He switched on the instrument as they reached the edge of the safety zone they’d already cleared, and stepped forward cautiously, heading towards the nearest soldier.
‘Everybody stand still,’ Watson roared. ‘Do not move. We’ll get you out.’ Across the clearing, Blake repeated his words in French.
Dawson was in a quandary. The injured French soldier was still yelling and screaming, but his cries were becoming weaker with every moment that passed. The only hope for him was if someone could reach him and administer immediate first aid, but there was no way that could be done safely. It was a classic ‘for the greater good of the greatest number’ situation – the French soldier was probably going to die no matter what anyone did, and Dawson’s first responsibility was to find a safe path to allow all the soldiers who were standing in the minefield to reach safety. Only then could he try and get to the injured man.
But he still worked as quickly as he could, moving the mine detector from side to side as he advanced slowly, while behind him Watson drove wooden stakes into the ground every five or six feet, marking out both sides of a safe path around four feet wide down which the soldiers could walk.
‘Stop!’ Dawson yelled. ‘I’ve got one right in front of me.’ He pulled one of the small red crosses from his belt and placed it on the spot, then turned away – they didn’t have time to remove or defuse the mine, so they’d just have to find a path around it.
Watson drove three stakes into the ground to clearly indicate the position of the mine as Dawson cleared the area to the right of it.
Ninety seconds later they reached the closest soldier, a young Frenchman, who was visibly quaking.
Dawson held up his hand, palm towards the young man, a universal gesture meaning ‘stop’ or ‘don’t move’, and to reinforce the message Watson grabbed him by the arm. Dawson ran the head of the mine detector around the French soldier’s feet, but received no hits at all.
‘The area’s clear,’ he said to Watson. ‘Send him back down the cleared lane.’
Watson pulled the French soldier towards him and pointed along the path he’d marked out with stakes. ‘Walk down there,’ he said slowly and clearly. ‘Stay between the stakes.’
The young soldier nodded and swallowed nervously, then began walking gingerly along the path.
Dawson had already started moving forward, covering the short distance – only about fifteen feet – to the next man.
Once he was certain the first soldier was heading the right way, Watson began marking the next section of the path with stakes, and within a minute the two sappers had reached the second man, without encountering any more mines. They sent him back along the safe path, then looked around for the next one.
The French soldier who triggered the mine had fallen almost silent, his cries now reduced to barely audible moans of agony.
The two British soldiers were standing quite close together, and clearing a safe path to them took only another three or four minutes, but the third French soldier was some distance away, on the far side of the clearing.
Dawson looked across at him, then back towards the badly wounded man. ‘Tommy,’ he yelled, ‘tell that French soldier to stay exactly where he is. We’re going to check on the man who stepped on the mine. And get someone to come out here after us with a first-aid kit. Just make sure they stay on the cleared path. Got it?’
‘I’ve got it,’ Blake shouted back and yelled an instruction in French at the remaining soldier, still standing rigidly on the spot.
Dawson turned towards the wounded man and began checking the ground directly in front of him, moving as quickly as possible, Watson still using stakes to mark the edge of the path as the two men advanced steadily.
Behind the sappers, a British soldier walked slowly and carefully towards them along the cleared lane, a bulky medical kit in his hand.
About fifteen feet short of their objective, Dawson detected another mine. Again he marked the spot with a red cross and detoured around it.
And then they reached the injured man.
‘Dear God,’ Watson muttered, as he looked down.
Behind them, the soldier carrying the first-aid pack stared in horror at what lay on the ground in front of them, turned away and vomited copiously.
Chapter 14
11 September 1939
The mine had detonated only about six or seven feet from where the French soldier had been standing, and he’d taken the full force of the blast.
Because it had exploded in mid-air, most of the ball bearings and shrapnel had torn into him at waist-level. He was still alive, just, but Dawson knew immediately that there was nothing anyone could do for him.
A virtual lake of blood surrounded his body like an obscene red halo; his left arm had been severed at the elbow and lay a couple of feet away, and his right hand was missing. But the worst injuries were to his midriff, and they were going to kill him, if he didn’t die first from the massive blood loss from the ruptured arteries in his arms and torso. His stomach had been ripped open, his intestines shredded and torn, most of them lying outside what was left of his body.
The soldier was lying on his back, his eyes open, his breathing shallow and rasping in his throat. Blood caked his face and bubbled from his open mouth.
Not even the most talented team of surgeons in the world, in the best-equipped and most modern operating theatre, would be able to save his life. In a field on the Franco-German border, three British soldiers clutching a basic field first-aid kit stood absolutely no chance of doing anything useful.
But still Dawson was determined to try.
‘Fucking hell,’ he murmured softly, the quiet grief in his voice making the expletive sound almost caressing. ‘Poor bastard.’
He turned to the soldier standing behind him, who was wiping traces of vomit from his mouth. ‘Give me that kit,’ Dawson ordered. He grabbed the first-aid pack from him and pulled it open. There were bandages, pads, tape, tourniquets, scissors, sutures and a range of other medical supplies in it, barely adequate to cope with even one of the French soldier’s multiple wounds.
