Close Quarters

by Thomas Wood

  A single lightbulb was the only source of light, hanging precariously from the ceiling in the middle, swaying gently as it sensed the urgency and excitement that was in the air.

  A figure was already up from his chair, trying desperately to retrieve his pistol from the leather belt that he had removed, and rested atop one of the tables.

  He pulled it out just in time but was unable to raise it quick enough for me.

  “Nein!” I screamed, surprised at the maliciousness in my throat. “Hände! Hände!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs several times over, praying desperately that he would do as I said and simply show me his hands. But I wasn’t holding out much hope.

  I caught sight of the single stripe on the German’s sleeve denoting that he was a lance corporal, and probably in charge of the whole operation here this evening. It wasn’t going all that well for him, and he knew that if he was to simply let us have our way, his life would not be worth living once his superiors found out.

  So, he did what any decent soldier would have done. He quickly raised his arm, bringing the pistol up towards my eyes and I could tell that he had already taken up first pressure on the trigger. One gentle squeeze would now be all that it took to have my life snatched away from me.

  But he was marginally too slow. I squeezed harder and faster than he was able to, my pistol already well-aimed and ready.

  The back of his head exploded, as the round entered just above his eye and took bits of skull and eye socket with it as it travelled through. There was a short silence, followed by a slow trickling of what sounded like water as his body slumped to the ground.

  There was a precious, harmonious silence for what felt like a minute or two, which was glorious as I basked in it. But then, my body was shocked into action once again, when an incredible scream threatened to sound louder than any of the gunshots had done.

  32

  Until that moment in time, I had not noticed the young girl who was in the room, perhaps only nineteen or twenty years of age. She sat in an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair, in front of a series of switches and plugs, with wires poking out of everywhere that I could see. It was a wonder that she had even known what had gone on around her as she would have had to concentrate so hard on what she was doing.

  The headset that was wrapped around her ears, a microphone bending round in front of her mouth, had become skewed by her brash movements.

  She continued to scream, a heart-wrenching, pained cry, my ears starting to ring under the strain of it all. Mike instantly went to comfort her, his arms wrapped around her face, bloodied by the spraying shrapnel of the dead soldier.

  Her cries turned to sobs but were drowned out as she wept into the crook of Mike’s arm, the blood running from her face and into the fibres of Mike’s clothes. Her body shook violently, as if she was possessed, as Mike made uncharacteristic soothing noises to try and comfort her as best as he could.

  I noticed by her clothes that she was nothing more than an ordinary civilian, perhaps one just as fed up with all the death she had seen in her own hometown. With two German soldiers to protect her, she probably would have assumed that she would have been relatively safe out here in the forest.

  As her head rocked back from Mike’s arms, her weeping still continuing but somewhat under control, I could not help but look at her bloodied and gory face and freeze. It was a face that I had seen before, one that I had taken time to admire and appreciate.

  It was Suzanne.

  But I knew that it couldn’t be. The face was too young, the girl too innocent and weepy to have been the woman that had been alongside me fighting the Germans. I tried to cut away but found it increasingly difficult to do so.

  “Jean! The charges. Now! Come on, quickly!”

  Even after Mike’s screams I was finding it difficult to move naturally, the sudden leap of my heart still taking its time to return to its normal pattern. But slowly I was able to make my body move, as I swung my back round and caught the satchel as it slid around my waist.

  Opening the flap, I revealed all the goodies and treats that I had for Mike, like Father Christmas.

  Mike dove in, with so much enthusiasm and vigour that I thought he was about to jump headfirst into the bag and disappear. He began pulling out the charges that I had become so used to seeing, with additional 808 that he intended to put in every little crevice that he could. We wanted a big bang, but not only that, we wanted to ensure that we completely destroyed the switchboard.

  No phone calls in or out of Besançon for the foreseeable future was one that filled me with a tremendous excitement.

  As Mike continued with the explosives, I began rummaging around the few tables that were there, discarding newspapers and playing cards in search of something far more rewarding. I found a notebook with various dates and numbers on that I could not quite translate quick enough, so instead bundled it into my satchel in preparation for the return journey.

  Finding nothing of any real significance, I staggered outside, hurriedly pulling the body of the soldier into the hut from outside and propping him next to his comrade.

  “Ready. Delays are set. Time to go!”

  “What about her?” I asked, nodding towards the still distraught young girl.

  “What about her?” Mike replied, shrugging. “Leave her be. She'll work out soon enough that the best place to be is as far away from here as possible.”

  “We can’t just leave her here though.”

  “Why not? She’s not our problem, Jean. Come on, let’s go.”

  She had bundled herself into a ball, gripping tightly to her knees and allowing bloody tears to roll down her cheeks. Staring into her pretty, but forlorn eyes, I spoke as slowly and as clearly as I possibly could.

  “You need to get out of here. Go home. Quickly. Get away from here. Do you understand?”

  She stared back at me, listening but not registering.

  “It’s no use, Johnny. Come on, let’s get gone.”

