Part 10 (1/2)

Chapter Nineteen.

IN THE MIDDLE OF April I had a car accident, and when I awoke some time later in the 100th General Hospital it was to find Leopold's face, a vaguely sinister angel from an El Greco background afloat somewhere above me in the unfocused shapes of the tent.

'The story is this,' he said. 'You have a fractured skull and a few other things that don't count for much. We're going into Tunis right behind the a.s.sault troops in about two weeks' time. If you're on your feet by then, OK. If you're not, you're off the section. We've been picked out for the biggest FS operation to date. We're in business at last.' The long El Greco face sharpened with thoughts of military adventures, and acquisition. 'We can't afford to be a man short at a time like this,' he said.

'I'll be there whatever happens,' I a.s.sured him.

Some hours later I saw the MO and explained the situation to him. He was entirely sympathetic to the extent of agreeing to a minor falsification of the records. A skull officially fractured meant a minimum of a month in hospital, but if the nature of the injury in the register were altered to concussion I could go as soon as I could stand on my feet. The MO warned me that if this were done I should deprive myself of an infinitely small disability pension.

The section left for Tunis on 4 May, the first British troops entered the city on the morning of the 7th, and at about the same time I set off alone, riding a motor cycle. I suffered from no feelings of discomfort, but was handicapped by being obliged to drive the machine - which fortunately possessed a foot gear-change - with one hand, due to fractured ribs on the left side. Apart from this I was inconvenienced by a loss of balance that only took effect when I got off the motor bike and prevented me from standing still.

On the whole I managed fairly well. The roads were perfect until Souk El Arba. I slept in a field there, got up at dawn, and within two or three hours reached Beja, sixty miles from Tunis. Here I had bad trouble with truckloads of Germans who had either been disarmed and directed to the rear, or were actually trying to escape. They were strangely exuberant and, seeing the lone motor cyclist in the road, one after another drove straight at me, and in one instance I landed in the ditch - this possibly being my nearest escape from death in the war. After Medjez el Bab the battlefield began, cratered everywhere, and littered with numerous shattered or burned-out tanks. The bodies - where they could be reached in the wreckage - had been removed, but in each case helmets had been left to provide a tally.

Casualty clearing stations had been established in the villages, each one with rows of bloodstained stretchers stood against the wall to dry in the sun, recurrent accents of bright colour in an otherwise drab and desolate landscape.

By mid-morning I was in Tunis, alert in a mind's eye antic.i.p.ation of a Brussels after Waterloo, delivered over to the cras.h.i.+ng of church bells, to flower-throwing, Te Deums and Caesarian triumphs. But what dominated the scene was a great sprawl through the streets and the squares of the city of thousands of unconscious British soldiers - I counted over fifty lying on the steps of a single church - a Goyaesque muddle of bodies and bottles and wine vomit. The crowds, surging without direction hither and thither, trod them underfoot, and the MPs dragged them from under the tracks of tanks and heaved them like sacks of potatoes over the tailboards of the lorries waiting to take them away. If this, I asked myself, was the British in victory, how would they have appeared in defeat?

The Army was on its way elsewhere, to Cap Bon where there was a final battle to be fought, and the crowds watching from the roadside seemed apathetic. In all probability to avoid the innumerable drunks, most of the young women had gone home, leaving a glum collection of the middle-aged and elderly of both s.e.xes, who had had enough of the war. It was astonis.h.i.+ng to discover that numerous German soldiers were included among these onlookers, still free to come and go as they pleased, and a greater surprise still, in the first bar where I tried to buy a beer, to be elbowed from the counter by the Germans that had taken over the place. A group of them were roaring a marching song. Thus it remained for the rest of this day and the next, the British celebrating victory, and the Germans making the best of defeat, each in their own way.

