Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘Brave? I think I’m just numb. I’ll pay for all this one day.’

  ‘Well, so will Hitler.’ He’d finished his bread and cheese. He glanced down at his crystal set. ‘Of course I can’t take this.’ He slipped off his boot, and without hesitation brought it crashing down like a hammer on the components of the set. ‘Right, that’s done. Come on, Mary, let’s find you that ointment.’

  XIX

  Leutnant Strohmeyer had a map. He spread it out on Pevensey’s dewy ground. Strohmeyer was a tough, humourless soldier who had served the Reich’s armies across Europe, from Poland to France. And now here he was sitting before a camp fire in the ruins of this ancient fort in England itself. When one of the lads dared to make a comment on this, Strohmeyer said only, ‘Funny old world, isn’t it? Now shut up and listen.’ He began to outline the day’s objectives, Day S Plus One, for these elements of the Twenty-sixth Division.

  It was another filthy, drizzling morning. Ernst, wrapped in his blanket, cradling the rifle he had been cleaning since dawn, tried to focus on what Strohmeyer was saying.

  He never would have believed he would sleep so well, tucked up in a corner of this dismal old fort under no more cover than a tarpaulin. Yesterday, the day of the crossing, had been a vivid, unreal day, a day of a kind he imagined he would never experience again, no matter how long his war lasted. He supposed the raw tension of it had carried him through. But he had woken this morning to find that he was still here, he really was in England, and now he had to get through the first of what might be many days of combat. He felt drained, exhausted, even shivery; he woke with no energy. Even the men with him were strangers; in the turmoil of the landing he had become separated from the men he had trained with in France, and he knew nobody here.

  He kept thinking of Claudine. He longed to be lying with her in her apartment in Boulogne, her long limbs beside him in the bed, so that she could soothe away the aches of his body and the trauma of his bruised mind.

  The man next to him whispered, ‘What’s he saying? I can’t see the wretched map.’

  Another replied softly, ‘Marching. That’s all you need to know, lads. When the Panzers come over in a day or two they’ll rip about the place. But until then it’s just us, and it’s foot-slogging. Best not to know how far.’

  So they stood, and began to form up.

  Elsewhere in the fort, Ben Kamen and a couple of other prisoners from the observation post at Pevensey were roughly woken by coarse German shouts.

  They rose stiffly. They were given cups of water to drink, and told in German to make their toilet in the corner of the room, if they needed it. Ben, not wanting to stand out, affected not to know any German - his bit of cheek yesterday had earned him a clubbing - and he acted dull, slow and baffled like the rest. In fact it wasn’t hard, as his head was still throbbing from the blow he had taken yesterday.

  They had been given nothing last night. No food or water, no blankets. Ben had slept in his clothes, huddled on the cold stone floor of one of the converted rooms. All night he had had broken dreams, glimpses of past and future, of the type that had so intrigued Rory and Julia back in Princeton. But none of them made any sense, and none was any comfort.

  One prisoner, a burly Canadian, drank a bit of the water and spat it out. ‘Horse’s piss,’ he yelled at the German corporal who had brought it. The corporal actually replied quite politely, in calm German, saying that the man’s rights would be protected when the German army had the resources to grant them, and that in the meantime his best course was to behave with self-respect.

  As far as Ben could see these elite-type combat troops had been reasonably civilised with their prisoners. Maybe it was true that the Germans, still intent on an eventual armistice with England, were under instructions to be restrained. But then, he reminded himself, the best of the Wehrmacht were not representative of the culture of modern Germany.

  The prisoners were shortly brought out, at gun point. There were other prisoners, brought here from emplacements along the invasion shore, regular soldiers and Home Guard and a few flyers in RAF blue and leather jackets. The fort was full of activity, as vehicles were serviced, horses fed, even bicycle wheels oiled. Ben tried to listen to the snippets of German conversation around him, hoping to learn something useful, but all he heard were typical soldiers’ gripes about the cold food, the lack of alcohol, and the absence of women in this soggy place.

