Weaver (40 page)

‘That seems a drastic point of view,’ Mackie murmured. ‘My gut feel is that history might be a bit more resilient than that. I mean, it seems to me it’s possible that if you were to make some sort of change, the consequences would just sort of ripple through. The tapestry of time must be a hefty piece of work. The patterns would persist, wouldn’t they, even if you pulled out the odd thread? The physicists have nothing to say, incidentally. Nothing sensible anyhow, which is typical of that crew.’

‘So if
you
could push the button?’

He pursed his lips. ‘I’d like more data. But it seems to me that it might be possible to calibrate the effects of interventions.’

‘Calibrate?’

‘It would mean turning history from an art to a science, but still! Think what a boon for good such power could be.’

And there, she thought, was the difference between herself and men like him. Mackie was an instrumentalist, who saw in this technology only a weapon. She saw horror. But then she thought of her own Dunkirk counter-history. Only if one were sufficiently desperate, she thought. Only then ...

‘Of course,’ Mackie said, ‘all this mandates us to keep this technology, if indeed it exists at all, out of the wrong hands.’

‘You mean the Nazis, the Russians—’

‘And the bally Americans, my dear, no offence! Now come, let’s get out of here. Can I offer you a lift anywhere?’ She stood. He took her arm, and guided her out of the ruins of the minster.

A liberty bus drew up outside the minster, a ‘passion wagon’ that took young women to dances at the GIs’ bases. The Land Girls flocked that way, colourful, grimy, laughing.

The marshalling area for the British Second Army was south of Guildford.

It was late afternoon when Gary reached Guildford, having been driven down from Aldershot with Willis Farjeon and Dougie Skelland and the rest of their platoon in the backs of studebakers. When they got there a river of men and machines was pouring through the town’s old centre. MPs and NCOs stood at every junction, directing the flow according to some complicated scheme. Even the roads had had to be rebuilt to take the traffic, bridges strengthened, junctions widened, the tarmac reinforced to withstand tank tracks. Gary could smell the fumes of the engines, like a vast traffic jam.

It was like this all the way along the Winston Line, from coast to coast.

South of the town, as they neared the marshalling area, the spectacle was even more amazing. The column broke up, and the vehicles swarmed off the road looking for a bit of hard standing to park up. From the elevation of his troop carrier Gary saw vehicles crowding as far as he could see, their backs glistening green or American olive in the dusty afternoon sunlight, with men moving everywhere and dumps of weapons and ammo covered in camouflage netting. There were more complicated machines too, such as the bridge-building gear of the Royal Engineers, who had been training to provide roadways over the concrete trenches of the Winston Line. Tanks moved through this crowd like elephants at a waterhole. Gary recognised the profiles of Shermans and Centaurs, and even a few squat Soviet T-34s; the Russians had insisted on making a contribution to this crucial push in the west. All this was going on under a cloud-littered sky through which fighter planes soared, Spits and Hurricanes and Mustangs and a few Soviet MIGs, there to deter the Luftwaffe from any ideas it might have entertained of disrupting the build-up. It was a spectacle that battered all the senses.

There was no secrecy now, no creeping around in the dark. Gary, lost in the middle of it, had a sense of huge energies gathering, a vast coiled spring about to be released. The war had turned. The Germans had been defeated in Africa and at Stalingrad, the Allies were winning the Atlantic war against the U-boats, and the Japs were held at Midway. Now Roosevelt and Halifax had done a deal, to sort out Europe first before resolving the Pacific war. This July the Allies were effectively opening four fronts against the Nazis. In the Mediterranean an invasion force was closing on Sicily, the beginning of an operation planned to knock Mussolini’s Italy out of the war. British and American bombers were beginning an intensive campaign of assault on the German homeland; the first great target was Hamburg. In the east the Russians were taking on the Germans in a gigantic tank battle on the Kursk salient.

And here in Britain Operation Walrus was ready to be launched. Gary knew there had been plenty of muttering in the British press about the time it had taken to get the Nazis out of England. But you wanted to assemble an overwhelming force before you could consider such an operation. Here, today, was the result. And it was remarkable to think that all this was just a prelude to the main event, when England would be used as the platform to launch the invasion of Europe itself, next year or the year after.

