A Kiss for the Enemy (16 page)

‘Where are our own shells that ought to be silencing those damned Frenchmen?' thought Frido. He had seen artillery officers move into observation posts on the east bank but German shells were conspicuously failing to give the crossing the support it needed.

Suddenly the French machine guns started again. French artillery fire became heavier. They heard the shells screeching overhead. All seemed to be landing at the exact point on the east bank whence their little flotilla had been launched. Now there were, miraculously, only about forty metres to go, and as far as Frido could see there was no French position at the place on the west bank where they would make a landfall.

‘Paddle, paddle!'

From the northward, from Frido's right, another machine gun clattered. It sounded disagreeably near. The next thing Frido felt was as if he were sprayed by a warm tap.

‘
Herr Leutnant
!' yelled the man with the paddle pointlessly. Frido looked at his uniform and hands, crimson with blood. The soldier who had been crouching in the middle of the little boat looked extraordinary, grotesque. There was something missing. Frido recognized, with a sense which he later recognized as shock in its literal sense, that the man's head had been almost severed by machine gun fire. His blood had struck his companions like water from a burst pipe. The soldier with the paddle retched but by a remarkable effort, a triumph of fear over weakness, maintained his efforts. At that exact moment Frido heard the sound of the paddle striking the bottom. He shouted –

‘Out! Out!'

The boat capsized as three men leapt from it and threw themselves into the water, wading frantically toward the bank. The headless
Panzer Grenadier
rolled into the Meuse.

Shouts could be heard along the bank. The mist was now clearing fast. Frido was able to see that a remarkable number of boats appeared to have made the crossing safely. A
Feldwebel
appeared from nowhere and saluted, reporting numbers. The company's next objective had been identified from an observation post on the east bank before they started – mist-shrouded, indistinct. Soldiers began running to the planned collecting points. There was much shouting and scurrying.

‘The vital thing,' thought Frido, ‘must be not just to reach some bit of ground, but to silence those damned machine guns.' For the sun was now up. The Meuse lay clear and silver beneath a glorious early summer sky. As he looked eastward, Frido could see no sign of the next company starting to embark. French shells were falling on the launch points with unceasing ferocity and machine guns were drumming away. One could see the strike of bullets as well as the grey spurts of shell bursts. ‘I wonder if we're the first Rifle company across the Meuse,' thought Frido. ‘I certainly hope we won't be the last.'

A few hours later he found a moment to thank God for sparing him and a large number of his company. Casualties
crossing the river had been surprisingly light. For several hours they had been isolated, as Frido feared, so devastating had been French fire at the east bank. This isolation had been unnerving, but otherwise they had not been much troubled. The French were manning their riverside bunkers, concentrating their fire on German attempts to reinforce, rather than spending blood and time in trying to deal with the enemy already across. And one German company was certainly inadequate, by itself, to attack the French positions firing on the river, widely separated as these were. Frido tried to organize a movement against two of the nearest of the bunkers, but they were difficult to get at. Instruction at officer school and previous practice had not prepared him for the launch of an attack from above against fortified emplacements lying beneath the overhang of a river bank, an attack supported either not at all or by artillery whose observers were all on the far side of the river.

‘The French,' thought Frido, ‘are winning this round.'

Then the situation changed – quickly and dramatically. There was a lull in the French fire. Suddenly everybody heard and recognized a new sound.

‘
Panzers
!'

From where he was Frido could see back across the Meuse. He saw, shuffling their noses from small feeder side streets and then moving on to the road running along the river bank itself, the familiar sight of German tanks. There had been tank fire earlier, but from further back. Now the tanks were moving boldly on to the riverside road itself and starting to drive slowly north and south, turrets traversed westward.

First one tank, then another, then all started firing, at point blank range at French bunkers and machine gun nests across the Meuse.

‘My God!' muttered Frido, ‘they're dead if the French have got anti-tank guns down here! They look like moving targets on the range!'

