James Delingpole

by Coward on The Beach (epub)

  'The rest of you, grab some kip,' says Lt. Truelove.

  None of us needs much prompting. I lay myself down side­ways in the narrow, shallow slit which is all I've managed in the time available to excavate from the stony ground, pull my gas cape over my head, and listen to the sounds of murmured conversation, the clink of entrenching tools, and the crack of sporadic rifle shots.

  Next thing, I'm being shaken awake.

  'Our turn, kiddo,' says Cpl. Blackwell.

  'What time is it, Corp?'

  '0200,' he says.

  Not even two hours' sleep.

  The third member of our patrol is Calladine. We travel light — me with my Schmeisser, a Sten for Calladine; a Tommy gun for Cpl. Blackwell — and as much ammo as we can cram into our pockets. Not, of course, that we expect to use it. The job of a recce patrol is to plot the enemy's positions, not to engage.

  We file grimly past the pickets guarding the edge of the woods — password, they remind us, is St Ives - and, treading with great care, move slowly down one of the network of paths leading to the base of the hill. I should know this spot. When we were last here, Price, Brigitte — a local woman with whom he was having a fling - and I came here for a picnic. Feeling a bit of a lemon, I went in search of the pyramid and bee orchids with which the hill is abundant while Price got on with his business. But for all the difference my local knowledge makesnow, this might as well be Mars. The moon is obscured by cloud. The darkness is so thick you could spread it like Marmite.

  We've been stealing our way onwards for what's probably no more than twenty minutes but which feels like an age, as things do when you're creeping at the pace of an elderly snail and with every step, at every crunch of a breaking twig, you're half-expecting to be greeted with a sudden flash and hail of bullets. Then my foot catches under something or other, a protruding tree root perhaps, and down I go, arse over tip, tumbling to the ground with a booming crash louder than the Day of Judgement.

  'Now I'm done for,' I think, rolling defensively, steeling myself for the inevitable.

  But the inevitable never happens. Nothing happens. No shots. No shouts. No whispers from the dark of 'You all right, mate?' No Calladine. No Cpl. Blackwell. Nothing.

  So I lie there a while, catching my breath, knowing that sooner or later they're going to come back. Bound to. We've been sticking pretty close. You have to in these conditions. Lose contact with the man in front for even a moment and, well, what happens is exactly what has happened to me now.

  Now what to do? If I call out, I stand a good chance of alerting the enemy. If I don't call out, I may end up stuck on my own all night.

  I decide to give it another minute - long enough for them to notice, if they're going to notice, that they're now minus their tail-end Charlie.

  After yet another minute has gone by, possibly two, I realise that if I was going to call out to Calladine and Cpl. Blackwell, the time to have done so should have been much, much earlier.

  As a last resort I make an owl sound, such as our game­keeper, Chatterley, once taught me to do. He taught me well.

  My owl call sounds far too much like an owl, and not enough like a lost soldier attempting to impersonate one.

  I wait another ten minutes, listening, nerve ends on fire, hearing everything: the crump of distant artillery; the bark of a dog somewhere near the hamlet of Escures; the whispering of leaves; the crunch of approaching footsteps -

  From somewhere in front of me a shot. Then another. Then a volley and, from behind, a quick burst of Bren fire. Jesus!

  The German assault on Point 72 has begun and I'm about to be caught in the middle.

  I pick myself off the floor, alert once more, synapses primed for fight or flight.

  Nothing.

  Schmeisser at the ready, I regain the path and push on cautiously down the wooded track. At the bottom, it opens into a field. Beyond it, by my reckoning, there should be a road. Rather than cut straight across — there's moonlight now and I'd be fearfully exposed — I stick to the hedges which border it. Eventually, I reach the lower edge and, sure enough, a gate which opens on to what's probably the Escures road.

  I ought to turn back. But an impetuous voice, the one which insists on rearing its head at the most inopportune moments, is urging me to keep going just a little further.

  The broad grass verge on the far side of the road ought to make it easy to move silently and quickly. And below it, there's a bank down which I can dive at the first sign of trouble.

  'Pssst!'

  I freeze.

  'Pssssttt! Monsieur! Venez. Vite!' It's coming from the bottom of the bank and it must be friendly or I'd be dead by now.

