The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  ‘Run! Run! Now!’ Screaming at my men, we sprinted, pushing at the loose sand with our boots.

  The young soldier scurried like a crab behind me. And was shot dead, by the snap of a single report. Another sniper kill. I began to think myself lucky. Or next.

  We hunkered down behind the sea wall, chests heaving, safe for the moment. The respite gave me the chance to turn and see what was happening behind us. Many had not been lucky. A tide of blood streaked the white foam of the foreshore. Wounded men called out pitifully. Some were still behind the abandoned tanks; they needed to get off the beach. But below the sea wall, I could see most of my men. Maybe thirty had made it. They crouched, holding fast to their rifles, looking at me.

  About a hundred yards to my left was a gap in the wall where a concrete ramp led down to the beach. If the amphibious tanks had advanced, that was the only way they could have gone. If. If they had trundled up the ramp, we should follow because they might have used their 75mm guns to clear a path through the pillboxes and trenches strung out along the road. My watch said 08.00. We had been on the beach long enough. I decided to take Corporal Lauder, to act as a runner. He had played rugby in the Border League, was agile and quick, and he could take back orders to the waiting men.

  Still roaring over our heads, the naval bombardment was directed further inland, or so I hoped. When Lauder and I reached the concrete ramp, we crawled on our bellies up to the level of the road. In each direction, we could clearly see fire spitting from gun emplacements, pillboxes and the upper floors of the tall seaside houses. For some reason, I remember the brightly painted shutters folded back on each side of the windows.

  Further along, I saw the smoke of artillery fire. Wherever the Lancasters had dropped their bombs, it was not here. But directly in front of us, between two houses that had been badly damaged by shelling, there was a trail of destruction, where tanks had flattened fences and struck inland.

  Don’t stop and think. Think when you have stopped. Without realising that I had learned it, that was the visceral lesson of an extraordinary morning on Queen Beach. Moving targets are harder to hit and if I could only keep my men moving forward, the picture would change constantly, forcing the Germans to turn, to look for us, to throw up barriers, move back from prepared positions. So long as we could keep moving, I felt sure confusion would be our friend as well as our enemy. We were in a strange land and the Germans knew it well. But we were running with the tide of history. Surely we were.

  With two other units of Borderers joining us, we moved inland, the map telling me we were about half a mile west of Ouistreham. We exchanged fire with retreating defenders who knew and used the landscape to make their escape. Having set up a perimeter around a battered, badly shelled and deserted farm steading, we needed to contact brigade headquarters, wherever they were, for fresh orders. Now what? Our mission was to push on and take the city of Caen, about eight miles to the south. But we needed more than infantry: tanks, more firepower, greater numbers and clear leadership amidst the confusion were all essential.

  The radio crackled into life and Private Mallen pressed his fingertips on the earphones, trying to find the right wavelength amongst all the deafening noise and the static. ‘That’s brigade, sir,’ said Mallen, handing me the headphones.

  I could hear only part of what Colonel Murray said but gathered enough to know that we were to rendezvous at 18.00, north of the village of Hermanville.

  ‘Must mean the Germans have it.’ Mallen smiled. ‘The Hermans.’

  Not very funny, but a break, a jolt, a different train of thought.

  We pressed on. The naval bombardment had been pitiless. We saw many dead cows and horses, but it was the awful, elemental bellowing of those that had been savagely wounded that haunted our steps. I shall never forget catching sight of a horse with most of its hindquarters blown away, an awful mess of blood and bone. Shrieking in agony, it was pulling itself forward with its forelegs, trying to run away from the pain. Corporal Lauder reprimanded men who spent bullets ending the suffering of wounded animals, but I told him to leave it.

  Before death had come screaming out of the skies, this had been dairying country. Small, lush fields were enclosed by ancient, high hedging and their peace had been shattered as bombs blew open ragged craters and dense blackthorn and juniper were smashed down by advancing tanks. Idyllic though this place must once have been, it was also dangerous. Known as bocage, it was perfect for ambush.

  I have no memory of falling. Only of coming round, dizzy and choking.