But the Panzers were keeping up their fire and Frido could not see one get hit. After a little, a cheer went up from the few men round him who could also watch the scene. From the east bank of the Meuse boats were being launched again! No sound of French machine guns disturbed the sudden peace. The
Panzers had done their deadly work, pouring in shell after shell at a distance of only a few hundred metres.

From further to the west could be heard the sporadic sound of French artillery, and shells were still falling: but the mood had changed. Menace had dissolved.

‘We'll soon sort those gunners out, once more of the Division and the general are across!' called Frido's Captain, suddenly appearing, voice and confidence greatly restored. ‘Wait till we raft some Panzers over, wait till we get a pontoon bridge! We'll soon chase those guns away! We'll be in their gun positions in half an hour when General Rommel starts!'

Eight days later.

Eight extraordinary days.

No reminiscences of his father, no instruction, no study of past campaigns had prepared Frido for anything like this. He found himself reflecting how unsurprising it was that man still turned to the evils and hazards of war if campaigning could be as exhilarating as this had been. There was nothing here of the carnage of old soldiers' tales described from twenty-two years before on the Western Front. No wire, no paralysing artillery bombardments, no muddy, churned-up ground, little physical destruction and, after breaking west from the Meuse Valley, extraordinarily little blood. French guns had at first given a lot of trouble and had hemmed in the German columns trying to debouch from the river valley: this had gone on for two days. But by 15th May, 7th Panzer Division's advance was meeting little opposition.

One of the biggest problems was how to dispose of huge numbers of prisoners without using an excessive number of men to guard them. As the Division rolled forward a French anti-tank gun sometimes picked off one of the leading tanks and had to be dealt with, but on the whole the enemy seemed keen to surrender and huge numbers of dispirited-looking French soldiers were marshalled in fields beside the road, dejected and bewildered rather than frightened, if their faces were anything to go by. Frido saw few civilians. They seemed to have abandoned their homes and driven or trudged westward. Some ran into the fields and gazed, little huddles of terrified and resentful humanity, at the driving columns. They made Frido feel uneasy. On the whole his
Panzer Grenadiers
, tired but exuberant, found these refugees objects of mockery rather than pity.

‘Look at that old cow, wheeling an easy chair strapped to a perambulator!'

‘Did you see the ones who tried to strap a bed on top of a donkey!'

‘Hey – why've you left the piano behind?'

The mood was of laughter and gaiety.

War quickly drives out pity, Frido thought. But although he tried, fiercely, to keep part of his mind reflective and principled, he knew that he, like his men, was caught up by the winds of victory, the intoxication of rapid advance deep into the enemy's land.

Few chances, however, could be taken. It was as often as not judged prudent for farms or villages overlooking the Division's line of advance to receive one or two well-aimed rounds from a tank gun. Often they burst into flames. Sometimes a few enemy soldiers emerged in consequence – more often not. On one occasion the German advance was held up by a huge refugee column which had become mixed up with French military traffic, with a French force fleeing, making no attempt to deploy or fight; guns, carts, lorries, men, horses, all mingled in inextricable confusion. To make matters worse, the Luftwaffe had taken the column as a target and the road verges were littered with smashed equipment, household goods, and dead and wounded human beings both in and out of uniform, together with the mutilated carcasses of cattle and horses. Somehow the road was cleared, the stench was left behind and the Division raced on. The advance seemed to quicken as the spearheads reached further and further west.

‘At this rate,' Frido said to his Captain, ‘we'll soon reach the sea!'

The division's tanks were now well ahead of the
Panzer Grenadiers.
Deep into northern France they were skirting the town of Arras, said to contain an enemy garrison and thus to be bypassed and isolated. The country was open and ways around such obstacles were not difficult to find. Frido's own column was temporarily halted. There seemed some obstruction in a village. Some delay in front? He focused his binoculars north.

What he saw was startling.

Unmistakable, menacing, a line of wholly unfamiliar tanks
was moving southwards towards them, at a distance of under two kilometres from where Frido stood, on the outskirts of a small village. Between those tanks and his own vehicles and troops another minor road ran parallel to his own. This road was being used by a second company of the Regiment. They, too, were halted. Presumably they, too, had seen what he had seen. Thirty seconds later, two vehicles from the neighbouring company burst into flames simultaneously. Men were leaping from vehicles, diving into ditches and behind walls.

