Chapter 2 Reprieve from despair; Zero Hour; The Lecture

REPRIEVE FROM DESPAIR

SYRIA was fine just then. The mountains, with the snow on the high ones hazy in the sun, were good to look at after the flatness of the desert. News came up that down there in the desert things weren't going so well but up here you felt so far away from it you preferred not to worry about it. You just went through the day, monotonous but quiet and peaceful, and everything was damn fine.

And then a week later they were in the desert again. They had come down the long coast road, the blue Mediterranean flashing in the sun beside the road and the native kids, shrill and dirty, running along behind and they knew they weren't going back. They moved up into action at El Alamein and back in their tars was the hard sound of gunfire and their nostrils were dry and their eyes were squinting again.

Now he was here he didn't feel so badly, About it. He hadn't wanted to come back here again; five months of Tobruk had built up a hate of a dead bare horizon at the bottom of a sky where the clouds are worn thin by the sun, but now he didn't have so much time to think about it.

They assigned his Company an objective and in they went and took it. It wasn't as easy as all that but you couldn't think about it without thinking about the men who had gone down to the earth and didn't get up. So in their next period he sat with the others and talked or slept and once he tried to write a letter but he never allowed himself to think.

Then they went up in again. This time they had to take a forward ridge and they went up with the sun warm on their backs in s young day and men fell again and didn't get up and then they took that position too.

They didn't have time to consolidate the ridge. He heard the shells coming and he dropped quickly into a hole. Two men near him grunted and he knew they had been too late. One of the men was above him on the ground against the sun and he looked huge and grotesque. The bracket stayed on them and he kept low and wished to hell he was somewhere else. Then it stopped and he heard the tanks coming. They came up fast and there was nothing he and the others could do. He was firing but he knew it was useless. For a moment he felt a lifting excitement when he saw some Bren carriers coming up on the flank and he shouted out loud, glad to let the sound go, articulating his relief. But the shout died in his mouth as the carriers came up firing on them, and he knew with a sudden low despair that these were Germans.

It was all over in a minute. A sergeant lumped down out of one of the tanks and came towards them. He was a big dark man with buck teeth. He shouted at them, motioning then, to bunch together. The men stood up, throwing down their rifles as ordered, and came together. The sergeant jumped up on the side of a tank, shouted again, and they shoved off back toward the German lines.

They had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile when he heard the shells coming again. The men dropped and he saw the sergeant jump from the tank and fling himself flat. The tanks went on a little way, then stopped as they saw the earth spuming up ahead of them. Then two of the tanks backed up to the prisoners while the others accelerated and, going off at a tangent, disappeared over the next low ridge. The tanks drove up in amongst the men. He saw the track above him and smelt the hot oil and felt the heat and he rolled clear. He could near the sergeant shouting and see him running, crouched down, around the men.

The shells were still landing on the rise but now the range was lessening and the bracket was 3lowly coming back towards them. Hell, he thought, we're going to get it from our own guns. Lying on the ground, he grinned sourly into the dust and in his mind he hummed, "I'm Nobody's Baby Now". He didn't care now. He didn't even feel like trying to escape. He felt all hollow inside, dead, like one feels the depth of a great sickness, and all he wanted now was to be out of the desert.

The artillery fire ceased, the O-pip must have at last recognized the bunch of men as prisoners, and the sergeant stood up and shouted at them again. They got to their feet, the sergeant bunched them into something resembling ranks, and they moved off again with the two tanks coasting along on each side of them.

His mind now was a blank as to what had gone: now he was thinking only of the time to come. I am done with the war. Me and the war, finis. No more death and the living on the edge, just sanctuary and a long wait to go home. Gosh, I sound as if I'm glad to be a prisoner! Snap out of it. You're thinking like an Itie.

They had passed through the German forward lines and were going down a well-worn road at the back of a long sloping ridge when they heard the planes, suddenly and very loud, and six Tomahawks came over the ridge behind them, flying low and very fast. He turned and felt again the surge of excitement a3 he saw the cockades on the wings, then he heard the sergeant shouting again and they had to stand close together while the tanks drew in near beside them. The planes swept over them, dark against the sun and the engine noise beating them down, making them duck instinctively, so low they could feel the momentary wind from the propellers.

