‘A man happy at his bally work,’ Birdie commented and then concentrated on the sea ahead. Next to him on the swaying, vibrating bridge. Smith balanced himself the best he could and studied the shore, flashing by at a dizzy rate, with his binoculars.
Now he could see dark figures, rifles at the trail running heavily across the white frozen fields. To their front there were white puffs of smoke coming from a line of trees, black and skeletal, stripped of their leaves, which lined the road. One of the running men threw up his arms dramatically. A rifle fell from the man’s suddenly nerveless fingers. Next instant the man pitched to the frozen furrow of the potato field.
Smith pursed his lips and lowered his glasses for a moment thoughtfully. The attackers would be a skirmish line of Polish civilians, trying to hold up the Germans who were presumably stalled among the trees. That was good; the Poles were stopping them, at least for a while. But where were the howitzers? He knew little about such guns, only that they could lob a shell high into the air so that it would come roaring out of the sky, with devastating effect, on its target. Could they hit the convoy at this range? he asked himself.
‘Dickie, take her in a little closer and slow to half speed.’
‘Ay ay, skipper,’ Dickie sang out jauntily, cap tilted at a rakish angle, white silk muffler streaming out behind him.
‘Billy,’ Smith called out to Bennett, who had finally stopped his jingle. ‘Keep a weather eye peeled. First sign of trouble at your end – let me know.’
‘Ay ay, sir.’
Now as they came closer in, their speed lower, Smith brought up his binoculars once more and began to survey the coastal road very carefully. He knew from what he had heard from men who had come back from the trenches that the Germans were masters of camouflage. But where could they hide their howitzers in that barren winter landscape?
Then he spotted where they had parked the howitzers while the firefight to the front was going on. There was a small collection of turnip and swede ‘pies’, of the kind used by Central European farmers to store their crops until they needed them for the animals: a hole in the ground into which the root crops were stacked, with layers of straw between, then earth piled up high on top so that the frost couldn’t get at them. They formed small mounds behind which one could hide a small gun and its carriage.
‘Slow both!’ Smith ordered swiftly, focusing his glasses. Yes, he was right. There were four small guns hidden by the mounds, a battery, and all around them dark figures scurried, unhooking them from the horse teams while an observer climbed on top of one of the mounds and was sweeping the coastal water with his own field glasses.
‘The Huns have spotted us!’ Smith yelled. He cried out the target and yelled as Billy Bennett swung his quick-firer round to face the mounds, ‘Fire at will!’
The fact cockney needed no urging. He pressed the trigger of the wicked-looking little cannon. It burst into frenetic activity at once. Gleaming brass shell cases started to tumble to the deck in rapid profusion. The dawn air was suddenly full of the stink of burnt cordite. White tracer shells began to race flatly across the water, dragging their burning light behind them on its surface, to pound right into the side of the mounds. Earth mushroomed on all sides. Turnips came tumbling out of the shattered ‘pies’ in a crazy torrent. Others flew into the air, flung there by the impact of the shells.
But even as Smith focused his glasses anew to get a better view, he knew their attempt to shell them out was going to be a failure. The mound of earth, straw and root crops was simply too thick for the little shells to penetrate. ‘Cease fire… save ammunition, Billy… cease fire!’ he cried angrily.
Just as angrily, the fat cockney took his finger from the firing trigger and snorted, ‘Dammit all. Ain’t fair. Can I have another whack, sir?’
Smith wasn’t listening. Already the top of the first howitzer’s muzzle was beginning to rise above the mound on the extreme right. He could see it quite clearly. They were going to fire on the Swordfish. Hurriedly he cried an order. Effortlessly Dickie spun the Swordfish to port and sped away. Not a moment too soon. There was a low roll as if of distant thunder. The dawn sky was ripped apart violently. Like the sound of a red-hot poker being plunged into a bucket of iced water, the first howitzer shell plummeted out of the hard blue sky right down where they had been a moment before. The Swordfish rocked from side to side crazily, as the second howitzer shell howled from the sky with the sound of canvas being torn in two ferociously. Again the Swordfish heeled and trembled, as Dickie opened the throttle wide out and they fled the shore, miserable at their impotence, defeated, or so it seemed, even before they had started…
* * *
They spotted the Uhlans minutes after the long slow convoy of creaking, heavily laden trucks had left the port. Their lances rested in the cup near their stirrup irons, bodies draped in ankle-length field-grey cloaks, those strange square shakoes which dated back to the eighteenth century, the German cavalry came slowly drifting out of the trees, taking their time, but not attempting to conceal themselves as their horses snorted and puffed, picking their way delicately across the furrowed icy fields.
