‘Yes,’ Willis said. ‘Come on, Sarge. What’s the plan? Now we’re all tucked away inside the barbed wire—’
Adams gave him a look. ‘Well, it’s simple. In the west you’ve got us, the British Second Army and the Canadian Third, under General Brooke. In the east, the US First and Third under Hodge. We’ll skirt the high ground, cutting south of the Weald, and meet up somewhere near Hastings, us coming from the west, the Yanks from the east. A pincer movement, see? With the Nazis cut off from the ports, and the air forces and the Navy already battering them, it will just be a question of mopping up. First one to Hastings gets the beers in.’
‘Let’s hope it’s the Americans then,’ Willis said.
‘Don’t forget to take your malaria pills, Skelland. And don’t be late for the briefing.’ He ducked out of the tent.
‘Yes, Mother,’ Dougie said.
‘What an exciting time we have ahead of us,’ Willis said drily.
‘Kursk,’ said Dougie Skelland reflectively. ‘Now that’s the place to be if you want a bit of drama. A million men on each side, a single battlefield bigger than Wales. It’s in the east this war will be decided, not in this tin-pot operation.’
Willis said, ‘Let’s just be glad we can leave that to Uncle Joe, then.’ He pulled his boots off with a grunting effort.
VII
4 July
Few of the men in the slit trenches had been able to sleep that night. You could tell from the soft voices in the dark.
As dawn neared, Ernst huddled with Heinz Kieser and Carl Fischer. Heinz smoked obsessively, clutching the cigarettes between the stumps of his ruined fingers, hiding their light with his good hand. They were not far south-east of the First Objective at a place called Shamley Green, on a straight line between Guildford and Horsham. They were in a scrap of forest, and a mild breeze rustled the branches of the trees above them. Everything was dark, with not a scrap of torchlight to give away their positions.
Though it was a summer night, and though they had had the time to line their trenches with bits of wood and corrugated iron, Ernst felt cold, and he was grateful for the warmth of the other men close to him. It had been like this night after night, as they waited for the Allied push.
At about five they were served stew and soup, brought up by runners. The field kitchens were so far behind the lines the stew was always lumpy and cold by the time it got to you. The men ate the stew with their Kommisbrot, hard Army bread, their murmured conversation counterpointed by the clink of tin spoons in bowls.
‘Listen to them,’ murmured Fischer. ‘The men. They fret, you can tell. They know they need to sleep. When the Americans come, who can say when any of us will sleep again?’
‘If,’ growled Heinz. ‘If any of us will sleep again.’
‘And they become anxious when sleep does not come. In a way all the inactivity, all the waiting, makes it harder.’
This was Fischer being typically soft about the state of his men’s mood. But Ernst knew it was true. There was only so much trench-digging you could do, so many telephone cables you could lay, only so many times you could polish your leather boots and belt.
He looked north-west, to where the Allied armies must be slumbering this night, only a few miles away. The mood could not have been more different from the 1940 invasion, the last time he had been posted to the front line. In the last months, after the Stalingrad disaster and the mounting losses in the east, the Albion garrison had been steadily stripped of men and materiel. Now, who was left to face the Tommies and the Amis? Rear-echelon types like himself, who had spent much of the war on office work in Hastings, second-raters like Fischer, whose softness and sentimentality had blocked any chance of promotion, and eastern-front veterans like Heinz, damaged in body and mind. Them and a few prisoner battalions shipped over from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and whatever conscripts the SS had managed to drum up from the local population - Jugend, most of them, it was said. Second-liners, second-raters, prisoners and kids.
He thought he heard an owl call. He wondered if he might get some sleep tonight.
‘Oh,’ Fischer said. He was looking up, and orange light bathed his face.
Ernst turned. To the north-west he saw a signal flare, yellow-orange, climb into the sky from beyond the Allied line. The night remained silent. Even the men in the trenches fell quiet, like children watching a firework display.
Ernst asked, ‘Another morning concert, do you think?’ Just another example of harassing fire, if that was so.
‘I don’t think so,’ Heinz said softly.
Then it started, a noise like thunder that smashed the silence. They all dropped on their bellies. Ernst pressed his face to the dirt and covered his head with his arms.
Birds rose into the sky, great flocks of them, alarmed.
The first shells landed somewhere to Ernst’s rear. The ground shook with the impacts, as if huge doors were being slammed. These were high-explosive shells hurled from guns that might be miles away, a bombardment meant to destroy the German defences before a single Allied boot had crossed the First Objective.
It was only seconds since the silence had been broken. The screaming of the wounded began.
