The Desert Falcons, page 3
They walked towards the lorries in the centre of the leaguer. Stockdale tall, fast-striding, bearded, leaning forward as though always eager to arrive at the next episode of his life.
His habitually amiable face was set in concentration, under the black and white checkered Arab headcloth and black headband that the squadron wore. This and the Senussi Arab jerd, the black blanket-like cloak, that they all wore when it was cold, were, with their blue neck cloths, the squadron’s only compulsory items of dress when on operations. The scarf was useful when a blue beret replaced the Arab kaffiya and agal, for it could be tied across the nose and mouth if the wind blew sand in their faces. Some of them wore khaki caps of diverse kinds, taken from the enemy. Some preferred Australian slouch hats or the New Zealand hats with broad brims that made them look like villainously mature Boy Scouts.
Some wore shorts and others were in a variety of long trousers: khaki drill or corduroy, bleached by the sun and laundering, often patched. There were those who wore sandals on bare feet and others who swore by regulation Army boots. Most of them preferred suede desert boots. Many sported beards.
Stockdale had been commissioned in a yeomanry regiment during his university years: not from any particular military leaning, but because he was a horseman and enjoyed the convivial company of others who shared his enthusiasm. It imposed little on his time beyond attendance at a bibulous training camp for two weeks every summer and a few parades during the year. In Egypt he began to take an interest in roaming the desert in a tough Ford tourer, navigating his way to various sites of archaeological and historical interest: it was some intellectual stimulus in a life otherwise filled by his work, polo and furthering his knowledge of Arabic dialects.
On the outbreak of war he offered his services to the Army H.Q. in Cairo and suggested that his intimate and unusual knowledge of the desert and its people should be put to better use than conventional regimental service. Thus R.S.R.S. gradually came into being. As a cavalryman he elected to call it a squadron rather than a company or group, and his men troopers. It now comprised two troops and an establishment of thirty-five officers and men. However, there were usually a few supernumeraries, colourful people who were specialists in various skills: they numbered, from time to time, Frenchmen, Greeks, Libyans, a Pole or two, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians and Rhodesians. They came from sober line regiments, the French Foreign Legion, the Spahis, the Royal Engineers, and from romantically named regiments of the Indian Army. Some stayed only a few weeks. All were volunteers, personally selected by Stockdale. Discipline was liberal, but any breach of rules, any failure of trust, and above all any selfishness or cowardice, earned immediate return to the offender’s original unit. This was a calamity that the members of the Rover Strike and Reconnaissance Squadron feared worse than death or captivity.
Their brief halt over, they moved back into the open desert from among the sheltering sand dunes and the two troops separated to look for Flt. Lt. Glashan, the to them anonymous Hurricane pilot who might be anywhere in a patch of desert thirty miles square: it was as well not to think of it as 900 square miles, for that made it sound impossibly vague.
Glashan had baled out twice before, in his twenty-two years of life. The first time was as a pupil at advanced flying school in 1939, learning to fly in formation: another pupil had collided with him during a cross-over. He had not cared for anything about that experience: not the crunch of metal and fabric, nor the feeling of impotence as his Gladiator biplane was sent reeling out of its course and into a spin; nor the instinctive thought about whether these damn parachute things really worked. Even when the parachute opened, he found no pleasure in the allegedly pleasant sensation of drifting high above the ground. He had wet his pants, for one thing. Baling out was something one could learn only in theory, and his jarring and messy contact with the earth in a cow pasture did not increase his enthusiasm for the experience. The second time was in 1941, when highly professional German anti-aircraft gunners shot off one wing of his Hurricane, here in the Western Desert. It had been during the fierce mid-summer fighting when Rommel succeeded in driving the British and their Commonwealth allies back to the Egyptian frontier, and there were many small units cut off and scattered behind the German advance. Glashan was at 15,000 feet on that occasion and took advantage of his long descent to guide himself as far to the east as possible. He was picked up by a South African armoured car four hours later.
