Blood and Blitzkrieg
Page 4
‘Wo sind wir?’
Clearly the man was a German, so the farmer replied in German.
‘Belgische, Mechelen.’
‘Have you got a match?’ asked the German, his pale face making the blood appear bright crimson.
Thinking he wanted a cigarette to calm his nerves after the crash, the farmer reached into his coat pocket and produced a match.
‘Danke,’ muttered the man and raced to the hedge that lined the field. As the farmer watched, the man pulled a sheaf of paper from the briefcase and struck the match with shaking hands. After a sputter, the match caught and he began burning the documents a page at a time. Blackened flakes were rising in the morning air as the first Belgian army patrol arrived.
~ ~ ~
‘The documents retrieved from the aircraft were a complete plan for the invasion of the Low Countries,’ said the officer from British military intelligence. ‘They indicate that the Germans are ready to attack at any time, striking from the north with the aim of capturing the Channel ports.’
‘What?’ exploded General Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force. ‘Well surely they’ll have to change their blasted plans now they know we’ve got this lot.’
‘Maybe,’ interjected General Huntziger, commander of the French 2nd Army, ‘but what if they don’t? What if they have done this deliberately so they can observe our troop movements? Our preparations are designed to counter just such an invasion, and in the last twenty-four hours we have mobilised right under the noses of German reconnaissance planes. If they didn’t know our plans before, they know them now.’
‘Well if these plans are a decoy they’ve done a good job faking it,’ replied General Gort, ‘this is a complete invasion plan, it must have taken months of work.’
‘We have already moved our armies up to our border with Belgium on the basis of this intelligence,’ said the French general, ‘surely the Belgians must allow us to move into position in their country now, or are we expected to pull our forces back again?’
‘I fear General,’ said Gort, ‘that it will be the latter. Until the Germans invade we are all in the hands of the politicians.’
‘Bah.’ said the Frenchman, ‘we should have invaded Germany months ago. What are we doing cowering here? Les Pantalons Rouges of my father’s generation would have taken the Rhineland by now. We are all turning into old women and no good will come of it.’
~ ~ ~
Hagan Schmidt hated women.
His mother had ignored him from the day he was born, handing him to an ancient nanny called Mrs Kahn, who smelt of stale cabbage and had a wart on her chin that sprouted hairs. When he was disobedient, she would beat him with a cane then lock him in the dark space beneath the stairs for hours at a time.
On his fifth birthday, when he accidentally soiled his pants, Mrs Kahn had grabbed him by the ear and hauled him up two flights of stairs to the bathroom, her nails drawing blood in the process and leaving permanent scars that itched when the weather was dry.
His parents were rarely there to hear his cries for help and would not have heeded them anyway. When he had tried to tell his mother how awful the nanny was, she had slapped his face and told him not to be insolent to his superiors.
He didn’t like men much either. His days at school had been filled with teasing, beatings and bastardry that had left him resentful and mistrustful of everyone. And why? Because he was not one of them. Not a poor boy, not by any means, but not from a ‘landed’ family. His father, Heinz Schmidt, was a Ruhr industrialist who’d made a fortune supplying the German army with artillery shells during the Great War. Armed with his fortune, Heinz Schmidt had set about trying to buy his way into the German aristocracy, with predictable results.
Clever overseas investments had protected the family against the roaring inflation of the Weimar Republic during the 1920s. After failing to get the boy into any of the better German schools, Schmidt sent his son to an elite British boarding school, attended mainly by the sons of British aristocrats. There he had been tormented from day one for being German and being a commoner. For Hagan it had meant years of misery, and when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power in Germany it got even worse.
In 1936, Hagan finally graduated and returned home. He’d kept an eye on what had been going on in Germany in his absence, and before he even visited his parents in their Dusselfdorf mansion he went straight to the local SS barracks, asking to join up.
When they discovered he spoke English, the SS passed him on to the Abwehr, the Nazi Secret Intelligence Service. There, a man he knew only as ‘Colonel Huber’ began training him to be a spy. The colonel and his team worked on refreshing Hagan’s English and French, and began teaching him Polish.
Hagan had a gift for language, and coupled with his paranoia, this made him a natural for the job, but he had a weakness: women. His humiliation at the hands of his mother and his nanny had created in him a compelling urge. He needed to have women at his mercy, to force his power upon them, to make real the fantasies of revenge he’d concocted as a boy while imprisoned in the darkness beneath the staircase, or cowering under the blows of the school bullies.
In December 1938, while on leave from the training camp near Wurttemburg, he raped and murdered a local barmaid who refused his advances. The Abwehr had to intervene and cover it up, claiming that the girl was actually a Jew hiding under false papers and had been killed resisting arrest. When her parents protested they were warned to keep quiet or be deported to a labour camp.
A few months later, he took to a second girl with a knife, not realising that she was the daughter of the local Nazi member. Hagan was arrested and given up to the German justice system. By this time though, it was June 1939, and the Nazis were planning their invasion of Poland. Instead of being sentenced as a murderer, Hagan was plucked from prison by the Abwehr, promoted, then infiltrated into Poland to lay the groundwork for the invasion, and murder on a scale never before seen.
