by Derek Beaven
Forty-eight hours his company had been confined to their open-topped vessel, with breaks only for trips up on to the wharf for meals at the mobile canteens. Vic was intensely familiar with the inside of the little ship, its painted metal and latrine-like smells. It was more like a flimsy kind of lighter than a barge.
A hundred and eighty men were its principal cargo, divided between four holds. He said to his pal, Norton, that if he’d been back at Everholt’s yard he could have welded the thing together in an afternoon. It had a tower structure over the engines at the back and a pair of drop ramps at the front. The installation of both was for one purpose only: the negotiation of the far beach.
Vic looked down at the items he held in his hands. They were the latest issue: bags for vomit, and pills for seasickness. He was impressed by the army’s attention to detail. It showed a certain loving kindness. Nevertheless, it was obvious enough that one well-aimed bomb could finish him and his mates – together with their officers, who’d come forward from their cabins to sit with them. Or one shell would be enough to empty them all out into the briny. And even if they did get across …?
He stowed the pills and sick bag in one of his innumerable fastenings and looked around him. His fellows, squashed in en masse, wearing their tin hats and Mae Wests, took up every square inch of floor space. A few were standing, smoking or drinking tea. Most were seated, resting against their equipment, gambling, talking, writing letters.
Rifles and entrenching tools bristled amidst the throng. At the far end of the hold the rations were packed; beside them, bizarrely, were the bicycles. Here, moored up in the midst of a fleet of similar craft at Southampton Docks, Vic felt he had more or less arrived at the end of the line.
Yet it came as a relief when the engines started. Everyone left what they were doing and stood up to get a view. He craned to see their crew unlash the tangle of strappings to the next boat. They cast off and joined the queue, of similar transports and similar soldiers; one by one they left the security of the docks.
Gradually, Vic felt the American-built vessel pick up the dip and rise of open water; the men braced themselves against their kitbags. He noted that the great assembly they’d passed on their way in – of much larger vessels at anchor, camouflaged troop-ships with their tugs and attendants – was no longer there.
‘Only back to Lymington, most like. Eh, Vic? It’s all off, isn’t it?’ Matthieson smiled sarcastically. He held on to the hull. ‘Those soft sailor bastards. All gone home. Didn’t like the look of the weather after all.’
But it was clear within the next five minutes that they were heading down the Solent towards the Channel in force, and that the event they had spent the last three years preparing for was finally under way. Vic peered above the steel bulwark at the black, feathered water. Going to be a sea and a half out there, he thought.
Norton twisted to get a glance back at the receding shore. Then he turned to Vic. ‘How long to get clear of the Isle of Wight, then?’ He cocked his head to one side, as if to savour the home waters. ‘You’re the fucking water rat round here.’
‘Hour, maybe.’ Vic said. ‘Depends on the swell. Depends on what this thing’ll do.’ He lit a cigarette. The cumbersome landing craft broke into heavier water. It chucked and danced into the broadening estuary.
The men sat down again, squatted in spaces, renewed card-games. Some read. Some said prayers. A sergeant-major seated a couple of yards away was already looking ill, his face green in the overcast evening. And Vic, sharpened, purposeful, could feel the anxiety sluice back and forth along some bilge in his own stomach.
For more than a week since the receipt of Clarice’s letter his thoughts had been in turmoil. He’d found himself enraged for hours; his anger for her concealment of Jack blinded him to her predicament. The affair had always been a cruel sham; she was exactly like Phyllis. Love was delusion, since all women were false. At other times, his own importunate demands on her disgusted him, now that he knew the score. The torment was his own blind insensitivity. He thought of the sweetness of revenge: for what Tony Rice had done to her, for his son, and for his own terrible feelings. The Army and the moment were providing the supreme opportunity. In the release of violence he’d feel clean.
IT WAS TRUE. HE was ready, a loaded gun, a trained killer. Other soldiers – decent men doing a job – stowed lucky coins, rabbits’ feet, family photographs in their pockets. Vic had his hatred curled about his heart.
