Killing Rommel

by Steven Pressfield

  “Do you really have horses,” Rose teased, “in the Royal Horse Artillery?”

  “Horses? We’re lucky to have artillery!”

  Stein had orders for Egypt. Wavell’s Army of the Nile was defending Cairo and the Canal from thirteen divisions of Mussolini’s fascisti, who were building up in Cyrenaica and outnumbered our fellows by between five and ten to one. Stein entertained us with tales of his training as an OP, a forward officer whose role it was to direct the gunnery of his battery of 25-pounders. He talked of “surveys” and “time on target.” All this was Greek to me but Stein, to his own surprise as well as mine and Jock’s, seemed to be thriving on it. His ship sailed in twenty days; he would spend his embarkation leave with his family in Yorkshire.

  “Will you look after something for me, Chap?”

  And he produced his manuscript.

  Rose frowned. “There’s nothing morbid in this overture, is there, Stein? For I won’t stand you forecasting some dire fate for yourself.”

  “My dear,” said he, “I shall outlive you all.”

  Rose, as I said, was Jock’s younger sister. During our first terms at Magdalen, Sheila would take the train from London at the weekend. Rose came along to keep the thing from appearing unseemly. Inevitably she and I were thrown together.

  If it is possible to be a double, or even triple, virgin, such was my state at that time. The concept of sex, let alone love, seemed absolutely unreachable. I had never known a woman, save my mother, to see past my surface presentation—and certainly none who actually believed in me. Rose changed that. From the first instant, I felt that she saw through to me—to a “me” that I was but that I could not yet grasp. She saw that “me” and all future “me” s and believed in them all. As for her, the first time I saw her, I thought she was the most ravishing creature I had ever set eyes upon. And she had wit. I had never known a girl who made me laugh. Rose feared no one and was kind to all, especially to me, a phenomenon I could not begin to make sense of. I could not imagine being worthy of her and would no more have pressed my physical attentions upon her than flown to the moon. Rather, the emotion I felt towards her was one of fierce protectiveness. She seemed, from the first, so precious that I would have hurled myself into fire in her defence.

  When you’re young and without resources, you have no place to go. Rose and I had no private rooms, no car, no way out of the weather. It seemed we were outdoors all the time. It was wonderful. Only Stein took us in. He made pots of tea and sat up with us till all hours, talking politics and poetry.

  Rose and I corresponded by mail. I still had not kissed her. It took me weeks to summon the temerity simply to upgrade my salutation from “Dear Miss McCall” to “My dear Miss McCall.” At the same time, I knew with absolute certainty that she and I would be married. I never said a word, nor did she. But we both knew it, and we knew that we knew it. At Oxford, each college has its own rowing club short of the varsity Blues. I rowed on Magdalen’s. There is a competition in early summer called Eights Week, a rather posh event in the university calendar. Rose came up to cheer me on. I can’t remember what place our boat took, but in the warm evening afterwards, when Rose and I as usual had no place to go, we walked with another couple along the river. A storm had got up; the four of us ducked for shelter into one of the boathouses. The other couple immediately began having it off in the one dry corner, an act that in those days was audacious beyond belief. Rose and I were mortified. We slipped out under the eaves. Our companions’ passion continued unabated. We gave up waiting and simply set off into the rain. I was so in love, I could barely draw breath. Suddenly I felt Rose take my hand. The rush of blood nearly dropped me faint.

  We began a romance. I fell into it like a man dropping off the edge of the earth. The innocence of our lovemaking would strain the credulity of today’s youth. Yet chastity did not preclude passion. We found places for trysts. Hideouts in the woods, back seats of cars. We took hotel rooms, registering as husband and wife.

  One night Jock caught Rose and me emerging from rooms above a pub on High Street, in front of a pharmacy that’s no longer there called Saxon Chemists. Jock was with Sheila; clearly they’d been doing the same thing and probably a lot more. “Damn you, Chapman! Where have you been with my sister?”

