It was nearly two miles before an unnatural square shape hardened against the sky. They parked the jeeps off the track and Tyler, de Carette and Gunner went forward to reconnoitre.

  The village had a wall, all right, squeezing it tight so that the outside houses and wall became part of each other. Feathery date palms stuck up among the buildings, giving the whole ramshackle place the look of a big flat flower bowl. The wall had no value against attack: it could be climbed in seconds. But here the usual enemy was the sand, ebbing and flowing with the winds and able to swamp an open village in a few days. There were occasional drifts piled as if they were trying to lift like a wave and break over the top of the wall, but none had made it yet. The only other way in was a single gateway blocked with two heavy but rickety wooden doors. Wood had to last a long time in the desert. And it could have been an abandoned cemetery for all the sound and light coming out of it.

  They crept around it at a distance where they hoped they, wouldn’t be seen – unless somebody had night glasses – and then made one cautious foray up to look at the wall itself. The Romans might have begun it, the Foreign Legion would certainly have done some of the patching, and two millenia of villagers the rest.

  They were fingering the flaky mud covering and crumbling stonework when the first motor started.

  Instinctively they crouched, Tommy-guns raised, but common sense said that if you’ve spotted an intruder the first thing you do isn’t to start a motor vehicle. Tyler waved them outwards, and they scuttled away into the night. Behind them, another engine coughed and then a third.

  “The first was a truck,” Tyler decided. “The second was different, maybe the scout car. Would you agree?” he added politely.

  “John, it is whatever you say.”

  “They’re not just running up their engines. They’re coming out.”

  But it was a couple of minutes after they reached a place to watch the gateway before there was a flash of headlights inside and the gates were dragged slowly open.

  Three vehicles drove out. A squat four-wheeled scout car, then unmistakably, the Chev, and finally a four-wheel truck.

  “Blast, blast, blast,” Tyler muttered.

  “Will your Yorkie start shooting?” de Carette asked nervously.

  “No,” Tyler said firmly, like an order aimed a mile down the track. “Not if he wants to stay in LRDG.”

  In that clear night there was no afterglow from the headlights; one moment they were lighting the dunes with their rocking beams, then they were out of sight completely, leaving just the engine noise. They listened for well after that too had faded before starting to walk back, gloomily.

  “That wasn’t a fighting patrol,” Tyler said. “They might be evacuating completely, or they could be just taking prisoners and wounded up to Mareth or somewhere, and be coming back in daylight. We can’t get the Chev’s wireless now.”

  “If there’s one in the village, Skipper,” Gunner said, “we could go and sort of liberate it, like.”

  “Could you make a German wireless work?” de Carette asked. He saw only the heads turn in the darkness, but knew he was getting an incredulous stare, and mumbled an apology. If you were prepared to drive across unmapped deserts for a thousand miles, you’d better believe you can make anything work.

  “Let’s go and sort t’buggers out – if they’re there,” Yorkie said.

  Tyler waited a moment for de Carette to cast his vote, then said quietly: “Right. We’ll do it in two stages…”

  27

  Tyler and de Carette climbed the crumbling wall very carefully, but still scabs of dried mud flaked off under their boots and flopped into the sand. They rolled carefully over the top and dropped a few feet into a tiny orange grove, itself held in by a two-foot wall. Even in the January night, the trees had a faint fragrance.

  A narrow alleyway led down between the houses towards what must be a central piazza with the water hole that had first made the village possible. The buildings on either side were jammed together, their flat roofs blending to form a second upstairs village that was private to the wives, leaving the streets strictly for men and a few servant girls.

  De Carette had been in villages like this before the war, but had felt hardly any more welcome. There would be plenty of rifles around that didn’t belong to the Afrika Korps.

  Starlight throws no shadows, just blurring patches of dark and not so dark. They paused in the mouth of the alley, where it met a sandy lane perhaps the width of a truck, leading uphill to the right towards the gateway. Tyler moved in a careful crouch across to a clump of stubby palms on the far side, and when nothing reacted to that, started moving down towards the piazza, de Carette paralleling him beside the near wall.

