Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  Green, God bless him, was a Geordie, and a persistent bugger. ‘. . . and if the Egyptians start shooting at us with real bullets, sir?’

  ‘Reload with live ammunition, Mr Green, and let the buggers have it! Do I really have to tell you that?’

  As far as I could see there was a flaw in this operation, which the planners back at base hadn’t spotted. In my experience, it was the guy who got the first shot in who usually survived a homicidal encounter. If we met a band of renegade Gyppoes intent on murder, we were likely to be at an initial disadvantage. The mad sod was going to get someone killed.

  The wooden table top on the desert stove was beginning to smell very warm, and if I wasn’t mistaken Smart’s map was beginning to char at the edges. He whipped it away, and began to beat at it with the other hand, dancing around and shouting, ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ and then it was, ‘Mount up; mount up . . .’ as if we were a troop of Household Cavalry.

  As Trigger and I trudged to the radio van I whispered, ‘Find out what the Sergeant thinks about all this, because I don’t know about you, but it’s making me windy.’

  ‘Mutiny’s a capital offence in the Army, sir.’

  ‘Only if you’re found out.’

  ‘Sergeant Clare wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘Who would be asking him to?’

  In the Austin’s oven of a cab, I had left my jacket draped over the back of the driver’s seat; I felt into its pockets to make sure my own small pistol was still there. Don’t worry; I wasn’t planning to murder the sod.

  Before we moved off the Army signaller sent off a positioning call – he was niftier than I would have thought, but also had that look in his eyes: the one that said his hands moved faster than his brain. He also signalled to the Centurion tanks somewhere up ahead. I thought I’d have to keep an eye on him.

  Then I took over for fifteen minutes, and searched the ether for the sounds of unfriendly aircraft. They must have been having a canny afternoon, because they weren’t talking to each other.

  When I came out of the back of the van, Smart glanced across at me from his jeep. He looked angry, and tapped his watch. Then he raised his arm, and hooked it forward. Wagons ho! He probably didn’t want to be late for his tea.

  That evening we stopped later than Clare would have done, and scrabbled around for a decent, defensible camp site and solid ground. We ended up in a wadi with a stone ridge on one side and a softer ridge of coarse stuff on the other . . . it petered out into blown sand if you walked far enough in that direction. The Sergeant suggested a lookout on one of the ridges, but was quickly vetoed by our bold officer.

  ‘There’s no one out here, Sergeant, except the Red team, and they’re days away.’

  ‘This is technically a high-alert zone, sir. Terrorists have attacked our schemes before.’

  ‘Don’t be such an old woman, Sergeant. I’ve told you we are alone, and safe; take my word for it.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  We were setting up the circle for the night, and stringing the barbed wire between the trucks. It was the same bloody simile again, wasn’t it? – covered wagons. Some of the men were digging out scrapes under the trucks to sleep in, or to jump into if we came under fire. Not even Smart could complain about that; it was SOP – that’s standard operating procedure to you. Just after he stopped speaking the inevitable Arab on the inevitable donkey rode into camp, bleating about his eggs. I was sure it was the same one I’d seen last month, even if we were eight hundred miles from there.

  Smart drew his pistol. I hoped it was loaded with blanks.

  ‘Where the devil did he spring from?’

  The Arab just grinned hopefully. He had an egg in each hand. Allah be praised they weren’t large enough to be mistaken for grenades.

  Clare said, ‘Nobody knows, sir. It happens all the time. It’s a mystery.’

  ‘He must have followed us. Tell him to go away.’

  ‘If I just bought his eggs he would go away faster, sir.’

  ‘Bugger that, Sergeant. Just tell him to push off.’

  Clare turned, and spoke to the Arab in Arabic. That surprised and gratified me: it meant that at least one person hadn’t wasted his time out here. There seemed to be a lot of shrugging at one another involved. Eventually the Arab snarled something and turned his mule back, pausing to hawk as he did so. His gob fell close to Smart Alec.

  Trigger said, ‘I wonder what he did with his bint. I wouldn’t have minded a look at her.’

