Take or Destroy!

by John Harris

  ‘Sound just what I’m looking for, sir.’

  Murray pulled a wry face. ‘Some of ‘em,’ he corrected. ‘You know the types who volunteer. The usual dedicated chaps, of course, who’ve spent too long sitting on their bums or are sick of running away from Jerry and want to hit back, but they also include the hotheads, the lunatics, the bored, the frustrated, the ones who’ve spent too much time in the desert and are a bit sand-happy, and the bad lots who’ve been given the alternative of volunteering for something that’ll take them away from their units or being court-martialled for some mayhem they’ve committed. You’ll get as many bad soldiers as good ones.’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers, sir.’

  ‘Well -’ Murray smiled ‘- at least they’re all supposed to be trained, though, of course, they’re not trained for anything in particular. They just know which end of a gun the bullet comes out. There’s a fairly high percentage of regulars, among them, though - chaps who were out here when the war started - but, on the other hand, some of ‘em haven’t ever been in a fight before.’

  Hockold opened his mouth to ask a question but Murray held up his hand. ‘Just one more thing,’ he said. ‘There’s a small nucleus of commandos among them.’

  Hockold’s heart leapt. He felt he was getting somewhere at last.

  ‘Don’t hoist the flag yet,’ Murray warned. ‘There aren’t many. You know they sent out 7, 8 and 11 Commandos last year and then didn’t know what to do with them. They laid on a few small raids - one on Bardia and that one on Beda Littoria when Geoffrey Keyes was killed - then they were used in Crete and Syria, and by the time that lot was finished there weren’t many of them left. A few of them went into Special Air Service and the Long Range Desert Group, but there were also a few who applied to go back to Europe where they thought there might be more happening, and ended up in No. 1 IBD. You could promote a few to show the others what to do.’

  ‘What about morale, sir?’

  ‘They seem to have plenty of spirit - ‘

  ‘That’s a help.’

  ‘-- Unfortunately, as usual, they use most of it up on each other. As far as I can make out, they spend all their time fighting among themselves. Jocks against English. Irish against Welsh. Australians against everybody. The British army in the field always did spend more time attacking each other than they did their enemies. Think they’ll be any good to you?’

  Hockold drew a deep breath. ‘I’d better go and have a look at ‘em first, sir.’

  Murray nodded. ‘I think you better had,’ he said. ‘I gave orders last night for ‘em to be rounded up. There’s also a couple of rather good chaps who were lying about loose who I’ve arranged to come and see you. They might be of some use too.’

  Hockold was still pondering the quality of the troops he’d so unexpectedly acquired when the first of his recruits arrived.

  He still wasn’t sure that he’d been wise to accept the direction of the operation because he was well aware that his personality had never made him good at handling men. He was best in the blue, he’d discovered, working independently with a few loyal followers in an area where his temperament didn’t matter, and he’d been rather hurried into the command when he’d expected that someone with more experience of raiding would have been given the job.

  There was another thing, too. After hours of thinking about the problem the night before, he had at last dropped off into a fitful sleep only to awaken sweating with fear, dreaming he was dead. He had seen himself quite clearly, sprawled under the sun among the debris of wrecked houses, the dust of the desert on his dry lips and congealed in his eyes; his blood blackening the sand, his hands still clawing at his body where he’d felt the pain. He had started to consciousness in an extremity of terror, sickened with a presentiment of death. His face had been covered with wounds as though he had been hit again and again about the head. The image had been too clear to push away, and he was wondering uneasily if it were an omen.

  He was still frowning at his own troubled thoughts when the door was opened by a youthful captain recently out of hospital after an attack of jaundice brought on by a too-extensive sojourn in the desert.

  ‘John Watson,’ he said. ‘Yeomanry. They said I might be of help.’

  ‘You a commando?’ Hockold asked.

  Watson smiled. Becoming a commando was one of the few ways he’d worked out as a means of getting home. On his overseas leave he’d married a girl whose parents had considered their daughter too young to be swept into marriage to a man they didn’t know, and he knew they’d only given their consent because he was going away and they suspected he might not be coming back. He’d been fully aware of their hostility. And of the dangers of parting, because he’d spent only two nights with his wife and the Eighth Army was full of stories of wives who’d gone astray.

