Watson glanced over his shoulder to check that Dawson had got the unit connected, then picked up the handset and pressed the microphone switch.
‘You there, Eddie?’
‘Loud and clear, mate.’
‘Right. I’m switching to the headphones and starting now.’
Watson knelt down on the ground, pulled on the headset and slowly inched his way towards the red wooden cross his colleague had placed over the buried object.
All anti-personnel mines require a certain minimum pressure before they’re triggered, for obvious reasons – it would be pointless laying mines if every rabbit or fox that walked over them could fire them – so generally a downward force of at least fifteen or twenty pounds was needed. Watson knew that he was safe as long as he didn’t lean directly on the trigger, or hit it, but he still exercised extreme care.
First, he just looked at the ground directly in front of him, trying to spot any signs of previous disturbance or digging, but he could see nothing. And, exactly as he’d been trained to do, he kept up a continuous running commentary to Dawson, who waited nervously beside the Morris truck, making notes as the operation progressed – again, standard procedure when dealing with unexploded ordnance of any sort.
‘No sign of recent digging,’ Watson reported. ‘The grass has grown over the object, so I’m guessing that whatever it is has been buried there for at least a year. No sign of exposed metal parts or triggers, so it’s presumably pressure-activated by a sensor just below the surface. A question, Dave. When the detector registered it, how big was the object? I mean, are we looking at something six inches across, or a foot, or what?’
Dawson thought for a second. ‘Quite small, certainly less than a foot.’
‘OK. In that case I’m going to start loosening the soil in a circle about two feet in diameter all around it, starting from the outside.’
‘Go gently, Dave,’ Dawson muttered.
Watson eased up into a crouch, pulled out his bayonet and slid the end of its blade gently into the earth some twelve inches from the red wooden cross, at a diagonal angle. He drove it in about six inches, felt no resistance, pulled it out and moved the blade closer. This time, he felt the tip touch something solid. That gave him an indication of the dimensions of the buried object.
He left the bayonet in position, picked up the shovel and drove it a couple of inches into the ground to scoop up the top layer of soil. He lifted the shovel, tossed the turf and earth behind him, away from the mine, then repeated the process slightly further over to his right, moving slowly around the buried object.
‘Right,’ he said into the microphone, as he lifted the last sod from the ground in front of him. ‘I’ve just completed the circle. The cleared area runs around the object at a distance of about a foot. I’m now going to start shifting the top layer of soil directly over the mine.’
Watson removed the wooden cross that showed the position of the buried object, and discarded the shovel. He pulled out the bayonet and slowly, with infinite care, started removing the grass and soil that covered the mine.
He’d shifted about half of it when he suddenly saw a slim metal object protruding from the soil, and instantly stopped moving.
‘Dave, I’ve spotted something,’ Watson said.
‘Keep talking,’ Dawson replied, still making notes. ‘Tell me what you can see.’ If Watson didn’t survive, the information Dawson would glean from his actions would help when he tackled the next one – as he would certainly have to do – and would hopefully allow him to avoid making the same mistake.
‘OK. It looks like a thin black metal tube, angled downwards into the ground at around forty-five degrees, and about half an inch below the surface. It has to be some kind of a trigger, but it’s not a type I’ve seen before.’
‘Hang on a second, Dave,’ Dawson said, doing a rough sketch on his pad of the object Watson had just described. ‘Unless the mine’s been installed at an angle, that sounds like just a part of the trigger. You could be looking at a three- or four-prong assembly. Can you try clearing the soil around it – carefully, of course – and just check it out.’
‘I’m doing it right now, mate,’ Watson said.
There was a short pause, then his voice sounded again in Dawson’s ear.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s a three-pronged trigger, like an inverted tripod. I’ve found two other prongs just the same, pointing in different directions. So I know exactly where the mine is. You were pretty much spot on with the cross. It was right over the trigger.’
‘I’m a professional, mate. What else would you expect?’ Dawson’s comment was light and humorous, but there was no disguising the tension in his voice. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘Keeping well away from that fucking trigger for starters. I’m probing with the bayonet to find out just how big this bastard is.’
There was another pause, and Dawson watched his friend closely.
‘OK, Eddie. I’ve found nothing at a distance of six inches from the trigger, and I’ve gone down around a foot, so it can’t be a flat mine. I’m guessing it’s tall and thin.’ Watson paused for a few seconds as he explored further. ‘Right, now I’ve got it. It’s not shaped like a conventional mine. It’s more like a can of beans, quite small. I’ve never seen one anything like this before.’
‘Copied that, Dave. What are you doing now?’
‘I’m shifting the earth from all around it. Once I’ve got it free, I’ll lift it out and we can take a proper look at it.’
Again there was silence over the field telephone circuit, and Dawson just stood and watched because there was nothing else he could do.
‘Right, Eddie. I’ve managed to shift all the earth. I’m going to lift it out of the hole. But before I do, I’ll just describe it to you, in case there’s any kind of an anti-handling device I haven’t spotted. The mine’s about six inches high and four inches in diameter, a thick black cylinder. On the top of the cylinder are four round plugs or something similar, and sticking out of the centre is a kind of rod that’s about three inches high, and on top of that are the three prongs. As far as I can tell, that’s the trigger. I guess pressure on the prongs would trigger a spring-loaded release, and that would detonate it.’
