Swordpoint (2011)

by John Harris

  ‘Lord,’ 000 Bawden lifted his face to the sky – ‘I know we have to have rain now and then, but this is bloody ridiculous!’

  They were just about to move off again when they heard a pop from the other side of the river.

  ‘Mortar!’

  They waited in agony for the first bomb to land. The crash came from up ahead near the river bank. Immediately there was another and another and another.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Rich said in his dark, ghoul’s voice. ‘This is goin’ to be bloody marvellous.’

  Warley moved among them, pushing at them, urging them forward.

  ‘Go on,’ he kept saying. ‘Don’t stop. The sooner we’re down there, the sooner we can dump this lot and start thinking of finding shelter.’

  ‘And the nearer we’ll be then to them bloody mortar bombs,’ 766 Bawden said.

  ‘More like the nearer, my God, to Thee,’ his namesake added.

  The guns on the slopes behind San Bartolomeo were hammering away at full bore now and, looking back, Warley could see the flashes. So far, the Germans had not retaliated with counter-fire – nothing more than light and heavy machine-guns which were spraying the river bank and the roads that led back into the hills.

  Then, as he watched, he saw the mist on the hillside opposite glow with a white light as the German batteries finally opened fire. Shells began to fall on the flats, smashing equipment and killing men. Engineers, lorry drivers and signallers began to scatter for cover, dropping what they were carrying. Some of them stumbled into undiscovered mines, and the tapes which had been so carefully laid were trampled into the mud or dragged out of position by muddy boots. One or two of the more fainthearted of Warley’s men disappeared, and it was hopeless to think of trying to round them up because the mist and rain concealed them.

  Suddenly the road was scattered with bodies and abandoned bridging material. All round Warley the darkness was filled with curses as men fought to keep their feet on the slippery mud and avoid crashing into Engineers who, occupied with the task of preparing to throw a bridge across the river, struggled with wire hawsers, tackles, ropes, anchors and pontoons. Then another flurry of shells landed in the fields nearby, exploding to fling mud, water and earth in a filthy slash across the road.

  ‘Come here often?’ one of the Engineers asked sourly.

  ‘Only Sat’day nights mate,’ Parkin responded no less bitterly. ‘The dancin’s better.’

  News and rumour began to trickle back. Some of the bridging material dumped along the road had been damaged beyond use by the shells, and out of the four planned footbridges one had already been destroyed by mines and another found to be defective.

  ‘And there’s a bloody good chance,’ an Engineer officer said, ‘that this bloody shelling will polish off the other two before we get ’em erected.’

  Sweating now despite the cold and the rain, they passed a little blockhouse which had once been German. Then a mule went by, carrying two wounded Engineers, their trousers glistening with fresh blood. Farther on there were more casualties resting by the side of the road.

  There was another long halt. Then, from ahead, there were urgent calls to get a move on as though something had gone wrong. The assault area, now they were approaching it, seemed to be right on top of the German positions. There was an eight-mile-an-hour current swirling past and Warley planned, as soon as the boats arrived, not to wait but to rush them straight down the bank and into the water. He was suddenly appalled at the idea. The tanks were too far away to give their support with their guns, while he and his men would be far too close for the artillery to keep the Germans’ heads down. The very thought of it put the fear of God into him.

  When at last they were able to rid themselves of the bridging material, one of the Engineers looked quizzically at Warley. ‘Your men ever done this job before?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Warley said angrily. ‘They’re getting on-the-spot training.’

  As they left the road and started looking for shelter, two men, a corporal and a private, appeared out of the darkness carrying what looked like a theatrical property basket.

  ‘North Yorkshires, sir?’ the corporal asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Warley said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Told to report to you, sir. Corporal Carter. Pigeons. We’ve got half a dozen in here. They’re going across with you.’

  Warley managed a smile. ‘Poor little buggers,’ he said. ‘I hope they can swim.’

