by Right
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he admitted. ‘If it is filled with something unstable and one of those bullets cooks it off, we’ll be the first to know about it. My guess is it doesn’t contain any kind of explosive. I still think the upper section is a shaped charge, and the lower part is something completely different, something to concentrate and direct the explosion. And that’s the clever bit.’
‘And that’s why we have to get out of here, Dawson. We must get that weapon back to our own lines.’
‘I’m doing my best.’
They were rapidly approaching the T-junction at the end of the road.
‘Left or right?’ Dawson asked.
‘Go right,’ Sykes instructed. ‘That should take us either west or north-west.’
Dawson stopped the car at the junction and checked both ways. There were several groups of civilians on the road, mostly heading away from the centre of the city, but he couldn’t see any German army patrols in either direction. He swung the wheel to the right and started weaving his way through the pedestrians.
‘I reckon we might be clear now,’ he said, staring ahead.
‘You’re optimistic, Dawson,’ Sykes replied, looking around the next bend.
Just coming into view was the end of a long queue of refugees and, right at the far end, perhaps a couple of hundred yards ahead, they could now see a group of soldiers wearing grey uniforms.
‘A German road-block,’ Sykes said. ‘We’ve no chance of getting through that. Take the next turning.’
‘Left or right?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just get us off this road before they spot us.’
There was a turning a short distance ahead, on the right-hand side of the main road. Dawson waited for a gap in the stream of dull-eyed refugees plodding along beside them, and swung the staff car down the side-street, picking up speed quickly. They were still stuck in the outskirts of Liège and, Dawson guessed, more and more enemy soldiers would be deployed there as the hours passed. They needed to get out, to get ahead of the advancing Germans.
‘We still need to get out of here,’ Sykes said, his words echoing Dawson’s thoughts. ‘Start heading west as soon as you can.’
The street appeared to be deserted, the doors of most of the houses standing wide open, presumably abandoned by their owners as the German attack on the city started, and all the Belgians they’d seen had been on the roads heading away from Liège.
There was a crossroads a few dozen yards in front of them, but Dawson didn’t drive the car around the corner, just in case there was a road-block on it. Instead, he braked the car to a halt about thirty yards back, hopped out and ran to the last house on that side of the street. He peered cautiously up the road, to the west, then drew back and returned to the staff car.
‘More Jerries,’ he said shortly. ‘They’ve blocked the road about seventy yards ahead.’ He pointed at the crossroads. ‘We’ll have to go straight over and try our luck further on.’
He slipped the car into gear and accelerated straight over the junction.
The staff car took only a few seconds to cross the road, but that was long enough for one of the German soldiers at the road-block to shout something, and for two of them to aim and fire their rifles, taking snap-shots at the vehicle.
Neither bullet hit the car, but the fact the Germans had opened fire immediately told its own story.
‘These aren’t just routine road-blocks, are they?’ Dawson asked. ‘Those buggers are looking for us.’
‘You could be right,’ Sykes agreed. ‘We did a lot of damage to that Jerry patrol, and we were spotted by those other soldiers. They don’t know who we are, obviously, but they’re looking for two enemy soldiers in a British staff car. They’re not interested in taking us prisoner or asking us questions – they’re just shooting.’
‘Is it worth trying another road out of the city?’
‘I don’t think so. The Germans have blocked the last two roads we tried. They’ll have positioned patrols on every route out of the city. I think we’re stuck inside the perimeter. It looks like we were very lucky – or rather unlucky – to get into Liège in the first place.’
Dawson eased off on the accelerator pedal and the vehicle started to slow down. ‘If you’re right, sir, then we’ve got to go to ground somewhere until the search winds down.’
‘Only one problem, Dawson. We’re dealing with Germans here, and one thing I do know about the Teutonic mind is that they’re very thorough. Once they start something, they carry right on to the end. The search won’t wind down, as you put it, until either they’ve found us or a counter-attack has driven them back across the border. I don’t think that’s likely.’
