The problem wasn’t their location, which was a bare two miles from the Franco-German border, it was the fact that, between them and that border, the area seemed to be swarming with German troops.
Back at the British camp on the outskirts of Dalstein, Lieutenant Charnforth had told them that the French had mounted an assault across the border, covering a front that was wide but not very deep, and had met with little resistance from the German forces. The trouble was, all the troops they’d seen so far were German, not French.
‘Any Frogs down there?’ Watson asked hopefully, lying beside Dawson in the undergrowth on the edge of the wood.
‘Fuck all, mate. Wall-to-wall Jerries as far as I can tell.’ Dawson lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’
Watson took the binoculars and began surveying the narrow plain that lay below the hill.
‘Charnforth told us the French had captured about twenty villages that the Germans had abandoned,’ Dawson remarked. ‘Looking down there at Rammelfangen, I reckon it’s completely deserted. No sign of any French troops, and all I can see everywhere else is Germans.’
‘The French probably buggered off as soon as the Germans arrived, which is what you’d expect, given their record. First sign of trouble and they’re off.’
‘They’re not that bad, are they?’ Dawson asked. ‘I thought the French army was pretty tough.’
‘You think about it,’ Watson said. ‘In Britain we celebrate a string of military victories, but all the Frogs do is mourn a bunch of glorious defeats. And you don’t see any of them down there now, do you?’
‘Can’t argue with that.’
‘If you’re reading that map right, we’re a mile or so from the border, so if Charnforth’s information was right, those should be French troops down there, not Jerries. So, like I said, if the Frogs ever were here, they’ve obviously buggered off now.’
Dawson nodded and looked back over the view below them. The ground sloped away gently from the hill to the level fields that lay to the west. A few scattered buildings – farmhouses and farm cottages and the occasional barn or machinery shed – studded the landscape, and roads and tracks meandered alongside the hedgerows. It could almost have been a view of England, perhaps somewhere in the West Country or Wales or even the Borders, except for the troops.
Most of them were too far away – moving about close to the woodland that lay on the opposite side of the wide valley – for Dawson to see them clearly, but through the binoculars the coal-scuttle helmets and grey-green uniforms of the Wehrmacht troops were completely unmistakable. They hadn’t tried to do an accurate count, but at a rough guess Dawson estimated there were about 200 German soldiers in front of them, plus about a dozen lorries and a hell of a lot of horses, apparently being used both as pack animals and also to pull carts loaded with supplies. But the number was frankly irrelevant. There was no way he and Watson were going to be able to slip past that concentration of troops without being noticed. And shot, obviously.
Watson lowered the binoculars and rested his chin on his hands. ‘We ain’t going that way,’ he stated.
‘Damn right,’ Dawson agreed. ‘In fact, we ain’t going anywhere any time soon. There are too many troops coming and going down there for us to risk leaving this wood in daylight. I think we’ll just have to hole up here until dark and then try and slip away.’
‘Which way?’ Watson asked.
Dawson looked at the German map which he’d placed on the ground right beside him. ‘I think we need to move further north. In fact, I think we need to try to get all the way up here’ – his fingers traced a route on the map – ‘to the border with Luxembourg.’
‘And then cross into France?’
Dawson shook his head. ‘No. I think our safest route might be to cross into Luxembourg itself. I doubt if that border’s heavily guarded, because Luxembourg’s neutral, and it’s not really got a military machine. The Germans would hardly be worried about an attack from that direction, and once we’re in Luxembourg I’d guess that crossing the second border, the one into France, would be a lot easier.’
Watson looked at the map, at the route Dawson was suggesting, and nodded. ‘It’s not even that far to go,’ he said. ‘I mean, we’ve covered about half the distance already. So as long as we can avoid the Jerries once we leave here, we should get to the Luxembourg border by tomorrow evening, something like that.’
‘As long as we don’t meet any more trouble on the way, yes,’ Dawson agreed. ‘Though with our present track record, that’s probably not very likely. Anyway, we’ll go slowly and quietly and hope for the best.’
‘And we keep on heading north, I suppose?’
‘Maybe north-east to start with,’ Dawson replied, ‘depending on what we find when we get out of this wood. What we have to do is avoid any contact with those troops, so we might even have to head east to get clear of the area, and then swing round to the north.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I guess we’ll find out in about three or four hours, when it’s dark enough to move.’
Chapter 26
13 September 1939
‘OK, it’s about time. Let’s go,’ Dawson muttered and stood up. He slung the Mauser over his shoulder and checked his Schmeisser – if they met anyone, it would probably be at very close range, and the machine-pistol would be a more useful weapon than the rifle in that circumstance.
‘Ready,’ Watson acknowledged, and stood ready to follow Dawson along the meandering path that led down the gentle slope from the hill to the level farmland below.
They’d watched the activity on the plain diminish steadily as dusk fell and the darkness approached. There had been progressively less movement of troops and supplies as the shadows lengthened, and by early evening most of the German soldiers had assembled in makeshift camps consisting of groups of tents, sentries posted on the outskirts of each encampment.
