Death or Glory III

by Michael Asher

  ‘It’ll be bloody Thermo-polly next,’ Wallace confided confidently. Cope beamed at him as if he were the class’s star pupil. ‘Thermopylae is a good example of what I mean: how a small force can fight off a much stronger enemy by compelling him to fight on a narrow front, where his strength is no advantage.’

  ‘How many were they at Thermo – whatever?’ Cutler grunted. ‘I’ll bet it was more than six.’

  ‘Hah,’ Wallace chuckled, ‘they wasn’t SAS, though, was they?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Caine grinned. ‘Harry’s right, too. We’d only have to hold off the troops or vehicles the Hun can get on the bridge at any one time.’

  ‘Yep,’ Copeland agreed, his voice excited now. ‘As long as we’re dug in we’ll have a chance. Site the bazooka, the mortar, and the heavy machine-guns at the blockhouse. We’ll have enfilade fire right down the bridge. The Krauts won’t have anywhere to hide.’

  ‘We’ve got two Brownings, and a Vickers “K”,’ Caine said. ‘We can mount ’em on the defences, covered by the rocket launcher and mortar …’

  ‘There’s that gunpit by the gap, too,’ Wallace added. ‘A twenty-five pounder’d be just the job …’

  ‘Hey!’ Cutler’s voice lashed. ‘You’re off yer rocker, mate. We ain’t got a twenty-five pounder, remember?’

  At that moment a flare spooshed, signed a high parabola over the blockhouse stump, plopped open in a green lattice, shed a soft hail of emerald stars. The SAS men stared. ‘What the Dickens … ?’ Caine exploded.

  ‘My tripwire,’ Trubman blinked. ‘I think we’re in business, boys.’

  19

  They moved out in double file, with Copeland and Caine on point, Bren-gunners Wallace and Grimshaw at the rear. Caine was proud of the way the men slipped instantly into tactical mode, after what they’d endured that day. They passed through the gap: Caine led them off the track to the right, gave the sign for arrowhead. They fanned out silently into formation, with the Brens on the flanks, moving slowly through the scrub, across the stonecobbled ground, listening for nightsounds, all senses trimmed. The pale masonry of the bridge came into Caine’s view: a file of humped shapes was slinking towards them in the silklight, not fifty yards away.

  Caine stiffened, his eyes went wide: his pulse leapfrogged. For an instant he groped in a timeless dimension, every action was an agonizing slowness, distant and abstract, as if this were happening to someone else. The Totenkopf patrol was creeping forward – four, five, six of them – trawling the ground with the care of men superbly disciplined, perfectly trained in tactical night movement. Caine caught moonlit details of faces, weapons, equipment, saw Hun bodies tense as they clocked the SAS patrol, saw weapons come up.

  He tried to shout, found his words choked, as if his mouth were full of molasses. He saw Cope go down on one knee, saw his SMLE poke out from his shoulder, saw flame-red firegas bulb out from the muzzle, heard a keeerackkk that bludgeoned his senses. Caine held his Tommy-gun low, tweaked iron, blitzed a burst at the Totenkopf boys. He felt the weapon buck, felt the stock vibrate, felt the earth toss, smelt the burnt brass of ejected cases. He eased the trigger, registered the rap-rap-rap-rap of Brenfire right and left, heard the gnash of rifles, heard deep echoes like angry red threats rumble off rock walls.

  He peered through smoke coils, saw Squareheads duck and hunker, heard Goth voices jabber. Weapons flashed: rounds whammied past him, sang with aching notes, plucked at the night with rippling echoes: airblast slapped at his eardrums, bonged in his head. Cutler ran out from his left, bellowed incoherently, rifle in one hand, a Mills bomb in the other: Caine saw him bowl the grenade overarm, saw Hun tracer swarm, saw Cutler beanbag over, heard him yell, ‘I’m hit. I’m hit.’

  Caine gritted his teeth, picked a Kraut, fired from the hip with both eyes open, spewed long squalls of electric hail across the no-man’s land gumpa, gumpa, gumpa, gump. The gun felt welded to his hands: it was like brandishing a long scythe of light. His ears were too dead to hear the Jerry’s scream, but a part of him felt it, felt the snubnose bullets whamp, felt the shapeless lead pigs rupture organs, crepitate bone. He was just thinking, Got the bastard, when Cutler’s grenade clamshelled with a wallop that snatched the air from his nostrils. Flame horned up, dirt and pebbles bow-waved, smoke-riffs blew.

