by Thomas Wood
My weapon was ready, my mind wasn’t. Maybe it was the headache from the throttling I had just received. Maybe it was the fifty-fifty chance that I would be cut down by enemy gunfire before I could get over to the other side of the bridge. I was worried about how easy it would be to defend the bridge to a group of attackers, attackers who were protected only by a thin layer of flesh, rather than a nice thick steel tank to hide behind. All they would have to do was to plonk two machine guns on the far end of the bridge and keep firing until all of us were either lying in a pool of our own blood, or running for our lives towards the beaches like our army had done four years ago. Whatever it was, my head didn’t quite seem in it.
Releasing the cocking handle and checking I still had all my spare mags in my bandolier, I gave a short, sharp tug at my battledress, making sure everything was secure. By now I had to give a decent effort to fall in behind the group of men that had begun to stagger groggily towards the bridge.
4
6th June 1944
00.19 hours
I had never known my father in the way that my mother spoke about him and about how he used to be. He had always been a shy man, humble and quiet. He never talked anyone down, and only looked for the best in people. His patience was unconditional, hours spent telling my brother and me to keep away from windows while hammering a football, as hard as was humanly possible, at each other.
He had never once raised his voice at either of us. Never once did he get angry. It got to a point in our childhood, to see how far we could push our father, to make him explode in the same way that we saw so many other fathers tear into their children. This culminated in us performing a great heist from the local shop, numerous bars of chocolate and groceries were stolen, for no other reason than to wind our father up. It became almost like a game to my brother, George, and me, seeing how far we could push him, always wanting to just tip him over the edge. It was never out of a lack of respect for my Dad that my brother and I taunted him, but out of a curiosity that we possessed and a mystery that surrounded him. He was a Dad like no other.
His stern glare was enough to make my brother and I feel as hurt as if we’d been given the belt four or five times, but it never stopped us from looking for trouble.
He had been a confident young man apparently, laughing and joking around with his friends, much the same as me and my brother, always on the lookout for mischief.
He had a youthful glint in his eye, never really wanting to grow up, but always wanting to be around his friends, kicking a ball around and causing havoc. He grew up to become a well-known figure in the village, always up to no good, sourcing this and that for people and bouncing from job to job, but never upsetting anyone. Well, except the local farmers. I supposed it was hereditary, things were never stolen or pinched according to my Dad, merely ‘acquired.’ The skill of ‘acquisition’ was an easy one for me to pick up.
My mother often commented on how she feared he would never grow up, stuck in a state of juvenile stupidity. She would smile when telling us about what he was like, the man she fell in love with all those years ago, but the smile would rapidly abandon her face soon after.
They were married during Dad’s first leave after he signed up, the most mature and grown up thing he had ever done it seemed. Mum knew that what was to come would be hell, but it would be better for him if he knew he had something to try and come home for, an empty house is enough to make anyone suicidal. Increasingly, I felt like I would now be doomed to that fate.
The story never went much further than that. The comments about his maturity went from a “childish stupidity” to “never the same.” Mum never pushed herself to tell me, I don’t think she ever wanted me to know. She blamed the war for the change in my Dad, she never told me, but the day I volunteered, I saw it in her eyes. She had retreated into the kitchen silently, a broken, despairing woman. But she’d known I had to do it.
Never once had she shed a tear when talking about my Dad, never once had she shown any overtly visible signs of grief for the man she mourned. But the effect that it had had on her mind, the piece of her that had remained over in France with my Dad, was far more haunting than any of her tears.
I longed to know what he was like before, I wanted him as my Dad. It killed me to see him like he was, a young, fun and exciting young man locked in the body of a man who had seen too much and sacrificed a great deal.
Not long after I’d signed up, I found myself being subjected to a story of another war, a distant one. The one my Dad had experienced. From the moment he started to tell me I desperately wanted to know more but at the same time, prayed that it would end. He’d only spoken to me about it once, and that was enough. I couldn’t listen to anymore, he couldn’t tell me anymore.
He sat in his chair and I looked up as he grunted in discomfort. He played around with his pipe before striking a match and lighting it. The chemical cocktail of odours that wafted to my nostrils of the match was swiftly replaced by the sweet aroma of tobacco. Pipes had never been my style, I much preferred cigarettes, American cigarettes.
“Through mud and blood to the green fields beyond,” he scoffed, his pipe bobbing up and down like a piston as he spoke.
“That was our motto…but there were no green fields.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I was used to him speaking to me, but this seemed more like the ramblings of a mad man. I went back to reading my book, one half recommended to me by another recruit, as “alright, but a bit wet.”
I looked up as he continued to speak, more to his pipe than to me, staring into the bowl and allowing the smoke to permeate through his eyes. I did not know what had triggered this sudden recollection of his military service, whether it was because of me recently having signed up, or if it was down to the fact that I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday and he now considered me grown up enough to learn about my old man.
