The Iron Stallions (19 page)

‘Like a sniff of perfume?’ he asked. ‘It’s a letter from my mistress.’

There was a letter from Jocelyn, informing him that Rosanna and Kitty appeared to have settled down.

‘
I’m doing a lot of riding
,’ she announced. ‘
Feeling quite the country lady. I think I shall like it here. I wonder what it will be like when we meet again. Friends of mine say that soldiers get unemotional and don’t think like human beings. I wonder if we shall be as good together as we were before you left
.’

Included was a letter from Rosanna herself. ‘Dere Our Father,’ it said, ‘I hope you kill lots of Gurmans. I can now ride the poony without a leding rein. Hoping it finds you as it leeves me at present. Rosanna Mary Keyho.’

That evening Rydderch called all squadron and troop leaders to his headquarters ten-tonner and, under his instruction, they began to crayon the rings and arrows of a westward movement on their maps.

Watched by Ackroyd and the rest of his crew, Josh clambered to the turret of his tank.

‘Start up,’ he said. ‘We’re leading.’

‘One of the arrows on the map?’ Harbottle asked. ‘I’ve often wanted to see one of them things on the ground.’

‘It might be blurred by the time we get there,’ Josh said. ‘We’ve got a Recce Corps, a Recce troop, a gunner OP and a section of sappers in front of us.’

‘No ENSA girls?’ Ackroyd asked.

As the long columns headed west in the darkness, the desert filled with the roar of the radial engines and the creaking protests of springs and bogey wheels. Settling down in leaguer for the night, they could hear the detonations as demolition parties blew holes in the Wire, but they were drowned by a tremendous thunderstorm that filled the desert with noise and purple lightning. The petrol lorries came up to top up tanks and the following morning as they brewed tea they received their first information about the enemy. Leaving their camouflage behind them, they moved through the Wire. There was no sign of the enemy and no sign of danger and Libya looked exactly the same as Egypt – brown, empty and bare.

As they moved briskly forward, the radio clattered. It was Rydderch. ‘ Josh? There are two hundred MET moving along the Trigh Lora. I want you to take C Squadron and cut them off. I’ll move north with Toby Reeves and B Squadron. A Squadron will be in support.’

As they roared across the dusty desert, Josh spoke to Ackroyd. ‘Two hundred mechanised enemy troops will mean tanks and anti-tank guns. So keep those revs up, Tyas.’

The Trigh Lora lay to the north, a desert track that stretched from horizon to horizon and had been flattened to a highway by convoy after convoy seeking its firm surface. Bringing his tanks to a long, low rise, Josh paused to let them come up behind him in a hull-down position. Ahead of them was the enemy column, moving slowly, as if totally unaware of the presence of hostile forces. Then suddenly, as if they had spotted the turrets of the tanks along the rise, the armoured cars which were escorting them began to chivvy them along like excited terriers.

‘They’ve seen us, sir!’ Robinson called from the radio position. ‘They’re telling the column to scatter. I’ve heard it before. I know what they’re saying.’

‘Are you on their wavelength?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then give me the microphone. I can speak German. I’ll tell ’em we’re friends.’

Lifting the microphone, Josh began to speak slowly.
‘Kein alarm,
’ he said. ‘
Kein alarm. Wir haben englische Panzer mit der Besatzung in Gefangenschaft
.’

As the enemy vehicles, which had broken to the north and north-east, slowed down, swung in large arcs and began to rejoin the column, Josh rose in the turret and waved his arm. ‘Okay, children,’ he said into his microphone. ‘Off we go!’

Twelve tanks leapt over the crest of the rise like hounds after a fox and roared down the slope flat out, Josh’s Honey in the lead, its pennant streaming, the wind trailing the dust behind like a banner. The armoured cars began to bustle about again and he saw Aubrey send one of them spinning on its side, and a light tank go up in flames. A second tank, hurriedly abandoned, petrol pouring from underneath the engine on to the sand, was quickly disposed of as Harbottle put a burst of tracer into the pool so that it roared up in a flower of orange flame and black smoke. As they swung and circled among the thin-skinned vehicles, as if they were ships on the high seas, the enemy column began to scatter to the west, but not before a good two dozen coils of black smoke lifted into the air to show their kills.

