by Thomas Wood
I tried to utter a “Right” out as an acknowledgement, but I'm not sure if I ever quite got that far. A hundred? One hundred? We had taken off with more than six hundred. Where had they all gone?
You two should move out...they didn’t have nearly enough men.
But we had hardly enough to even match the number that would be defending the battery. It was estimated that there was around one hundred and fifty Germans that were defending this massive fortification, and the vast majority of them were inside reinforced steel, defensive positions. Even those that were more ‘open’ were surrounded by sandbags and drowning in the number of belts they had to feed their machineguns.
I began to wander if there was even any point in us making our way to the battery now, as it was unlikely that we would even get close to the casemates, never mind close enough to try and get the explosives near them.
The boss must have been troubled, he wouldn’t have held on for any longer than he dared to make the approach and just by holding off suggested that he had been putting off a decision, in the hope the situation would rectify itself. I hoped he still had his head about him, but then again, he hadn’t exactly struck me as the sort of man to get flustered very easily. He had been appointed as the commander of this operation by the Boss himself, so I knew it wouldn’t have been an appointment that he hadn’t given some serious thought. He had known exactly what our job would have been when he formed up this division.
He was quite a tall, powerful man, and a brilliant officer. He cared about us, but remained distant and elusive, just enough for us to get the picture that he was our superior, not a friend. He was unlike a lot of other career officers, he wanted to be in the thick of it, and do what was right, rather than go chasing the next promotion or another medal ribbon. The other thing that set him aside from other officers, was that he smiled. He didn’t have the best teeth, his two teeth at the front were jarred and it was like they were trying to escape from his mouth when he did bare a grin. But that was one of the things that made him so well liked, he wasn’t a toff who was constantly faffing over the way he looked or how he appeared to his superiors, he had a normal side, he had imperfections, just like us cannon fodder.
I had unknowingly removed my helmet; the chinstraps had been digging in for a while and had begun to rub away at my skin, as it had been lubricated by the layers upon layers of greasy sweat that now settled on the surface of my chin. As the world erupted around us, I slammed it back on my head so hard, that I thought I was going to cave my skull in.
I gave a knowing look to the sapper and, grabbing his Sten, he began to move out of the ditch, and towards the marked path that signalled our approach route.
“The taping party lost their tape...follow the two gouges!” Called out a Canadian voice now behind us.
Two, shallow, barely visible tracks ran in the general direction of the battery, which must have been where the mine clearance team had marked out our safe approach. The battery had two rings of steel around it, literally, an outer and an inner perimeter marked out with barbed wire. Inside the no man's land that this barbed wire had caused, was a minefield, which was due to be painstakingly cleared by a taping party, so that we could make an approach safely.
The gunfire that seemed to come from a lot more than one hundred guns continued up ahead, and I could make out single shots, automatic fire, grenades and just about everything else in between. I was sure I even heard someone throw a rock at one point.
I focused in on one weapon in particular, as for some reason, I was just able to tune in on it, like a bat using it as a honing beacon. It was a Bren gun, but he wasn't firing it in the usual, recommended, three round bursts. He was firing it single shot, the distinctive snap of the Bren followed by too long a silence for it to have the trigger continuously depressed.
We were getting closer now and the shadows of the casemates and the surrounding buildings began to focus more in my vision. I started to make out individual figures, running about seemingly without any objective, but I knew that each figure would have a very specific destination. The individual silhouettes were darkened until a muzzle flash or an explosion, lit them up sporadically.
As I made it inside the perimeter of the battery itself, I was finally able to veer off the track that the taping party had mapped out for us and I felt like I finally had an element of freedom. The freedom was needed as almost immediately I felt a change in the air pressure as we entered, a bullet zipping incredibly close to me. I darted off to the left and ducked into a now vacated machine gun pit, to try and assess the situation before moving off.
The Germans must have been complacent and assumed that we would be coming in from the North, and not from the heavily fortified minefield that we had just navigated our way across. The machine gun was facing out to the north, presumably positioned to cover a German retreat if an attack came in from the ocean side.
The two Germans that had manned the gun were now lying at the bottom of the pit, one of them with a large crimson stain in the front of his tunic, too large to have been from a bullet and only jagged enough to have been from a bayonet, or a knife, as it was twisted inside his chest before being ripped out mercilessly.
I didn’t feel sorry for him, I felt nothing towards the two bodies that lay at my feet, they were all just a casualty of this war, but I found myself thinking of my first two killings from four years ago. I wished that I had given them the chance to move away, to surrender, and then maybe, just maybe, they would have gone on to shorten this war themselves somehow.
The great big bomb craters that littered the battery were incredible, they must have been at least six feet deep in some places, with a great big bowl around them, causing considerable obstacles for us to work around. The one thing I couldn’t help noticing however, was the fact that every single crater seemed to have danced around anything that had contained any concrete in its structure whatsoever, the casemates, the barracks, the ammo stores, all of it, remained completely untouched. The bombing seemed to have been a complete and utter waste of time.
