Weaver (18 page)

And she did. She held it together until they got to Hurst Green, another deserted little village, where, remarkably, a green-painted bus was waiting for her. The driver, a British soldier, actually saluted his German counterpart. The British seemed surprised to see her alone, but Mary just climbed on the bus and snapped, ‘Don’t talk. Just drive. And when you get me to Tunbridge Wells, find me a fucking phone.’

‘Morning, ladies.’ Unteroffizier Fischer came stomping through the lounge bar, his boots clattering on the pub’s straw-strewn stone floor. He yanked open curtains with his gloved hands, pulling one so hard it came away from its hooks. The window was a rectangle of blue-grey. ‘It’s Wednesday morning, and you’re still in England.’

The men under their army blankets stirred, like huge slugs. Their boots and rifles were stacked against the bar walls.

Ernst glanced at the big railway clock on the wall. Five in the morning, English time. He groaned. He heard a distant rumble, like thunder. Chances were it wasn’t a storm. He sat up, rubbing his face. ‘Today’s the day, is it, Unteroffizier? The break-out.’

‘That’s the idea, Trojan. You pretty boys will have the privilege of following Seventh Panzer out of here, all the way from Uckfield to Guildford.’

‘Where on God’s earth is Guildford?’

‘I don’t even know where Uckfield is.’

‘I’ll tell you where Guildford is, Kieser. It’s on OKH Objective One, our first operational objective. And if, when, we reach it today, we’ll have achieved in five days what the Fuhrer’s plan called for in ten. And then we will be out of this hedgehog country where there’s a partisan in every piss-pot, and we will let the Panzers loose and it will be like France all over again.’

‘We’ll all get medals,’ said Kieser.

‘I’ll pin yours on myself. Personally I would like to see Oxford. Now shift your pretty arses, we form up in half an hour.’ He stomped out.

The men stirred, sitting up and pushing back their blankets. The rotting-feet stink and stale farts that had been trapped under the blankets filled the air. Kieser waved a hand. ‘By Christ, lads. Fuhrer directive forty-seven. Soldiers of the Twenty-sixth Division shouldn’t light a fag in the mornings.’

The men moved slowly. They all knew Fischer was a bit soft, and you could grab a few more minutes’ kip with impunity.

Ernst got to his feet. He was in his shorts and vest and socks, and he picked up a kit bag containing his razor and a bit of soap. He stepped over the bodies of the stirring men, making for the door. The floor was sticky with stale beer. This pub, in this place called Uckfield, had been a big disappointment to the men billeted here. Some English bastard had stolen all the spirits and taken an axe to the barrels behind the bar. ‘These English partisans fight dirty,’ Unteroffizier Fischer had said.

Ernst pushed out of the bar room into fresh, cold air. There was already a queue outside the lavatory, four or five men in their grubby underwear with towels around their necks, rubbing their arms to get warm. The paving stones were slick with dew, and Ernst took off his woollen socks and tucked them into the elastic waist of his pants. Better wet feet than wet socks.

He heard a distant explosion. It came from his right, the south, back towards the coast. When he looked that way there was a fading glow.

‘That was a big one,’ somebody grumbled. ‘Must be fifteen miles away.’

Ernst heard a rumble of engines. Looking up he saw planes crossing the sky, very high, without lights, just silhouettes against the steel grey, like cardboard cut-outs, flying north to south.

‘Old Goering will swat those fuckers like flies,’ somebody said, yawning.

‘But he was supposed to have got rid of the RAF by now.’

‘Nothing to do with us, lads,’ said the man at the head of the queue. He hammered on the toilet door. ‘What are you doing in there, Wilhelm? We’re freezing our balls off.’

More planes swept over, all of them coming from the north, wave after wave of them, without a challenge from any Luftwaffe planes, or a single anti-aircraft shot being fired.

As Gary entered the ops room he was met by a barrage of popping flashbulbs and calls, some of them in American twangs. ‘This way, Gary!’ ‘Over here, Corporal Wooler!’ ‘Gary! Smile for the folks back home, Gary!’

He stood there, uncertain, reluctant, the staff officer who’d escorted him at his side. They were behind the British lines here, in Alton, a few miles from the Petersfield to Farnborough line where Gary’s own division was concentrated.

