Forced March

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Why don’t you send them a shitting printed invitation that we’re coming? They’ll spot us straight away.’

  ‘Exactly, you miserable piece of apeshit. That’s what I want them to do. I want them to have us fixed as being over here. Once they’ve spotted us, we’ll do a quick retreat, provided that you can sort out reverse gear in time, being the dum-dum that you are.’

  ‘I resent that,’ Matz said hotly.

  Schulze told him what he could do with his resentment and Matz grinned. ‘I can’t, Schulze. I’ve already got a double-decker bus up there.’

  ‘Then we make smoke, blinding the buck-teethed buggers and go like a bat out of hell for their rear into the blind ground. Have you got it?’

  ‘Got it!’ Matz answered easily. ‘Should I carve a couple of crosses for our graves now with my sabre?’

  ‘I’ll carve a cross on your ugly mug in a minute. We can do it all right with a bit of luck and provided that you’re nifty enough with that joystick of yours. All right, let’s roll ’em! And you,’ he added to the corporal standing on the turret, his face deathly pale and streaked with black, congealed blood. ‘Fire that popgun of yours as soon as we hit that rise. I’m in charge of the smoke launchers. All right, move it!’

  * * *

  ‘Jerry tank!’ the Snotty yelled in sudden fear as the Mark IV breasted the rise to their right, showering soil and sods of grass everywhere.

  ‘On that bloody gun – gildy!’ the Laird reacted immediately, ‘Curtis, Menzies!’

  The men needed no urging. A frenzy of fumbling. The great cannon swung round. Two hundred yards away the tank was rolling down the rise, its cannon already in action.

  Curtis flung himself in the gun-layer’s seat. There was no time to sight the cannon. The Mark IV was only a hundred and fifty yards away. He snatched crazily at the firing lever. The monstrous weapon erupted with a huge roar. Hot blast whipped their tired faces. The turret flooded with yellow smoke. The Laird gasped as his lungs filled with the acrid blast and staggered to the nearest slit. Where the tank had been a moment before there was a sudden hole of brown steaming earth, and beyond it, thick clouds of white smoke rising swiftly from the ground.

  ‘Did we get it?’ the Snotty asked excitedly, staggering over to him, his fear replaced by the thrill of combat.

  The Laird rubbed his reddened eyes wearily. ‘I don’t rightly know, laddie, but it looks like it … All right?’ he commanded, his voice firm again, ‘keep a weather-eye on that spot, Curtis and Menzies. I don’t want no more of them buggers creeping up on us like that. ‘Cos once they’ve got under the range of that popgun of yours, they’ve got us by the short arm. With them tank guns, they’ll take us apart bit by bit and there’s bugger all we’ll be able to do about it. So keep yer eyes skinned!’

  * * *

  ‘Shit on the shingle,’ Matz cursed, his voice thin and seeming very far away. ‘Never soddingly well do anything like that to me again, Schulze, or I’ll stick that bit of tin you wears round yer neck right up your arse – sideways!’ Savagely he rammed home yet another gear and the tank rattled across the uneven ground as if the devil himself were after it.

  Schulze slapped his ear. He had hardly been able to make out Matz’s words, deafened by the roar of the great shell which had shaken the tank, as if it had been a child’s tin toy. Next to him the gunner, who had forgotten to open his mouth when the blast had engulfed him, was bleeding from both nose and ears.

  Schulze poked his head cautiously above the turret and tried to make out their position in the white smoke which swirled all around them like one of the thick seafogs of his native Hamburg.

  ‘Well?’ Matz’s voice inquired over the radio.

  ‘Don’t worry me, monkey turd. Keep your foot down on the gas pedal that’s all and give her all the juice you’ve got!’

  ‘Look out, sir!’ the corporal cried urgently.

  ‘What? Oh Christ on a crutch, we’re running out of smoke!’ A sudden breeze had come in from the sea and was dispersing the fog to their right; they were heading for the cleared patch at thirty kilometres an hour. ‘Matz, watch it!’

  But the little one-legged driver had already spotted the danger. Frantically he jerked at the left-hand tiller bar to pull the tank round and out of danger but it was too late. They were already in the open, clearly outlined in the brilliant August sunshine which had suddenly flooded the cliff top. ‘Oh Mama,’ Schulze moaned to no one in particular, as the great gun began to swing towards them, ‘here’s where we start looking at the taties from below!’

