by John Harris
Near the sea, amidst the monstrous chaos of charred wreckage and tortured steel, bodies were being laid out in long lines to await collection; and more wounded soldiers, many in severe shock, waited for the medical orderlies. There were so many of them the orderlies didn’t seem to know where to start, and there was a terrible politeness among them as they waited. Nearby, oblivious of the machine-gun bullets, a weeping man was throwing stones into the sea as though he had nothing to do with the battle. A group of prisoners was standing knee-deep in the water; gaunt, worn men still dazed by the bombardment.
More men were collecting the waterlogged corpses gruesomely jostling each other in the surf and, as Iremonger and Pargeter arrived, two stretcher-bearers stumbled through the sand with a groaning man. The sergeant with the notebook looked up. ‘Right femur,’ one of the stretcher-bearers said. ‘Hit by a piece of shell. It’s sprinkled with sulphanilamide but I guess he’s lost a lot of blood.’
The sergeant pointed to the blood transfusion unit. ‘Over there,’ he said.
A doctor bent over a man who’d been hit by mortar fragments, digging scraps of clothing out of the wounds.
‘I’m looking for a guy called Cornelow,’ Iremonger began but the doctor gestured without even looking up.
‘See the sergeant,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy.’
Iremonger and Pargeter crossed to the sergeant with the notebook.
‘Cornelow,’ Iremonger said. ‘Captain Cornelow. Third Cavalry Recce Squadron. You got him here?’
The sergeant looked up. He seemed exhausted. ‘Colonel, sir,’ he said. ‘Honest to God, I lost count of the number of casualties we’ve treated.’
Iremonger’s voice was gentle. ‘It’s important, Sergeant.’
The sergeant seemed almost as shocked as some of the men being treated. ‘Colonel, sir,’ he said. ‘Every one of these guys with me is bone-tired. Out of one guy we picked around two hundred pieces of metal, looking for the one that had done some damage. None of ’em had. He was just punctured like a colander. Then there was a kid with a little hole below his hip that didn’t look at all serious. But, underneath, the bone was shattered and the arteries were severed. He’s over there.’ His hand jerked at the line of blanket-covered bodies. ‘There’s another guy who was hit in the wrist and the shell fragments went right up his arm to his elbow. It didn’t even break the skin but he has a hell of a great blister from the heat of the metal.’
‘Sergeant,’ Iremonger bent down, speaking slowly. ‘It’s important that we find this Captain Cornelow.’
‘Colonel, sir,’ the sergeant raised red-rimmed eyes. ‘For all I know, he’s been evacuated. A few have. We got ’em down to the water and aboard landing craft.’
‘I’d like to know, Sergeant.’
The sergeant looked up. Down the beach, MPs and beach-masters were beginning now to bring some order after the seven hours of chaos. Landing craft still burned, the oily smoke rising in thick clouds to the sky over the pounding surf, and the low tide was exposing the ruin of the earlier hours and the bodies caught under the barbed wire.
‘I’ll look, sir.’ The sergeant turned the pages of the notebook slowly. ‘I’ve been awake now, sir, Colonel, for nearly seventy-two hours.’ He began to read out aloud. ‘Anderson, Donald; Zimmermann, John; Dube; Cunningham; Janzen; Phillips; Tallerday; Wozenski; Hupfer; Glisson; Jones–’ the weary eyes lifted. ‘Sir, it’ll take all day! There’ve been so goddam many on this stretch of beach.’
‘Sergeant, it’s important,’ Iremonger urged. ‘We have reason to think this Cornelow is a German.’
‘Sir, we didn’t have no Germans through here. We just looked after our own boys. Any case, there’ve been goddam few Germans captured round here.’
‘He wasn’t captured, son. He was in uniform – the same uniform you’re wearing.’
The sergeant looked puzzled. He was too tired to take in the implication of what Iremonger was saying.
‘We have reason to think he was a German spy, Sergeant,’ Pargeter said. ‘We have to find him.’
‘German spy? I guess you’d better see the lieutenant, sir.’
‘Sergeant–’ Iremonger’s voice grew harsher ‘–who’s got the names of the guys who’ve been treated here?’
