If it had been scored by Wagner instead of the machines, it would have seemed a war of angels. To the south, above the main enemy thrust, Fairey Albacores dropped phosphorus flares that lit up the desert with electric brilliance, illuminating targets for Wellington bombers. Above their own sector, the Luftwaffe slit the full-moon sky with tracer fire. Planes dropped cases of butterfly bombs: delicate contraptions with hinged casings that sprang open, releasing a pair of wings that spun in the airflow, and drove a spindle into the bomblet to arm it. Landing, they flashed complex patterns on distant ground. Pulsing scarlet flares arced above the Allied lines, and searchlights swung across the spectacle, long flailing spider legs of light that grabbed at the descending figures. The stars burned on above it all.
‘An exhilarating performance,’ the major wrote in the unit diary.
The following morning they had orders to move east at once, and lay a minefield to stop the Panzer force from getting any further north. The company’s lorries stretched out into the desert, each a hundred yards behind the other, raising a great cliffside of dust and grit.
Wright, in charge of picking up stragglers, drove a jeep all the way at the rear. His windscreen wipers worked non-stop to scrape open a view of the road. Turning to look over his elbow, Wright noticed a stationary staff car just south of their line of march. It didn’t seem to belong to the company, but he pulled off the track toward it. He stopped a regulation distance away and hailed the men beside the vehicle, and hearing English voices, walked over.
The Humber had its bonnet up, and a helpless-looking sergeant underneath it, prodding at an engine that was belching steam. By the doors were two older officers, one carrying a fly-whisk and wearing the beret of the 11th Hussars, and the other wearing a flinty expression and a peaked cap with a red band.
‘Anything wrong, sir?’ Wright called out.
‘Of course there is,’ the first officer snapped. ‘You don’t think I want to stop here?’
Wright brought his jeep up to where the staff car was still sizzling. The fan belt was gone.
‘I’ll have to tow you, sir. Where do you need to go?’
‘Army HQ, of course,’ said the impatient Hussar. ‘At Burg el Arab.’
Wright nodded, and went to unspool the towing hook from his jeep. Perhaps he should ask who they were. Of course he should ask who they were: it was protocol for desert encounters, where anyone might be an enemy infiltrator. He turned and snapped out a salute. ‘Mind if I ask for your identity card, sir?’
The older officer’s hand drifted to his pocket, but the Hussar exploded. ‘Don’t be a fool, man! Don’t you know the Army Commander?’
Wright made sure his face stayed flat and solicitous. The Eighth Army Commander was General Auchinleck, but this didn’t look like him. Someone had neglected to tell him that ‘the Auk’ had been relieved of his command. The news would be disappointing to any Indian soldier, but especially for the 161st Brigade, which included the regiment the Auk had once personally commanded, the 1/1st Punjab.
‘Oh!’ said Wright, and saluted again.
He hooked up the Army Commander’s car and off they went. Wright’s eye drifted to his rear-view mirror for a glimpse of the pinched face of the man who would dictate the fate of the Eighth Army. He was General Bernard Montgomery, the second appointee to replace the Auk, after a German Stuka put a bullet in the chest of General Gott as he flew to Cairo. Montgomery had some antipathy for the Indian Army: perhaps because he hadn’t passed out from Sandhurst high enough to join it himself.
Wright was thinking that it would require snappy navigation to get the general to the Army HQ and still locate his convoy before dark. He decided to head straight across on the compass bearing, which meant getting off the main Army track. He quickly found a strategic track, less visible and used by L-of-C transport to evade aerial observation, and steered onto it. It was rough and covered in fine sand, but the coupled vehicles made good progress. Wright’s eye went to his mirror again. The tow-chain disappeared into a cloud of dust. He sighed. Eventually he deposited a beige-masked, sand-blasted Army Commander at Burg el Arab, and waited for thanks, ‘which were not forthcoming’.
Hours later, when he found the company, he also found a furious captain waiting, who refused to believe a word of it.
When Bobby’s duties had him in the HQ tent, he read through the onion-paper pages of the unit diary, as quick as he could. The story of the September battle was completed here. By the time the sappers’ work on the new minefield had begun, Rommel’s last thrust was already exhausted. Short of petrol again, his Panzers ground to a halt amidst the fighting. They were forced to withdraw, and the offensive chance now lay with the Eighth Army, which was flush with new troops, new American tanks, raised morale and plenty of fuel.