  Caine stopped shooting: Brens pumped, rifles cracked, a raft of green tracer groped through the smoke in slow threads. A Jerry slumped, another jack-knifed sideways: Copeland drilled .303 rimfire through his skull. A German almost the size of Wallace came lumping towards them screeching ‘Totenkopf, Totenkopf,’ a spudmasher in each mitt. He raised his hands to lob the bombs: Caine hit him with a five-round crumpler that sheared the flesh off his right thigh. The big Jerry toppled, crashed: the grenades bashawed in a double blast that hacked his body to bits: thundering afterblasts echoed off the scarp walls.

  Caine felt the shockwave, felt his lungs squeezed. He swivelled off a last spurt, yodelled, ‘That’s enough, lads.’

  Silence fell: smoke vorticed, fusilgas reeked, nightbirds broke into squawking protest above. Caine swallowed, licked numbed lips. His weapon felt light in his hands and he realized the mag must be almost empty: he couldn’t believe he’d fired the best part of fifty rounds. The contact had lasted a minute in all. He swapped mags with steady hands, swept a shufti around him: some of the boys were reloading, others watched the ground. Caine signalled advance. As the patrol inched forward Cutler stood up, clutching his left shoulder. His hand and arm were slick with blood where a Hun bullet had lacerated the hard muscle: the wound was cushy, though – the round hadn’t struck bone. Caine gave him a field dressing, told him to go back to the leaguer and wait for them there.

  Five of the Jerries were dead: maimed bodies with waxwork faces and vacant eyes, filmed with dirt. Close up, some of the wounds were gut-curdling: Caine saw a trooper whose neck had been broken and almost severed: his head lolled back at an acute angle: blood still pumped from a mess of gouged arteries. Another Jerry corpse had yolky matter seeping from a skull crushed like an eggshell.

  It was miraculous how lightly his patrol had got off, he thought – almost uncanny. Both patrols had been taken by surprise, both had had the same split-second chance to react: Caine didn’t believe that his SAS were faster or better shots. Then he realized that the Hun’s formation – Indian file – had made him more vulnerable. The Death’s Head leader should have formed his men into arrowhead as they left the bridge. He wondered why they’d advanced so quickly after the flare had gone up: his own reaction would have been to go to ground and wait for what came. In pressing on, the Jerry patrol leader had taken a gamble that hadn’t come off.

  Wallace called him over to look at the sixth Jerry – a sergeant. He was still alive, writhing with lurching spasms, his demented rambling punctuated by shrieks that gave Caine the willies. He scrooched down next to the sergeant, a stalk-necked youth with a hollow-templed head, face black and puckered with tiny cuts, eyes shiny and deranged. Caine took in the Waffen SS insignia on his collar, the Jolly Roger design on his field cap, wondered if this was the patrol commander. He was mortally wounded. His guts had been clawed out: his entrails squirmed like red snakes. The German stared at him, blinking, trying to focus. ‘Help,’ he gasped.

  Caine shook his head sadly, knowing there was nothing he could do: even water would make the gut-wound worse. ‘Poor sod,’ Wallace growled. ‘Shall I finish him, skipper? It’d be a mercy.’

  Caine paused, nodded, avoided the German’s eye.

  The big man drew his Purdey sawnoff, knelt beside the sergeant’s head. The Jerry’s eyelids fluttered at him: there was a frozen, sad smile on his face. ‘They’ll get you,’ he croaked. ‘They will be here soon.’

  ‘Maybe they will, mate,’ Wallace intoned gravely, ‘but that ain’t your concern now. You did your best. I don’t care what you are – Death’s Head, ex-screw, ex-jailbird or whatever – you’re a brave soldier. I ain’t much of a one for churchifying, but God bless.’
r />   He pulled both triggers: the double report slammed Caine so hard he almost fell over: his smock was spattered with gore. He moved away without looking back at the dead man. ‘Collect the weapons,’ he told the patrol. ‘Grenades, ammunition, everything. Do it fast: if that bloke was right, we’ll soon be fighting for our lives.’

  20

  Caine left the Totenkopf dead on the field, but not out of disrespect: any Jerry follow-up party might be tempted to retrieve the bodies, giving the SAS a tactical advantage. It was a mean ploy – in other circumstances he would have let the enemy lift their dead under a white flag – but they were in a tight fix, and couldn’t afford to miss a trick. He remembered grimly what Copeland had said only that afternoon, about honour, and playing by the rules.