‘I have, Colonel.’
‘Then look through your list, son, and find him.’
The sergeant shook his head but he went back to his note-book, muttering to himself ‘Tucker, Vandervoort, Sweeney, Schultz, Kirk – Christ, sir, there are hundreds!’
‘Keep looking, Sergeant.’
The sergeant struggled through the book, interrupted now and again as one of the medical corpsmen appeared with a question or a wounded man came up or was reported by the men carrying his stretcher. Dazed by weariness, he kept losing his place but, driving him, forcing him against his own inclinations and theirs, they pushed him through to the end of the list of names.
‘No Cornelow,’ the sergeant said.
Iremonger frowned. ‘Could he have died?’
‘I got the names here, sir. Ain’t many, thank God! We kept most of ’em alive.’
‘Go through ’em, Sergeant.’
A group of stretchers arrived and the sergeant had to break off to take down particulars. The men on them were all lightly wounded and talkative, and they had to wait with gritted teeth for them to be cleared.
‘Sir, for God’s sake,’ the sergeant appealed, ‘you can see how busy we are!’
An officer joined them. He was a doctor and stood stretching his back, stiff with bending over injured men. He was frowning.
‘What the hell’s going on here, Sergeant?’
‘Mr Willetts, sir, these gentlemen insist on me finding some guy they say is a German.’
The lieutenant turned on Iremonger. ‘We have no Germans here,’ he snapped. ‘We haven’t treated any Germans.’
Iremonger drew a deep breath. ‘This German was wearing American uniform, Lieutenant,’ he grated.
The doctor looked as weary as the sergeant. ‘You can see how busy we are. Now that the beach’s clearing, it’s only starting.’
Another group of wounded arrived, helping each other. The doctor broke off to direct them to the teams of orderlies, and the sergeant, grateful to be off the hook, followed them to take their names and particulars.
The doctor was just turning away when Iremonger laid a hand on his arm. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘Doctor. Believe me, I wouldn’t be bothering you in the work you’re doing if it weren’t important.’
‘What’s more important than saving lives?’
‘Lieutenant, that’s just what we are doing. This guy, this Captain Cornelow, is a German officer.’
The doctor’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you kidding me?’
Iremonger scowled. ‘Do I look as if I’m kidding? I’ve been here since five o’clock this morning. As long as you have. Do you think I’d go through that lot just to be kidding?’
The doctor’s expression changed. ‘No, I guess not. But, hell, you can see–’
‘–how busy you are. Sure I can, Lieutenant. But–’ Iremonger’s voice rose ‘–for Christ’s sake, just listen to me for a minute, that’s all! One minute. If we don’t find this guy, it might well be that all those boys going inland now will be driven back into the sea tomorrow. You, too, for that matter. This guy we’re looking for knows exactly what the follow-up plans are and he’s trying to get them to his buddies over there. We’ve got to find him. He was with the Third Cavalry Recce Squadron and he was wounded and brought over here. His own men brought him. They told us. We have to find him.’
The doctor stared at Iremonger and then at Pargeter but he made no comment. He stood thinking for a moment. ‘Does the sergeant have no record of him?’ he asked.
‘The sergeant has no record among the wounded. If the guy’s died, that’s fine. We know where we are. But, Lieutenant, this goddam landing’s been jeopardised half a dozen times by the possibility of its secrets leaking out. T
his is just another. And this is the most important of all because this guy knows what’s going to happen tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, all the way to Berlin maybe, for all I know. Now, do you help us find him?’
The doctor said nothing for a moment. Then he called the sergeant to him. ‘Give me your notebook, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘You got another?’
‘Yeah, sir, but–’
‘Open it. Start a new record. I’ll use this for the time being.’
As the sergeant went away, grumbling, the lieutenant checked carefully through the list of names. ‘No Cornelow among the wounded,’ he said. He began to read again, turning the pages over. ‘No Cornelow among the dead. You sure he was brought here, Colonel?’
‘I’m sure of nothing except that I have to know what happened to him. The guys with him say he was hit and they brought him here.’
The lieutenant frowned, brushing aside a medical corpsman who demanded his attention. His expression distracted, he called the sergeant back.