‘So what can we do?’
‘We have no choice. We’ll ditch the car and get out of here some other way.’
‘How?’ Dawson asked simply.
‘I’m working on it,’ Sykes replied, ‘but we’ll have to get rid of our uniforms and weapons as well as the car. Somehow, we have to become Belgian civilians to get past those road-blocks. Maybe we can find a cart or something I can ride in.’
Dawson glanced at the officer unhappily, and shook his head. What about the rules of combat –’ he began.
‘I know what you’re going to say, Dawson,’ Sykes interrupted, ‘but we’ve got no choice in this case. We have to get that demolition charge into Allied hands, and the only way we can do that is to become civilians. It’s a fine line anyway – if a soldier is engaged in combat he is required to wear a uniform or something that identifies him as a soldier. We’ll be unarmed and, obviously, we won’t be engaging in combat. The other side of the coin is that the Germans might regard us as spies, because we’ll be carrying a piece of secret equipment and trying to get it into British hands.’
‘That makes it better, does it? I thought they shot spies?’
‘They do,’ Sykes said with a weary smile, ‘so we’ll just have to blend in with the rest of the refugees and hope for the best. We’ll only be passing through a road-block or, at least, I hope we will.’
Dawson still didn’t look happy, but he didn’t see that they had any options.
‘So how do we do it, sir?’
But before Sykes could reply, a shot sounded from behind them.
Dawson pressed down on the accelerator pedal, swung the steering wheel over to the left, and looked in the rear-view mirror.
Another German soldier, apparently by himself, had just appeared from a narrow alleyway. He was standing beside a house, his rifle raised and pointing at the staff car, and preparing to fire again.
‘Bloody place is full of fucking Jerries,’ Dawson muttered, then powered the vehicle round the next corner, just as the soldier pulled the trigger.
It was a good shot, bearing in mind the target was moving. The bullet slammed into the left-hand side of the staff car directly behind the door, went right through the metal and buried itself deep in the rear seat.
‘Bloody good job I was in the front,’ Sykes said, glancing behind him at the rip in the upholstery.
Dawson spotted another side-street over to their right – the area seemed to be a virtual maze of narrow roads, some little more than alleys – and swung the car down it.
‘Find somewhere to dump this car,’ Sykes ordered. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to run into a patrol that we can’t fight our way through or run away from.’
The street Dawson was driving down was even narrower than the one they’d just left. Deserted terraced houses lined the right-hand side of the road, while on the left was a worryingly open expanse of waste ground. If a German patrol was in that area, the staff car would immediately be visible. Dawson kept turning his head to the left, but saw nobody.
‘We really need to dump this car and make the Jerries think they’ve got rid of us at the same time,’ he said. ‘This car is far too conspicuous.’
‘How?’ Sykes asked, sounding interested.
Dawson pointed ahead, towards the end of the stre
et, where a bomb or perhaps a salvo of artillery shells had virtually demolished two of the houses. Three dark shapes lay unmoving on the road near the wreckage.
‘It’s a bit fucking ghoulish, I know, but I think those are dead bodies down there – civilians killed in the German attack. We could put a couple of them in this car, and then torch it. When the Jerries come along to investigate they’ll find what’s left of a British staff car with two bodies inside it. They’ll think we crashed the car or something, and then the fuel tank exploded. But whatever they think happened, when they find the car they’ll probably call off their search for us.’
‘I don’t like the idea, Dawson,’ Sykes said slowly, ‘but you’re right. If we can make it look convincing enough, we might just get away with it. Two dead Belgians aren’t going to complain. They might even get military burials, which is better than being left to rot or getting eaten by rats. Let’s do it.’
Dawson drove on down the road, still watching out for any sign of enemy patrols.
