Tramp in Armour (32 page)

'You mean the rest of your outfit got wiped out?' .

'I mean we got separated from them at the very beginning and it's been that way ever since. If you come with us you'd better understand we have one two-pounder gun, one light
machine gun, several machine-pistols and three revolvers. That's the extent of our armament and so far we've escaped
detection by three separate Panzer columns by the skin of our
teeth.'

'Sounds a little one-sided. I'd have thought you could do with a little reinforcement.'

'We could, but tanks don't fly and you're a pilot.'

'You may have a point there. What's the alternative?'

'The alternative, Colburn, is to make your own way home.'
He paused. 'Unless you'd sooner take the easier way out and walk down that road into Cambrai where the Germans are. Then you could spend the rest of your war in a nice quiet POW camp.
'

He waited for the Canadian's reaction, but still nothing had
changed in the steady expression. Even the voice was mild
when he retaliated.

'I suppose if I were to hit you in the mouth for that, Ser
geant, your pal in the tank would gun me down?'

'I'm sure he would. Don't let me get under your skin, Col
burn. It's just that I have to be sure.'

'Sure of what? I thought you'd have realized by now that
I was taking off from Manston half an hour ago.'

'I have to be sure you won't get in the way. You're a Cana
dian, you say, yet you're in the RAF.'

'I volunteered. It was very hot weather at the time and the
heat can make you do silly things...'

'What were you in civvy street, Colburn?'

'I took my medical degree and then...'

'You're a doctor?' Barnes didn't attempt to keep the eager
ness out of his voice.

'No, I'm not. I never practised. I found I didn't like it so I
became a chemist.'

'A chemist?' Barnes found it difficult to visualize Colburn
behind a counter handing out aspirin.

'An industrial chemist. I developed an interest in high-ex
plosives and had my own outfit after a few years. We supplied stuff for quarry-blasting operations all over Canada.
So now
you'll know how crazy I was to volunteer.'

'You had your own business and you gave it up?' Barnes stared even more closely at Colburn's sun-tanned features,
wondering what made a man throw up everything to travel
three thousand miles to fight someone else's war. His decision was crystallizing rapidly now.

'No, it wasn't as bad as that. I handed over to my brother
and he's running things till I get back.' Colburn smiled faintly. 'Ed doesn't see any reason why the British shouldn't be left to fight their own wars. He could be right at that. Sergeant, what
made you jump half a mile when I said I'd taken my medical
degree?'

'My corporal's seriously wounded and I've been praying to run into a doctor for hours. Would you take a look at him for
me?'

'Be glad to - but remember, I'm the most qualified non-
practising doctor in the western hemisphere. Where is he?'

Barnes stayed behind to gather up the collapsed parachute while Colburn walked back to where Reynolds waited on the hull of the tank. It took him several minutes to bundle up the
cloth and cords into a package which resembled an overblown
eiderdown and then he bid it inside a drainage ditch. There
was no point in alerting any German patrol which might arrive
later to the fact that there was a British airman in the district.
When he returned to the tank Reynolds was out of sight inside
the hull but Colburn's head emerged from the turret. He
looked down at Barnes, his voice quiet.

'The guy down there is a close friend of yours?'

'He's my corporal,' replied Barnes flatly.

'Sorry, that was badly put. The news isn't good, I'm afraid.'

'He may not make it?'

'He didn't make it - he's dead.'

* * *

It took them well over an hour to dig the grave out of the sunbaked French soil. They worked with the same shovels which
had been used to dig them out of the tunnel at Etreux, and
they took it in turns when Colburn insisted on helping. During
his rest period Barnes watched Colburn closely: on the basis
of sheer physical strength there was very little to choose be
tween the Canadian and Reynolds, but the main thing he liked about Colburn was his quick acceptance of an entirely new
situation. By now the poor devil might well have expected to
be landing at Mansion prior to a trip to the nearest local:
instead of which he was marooned in the middle of the battle zone helping to bury the body of a man he had never known
alive. As he watched them dig out the final shovelfuls his mind
was stunned. Penn had spent three years with him and in that time they had established a working relationship which func
tioned so smoothly they might have known each other all their
lives. Penn, who had never really believed in anything, who found his sergeant's intense preoccupation with his profession
rather amusing, Penn was a man who could always be relied
upon. And, by God, they'd relied on him during that endless
night when he'd stood sentry-go on the bridge while the
Panzers rolled past. Penn had found his sanctuary now, although not the sanctuary Barnes had planned for him.

