Killing Rommel

  7

  IT TOOK ME ten days to reach Rose. I could not get furlough, or even an overnight pass into Cairo.

  Eighth Army was being reorganised top to bottom. What was left of our regiment remained under 22nd Armoured Brigade but was thrown in with an anti-tank company, a battery of 25-pounders and two depleted battalions of motorised infantry to make a new formation. We would be among a number of like units held in mobile reserve for when Rommel resumed his assault. What this meant immediately was new tanks, new crews and new training. I was stuck and so was everyone else. This was at Kabrit, where the Armoured Division was temporarily headquartered. Jock was there too. We ran into each other one night at a fuelling point called Dixie Eleven. Jock was a captain now, with a Military Cross on the way for his heroism in the breakout from Tobruk. He had spoken to Rose by phone two nights earlier. “She’s well and I’ve told her you are too.”

  To hear Rose was close made me even more desperate to see her.

  “Where is she?”

  “Still at Naval Intelligence. They’ve moved the office from Alex to Grey Pillars in Cairo. Don’t worry. I’ve reassured her that you’re fine and that she’ll see you soon.”

  “Will they evacuate her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The fuelling point was nothing but a half-circle of tankers parked under blackout lamps on a flat beneath the Muqattam hills, with queues of tanks, lorries, quads and Bren carriers snaking round hoping to suck up a few gallons. Petrol was supposed to be dispensed only by requisition and only at appointed hours, but a new order had arisen with the imminence of Rommel’s assault; currency had become whisky and cigarettes, English pounds (not Egyptian currency), and running into friends who actually had requisitions and would let you pump a few gallons on their ticket before the indignation of others made them stop.

  I asked Jock whether Rose had told him anything about the baby. My wife, as I said, was pregnant—nearly six months. “She’s fine, Chap. Better than we are.” Jock’s citation for valour had come with a twelve-hour pass. He gave it to me, to use to try to reach Rose.

  I got through by phone the next morning; we made plans to meet at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo in two days. As for Rose’s own safety, she begged me not to be anxious; her section was being withdrawn to Haifa as soon as transport could be arranged.

  Jock’s pass turned out to be useless. You had to be cleared by your commanding officer. I couldn’t get another. Phone lines had now been restricted to emergency calls only. Four more days went by; finally on the fifth, still unable to get through by telephone, I caught a ride in to Shepheard’s, hoping against hope that Rose had left me a note.

  She was there.

  Everything they say about wartime romance is true. When I saw my bride, she was in the most unravishing pose possible—slouched against the wall in a windowless alcove, with both shoes off and her hair, which had become dishevelled when she had taken off her hat to adjust it, falling across one eye. She was in civilian clothes. She hadn’t seen me yet. Shepheard’s at that time was one of the most glamorous hotels in the world. The atmosphere of peril had been screwed to an almost unbearable pitch by Rommel’s approach, rendering every sound and sensation precious. Amidst this stood Rose. I suppose every fellow must believe his sweetheart the most beautiful in the world. I rushed to her. We crashed together and hung on for dear life. “How long have you been here?”

  “Every night. I knew you wouldn’t be able to get a phone line.” We kissed crazily. “Are you all right, darling?”

  “Me? Are you?”

  She said she had got us a room. I pulled her to me. I felt her resist. For a moment I thought it was because of the baby. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  She took a breath and straightened.

  “It’s Stein.”

  I felt the floor open beneath me.

  “He’s dead,” Rose said. “The report came across my desk. I saw it.”

  I felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Rose told me she had tried to get a carbon of the report, but regulations forbade removing anything from the office.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  We worked through the crush of the main salon. Some colonel was playing the grand piano. A group was singing a university song. Outside, the terrace was mobbed with drunken Aussies and South Africans. Gharries and taxis were coming and going. Two New Zealand majors, noting Rose’s swollen belly and her state of agitation, stood at once and offered their table. When I shook their hands, I was trembling.

