by Megan Rix
‘We have to wait for the red light,’ Sergeant Harris shouted back. But out of the hatch he could see more and more planes being shot down and he didn’t want his men to die without having a chance to survive.
‘Equipment check, strap on!’ he yelled. There followed a frantic few minutes as the men followed the instructions they’d learned during their training, and leapt out into the night sky.
The plane’s right wing was ablaze as the last man jumped and the pilot parachuted out too.
Chapter 16
As Grey raced towards the coastline after the planes he heard the chattering chi chi chi sound of alarmed guinea fowl. The day had dawned bright and clear but the drone of the Allied planes continued and it had left them in a state of panic. To Grey the flock of large grey birds looked similar to the chickens he’d seen at the farm in Kent, but not quite the same. He stopped running and went a little closer, only to have first one bird and then all of the birds come at him.
One bird wouldn’t have intimidated Grey. Nor would two or three, but many terrified guinea fowls squawking their alarm cry and charging him was too much and Grey turned and ran on.
Before him was a vast expanse of dunes and sand leading to the sea, and lying among the sand dunes there was a solitary plane. Grey raced towards it over the sand dunes, only to suddenly yelp in pain and stop. He’d stepped on a jagged piece of shrapnel buried in the sand. He felt a wave of agony sweep through him and he bit at his paw to try to remove the iron debris left from an exploded gun shell, but the fragment was embedded too deep and he couldn’t remove it.
He tried to run on but it was too painful to even touch the paw to the ground. He hobbled three-legged to the plane. It had lost both its wings as it had come crashing to the ground, and most of its tail. The front of it was also mostly gone, leaving a large entrance hole.
Before it fell the plane had caught fire and Grey could still detect the faint lingering smell of smoke. He sniffed again and crept closer. The pilot of the plane had parachuted from it as soon as it had been hit. Not to have done so would have meant certain death.
Grey peered into the wrecked plane and then went inside, giving a shrill yelp of agony from the pain in his paw as he lay down in his new den.
A day that had started so bright and sunny soon turned cloudy, but the plane kept him dry during the rainstorm that followed and he found the sound of droplets tapping on the plane’s metal casing oddly soothing. Grey dozed and then slept.
‘What have we here, then?’ a voice asked in French.
Grey couldn’t understand the actual words but the tone of the man’s voice was kind. He looked up at the old man with the wrinkled, weather-beaten face and merry brown eyes, silently begging him to stop the pain he was feeling. ‘Looks like you’re in a sorry state, dog.’
The old man shook his head as he poured some water from an earthenware jar into his hand and held it close to Grey for him to lap at.
‘The name’s Elijah,’ he told the dog, as he looked at the painful paw Grey was holding up. ‘Elijah Buckley and I’d say it’s your lucky day – and mine too.’ He gestured to the swastika painted on the side of the plane. ‘It won’t mean anything to you, dog, but this is a German bomber. I feel they owe me a bit of shelter.’
Only a few days before Elijah had had a horse and a caravan, but they’d been confiscated by the German invaders. For the last few nights he’d slept under hedgerows, but tonight he needed somewhere dry. His bones were too old for sleeping rough in the rain.
‘Back in a minute,’ he told the dog, as he went to collect twigs to make a fire. When he came back, Grey was licking his injured paw. ‘It’ll get infected if you keep doing that,’ Elijah told him. That paw would need seeing to but the dog wasn’t going to like it. ‘Looks nasty.’
Elijah had lived as a traveller all his life, although he was now without a caravan. His grandmother had taught him the old ways of healing and now he collected the herbs and plants he would need to help Grey to get better.
Then he made some gruel on the fire, added the herbs to it and gave the meal to Grey on a plate. Although he was in a lot of pain, Grey was still hungry and he licked it all up as Elijah made himself a separate bowl of gruel without any herbs.
As Grey ate, his eyelids grew more and more droopy until he could barely keep awake.
‘That’ll be enough,’ Elijah said, at last.
The herbs had done their job.
As Grey lay unconscious on the ground, Elijah cut open the paw and removed the piece of iron shrapnel, sewed Grey’s paw up again and put a poultice on it.
Grey slept for the rest of the day but in the evening he heard a sound unlike any he’d ever heard before and his eyes opened wide.
Elijah was playing his fiddle into the night sky and Grey was entranced by the sound.
‘You like that, do you?’ Elijah asked, noting the dog’s interest.
When he stopped playing, Grey made a small whine of disappointment and so Elijah played another tune and another after that, until the sky was completely dark and a full moon looked down on dog and man sitting by the German bomber plane. During the music, Grey would make small sounds, part whine, part howl, as if he were trying to join in.
‘I wonder where you’ve come from,’ mused Elijah to himself. ‘Shame to see a nice dog like you on your own. Got someone looking for you, eh boy?’
And all the while, only a few miles further along the beach, the Allies and the occupiers fought each other with guns and mortars and grenades and the sky was bright with rockets and flames.
