He slipped out of the room, went downstairs, used the bathroom, and pushed his bare feet into his shoes. He paused in the hall and glanced in a mirror, scratching at the grey stubble on his jowls. Then he turned the latch key, opened the front door, and stepped out, testing the morning.
He was in the shadows of the narrow, steep street, but the sky above was a deep blue, crusted with bits of cloud. The sound of the guns was louder out here, the noise echoing from the blank walls of the boarded-up houses. It was chill, dewy, but he’d survive outdoors for a few minutes without a coat. He pulled the door closed.
He walked down the road, breathing deep of the fresh air. Grass was pushing through the paving stones; clearing it was the sort of chore nobody tended to these days. The street was quiet, though he could hear a rumble of traffic off in the distance: heavy stuff, a throaty roar, military vehicles probably.
A door opened as he passed, and a woman emerged - Mrs Thompson, a Great War widow, fiftyish, he knew her slightly. She was clumsily pushing a baby’s pram, piled up with goods and covered by a blanket. She locked her door and set off up the road, away from the coast, muttering to herself. For days the occupation authorities had been moaning about refugees getting in the way of military vehicles on the routes out of town in every direction. But the Germans in these latter days seemed to have no will to do anything about it, and George certainly wasn’t going to try to resist the tide with his few officers. He worried a bit for Mrs Thompson, though. It would have been better for her if she’d stayed put in her home until it was all over, following the British coppers’ quiet instructions.
At the baker’s an SS officer came striding out clutching a loaf. The baker himself chased after him. He was a small man of sixty, bald, with the sagging face of one who had once been overweight. ‘Here!’ he called at the German, indignant. ‘You ain’t paid for that!’
The SS man shrugged. ‘By tomorrow Tommy will be here. He will pay.’ And he strolled off, not looking back.
‘Blithering cheek,’ the baker said to George. ‘The usual, is it, Sergeant?’
‘If you can manage it, Albert.’
As the baker went back into his shop a squad of soldiers marched through the crossroads up ahead - at least they looked like soldiers, fellows in ill-fitting Wehrmacht uniforms led by an SS officer. But they were short, skinny, their helmets too big on their heads. They were Hitler Jugend, young English boys seduced from scouting into training to serve the Reich. The ultimate expression of Nazi madness, George thought, kids going to war. He paid for his National Loaf.
When he got home Julia was making coffee in the kitchen, with her SS ration. Her hair was still down, she wore her uniform blouse, and as he came into the kitchen he could see the soft curve of her buttocks above her slim legs, her bare feet on the flags of his kitchen floor. He got a knife from the cutlery drawer and began to cut into the loaf.
There was a particularly loud explosion that made them both flinch.
‘A storm is coming,’ Julia said, not looking round.
‘Sounds like it to me. I’ll be glad to get it bloody over.’ He spread a scraping of marge onto a bread slice, and opened a little pot of jam made by a neighbour from the year’s early strawberries. ‘Calm is what I like. I don’t much care if it’s calm under the Jerries or calm under the Yanks.’
‘What a tidy sort of chap you are. Well, I too will be glad when the balloon goes up. I’m rather tired of shepherding cowardly members of Hoare’s government down to the port and packing them off to France.’
‘Ah. That’s why you’re here.’ She didn’t always tell him what brought her to Hastings, and he didn’t generally want to know.
‘The sooner I can get back to Richborough the better. Is there any of that jam left?’ She pinched the bit of bread from his hand and licked the surface, digging her tongue into the jam.
He could smell her, unwashed, the scent of bed still on her. Even the way she ate jam and bread was quite unreasonably erotic. ‘If the Americans are coming, that’s it for us, I suppose.’
‘I suppose it is. Been a funny sort of business, hasn’t it, Sergeant George? Us. And yet it’s lasted three years.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said stiffly. ‘Don’t suppose I ever will.’
