by John Harris
From his position further down the hill, Neville saw everything with shocked eyes as if it were magnified, its colours multiplied and doubly gaudy. Just below him, a lorry slewed sideways to a halt and a man jumped out and started to run. Three more men followed, and he recognized the last one as Hössenfelder, the dumpy Westphalian who had appeared at the farm to help, the little man whose love of the soil had driven him to work even for the French.
Gaudin’s elder son, taut and bitter since the murder of his brother, lifted his rifle. As Neville turned to stop him, Urquhart’s warning came back to him and he choked on the words in his throat. As the rifle cracked, Hössenfelder’s running feet grew slower and his body leaned further and further forward before he finally went down, his body sliding along the surface of the road. As he came to a stop, he rolled over, and Neville could see tar, melted in the hot sun, smearing his face.
Caught in the flank behind their vehicles where they’d been sheltering from the firing from the cutting, men went over like shot rabbits. The tank in the dip was swinging wildly now, its tracks having difficulty gripping the sticky mud formed by the diverted spring and the leaking dam on the slopes above. Then Dring’s gun fired again and the tank caught fire. The hatches opened and the crew began to scramble clear. The first man out reached down to where another man was pushing up the body of the commander, but a Bren burst caught him across the waist and he fell headfirst into the turret. As the flames took hold, an incandescent flare shot upwards from the hatch, and someone inside started screaming.
At the back of the column, down in the valley, a command car driven by a cypher clerk from St Seigneur was trying desperately to turn on the narrow road to head back to the safety of Néry. As the driver fought with the wheel, a lorry-mounted machine-gun behind him began to fire at figures running among the trees on the higher ground alongside. One of them fell but was snatched up and dragged out of sight; then an explosion behind them sent the high bank of the road toppling down across the road and on to the bonnet of the car.
‘Get rid of it,’ the lieutenant in command of the group screamed, but as his men jumped from their lorries with shovels and began to tear at the loose earth, a series of cracks made them look up. Greyish smoke was drifting away between the trees and half a dozen tall firs were teetering across the blue skyline above them. As they ran for safety, the trees crashed down across the road in a cloud of dust and flying twigs, the last one falling across the trapped car to pin the driver in his seat with a broken spine. As men ran towards him, machine-guns started firing from the trees and a phosphorous grenade landed among them. Car, driver, rescuers and all disappeared in a cloud of white smoke and stabbing flame.
On the Néry side of the fallen trees, the drivers of the vehicles crowding up from the village were also trying to turn to escape from the firing higher up the valley. One or two broke clear and were already pushing their way back to the village alongside the jammed column. But as they reached the first of the houses, they found themselves facing the last of the vehicles leaving the Chemin de Ste Reine. Two of them collided and blocked the road and the whole lot became hopelessly jammed near the burning barn where the smoke drifted thick and golden across the glaring sunshine.
‘They’ve closed the road!’ The yell was taken up on all sides. ‘Turn round!’
In the narrow streets, however, it was impossible to change direction. A man, frightened and drunk on brandy looted in Rolandpoint, kicked in the door of the nearest house and, snatching up a burning plank from the blazing barn, tossed it inside. One of Frobinius’ men, cut off from his group after the retreat from the Chemin de Ste Reine, caught the spirit of the thing at once. This was the sort of occasion when he knew exactly what to do.
‘Bum them out,’ he roared. ‘Burn out the French filth!’
Bursting open the next house, he flung in an opened jerry-can of petrol and hurled a grenade after it. The crash of the explosion and the whoof of the petrol going up blew out the windows and flapped the shutters, and smoke poured out in a thick cloud. Another drunken man ran into the church and sprinkled petrol among the pews. Yet another let fly with his Schmeisser at the altar, and the intricate carved and painted figurines leapt and toppled, wooden heads and arms flying through the air. The great metal pipe from the stove, running across the church like the bowels of a submarine, collapsed in a cloud of rust and soot. Then the Henri IV window fell out and flames began to rise as still more German soldiers dragged benches forward to feed the blaze.
