North Strike

by John Harris

  Eventually the snowstorm stopped and they began to descend towards the fjord. A colossal amount of snow had fallen and the breeze was lifting flurries from the laden branches of the trees and plucking little whorls from the exposed ledges. Pushing through the forest, they came to a narrow winding road. It appeared to lead downwards towards the sea and they were just about to step out on to it when Campbell spoke.

  ‘Germans!’

  Through the whiteness, as they scrambled back among the trees, they could see movement and hear voices. Magnusson’s heart began to thump. The approaching men couldn’t fail to notice their tracks and not one of them was armed.

  They could hear the crunch of boots now on the snow, and Magnusson saw the tips of slung rifles through the trees. Some of the men wore peaked grey-green caps, and he was just trying to decide whether to run for it when Annie put a hand on his arm.

  ‘They’re not German! That’s Norwegian they’re speaking!’

  Lifting his head slightly, Magnusson saw the group of men drawing nearer. They were marching briskly, all carrying rifles but in no military order. They were in ragged groups of ones and twos, but just behind them he noticed another group. These men were marching in threes – five files of them with one man in front – and he recognised the flat, bowl-shaped British steel helmets and heard an aggrieved voice complaining about the snow with a string of obscenities that could have come from no one but a fed-up British soldier.

  Without waiting, he stepped out into the road.

  The Norwegian soldiers in the lead stopped dead, waiting. The British soldiers behind had unslung their rifles and, though they were dirty, unshaven and travel-stained, they were alert and wary.

  As Campbell and the others followed Magnusson into the road, the man in front, a sergeant, held his hand out sideways, the palm turned behind him as a warning for caution to his men.

  ‘You English?’ he asked. His voice was hostile and suspicious and he kept his rifle ready in front of him, one hand on the trigger.

  ‘Yes. Royal Navy.’

  ‘You don’t look like Royal Navy.’

  Magnusson explained but the sergeant remained suspicious.

  ‘What proof have I got?’ he said.

  ‘What proof do you want?’ Magnusson treated him to a few obscenities he’d learned before the mast and the sergeant grinned.

  ‘Couldn’t be anything else,’ he said, lowering the rifle. ‘I’m Sergeant Atwood, Koylis. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, that is.’

  Magnusson grinned. ‘I’m pleased to see you, Sergeant. Can you use those rifles?’

  Atwood’s face tautened. ‘You bet we can sir. We belong to the Unsurpassable Six.’

  ‘What in God’s name are the Unsurpassable Six?’

  Atwood gave him a cold contemptuous look. ‘That’s the trouble with the Navy,’ he said. ‘They’re always so bloody concerned with their own tradition, they forget the army’s got a bit too. At Minden in 1759, six British infantry regiments – the Suffolks, the Hampshires, the Royal Welch, the Lancashires, the Kosbies and us, the Koylis, the old 51st of Foot – was given the order to advance with the drums beating out the proper time. Against cavalry! We wasn’t advancing to receive ’em neither. We was advancing to attack ’em. And we routed the bastards too! Three lines of ’em. Eighty-three squadrons. We wear roses every 1 August because of that. We picked ’em as we marched forward.’

  ‘You know your military history, Sergeant,’ Magnusson said.

  ‘I’m a regular and they made certain we did. I was attached to the 4th Battalion to lick ’em into shape and I made bloody sure they was good, even if they was Territorials. They didn’t know what hit ’em, but they soon found out what I was talkin’ about when they got ’ere.’

  ‘Come to that, how did you get here?’

  ‘We was sent forward, sir, from Namsos. We ’ad three kitbags of clothes – winter, summer and arctic. When we put ’em on we looked like paralysed polar bears.’

  ‘Mind if we join up with you?’

  ‘Won’t do you much good. We got no transport. They just dumped us. How the ’ell the Navy got their ships in, I dunno. Most of ’em seemed bigger than the fjords.’

  ‘What are they trying to do?’

