They heard a violent explosion, crossed the next field, and looked down on B Squadron, neatly in line on the lane, and stationary.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Fergus radioed to B Squadron.
‘I think Captain Hartley has brewed, sir,’ Lieutenant Cassidy told him.
‘Oh, hell.’ So there was an anti-tank gun, only it was aimed down the road instead of across the field. Because of course, if the lead tank went up on such a narrow roadway, the rest were stymied. They would all have to move across country. But brewed? Hartley? ‘All right, Cassidy, take command,’ Fergus said. ‘Come up on to the field level. C Squadron, do the same and move forward. Remember that there must be an anti-tank gun up there.’
A Squadron advanced again, and with a mighty roaring of engines B Squadron joined them. They went in and out of hedgerows and were assailed by a sudden burst of fire which sent one of the Shermans sideways with its tracks shot off.
‘There’s the bugger,’ Mather shouted. ‘Traverse right, seven degrees, range four hundred yards, fire.’
The gun exploded.
‘Full speed,’ Fergus snapped.
This was difficult to achieve on the broken ground, but the tank wallowed forward, and looked down on the gun emplacement. Someone’s shooting had been accurate, for the gun crew lay around their shattered weapon in the profusion of death. He looked back down the lane, and could see the burning remnants of Hartley’s tank. But presumably, he thought, General Headquarters would continue to regard the casualties as quite light.
*
The regiment reached more open country just on lunch time, and Fergus called a halt. In a dip about three miles away he could see a church steeple which he took to be Ryes. ‘We’ll eat,’ he told his men, and began searching the wireless for Brigade.
‘Your position is admirable,’ Manton told him. ‘Any casualties?’
‘I have fifty-three tanks ready for duty,’ Fergus said. ‘So I seem to have lost seven. But four went up with the LST. One I know is brewed. One was left in a field a mile back but I estimate is repairable. And one just seems to have gone astray. I know my adjutant is dead as well as the padre.’
‘The padre? That’s bad luck.’ Manton’s tone suggested he considered it damned carelessness. ‘How is your fuel situation?’
‘About another hour.’
‘That should do it,’ Manton assured him. ‘My position is two miles to your left, so we are looking at the same village. Reconnaissance suggests it may be held in force, so we will eat before advancing. Infantry support is also on its way. Stand by.’
Fergus climbed out of the tank to stretch his legs with Mather and the lieutenants. The rest of the regiment had closed up by now, and Captain Smithie and Lieutenant Cassidy joined them. ‘We have a battle waiting for us, gentlemen,’ Fergus told them. ‘Eat, drink and be merry.’
*
The sun had by now disappeared beneath huge clouds sweeping in from the sea, although it remained quite warm. But now it started to rain, a steady, remorseless downpour which got everywhere. The regiment might again have been in a world all of its own. The troopers finished their soggy meal and climbed back into their soggy tanks, where their soggier bodies created clouds of steam. Overhead aircraft were still roaring, and there were a series of sharp explosions from in front of them; presumably Ryes was being liberated.
‘I don’t see how they can see what they’re doing,’ Mather remarked. ‘Let’s hope they don’t drop anything short.’ Fergus thought that was extremely possible.
‘Vehicles approaching from behind,’ Smithie warned. C Squadron was parked nearest to the road.
‘Start up and turn,’ Fergus told him. ‘Squadron alert.’ He raised the hatch to look out, water pounding on his beret and trickling down his neck, and gazed at the rest of the brigade.
‘Brigade will advance,’ Manton said. ‘To the south.’
‘I’m glad he said that,’ Mather remarked. ‘That must be where Jerry is.’
*
But Jerry wasn’t; he had pulled out of Ryes. Unfortunately, the fuel situation was now acute, and the brigade soon ground to a halt again. ‘Here we stay,’ Manton told them. ‘We’ll try for Bayeux tomorrow.’
