Gliders Over Normandy Series Box Set

by Thomas Wood

  I didn’t have to wait long for an answer however, as I began to make out movement, behind his eyelids, like he was experiencing a very real, vivid dream, his eyes darting around as if they would have done had he been awake and conscious.

  Suddenly, with a gasp, his eyes shot open, and the bright white pigment burned brightly against the contrasting darkness of his skin. His eyes shone like a beacon in the darkness, and it made me think briefly of the beacons used to warn the English of the approaching Spanish Armada, in turn making me consciously warn myself that a German counter attack in the next few moments, was both entirely possible and also inevitable.

  I felt like giving him a good slap and making him realise how he had made me feel in those few short moments where he had appeared dead, but the elation that bubbled up inside me suppressed my feelings of frustration. Outwardly, I restricted myself to a short, “Well, thank goodness for that,” before trying to gee him up to sit up, and hopefully, stand.

  “Any pain anywhere?”

  “Just my head,” he replied, groggily.

  “That’s good,” I responded, “You’ve only got a slight gash there, that’ll be what’s causing the pain, come on, no more heroics.”

  I got a confused smile in return from him, which was followed by almost pure obedience. He began to stumble about, like a young foal, trying to find his feet, but within a few seconds, he was ready to move.

  “Come on then, lad.”

  I was almost chipper about the whole situation, for a moment, I thought I had lost everything that I cared about, the only reason that I was here, but now, I had everything back, he was listening to me and I felt in control of the situation once more.

  I heard him stop for a moment, before retching and spewing out a pathetic, weak mixture of water and what must have been baked beans onto the ground. He finished up, spitting and wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

  “Better?” I asked, almost laughing at him.

  “Where are we actually going?”

  That was when it clicked. He wasn’t okay, he was concussed. The unsteadiness on his feet, the confused look in his eye plus the forgetfulness were all signs that the head injury wasn’t as superficial as I had hoped.

  “We’re off to the Calvary lad, you remember?”

  “Yes, yes…of course…” he lied.

  I pulled him towards me, so that I was no longer leading the way, but we were running, side by side, so I could keep an eye on him, and we began bashing into each other as I used my bodyweight to steer him, rather than having me as his guide.

  I was certain that he was going to be alright, but he was going to need a bit more of a close eye than what he was used to, certainly for the next few minutes at least.

  It felt good to suddenly have him by my side, gripping his arm from time to time and feeling that physical connection, that sense that I was physically in control of him for once. If anything happened to him now, it really would be all my fault.

  Even though I felt good as we sped our way towards the RV, I still felt the churning of the darkness, deep within me, in the pit of my stomach. It seemed further away now, not as restrictive as it had felt a moment ago, but it was still there, ready for my moment of weakness, when it would pounce, surrounding me from every side until I had no other option but to allow my mind to be consumed by it.

  I tried to keep as tight a lid on it for the next few minutes as was possible, I didn’t want anything to get in the way of us, and the relative safety of Calvary.

  31

  I was in a bad way, my mind was all over the place, like it didn’t exactly belong in my body anymore, almost as if now that this unknown side to my psyche had been opened up to me, that I didn’t want to be here anymore. I was trying with every fibre of my being, every ounce of energy that I could muster from anywhere, to suppress the feelings of guilt and despondency that suddenly overwhelmed me. But it didn’t feel like they would be leaving me, not soon enough anyway.

  I knew that I was now in a very dangerous position. Apart from the continuous thumps of mortars as they rained down on us like an autumnal downpour back in Britain, the weapon that was my mind was coming perilously close to dragging me down. Sometimes you see it with soldiers, in others you don’t, but that sense of losing everything that you once held dear, losing the very reason for why you were fighting, was enough to get you killed. It made you do stupid things.

  I had seen it before, in France, back in 1940. A young private, a Scotsman by the name of Kerr, had received a letter from his girlfriend while we were away, part of the so called Phoney War, towards the end of April. She had found someone else, someone who was not yet in the army, so could give her the stability and the attention that she craved. Kerr went into himself, and became prone to sudden outbursts of violence that once landed him in the cells of a local French police station, rescued only by the CO’s excellent French, and a nice bottle of brandy that he had acquired some weeks before. When the Germans had taken all of us by surprise, our call to arms was met, by most, with level-headedness and a sense of duty, some may even call it a willingness, to fight. But not Kerr. He didn’t possess a level-headedness, nor did he even have a willingness to fight. He bubbled over with rage, a pure aggression so fierce that, you could almost see it bursting from the vein at the side of his head that became so prominent that it stayed there, poking out of the surface of his skin.

  He did not have the desire to fight, but to brawl, one or two claiming that he would simply ‘butcher’ the enemy if he laid eyes on them, blaming them for this war and so, by association, blaming them for losing his girlfriend to some “stuck up, low-life coward.”