  Jock was a skilled amateur boxer. In a flash his fists went up; I tackled him to keep him from swinging. The scene devolved into low burlesque, with the pair of us crashing together into the rows of bicycles parked along the pavement while our young ladies beat upon our backs with their handbags, clamouring for us to stop. Two policemen pulled us apart. Jock was hauling Rose away. She jerked free. “Piss off, Jock!”

  She crossed to me; I took her under my arm.

  Jock goggled in consternation. “Bloody hell, Rose! Is this the kind of language you’ve caught from him?” He glared at me. “What have you to say, you damned sod?”

  I took a breath. “Your sister’s with me, Jock. That’s it.”

  Rose’s arms tightened round my waist. I had never been happier in my life.

  For months, Jock wouldn’t speak to me. This was at the moment in Stein’s scandal when the college was physically evicting him. I had read Stein’s novel by then. When Stein left for the army, I took it upon myself to see the book published, if I had to bring it out myself, hand printed and hand bound. Rose backed me up. We spent days at a time in London, resubmitting the manuscript to every house that had turned it down. An editor at Lion’s Gate mulled it briefly, imagining war breaking out and Stein dying as a hero. Novels by gallantly fallen authors sell better. “We’ll speak to Stein,” said Rose. “Perhaps we can arrange to have him catch it precisely upon date of publication.”

  Rose was living at home then. Her father, a Territorial Army colonel, took a dim view of her liaison with a penniless, academically faltering university student. He ordered Rose “confined to quarters.” She sneaked out anyway. We’d meet in tube stations and news arcades, riding for hours on buses or the underground. Just before the autumn term, Rose left school and moved out on her own. She found a flat at Shepherd’s Bush and a job in a print shop. “It’s positively Dickensian.” She loved it. We planned to marry. I was set to return to Oxford. Then came 1 September 1939.

  Hitler invades Poland! Two days later the nation was at war.

  There was no question but that I would enlist. What astonished me was the intensity of my reaction. At once, all clouds lifted. Clarity returned. I loved Rose and I was going off to fight. The only question was where to enlist and in what capacity.

  Of all people, it was B. who decided my course—the unfortunate fellow whose infatuation with Stein had kicked off this whole debacle. He had come to Stein at the height of the scandal and apologised. Astonishingly, he and Stein became friends. I liked him too. It was B. who suggested that he and I enlist as private soldiers. We drove to the recruiting station in Kensington in the rain in his ’32 Standard. B. was ecstatic. “Tell me, Chapman, do you feel as I do? I’m overwhelmed by relief. I feel as if I’ve been waiting for something all my life and now it’s here.” This was the moment, he declared. “History. Great events.”

  At Kensington, the various regiments had set up tables on the pavement under awnings, each manned by a senior NCO and each with a queue of young men waiting before it in the rain. B. went straight for the Royal Marines. I set out seeking the Staffordshire Yeomanry, in which my father and uncles had served. The recruiting sergeant informed me that a young man with my qualifications, that is, more than two years of university, would be enrolled at once in OCTU and sent straight to Sandhurst. This, I knew from Stein and other friends, could mean, with specialised training afterwards, a year or longer before getting into action. I baulked. Behind the adjacent table sat a lean sergeant-major of about forty. He had been talking with two potential enlistees, but I could see that with one ear he had been keeping tabs on my conversation as well. Propped before him, half-sodden in the drizzle, stood a recruiting poster depicting that armoured
clanker I would come to know at Bovington as a Nuffield Cruiser A-9. A name plate said:

  SGT-MAJ STREETER ROYAL TANK REGIMENT

  “Why walk,” he said, “when you can ride?”

  He promised that if I took the King’s shilling that day, he’d have me on my way to battling the Hun in twenty-six weeks.

  Rose was the only one who approved of my decision. My uncles were apoplectic. Rose herself had signed to be a Volunteer Air Warden and was applying for training as an ambulance driver. We all felt that way then. We would have drained our blood for England.

  Jock and I repaired our friendship some months later. Jock had enlisted with the Cameron Highlanders, his family’s regiment for five generations. He could not forgive me for the “liberties I had taken” with his sister. “But,” he wrote, “it’s my own fault for putting her in harm’s way.” He added that he would give me two choices for the war ahead—get killed or marry Rose.