During the last two weeks, while the last briefings had gone down and the live rounds were issued, he’d learnt to rely on this feeling growing inside him. It would see him through. It had kept him warm, hot. Suddenly, in mid-Channel, it deserted him. Seasickness? He’d never been seasick in his life. The body took over, and an unnerving faintness swept him. He could barely move, let alone fight.
He found himself acutely preoccupied with the enemy. The young German who would take his life was having his evening meal in a concrete bunker, maybe, or chatting to a girl in some wind-whipped seaside bar. Or there was some Russian conscript – troops they’d been told about – with nothing much to hope for, but nothing to lose either. Vic’s thoughts raced ahead, leaping over the sea, collapsing too precipitately the hours and miles. It was the worst thing, this breakdown of character, so soon. It took him by surprise.
He stood up again, next to Matthieson, to smoke.
‘Done your letters, then?’ said Matthieson.
‘One to my son,’ Vic said. His nerves subsided a little. ‘Couldn’t think what to put to anyone else. When it came to it.’
‘Know what you mean.’ Matthieson shifted his boots on the steel floor with a grating sound. He looked up at the clouds. ‘Sitting ducks, us. If the fuckers catch on.’
But there was no attack, even though a glimmer of twilight lingered until late, and the boat plunged on exposed, riding the heavy swell. Vic reckoned the odds. There was little chance of success. The conditions were disastrous. It would be another Dieppe, on a massive scale. Another Somme. Three times his father had been wounded; three times Percy recovered. Ironically named Victor, this son of his was in a blue funk before getting anywhere near the combat zone. Always with the image of his father before him, Vic cringed at the poor show. His wasn’t even an assault unit, but second wave. His fighting was supposed to be inland, not on the beach.
The unseasonable wind whipped the tops off waves and spattered the hull behind Vic’s head with a premonition of machine-gun fire. At midnight, when their young officer, Lieutenant Fairfax, informed them they were in mid-Channel, he judged the seas were a good four or five feet high. They had been shipping spray for hours. The unkind craft would kick up and then smash down. Men were being repeatedly sick over their clothes; the sound was awful. On a few spare inches of wet deck, between Norton, Matthieson and a pair of stubborn boots he thought might be Fairbrother’s, he tried unsuccessfully to sleep.
At one o’clock, he sat up and looked across the heaving steel darkness. His comrades were shapes, black upon black. Some lay stretched out. Some groaned in their mal de mer. Others were in groups, still gambling, or talking quietly amongst themselves. They were already ghosts, the sea destabilised them, back and forth, their cigarette tips glowing, sudden red points in the catching wind. Over Vic’s head a corporal held a box like a tray of ices at the cinema.
‘Kidney soup? Cocoa?’
Vic fumbled with his self-heating can. He set his tins unopened beside him and lay back against his rucksack. If he closed his eyes he felt nauseous, almost as though he were drunk. He thought of the Coal Hole – he deserved everything he got. Back in Tony Rice’s car, that first time – ‘We’ve got this little place in the country. Why don’t you all come down?’ – how ridiculous he’d been. Then he’d lain next to Phyllis in the bed, his head full of jazz and the tart and the contract. The boat shook and tumbled, its screws racing. He fell asleep – letting go at last.
While he lay in the slop of stomach acids and sea water, the fleet began
to position itself. The Americans were to the right, the Canadians to the left. Sea corridors had been swept of mines, the depths had been cleared of U-boats, and the air overhead had been quite extinguished of its last bandits and angels. Now, the big warships turned broadside to the shore. Everything was thrown into the balance.
HE WAS WOKEN by gunfire. The sound was like nothing he’d heard before, deeper and more penetrating, but still far off. Something metallic behind his head was vibrating, almost ringing, and then the floor bucked up and fell. It was still dark. He groped for his rifle, and sat up.
‘All right, mate?’ It was Norton.
‘Christ.’
‘Not long now.’
His bowels churned. He would have run, if he could, for the bucket. Anything, he thought, as he returned, staggering, would be better than this. A glimmer of grey light was leaking in the east. A shadowy officer was coming down one of the ladders, Major Whitton. He held a mug of liquid. ‘All right, you men?’ he said. ‘Nice day for it’ He was fatherly. With him stood Lieutenant Fairfax, biting his lip, fingering the pistol in its case on his belt.
