Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  At last the water shallowed, and he found himself crunching over slippery shingle. The beach was long and sloping. It looked an awfully long way to the pillboxes beyond the sea wall which still spat their spiteful fire. And the beach was already littered with men lying still where they had fallen, and by the wreckage of boats and barges.

  Automatic fire hissed through the air. He threw himself flat. He landed heavily, his pack slamming between his shoulder blades like a punch.

  He saw there was a low wooden wall only a few feet to his right, like a groyne. Men huddled behind it. He might get a bit of cover there, if he could reach it. He rolled towards the groyne, over and over, his pack bumping under his back. A stray bullet smacked into the shingle, only inches from his right eye, and a pebble splintered and peppered his face with a kind of shrapnel. He cried out, feeling the sting of blood.

  But he got to the groyne. He pressed himself against the thick wood, which was dark and slippery with seaweed. It wasn’t much protection, but it was better than nothing, better than being out there exposed on the shingle like a beached porpoise. The men already here were soaked, wild-eyed, some of them wounded. None of them was from his company.

  He risked a look over the groyne. There was a pillbox directly ahead of him. He was right in its line of fire. He could not imagine the men inside it, fighting for their lives; it seemed like something superhuman, brooding, a slit-eyed monster spitting lead at him. Before it the beach was chaotic, cratered, men crawling or lying still, looking for cover in shell-holes or behind the wreckage of boats. He saw the black plumes of mortar fire, the crack of bullets, and toxic fumes and sprays of red-hot shrapnel rose up from shell falls. Overhead the aerial battle continued, much of it hidden by the murky low cloud. The RAF fighters dipped low enough to scour the men on the beach with their guns. And there were Luftwaffe planes in there too; he saw a Stuka dive bomber coming down to take on some English gun nest. There was a smell of cordite and salty sea spray and the rich, sickening tang of blood.

  And there was a wall further up where more men crowded, seeking shelter, their soaked battledress dark. Ernst realised that he had joined one of the black lines he had seen from the sea: bands of black that were mortal men huddling behind whatever cover they could find, trying to stay alive.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he reminded himself. Evidently the English resistance had been underestimated. A shot slapped the wood close to his face, and he ducked back down.

  Well, he couldn’t stay here. Looking around, he saw that others drawn up against the groyne had the same idea. One man, an unterfeldwebel, raised his arm.

  Ernst moved with the rest. And for the first time since landing in England he raised his weapon and fired.

  The troops advanced up the beach in turn. It was a long slog. It was a question of lift your head, take a shot to cover the rest, and then when they were firing take your chance to crawl a bit further forward, before ducking down again. Still the pillboxes fired. There were hazards on the beach too; Ernst nearly fell into a dugout improvised from a bit of drainpipe buried in the shingle, but the Englishman inside was already dead.

  And then a mortar emplacement got its range, and the shells rained down on the beach all around Ernst. Men and bits of kit were thrown high in the air, men torn to pieces in an instant, their limbs scattered. Ernst found himself crawling desperately over the bodies of the fallen. You could even get a bit of cover, if you ducked down behind a corpse.

  But gradually, he saw, inch by inch - life by life - the tide of the German offensive was rising up towards the defenders, and one after another their emplacements fell silent, put out of action by a rattle of gunfire or the pop of an explosion.

  And as he climbed the beach, and the daylight gathered, he began to see the scale of the operation unfolding around him. To right and left, all along the four miles of this shallow beach as far as he could see, men were making their advance, fighting and dying, Twenty-sixth Division slowly achieving its objective. Back at the edge of the sea, beyond the litter of assault boats and splintered barges, more troop carriers were pressing to land, a great crowd of them still stuck off shore. But already the sapper companies were landing their heavier equipment. He saw mortars and machine guns being assembled, and a big PAK anti-tank gun, and even an anti-aircraft weapon. The first horses were landing, bucking nervously as they were led through the spray. There were even men struggling to drag the barges out to sea, so they could be towed back across the Channel to be loaded with the second wave.

