by John Harris
A lifting breeze had blown the remains of the smoke screen to shreds of white mist, and the Germans could now see well enough in the glare of the flames to turn their attention to individual boats. Trying to avoid the fire, Hunters steered the boat in a circle. There was another crash, and he realised it too had been hit and was sinking. Amidships, a man was yelling at him something he couldn’t understand, and as the boat vanished from under his feet he found himself standing in water no more than waist-deep and knew he’d reached the other side. Without waiting to see what had happened to his companions, and certain he was dying, he scrambled up the bank and cowered under a muddy tufted knoll that was being clipped by machine-gun fire. His uniform was soaked – he had no idea how much of it was water and how much blood – and all he could feel in his side was a numbness which turned into a sharp pain every time he moved.
As the boat had sunk, Corporal Carter, his Number Two vanished in the confusion, had grabbed his basket of pigeons and lifted it in his arms. He had no idea how he was supposed to swim with it but his job was to save the birds if he could. He was just about to forget the pigeons and think of himself when, like Hunters, he realised his feet were on the bottom and, holding the basket high above his head, he waded ashore, dripping water. As he looked up, another boat beached alongside him, every man in it dead but the man at the tiller. It was Corporal Gask, still blank-faced and unemotional, who yanked him from his seat and literally threw him into shelter.
As the tanks began to lay a fresh smoke screen, two more boats arrived. In one of them Deacon kicked at Syzling to get him on his feet, gave Puddephatt a shove which stirred him to life, and then began to climb up the bank, determined to do something even if it were wrong. Hunters crawled from his shelter to follow him, curiously exhilarated to find himself still alive. The pain in his side didn’t seem to be bothering him much, so perhaps it was just a cracked rib and he hadn’t been properly wounded at all. Somehow or other more boats were arriving all the time, and out of them more men were landing to follow Deacon.
Hunters had never been very fond of Lieutenant Deacon and his shrill voice, but he had to admit that at least he was no coward.
There were further casualties as they crossed the open ground, before reaching a small hollow where they flung themselves down and turned their weapons on the slopes just above. Behind them the river bank was now littered with dead and wounded men. Among them moved the stretcher bearers, trying to pull them into the shelter of the tufted knolls, stretching them out on the mud in the only places where it was safe from the flying metal.
From where he crouched on the opposite bank, Warley had been gathering his scattered group together. What was happening at the end of the Capodozzi track, he didn’t know. He’d already had several of the waiting men wounded, but the German small arms fire was beginning to slacken a little, as if Deacon’s weapons were beginning to take effect. Now that the Engineers had got their vehicles down to the river bank and were unloading them, the tanks had been able to follow up on to their little sidings of wire matting, and their fire was also helping the struggling infantry.
Nevertheless, he had a suspicion that everything possible had gone wrong. War was never easy, but battles had a feel about them and Warley had been in enough to know that this one was going to give them the horrors until their dying day.
The rain was still drifting down, thinner now, coming in grey waves that seemed to wander down out of the darkness and then turn into a coppery haze in the light of the flames; only to disappear in the smoke that was beginning to drift across the river again as the smoke shells from the tanks took effect. He could see the boats heading back now, sidling across the river like black water-bugs against the red-tinted ripples. Glancing about him to make sure his men were ready, his eyes fell on the strained face of Jago. He looked more worn out than Warley had ever seen him before.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
Jago had once been offered a job on the staff by an uncle of his who was a brigadier with Montgomery and had promised to do what he could for him. Feeling that no real man could sit at an office desk and push flags about over maps, Jago had turned the offer down but now, exhausted by the long struggle north from Sicily, he wished to God he’d accepted.
‘Yes,’ he managed. ‘I’m fine.’
Warley didn’t agree and made up his mind at once. ‘Look, Tony,’ he said. ‘It looks to me as though this is the biggest balls-up since Hastings, and I think I ought to be across there to help Deacon; he seems to be doing very well. So I want you to stay and organise the final dribs and drabs. There are bound to be a few who’ll hang back.’
Jago nodded, his face taut. Once – years ago, it seemed – he’d been fresh and had found in war some of the basic exhilaration of the hunt, the pitting of his own wits against other men’s wits. But it had gone on too long and the winter had taken too much out of him.
By this time, the remaining boats were approaching the bank in a ragged wave. Most of them were way off course, and Warley saw at once that they were going to arrive a hundred yards further down. Calling to his men, he led them along the bank to meet them. The Engineers had already got girders across the broken span of the stone bridge, and he was staggered at the speed with which they’d worked. But at that moment another clutch of shells came down and, as the smoke cleared, he saw that the span beyond the one they were repairing had now collapsed.
A groan went up from the men around him but he tried to shut his ears to it. It wasn’t his job to worry about the Engineers. He knew they wouldn’t let them down if they could help it, and even now he could see a group of them lying flat on their faces at the far side of the partly repaired span and staring at the newly broken one, trying to decide if the pillars were still strong enough to support their work.
Watching from the other side, Captain Reis realised he had to move fast. The British seemed to have a foothold across the river and it was up to him to see that they were thrown back before they could enlarge it.
