by Ken Follett
When it stopped, they were all still.
Silence fell.
Beside Woody, Lefty Cameron said: ‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’
Woody could have wept. He had sent ten men to their deaths, five Americans and five Germans, yet he had failed to achieve his objective. The enemy still held the far end of the bridge and could stop Allied forces crossing it.
He had four men left. If they tried again, and ran across the bridge together, they would all be killed. He needed a new plan.
He studied the townscape. What could he do? He wished he had a tank.
He had to act fast. There might well be enemy troops elsewhere in the town. They would have been alerted by the gunfire. They would respond soon. He could deal with them if he had both pillboxes. Otherwise he would be in trouble.
If his men could not cross the bridge, he thought desperately, perhaps they could swim the river. He decided to take a quick look at the bank. ‘Mack and Smoking Joe,’ he said. ‘Fire at the other pillbox. See if you can get a bullet through the slit. Keep them busy while I scout around.’
The carbines opened up and he went out through the door.
He was able to shelter behind the near pillbox while he looked over the parapet at the upstream bank. Then he had to scuttle across the road to see the other edge. However, no fire came from the enemy position.
There was no river wall. Instead an earth slope went down to the water. It looked the same on the far bank, he thought, though there was not enough light to be sure. A good swimmer might get across. Under the span of the arch he would not be easy to see from the enemy position. Then he could repeat on the far side what Sneaky Pete had done this side, and grenade the pillbox.
Looking at the structure of the bridge he had a better idea. Below the level of the parapet was a stone ledge a foot wide. A man with steady nerves could crawl across, all the time remaining out of sight.
He returned to the captured pillbox. The smallest man was Lefty Cameron. He was also feisty, not the type to get the shakes. ‘Lefty,’ said Woody. ‘There’s a hidden ledge that runs across the outside of the bridge below the parapet. Probably used by workmen doing repairs. I want you to crawl across and grenade the other pillbox.’
‘You bet,’ said Lefty.
It was a gutsy response from someone who had just seen five comrades killed.
Woody turned to Mack and Smoking Joe and said: ‘Give him cover.’ They began to shoot.
Lefty said: ‘What if I fall in?’
‘It’s only fifteen or twenty feet above the water at most,’ Woody said. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Okay,’ said Lefty. He went to the door. ‘I can’t swim, though,’ he said. Then he was gone.
Woody saw him dart across the road. He looked over the parapet, then straddled it and eased down the other side until he was lost to view.
‘Okay,’ he said to the others. ‘Hold your fire. He’s on his way.’
They all stared out. Nothing moved. It was dawn, Woody realized: the town was coming more clearly into view. But none of the inhabitants showed themselves: they knew better. Perhaps German troops were mobilizing in some neighbouring street, but he could hear nothing. He realized he was listening for a splash, fearful that Lefty would fall in the river.
A dog came trotting across the bridge, a medium-size mongrel with a curled tail that stuck up jauntily. It sniffed the dead bodies with curiosity, then moved on purposefully, as if it had an important rendezvous elsewhere. Woody watched it pass the far pillbox and continue into the other side of the town.
Dawn meant the main force was now landing on the beaches. Someone had said it was the largest amphibious attack in the history of warfare. He wondered what kind of resistance they were meeting. There was no one more vulnerable than an infantryman loaded with gear splashing through the shallows, the flat beach ahead of him offering a clear field of fire to gunners in the dunes. Woody felt grateful for this concrete pillbox.
Lefty was taking a long time. Had he fallen in the water quietly? Could something else have gone wrong?
Then Woody saw him, a slim khaki form bellying over the parapet of the bridge at the far end. Woody held his breath. Lefty dropped to his knees, crawled to the pillbox, and came upright with his back flat against the curved concrete. With his left hand he drew out a grenade. He pulled the pin, waited a couple of seconds, then reached around and threw the grenade through the slit.
Woody heard the boom of the explosion and saw a flash of lurid light from the firing slits. Lefty raised his arms above his head like a champion.
