by John Harris
Whether the third shell killed the sniper or not, it effectively blocked his view because the rest of the walls fell down over the hole and Jago’s men were able to move forward once more.
Warley was having similar problems on the other side of the village. Without tanks, a man was constantly having to show himself for a fleeting instant to draw sniper fire, while others with Brens sprayed the marksman as soon as he revealed his position by firing. Working together, Gask and Henry White had already disposed of three in this manner, but nobody could call it an easy way of doing things.
As the Germans were killed off one by one, they made their way into the centre of the village by a series of quick dashes across open ground, from one cellar to another, from one ruin to the next. Then Warley was puzzled by the sound of a tank engine turning over quietly nearby. It appeared to come from the building next to the one they were occupying, but no tank was visible and, crawling round the back, CSM Farnsworth returned with the information that it was sealed inside.
‘Seems to be a job for the Yeomanry,’ Warley said.
They waited for what seemed hours until the Churchills appeared, lumbering through the debris. The leading machine had been brewed up by an anti-tank gun, but the gun had been knocked out at once and the other five tanks were now roaming through the village, waiting to be given targets. As the new leader fired on the house where the concealed Germans were waiting, it collapsed like a pack of cards and Warley’s men stormed forward. The tank, still intact, lay beneath the debris, its engine running, covered with bricks, timbers and rubble. One surviving member of the crew climbed out and gave himself up. Only the fact that the commander had had to run his engines to charge his radio batteries had enabled them to discover it.
By this time, they were all hungry because they’d had no hot food since long before crossing the river. The radio sets were also out of action again, because the minute one of the long aerial antennas was put up it brought sniper fire or mortar bombs down on them. By this time, also, several of the houses were burning and the place was full of acrid yellow smoke which added to the difficulties. And then there were the rats. The bombing had disturbed whole colonies of them and, instead of being stunned by the blast, they seemed more active than usual, scattering in dozens every time the men made their way into a cellar.
Near the Piazza Roma in the centre of the village, they were held up again from the ruins of a small hotel. CSM Farnsworth worked his way forward to have a look at it and pinpointed the German strongpoint. Bellowing in his iron voice, he directed the fire of one of the Churchills and, as the building collapsed, a handful of Germans appeared with their hands in the air. He lined them up against the walls of the building where he crouched, and handed them over to 000 Bawden.
Farnsworth had an idea that there were more Germans in the ruins, only waiting for them to move away before setting up the strongpoint again. Turning to see who was with him, he caught Martindale busily lighting his pipe for a quick, soothing puff during the lull in the fighting.
‘Put that bloody thing away,’ he snapped. ‘You think the Teds are blind? It’s worse than a radio antenna. They can see the smoke and they know when you’re coming.’
Martindale stuffed the pipe away, but it was still alight and he was itching to put it back in his mouth. It was always a pity to waste a good glowing bowl of tobacco, and he decided to wait until he was out of sight.
There didn’t seem to Farnsworth to be enough of them to tackle the ruins by rushing them, so he decided on bluff. Spreading his men out, he sent them ahead among the ruins on either side. Martindale was with them, his hand already moving towards his pocket. Watching them vanish, Farnsworth rose to his knees and lifted his head.
‘You lot in there,’ he bellowed. ‘I hope to Christ there’s one of you understands English and knows what I’m saying because, if you’re not out in two minutes, you’re for it.’ Raising his voice, he bellowed. ‘Corporal, bring up that flame-thrower! But keep it out of sight in case the bastards spot you. Let it go when I give you the word.’
There was no flame-thrower but in the silence that followed Farnsworth shouted again. ‘It’ll be bloody funny being burned alive first and then having the fire put out when the sewer fills the cellar.’
There was another long silence. Then a voice came from the ruins.
‘Stop! Stop! We come out!’
Twenty-five more men crawled out, their hands in the air, their eyes circling the square for the non-existent flame-thrower and the leaking sewer. As they were marched away, Farnsworth paused, listened, then pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it into the hole through which they’d appeared. As it exploded there was a scream and he gave a nod of satisfaction.
