Killing Rommel (12 page)

Book Three

The Inner Desert

11

I'M LOOKING OVER the windscreen-less bonnet. The speedometer reads 35. As far as sight can carry, the plain is flat as a billiard table and white as an ocean of salt. No need for goggles; the heavy sand grains raised by our tyres are whipped away by the wind before they get a foot high. The air beating past our brows is pellucid. Adam himself breathed nothing purer. Were it noon, we'd be squinting across the surface of a mirage lake, with heat-shimmer rising fifty feet into the air. But the trucks can't travel at noon; the shadow is too short to give a bearing on the sun compass. The lads lie up instead in the shade beneath the undercarriages of their trucks, in sun-scorch so fierce that it wicks the moisture off the surface of your eyeballs and sucks the air and its water content out of your lungs. It's 0900 now though and the day still clings to its last breath of cool. We skim over a surface as smooth as tarmac. Not a bush, not a hummock. A teacup set on the sand would show up five miles away.

Over the Chev's bonnet I can see T1 and R1 patrols, speeding ahead in third gear, six trucks each in diamond formation, with patrol commanders out in front in their jeeps, the lot dispersed in case of air attack—two hundred yards between each vehicle and half a mile between patrols. Collie's jeep lays down tracks ahead; over my tailboard I see our trailing Chevs. They look like torpedo boats at sea. Our truck's plume blasts behind like a shallow wake; the two to our rear throw up their own miniature cockerel tails. The trail blows away to the north. It's gorgeous. We sport like lads set loose in the grandest of amusement parks. Punch grins from behind the wheel. “Fun, ain't it?” He's already got a two-day start on his beard.

The patrols' route from Faiyoum has been south to Beni Suef, past the poor-relation pyramids of Hawara and El Lahun, and on to the Assyut road. Our departure is supposed to be secret but when we bundle through the gharry-and donkey cart–congested bazaar at Nazir el Wab, the boys who sell melons and dates off street-barrows are waiting in the lanes as if they've known we were coming for days. The patrols have pooled their piastres under Sergeant Kehoe of T1; he stocks up as we weave through the crush at a pace slower than a walking man's, buying eggs and dates, lubia beans and fresh oranges. This is the last place that paper money will be good. By ten we have cleared “the cultivation” and left civilisation behind.

The other ranks have still not been briefed on the mission. That will come in the next few days, whenever Jake feels ready. What all have been told is that the usual routes into the desert can no longer be taken. Rommel's forces now hold Siwa oasis, the old LRDG base. From there, the Germans can patrol by air and ground for hundreds of miles. Other enemy units have either physically blocked the tracks via the Qattara Depression or are scouring them too frequently for any Allied formation to take a chance on using them. As for us, we'll be swinging far to the south, beyond the range of Axis patrol planes, then making west across the theoretically impassable waste of the Great Egyptian Sand Sea. For me this is tremendously exciting.

Dearest Rose,

Finally I am where I want to be. Insignificant as our tiny formation may be numerically, I feel for the first time a part of great things. We shall be crossing stretches of wilderness that no motorised expedition, other than prior LRDG patrols, has ever traversed, and seeing sights that few, if any, Europeans have ever seen.

The track into the desert comes up suddenly at the end of an irrigated patch of melons. There's a stone cairn and a battered tin sign with the seal of the Royal Egyptian Automobile Club:

SIWA 500 KM

The column turns off the road. A ragged two-tyre track runs straight ahead. It's hotter away from the river. The temperature jumps ten degrees in the space of a hundred yards, becoming a parched, furnace-like blast that's oddly invigorating. The trucks bang across choppy but good going. I feel elation. I start to turn round for a last glimpse at civilisation. Punch stops me. “Don't look back, sir. Bad luck.”

The track runs dead straight, a washboard that rattles your brain in its pan and wrenches your molars in their sockets. Punch handles the wheel skilfully, though; he finds the speed that skims us crest to crest. Other trucks swing off the verges, seeking smoother going. The wind beats out of the south, our left hand as we speed west, making each trailing vehicle decline in that direction to avoid the dust of the ones ahead. It's a thrilling sight, this desert-camouflaged armada zipping along at forty miles an hour.

