by Thomas Wood
“We’re going to hit the orchard…brace!” His words confirmed that I was still in the Horsa, but did nothing to comfort me as to my current situation. I clamped my molars down upon one another hard, so that when the landing inevitably came, I didn’t actually sink one of my teeth into the surface of my tongue, something that I had learned very early on in training.
After that, there was silence. Even the sound of the air rushing over the surface of the wings disappeared into the night, along with the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire. I thought about opening my eyes, it felt like everything was over already, but I kept them shut, petrified at the thought of what purgatory looked like.
Then the sound of ripping; not the sound of ripping that I was ever used to, paper tearing from paper, nor was it like a sheet of fabric being torn, it was more like an ear-splitting crack, one that never seemed to end and continued to grow louder and louder.
I felt every single groove as we snaked our way across the ground, waiting for the thump and lurch of us smashing into the first tree in the orchard. I felt strange at the thought that one of the only things in my life that I obsessed over, was now quite possibly the thing that was most likely to kill me.
I loved how solid and dependable trees were, always allowing themselves to be battered and bruised by a storm, the way they let their branches twist and snap in the wind, but rarely surrendering the trunk to any force of nature.
I was always transfixed in the autumn, when the leaves turned from a luscious green, to the crunchy brown texture as they died, before finally throwing themselves to the ground, dramatically gliding to the floor, taking their time as they did so.
It was on one such autumn afternoon, as I found myself taking a particularly detailed sketch of a dead leaf by a lake, that I found my life was changed. It was a warm afternoon, the unusual kind that the country was occasionally graced with, only to be followed by an almighty downpour the very next day.
Unintenionally, I found myself hiding behind a trunk of an old oak tree, its bark flaking away as it had been dried out over many hundreds of years of weathering. I kept my eyes transfixed on the leaf I was trying to draw, the veins emanating from its stem more prominent than any other dying leaf I had ever seen before.
It was then that I saw her for the first time. I was not aware of her presence at first, but I caught a glimpse of her orange dress at the corner of my vision, its colours clashing violently with the browns of the decaying leaves all around me. She sat by the lake, her jacket spread out on the floor, where she perched. She clutched a book in her hand which she was totally engrossed in, either ignoring me or completely unaware of me.
The orangey hues of her dress drew me in and a normal young lad would find himself talking to her as he perched down beside her. As my hobby of drawing the most common thing in the country suggested, I was unfortunately anything but a normal lad and, after a few moments of contemplation and observation, I began to sketch the outline of the blonde-haired girl, totally engrossed in a novel.
I looked up from my pad, to take in the way her hair fell across the backs of her shoulder, whereupon I found myself, not staring at the back of her like I was expecting, but staring at the deep blue eyes that she possessed. As quickly as I had looked up, I looked away, and threw myself behind the nearest tree trunk that would disguise me.
“Hello,” I found her soft voice calling out to me, “What are you doing there?”
It was from there, that I explained my obsession and the way in which that her dress had captivated me, and compelled me to draw it. I was surprised by her reaction, and continued to be, not least of all when she finally agreed to marry me at the third time of asking.
I carried on waiting for the final, solid, dependable crack as a wooden glider collided with a French orchard, but it never came. Instead, all that came was a silence, a silence deeper and more meaningful than the last one. Whereas the other silence had convinced me that I was dead, this one seemed to give me the assurance that I was, in fact, alive.
More than that, I was fine. I felt no pain, I could hear no involuntary groans or pleas escaping my mouth, no weeps or cries that would bring my rank into disrepute. The silence clung to me, no, probably more than that, it caressed me, it had me captivated. It seemed to chip away at my inner self, my soul even, and, like a small pebble being repetitively washed by the incoming tide, it chipped away at my jagged edges, it smoothed my soul. The silence, as pure and as unblemished as a heavy snowfall on an early morning, would be something that I adored, that I would come to crave.
The silence that I had come to need wasn’t shattered, it ebbed away, as the comforting embrace it offered was slowly conquered by the groans and torrent of curse words that erupted inside what was left of the glider.
“Sergeant-Major?”
“Sergeant-M..major…can you help me? Are you alright?”
It was only then that I opened my eyes. The cockpit that had previously been lit up by all manner of illuminating objects of war, was now in a total darkness, and after a second or two of adjustment I could see that it practically wasn’t there anymore. The Perspex windscreen had been replaced by a tuft of grass, a few branches curiously poking their way in for a nose round.
“Is anyone else hurt? I think I’m hurt…I’m hurt pretty bad…”
As my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness that now engulfed me more than the silence ever did, I noticed that one of our pilots, I couldn’t tell which, was dangling limply from his chair, a phlegmy, sticky streak of blood hanging from his mouth, glistening in the light that the moon provided as a cloud revealed it to us.
The other pilot was nowhere to be seen, I had to forget about them, their role had been to land us safely near the target, they had no secondary objective, they had no other role to fulfil now. If they were okay, they would catch up with the main force sooner or later. If they weren’t okay, there was nothing I could do about it, I wasn’t a medic.