‘Out! Out!' yelled Frido. He shouted a command or two, aimed at getting his soldiers into some sort of firing positions. He heard a
Feldwebel
take up the order. It was impossible to drive clear in vehicles – they were jammed in front and had closed up behind. To try to turn would be laborious and suicidal.

‘Out! Out!'

The line of enemy tanks was closer. He could now hear machine gun fire, presumably from the tanks. A vehicle, two behind Frido's, exploded like a matchbox accidentally ignited. Most of the enemy's fire seemed to be going high. Men were cowering behind vehicles or in ditches. This was a new and disagreeable experience.

‘Marvell, you speak German. You're urgently needed for a special job. You're going to be attached to another brigade headquarters, not ours, to help with on-the-spot interrogation of German prisoners.'

‘German prisoners, sir? I didn't know we held them in unmanageable numbers!'

His Company Commander did not smile.

‘We may soon. There's a big action due – a counter-attack. Now get cracking. Here's where you're to go. Jephson will drive you down. You've got to be there by nine o'clock in the morning at the latest. You'll be crossing the main refugee routes. Shouldn't be too bad.'

‘Must I leave my platoon, sir? At this moment?'

‘Stop arguing and get down there. It's nobody's fault but yours that you speak fluent German. You know perfectly well every linguist's name is listed.'

Anthony had spent six months as an officer. His commissioning had been advanced because of the imminence of war and he had been sent to a depot for four months with a large number of other junior officers, all more or less ignorant of military practicalities, duties or traditions, all more or less sceptical of the realism of such knowledge as was being imparted to them. Had war not intervened Anthony was scheduled to serve with his own Territorial soldiers, unskilled perhaps, but familiar certainly. As it was, the inscrutable ways of the Army whisked him away to a large training establishment where raw recruits and equally raw officers of the same Regiment were assembled together in huge numbers and somewhat mistrustful proximity. The winter had been frustrating.

‘I wish to God I could have a platoon of my own! I'd learn much quicker with a little responsibility, rather than theorizing about how to command men and being treated like a delinquent schoolboy!'

‘There's no demand for more officers at the moment, Marvell. There's no fighting, no casualties. It'll come.'

‘Some of us will have rotted from boredom by then.'

‘We've got to be patient. The Army's expanding, new battalions, new divisions. It'll come.'

And it had come. In March, 1940 Anthony, proud and refreshed, had found himself at last a junior commander in his own right, a warrior among his peers, in a Service battalion, and within weeks that battalion was in France. He had just about come to terms with the men in his platoon and the officers in his battalion when the alarm went on that May morning ten days ago. 10th May. The Germans had invaded Belgium and Holland! The long-awaited enemy offensive had started! The War had begun.

The ensuing days were chiefly noteworthy, in Anthony's mind, for lack of sleep. Fear, so far, was principally caused by air attacks which had been fierce, sudden and alarming. The battalion had twice been caught by the Luftwaffe on the move in vehicles – a most disagreeable experience, full of noise, explosions, shouts and acrid smells. Astonishingly, there had been no casualties. But all the time, after the first days, they were going back – back through Belgium, back towards the places whence they had started, back, back, back.

Of the German Army, Anthony had seen remarkably little. There were plenty of stories, of course, stories that lost nothing in the telling. It was said that German tanks had fallen in huge numbers on the brigade next door. German infantry appeared to have lapped like flood water round the flanks of a neighbouring division. Anthony had experienced none of these things. There was a good deal of artillery fire but it always seemed rather distant. The campaign had, for the most part, consisted of incessant marching, digging and waiting: accompanied by a great deal of explanation to his sceptical but, by and large, patient men about the destination of the march, the purpose of the digging (‘I know we left the last trenches fifteen minutes after finishing them, O'Halloran. It'll be different one day. They'll save our lives') and the fact that some shrewd operational plan inspired the waiting. It was not always easy.