‘Thought so,’ he said.
They were just moving off again, keeping well to the walls, when, just ahead, a figure stepped into the road. Half way across, a burst of Spandau fire stopped it dead. It was Martindale, his pipe in his mouth once more, and they all saw his stare of disbelief and heard the protest – unidentifiable but quite clear – that came from his throat as the pipe dropped away and clattered on to the road. As he fell, they knew he was stone dead. He had been hit in the chest and stomach, and as he rolled over, the blood glistening in the sunshine, they saw his insides spilling out.
The hatch of the leading tank lifted a fraction. ‘I’ll find the bastard,’ the commander said.
But as the tank moved slowly up the street it suddenly stopped dead with a violent metallic clang. His head down, Warley thought it had fired its gun. Then, looking up, he noticed there was something odd about it and saw that all the boxes of spare ammunition, the jerricans of water, bedrolls and bundles of camouflage netting on its sides had vanished. It had been hit. A man rolled out of the turret and with quick jerky movements fell into the ditch. It looked odd and almost comic until a second figure appeared from the turret, covered with blood and minus a leg. At the same time, the man crouching next to Warley sagged back and sat down, his head lolling. At first Warley thought he was the victim of a sniper, because there was a small hole in his temple, but then he realised he must have been killed by a fragment from the 88 mm shell that had hit the tank.
The man who had lost a leg was frantically demanding to know when the stretcher-bearers were going to come, and when Warley said ‘Soon’ he gave a bitter laugh. Evans the Bomb found a scrap of abandoned blanket and put it over the dead infantryman’s face, and tried to lay another over the tank man; but the tank man seemed fascinated by the dreadful injury he’d suffered and pushed it aside, staring at the blue-white splintered bone among the bloody flesh and trying to brush away the flies that had appeared from nowhere.
The other tanks had backed away behind the ruined buildings.
‘It’s a self-propelled gun,’ Farnsworth was saying. ‘The bastard’s just between those two houses.’
‘Frying,’ Deacon said to Syzling. ‘Now’s your chance. Come on. Let’s get the sod.’
Moving to the side, crawling over the rubble, the two of them managed to get within fifty yards of the gun and Deacon gestured.
‘Let him have it, Sizzle,’ he said.
He wasn’t ready when Syzling fired, and the bang as the gun was hit startled him. The turret seemed to swell and change shape, and smoke came from it in slow oozing coils.
‘Give him another,’ Deacon said.
This time, men leapt from the rear of the gun and began to run down the street. Deacon’s Bren brought them down and he slapped Syzling on the shoulder, amazed at the amount of affection he felt for him. Syzling’s reaction was a dull stare and a slow, spreading grin.
All morning, they fought through the ruins in a confused nightmare of small actions, from craters to rat-infested cellars, and from rat-infested cellars to ruined houses; sometimes even grateful for the shelter of a stinking sewer to escape a stream of bullets. One or two of them distinguished themselves. Deacon and Syzling, operating together in a strangely joyous sort of union, used the
Piat again and again as a miniature field gun, gleeful at their own success.
Nevertheless, the Germans were still fighting back with the military professionalism that had sustained them through nearly five long years of war and eighteen months of defeat after defeat. Long after their flanks had been by-passed, small parties were still resisting, and a last stand took place in the cemetery. Headstones and weeping stone figures lay chipped and crooked and vaults lay open, smashed by mortar bombs. In some of them were uncoffined bodies, one on top of another, the remains of the poor, shrunken in death. The stench was appalling.
Farnsworth turned to Warley. ‘I think we’ve got ’em on the run at last, sir,’ he said.
But, as he spoke, what must have been the last German tank in the area appeared. It was covered with dust and rubble, looking as though it had been concealed inside a house and had finally come out to be used for its proper function. As it nosed round the corner, they all ran like hares, diving behind walls and into craters.
‘Syzling!’