I felt bad of course, and for a brief moment, Chambers and Manning flashed through my mind and I hoped desperately that they weren’t in a similar predicament, and if they were, that the passengers that they had just landed with were more grateful and forthcoming with their assistance than I was prepared to be.
A lot of the boys had been knocked out, probably around half of us, their heads hanging limply to one side and a globule of saliva dripped out the corner of one or two mouths. Within a matter of seconds though, most of them were sucking up their spit, or letting it drip to the ground, as they rolled their heads around trying to overcome the stiffness and the splitting headaches they would now carry into battle with them.
My eyes fell on the sapper who had been sitting to my half-left, he was the one that now became the most important to me, he was the one who would be bringing up the high explosives with me to the casemates. Taylor shifted a bit in his seat, then a cough, good. He was okay.
I felt selfish allowing my condition, and the condition of Sapper Taylor, to take the forefront position in my mind, but, as much as these boys all mattered to me, none of them mattered to me more than Harry Walsh. At the mere thought of his childlike face, I managed to conjure up enough motivation to almost fly out of my seat, a manoeuvre that proved difficult when I found that the glider was resting on its side, and I was in fact lying on my back.
Struggling to my feet, I pulled Taylor up and off the floor, and we began to gather up our kit, most importantly, the PHE that I had kept stored under my bench. We worked silently, as did everyone else, and within a few moments, a few of the boys were on the move, they seemed to know exactly where they were, without even consulting one another first. I wanted to call after them, to make sure they had their bearings and that they weren’t about to charge arrogantly into one of the surrounding minefields.
I resisted, and noticing that a clamour of gunfire and explosions were coming from in front of us, assumed that they were going in the correct direction, the very direction that I would soon find myself charging tow
ards. As I watched them charge off in to the night, I was shocked to find that the smell of cordite was wafting its way up my nostrils. I couldn’t tell how far the battery was from where I was standing, but I was almost certain that we weren’t as close as we should have been, and yet, the sharp, slightly sweet aroma of cordite clung to each hair that occupied my nasal channels, it was a smell I both loved and detested.
“Come on, we better get this stuff moving, lad.” I got a grunt of approval as he checked himself over one last time for any sort of excuse to avoid charging towards the battery, where speeding lead was much more common than oxygen.
My hand shot for the left-hand pouch on my webbing, my place of choice for leaving all of my ammunition. Some of the lads opted for a bandolier, a piece of thin canvas that wrapped itself diagonally across the torso of the body, each pouch deliberately designed to house plenty of rounds, but I chose not to as I had a knack of ripping the canvas, or being struck in the face by rounds as I charged around.
Pulling out a charger clip from the pouch, I pulled the bolt back on my rifle, and like an automaton, I pushed my finger around inside till I was confident that an invisible man hadn’t loaded my rifle for me. I lined up the clip with the waiting breech and pushed down on it, hard. Obediently, the rounds slid into the rifle and I pulled the charger out, with all five rounds dispensed into the weapon. That would be it for now, I liked to keep an eye on how many rounds I was dispelling and keep an eye on my firing discipline and it was much easier to count when I was dealing with smaller numbers. Weapon now ready, and PHE safely tucked away in various pockets on mine and Sapper Taylor’s person, we gave each other a nod of approval. He smirked at me as he fiddled with his canvas chinstrap, letting it dangle flippantly from underneath his chin, I readjusted mine so it was even tighter around my head.
My job now was to get this explosive to the casemate. But it still wasn’t my primary objective.
17
“How many of you have actually finished school?” It was a question that I needed to know the answer to, but at the same time, knew the answer would do me no good at all. As I looked round at the faces of the medics, the pigment of youthfulness and the air of naïve optimism was all that stared back at me.
There were a couple of unintelligible nods, which I took to mean that they had in fact, completed at least some education. These young lads needed to be switched on, I needed them to understand the reality of war, because it was these young boys, the oldest of whom couldn’t have been over the age of nineteen, who would be doing their utmost to keep my company alive, and keep them working towards their objective.
I asked them, not to call their courage or their bravery into question, but to get them to think about their age, and how fragile their minds would be.
“Alright. You keep my boys alive, okay?”
As I pulled myself back into the present, checking for what would be the last time that all my pouches were done up and all my rounds were secure, it was Private Walsh who I fixed my gaze on as I began to turn. He had looked different to all the others, he was totally petrified, as if he was convinced that he had volunteered for the wrong outfit all of a sudden. I held my gaze with him for a moment longer, before returning to my duties, preparing for an invasion.
I hadn’t taken to him straight away, but over the coming days and weeks as we all trained together, I made it an extra duty of mine to find out about these boys, their backgrounds, their hobbies, the names of their girlfriends, all of it. It wouldn’t help me in the slightest, if anything, all it would achieve for me would be the utter despair and involuntary sadness at the loss of one of the boys, not just a soldier, but a person. I did it to put them at ease though, soldiers, especially young ones, as they prepare for war, feel lonely, a void of any company even though they’re surrounded by it. They feel like they are the only one in the boat that they are in, even though they know they’re not. It’s a tumultuous time for a young soldier. Feeling like there is someone senior, even if I was a humble NCO, who cares about them, who wants to know about them, makes all the difference. It was something I had picked up from Sergeant Blake, when I started out, all those years ago. It was my duty to help them through, and if that meant acting like their mother, then that is what I would do.