The houses at the end had been ripped apart by high explosive, their walls blown down, shards of broken glass, lengths of wood, curtaining, electric cables, pipes and lumps of plaster lying around in tangled heaps. And over it all lay a pathetic detritus of bits of broken household goods and equipment, the ruined remains of some anonymous family’s shattered life.
But neither man was interested in the demolished properties. What grabbed their attention, as Dawson pulled the staff car to a halt, were the three bodies lying just outside the collapsed front wall of the left-hand house. Somebody had covered each of them with an old blanket – a neighbour or a passer-by, who knew? – and weighed down the fabric with stones they’d pulled from the rubble.
‘Poor sods,’ Sykes murmured. ‘Probably never knew what hit them.’
Dawson nodded and climbed out of the staff car. He walked over to the nearest corpse and gently lifted up the ragged and bloodstained blanket to reveal the body lying beneath.
The corpse was that of an old man, maybe seventy or so years old and slightly built. His clothes were ripped and sodden with blood, and his dull eyes stared sightlessly upwards. The open wounds on his face were the temporary abode of a number of flies, which buzzed angrily into the air as Dawson flapped his hand over the body. The trails of blood that had run from his nose and ears suggested he’d probably been killed by a blast – Dawson had seen enough bodies in his civilian career to spot the signs.
‘Male or female?’ Sykes asked.
‘Male. An old man. I’ll check the others.’
Dawson looked at the second body for only a brief moment, then dropped the blanket back into place.
‘No good?’ Sykes asked.
‘A little girl, maybe ten or twelve,’ Dawson said, a catch in his voice. ‘Blonde and pretty.’
He strode across to the third still and silent blanket-covered mound, lifted the corner of the fabric, looked down and then shook his head.
‘This one’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s a woman – a middle-aged woman.’
‘That might not matter,’ Sykes called out from the passenger seat of the staff car. ‘We’re going to have to burn the car. By the time we’ve finished one charred corpse is going to look pretty much like any other charred corpse.’
Dawson just stared at him. ‘You’re serious about this?’
‘Definitely. This is no time to be squeamish. The woman’s dead, Dawson, and that’s a fact. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to help her now, but maybe, just maybe, she can help us. Getting back to our own lines with that demolition charge is crucial. Right now we’re almost out of options.’
Sykes undid the door and struggled to get out of the car. ‘Give me a hand,’ he said. ‘I can barely move this bloody leg.’
Dawson jogged back to the staff car and grabbed Sykes around the shoulders, lifting the officer out of the vehicle.
‘Can you stand?’ he asked.
Perspiration stood out on the major’s forehead as he gingerly tried to put some of his weight onto his injured leg. Despite the bandages and strapping, the leg of his trousers was red with blood that had leaked from the wound. He shook his head. ‘No. I’ll have to sit or lie down. It fucking hurts, Dawson. I’m sorry, I can’t help you with this.’
The corporal nodded sympathetically, and helped Sykes stumble across the rubble to where a mattress had been blown out of one of the houses. It was covered in debris and several lengths of timber, but it was the only thing he could see that gave the major a place to lie without exacerbating the pain of his wound.
Part of a wall still stood a few feet from the mattress, and Dawson helped Sykes over to it.
‘Just lean against this for a few seconds, sir,’ he said.
He made sure the officer was able to support himself on his good leg, then strode across to the mattress. He grabbed one side of it and picked it up bodily, flicking all the rubble and other debris off it, and carried it over to the remains of the wall. He put it on the ground close to where Sykes was standing, and helped the major to hobble across and lie down on it.
‘Thanks, Dawson,’ Sykes said, gritting his teeth against the pain. ‘Now, you know what you have to do?’
‘Yes. Get that demolition charge out of the car, put these two bodies in the front seats and light it up.’
Sykes nodded. ‘Put plenty of petrol over the corpses. They have to be completely unrecognizable.’ The officer looked at the expression on Dawson’s face. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘No soldier should have to do this sort of thing, but we have no choice. If I could do it myself, I would. You know that.’
