by Thomas Wood
The incessant racket screaming from the engine seemed to grow louder than ever before and began to cloud my mind. The intense noise contributed significantly to a huge pressure bursting from my skull, I needed fresh air, and soon.
The tinging grew louder and louder as furious bees whizzed past, slamming themselves suicidally into us.
“Hold tight!” I found myself screaming, as I felt resistance in the controls while the tracks struggled to crush the barbed wire.
As we shook our way over the German lines, it was impossible to block out the thoughts of the men below. They were the enemy, the very people that we had been taught to hate, to kill. But I couldn’t help but feel a sympathy for them, all of them there with their individual characteristics and foibles. In many ways, they were just like us, I supposed. Yes, they were killers, murderers even, but with their heads ducking down as a thirty-tonne steel box trundled over their positions, they became just like our boys, who would more than likely be dead within a couple of days, if not, hours.
The sound of multiple twangs freed up the controls and we lurched forward with a renewed energy towards the enemy stronghold. We were to continue forwards to a nearby town where we would hold and wait for reinforcements.
The noise of war died down as we squeaked our way through the French countryside. We stopped just short of the edge of a sparse forest.
The Lieutenant risked opening the hatch.
He muttered and cursed under his breath as he drew his pistol and leapt out of the tank, leaving the door wide open as he stormed out.
We jumped out behind him, drawing and readying our revolvers.
“Where is everyone?!”
I looked around nervously, there wasn’t a soul about. Not even any enemy. The Mark IV was an incredible contraption, a real technological miracle; the vision it allowed its occupants however, meant that it wouldn’t be taking tourists around London anytime soon. We hadn’t been able to see any of our other tanks.
We were able to talk freely, but out of fear, we rasped to each other. I kept my eyes fixed firmly on the trees, willing them to move so I could empty a cylinder load of rounds into the nearest moving object. My finger twitched as it precariously rested on the trigger. I made the conscious decision to remove my index finger for now, I didn’t want to make this situation even worse by accidentally sticking a round into one of my mate’s backs.
“We can’t be the only ones left.”
We staggered around for a while, circling Doris and hoping that at any moment we would hear the familiar squeal of tracks as they homed in to find us.
As Lieutenant Harper put his binoculars away for the seventh time, we all came to the realisation that we were alone. Don was already praying, his lisping tongue probably praying more for the return of his photograph than to get us lot out alive. He never had his priorities right.
Four hundred tanks and this is it. Just eight men.
“They’ve either gone on ahead or retreated. We have two options; we go back and risk a breakdown in enemy held territory…” he looked at us for a response, which he didn’t get, “…or proceed to the objective, which is closer, in the hope that they have made it there before us. Thoughts?”
We all had thoughts, all of them the same. We all wanted to go home. I couldn’t see how anyone could have overtaken us, we had pushed Doris to her absolute limit, we had led the charge, then suddenly, we had found ourselves alone. There was no chance of us being lost, we had all seen the route, and the Lieutenant had never once let us down in his navigation.
Or was today his first balls up?
“I say we carry on chaps.”
There was no further discussion, we all had differing opinions of this situation, some more democratic than others, but we all chose not to voice them, most of our suggestions would have been wholesomely unhelpful. One by one we hopped back into our steel tank and began rolling our way forward once more.
We began to edge forward precariously, and I could sense that each one of us was holding our breath, and not because of the fumes. We knew we were now completely alone.
Out of my peep hole I could see a dense mist as it began to descend, like a blanket being pulled up and over the terrain around us. It clung to the ground, and wrapped its way around the trees that had now begun to flank us. In my mind I watched figures dance between the trees like children. In reality though, I knew that any figures in amongst the trees would almost certainly not be playful children.
I kept my eyes dead ahead, not because that’s the only place I could look, but because I didn’t much want to see the hordes of men pour from the forest around us, and descend on us like circling vultures. As I began to take notice of the cloud, our pace dropped rapidly, the engine began to scream, filling the interior with a fog thicker than that outside.
Eventually, the engine gave up with a depressing whine.
“No! No! No!” Screamed Harper, as he ordered four of us out, to scout and secure the area.
The two rifles we had stored away were snatched up leaving me with just a revolver. As Jack, our resident mechanic got to work on the beast, the four of us spread out. He was another one with a short fuse, something of a recurring theme inside our tank, and we knew that when he was working, it was best to leave him well alone, besides, he loved Doris more than he loved his own mother.
We were in a wooded area, one that had obviously been cleared to allow vehicles and men to pass through easily. The beaten track that we were driving on had hoof marks mixed with foot prints in the sodden mud. I could just make out the individual foot prints of boots as they had been retreating in the very direction we were now heading. Crouching down I tried to guess what size boot the possessor of this particular footprint had. Roughly the same as mine I supposed. I pulled my own boot from the clutches of the enemy’s footprint as I begun to swivel round and take in the rest of our surroundings.
