Weaver tt-4

by Stephen Baxter

  But as Ernst walked with his comrades, swinging his arms and stepping out, he felt his blood flow, his heart pump, the clean English air filling his lungs, and he began to feel alive again. Why not? He was young, he was strong, his training was good, and he was with the best army in the world, a fact proven by accomplishment. He dared to look ahead, to the future. Perhaps he would be in London when the Fuhrer made his entrance – by barge, perhaps, along the Thames. What a grand day that would be!

  The men rumbled into a marching song – 'Bomben auf Engelland', a popular favourite on the French beaches.

  But this mood did not last long. Aircraft buzzed across the sky, out of sight above the lid of low cloud. Ernst winced every time one came close; he had seen troop columns strafed from the air on the continent. But no harm came from that quarter. Rumours went around the column that the RAF today was targeting the embarkation ports in France and the returning fleets of barges and tugs, trying to disrupt the invasion's second echelon.

  And as the morning wore on the going became slow, disjointed. The first serious resistance they encountered was at a crossroads near a pub called the Lamb Inn, a location that commanded the levels behind them. That didn't take long to resolve, thanks to the tank. But after that the resistance became more frequent, and over and over again the column ground to a halt. Often Ernst couldn't even see what was going on up ahead. He would hear the thump of explosions, the pop of small-arms fire, occasionally a roar as the tank let loose its main gun, and see the smoke of burning petrol. Sometimes they would see one or more of their own vehicles, disabled or burned out and shoved over to the side of the road. There were a few German dead, a steady trickle; Ernst saw the bodies at the side of the road covered by tarpaulins from the disabled trucks. Medics patched up the injured.

  And the troops would stare as they passed a blown-apart pillbox of piled-up sandbags, or a cleared-aside roadblock made of concrete and lengths of rail track and concrete anti-tank 'dimples', lines of little cones. The weapons in the blown-open pillboxes and bunkers, seemed crude. Ernst saw one mortar that looked as if it might have been used against Napoleon.

  On they went. Every bridge was demolished, and the scouts had to find them places to ford the streams. Elsewhere there were ditches, meant to stop tanks perhaps, and the weary men scrambled down one bank and up another. These assaults were petty, but they steadily eroded the column's manpower, and took out their vehicles and horses and used up their ammunition. And, more importantly, they were slowed down.

  A horse was killed by a mine in a grotesque explosion that burst the animal's carcass, showering the men with bloody fur and shredded bits of meat. The men took a break as the engineers dealt with that.

  Two British troops, wounded but alive, had been taken in this place. The men sat on the ground with their hands on their heads. They wore what looked like proper army uniforms, with flat steel helmets, leather gaiters, boots, greatcoats and leather belts. One had an officer's stripes. But their arm bands read HOME GUARD. These two were old, Ernst saw with a shock as he passed, their hair grey, their faces deeply lined – either of them old enough to be his own father, if not his grandfather. Perhaps the rumours that had been circulating since France were true, that the British forces really were badly depleted by the catastrophe that had overtaken them at Dunkirk. Old these fellows might be, and defeated and captured, but they sat up straight like soldiers, one with blood trickling into a closed eye from a head wound, and they stared every German in the eye.

  'Partisans?' muttered one man.

  'No,' the leutnant snapped. 'You can't be a partisan until your country has surrendered, Breitling. Until then these gentleman are to be treated as prisoners of war.'

  'They should be fucking shot,' Breitling said. 'Fucking English. Why can't they just roll over like the French?'

  'Don't let it get you down, lads,' said the leutnant. 'Look at what we're up against. Old men and boys, and weapons from a museum. When the Panzers get over here on Tuesday they'll roll up this countryside like a carpet.'

  But later Ernst overheard the leutnant muttering with an officer about this slow progress, and how it was becoming important they found fuel before they exhausted the supply they had brought over from France.

  For Ben and the other prisoners it was not an arduous walk. Stuck in the middle of the column and surrounded by guards, they plodded steadily along. They talked quietly, swapped their stories, and bummed furtive cigarettes from each other. They seemed resigned to their fate, Ben thought.