The door of Mere Ledoux’s bar was smashed down and when they found no drink, the Germans fired at the shelves, and glasses and bottles leapt into the air. A moment later, flames started there, too. Reinach’s home followed, then Balmaceda’s studio, the Gaudin farmhouse, and Dréo’s smithy where the work of destruction was made easier by the embers still glowing in the forge.
It was only when half the village was alight that it dawned on the infuriated Germans that they were endangering their own escape. The smoke and flames had been caught by the breeze and were roaring across the street. With the Americans pushing into St Seigneur and the routes from the south jammed by troops fighting to get north, there was now only one way out of Néry and that was to the north-east.
Already groups of men, abandoning their vehicles, were drifting on foot up the Rue des Roches and the Chemin de Ste Reine. Indifferent to the shambles which had started in the Fond St Amarin, their only concern was to get through to the Mary-les-Rivieres road beyond and on to Belfort. Not many of them did.
By this time, the third tank had been stopped by Yves Rapin’s bazooka and the column was becoming a tangle of burning vehicles. Since the attackers were thirty feet above their heads and overlooking them, it was almost impossible to bring the 88s to bear. An attempt was made, only to be defeated by the mortar fire coming over the trees. The bombs dropped among the lorries, killing men, tearing away limbs, and smashing more vehicles.
The commander of the fourth tank tried to bring his gun round but a fresh shower of grenades came down from the cliff. Several of them burst against the turret and one went straight into the open hatch. The thump of the explosion was followed by silence. The crew of the third tank had already abandoned their disabled vehicle and run for shelter.
Lorries were still trying to turn off the road and one or two of the smaller ones had swung into the dip alongside in the hope of reversing direction there. But the dip had become a bog and not one of them managed it. Only one small tracked vehicle managed to reach a ridge of stones built as a cattle crossing, but it was promptly bit by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire and stopped, burning furiously, to block up the only escape route.
Alongside Urquhart, Sergeant Dréo was hammering with the old mitrailleuse, his bullets punching holes in the sides of vehicles and dropping men. Guardian Moch, still wearing his ‘Anthony Eden’ hat, was shooting as if he’d lived all his life as a huntsman. Dring and Ernouf, in shirt sleeves, were handling their long rifles expertly as they talked and smoked, while Stens and Brens rattled from the shattered cutting where a wildly exited Patrice de Frager was hopping about between the rocks and trees, shouting orders. A group of hated Miliciens in their distinctive uniforms became a sitting target, and automatic weapons opened up on the struggling mass as they tumbled from their trucks. The frenzy was infectious; cheering started and a few heads popped up.
‘Get down,’ Urquhart yelled furiously. ‘Get down, you stupid bastards!’
No one could hear him above the din, and a boy in a group of exited youngsters running wildly along the Up of the escarpment was seen and caught by a machine-gun burst from the road. He was lifted off his feet and flung down in front of his girl friend, his head almost torn from his shoulders. Another boy, his eyes glassy with the shock of battle, stared at the body then stood up, a grenade in his fist.
‘For Christ’s sake, Reinach!’ Urquhart stormed, infuriated by the blind courage the French boys were showing. ‘Tell them to cut out the heroics!’
&
nbsp; But he was too late and the boy was hit in the legs. Spinning round, he fell across a bush, which slowly sagged and deposited him in the grass, watched by the girl who was still frozen into immobility with horror.
One of his friends began to crawl towards him but suddenly he stopped, yelling and rolling with difficulty on to his face, his trousers shining with the blood pouring from his thighs, reached for the grenade. His hand scrabbled weakly about in the grass before he managed to clutch it. Then he began to crawl forward again, his face torn by the bush and ghastly with his agony. At the edge of the escarpment he forced himself to his knees and wrenched at the pin of the grenade. It landed under the petrol tank of a lorry which went up like a bomb.
‘Got the bastard,’ he sobbed, and fell back in the grass writhing with pain. ‘Merde,’ he moaned as he was carried away to safety. ‘My legs! Oh, God, how they hurt!’
