‘We have an inkling of their battle plan - plenty of spies in Berlin! And we were given pretty good briefings at the station; we needed them to do our job, you see. Evidently they’re now moving forward. They’re planning a break-out. It might take a couple of days to get their assets in place, and then—’
‘Made a right mess of the road surface, mind.’The kidney-failure man was talking to the German soldiers. He was right; the tarmac was chewed up by the tank tracks. ‘The council’s going to have something to say about that, I can tell you. So is that that? Can we get back on the bus now?’
The German driver blocked his way. ‘Nein. No. Not yet. Look!’ He pointed down the road.
Mary saw that another column was approaching, at a much slower pace.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said the kidney man. ‘We’ll be stuck here all day.’
‘Now, now, Giles,’ his companion, Bill, said, ‘don’t annoy the nice Germans. We’ll get to Tunbridge Wells for tea, you mark my words.’
That won a ripple of laughter. The Germans scowled, not understanding, suspicious.
Giles, the kidney man, didn’t laugh either. ‘I’ve had enough of this lot,’ he muttered.
The second column, trundling at walking pace, was led by a couple of heavy vehicles, perhaps for recovery or clearing roadblocks. Then came more vehicles, mobile guns and troop carriers, and then troops on foot walking single file, in columns alternately to either side of the road. After that came trucks and armoured vehicles, including a couple of tanks, and then a string of carts and artillery pieces drawn by horses. As the lead vehicles passed the bus, the marching troops exchanged banter with the waiting bus crew. Some of them whistled at Hilda, and she replied with sarcastic curtseys that made them laugh.
Bill, the friend of Giles, came to stand before Hilda. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve had enough of. I’ve had enough of girls like you.’ A minute ago he had been elegantly joking. Now, out of nowhere, he was shouting.
Hilda was bewildered. ‘Look, what do you want?’
‘I saw you smiling at those Jerries. I was in the bloody BEF. We saw girls like you in France. A Jerrybag, are you, is that the story?’
Hilda flared. ‘I most certainly am not.’
The bus-crew Germans came closer, uneasy. ‘What is this?’
‘You are what I say you are, you little whore!’
Mary stood between the man and Hilda. ‘Now, you back off, buster. I don’t know what your game is, but—’
The man swung his fist. Mary ducked, but she took a blow to the temple that sent her staggering. She could barely believe it had happened.
Bill went for Hilda, reaching for her throat. He was heavier than she was, and he came at her without warning. He fell forward, knocking her to the ground, his heavy overcoat flapping.
Everybody seemed to be shouting now, Hilda and Bill, the passengers. The Germans hurried forward to grab the man, trying to haul him off Hilda.
And an engine roared. Mary looked across, startled. The bus was pulling out from where it was parked on the verge. ‘He said he used to drive buses. Oh, shit.’ She ran forward. ‘Giles! Don’t do it, you’ll get yourself killed!’
The Germans had hauled Bill off Hilda, but now they realised what Giles was up to, that Bill had just been distracting them. They ran at the bus, dragging their pistols from their holsters.
Giles was turning the bus around. The German troops in the column actually continued their march, evidently unable to believe what they were seeing. But when Giles gunned the bus straight at them, the marching men scattered, yelling. The first shots were fired, by some of the troopers with the presence of mind to grab their weapons. The windows of the bus shattered, but still it came on.
Mary saw it all. The bus ploughed into the lines of men like a bowling ball into a rack of pins. Some of the troops were knocked aside, some fell under the wheels. One man, grotesquely, got pinned to the bonnet like a bit of cloth, bent over backwards. He was perhaps the first to die when the bus slammed into the tank that followed the line of infantry, or perhaps it was Giles.
The bus’s petrol tank exploded, a blossoming fireball. Mary was knocked onto her back.
XXIX
Mary stood with Hilda. They were both smoking. Mary couldn’t stop trembling.
The bus passengers stood in a loose group, guarded now by men from the column, who were, Hilda had overheard, elements of the Thirty-fourth Division of the German Ninth Army. Only Bill was kept apart. He was kneeling on the ground, his hands tied behind his back, his face puffy from the blows he had taken.
The Germans were working to fix the mess Giles had made. The column had moved into a defensive formation, the vehicles driven off the road, the heavy weapons deployed, the men taking loose cover in ditches by the side of the road. Engineers from the column were still labouring to bring the fire under control. The heavy vehicles stood by, waiting to shove the wrecks off the road.
The column’s medics had set up a field station next to the road. There were seven dead, many more wounded, with broken bones, bashed heads, internal injuries. The dead lay in a short row, covered in blankets. Mary saw that some of the soldiers were unloading shovels from a supply truck; perhaps they meant to bury the dead. They seemed to need a lot of shovels, however.
