Elaine was a courageous girl and accustomed to the antics of drunken men. Even so, it took her a few seconds to clear her brain sufficiently to grapple with the situation, for she was not at all sure whether or not the revolver was loaded. Usually it was not and she knew that he kept the ammunition in the little pouch, attached to the webbing belt that supported the holster.
She looked carefully on each side of him and was relieved to see the belt and its unbuttoned pouch lying on the bookcase, beside him. She decided then that he looked more absurd than frightening, hunched in the armchair, his nose dripping blood, his huge, swarthy body dripping water. She noticed too that his clarinet was on the mantelshelf, where he had placed it after she had coaxed him in from the garden.
She fell back on the sole armament at her disposal. Smiling archly, and letting fall the bathrobe, she unmasked her battery of charms at a range of less than six feet and in the gentlest of tones said:
“You don’t have to persuade me with a gun, Dutch darling!”
As she said it he gave a bellow and dropped the gun, throwing himself forward, his head down and his arms spread to enfold her. She had, however, anticipated this and side stepping his rush she grabbed the clarinet, whirled it high, and brought it crashing down on the back of his neck.
He fell forward on his knees and as he pitched to the floor she raised the clarinet for a second blow.
It was not necessary. He lay full-length, wheezing like a punctured bellows, and she left him there after putting the revolver into its holster, and hiding the belt behind a long row of Every Man His Own Lawyer, that stood on the lower shelf of the bookcase.
He was sitting up when she had finished her packing. His nose had ceased to bleed and he looked very sick, but seemed more or less sober.
“I’m going now,” she told him, “you’d better make yourself some coffee and then start clearing up this mess! I’ve emptied the bath and hidden your gun. You’ll find it if you lay off the rum long enough. Good-bye now, Dutch!”
He said nothing but continued to stare at her. She went out into the kitchen to find something in which she could wrap her wet clothes, finally deciding to use the American cloth that was pinned to the table.
When she returned to the living-room for her suitcase he was still sitting there, ruefully examining his clarinet. She saw that it was cracked along its whole length and that some of its stops were twisted.
“Who did this?” he demanded, sullenly.
“I did! On you!” said Elaine lightly, and picking up her case she went out through the hall and into the road.
She caught the first available train to London, arriving at Woodside about 6.30 a.m. There was no ’bus or taxi at that hour, so she had to carry the case along to Shirley Rise and up the hill to the Avenue.
It was a heavy case and she was panting when she turned into the crescent and passed the gate of Number Four.
An American officer was emerging, a slim, middle-aged man, with rimless spectacles. Elaine glanced at him, noted his uniform, looked away quickly and then looked back, beseechingly.
He ran after her, calling out in the rich drawl of the Deep South:
“Pardon me, ma’am…let me help you with that baggage! Kinda heavy for a lady, isn’t it? You live hereabouts, ma’am?”
Elaine stopped and handed him the case. She smiled, and thereby bestowed upon Lieutenant Ericssohn the fatal glance, demure, yet vaguely promising, that she had once practised before a wardrobe mirror not fifty yards from where they now stood.
“You’re so kind,” she said, “but I’m not going far, only across to Number Forty-Three…would you…it has been a drag, all the way from the station …!”
They walked together across the Avenue and down the odd side as far as the gate of Number Forty-Three.
“Thank you captain…that was charming of you…but then, all Americans are gentlemen aren’t they? Everybody says so!”
He gazed at her rapturously as she fumbled for her key.
“Say ma’am—I’m billeted here, Number Four, party by the name o’ Miss Clegg. I’m from the dee-pot, over in the wood, and ma name’s ‘Ericssohn’, Lootenan’ Ericssohn!”
“I’m delighted to know you, Lootenant,” said Elaine offering her gloved hand.
CHAPTER XIX
Reconnaissance In Force
AN HOUR OR so before Elaine dragged her heavy case up Shirley Rise that August morning, two other members of the Avenue rump were nearing the end of a more complicated journey. They were heavily laden, but not with suitcases. They carried, as well as their routine equipment, sections of a Bangalore torpedo for the purpose of blasting a passage through the wired gullies that led up towards the Hess battery, west of Dieppe.