  I didn’t snap at him, but I wanted to. That was interesting. It was a different Charlie, wasn’t it? Ten minutes later Smart ordered Roy to double out into the sand, and dig a latrine. That was unusual.

  What they’d taught me on the last scheme was that when your time came you wandered off into the blue with an entrenching tool, dug a hole and dropped your trousers. Then you covered it up when you were finished. If the security situation was truly dodgy you took a mate with you, and he turned his back as you dropped your kegs, but covered you with his gun. Smart Alec, however, thought that arrangement unsoldierly. Where soldiers stopped for the night a latrine hole was to be dug, all ranks for the use of. What’s more the latrine had to be at least twenty yards away. And what’s more than that, two small slit trenches had to be dug between the latrine and the camp, so you had somewhere to drop into if you came under fire on the way. Smart Alec assured us we were unobserved by hostiles, but he still wanted his latrine and two trenches. All evenly spaced. Even although it was in the softer stuff, it took Roy an hour and a quarter, and he was knackered when he came back. He sat with his back against the Austin’s big front wheel and panted. It was cooling down and there was a light breeze. It probably came all the way from the Med, because there was now damn-all between it and us, and it dried the sweat on Trigger’s body.

  He said, ‘Fucking bastard!’

  ‘Making a fucking point,’ I observed, and handed him a mug of char.

  ‘Thanks. He’s got it in for me.’

  ‘. . . only because you took the rise out of him.’

  He grinned ruefully. ‘Yeah. There was that. I’ll have to watch my lip.’

  ‘Because mutiny is a capital offence in the British Army,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Only when you get caught, sir. I seem to remember some officer telling me that.’

  After he finished his char and poured the dregs on the earth between his feet, he stood up and wandered over to the cookie for some grub. The rest of us had already eaten.

  The fun started later in the evening. Most of us were gathered around the stove, wearing either jackets or blankets around our shoulders. The stove gave out no light, but a bit of residual heat, and it was cool for the time of year. There was a card school going around a hurricane lamp, and despite his committed view Smart had put two men up in the trucks as lookouts. Maybe the silly bastard was educable after all. When my bowel performed a serious ritual of summoning, I stood up, picked up the entrenching tool and a small torch, and started to move out of the light.

  Smart Alec glanced up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To christen your new bog.’ Factually inaccurate, Charlie. It was no longer a virgin.

  ‘Bit late.’

  I was almost at the legs-crossed stage, so I wasn’t as patient as I might have been.

  ‘The way I see it is that you’re going to get my shit here, or in your latrine, but either way you are going to get my shit.’

  Somebody laughed wheezily from the shadow. At least it wasn’t Trigger. I didn’t want him in more trouble than he was.

  Smart Whatsit frowned, and said, ‘I’ll come with you. Wouldn’t want anyone wandering off into the dark, and getting lost.’ He sighed as he got up, as if my bodily functions should have a more considerate sense of timing.

  As we stepped out of the cover of the lorries I said, ‘It didn’t have to be you. One of the others could have come.’

  ‘And have an oik sniggering over the sight of an officer’s bare back
side? I don’t think so, Charles.’

  ‘Not good for morale?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  We were halfway between his two fire trenches when some bastard opened up on us from a half-mile away. At first I thought that the patrol he said wouldn’t reach us for days had worked around our flank, and ambushed us. Two officers heading out into the blue for a dump must have seemed like a godsend to them.

  I said, ‘Bastards!’ Then I heard the bullets zipping past. They make a peculiarly personal sound when they’re close to you. I turned on Smart and pushed him backwards away from me. He ran until he found the first trench, and dropped in it. I followed this from his bobbing torchlight. I ran about seven paces in the other direction until I literally fell into the outer trench. The initial shouts and clattering around coming from our small circle of trucks descended into order. I heard Clare conducting some sort of a roll call, and getting a satisfactory answer.

  Smart Alec shouted out, ‘Who is it, Sergeant Clare?’

  There was an immediate fusillade of incoming rifle fire. I heard the bullets pattering around me, and made myself as small as I could.

  ‘Gyppoes, sir . . . and for God’s sake keep quiet. They’re firing at your voices now.’