Dawson nodded in his turn, then spun round, checked the street was still deserted, and walked back towards the staff car.
Before he’d taken more than a couple of steps the sound of an engine echoed between the houses. He immediately ducked down amongst the rubble, staring towards the other end of the road.
‘What is it?’ Sykes hissed. ‘A truck?’
Dawson glanced across at the major and shook his head. ‘Good news is it isn’t a lorry full of Jerry soldiers. Bad news is a motorcycle combination has just driven around the corner of the street, and the passenger has a machine-gun mounted in front of him. And the even worse news is that my Lee-Enfield is still over there in the staff car.’
Chapter 18
10 May 1940
Liège, Belgium
The sound of the motorcycle engine got louder as the combination approached slowly. The two German soldiers had obviously seen the empty staff car and were being cautious, possibly fearing a trap.
‘Maybe they’ll see the car’s empty and guess we’ve abandoned it and run off on foot,’ Dawson suggested.
‘They might,’ Sykes said, ‘but only after they’ve stopped and searched the area.’
He unsnapped his holster, pulled out his Webley revolver and checked it was fully loaded. ‘I should have remembered to bring the rifle,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Dawson. That’s my fault. You’re unarmed. I don’t think I’ll be able to take them both with this revolver.’
‘Actually, I’m not quite unarmed,’ Dawson said, and pulled out the automatic pistol he’d taken off the Belgian soldier back at Eben Emael.
Sykes grinned weakly at him. ‘So now it’s two pistols against a machine-gun and whatever the motorcycle rider is armed with. Not the best odds.’
Dawson didn’t reply. He checked the position of the approaching motorcycle combination and crept back into the ruined house, out of sight of the road, and crossed over to a position slightly closer to the staff car. He knew Sykes couldn’t be seen unless one of the Germans walked into the demolished house itself – the position of the mattress behind the wall ensured that. The only hope they had was if both the enemy soldiers walked into the ruined property and he and Sykes could engage them at close range almost simultaneously.
But what the two Germans did next showed just how forlorn a hope that was. The rider swung the combination around so that it faced back the w
ay it had come, ready for a quick getaway. The rider remained in the saddle, with the engine running. Obviously only the passenger was going to investigate the empty car and the ruined houses beside it. The moment Dawson or Sykes shot at him, the rider would be off, fleeing the scene and raising the alarm.
At that moment Dawson realized they would probably both be dead within minutes.
The passenger stood up in the sidecar and stared at the staff car for a few seconds, then stepped out of the vehicle. He took the Schmeisser sub-machine-gun that the rider offered him, checked it and then stepped forwards.
He walked across to the staff car, the weapon held ready, and peered inside it. As soon as he’d verified that it was empty, he called out something to the rider and turned to face the demolished houses. He took a couple of steps forward and then stopped abruptly as a moan sounded from somewhere in front of him.
Dawson guessed the major was trying to entice the soldier into the building so that either he or Dawson could get a clear shot at him. But that wouldn’t stop the motorcycle rider from powering away from the scene and returning with a dozen heavily-armed German soldiers.
The German shouted something over his shoulder to his companion, then took another couple of steps forward.
Dawson eased back to a vantage point from which he could see Major Sykes. But what he saw shocked him. The Webley had fallen from Sykes’s grasp, and lay on the ground beside the mattress. The major appeared to be unconscious, his eyes closed and his body limp. It looked as if the pain from his wound had finally been too much to bear.
The German soldier moved forward more quickly now, swinging his Schmeisser from side to side. Then he saw the major’s body. He stopped moving and aimed the machine-pistol at the recumbent form, his finger resting on the trigger. He took another couple of strides and, before Dawson could do anything, he kicked out – a short, savage blow that drove the toe of his boot hard into Sykes’s wounded thigh. The major screamed with the pain, his whole back arching as his hands sought to close around the wound, to do something – anything – to ease his agony.