Groups of four or five men seemed to leap up from various firing points, before inching closer and closer towards the casemates.
I scanned the area looking for Harry. I felt like I would be a proud parent if I spotted him, wandering around tending to those who needed his help. But I knew the reality of spotting him was incredibly slim indeed. Everyone looked identical, it was just a sea of khaki and blackened faces screaming and charging around all over the place and I wouldn’t have been able to pick out even my own wife had she been there that night.
The movement to my right made me start, but it also brought me back to the present. As Taylor moved off and out of the trench, I instantly heard three horrible, sobering thuds, and his chest seemed to disperse itself in a whole range of different directions, just as Harfield's had done.
He staggered for another couple of paces, before another three rounds punctured his skin, sending more bits of blood and internals spraying out over the surrounding area. This time he sunk to his knees, before flopping down into the mud, face down.
I heard him wheezing for a moment or two, and I made my way over to him, trying to pull him into the pit with me. By the time I managed to manoeuvre my way over to him, he was dead.
Instead, I refocused myself on doing something useful, and scoured the area where I thought the rounds must have come from. I reasoned that it must have come from a pre-built, defensive position, no man on the move would stop to fire three rounds, then fire three more a second or two later. Up ahead, to my half right, a machine gun continued to spit out rounds as if nothing had happened, completely forgetting the young man it had just cut down indiscriminately.
I aimed just above the flashes, where I imagined the head to be, before firing three, well grouped shots. I now had two rounds left in my weapon.
Immediately after firing my shots, I leapt up from the pit and began making my way to the casemates. I didn’t know if I'd hit the gunner, or j
ust succeeded in making him get his head down, but I knew that if I had hit him, he probably had an assistant who would soon be itching to take over.
But, I reasoned, I would find out soon enough, and just focused on pounding one leg in front of the other, until I was able to make it to some other sort of cover.
20
Great big craters littered the battery, all of them reiterating the fact that they had managed to completely miss anything with so much of an utterance of having concrete in its structure. The casemates were intact.
Automatic gunfire erupted from every possible corner of my attention, from so many places that I found it near on impossible to focus in on one specific weapon and return some fire. A sobering, dependable crack snapped out every four or five seconds, as one of the sharpshooters managed to get his eye in and inflict some casualties. He would be aiming to kill, there was no time to wait for an opportunity to shoot to wound, and we wouldn’t be able to accommodate for any prisoners, we were due to move on very soon after taking the battery.
I could just make out the casements a little ahead of me, they were large, imposing structures, sunken slightly into the ground and, even in the semi-darkness of the early French morning, I could see that they were covered with foliage, in an attempt to stop any reconnaissance picking up their importance. They’d also succeeded in managing to evade the falling bombs too.
Several buildings sat in the way between our assault and our targets. Most of them were billets for those on duty tonight, but they were heavily defended, as we were now finding out.
I found myself lying on the ground, but felt as if I was still moving, as if I was going down some sort of slide. One of the bomb craters had come up and surprised me, and I was now making my way down the steep edges on my backside, unable to stop my demise into the pit. I had a huge task on my hands to make it up the other side of the crater, making it feel like I was in some sort of never-ending bad dream. The bomb had caused the earth to come loose and every footstep I took, my foot slipped and dislodged another helping of loose dirt, making it plummet into the darkness of the crater. It felt like I was fighting against some sort of sand dune, and after what felt like about ten minutes of continuous trying, spurred on only by the gunfire and war cries of the men all around me, I made it to the lip of the crater.
“Need a hand, Norman?” the Major had stopped to have a good old chuckle as he offered me his blackened hand, which I gratefully took. He didn’t even give me an opportunity to thank him before he was already charging off, focused only on the task at hand.
As he was running, his right leg seemed to rewind, and lingered backwards for half a second, before his chest seemed to do the same, sending him flopping to the ground, as if he’d just had a funny turn and passed out.
I raced over to him as quickly as I possibly could, feeling like a pack horse being whipped within an inch of its life, due to the large amounts of kit that I needed to carry. I felt the weight sag further and further down my body with every step I took, and I willed my knees not to buckle under the sheer pressure that I was exposing them to.
Even in the lack of light that I had now grown used to, I saw the blood before I could see him properly. The Major just lay there, quite docilely, as if he was taking in a summer's sun on a long September evening.
“Get them, Norm, give them absolutely everything!” His teeth were stained a nice shade of crimson, as if he'd pummelled a punnet of raspberries into his mouth and was now regurgitating them.
“Make sure the lads are alright won't you...Make sure they...” His speech was abruptly cut short as he winced in pain, screwing his eyes up so that they were just a mess of wrinkles and scrunches. As he sucked air in through his teeth, I heard the liquids in his throat bubble at the back of his mouth, and he sucked in so hard, I thought for a moment that I might be dragged inside.
As I tried to locate his wounds, by poking my finger around, he stayed silent apart from the occasional grunt and hiss of air. He had two bullet wounds to his upper thigh, and a third had smashed its way through the front of his kneecap. His lower leg dangled as I lifted it up, trying to stop the blood flow from pouring itself all over the floor.