She kissed him now, lightly. Her tongue flickered into his mouth, and he could taste the strawberries. Her tongue withdrew and his followed, and she bit down on its tip, quite hard, and he flinched back. She laughed at him. ‘You despise me,’ she said. ‘You must do. I’m a traitor, by your lights. But to me you’re the traitor, you see. You and the rest of the complicit, complacent English, for allowing our destiny to slip away through sentimentality and false loyalties. You should be joining Germany in the great war on Bolshevism!’
‘I think you’re a bloody nutter. And I think I am too.’
‘A paradox, isn’t it?’
They stood there, their mouths close, their breaths mingling. There was another crash, powerful enough to make the crockery on George’s dresser rattle.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘That one came from the south.’ She went to the window. ‘They’re bombing the harbour.’ She brushed her hair back from her face and peered up at the sky. ‘There are planes up there, bombers. This is what we expected the Allies would do. Smash the harbours to bottle us up, while striking overland from the north.’
‘Julia. Look - don’t go back to Richborough. Stay here.’
‘With you?’ She sounded quite incredulous, as if the idea was absurd.
‘Give yourself up. You must see the war is lost.’
‘I don’t see any such thing.’ She looked him up and down. ‘You know, suddenly I feel I’m waking from a nightmare. Why have I been wasting my time on a fat old fool like you? Oh, the war’s not lost yet. And once I get back to Richborough I’ll win it for sure. Mind if I use the bathroom first?’ She hurried out. The steam from her half-drunk coffee curled up into the air.
There was another explosion, another shuddering shock, and George clamped his hands to his ears.
IX
The retreating Germans were leaving a mess behind them. Bridges were routinely blown, the roads churned up, the villages torched.
Gary’s troop marched past a burned-out truck. The driver still sat behind his wheel, on the left hand side of this German vehicle. He had been reduced to a stick figure by the flames, just a blackened husk. His teeth gleamed white behind peeled-back lips, and his hands still clasped a melted steering wheel.
‘Look at that.’ Willis used his rifle to point at the driver’s wrist, where there was a white band, a bit of flesh. ‘How about that, Dougie? Some bugger’s nicked this poor bastard’s watch. How’s that for heartlessness?’
‘Shift your arses, ladies,’ said Danny Adams.
The troop had to get off the road to let a column of tanks go by. The tanks were Shermans. They had bedsprings and other bits of iron strapped around their bodies with bits of rope. The junk was there because it caused premature explosions of the panzerfausts, rocket-propelled grenades. The troopers predictably mocked the tank crews as the vehicles rolled past.
Gary was glad of a chance to sit for a bit on the soft ground and have a smoke, although Dougie Skelland had a ciggie in his mouth most of the time anyhow. Their blackened faces were streaked with sweat.
‘Just let them go by, lads,’ Danny Adams said. ‘A tank’s all right. But what counts in war is feet on the ground. One bloody footstep after another. And that’s us. Winning England back step by step. Come on, let’s get on with it.’
They clambered back onto the road and carried on. The road surface had been churned up by the tank tracks, so you had to watch where you stepped.
It was mid-morning. After the dawn bombardment they had quickly broken through the smashed crust of defences behind the Winston Line itself, and now they were pursuing the retreating Germans hard, to give them as little time as possible to regroup. But Christ, he was tired, Gary thought; he’d been
on the go for eight or nine hours already.
It could have been a lot worse. There were rumours that the Germans had concentrated their mechanised divisions in the east of the protectorate, to take on the Americans; in the fields of eastern Kent a massive tank battle was being waged, and the Germans’ deep defence was concentrating on holding the major ports, such as Folkestone. But even here in the west the Germans were putting up a determined resistance, for which they had had three years to prepare.
Although lead units had already surged through the countryside there were plenty of pockets of Germans left, and the advancing troops knew they were surrounded by the enemy, by peril. In this closed-in landscape of fields and hedges and trees and lanes, there was little visibility. Every tree, every window of every one of these bucolic cottages could hide a sniper; every furrow in every field could shelter a machine gun nest or a mortar. Further out the Germans had some big guns emplaced which could spit their vicious shells miles, aiming for the dust plumes of the advancing columns. As a result the vehicles were crawling along at not much better than walking pace. The lead units had stuck signs to telephone posts and trees: GO SLOW. DUST MEANS DEATH.
