by John Harris
On the bridge of Umberto, Hockold sucked at a cold pipe, his thoughts on the job ahead. From time to time, they strayed to Kirstie McRuer and he wondered what it would be like to visit her after the war as she’d suggested. Then he remembered that for him there was to be no after the war, just an empty darkness among the wreckage of Qaba, and he frowned and wrenched his mind back to the present. Alongside him, Babington tried to remember the family he hadn’t seen for two years and to his horror found it was growing harder to imagine what the two individuals he’d left as children could look like, now that they were in their teens and growing into adulthood. In the officers’ wardroom Captain Watson was busy over a sheet of paper, trying not very successfully to let his wife know what he was feeling.
‘Last letter home?’ Amos asked.
Watson nodded. ‘Trying to give the impression that I’m about to become a hero without suggesting a massacre. Since she’ll get it after it’s all over, she’ll be able to make her own mind up anyway.’
He paused, his mind far away. Sometimes his body ached for his wife. But above all he needed to see her, to know that her face was as it was on the photographs she sent, that her hair was as soft as he recalled, that her eyes were as warm. She was only twenty even now and, because they were to be parted so soon, she’d been voracious on their honeymoon. ‘I must have something to remember,’ she’d kept saying with a desperate ferocity, and in his heart of hearts he hoped he’d collect a Blighty wound and be sent home. He’d tried often enough in the past but he’d come through two years of being chased up and down the desert without a scratch.
Amos was brooding. ‘It makes you wonder who’ll inherit the earth after this little scrum’s over,’ he said.
‘Not the meek,’ Watson said. ‘That’s for certain.’
‘Office wallahs, file-carriers, pen-pushers and other fly blighters, I expect. They’re the ones who’ll get the knighthoods and the seats on the boards. I wonder sometimes, in fact, if they really know at home what we’re up to out here.’
Watson looked up and grinned. ‘Oh, I think so. The British have always been confirmed in their belief that everything bad happens abroad.’
Below them, at the bottom of the ladder, Willow was also clutching a piece of paper. He was nervous and the paper gave him a lot of comfort. Sidebottom, who was prowling about, his mad eyes bright, watched him for a while, seeing him yawn prodigiously and then snap his jaws together, looking faintly sick. ‘You all right, son?’ he asked.
By this time Willow had decided that he must have been barmy to fight his way into an operation like this when the sore on his knee had offered him a legitimate excuse to stay out. ‘I don’t feel very brave, Sarge,’ he said.
‘You never do, son,’ Sidebottom said mildly. ‘Tired or worried or hungry or alakeefik. But never brave, son, never brave.’
‘When was your first time, Sarge? 1940?’
‘Bit before that, son. North West Frontier, 1930. Up at Razmak. Guarding a conner-dump in the cud.’
‘Was it bad, Sarge?’
‘Mostly just uncomfortable. It got worse later when the Fakir of Ipi arrived.’
‘Were you scared the first time?’
‘Couldn’t stop me knees knocking.’ Sidebottom nodded at the piece of paper Willow was clutching. ‘What you got there, son?’ he asked.
‘It’s a charm against death, Sarge,’ Willow said, faintly shamefaced. ‘This old Egyptian sold it me when I first arrived. He was a nice chap. Even his galabiyah was clean.’
‘Let’s have a look, son. I can read Arabic’ Sidebottom took the proffered paper, glanced at it, and handed it back. ‘Intaquois,’ he said. ‘Pukka gen. Ought to protect you a lot, lad.’
Willow smiled nervously and tucked the paper in his blouse pocket. ‘To protect the heart, Sarge,’ he said.
Sidebottom nodded. The paper was an old laundry bill, but, though Sidebottom might have been mad, touched by the sun, tapped by a deolali stick, whatever you liked to call it, he wasn’t so bloody silly as to take away Willow’s feeling of security.
On LCT 11, Murdoch stood in silence, not bothering even to smoke. He didn’t seem to need conversation. He had his two pistols and sniper’s rifle with him, but his face was still that of a professor when you couldn’t see the deadly glow in his yellow eyes. On ML 138, second in the file on the starboard side of Umberto, Swann was still badgering his men. ‘Soon be there, chaps,’ he said.
