by Colin Smith
Hare’s convoy, in which Calderwell’s Austin was now the rear vehicle, was frequently held up by the crowded trams that clanged self-importantly up and down its boulevards. True there were sandbags and an anti-aircraft gun in Mohammed Ali square and here and there, especially around the port and the stinking Street of the Abattoirs, there were signs of air raid damage with shrapnel pocked walls, crumbling holes in the road and the occasional collapsed roof. But mostly there remained a leisured Levantine air about the place. It reminded Calderwell of pre-war visits to French Beirut.
He and Hare went to eat in the officers’ mess at the Mustapha barracks transit camp where afterwards Hare would collect the German speaking Poles awaiting him in the sergeants’ accommodation. Hare was enjoying this opportunity to play host to the policeman and, buffeted by these unfamiliar military currents, Calderwell welcomed the presence of a familiar face. At one point he told Hare how, in 1917, his yeomanry regiment had covered the same ground on horseback though going in the opposite direction - from Egypt to Palestine. And this time the younger man, who had a curiosity Fraser quite lacked, had listened with obvious interest. At one point he found himself wondering whether his own world would have changed so much in the space of twenty-five years. Somehow the very the idea of 1967 seemed quite preposterous.
Fraser was eating with Hare’s men in what the British Army referred to as an Other Ranks’ dining hall, inevitably a crowded and noisier place. Calderwell found himself deriving a certain guilty enjoyment from the discrimination. He had last seen his driver outside the guardroom at the entrance to the camp where an elderly Royal Army Ordnance Corps major and a corporal were standing by a long table demanding all personal weapons and issuing chits for them. “We’re examining cleanliness of arms and the state of the ammunition,” explained the major. “And I don’t mind telling you we’ve uncovered some pretty gruesome sights.”
Calderwell had recognised it immediately as the kind of bullshit that the tail end of armies indulged in - you rarely had to tell fighting soldiers to keep their weapons clean. Nonetheless, like a good guest he handed over his revolver without demur and Fraser had followed his example. After dinner, on their way out with the Poles, they gave in their chits and had their pistols returned to them by the major who had taken his beret off to reveal he was quite bald underneath. “At least the Palestine Police know how to look after their kit,” he said in the sepulchral tones of a man waging a lonely struggle against declining standards.
Calderwell broke his Webley and checked that its five-round load had not been added to and the hammer was still resting on an empty chamber. He was returning it to its holster when the air raid siren sounded.
“Not again!” said the major. “They laid a stick of bombs right across the camp last night. Amazing nobody was killed. Follow me, I’ll show you where the nearest shelter is.” He was already putting on his tin hat.
It turned out to be a 1914-18-style trench dug round the perimeter of the camp that even had sand bagged fire steps in places. Should the enemy break through it was intended to be the place where those disparate elements corralled into Mustapha barracks would make their last stand. By the time they got there it was already crowded with men stumbling about in the dark, shouting for their friends or trying to impose some sort of order. “Put that bloody light out!” barked a parade ground voice at the owner of a little pocket torch whose faint glow was bobbing about like a firefly.
“I’m an officer,” came the indignant reply.
“Put that bloody light out SIR!” shouted half-a-dozen voices at once.
A brace of searchlights went on, their urgent beams sometimes crossing and then moving slowly apart again. Soon they could hear the distinctive high and low drones of the Italians’ three-engined Caproni bombers. The first anti-aircraft fire came from the navy that had begun to return to Alexandria now that the initial panic caused by the fall of Tobruk had subsided. Indolent balls of red and gold tracer floated lazily across the night sky. Then came the flashes as the heavier anti-aircraft guns ashore started up followed, never less than three at a time, by the distinctive crumph of exploding bombs. As the Regia Aeronautica got closer Calderwell began to hear the bombs whistle in flight, something he had heard about but never actually experienced. It was an altogether shriller sound than the artillery shells he remembered from his war against the Turks in Palestine. He wondered why on earth it had not occurred to him to bring a helmet with him. The Palestine Police had worn them against stone throwing rioters for years.