On either side of the wide path were banks, maybe four-foot-high, where the trees and forestry had continued to grow as if there was no war on. It was from here that I was half expecting the German army to emerge from, mowing us all down in the process. Heaving myself up using the flimsy root of a nearby tree, I crouched behind a sturdy trunk to continue taking in my environment.
This was not a good place to break down in a tank, if there ever was a good one. The track continued out in front of us, but rose gently, which made it more difficult for us to see what lay ahead of us, even with the Lieutenant’s trusty binoculars. The amount of traffic that had clearly been using this road was not a good sign for a lone tank either. It meant that either a secondary defensive position was up ahead, or a regrouping point for a potential counter attack.
The one thing that I couldn’t help but noticing was the distinct lack of any kind of mechanised tank tracks. I decided to keep that one to myself, as I was sure the others had already spotted it for themselves.
I watched as my crewmates hoisted themselves up the bank as well, the two rifles slightly further up than us lowly, revolver bearing men. I knew I could trust them, I’d been with them a while, we’d been in this situation together many times before. But that didn’t necessarily make it any easier.
The track they had made was desolate, other than the churned-up earth and footprints. Up here, it couldn’t have been more different. I hadn’t seen so much green this close to the frontline since being in France. A scattering of Bluebells had sprung up not too far from my resting point, only a handful of them nearby, the main gathering of them stretching much further into the woods, like a prettier version of Hansel and Gretel. The lilac glow of the bell drooped softly at the top of the stem, almost as if it was dying, but its colour aggressively contradicting that.
The silence was shocking, if it hadn’t filled me with a sense of dread and paranoia, I would have relished in it. It was so quiet, I could just imagine the birds singing softly in the trees before the war had begun. As I reminisced about birdsong, I yearned to know where all the birds on the Western Front
had gone, for I had not seen one, not even a blackbird, for some time.
I pined to see one, just one, emerge from the treetops and I found myself muttering encouragement to a bird that I knew wasn’t there. I could barely remember what they looked like anymore. A sudden urge to want to fly, to be able to glide over the treetops gripped me with such ferocity that I couldn’t ignore it. Maybe I would learn to fly one day.
I slid down the tree, in a brief moment of relaxation. I sucked in the clean air, a marked difference from the grease filled oxygen I had been breathing in for the last hour, maybe this breakdown would do me some good after all. My hand slipped over my forehead as the black sweat that clung to my head rubbed off on my hand.
I let out a groan as the release of oxygen unsuspectingly passed over my vocal chords and, closing my eyes, I allowed myself to risk thinking of home. I had enjoyed many hours in Thetford forest with my wife. I had not been able to call her my wife for too long, but now I did at every given opportunity, every man in the British Army knew who I was and how long we had been married. We’d sit much like I was now, back to the tree, listening intently to the different warbles of the birds of the trees, identifying each one in turn.
We could sit for hours in total silence, content only with each other’s company, able to drink in and bask in the total silence and yet, feel closer to one another for it.
I urged the birds to sing now, just one solitary tweet would fill my soul with the peace and reassurance that I craved, but nothing came. I could hardly remember what they all sounded like, I could hardly remember home.
I sighed. Simultaneously, a great yell shattered the sacred silence.
7
6th June 1944
00.21 hours
Brick dust and mortar sprayed into my mouth as rounds began chipping away at the building like a furious sculptor. I marvelled at the terrific light display that was exploding all around me, great flashes of light as lightning-quick fireflies zipped around the small village. With each crack of a gun, a person would be lit up, sometimes just a head, other times a full figure, but each time enough to see a man pulling the trigger. Voices yelled and grunted in all the directions I could comprehend, as the figures fought with the raging bulls that wrestled in their shoulders.
I was yanked backwards by my webbing by an unknown pair of hands standing behind me, the hands belonging to a body that threw itself in front of me and onto the ground. Before I really knew what had happened, three round bursts were spitting their way out from the Bren gun, standing proudly on the bipod, butt kicking away into the shoulder of my rescuer. I loved the Bren, the power and courage that you felt when operating a small gun, like a revolver, was powerful enough, but one that was able to relinquish five hundred rounds in sixty seconds, gave me such a sense of satisfaction that I would forget the devastation it could cause. I stared at him for a moment or two, like a little boy who had just stumbled into his favourite football player.
He rolled over on to his side to gain a little extra cover as lethal shards of stone were thrown up in the air by retaliating rounds. He fumbled in his back pocket for another magazine, the dust cloud that had formed around us from the brick seemed to be sucked directly into his lungs as he turned and screamed at me.
“House over the crossroads…upstairs window, MG, take it now!” His voice was so strained I thought it might give up if he uttered another syllable. He coughed and spluttered for a moment, before splashing a lump of brick dust red phlegm on the ground beside him, ushering me away with his hands.
The noise intensified and battered my senses as he pinged a few more rounds in the direction of the machine gun, my signal to move. I found myself sprinting for my life again, no other thoughts passing through my mind other than sending one foot crashing down in front of the other. A stabbing pain shot up my leg as I brought one leg down harder than I needed to, but within a millisecond it was flying through the air once more, before it clattered to the ground. It was a process that I had to consciously push myself to continue doing.
