Under Fire and Siege

A low iron railing edged the veranda, its decorative curves now half buried behind a wall of sandbags piled chest-high along the front. Above the tiled lean-to roof, someone had painted a red cross on the wall in hurried strokes, yet it sat neatly between the two tall windows as if placed there by design.

Orderlies moved in and out of the doorway with the unhurried purpose of men who had too much to do to waste time rushing. Somewhere inside the customs building, a man groaned softly, the sound muffled by canvas and stone. The smell drifting out was a mixture of disinfectant, sweat, and dust baked hard by the heat.

Archer leant back against the wall and stretched his legs out in front of him. His webbing had been taken from him two days earlier, and now it lay somewhere inside with the rest of the platoon’s equipment. For the moment, he wore only his clean but faded uniform, which now seemed too large for the weight he had lost over the past weeks.

When they had first come in from the desert, the medical orderlies had dealt with them one by one beneath the shade of the veranda. Most of the men were suffering from the same complaints — dehydration, sunburn, and exhaustion so deep it made them slow to answer the simplest questions. A few had been worse off. One or two cases of sunstroke. men vomiting, confused and barely able to stand.  . All of them carried cracked lips, blistered feet, and eyes that had spent too long staring into desert glare.

The first thing they had been given was water. Slowly at first, under the watchful eye of a medical orderly who had insisted they take it steady. Too much too quickly, he had warned, would make a man sicker than thirst itself.

The water had brought Archer back gradually. Sleep had done the rest. Twelve hours at a stretch the first night, then another long stretch the next day, broken only by food and more water. His uniform had been washed somewhere along the way. It hung on him now, cleaner but no less faded, the cloth stiff where desert sweat had worked itself deep into the fibres.

He had shaved that morning for the first time in days. His chin still felt strange without the rough stubble that had grown there during the march.

Across the small veranda, Lieutenant McBain sat on a low stone wall with his cap tilted back and a mug of tea balanced carefully in one hand. The Scotsman looked better than he had two days earlier, though that was not saying much. His face still carried the drawn look of a man who had spent too long under a desert sun.

Archer’s thoughts wandered back to earlier in the day when Jacks had found him sitting on the side of his bed and had dropped down beside him without ceremony. After a moment, Jacks had produced a crumpled packet of cigarettes, tapped one loose, and held it out. They had shared it between them while Jacks gave him the news of the platoon.

Apparently, most of the men were gathered around the Regimental Aid Post a short distance away. The post was set up in a row of low buildings behind the quay road. Saunders had already bounced back and, according to Jacks, had somehow talked his way into acting as a runner for the medical staff. Webb was helping the orderlies haul water cans and stretchers about the place. A few of the others were still laid up with sunstroke and dehydration. Pritchard had taken the worst of the heat, but Jacks had reckoned he would come round with another day or two of rest.

From what Jacks had told him, some of the men had not survived the last days in the desert. Archer had tried not to dwell on those they had left behind, but their absence was harder to ignore now that the rest of them were safe. The desert had given them a hard knock, but they had come through it better than Archer had feared.

Jacks had crushed the cigarette under his heel and stood.

“RAP’s just down past the stores sheds, Sir,” he had said. “Most of the lads are there if you need ’em.”

Jacks had been treated at the RAP with the rest of the men, but once he was back on his feet, he had gone back to organising the company. McBain had been admitted alongside Archer and was recovering at the hospital as well. He had been sitting nearby in silence until he followed Archer’s gaze towards the harbour and spoke.

“Busy place,” he said after a moment.

Archer nodded.

Below them, the port of Tobruk stretched along the curve of the bay in a patchwork of movement and dust. Lorries crawled along the quayside in slow files, their drivers leaning out of cab windows to shout directions to men on the ground. Crates were being swung ashore from the holds of a cargo ship adjacent to a pair of cranes that creaked and clattered with every movement.

Camouflage nets hung everywhere.

They were stretched over supply dumps, over stacks of ammunition boxes, even over parts of the quay where vehicles stood parked nose to tail beneath the shade of the mesh. From a distance, the nets gave the harbour a strange uneven look as if someone had tried to hide it under a blanket that was far too small.

Out in the bay, two ships lay at anchor, their outlines broken up by canvas screens and timber frames fixed to their decks. One of them carried a freighter’s high superstructure; the other sat lower in the water, squat and purposeful.

Closer to the waterfront, the port facilities crowded together in a jumble of low buildings and sheds that had once belonged to the Italian administration. Some still bore their faded paint and shuttered windows, though sandbags now lined their walls, and signal cables ran from roof to roof like washing lines.

A tall lattice crane stood near the end of one pier, its arm swinging slowly over the deck of a transport while naval ratings guided a crate the size of a small car onto the quay below. Nearby, a bulldozer pushed a mound of sand against the wall of a warehouse, raising another blast barrier around a stack of fuel drums.

When Archer looked closely, it was obvious that anti-aircraft guns were everywhere once you noticed them.

A pair of 40mm Bofors guns stood on a rough platform cut into the slope above the harbour road, their barrels tilted towards the empty sky. Another gun crew had dug themselves in beside a line of oil tanks, their circular pit edged with sandbags and spare ammunition clips stacked neatly against the wall.

Even at this distance, Archer could see the rhythm of the place. Ships unloading. Lorries moving. Men hauling, stacking, signalling, shouting. It looked busy enough to be a port during peacetime. Only the guns, the camouflage, and the constant urgency in every movement betrayed what it really was.

The ships drew his thoughts back to Dunkirk. The last time he had seen ships gathered like that, he and several thousand men  had been desperately moving  towards them. He could almost smell the smoke drifting across the beaches again and hear the distant thunder of guns rolling closer with every hour. He could see the grey, cold water again, churned by propellers, and the wakes of small boats darting back and forth through the chaos.

Slowly, the memory faded, and he could see that one of the ships lying off the Tobruk mole was a destroyer, low and lean against the water, her narrow hull streaked with rust where the paint had burnt away under the Mediterranean sun. Archer found himself studying her longer than the others.

It had been a destroyer that had taken him off the mole at Dunkirk: men packed shoulder to shoulder along the decks, rifles stacked in corners, the crew shouting them aboard as the tide lifted the ship clear of the sandbanks.

For a moment, the memory held him. He imagined the same rush of boots on steel decks and the same shouted orders echoing across the harbour. But here, the ships were not taking men away. They were bringing the war with them.