The Riddle Of The Third Mile

The sixth book in the Inspector Morse series, 1983

There had been the three of them-the three Gilbert brothers: the twins, Alfred and Albert; and the younger boy, John, who had been killed one day in North Africa. And it was upon his dead brother that the thoughts of Albert Gilbert were concentrated as he sat alone in a North London pub just before closing time: John, who had always been less sturdy, more vulnerable, than the formidable, inseparable, and virtually indistinguishable pair known to their schoolmates as “Alf ‘n’ Bert”; John, whom his elder brothers had always sought to protect; the same John whom they had not been able to protect that terrible day in 1942.

It was in the early morning of 2nd November that “Operation Supercharge” had been launched against the Rahman Track to the west of El Alamein. To Gilbert, it had always seemed strange that this campaign was considered by war historians to be such a miraculous triumph of strategic planning, since from his brief but not unheroic participation in that battle he could remember only the blinding confusions around him during that pre-dawn attack. ‘The tanks must go through’ had been the previous evening’s orders, filtered down from the red-tabbed hierarchy of Armoured Brigade to the field officers and the NCOs of the Royal Wiltshires, into which regiment Alf and Bert had enlisted in October 1939, soon to find themselves grinding over Salisbury Plain in the drivers’ seats of antique tanks-both duly promoted to full corporals, and both shipped off to Cairo at the end of 1941. And it had been a happy day for the two of them when brother John had joined them in mid-1942, as each side built up reinforcements for the imminent show-down.

On that morning of 2nd November, at 0105 hours, Alf and Bert moved their tanks forward along the north side of Kidney Ridge, where they came under heavy fire from the German 88s and the Panzers dug in at Tel Aqqaqir. The guns of the Wiltshires’ tanks had spat and belched their shells into the enemy lines, and the battle raged furiously. But it was an uneven fight, for the advancing British tanks were open targets for the antitank weapons and, as they nosed forward, they were picked off piecemeal from the German emplacements.

It was a hard and bitter memory, even now; but Gilbert allowed his thoughts full rein. He could do so now. Yes, and it was important that he
should
do so.

About fifty yards ahead of him, one of the leading tanks was burning, the commander’s body sprawled across the hatch, the left arm dangling down towards the main turret, the tin-helmeted head spattered with blood. Another tank, to his left, lurched to a crazy standstill as a German shell shattered its left-side track, four men jumping down and sprinting back towards the comparative safety of the boundless, anonymous sands behind them.

The noise of battle was deafening as shrapnel soared and whistled and plunged and dealt its death amidst the desert in that semi-dawn. Men shouted and pleaded and ran-and died; some blessedly swiftly in an instantaneous annihilation, others lingeringly as they lay mortally wounded on the bloody sand. Yet others burned to death inside their tanks as the twisted metal of the hatches jammed, or shot-up limbs could find no final, desperate leverage.

Then it was the turn of the tank immediately to Gilbert’s right-an officer leaping down, clutching a hand that spurted blood, and just managing to race clear before the tank exploded into blinding flame.

Gilbert’s turret-gunner was shouting down to him.

‘Christ! See that, Bert? No wonder they christened these fuckin’ things “Tommycookers”!’

‘You just keep giving it to the bastards, Wilf!’ Gilbert had shouted back.

But he received no reply, for Wilfred Barnes, Private in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, had spoken his last words.

The next thing Gilbert saw was the face of Private Phillips as the latter wrestled with the driver’s hatch and helped him out.

‘Run like hell, corporal! The other two have had it.’

They had struggled only some forty yards before flinging themselves down as another shell kicked up the sand just ahead of them, spewing its steel fragments in a shower of jagged metal. And when Gilbert finally looked up, he found that Private Phillips, too, was dead-a lump of twisted steel embedded hi his lower back. For several minutes after that, Gilbert sat where he was, severely shocked but apparently uninjured. His eyes looked down at his legs, then at his arms; he felt his face and his chest; then he tried to wriggle his toes in his army boots. Just thirty seconds ago there had been four men. And now there was only one-
him
. His first conscious thought (which he could recall so vividly) was a feeling of ineffable anger; but almost immediately his heart rejoiced as he saw a fresh wave of 8th Armoured Brigade tanks moving up through the gaps between the broken or blazing hulks of the first assault formation. Only gradually did a sense of vast relief surge through him – relief that he had survived, and he said a brief prayer to his God in gratitude for coming through.

Then he heard the voice.

