A Good Clean Fight (11 page)

He was next to a lanky, gray-haired Reuters man, Shapiro. Shapiro said: “Somehow it seems worse, out in the desert. I mean, you look at the bodies and you think: They died for what? For
that
? That sand?” He shrugged.

“Casualty figures don't matter any more,” said Saxon. “Not since the last war.”

“You can't mean that,” Lester said. “Tell me you don't really mean that.” Saxon shrugged.

“Arrows on maps,” Shapiro said. “Joe Public opens his newspaper and he sees arrows on maps, and he thinks, ‘Hey, that's the same as this time last year.
And
the year before. What's goin' on out there?'”

“An extremely difficult war,” Munroe said. “That's what's going on.”

“Which you make more difficult for yourselves by keeping everything so damned secret,” Lester said. “I talked to more generals and admirals and air marshals in Poland and in France than I've ever
seen
here.”

“Poland and France fell rather quickly,” Saxon said. “As I recall.”

“Yes, but Henry's got a point,” Shapiro said. “You're never going to win here unless you get big reinforcements. You're fighting Rommel and you're also fighting London and Washington. You've got to get your Western Desert back on the front page.”

“They've had victories here,” Mrs. Lester said. She was sick of the subject.

“We have indeed,” Munroe said. “We've won plenty of tank battles, for instance.”

“See one burning tank, you've seen 'em all,” Lester said.

“I've seen fifty burning tanks. Theirs, not ours.”

“Me too,” Shapiro said. “I took pictures but they were no good. All smoke. Black on black.”

“That's a frightful shame,” Saxon said, “but we don't actually destroy the enemy in order to make attractive
illustrations for the world's press. If you had been in Sidi Barrani when we took it, you would have seen . . .” He paused. “Well, perhaps it's better not to pursue that theme at the dinner table. Suffice it to say that the scenes were unforgettable.”

“I believe you,” Lester said. “The trouble is, Sidi Barrani has changed hands so often, it's a joke.” Saxon drank his coffee and studied the dregs. “You think I'm being unfair, don't you?” Lester said. “The fact is, people in England make jokes about Sidi Barrani. And it's even worse in Chicago. In Chicago they think Sidi Barrani's one of the chorus in
The Desert Song.”

“That's certainly box-office,” Mrs. Lester said. “I saw it three times.”

“Well, I don't know,” Munroe said. “You don't want tank battles and you don't want Sidi Barrani. What
do
you want?”

“First choice?” Shapiro said. “A storming advance, a massive victory, and no ping-pong.”

“That may take a little time to arrange,” Saxon said. “Second choice?”

“Action!” Lester said. “Gung-ho slam-bang excitement. Hollywood's making a monkey out of the Nazis, it's easy, Errol Flynn does it every week. Why can't you?”

“Because it's not the same as victory,” Munroe said comfortably.

“No,” Shapiro agreed, “but it'll do until victory, comes along.”

“Otherwise the public is really going to lose interest,” Lester said.

“You know, there
are
other wars,” Saxon told him. “You're not obliged to stay here. Go to Russia. Go to the Pacific. Go to China.”

“I did. I spent two years covering China. Lousy war. Did you know the Chinese have twenty-six ways of spelling dysentery?”

Saxon said: “Is your husband always as dissatisfied as this, Mrs. Lester?”

“Henry was born miserable. He came down the birth canal shouting for Customer Complaints.”

“They were closed,” Lester said. “Typical incompetence. I couldn't even reach my lawyer! Can you believe it? Half-past four in the morning, here I am, stark naked and held against my will in this squalid hospital, and my lawyer doesn't answer his phone!”

“Nothing went right after that,” his wife said. “Nothing.” The others smiled. She didn't. It wasn't funny to her any more. “Dance with me, Sydney,” she said appealingly to Shapiro, “or I'll have the Mafia break both your legs.”

“Well, if you're going to use flattery . . .” he said, and led her to the dance floor.

*   *   *

The patrol got four days' leave.

