How I Won the War Read online

  Chests began to swell a little all round.

  “Now I want to tell you just how we’re going to set about our last battle in Africa. We won’t be having it for a few days yet because I’m not ready…. Never want to fight a battle till you’re ready. That’s the way to lose battles. And we’re not here to lose, are we? We’re here to win. That’s our job. To win. And that’s what I told the Prime Minister when he was here the other week. Very great man, of course, but a bit impatient, you know. It’s high time, he said to me, that you had another battle. I can’t have a battle yet, I said to him, I’m not ready. Why not? he said. Haven’t got enough guns, tanks, or aeroplanes yet, I said. Never put my chaps into battle, sir, unless we’ve got at least twice as much stuff as the enemy. Never put my chaps into battle unless we’re sure to win. And if we’re going to be sure of winning this next party I want five hundred guns, three hundred tanks and two hundred aeroplanes. And I’m not going to attack till I’ve got ’em.”

  His dry, matter-of-fact tones dealt with the hazards of war as simple arithmetic, listing its deadly requirements as undramatically as the weekend groceries.

  “Well,” He went on, sighing at such illogical behaviour, “the Prime Minister got a little cross with me. Told me in no uncertain terms, you know, he still wanted me to attack right away. And I had to be firm with him … quite firm … very sorry, sir, I said, but we can’t have a battle until you give us those tanks and guns and aeroplanes. I’m afraid he was a bit difficult about it for a while … very tough chap, you know, when he’s made up his mind … but in the end he came round to my point of view. And now he’s sent us the stuff I wanted. We’ve got our five hundred guns, three hundred tanks and two hundred aeroplanes and we can have our party.”

  “Chuck in a couple of crates of Guinness,” said Corporal Dooley, “and I’ll be coming with you myself.”

  “And now I’ll tell you my plan. It’s a very simple one. Always pays to be simple. Get too complicated and you disperse your effort. And that’s the way to lose battles. But we’re going to win … that’s what we’re going to do … win…. So we shall attack at one point with everything we’ve got. Pick out, say, about three hundred yards of the enemy’s line. Not too big, you know. Don’t want to waste anything. And just before dawn we’ll get those two hundred aeroplanes to come over all together and bomb the daylights out of that strip. Then we’ll fire all those five hundred guns at once on the same place. As soon as they’ve finished we’ll attack with two infantry divisions supported by two armoured divisions, punch straight through to Tunis and hit the Boche for six clean out of Africa…. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to attack with overwhelming superiority and we’re going to win. There’s no doubt about that … no doubt whatever…. Once we break through and get him off balance we’ve just got to keep at him … keep at him like a terrier after a rat …”

  And He talked on, simply, prosaically, about the mechanics of the coming battle for another five minutes, reiterating His confidence of victory, wished everybody luck, demanded the support of Almighty God, left cartons of cigarettes for distribution and disappeared back down the forest path in His jeep.

  “Blimey!” said Corporal Hink. “It’s going to be a cakewalk. We can’t lose.”

  “Poor old Jerry,” said Private Clapper. “Two hundred bombers and five hundred guns. I’m glad I ain’t up there.”

  “Little feller, wasn’t he?” said Corporal Globe. “Looked more like a debt collector’s clerk than a general. But he’s got the right idea, ain’t he? Three hundred tanks is a bit more like it. All we ever seen round here yet is Churchills getting knocked off by eighty-eights in little penny packets.”

  “Publicity,” said Private Drogue. “That’s all it is, mate. Selling war like other blokes sell soap. The old bull, that’s what we just been getting. All in aid of getting everybody off across no-man’s-land at the happy, laughing double.”

  “If you got to go,” said Corporal Dooley, “you might as well go cheerful. All the brass hats ever came round us before spent their time bellyaching about you got your gas-cape rolled the wrong way, your blanco’s the wrong colour, or there’s a man in the front rank got a stud short on his left boot. But that bloke, now, he may not have been twopennorth of scrag-end to look at, but he sounds as though he’s on the same side as us.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Private Spool. “That’s just the same old madam. Bash on, chaps. Rah-rah-rah. Gawd’s on our side, you can’t lose and my middle name’s Napoleon.”

