If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  The enemy here put up no determined resistance. The greater part of the defenders had fallen back, or found themselves outflanked. He didn’t see the bodies afterwards, only a knot of prisoners, looking dejected – or was it relieved? So high was his mood he found it hard to believe he might have done anyone harm. They pressed on, more cautious now.

  From the hamlet of Ryes in the late afternoon there was a road to St Sulpice. The land was not entirely land, the sky not quite sky. Birds sang that he couldn’t precisely identify, and now he trod like a sleepwalker, hardly feeling his feet starting to blister from the salt water that had got into his boots. How long had they been going? He looked at his watch. It recorded twelve thirty-three, the exact moment he’d jumped off the ramp under the sea wall. His shoulders ached from the pack.

  IT WAS EVENING by the time they occupied St Sulpice. There’d been contact with the defenders of Bayeux. On the battalion’s right the South Wales Borderers were engaged and there would be a head-on attack before the end of the day. Vic tried to ready himself, picture himself going forward somewhere beyond this village.

  There was a flurry of organisation. Officers passed in front of them to confer. He looked across at Norton who leant against the wall of a house. ‘Your matches dried out yet?’

  ‘Parky’s got some. Eh, Parky. Give Vic a light, will you?’

  No one spoke of the fire-fight that had occurred, nor of the attack that was imminent. Men swore, checked their equipment. The cries of swifts above the little church mingled with the intimate gunfire from the next sector. Then an artillery shell passed close as a breath overhead, suggesting a flak gun in the town was shooting wildly into the evening. It exploded somewhere in the distance. There came a rumour of casualties from the sniper fire. Two patrols were sent forward while the battalion waited.

  When the patrols returned they told of a manned anti-tank ditch that lay ahead, and a decision hung almost palpably in the air for twenty minutes. Then the attack was called off. Vic looked up at the grey clouds scudding under the west. He felt first disappointment, next inordinate relief. While they dug in, he mused as to why it should have been that way round. How unreal the place felt, only a hundred miles or so from England. How different everything was.

  He was not detailed for night patrol, so he slept fitfully to the sound of intermittent rifle fire, frightened, alert for the dawn, dreaming back to the sea passage. In the morning there were tanks alongside the position. The Sherwood Rangers had driven up from the coast to support the attack. An order was given, and the movement forward under grey streamers of cloud and into the outskirts of the town was stealthy, full of intent.

  Bayeux was deserted. They made their entry warily, cautiously, amongst the parks and old houses that were dawn-lit across the bridges of the Aure. There was no hand-to-hand fighting, no rush and raid amidst the screams of civilians. It seemed the enemy had withdrawn in the night.

  And when they had stolen into the medieval town, their boots loud on the cobbles, their whispered, incredulous voices echoing on the silent walls, then, as if some secret signal had been given, shutters were suddenly flung open. Shouts and laughter rang out instead of gunfire, and women were waving from windows. Vic found himself a liberator; he came into his name. Tricolours appeared from balconies and the streets were full of children. They sang the song of the lark, Alouette.

  He stood in the town square, sipping calvados and nodding to the girl who’d brought it. She threw her arms around his neck and then hung back, smiling. He smiled at her in turn. How unearthly. So they nodded to one another, and spoke without understanding. And he felt himself caught up with the celebration under the cathedral that was quite different from anything he’d known in England. Tinged with brandy and Catholicism, it assumed some direct acquaintance with heaven and hell. A family rushed out of a house to shake his hand. They were introducing themselves, the chattering woman and her father in his loose black jacket, and a little boy in baggy grey shorts. He thought instantly of Jack. They brought bread and cheese and more calvados.

  So the town swirled and cheered as the tanks came rumbling through. Someone had found a group of Germans. They brought them along the Rue Larcher in front of the cathedral, poor bewildered lads in their uniforms, one with a beaten mask of a face. The South Wales Borderers were guarding them. He wondered what the crowd would have done to the boys if they’d been left to it, if these good folk had all decided to turn nasty – as they had every right to. And he remembered suddenly the carnivalesque, shell-shocked world he’d grown up in. He’d seen grotesques. In East Ham, the amputees – even the dead – were everywhere, slain youths and men who refused to go away. He’d seen them, or imagined he did: ruined tailors and gasping lathe operators, and pierced chemical workers, and shoemakers without heads. Yet the little cream-painted structure far away amid grass and trees, the cottage with its slatted sides and corrugated roof, stood always at the back of his mind.