Their troop was early in the field that morning, for the main battle had yet to begin. The little convoy of landing craft chugged across a calm sea, shrouded in the greyish white mist of the hour known to Commandos as ‘Nautical Twilight’ and the smaller Commando group, to which the Carver twins were attached, headed direct for Vesterival. Its members were armed, in the main, with mortars, and their job was to engage the battery whilst a heavier column circled it from Quiberville beach and then attacked from the rear.
The twins had passed close by Dieppe during their long trek from the Belgium frontier two years before but their familiarity with the landscape did not date from Dunkirk days. They had since studied every yard of the Vesterival beach and the village beyond from a scale model, built up by their officers from hundreds of aerial photographs. They now felt they knew the ground as well as they knew the Rec’ or the ploughland beyond Manor Woods, south-east of the Avenue.
They stood, as usual, very close together in the bows of the landing craft and it was just light enough for Bernard to make out the outline of Boxer’s bullet-head and powerful shoulders. They had not spoken since they had left the transport vessel. Boxer never spoke much on these occasions and this morning Bernard could not trust himself to speak.
He had never felt this way before, not even on the first occasion that they had gone into action, and certainly not at the outset of the bigger shows, like Vaagso, and St. Nazaire. On those occasions he had experienced successive waves of excitement that were almost pleasurable and his thoughts concerning the probable outcome of the raid had always been optimistic.
He did not feel this way today. Every few moments his stomach seemed to detach itself from his trunk and float away, as if attached to a long, tenuous cord which had to be gathered in before his stomach returned to its normal place. Then, when the stomach was back where it belonged, it was invaded by a large, malevolent crab, with ice-tipped pincers, that nipped and squeezed, causing Bernard to suck in huge mouthfuls of air and hiccough.
He wondered if any of the men standing close to him had noticed his hiccoughs. Boxer, who had his back to him, did not appear to have done so, for once or twice he half turned, and grinned his wide, clownish grin, jerking his head sideways, as if to express exuberance. When he did this Bernard almost hated him for his utter lack of nerves and his inexhaustible reserve of schoolboy élan.
As the boat pushed silently through the mist Bernard wondered if Pippa, the sallow, brown-eyed girl in the Avenue, was responsible for how he felt now. If so, then it was a pity that he had encouraged her by telling her about Boxer, and by writing her all those letters before their outgoing mail had been banned and they had been isolated behind wire in preparation for the big show.
He carried a bundle of her letters in his breast pocket, a dozen or more fat envelopes, making up a package the thickness of a small Bible, like the Bible that Lofty Burridge always carried into battle.
Bernard wondered if the reason why he had disobeyed regulations by carrying the letters across the Channel was in any way related to the reason why Lofty Burridge carried his Bible. Lofty was not a religious man but he had a superstitious belief in the power of a pocket Bible to isolate his heart from a sniper’s bullets. His father, so he told them, had met a man in the
trenches during the last war who had shown him a New Testament with a small piece of shrapnel embedded in its leaves. It was absurd to imagine that a packet of letters would afford any protection against a bullet or a grenade splinter. Nevertheless, Bernard had slipped the envelopes into his left-hand breast pocket when he had been equipping himself the previous night.
He gathered his stomach to himself once again and lifted his hand to feel the letters. As he did so his mind’s eye conjured up a familiar image of their author, thin-faced, earnest and immensely reassuring as she had seemed that day on Shirley Hills, when he had made such a bloody fool of himself by weeping on her breast and then, unaccountably, dropping off into a heavy doze.
He remembered then what she had said to him about looking after himself, about letting Boxer take his chance when the fixed machine-guns began to chatter and the air about them hissed with bursting mortar shells and exploding grenades. The memory of her plea now seemed disloyal to Boxer, and so he put it from his mind and reached out to touch Boxer’s hairy wrist.