Effortlessly Chris, big revolver in one hand, swung herself out of the cab of the lead truck and stared at them anxiously. There were about 150 of them, perhaps a reinforced squadron, and she guessed from the fine look of their big bays that their mounts were fast enough not to be outrun by this worn ancient collection of lorries.
Chris bit her bottom lip with worry. What were the Uhlans up to? In the war they had had a fearsome reputation for bravery and savagery. There were tales of them riding through Belgium in 1914 with Belgian babies skewered to their long lances. But they were certainly always in the forefront of any German attack, riding to the assault regardless of their casualties.
As she saw it, they could split the convoy in half by a bold assault in the centre, then carve up each half at their leisure. To the rear of the line of slow-moving trucks, the Polish guards had already come to the same conclusion and were firing out of the backs of the open trucks, although the Uhlans were well out of range. But for some reasons, the Uhlans seemed to show no intention of gathering for the charge – officers waving swords, banners being unfurled, trumpeters shrilling notes on their bugles, NCOs bellowing orders. Instead they kept on advancing at the walk, their lances still in their cases, no sign of forming a skirmish line for a bold charge across the ground which separated them from the line of trucks.
There was something strange, awesome now, about the approach of the riders, coming forwards in total silence, broken only by the heavy chug-chug of the truck motors and the wild snap-and-crackle of the Poles firing at them. It made Chris, as she hung there on the running board, uneasy, even frightened, something unusual for her. It was as if nothing could stop them; as if fate had already decided that there was no hope for the Poles. Their cause was lost and these strange-looking riders coming out of white glittering trees like grey ghosts, risen from the dead, were ordained to be the victors.
Then suddenly, startlingly, that heavy brooding silence and the strange remorseless approach of the Uhlans were broken by a sharp throaty crack far away, followed an instant later by a banshee howling, the keening of some wild lost spirit. Chris looked upwards. Out of the sky a dark object was falling, growing larger by the second. Crump! With a stab of cherry-red angry flame, the first howitzer shell exploded right into the middle of the convoy and the first troop of the Uhlans charged!
Six
Polack Joe had been too old for the Great War, as they now called it. But he had dyed what was left of his grey hair, bought himself a younger birth certificate in his local saloon and confident that his splendid physique would make him look younger than his age, he had presented himself at his local US Army enlistment centre.
The hard-faced recruiting sergeant had looked up at him from behind his desk and snarled, ‘Who are you trying to kid, buddy? You’re fifty if you’re a day. Beat it!’
Polack Joe had kep
t his temper with difficulty. He had answered in his somewhat fractured English, ‘Mr Sergeant, I ain’t a day over thirty-five, Honest Injun, Mister Sergeant. Look at me.’ He had flexed his biceps. ‘No one else can move steel like me in the rolling mill, please you believe me.’
The sergeant’s leathery face had cracked into a semblance of a smile. ‘Okay, Pop, you’ve made a good shot at it. But this is a young man’s war. Over there in France in the trenches they need young guys. Why else, you think I’m sitting on my fat keester here getting my pants shiny? On your way, Pop and don’t waste no more of Uncle Sam’s time.’
Sadly he had gone across to the nearest saloon and had got drunk on rye with beer chasers. But afterwards, before he had returned to Poland, he had listened avidly to the stories the vets from the ‘Big Red One’ and the ‘All American’ had had to tell when they had come back from France. What it had been like in the forests of the Argonne and how they had been slaughtered in the Saint-Mihiel ‘push’. And one thing he had always remembered from their tales of Heinies being chained to their machine guns, and booby-trapped bottles of Jerry hooch found in their dugouts was the need to ‘take out their frigging FAOs,’ as they always related it.
