Tramp in Armour

by Colin Forbes

  The man with the moustache stepped forwards and sideways, presenting his body to the pistol muzzle, shielding a woman instinctively. His wife. A hush of horror fell on the sunlit square. Even Meyer was disturbed. He spoke quickly.

  'That won't be necessary.'

  'Ask him, Meyer.'

  The gun remained levelled at the man's chest. Meyer stepped forward, his face stiff with anger. He even placed his own body between the man and the pointed muzzle as he addressed him in excellent French.

  'Which is the direct route to St Quentin? You see what we have with us, so think carefully before you reply. The direct route to St Quentin.'

  The Frenchman moistened his lips and glanced sideways as an Army truck drove into the square. Before it had pulled up men were jumping out of the back, German soldiers armed with rifles and machine-pistols. Their sergeant held a map in his hand, a detailed map of the district. He glanced around quickly, pointed, and a detachment ran into a building. Outside in the square, the moustached Frenchman had taken his decision: he had his wife to consider, and the other villagers. He pointed in the direction the motor-cyclists had taken, his hand wobbling.

  'That is the way to St Quentin - the only direct way. I swear to God.'

  Meyer nodded and turned round, his body still shielding the Frenchman while the general put away his pistol.

  'He says the route is down that street. He's telling the truth, I'm sure of it.'

  'Good, good. As long as we're sure.' The general turned round in his turret and called out to the sergeant who stood by the truck with several of his men.

  'Tell them we come as liberators. Tell them also that at the slightest sign of resistance they will all be shot.' He broke off impatiently. 'You know what to say, I should hope. We are pressing on.'

  He issued the order to his driver and the tank rumbled away from the square, leaving Meyer to scramble up inside his own vehicle while the villagers stood perfectly still, not yet able to grasp the nightmare which had arrived in brilliant sunshine.

  I'm right, the general told himself as the tank advanced into open country beyond the village, I do believe I'm right. He allowed a little of the exultation to well up inside him. There isn't going to be any real resistance. Those people in the village were symbolic: the shock of the armoured hammer had smashed French morale, had brought on a state of psychological paralysis. We must keep moving, on and on. And on and on raced the German spearhead, a spearhead tipped by the 14th Panzer division, commanded by General Heinrich Storch.

  The tank crew had been entombed inside the tunnel for over twenty-four hours and the strain was telling. In spite of the fact that they had spent over two-thirds of their time in back-breaking toil, removing large boulders with their bare hands, carting away hundredweights of debris with the shovels they carried on the tank, their state of near-physical exhaustion still couldn't prevent them from thinking, and the longer they remained trapped inside the hill the more they began to wonder whether they would ever leave the tunnel alive. Barnes paused to lean on his shovel, wiping sweat from his dripping forehead as he looked at his watch in the headlights. Seven o'clock in the evening of Friday May 17th.

  They had driven into the tunnel at eleven o'clock on the morning of the previous day and there was still no sign that they had more than scraped the surface of the landslide. At the rock face, its impenetrable solidity, only too apparent in the pitiless headlight beams, Davis and Reynolds wrestled to haul out a massive boulder from the left-hand side of the wall. The two men were working together as a team while Barnes and Penn wielded the shovels - a sensible division of labour since the two troopers were easily the strongest men in the crew. Barnes stood back and watched them working while he began his fifteen-minute break. He had organized the work routine so they had fifteen minutes off in every hour, and he had further arranged that the breaks should be taken in pairs, so that each man had someone to talk to, but at the same time he was encouraged by still seeing the work in progress. Four men resting at the same time, all voicing their fears, could have a disastrous effect on morale.

  'Time for a break, Penn,' he called out.

  'In a tick - I'll just finish shifting this lot.'

  Thirty-four years old, Barnes was not only the oldest member of the crew, he was also the smallest. Barely five foot seven inches tall, he was small-boned and slim, but his frame was wiry and on a long-term endurance basis he could probably outlast the other three on sheer will-power alone. His face was lean, clean-shaven, and above prominent cheekbones his brown eyes were still alert and watchful as he studied Reynolds and Davis. In size there wasn't a great deal to choose between them; they were both large, heavily-built men, but there was an enormous difference in temperament. Whereas Davis, the ex-miner, was subject to moods of melancholy, Reynolds could be relied upon to carry out any task he was set until he dropped, showing neither enthusiasm nor depression at any stage. As for thirty-year-old Corporal Penn, he was easily the most intelligent and best-educated of the four men. At the outbreak of war he could have obtained a commission but he had turned it down for reasons which were never quite clear. Slim and tall, he was the most light-hearted of the crew, and at the same time the most sensitive. Dropping his shovel, he wobbled over to Barnes in an exaggerated manner.

  'There should be extra pay for this, there really should. Working underground doesn't come within my agreed sphere of duties, you know. I'll have to look it up in King's Regs. Mind if we take a stroll along the promenade?'

  Along the promenade was Penn's version for walking through the tunnel, so Barnes got up off the hull where he had been sitting and walked with Penn, his torch beam showing the way. As soon as they were out of earshot of the other two men Penn began talking.

