A Wind on the Heath

by James Pattinson

  Sterne was forced to accept the truth of what Blake was saying. The proof was in the radio transmitter hidden in the attic of that unpretentious house on Rosetta Avenue, in the code books found with it, in the evidence of an agent intercepted coming from the bookshop who had decided that it was in his own best interests to turn informer and put the finger on Peter Lakos.

  And then he remembered the man he himself had seen in Lakos’s shop; the man in a black raincoat and a black felt hat. He remembered the man’s eyes that had held his own for a moment, and how he had felt unnerved. He remembered too that Lakos had seemed uneasy and had told him that he would have to leave. There had also been the matter of the revolver with which he had threatened Judas Raven. Would an ordinary law-abiding citizen have owned such a weapon? And would a law-abiding citizen have been so opposed to the idea of reporting the incident to the police? His reluctance to take any action of that kind was perfectly explicable now. He would not have wished to attract the attention of those gentlemen.

  But would anyone engaged in such a criminal activity as passing secret information to a foreign power have taken the risk of letting to another person the flat immediately below the attic where the transmitter was installed? Surely not.

  He put this also to Sergeant Blake and was told that it was quite likely. ‘It would reinforce the innocent appearance of the establishment. The séances and meditation and all that sort of thing could have been for the same purpose. A smokescreen. Oh, they’re a sly pair, those two.’

  Sterne had by this time succeeded in convincing the sergeant and his superiors that he himself was innocent. They had no evidence pointing to his involvement in the espionage, and the fact that he had recently joined the Territorial Army counted in his favour.

  ‘Though,’ Blake said with a grin, ‘that could have been a blind too, couldn’t it?’

  He was not allowed to see the Lakoses before leaving. He asked Blake what would happen to them, and the detective gave a shrug.

  ‘They’ll be put behind bars for a good long time. You can count on that.’

  Sterne felt saddened. It seemed a terrible prospect. How would they stand up to it? He still felt there must be some explanation for what they had done. But what possible explanation could there be except the obvious one that they were dyed-in-the-wool Nazis? And he would never understand how two such likable people could be that.

  It was to be several years before he learned the whole truth of the matter. And by then one of the couple was dead and the other was close to dying.

  Chapter Thirteen – MIRACLE

  A few days later he had other things to occupy his mind. Britain was at war with Germany and he was a full-time soldier. More than six years were to pass before he could return to civilian life. People were saying that it would be all over by Christmas; but which Christmas? That was the question.

  He spent the first Christmas of the War in Northern France, not far from the Maginot Line and the Belgian border. Life was uncomfortable but not particularly dangerous. The most notable thing that had happened to him was the award of his first stripe, and he was now a lance-bombardier. It was a rank that carried with it a few more responsibilities and no noticeable advantages apart from a very small rise in pay from the fourteen shillings a week earned by a gunner.

  It was the time of the so-called Phoney War. In fact it suited both sides to have little activity on the Franco-German frontier: the British used the lull to continue rearming and the Germans were happy with a quiet Western Front while they dealt with Poland and prepared for a spring offensive against the Allies.

  Not that all was quiet. At sea there never had been anything phoney about the conflict. Surface raiders and U-boats were sinking British ships in large numbers; the battleship Royal Oak had been sunk in Scapa Flow; and the Battle of the River Plate had ended in the scuttling of the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee. Meanwhile, Russia had invaded Finland, and after initial reverses had overpowered the small Finnish army by sheer weight of numbers. As a result the Finns lost the Karelia Isthmus and more besides.

  But where Sterne was nothing much was happening, and this state of affairs continued into the New Year. Even when the Germans invaded Norway on April the Tenth and Britain sent an ill-fated expeditionary force to help the Norwegians and suffered ignominious defeat, this had little effect on him. Life went on in much the same way: monotonous, unexciting, boring.

  All this abruptly changed early in May when the German blitzkrieg was suddenly launched with the invasion of Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg. The Maginot Line, which was supposed to have protected France, became an irrelevance overnight, since the German army had simply bypassed it at the northern end by way of the neighbouring country.

  In the ensuing three weeks life for him became hectic and confusing. He had become one small part of an army in full retreat. The BEF was withdrawing, and he as an individual soldier knew nothing of the grand design or even if there was one. To him it seemed more and more like panic flight rather than an orderly withdrawal.

  There was a sergeant named Holmes in command of the gun team, and it was not long before they became separated from the rest of the troop. They rode in the truck that hauled the gun for the first part of the journey, and everywhere the houses had white sheets hanging from the windows, the inhabitants knowing that the Germans were coming and already preparing to make their peace with them. Collaboration was on the way.

  Others were fleeing, not willing to trust the invader. The roads were crammed with refugees using all kinds of transport: cars, lorries, horse-drawn carts and trollies, handcarts, prams, bicycles, anything on wheels. All that they could carry they were taking with them: bedding, furniture, bundles of clothing, pots and pans. Old men, women, children, all were on the move towards some unknown destination, leaving behind their homes and heading for they knew not what. Instinct told them to flee from the terror advancing from the east and the north, and they fled blindly in fear and desperation.