Ninety minutes out, at a formation called Needle Rock, our White 10-tonner and Mack NR9 are waiting for us with fuel. A tall Bedford flatbed squats by the rock as well, carrying under tarpaulins the four Afrika Korps jeeps that I had noted back at Faiyoum. My watch says 1100. Punch logs the temp at 122, though it doesn't feel that hot. The men are lying up under the lorries, making a lunch of tinned salmon, melons and egg-fruit. The RASC driver off-loads the jeeps, refusing all assistance. He wears welder's gloves. Even under the tarps the metal surfaces are too sizzling to touch. The men eye the swastika-and-palm-tree insignias of the Afrika Korps on the Kübelwagens' bonnets. “Who're we after on this beat-up, Lieutenant?” calls a trooper as I pass, heading for a pow-wow at Jake's truck. I stay quiet and keep moving.

Supper that evening is at a place called Mushroom Rock which, not surprisingly, looks exactly like a mushroom; then a long second day over soft, deep sand, with trucks again and again bellying into that spirit-deflating nose-dive stop, like driving into a vat of tapioca. Out come the sand mats and channels. The labour is excruciating at 120-plus but the men's hearts remain high; they treat the crossing as a contest—which driver can get stuck least?—and chaff each other with merry profanity when a rival hits the soup.

It's much drier here than along the coast. My photo of Rose curls up like a leaf in a flame. Spines of paperbacks warp; the stitches in your boots parch and pull apart. Still, we're a long way from true inner desert. Signs of human passage are everywhere. The sand is scored with tyre tracks by the hundred. Markers line the trail: iron posts, stone cairns, empty petrol tins weighted with sand to keep them from blowing away. Every twenty miles we pass a dump of fuel and rations, water tins and spare parts. We haven't had to do any navigation yet. Just follow the track and the dust of the trucks in front of you. Late in the second day, I ask Collie where the Sand Sea begins.

“Don't worry, Chap. You won't miss it.”

I'm keeping a diary. It'll help with the “going” reports I must file, but I want it as well to keep my thoughts in order. It's easy to drift off out here. Late in the afternoon of Day Two, we stop at a well called Bir el Aden, which is nothing but a circle of stones in the middle of a hundred miles of sand. An iron pipe has been topped with a pair of petrol tins as a marker; there's a pulley and two buckets. Will we camp here? No, comes the word from Jake, we've still got two hours of daylight. The trucks and jeeps take on all the water they can carry, emptying all partially full containers. It seems mad, pouring good drinking water into the sand, but you can't put new in with old. If the old is bad, it'll contaminate the new. All hands re-balance their loads, checking guns, tyres, fluids. Jake comes by and asks if all is well; I say yes. Do I need anything? Any reason to go back?

At 1030 on the third day, the patrols enter the broad gravel basin in which lies Ain Dalla, our first real landmark.
Ain
means spring in Arabic. A patch of good going appears. We fly over it. Up ahead one of the trucks has stopped. Puncture. Our vehicles sweep past at forty. The bogged truck is Sergeant Kehoe's, of T1, Wilder's patrol. All four crewmen are out working with patch kits and jack. I can see two fellows pulling the inner tube out of the tyre as we speed by. No other vehicle has halted to help them. This is policy, straight from the manual. Still it's unnerving, waving and watching Kehoe's truck recede, all alone in this vast nothing. I ask Punch, “What if they can't get moving again?”

“They will.”

Time reads 1111 when we come over a rise and there's Ain Dalla. Jake's and Nick's patrols are already on-site setting up for the midday siesta when our three T3 trucks and jeep clatter in. I swear every nut and bolt is rattling and every rivet straining to pop from its seat; the poor steering rods have taken such a pounding that Durrance, the fitter, has to wait till the steel cools before beating them back into true; if he hammers the rods while they're still hot, he says, they'll bend like rubber.