‘What are you going to do?’ Watson asked, the shock evident in his voice.
‘Put a couple of tourniquets on his arms, try to slow down the blood loss. There’s nothing I can do about his stomach wound.’
‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Dawson muttered, unconsciously lowering his voice so the fatally injured man wouldn’t hear his words – though it was doubtful if he had the slightest awareness of his surroundings.
‘Then do nothing, Eddie. That’s the best thing. He’s still losing a lot of blood from his arms. If you stop that, he’ll just last longer, which means he’ll suffer even more. The kindest thing you can do right now is just let him die.’
Dawson nodded his head slowly. ‘You’re right – I know you’re right, Dave – but I can’t just stand here and watch a man die and do nothing.’
Watson looked at the hideous shape – an object that just minutes earlier had been a fit young soldier – lying on the ground. Then he turned back to Dawson. ‘I don’t think you need worry now, Eddie. He’s stopped breathing. It’s all over.’
Dawson, too, looked down, but Watson was right. The man’s chest had stopped moving, and there was a sudden stillness about his features that told the story. His eyes were still half-open, and Dawson bent forward and gently pulled the eyelids closed.
‘Poor little sod,’ he muttered.
‘Come on, Eddie. There’s nothing we can do now, but there’s still that French soldier over there we need to sort out.’
Dawson tugged his gaze away from the dead body and turned round. ‘Yeah. Let’s go.’
He switched on the mine detector again and took a step forward, careful to keep within the safety lane Watson had marked out.
‘We’re coming to get you now,’ Dawson shouted, and it looked as if the French soldier – who was about thirty yards away – understood his words because he nod
ded.
Then he took a single step backwards, probably just to change position after remaining in one place for so long, and looked down at his feet, a puzzled expression on his face.
Dawson caught the glance and in that instant guessed what had just happened. ‘Down! Everybody down!’ he yelled, grabbed Watson by the shoulder and pulled him flat onto the ground.
‘What the fuck?’ Watson asked.
‘That French soldier. I saw his face. He’s just stepped on something. He’s triggered another mine.’
‘Eddie, why hasn’t it blown up? It must be about three or four seconds since you –’
There was a bang from directly in front of them, and both sappers instinctively flattened themselves even more, hoping against hope that the main charge in the mine wouldn’t ignite. Or that if it did, their steel helmets would offer their heads some protection.
Another massive explosion shook the trees, and a fusillade of shrapnel flew in all directions as the mine detonated.
Chapter 15
11 September 1939
Two hours later Dawson and Watson were slumped, exhausted, behind the Morris truck, cigarettes in hand, their gear tossed into the back of the lorry. They were covered in mud and blood, none of it their own. Two of the soldiers who’d accompanied them into the forest had been hit by shrapnel from the explosion of the second mine, and had been taken away in an ambulance. The remaining four men – including Tommy Blake, the French-speaker – sat and lay nearby, in a similar bloodied, but uninjured, state.
The two sappers had been so committed to clearing the soldiers out of the minefield and getting to the wounded Frenchman that they hadn’t taken too much notice of the other injuries caused by the first mine. These were comparatively light because the explosion had been some distance from where most of the soldiers had been standing, and were mainly flesh wounds where red-hot ball bearings had ripped through clothing and torn into the skin beneath. None of the soldiers injured by that blast had life-threatening wounds, but the second weapon had caused much more devastation.
When the mine had exploded, half a dozen men had still been standing at distances of between fifty and seventy yards from the epicentre of the blast, and they’d all been hit by shrapnel, mainly on their lower torsos and thighs, and some of these wounds were deep and serious. The soldier who’d stepped on the second mine had died instantly.
Three field ambulances had been summoned by one of the French officers after the first mine had exploded, and they arrived a couple of minutes after the detonation of the second weapon, which was providential. When the French medics climbed out and surveyed the scene, they immediately implemented a basic form of triage, ignoring those men with superficial wounds and concentrating on those with more serious injuries.
But somebody had to help the other men, and that task had fallen to Dawson and Watson and the four uninjured soldiers. They’d spent the previous two hours applying tourniquets, wrapping bandages round injured limbs and tying pads over gaping wounds, trying to do what they could until the doctor – only one had appeared in response to the French officer’s request for help – could attend to the injured men. None of them had any proper qualifications for what they were doing, though both sappers had attended a field medicine course back in Britain, but stopping wounds from bleeding using dressings didn’t take a very high degree of skill. They’d managed to cope, and the final ambulance had left the clearing ten minutes ago, carrying the last of the wounded men to hospital somewhere on the west side of the French border.
‘What a fucking awful day,’ Watson said, drawing deeply on his cigarette.
‘Can’t argue with that. We were bloody lucky, you know.’
‘Thanks to you, Eddie. If you hadn’t spotted that poor sod looking down when he stepped on the trigger, we’d probably both be dead now. I reckon it was being so close to the point of detonation that saved us. All the bloody ball bearings went right over us ’cause we were lying flat. If we’d been standing, we’d have been cut in two.’