Vic shut his mind to the cold in his wet clothes. He stayed standing and made a cigarette, bracing himself, fumbling for the lighter and materials with his trembling hands. When he next looked up he was amazed. The cold summer’s day had inked in a Channel strewn with the silhouettes of ships. On their own port quarter, almost close enough to touch, the black bulk of a tank lander was riding out its own rhythm. Men on board were inflating a great grey shape, a barrage balloon. And as Vic watched and swept his gaze across the seascape, similar toy balloons began to mushroom and then float up, to hover eerily above the funnels and superstructures that shaped the horizon.
There was a roar overhead. Lightnings in echelon were above them, and then a wave of Spitfires. The distant guns boomed and thudded. A streamer of rockets went up from somewhere far to the right, then another, and another.
He thought of the Hampshires and Dorsets well on ahead, ready to go in. Even now they were preparing to drop into their miniature landing craft, sardines packing into their tins, primed to come to salty life and run up that beach. He envied them, going in, getting it over – heroes. Upon them, most probably, would depend whether he saw the day’s end.
He cast his mind back to the sweltering tent at Beaulieu, where he’d done his best to memorise the sand model of the approaches to Arromanches. He imagined his father queueing in the supply trenches, inching along under the shattering bombardment while the first men went over the top. And then there were all the generations of his family, crowding in and leading down to this moment. Had they any conception of what they were passing on? Thames folk, scrabbling for a bit of a life on the mud of the Essex marshes. Making a bit, taking a bit, trying to look respectable – the women struggling with the washing, cooking, the kids and the laying out; the men poling lighters on the river, odd-jobbing, serving every so often for king and country. He saw them coming home, parading. He saw the brilliance of a thousand uniforms. He conjured them now, with their breastplates and flashing swords after Waterloo, say. The cavalry horses had tossed their heads, and shaken their bridles. Their hooves had struck sparks out of the stones. Would he, Vic Warren, acquit himself well in the brown squalor of modern warfare? In the wind and waves it was almost possible to hear the dead generations – the adulation, the shouts of command, the tramp of feet in perfect unison. There, the jingle of harnesses, and the rattle of the field guns as they passed by on their carriages. And there were the captured cannon, the cartloads of spears and spoils and trophies. The men were coming home; once more, everything was in place.
Then Perce, coughing his lungs up ever after. And now this. Vic looked up from his kidney soup. Four hours to wait. The naval barrage intensified. The little ship shuddered, still driving on. England was draining away from him. What ties did he have? What concern did he have for that ridiculous little place – with its dwarfish factory workers and mawkish sentimental songs – that had stumbled on the world and tried to give it good government? If he survived, what should he have to look forward to? Not love. Not Clarice, now. What then? Forty more years of drudgery punctuated by spare weeks at the Brighton seaside and tawdry penny entertainments. His gut burnt with the longing for revenge. ‘Why don’t you kill me then? That’s what you want, isn’t it? Eh, Vic? Then you’d be happy, wouldn’t you? Then you’d be free.’
He fingered his rifle and prepared himself to die.
WHEN THE RAMP went down there was no gunfire to encounter. Two and a half hours adrift of schedule, the whole flotilla of the second contingent was adrift, too, of its position. Under mortar and artillery bombardment from Le Hamel, they had nudged helplessly against the wind and the high tide. The glistening remains of a British ship, American canisters, petrol tanks, unidentifiable pieces of camouflaged equipment held up by tricks of buoyancy – the morning’s debris from Gold and even Omaha – had begun to float past them. Vic could see shelled seaside villas and burning tanks, the mined spikes, entanglements and confusion of the esplanade. Major Whitton, damning the maps for the loss of a mile, ordered the landing. Uncertain of any success or failures that might have gone on before him, Vic jumped into deep water close under the timbered sea wall of the wrong beach.
