by David Fraser
‘We’ve got guides on the track, to lead the platoons to their ground. I can’t raise Battalion Headquarters. Wireless packed in, and two signallers hit an hour ago, bugger it! Freddie’s telling them what’s happening as well as he can.’
Richard Wright was known to have a poor opinion of Freddie Lang. Relations between the two companies had, consequently, never been close. But they needed each other now. There was a hiss and a crump, several times repeated along the way they had just come. More German shelling.
With unwonted frankness Anthony said,
‘You’ll have nobody to take over if you stop one, Richard!’
‘Freddie and I will be together. Run both companies together while we’re here, makes sense. If anything gets me he’ll command both.’
‘Or if Lang is disabled,’ thought Anthony, ‘you’ll command both. That would be good.’
Wright said,
‘We must get the picture to Battalion Headquarters or there’s no hope for anyone. At present the Battalion’s sliced into small pieces.’
Anthony said, ‘Right!’ still feeling it was wrong to send him. He said, ‘I’ll tell Colonel Adam …’
Lieutenant-Colonel Adam Jenkinson commanded the Battalion. Another shell exploded, about fifty yards down the track below them on the route to Battalion Headquarters.
‘Colonel Adam’s been hit. Shell, this evening. I don’t know who’s at Battalion Headquarters. I suppose Freddie will be taking command but the Adjutant hasn’t been through. Anyway, Freddie can’t get away from here at the moment. Obviously.
‘Get DOWN!’
More shells fell, and the German machine guns suddenly opened up again with sustained bursts.
‘Here they come, I expect,’ said Wright in a matter-of-fact voice. B Company had been filing rapidly down and off the track during their conversation. Wright’s system was working. Somehow, somewhere, in whatever confusion of darkness, he would get his Company in some sort of defensible perimeter within supporting distance of C Company and would handle the Germans when they came. This sounded as if it would be very soon indeed.
‘Off you go, Anthony,’ Wright said, still in his matter-of-fact tone. ‘Tell them what’s going on. We and C Companies can’t get back at the moment. We’d be caught on the run and the Jerries could drive wherever they like. If we can hang on till morning, here at the Pimple, somebody can make some sense of it all. We’ll get word to them, somehow, that you’re on the way back, but put it across, for God’s sake, to whoever thinks he’s running the Battalion tonight.’
Anthony knew that he spoke truth. The Pimple commanded all routes into what had been the Battalion area.
‘Off you go! Take Billings here with you. He’s no good here, now we’ve got no bloody wireless. And look after yourself!’ For the moment Wright sounded dubious. Private Billings, a spare signaller at Company Headquarters, loomed out of the darkness.
Feeling a deserter, Anthony moved down the track. Soon he and Billings were alone. He sensed rather than saw survivors of B Company filing off to the right, toward what Wright called the reverse side of the Pimple. There, he knew, the energy and the soldierly competence of Wright, supported by the intelligent anticipation of Sergeant-Major Phillips, would again make B Company a hard nut for the Germans to crack. And while those Germans dashed themselves like waves against the breakwaters of B and C combined companies on the Pimple somebody else – the Brigadier? the General? – presumably could and no doubt would find a way to restore the position in the Battalion’s right rear, on the ground occupied until this morning by D Company. For as far as Anthony could imagine from his recollection of the map, from what he had originally seen of the ground, there could not be much – indeed was there anything? – between the Germans and Battalion Headquarters. Or, for that matter, between the Germans and the Battalion supply echelon in the woods far beyond: between the Germans and the heart of the brigade position.
Anthony had been once to Battalion Headquarters. It was in some caves, holes in a vertical rockface in the middle of woods. These woods stretched along the foot of the hill they had been defending, from which they had now climbed painfully down. They stretched, too, along the slopes running down from the Pimple, that bump to be passed in the night but now turned into an improvised fortress for B and C Companies. The caves were, Anthony thought, about one thousand yards from where he had left Wright. It was a long way in the dark. He moved as quickly as he could, stumbling now and then, pausing on occasion to ensure contact with Billings, hoping his sense of direction was not betraying him.
