In the corridor Dorothy faced Miss Parsons. ‘There’s … there’s a hand grenade in the classroom,’ she said. At last her voice croaked. ‘Mary Steer brought it in.’
The other teacher looked annoyed, as if she did not believe her. She stared through the panes. ‘Where?’ she demanded. ‘This isn’t some sort of fun, is it?’
‘It’s by the second desk on the aisle,’ pointed Dorothy, now whispering as if she feared her voice might set the thing off. ‘It still has the pin fixed in it, so it shouldn’t go off. You’d better get your class out into the playground. I’ll telephone the police.’ Suddenly, with horror she thought of Billy Steer.
With a strange snort, the other teacher was already hurrying back to the other room. Dorothy said after her: ‘Billy Steer is somewhere. He didn’t turn up …’
‘Billy Steer is your responsibility,’ snapped the other woman. As she reached the door of her classroom she bellowed: ‘Out! Out! Everybody leave the school!’ The children came tumbling out, running into the sun-splashed playground with cries of ‘What’s up?’, ‘What’s goin’ on?’ to their playmates already there. Dorothy was ahead of them. She reached Mary Steer and grasped her arm firmly. ‘Where is your brother?’ she demanded. ‘You must tell me, Mary. Did he have any more of those things?’
Mary looked around, her eyes awash with frightened tears. ‘Billy be in the lavs, Miss. ’Im and Bobby Bewler. ’Twas ’ee found them bombs. They got another, miss.’
Dorothy’s whole body tightened. Miss Parsons was strutting from the schoolhouse. Her question: ‘Did you phone?’ was stopped before it was half out.
‘They’ve got another one,’ Dorothy trembled. ‘In the lavatories. Billy Steer and Bobby Bewler.’
‘Bewler? Oh God, he’s off his head!’ cried Miss Parsons.
‘Get them all away,’ muttered Dorothy. Her eyes had not left the brick lavatories. ‘Please, get the children away.’
She began to walk across the tarmac playground. Behind her the senior teacher drove the children from the gates. People were looking from the windows of the cottages across the lane. ‘Billy Steer,’ called Dorothy. ‘Billy … Bobby Bewler … I know you’re in there. Don’t touch that thing, Billy. Don’t touch it. Come on out.’
Halfway across the playground she thought it had worked because the slyly smiling Bobby Bewler appeared. He was pale and fatty, his eyes permanently crossed, his face always idiotic. ‘Where’s Billy Steer?’ Dorothy demanded. She rushed forward. ‘Has he got that thing in there?’
She was answered at once. A terrible explosion blew the glass roof off the lavatories. The bricks toppled from the top of the walls and smoke spat from the entrance and through the opened top. The bang and the blast sent her stumbling backwards. The simpleton boy stood gaping at the dreadful thing and burst into huge bawling tears. Dorothy lifted her hand and smacked it across his white face, streaked now with brick dust. ‘Shut up!’ she shouted.
She walked slowly towards the lavatory door, smoke still clouding from the roof and door. ‘Billy!’ she called. ‘Billy Steer … Billy?’
Colonel Schorner picked up his telephone. A voice babbled from the other end. His whole body seemed to dry. ‘Oh, God,’ he muttered. ‘Jesus.’ Then firmly: ‘I’ll get an ambulance there right away.’
He put the phone down and bawled, ‘Albie!’ He picked the receiver up again. Albie appeared at the door of the hut. Schorner was already speaking into the phone. ‘This is the commanding officer. Get an ambulance to the school in Wilcoombe, and at the double. A child has been injured by a grenade. Get there quick. Take him to the US Military Hospital at Newton Abbot. Got me? Okay, move!’ He banged the phone down.
‘That’s terrible,’ said Albie at the door. ‘You want to go there, sir?’
‘Yes, get me to the school,’ said Schorner. The telephone rang again; he almost left it but after a moment’s hesitation picked it up. ‘Schorner.’
‘Sir,’ said the voice. ‘It’s the medics here. Lieutenant Browning. That incident …’
‘What about it? Get the goddamn ambulance there!’
‘Sir,’ persisted the officer, ‘we have orders that no civilian personnel can be taken to the Newton Abbot base hospital, sir. Only severe cases of military personnel, sir. No civilians …’
‘Get him to that hospital,’ Schorner grated down the phone. ‘Get the kid to the hospital, lieutenant, or I’ll have my hands around your goddamn throat! Do it!’