‘Sergeant, did we have any men who were wounded and insisted on returning to their units?’
‘One or two, sir. Not many. Most of ’em were glad enough to stay put.’
‘Any officers?’
‘One or two, sir.’
‘Could this guy, Cornelow, be one of them?’
‘Christ, sir, I don’t know. One of ’em wouldn’t even give his name. Nellar told me.’
‘Where’s Nellar now?’ Pargeter asked and the sergeant’s hand jerked towards the line of bodies.
‘There must have been somebody working with Nellar,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Find him, Sergeant.’
‘Sir, for Christ’s sake–!’
‘Find him, Sergeant. It’s important.’
The sergeant stumbled away, his shoulders bowed.
The doctor followed a medical corpsman who was waiting alongside and bent over a stretcher. Down the beach still more men were trying to land through the line of ruined vehicles that clogged the surf, heading inland in a steady stream now, struggling up the slopes, weighed down by weapons and equipment.
Iremonger sighed, suddenly weary. ‘Christ, I didn’t enjoy biting that sergeant,’ he said. ‘The guy was whacked. Come to that, so am I. So are you.’
Pargeter shrugged. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Ain’t much here.’
‘We could always eat each other.’
Conditions were still improving. German artillery and automatic weapons continued to fire on the beach but with diminished intensity now. The engineers were blowing more gaps through the sea wall, bridging anti-tank ditches and clearing minefields. As the tide had receded, the demolition teams had made a fresh assault on the underwater obstacles in readiness for the next high tide. Ashore, more engineers, not waiting for the last house to be captured, were bulldozing a bypass through the village of St Laurent to the Bayeux-Isigny highway, and a steady flow of traffic was building up.
The sergeant returned, followed by a medical corpsman wearing spectacles. His hand was bandaged. The doctor looked up from a stretcher case he was examining and joined them.
‘This is Corpsman Deery,’ he said. ‘He was wounded when Nellar was killed. They were down the beach bringing in a wounded officer. Go on, Deery, tell the colonel here what you know about the officer you and Nellar treated. The one who wouldn’t give his name.’
Deery shrugged. Like the lieutenant and the sergeant, he seemed to be drugged with tiredness. ‘Hell, sir, I got his name.’
‘You did,’ Iremonger said. ‘What was it?’
‘I didn’t write it down. But I got a look at his dog tags.’
‘What was it, son? For God’s sake, what was it?’
‘Cronelow. Cronlow. Something like that.’
‘Cornelow?’
‘Might have been. Hard to remember. Hard to remember anything, but I think it was.’
Pargeter produced his photographs. ‘Was that him?’
Decry looked at them. He didn’t seem to be focusing too well. ‘Looks like him, sir. But, Jesus, sir, so much was going on at the time. We were swamped with wounded just then, sir.’
‘Go on, son,’ Iremonger urged gently. ‘You’re doing all right. What happened?’
‘Well, the guy had been hit in the thigh and the head, sir.’
‘Bad?’
‘Mortar, I think, sir. The head wound wasn’t too bad but the thigh wound was a lulu. No bones broken, but there was a hell of a hole there.’
‘Go on, son.’
‘He sat up while I was looking at his dog tags and pushed us away. Nellar pushed him down again–’
‘And then?’
‘And then he got on his feet. I told him, for Christ’s sake, sir, you’re wounded, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Sir, that sure was a brave guy. He just wanted to get back to his unit. Nellar told him he was in no fit state to go back anywhere but he said, for Christ’s sake, he was going back. Then he said something I didn’t understand.’
‘Didn’t understand?’
‘Foreign language, sir. German I thought. My mom was German, sir. I speak a bit of German. It sounded like “Ich muss gehen…” Something like that. I didn’t catch it properly.’
Iremonger looked at Pargeter. ‘Go on, son,’ he encouraged. ‘You’re doing pretty good.’
‘Then he started speaking English. He said, “I’ve got to go.” And Nellar said, “Then for Christ’s sake, sir, let me do something about that leg!”’
‘What did he do?’
‘He seemed to see the sense then. He agreed to let us fix it. We sprinkled it with sulpha powder and put a pad on and bandaged it. That guy sure had guts, sir. I know what I’d have done if I’d had a hole in me like he had.’