The column commander, who Hilda thought was the SS equivalent of a colonel, a standartenfuhrer, was a big, cold man in a green Waffen-SS uniform. He was arguing with the bus crew, who were nervously going through some kind of list with him. Mary had no idea what they were talking about, and, numbed by all that had happened, found it hard to care.
Hilda said, ‘The funny thing is, my dad would have loathed a man like Giles. He always said the upper-crust types would welcome the Nazis with open arms.’
‘Then your dad would have got him wrong. And the Germans, and it cost them.’
‘Yes. Any of us could have done what he did, I suppose. I mean it was suicidal, but he got rid of a good few of them, and he’s held up this whole column for hours. Seen in that light, it’s not a bad exchange for one life.’
‘What an awful way to look at it.’
“‘Take One With You. That’s what Churchill has been saying.’
‘Excuse me.’ It was the SS colonel. He might have been fifty; he wore small round spectacles. He smiled at the passengers. ‘If I could have your attention. I am Standartenfuhrer Thyrolf. I must ask you to step back now from the road. We will clear the bus and the tank, and there may be some risk to yourselves.’ His English was crisp, heavily accented.
The passengers complied, all save Bill who remained kneeling at the feet of his guards, and they allowed the SS colonel to shepherd them into the field away from the road.
Thyrolf said now, ‘Once we have the road cleared the column will move on. We will loan you one of our trucks to take you to your rendezvous with the English. So you see, you will not be too, um, inconvenient? Inconvenienced. One moment, please.’ He turned to speak to the bus driver.
Mary felt exhausted, drained by it all. Something in her responded, quite illogically, to the charming manner of this SS colonel. ‘He’s like a hotel manager. Come to apologise because our room isn’t ready.’
Hilda was frowning. ‘Something’s wrong. Why would he tell us his name?’
Mary took a deep breath. ‘It’s a relief to be away from the stink of burning fuel. Standing here in this long grass, it all seems a bit absurd, doesn’t it?’
There was a discreet cough at her shoulder. It was Thyrolf with the bus driver. ‘Mrs Wooler? Mrs Mary Wooler?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are also a Mrs Wooler? Hilda Wooler?’
‘Yes...’
He turned to Mary. ‘Mrs Wooler, may I see your passport?’ She produced it from her handbag, and he inspected it as gravely as any customs official. He handed the document back. ‘Now you, Mrs Hilda Wooler, are a British subject, but you recently married an American?’
‘Not just any American,’ Mary said. ‘My son the Am
erican!’
He laughed, a charming sound. ‘Congratulations. You have proof of this?’
Hilda produced her marriage certificate from her gas-mask pouch.
‘Very good. If you would both come this way.’ Holding Mary’s arm lightly, he drew them to the road, where a staff car was waiting. Mary followed, unquestioning.
Hilda hung back. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The arrangements made for American citizens at Hurst Green have been adjusted. It will be more convenient for you to be carried separately. You can go on now; you do not have to wait. The others, the British, will follow soon after.’
‘No.’ Hilda stepped back into the crowd of passengers. ‘I’ll stay here. I’m British. I’m a soldier, for God’s sake.’
Mary asked, ‘Hilda? What’s wrong?’
Thyrolf studied Hilda, his eyes soft behind his glasses. ‘You are sure?’
‘Yes. Mary - you go.’ Hilda looked as if she longed to hug Mary, but she still hung back. ‘Look, I won’t be long after you. Do you know Tunbridge Wells? I’ll see you there. There’s a parade called the Pantiles - it has a good tea shop.’ She laughed, a brittle sound. ‘At least it used to be good, before the war. I’ll find you there.’
‘It’s a date.’
Mary let the SS colonel lead her off the field, back to the road, to the staff car. Overwhelmed by his confident manner, she didn’t know what else to do. She had to walk past Bill, the kneeling man. His eyes were swollen from the blows he had taken. But when she walked past, he whispered to her, ‘Peter’s Well.’
‘What?’
‘This place. It’s called Peter’s Well. Remember.’ A rifle-butt to the back of the head shut him up.
Thyrolf actually helped her into the staff car. She sat beside the driver and settled her rucksack on her lap. Thyrolf gave her a little salute, and then waved the driver to go.
As the car pulled out, Mary looked back. Soldiers were walking from the column now, towards the passengers. She saw Hilda, her blue uniform and red hair unmistakable. She seemed to have gathered the passengers in a group. She was holding somebody’s hand, an elderly man. The group was soon out of sight. Mary thought she heard singing, some mournful song, perhaps a hymn.
Mary’s thinking was glacial. Only slowly was she starting to realise what was happening here.
The ripple of shots didn’t even sound like gunfire. It was a distant, peaceful noise. The rooks that rose up cawing in response were more disturbing. The singing stopped, however. And then there was a series of isolated pops.
