The Sword of Fate (18 page)

“Thought I’d better ’ave a looksee ’oo you was, sir, insteada whistling back, in case you was those Heyeties,” he shouted, adding with a wave of his arm, “H’our sergeant’s copped a packet, but ’e’s still able to lay about ’im wiv’ ’is tongue.”

I followed the red-headed Guardsman across the waste until I reached a hollow in which another of our parties had been lurking. A brawny sergeant was sitting there, nursing a shattered knee-cap, and his language was something to marvel at.

While the redhead and I were dressing the wound as well as we could with our first-aid kit, two more survivors joined us. They had seen me in the distance, walking back with the redhead. One had a slight wound in the arm, but the other had escaped without a scratch.

Having consulted with the sergeant we decided our only course was to follow the tracks of our own Bren-gun carriers, since we thought there was a fair chance that, provided Aitken had escaped, as soon as he was clear of the tanks he would come
back by the same route to look for any of his party that might have escaped death or capture.

After collecting all the water-bottles and iron rations from the dead and distributing them evenly among ourselves, we made a sling out of some webbing equipment which would keep the sergeant’s wounded foot off the ground. We then set off with him hopping along, his arms thrown over the shoulders of two men, while I went ahead with the other slightly wounded man to act as guide and lookout.

But it proved to be our unlucky day. Instead of meeting a patrol of our own people we ran slap into the squadron of enemy tanks on its way home. We tried to hide among some loose rocks, but the country was very flat there and we were spotted almost immediately. Three tanks swerved from their course and charged right up to us. To have fought with revolvers against those steel monsters would simply have been chucking the lives of myself and my men away without such a sacrifice achieving the least useful purpose, and we’d have been dead in ten seconds if we’d attempted to run. I felt so bitter that I think I could have spat gall as those Italians swivelled their tank cannon on to us and yelled to us to put up our hands; but the only possible course was to surrender.

The hatches of the tanks were opened, a lieutenant and some men climbed out, relieved us of such weapons as we had, ran through our pockets confiscating all our papers but returning the other things, and divided us among the nearest tanks. We were then ordered to climb on their backs and hang on there, while an Italian soldier in each tank that had prisoners on it covered them with a gun for the purpose of shooting them if they tried to jump off.

Tanks are not made to cling to, and it took all our strength and skill to hang on to our precarious perches while we bumped over the desert heading almost due west. At about two o’clock in the afternoon we came to one of the big depressions, and in it I saw that the Italians had established a strong advance-post. Apart from the tank unit whose base it was, at least a company of mechanised infantry were encamped there, and the place was well defended with anti-aircraft guns.

I was taken at once to the tent of a small dark officer with flashing teeth who questioned me in poor English. Actually, had I chosen, we could have conversed fluently in Italian, but I thought it might prove an advantage to me later if none of them knew that I understood their language.

My questioner was quite a decent fellow as he made me sit
down and gave me a drink and a smoke. After a little he accepted my reiterated assurance that I was only an interpreter of Arabic who had come up to the front line the previous morning and gone out with the reconnoitring party for fun, and that, therefore, I knew nothing whatever of the British dispositions.

Having taken down these scant particulars he ordered a soldier to take me to an empty tent, where I sat with my back against the tent-pole in miserable dejection for the rest of the afternoon.

In the evening an orderly brought in an ammunition box for me to sit on and two more to form a makeshift table, then a tray upon which there was quite a passable meal.

Now that night was approaching I began to consider seriously the possibilities of escape. As far as I could judge the Italian camp was not much more than ten miles from the depression in which Aitken had halted his small force that morning. I thought I ought to be able to cover that distance in the course of the night, if only I could get away, and once I had got so far there was quite a reasonable chance of my running into one of the British patrols.

One thing was certain: if I did not make a bid for liberty while I was still at this advance post, it would be infinitely harder once I had been carted off into the interior of Libya, as I felt quite certain that I should be. It was now or never, and as darkness fell without anyone coming to handcuff me or tie me up, the despondency that I had felt in the afternoon gradually gave way to half-fearful hope.