The planes went up in sharp climbs, banked and came ramming down again. For a moment panic tore its way through him and he dropped flat to the ground, a reflex action, but the planes were over them and gone and he felt relief come in to take the place of panic. They all look the same, ours or theirs, when they are coming down out of the sun at you. I guess I'll never again be able to see a plant diving without getting tight inside like this.

They moved on again. He grew tired and his mind went to sleep within him. Aware of it but not interested or caring, he remembered coming to a supply dump where Italians took them over from the Germans and they were told to mount two trucks.

He climbed up in and slumped down in the corner. The other men crowded in around him and he heard the engine start and felt the truck move off and after that he slept, heavily and blankly.

They woke him and he stood up in the truck, looking about him. He recognized El Daba. He could see the 'drome over to the right with two planes dispersed at the far end. He had camped here back in March '41 with his old show. Then we had the place and he could remember there were planes at the far end of the 'drome just like now but they were Hurricanes instead of Macchis. Mine to-day, yours to-morrow. That was the way war in the desert went. Only the Hun had never come through this far before.

They stayed there that night. They were put into a compound and fed with a tin of Itie beef to two men and two thick mouth drying biscuits each. The men lay down, huddling together for warmth, and, still tired, he slept.

The next morning they were put on the trucks again. That day and the next and the next they travelled, stopping overnight at each place, and as they went through the towns, Mersa Alatruh, Tobruk, then finally Benghazi, he saw how little these places changed with the change of occupants. The houses were still battered and glarey under the sun, there were still the same wrecks at the same places; now there were the high-crowned caps to be seen instead of the slouch hats and that was the only change.

They put them in a compound just outside Benghazi. There were a lot of prisoners there: Tommies, Enzeds, and, the biggest percentage of all, South Africans who had been captured at Tobruk. They told him they had stopped fighting there because they had been told that Tobruk had surrendered. He listened to them and believed them; these big slow talking men didn't strike as ones who would run away from a fight. He noticed the attitudes of the various sections: the quiet acceptance of the Tommies, the sullenness of the South Africans, the cockiness of the Australians and the Enzeds. He thought to himself, and what of me? Do I care? He still didn't know. He was still glad to be escaping the desert and so far that was his only feeling. Later would come the anger or the remorse or the shame or whatever it was you felt when you were taken prisoner.

They were three weeks at Benghazi. Dysentery was rife in the compound. There were men lying about so weak that they couldn't rise to go to the latrines, and he wondered when it would catch up with him. But he escaped it though towards the end of the stay there he was weak too. The ration of half a tin of beef and two biscuits per day revolted his stomach, and though he would eat it rather than starve, most times he was sick after it.

Then one morning the whole compound was marched down to the harbour, the bad dysentery cases being taken down in trucks. They put them on barges and took them out to two cargo ships lying in the middle of the harbour. He looked up as their barge swung in under one of the ships and he could see the name, rusted and dull: Nino Dixio. They went up the ladder on the ship's side and were herded along the deck, moving in single file.

Some of the Australians, still cocky and cheerful, began to bleat like sheep and the Tommies joined in. It was ridiculous but it made you laugh and laughter was a good thing, especially now. They went down into the for-ward hold, and as he climbed down the ladder, past the two Germans standing there, one of them was counting. Later he heard one of the Tommies who spoke German say that when the last man came down the ladder the guard had counted to seven hundred.

The hold was jammed tight. Light came through the open hatch and he could see the men sitting, back to back, or lying curled up, but in the corners away from the light he could see nothing, just hear the murmur of voices.

There was nothing to do but sleep. That filled the day and the night. Sometimes he would lie looking up at the square of blue, now and again a white blur of cloud drifting across it, and now he was beginning to think of this time to come. Now, he didn't like it at all. He could see these months, maybe years, ahead as being monotonous and he hated monotony: monotony had been the thing he hated most about the desert. He didn't know what life was like in prison camps so he couldn't plan how he would fill in the time. Perhaps he might write, he had always wanted to do that, but what was he to write on? Death, that was all, death in the desert.

And he hated both of them, the death and the desert. Maybe he could write about home. He didn't hate that. But he hated to think about it. He always felt peaceful thinking about it, his mother, his sisters, June, and then after-wards he felt low and moody and he wished he had never started remembering. You could think of her lips on yours and it was so real that you could almost put out your hand and touch her and then something snapped and it was gone and you were lonely as you had never been before.