‘For Christ’s sake, get out of here, corporal!’ It was the officer with the bleeding hand, a lieutenant in the Wiltshires-a man who was known as a stickler for discipline, and a bit pompous with it; but not an unpopular officer, and indeed the one who the night before had relayed to his men the Montgomery memorandum.

‘You a’right, sir? Gilbert asked.

‘Not too bad.’ He looked down at his hand, the right index finger hanging only by a tissue of flesh to the rest of his hand. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘We’ll get back to Kidney Ridge-that’s about all we
can
do.’ Even here, amid the horrifying scenes of carnage, the voice was that of a pre-war wireless announcer, clipped and precise -what they called an “Oxford” accent.

The two men scrambled through the soft sand for a few hundred yards before Gilbert collapsed.

‘Come on! What’s the matter with you, man?’

‘I dunno, sir. I just don’t seem…’ He looked down at his left trouser-leg, where he had felt the fire of some intense pain; and he saw that blood had oozed copiously through the rough khaki. Then he put his left hand to the back of his leg and felt the sticky morass of bleeding flesh where half his calf had been shot away. He grinned ruefully:

‘You go on, sir. I’ll bring up the rear.’

But already the focus had changed. A tank which had seemed to be bearing down upon them suddenly slewed round upon its tracks so that now it faced backwards, its top completely sheared away. Its engine, however, still throbbed and growled, the gears grinding like the gnashing of tortured teeth in hell. But Gilbert heard more than that. He heard the voice of a man crying out in the agony of some godforsaken despair, and he found himself staggering towards the tank as it lurched round yet again in a spurting spray of sand. The man in the driver’s seat was alive! Thereafter Gilbert forgot himself completely: forgot his leg-wound, forgot his fear, forgot his relief, forgot his anger. He thought only of Private Phillips from Devizes…

The hatch was a shattered weld of hot steel that just would not open-not yet.
Almost
it came; and the sweat showered down Gilbert’s face as he swore and wrenched and whimpered at his task. The petrol-tank ignited with a soft, almost apologetic ‘whush’, and Gilbert knew it was a matter only of seconds before another man was doomed to death inside a Tommycooker.

‘For Chrissake!’ he yelled to the officer behind him. ‘Help! Please! I’ve-nearly-’He wrenched for the last time at the hatch, and the sweat poured again on to his bulging, vein-ridged forearms.

‘Can’t you fuckin’ well see? Can’t you -’ His voice tailed off in desperation, and he fell to the sand, overwhelmed by failure and exhaustion.

‘Leave it, corporal! Come away! That’s an
order?

So Gilbert crawled away across the sand and wept in frenetic despair, his grimed face looking up to see through his tears the glaze in the officer’s eyes… the glaze of frozen cowardice. But he remembered little else except the screaming of that burning fellow soldier. And it was only later that he thought he’d recognized the voice-for he hadn’t seen the face.

He was picked up (so they told him) soon after this by an army truck, and the next thing he could remember was lying comfortably in very white sheets and red blankets in a military hospital. They didn’t tell him until two weeks later that his brother John, tank driver with the 8th Armoured Brigade, had been killed in the second-phase offensive.

Then Albert Gilbert had been almost sure; but even now, he wasn’t
quite
sure. He knew one thing, though, for nothing could erase from his cerebral cortex the name of the officer who, one morning in the desert, in the battle for the ridge at Tel El Aqqaqir, had been tried in the balance of courage-and been found wanting. Lieutenant Browne-Smith, that was the name. Funny name, really, with an ‘e’ in the middle. A name he’d never seen again, until recently.

‘He would have walked a first otherwise,’ said the Chairman. He looked down again at the six separate assessments, all of them liberally sprinkled with alphas and beta plusses except for the one opposite Greek History, where stood a feeble-looking beta double minus/delta. Not, this last, the category of the finest minds.

‘Well, what do you think, gentlemen? Worth a viva, surely, isn’t he?’

With minimal effort, five of the other six men, seated at a large table bestrewn with scripts and lists and mark-sheets, raised the palms of their hands in agreement.

‘You
don’t think so?’ The Chairman had turned towards the seventh member of the examining panel.

‘No, Chairman. He’s not worth it-not on this evidence.’ He flicked the script in front of him. ‘He’s proved quite conclusively to me that he knows next to nothing outside fifth- century Athens. I’m sorry. If he wanted a first, he ought to have done a bit more work than
this.’
Again he flicked the script, an expression of disgust further disfiguring a face that had probably been sour from birth. Yet, as all those present knew, no one else in the University could award a delicate grading like B+/B+?+ with such confident aplomb, or justify it with such fierce conviction.