Take or Destroy!

by John Harris

  ‘We still haven’t picked up any signallers,’ he pointed out.

  Kirstie made a note in a pocket book. ‘I’ll see what we can do,’ she said. ‘But it won’t be easy. Everybody’s busy with the coming battle and the general’s a stickler for getting what he wants. That’s why you’re stuck with me instead of a man.’

  The words took the edge from Hockold’s worry, and his smile was encouraging. ‘You’re doing fine, really,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got to have everything in hand by tomorrow. I must have a model of Qaba, too, and some demolition experts who won’t make mistakes when the bullets are flying.’

  She looked up over her plate. ‘How bad will it be, George?’

  The question was unexpected and Hockold was silent for a while.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said eventually.

  Her eyes shone with her anger. ‘I don’t believe it. The Germans know the Eighth Army’s going to attack soon. They won’t be unready.’

  Hockold said nothing because he knew she was right. The Germans would be ready. When they’d chased the Italians back in 1940, he’d come out of the desert with torn trousers, matted hair and a lorry full of Zeiss binoculars. But when they’d gone the other way it had been different, and he could still remember the big fire in Derna and the explosions and the smoke, and drunken soldiers staggering from the Naafi store with crates of whisky. He’d often thought since that he ought to have made more effort than he had to stop the rout, but it had been so colossal it had been more than one man - or many men, for that matter - could handle, and in the end he’d gone along with the rest.

  He badly wanted to get his own back for it, but he’d also learned from experience that you didn’t just lash out at the Afrika Korps in a fit of pique and hope for the best. You had to think of every tiny detail, because if you found yourself short of something you desperately needed in the desert it could make all the difference between life and death.

  He realized Kirstie was watching his face, and tried to be nonchalant. ‘It’ll be a bit messy perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘Nothing we can’t cope with, though.’

  ‘But at what cost?’

  Hockold shrugged again. ‘Always a cost,’ he admitted. ‘Oldest military cliché in the world is that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Somebody’s bound to get hurt.’

  ‘Take care, George!’

  He looked up quickly. Her eyes were clear and bright and steady.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘The one thing I’ve never liked about my job here,’ she said, ‘is meeting people and then learning that they’ve been killed. It’s something I can’t ever get used to.’

  ‘I’ll try to bring back the news of our success personally.’

  He seemed suddenly to ease with her and she smiled. ‘Do that, George. Try to do that.’

  He jerked a hand at a military driver waiting with a staff car near the entrance to the club. ‘As somebody much cleverer than me once said,’ he pointed out, ‘it all depends on that article.’ He paused. ‘Don’t think they’ll let me down though,’ he ended. ‘I wonder how they’re settling in.’

  At that particular moment, they weren’t.

  In Tent 7, his eyes anxious, Private Sugarwhite sat on his blankets and sucked at a cigarette. It was one of the Victory Vs to which everybody was reduced from time to time. They were said to be made in India but everybody was convinced they were manufactured locally from bat shit and camel dung scraped up round the Pyramids. In his pack he had a tin of fifty Players but he had no intention of producing them in the company he was having to keep at that moment. It was much easier to make a martyr of himself. The misery even seemed a comfort in the prevailing gloom.

  He’d never been in such a rotten tent, he decided.

  Opposite him was the big ugly brute who’d flattened him the night before and next door to him the lunatic who’d started it all, still caterwauling his blocked-nose catch-phrases as though he were defying the army to get him down, so that the man next to him gave him a weary look. He was a Royal Welch from Barnsley and beyond him there was an East Yorks from Wales. On his other side was an Argyll and a gloomy-looking Durham, while opposite there was a Rifleman who looked like a gipsy, and a Middlesex who’d never stopped reading from the minute he’d arrived. The tent’s senior commando was a silent ex-Grenadier lance-corporal called Cobbe who knew all there was to know about war because he’d walked all the way from Brussels to Dunkirk in 1940 and been among the last to leave.

  To Private Sugarwhite they looked the most unprepossessing crew he’d ever seen, and at any moment now, he suspected, the ginger-haired madman who appeared to be called Waterhouse was going to start his song and dance about his name and they’d all start rolling about in heaps again.