Ain Dalla is population zero, a few date palms and a sandhill with the spring at mid-slope and a six-inch pipe feeding the excellent, cool water into a splash pool hammered out of discarded petrol tins. A queue of a dozen men waits to snatch a quick skull-scrub and whore's bath. Each patrol establishes its own noonday camp, dispersed in case of air attack. The men finish off the fresh fruit. Punch reminds me that this is the last time we'll have extra water, so shave and wash now because we won't get a chance again. The 10-tonner fuel lorry has come with us this far. It will top up all our tanks, then head back to Faiyoum. As Standage and Oliphant rig our midday lie-up, Collier and I drive forward to catch up with Nick and Jake. Jake's crew are setting up the Wyndom aerial to radio back to base at Cairo. The two masts are seventeen feet tall, supported by guy lines, with the aerial suspended in between. Pints of water are being dispensed when we come up. The fellows pool them for tea. Wilder walks up at the same time we do.

“How do you like the real desert, Chapman?”

I tell him I thought it was supposed to cool off in September.

“This
is
cool.” He laughs. “C'mon, let's have a chin-wag.”

Officers and NCOs assemble in the shade beneath a flysheet alongside Jake's weapons truck. The vehicle radiates heat like a foundry. Jake reviews the scheme for the postnoon, quickly so we can rest, and so Nick and Collier and I can get back to our tea and a feed. I watch the faces. How competent they are! How relaxed! The fellows might as well be convening on the railway platform at Wimbledon.

“What happened with Kehoe back there?” Jake asks.

“Puncture.”

Jake's navigator, Corporal Erskine, goes over the form for tackling the Sand Sea, whose easternmost rampart, I gather as he speaks, is only five hours ahead. We'll camp short tonight and attack the dunes early; you need shadows to judge ascents and crests. Jake still hasn't called a war council. The fellows, however, have pretty well doped out the scheme. They're excited. I am too. So far there's no sense of danger. The scale and isolation of the landscape is so overwhelming that, if you ran into other humans, your instinct would be to hail them in for a smoke and a cup of tea. The emptiness humbles you. When Punch speaks, or Collie or Oliphant, it's often in a whisper. I catch myself doing the same.

Dearest Rose,

One would think that the imagination would run riot in a place so blank and devoid of stimuli. But the case is the opposite. The creative faculty shuts down.

I don't think of Rose till we're in camp at night. Jake was right; one expends all one's energy simply trying to focus. “A man lives like a reptile out here,” says Punch as we spool across good gravel at twenty miles per hour, squinting ahead for sign of the Sand Sea. “Conserve everything, even the air in your lungs.” He shows me how to breathe through the nostrils, never the mouth. “You'll lose three pints a day, just out of your gizzard.”

12

Three days into the Sand Sea now. The dunes tower as high as thirty-storey buildings; we speed up their faces in our rolling-bomb trucks with tyres half flat for traction and the accelerator pressed to the floorboard. It's like climbing mountains of sugar. One skates over a surface of grain geometry so fragile that it tears like silk at the slightest mistread. Ten times a day we dig ourselves out of bogs in sun like a furnace blast and air so scorching it sears your lungs just to breathe.

I've decided to combine my diary into a sort of running letter to Rose. Might as well, since we can't mail anything till we get back. The Sand Sea lives up to its reputation. The terrain is like the surface of Mars—devoid of life, perfectly geometric, shaped only by forces of wind, gravity, and time. Once you are in it, the landscape dominates your attention utterly. To stand on a razorback ridge with a plume of sand blowing off it sideways, squinting into eternity at the ranks of endless, rolling combers, each coloured a different shade of pastel as the distance recedes, must be like what George Leigh Mallory felt at the summit of Everest if he ever got there. Then you slide down into the trough between the crests—and slide is the word, for the descent is more like skiing than driving, with all four tyres useless except as skids and no amount of wheel-turning altering your course one jot. The emotion changes from otherworldly exaltation to something deep, maternal and cocoon-like. You feel safe. Striking the floor of the trough, when your front tyres at last find purchase on the sandy but drivable flat and your hearing and sense of touch return with the grind of your engine and the feel of the pedals starting again to respond, you are enveloped by a feeling of release that is prehistoric, primordial, other-terrestrial. You understand why holy men seek out desert places. The great dunes seem to collect and concentrate some immense cosmic energy and focus it on to the boulevard down which you now glide. It mesmerises you. Counteracting this, the men revert to their profane soldier selves. Our Kiwis, most mature of troopers, curse and jabber now; they make engines rev and gears grind. Orders are shouted and a great hubbub is made of resettling, reorganising, refitting. The flat between dunes can be two or three miles wide. Here the lads pump up the tyres from 10 psi to 40 (they'll go to 60 later on hard gravel serir); drivers and fitters slide beneath their undercarriages to sweep out the sand, which has wedged itself into every joint and crevice, abrading oil from lubrication points and burnishing the undersides of propeller shafts as if they'd been scoured with steel wool.