Once again Syzling and Deacon went into action, but this time their efforts were an anti-climax. Syzling did what he’d always normally done but had failed so magnificently to do during the whole of that day. He overlooked the angle of trajectory and, just as the tank appeared, the bomb slid out of the tube and dropped among the rubble just out of reach.
‘Run,’ Deacon yelled, and the two of them took to their heels and leapt into a bomb crater on top of everybody else to watch mesmerised as the huge tank swung into the street.
As it turned, the turret lid lifted and a German appeared, holding a stick grenade ready to throw. Why he was throwing a grenade when there was a gun available nobody ever knew because at that moment the lanky figure of Corporal Gask appeared from the ruined houses beyond the tank, raced up behind it, leapt on to its back as if he were hurdling, shot the German, pushed a grenade down the hatch and slammed it shut. It was all over in a second or two.
The ‘whanngg’ of the grenade inside the tank stopped it dead. There was no movement, and cautiously they lifted their heads.
The last burst of fighting took place round what had once been the mayor’s office but, with the tanks hammering at it and the Brens chipping away at the window frames, the place began to dissolve into brick dust and fragmented stone. Eventually, a white sheet on the end of a pole appeared and wagged furiously.
‘Cease fire!’ Warley yelled.
As the firing stopped, a man stumbled out with his hands above his head and stood against the wall, cowering, obviously awaiting the blast of weaponry. When nothing happened, more men began to appear, dazed-looking but glad to be alive.
The last man out was Reis. Tall and straight-backed, his heart in his mouth because men in the heat of battle were sometimes too excited to check, he lifted his hands and prayed he’d survive to go home to his wife; something he could never have expected to do on the Russian front where you fought to the death like animals. As he stepped forward, McWatters knocked him to his knees with a blow between the shoulders from his rifle butt.
‘Ye geikit Fascist bastarrd,’ he snarled.
As his finger reached for the trigger, Warley knocked up the gun and shoved him aside.
‘Yon’s a Nazi hoor!’
‘He looks uncommonly like the chap who let us fetch in our wounded,’ Warley said calmly. ‘Push off, McWatters. I’m running this show, not you.’
They grouped together again, their eyes flickering warily over the fronts of the houses. Apart from odd shots from the other side of the village, the fighting seemed to have ended and they were safe now because the spur of the escarpment behind the village protected them.
The dust settled slowly and the outlines of buildings emerged, then the ground beyond, scarred with craters and marked with smashed and splintered trees and the usual litter of war – German rifles, ammunition belts, old grenades, rags, paper – always paper – and here and there the grey flattened shapes of dead Germans. The village was a mass of rubble that stank of burning timber, explosives and the new dead.
The Germans were being rounded up in large numbers now. A sergeant-major with an Iron Cross, First Class, marched forward with his hands in the air, a starved-looking Italian boy of no more than fifteen walking behind him with a machine-pistol, a broad grin on his angelic face. Suddenly everything had gone quiet and all they could hear were voices – British voices – calling to each other.
As Warley drew a deep thankful breath, he saw Jago coming towards him.
‘Tony! You okay?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘Yes. I think we’ve got the place.’
The captain of the Baluchis appeared shortly afterwards, followed by the colonel of the Punjabis.
‘I think we’d better send a runner back to give them the gen,’ the colonel said.
Warley saw Fletcher-Smith standing nearby. There was blood on his face but he was unhurt and it seemed that the blood belonged to someone else. Who better, he thought.
It was well into the afternoon when Fletcher-Smith appeared once more at Tallemach’s headquarters. Tonge was there when he was brought in.
‘You again?’ Tallemach said. ‘How did you do it this time?’
‘Same as when I went back, sir,’ Fletcher-Smith said. ‘Down the ditch and across the stone bridge. It was nothing like as bad as last time.’
Tallemach smiled. ‘This is getting to be a habit,’ he said. He drew Tonge to one side. ‘I think this chap deserves something, sir,’ he said. ‘This is the third time he’s crossed the river under fire.’
When Fletcher-Smith had finished his report, Tonge moved forward. ‘You’d better go and get some food,’ he advised. ‘Then find yourself a snug corner to wait for your people to be relieved.’
