There were a lot of vehicles standing about and the divisional signs on them were none anybody had ever seen before. On one of them was painted an Italian fasces and on the side someone had scrawled Egitto, Veniamo Qui. The vehicles looked dusty and battered and, round them, in corners out of the wind, tired-looking men were eating from dixies and drinking from straw-covered bottles. They were dressed in a haphazard mixture of khaki and grey-green, as if shortages had forced them to wear whatever they could lay their hands on. On their heads were round stubby helmets adorned by a spherical insignia and on their collars a variety of coloured flashes. A few wore narrow-brimmed felt hats or sun helmets with feathers, and they all seemed to be armed to the teeth.
As the men in the back of the lorry stared at them one of the Italians waved and pointed towards the east. Clegg waved back automatically.
‘Quella via,’ the Italian shouted.
Speechlessly, Clegg nodded and forced a grin. ‘What’s he say?’ he asked.
‘He says,’ Morton translated, as if he were gagging for need of a drink, ‘that we’re going the wrong way.’
‘I wish to Christ we were.’
As they reached the other side of the town, Caccia swung the vehicle off the road into a grove of trees. Through the drifting clouds of dust they could see the sea and a few corrugated-iron sheds in the distance, but the Italians seemed to be sticking to the built-up areas of the town and there was no one near them. Still shocked, Clegg heard the driver’s door slam, and Caccia’s face appeared at the tailgate of the lorry.
‘Am I off my onion?’ he asked in a shocked voice. ‘Or were those buggers Italian?’
‘That’s what I said, boyo,’ Jones insisted shrilly. ‘They were Italians!’
‘Well, if they are, where the bloody hell are we?’
‘I’ll tell you where we are, bach,’ Jones said. ‘We’re behind the Italian lines. Our lot have moved back, see, and left us here on our own. That’s what all that noise was last night.’
They had all scrambled out by this time and were standing in the lee of the lorry out of the flying grit.
‘Zuq was full of our fellers a week ago,’ Clegg pointed out.
‘Well, it isn’t now,’ Caccia said. ‘I reckon we’re proper in the dripping.’
‘Something’s gone wrong,’ Jones wailed, his whole shabby shape expressing woe.
Caccia turned on him angrily. ‘Give over, you miserable Welsh gnome,’ he snarled. ‘Can’t you think of anything else to say?’
Jones backed away, his Italian forage cap low over his eyes, his greasy hair sticking out beneath it in spikes. Caccia, spruce, clean and polished as any good lady’s man should be, was always bullying him for his complaints and his general grubbiness. ‘My headache’s getting worse,’ he said.
‘The best thing we can do,’ Morton decided, ‘is get straight back in the lorry, turn her round and push off.’
‘And probably get shot for our trouble,’ Clegg pointed out. ‘I reckon, comrades and boon companions, that the best thing is to stay where we are until dark, then head back. It’ll be a damn sight safer. If they can’t see you, they can’t shoot you.’
There was a lot of arguing about whose fault it was but they all knew it was really only the back and forth, the to and fro of the desert war, that was the reason for their plight. It was like fighting a sea war on sand, with lorries instead of ships. You could go in any direction you wanted except up or down and, because the front line wasn’t a set of trenches running from the sea down into Central Africa but just a series of fortified outposts where soldiers sat by their lorries and tanks and watched and waited and bit their nails, it wasn’t difficult for any aggressive group to circle another and come up behind. That, it seemed, was what had happened to the outfit they were supposed to be playing to. The Italians had put them in the bag.
‘All the same’ – the thought seemed to worry Morton – ‘it’s funny we didn’t hear about it before we set off.’
‘These Italians are treacherous bastards,’ Caccia said.
‘Look who’s talking.’ Jones was itching to get his own back and he gave a mock fascist salute. ‘Up the inglesi and fuck Winston-a Churchill.’
‘That bloody Italian uniform’s gone to your head,’ Caccia snarled.
‘I’m glad I was wearing mine all the same,’ Morton pointed out. ‘Otherwise, they’d probably have turned a machine-gun on us.’
Caccia gave a sudden grin. ‘Well, you can’t have it all ways,’ he said. ‘If they catch you like that, all done up like rabbit stew, they’ll stick you in front of a firing squad instead and shoot you as a spy.’
Morton’s jaw dropped and he wrenched off the German jacket and cap he was wearing and tossed them into the back of the lorry. As he turned, visibly shaken, the others also started wrenching at their headgear until they all stood bareheaded in shirts and shorts, staring at each other and wondering what to do.
‘Why don’t we,’ Morton said after a moment or two, ‘stick the lorry among those ruined sheds and wait until dark?’
‘We’ll never get away with it,’ Jones wailed. ‘They’ll spot us at once, boy.’
‘I wonder if they would,’ Clegg said slowly. ‘Once when we gave a show at a camp near Richmond, we were doing a sketch about two German officers and, just before it started, two of us strolled out, German uniforms and all, to buy some fags. The guard saluted us.’
Through the thinning clouds of dust, they headed the lorry back on to the road and round to the corrugated-iron sheds near the harbour. Nobody stopped them. Nobody
