Alamein: The turning point of World War Two. Iain Gale
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this great adventure. He knew that if he had not come he would forever have regretted it. Not for missing the chance to fight. As the son of a Quaker and a pacifist in his own mind, he would not have joined the regular army and would have protested if conscripted. Killing was anathema to him. But helping his fellow man, whatever his nationality, now that was something else. The American Field Service, an independent ambulance unit with a distinguished record in the last war had seemed perfect.
Perhaps, he thought, that was why he had felt the need to learn so much about war. He still believed that there might be another way. While his fellow students ploughed on deep into Plato and Socrates, Miller preferred to stay with Thucydides, Xenophon and Caesar. Now later conflicts interested him. Napoleon in particular fascinated him and in Cairo, after they had finally got there from the depot at El Tahag, while all the talk among his friends had been of pharaohs and pyramids, Miller’s mind had been on the image of a small Corsican general standing at the base of the Sphinx less than two hundred years ago. A man bent on world domination whose wars had lasted twenty-five years. He wondered how long this present one would last, fuelled as it was by the megalomania of another European emperor.
He was such a long way from home. Halfway across the world from college, and from the family home in Long Island. And in real terms he might as well have been on the moon.
Aged nineteen and filled with curiosity to see more of the world, he had volunteered without hesitation for the ambulance service. Someone had given him a copy of Life magazine and pointed to photographs of AFS volunteers helping the British in North Africa. Ambulances alone in vast expanses of sand; men running with stretchers. He had thought how romantic it all seemed. After he had signed up he learnt how at Tobruk AFS men had died with the British and their allies. Others had been made prisoner. He looked now at the small group who for the last two months had inhabited the ambulance that had made the journey with them five thousand miles across the Atlantic. Thought how they looked for all the world like straight British soldiers with their funny schoolboy shorts and their socks and their boots. They wore the same kit, had the same webbing, even had the same haircuts. It was only when they spoke, as now that you could tell they were Americans.
‘Oh Jeeze, Lieutenant. Not again. How come you always get to win?’
‘Privilege of rank, Turk. Nothing more. Goes with the territory.’
Charlie Turk, a muscle-bound quarterback with a navy-cut hairstyle and wearing a T-shirt with his British army-issue shorts, sat on a bunk in the back of the ambulance and paid the lieutenant his winnings. Then he picked up the pack and shuffled before dealing out two new hands on the rough red serge of the British army-issue hospital blanket.
‘Double or quits, Lieutenant. What d’you say?’
‘It’s your funeral, Turk.’
Lieutenant Evan Thomas grinned. This would be the sixth game he had played against Turk. He looked at the wodge of dollar bills at his side and tried to guess how much he had won. Four hundred? He really hated to fleece poor Turk, but if the guy insisted.
They fanned out their hands and took a look at them. Neither man smiled.
At length Turk spoke: ‘Card.’
The lieutenant handed him a card. He looked at it and said nothing.
The lieutenant took a card. Turk smiled: ‘OK three kings. What you got?’
‘Full house. I win.’
‘Beats me. You win again. I swear, Loot, you’ve got the luck of the devil himself.’
‘Not the devil, Turk. I sure don’t get my luck from him. If anyone’s on my side, it’s got to be the big guy. Don’t you think?’
Miller did not play cards, had not been brought up that way. His family were Quakers. For his part he had not yet decided, but he was pretty certain that there was some deity above them. He only hoped that whatever or whoever it was would be looking out for him in the coming battle. Because they were sure there was going to be a battle. A big one. That’s why they had been rushed here from Alexandria so fast. The lieutenant began to count his money. Miller guessed there was a time and place for everything and he had seen more things in this war than he had ever thought he would. And surely, even if God was against gambling, if He could countenance such inhumanity then He would bend the rules a little when it came to a card game. Although it did seem a little unfair that the lieutenant kept winning all the time.
He liked Thomas, who wore his officer’s rank lightly. The service was nominally subject to British army law but they had worked it out with the Brits that their own officers could dish out whatever punishments were needed.
Turk was a character too. A football player who had won a sports scholarship to Harvard and come out here to see some action before he was called up to the US army. He figured that it would give him some good battlefield experience and Miller reckoned he would probably be right.
As for himself, he had not really known what to expect. He had joined and volunteered in the fervour that came of adrenalin and then halfway across the Atlantic on the Aquitania had almost regretted it when a member of the ship’s crew had attempted suicide and the game had become a reality. But by then it had been too late.
One thing he did know. He had not yet seen a dead man, had not even seen a single casualty still on the battlefield. Sure, he had seen enough wounded in the hospitals in Cairo and Alexandria but did they really count? He reckoned not. They were all dressed and bundled up. Even the amputees seemed sanitized. No, Miller had not seen the full horror of war and he was not sure just how he was going to react to it.
Turk’s voice cut through his thoughts: ‘See this. It’s crap, McGinty. Pure crap. The lieutenant wins every time.’
The fourth member of their team, Joe McGinty, an Irishman from New York looked up from his copy of a comic book: ‘So why d’ya keep playing, you great lunk?’
‘Well I reckon he’s got to lose sometime, ain’t he? I mean stands to reason that even the lieutenant’s luck’s got to run out sometime, don’t it?’
Miller shook his head and went on reading: ‘…the Persians, even before they were within the range of the arrows, wavered and ran away. Then the Greeks pressed on the pursuit vigorously, but they shouted to each other not to run, but to follow up the enemy without breaking ranks…’
He wondered whether it would be like that when the British attacked and conjectured just what ‘pressed on the pursuit vigorously’ might mean. He envisaged ragged ranks of Greeks hacking in all directions, swords meeting flesh as the Persians fell under the advancing army. Razor-sharp steel slicing through skin and tissue and sinew and bone. ‘Pressed on the pursuit vigorously’. It sounded almost modern. Might even feature on one of Monty’s orders.
Turk, after his seventh losing game, had dealt an eighth. But no amount of money lost at cards could take his mind off a fear that had got hold of him. He was rattled and he wanted some answers. ‘What I don’t understand, Loot, is what we’re doing here. If we’re so strong why aren’t we chasing Rommel’s men back into the sea?’
Thomas studied his cards as he spoke: ‘We’re playing a waiting game, Turk. Just waiting. Like when you play cards. We’re trying to out-guess the enemy, figure out his next move. The British are waiting for him to make a mistake then they’ll pounce.’ He played his hand.
‘Shee-it! Sorry, Lieutenant. But Jeeze. OK, you win. That’s it. I’m done.’
McGinty spoke: ‘He’s got a point, Lieutenant. How did we end up here?’
From the other side of the ambulance another man emerged. Ed Bigelow was a geology student at Princeton. His black-rimmed spectacles sat on the bridge of his birdlike nose. In one hand he held a piece of rock, in the other a small magnifying glass. If Bigelow had one failing it was his inability to stifle his penchant for wicked sarcasm. He smiled at McGinty: ‘Don’t you remember, Joe, you came out on that transporter ship. Across the sea. Big blue watery thing. Took a while to cross. Wow,