A familiar, jagged black screen rose up between the jemadar and the paling sky. He was back at the roadblock, but this time with an idea. Before the enemy could find them, the sappers pulled the grilles off a culvert beneath the road, scuttled inside and walled themselves in with sandbags. Once the shelling began, it rattled the culvert and sent grit down the sappers’ collars, but the men stayed focused on preparing explosive charges. Singh counted in his head. The guns, he knew, were old-fashioned artillery pieces: they broke off firing for fifty seconds to reload. That was the sappers’ window to place the charges.
Each time a charge was blown the dawn light blacked out, then came streaming back through clouds of cordite and powdered stone. Between detonations, the sappers attacked the rock with crowbars. At this rate, the boulders would be cleared by afternoon, but the danger remained that enemy tanks would come through the breach first, and massacre the company. Someone had to cover the far side. Singh volunteered. He assembled twenty sappers at the head of the culvert, where Lieutenant Selkirk crouched, eyes on his wristwatch. The jemadar flexed his fingers around his walking stick. As the second hand clicked into 0900 hours the lieutenant said go. He went. He ran out past the demo parties and scrambled over the final boulders.
Nobody was visible on the far side, and they were not receiving fire. The sappers spread out at once, giving cover and laying anti-tank mines and concertina wire. Singh jogged from point to point, supervising. The work was quick and uninterrupted. It was almost too easy. The enemy’s silence made him uncomfortable. He stepped away to the edge of the road, where the ground sloped away and the dark mouth of another culvert was visible. Without any noise, he slipped down to the level of the culvert, squeezed his eyes shut for a second, and swung himself around to stand before it.
His eyes opened and he could see down the tunnel. Two rows of men stared back from within. His figure blocked their exit, visible only as a dark silhouette with the light behind it, holding what looked like a sub-machine gun at the level of his chest. He was screaming in a language they did not know, Drop your weapons! Drop your weapons! His voice flooded the tunnel, so none could make out their superior’s orders. They dropped their rifles. Other sappers were down by the jemadar’s side now, sighting down their rifles as a score of men, Abyssinians and Italian officers, filed out with hands above their heads. They blinked and stared at the morning light and at the realisation that all the jemadar held in his hands was a walking stick.
By the next morning, the road was clear through that last block in the Dongolaas Gorge. The tanks went through, then the armoured troop carriers, trucks and jeeps. White flags rose over Brigs Peak and Sanchil. A day later, the 5th Division marched into Keren unopposed. At the capital, Asmara, the garrison surrendered. The bishop and the heads of government and police received the commander of 10th Brigade at the gates.
As the division trundled on astride the main highway, a grey python of Italian prisoners crawled away in the opposite direction. Eritrean villagers gathered on bluffs and rises above them, ululating and cheering at their masters’ defeat. The Italians faced some risk of reprisals from their own, now disbanded native troops, but the prisoners overall seemed in good cheer. They were on their way to the railhead at Agordat, from there to be transported to camps in the Deccan, to idle away the next four years. They would be in India long before the jemadar or any of his men.
In the lull that followed Asanandan Singh’s story, only the dry wind slapped at the canvas walls. What he had left unsaid was that the prisoners had one thing over their victors: they knew they would survive the war. Keren was one of Britain’s first victories, most welcome at a time when the Empire fought its enemies alone. When the divisional commander, Lewis Heath, was promoted in April he paid a departing tribute to ‘the Sapper and Miner Companies’ almost superhuman energy, quite undaunted by shot or shell …’. But the only reward for bravery was to fight even harder. Beyond Asmara were more granite landslides and burning lorries; more battles, at Massawa by the sea, and then at the deadly mountain redoubt of Amba Alagi, and eventually at Gazala.
The pipe was packed again, and Wright and Bobby crushed their empty cans and smoked. The only one not smoking now was Gurbachan Singh, jemadar of the Sikh ‘B’ Platoon, who sat further back from the light and the corruption. It was his turn to speak, however, as he had been at Gazala and had gone into the Cauldron – and he was one of the few who returned.