‘Get back under cover, asshole,’ Woody said, though Lefty could not hear him. There could be a German soldier hiding in a nearby building waiting to avenge the deaths of his friends.
But no shot rang out, and after a brief victory dance Lefty went inside the pillbox, and Woody breathed more easily.
However, he was not yet fully secure. At this point a sudden sally by a couple of dozen Germans could win the bridge back. Then it would all have been in vain.
He forced himself to wait another minute to see if any enemy troops showed themselves. Still nothing moved. It was beginning to look as if there were no Germans in Eglise-des-Soeurs other than those manning the bridge: they were probably relieved every twelve hours from a barracks a few miles away.
‘Smoking Joe,’ he said. ‘Get rid of the dead Germans. Throw them in the river.’
Joe dragged the three bodies out of the pillbox and disposed of them, then did the same with the two sentries.
‘Pete and Mack,’ Woody said. ‘Go over to the other pillbox and join Lefty. Make sure the three of you stay alert. We haven’t killed all the Germans in France yet. If you see enemy troops approaching your position, don’t hesitate, don’t negotiate, just shoot them.’
The two men left the pillbox and walked briskly across the bridge to the far end.
There were now three Americans in the far pillbox. If the Germans tried to retake the bridge they would have a hard time of it, especially in the growing light.
Woody realized that the dead Americans on the bridge would forewarn any approaching enemy forces that the pillboxes had been captured. Otherwise he might retain an element of surprise.
That meant he had to get rid of the American corpses too.
He told the others what he was going to do, then stepped outside.
The morning air tasted fresh and clean.
He walked to the middle of the bridge. He checked each body for a pulse, but there was no doubt: they were all dead.
One by one, he picked up his comrades and dropped them over the parapet.
The last one was Ace Webber. As he hit the water, Woody said: ‘Rest in peace, buddies.’ He stood still for a minute with his head bent and his eyes closed.
When he turned around, the sun was coming up.
(vii)
The great fear of Allied planners was that the Germans would rapidly reinforce their troops in Normandy, and mount a powerful counter-attack that would drive the invaders back into the sea, in a repeat of the Dunkirk disaster.
Lloyd Williams was one of the people trying to make sure that did not happen.
His job helping escaped prisoners get home had low priority after the invasion, and he was now working with the French Resistance.
At the end of May the BBC broadcast coded messages that triggered a campaign of sabotage in German-occupied France. During the first few days of June hundreds of telephone lines were cut, usually in hard-to-find places. Fuel depots were set on fire, roads were blocked by trees, and tyres were slashed.
Lloyd was assisting the railwaymen, who were strongly Communist and called themselves Resistance Fer. For years they had maddened the Nazis with their sly subversion. German troop trains somehow got diverted down obscure branch lines and sent many miles out of their way. Engines broke down unaccountably and carriages were derailed. It was so bad that the occupiers brought railwaymen from Germany to run the system. But the disruption got worse.
In the spring of 1944 the railwaymen began to damage their own network. They blew up tracks and sabotaged the heavy lifting cranes required for moving crashed trains.
The Nazis did not take this lying down. Hundreds of railwaymen were executed, and thousands deported to camps. But the campaign escalated, and by D-Day rail traffic in some parts of France had come to a halt.
Now, on D-Day plus one, Lloyd lay at the summit of an embankment beside the main line to Rouen, capital city of Normandy, at a point where the track entered a tunnel. From his vantage point he could see approaching trains a mile away.
With Lloyd were two others, codenamed Legionnaire and Cigare. Legionnaire was leader of the Resistance in this neighbourhood. Cigare was a railwayman. Lloyd had brought the dynamite. Supplying weaponry was the main role played by the British in the French Resistance.
The three men were half hidden by long grass dotted with wild flowers. It was the kind of place to bring a girl on a fine day such as this, Lloyd thought. Daisy would like it.
