‘Jesus Christ, that hurts,’ Watson muttered.
‘It will do,’ Dawson replied. ‘That was a pretty big lump of steel I pulled out of your shoulder.’
‘Not that. My shoulder is just numb, but it feels like there’s a man with an axe cutting his way onto my skull.’
‘Where?’
‘The left side, just above my ear.’
Dawson leant forward and looked at the side of Watson’s head. There was a huge bruise there, badly swollen.
‘That’s quite a crack you’ve got there, Dave. At least it wasn’t a piece of shrapnel, otherwise you’d have bled to death by now. You were hit by something large and solid. Maybe when the grenades blew a chunk of wood off one of the logs shot up the bank. You’ve got a bruise and a graze, but the skin isn’t badly cut.’
Dawson eased the makeshift pad away from the wound on Watson’s shoulder and looked at it critically. He could see a piece of fabric sticking out of the cavity – a strip of Watson’s torn vest – and knew he had to remove that as well.
‘Just lie still, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to shift some debris from your wound. I’m sorry, but it’s going to hurt.’
Watson grimaced. ‘OK. Just be quick.’
Dawson dried his hand, took a firm grip on the edge of the material and pulled. There was another sudden rush of blood as the sodden strip of cloth emerged. Watson moaned in pain. Dawson pushed the pad into place and held it firmly.
‘It’s still bleeding,’ he said, ‘but not too badly. Before we can move, I’ll have to try to strap it up. Are you OK to sit up now?’
Watson tried to nod and grimaced as another wave of pain shot through his skull. ‘Yes,’ he said weakly.
‘Right, I’ll help you. Just hold this pad in place.’
Dawson waited until Watson had placed his right hand over the wadded-up remnants of the shirt, then stepped over his body. He seized his friend’s uninjured shoulder and helped him sit up.
‘You OK?’ he asked anxiously, as Watson seemed about to collapse.
‘Bit dizzy. Hurting.’
Dawson grabbed the cut-up lengths of his shirt and looped one of them under Watson’ arm and round his neck. The wound was in an awkward place. He knew that trying to keep any degree of pressure on it was going to be difficult, especially if they were walking – and they were going to have to get moving pretty soon. He was also worried that his companion had lost quite a lot of blood.
‘You’ll need to keep the pressure on that pad, Dave. I can’t get it any tighter and you’re still bleeding.’
‘Fucking crap doctor you are,’ Watson said. ‘Give me a hand to get dressed.’
Dawson helped Watson pull on his shirt and trousers, then laced his boots. Only then did he get dressed himself, and take stock of their situation.
The good news was that they were undeniably out of Germany and in Luxembourg, and so they were safe from the Germans, but that was pretty much all that was good. Watson was weak and hurting, and Dawson knew he wouldn’t be able to walk far, or fast. They were both famished and thirsty. They’d had no food for what felt like a week, and their water bottles had presumably either fallen off the raft to drift away downstream, or had been blown to pieces when the grenades blew up. And he had no idea how any Luxembourgers would react to meeting them, but he doubted very much if they’d be welcomed with open arms.
They needed to move – and move quickly – and find somewhere they could hide for a while, plus they needed food and water, and much better bandages or something for Watson’s wound.
‘Can you stand?’ Dawson asked. ‘And walk?’
‘I can’t run, if that’s what you’re going to ask next,’ Watson said, with a flash of his old spirit.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to. Here, let me give you a hand.’
Dawson stepped behind his companion and helped him stand up. Watson groaned as the wound in his shoulder sent a stab of pain across his chest, and swayed slightly. Then he nodded. ‘OK. I think I can manage. But for Christ’s sake, just take it slow. Where are we going?’
‘Bloody good question. I’ve still got the map in my pocket, but the compass has gone, not that we need it.’ Dawson gestured to the east, where the dark waters of the Moselle were flowing silently past the bank. ‘That’s a bloody great river, and if we keep it on our left-hand side, we have to be heading south. So we just keep walking until we reach the border. That’s my plan, anyway.’