Movement Control directed me to our headquarters in an elegant suburb at the better end of the boulevard. This villa until a day or two before had housed Gestapo personnel, and they had created in it a little haven of pseudo-Bavarian Gemtlichkeit, with drinking-steins decorated with jocose faces, and rackfuls of carved pipes, beery wall-mottoes, and clocks from which small rustic German figures popped as the hour chimed to execute a few clog-dance steps before being jerked back out of sight.

This place was the reverse of sinister, and the hatchet-faced men - as we supposed them to be - who had lived here must have left it with real regret. They had gone off in a hurry, leaving a cupboard stuffed with a huge variety of jams, with innumerable condoms - some with fanciful additions - and an a.s.sortment of feathered hats. Personal correspondence had been overlooked too, in the haste of departure, including letters waiting to be posted. This showed the writers on the whole as sensitive men, caring sons and devoted fathers. 'Persuade Mutti to take regular meals ... Magda's friends sound to me rather wild. Please take care.' Friends and relatives were rea.s.sured as to the correspondent's health and the future of the cause. 'The exercise is good for me. I've never felt so fit ... of course the going's been hard, but I see a break in the clouds.' One Kriminalsekretr was distressed by the condition of the Arab population. 'I've never seen such poverty. To tell you the truth it thoroughly depresses me.'

It was Leopold's moment of triumph, his apotheosis, and he could hardly contain himself for delight. After so many barren months in Philippeville relieved only by weekly orgies chez Fortuna, this unimaginable prize had fallen to us. A great, mysterious and inviolate oriental city was ours for the taking. The first thing was to settle in and, overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with good humour, Leopold allocated the sleeping quarters. Up to this we had lived to some small extent under the dead hand of the Crimean War, from which time we were a.s.sured a regulation had survived that prohibited Other Ranks billeted upon civilians from sleeping in beds. In each villa, therefore, which we had previously occupied, the beds were removed to allow us to sleep, as in the days of Florence Nightingale, on the floors. But now it seemed even to Leopold unreasonable that we should be denied the modest degree of comfort that had been enjoyed by the Gestapo.

Amid this general euphoria a single note of warning was struck. Captain Merrylees - now FitzClarence - announced that to mark our entry into Tunis he would shortly be changing his name again, but had not decided to what. Next, smiling dangerously, he issued an edict imposing a curfew upon us. The front door would be locked at 11 p.m. He kept his pistol ready by his bed, he said, and might decide to fire through his bedroom window, overlooking the door, at anyone who tried to enter after that time.

No one was quite sure how to take this. Was it supposed to be some sort of stupid joke, or had this strange, confused man drifted so far from the sh.o.r.es of reality that he was capable of putting such a threat into action? As Leopold, shaking his head, remembered, even in the relative calm of the first days in Philippeville there had never been any question of working to a time-table, and that our duties there had occupied us as much by night as by day.

9TH MAY.

Chaos in Tunis is in no way diminished, and as so far no duties have been a.s.signed to us there is little to do but roam the streets. Yesterday the last of the drunks had been carted away before midnight, but today shows promise of producing as heavy a crop as ever, as fresh Eighth Army troops arrive, set up camps in the neighbourhood and soldiers flock into town. Sometimes there is more Hogarth than Goya in the aspects of intoxication. I saw soldiers streaming into a wine-shop, drinking from the necks of bottles as they came out, then almost within seconds falling senseless. One man, unable to remove a cork, smashed the neck off the bottle, and emptied it, the jagged gla.s.s to his lips.

The movement of our fighting troops along the avenue de Paris is settling to something more like a parade, with the top bra.s.s showing off. Every soldier must feel the need to do something to a.s.sert his individuality in the terrible anonymity of Army life, and this is an impulse that has led in the Eighth Army to unusual results. We get away with brown shoes, unorthodox headgear and odd badges. In the Eighth Army the officers go in for polka-dotted scarves and corduroys. Astonis.h.i.+ng that even a general should suffer from the same ambition to stand out in the crowd, to the extent - as one does - of wearing in this sweltering heat a battle blouse with a fur collar.

