“Heard any news, Rodney?”
“Not a word since the Major told us that Jerry armour and infantry had arrived at Eben Emael and crossed the Albert Canal.”
“Word came down from One Platoon that there’s a report about two Panzer divs on their way to cross the canal now.”
“We might just be lucky. It seems that the main Panzer thrust is against the Meuse and north of Eben Emael. We could be bypassed north and south.”
“And cut off.”
“Not if the div moves fast enough. We could be in new positions before Jerry gets there.”
Dempster grinned. It was forced and did not deceive Taggart. But Taggart rated courage high on the list of virtues and he guessed how much effort the grin had cost. It was not bravado that had prompted Dempster, nor his usual flippancy. He knew that some of the men were glancing over their shoulders and would take comfort from his and Taggart’s apparent coolness.
He said “No sound of tanks or dive-bombers. You must be right.”
The shelling stopped and B Company saw German infantry advancing through the woods and along the edges of fields. The enemy, seen in daylight, did not bring the same menace as they had when they were black shapes flitting over the snow in intermittent darkness and weak moonlight. They could be seen and counted. They were not a horde that had mysteriously materialised out of the ground, but vulnerable human automatons drilled to accept orders and die in the process.
The division had a battalion from each of two machine-gun regiments. Vickers guns opened fire on the enemy. Spandaus responded, but the enemy machine-gunners were forced to keep moving whereas the British were well dug in in sandbagged pits and had the advantage of knowing the range of various landmarks. The first rank of enemy infantry began to thin as men fell, wounded and dead, and others went to ground or dodged behind. trees.
There was a twenty-minute lull during which the battalion waited for another artillery barrage.
As time passed Taggart felt as though an eel, cold from the sea, were wriggling along his intestines. This must be it, then, if there was to be no barrage: the Stukas and Panzers must be about to launch a Blitzkrieg attack. He glanced down the trench and saw that Dempster was pale and his features were set in a look of seriousness that was reflected in the faces of all the men whom Taggart could see; including, near him, Udall and Fysshe-Smith.
But no dive-bomber or tank engines roared or clattered. Instead, with a concerted shout, more infantry ran through the woods and across the fields, supported by heavy Spandau fire. The charging men hurled grenades to force the defenders to dodge beneath the parapets of their trenches. But Mills bombs flew out at the attackers in high arching trajectory, the Vickers gunners kept up a steady fire, rifles cracked all along the battalion front.
German dead hung on the coiled Dannert wire, others lay on the ground between the wire and the woods and ditches to the east. There were no fatal casualties in B Company; only five men wounded.
Again there was silence except for the drone of high-flying aircraft and the occasional stutter of machine-guns as Hurricanes, Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Dorniers traced the arabesque manoeuvres of a sprawling aerial battle.
Three hours passed, containers of hot food arrived. The men chattered cheerfully and Taggart asked himself if it was the nervous reaction of men who thought themselves reprieved from expected death. He hoped it was a healthier reaction to the lull in the fighting.
Then the ominous noises for which they had braced themselves fell on their hearing. The snarl of dive-bombers and the crump of bombs; the flat note of anti-tank guns and the rattle of tank tracks, the chunter of tank engines; the sound of Spandau, Vickers and Bren; of grenades.
Runners summoned platoon commanders to the company command post.
Major Eugster, looking as gratified as though he had just booked an order for bath and lavatory equipment for a big new hotel, said “The Midland are taking a pasting. The Brigadier has asked the Colonel to send up support. The Colonel’s given B Company the job. Troop carriers are on their way from Rear H.Q. already. Fall your men out and R.V. on the road two hundred yards back from here.”
“Anyone taking over our trench, sir?”
“Half of C Company will move in.”
Prince Albert’s Own Loyal Midland Rifles held a sector on the division’s right. It was evidently they who had been under the Stuka and Panzer attack that the battalion had heard and which had now, by the sounds, swung away to the south, making towards the British division’s right flank and the left flank of the neighbouring French Seventh Army.
