Weaver (42 page)

Danny Adams was poking in the dirt. ‘Over here, lads. The trench has been pretty much stripped, but I think there are weapons. See, buried in the dirt where the wall collapsed?’

Gary went to see. ‘Panzerfausts.’ They had been trained up on these; it turned out that a panzerfaust’s rocket-propelled grenade, designed to take out a tank, did a good job of smashing in the walls of a house.

‘Come on, let’s dig them out. I’ll call for a truck.’

The trench itself was a bit of a mess, when Gary got into it. Grenades had clearly been used, you could see the cratering in the trench walls. Most of the bodies were intact, more or less, killed by the blast, but some had been ripped apart, and you had to watch where you stepped. In one place Gary saw that one fellow had fallen over another when he died, with bits of medical kit scattered around, bandages, syringes, even a stethoscope.

‘A doctor,’ Willis said. ‘Killed as he treated another man, you think?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Odd, isn’t it? He stayed to do his duty, and got killed for it. Sort of thing that rather proves there’s no God. Now then—’ Using his rifle barrel as a scoop, he got hold of the stethoscope. ‘That’s a souvenir you don’t see every day.’

‘Yeah,’ Dougie Skelland growled. ‘You can use it to find out if you’ve got a fucking heart, you faggot.’

Danny Adams said, ‘Shut up and get these panzerfausts stacked.’

5
July

By midnight, as the fourth of July gave way to the fifth, the retreat was in full flight.

They were kept marching through the night, in the pitch dark, moving on south step by step, following the little English country lanes. The dark was the only cover they had, from the planes that buzzed constantly overhead and from the heavy English guns. They weren’t allowed so much as a torch beam to see their way forward, and Heinz was slapped down when he tried to light his cigarettes. So it was a question of stumbling forward in the dark, endlessly tripping over tarmac churned up by tank treads, and everybody bumping into each other with soft curses.

By the time the dawn seeped into the sky, Ernst was exhausted. Practically since the softening-up bombardment it had been twenty-four hours of this clumsy, uncoordinated flight, when you were barely able to rest either physically or mentally, not for a moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, and for hours had had nothing to drink but water from his canteen, refilled from brackish puddles in the ditches. In the grey dawn light, as the hulking, grimy shapes of the men coalesced around him, he felt unreal, distant, as if he were watching some black-and-white cinema film.

At about nine o’clock in the morning they heard a roar of engines, a rattle of treads coming from the rear. They rushed for cover, thinking that the Allied army had overtaken them. But the column’s lead tank was a Tiger. The men emerged from cover, their legs splashed with mud and dew.

The vehicles drew to a halt, pulling off the road into bits of cover. The column was a ragtag bunch, a couple of tanks, some self-propelled guns, and a chain of open-backed trucks crowded with troops. The men clambered down. The troops swapped cigarettes; one man passed around a bottle of sloe gin he had stolen from a farmhouse. Officers, NCOs and feldgendarmerie from the column and the infantry units stood in a huddle, negotiating. Most were Wehrmacht, but some of them were SS, and others, very agitated, wore the brown uniforms of the Party. Mechanics worked at one of the trucks, whose exhaust smoked blackly. It was clearly breaking down, so they siphoned off its fuel and stripped it of its tyres and spark plugs and other parts, cannibalising it. What they could not reuse they began to wreck, systematically.

Men stood by the vehicles, or leaned against trees, their rifle butts on the ground. They all had blackened faces. You could see that some of them were asleep standing up. For a moment it was calm, no engines running, not even a distant buzz of aircraft engines to disturb the peace. It was a fine morning, if misty. Ernst breathed in the scent of honeysuckle.

‘It was just like this after Stalingrad,’ Heinz muttered.

‘What was?’

‘The retreat. Our front just collapsed. So it is here. No coordination, no proper communication. The calmer officers trying to impose a bit of organization. Just a headlong flight, really.’

Fischer approached them. ‘You keep talking like that, Kieser, and we’ll leave you with that broken-down truck.’

Ernst asked, ‘So what’s going on, Unteroffizier?’

‘The hauptmann over there says the Americans have broken through at Faversham. Their tanks are heading for Canterbury, and then on to Folkestone. It will all be over by nightfall.’

‘They have learned the art of blitzkrieg,’ Heinz said without emotion.