That night, huddled in the still teeming rain, feeling the field in which they were parked slowly turning into a bog, they listened to reports of a German counter-attack, with armour, on the Canadians to their left, and cursed at their inability to do anything about it. But the attack was driven off, and next morning the rain had stopped, although there was still a lot of cloud about, and by the comments on the wireless the roads were worse than ever. But sufficient fuel got through to replenish the tanks, and that afternoon they rolled into Bayeux, where they were greeted by the Sixth Airborne Division, who had been holding the town for nearly forty-eight hours. The paratroopers were glad to be relieved, but the people of Bayeux were not as enthusiastic as those nearer the coast. They did not enjoy having had their little town knocked about, and they were displeased with the peremptory attitude of the Free French officers who accompanied the British and assumed command.
‘I wonder if there’ll be time to look at the tapestry?’ Mather asked.
There was; having reached the vital road, the orders were to consolidate their holdings and wait for reinforcements. Next day the remainder of the division was landed, and the following afternoon their support trucks arrived, Sergeant-Major Manly-Smith himself driving the ACV.
‘Am I glad to see you, Sergeant-Major,’ Fergus said. And remarkably he was. He needed his mechanics and he needed more ammunition and he needed more food, but it was the sight of Bert, big and coarse and cheery, that he needed most.
‘Is the padre with you, after all, sir?’ Bert asked. ‘I couldn’t find him anywhere on the beach.’
‘I don’t think there’s a lot of him to be found, Bert,’ Fergus said. ‘Poor old Johnny Long.’ He was just contemplating the letter he would have to write to Long’s old widowed mother, with the weak heart. ‘Major Allack bought it as well, and a lot of other good chaps.’
‘But we’re winning, sir,’ Bert pointed out. He was a pragmatist.
On Saturday they were informed that Montgomery himself had come ashore and established his headquarters. By Monday the 12th more than three hundred thousand men and fifty thousand vehicles had been landed, and the Americans were breaking out towards Carentan.
During all this time the Germans were hardly conspicuous. They could not move by day, as the Allied air forces continued to roam the skies, quite unopposed by any enemy aircraft, shooting at anything which trembled on the wrong side of the front. And as the British armour had fuelling problems, the German situation had to be desperate.
But they were still going to fight. On Tuesday, a week after the landings, one of the division’s supply columns, twenty-five vehicles long, was pounced upon by a single Tiger tank. Alarm calls went out, and the regiment was one of those that raced to the rescue; when they got there, they found nothing but the burnt-out trucks and the dead and dying men.
‘You know something,’ Fergus told his officers. ‘This war isn’t going to be over all that quickly.’
*
The British continued to mark time, turning out for an inspection by King George himself, while the Americans swung to their right to complete the capture of the Cotentin Peninsula and the seaport of Cherbourg. This was now becoming vital, as the entire strategic plan, and the main reason for the British hold-up, was lack of logistical support. The weather, instead of improving, merely got worse, and although with great ingenuity the Engineers created the two artificial harbours — Mulberrys, they were called — by sinking ships off selected beaches to create breakwaters, while equally ingeniously, fuel was being piped across the Channel by an undersea line — Pluto — there was still not enough getting ashore to supply both armies at the same time, and a tremendous storm, which began to blow on the 19th, completely wrecked the American Mulberry and badly damaged the British, making
the situation still more acute.
By then however the Americans were investing Cherbourg, and although the garrison refused to surrender, the town was eventually carried by assault. While the siege was still going on, the British were at last able to resume their advance, on Caen.
*
Here too the resistance was fierce, and although the regiment, fed up with kicking their heels in the rain, and watching the bog in which they were parked turning into a vast cesspool, were delighted at the prospect of action, they soon realized they were in for a hard slog. Fergus had by now promoted Smithie to adjutant, and given Cassidy and Withers brevet rank of captain. His tanks were fighting fit and fully fuelled, and his men ready to go.
