‘That damned man’s getting ideas too big for his head, Mr Rafferty,’ he said.
There were now two Bedford three-tonners, two fifteen-hundredweight tracks and Dampier’s Humber. They were all dusty and, with the exception of the Humber which, being a staff car, was deemed to need a measure of dignity, were all plastered with the enthusiastic slogans the Italians enjoyed seeing – the usual Combattere, Obbedire, Vincere, and a few others that Morton had thought up: Evviva Mussolini; Avanti; In Viaggio per Londra; and Attenti, Inglesi! Veniamo Qui!
They had attached the Italian flag to the front of the Humber so that it fluttered red, white and green in the wind, and they started off cheerfully enough in the late evening. Rafferty, his sleeves devoid of badges, led in Dampier’s car, with Morton alongside him and Dampier, to his disgust, sitting in the back among the equipment. Caccia brought up the rear in the Ratbags’ Bedford in case anybody came up from behind, while the rest were stuffed in between. Their progress south-east from Zuq went quite unhindered until at dusk they ran into units of German field police strung across their route. As they stopped, Morton climbed out, marched forward and spoke quickly in German. The German officer who answered him gestured towards the east. ‘Etwas gehts los im Osten,’ he said.
Morton responded in the same language and there was a brief discussion before he returned to the car to inform Dampier and Rafferty what had been said. ‘We’ll not get past here,’ he pointed out quietly. ‘Things are happening towards the east and they’re here to mark the junction of the Italian and German divisions. I think we should swop one or two of our vehicles at the first opportunity because he was a bit suspicious at seeing them all British. I told him we were a recovery unit and had picked them all up after they’d been abandoned.’
He climbed into his seat, still talking quietly. ‘He also said we should be heading north and seemed at first to suspect we were trying to desert because we were too far forward. I told him our compass was kaput and he seemed satisfied.’
Gesturing with his arm for the benefit of the German, he led the little convoy north until they had swung over a ridge of dunes, when they promptly turned south once more. Almost immediately they ran into the German field police again. A carbide lamp appeared in front of them, swinging to indicate they should stop.
There was a long exchange between Morton and a German sergeant before they were turned back again. Rafferty decided it might be safer to head north for a while, after all, if only to get away from the suspicious Germans and back within the sphere of influence of the more easygoing Italians, who were always short of transport and less likely to question the origin of their vehicles. It was as well they did, because five minutes later a German kübelwagen came tearing up behind them, the German sergeant waving them further westwards.
‘This is a bloody well-organized battle,’ Clegg observed.
To the east the sky was filled with smoke from burning lorries to show where the fighting was going on and hundreds of vehicles had ploughed deep ruts in the soft sand. When they stopped and the engines were silent, they could hear the thump and rumble of gunfire.
Eventually they tried to edge southwards again but once more they ran into the German field police and were forced to head north again. They were all tired and dusty now, all on edge and nervy, and wondering just when some German field police sergeant would examine them closely enough to discover their identity. It was beginning to grow light again by this time and the Italians they met were elated by their unexpected success. But they were forward troops and no one claiming to be a repair unit had any right to be so far forward; so, as the sun came up like a gigantic gun flash on the horizon, they were forced to head westwards again and finally found themselves approaching Sofi, a shabby little village alongside the sea east of Zuq. Half the place seemed to be on fire and there were explosions and clouds of smoke. From a burning hut, Italians were carrying crates of British beer.
‘I bet there wasn’t a lot left, comrades and boon companions,’ Clegg said, eyeing it enviously. ‘I bet our lot got in there when the retreat started. Free beer’s free beer even if the Empire falls apart, and bottled Bass’s a bloody sight better than that horse piss and onion water that goes by the name of beer in Egypt.’
There were also cartons of chocolate, cigarettes that made their nostrils twitch, and Italian soldiers grinning under piles of British shirts, trousers, overcoats, shoes, tinned ham, fish and cheese, and bottles of liqueur.
Near the beach, the Italians had marked out an area as big as a football pitch and one group of them was busy knocking posts into the ground while second, third and fourth groups followed behind stringing barbed wire between them in rows. It was hot work and, since the Italians were stripped to the waist, it wasn’t difficult to help themselves to more scraps of uniform when no one was looking.
The town itself started just beyond the cage, a huddle of flat-roofed, mud-built whitewashed houses with a mosque, a few palm trees and an apology for an inn that went by the name of the Sofi Hotel. There was a heavy traffic congestion with a column of British prisoners standing at the side of the road waiting for it to clear. Italian vehicles were parked at all angles and triumphant Italian officers were sitting on shabby chairs in the shade of a cane-roofed terrace outside the hotel, drinking wine, watched with envy and resentment by the prisoners, whose throats were working with thirst at the sight of the bottles on the tables.
Their