“What is it, Berni-boy?”
Bernard swallowed and at last managed to speak. His voice was midway between a croak and a hoarse whisper.
“Don’t forget, Boxer, we stay together, no matter what! You remember that, Boxer! Don’t you go whooping off on your own, like you did last time!”
Boxer chuckled, his shoulders shaking.
“Why sure, sure! That’s what we fixed, didn’t we?”
And then something of his twin’s tension must have communicated itself to him, for he half-turned and peered more closely at Bernard.
“You okay, son? You okay, Berni-boy?”
The big crab began another deliberate exploration of Bernard’s bowels but he managed to say:
“Sure I’m okay! Don’t worry about me! Just you remember what I said, that’s all. Just don’t lose touch on the way up!”
Bernard was not able to discover whether this repetitive statement reassured Boxer, for at that moment a shower of star-shells exploded about the winking beacon of the Pointe d’Ailly lighthouse. Simultaneously an air-raid siren began to wail from somewhere in the town, on their port quarter.
The man behind Bernard said: “Look! That must be the Spits going in! It’s any minute now!” but there was still no unmistakable sign that the coast ahead had been alerted, no crescendo of sound, as at Vaagso or St. Nazaire, that announced that they were recognised and being fired upon.
The blaze of light from the star-shells and the throb of aircraft to starboard helped to calm Bernard, so that he forced himself to assess the known factors from a military rather than a personal standpoint.
“What’s the chances of catching ’em napping, Ginger?” he demanded, of the man on his right.
Ginger, a thickset man of Boxer’s temperament, rolled chewing gum on his tongue and cocked an eye towards the lighthouse. The main stream of their assault group had already veered off to the west and were due at any moment to ground on the shingle at Quiberville.
“I dunno,” said Ginger, at length and then, carelessly: “A bit less’n bugger all, I should say!”
Boxer heard the grim joke and chortled.
“Pipe down there,” muttered an officer, from his position in the bows, “we’re almost in, chaps!”
Any minute now thought Bernard and his brain seethed with alternatives. Let Boxer go and play safe himself, doing exactly what he had been told to do, no more and no less. Hold Boxer back, as he knew, no matter what kind of hell they faced on the beach, he was capable of holding Boxer back. The Commandos had had Boxer but two years but he had made Boxer’s decisions for twenty-two. Compromise between these two alternatives, forge ahead with Boxer, as at Vaagso, and thereafter rely on his own quickness of eye and on Boxer’s astonishing proficiency with firearms, to keep them both alive until the recall, until Verey lights from beyond the battery told them that the main column was attacking and the mortar party was free to retire? Or one other course; let things slide, trust to luck and do what seemed the right thing to do at the climax of each successive moment?
His mind exploded like a box of ammunition, conflicting resolutions shooting this way and that, demolishing each other in flight, but beyond it all he could still see the solemn, narrow face of the girl, Pippa, and he began to curse her for the confusion she had created inside his head. On all previous occasions it had been so simple and uncomplicated, simply ‘Look after Boxer! Watch out for Boxer! Keep Boxer alive! Stop Boxer from getting killed!’
Suddenly the boat grated on sand and at once the mass shook itself into dozens of independent shadows. The light from the star-shells waned as boots pounded on shifting pebbles and men ran crouching into the blackness ahead.
Bernard sensed rather than saw that Boxer was only a yard or so in front of him and his feet lunged at the pebbles, thrusting his body upward towards the low cliff, where the initial impetus soon spent itself and men seemed to mill here and there without purpose or direction.
Boxer’s big face appeared out of the murk, and Bernard heard him shout:
“Number One Gully’s wired up! We’re going to blast out Number Three—come on,” and he shot off to the right, fumbling with equipment as he ran.
Bernard sprinted in pursuit, overtaking an officer just as a series of ear-splitting explosions crashed out from the direction of the lighthouse.