  The deep depression that a soldier can get in, can make you do some very stupid things, and are often masked as bravery or courage. Kerr and a few others, found their withdrawal route hindered by the machine gun fire that was forcing to keep their heads down, behind an upturned vegetable cart in the middle of a French village. Waiting for the machine gun to reload, Kerr drew his bayonet, and charged to the water fountain that occupied the centre of the village square. The Germans must have thought they had killed him as he stumbled behind the fountain, as they redirected their fire once again, towards the remaining British soldiers, only for Kerr to burst from cover once again, taking them by total surprise.

  After a scuffle, the two-man machine gun crew landed up with around twenty bayonet wounds each, mainly centred around their chest and neck areas. Kerr was covered, head to toe in blood, mostly the Germans’, but also, partly his, as one of the gunners had gone for his pistol, and managed to bury a 9mm round from a Luger into his gut. Kerr died, and he died slowly and in pain. His death was completely avoidable, not by making his girl stay with him, but by keeping his head, making sure his mind was in check before suicidally, with an element of heroism chucked in, throwing himself at a German machine gun.

  It was something that I was very conscious about and I knew that my mind was around the same place as Kerr’s was some four years ago. I needed to make sure that I double checked every little thing that I did, from stepping out from cover, to putting more rounds in my rifle. Was I going to get myself killed doing this? Could I get around this another way?

  I was here, in the middle of all this chaos and confusion to protect my mind. I was here to protect Harry, to make me feel like I was doing something useful, something commendable. I had staggered through this war so far, killing people, maiming some, but now, I needed to do something to keep my sanity, to give myself something to fight for. Some people reasoned their rationale for fighting simply as for their family, but I needed something more obvious than that, something far more urgent than that when a thousand weapons are pointed at your head. Harry was that reason.

  I was here to try and settle my mind, so that I could go home, look people in the eye and tell them what I had done, with a little hint of pride thrown in that one boy was still living as a result of my actions. But the more that time went on, I realised this was having the o
pposite effect. All I could do, all I could think about, was the all-consuming darkness that had now taken residence within me. Being here was making me feel worse.

  I had begun to think that Harry hadn’t been concussed after all because, after what seemed like only a few moments, his condition had improved greatly. He knew where we going now anyway, even if he did have to keep repeating it to himself as we moved. We still ran side by side, as if he still needed me as his guide; I was sure he knew exactly where to go, and his pace was no doubt much faster than mine, so I had no idea why he slowed it down so much as to be with me.

  Perhaps he had felt a sense of duty to get me home, to my wife and my family, so that none of them would live the rest of their lives with nothing but hatred and gloom at the thought of this wretched war. It would be nice if their sadness as they thought of the war was mixed with the slightest tinge of happiness, at recalling the day that I returned home, after disembarking the ship that had carried me to safety. It would be so nice to make it home.

  Harry’s condition had improved somewhat, but he still either had a slight concussion, as he failed to see the immediate dangers of the situation, or he had a sheer disregard for the position we found ourselves in.

  He began deviating from our escape route, no longer needing me as his guide, but I stayed at his side nonetheless. He began ripping at dressings, or dabbing at wounds as he began to tend to the injured once again. His treatment now was a lot shallower than before, limiting more to cleaning up the superficial wounds, before administering a shot of morphine before moving on. I wasn’t sure if this was down to a final appreciation of the situation, or if, more likely, he was running low on supplies.

  I knelt down beside him at each casualty, raising my rifle so I could scan the perimeter of the battery, each time expecting to see the uniform of the Wehrmacht appearing in my sights, ready to force us all out of here for good. I watched in total astonishment as I saw Harry reach into the smock of a dead officer, and drew out an Enfield Mark Two service revolver, holding it expertly in his right hand. I had never seen him hold a weapon before, as he had refused to on the grounds of being a conscientious objector. As he got used to the weight in the palm of his hand, running his bloodstained thumb over the grooves in the pistol grip, I wondered if he would ever actually use it, or whether he would ever be likely to take a life.

  As quickly as he had pulled the revolver from the jacket, he began marching over to a slit trench, where a few Germans sat, cowering in the bottom from their own mortars, smoking.

  “You, you, you!” He screamed, making it perfectly clear who he was addressing by accusingly pointing the business end of the revolver in their faces.

  “Drag our wounded over there, into your cover!”

  I wasn’t sure if they spoke English or not, but when a weapon is being waved around in your face, you tend to speak most languages on the planet. They weren’t to know that he was a conchie, and I highly doubted if he would ever pull the trigger, even if the rage in him was so overwhelming that it was the only thing he could think of doing. But the Germans weren’t to know that, and Harry knew that too, so the confidence and aggression that he showed, had to be convincing enough to make them do as he told them.

  Almost instantly, working as a team of three, they began dragging the wounded, the ones that were screaming out for help anyway, towards some cover. They sped along, two holding the upper body, while the third took the legs, and in less than a minute, had already taken two bodies over to where they had been cowering a few moments before.

  Harry began trying to drag others into cover himself. With a frustrated roar, I pushed up from my observation position, and ran over to help him.

  For what felt like the thousandth time tonight, I found myself going against everything that I had ever been taught to do. Running across open ground as enemy fire came down, all the while everyone else was making their way to the RV point.

