by Thomas Wood
Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting crash, and the sound of metal on metal smashed through my eardrums, almost deafening me. Clarkey began to sob almost immediately, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see him! I must have nodded off!”
The shouts that shot up not just from the inside of the tank, but also outside, were frightening. Red sat wide-eyed, making his revolver ready to take as many of the enemy with him as he possibly could.
The angry shouts from outside grew louder and louder, to the point where I knew we would have to face the music. Whipping my headset off, and ensuring that none of my insignia would show, I hopped out of the turret, in the hope that none of the Germans would be shining a torch in my face and see that I was clearly a Brit.
The men obviously in charge of the road were absolutely fuming, this hold up quite easily could have cost them their cushy job of marshalling traffic in the middle of the night. To the men at the sides of the road, the real workhorses, the whole episode was raucously funny, and I watched as one or two of them, next to burning oil drums, were forced to take a seat for fear of passing out with the sheer hilarity of it all.
Two German soldiers up ahead, one of them gesticulating like an officer, were having a furious row, each one seemingly blaming the other for the cock up. A road from the left had appeared from nowhere and evidently, wanting to join the flow of traffic, the truck that was now stuck to the front of our tank, had tried to sneak himself in front of us, with disastrous consequences.
Something needed to be done, we couldn’t just sit here all night. We needed to be out of here, and fast.
“Clarkey, back her up a bit.”
As soon as the truck was away from the hull of our tank, I began screaming, adopting the same sort of tone that the officer out the front had been doing, waving my arms around as if there was an incredibly persistent wasp attacking my face.
My German was limited to a few words and phrases, one of them coming to me like I had long forgotten it.
“Ausweichen! Ausweichen! Dummkopf!”
As I screamed, I put on my best German accent possible, and hoped that the laughter and engines would mask the rest of my poor Germanic. To my amazement, the officer ahead seemed to begin shouting the same thing.
“Out the way! Out the way! Idiot!” He continued screaming at the corporal, until he was firmly in the cab of the truck and he began inching it out of the way. As soon as the blockage was cleared, Clarke needed no further instruction but to begin moving off, and he pushed the engine as hard as possible, trying to get us away from the whole sorry situation. I hoped that the Germans would just assume that we were eager to catch up with the rest of the column.
I tucked my body back inside the tank and not one of us breathed for the next five minutes, until we were able to deviate from the column, with no one seeing us. We pulled up on a lonely dirt track, that seemed to run straight through the middle of two adjoining fields and shut the engine down.
Clarke immediately began to cry silent tears as he vowed never to sit in the driver’s seat of a tank ever again, while Red and I began to laugh nervously and slap each other on the back.
We all hopped out and agreed that we wouldn’t move again until daylight, much preferring to run the risk of being identified in daylight than having a repeat of what had just happened. After Clarke had thrown up a little bit, and Red had finished laughing and repeating back to us the whole episode, we got our heads down, taking it in turns to keep watch.
I could only pray that tomorrow would be better than today.
9
“Sir…we’re low on fuel.” Excellent, that was all we needed right now. This tank was all that we had to keep our hopes alive of finding some friendlies, and without that, and her half inch of armour, we were as good as dead.
We were low on pretty much everything; we had no energy left, we’d not had a drink in well over twenty-four hours now and we were dangerously low on will to live. We were fast approaching the lowest point that a soldier can get.
“Okay Red, keep her going as long as possible. But keep half an eye out for somewhere to ditch her.”
It would be heart-breaking to have to leave her, especially leaving her somewhere where we weren’t quite sure where we were, with no chance of being able to come back and recover her. I hoped that we could find a quiet spot, somewhere so far out of the way that the Germans would never be able to pick her up and use her, so that she could have the retirement that she so desperately craved and deserved.
We hadn’t seen anyone in quite some hours now and so made no attempts at hiding who we were, my head and shoulders becoming a permanent fixture at the top of the turret. In a way, we all hoped that we were seen, even if it was by an enemy patrol, at least then we might get some food and water.
Clarke was asleep, in much the same position that Red had adopted the night before. I was beginning to worry about him, his nerves clearly weren’t up to it. He blamed himself for what had happened the night before, even though anyone of us could have been driving when a half-witted German corporal decided to send a truck straight in front of our path. He’d hardly said a word since the accident, and even then, it was only to announce that he needed to relieve himself or to apologise again for putting us through that ordeal.