  The back rim of my helmet had hit the ground so hard after I somersaulted that the chinstrap was choking me, only freeing when I rolled on my side. I had no idea if I had been hit, no pain, no feeling in my limbs or torso except a floppy disarticulation.

  Lauder’s face loomed over me. ‘Mortars, sir,’ he shouted, inches from my ear, his voice echoing down a long tunnel. ‘We need to get off the road.’

  I realised I was lying on my revolver, and I was glad I could feel it jabbing into my side. My rifle lay a few feet away and I tried to roll onto all fours but collapsed slowly sideways. Lauder dragged me into a ditch choked with briar and willowherb. From a long, long way away, I heard, ‘You’re not hit, sir,’ and darkness closed over me.

  Very badly concussed, or worse, the pain in my neck excruciating and overwhelmed with nausea, I came to at the sound of engines. No more than a few feet from where I lay, I saw the wheels of vehicles passing slowly. Time seemed to collapse on itself and light at first faded and then brightened. When Lauder broke into my nightmares, arriving with stretcher-bearers, I realised that many had had marched past me thinking I was a goner, another casualty of a bocage ambush.

  *

  Like church spires rising above the fog, my recollections of the following few days are sparse, seen fleetingly, only sharp impressions. My left side was at first numb and I pissed myself more than once. But once feeling returned, I could stand, unsteadily at first, rocking on the balls of my feet, and then I could walk.

  I was desperate to return to my unit. Such was the intensity of my new-found sense of responsibility that I felt I had let them down. I wanted to know who amongst my band of Borderers had survived the mortar attack, where they had been deployed and who commanded them.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked a sergeant from the Royal Ulster Rifles who lay on the bed next to me at the field hospital.

  ‘Panzers,’ he said. ‘Probably SS. They broke through, between us and the Canadians.’

  Perhaps this would all go wrong, I thought, perhaps we would be driven back into the sea. ‘What about Caen?’ I said. ‘Surely to God we’ve taken it. It’s only a few miles away.’ I felt myself lurching into despair, on the edge of tears and also, I’m ashamed to say, of fear.

  ‘Didn’t have the bloody kit, did they,’ said the Ulsterman. ‘Not enough armour. That’s why the Panzers broke through, how they kept us out of Caen.’

  Dear God in Heaven, was this all beginning to unravel? The sergeant was panting, grimacing with the effort of talking. I saw that his right leg was splinted and bandaged, and after blowing out his cheeks and a long sigh, he turned away. But I couldn’t. My men were still out there and I was lying here without a mark on me.

  The orderlies were overwhelmed by casualties – real casualties, not confused malingerers like me – and I had no difficulty persuading them that I was fit and should not take up room.

  ‘The Jocks are up ahead, sir,’ said a sergeant from the Royal Signals as I left. ‘Heavy fighting at Hermanville, and beyond.’

  Stiff, limping and constantly thirsty, I made my way forward to where my unit might have been. ‘March towards the sound of distant guns’ was a standing order given by Napoleon to his marshals, and even though it was probably apocryphal, it was what I was doing.

  Waving green wheat beginning to turn biscuit-ripe is an image that has stayed with me, and sends a shiver of fear up my spine. It was dusk at the edge of a wide field, not typical of th
e hedged enclosures but just as deadly: an open killing field, like the beach. The Ulsters had advanced across it, taking very heavy casualties from hidden machine gun nests at the edge of the village on the other side. But they took it, showing immense determination, and the Borderers came behind to reinforce and consolidate.

  I remember seeing one of the Paddies carrying a sten gun as though it was a toy and opening up at a target I could not see. Showing extraordinary physical courage, he charged a sandbagged emplacement, constantly firing, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Hände hoch! Hände hoch!’ Maybe too many of his mates had died. When he kept coming, they surrendered. Astonishingly, attacked by only one man, the Germans stood up with their hands held high. But two made a fatal mistake when they suddenly turned away from the Ulsterman. He mowed them down instantly.