The 4th and 5th Indian Divisions traded places one final time. The weary 5th piled into lorries to join the enormous reserve lying up in Iraq; only the 161st Brigade, its battalions still fresh, stayed put on Ruweisat Ridge. In the unit diary Bobby found the letters that had come down to the company in October, announcing ‘D-Day’ at last. ‘Together we will hit the enemy for a “six”, right out of North Africa,’ Montgomery wrote. ‘Let every officer and man enter the battle with the determination to do his duty so long as he has breath in his body. AND LET NO MAN SURRENDER AS LONG AS HE IS UNWOUNDED AND CAN FIGHT.’ The 4th Division commander had added his own message: they were to fight to ‘the last man, the last round, the last bomb, the last bayonet’.
It never came to that – Wright resumed his story, while they checked a register of tools maintenance with the stores naik that evening – once the attack began, Rommel’s ranks were quickly broken. There was one terrible day when a Stuka bomber dropped a stick of bombs over their lines, nearly killing the officers in the mess truck, but saving its rage for the cook staff. They found the water carrier, Maqbool, screaming at a stump of flesh that had been his left hand. Mohammed Sharif the masalchi, only seventeen years old, was blown to pieces, ‘shattered from head to toe’; Budhu Masi, the cook, was disembowelled. He was twenty years old and healthy. He took three hours to die.2
Still the battle moved west of them, and its blanket of noise was lifted, then blown off by the open roar of the wind. Wright’s platoon found themselves in a quiet sector by the Qattara track, clearing S-mines. Those were anti-personnel devices that popped into the air and exploded at chest level. It was while clearing a minefield that the sappers looked like the farm boys many of them had been. A serried line of men jabbed their bayonets into the ground and felt for the edge of metal on metal. If they felt nothing, they struck again and again, clearing crescents before them, and advanced this way, scything slowly under the sand. The strange agriculture of the desert. One side planted steel seeds, and the other side harvested them. Only some lived out their natural design, to rise suddenly as a plumed palm of shocked air and sand.
Wright sat on a rock, watching his men till the sand. One NCO, Naik Taj Mohammed, was moving fast – he had cleared about thirty already. But then: the sharp noise, the bomblet hanging in the air. Wright felt the blast, the instant of utter surrender, everything tilting over, followed by long, gaping seconds of realisation. He saw the naik sit upright, his belly hanging in his lap like a tongue. It was bad but he would survive; the Germans built the mines that way, since a wounded man was a heavier burden than a corpse. When the ambulance left, work resumed.
Afterward, a jeep rolled up to where Wright stood, and he was hailed by Colonel John Blundell, the divisional Chief of Royal Engineers. The lieutenant explained how things were going. ‘Right, well, hop in,’ said the colonel. ‘They can look after themselves.’ They drove west into a minor depression of soft sand, interrupted by great limestone boulders, outrageously sculpted by the grainy wind. Wright was chuffed to be so friendly with the colonel, the CRE, and they spoke idly about the news of the fighting. The Desert Fox was losing, for lack of the one thing he valued even over water: petrol. This time the Eighth Army c
ould exploit its advantage all the way. Both men were offended that the 4th Indian Division, one of three Allied divisions in Egypt since the desert war began, was being held back on salvage duty. Wright was wondering aloud whether that had anything to do with him giving Montgomery a mouthful of sand, when he heard a snap and a whistle past his ear.
It took a moment to register that they were being shot at. His instinct was to duck behind the dashboard, but the colonel floored the accelerator, and the jeep lurched forward at one of the boulders. Sure enough, an Italian soldier emerged from behind it with his hands behind his head. ‘Know Italian?’ the colonel shouted, above the engine’s whine. Wright didn’t.
The jeep slammed to a halt in front of the Italian, and the colonel leapt out and bounded right at him. In a flash, he picked up the man’s rifle and tossed it as far as he could. Then he gripped the straggler by his shoulders, and in lieu of arresting him as a prisoner of war, the colonel turned him to face due east, stepped three paces back and gave him a running kick in the bottom. The Italian went sprawling in the sand. The colonel dragged him back to his feet, turned him east again and gave him a shove. The Italian took off running toward the Eighth Army reserve.
