The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  No more than a hundred yards away, hidden by trees until that moment, stood a small circular building with a conical roof. And on the point of the cone there shone a tiny moon, an earthly reflection of the astronomical body above. It seemed to radiate a light of its own. But as the man moved closer, magnetically attracted, as if he saw that it was a steel ball of some kind. Burnished to a brilliant sheen, it absorbed the milky light of the moon and appeared to have its own aura.

  There was a low wooden door on the far side of the building, hidden from the big house. Captivated and made bold by the otherworldly moment, the man did not hesitate, or trouble to look around or care about the noise when he shouldered the door open. In the musty blackness, he put on his head torch and looked inside. There was nothing. The little building was empty, completely empty; there were no chests or containers of any sort on the paved floor. Not rounded like the outside, the walls were squared, making a box-like interior. There was nothing at all to be seen.

  The man raked his torch beam up and down the walls. They were not flush but covered with square stone boxes about a foot across. He had broken into an old dovecote and these were nesting boxes for pigeons, although no pigeons nested and nothing seemed to have been left or hidden anywhere. Nonetheless, the man felt sure that Walter Scott’s ‘varying light’ had led him to the right place. He stood in the middle of the paved floor staring at the stone squares and, very slowly, almost without thinking, he realised that they were not only nesting boxes. They were also something else.

  He was staring at a giant merelles board.

  On one wall, twenty-four boxes imitated the twenty-four points on a board, and he could see two mills. Three small round stones had been placed in one row of boxes that were horizontal, and in another three was a mill of three more round stones that ran vertically. He could see that they were arranged as coordinates. The mills almost met in the middle of the wall of boxes. Almost. Both pointed at a nesting box that had been closed, made blank. A stone square had been fitted over the box.

  The man could reach up and touch it but he was not tall enough to shift the square piece of stone. Climbing, using the lower boxes as footholds, he managed to squeeze his fingers into a tiny gap on one side. But the piece of stone would not shift. Tearing his fingernails, he could not pull it out. His chest heaving, sweat running down his face, he tugged and scraped at the edges, but there was not even the slightest movement. The cover seemed to be fitted flush. Tiring, and grunting with effort, the man tried to climb up a little higher to get more purchase, but he lost his footing, grabbed at anything – and accidentally pushed at the little stone square. It fell inwards.

  The man lifted up its edge and slid it out. Feeling with his hands in the nesting box, he pulled down a package, something wrapped in an oilskin. Inside was a thick, weathered and battered leather-bound notebook. That was all there was. The man managed to climb a little higher and shone his torch into the nesting box but there was nothing else to be found.

  Riffling quickly through its thin pages, he saw that he had found not a printed book but hundreds of pages of small but clear handwriting. It seemed to be a diary or a journal of some kind. Brushing off the dust and the cobwebs, the man opened the notebook and read the first lines on the first page.

  This journal is the property of Captain David Erskine

  of the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

  If you have retrived it, that means he is a dead man.

  I

  What you have in your hands is, for the most part, an account of history in the old sense. For the Greeks who invented it – Herodotus, Thucydides and the others – the word histor meant ‘witness’; what witnesses saw with their own eyes and reported that was history. Much of what you will read, I saw and was witness to.

  Too disorganised and episodic for a diary, what follows is more like a journal, a record of what I remembered and wrote down, sometimes at the time, sometimes later. I have also occasionally added material about events that took place elsewhere and I did not witness, as they help explain how and why things occurred as they did. Especially when events began to accelerate, running far beyond my ability to record them directly, I have had to rely on my imagination. But I have invented nothing. Instead, I have used my knowledge and understanding of how our enemies thought and acted to give context to the awful incidents I did witness. And I have included my own versions of what others – particularly one who is very dear to me – told me of their experiences at the time.