  I left the parade ground with fire smouldering in my belly, confident of victory in the coming battle; not only because His address had inspired me, but also because His analysis of the situation, armament estimates, and general plan of campaign, agreed entirely with my own. Which was, perhaps, just as well, for a fortnight later the five hundred guns broke loose and the Musketeers came through the promised gap behind the tanks and went hightailing it for Tunis. C Company was in battalion reserve fifteen miles from Tunis when Major Arkdust sent for me.

  “We’ve got a job,” he said. “The tanks up to our north are running out of steam. They’re having to harbour up for tonight and need infantry protection. C Company comes under command of 17th Dragoons and is to work with their Z Squadron. They are still trying to push on and, with the Boche holding in some places and pulling out in others, the situation is very fluid and the available information is confused. We have, however, the locations of each troop at midday, that’s almost an hour ago now, and the axes on which they are advancing. Platoons will be allocated to locate and protect each tank troop as follows …”

  Twelve Platoon’s orders were to link up with Eight Troop of the Dragoons last heard of swinging west along a third-class road to Jaiba. We moved off in four scout trucks at two o’clock and drove across the newly sown battlefield. German traffic signs were still up, brewed-up tanks, Tigers, Churchills, Shermans, smouldered here and there in a last drift of smoke, the shell scars on shattered buildings were livid and unweathered, and the bodies about them not yet wearing their grey pall of dust. The going was fairly good on the main road where the sappers had been at work, but the craters and demolitions were still thick and virgin when we turned up the side road to Jaiba. The detours of the tanks were not always easy enough for our trucks and we had to stop and dig our way round some obstacles. Our progress was slow and the route tortuous. Map reading was difficult and there were many more sidetracks and junctions than we had on our map.

  “Jerry must have had a supply depot or something round here,” said Sergeant Transom. “There’s new tracks running all ways and you can’t pick out the old road at all. No wonder those tank boys couldn’t give us a reference. The map’s useless. We’ll have to work off the compass.”

  “We don’t need to,” I said. “Jaiba is not our objective. It’s the tanks we’ve got to locate.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Follow their tracks.” I pointed to the striped imprint which the tank tracks, mud-laden by the last detour, had left on the road. “We can forget the map and follow the footmarks. They pick up new mud at every loop.”

  My idea worked magnificently and we made far better time unhindered by map reading. We rolled steadily on for half an hour, the spoor winding clearly before us, freshened nicely at each piece of cross-country.

  Our first setback came as we crossed a flat, rocky area where deviations were unnecessary and the caterpillars dried out, leaving no obvious impression. At a meeting of five ways we lost the scent completely. I debussed the platoon, spread them out shoulder to shoulder, eyes to the ground, and led them in controlled scrutiny like a row of hunchback grouse beaters.

  “Pity we ain’t got my brother Geronimo here,” said Private Drogue.

  “Why?” asked Private Spool.

  “Because he’s a Red Indian. Just the boy for finding armour-plated footprints. Give him half-a-bar and he’d bring his Comanche bloodhounds and smell out those petrol-footed dragoons
.”

  This mass drive met no success whatever. It was not till I quartered the area personally that I finally detected the tank trail again on a sand-filled crack a hundred yards down the extreme right fork.

  “I dunno,” said Sergeant Transom, looking at the sun, “but I’d have thought they’d have been running more round towards the north.”

  Round the next bend, however, we came off the rock and dropped into a river valley where the verges were soft and muddy and the Shermans had left their imprints deep and clear. Bogged down, one wheel axle deep off the edge of the macadam, stood a German light armoured car.

  “They were going back in a hurry,” I said. “It wouldn’t have taken much to get that out.”