  * * *

  ‘In the name of sweet Jesus, get that big bitch round, will yer?’ the Laird cried hysterically, as Curtis and Menzies heaved the cannon round. ‘Come on, the rest of you, don’t stand there like spare dildoes in a convent, lend a sodding hand!’

  Curtis flung himself into the gun-layer’s seat and left the pushing to the rest. Menzies freed one hand and snapped up the breech lever. ‘Away ye go, Jock!’ he yelled as the gun reached its maximum traverse.

  Curtis thrust his eye against the rubber eye-piece. The Mark IV leapt into view, bisected neatly by the graduated line of the sight. ‘I’m going to fire,’ he yelled and grabbed for the firing lever. In another second the Mark IV would have vanished into the blind ground.

  ‘Fire, for God’s sake!’ the Laird screamed in fearful exasperation. ‘Fire!’

  Curtis jerked back the lever. Once again the big gun roared into life. Instinctively the Laird blinked. When he opened his eyes again a fraction of a second later, he caught a glimpse of the dark whirling mass of the shell heading straight out to sea and the disappearing metal rump of the Mark IV scuttling for the dead ground.

  * * *

  Schulze took over the 75mm personally, as the Mark IV came to a halt some fifty metres behind and to the right of the silent turret. ‘You see, greenbeak,’ he lectured the young corporal as he settled himself comfortably in the gunner’s seat, ‘this is where the real expert comes in. For a job like this, you’ve got to treat yer gun like yer’d treat a virgin – though I suppose you wouldn’t even know how to do that. Soft, gentle, trying not to hurt her, but using a bit of cunning to get her to roll over and open her pearly gates for yer, just as we’re going to get that lot over there to open their legs for us.’ He fondled the gun lovingly.

  ‘Aw for Chrissake,’ Matz complained from below. ‘I won’t be able to get out of the driving seat if yer go on, talking like that – I’ll be wedged in here. What is this – a war or a sodding session at Rosi-Rosi’s knocking shop?’

  Schulze swung the turret round until the long, hooded 75mm was sighted directly on the turret’s nearest slit. His big hand clutched at the firing bar. He took a deep breath and then yelled, using all the English he knew, ‘All right, Tommies, it’s a long way to Tipperary! And here you go!’

  * * *

  Curtis was blinded by the first shell. He reeled back from the observation slit, his face a myriad of bleeding cuts, as if someone had rubbed it with a wire pan cleaner.

  Apologetically he said: ‘I’m sorry, Laird. But I think yon shell did fer mah eyes. I canna see. Then as the turret was struck a second time and the gloomy, wildly shaking room was filled with thick choking concrete dust, he sat down carefully in the corner and politely but determinedly refused to be touched.

  Next to him, Menzies, his pal, pressed his broad back against the heeling wall and began softly saying psalms.

  The terrible pounding continued. After a while the Snotty went mad. At first it was a reserved, English form of madness, and consisted of the boy placing his face in his hands and sobbing quietly. But as that monstrous, close-ranged battering went on and on, he began to scream.

  The Laird hit him across the face, but the nerve-wracking screaming went on. Then the Snotty began to chew his tongue, his eyeballs turned back in his head with only a bit of the white showing, the saliva running down his dust-coated contorted face was tinged pink with blood.

  ‘Grab hold of
him!’ the Laird commanded.

  A couple of the commandos seized the boy’s arms. The Laird drew his skean dhu, and prising open the Snotty’s jaw, slid in the little blade to prevent him biting off his tongue. The trick worked. The boy started to grind his teeth on the steel blade, his body still twitching convulsively, but his cries becoming weaker and weaker until they had fallen to a soft whimper, large tears trickling down his cheeks. The Laird cradled the boy’s face in his arms, muttering softly to him all the time until he closed his eyes and died.

  * * *

  ‘Will the buck-teethed bastards never give up?’ cried Matz from below. ‘My head’s going like a shitty ding-dong bell with the noise. And look at the place, it looks as if somebody has worked it over with a power-shovel!’