Beyond the blizzard of light the work of the ops room continued. Gary looked down on the great map table in the pit below him. The map showed southern England, a fat green peninsula pinned by the grey mass of London on the northern edge, and bounded by the pale blue of ocean to the south. This very old country was crowded with towns and villages, and by the traceries of roads that snaked around the lumpy brown of ranges of hills. But now it was disfigured by the bold red slashes of defensive lines, and harsh black scribbles that must be the perimeters of the occupied territories. Coloured blocks littered the map, representing units of men and armour, shoved across the map by Wrens with long-handled wooden shovels, like croupiers in some immense game of roulette. Along the coast from Brighton to Dover there was a cloud of toy aircraft, while little ships pushed through the Channel.

The Wrens wore headsets, and talked constantly. Telephones and radio receiving stations were set up around the walls. Officers in the uniforms of all the services watched from railed balconies, with a few civilians, ministers perhaps, puffing cigars. Still the flashbulbs popped.

None of this seemed real to Gary. The pit of light, the controlled murmur of voices, the flashing bulbs, the smell of cigar smoke, made it all dreamlike. He wasn’t sure how he had kept functioning, in fact, since his mother had got through to him two days ago with the news about Hilda. He was going through the motions of his duties. But he felt as if he were neither asleep nor awake.

An officer, Royal Navy from his uniform, marched towards Gary. Maybe forty, he looked sharp, intelligent, his face lean and ruddy, an outdoors look, and he wore a precisely clipped black moustache. ‘Corporal Wooler? I’m Captain Mackie, RN - Tom Mackie, MI-14. Look, I’m sorry for this charade. I know you’d rather be with your unit.’

‘Yes, sir—’

‘But in this bloody war, image and news presentation are assets just as significant as boots and guns on the ground. Let’s get it over with and kick this shower of hacks and bulb-wasters out of our ops room, shall we?’ He grasped Gary’s hand and turned to the cameras, which flashed even more furiously. Through a fixed grin, Mackie said, ‘Of course we’re proud you’ve c
hosen to wear the uniform of the British Army. But it’s a shame you don’t look a bit more American, if you know what I mean.’

‘I should have worn spurs and a cowboy hat.’

‘That’s the spirit! Look, General Brooke hoped to be here himself to meet you.’

‘General Brooke?’

‘CIC Southern Command, since July. He’s been shaking up our home defence and doing a bloody good job, I should say. Right, that’s enough for this lot. Show these gentlemen the door, would you, Sergeant Blackwell ?’

‘Right you are, sir.’

Mackie touched Gary’s shoulder and led him to the railing that overlooked the big ops table. ‘I know you’re eager to get back to your unit. But I want you to take a moment to understand the big picture, and to see why your contribution today is so important, you and your mother’s. I’m with MI-14, by the way, I think I mentioned that. We’re that corner of Military Intelligence dedicated to analysing the Germans’ intentions. I take it you can read the map?’

‘More or less, sir.’

‘We know that since establishing their first beachheads the Germans have moved forward to a preliminary covering line that runs from Uckfield to Canterbury, roughly. He pointed at the map. ‘And although we’ve been disrupting the shipping, over the last few days they’ve managed to get some supplies and more men over, through the captured ports and airfields. Now we think their intention is to push forward to a deeper objective line, running from Portsmouth through Guildford and Reigate, all the way to the Thames estuary at Gravesend. Do you see? If they achieve that, they’ll have sliced off the whole of south-east England, including all the airfields. And we believe that after
that
they will make a thrust west of London, up from Guildford to Reading. London would then be pretty much at their mercy.’

‘So the plan is to stop them.’

‘Quite right. Now.’ He pointed to the Uckfield-Canterbury line. ‘We can’t hold the whole of that perimeter; we can’t stop them crossing the line somewhere. Even if we hadn’t left half our bloody army on the beaches at Dunkirk, we couldn’t manage that. What we’re trying to do is to contain their advance. Now look, can you see our assets? What we want to do is to confine their thrust roughly to the Uckfield-Guildford corridor.’

‘Why there?’

‘For one thing it’s at the boundary between the two armies, the Ninth and Sixteenth, that make up the Germans’ Army Group A. Always a weak point, that, the hinge between two forces ...’

