Fox from His Lair

by John Harris

  The soldier looked scared. ‘Look, Colonel,’ he said. ‘I’ve gotta get back out there and pick up a bunch of officers!’

  ‘They can wait!’

  ‘They’ll sure as hell chew my balls off, Colonel!’

  ‘Take your pick. Either they do or I do.’ Iremonger pointed along the beach towards the east. ‘Over there,’ he went on. ‘I’ve got to contact the Third Cavalry Recce Squadron on Easy Red.’

  ‘When, Colonel?’ The man at the wheel was staring horrified at burning landing craft. ‘Now?’

  ‘Now,’ Iremonger snapped. ‘Get going!’

  ‘Colonel, sir–’ the soldier clearly didn’t wish to go where so much damage was being done ‘–I gotta get back to the ship for these officers!’

  Iremonger whirled. ‘For Jesus’ sake, man,’ he roared, ‘you can see what’s happening, can’t you? It’s not a time to go by the book! Unless I get to Easy Red, there’ll be a lot more dead men floating in the water here. Perhaps even you! Now back off and get going!’

  The ramp slammed into place and, as the engines roared, the vessel went astern into deeper water. All round them the mined obstacles loomed up and Pargeter could see the helms-man’s adam’s apple jerking as he swallowed nervously. His clothes saturated, his face grimy with smoke and the oil in the water, Iremonger glanced at Pargeter who was just lighting a couple of cigarettes. As Iremonger stared at him, he took one of the cigarettes from his mouth and handed it to him. Then he handed the other to the helmsman who took it in a dazed way.

  As they moved in, a gun opened up on them and they could hear the bullets striking the front and sides of the vessel at an angle and whining off over the sea.

  ‘This seems to be a private stretch of sand,’ Pargeter said. ‘They don’t seem to want us.’

  The beach obstacles had played havoc with the landing craft ahead and they could see several awash where they had been blown up. Then a DC3, appearing from nowhere and just turning in the sky above them, was caught by the anti-aircraft fire and its port engine fell from the wing, to drop in a curving arc right on to the ack-ack battery that had shot it off.

  As they grounded, Iremonger and Pargeter scrambled over the side, and crouched behind a group of corpses. Nearby, as though separated by their rank, were three officers, all captains, all shot through the head, rolling backwards and forwards in the surf.

  As the firing died a little, they pounded up the beach to where a crowd of soldiers huddled together under the lee of the cliff; looking like a lot of swarming bees. There were a great many dead about, but the survivors seemed in better shape than the men on Dog Red beach. There were several wounded men with them, their heads or arms bandaged, but they still clutched their weapons and were glaring at the cliff with savage eyes as they wondered what they could do.

  ‘Who’s your senior officer, Sergeant?’ Iremonger demanded as they dropped among them.

  ‘You are, I guess, sir. Have you come to take over? I sure hope so, because the colonel and the major are down and we left Captain Cruse and Captain Smart right down there.’ The sergeant’s hand pointed down the beach. ‘We’re all right. But we’re split up a bit, and we need pulling together.’

  ‘I’ve not come to take over, Sergeant,’ Iremonger said. ‘I’ve got another job to do. Haven’t you any officers?’

  ‘Lieutenant Cuddy, sir. He’s only a kid outa school but so far he’s doing okay.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  The sergeant pointed to another group of men further along the cliff, and Iremonger slapped Pargeter’s shoulder and began to run.

  Lieutenant Cuddy looked about seventeen but, as the sergeant had said, he seemed to be well in control of himself and in command of his men. As they dropped down alongside him, he was shouting above the noise into the ear of a husky sergeant old enough to be his father.

  He looked up as they appeared. ‘Thank God you’ve come, sir. We seem to need someone here with a bit of experience.’

  ‘I’m sorry, son,’ Iremonger said. ‘I’ve got other things to do. I’m looking for the Third Cavalry Recce Squadron and I’ve sure as hell got to find them. Are they here?’

  The lieutenant stared at him. ‘You mean you haven’t come to take over, sir?’

  ‘No, son, I haven’t. I’m afraid you’re still on your own.’

  ‘We’ll be all right, Lieutenant,’ the big sergeant growled. ‘We’ve got these Krauts licked between us. You’ve only to say the word. The guys’ll go.’

