Fox from His Lair

by John Harris

  ‘Yes. Not your outfit, though. Pargeter’s the name. Cuthbert Pargeter.’

  ‘I’m Ackerman, sir. Harry Ackerman, of Charleston, South Carolina.’

  Ducking from the spray and flinching from the crashes, Iremonger was treated to the spectacle of Pargeter solemnly shaking hands with the boy as if he were at a garden party. Then a shell crashed nearby and Iremonger saw shapes like grey-brown trees rising from the beach through the haze, and it dawned on him that they were explosions.

  ‘Engineers,’ the sergeant said. ‘Destroying the obstacles and minefields so we can get in.’

  The boy looked at Pargeter. ‘What are you doing with us, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Sort of a job.’ Pargeter indicated Iremonger crouched with his head down. ‘With the colonel there.’

  The boy’s mouth writhed as he forced a smile. ‘That hat, sir. It’s different.’

  Pargeter took off the navy-blue helmet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Borrowed it. Had to have something.’

  There was another crash alongside and a shower of spray hit them. Blinking, they spat out the salt water. The boy was still studying Pargeter. He seemed to regard him as if he were a strange animal.

  ‘You in the British army, sir?’

  ‘Middlesex Regiment. They call us the Diehards.’

  ‘That’s a goddam funny name.’

  ‘There are funnier ones,’ Pargeter said. ‘The Poona Pets, for instance, Blayney’s Bloodhounds, the Dirty Half Hundred, the Mutton Lancers, the Holy Boys, the Old and Bold, the Emperor’s Chambermaids. That’s the 14th Hussars. Know how they got it?’ He had replaced the steel helmet and seemed to Iremonger almost to be enjoying himself. ‘During the wars against Napoleon, they captured the baggage of Napoleon’s brother, King Joseph, and among it there was an item of bedroom furniture made of solid silver.’

  ‘A thundermug?’ The boy smiled.

  Another wave came over as they neared the surf. Pargeter mopped his face with a red handkerchief. ‘The very same,’ he said. ‘They paraded it with whoops of triumph, mounted guard on it and paid it the ceremonial honours due to a “royal throne”. When they were first called the Chambermaids by the rest of the army they took it rather amiss and a few fights started, but later they began to consider it rather a good nickname. Mind you, their trophy, unlike some they’d taken, never appeared on their drum cloths.’

  The boy was grinning now. Then he glanced ashore again, and his smile vanished. ‘That was sure a good story, sir,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it. But I guess I’m still scared.’ He swallowed. ‘All the same, I’m glad I’m here. I’d hate to miss what’s mebbe the biggest thing that’ll ever happen to my generation.’

  He stopped and glanced ahead. Two amphibious tanks had been abandoned halfway up the beach, and two landing craft, one burning with an extraordinary brightness and throwing out shells and debris, the other smoking like a tar barrel, were stranded at the water’s edge, broached to and lopsided. Then a shell hurtled over their bows and struck a landing craft on their port side which heeled over, swung away and burst into flames as it came to a stop, and they realised that the mushrooming explosions on the beach were not engineers’ demolitions, after all, but German shells. Iremonger saw Ackerman’s adam’s apple jerk as he swallowed convulsively.

  ‘One thing, sir,’ he said to Pargeter, staring at the shore with eyes that were suddenly bleak. ‘I guess you won’t find it so goddam hard to die here.’

  Five

  They were closing in on Omaha now. There was a great deal of smoke and the mist seemed thick enough here to cut with a knife, so that it was suddenly difficult to see what lay ahead.

  The coxswain was shouting to a man by the ramp, asking which was the disembarkation spot, and the soldier kept pointing at a yellow-brick house behind the beach, with patterns like Xs built into the walls with darker bricks. There were wrecked landing craft everywhere among the obstructions the Germans had erected. The bristling stakes stretched before them in rows, and the mines on them looked as big as mooring buoys. Iremonger could also see graze-nose shells pointing towards them and reflected how ironic it would be to be blown up by something that looked like a bottle of beer.

  His steel helmet seemed too big for him. It kept jumping on his head with the concussion of the explosions and coming down over his eyes. Men on the beach were falling, and he thought how surprised they looked as they stopped and how slowly they spun round before they fell. There was another explosion just ahead and he saw men and machines tossed into the air as if they were made of straw.