‘Time for bed,’ Elijah yawned, and he wrapped himself in the pilot’s coat, which had been left behind.
Elijah and Grey slept soundly together in the body of the plane as the battle continued to free France.
In the morning, Grey was a little better and he ate some of the fish Elijah had caught while he’d been sleeping the day before. His paw was still very tender so Elijah wrapped seaweed around it and tied it carefully in place.
‘No walking for you today, dog,’ he said.
Every day for the next week they ate fish, and every evening Elijah played his fiddle and sometimes Grey joined in and sometimes, when the music was sad, his eyes took on a faraway look and he lay still and just listened.
By the time the early morning mist rose over the sea on the seventh day, Grey’s paw was healed and he was gone.
As he lit the camp fire to make his breakfast, Elijah grinned as he remembered Grey’s ‘singing’. He’d miss the dog and wished he could have stayed with him for longer, but a traveller would never stop a fellow traveller from going on his way.
The bomber was not as cosy as his caravan had been, but it would do as a home for now.
Chapter 17
Otto felt much too hot in his German uniform even though he’d taken his boots off while he fished.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he told his German Shepherd guard dog, Wolf. ‘You don’t have to wear clothes.’
Wolf looked at him and panted. He always preferred the snow to the sun.
‘I guess I don’t have to wear a fur coat like you,’ Otto agreed. ‘But if you’d just go in the water you could cool off.’
But Wolf, like more than one German Shepherd Otto had known, was not very keen on water and would only do so much as dip his paws into it if he could help it. Otto was very familiar with the German Shepherd breed. He admired their courage and intelligence and he had played a part in gathering as many as he could from French farmers to be trained up as German war
dogs. Four years ago, he had taken a whole litter of puppies from the Dubois family, not far from here.
Grey caught the scent of fish on the air, and wandered down to the river’s edge. As he lowered his head to drink the water, Otto spotted the sable-coated German Shepherd, but he didn’t let on that he’d seen him.
A moment later, Wolf spotted him too.
Grey lifted his head from the river to see another German Shepherd dog running towards him, barking aggressively. Wolf was a guard dog who’d been in the army since he was a puppy.
Grey turned to face this strange dog, the hackles along his back rising. But Wolf, who only moments before had been snarling at Grey, suddenly stopped and wagged his tail in the hope of making a new friend. Then dipped his head over his front paws in a play bow. Grey returned the older dog’s play bow and the two dogs ran to greet each other and were soon nose to nose as they sniffed their hellos, tails wagging constantly. All their initial hesitancy and fear was forgotten.
Otto strolled over to the dogs, acting as if he wasn’t really interested in Grey, but holding out a tantalizing piece of bratwurst sausage nevertheless. He dropped it on the ground close to Grey but not too close.
The smell of the sausage made Grey drool and he swallowed it down in one gulp.
Otto threw more sausage, and some for Wolf as well, but this time he dropped it a little closer to himself, though still without looking at Grey.
Grey ate the second bit of sausage and looked up hopefully for more, but his wariness was still holding him back. However, another chunk of sausage appeared, without any alarming movements from the soldier, so Grey plucked up the courage to approach it and gobble it down.
In no time at all he was sitting with Wolf beside Otto and sharing his picnic. He even let Otto stroke him and didn’t realize until it was too late that Otto intended to capture him.
Grey struggled violently against the noose that Otto slipped over his neck, but it was no good; he was well and truly caught and there was no escaping. Otto put him into the jeep and started the engine.
‘What have we here?’ The kommandant asked when Otto returned to the camp with Grey.
‘He’s a lost German guard dog,’ Otto said, although he didn’t know if this was true. But the dog certainly looked as though he could be one and this was the only way he’d be allowed to keep him.
The kommandant nodded. They needed more dogs to protect the railway gun that had arrived and for which they were now responsible.
‘No collar on him?’
Otto shook his head.
‘What are you going to call him?’
‘Max,’ Otto said. ‘He must be a German dog because he’s crazy about bratwurst.’
Otto chained Grey to the kennel next to Wolf’s and brought more food for them both. He also found a German collar and lead for Grey.
‘Now you look like a proper war dog,’ he told Grey, once the collar was on.
Grey tilted his head to one side and looked up as Otto petted him and imagined he could understand his every word.
‘What stories you could tell if you could only speak,’ he said.
The dog had obviously been trained, but he didn’t know where and he hadn’t heard of any German dogs going missing. Not that this meant that there weren’t any missing dogs. This was war after all, and he knew that situations were often confusing and chaotic.
That night he made sure the dog was tied securely both with a collar and a harness. He didn’t want him running off now he’d caught him.
Grey pulled against his chain collar but he couldn’t get free because of the additional harness, which wouldn’t let him pull his head back. Finally he lay down and Wolf, who wasn’t chained up, lay down beside him.
Both dogs were fast asleep but they immediately woke up when an enormous freight train pulled into the camp. It was carrying the massive railway gun from where it had been hidden further along the coast, and the train was the only machine powerful enough to pull it along.