B Company arrived at the rendez-vous just before the troop carriers.
Major Eugster told his men to stand easy.
“Before we move off, I want to put you in the picture. The Midlands took a bit of a mauling from those dive-bombers and tanks we heard. Enemy infantry are following up. Reinforcements are being brought in from the reserve battalion, but in the meanwhile we’re going to plug the gap. It’s just a question of holding Jerry off for an hour or so.”
“And pigs’ll fucking fly,” the garrulous Chalky White was heard to mutter. He was a lugubrious little man, a barber in civil life, soured by a decade of trimming the heads of Battersea’s poorer residents at sixpence a go, and being told to cut it short enough to last at least two months before the next expenditure of what amounted, for many, to one-fortieth of a week’s wages. But he was not alone in his scepticism this time.
The carriers raced along roads which were already crowded by people moving away from the frontier zone. Cars and lorries were packed with passengers and luggage, with furniture and household goods.
“Everything but bath and bog porcelain,” Dempster remarked to Taggart, with a glance in the Major’s direction.
The sounds of automatic weapons and rifles, grenades and mortars grew louder and soon there were no more civilian vehicles on the roads.
Leaving the carriers, B Company saw burning houses and barns among the Midlands’ positions and on the far side of the ground across which the enemy had attacked. Dense smoke hung over these ruins and when it drifted into men’s eyes and mouths it stung and made them cough.
Dead British soldiers lay in a row behind the trench into which B Company filed. German dead lay on and beyond the wire. Wounded Midlanders were being carried away on stretchers.
The commander of the Midland company they were reinforcing had been killed, his second-in-command wounded. The senior subaltern had his left arm in a sling and greeted Eugster with a wan and wild-eyed look of misery.
“Sorry to drag you into this, sir. We’re holding them, but the swine are using flame-throwers...”
Yells came from a thicket that concealed the enemy. In a moment grey-clad infantry were charging with the bayonet, some of them firing submachine-guns from the hip, others holding stick grenades and swinging their arms preparatory to throwing them.
In the forefront Taggart saw half a dozen men who stooped under the weight of heavy backpacks and carried long nozzles at the end of rubber tubes that were attached to the canisters between their shoulders.
He saw also, for the first time, the charred bodies of British machine-gunners in slit trenches well forward of the main trench line.
The men carrying flame throwers had scrambled out of three of these slit trenches and a few strides brought them within range of the defence line. Gouts of yellow fire spurted from the nozzles.
Taggart saw, from the corner of an eye, a man scramble onto the fire step of the trench, expose his whole torso above the parapet and take aim with a revolver.
Turning, he saw that it was Dempster.
He saw the .38 Enfield’s barrel jump three times in quick succession as Dempster fired. His first bullet hit the ground and sent up a spurt of dust. The second hit his target in the knee. The third took the German in the stomach and he fell.
He fell in such a way that the hose of his flame-thrower was torn away from his grasp and the nozzle whipped round so that its
flame engulfed him.
Taggart caught the stench of roasting flesh at the same moment that he saw Dempster topple and dashed forward to catch him.
“Bloody fool, George...”
“Christ! I’m a rotten shot... should have got him first time...”
Dempster bit his lip and his whole body shuddered. Blood was running from two bullet holes in the right side of his battledress blouse. He fell limply against Taggart.
Taggart thrust a hand between his collar and neck. The vein he touched was still throbbing steadily. He shouted for stretcher bearers; then went about his own business.
His platoon was lined almost shoulder-to-shoulder along the parapet. The enemy had cut the wire and come within ten yards.
He threw four grenades as fast as he could and looked for more. There was a small stack of them on the fire step. He saw Udall, close beside him, ramming a fresh clip of cartridges into the magazine of his Lee Enfield. He saw Corporal Fysshe-Smith shooting steadily, every shot carefully aimed. Looking out of the trench he saw three Germans lying, two twitching and yelling, one inert, in the corporal’s line of fire.
He hoped that the relieving companies from the reserve battalion would arrive before the enemy overran the trench.