In a fragmentary lull, Ernst dared to look up. There was plenty of light now. Through the trees to the north-west the whole sky was in flames, from horizon to horizon. Smoke billowed up, illuminated by the sparking of the great guns themselves, and more signal flares scraped across the sky. It was a sudden dawn, rising hideously on the wrong side of the world.
He twisted. Behind him the neat zigzags and diamonds of the trenches had been broken by fresh pits, neat and round like craters on the moon, and fires were burning. Across this smashed-up landscape he saw engineers trying to reconnect severed wires, and medics struggling to get to the wounded, men buried in the trenches they had dug themselves. And more shells fell, the explosions seeming to burst up out of the ground. Ernst saw men thrown up in the air, men and bits of men, limbs and torsos neatly pulled apart.
A hand grabbed Ernst’s shoulder and dragged him back under the cover of the trench’s corrugated iron roof - it was Heinz, of course. A shell burst somewhere over Ernst’s head, shattering the trees, and wood splinters hammered on the iron. Aiming for the trees was a gunner’s tactic; you could kill and maim with shards of wood as well as with hot metal.
‘July the fourth,’ Heinz yelled through the noise.
‘What?’
‘July the fourth! Of course the Americans would start their war today. We should have known.’
Another shell screamed close, and they ducked again. And then came a new sound, a whooshing, screaming roar, and machine-gun fire pocked the dirt around the huddling men. It was an aircraft, a ground-attack plane, roaring along the line of the defences. Ernst saw by the light of the fires that the plane had red stars on its wings.
‘That’s a Shturmovik,’ Heinz said. ‘By Goebbel’s balls, I never thought I’d see one of them again—’
There was a roar of engines, a rusty clatter of tracks.
‘They’re coming,’ Fischer yelled over the din. ‘Positions, lads!’
They had trained for this. Ernst grabbed a panzerfaust and rested it against the northern wall of the trench, the weapon raised at his cheek. Heinz was on one side of him, Fischer the other, prepared.
The forest ahead was full of smoke now, a bank of smoke and mist and dirt illuminated by lights. The men in the trenches were already shooting back, with panzerfaust grenades rocketing into the mist and the clatter of small arms fire. Though he could see no vehicles yet, Ernst saw trees felled, just pushed over and crushed under the advance.
Then the first of the tanks burst out of the trees and through the smoke barrier. It was like something mythical, Ernst thought, a monster emerging from the woods, from the cradle of all human fears. He could see something scrawled on its turret, white paint over the camouflage green: REMEMBER PETER’S WELL.
‘Fire!’ Heinz slapped Ernst’s neck. ‘Fire t
he bloody thing!’
Ernst hefted his panzerfaust, aimed, and fired. The roar of the rocket-propelled grenade was loud, the tube hot, and he could not see what damage he had wrought.
VIII
In Hastings George was woken by the sound of the guns. It was like thunder coming from the north, from far inland.
But the first thought in his head was that they were out of bread. He checked his alarm clock by the light of a pen torch. Not yet six thirty. Early, but he knew the baker’s ought to be open at this hour. With any luck he could beat the queues. He turned on his bedside light; the power was down again, but there was enough light to see by. He slid out of bed. He’d got used to doing this without waking Julia. He pulled on his shirt and trousers.
She turned over, away from him, grumbling a little in her sleep. In the soft yellow light the skin of her long back was smooth, unblemished, the sheets draped over her like the posing of an artist’s model. She really was quite beautiful, when she slept.
He slipped out of the room, went downstairs, used the bathroom, and pushed his bare feet into his shoes. He paused in the hall and glanced in a mirror, scratching at the grey stubble on his jowls. Then he turned the latch key, opened the front door, and stepped out, testing the morning.
He was in the shadows of the narrow, steep street, but the sky above was a deep blue, crusted with bits of cloud. The sound of the guns was louder out here, the noise echoing from the blank walls of the boarded-up houses. It was chill, dewy, but he’d survive outdoors for a few minutes without a coat. He pulled the door closed.
He walked down the road, breathing deep of the fresh air. Grass was pushing through the paving stones; clearing it was the sort of chore nobody tended to these days. The street was quiet, though he could hear a rumble of traffic off in the distance: heavy stuff, a throaty roar, military vehicles probably.
A door opened as he passed, and a woman emerged - Mrs Thompson, a Great War widow, fiftyish, he knew her slightly. She was clumsily pushing a baby’s pram, piled up with goods and covered by a blanket. She locked her door and set off up the road, away from the coast, muttering to herself. For days the occupation authorities had been moaning about refugees getting in the way of military vehicles on the routes out of town in every direction. But the Germans in these latter days seemed to have no will to do anything about it, and George certainly wasn’t going to try to resist the tide with his few officers. He worried a bit for Mrs Thompson, though. It would have been better for her if she’d stayed put in her home until it was all over, following the British coppers’ quiet instructions.