  When evening came bringing rain, they dug in and made camp in a public garden. Major Whitton had a book instead of a map. Vic overheard him. ‘Bayeux,’ he said, looking up as though from the pages of a guidebook. ‘So lofty in its noble coronet of rusty lace. Ever care for Proust, Fairfax?’

  ‘Not that I was frightfully aware of, sir,’ said Lieutenant Fairfax, saluting.

  A FIELD STRETCHED away to the south under skies still overcast in the late afternoon. Green corn waved in the gusting breeze, spattered here and there with the bright heads of poppies. For the hundredth time Vic scanned the low hedgerow at the field’s far boundary, its base obscured both by the half-grown stand of wheat and by the slight downward contour of the terrain. There had been rain for most of the previous night, and again at midday. A mouldy waft rose up from his clothes. He finished his bread and tinned meat, and checked his rifle, clicking the bolt back and forth.

  ‘Put the bloody thing down, Warren. I expect it’ll work.’ Second Lieutenant Fairfax turned his head irritably. His fresh face under his helmet looked painfully young and vulnerable, the eyes pale blue and the lashes invisible.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you, Norton.’

  Norton snapped to attention, his tin mug held, slopping, against his trouser seam.

  ‘No, no. At ease, man. Stand easy. Drink your damn tea.’ He looked pleadingly for a moment, as though he would have given anything to be able to break through the formalities of command and apologise for his nerves. ‘Never mind. Carry on.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  A jeep revved in the lane behind them, then swerved in at the gate. Major Whitton leapt out of the passenger seat, holding a solid-looking field compass in his left hand and his map case in his right. Vic watched as he spread the map out on the jeep’s bonnet and then called his captains and junior officers around. Then Lieutenant Fairfax came back to relay the details. The battalion in entirety was to advance on a selected bearing at eighteen hundred hours and take an orchard about a mile away down the slope. The lieutenant indicated the direction across the cornfield. Enemy troops with tanks had been seen there. They’d been identified as belonging to a Panzer training unit.

  ‘Hardly a pushover, I’d say. Would you?’ Lieutenant Fairfax set his lips. ‘This is to be the battalion’s first full-scale attack. But, in fact, it’s pretty much a textbook situation. About the only bit of open country for miles.’ He looked the platoon up and down, his jaw thrust forward meaningfully. ‘More or less what we’ve all been trained for.’ He snorted through his nose.

  Then, with his nervous little smile, he outlined the distances of the attack, and wished his platoon luck. ‘At the moment we’re well ahead of the Yanks on our right. Some of them had a pretty bad show on the beaches, by all accounts, but they’re right back in contention just over there.’ He pointed to the west. ‘And more or less level pegging. We have linkage with all Canadian and British troops to our left. But they’ve run into big resistance at Caen.’ A schoolboy grin appeared on his lips and he laughed again nervous
ly. Vic noticed how he held on to the strap of his webbing, where the knuckles were white. ‘Well. All right? Today is our chance to show them all what we’re made of. I know I can say with absolute confidence that none of you men will let me, or the regiment, down.’

  A moment of silence followed. Vic noticed the chatter of the sparrows in the brake next to him suddenly grow louder. But it was only a moment, for in the next minute their own field guns in the bocage behind them opened up. Shells whined overhead; faint drifts of smoke seeped from beyond the drop of the terrain. He watched them until the command came from the sergeants all along the line to form up.

  It was what he’d been trained for. Precisely at six, they started forward. Nearly a thousand yards wide, the advance proceeded on a two-company front in perfect formation. Lieutenant Fairfax strode purposefully through the corn, his revolver drawn. To Vic’s left was Norton, partially obscuring the major and his map. To his right Williams, the Dunkirk veteran. Behind him, he could feel the presence of Matthieson and Fairbrother, and occasionally hear their movements.