All day we follow the tracks of the patrols ahead of us. The parties try to keep together but it's impossible; the skilled desert hands inevitably outpace the newcomers. By noon of the third day, Jake's and Nick's tailboards have sailed from sight over the massive sand swells. In T3 patrol we rotate drivers, seeking ones with the big-dune touch. Punch turns out to be a thorough hand. He takes over from Oliphant. Holden does fine, leading in Collie's jeep, but Marks in the third Chev can't get the hang of it and Hornsby in the Breda truck—“Guns,” as the fellows call it—is setting new records for B&B, bogging down and boiling over. Miller, the medic, takes over. I relieve Punch when he starts to wear down. I'm happy to contribute. I feel less like a passenger. When we halt at noon on the second day, Standage shows me a trick for refreshment: a tot of rum with water and lime powder in a shallow saucer. “Set it here,” he says, placing the cocktail on the crown of a tyre in the shade of the mud-guard, “where the breeze can work on it.” Sure enough, five minutes produce a brilliant cool drink. Standage sips his like a colonel poolside at the Gezira Sporting Club.

My “going” reports read the same every night:

Impassable to M.T.

Motor transport—meaning tanks and artillery—can't cross the Sand Sea. Even our specially rigged trucks can barely handle the extreme terrain—and then thanks only to the skill and patience of their crews.

Ahead, Jake's and Nick's formations have split up. They have to, to avoid driving over sand displaced and weakened by the trucks of other patrols crossing the dunes ahead of them. Vehicles fan out, seeking firm going. Trailing in Jake and Nick's wake, we can see scarred dune faces where trucks have bellied and had to be dug out. By the third night, our patrol camps alone. I've been looking forward to this all day, but now, when we stop, an eerie emotion overtakes me. The same dunes that had seemed so welcoming and maternal yesterday have turned ghoulish and uncanny. No one else seems to feel it. The lads turn to in brisk fashion; soon they have a pretty camp going. We're in a vale between two-hundred-foot combers; a narrow avenue extends northeast round one corner and southwest round another. It's like sitting in the bottom of a bottle.

I'm getting claustrophobic. The world has gone lunar and, with the descent of darkness, freezing. The sensation is like being on another planet, in a bad way, as if you've gone so far out you can never come back. I can feel my breath coming shallow and my heart hammering. What's wrong with me? The others are yarning and laughing; three campfires blaze gaily. To make matters worse, a weird, otherworldly keening now rises from beyond the shoulder of the dunes. I have never heard anything so ghostly. I eye Pokorny, the SAS sergeant; he hears it too. The sound rises in pitch, drops, then returns louder. Engines? Human voices? “What the hell is that?” Pokorny asks.

“Sand,” says Grainger nonchalantly, crossing from the wireless truck and taking a seat with his back against the right rear tyre of Guns. “When the day's been blowy like today and the wind drops at night, the grains on the surface settle and rub against one another.”

“That's what's making that sound?”

“Spooky, ain't it?”

The old sweats get a chuckle, watching us new men find our legs. Punch grins across the fire and gestures in my direction.