  Almost without being aware of it, he was watching a man loading his seasick friend’s rifle because its owner was incapable.

  ‘Soon be off, Chuck,’ he was saying. ‘Soon be on dry land.’

  Ackerman produced a flask from his pocket and passed it to Pargeter. ‘Fancy a drink, sir?’ he said. ‘Just for luck.’

  Pargeter gave him a smile. ‘Helps to steady the old nerves,’ he said.

  ‘You scared too, sir?’

  ‘Scared as hell. Always am.’

  Pargeter felt the hot liquor shooting out its tentacles inside him. Ackerman took a gulp himself, and passed the flask to the man alongside him who was too sick to care; it moved along the landing craft until it was empty and was tossed overboard.

  ‘Won’t be much use to me if I get shot,’ Ackerman said.

  Ahead of them, wrecked DUKWs were swinging backwards and forwards in the surf, and along the tide line men were crouching behind the exposed obstacles, flat on their faces, their heads down, firing sporadically towards the bluffs. As they watched, they saw little darts of wet sand leap up as a machine gun raked the beach; then a small group of men rose to their feet and began to run. Above the crash of the waves, they couldn’t hear the weapon, which caught them, but they saw the spurts of sand and the men staggering, still trying to move forward on legs which had suddenly become like jelly. Those who weren’t hit flung themselves down again.

  The breakers in front of them looked ominous and were clearly terrifying to the heavily-laden soldiers. A man at the front of the landing craft began to shout. ‘Any minute now! Any minute now!’

  The vessel pitched violently and a hailstorm of bullets started to drum against the steel plating of the ramp. Private Ackerman looked at Pargeter.

  ‘They said there was nothing but second-rate troops in front of us,’ he complained. ‘And that they’d throw down their arms and surrender as soon as we appeared. Those sonsabitches are firing like a regiment of veterans.’

  Pargeter tapped Iremonger’s arm. ‘If I were you, old boy,’ he said, ‘I’d give that front end of the boat a wide berth.’ He glanced at Ackerman. ‘Do what I do, son.’

  The coxswain was standing up now, one hand in the air. ‘Stand by to beach,’ he yelled, and the lurching bodies crowded against each other, tense with an upsurge of spirit. Any moment now they’d be out of this dreadful craft.

  A fountain of water shot up near their port bow and the sergeant glanced at his watch. ‘We’re early,’ he shouted.

  ‘I don’t think anybody’ll mind today,’ the coxswain said.

  The forefoot grounded on the sand slightly askew, flinging them all forward and sideways. Pargeter slapped Ackerman and Iremonger on the back, and jumped for the sea side of the boat. Iremonger followed him and, sitting on the gunwale, they reached down and yanked Ackerman after them just as the ramp slammed outwards. As the men surged forward, a German machine gunner, who must have had his weapon trained on the landing craft all the way in, let go with a long burst and the pushing men fell in a stumbling, yelling heap. As others tried to fight their way round them, more automatic weapons opened up until the interior of the landing craft was filled with a mush of bloodstained flesh.

  Ahead of them was a shallow arc of sand enclosed by bluffs rising in a gentle slope for a hundred and fifty feet in the direction of scattered stone hamlets, and Pargeter knew from experience that it was an excellent defensive position with carefully con
cealed machine-guns and artillery hidden among the folds of land. Struggling ashore, he trod on men still squirming in the water. One man, freed of his pack, suddenly shot to the surface, gasping, his face purple.

  ‘Oh, God Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘I thought I was going to drown!’ As he spoke, machine-gun bullets lashed the water, and with a look of surprise on his face he slid out of sight again.

  As the battered landing craft swung, the few men who had escaped the slaughter rushed out of the bows, hunched up, heading for a gap that had been blown in the wire. A man was floating on his back in the water alongside, one arm missing and clearly dying, but though his lips moved, he didn’t ask anyone to stop and help him. Crouching, chest-deep in the water, at the side of the vessel, Pargeter edged forward. There were three bodies bobbing together nearby, one just a head and shoulders, another without arms or legs. As the machine-guns finished their deadly work and moved on to find fresh victims, he straightened up and ran for the beach.