I grew frustrated with myself as I pulled the bolt back slightly on my rifle and tilted it so I could get a good look inside, I seemed to be getting more and more hooked up on looking at the internals of my rifle, checking and rechecking whether I did, or did not have a round in there. Without looking around for my sapper, I began to turn towards the battery, expecting him to follow me like a loyal whippet dog at my ankles.
The cracks and thumps of the sound of gunfire became more audible to me now, and it began to draw me in. Not because I missed the action or the excitement of being under fire, knowing that the next step that you take may well be your last, but because I knew it was my boys being pinned down by fire, my young lads that were being subjected to heavy machine gun bullets and mortars. The skyline was erupting with oranges and flashing white lights as the invasion really began to gather some momentum.
Briefly, I thought about the Germans and what they understood about the situation. Would they have been communicating with other major defences in the region? What about bridges and crossroads that would be so vital to an invasion attempt? Or were they just fighting for their lives, under the impression that this was an isolated incident or even the work of resistance fighters?
I had no idea, and I didn’t waste any more time entertaining myself with the thought, whatever the situation of the German, he would be fighting for his life, just as hard, if not harder, as I was.
“Oi! Sarge…quick!” At first, I didn’t really know how to react, so I just kept going about my business, checking my kit and observing how far I would have to run to make it to the battery itself. It was probably about five hundred yards or so, a two-minute half-jog, half-sprint, max.
But it was the second, more urgent, “Oi!” that I objected to and spun around on my heel, as quickly as the weight of all my kit would let me, half expecting that the momentum gained from the spin, coupled with the weight behind it, would send me into a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin.
I was furious, not only with him for calling out to me with the kind of outburst that you would expect on a school field, but for not using my correct title, something that didn’t usually annoy me. But it was the way he had said it, with an almost begrudging slur to it, that made him seem even more indignant to authority than he perhaps was.
Just as I was preparing to bawl him out, and promise to put him up for an insubordination charge as soon as this was all over, he rasped again, in an even more urgent whisper than the last.
“Smell that, Sir?”
My anger and pure fury that I was about to bring down on this young lad’s head quickly dissipated into a curious sniff of my nose. As I did so, the sharp aroma of expelled cordite, that had greeted me upon exiting the glider, was replaced by a different, much more familiar smell.
As a child, flames had always fascinated me, it was the way that they danced all over the place and chucked out an unholy amount of heat. It was the way that you could manipulate its direction and the way that it would morph its way around a stick if you poked it right in amongst it. But the most memorable thing about it, was its smell; its all-encompassing, choking smell, so thick that you could almost feel it glide its way into the pit of your lungs.
It clung to every single fibre of your clothing, your hair and made you recoil when it forced its way into the pupils of your eyes. It was that, familiar, friendly smell that met me now.
“The glider, it’s on fire!”
I suddenly realised that the smell of cordite that I could make out upon landing, wasn’t the smell of battle a few hundred yards away, but the smell of ammo as it began to smoulder in the wreckage of the aircraft.
Underneath our benches we had all manner of equipment, everything we would need f
or the days ahead, radios, rations, cleaning equipment, the lot, but the items I was interested in most right now were also there; flamethrower, smoke bombs, grenades and every other piece of flammable equipment that the British Army could pack into such a small space. It had never occurred to me how stupid it all was, how we had effectively been a flying tinderbox, just waiting for the tiniest spark that could have engulfed us all in licking, enticing flames.
I was suddenly incredulous at the top brass that had thought it was such a good idea to pack all the highly flammable and explosive materials in a wooden box, a completely undefended wooden box at that, and allow a group of men to put their backsides, quite literally on top of it all. A tracer round must have penetrated the plywood of the glider, before embedding itself into one of the ammo boxes, waiting for its moment to spark one of the explosive boxes into motion.
“Are there still any in there?” I quizzed him, as if he should have all the answers when, in reality, he probably knew just as little as I did about it all.
“Some of them haven't come round yet, Sir.”
We both stood for a second or two longer, both of us deliberating what we should do, thoughts and ideas popping into our minds at one hundred miles an hour.
They weren't my priority, in fact they didn't have anything to do with me now, we all had our own jobs that we had to get done, pulling them out of the wreckage, risking my life in the process, wasn't one of them. How dangerous was the glider? It could have been smouldering right next to the flamethrower for all we knew, just simmering nicely, waiting for the rescuers to clamber aboard, before engulfing us all in a toxic fireball. If that happened, the explosive wouldn’t make it to the casemate, we wouldn't be able to disable those guns, meaning our boys would be pulverised on that beach in a few hours.