That was what Dawson had been hoping would happen. The wood they’d taken shelter in was to the south of an unmade road the Germans had been using to transport men and materiel. It would have been very difficult to cross it unseen if the movements had continued through the night, and they had to cross it to make any progress towards the north-west and the border with Luxembourg.
In silence, the two sappers walked down the track that snaked through the trees. At the very bottom of the hill there was a small clearing. Just before they entered it, Dawson held up his hand, and both men stood in watchful silence, carefully checking the land ahead of them, in case the Germans had positioned sentries there. But the clearing appeared completely empty in the moonlight, the only illumination.
Dawson stepped forward, Watson a few steps behind him.
‘The road’s about a hundred yards over there,’ Dawson whispered, pointing to the north. ‘I know it all seems quiet at the moment, but I still think we ought to head east for a while.’
The two men walked around the edge of the clearing, and emerged through the trees on the far side. Beyond the wood and the hill, the land was more or less flat, a network of cultivated fields with lanes and tracks snaking around them.
‘This way,’ Dawson muttered, and began walking slowly down a narrow track that turned into a field through an open gate. They stepped through the gateway and carried on walking down the side of the field in the same direction, Dawson holding the compass in his left hand and checking it periodically.
After about half a mile, he stopped. In front of them just outside the field was another lane or track, unmade and continuing to the east.
‘I think this is about far enough, Dave,’ he muttered. ‘We don’t want to go very far this way or we’re going to get too close to that town over there – Pachten, I think it’s called. It’s time we tried to cross that road.’
Dawson led the way out of the field, across the unmade track and into the next field. The whole time both men scanned in all directions for any sign of trouble. The field was perhaps 400 yards wide, and they kept clo
se to one end of it, where the fence and hedge offered some cover. At the far side they stopped and looked over the fence into the adjoining meadow.
‘Empty,’ Dawson muttered, ‘but we must be getting close to the road now. Keep your eyes open.’
‘I’m like a tree-full of owls, mate.’
The two men followed the same routine, crossing the field at one end, walking about twenty feet apart.
At the opposite side they stopped and again checked over the hedge. But this time, they could actually see the track the Germans had been using, because beyond this hedge was an area of unfenced waste ground, and the rutted and unmade road was clearly visible on the far side of it.
Also visible were two intermittent faint red glows that periodically brightened and then faded, but always stayed just visible.
‘Bugger,’ Dawson muttered. ‘Two sentries, both smoking cigarettes. And there might be more of them – non-smokers, maybe – that we can’t see, posted at intervals along the road.’
‘Do you want to try to take them out? Rush them and then run for it?’
‘No. Far too risky. I’d rather try and slip across the road without being spotted. If we use the pistol or the Schmeissers, we’ll wake up the entire camp back there and we’ll end up running with a couple of hundred fucking Jerry soldiers hot on our trail. A really bad idea. If we do have to make a kill, we’ll have to use the bayonets, but I really don’t want to do that. We’ve no idea when these sentries are going to be relieved, and if we did kill one, his body might be found within minutes.’
‘So we need to sneak across that road, somehow and somewhere?’
Dawson nodded. ‘Definitely, even if we have to go another mile east.’
Watson took a final look over the hedge at the silent sentries. ‘Then we’d best get moving,’ he whispered.
* * *
An hour later, that’s where they were – about a mile further east – having back-tracked some distance away from the unmade road before they again started heading in the general direction of Pachten.
‘Right,’ Dawson said, ‘let’s try again.’
As before, the two men moved slowly and as quietly as they could in a northerly direction, creeping across the deserted fields towards the road they needed to cross. The geography was much the same – fields separated by hedgerows and tracks used for farm machinery – but this time they had to cross three meadows before they reached a point where they could see the unmade road.
‘What do you reckon?’ Watson whispered, peering through a gap in the hedge.
‘I don’t see any sentries,’ Dawson replied quietly, studying the land beyond the hedge just as carefully as his companion, ‘but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there. Let’s give it another few minutes, just in case.’
They waited in silence for perhaps another five minutes, but saw nothing to suggest that the Germans had posted any sentries along that stretch of the road.
‘Right,’ Dawson decided. ‘Time’s passing, and we’ve got a long way to go. Let’s do it.’
They stood up cautiously, backed away from the hedge and checked their weapons. They each had their Mauser rifles slung diagonally across their shoulders and the straps of the Schmeissers around their necks, allowing the machine-pistols to hang directly in front of their chests, within easy reach.
Dawson reached down to his belt and drew out the Mauser bayonet, and motioned Watson to do the same.
‘Just in case,’ Dawson said. ‘No noise.’
He led the way to a break in the hedge perhaps twenty yards away, then paused and for a few seconds just stared towards the road, alert to any sight or sound. He still neither saw nor heard anything, so he stepped cautiously through and took a dozen silent steps that brought him to the edge of the unmade track.
He glanced behind him, checking that Watson was ready to follow him, then looked both ways again and stepped out. He was barely half-way across when he heard a guttural shout from his left. He stopped immediately and half turned towards the sound.
