by Max Hennessy
‘It’s yours to do what you like with.’ Josh paused. ‘There’s just one small problem.’ He fished in his pocket and produced the emerald ring which he placed in her lap. On top of it he placed the special licence he’d obtained. ‘You’d first have to stand alongside me in Braxby Church while the Rector pronounced sentence on you–’ he moved the licence – ‘with the aid of this. In the meantime, you would have to wear–’ he moved the emerald ‘–this. It was my grandmother’s.’
She stared at him, speechless, her eyes filling with tears.
‘You’re not just being kind, are you, Josh?’
‘There was nothing farther than kindness from my thoughts. I’m being entirely selfish. I want you. That’s all.’
‘Can I have time to think?’
‘There isn’t time to think. Next week I may be in France. We have to get on with it before the balloon goes up.’
Four
Three weeks later, Josh stood on French soil.
There was a sullen smell of smoke everywhere and the air was full of the grind and groan of moving vehicles.
The build-up had never stopped. Further to the west there had been a disaster where the Americans had been temporarily stopped at Omaha but some splendid leadership had carried them through, and all along the beachhead the army was now ashore. Lorries, men, tanks and guns were moving steadily inland. A few German planes had flown over and a few bombs had been dropped, but the worst danger on the beach now was from the falling splinters of ack-ack shells which sliced through tents, tore down branches and clanged on lorries.
There was no sign of the French people, and the houses they passed, all of them boarded up, had been smashed by the shellfire and looked forlorn and lost. As the 43rd Armoured trundled away from the beach, along the side of the track bodies were laid out in rows. A burning Sherman was tilted on one side, its track in a ditch, vomiting black smoke, a red and white glow in the hatch holes, its massive turret wrenched from the hull by an armour-piercing shot.
‘Keep going! Keep going!’ An officer with a grey face and a bloody bandage on his hand, waved them on. ‘Fast as you can. Keep going!’
They passed another line of bodies. They seemed to be sleeping, except that their faces had a curious putty tinge, and their fists were clenched as though in the agony of dying and they had tried to hold back their cries.
Normandy was a rich green land full of orchards loaded with young apples. The hedges were high and full of flowers and through the smoke the smell was the same as an English countryside, a mixture of soil, growing things and dung.
As they waited near a house with Byrrh painted on its gable end for a traffic jam to clear, the German machine guns started and they saw tracer streaking past like red-hot rods to fill the air with a whipping sound. Stones and dust were flicked up from the roadway, and leaves, twigs and branches fluttered down with the last pink flecks of blossom.
They moved into a field where they received some shelter from the curve of the land. The air was full of voices and the noise of engines, and an infantry colonel appeared, as though coming up through the ground like the devil in a pantomime, to wave them into an orchard.
‘For God’s sake, go away from us,’ he begged.
They crashed through the hedge among the apple trees. For the first time there was time to blow the explosive cords which freed the waterproofing chimneys on the engine inlets and exhausts, and as the blue smoke drifted through the trees, the crews began to remove the unwanted devices and dump them under the hedges.
They had already discovered that some of the minefields they had expected were non-existent. Perhaps there had not been enough mines to go round, perhaps there had not been time to lay them. There were still no clear orders about moving inland, however. Though they were ashore, the Germans were in strength in front of them, and all round them engineers were erecting notices, ‘You are in sight of the enemy.’ ‘Drive slowly.’ ‘Dust causes shells.’
The house painted with the Byrrh sign was part of a village. Several buildings were still burning but, despite the uproar, cattle were continuing to graze placidly beyond the orchard among the swollen carcasses of other animals that lay in the grass. A military policeman, his eyes pale spots in a grime-encrusted face, appeared. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he shouted. ‘There are booby traps everywhere. So don’t wander. And keep your heads down. There are snipers.’
There was a jumpiness in the air because there were no rear areas and the beachhead was not very deep. As they continued to wait in the orchard for orders, confused voices came through on the radios.
‘Hello Dogface One. Hello Dogface One. I am being attacked.’
‘Able Two, for Christ’s sake, where are you?’
Suddenly gunfire fell among the trees, the shells exploding like the slamming of great iron doors, to turn the air to jelly with the blast.
‘Hello, Daisy Leader–’ this time it was the voice of Aubrey who was up ahead doing a recce with a troop of B squadron – ‘Baker Apple Two has been hit. We need the doctor.’
Lurching into motion, Josh’s tank edged forward until it was stopped by a line of close-growing poplars where two tanks hugged a high, hedged bank. Scrambling from the turret, Josh started to hurry forward. Outside the tank without earphones, the noise was unbelievable. The heavier explosions of the field guns were cut across by the vicious bangs of high velocity guns, and the whining chatter of machine guns and rifles, then the unexpected high crack as one of the fifteen-inch shells from the warships off the beach seared the air above them.
He was glad when he reached the shelter of the bank where Aubrey bent with the doctor over the sergeant of the knocked-out tank.
‘Both legs,’ he said. ‘He’s probably going to lose one.’
‘Get him back if you can, Doc,’ Josh said. ‘If we move on, you’ll have to leave him to be collected.’