When it happened for the third time, he told himself ruefully that this was becoming almost an annual event and he must find some way of putting a stop to it.
He had joined the R.A.F. on a short service commission at the age of eighteen, immediately on leaving school, and was posted to a squadron in the Suez Canal Zone in August 1939. By now he was a veteran of the Middle East and the Western Desert.
Having had more practice at baling out than comes the way of most people, he had learned to adapt his stocky, scrum-half’s frame to hitting the ground with the minimum of discomfort. He rolled expertly on landing, was out of his harness in a trice and on his feet.
He had watched his Hurricane hit the sand and explode many miles away. If it had been intact he would have tried to find it and sit under the shade of a wing until picked up. As it was, he was faced with a long trudge under the grilling sun. He had lost his helmet when he struggled out of the cockpit.
He wore the usual desert pilot’s silk scarf at his neck and could make some kind of headgear out of it. Regulations prescribed long trousers and sleeves, in case of aircraft fire, and this was a rule on which Sqdn. Ldr. Aylwood insisted, thus he had some cover against sunburn. He wore suede desert boots, as flying boots were too hot, so he could walk in comfort.
He knew there must be odd vehicles of the Long Range Desert Group or S.A.S. wandering the desert. Not to mention the other irregular units: almost tripping over each other, as he put it to himself with the intolerance and suspicion with which most people regarded these military gipsies with their bizarre dress and flamboyance. There were also the more conventional armoured cars, tanks, lorries of the Service Corps, gunners, signallers and various technical arms. His chances of being picked up seemed fairly good.
On the other hand he may have to fend entirely for himself for many days and depend only on his own resources for survival. In which event, he had better find some food and water. Although it was uncomfortable, he flew with a revolver and water bottle at his belt and carried a tin of pemmican in one shirt pocket and a packet of biscuits and some raisins in the other. That wouldn’t see him far, for he was a long way from anywhere. The closest place of human habitation he knew was the dump they had just raided. It was possible that some of the small Italian garrison’s supply of food and water remained. He decided to set off there and try to equip himself for a long journey home. He took a bearing from his small pocket compass and set out.
*
Odile von Choltitz, nee Vautier, had everything she needed but a man. Since her husband had died from a liver and kidney infection two years ago she had occasionally and highly selectively made good this deficiency. She didn’t care for Italians but many of them were wonderfully handsome and often amusing with it, displaying that decadent kind of frivolity, the combination of childishness and depravity, of which only they are capable. She liked to be amused but she also admired the harsh, extravagant masculinity of some of the hulking German officers: self-consciously tough though they were with their leather accoutrements, sun-scorched hides, blazing blond hair and staring pale eyes. So she sometimes helped herself to one of those as well.
When she began to fantasise about one or two of the younger and cleaner Arabs among her helpers, she thought that perhaps it would have been best to renounce her clamorous flesh altogether and invite the nuns from one of the convents in Benghazi, Barce or Derna to come and work with her; and keep temptation at bay. But it was too late now: she had given way and she liked it too much. And the fighting had cut her off from those places. It had been a long time, and there was no prospect of a trip to the coast now, with the British and their allies holding a line from Gazala, to the west of Tobruk, stretching far to the south. Since the Allies had surged right through to Benghazi early last year, before being driven back towards Egypt, life had been disrupted and she was marooned here in the wilderness.
She managed to live comfortably enough among the ruins she had excavated, in the this timeless oasis served by its ancient well. It gave her a special kind of satisfaction to feel that she was carrying on a civilisation two thousand years old, occupying what was left of a home built by some colonising Roman, enjoying his mosaics and bas reliefs just as much as he must have; sheltering from the sun and the cold desert nights behind the same stout walls. With canvas tenting and camp furniture, she had settled here with an air of permanence, roofing over the broken walls, drawing water from the ancient well that had served the Arabs before ever the Romans came. Her helpers grazed goats and sheep and grew a few wretched crops under her guidance. She had enough. Almost enough: she was lonely in her narrow bed.
