"What do you think will happen to them?" Christian asked.
Hardenburg shrugged carelessly. "They will surrender and go to a British prison. Italians love to go to prison. Now," he said, "keep quiet. I wish to sleep."
A moment later, his breath coming evenly, his bloody, filthy face composed and child-like, he was sleeping. Christian remained awake. Someone, he thought, ought to watch the desert and the driver who sat rigidly before them, holding the speeding, powerful car on the road.
Mersa Matruh was like a candy-box in which a death had taken place. They tried to find someone to report to, but the town was a chaos of trucks and staggering men and broken armour among the ruins. While they were there a squadron of planes came over and dropped bombs on them for twenty minutes. There were more ruins and an ambulance train was spilled open, with men shouting like animals from the twisted wreckage, and everybody seemed intent only upon pressing west, so Hardenburg ordered the driver into the long, slowly moving stream of vehicles and they made their way towards the outskirts of the town. There was a control post there, with a gaunt-eyed Captain with a long sheet of paper mounted on a board. The Captain was taking down names and unit designations from the caked and exhausted men streaming past him. He looked like a lunatic accountant trying to balance impossible accounts in a bank that was tottering in an earthquake. He did not know where their Division Headquarters were, or whether they still existed. He kept saying in a loud, dead voice, through the cake of dust around his lips, "Keep moving. Keep moving. Ridiculous. Keep moving."
When he saw the Italian driver he said, "Leave that one here with me. We can use him to defend the town. I'll give you a German driver."
Hardenburg spoke gently to the Italian. The Italian began to cry, but he got out of the car, and stood next to the Captain with the long sheet of paper. He took his rifle with him, but held it sadly near the muzzle, dragging it in the dust. It looked harmless and inoffensive in his hands as he stared hopelessly at the guns and the trucks and the tottering soldiers rolling past him.
"We will not hold Matruh for ever," Hardenburg said grimly, "with troops like that."
"Of course," the Captain said crazily. "Naturally not. Ridiculous." And he peered into the dust and put down the unit numbers of two anti-tank guns and an armoured car that rumbled past him, smothering him in a fog of dust.
But he gave them a tank driver who had lost his tank and a Messerschmitt pilot who had been shot down over the town to ride with them, and told them to get back to Solium as fast as possible; there was a likelihood things were in better shape that far back.
The tank driver was a large blond peasant who grasped the wheel solidly as he drove. He reminded Christian of Corporal Kraus, dead outside Paris long ago with cherry stains on his lips. The pilot was young, but bald, with a grey, shrunken face, and a bad twitch that pulled his mouth to the right twenty times a minute. "This morning," he kept saying, "this morning I did not have this. It is getting worse and worse. Does it look very bad?"
"No," said Christian, "you hardly notice it."
"I was shot down by an American," the pilot said, wonderingly. "The first American I ever saw." He shook his head as though this was the final and most devastating point scored against German arms in all the campaigns in Africa. "I didn't even know they were here."
The blond peasant was a good driver. They darted in and out of the heavier traffic, making good time on the bombed and pitted road alongside the shining blue waters of the Mediterranean, stretching, peaceful and cool, to Greece, to Italy, to Europe…
It happened the next day.
They still had their car and they had siphoned petrol out of a wrecked truck along the road, and they were in a long, slow line that was moving in fits and starts up the winding, ruined road that climbs from the small, wiped-out village of Solium to the Cyrenaican escarpment. Down below, the fragments of walls gleamed white and pretty about the keyhole-shaped harbour, where the water shone bright green and pure blue as it sliced into the burned land. Wrecks of ships rested in the water, looking like the deposits of ancient wars, their lines wavering gently and peacefully in the slight ripples.
The pilot was twitching worse than ever now and insisted upon looking at himself in the rear-view mirror all the time, in an effort to catch the twitch at the moment of inception and somehow freeze it there to study it. So far he had not been successful, and he had screamed in agony every time he fell off to sleep the night before. Hardenburg was getting very impatient with him.
But there were signs that order was being restored down below. There were anti-aircraft guns set up about the town, and two battalions of infantry could be seen digging in on the eastern edge, and a General had been seen striding back and forth near the harbour, waving his arms about and delivering himself of orders.
Certain armoured elements had been held out of the column that stretched back as far as the eye could reach. They were being assembled in a reserve area behind the infantry and small figures could be seen from the height pouring fuel and handing up ammunition to the men working in the turrets.
Hardenburg was standing up in the rear of the car, surveying everything keenly. He had even managed to shave in the morning, although he was running a high fever. His lips were cracked and covered with sores, he had a new bandage on his forehead, but he looked once more like a soldier. "This is where we stop," he announced. "This is as far as they go."
Then the planes had come in low from the sea, the drumming of their engines drowning the slow roar of the armour on the climbing road. They came in regular, arrow-like formation, like stunt-fliers at a carnival. They looked slow and vulnerable. But somehow, no one was firing at them. Christian could see the bombs dropping in twisting, curling arcs. Then the mountainside was exploding. A truck deliberately toppled over above them, and went crashing ponderously into the ravine a hundred metres below. One boot flew in a long, tumbling curve out from it, as though it had been thrown out from the truck by a man who was resolved to save the first thing that came to his hand from the wreck.
Then a bomb hit close by. Christian felt himself being lifted, and he thought: It is not fair, after having come so far and so hard, it is not at all fair. Then he knew he was hurt, except that there was no pain, and he knew that he was going to go out, and it was quite peaceful and delicious to relax into the spinning, many-coloured, but painless chaos. Then he was out.
Later, he opened his eyes. Something was weighing him down and he pushed against it, but there was no use. There was the yellow smell of cordite and the brassy smell of burned rock and the old smell of dying vehicles, burning rubber and leather and singed paint. Then he saw a uniform and a bandage and he realized that it must be Lieutenant Hardenburg, and Lieutenant Hardenburg was saying calmly, "Get me to a doctor." But only the voice and the tabs and the bandage was Lieutenant Hardenburg because there was no face there at all. There was just a red and white pulpy mass, with the calm voice coming somehow through the red bubbles and the white strips of whatever it had been that had held the inside of Lieutenant Hardenburg's face together. Dreamily, Christian tried to remember where he had seen something like that before. It was hard to remember because he had a tendency to go out again, but finally it came back to him. It was like a pomegranate, roughly and inaccurately broken open, veined and red and with the juice running from the glistening, ripe globules past the knife down on to the shining ivory plate. Then he began to hurt and he didn't think about anything else for a long time.