North Africa
Gerald Meadows kneeled down beside a dead German officer and saw that the man’s eyes had been picked out by vultures. Two gaping black holes stared blankly back at him and a swarm of flies shot into the air and swirled angrily about him. Otherwise the man’s face was untouched, the flesh puckered a little and peeling from the sun, but the forage cap still on his head, his unit insignia glinting in the sun, his uniform, that of a captain in the Afrika Korps, intact. His holster was empty. Someone had been here before them. The man was lying on his back and Gerald could see no obvious sign of how he had died. If he turned the fellow over he would see some gaping wound in the back of his skull or a scorched, bloodied hole in his back.
Gerald stood up. They were not here to investigate anyone’s death.
A short distance away a burnt-out armoured vehicle lay on its side as though it had struck a mine or been hit by an anti-tank missile. Perhaps the dead officer had been thrown from the car. It was a distance of thirty, forty yards but it was possible. Anything was possible, it seemed, in war. The limits of what one assumed was possible, in terms of human endeavour, human survival, human depravity, just kept expanding. Perhaps there was no limit. Perhaps the very notion of a limit was pointless.
Gerald walked away from the dead officer, ostensibly to look over the burnt-out vehicle but really just for form’s sake. The vehicle had been destroyed, there was nothing salvageable. The upholstery was gone, the radio melted, even its markings had been burned off. It had clearly been here a long time, months perhaps. And yet the corpse was fresh. In the desert a two-day-old corpse was bloated and blackened and riddled with maggots. If you pulled, even gently, at a limb while searching for documents or identity discs it would come off in your hand.
But this corpse was fresh. Where had he come from, then?
The war here in the desert had ended six months ago with the capture of Tunis. Most of Rommel’s troops and what remained of the Italian forces had been rounded up. Most, but not all. Some had escaped, made their way along the coast hoping for some sort of Dunkirk-esque evacuation by the German Navy that had never eventuated, or fled south into the Blue—like this chap, presumably. Had he been trying to get back to his own lines all this time? He would have been better off surrendering to the Allied forces rather than dying out here alone, in a desert, his eyes plucked out by vultures.
I would have surrendered, thought Gerald.
He studied the ground. Clearly the poor bastard had not come here on foot, yet there were no tracks, or none discernible in the rough scrubby terrain. Desert stretched in all directions, rocky and impassable in this part, unscaleable soft sand dunes elsewhere, and it was odd, he reflected, referring to it as ‘the Blue’, for there was every colour in the desert except blue. But that was what the men called it. And it was beautiful at dawn and at dusk when the myriad colours, the sudden change in temperature, made you stand in awe to see it. The rest of the time it was a hellish cauldron.
And the flies. They were enough to send a sane man crazy. He brushed them away from his face and readjusted the scarf that he wore wrapped Arab-style around his head. It was not official military headgear but the usual rules did not seem to apply in the desert. He had arrived fresh off a troopship three years earlier, laden down with all manner of kit, none of which seemed to have been designed with desert warfare in mind. Now all he wore—all any of the men wore—were his boots, a single pair of khaki drill shorts, a shirt so caked in dried sweat it was stiff as a board, and the headscarf. Aside from a change of underwear and a groundsheet and his mess tin and canteen, this was all the kit he had. It was all he needed.
Enderby and Crouch stood a little distance away, not together, smoking their foul cigarettes. Enderby, their gunner, stood in the shade provided by their stationary tank, squinting at some papers he had pulled from his pocket. Crouch, their driver, stood a little further away on a slight rise, surveying the horizon, a hand shielding his eyes, the other hand swatting the unceasing flies. They both waited silently, patiently, unquestioningly, for Gerald to decide what they would do next.
What would they do next? He wasn’t entirely sure.
It had bothered him at first, that constant need to give orders, to make decisions. It had seemed wearying, burdensome, potentially catastrophic, but they had survived thus far. Indeed, it had turned out that his decisions made very little difference. They would stay the night or move on; they would head south or bear east, they would stop and investigate, they would continue on their way. None of it actually seemed to matter. The war in the desert was over, the rest of the division had landed in Italy in September and were now back in England for rest, refitting and retraining. A handful of skeleton units had been left behind on a mopping-up operation: salvage and rescue, though there was nothing to salvage and no one to rescue.
