It was a formidable bunker, a concrete block set down uncompromisingly in the middle of English countryside. A triple wire fence surrounded it, and the bare earth between the fence and the building was no doubt riddled with mines and other nasties. The Germans did build well, you had to say that for them. An impressive anti-aircraft gun installation had been mounted on the roof, but that was a twisted tangle of metal, already taken out from the air.
There was a fire fight going on, closer in. Stray shots came pinging, and occasionally there would be the thump of a mortar. The Germans in the bunker were evidently still putting up a decent fight. But Gary could see that a Wolverine, a big mobile gun, had been drawn up to face the bunker. It was firing shell after shell, and was making craters in the concrete wall. A Sherman stood behind the Wolverine, quiet, its shoulders massive. It was like a huge beast waiting to pounce, Gary thought.
The countryside around was littered with the wreckage of battle. Gary and his mates approached along a road lined with burned-out tanks and mobile guns and armoured cars and trucks, shoved aside to clear the way. There were bodies too, stacked up in a field. Some had their faces covered by their jackets, but others had been stripped of boots and shoulder boards and other mementoes.
They were halted beside a burned-out Sherman tank, some way short of the bunker. While Danny Adams crawled forward to find out what was what, Gary, Willis and the rest of their platoon huddled in the cover of the tank.
They swapped cigarettes; the smoke dispelled the stench of burned oil and rubber from Gary’s nostrils. Willis napped a bit. They were all exhausted, even though the exhilaration of the advance pepped them up.
Adams came crawling back. ‘All right, lads, here’s the picture. We’ve surrounded the bunker, the wireless masts have been shot up, the telephone lines cut. The Jerries are isolated in there and have got to be running out of ammo and fuel. But they’re still fighting.’ He sketched on a bit of paper. ‘What we’ve got is actually three houses in a terrace, farm workers’ cottages. The Nazis plated over the whole terrace with concrete. Inside you’re going to find lots of little rooms, doorways, cellars. Outside, you’ve got this triple wire fence around the perimeter, and this whole area between bunker and fence is mined.’
‘Lovely,’ said Willis.
‘Shut up, Betty Grable. Now here’s what’s what. As soon as that wall gives way we’ll be one of the lead units going into the compound.’ Adams drew stabbing marks on the paper with his pencil. ‘We’ll go in through the west fence, here. We’ll have a sapper unit with us to cut the wire, and we’ll make our way across the mines with a few Bangalores. At the bunker, in we go if we can, and the sappers will have a go at the wall with their picks. And meanwhile in the rear, more sappers will be clearing a channel for that Sherman. At the same time a Marine commando will be going in from the east side. Any questions?’
‘Can I go back to the stalag?’ said Willis.
‘No.’
There was a throaty rumble, a ragged cheer from the men. Adams looked around. The concrete wall of the bunker, riddled by Wolverine shells, was crumbling, revealing a dark interior shrouded by dust.
‘No time like the present,’ Adams said with a grin. ‘At this rate we’ll be in Hastings before the pubs are open. All ready? Go!’
Gary, Willis and Dougie scurried across the open ground towards the bunker, always keeping low, bullets singing around them. They lobbed smoke grenades ahead for cover. They were in an assault group of eight men, armed with grenades, sub-machine guns and daggers. They were followed by reinforcement groups with heavier weapons and flame throwers, and then by sappers with explosives and pickaxes, and finally by reserve units.
The going was slow. They all carried bits of a ‘Bangalore torpedo’, steel pipe crammed with explosive. It was awkward to carry, and Gary had always felt nervous of this crude bit of kit anyhow.
Willis, though, seemed fearless, as always. He soon outstripped Gary, and was one of the first to reach the fence. Gary watched as the sappers prised back the layers of wire. Amid a hail of covering fire, the men fitted the torpedo together, then pushed it through the wire.
The torpedo went up, detonating the mines. Earth was thrown up in a string of muddy fountains.
Willis was already scrambling ahead. Gary followed in Willis’s tracks over the ground into the minefield, head down and feet tucked in under his body, praying that all the mines had been cleared. It was hard going. The ground was broken by trenches, and now it was churned up by the craters of the mine detonations.
At the wall, he and Willis threw themselves flat on the ground. The upper edge of the broken wall was only about three feet above them.
Gary glanced back the way he had come. More men were following under covering fire. They swarmed over the muddy, broken ground, looking oddly rat-like. Around them the sappers were working to clear more mines and to bridge the trenches for the tanks to follow.
Willis grinned, his teeth white in his blackened face. He hefted a grenade. ‘Ready for a bit of the old Stalingrad two-step?’
Gary pulled out a grenade of his own. ‘After you.’