“I joined the Army Service Corps. 1916.” That already doubled what I knew about his wartime experiences. I loved my dad, he was my hero in many ways, calmly, quietly, persevering with his life, despite all the problems that he had. I looked at him out of respect rather than intrigue, it felt like the right thing to do, I hadn’t even finished my chapter.
I was more interested in the vast amount of smoke that continued to rise from his pipe, and disappear into the great valleys that now formed on his forehead.
His voice seemed to fade in and out, he spoke so softly, and I began to get the impression that I was missing words on either side of his sentences.
He still peered into his pipe, like a schoolboy avoiding eye contact with his teacher, not wanting to be selected to give an unknown answer. Deep sighs began to break up his speech. Either he didn’t want to go on, or the smoke was getting into his lungs.
“The tank was slow, cumbersome, vulnerable. A bit like you in your first year of school.” His speech was broken up by a haunting chuckle, making me feel like running from the room, but I couldn’t, I was transfixed.
He cupped his hand over his mouth and, for a moment, I thought he was going to vomit. He held it there as he shut his eyes gently, as if he was trying to focus all his energy on remembering something.
“It looked awful, it was rough, bits stuck out of it as if it was half finished and it made you giddy with all the fumes,” a reminiscent smile appeared on his face, causing the valleys to appear on his cheeks as well as at the corner of his eyes.
He spoke slowly, deliberately, but involuntary pauses broke his speech up so much I wondered if we would ever reach the end of what he was trying to tell me. In a way, I was more comfortable with that.
I thought for a moment about re-engaging myself in my book, hoping that he would eventually realise that he was speaking, rather than thinking, and he would supress his speech and place it firmly back in his mind. Smoke shot out of his nostrils as he smirked, and for the first time he looked up from the smoke and across at me, but the sadness in his eyes made me wish for a pipe of my own
. I busied myself repositioning my body in the chair.
“But it was a thing of beauty. It glided over the ground, nothing stopped it, it didn’t look as though it should get anywhere, a twenty-nine-tonne steel box Johnny, it don’t make sense, does it?”
The tone in his voice rose, and steadily grew faster as the fire in his eyes was stoked.
His eyes began to fill with tears, but I was more concerned about whether he was expecting a response from me. He held my gaze for a moment longer, softly nodding his head up and down with the occasional mutter in between puffs.
“We were at the forefront of a technological war, son. We were the ones that every man on the Western Front wanted on his side. They relied on us, they would watch us as rounds pinged off the side of our armour as if they were peas.”
He smirked at his own joke again. His speech and demeanour was proud, something I had never seen in him before, arrogant almost, but it was combatted by humbling tears that glistened in his eyes.
“Gott mit uns is what they had on their belts,” he paused momentarily as the cogs whirred in his head, trying to translate.
“But our boys in their dugouts had a sign themselves. ‘God with them. Tank with us.’”
He sat in silence for a few minutes, just watching the smoke that billowed from his pipe. I began to settle back down to my book.
“There were eight of us in our tank. Six beasts in our section. We were to smash through the enemy lines and advance on the nearby town.”
He couldn’t remember the name anymore, no matter how hard he massaged his forehead.
“We were the most advanced soldiers on the battlefield. We cut down everything. And do you know who they sent in behind us to clean up? The cavalry. Horses were cut down all around us, Johnny. Not a thing we could do.
“We’d see ‘em die, that was bad enough, great beasts rearing up as they took machine gun rounds to their chest, before thumping to the ground in agony. But the smell was worse. No one cleared them up, Johnny. Eighty-odd stone of horse meat, just rotting all around us. It smells okay at first, just a sweet aroma, but before long the flies attack, it begins to rot, flooding the area with a nostril burning substance…”
He was speaking in a matter-of-fact manner, as if it did not affect him but, before long, his voice trailed off as splutters turned to blubbing.
Leave it. Your job is to stay alive now.
As the sound of my Dad’s uncontrollable sobbing faded back into the pits of my mind, the sound of clinking kit began to take over. I pushed myself harder to catch up with the others.
5
6th June 1944
00.20 hours
The rhythmic chiming of my kit rubbing itself up and down my body was almost hypnotic, it felt heavier every time it fell and threatened to pull me to the ground.
My breathing was in sync with the clinking of my kit, as were my footsteps. I became a machine, all the cogs working in unison together as I paced my way towards the bridge.
My feet began to itch as the terrible woollen socks began to soak themselves in the dampness of the night, and I felt great clumps of my foot cling nastily to the fibres of the wool.
The outline of the men in front of me soon changed from silhouettes to machines themselves as the dull jingling of kit echoed from every direction.
A constant tinging, swishing sound began to flow across the field, as all of us moved as one body towards our target. My Sten slipped around in my hands as the sweat threatened to loosen my grip on my weapon, but my new-found confidence made sure I had a tight grip on it. I felt unstoppable. A fully automatic weapon swaying around at my hip, surrounded by like-minded and similarly armed men all powering towards a few, unsuspecting, hopefully sleepy soldiers. Nothing would stop us. We were trained and ready for combat. This is what we had all waited for. This is what all the months of training was for, the endless night exercises and constant classroom lessons. All of it coming together in what should be a few moments of pure aggression and total surprise.
