by John Harris
Reardon looked Gow up and down. He was not very old but behind him there were nearly three hundred years of discipline and pride. Reardon had once been on an aerodrome at the beginning of the war when a battalion of Grenadiers had arrived in the neighbourhood and, because they had to show the rest of the Services that they were something special, they’d taken over the parade ground twice a week to perform the ritual saraband the army called foot drill. The high screech of the officers and NCOs and the stiff puppet-like turnings and stampings had seemed a little stupid at first to men trained in the free-and-easy atmosphere of a technical outfit, but, as they’d watched they’d realised that these tall ramrod-straight men who wore their hats over the noses to force their heads up possessed something that made them envious that they didn’t possess it, too.
‘OK, Gow.’ He admitted defeat. ‘I got it.’
‘I am no’ “Gow”,’ the Guardsman said coldly. He touched his sleeve. ‘I am “Lance-Corporal Gow” and you address me as such.’
Reardon gestured. ‘Wrap it up, mate,’ he said. ‘I’m here to pick up my officer, not stand about arguing.’
Gow stared at him with bright icy eyes then he pointed. ‘You’ll have to go by Banfort. And just look out. We’ve been expecting yon bastards down by here for the last hour.’ His bony white face cracked into what by a vast stretch of imagination might have been called a smile. ‘And they’ll get a gey fine surprise, mon, when they arrive. We found a convoy of abandoned RASC lorries and they were full o’ land mines.’
The hum of engines came even as he spoke, and as Gow trotted off, his boots heavy on the road, Reardon became aware that he was right under the Germans’ noses and that the chances of Flying Officer Conybeare being picked up were growing slimmer all the time.
He’d just backed the truck into a gateway when the Germans turned the corner, two scout cars mounted with machine guns, two motor-cycle combinations and three lorryloads of troops. The blast of fire from the Guardsmen hit them just as their wheels detonated the row of land mines.
One of the motor-cycle combinations and one of the scout cars disintegrated, their crews hurled through the air like limp bags of bleeding straw. The other motor-cycle combination and the other scout car curved into the ditch, their crews already dead or dying. Behind them, the driver of the first lorry was hit in the chest and throat and died at the wheel, and the men in the back bolted for the ditches, several of them going over like shot rabbits before the Guardsmen’s fire. Out of sight, they brought their weapons to bear, and Reardon had just swung from the gateway and moved the gear lever into neutral on the way to second for a quick getaway, when a burst from a machine gun caught him in the shoulders and neck, shredding his windpipe, in bubbling gouts of blood. The truck slowed down as his foot slipped off the accelerator, and rolled gently towards the side of the road where it came to a stop, its wheels against the verge. The last thing Reardon thought about as the light went out of the day was that Flying Officer Conybeare was going to be lucky if he didn’t end up in a prisoner of war camp.
Baudain was a deserted village with a single street of one-storey houses. From the huddle of bricks where he crouched, Corporal Gustave Chouteau, of the 121st Regiment of Infantry in the 25th Division of the French Seventh Army, studied his officer. Captain Deshayes was an overweight reservist who owned a packing business in Limoges, and Chouteau knew perfectly well that if the Germans came he wouldn’t be over-anxious to die. He had a solid bank account, a string of young children and a wife whose family owned a department store in Clermont-Ferrand.
Life or death was a matter of supreme indifference to Corporal Chouteau. He had no bank account, no wife and no children. All he possessed to make him different from his fellow men was a period of service in the Foreign Legion that had left him with a face deeply lined by the African sun. His return to civilian life and the Reserve had not been happy because he’d noticed something very different about the France he’d left some years before: Everyone had suddenly seemed to be afraid of the Germans, a result, as Chouteau well knew, of twenty years of Ministers who took more notice of their mistresses than they did of their constituents, and of the nerveless ruling of the same old gang who changed positions in the government as though they were playing musical chairs.
Chouteau glanced again at Deshayes. He was standing in front of the major, Soustelle de Louis. Soustelle was a regular soldier, thin, spare and greying, who in Germany would have been at least a colonel but in the weariness that had gripped France since 1918 had remained only a major while lesser men with better connections rose over his head.
