Take or Destroy! (21 page)

‘Oh!’ Murray was intrigued. ‘Nice chap, though, really.’

She still kept her eyes on the typewriter but he saw her lips tighten. ‘George Hockold’s a good man,’ she said.

‘You’ve seen a lot of him over the last few days. Even over and above the call of duty.’

‘Yes.’

Murray lit a cigarette and allowed a long pause. ‘Come to mean anything to you, Kirstie?’ he asked abruptly.

She lowered her hands from the typewriter and swung the swivel chair until she was facing him. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly.

Her eyes were blazing and she spoke with such defiance, as though challenging him to dispute her opinion or question her any further, that he drew in smoke unexpectedly and was glad to turn away coughing. When he recovered, she was picking calmly at the typewriter again.

‘Well,’ he said, trying to make his peace. ‘Good luck to him, Kirstie. I think he’ll pull it off. At least
Umberto’s
at sea.’

Not half she wasn’t.

There was a small lop running, and it gave the ship an uneasy lurching motion that was sheer hell to the seasick men below.

Because the decks were packed with sailors trying to push the landing ladders and gangways into place and lash them alongside ready for dropping ashore, and men were still screwing steel plates to baulks of timber erected round the bridge and stacking sandbags in appropriate places, there was no room on deck for the troops. Forced to remain below, they fought with their queasy stomachs and clung grimly to the few places where fresh air was available. By common consent, those with stronger insides left them to it and kept out of their way.

With its steel bulkheads, the place looked like a prison, the men grouped chiefly near the ladders because there might be a torpedo and it might be necessary to get out in a hurry. Taped to- the bulkheads were roneoed maps of Qaba, but not many looked at them because they knew them off by heart now. Five hundred paces, turn left. Three hundred more and there you were. It was as simple as that because Hockold’s knowledge and Murdoch’s experience had made it so. A few men muttered to themselves, but most of them were bored and simply talked of wives, children and families. A few smoked, wrestled and indulged in horseplay. A few played cards - the officers bridge, the men poker or rummy. A few of the more experienced slept peacefully. Watching them, Hockold decided that he loved the army. In no other civilized unit did men mean so much to each other.

The men on
Umberto
were the lucky ones. Their ship was at least reasonably stable. Despite the calm sea, the smaller vessels were moving up and down like horses on a roundabout and the soldiers were suffering terribly from sea-sickness so that the smell below decks was already appalling. A stink of petrol, vomit and blocked-up lavatories filled the air, and the crews, knowing it would be their lot to clean it all up when the pongos left, could only regard the whole business with disgust.

Yet they were all glad to be on the way, despite what lay ahead. They were emotionally drained, and the prospect of action was welcomed because it meant an end to doubt. If it had to be done, was the feeling, then let it be done and over with as soon as possible.

One or two had prayed quietly to themselves during the night, but the time had passed slowly because most of them had been too excited to sleep. As dawn had broken, a few had directed uneasy glances at the sea for prowling U-boats, and a few had kept their eyes on the sky for the Luftwaffe. But there were no U-boats and only RAF planes in the sky.

Because he needed to be busy, Taffy Jones was showing off his belt with its collection of regimental badges. ‘Seaforth Highlanders, Scots Guards, 17th Lancers, Buffs and Diehards,’ he was saying in a curious cracked voice. ‘I have got them all, look you.’

The tea and the food came round. It was chiefly bully sandwiches and soup. The smaller vessels had taken theirs aboard the night before and the bread was curling a little at the edges, but they ate it without complaint. At midday, the launches went in turn alongside
Horambeb,
chugging away on the beam, long enough to receive hot boxes and large Thermos flasks which had been prepared in the galley. Only Cook-Corporal Rogers complained at the tepid stew but during the afternoon, with nothing left to grumble about, he occupied himself with a game of poker.

‘ ‘Tes a nice pot you ‘ave there, me dear,’ Eva said.

Rogers stared at the money in front of him. ‘Won’t do me much good if I stop one, will it?’ he said.

Eva’s face was expressionless. ‘You could leave ‘un to me,’ he suggested.

Rogers seemed to be caught by a sense of foreboding. ‘Fair enough, Tinner,’ he said. ‘It’ll be in my wallet in my blouse pocket. Just make sure I’ve had it first, that’s all.’