She knew she must remain here until the war was over, however long it took. When the British came, as she supposed they inevitably must, she would revert to her native French name and nationality and hope they would be too busy to concern themselves with her German marriage and chivalrous enough not to exact any penalties for it. She was confident of her ability to arouse any latent feelings of chivalry in any man of any nation.
She was sure that if she needed a protector she would find herself one among the next conquerors of Libya. The Italians had annexed the country in 1911, but three thousand years before that the Berbers had come, and after them the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans.
A sophisticated and beautiful woman’s wiles were surely ancient and subtle enough to cope with any new temporary masters of the country.
She wondered when Klaus would come to see her again. Major Klaus Dussel with his ridiculous formality, his heel-clicking, bowing and stiff hand-kissing, as though he did it by numbers: one, extend the right hand, palm upwards, and take the lady’s; two, raise it precisely 30 centimetres; three, incline from the waist at an angle of 45 degrees exactly; four, briefly touch the back of the lady’s hand with the lips; five, simultaneously release the hand and return to the upright position. She giggled over the memory. But he had relaxed towards the end of his third visit, and decided to bivouac among the ruins; and he had not spent the whole night beside his armoured car with his officers and men.
It was twelve hours since she had seen the great pillar of smoke on the horizon and watched the British aeroplanes fly away. She wondered how many of them had got safely home. And she wondered exactly what Klaus had been up to over there in such nervous secrecy. Whatever it was, he seemed to have finished what he was doing, for it was nearly a month since she last saw him.
She rose restlessly and went to stand in the doorway, looking out into the night. If her eyes could have penetrated the darkness they would have seen a weary pilot plodding over the sand and thorns in the general direction of her beloved ruins, and nearer at hand a group of strangely garbed soldiers settling for the night by their defensively deployed jeeps and lorries. When she turned to take a final look northward, towards the horizon on which, in daylight, she could see the low hump of the Jebel, she could, if she were able to project her thoughts, have made telepathic contact with Major Dussel, whose armoured cars were also crossing the desert in her direction.
Last of all, she moved out of the building and searched the western sky for searchlights or flak: the signs of further R.A.F. penetration towards Tripoli and Tunisia. In doing so, she remembered the most beautiful of all the Italian officers she had known, the dashing captain she had met in Benghazi, and his smirking, funny stories about the farmer friend who kept open house for him and seemed to think more of his crops and herds than his pretty wife.
He had once turned up here, many months ago, and she wondered if he were still alive and uncaptured and whether the fortunes of war would ever bring him this way again.
Capitano Armando Bellazzi, at your service: and he said it with a smile, a wink and an inflection that left no doubt about the type of service he had in mind. She had no premonition that he had been torn from the arms of his friend’s complaisant wife and ordered into the desert.
Odile went on with her cataloguing and note-writing, wondering how long it could be before the full weight of war bore down on this comparatively quiet little oasis. She recognised, in the morning’s air raid and the arrival soon afterwards of a flight of Messerschmitts to circle over the distant rising smoke, that it must be on its way.
Sqdn. Ldr. Killer Cruttenden leaned out of his Blenheim and tootled a “Gone Away” on his hunting horn. He always signalled his return by blowing his horn, and the whole camp recognised the message. When they heard the Gone Away they knew there was no use waiting for the other two to land. It was a macabre performance. When he came back from an operation without casualties he gave them the “Tallyho”.
He got out of his aircraft, twirled his moustache, and strolled with his bow-legged, National Hunt jockey’s gait beside the group captain commanding the wing, who had come out to greet his return, towards Operations.
His first words were “What about the Hurricanes, sir?”
“The one-o-nines bagged one, but the driver got out. It was Glashan.”
“Poor Derek. Any news yet?”
“‘Fraid not. Those weird R.S.R.S. types are out there somewhere; I daresay they’ll pick him up. What happened to you?”
“We pranged the target. Piece of cake.” He turned his angry eyes up to the group captain’s. “If we’d had a proper fighter cover, instead of playing silly buggers pretending we weren’t going anywhere in particular, we’d all have got back.”