  And through this ruck of terror-stricken humanity the retreating armies, French, British and Belgian, struggled to force their way. Trucks, Bren-gun carriers, half-tracks, staff cars, artillery were all streaming in one direction, away from the enemy.

  The dive-bombers, the Stukas with their cranked wings and their banshee wailing came to add to the confusion and terror, and there was scarcely time to set up the Bofors gun and fire back before the planes had dropped their bombs and gone. The carnage was fearful; civilians and soldiers were slaughtered together; children and grand-parents cut to pieces in the same explosion. But when the planes had gone the column moved on, the wreckage shifted aside, the dead abandoned.

  On the fifth day Sergeant Holmes was killed by a bullet from a strafing Messerschmidt and Sterne had to take command of the little detachment of gunners. Gradually the countryside altered in appearance and they came to a region of low-lying fields with a network of canals and roadways dividing the land into squares and rectangles. The ground was marshy and the road they were following ran straight through it, with dykes on either side and a few pollarded trees. Into this flat soggy area the retreating armies seemed to be converging, and the entire landscape was marked by the drab-coloured columns that moved so slowly towards their destination which, according to the word that had gone round, was to be the port of Dunkirk.

  One day when they were still some way from the journey’s end the order came through that the gun and the truck were to be broken up so that they should not fall into the hands of the enemy. Everywhere equipment was being destroyed with sledge-hammers and crowbars, tyres slashed with knives or saws, radio apparatus wrecked, motor engines smashed to pieces. The Bofors gun and the truck that had hauled it did not escape this mayhem; that which they had cherished for so long, maintaining it in perfect condition with so much devotion, was now to be completely ruined beneath the frenzied blows of a hammer. It was vandalism by order.

  ‘It’s a bleedin’ shame,’ Gunner Smith said. He was a little runt of a man, ge
nerally known as Smith 124, these being the last three digits in his army number, to distinguish him from Smith 493 who was also in the troop. ‘People went to a lotta trouble making that there gun and now it comes to this. It won’t never get put together again.’

  ‘That,’ Sterne said, ‘is the object of the exercise.’

  ‘I know. But it ain’t right. It’s like we was turning on an old friend an’ givin’ ’im a kick in the teeth.’

  Sterne would not have expected him to have so much sentiment; he had never shown any affection for the gun when there had been work to do on it. But you never knew how people would react in any unforeseen situation.

  *

  They had to walk those last miles to Dunkirk, though in fact it was not to the port itself that they were to go, but to the seaside resort of Malo-les-Bains which adjoined it. The last part of the way found them stumbling through sand-dunes as the light faded. They were not the first to reach the beaches; the evacuation operation had already been in progress for three days, and the first thing that struck Sterne as they came through the dunes was the stench of rotting flesh. The beaches had been shelled continually and attacked from the air, and there were dead bodies everywhere. There were wounded and dying men lying around on the sand, many horribly mutilated by shell splinters. From here and there out of the gloom came a low moaning sound, punctuated by sudden quivering screams of pain.

  Down towards the edge of the sea three fairly widely separated lines could just be discerned extending a short distance from the shore. These were the queues of men standing in pairs and waiting patiently for the small boats that would ferry them to the larger craft anchored offshore in deeper water. The queues were very orderly, like people waiting outside a cinema or theatre, and they gave the impression of being groynes or jetties, apparently just as motionless.

  A curious fact was that this was not the first occasion when Sterne had been on this beach; but the previous time had been in far different circumstances. He had been about fifteen years old then, and had come to Dunkirk with a party of schoolboys in the summer holiday. They had stayed for two weeks in an old boarding-school named after the seventeenth century French Admiral Jean Bart who was born in the town, and they had walked daily to another school for instruction in the language of the country. Not that his mastery of French, never very great, had improved much as a result, but there had been outings and games and plenty of free time, which made the operation worth while from his point of view.

  He remembered an outing by bus when they had crossed the frontier into Belgium and had visited Ypres. They had seen some of the old trenches of that other war, with the dugouts and the barbed wire, preserved perhaps as a warning to later generations – a warning unfortunately that had gone unheeded. They had visited the Menin Gate with its columns of names of men who had died in those bloody battles years ago, when there had been another retreat – from Mons. An angel had appeared to those men, so it was said, protecting them. He had seen no angel this time.

  They had gone swimming from this very beach, he and some of the other boys. There had been bathing-machines on the sands then. You got inside where you could change your clothes in decent seclusion, and a horse was harnessed to the machine and it was dragged down on its wheels to the water. When you had finished bathing you got back into the machine and raised a small flag on the top by means of a cord. Then the attendant brought the horse and you were conveyed back up the beach. He could see no bathing-machines now, but perhaps they were there somewhere. He could just discern the long promenade where they had walked and cast glances at the pretty girls in their white dresses and summer hats.

  It was all so different now: no pretty girls, no white dresses, just the remnants of a defeated army waiting to be rescued.

  He and his men were on the beach for two days. They were two days of sheer hell; of shelling, bombing and strafing, getting what little shelter they could by digging shallow holes in the sand.