Now as Polack Joe crouched with his own handful of heavily armed volunteers, just beyond where the howitzers were crumping shell after shell at the stalled convoy in the distance, he remembered the need to ‘take out their frigging FAOs’ – the German forwards artillery observers. They were the men who lay hidden somewhere in front of the artillery, spotting targets, giving the co-ordinates to the battery by means of radio, and reporting back whether the shells had been accurate or not.
Polack Joe, as bold and as headstrong as he was, knew he and his handful had no hope of attacking the battery directly. They were surrounded by infantry dug-in and equipped with machine guns. They’d be simply walking into their deaths purposelessly. But the big ex-steelworker reckoned, if they could take out the unseen observer for a while, it would give the convoy a chance to get moving once more before the Germans could send up a replacement observer. But where was the present one hidden, whispering back his messages of impending death?
Polack Joe narrowed his eyes and searched the winter-white landscape, while all around him the volunteers crouched, cursing every time another Herman shell howled over their heads.
The coastal plain was flat and white, a collection of potato fields, dotted here and there with peasant cottages, thatch-roofed and single-storeyed, not high enough for an artillery observer. There was one tower, ruined and abandoned, perhaps some remnants of the seventeenth-century coastal defences when the Swedes regularly invaded this part of the Baltic. But it was behind the present German positions and, as he knew from the vets of the ‘Big Red One’ and the ‘Ivy League’, forwards observation posts were always placed in front of the Heinie positions.
Then he had it. To the front and right of the Germans dug in along the road and behind the root crop ‘pies’, there was a now abandoned former German church. When this had been German territory, the vast majority of the people had been Lutherans. When the Catholic Poles had taken over after Versailles, the German Protestants had retreated south to where there was still a German majority. As a result the church had not been needed. What had been worth taking had long been looted by the local Polish peasants, whereupon it had been boarded up and left. But its steeple did command the coastal plain. It would be an ideal place for anyone to spot what was going on four or five kilometres away on the road leading to Opele.
‘Jerczy,’ he hissed to the young boy, still wearing his white silk schoolboy’s cap with its bright tassels, ‘you’ve got better eyes than mine. Cast your glassy orbits on that heathen church and see if you can see anything moving – up in the tower.’
‘Tak, tak, Pan Drawtniak,’ the tall high-school boy whispered and raising his head slightly, stared intently at the steeple with his bright blue eyes, while the others watched him, puzzled about what was going on.
For what seemed an age, the boy peered at the church steeple, running his gaze up and down its pointed steeple until finally he focused his keen blue eyes on the little bell chamber opening. ‘There,’ he whispered suddenly. ‘I saw something move up there in the bell chamber. I’m sure.’
‘I believe you, Jerczy,’ Polack Joe said, his mind made up. ‘Come on, this is what we’re going to do…’
Now the Uhlans had fallen back, leaving the field to the front of the road where the convoy was trapped littered with dead bodies and grievously wounded horses, whinnying piteously, their flanks stained with blood, attempting frantically to rise to their feet.
Chris, her face sweat-lathered, the revolver still clutched in her fist, had always thought that cavalry charged straight into their opponents as they did in the romantic nineteenth-century oils which hung in the gallery of her father’s home. But they didn’t. In the very last moment when the artillery shelling had ceased they had wheeled to left and right. It was then that the Polish volleys had slammed into them viciously with devastating effect. Men and horses had gone down on all sides. Dead riders trapped by their stirrups had been dragged away by panicked horses, their manes flying in the wind. In an instant all had been chaos and sudden death.