  He was just mentally flexing his fists at the thought when the Royal Welch on his left, who was digging into his kitbag for note-paper and pencil for a letter home, looked round and sniffed.

  ‘Those are lousy fags.’ The flat North Country voice took Sugarwhite by surprise. ‘Better have a Woodbine.’

  In his soured mood Sugarwhite automatically assumed a sneer but, as he turned, he saw a tin being held out to him. He stared at it, a little startled, then he pulled himself together.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  The other man offered him a light. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  Here we go, Sugarwhite thought. He frowned and gulped.

  ‘Sugarwhite,’ he said, waiting for the peals of laughter.

  To his surprise, none came. ‘What do your pals call you? Darkie?’

  ‘Darkie?’

  ‘Sugarwhite - Darkie. A feller’s short, they call him Lofty. He’s six-foot-five, they call him Tiny. My pal’s name was Slowe, so we called him Blitz.’

  Sugarwhite’s mouth clicked shut. He couldn’t imagine why he’d never thought of this simple solution before. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Darkie. Sometimes other things.’

  ‘My name’s Gardner,’ the Yorkshireman said. ‘So they call me Spade. Sometimes even Shovel. I was just going to write a letter to my girl to tell her we’ve gone into the blue again.’ He pushed a photograph across. ‘That’s her. The one and only.’

  Sugarwhite stared down at a nondescript-looking young woman in a dress that looked like a flower-stall at a bazaar and wondered what made her so special.

  ‘We’ve never - you know. She’s different. Not like the others. You got a girl?’

  Sugarwhite had not got a girl, and it made him feel as inadequate as a spayed tom-cat. He fished in his wallet. He’d picked up a few photographs during his career and, in the desperation of youth, had clung on to them. He sorted them out like a hand of whist and pushed the one he thought was best-looking at Gardner. He couldn’t even remember her name.

  Gardner passed the photograph to the Durham who had come far enough out of his gloom to look interested. ‘Wheyhey!’ he said. ‘She’s all right, man!’

  Sugarwhite made a moue of modesty and the others in the tent began to make shy forward movements to join in. Had Sugarwhite only known it, they’d all been feeling much the same as himself and were only waiting for someone to break the ice. They passed the photographs round, making suitable comments.

  ‘You’m lucky, me dear,’ the swarthy-looking Rifleman said, holding one of them at arm’s length. ‘She’s all right. Does she?’

  ‘Does she what?’

  ‘Does she what. You’m a dark one, edden you? What’s your name? Abdul the Bul-Bul Emir?’

  While they were talking, the East Yorks took a watch from his pocket. ‘My girl gave me this when I left,’ he said in a high Welsh voice full of bombast. ‘Thinks a lot of me, see, she does. Likes a man with a bit of virility and a good body.’

  They all politely but without much interest studied the Welshman’s bulging biceps and narrow hips, and he went on without a trace of self-consciousness. ‘I did a Charles Atlas course, see. I can take any three on, one hand behind my back. Girls like fellers like that, you
know. I have been with a few in my time. She gave it to me so I can work out just what she is doing at any given moment. I look at it a lot at bedtime.’ He clicked the back open. ‘Bought in Cardiff it was. I’m Welsh, see. Cwmru am Byth. Wales for ever.’

  They admired the watch, even the Guardsman who was growing bored with his own company by this time. He was actually a gregarious young man and it was only because he’d always been taught that a Guardsman was equal to any six other soldiers and a commando to any further six that he’d got a lofty built-in superiority complex.

  As they talked they swopped identities. ‘I’m from Barnsley,’ Gardner said. ‘My proper name’s Phil.’

  ‘I’m Jim,’ the Durham said.

  ‘I’m Taffy.’

  Waterhouse’s face split in a mad grin under the pan-scrubber hair. ‘I’b buggered,’ he said.

  They all looked at the little Rifleman. His jetty eyes stared back at them expressionlessly.

  ‘Sometimes they call me Cornish Jack,’ he said. ‘Sometimes Tinner. Me name’s Baragwanath. Baragwanath Eva.’

  The Welshman laughed. ‘What sort of name’s that?’ he said contemptuously. ‘A bloody girl’s, look you! What did you do when you were at home?’

  ‘I earned me livin’ catchin’ rabbits.’