A train appeared in the distance. Cigare scrutinized it as it came nearer. He was about sixty, wiry and small, with the lined face of a heavy smoker. When the train was still a quarter of a mile away he shook his head in negation. This was not the one they were waiting for. The engine passed them, puffing smoke, and entered the tunnel. It was hauling four passenger coaches, all full, carrying a mixture of civilians and uniformed men. Lloyd had more important prey in his sights.
Legionnaire looked at his watch. He had dark skin and a black moustache, and Lloyd guessed he might have a North African somewhere in his ancestry. Now he was jumpy. They were exposed here, in the open air and in daylight. The longer they stayed, the higher the chance they would be spotted. ‘How much longer?’ he said worriedly.
Cigare shrugged. ‘We’ll see.’
Lloyd said in French: ‘You can leave now, if you wish. Everything is set.’
Legionnaire did not reply. He was not going to miss the action. For the sake of his prestige and authority he had to be able to say: ‘I was there.’
Cigare tensed, peering into the distance, the skin around his eyes creasing with the effort. ‘So,’ he said cryptically. He raised himself to his knees.
Lloyd could hardly see the train, let alone identify it, but Cigare was alert. It was moving a lot faster than the previous one, Lloyd could tell. As it came closer he observed that it was longer, too: twenty-four carriages or more, he thought.
‘This is it,’ said Cigare.
Lloyd’s pulse quickened. If Cigare was right, this was a German troop train carrying more than a thousand officers and men to the Normandy battlefield – perhaps the first of many such trains. It was Lloyd’s job to make sure neither this train nor any following passed through the tunnel.
Then he saw something else. A plane was tracking the train. As he watched, the aircraft matched course with the train and began to lose height.
The plane was British.
Lloyd recognized it as a Hawker Typhoon, nicknamed a Tiffy, a one-man fighter-bomber. Tiffies were often given the dangerous mission of penetrating deep behind enemy lines to harass communications. There was a brave man at the controls, Lloyd thought.
But this formed no part of Lloyd’s plan. He did not want the train to be wrecked before it reached the tunnel.
‘Shit,’ he said.
The Tiffy fired a machine-gun burst at the carriages.
Legionnaire said: ‘But what is this?’
Lloyd replied in English: ‘Fucked if I know.’
He could see now that the engine was hauling a mixture of passenger coaches and cattle trucks. However, the cattle trucks probably also contained men.
The plane, travelling faster, strafed the carriages as it overhauled the train. It had four belt-fed 20mm cannon, and they made a fearsome rattling sound that could be heard over the roar of the plane’s engine and the energetic puffing of the train. Lloyd could not help feeling sorry for the trapped soldiers, unable to get out of the way of the lethal hail of bullets. He wondered why the pilot did not fire his rockets. They were highly destructive against trains or cars, though difficult to fire accurately. Perhaps they had been used up in an earlier encounter.
Some of the Germans bravely put their heads out of the windows and fired pistols and rifles at the plane, with no effect.
But Lloyd now saw a light anti-aircraft battery emplaced on a flatbed car immediately behind the engine. Two gunners were hastily deploying the big gun. It swivelled on its base and the barrel lifted to aim at the British plane.
The pilot did not appear to have seen it, for he held his course, rounds from his cannon tearing through the roofs of the carriages as he overhauled them.
The big gun fired and missed.
Lloyd wondered if he knew the flyer. There were only about five thousand pilots on active service in the UK at any one time. Quite a lot of them had been to Daisy’s parties. Lloyd thought of Hubert St John, a brilliant Cambridge graduate with whom he had been reminiscing about student days a few weeks ago; of Dennis Chaucer, a West Indian from Trinidad who complained bitterly about tasteless English food, especially the mashed potatoes that seemed to be served with every meal; and of Brian Mantel, an amiable Australian he had brought across the Pyrenees on his last trip. The brave man in the Tiffy could easily be someone Lloyd had met.
The anti-aircraft gun fired again, and missed again.
Either the pilot still had not seen the gun, or he felt it could not hit him; for he took no evasive action, but continued to fly dangerously low and wreak carnage on the troop train.
