Seek Out and Destroy (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  Smith said, ‘Stand to. Tea. And it’s stopped raining.’

  Buckley muttered, ‘They must ha’ run out of it.’ He sucked at the tea gratefully. ‘Thank ye, sir.’

  Smith wound the handle on the field telephone and lifted the receiver. Menzies’ voice squeaked distantly in his ear:

  ‘Fortnum and Mason — high class provisions. Hampers a speciality. What can I send you, Mr. Buckley?’

  Smith glanced at Buckley now running fingers through his hair and jamming on his cap. He said, ‘Mr. Buckley is performing his toilet.’

  He heard Menzies say, ‘Oh, Lord!’ Then: ‘Menzies, here sir.’

  Smith said drily, ‘So I gathered. Stand to.’

  ‘Standing to now, sir.’

  ‘Did that ammunition come up?’

  ‘Not yet, sir.’

  And they were down to twenty rounds. Smith said, ‘Let me know as soon as it does.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Smith replaced the receiver and Buckley cleared his throat, said, ‘We’ve been in the habit of having a bit of a joke when things was quiet, sir. Very humorous, Mr. Menzies, sir.’

  ‘I’d noticed.’ Smith turned away and Buckley grinned.

  Smith returned to stand at the front of the house, gulped at his tea and as the light grew he peered out at the churned mud, pocked with shell-holes and stretching away into the half-light. Somewhere out there, no more than a mile away from him, lay the Cavetta canal and the enemy. He knelt by the field telephone wired to Garizzo’s dug-out and wound the handle. Garizzo answered and Smith said, ‘That ammunition didn’t come up. We’re down to twenty rounds. Can you send another message?’

  Garizzo swore and Smith winced as the expletive crackled in his ear, then: ‘I will send a message to Headquarters now.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Smith set the instrument down and went back to staring out into no-man’s land. His gun had only twenty rounds of ammunition. The attack would come soon. He watched the light grow until he could see the canal and beyond it the enemy lines sketched by the strung barbed-wire. He had expected a barrage by now but no gun fired. It was so quiet that Smith jumped, his overstretched nerves reacting, when the telephone jangled. He snatched it. ‘Smith.’

  Garizzo’s voice squawked in Smith’s ear. ‘What the hell is going on? Can you see anything?’

  Smith answered, on one knee and peering out across the marshes, ‘Nothing. No sign of anyone.’

  ‘They’re there. Last night the patrols heard them and said it sounded as if the place was full of them.’

  ‘They could be hidden along the bank of the canal. They could hide a thousand men there.’ The Austrians had hidden three times that many the previous day.

  What are they waiting for? There is something strange. ‘I don’t like it.’ Garizzo sounded uneasy. He finished, ‘Keep watch.’

  Smith put down the telephone. He did not like this quiet, either. He wondered if he should order the gun to fire two or three searching rounds at the line of the canal then decided against it. Ammunition was short. He dared not waste a round in probing when there might not be a single man hidden below the canal bank.

  Buckley muttered, ‘Fine morning like this, you could fancy walking down and having a look.’

  It was a fine morning, cool but clear, the mountains hidden only in the haze of distance. So according to Garizzo it would have been fine in Trieste last night. A bird sang out in the wasteland between the trench and the house and its song carried to Smith in the stillness. Nothing moved in the open marshland but far back where lay the Austrian lines there was a drift of blue smoke as someone cooked breakfast or made coffee. To seaward the sun glinted on blue water and was so low it hurt the eye to look into its glare. Smith lifted his hand and averted his eyes from that glare — then froze with the hand uplifted, lips parting. So for a moment until Buckley said, ‘Sir?’ — and himself turned to gaze seaward.

