Moon Tiger (29 page)
Burying the crew of a Crusader from C squadron. They dropped behind with engine trouble during an attack and later we found the tank shot up and burnt out, all dead, the driver and commander still inside, a bloody mess fuming with flies that we took out as best we could, in pieces, the gunner and operator lying near in the sand, shot when they’d tried to bale out, hardly
a scratch on them, just stiff on the sand in that absolute unreachable silence of the dead.
Battle noise that reverberates in the head long after it has ceased – noise to which one responds like an automaton, not identifying but blowing with it, one jump ahead, seeing in the mind’s eye the field-guns and rifles, accounting for a burst of high-velocity fire, assessing range and distance. And the voices always in one’s ears, the disembodied to and fro of the squadron as though we roamed the sand like tormented spirits, calling to one another in a mad private language – ‘Hello, Fish One, Rover calling… O.K. off to you… All stations Fish… Advance on a bearing of figures ten degrees… Move now… Can you confirm…’ – and sometimes the pitch changes, the tempo becomes frenetic, the voices shriek and wail against each other in the tight box of one’s head – ‘Fish Three where the hell are you… bloody well get off the air when I’m talking… Fish Three, blast you, where are you?… Hello, Rover, I am hit, repeat, I am hit and withdrawing.’ It is as though one existed on different planes: that of sight – the confusing treacherous spread of the desert, smoking and flaming, flinging up tracer and Very lights, vehicles crawling hither and thither like ants, and that of sound – which comes from everywhere, above, around, beyond, within – the whine of aircraft, the bangs, clatter, screech and the voices which seem to come not from what one sees but to be detached, a commentary, a ghost chorus.
I’ve just seen a gazelle. Usually we shoot them when we get the chance – they make a fine change from bully beef and tinned bacon – but I couldn’t bring myself to this time. It hadn’t seen me, just stood there flicking its tail, ears pricked, sand-coloured but somehow brilliant in the rock and scrub, in the deadness of the place, rusty petrol tins and barbed wire and a burnt-out lorry near and in the middle of it this scrap of life. And then it scented me and went bounding off.
Sleeping after being in action. Either a black pit of extinction or one skates around just below the level of consciousness, having wild manic dreams, surrealistic dreams in which crazy things go on that you never question. Apt reflection of what we’re in the middle of, come to think of it – preposterous world of sand and explosions that becomes the only one you’ve ever known and therefore banal, mundane, normal.
The moments that rear up, when one stops, the pictures that stay in the head… My gunner squatting in the sand over a fry-up in a respite between actions, intent, absorbed, the sky-line exploding all around, smoke streaming, ‘Here we are, sir, try a bit of this,’ small wiry chap with a Midlands accent, in the building trade pre-war. Staring into heat-shimmer unable to make out line of vehicles on a ridge, what are they? Tanks or lorries? Enemy or not? They hang quivering just out of reach and I am hunched in the turret gripping field-glasses so intently they mark my hands. Italians scrambling out of a gun-emplacement, being herded together by an Aussie infantryman with cigarette glued to his lip, bawling at them occasionally, the blue-green Italian uniforms looking suddenly alien, foreign, intrusive against the khaki – and now I see them again and think of the expedient simplistic way in which war conditions thought of us and them, ours and theirs, good and bad, black and white, no confusing uncomfortable indeterminate areas.
Except the desert, of course, which is neutral. Not on our side or on theirs, but simply on its own. Going about its business of hot and cold, sun and wind, cycles of days and months and years for ever and bloody ever. Unlike us.
More moments. Padre setting up altar for Sunday service in the back of a ten-ton lorry, tail-board let down, men standing round in half-circle, apologetic unsynchronised murmur of prayers and hymns, column of armoured cars moving past behind. God being said of course to be on our side.
Looking down into a weapon-pit with what seems to be a heap of torn clothing in the bottom and it is not clothes but a corpse, resolving itself suddenly into twisted limbs and flung-back head with open eyes crusted in dust, and again that remote silence of the dead, almost a superiority, as though they knew something you don’t. Walking off to some rocks for a shit and finding oneself eye to eye with a little snake, coiled up as still as a stone, just its tongue flicking, beady black eyes, bright zig-zag markings down its back. These two sights separated perhaps by days but they come together now and seem to complement one another, to say something about the potency of life, its charge, the way in which death is total absence.
