'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  “Sarn’t Major!”

  The angry bellow brought Arnie Moore from where he had been toiling with the drivers, orderlies and off watch signallers to complete the CP bunker.

  “Sir?”

  The CO was standing with hands on hips and apparently not about to shout across whatever had pissed him off, so the American paratrooper ducked back inside to re-emerge with personal weapon in one large fist and entrenching tool reattached to his fighting order, which he pulled on as he trotted down the slope to the Coldstream Guards CO.

  “The track plan Sarn’t Major, is not being adhered to.”

  No matter how skilfully the individual positions were camouflaged and concealed, and no matter how diligently signals security was applied, the unmistakable signs of human and vehicular traffic could undo it all. The only way to minimise such indications was to enforce the use of prescribed routes, and these had been given out following the locations initial recce prior to its occupation.

  Arnie followed the Commanding Officers gaze and cursed to himself. They were all so damned tired that things were starting to slip, and he should not have had this particular lapse in discipline brought to his attention by the CO of all people.

  “Right sir, I’m on it.”

  Pat stalked off to the O Group, leaving the American to get it sorted.

  Arnie headed for the nearest company location to breathe fire and brimstone on the NCOs, he could have taken a vehicle, following the correct tracks of course, but by going on foot he would see any other problems he might otherwise miss, and turning up unexpectedly would in itself remind everyone to stay on the ball.

  He was just a few metres from 1 Platoons CP trench before Oz spotted him.

  “Hide the grot mags and the still Colin, colonial approaching at our six!”

  “Cut the shit sergeant, I’m here on official business.” Arnie drawled. “And I haven’t seen a decent porn mag amongst any of your guys.”

  Colin backed out of the newly completed shelter bay and stood with a groan born of several hours digging, but the smile was as sincere as the extended, though grubby hand. “What did I hear Oz, he’s returning your light reading material and re-stocking the cocktail cabinet?”

  “No such luck, just grumbling about there being no Hustlers ‘Barely a Ewe’. Typical country boy.”

  Arnie gave Sergeant Osgood the finger and squatted down. “I just got a minor ass singeing from the CO over non-compliance with the track plan.”

  Colin slopped some water into a his metal mug, added to it with some from Oz’s water bottle and Arnie dutifully handed over his own, payment for his share of the brew.

  “Tea or coffee?” Colin asked.

  “You always ask me that, and the answers the same as always.”

  Colin gave him a malicious grin. “Tough shit, we’re out of coffee so you can have a civilised drink for once in your heathen life.” He lit a solid fuel tablet and placed it on the small folding stove. “I’ll get the section commanders together and read the riot act, but you know the underlying reason the same as I do?”

  “The boys need a break.” Arnie answered.

  “We all need a break!” Oz muttered as he carefully rolled long strips of turf back over the spoil that formed the overhead protection of the shelter bays roof.

  Arnie let him complete the task before frowning critically.

  If there was anything Sgt Osgood knew about, it was field engineering with pick and shovel, so he was instantly defensive when he noticed the American’s expression. “What?”

  Arnie jumped into the fire bay before sticking his head inside the shelter bay for a brief look, and then kicking the trench wall like a prospective buyer tapping the tyres of a used car with a toecap. Finally he shook his head and clambered out of the trench.

  “You’re going to have to fill it in and start again, guys.”

  Colin caught the wink Arnie gave him and settled back to watch Oz take the bait.

  “No we won’t!” indignantly challenging the American as if he had been asked to perform an indecent act, Oz stood up and looked for any obvious faults in its construction.

  “It’s a bloody good trench that is, solid built and well cammed, with good arcs of fire!”

  Arnie shook his head sympathetically.

  “It’s facing in the wrong direction Sarn’t Osgood, and as for the shelter bay entrance, well…” Like an art critic rubbishing a piece of work for reasons he felt should be obvious, he threw up his arms in despair.

  Oz was incredulous.