‘OK, Dave. Just do me a favour and check all around it first, before you lift it out of the hole.’
‘You bet. Wait, I’ve just noticed something else. That vertical rod I described has two thicknesses. It’s fatter at the base, and there’s a thinner section on top. I think that’s the trigger. It looks like the thin section slides into the fatter part.’
‘Got that, Eddie. Let me know when you’ve lifted it out of the ground.’
Less than thirty seconds later, Dawson watched Watson stand up and back away from the hole, and as he moved backwards Dawson saw the mine for the first time. At that distance, it looked remarkably insignificant, just a small black can with a rod on the top, but he had no doubt about its lethal power.
‘That’s it, Eddie,’ Watson said. ‘You can come over and take a look at it.’
Dawson placed his notebook in the back of the Morris truck and walked across towards Watson. When he reached his friend, the two men stood in silence for few seconds, just staring down at the mine Watson had recovered. It appeared to be black-painted, but it was covered in earth so any markings on it were invisible.
‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Dawson commented.
‘No, but if it’s the same type as the one that Frog soldier stepped on, we know it’s a dangerous bastard.’
Dawson bent down and looked closely at the weapon. Then he pointed at the top of it. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘There’s a hole through the thinner part of the rod. I’ll bet that’s where a safety pin would go.’
‘If you’re right, that would make disarming it really easy. Just stick another pin through the hole, and you could probably play football with it.’
‘R
ather you than me,’ Dawson said, ‘but I think you’re right. I think that’s how you make the weapon safe. Hang on a minute. I’ll see if there’s anything in the truck we could use.’
A couple of minutes later he was back, a selection of bolts and nails in his hand. He checked the size of the hole in the rod carefully, then chose a bolt about two inches long and slid it through the hole. For safety, he screwed a nut onto the thread to hold it in place.
‘You think that’s it?’ Watson asked.
‘Yes, I do.’ Gingerly, Dawson stretched out his hand, picked up the mine and looked at it closely. ‘You were right – the thinner section of the rod slides inside the other, and that must be the trigger. I guess the detonator’s directly underneath that.’ He hefted it in his hand. ‘It feels as if it weighs about ten pounds.’
He turned it over and looked at the base, but there appeared to be no markings on it anywhere. The mine’s body looked as if it had been forged from a single piece of steel, formed into a cup shape, with a waterproof seal round the top, through which the trigger assembly and the four caps Watson had mentioned protruded.
‘There’s no sign of anything on the base of the mine,’ Watson remarked. ‘No separate charge to make the bugger fly up into the air.’
‘No, but that would probably be internal. This mine was designed to be left buried in the ground for a long time, so the Jerries would have wanted as few seams and joints as possible to make sure it stayed watertight. If there is a charge designed to launch it upwards, it’ll be inside the casing, with a steel plate above it to direct the blast downwards. That would work.’
‘Yeah, Eddie. OK. That’s one down and Christ knows how many to go.’
‘Right. Let’s put this bastard somewhere safe, and then we’d better carry on,’ Dawson said. ‘Do you want to use the detector and I’ll dig out the next one?’
‘Yeah, fine.’
The two men walked back to the Morris truck, where a small crowd of people had now assembled, not only the six British soldiers who had come with them into the forest, but also the two French officers and a handful of French soldiers as well.
‘Where’s Tommy?’ Dawson asked, looking round. ‘We need him to explain what we’ve found.’
‘Here, mate,’ Blake said, stepping forward.
‘Right. Tell these Frenchies that this is a new kind of mine, and that we’re going to have to look at it carefully before we can work out exactly how it works. From the pattern of destruction we’ve seen, we think it probably jumps up into the air before it explodes, so it’s bloody nasty. We think we’ve made this one safe, so we’re going to leave it over there’ – he pointed off to one side of the track where there was a ditch – ‘while we carry on searching for any others. Tell them that nobody should handle or even touch this – we don’t want any accidents.’
‘Got that,’ the lance-corporal said. He swung round, converted Dawson’s remarks into slightly hesitant and far from colloquial French and fired it at the officers and soldiers standing there.
As he did so, Watson carried the mine over to the dry ditch, knelt down and placed it carefully on its side in the bottom of it, and marked the location with a couple of red-painted wooden stakes.
Then the two sappers turned and walked back towards the minefield.
Chapter 12
11 September 1939
‘We need to establish the pattern,’ Dawson said, ‘so let’s start by marking the spot where we pulled that one out.’
He took a small wooden stake and hammered it into the ground a few inches from the hole Watson had dug to remove the weapon, then retreated a few yards as his colleague donned the headphones and switched on the mine detector.
‘I’m continuing the sweep you started,’ Watson said, and began walking slowly, moving the head of the instrument over the ground, as he worked his way from one side of the track to the other.
He’d only covered about ten feet when he stopped abruptly. He moved the detector very slowly over a spot directly in front of him, then changed position slightly and repeated the process.