Now he was back at Abwehr headquarters being briefed for his next mission: England.
‘This war will last a long time Hagan,’ Oberst Huber had said, ‘and if we don’t destroy the British Army early on, we will have to fight them many times before we defeat them. We need someone who has training and experience in their signals from the inside. Once you are established, we will have you transferred into Army Intelligence headquarters.’
‘How will you arrange that sir?’
‘It’s never guaranteed, but our spies do have some influence over unit placements in their army. You’re most likely to go to a headquarters unit. There’s a small chance you may be assigned to a frontline unit, we’ll try to avoid that, but there’s only so much we can do.’
‘A frontline unit? What use will I be there?’ asked Hagan.
‘Not as much as we would like, but if that happens, you will just have to stick it out and make the best of it. Eventually you will be rotated back to England. Besides, having some combat experience will be a feather in your cap at the British GHQ. Now, your alias. Do you want to be English or Polish?’
~ ~ ~
Joe could recall the soft cadences of his mother’s voice as if she were standing beside him.
‘Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six …’
Despite being on the far side of the world, Gabrielle Dean had made sure that her first child grew up speaking enough French that she could still have a conversation in her own language. English was all very well, but it didn’t have the fluid elegance of French. Her husband George couldn’t see the point.
‘Where’s he going to use French here for heaven’s sake?’ he’d said one day. ‘We’d be better off teaching him German now they’ve let ‘em all out of the internment camps. Who’s he going to talk to except you?’
‘If he only ever speaks French to me that will be enough,’ replied Gabrielle, ‘it is not as if you are interested in speaking it anymore, is it mon cherie,’ she added playfully, ‘now you have your French bride?’
‘Perhaps he can train the kelpies to respond only to French commands,’ chuckled George, ‘that’d go down well at the Sheep Show.’
Joe had wondered what his mother had seen in his father. Certainly, he must have been a strapping lad in 1916, but he’d have needed some powerful charm to entice her to leave her family and go all the way to Australia, to live in a wooden house with a tin roof in the back of beyond. The Barossa Valley was only a day’s ride from Adelaide, but it might as well have been the moon as far as she was concerned; a hot, dry moon.
Mind you, George Dean was a decent man, who took an interest in his two sons. Some of Joe’s friends had fathers who’d belt them as soon as look at them, and mothers who didn’t care whether they had shoes or not when they came to school. His parents were different: they’d put their heart and soul into Joe and his little brother Matthew.
One night at the kitchen table, shortly before leaving for Duntroon, Joe had asked his mother about this as she dressed some mutton ribs.
‘When the Australians came to Fromelles they were like giants,’ she reminisced. ‘French men were so small, but the Australians, we’d never seen anything like them. They were all brown and healthy with beautiful broad shoulders, they seemed so huge and carefree. Before the battle anyway,’ she said reflectively.
‘Your father used to come to our farm to buy milk for his men, and he and I would go to the barn to fill his containers. It never occurred to me until later that it was strange for a Captain to do such a menial task. By then ...’ she shrugged, ‘I had already fallen in love.’
She sighed and looked at her first baby, whose diet of mutton had made him grow over six feet tall. A confident young man, the image of his father when she had met him.
‘And now I have two big Australian boys of my own. I really must write to Claudette and see how her twins are getting along.’
‘Do you miss her?’ asked Joe.
‘My sister? Of course. I have always hoped to return to France one day and who knows, perhaps we will? I do hope you get to see it Joe, it is a truly beautiful place. Green, not like here.’
‘I’m sure I will Mum,’ said Joe, ‘one day, I’m sure I will.’
Chapter Six
France, 7 March 1940
The British were dug in and ready to fight, but then—nothing happened. The Germans didn’t come, and two long, dull months passed. Months of hard winter spent mostly outside, digging entrenchments, filling sandbags, checking fields of fire, drilling, marching miles in the dark in full kit, sweating and freezing simultaneously.
The shared experience of hardship had given Joe an opportunity to get to know the other two lieutenants in his company a little better. James Jameson and Arthur Ferguson, the ‘Sons’ as Major Merrivale liked to refer to them, were both from solid middle-class English families, sons of a banker and a factory manager. Like most men in their early twenties, they enjoyed a drink, and after particularly hard exercises, Joe had been able to offer them the hospitality of the doctor’s wine cellar, which had been warmly received.
When they had first arrived at Roubaix, the major had stressed to his officers the importance of keeping the men busy at all times.
‘This may be called a “Phoney War” now,’ he’d said, ‘but it will get real enough pretty darn quickly when the Germans finally decide to get off their backsides and invade. I want this regiment to be the fittest, best-trained, best dug-in and readiest when that moment arrives. It’s up to officers like you to give me what I want. I don’t care how you do it, but God help you if I find any sloppiness. We’re at war gentlemen, it may not feel like it, but we are. I will inspect your troops every week. Dismissed.’
