Killing Rommel

by Steven Pressfield

  “You’re a sick fellow, Chapman.” He shows me my chart:

  Bacterial pneumonia (acute); bruised ribs and sternum; numerous ulcerated desert sores; possible malaria; possible worms.

  I am stacked in a tent ward and pumped full of chalk and penicillin. My temperature, which the orderly won’t tell me but which I read later on my chart, is 104. I have lost all my kit at Jalo, including the rucksack with my diary and Stein’s manuscript. Where am I? What has happened?

  After Popski’s Arabs find us at the cistern cave, they lead us to rendezvous with Tinker’s T2 patrol at Bat el Agar, a complex of caverns west of the line of balats. Popski is there. Nick Wilder, he tells us, has got clear of our friends from Combat Group 288. His trucks are on their way to Landing Ground 125, an emergency evacuation strip in the desert south of Msus. Another LRDG patrol, under Lieutenant Bernard Bruce, appears that evening. Bruce is a wonderfully bawdy chap, who stands somewhere in line to become Lord Elgin and must, by the dictates of title protocol, file his reports not as “Lieutenant” but as “Lieutenant the Honourable.” He takes Marks aboard a truck evacuating his own wounded to Jalo oasis, now in British hands, from which an air ambulance will fly the men to hospital in Benghazi, also under a newly hoisted Union Jack. The rest of us will have to sit tight; Bruce can spare no other transport. “Besides, thanks to your efforts,” he declares, “the desert is lousy with Jerry patrols.” We can file reports, though. I put in Collie, Punch and Grainger for mentions in despatches.

  For ten days our group lies up in caves out of the rain, waiting for transport to get clear. I have never been sicker. The Arabs succour us—generously, considering their own poor state—on eggs, dates and sour goat’s milk with wild thyme, none of which I can keep down. Every ounce of fluid flushes from my body, leaving me limp as a stalk and burning with fever.

  Collie nurses me through frightful dreams. I see Stein, dead on his sand-channel, and my mother in her barge. I see the Italians we massacred. This apparition is so real, complete with the stink of cordite and the banging of the guns, that my comrade has to shake me for seconds even after I’m awake. I’m seeing Standage and Miller too, our own dead. I keep apologising to them. They brush me off. “It’s nothing, Chap,” they say.

  Each night we move camp. Popski’s Arabs guide us. My guts are in a twist the whole time. We can travel only in darkness, which is freezing, with wet gales that knife through every blanket and rag you bundle round yourself. We slog afoot or on trucks for what feels like hours, only to end up in another dank grotto stinking of goat droppings and camel dung. Every cell in my body aches. Never have I been more excruciatingly aware of this physical envelope that is the flesh. How I long to escape it! How can one be so cold and so hot at the same time?

  On the tenth night, three trucks of a patrol led by a Lieutenant Birdwood (who himself is absent, recce-ing west) arrive and take us out. Collie, Punch and I are piled together on to the bed of their fitter’s truck. The sergeant in command is named Chapman like me. There’s a dressing station at Jalo, he tells us, under Captain Lawson. Chapman turns out to be a BBC buff; he has all the latest news. Eighth Army has taken Derna and Benghazi. Hurricanes of the RAF and the Royal South Africans are flying now out of Benina, the field where we shot up the Italians only, what…twenty days ago? Rommel’s Panzers have evacuated Msus and Solluch and are pulling out of Antelat and Agedabia. All of Cyrenaica is in British hands. It’s 10 December, Christmas is coming!

  Rommel himself, Chapman says, has withdrawn all the way to his old defensive box at El Agheila, which, we will learn at Jalo, he vacates on the twelfth. Combat Group 288 serves as his rearguard; our old friends are blowing bridges and mining wadis as Panzerarmee Afrika falls back on Tripoli.

  The whole show is a blur to me. The front has shifted so far west so rapidly that the next likely action, I am told, will be not another Rommel counter-offensive but a head-on Allied assault, either against prepared Axis positions at Wadi Zem Zem east of Tripoli, or farther west across the Tunisian frontier at the natural and manmade barrier of the Mareth Line. This is the old French skein of fortifications that Don Munro and the war correspondents told us about when we ran into them at Derna.