  ‘Give us covering fire’ . . . another half-dozen shots.

  ‘No point, sir. I wouldn’t know where to fire. I can’t see any muzzle flashes. The lads are reloading with live ammo now. You OK, Mr Bassett?’

  ‘Yes.’ I kept it low, but there was a single shot, and it came too bloody close.

  ‘Keep your heads down, sirs, and I’ll try to work out how to get you back. You may have to stay there until they withdraw . . . there’s another load of fireworks over to the west; they must be having a go at the tanks.’

  The hole I was in was just big enough if I drew my knees up and lay three quarters on my side, with my head below the parapet. Once I’d sorted out the noises, and fitted them to what Clare had said to us, I could work out what was happening. It looked as if a number of wogs were having a go at the three tanks which were ahead of us. They must have seen our lights and left a few friendly natives the task of keeping us out of it. I just hoped someone had been able to get to the radio.

  I was there for hours, and staving off the cramp became the second worst problem. My worst problem was the reason I’d landed up out there in the first place. Whether I liked it or not, my body was about to evacuate on a grand scale, and there was nothing I could do about it . . . but, wogs or no wogs, I was damned if I was going to lie in my own excrement all night. So I pulled down my trousers, shat on my own hand, and flung it over my shoulder and out of the trench. Then I wiped my backside with that bloody horrible great services handkerchief – I always knew it would come in handy for something – and rubbed my hand in the sand until it was clean. That occurred four or five times before my belly stopped aching. The trots I’d been warned to look out for on the trip to Istanbul had finally caught up with me in the desert triangle between Suez, Ismailia and Cairo. Believe it or not I eventually went to sleep. There was nothing else to do.

  When I awoke it was light, and the ground was shaking like the aftershock of a small earthquake. After a session of overtures and beginners, gentlemen please, my brain told me the tanks were coming back down their original track.

  Clare’s voice carried to us . . . ‘I think you’re OK now, sirs, the Seventh Cavalry’s arriving . . . you can get back here in a couple of ticks.’

  Then I heard a howl of rage that might have been the scream of a demented tiger, or a second lieutenant tried beyond endurance, as Smart Alec shouted, ‘Mr Bassett . . . Mr Bastard Bassett, sir . . .’

  It was only old habits that made me stand stiffly to, swing round to face him and answer, ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You’re on a fucking charge, sir!’

  He was standing in his slit trench literally shaking with rage. Spitting with it . . . covered in it, actually. Covered in diarrhoea. The brown stains and streaks, all over his beautiful KDs, told their own story. Ah well, Charlie. You can’t win ’em all. Bloody good shots all the same, even if the thought of deliberately taking aim had never entered my head.

  He glowered at me throughout breakfast, but never said another word. Perhaps he didn’t trust himself. On the other hand several of the blokes contrived to touch me on the shoulder or the head as they passed me. A curious show of solidarity. It was as if I had passed the initiation ceremony, and had been admitted into the Lodge. Even Sergeant Clare brought me another mug of char, and winked before he turned away.

  I thought that Smart Alec would want to have it out, but he wasn’t the type. When I faced him off all he said was, ‘Don’t say a word, Charles. I shall report you to your senior officer as soon as we’re back in base. Just consider yourself on a charge . . . because you bloody well will be if I have anything to do with it.’ Something like conduct prejudicial, I presumed. I leaned forward until my mouth was close to his ear.

  Perhaps he thought I was going to plead or apologize, but I whispered, ‘Go fuck yourself, idiot.’ In for a penny in for a pound: my dad used to say it all of the time. Smart flushed like a girl being asked to dance by a bloke she didn’t fancy. I looked up as I turned away from him. Five geese flew high over us in a nice tight V formation. Where the hell had they come from? Maybe Nancy would be up there one day.

  The tanks soon split. They’d taken a few hits the night before, and their sandy-coloured armour was marked by bright streaks of bare metal where the wog bullets had bounced off, but the tankies were made of sterner stuff than us, and lurched off into the sand again. They were friendly guys, but quite mad.

