The beach head was swarming with men and machines, for it wasn’t just troops that were being brought ashore. There were Vehicle Landing Craft all along the water’s edge too. One was unloading Sherman tanks, which came rumbling down the ramp one after the other to crunch off across the sand, looking massive in that restricted space. Higher up the beach one had broken down and a mobile repair unit was refitting it with a new track which lay beside it in a huge sand-spattered coil. And weaving through the new arrivals, the mine-detectors were at work, moving cautiously, the long sticks of their detectors swinging backwards and forwards before them like pendulums.
The brigade trudged through the dunes, following the column, and pressed on through the gaps between the houses until they reached open country where they found a signpost like a pollarded tree with too many branches, newly erected and covered with unit signs and initials, among them the familiar pink Desert Rat of the 7th Armoured Division. Now it was simply a matter of following the signs, which led them to an earth track, which had once been a country lane but was now churned into muddy ridges by its unaccustomed traffic. A convoy of heavy vehicles roared past, heading inland and spraying them with mud, and as they marched on, they could see the erupting plumes of distant explosions from the bombardment.
Although they still hadn’t come under fire there were signs of recent battle wherever they looked – earth pitted with shell holes, trees shattered, a concrete pill-box smashed open as if it had been hit by a giant fist. From time to time they passed a group of newly dug mounds, and realised with a frisson of fear that this was the temporary burial of the dead, German and British side by side with a rifle and helmet stuck at the head of each grave. Nobody spoke but they were all thinking the same thing, knowing that this was how they could end up and praying that they could avoid it, somehow or other. A hundred yards on, they came upon one of the most dreaded German guns, an 88-millimetre, still in its emplacement, but with its muzzle shattered, like one of Groucho Marx’s exploding cigars. The sight of it brought a cheer and a warming sense of triumph. But even so, fear brooded with them all the way to their first camp.
That night, after a solid meal, they wrote their first letters home and settled to sleep in the open air. Steve spent the first two hours of the night on sentry-go, marching about their improvised settlement with a tommy-gun in his hands and nothing but his thoughts for company. He was surprised by how still it was, even though there were guns rumbling like thunder somewhere inland. Far away on the plain he could see fires burning, the flames flaring and dying and rekindling to flare again, now orange and yellow, now lurid red with a blue core. He watched with fascination, off and on, for over an hour, wondering what it would be like close to. But when his relief took over, he simply reported that it was all quiet.
He took off his boots, rolled his tunic into a rough pillow and lay down in his bedroll. But although he was dog-tired he was too keyed up and fearful to sleep. Tomorrow they would be in action. Tomorrow he could be killed, blown into the air like those poor sods in the LCT or left to die on his own while the army moved on. Wakefulness made him face up to it although he would rather have slept and forgotten. After an hour fear was gnawing at his stomach and his mouth was full of bile. He felt the need to pray but he couldn’t remember a single prayer, just a few odd words from something he’d learned at school. So he said that. ‘O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts. Possess them not with fear. Take from them now the sense of reckoning … Not today, Oh Lord. Oh not today.’
The next thing he was aware of was the sound of the wind whistling through the wheels of the nearest TCV. His hair was damp with dew and when he sat up he could see that the eastern sky was pale green. It was dawn.
Daylight brought a return of common sense and a great deal to do in a very short time. Orders came through as soon as they’d been fed. They were to advance to a place called Ellon where they would join three regiments of tanks to spearhead the next advance to a road centre called Villers Bocage. And by now, with food in their bellies and the night behind them, they felt cocky enough to joke.
‘Villers Bocage!’ Dusty whispered to Steve and Taffy. ‘They got some names round here! What d’you reckon that is when it’s at home?’
‘Good defensive territory,’ they were warned, ‘so keep your eyes skinned for snipers and pockets of German infantry. They’re well camouflaged and some of them are armed with faust patronen or panzerfaust. It’s like the American bazooka, which you know about, a hollow charge projectile on a rocket tube with a range of about seventy-five yards. Extremely effective against tanks.’
So we hit them before they hit us, Steve understood.
They were warned about a new German mine too. ‘The Yanks call it the 50-50. It’s like the “S” mine, which you know about, but, instead of ball-bearings, this one hits you with a sharp steel rod. If you hit with your right foot, the rod flies up past your right side. If you hit with the left, you’ll be singing tenor.’
‘Lovely!’ Taffy joked as he lit a new cigarette from the butt of the dying one. ‘I’ve always fancied singing tenor.’ But his eyes were strained despite his grin.
And that was that. By 5.45 they were in their TCV’s and on the move. Soon they’d left the open plain behind and were driving cautiously down a sunken road between very high hedges, discovering with every yard that this terrain was more difficult than anything they’d tackled in training and more fearsome than anything they could have imagined. For the bocage turned out to be perfect cover for snipers. It was a maze of small, high-banked fields and orchards, surrounded by pollarded trees and hedges that were more than twelve foot high and so thick that it was impossible to see through them. And to make matters worse the roads weren’t simply narrow and overhung with foliage, they snaked and curved so that visibility was never more than fifty yards. They could be picked off at any time and from any direction for German infantry could be anywhere.
