Swordpoint (2011)

by John Harris

  ‘Pick the smartest men, sir,’ CSM Farnsworth hissed. ‘Don’t let the buggers realise what it’s like here.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Warley said. ‘Corporal Gask, Rich, Martindale, Bawden, Duff, Parkin. You’ll do for the first party. Sar’-Major, round me up some more.’

  Twice the stretcher-bearers went out from the dip, lifting the inert figures while O’Mara continued to stand bolt upright in No Man’s Land holding up the white vest on his stick. As the second party struggled back to the dip, Reis’ head appeared.

  ‘I could just knock yon hoor off from here,’ McWatters said, cradling his rifle.

  ‘There’ll be no shooting,’ Yuell snapped. ‘Not with the padre out there.’

  ‘You are a brave man, Father,’ Reis called.

  O’Mara managed a smile. ‘I hope I’m a compassionate one, my son,’ he observed.

  ‘You have twenty more minutes,’ Reis said.

  ‘One more journey,’ O’Mara pleaded.

  ‘One only,’ Reis conceded. ‘After that you must not make any more.’

  By the end of the hour, they had carried in everyone within reach who had survived his wounds and Reis fired a flare which soared above their heads.

  ‘Genug,’ he called. ‘That is enough.’

  O’Mara waved. ‘We can ask no more, my son. The Blessing of God be upon you.’

  ‘And upon you, Father. Go now. I must order my men to fire.’

  As O’Mara slipped back into the dip, Warley stared at him. ‘I never expected to see that, Father. It was very brave.’

  O’Mara blinked. He looked a little startled at what he’d done. ‘The strength of any religion,’ he said slowly, ‘lies in the behaviour of those who practise it. It was nothing, my son.’

  The firing didn’t start again at once, but after a while one of the German Spandaus let off a short burst, which another one took up. Eventually they were back to normal, nobody being particularly aggressive but nobody missing any chances either.

  ‘They’re a long time throwing in another counter-attack,’ Yuell said.

  ‘Perhaps they don’t think it’s necessary to risk lives, sir,’ Warley pointed out. ‘After all, it’s obvious we’re not going anywhere and that we can’t get back to the river. They’ve only got to keep up the pressure and we’ll run out of ammunition.’

  There was nothing to do but wait. The hours passed slowly. By mid-morning there had still been no fresh counter-attack, and even into the afternoon the Germans had not gone beyond the use of gunfire and mortars. Then the lorries returned from Naples and the gunners at the other side of the river began to thicken up the smoke screen, confident now they could keep it going indefinitely. It proved a double-edged weapon, and soon after three o’clock the ominous grating of tanks was heard beyond it. First came the roar of engines followed by a clanking noise and what sounded like someone throwing gravel against a tin fence; then the crack of a high velocity gun. The shell burst just beyond the dip.

  Everybody fell silent as soldiers must have done when Hannibal had appeared with his elephants, two thousand years before, or Murat had borne down with his glittering squadrons of horsemen.

  The first tank lurched round a clump of rock, moving slowly, its gun swinging in search of a target. With everyone in the dip, there wasn’t much to fire at and the tank commander seemed uncertain what to do. Then a second tank approached, partly hidden behind the first. As they both drew closer, vanishing temporarily into a fold of ground, the man with the Piat anti-tank launcher laid down his weapon, scrambled out of the hole he was occupying with Syzling and Deacon, and ran towards the river.

  ‘You rotten bastard,’ Syzling yelled after him. ‘You bloody rotten yellow bugger!’

  He and Deacon were manning a Bren just ahead of the dip to give support to the Piat team; but of these, one had been killed, a second wounded, and the third had just bolted. However, there seemed to be plenty of bombs and Deacon stared at the three-foot-long tube with its pistol grip and firing mechanism. There was a bomb alongside the open-ended trough, its detonator in place. As he well knew, infantrymen with Piats were difficult to spot and their tactical effects were profound, their mere presence inducing caution in tank crews who immediately started calling up infantry support; something that would not be easy here because the dip he’d chosen was a sound base and he and Warley and Jago had worked throughout the night to strengthen it.

