Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Shift your arses, ladies,’ said Danny Adams.

  The troop had to get off the road to let a column of tanks go by. The tanks were Shermans. They had bedsprings and other bits of iron strapped around their bodies with bits of rope. The junk was there because it caused premature explosions of the panzerfausts, rocket-propelled grenades. The troopers predictably mocked the tank crews as the vehicles rolled past.

  Gary was glad of a chance to sit for a bit on the soft ground and have a smoke, although Dougie Skelland had a ciggie in his mouth most of the time anyhow. Their blackened faces were streaked with sweat.

  ‘Just let them go by, lads,’ Danny Adams said. ‘A tank’s all right. But what counts in war is feet on the ground. One bloody footstep after another. And that’s us. Winning England back step by step. Come on, let’s get on with it.’

  They clambered back onto the road and carried on. The road surface had been churned up by the tank tracks, so you had to watch where you stepped.

  It was mid-morning. After the dawn bombardment they had quickly broken through the smashed crust of defences behind the Winston Line itself, and now they were pursuing the retreating Germans hard, to give them as little time as possible to regroup. But Christ, he was tired, Gary thought; he’d been on the go for eight or nine hours already.

  It could have been a lot worse. There were rumours that the Germans had concentrated their mechanised divisions in the east of the protectorate, to take on the Americans; in the fields of eastern Kent a massive tank battle was being waged, and the Germans’ deep defence was concentrating on holding the major ports, such as Folkestone. But even here in the west the Germans were putting up a determined resistance, for which they had had three years to prepare.

  Although lead units had already surged through the countryside there were plenty of pockets of Germans left, and the advancing troops knew they were surrounded by the enemy, by peril. In this closed-in landscape of fields and hedges and trees and lanes, there was little visibility. Every tree, every window of every one of these bucolic cottages could hide a sniper; every furrow in every field could shelter a machine gun nest or a mortar. Further out the Germans had some big guns emplaced which could spit their vicious shells miles, aiming for the dust plumes of the advancing columns. As a result the vehicles were crawling along at not much better than walking pace. The lead units had stuck signs to telephone posts and trees: GO SLOW. DUST MEANS DEATH.

  Everything was mixed up. Sometimes you came so close to the enemy you would hear German voices, or the clatter of their horses’ hooves.

  But in the middle of all this, it was still England, and those civilians who hadn’t fled were carrying on with their lives. Once Gary saw a tank detachment stopped to allow a farmer to drive his cows across the road for milking. Cows!

  They came to an abandoned German position behind a crossroads, a complex of interconnected slit trenches protected by a minefield. The sappers had marked out a safe path with white tape. Gary saw a gruesome monument lying in the road: a human leg blown clean off at the knee, the booted foot shredded. Somebody had paid dearly for the path he followed now.

  Danny Adams was poking in the dirt. ‘Over here, lads. The trench has been pretty much stripped, but I think there are weapons. See, buried in the dirt where the wall collapsed?’

  Gary went to see. ‘Panzerfausts.’ They had been trained up on these; it turned out that a panzerfaust’s rocket-propelled grenade, designed to take out a tank, did a good job of smashing in the walls of a house.

  ‘Come on, let’s dig them out. I’ll call for a truck.’

  The trench itself was a bit of a mess, when Gary got into it. Grenades had clearly been used, you could see the cratering in the trench walls. Most of the bodies were intact, more or less, killed by the blast, but some had been ripped apart, and you had to watch where you stepped. In one place Gary saw that one fellow had fallen over another when he died, with bits of medical kit scattered around, bandages, syringes, even a stethoscope.

  ‘A doctor,’ Willis said. ‘Killed as he treated another man, you think?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Odd, isn’t it? He stayed to do his duty, and got killed for it. Sort of thing that rather proves there’s no God. Now then—’ Using his rifle barrel as a scoop, he got hold of the stethoscope. ‘That’s a souvenir you don’t see every day.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dougie Skelland growled. ‘You can use it to find out if you’ve got a fucking heart, you faggot.’

  Danny Adams said, ‘Shut up and get these panzerfausts stacked.’

  X

  5 July

  By midnight, as the fourth of July gave way to the fifth, the retreat was in full flight.

  They were kept marching through the night, in the pitch dark, moving on south step by step, following the little English country lanes. The dark was the only cover they had, from the planes that buzzed constantly overhead and from the heavy English guns. They weren’t allowed so much as a torch beam to see their way forward, and Heinz was slapped down when he tried to light his cigarettes. So it was a question of stumbling forward in the dark, endlessly tripping over tarmac churned up by tank treads, and everybody bumping into each other with soft curses.