And things got worse when they’d made their rendezvous with the tanks, for now, although they were heavily camouflaged, they were on foot and advancing into enemy territory, sometimes across fields and through dense woodland, sometimes along roads that were little more than footpaths, treacherous, narrow, overhung by foliage – and mined, probably with the new 50-50’s. Steve had never experienced such fear. His heart was beating so fast it pained him, his throat was full and his mouth so dry it was difficult to swallow, and sweat was pouring from him, running down his back and his sides and streaming down his forehead so copiously that he had to shake it away like a dog freeing his coat of water.
When the first attack began it was almost, a relief. Suddenly there were voices shouting, ‘Take cover!’, a rattle of machine-gun fire, the red trace of a sniper’s bullet, somebody screaming close behind him.
Fear coalesced into anger, he remembered his training, obeyed orders although his fingers were stiff, sprayed their hidden enemy with machine-gun fire, hoping his aim was accurate. A tank crashed through the hedges just ahead of them, sending branches spinning to left and right, and roared across the pathway to smash down the opposite hedge and head out into the fields. Two seconds later it was followed by a Sexton, and Steve just had time to realise that they must have run into German tanks and called in the artillery, before he glimpsed a Tiger through the new gap in the hedge and watched it ricochet as it fired. Then he was running past the gap, head down, scrabbling for cover in the ditch as another volley of fire raked the hedges.
There was a reek of petrol, a stink of cordite, an explosion that made the hedges shake, billows of black smoke and long tongues of flame, and he knew that a tank had brewed up and hoped it was the Tiger.
And then it was over, as suddenly as it had begun, and he leant against the hedge and was sick.
The pathway was littered with cartridge cases and strewn with bodies, some blown to pieces, some wounded and groaning, one trying to crawl away. And among them was Taffy, lying on his back, hideously spread-eagled in a long pool of blood. Oh Ch
rist! Taffy!
Get to him quick! What was it they said? Shock was the worst killer. Must keep him warm. How the hell do I do that? Where’s the field dressing? Chest wound. Chest wound. What did they tell us about chest wounds? Staunch the blood. ‘Taff! You’re all right mate! I’ve got you.’ Struggling to undo the buttons on a tunic slippery with blood.
Dusty was crouching beside another casualty – Johnnie Taylor wasn’t it? – holding a cigarette for him. ‘Bloody awful mate! Don’t move. They’ve called for the stretchers. Don’t wanna disappoint ’em.’
It was totally incongruous. One man joking, the next man unconscious. ‘Taffy! Open your eyes mate! Taff! Come on!’
The stretcher bearers were standing beside him. He was aware of their boots, their khaki legs, the smell of their sweat. Almost as strong as the sickly smell of blood.
‘He can’t hear you, mate,’ a voice was saying. ‘He’s gone.’
‘Gone? He can’t be. He was talking to me a minute ago.’ But they were already moving off to attend to Taylor and the Corporal was rounding up the survivors, shouting orders.
‘Get up! Leave them! You can’t do any more! We’re moving!’ Steve obeyed, although his legs were leaden with grief and his brain stuck with a single thought. Alive one minute, dead the next. But there wasn’t time for pity. Ten minutes later, a private from A company came hurtling down the road towards them, white faced, waving his arms in warning and shouting that the road ahead was occupied by hundreds of Germans and to get the hell out of it.
Then they found the strength to run and legged it across the field into a thick wood, where they waited, fear returning. It was silent among the trees and they didn’t come under fire, although they could hear a tank battle raging below and to the east of them.
Presently the order came through that they were to head through the woods to a line of slit trenches and regroup. And it began to rain.
And so the day continued. They were fired on so often they lost count. Time itself was an irrelevance. There was only action and reaction, deferred grief and that awful, ever-present terror. When the dusk finally arrived and they leaguered for the night, they were so tired they slept where they dropped. It was ten, o’clock and they’d been in the front line for seventeen hours.
The night gave them little rest. There were still sentry duties. The hedges had to be patrolled. A watch had to be kept. So they slept when they could, and at first light, just after their supply column arrived, the battle began again.
For days they slogged it out in the damp prison of the bocage, as the rain filled their slit trenches with mud, the tankies grew more and more irritated to be cooped up in such terrain and the Germans harassed them day and night with shell and mortar fire. They were well supplied and usually well fed, but their casualty rate was alarmingly high and progress demoralisingly slow. And there was never time to digest what was happening to them. And never time to grieve.
They were simply relieved when the order came that they were to make a temporary withdrawal from Villers and its hated bocage because the RAF were going to bomb the place. ‘And about bloody time too!’
They took up their positions on the reverse slope of a hill north of another shattered village called Livry and watched. It was a massive raid delivered by heavy bombers and it seemed to go on for a very long time.
‘There won’t be a stone left standing,’ Steve said as the noise went on. ‘I pity the poor buggers who live there.’ And he suddenly thought of the red tiles of his honeymoon cottage and that peaceful musty bed and their first picnic out in the rough grass of that peaceful garden. ‘I ought to write home,’ he said.