Gerald pulled a battered chart and his sun compass from his shirt pocket and studied both carefully, hoping to find something that would help him. There was nothing on the chart. It was a chart of the desert. They were some sixty or seventy miles south of Khoms, between Misrata on the Mediterranean coast and the desert settlement of Bani Walid, which was, one presumed—one hoped—somewhere to the west, though it had thus far eluded them. They weren’t lost, there was no question of that, it was just that their exact position at this moment was tricky to pinpoint. Their tank had a hundred-and-thirty-mile range and they had enough petrol for one more refuelling, assuming the petrol had not evaporated in the can.
The rest of the division had landed in Italy and they had been left behind. Gerald hadn’t questioned it, one didn’t, though the assumption among one’s fellow officers was that one was chomping at the bit to follow the action, to get across to Italy. In truth, it had been a relief to be left to trundle around the desert in a light tank. But now the division was back in England, and he and Enderby and Crouch were stuck in the desert unable to find the only settlement for hundreds of miles. It was no longer a relief. Gerald stuffed the chart and the compass back in his pocket and looked over at his men.
Enderby and Crouch. They sounded like a small but long-established firm of solicitors whose business was made up entirely of wills, entails and probate. Gerald rather liked the firm of Enderby and Crouch. He sometimes imagined their offices, housed in a Georgian building on one side of a square in a small market town in Suffolk perhaps, or Lincolnshire.
The reality of Enderby and Crouch was somewhat different. Enderby, a short, taciturn dairy farmer from Northallerton, had reddish-blond hair, ears that protruded like jug handles and a fair complexion well suited to the low skies, short days and endless winters of North Yorkshire and utterly unsuited to the crippling heat and relentless sun of the Western Desert, so that his skin was permanently burnt, blistered and peeling.
Crouch, who was equally diminutive, heralded from Walthamstow in north-east London and had worked at Smithfield meat market before the war. He had something of the disreputable bookie about him, and where Enderby had a thin, almost malnourished frame, Crouch was lean and wiry, packed with all the pugnacious energy of a bantamweight boxer. He viewed the world through suspicious eyes and sharp features and a mass of very dark, brylcreemed hair, and there was Jewish blood, Gerald presumed, a generation or so back.
The fact that both men were below average height perhaps went some way to explaining their presence in the tank regiment. It certainly wasn’t their skill as soldiers. You didn’t want a six-foot chap in a tiny, cramped vehicle with no windows save for a flap through which the driver could see out and a turret to climb in through. Gerald knew this because he was a shade under six foot himself and could attest to how extremely inconvenient it was.
Enderby and Crouch did not like each other. They tolerated each other when the confines of the tank dictated it, but once the turret hatch was open and they were both outside smoking their foul cigarettes or striking up a brew they squabbled like a married couple, and Gerald, for the most part, let them—so long as it didn’t come to blows, which occasionally it did. He had been presented with the pair of them in November and the three of them had been making short, and sometimes longer, incursions into the Blue ever since.
In the new year their field of operations had expanded south and west, and they had encountered only unresponsive smoking Arab men on camels, the occasional opportunistic civilian Europeans driving big old thirties cars who had resurfaced now that the war in the desert was ended, and one or two other straggling Allied units like themselves. They had found no sign of the enemy, other than corpses and burnt-out equipment and vehicles. Anyone who had made it this far had either died or turned back. It had been five days since they had left GHQ and they were running low on provisions as well as fuel. Their means of transport on this seemingly unending and purposeless mission was a Light Mk VI, a tank that had once been the mainstay of Britain’s overseas territories but was now largely redundant. Vickers had ended production four years ago when the division had switched to the heavier Matilda and Cruiser tanks and later the American Grants and Shermans. The Mk VI had an off-road top speed of twenty-five miles per hour, which meant it could be outstripped by all but the most sluggish Panzer. It had space for just three crew: the gunner, a driver and the commander, who doubled as radio operator. The radio, their only link back to GHQ and the outside world, did not operate at this range, though every so often Gerald placed the headphones over his ears and listened to the unvarying and eerie storm of static that seemed, to him, to be the sound of the desert. As well as a short-range radio the Mk VI was fitted with one .303-inch gun, which had jammed the only time they had tried to use it, and one .50-inch Vickers machine gun. The Mk VI’s half-inch of armour stopped rifle fire and machine-gun bullets sure enough, but against the German 88mm anti-tank guns it afforded as much protection as, say, a tennis net might.
