The roar of laughter floated reassuringly across the minefields, died down in a stream of low-toned profanity from the captain. Sergeant Malloy glanced at his watch; the second hand was just sweeping up to 9:40 pip-emma. Eight hundred and eighty-two British guns and howitzers spoke together. The heavens reeled, the ground lifted, expanded, could not settle, for the barrage went on and on without a second's diminution in the mindshattering volume of noise. It was no use plugging fingers in ears; the gargantuan booming came up through the earth and traveled inward to the brain via the bones. What the effect must have been on Rommel's front the troops of the Ninth in their trenches could only imagine. Usually it was possible to pick out this type and size of artillery from that, but tonight their iron throats chorused in perfect harmony, and thundered on as the minutes passed. The desert fit not with the light of day but with the fire of the sun itself; a vast billowing cloud of dust rose like coiling smoke thousands of feet, glowing with the flashes of exploding shells and mines, the leaping flames of massive concentrations of detonating casings, igniting payloads. Everything Montgomery had was aimed at the minefields-guns, howitzers, mortars. And everything Montgomery had was thrown as fast as the sweatingartillery crews could throw it, slaves feeding the maws of their weapons like small frantic birds a huge cuckoo; gun casings grew hot, the time between recoil and reload shorter and shorter as the artillerymen got carried away on their own impetus. Madmen, maddened, they danced a stereotyped pattern of attendance on their fieldpieces.
It was beautiful, wonderful-the high point of an artilleryman's life, which he lived and relived in his dreams, waking and sleeping, for the rest of his anticlimactic days. And yearned to have back again, those fifteen minutes with Montgomery's guns.
Silence. Stilled, absolute silence, breaking like waves on distended eardrums; unbearable silence. Five minutes before ten, exactly. The Ninth got up and moved forward out of its trenches into no man's land, fixing bayonets, feeling for ammunition clips, releasing safety catches, checking water bottles, iron rations, watches, tin hats, whether bootlaces were well tied, the location of those carrying the machine guns. It was easy to see, in the unholy glow of fires and red-hot sand melted into glass; but the dust pall hung between the Enemy and them, they were safe. For the moment. On the very edge of the minefields they halted, waited.
Ten pip-emma, on the dot. Sergeant Malloy put his whistle to his lips and blew a shrill blast up and down the company lines; the captain shouted his forward command. On a two-mile front the Ninth stepped off into the minefields and the guns began again behind them, bellowing. They could see where they were going as if it had been day, the howitzers trained on shortest range bursting shells not yards in front of them. Every three minutes the range lifted another hundred yards; advance those hundred yards praying it was only through antitank mines, or that the S-mines, the man mines, had been shelled out of existence by Montgomery's guns. There were still Germans and Italians in the field, outposts of machine guns, 50-mm small artillery, mortars. Sometimes a man would step on an Unexploded S-mine, have time to see it leap upward out of the sand before it blew him in half. No time to think, no time to do anything save crabscuttle in time to the guns, a hundred yards forward every three minutes, praying. Noise, light, dust, smoke, gut-watering terror. Minefields which had no end, two or three miles of them to the other side, and no going back. Sometimes in the tiny pauses between barrages came the distant, eerie skirl of a bagpipe on the roasting gritty air; on the left of the Ninth Australian, the Fiftyfirst Highlanders were trekking through the minefields with a piper to lead every company commander. To a Scot the sound of. his piper drawing him into battle was the sweetest lure in the world, and to an Australian very friendly, comforting. But to a German or an Italian it was hackle-raising. The battle went on for twelve days, and twelve days is a very long battle. The Ninth was lucky at first; its casualties were relatively light through the minefields and through those first days of continued advance into Rommel's territory.
"You know, I'd rather be me and get shot at than be a sapper," said Col Stuart, leaning on his shovel.
"I dunno, mate; I think they've got the best of it," growled his sergeant. "Waiting behind the fuckin' lines until we've done all the work, then out they toddle with their bloody minesweepers to clear nice little paths for the fuckin' tanks."
"It isn't the tanks at fault, Bob; it's the brass who deploy them," Jims said, patting the earth down around the top of his section of their new trench with the fiat of his spade. "Christ, though, I wish they'd decide to keep us in one place for a while! I've dug more dirt in the last five days than a bloody anteater."
"Keep digging, mate," said Bob unsympathetically.
"Hey, look!" cried Col, pointing skyward.
Eighteen RAF light bombers came down the valley in perfect flying-school formation, dropping their sticks of bombs among the Germans and Italians with deadly accuracy.
"Bloody beautiful," said Sergeant Bob Malloy, his long neck tilting his head at the sky.