“Cannon-fire…! Thank God for the Spits! It’ll cover the noise of our torps,” gasped the officer. Then, without remembering at all how he came to be there, Bernard was kneeling at the foot of a wide cleft in the cliff-side, struggling with fuses as the first Bangalore torpedo blew a gap in the crisscross of wire that was stretched tightly across the mouth of the gully.
With the first detonation Bernard’s confusion disappeared and with it went all his fears. The habit of military discipline, and month after month of specialised training, reasserted themselves and he became a fiendishly active automaton, linked to Boxer not because Boxer was his twin, but simply because he was his partner in this particular enterprise.
Together they unslung their rifles and struggled up the gulley on the heels of the officer and side by side they swept into the village beyond the cliff-edge and set about winkling the bewildered enemy from the houses and shepherding a flock of sleep dazed civilians into chattering groups as the sub-section established its line of communication to the beach.
The vicious crab slept as the troop took up its position in the scrub, close by the outer section of the battery’s wire. There was a murderous rhythm about each move of every man in the section. The two-inch and three-inch mortars were yanked into position and the anti-tank gun dragged stealthily forward to a point where the gunner could hear German voices muttering inside the wire.
Snipers, Bernard and Boxer among them, took up their positions on the very edge of the cover, marking down a light machine-gun position on the roof and the heavy machine-gun posts inside the compound. The sparse shrub twitched with the movement of invisible figures but, miraculously it seemed, they were undetected by the garrison.
Presently a heavy silence descended on the extended group and Bernard, lying prone, could hear Boxer’s breathing as he shifted his position slightly, throwing out his elbow in order to get a better purchase on his rifle butt. Inch by inch Bernard turned his head to the right and waited while the mist shredded away. Soon, as the minutes to zero hour ticked by, he could make out his twin’s freckled face, streaked green and brown, with its lavish coating of camouflage paint, so that Boxer looked more like a clown than he had ever looked.
Casual voices drifted across the scrub from the interior of the compound. It seemed to Bernard incredible that they could lie here, armed to the teeth and within grenade-throwing distance of the German wire, yet still remain undiscovered in growing daylight. Never before had they achieved this measure of success. Never had the real thing followed so closely the detailed planning of their briefing.
At ten minutes to six, when the last of the mist ha
d disappeared and a faint roar of battle was beginning to be heard from the east, the order was given to fire and the calm of the morning was shattered by an inferno of sound that seemed to sweep over the ground like a raging tide, swallowing them in vast waves and stunning their senses so that they watched their fingers perform tasks that had no origin in their brains.
Tiny, inconsequent facets of that action, imprinted themselves on Bernard’s memory; a German gunner, performing an almost graceful somersault over the light gun on the roof; a figure brought up short in a fast run across the compound and then lifted bodily by a second burst of the anti-tank gun, firing from the trees on his right; a direct hit by a mortar shell on one of the flak towers that seemed under the impact, to shred away like a stack of newspapers in a gale.
Of the main action, and of his own part in it, Bernard remembered nothing, up to the moment that one of the mortar teams dropped a shell into a stack of cordite in the compound and the entire enclosure rose up in a wide sheet of yellow flame, the blast wave striking the line of commandos and pitching them askew like a row of skittles.
Then more facets, each a horror in miniature; burned men appearing and disappearing in front of the wall of smoke; Boxer’s jubilant face an inch from his own, screaming something, he knew now what, and pointing wildly to a brace of Verey lights that were soaring into the grey sky beyond the battery.
Bernard recognised this as the signal and once again his training reasserted itself, telling him that it was time to writhe back from the blazing mass and seek what shelter he could find in the heavier undergrowth through which they had advanced.
He began to move at once, fixing his eyes on Boxer’s upturned soles and watching them recede as Boxer struggled to his feet to stand waist high in the coarse grass, firing and firing into the belt of flame beyond the remnants of wire.
Then the crab in Bernard’s stomach awoke and nipped, so fiercely that he cried out, rising to his knees and madly whirling his left arm.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 28