‘What’s the score, then, guv’nor?’ said Crouch, coming down from his position on the ridge, scratching his backside furiously and shaking his head disgustedly as he spat out a fly. The muscles in his sinewy arms rippled beneath the leathery-brown skin and it was an easy stretch to see him right back at Smithfield after the war, a carcass slung over his shoulder, in bloodied white overalls caked in sawdust. He would survive, Crouch would, when others who had shone more brightly, who had made a difference, had died.
Gerald thought of Ashby, just briefly, and then he stopped.
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Crouch,’ he replied mildly, fishing for a cigarette. Crouch’s guess was not as good as his, they both knew that, and it didn’t need to be, Crouch being the trooper and Gerald being his commanding officer, but it served them both to relax the formalities a bit. It made being stuck in a small tank with two other men just bearable. For they all slept together under the same tarpaulin at night and they all shared the same rations. They all knew when Crouch’s dysentery had returned and that Enderby had not been able to shit in five days. And they all knew why they were really here. If they had been a crack team they would have been on that troopship heading towards the Italian coast, they would be with the Americans fighting their way towards Rome. As it was they were lumbering about the desert in a clapped-out Mk VI mopping up. None of them had any illusions about this nor any complaints, and as such Gerald could see no reason why they needed to be forever saluting and jumping to attention and all that nonsense, not in the desert.
And they had done their bit, had taken part in the skirmishes around Mersa Matruh and Sidi Barrani in late ’40 and early ’41, arriving in Tobruk to see the Italians surrendering in their thousands. They had retreated with the rest of the division to Cairo in ’42 after Rommel and the Afrika Korps had landed, they had played their part in both the El Alamein battles. They had followed the division into Tripoli a year ago and six months later had finally linked up with the Americans and swept triumphantly into Tunis. They had seen the King himself thanking the troops. In three years they had come under fire, they had experienced mechanical failures in the middle of minefields, their guns had jammed, they had had their tank shot from under them and had leaped for their lives under enemy fire, they had become bogged and stranded and lost, they had rounded up prisoners, they had shot at their own troops in the madness and the confusion and been shot at from above by the RAF. They had seen men die and had seen other men scream with pain and cry out for their mothers. They had each of them played his part and the war, this part of the war at least, had been won.
If it had been left to him, Gerald accepted, they would probably have lost. But they had not lost. The war in the desert was over and better men than he had won it. And perhaps that was how it was—a handful of really good men made the decisions and performed heroically and everyone else just did what they were told.
He thought of Ashby, whose Sherman had been hit by a shell on the first day of the advance at El Alamein. He had watched it happen and there had been no question of survivors. The earlier Shermans ran on high-powered and highly inflammable aircraft fuel. Ashby’s tank had exploded into a firebomb that had lit up the pre-dawn desert. That was how wars were won. And El Alamein had been a spectacular victory.
It was best not to think. War was something one took part in but did not understand. He suspected it was so for most of the men, in this war and in previous ones.
Gerald had grown up in the shadow of war. An uncle, his father’s only brother, had died in the second South African War in the first days of the new century, a few weeks before his own birth. He was fourteen at the outbreak of the Great War and spent his years at a minor public school in Dorset watching as the senior boys left in a blaze of glory, went off to France and were cut down a few weeks later, and he fully expected to join them. But the armistice came in his final year of school and he was spared.
He was not spared for long. A telegram arrived at the school just a week later announcing the death of his parents in a road accident.