  He had been flattered at first that Tyler had picked him, then depressed when he realised that, au contraire, Tyler had picked Yorkie and Gunner as the ones he trusted to handle the jeeps. Now he just felt frightened. But at least he might get his first chance to kill somebody. Yesterday’s Stukas had made the war a very personal thing, and he didn’t want to die that sort of virgin.

  Then they were at the piazza and fading back into dark doorways to survey it.

  It would have been about thirty yards square if anything in that village had been square, with a dim glitter of water in a walled pond off to one side among the date palms. Alleys made doorways of darkness at the comers, and opposite, past the palms, were the arches of camel stables and…

  … and the faint hard outline of another Volkswagen. De Carette’s heart seemed to give a gulp. A parked vehicle meant a guard: in a place like this the villagers would loot the gold from your teeth while you slept.

  For a full five minutes they watched, but nothing moved or made any sound. Then Tyler eased slowly back up the lane and de Carette followed. They went about fifty yards and met under another palm.

  “The guard must be in the stables,” Tyler whispered.

  “They are probably all in the stables. To be anywhere else they would have to put people out of their houses, and I think it is not German policy to cause such trouble here.”

  “Yes… I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you, Henri.” De Carette felt a glow of satisfaction.

  “And another at the gate,” Tyler went on. He looked at his watch. “Twelve minutes, Let’s get up there.”

  They slunk quietly up the winding lane, until the gap of stars ahead showed they were in sight of the gateway. It was too risky to go any further. They slid into doorways and waited. Above, a sprinkle of real light, by starlight standards, had fallen on the highest roofs and palms. The moon was up. De Carette found suddenly that he was staring across the lane at a battered old enamel Singer Sewing Machine advertisement. He almost laughed aloud, but remembered that this was one machine that needed no power and usually no repair. The sewing machine and the rifle. The front line of civilisation.

  Then he heard the growl of the jeep.

  A figure that was just a moving shadow broke the line of the gateway, peering out at the sound. On the left. How would he be armed? A light machine-gun would be the obvious weapon, but that should have two men…

  Somebody shouted from the piazza and the gate guard called back, then the night shattered as the K guns fired, throwing a burst of little tracer darts though the topmost palm fronds and spattering against the buildings.

  Two men ran up from the piazza, clumping and panting. They carried rifles, but missed seeing Tyler and de Carette because they just weren’t looking. They joined the guard at the gates, trying to drag them shut.

  Tyler slipped out of his doorway and cat-footed up the lane. De Carette followed. This was better than they’d expected: three men at the gate instead of one or two. At twenty yards range. Tyler stopped and lifted his gun to his shoulder. De Carette did the same, in the slow motion of utter certainty.

  He aimed low at the figure hauling on the right-hand gate and squeezed the trigger, letting the gun track upwards with the recoil. The man collapsed like a burst balloon, and de Carette felt a surge of relief that was almost a sexual climax. He could do it, he had done it, and if he died now, the score was at least level.

  He stepped back against the wall to reach into his haversack for another magazine, thumb the old one out, let it drop, push the new one into place. They ran forward.

  One of the men on the left of the gate was still moving. Tyler fired two shots into him. De Carette took his own victim by the feet and dragged him clear of the gateway, which was still open wide enough to take a jeep.

  He would like to have known the man’s name.

  The jeep charged past on the moonlight plain, and Tyler flashed his torch at it. It swung in and ran up to them.

  Lecat was sitting up in the back of it, holding a rifle.

  “Why the hell did you bring him?” Tyler asked Gunner, who was driving, with Yorkie at the guns.

  “You try making him stay behind, Skip. He’s like a fuckin’ dog.”

  “I explained to him,” de Carette began.

  “Never mind,” Tyler said. “We’ve knocked off three and there might be only one left. Follow us.”

  “I did explain to him, John,” de Carette muttered, as they moved out ahead.

  “I heard you. I forgot what I had said yesterday: he has found a new mother. He isn’t going to be alone again.”