Willis counted down on his fingers. Three, two, one. They pulled the pins out of their grenades and hurled them over the wall, and huddled during the double explosion. Then they stood up so they were looking over the wall, their Thompson guns raking fire into the room. A machine gun emplacement had been wrecked by the grenades. Two men lay dead, but another ducked out of an open doorway, firing a pistol at the invaders.
Gary and Willis swept their legs over the wall and clambered in.
They pushed forward, moving from room to room. It was a routine, throw a grenade, follow it up with automatic fire, then on to the next. Gary made sure he raked the walls and even the ceilings. Some of the rooms were crowded, and they used concussion grenades, smoke or phosphorus to cause confusion and panic, before wading in with their weapons, leaving behind corpses, wounded and prisoners. They had been trained up for this sort of operation by Soviet advisors, who had learned hard lessons about a new kind of infantry warfare in the streets of Stalingrad, and they had exercised in bombed-out districts of London.
The complex was quite elaborate, with communications gear and a range of weapons, including mortars and some larger pieces. The individual houses under their shell of concrete were connected by knock-through doorways and tunnels. Many of the rooms were lit only by slit windows in the concrete shell. Under one window, Gary found a sketch of the countryside painted on the wall, with ranging information for the guns.
He crashed at last through one more doorway, grenade in hand, ready to draw the pin.
A soldier of the Wehrmacht faced him, a torch in his hand, his arms aloft. ‘Please.’ The man swung his torch around. The room was full of people in civilian clothes, many of them women; their faces swam in the dark before Gary, their eyes wide, their mouths open. There was a stink in here, of urine and shit and vomit. The Wehrmacht man said, his English good, ‘I am Obergefreiter Ernst Trojan. I am the only military personnel here. These are civilians. German civilians. There is no need to injure them.’
Gary hesitated. ‘Don’t I know you?’
Trojan stared at him. ‘From Richborough? A Roman spear, a raid? Another life ...’
‘What the hell are these people doing here?’
‘They are civil servants. Brought from Germany to Hastings to help run the protectorate. You see? They are clerks, telephonists, typists. When the counter-invasion came they were brought to this bunker for safety. Where else were they to go?’
‘How about back to fucking France?’
Trojan actually smiled. ‘Ah, the boats are reserved for SS and Party members.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
There was a crash; the whole bunker shook, and the civil servants screamed as plaster rained down from the roof. Gary heard an engine roar, a grind of pulverised concrete, a scream of twisted metal. And then a big gun barked, unmistakably the Sherman’s sev
enty-five millimetre.
Trojan said, ‘Your tank is inside the stronghold - well, the game is up, yes?’
Gary heard English voices calling. ‘Put it down!’ ‘Hands on heads!’ ‘Back up, against the wall. Back up!’ The gunfire ceased all over the building, as if a rainstorm was ending.
XII
George, uniformed, plodded through the heart of Hastings, looking for Julia.
It was late afternoon. It had been a day from hell. And it wasn’t over yet.
Not a single Allied soldier had yet set foot in the town. But the battle raged all around. You could hear the boom of the big guns firing out at sea as the Kriegsmarine struggled with the Royal Navy to keep open the evacuation corridor across the Channel. In the air, Luftwaffe fighters flying from France were trying to fend off the Allied bombers striking at the harbour. You could hear air battles going on inland too, as the RAF attacked the columns of German personnel and vehicles heading for the coast. Royal Navy ships out at sea were also using their heavy guns to strike at the harbour, but their accuracy was predictably poor. You would see great waterspouts thrown up where the shells fell short - and, worse, some of them fell into the town.
Caught in the crossfire, Hastings was having its worst day since the invasion itself. There were few civilians around, nobody out of doors who didn’t need to be, and the air raid shelters built earlier in the war were all full once more. The ARP and the fire service, the WVS and Home Guard and ambulances were all out in force at each bombed-out house.
And meanwhile the Germans were all over the place. The town swarmed with Party members and SS, crowding to book places on the last boats to the continent, men who had so brutally imposed their own sort of rule now running in fear of the ‘Tommies’ and ‘Amis’. And in these last hours the SS were going crazy. Bodies dangled from the lamp-posts of Hastings, most of them English civilians punished for some misdemeanour, but some in the uniforms of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, even the SS themselves. The only fresh soldiers George had seen thrown into the defence of the town today were the wretched children of the Jugend, and the Legion of St George, English volunteers fighting for the occupying army under the banner of the SS, men with no future.
For a policeman this final collapse of order was a nightmare made real. George felt as if he were the only sane man left in a town of lunatics. He longed to cut down the corpses from the lamp-posts, but he knew he dare not while the SS still had any vestige of authority.
In the end he spotted Julia close to the town hall. Here a line of muddy-looking men, probably resistance brought in from the country, were being roughly lined up against a wall by the SS. The wall was already pocked and splashed with blood. A nervous-looking SS officer walked along the line offering cigarettes and blindfolds. A gang of civilians, watched over by armed Waffen-SS, stood by uneasily, no doubt detailed to remove the bodies when the work was done.