  'I don't like the look of Davis. I don't think he can stand much more of this.'

  'He'll have to - it's the same for all of us and we may be through to the other side any moment now.'

  'Do you really think so? That wall could be twenty feet thick. I imagine the Germans blew in the entrance.'

  'It looks like it - or they might have been bombing the railway and dropped one which started a landslide. It doesn't make much difference now - we've just got to get far enough through to be able to use the two-pounder.'

  'The two-pounder?' Penn stopped in the middle of the rail track. 'You're joking, of course?'

  'Look, Penn, by the time we see daylight we're going to be pretty tired. And in any case we've been away from the troop for well over twenty-four hours. God knows what's been happening on the outside but our job is to get back as fast as we can - and the way to do that is to shoot our way but when we can. We'll wait until we have a hole big enough for me to crawl through and do a recce. Then Davis can take his mind off things by shelling the rest out of the way.'

  'Just so long as Davis lasts out the course - and always assuming we ever reach your little hole.'

  'Now you're beginning to talk like Davis. It doesn't seem to have struck any of you that being cooped up inside here is a damned sight safer than being bombed by Stukas.'

  Penn glanced at Barnes in amazement. He had really meant what he had said, Penn felt sure of it. The idea that they might be trapped inside this tunnel until they were out of water, out of food, out of lighting when the batteries ran down - none of this seemed to have crossed Barnes' mind. In his usual way he just assumed that they would make it, that it was only a matter of time before they broke through that terrible wall. Well, if faith moved mountains, Barnes was likely to move that wall, and their tank commander had a habit of backing up bis faith with planning and forethought: they were still enjoying meals of bully beef and biscuits because of Barnes' insistence that they should always carry provisions for one" week. He turned and followed Barnes back to the rock face, sensing trouble as soon as they arrived. Davis had apparently been waiting for their return and now the burly gunner was glaring at his sergeant, his voice an insubordinate growl.

  'We'll never get through this bloody wall.'

>   'No, we won't - not if you just stand there,' Barnes agreed mildly. 'So get on with it.'

  'We're wasting our time.,.'

  'No, Davis - we aren't. At the moment you are the one who is wasting time, so get on with it.'

  Barnes' voice was still very mild. He stood close to his large gunner with a relaxed air, his eyes never leaving Davis'.

  'We're going to die down here - die, did you hear me? And one day they'll open up this bleedin' tunnel and find four corpses - four skeletons.' His voice was close to hysteria now, his mouth and hands working as though on the edge of a complete breakdown. 'I'm a miner - I know what this means. I've...'

  'Davis!' Barnes' tone was sharper now. 'You haven't by any chance thought yourself into thinking that this is a mine shaft, have you?'

  'No, but...'

  'So, instead of being hundreds of feet below the surface we're actually at ground level - right? The fact is, Davis, that your being a miner is just about as relevant as the fact that Penn was once a draughtsman. Now, do you expect Reynolds to shift that boulder all by himself or are you going to give him a hand?'

  'It may take a fortnight to shift that lot,' Davis persisted stubbornly. 'There could be hundreds of...'

  'Davis, I'm beginning to lose patience with you. It's just possible that it will take all four of us to break through, so we can't afford any spare wheels round here, and that's what you are at the moment. For the third time, I'm ordering you to get on with it.'

  'Why not have a go at the other end - the wall may be thinner there.'

  Barnes' face tightened. He prodded a stiff finger hard into Davis' chest, punctuating his words with prods.

  'You have been given an order three times and three times you have refused to carry it out. As soon as we get back you're on a charge. In the meantime you will do your bit with the rest of us, and since you've wasted five minutes gassing, your next break period will be ten minutes instead of fifteen. Give Reynolds a hand with that boulder at once.'

  He turned away and went back to sit on the tank hull, checking his watch to see whether his fifteen minutes was nearly up, putting his hands flat on either side of his body as he watched Davis start work again. Beside him Penn grinned and whispered, 'He thinks he can be Bolshie now we're on our own.' But Barnes made no reply and his face was grim. It had been a close run thing. They only needed one rotten apple in the barrel for the infection to spread, and the most contagious infection of all is fear. Outwardly, Barnes remained perfectly confident, his every word and gesture indicating clearly that it was only a matter of some hard slogging before they reached the outside world, but inwardly he didn't like the look of it. They were marooned in the centre of a battlefield and the war could rage backwards and forwards over the front for weeks as it had done a quarter of a century earlier. While that went on there would be a certain shortage of people to go round digging out buried tunnels, even supposing that the idea seemed important to them. There was no real problem of air - the tunnel was long enough for them to breathe inside it for weeks - but their water and food supplies would only last for several days, to say nothing of Bert's batteries. And when the batteries went they would be plunged into darkness, which would make working on the wall face almost impossible. For the first few hours of their entombment Barnes had mainly fretted about being cut off from his troop, but as the hours passed and they entered on a new day he found his mind beginning to think like Davis', and the analogy of the mine disaster was only too apt, which was why he had shut up Davis at the earliest possible moment. He glanced at his watch again, nodded to Penn, and went forward to pick up his shovel.