  By the time the dawn seeped into the sky, Ernst was exhausted. Practically since the softening-up bombardment it had been twenty-four hours of this clumsy, uncoordinated flight, when you were barely able to rest either physically or mentally, not for a moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, and for hours had had nothing to drink but water from his canteen, refilled from brackish puddles in the ditches. In the grey dawn light, as the hulking, grimy shapes of the men coalesced around him, he felt unreal, distant, as if he were watching some black-and-white cinema film.

  At about nine o’clock in the morning they heard a roar of engines, a rattle of treads coming from the rear. They rushed for cover, thinking that the Allied army had overtaken them. But the column’s lead tank was a Tiger. The men emerged from cover, their legs splashed with mud and dew.

  The vehicles drew to a halt, pulling off the road into bits of cover. The column was a ragtag bunch, a couple of tanks, some self-propelled guns, and a chain of open-backed trucks crowded with troops. The men clambered down. The troops swapped cigarettes; one man passed around a bottle of sloe gin he had stolen from a farmhouse. Officers, NCOs and feldgendarmerie from the column and the infantry units stood in a huddle, negotiating. Most were Wehrmacht, but some of them were SS, and others, very agitated, wore the brown uniforms of the Party. Mechanics worked at one of the trucks, whose exhaust smoked blackly. It was clearly breaking down, so they siphoned off its fuel and stripped it of its tyres and spark plugs and other parts, cannibalising it. What they could not reuse they began to wreck, systematically.

  Men stood by the vehicles, or leaned against trees, their rifle butts on the ground. They all had blackened faces. You could see that some of them were asleep standing up. For a moment it was calm, no engines running, not even a distant buzz of aircraft engines to disturb the peace. It was a fine morning, if misty. Ernst breathed in the scent of honeysuckle.

  ‘It was just like this after Stalingrad,’ Heinz muttered.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The retreat. Our front just collapsed. So it is here. No coordination, no proper communication. The calmer officers trying to impose a bit of organization. Just a headlong flight, really.’

  Fischer approached them. ‘You keep talking like that, Kieser, and we’ll leave you with that broken-down truck.’

  Ernst asked, ‘So what’s going on, Unteroffizier?’

  ‘The hauptmann over there says the Americans have broken through at Faversham. Their tanks are heading for Canterbury, and then on to Folkestone. It will all be over by nightfall.’

  ‘They have learned the art of blitzkrieg,’ Heinz said without emotion.

  ‘They will find nothing but rubble left of Canterbury. And there’s talk of a fighting withdrawal, making a stand at the Hast
ings bunker. I think—’

  There was an explosion, out of nowhere.

  Ernst dived for cover behind a truck. Fischer almost landed on top of him, his heavy bulk thudding into the dirt. Bits of twisted metal clattered from the truck’s body, and a wall of dust and heat swept over them. There was a stink of petrol and oil and rubber.

  When the shock wave had passed, Ernst twisted sideways and looked out, under the truck’s body. One of the tanks was burning, still sitting where it had been parked. Flames shot out of its open hatch. Ernst could smell oil smoke and cordite, and the sour, awful stench of burning flesh. But then another explosion broke open the tank turret further, and Ernst had to duck again. Now there was a rattle of machine-gun fire.

  One of the officers from the motorised column came running by, a Schmeisser machine pistol in his hand. ‘Partisans! Fucking partisans! X Company with me, we’ll clean these bastards out. The rest of you stay under cover.’ So Ernst huddled with Fischer under the truck, while the troopers stormed the resistance hold-out. There was a crackle of small-arms fire, the chatter of machine guns, the thump of grenades - and screaming, plenty of that.

  But even as men fought and died Fischer dug a pack of field rations out of his pocket. It was wrapped in a bit of newspaper, one of the last editions of the Albion Times, with a picture of Goebbels’ visit. Fischer unwrapped the paper and handed Ernst a bit of army bread. Ernst had some water in his canteen, so he got that out to share. ‘Quite a picnic,’ Fischer said, chewing on his bread. ‘We must do it again—’

  Another explosion, and a clatter of shrapnel against the truck sides.

  After that Ernst thought he might have slept for a while, despite the extraordinary situation.

  At last they were called out of hiding. Men emerged from the vehicles and the ditches, and slowly began to form up into marching order once again.

  Heinz nudged Ernst. ‘Come on. Let’s take the chance and go and see how those partisans have been living.’

  They crept forward, past the burned-out tank.