  Schulze nodded. He had destroyed every slit in front of him and the concrete of the turret was so deeply gouged and scarred with shell-fire that there was little trace of its original shape left. They must be shittingly well off their heads to stand that kind of punishment,’ he agreed and wiped, the dripping sweat from his brow, his face burned from the August sun and the terrific heat of the open turret. He threw a glance at Number One Company sprawled in the parched grass waiting for the turret to surrender. ‘All the same, the CO’s not going to risk those greenbeaks in a direct attack, Matz,’ he explained. ‘It’s up to us to make the Tommies give in.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s allus the old heads who get the dirty work.’

  With a sigh, Schulze stowed new shells in the ready bins and swung himself behind the red-hot gun once more. ‘All right, you little currant-crapper,’ he said, ‘you’d better take another aspirin for that turnip of yours. Here we go again.’ He jerked the lever and the gun roared into violent life.

  ‘Great God and all his shitty triangles,’ Matz cursed, his hands pressed tightly over his bleeding ears, ‘how long is this going to go on for?’

  * * *

  The Laird was asking himself the same question as the terrible pounding began again. He looked around the shaking, dust-filled gloom of the turret and knew that his men were at the end of their tether. All of them had sunk into a strange lethargy, their eyes wide and staring, the only sign of the tremendous strain they were under, the nervous tics of their dust-coated faces. In between shells the silence of the turret was only broken by Menzies’ low murmur as he repeated over and over again, ‘the Lord is my shepherd …’

  Slowly the Laird levered himself up against the trembling wall and said in a voice that he hardly recognised as his own, ‘Lads, I … I think we’ve … had it …’

  It seemed an age before the men reacted. Then slowly they turned their eyes in his direction, and looked at him in dumb expectation.

  ‘Lads, do we surrender?’ It seemed an age before they reacted. Then, one by one, they shook their heads.

  The Laird smiled slowly and gravely. ‘Thank you, lads,’ he croaked. He raised his voice. ‘On your feet. Come on, you bunch of pregnant penguins, get them fingers out of your orifices – move it!

  ‘All right. Them sodding Jerries are not going to take us alive – we’re the Seventh Commando; remember! The bash-on boys!’ There was iron in his voice now. ‘Not a ruddy lot of square-bashing squaddies. Come on now, let’s see a bit of swank there. You Murdock, get that tunic of yours buttoned up … Gilchrist, how often have I told yer, you idle man, that your webbing belt’s got to be over yer blouse. Now get it soddingly well seen to, or yer’ll be on a fizzer before yer knows what hits yer. At the double, man!’

  With fingers that felt as thick as pork sausages, the survivors adjusted their uniforms, pulling down their blouses and canvas gaiters, buttoning up their jackets, tugging at their stocking caps. It was as though they imagined they would hear the tremendous voice of Black Jack, the Commando’s Regimental Sergeant Major, now long dead and floating face downwards in the English Channel, crying: ‘All right, right-markers, get on parade!’ and they would tense, legs apart, arms rigid down behind their backs, ready to march on as soon as the next command came – ‘Seventh Commando – Seventh Commando, get on PARADE!’

  But now the last command they would ever receive was not to get on parade, but to die. The Laird’s lips were red against his dusty face as he snarled, ‘All right, what are yer waiting for – fix bayonets!’

  There was a frenzy of fumbling. The Laird turned and walked smartly down the dark littered corridor, turned the steel catches on the door, his head full of the stirring music of the pipes. The men crowded around him, their bayonets glinting in the faint light.

  ‘Now!’ the Laird yelled, raising his skean dhu high in the air.

  * * *

  ‘Oh, my holy Christ!’ Schulze breathed in awe, as they came stumbling out into the bright sunshine, blinded by the sudden light, but bayonets at the ready, led by a little runt of an officer, dressed in an absurd skirt which dangled around his skinny knees. The corporal raised his schmeisser. Hastily Schulze pushed it to one side. ‘Knock it off,’ he cried angrily.

  ‘Hold your fire!’ bellowed von Dodenburg, only fifty metres away, as his men raised their weapons too. ‘Hold your fire, I say!’ his eyes filled with awed respect at these filthy apparitions who had once been men, staggering wearily towards them.

