Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online

knew from Stein and other friends, could mean, with specialised training afterwards, a year or longer before getting into action. I baulked. Behind the adjacent table sat a lean sergeant-major of about forty. He had been talking with two potential enlistees, but I could see that with one ear he had been keeping tabs on my conversation as well. Propped before him, half-sodden in the drizzle, stood a recruiting poster depicting that armoured clanker I would come to know at Bovington as a Nuffield Cruiser A-9. A name plate said:
    SGT-MAJ STREETER ROYAL TANK REGIMENT
    â€œWhy walk,” he said, “when you can ride?”
    He promised that if I took the King’s shilling that day, he’d have me on my way to battling the Hun in twenty-six weeks.
    Rose was the only one who approved of my decision. My uncles were apoplectic. Rose herself had signed to be a Volunteer Air Warden and was applying for training as an ambulance driver. We all felt that way then. We would have drained our blood for England.
    Jock and I repaired our friendship some months later. Jock had enlisted with the Cameron Highlanders, his family’s regiment for five generations. He could not forgive me for the “liberties I had taken” with his sister. “But,” he wrote, “it’s my own fault for putting her in harm’s way.” He added that he would give me two choices for the war ahead—get killed or marry Rose.
    The platform at Victoria Station was packed with enlistees and their sweethearts seeing them off for the various training depots. The mood was not brash and gay as it had been in our fathers’ time, the Great War. Neither was it grave, as it ought to have been. Rather, as B. had said, the sensation was one of overwhelming relief. One felt released from a state of excruciating suspense and set free on to the field of action.
    At last, I thought, I am neither too small nor too young to defend my country and the woman I love.

5
    THE TRAINING DEPOT of the Royal Armoured Corps, as it was then coming to be called, was at Bovington Camp in Dorset. The place was packed with enlistees and conscripts; by the time the contingent I was with arrived, there was no room for us in barracks. We were housed instead in twelve-man tents with plank floors and one three-hole latrine for every four tents. After initial “square-bashing,” the driver’s course was sixteen weeks. We practised first on light 15-hundredweight trucks, then 30-hundredweights, then 3-tonners, learning to operate on paved roads, cross country and over obstacle courses. After six weeks we graduated to tracked vehicles: first Bren carriers, then light tanks. We learnt to ford streams, surmount stone walls; we drilled at binding fascines (great bundles of timber or pipe) and using them to cross anti-tank ditches. When it came time to train on full-sized tanks, the depot had so few that we had to use dummies fabricated from original Holt Caterpillar farm tractors, the old DCMs from the Great War. A shell of wood and canvas was mounted over the steering station so that the learning driver could not see ahead. Above and behind him sat a second recruit, the “tank commander,” who possessed a view over the top of the cab. The commander shouted directions—“Driver, advance! Driver, hard left!”—while the poor bugger in the blind-box heaved against the steering levers and wrestled the massive clutch, simultaneously working the two throttles and clanging through the gears of the unsynchronised double-clutch crashbox. You turn a tank not with a wheel but by levers and pedals, retarding one track while advancing the other. This is not easy. Turn too tight and you snap the track pins; the track comes spooling off its sprockets like toilet tissue from a thrown roll. When this happens, the crew have to sort the mess out themselves.

    Dearest Rose,
    I should not be enjoying myself as much as I am, I know, given the desperate