  Deacon continued to stare at the Piat with growing fascination, realising as he did so that it could cause a considerable slowing down of operations which normally thrived best on speed. He turned towards Syzling.

  ‘Shut up swearing,’ he snapped, ‘and get hold of the bloody thing!’

  ‘Oo?’ Syzling said. ‘Me?’

  ‘Why not, for God’s sake? You’ve been trained.’

  ‘I’ve forgot it all.’ Syzling scowled. ‘Besides, I’ll get killed. You ain’t got a chance of getting a ’it at more than a ’undred yards. I’ll ’ave to wait for ’im to get closer and I’m not that daft. That bugger’s got another one be’ind ’im and they’ll be on the look out for me. Anyway,’ he went on aggrievedly, ‘I saw one ’it by a Piat down in Sicily an’ all it did was blow the bloody ’atches open. The crew just shut ’em again and went on like nothing ’ad ’appened.’

  Deacon shifted uncomfortably. What Syzling said was only too true. Not only did the bomb sometimes fail to stop a tank, sometimes it also disproved the theory that the blast from an internal explosion was lethal. After further badgering, however, Syzling eventually had to admit he could just possibly still remember how to use the weapon.

  ‘Well, look slippy, you idiot,’ Deacon bellowed, despairing even now of ever getting Syzling to call him ‘sir’. ‘The bloody thing’ll be on top of us soon.’

  Syzling lifted the Piat and peered anxiously over the edge of the hole. The leading tank was just coming into view again, and Deacon felt himself shivering. It looked as big as a house – huge, dark and angular – its great gun probing ahead of it. His face twitched and he tried in vain to stop it.

  ‘If you don’t get on with it,’ he hissed, ‘the bloody thing’ll run us down!’

  Laboriously – incredibly slowly, it seemed to Deacon – Syzling managed to check the missile.

  ‘And this time,’ Deacon went on, his nerves twanging with tension, ‘don’t lower the muzzle or you’ll lose the bloody bomb as usual.’

  ‘I’m trying, aren’t I?’ Syzling said.

  ‘Okay.’ Deacon struggled to hold on to his temper in case he panicked Syzling. ‘Give it a bit longer till he’s nearer, but for Christ’s sake don’t leave it too long!’

  ‘I wish you’d shut up,’ Syzling wailed. ‘You’re putting me off! I can’t concentrate!’

  ‘You never could.’

  ‘I’ll bloody well aim it at you soon!’

  Deacon was so startled at this little mutiny he fell silent while Syzling took a deep breath and stood up in full view of the Germans. The range was around sixty yards and the explosion seemed to be on the tank’s starboard track. They saw the flash and the puff of smoke, then a curling metallic snake as the track ran off the bogies. Deacon’s eyes almost fell out of their sockets.

  ‘You hit the bloody thing!’ he cried, like Syzling standing bolt upright in amazement.

  ‘Well, you shut up for once,’ Syzling explained patiently. ‘That’s why. Nobody ever gives me time to think.’

  The tank’s gun fired and the shell burst just to their left in a huge cloud of smoke, scattering mud and rock.

  ‘Give it another for luck!’ Deacon yelled excitedly.

  This time Syzling’s shot landed just in front of the tank, raising another huge cloud of smoke. Once again the tank fired, but the shot whistled over their heads and sailed down towards the river. Then they saw the crew climbing out. As they jumped down, they opened up with Schmeissers but they didn’t appear to be certain where the Piat was and, as Deacon fired the Bren, they all disappeared from sight, eith
er dead or wounded. There was a roar of enthusiasm from the dip.

  ‘Now the other!’

  ‘Other what?’ Syzling demanded.

  ‘The other tank, you gormless idiot! It’s coming up!’

  ‘Well, shut up then,’ Syzling said peevishly. ‘And pass me one of them bombs.’

  It was a new experience for Deacon to be told what to do by Syzling instead of the other way round, but in the excitement of the moment he didn’t even notice. As Syzling fired again, the second tank was just turning as if to retreat and it immediately burst into flames. Beyond the smoke they saw the crew running, their clothes on fire. Deacon shot them down, and then he and Syzling grabbed each other and shook hands, grinning.