‘Sir–’ it was Robinson, Josh’s radio operator, shouting over the din ‘–you’re wanted.’
As Josh headed back to his tank, the gunners of a battery dug in under the bank were brewing tea, and when a salvo of shells fell in the orchard, they all started to run. A man carrying a mug went after them, trying not to spill the contents as he scuttled for safety. The air seemed to open and shut like a door and Josh was punched in the back by a huge soft fist and found himself lying on the grass. As he lifted his head he heard a high-pitched animal-keening and saw the man with the mug bumping blindly into the trees. Half his face was hanging off, yet his big brown fist still held the mug of tea. As he was helped to the rear, not far away, in odd contrast, a bird was singing.
As Josh reached his tank, the headphones dropped over the side and he held them to his ear.
‘Daisy leader,’ he said,
‘Josh–’ it was Rydderch, as usual not standing on formality – ‘I want you to move forward to Rouilly. I want you there for tomorrow morning, so get moving at once. You’ll be safe. The Germans are going to have their heads down. The bombers are coming in. Take advantage of them.’
Engines roared as the tanks crashed through the hedge into the field beyond. In line ahead, they moved along a sheltering bank towards the road that led south to Rouilly. As they went they became aware of the air filling with a vast metallic roar and, from the hatch, Josh looked up to see lines of bombers coming from the north. As soon as one line was distinguishable as aeroplanes, it was possible to see another behind it, then, as that approached, still another. The sky seemed black with advancing machines and the air shuddered under the racket of their engines.
‘Daisy leader to Able One. Get a move on. Get your whip out, Toby.’
There was a spattering of machine-gun fire and a few shells cracked, then the flotilla of aeroplanes was passing overhead. Just to the south, the land seemed to heave and the earth was slashed with vivid jets of red and yellow flame. A rol
ling cloud started to lift only to be dispersed as the bombs from the second wave fell among it. The anti-tank fire stopped as the guns were trained upwards, but screeching overhead at tree-top height, Typhoons came tearing in, their cannon raking the German gunners.
The air was full of smoke and noise as the tanks reached the road and began to move along it at full speed. Rouilly was already shattered as they roared through it but suddenly among the smashed buildings and from gaping doorways French people began to appear and started cheering.
‘Vive le D-jour!’
They seemed to be all old men, women and children and they looked grey-faced and shocked, but there seemed no resentment at the damage being done to their houses, their fields and their orchards. The tanks reached the woods in safety and pushed in among the trees. The aeroplanes had gone now and the firing from the Germans had started again, directed still at the orchard they had just left. In the whole of their first day in France, Josh thought, they had not been called upon to do anything apart from move from one place to another and so far had lost only one tank and two men.
The casualties generally, in fact, seemed less high than expected. Along the sea line there was a monstrous chaos of charred and tortured steel, smashed guns, tanks, vehicles and landing craft where the medical orderlies worked to drag the wounded from among the corpses gruesomely jostling each other among the beach obstacles. But engineers were blowing gaps in sea walls, bridging anti-tank ditches and clearing minefields and – as the tide receded – making a fresh assault on the underwater obstacles so that landing craft could take advantage of the next high tide. On the whole, everybody was surprised to find they were still alive and that so many of their friends were alive, too.
As darkness came, the sky glittered with distant flak and voices could be heard over the clatter of tank tracks as more units moved inland. They were all a little jumpy because the Germans usually had an ace up their sleeve and no one wanted to be where they played it.
Lying awake in a partly-wrecked farmhouse where he had established his headquarters, Josh found it hard to realise he was back in France. The tanks had been loaded at the Gosport hards, nudging down the slopes into the interiors of the landing craft, and as the great doors had closed their crews had got down at once to making themselves comfortable, swarming over the huge steel hulls to check radio sets, bogies, tracks and the equipment strapped to the hulls.
How long they had swayed and rolled in the clutch of the sea they didn’t know. They had heard the invasion had been postponed for a day, and a few had hoped it might be postponed for ever, but most of them had groaned at the thought of putting off something they seemed to have been expecting half their lives.
On June 6th they had all been awake before first light, checking things for the thousandth time and wondering about German torpedo attacks. The weather was still grey, the sea lifted ominously and the air was filled with a drizzly rain. Holding a briefing at six o’clock Josh had explained the maps which had been opened the day before, then he had read the message from the Supreme Commander.
It was a clever message, designed to touch them all, whatever their politics and beliefs, and he wondered how many people had been involved in writing and correcting the apparent spontaneity. As he spoke, he watched the faces of the men in front of him. Toby Reeves looked sombre and thoughtful and Josh wondered what was going on in his mind. He had spent his last weekend’s leave at Braxby because his American Waac had moved to the West Country ready for the invasion. It didn’t seem possible that war could wipe out a family as it had wiped out his. His grandfather had died of enteric in South Africa, and his father and a cousin had been killed in the last war. Then his brother had disappeared in a Channel battle and finally Ailsa and his mother in the Blitz. There was nothing left of them now and it wasn’t hard to understand his premonitions.