  The platform at Victoria Station was packed with enlistees and their sweethearts seeing them off for the various training depots. The mood was not brash and gay as it had been in our fathers’ time, the Great War. Neither was it grave, as it ought to have been. Rather, as B. had said, the sensation was one of overwhelming relief. One felt released from a state of excruciating suspense and set free on to the field of action.

  At last, I thought, I am neither too small nor too young to defend my country and the woman I love.

  5

  THE TRAINING DEPOT of the Royal Armoured Corps, as it was then coming to be called, was at Bovington Camp in Dorset. The place was packed with enlistees and conscripts; by the time the contingent I was with arrived, there was no room for us in barracks. We were housed instead in twelve-man tents with plank floors and one three-hole latrine for every four tents. After initial “square-bashing,” the driver’s course was sixteen weeks. We practised first on light 15-hundredweight trucks, then 30-hundredweights, then 3-tonners, learning to operate on paved roads, cross country and over obstacle courses. After six weeks we graduated to tracked vehicles: first Bren carriers, then light tanks. We learnt to ford streams, surmount stone walls; we drilled at binding fascines (great bundles of timber or pipe) and using them to cross anti-tank ditches. When it came time to train on full-sized tanks, the depot had so few that we had to use dummies fabricated from original Holt Caterpillar farm tractors, the old DCMs from the Great War. A shell of wood and canvas was mounted over the steering station so that the learning driver could not see ahead. Above and behind him sat a second recruit, the “tank commander,” who possessed a view over the top of the cab. The commander shouted directions—“Driver, advance! Driver, hard left!”—while the poor bugger in the blind-box heaved against the steering levers and wrestled the massive clutch, simultaneously working the two throttles and clanging through the gears of the unsynchronised double-clutch crashbox. You turn a tank not with a wheel but by levers and pedals, retarding one track while advancing the other. This is not easy. Turn too tight and you snap the track pins; the track comes spooling off its sprockets like toilet tissue from a thrown roll. When this happens, the crew have to sort the mess out themselves.

  Dearest Rose,

  I should not be enjoying myself as much as I am, I know, given the desperate state of affairs in Europe and the world. Still I am having fun! The commanding officer of our training battalion has called me out for officer training, as the army has every man with even ten minutes at university, but he says I must learn to drive a tank in any event, so I might as well stay and finish the course.

  The training got easier when we moved to Lulworth to practise on A-9s and 10s—real tanks—and the new A-13s, the first of that series to be called Crusaders. If you were a driver/operator, as all of us were, you learnt to work the wireless as well. We had to master every skill in the tank, so that a loader could stand in for a driver or wireless operator and all at a pinch could take over as commander. In addition we were required to learn maintenance. The instructors, most of whom were fitters drafted out of civilian garages, taught us by deliberately putting vehicles out of action—disabling cooling systems, clogging fuel lines and so forth. We were supposed to diagnose the problem and come up with the fix, while our teachers ranted in our ears, “What’s the hold-up, cock? Set the bleeder right, can’t you?” Physical training consisted of three-mile and five-mile trots with steel helmets, laden rucksacks, and rifles at port arms. One morning on a hill south of Fordingbridge my legs gave out beneath me. An ambulance took me to hospital, where an Indian major who spoke the most flawless English I had ever heard examined me sole to crown. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve got polio.”

  In those days, a diagnosis of infantile paralysis was the most frightful finding a patient could hear. The disease was virulent, infectious and incurable. Paralysis started in the legs, then worked up into the torso, eventually reaching the lungs, so that the victim could not even breathe without the aid of a monstrous mechanical contraption called an iron lung, in which he was imprisoned, immobile and flat on his back. Yet, terrified as I was by the medical side of the calamity, the thought of dropping out of training was even worse. Why was this so important to me? I can’t say, even today. I doubt that many of my contemporaries could either. We were simply driven to get into the fight or, perhaps more to the point, to not be left out. Absurd as it sounds, for me the dread of spending the rest of my life as an invalid paled alongside the agony of being shunted to the sidelines unable to aid England while she stood in mortal peril.