‘They will find nothing but rubble left of Canterbury. And there’s talk of a fighting withdrawal, making a stand at the Hastings bunker. I think—’

There was an explosion, out of nowhere.

Ernst dived for cover behind a truck. Fischer almost landed on top of him, his heavy bulk thudding into the dirt. Bits of twisted metal clattered from the truck’s body, and a wall of dust and heat swept over them. There was a stink of petrol and oil and rubber.

When the shock wave had passed, Ernst twisted sideways and looked out, under the truck’s body. One of the tanks was burning, still sitting where it had been parked. Flames shot out of its open hatch. Ernst could smell oil smoke and cordite, and the sour, awful stench of burning flesh. But then another explosion broke open the tank turret further, and Ernst had to duck again. Now there was a rattle of machine-gun fire.

One of the officers from the motorised column came running by, a Schmeisser machine pistol in his hand. ‘Partisans! Fucking partisans! X Company with me, we’ll clean these bastards out. The rest of you stay under cover.’ So Ernst huddled with Fischer under the truck, while the troopers stormed the resistance hold-out. There was a crackle of small-arms fire, the chatter of machine guns, the thump of grenades - and screaming, plenty of that.

But even as men fought and died Fischer dug a pack of field rations out of his pocket. It was wrapped in a bit of newspaper, one of the last editions of the
Albion Times,
with a picture of Goebbels’ visit. Fischer unwrapped the paper and handed Ernst a bit of army bread. Ernst had some water in his canteen, so he got that out to share. ‘Quite a picnic,’ Fischer said, chewing on his bread. ‘We must do it again—’

Another explosion, and a clatter of shrapnel against the truck sides.

After that Ernst thought he might have slept for a while, despite the extraordinary situation.

At last they were called out of hiding. Men emerged from the vehicles and the ditches, and slowly began to form up into marching order once again.

Heinz nudged Ernst. ‘Come on. Let’s take the chance and go and see how those partisans have been living.’

They crept forward, past the burned-out tank.

The auxiliaries’ bunker had been broken open by grenades. SS men were rifling through the junk. Built of railway sleepers and corrugated iron, it was quite extensive, with rooms and tunnels, and bits of equipment scattered everywhere - weapons, tinned food, paraffin lamps, radio gear. Bodies were curled up in the ruins. One SS man picked up a thick booklet marked ‘Countryman’s Diary 1939’; it seemed to contain instructions on sabotage and guerrilla warfare.

A German medical orderly was tending wounded, mostly German but one British with a shot-up kneecap. Some prisoners had been taken, men in battledress sitting with their hands on their heads, watched over by more SS troopers. The captured men were a mixed lot, mostly older men but some younger, aged eighteen, nineteen, twenty perhaps, men who had grown up during the years of the occupation.

And one man, aged perhaps twenty-two, looked familiar to Ernst.

Ernst spoke to the SS guard, offering him a cigarette. ‘May I talk to that man?’

The guard took the smoke. ‘Makes no difference to me or him. Partisans get nothing but a bullet, you know that.’

Ernst stepped forward and squatted down before the man.

The Englishman watched him with a kind of insolent curiosity. ‘What’s your problem, Fritz?’

‘My name is Ernst Trojan. I am an obergefreiter of the Wehrmacht. You are surprised at my English.’

‘Not that you speak it. You sound like you’ve picked up a Sussex accent.’

Ernst smiled. ‘That would not be unexpected. I have spent much of the three years since the invasion billeted with a family, in a farmhouse near Battle. And you I recognise from their photographs. You are Jack Miller.’

Jack raised his eyebrows.

‘Your family believe you are a prisoner on the continent. Or, perhaps, dead. They have not heard from you for a long time.’

Jack looked angry, as if he had been reprimanded. He was a young man, but Ernst saw in him something of his father’s stubbornness. ‘Wel
l, you can see how I’m fixed, Obergefreiter. I broke out of a stalag in Hampshire pretty sharpish back in ‘41, and got picked up by this lot, and I’ve been with these blokes ever since. I had to stay off the radar, see. I’ve become a UXB specialist, if you want to know. These old men need somebody with a bit of military expertise to give them backbone.’

This banter was directed at his comrades. They grinned. ‘Yeah, yeah. You tell it like it is, Windy.’

‘And did you receive any of the letters sent from your family?’

‘Not since I left the stalag. This isn’t the kind of location you can send a postcard to, is it? But we’ve all got our duties to do, haven’t we, Obergefreiter?’