There are as many Germans to be seen as ever - but not a drunken one so far. They form groups to sing their aggressive songs, some of them having removed their badges of rank, although inexplicably their uniforms remain neat and well-pressed. They treat us with amused disdain, rather as British officers at the time of the Indian Mutiny might have viewed momentarily victorious sepoys.

I go into a pub full of them, and attract a little cold curiosity by having to pace backwards and forwards to keep my balance. Hardly any of the British speak a word of German, but one in three of the Germans has a fair amount of English, and this can be even fluent and colloquial, as in the case of one of them who debars my access to the crowded bar and says, 'f.u.c.k off.'

Served in the end, I make for a corner and there find a defeated adversary who has no objection to talking to me. He is small, and superior in manner with thick pebbled spectacles, and gives me the impression of never having smiled in his life. He appears to be short of cash, accepts a drink from me and a conversation in 50-50 German and English begins. Drinking my beer, he obviously tries to put a brake on his contempt, but starts off, 'As an army, you are nothing. This is an episode of no importance. An interlude.' He does not see the Afrika Korps as defeated. They have responded to the need for strategic adjustment. The outcome of the war, he says, will be decided in Russia, and at this point I agree with him.

His battle career has been a dramatic one, making him sound like the personification of some Teutonic myth. He volunteered for action on the Russian front, collected five wounds - 'I'm like a sieve with bullet holes,' he says - and frostbite that removed two toes. He was then sent to North Africa, where he found the war sluggish and unentertaining, and he had applied to be returned to Russia. Apart from the Germans, he says, the Russians are the only soldiers worth anything. 'When we advanced,' he says, 'we had orders to take no prisoners and kill all the wounded. If you left a wounded man alive he would come round eventually and start shooting again. I live only for war,' he adds. 'There is no other experience in life to equal it.'

Strangely, he is obsessed by the knowledge that months will probably pa.s.s before his mother hears that he has survived after he disappears into a PoW camp, and he presses on me a piece of paper giving an address in Switzerland through which she may be reached with news of him. Suddenly the obsidian Teutonic heart softens. 'Do this for me,' he says, and he takes off his wrist.w.a.tch and tries to make me take it in payment.

10TH MAY.

A chance encounter in the avenue de Paris with my friend Tennant of the Medjez el Bab section whose hunted expression seems much increased since our last meeting back in the winter. Dive-bombing induces in the end its own special melancholy, as I remember from our short experience of it in Philippeville, and Tennant has been under the bombers for six months. Faith and hope have drained from him, and gloomily he unburdens himself of depressing secrets.

'I suppose we outnumbered them ten or twelve times,' he said. 'In Medjez alone we had about 3,500 troops - British, American, French. In the end the Germans got tired of waiting for us and they sent a battalion of 300 men down the road from Tunis to get rid of us. We made an orderly withdrawal to previously prepared positions - in other words we p.i.s.sed off as fast as we could. Three hundred against three thousand. Remember the stuff they fed you in the history books? Remember Clive of India? What's happened to us, for Christ's sake? Why aren't we heroes any more? - or perhaps it was all b.a.l.l.s and we never were. Did you hear how the Americans lost half their tanks? I can tell you because I was there. They weren't knocked out. They heard the Jerries were coming, and they turned round and ran off the road and got stuck in the mud.'

'Never mind, John,' I said. 'We're here at last,' I said.

'Do you know why? Only because you can't go on fighting when you've run out of petrol and ammo. They had nothing left to fight with.'

11TH MAY.

Action at last. A large operation is to be mounted for the search of the German security headquarters in the rue de la Marne where innumerable doc.u.ments that have escaped a back-garden bonfire are to be collected and sorted out for study.