  I’m too sick to visualise the campaign map. All I know as Sergeant Chapman transports us to Jalo is that I have to evacuate my bowels every quarter of an hour; the truck halts once every two. I have a quart dixie for a bedpan and part of a wet Arab newspaper. Downpours continue to drench us; Collie, Punch and I have no cover but what loose tarpaulins we can wrestle over our shoulders in the wind. Punch is sicker than I am. Every time he relieves himself, I follow suit; when I do, he does. How we hate this desert! What wouldn’t we give for a dry room and a warm squat!

  The brick through all this is Collie. Despite his own ills, he stands over us. We call him Sherlock for the stolid imperturbability with which he lights his Hound of the Baskervilles pipe upside-down in the wind.

  What do I know of Collie? Home again in New Zealand, if fortune bears him safely there, you could not pick him out from twenty others in a pew at the Anglican church or tinkering with his Norton on a weekend rideabout. But he is a hero. A bulwark of the Empire. By rank this patrol may be mine, but he is its backbone and beating heart. He respects me. To him I am “Sir,” “Skip,” “Lieutenant.” He won’t call me “Chap,” though I have asked him to more than once and would take no offence if he did. If we meet for a pint when this mess is over, he’ll still call me Skip and take his leave with the same awkward, half-embarrassed gait.

  In real life, I would never meet such a man either socially or professionally. Yet here we are closer than brothers. I consider it one of the signal honours of my life to serve beside him. No man could ask for finer.

  At Jalo, our group is separated. Collie, Punch, Grainger, Oliphant and Jenkins will stay here with Doc Lawson; I am put on a Valentia and flown to Zella, then on a Bombay bomber to Marble Arch, Eighth Army HQ, where excitement and novelty carry me through a two-hour debriefing, of which I remember nothing and after which I faint on a bench outside the tent and must be hurried to hospital on a stretcher.

  I lie for a day and night in a ward comprising four conjoined tents, part of a greater tent hospital that sprawls across acres of desert alongside the Via Balbia. The ward is theoretically for British and Commonwealth officers only, but so great is the number of casualties flooding in, Axis as well as Allied, that the MOs have stopped screening. Litters bearing the maimed and dying of both sides are set down under tent flies out of the rain or simply parked, stacked three and four high, in the ambulances and lorries that bring them. Under canvas, space is so tight that cots are butted together in islands of four with walkways round the peripheries. In the first twenty-four hours, three Afrika Korps officers occupy in succession the bed adjoining mine. The first two are lieutenants named Schmidt—I note this from the white three-by-five cards (Allied cards are blue) that the orderlies pin to their blankets. Or maybe the admitting clerks call them Schmidt the way we’d say Tommy Atkins, and gift them with the honorific of Leutnant so they’ll require less paperwork when they move on. At any rate, neither Schmidt can speak; both are too far gone.

  The third officer is named Ehrlich, which means “honourable.” He and I converse in German and English; he is a schoolteacher and ski instructor from Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. He explains the difference between an Oberleutnant, equivalent to a British captain, and an Oberstleutnant, a lieutenant-colonel. I forget which one he is. He’s a battery commander, like Stein. His pelvis has been shattered by .303 machine-gun rounds from a strafing Hurricane. “My guts are soup,” he says. He gives me his wallet and paybook, which he asks me, in a whisper, to deliver to his wife when the war is over. With our meals come four-cig packs of Capstans and four-pellet boxes of chewing gum called Beechies. Ehrlich gives me his from breakfast. “I shall be dead before luncheon.”

  While he naps, an orderly comes in and says an officer of the Cameron Highlanders has been
looking for me. A minute later the tent flap opens and Jock walks in. He asks what I’ve got. I tell him pneumonia.

  He grins. “Good enough.”

  29

  I AM A FATHER. Rose has given birth. A daughter. Jock doesn’t know the child’s name.

  He tries to get me on a truck, but I won’t leave Ehrlich.

  “You’ve got a ticket out,” he says. “I can get you back to Cairo, even Haifa. You’re not going to play the hero, are you?”