“Now take Mr. Chapman here. Content as a clam he is, out in the Tall Sand! Ain't you, sir, away from all that bumf back in the regular army—fatigues and drills, parades every time you turn round and always some lofty bugger jumping down your neck cause you got the wrong button or the seams of your drill shorts don't match. I was with Second New Zealand in Operation Battleaxe before I got away to here, thank heaven. The desert was like bloody Piccadilly at rush hour—lorries and guns, tanks and carriers. Not out here! This is the life!” Punch gestures to the endless dunes and sky. “No officers—or only decent ones that know the score—and nothing to bother you except the odd scorpion in your boot or black-snake crawling up your arse in your sleep.”

Day Four, I get a moment to speak alone with Sergeant Collier. It's noon, the trucks are lying up waiting for the sun to fall from its zenith. On foot Collie and I have climbed a skyscraper dune and are peering ahead through binoculars, seeking tracks that may be Jake's or Nick's. Collie offers me a smoke. His birthday, it turns out, is 17 September, same as mine. He's twenty-seven, five years older than I. In civilian life, he tells me, he's a farm appraiser. He's got a wife named Nola, short for Eleanor, and three daughters. He volunteered for 2NZ Division and, from there, for LRDG. He's one of the original volunteers who were in from the start, when Colonel Bagnold founded the formation. “It was called LRP then, the Long Range Patrols.”

I note his thick red-blond forearms as he raises his cigarette case to shield a light. On one side is a hand-drawn “Swee' Pea” over a sketch of Popeye, Olive Oyl, and their baby. His eldest, Susannah, did it for him when he shipped out.

I admire him. I think of Rose and our life to come. In a way Collier is who I want to be. A straight-ahead chap, decent and true, with no humbug about him.

All afternoon we assault dune after dune, executing 90-degree turns at each summit to halt and peer ahead through glasses, seeking a glimmer of Nick or Jake. No exertion has drained me like this. We stick again and again. Finally, with my watch reading 1600, we ski down the face of the last razorback and we're through!

The Sand Sea is behind us. An endless gravel plain stretches west. Where are Jake and Nick? Collie and I split the patrol into two-truck sections and take off in opposite directions. My outfit finds tyre tracks just before dark. I fire a Verey flare to bring Collie in.

Together we follow the trail into the setting sun. Dark comes fast, this far south. We're groping lights-out across a pan strewn with sharp black stones the size of crab apples. Guns has lost third gear and the wireless truck labours with a cracked sump; it's leaking oil so fast we have to stop every fifteen minutes to refill. Collie and Punch go ahead. An hour passes. Finally we catch a glittering, which grows to a gleam, then a solitary light and at last divides in two and becomes the headlamps of Collie's Chev coming back to guide us in. The crab-apple plain turns to pebbly gravel, broken at intervals by low crescent dunes. Jake's and Nick's trucks camp round petrol-tin fires at the base of one.

We come in to no ceremony. One of Jake's corporals indicates the area where Punch's truck has already set up and where we are to make camp as well. Collie passes the word to all hands: no tea and no supper till the trucks' needs have been seen to, all weapons cleaned, oiled and recovered, and loads re-balanced after the day's jouncing and jostling. He makes straight to Jake to report, with me in train.

I'm expecting a rocket for our tardiness. But Jake is fine. When he offers tea, Collie declines till our fellows have had theirs. I feel immense relief. We've made it! The day could easily have devolved into calamity. But here we are, in one piece and still rolling.

Then we cross to our little camp and Oliphant comes up with a sick look. “We were sorting the loads for tomorrow…”

“What is it?” asks Collie.

“…when we got to the forty-four-gallon fuel drums. They've been under tarps, remember…”

“What's wrong?”

“Diesel.”

Collie's face changes. Three 44-gallon drums is more than half our patrol's reserves. If they're diesel fuel, our trucks' petrol engines can't use them.

Loading in the dark back at Faiyoum, we must have somehow put up the wrong drums.

“How many?” Collie asks.

“Three out of five.”

The bottom drops out of my stomach. Three drums equals 132 gallons: 1,320 miles. In other words, T3 doesn't have enough fuel even to reach its objective, let alone get back.

“I was the one who loaded the drums,” I say. “It's my fault.”