The ground shook and a couple of times stones and clods of earth fell into their trench. The only time Calderwell had experienced anything like it before was when he was in Tel Aviv during an earthquake tremor and everyone had come running out of shops and offices. He tried to remind himself that the chances of a bomb landing in his part of a long, four foot wide trench were small when the loudest and most demented whistle he had yet heard had him curling himself into a ball. He felt the blast tug at his shirt a fraction before a deafening bang. Then a torrent of debris was pressing him down into the bottom of the trench. It seemed to be burying him alive.
In a panic he scrambled to his feet. Once upright he realised that, though part of the trench wall had collapsed, the debris was hardly up to his knees. Then, faintly at first because his ears were still full of the explosion, he heard the groaning and mumbling of badly hurt men. “Stretcher bearer! Stretcher bearer!” Calderwell thought it might have been the officer with the torch. It had that petulant tone you sometimes detect in certain English voices trying to hail a taxi. Above them there was a flickering of flame which some claimed to be the death throes of a stricken Caproni tumbling to earth while others insisted it was merely a parachute flare. Then the anti-aircraft fire began to subside.
Calderwell and Hare gave a hand with the casualties. Among the seriously wounded was the Ordnance Corps major who they turned onto his stomach because he had a lot of blood on his back, gently explaining that he would be more comfortable that way. Lying next to him was Fraser, Calderwell’s driver, who was sitting up on his stretcher smoking a cigarette and holding a loosely tied shell dressing to his forehead with his other hand. There was a lot of blood coming through it.
“Sorry about this sir,” he said. “But I think you might be driving yourself for a bit.” Then he put his cigarette down and was sick.
A few hours later it occurred to Calderwell that this had been the first time Fraser had called him “sir”. By then Hare’s little command, their backs to the rising sun, were heading towards Burg el-Arab where the headquarters of the armoured brigade they were joining was laagered. Sitting next to the policeman in the passenger seat of the Austin was one of Hare’s Poles. He proffered a silver hip flask he had extracted from a shirt pocket. It was whisky and Calderwell was glad of it.
24 - A Frontline
“If going much further please take one,” advised the road sign. Next to the last word were pinned some small white crosses.
“Australian front line humour I suppose,” said the Templer to Lang who was behind the wheel.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t mean that their driving gets any worse.”
For the last half hour the engineers working with 9th Australian Division who maintained most of the coast road west of Alexandria to Burg El Arab and beyond had been much in evidence. Some of them were attached UK units but most were Australian and easy to spot in an area where steel helmets were still not de rigueur by their wide brimmed hats. Also a certain irreverence. “C’mon yer silly Polski bastards,” said a large man standing by a stationary steam roller who had spotted Lang’s shoulder flashes as they crawled past in the Fiat truck. “Remember Warsaw!”
“How could I ever forget,” murmured the Templer as Lang pulled away.
“You were there?”
“I was.”
“Were the Poles good fighters?”
“Some were very good indeed, almost suicidal.”
“Then how did you defeat them
so quickly?”
“It wasn’t that quick. Once we started properly the French didn’t last much longer and they had a far bigger army. The Poles’ mistake was that they attempted to defend all fifteen hundred kilometres of their western border and they were spread much too thinly. They should have withdrawn to the eastern bank of the Vistula and fought us from there. Of course, it didn’t help that the Russians were coming the other way. Anyway, western Poland is now part of the Reich as it always should have been. Most of the Silesians are German speakers and happy to serve in our army. East of the Vistula is forests and swamps.”
“And Jews?”
“Jews everywhere. Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Lublin. As I’m sure you know, Poland has the biggest Jewish community is the world.”
“And now they’re all in ghettoes?”
“For their own safety, until they’re resettled.”
“In Palestine?”
“In Zionist Palestine. Why not?”
