Lieutenant Rowland Green was bleeding to death. He had
been hit by a 9mm dum-dum round that had plunged into
his armpit and burst out through his back in a shower of
gore. Sergeant Tom Caine tore open his shirt and applied a
shell-dressing, but it was like trying to stem a dam-burst
with blotting paper. Blood soaked into his khaki drill shorts.
‘You’ll be all right, sir,’ Caine said. ‘It’s not too bad.’ He
pressed the lieutenant’s right hand down on the pad and
told him to keep it there. ‘Orderly,’ he bellowed. ‘I need
morphia – now.’
Medical orderly Maurice Pickney heard Caine’s call, but
was focused on another task requiring his full attention.
Squatting in a slit-trench a few yards away, he was trying
to prize a No. 36 Mills grenade from the frozen fingers of
Private ‘ Tinkerbell’ Jones, who had been shot in the act of
hurling it. Jones had a critical wound in the abdomen, and
was blubbering in shock. Pickney spoke reassuringly to him,
holding his wrist in a vice-like grip with one hand, forcing
his fingers back one by one with the other. If Jones released
the grenade suddenly, Pickney knew, both of them would
have about five seconds to live. A moment later he was
gripping the steel pineapple tight in his palm, wondering
what to do with it. He was about to chuck it over the edge,
when he found the pin lying in the dust. He picked it up,
slid it back carefully into place, and let out a long sigh.
‘We’re out of morphia, Sarn’t Caine,’ he yelled.
Caine swore savagely. From further down the line, he
could hear Corporal Harry Copeland demanding a casualty
and ammunition report from each trench in turn. From
Caine’s left came the booming voice of Gunner Fred
Wallace, a six-foot-seven regular soldier from Leatherhead.
Wallace was relating his experiences, his words coming out
slurred with thirst, while someone else treated multiple
shrapnel wounds on his arms. ‘I seen a Jerry throwing a
potato-masher,’ he was saying. ‘I shot him and he went
down, but I didn’t mark where the grenade landed, and just
as I was squeezing the trigger a second time, it went off. I
didn’t feel a damn’ thing. Didn’t even know I’d been hit till
I saw the blood.’
The attack had been over no more than a minute, but to
Caine it already seemed like a dream. The Germans, Panzer
Grenadiers of Rommel’s 90th Light Division, had somehow
got through the minefield and crawled up a gully, launching
the assault from about two hundred yards. Caine’s men –
No.1 Troop, Middle East Commando – had risen to meet
them. Hazily, Caine recalled the ferocious clash of bayonet
on bayonet, the thump and crack of grenades, the rat-tat-tat
of sub-machine guns fired at point-blank range. The fight
couldn’t have lasted longer than it took to smoke a cigarette,
but time had seemed to stand still. Caine’s memories of it
were a sequence of disjointed images – putting three .45-
calibre rounds through a German soldier’s chest – three
neat scarlet rosettes blossoming on the khaki drill shirt;
Lieutenant Green howling as he shot an enemy with a bullet
from his Colt; the Jerry snapping off the dum-dum that
brought Green down; Fred Wallace dancing madly like a
giant marionette, blasting away with his Bren, scything a
swathe through the khaki bodies, bringing out his sawn-off
twelve-bore shotgun, flaying off Hun faces; Harry Copeland,
the battalion’s champion sniper, cool as an ice-pick, drilling
shots from his .303 into the melee; men falling, men thrashing,
men entwined together so you couldn’t tell friend from
foe, mutilated men screaming for Mother; surly ex-Redcap
Todd Sweeney stabbing an enemy in the stomach with a
bayonet; a German grabbing Sweeney from behind and
Geoff Hutchins shooting him in the head with his Tommygun,
so close that half the man’s brains spilled out and
splashed over them; then Hutchins himself uplifted gracefully
on a wave of fire and smoke that whacked his whole
body apart.
The desert sky was an open furnace, pulsating raw heat.
The stones around the trenches were so hot they scorched
bare flesh: inside, the stifling heat lay on the men like a
liquid lead; it was too hot to move, almost too hot to think.
The commandos had now been awake more than thirty
hours, thanks to the huge doses of Benzedrine they’d swallowed,
but the amphetamine haze was wearing thin. Caine
felt parched, dazed and exhausted. He pulled the brim of
his ‘soup bowl’ helmet down against the lowering sun, then
checked that the drum magazine on his Thompson submachine
gun was still firmly in place. The gunmetal was hot
to the touch. He was the only man in the battalion to use
this hundred-round mag, which had a tendency to drop off
at inopportune moments. Caine had personally modified the
locking mechanism on his magazines, making them secure,
and giving his own ‘trench-sweeper’ more than four times
the fire-power of any other. Some of the lads scoffed at
what they called his ‘Al Capone’ shooter, but then few of
them had his physique – the powerful shoulders and biceps
that were needed to brace the weapon properly.
Caine wasn’t much above average height but seemed
top-heavy with muscle, as if his chest and shoulders had
developed separately from the rest of him. A veteran at
twenty-three, his combat experience was reflected in the
grimly determined set of his chin and lips, amplified by the
cool steadiness of slate-grey eyes that seemed to have been
honed by desert winds. He traversed the Tommy-gun’s
muzzle across the undulating ground in front of the troop’s
position – shell-holes, bomb-craters, Jerry dead. All the way
along the Box he could see palls of black smoke rising from
smouldering vehicles – remnants of a supply column that
had tried, in vain, to reach them. There were dark circles
like black eyes in the desert where Stuka dive-bombers had
crashed and burned, shot down by RAF Kittyhawks and
Hurricanes. About four miles to the west he could see
dust-clouds kicked up by Panzer Army tanks gathering like
crows on the edge of minefields that protected the Box.
From the ridge behind him there was the continual snarl
and crash of twenty-five-pounder field-guns, manned by
men of the Royal Horse Artillery. Caine knew that Jerry’s
88mm guns would open up any minute.