Take or Destroy! (36 page)

Kirstie McRuer, waiting with the door ajar, heard Murray speaking, heard him asking about the dead, the wounded and the missing, and the thunderous silence as he listened intently while names were given. As she heard the click of the telephone, she rose and went to the door. Despite the heat, she felt as cold as ice.

In the corridor people were still discussing the battle in the desert. Montgomery had been right all along. The feeling they’d had that this time it was all going to be different had been correct. The Afrika Korps was as good as beaten - completely, finally and for all time. Rommel’s rear areas were already in a state of panic. The information sent back by Intelligence was that the panzers were running down like an unwound clock for lack of petrol; the whole desert was alive with British vehicles, every man in them aware of the exultation of victory.

The excitement made the return of Cut-Price all the more poignant and Kirstie waited silently by the door for Murray to speak. He was sitting with his hands on the desk, his fingers entwined, staring at the telephone, and as he became aware of her at last, his expression changed with an effort.

‘Complete success, Kirstie,’ he said. ‘All four ships, spares, petrol and lorries. Also, as far as we can make out, several guns and God knows how many Germans and Italians.’

He was talking quickly, deliberately, spinning it out, she knew. ‘What about the men?’ she interrupted. ‘Who’s dead?’

The words were brutal enough to make Murray look up sharply. ‘Babington,’ he said, frowning. ‘Hardness. Two of the HSL skippers and one ML skipper. The captain of
Horambeb,
Watson and Brandison. Those are known. Carter, the captain of the LCT, is alive but he’ll be a long time in hospital.’

‘What about the shore parties?’

Murray paused, staring at the telephone again, troubled by the evenness of her voice. ‘Murdoch’s not among them. Nor are the Americans. Devenish is wounded. Amos is missing --’

‘What about George Hockold?’

Murray’s head lifted as though it weighed a ton, then his eyes moved to her. He drew a deep breath that seemed to hurt him.

‘He’s not with them.’

Kirstie stared at him for a moment, suddenly sensing what had been troubling Hockold through his silences. When she spoke her voice seemed dry. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

She turned away and, closing the door behind her, aware of Murray trying to explain -- ‘They may be in the desert, of course!’ - she leaned against it. ‘Oh, damn,’ she whispered. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’

Then she drew a deep breath, blew her nose and, going to the desk, drew a sheet of paper from the typewriter she’d been using and began to look for mistakes. It was difficult because she couldn’t see very well.

‘The British raid on Qaba,’ Rome radio announced on 2 November, ‘was a complete fiasco. A small amount of fuel was destroyed and one or two lorries were wrecked, but it is worthy of note that even the night clubs in the town are still flourishing.’

No one in Qaba took the slightest notice. The only night clubs Qaba had ever possessed were brothels, and it was already growing clear that the results of Cut-Price were causing tremendous damage far beyond the town itself. Reports were coming in of guns left by the roadside because there was no transport to haul them away; of tanks and tank workshops surrendered intact because they’d run out of fuel; of aircraft destroyed by their own crews for lack of spare parts; and trucks abandoned with their petrol gauges empty. The old routine was ended. They all knew it. North Africa would never be the same again and the feeling that it would all go on and keep on going on for ever had vanished.

Over the town there was a hush, sorrowing and austere. The streets were those of a dead place and everybody seemed to be white with dust. There were still a few flattened bodies lying about and a few wounded groaning among the shattered houses. What was left of
Andolfo, Guglielmotti
and
Cassandra
were mere scorched hulks. Of
Giuseppe Bianchi
there was no sign except an upturned stern and a few steel plates sticking out of the water. The ruins made the place look like the end of the world.

The dead, some of them out of sight among the wreckage, were beginning to smell now, and all over the town they were being buried where they were found. Many of them were smoke-blackened, mutilated and slippery; peeled and contorted human shapes atrociously denied. Here a face was split almost in two so that the eyes were not human and only the rough hands showed the owner to have been a man; there dead fingers still tried to thrust a grey tangle of intestines back into a torn body. Down on the beach Sergeant Gleeson, half out of his tank, his arms over the edge of the turret, was still struggling to escape, his blue face staring at the men approaching gingerly with ropes to get him out of sight before they all had nightmares.

