Take or Destroy! (22 page)

‘He’s concentrating everything in the north,’ he said. ‘At Sidi Abd el Rahman so that he can either resist or withdraw.’

It was while they were still feeling a little more confident that Tarnow received a report passed on from Fuka that
Umberto Uno
had escaped from Alexandria.

‘Shot her way out of the harbour last night,’ he announced. ‘Overpowered the guards and turned her gun on the guard-ship. They’ve been picking up bodies all day.’

‘Where is she now?’ Hochstatter asked.

‘The Luftwaffe’s not reported her but they’re a bit busy, aren’t they? For all I know, she’s heading for Sicily.’

‘Or here!’ Veledetti said excitedly.

As they stared at each other, the elderly commodore who had brought in the four supply ships joined them. ‘She’s got guns aboard,’ he said. ‘New 88s, some 76.2s they captured in Russia and some Italian 47s. I saw them loaded.’

Nietzsche smiled. ‘We’ll hang on to a few of those,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’re going to be all right, after all.’

By this time,
Andolfo
was almost unloaded and von Steen was trying to organize the means to haul her out so that they could get at
Guglielmotti
and
Cassandra.
He had already spent what seemed like hours on the telephone demanding that the tug which had been taken from Qaba for Bardia three weeks before should be returned immediately, but all he could get in reply was a promise that it would probably leave the following morning.

As it grew dark, sensing that it might be their last chance for a while, Hochstatter sent round a little note inviting them all for drinks at his headquarters.

The party went on longer than anyone had expected, and feeling pleasantly drunk, Wutka moved on to the verandah overlooking the harbour. There were a few dim lights about and men were still moving drums down the mole, so that he could hear the occasional rumble of wheels as handcarts crossed his wooden bridge to the waiting lorries. Above him the moon hung like a squashed yellow orange over the desert and the hill behind the Shariah Jedid was touched with gold. He felt more homesick than he’d felt for weeks and his soul seemed to reach up to the motionless stars.

As he held his breath, afraid to break the fragile spell of the evening, he caught scraps of native chatter from near the mosque - all
lnsh’ Allah
and
Ou Allah
- and the toneless wailing of flutes, aggressive but somehow lacking in result; then a sailor in the barracks opposite playing
‘Muss i’ denn
’
,
the naval song of farewell, on a mouth organ. As though it had stirred up a heart-sick desperation for home, an Italian near the Mantazeh Palace began to sing. The notes came up to where Wutka stood, sharp in the still air, clear and sad against the distant rumble of artillery.

‘Tutte le sere, sotto quel fanal’
Presso la caserna. ..’

The words lifted in the sort of crystal clarity only Italian tenors could manage and other voices began to join in, in German. If they could have been heard in the desert, they would have been taken up in English, Afrikaans, French, Polish, Greek, Urdu and half a dozen other languages, because they were known to every man in North Africa.

‘...
con te, Lili Marlene
Con te, Lili Marlene.’

There was something in the air. It was something nobody could define - a sense of unease - and long after Hochstatter’s little get-together finished they hung around headquarters talking. Then the voices in the streets died away and, apart from the men still working under the shaded lights by the harbour, Qaba became silent.

At headquarters, the feeling of anxiety returned and Wutka went out on to the verandah again to stare into the darkness. The thudding of guns was still coming from the east and he could see the sky shifting in a fitful flickering of light.

Hrabak appeared alongside him and stared at the sky with him.

‘Thinking of home?’ Wutka asked,

‘I have no home,’ Hrabak said.

Wutka turned to look at him but the supply officer’s face was blank.

‘Haven’t you heard anything?’

‘I shan’t now.’

They could hear the other voices beyond the black-out curtains, Hochstatter’s everlastingly diplomatic; von Steen’s high pitched, an old navy voice; Tarnow’s harsh and imperious, a Nazi voice; Dr Carell’s quiet, persuasive and scholarly; Veledetti’s milky with Italian consonants. Then Wutka cocked his head, listening to the sounds from the desert.

‘They must be closer,’ he said. ‘You can hear the tanks.’

For a while they strained their ears and Hrabak frowned. ‘That’s coming from the sea,’ he pointed out.

Wutka turned, his eyes on the stars again, looking for dark shapes. ‘Aeroplanes,’ he agreed.