  In an odd, arrhythmic music the shells from the twenty-five pounders sliced the air above, almost close enough to touch. The effect was hypnotic: it was like a training exercise, yet nothing like, a sense of déjà vu which had no relation to any former experience. His heart raced, his fingers were slippery on the wooden stock of his gun. Under his boots the corn stalks cricked and dragged against his legs like the shallows of some soft persistent tide.

  They came to the hedge. Compared to the obstacles of the early afternoon, it was no more than a flimsy marker between one crop and the next. But even the recent past and its landscape were already a blur. Bayeux was forgotten. Was it only a few hours ago there’d been a monastery, and a farmhouse? Had more prisoners been taken? The whole of Vic’s former life had fallen away. Before the invasion, there had been some drama of love, some wrestling with sensibilities. The woman was lost. Only this gradually declining slope with its swaying corn and whirring, punctuated air had ever existed.

  Steady pace; he made himself count the steps. One hundred yards filled nearly two minutes. He disciplined his fear. Two hundred yards and through the next low line of thorn, still to its own sounds, still with its own deliberate momentum, the advance continued. Then it was some necessary repetition, some meaningful machinery of nature, surely, this deliberate walk towards the enemy. It was a condition of manhood, and had to be gone through. They broke the next boundary.

  Now there was a far horizon, a dark blue-green shading off, purple against the grey sky. But as they proceeded across the new field, sown waist high with some inconvenient vegetable Vic didn’t recognise, there arose on a sight-line of the middle distance a fringe of paler green rising as though out of a fold. He fixed his eyes on it. As he walked, it thickened and gained definition, and then he could see clearly that it was the topmost boughs of pruned orchard apple trees.

  It occurred to him that the barrage from their own guns had stopped. But the pace kept up, coordinated, deliberate. Vic held his position; the major in front and to the left, glancing down at his compass; the lieutenant, striding forward stiff-legged, with his boyish, rather self-conscious gait; Norton, with his long, loping walk. Vic felt the common sense in his own legs that wanted to stop him in his tracks and turn him around. He overruled it. But he knew that now each further step down the gradual slope could only offer up ever more candidly the strung-out lines of men. It was a textbook situation, and he knew the name of it. It was a killing ground.

  NOW THE TREES were the green tops of lollipops, teasing and innocent. Now they’d acquired the suggestion of their sticks below. Still the line continued forward, eight hundred yards from the wood, seven hundred, six. He felt light-headed, almost already dead. He was not walking but floating. A lark burst up in front of him, hovering suddenly with a distressed, heart-rending call. Vic started, and then nearly cried out himself for the delicious, ludicrous song that poured down out of it. Another, and he was convinced the whole business had gone quite into madness. Je te plumerai. In his imagination he could already hear the rattle of machine-gun fire, feel the hot bullets in his chest. He entered the next field. It was a crop of cabbages, and the orchard was fully in view.

  Then at last the command came and he dropped gratefully to the ground. The gun barrel smashed one globing plant from its fat stalk. A minute stream of trapped water trickled on to his hand from the fat blue leaf of another. Norton was getting up in front of him. Vic raced after him and they both crashed down into the wet brassicas. Then up once more. And down again. New shells from their own guns whined above them for the final softener. Fragments fountained amongst the fruit trees. One smashed and toppled. Smoke boiled under the low clouds and was then blown sideways. The breath tore in and out of Vic’s lungs.

  The new rhythm took hold. He had a sensation of the land all around him on the move in this strange irregular ripple of khaki battledress, like a visible earthquake that crept forward harmlessly, carefully, under a blanket of sprouting soil. Now their own barrage had fallen silent. Yet there had been no returned fire, no indication of an enemy at all.

  An impulse, almost irresistible in its folly, to stand up and walk just as they’d been doing at the start, began to take hold of him. He should stroll, even. There was no opposition. How could there be? How odd the major looked when he threw himself down only to scramble up again. There was nothing between the tree-trunks. Vic stood up and ran forward. The base of the wood turned orange.