  The army quarantined me and shipped me off-depot to a civilian polio ward. Rose came on the run. She refused to accept the diagnosis. She got into a table-banging row with my second or third doctor, I forget which; he would not discharge me for fear of infection in the community, while Rose would not hear of my staying on the ward, where I would almost certainly be stricken if I wasn’t already. At the same time she began her own independent research of medical journals, physicians’ articles and case histories; she made herself an expert on all forms of viral disorder, particularly those which attack the sheaths of the nerve canals. In the end I was passed through six wards in three hospitals, each time receiving a different diagnosis. By now I had lost motor function below the waist and was running a fever of 103. My battalion commander, a decent sort, visited me in hospital to congratulate me on my acceptance to OCTU. The course started in ten days. “We’ll hold a place for you, Chapman,” he said with a look that communicated that he never expected to see me again.

  I was placed on convalescent leave. Rose took me home to her sister’s family’s farm at Golspie. We were married from there, at Dornoch Cathedral, with me in a wheelchair and my two weeks’ army pay packet—one pound six shillings—in my pocket. I shall never forget the faith and kindness of Rose’s family, particularly her sister Evelyn and brother-in-law Angus, whose cottage we lived in all that winter, spring and summer. They took me in as if I were their own blood. There was a disease similar to polio, Rose had learnt, called transverse myelitis. The doctors confirmed this. It was sometimes called “false polio.”

  With Rose’s aid, I struggled to walk. I hobbled first on crutches, in leg braces, just the fifty yards out to the farm steading. Later we struck for the post box, about a hundred and fifty yards. The day I could climb the hill to the house—a full furlong—we all got gloriously drunk.

  The town golf course at Golspie runs along Dornoch Firth; I began walking there morning and evening with Rose and a local hound named Jack who had adopted us and met us without fail at the first tee. Till then I had known nothing about golf. I thought it an old man’s game. But as Rose and I trekked back and forth day after day, the brusque great-heartedness of the local players, mostly old sweats of Great War vintage, touched me and made me appreciate the dour beauty of the game. I still could not swing a club. I would come home from walking three or four holes, so exhausted that I could not mount the steps to the house. Inside, I collapsed into a chair as if dead.

  Throughout th
is period, letters came from Stein in North Africa. He had been wounded in Operation Battleaxe, promoted to first lieutenant and mentioned in despatches. He was a hero. Jock had been in France and barely got out at Dunkirk. I envied them desperately, as I did every man who could stand and walk and do his bit. On the farm, all chores revolved round supplying the troops. The barley crop, which before the war had gone for Scotch whisky distilled locally at Glenmorangie, was now contracted to the Office of Procurement for cereal, soup and fodder. Spitfire pilots were training at Nairn; we’d see them practising “touch-and-goes” from the fairways there and at Royal Dornoch. A coast watch was on night and day; ammunition bunkers were going in at Brora and every twenty miles along the road to John o’Groats.

  By midsummer I could walk thirty-six holes. The Royal Armoured Corps would not take me back till I had passed the PHT, the Physical Hardiness Test, a sort of obstacle course that all applicants for Officer Cadet Training Unit must complete in under a certain time. By luck, the scorer assigned to my group was Sergeant-Major Streeter, the same man who had recruited me at his pavement table at Kensington. My tally was 47 out of a possible 50. I was in. Years later, I ran into Streeter on a platform at Waterloo Station; he confessed that my real score had been 27, failure. “My pencil slipped, I reckon.”

  In the end my diagnosis was confirmed as false polio. It retreated the way it had come, from trunk to thighs to calves and, at last, entirely.

  France fell while I was recuperating; the Battle of Britain raged; Hitler was preparing his invasion of Russia. By spring 1941, when I had at last completed OCTU, Rommel had arrived in Tunisia with the Afrika Korps. His first onslaught had caught our Western Desert Force off-guard and driven it east nearly to Alexandria; later Rommel himself fell back before Auchinleck’s counter-thrust of Operation Crusader. (Western Desert Force had by then become Eighth Army.) When I arrived in Palestine at the turn of the year, Rommel was building up to his next attack out of his bastion at El Agheila.