They had been moving for about ten minutes when there broke out behind them renewed and sustained Spandau fire and the sound of sharper explosions than the crump of shell or mortar bomb. Anthony looked back. The flashes were unmistakeable.
Grenades.
So the attack was going in! The Germans, masters of infiltration and assault by day, were not particularly enthusiastic fighters by night. They must want the Pimple badly. They must have more ambitious plans for the morning. From the Pimple came a mighty clatter of machine gun and rifle fire. Anthony disliked himself for not being there. He felt extraordinarily lonely. After they had received the withdrawal orders in the afternoon Richard Wright had suddenly said to him,
‘You did very well, Anthony, it was a great help to know you were always being sensible in the right place. Thanks.’ Then he had hastily spoken of other things. Anthony had been much moved. B Company was his family and they were at this moment, fighting it out on the Pimple. Without him.
‘Come on, Billings!’
Billings was making slow progress, although the inferno of noise from the Pimple might have provided strong incentive to move away from it as rapidly as possible. Billings was a clumsy, maladroit man, his fingers astonishingly competent with a wireless set, his other limbs ungainly and shambling. Wright found him irritating and had small patience with him.
They moved slowly on. The track fell steeply at this point. Anthony thought he remembered it.
‘Get down!’
The crack of the first shell’s explosion was particularly sharp.
‘A high velocity gun,’ a tiny part of Anthony’s mind reflected. Seven shells exploded. Each felt as if it were about three yards away, but five out of the seven hit the track, or ground near it, higher up the hillside, hit the route they had already traversed. Anthony had burrowed into the stony earth, tried to make his bulk as minuscule as possible. The hot smell of cordite was everywhere, and dust thickened the night air. He thought he had probably been unduly precipitate in his reactions and was glad they had been unwatched except by Billings.
‘I’m getting windy,’ he told himself with honesty. ‘Getting windy after that bloody hill.’
‘Are you all right, Billings?’
There was no reply.
‘Billings!’
Billings was not all right. Lagging a little way behind Anthony he had dived into some bushes beside the track. The third shell had killed him instantly. Billings’ legs extended from the bushes and Anthony tripped over them as he retraced his steps. He picked himself up and shone his torch on the rest of Billings. There was a small wound in his throat: very small, almost surgical. There was little of the blood, grime, sickening ugliness of much of war: little of what the cry ‘stretcher bearers’, the word ‘casualties’ now evoked in Anthony’s mind’s eye after the long days on B Company’s hill. Billings, by contrast, had gone with great neatness and consideration. The awkward, untidy man had been treated by death with curious courtesy, with marked exactitude.
Anthony stood up. On the hill he had lost men he had come greatly to care about. He had seen them die, watched them squirm and moan from wounds which must lead to death before they reached the Medical Aid Post after a jolting, agonizing, journey. He had thought, ‘I shall mind all this very much one day. But I can’t feel anything yet. I haven’t time. I’ve no feelings to spare.’
Anthony had not known Billings particularly well. He
had found him dull and unsympathetic. Yet now the death of Billings hit him hard. He found himself hating the German gunners who fired the shell which found Billings. The man was so extraordinarily inoffensive! So clumsy, so unmilitary, so patently allergic to soldierly duty except where it kept him with his beloved wireless set. Billings was a man of peace. There was nothing to be done for him now. Anthony left him, with his small, tidy hole in the throat and hurried on in the darkness, alone.
Anthony reckoned that another three hundred yards should take him to the area of Battalion Headquarters. He had already entered the woods, small, twisted trees for the most part, yet making darkness more impenetrable. There was no moon. He forced his eyes to do their best but he tripped and stumbled a good deal. Perhaps it was more than three hundred yards? One generally over-estimated how much distance one had covered in the dark. It would be getting light soon now. Already shapes were more distinguishable.
He started to count his steps. He reached 140, and then, to his profound relief, saw something move beside the track. Battalion Headquarters sentries! There was often disloyal ribaldry among the rifle companies at what was alleged to be the slackness of routine at Battalion Headquarters.