In the wheelhouse of the landing craft, Carter lounged near the compass, idly watching the card. He was happy. He didn’t even have to worry about navigation. Not far below him, Corporal Cobbe was cheering up a group of young soldiers who had suddenly got cold feet. ‘Why worry?’ he asked. ‘We’ll either get shot at or we won’t. If we don’t, that’s all right. If we get hit, we’ll either die or we won’t. If we don’t, that’s all right. If we do, we shan’t be in a position to bloody worry, will we?’

On the bridge of
Umberto,
Hockold sucked at a cold pipe, his thoughts on the job ahead. From time to time, they strayed to Kirstie McRuer and he wondered what it would be like to visit her after the war as she’d suggested. Then he remembered that for him there was to be no after the war, just an empty darkness among the wreckage of Qaba, and he frowned and wrenched his mind back to the present. Alongside him, Babington tried to remember the family he hadn’t seen for two years and to his horror found it was growing harder to imagine what the two individuals he’d left as children could look like, now that they were in their teens and growing into adulthood. In the officers’ wardroom Captain Watson was busy over a sheet of paper, trying not very successfully to let his wife know what he was feeling.

‘Last letter home?’ Amos asked.

Watson nodded. ‘Trying to give the impression that I’m about to become a hero without suggesting a massacre. Since she’ll get it after it’s all over, she’ll be able to make her own mind up anyway.’

He paused, his mind far away. Sometimes his body ached for his wife. But above all he needed to see her, to know that her face was as it was on the photographs she sent, that her hair was as soft as he recalled, that her eyes were as warm. She was only twenty even now and, because they were to be parted so soon, she’d been voracious on their honeymoon. ‘I must have something to remember,’ she’d kept saying with a desperate ferocity, and in his heart of hearts he hoped he’d collect a Blighty wound and be sent home. He’d tried often enough in the past but he’d come through two years of being chased up and down the desert without a scratch.

Amos was brooding. ‘It makes you wonder who’ll inherit the earth after this little scrum’s over,’ he said.

‘Not the meek,’ Watson said. ‘That’s for certain.’

‘Office wallahs, file-carriers, pen-pushers and other fly blighters, I expect. They’re the ones who’ll get the knighthoods and the seats on the boards. I wonder sometimes, in fact, if they really know at home what we’re up to out here.’

Watson looked up and grinned. ‘Oh, I think so. The British have always been confirmed in their belief that everything bad happens abroad.’

Below them, at the bottom of the ladder, Willow was also clutching a piece of paper. He was nervous and the paper gave him a lot of comfort. Sidebottom, who was prowling about, his mad eyes bright, watched him for a while, seeing him yawn prodigiously and then snap his jaws together, looking faintly sick. ‘You all right, son?’ he asked.

By this time Willow had decided that he must have been barmy to fight his way into an operation like this when the sore on his knee had offered him a legitimate excuse to stay out. ‘I don’t feel very brave, Sarge,’ he said.

‘You never do, son,’ Sidebottom said mildly. ‘Tired or worried or hungry or alakeefik. But never brave, son, never brave.’

‘When was
your
first time, Sarge? 1940?’

‘Bit before that, son. North West Frontier, 1930. Up at Razmak. Guarding a conner-dump in the cud.’

‘Was it bad, Sarge?’

‘Mostly just uncomfortable. It got worse later when the Fakir of Ipi arrived.’

‘Were
you
scared the first time?’

‘Couldn’t stop me knees knocking.’ Sidebottom nodded at the piece of paper Willow was clutching. ‘What you got there, son?’ he asked.

‘It’s a charm against death, Sarge,’ Willow said, faintly shamefaced. ‘This old Egyptian sold it me when I first arrived. He was a nice chap. Even his galabiyah was clean.’

‘Let’s have a look, son. I can read Arabic’ Sidebottom took the proffered paper, glanced at it, and handed it back. ‘Intaquois,’ he said. ‘Pukka gen. Ought to protect you a lot, lad.’

Willow smiled nervously and tucked the paper in his blouse pocket. ‘To protect the heart, Sarge,’ he said.

Sidebottom nodded. The paper was an old laundry bill, but, though Sidebottom might have been mad, touched by the sun, tapped by a deolali stick, whatever you liked to call it, he wasn’t so bloody silly as to take away Willow’s feeling of security.