Close by the burning lorry, a troop of horses pulling a gun and terrified by the flames and the explosion, began to rear and plunge in a confusion of twisted leathers and shouting men. The gun swung across the road, its wheels caught in the rusty barbed wire that edged the tarmacadam. Urquhart jabbed at Sergeant Dréo and yelled in his ear. The flash of eyes in response showed all the bottled-up hatred of four years. The old machine-gun swung and one after the other the horses dropped, their heavy legs threshing in the roadway, their bodies effectively forming a barrier against either advance or escape. Dréo went on firing until the last of them was still.
Below them, Frobinius was screaming at the naval lieutenant who, now that Fregattenkapitan von Hasbach was incarcerated in the cellar of the Chateau de Frager with Klemens and General Dannhüber, had taken over command of what he had cheerfully called the Marine Cavalry. He was not so cheerful now because Frobinius was pointing at the silent trees at the top of the sloping meadow at the right-hand side of the road beyond the dip.
‘Get up there,’ he was yelling. ‘Horses can cross that mud. Get up the field and among those trees. Get on to the ridge and come round behind the bastards!’
The lieutenant didn’t think much of the idea but he was willing enough. Having been a sailor until a few weeks before, he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he should do and his men were equally in the dark. Cavalry charges, he knew, were usually delivered with a sword or a lance and the sheer momentum of the swiftly-moving weight of a hundred or more horses. He had no idea how to deliver a charge with rifles, but he drew his pistol and tried. He got his men into some sort of order in the smoke, his unskilful sailors wrenching at their nervous mounts. Then, as he waved his arm, they began to form into a ragged line and plough through the brambles and undergrowth in the bog, avoiding the disabled tank and the burning scout car.
As they moved clear of the undergrowth, the firing from the cliff caught them. A horse screamed and went down, shot through the spine, its rider leaping clear as the agonized animal tried to drag itself away, trailing its hindquarters. More horses fell and riders toppled from the saddle. Then mortar bombs began to land among them, and they opened out, leaving three animals struggling on the grass and a man climbing to his feet and limping away. They kept going, however, and from the top of the escarpment Reinach stared across the valley. ‘It’s up to Verdy de Clary now,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope he can wait.’
Urquhart’s eyes narrowed. ‘He’ll wait,’ he said with the confidence of a soldier in the durability of army training.
The horsemen were half-way up the slope when the whole line of the trees where Verdy de Clary waited burst into flame. More horses went down and the whole line lost cohesion. In a moment there were a couple of dozen dead and dying animals scattered across the grass, their riders running back to the road, and more horses galloping away with empty saddles.
The sailors struggled back. One of them had been kicked in the chest by a wounded animal. As he was helped to shelter he was breathing agonizedly in terrible snoring whispers, choking on his own blood under his shattered ribs. Several of the riderless horses trotted back with them, mingling with the lorries and scattering men in their panic until the machine-guns brought them down.
Furious and sickened by the butchery, the lieutenant limped to the shelter of a wrecked tank. ‘Whose damned silly idea was that?’ he snarled.
11
Crouching behind von Hoelcke’s tank, Frobinius stared horrified at the ruins of the charge he had ordered. As far as the Germans were concerned, the Frenchmen thirty feet above them might well have been three hundred feet up. He was baffled what to do next and it was von Hoelcke who decided that the only alternative was a proper attack by the few experienced infantrymen they had up the slopes of the field where the horsemen had failed.
Like Urquhart he had faith in training. The meadow on their right rose with occasional dips like shallow trenches behind which attackers could hide and at the top there was a belt of thick undergrowth which could shelter them for a last rush into the trees. It didn’t seem impossible that they could fight their way along the ridge to the groups of men firing from the cutting and round to the lip of the escarpment.
He managed with a struggle and the aid of Captain Witkus to get the assault organized. By manhandling them, they got two of the 88s pointing towards the trees. It was difficult because the slopes were steep and there was no time to dig the guns in tail-down. Somehow they also directed one or two heavy machine-guns up the slope, then von Hoelcke turned to Witkus.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Off you go! I’ll support you with everything I can bring to bear.’
The machine-guns began to hammer and the 88s got off one or two shells, but then a bazooka rocket hit one of them, throwing it on its side and killing its crew. The second gun was already being showered by grenades.