‘Command reports that lorried troops are heading this way,’ he was telling Deshayes. ‘They’ve been turned aside near Vanchette and they’re trying to feel their way round. We must stop them.’
Deshayes was nodding but Chouteau noticed that he’d gone pale and was chewing at his lip.
‘Your men are in position?’ Soustelle asked.
‘Yes, Major.’
‘I hope you have some good ones,’ Soustelle said, and Chouteau knew exactly what he meant. In spirit most of the soldiers around him were like Deshayes, boys newly called to the colours or middle-aged men with families and good jobs who were unlikely to consider dying before their children and their wives. Pacard, sitting behind the Hotchkiss, was a baker by trade; Angelet, on his right, a mere youth who’d been an assistant in the millinery department of a Marseilles store. Favre was a journalist from one of the weird little magazines the capital had always managed to throw up, given to Leftist politics and considering himself a cut above his fellow soldiers; and Burnecker, a big talker and a better boaster, was a fascist if ever there were one.
The afternoon passed slowly and Chouteau was beginning to wonder whether he could persuade Deshayes to send someone to the village to find some beer when he heard the sound of Soustelle’s car and the screech of brakes.
‘They are here,’ he announced cheerfully, his thin face alight with optimism.
He moved along the line with Deshayes who was licking his lips nervously. As he stopped at Chouteau’s position, he glanced along the barrel of the gun where Pacard crouched.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘Good!’ Then he saw the pale-blue and white ribbon that Chouteau wore on his breast, a relic of the campaigns in North Africa. ‘At least, you know your job, mon vieux,’ he grinned.
As he vanished, Favre began muttering. ‘Old fool,’ he said. ‘Who wants to sacrifice his life these days? It’s out of date.’
‘Especially against the Germans,’ Burnecker added. ‘He belongs to the past.’
‘So will you, my friend,’ Chouteau said quietly, ‘if you don’t shut up.’
He turned his back on them contemptuously. ‘Observe,’ he said, pointing. ‘You will see dust over the hedges there. That, I suspect, my friends, is the enemy.’
He glanced to right and left where other outposts were dug in under the hedges, then Soustelle came back with Deshayes. ‘Don’t fire, mon vieux,’ he said to Chouteau, ‘until I give the signal.’
Chouteau nodded, and they went on waiting, aware of the distant sound of lorry engines and the singing of the birds among the houses about them. Somewhere in the distance, they could hear the dull rumble of artillery and somewhere overhead the drone of a flight of aeroplanes. Chouteau didn’t look up. He had his eye firmly fixed on the moving cloud of dust.
‘Sight on that corner there,’ he told the others. ‘It’s two hundred and twenty yards away. I measured it this morning. At that range, even you lot ought to be able to hit something.’
He was already aware of Pacard glancing towards the rear, of Favre muttering with Burnecker, and Angelet whispering to himself. But Soustelle was standing just behind them now, quivering like an excited terrier at a rat-hole. Alongside him, Deshayes crouched behind a stone wall, keeping his head well down already, Chouteau noticed.
The dust cloud came nearer and Chouteau saw that it was slowing. As the first lorry came in sight, Soustelle lift
ed his revolver. The lorries drew nearer and Chouteau became conscious of his own breathing and of Angelet praying in a high feminine voice. The birds seemed louder than ever in the stillness.
‘Come on, you old fool,’ Favre whispered. ‘Give the signal!’
As he spoke, there was a crackle of firing from the hedge on his right that was taken up immediately from the post on his left.
Soustelle was still standing with his pistol in the air to give the signal and Chouteau saw his face go red with fury. Then Pacard’s Hotchkiss started rattling and Burnecker’s weapon exploded close to his ear and he gripped his rifle and joined in.
Favre began to sob and Chouteau swung backhanded at him. Then a blast of Schmeisser bullets rattled and clinked against the brickwork above their heads and as Chouteau glanced back he saw Soustelle’s right leg buckle, then he pitched forward on his face, his helmet rolling off so that his thin grey hair moved in the breeze that stirred the dust.