  The prisoners had to shelter like the rest from the attacks by the resistance elements. This was another product of the war in Spain, Ben supposed, that great warm-up fixture where the Germans had learned how to machine-gun civilians from the air and the British had learned to make Molotov cocktails.

  As the day wore on Ben's headache got worse.

  One man helped him when he staggered. 'Just walk. It was like this in France, in the early days. March and march. You just have to get on with it. My advice is to think about something else.' He had a strong accent, barely comprehensible to Ben. 'You got a girl?'

  'Not exactly.'

  'Well, you're a bright lad. Do a crossword in your head. That's my advice.'

  So Ben walked, trying to ignore the pain in his head. He tried to visualise problems in relativity, like Godel's beautiful rotating-universe solution of Einstein's equations. But the math kept sliding away from him, the tensors with their forests of suffices blurring into invisibility.

  Soon he had trouble keeping up with the pace, and drifted to the back of the little group of prisoners. The German guards thumped him with their rifle-butts, yelling at him to keep up, and even rode into the back of his legs with their bicycle wheels.

  The veteran protested: 'Hey, go easy, Funf. Can't you see he's ill?' That won him shouts in German that if he didn't shut up he'd be taken out of the line and shot. The veteran understood their tone, if not their words. 'The front-line corps who captured us were gentlemen. Not like this shower. Look at them, car mechanics and horse handlers, bottle washers and sausage makers. Scum of the earth, the lot of them.'

  XX

  Mary prepared to leave George's house before nine o'clock, this Sunday morning.

  She sorted out her belongings. She slung her handbag under her coat, so it was less likely to be grabbed off her. She hesitated a bit about taking the research papers from the briefcase. The strange allo-historical questions she had been following since meeting Ben Kamen didn't seem to matter now, didn't even seem real, compared to the vast violence all around her. And yet not to have taken the papers would have felt like a defeat, as if she was giving up something of herself, a bit of her identity. So she stuffed the papers into her rucksack, along with her knickers and stockings.

  Then she stepped out of the house, and once more locked the door carefully. Aircraft screamed overhead, making her flinch, but at least the town wasn't coming under attack this morning. She walked out of the Old Town, down the narrow, sloping streets to the coast road, and then headed west beneath the imposing West Hill, with its Norman castle and anti-aircraft gun emplacement. She meant to cut up past the rail station and then make for Bohemia Road, which would lead to the main road out to Battle.

  The heavy-lift crews had been out clearing the streets of rubble, just shoving it aside and piling it up in bomb sites and any open spaces available. But most of the shops were shut up. Some had been left with their doors open, with signs saying 'Help Yourself'. There was no food or milk, nothing she could see that would be useful now.

  She heard detonations coming from the direction of the harbour. It wasn't much of a harbour, just a fishermen's port, the sea walls built by the Victorians after centuries of struggle against geography, and now mostly silted up. But George had told her of plans to defend it with guns and torpedo tubes, and in the end to wreck it. Functioning ports were key for the Germans; without harbours it was going to be hard for them to land their heavy equipment, supplies and reinforcements.
Yesterday at the start of the invasion they had launched a paratroop raid on Dover, which seemed to have failed, but today there was said to be a major battle going on around Folkestone.

  When she got to Bohemia Road she came upon the main flow of refugees, heading out of town, slogging it on foot with their carts and wheelbarrows and prams. They were a river of people.

  There was a good bit of traffic, private cars and buses and lorries and ambulances, but at least everybody was driving the same way, to the north and out of Hastings, and there were police and ARP wardens to shepherd the pedestrians off the road to keep the traffic moving. A few bicycles threaded through the crowd; that was a sensible way to go, if you could manage it. Mary saw one lad on a bicycle hanging onto the back of a lorry, pulled along as the vehicle ploughed forward.