Where
Umberto’s
shell had wrecked the searchlight behind the palace, the earth had caved in, the ground was churned up, and the barbed wire fence had been ripped to pieces. There was a dead German lying there, his face black, a coagulated trickle of dark blood oozing from his mouth, and an Italian minus everything but his head, his face fixed in horror; flesh, hair and uniform matted together in a purple mass crawling with flies. They used the hole the shell had made for the grave, lifting the bodies in silently, and hurriedly shovelled the dust on to the upturned faces and staring eyes.

All over the town, little groups of men stared at the opened earth, and here and there mouth organs filled the air with the notes of
‘Ick hatt einen Kameraden’.
Near the flattened area round the harbour Jumpke was still expounding on his escape when he ought to have been dead like the other men at the end of the mole. ‘I didn’t even know I could swim,’ he kept saying. More groups were trying to clear the debris at the fuelling post, the lorry park and the petrol dump, and men from the airfield were digging a grave for those of Baldissera’s Italians who hadn’t survived the return to Qaba.

A few Arabs, some of them with looted cigarettes, a few with abandoned British weapons with which they intended to pay off old scores in the Borgo Nero, wailed round their own dead and the wreckage where stray shells had brought down their homes. Their leaders shouted angrily at the destruction of the Mantazeh Palace and the roof of the mosque, or gestured wildly over the splintered planks of their boats. Though Hockold had stressed that native property was not to be touched, the sweep of the arm of war was always a wild one. Even the camel drivers stared at the splintered poles of the palms and realized they would have to find shade elsewhere from now on.

Smoke still hung over the town, and everybody knew that defeat was at hand. They’d heard that British tanks and infantry had reached the Rahman Track, the last defence behind the lines, where they had destroyed the Ariete Division and were now smashing the German units there, cutting off whole groups of bewildered men from the rear. Then news came in that von Thoma, the commander of the Afrika Korps, had been captured, that Fuka and the forward supply base at Daba had gone, and that the British were pushing into Libya in the direction of Sollum, and going like a pack of hounds for Tobruk itself.

The first shattered Italians who passed through Qaba improved on the story. ‘There was no petrol,’ they said, ‘and no armour, and when they came with bayonets we legged it.’

Then a major in a staff car appeared from Rommel himself to find out if it was true there was no petrol. He didn’t have to ask twice, and Hrabak demanded to know more.

‘There’s been an order,’ the major said. ‘We’ve got to return.’

‘Return where?’ Hrabak said.

‘To the front. It’s Hitler’s order.’

‘Then Hitler should come out of those damned headquarters of his,’ Hrabak said bitterly, ‘and take a look at Qaba. Or better still, get hold of a gun and help.’

Tarnow was watching him but Hrabak didn’t care because he had a feeling now that Tarnow didn’t care either.

The sun was hot and some of the Italians tramping through the town had thrown away clothing and weapons and bandaged their feet with rags. One group started a fire by the roadside. They had found a can of petrol and, because they’d thought it was water, had smashed it in fury and set it alight. More cans were added to the blaze, and then anything they could think of -jackets, sandbags, straps, bandoliers, puttees, webbing belts, jerseys, packets of letters, postcards, even money - everything, but what they stood up in. They gave it the Fascist salute, shouting sarcastic
Evvivas
for Mussolini, and finally someone found a large portrait of Hitler and held it up in an attitude of mock obeisance so that everyone could see it before, with a shout of
‘Sieg Heil’,
tossing that into the fire, too,

Hochstatter watched them. His body frail and shrunken underneath his uniform, he looked an old man, his face lined and haggard, his grieving eyes dark in his head.

‘I think, Hrabak,’ he said, ‘that it’s about time we left.’

Even Tarnow didn’t argue, and they found a car and filled it with the last can of petrol in Qaba, then drove up the Shariah Jedid, past the ruined Roman arch, and the burned-out warehouses, towards the wrecked lorry park and the blasted area of the petrol dump. As they reached the top of the hill, Hochstatter stopped the car and, standing up, looked back.

‘I think we shall lose this war,’ he said.

He was still looking back, when, coming over the brow of the hill, out of sight and soundless until the last moment, the Hurricanes found him.

The remains of the car were there when the dusty vehicles came in out of the desert, heading back past what was left of the fuel dump and the lorry park with its blackened skeletons.

Narrowed eyes stared at the grave alongside. ‘Oberst Eitel-Friedrich Hochstatter,’ the name on the cross proclaimed,
‘Geboren 6.6.92, gefallen 5.11.42’.