It was three o'clock of the second afternoon, a fine warm blue sky afternoon, when the torpedoes hit them. It came with a sudden ness like the clicking on of a light. There was a roar that was all sound and light and force. He felt himself lifted up as a great wind hit him and he felt giddy and sick and his eyes went back into his head against the glare of the flash and he could see blobs against the flash, whirling and coming at him, and then one of the blobs hit him and he felt everything drop away from him and he went out of himself into blackness.

When he came to he was on the deck. He could feel the sun warm on him and he shut his eyes against the glare. He felt pain in his leg and he opened his eyes and looked down. His lower leg was covered in blood and he could feel something against the bone in his shin. He moved the leg and it hurt like all hell. He didn't move it again. Then he noticed his head was higher than his feet and, turning his head, lie looked along and could see the whole deck was on an angle. The ship was still moving but she was listing heavily.

He asked someone what had happened. There had been two torpedoes, one in the forward hold and one in the engine-room. More than half of the men in the hold had been killed. The escort, a cruiser and two destroyers from the Italian Navy, had disappeared without dropping any depth charges. The six planes that had been patrolling above them had cruised around for a while and then they too, along with the other cargo boat, had disappeared.

They gave him a drink of water and he lay on the deck listening to the other men and trying to forget the pain. About six the Navy came back. There was a lot of signalling and scurrying about by the crew and then the cruiser drew up close in front of them, lines were thrown and he could hear a chain running out. Then the cruiser slowly moved away and in tow behind her the prison ship limped along.

He spent the rest of the voyage there on the deck. His leg grew numb and he began to fear infection. Another Australian sat by him and looked after him. He talked to this chap all day, talking fast so that he wouldn't have time to think of his leg, and then, tired out with his talking, he would drop off and sleep right through the night.

They came into a port. He didn't know it at all and there were lots of guesses. But most of them were way out. A Tommy sergeant who had been here before told him it was Navarino, in Greece.

It was mid-afternoon when they took him off the boat. They took him up through the town to a school that had been converted into a hospital. If the pain had been bad on the boat, it was unbearably awful here. Six Italian orderlies held him on the table while a doctor cut his leg and took the shrap out. He tried taking it quietly at first but the pain knifed through him and was all over him, his stomach bubbling and his head tightening, and at the end he was screaming and crying. The doctor came over afterwards and in broken English said he was sorry they had no anesthetic. He just nodded, still sick within, and the doctor went away and he didn't see him again.

The next day they put him in an ambulance with three wounded Tommies. They rode for a long time, his watch told him eighteen hours but it had stopped for a while and he wasn't sure. Then they were taken out and taken up a gangway on to another boat. It was still dark and he couldn't see the port but he heard someone speak once and the language was neither Italian nor German. He found out later from one of the crew that it had been Durazzo, the principal port of Albania.

When they took him off the boat again he lay on the wharf for a while and looking about him he saw a big sign on an hotel across the water that told him he was in Brindisi. The harbour was very full of ships and he could see one, standing out in the stream, with a great gaping hole right in the centre of it.

They put him on another ambulance and took him out of Brindisi, up through country

that reminded him of the Lebanon only it was greener and less majestic, to another hospital. This one had barbed wire round it and when the ambulance drew up at the gate a guard came and looked in the back.

They put him in a bed in a long cold room and there the other men told him about this place. It was Bari Hospital, run by the Italian Army, and here they kept seriously wounded prisoners till they were well enough to be sent to Altamura. So here I am, he thought, and now begins the waiting. It was cold and he was glad that he was in bed. The food was barely sufficient to keep them from being continuously hungry but each week parcels arrived from the Red Cross and by pooling the tinned food in the parcels they managed to eke out a satisfactory diet.

After three months they sent him to Altamura. There he was kept in a bed and again he was glad of it: this place was colder than Bari. Now he had dropped into a mental lethargy that gave him no entertainment but kept his mind off the things he didn't want to think about. He tried writing but what he had expected came: blank verse about death in the bright hot sun or nostalgic rhyme about blue-gums and surf and aboriginal names that were so musical. It left him moody and he threw away his pencil and didn't try again. Sometimes the men who could move around would congregate about the bed of a Tommy sergeant who played a mouth-organ and they would sing, mostly old songs because they couldn't remember the words of the new ones' and he would join in with them and then at those times he felt best.