John Wright watched as the soldier pitched through the sand. His figure grew smaller and lost detail, but on the clear, flat ground he stayed visible for a long while, running east and east while his army ran west. Very soon, Wright suspected, he would be doing the same.
12
Kings of Persia
Baghdad, April 1943
As much as Bobby collected Wright’s sapper tales to fill the deficit of his war experience, they seemed counterfeit when held in his account. At Latifiya Camp there was nothing to compare. Each morning he woke for reveille, already sweating, to look out through the close mesh of his sand-fly net at a scene that would have resembled Roorkee, if God had ground Roorkee lightly under his heel. Dusty white tents covered endless acres, in orderly rows marred by jeep tracks. The air was filmed with oily smoke from the jerry-rigged stoves the men fired through the night, and it stayed that way even after dawn gave way to broiling mid-morning.
The overall white and buff was only flecked with dull green where roadside shrubs and palms sagged in dust; a heavy slog for eyes accustomed to Malabar’s tropical profusion. Beyond the camp was the first stage of Lawrence’s desert, which manifested unfortunately as a knobbly gravel plain. The sappers reported that you couldn’t kick a football two hundred yards out without chasing it three hundred back and forth. A brief, spring grass had risen and then died back into the stones, leaving the horizon speckled with thousands of white roses, shivering in the wind: crumpled loo-paper gusted out of the British latrines.
Every day had a timetable of continuation training – rowing, knotting and lashing, demolitions revision, Roman Urdu and geometry – mostly classroom lectures, alternating with parade. Brigade exercises came and went, strenuous but not dangerous, and returned Bobby each time to inspections of bedrolls and next-of-kin rolls, and barracks that reeked of sweat and scum. He inspected his men and was inspected in return.
Bobby regarded his life as an anti-suspense novel: How will our hero escape his monotonous safety, and find his way to danger? Manek, as always, was far ahead of him. He wrote: he was flying to Imphal. He could say no more – even to Kosh – because it was a secret operation. A secret operation! That was hardly necessary. Bobby even felt envious of his old roommate Mukundan, who was in the Indian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, test-driving American battle tanks after their reassembly in India. They had just begun to receive Shermans, Mukundan wrote, tanks built for big, beef-fed American boys. The bantam-sized Mukundan had to stand on tiptoe to steer, and slammed his lip on the hatch every time he changed gears. He still liked his job, he said: the Shermans had turned the Allies’ luck at El Alamein, and they would turn their army’s luck in Burma. Only Bobby’s efforts, out in Baghdad, seemed completely irrelevant to anyone’s luck anywhere.
The problem was that the company, and the Fighting Fifth, and the whole of the combat army, were no more than houseguests in Iraq. It had been different in 1942, when all of Paiforce stood bracing for the war to burst upon it through the Caucasus or the Sinai. By the spring of 1943, however, the Panzerarmee Afrika was falling back, and weeks before Bobby’s landing at Basra, General von Paulus’s army was destroyed outside the city it had spent six months battering and starving. The siege of Stalingrad lifted, and with it the shadow it had cast over Asia. Paiforce turned back to porterage, the timeless duty of Indians in the world.
The Army did its best to show them their place in the scheme of things. Wireless stations in Baghdad and Tehran made broadcasts in eight Indian languages, and two newspapers – the weekly Fauji Akhbar and the biweekly Jang-i-Khabarein – appeared in several languages as well. When an open-air cinema came down from Quetta Camp, a propaganda film played before the main Hindustani feature. The stirring theme of the Ministry of Information struck up, and the screen lit with flickering scenes of the sort Bobby had witnessed at Margil: diverse goods of war moving from ship to shore, shore to barge, barge to train, scuttling at low frame-rate across Iraq.1
In the film, the train stops beside long rows of lorries parked abreast, each cab deep in the shadow arch of its carriage, forming trompe l’oeil aqueducts. Here waits young ‘Apputy’. Too dark and too slender for the infantry, he was given to the Army Transport Corps, who taught him to drive. He is part of an immense transformation in the Indian Army – its mechanisation – another change bemoaned by its old establishment but forced by Auchinleck and the demands of war. In Bangalore, Apputy learned to take a motorbus, squealing and stalling, around in a circle on a repurposed polo ground. In Khanaqin, he swings into the cab of a three-ton Studebaker.