Everything was mixed up. Sometimes you came so close to the enemy you would hear German voices, or the clatter of their horses’ hooves.
But in the middle of all this, it was still England, and those civilians who hadn’t fled were carrying on with their lives. Once Gary saw a tank detachment stopped to allow a farmer to drive his cows across the road for milking. Cows!
They came to an abandoned German position behind a crossroads, a complex of interconnected slit trenches protected by a minefield. The sappers had marked out a safe path with white tape. Gary saw a gruesome monument lying in the road: a human leg blown clean off at the knee, the booted foot shredded. Somebody had paid dearly for the path he followed now.
Danny Adams was poking in the dirt. ‘Over here, lads. The trench has been pretty much stripped, but I think there are weapons. See, buried in the dirt where the wall collapsed?’
Gary went to see. ‘Panzerfausts.’ They had been trained up on these; it turned out that a panzerfaust’s rocket-propelled grenade, designed to take out a tank, did a good job of smashing in the walls of a house.
‘Come on, let’s dig them out. I’ll call for a truck.’
The trench itself was a bit of a mess, when Gary got into it. Grenades had clearly been used, you could see the cratering in the trench walls. Most of the bodies were intact, more or less, killed by the blast, but some had been ripped apart, and you had to watch where you stepped. In one place Gary saw that one fellow had fallen over another when he died, with bits of medical kit scattered around, bandages, syringes, even a stethoscope.
‘A doctor,’ Willis said. ‘Killed as he treated another man, you think?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Odd, isn’t it? He stayed to do his duty, and got killed for it. Sort of thing that rather proves there’s no God. Now then—’ Using his rifle barrel as a scoop, he got hold of the stethoscope. ‘That’s a souvenir you don’t see every day.’
‘Yeah,’ Dougie Skelland growled. ‘You can use it to find out if you’ve got a fucking heart, you faggot.’
Danny Adams said, ‘Shut up and get these panzerfausts stacked.’
X
5 July
By midnight, as the fourth of July gave way to the fifth, the retreat was in full flight.
They were kept marching through the night, in the pitch dark, moving on south step by step, following the little English country lanes. The dark was the only cover they had, from the planes that buzzed constantly overhead and from the heavy English guns. They weren’t allowed so much as a torch beam to see their way forward, and Heinz was slapped down when he tried to light his cigarettes. So it was a question of stumbling forward in the dark, endlessly tripping over tarmac churned up by tank treads, and everybody bumping into each other with soft curses.
By the time the dawn seeped into the sky, Ernst was exhausted. Practically since the softening-up bombardment it had been twenty-four hours of this clumsy, uncoordinated flight, when you were barely able to rest either physically or mentally, not for a moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, and for hours had had nothing to drink but water from his canteen, refilled from brackish puddles in the ditches. In the grey dawn light, as the hulking, grimy shapes of the men coalesced around him, he felt unreal, distant, as if he were watching some black-and-white cinema film.
At about nine o’clock in the morning they heard a roar of engines, a rattle of treads coming from the rear. They rushed for cover, thinking that the Allied army had overtaken them. But the column’s lead tank was a Tiger. The men emerged from cover, their legs splashed with mud and dew.
The vehicles drew to a halt, pulling off the road into bits of cover. The column was a ragtag bunch, a couple of tanks, some self-propelled guns, and a chain of open-backed trucks crowded with troops. The men clambered down. The troops swapped cigarettes; one man passed around a bottle of sloe gin he had stolen from a farmhouse. Officers, NCOs and feldgendarmerie from the column and the infantry units stood in a huddle, negotiating. Most were Wehrmacht, but some of them were SS, and others, very agitated, wore the brown uniforms of the Party. Mechanics worked at one of the trucks, whose exhaust smoked blackly. It was clearly breaking down, so they siphoned off its fuel and stripped it of its tyres and spark plugs and other parts, cannibalising it. What they could not reuse they began to wreck, systematically.