What had seemed to be the simplest part of their mournful task proved to be the hardest - the lowering of the body. The
grave was ready and Colburn stood aside, leaving it to Barnes
and Reynolds to lift the body which they had swathed in a blanket and then further protected by folding a groundsheet
round it. To enable them to lower their burden slowly they
had looped two ropes round the groundsheet - one over the
chest and the other over the legs. All went well until the body
was halfway down inside the grave, then it stuck, wedged in at
the shoulders at a point where the hole narrowed. They raised it and then lowered it a second time, but again it stuck. Barnes
looked at Colburn.

'Would you take over this rope for me?'

He waited until the Canadian was in position and then he
knelt down, placing the flat of his hand on the groundsheet. As
he pressed he could feel the thickness of the bandage over
Penn's left arm. Colburn had said that it was probably the
shock of severe burning on top of his shoulder wound which
had finally dictated that he couldn't survive. The heavily-
wrapped body still wouldn
'
t go down. He pressed harder, feel
ing that Penn didn't want to be buried here and was resisting
him. What was it he had said? 'You'll see me hugging the old
two-pounder again before we reach Calais.' Well, they were a
long way from Calais and now Penn would never know
whether they made it or not. He pressed harder still, knowing
that they hadn't time to embark on fresh digging because out
here they were horribly exposed to view. The body gave up the
struggle suddenly, sinking down so unexpectedly that Barnes
almost over-balanced. When he stood up his face and hands were running with sweat and all he wanted to do was to get
away from this place.

'Shouldn't we say something over him?' mumbled Rey
nolds.

'No,' said Barnes abruptly, 'nothing. Didn't you know - he
was an agnostic.'

When they had filled in the grave they erected a crude
marker, and they used a shovel because it was the only instru
ment they could find for their purpose. The shovel was dug
deep into the ground and on the handle Barnes had inscribed simple wording which he cut into the wood with his knife.
'18972451 Corporal M. Penn. Killed in Action. May 25th,
1940.'

Before they moved off he asked Colburn to check his shoulder wound. While he had been leaning over into the
grave, at the moment when the body had suddenly slipped
down into its resting place, he had jerked his shoulder, feeling
something give: he had ripped open the wound again. He sat
on the warm hull while the Canadian removed the bandage
and Colburn's voice spoke volumes of disapproval.

'I can see this dressing hasn't been changed recently.'

'You mean it's turned septic?' Barnes inquired quietly.

'No, you were lucky there. I'm talking about the state of the outside of the dressing. You've reopened it again, all right, but
it looks clean and that's the main thing. Now, keep still. This
may hurt.'

Cleaning the freshly-opened wound thoroughly, he applied a
new dressing and then helped Barnes on with his shirt and
jacket. The shoulder was starting to throb steadily, a nagging
ache which absorbed far too much energy. When he was
dressed he took out a pencil from the pocket containing Penn's
pay-book and diary, spread out his map over the hull and
roughly marked the spot where the corporal was buried. One
day Penn's parents might wish to make a pilgrimage to this
spot, but by then anything could have happened to the shovel. Really, he told himself, it's a waste of time. All he could hope for was that the whole ruddy war wasn't a waste of time. He
began discussing the battlefield situation with Colburn but soon found out that the Canadian could tell him little more
than he already knew.

'As far as I can make out,' Barnes went on, 'The BEF is
roughly north of this line with the Belgian Army on its left.
We're standing in the middle of a huge no-man's-land...'

'The gap,' said Colburn.

'You mean they're actually calling it that?'

'Yes, it's referred to as that on our briefing maps. As you
say, you're slap in the middle of it but there's a lot of
argument as to how wide it is. My squadron came over to mix
it with Hun fighters but as a sideline we were told to shoot up any Panzers we found. They think reinforcements may
come through here soon.'

'They were right - they came through early this morning.'

'Late again.' He smiled faintly. 'Going back to those Panzers, I raised a query about the risk of shooting up our own
guys and you're not going to like the answer they gave. They
said that if we found a whole lot of heavy tanks strung out
along a road they were bound to be German - the British only
have a handful and the French have cleverly scattered theirs in
penny packets over the whole front.'

'You don't seem to know a great deal more than I do, Col
burn.'

'Sergeant, you're over here in the thick of it, and it's my
opinion that you're far to close to be able to take in the general
picture.'

'That, Colburn, said Barnes irritably, 'is what I'm trying to
extract from you. You get detailed briefings before you take to
the air, you fly over the battlefield - if anyone has a general
picture it should be you.'

'Oh, I've got it, all right, but from your questions I get the
idea you're looking for some sort of clear pattern I should
draw you, some nice neat little map which will show the Ger
mans here, your lot there, and the French some other place.
Well, I can't do that, and again it's only my opinion, but I'm
pretty sure that when this war is only a memory and the historians get busy with their tidy little analyses they still won't
be able to say exactly which unit was where and on what day.-
This, for what it's worth, is the biggest muddle of a battle that
ever was.'