  The Welshman laughed. ‘Well, it is not rabbits you are fighting out here, is it now?’

  There was a moment’s silence because the Cornishman, small and shadowy as he was, seemed to be a law to himself and clearly didn’t welcome personal comments about his name. There was a sudden awareness in the tent that enemies had been made, but Welsh Taffy said nothing further. A Royal Sussex, who’d been shaving outside, came into the tent to break the unexpected silence.

  ‘My name’s Willow,’ he said. ‘Tom Willow. They call me Tit.’

  They were glad to change the subject. ‘Why dot Tits?’ Water-house yelled. ‘You odly got one?’

  ‘I think it’s some song.’ Willow began to sing. ‘ “On a tree by a river a little torn-tit, Sang Willow, Tit-Willow, Tit-Willow.” ‘

  ‘Know any more?’ Gardner asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. We could have had a concert.’

  ‘All Welshmen can sing -’ Taffy Jones started, but the Cornishman interrupted him, fishing in his side pack.

  ‘I got some whisky,’ he said. ‘Leastways, they mucky toads in Akkaba who sold it me said it was whisky.’ He jabbed a blunt finger at the gaudy label. ‘ “Fine Olde English King Anne Whisky.” That’s a laugh, edden it? ‘Tes distilled gnats’ piss, I think.’

  There was a guffaw and fags were handed round.

  ‘Bit of a rum do we’re on,’ Gardner said. ‘A week to get ready. Good job we’re all trained men.’

  They were pleased to acknowledge that they were trained men, experts, wise in the ways of war, old soldiers, cunning in their worn uniforms, never at a loss, knowing their way about, hard-bitten, aloof, unresponsive, conscious of the psychological barrier between themselves and newcomers, and above all capable of mayhem if a German got in the way. If they’d only known it, it was the beginning of a pride in their new unit.

  They passed the bottle of distilled gnats’ piss round. It was enough to peel the enamel from the mug but, to a group of men who a few seconds before were as far down in the dumps as they could be it wasn’t bad. Cigarettes were handed round - not Victory Vs but decent fags from old carefully hoarded stores - even Sugarwhite’s Players. The Welshman dragged out a brown packet of Capstan Strong. ‘I like these best,’ he said, not bothering to offer them. ‘Strong, see. Mild smokes are for kids.’

  Then Lance-Corporal Cobbe began a long-winded yarn about the retreat from Dunkirk and a sergeant of the Coldstream who’d insisted on stopping after every battle for his section to polish their brass and clean their boots. ‘They say he had a button stick in his hand when Jerry put him in the bag,’ he said.

  They all nodded appreciatively, acknowledging that bastards with button sticks were a menace in anybody’s army, but nobody said anything out loud because it was accepted that Guards bull was what helped them to do the Homeric things they did.

  ‘Nil illegitibi carborunddum,’ Private Waterhouse yelped, looking half-drunk already. ‘Don’t let the bastards gride you dowd. I reckon they picked us for this job because we’d beed at Death Valley so log they knew we’d all got spiteful enough to do a lot of damage.’

  ‘And because we are all fit and strong, look you -’

  ‘They got us cheap,’ the Royal Welch said.

  ‘Cut-price.’ The Middlesex with the book spoke for the first time.

  ‘The cut-price commandos,’ Sugarwhite added, and to his surprise they all seemed to think it clever.

  ‘Cut-Price Commandos,’ Gardner said. ‘That’s a good name, Abdul. That’s clever.’

  Sugarwhite’s youthful heart filled and he beamed with pleasure. He’d got a new name and a new reputation already. His smile grew wider. Abdul Sugarwhite, the Cut-Price Commando card. He decided he was going to enjoy being in this mob after all.

  6

  A plan was formulated to enable the raiding force to make a landing.

  ‘Heard what they’re calling us, sir?’ Amos asked Hockold the next morning. ‘The Cut-Price Commandos. Somebody coined it last evening and it’s spread like wildfire. I think they like it. A bit like the Eighth Army calling itself the Desert Rats.’