  We got a recall. Roy and I were sweating in the radio wagon when a string of signals came through for the Brown Jobs. They were in code, but he recognized the form, without summoning his own signaller.

  ‘Come home, sir; all is forgiven.’

  ‘Not in my case.’

  ‘What did you expect, sir . . . throwing shite all over the Patrol Leader like that?’ It was a phrase someone had used to describe the Lieutenant which everyone had quickly adopted. It wasn’t insubordinate, because it described his role accurately. It also made him sound like a Boy Scout, so he bloody hated it.

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t think.’

  ‘I’ll bet he did: all bleedin’ night! Can you imagine him lying there waiting for the next handful to arrive . . . and having to keep quiet and put up with it? Bloody wonderful, sir. I’ll take him his messages now. It will take ’im an hour to decode them.’

  I got a big signal on one of my sweeps. Its bearing was moving too fast across the terrain to be anything except an aircraft, and it wasn’t that far away. Now what? I gave Watson a quick burst to let him know I was on to something, and then went back to it. Then there were two. The signals didn’t seem to have that air of urgency which screamed operations, so I reckoned it was a Gyppo air force reconnaissance mission out over the Delta, or the salt marshes behind Port Said. Watson had wanted to know if the Gyppo air force Lancasters were airworthy – I reckoned he had his answer.

  You have to wonder about the War Office and the RAF sometimes. What idiot had thought it was a good idea to sell the Egyptians half a dozen of our old war-surplus Lancasters, which might then be used to bomb our own boys? It’s almost as if the people in the room trying to run the Army in the Canal Zone never spoke to the guys in the room next door, who were busily flogging off the RAF’s spare kit. If a bunch of renegade Nazis had come back from Brazil and asked to buy a squadron of Spitfires, would the mad sods in Whitehall have set the cash registers ringing? – sadly the answer is, probably, yes. They never ever bloody learn.

  Roy Rogers came back.

  ‘What’s up?’ I demanded.

  ‘The scheme’s been scaled back, just as I thought. The patrol coming up from the south got lost, and ran out of water. Everyone is panicking, and the Air Corps is trying to get an Auster down to them. What a cock-up!’ The Army Air Corps ran their ow
n artillery-spotting and reconnaissance aircraft.

  ‘Can’t say I’m sorry. Are we going back then?’

  ‘Not immediately. The covered wagons will remain here for the time being, whilst we set off through Indian country to find those bloody tanks.’

  ‘Who do you mean by we?’

  ‘You and me, Kemo Sabe. Our master has ordered it, and we must make it so. We have to take one of the jeeps.’

  ‘Why don’t we just signal them?’

  ‘I asked him that, sir.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Security, Mr Rogers. Walls have ears.’

  ‘He’s off his fucking head! There are no walls out here – just miles and miles of fucking desert.’

  ‘I take your point, sir . . . although I remember there’s some sort of ruin out there somewhere. He thought the tanks might be making for it.’

  ‘. . . and I’m one of his radio operators. What happens if he wants to signal the RAF?’

  ‘Our man Baloo will have to sub for you until you get back sir. Mr Smart-Watkins has his punishment strategy for us well worked out. It’s going to be as hot as a Dutch whore’s fanny out there this afternoon.’ It happened again. I was made slightly uncomfortable by Trigger’s phrasing – that was interesting. But when in Rome, and all that.

  Baloo was the army’s own sparks – a big hulking bear of a man, hence his nickname. He was a bit of a slow thinker, as I’ve already indicated, but he came from Cardiff so what did you expect? Every one had nicknames then. Just why are modern men so reluctant to accept one these days?

  ‘Will Baloo manage?’

  ‘He will, if you preset your dials and switches for him, sir, and tape over the dials so he can’t change things.’

  ‘What a cock-up!’

  ‘I said that before, sir.’

  ‘I agreed with you then as well.’

  We set off after we had fed and watered. We had a jeep, a map, an old field compass and a precious gallon of water. After we breasted the first ridge I pulled off my old cap and flung it in the back. I pulled the Afrika Korps job out of my small pack and stuck it on.