  “Waddaya mean its facing the wrong direction?” striding around to stand beside Arnie he peered at the scene north. “And what’s this shit about the entrance…where else would ya put it, ya soft twat!”

  “It coddles the negative energy and deters the positive…” Arnie ducked to avoid the Geordies backhand blow.

  “You Texican wanker…you had me going, there!”

  Colin removed a sachet of non-dairy whitening and then replaced it in his webbing; fishing into the depths of his bergen for a small can of Nestles evaporated milk instead. They needed a treat under the circumstances, he decided.

  The field telephone at the end of the firebay buzzed and Colin lifted the handset, listening for a moment before replacing it with a grunt. He tugged on a length of communications cord and when a face appeared over the parapet of the nearest trench to theirs he laid a pair of extended fingers against his left bicep, summoning the section commander who resided in that fighting position. When the Lance Corporal arrived Colin nodded downhill. “The Q Blokes got a ration and ammo replen, take four blokes and play grocer, Corporal Bethers.”

  The NCO doubled away and Colin shouted after him. “And follow the track plan!”

  The water came to a boil and Colin served up a mug of strong, sweet tea, NATO style, which was handed around the trio while they talked over local issues.

  L/Cpl Bethers and his fatigue party came and went, dropping off grenades, smoke, shermoulies, small arms ammunition, compo and topping up their water bottles from a jerry can.

  Colin had started smoking again a week before, which made the three of them in deep trouble once their wives found out, unless of course they could break the habit before crossing the thresholds of their various homes once more. He lit up a cigarette and took a drag on it, enjoying the sensation.

  “Two’s up.” Arnie said, the British Army slang came naturally to him now, and Colin passed it across, sharing as requested.

  The explosion came as the American exhaled and was in the process of passing the ‘fag’ to Oz. The cigarette went spinning away as he rolled over the parapet to join the two Guardsmen now crouching down at the bottom of the firebay.

  Screaming came from over to their left along with desperate shouts of “Medic!” but there were no further detonations.

  Arnie and Oz left the trench, crawling rapidly over the muddy earth toward the cries for help whilst Colin yelled for the platoon to stand-to.

  All about the area weapons were cocked and shouts echoed the CSMs order to stand-to. It was a time of confusion, when no one knew what the hell was going on but all wanted to. In answer to Colin Probert’s call for a medic to the company CP by field telephone, he immediately received a demand for information on the cause of the explosion, was it an attack, was it a mine or a booby trap? But all he could say in reply was to ‘wait out’.

  This was the part of a platoon commander’s job that he liked the least, relying on others to do what his instincts urged him to do, find the problem and report back.

  It could have been no more than a minute or so before one of L/Cpl Bethers fatigue men sprinted over to him, but it seemed an age. The young Guardsman was not one of the original battalion and had seen little blood and gore up to that moment. He was breathless as he arrived, his face pale having seen the first most terrible thing to occur in his eighteen years.

  “Sir, its Robertson and Aldridge…a grenade went off, we’d just replened them and something must have go
ne wrong…the RSM and Sarn’t Osgood is workin’ on Robbo, but Aldridge is, is…..!”

  Colin’s stomach sank at the names of the Tyne and Weir romantics, and cutting him short he ordered him into the trench to stand by the field phone. Robertson and Aldridge were members of a group at risk of becoming an endangered species, the original members of the battalion.

  Hauling himself out of the trench he grabbed up his rifle and left at a run. He could see a cluster of men bent over watching something, and as he drew near he snarled at them to do as they’d been damn well told and stand to. They scattered away to their own trenches and Colin reached the object of their interest.

  The smell of high explosive hung in the air about the fighting position. Torn and ripped sandbags that had lined the parapet of the trenches firebay lay scattered about, the contents bleeding out into the wet ground. The leaves of bushes that had provided the natural cover growing around the position were splashed with blood, and something red and pink, wrapped in shredded camouflage material, was draped over the branch of a tree just behind the trench.