‘Thiergartner,’ he yelled into the telephone above the din. ‘Can you see where they are?’
Thiergartner said nothing and Reis yelled again.
‘You all right?’
Thiergartner’s voice came at last. ‘Yes, Herr Hauptmann,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Then for God’s sake, find out where they are! We’re probably going to need help!’
‘I’ll do what I can, Herr Hauptmann.’
‘Never mind “I’ll do what I can.” Your job’s to feed me reports about what’s going on. Above all, it’s to hold that post. Understand?’
Thiergartner still sounded uncertain and, slamming the telephone down, Reis called Pulovski towards him. Writing out an order, he handed it over. If it were in writing, Thiergartner wouldn’t be able to claim the right to use his own initiative. There was no such thing at that moment, and Reis was making sure that Thiergartner wasn’t given the opportunity to back away.
‘Take this down to Lieutenant Thiergartner,’ he said. ‘You know where he is?’
‘Exactly, Herr Hauptmann.’
‘Then be off with you. As soon as you’ve given it to him, come back here. Understand?’
‘Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.’
Pulovski glanced at the shells flashing on the plain below and seemed to hesitate. Reis gave him a shove and he began to move off.
‘Not that way, you damned idiot!’ Reis yelled as he drifted to the left. ‘They’re covering the road with their machine-guns. The other way. Down the front slope.’
As Pulovski vanished, Reis wondered again if he dared leave the defence of the river bank in Thiergartner’s hands. He’d have liked to have gone down there himself but it was his job to stay where he was and co-ordinate the defence from a position where he could see everything that went on; from where, if it became necessary, he could easily retreat to the stronghold they’d constructed in San Eusebio.
Thiergartner had sounded distinctly shaky, and that
quiet humour that had always seemed to support him appeared to have vanished. If there were the slightest hesitation in what he did, the British would be quick to take advantage of it because they were now as experienced in attack as the Germans were in defence and had developed a great gift for spotting the weakest points.
The Engineers were already pushing their Class 40 bridge out from the bank, floating out their pontoons, attaching the bows to the hawser they’d strung across and hauled taut with tackle, and throwing out anchors to hold the sterns in place. As they worked, more men hurried the Bailey panels forward and were bolting them together like a child’s construction kit.
As the returning boats grounded on the mud, Warley blew his whistle and the men around him rose up from among the knolls and hillocks of earth, daubed with dirt, wet-through and half-frozen from the rain.
Among them he saw the medical officer and Father O’Mara.
‘Not yet,’ he shouted above the din. ‘You come over with Tony Jago!’
The doctor smiled and shook his head, and O’Mara gave one of his expansive Irish gestures, waving cheerfully with his walking stick. He carried no weapons but he was loaded down like the commonest soldier with rations, medical supplies and even ammunition.
‘Me eyes may be on the next world, my son,’ he said, ‘but I’m aware that it’s the work of a man of God in this one to smite the ungodly.’
‘But not to get yourself killed, Padre.’
O’Mara smiled. ‘You miss the point of me belief, my son. That comes from not listening to the sermon in church.’
Though the German barrage had slackened a little, it was still churning up the mud on the river bank, and, going from boat to boat, upright in spite of the flailing fire, Warley made the men fall in properly on either side, knee-deep in the swirling water; then, while the boats were held securely in place, he made them climb in carefully, and had the last man push off. This time there were no sinkings through haste or lack of knowledge. After having survived one crossing, the men in charge had grown more careful.
The undergrowth and brambles along the bank were catching fire in places from the shelling, but the darkness and the rain made it impossible to see more than a few paces in front. As Warley moved across a stretch of shingle with Henry White, a shell exploded on the very spot where he’d been sheltering. Bowled over by the blast he saw White disappear in the other direction. As he scrambled up, he saw him on his feet but bent double, muttering curses, one hand to his mouth, the other with the fingertips pawing the ground.
‘You all right, Henry?’ he asked.
‘No, sir,’ White mumbled. ‘I’m not. I’ve lost me fuckin’ false teeth.’
Every bit of artillery on the German side was ranging in now, and Warley saw another boat capsize. Wounded men clung to the wreckage or tried to swim back to the near bank. With Warley in charge, however, there was no panic. One man, sole survivor from a sunken boat in the first wave, staggered ashore wearing nothing but a shirt and underwear. Somehow, he’d managed to divest himself of clothes and equipment, though he still clutched his rifle and wore his steel helmet.
‘I got across, sir,’ he grinned.
‘Don’t talk so bloody daft, man,’ Warley said. ‘You’re still on the same side.’
There were a few men still crouching among the bushes and undergrowth. Jago moved among them, kicking them to life. ‘Get going, you bastards,’ he was yelling. ‘You’re needed! Get cracking!’
As he turned towards his boat, Warley fell over a group of bodies. What had happened to them and why they all came to be dead together he couldn’t imagine. Then he saw men taking advantage of the darkness and confusion to dump the canvas identification panels they’d been given for the air force strike and he made them pick them up again, feeling that sometime, somewhere – even if it were only in the event that they had to retreat – they might be glad of them.