  Now they were below the level of the road, Warley felt a small breeze touching the side of his cheek, and realised that the mist which had been helping to hide them was dispersing. In the flash of shells, he could see it breaking into wisps and, beyond it, the dark shape of the opposite bank. A machine-gun opened up and slots of light shot out of the blackness directly towards them. In the darkness a man cried out, and someone started swearing steadily in a low voice that could nonetheless be heard above the lorry engines. Never repeating itself, the voice let forth a vicious stream of oaths and abuse directed not against the Germans but against the people sitting in offices who had got them into this mess.

  They were hiding along the bank now. It varied in height and they were crouching behind little mounds covered with rough marram-like grass where the river had eaten into the soil. Their shelter wasn’t more than three or four feet deep at any point and they had to cower on the mud, heads down, slithering and slipping on the black slime until they were all soaked and filthy.

  ‘Pity I wasn’t born a mule,’ Martindale said bitterly.

  ‘Never mind mules, mate,’ Parkin retorted. ‘You remember what your mum said when you joined up and don’t get your feet wet.’

  ‘Oh, bloody funny,’ Martindale said. He was kneeling in six inches of water and smoking his pipe upside-down to keep the rain out.

  They heard the sudden hysterical screech of a Schmeisser and the steady thump of an answering Bren, then the low burrp of an MG42, and all the time a sizzling noise as giant shells sped swiftly above them to burst ahead with a searing flash and a clap of thunder. The German artillery was going full throttle now, and they heard a lorry blow up behind them. There was a low ‘whump’, and the night was lit by a towering flower of flame. Against its yellow glow, they could see figures moving backwards and forwards, running for shelter. A man began to scream in the darkness again and again, as though he didn’t know what to do with himself or how to hold back his agony.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Hunters muttered between gritted teeth, ‘shut the bastard up, somebody!’

  There was no sympathy for the injured man, only a selfish fear for their own safety that showed itself as hatred for the man who was causing the noise. Then, as they listened, the cries slowly dwindled and finally died.

  It left them shaken, and almost at once the heavy counter-barrage from the opposite side of the river shifted and the shells began to whack down on the road. As Yuell had predicted, the Germans didn’t have to aim. They had a battery opposite the end of the road and all they had to do was raise or lower their sights.

  Another lorry went up with a crash, and vehicles were trying to back away out of the holocaust. Other shells began falling alongside the dirt road from Capodozzi to the disused ferry. With their usual efficiency, the Germans hadn’t overlooked that one either.

  Warley tried to keep in contact with each group of huddled men. He found it difficult because the shelling had scattered them into the darkness. But as far as he could make out, almost all of them were still there, and the shrill voice of Lieutenant Deacon, nagging at Private Syzling to get his head down, even took on curiously reassuring quality.

  Corporal Carter, the pigeon handler, was sprawling next to him with his basket of birds, the mud smeared across his face.

  ‘They all right?’ Warley asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Carter said. ‘They don’t like the water though. It’s coming through the bottom of the basket. They’re nervous little things, sir, and I always think it’s a bit hard taking ’em in
to a battle.’

  Warley moved on, talking to his men, making sure they knew exactly what to do. ‘As soon as the boats arrive,’ he kept shouting above the racket, ‘get them down to the water’s edge. You’ll be safer down there. They won’t be able to see you against the blackness of the bank. And no taking off in ones and twos. The first wave’s got to arrive on the other side all together.’

  He had a feeling that, however hard they tried to avoid it, the second wave would be ragged because boats would have been holed by bullets and there would probably be wounded or dead to remove from them before their second crossing. God alone knew what the third wave would be like.

  The artillery was laying a smoke screen now, and to Warley there seemed too damned much of it. It was blowing back towards them, and the artificial haze produced by the oil droplets choked the soldiers and was beginning to handicap the Engineers and cause confusion on their own side of the river.