  They went about twenty yards ahead of the blacked-out jeep that purred gently on the downhill slope. There might be no more than one man down there. The Volkswagen only held four; it was smaller than a jeep. But that, de Carette thought uneasily, meant that it could hardly carry any supplies as well. That didn’t sound like the desert.

  He thumbed the safety catch on the Tommy-gun for the thousandth time, which was silly because none of them ever put it on when carrying the gun. It was too stiff and awkward, and the trigger pull was heavy enough for safety anyway…

  A second engine roared, dropped to a rumble, then in a blaze of headlights the cubist shape of a scout car came up the slope from its hiding place in the piazza stables.

  De Carette darted forward into the mouth of an alley, then lifted the gun.

  “Grenades!” Tyler roared.

  Of course. He reached into his haversack. Pull out the pin, glance around the corner, toss it down the lane as the lever whanged away.

  The grenades went off almost simultaneously, the blast bouncing off the close walls and hitting de Carette like a slap on the ears. A cloud of dust erupted in the narrow lane, but through it he saw the flare of the scout car’s twenty-millimetre. The K guns hammered back, and screaming nails of light bounced every way off the scout car, jamming the narrow lane with noise, flashes, dust and madness.

  The undamaged scout car ground past the alley, the jeep’s engine revved furiously, and the two vehicles charged into each other head-on with a noise like a gigantic gong. Or maybe he was only remembering it that way, because it signalled’ the end of all the other noises.

  In the silence, Tyler ran forward and dropped a grenade into the open turret of the scout car. Somebody in there screamed and heaved into view, then the grenade went off beneath him with a hollow bang, and he collapsed out of the turret and slid down into the lane. He didn’t need shooting.

  Neither did Gunner. At the last instant, the last shot from the scout car had exploded in his chest. He was a shrunken, shortened object wrapped around the steering-wheel by the impact, and de Carette was glad that the starlight made him colourless.

  The jeep wasn’t going to move again, its bonnet steaming and crumpled.

  “Right,” Tyler said. “Yorkie and Lecat get the stuff unloaded. Henri, down to the stables with me.”

  There might have been a clever back way to the piazza, down through the alleyways, but they hadn’t time to find it. War is not having time to be clever, being forced to meet things head on. As Gunner had.

  The Volkswagen was still in place, and nothing moved. Tyler ran around the left-hand side, between the palms and the pond, and fired a short burst against the stable wall, just to provoke a reaction. Nothing reacted. And there was no radio in the stables.

  “Damn,” Tyler said. “All for not much. I’d rather have Gunner than… Damn.”

  “Listen,” de Carette said, and Tyler became very still. At first there was just a whimpering sound from one of the windows around the piazza, the first reminder that this was a living village, and certainly no longer a sleeping one. But the villagers were letting the Europeans settle their quarrels by themselves. At the end of it, there would always be some loot.

  Then Tyler heard the distant sound of motors.

  Yorkie came staggering into the piazza, supporting Lecat with one hand and dragging a load of haversacks, water-bottles and gear with the other.

  “They’re coming back, Skipper. I could see flights.”

  “How many?”

  “There’s two of’em.”

  One vehicle they might ambush, but two… particularly if it was a truck of infantry.

  “Over the wall.” Tyler decided. “And no shooting. You know the way, Henri.”

  As de Carette helped Lecat back towards the alley, Tyler opened the engine of the Volks and yanked out the whole handful of high-tension leads, then threw them in the pond. When he joined them at the wall itself, he was carrying a heavy Jerry-can marked with a white cross, the sign for drinking water.

  They lowered Lecat over the wall and dropped down beside him. The vehicle lights were just coming out of the track onto the flat plain around the village. A scout car and a truck, which stopped well before the gate, obviously suspicious.

  Yorkie simply lifted Lecat onto his back and started running. De Carette and Tyler snatched up all the rest and followed. They dodged behind the village and into the soft dunes. There they collapsed, panting.