  “Unless the motor’s gone phut,” said Sergeant Transom. He climbed inside and poked around the controls. The engine whirred over, coughed once or twice and started like a bird.

  “Let’s take it with us,” he said. “Never know when it might come in handy.”

  We dug the wheel out, shoved down a sand channel and got it back on the road. I put it in the middle of the column, under command of Corporal Dooley, so that the Dragoons would not see it first and mistake us for Jerries. The going along the river valley was first-class and there were no more demolitions. We made fine speed in the wake of the tanks and began coming out of the wild country and into the outskirts of a village.

  “This might be Jaiba,” I said.

  “Wherever it is,” said Sergeant Transom. “They’re not over-pleased to see us.”

  Farms and houses were springing up on the roadside, all happily undamaged, but none of the people in the gardens or standing at the windows gave us so much as a welcoming wave. Suddenly the black track marks swung wide across the road and turned into the gate of a farmyard.

  “Here they are,” I said. “We’re up with the Dragoons.”

  Halting the trucks against the high, stone wall I got down and walked up the garden path between the tank ruts. I knocked on the farmhouse door. It opened.

  “Good afternoon …” I said.

  A German soldier looked at me.

  “Was wurden Sie … Mein Gott!” he shouted. “Englander!”

  He slammed the door in my face and I heard the bolt go home.

  “Jesus Christ!” gasped Sergeant Transom. “Jerries!” He pointed at the ruts. “Those are Tiger tracks you’ve been following!”

  I do not recall my feet touching ground as we flew down the path and back into the truck.

  “Get rolling,” yelled Sergeant Transom. “And Dooley! Ditch that arc across the gate.”

  He lobbed three smoke bombs over the wall as Corporal Dooley ran the German armoured car across the entrance, and transferred to my truck. Machine gun fire came through the smoke and spat chips off the top of the wall as our column roared off down the hill, engines screaming flat out in second till we made the cover of the next bend. It was a sharp hairpin, and as we braked hard to get round it a civilian with a shotgun leapt on to my running board.

  “Maquis!” he shouted. “Maquis … keep going. I show you safe place.”

  We raced out of the hairpin and the road skirted round a bluff. Suddenly, down below, we saw masses of houses, monumental buildings, and the blue of the sea.

  “Where’s this?” I yelled to our hitchhiker. “Jaiba?”

  “Jaiba? You’re miles past Jaiba. This is Tunis!”

  “Tunis!” I cried. “Good Lord!”

  “Tunis!” groaned Sergeant Transom. “And Tigers behind us.”

  “Tunis!” beefed Private Drogue. “I ain’t transferred to no suicide squad.”

  “Tunis!” yelped Private Spool. “Stop the bus. We’re going the wrong way.”

  “Tunis!” said Corporal Dooley. “Then I’ll be asking the foreman for me cards.”

  “Turn left here!” snapped our guide. “Quickly … now right … and straight through the yard of that factory …”

  We twisted and turned, up alleys barely wide enough for the trucks, across vacant lots, along canal banks, through a railway tunnel and down into dockland. Swaying and rattling over the broken cobbles we swung through a warren of warehouses, over a slender steel bridge and on to a wharf…. The doors of a vast corrugated iron barn were open … the trucks roared inside and slammed to a frantic stop among serried ranks of grain bags.

  The magnitude of our deed suddenly struck me.

  “First into Tunis, Sergeant Transom,” I said. “For the glory of the Musketeers.”

  “And first for the flaming firing squad when Jerry comes over that bridge.”

  “Not to have no fear,” said the maquis-man. “I fix it. I am Henri Jardot. How do you do?”

  He extended an old-world hand and I shook it on the run back to the entrance.

  “Pleased to meet you. I am Lieutenant Goodbody.”

  We helped him slide shut the doors from outside and the vehicles were hidden. He turned to a winding gear at the head of the bridge and started cranking for all he was worth…. Slowly the carriageway pulled away from the mainland and swung towards us.