‘Bastard,’ he swore, slamming down the phone. ‘Stupid bastard.’ He picked it up again. ‘Give me the US Hospital at Newton Abbot and I mean quick,’ he rasped. He was through quickly.
‘Get me the commanding officer,’ he told the switchboard operator. Albie watched his face suffuse as the man replied. ‘Get me somebody then,’ he ordered. ‘And move your ass, soldier. This is Colonel Schorner, Engineers, at Telcoombe. I’ve got a casualty on the way and I want to make sure it’s treated right. Don’t argue, son. Get me an officer.’
He waited. Albie had gone and the car was already waiting, its engine running, before a voice came on the other end. ‘Captain Millbach here,’ it said. ‘Is there some trouble, colonel?’
‘I’ve got an ambulance on its way to you right now,’ said Schorner tersely. ‘An English child –’
‘No civilians,’ the other officer broke in. ‘That’s a strict order, sir.’
‘My ass, strict orders!’ Schorner shouted. ‘Listen, captain that kid is on his way. It was a US grenade, okay? I’m taking full responsibility …’
‘There is an order, sir –’
‘Fuck the order,’ bellowed Schorner. ‘I repeat, that kid is coming there on my orders. Do something about it, Captain Millbach, d’you hear? Do something. I’m going to call General Georgeton right away. If you don’t help that kid I’ll come and shoot your goddamn balls off. Got it?’
He thrust the phone down, then picked it up again. ‘Get me General Headquarters, Exeter,’ he ordered. ‘I want General Georgeton, right away.’
He waited, drumming his fist against the desk. Albie pushed away an orderly who was coming into the hut with a fistful of mail. ‘Later, later,’ he warned.
The soldier’s eyebrows went up when he saw Schorner’s face. ‘We lost the war?’ he asked Albie.
‘Beat it,’ said Albie.
Schorner got a connection. ‘General Georgeton, yes. And hurry, if you don’t mind, it’s urgent. What? Jesus Christ … Right, okay, put Captain Scarlett on.’
Scarlett spoke briefly from the other end. ‘Okay, colonel,’ he said when he had heard. ‘They do have an order, but I’ll clear it. They’re just dumb doctors. If I get busted I’m going to need you. I’ll see you at the hospital.’
Schorner picked up his cap and ran for the door. Albie was ready in the car. The colonel jumped into the back and they started fast across the camp towards the gate. ‘The hospital, sir?’ asked Albie.
‘The school, Albie. We’d better take in the school on the way.’
‘In case those meathead medic guys don’t get there,’ guessed Albie aloud. ‘That sounds like a good idea.’
The little soldier drove at speed down the long and narrow hill to the sea, then roared along the coastal road almost crashing the boundary barrier. ‘Emergency!’ he shouted at the confused military policeman on the gate. Schorner leaned forward to add his order but it was unnecessary. The snowdrop raised the barrier and whistled softly as the car shot on. ‘I guess the big day is here,’ he called to his colleague at the guardhouse door watching the car disappear to the west.
They speeded up Wilcoombe Hill and then immediately down into the coombe towards the school. A crowd of villagers were standing solidly outside the railings in the placid sunshine. They turned as they heard the car and parted to allow it through. Even then Schorner could see their hostile faces. A civilian ambulance was standing at the gate and in the playground the village policeman was saying something to Miss Parsons who was sobbing into a pink handkerchief. In
the corner the brick lavatory was blackened around its top and glass was lying across the ground. Schorner got out of the car and pushed his way into the schoolyard. ‘Did the military ambulance get here?’ he said to the constable.
‘It got here all right, sir,’ said the policeman saluting, an action which brought a murmur of disdain from the villagers. ‘They took Billy Steer off in it’
‘It was one of your damned, hateful bombs,’ Miss Parsons wailed. ‘You’re all just killers … all of you.’ She turned away and hurried to the gate.
‘How bad was Billy?’ Schorner said to the constable.
‘Bad, sir,’ said the man calmly. ‘They bain’t meant to cause pinpricks, be they?’