Chris shook her head hard like someone trying to wake up out of a bad dream. They couldn’t waste any more time stalled on the road like this. The Uhlans had retired to the cover of the trees to lick their wounds. But she could see their dark outlines moving in and out of the woods like those sullen wolves, beaten off with their tails between their legs, but ready at a moment’s notice to attack again when they thought the advantage was on their side. ‘Move the wrecked trucks!’ she shouted standing high on the running board. ‘Reload the stuff on them… Come on, let’s get moving!’ She waved her arm round in a circle three times, the signal for start. Hurriedly the drivers threw in their clutches and began to move forwards once more.
Chris mopped her face and peered anxiously at the horizon to the west. It wouldn’t be long now before the German gunners knew that their Uhlans had been thrown back in defeat. Then they would start shelling the one road south once more. Time was running out fast again.
Now the convoy was on the move again. From the trees the Uhlans opened up angry fire with their short-muzzled carbines. Slugs whined off the sides of the trucks. Here and there a Pole screamed, threw up his hands and dropped over the side. But there was no time to stop and haul the wounded back in again. So they progressed southwards, leaving behind the bodies of those who had died for this new Poland which was hardly two years old, lying there on the white cobbles in the extravagant postures of those who have been violently done to death…
* * *
The Swordfish rocked to and fro gently on the waves, as Smith and Dickie craned their heads to the slight breeze, listening for the crack and boom of the German howitzers. But there was nothing. The howitzers had ceased firing for some strange reason and the silence continued. There was some faint small-arms fire. But that was about all. Were the Poles going to be allowed to clear off south with their vital convoy after all, while the Germans sat on their hands and did nothing? Smith and Dickie hardly thought that possible.
Almost angrily Smith broke the brooding silence with, ‘How I hate to be so damned ineffective! Here we have trained men, weapons, the lot, and we can’t do a damned thing! God it’s almost unbearable!’
Dickie didn’t respond for a moment. His brow was furrowed with thought and Smith suspected he had something up his sleeve, for he calmed himself – with difficulty – and said, ‘All right, Dickie. I know that look on your ugly mug. You’re cogitating. Come on, spit it out. A penny for them.’
Dickie sucked his front teeth and then said slowly, ‘Do you remember old Basher Bradley? You know that great rough of a chap, who was nearly thrown out of Dartmouth for seducing the admiral’s daughter? He was a couple of terms ahead of us.’
Smith nodded, wondering where this was leading.
�
�Well, just before he went down with his sub off Galipolli, he did an extraordinary thing – I mean if he hadn’t been the character he was, they would have given him the DSO or something for it.’
‘Go on,’ Smith urged.
‘Well, his sub was cruising off the beaches – you know where the Aussies were dug in and with Johnny Turk on the heights – when he spotted a troop train. The Turks had built a single-track line along the heights to bring up reinforcements from Constantinople.’
‘Get on with it!’
‘I am. Well, old Basher, being the sort of chap he was, he ran his boat in as close as he could get in shallows, in full view of Johnny Turk on the ridge line, ignoring the fact that they were blasting away at him with all they had, and loosed his two forwards bow torpedoes.’
‘At what, for God’s sake?’ Smith cried in exasperation.
‘I was just going to tell you, old fruit,’ Dickie said easily. ‘At the jolly old Turkish troop train!’
‘At what?’
‘You heard.’
‘Thought I hadn’t. Then what happened?’
‘The blessed “tin fish” careered out of the blessed water, ran straight up the blessed beach, scattering the Aussies all over the place, and hit the blessed troop train with a ruddy great thump.’ He shrugged and smiled in a slightly idiot manner. ‘End of Turkish troop train.’
Smith gave his old friend and comrade a hard look. ‘Are you suggesting what I think you are?’
‘I am.’
‘But do you think we can pull it off?’
‘We can but try—’ His words were interrupted by the sudden renewed thump of the German howitzers on the coastal road. ‘And the sooner we do so, the better, I think, Smithie.’
New energy surged through Smith’s weary body. He grabbed the voice tube, whistled into it and yelled, ‘Ready to move off, Sandy?’
‘Ay ay’ Sandy Ferguson’s voice came floating up the tube. ‘Ready as always, sir…’ He sounded as if he had been at the vodka.
The Baltic Run Page 20