  When he reached the head of the beach, he had to crawl around anti-tank obstacles, big concrete cubes. And then he came to the barbed wire, already snipped and pulled back by the first wave of engineers.

  At last he was almost under the face of that damn pillbox itself. It was sheer concrete that glistened as if still moist. A man rushed it, lobbed a grenade through that slit, and ducked down. The grenade detonated with a dull thud, smoke and fire billowed briefly from the slit, and the pillbox was silenced. Ernst cheered with the others, wishing he could have thrown the grenade himself.

  And then one more push and he was on grass, the beach at last behind him.

  He heard a throaty roar. He turned, lying on his back, breathing hard.

  An amphibious tank was coming out of the water, its snorkel raised like an elephant’s trunk, a monster rising from the deep. On a day of extraordinary sights, this schwimmpanzer was the most remarkable. But a wounded man, lying behind a heap of corpses for cover, was right in its tracks. He screamed and tried to crawl out of the way, wriggling. But the tank driver could not see him and he was crushed into the shingle. His guts were forced out of his mouth and his arse, like toothpaste from a tube.

  XVI

  Ben Kamen watched the landings from the look-out post, high on the walls at Pevensey Castle.

  From horizon to horizon, as the sun rose, the beach was alight with the spark of firing. Shells came in from the sea too, where the German ships were firing on the coastal defences. There was even fire coming from big guns on the continent, massive rail-mounted Bruno-class, perhaps. And one by one the gun emplacements and Martello towers and anti-tank ditches and pillboxes that had been so hastily manned during the summer were silenced.

  Ben glanced around the interior of the fort. He was at the west gate, a relic of the Roman fort. The Roman curtain wall surrounded a cluster of medieval buildings, a lesser fort within the mightier ruin. It was this vast expanse of enclosed space that had inspired William of Normandy to make his landing here, when he had made his own invasion; it had been a defensible place to land his troops that first crucial night nine hundred years back.

  Well, the sea had receded since then. And now, after all this time, the fort had been adapted for another invasion, another war. The castle was host to a garrison that included Home Guard like Ben, and British and Canadian regular units. Pillboxes had been built into the ruins of the keep, and the towers of the inner bailey had been fitted out as a garrison. It was very odd for Ben to see the characteristic slit gun port of a modern pillbox cut into what was obviously medieval stonework, itself built of reused Roman masonry.

  But it was the same all the way along the English coast. Martello towers had been pressed into service, more than seventy of them, hefty structures thrown up before the time of Napoleon when the British feared invasion by the French. Now, after a hundred and fifty years of patient watchfulness, many were falling silent after only hours of use.

  ‘We’re not going to stop this lot today, mate,’ said Johnnie Cox. ‘Not this way anyhow.’ Johnnie was a Canadian.

  Ben shrugged. ‘Yeah, but that wasn’t the point, was it?’ He was aware of a faint Canadian inflection in his own voice; he had a habit of taking on the accents of others, in an unconscious strategy to fit in. ‘This is the coastal crust; it’s just supposed to slow them down. But when the counterattack comes—’

  ‘What counterattack? General Brooke doesn’t have the men, I’ll tell you that. If the BEF
wasn’t locked up in jail on the continent—’

  Ben shook his head. ‘You know, Johnnie, I’ve got to know a few soldiers in my time in England, and they’re all miserable bastards. But you take the biscuit. Don’t the Brits have any chance?’

  ‘Well, maybe one. It all depends on how tough they are.’

  ‘Tough? What do you mean?’

  ‘You got your gas-mask with you?’

  XVII

  It took until noon before Pevensey Bay was secured, with the railway line crossed at the halt, and the road to Bexhill taken, and the assault groups were at last able to form up, ready to move out. The tide had long since turned, and the barges and motor boats were desperately trying to reach the sea, for they were needed to bring across the second echelon, but they were having trouble finding clear water through the wreckage of boats and the tangles of corpses. The casualty rate must be high, Ernst thought, a quarter, a third of this first wave lost; he was lucky to be alive. But he had been forced to watch many comrades die.