  He practically pulled me out of the door and down the steps, my feet slipping in the pool of blood that had been left by the first soldier.

  By the time I had reached the bottom of the stairs, I was resigned to the fact that the girl was the master of her own fate. She knew what she had to do to survive, it was down to her if she was going to act on it.

  I turned and started to run back the way that we had come earlier on, with far less finesse and elegance as before.

  I had just made it to the other side of the track when I heard a frantic and impassioned cry from the hut.

  “Hey! Hey, attendez!” the girl started screaming, her face dripping with just as much blood as it did sweat.

  “Give me strength!” Mike bellowed as I stood up from the ditch and waved her over. “Can’t she make up her mind?!”

  Mike’s last few words were swallowed up by the first few rapports of gunfire, as they began to zip down the road and kick up the bits of gravel and dust that hissed and whined as they were disturbed.

  “Argh!” he screamed, as he slid his body down into the bottom of the ditch, just out of sight of the automatic gunfire that had suddenly ripped through the night. It was a safe bet, in the dark, but not one that would have covered us with much glory.

  Rifles and submachine guns started kicking off from every available space up ahead of us, some of the rounds flying dangerously close to my head and making an awful noise as they did so.

  The weapons started discharging a lot closer than they had done before and, as I peeked my head up out of the ditch, all I could see were twinkling flashes as they slowly advanced on our position.

  I could not see the girl, I could not even see the shed, but I could hear the rounds striking the side and wondered whether they even knew what it was they were aiming at. Hundreds, if not thousands of rounds had already been wasted, and I took quite a confidence in the fact that neither of their two targets had yet been hit. But I worried about one or two lucky rounds that somehow penetrated the thin wood of
the shed, prematurely detonating the charges and showering us all in a deadly bomb of glass and shrapnel.

  It wouldn’t be such a bad way to go though.

  I found myself glaring at a petrified pair of white eyes, as they switched on and off as they blinked. Mike was fearful, of that much I was sure, but it was only as I looked at him that I was overcome by a curious sense of the same feeling.

  It wasn’t a fear that I had experienced before, but more one of resignation that now was my time to go. It was different to how I had imagined it; I had often thought of it as a paralysing and limiting fear, but this one was filling me with a determination to continue to the bitter end. I wanted as many of these Germans to be glaring glassy-eyed to the heavens as I possibly could, before I ended up doing the exact same.

  My means were limited, but determination was boundless.

  The anguished cry began to register in my head above the din of incoming rounds, which Mike was now beginning to reply to. For a moment or two, the attention was diverted away from the hut and towards the one fool who was trying to take on an entire platoon with one measly pistol.

  It just so happened that that fool was lying next to me, a grin now on his face as he relished in the chance to go down fighting. This was what all the comics were full of back at home. Now he was living it.

  The screams of the young girl were beginning to become too much for my heart to bear. All I could think of was how helpless Suzanne had been that first time when she had been blown up. Without Mike or me, she would have been dead. That girl was in exactly the same position. I knew that I had to help her.

  “Mike! I need to get to her. Can you keep firing while I get her across?”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll get back up the bank as best we can. Make for the high ground and hope for the best!”

  He looked at me sternly, as his body jolted in response to the impacts in the bank just above our ditch.

  “If hope is all we’ve got left, old fruit, then I’d say we’re done for this time!”

  “Me too. But let’s go down fighting, shall we?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I exhaled.

  “Right then, after three. One, two—”

  But before I could get to the end of my countdown, the girl screamed, louder than before, tearing at all the chords in her throat and bursting a blood vessel or two in her head. She took a few paces backwards, before charging towards us, her eyes fixed on mine as she gathered pace.

  I glared dumbfounded as she got closer but, just as her body emerged from the cover of the hut, her right shoulder was ripped backwards, as if an invisible hand had gripped her from behind.

  She then spun to the ground where another lucky round ripped into her knee, the sound of her kneecap shattering, clear above all the noise and confusion, making me wince awfully.

  “No!” I screamed, repeated by Mike as he hollered at me to leave her.

  I scrambled from the ditch, the ground a hotbed of activity and noise, my clothes ripping along with my skin as I skidded down by her side. She was alive, just about and, as she was still close to the shed, I gripped her by her wrists and pulled with all my might.

  Rounds began to increase in their density, and I could make out the distinctive noise of them burying themselves inside the dry and arid ground.

  The girl’s screams had ceased.

  I pulled her upright and propped her up against the shed, but there was nothing left in her eyes. They were already glazed and sad, the warm blood oozing out of her chest and leg complemented by the holes that had been ripped open in her arms, stomach and ankle.

  She was gone.

  I hadn’t been able to save her. And there was a decreasing chance that I would be able to save myself.

  The road ahead of me was now spitting so furiously that it looked like a pan of water that had been left far too long to boil. There had been little chance of me making it across there unscathed before, but now it was all but impossible.

