Derek Robinson - A Good Clean Fight

It was good to be alive and young and flying Messerschmitt 109s from Barce airfield in April 1942.

Barce was in Libya, near enough to the comforts of Benghazi and far enough from the Gazala Line, which was a couple of hundred miles to the east, near Tobruk. Beyond the Gazala Line (which existed on the map, but was mainly minefields, and so invisible) were the enemy: British, Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians, South Africans, Indians. So you were usually safe enough at Barce. If you were a Me 109 pilot you flew every day—training exercises, mock combat, gunnery practice—just to keep yourself tuned-up. When you landed you could go for a swim in the Med, maybe drive into Benghazi for a meal. It was a good life. Rewarding by day and relaxing by night. It would come to an end soon. One more big shove by the Afrika Korps and Rommel would be in Alexandria. Where would the British go then? India, probably. That was somewhat beyond the range of a 109, even with drop-tanks.

The only thing conceivably wrong with Barce (and the half-dozen other airfields along the coastal strip between Benghazi and Tobruk) was a range of mountains just to the south, called the Jebel al Akhdar; and even the Jebel wasn’t much of a problem because as mountains go they were more like high hills: in fact they had to work hard to reach a couple of thousand feet. Nevertheless, if the weather suddenly closed in—and it could rain like a bastard in this part of Africa—then a bit of careless navigation could lead you to try to fly slap through the limestone escarpment of the Jebel. So far nobody had succeeded in achieving this feat, although a couple of scorched wrecks marked the sites of brave attempts.

Captain Lampard and Sergeant Davis came across one of the wrecks just below the rim of the escarpment and sat in the shade of what was left of a wing while they looked down on Barce. It was midday and the heat was brutal. Lampard had chosen to leave their camp, hidden five miles back in the Jebel, and come here at midday because he reckoned nobody down there would be looking up. And even if someone did look up, all he would see would be dazzle and shimmer and, if his eyesight was phenomenally good, the army of flies that followed Lampard and Davis everywhere. If they followed Lampard rather more faithfully it was not because he was the officer but because he was six foot two and there was more of him to overheat.

Each man examined the airfield through binoculars while the flies walked around their ears, lips and nostrils.

“See the wire?” Lampard said.

“Yes. Concertina, the usual stuff.” Davis spat out a reckless fly. “We can cut it, easy.”

“Might be an alarm wire running through the middle. Cut that and bells start ringing.”

“Doubt it,” Davis said. “Look at the length of the perimeter. Bloody miles. Think of the current you’d need.”

Lampard thought about it while he went on looking, and then said: “Doesn’t matter, anyway. There’s a damn great gap. See? Far right.”

Davis found the gap in the wire. It was where the coastal road passed closest to the airfield. As they watched, a truck swung off the road and drove through the gap. “That’s daft,” he said. “Why string up miles of wire if you’re going to leave a hole? I can’t believe it.”

“Maybe they shut it up at night,” Lampard suggested.

“Can’t see any spare wire lying around. No sentry, either. That’s sloppy, that is. Not like Jerry at all.” Davis was a Guardsman; he disapproved of sloppiness, even German sloppiness.

But Lampard had already lost interest in the unfinished wire. He had turned his binoculars on the built-up area of the airfield and he was watching the arrival of a large staff car, an Alfa-Romeo with the top down. Three officers and a dog got out. The dog was enormous, as big as a young pony. It cantered around the car, skidded to a halt in front of one of the officers, reared up, put its paws on his shoulders and licked his face. He stumbled backward and the dog fell off him. Lampard saw the silent laughter of the other men. One of them clapped his hands, soundlessly. The dog bounded amongst them and the man whose face it had licked shook his fist, then took a little run, swung his leg and kicked it on the rump. “Did you see that, Davis?” Lampard gazed wide-eyed at the sergeant. “First they invade Poland, then they go around kicking dogs. People like that have got to be taught a lesson.”

Lampard booted the blistered wreckage of the German airplane, hard, as they went back up the escarpment. “That’s blindingly obvious,” he said.

“I wonder how much one of these costs, new,” Davis said.

“Ten thousand pounds, I think. Twenty, by the time they’ve got it all the way out here.”

“So there must be about half a million quid standing around down there.” Davis paused to take a last, backward look. “I hope they got good insurance.” Lampard was already at the top, striding hard, rapidly moving out of sight. Lampard knew only two speeds: asleep, and apace.

They came back at ten o’clock that night with three more men: a lieutenant called Dunn and two corporals, Pocock and Harris. Apart from desert boots and black stocking-caps, they wore normal British army battledress, so dirty that it was more charcoal-gray than khaki. They were all bearded and their faces were sunburned to a deep teak that merged with the night. Each man carried a rucksack, a revolver and six grenades. Lampard also had a tommy-gun. There was no moon. From the top of the escarpment, Barce airfield was a total blank. Even the road that ran past it was lost in the darkness.

Lampard could find only one track down the escarpment so he led his party down it. The track wandered aimlessly and took them into clumps of scrub or across patches of scree. The scrub grabbed at their arms and tugged at the rucksacks. The scree collapsed beneath their feet and sent them slithering, hands raked by the broken stones. Before they were halfway down it was obvious that the track had lost them, or they had lost it, or maybe it had never meant to go all the way to the bottom anyway. Lampard waited while they gathered round him. The starlight was just bright enough to let him count them. “Any damage?” he said. Everyone was scratched and bleeding, but Lampard meant something serious, a broken leg or, even worse, a lost rucksack. Nobody spoke.

He followed the contours until he met a dry streambed. At least that’s what it looked like; it was certainly a gully that seemed to take the shortest route down the hillside. He stepped into it and dislodged a rock that made off at great speed, leaving small, rattling avalanches behind it.

“One at a time down here,” Lampard said. “Allow a decent interval. No point in stopping a rock with your head. This is liable to be a bit steep.”

He went first. It was more than a bit steep. By sliding on his hands and backside and braking with his boots he made fast, painful progress. Pebbles scuttled alongside him. Then it got steeper and the pebbles were beating him. He glimpsed a looming boulder blocking the streambed, got his feet up in time and flexed his legs; even so, the shock jarred all his joints and left him sprawled over the boulder with the gun-muzzle poking his ear and the grenades making dents in his chest.