  9 July 1944

  The night before the attack on Caen, Colonel Murray ordered me to leave my unit and stay by his side throughout the operation. As a fluent German speaker, I was to interrogate prisoners. Intelligence about the strength of enemy resistance had been very poor and two Panzer divisions supported by grenadiers and other units had held up our advance for a month. The positioning, supply and robustness of artillery and machine gun emplacements had also hampered us greatly. I frankly doubted that prisoners of war would give up any information but Murray insisted we try to extract what we could. I suspected he thought I was still not fit enough to lead my Borderers.

  Clearly, I had suffered a severe head injury but showed no outward signs of having been wounded. That spurred me to protest that I should be allowed to return to my unit, but the colonel was adamant. He had another reason for keeping a German speaker on his staff: to find any information about the massacres of Allied prisoners. Waffen SS Panzer grenadiers had killed seventeen captured Canadians, and other atrocities had been discovered as the Germans retreated. On both sides, I suspected.

  Our startline lay to the east of Caen, on the farther side of the River Orne, which flows through the middle of the city. In the centre were the Royal Ulster Rifles, and from the west, having broken through from Juno Beach, the Canadians and their armour would attack.

  At 09.00 we moved off, at first under heavy shellfire. It was misty and the very badly damaged buildings of the outskirts of Caen loomed up like ghostly ruins. And when ghosts emerged, civilians who had been sheltering amidst this chaos, we almost fired on them. One old lady carried a bottle of cognac in one hand and in the other two crystal balloon glasses; she was like a figure from another world. Suddenly there was a rattle of machine gun fire and, as we scrambled for cover, she walked over to us as though it was a mere irritation. ‘Là-haut! Là-haut!’ She pointed to a church tower. ‘Up there!’

  To keep the Germans’ heads down, the Borderers maintained a steady volley of fire until a bazooka could be assembled. A direct hit just below the topmost window silenced the machine gun, and moments later five Germans ran out of the doorway quickly enough to disappear into the narrow streets of the old town. There was no time for cognac.

  Advancing slowly, darting from doorways to street corners, covering each move with rifle fire, the Borderers slowly cleared the town, despite snipers downing several men. French civilians pointed out German positions, and through bomb craters and around tremendous piles of debris strewn across the streets, our men made their way down to the river. I was certain many local people had died in the bombardment. Near a railway bridge, a young boy pointed out Boches and a well-defended battery. But after a sustained and merciless series of mortar volleys, the defenders lost heart. When five of them surrendered, I recognised the uniforms and insignia of the Waffen SS.

  The SS colonel was defiant. ‘Your bombers destroyed our cities, murdering thousands of our people, mothers and children, and we seek revenge!’ To my astonishment, he admitted to killing Canadian prisoners but would tell us nothing about the strength of German forces in Normandy. ‘If you defeat us, you will soon be fighting the Russians alone!’

  Colonel Murray was unequivocal, despite the fact that I wanted to question the prisoners further: I should march the Germans to the rear of the HQ, where they would be shot by firing squad. And, if possible, the other POWs captured when Caen had been surrounded should watch the execution.

  Even though I had seen nothing but death for a month, the Colonel’s orders took me aback. His summary judgment was certainly justified. Seventeen Canadians had been massacred. But something niggled at me. Were we not better than them? Should we not send them back across the Channel and then follow the processes of the law? But then, in the chaos of war, witnesses die, facts become forgotten or twisted. For now, there was no doubt. These men, these black-uniformed Nazis, these fanatics, had admitted murder, and they were about to suffer the ultimate field punishment.

  ‘Götterdämmerung!’ shouted the SS colonel, still defiant. ‘That is what will descend on you from the skies if you dare to put one foot in the Reich.’

  The five prisoners were lined up against the half-ruined gable of a farmhouse. Behind the five soldiers selected to perform the execution, hundreds of German POWs watched, sitting on the ground, their guards with their guns cocked and ready.

  ‘The Führer will call down the wrath of the Gods and the whole world will burn – and he will renew it in the flames. Ruin waits for you.’

  They refused blindfolds. I noticed that one of the younger soldiers, little more than a boy, had pissed himself and was shaking. Just before I gave the order to fire, they all saluted and called out, Heil Hitler. The force of the close-range volley slammed them all back against the gable wall, and the SS colonel spun and fell on his side.