  Hockold wasn’t so sure that self-disparagement was a good idea, because it seemed important that their approach should be one of utter self-confidence. Not that he felt utterly self-confident himself; most of the night he’d tossed and turned on his blankets after starting awake again with his dream about dying. There was no reason for it. He didn’t feel ill - nothing more than an enormous tiredness that had been growing on him for some time - but he was becoming quite certain that he was going to be killed at Qaba and his chief worry was that, with all the difficulties they were facing, too many of his command would be killed with him.

  By this time, the enterprise was gaining momentum. Amos was a man of incredible industry who revelled in the detailed minutiae of administration, while it had been obvious from the start that there was nothing to worry about in Murdoch’s training. He had laid out sections of the desert and the ravines round Gott el Scouab with white tape, one square representing a block of houses, another a ship, another the prisoner of war compound, a fourth the warehouse, a fifth the fuel dump.

  ‘It’s got to be fast, y’see,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to have yon bridge across the gap in the mole. If we’re slow about that, we might just as well wrap up and go home. The most difficult job will be the lorry park and the petrol compound.’

  ‘I thought of you for that,’ Hockold said. ‘But it’s nearly a mile from the docks, and getting back again will be the big problem. If things go wrong, you’re the one who’s going to be put in the bag.’

  Murdoch gave a low laugh. ‘They’ll no’ put me in the bag,’ he said.

  Hockold’s first call of the day was to see the army commander.

  The desert road was full of vehicles but they all seemed to be turning south and he guessed it was part of the great deception for the coming battle, and that they’d all be heading north again after dark. Among them were dummy tanks constructed from canvas-covered frames on three-ton trucks; new guns obscured from the German spotter planes under netting on dummy lorries; water carts, ammunition trucks, and scout cars, all being dispersed away from prying eyes. Brand new refuelling posts were also being set up, along with petrol and ammunition dumps, field hospitals and first aid posts, to say nothing of repair shops, spare part depots, bakeries, and stores where the air smelled pungently of petrol and oil and melting asphalt.

  Over all there was an atmosphere such as Hockold had never before experienced in all the time he’d been in North Africa, a sense of impending victory, a feeling of confidence that he could put down only to the presence of Montgomery and the new faces he’d introduced to replac
e the bewildered leaders of the past. It was something everybody else obviously felt too. They all seemed invigorated and exhilarated, and it made him believe that when they went into Qaba the army wouldn’t be far behind.

  The army commander was away on one of his tours of inspection and it was de Guingand who saw him. He seemed about to take off himself and was cramming papers into a canvas bag as he talked.

  ‘Monty’s been thinking about this little diversion of yours, Hockold,’ he said. ‘And he’s getting very enthusiastic. We’ve arranged a feint landing on the night we start and a convoy’s sailing west in the afternoon from Alex. All but a few fast craft will put back after dark, of course, but there’ll be shelling and mortar and machine-gun fire and light signals, all timed to take place three hours after the guns open up in the hope of tying down their reserves.’

  He began to buckle the canvas bag, and reached for a folder of maps. ‘Strategic surprise’s out of the question, naturally,’ he went on, ‘because they know we’re coming. So we can only delude them as to weight, date, time and direction. We’re doing what we can, of course, but anything anyone can contribute will help.’

  An officer appeared in the doorway and de Guingand reached for his cap. ‘Brigadier Torrance is waiting to put you in the picture,’ he concluded. ‘We’re relying a lot on you, Hockold, because the one thing that mustn’t happen is that the panzers get that petrol. Once the battle starts, we’ll be ready for counterattacks, and they’ll only end with the destruction of their tanks. But if they run out of petrol as well, it’ll put the lid on the Afrika Korps for good and we can grab the lot.’

  Brigadier Torrance had a face that had been burnt brick-red by the sun, and he appeared to be trying to model himself on Montgomery.

  ‘The plan’s got to be elastic,’ he said sharply. ‘Your men have to be quick.’

  ‘They won’t be slow,’ Hockold interrupted brusquely, irritated by the apparent assumption that he didn’t know his job.

  ‘Good. Good.’ Torrance peered at him. ‘This feint we’re making on the day we go in. The loading’ll be done where enemy agents can see. Tanks’ll be shipped and troops marched aboard. They’ll all be disembarked later, of course, because they’re earmarked for support roles after the breakthrough, and when nothing happens Jerry’ll assume it’s a feint. But then your people will hit Qaba, and he’ll think they’ve finally arrived after all.’