Amid huge excitement we prepare to take control. Captain Merrylees, stiffly animated after some hours spent by his batman polis.h.i.+ng his leather and bra.s.s, leads our exultant convoy to the scene, where something strange in the atmosphere is instantly to be detected. No one has awaited our arrival, and no one seems to notice that we are there. Officers and NCOs, like flying ants in a disturbed nest, rush wildly about with armfuls of doc.u.ments - some badly charred - dodging or sometimes colliding with us. We are mysteriously excluded from all this urgent activity, which in theory we should have directed. Captain Merrylees wanders away to look for a lavatory, and we suspect that is the last we have seen of him. A moment later a red-faced major comes up, twitching and frothing with anger, and yells, 'Who the h.e.l.l are you?'

Leopold explains our business there, and the major runs his eye over us with something like disbelief. He stares down at our brown shoes, then at webbing and belts that have never known blanco, and the trousers that should have been tropical issue, but which in two cases have been made up by a civilian tailor in Philippeville, and now we realize that it is our un-regimental appearance that appals him. Some instinct of self-preservation has saved Leopold on this occasion from wearing his two guns.

It dawns on me that these interlopers must be members of a new section, or sections straight from England, for I recognize them, in their brisk bloodlessness, as men still stunned by their training. They all wear Intelligence Corps badges and caps set at exactly the right angle, where the North African sections have taken to berets, and their equipment is coated by the green blanco insisted on by the Winchester depot. The major stops one of these dazed automata to put some question to him, and the man comes to attention with a crash of heavy boots. He turns his attention on us again. 'You're an absolute shower,' he says, 'if ever I saw one.'

Coming closer to yank at a loosely hanging s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton, his fury has sharpened by suspicion. The culprit in this case is Watson, one of our section drunkards, and the major sniffs incredulously. 'Have you been drinking?' he shouts at him. Half the section has been drunk up to half the time since our arrival in North Africa, and two members including Watson have been drunk every day from early morning until late at night. With huge concentration and practice they have learned in the end how to walk without staggering while in this state, but they are never free from the special odour of the so-called pure alcohol used in the manufacture of anisette. Watson, a journalist in civilian life and a persuasive talker, manages with practised dignity to flannel his way out of this situation. Fortunately the major's attention is distracted from our second drunk, Spriggs, who is notoriously incoherent, but who stands perfectly to attention with an expression of extreme alertness.

The major, in charge, it seems, of all the security personnel in the building, now a.s.signs our duties for the day, which consist in opening and closing doors for these earnest, doc.u.ment-laden figures as they dash backwards and forwards from one room to another. The FSO and Leopold make themselves scarce, leaving us to it.

Next day, with excitement everywhere at fever pitch, beleaguered by clamorous citizens who cannot make themselves understood - for there are no French speakers in sight - we are on our door-keeping duties again. All we are allowed to do is to direct enquiries to a bewildered-looking young corporal who waves his arms hopelessly as if trying to disperse smoke while the pet.i.tions and denunciations pile up on his desk top, and supplicants try to trap his hands and bribe him by sticking banknotes between his fingers. We, too, are constantly a.s.sailed by plausible scoundrels who offer women, boys, gold, the kingdom of heaven if we will only find some way of smuggling them into the presence of the Allied Commander, who they are certain can be corrupted if only he can be reached. Some time in the morning a bomb is allegedly discovered, and everybody rushes out of the building, then back again when it is p.r.o.nounced to be a harmless Gestapo souvenir. Every so often our enemy the major flings open a door and brays through it into the ruckus and confusion, 'This must be kept as a pool of silence.' Watson, immutably drunk, copes with all this imperturbably, but Spriggs manages at one point to go to sleep on his feet propped against a door, and falls over when it is opened suddenly.

Back at HQ for the midday meal Leopold makes a shattering announcement. 'We're being shunted into a siding,' he says, looking as though he has just listened to sentence of death being pa.s.sed upon him. He goes on to explain that we are being pulled out of Tunis and moved to the port of La Goulette, six miles out of the city. 'It's a quiet place,' he says. 'Smashed up, with nothing working.' His theory is that GHQ Tunis may have had reports about Captain Merrylees, causing them to lose confidence in him, and they want to get him - and us - out of their hair.

Chapter Twenty.