They were out in Ceylon, his father a railway engineer who had accepted a position in the colonies in the first year of the war and took his wife with him, leaving Gerald at the minor public school. The war came and he and they were separated, and he felt it keenly, but most people were separated in war. His father, Percy Meadows, a kindly man with an anxious nature and a tendency towards melancholia, wrote him letters full of technical details and fascinating statistics about the railway. His mother, Abigail, a stout, hearty clergyman’s daughter who laughed a lot at life but whose laughter turned to tears sometimes when she thought no one was looking, wrote him endearing letters that described in colourful detail colonial life and the other wives and the endless tennis and polo parties and the trouble with the servants and, once, how an elephant had come crashing through a wall and into the house.
None of it seemed entirely real. His parents’ sudden death, caused when the car they were travelling in had gone off the road and over a precipice in some mountainous region, did not seem real either. His form master took him aside and that was real. The headmaster called Gerald to his office and offered awkward condolences, he attended a memorial service in the village of his father’s family. And his parents’ letters ceased, all but one letter from his mother, sent the week before her death and arriving, disconcertingly, four weeks after it.
They were gone. In an instant everything had been swept aside. He experienced something akin to vertigo, as though he, too, were plunging over a precipice, but after so much death it seemed churlish to make too much of it. The world had seen an orgy of death, it was tired of death, tired of mourning. Gerald kept his mourning to himself. He stayed on to the end of the school year, for the fees were paid in advance and his only relative now was an elderly great-aunt in Inverness. After his final exams he had little idea of what he might do, so his form master found him a position in a brokerage firm in the City. It felt an arbitrary decision, going directly into a position rather than trying for Oxford or Cambridge, going into a business about which he knew nothing, but his parents had not left him well provided for so in the end the decision was one of necessity as much as choice.
He joined Goldberg Staedtler. This distinguished firm, located at Ludgate Hill, had established its offices in the dying years of the eighteenth century when the war against America was raging on the other side of the Atlantic and, unimpeded by the blockades and restrictions of that time, had made fortunes on the back of the tobacco, cotton and sugar trade. For a young man of limited funds and no family, and therefore no distractions, it provided a place and a reason to work hard. By the age of twenty-eight, Gerald made senior broker.
Then he met Rosamund and it all came crashing down.
She was the sister of Maurice Lambton, a fellow broker, and had recently returned from New York from where she had, enticingly, retained a trace of an American accent. For some reason never adequately explained, Rosamund was known to everyone, even her own parents, as Bunny. It was a name she somehow lived up to while not appearing to, affording Gerald fleeting glimpses of herself then vanishing with a flick of her hair out of a room and seemingly into thin air. They met at a dance in Mayfair a week into the new year. She wore a knee-length chiffon dress of bottle green hemmed with silken tassels that shimmered when she moved, a mink stole, a string of pearls at her throat and long black gloves, and she smoked her cigarette through an ivory holder. Her hair was bobbed and gleamed with a silky jet shine over a shapely nose and a pointed aristocratic chin and brooding green eyes that made one think of a Siamese kitten lapping a saucer of cream. She danced with everyone that night and appeared to adore everyone equally.
It was bewildering and Gerald was smitten.
He spent a wretched time in the days and weeks that followed, eventually engineering an invitation to a weekend party at a house in Berkshire. Bunny would be there. Bunny was there. He was smitten afresh. His every thought was of her, his only desire to see her, she filled his head and his heart, she coursed through his veins. She opened a door and showed him a part of himself he had been unaware existed and he galloped through that door like a horse over a fence. Certainly there were other young men at that weekend party, but Gerald bided his time. He picked his moment. He got up before dawn and presented her with a crocus at breakfast. She laughed, but afterwards she looked at him differently.
She invited him to a dance in Belgravia the following week. In an agony of joy he danced with her until dawn and walked with her along the Chelsea Embankment, which was nowhere near the dance or her house but seemed a romantic thing to do. When they reached Albert Bridge and were too far from anywhere to walk back home he put her in a cab and kissed her through the window. She laughed and his heart lurched.
At Easter he arrived at her house with his dead mother’s engagement ring in his pocket, but she had gone out for the evening. He paced up and down her street until midnight, at which time she arrived home in a cab in the arms of another man.