  The police and wardens were keeping the right hand lane clear, the lane heading back to town, but there was little traffic on it. George had said that the authorities had plans to avoid what had happened on the continent, when refugee flows had snarled up attempts to move military assets into place for a counterattack, and the police had been given maps with some routes marked in yellow for the use of civilians, others red for the military. It might have worked better, George said drily, if the maps had been printed in the right coloured ink.

  Mary felt reluctant to join the shuffling throng, as if it would mean sacrificing her individuality. But there was no choice. She stepped forward, and found a place behind a boy pushing a barrow, before a mother with two kids in a pram, beside an old man leaning on a sturdy woman who might have been his wife. And then she could do nothing but walk with the rest.

  They passed abandoned vehicles, broken down or out of petrol, briskly shoved off the road. She didn't see many military vehicles. Mostly it was just people, walking. They trudged along with their children on their backs and their wheelbarrows and prams laden with luggage and pots and pans. They seemed stoical enough. Maybe the national myths of the bulldog breed helped them hold it together. Churchill's rhetoric, still working its magic. But there were many with drawn faces and strange absent looks – plenty of trauma, even as this dreadful day got going. How strange it was, Mary thought, that only a couple of days ago she had woken up with all these people in a town where the milk was delivered and the post and papers arrived, and you could expect the shops to be open sharp in the mornings. Now all that was stripped away, and these British subjects were refugees, as simple as that, with no dignity and precious little hope. It was a scene of a population in flight, right out of H.G. Wells.

  On the outskirts of town she passed a factory. Contained within a tall wire fence, it had once manufactured components for gas cookers, but had been turned over to munitions manufacture at the outbreak of war. Now it was being systematically vandalised. A handful of women dragged equipment out of the buildings and went at it with sledgehammers and iron bars. Every factory was supposed to have a plan to disable its equipment lest it fall into enemy hands. The women, in overalls and headscarves, drafted in to replace men lost to the forces, looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Perhaps it felt like a holiday, an end to the dull and dangerous work that had occupied them for the year of the war.

  Once they got out of town towards the open country there seemed to be nobody in charge, no more police or ARP wardens, except a few who had joined the flight themselves. And still they walked, limping terribly slowly through these few miles to Battle. By now Mary was dirty, hot, thirsty, hungry, tired, and her feet ached; she felt dizzy from the lack of sleep.

  A plane came looming out of the sky, following the line of the road, heading straight toward the column. The people slowed. Mary watched in disbelief.

  'I think it's one of ours,' said one old man.

  The plane howled as it descended.

  'That's a bloody Stuka!' somebody yelled.

  When the machine guns opened up people screamed and scattered. Mary threw herself off the road, into a field of stubble. Bullets sang off the road surface as the plane roared low overhead. Then a bomb fell with a devastating crash, making a kind of bloody splash in the crowd.

  XXI

  At noon the German column came at last into Windmill Hill. It was just a hamlet surrounded by farmland. Here Ernst heard challenges to the advance in his own language. Elements of the Thirty-fourth, who had landed at Bexhill, were already in possession.

  The column broke. While sentries patrolled, the men gathered in little groups and sat around in the dirt, eating their field rations, massaging their bare feet and swapping horror stories of the landing.

  A few men were detailed to break into the houses and to search the nearby farms. No food was found, no stocks of petrol in the barns, no horses, though some of the men emerged with souvenirs – a photograph of the King, English newspapers, a government leaflet offering advice about what to do 'If The Invader Comes', over which the men had a good laugh.

  A motor car was found abandoned. A couple of the men spent some minutes trying to start it, but the rotor arm had been removed. Another man turned up a bicycle, so small it must have been meant for a child. But even that had been disabled, its front wheel bent out of shape and its chain snapped. Still the man tried to ride it, with his legs folded and his big knees sticking up in the air. He kept falling off, and raised a few laughs.

  Ernst, wandering around, saw graffiti on one of the barns, painted in thick whitewash. There was a huge letter 'V', perhaps aping Churchill's notorious gesture. And on another, more bluntly, the words 'PISS OFF HUN'.