On LCT 11, Murdoch stood in silence, not bothering even to smoke. He didn’t seem to need conversation. He had his two pistols and sniper’s rifle with him, but his face was still that of a professor when you couldn’t see the deadly glow in his yellow eyes. On ML 138, second in the file on the starboard side of
Umberto,
Swann was still badgering his men. ‘Soon be there, chaps,’ he said.

‘That makes four hundred and seventy-nine times he’s said that,’ Jacka announced. ‘I’ve counted ‘em.’

On HSL 117, second in line on the port side, Sotheby was equally edgy. His stutter always grew worse when he was excited and he was terrified that when the time came to give orders he wouldn’t be coherent. He was also frightened, not of being hit, of being wounded, of dying, but of getting in Collier’s way, of dropping his Sten gun just when he needed it, of his bootlace breaking, of tripping when they jumped ashore and going flat on his face, of everything in fact
but
getting hurt. In his white-faced tenseness, he looked a born victim.

‘I wish to Christ he’d go to sleep,’ Sergeant Berringer muttered in disgust.

The battle had now been going on for six days and nights, and the desert air hummed with an impenetrable jargon of English, German, Italian, French, Greek, Urdu and Afrikaans.

The flash of the guns was still lighting the horizon, and in Qaba Hochstatter had decided to make certain that what little he had to defend the place with was in good working order. Accompanied by Nietzsche and von Steen he drove round the town, insisting that everybody redouble their efforts and ordering that a battery of Schlabrendorff’s flak guns be turned to the east in case of an attack from that direction.

They had no sooner got them in position than a colonel from
Flakartillerie
HQ arrived to claim them for the desert, together with Schlabrendorff himself. Hochstatter complained that his defences were being taken away, but the artillery colonel had seen the panzers being shattered in the desert and his guns smashed one by one. To him the issue was simple. If the Tommies got past his positions, nothing they’d got at Qaba would stop them. So before Hochstatter and Nietzsche really knew what was happening, most of the gun positions Wutka had so painstakingly built no longer had weapons in them.

‘Thank God they left our two 75s,’ Hochstatter commented bitterly.

Stories came in of hundreds of burned-out vehicles scattered across the desert and of groups of Englishmen holding out against even the fiercest of the counter-attacks, hanging on like grim death and doing more damage to the panzers than they could afford to take. Hochstatter’s office was bedlam, with Hrabak furiously demanding lorries because some officer with authority from panzer headquarters had snatched more of his own away from him.

‘My men can’t carry shells away one under each arm,’ he was storming. ‘I’ve got to have transport!’

Hochstatter was still trying to work out a new scheme, with half of his men occupied in unloading and the other half in the desert with the commandeered guns, when a
Sanitätskorps
colonel arrived to demand tents.

‘We’ve got no spare tents,’ Hochstatter said. ‘They’ve all been taken!’

‘I’ve been told to expect two thousand wounded. Where am I supposed to put them?’

‘There’s the Mantazeh Palace,’ Dr Carell, the medical officer, suggested.

‘It’s almost a ruin.’

‘If the wounded have been in the desert,’ Carell said, ‘they won’t complain.’

Then .Captain Veledetti, in charge of the POW compound, asked when they were going to get his prisoners away. They were growing restless, he said, and he suspected they were making wire-cutters.

Through all the panic, the roaring of the guns continued beyond Qaba and the news from the desert became increasingly grim. It seemed the Tommies had broken through near the coast and that though the panzers had been strengthened by new and repaired vehicles, there were still only half the number there had been when the battle had started, while the artillery was being shattered, crazed and exhausted by the sustained pressure from tanks, guns and aircraft.

Yet by the afternoon of the 30th, as Babington’s little fleet began to draw near, things in Qaba were actually beginning to look up. Though the pioneer officer had been whipped away to take over a staff job at Fuka, what was left of his pioneers remained and a signal arrived from army headquarters ordering that under no circumstances were the two 75s that Schoeler had acquired to be removed and that the defences were not -- repeat not -- to be reduced any further.

The tension was further eased by the news that Rommel had decided to pull back towards Fuka. This was brought in by the pioneer officer who reappeared to pick up his kit as he passed through Qaba en route for Bardia where he was hoping to rustle up fresh vehicles for the panzers.