  He tried briefly to tell Hockold how much he needed to see the war won, and Hockold listened with sympathy. With a broken home, bullying at school because he was over-tall and awkward, and a chronic lack of money which had always obliged him to eschew social occasions, parties and girls, he had never considered that he had had a life filled with much warmth either.

  They were still talking when the door opened again and a burly figure with a shaggy ginger moustache and spectacles appeared.

  ‘Alexander Mackay Murdoch,’ he said in a marked Inverness-shire accent. ‘Major, Black Watch. I haird there was a wee bit o’ fun being planned.’

  Hockold studied Murdoch across the desk. He was an ex-NCO, tall and strong. Yet though he wore a kilt, bonnet and brogues, he still managed somehow to look like a professor from a university.

  ‘Doubt if I’d call it fun,’ Hockold explained. ‘It’s a raid along the coast behind Jerry’s lines.’

  The Scot’s face didn’t change, and there was something quiet - and curiously deadly - about him, so that a sudden flash of understanding came to Hockold.

  ‘You done this sort of thing before?’ he asked.

  ‘A few times.’

  ‘Where?’

  Murdoch smiled. ‘Spanish Civil War. Before that, Abyssinia.’

  He was intelligent, cold, and sure of himself, a throw-back to the efficient, single-minded Scottish soldiers of fortune who had fought in every war from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and Hockold found himself setting out his ideas for him with enthusiasm.

  ‘We have a few experienced men,’ he explained. ‘Belonging originally to 7, 8 and 11 Commandos. They’re at No. 1 IBD.’

  ‘Aye, I know.’ The circular army spectacles gleamed. ‘I took ‘em into Crete last year. We came oot with our blankets lashed together with bootlaces to make sails. We also did yon raid on Bardia. It was no’ very successful but we blew up a few guns. I’ve been in hospital a wee while since.’

  His matter-of-fact tones intrigued Hockold and he smiled. Murdoch’s self-sufficient cool-headedness reminded him of the army commander.

  ‘Our job’s to destroy ships,’ he said. ‘The general also wants us to create as much hell as we can in the hope that it’ll distract the Germans just when they’re getting worked up about his battle. Can you prepare troops for the job?’

  ‘Are they trained men?’

  ‘They’re not commandos.’

  Murdoch gave a thin smile. ‘They will be when I’ve finished with ‘em,’ he said.

  According to its occupants, No. 2 Transit Gamp at Akkaba was a bastard at the best of times, and when it was windy, it was the nearest thing you could get to hell.

  It was really part of another vast grouping of huts and tents known as No. 1 Infantry Base Depot, from which it was separated by a wire fence. The scenery around was as stark as if it were on the moon, with sand stretching to the horizon on every side and making the eye and the mind alike ache with its arid uncompromising harshness. Beneath the strident sun, it was imposed on a landscape of bleak desolation, which, every time the wind blew, lifted up and rolled past them in clouds of dust. ‘Dear Mum,’ they wrote, ‘we are n
ow sixty miles inside Egypt. Fifty miles of it just blew into our tent.’

  Though almost empty now, until recently No. 1 IBD had had every British infantry regiment in Egypt represented in its lines, each company with its own area of tents, parade spaces and huts to house company offices, stores and mess kitchens. It was the most God-forsaken hole in Egypt and No. 2 Transit, on its southern fringe, was the most God-forgotten part of it. Since most of those inside No. 2 Transit were volunteers for Combined Operations training, it had become known to the rest of No. 1 IBD as Death Valley.

  The inhabitants of Death Valley were a pretty mixed lot, speaking with every accent of the British Isles, and mostly they were private soldiers who considered themselves entirely forgotten and far from home. With the bored, the frustrated and the rebellious, they were a pretty fair mixture of good and bad, ardent and indifferent, intelligent and stupid - in fact, the warp and weft of a reasonably normal unit.