Marshalling Area A-C, only a few miles north of the great gash of the Winston Line itself, consisted of two camps set out to either side of Quarry Street, the main road that led south out of Guildford and on to Horsham. The camps were surrounded by triple fences of barbed wire, and the troops, lugging their gear, were marched through gates manned by American guards. The sappers had colonised Pewley Green to the east of the road and a golf course to the west, and in the distance Gary saw water glisten; the camps tapped into the River Wey. NCOs directed the troopers through a city of tents clustered around central wooden buildings. Everything was green and brown, canvas and khaki and paint, the colour of the English ground.

They found the bell tent Gary was to share with Willis and Dougie Skelland. Inside, duck boards covered the grass, and there was a tortoise stove. The three of them dumped their gear. ‘This isn’t bad,’ Willis Farjeon said. He inspected the stove. ‘Anybody got any water left? We could have a quick brew up.’ The others handed over their canteens.

Dougie Skelland already had his boots off, and a fag in his mouth. Dougie was a veteran of campaigns in Africa and the Middle East. He’d been reassigned after a spell at home recovering from malaria. His skin was weather-beaten dark, with ingrained dirt that didn’t seem to shift no matter how hard he washed, and his eyes were narrowed from too much wind and sun, so that he had an oriental look about him. They were all misfits, in a new battalion welded together from survivors of other, long-disrupted units: Gary the Dunkirk veteran, Willis a POW escapee, and Dougie who had fought with Montgomery. Dougie didn’t seem to care where he was sent, save that he was aggrieved to have missed el Alamein, which the commentators all called the first great victory of the war. But he could get his boots off and a fag in his mouth faster than any other man Gary had ever met.

‘Americans manning the fence,’ Dougie said now. ‘See that?’ He had a faint Scottish lilt. ‘Security over W-Day, see. The Yanks don’t trust anybody.’

‘Who cares?’ Willis asked. ‘In American camps you get the best, that’s what I heard. A great big NAAFI.’

‘P X,’ Gary murmured. ‘They call it the PX.’

‘Briefing halls like theatres. Hot showers. Cinemas!’

Dougie growled, ‘You really are a wanker, aren’t you, Farjeon?’

‘I sure am,’ said Farjeon cheerfully. ‘But it’s a big camp. I’m hoping for a bit more action tonight than Johnny Five-Fingers, frankly. I hear some of the Poles are up for it for the price of a packet of fags.’ He winked at Gary. ‘Just like the stalag.’

Dougie looked disgusted.

Gary shook his head. ‘Don’t let him get to you, Dougie. He just says this shit to wind you up.’

‘The trouble is,’ Dougie said coldly, ‘I don’t know if you’re a bloody sodomite or not, Farjeon. I saw you trying to pull those Yank bashers in Aldershot. What do you want a bird for if you’re a shirt lifter?’

‘He goes both ways,’ Gary said.

‘Well, I’ve never heard of bloody that,’ said Dougie.

Willis grinned. ‘Don’t they have people like me in Edinburgh, Dougie? I’m a breaker of hearts. And of sphincter muscles.’

Gary said, ‘It’s all just a game to you, isn’t it, Willis?’

‘I’ve seen men like him,’ Dougie said. ‘Who can kill a man hand to hand and make a sport of it. Arseholes like him don’t live long in combat. That’s what I’ve seen.’

Willis laughed at him. ‘I’ll remember that when I’m singing Auld Lang Syne“ and shovelling dirt on your cold dead face, Dougie. Give me your mugs.’

Danny Adams stuck his head into the tent. ‘Evening, ladies. I see you’re settling in.’ Gary had known Adams since the stalag, from which the former SBO had escaped in 1942 with Willis; his accent was as broad Scouse as ever.

‘Could be worse, Sarge, could be worse,’ said Willis.

‘Shut up, Betty Grable. Right, two things you need to know. This is a sealed camp. That means if General Brooke himself tried to leave he’d get his arse shot off by the US Army. Security. Got that?’

‘Noted,’ said Gary.

‘Second. You’ll get your final operational instructions in briefing marquee F.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the golf course. ‘You’ll find it, just follow the other ladies. Eighteen hundred, and if you’re late
I’ll
shoot your arse off. Oh, and at twenty hundred the padre is coming round. Any questions?’