  And then, after all that, four hours after Ernst landed, the gas came.

  Just one shell was dropped by a Blenheim bomber, onto the beach where Ernst himself had landed. It seemed to detonate harmlessly, causing few casualties. But then the gas spread, and men fell, crying out, clawing at their eyes and their blistering skin. Those officers with experience of the first war knew what this was: mustard gas. Fear spread through the ranks of the men, still massed tight on the beaches. They scrambled for gas-masks, fearing they might have been ruined by immersion in the sea.

  But there was only that one plane, that one shell. Perhaps this attack was carried out by a rogue unit, disaffected officers of the RAF. The British did not quite have the inhumanity to use this last resort - or, some said, the courage.

  Whatever, the incident served only to enrage the men. Ernst felt it himself.

  He was in the group that took Pevensey Castle. The defences here were feeble, and surrendered quickly when a flame tank, a flammenpanzer, forced its way through the west gate. Ernst was one of the first into a garrison that had been built into the ruins of the inner bailey, and he himself took several prisoners.

  One small man, dark, in the uniform of the Home Guard, dared to speak to them in German: ‘Welcome to England.’ Ernst used his rifle-butt to club him to silence.

  XVIII

  22 September

  Around seven a.m. on the Sunday morning, the day after the invasion started, the raids let up for a bit.

  The WVS coordinator was a plump, brisk woman of around fifty called Mollie. She practically shoved Mary away. ‘Get some rest. You’re no use to anybody dead on your feet. I dare say the Jerries will be at it again when you come back.’

  So Mary complied. After all, she hadn’t slept at all on the Friday night, had worked all Saturday, and had stayed awake that night too.

  She picked up her stuff, her rucksack and handbag, the briefcase that she’d taken to slinging around her neck on a bit of string, and she stumbled home, to George’s little terraced house in the Old Town. It took her only minutes to get there. It shocked her, actually, how close to home all this destruction and injury and death was. It was as if the whole of the war had focused down on this little bit of England, into her life.

  The house itself looked intact. But the front door stuck when she tried to open it, and she had to barge it with her shoulder. She felt the frame splinter as the door gave way. The corridor was dark, and the light didn’t turn on when she snapped the switch. Everything was quiet, eerily so after all the commotion outside. The carpets were covered with a patina of plaster dust. For Mary, lacking sleep, it was very odd to be here again. When she’d left on Friday night she hadn’t really expected to come back, not for a long while.

  She pulled off her gas-mask and rucksack, and dumped the felt hat and green WVS jacket she had been loaned. She made straight for the bathroom. Like the other WVS ladies, with embarrassed averted gazes or sometimes a giggle, she had been relieving herself behind heaps of rubble, in the smashed-up ruins of what had so recently been homes. The toilet flushed, but she could hear the cistern wasn’t refilling. She wasn’t surprised. Even as the raids continued she had seen teams of workers trying to patch up water mains, gas pipes, electric cables.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was a mask of greasy sweat and soot, her cheeks and forehead smeared where she had rubbed them with the backs of her hands.

  Nothing came out of the taps, but the water she had poured out on Friday stood in the sink, covered by a skim of plaster dust. She scraped the dust off with her palm and bent to soak her face. The water stung her hands. She saw that under the dirt she had blisters, burned patches. But the dirt floated off easily, and the cold of the water revived her a bit. She longed for a bath, and to wash her hair properly.

  She made her way to the kitchen. More in hope than in expectation she tried the gas ring on the cooker, but that didn’t work either. A cup of tea was off the menu, then, unless she built a fire in the living room and used the iron stand. It seemed a lengthy project, getting the coal, finding matches and a bit of paper and kindling, building the fire - she decided she couldn’t face it. Anyhow there was some milk, and more scummy water, and she knew there was a bit of bread; she could make a sandwich.

  She heard a clatter from the front door, a muffled curse. It was George. She walked back to the hall.