Men stood by the vehicles, or leaned against trees, their rifle butts on the ground. They all had blackened faces. You could see that some of them were asleep standing up. For a moment it was calm, no engines running, not even a distant buzz of aircraft engines to disturb the peace. It was a fine morning, if misty. Ernst breathed in the scent of honeysuckle.
‘It was just like this after Stalingrad,’ Heinz muttered.
‘What was?’
‘The retreat. Our front just collapsed. So it is here. No coordination, no proper communication. The calmer officers trying to impose a bit of organization. Just a headlong flight, really.’
Fischer approached them. ‘You keep talking like that, Kieser, and we’ll leave you with that broken-down truck.’
Ernst asked, ‘So what’s going on, Unteroffizier?’
‘The hauptmann over there says the Americans have broken through at Faversham. Their tanks are heading for Canterbury, and then on to Folkestone. It will all be over by nightfall.’
‘They have learned the art of blitzkrieg,’ Heinz said without emotion.
‘They will find nothing but rubble left of Canterbury. And there’s talk of a fighting withdrawal, making a stand at the Hastings bunker. I think—’
There was an explosion, out of nowhere.
Ernst dived for cover behind a truck. Fischer almost landed on top of him, his heavy bulk thudding into the dirt. Bits of twisted metal clattered from the truck’s body, and a wall of dust and heat swept over them. There was a stink of petrol and oil and rubber.
When the shock wave had passed, Ernst twisted sideways and looked out, under the truck’s body. One of the tanks was burning, still sitting where it had been parked. Flames shot out of its open hatch. Ernst could smell oil smoke and cordite, and the sour, awful stench of burning flesh. But then another explosion broke open the tank turret further, and Ernst had to duck again. Now there was a rattle of machine-gun fire.
One of the officers from the motorised column came running by, a Schmeisser machine pistol in his hand. ‘Partisans! Fucking partisans! X Company with me, we’ll clean these bastards out. The rest of you stay under cover.’ So Ernst huddled with Fischer under the truck, while the troopers stormed the resistance hold-out. There was a crackle of small-arms fire, the chatter of machine guns, the thump of grenades - and screaming, plenty of that.
But even as men fought and died Fischer dug a pack of field rations out of his pocket. It was wrapped in a bit of newspaper,
one of the last editions of the Albion Times, with a picture of Goebbels’ visit. Fischer unwrapped the paper and handed Ernst a bit of army bread. Ernst had some water in his canteen, so he got that out to share. ‘Quite a picnic,’ Fischer said, chewing on his bread. ‘We must do it again—’
Another explosion, and a clatter of shrapnel against the truck sides.
After that Ernst thought he might have slept for a while, despite the extraordinary situation.
At last they were called out of hiding. Men emerged from the vehicles and the ditches, and slowly began to form up into marching order once again.
Heinz nudged Ernst. ‘Come on. Let’s take the chance and go and see how those partisans have been living.’
They crept forward, past the burned-out tank.
The auxiliaries’ bunker had been broken open by grenades. SS men were rifling through the junk. Built of railway sleepers and corrugated iron, it was quite extensive, with rooms and tunnels, and bits of equipment scattered everywhere - weapons, tinned food, paraffin lamps, radio gear. Bodies were curled up in the ruins. One SS man picked up a thick booklet marked ‘Countryman’s Diary 1939’; it seemed to contain instructions on sabotage and guerrilla warfare.
A German medical orderly was tending wounded, mostly German but one British with a shot-up kneecap. Some prisoners had been taken, men in battledress sitting with their hands on their heads, watched over by more SS troopers. The captured men were a mixed lot, mostly older men but some younger, aged eighteen, nineteen, twenty perhaps, men who had grown up during the years of the occupation.
And one man, aged perhaps twenty-two, looked familiar to Ernst.
Ernst spoke to the SS guard, offering him a cigarette. ‘May I talk to that man?’
The guard took the smoke. ‘Makes no difference to me or him. Partisans get nothing but a bullet, you know that.’
Ernst stepped forward and squatted down before the man.
The Englishman watched him with a kind of insolent curiosity. ‘What’s your problem, Fritz?’
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