the onion bed doesn’t have the same style, somehow. (By the way, you don’t say when it is? Soon? No point in waiting, these days.) Still, a wartime wedding is frightfully romantic (though there’s rather too many of them these days to be really smart) and at least you’ll have Pansy as a friendly face from home. She’ll make a perfect bridesmaid and I shall be spared the agonies of having to wear frilly pink organza! Will you have time to have a honeymoon? Where will you go and what will you do?????
Write soon and tell all!
Love and kisses from Kate.
P.S. There’s no-one in my life at the moment. Laszlo turned out to be an absolute cad and a married cad at that. Still, a girl can hope, can’t she?
P.P.S. Guess who turned up the other day? You never will, so I’ll have to tell you. Martin! Isn’t that amazing? He was on leave from some sort of army film set-up. Mrs Buckland has moved back to Ansty for the duration – says her nerves are shot to blazes. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they – no-one ever had nerves quite like hers! He looks frightfully dashing in khaki and with three stripes up, too. He outranks both of us! We went for a quick drink together in the Green Dragon, for old times’ sake, and ended up gossiping until closing time. Ted Colebeck threatened to throw us out! I must say, he’s turned out better than you’d imagine. I do like older men. They really know how to treat a girl!
I read the letter over and over, but I read the P.P.S. more often than anything else. I tried to imagine Martin as he must be now. What would he be like? How would he have changed? A man, not a boy, married maybe – quite likely, and with children – Kate didn’t say, but she probably didn’t care, anyway. Yet the image that I conjured time and again was Martin as he had leaned over the stable door and said goodbye. I had waited and waited. But he had not come back.
And what possible difference did it make to me now? We were strangers. I didn’t suppose he’d thought of me once in all those years. All the same, I wished that Kate had not scribbled down her afterthoughts.
* * *
After some months of inactivity or of sporadic activity, on 18 November, preceded by two disastrous raids that achieved nothing but lost lives, Operation Crusader was launched with the aim of relieving Tobruk. The tanks of XXX Corps roared into the desert to hook upwards and destroy the enemy armour. Mainly infantry, XIII Corps was to surge along the coastal strip, avoiding enemy strong points at Halfaya and Sollum, to meet XXX Corps at Tobruk.
That was the plan. One hundred thousand men, 600 tanks, 5,000 other vehicles advanced through icy winds and driving rain. Sand turned to slush, clogging engines and bogging down vehicles to their axles. Men had to endure cold, wet grit instead of hot, dry grit working its way into their clothes, but it still caused desert sores, creeping under ridges of skin, into the most sensitive places.
By 19 November the impetus of XXX Corps had been halted by the German airfield defences at Sidi Rezegh. XIII Corps was making progress towards Tobruk, but would have been in danger if Rommel had decided to concentrate his energies there. If he had known that the battle on 23 November – Totensonntag – would be the bloodiest and most costly to date, he could have driven the British forces right back into Cairo.
Instead, he made an impetuous miscalculation. Pulling his forces off the attack, he led them in a flat-out gallop for the wire of the Egyptian frontier, attempting to cut the British supply lines, stretching his own supply lines beyond their limits and cutting himself off from fuel and ammunition. Overextended, he was forced to retreat westwards again.
Rommel’s ‘dash to the wire’ had given XXX Corps time to recover and, by the end of the first week in December, a week of heavy fighting around Tobruk, he was forced to begin withdrawal from Cyrenaica. The exhausted British,
Write soon and tell all!
Love and kisses from Kate.
P.S. There’s no-one in my life at the moment. Laszlo turned out to be an absolute cad and a married cad at that. Still, a girl can hope, can’t she?
P.P.S. Guess who turned up the other day? You never will, so I’ll have to tell you. Martin! Isn’t that amazing? He was on leave from some sort of army film set-up. Mrs Buckland has moved back to Ansty for the duration – says her nerves are shot to blazes. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they – no-one ever had nerves quite like hers! He looks frightfully dashing in khaki and with three stripes up, too. He outranks both of us! We went for a quick drink together in the Green Dragon, for old times’ sake, and ended up gossiping until closing time. Ted Colebeck threatened to throw us out! I must say, he’s turned out better than you’d imagine. I do like older men. They really know how to treat a girl!
I read the letter over and over, but I read the P.P.S. more often than anything else. I tried to imagine Martin as he must be now. What would he be like? How would he have changed? A man, not a boy, married maybe – quite likely, and with children – Kate didn’t say, but she probably didn’t care, anyway. Yet the image that I conjured time and again was Martin as he had leaned over the stable door and said goodbye. I had waited and waited. But he had not come back.
And what possible difference did it make to me now? We were strangers. I didn’t suppose he’d thought of me once in all those years. All the same, I wished that Kate had not scribbled down her afterthoughts.
* * *
After some months of inactivity or of sporadic activity, on 18 November, preceded by two disastrous raids that achieved nothing but lost lives, Operation Crusader was launched with the aim of relieving Tobruk. The tanks of XXX Corps roared into the desert to hook upwards and destroy the enemy armour. Mainly infantry, XIII Corps was to surge along the coastal strip, avoiding enemy strong points at Halfaya and Sollum, to meet XXX Corps at Tobruk.
That was the plan. One hundred thousand men, 600 tanks, 5,000 other vehicles advanced through icy winds and driving rain. Sand turned to slush, clogging engines and bogging down vehicles to their axles. Men had to endure cold, wet grit instead of hot, dry grit working its way into their clothes, but it still caused desert sores, creeping under ridges of skin, into the most sensitive places.
By 19 November the impetus of XXX Corps had been halted by the German airfield defences at Sidi Rezegh. XIII Corps was making progress towards Tobruk, but would have been in danger if Rommel had decided to concentrate his energies there. If he had known that the battle on 23 November – Totensonntag – would be the bloodiest and most costly to date, he could have driven the British forces right back into Cairo.
Instead, he made an impetuous miscalculation. Pulling his forces off the attack, he led them in a flat-out gallop for the wire of the Egyptian frontier, attempting to cut the British supply lines, stretching his own supply lines beyond their limits and cutting himself off from fuel and ammunition. Overextended, he was forced to retreat westwards again.
Rommel’s ‘dash to the wire’ had given XXX Corps time to recover and, by the end of the first week in December, a week of heavy fighting around Tobruk, he was forced to begin withdrawal from Cyrenaica. The exhausted British,
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