‘Weapons?’ Watson asked.
Dawson shrugged his shoulders. ‘One trench knife, and one Mauser bayonet. That’s it. Everything else went down when the grenades blew the raft apart. I even lost the pistol. But it doesn’t matter now we’re here in Luxembourg. In fact, if we still had the Schmeissers I’d suggest we dumped them.’
Watson nodded. Dawson noticed he was swaying slightly. He obviously needed something to support him when they started walking.
Dawson looked around the bank. ‘Hang on here just a second,’ he said, and walked across to a nearby clump of trees. He took out the Mauser bayonet and selected a branch about six feet long. Half a dozen blows from the bayonet severed it from the trunk of the tree, and another dozen trimmed all the smaller branches from it.
‘Here, Dave,’ Dawson said, walking back to his companion. ‘Sorry this is a bit rough, but it should help you walk. Are you OK to start now?’
Watson took the trimmed branch in his right hand and hefted it, then nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘This should help a bit. Right, let’s go.’
Dawson stayed close beside Watson as the two men started walking away from the bank of the river – if there were still any Germans over on the opposite side of the Moselle, they didn’t want to be close enough to be seen once dawn broke.
Dawson glanced at his watch. ‘I think it should start getting light soon,’ he said. ‘I’d really like to find somewhere to hide out before daybreak.’
‘Somewhere in the woods, you mean?’
‘Probably,’ Dawson nodded. ‘According to this map, there aren’t any towns very close to the border, so we shouldn’t have a problem staying out of sight.’
The area was quite heavily wooded, and Dawson was convinced that once they moved away from the river bank they’d be safe from German snipers.
He and Watson moved slowly into the shelter of the trees. The sky to the east was lightening, and their visibility was slowly improving, even under the canopy of leaves above their heads. Watson was obviously hurting badly, and could only walk quite slowly, so Dawson knew they’d have to stop pretty soon.
They’d covered perhaps 500 yards from the spot where they’d crawled ashore before he found anything suitable, and even then it wasn’t ideal. He’d have preferred to put a bit more distance between themselves and the place they’d landed, just in case the Luxembourg police or anyone had spotted them.
But Watson couldn’t walk much further, so it would have to do. Two large trees surrounded by heavy undergrowth were backed up against a sharp rise in the ground, and formed a natural vantage point. It offered a place where they could hide and lick their wounds, and allow Watson time to recover.
‘Let’s get in there, Dave,’ Dawson said. ‘That’s as good as a spot as anywhere I’ve seen.’
He led the way through the bushes, Watson following close behind him. Between the two trees was a more or less level area, and Dawson helped his friend sit down on it, then eased him backwards until he was leaning against one of the trees.
‘Let’s take a look at your shoulder, Dave.’
Dawson undid the buttons on Watson’s shirt and pulled it open. The pad he’d tried to tie around the wound was sodden with blood, and when he eased it away from the skin, he could see that the injury was still bleeding, although the flow seemed a bit less than before. But one thing was perfectly obvious – Watson needed medical attention, and quickly, or at the very least the wound would have to be strapped up.
‘Right, Dave,’ Dawson said, forcing himself to sound a lot more ch
eerful than he felt. ‘You stay here. I’m going to go off and try and find some food and drink for us and I’ll try and grab some bandages or a medical kit or something for your shoulder, OK?’
Watson just nodded. He looked absolutely exhausted, grey with fatigue and loss of blood.
Dawson checked he had both the trench knife and the Mauser bayonet – there was no point in leaving one of the weapons with Watson, as he was plainly far too exhausted to use one – and stepped back out of the clump of undergrowth into the forest.
He glanced around but saw nothing and nobody. Then he looked back, mentally fixing the appearance of the spot in his mind, before he turned and walked away. Behind him, the sun was just starting to rise, so he kept it at his back, to ensure he was heading west. He needed to keep away from the border, and ideally wanted to find some kind of outlying farmhouse. He didn’t want to break in and steal stuff, but because of his situation – and more importantly due to Watson’s fragile condition – he didn’t see that he had much option. If he couldn’t find food and drink and a medical kit, he guessed his friend might be dead by evening. There was no way Dawson was going to let that happen.
