Tramp in Armour (5 page)

Twenty-four hours later, in the evening of Saturday May 18th, they had removed an incredibly large mass of rubble and rock, but still the wall face was intact. They worked now by the light of the oil lamp which Barnes always carried inside the tank, and the reason for this was not only to save Bert's headlights: Barnes foresaw that later, when morale was sagging, switching on the headlights again might just keep them going a while longer, but he kept the real reason for this decision to himself. In the middle of the afternoon there had almost been a fatal accident when part of the wall suddenly came away and slid forward of its own momentum. Only Reynolds' speed and strength had saved Davis when he had grabbed the gunner's arm and hauled him sideways out of the path of the tumbling boulders. It was a measure of their anxiety that even when Davis had just experienced this shock he was the first to recover, running away from Reynolds to gaze up at the centre of the wall in desperate hope, his voice hoarse and strained.

'Maybe we're through now.'

'Keep back. I'll see,' snapped Barnes.

Gingerly, he had climbed up the rubble slope, expecting at any moment a fresh fall, but when he had reached the rock face and pushed it was like leaning against the side of a fortress. So they had started again, Barnes and Penn working furiously with their shovels to remove the fresh rubble so that the other two could reach the rock face with their crowbar. It was just after seven o'clock in the evening when Penn made his remark during their rest period. Barnes sat alongside him on the tank hull, watching Reynolds prising out a fresh boulder while Davis sought to give extra leverage by pulling with his bare hands.

'It's funny, but ever since we've been in here we haven't heard any sound of the battle.'

'We've probably driven them back a bit - besides, there
wasn't so much going on this side of Etreux.'

He left it at that, wondering why the obvious and macabre conclusion had not been drawn by the others long ago. The fact that they could not hear even faint sounds of the huge bombardment taking place in the outside world demonstrated more clearly than anything the immense thickness of the wall which barred their escape. The thought had occurred to Barnes twenty-four hours earlier and had so worried him that he had waited until the others were asleep before walking back down the tunnel. When he reached the far end he had listened carefully at the blocked entrance but no sound had penetrated from the outside world. They were well and truly sealed in at both ends. Taking a sip of water from his mug, he frowned.

Then, very carefully, he put the mug down on the hull and walked over to where Reynolds and Davis were working. He faced the wall and then turned sideways as though listening. It was a dramatic moment and Penn instantly guessed that something had happened because he got down off the tank and walked forward. Something in Barnes' attitude had attracted the attention of Reynolds and Davis and they stopped working.

'What is it?' asked Penn.

Barnes shook his head and faced the wall again, his hands
on his hips, his eyes searching the surface carefully. When he
spoke his voice was quiet.
'I think we're nearly through.'
'Why?' Penn asked quickly.

'I can feel a faint current of air - come and stand here.'
'My God! You're right! You're right!'
They began to work feverishly at the point where Barnes had traced the air current's entrance, a point about four feet
above the level of the tunnel floor. A quarter of an hour later
they experienced another heart-lifting moment when Barnes told them to stop working for a minute while he put out the lamp. For a short time there-was no sound in the darkness of
the tunnel while four pairs of eyes strained to see any sign of
daylight in the wall. It was Barnes who spotted it first - a
narrow, paper-thin slit along the upper surface of one large
boulder.

'We're through,' shouted Davis. 'We're really through. Dear
Mother of God, we're through!'

'Take it easy now,' warned Barnes, 'this could be tricky.
There's still a solid mass of rock up there.'

He relit the oil lamp and when he turned round Davis was already inserting the crowbar into a corner near the end of the slit they had seen, his hands gripping the iron with a ferocious intensity as he drove the end deeper into the wall and began to twist and turn for leverage. Barnes opened his mouth and closed it again without speaking. The poor devil must have gone through even greater agonies than the rest of them with his memories of the mine trap he had escaped from. Barnes
had realized this when he had treated Davis roughly, but any display of sympathy at that time could have destroyed the morale of all of them, and Barnes never forgot the dictum of Napoleon - morale is to the material as three is to one. So now he let Davis break loose as he dug and rammed the bar into the remaining barrier, punishing his hands with the force of his efforts and never even noticing the punishment. Penn spoke as he shovelled debris to expose the base of the remaining rocks. 'I'll tell you now, I never thought we'd make it.' 'We'll face tougher things than this before this war's over.' Within ten minutes Davis had prised the boulder loose and Reynolds was helping
him to haul it back out of the wall, a boulder as large as the oil stove they carried inside Bert for emergency cooking arrangements. It came away suddenly. One moment Davis was leaning his full weight against the crowbar, sweat streaming down the sides of his face, and then the rock was shifting inwards, swaying gently before it toppled back into the tunnel, so unexpectedly that the two men had to jump sideways to avoid it. Picking up the oil lamp, Barnes held it behind his back and they all stared at the oblong of daylight. It was a memorable moment. Four-men, each of whom had secretly felt that they would never make it, knew now that they would live. There was a pause when no one spoke, no one moved. Then Davis went berserk.

Seizing the crowbar which had fallen with the boulder, he rammed it behind the rock above the opening and began heaving and twisting with all his strength. Barnes shouted a warning, but Davis either didn't or wouldn't hear him. He felt the rock moving easily and dropped the crowbar. Reaching up to his full height he pushed, both hands flat against the rock, which fell outwards, enlarging the window considerably, enlarging it enough for Davis to climb up into it, crouching inside the alcove on his knees as he pushed with his hands at the loosened rock above. Barnes was still shouting when disaster struck.