‘A few Jerry attacks would sharpen that lot up,’ Sergeant-Major Phillips had observed with relish, after some doubtless apocryphal story of Battalion Headquarters’ unsoldierly remoteness from real fighting.
‘It will be different now,’ thought Anthony grimly. After the morning’s fighting Battalion Headquarters sentries were likely to be not slack but jittery. He moved cautiously. There were plenty of precedents for being shot by one’s own sentries. The password was on his tongue. It would be better to walk with a certain amount of noise. He was sure the movement he had seen was no more than thirty yards away. They should be expecting him, although it was such a confused night that one could not count on this vital information having reached the sentries.
He crouched down and saw, without question, two shapes that were not rocks or bushes, saw them against the ever paler background of the night sky. It was the sentries all right – about twenty-five yards away. Anthony noted with wry amusement that they were close together and could not possibly be covering each other in the approved manner. Battalion Headquarters! This would make an acceptable story in B Company! He strode forward.
There followed several sharp cracks, followed by a number of blinding flashes. Anthony found himself lying on his back without knowing how he got there.
‘Grenades!’ he thought, perfectly clearly. ‘My God, they must think I’m a whole bloody company withdrawing.’ He was conscious of no pain. But when he attempted to turn on his stomach, to crawl, he found that he could not move and the attempt brought anguish which he thought he identified as running down his left side. There seemed to be a great weight pinning his left thigh. Then he found that he was, for no reason that made sense, calling out –
‘It’s Captain Marvell!’
He remembered afterwards, when these things began to come back to him, a great deal of shouting. Words were distinguishable as from a great distance –
‘Nur ein! Nur ein!’ and ‘Verwundet!’ and a little later –‘ Offizier!’
He saw a boot near his head. Then a voice spoke, very near. Fear, pain, were overtaken by irritation as Anthony heard the sound of a German, clearly fancying his fluency in English, showing off his skill with unconvincing idiom. And there was nobody to laugh with about it! The voice was patronizing and affected, the accent artificial.
‘Well, old boy, I’m afraid you must be spending Christmas behind barbed wire!’
Anthony summoned up a flicker of resistance – ‘Unsinn!’ he found he could do no more than whisper, ‘Dummkopf! he added for good measure. He could not tell whether the croak was audible but the defiance was necessary even if childish.
Then he lost consciousness.
Chapter 16
Ten days to Christmas! Christmas, 1942! Toni Rudberg shivered. He stamped his feet ceaselessly on the earth floor of the peasant cottage to try to maintain some sort of circulation. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero and still falling.
Against the wooden walls of the cottage two command vehicles were parked and Toni, now a Major, had set up the Divisional operations staff cell in the cottage itself. With casualties and illness having taken their toll he now found himself virtually running the Operations Staff of the Division. They’d moved south some weeks before to join what most people regarded as a doomed attempt to relieve Sixth Army from the south-west, to fight their way from the Don to the Volga and somehow link hands with the poor wretches in Stalingrad. It had been the first such attempt. In Stalingrad more than 200,000 German soldiers of Sixth Army were surrounded by what appeared to be most of the Red Army, pinning them in a great pocket west of the Volga.
Toni had been delighted to be assigned again to a Panzer Division, after nearly a year spent on a Corps Staff. One was nearer the troops, the action. A Divisional staff was small, intimate, congenial. But when he gazed at the sullen grey of the eastern sky, listened to the incessant grumble of the Russian guns and rockets pounding the defenders of Stalingrad, he found himself thinking with nostalgia of his last appointment, of a different part of the front. Above all, his mind went back to those extraordinary days in the Summer of 1941. The advance had been exhilarating, no question of it. They had been going forward – going forward huge distances over an empty landscape much of the time. Until the beginning of November the weather had been agreeable. Thereafter – the winter of 1941 was not a pleasant recollection. There had been no decent winter clothing, no effective winter equipment. Vehicles had been unusable, oil had frozen, automatic weapons jammed, supply had been laborious or non-existent. Instead of sweeping advances into this vast and melancholy land they’d had to sit tight, to hold positions where they happened to be – which were seldom positions any sane man would have chosen to defend.