  There were seventeen officers, all of them subalterns. One of them, Lieutenant Collier, was a keen yachtsman who had been turned down by the navy, and felt that since the commandos went to war in boats instead of lorries, they were the next best thing. Another, Lieutenant Swann, had gone into the army straight from school. His ambition was simply to get among the action. He wasn’t very clever, but he was brave enough and so far he hadn’t managed to hear a single shot fired in anger.

  The rest were much the same in terms of aggressiveness and ambition, types like Lieutenant Brandison who had played rugby for his county and considered himself ideally suited in build and temperament for a commando. But there was one, Second-Lieutenant Sotheby, who was nervous and stuttered and, considered a little slow in his own regiment, had been encouraged by his colonel to volunteer as a means of getting rid of him. His father had been killed at Dunkirk and he hoped he might be able to avenge him.

  Among the NCOs, Sergeant Jacka was there quite simply because he was a commando and wanted to get on with his job. Sergeant Freelove was there because he considered he ought to be a sergeant-major and had been passed over for some creeper who didn’t know his arse from his elbow. Sergeant Berringer had an undoubted gift of command. Sergeant Bunch was an NCO of the old school and a man of limited vocabulary -- ‘Get fell in,’ ‘Get spread out,’ ‘Get sat down’- who was reputed to salute the telephone when speaking to an officer. A little old for action, he was there because he thought the modern army nothing but bumph and wanted to join something that had been invented for fighting.

  Then there was Corporal Sidebottom who had served in Egypt and India for more years than most people had lived. He spoke a language of his own composed of Arabic, Urdu and Hindi, and had crazy light-blue eyes. He was widely believed to be a little mad, and was known to everyone as Sidi-Bot-Om or Mo-for-Mohammed. Corporal Curtiss of Signals had tired of punching keys and filling in message forms, and Corporal Snow, who had lost his whole family in the blitz on Coventry, simply wanted to slit a few German throats.

  The private soldiers similarly reflected the diversity of the army. Some came from the far corners of the earth where a meeting with another human being was an event of some importance, some came from cities as crowded as anthills, their chief adventure a Saturday afternoon football match. There was a South African who’d joined because he didn’t approve of the Afrikaaner opposition to Smuts’ support of the United Kingdom, and there were New Zealanders who’d volunteered for fighting and after Crete had grown bored with not having any. Private Willow had once beamed on holidaymakers as he’d peddled ice cream along the crowded beaches of East Sussex, but Private Comrie had acquired his bitter ill-humour fighting the sea as a fisherman beyond the lonely stretches of the northern isles.

  Private Belcher was an ex-barrow-boy - independent, self-reliant and quick-witted - who had heard, quite rightly, that at the sharp end of an army neither the officers nor the sergeants stood on their dignity too much, and that a private soldier was as good as any man if he could do his job. He had already worked out a neat little scheme for cornering all the camp’s spare fags and selling them back at a profit during shortages.

  Private Auchmuty never said two words if one would do, and not even one if a grunt would suffice. He had spent most of his life alone as a shepherd in his native Banffshire and liked it that way. He had volunteered because he’d been doing guard duties near the canal where, as in all units away from the firing line, there was a strange belief that an idle soldier was an inefficient soldier. Baragwanath Eva, dark as a gipsy, had carried a gun ever since he could walk. In his native Cornwall, he had managed to live from poaching other people’s game, farmers’ handouts when he’d cleared their farms of rabbits, and the money he got from the sale of the skins. He could thread a needle with a rifle.

  Owen John Jones - Taffy to most people - was a handsome bull of a man, a big talker and a great lover. Coming from a village on the border, he barely scraped in as a Welshman and, anyway, had spent most of his adult life patting water into butter in a Shrewsbury grocer’s. A man constantly at odds with the fortitude that obsessed him, he had taken the Charles Atlas Mr World course and looked like a Greek god. He was fond of saying what he was going to do to the Nazis and was at Akkaba because of the jeerings of his comrades in the East Yorks who had said he should put up or shut up.