They hurried back inside the room to give the warning, and everyone came out on to the verandah. Ibrahimiya airfield was only five miles away but it remained dark and silent and, as they watched, the lights round the harbour went out one by one.

Slowly, without hurry, they went to their positions - von Steen to his office in the naval barracks; Schoeler to his command post in a hut near the 75 on the Ibrahimiya side of the town; Dr Carell to the bunker under the harbour wall where mattresses, running water, disinfectants and bandages were waiting, and his surgical instruments, syringes and morphine were already being laid out. The others remained in Hochstatter’s office where they could be called upon at once and could issue orders.

The aeroplane engines seemed louder now and they all found their eyes turning upwards to the ceiling. Tarnow, whose cold face never showed much emotion and who never seemed moved by the possibility of death, swallowed the last of his drink.

‘It doesn’t seem a very big raid,’ he said.

And neither did it. But Private Bontempelli, standing outside his dug-out among his friends, stared unhappily at the sky. He’d been asleep when the alarm had been given, dreaming of Sundays in the fields outside Naples, of girls, bowls, wrestling matches and hunting hares - and of Maddalena Corri’s warm lips and soft body in Taranto. Near him the breeze raised the dust from the roadway. That day, knowing that the British weren’t far away, the priest had managed to hold a mass, preparing an altar on a slab of marble resting on sandbags and covered with a linen cloth. But it didn’t seem to have helped much; the British were still coming.

Baldissera arrived and they saw him moving round the defences with Sergente Barbella.

‘More sandbags,’ someone observed. ‘More digging.’ ‘We’ve already dug up the whole of Libya,’ Bontempelli said. ‘Now we’re digging up Egypt.’

In the silence over the town, it was possible from Hochstatter’s verandah to hear the voices of the men moving to their positions. For a while Hochstatter stared at the plan of the town attached to the wall of his quarters. It seemed extraordinary that after ten days of hard work, all that was left to him of the weapons he’d been sent were the two French 75s. Still, he thought, with the addition of his original three 47s and a percentage of well-placed light and heavy machine-guns, they were heavy enough to stop any normal landing from the sea.

He glanced at the list prepared for him by Nietzsche and von Steen. With the pioneers and von Steen’s sailors and the men he could call on from Wutka and Hrabak, he had 523 men to defend the town. It was surely enough for so small a place.

Had he only known it, by a strange coincidence, and with the assistance of Cook-Corporal Rogers, it was exactly the same number of men as Hockold was proposing to throw ashore.

The ships had long since passed Fuka, well beyond the Eighth Army’s farthest forward outposts, and everybody aboard them began to look at his weapons again. The gunners checked their ammunition, and down below the engineers glanced anxiously at the concrete and steel plates erected round the engine rooms to protect them.

There wasn’t long to go now. They all knew it and you could have cut the tension with a knife. Cook-Corporal Rogers was still playing cards. Willow was still occasionally fingering the paper in his pocket. Sergeant Berringer was still muttering savagely about Sotheby’s nervousness, and Lieutenant Swann was still badgering his men to the point of fury. The one thing nobody was doing was voicing his fears, or wondering aloud what it was like to get the chop, and what death was like, apart from being dark and cold and lonely.

Sidebottom and Jacka were talking quietly in a corner.

‘The wogs was all round us,’ Sidebottom was saying, ‘and they’re not bad with their bundooks at three hundred yards. Quiet as mice they was, and all you could see was rocks. Then this shot comes and the officer -- pukka chap, called Gavin -- he just says “Oh!” Just like that. Nothing else. Just “Oh!” And falls plonk off his horse.’

‘Where was that, Sidi?’ Jacka asked.

‘Loe. Up near the Malakand. In ‘Thirty-four. Or was it ‘Thirty-three? Buggered if I remember.’

At about that moment someone on LCT 11 noticed that the breeze which had been blowing on their cheeks all day was now blowing into their faces, and they realized they’d changed direction.

‘We’re going in,’ Cobbe said and a few hands started to reach for equipment.

‘Leave it alone!’ Murdoch was there. Nobody had seen him arrive but he had appeared, as though through the floor like the demon king in a pantomime. ‘There’s plenty o’ time. No need to exhaust yourselves carting heavy equipment about yet. You’ll be told when to put it on.’