Air attack on enemy anti-tank guns dug in at the neck of a shallow valley, blocking us for hours, CO’s voice on the headphones saying ‘Friends up above, thank God, at last,’ and then the bombs showering down like white skittles. And before that – after – I don’t know – a hideous time when what I thought were rocks turn into a line of Mark IIIs, hull-down a couple of hundred yards off and I have seconds in which to decide whether to get into reverse bloody quick and withdraw or find the range and take them on, have they seen me yet? Can I hold them off long enough to call up support? And then they solve the problem for me by opening fire, the first shells whistling past thank God and I report my position to command, bawl at my gunner to fire, all at the same moment it seems and stuttering with the effort to keep panic out of my voice.
The desert lifting around me as someone walks into an ‘S’ mine a dozen yards ahead. He is killed. I am deafened for half an hour and have a small flesh wound in one leg. Everyone has their tale of a miraculous escape – that I suppose is mine, except that miracles don’t come into it, just blind chance. But no one likes the idea of chance, so they play games with language and talk about miracles instead.
Nights. The noisy illuminated darkness full of aircraft, ack-ack guns, thuds and bangs off-stage, orange flashes, the silver rise of shells, great glowing furnaces – a Gotterdammerung above which the stars preside, the same icy glitter night after night, Orion, Sirius, the Plough, the Bear. Periods of truce in which we leaguer (odd, that term, reaching back to other wars, other landscapes) – soft vehicles within defensive ring of armour, draw breath, take stock, get orders for tomorrow and, occasionally, sleep.
Two weeks later. Nothing doing for days now – pitched from frenzy into boredom, apathy – the capricious way of this campaign. Rumours that we will advance, withdraw, be sent on leave, sit here for months. So we sit – dispersed untidy city of vehicles and tents and dug-outs. Shanty-towns of petrol tins spring up. People lay out a cricket pitch. Supplies are brought up. We repair kit, equipment, ourselves. Pass round tattered magazines. Write letters. I write this.
To whom it may concern. C., I hope. Myself, maybe, in some future that at the moment seems frankly incredible. We all talk about ‘after the war’ but it is almost an incantation – a protective device: touch wood. One thinks about it, one daydreams, makes plans – something like the day-dreaming of childhood: When I’m Grown-up. So I say to myself: when I’m grown-up in this mythical world in which there are no more tanks, guns, mines, bombs, in which sand is stuff on beaches and the sun is something one appreciates – when I’m let loose in this playground I’m going to… What am I going to do? And then the mythologies take over because what one conjures up is a place stripped of imperfections, a nirvana of green grass, happy children, tolerance and justice which never existed and never will. So one shoves that out of the way and summons up more wholesome stuff like hot meals, clean sheets, drink and sex. All those things one took for granted a bare three years ago which now take on almost holy significance. Which seem at times to be what we are fighting for.
‘Tell me a story,’ C. said in Luxor. I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticised story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been enough time for, in which this damn thing is suspended and we are living happily ever after, world without end, amen. To such indulgences have I sunk. Well, perhaps I am telling her this now, and if I am, may she be tolerant and understanding, may she perceive the extravagance into which one is pitched by war, the suspension of ordinary common sense except that aspect of common sense needed for
doing what has to be done, for telling other people what to do, for moving a lot of heavy metal around and trying to kill people with it while avoiding being killed oneself.
May we, eventually, contemplate all this together.
And now I want to get yesterday down while I still have the awful taste of it.
Orders to move off before dawn again – objective enemy tanks in large numbers reported twenty miles east. Felt keyed up during midnight briefing in CO’s HQ, even glad at prospect of something positive after days of sitting around. Walked back to my tank – brilliant starry night, quite still, men moving about against the pale sand, black hunched shapes of vehicles. Settled down for a few hours sleep and was seized by something I’ve not known before – sudden paralysing awareness of where I am, of what is happening, that I may die, so savage that I lay there rigid, as though in shock, but the mind screaming, howling. Fear, yes, but something more than that – something atavistic, primitive, the instinct to run. I told myself to snap out of it, take a grip on things. I tried breathing deeply, counting to a hundred, going over the codes for the day yet again. No bloody good. All that I can think of is that the morning is riding at me full tilt and I am pinned down with no escape and shit-scared as I’ve never been before and I don’t know why. So I try something else. Tell myself I am not really here. That I am moving through this place, this time, must do so, cannot avoid it, but soon I shall come through and out beyond into another part of the story. Thought of the gazelle I saw, flicking its tail carefree amid heaps of rusty metal, that I envied for a moment; but the gazelle has no story, that is the difference. Pinned down and shit-scared, I have a story, which makes me a man, and therefore set apart.
