Winded, Clegg looked up. Bullets were clipping the dried yellow grass along the lip of the ditch. Micklethwaite’s face appeared from somewhere beneath his right elbow.
‘You all right?’ Clegg asked.
Flattened by Clegg’s fifteen stone, Micklethwaite was unable to do any more than nod speechlessly.
Clegg gave him a shaky grin, as usual unable to resist a joke. ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘And never called me mother.’
Somehow the dash he’d made had shaken the Italians and, as they hesitated, Sergeant Grady and one of the LRDGs ran along the column and began to toss grenades under the vehicles. Two of them went up in flames at once and there were screams. Then the white flag reappeared. More followed and Italians began to jump from the trucks, their hands in the air, shouting for mercy.
‘Sono prigionieri! Ci arrendiamo! Tedeschi no boni! Evviva Inghilterra!’
The Australians appeared warily from behind their walls and trees and out of the ditches and began to stalk forward. They were gaunt, their faces ugly with dislike. As they reached Micklethwaite, Fee snatched the flag off him. ‘Bloody sauce,’ he said. ‘Pinchin’ my flag.’
Rafferty appeared and pulled Micklethwaite to his feet. Clegg looked up to see Morton staring down at him.
‘You okay?’
‘Cured and ready to be killed again, old mate.’
‘I think you stopped the battle,’ Morton said. ‘They’d never seen anything as big as you before. They probably thought it was King Kong.’ He turned to the newspaperman. ‘What in God’s name were you doing there?’
‘I was trying to reach the Australians,’ Micklethwaite explained. ‘I thought the flag would stop me being shot.’
‘They’d shoot all the harder with that in your hand.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the Italians. I was thinking of you lot.’
Rafferty’s eyes were dancing with merriment. ‘You had ’em surrounded, boy,’ he said.
They began to laugh, a little hysterically now that it was all over, because Micklethwaite was the last person in the world from whom they’d expected anything brave or unusual. Staring at the Italians, Dampier listened proudly as Rafferty reported. He was wearing his British uniform and cap again, his 1914–18 medal ribbons bright on his chest and a glow in his eye as if he’d thoroughly enjoyed himself.
One of the prisoners, a Libyan conscript, approached. ‘Why don’t they let me go?’ he asked Morton. ‘I’m not Italian.’
‘What’s he say?’ Dampier asked.
‘He says he doesn’t like it here.’
‘Tell him neither do we.’
Morton did so and the Libyan looked at him with puzzled eyes. ‘Then why don’t we all go home?’ he asked.
To Clegg it seemed a splendid idea.
Chapter 9
By late evening they knew there would be no more resistance. The Arabs, inevitably the first to return, scented loot and came out of their shanties on the edge of the town and started going through any empty buildings they could find. Shops, offices and homes were broken open and their furniture and other contents strewn across the road. The Arabs had never had much love for the Italians who had stolen their land and were anxious to pay off old scores. Outside the house that Brigadier Marziale had occupied, a house that was gracious in the Spanish style with a cobbled courtyard and palms, lay everything it had contained, food, clothing, pictures, crockery, even doors and windows.
A few mules and an occasional dog sniffed about in search of food and water and a few of the Australians, farmers by instinct, were rounding them up and taking them to compounds to be fed. Arabs, on donkeys, on camels, even on bicycles, impeded by the loot they were carrying, were heading for the anonymity of the desert. As they went, shattered Italian units began to arrive, the soldiers gathering in groups, offering no resistance. The Germans, they said bitterly, were retiring westwards with all their vehicles and, sick of Mussolini’s boasts, sick of his guerra di povera – the war of the poor people – they had had enough. There were so many anxious to surrender, nobody bothered to round them up, leaving them alone with their misery, disillusioned men with gaunt, unshaven faces throwing away their equipment, clothing and weapons as they came.
They limped in, clutching cardboard suitcases, the toes cut from their dreadful boots, the rotten thread broken in the seams of their uniforms, to gather in little knots, shouting to each other – ‘Bruno!’ ‘Antonio!’ ‘Acqua, per favore, acqua!’ – and offering swigs of wine in exchange for cigarettes.
One group had started a fire by the roadside and were bringing out from the houses the obligatory pictures of Mussolini as fuel, but mostly they huddled together with hunched shoulders and stony faces. Among them was Scarlatti, brought in with his staff by Morton himself. He had been making a half-hearted attempt to destroy his dump but had obviously been hoping that a lack of success might put him in a better light with any British captors he might have to face. Guiltily aware of the fiddling he’d done, he assumed at first that Morton was part of the Italian field police and had been spying on him all along, and was convinced he was about to be shot. When he learned the truth, his large sad eyes gave Morton a reproachful look as he handed over his sword and the photograph of Caccia’s wedding.
‘It is like Caporetto,’ he said. ‘Except that the events are greater