The engine was just a few seconds from the tunnel when the plane was hit.
Flame flared from the plane’s engine, and black smoke billowed. Too late, the pilot veered away from the railway track.
The train entered the tunnel, and the carriages flashed past Lloyd’s position. He saw that every one was packed full with dozens, hundreds of German soldiers.
The Tiffy flew directly at Lloyd. For a moment he thought it would crash where he lay. He was already flat on the ground, but he stupidly put his hands over his head, as if that could protect him.
The Tiffy roared by a hundred feet above him.
Then Legionnaire pressed the plunger of the detonator.
There was a roar like thunder inside the tunnel as the track blew up, followed by a terrible screeching of tortured steel as the train crashed.
At first the carriages full of soldiers continued to flash by, but a second later their charge was arrested. The ends of two linked carriages rose in the air, forming an inverted V. Lloyd heard the men inside screaming. All the carriages came off the rails and tumbled like dropped matchsticks around the dark O of the tunnel’s mouth. Iron crumpled like paper, and broken glass rained on the three saboteurs watching from the top of the embankment. They were in danger of being killed by their own explosion, and without a word they all leaped to their feet and ran.
By the time they had reached a safe distance it was all over. Smoke was billowing out of the tunnel: in the unlikely event that any men in there had survived the crash, they would burn to death.
Lloyd’s plan was a success. Not only had he killed hundreds of enemy troops and wrecked a train, he had also blocked a main railway line. Crashes in tunnels took weeks to clear. He had made it much more difficult for the Germans to reinforce their defences in Normandy.
He was horrified.
He had seen death and destruction in Spain, but nothing like this. And he had caused it.
There was another crash, and when he looked in the direction of the sound he saw that the Tiffy had hit the ground. It was burning, but the fuselage had not broken up. The pilot might be alive.
He ran towards the plane, and Cigare and Legionnaire followed.
The downed aircraft lay on its belly. One wing had snapped in half. Smoke came from the single engine. The perspex dome was blackened by soot and Lloyd could not see the pilot.
He stepped on the wing and unfastened the hoo
d catch. Cigare did the same on the other side. Together, they slid the dome back on its rails.
The pilot was unconscious. He wore a helmet and goggles, and an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Lloyd could not tell whether it was someone he knew.
He wondered where the oxygen tank was, and whether it had yet burst.
Legionnaire had a similar thought. ‘We have to get him out before the plane blows up,’ he said.
Lloyd reached inside and unfastened the safety harness. Then he put his hands under the pilot’s arms and pulled. The man was completely limp. Lloyd had no way of knowing what his injuries might be. He was not even sure the man was alive.
He dragged the pilot out of the cockpit, then got him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried him a safe distance from the burning wreckage. As gently as he could, he laid the man on the ground face up.
He heard a noise that was a cross between a whoosh and a thump, and looked back to see that the whole plane was ablaze.
He bent over the pilot and carefully removed the goggles and the oxygen mask, revealing a face that was shockingly familiar.
The pilot was Boy Fitzherbert.
And he was breathing.
Lloyd wiped blood from Boy’s nose and mouth.
Boy opened his eyes. At first there seemed no intelligence behind them. Then, after a minute, his expression altered and he said: ‘You.’
‘We blew up the train,’ Lloyd said.
Boy seemed unable to move anything but his eyes and mouth. ‘Small world,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it?’
Cigare said: ‘Who is he?’
Lloyd hesitated, then said: ‘My brother.’
‘My God.’
Boy’s eyes closed.
Lloyd said to Legionnaire: ‘We have to bring a doctor.’
Legionnaire shook his head. ‘We must get out of here. The Germans will be coming to investigate the train crash within minutes.’
Lloyd knew he was right. ‘We’ll have to take him with us.’
Boy opened his eyes and said: ‘Williams.’
‘What is it, Boy?’
Boy seemed to grin. ‘You can marry the bitch now,’ he said.