  Gritting my teeth, I walked over to the crumpled tangle of bodies to put a bullet through each head. When I came to the colonel, I crouched lower, fired into the ground beyond him and whispered, ‘Stay there and do not move.’

  III

  Disobedience of a direct order from a superior officer had only one consequence. Any court martial verdict would be a foregone conclusion. I would be convicted and at best sent to the Glasshouse, to a military prison. As much of a punishment would be the sense of shame, of failure, and even betrayal. I would have let down my band of Borderers and brought ill repute on an old Border family. But I still thought it right to stage the execution of the Waffen SS colonel. My promise to the men in the firing squad that I would finish him off myself after more interrogation, his tongue loosened by near-death and the sight of his comrades dying beside him, seemed to satisfy. In the chaos north of Caen, as armour rumbled towards the smoking, disintegrating city, an odd incident like that stood every chance of being forgotten.

  Before the march back to the rear of the HQ, I had ensured the SS prisoners’ hands were bound, in order to minimise the escort needed. While two Borderers had led the four grenadiers in front, I had walked beside the SS colonel. Tall, erect, despite an exhausting battle for the city, and with fair hair, he looked like a specimen, the sort that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and the others had in mind when they ranted from platforms about das Herrenvolk, the master race. More than once, I had mused on the contradiction: none of the Nazi leadership looked anything like the Nordic ideal they worshipped. Hitler was dark and had black circles under his eyes; even in his pomp, Himmler was chinless, bespectacled and balding; Goebbels was emaciated and limping; and Goering fat and jowly. But the man beside me, walking to his death, appeared to be the embodiment all of their poison, of Rassenkunde, the crazy nonsense of race-science.

  Nazism had long struck me as an ideology of narcissism and immense male vanity. The look of everything mattered. The uniforms, the jackboots, the insignia, the decorations, the Wagnerian names of regiments and units, the universal use of the swastika and the elaborate staginess of ceremonies all added up to the worship of the heroic soldier. When the Pathé newsreels played snatches of Hitler’s speeches, I could understand the harsh and pounding oratory, and the use of the first person plural was constant throughout: ‘We, the German people. We, th
e soldiers of destiny. We, the children of the Fatherland.’ But when the crescendo came, ‘we’ became ‘me’: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer! On the wide cinema screen, the theatre of the rallies was spine-tingling, brilliantly performed as thousands of flags fluttered, stormtroopers marched, searchlights played across the Sieg Heil! chants and the raised right arm of the Nazi salute. Germany seemed intoxicated with itself.

  ‘Your German is excellent, completely without accent,’ the colonel had said suddenly. ‘Do you have German relatives?’

  In thirty minutes or so, this man would be dead, bullets having shattered his chest at close range, and yet he was making conversation. Perhaps he might be persuaded to say something useful. Ignoring his question, I wanted to know why the resistance in Normandy had been so fierce, even fanatical. ‘You’re a soldier. You understand history,’ I said. ‘Fighting on two fronts, being driven back by the Russians: you can’t win. The war’s lost. Our bombers will pulverise your cities. Why not surrender and save lives?’

  He turned and smiled, indulgently. ‘You have no honour. You cannot hope to understand.’ A shell suddenly burst behind us, but while everyone else flinched, this man did not so much as break his stride. ‘We swore an oath to the Führer, a sacred oath to defend the Fatherland, the holy soil of the Reich.’ With no hint of irony, his voice was even, resolved and not raised.

  When I said that it was only a matter of time before there was a breakthrough in Normandy, he cut in.

  ‘We also fight for time. When Germany launches weapons the like of which have never been seen before, it is the Allies and the Soviets who will beg for peace. We have Götterdämmerung. When the Führer calls down the Twilight of the Gods, the roar of their thunder will silence your guns and stop your tanks in their tracks.’

  This was more than bombast or the repetition of propaganda about Vergeltungswaffen, commonly known as ‘Wonder Weapons’ – although the literal translation is ‘Vengeance Weapons’, a label that intrigued me. We had heard reports that rockets had hit London, but their impact had apparently been negligible. It struck me that this man was talking about something much more powerful, and from personal knowledge of some sort.