  He was pressed into the earth. The grit was in his mouth, on his tongue. Clods were falling on him. He felt them thump into his back like punches. His head was under something. Above him the air tore and snarled. He tried to force himself flatter. Then the ground only feet away kicked up in deafening fire and he felt himself blown back and twisted round by the blast.

  A large figure was running past him, Platoon Sergeant Bell. Vic followed an instruction he didn’t know he’d heard and reached for his bayonet. As he was trying to fix it to the front of his rifle, he saw the sergeant lifted and thrown backwards as though by colossal impact. The body hung for a moment with its own weapon spinning slowly in the air, the strap passing only a few inches from the outstretched hand. It collapsed down heavily on to its pack, even seeming to bounce slightly amid a shower of stones and pieces of earth.

  Vic was up once more and dashing on. As he neared the sergeant there was another flash from the wood and a patter of small-arms fire. He swerved. The ground in front of him offered a gaping hole and he jumped into it. Ahead of him in amongst the trees he saw the swivelling turret of a tank. The flash came again and the body of the tank shuddered.

  He stole a glance to his left. The shot had torn away a great part of the field, but the line was still moving forward. Further along it was broken in places. And, close at hand, though there was smoke drifting in great wreaths out of other new pits in the field, he thought he could make out Norton.

  The wood flashed and flashed again; it crackled as though it were on fire. He ran forward. Three hundred yards remained. The earth crashed and heaved. He ran forward. He could see figures under the apple trees, little puffs of white smoke beside them. Then there was another tank. The blast from a cannon round exploding to his right threw him sideways. He picked himself up and ran forward.

  At one hundred yards there were shouts. He dropped down. The dozen rounds of rapid fire went off, the heavy wooden stock of his rifle bruising back into his shoulder, the stark black spike of his foresight ranging now here, now there, upon confused and dark green shapes amidst the smoke-filled trees. He could see the tanks as they reversed. The turrets swung and flashed again. But he heard nothing. He was briefly immune to noise.

  Then they were all charging, all at once, along the whole front, borne forward by a shout that seemed to have welled up from deep inside him. The shout had filled him up and was sweeping him along. One shape beside him crumpled. Another stumbled. He ran through smoke and flying debris, intent only
on getting in under the branches to stab and hack at whatever blind retreating figures dodged between the orderly, knobbled tree-trunks.

  Under a canopy of leaves he stopped, exhausted, leaning on his gun. There were figures all about him, but no sign of Norton. Nor of the veteran, Williams. The major was calling for a defensive box formation to be organised. The two companies who’d been bringing up the rear were already starting to stream through into the more forward positions. He saw Matthieson. ‘All right?’

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t know about the others, though.’

  Lieutenant Fairfax appeared. He began to check off numbers. Norton was indeed missing. And Fairbrother. A lance-corporal from another platoon arrived with Williams. He was groaning from a stomach wound. Vic fought back nausea at the sight of it. Then he was detailed to a defensive post.

  It seemed almost immediately that the popping sound of mortar shells began, exploding up ahead in the forward positions, right in the centre of the wood, and there were more cries and shouts. Vic couldn’t get the hang of what ought to be done. Men behind him were digging slit trenches. He crouched at his post, his gun on the crook of a branch, ready aimed. Five yards in front of him, in the long grass, lay the body of a German boy. Its eyes stared over Vic’s head.

  There was small-arms fire. The mortar stopped. Now a touch of evening was in the air. The wood had begun to darken, the breeze to die down. But like a summer storm reluctant to pass, the engagement was still active. Flashes and sounds continued to come out of the gloom ahead. There were rifle shots, and every now and then bursts from a machine pistol, disagreeably close like an unpleasant insect. Vic waited. The platoon waited, gathered on the edge of the orchard. No armoured support appeared to have arrived.

  It was at about nine o’clock that the counter-attack started. All at once the mortar fire was renewed and concentrated. In the intervals between hits on the forward line, Vic could hear the insistent creak and grind of tanks. Suddenly the enemy cannon were blasting, it felt at point-blank range. The detonations were shatteringly loud, and the wood seemed perpetually erupting in fire and flame. Trees splintered. Branches fell, burning. All at once the air was contaminated with the sweet, sickly smell of high explosives.