  The lieutenant nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, and Pargeter saw him swallow down his fear.

  He pointed. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to be a mobile signalling station, but I guess their equipment’s still down the beach somewhere.’

  As he turned, there was a flat thunk behind them and a man who’d been lying stretched out on the sand, squinting along his rifle for the sight of a German head, jerked sideways, a bloody hole in his temple.

  ‘Sniper,’ Cuddy said. ‘Get these guys further in to the cliffs, Sergeant.’

  By this time, the gunfire support ships were pounding the bluffs behind them, showering them with grit and stones and pulverised earth.

  ‘Give those naval guys a chance, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Then I guess we can go. I’ll go first, sir.’

  ‘No, Sergeant,’ Cuddy said. ‘I’ll go first. That’s my job. You make sure the men follow me.’

  He looked at Iremonger and Pargeter and pointed to a narrow gap in the bluffs. ‘That’s where we’re going, Colonel. I hope you find the cavalry boys. Come on, Sergeant.’

  He stood up and started running, his young voice thin in the racket. The sergeant rose behind him, shoving and kicking at his men until they were all running too.

  Iremonger watched, fascinated and appalled by their courage. Then a machine gun opened up, and the lieutenant stopped dead. His mouth opened and shut several times but he was unable to speak and all he could do was wave feebly.

  ‘Keep going,’ the sergeant roared at the running men. ‘Keep running! You’re away, so, for Christ’s sake, don’t stop!’

  The lieutenant was still waving, but his arm had dropped and they saw the pistol fall from his hand. He was still standing, shuddering, his tunic red with blood, as the men swept past him. Then the big sergeant snatched him up in his arms and they disappeared out of sight over the bluff.

  Iremonger stared after them, his face bleak, then he turned to Pargeter. His mouth opened then snapped shut again.

  ‘Come on, Cuth,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ve a job to do too.’

  Eight

  Running along the beach in the shelter of the bluffs, they flung themselves down again by a group of men crouching against the cliff. Some of them were wounded and there were several dead sprawled further down the beach. A youngster with glasses was moaning in a loud nasal whine.

  ‘Those goddam Krauts just won’t stop fighting and my ma didn’t raise me to be shot at! My ma raised me to be a farmer! It was hard too! There wasn’t no money and my ma – !’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ another man snarled, ‘shut up about your sonofabitchin’ ma! My ma didn’t raise me to be shot at by the goddam Krauts either, but I’m not making no song and dance act out of it!’

  ‘My ma–’

  The second speaker leaned over and the complaints came to an abrupt stop as a fist caught the youngster at the side of the head. ‘Pass that on to your goddam ma, son, with the compliments of Private First Class Le May!’

  As Iremonger pushed among the group, the muttering stopped. Occasionally mortar bombs fell a little further down the beach, scattering them with sand and grit.

  ‘Where’s your officer?’ Iremonger demanded.

  The man called Le May jerked a hand towards a corpse lying a few yards away. ‘That’s Captain Ward,’ he said. ‘Lieutenant Trenchard’s over there. He’s dead too. The bastards caught us just as we reached shelter. I reckon they was waiting for us. They let us get out of the landing craft. Then they blew i
t up with all our equipment. They let us run up the beach and opened up with machine-guns just as we reached the shingle. They got Captain Ward and Lieutenant Trenchard right off.’

  ‘I’m looking for a Captain Loftus.’

  ‘Ain’t no Captain Loftus in this outfit, Colonel.’

  ‘Any new officers?’

  ‘Sure, sir. One. Captain Cornelow.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Le May pointed along the beach. ‘We took him over there, Colonel.’

  ‘Took him?’

  ‘Sure, sir. He was hit. That guy sure had guts, sir. We’re not supposed to be a fighting outfit, but he sure was set on getting through to the Germans.’ He pointed again and they saw several bodies lying in a cutting just above. ‘We got him back, Colonel, and took him along to the medics.’

  ‘What was he like, this Cornelow?’