  Stein had been killed, Rose said, at a place called Bir Hamet, south of Fuka. A high-explosive shell had taken him and two others. “I tracked down the reporting officer and made him confirm that he’d seen the event with his own eyes. I verified the name and checked it against all the rosters in Eighth Army. Captain Zachary Aaron Stein. There’s no other.”

  I put my arms round Rose. We downed two brandies as if they were water. Rose said that she had told Jock of Stein’s death; he had known when he ran into me at the fuelling point. “He told me that when he saw you, he couldn’t make himself deliver the news.”

  My gallant Rose. “You’re braver than any soldier.”

  That Stein could die was a possibility I had never even considered. He was my mentor. He had saved my life. “It’s like…” I said, “…like losing the war.”

  The most important thing now was getting Rose out of harm’s way. Palestine was no safer than Egypt. If Cairo fell, no place in the Middle East would be secure. I told Rose she must resign her post in the Code Office. She must go home.

  She refused. She was needed here. “Do you imagine,” she said, “that home is any safer?”

  She told me that Stein’s remains were being held in the temporary morgue at Ksar-el-Nil barracks in the city centre. We decided to go. I am one of those who fends off shock by activity. I must see Stein’s body. Identify it. I must get through to Stein’s family and execute their wishes as soon and as best as I could. The hour was eight in the evening. Would the morgue even be open?

  There are two public telephones at Shepheard’s, in the corridor outside the bar. Queues of officers waited for both. One of them was Colonel L. Balls, I thought, this is all I need! L. had seen us. I introduced Rose. There was no getting out of it. When L. asked what errand we were on, there seemed no option but to tell him.

  To my astonishment L. offered immediately to help. He had a car and driver; he would take us to Ksar-el-Nil straight away. He did, brushing aside the duty sergeant who tried to make us come back the next morning.

  The morgue was two vast mess tents jiggered together in a square that had formerly been used for cavalry exercises. Only uniformed personnel were allowed in. L. offered to stay with Rose. I entered alone, escorted by a Graves Registry corporal. Two enormous diesel refrigeration units stood outside each entry. They had been switched off at night, the clerk said, to conserve fuel.

  The dead, all officers, were laid out on tables and cots—any surface that could be put to use. “We had litters,” said the corporal, “but the Ambulance Corps took ’em.” He led me to two wrong corpses before finally locating Stein.

  My friend’s remains were laid out on a perforated steel sand-channel, the kind used by trucks and armoured cars to extricate themselves from bog-downs in the desert. A hospital sheet covered him.

  I thought: This is just like my mother.

  It took no time to make the identification. The high explosive had incinerated half of Stein’s face, leaving the other half more or less undamaged. “Your mate’s in for a DSO,” said the clerk, indicating the registry card. “He’ll get it too. The board never turns down a PH.”

  “PH?”

  “Posthumous.” L. offered a smoke when I got back outside. He was telling Rose of Stein’s heroism at El Duda. Outside he hailed a cab for us and paid for it; he had an appointment and needed his car. I held out my hand; L. took it.

  “I owe you, sir, for far more than y
our kindness this night. I have served you ill in the field, and for that I am deeply sorry. Please forgive me. From this hour, I shall bend heaven and earth to serve to my fullest capacity.”

  The power was off when Rose and I got back to Shepheard’s. The fans wouldn’t work in our room. We sat on the bed in the dark, smoking and drinking warm champagne from the bottle. Rose had brought Stein’s manuscript; I had left it with her for safekeeping. She put it in my rucksack. The typewritten pages were in a velveteen case with the word “Macédoine” in script. A trade-name of porcelain or something.

  We stayed up all night. I told Rose everything I could remember of Stein during the fall-back to Cairo. I was not the only one, I said, who thought the world of him. “Do you remember how solid he was in every crisis at Magdalen? That was how he was in the desert. He hadn’t changed. I can’t tell you how frightening, exhausting and nerve-racking it was out there, and how close we all got to out-and-out breakdown. Stein held the wires together. When he appeared among a circle of officers, you could almost hear the expulsion of breath. Stein’s here, we all thought. We’ll be all right.”