After that was a bad time. He plunged back to that place he had inhabited ten years previously, when his form master had taken him aside to announce the death of his parents. He had thought it a place he would never return to yet here he was. On that occasion ten years before he had steeled himself against the pain because everyone was in pain, his pain had been filtered through a prism of four years of cataclysmic war. But this time, ten years later, there was no prism. This time the pain was his alone, raw and terrible, and he reeled. The door that had opened, that she had opened, taunted him, and when he looked through it now he saw a no-man’s-land of crushed hope and despair.
He closed and bolted the door forever. And perhaps, during this time, he looked no different, for he was young enough that pain did not outwardly leave its mark, but his heart had turned black.
A few months later, as a favour to a friend, and only when he had been assured Bunny would not be there, he attended a tennis party in Ruislip.
‘Guv! Looks like smoke over there!’
Enderby jogged over, stumbling over the rocky terrain, kicking up sand and dust with his boots. He was short enough in the leg that the hem of his khaki shorts almost reached his shins. His shirt sleeves were rolled up—all their shirt sleeves were rolled up—but Enderby’s rolled-up sleeves came down over his elbows. A deep permanent red sunburned V showed at his neck where his shirt was undone, a flash of almost translucent white skin visible where his headscarf had come loose.
‘Over there!’ he said, pointing.
Crouch, a short distance away, scoffed. ‘What smoke? Out ’ere?’ You’re ’avin’ a laugh.’
Enderby ignored him and indicated the western horizon. ‘Over there.’
Gerald looked. He could see nothing. He lifted his field glasses to his eyes. Was there perhaps something, a dark shadow, shimmering in the heat? It could be smoke but it could just be low cloud or a mirage. Or a town, it could be a town. He knew it probably wasn’t.
‘We’re heading that way anyway,’ he said, making a decision. ‘Let’s move out.’
But they finished their cigarettes first.
There was no smoke. And there was no town either. There was nothing.
After some hours they stopped on a crest and refuelled, Enderby cursing when Crouch spilled a few precious drops of petrol on the ground then shouting at him when he lit a cigarette too close to the engine. Gerald left them squabbling and went off to relieve himself.
The feud between the two stemmed from a night out and a girl in Tunis six months earlier. In the week following the city’s liberation a sort of madness had taken over the liberating troops and the newly liberated people that had seen soldiers running wildly down the streets, singing and dancing and drinking and feasting, firing guns and flares and rockets in the air and blasting the horns of purloined vehicles, scaling buildings to hang flags and kiss girls. The French residents had opened up what was left of their cellars and the liberating army, British and American, had been drunk for a week. And some of it had been spiked with petrol and anti-freeze by the Arabs who hated the liberators as much as they hated the Germans occupiers and a number of officers had died horrid deaths. Amid this insanity, Enderby—who had a girl called Elspeth back home in Northallerton—had danced with the widow of a dead French government official, but it was Crouch who had boasted the following morning that he had spent the night with the woman. Whether Crouch had in fact made this conquest Gerald doubted, but Enderby had gone for it, had gone for Crouch’s throat, and the two had ended up in a cell and on report. But rather than put them on a charge, the army had, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send them off into the desert together in a tiny Mk VI with Gerald as their commanding officer.
Or that was how it felt. It was entirely possible no one had made any such decision, that the fact of Enderby and Crouch ending up together in the desert on this pointless mission was just an accident of fate. Gerald had been in the army long enough not to question its wisdom or to read too much into its decisions. In the first weeks of his arrival and attachment to a tank regiment he had let himself think, with a sort of surreal bemusement, But I am a stockbroker. What am I doing here in a tank in the desert? It was a lazy thought, it was cheap, for everyone was a stockbroker or a meat-carrier or a dairy farmer or a butcher or a miner or a teacher. Ashby had been a barrister.
A barrister, for God’s sake!
He was the first person Gerald met as he staggered down the gangway of the troopship in Cairo in late November ’40 with a full kit and a gas mask banging against his lily-white knees. Ashby, already brown and lean as a native, having been there a month, an unlit pipe dangling from the side of his mouth and eyes permanently narrowed against the searing heat and the blistering white light, took one look at him and, with a sardonic laugh, tossed his gas mask into the Nile and led him to the mess.