The infantrymen had set off, stumbling and cursing, into the bog at the side of the road. Fighting their way through, their clothes snatched at by brambles, they flung themselves down behind the sloping bank, only to find they were still exposed to the fire from the escarpment. With no alternative but to go forward - and as fast as possible - Witkus waved his arm and set off running, bent double, up the slope.
By this time, the second 88 had been silenced and one by one the heavy machine-guns had had to retreat across the river to the trees on the narrow strip of stony soil under the escarpment. But it was almost as dangerous there because grenades could be tossed down on to them and, though they couldn’t be seen so easily from above, the smoke from the burning lorries obscured their view of the opposite slope.
Witkus’-infantrymen had now reached the belt of undergrowth near the crest and, feeling that at least it hid them from view, they plunged into it. Almost immediately, they found themselves caught up on a criss-cross of barbed wire -their own wire, German wire - the wire Klemens had handed over for fencing French pastures. There wasn’t enough to be completely effective but it delayed them.
Cursing and sweating, Witkus urged them on. ‘Keep going,’ he yelled. ‘Keep going!’
At the other side of the belt of wire, deep in the tangle of bushes and brambles, the land dropped into a small ditch. The first man leapt thankfully for its shelter, only to scream as a pointed stake ran deep into his groin, and Witkus saw that the ditch was filled with dozens of interlocked sharpened poles like an ancient cheval de frise.
‘You can get through that,’ he yelled. ‘Keep your heads!’
As the soldiers struggled on, Witkus noticed an ominous silence from the weapons at the top of the hill. Perhaps his men couldn’t be seen, he thought, because he could still hear the guns from the escarpment hammering away and the occasional thump of a grenade. They were no longer firing at him, however, and biting his lip, knowing that the Wehrmacht had been fooled by a set of French farmers, he gathered his men together for the final rush forward.
Néry was a shambles by this time, with furious German soldiers shooting the cattle in a lunatic welter of slaughter. Two old men and a sick woman who had refused to leave the village were dragged out and shot. So was
a boy who had sneaked back against orders with his girl friend to find her cat. His body was stripped and flung on to the steps of the war memorial, then the girl was dragged into a house and raped.
More lorries had managed to force their way into the village from the west. The Americans near St Seigneur were close behind them, creating havoc with their artillery among the tail-end of the stream of vehicles heading east, and those in the lead simply ignored the shouts of the military police in Néry until, in the confusion of vehicles facing in every imaginable direction in the village street, it became impossible to move out in any direction at all. Through the confusion lines of men threaded, desperately seeking safety, fires roaring on both sides of them. Officers were ransacking their baggage for food and weapons they could carry on foot and there was no longer any talk about beloved Führers or Thousand-year Reichs. They were all just hoping to get home in one piece and that somebody would stop the slaughter before it caught up with them.
To the east, up the Fond St Amarin, they could hear the rattle of machine-guns and rifle fire and the thump of mortars, and they knew without doubt that their only hope was to get out via the Rue des Roches or the Chemin de Ste Reine. The village was like a scene from hell. Dead cattle and horses lay in the fields and farmyards, and men who were too old or too young or too sick to be in the front line - clerks and cooks and waiters and orderlies - watched, their minds numb, as wounded stumbled back, covered with blood and dust. Those who had come through the pocket at Falaise knew they were going through the same thing all over again. Men fought their way between the jammed vehicles, grim-faced and filthy. Occasionally a doctor bent over an injured man or tried to set up a dressing station in a cottage garden. The village was already littered with abandoned rifles, knapsacks and scraps of uniform, and the crowd of angry soldiers milled round, aware of a failure in command, seeking food, drink, a way to safety. With the pressure growing from the west, the stream of men from that direction was turning now into a flood and the flood into a stampede. A horse-drawn gun locked its wheels with a waggon, and the carriages and lorries piled up around it in inextricable chaos until the road became quite impassable. Carts and screaming horses with crushed limbs tried to fight their way free, and desperate men climbed over the bonnets and wings of cars to make any progress at all. And, all the time, soldiers, exhausted by the long retreat and indifferent to what was happening in their weariness, were falling asleep in doorways and front gardens.