All of them spent a lot of it in water. They had dreamed and daydreamed about water all the time they were in the desert: rivers, streams, cloudbursts, running taps, blue-green swimming pools ten feet deep. Fire hoses spouting. Spring showers. Mountain lakes. The spray from watering-cans. Melting ice. There were countless ways to dream about water when the temperature was a hundred and twenty, when the ration was eight pints per day and you felt you were sweating nine pints an hour. During their leave in Cairo the members of the patrol caught up on their fantasies and wallowed in the stuff.

After that, they ate and drank. Rommel's Afrika Armee was waiting beyond the border, but Egypt was technically neutral and there was no rationing in Cairo. The patrol gorged itself on fresh fruit: melons and pomegranates, peaches and grapes, oranges and figs, cherries and pears and plums. Not dates. They'd seen enough of dates. Above
all, they ate ice cream. There were places in Cairo that sold ice cream that was such a silky, swift-melting masterpiece of chilled flavor that even the passing thought of it in the depths of the Sahara made a man salivate. The patrol ate a lot of ice cream. Also many plates of egg and chips. Forget Harris. You couldn't beat egg and chips.

At night they drank. The officers drank, in the main, gin and tonic; the other ranks drank beer. Most got drunk but none got dangerously drunk. The worst thing that could happen to a soldier in the SAS was to be kicked out: “returned to unit,” as the official phrase had it. Nobody got drunk enough to risk that.

Sex—which, in the desert, quickly receded in the face of such heavy competition as survival and combat—emerged again in Cairo as a major preoccupation. However, very few of them took a chance on the prostitutes who were making a killing out of the war. This had little to do with any high moral tone in the SAS but a lot to do with avoiding being returned to unit. Those with an irresistible itch for sex simply scratched it and then went for another swim, another dish of ice cream, another plate of egg and chips.

Captain Lampard—unlike many of his fellow-officers—did not rent a flat or a house in Cairo; he preferred to live in his tent in the SAS camp just outside the city. He spent the first morning of his leave writing a report of the raid on Barce and subsequent events. He left it with the adjutant's office to be typed up, took a shower, changed into a fresh lightweight uniform, signed out a jeep, and set off to call on some old chums in a part of British Army Headquarters known as Department SU. Here they had the safe if mournful task of recording the names of those who had fallen in battle, or laid down their lives, or made the supreme sacrifice, or even—modern war being a mechanical and impersonal affair—been killed. Someone with an eye for symbolism had brought back from Benghazi an Italian road sign which said
SENSO UNICO
, meaning
one-way street, and stuck it on the department's door. It soon got taken down, but the name stuck. Lampard was heading for Department SU.

*   *   *

“There you go,” said the Army Censor. “Best I can do, I'm afraid.”

Henry Lester took the typewritten pages from him and flicked through them. Almost at once he felt a stoniness in his stomach. He recognized the sensation and he hated it. Even after two years of reporting this war he was still not immune to its horrors. He shuffled the pages into a bundle and fanned himself with it. He had expected losses, you always got some losses, but this was a massacre. Blue pencil ran from end to end. Whole paragraphs were wiped out. The bastards hadn't censored his story, they'd carpet-bombed it. “I can't send this,” he said.

“That, of course, must be your decision.”

“It won't mean a damn in Chicago.”

“Possibly not. I've never been to Chicago.” That sounded as if it might possibly be construed as a somewhat harsh comment, so the Army Censor added: “I must say I did enjoy your little reference to the Poles.”

“So why kill it?”

“Ah . . . policy, old chap, policy.”

Lester felt his heart begin to pound. That piece about Polish troops had cost him two days' research. “I want to see your boss,” he said.

“Colonel Knibbs? I'll
try
, but . . .” He picked up the phone.

Lester waited an hour and ten minutes outside the Chief Censor's office while, inside, a foul-tempered argument simmered and occasionally boiled over. At last, two disgruntled officers, both much-decorated and deeply sunburned, came out and Lester was shown in. Colonel
Knibbs, tall and thin with half-moon glasses propped on his forehead, was standing by the window, drinking tonic water from the bottle as he looked down at the crowded street. “If you were to shut your eyes and chuck ten bricks out of this window,” he said, “I bet you'd hit one enemy agent on the head. Possibly two.”

“Can I quote you?”