The forest started to thin out slightly as he walked further west. He scanned the ground ahead, looking for any signs of habitation, but it wasn’t a house, as he’d hoped, that he saw first. It was a track, deeply rutted with the marks of what looked like a horse-drawn cart – he couldn’t see any tread patterns that might indicate the tyres of a motor vehicle – and the centre bore the unmistakable signs of horses’ hooves.
He arrived at the track at an oblique angle – it looked as if it ran more or less north-east to south-west – and for a few seconds Dawson just stood there, looking along it in both directions, trying to decide which way to go. South-west would take him deeper into Luxembourg itself, north-east towards the river Moselle and the border, and there was no way he could tell which way the farmhouse, or whatever the track served, was located. The track might lead to a group of fields near the river, or perhaps some kind of habitation.
Eventually Dawson cut a mark on a tree to ensure he’d know exactly where he’d joined the track, then flipped a mental coin and turned left, away from the border. Even if the track didn’t lead to a farmhouse, by going deeper into Luxembourg he should – sooner or later – find a farmhouse or cottage.
He trudged along the track, keeping close to the left-hand side so that he would be able to dive off into the forest if he encountered anyone, though at that early hour he was hopeful that everyone in the area would still be in bed.
After about 300 yards, another track ran off to the right. Dawson kept on the original route because the other track looked a lot narrower. In another 100 yards, it looked as if his decision was justified.
Directly in front of him, around a slight bend, the track ended in a muddy yard, a small house on one side and what looked like a hay barn on the other. Beside the barn was a large shed or equipment store, and sticking out of that was the front end of a wooden cart. In a field to the left of the barn a heavy horse – it looked to Dawson’s amateur eyes like a shire horse or something similar – was standing, contentedly munching a breakfast of grass.
Neither the hay barn nor the equipment store were likely to hold stocks of food or drink, but beside the house itself was a small brick building that looked like a wash-house or perhaps a storeroom. That, to Dawson, looked a lot more hopeful. There was no sign of activity in the house, so with any luck he could get into the building, find what he was looking for and get out again unnoticed.
He checked around him once more, then started walking towards the house, keeping among the trees and out of sight as much as he could. He reached a position behind the equipment shed which shielded him completely from the house and strode quickly across to the building. Dawson peered round the corner, towards the house. Still no movement. There was a stretch of open ground in front of him, between the shed and the small outhouse, and no way to go around it, so he simply ran.
He reached the wall of the outhouse and for a few seconds just stood there, catching his breath. The lack of food had left him feeling weak and feeble. He was surprised how much that brief exertion had taken it out of him.
When his breathing returned to normal, he risked a glance around the end of the building, over towards the house. There was still nobody in sight and no sign of any movement within the property, so he slipped around the end of the wall to the outhouse door.
There was no lock, just a simple handle, and the door was actually standing slightly ajar. As Dawson pushed it open, the hinges creaked alarmingly. He stepped inside, but left the door open – he didn’t want to make the same noise when he left.
In the gloom, Dawson looked round, and was immediately disappointed. It had perhaps been a long-shot, hoping that the family might have stored food there, but the building was obviously nothing more than a wash-house, for both clothes and bodies, by the looks of it.
On the left-hand wall was a large square ceramic sink, and above it a single tap – a slightly more sophisticated arrangement than the outside pump he’d seen at the farm in Germany where he and Watson had taken temporary refuge, what felt like weeks earlier.
The tap meant water and he badly needed a drink. Dawson turned the tap, waited for the water so he could at least check the colour, then stuck his mouth under the spout and drank greedily. He came up for air, then drank again.
As he straightened up, water running down his unshaven chin, he was aware suddenly he was no longer alone.