  These men were all survivors of the battles yesterday, Ben reflected; save for the odd paratrooper, not a single German could have come here any other way but across that treacherous stretch of shingle. There was a smell of war about them all, with their unshaven faces and grimy clothes, a scent of cordite and diesel and petrol and dust, of burning and of blood.

  The prisoners were marched up to the Bexhill road. A column was forming up here, men, horses, vehicles, guns, even one amphibious tank. Ben guessed these units were heading towards Bexhill and perhaps Hastings. As for the prisoners, maybe they were being marched to a POW camp somewhere. Ben didn’t know where he was going, and he supposed he didn’t need to know; he had no choices left, nothing to do but do what he was told, and survive.

  As the column set off, Ernst walked behind the single tank. It had been made waterproof for its amphibious landing, but now the protective coverings and snorkel had been cut away, and its turret turned this way and that, questing, as the crew tested out the vehicle. There were a good number of trucks, some of them with seawater stains on their canvas tops. The horses were harnessed up to carts and mobile field weapons, and the infantry marched in their files on either side of the road. Some troops rode bicycles, many of them harvested from Holland and brought over on the invasion barges. There were even a few commandos out-riding on motorcycles; they were to be used as scouts, running ahead of the main column.

  So they marched, north away from Pevensey. Their first objective was five miles or so inland, a place named on the leutnant’s map as Windmill Hill. They soon left behind the rather dilapidated seaside villas at Pevensey. The column followed minor roads and farm tracks, but made reasonable progress over the level salt marshes beyond. The day stayed grey, even as the light gathered, and the drizzle and mist was depressing. ‘If this is England, Churchill can keep it,’ one man murmured.

  But as Ernst walked with his comrades, swinging his arms and stepping out, he felt his blood flow, his heart pump, the clean English air filling his lungs, and he began to feel alive again. Why not? He was young, he was strong, his training was good, and he was with the best army in the world, a fact proven by accomplishment. He dared to look ahead, to the future. Perhaps he would be in London when the Fuhrer made his entrance - by barge, perhaps, along the Thames. What a grand day that would be!

  The men rumbled into a marching song - ‘Bomben auf Engelland’, a popular favourite on the French beaches.

  But this mood did not last long. Aircraft buzzed across the sky, out of sight above the lid of low cloud. Ernst winced every time one came close; he had seen troop columns strafed from the air on the continent. But no harm came from that quarter. Rumours went around the column that the RAF today was targeting the embarkation ports in France and the returning fleets of barges and tugs, trying to disrupt the invasion’s second echelon.

  And as the morning wore on the going became slow, disjointed. The first serious resistance they encountered was at a crossroads near a pub called the Lamb Inn, a location that commanded the levels behind them. That didn’t take long to resolve, thanks to the tank. But after that the resistance became more frequent, and over and over again the column ground to a halt. Often Ernst couldn’t even see what was going on up ahead. He would hear the thump of explosions, the pop of small-arms fire, occasionally a roar as the tank let loose its main gun, and see the smoke of burning petrol. Sometimes they would see one or more of their own vehicles, disabled or burned out and shoved over to the side of the road. There were a few German dead, a steady trickle; Ernst saw the bodies at the side of the road co
vered by tarpaulins from the disabled trucks. Medics patched up the injured.

  And the troops would stare as they passed a blown-apart pillbox of piled-up sandbags, or a cleared-aside roadblock made of concrete and lengths of rail track and concrete anti-tank ‘dimples’, lines of little cones. The weapons in the blown-open pillboxes and bunkers, seemed crude. Ernst saw one mortar that looked as if it might have been used against Napoleon.

  On they went. Every bridge was demolished, and the scouts had to find them places to ford the streams. Elsewhere there were ditches, meant to stop tanks perhaps, and the weary men scrambled down one bank and up another. These assaults were petty, but they steadily eroded the column’s manpower, and took out their vehicles and horses and used up their ammunition. And, more importantly, they were slowed down.