  Jock looks hale and trim. He’s on division staff, he says. He draws up a petrol-tin and takes a seat. He has no more news of Rose, except that she’s well and so is the baby. Word has come by victorygram, fifteen words maximum. We toast our new arrival. “You look grand, Jock.”

  He can stay only a minute, he says; he’s hunting up a wounded officer of the Camerons. Seeking this man’s name, he stumbled on to mine. Jock tells me he can pull strings, get me out of here, maybe even by hospital ship. “Pneumonia’s good for two weeks at Lady Lampson’s rest house on the Nile and a month or more for recupe. For Rose to see you will mean the world.”

  I ask Jock what’s coming up for Eighth Army.

  He confirms it will be the Mareth Line. We’re now in mid-December; by February Rommel will have consolidated his position round Gabès and Sfax in Tunisia. The Mareth Line protects these. If I’m healthy, Jock tells me, I’ll be back with my old tank regiment and have become a cog in the assault, which looks to be a bloodbath. Jock says he’ll find a way to get me out, to a staff job if he can; if not, then to some post out of harm’s way.

  My brother-in-law means well. I love him as a friend. Heaven knows he has earned the Military Cross on his lapel, fighting his way out of Tobruk behind fixed bayonets. But the more he speaks of getting me out, the more clearly I know I must stay.

  Ehrlich listens. He understands. Later, when Jock has gone, he and I talk.

  If I take this ticket out, the one Jock can arrange for me, I’ll never see my comrades of the LRDG again. Royal Tanks will catch me up. Am I daft to resist this? I tell Ehrlich of the Italians at Benina. He says nothing, which makes me believe he has experienced the same. “They will pin a medal on you for this,” he says. I tell him of Standage and Miller. He understands that too.

  An orderly appears to clean Ehrlich’s wound and change his dressing. There are plenty of bandages, apparently, but no morphia—for him or for anybody. Ehrlich utters not a peep. He lies very still for a long time, so long that I start to fear he has stopped breathing.

  “Chapman…”

  “Yes.” I roll towards him at once.

  “Will you permit me an observation about your countrymen?”

  I wish very much to hear this, because I suspect he will address my dilemma. But, I tell him, I can’t stand to see him in pain from the exertion of speech. He smiles and rolls on to one elbow so that our eyes meet.

  “You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as—what is the word?—‘amateurs.’” He chuckles at this term, which sends a stab of agony through his guts. Long moments pass before his breath returns.

  “But you are warriors, you English. You are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field.”

  I tell him I don’t understand.

  “Do not be afraid,” Ehrlich says, “to take that decision which a warrior would take—and for a warrior’s reasons.”

  He falls asleep. I do too. When I wake after dark, another wounded officer lies in Ehrlich’s bed. Overnight two more, a Rhodesian and an Australian, take the cot and die in it. I have to get out of here. I decide simply to walk away. Find LRDG headquarters and report for duty. Let the army put me on a charge, I don’t care. My only fear is that the system, when it can’t find me, will notify Rose that I am missing or dead. How to prevent this? I hunt up the South African major who originally checked me in. I find him outside with two other physicians, between surgeries, grabbing a smoke. He understands my fix before I get out two sentences. “Get on,” he says. “I need the bed.”

  He tells me where to pick up a victorygram sheet; the fifteen words will be delivered to anyone I want. The hospital, he says, is forty-eight hours behind on paperwork; that will be my head start. “Travel from dressing station to dressing station. That way, if you fail, you won’t just die by the side of the road.” I dash off the following to Rose:

  In hospital saw Jock safe and sound cracking carelove to you and baby.

  The South African major is coming in as I head out. He stuffs a packet of pills into my fist. “You’re the one I saw before who had pneumonia, right?” He probes my belly and the ribs round my liver. “You’ve got jaundice too.”

  In a pile at the precinct entry are hundreds of boots, belts, headgear and coats—property, apparently, of men who no longer need them. I grab a pair of hightoppers and a new tropel greatcoat. Two hours later, I’m on a 3-tonner lurching towards the front.

  30

  BEFORE I TAKE OFF, I go looking for Nick Wilder. He’s gone. I can’t find Tinker or Popski. Someone tells me the LRDG’s forward base has been moved up to Zella oasis, where I flew in from, a hundred fifty miles southwest of El Agheila. I bum a ride to Wadi Matratin on a five-ton Bedford loaded with tinned cherries and Christmas hams.