  But Sergeant-Major Metzger, aware that he must take some part in the battle for Dieppe before it was too late if he were to retain his position as senior NCO of SS Battalion Wotan, was not listening to such orders. Standing at the back of the truck which had brought him to the scene of the action and sure he was in full view of the Vulture, coming up with the rest of the Battalion, he pressed the trigger of his schmeisser. At that range he could not miss.

  ‘Stop that, Metzger!’ cried von Dodenburg. ‘For God’s sake –’ the words died on his lips for it was already too late. All of the English were writhing in their death throes on the ground save the lone figure in the kilt who staggered another few paces before he took the Butcher’s last burst in his stomach. The thin knees beneath the overlong kilt gave way and he dropped to the ground. The Laird of Abernockie and Dearth, once known as ‘Foxy Fergus’, was dead at last. When von Dodenburg turned his body over, he was surprised to see the dead Englishman was smiling.

  * * *

  It was five o’clock. Exactly forty minutes later, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt telephoned the Führer’s HQ. His message was short and brutal in its simplicity: ‘Mein Führer, no armed Englishman remains on the Continent!’

  FIFTEEN

  The setting sun was beginning to slip into the sea. From the land the hard black shadows were stealing in at last to hide the terrible beach. Yet for a few more minutes the setting sun still bathed that scene of death and destruction in its crimson light.

  Field Marshal von Rundstedt and his staff officers, standing on the shattered, battle-littered promenade, surveyed it in a profound silence broken only by the soft whimpering of the last of the Canadian wounded. Hardened, professional soldiers as they were – many of them veterans of the mass slaughters of the Western Front in the First War – they were awed and impressed by the sheer degree of the massacre.

  Nothing had escaped the defenders’ withering fire – neither man nor machine. Everywhere the British dead lay, their big boots sticking upwards or face downwards in the warm sand among the shattered tanks and landing craft – the whole beach as far as the eye could see seemed carpeted with their khaki-clad bodies. And everything was so dreadfully still. Nothing stirred except the sand flies buzzing busily above the dead, and the pathetic, wilted hedge-roses which some of the Canadians had plucked to stick in their helmets as they marched so bravely to their boats only a few short hours before.

  Field Marshal von Rundstedt took his eyes from that barren, blasted landscape and said in an old and very tired voice, ‘Gentlemen, we cannot consider the operation at Dieppe a local raid. The expenditure in men and material was too great for that.’ Wearily he pointed his marshal’s baton, given to him personally by Hitler, at one of the shattered Churchills. �
�One does not sacrifice twenty or thirty of one’s most modern tanks for a raid.’

  There was a low murmur of agreement from his officers. ‘No matter. In our propaganda statements we must now emphasise that the enemy believed he could seize a bridgehead here at Dieppe and then use the good port facilities for bringing up and landing in succession the floating and operational reserves. We shall call it a failed attempt at the Second Front. Is that understood, gentlemen?’

  ‘Understood, Excellency.’

  For a few moments the aged Field Marshal was silent, sunk in his own thoughts. His watery gaze fell on a little group of Tommies caught by a burst of fire in the act of setting up a machine-gun. One was still propped up behind his Bren gun by the sand, peering along the barrel, his face set in an eloquent, passionate look of devotion to duty, even in death, with the sand flies crawling over the glassy balls of his eyes. Next to him lay the loader with the curved magazine clutched in his claw of a hand, his lips drawn back in a grim smile that gave his dead face a triumphant look.

  ‘It was an amateurish operation,’ he whispered drily to himself. ‘One would think they wanted it to fail right from the start.’ He shivered.

  ‘Is anything the matter, Excellency?’ his chief aide inquired anxiously.

  ‘No, Heinz, it’s nothing.’ He smiled thinly, his eyes almost disappearing into the mass of wrinkles around his faded eyes. ‘A louse must have run over my liver. But I will tell you this, gentlemen,’ he raised his thin voice so that they could all hear, ‘they will not do it like this again. And they will come again, believe you me!’ He took a last look at the still sea, momentarily flushed a dramatic crimson by the dying sun, and turned to go without another word. His staff officers, suddenly depressed and apprehensive, filed after him to the waiting Horch.

  * * *

  ‘All right, it’s all clear,’ Schulze whispered, as the staff car with its ancient passenger drew away and the beach was left to the dead, ‘he’s gone, Matzi.’