  Then Smith’s hand snapped down to grab the telephone and whirl the handle. As Garizzo answered Smith shouted, ‘Enemy ship opening fire! Take cover!’ He repeated the warning while Buckley stared out to sea at the ship there, lean and graceful, steaming slowly inside her destroyer screen, pushing out of the smoke made by her own firing. On that morning and in that visibility there was no mistaking Salzburg. Buckley stood transfixed at sight of her. Then the salvo from that beautiful ship screamed in to turn the still morning into a hell. The eleven-inch shells burst monstrously like thunderclaps and hurled tons of wet earth and mud high into the air. The open ground before the house erupted in yellow flame and jetting smoke, and hot breath from the shells nearest the house stripped the last of the tiles from it and threw Buckley, Smith and the telephones to the back wall. Smith, deafened, pushed at Buckley and mouthed at him, ‘Get out!’ He pointed at the hole in the floor and Buckley grabbed his rifle and dropped through to the room below. Smith ripped the wires from the telephones, tossed the instruments down to the waiting Buckley then jumped. He landed on fingers and toes, Buckley seized his arm and hurried him through the hole where the door had been. Together they ran across the track and fell into the ditch there, crouched again with water up to their waists, pressed their faces into the mud and covered their heads with their arms as the ground leapt under them and bricks rained down around them.

  When the earth was briefly still Smith raised his head and saw the house gone, now only existed as a heap of rubble with the timber sticking out of it like broken ribs. He could see it through the smoke that blanketed the ground before him. Somewhere behind that smoke lay the trench, Garizzo and his marines. Beyond them — Smith jammed his head down under his protective arms as the earth lifted under him again, blast punched at him and the heavens fell.

  *

  They heard that tremendous barrage all along the line past Mestre. In Venice it came to them as a rolling thunder and they saw the far-off lifting of the smoke. Helen Blair had not slept till near the dawn and now came running from her bed with a snatched robe around her shoulders, stood trembling at the window and prayed.

  *

  Smith lost track of time as he lay and shuddered, pressed deeper into the ditch. When the barrage stopped he still lay prone, eyes closed against it, waiting in the ear-ringing stillness for the hell to burst on him again. When it did not he lifted his head from his shaking arms and saw Buckley lying with face turned towards him, eyes wide in the muddied mask.

  Faintly he heard Buckley say, ‘Lifted, sir.’ He nodded in reply. The barrage had lifted. Smoke drifted before him, lazily coiling on the breeze. He pushed to his knees and then stood up. Through breaks in the smoke he could see Salzburg turning away eastward. She had done her murderous work and was moving on before the MAS boats and destroyers came tearing out from Venice to hunt her. He spat earth from his lips and swallowed, told Buckley, ‘The telephone.’

  They traced the wires to where they ran into the smoking rubble of the house, crouched in the shelter the rubble gave and Buckley cut the wires, bared the ends and screwed the terminals of the telephone down on them. He wound the handle furiously and set the receiver to his ear, listened, eyes on Smith, then shook his head. ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘Keep trying.’ Smith lifted cautiously to peer over the rubble. The sky was clear above him but he could only see a few score yards of blasted earth, smoke hid everything else. From beyond the smoke came the rattle and crack of rifle-fire but now there was no stutter of machine-guns and the firing sounded sporadic, scattered. He thought numbly that although the trenches the marines held and the holes they’d dug in the sides of them gave fair protection against the light field-guns and mortars, even a near-miss from Salzburg’s big guns could cave in a trench dug out of mud while a direct hit would obliterate it. The marines, out-numbered and out-gunned, had nevertheless held the line up to now, but this final stroke, the bombardment from the sea, would have been too much. Some of them would probably have survived, though that was hard to believe, but they would be under attack now, the waves of infantry
rolling forward from their gathering place along the sheltering bank of the canal.

  ‘Got ‘em, sir!’

  He spun round at Buckley’s shout, grabbed the telephone and spoke into it as he stared at the smoke, ‘Smith.’

  ‘Menzies, sir.’ His voice came faintly.

  Smith raised his. ‘What is your situation?’

  ‘They pasted us, sir. Pontoon’s holed but she was resting on the bottom anyway. The gun is all right. I’ve one man dead and another wounded, sir. He’s pretty bad.’ Menzies’ squeaky voice stopped.