‘That makes four hundred and seventy-nine times he’s said that,’ Jacka announced. ‘I’ve counted ‘em.’
On HSL 117, second in line on the port side, Sotheby was equally edgy. His stutter always grew worse when he was excited and he was terrified that when the time came to give orders he wouldn’t be coherent. He was also frightened, not of being hit, of being wounded, of dying, but of getting in Collier’s way, of dropping his Sten gun just when he needed it, of his bootlace breaking, of tripping when they jumped ashore and going flat on his face, of everything in fact but getting hurt. In his white-faced tenseness, he looked a born victim.
‘I wish to Christ he’d go to sleep,’ Sergeant Berringer muttered in disgust.
The battle had now been going on for six days and nights, and the desert air hummed with an impenetrable jargon of English, German, Italian, French, Greek, Urdu and Afrikaans.
The flash of the guns was still lighting the horizon, and in Qaba Hochstatter had decided to make certain that what little he had to defend the place with was in good working order. Accompanied by Nietzsche and von Steen he drove round the town, insisting that everybody redouble their efforts and ordering that a battery of Schlabrendorff’s flak guns be turned to the east in case of an attack from that direction.
They had no sooner got them in position than a colonel from Flakartillerie HQ arrived to claim them for the desert, together with Schlabrendorff himself. Hochstatter complained that his defences were being taken away, but the artillery colonel had seen the panzers being shattered in the desert and his guns smashed one by one. To him the issue was simple. If the Tommies got past his positions, nothing they’d got at Qaba would stop them. So before Hochstatter and Nietzsche really knew what was happening, most of the gun positions Wutka had so painstakingly built no longer had weapons in them.
‘Thank God they left our two 75s,’ Hochstatter commented bitterly.
Stories came in of hundreds of burned-out vehicles scattered across the desert and of groups of Englishmen holding out against even the fiercest of the counter-attacks, hanging on like grim death and doing more damage to the panzers than they could afford to take. Hochstatter’s office was bedlam, with Hrabak furiously demanding lorries because some officer with authority from panzer headquarters had snatched more of his own away from him.
‘My men can’t carry shells away one under each arm,’ he was storming. ‘I’ve got to have transport!’
Hochstatter was still trying to work out a new scheme, with half of his men occupied in unloading and the other half in the desert with the commandeered guns, when a Sanitätskorps colonel arrived to demand tents.
‘We’ve got no spare tents,’ Hochstatter said. ‘They’ve all been taken!’
‘I’ve been told to expect two thousand wounded. Where am I supposed to put them?’
‘There’s the Mantazeh Palace,’ Dr Carell, the medical officer, suggested.
‘It’s almost a ruin.’
‘If the wounded have been in the desert,’ Carell said, ‘they won’t complain.’
Then .Captain Veledetti, in charge of the POW compound, asked when they were going to get his prisoners away. They were growing restless, he said, and he suspected they were making wire-cutters.
Through all the panic, the roaring of the guns continued beyond Qaba and the news from the desert became increasingly grim. It seemed the Tommies had broken through near the coast and that though the panzers had been strengthened by new and repaired vehicles, there were still only half the number there had been when the battle had started
, while the artillery was being shattered, crazed and exhausted by the sustained pressure from tanks, guns and aircraft.
Yet by the afternoon of the 30th, as Babington’s little fleet began to draw near, things in Qaba were actually beginning to look up. Though the pioneer officer had been whipped away to take over a staff job at Fuka, what was left of his pioneers remained and a signal arrived from army headquarters ordering that under no circumstances were the two 75s that Schoeler had acquired to be removed and that the defences were not -- repeat not -- to be reduced any further.
The tension was further eased by the news that Rommel had decided to pull back towards Fuka. This was brought in by the pioneer officer who reappeared to pick up his kit as he passed through Qaba en route for Bardia where he was hoping to rustle up fresh vehicles for the panzers.