  The auxiliaries’ bunker had been broken open by grenades. SS men were rifling through the junk. Built of railway sleepers and corrugated iron, it was quite extensive, with rooms and tunnels, and bits of equipment scattered everywhere - weapons, tinned food, paraffin lamps, radio gear. Bodies were curled up in the ruins. One SS man picked up a thick booklet marked ‘Countryman’s Diary 1939’; it seemed to contain instructions on sabotage and guerrilla warfare.

  A German medical orderly was tending wounded, mostly German but one British with a shot-up kneecap. Some prisoners had been taken, men in battledress sitting with their hands on their heads, watched over by more SS troopers. The captured men were a mixed lot, mostly older men but some younger, aged eighteen, nineteen, twenty perhaps, men who had grown up during the years of the occupation.

  And one man, aged perhaps twenty-two, looked familiar to Ernst.

  Ernst spoke to the SS guard, offering him a cigarette. ‘May I talk to that man?’

  The guard took the smoke. ‘Makes no difference to me or him. Partisans get nothing but a bullet, you know that.’

  Ernst stepped forward and squatted down before the man.

  The Englishman watched him with a kind of insolent curiosity. ‘What’s your problem, Fritz?’

  ‘My name is Ernst Trojan. I am an obergefreiter of the Wehrmacht. You are surprised at my English.’

  ‘Not that you speak it. You sound like you’ve picked up a Sussex accent.’

  Ernst smiled. ‘That would not be unexpected. I have spent much of the three years since the invasion billeted with a family, in a farmhouse near Battle. And you I recognise from their photographs. You are Jack Miller.’

  Jack raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Your family believe you are a prisoner on the continent. Or, perhaps, dead. They have not heard from you for a long time.’

  Jack looked angry, as if he had been reprimanded. He was a young man, but Ernst saw in him something of his father’s stubbornness. ‘Well, you can see how I’m fixed, Obergefreiter. I broke out of a stalag in Hampshire pretty sharpish back in ‘41, and got picked up by this lot, and I’ve been with these blokes ever since. I had to stay off the radar, see. I’ve become a UXB specialist, if you want to know. These old men need somebody with a bit of military expertise to give them backbone.’

  This banter was directed at his comrades. They grinned. ‘Yeah, yeah. You tell it like it is, Windy.’

  ‘And did you receive any of the letters sent from your family?’

  ‘Not since I left the stalag. This isn’t the kind of location you can send a postcard to, is it? But we’ve all got our duties to do, haven’t we, Obergefreiter?’

  ‘That is true.’

  Jack hesitated. ‘So how are they, the family?’

  Ernst sighed, and wondered how to compress three years of family news, and such difficult news, into a few sentences. And yet he must try. ‘Your father is well. He rages against the occupation.’

  ‘So he should.’

  ‘Your mother - you have a new little sister. Myrtle, born in 1941.’ That perplexed Jack. ‘That’s a shock.’

  ‘Your brother Alfie joined the Jugend. He had little choice.’

  ‘And Viv? Wow, she must be seventeen now.’

  ‘She is fine.’

  ‘I did read about you. Those early letters to the stalag. They said you were a decent man, for a German.’

  ‘Praise indeed.’

  Fischer nudged Ernst. ‘Time to move on, Trojan.’

  Ernst stood.

  Jack said, ‘Herr Obergefreiter - my family—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you find a way, will you tell them, you know ...’

  Ernst tried to keep his voice level. ‘Yes, of course. I will write. I will tell them how I met you. And when all this nonsense is over you and I will drink English beer together, two old men talking about the war.’

  ‘You’re bloody paying,’ said Jack.

  Ernst walked back to his unit, which was ready to move out. The conferring officers seemed to have come to a decision.

  ‘So now what?’ Heinz asked Fischer.

  ‘We have new orders,’ said Fischer. ‘We split up. We Wehrmacht elements will make for the Hastings bunker, with the tanks. Meanwhile the SS and the Party men will make a dash for the town, hoping to get to the transports before the harbour is closed.’ Everybody knew what he meant: the Wehrmacht men were expected to lay down their lives to cover the escape of the SS. Fischer said, ‘The SS are going to take these prisoners with them.’

  Heinz asked, ‘Why not just shoot the bastards here?’

  ‘The SS officers are concerned about due process.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Heinz said. ‘They’re concerned about their own arses. They don’t want to leave another mass grave, not with Tommy and the Amis half a day away.’

  ‘Well, whatever, these are our orders. Form up.’ Fischer walked around, blowing his whistle, calling for his men. ‘Form up! Form up!’

  Ernst looked for Jack again. But the prisoners had already been loaded onto a troop carrier, which roared away, dashing south.

  XI

  It was about three in the afternoon by the time Gary reached the strongpoint. It straddled the Battle road two or three miles north of Hastings, near a hamlet called Telham.