  Smith tried not to imagine him down there by the gun in the bloody chaos, tried to forget Menzies squeaking cheerfully, ‘Fortnum and Mason — high class provisions.’ The smoke was drifting away before him and he could see across the open ground to the communication trench and away to his left the end of it where it emerged in the shelter of the houses. Now the houses were rubble. Marines were stumbling up out of the trench and staggering past the piles of rubble, across the road to the ditch beyond. Garizzo stood at the head of the trench, hauling the men out, pushing them towards the ditch.

  So the front-line trench was lost and Garizzo would try to hold a line along the road using the ditch as a makeshift trench. There was nowhere else and if that failed the enemy would pour through the gap, widening it as they rolled up the defences on either side. Smith could see them now, swarming across the marshland from the trench the marines had held these last two days.

  The Austrians had prepared this attack and the key to it was the bombardment by Salzburg. She had sailed from Trieste in the night when the weather cleared there, sure that visibility off the coast would be good enough in the morning for her big guns to pour in a heavy fire that would smash a hole in the line. They were advancing to exploit it now, across the muddy waste. This was the attack in force that Garizzo had dreaded would come if the Austrians were repulsed elsewhere. Line after line rolled over the trench and across the marsh. But there was an even closer threat. They had seen how they could advance quickly along the causeway leading across no-man’s land from the canal to the houses. It was horribly exposed but now, obviously, they believed the bombardment by Salzburg would have neutralised any defensive fire. From the scattered rifle-fire it seemed they were right. They crowded the track, pushing along it in a dense, hurrying column.

  Smith spoke into the telephone, urgently, ‘SOS. Target One! SOS. Target One! Fire Fire!’

  Menzies answered, ‘SOS. Target One! Fire!’

  It was an order Smith had prayed he would not have to give. The SOS targets were in rear of the front-line trench, the gun had never fired on them and the firing data had been calculated from other, registered, targets. For Target One they had worked from a shoot in the track. He crouched behind the rubble and fumbled for the pistol at his belt. Buckley sprawled a yard away, the Lee-Enfield at his shoulder, firing as fast as he could work the bolt. Rifle-fire crackled away to the left, but sparsely. There were only the few survivors crouched in the ditch firing now.

  Garizzo came running, stumbling and slipping on the muddy earth and dropped down beside Smith. He carried a rifle and a bandolier of ammunition hung over his shoulder. Like all of them he was coated in mud that had dried on his face and cracked with the creases of it. His breath wheezed as he panted, ‘The trench fell in! Metres and metres of it! Those shells just levelled it, filled it! Both machine-guns lost and I only brought out about twenty men. The rest of the regiment’— he jerked his thumb westward — ‘are still holding out if the Austrians pour through this gap —!’ He glared at Smith. ‘What about your gun?’

  ‘Serviceable.’ Smith, telephone pressed to his ear, heard the faint squawking, covered his other ear with the hand that gripped the pistol and said, ‘Say again!’

  This time he heard Menzies: ‘Shot! Time of flight seven seconds!’

  ‘Shot!’ Smith looked down at his watch, counted seconds, looked up and saw the shell fall, left of the rack and just ahead of the column.

  ‘Repeat!’

  ‘Repeat!’ That was Menzies, then: ‘Shot!’

  Counting as the smoke drifted away and he saw the column coming on. Seven. The shell burst on the head of the column.

  ‘Repeat!... Repeat!... Repeat!...’ He had to hoard his ammunition on this narrow target, so instead of gunfire ordered single rounds, ready to correct if necessary. The shells fell on or close alongside the track and the column melted away, men stumbling off across the marshy open ground, seeking cover or their own lines.

  He turned away, back to the main thrust of the Austrian attack.

  The attacking lines that had rolled over the lost trench were pressing home the attack, bent on breaking through. The ruined houses drew them, the sole prominent feature in a nearly featureless landscape and they closed in towards it as if advancing into a funnel.

  Smith called, ‘SOS. Target Two! SOS. Target Two! Five rounds gunfire!’

  ‘SOS. Target Two! Five rounds gunfire!’ Then: ‘Shot! Time of flight seven seconds!’