  In the end they were taken off by one of the armada of little ships that came across the Channel to join in the work of rescue. The boat which took them was a private motor-cruiser commanded by an elderly grey-haired man wearing a yachting cap, blue blazer and white trousers. His crew was a boy of sixteen who turned out to be his grandson. Both were remarkably cool in the circumstances and seemed to know exactly what to do. Twenty-five survivors were packed in somehow and transported to Ramsgate.

  Smith 124 put his own feelings pretty accurately into words. ‘Strewth,’ he said, ‘I thought we was bloody goners, for sure. It’s a miracle, that’s what it is. A bloody miracle.’

  ‘For once, Smithie,’ Sterne said, ‘I think you’re right.’

  It was not until years later that he was to learn how much Adolf Hitler himself had contributed to this miracle. Receiving reports of the progress of the campaign at the headquarters of the Supreme Command far away in Berlin, the Fuehrer had decided to ignore the recommendations of Field-Marshall von Runstedt, the man in command on the spot, and forbid the sending in of the panzer divisions for a final assault on Dunkirk. His reason apparently was that he feared his tanks might get bogged down in the marshy ground and suffer heavy losses. So the German army halted ten kilometres from the town and waited while 224,585 British and 112,546 French and Belgian troops, who might have been killed or captured, were spirited away under their very noses. The effect of this incredible blunder on the subsequent course of the war was incalculable.

  What was quite certain, however, was that it enabled a certain Lance-Bombardier David Sterne to live to fight another day.

  Chapter Fourteen – EMBARKATION

  Soon after his return to England and a spell of leave Sterne was posted to a light anti-aircraft battery which was stationed in East Anglia. There were four gun-sites at points along the perimeter of an airfield from which Blenheim light bombers were operating. The Bofors guns were there to defend the airfield from low-level attacks by German bombers, but in all the time he was stationed there not one bomb fell anywhere near.

  He had been promoted to the rank of full bombardier and his pay had gone up, but it had to be admitted that the life was unexciting, and indeed deadly boring. He lived in a wooden hut with half a dozen other men, and they went through the same routine day after day. They cleaned the gun, they did gun-drill, they watched the skies for the marauders that never came, they saw the Blenheims taking off on missions and saw them return – those that did return. They polished buttons and cap badges and blancoed webbing. They had visits from the lieutenant, the captain, the major and occasionally the colonel. They kept in the hut a Lewis gun and several pans of .303 ammunition for use in defending the site in the event of enemy paratroops descending on the airfield. None of them had ever fired a Lewis gun and no paratroops came.

  He went on courses. He learned all about gas warfare and came to the conclusion that if poison gas were ever used life would become intolerable. He doubted whether the gas-cape which was standard issue would really be much good at protecting him from mustard gas or lewisite.

  It was a white Christmas. It was the second one of the War and people had stopped saying it would all be over by Christmas; everybody knew it would be a long haul and they were resigned to it. No one that he knew seemed to think for a moment that Britain would lose the War; but looking at the hard facts it was difficult to see how it could ever be won. It was a case of blind faith overcoming cold logic. Defeat was unthinkable.

  *

  In the spring of 1941 Sterne decided to volunteer for a unit that was being formed to man Bofors guns on board merchant ships. Hitherto their only defence against attacks from the air had been Lewis guns on high-angle mountings and Hotchkisses and Marlins and old twelve-pounders, together with a variety of Heath-Robinsonish devices such as rockets that carried up cables with small parachutes attached, designed to catch the wings of low-flying aircraft. It appeared that the output of Bofors guns from the ordnance factories was now sufficient to warrant the mounting of them on ships, a
nd the various light anti-aircraft batteries around the country were being invited to supply the personnel to man them.

  Thus it was that in May 1941 Bombardier David Sterne arrived with his kit at North Shields to join a battery that was later to become part of the Maritime Royal Artillery working in partnership with the Naval DEMS organisation, the initials standing for Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships. The battery was at the time accommodated in a number of requisitioned terrace houses facing a piece of waste ground. The battery office was at one end of the row, and it was here that he was interviewed by the captain who was in command and was soon to be promoted to the rank of major. This officer welcomed him to what appeared from his words to be one of the finest units in the British army.

  ‘You are,’ he said, ‘joining a first class body of men. You, bombardier, will be given a gun-team and will go out from here to defend our shipping from the enemy. There can be no more important task than that. The convoys are this country’s lifelines and if we lose the Battle of the Atlantic we’re sunk.’

  The captain had a staccato way of speaking and he obviously believed in the efficacy of the pep talk. He was also at pains to impress upon this latest addition to his force the splendid qualities of the battery he was joining.

  A rather different version was given by a gunner who conducted him to the room where he was to sleep. It had been a bedroom in former days but probably never with so many occupants. The only furniture it contained was a number of two-tier timber-and-wire bunks. One of the upper bunks was vacant and Sterne took it.

  ‘You’ve come to a right bloody shambles here, bom,’ the gunner said. He was a sour-looking character who spoke with a kind of whine. ‘Talk about Fred Karno’s army! They ain’t in it. Not with this lot.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ Sterne said. ‘The captain told me it was all first class.’