  All round him men were picking their way gingerly through the mined obstacles. No artillery had landed and there were no tanks to support them. It was a terrible distance to the sea wall below the bluffs and wounded men were prone on the wet sand, crawling in with the tide at a yard a minute until, as they grew weaker and the water began to move faster than they did, they finally drowned. Dead men floated face-down, fouled in the wire, until the flooding tide plucked them free and washed them further inshore to catch on the next line of barbs. A destroyed tank just in front was on fire and the ammunition was fountaining skywards as it exploded. Men crouched behind it but a German sniper on the flank was picking them off one by one.

  To Iremonger, Pargeter seemed to know exactly where to go. Dashing between the mined obstacles, he ran up the beach in sweeping zigzags, until his feet crunched on the shingle and pebbles, and he flung himself down in the shelter of the sea wall. A moment later Iremonger arrived alongside him, panting, followed a second later by Private Ackerman.

  ‘Made it,’ Pargeter said.

  For the moment they were safe, though all round them they could hear the cries of wounded and drowning men. The LCMs full of engineers were coming ashore now, loaded with high explosives, and they saw two blow up in quick succession as they touched off the German mines which in turn set off their cargoes. A bulldozer landed but it couldn’t do its work properly for the crowd of men sheltering behind it. As it tried to move up the beach, it was hit by a shell and disappeared in a ball of flame and black smoke from which sheltering infantrymen reeled away to flop down, writhing in their burning clothes.

  Dozens of men, stripped by the sea of arms and armour, clung to the wall. More men arrived, top-heavy with their loads, and an officer, standing up and yelling at them to go on, suddenly grunted and sank slowly to his knees, then folded up until his helmet fell off and he was kneeling on the sand, head down, quite dead.

  Other men were digging in along the wire, unaware that the Germans had its exact range and would shortly start blasting it out of existence and them with it. A sergeant, shouting at them to get up the beach, stopped and sat down abruptly, clutching his knee and weeping over the bloody mess it had become. Men running up the beach set off a mine and, as the smoke cleared, eight of them were lying with their battledresses smoking, the sand around them tinged with red. The only survivor, running for safety, leapt into the air and landed right alongside Iremonger, his eyes already glazing. As Iremonger stared at him, horrified, Ackerman started yelling for the medical orderlies.

  Down the beach more ships and landing craft were blazing. Bodies were scattered everywhere and medical orderlies were doing their best to attend to the injured. To Iremonger it seemed as if every gun on the beach was aimed at him personally, and when a bullet glanced off his helmet he dived hastily for shelter. ‘Oh, brother,’ he said. ‘Someone sure did a good job with these hats.’

  ‘You ask me,’ Pargeter observed grimly, ‘I’d say that the only people who’re going to stay here will be dead. They ought to be moved on somehow.’

  ‘That’s not our job.’ Iremonger flinched as a mortar bomb showered them with grit. ‘And I guess it’s occurred to other people, too.’

  Crawling and scrambling among the crouching men, they made their way along the sea wall, showered constantly by pebbles and sand from the explosions. It was a terribly overcrowded area as more soldiers arrived from the sea, most of them too stunned for coherent thought. There seemed to be little future for them there, because they couldn’t go back and the only way they could move – forward to the road that ran behind the sea wall – was barred by coils of concertina wire in the cuttings that carried pathways from the beach. Men with wire cutters who had tried to clear them hung on the coils in grotesque shapes.

  ‘Where the hell are the bangalore torpedoes?’ an officer was shouting.

  ‘They were lost in the landing, lieutenant,’ his sergeant yelled back above the din. ‘Together with our radios and mortars – and our goddam tanks and artillery!’

  Iremonger crawled up to the lieutenant and, as another mortar bomb landed, they both dived headfirst for the shelter of the wall again.

  ‘I’m looking for the Seventeenth Rangers,’ Iremonger yelled.

  The lieutenant stared at him. His eyes looked wild but he wasn’t panicking.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m Intelligence. I’m looking for a guy called Gavin.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Colonel, I got better things to do just now!’

  ‘I’ve got to find this guy,’ Iremonger insisted. ‘He might well be a German agent.’