‘He’s concentrating everything in the north,’ he said. ‘At Sidi Abd el Rahman so that he can either resist or withdraw.’
It was while they were still feeling a little more confident that Tarnow received a report passed on from Fuka that Umberto Uno had escaped from Alexandria.
‘Shot her way out of the harbour last night,’ he announced. ‘Overpowered the guards and turned her gun on the guard-ship. They’ve been picking up bodies all day.’
‘Where is she now?’ Hochstatter asked.
‘The Luftwaffe’s not reported her but they’re a bit busy, aren’t they? For all I know, she’s heading for Sicily.’
‘Or here!’ Veledetti said excitedly.
As they stared at each other, the elderly commodore who had brought in the four supply ships joined them. ‘She’s got guns aboard,’ he said. ‘New 88s, some 76.2s they captured in Russia and some Italian 47s. I saw them loaded.’
Nietzsche smiled. ‘We’ll hang on to a few of those,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’re going to be all right, after all.’
By this time, Andolfo was almost unloaded and von Steen was trying to organize the means to haul her out so that they could get at Guglielmotti and Cassandra. He had already spent what seemed like hours on the telephone demanding that the tug which had been taken from Qaba for Bardia three weeks before should be returned immediately, but all he could get in reply was a promise that it would probably leave the following morning.
As it grew dark, sensing that it might be their last chance for a while, Hochstatter sent round a little note inviting them all for drinks at his headquarters.
The party went on longer than anyone had expected, and feeling pleasantly drunk, Wutka moved on to the verandah overlooking the harbour. There were a few dim lights about and men were still moving drums down the mole, so that he could hear the occasional rumble of wheels as handcarts crossed his wooden bridge to the waiting lorries. Above him the moon hung like a squashed yellow orange over the desert and the hill behind the Shariah Jedid was touched with gold. He felt more homesick than he’d felt for weeks and his soul seemed to reach up to the motionless stars.
As he held his breath, afraid to break the fragile spell of the evening, he caught scraps of native chatter from near the mosque - all lnsh’ Allah and Ou Allah - and the toneless wailing of flutes, aggressive but somehow lacking in result; then a sailor in the barracks opposite playing ‘Muss i’ denn’, the naval song of farewell, on a mouth organ. As though it had stirred up a heart-sick desperation for home, an Italian near the Mantazeh Palace began to sing. The notes came up to where Wutka stood, sharp in the still air, clear and sad against the distant rumble of artillery.
‘Tutte le sere, sotto quel fanal’
Presso la caserna. ..’
The words lifted in the sort of crystal clarity only Italian tenors could manage and other voices began to join in, in German. If they could have been heard in the desert, they would have been taken up in English, Afrikaans, French, Polish, Greek, Urdu and half a dozen other languages, because they were known to every man in North Africa.
‘... con te, Lili Marlene
Con te, Lili Marlene.’
There was something in the air. It was something nobody could define - a sense of unease - and long after Hochstatter’s little get-together finished they hung around headquarters talking. Then the voices in the streets died away and, apart from the men still working under the shaded lights by the harbour, Qaba became silent.
At headquarters, the feeling of anxiety returned and Wutka went out on to the verandah again to stare into the darkness. The thudding of guns was still coming from the east and he could see the sky shifting in a fitful flickering of light.
Hrabak appeared alongside him and stared at the sky with him.
‘Thinking of home?’ Wutka asked,
‘I have no home,’ Hrabak said.
Wutka turned to look at him but the supply officer’s face was blank.
‘Haven’t you heard anything?’
‘I shan’t now.’
They could hear the other voices beyond the black-out curtains, Hochstatter’s everlastingly diplomatic; von Steen’s high pitched, an old navy voice; Tarnow’s harsh and imperious, a Nazi voice; Dr Carell’s quiet, persuasive and scholarly; Veledetti’s milky with Italian consonants. Then Wutka cocked his head, listening to the sounds from the desert.
‘They must be closer,’ he said. ‘You can hear the tanks.’
For a while they strained their ears and Hrabak frowned. ‘That’s coming from the sea,’ he pointed out.
