let you go, if you want to know what I think. You’re wasted as a corporal. I’m making you a sergeant-let’s see how you do.”
He handed Fujita two silver metal stars-one for each collar tab. “Put these on. You’ll help us more with two stars on each tab than with one.”
“ Domo arigato, Major- san! ” Fujita bowed low, grateful inferior to superior. The joy he felt at getting his rank back made coming inside the unhappy Burmese comfort woman seem as nothing beside it.
“You’re welcome, Sergeant. And you’re dismissed.” Major Hataba might promote him, but he wasn’t about to waste a whole lot of time on him.
So what? Fujita bowed again, almost as deeply. He didn’t think his feet touched the ground as he left the major’s presence. As soon as he could, he affixed the new stars to the red tabs with the yellow stripe across the middle. The tabs looked so much better now that they had their second stars back! He thought so, anyhow.
People noticed when he walked around the little base. “Congratulations, Sergeant- san!” a private said, and gave him a cigarette and a light. Even as a corporal, he could have knocked a private around. But a sergeant could do it with more flair. A sergeant could do anything with more flair. And all the corporals who’d been senior to him would need to watch themselves from here on out!
Chapter 22
When you came out of the line here, you couldn’t toddle off to an estaminet to soak up some wine and chat up the barmaid. This was war without distractions, and Alistair Walsh missed them.
Even the Italians weren’t much of a distraction. That was the only good part of the fighting here. As Sergeant Billings had said, some of their units weren’t too bad. Most, though, didn’t really have their hearts in the fight. When English forces outmaneuvered them, they would surrender with smiles on their faces. It happened again and again, because the English had more tanks and far more lorries than Mussolini’s boys.
“You have to understand, sir, it doesn’t work this way all the time,” Walsh told Lieutenant Preston when another band of Italians waved white flags after the briefest exchange of fire. “For those dagos, it’s nothing but a game. You come up against Fritz, though, and you’ll find out he means it.”
The subaltern nodded, with luck in wisdom. “Quite,” he said. “It is a bit like playing football when the other side’s down to nine men, isn’t it? Hardly seems sporting.”
“Bugger sporting… sir,” Walsh said earnestly. “You lose men here, they don’t get up again after the referee blows his bleeding whistle. It’ll take the Judgment Trump to set ’em on their pins again.”
Wilf Preston stared at him. The youngster’s eyes were blue as sapphires. They were also red-tracked with weariness, just like Walsh’s. Sun and wind and sand had burned and chapped Preston’s fine, fair skin. “I do grasp the difference, Sergeant,” he said, his voice starchy with indignation.
Devil you do. But Walsh couldn’t say that. “Yes, sir” would have to do. “Besides,” Preston went on, “wouldn’t you sooner have it easy than rough?”
Maybe he wasn’t a complete twit. Walsh sketched a salute. “Now that you mention it, sir,” he answered, “yes.”
Only later did he wonder how true that was. Had he asked Ronald Cartland to stay in England and help turn young hooligans into proper soldiers, the MP would have arranged that as effortlessly as he’d seen to this. And Walsh would have done something useful to King and country, something where he could have lived comfortably and where he would have been most unlikely to catch a packet.
Instead, he’d requested service here, and here he was. A fat black fly landed on the back of his hand. He squashed it before it could bite him. It had a nasty smell, like shit mixed with blood. And you couldn’t kill them all. There were just too many. Beelzebub-lord of the flies. He’d had the Bible pounded into him when he was a boy, same as most Welshmen. Till this campaign, though, he’d never realized what a dark and terrible god old Beelzebub must have been.
Lieutenant Preston wasn’t immune to the flies, either. Could you bring the bugs up on charges? Officers, disrespect to — something like that? Preston didn’t try to smash his flies. He just waved his hands over them so they buzzed away. That might have been a better idea. He didn’t need to fret about the mess and the stink. Of course, the bloody things would come back…
He still had his pecker up: “If we keep going the way we are, we’ll take Tobruk away from Musso’s lads before long. What will they do then?”
“They’ll be in even more trouble than they are already, that’s what,” Walsh answered, liking the notion. Tobruk was the big Italian base in eastern Libya. If it fell, the enemy might have to fall back to Benghazi, or maybe all the way to Tripoli. Without it, the dagos sure as dammit wouldn’t be able to mount another attack on Egypt.
They seemed to know that, too. Some of them even seemed to care. Their resistance stiffened as they pulled back into the works surrounding the Mediterranean port. No doubt about it, they were better at fighting a static campaign than one that called for movement.
And now they had ships bringing supplies straight in to them. That beat the stuffing out of the English truck convoys that started way the hell back in Alexandria. Italian tanks might be laughable, but one army’s 105mm howitzer was about the same as another’s. If the other buggers could bring in more ammo than you could…
In that case, you dug trenches and laid barbed wire in a ring around his trenches and barbed wire and you settled in as best you could, because grabbing Tobruk was liable to take a while after all. But for the weather and the scenery, it might have been 1918 over again.
In 1918, biplanes had dueled above the trenches. And so they did again here in 1941. RAF Gloster Gladiators fought Fiat CR-42s high overhead. Planes and pilots seemed evenly matched. When one side or the other won a dogfight, a cheer went up from its troops on the ground.
These days, pilots wore parachutes. They mostly hadn’t in 1918. God, what a long, hard way down! Every time Walsh saw a silk canopy blossom in the sky, he remembered Rudolf Hess bailing out of his Bf-110 over Scotland. What a mess that had made! Not for the first time, Walsh thought, I should have bashed his brains in with a rock.
Both RAF flyers and their Italian foes were sporting. When a pilot hit the silk, they didn’t machine-gun him while he floated helplessly. The same courtesy had been observed most of the time in Western Europe. From things Walsh had heard, the Russians and the Japanese didn’t play by those rules. Neither did the Fritzes in Russia. Fair play? Verboten!
Italian bombers sometimes came over the English lines by night. They weren’t very accurate-they cost the Tommies more in lost sleep than in damage or casualties.
Little by little, the besiegers assembled a striking column to try to break through the Italian lines. The Italians had to defend everywhere, so they spread themselves thin. Without tanks, an attack on their position would have been suicidal (remembering 1918, Walsh knew that might not have stopped the donkeys with the red collar tabs from ordering one anyway). With tanks, a breakthrough had a chance. That was one of the things tanks were for: punching holes in positions too tough for infantry to crack by itself.
The Italians didn’t do much to hinder the English concentration. Walsh got the idea that, like a tortoise bothered by a dog, they weren’t going to stick their heads out of their fortified shell unless and until they had to. The English generals must have got the same idea, because they took their own sweet time readying their attack.
As things turned out, they waited too long. Walsh’s regiment wasn’t in the main striking column. It went to a smaller one that would deliver a feint to make the Italians commit their reserves to the wrong part of the semicircle around Tobruk.
Just after dawn two days before the feint was supposed to go in, he heard unfamiliar engine noises in the air. Then, all of a sudden, they weren’t the least bit unfamiliar-only unexpected and out of place, which, unfortunately, wasn’t the same thing.
He grabbed Lieutenant Preston’s arm. “Sir-that’s the bloody Luftwaffe -109s and Stukas, heading this way!”
“What? You’re daft!” the subaltern exclaimed… perhaps five seconds before the Messerschmitts started