Mary turned to her driver. ‘That’s the clean-up. Right?’
He looked at her nervously.
‘No English, huh? You didn’t get your timing quite right, did you? If I’d been a bit further away, if I hadn’t actually heard the gunfire, I mightn’t have put it all together. I’m not as smart as poor Hilda, am I? And I’m not used to this sort of war. Well, don’t worry, Fritz, I’m not going to make trouble for you. Just go ahead. I’ll hold it together, you’ll see.’
And she did. She held it together until they got to Hurst Green, another deserted little village, where, remarkably, a green-painted bus was waiting for her. The driver, a British soldier, actually saluted his German counterpart. The British seemed surprised to see her alone, but Mary just climbed on the bus and snapped, ‘Don’t talk. Just drive. And when you get me to Tunbridge Wells, find me a fucking phone.’
XXX
25 September
‘Morning, ladies.’ Unteroffizier Fischer came stomping through the lounge bar, his boots clattering on the pub’s straw-strewn stone floor. He yanked open curtains with his gloved hands, pulling one so hard it came away from its hooks. The window was a rectangle of blue-grey. ‘It’s Wednesday morning, and you’re still in England.’
The men under their army blankets stirred, like huge slugs. Their boots and rifles were stacked against the bar walls.
Ernst glanced at the big railway clock on the wall. Five in the morning, English time. He groaned. He heard a distant rumble, like thunder. Chances were it wasn’t a storm. He sat up, rubbing his face. ‘Today’s the day, is it, Unteroffizier? The break-out.’
‘That’s the idea, Trojan. You pretty boys will have the privilege of following Seventh Panzer out of here, all the way from Uckfield to Guildford.’
‘Where on God’s earth is Guildford?’
‘I don’t even know where Uckfield is.’
‘I’ll tell you where Guildford is, Kieser. It’s on OKH Objective One, our first operational objective. And if, when, we reach it today, we’ll have achieved in five days what the Fuhrer’s plan called for in ten. And then we will be out of this hedgehog country where there’s a partisan in every piss-pot, and we will let the Panzers loose and it will be like France all over again.’
‘We’ll all get medals,’ said Kieser.
‘I’ll pin yours on myself. Personally I would like to see Oxford. Now shift your pretty arses, we form up in half an hour.’ He stomped out.
The men stirred, sitting up and pushing back their blankets. The rotting-feet stink and stale farts that had been trapped under the blankets filled the air. Kieser waved a hand. ‘By Christ, lads. Fuhrer directive forty-seven. Soldiers of the Twenty-sixth Division shouldn’t light a fag in the mornings.’
The men moved slowly. They all knew Fischer was a bit soft, and you could grab a few more minutes’ kip with impunity.
Ernst got to his feet. He was in his shorts and vest and socks, and he picked up a kit bag containing his razor and a bit of soap. He stepped over the bodies of the stirring men, making for the door. The floor was sticky with stale beer. This pub, in this place called Uckfield, had been a big disappointment to the men billeted here. Some English bastard had stolen all the spirits and taken an axe to the barrels behind the bar. ‘These English partisans fight dirty,’ Unteroffizier Fischer had said.
Ernst pushed out of the bar room into fresh, cold air. There was already a queue outside the lavatory, four or five men in their grubby underwear with towels around their necks, rubbing their arms to get warm. The paving stones were slick with dew, and Ernst took off his woollen socks and tucked them into the elastic waist of his pants. Better wet feet than wet socks.
He heard a distant explosion. It came from his right, the south, back towards the coast. When he looked that way there was a fading glow.
‘That was a big one,’ somebody grumbled. ‘Must be fifteen miles away.’
Ernst heard a rumble of engines. Looking up he saw planes crossing the sky, very high, without lights, just silhouettes against the steel grey, like cardboard cut-outs, flying north to south.
‘Old Goering will swat those fuckers like flies,’ somebody said, yawning.
‘But he was supposed to have got rid of the RAF by now.’
‘Nothing to do with us, lads,’ said the man at the head of the queue. He hammered on the toilet door. ‘What are you doing in there, Wilhelm? We’re freezing our balls off.’
More planes swept over, all of them coming from the north, wave after wave of them, without a challenge from any Luftwaffe planes, or a single anti-aircraft shot being fired.
XXXI
As Gary entered the ops room he was met by a barrage of popping flashbulbs and calls, some of them in American twangs. ‘This way, Gary!’ ‘Over here, Corporal Wooler!’ ‘Gary! Smile for the folks back home, Gary!’
He stood there, uncertain, reluctant, the staff officer who’d escorted him at his side. They were behind the British lines here, in Alton, a few miles from the Petersfield to Farnborough line where Gary’s own division was concentrated.
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