Nobody said anything. They were too tired, their eyes dark slits peering out of grey masks, unshaven, stinking of sweat, dirt, grease and gun oil, and so tattered they’d been shot at by trigger-happy Australians who’d thought they were Italians. They had very nearly reached the limit of their endeavour.

They had buried the wounded who had died well to the south near the Rahman Track on the 6th, placing them in the earth by a solitary wooden cross they found bearing the words,
Ein unbekannter englischer Soldat
-- a faded reminder of some long-dead fight - and as they’d thrown the last spadeful of dusty earth over them, heavy grey storm-clouds had rolled up and great hailstones had come down to fill the arid wadis with water. Already the westward-moving convoys were slowing to a crawl and, as the mud started, the roads became jammed and they had remained motionless for hours among the thousands of halted vehicles, able to do nothing as the Germans streamed away; nothing but take off the gluey coverings that went by the name of socks and wait.

The desert looked rinsed and cool as the rain died away. As they had moved on again in fresh implacable sunshine on the 9th, it soon became clear that nobody was bothering about Qaba out on its little peninsula to the north, and the idea of returning to it as somewhere to recuperate grew stronger in their minds. When they reached Ibrahimiya, they saw the burned-out trucks of Baldissera’s command still containing what they had always flippantly called
soldati fritti;
empty flapping tents; and blackened, wind-ripped aircraft, with bent propellers, broken backs and shattered wings, for once all bearing the hated swastika. Along the southern perimeter, past a knocked-out 88, its endless barrel like a fallen pine, a vast column of prisoners was trudging into captivity with doped rhythmic steps and weary stony faces. The dust from the drying desert rose in a great cloud from their feet as they plodded along four abreast, an endless crocodile stretching away to both horizons, only an armoured car and a few British privates shouting in mixed English, Arabic and Italian alongside.

Among them was Private Bontempelli. His guess had been a good one. Baldissera and his few remaining men had been ordered south to stop the British advance -- and this time Bontempelli had gone with them. No one had argued when Baldissera, his knees showing through his torn trousers, had stepped forward to surrender to the first tanks that appeared.
‘Sono prigioneri,’
he had said unhappily.
‘Ci arrendiamo. Tedeschi non bono.
Viva I’Inghilterra.’

The morning was bleak and the wind whipped at the yellow grass. The marching men were unkempt and dirty, their steel helmets down over their eyes to break the force of the wind, their hands blotched with desert sores. Staring at them, the survivors of Cut-Price were surprised to find they felt no sense of triumph, even though they knew the war in North Africa was nearing its end. All they could feel was the tragedy of hunger, wounds and defeat, and a deep concern for their own safety because they, too, were fatigued and tacky-socked; men of dirt and tatters, their beards dusty, their red-rimmed eyes glaring into the sun, feeling they could sleep for a hundred years.

From the top of the hill, Qaba seemed a place of utter desolation, the empty Italian camps containing abandoned boxes of half-packed clothes and tables bearing half-eaten food. A few Italian tanks stood where they’d run out of petrol, and in breaches in sandbagged walls men lay crumpled or grotesquely spread-eagled. A few mules and an occasional dog nosed mournfully among the debris in search of food or water and, half-hidden by the blown sand that covered corpses, carcasses of dead animals and broken machinery, there were millions of cartridge clips, belts of ammunition, rifles, machine-guns, hand grenades, rolls of wire, pieces of clothing and equipment, lifted mines, batteries and blackened piles of ruined metal. The chirping crickets and the rustling of letters blowing among the thorn bushes provided the only sound.

The town was a maze of broken tottering buildings, its white walls stained with scorch marks so that they frowned with embarrassment at the terrible destruction they had wrought. Nobody stopped the lorries as they moved in. A few Arabs demanded cigarettes and a few Italians appeared holding white flags. The grimy men divested them of their watches and wallets and marched them in groups to the POW compound they had built for the British. There they found Swann, still seeking excuses; Bradshaw, who had come to realize he would probably be deaf for the rest of his life; and Sugarwhite, bent double now but grinning and shouting, ‘It took you long enough’ - a determined card to the bitter end. Hickey and Carell were still in the bunker, surrounded by millions of flies attracted by the smell of blood. The Egyptian girl was with them now, but Amos had disappeared.