  Atwood shrugged. ‘Ask me another, sir. The colonel said we could do what we liked because the government in London didn’t seem to know what it wanted done. As far as I could see at Namsos, it seemed to be all staff and no war. We had no transport, mortars, ack-ack, or artillery, and the cooks had to borrow buckets and baths to cook us a meal. We was sent to Sticklestead in support of some Norwegians and I reckon nobody got nearer the Germans than we did. But we didn’t ’ave radios and ’ad to keep in touch with runners floundering about waist-deep in snow.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘We got as far as Rora, but we was threatened from three sides and the bloody aeroplanes kept coming down on us. It’s a bit unnerving being peppered by a plane coming straight down on you. It takes a bit of getting used to.’

  Magnusson nodded. ‘As we’ve discovered,’ he agreed.

  The sergeant gestured at his men. ‘It was the biggest balls-up since Ma caught ’er tits in the mangle. In all me puff I never seen worse. When we got cut off from the rest, we decided to try to head back for Namsos, only now we’ve ’eard that’s gone too.’

  ‘It’s a long walk to Narvik, Sergeant.’

  ‘I reckon we can do it, sir, if we have to.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’

  ‘Sixteen, sir, including me. With nine Norwegians. We came here on the off chance we might just pinch a ship. The Norwegians said they’d know what to do with it. Some of ’em are ex-sailors.’

  Magnusson smiled. ‘Great minds think alike, Sergeant, because we came here to pinch a ship too.’

  There was no argument. After a short discussion and an exchange of cigarettes, of which the sergeant’s men seemed to have hundreds, they fell in together and began to move on again.

  ‘We helped ourselves to the fags, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Naafi. When we started to retreat, they threw it open for us to take what we wanted.’

  The road continued to wind downwards through the trees until at last they saw spires of smoke standing up in the still air. After a while, they saw houses and decided to leave the road.

  Plunging through the undergrowth, they made their way towards the village down the slope of the hill from where they could see the fjord stretching away to the south-west, curving jaggedly first one way and then the other, the steep sides covered with fir trees.

  Marsjøen was a typical Norwegian village of timber dwellings huddled against the hill with, dotted above it, houses and farms where a living was being carved out of the unforgiving earth. They rejoined the road above the place and began to move down it in a long straggling procession, their breath hanging in the frosty air, thirty-six men and three girls, all of them young, all wishing to be away from the hated Germans.

  Then Magnusson, who was in the lead, stopped and listened. No one was talking and the woods were uncannily silent, but faintly he could hear a low rhythmic thump almost like the beating of his own heart.

  He looked back the way he’d come and the sound seemed to die away again. He said nothing and they continued down the hill. Eventually, he stopped again. The thump came once more and his heart thumped with it. The sound had started a sort of panic inside him. It was unexpected yet familiar. He had heard it before and he strained his eyes through the trees for what he was expecting to see. The sound seemed to die away and he wondered if his ears were playing tricks, if what he was hearing was one of the timber cutters at Marsjøen repairing equipment or hammering at a log. But then the sound came again, too rhythmic to be connected to anything human, and it had a metallic echo, still faint but quite distinct now.

  He waited for the others to catch him up. Annie was the first to join him and she touched his hand with hers, almost imperceptibly but in a way that indicated she trusted him. Then Campbell came up, his
handsome face heavy with the dislike of walking.

  ‘Do you hear what I hear?’ Magnusson said.

  ‘What do you bloody well hear?’ Campbell growled.

  ‘A ship, my lad. Not a big one, but a ship nevertheless.’

  Then they saw her, a small, high-bowed fishing boat with a square white wheelhouse aft. Above, her masts and booms were heavy with rigging but stripped of sails. She was coming down the fjord from the sea, a white speck against the black waters, and they could see the small puffs of smoke that came from the tall stack of her single-cylinder diesel as it thumped, slow, solemn and now very loud – tonk-tonk-tonk. She was heading for Marsjøen and, with the light behind her, they could see the sharp arrowhead of her wake.

  Campbell stared, then looked at Magnusson. Magnusson was grinning and he noticed that Annie’s hand had grasped his. Their luck seemed to swing from one extreme to the other.