The sound of the suicidal wasps and the energetic fireflies disappeared, replaced only by the rushing of the wind as I charged across the open space, with no final destination, until a pile of sandbags came into view. I slid my way behind them in a fashion that a professional footballer would be proud of, clattering into the stomach of a trooper who was holed up there.
I nodded a “sorry” to him before we began to pool our knowledge of the situation. We had charged across the bridge in a westward direction, the road following in that direction before splitting and heading north and south. Just off to the right of the junction, a solitary building overlooked the crossroad, where the shutters of an upstairs window had been thrown open to reveal a sandbagged machine gun.
I spat on the ground to compose myself, to clear my mind as well as my throat, which was producing much more saliva than I could cope with. He did the same, but allowed a sliver of it to dangle, before wrapping its way under his chin, like a cobweb. It wasn’t the sort of thing that I would do under normal circumstances, but these were anything but normal circumstances; I was about to charge full pelt towards a weapon that could spit out over twelve hundred rounds a minute.
The only way of getting there was another Olympic sprinter impression, an Olympic sprinter in full battledress, carrying a weapon, and running for his life. We’d need to sprint across the open ground ahead of us, over the junction, not knowing what could be lurking around the corners, before entering, and clearing, the building, all without a hundred bullets ripping my brand-new smock to shreds.
We were joined by another trooper, this one carrying an unloaded Bren. He was relishing in the chaos around him, there was something in his eyes that told me he was enjoying all this, that and the massive grin on his face.
“Would you chaps like some covering fire?” his tone was wholeheartedly sarcastic, the smile never leaving his face as he slammed a magazine into the top of his gun. His mocking upper-class impression was poor, but as he poured a few more rounds out of his Bren, I noticed that his grouping was good.
It was nice, I thought momentarily, to have someone who could still keep their head, and have a laugh when, at the drop of a hat, a tiny copper projectile could shut down your entire body, for good. But, then again, it was entirely possible that he had gone the complete opposite way and been driven totally insane by the environment we’d found ourselves in. The rate at which he was firing at seemed to suggest the latter. He grinned as he ducked behind our sandbag fortress and popped another magazine into the top of the Bren.
Cocking it, he hopped up enthusiastically, poked his eye down the sight, located on the side of the weapon, and placed his finger menacingly over the trigger.
“On your go gents,” his tone made it seem more like an order than a friendly encouragement and it didn’t leave us with any other choice than to look at each other with petrified eyes, before leaping over our cover and racing to the wall of the house. Our gunner confirmed his own insanity rather quickly as I just made out the wails of, “Fly you fuzzy wuzzy bees! Fly!”
A manic cackle, like a lunatic standing over a body with a meat cleaver, quickly confirmed my suspicions. He had gone insane. But at least he was covering our movements. The short, sharp bursts of his controlled fire echoed from behind me, spurring me on, as some of his rounds appeared to get incredibly close to my vital organs.
The air around me cracked as bullets zipped past, I didn’t know from which side they were coming from, until the heavier boom and snap of a higher calibre weapon focussed its attention on the two nutters sprinting across open ground, letting themselves become target practice. I had tried heavy weaponry in training and one of the easiest to use was the machine guns. Especially firing a machine gun at a nice, big target. Particularly a target that got bigger and bigger the closer it got.
Hunched over, my companion and I raced each other to the finish line, hoping more than anything that we weren’t tripped up by the lethal confetti sca
ttering itself around us. The Germans must have been giggling with glee at the two, very large, fish, swimming about in the very tiny barrel, as none of their rounds hit their targets at all. Or maybe they were just having fun watching us skip and dance, avoiding the sharpened projectiles like the world’s worst game of hopscotch.
My mind raced, if I was to make it to the building, I needed to be quick, get in as soon as possible and clear the building before they could process what was happening. Which way would the door open? Would they have barricaded themselves in to slow down my progress into the building? Or would they just pepper the doorway at the first sign of movement? If I made it to the building, would my partner still be with me?
If I looked back and saw him flapping around like a fish out of water, clutching at his insides as they became his outsides, what would I do? Would I wait for someone else to take his place and let the gunner keep pouring fiery bullets down on my men? Or would I just go in on my own and hope for the best?
I’d hoped for the best so far. I’d go with that.
I skidded into the wall, followed closely by a thud and a gasp as my ally crashed into the wall beside me. We ran our eyes over each other as we both checked for any missed wounds, the power of the adrenaline in us made me feel like no pain was possible. No blood from what I could see, he gave me a quick nod which I returned. We’d made it.
My eyes widened as I watched him slowly draw his bayonet, before clicking it into place on the end of his rifle, a grotesque extension of his own arm. I knew how to use them, I’d stuffed them into sacks of straw before, but the thought of plunging it deep inside someone, pushing harder at the indication of resistance, then drawing it out covered in the blood of a human being terrified me. I dressed myself down and prepared myself for what I was about to do. Kill.