Some of the men were very cheerful, resigned to being here till the end of the war, and after a while he found their spirits infectious and he felt better than he had felt for a long time. Each time he wrote a letter home now he dwelt on the thoughts in it and then one day they came in and dropped six letters on his bed. fie recognized the hands on all of them and he tore them open, skimming quickly through them and then going over them slowly, scanning every word. He lay awake a long time that night.

The Papal Nuncio had presented them with a piano-accordion but they didn't see it, only heard it. The Commandant's daughter, a pretty girl of sixteen whom some of them had seen walking with her father outside the grounds, was learning to play it, and they could hear her trying to pound out a tune. Some of the men would stand at the window and howl like dogs and then the music would stop.

Then the Commandant left and when the new one came he gave them the accordion. Things then were much brighter in the ward. They had sing-songs every night and one night the corporal of the guard, a little fat man, came in and played the accordion with the touch of a master. He played arias from the operas and sang them in a bull tenor voice and some of the men joined in with him in bits they knew.

It was the end of May, nearly eleven months after he had been captured, that they told him he was to be repatriated home. The Red Cross Commissioners, a Swede and a Swiss, came down to his bed, past all the other men looking at them inquiringly and hopefully, and they told him he was going home. It took him a long time to fully grasp the news and there were a lot of things he wanted to ask them but there was the language difficulty and after a while they went away and left him confused and a little unbelieving of his good fortune. He sat silently in the midst of the excited congratulations around him and thought a lot about the joy of it and from then on till they came for him he was very happy.

"NX15943"
"VX14241"

Zero Hour

IT was at El Alamein, at 2140 hours on the night of the 23rd of October 1942 that the vital Battle of Egypt commenced. This article was written at 0300 hours on the 24th of October, in a dug-out four thousand yards from enemy wire.

Outside the full moon is hanging in the western sky, its pale golden light is trying to penetrate the white haze of battle smoke. The cold air reeks with the acrid smell of burnt cordite and is vibrating from the intense thunder of the guns of the Eighth Army.

For hours, the noise has never ceased and when morning breaks across the dusty hazy rim of the desert it will go on, for we know that as soon as daylight comes the panzers will be at our forward positions.

The preparations for this night started days ago for us; and for the army, perhaps, months back. For weeks, men and material had been brought from overseas and the Nile Delta to concentration areas in the rear. To us, in the forward areas, the war was Just going on, the newspapers were reporting, "There is a lull in the fighting in the Western Desert, the only activity being occasional artillery exchanges."

A short time ago, materials started to come forward quietly; vehicles were put in the place of dummy substitutes, and tanks, deadly efficient and new, came dressed up as three ton lorries. In the air, our fighters hung over as constantly and readily gave battle to any M.E. 109's that appeared. New men, from the home country, came forward and were "blooded" by the tough seasoned troops, who taught them the practical art of desert war-are. For weeks, reccy patrols prowled by night in and through the German wire to locate minefields and booby traps; from towers, men watched and flash-spotted the enemy's guns. During the daylight, our photo/ reccy planes flew over his positions and the camera recorded his defences.

Produced from the combined efforts of infantry patrols, flash spotting and aerial photographs, an accurate Large scale overprint map, showing all the defences and strong points of the enemy, is leaning against the sandbag wall of the dugout. As "Day z " came near, the administration offices churned out "Operation Orders" and all the necessary stores and emergency spare parts were checked and their delivery carefully worked out. Long lines of heavy lorries rumbled at night; their loads of ammunition and supplies were buried somewhere in the sands, and the vehicles were away by first light. At night, our heavy bombers raided and smashed 'dromes and lines of communications in the rear; the sullen drone of their motors caused us to stir uneasily in our sleep.

The 23rd dawned fine; on the roads there was little movement. The infantry and artillery went into position the night before and slept in camouflaged pits and made no movement during daylight. The afternoon was cloudy and stormy. This meant dog-fights in the clouds above. An occasional gun barked along the coast and a squadron of fighter-bombers slid down on the defences on "Clover Leaf".