At the baker’s an SS officer came striding out clutching a loaf. The baker himself chased after him. He was a small man of sixty, bald, with the sagging face of one who had once been overweight. ‘Here!’ he called at the German, indignant. ‘You ain’t paid for that!’
The SS man shrugged. ‘By tomorrow Tommy will be here. He will pay.’ And he strolled off, not looking back.
‘Blithering cheek,’ the baker said to George. ‘The usual, is it, Sergeant?’
‘If you can manage it, Albert.’
As the baker went back into his shop a squad of soldiers marched through the crossroads up ahead - at least they looked like soldiers, fellows in ill-fitting Wehrmacht uniforms led by an SS officer. But they were short, skinny, their helmets too big on their heads. They were Hitler Jugend, young English boys seduced from scouting into training to serve the Reich. The ultimate expression of Nazi madness, George thought, kids going to war. He paid for his National Loaf.
When he got home Julia was making coffee in the kitchen, with her SS ration. Her hair was still down, she wore her uniform blouse, and as he came into the kitchen he could see the soft curve of her buttocks above her slim legs, her bare feet on the flags of his kitchen floor. He got a knife from the cutlery drawer and began to cut into the loaf.
There was a particularly loud explosion that made them both flinch.
‘A storm is coming,’ Julia said, not looking round.
‘Sounds like it to me. I’ll be glad to get it bloody over.’ He spread a scraping of marge onto a bread slice, and opened a little pot of jam made by a neighbour from the year’s early strawberries. ‘Calm is what I like. I don’t much care if it’s calm under the Jerries or calm under the Yanks.’
‘What a tidy sort of chap you are. Well, I too will be glad when the balloon goes up. I’m rather tired of shepherding cowardly members of Hoare’s government down to the port and packing them off to France.’
‘Ah. That’s why you’re here.’ She didn’t always tell him what brought her to Hastings, and he didn’t generally want to know.
‘The sooner I can get back to Richborough the better. Is there any of that jam left?’ She pinched the bit of bread from his hand and licked the surface, digging her tongue into the jam.
He could smell her, unwashed, the scent of bed still on her. Even the way she ate jam and bread was quite unreasonably erotic. ‘If the Americans are coming, that’s it for us, I suppose.’
‘I suppose it is. Been a funny sort of business, hasn’t it, Sergeant George? Us. And yet it’s lasted three years.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said stiffly. ‘Don’t suppose I ever will.’
She kissed him now, lightly. Her tongue flickered into his mouth, and he could taste the strawberries. Her tongue withdrew and his followed, and she bit down on its tip, quite hard, and he flinched back. She laughed at him. ‘You despise me,’ she said. ‘You must do. I’m a traitor, by your lights. But to me you’re the traitor, you see. You and the rest of the complicit, complacent English, for allowing our destiny to slip away through sentimentality and false loyalties. You should be joining Germany in the great war on Bolshevism!’
‘I think you’re a bloody nutter. And I think I am too.’
‘A paradox, isn’t it?’
They stood there, their mouths close, their breaths mingling. There was another crash, powerful enough to make the crockery on George’s dresser rattle.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘That one came from the south.’ She went to the window. ‘They’re bombing the harbour.’ She brushed her hair back from her face and peered up at the sky. ‘There are planes up there, bombers. This is what we expected the Allies would do. Smash the harbours to bottle us up, while striking overland from the north.’
‘Julia. Look - don’t go back to Richborough. Stay here.’
‘With you?’ She sounded quite incredulous, as if the idea was absurd.
‘Give yourself up. You must see the war is lost.’
‘I don’t see any such thing.’ She looked him up and down. ‘You know, suddenly I feel I’m waking from a nightmare. Why have I been wasting my time on a fat old fool like you? Oh, the war’s not lost yet. And once I get back to Richborough I’ll win it for sure. Mind if I use the bathroom first?’ She hurried out. The steam from her half-drunk coffee curled up into the air.
There was another explosion, another shuddering shock, and George clamped his hands to his ears.
IX
The retreating Germans were leaving a mess behind them. Bridges were routinely blown, the roads churned up, the villages torched.
Gary’s troop marched past a burned-out truck. The driver still sat behind his wheel, on the left hand side of this German vehicle. He had been reduced to a stick figure by the flames, just a blackened husk. His teeth gleamed white behind peeled-back lips, and his hands still clasped a melted steering wheel.
‘Look at that.’ Willis used his rifle to point at the driver’s wrist, where there was a white band, a bit of flesh. ‘How about that, Dougie? Some bugger’s nicked this poor bastard’s watch. How’s that for heartlessness?’
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