True, I could not possibly have escaped in broad daylight, for a sentry had been posted outside the tent ever since I entered it. But I had no wild idea of endeavouring to overpower him. My prison was a perfectly ordinary round bell-tent and its skirt was held down in the usual way by being half-buried in a shallow trench. It seemed that all I had to do was to scrape the sand away with my hands, scoop out a shallow tunnel and crawl out of the back while the sentry was drowsing in front. After that it would be largely a matter of luck as to whether I got caught while picking my way between the enemy vehicles or managed to reach the desert undetected. I reckoned that my best chance would be at about three o’clock in the morning, as by then the maximum number of troops would probably be asleep; but it was decreed that I was never to make the attempt.

Shortly before midnight the sentry called to me to come out, and a non-commissioned officer marched me away to the western end of the depression where a small convoy of vehicles was waiting. They were mainly light lorries with two Fiat cars, and all of
them had huge balloon tyres, the invention of which, in comparatively recent years, has made desert travel so much safer and easier.’

Except for the badly-wounded sergeant, who had been taken to the hospital tent on our arrival, the rest of my companions of the morning were already seated on the floor of one of the lorries. My guard raised no objection when I went over to the men and had a few words with them. There was little I could say to cheer them up, but I shared my remaining cigarettes with them and learnt from the redheaded fellow that the sergeant was being well-cared for.

I was then ordered over to the leading Fiat and into its back seat, where I was joined shortly afterwards by an Italian officer. He spoke no English and I don’t think he liked us as he produced his gun and pointed it first at me and then at the window, indicating quite clearly that he meant to shoot me if I jumped out, and from his unpleasant smirk I gathered that it would give him considerable pleasure to have the chance of doing so. I didn’t like him, either, for a variety of reasons, amongst others that he reeked of cheap scent.

It was about four o’clock in the morning and the moon was low in the sky when we reached our destination, which, as I learned the following day, was Fort Maddalena—a desert stronghold just over the Libyan border and about sixty miles from the sea. It had been no more than an ancient mud-walled castle set in an oasis of a few acres of date palms before Mussolini had decided to become a modern Roman Emperor; but the whole fertile area had since been surrounded by a deep ditch which bristled with anti-tank obstacles. Beyond the ditch was a reinforced concrete wall broken here and there by round flat-topped casemates that obviously contained powerful guns. Inside these fortifications the whole place was now a great armed camp.

In a clearing among some palm trees a barbed-wire prisoners’ cage had been erected, with a score of long hutments inside it, two of which were separated and fenced off from the rest as officers’ quarters. I was taken straight to one of these. Opening the door, the guard flashed his torch for a moment upon a big pile of blankets, indicating that I was to look after myself; then he left me in the dark, slamming and locking the door behind him.

After fumbling round I made myself up quite a comfortable bed from a pile of blankets, and pulling off my boots and tunic snuggled down into them. It would obviously have been futile to contemplate escape any further that night, knowing nothing
more of my new surroundings than I had glimpsed by the setting moon, and it was now twenty-four hours since I had slept. Almost before I knew it my anger and my dejection at my capture were overcome by fatigue and I had dropped off.

When I awoke it was broad daylight and another British officer was bending over me. He was the only other occupant of the hut, and he said he had been sound asleep when I had been brought in, so had known nothing of my presence until he had discovered me, a few minutes earlier, coiled up in the pile of blankets. As I sat up I saw that one side of the hut was occupied by rows of bunks made of wire-netting stretched across wooden frames, and that each had a palliasse already laid out on it; but evidently my guard of the night before had been too lazy or antagonistic to flash his torch on these.