‘Yes,’ Willis said. ‘Come on, Sarge. What’s the plan? Now we’re all tucked away inside the barbed wire—’

Adams gave him a look. ‘Well, it’s simple. In the west you’ve got us, the British Second Army and the Canadian Third, under General Brooke. In the east, the US First and Third under Hodge. We’ll skirt the high ground, cutting south of the Weald, and meet up somewhere near Hastings, us coming from the west, the Yanks from the east. A pincer movement, see? Wit
h the Nazis cut off from the ports, and the air forces and the Navy already battering them, it will just be a question of mopping up. First one to Hastings gets the beers in.’

‘Let’s hope it’s the Americans then,’ Willis said.

‘Don’t forget to take your malaria pills, Skelland. And don’t be late for the briefing.’ He ducked out of the tent.

‘Yes, Mother,’ Dougie said.

‘What an exciting time we have ahead of us,’ Willis said drily.

‘Kursk,’ said Dougie Skelland reflectively. ‘Now that’s the place to be if you want a bit of drama. A million men on each side, a single battlefield bigger than Wales. It’s in the east this war will be decided, not in this tin-pot operation.’

Willis said, ‘Let’s just be glad we can leave that to Uncle Joe, then.’ He pulled his boots off with a grunting effort.

Few of the men in the slit trenches had been able to sleep that night. You could tell from the soft voices in the dark.

As dawn neared, Ernst huddled with Heinz Kieser and Carl Fischer. Heinz smoked obsessively, clutching the cigarettes between the stumps of his ruined fingers, hiding their light with his good hand. They were not far south-east of the First Objective at a place called Shamley Green, on a straight line between Guildford and Horsham. They were in a scrap of forest, and a mild breeze rustled the branches of the trees above them. Everything was dark, with not a scrap of torchlight to give away their positions.

Though it was a summer night, and though they had had the time to line their trenches with bits of wood and corrugated iron, Ernst felt cold, and he was grateful for the warmth of the other men close to him. It had been like this night after night, as they waited for the Allied push.

At about five they were served stew and soup, brought up by runners. The field kitchens were so far behind the lines the stew was always lumpy and cold by the time it got to you. The men ate the stew with their Kommisbrot, hard Army bread, their murmured conversation counterpointed by the clink of tin spoons in bowls.

‘Listen to them,’ murmured Fischer. ‘The men. They fret, you can tell. They know they need to sleep. When the Americans come, who can say when any of us will sleep again?’

‘If,’
growled Heinz. ‘If any of us will sleep again.’

‘And they become anxious when sleep does not come. In a way all the inactivity, all the waiting, makes it harder.’

This was Fischer being typically soft about the state of his men’s mood. But Ernst knew it was true. There was only so much trench-digging you could do, so many telephone cables you could lay, only so many times you could polish your leather boots and belt.

He looked north-west, to where the Allied armies must be slumbering this night, only a few miles away. The mood could not have been more different from the 1940 invasion, the last time he had been posted to the front line. In the last months, after the Stalingrad disaster and the mounting losses in the east, the Albion garrison had been steadily stripped of men and materiel. Now, who was left to face the Tommies and the Amis? Rear-echelon types like himself, who had spent much of the war on office work in Hastings, second-raters like Fischer, whose softness and sentimentality had blocked any chance of promotion, and eastern-front veterans like Heinz, damaged in body and mind. Them and a few prisoner battalions shipped over fr
om Poland and Czechoslovakia, and whatever conscripts the SS had managed to drum up from the local population - Jugend, most of them, it was said. Second-liners, second-raters, prisoners and kids.

He thought he heard an owl call. He wondered if he might get some sleep tonight.

‘Oh,’ Fischer said. He was looking up, and orange light bathed his face.

Ernst turned. To the north-west he saw a signal flare, yellow-orange, climb into the sky from beyond the Allied line. The night remained silent. Even the men in the trenches fell quiet, like children watching a firework display.

Ernst asked, ‘Another morning concert, do you think?’ Just another example of harassing fire, if that was so.

‘I don’t think so,’ Heinz said softly.

Then it started, a noise like thunder that smashed the silence. They all dropped on their bellies. Ernst pressed his face to the dirt and covered his head with his arms.