‘That is true.’

Jack hesitated. ‘So how are they, the family?’

Ernst sighed, and wondered how to compress three years of family news, and such difficult news, into a few sentences. And yet he must try. ‘Your father is well. He rages against the occupation.’

‘So he should.’

‘Your mother - you have a new little sister. Myrtle, born in 1941.’ That perplexed Jack. ‘That’s a shock.’

‘Your brother Alfie joined the Jugend. He had little choice.’

‘And Viv? Wow, she must be seventeen now.’

‘She is fine.’

‘I did read about you. Those early letters to the stalag. They said you were a decent man, for a German.’

‘Praise indeed.’

Fischer nudged Ernst. ‘Time to move on, Trojan.’

Ernst stood.

Jack said, ‘Herr Obergefreiter - my family—’

‘Yes?’

‘If you find a way, will you tell them, you know ...’

Ernst tried to keep his voice level. ‘Yes, of course. I will write. I will tell them how I met you. And when all this nonsense is over you and I will drink English beer together, two old men talking about the war.’

‘You’re bloody paying,’ said Jack.

Ernst walked back to his unit, which was ready to move out. The conferring officers seemed to have come to a decision.

‘So now what?’ Heinz asked Fischer.

‘We have new orders,’ said Fischer. ‘We split up. We Wehrmacht elements will make for the Hastings bunker, with the tanks. Meanwhile the SS and the Party men will make a dash for the town, hoping to get to the transports before the harbour is closed.’ Everybody knew what he meant: the Wehrmacht men were expected to lay down their lives to cover the escape of the SS. Fischer said, ‘The SS are going to take these prisoners with them.’

Heinz asked, ‘Why not just shoot the bastards here?’

‘The SS officers are concerned about due process.’

‘Rubbish,’ Heinz said. ‘They’re concerned about their own arses. They don’t want to leave another mass grave, not with Tommy and the Amis half a day away.’

‘Well, whatever, these are our orders. Form up.’ Fischer walked around, blowing his whistle, calling for his men. ‘Form up! Form up!’

Ernst looked for Jack again. But the prisoners had already been loaded onto a troop carrier, which roared away, dashing south.

It was about three in the afternoon by the time Gary reached the strongpoint. It straddled the Battle road two or three miles north of Hastings, near a hamlet called Telham.

It was a formidable bunker, a concrete block set down uncompromisingly in the middle of English countryside. A triple wire fence surrounded it, and the bare earth between the fence and the building was no doubt riddled with mines and other nasties. The Germans did build well, you had to say that for them. An impressive anti-aircraft gun installation had been mounted on the roof, but that was a twisted tangle of metal, already taken out from the air.

There was a fire fight going on, closer in. Stray shots came pinging, and occasionally there would be the thump of a mortar. The Germans in the bunker were evidently still putting up a decent fight. But Gary could see that a Wolverine, a big mobile gun, had been drawn up to face the bunker. It was firing shell after shell, and was making craters in the concrete wall. A Sherman stood behind the Wolverine, quiet, its shoulders massive. It was like a huge beast waiting to pounce, Gary thought.

The countryside around was littered with the wreckage of battle. Gary and his mates approached along a road lined with burned-out tanks and mobile guns and armoured cars and trucks, shoved aside to clear the way. There were bodies too, stacked up in a field. Some had their faces covered by their jackets, but others had been stripped of boots and shoulder boards and other mementoes.

They were halted beside a burned-out Sherman tank, some way short of the bunker. While Danny Adams crawled forward to find out what was what, Gary, Willis and the rest of their platoon huddled in the cover of the tank.

They swapped cigarettes; the smoke dispelled the stench of burned oil and rubber from Gary’s nostrils. Willis napped a bit. They were all exhausted, even though the exhilaration of the advance pepped them up.

Adams came crawling back. ‘All right, lads, here’s the picture. We’ve surrounded the bunker, the wireless masts have been shot up, the telephone lines cut. The Jerries are isolated in there and have got to be running out of ammo and fuel. But they’re still fighting.’ He sketched on a bit of paper. ‘What we’ve got is actually three houses in a terrace, farm workers’ cottages. The Nazis plated over the whole terrace with concrete. Inside you’re going to find lots of little rooms, doorways, cellars. Outside, you’ve got this triple wire fence around the perimeter, and this whole area between bunker and fence is mined.’