Joe had never been that interested in the ‘toy soldier’ approach of making sure every boot shone and every belt buckle gleamed. To him, soldiering was all about shooting accurately, moving quietly, flanking the enemy, using the tactics they’d taught him at Duntroon. The British army was a professional force, but it still had a lot of ideas that, to Joe’s eyes, seemed to date to the previous century when they’d been defending the British Empire against native uprisings, so Joe had sought permission from the Major to do things a little differently.
Instead of endless drilling and polishing of brass, his platoon had spent much of their winter at the rifle range, crawling about in the swamps that lined the nearby river, going on route marches and, in their free time, playing rugby. With 30 men at his disposal, Joe had created two teams and they played for 80 minutes twice a week, with four training sessions in between. Every week he switched the players around, so everyone got to play on a team with everyone else in the platoon.
The games were pretty rough-and-ready affairs, with Joe acting as referee, but the spirit of competition had spread from the field to their other activities, so whether they were digging a trench or straggling through the last mile of a route march, the men competed despite themselves. The competition was particularly fierce at the rifle range. After some indifferent shooting early on, the platoon had increased its average hit rate by more than fifty percent. Joe had set the standard by firing three bull’s-eyes in a row at the one target. Years of shooting foxes, wild pigs and kangaroos had given him an unerring eye and a stationary target was simply too easy. His men, many of them city-bred, had none of his innate skill or training, but under his guidance they were getting better.
They took to shooting at birds and he showed them how to lead the target. After a few weeks most of them could get at least half their shots in the bulls-eye, while Private Wellesley and Lance-corporal Clark had developed into reasonable marksmen. They all had ‘303-eye’ in various degrees, a bruise under the right eye from where their thumbs had struck over and over again as they pulled the bolt to reload the bullets that were .303 of an inch wide. They also spent many hours pulling their Lee-Enfield rifles apart cleaning them and putting them back together, in all kinds of weather and without notice. Joe had woken his men several times in the middle of the night and forced them outside to strip their weapons in the dirt, clean them and re-assemble them.
After one particularly cold 4 am route march with packs, Lance-Corporal Jensen had come to him before the morning parade. Joe was sitting outside the command post whistling to himself as he cleaned the rifle he‘d requisitioned from the regimental stores. Although as a junior officer he was expected to go into battle with a pistol, he’d decided to keep his eye in with a real gun. Each morning he spent ten minutes stripping and cleaning it, working the bolt, then when he was satisfied it was clean he tracked birds, taking imaginary shots. He was pulling the brush through the barrel for the third time when Jensen appeared.
‘Sir, the men are complaining about these night-time drills, especially the gun cleaning. They reckon they know how to do it now, so why keep tormenting them?’
‘They won’t be complaining if their guns jam when Fritz is attacking,’ replied Joe curtly, inserting the brush one more time, ‘they’ll be dead. Tell ‘em that for me will you Corporal? And Corporal?’
‘Yes sir?’ asked Jensen, turning.
‘Tell ‘em to clean their guns again, now. Firing range after parade, any man who misfires will be on a charge. And whoever it was who came to you to complain, he’s cockatoo tonight.’
‘Come again sir?’
‘Sentry duty. Don’t you Poms know anything?’
‘Right you are sir,’ said Jensen with a grin.
~ ~ ~
During those icy months Joe had run into Yvette on the street several times and they had made polite conversation. He usually walked away cursing himself for all the witty, interesting comments that he hadn’t made. Once, on the sole sunny day they’d had
during February, she’d ventured into the diggings behind his entrenchments. He was deepening the trench with his men, shirts off and sweating despite the cold. She’d sat and watched them from a distance, and when he waved she’d waved back.
Then in the first week of March, the regiment was finally given a few days’ furlough, and descended upon the town like a plague of locusts. The local brothel became notorious overnight and the bars were full of drunken Tommies starting brawls at the slightest provocation and bringing the redcaps running with batons. Five of Joe’s platoon were on charges; one of them hadn’t yet awoken from an alcoholic stupor, but that was nothing compared with the Glaswegians of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. An MP had told him the week before that “once they’ve got into the French brandy, the only way to control that lot is to handcuff them, tie them to stakes in the ground and leave them overnight until they sober up.” Joe’s platoon were tame compared to that and he was grateful for it.
The air in the tavern was blue with cigarette smoke and on the piano in the corner a private was thumping out ‘Lili Marlene’, barely audible above the yammering of dozens of soldiers given leave: leave to get drunk; leave to do something other than soldiering; leave to get their hands on a woman for the first time in months.
Joe turned to Ferguson.
‘Hey Massey, you’re cashed up, it’s your round.’
‘Massey? What the hell?’ asked Ferguson.
‘Massey-Ferguson, the tractor makers,’ said Joe.
‘Tractors? I’ve never ridden a tractor in my life.’ remonstrated Ferguson, smoothing his moustache.
‘You got a mousetrap in your pocket? It’s your round.’
As Ferguson made his way to the bar, the door opened and the spring breeze swirled in, sending a chill through the room.