  Caine detached Grimshaw at the old gunpit on the gap, with the Bren and a Very pistol, and orders to watch for further enemy movement. His own feeling was that they’d encountered a probing recce patrol. He guessed that the main body of Krauts was gathering at the bottom of the escarpment and wouldn’t advance until just before first light.

  They moved back to the leaguer, found Cutler leaning on a jeep, whitefaced and woozy. He’d cleaned and dressed his wound as best he could, but he’d lost blood, and his whole left arm had gone to sleep: the elbow joint was stiff, and he could only just move the fingers. ‘That’s me out for rifle shooting,’ he told Caine apologetically. ‘I might manage a Bren.’

  ‘You can man the mortar,’ Caine said. ‘You only need one hand for that.’

  They moved the jeeps up the steep track into the blockhouse courtyard, dismounted the heavy machine-guns. Cutler led them through the tunnel to the three sangars on the wall overlooking the approach. Caine detailed Wallace to occupy the middle sangar with the bazooka, and to shift the remaining rockets there. He assigned the two-inch mortar to Cutler and told him to set it up in the same place. He and Copeland took the side sangars, mounted heavy machine-guns on tripods, set up the Vickers ‘K’ at one, a .50 Browning at the other. ‘What about the spare Browning?’ Copeland asked.

  Caine glanced up at the dark walls of the blockhouse behind them. ‘Didn’t Quinnell say there was a sandbagged position up there?’

  While the others set about improving the defences, Caine sent Trubman to have another gander at the wireless set – getting comms with Fraser might be life and death now. Then he and Copeland climbed the ladder to the roof, inspected the post.

  ‘It’ll do,’ Caine said. ‘Only thing is, it stands out like a sore thumb. It’ll be the first place they’ll hit.’

  He gave Copeland a smoke: they stood quietly for a few moments, gazed down at the yard, watched shadows scurrying back and forth with ammo boxes and weapons, heard low voices, the clink of an entrenching tool. There was a view of the bridge from here, mother-of-pearl in the milklight. Cope smoked silently, studied the scene. ‘Ought to lay some mines down there, Tom,’ he said. ‘Round the bridgehead.’

  Caine nodded. ‘Have to get water, too. We’ll lay the mines, pick up Grimshaw, fill the jerrycans in the gorge.’

  There was a breath of wind, carrying with it odours like old resin and baked shale. Beyond the rise at the far end of the bridge, beyond the shoreless void of blackness, lay the far hillpeaks, dark chiselled chines and blunt chimneys, with a pale frame of vanilla thickening slowly along the edges. ‘Soon be light,’ Copeland said. He threw away his fag, met Caine’s eyes for a long second. ‘This is going to be a sticky one, mate.’

  Caine nodded again, felt a sudden overwhelming surge of emotion: fear, gratitude, sadness, guilt, love, a longing for Betty Nolan, nostalgia for a life that could never be again.

  ‘Thanks, Harry … I –’

  ‘No speeches, mate. We’ll get through it all right.’ He wrinkled his face, stuck his chin out, Fred Wallace fashion. ‘We’re bleedin’ SAS, ain’t we?’

  Trubman was still tinkering with the wireless at the tailboard of the signals jeep: he glanced up as Copeland and Caine approached, scratched his eyes under his glasses, as if he’d just woken from a dream. ‘Any luck, Taff ?’ Caine enquired.

  ‘Haven’t got comms yet, skipper. I’ll need to set up the Windam aerials for that. It’s a dicey job, see, these sets are fragile as anythink, like I always say, and –’

  ‘No comms?’ Caine cut him off. ‘You mean you’ve got the damn’ thing working?’

  Trubman gave him a dazed look. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Got it going a while back. I’m just doin’ the fine tunin’, see …’

  Copeland grinned massively: Caine clapped the stumpy signaller on the back. ‘You’re the best, mate. Now we’ve got a chance.’

  Trubman turned crab-coloured. ‘Well, I … working is one thing, see, comms is another …’

  ‘Keep at it,’ Caine said. ‘All we need is Fraser’s Bubbles and Frogs, and a flight of bombers, and Bob’s your Aunt Fanny.’

  There were a dozen No. 2 mines: Caine, Copeland and Wallace loaded them into the other jeep, together with four empty jerrycans. Caine left Copeland to set up the .50 on the roof, reminded him that either he or Cutler should be stood to at all times. Cope nodded. ‘Don’t hang about, skipper. It’s going to get lonely up here.’