  Smith waited, then watched as the shells came down. The zone of the gun, those tiny inequalities in charges you could never calculate for, spread the bursts about the marsh. He needed them spread like that across the horde that filled it but they fell too far in rear, on the lines still coming forward from the trench but the leading lines were closer and still advancing. A battalion? Two? A thousand, two thousand men pouring down the narrow bottleneck towards the houses, towards himself. He saw Garizzo running crouched along the rear of the thin line of his men spaced along the ditch. They were fixing bayonets.

  Smith ordered, ‘Three hundred yards! One o’clock! Ten rounds gunfire!’

  Menzies answered, ‘Three hundred yards! One o’clock! Ten rounds gunfire!’ Then: ‘Only ten rounds remaining, sir.’

  ‘Fire!’

  Smith saw Buckley in the act of reloading, thumbing the rounds from the clip into the breach of the Lee-Enfield. Buckley looked up at that order, realising it would call fire down on top of them, then closed the bolt of the rifle.

  Smith shouted at him, ‘Get out of it! Get back to the marines!’

  Buckley shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t get a yard, sir!’

  That was true. The Austrians were firing as they advanced, the whip-crack! ripping the air overhead. Smith watched them, now so close that he could see faces, make out features, the eyes under the helmets, the mouths open, panting. They walked, breathless and worn down by the slogging trot across the heavy ground, their ranks ragged. But there was no scything machine-gun, nothing to stop their steamroller advance from grinding over Garizzo and his handful of marines.

  Smith never heard the shell howl in because it fell barely fifty yards in front. He had one camera-blink impression of the havoc wrought in the leading files then his head went down as he huddled behind the rubble. His body shook again as the earth was shaken beneath him by the impact of big shells falling close before the ruined house. These shells were not from Salzburg but the gun commanded by Menzies and Davies. They could kill him just the same. In theory they should fall fifty yards away but once again the zone of the gun, those tiny inequalities in charges, could spread the bursts, and mean a direct hit where he lay.

  He found himself counting. When the tenth shell’s exploding ripped the air and brought mud, stones and splinters cracking down on the rubble of the house and the road, on Buckley and himself, he cowered under it then slowly raised his head. Smoke swirled and drifted again on the wind across the battleground. Through it he saw men standing bewildered or wandering aimlessly, other figures sprawled in the wasteland of mud and pools of black water. He heard the regular crack! of Buckley’s rifle and the marines firing away to his left. He could hear the wounded, see them.

  Buckley had stopped to reload and shouted hoarsely, ‘They’re pulling back, sir!’ They were. In expectation of a further barrage the wave was receding, rolling slowly back towards the trench and then the canal. They did not know, could not know, that the defending gun had f
ired its last shell.

  Garizzo appeared, slapped Smith’s shoulder, then turned to bawl at his marines as they dragged themselves wearily from their cover in the ditch. He bawled again at Sevastano, his second-in-command, trotting up from the flank that had escaped Salzburg’s barrage and leading a long file of marines. Garizzo turned to Smith again. ‘Magnificent! Now we take back our trench and dig it out again!’ He was gone, striding inexhaustibly at the head of his men as they deployed behind him and plodded through the mud towards the ruined trench. The Austrians had made no attempt to hold it, poured past it to the canal and dropped out of sight. If they regrouped there then Garizzo would be calling for fire again.

  Smith reached down for the telephone and saw his hand shaking so the receiver rattled on its stand. It rang. He lifted it and said, ‘Smith.’

  Menzies answered, ‘There’s a steam-barge coming up the coast, sir. It might be our ammunition.’

  ‘Let me know. We’ll need it.’

  Ten minutes later Menzies confirmed the barge carried the ammunition and: ‘There’s a relief crew for the gun, sir. The officer’s coming up to take over from you. I’ve seen his orders and Davies read them and said they’re all right. The officer’s signing for everything and I’ve fired two flares for Hercules to come up.’

  The line crackled. Smith was certain he heard correctly but asked Menzies to repeat it all because it seemed too good to be true. Lucky skipper of the barge. Had he left Venice a half hour earlier he would have been shelled by Salzburg and her escort.