This was just as well, because the Germans had now committed a considerable portion of their armour, as the attack on Caen had been intended to make them do, and the Westerns soon found themselves in the midst of a melée quite as furious as anything they had experienced in the desert. Except that this wasn’t the desert. It was a series of once green fields which had been churned into huge mud baths, and were liquefied almost every day by renewed showers of rain, in between which a really hot sun brought out the flies to go buzzing around the many burned-out tanks, grotesque monsters already turning to rust, the green-faced cadavers which had once been their crews grinning idly at the passing clouds.
‘Funny, I never thought of the desert as clean until now,’ Mather remarked.
The battle raged for ten days, in which time no one ever left his tank except under the direst emergency, such as a serious natural call; empty shell cases were fine as urinals, but couldn’t really cope with solid stuff. Then it was necessary to seek a convenient shell hole, but when several of his men failed to return, Fergus felt compelled to issue orders that as constipation was preferable to death, such expeditions were only to be undertaken at night.
The fuel trucks and support columns had the hardest time, as they were continually being shot up, but as usual RSM Manly-Smith coped with tireless energy and efficiency. Yet it was the longest and grimmest ten days the regiment had ever known. The battle raged back and forth outside the city, the Germans counter-attacking whenever the British stopped to replenish, and the British surging forward again, but gaining very little ground. Fergus kept reminding himself that this was all part of the plan, that taking Caen was not the goal, only the forcing of Rommel to commit his armour so that the Americans could break out, and his he had done — but it was a depressing battle for that reason: there seemed no overall tactical concept other than to find Germans and shoot at them.
Yet furiously as the Germans fought, the odds against them were too great. On 29 June the Americans finally took Cherbourg — although the harbour was so badly damaged it would not be usable for several weeks — and were ready for their break-out. Still the panzers hung on in front of Caen, and a week later Montgomery ordered a full-scale aerial blitz on the city. The troopers watched from their cupolas as four hundred and fifty Halifax and Lancaster bombers delivered two thousand tons of bombs on to the German defences — but not all found their target.
‘There ain’t going to be much left of that lot,’ Bert commented. He had, as usual at night, brought the support trucks up to the edge of the battlefield.
There wasn’t. The Germans held out for another week, before pulling back. Fergus rolled up the top of a slight slope and finally looked down on the city, and recalled tales his father had told him of Flanders in the last war. It was difficult to discover a single house standing, although, with the careless uncertainty of warfare, there was a forest of single walls rising out of immense piles of rubble.
‘No place for tanks,’ Mather remarked.
Fergus agreed with him. But he wanted to stretch his legs. He left Smithie in command — they were down to thirty-six vehicles, now, until their replacements came along — and with the new padre, Captain Wint, who had only just arrived and was dead keen, made his way down the slope. They were saluted and directed by the ubiquitous redcaps, who had already taken control of all the roads in or out of the stricken city, and entered the suburbs, where they came upon a group of Canadian soldiers burying one of their number.
‘You want to watch it, sir,’ remarked the sergeant. ‘The place is full of snipers.’
Fergus nodded, and he and Wint made their way through the rubbled streets, keeping close to such walls as remained standing. After the furious battles of the previous month it was strangely quiet, a silence broken every few minutes by a shot or a shout, or the rumble of falling masonry.
‘Fairly gives one the creeps,’ Wint commented.
They discovered they were not alone. Out of the wreckage arose children, gaunt skeletons of little boys and girls, clothes torn and dirty, who stared at them from huge shadowed eyes.
‘How’s your French?’ Fergus asked.
‘Non-existent. I’m afraid.’
‘Bonjour,’ Fergus said, grinning at them.
‘Please, sir,’ said one little girl in English. ‘Have you any chocolate?’
She held a smaller sister by the hand. Fergus wondered when last they had eaten anything at all.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.
‘I have.’ Wint had a sweet tooth, and now from the pocket of his battledress he took an unopened Cadbury’s bar, and held it out.
The girl hesitated.
‘Take it,’ Wint said. ‘All of it.’