  ‘Big guy, sir. Your age. Sure knew his stuff. No nerves. He wanted to get to them Krauts and he was sure going to try. Lieutenant Gray, sir, went with him.’ He indicated one of the bodies on the bluffs. ‘That’s Lieutenant Gray, sir. He thought that if Captain Cornelow could go, he could go too. The machine-guns got him soon after.’

  Pargeter produced the photographs they had of Reinecke. ‘That him?’ he asked.

  Le May looked at Pargeter’s unexpected uniform and then at Iremonger. ‘Who’s this guy, sir?’ he demanded suspiciously.

  ‘British officer. We want to see your Captain Cornelow. Is that him?’

  Le May looked at the photographs. ‘Looks like him, sir, but this guy in the pictures ain’t wearing Uncle Sam’s uniform. It’s – Christ, I don’t know what it is!’

  ‘It’s a Polish uniform,’ Pargeter said.

  ‘He was a Pole?’

  ‘He was a goddam Kraut,’ Iremonger growled. ‘Thanks, soldier, for your help. If he stopped one, mebbe we can catch up with him. We’ve been trying long enough.’

  By this time the beach presented an incredible picture of waste and destruction, the German obstacles swamped by the rising tide in a great wilderness of smashed landing craft and vehicles nudged by the floating bodies of dead soldiers. All around them, men clutched their wounds, their faces pasty with shock, silent, tight-mouthed, trying to reconcile their conduct with the pain of their injuries.

  As Iremonger rose to his knees again, brushing off the dirt, a mortar bomb landed a few yards away. His helmet flew off and he was lifted up and flung on to his back. As he sprawled on the sand, a fresh burst of machine-gun bullets cut a swathe around him. Pargeter jumped up and, grabbing him by the ankles dragged him into cover. After a while, Iremonger’s eyes opened and he began to sit up. Pargeter immediately pressed him down and pulled him further under the shelter of the cliff.

  His eyes and mouth full of sand, Iremonger struggled to sit up, blinking and spitting out grit. ‘Thanks, Cuth,’ he said. ‘You’re better at this sort of thing than you look. I can just see you winning a VC or sump’n for giving me a fireman’s carry across a blazing beach. Can you do a fireman’s carry?’

  A thin smile flashed disconcertingly across the grave face. ‘I come from a long line of firemen,’ Pargeter said.

  Iremonger shook his head. Bells were ringing inside it, and Pargeter looked at him, concerned. ‘You all right?’

  Iremonger shook his head again. ‘They lowered the boom on me, Cuthbert. I can’t hear. I’m deaf! I’ve gone deaf, Cuth!’

  Pargeter grinned. ‘It’ll go,’ he shouted in his ear. ‘It was a close one. Stay here, I’ll go on to the dressing station.’

  ‘Not damn likely! If you’re going, I’m coming too. Just hold your water until I find me a helmet.’

  There were several bodies under the cliffs, and a lot of scattered equipment. Iremonger grabbed for the nearest steel helmet and he was just about to put it on when his jaw dropped. He looked up at Pargeter with a sick expression on his face; inside the helmet was part of a man’s head and brains.

  Pargeter knocked the helmet from his hands and pushed another one at him. Iremonger nodded, his eyes bleak. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  But, as he spoke, another clump of mortar bombs dropped just down the beach and they had to dive back for the shelter of the cliff, their heads down, blinking at the crashes which seemed to strip the flesh from their nerves. Then the machine-guns opened up yet again, rippling along the sand in little waves. Iremonger looked up at the sky, as though wondering where the air forces were, then he scrabbled round in the hole they’d made in the shingle with their movements and stared at the cliff. Somewhere above a machine gun was firing.

  ‘I think we’d better stay where we are,’ Pargeter suggested. ‘Mebbe you’re right. If that goddam Fox has been hit, he sure won’t be moving far.’

  They seemed to have been pinned down on the beach for hours and Iremonger glanced at his watch.

  ‘Eleven o’clock,’ he said. ‘Jesus, is that all? I thought we’d been here weeks.’

  His back to the bluffs, he looked across at Pargeter. The Englishman had a gift for remaining motionless for long periods at a time, only his eyes moving. He was as filthy as Iremonger, soaked and covered with oil; a small, strong, grubby figure, self-contained and capable, but still a little remote. His eyes, like Iremonger’s were ringed with tiredness but Iremonger was surprised at the amount of energy his small frame still contained.