They left Cairo almost at once, with the division, and hurtled on that extraordinary five-hundred-mile advance across the desert to overrun the fleeing Italians, taking a hundred and thirty thousand prisoners, capturing four hundred tanks. Ashby was there with him the whole time, his pipe in his mouth, a wry laugh always on his lips. Ashby, who had been a barrister in civvy street, helped him. They helped each other. Like Gerald, Ashby had a wife and small child in a middle-class suburb of London. They talked about ‘after the war’. They went through Sidi Rezegh, the retreat from Tobruk, Gazala, Mersa Matruh, Alam Halfa, the first El Alamein. They would both survive or they would both die.
It had not occurred to Gerald that one of them might die and the other survive.
He thought of the burning Sherman in the pre-dawn desert. Fourteen months had passed and it was looking increasingly likely that he, Gerald, would survive but Ashby was dead, fourteen months dead. Gerald would make it home and he had assumed that, on his return, he would seek out Ashby’s widow and child, but now he was no longer sure. The reason for seeking them out was no longer clear.
The place he had found to relieve himself was a ridge a little beyond the spot they had chosen to stop the tank and as he crested the ridge he found himself at the top of a vast escarpment with a steep drop beyond. At the bottom of this escarpment was a large flat area in the middle of which was an abandoned Scorpion, its arms stuck out before it.
A minefield. And they had almost missed it. Missing a minefield was actually better than driving into one, but still it was a bit slack to have simply driven blithely past utterly unaware. Not that there was much one could do with it except chart its position. If one knew one’s positon . . . Still, they could record it.
‘Crouch! Enderby! Over here.’
‘Bloody ’ell! How’d we miss that?’ Crouch said, joining him on the crest of the ridge, and when Gerald offered no reply, ‘How long d’you think it’s been there?’
Gerald shrugged. ‘Since ’41 at least, I should say.’
Most of the warfare in the last two years had been concentrated along the coastline far to the north, but this Scorpion looked in good condition and completely undamaged. It was a flail tank, a vehicle with two extending arms designed to be sent into a minefield ahead of the men, the arms beating the ground and making a pathway though the mined area. In reality the Scorpions overheated rapidly in the North African climate and the petrol evaporated after only a couple of hundred yards or so. If they didn’t overheat their air filters got so clogged with dust they simply broke down, at which point they either had to be repaired on the field of battle under enemy fire or they were abandoned—as this one evidently had been. At Alamein the sappers had ended up going in on foot with bayonets, prodding the earth and locating the mines that way.
‘Looks in good nick,’ said Crouch, making no move to go down to it.
‘How long’s that thing been down there, then?’ said Enderby, joining them, his flat Yorkshire vowels even more pronounced than usual.
‘Dunno. Why don’t you go down there and take a shufty, Endy?’ suggested Crouch with a sneer.
‘I ain’t going nowhere near no bloody minefield. Is it one of ours?’
Gerald cast his field glasses over the terrain and something glinted in the sunlight at ground level. No, the mines weren’t theirs. They were German anti-personnel ‘S’ mines, about the size of a tin can buried just beneath the ground with three prongs sticking up out of the sand. That was what he could see, the tip of one prong. He lifted his gaze to take in the entire plateau. How many were there? How far did it stretch? No way to tell. If you stepped on one of these the initial explosion flung the mine upwards. A secondary explosion sent hundreds of steel ball bearings into the air. He had seen it happen, he had no desire to experience it for himself.
‘I think we chart its position from a safe distance and move on,’ he announced, giving his final order of the day, and Crouch and Enderby almost fell over themselves in their haste to comply.
They were soon underway again, steering well clear of the minefield, which meant moving over rough rocky terrain. This was not good news for the Mk VI, which was a very short vehicle in relation to its width, meaning it lurched alarmingly and if they weren’t careful Crouch, in the driver’s seat up beside the engine, would throw up. They were already driving with the hatch open from the last time he had spewed.