‘I think that’s another one,’ he said, raising his voice. Mirroring Dawson’s previous actions, he noted the spot where the signal from the buried object was strongest, and placed a red cross over that exact location.
Dawson prepared to remove the second mine and make it safe, while Watson walked back over to the Morris truck to observe and make notes. Knowing the type of weapon they were dealing with made the task of extracting it a lot quicker. Once he’d established exactly where the trigger was located, Dawson was able to dig down in a circle around it, and within five minutes he’d removed the mine, inserted a bolt through the hole in the metal plunger and placed the weapon beside the first one in the ditch.
Watson drove another stake into the earth to mark the original position of the mine, and then resumed his clearance procedure.
It quickly became a routine and, within about an hour, Dawson and Watson had found and removed a further four mines, which they stored in the ditch with the first two. The cleared lane was now marked with half a dozen wooden stakes and white tape, and studded with other stakes that showed where the mines had been positioned. By then, the soldiers who’d accompanied them had brewed some tea, and the two sappers stopped working and sat down at the back of the lorry for a drink and a smoke.
‘I can see the pattern now, Dave,’ Dawson said, lighting another cigarette. ‘They’ve laid them in groups of three, starting more or less on the right-hand side of the track and then angling across to the opposite side. Then they moved about twenty feet forward and repeated the line, this time from left to right, so it’s a kind of open zig-zag that covers the whole of the track through the forest. You’d have to be bloody lucky not to step on one of them if you were walking through here. Any sizeable force would be cut to pieces.’
‘Yeah,’ Watson agreed, ‘and, now we know how they were positioned, it should be a lot quicker to find the rest of them.’
‘As long as the Jerries stuck to the same pattern, yes. If I was laying a minefield, I think I’d alternate them a bit, just to keep the enemy sappers on their toes.’
Watson looked at him. ‘Thanks for that, you cheerful sod. But you’re right – we mustn’t make any assumptions. We’ll take it slowly and carefully, and check everything.’
Dawson looked at the area they’d cleared so far, which looked pathetically small compared to the acres of forest that surrounded them.
‘Just looking at that,’ he said, ‘and bearing in mind there are exactly two of us here, I reckon it’ll take months to clear a path all the way through. And that’s assuming that the bloody mine detector keeps on working.’
‘Don’t forget what that lieutenant said. The French are supposed to be sending some of their own sappers out here to help us.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it. When I –’
At that moment there was a loud bang from somewhere well over to the right of the safety lane, almost at the edge of the clearing. Watson and Dawson spun round to look, and saw a sight that both of them knew instantly would stay with them for ever.
About seventy yards away, a French soldier had wandered towards the undergrowth, perhaps looking simply for a place to have a crap, and had clearly stepped on one of the buried mines.
As the sappers – and everyone else in the clearing – watched, a black object shot out of the ground from just behind the soldier, reached about level with his waist and almost immediately exploded, the sound an echoing blast that dwarfed the first explosion.
Chapter 13
11 September 1939
‘Down! Get down!’ Dawson yelled, and threw himself behind the Morris truck, Watson tumbling to the ground right behind him.
They covered their heads with their arms and lay as flat as they possibly could. Less than a second afterwards, the metal sides of the Morris truck rang with hammer-blows as the ball bearings from the mine crashed into it. Other missiles whistled past them
, screaming over their heads and embedding themselves harmlessly in the ground beyond or smashing into the undergrowth around them.
‘Fucking hell!’ Watson muttered. ‘Did you see that?’
‘Damn right I did. That bloody mine popped right up out of the ground. What a bastard.’ Dawson looked round cautiously. ‘We’d better see if we can help that poor sod.’
Watson shook his head. ‘He’ll be cats’ meat, but we’ll have to go and check.’
‘Yes, and head off the rest of the Frogs before they rush over there and step on another one. Come on, and bring the detector.’
The two men climbed to their feet and looked cautiously around the side of the lorry. The shrapnel from the mine had torn a devastating circular path through the clearing, and Dawson could see at least three soldiers writhing in agony on the ground, already being attended to by their comrades. Yells and shouts of pain echoed around.
And, as Dawson had feared, three French soldiers and a couple of the British lads were already running towards the site of the explosion.
‘Oh, shit,’ Watson said. Then he yelled out, ‘Stop!’ at the top of his voice.
Beside him, Dawson joined the chorus, bellowing, ‘Halt! Mines!’
The two British soldiers stopped dead in their tracks, but the French carried on running. Then Tommy Blake, who’d been bending over one of his fallen comrades, stood up, took a couple of paces forward and shouted something, and the French soldiers stopped as well.
‘Stand still, everybody,’ Dawson yelled. ‘You’re all in the middle of a minefield. For Christ’s sake, nobody move.’
For a few seconds there was no movement and total silence, then a piercing scream cut through the air, followed by a howl of absolute agony.
‘He’s still alive, then, the poor bastard,’ Watson said, looking across the clearing towards the dark shape lying on the ground about sixty yards away.
‘Be better if he’d died straight away, because I don’t think we’re going to be able to get there in time to do anything for him. I’ll use the detector,’ Dawson said. ‘You mark out the path behind me.’
To Do or Die Page 7