  I slide down the bank. At the bottom, a figure in black emerges from the shadows. He's a young man of about sixteen, apparently unarmed.

  "Suis Jean. Bienvenu a Port-en-Bessin,' he whispers, extending a hand. Or rather, a stump, which is all he has at the end of his right arm. I try to stifle my surprise at feeling the warm, smooth little lumps on his scarred stubby flesh, but, of course, he notices. As indeed he does when I glance down to see whether his other arm is similarly impaired. It is.

  'Oui, Monsieur. Grenade allemande. II y a trois ans. Mais vous venez?' 'Ou?'

  'Port-en-Bessin!'

  Not bloody likely, I want to say to him. Not without artillery support, a smoke screen and another 300 men. But, before I get the chance, he has darted into the shadows and I'm forced to make an instant decision.

  I decide to follow. You might think this is bloody stupid of me and perhaps you're right. It could be a trap. He could be a fool who's about to get us both shot. But you don't survive as long as I have without developing a certain instinct. So, I trail this mysterious, eager, nimble boy through fields of tall, swishing meadow grass, along hedgerows, over stone walls, and into ditches, sometimes running, sometimes creeping, often crawling on all fours, never pausing to take a breather or consider what a thoroughly crazed and suicidal mission this is shaping up to be.

  At the time it's all just a sweating, palpitating blur but what I discover subsequently is that we're more or less following the line of the Escures—Port-en-Bessin road, past the enemy's first major line of defensive weapons pits, and into the inner port.

  To negotiate the weapons pits, we must leopard-crawl through a ditch no more than fifteen yards from a German sentry post. I overhear part of the conversation.

  'It could be worse. They say the Englanders make very good breakfasts. Our comrades behind the wire in Russia should be so lucky.'

  'Defeatist talk like that will get you shot.'

  'Defeatist? Realistic, more like.'

  'Then you're a bigger fool than I thought. You heard the noise from the west yesterday? That was the sound of our comrades driving the Americans back into the sea. Today we will do the same to the Englanders. If they dare come . . .'

  He's talking, presumably, about the landings up the way towards the Cotentin Peninsula. All lies and propaganda, obvi­ously. I'd like to hang around, eavesdrop a little more, see if there isn't anything useful I can relay back to HQ. If the Americans really are in trouble in the west it means we'll have to rethink the security of our left flank; and the likelihood of getting any extra fire support or medical or logistical back­up. But, already, Jean is pressing on.

  We're over the worst. Things only get more difficult again once we've entered the town proper. The streets are empty. There's a curfew. From at least two directions we can hear the rhythmic crunch of patrolling feet on cobbled stone - so any open movement would be fatal.

  Instead, we negotiate our way through a maze of back gardens, climbing over fences, tripping over garden tools, clattering buckets, startling chickens and generally making what seems to me the sort of din that would alert the whole neighbour­hood. But the people of Port-en-Bessin know better than to expose themselves in the window on a night as fraught as this.

  We stop outside a small, shabby cottage with shuttered windows. Jean stands by the back d
oor and blows a short sharp whistle through his teeth. From within come the sounds of stirring. A bolt screeches, then another. The door is pushed half open and I follow Jean quickly into the pitch-black inte­rior. The door is closed behind me and it gets darker still.

  'Bonsoir, Monsieur,' croaks a voice from the darkness.

  'Uh, bonsoir,' I say, trying to get my bearings.

  'Ne vous inquietez pas, Monsieur. Mon grand-pere, il est aveugle.'

  A blind old man living with a handless teenager. A recipe for domestic bliss, I'm sure.

  'Vous etes americain?' asks the elderly voice.

  'Non. Anglais.'

  'Soyez le bienvenu, Monsieur le liberateur,' says the voice, much closer now, and next thing I know I'm being embraced, and three watery kisses redolent of onions and alcohol have been placed either side of my mouth. Just my ruddy luck. Do you know, since the war, I've met no fewer than five chaps who've sworn blind that on the very night of D-Day they managed to insinuate themselves into the arms of sex-starved young Frenchwomen. One of them, for God's sake, ended up sharing a bed with three of them, all sisters, one sixteen, one seventeen, one eighteen.