Schorner started to glare at him but he ceased when he realized it was a statement, not an accusation. ‘Where’s Miss Jenkins?’ he asked.
‘She went in your ambulance, sir. With the boy’s mother.’
‘Was he alive?’
‘I couldn’t rightly say. I got here just as your medical blokes was lifting him in. He didn’t look very lively to me. Both ’is arms was off.’
A sickness gripped Schorner’s chest. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.
‘That won’t help, sir,’ returned the policeman with the merest touch of censure. ‘The mischief’s been done.’
He turned away and made a token movement to send the people back from the school gate. Schorner wheeled and hurried towards the car. The crowd fell into sulky silence as he reached them and went between them, then, as he got in the car, an old woman up in a cottage window began to bawl abuse. It took only a moment for the crowd to join in. The swear words were mingled and confusing but the raised fists were plain enough and the word ‘Yanks’ repeated with hate from all around.
‘Let’s get out of this,’ Schorner ordered Albie. ‘The hospital.’
As the car moved, the rural fists began to beat on its roof. Albie accelerated and they were soon out of reach. Schorner cursed to himself. He did not turn round.
They reached Newton Abbot after a flying journey through the military traffic clogging the roads. Just outside Wilcoombe, Schorner had told Albie to stop at a military police control point and had ordered one of the white-helmeted motor cyclists to ride before them clearing the way.
At the hospital, a clean and widespread pattern of low buildings, they saw Scarlett coming down the steps from the main casualty area. He hurried forward, clay-faced. ‘They couldn’t do a thing for him, colonel,’ he said heavily.
Schorner stood staring at the hospital. ‘Not even with all the stuff they’ve got here,’ he said. It was a comment, not a question.
‘No, sir. He was dead on arrival.’
The American colonel looked behind Scarlett and saw Dorothy Jenkins walking, almost staggering towards the steps, her arms about a bent and weeping woman. He felt himself pale as he walked towards the pair. He reached them at the foot of the steps. Dorothy looked straight ahead, a terrible stare, as if she did not see him. Little grunts of sorrow were coming from the other woman.
‘I have a car,’ he muttered as they walked past him. Neither answered.
Drained, he stood and watched them go. ‘Get a car for those people will you, captain,’ he said to Scarlett. Scarlett saluted and ran up the hospital steps. Schorner was still standing watching the women. Albie stared after them also, his face puckered.
Then the pair stopped and slowly turned. It was the hunched crying woman who led the way back. Dorothy followed a pace behind, her expression like ice. Schorner moved towards them. ‘This is Mrs Steer,’ said Dorothy when they had reached each other. ‘Billy’s mother.’
Schorner was speechless. The woman looked up with a wet ingrained face. ‘’T’wadn’t your fault,’ she said with ghostly quietness. ‘You couldn’t ’elp ’un. ’Twas just the war.’
May
On an evening when the Devon air was as light as cotton, soldiers in vehicles moved from the camp and made for the embarkation area. All along the inlets and harbours of the south-western coast ships, boats and strange craft were readying.
The soldiers were in thousands, appearing from many directions, assault troops, tankmen, artillery units, infantry, engineers and a dozen other trades of war. As they moved on Wilcoombe and the other embarkation harbours they stared at each other in surprise and an odd resentment, as suspicious strangers might in such a crowd. They were not comrades, they were just going to the same fight. Under their low helmets and trailing their many weapons they made for the ships, the long steel landing ships, deep as valleys, each five thousand tons and carrying five hundred men and their vehicles to battle. At Plymouth, where a French battleship with a huge and inexplicable clock on its superstructure had lain in the Sound since 1940, there were strange sights. A company of Rangers, the commandos of the US Army, went aboard a landing craft in the full regalia of Red Indians, heads shaved, warpaint on their cheeks, stamping their feet and brandishing tomahawks along with their sub-machine guns. It was to be a full dress rehearsal, in every sense, for the invasion.
The conventional soldiers under Colonel Schorner’s command had only the short drive to the boarding point, the harbour at Wilcoombe. Others who boarded at that point came from widespread units and camps, three and a half thousand of them, embarking in eight landing ships. They were watched by the Devon people, fallen to silence, as if they had begun to understand. Doey Bidgood shouted to the easily recognizable Ballimach as the GIs left the trucks at the harbour, ‘Be this the real thing then, Yank?’