Aubrey looked solemn, owlish behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. He never managed to look quite like a soldier, always a little untidy, always a little too plump, his eyes popping slightly like his father’s. Winder and Dodgin looked grave but solid as English oak. Packer, Greatorex and Flood all looked confident. They were old soldiers now, knowledgeable in the ways of war. Only Pallovicini seemed not to have recovered from the strain of the desert fighting and his lean features looked more of a caricature than ever. He had never particularly distinguished himself and Josh had often wondered how he would shape up in Europe. The rest were pink-faced boys, incredibly young but bursting with eagerness, and as Josh finished reading the Supreme Commander’s message, he noticed one or two of them shifting from one foot to the other and decided to make his own message short and to the point.
He also wondered if he should offer some sort of prayer as some commanders did. He was not a religious man, though he believed in God in a simple unquestioning way, as if He were a sort of celestial field marshal whom he didn’t expect to be concerned with his daily routine. He decided to compromise.
‘There’s nothing much else to say,’ he had ended, ‘except perhaps to quote the words of Sir Jacob Astley before the battle of Edgehill. They seem very apt. “Oh Lord Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.”’
A few heads nodded. Good old Jacob, he thought. His words must have been quoted a hundred times to soldiers going into action yet, despite that and the distance in time since they were first spoken, there were few prayers that suited a soldier more.
The shore of France had seemed almost too crowded for them to take it all in. Above the hissing waves, the air had been filled with a chaos of sound, from the drone of aeroplanes to the crash of naval guns hurling their enormous shells miles inland to where the German reserves were gathering. An aeroplane came down out of the grey murk of cloud, twisting and turning until it fell into the sea. Small craft returning from the beaches for their next load were bringing back with them men who had not made it, limp sacks splashed with blood like old bundles of clothes, their faces grey and twisted with pain, their eyes bewildered and questioning.
When it was their turn to head into the appalling backdrop of smoke and flame, the landing craft had turned for its run in, the hold grey-blue with exhaust smoke as the tank engines were started. As the great doors in the bow had opened and daylight had come into the gloom, a rhino ferry had appeared, and the first tank had clanged on board. As it filled and moved away, the next rhino moved into place.
Outside the farmhouse, the sky was red with the glow of flames. The night was windy, wet and cold and as Josh moved he heard an aeroplane overhead and the flurry of guns from the ships offshore. The battered building shook.
Was it only three weeks since he had stood alongside Louise in front of the Rector at Braxby? Other Goffs who’d been married there had had distinguished churchmen to marry them. His grandfather had had a bishop who was a distant relative, and his father a dean, a grandson of that same bishop. Josh had had the Rector, old and bumbling, because there’d been no time to contact anyone else, but Louise, her face peaked and elfin as usual but radiant with happiness, had looked as beautiful as any earlier Goff bride.
His mother had tried to do the thing properly and it was incredible how many of the family she had managed to gather together. They had included the past, present and future, because they had ranged from old Ellis Ackroyd, who had been at Omdurman with Josh’s father and grandfather, to Kitty and Rosanna, the very newest members of the family, dressed to within an inch of their young lives as bridemaids.
It seemed, Josh decided as he listened, stiff and dirty and alert to the grating sound of the radio his operator had set up in the kitchen, that he would somehow have to survive the coming battles. He hadn’t yet told Louise about his Uncle Robert’s eagerness to get his clutches on the house and he was desperately afraid if anything happened to him that Robert would contrive to snatch it from under her feet.
Nevertheless, he had made a new will, leaving eve
rything he possessed to her and the two children. He could never, he realised, have left everything to Jocelyn in this manner. She would never have done what he asked. How could you be so doubtful about one woman and so certain of another?
‘Sir! The brigadier!’
Josh rose and moved to the radio. It wasn’t Rydderch but Leduc.
‘Josh,’ he said. ‘Are you ready to move?’
‘In every way, sir.’
‘Right. We might not start today because we’ve still to link up with the Canadians, but we’re to make an all-out effort for Caen. In the meantime, we expect German counter-attacks at Ouistreham and we need armour up there to deal with them. Lion-sur-Mer’s clear, so go along the coast. It’s factory country and you’ll find it difficult, but you can handle it. The Derbyshires and the Hussars will follow you. Get going.’
Dawn was breaking as they set off. All along the route men were waking, cold and stiff from a night of fitful sleep in shallow holes, pinching themselves to make certain they were still alive. Tanks and bulldozers were dragging wreckage aside to ensure the break-out’s success and military police were calmly waving the traffic forward as if the Germans were thousands of miles away. Alongside them, jeep ambulances jolted back between the taped-off minefields towards the beach where in the fields the graves registration squads were burying the dead.
As the sky lightened they could see the contours of the countryside. This would probably be the most important day of the invasion, the day when the counter-attacks would come. At the end of this day they would know whether they were in France to stay or whether the whole thing would have to be called off and the war go on for another ten years and end with a negotiated peace.
Five
‘Louie–’ Rosanna looked up from where she was sprawled on the floor with the daily paper ‘–what’s liberated mean?’