Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield Page B

something.
    We stayed up all night. I told Rose everything I could remember of Stein during the fall-back to Cairo. I was not the only one, I said, who thought the world of him. “Do you remember how solid he was in every crisis at Magdalen? That was how he was in the desert. He hadn’t changed. I can’t tell you how frightening, exhausting and nerve-racking it was out there, and how close we all got to out-and-out breakdown. Stein held the wires together. When he appeared among a circle of officers, you could almost hear the expulsion of breath. Stein’s here, we all thought. We’ll be all right.”
    I told Rose how Stein would sit up patiently teaching young corporals how to call in fire orders, when he himself had gone for nights on only a few hours’ sleep. “In the Armoured Division we had our tanks to jump into when the shells started coming in. But Stein with his 25-pounders was out in the open. I asked him one time if he was afraid. ‘Bloody petrified,’ he said. ‘But one can’t show it, can one?’”
    I told Rose that despite all the blood and death of the past thirty days, the experience of war had until now remained unreal to me. “I was just watching it, like a film, or something that was happening to somebody else.”
    In the morning Rose and I ordered
croques-madame
on the hotel terrace and chased them down with pots of strong Egyptian coffee. I discovered a boxed scarf in my jacket pocket, a gift for her that I had forgotten. Today was her birthday. She was twenty years old.
    â€œI know you’re worried about me, darling,” she said, “and I love you for it. But I’ll be all right, I promise, and I’ll bring our child safely into this world.”
    Rose made it clear that I was never again to speak of sending her home. “I won’t go. Don’t ask me. I have my job, as you do. Our child will be born here. Maybe that’s how it should be.”
    Our taxi dropped Rose at Grey Pillars. She had to get in to the code office and I had to go back to camp. Our parting kiss was on the pavement in front of the sandbagged guard post. “I came out here from England for you, my love,” Rose said. “It was a game to me then, too. A romance, a grand adventure. But it has become something other, hasn’t it?”
    Three weeks later Rose was evacuated with her office to Haifa. Eighth Army’s new commanders, Alexander and Montgomery, had now assumed their posts. The line at El Alamein was holding.
    Stalemate followed as both sides built up supplies for the inevitable all-out clash. I trained with my formation through the end of August. One morning, just before the turn of the month, I was sent with reports to Saladin’s Citadel, the great Arabian Nights complex where the Royal Armoured Corps then had its headquarters. On the stairs I ran into Mike Mallory. He was just returning from the ceremony in which he had received his DSO; he still had the citation box in his hand. Better yet, he said, he had been kicked up to temporary lieutenant-colonel. He was taking over a battalion of the 1st Armoured Division.
    â€œI requested you,” he said, meaning he had put my name in to serve under him at his new posting. “But it seems GHQ has got you down for the Long Range Desert Group.”
    â€œWhat?”
    He shook my hand in congratulation. “Apparently Colonel L. has put in a word for us both. I’m off for ‘the Blue’ and you for the bush.”

Book Two
    The Long Range Desert Group

8
    THE LONG RANGE DESERT GROUP was, as I said, one of the “special forces” units to which I had applied unsuccessfully during the previous winter in Palestine. I had long since given up hope of hearing back from them and certainly never expected to receive orders to report. The news electrified me.
    Here at last was a unit that was small and personal, where a single individual might make a difference.