Lang pulled over to overtake a battery of British twenty-five pounder field guns. One of the gunners, stripped to the waist, and with a large pair of field glasses dangling with his dog tags on his bare chest, was squatting on the roof of one of the towing vehicles evidently there as a lookout for enemy aircraft. As they overtook him the Templer saw that he was drumming on steel helmet with a spoon. He gave them a cheery wave.
“They don’t look much like a defeated army,” said Lang who had been troubled by his thought for some time now.
“Their soldiers can be good,” said the Templer. “Stubborn in defence though they rarely display the kind of initiative the Wehrmacht has in attack. Their main problem is leadership. You can’t expect troops to fight well when they know contingency plans are being made for a major retreat. How many men are going to see His Excellency Sir Harold MacMichael fly back to Jerusalem from Burg el Arab today after his meeting with Auchinleck? It’s very hard to keep that sort of thing secret in an army. Rumours spread. In the end it’s demoralising.”
“Almost as bad as being under your own bombs.”
They had spent a frightening night trying to sleep under the Fiat in a vehicle park near the port. One near miss had blown out their windscreen. Typically the Templer had insisted that this was all to the good because it made them look more like front line troops who often removed any glass from a vehicle which might catch the sun and give away their position.
But for the moment there biggest problem was other drivers. Ever since they crossed into Egypt Lang had noticed that the 8th Army was extremely accident prone. Wrecked lorries or jeeps were encountered every couple of miles as were military police signs warning that reckless driving was a court martial offence. A black bereted tank corporal thumbing a lift at the side of the road who the Templer insisted they pick up turned out to be another casualty. He was hitching his way back to his unit from Alexandria where he had gone to be fitted with new spectacles having smashed his last serviceable pair when his Grant bounced off another while his troop was manoeuvring in the dark.
“Who you vith?” the Templer inquired in what Lang supposed was meant to be English rendered though a Middle European filter. And the corporal had chatted loosely away, evidently flattered that a major, even if he was Polish, should take an interest in him. Soon the Templer not only knew who he was vith but that the corporal’s regiment was shortly going to be re-equipped with Shermans which were supposed to have a main gun on them which could deal with anything Rommel could point at it. So, it seemed, were most of the corporal’s neighbouring regiments in the sprawling and, for the most part, cleverly camouflaged subterranean vehicle lair the armoured division had burrowed for itself around Burg El Arab. As they negotiated their way through it Lang properly understood for the first time why the Eighth Army called themselves the “Desert Rats”.
Once they had dropped the corporal off at his particular nest Lang realised that the Templer’s questioning, whatever other gems of intelligence it might reveal, was principally to enable him to bluff his way through the next checkpoint by apologetically inquiring the whereabouts of a nearby unit. Then he would listen patiently to directions and if these meant going back the way they had come, mutter his zanks and find another way round.
Once they had to pull sharply off the road to avoid a careering tank transporter that was being driven as if it was under fire. When the dust had settled and they drove on they saw that the jeep in front of them had not been so lucky and its two near side wheels had fallen into some kind of trench dug into the verge. Alongside stood a major in a Sam Browne belt and a tired looking civilian in a crumpled linen suit and red polka dot tie clutching a brief case in one hand and a Panama hat in the other. As they approached he began to wave his hat at them in a very firm manner indeed but Lang put his foot down.
“He looked interesting,” said the Templer sadly.
“He’s probably selling motor insurance.” The truth was that Lang thought Davison looked rather too interesting and was tired of pushing their luck.
But when they came to an unmanned three-tonner with a crumpled front the Templer made him reverse back to it. “Give me a hand!” he shouted, dropping out of the cab.
Lang followed and saw him struggling with a furled camouflage net he had spotted at the back of the truck that they carried between them like a long roll of carpet and tossed on top of the orange juice in the flatbed of their Fiat. “Just what we need,” said the Templer. “Otherwise, when we find the right spot, our neighbours might consider us lacking in military virtue.”