She drew a deep breath, as if summoning up all her courage, then snatched the bar and ran into the rubble, her sister chasing behind her. Several of the other children ran as well.
‘I wonder how much of it she’ll get,’ Fergus mused.
They came across a church, relatively undamaged — only half a wall and part of the roof had been blown away — that was being used as a hospital, found nuns and priests assisting the army doctors who were doing what they could. There were wounded civilians in here, some of them suffering from hideous injuries. But Fergus was used to hideous injuries. What disturbed him was that the church had also been used as a receptacle for the sick from more exposed hospitals. Somehow it seemed unreasonable that a man dying of tuberculosis should be lying next to a woman dying because her leg had been blown off.
‘You know what,’ he said to Wint. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ Because they were the strong and the living, if only temporarily.
‘I’ll stay a while,’ the padre said. ‘Might be able to help.’
‘Yes,’ Fergus said, and made his way back through the rubble.
It was a relief to be back with the tanks, even if the stench of the unburied dead lay across these fields too. But these were men, and had been men, who had died with weapons in their hands, suddenly, and unexpectedly. To dwindle, slowly, was not a fate he wanted to experience.
‘Ah, sir,’ Smithie said when he clambered into the ACV he would again be able to use as a home; Waterman had a kettle on, and was buttering biscuits. Fergus wondered where on earth he had got the butter from, but being Waterman he had probably stolen it, so it was better not to ask. ‘There was an MP here looking for you.’
‘Got me at last, have they? What did he want?’
‘Seems his captain had a message for you. Something about asking you to help identify someone they found in the Gestapo cells in the city.’
‘That involves me?’
‘Well, yes, sir. Apparently one of the people there used your name, as a sort of reference.’
Fergus frowned at him. ‘My name? A prisoner of the Gestapo?’
‘Yes. I have it written down here. This woman claims to have been a British agent — she’s French of course — who was parachuted in to France back in 1942, and was picked up by the Gestapo fairly quickly. She says she was actually employed by your father, Sir Murdoch. Well, of course, if this were true, she would be entitled to special treatment and back pay and God alone knows what else, but naturally she has no proof. The MP captain pointed this out, and also told her that confirmation of her story woul
d be difficult, because Sir Murdoch is a prisoner of war in Germany. So then she told the captain that she also knew Sir Murdoch’s son, Major Fergus Mackinder. Bit out of date with her ranking, what? Anyway, he was wondering if you could spare the time to go along and at least identify her.’
Fergus sat down. ‘What is her name?’ he asked, his throat suddenly dryer than even when he had been in the hospital.
‘Ah...’ Smithie consulted his notebook. ‘I don’t know if I’ve spelt it right. Monique...Monique Deschards.’
12
Yugoslavia, 1944
With a deep-throated ‘oorah’ the partisans arose from their concealment in the trees and rushed down the slope. The German forces beneath them were still recovering from the smothering mortar fire to which they had been subjected, and perhaps they had not expected to be confronted by quite so many foes. But Tito commanded at least brigade strength now, and was very well equipped; the partisans could control events, at least outside of the major towns and fortified strongholds. Yet these towns and strongholds still had to be supplied, and however powerful the relief columns, they were subject to overwhelming attacks by determined men and women, resolutely led. As now.
Murdoch glanced at Tito, who stood beside him on the hillside, watching the fighting in the valley. He had directed the whole operation personally, using only the single girl radio operator who knelt behind him. He had a team of these, every one devoted to her leader, ready at any moment to die for him. But then, every man in the army was equally devoted.
And himself? Murdoch had now lived and fought with this man for better than a year. That was longer than he had expected to spend in Yugoslavia, but he had no intention of calling it a day until the Germans had been liquidated or driven out. With perhaps the exception of General Paul von Reger; but to his great relief Paul had been transferred to a command in Germany. Perhaps he would, after all, survive the war, and make something of his life; certainly he could not be held responsible for Edmunds’s death.
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