  For a moment, he thought despairingly of Graziella Vanvitelli. He had no idea where the thought came from because she certainly didn’t belong in the madhouse that the river bank had become, but it suddenly occurred to him that Creation must be crazy when it could separate two people who were obviously made for each other, just because a cabal of semi-lunatics in Berlin wanted to rule the world. He wondered why he was so certain they were intended for each other and even whether there really was a God. He’d noticed all along that it was always the best, the bravest, the most level-headed, the most kind who seemed to be killed, while the shits lived on to a ripe old age, full of honour and loaded with rewards. He’d heard his father going on about the same thing after the last war, and so far in this one he saw no reason to disagree with him. Perhaps the ones who died were merely stupid. Certainly the grass grew as green over the graves of the shits as it did over the graves of the gallant and good.

  He glanced about him, wondering what his men were thinking but the only two he could see were Corporal Gask and Henry White on either side of him. and they were no help whatsoever. Gask’s pale bony face was totally unemotional, as if he were waiting to cross a busy road at a rush hour. White’s leathery visage was equally blank, his jaws moving all the time like a cow ruminating over its cud. The born soldier and the experienced soldier. They weren’t the ones he was worried about.

  He looked at his watch. They were going to be late starting, and he called up the artillery on the radio and asked them to continue the preparatory barrage for another ten minutes. Nearby, cursing Engineer officers were managing to put together a complete footbridge from the pieces of two damaged ones and a defective one.

  ‘You’ll have to hang on,’ one of them told Warley. ‘It won’t be open for foot traffic for some time.’

  As the last of the smoke curled away, the first of the boats arrived, carried by Engineers and men from the other half of A Company. They had found the struggle along the bank a nightmare. Already two boats had been lost. A man trying to side-step a bush had trodden on a mine just off the footpath, and the boat had slipped from the hands of the others as they’d rushed to help him, and been swept away by the current; a second had been hit by bullets and holed. They were staggering and stumbling, and one of them was soaked to the waist as though at some point he’d slid from the bank into the water.

  ‘There you are,’ he snarled as he dropped his load. And you’re fucking welcome to it!’

  Jago appeared out of the darkness and started barking at them. ‘Come on, then, let’s have you! Don’t hang about! We’ve got things to do!’

  Out of sight in the shadows, someone told him to get stuffed and Warley saw at once that the men were exhausted to the point of rage and were in no state to set about crossing the river.

  ‘Hold it, Tony,’ he said. ‘These chaps are whacked. Give them a chance to get their breath back. Deacon, are you ready?’

  ‘Yes, I’m ready.’

  ‘Right, then get yourself across! Find somewhere to dig in and wait until Tony Jago arrives. We’ll have the two waves together for the push up the slopes.’

  By this time, the road was a scene of confusion in the darkness and smoke. Overhead shells raced, the 25-pounders sounding as if someone was tearing a curtain, the 4.5s and 5.5s churning through the air like express trains. The noise grew harsher, reminding Warley of the noise the iron shutters on Parisian bars made when they were dragged down at night. He glanced up, half expecting to see the sky streaked with rocket trails, and was surprised, as he always was, to find that the barrage was invisible.

  It was no longer a matter of maps and charts, he thought, but of flesh and blood – his flesh and blood, and the flesh and blood of his men.

  Two

  With one eye on his watch, Warley kept the other on the far bank. The two companies at the end of the track from Capodozzi must have already started. As the extra minutes he’d requested drew to a close, against the deafening sound of the barrage, he yelled ‘Go!’ and they all grabbed the boats and started to drag them down to the mud.

  Immediately, the launching assumed the proportions of a disaster. Boats put into shallow water bogged down at once and refused to budge, and Deacon started screaming frustratedly.

  ‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Get out! You’ll have to wade further out! Syzling, get out of that bloody boat!’

  Struggling and splashing in the shallows, they carried the boats into deeper water and pushed them out again. Once more, Syzling climbed aboard and sat down on the starboard side. But when two other men joined him, the boat upended and the river began to pour in. In no time, it was on the bottom again and they were waist-deep in water.