“I know, Killer, I know: but there were reasons.”
“Try telling that to my six chaps who didn’t make it: and the rest of the squadron.”
“There won’t be another show like that, I promise you.”
“If there is, I want the chairborne bastard at H.Q. who dreams these things up to come along and see for himself.”
“There’s no need to be like that. You’re tired.”
Cruttenden tugged at his moustache again and slapped angrily at a fly. “I hope it turns out to have been worth it, sir.”
“If I could tell you more about it, Killer, I know you’d agree it was. Even with two-thirds casualties.”
“I can’t wait,” said the squadron commander drily, “to hear all about it.”
The group captain sat through the whole de-briefing, his face expressionless, his hidden thoughts full of sadness. The chairborne bastard at Headquarters who had ordered the operation was an old friend of his, a bomber pilot with two tours of operations already behind him and a D.S.O., D.F.C. and bar to show for them, who would gladly have led the raid. But it was better to let Cruttenden find out things like that for himself.
Padi Field was waiting at the dispersal point when the two Hurricanes landed. The squadron commander, who had just come back from a sortie himself, was at his side. Sqdn. Ldr. Aylwood hadn’t lost a flight commander for six months, and wanted to hear about Derek Glashan more than about the success of the sortie or the shooting down of the two Blenheims. “You’re sure Derek’s O.K?” he asked the other two pilots.
“We watched him down, sir, and buzzed him when he was on the deck: he was standing up and waving,” said Morris.
“Did you see him start walking?”
“He didn’t go towards his kite, sir; it was miles away, and burned out anyway.”
“Which way did he go?”
Morris and Dainty exchanged a look. “Back the way we’d come, sir. We flew over again and pointed this way, but he waved a kind of negative, sir, and kept on.”
“What the hell? Was there anything there? A well, or a wadi? One of those old tombs? An Arab tent?”
“Nothing we could see, sir,” said F/Sgt. Dainty.
The squadron commander looked discouragingly at him. An N.C.O. who was known to have substantial private means and had been educated at Winchester confused him. Dainty had politely refused a commission on both occasions he had offered him one, and it was on record that he had twice previously made the same refusal earlier in his career. It struck Sqdn. Ldr. Aylwood as indecent, and made him feel frustrated: he sensed that somehow the flight sergeant was laughing not only at him but at the whole Service. He knew he oughtn’t to encourage the chap, but he did have two valuable attributes: the sharpest eyes on the wing, and the most unerring aim with any kind of firearm, including a Hurricane’s guns. “You’re sure, Flight Sergeant?”
“Positively, sir.” He added encouragingly “I’m sure Flt. Lt. Glashan knew what he was doing, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Aylwood answered, a touch grimly.
“Oh, he was all right, sir,” Morris said quickly. “He didn’t land on his head or anything, or hit it when he baled out: it was a damn good exit; he had plenty of time.”
“Well, they’re looking for him,” said his C.O. “Let’s go and get you de-briefed, then I want a word with you both. Too bad about the Blenheims.” He didn’t add, What can I say to their squadron commander? But it was his preoccupation now that he had learned as much as he could about his own pilot.
Morris interrupted his thoughts. “How did your trip go, sir?”
Aylwood involuntarily half-smiled. “We’re getting pretty good at this close support bombing. We knocked out a couple of Italian tanks, M 13s; and a Tiger; and got some flamers in a Jerry truck convoy.”
“It might have been better if you had come with us instead of the Blenheims, sir,” F/Sgt. Dainty suggested.
One couldn’t tell from the fellow’s expression how he meant it to be taken; but Aylwood had been thinking the same thing himself. He didn’t reply.
A section of Hurricanes searched for Glashan that afternoon, but was intercepted by six Me.109s and had to give up after a fight in which one aircraft on each side was damaged. In another search later, while there was still enough light, three Hurricanes encountered twelve Italian Air Force CR42 biplanes and shot eight of them down, but the interruption interfered with their task and they saw no trace of the missing flight commander.