* * *
The battalion reeled through the succeeding days in a chaos of weariness, frequent hunger and thirst, orders and countermands, rumours and bad news.
The division had been ordered to Belgium, where British and French forces stood behind the river Scheldt. On the 13th May, two days after Dempster was wounded, German armour crossed the Meuse at Sedan and Dinant. Two days later, Holland surrendered. The day after that, the British and French began to pull out of Belgium.
The 21st May saw the division within 100 miles of the Channel coast, after being tumbled back from a line they had held 50 miles to the east, behind the Oise.
Tired, dispirited, bewildered, Taggart found himself in a counter-thrust led by British armour near Arras: the Matilda tanks were impervious to the enemy’s anti-tank guns.
Commanding a depleted platoon, in a company that had lost a quarter of its strength, wounded or dead, of a battalion that was down to 450 men, and 28 officers out of nearly 40, Taggart thought that here at last they were about to turn the tables.
The Matildas butted and lurched their way into the enemy. Anti-tank shells ricocheted off their sides or burst without damaging them. The infantry surged forward in their wake, rifles and Brens hot with pouring round after round into the retreating Germans, bayonets dripping from hand-to-hand fighting when they cleared the enemy from shallow foxholes and out of battered houses in shell-torn villages.
“We’ve got them on the run,” Taggart said, near exhaustion. Sergeant Duff, grimed and his uniform blood-stained, was there to hear and believe him. Corporal Fysshe-Smith was there, Udall, of course, Gallagher, now that the remnants of Nos 3 and 4 Platoons had been combined, and White were there.
Three more of those who had shared his two patrols in front of The Maginot Line were there.
“If Mister Taggart says we’ve got old Jerry on the run,” they said, “then we have got him on the run.”
Taggard had armed himself with a Tommy gun on the day after they had gone to the support of the Midlands. He was festooned with magazines and with pouches of spare ammunition with which to reload them. He had been stupefied by lack of sleep, anxiety for the men for whom he was responsible, irritation at contradictory orders and at his own slowness in interpreting them when his mind was fogged with weariness. Now, with the Matildas rumbling along ahead of him, the fumes of their exhausts reminding him of England and a main road to the south coast on a fine summer’s day, with home very much in his mind and a longing to see it again, and with the bullets from his Tommy gun slamming into a recoiling enemy, he was momentarily clear-headed and exultant.
He heard the flat double thump, twice, of an eighty-eight firing and saw a Matilda stop dead, a track torn off, fire pouring in a black and red waft of smoke and flames from its torn-open turret. He heard an 88 fire again and saw another British tank hurled sideways and its crew tumbling out through spreading fire: some to be burned, others picked off by enemy machine-gunners.
The anti-tank guns had been replaced by the ubiquitous and polyvalent 88s. Once more Taggart was shouting to his men to fall back, driving them ahead of him while he and Sergeant Duff and a dozen others faced the enemy while they retreated, pausing now and then to fight as rearguard.
By nightfall the battalion’s survivors had assembled in a derelict barn, under orders to make for the coast.
Motor cyclists were sent ahead to try to clear a path through the slow-moving mass of refugees. It was not good to be caught amid the cars and lorries and farm carts and trudging men, women and children on foot. These were the enemy airmen’s favourite target. Old men and women, children, the sick, the crippled and wounded had no weapons. The Ju 87s could dive-bomb them, the Me 109s and 1 lOs machine-gun them and pour cannon fire into them with impunity: and they did so. The division could not afford to be trapped among them. The division still had some 2000 vehicles: troop and Bren carriers, ration and blanket lorries, water bowsers, ambulances, 15 cwt trucks with Vickers guns to protect them from air attack, office and petrol lorries and a few captured enemy scout cars with the Swastika and German cross painted out.
The day following the abortive counter-attack at Arras, the Germans were at the coast of the English Channel, making for Calais and Boulogne. Four days later, the entire British Expeditionary Force was falling back on Dunkirk: with the exception of the 51st (Highland) Division, which stayed and fought until eleven days after the rest of the B.E.F. had quitted France.