Fletcher-Smith stiffened. ‘With your permission, sir, I’ll rejoin my battalion.’
Tonge studied him carefully. There was no suggestion of false heroism about him.
‘Crossing that bridge again?’
‘They’re getting jeeps and lorries across now, sir. They won’t worry about me. And I was there when it started, so I’d like to be there when it finishes.’
‘Why?’
Fletcher-Smith considered. There appeared to be only one answer. ‘We’re rather a good battalion, sir,’ he said.
As Fletcher-Smith vanished, Tallemach smiled. ‘I think this must be the beginning of the end for Jerry, sir,’ he said. ‘Funny we should think we were going to fail.’
Which raised quite a point, Tonge decided. He’d already made up his mind that Heathfield must go and had been working out the ways and means of doing it when he realised he’d have to be rather more circumspect about it than he’d intended.
Even before success had begun to appear from the fog of defeat, Heathfield had been curiously defiant.
‘If I’m to be accused, sir,’ he’d said, ‘thank the Lord I’m being accused of attacking, not retreating.’
Now, with success snatched out of chaos by the ordinary fighting man, Tonge imagined that Heathfield’s budding political instinct might even incline him to expect praise. Because, consider it how he might, Heathfield’s plan had come off and, in the end, he’d been shown to be right; ironically because he’d stubbornly persisted when the others had been inclined to throw in the sponge. The fact that his rightness had only been proved by better men of lesser rank was nothing to do with it, and Tonge could hardly chuck out someone whose ideas had worked, whose pertinacity had paid dividends – even if, by all the rules, they ought not to have done. He’d have to wait and give him enough rope to hang himself. He had a suspicion it wouldn’t take long.
‘Another case,’ he observed to Tallemach, ‘of the private soldier saving his senior officer’s reputation.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Tallemach said. ‘I suppose I’ve a lot to be grateful for.’
Tonge lit a cigarette and turned towards his car. ‘I wasn’t thinking of you, Tom,’ he said.
Nine
They wer
e relieved two nights later.
The wounded had all been evacuated by this time and the dead buried; the British first, laid under the stony soil just outside the cemetery where some of them had died. They’d been brought up from the river and from Deacon’s Dip, from the machine-gun positions they’d rushed, from the wire, and from among the ruins of San Eusebio, their bodies not in the tidy attitudes you saw in Errol Flynn films but twisted bundles of flesh, blood and bones often blackened by high explosives. Major Peddy, the letter to his wife still in his pocket, was among them, along with Second-Lieutenant Taylor, Corporal Wymark, 766 Bawden, Martindale and a few more. They lay in neat rows. Army dead were like army living, always regimental. Crosses marked where they lay, neat white wooden markers made by the battalion carpenter of the Yellowjackets – because the carpenter of the North Yorkshires was under a cross himself – and they’d been painted by Lofty Duff who was a signwriter in civilian life.
The burial service had been conducted by O’Mara since the Anglican chaplain had still not appeared. Nobody minded the Latin. They wouldn’t have minded if he’d done it in Swahili because O’Mara had been there with them. In fact, the service was a mixture of all denominations and perhaps his last words, spoken in English, touched them more closely than all the rest.
‘In the hands of God the omniscient,’ he said as he turned away, ‘may the tears of Paradise fall upon them.’
After the British dead had come the Germans, but they made the prisoners do most of that because by this time, in the growing heat, the bodies had swelled and their skin had stretched so that their features had disappeared. Then, since they had to live in the place, they had started to tidy it up. A few dazed Italians had appeared from the ruins, hanging out white sheets as indications that they were on the side of the Allies and chanting repeatedly, ‘Vivano i nostri liberatori!’
Discarded weapons had been collected. A troop of Engineers had appeared with mine detectors, picket posts and tape to clear the minefields and to lay markings. Here and there, an occasional body was still being found; and a column of prisoners was moving rearwards under escort, passing the stretcher-bearers carrying their loads.