  I told Rose how Stein would sit up patiently teaching young corporals how to call in fire orders, when he himself had gone for nights on only a few hours’ sleep. “In the Armoured Division we had our tanks to jump into when the shells started coming in. But Stein with his 25-pounders was out in the open. I asked him one time if he was afraid. ‘Bloody petrified,’ he said. ‘But one can’t show it, can one?’”

  I told Rose that despite all the blood and death of the past thirty days, the experience of war had until now remained unreal to me. “I was just watching it, like a film, or something that was happening to somebody else.”

  In the morning Rose and I ordered croques-madame on the hotel terrace and chased them down with pots of strong Egyptian coffee. I discovered a boxed scarf in my jacket pocket, a gift for her that I had forgotten. Today was her birthday. She was twenty years old.

  “I know you’re worried about me, darling,” she said, “and I love you for it. But I’ll be all right, I promise, and I’ll bring our child safely into this world.”

  Rose made it clear that I was never again to speak of sending her home. “I won’t go. Don’t ask me. I have my job, as you do. Our child will be born here. Maybe that’s how it should be.”

  Our taxi dropped Rose at Grey Pillars. She had to get in to the code office and I had to go back to camp. Our parting kiss was on the pavement in front of the sandbagged guard post. “I came out here from England for you, my love,” Rose said. “It was a game to me then, too. A romance, a grand adventure. But it has become something other, hasn’t it?”

  Three weeks later Rose was evacuated with her office to Haifa. Eighth Army’s new commanders, Alexander and Montgomery, had now assumed their posts. The line at El Alamein was holding.

  Stalemate followed as both sides built up supplies for the inevitable all-out clash. I trained with my formation through the end of August. One morning, just before the turn of the month, I was sent with reports to Saladin’s Citadel, the great Arabian Nights complex where the Royal Armoured Corps then had its headquarters. On the stairs I ran into Mike Mallory. He was just returning from the ceremony in which he had received his DSO; he still had the citation box in his hand. Better yet, he said, he had been kicked up to temporary lieutenant-colonel. He was taking over a battalion of the 1st Armoured Division.

  “I requested you,” he said, meaning he had put my name in to serve under him at his new posting. “But it seems GHQ has got you down for the Long Range Desert Group.”

  “What?”

  He shook my hand in congratulation. “Apparently Colonel L. has put in a word for us both. I’m off for ‘the Blue’ and you for the bush.”

  Book Two

  The Long Range Desert Group

  8

  THE LONG RANGE DESERT GROUP was, as I said, one of the “special forces” units to which I had applied unsuccessfully during the previous winter in Palestine. I had long since given up hope of hearing back from them and certainly never expected to receive orders to report. The news electrified me.

  Here at last was a unit that was small and personal, where a single individual might make a difference. The LRDG operated on its own, behind enemy lines, hundreds of miles beyond centralised command. Risk was high, but so was the chance to strike a blow. If I’m honest, though, there was something far deeper to my desire to serve with this group of men. It had to do with the desert, the inner desert. I wanted to go there. I wanted to break clear of the crowded, corrupted coastal strip and get south five hundred, a thousand miles into the raw interior.

  Did this have to do with Stein’s death? I couldn’t have answered. I knew only that I needed to place myself past where others had been, beyond where I had been myself. I needed to be tested. The war had little to do with it. I didn’t hate the Germans. I bore no burning desire to inflict injury or death. But I wanted to strike. I wanted to deal a blow.

  How disappointed was I, four days later when my orders at last arrived, to discover that Eighth Army was not sending me to join the LRDG but only to be temporarily attached? I would “serve in a technical capacity.”

  TASK: To accompany a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group for the purpose of assessing “the going,” in a quadrant to be specified, for its suitability of passage for a force of all arms.

  In other words, I would help find routes through the inner desert that could be driven over by tanks, guns and heavy equipment.