The Schmeisser fire was rattling all round them now and they could hear bullets whining and cracking overhead. The Hotchkiss stopped and, as he reached out to jerk at the cocking handle, Pacard somersaulted backwards to sprawl among the scattered bricks. Chouteau swore and hammered at the breech to remove the damaged round that had jammed it.
‘That’s it!’ Burnecker said. ‘Deshayes has hopped it! He’s got Soustelle on his back and he’s putting on a hero act! I bet he doesn’t come back! C’en est fait! It’s finished!’
Turning his head, Chouteau saw men running bent-double across the fields, then another burst of fire rattled against the bricks and Burnecker disappeared over a low wall behind them, his booted feet sticking up in the air. Favre stood up, his mouth hanging open, and began to run, throwing down his rifle as he went. Angelet was still whimpering and praying but he was also still firing. Chouteau got the machine gun going again and the Schmeisser fire stopped.
But then he realised that the men on the left were also moving back across the fields, running for the trees, and that from among the forty or fifty men in the buildings around there was only an odd rifle still firing. Gradually even these stopped as the stouter-hearted men realised their numbers had dwindled to nothing and they were isolated, then Chouteau saw men standing up around him among the scattered walls, bewildered and frightened, wondering if they, too, shouldn’t join the rush for safety.
Then, over on the right, out of one of the windows, he saw a white sheet appear on the end of a rifle and begin to wag frantically. He glanced at Angelet. The boy was scrabbling among the bricks for Pacard’s ammunition pouches, sobbing and whimpering as his grimy fingers pawed over the dead man.
He slapped the boy’s shoulder. ‘Do you want to surrender, too, mon brave?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Angelet’s lip was quivering and there were tears in his eyes but he shook his head. ‘I’ll stay if you want me to.’
Chouteau grinned at him. ‘There comes a time,’ he said, ‘when death and glory begin to lose their point.’ He slapped the boy’s shoulder and jerked his head to the rear, ‘It’s time for Système D.’
‘Système D?’
‘Débrouillez-vous!’ Chouteau said. ‘Fend for yourself.’
Not only Private Angelet, of the 121st Regiment of Infantry, was worried about his future. So was Private Elijah Noble, of the 5th Field Company Workshops of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps who, one way and another, was suddenly having quite a war.
When the despatch rider had come through the trees, weaving in and out and ducking his head to avoid low branches, Private Noble had been counting his spoil. Called up not long before under the new Enlistment Act to become a National Serviceman, Private Noble – wrongly named, if ever a man was – had long since decided that the wisest soldiers were those who were near enough to a battle to be able to pick up a little reflected glory but far enough away to be safe. His skill had always lain in knowing how to make a comfortable bed from chicken wire, what to barter for eggs and how much to pay for vin rouge. He knew the best brothels and called the local maire by his first name, and he had a nice little racket going in changing francs into pounds when his friends went on leave and vice versa when they returned. The life, even if it were dead boring, was also dead profitable.
Brought up in the East End of London by a father with a sharp eye for the main chance, his school years had been spent mostly in playing truant while his mother had fought off the school attendance officer, and he had passed most of his time watching the little cheats his father had worked so that it was small wonder he’d found it easy to follow the same bent. It had come as a shock when the letter announcing his call-up had arrived and his first instinct had been to bolt. His father had jeered at him. ‘Garn, Lije,’ he’d said. ‘You’d be in dead trouble if you did and you can make money in the army as well as you can out of it.’
Noble had soon discovered the truth of his father’s words. Crown and anchor had emptied the pockets of less quick-witted men and when he’d taken over the job of one of the transport drivers, his future was assured. He’d known all the people in Shrewsbury, where his unit was stationed, who could use a joint of army meat, and all the publicans who’d swap a bottle of whisky for a few bags of army coal.