His voice was oddly soft for a change, all the harshness gone, and he stopped occasionally, as they’d never seen him stop before, to exchange a word here and there, usually with the youngest men, or to offer a cigarette or a match.

Above him, they could hear a faint tuneless song coming from the bridge that sounded a little like the hymn, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. It was Lieutenant Carter. He was riotously happy. He was doing the thing he was trained for. He had a ship under his feet and he was going into battle. He was also a little drunk because he hadn’t been able to resist having a tot to celebrate and then another and another. But he was still capable of doing his work, if only instinctively, and the rum insulated him from fear. He was singing the “Minesweepers’ Song” --

‘Sweeping, sweeping, sweeping,
Always bloody well sweeping’

The first lieutenant, a boy of twenty, stared at him, worried and wondering if he ought to take over. But he liked Carter, for all his faults, and he knew better than to try anyway.

The talking became desultory and on every ship men merely sat and stood and leaned, smoking, waiting, busy with their own thoughts again. Grisly last-minute preparations for death were made on
Umberto,
and the ship’s surgeon in his ‘butcher’s overall’, stethoscope in his pocket and gauze mask dangling under his chin, was laying out an array of instruments and bottles. First-aid dressings were handed round and bundles of them stacked in odd corners about the ship. Carbide lamps were placed alongside electric bulbs, hoses drenched woodwork and splinter matting and the stacks of ammunition by the guns. Over all was the sound and feel of men preparing themselves for action - the creak of webbing and the clink of weapons, the sudden nervous cough hastily suppressed, and the thunderous silences emphasized by the bitter swearing of those fortunate enough to be busy.

A lot of them were introspective now and spoke of all sorts of private things that they wouldn’t have dreamed of disclosing to anybody at a different time - talking with unusual candour, drawing closer to one another in the harsh bowels of the ship, confiding in men they’d never spoken to before, about home and the past and what they hoped would be a future.

By the ladder, Bradshaw smoked a cigarette and read, his face dark under his helmet. Docwra was playing softly on a mouth organ as he’d done so often before in the loneliness of the Cumberland fells.

Sugarwhite’s thoughts were on his home. ‘Think of all those folk back in England worrying about us,’ he said.

Waterhouse, who was engaged in a heavy discussion on the delights of the Alexandria waterfront, turned sarcastically, his ginger hair as wild as if it had had an electric current passed through it. ‘And thingk of all the bastards who dod’t give a sod,’ he said.

A few men were swopping smutty jokes and a few more telling of the times they’d had with women. Taffy Jones, desperate to keep his mind off what lay ahead, had just finished explaining how he’d halted the invasion of England in 1940 by joining up, and was now laying it on ad nauseam about a girl he’d had in Cardiff.

‘Poor old Arienwen,’ he was saying. ‘Duw, she was a pretty girl, man. She could play the piano lovely. Used to help at the glee club. But there’s a state she was in that night, behind Geary the Emporium’s, Begging me for it she was. The moon was out and I could see it shining on her -- all white --’

‘Ghost-like?’

‘No. Not ghost-like. Soft. You know what I was thinking then?’

Tit Willow, bored to tears, lifted his head. ‘That you fancied sixpennyworth of fish and chips,’ he said.

Sergeant Bunch, who had just appeared, heard him and swung round. ‘You was supposed to be in hospital,’ he said heavily.

‘I didn’t want to miss it, Sarge.’

Bunch glared, rigid as a poker. ‘You was ordered to hospital, you dozy idle man,’ he barked. ‘An order’s an order and you’re supposed to obey it. You’re on the fizzer.’ Then the hard leathery face, marked by barrack-room brawls and years of acne as a youth, softened alarmingly. ‘How’s it go, son?’ he asked. ‘Hurt?’

‘A bit, Sarge.’

‘Like the parrot said, when it laid square eggs.’ Legs stiff, back straight, Bunch stalked off and Willow stared after him, startled, aware that it was Bunch’s way of trying to put him at his ease.

Someone started singing, the same song for the hundredth time - ‘I don’t want to be a soldier. I don’t want to go to war . . .’ and slowly everybody began to join in softly. Then the Welsh element changed it to a hymn. They seemed to have been singing hymns on and off every bit of the way, Taffy Jones in the lead parts whenever he could check the squirming in his stomach.