With all the circling and movement, they were uncertain of their position but as the light failed they found a group of armoured cars from the King’s Dragoon Guards from whom they picked up directions. A petrol lorry, directed by bursts of tracer bullets into the dark sky, refuelled them, and Aubrey’s tank, which had had a bogey wheel shot off, was immobilised as they radioed for the technical sergeant’s lorry, an enormous vehicle with enough paraphernalia inside to keep a regiment of tanks on the move.

‘He’s probably got a bed in there, too,’ Aubrey said. ‘With a couple of Egyptian bints in it.’

Despite their success, the Germans had not reacted to the rest of the army’s manoeuvre as had been expected and rumours were coming in of German Mark IIs and IVs knocking out Honeys and Crusaders, whose little cannon simply could not reply. The following day, Josh was leading C and A squadrons north to rejoin when a frantic call for help from the Colonel that B Squadron was facing over a hundred enemy tanks sent them rushing northwards at top speed. Well over fifty tanks appeared from the west, moving across their bows in the sunshine. There was no need to shout orders.

Aubrey’s tank was the first to fire, then Josh himself was yelling into the microphone.

‘Driver, halt! Traverse right!’

Harbottle’s wrist twisted and, with a hiss of air, the turret moved.

‘Right again!’

Harbottle’s wrist twisted again and the turret screamed round until Josh saw a black tank with a gun pointed straight at them. He identified it as Italian.

‘Steady! On! Fire!’

As Harbottle’s fingers squeezed, the tank was shaken by a great spasm and the gun recoiled with a deafening crack.

Out of the corner of his eye Josh could see tanks on fire then a shell hit the ground in front, leapt up and threw out white sparks as it scored a groove along the side of the Honey. Harbottle’s gun cracked again, and Josh saw the nose of the Italian tank lift. A tongue of flame shot skywards, becoming a monstrous sun as the ball of light expanded slowly, grey-edged and bloated. There was a dull roar as the ammunition exploded and the tank seemed to burst apart in showers of metal that came hailing down on the hot sand and the other tanks around it. A figure, its face blackened, its clothes and hair alight, stumbled through the smoke for a few yards, then fell and in a frenzy of agony rolled frantically in the sand in an effort to put out the flames. Gradually, its arms and legs still flailing, it began to move more slowly while they watched with horrified fascination until, with a last convulsive heave, it lay still.

‘Got the bastard,’ Harbottle said, but there wasn’t a trace of triumph in his voice.

As they broke leaguer in the cold dark of the next dawn, they were hungry, tired and unenthusiastic, and mummified with the dirt on their bodies. A and B Squadrons had gone north and C was on its own again, moving forward warily.

It was a day of confused skirmishing, with enemy and friendly tanks appearing at odd unexpected moments. C squadron added four to its bag, to say nothing of a good dozen lorries and a petrol tanker from another Italian column they stumbled across. Nevertheless, to Josh, they seemed to be doing the thing wrongly. Cavalry action remained the same, whether in tanks or on horseback. Massed, they were capable of smashing armies, yet they were being used in valueless penny numbers and were being knocked out in the same way.

As the day drew to a close, they were all silent and grim-faced. The sense of adventure with which they had started the battle had been replaced by a mounting weariness, and they were even beginning to grow a little unwilling when they were ordered to attack at Sidi Rezegh, where German and Italian tanks were moving forward to destroy the infantry, guns and tanks which had occupied the airfield in an attempt to link up with a sortie from besieged Tobruk.

C Squadron was the first to make contact, and the first signs of the battle were the tell-tale columns of dark smoke rising into the air along the horizon above the black dots of moving vehicles. Then, as they lifted over the rise, they saw the airfield below them, littered with destroyed German and Italian aeroplanes and wrecked tanks. The desert to south and west was covered with a cloud of thin-skinned vehicles and the slope of the escarpment was crawling with figures digging trenches, putting down mines and dragging forward anti-tank and field guns.

The weary men with the spades gave them the thumbs-up sign as they roared past like the field going for the first fence at a point-to-point. Then, as they moved between a group of burning tanks, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by fountains of red and yellow earth and flying stones. Ahead, an array of monster tanks was coming at them through the smoke in a solid line abreast, the blood-red sky behind silhouetting them as they lurched and bucketed over the uneven ground.

‘Harbottle! Twelve hundred yards! Pick out the nearest and keep firing at it until you stop it!’