The soldiers were excited to see it arrive, and jokingly dared each other to climb up. The gun was so vast they discovered that twenty-two of them could stand side by side along its barrel.The men who had accompanied it swiftly and skilfully built an igloo-like bunker over the top to try to disguise the gun from the Allies.
‘You will guard this gun night and day. With your lives if necessary,’ the kommandant shouted to his soldiers. It was a very important long-range firing gun and he was desperate to make sure the Allies didn’t take it from them, or even destroy it.
‘Alert me immediately if you detect anything out of the ordinary,’ he bellowed.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Otto’s colleague, Fritz, saluting and clicking his heels together. He clipped Wolf’s lead to his collar. ‘I’ll take the first watch,’ he told Otto. ‘You’ll take the second.’
The next morning, Otto took Grey for an early walk along the beach and through the forest on his lead and harness, so they could both stretch their legs before they had to take over from Fritz and Wolf.
But, almost as soon as they got into the trees, Grey caught the smell of a rabbit on the crisp morning air and pulled on his lead. Otto had had a dog called Gretel in his native Bavaria – she’d loved to chase rabbits, and sometimes caught them too. He wanted to trust this dog and let him off the lead but he’d only just caught him and he’d be in trouble from the kommandant if he lost him.
Instead of letting him run free, Otto ran through the trees with Grey still on his lead.
‘Watch out for Wolpertingers,’ Otto laughed as they loped along together.
Bavarian folklore said that horned rabbits or Wolpertingers lived in large forests. As a little boy he’d been frightened of the stories, but not any more. Now he knew there were many more real things to be frightened of than imaginary ones.
He missed Bavaria more than he could ever have believed possible and he longed for the war to be over so he could go home. But he knew he might not live to see that day.
‘The French Resistance have reported that the Germans now have an enormous railway gun in this area. Our aim is to reach it and destroy it before it can do any more harm,’ Major Parry told his men, who had all luckily survived the drop and had set up headquarters in a bombed-out, half-demolished, one-roomed school. He spread out the large-scale map on a desk to show them the positions each of them needed to be in. The gun was ten miles to the north of their location.
‘Green, you’ll come from the rear here …’ he said, pointing to the spot with the pencil he usually kept behind his ear.
Nathan nodded.
‘Timms and George, you move in from this angle,’ the major continued as he outlined the plan. ‘Solomon and Carter here.’
The men leant forward as he spoke, concentrating hard.
‘We’ll set off at midnight,’ he said finally, when he’d told them all they needed to know. ‘Till then try and get some sleep.’
Nathan lay by the classroom wall and thought about Grey as the other soldiers made themselves as comfortable as they could in the school with no roof. He didn’t expect to sleep, but was so exhausted that he was dead to the world almost as soon as he closed his eyes. In his dream he and Grey were reunited, but then pulled apart as he was roughly shaken awake. He felt that he’d only been asleep for a minute but hours had gone by and it was time to leave.
‘Camouflage up!’ the major said.
Nathan and the rest of the men smeared their faces and hands with greenish-brown face paint from the small tins they’d be
en issued. They left the school just after midnight and trekked silently through the countryside.
It was just after five o’clock when they reached their destination and time for the mission to begin properly. Everyone felt very tense.
Nathan and the other soldiers edged through the trees, creeping ever closer to the well-guarded gun.
‘Just ahead,’ the major hissed. He indicated to Nathan that he should now head round to the rear of the gun. The weapon was surrounded by barbed wire, which they would need to cut through.
Through his binoculars Nathan could see patrolling soldiers and a German Shepherd dog inside the barbed-wire fence. It was going to be tough to get past the soldiers, but the deadly railway gun had to be captured or destroyed. It could fire shells up to thirty miles and cause devastation with a single shot, so the British needed to do everything they possibly could to prevent the Germans from using it.
As Otto and Grey headed back to the camp, Nathan crept out on to the beach and carefully circled the barbed-wire fence, looking for a spot at the rear where he wouldn’t be seen as he cut through it.
Otto and Grey had almost reached the camp when Grey suddenly stopped in his tracks. He’d caught the scent of Nathan in the air at last and he had to find him.
‘Slow down!’ Otto shouted as Grey took off, pulling him towards the beach. Then he heard the staccato sound of machine-gun fire. The British soldiers had been spotted by the camp’s defenders and the battle had begun.
As Grey tried to drag Otto towards the beach, a sniper in the watchtower spotted Nathan. He carefully tracked him as he crawled between the sand dunes until he had a clear sight of him. He aimed and fired, then smiled in satisfaction as he realized his shot had reached its target. Then the sniper turned to shoot at the other British soldiers who were heading towards the railway gun from the other direction, but realized there was little he could do – there were far too many of them for him to be able to stop. Meanwhile, Nathan had collapsed in agony from the burning, searing bullet wound in his calf and he crawled on his belly back into the sand dunes where he remained hidden.