Standing in the doorway of the wash-house, framed against the rising sun directly behind her, stood a young woman of perhaps twenty. It looked as if she was still wearing her night-clothes and had just pulled on a simple housecoat over them.
Dawson noticed two things about her immediately. The first was that, despite being almost in silhouette, she was obviously very pretty, with slightly tousled long blonde hair framing her face.
The second was the fact that she was holding a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, both hammers pulled back into the firing position, which she was pointing directly at his stomach. It looked to Dawson as if she knew exactly how to use it.
Chapter 42
16 September 1939
Dawson was effectively unarmed – the Mauser bayonet was in its scabbard on his belt and the trench knife was tucked into his right boot, but against a shotgun both blades were useless – so he did the only thing he could. He straightened up very slowly and raised both hands high.
The girl nodded in approval and barked a sentence at him.
Dawson understood not a word of it, so he shook his head slowly. ‘I do not understand,’ he replied, enunciating each syllable of each word very carefully. ‘I am an English soldier. Do you speak English?’
The girl lowered the weapon very slightly, so that it was pointing at his groin rather than his stomach – though to Dawson, this didn’t seem like much of an improvement – and stared at him for a moment. Then she said something else, again in a language Dawson didn’t know, though it sounded guttural, like German.
He shrugged – not easy with his arms above his head – and tried on a smile for size.
The girl didn’t return his smile, just gestured with the muzzle of the shotgun towards Dawson’s bayonet. ‘Take that out,’ she ordered, her English fairly fluent. ‘Put it on the floor and kick it towards me.’
Dawson did exactly as he was told.
The girl nodded. ‘Now, that looks like a knife in your right boot. Do the same with that.’
Again Dawson complied, because there was nothing else he could do.
The girl stepped back a couple of paces and for a few seconds glanced down at the two weapons lying on the floor near her feet. Then she kicked them both over to the side of the wash-house, out of his reach.
‘I know weapons,’ the girl said. ‘I have shot rifles and shotguns since I was child. That is a Mauser bayonet and Wehrmacht trench knife. If you really are an English
soldier, why do you carry German weapons?’
‘It’s a long story,’ Dawson said.
‘Why don’t you tell me? I like stories. I’ve got all day.’
‘But I haven’t.’
‘You are in no position to argue. How do I know you’re not a German spy?’
‘Because I don’t speak German?’ Dawson suggested.
The girl stared at him for a few moments, then again spoke in what sounded like German.
‘Ich hasse die Engländer. Ich werde dich erscheissen.’
Then she raised her weapon to her shoulder and aimed it carefully at Dawson’s head.
And, again, there was nothing he could do except shrug his shoulders.
Then the girl lowered the shotgun. ‘I think you are English,’ she said, almost reluctantly. ‘I just told you – in German – that I hate the English and that I am going to shoot you. If you are German, I think, when you look down these barrels, you would have admitted it. There is another reason too,’ she added, but didn’t elaborate.
Dawson heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Do you hate the English?’ he asked.
‘No. You can put your arms down now,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s Eddie Dawson and I am a British soldier. Your English is very good.’
‘I am Celine. I had an Englishman as my teacher at school. My parents paid for extra lessons for me. If you are English, you should know Luxembourg is neutral, so what are you doing here in this country, on my land?’
Quickly, Dawson explained how they’d been cut off behind the German lines and apparently abandoned by the French.
‘Of course,’ Celine muttered, when he told her about Capitaine de St Véran.
‘You don’t like the French?’ Dawson asked.
‘They talk good fighting and then they always run away,’ she said. ‘So what happened then?’
Dawson finished his tale by explaining that his fellow soldier had been wounded when the stick grenades blew up on the river and was hiding out in the woods nearby.
‘I don’t think he’s very badly injured,’ Dawson told her, ‘but he must have lost a lot of blood so he’s very weak. I need bandages and pads to keep the bleeding under control. And we haven’t had much to eat or drink ever since we escaped from the Warndt Forest.’
To Do or Die Page 26