His own boat was the last to push off, and he huddled in the bow along with his signaller and the company runner. The river was jet black but it was caught here and there by sparkles of light. Overhead, tracer bullets flashed in streams. On his right, Warley could see the loom of the bridge with its empty span stark against the flames, Engineer officers standing, indifferent to the firing, on the edge of the newly-broken stonework.
Then a spatter of bullets stirred the water alongside them and the signaller’s eyes dilated.
‘Can’t say I like this, sir,’ he said.
‘I’m not enjoying it much myself,’ Warley admitted.
In midstream, the German fire seemed to lose them and they were able to make the last twenty yards to the other side without too much trouble. The boat grounded on the mud, and he was slapping at the shoulders of his men and following them as they bounded ashore, splashing and slithering their way up the bank to the footpath. They had drifted twenty or thirty yards further downstream from where Deacon had landed and one of the men, wandering off course a little, found himself in a minefield. There was a crash and a scream, then nothing.
‘Keep going,’ Warley yelled. ‘Keep going! And bear left for Mr Deacon’s group!’
Mortar bombs were coming down on them now, exploding by the water’s edge, throwing up great gouts of mud from the shallows. But they were across. How many, Warley had no idea. But they were across.
They were across.
Three
On the track from Capodozzi, Colonel Yuell stood in the drizzling rain staring towards the mountains beyond the river, identifiable only by the twinkling of lights that betrayed the positions of German guns on their slopes. What was happening to his men he had no idea because they’d hardly had time yet to get across and establish themselves.
Then Major Peddy called to him and, entering his command post, he saw that the second-in-command’s face was grim.
‘The Yellowjackets are in trouble,’ Peddy said at once. ‘They seem to have had a chaotic march down to the river. They had a lot of stragglers who took advantage of the smoke, and the guides lost their way and wandered into the minefields. Some of their rubber boats were holed by shell-fire and they thought the Engineers were bringing up replacements and waited. They also got into a sunken road near the crossing site, and that delayed them too.’
‘Are they across?’
‘Just. The Teds brought nebelwerfers down on them but they got one company across just after 2000 hours. They got up the banks but they came under accurate small arms fire from concealed posts, so close the artillery couldn’t give ’em support. They’re digging foxholes and they report hearing tank engines.’
Yuell glanced over his shoulder into the darkness, suspecting that the report might well fit his own men’s crossing before the night was over. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Heavy casualties. Mortars pinned them to the edge of the river. Some of the company officers killed or wounded were men who’d been given special jobs to do. They’re yelling for help and want us to push on quickly to relieve them a little.’
‘I wish to God we could,’ Yuell said. ‘Why the devil haven’t we heard from Warley? Have you kept trying?’
‘Yes, sir, I have.’
‘Shells must have severed the telephone wires.’ Yuell slapped at his leg with his walking stick and made up his mind.
‘Get my jeep up,’ he said. ‘I’m going down to the river.’
‘You’ll probably have to walk,’ Peddy pointed out. ‘I gather the San Bartolomeo road’s jammed with vehicles and the track from Capodozzi’s under heavy fire now.’
‘Very well,’ Yuell said. ‘I can always do that.’ He frowned. ‘I wonder why we haven’t heard from them?’
The reason was simple. There wasn’t a single working link. All the ‘Eighteens’ had been lost or damaged in the disasters of the crossing, and the field telephone line, unreeled as they’d advanced, seemed to have been cut by shellfire somewhere near the river. The regimental signallers, ordinary soldiers who got no extra pay and only crossed flags on their sleeves, had set off in pa
irs, with their knives and insulating tape, to find the break. Until it could be repaired they were out of touch. There wasn’t even contact with other companies.
Deacon had showed remarkable initiative and had continued to push inland, leaving guides behind to direct the second wave. He’d reached the uneven ground beyond the road and the railway line and had found a larger hollow surrounded by rocks, which he was busy fortifying when Warley joined him, pushing men out to right and left to dig slit trenches. On the German side of the dip, sheltered by the slope, there was a small stone building probably once used as a cow byre to which they were carrying the wounded.
‘We’ve got to get in contact with the colonel,’ Warley said. ‘Let’s try a pigeon.’
But, in the din and confusion of mortar fire, the bird merely circled slowly above them and they saw it come to rest on a broken wall just ahead of them out of reach, shaking its head and fluffing out its wet feathers.
‘The bastard’s allergic to the dark,’ Farnsworth snarled.
‘It’ll probably go at daylight, sir,’ Corporal Carter said helpfully.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Warley growled. ‘Got any more?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Better wait a bit then. It’ll soon be daylight. We’ll try again then.’ As Warley turned, he saw his signaller sitting against a rock with blood on his face and a dazed look in his eyes.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Bits of stone, chiefly, sir, I think. It’s made me go deaf. I can hardly hear a bloody thing.’
‘Think you can help the doctor and the padre set up an aid post, and get the wounded to it?’
‘I reckon so, sir. You’d better use another signaller in my place.’
‘Right. See what you can do to help. We seem to be a bit short of men.’