  After an hour at Windmill Hill the column formed up, reinforced with the men of the Thirty-fourth and a few more tanks. The prisoners were sent down to Bexhill, with a detachment of guards. Ernst felt in good spirits as the column set off for several more miles' walk along the A-road towards a place called Battle – so they were assured by the spotters. All the road signs had been removed from their posts, so the ordinary troops had no real idea where they were, in green English countryside that looked much the same whichever direction you marched.

  They joined a major road at Boreham Street. Again the place was deserted, but the engineers came upon a petrol station. Adorned with metal advertising signs for Shell and Mobiloil, it was abandoned, but the engineers quickly discovered that one of the big underground tanks wasn't empty. Soon they were siphoning off the fuel and filling up the trucks.

  But after half an hour the first of the trucks coughed, and ground to a halt. The fuel they had taken had burned to a sticky sludge and was wrecking the engine. The fuel had been doped, with sugar maybe. Cursing, the engineers had to stop all the trucks that had been refuelled at Boreham Street, and fill them again from the column's own dwindling supply, brought from the continent. It was another delay, another hour lost, another vehicle ruined.

  As the column approached Battle the country became more difficult, with narrow valleys and low hills, a carpet of fields and hedgerows and copses – ideal cover. The men proceeded cautiously, as silently as possible. Sheep grazed calmly, watching the column pass.

  Suddenly they came under heavy fire; it just erupted all around them. Leutnant Strohmeyer got a bullet in the arm, and swore furiously. The vehicles pulled off the road, and the men dived into the ditches by the road. A hail of bottles came spinning out of the woods. They were Molotov cocktails; they splashed where they fell, mostly harmlessly.

  'I wonder where they got the bloody petrol,' Breitling muttered.

  XXII

  It was late afternoon by the time Mary approached Battle itself, where the refugees had been promised a convoy of vehicles would be waiting to take them further. There were many walking wounded after the Stuka attack, people moaning as they struggled to take one step after another. Mary did her best not to think of those left behind.

  But an immense plume of flame rose up above Battle, bright in the sky of this late September Sunday. Mary heard the pop of guns and the deeper booming of artillery, and planes stitched the air. The walkers stalled. Mary heard muttering. But t
hey could not go back; they plodded forward, for there was no choice.

  They approached a crossroads. The road signs had been dismantled, but Mary heard mutterings that this was the transverse road that ran just south of Battle, joining two places she'd never heard of, Catsfield to the west and Sedlescombe to the east. The refugee flow pushed on across the road junction.

  But just as Mary reached the junction there was a roar of some heavy engine. People screamed and scattered back out of the way. Mary was knocked to the ground in the crowd; she landed heavily.

  A tank came roaring across the junction, heading from west to east. It stopped with a grind of gears, bang in the middle of the junction. It had a square black cross on its turret. An officer, his head and shoulders protruding from the turret, stared with astonishment at the people before him.

  XXIII

  All that Sunday George picked up bits of news from the folk coming and going at the town hall.

  There was a ferocious battle for Folkestone. The defenders were mostly a New Zealander division. Far from home, they fought well, but by two in the afternoon the Germans had taken the town. But the retreating troops blew up the harbour with its wharves and cranes.

  Some German units had made it over the Channel today. But the hinge of the invasion would come overnight, when the bulk of the second echelon would try to make it across to their landing points at dawn on Monday. In advance of that a major battle was unfolding in the Channel. The RAF was strafing the flows of shipping and bombing the embarkation ports, all the while battling it out with the Luftwaffe, and trying to fend off bomber attacks on London and other inland cities. Its resources spread thin, the RAF was near collapse, so the rumours went. The Royal Navy also had split objectives, with a mandate to protect the Atlantic convoys even while the invasion was underway. But today the Home Fleet was fully deployed in the Channel. The destroyers and torpedo boats were taking on the Kriegsmarine, and were getting among the lines of barges and tugs returning from England.