The Levant Trilogy (12 page)

Harriet was not
sure whether he was laughing at her or not. Probably in the face of the fall of
Alexandria, Guy's fate seemed to him, as it would to most people, a minor
matter. But it was not minor to her and Dobson, all in all, was a kindly man.
After a moment's reflection, he said, 'I'll tell you what I'll do. If I can get
the Embassy line cleared this evening, I
'll
give him a tinkle and advise him to be on the alert.'

'T
hank you. But much better to
tell him to come to Cairo.'

'I can't very
well do that. Not my territory, you know, but I'll warn him that the
situation's serious.'

And that, she
realized, was as much as she could hope for from Dobson, who now had to get
back to his bonfire. But the bonfire was dying in the twilight and the girls
were going
home. Dobson paused inside
the gate to say, Though there's no cause for panic, I really think you'd do
well to leave Cairo. Most of the women and children are being packed off.
There's a special train taking anyone who wants to go. It leaves about nine
tomorrow morning.'

'But if there's
no cause for panic ...'

'No
immediate
cause.
No one's being forced to go at the moment, but there could be a God-almighty
flap if and when they are. If you leave in good time, you'll be spared the
turmoil. We just want to clear the decks, in case ... Then, if the situation
rights itself, you'll have had a free holiday in the Holy Land.'

Harriet said
nothing.

'I'd get to the
station early, if I were you. Bound to be a bit of a crush.' Dobson smiled,
taking her silence for acquiescence. Good-natured though he was, he could be
self-important in office and now, satisfied that he had disposed of her, he
nodded her away. 'Good-bye. And perhaps we'll meet at Philippi.'

It took a couple
of days for the convoy to disperse. It had arrived during a lull in the
fighting. When they leaguered, the gunfire had stopped but next day, at first
light, the men were awakened by a thudding uproar that seemed to be less than a
mile away. Simon, sitting up in alarm, was taut with protest: the noise was too
close and he was not prepared for it. Surely he should have been given time to
brace himself against an onslaught like this? He got out of his sleeping-bag to
see what was to be seen and there was nothing but rising billows of smoke on
the horizon. The guns must be three or four miles away.

Realizing this,
his nerves subsided but he was dispirited by the arid desolation around him and
suffered, like everyone else, from fear of what would happen next. Those who
could locate their units were the lucky ones. They were packed into
trucks to be delivered to friends, in places where they knew the
routine of life. They went cheerfully and the other men said to each other,
'Lucky buggers!' Half the trucks went with them so the remaining men, with gaps
in their leaguer, felt exposed to the unknown.

At mid-morning,
having nothing much to do, they were distracted by signs of activity near by.
Traffic today was mostly driving westward. Different sorts of transport trucks
were bringing up supplies and waiting to deliver on to an area a hundred yards
west of the convoy's camp. Simon, asking the sergeant what was going on,
discovered that this area was to form a service depot for the battle a few
miles up the road. Engineers took over the area and put down oil barrels that
marked tracks for the lorries. The lorries then moved on to the mardam to
deliver their goods. Service lorries came next. Gradually, as though the
positioning of the black barrels gave meaning to the desert, the enclosed sand
was occupied by vehicle workshops, tank repair units, dressing stations and
supply dumps.

The men who were
still in the camp stood and watched as the empty sand flats filled with men and
materials. The service units seemed aware of an audience and moved about like
stage hands, displaying their efficiency. Simon and the others, grouped together
to hide the embarrassment at their enforced idleness, saw the supply base grow
before them.

The Spitfires and
Hurricanes went unheeded until a plane of a different kind dived over the camp
and spattered the ground with bullets. The men threw themselves down, trying to
dig themselves in, for the first time aware that here, idle and useless though
they were, they could die as easily as the men at the front. Simon, being the
only officer among them, ordered them to get spades from the lorries and dig
slit trenches. They did this with enthusiasm. The sand digging was easy enough,
the trenches were completed in an hour and their occupants, again with nothing
to do, stood deep in them, resting their arms on the sand, bored by their own
inactivity and envious of the activity of others.

The traffic
changed direction again. Trucks that had gone up to the front were returning
with wounded and taking on supplies. Smoke and dust hung in the growing heat
Seeing
the orderlies and
stretcher-bearers moving, as grey as ghosts in the dusty distance, the men of
the convoy grumbled resentfully. Couldn't they go and offer a hand? Simon
consulted with the sergeant but the men were untrained in the work in progress
and the trained men would have no use for them.