Wutka turned, his eyes on the stars again, looking for dark shapes. ‘Aeroplanes,’ he agreed.
They hurried back inside the room to give the warning, and everyone came out on to the verandah. Ibrahimiya airfield was only five miles away but it remained dark and silent and, as they watched, the lights round the harbour went out one by one.
Slowly, without hurry, they went to their positions - von Steen to his office in the naval barracks; Schoeler to his command post in a hut near the 75 on the Ibrahimiya side of the town; Dr Carell to the bunker under the harbour wall where mattresses, running water, disinfectants and bandages were waiting, and his surgical instruments, syringes and morphine were already being laid out. The others remained in Hochstatter’s office where they could be called upon at once and could issue orders.
The aeroplane engines seemed louder now and they all found their eyes turning upwards to the ceiling. Tarnow, whose cold face never showed much emotion and who never seemed moved by the possibility of death, swallowed the last of his drink.
‘It doesn’t seem a very big raid,’ he said.
And neither did it. But Private Bontempelli, standing outside his dug-out among his friends, stared unhappily at the sky. He’d been asleep when the alarm had been given, dreaming of Sundays in the fields outside Naples, of girls, bowls, wrestling matches and hunting hares - and of Maddalena Corri’s warm lips and soft body in Taranto. Near him the breeze raised the dust from the roadway. That day, knowing that the British weren’t far away, the priest had managed to hold a mass, preparing an altar on a slab of marble resting on sandbags and covered with a linen cloth. But it didn’t seem to have helped much; the British were still coming.
Baldissera arrived and they saw him moving round the defences with Sergente Barbella.
‘More sandbags,’ someone observed. ‘More digging.’ ‘We’ve already dug up the whole of Libya,’ Bontempelli said. ‘Now we’re digging up Egypt.’
In the silence over the town, it was possible from Hochstatter’s verandah to hear the voices of the men moving to their positions. For a while Hochstatter stared at the plan of the town attached to the wall of his quarters. It seemed extraordinary that after ten days of hard work, all that was left to him of the weapons he’d been sent were the two French 75s. Still, he thought, with the addition of his original three 47s and a percentage of well-placed light and heavy machine-guns, they were heavy enough to stop any normal landing from the sea.
He glanced at the list prepared for him by Nietzsche and von Steen. With the pioneers and von Steen’s sailors and the men he could call on from Wutka and Hr
abak, he had 523 men to defend the town. It was surely enough for so small a place.
Had he only known it, by a strange coincidence, and with the assistance of Cook-Corporal Rogers, it was exactly the same number of men as Hockold was proposing to throw ashore.
The ships had long since passed Fuka, well beyond the Eighth Army’s farthest forward outposts, and everybody aboard them began to look at his weapons again. The gunners checked their ammunition, and down below the engineers glanced anxiously at the concrete and steel plates erected round the engine rooms to protect them.
There wasn’t long to go now. They all knew it and you could have cut the tension with a knife. Cook-Corporal Rogers was still playing cards. Willow was still occasionally fingering the paper in his pocket. Sergeant Berringer was still muttering savagely about Sotheby’s nervousness, and Lieutenant Swann was still badgering his men to the point of fury. The one thing nobody was doing was voicing his fears, or wondering aloud what it was like to get the chop, and what death was like, apart from being dark and cold and lonely.
Sidebottom and Jacka were talking quietly in a corner.
‘The wogs was all round us,’ Sidebottom was saying, ‘and they’re not bad with their bundooks at three hundred yards. Quiet as mice they was, and all you could see was rocks. Then this shot comes and the officer -- pukka chap, called Gavin -- he just says “Oh!” Just like that. Nothing else. Just “Oh!” And falls plonk off his horse.’
‘Where was that, Sidi?’ Jacka asked.
‘Loe. Up near the Malakand. In ‘Thirty-four. Or was it ‘Thirty-three? Buggered if I remember.’
At about that moment someone on LCT 11 noticed that the breeze which had been blowing on their cheeks all day was now blowing into their faces, and they realized they’d changed direction.
‘We’re going in,’ Cobbe said and a few hands started to reach for equipment.