“Our virtue will certainly be in question if they catch us wearing these uniforms,” said Lang.
“If we’re caught,” said the Templer. “We’re dead anyway no matter what uniforms we’re wearing. Terrorists and spies, and that is what we are, cannot expect to be treated as prisoners-of-war. But we are not going to get caught.”
The German had his lopsided grin on, buoyed by his cause for the first time since their escape from Jerusalem. There was still a chance of avenging Heydrich. They decided the right spot to spread their newly acquired camouflage net was over a hummock tufted with dried out yellow grass overlooking the air strip at Burg El Arab which was about half a mile away. Tyre tracks and old oil stains showed that somebody had already used it for the same purpose. “What if they come back?” asked Lang.
“If they outrank us we go quietly away. If they’re military police and they’re asking too many questions we shoot them and run away. Otherwise, we inform them this place has now been requisitioned by Polish Wireless Liaison and tell them to go away. Once we have the camouflage net arranged we will set up your set and call Athens.”
“From here? What if they have those direction finding teams again?”
“Look around you. Everywhere there are aerials sticking out of holes in the sand. Once again we’re another tree in the forest. There will be so much radio traffic on the air and we will keep our messages short. Even if they pick us up they will find it very difficult to pinpoint a transmitter amongst all this. And this is our last chance to get MacMichael. According to my friend Jessica he’ll be leaving here today. We watch the airfield and as soon as we see a likely looking aircraft preparing to take off we call Athens and they can relay the message to the Luftwaffe command at Benghazi or wherever they are now. With any luck they might shoot it down.”
“And what about us? Do we go down with all guns blazing too?” demanded Lang as he threw down the rolled camouflage net from the back of the truck. “Are you planning a Götterdämmerung? I’m not sure Jews are allowed into Valhalla under its present management. Even if they were, I think I’d get tired of all that Wagner.”
“No Götterdämmerung I promise,” said the Templer, laughing for he enjoyed it when Lang got into one of these moods. He could grouch like a real old soldier. “Even if we were not watching the airfield I would want to hide out somewhere until dusk. If we head towards the front in daylight our dust will probably attract attention from both sides. So we wait here until it is
almost dark and then set off in a southeasterly direction towards the Qattara Depression where positions are more thinly manned. In any case I don’t think either side has the kind of continuous lines we had in France during the last war. They hold these defensive boxes. There are always places through which a few men can insert themselves. When we get close we’ll abandon the Fiat and go on foot.”
“What about minefields?”
“These places are new for both sides. With any luck there will not have been time for much mine laying yet.”
But he could see that the Jew was not convinced and, when he thought about it, he would have been surprised if he had been.
They attached the camouflaged net on the cab and the sides of the Fiat truck and then brought it down at an angle so that, with the truck as its back wall, it made a lean-to tent. They brought some of the cardboard orange-juice boxes down from the trailer and used them to sit on and made a table out of eight more on which Lang rested his transmitter, taking out of the suitcase a telescopic aerial which he had never used before, the tip of which boldly pierced one of the squares in the camouflage net just like many of the other encampments all around them. The WAAF turned out to keep a considerable amount of bedding in the cab, a pillow and four thick blankets which they spread out on the ground under the net.
Stuffed behind the driving sea they discovered her small pack and Lang rather wished they had left with her. Apart from underwear, socks and a grubby shirt all wrapped up in a yellow scarf, its contents were mostly of the handbag variety: cigarettes, lighter, scent, lipstick, tweezers, scissors, comb, mirror, what looked like house-keys, a couple of sanitary towels and a bar of dark chocolate wrapped in extra tin foil. They also had to eat fresh petits pains purchased in Alexandria at a boulangerie along the Corniche and several cans of some unidentifiable pink meat discovered on sale in a grocer’s not far from the pension where they had stayed the night. Close examination of their faded labels showed that these were spoils of war having once been the property of the Italian army then presumably acquired by Egypt’s black market.