  A horse was killed by a mine in a grotesque explosion that burst the animal’s carcass, showering the men with bloody fur and shredded bits of meat. The men took a break as the engineers dealt with that.

  Two British troops, wounded but alive, had been taken in this place. The men sat on the ground with their hands on their heads. They wore what looked like proper army uniforms, with flat steel helmets, leather gaiters, boots, greatcoats and leather belts. One had an officer’s stripes. But their arm bands read HOME GUARD. These two were old, Ernst saw with a shock as he passed, their hair grey, their faces deeply lined - either of them old enough to be his own father, if not his grandfather. Perhaps the rumours that had been circulating since France were true, that the British forces really were badly depleted by the catastrophe that had overtaken them at Dunkirk. Old these fellows might be, and defeated and captured, but they sat up straight like soldiers, one with blood trickling into a closed eye from a head wound, and they stared every German in the eye.

  ‘Partisans?’ muttered one man.

  ‘No,’ the leutnant snapped. ‘You can’t be a partisan until your country has surrendered, Breitling. Until then these gentleman are to be treated as prisoners of war.’

  ‘They should be fucking shot,’ Breitling said. ‘Fucking English. Why can’t they just roll over like the French?’

  ‘Don’t let it get you down, lads,’ said the leutnant. ‘Look at what we’re up against. Old men and boys, and weapons from a museum. When the Panzers get over here on Tuesday they’ll roll up this countryside like a carpet.’

  But later Ernst overheard the leutnant muttering with an officer about this slow progress, and how it was becoming important they found fuel before they exhausted the supply they had brought over from France.

  For Ben and the other prisoners it was not an arduous walk. Stuck in the middle of the column and surrounded by guards, they plodded steadily along. They talked quietly, swapped their stories, and bummed furtive cigarettes from each other. They seemed resigned to their fate, Ben thought.

  The prisoners had to shelter like the rest from the attacks by the resistance elements. This was another product of the war in Spain, Ben supposed, that great warm-up fixture where the Germans had learned how to machine-gun civilians from the air and the British had learned to make Molotov cocktails.

  As the day wore on Ben’s headache got worse.

  One man helped him when he staggered. ‘Just walk. It was like this in France, in the early days. March and march. You just have to get on with it. My advice is to think about something else.’ He had a strong accent, barely comprehensible to Ben. ‘You got a girl?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Well, you’re a bright lad. Do a crossword in your head. That’s my advice.’

  So Ben walked, trying to ignore the pain in his head. He tried to visualise problems in relativity, like Gödel’s beautiful rotating-universe solution of Einstein’s equations. But the math kept sliding away from him, the tensors with their forests of suffices blurring into invisibility.

  Soon he had trouble keeping up with the pace, and drifted to the back of the little group of prisoners. The German guards thumped him with their rifle-butts, yelling at him to keep up, and even rode into the back of his legs with their bicycle wheels.

  The veteran protested: ‘Hey, go easy, Funf. Can’t you see he’s ill?’ That won him shouts in German that if he didn’t shut up he’d be taken out of the line and shot. The veteran understood their tone, if not their words. ‘The front-line corps who captured us were gentlemen. Not like this shower. Look at them, car mechanics and horse handlers, bottle washers and sausage makers. Scum of the earth, the lot of them.’

  XX

  Mary prepared to leave George’s house before nine o’clock, this Sunday morning.

  She sorted out her belongings. She slung her handbag under her coat, so it was less likely to be grabbed off her. She hesitated a bit about taking the research papers from the briefcase. The strange allo-historical questions she had been following since meeting Ben Kamen didn’t seem to matter now, didn’t even seem real, compared to the vast violence all around her. And yet not to have taken the papers would have felt like a defeat, as if she was giving up something of herself, a bit of her identity. So she stuffed the papers into her rucksack, along with her knickers and stockings.