  Robertson had been pulled from the trench and laid on the ground beside it so that he could be worked on. L/Cpl Bethers was elevating the remains of what had been an arm, and pressing down hard as he applied a field dressing to the end of the foreshortened limb. The dressing had already reached its limit, it was bright red and blood fell from it at a steady rate.

  Oz was knelt down applying a dressing to Robertson’s chest, and it too was soaked with arterial blood. Discarded wound dressing wrappers littered the muddy ground around the young soldier, ground that wore a growing dark stain.

  Stepping up to Bethers side, Colin put the heel of his boot in Robertson’s armpit, and bore down on it to compress the artery that had been severed further along, above the soldiers elbow.

  It had to have hurt, and Colin looked at his Guardsman intending to speak some words of reassurance, but Robertson’s lower jaw, nose, eyes and most of the soft tissue of his face were missing. What remained showed no visible reaction.

  Arnie arrived back at a sprint, having gone for more dressings and encountered the medical officer already enroute. A pair of the battalion medics accompanied the officer with a stretcher and Bergens loaded with the tools of their trade. A medic relieved Colin and Bethers of their task with the pressure point and wound, and the Warrant Officer with nothing else he could do to save his soldier tried to discover what had happened in the first place.

  The three remaining Guardsmen of Bethers replenishment party were with their small stock of stores at the next trench, where the trio lay in all round defence. Hand signals summoned one of the Guardsmen to his side, where Colin spoke to the rifleman briefly before sending him to the company commanders CP with a sitrep.

  “Okay Corporal, any ideas as to what happened?”

  Aged only twenty, L/Cpl Bethers had that jump on maturity that servicemen possess, and which is absent from civilians of the same age group. He already had an opinion as to what had occurred after Aldridge and Robertson had been resupplied.

  “Sir, we gave them the same as we gave you. A hundred rounds of ball, fifty linked, one shermouli, one smoke, one frag and its fuse assembly, their water and rat packs.” He nodded towards the body. “Aldridge was like a zombie, all fingers and thumbs, and he dropped the body of the frag when he was trying to screw the fuse in.”

  Colin stepped to the edge of the trench and looked down, the sight that met him was not pleasant, but Bethers was still talking.

  “I bollocked him and told him to clean it before trying again, and then we moved on to Chedrick and Pitchman’s hole.”

  Colin could picture it in his mind’s eye; the body of the grenade landing in the mud at the bottom of the trench, the tired Aldridge squatting down, retrieving it and only doing half a job of ensuring the fuse chamber was cleaned of the dirt. It was dark down there so he wouldn’t have been able to see the muck that had got inside, instead of standing up in the light to check it properly. The assembly would have met resistance as he tried to screw it in, but the tired brain would just command the hands and fingers to apply more pressure.

  Fulminate of mercury demands respect and care, and the weary soldier in trying to force the fuse that it contained had lacked those qualities at that particular moment. It had gone off, setting off the explosive in the main body of the grenade.

  “Should I have hung around to make sure he did it properly, sir?”

  Colin turned and waved to the rest of the fatigue party, calling them over before he answered.

  “No Corporal, they were trained soldiers not recruits, it wasn’t your fault, ok?”

  Bethers did not look relieved, but nodded in acceptance of his platoon commanders words.

  After five minutes hard work in trying to stabilize the horribly wounded young man, the MO finally stopped what he was doing and used a scalpel to cut free the I.D tags hung about Robertson’s neck and handed them to Oz, who left the bloody dressing he had been applying and wiped the gore from the metal discs, before picking up his own SLR and walking back to the trench he shared with Colin. He didn’t look around or speak to anyone; he just left the scene of tragic death, not trusting himself to do anything else for a while.

  Arnie Moore watched him go, then turned on his heel and headed for the next platoon location. The only way to curb the carelessness that had started to creep in was not with happy-clappy, beanbag sessions, but by some old fashioned, down to earth discipline. It was the job of the NCOs to lay into their blokes whenever they witnessed it, and that wasn’t happening so Arnie was off to kick some ass, and ensure it started.