For a few hours his convoy drives east, following an ancient caravan route that now bears more tonnage each day than it would have done before the war in a year. Before him rises the heat-smudged outline of a mountain escarpment, the edge of the temperate and aromatic Iranian plateau; beyond it, quail hop through mulberry bushes and good red wine is a shilling a bottle; but that is not his destination. From the foot of the Zagros Mountains, the lorries begin to haul themselves up 7,000 feet. The air grows cool, scented by pines, and then freezing. Apputy sleeps in his lorry, and each morning wakes frozen so stiff that he cannot bend his fingers. He drives with open palms pressed against the wheel and gearstick, until the sun rises high enough to oil his rusty joints.
White flecks his windshield, and the slopes accumulate white stubble. Before joining the Army, Apputy had never heard of snow. Now he and the other drivers pull on their extra winter issue: sheepskin greatcoats over oilskin jackets, fur-lined gloves and snow goggles. Even here, in the passes, there are more Indians: sappers scraping aside rockfall or signalmen guiding precious cables through the sleet, so that GHQ Middle East in Cairo might lift a telephone and hear the voice of GHQ India in Delhi. They drive higher, until even the road is glazed with ice and pebbles spring from under his wheels to come to a rest hundreds of feet below him. He has seen trucks go the same way.
Beyond the Shah Pass, they roll down toward Tehran and the Caspian sea ports, or to Tabriz on the Soviet land border. At the border, he tarries while the cargo is transferred and his officers compare forms with their Russian counterparts. Then they turn around and drive back, through Kermanshah, through Behistun, where the mountainside is carved with the symbol of Farohar and giant figures of the Magi. The words of Darius are inscribed there, singing his own praises – ‘By the Grace of Ahura Mazda do I hold this empire’ – and listing everyone he killed to keep it.
Bobby’s own expeditions never took him as far afield, though they did bring him face to face with the relics of the Persian kings. Some days the sappers went sightseeing, bussing north to the spiral minaret of Samarra or south to the ziggurat of Ur. The best of the ruins, the Arch of Ctesiphon, lay only ten miles east of Latifiya Camp, a practical distance for a route march. They could s
ee it rise from afar, walls curving high and unsupported till they pressed together at the top, fingertips of buried hands. Once they reached it, the langar – canteen – was pulled off a truck, and the men sat on their haunches chewing dates, squinting up at the vacant clay.
For the regiment, the arch itself was less significant than the ground around it. The names of Ctesiphon and Kut-al-Amara resounded as battle honours of the Bengal Sappers. Asanandan Singh told what he had heard from the subedar-major, who had been there himself, when he was a new recruit. That was 1916. The 6th Poona Division landed at Basra and marched up the country, till it met the Ottoman machine guns at Ctesiphon. It left this courtyard full of the dying: men and mules entwined in barbed wire, limbs smashed, weeping for water. It’s a terrible thing for a dying man to have a dry mouth – many knew that from Gazala. Five thousand mouths were left open, dry and fly-filled as the arch behind them.
The defeated force fell back to a walled town, and a siege began. That was Kut. For five months the division survived there, out of reach of rescue or provision. The Indians ransacked Arab houses for grain, and slaughtered the mules for meat. Twenty jawans died of starvation each day before Kut was surrendered.
To Bobby, who had never been hungry, that was a picture of cruelty utterly remote from the war of the present. The thought of Ottoman vengeance was as exotic as the imperial adventures of a thousand years earlier, when the men who ruled from Ctesiphon were fire-worshiping kings – Bobby’s ancestors. Back then, the wings of Farohar enclosed the world from the Nile to the Indus. Before this very arch, the Muslims defeated the Sassanid Empire, sealing the fate of the Zoroastrians, whose children would become the refugees called the Parsis. Through a millennium in Hindustan, they preserved their flame, their blood and their noble names from extinction. Now a Parsi had returned to reclaim his ancient title. Hadn’t his army conquered Greater Persia? Bobby strutted through the hall, listening for echoes of his empire. But the arch was silent, emptied of all prayer, left to do nothing but sunbathe its blank planes through eternity. The Zoroastrians were a race of subjects now, and the terrible names of Persia – Cyrus, Darius, Ardeshir – had become a knot of boys being called in from the yard for dinner.
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