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at his desk writing up his diary.
     
    There were other last-minute details to be attended to, including the fitting of false compartments in Rohrbach’s and Widmark’s cars. This was done by McFadden in the garage at his house in Rondebosch, with the assistance of Hans le Roux, some fine gauge sheet-steel and a welding outfit. The compartments were built in behind the backs to the rear seats, and into them fitted snugly the equipment they needed.
     
    Rohrbach and Johan le Roux drove to Lourenço Marques by way of Johannesburg. There Johan got one barber to remove his beard and another to dye his hair and eyebrows dark brown. The change in appearance was remarkable, and but for the broken nose Rohrbach would have had difficulty in recognising him. A telegram was sent off to Widmark: Aunt Mabel leaves for the farm to-morrow morning at eight ;and the next day they drove across the Transvaal highveld to the Drakensberg escarpment dropping down through Schoeman’s Kloof to the lowveld, ablaze with flamboyants and jacaranda, and orchards of orange, avocado and paw-paw. The road was hot, there was dust everywhere, musky and penetrating, and the sun beat down on the steel roof of the car. They were silent, Johan’s thoughts on the farm at Swartruggens far away to the west; a small sense of guilt in his mind because he was not spending his leave there with his parents and would not be seeing Anna Marie … but mostly he felt excitement at what lay ahead. David Rohrbach was thinking about other things: first, worrying as he so often did about his family in Germany, then recalling Lawrence’s description of the weather as theywaited in a ship off Jedda: … the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless .That had happened as they reached the foot of Schoeman’s Kloof and started along the valley towards Montrose Falls, the heat of the lowveld encompassing them like a fog, humid and clinging. Rohrbach felt other things, too: a deep satisfaction, for example, at the course of events. At last there was to be something tangible; identifiable; direct action, and for a worthwhile objective. He was too sensitive and intelligent to imagine that their plans would be easy to execute, that nothing could go wrong. Unlike Widmark, he envisaged the possibility of failure and wondered in what way it might come and what its consequences might be. But these gloomy thoughts soon gave way to optimism, for it was not easy to contemplate failure with the Butcher. Rohrbach thought about him. His enormous self-sufficiency , his determination and—Rohrbach jibbed at the thought—his ruthlessness, inspired unusual confidence. He remembered what Johan le Roux had told him about Widmark at Suda Bay: “We were oiling at the time, alongside Fleetol , and about thirty Stukas piled in. All hell broke loose and we couldn’t do a thing except poop off an occasional burst of Lewis-gun fire which was about as much use as a catapult. It was our first experience of air attack. Fleetol was hit and a bloody great fire started and there was the Butcher on the bridge with smoke and flames all round him acting as cool as a cucumber while the Fleetol’ ssurvivors tumbled aboard. Then it was ‘Let go bow line! … let go aft! … hold on to that spring! … starboard twenty! … slow ahead!’ All in the same dry voice. If it hadn’t been for the noise of the air attack and the flames you’d have thought we were getting under weigh from the Alfred Basin on a quiet Sunday morning. As we got clear, some low-flying Messerschmitts buzzed us and the coxswain caught a burst of machine-gun fire in the face and bits of him got plastered all over the bridge, and the Butcher takes the wheel and looks at what’s left and says quietly, ‘Poor old Cox. He’s got hurt.’ You’d have thought thecoxswain’d been laid out in a rugger match, the way the Butcher said it. Hy’s ’n snaakse kêrel —He’s an odd bloke. I don’t think he feels things