Julia, in her uniform, stood watching this spectacle, her arms folded.
George hurried to her. ‘Julia, for God’s sake—’
‘George.’ She turned to him, oddly calm. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Believe it or not, I’m glad to see you.’
‘What do you mean? - Look, everything’s unravelling. The British will be here in an hour. What’s the point of this? Can’t you stop it?’
‘I could not if I wished to. These deaths mean nothing.’
He saw the bleak coldness in her then. In some sense none of this was real to her; the men being shot might have been mannequins. He wondered, not for the first time, how he had managed to share her bed for three years. ‘The game’s up,’ he said. ‘You won’t get out of here. It’s already too late.’
‘I don’t think so.’ He felt something press at his belly. It was the muzzle of her silver pistol.
‘You can’t be serious—’
‘I have a car waiting,’ she said. ‘You see how it’ll work. Our two uniforms will get us past any barrier we are likely to encounter. And if we cross into Allied territory I will change out of my uniform - I am English after all; we can concoct some story or other.’
‘My job is here. I’m a copper, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Well, you will be a dead copper unless you do as I say, and what good will that be to anybody? I will kill you if you refuse, you know.’ And he knew she was telling the truth. ‘Come with me now ...’
There was a commotion among the doomed men. One of the civilians waiting to process the bodies, a burly older man, came rushing forward, limping a bit, breaking past the line of SS men. George could hear him call, ‘Jack! Jack Miller! It’s me!’
‘Dad? No ... go back ...’ There was horror in the younger man’s voice, even as he embraced his father.
A young SS man came up, pistol drawn, and tried to pull the older man away. But he stood his ground, hanging onto his son. ‘Shoot him and you shoot me, you black-hearted bastards.’
The SS man tried a bit longer, and the son tried to push his father away. But the old man was stubborn. At length an officer snapped an order, and the trooper pushed the old man against the wall beside his son. Father and son clung to each other, both weeping now, until the rifle shots echoed.
XIII
The German prisoners were marched along the coast road from St Leonards into Hastings. It was evening now, the sun casting long shadows through air laden with dusty smoke from the bombings. And as the day ended, so did the battle, it seemed. The gunfire on the land had stopped, though you could still hear the deep guttural booming of ships’ guns rolling in from the sea like distant thunder.
This was a road Ernst had walked many times, but never as he walked it now, one of a hundred or so prisoners, all stripped of their helmets and weapons, and some of boots and belts taken by the Tommies as souvenirs, walking with their hands on their heads. Nobody spoke, and it was hard to tell what the men thought as they plodded along. Ernst himself longed for sleep. But aside from that he felt only relief that he was alive, and that he would presumably see out the rest of this wretched war in a prisoner-of-war camp rather than be shipped off to an even more brutal front. Relief, mixed with a good dose of shame, that so many had died where he still lived.
On the outskirts of the town they came on a German column that had evidently been caught in the open by RAF planes. The tanks, guns, trucks, horse-drawn carts were blown up and burned out, and bodies were littered everywhere, sprawled over dashboards or dangling from the back of the trucks. Horses had died too, their great bodies smashed and splashed. You could see where some vehicle, a bulldozer perhaps, had cut right through this mess to clear it, leaving track-marks stained with engine oil and the brown of drying blood. The men walked through with eyes averted. You could shut out the sights but not the smells, the endless stink of blood and cordite and oil and soot that seemed to soak through all of this corner of England. The Allied guards allowed the Germans to lower their hands and hold handkerchiefs to their faces.
It was only a hundred yards past the destroyed column that they started to come into the town.
British flags hung out of the windows of the houses, and Ernst wondered where they had been hidden all these years. People leaned out of upstairs rooms and shouted at the British troops as they walked by below, women came out with trays of tea, and the soldiers were given kisses and handshakes. One girl in bright lipstick called as they passed, ‘Any Americans? Have a go, Joe! Any Americans here?’
Heinz plodded beside Ernst, hands clamped to his head. ‘All this only a hundred paces from the dead. What’s the word I’m looking for?’
‘Surreal.’
‘That’s the one.’
They were walked along the sea front road. The beach, to the prisoners’ right, was littered with the wreckage of boats and bodies, spread over the shingle. An old man was picking his way among the corpses, taking watches or wallets or even just cigarettes. Ernst wondered where the British police had vanished to; the ‘coppers’ he had got to know wouldn’t have tolerated such disrespect. As they walk
ed on Ernst heard the sound of a violin, played jerkily but sweetly. The tune was a simple one, but familiar: ‘Lili Marlene’. ‘Just as Alfie Miller used to play,’ he murmured to Heinz, but Heinz didn’t care. Some of the marching Germans began to hum the melody, or even sing the words, softly. After a few paces some of the British guarding them joined in.
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