Since he hadn’t really taken to the dung-coloured spud sack rough-hewn by a one-armed tinsmith with which the army had replaced the Jimmy Cagney jacket he’d been in the habit of wearing, he’d taken it to a tailor and had it so fined off he could hardly lift his arms. He’d gone through the usual dodges of reporting sick to avoid church parades and fatigues and had not been in the slightest alarmed when his unit had moved to Dover Castle. Unfortunately he hadn’t been quick enough to catch on that he was going to France and before he knew where he was he’d found himself at the other side of the Channel.
Which was a bastard. Because until that moment he’d hardly known where France was and hadn’t been interested enough to find out. The French language seemed to consist of talking down your nose and waving your arms about and, as for the Nazis, they were obviously a rotten lot while Hitler was just dead common.
He’d looked up as the despatch rider had passed him.
‘What’s the buzz, mon fils?’ he’d asked.
‘The front’s given way at Cambrai,’ the despatch rider had said.
‘That’s a long way from here.’
‘Not the way the Germans are moving.’
‘Where are they?’ Noble asked, pushing forward a packet of fiddled fags.
The despatch rider had taken one of the fags and stuck it behind his ear under his helmet. ‘All over the shop. The whole bloody front’s moving back!’
As he’d kicked his machine to life again and roared off, Noble had stared after him, his eyes thoughtful. If the army was in retreat, he’d decided, there’d be barrowloads of cameras, field-glasses, tennis rackets and golf clubs lying around loose, because the winter had been so quiet everyone had imported something from England to make for comfort, and he’d lit a bent cigarette and walked slowly towards the 15-cwt van he drove. If he’d got to wade in tyrant’s blood he might just as well turn it to his advantage before he joined the waltz.
Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d collected an excellent assortment of abandoned weapons, field-glasses and typewriters, but south of Tournai he’d been startled to see British troops setting fire to the stores they’d laboriously collected during the winter months, and it had suddenly made him feel nervous. As a city boy, apart from Cockney nerve, he hadn’t much he could offer in a situation that seemed to present certain difficulties. The army had merely showed him how to do pointless things with a rifle he’d been careful never to do since, and now somebody had taken a diabolical liberty with his safety.
In fact, he’d barely started.
By dark that night the whole front was alight with bursting bombs and shells. Two big fires were blazing, one in a petrol dump so that the smoke ascended in great rolling billows and, in the sky above, an incredible display of tracer shells had made weird designs
through which an occasional rocket burst into a ball of brilliantly coloured flares. Among them were Very lights and all too often the white rockets which by this time he’d learned the Germans fired to indicate a success.
Somehow it didn’t look right even to Noble.
He’d slept in the van again and again, scrounging a cup of tea here and a bully beef sandwich there, spinning a yarn about looking for his adjutant to anyone who asked, but then the army had stopped and dug in again, setting up their Brens and the few mortars they possessed and Noble had seen Heinkels, Dorniers and Stukas in dozens. The only British machines he’d seen had been ancient Battles getting the chop one after the other with monotonous regularity, and once at a first-aid post he’d heard a bitter Lysander gunner, his tunic torn from top to bottom by bullets, complaining about the politicians sending him up in a machine whose only noteworthy characteristic was that it looked as though it had its wings on backwards.
He had found it wise to continue at full speed, but near Seclin he had been caught up in a flood of retreating Frenchmen, a double row of horse-drawn vehicles and a double row of motorised vehicles – four lines altogether – that had forced him into the fields. He didn’t argue. They didn’t look the sort of men you could argue with. The drivers were unshaven, their clothes muddy, and there were no officers or NCOs. As they had passed they had managed embarrassed smiles that had sent a cold chill through Noble’s heart. This wasn’t just a quick nip back to re-form, he decided. It was a rout.
As they turned the corner, one of the tanks, an ancient Model R35 which they used for training purposes, brushed against the last of the stragglers. A man screamed and fell and Noble’s eyes started out of his head as he saw how the treads had crushed his leg to pulp. A few of the soldiers stopped but the tank didn’t even pause, its tracks clawing a deep gouge in the turf, and as the rest of them pushed past, indifferent to the screams of the injured man, Noble started up the 15-cwt and began to bounce across the fields, his stomach heaving.