Clearly visible in the pale moonlight was a German soldier, striding down the track, his Schmeisser pointed straight at him.
Chapter 27
13 September 1939
Dawson stood stock still, his heart pounding. His hope was that, in the darkness, the sentry wouldn’t be able to properly see either the outline of his helmet or the colour of his uniform, and might even mistake him for another German soldier because of the unmistakable shape of the Schmeisser machine-pistol hanging round his neck. He held the Mauser bayonet down beside his right leg, where it would be invisible to the approaching soldier.
The man barked something else at Dawson and gestured with the muzzle of his Schmeisser. Dawson turned further towards him, still keeping the bayonet out of sight, but otherwise didn’t react.
The German soldier stopped about three or four feet away, and shouted something else. Dawson had no idea what he’d said – the only word of the German language he knew was Achtung, and he wasn’t even sure what that meant – but he guessed the soldier might be asking for his papers. If the situation had been reversed, and Dawson had been on sentry duty and spotted an unknown man approaching, that’s what he would have demanded. So he reached towards the top right-hand pocket of his battledress, undid the button and slipped his fingers inside.
He pulled out a piece of folded paper, and realized it was the original printed order he’d been given, instructing him to report to Major Sykes at Cherbourg, what seemed like months ago. He extended his arm towards the German, but at that instant everything changed.
The sentry suddenly noticed something about Dawson – maybe his characteristic British helmet, or perhaps the design or the colour of his battledress – and snapped the Schmeisser up and into the firing position.
Dawson dropped the paper and immediately swung the bayonet towards the German, but even as he did so he knew that he was too slow – a lifetime too slow.
But before the enemy soldier could pull the trigger of his machine-pistol, a dark shape materialized behind him, and Dawson saw a sudden flash of steel. A hand reached over the man’s shoulder, wrapped itself around his mouth, jerking his head back, and simultaneously the gleaming steel blade of a bayonet ripped through his throat, tearing the life from his body as a spray of blood fountained upwards.
The German soldier slumped forward, his limbs twitching in his death throes. Behind him, Dave Watson lowered the man’s body to the ground, the blade of his bayonet dripping blood onto the surface of the road.
‘Thanks a lot, Dave,’ Dawson said hoarsely, as he stepped forward. He’d looked death in the eyes, and hadn’t much enjoyed the experience. ‘I owe you one. Let’s get him out of sight.’
While Watson cleaned the blood off the blade of his bayonet on the dead man’s clothes, Dawson picked up the sheet of paper – he knew that leaving that piece of evidence behind would be a really bad idea. And then, together, the two men lugged the body of the German soldier off the side of the road and into the adjoining field to the south. They dragged him about thirty yards, then dropped the corpse behind a clump of low bushes.
‘Somebody’s bound to find him pretty soon,’ Dawson muttered. ‘When the watch changes and another soldier arrives to relieve him they’re going to know he’s missing. All we can hope is that maybe they’ll think he’s gone AWOL.’
‘Maybe,’ Watson agreed, ‘but we’ll need to get rid of the blood on the road right now or it’ll be obvious someone killed him. I never thought he’d bleed that much.’
‘You must have cut through one of the arteries in his neck.’
There was a substantial dark stain marring the surface of the unmade road where the German sentry had met his untimely end, clearly visible in the light from the moon, but it was an easy job to toss a few handfuls of loose soil over it. That, Dawson knew, probably wouldn’t be enough to hide what had happened when dawn broke, but hopefully in the darkness it would be enough to conceal the stain. And, at the very l
east, even if the Germans discovered the dead body, they would still have no idea who’d killed the man or which way his attacker or attackers were going.
The two men checked in both directions that there were no more enemy soldiers in sight, then strode swiftly across the road and vanished through a gate and into the field that bordered the northern side.
The moon chose that moment to disappear behind a cloud, plunging the landscape into full darkness and, moments later, Watson tripped on the uneven ground and fell heavily, his equipment clattering and banging.
Almost immediately, there was a challenge in German from somewhere behind them.
‘Fucking hell,’ Dawson muttered, as he and Watson automatically ducked down into cover behind a low mound in the field.
‘They must have heard,’ Watson said.
Dawson risked a quick glance around the side of the mound, keeping his head pressed well down into the long grass that covered it.
The moon was emerging fitfully from behind one of the clouds that partially covered the sky. On the road, no more than thirty yards away, two German soldiers were standing and staring in their direction, their faces pale and anonymous blobs in the semi-darkness, their weapons – both were armed with rifles – held across their bodies. They’d obviously heard the two men, or at least heard the noise Watson had made, but didn’t know exactly who or what had caused it.
‘There are two of them,’ Dawson whispered. ‘Stay really still. They might just go away.’
But somehow that didn’t look likely. The two German soldiers remained immobile but obviously alert, clearly highly suspicious of the noise they’d heard, but apparently unwilling to venture off the road to investigate it.
To Do or Die Page 16