We didn't say anything while we worked, I just read his face to tell where the pain was greatest, a relatively easy job considering the amount of pain he was in. I ripped open his smock pocket and fumbled around to get at his field dressing. I tied it as tightly as I possibly could around his upper thigh, encompassing the two holes that stared out at me, so close to one another that they almost formed one hole. The dressing was instantly bathed in a bloody cocktail, and I knew that before long it would have turned brown and rancid – so long as the wound actually stopped bleeding.
Now, I turned my attention to his—
It was the headache that I was first aware of. A splitting headache like no other that I had ever experienced, one that was so powerful that I reached up to have a feel around my skull, half expecting to find it cracked open like an egg, with someone pummelling the inside with a chisel. But my skull, my brain, seemed intact, even though my helmet was not where it should have been.
The force of the blast must have ripped the straps clean off, and I could feel an intense burning on the underside of my chin, as if a strip of sandpaper had attempted to work its magic on my skin.
The ringing in my ears subsided a lot quicker than I imagined it would have done, seamlessly replaced by the overlapping rat-tat-tat of German machine gun fire and the crack-crack-crack of British fire in return.
Apart from my head, a dull ache resounded from my breast bone like a deathly toll, especially when I tried to breathe in but, as I spat out a mouthful of dirt from my bone-dry mouth, I realised that I was fine.
Major Sanderson lay a few feet from me, face down in the dirt, and I began crawling my way over to him. Blood had poured from his ears and as I rolled him over, a great reservoir of sticky, phlegmy blood, dangled from his mouth, like a spider's web, refusing to let go of its grip. His smock had been burned away, and parts of it had moulded to the remnants of his flesh, a grotesque version of the uniform that the Major would wear forever more.
Taking my rifle that lay a few yards away, I knew there was nothing more I could do for him and so, locating my helmet, now minus the chinstraps, I checked myself over and began to focus in on my task.
Again, I found myself, desperately scanning the scene before me, trying to take in as much information as I possibly could, but also trying to spot Harry Walsh. Major Sanderson's life had gone, just like that, no dramatics, no emotional last words, just a mortar, or some other explosive, finding its way to us, before ending his life in a half-second.
There was still a glimmer of hope for Harry in my mind, I was still making out the shadows of my lads, dashing in between cover and craters. They were still alive, so why wouldn’t Harry be? I comforted myself with the thought momentarily that I wasn't the last remaining man, and until that point, I still had a job to do.
The more I was outside, with rounds zipping past some vitally important body parts, the more likely I was to get hit, which meant I wouldn’t get Harry home, I wouldn’t get home myself; I needed to get alongside one of the casemates. I needed to become a Company Sergeant Major. I began launching one leg in front of the other, leaning forward to try and use my own weight in my favour.
I must have been running faster than anyone imagined a man could run because, as I surged past the first casement, I watched as a group of young Germans began to fight with nothing but their bare hands, against an even younger group of my paras.
I carried on and, reaching the second casemate, found an assault team had already made it inside.
“You two! You're coming with me to take out the trench firers there! You!” I pointed at the remaining three, “You're to provide covering fire then join us there! We'll make it to number three together!”
I had to scream as the Schmeissers, coming from the slit trench between two and three casements, loosed off ro
unds, expertly aimed at us. The Schmeisser was an excellent weapon, and we'd had hours of access to examples of them, captured for us to learn how to use. The idea of paratroopers meant that we might be required to be self-sufficient for a long period of time and this included weapons. We'd trained on loads of them, some that I was certain hadn't been used since the last time we were fighting the Germans in France back in 1918, but ones that proficiency in them was heavily encouraged by our superiors.
The Schmeisser had, recalling a lecture from a mysterious man, who had claimed to have active experience in France in recent months, an excellent rate of fire.
“Not only that,” the man had continued, “It is incredibly smooth.” He prolonged the word “incredibly” in what felt like a personal attack on British weapons and their ability to provide smooth fire.
“It's so smooth in fact,” he went on, smirking as if he was incredibly proud of this next line, “you can hardly tell the difference between firing it, and watering your geraniums on a Sunday afternoon.” The hall had howled in laughter at that one, and I watched as he made a mental note to make more of an exhibit of this joke at his next lecture.
It was not one that I found particularly funny however, not just because he was perhaps the most arrogant man that I had ever met, nor that he insisted on remaining persistently coy about his operations in Europe, but because making comments about enemy weapons like that could have a disastrous effect on my lads.
Yes, he might have got a laugh from them in that stuffy, bland lecture hall, but it was here, when being pinned down by its “incredibly smooth,” rapid rate of fire, that these teenagers would remember his ‘joke’. They would suddenly become petrified by it, and it would mean that a near-total mental block would barricade their abilities, and prevent them from emerging from the cover of the concrete.
I needed them to have a fear of these weapons from the start, so that the first time they came under fire from them they would already have a fear of them, but one that was manageable, rather than shocking.