  Cutler helped Copeland hoist the parts of the .50 calibre up to the roof as best he could: the feeling was already coming back to his arm: Cope assembled the gun, then went back for the ammo boxes, which Cutler couldn’t manage. When the Browning was standing on its tripod in the sangar, loaded and made safe, he climbed down into the courtyard, checked that the other Browning and the Vickers were in place, crouched in the support weapons emplacement with Cutler, shuftied the ground below. The ashen band on the skyline had become a butterwedge, the drapes of the night fraying along the edges in tattered dark filaments. Segments of the hills on both sides of the blockhouse were coming slowly into focus, angles and contours emerging from ironblue shadow like a slowly waking presence. It was silent: the final chapter of night when the whole world seemed to be waiting. They could make out the dark stains of the Totenkopf dead to their front, an asymmetrical configuration of bodies, lying on purple ground scattered with thornscrub and grass tussocks. Directly beyond the corpses, they could see the pale outline of the bridgehead, where Caine and Wallace were minelaying, a few paces from the jeep. About two hundred yards to their right, where the escarpment dropped sheer into the gorge, thicker trees hid from view the drywash that cut through the slope, ran along its base for a short distance, debouched into the ravine. ‘That’s the weak point in our perimeter,’ Copeland observed. He pointed to the copse. ‘The enemy could cross the gorge on foot and mass for an assault under the cover of those trees.’

  Cutler nodded. ‘Yep, maybe they’re that good. But they’d still have to cross open ground between there and here.’

  Cope surveyed the terrain immediately to their left: the old highroad passed through the gap between the blockhouse knoll and the northern scarp: no one could get through that without being spotted. ‘The only way they can get behind us is by climbing the escarpment,’ he commented.

  ‘Forget it, sir,’ Cutler said. ‘Me and Shorty reccied that cliff – it’s unclimbable, and it goes on for ever.’

  Copeland gave a grunt. ‘Not much more we can do then.’

  Cutler nodded. He admired Copeland’s careful attention to detail – that was one of the things, he thought, that made a good soldier. He liked to think he had the same thoroughness himself: it was one reason why he was already a lancejack at nineteen, when many of his comrades who’d seen longer service were still Tommies. Mike Cutler came from a town in Dorset, where his father had a small business building fences. His dad had been too young to serve in the Great War, but his uncle, Herbert, had been in the Royal Hampshires, and had been killed at Gallipoli. Mike had three elder sisters and a younger brother, who’d suffered from polio as an infant, and wasn’t able to attend school. Mike, who’d been good at his lessons, had repeated them every night for his benefit. He’d left school at fourteen, tak
en a job working at the local railway station for thirty-five bob a week. It wasn’t much even then, but times were hard and jobs were scarce. At sixteen he’d become apprenticed as a wool grader: it was skilled work, and well paid when you were qualified, but Cutler had never settled to it. When the war came, he’d been one of the first at the recruiting office and had signed on with the Devons and Dorsets. He’d done well in basic training: his stamina and determination had made up for his spindly physique: his boyish good humour and frankness had charmed even the hardest-nosed drill sergeants. No. 8 Commando had snapped him up, and when Layforce had been disbanded, he’d volunteered for the SAS – a unit never intended to fight defensive actions. Yet here he was, preparing to hold a bridge against overwhelming odds. He’d argued against it, but since Caine had decided this way, he was resigned to it: it seemed impossible, but he kept reminding himself of what his instructor at the depot had been fond of reciting: give me six good men and I can do anything you like.

  Copeland was drowzy, but he was starving too: they hadn’t eaten since before the foray to the derelict aircraft. That seemed a lifetime ago: they’d fought two actions since then. Some scoff, a brew and a few Bennies would keep the demons at bay, he thought. If they didn’t get some grub down their necks, they might not get another chance. ‘I’ll get a brew on,’ he told Cutler. ‘Keep your eyes on the bridge.’

  ‘Right-oh, sir.’

  Cope opened compo tins with his clasp knife, lit two Tommy-cookers, heated bully-beef stew in a mess tin, boiled tea. When it was ready, he called Trubman in from the back yard. The signaller’s broad face was animated. ‘You get through, Taffy?’ Copeland asked.

  ‘I got the Windam aerials up,’ Trubman said, taking a mess tin of stew and a mug of tea. ‘That’s a hard job, see, specially on ground like that, and I had to do it by myself …’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but did you get comms?’