  ‘Here? For Christ’s sake, no German agent would be that goddam silly!’

  ‘This one might,’ Pargeter said.

  The lieutenant looked at him. ‘Who the hell’s this guy?’ he snapped. ‘He looks like your German agent himself.’

  ‘Major Pargeter,’ Iremonger said. ‘British Intelligence. We’ve chased this goddam German all across the South of England and we have reason to believe he’s right here on this beach.’

  ‘Well, good luck to you, Colonel. They’re over there – what’s left of ’em.’

  It was difficult to move, and half the time they were scrambling over dead, wounded or frightened men, or men who were simply crouching against the stone wall waiting for someone to emerge as a leader and tell them what to do. The remnants of the Rangers were huddled together in an angle of a low sandy cliff. One or two of them were digging into it with bayonets to make a protecting overhang, and all the time, at every crash, the sand dribbled down on top of them.

  Reaching them, Iremonger and Pargeter dived into a shell hole. There were two dead GIs in it, and they scrambled out again and jumped into another, which appeared to be a headquarters because there was a man with a radio. The lieutenant in charge looked barely old enough to shave but he was putting on a good show of being a commanding officer.

  ‘Everybody else’s dead,’ he explained. ‘And I sure as hell don’t know your Captain Gavin.’ He turned to one of his sergeants. ‘Do you know Captain Gavin, Sergeant?’

  The sergeant had a bandage round his head and another round his hand. He gestured towards a group of men hugging the cliffs twenty or thirty yards away, and Iremonger and Pargeter set off towards them, bent double.

  ‘If it’s the new officer,’ a haggard-looking soldier told them, ‘then he’s had it. You ask me, Colonel, I think we’ve all had it.’ He jerked a hand towards a body lying facedown at the edge of the shingle. ‘That’s him, sir. He got us here and went back for the sergeant. That’s the sergeant further back.’

  Pargeter looked at Iremonger. ‘Doesn’t sound like our chap,’ he said. ‘Stay here, Linus. I’ll go and look.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Don’t be damn silly! If they knock us both off, who’s going to find Kechinski? You can be the hero next time.’

  He pushed Iremonger back among the huddled men and ran bent-double towards the dead man, to fling himself down on
the seaward side of the body so that it protected him from the firing. Iremonger saw him roll the body over and lift his head to stare at the dead face, then he scrambled to his knees and began to run for the wall again, the bullets kicking up the sand at his heels.

  ‘It’s not Kechinski,’ he panted as he crashed into Iremonger. ‘Wrong jaw. Wrong nose. Wrong face altogether.’

  His back against the wall, he wrenched the list from his pocket and scanned it quickly. ‘Lieutenant Loftus, Third Cavalry Recce Squadron; Captain Jones, Ninth Mortar Unit.’ He jerked a hand. ‘Third Cavalry Recce’s on Easy Red and the mortar people are on Fox Green. We’ve got to get along there.’

  Iremonger stared at the beach. ‘I sure hope we make it,’ he said fervently.

  They were just on the point of leaving when one of the soldiers scrambled forward to where they were huddled. His eyes were red-rimmed and there was blood on his hands.

  ‘Colonel, sir,’ he said to Iremonger. ‘When are we goin’ to move off from here? These guys only need someone to kick their butts to get ’em going, sir. They’re less scared than mad. They’re mad as hornets, sir. For Christ’s sake, we’ll never win this goddam war if they stay where they are.’

  Iremonger glanced at Pargeter. ‘Where are your officers, son?’

  ‘They’re all down, Colonel. The Krauts got ’em. There’s a machine gun up there just beyond the wire. But there’s a sign up there as well. It’s for a minefield. There’s a gap, sir. I reckon we could get through it and take that goddam gun in the rear.’

  Iremonger frowned. ‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a job to do.’

  The soldier’s eyes hardened. ‘Where, Colonel?’

  Iremonger’s hand jerked. ‘Right along there, son. I’ve got to find someone.’

  ‘Getting these guys off their butts is more important than finding someone, Colonel!’

  Iremonger’s eyes flashed. ‘Then get ’em off their goddam butts, soldier!’ he snapped. ‘You obviously know what to do. Do it!’