The camel’s hump of cable drum on Ballimach’s back shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me, Mac. Ike don’t tell me a single thing.’
It raised a few ready smiles with the people and among his fellow soldiers. Most realized that it was to be one more exercise; one more, but the last before the genuine day. Colonel Schorner stood on the harbour wall, checking the men as they trooped by, almost as if he were counting them in case any were missing. They were hung with bandoliers of ammunition and grenades; weapons, rifles, machine guns; the now famous bazookas and flame-throwers were carried down the worn sea steps and on to small craft. The soldiers were black-painted and quiet. Their equipment as assault force engineers was already loaded on the eight five-thousand-ton landing ships lying like logs out on the evening-shadowed sea. The sun had backed away almost to the Atlantic, its low light silvering the bay and giving the land a rosy hue. Gulls cried, their voices alarmed, as they flew around the boats leaving the tight harbour.
Schorner watched the whole of his unit embark – two hundred men – and then boarded the last of the barges with Scarlett, Bryant and Hulton. ‘Nice to see Smokey and Stover again,’ the colonel commented wryly as they rounded the high harbour entrance and saw the two elderly destroyers puffing away from their stacks like contented old men out fishing.
Hulton said: ‘Are they kidding or are we really going to be stuck with those museum pieces?’
‘I think you can count on it,’ said Schorner. He tried to make it sound as if he were satisfied. ‘We’ve got to use everything, captain. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Louisiana paddleboat out here.’
Scarlett said bitterly and quietly to Bryant, ‘They used eighty-seven LSTs on some peewee league landing in the Pacific last month. Eight-seven for some lousy island with a handful of scared-as-shit Japs to defend it. We could do with some of those. The guys out there don’t mean to take risks.’
‘Maybe they’ve already taken too many,’ said Schorner. Scarlett looked embarrassed because he had not realized the colonel would hear. ‘Maybe they figure that they’d like to stay alive now that the war is about to shift to this theatre.’ He put his field glasses up and scanned the assembled ships on the aluminium sea. After some minutes, he added: ‘But that don’t make it any easier for us.’
As they progressed south then west through the easy evening swell, the horizon became built up with basking ships. The soldiers felt encouraged to see so many. They pointed them out to each other. The arms of the two headlands
of Start Bay opened away from them. Schorner looked back reflectively at the comfortable land behind, retreating now from clear sight in the dusk. The hills and coombes, the white patches that were people’s houses, the places of trees, the long straight beach.
They all watched the bulky herd of ships. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Scarlett abruptly. ‘That’s a locomotive. Now I’ve seen everything. A railroad train at sea.’
Bryant and Schorner looked out towards the flotilla of craft that were lying ahead, large, cumbersome, blunt-nosed landing ships and landing craft wallowing among smaller vessels and the two destroyers, HMS Oregon and HMS Florida. On the deck of one of the large, boxy landing craft next in the convoy line could clearly be seen the outline of a steam locomotive.
It was time for the barge to put into the side of the LST, five thousand tons unladen, capable of taking twenty-five tanks aboard and unloading them directly on to a beach through an opening bow and a lowered ramp. Each was as slow and awkward as a hippopotamus. Schorner watched his men climb aboard, up the landing nets and nodded with satisfaction as he saw the heavily-laden soldiers reach the higher deck. They had learned.
He went aboard the same way, followed by Bryant and Scarlett. Hulton followed, ivory-faced under the streaks of black across his cheekbones, his eyes moving with apprehension under the steel helmet. Schorner watched him clamber aboard. ‘Still wish you were back in Georgia?’ he joked encouragingly.
‘With my mother,’ completed Hulton. ‘With all my heart, sir.’
They climbed along the deck, above the well in which the vehicles of the unit were already sitting. An advanced amphibian tank, scheduled to go first on to the beach to provide fire cover for the assault troops, was immediately behind the bow doors; followed by four dukws, the amphibious troop carriers, known as ducks; then came the trucks carrying the immediate supplies, fuel and ammunition, that would be needed once space had been gained for them to move. The metal treads to be spread along the beach, beneath the tracks and wheels of the vehicles, the explosives for detonating obstacles, the first ambulance, were all aboard. Four hundred soldiers also.
The Magic Army Page 48