  ‘You’re a goddam funny guy, Cuthbert,’ he said.

  Pargeter smiled his secretive smile, as if the day’s challenge had lifted his spirits. ‘Other people have said that too,’ he agreed.

  The destroyers were coming in closer now, their guns ranging on the cliffs above them, and as they watched, a landing craft came in at full speed, smashing through the obstacles, and ground to a stop. The men aboard poured out at once and dived for shelter behind stranded vehicles. A second landing craft tried to do the same but, as it crashed up the beach, one of the mines on a tetrahydra exploded against its side. It continued to move ahead, however, and finally ground to a stop alongside the other, and they saw that the coxswains of other landing craft, realising what could be done, were doing the same. Destroyers backing up the movement were so close inshore they seemed in danger of touching the bottom, and at point-blank range they were firing at the German strongpoints all along the bluffs.

  The battle, which had produced a lull after the pinning down of the first waves, seemed to have wakened up again. Under the covering barrage, the engineers were completing the demolitions they had begun seven terrible hours earlier. The shore was still a waste of wreckage, burning vehicles and battered craft; and with none of the exits yet open, messages had been sent to the fleet to send no more vehicles, only men. But at last, incredibly, order was beginning to emerge from the chaos, and men were beginning to fight for more than just their lives. Above them the bush fires were still burning on the bluffs, but the morbid fear of mines which had so worried the first men ashore was beginning to recede. For hours, wounded had lain in the minefields, not daring to move, then, seeing the grisly remains of dead men, someone had realised that if they had exploded the mines with their deaths, their friends could at least cross at the points where they’d died.

  A few brave men walked erect, cutting wire, taunting others at the water’s edge, and an engineer lieutenant was on his face probing the sand with a knife for mines. Slowly, apart from a few units, which were beyond rallying, they began to move.

  A man with a brigadier-general’s star was striding up and down in a hail of fire waving a revolver and shouting to the soldiers to get off the beach. Along the shingle, behind the sea wall and crouched in the coarse marram grass at the base of the bluffs, they stared at him, as though unable to believe that anyone could stand upright and live. Then one of them rose to his feet and ran to an abandoned bulldozer and climbed aboard. The bulldozers engine exploded into life.

  Seeing the general still untouched, other officers began to clamber to their feet and stand upright. A colonel with a wounded hand tied up
in a bloody handkerchief was moving through the dead and the dying and the shocked groups of men, talking to them and pointing; gradually, in ones and twos and small groups, they began to rise to their feet and head inland. There was even a trickle of German prisoners, dazed by the gunfire, their hands in the air, anxious to surrender.

  The naval guns were knocking chunks off the bluffs by this time. The German fire had slackened, and men who had landed at Sicily and Salerno began to come out of their shock to probe their way forward. A sergeant, lying in the marram grass, used a bazooka to knock out a pill-box at the top of the slope. Another sergeant was running among the groups of huddled men, kicking at them with his boots. ‘Get up, you yellow bastards,’ he was shouting. ‘I’m going. Who’s coming with me?’

  German fire was still taking its toll, but now the soldiers weren’t diving for cover but running, bent double, for shelter higher up the bluffs and off the beach. Suddenly the whole beach was on the move. Men who not long before were cowering in fear of their lives were now standing upright, shouting and cheering, and the groups moving inland clotted together and became a steady stream.

  Iremonger swung round to face Pargeter. ‘We did it,’ he yelled. ‘By Christ, Cuth, in spite of everything, we did it! Come on, let’s go find that goddam Fox!’

  Nine

  The dressing station had been set up in a hole scraped in the beach under the bluffs. The dead lay in rows under blankets, labels attached to their feet for identification. A few bandaged men huddled nearby, their faces blank and expressionless. One of them was a bazookaman who still gripped his weapon with grimy straining fingers. A medical corpsman bent over him, giving him an injection into a bared arm, while nearby a sergeant was busy writing details in a notebook. The beach behind them was clearing now. Exhausted, hungry men were finding time to drink self-heating soup out of tins. Amazingly, above the racket, it was possible to hear birds singing in a way that lifted the spirits, and there were even butterflies fluttering about the bluffs.