
Marty wouldn’t have believed that so much could be crammed into a single day, but it was and it left him almost reeling. The rigours of training, as he was swiftly learning, were in no way eased by the additional hardships imposed by the desert itself, which affected Marty and the others in strange ways.
By night the desert was freezing cold, but during the day the heat was fierce, shimmering up off the sand, hurting the eyes, making sweat flow, and leading to short tempers and, occasionally, fist fights. Tempers were also fused by the constant dust– blowing every second of every day and night, covering everything, filling the throat and nostrils, getting into food and drink, even inside sleeping bags – a constant dust that swirled in moaning clouds and drifted over the plains of rocky ground, soft sand and gravel. The dust also charged the metal parts of vehicles with electricity, shorting out the engines, often stopping the vehicles altogether and giving the men electric shocks.
Worst of all were the flies, thousands of them, all fat and black, attacking eyes and ears, dropping into drinks and food, buzzing noisily, frantically, all day long, and making a visit to the holes used as latrines a veritable endurance test.
Although the nights, which were freezing, gave some respite from the flies, a similar torment was offered in the shape of lice, bugs and cockroaches, and, if a man became too careless, poisonous scorpions. All of these drove the men crazy and led to frayed tempers.
Then there was the thirst, which was constant and hellish to endure. The drinking water was always warm, distilled sea water that just about kept them alive while failing dismally to quench their unrelenting thirst. Foul to drink on its own, it was more satisfying in a brew-up, though even then its high salt content curdled the tinned milk and filled the mugs with soft, disgusting curds. The tea was more refreshing than the water, but even that didn’t quench their thirst.