  Twenty-four hours later, in the evening of Saturday May 18th, they had removed an incredibly large mass of rubble and rock, but still the wall face was intact. They worked now by the light of the oil lamp which Barnes always carried inside the tank, and the reason for this was not only to save Bert's headlights: Barnes foresaw that later, when morale was sagging, switching on the headlights again might just keep them going a while longer, but he kept the real reason for this decision to himself. In the middle of the afternoon there had almost been a fatal accident when part of the wall suddenly came away and slid forward of its own momentum. Only Reynolds' speed and strength had saved Davis when he had grabbed the gunner's arm and hauled him sideways out of the path of the tumbling boulders. It was a measure of their anxiety that even when Davis had just experienced this shock he was the first to recover, running away from Reynolds to gaze up at the centre of the wall in desperate hope, his voice hoarse and strained.

  'Maybe we're through now.'

  'Keep back. I'll see,' snapped Barnes.

  Gingerly, he had climbed up the rubble slope, expecting at any moment a fresh fall, but when he had reached the rock face and pushed it was like leaning against the side of a fortress. So they had started again, Barnes and Penn working furiously with their shovels to remove the fresh rubble so that the other two could reach the rock face with their crowbar. It was just after seven o'clock in the evening when Penn made his remark during their rest period. Barnes sat alongside him on the tank hull, watching Reynolds prising out a fresh boulder while Davis sought to give extra leverage by pulling with his bare hands.

  'It's funny, but ever since we've been in here we haven't heard any sound of the battle.'

  'We've probably driven them back a bit - besides, there wasn't so much going on this side of Etreux.'

  He left it at that, wondering why the obvious and macabre conclusion had not been drawn by the others long ago. The fact that they could not hear even faint sounds of the huge bombardment taking place in the outside world demonstrated more clearly than anything the immense thickness of the wall which barred their escape. The thought had occurred to Barnes twenty-four hours earlier and had so worried him that he had waited until the others were asleep before walking back down the tunnel. When he reached the far end he had listened carefully at the blocked entrance but no sound had penetrated from the outside world. They were well and truly sealed in at both ends. Taking a sip of water from his mug, he frowned.

  Then, very carefully, he put the mug down on the hull and walked over to where Reynolds and Davis were working. He faced the wall and then turned sideways as though listening. It was a dramatic moment and Penn instantly guessed that something had happened because he got down off the tank and walked forward. Something in Barnes' attitude had attracted the attention of Reynolds and Davis and they stopped working.

  'What is it?' asked Penn.

  Barnes shook his head and faced the wall again, his hands on his hips, his eyes searching the surface carefully. When he spoke his voice was quiet. 'I think we're nearly through.' 'Why?' Penn asked quickly.

  'I can feel a faint current of air - come and stand here.' 'My God! You're right! You're right!' They began to work feverishly at the point where Barnes had traced the air current's entrance, a point about four feet above the level of the tunnel floor. A quarter of an hour later they experienced another heart-lifting moment when Barnes told them to stop working for a minute while he put out the lamp. For a short time there-was no sound in the darkness of the tunnel while four pairs of eyes strained to see any sign of daylight in the wall. It was Barnes who spotted it first - a narrow, paper-thin slit along the upper surface of one large boulder.

  'We're through,' shouted Davis. 'We're really through. Dear Mother of God, we're through!'

  'Take it easy now,' warned Barnes, 'this could be tricky. There's still a solid mass of rock up there.'

  He relit the oil lamp and when he turned round Davis was already inserting the crowbar into a corner near the end of the slit they had seen, his hands gripping the iron with a ferocious intensity as he drove the end deeper into the wall and began to twist and turn for leverage. Barnes opened his mouth and closed it again without speaking. The poor devil must have gone through even greater agonies than the rest of them with his memories of the mine trap he had escaped from. Barnes had realized this when he had treated Davis roughly,
but any display of sympathy at that time could have destroyed the morale of all of them, and Barnes never forgot the dictum of Napoleon - morale is to the material as three is to one. So now he let Davis break loose as he dug and rammed the bar into the remaining barrier, punishing his hands with the force of his efforts and never even noticing the punishment. Penn spoke as he shovelled debris to expose the base of the remaining rocks. 'I'll tell you now, I never thought we'd make it.' 'We'll face tougher things than this before this war's over.' Within ten minutes Davis had prised the boulder loose and Reynolds was helping him to haul it back out of the wall, a boulder as large as the oil stove they carried inside Bert for emergency cooking arrangements. It came away suddenly. One moment Davis was leaning his full weight against the crowbar, sweat streaming down the sides of his face, and then the rock was shifting inwards, swaying gently before it toppled back into the tunnel, so unexpectedly that the two men had to jump sideways to avoid it. Picking up the oil lamp, Barnes held it behind his back and they all stared at the oblong of daylight. It was a memorable moment. Four-men, each of whom had secretly felt that they would never make it, knew now that they would live. There was a pause when no one spoke, no one moved. Then Davis went berserk.