And then great news! All the Australian troops in North Africa were to come home. Prime Minister Curtin rode the swells of Churchillian wrath undismayed, insisting that Australia had first call on Australian men. The Sixth and Seventh Australian Divisions embarked in Alexandria quickly; the Ninth, still recovering in Cairo from its battering at Tobruk, was to follow as soon as more ships could be provided. Fee smiled, Meggie was delirious with joy. Jims and Patsy were coming home.

Only they didn’t. While the North waited for its troopships the seesaw tipped again; the Eighth Army was in full retreat back from Benghazi. Prime Minister Churchill struck a bargain with Prime Minister Curtin. The Ninth Australian Division would remain in North Africa, in exchange for the shipment of an American division to defend Australia. Poor soldiers, shuttled around by decisions made in offices not even belonging to their own countries. Give a little here, take a little there.

But it was a hard jolt for Australia, to discover that the Mother Country was booting all her Far Eastern chicks out of the nest, even a poult as fat and promising as Australia.

* * *

On the night of October 23rd, 1942, it was very quiet in the desert. Patsy shifted slightly, found his brother in the darkness, and leaned like a small child right into the curve of his shoulder. Jims’s arm went around him and they sat together in companionable silence. Sergeant Bob Malloy nudged Private Col Stuart, grinned.

“Pair of poofs,” he said.

“Fuck you, too,” said Jims.

“Come on, Harpo, say something,” Col murmured. Patsy gave him an angelic smile only half seen in the darkness, opened his mouth and hooted an excellent imitation of Harpo Marx’s horn. Everyone for several yards hissed at Patsy to shut up; there was an all-quiet alert on.

“Christ, this waiting’s killing me,” Bob sighed.

Patsy spoken in a shout: “It’s the silence that’s killing me!”

“You fuckin’ side-show fraud, I’ll do the killing!” Col croaked hoarsely, reaching for his bayonet.

“For Crissake pipe down!” came the captain’s whisper. “Who’s the bloody idiot yelling?”

“Patsy,” chorused half a dozen voices.

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 mind-shattering 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 lit 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 sweating artillery 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 anti-climactic 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 crab-scuttle 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 Fifty-first 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 flat 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.

Three days later he was dead; a huge piece of shrapnel took off his arm and half his side in a fresh advance, but no one had time to stop except to pluck his whistle from what was left of his mouth. Men were going down now like flies, too tired to maintain the initial pitch of vigilance and swiftness; but what miserable barren ground they took they held on to, in the face of a bitter defense by the cream of a magnificent army. It had become to them all no more than a dumb, stubborn refusal to be defeated.

The Ninth held off Graf von Sponeck and Lungerhausen while the tanks broke out to the south, and finally Rommel was beaten. By November 8 he was trying to rally beyond the Egyptian border, and Montgomery was left in command of the entire field. A very important tactical victory, Second Alamein; Rommel had been forced to leave behind many of his tanks, guns and equipment. Operation Torch could commence its push eastward from Morocco and Algeria with more security. There was still plenty of fight in the Desert Fox, but a large part of his brush was on the ground at El Alamein. The biggest and most decisive battle of the North African theater had been fought, and Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein was its victor.

Second Alamein was the swan song of the Ninth Australian Division in North Africa. They were finally going home to contend with the Japanese, on the mainland of New Guinea. Since March of 1941 they had been more or less permanently in the front line, arriving poorly trained and equipped, but going home now with a reputation exceeded only by the Fourth Indian Division. And with the Ninth went Jims and Patsy, safe and whole.

* * *

Of course they were granted leave to go home to Drogheda. Bob drove into Gilly to collect them from the Goondiwindi train, for the Ninth was based in Brisbane and would depart after jungle training for New Guinea. When the Rolls swept round the drive all the women were out on the lawn waiting, Jack and Hughie hanging back a little but just as eager to see their young brothers. Every sheep left alive on Drogheda could drop dead if it so desired, but this was a holiday.