Fortunes of War Page 6

  A wind, cool enough to be pleasurable, blew into Simon’s face and he said to himself, ‘Why, it’s beautiful!’ The whole city was beautiful and for a few minutes the beauty remained, then the pearl hardened and lost its lustre. The sun had topped the horizon. The air was already warm. The terrible crescendo of the day had begun.

  Major Hardy, arriving at the barracks square, chose to place his staff car half-way down the column. Simon, given no order to join him, climbed in beside the driver of the leading lorry. Trying to sound knowledgeable, he asked, ‘How are we going out, corporal?’

  The corporal, whose round, sunburnt face was even younger than his own, replied, ‘Oh, the usual way, sir,’ and Simon waited to see what way that was. It proved to be familiar. They went, as Clifford’s party had done, past Mena House and the pyramids. The corporal did not give the pyramids a look and Simon, seeing for the second time the small one sliding out from behind the greater, felt less wonder and said nothing. When they passed the excavated village, only Simon noticed it. They were travelling slowly so the lorries would keep together. At first the pace — it seldom exceeded ten miles an hour — was tolerable but when they faced the open desert, with the sun rising and shining into the cab window, tedium came down on them. Until then, Simon had still been attached to the known world but now it was disappearing behind him. He felt apprehensive, disconnected and rootless, and asked himself what on earth he was doing, going off like this into the unknown? Then, it came to him that, though he was vulnerable, he was not alone. He was a man among other men who, if they had to act, would act together. Yet the apprehension, fixed in his stomach, could not be moved. To reassure himself, he asked the driver, ‘What’s it like out there?’

  ‘Oh,’ the driver, called Arnold, ducked his head in a deprecating way, ‘not bad, sir. You get browned off, a’course, but it’s got its moments.’

  Arnold had been one of those stranded in Cairo and had to find his battalion. He had no certainty he would do so. ‘Never know what’s happened when you’re away. Don’t want to start with a fresh mob, not when you’re used to your own lot.’

  This statement conveyed a sense of confusion ahead and Simon asked, ‘How do you find your way around in the desert?’

  The corporal laughed. ‘You get a feel for it, sir.’

  The sun rose above the cab roof and mirage hid the sand. The sky, if anyone could bear to look at it, had the molten whiteness of mid-day. They touched on the edge of a town. It was like a holiday scene with small, white villas, date palms and walls hung with purple bougainvillaea, then came the white dazzle of sand and a sea, in bands of green, blue and violet, that seemed more light than water. They passed abandoned camping sites where regimental flags hung over emptiness, then drove between two shallow lakes, one of them green, the other raspberry pink, both dotted with floating chunks of soda. Simon could not hide his astonishment.

  ‘What a weird place!’

  ‘It’s only Alex, sir.’ Outside the town, Arnold tentatively asked, ‘Time to brew up, sir?’

  ‘Good heavens, yes. I should have thought of it, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘That’s all right, sir.’

  The red flag was hoisted and the convoy drew into the side of the road. Numbers of army trucks and cars were going east. It seemed that that day only the convoy was going west. Looking down its length, Simon saw Major Hardy getting out of his car. The major was merely a passenger to the front but Simon, with no great confidence in his own power to command, felt it would be politic to treat him as if he were in charge. As Simon strolled down to the car, the major, spreading a large-scale map out over the bonnet, lifted a dark, lined face with a bar of black hair on the upper lip and gave him a stare of acute irritation. Simon started to introduce himself but Hardy interrupted him. ‘Your section’s brewing up. Better get back to see fair play.’

  The sergeant, whose glum, folded face was kippered by the sun, was demonstrating, with an air of long-suffering, how to make a fire and boil water for the brew. The new men looked on as two large stones were set up to form a hob for the brew can, which was a cut-down petrol can. The water came from the convoy’s reserves but the sergeant said sternly, ‘You don’t use it, see, if you can get it from anywhere else.’ He packed scrubwood between the stones and set it alight. Down the convoy, other fires were being started for other sections. At intervals, at the roadside, groups of men stood and watched for water to boil.