‘Do it now,’ Dusty advised. ‘You won’t get the chance once the bombers have gone.’
But when he’d found pencil and paper, and had written ‘My darling,’ he couldn’t think what to say. He couldn’t tell her where he was or what was happening because the censor wouldn’t let it through, he couldn’t tell her about Taffy – he couldn’t even bear to think about Taffy – and he certainly couldn’t let her know what he was feeling, although the words leapt into his head, straight and simple and honest. Dear Barbara, I’m frightened. I want to come home. The very idea of writing such things shamed him to blushing. She would think him a booby if he went on like that. In the end he had to settle for platitudes, like everyone else in the brigade.
We have been in the front line since we arrived but are having a spot of rest at the moment. The rain is incessant. We keep as dry as we can with ground sheets and gas-capes. We are all very dirty but the grub is good, tell Mum. I can’t say much because of the censor. Give my love to everyone. I haven’t had any letters yet but they will catch up with us eventually so keep them coming. At least we’ve got the consolation of knowing that we are keeping the Germans so busy here they won’t have any planes left over for bombing London.
Love to you all.
Steve
Chapter Twelve
It took five days for Steve’s first letter to reach Childeric Road and Barbara worried through every minute of every one of them, waking long before the postwoman was due and prowling up and down the stairs endlessly until she arrived, stamping her feet to urge her on, ‘Hassen you up woman. Where’s my letter?’ She knew her restlessness was making her mother-in-law irritable but she didn’t care. Her anxiety was too acute.
On the first day she had a long letter from Joan, which she glanced at and didn’t read. On the second, a card from Becky and a parcel addressed to Mr & Mrs Steven Wilkins which turned out to contain an album full of wedding photographs, neatly arranged from a blurred shot of their scamper up the Town Hall steps to a perfect close-up of their cardboard cake. Bob said they were lovely and even Heather approved of the group picture, although she sniffed at all the others, but Barbara simply couldn’t take them in. They were pictures, that was all, of a day that had receded into insignificance under the impact of this awesome invasion and the endless, yearning need to know what was happening.
After two days, little Mrs Connelly, who lived downstairs, joined in the vigil, calling encouragement – ‘She’s just coming, so she is.’ ‘She’s on her way.’ ‘I can see her.’ – and crooning commiserations when the wanted letter still wasn’t delivered. And Bob assured her every morning that it would be ‘bound to come tomorrow’. But nothing made the wait for it any easier.
Its eventual arrival was greeted with relief by every member of the household, even old Mr Connelly, who usually sat in the kitchen stolidly munching through his breakfast no matter what was going on.
But for Barbara the relief was very short lived. The letter had been written five days ago and, although it proved he had survived the landing, she had no idea what had happened to him since then. Even when she found his second letter waiting for her when she got home from work that afternoon, the anxiety remained. It was wonderful to see his lovely flowing handwriting twice in one day and to know that he’d still been alive and well when he wrote for the second time but now there was another anxiety. It was such a short letter. Almost curt. It hadn’t told her anything really. And he hadn’t said he loved her.
She read it for a second time, missing him with a new yearning. If only he’d said something personal and loving, something about the time they’d spent together. He couldn’t have forgotten it already, could he?
I’ll send him a nice long answer, she decided, looking at his nice long row of books, and I’ll remind him.
In the middle of the row, set neatly between the blue and orange of all those Penguins, was the white spine of her new photograph album. The sight of it gave her an even better idea. She would send him a photo, not one of those blurred ones and definitely not a group, but a nice one of just the pair of them, looking at one another. There was one at the end of the book that was just right. How young they looked! And what a long time ago it seemed! She eased the little picture from its restraining corners, turned it over and wrote on the back: ‘Just in case you’ve forgot what I look like!�
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Then she composed her letter, telling him everything that had happened since her last and adding, ‘You were right about the Germans not bombing us. It’s all very quiet here.’
But she spoke too soon. The very next night she was yanked from her sleep by the sound of a massive explosion.
For a moment she couldn’t understand what was happening. Then she sat bolt upright, struggling to wake and feeling very frightened. The window was rattling in its frame and she could hear the explosion still reverberating in the darkness. Oh God, she thought. Thass a bomb. And she remembered her mother’s mocking words, ‘Go to London? They’re bombing people in London.’ And her own wild, stupid reply. ‘I don’t care!’ And now here she was in the middle of an air raid, shaking with fright, her mind full of terrifying images – bombs, falling out of the sky, crashing through the ceiling – this ceiling – exploding and destroying and blowing people to bits.
The noise faded and stopped, and now she could hear voices in the front bedroom, curtains being drawn, a light being switched on. I mustn’t let them see I’m frightened, she decided. No matter what. And she made an effort to stop shaking, got out of bed and began to put on her clothes.
The light on the landing was switched on, there was a patter of feet outside her door and her mother-in-law appeared in the doorway, putting on her dressing gown.
‘Don’t go near the window,’ she ordered. ‘If there’s another one you could be cut to pieces.’
Avalanche of Daisies Page 15