  ‘I was expecting maybe a steamer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps even an ocean liner or a British destroyer. At the very least a boat with a set of oars. What we’ve got are puffers and, judging by that one, they look like Mores, which are the best design of the lot.’

  Part Three

  Westwards

  One

  ‘Suppose,’ Willie John said, ‘they willnae want tae take their boats across tae England?’

  Magnusson stared at him discouragingly, but Willie John refused to be put off. ‘Suppose they’ve decided they like the Germans and want tae stay here? Suppose the captain’s wife’s due tae ha’e a bairn? Suppose even she iss Swedish, boy? They willnae take very kindly tae any suggestion that they join us in a war that’s naethin’ tae do wi’ them.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ll need to be persuaded,’ Campbell said coldly.

  ‘What are ye suggestin’, mon? Bash ’em on the head and take off wi’oot ’em?’

  ‘There are enough of us.’

  ‘’Twould create a diplomatic incident.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ Magnusson observed, ‘that diplomatic incidents have been created right, left and centre in this neck of the woods in the last week or so. I’m prepared to chance it and let the Foreign Office sort it out when we arrive.’

  Willie John shrugged and grinned. ‘Their Lordships o’ the Admiralty’ll probably decide they dinnae need your services any longer an’ ye’ll find yourself back with the merchant fleet.’

  ‘After Oulu, you think that’d be a hardship?’

  ‘Perhaps even in a coaster circling England, boy. Maybe a weekly boat, full o’ rats and discomfort. Maybe even–’ Willie John’s grin widened ‘–a dredger in Portsmouth harbour or a sewage disposal barge in the Thames.’

  Magnusson smiled back at him. ‘Home every night, in a pub, with a girl round the corner with a warm fire and a warmer bed! In wartime, that’s not hardship! Are you coming, or aren’t you?’

  Willie John grinned again. ‘O’ course I’m comin’, boy,’ he said. ‘I’m all for dredgers and foo-foo barges. Besides, this iss a bloody cold country and I’m longing for Liverpool with the roadway swimmin’ wi’ rain an’ the Irish and the Protestants starin’ at each other across the street itchin’ for a fight.’

  They stood among the trees above Marsjøen gazing down at the fishing boat now beginning to approach the quay. As it disappeared behind the trees towards the little town, the tonk-tonk of the engine stopped and in the ensuing silence they could hear the calls of the men aboard as they moored.

  ‘Do they leave a man on board?’ Magnusson asked.

  ‘Not in their home ports,’ Annie said. ‘Everybody is trusted up here. Nobody locks things up.’

  Magnusson grunted. ‘They’ll probably have to start now the Germans have come,’ he said.

  Just above the village there was a broken-down barn in the wood close to the road, which had once been used as a store-shed. It contained the remains of a lorry, an old plough and a few rusty timber-cutting tools. Inside, it felt like a refrigerator and smelled of damp, mould, mice and rust, and the metal of the old junk that filled it was icy to the touch. But the struggle through the snow had exhausted them and they all sank down on baulks of timber, bales of hay, the running board of the old lorry.

  Atwood’s men and the Norwegian soldiers with them had a few rations and they swapped flatbrød and tinned pork for bully beef. Only Wolszcka, the Pole, remained on his feet, moving about the barn restlessly, occasionally stropping his knife on a stone or a piece of steel.

  ‘Yon mad bugger gi’es me the creeps,’ Willie John said. ‘’Tis as jolly as a handful o’ worms he iss, the way he moves aboot. What iss he lookin’ for just?’

  ‘An aim in life I expect,’ Magnusson said. ‘He knows there’s something he ought to be able to do but he doesn’t know what it is.’

  When dusk arrived, Magnusson decided to go down to the village to where they could see the jetty. Atwood was by his side at once, suspicious, as if he thought he was up to something that might affect him and his men.

  When Magnusson explained what he had in mind, Atwood immediately said he’d go with him. ‘Just to cover you, sir,’ he said. ‘In case of trouble. There might be Germans down there. I’ll bring two or three of my best lads.’