Then had come the huge Russian attacks on the Central Front. Immense packs of men, advancing wolflike across the frozen ground in close order, inviting massacre, yelling, mad with drink, making no attempt to manoeuvre, to skirmish.
It was like a film he’d seen in Berlin long ago about the English being attacked by Zulus, although from his recollection the Zulus had appeared more methodical.
Most of the Russian troops who had carried out the great counter-attacks of the winter around Moscow had been oriental divisions from the Soviet east. Again and again the defenders had given ground because there simply wasn’t enough ammunition for the machine guns and mortars to stem the flood. Toni had been shaken on one occasion by seeing at first hand the sense of self-preservation which even the hardened German landser could display. He had been sent to visit a forward regiment and was lying behind a bank of snow beside a light machine gun team, one of half a dozen on the front edge of a wood. The Russian attack was the third in two days. Toni watched the leading ranks through his binoculars as they stumbled forward in the snow. Maybe one thousand metres, he thought, and glanced at the nearest machine gunners. The gefreiter in charge was an old soldier, grizzled, hardbitten. A minute later the Spandau opened up. The Russian shrieks were audible in the crisp, icy air.
‘Urra! Urra!’
There were German shouts from left and right of Toni and a yelled order from the team next to him.
‘Back, right away!’
‘What the hell –’ roared Toni. He was a Staff officer, visiting in order to report first-hand impressions, but he knew that no withdrawal had been authorized in this sector.
‘We’re going back, Herr Hauptmann. You’d better come. Quick.’
‘Why –’
‘You don’t think we’ve got the ammunition to stop that lot!’ the man said contemptuously as he shouldered cartridge belts and bent to lift a box. Toni looked at him. Should he shoot the Gefreiter instantly, take command, restore the situation? He looked at the other machine gun teams. They were already climbing out of the snow-filled ditch into t
he cover of the wood and through it. Toni looked at the Russians. Six hundred metres.
‘Better come along, Herr Hauptmann,’ said the Gefreiter. ‘There’s plenty of Russia behind us. If we stick to this bit of it for another three minutes we’ll never leave it.’ Toni moved back without a word.
It was the same everywhere, this second winter. There was the conversation he had had with an old friend only two weeks ago, here in the south. They’d met during what passed for a rest period – a few days’ lull before this last desperate attempt to relieve Stalingrad. Von Wrede was with an infantry regiment, a battalion commander, several years younger than Toni. Most infantry battalions were commanded by lieutenants by now. Wrede was a friend from carefree, peacetime days. They’d once been in the same skiing party at St Anton, raced each other, drank together until all hours, chased the same girl. Toni had won the chase but they’d always got on well. Wrede appeared a different man now. He not only looked older than Toni, Toni thought without pleasure: he, a youngster, actually looked like an old man.
‘Rudberg, these men have got to have some rest, some relief. They’re fine men but they’ve been pushed too hard. They’re losing confidence.’ And von Wrede told him that during the great Soviet advances of mid-November, 1942, those attacks which had smashed the Rumanian army, torn a great hole in the Don front and encircled Stalingrad, his Sergeant-Major had come to him one evening and saluted.
‘Are we to retire tonight?’
‘No, we’re staying here.’
‘Herr Oberleutnant, the soldiers –’ the man was embarrassed. More, he was wretched. He told von Wrede that unless orders were given to withdraw he had information – reliable information – that there was a plot to kill the officers and withdraw willy-nilly. There were no loyal, dissentient voices: none, at least, that could be relied upon to stay firm.
‘They know they may be detected, shot. But they count on the confusion to get away with it. And they’re saying – what’s the odds? If we stay here, it’s a Russian bullet or bayonet. For the lucky ones,’ the Sergeant-Major muttered. For the less fortunate, as every man knew, torture and mutilation were the hazards of wounding or capture by the Red Army.