In the late afternoon, my unit moved forward and occupied Tactical Headquarters, near Tel El Eisa station. Slit-trenches were dug near a rocky pimple which was once an Italian O.P. The day faded; a golden moon climbed through the fast dwindling storm clouds. With the closing of the day, the silence that usually marks the night did not come; from the main road and the newly made tracks, a low throbbing hum drifted, as

the armour of tanks, guns, carriers and armoured fighting vehicles moved to their battle positions. At 2100 hours, the noise ceased and then came-silence, as if all things had gone to sleep. Across the desert a Bren gun chattered and a Spandau snarled in reply. In this period of strange uncanny silence came the realization that the Eighth Army was ready to strike. Men all over the vast battlefield sensed this realization and knew what it meant; they shook hands with their fellow men. Under cover of their shallow slit trenches, cigarettes glowed. As zero hour approached, I climbed the rocky pimple and settled down between a pile of stones, where I was joined by several officers and men. From this vantage point I had an uninterrupted view of the battle-front from Tel El Eisa to the Qattara Road. No lights could be seen and no sound heard from the seemingly empty space in front. A night bird called eerily from the sea swamps.

At 2f4o hours it was Zero Hour for the artillery. Over the rolling ridges of Miteiriya, pinpoints of light flashed as far south as the Qattara Depression and, as quick as summer lightning, these flashes rippled up the long British line. The guns flamed at the Depression, up and around Ruweisat and Himeimat Ridges, across the dusty plain of Alamein, past the station and Qattara Track, on Tel El Eisa and the coastal strip. In a few short seconds, a thousand guns stabbed the air with livid flame and a thousand shells screamed their way to enemy gun positions. I saw the flashes; the next second, earth and air trembled with terrible sound.

It was something living and majestic, yet horribly savage with hate. Speech was impossible and the ears tingled with the vibrations. There was never a break in the gunfire, lances of flame stabbed the night all around me. After a minute of firing, a new sound filtered through, it was the dull, ugly crump of bursting shells as they exploded in enemy gun positions. Over the horizon and directly in front, a red, angry smudge glowed vividly as our shells found enemy guns and ammunition. For fifteen terrible minutes the guns thundered and then stopped-suddenly. The infantry and tanks moved through our wire and minefields to their start lines.

At 2200 hours, the desert flamed into life again. This was Zero Hour for the infantry. The guns splashed light everywhere, and German guns that had escaped our counter battery fire added their sound and shells. Small arms chattered amid the din. The horizon burned with Very lights; rockets, climbing to their zenith, burst into brilliant coloured lights. Amidst the inferno of sound, I could hear the drone of bombers and the snarl of night fighters as they passed unseen.

Three miles away, a string of golden brilliant flares hung from the sky as the planes lit the earth below for the advancing infantry. Farther back, more flares hung over gun positions and dull, angry crumps of heavy bombs filtered through to us. The noise drugged our thoughts and we watched vacantly until in one screaming second, we were brought swiftly back to reality. Four shells arrived with shrill screams, exploded, and filled the air with slivers of steel. On the flat, some ninety yards away, ominous black blobs of smoke and dust twisted into fantastic shapes in the moonlight. We dropped and kept our heads well down and after the next salvo detonated, I made a dive for the dug-out and slithered down the steps. The next lot sent jagged lumps whining over the camouflaged entrance.

Down in the dug-out, where the reports of battle were coming through by phone and runner, it was fairly quiet. The sound of gunfire was muffled but the walls shook; tiny rivulets of sand ran from the coarse sandbags. The shells arrived regularly, some rocked the place and filled the air with fine grit. Those who were not on duty played cards, and with each shell the game would be temporarily suspended for that brief moment. An hour passed; the shelling stopped and I went outside for a breath of air, which was cold and bitter with the smell of burnt explosives.

The first phase was over; the guns were silent but small arms rattled viciously. The horizon was hazy with smoke, which crawled in long white lanes and hung low to the earth. Coils of white smoke of burnt-out aerial flares spiralled in the still air. The Air Force was very active at this stage; they lit the enemy strong posts with light and the crump of heavy bombs made the earth tremble.

Midnight passed; out in the cold, dry sands men are dying. Australian bayonets arc red; men are consolidating for the counter-attacks that will come at dawn. A few hours ago, by the light of the moon, the Commander of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant-General B. L. Montgomery, told war correspondents, "During the night there will be a terrific battle. We will know better at dawn to-morrow where we are. There is no doubt on the issue."

The guns have started their final phase of the night's operations and men who know no sleep are moving forward.

"SX9847"