  He was experimenting with the door, which wouldn’t fit back in its frame. His uniform was dust-smeared and the left knee was torn badly. His face was black with dust and dirt and soot, as hers had been. He glanced at her. ‘Thought you’d still be around. The door - can you see, the whole frame is distorted? It’ll be a nightmare to get hold of a builder. Bloody Goering. Are you all right? You look done in.’

  ‘No worse than you,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘What happened to your hands?’ He took her hands and turned them over; his own hands were caked in dirt. ‘You need to do something about these blisters. We’ve got a bit of ointment somewhere.’

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  He followed her back towards the kitchen. ‘Is the gas on, then?’

  ‘No. But I was thinking of building a fire.’

  He shook his head. ‘No time for that. Look, let’s just have something quick. I need to get back to work. And you need to get out of here. Out of town, I mean.’ In the kitchen he put his helmet and gas-mask on the wooden table, opened a few buttons of his uniform jacket, and washed his hands in the sink.

  They began to make a rough breakfast together, glasses of milk, slices of bread with a pale scrape of margarine and elderly cheese.

  She said, ‘The Germans, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, they’ve landed at Pevensey and near Bexhill, and to the east between Hastings and Rye. Actually they’re all along the south coast. Today they’ll be trying to get more troops across, I should think, and supplies, although the bulk of the second echelon will come over tonight. And those already landed will be consolidating.’

  ‘And coming here.’

  ‘That’s the best guess. We’re supposed to evacuate what’s left of the civilian population. Let’s see if we can get a bit of news.’

  He went off to the parlour, and came back with his home-made wireless in its shoe box. He set it on the table, held up an earpiece scavenged from an old telephone, and began to fiddle with the settings. This home-made crystal set, by some process which non-scientific Mary regarded as a miracle, didn’t need any power.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘There’s Alvar Lidell. I wonder where he is now. They were talking about moving the BBC out from London to Bristol ...’ His voice trailed off as he listened. He sat at the table, chewing his bit of bread, his face emptying, the old phone earpiece clamped to his head. Mary sat with him and waited.

  ‘Well, there we are,’ he said. “‘The Germans have invaded Great Britain. In due course they will be driven out by our Navy, our Army and our Air Force. The Prime Minister, Mr Churchill,
has emphasised that the ordinary men and women of the civilian population will have their part to play ...’ He listened further. ‘Sounds like they’re panicking a bit in London. They’re moving the civil servants out to Lancashire and Wales. The government is talking to the Americans about ”increased cooperation, whatever that means. We could do with a few tanks and guns, never mind cooperation.’

  ‘Maybe they’re doing deals,’ Mary said.

  ‘Your ambassador Kennedy thinks we should surrender.’

  ‘Yeah, but we don’t all agree with him. The US has no interest in seeing Britain fall to the Nazis. I know Churchill exchanged military bases in Newfoundland and the West Indies for a pack of old destroyers. Maybe they’re working on something like that.’

  George grunted. ‘Nothing comes free with you lot, does it? Oh. The King is moving out of London, and his family. That’s a bit of a blow to morale.’ He put the earpiece down. ‘Well, that’s that. Look, Mary, just clear off. The trains are out. If you can, head out of town along the A-ROAD towards Battle. The police are organising convoys there, to be driven up towards London and the north.’

  ‘I was thinking of sleeping a bit.’

  ‘Sleep. God, I could do with a bit of that. Not just now. The next hours are critical.’

  She nodded reluctantly. ‘All right, George. Look - the others, Hilda and Gary—’

  ‘I haven’t heard from them since Friday. Seems like years ago.’

  ‘I left a note in the Anderson shelter. Said we should meet at Battle, if the opportunity arises.’

  He nodded. ‘Not a bad idea.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘It’s my job to stay here, Mary. I’m a copper.’

  ‘Your German is lousy.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. And so will you.’ He took her hand, carefully avoiding her burns. ‘You’re brave. If you’re an example of what Americans can do, the sooner you’re in this war the better.’