  “It’s a swing-bridge,” said Sergeant Transom. “We’re pulling up the ladder behind us.”

  We joined the panting winder and soon the bridge lay flat against our bank. Thirty yards of dark water separated us from the dock. We ran back inside the building.

  “Is this an island?” said Sergeant Transom.

  “Yes,” said the Frenchman. “Very small. Just this warehouse and the wharf around it. All belongs to me.”

  “Corporal Dooley,” ordered Sergeant Transom, pointing to the gallery which ran round the storehouse. “Get up there and lay a couple of Brens covering the bridge. We don’t want Jerry nipping across and winding it back.”

  “Not to have no fear. No one can move the bridge without the handle.” Henri held up the pinioned crank which he had withdrawn from the wheelhouse. “The bridge turns only from this side.”

  He hung the handle from a peg near the door.

  “That’s a help, anyway,” said the sergeant. “Corporal Hink … get a load of these sacks built up on the front walls. Corporal Globe, come down the back with me …”

  With bastions of grain bags at strategic points and gun ports at every corner, I soon had the warehouse in a capital state of defence.

  “I think,” said Henri after half an hour had gone by with no interruption, “that the Boche lost our trail. Otherwise he would have been here by now.”

  “He might still be searching.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I have men watching over there. The Boche has big trouble south of Tunis. Three—four divisions coming at him. He’s not much time to worry about twenty—thirty men like you got up here in the north. He’s still got thousands of men and knows all you can do is lie low till Tunis falls.”

  “If he’s got all those troops round about,” asked Sergeant Transom, “why did he let us get in so far?”

  Henri’s Dali moustache crinkled in admiration.

  “That Boche armoured car. He thought, like we did, that coming back behind the Tigers you were a column of prisoners with armoured car escort. That’s why we were all ready for you. We had ambush laid at the corner where I jumped you…. You damned brave man, Lieutenant, bluffing your way in like that with just twenty—thirty men. But you never stood no chance without tanks.”

  I shrugged with British devil-may-care.

  “Toujours l’audace,” I said. “Nothing venture, nothing gain. What is life but a gamble with death?”

  I was about to quote the pitch-and-toss bit from Montrose, when Corporal Dooley yelled down from the gallery.

  “We got visitors. Ship, ahoy!”

  Henri opened the wicket in the main door. Four rowing boats were coming across from the mainland, loaded to the gunwales with women.

  “Stop!” I cried. “Go back! This is a battle area. Out of bounds! W. D. property! Go back!”

  I recognized their gaudy colours in a flash. An efficient officer can always l
earn something from his mistakes. I had profited from my unfortunate error at Cleptha. I could now recognize a prostitute when I saw one and here were four boatloads of them just making landfall on my fortress. Their vast, brassy haired captain, laocooned in beads, came at me like Hackenschmidt and folded me suffocating to her bosom.

  “English!” she cried. “Always everybody love the English. We come when we hear. We give you big welcome and plenty good time.”

  “But, madame,” I said, “we are in no position to …”

  She held up a magisterial hand.

  “You say not nothing. This is for free! For the first of the English in Tunis everything is for free. I give you cards and you tell all your friends that come later to go to Rosabella for plenty good time.”

  She plucked from the chimney of her cleavage a pack of gilt-edged cards and dropped them into my hand. The whole of Twelve Platoon had deserted their posts and were engaged in helping Rosabella’s handmaidens to disembark themselves and their basket cargo of food, drink, and gramophone records.

  “You very lucky, Lieutenant,” said Henri. “She bring you best bad women in all Tunis. Now the Germans are going, she look for new custom.”

  “Stop!” I commanded. “Put those women down. Drop them back in the boats. You cannot land here, madame. You must take your employees back to the mainland.”

  “Why you like that?” demanded Rosabella. “You ain’t queer or something?”

  “No. Not at all. I order you to leave this island. We are not here to play games. We are fighting the Germans.”