  That was good enough.

  That would do.

  I report to LRDG headquarters at Faiyoum oasis on 7 September, ten days short of my twenty-second birthday. I have been PTD’ed, as I said, for the duration of one desert patrol.

  Faiyoum is a made-over resort sited along a string of salt lakes an hour’s ride south of Cairo. The place is enormous. Elements of 4th and 7th Royal Tanks are here training on the new American Shermans, as are formations of 2nd County of London Yeomanry and the Staffordshire Yeomanry, my father and uncles’ old outfit. Rommel is expected to attack El Alamein at any moment. Queues of transporters line the broiling tarmac, waiting to carry tanks back to the fight. My own reconfigured formation is already in defensive positions at Alam Halfa.

  It’s 1330 when I locate the Orderly Room. The thermometer reads 110. Major Jake Easonsmith, to whom I am to report, greets me cordially and hands me over to Sergeant Malcolm McCool, a New Zealander, who signs me in and walks me across to my quarters, a bungalow in what had been the bathing area of the disused resort. I’ll share two rooms with a second lieutenant named Tinker, who is absent on patrol. McCool asks if I’ve had lunch; when I say no, he takes me over to the common mess (officers and other ranks dine together in the LRDG), a Nissen hut with mirages of heat radiating off its roof and portable floor fans blowing at both ends. I am to report back to Easonsmith’s office at 1630, McCool says. “You’ll get your books then.”

  “Books?”

  “Lots to learn, sir.” And he grins and leaves me to it.

  The mess is empty when I enter except for six fellows sitting together at a table beneath the curving corrugated roof. I have never seen men so brown and fit. They are SAS commandos. They keep their weapons within hand’s reach—two Thompson submachine guns, three Brens, and a heavy machine gun, which turns out to be a German Spandau. Only one is an officer. I recognise him. He is Paddy Mayne, the legendary Irish rugby wing-forward, who was my idol when I was at school. Mayne is in his late twenties but looks older, six foot three and as powerful as Ajax. I’d be less nervous meeting the King. But he and his men welcome me warmly. They have been told to expect an officer of the Armoured Division. We are to train together for an unspecified but brief length of time, then set off on some sort of “beat-up,” which I take to mean a raid. I try to act as if this is not news to me. “Do you have any idea where we’ll be going?”

  “Somewhere fun,” says a sergeant.

  It’s dark by the time
I get in to see Major Easonsmith. He is matter-of-fact but welcoming. I hand him my orders, which he scans in seconds, then tosses aside. I start to ask about my assignment.

  “You needn’t worry about that,” says he. “And please, call me Jake.”

  Jake explains my duties in the vaguest terms. For now, they will be simply to train and get up to speed on LRDG protocol. “You’ll have to absorb six weeks’ material in less than two. I hope that suits you.” Before I can answer he indicates a stack of a dozen books on a table at the rear of the room. “Read these. Learn everything that’s in them. You must not fail, because no one else will get a look at them.”

  He taps my orders dossier and congratulates me on my evaluation.

  “Sir?”

  “Your colonel’s appraisal of your performance as an officer. According to him, you can walk on water.”

  So: my parting gift from L.

  I have been selected for this assignment as well, Easonsmith tells me, because my service record indicates that I speak German. I explain that at the peak of my powers, several university terms in the past, the best I could do was struggle through the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

  “It’ll come back,” Jake assures me. He gives me a peaked Wehrmacht cap. “In case you need it.”

  He stands. “Oh, by the way, the books can’t leave this office. You’ll have to study them here after the day’s training.” He raps me warmly on the shoulder and strides for the door. “It goes without saying: you may speak a word of this to no one.”

  Dearest Rose,

  Well, I’m here. Can’t tell you where, but it’s picturesque as hell and about the same temperature. The unit is unlike any I’ve served with. Officers wear no insignia and are called by their Christian names. When there’s manual labour to be done, everyone mucks in. I like it.