The King’s Rifles were now shut inside the Rock, and General Liddell knew he could not hope to hold the remainder of the ground to the south through Rosia Bay. At 02:00 he finally gave the grim order that all service troops and battery crews on Windmill Hill and Europa Point should make their way into Saint Michael’s Cave, a natural labyrinth where stalagmites grinned like stony teeth. There they would stolidly hold their ground, accepting this self imposed internment rather than surrender, unless order to do so by higher authorities.
Lieutenant Dawes was shut inside Saint Michael’s cave with all the rest. In the heady retreat up the steep ground he had come across a fallen private, noting the patch on his shoulder-4th Battalion, Devonshire Regiment. It had once been called the 11th Regiment of Foot, formed in the year 1667, with a long and storied history. The Regiment fought in Holland, Spain and Austria, it’s powder blackening the air at battles like Fontenoy, Warburg, and Kampen. During the years when Napoleon loomed as the great threat in Europe, it fought as a Marine unit at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, at the siege of Malta, in the Peninsular War, and the famous Battle of Salamanca. There it took on a well earned nickname-the Bloody Eleventh, and carried it on through the Great War, in Italy, Macedonia, Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia. It went ‘over the top’ at the battle of the Somme, and then one day the 4th Battalion found its way here-to the Rock of Gibraltar.
Dawes looked down at his own shoulder patch, the 10th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Support Group, realizing that this was the first engagement his unit would have fought in-and it would most likely be the last. The fallen Private lay on a cart, where men had been taking the wounded and dead in to give them some form of decent burial. Dawes looked at the man, seeing him like a fallen Prince, and not a mere Private. The man was still cradling his rifle, and the Lieutenant was possessed with the urge to take up arms.
I don’t deserve it, he thought, berating himself. I’ve done nothing to earn it. But the impulse was simply too strong, and he found himself reaching for the rifle. Nearly three hundred years of history had carried that rifle here to this place, or so he thought. He had no right to touch it; no right to desecrate the sacrifice made by that brave young Private. Just last night he had been so rattled that he could barely light a cigarette, and he came to feel a coward.
Then the Sergeant he had spoken with the previous night at Europa Point came up, recognizing him, and folded his arms.
“Heading up to Saint Michael’s, Lieutenant?”
Dawes jumped, his reverie and self recrimination broken by the Sergeant’s voice. “What? Why yes, we’ve got the order right from General Liddell. All service troops and gunnery crews are to report to the cave.”
“Then you might want to take that with you.” The Sergeant pointed at the fallen Private’s rifle, seeing how Dawes had been eyeing it, and knowing what might be in his mind.
Dawes gave him a nervous look. Then he slowly reached for the rifle, seeing a stain of blood there, which gave him a shudder. He took the weapon up and the rifle changed hands from the dead to the living, like a dying man passing a torch. The Bloody Eleventh had just taken in its latest recruit.
Dawes shouldered the rifle trying to muster some sense of determination, but in a moment of self-confession he spoke his greatest fear. “I must tell you Sergeant, that I’m not a very brave man. It doesn’t really feel fitting that I should-”
“Now none of that talk, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir. You’ll do fine when the time comes. You just point the damn thing at the other fellow and pull the trigger-before he pulls his.” The Sergeant smiled at him. “Good luck, Lieutenant. Look for that Barbary Ape I told you about! I expect I’ll be up there soon myself, and if I get the little weasel, he’ll lead me right to the promised land.”
In modern times the tunnels of Gibraltar were a maze like warren that wandered nearly 30 miles beneath the Rock-and this beneath a physical area measuring only a mile wide and a little more than a mile long! They were layered with galleries and connecting communications passages one on top of another, like the history that had built them. Some dated back to the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783, mainly those overlooking the airfield and North Front area. Others had been built to create underground reservoirs and magazine storage areas, and when the airplane became a military threat, to create bomb shelters. By WWII even more space was drilled out to store food, generators, fuel, equipment, and ammunition.
Parts of the old fortifications and gun embrasures still bore their original names, such as King’s Lines, Queen’s Lines, Winsdor Battery, and there were halls named for Cornwallis and St. George. At the turn of the century, when old battleships began to drop anchor at the port, the Ragged Staff Cave bordering the harbor area was turned into a naval magazine. With no natural source of water, the Rock also had vast areas devoted to the collection of rainwater in great catchments.
Yet all the work done by 1939 amounted to little more than seven miles of tunnels. Artisan Engineers arrived early in this new history, drilling hard through the limestone to create another mile or two by the fall of 1940, mainly to connect existing galleries and tunnels. In the history Fedorov knew, the tunnels were not extended to a length of about 25 miles until the end of WWII. In this history they might never reach that scale, yet for the moment, the existing galleries and caves were enough to shelter the modest force garrisoned there.
The entrance nearest the British defensive positions was at Hay’s Level, between the Moorish Castle and the 18th century Siege Tunnels. It was defended by two companies of the 2nd Somerset Light on the line, and a single reserve company of the Black Watch near the entrance itself.
Farther south a company of the 4th Devonshire battalion and most of the service troops and gun crews were holed up in the famous Saint Michael’s Cave. This enormous network of natural caverns and passages had been set up as an emergency hospital, and scores of wounded sat in sullen groups beneath the tall spires of rock, and the striated falls of Stalactites from the high ceiling above. Legend lay heavy on that place, once thought to be the gates of Hades by the ancient Greeks. It was also said, just as the Sergeant had told it to Lieutenant Dawes, that the entrance to a hidden tunnel could be found there, one that would wind deep beneath the Straits of Gibraltar to Spanish Morocco, a secret pathway known only to the Barbary Apes, the monkeys who had used it to come here ages ago.
Now the caves were part of the last stand of modern British power in the Western Mediterranean, and by day’s end most of the remaining garrison was sealed up in the old siege tunnels of the Rock. Liddell knew there would be no relief any time soon, though he had supplies enough to hold out for months. If the Germans wanted the place they would now have to fight from one subterranean passage to another, clearing the tunnels and hidden stone rooms with shock and fire.
They tried to take the main entrance by storm, thinking the defense might not yet be prepared, and as it happened Lieutenant Dawes had only just come in through the arched gate after a long climb up. There came a sound of gunfire, a warning to all that this place was no safe sanctuary. The fire of war would burn through the maw of this cave, and death would follow sure enough.