  It seemed an unnecessary precaution but, like the rest of them, Atwood had been living on his nerves a long time now and wasn’t taking any chances. With them went Campbell, Willie John and one of the Norwegian officers. Annie insisted on going too, in case there was a need to placate the villagers.

  ‘Perhaps they haven’t had armed men here yet,’ she said. ‘And if they see me, they’ll not be scared.’

  Leaving everybody else in the barn, they moved off through the woods. The little fishing vessel lay alongside the jetty. To Magnusson’s surprise, there were no other fishing boats; he had expected at least two or three, and he began to worry how they could possibly cram thirty-nine people aboard, his mind filled with sums as he wondered if they could manage until they could find something else further up the fjord.

  The deep snow made walking difficult but its whiteness enabled them to see. The village was silent, the smoke standing straight up in the frosty air into a sky which contained a thin sliver of moon and was full of stars that promised a clear day the following morning. From one of the houses they could hear a radio going, but there was no one about in the single street and Magnusson could only assume that the villagers, still shocked by the invasion of their country, were keeping indoors. The wooden houses with their layers of snow merged into the trees above the fjord, dark shadows with dim yellow lights coming from the windows.

  The jetty stretched out into the water, strongly made of timber and steel. Alongside it lay several large dinghies and the single More, the name, Støregutt, painted on her stern.

  Sergeant Atwood insisted on staying ashore to keep a lookout in case anybody came.

  ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘Them Germans are right buggers but they know how to fight. They play it big and use both ’ands.’

  Magnusson thought he was making a lot of it, since the village was clearly not occupied but left him in the shadows of the trees. Then moving cautiously, trying to avoid making any sound, the rest of them slipped along the jetty and climbed aboard the fishing boat. After the frosty air outside, the wheelhouse felt stuffy. It was warm from recent occupation, but the bunks had been stripped of blankets. In the forecastle not a jersey or a jacket or an oilskin was to be seen and there was nothing in the food locker but a couple of tins of sweetened milk, a tin of bully beef and a stale loaf. Annie and the Norwegian were staring round them, puzzled.

  ‘But there is nothing to stop us starting the engine,’ Annie said. ‘We have only to turn on the fuel tap and swing the motor.’

  ‘Talking of fuel,’ Magnusson said. ‘How about checking the tanks?’

  Campbell disappeared aft to the engine-room. As he vanished, Annie looked up. ‘Do you think we shall get away?’ she asked, and for the first time Magnusson realised it was she who was seeking his advice and encoura
gement, not the other way round.

  ‘We’ll have a good try,’ he said.

  Campbell reappeared, his face grave. ‘She’s dry.’

  ‘She must have sails. A foresail, a mizzen and a little triangular mainsail. I’ve seen ’em using them.’

  They found the sails in the hold but Campbell pointed to the open hatch. Above his head they could see the square of sky studded with stars.

  ‘There isn’t a breath of wind,’ he said.

  In the still frosty air, the fjord was silent with the silence of the tomb. There wasn’t even the sound of waves, nothing more than the soft slop of water against the hull.

  ‘Isn’t there even enough fuel to get us to the end of the fjord?’ Magnusson asked. ‘We’d pick up a wind there.’

  ‘Bone dry,’ Campbell said. ‘They must have come in on their last drop. There’s another thing, too; there are no fish in the hold. They must have been fishing when they heard of the invasion and decided to come in.’

  Willie John had already found the radio in the charthouse, which was behind the wheelhouse. There was a smell of booze about him and Magnusson eyed him suspiciously, though he’d not seen him drinking again. Turning the set on, Willie John bent over it, his head cocked. He was singing softly to himself and Magnusson caught the words.

  ‘When I get oot o’ the Navy,

  What a wonderful wife I’ll make–’

  ‘Get on with it, man, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Wait, boy, wait!’

  With what Magnusson considered was an unnecessary amount of fiddling with the knobs to show his esoteric skill, Willie John located Stockholm and a news bulletin which told them Namsos had been bombed out of existence, but that British troops were now at Lillehammer. Other areas had been lost, however, and the Germans were heading north in strength.