Why talk about Gazala? The sahibs knew enough already. The brigade John Wright was meant to join was the first to be destroyed there, and their own brigade, the 10th Indian, was destroyed before the end. It came a year after Keren, and they spent the intervening winter in Cyprus, fortifying airfields against attack by German paratroopers. Four months on an island of fruit and shade, watching the sun suck jewel colours out of the sea, and forgetting the war being fought just past its horizon.
There, on the huge, flat field of the Libyan desert, Auchinleck’s Eighth Army faced the Panzerarmee Afrika in a deadly game. This time it was an even match. Twice each, they had pushed into the other’s half; twice each, they’d faltered and fallen all the way back. Armadas of tanks, trucks and wheeled artillery sailed back and forth across the desert, making movements vast in compass, without a thought for roads or bridges. At first, like most Germans, their commander Erwin Rommel had been insulted to find brown men set against his Aryan heroes. The 4th Indian Division taught him to feel otherwise. They had led the advance on Benghazi, and when the tide turned again, they fought a savage rearguard action, all the way to the coastal town of Gazala. This was meant to be Britain’s forward bastion, a massive triangle of minefields and fortified brigades anchored in the open desert, just before the fortress of Tobruk.
By the early summer of 1942, when they were relieved by the 5th Division at Gazala, the men of the 4th were thanking their stars. At last they were escaping the black magician Rommel. Gurbachan Singh learned all about his powers: about his command vehicle, a captured British truck he called ‘Mammut’, the Elephant, which was enchanted and could float over minefields. About the death ray, a weapon he wielded personally, that lanced out of the sky to wipe out full battalions. And Gurbachan Singh would experience for himself the necromancy of desert war: its boundless expanse, on which enemy Panzers rose up out of nothing; the unstable hex of landmines, which turned bare ground deadly; the occult rituals of desert combat and the dread dimensions of a desert retreat.
The 5th arrived there just as Rommel struck again – if not with magic, then with supernatural daring. He whisked his tanks deep into the desert and punched through the weak apex of the Gazala triangle. By the first day’s end, his forces had rolled into its centre, backed up against the barrier of minefields, facing out to the bristling Allies. Their position was defensible, but hazardous in the extreme. Petrol, water and reinforcements could not reach them, and General Ritchie let Rommel’s strike force stew in ‘the Cauldron’, their throats and fuel tanks drying up. When the 5th Division’s recon group climbed a low ridge, they panned their binoculars over a hundred Panzers dead in the water. The sappers prepared to infiltrate and wreck the stranded tanks with explosives. But they were ordered to hold back, awaiting Ritchie’s jhatka, his death blow.
More days passed, still but stirred by the delirium of June heat. Allied forces massed around the Cauldron, but still no orders came. Only the khamseen, a running cliff of sand that raised the level of the desert to the sky, and buried the company a thousand feet deep in stinging sand. When it passed, and they cleaned the grit out of their eyes and their field glasses, they took in an awful sight: as if by magic, the Panzers had sprung back to life.
Under cover of the sandstorm, Rommel’s reserve troops had breached the minefield and carried supplies and fuel across. His force no longer looked like exhausted quarry in a trap – more like an angry steer swinging its horns at the belly of the Eighth Army. Ritchie ordered the attack, a week too late.
At half past two in the morning of 5 June, Gu
rbachan Singh roused his men into the icy air. Each sapper platoon would provide a detachment to one battalion of 10th Brigade, which would be the first into the fray.4 At three, as Singh’s group climbed into their transport with the 4/10th Baluch, the blowing night silence was split by the roar of a hundred field guns firing together. The barrage lasted twenty minutes, and their column rolled forward. In half an hour they had their objective: a ridge of naked, stony ground called the Dahar el Aslagh, marked only by two wooden barrels. As Singh dismounted, he heard cheers from the forward companies of the Baluchis. ‘They are obviously mopping up,’ their colonel reported. The earth turned briefly vivid green from the flare signalling the battalion’s success.