The gunfire was
an unending reverberation against the senses. The distant smoke clouds rose so
thickly that the sun was a white transparent circle behind haze, but the loss
of light did not bring any diminution of heat By mid-afternoon most of the men
had lost interest in the service depot and, prodding down into the trenches,
slept until sunset when the canteen truck came round. The sound of the guns was
dying out. The trucks, leaving the depot, were going eastwards again and the
men of the convoy relaxed into a new friendliness, feeling they had survived an
ordeal.

The sergeant came
over to Simon and said in a sociable way, 'In case you don't know, sir, my
name's Ridley.
'

The fact they
were among the remnants left in the camp had brought them together and Ridley,
become confiding, said he had seen Major Hardy leaving the camp soon after
daybreak. According to Ridley, the major had driven off to divisional headquarters
on a ploy of his own.

'Been sick, see,
'
Ridley said. 'Jaundice. The brass-hats
all get it, comes from all the whisky they put down. Well, he was in hospital a
long time and when he came out, he found he's been replaced, which doesn't
surprise anyone. What he wants, if you ask me, is to get on to staff but he's a
toffee-nosed old humbler and I bet they don't want him.'

'What do you
think will happen to the rest of us?'

'Can't tell you
that, sir, but let's hope we stick together.' At dawn next day, the guns
started up again and the service units were out sweeping and tidying their
areas as though attempting to make a habitat of a bit of desert. The men of
the convoy, expecting another day of tedium, watched disgruntled till the
canteen truck came round. While they were eating their sandwiches. Major
Hardy's staff car came into the leaguer. This was indeed a diversion. The
sergeant, who knew everything, had said to Simon, 'We won't see his nibs
again.' They all stood and watched Hardy's legs come out of the car as though
his
emergence were a special
entertainment laid on for them. Standing beside the car, he called Simon to
him. He was a changed man. Until then, keeping his distance, he had had the
ruffled atmosphere of one who nursed a grievance.

'Boulderstone,'
he said, addressing Simon with easy confidence. This area will be evacuated at
six a.m. tomorrow. The trucks are to move to another camping site a few miles
back. Any questions?'

'Yes, sir. Are
you coming with us, sir?'

'I am. I am now
your commanding officer.' Before Simon could make any comment, Hardy dismissed
him and returned to the car where he sat examining papers for most of the
daylight hours.

Next morning,
taking his place in the leading lorry, Simon found Arnold at the wheel. He was
surprised that Arnold was still with the remnants left in camp. He said, 'I
thought you went with the trucks.' Arnold had gone with the trucks but his unit
had moved. No one could tell him where it was and so, after dark, when the men
were asleep, Arnold had made an unobtrusive return to the camp. 'And you're
staying with us?'

'Looks like it,
sir.'

'Splendid.'
Arnold was someone Simon knew. Arnold had given him help on the outward trip
and could be relied on to help him now. Arnold, known and helpful, brought a
sense of continuity to a disrupted world.

They sat together
in comfortable silence, awaiting the order to move. It did not come. Time
passed and the cool of daybreak took on the sting of morning. At last, Simon
jumped down from the cabin, intending to approach Hardy but was stopped by the
sight of the major, face drawn, hands shuffling through the paper that lay,
disordered, on the car bonnet. He gave Simon a look of such rancour that Simon
made off to where Ridley stood with a sardonic smile on his narrow, kippered
face.

'What's the
hold-up, sergeant?'

'If you ask me,
sir, the old fucker's lost his notes of the route.' Whatever Hardy had lost, he
had now found and coming
over to Simon and Ridley, fussily
important, he ordered Ridley's truck into the lead. Climbing back into his
cabin, Simon found Arnold drooping under the heat from the roof. As they were
about to start out, the canteen truck came round and the men, getting down for
their tea and bully, could see Hardy haranguing the sergeant.

Everyone was
eager to be off. The patch of desert where they had leaguered was like most of
the desert elsewhere, yet it had become hateful to them. They seemed to imagine
that, once on the move, their world would change. By the time they set out, the
track was under mirage and the convoy went at a crawl. Heat fogged the distance
so there was no horizon, nothing to separate the silver mirage fluid from the
swimming, sparkling white heat of the sky. They might have been moving in space
except that objects - petrol cans, scraps scattered from falling aircraft,
abandoned metal parts - stood monstrous and distorted out of the mirage.