  ‘Now,’ said the sergeant, ‘y’puts in yer tea, see.’ He broke open a case of tea and threw two large handfuls on to the boiling water. ‘Right. Now y’lifts it off, see.’ He lifted the can as though his dry, brown hands were insulated against heat. ‘Right. And now — where’s yer mugs?’

  The mugs stood together on the sand, a concourse of mugs, one for each man in the section and a couple over. Vincent trailed condensed milk from mug to mug, giving an inch or more of milk, and then the sergeant splashed the brew can over them. The men, picking up their tea mugs, moved into groups as though each had sorted out the companions natural to his kind. Already, Simon thought, they had ceased to be a collection of strangers and soon they would be wedded into twos and threes of which each member belonged to the others as he had belonged to Trench and Codley. Feeling himself solitary and apart, he looked for Arnold but Arnold had his own friends, men who had been with him, stranded, in Cairo. The sergeant brought over one of the spare mugs and two bully beef sandwiches. ‘Spot of char, sir?’, then remained beside Simon who, deeply gratified, asked him where he had been before he went on leave.

  ‘Mersa. The jerries were just outside.’

  ‘Where do you think they are now?’

  The sergeant snorted. ‘A few yards up the road, I reckon.’

  Simon saw that he was not, as he had thought, sullen or remote. He was dejected by defeat. ‘We had Gazala. We had Tobruk. It was hunkey-dorey. Looked like in no time we’d be back in Benghazi, then this happened.’

  ‘What did happen?’

  ‘Came down on us like a bat out’a hell.’

  Arnold called, ‘Blue flag, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Blue flag.’

  Looking towards the horizon where the heat was thickening into a pall, Simon could imagine the German tanks appearing like monstrous bats, advancing with such speed and fury, the convoy could be wiped out before it had time to turn round. But the horizon was empty and even the eastbound traffic had stopped.

  ‘Quiet, isn’t it!’

  Arnold said, ‘Jerry’s too busy to bother us,’ and as he spoke, a Heinkel, returning from a reconnaissance flight, dived over the convoy. He braked sharply. The Heinkel, returning, sprayed the sand like a gesture of contempt. The bullets winged harmlessly into the sand. The plane flew off.

  As the sun began to sink, Simon was concerned about the routine for the night. At some place and point in time he should give the order to make camp but before the need became an anxiety Arnold said, ‘Think we should leaguer here, sir?’

  There was a glimmer of white on the coast. The glimmer grew into a village of pleasant holiday homes with a bay, like a long white bone, that curved into the desert’s cinderous buffs and browns.

  ‘Who lives out here?’ Simon asked.

  ‘No one, now. They all moved away long ago.’

  The lorries were positioned into a close-rank formation that served as camp and defence. Arnold, smiling as though he had begun to feel a protective affection for Simon, asked him, ‘Permission to bathe, sir.’

  Simon followed as the men, running between the dunes, shouting at each other, pulling off their shirts and shorts, went naked into a sea as warm and clinging as milk. Lying on the sea, in the haze of evening, he looked back at the village and was surprise to find it was still there. Had he been asked as they covered mile after mile of sand, ‘Where would you choose to be?’ he might well have chosen this oasis beside the white shore, with its villas under a shelter of palm trees. He raised his head to look westwards into the foggy distance of the desert coa
st and seeing nothing, he had an illusion of safety. The enemy must be further away than the sergeant imagined. Content filled him and he smiled at the man nearest to him. ‘We didn’t expect this, did we?’

  The man laughed and twisted his head in a movement of appreciation. ‘Dead cushy,’ he said.

  That night, startled out of sleep by the rising moon, Simon felt the earth vibrating beneath him. He sat up, uncertain where he was, and saw the brilliant whiteness of the houses patterned over by the palm fronds. There was a booming in the air, distant but heavy, and he knew it must be artillery. Pulling himself down into his sleeping-bag, he put his hands over his ears and sank back into sleep.