  Everything I did, I did for the best as I understood it, and of course I made terrible mistakes and calamitous misjudgements. My actions sometimes caused heart-breaking sadness and I will carry the guilt and regret for those to my grave. But I tried to act in the best interests of my country, more particularly in the interests of the best of my country. God knows, others behaved wickedly and brought down shame on all our heads.

  What you have here is a true record of a most momentous time, a period when the world was changed utterly.

  Through bright and dark times, I kept in mind lines from Walter Scott. He is buried with my kinsmen in our ancestral place and even though he wrote spitefully about my people, he captured the wellspring of why I did all that I did as the world hurtled towards the edge of an abyss.

  Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

  Who never to himself hath said,

  This is my own, my native land!

  Addendum – 28 March 1945

  You are about to read a copy of the original journal. It was made soon after the events it describes, when memories were fresh. The copyist has included their own accounts of events the primary writer knew very little of. In particular, the copyist made a journey into the Cheviot Hills to discover the fate of someone whose role was pivotal to all that happened and to listen to a remarkable story.

  II

  6 June 1944

  Rum, vomit and fear, all soaked by salt spray. As the flat-bottomed landing craft whumped down on the choppy seas of the Channel, sometimes yawing from side to side, men retched, soiling their clothes, smearing sick over the packs of those in front of them. Some, even though their throats were raw from dry heaving, took a swig of fiery, sickly sweet rum as the canteen was passed around. Some men vomited into their helmets and let the continuous spray rinse them.

  Holding tight onto a bow rail, I forced myself to look ahead fixedly, determined not to throw up. This was bad enough, but God knows what we would face when the landing craft finally stopped throwing us around and the ramp went down at 07.25.

  Fear makes a mockery of us all, voiding our bowels as well as our stomachs, making our hands shake and our hearts race. But the truth is that fear keeps us alive. It makes us react, incites us to retaliate, to lash out, to be violent and to kill.

  Earlier, when the sergeants assembled the three platoons on the deck of the transport ship, waiting for the order to embark on the landing craft, I shouted for the men to gather round for some brief words I had rehearsed many times in the previous twenty-four hours. A senior officer had firmly advised me to keep it brief and not to try to rouse emotions. The Borderers were all regular soldiers, and some had been under intense fire on French beaches before, at Dunkirk. Nevertheless, I sensed that they looked to me, of all people, for reassurance – of any sort. What I said was banal. On the page, it even looks dull, uninspired, not fitting for the moment. But on that night before that morning, nothing could be banal, all was heightened.

  ‘Borderers!’ I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. ‘In a short time the ramp will go down and we’ll face the enemy. Reconnaissance tells us that we’ll see a beach at low tide, a sea-wall, a road behind it and a row of houses on the other side. At all costs, we must get off the beach as soon as we can. Go forward. Do not stop. Take the fight to the enemy. God speed, and God protect the Borderers!’

  The truth was that I believed in neither God nor my ability to lead these soldiers to victory, safety or even survival. I had been given my
commission not for any military merit but because I could speak German fluently and had been in the officer training corps at my university. And also, I suspect, on account of my family and its history. Titles carry obligations as well as privileges, as well as the baseless assumption of an inherited ability to lead men.

  As the ceaseless spray washed over the landing craft and men retched as it slapped down on the sea after each swell, my hands were shaking and my head spinning. God knows what we were about to face. I prayed that such courage as I had would not fail me, my legs would move and I would not dishonour my name.

  *

  Nothing, I suspect, had prepared even the most experienced regular soldiers and officers for the sights that greeted them on embarkation at Southampton the night before. The 1st Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers boarded one of more than five thousand ships about to set sail from the Channel ports to rendezvous in a sector south of the Isle of Wight. It was an astonishing armada, but one travelling in the opposite direction from the Spanish. On every side the sea was studded with dark, looming shapes: huge battleships, the Warspite, Ramillies and others; many cruisers; even more destroyers, minesweepers, transport ships and craft I could not identify. Armed, waiting, hoping against hope, more than one hundred and fifty thousand men were being carried by this armada to attack the Normandy coast. Surely it was enough? Surely sheer numbers and firepower would overwhelm the German defences. As we steamed southwards, the edging light on the eastern horizon picked out smoking funnels, masts and the spiky outline of batteries of great guns. It was a belly-hollowing sight.