My fellow-prisoner was a garrulous Irish lieutenent named Malone. He said that he had been taken prisoner three weeks before and, as it transpired, in a very similar circumstance to myself. He asked me innumerable questions about the units I had been with and how things had been going at Mersa Matruh since his capture; but as the conversation progressed it struck me that he seemed to know strangely little about the composition of the Army of the Nile and was altogether too curious.

We were given a very decent breakfast of quite drinkable coffee, brown bread, honey and dates, soon after which I was called out of the hut and taken along a path through the palm trees to a big white building. My guard shepherded me into one of a long row of offices where an officer was sitting behind a desk and it soon transpired that I was in for further questioning.

My interrogator on this occasion was a sharp-eyed grizzled man of major’s rank who was evidently a trained intelligence officer. He spoke English fluently and put a great number of very shrewd questions to me, the business lasting for well over an hour.

I stonewalled most of the time, simply repeating that I was not a real soldier at all but only an officer of the Interpreter Corps who had qualified in Arabic, and that as I had been stationed in Alexandria up to a few days ago I knew nothing whatever about the numbers or dispositions of the British forces in the line. The fellow could not prove me a liar and it made things slightly less unpleasant to maintain that one simply did not know than to dig one’s heels and flatly refuse to talk.

At the end of the interview he handed back the papers that had been taken from me; I was overjoyed to have them as they consisted mainly of the few letters that I had ever received from
Daphnis. Hardly an hour had passed since my capture without my thinking of her. Overwhelmed as I was by this tragic separation, which might become a torture of months or even years if I could not find a way to escape, I was even more concerned on her account than for myself. She would, I knew, be as heartbroken as I was when she heard that I had been taken, but she would have all the additional agony of having to cancel the arrangements for our wedding and live on among her family and friends as an object of their well-meant but infuriating pity.

As I was taken back to the prison I kept my eyes skinned to take in every mortal thing I could which might later aid me if I was able to make a break for liberty, but what I saw was far from encouraging. Every corner of the oasis was full of troops, and I came to the conclusion that there must be the best part of a brigade there, as well as large numbers of specialists. The place was stiff with tanks, guns, lorries, searchlights, ambulances, water-carts, and every other type of military equipment, and as the Italians carried out most of their troop movements, like ourselves, at night, it was quite certain that right round the clock there would always be considerable numbers of them awake and moving about on one duty or another.

The prospects of getting out of the cage and then away from such an active, well-populated hive seemed extremely slender, and if I did succeed in getting clear of the fortress I was now at least a hundred miles from the line of British outposts which ran south from Mersa Matruh. Without proper preparations it would, I knew, be positive madness to attempt such a journey and hazardous to make it at any time, even with a car, unless one had proper guides.

Back in the hut Malone recommenced his lighthearted but persistent questioning, and it suddenly struck me that his enquiries followed very similar lines to those of the Italian major who had just grilled me. In consequence I formed a disquieting theory about my room-mate that he might be Irish or part-Irish, but that he was not a British officer at all.

By the evening I had definitely reached the conclusion that Mr. Malone was an Irishman with Italian blood who had probably lived in Italy for a good part of his life. Just as Major Cozelli was half Italian—but almost fanatically pro-British in feeling—so Malone was, I concluded, fanatically anti-British, and he had been put in the cage only as a stool-pigeon to listen to what other prisoners said and report any plans for escape they might be making.

It was a depressing thought that my sole companion was an Italian spy, but I felt so certain that I was right that I decided that it was now useless to make any attempt to escape until they had realised the futility of keeping him locked up with me any longer.

Two days passed and I began to wonder why I was being kept there instead of being sent back to one of the Italian bases. I hardly knew whether to hope for or dread that now. It is true that in the coastal region, if I could once evade my gaolers and get an Italian uniform or an Arab
burnous
, since I spoke both languages, there would be quite a decent chance of my working my way gradually back to the British lines; but the other side of the picture was that, once I was sent to the coast, I might not be kept there for more than a few hours before being despatched to Italy, and once there all hope of getting to Egypt would be out of the question.