  For most of the next day the convoy seemed alone in the desert. Occasionally a dispatch rider passed on a motorcycle and once a staff car came up behind them and went by with the speed of a police car. Then, in mid-morning, a pinkish smudge appeared on the horizon. Simon asked Arnold what he thought it was.

  ‘Could be a sandstorm.’

  The smudge, pale and indefinite at first, deepened in colour and expanded, swelling towards the convoy until, less than a mile away, it revealed itself as a sand cloud, rising so thickly into the heat fuzz of the upper air that the sun was almost occluded. Inside the cloud, the dark shapes of vehicles were visible. The first of them was a supply truck, lurching, top-heavy with mess equipment. The procession that followed stretched away to the horizon. Like the convoy, it moved slowly, creaking and clanking amid the stench of its own exhausts and petrol fumes. As they reached and passed it, Simon felt the heat from the vehicles that followed one after the other on the other side of the road.

  Transports carried tanks that had lost their treads. Trucks towed broken-down aircraft or other trucks. Troop carriers were piled with men who slept, one on top of the other, a sleep of exhaustion. Guns, RAF wagons, recovery vehicles, armoured cars, loads of Naafi stores and equipment, went past, mile after mile of them, their yellow paint coated with sand, all unsteady, all, it seemed, on the point of collapse. As they moved nose to tail, they gave an impression of scrapyard confusion yet somehow maintained a semblance of order.

  A staff car, that had pulled on to the wrong side of the road, brought the convoy to a halt. Major Hardy, striding towards it, shouted, ‘What’s going on? Is the whole damned army in retreat?’

  Another major looked out of the disabled car, his face creased with weariness, and shouted back, ‘No, it damn well isn’t. The line’s holding a few miles up the road. The Aussie 9th Division is rumoured to be on its way — and it better be. They’re a mixed bunch back there: 8th Army, Kiwis, South Africans, a few Indians. How long they can hold out is anybody’s guess.’

  ‘But where’s this lot going?’

  ‘Ordered to prepare defences further east.’

  ‘Where? The back gardens of Abou Kir?’

  ‘Likely enough,’ the major wiped the sweat from his face and gave a grin. ‘We’ll fight on the beaches.’

  ‘This convoy’s to report to 7th Motor Brigade. Any idea where that is?’

  ‘Search me. Could be anywhere. It’s hell and plain bloody murder where we came from.’

  The obstructing car was pushed off the road to await a mechanic and the convoy went on, moving westward when it seemed that everything else in the world was going east. The breakdowns become more frequent. Every few hundred yards there was a halt and men were sent to push some vehicle away while Major Hardy questioned anyone he could find to question. He became more flustered, finding no one who knew or cared where the convoy might find its divisional headquarters. He shouted at Simon, ‘Don’t dog my heels, Boulderstone. Get a move on or we’ll have another night on the road.’

  They made what progress they could. Structures appeared beside the road, temporary and flimsy but suggesting that at last, among the muddle of wire and piled up stones, the tired newcomers might find their destination. Some sappers were at work on a crack in the tarmac and Simon, seeing them before Hardy had a chance to get to them, ran to make the usual inquiries. From their manner, he was uncertain whether they were telling him the truth or not. One sapper said, ‘The Auk’s down the road. Been standing there all day without his hat, just watching this ruddy circus go by. He’ll tell you where to go.’

  Simon doubted that but asked, ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘The Auk? Great man, ruddy hero. Big. Big chap. You can’t miss ’im.’

  The sappers, still laughing, stood back to let the convoy bump its way across the broken surface and drive on towards a red blur where the sun was beginning to set. The booming that had disturbed Simon the night before, now started again; a much more ponderous sound. Stars of red and green were rising into the sunset and Simon asked Arnold: ‘Is that the front line?’

  ‘No, the front’s a good ten miles on.’ They drove another mile. ‘Think we’d better get down, sir?’

  It was time to leaguer. The men sprang from the trucks, shaking the cramp from their legs, cheerfully congratulating each other as though they had reached home. The westbound traffic had been stopped by its own congestion and the dust had begun to settle. The air cleared but there was not much to see; only a vast plain, crimsoned by sunset, from which two columns of smoke, black as soot, rose into the blood-red brilliance of the sky.