I pushed all other thoughts out of my mind; my socks, Charlie, even my Dad. They were all gone. It was just me, my Sten and the enemy. All meanderings about failure or the idea of our inequality with the enemy simply disappeared. There was no possibility of failure in my mind, no chance even, of me being killed.
My helmet bobbed around on my head, like a child whose clothes don’t fit him properly. I couldn’t shake the clamminess from my hands, no matter how confident I felt, and I allowed them to slide all over the steel.
I was nearing the bridge, getting closer to where my life could possibly be cut short. And I found myself running. Saliva splashed from my mouth as I began charging forwards, allowing it to cling to my chin as it was soon joined by more.
I stopped sprinting suddenly and felt my heels dig into the French countryside, leaving great craters where I halted. The unmistakeable crack crack crack of a Sten gun blast resounded out, breaking the rhythmic pounding of footsteps on grass.
My silence had been broken.
“Keep going!” someone screamed as he charged past me, another grabbing my webbing and thrusting me forward. I stumbled as he released me from his grip and flew past me, struggling to keep my legs galloping towards potential death.
Here we go. This is it. This is what you trained for.
Minutes before I had been a master of the air, toying with the glider and manipulating nature to guide my craft down gently alongside Charlie. Nothing else mattered now. I was a soldier.
I felt alone all of a sudden, as if one enemy soldier had me in his sights, tracing my every movement ready to pull the trigger. I could see myself slow down as he steadied his breathing, getting ready to take the shot that would cut me down. The loneliness was combatted by my certainty that every man that I could see charging towards the bridge, shared my every thought.
I rounded the corner from the field and the crunching of boots on a more solid track became audible. The crunching of boots gave me a new wave of confidence. I was no longer slipping over the sodden grass, but I had a firm footing in France.
The large, imposing structure of the steel bascule bridge rose up in front of me, as if it was only just being sketched out onto an artist’s pad. The closer I got to it, the more detailed the sketch got, and extra features began to appear. I wanted to stop and marvel at it, it was unlike any other bridge I had ever seen before.
To my right, some men that I didn’t recognise, but definitely on my side, leapt out of a trench looking more than pleased with themselves, two German grenades each sticking proudly out of their breast pockets. They wouldn’t need to bother reading the instruction manual with those ones. We knew how almost every weapon in the Reich worked, with our eyes closed. All you had to do with the potato masher grenade was unscrew the cap at the base of the handle, let the small porcelain ball dangle out from the bottom of it and give it an almighty tug. You then had five seconds to get rid of it before you splattered yourself all over the countryside. The two men shared a joke with each other before shaking hands and charging onwards.
Preparing to die was one lesson that we hadn’t been given as part of our training. So, I did the next best thing, prepare to go down fighting, the voice of one of our lecturers ringing in my head.
“To go down with a full magazine is to go down a coward. An empty magazine secures hero status, gents.”
Making it to the start of the bridge, I brought my Sten up into my shoulder, ready to fire. It was safe to say that none of us here were going for hero status, we just wanted to make it out of here alive; but not one of us wanted to go down with the possibility of being called a coward.
The vicinity erupted with a clamour as weapons were fired at invisible targets and men screamed orders to each other. Great zipping noises became the incessant background to my soundtrack of war, each zip sounding closer and closer to my head.
Flashes of light sparked up on the other side of the bridge and I prepared myself to open fire, aiming just above the bursts o
f gunfire.
“Move!” came the command, “They’ve got charges all over! Get to the other side!”
Men all around pushed themselves up from their knees and, weapons raised, began charging towards the other side of the bridge. We poured across the great steel structure, footsteps creating a gunfire of their own as they clanged their way across. Men jostled with each other, as if a great stampede was on in order to see the King.
I felt a pop of air against my leg, almost as if someone had spat onto my trouser leg, a worrying sign that a bullet had come dangerously close to embedding itself inside me. I felt amazing, I had avoided death so far, I was still living when so many men, generations before me, had perished within a matter of seconds. I felt completely invincible, as if each bullet smacked into a defensive barrier around me and yet, simultaneously, I had never felt quite so aware of my own mortality.
I glanced across at one of the slit trenches. A machine gun hung limply on a mount where, if manned, it would point directly down the road. On the far side a small figure sat cowering in the corner. He was one of us that was for sure, his face blackened with the same cream issued to all of us. He clutched his rifle passionately as he muttered to himself.
Tears cascaded down his cheeks as he uttered what I could only imagine was some sort of prayer.
“Poor devil,” I found myself murmuring as another whizz-crack pushed my legs faster to the other side of the bridge.
My senses seemed to sharpen with every snap of a gun, able to take in new information quicker than a machine gun can spit out its deadly cargo. Something whizzed past my cheek, like a bee who flies a little too close to you, just able to feel the tickle of his furry back. I thought about the bullet as it continued on its journey, wondering whether some other poor man would feel it plunge itself into his flesh.