‘Did he give his name?’
‘No, sir. He was kinda impatient. Said he ought to be off. Nellar kept asking. We’re supposed to keep records. But he wouldn’t give it. “I’m not dead,” he kept saying. “I’m not even dying. Forget it. I’ve never even been here.” Sir, that guy oughta had a medal.’
‘Go on, son,’ Iremonger said gently.
‘And then he went off. Limping. His leg bandaged, his face beginning to swell. Me and Nellar watched; then we went down the beach for this officer who’d lost a leg. That’s when Nellar was–’ the boy gulped. ‘The officer was dead when we got to him.’
The lieutenant laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, Deery,’ he said. ‘That’ll be all.’
‘Not quite,’ Pargeter said. ‘Where did he go, Deery? Back to the Third Cavalry?’
Decry struggled through his tiredness to make his mind work. ‘No, sir. He went inland right here.’
His hand moved to indicate the men now filing through the cutting in the bluffs.
‘Did he join any particular unit?’
‘Jesus, sir, I don’t know. He just went. It sure looked like hard work to me, but he went all the same.’
Iremonger nodded. ‘Thank you, son.’ He turned to the doctor. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. I guess it’s up to us now.’
He turned to Pargeter. His shoulders were bowed and he looked as weary as the medical corpsmen. ‘I guess the bastard’s still one jump in front of us, Cuthbert,’ he said. ‘We don’t know where he’s at, who he’s with, or any goddam thing. We’re right back to square one.’
Ten
There was a sullen smell of smoke in the air, foul and threatening. The night was full of the grind and groan of moving vehicles. Despite the darkness, the build-up had not stopped and the lorries and men and guns and tanks, directed by the beachmasters from their sandbagged bunkers, were still moving steadily inland. A few German planes had flown over and a few bombs had been dropped, but the worst danger had been from falling splinters from the ack-ack shells which had sliced through tents, torn down branches and clanged on lorries.
Iremonger watched Pargeter. He still preferred to keep things simple, and Iremonger’s carbine was all he carried apart from his revolver and the pa
pers in his pocket. Iremonger had now acquired a tommy gun from among the hundreds of weapons abandoned along the shore. As they’d left the beach, lorries had been rolling down ramps to enter the water, accelerating into the shallows to prevent the sea reaching the ignition. When they failed, and the steam rose in clouds, they were immediately surrounded by men with ropes attached to bulldozers to drag them clear.
The first real sign of France they’d seen had been a ruined cottage on the edge of a village with an advertisement for St Raphaël painted on the wall and, beyond it, a profusion of small fields with clumps of trees and hedges on high banks. Before it had grown dark, the German artillery had wakened up and they’d lain like frightened rats in an orchard, pressed to the ground, their faces in the grass. As they’d moved ahead at last in the lull that had followed, MPs were sticking up notices – ‘You are in sight of the enemy’, and ‘Drive slowly. Dust causes shells’.
The village had been destroyed by the Germans to make a strongpoint and had been captured only a short time before. Several houses were still smoking but, despite the uproar, cattle continued to graze in the fields among the swollen bodies of other animals and, as they watched, a shell had killed a cow, spewing its stomach and intestines all over the grass.
An MP, only his eyes visible under the crust of dust and sweat that covered his face, had given them a warning. ‘No straying,’ he said. ‘Keep off the roads. Don’t touch anything. And avoid areas marked by cloth strips. They’re still mined.’ He jerked a hand at a row of corpses laid out neatly at the side of the road, their faces covered by their helmets. ‘And keep your heads down. There are snipers.’
Men pressed around them, crowding the narrow strip of occupied countryside to the point of discomfort. Through the blackness of the night, shouts could be heard over the sound of engines and the clatter of tank tracks, and the darkness was broken here and there by the winking cats’ eyes of blacked-out vehicles. Nobody was happy, though news had come through that on Utah Beach substantial gains had been made and the seaborne troops had linked up with the airborne division at Ste Mère-Eglise. The British and Canadians had failed to reach their first-day objective, Caen, but they were firmly established ashore at Gold, Juno and Sword beaches.