With the pallid, heating dawn came the enemy shells, landing with great accuracy. By noon, the forward companies reported seventeen Panzers advancing, but they were engaged by the Highland Light Infantry, with whom were the sappers of ‘A’ Platoon, badly exposed. Their own tank cavalry stayed flea-sized in the distance, outclassed and demoralised. From what Garbachan later heard, the Highlanders left 180 of their men dead on the ridge before they were withdrawn. Well, they were the lucky ones. The Baluchis and the Gurkhas were told to hold their ground at all costs – the attack would be renewed the next day, with fresh troops. The ‘C’ Platoon sapper-officer went back to bring up extra tools and mines, and even bulldozers to improve the defences, but he never returned.5
When the new dawn revealed the horizon, Gurbachan Singh could see the Panzers himself, and now there were sixty of them. Every undulation seemed crested by a turret. They halted just outside of range, hulls down, and knocked out the British anti-tank weapons one by one.6 Still their own tanks did not come. By nine thirty, the Panzers were crawling up the ridge and through the forward positions. They crossed trench after shallow trench, blasting the men out of the bottom, with nothing but small-arms fire to oppose them. As they expanded into terrifying detail, Gurbachan Singh felt a hand on his shoulder, and an officer shouted in his ear, pointing at a field gun stranded in the distance. Then he was sprinting toward the gun and lighting a bag of ammonal underneath it, and when he turned he saw a Panzer squatting over his position, and the enemy infantry pouring in, rifles levelled at survivors. So he turned again and kept running.
Bobby had to ask: didn’t they signal to headquarters for help?
The Sikh jemadar nodded at Asanandan Singh – ask him. They signalled again and again for help. They did not know that the brigade HQ was gone, that their brigadier was a prisoner; that divisional headquarters too was gone, and the radios lay in pieces. They did not know that their fight was long over, so they fought on. The sun closed its eye to the sight.
Asanandan Singh exhaled a feather of smoke and took a moment before he spoke. He did not like to tell the story of a retreat. That day and the days that followed had shamed their commanders, and he did not like to talk of that. It was true that he was at the brigade base, watching as a traffic jam formed in the middle of the desert. It was a mess of the withdrawn and the wounded, and soon more vehicles came stampeding through the company area: lorries and carriers, in no order, simply running east. Something was badly wrong, and that became clearer when USAAF Tomahawks flew over and strafed the sapper camp, taking it for a camp on the enemy side. Major Scott ordered the company back two miles, onto higher ground. From there they had a fine view of the enemy sweeping over their brigade HQ, while the staff smashed their wireless sets and leapt into their jeeps. The last to leave was their colonel, Arthur Napier, whose group of five jeeps was tailed by white streaks of tracer.
‘On trucks!’ the major shouted, and the sappers joined the rout. They ran east through the dusk. Asanandan Singh looked up and saw yellow squares forming in the blue sky, as bombers opened their hatches above him. When they reached the temporary safety of the El Adem escarpment, the vehicle carrying the jemadar and the major pulled over, and they climbed out.
The stars were out, and below them the ground too was dotted with light, where flames gulped at burning trucks. New fires were lighting up along the main track, and the major marvelled at the precision of the German guns in the dark.
‘It’s our minefield, sahib,’ Singh pointed out.
Their own panicked army was running onto mines that 2nd Field had laid the month before.
‘And there is Potts-sahib,’ said the jemadar, pinning down with his field glasses some smaller points of light that danced to and fro.
Captain Potts and his group of sappers, with men from the 3/12th Frontier Rifles, ran along the edge, trying to wave off the drivers, who were paying them no attention. Seeing the surrounding trucks explode, the drivers assumed the Germans were closing in, and redoubled their charge onto the minefield. Three hundred British vehicles ran onto the field that night – ‘a striking tribute’, the major said drily, ‘to the quality of the company’s work’.
Back in the Cauldron, hundreds were left to die of their wounds and be buried with the secret rites of the desert. The survivors regrouped at El Adem, where 2nd Field counted its losses: of the entire ‘B’ Platoon detail, only Gurbachan Singh had escaped. Of the ‘C’ Platoon detail, there was no sign of anybody. All told, two British officers and fifty-nine Indians of the company were killed or captured.