  32

  The Germans did as Harry had instructed them until the mortars and shelling intensified to the point where even they were willing to risk Harry’s wrath, rather than be out in open ground. It was a case of fair enough on their part, because the explosions had gradually become more and more frequent, to the point where I was unwilling to risk myself being out here anymore.

  The Germans really must be coming soon.

  I found myself repeating the thought in my head, with no doubt in my mind anymore that the counter attack was inevitable. The explosions, which had started off as being one or two every thirty seconds, causing enough devastation themselves, had now intensified to two blasts every ten seconds or so, greatly slashing our odds of being the next ones to take a hit directly on top of us.

  I had met survivors of several bomb blasts, some of them now on sticks to accompany the wooden leg that replaced the fleshy one that had been ripped off. Each one of them had strongly recommended that I avoid being blown up if I could avoid it, something that each of them had found raucously funny when they made such a suggestion. It wasn’t so much the instant death that I was scared of, it was the possibility of still being alive in those few seconds in the air, giving me time to think about what my life could have been. If I was to die, I wanted it to be quick, none of this, “tell my wife I loved her” nonsense. I just wanted the whole saga to be done with.

  Harry looked across at me at just the right moment, “Time to go?” He screamed, a broad smile sweeping across his face.

  I didn’t have time to take in the stupid look on his face, or get annoyed at his joviality at such a situation, there was no time for anything apart from a hastily screamed, “Agreed!”

  This time Harry offered no resistance to my demands, no desire to help the injured that lay around at his feet, screaming.

  “Not my fight anymore!” I heard him yell above the din of mortars impacting with the ground, a nod towards what I had been told earlier, but something that I was more than happy to forget. He was right, it wasn’t his fight anymore, and it wasn’t mine either. I had to act more senior now, like an NCO should. Why couldn’t I adjust to the situation? I’d been here before.

  My mind darted to the possibility that everyone up at the RV would be on the move by now, as there wasn’t a single person left standing in the vicinity of the battery as we ran. I rattled through ideas on what to do if I did find myself without the support of the rest of the battalion. What would I do? Would Harry be with me? Would there be other stragglers at the RV point? And would I be in charge of those stragglers?

  I knew that our next objective was to take La Plein, and so I assumed that I would make my way there, double time, in the hope that I caught up with the rest of the battalion. I had no map though, no way of knowing if I was heading in the right direction or even if I was walking towards the front rank of the German counter attack. I hoped, almost to the point of driving myself hysterical, that there would be other stragglers with me, maybe one with a compass, or even better, a map.

  Suddenly, it was as if I felt that millions upon billions of tiny air particles that occupied the air, all converged in one area, giving me an immediate, excruciating pressure headache. The wind around me seemed to rush past me at several hundred miles an hour, strong enough to knock Nelson from his column and send him crashing to the ground.

  Nothing seemed to be going through my head at this point, all I could see was a completely black canvas, a white one, ready to be splashed with all the colours that an artist required. As the silence came to an end, the only thought that seemed to repeat through my mind was how much I wanted to kill the man that had fired the shot that was now flinging me through the air. My face felt like it was burning, not far from the feeling that you were to get if you shoved your head into an oven, half way through its attack on a nice roast chicken joint on a Sunday. Then, came the impact, as the earth seemed like it rose to meet me, at a similar speed to that which I was currently travelling at.

  I hit the ground with such a force that I felt every bone in my body cra
ck upon impact, one or two ribs feeling like they had completely snapped into several pieces. I felt my body crumple in a heap, and I didn’t seem to care about the unnatural position I found myself in, one arm bent up behind my back, with one knee twisted round in a way that it wasn’t meant to go.

  My hearing suddenly came back, as the bits of shrapnel and debris, that hadn’t embedded themselves into me, began to come back down to earth, much more gracefully than I had done a millisecond before. The slight hiss of the dirt falling to the ground was accompanied by the tinging of metal as well as the much heavier thumping of what I could only assume to be chunks of concrete. The blast not only blew itself in a whole manner of directions, taking a whole load of objects apart as a result, but the wind it generated created a sort of vortex, sucking anything nearby into it, before launching that around as well. It was entirely possible that the lumps of concrete had been as a result of one of our bombers dropping something much earlier on, only to be used against us now, as a fast flying, lethal projectile.

  I stayed perfectly still on my back, for as long as I dared, just letting the debris and rubbish float back to the earth. I didn’t want to move and then be struck on the back of my head by another falling piece of concrete, and I was in no position to run fast enough to get out of the way of the falling debris. It would only be a few seconds more, I thought, before I would be able to get up without the threat of another falling concrete block. But then again, it would be only a few seconds more before a German was looking down at the pathetic excuse of a human being that was disgracing the sole of his boot.

  I felt nothing, the adrenaline, that I could almost feel surging around my body, kept what pain I should be experiencing, right in the periphery. It was also helping to keep me calm, my breathing was incredibly docile and I felt almost as relaxed as if I was walking along the coast on a Sunday afternoon in England. It was then that I allowed my head to roll to one side, and it was then that I felt the adrenaline drain from my body, quicker than a sponge being forced through a clothes wringer.