  I made eye contact with Mike as I finished emptying my magazine towards the advancing winks of light.

  There was no heartfelt plea to try and get across, no agonised goodbye as we resigned ourselves to death. Just a slight nod, accompanied by the very daintiest of smiles.

  “Good luck, Johnny!” came the call, as he used up the final few rounds in his possession.

  “See you back in London!” I called back towards him. “Good luck,” I screamed. “…Old fruit,” I shouted with both a hint of sadness and amusement.

  I had hated being called it but shouting it towards him made me feel ten times better, as I watched his beaming smile disappear as he began to scrabble up the bank.

  Now, I was on my own.

  33

  The gunfire grew to the point where I thought my head would no longer be able to cope, the pressure building inside so great that my skull simply wanted to explode. Part of me wanted to let it.

  But I knew that I had to keep going, particularly as I was now all alone in the world, with no one to tell me to pick my feet up and carry on. I would have to simply motivate myself.

  Having watched Mike’s back dance up the bank as he scurried away in search of freedom, I turned my back to him and charged towards the valley on the far side of the hut. I had totally run out of all options.

  There was no chance of charging down the road away from the Germans, as there would surely be reinforcements moving towards me in the next few seconds. My route across the track back towards Mike was blocked by a wall of ammunition, and there was certainly no way that I was about to walk towards my attackers with my white pants on a stick, in submission to the evil occupiers that I had spent so long trying to avoid.

  My only hope was the valley, the inkwell of darkness, with a wish that I would simply be swallowed up in the blackness, to at least buy myself some time from my pursuers. But I had put my chances of surviving the drop at less than fifty percent, and even then, I was being generous to myself.

  I leapt over the edge, my feet out in front of me and the underside of my body tensed and ready for the impact. But, even still, the force was so great that I felt as though great chunks had been taken from my legs and, as I started to slide my way down into the valley, I could already feel the blood being left in a long trail behind me.

  I hit every single groove and bump on the way down, and I felt a certain snap as my foot snagged in a rabbit warren, the momentum behind me cracking my shin in two as I continued to fall to the bottom.

  No noise came from my mouth, the initial landing enough to knock the wind from my lungs and prevent me from screaming or grunting any further. The only noise that I could hear was the incredible rush of wind, like I was about to take off, and the sounds of my body impacting everything that got in its way.

  In the darkness, it was difficult to make anything out until it was too late, and it was especially so with the tree, its vague outline slowly being filled in as I hurtled towards it. I tried to wriggle and roll to one side, but it was advancing too quickly, and I immediately knew that I had made it so much worse for myself.

  By trying to wriggle from its path, I had lined up the base of the trunk perfectly with the bridge of my nose.

  I felt the impact, but not much else after that.

  It was only as the rain slowly began to smack me on the cheek, like a rude awakening from my mother, that I realised that I was still alive. My nose, crumpled and tender, was surrounded by brown, flaking blood, that fell off in large chunks as I gently brushed all around it. Surprisingly though, there was very little blood to tell of my ordeal.

  My head, on the other hand, pounded as if to make up for the lack of visible distress, a headache like no other that blinded me as much as it did incapacitate. I ran my hands around my skull, checking for any obvious signs of fracture or dislocation, but I could feel nothing.

  I would get over it all, I would just have to soldier on for now. I couldn’t lie in the bush forever.

  As the rain
grew in intensity, I lifted my face to the heavens, allowing the great beads of water to pass over my face, and gently cleanse me.

  Thankfully, I had studied maps of the area which the telephone exchange had been in, and so I knew exactly where the bed of the valley would take me.

  I started to trudge towards a row of huts I could see some three hundred yards away, covered in a mist on account of the rain, and knew that the sheep would not mind me sheltering in there for an hour or two.

  The sky was dark, but a slightly paling of the sky had started and, as I looked at my watch, completely smashed and destroyed, I reasoned that the charges should have gone off some time ago.

  But there was no hope of going to check. I possessed neither the courage, nor the energy to ascend the valley drop once again to make sure. Either way, we had inconvenienced the Germans, and that was enough for me.

  But I could not help but wonder how the others had fared. We had certainly had a rough night, but we had known that it wouldn’t have been easy. I prayed briefly that they had got on alright, and that my head would soon stop pounding as aggressively as it was.

  I rested as best as I could in the disused sheep shed, not sleeping exactly, but just allowing my eyes to take it in turns to close momentarily.

  I washed in a bucket of rancid water that must have been stagnant for at least a decade, but helped my appearance tremendously by ridding myself of the remainder of the dried blood, the muck and dirt that had stuck to me during my tumble.

  Shortly after I began to make my way back to the village, specifically back to Jules’ house. It was there that I hoped to find my respite, hoping that Mike had made it back before me along with all the other happy faces.

  It did not take me long to find my bearings and, despite the deep bruises that I could feel pressuring my limbs at every pace, I made good time.

  I checked my useless watch once more as I set eyes on Jules’ home for what felt like the first time in forever.