His boots touched the shingled bottom and his Mae West bobbed up in front of him. His pack threatened to drown him. Then a wave flung him forward on to his face. Men crowded past, but he was determined and staggered after Norton. The Major had found a way up the wall. Water sluiced out of Vic’s clothes. He forced his way through the shallows, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, expecting the seabed to explode at any minute.
On the higher level, instead of raking machine-gun fire, there was disconcerting good order. The thin remaining strip between the beach and the road was more like the entrance to a municipal event than a corner of a battlefield. Vic’s major was chatting unconcernedly with a traffic officer. Companies of dripping men were moving on ahead along a wide strip of coconut matting. The matting was reddish brown, like the PT rugs he’d put down in the little cabin. It ran off across pitted clay where the mines had been cleared by a flail tank. All about were the signs of a competent occupation. Matthieson caught up with him, together with Lieutenant Fairfax.
‘Jesus!’
‘Get going, you two. Movement is of the essence,’ said the major. ‘I’ll be along directly.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
Vic glanced to his right. Along the high tide there were companies of men starting to trek inshore from the landing craft. They were concentrating on to other strips of matting, which looked, in the distance, like black snakes between the milling vehicles, the miniature flags, and the officers who waved – far-off car-park attendants. And there were little mobs of different soldiers, standing stationary, unarmed. Dare he imagine they were prisoners? His heart exulted as he marched. He was glad at the sight of them. Beyond, still further off, some intermittent detonation continued. Out of the corner of his eye, Vic caught the plumes of water still leaping up. A tank was engaged, two of them, three. He pressed on along the corridor, holding his rifle, the brine squelching in his boots. His legs felt rubbery, as though he had no knee joints. He looked down, surprised to see them intact. There was blood – yes, a graze on the knuckle of his first finger. He sucked it. The keen wind smelt of smoke.
At a village called Meuvaines the whole brigade was assembled. Still to the right there was the sound of fighting. Rations were taken quickly, rifles stripped and cleaned, tea brewed. French children, clattering on the flagstones in their wooden shoes, came asking for food – treating the battle zone around their houses as the most ordinary thing in the world. About a quarter of a mile away, tank turrets were visible behind a hedge. Every so often, cannons were fired. Map in hand, Major Whitton came up beside Vic’s company together with a captain of the Second Gloucesters. ‘Getting the hang of this bloody place,’ he said. ‘Someone’s going to sort out that Le Hamel battery. But
it’s not us, apparently.’ Bren-gun carriers appeared in the road. Strapped on to them were the precious bicycles. Vic laughed out loud.
His uniform was dry when they set out again. On the left of a broad front his battalion was advancing across country towards Bayeux – the first day’s objective. They had passed through the left wing of the assault troops, the Green Howards. While his own company had been still wallowing at sea these soldiers had taken casualties enough. The tide had covered them.
But Vic could hardly recall the morning. Nor had the faces of the advance troops touched him. A happiness filled him. His body was doing what it had been trained for, and his thoughts were in abeyance. All along the basin of a small river stretched a profusion of meadow flowers: kingcups, cow parsleys, vetches, clovers. Clusters of ox-eye daisies straggled down from the banks among the nettles. Close to the water there were yellow flag irises, and at a field’s edge, poppies blinked in the green corn crop. Beside a fresh bomb crater, tall trees arched, their tops rustling and bending in the wind.
Then they were marching in a lane. On either side, hedgerows towered up out of steep earthen walls, and, under great curds of elderflower, the road twisted amidst a maze of paddocks. They crossed a field between gates. Suddenly there were shots out of the trees that rose up on top of the far boundary. Men dropped to the ground all round him. He found himself pressed flat to the damp, sweet-smelling grasses, with dock leaves and shepherd’s purse, his heart hammering, his rifle levelled towards the grey-green rampart in front of him.
Somehow, then, the landscape contained an exchange of fire. He was awestruck – only yards to his left, cows were grazing. Next, on a command, he was running forward across the pasture, his pack jolting and straining. Norton was five yards away. They threw themselves down again. A shot cracked from the hedge. Vic and a dozen others returned fire.