  But most of all on that night voyage, I remember the pipes. Cutting through the hum of the engines of the ships and the wash of the choppy sea, I could distinctly hear bagpipes playing and immediately recognised ‘The Road to the Isles’. Its familiar lines – ‘the far Cuillin are putting love on me’, or ‘by Tummel and Loch Rannoch’ and ‘the tangle o’ the Isles’ – rang round and round my head. The Borderers cheered, glad to have something to distract them. It was not a war rant, but a march of sorts, one that crossed another sea, and its jaunty melody somehow sent us into battle in better spirits. Later, I learned that Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, had asked his piper, Bill Millin, to play, telling him that the Scots ought to lead the invasion of Hitler’s Europe. Other ships heard the skirl of the pipes and captains ordered more music to be played over the tannoys as the armada steamed through the fateful night.

  When their commando landing craft reached its beach, Lovat apparently asked Millin to play ‘Highland Laddie’ and ‘All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border’. Crazy, but somehow the music seemed to dissipate the terror around the men. A German prisoner of war taken that day said they did not take aim at Millin as he marched up and down the beach, his drones and their tartan trim an easy target, because they thought him a madman. An extraordinary image as war raged around the lone piper.

  From the transport ship I had seen a pale dawn rising, no sun but streaks of light blue on the eastern horizon. Above us, squadrons of Lancasters and other planes I did not recognise droned towards the French coast and in moments we saw flashes as their bombs burst over the land. It was encouraging. Perhaps we would find the German defences pulverised, soldiers emerging from the rubble with their hands in the air, ready to surrender. From that moment, time began to accelerate so quickly that I did everything without thinking, relying only on instinct.

  The ship’s tannoy crackled: ‘Prepare to man your boats.’ There was no turning back now.

  My three platoons had to climb down the sides of the ships using scramble nets in the subdued morning light. The sea was so rough that the landing craft bobbed up and down alarmingly, and despite the efforts of the crew, the swell opened up gaps between it and the transport ship, or the two clanked as they collided. It was very dangerous. Some men carried more equipment than others and my radio operator, Mallen, had great trouble. But enough of us had made the descent to be able to pull the scramble net tight against the landing craft. We bundled Mallen down, although he yelped when he cracked his elbows on the metal deck.

  Twenty-four hours before, the briefing had identified our objective as Queen Beach, near the small seaside town of Ouistreham, not far from Caen. Air reconnaissance had shown defences, pillboxes and artillery batteries behind a long sea wall. It would be vital to reach it, get over it, get across the road and get behind the defensive line. The plan was for amphibious tanks to land first, attack and attract fire, and before that bombers would attempt to make craters for infantry cover. But the two hundred yards of the beach below the wall looked to me like the perfect killing field. To say nothing of wading agonisingly slowly through the sea before it was reached.

  Three regiments each supplied a battalion in the first wave: the Borderers, the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Lincolnshire Regiment. Scotland, Ireland and England. For completeness, we should have been joined by the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

  Despite the choppy sea, the crews of the landing craft managed to get us all in formation so that we would reach the beach at approximately the same time, 07.25. A staggered series of landings would have been disastrous, allowing the defenders to concentrate their fire on each craft in turn. But before we could move forward together, thunder boomed and fire rent the sky. The naval bombardment began. It was deafening, as though the heavens were exploding. Behind us, the Warspite and the Ramillies fired their huge guns and the shells shot over our heads like express trains racing out of a tunnel.