So I make myself move backwards and forwards, lying there huddled in the sleeping-bag on the cold sand – backwards to other places, to childhood, to a time I climbed a Welsh mountain, walked the streets of New York, was happy, not happy, was by the sea in Cornwall long ago or on a bed in Luxor with C. last month. Forwards into obscurity but an obscurity lit
by dreams which is another word for hope. I make myself dream, push away the night and the desert and the black shapes all round me, push past the morning and tomorrow and next week and make pictures, dreams. I dream of green fields. I dream of cities. I dream of C. And at last the primitive paralysing thing loosens its grip and I even sleep, to be shaken awake by my driver. 0500 hours; I am tense but sane.
And then the rest. Advanced all morning, patrols reporting enemy position and direction, then contact lost, much swanning around looking for them, at one point they appear to have melted into the sand, or were never there in the first place, then my headphones jammed with excited orders, they are spotted again at 7000 yards. Relieved to find I am still sane, functioning O.K., almost calm. Switch over to talk to the crew. We have a new gunner, Jennings. He is fresh from the Delta – his first time in action, which I hadn’t realised till the night before, a stocky lad from Aylesbury, barely into his twenties I imagine. Hadn’t had much time to get to know him, he seemed efficient enough, a bit silent I thought but we were all too busy in the usual flap of last-minute checks to do much about him. And now I realised there was something wrong – first I couldn’t get an answer out of him at all, then he didn’t make sense, went on muttering things I couldn’t catch. I said ‘Jennings, are you O.K.?’ – but the CO’s voice was coming over now on the other set and I had to switch off and the next fifteen minutes or so were chaos – orders and counter-orders, our B squadron in action against a bunch of German Mark IIIs, we were told to move up and give support, then had to wheel round to take on another lot they hadn’t spotted. I told Jennings to get the range and be ready to open fire, and all I could get from him was a whimpering noise, terrible, like a tormented animal. And then words – the same thing over and over again: ‘Please get me out of here. Please get me out of here. Please get me out of here.’ I tried talking to him calmly and steadily, not bawling him out, telling him to take his time, steady up, just do the things he’d been taught to do. But now I could see the enemy tanks, coming on fast, and a couple of shots slammed past us and seconds later my sergeant’s tank was hit and brewed up at once. We couldn’t carry on like this, a sitting duck, so I pulled back both remaining tanks to a hull-down position in a dip behind us and tried once again to persuade Jennings to get a grip on himself. But it was hopeless. All the time he was moaning and whimpering – out of his mind clearly poor little blighter.
God knows why we weren’t hit. The Mark Ills kept on firing. There was nothing I could do – short of throwing Jennings out of the tank and taking over the gun myself. But then the commander was saying there was another of them coming up and we were to pull back for the time being until he could bring up support from our friends to the east. We withdrew out of range and the Germans chased for a bit and then held back and I reported that my gunner was a casualty and asked for the MO, the CO saying angrily ‘What the hell’s up with you – you weren’t hit?’
I got Jennings out of the tank. The rest of the crew hung about awkwardly, not wanting to talk about it, lighting cigarettes. Jennings sat slumped with his head in his hands – he’d been sick and his battle-dress was flecked with yellow vomit. I tried talking to him, told him not to worry, he’d be all right presently, things like that, but I don’t think he took anything in. He looked up at me once, and his eyes were like a child’s, but a child that’s seen some nameless horror, the pupils swollen, black pits in a white face. So I stopped trying and we hung around there fidgeting and presently the MO’s truck came bustling up and the doctor jumped down and took one look at Jennings and said ‘O.K., old chap, come on then.’ And as soon as he’d taken Jennings off the rest of the crew began joking, exaggerated, feverish, like I’ve seen men do after a near miss, and I felt myself as though I’d shaken something off, something unlucky, contaminating – I didn’t want to think about him: his face, his voice.