  ‘Better give the first ’un another for luck,’ Syzling said. ‘In case they come back an’ get it.’

  Deacon helped with the bomb again, but this time it went off in the tube. There was a tremendous clang and Deacon was flung against the earth wall of the hole. When he came to, his head was ringing and his lungs felt full of acrid smoke. He pulled himself upright, coughing and retching, the sweat standing out on his face, the bile dribbling from his open mouth. Then he saw that Syzling was huddled in a corner with two enormous black eyes and small pieces of metal sticking in his face.

  He looked dead, but Deacon realised he was breathing and decided he’d better try to get him to the stretcher-bearers. Their vicious little attack seemed to have shaken the Germans and, hidden by the smoke from the burning tank, he was able to get Syzling out of the hole and heave him on to his back. There was one more burst of firing, but even that stopped as Deacon fell into the dip where the orderlies took over.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Syzling. Frying Tonight.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Piat blew up in his face.’

  Collecting two men and several Bren magazines, Deacon squirmed back through the smoke to his hole, feeling curiously bereft. He’d been nagging at Syzling so long that to be without him was like losing a limb. He hoped there’d be no more tanks.

  ‘Oy!’ The voice made him turn and he saw Syzling running bent double towards him. ‘Catch ’old of this ’ere!’

  ‘This’ was another Piat and it almost flattened Deacon.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ he demanded.

  ‘They had one wi’ nobody to fire it.’

  ‘You’ve got a couple of lovely shiners, Syzling. You all right?’

  Syzling looked dazed. ‘Me ’ead’s spinnin’ a bit,’ he said. ‘It’s addled me brain.’

  ‘You never had a brain, Syzling,’ Deacon grinned. ‘Nobody with a brain would have dared to do what you did.’

  For once, Syzling failed to react with a protest.

  ‘Well, you ’elped,’ he admitted.

  ‘I’ll get you a medal for this, Syzling, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘You ought to ’ave one as well, sir. You stood up wi’ me.’

  Deacon was overcome. Sir! Syzling had finally managed it. At last he seemed to have got through to him. At last they were on the same wavelength.

  ‘I think we’ve got this business taped,’ he said.

  Five

  Carefully examining Warley’s radio, the signallers had come to the conclusion that, with a cracked panel and the veins of the condenser shot to hell, they weren’t going to get much out of it, and they were too far from the river by this time to use the field telephone. But, with B and C Companies finally rounded up and the parts of another damaged set available, late in the afternoon they were able to announce that they’d managed to make one of them work. Yuell immediately ordered them to contact the Yellowjackets. ‘If we can get ’em to move up to us,’ he said to Warley, we might hang on and, if we can, they might get the tanks across.’

  Warley thought the colonel was being bloody optimistic and, in any case, the Yellowjackets seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. By this time, however, Tallemach had pushed a group of Baluchi signallers and one of their sets across the river, and it was now possible to relay a message to the other bank and receive assurances that help was coming.

  Giving the position of German mortar and machine-gun posts, they were also able to ask for artillery support and had the satisfaction soon afterwards of seeing the first shells landing among the wire just ahead. The guns were firing well, just clipping their position to land their missiles among the Germans. But then a new battery joined in, firing to instructions given in the fifty-six page orders where a weary clerk had misread the numbers, and three shells arrived far too close for comfort. They left shallow craters that were still smoking from the tremendous heat of the explosion when a moment later another salvo arrived, showering them with dirt and stones and wounding two men with fragments of rock.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Warley was staring towards the other side of the river, as though by sheer will-power he could compel a change of range. ‘Haven’t we got enough shooting at us without those silly buggers!’

  The radio squawked as Yuell sent off a series of angry messages, but the artillery didn’t appear to believe him and more shells arrived, still fortunately just ahead. It was twenty-five minutes – during which they all hugged the earth, sick with fear – before they could get the shooting stopped. Morale, raised by Syzling’s feat with the Piat, had slumped badly.