  Then she stepped out of the house, and once more locked the door carefully. Aircraft screamed overhead, making her flinch, but at least the town wasn’t coming under attack this morning. She walked out of the Old Town, down the narrow, sloping streets to the coast road, and then headed west beneath the imposing West Hill, with its Norman castle and anti-aircraft gun emplacement. She meant to cut up past the rail station and then make for Bohemia Road, which would lead to the main road out to Battle.

  The heavy-lift crews had been out clearing the streets of rubble, just shoving it aside and piling it up in bomb sites and any open spaces available. But most of the shops were shut up. Some had been left with their doors open, with signs saying ‘Help Yourself’. There was no food or milk, nothing she could see that would be useful now.

  She heard detonations coming from the direction of the harbour. It wasn’t much of a harbour, just a fishermen’s port, the sea walls built by the Victorians after centuries of struggle against geography, and now mostly silted up. But George had told her of plans to defend it with guns and torpedo tubes, and in the end to wreck it. Functioning ports were key for the Germans; without harbours it was going to be hard for them to land their heavy equipment, supplies and reinforcements. Yesterday at the start of the invasion they had launched a paratroop raid on Dover, which seemed to have failed, but today there was said to be a major battle going on around Folkestone.

  When she got to Bohemia Road she came upon the main flow of refugees, heading out of town, slogging it on foot with their carts and wheelbarrows and prams. They were a river of people.

  There was a good bit of traffic, private cars and buses and lorries and ambulances, but at least everybody was driving the same way, to the north and out of Hastings, and there were police and ARP wardens to shepherd the pedestrians off the road to keep the traffic moving. A few bicycles threaded through the crowd; that was a sensible way to go, if you could manage it. Mary saw one lad on a bicycle hanging onto the back of a lorry, pulled along as the vehicle ploughed forward.

  The police and wardens were keeping the right hand lane clear, the lane heading back to town, but there was little traffic on it. George had said that the authorities had plans to avoid what had happened on the continent, when refugee flows had snarled up attempts to move military assets into place for a counterattack, and the police had been given maps with some routes marked in yellow for the use of civilians, others red for the military. It might have worked better, George said drily, if the maps had been printed in the right coloured ink.

  Mary felt reluctant to join the shuffling throng, as if it would mean sacrificing her individuality. But there was no choice. She stepped forward, and found a place behind a boy pushing a barrow, before a mother with two kids in a pram, beside an old man leaning on a sturdy woman who might have been his wife. And then she could do nothing but
walk with the rest.

  They passed abandoned vehicles, broken down or out of petrol, briskly shoved off the road. She didn’t see many military vehicles. Mostly it was just people, walking. They trudged along with their children on their backs and their wheelbarrows and prams laden with luggage and pots and pans. They seemed stoical enough. Maybe the national myths of the bulldog breed helped them hold it together. Churchill’s rhetoric, still working its magic. But there were many with drawn faces and strange absent looks - plenty of trauma, even as this dreadful day got going. How strange it was, Mary thought, that only a couple of days ago she had woken up with all these people in a town where the milk was delivered and the post and papers arrived, and you could expect the shops to be open sharp in the mornings. Now all that was stripped away, and these British subjects were refugees, as simple as that, with no dignity and precious little hope. It was a scene of a population in flight, right out of H.G. Wells.

  On the outskirts of town she passed a factory. Contained within a tall wire fence, it had once manufactured components for gas cookers, but had been turned over to munitions manufacture at the outbreak of war. Now it was being systematically vandalised. A handful of women dragged equipment out of the buildings and went at it with sledgehammers and iron bars. Every factory was supposed to have a plan to disable its equipment lest it fall into enemy hands. The women, in overalls and headscarves, drafted in to replace men lost to the forces, looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Perhaps it felt like a holiday, an end to the dull and dangerous work that had occupied them for the year of the war.

  Once they got out of town towards the open country there seemed to be nobody in charge, no more police or ARP wardens, except a few who had joined the flight themselves. And still they walked, limping terribly slowly through these few miles to Battle. By now Mary was dirty, hot, thirsty, hungry, tired, and her feet ached; she felt dizzy from the lack of sleep.