To achieve this containment British and allied units had been positioned to deter the Germans from advances elsewhere. The First London would block a push north of the high ground of the Weald. In the east a division of New Zealanders was trying to block an advance on Rams-gate ; they were outnumbered, but had heavy guns capable of knocking out a Panzer advance. The Forty-fifth Division was positioned on the Weald itself, forcing the Germans to go west. North of the Weald were bodies of reserves, including Canadians, an armoured division and a tank brigade.

And in the west more reserves, including the Third Division under Montgomery - the division Gary had been transferred to - were ready to fall on the expected advance towards Guildford, when the opportunity rose, and carve it up.

‘You see the pattern,’ Mackie said. ‘Now while all this is going on we’ve still got the RAF and Navy striking at the Germans supply lines, in their rear. They seem to have seriously miscalculated their logistics. They are still reliant on fuel and other supplies shipped over from France; the fuel especially is critical. That’s the plan. It’s all about logistics, essentially. We bottle them up, strike at them when they try to advance, and starve them of supplies. A kind of mobile siege.’ He glanced at Gary. ‘So what do you think?’

Gary considered. ‘Sir, I’m just a regular corporal, and I’ve only been that a few days—’

‘Oh, you’re a bit more than that, Wooler.’

‘This is above my head. It seems like it might have a fighting chance.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Mackie nodded. ‘Well, that’s how it seems to me. A fighting chance. But no more than that. You see, Wooler, the loss of the BEF was a dreadful blow, both materially and in terms of morale. We’re putting up a fight. I think it’s possible we can hold these bloody Germans on our soil, today and tomorrow. But it’s certainly going to take more than we’ve got to drive them back into the sea. Which is where you come in.’

‘And which is why,’ Gary said coldly, ‘what happened to Hilda was so
useful
.’

Mackie’s face was hard. ‘Yes, it was. I know how bloody this is for you, Wooler. Blame your mother, if you like. Peter’s Well was sadly not the only atrocity the Nazis have committed on our soil. Himmler’s einsatzgruppen, the SS killing squads, have been spilling English blood just as busily as they did on the continent. But Peter’s Well was the one that was witnessed by an American. Your mother’s telephone call from Tunbridge Wells was broadcast across the US by hundreds of syndicated stations. And here you are, her son and a grieving husband, an American already fighting this dreadful evil.’

‘Good propaganda, right?’

‘No. It’s the truth, Wooler, cold and unvarnished. And it’s precisely what is needed to make your countrymen realise that our fight is their fight, that the Nazis’ threat to us is a threat to them. It’s said that in the last twenty-four hours, despite the desperate situation, Churchill has spent more time working with the Americans than against the Germans.’ He studied Gary. ‘Interventionists versus isolationists - that’s the language of the debates going on over there, isn’t it? But didn’t Jefferson himself warn that America should always fear a Europe united under a single hand? And even he didn’t anticipate Hitler. Anyhow here we are. You lost Hilda, I know. But by making this contribution, you’re helping to ensure there will be no more Hildas in the future.’

‘I guess we all have our duty.’

‘That’s the spirit ...’

There was movement at the ops table, and a stir among the listeners at the phones and wireless sets.

‘They’re moving,’ Mackie said, his voice tight. ‘They’ll call this the Battle of England one day - win or lose. Watch and remember.’

The fire roared down on the convoy from right and left, shells erupting from the fields and valleys of this folded, claustrophobic country. Once again the vehicles scattered. The Panzergrenadiers went roaring into the countryside, followed by a couple of the tanks, in search of pillboxes and other English defensive positions.

Ernst and the other men in the troop carriers leapt out to take up what positions they could find beside the road. Ernst found himself in a sort of drainage ditch, blocked by crisp autumn leaves; their smoky smell was rich.

‘Where do you think we are?’ Ernst shouted at Unteroffizier Fischer.

‘God knows.’ Fischer checked his watch. ‘I know where we should be. On the other side of Haywards Heath by now.’ He stumbled over the odd English name.

Ernst knew the route, roughly. From Uckfield they had headed west and north. The plan was to follow the A-class roads though Haywards Heath and Horsham and then make the long run up to Guildford. On the map it looked straightforward. But they had run into this sort of resistance as soon as they had left Uckfield.