  Warley appeared among them. Having a boat of his own at Bridlington, he knew something about them, which was more than his ham-fisted clodhoppers from the hills did. Some of them even came from the south-west tip of the county, which was about as far as you could get from the sea in England, and they had no experience whatsoever. One boat, caught by the current, went wandering off with only three signallers on board, paying out the wire of the field telephone, and Deacon began to shout at them to bring it back. But as the signallers dug at the water with their rifle butts, the boat merely swirled round in helpless circles, and continued to drift downstream until it was lost in the darkness. Another boat, held steady until everybody was aboard, simply sank under them. There were a dozen splinter holes in it.

  The confusion was appalling. Watching with dilated eyes as his boat vanished beneath him, 766 Bawden gulped and cried out, ‘I can’t swim.’

  As he found himself struggling in the water, 000 Bawden grabbed him by the collar and hauled him towards the bank. Scrambling to safety, they looked round for other transport. Such was the discipline instilled in them, it didn’t occur to them for a moment that they’d done all they could. They found Warley pushing off another boat and climbed in. Before they knew where they were, they were in midstream again, terrified it too would sink and they would drown under the weight of their equipment.

  In those boats which were under way, men tried to row with paddles, rifle butts and hands. Already wet through from the rain and liberally daubed with mud, the spray from the slashing paddles and rifle butts now drenched them again, so that they crouched with heads down as if battling their way through sleet. Only Gask sat upright – bolt upright – as if he were riding on a Number 11 bus and didn’t expect any problems.

  They were half-way across when the smoke began to break up and the Germans found them. The gun-fire was intense and concentrated, mostly heavy machine-guns and mortars, coming from the slopes just above the bridge. Glancing back, 000 Bawden saw that the Engineers were already in position on the stonework, apparently indifferent to the fire, dragging up girders and planks to throw across the broken span. He felt like a sitting duck, and was just turning to say so to 766 Bawden, sitting next to him, when he saw his head whipped off by a shell. Spattered with blood and brains, he leaned over the side of the boat, weak and sick with terror.

  From the shore, Warley watched the
shambles in silence. It was horrifying to see the unprotected boats driving on in a sidling movement against the stream towards the other side. Huge spouts of spray kept shooting up as shells exploded, and the small arms fire churned the water until it looked as if it were boiling. The flames were catching the movement of the river, so that it seemed alive with copper-coloured lights. Then he saw a shell score a direct hit on a boat, and when the smoke had cleared he could see nothing but one arm – one arm reaching up out of the water, black and stark against a patch of flame-tinted river, with clawing fingers reaching for help that didn’t come.

  Shrapnel was ripping into the little flotilla. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ someone screamed from the near bank. ‘Somebody direct those bloody guns on to the Germans!’

  But the shells were German. The British artillery and the tank gunners had had to stop, now that the boats were approaching the opposite shore, for fear of hitting their own men who could see the Germans standing up to aim at them, an officer in a steel helmet directing the fire.

  In Hunters’ boat they were crouching down, keeping their heads as low as possible, aware that the frail canvas sides gave them no protection whatsoever. Then the Engineer at the rudder touched Hunters’ arm. ‘Take the tiller, mate,’ he said, and flopped forward into Hunters’ arms. Pushing him aside, Hunters reached over him, trying to steer by staring over his shoulder, his backside in the air towards the German lines.

  ‘I must be the only bloody man in the world who’s crossed the Liri on all fours backwards,’ he thought wildly.

  Up in the bow, Corporal Carter, clutching his basket of pigeons, was trying to direct him, but a shell exploded in the water nearby and Hunters felt something hit him in the side. For a moment, the boat swirled round, out of control; then, uncertain whether he were badly injured or not, dying or not, Hunters managed to grab the tiller again and steer towards the bank.