  Every vehicle is moving west. Mussolini’s Via Balbia is nose-to-tail with trucks and guns. At Matratin I run into a man I rowed with at Oxford named Jeffers, now a captain in the RASC; he gets me out of the rain into the cab of a 3-tonner. I gulp chalk solution like a pup on a teat. It does nothing. My bowels empty every twenty minutes. Half the troops in the trucks are in the same state. An orderly lectures us: “Keep drinking, it’s the dehydration that kills you.” He gives us salt tablets, so our systems don’t short-circuit for want of electrolytes. We take a spade for a walk at every stop. One sees the same faces, so to speak, again and again.

  As chaotic as the retreat to Cairo had been last year, this advance is worse. Thousands of men have been separated from their units; entire columns of vehicles lumber aimlessly forward with no idea of their destination. All that the drivers know for certain is that there is only one road; the traffic is all going the same direction; and no provost will put you on a charge for heading towards the front.

  By midnight I’m beginning to wonder whether I haven’t made a serious blunder quitting the hospital. Two o’clock comes; I’m clinging to the bank seat in the cab of a canvas-sided lorry, freezing rain sheeting in through the zip-up window. I curl on to myself like a sick cat. Behind in the canvas-covered truckbed ride two squads of South African infantry, each man seated miserably on the inward-facing benches with his rifle upright between his knees and his tin-hatted head lolling on to his forearms, hanging on to the barrel of his Enfield like a drunk on to a lamp post.

  A matching image enters my mind and refuses to leave—a dark image, of the Italian soldiers we gunned down at Benina. I keep seeing them. I have never felt less like a military man. The insignia on my shoulder, the uniform I wear—beneath them, I am still me. I cannot excuse my actions of that night by citing such notions as “war” or “enemy.” And yet this is war.

  I realise I am having a moral crisis. At the same time I’m so fevered that the experience seems to be happening to someone else. I strain to make my mind blank, but the insides of my eyelids keep lighting up like cinema screens, playing the same newsreel over and over. My crisis is happening inverted. The army is trying to send me to the rear, where I can be with my wife and baby, that union which I desire more than anything in the world, yet here I am hastening, against all common sense and the expectations of my peers, towards the front. Why? Because I feel guilty for killing the enemy, which is exactly what I am supposed to do and what I agree I’m supposed to do. When I get to the front, how do I hope to redeem myself? By killing more enemy, or taking such actions as will lead directly or indirectly to the deaths of as many of the enemy as possible, as if by t
his further crime I will absolve all previous crimes, which are not crimes at all but actions for which my country will honour me and in which I in later years no doubt will take secret and perhaps not so secret satisfaction. Am I mad? On the one hand, I cannot and will not let myself believe that what I have ordered and performed at Benina is “right.” It isn’t and never can be. I can’t simply block it out and carry on as if nothing has happened. At the same time I must carry on—for my mates, for England, for Rose and for our child. The alternative is unthinkable. With this, I understand the perverse logic of war and the true tragedy of armed conflict. The enemy against whom we fight are human beings like ourselves, individuals with whom each of us might have been friends except for the deranged fictions of nation, doctrine, race and religion, and whom now we must murder (as they seek to murder us) in the name of those very same fictions. And yet, knowing all this and understanding it, still, in some depraved and ineluctable way, we and they must live it out to the bloody finish.

  I have stopped keeping my diary. All I can do is mark each day with a tick. On the third tick—a bright, windy noon—I stagger into an ADS, an Advanced Dressing Station, and simply sit down among the wounded. There are no tents, no beds, no shelter. Germans, English and Empire troops sprawl side by side across an open flat half the size of a football pitch. Someone gives me an injection. I have no clue what’s in it but I feel better. I wake in the lee of a canvas windbreak where two bandaged Indian troopers are cooking chapatties on a flat stove made from a petrol tin. An orderly is noting my name from my AB64 pay book. The winter sun slants down. As far as sight can carry, the desert is littered with wrecked tanks, trucks and guns.