On the fourth day of battle, relays of exhausted men came into the camp to be replaced by reserve troops. These men, most of them from tanks, had been lucky to get three hours sleep in a night and Simon, when he heard this, felt ashamed of his own nervous fatigue. Unable to excuse himself, he told himself that he would have done better to remain under fire and become conditioned to it. The rest periods between his sorties into action, and the fact he was liable to be wakened at any hour of the night, had demoralized him.
He had little or no idea what had been gained by the fighting and Fitzwilliams, though he questioned the returning men, could not tell him much. The general belief was that in the northern sector British armour had driven a wedge into the German defences but no sooner had this news gone round, than the commander in the sector radioed to say that his whole brigade was ringed by enemy anti-tank guns.
Fitzwilliams, like the officers Simon had approached on the road, was critical of the strategy of the battle: ‘Bad show, I call it. Suppose the brass hats know what they’re doing, but I’ve never heard of tanks being sent into a breach. Could lose the whole damn lot.’
For a while it seemed that, if not lost, the battle was petering out. There were a couple of empty days for Simon who had become used to action and felt the need for excitement. He hung around the command vehicle in a state of restless boredom; then a fresh offensive began. Given a signal to deliver, he ran gleefully to the jeep shouting, ‘Come on, Crosbie, wake up. This is the life.’ Crosbie, baffled as usual by Simon’s moods, grunted and muttered, ‘Sir.’
At the end of October, the division to which Simon belonged was withdrawn from the line. The tank crews, decimated by continuous fighting, were ordered back to reserve positions and Simon was assigned a new sector. He had to report to a coastal area where a fresh division was being prepared for an attack.
When he set out, November was beginning with dramatic splendour. The sky, that had dazzled the sight with its brazen emptiness, was filling with immense cumulous clouds. They were rising out of the sea and stretching, as though each was trying to over-top the other, until by mid-day they had reached the zenith. They were of different colours: one was a dark purple, its neighbour, swelling up behind, was azure, while on either side of them billowing curves of wool white, catching the sun on outer rims, gleamed like mother-of-pearl.
Simon, amazed by this display, said to Crosbie, ‘What do you make of it?’
Raising his eyes without lifting his head, Crosbie muttered, ‘Looks like trouble to me.’
The dark cloud grew until it dominated the sky. The wind strengthened in the unusual gloom and the sand lifted, but the storm did not break until the men were in sight of the camp. The rain came at them like a slanting curtain, as hard and rough as emery paper, and clattered against the jeep. The road was blotted out. Crosbie braked and flung himself round to find ground-sheets in the back of the jeep. They wrapped themselves up and waited for the deluge to slacken. The rain stopped within minutes but the camp, when they reached it, was under water.
Dawson, in the command vehicle, told Simon they were preparing to move forward. The new arrivals would be lucky if they could find themselves tea and bully.
The men, splashing through puddles, were shifting equipment. Though the water sank rapidly, the ground was left muddy and a wetness hung in the air. Dawson had been right about food. Crosbie, sent to forage, came back with mugs of tea and a couple of bully-beef sandwiches. They would have to spend the night in the jeep. Crosbie took up his favourite position, sprawled over the wheel and Simon climbed into the back seat. He wakened, cramped and chilly, at midnight when the petrol replenishing lorries went out. Then the barrage started up again, and turning on his back, staring up at the starless sky, he felt the war would never end. This, he told himself, could be his whole life and it might be a short life. He was as liable as any man in the field to be killed by the enemy. He turned towards the jeep back and tried to lose his old, abiding fear in sleep but just as he was drifting off, a messenger shook him and ordered him to report to his CO.
Dawson had gone off duty and a stranger was in charge of the command truck. He sounded as disconsolate as Simon felt. ‘’Fraid I’ve got to send you up front. The Kiwis are supposed to be advancing on Fuka but they’ve hit a snag. They say there’s an unmapped mine field in their path. Well, here . . .’ he spread out a hand-drawn sketch of the field; ‘ . . . it’s marked as a dummy, put down by our chaps last June. The commander won’t take my word for it. Says it’s too risky. Says he’ll dig in till he gets further orders. You’ll have to take this along to show him. Let him see for himself. Right?’
‘Sir. Which route, sir?’
‘God knows. All the routes are in a mess. Sheer, bloody shambles between here and Tel el Eisa. Try “Star”, it’s no worse than the others. If you can’t find it, you’ll have to ask as you go.’
Setting out, Simon had no more zest for the journey than Crosbie had. The battle had gone on too long and all he could feel now was a racking weariness.
The track, churned up by vehicles, had dried and hardened to the consistency of concrete and the jeep rocked on ridges and skidded through slime left by puddles. The sky had cleared and the waning moon gave a bleak, dispirited light.
The track was soon lost and they made their way guided by staccato flashes on the western horizon. They had covered little more than a mile when Simon realized the division had driven straight through an enemy position. The tanks standing idle about them were German tanks; the bodies propped in slit trenches wore German headgear and the black-clad figures that trudged past the jeep, avoiding it with blundering steps, were unarmed Germans who had given themselves up. The tank commanders, with no room or time for prisoners, had sent them back and now they were making their own way into captivity. Thankfully, Simon imagined. Once they reached the camp, they would throw themselves down to sleep and Simon wished he could do the same.
Crosbie had other thoughts. Looking askance at the burnt-out tanks, he at last reached the point of speech, ‘You seen inside these ruddy Marks? God, what a sight!’
‘Don’t look, then. Keep your eyes on the road.’
Beyond the German positions, the first reserves of tanks waited, hidden among sand bunkers. Ahead of them was the confusion that Simon now knew and expected. The forward tanks had thrown up a screen of dust, blinding the drivers of vehicles in the rear. Lorries had bogged down in the soft sand and commanders were trying to guide their tanks round each obstruction as they came to it. They were lit by blazing vehicles that glowed through the dust like a stage effect. None of it was new to Simon. Seeing petrol leaking from a burning truck, he shouted to Crosbie: ‘Make a dash for it before the whole show goes up and takes us with it.’
When they drove out of the dust belt, they found the moon had set and the overhanging face of the Fuka escarpment was just visible, darker than the prevailing darkness. Beneath it there was a gathering of torches where the tank commanders conferred. Simon, going forward on foot, reached the command tank as the sky grew pallid with first light.
The CO greeted him with little patience, saying as Simon handed him the map: ‘What’ve you got there? Let’s hope it makes sense because nothing else does. They call us a corps de chasse but how the hell can we chase anything with supply trucks littering the ground and now a ruddy mine field in the way.’
‘It’s a dummy, sir.’
‘So they think, but I want to know more about it. We’ve lost seventeen tanks already, mostly on mines.’
‘You can see it here, sir. Our chaps laid it in June when the retreat was on.’
‘Damn fool thing to do.’ The commander, in a fury, turned his back on Simon and Simon, in no better humour, went to the jeep, saying to himself, ‘They might have let me sleep.’
He had only been gone ten minutes but Crosbie was unconscious over the wheel and Simon, with scarcely the heart to wake him, thought, ‘Don’t blame him, either,’ then shouted ‘Come on, Crosbie, lazy bastard. For God’s sake, let’s get back to camp.’