There was a vicious crack and a buffet of air, but the shell merely bounced off the monster.

‘Caro One, Two, Three and Four! Let’s get out of here! Head for the derelict tanks! And make it fast! Tyas, reverse and give it all you’ve got!’

The red fountains of earth were still rising around them as they retreated and Josh’s mouth was filled with the acrid taste of cordite. Over the sound of high explosive and the crack of his own gun he could hear the terrifying swish of armour-piercing shells that seemed to suck the breath out of his lungs as they passed. Several times the Honey lurched as it was hit but Josh hardly noticed as he yelled into the microphone on the regimental frequency.

As they reached the wrecked tanks, he swung northwards, followed by the rest of the squadron. Turning to face west, they took up positions behind the derelicts, pumping shells into the advancing armour before retreating again into the smoke of the shell bursts and the cloud of dust they were churning up. The battalion frequency was a bedlam of orders and counter-orders and frantic demands for information, and in the end the Colonel’s voice ordered everybody to be quiet so he could speak to Josh.

‘What’s happening out there?’ he asked.

‘There are about sixty German tanks coming our way across the airfield,’ Josh reported. ‘I’m just in front of them. If you line up on the eastern perimeter, you’ll see them within minutes. Don’t shoot at us. We shall be coming first.’

As they reached the line of stationary Honeys, Josh’s tank started to falter and he smelled smoke. Glancing down, he saw the white faces of Harbottle and Robinson looking up at him. ‘Fire!’ Harbottle croaked and, looking out of the turret, Josh saw flames coming from the engine louvres.

‘Bale out!’ he yelled, and they all scrambled to the sand, grabbing what they could of bedding, food, water bottles and cooking utensils from the armour plating. Bullets were coming at them from all directions and, as they threw themselves flat on the ground, a shell crashed into the engine compartment of the Honey and there was a ‘whoomph’ as the petrol ignited. In a moment the tank was blazing from stem to stern. Hugging the ground, they edged cautiously away until they could run for shelter under cover of the smoke that obscured everything and filled their nostrils with the stench of burning oil and rubber.

Struggling back into the British lines, they had to fling themselves down as they were fired on by a tank Josh recognised as Aubrey’s.

‘Is that you, Aubrey?’ he yelled furiously.

Aubrey’s head appeared. ‘Yes, it is. Who’s that?’

‘Josh. I’m going to write home about this. You’ll be drummed out of Braxby.’

Aubrey grinned and waved them into the leaguer. The brigadier was complaining that his headquarters had been overrun and was trying to raise sufficient tanks to win it back again.

‘Sergeant Atkins bought it,’ Reeves said. ‘With all his crew. Brewed up and nobody got out. But I think the Germans have been stopped – either by us or because they’ve run out of petrol.’

‘It must be petrol,’ Josh growled. ‘Surely to God they wouldn’t be afraid of a regiment of Honeys.’

For twenty-five more days the battle swayed backwards and forwards.

Unshaven, courage struggling with fear, they found themselves one moment successful, the next in headlong retreat, one minute rounding up Germans, the next in danger of being the prisoners of the men they were guarding as German tanks appeared. The burnt-out remains of tanks and lorries increased, alongside them the pathetic little mounds that were the graves of what had once been their crews.

At one point, out of ammunition, they were ordered to stay in the line to show a front and for a grim ten minutes, with thoughts of his grandfather at Balaclava, Josh waited in the turbulent twilight, steadying his men with chatter to keep them from thinking too much as the desert heaved under the onslaught of explosive. Despite their silent guns, not a single tank moved out of line, the moral effect of their presence stabilising a line of shaken infantry and gunners.

As the battle swung violently one way and then the other, they lost track of where they were. One morning they were south-west of Sidi Rezegh, another actually looking down on the roofs of Bardia. There was no such thing as advance and retreat, just hectic dashes to those points where the urgency of the moment demanded their presence. Every day was the same. Rising between midnight and first light to be in battle positions before dawn, they snatched meals when they could throughout a long day of brushes with the enemy until darkness put a stop to the fighting. Tanks were knocked out, crews killed, mutilated or burned to death, and still the fight went on, only the darkness bringing relief when they could rest, contact base or listen to the throat-tightening nostalgia of
Lili Marlene
, played by some Middle European radio station for the benefit of the Africa Korps.