“Alas, no.”

“No.” Lester sat down but the seat was hot, so he found a cool one. “Looks to me like I can't say anything.” He held up his censored story by the corner, letting it dangle like a small dead animal.

“Well, you certainly can't send
that.
It amounts to an explanation of our loss of Benghazi.” Knibbs spoke sharply.

“None of which will come as a surprise to Rommel.”

Knibbs finished his tonic and let the bottle drop into a waste basket. “Let me tell you what those two officers were so angry about, Mr. Lester,” he said. “They got out of Benghazi before it fell. Now, there were many reasons why Rommel was able to take Benghazi so easily, and most of them are in your excellent but doomed report. Superior armor, shorter supply-lines, poor British communications, and so on. But, as I'm sure you know, everyone in the desert listens to the BBC news, and the morale of our men was considerably damaged when some idiot in London announced on the BBC that Benghazi was indefensible, that as a battleground it was impossible to hold.”

“Yeah, I heard something about that,” Lester said.

“Those officers heard
all
about it. They were desperately trying to organize a confused jumble of men who were tired and hungry and who had lost half their weapons, and who were getting bombed by the Luftwaffe every twenty minutes and shelled by the Italians every ten, and to put the tin hat on it, every hour on the hour the BBC came in loud and clear saying Benghazi hadn't got a hope.”

“Not smart.”

“They blame me,” Knibbs said. “Understandable. I'm the nearest censor. Nothing to do with me, of course. I don't control the BBC. Nevertheless, I think it's time we gave Benghazi a rest.”

“What about the Poles?” Lester asked. He pointed to the censored paragraphs. “They weren't there. I put them in for contrast. The Poles fight like hell.”

“And if they get captured, the Germans promptly shoot them. Not always, but often enough. So, for the Poles' sake, no tales of Polish ferocity. Not for a while, anyway.”

Lester went home. His wife took one look at him and returned to her book. “And you can shut up, for a start,” he said.

*   *   *

Lampard sat at a desk in a spare room at Senso Unico and carefully scanned the typewritten sheets listing the names of officers recently killed in action in the Western Desert.

He paid no attention to anyone above the rank of captain; nor was he interested in New Zealanders or Australians or Indians. He was looking for junior officers in English regiments (not Scottish) and only in certain regiments at that—the closer to London, the better. He might accept the Gloucestershires, at a pinch, but not the Durham Light Infantry, and certainly not the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Then he looked at the next-of-kin. Most of the addresses were in England, but a few were in Cairo or Alexandria. After all, Egypt was a neutral country; you couldn't stop somebody's wife living there if she could wangle the passage. India was full of officers' wives, and when their husbands got posted to Egypt the wives sometimes followed. And occasionally a chap met an English girl in Cairo working as a secretary at GHQ or the embassy, and married her.

Lampard made a short-list of nine, all first-lieutenants or captains from decent regiments, with next-of-kin living in Cairo. He studied the addresses and crossed out two. Wrong parts of town. He stared hard at the remaining seven names: Benson, Challis, Fitzroy, d'Armytage, Tait, Spencer and Cox. He didn't like Tait, it looked hard and unpleasant, but he couldn't think why. He crossed it out. There was something wrong with Cox, too. Lampard frowned and rolled the pencil between his fingertips. Of course. There was a Cox in his patrol. No relation, but Lampard was superstitious about such things. Cox was deleted. That left five.

He returned the lists to the sergeant who had produced them, thanked him and left. It was tea time. Perfect.

*   *   *

Most people considered Cairo in midsummer too hot for tennis. After the stupefying, relentless, furnace-heat of the desert, Dunn and Gibbon found Cairo quite mild. They played a couple of sets at the Gezira Sporting Club in order to work up a sweat and go for a swim. The luxury of diving into a few hundred thousand gallons of water had the same appeal as an open brewery to a drunk: they kept climbing out for the sheer pleasure of jumping in again.

They were sitting on the marble edge of the pool, legs in the water, skin glittering like fresh paint, when Dunn said, “Funny thing. All the time we're in the desert I dream about getting back here, and now I'm back here—”

“You can't wait to go out on patrol again.”