‘Maybe,’ Dawson nodded. ‘And now we know something else about these bloody bouncing mines. There’s a three- or four-second delay between somebody stepping on it and the first charge detonating. We saw that with the second one, and when we were over by that first soldier I noticed he was lying about six feet clear of the hole where the mine had been buried, so he must have taken three or four steps after he triggered it.’
Watson nodded. ‘Tactically, that makes bloody good sense. The designers of these bastards obviously want the victim to move away from the mine’s location so that when the first charge fires there’s clear air above it. That way the main charge can send the shrapnel the maximum possible distance and cause the greatest injuries. It’s a foul weapon, but by Christ it’s clever.’
Tommy Blake rolled onto his side and looked across at Watson. ‘I was talking to one of the French soldiers earlier this afternoon,’ he said. ‘He spoke a bit of English, and my French isn’t that bad. Anyway, according to him, the French have already given it a nickname. They call it “The Silent Soldier”.’
Watson nodded. ‘That’s a pretty good name for it. Any patrol trying to walk through this forest is probably going to trigger at least one or two of these mines. They’ve got a lethal radius of at least twenty yards, maybe further, and we know the shrapnel can still give you a nasty wound at nearly a hundred yards. The Jerries probably chose ball bearings because they’d travel further than just lumps of steel. One of these mines could wipe out a dozen men just as effectively as a squad of Jerry soldiers.’
‘Yeah,’ Dawson agreed. ‘And that mine’s a soldier that never sleeps, never needs relieving on duty and always reacts exactly the way he’s supposed to. And they probably cost bugger-all to make, probably even less than a real soldier’s uniform.’
He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. ‘You stay here, Dave. I’m going to take a look at one of the mines we pulled out of the ground.’
‘We know what they look like,’ Watson pointed out.
‘I know, but I thought I’d try cleaning one up a bit, see if I can find a number or anything on it, something to tell us what it’s called.’
‘For fuck’s sake be careful. I don’t want the Frogs to have to carry you off in a coffin.’
Dawson nodded and walked away, heading for the ditch where they’d stored the mines they’d extracted. He bent down over the lethal pile and selected the one that looked the cleanest and picked it up, being careful to grasp it around the body and avoid touching any part of the stepped rod that formed the trigger.
He looked carefully at the mine, again surprised at how effective and compact a weapon it was, then started to rub the sides of the cylinder with his fingers, shifting the earth that clung to the metal. It wasn’t easy to remove, presumably because the mine had been buried in the ground for at least a year, but slowly he managed to clean the surface.
What he found under the compacted earth wasn’t helpful. The outside of the cylinder seemed to be smooth and featureless black-painted steel, devoid of markings of any sort. But when he started clearing away the soil from the base, his fingertips felt something different, some faint incised letters. Dawson spat on the cylinder and rubbed harder, removing the last of the soil, and then held the object up in front of his face, the better to make out the words or designation.
At first, he simply couldn’t discern what it was, but then he turned the cylinder slightly, and the last rays of the setting sun brought the letters into sharp relief.
‘Dave,’ he called out, ‘can you write this down for me.’ Letter by letter, he read out what he could see etched into the side of the cylinder, fairly close to the base. Then he gently replaced the mine in the ditch and walked back over to where Watson was sitting, looking at the notebook in his hand.
‘So it’s a “S.Mi.Z 35”, whatever the fuck that is,’ Watson said. ‘Also known as a schrapnellmine. A bloody nasty weapon.’
For a few seconds the two men sat in sil
ence, their thoughts running over the events of the long and extremely traumatic afternoon.
Dawson spoke first. ‘You ever seen a dead man before, Dave?’
‘A few,’ Watson admitted. ‘Accidents happen all the time in my line of business. But I’ve never seen anyone torn apart like those two Frenchies this afternoon. If I don’t see another one for the rest of this bloody war, that’ll be fine by me. A bit too much to hope for though, isn’t it? What about you?’
Dawson nodded. ‘I’ve seen lots. You should try mining and demolition. We had plenty of accidents in the mines. Quarrying’s just as bad. Confined spaces and high explosives are a really dangerous combination.’
Watson glanced round. The afternoon was slowly shading into evening, and the light was fading in the clearing. ‘It’s getting dark. There’s nothing else we can do here now. Let’s get back to camp.’
They stood up, but as they did so a pair of headlamps suddenly illuminated them when a staff car on French army plates turned into the clearing and stopped a short distance away from the Morris lorry.
The British soldiers stared at it as the door opened and a French officer climbed out.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Dawson muttered. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘What do you mean?’ Watson asked.
‘You’ll see.’
Immediately recognizable to the sapper in the twilight was the elegant figure of Capitaine Marcel de St Véran.
The French officer looked with distaste at the muddy ground around him, then walked slowly towards the silent British soldiers, who came somewhat raggedly to attention and saluted. He stopped a few feet away, lifted his swagger stick in casual acknowledgement, and then sniffed disdainfully.
‘You men are filthy,’ he snapped. ‘You look disgraceful. Where is your officer?’
For a few seconds nobody responded, so Dawson took a half-pace forward. ‘There’s no officer with us, sir.’
To Do or Die Page 8