  After a few minutes there was a burst of firing, somebody shooting at a villager or just a ghost. Some shouting, then silence.

  “Nobody’s going to come looking for us in the dark,” Tyler said. “Back around to the other jeep.”

  They had less than two hours to dawn and took most of it in helping Lecat through the tangle of hummocks and dunes. They had to bring him to the jeep, not vice versa; it was parked at what they believed was just out of hearing of the village – a long way on a desert night – they daren’t bring it closer.

  It was also parked rather carelessly, close to the track, because they had assumed they’d be back to it well before dawn. They were almost there when they heard it drive away.

  For a moment, de Carette feared Tyler was thinking of a second attack on the village. But then they staggered back into the dunes, away from where the jeep had been parked because that would be the first place the Germans would come looking in daylight.

  The day began with a pale light, like the first jet of a gas burner flaring across the stars. Streamers of red appeared overhead and then the bloodshot sun itself, bringing light but no warmth. They felt safe to light cigarettes and Tyler poured out one cup of water for each, in turn. They only had one cup with them.

  “We’re going to have to do some walking,” he said.

  “To Zella?” That must be 600 miles, more than the depth of France from the Channel to the Riviera.

  “No. We’ll head north.”

  “John, in the north is Rommel.”

  “We won’t go that far. If we can get around west of the salt marsh, to Nefta, we’ll find something. There was a rumour 1st Army had got as far as Tozeur, so they could be further by now. That’s only about a hundred and twenty miles.”

  Instinctively, de Carette’s mind began breaking the distance down into day’s marches: rations, water, bivouac times… and it was all meaningless.

  “John – we have soldat de la premiиre classe Lecat with us.”

  “Ask him if he’d rather surrender. It has to come from you.”

  De Carette turned reluctantly to the young soldier, very young indeed behind the patchy beard and pain-weary eyes. He already knew what the answer would be.

  They began to walk. They walked very slowly, if possible along the troughs between the crescent dunes, which lay in roughly north-south lines and curved liked arches laid flat on the landscape. Sometimes they had to climb over a dune, where it was soft, deep and slippery, like wading through flour. The slightest breath of wind skimmed the sand off the crest of the dunes and drifted it into their eyes. Only Yorkie and Lecat has sand-goggles, but they were passed round in rotation.

  Lecat always needed one man to help him along, since he’d abandoned the plank crutch when they first rescued him. Who needed a crutch to ride in the back of a jeep? One man carried most of the haversacks, a Tommy-gun and the water Jerry-can, which made him awkwardly lopsided like a heavy suitcase does. The third was resting from a bout with Lecat and just carried a gun, a haversack of grenades and a few odds and ends.

  After two days they simply threw away the Tommy-guns, which weighed around twelve pounds, and the grenades which were a pound and a half each, leaving themselves with just two pistols. It-was ridiculous to pretend they might be a fighting force any longer.

  Without Lecat, they could have marched over twenty miles a day. With him, they were managing five, at best seven. And just being forced to move so slowly was more tiring than a natural pace.

  It was Yorkie who mentioned it first. “If t’Frenchie had been captured, Skip, ah reckon he’d be in t’ospitai by now, being fixed up fine. You do ‘ear that Jerry runs good ‘espitбis.”

  “He is a Frenchman,” de Carette said coldly.

  “He’s one of us,” Tyler said, that finished it. But Lecat wasn’t really one of them. Armies are made up of tiny groups – platoons, patrols, squadrons, troops – with the fierce loyalty of shared experience and danger. Even to de Carette, Lecat was still outside the LRDG family.

  They walked mostly by night and lay up by day. It was nothing to do with being seen: out in the sand, neither friend nor enemy would find them because nobody bothered to look. They were in a place that was impassable to vehicles, and in the desert war such a place was a nowhere. But the nights were too cold for sleeping without the greatcoats and tents they had lost with the jeeps, and the days often too hot to move far without sweating and getting thirsty. They usually found a bush and lay down in its thin shade, staying still even when they weren’t sleeping, because movement wasted energy…

 

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