  As the offending guns became silent, the German fire began to increase again, hammering at a point by the river. Turning his binoculars in that direction, Yuell was just able to pick out movement in the greyness round Capodozzi and at Foiano further east.

  ‘Must be the Baluchis supporting the Yellowjackets,’ he said.

  The new attack had started in the early evening. The air was already thick with smoke, and though the sun had appeared briefly, it gave no warmth. With the clouds rapidly closing in again, it became impossible to make out what was happening, but the firing in front of them slackened a little as though the German weapons had had to be diverted. Then, as the breeze cleared the smoke for a moment, they saw the outline of the bank, scarred with craters, and boats ferrying men across.

  ‘The Yellowjackets must have done better than we did,’ Yuell observed. ‘They’ll be pushing towards us before long.’

  But by the time it was growing dark, there was no sign of relief and the rain had started once more. They were wet, tired and more than a little frightened. Hunger, and the shadow of a prisoner-of-war camp hovering over them, added to their misery.

  The Germans kept firing flares, as if expecting them to try to advance, and the battlefield was lit up in a series of fleeting glimpses. They were all thinking about their own artillery now because it had suddenly dawned on them that until they moved, the guns were as likely to hit them as hit the Germans.

  ‘I wish they’d shell the bloody general,’ Hunters growled.

  A few of them managed to snatch a little sleep in catnaps, while others counted noses in the dark and tried to find out what had happened to everybody.

  ‘Where’s Pedlar Parkin?’ White asked. It was almost as if he missed Parkin’s baiting.

  ‘Ain’t seen ’im since we got down to t’ river,’ Rich said. ‘Musta got lost or copped it down there somewhere.’

  There was a sudden silence because it wasn’t like Parkin to get lost.

  ‘Peace in our time.’ 000 Bawden spoke next and as though he’d been brooding on something for a long while. ‘That bastard with the moustache and umbrella. When he came back from Munich. Remember? Fat lot of bloody peace we’ve seen since then.’

  ‘I notice ’e didn’t join up and pick up a rifle,’ Martindale said, sucking at an empty pipe.

  ‘They never do, them lot,’ Henry White said, his mouth as empty as a cavern. ‘They’re good at declarin’ war, but they never join up an’ fight it.’

  ‘They did at Waterloo, ’Enry,’ Rich said, as though he considered it his duty in Parkin’s absence to take over the baiting. ‘Napoleon was there. You musta seen ’im.’

>   ‘I ’eard,’ Puddephatt said solemnly, ‘that the Argylls caught a chameleon in North Africa.’

  ‘What’s that got to do wi’ it?’ Rich asked.

  ‘Nothing. They put it on one of their kilts. It settled it champion. It couldn’t manage nothing more than a mucky brown, they said.’

  ‘Well, could you?’

  ‘I’m not a chameleon.’

  ‘Even if you were.’

  The argument dragged on as army arguments always did, pointless, witless, following no particular line, getting side-tracked whenever they lost the gist of what they were talking about. But it took their minds off their misery, the hunger and the cold, and the dead and wounded in the bottom of the hollow. As darkness finally enveloped them, every single weapon seemed to stop firing within a matter of minutes and there was one of those strange lulls that occasionally fall on a battlefield.

  And then, someone started to sing in a foxhole over on the left. The voice came out of the darkness, shrill, almost falsetto, the accent ill-educated but quite plain. They could all hear it and knew that the Germans could hear it too.

  ‘Now the day is o-over, night is drawing nigh,

  Shadows of the e-evening flit across the flippin’ sky.’

  ‘It’s Pedlar,’ White said, his empty mouth grinning.

  The arguments stopped and men smiled, pleased that A Company’s fool was still around. Even Yuell, crouching with Warley near the radio, stopped and listened.

  The voice came again, doggedly.

  ‘When this bloomin’ war is over,

  Oh, ’ow ’appy I shall be,

  When I gits me civvy clo’s on,

  No more soldierin’ for me.

  No more church parades on Sundays,

  No more askin’ for a pass,

  You can tell the sergeant-major