The upper rock was held in position over the opening by ledges on either side of the aperture, but it moved loosely on the ledges so that when Davis again pushed his full strength
against it the rock wobbled and then fell outwards under the fierce pressure of Davis' hands. As it fell away it unhinged the centre of gravity of the wall above. Davis was still crouched in the aperture when there was a low rumbling sound. The whole upper wall began to quiver and disintegrate. Barnes was running forward to grab Davis when Penn grasped
his arm firmly and hauled him back against the side of the tunnel. A second later an avalanche of rock and rubble poured down over the floor where Barnes had been standing, spilling tons of debris along the centre of the rail track, filling the tunnel with a roaring sound which deafened them. Then they were bending over and choking and spluttering as the dust invaded their lungs and blinded their eyes.

It was only when the dust began to settle that Barnes saw
what had happened. On the far side of the tunnel, his back
against the wall, Reynolds was safe. Beside Barnes, Penn was
wiping his eyes to try and clear bis vision. But it was the
entrance to the tunnel which was the most awe-inspiring sight.
The new landslide had completely cleared the upper part of
the tunnel, leaving a great gap above the rubble slope which
now stretched deep inside the tunnel, a gap through which
they could see the blessed evening sky, a gap through which-
Bert could be driven once he had mounted the slope.

It took them several minutes to locate Davis, and they found the gunner only a few feet away from where Barnes had been standing after Penn had jerked him back out of the path of the falling wall. At least, they found Davis' head. The rest of his body was buried under the fall and it needed only a second's examination for them to realize that he was dead.

TWO

Saturday3 May 18th

Something very strange had happened to the world in this part
of Belgium. The war had gone away.

Before they drove the tank out of the tunnel, up the rubble slope, and down the other side, Barnes had made a personal reconnaissance in the brilliant warmth of early evening. The first thing that struck him was the incredible silence, a silence which was intensified by the only sound, the peaceful twittering of an unseen bird. Beyond the tunnel the railway stretched away across open country, the track empty, the green fields deserted, not a sign of life anywhere. Etreux, or what was left of it, must have petered out farther along the hillside, because over to his right there were no buildings, no people. Only the still waters of the broad canal which barred their easy way back to Etreux.

He found the silence, the absence of gunfire, so disturbing that he climbed a little way up the hillside above the wrecked
tunnel entrance, but still he heard nothing, saw nothing. The war had gone far away - to where? And which way? He sat
down for a moment on the grass, his nerves strangely on edge
as though the peaceful landscape were full of sinister meaning.
He sat there blinking against the strong sunlight, drinking in
the fresh air, then he got up quickly, went back to the tank,
and gave the order to advance.

There had been no question of burying Davis, for Davis was already buried under a ton of rock, so they wrote his name, rank, and number on a piece of paper and left this under a rock close to the head. Then they drove away, too exhausted to feel much emotion other than shock at the suddenness of the gunner's death. The thought uppermost in Barnes' mind now was that his crew was reduced from four to three. They were
all capable of firing the guns in an emergency and he told Perm that when the need arose he would act as gunner. As they moved along the rail track Barnes stood in the turret, map in hand, and his mind weighed up the situation grimly. At least they had almost full fuel tanks, which meant that they could travel one hundred and fifty miles along the roads, a distance which would be reduced by fifty per cent once they began moving across country, but this was the only credit point he. could muster. One crew member short, the wireless out of action, no knowledge of where Parker might be: they almost resembled a warship sailing into uncharted seas with no means of communicating with its base. Half his mind pondered the dubious likelihood of rejoining his troop while the other half toyed with the glimmer of an idea which was to grow.
Whatever happened, they must find a really worthwhile objective.

A mile from the tunnel the track reached a level crossing and it was at this point where they turned off the railway line and began to move along a second-class road which ran between low hedges bordering fields of poor grassland. Six miles farther on they should turn right along a road which would take them into the rear area behind Etreux. But where were the armies?

Standing upright in the turret Barnes strained his ears for sounds of gunfire, strained his eyes for sight of smoke or planes. The fields stretched away, empty; the sky, a vault of pale blue, stretched away uninhabited. The uncanny feeling grew, a feeling of men moving into unexplored territory. The tank tracks ground forward at top speed, the engines throbbed with power, as though determined to enjoy to the full this race across open country after the confinement inside the tunnel, and then Barnes saw the first traces of battle - the faint marks of tank tracks in the fields, the occasional crater where a shell or bomb had exploded, and as they proceeded along the deserted road the traces became more frequent, less reassuring. At one point Barnes ordered Reynolds to halt while he got down to'examine wrecked vehicles by the roadside. They were~ burnt-out tanks, five of them, and they were French Renault tanks which looked as though they had fought the entire
German Army on their own, A little farther along the_road he stopped again and Penn climbed but with him to look at a mess of French equipment. In the ditch, rifles lay there as though they had been thrown down in panic flight from something awful and overpowering. When Barnes picked one up he found the weapon was still loaded. A few yards farther along there were abandoned Army packs, abandoned helmets, all French. Search as he might, Barnes could find no German equipment. Two of the helmets were occupied, the bodies lying on their backs facing the sky. Then more rifles, all of them loaded.