  And what do I get? Three fat smackers on the lips from a blind, pongy-breathed old Frenchman.

  'Asseyez-vous, Monsieur,' he says, guiding me into a wooden chair. I settle into it, feeling what must be a large table in front of me.

  There's a blinding flash which makes me shut my eyes. When I open them again, the room has been illuminated by a gas lamp. We're in a small, whitewashed, stone-floored room whose furnishings comprise a basin, a table, a cupboard and two chairs. On the table is set a dusty old bottle, a knife, three glasses and a sausage which looks as if it has been hanging around since the Franco-Prussian War.

  The old man feels his way to the bottle and carefully pours out three large measures.

  'Vive l'Angleterre!' says old Pongy Breath, raising his glass.

  'Vive l'Angleterre,' Jean and I repeat, Jean holding the glass between his stumps with admirable dexterity. He downs his drink in one, as does Grand-pere, leaving only me with most of my drink intact. It's Calvados. Exceptionally fiery Calvados.

  'II a fini son verre, l'anglais?' asks Grand-pere.

  'Pas encore,' says Jean, urging me with a sharp nod to finish. To do otherwise would be the height of bad manners, clearly.

  I raise the glass once more — the fumes alone are almost enough to get me rat-arsed - and tip the flaming liquid down my throat.

  'Ca lui a plu?' asks Grand-pere, on hearing my rasps.

  'Ah oui, qa.lui a bien plu,' says Jean, who has considerately chosen not to report back to Grand-pere the agonised face I pull and the fact that I'm shaking my head vigorously to indi­cate never, never again. My tonsils feel like the interior of a German bunker, moments after it has been cleared by a flame­thrower.

  'C'est du Calvados special reserve,' adds Jean for my benefit. 'Grand-pere l'a garde pendant cinq ans, juste pour la libera­tion! Et le saucisson, aussi.'

  I glance nervously at the sausage, which up till now I'd rather fancied. Five years old, eh?

  'Et maintenant, la France!' announces the old man, charging the glasses once more — almost to the brim, this time.

  I lean as close as I can to Jean's ear. 'Jean. Je suis soldat. J'ai mes devoirs!' I murmur in protest.

  'Qu'est-ce qu'il dit, Jean?' Grand-pere asks.

  'II dit que c'est un grand honneur, boire votre Calvados magnifique a la gloire de la France,' he says, nodding at me encouragingly.

  'Vive la France!' toasts Grand-pere.

  'Vive la France,' Jean and I echo, Jean watching me over the lip of his glass, to ensure that I don't cheat.

  And I don't. But the second glass almost floors me.

  'Mangez, Monsieur!' commands Grand-pere.

  Perhaps it's as well I have something to do, trying with my shaky hands and a blunt knife to slice the hard, dry sausage into digestible chunks, because otherwise I'm pretty sure I would collapse. In the military you develop a head for alcohol. But remember, this is on an empty stomach and barely two hours' sleep.

  While I share out the sausage — salty, piggy, almost edible after the fiftieth chew - Jean and Grand-pere tell me a little more about themselves. After his elder brother and father were taken away to work in labour camps in Germany, Jean and his grandfather would like to have joined the Resistance; both were rejected, but both vowed none the less that when the Liberation came they would do everything in their power to help the gallant Allies. Before his accident, young Jean would explore the German defences under the pretence of taking his blind grandfather for some sea air and even got to befriend some of the German garrison, by responding kindly to their overtures when so many of his schoolmates did not. It earned him the reprehension of his peers, but Jean was playing a longer game than they knew: he was building relationships which might one day prove valuable to the Resistance. Or so he thought. The problem was that when he made his first, tentative approach, it was curtly suggested to him that since he apparently loved Germans so much, he ought to join the Milice instead. A few months later, he was planning to try again, this time carrying as a token of his goodwill a stolen grenade detonator. But before he could do so, it blew up in his hands.

  Others might have seen this as a fatal set-back. For Jean it was an opportunity. After the accident, he began to act slow and half-witted, as if his brain had been damaged, exploiting the Germans' sympathy for an accident he persuaded them to imagine was their fault. Sometimes they would let the lolling half-wit sit and watch their training manoeuvres — it was here that Jean learned the arts of movement and concealment — and sometimes they would even allow him into their cliff-top obser­vation posts to watch their E-boats patrolling off the coast.