  David Evan Bradshaw came from the heart of the Brecknock hills but, though he was twice as Welsh as Taffy Jones, he never sounded Welsh and was never called Taffy. Yet his name was unaccountably the source of constant confusion. Officers and the NCOs variously addressed him as Braddock, Bradwell, Bradley, Bradbury, Bradford and Bradway. His fellow privates further complicated matters with Bulstrode, Oxshott and anything else that came into their heads -- even, sometimes, when they’d had a few soapy Egyptian beers, ‘De Vere Anstruther, darling’. To Bradshaw, a quiet, self-contained, curiously confident man who could usually be identified by the book in his hand, it was a matter of supreme indifference how he was addressed. An American airman had moved into Bradshaw’s bed not long after he’d moved out en route for Egypt and he’d volunteered in the hope of being posted home again -- not, as one might have supposed, to black his wife’s eye but to rescue his books which she’d consigned to the garage. Between him and Taffy Jones there was a curious lack of accord.

  Scrapper Keely of the Argylls was more Irish than Scots and had finally compounded a whole string of villainies - most of which consisted of pounding military policemen senseless -- by being caught out of bounds in Cairo wearing nothing but his boots. His excuse - ‘I got lost in the black-out, sorr’- hadn’t convinced his colonel, who had offered him a choice of volunteering or going before a court-martial.

  Private Gardner, from Barnsley in Yorkshire, had inevitably found himself in the Royal Welch, just as Taffy Jones had arrived in the East Yorks. Private Docwra from Cumberland didn’t see eye to eye with the desert because it was about as different from his native fells as chalk was from cheese. Private Kirkpatrick’s face was scarred from burns received when the motor-boat in which he’d been chased out of Greece had been set on fire. Private Fidge had volunteered in the hope of being posted home, so he could then report sick with some none-too-well-defined disease until he could look around his native Birmingham and find himself a cushy posting or even go over the wall and disappear among a few friends who lived off the black market and managed to avoid the army.

  Mitchell, Smith and Chamberlain - each of them over six feet tall -- had grown up together, enlisted together, whored together and raised hell together, and were known as the Three Stooges. Private Sugarwhite, an even-tempered young man with guileless eyes, was there chiefly because he didn’t like his own name and was sick of people addressing him as ‘Sweetie’ or ‘Sugarpie’ and thought he might find a different breed of men in the commandos. Ed By had the shape and demeanour of a Suffolk Punch -- large, slow, plodding, not very clever, but willing, hard-working and proud, six-feet-five of human being built like a brewery dray and all encompassed in four small letters
.

  Rounding them off - literally, since his name began with a W and he was always down at the end of every list - was Herbert Kitchener Waterhouse, a vulgar, light-hearted irrepressible young man with concave cheeks and a thatch of ginger hair like a copper pan-scrubber, who spoke -- even at close quarters -- in shouts and yelps that were thick with a catarrhal cold-in-the-nose sound which came from too many years of breathing coal-dust. Private Waterhouse had no idea why he’d volunteered,, unless it was for a change, and didn’t care much anyway.

  They were all ordinary soldiers, with ordinary faces and ordinary feelings, and nobody knew what to do, with them except drill them and march them and nag them - chiefly Sergeant Bunch, who was a master of every army joke that had ever been made. ‘Straighten your back,’ he roared. ‘You’re not Quasimodo! Chests out! Not that nasty thing, Bradway! You look pregnant! Fists nicely closed! Heads up! Bags of swank!’

  Once there had been a corporal who’d nagged them like Bunch, and when Bradshaw had told him to go and get stuffed he’d merely slunk off. Bunch was different. The last time Bunch had laughed was firmly believed to be for his mother when she’d shaken his rattle at his pram, but he commanded a certain amount of grudging respect because he’d fought on the Somme in ‘Sixteen, aged just that; at Cambrai in ‘Seventeen; in Belgium in ‘Eighteen; in Russia in ‘Nineteen; and in India and Palestine in the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties; to say nothing of Dunkirk in 1940, Tobruk in 1941 and Gazala earlier in the year. With that awesome record, they accepted as normal his strange method of command -- ‘Left turn! By the Christ -- quick march!’-- their only consolation that he was always there with them, keeping up the step, carrying as much equipment as they did and not even saving his breath for marching but wasting it on shouting.