  Robertson had been taken away by stretcher, and Colin was supervising the removal of Aldridge and the scattered body parts when Ray Tessler, 1 Company’s CSM arrived. All the company commanders were at the COs O Group so he was holding the fort. By rights the company should have had a captain as the 2 i/c, but their last one was now OC of 3 Company and therefore Ray Tessler was mister two-hats.

  There had been too many casualties and too few replacements coming in, resulting in the next man in line taking over as the command structure was thinned out by enemy action.

  One of the platoons in 4 Company had only two lance corporals remaining of its NCO compliment, and one of those was now the acting platoon commander. He wouldn’t hold the post for very long, only until the CO had reshuffled his remaining officers, warrant officers and senior NCOs to fill the slots. Which was one of the items on the agenda at today’s O Group.

  Colin had liked both Robertson and Aldridge, two young men so typical of the Geordies and Yorkshiremen that made up the Coldstream Guards, but he now filed away not so much their memories, as their personalities. If he lived to see another Remembrance Sunday then he would allow them out, the two youngsters who had fantasised over hot tub orgies with lovely pop stars whilst they awaited the war to come to them. They would be allowed out with the others Colin had once soldiered with, shared a pint with, food and laughter, along with the good and bad times that went with army life, both on or off operations. For now though, they were shut away as he and Ray retrieved their weapons, ammunition and equipment, ready for collection by the company quartermaster sergeant to clean and re-issue. Their personal effects would be separated and then passed down the line to RHQ in London, for onward transmission to the young men’s families.

  Paris, France: 1648hrs, same day.

  The man who emerged from the doorway of a small hotel in Rue Des Abesses, in the Montmartre area of the French capital, was someone who was an almost unknown outside of the military circles in his own country, and he looked slightly uncomfortable wearing local civilian attire. As he disappeared into the crowds a man and a woman stepped from the same hotel entrance and immediately separated, each taking a different direction.

  Over a period of twenty minutes a total of thirteen individuals left the one star hotel, but only one of these was a French national.

  It went unnoticed by the local pol
ice or SDECE, the French Intelligence Service, and there were no longer any tourists to accidentally snap them as they disappeared as surreptitiously as they had arrived six hours before.

  Moscow, Russia: 1755hrs, same day.

  Udi’s day had been fairly crappy on the whole. The workday started with his section head almost giving him a heart attack by summonsing him to his office. Udi had barely arrived and was in the act of removing his topcoat when the tap on the shoulder had come.

  Fearing the worst and desperately trying to formulate a speech in his head to explain his failing to report the jamming that night, he had knocked on the office door.

  He had almost laughed when he was told the reason for his presence in the office, the head of department’s birthday was approaching and his boss had elected Udi to organise a collection amongst his colleagues, and then to purchase a suitable gift.

  His shift had passed by slowly, with the weary Udi clock watching the whole time. There were no surveillance devices for him to plant that day and so he monitored those that were already in place.

  When the minute hand reached the hour he had joined the rest of his shift in a restrained scramble for coats and headed home.

  The running program was the first thing he checked after reaching his flat and locking the door behind him.

  The program for the section of the hallway and stairs had been cleaned up in the preceding hours he had been at work, and it also seemed that he might have sound for this segment also.

  Udi removed his coat and tossed it toward an armchair before sitting before the terminal and playing the segment. The first thirty seconds showed him nothing that had not been present before the jamming had begun, and then he heard the dachas door open. Having psyched himself up for the appearance of a man he was surprised when a female appeared.

  The surveillance device was sited close to the power cables that served the outside light over the dachas main door, a position where the magnetic field given off by the cable would run interference with any counter surveillance device during a casual sweep. As such he could see only the back of the woman who did not turn as she closed the door, shutting it instead with a backward shove of a hand. That simple act is one associated with familiarity, the act of someone who had been to that dacha on more than a few occasions, but the tired Udi did not pick up on that fact.