  Most of that stopped when the construction of the Atlantic Wall began in earnest and security tightened. Some of Jean's German friends were sent east, while the ones that replaced them tended to be much harder and less sympathetic, many of them brutalised, convalescing veterans of the war against the Soviets.

  Then, in the very early morning of 6 June, attracted by the sound of naval gunfire and ack-ack and the rumble of plane engines overhead, Jean sneaked out for a peek, only to find himself being arrested by a German patrol. The Oberleutnant was all for shooting Jean on the spot; but his sergeant, who knew Jean, persuaded him to relent. Instead, the Oberleutnant had Jean frogmarched up near the top of the Eastern Feature, mock-solicitously offering him a better look of the invasion fleet gathered out to sea.

  'Hast du genug gesehen?' asked the Oberleutnant.

  Jean didn't know what to reply.

  'Ja, hast du!' decides the Oberleutnant, giving orders to his men. And next thing poor Jean knows, he's being hustled against the outer wall of one of the bunkers, clearly on the verge of being executed.

  It's at this trouser-soiling moment that a salvo of shells from the fleet begins crashing down on the cliff-top defences, and the Germans, Oberleutnant and all, start hurrying for cover, their prospective victim now forgotten in their rush to save their skins.

  'Fuck off. Quickly,' says the German sergeant to the stunned Jean.

  Which, of course, he does. But not without first having the presence of mind to grab an eyeful of the new, improved German defence system, and to note that the broad zigzag path by which he has been escorted up the hill and down which he is now fleeing for his life is apparently clear of mines.

  After that incident, his grandfather's understandably reluc­tant to let Jean risk breaking the curfew a second night in a row. But Jean insists. On hearing small-arms fire from the direction of Escures and the sniper school at Fosse Soucy — a sniper school? There's another small detail Intelligence neglected to mention - he knows there must be Allies near by and determines to bring one back, so that he could give him the map.

  'Le plan?'

  'Oui. J'ai fait un plan des defenses allemandes. Ce n'est pas tres bien dessine, mais vous comprenez, Monsieur

  Yes,
yes, of course I understand it's difficult to draw a map when you've got no hands, but just get on and show it me, you bugger. The worst of the alcohol has started to wear off and the horrid thought dawns that unless I get back to my lines soon I may well never make it at all.

  Jean disappears briefly into a neighbouring room and returns with a sheet of frayed, yellowing paper scratched with faint pencil markings. Beaming with pride, he sets it in front of me. I try not to look too disappointed. It's not drawn remotely to scale and the markings are in places scarcely legible.

  'II faut que je te l'explique,' says Jean, as if reading my thoughts.

  Pointing with his stub, he tries to impress on me the most important details. The weapons pits we had to pass on the way into town; the zigzag path which leads to the top of the Eastern Feature; the German boat which he thinks may be in the harbour.

  Boat? What sort of boat?

  'Je ne sais pas. Je ne l'ai pas vu.'

  He hasn't seen it? Then what makes him think —

  'Des marins. J'ai vu des marins.'

  'Kriegsmarine? Tu es sur?'

  'Absolument.'

  It may not be an immediate contender for the Louvre, this map he's drawn me, but he's done us a damn useful service, this French lad.

  'II faut partir,' I say.

  'Pour l'Escures?' asks Jean.

  'C'est possible?' I ask.

  'Tout est possible, Monsieur, quand vous etes avec Jean Lionnet.'

  After another trio of garlicky, alcoholic kisses from Grand- pere and an enormous hug, we creep out into the night.

  It's much lighter now. Dawn is about to break and we have almost two miles of enemy territory to weave through before we reach our lines.

  You'll ask me how we manage it and I really couldn't say. I suppose it helps that we're moving in the opposite direction to the one the Germans are expecting their enemies to be heading in; that Jean knows every ditch, every bump, every scrap of cover like the back of his hand (rather better, in fact, when you think about it); that at just the moment we're passing the weapons pits, the sentries are distracted by a flight of bombers overhead, no doubt about to dump their loads on Bayeux. It might even be an advantage that I'm still half cut from all that Calvados, and consequently more fluid in my movements and less prone to panic.