They were headed in a vaguely westerly direction and sooner or later they were bound to run into someone and hopefully it would be someone from their own side. That was about as much as one did hope for. The bigger picture—battles, strategy, theatres of war—there was no point worrying about, for one could do nothing about them. Gerald had no illusions about his own, or his men’s, heroic capabilities. Mostly what had been required of him over the last four years was to know when to take cover and when to run and when to sit tight, which he had done, often, sealed into the tank providing support for the infantry and under heavy enemy fire hour after hour and not being able to return fire or to turn and run or do anything really except take it and hope it would be alright.
And sometimes it wasn’t alright.
Gerald had gone to a tennis party in Ruislip in the summer of ’28.
He went with bad grace, determined to hate everyone and everything. Finally Marian Fairfax, at whose house the tennis party was held and at whose behest he had sacrificed his Saturday to motor into darkest Middlesex, took him aside and roundly scolded him. Chastened, smarting but still aggrieved (for what did Marian Fairfax know of his black heart?) he changed into his tennis whites. Bunny hadn’t come and in her place was a girl he didn’t know. She was a curious little thing, not pretty, her snub nose almost like a child’s and her chin a little too prominent and lips too narrow around a too-large mouth that badly applied lipstick had only accentuated. But she was poised, somehow, with an elegant neck and very fierce, very frightening little eyes that told him she was out of her depth socially and that she minded this very much. The girl—her name was Diana—had been partnered with Eddie Devlin, which was bad luck for her as Eddie always took the whole thing very seriously and made his partner pay if they fluffed a shot. But miraculously the girl was up to it, more than up to it; she matched him shot for shot, whipping out stunning backhands one after another. It was marvellous to see and the most marvellous part was that the girl’s fear utterly vanished and she glowed, positively glowed—until Ed sent a ball right at poor Cecily Porter’s face in the deciding set and that was the end of that. They had won, Eddie and the girl, but Gerald could see her dismay at the manner of their victory and when Phyllis Devlin caused a nasty little scene afterwards her dismay turned to horror. An outraged horror, he saw; the outraged horror of a very upright, moral person when faced with a bully. And, damn it, Ed was a bully. And, as much to his own surprise as hers, Gerald presented himself to the girl shortly afterwards and suggested he drive her home.
It was all a long time ago. A tennis party in Ruislip in 1928.
Where the hell was Bani Walid?
Gerald stuck his head out through the Mk VI’s turret and scanned the western horizon. What if they should get this far, survive three years of war, only to die like this, blundering about in the desert? He was the commanding officer, it was incumbent on him to keep his men safe, to get them home. He imagined, with unsettling clarity, an ageing and weathered Mrs Enderby many miles away in Northallerton, a woman with broken veins in her legs and bunions on her feet, waiting for her boy to come home. He imagined Endersby’s Elspeth working silently and solemnly in the dairy, day after interminable day, waiting for the boy who would never come home. He had a little more trouble picturing Crouch’s family, imagining a violent, angry father and a terrified meek woman, Crouch’s mother, living in nightly fear of her husband’s fists. He imagined the telegram coming to the house and the terrified, meek Mrs Crouch falling into a faint from which she would never recover. He could see it all quite clearly. The longer he spent in the company of Enderby and Crouch the more vivid these images of their families became, and always he pictured them at the moment at which news of their sons’ deaths were received.
He would not picture the same scene in his own house, with his own family.
There was something up ahead. Gerald snatched up the field glasses. Yes, a dark, square shape, not a building, too small for that, but definitely manmade.
‘Crouch, north thirty degrees!’
It was a Panzer, unmistakable by its grey colouring. A big old Panzer III just sitting there, alone and abandoned, in a flat and utterly barren area of scree and gravel. Nothing else for miles in any direction. It was the first intact Panzer they had come across. What was it doing all the way out here? It had a range of only about ninety miles at most, and a top speed off-road of twelve miles per hour. She made the British Mk VI seem like a sports car by comparison. She was larger than their own Mk VI, a five-man vehicle with a three-man turret. At her hull was almost an inch of armour which made her invincible against the Allies’ anti-tank guns—if you took her face on. From the sides and the rear she was useless and a well-aimed machine gun could pierce her like a piece of cheese. She was an obsolete model, superseded by the Panzer IV years back, and perhaps that explained her presence out here, for she would not have been risked in battle, would in all likelihood have been abandoned during the final Axis retreat, or taken by those wishing to avoid the advancing Allies.