* * *
Exactly a week later, King Leopold of Belgium, without informing his allies, surrendered his country to the enemy.
In the hasty redeployment of British and French divisions to stop the enemy taking Nieuport and driving on to Dunkirk, where the large-scale evacuation of the B.E.F. and those of the French Army who wished to reassemble in Great Britain had begun, Taggart’s battalion was given a sector of the Dunkirk perimeter to defend.
A few miles to the east of the city, a crossroads around which a hamlet had sprung up was on the German armour’s main axis of advance. This was not good tank country, but the Nazis were prodigal with their Panzer in what was obviously the final stage of victory.
Taggart was unsteady on his feet for several minutes when roused from a sleep he had managed to snatch in mid-afternoon after a night march and a brisk action against a flying column of enemy motorised infantry. His head reeled while he tried to absorb the Colonel’s briefing. The Colonel no longer looked the sleek stockbroker with military overtones provided by a moustache and short haircut. He had lost over a stone in weight in ten days, his florid face had become pallid and sunken, his eyes protruded as though he had developed thyroid trouble, and were bloodshot.
All that registered in Taggart’s brain was that B Company would establish positions on the edge of the perimeter, to receive the first shock of the enemy’s assault.
Major Eugster, with a bandage around his head over a wound from a shell splinter, his battledress creased and blood-spattered, his medal ribbons faded and soiled, the M.C. partly obscured by encrusted blood from the bursting brains of a German he had shot at point-blank range, would never have been taken for a salesman of sanitaryware by anyone who saw him for the first time now.
“I’m posting your platoon at the sharp end of the company front, Rodney.”
What else? Taggart thought. He was resigned to the malignancy of military fate, which rewarded achievement with all the dirtiest jobs. He had been paid a compliment — so had his men — that they could do without.
He led the way to the further side of the north-to-south road that crossed the one from east to west. Udall had recently formed a habit of whistling through his teeth. Taggart knew that it was a psychological reaction to days and nights of repeated close escapes from death
or injury. Some men smoked incessantly, others filled their waterbottles with wine or brandy if they could find the opportunity; there were men who had developed a tic and men who constantly scratched themselves, or laughed nervously, or who had trouble with their bladders. In Udall, the strain and the fear manifested themselves in a deliberate attempt to appear unconcerned. Hence the sibilant, tuneless noise he emitted.
“Shut up, Udall, for God’s sake. I’m trying to listen for the bloody enemy.”
Udall looked hurt and amazed. Taggart cursed himself silently for betraying the tautness of his own nerves and for being rude to Udall.
Sergeant Duff, a yard or two away, heard and saw and noted. If the best young officer in the battalion was showing signs of battle nerves, he had better be ready for him to crack. Sergeants, he had been taught to believe, were the backbone of any army. He knew he could command a platoon as effectively as most of the subalterns. But he did not want to have to take over from Mr. Taggart. He’d watch him, just the same.
Taggart stopped suddenly and both Udall and the sergeant had to step aside to avoid colliding with him. He shut his eyes. When he reopened them the double vision, which had made the houses along the road slide into one image superimposed on another, had corrected itself. His heartbeat quickened at this further sign of near-exhaustion.
He marched forward again.
“Sarn’t Duff.”
“Sir?”
Duff doubled to Taggart’s side.
Taggart pointed. “Bren there... and there... rifle sections here and here... one Boys in that ditch. I’m going ahead, to that dormer-roofed house with the other Boys. Detail two chaps who can chuck a grenade as far as a cricket ball.”
It wasn’t much of a joke but the sergeant made the most of it and chuckled.
“Right, sir.”
Taggart knew as well as he did who were the best grenade throwers in the platoon, but he was good about protocol. He told his N.C.O. what he wanted arid the N.C.O. provided it.
Presently two stalwarts, Fillery and Robinson, joined Taggart and Udall.
The Steel Fist Page 7