The wind, blowing
hot into the cabin, roused Simon to painful awareness that here he was and
here, for God knows how long, he would have to remain. Pushing the sweat
streams back into his hair, he said, 'It's so bad, I suppose it can only get
better.'

'Oh, surprising
how you get to like it, sir.' Arnold, though he was no longer in the lead,
peered from habit out of the windscreen for sight of the piles of stones,
trig-point triangles or oil barrels with which the engineers marked the line of
firm sand.

It was late
afternoon before the mirage folded in on itself and dwindled away. Arnold gave
a murmur of satisfaction, seeing them still on the track, and Simon said,
'Good show, eh?'

Arnold smiled and
Simon, wanting to know more about him, asked, 'You came round the Cape? What
was it like?'

'Not bad. We
didn't see much till we stopped at Freetown. Then at Cape Town, they took us a
trip up Table Mountain. It was smashing.'

'T
he scenery, you mean?'

'T
he scenery wasn't bad,
either. But it was the flowers. Never saw anything like them.'

'We weren't
allowed ashore. They'd had the British army by
the time we arrived and we just had to stay on
board. It was a big ship - the
Queen Mary.
A liner.'

Arnold, too, had
come out on a liner but could not remember what it was called. The lower deck
had been packed like a slave ship, the hammocks slung so close it was
impossible to move without rocking the man on either side, but he had discovered
there were splendours higher up. Sent to the saloon deck with a message, he had
looked in through an open door and seen a real bed, gilt chairs with tapestry
seats and a carpet on the floor.

He commented
without envy. 'The officers had it good.'

'Only the brass
hats. There wasn't elbow room in our cabin. They'd put in extra bunks and your
face nearly hit the one above. Did you have any special friends on the ship?'

Arnold nodded but
paused before admitting their names. Ted and Fred. Chaps I dossed down with.'

That, it seemed,
was the most Arnold would give away for the moment. They drove a few miles in
silence then Simon questioned him again, wondering if he had felt about Ted and
Fred as Simon had felt about Trench and Codley. Arnold said, 'Ted and Fred were
all right,' and another mile passed before he explained how the three had been
drawn together. They had occupied three hammocks, in a cubby beside the engine.
'You see, I had the middle place.' Only that fact, he believed in his humility,
had admitted him to the team. They had taken possession of two square yards of
deck space and each morning, first thing, one of them would go to the space
while the other two queued in the canteen.

'T
ed and Fred: they were
special, weren't they?'

Arnold gave an
embarrassed grunt and excused his emotions by saying, 'They were my mates.'

'What happened
when you reached Suez?'

Arnold had had
better luck than Simon. His relationship with Ted and Fred had survived for
nearly a month in Egypt. There had been no emergency in those days, so the
three went to a base depot for acclimatization before being sent to a camp at
Mahdi where they shared a tent and waited for their movement orders. If no
order arrived by mid-day, they were free to get passes out of camp and take the
tram-car into Cairo. They
usually went to a cinema but
often enough they just walked about, grumbling to each other. They were browned
off, not only because they were there, but because they felt no one cared
whether they were there or not.

Ted and Fred were
town-bred boys and did not find Cairo as strange as it seemed to Arnold. He had
grown up in the Lake District and, wandering aimlessly through foetid, filthy,
noisy, sun-baked streets, he longed for his own green countryside. Months
passed before he was reconciled to the desert but now he said, 'The desert's
all right when you get to know it.'

They had been
nearly a month at Mahdi when Ted, who was the boldest of them, said to the
sergeant, 'What are we here for, sarge, mucking about in camp?'

The sergeant
seemed to like his cheek. 'You'll find out soon enough, my lad,' and a week
later, when two men were needed to make up the complement of an out-going
truck, he picked on Ted and Fred. Arnold, who had visited the zoo on his own,
came back as the truck was moving off. He ran after it, shouting, 'Where are
they taking you?'

Ted and Fred,
looking at him over the back flap, could only shrug their ignorance. Ted
grimaced, comically rueful, but Arnold knew they were gratified at being chosen
while he was not. The truck turned out of the compound and that was the last he
ever saw of Ted and Fred.

'I bet you missed
them?'

Arnold stared
ahead for a minute or two before he whispered, 'I didn't know how I was going
to go on living.'