He gave the order and they trundled warily towards it, pulling up fifty yards short. Crouch switched off the engine and inside the Mk VI no one spoke. After a moment Gerald jumped down and cautiously circled the immobile Panzer on foot. It was caked in a thick crust of sand and the caterpillar tracks were worn almost to shreds, but just below the turret the insignia of the Afrika Korps, a black cross and palm tree, was intact. The turret hatch was closed. Gerald walked over, aware that Crouch and Enderby were watching. The tank was abandoned; he was certain of this. The dust had settled all around it. No tracks were visible before or behind, though the terrain was so scrubby, the winds so quick and intense, that any tracks it might have made—even an hour ago—would long have vanished. He climbed up onto the body and stood for a moment beside the hatch. He was close enough to read the manufacturer’s details on the rim: DAIMLER-BENZ · STUTTGART · 1938. His heart was thudding in his chest, which was odd because the war in the desert was over and he had survived. But his heart was thudding.
He eased open the latch and swung the lid back, brandishing his unloaded pistol as he did so and ducking lest a shot was fired. But no shot was fired. After a long moment he peered inside then jerked back at once as the smell of decaying flesh struck him. He turned away, gagging and choking. Bloody hell, he thought furiously. It had not even occurred to him someone might be dead in there. He stuck his head back inside, this time seeing the driver’s seat, the gunner’s perch, a damaged radio set.
And a body.
It was slumped over the fuel chamber at the rear of the tank, a gunner in fatigues, arms flung out before him, his cap on the floor at his feet, the side of his head dark red with matted hair and blood. A second wound, on his leg below the knee, was festering, the flesh black and putrid. Gerald pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose.
‘Crouch! Enderby! Get over here. Let’s get this poor bugger out.’
If they were going to salvage the Panzer, and it was not clear to him if they would or would not—it might simply depend on how much fuel it had—they were not going to drive the thing away with a corpse inside.
They came running, Crouch first, Enderby a few yards behind, both with that odd reluctant run of men commanded to do something they really had no wish to do.
‘Looks like a gunshot wound,’ said Gerald, climbing down inside the Panzer. His foot kicked a Luger that had been lying on the floor near the man’s cap, sending it skidding away beneath the driver’s foot pedals. As it began to cross his mind that the man had pulled the trigger himself, that the gaping wound in the side of his head was self-inflicted, the body let out a groan.
Gerald jumped back, banging his head painfully on the roof. Crouch, who was climbing after him, lost his footing and fell with a sickening thud onto the metal floor. Enderby, still standing outside on the top of the tank, fell back with a shout and disappeared.
‘Bloody hell!’ cried Crouch, scrambling to his feet and backing away. ‘Bugger’s not dead,’ he added unnecessarily.
‘Well, he’s not exactly going anywhere, is he?’ said Gerald, prodding the man with the end of his pistol, which merely elicited another groan. The man was alive, but barely so. ‘Come on, let’s get him out, for God’s sake!’ And they manhandled the fellow feet first out of the turret hatch and then over the side of the tank, where, horribly, they dropped him and he rolled off the tank and onto the ground and lay, face down, letting out a dreadful wheezing whine that was barely human.
Dear God, thought Gerald. He scrambled down and they turned the man over and lay him on his back. The side of his skull was gone, blown away by the Luger, and there was nothing they could do for him. The other side of his face was quite untouched, and it was the face of a young man badly malnourished and unshaven for many weeks, his skin blistered and destroyed by the desert sun and deprivation. His eyes were wide open though they seemed not to see anything, thank God. Enderby fetched a canteen and they wet his lips, which were cracked and swollen and bloodied, but he was too far gone to notice.
Dusk had come and they were going nowhere, now, till dawn. They broke out their meagre rations and, as the temperature began to drop, huddled on the groundsheet beside the tank and listened as the man made horrid gurgling, drowning sounds in the back of his throat.
‘Die, you bastard, die!’ muttered Crouch in a low voice.
But it was almost dawn before the man took his final breath.