  My chest seemed to tighten and the pressure waves pushed hard on our landing craft as salvoes from the battleships, cruisers and destroyers made the great ships recoil. The roar and the flashes should have made us cheer, but in truth the overwhelming instinct was to cower and flinch and hope none of the shells dropped short.

  When the guns were finally silenced, it was like a signal. Now it was our turn. The formation of landing craft moved forward like a monstrous metal tide. We were carried into the eye of a gathering storm, one that would burst on us in moments.

  *

  I looked over the edge of the forward ramp and it seemed in the eerie, grey stillness that the winds of the world swirled around us. When we reached the shallow water of the foreshore, the ramp would be let down and I would lead my men into the killing field. In all my life, I had never felt such hollow loneliness.

  I was jolted back into the moment by Sergeant Taylor shouting in my ear, ‘Thirty minutes to landing, sir!’

  I turned and nodded.

  ‘You’ll be all right, sir,’ he added with a tight, grim smile.

  That flash of kindness told me we would fight for our country and against a manifest evil, certainly, but most of all, we would fight for each other. We were a band of Borderers, and perhaps brothers too.

  Maddened by fear, by finding themselves in the jaws of hell, skeins of sea birds flew low and very fast just above the surface, like tracer fire. God knows what carnage was happening on the farms inland, with animals running in blind panic as shells exploded and bombs tore craters out of the fields.

  As we moved closer, I could see that the Ulsters on our left were holding formation. And then a moment later I felt the shock of finding we were in range, as a rattle of metallic pings tinged off the sides of the landing craft. A hail of what must have been machine guns bullets hit us. I could hear them whipping through the air. In an instant reflex, we all cowered down below the hull. The moment we let down the ramp, we would be fired on. We were in their sights.

  ‘Be ready,’ I roared to Sergeant Taylor, ‘to give the order to disembark!’

  My watch had 07.25 precisely. I risked looking to my right to the line of Borderers’ landing craft and then left to the Ulsters’. They had all halted or were slowing but none had let down their ramps. Why the moment of hesitation? A sense of ‘you first’? Were they waiting for one craft to charge the beach and attract fire before giving the order to disembark? Surely not.

  We were not now under fire. Now was the time to go, wha
tever any other commander decided. On the beach I saw two disabled and abandoned amphibious tanks. Had there been a successful landing? Had some broken through? Where?

  The Ulsters’ ramp inched forward, and I shouted, ‘Now!’

  Grinding, cranking down through what sounded like rusty gears, the ramp splashed into the water. Grabbing the handrail, losing my slippery footing, almost falling as the craft suddenly shifted, I scrambled down. The shock of the water sharpened my senses even more. Up to my waist, it made me pump my legs and move. The Borderers followed.

  I turned to Sergeant Taylor and, as he opened his mouth to speak, he was hit in the face. He toppled forward, instantly dead, knocked me down and saved my life. Others pulled at the straps of my pack and I spluttered upright and waded ashore, soaked, breathless with shock.

  Enemy fire was sporadic. Thoughts flickered. Perhaps they were too few to direct their guns at every landing craft at once. But they clearly had snipers, perhaps in the tall houses I could see, picking off the first down the ramps, those men moving so, so slowly through the water. And one of them had missed me and killed my sergeant.

  Now on wet sand, I ran, half falling as it gave way under my boots, and made for the sanctuary of an abandoned tank. Taking cover behind it were half a dozen other Borderers. At that moment, a landing craft behind us was hit by a shell, killing and maiming many, buckling the hull. Clearly the Germans had wheeled artillery into their defensive line, and the tank was a big target; we had to move, get off the beach. Ahead of us, out in the open, a young recruit, clearly terrified, was digging feverishly with his entrenching tool. He made me move. Roaring for them to gather round me, I ran out with my men from behind the tank, a spray of machine gun fire throwing up sand in front of me, and I grabbed the at the boy’s pack and dragged him behind me. We were forty yards from the sea wall and safety.