It was Rommel’s greatest victory. The Eighth Army had lost its izzat (and nearly all its tanks), yet its disgrace was still far from over. The Panzers chased on. Two weeks later, Tobruk was lost, surrendered with a garrison of 35,000 men: a bewildering capitulation on the scale of Singapore. The sappers raced back to Egypt, running day and night, as their army collapsed around them. By July they were at El Alamein, the coastal town that marked the last line of defence before the Nile. Here the Army held its ground at last, and the running war became a static one. The broad battlefront had tapered down to forty miles – a thin band between the sea and the Qattara Depression, where the earth dropped away to a vast pit of salt marsh and sand bog. The long retreat had levelled the two armies’ strengths: it shortened the Allied supply lines, but stretched the Axis thin across the desert.
Auchinleck turned immediately to re-equipping and reinforcements. Second Field’s brigade had been wiped out at Gazala, and they were attached to a new one, the 161st Indian Motor Brigade.7 They joined them on Ruweisat Ridge, a stony belt across the waist of the defensive line. For a few weeks the melee continued, testing the essential stalemate. The opposing armies met in lurching, tired collisions, and then both sank into their trenches, and stayed there. Before them, the no-man’s-land filled with debris: black shells of ambulances, severed braids of telephone wire, petrol tins and dud shells, and more than a million landmines. Into that lulled purgatory arrived this sahib, John Walker Wright.
11
The Lieutenant’s Story
El Alamein, July–November 1942
Late that night, two lieutenants, escaping the fug of the VCOs’ circle, prowled the tented rows of Latifiya Camp and found a pipeline on which to sit, or perhaps lie down. They lay down. The stars hung chandelier-like, so infinitely various and bright that some seemed pinned up, high in the tent of night, and others dangled low, heavy with radiance. Bobby’s head spun slowly, and he could not shut his eyes, and the stars poured into them.
In the desert, Wright said, this was the only sight he had not tired of ten times over. On his first night at Ruweisat Ridge, he thought God had taken down the old night-roof and put in a new one. The sky had three dimensions here, which was a mercy, because the desert was so damned flat.
They were engineers, trained to work with inclines, gradients, cambers, but in the Western Desert, just about the only place where vertical relief mattered was up there. The stars suggested it, and men elaborated on the imaginary contours. The launch and drop of artillery shells traced thousands of hills in the sky; the long flight of Spitfires and Stukas drew an aerial steppe. Paratroopers jogged down gentle bluffs, swinging sideways from slope to opposing slope. Bursting anti-aircraft shells made pale vegetation, and even s
hots from rifles, fired in error or in desperation, added the thinnest pencil strokes to the mad conjured landscape. In night battle it was visible: Verey flares etched the luminous outlines, which glowed in his eyelids when he blinked.
Mainly there was no battle. Only the desert, so woefully flat. Wright arrived in Cairo to the news that his formation, the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade, had been destroyed at Gazala.1 He was instead to join 2nd Field Company, barely half a mile from the front line. On Ruweisat Ridge rain had parted the curtains of desert haze, and a long blue scratch of Mediterranean water had appeared to the north, beyond the pebbled flatness. The infantry roasted in their trenches, endlessly cleaning the sand out of their weapons and flies out of their ears. In the daytime, an inattentive nomad might walk right through the forward area, veined and scabbed as it was by trenches and sandbags, and barely notice. Brown heads and helmets only rose out of the earth like moles, travelled low along the ground and vanished again. Only the engineers worked all day, fixing desert tracks or blasting rock, or planting and clearing, planting and clearing, planting and clearing mines.
At dusk, as the sky’s fever abated and cool winds crossed the camp, life rose out of the blistered ground. Bright points of cigarettes glowed against the indigo sky and the grey earth, and the Muslim sappers bent in prayer, their bottoms to the foe. Cut-off petrol tins mouthed cowbell noises as tea was boiled. Infantry patrols slipped up to the wire, and rifles barked as snipers took aim at silhouettes, in the minutes before they were swallowed by darkness.
It was not until September that the dreary peace lifted, and a battle began that dazzled the eye. Replaying Gazala, the Panzers punched into the southern El Alamein front, then swerved back in behind the British lines, cutting an arc below Ruweisat Ridge. From up on top, Wright watched the fireworks.
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