  Two

  At eight a.m.. the hour when the Egyptian sun exploded in at the edges of shutters and curtains, Harriet Pringle heard an uproar outside her bedroom door. The noise was only one woman’s voice — the voice of Madame Wilk, the proprietor of the pension — but so heightened was it by panic and outrage that Harriet jumped out of bed, certain that calamity was upon them.

  Madame Wilk was shouting into the telephone, ‘They were seen. How do I know who saw them? It is known everywhere. I am telling you — thousands of them, all broken and useless, the men dead to the world. I have friends in Heliopolis and they rang me. They said, “They’re still coming. A terrible sight, a whole army in retreat.’” Madame Wilk, her indignation growing, began to thump the door beside her, Harriet’s door. ‘Get up. Get up. You’re finished, you British. The Germans are here already. Oh, oh, oh, what shall I do?’ The voice rose into a funereal wail of such agony that Harriet opened the door.

  Outside, Madame Wilk stood with the receiver in her hand, a shrunken little monkey of a woman with large brown eyes, faded and swimming with tears. She was a Copt, married during the first war to a British officer who had gone home leaving her with nothing but a British passport. Now she realized that if the British were finished, she, too, was finished, and the tears overflowed from her wrinkled eyelids and trickled down her withered cheeks. ‘All my shares is gone. What have I? What is to happen to me?’

  ‘What will happen to any of us?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘You? — you will run away, but me! What can I live on? Here I have worked, I have saved for my old age. I bought my pension, I bought shares because of my good sense, and now what are they worth? Nothing. They’re worth nothing.’

  Major Perry, putting his head out of the room opposite, said ‘They’ll recover. The exchange goes up and down like a bally yo-yo.’

  ‘What good my shares recover and me not here where my shares are?’

  Major Perry’s laughter distracted Madame Wilk so Harriet was able to close her door. She hurried to take her shower and dress so she could find the truth of this latest, frightful, rumour of retreat, then went out to the long hallway that was the heart and centre of the Pension Wilk. The hall served as dining-room and sitting-room (not that anyone would sit there for long), and the tables and chairs, lined along one wall, almost blocked the passage. Guest-rooms opened off on either side. They were small but each had a shower-room attached and this enabled Madame Wilk to claim for the pension ‘luxury’ status.

  Windows were shuttered during the daylight hours and meals had to be taken by artificial light. Harriet found this oppressive but had to accept that in Egypt the sun was an enemy. If it were not excluded, the indoor heat would be intolerabl
e. Still, she felt a sense almost of triumph when she found that a door in the hall had been left open and daylight shone on the breakfast tables. The door, propped open at dawn for the sake of ventilation, had to be closed, locked and bolted before the guests were up. Harriet had often heard Madame Wilk’s voice raised when a safragi had forgotten to shut it, but this morning, with other things to scream about, Madame herself had forgotten the door. Walking through it for the first time, Harriet could see why she was so concerned to keep it shut. It led on to a flat roof. The Pension Wilk was at the top of a tall block of flats and Harriet, going to the edge of the roof, found that only a single rail ran between her and the drop down to the street. Conscious of daring, she stood by the rail and looked towards Giza, half expecting to see the defeated army wandering in past Mena House. But there was no army. She saw nothing but the pyramids, that were visible only in early morning and at sunset, looking as small as the little metal pyramids that were used as pencil sharpeners.

  The morning was so still, it did not relate to war. The traffic had not started up and she could hear, from a hundred yards below her, the bell of a camel and the slap of the camel-driver’s bare feet.

  She moved round the roof, astonished by the extent and clarity of the view in this early sunlight. Soon the town would be hidden under heat but now she could see the small houses washing, like a sea of curdled foam, up to the cliff-face of the Mokattam Hills. Above them Mohammad Ali’s alabaster mosque, uniquely white in this sand-coloured city, sat with minarets pricked, like a fat, white, watchful cat.