He needed to pull himself together, or he would be left behind just like the rest of the regiment. The problem was, I didn’t have the energy or the motivation to force him to buck his ideas up and Red was too busy driving to notice. He would be all alone in this battle.
Up ahead, I noticed the steeple of a church and enthusiastically, I made for the maps that I had taken great delight in keeping throughout our travels. By the lie of the land, and the roads that I could make out all around us, I was able to pinpoint where we were for the first time in a couple of days.
We had just made our way back on to the map that we had been issued with, coming up from the bottom of the map in a northward direction. It may have meant that we had travelled in a circle at some point in our journey, but I was so overjoyed to know where we were that I didn’t really care.
Knowing where you are is something that you take for granted every day and the feeling of utter powerlessness and helplessness if you don’t know where you are for a prolonged period of time, is one that begins to grind you down and takes its toll on you in ways you wouldn’t believe.
“I know where we are boys!” I almost shouted, waking Clarke up with a start.
“That’s good,” said Red, the engines beginning to shut down now. “See that orchard to the right sir? I’m going in there to ditch her, hopefully the farmer won’t mind.”
Red shut the engine down as he had promised, before hopping out to leave with me and Clarke close behind him.
“How much fuel is left?” I was surprised at Clarke’s sudden interest in our situation and thought maybe, now that we knew where we were, he had managed to pull himself out of the state he had found himself in.
“Some. Not enough to chase us down though.” Red chuckled to himself, “Here’s as good a place as any to put her to bed.”
“Right then,” I said, taking control of the situation and the conversation, “we are here, which, last time I checked, was in British hands,” I began folding the map away again, before stuffing it inside my battledress.
“But a lot has changed since then…We were billeted about four miles down the road from here, just past that village there, when the tanks went in for maintenance about three months ago, remember it?”
I wasn’t surprised that Red couldn’t remember it, he’d spent almost every day of our time in the village of Airaines completely intoxicated, almost to the point where I was certain he wouldn’t be able to spell his own name.
“I reckon we should walk through these fields and orchards for three miles until we’re just outside the village, then wait till nightfall to recce the area, and see if we can find any friendlies. Thoughts?”
Either they had none, or they simply didn’t
have enough energy to disagree with me, as I was met with nothing apart from a couple of nods.
Our progress over the next few hours was slow, as we made our way along the perimeter of one field, taking care to stop and observe every few hundred yards or so. Listening for anything, ranging from a shout from an unimpressed farmer, to the faint squeal of tank tracks.
All in all, it took us nearly three hours to walk the three miles to the edge of the village, we were that careful, but also knackered. Spots had begun to appear in my vision and my headache had intensified, something that we had all shared as we staggered across the field. We were in desperate need of some water, even if it was only a sip each.
The main road into Airaines was on a slight slope downwards, the boundary of this side of the village marked out by a smattering of trees. We found ourselves in an irrigation ditch on one of the fields that bordered all four sides of this village. From here, we could look down into the town and make out a few of the local landmarks, without being seen. The main road sloped down, before splitting off in two directions, which marked the edge of the main square. In the main square were a mixture of shops and houses and formed the main bulk of where all the hustle and bustle was coming from.
To the left of the main drag was the church, Saint-Denis, with the tower rising high over the rest of the skyline and where a friendly local had volunteered to take supplies up to whoever was watchman there overnight.
I resisted the urge to thunder my way down there and bang on one of the houses that was sited just off to the right-hand side of the main green, being reunited with Madame Moreau who had welcomed me in and taken such good care of me during my brief stint in the village. I wondered for a moment if she was even still there.
I was pulled out of my latest meanderings by the sound of slurping to my left, whereupon I saw both Red and Clarke cupping their hands to the water that we were standing in and raising it to their desperate mouths. I knew the situation was desperate and that they would be wanting to drink pint after pint of it to quench their thirst, but I knew it would not be good water. Goodness knows how long it had been standing there for and before too long, they would be squatting in a bush somewhere, with it pouring out of their backend quicker than a machine gun can eject its rounds.
“Not too much boys. You’ll only regret it.” Having said that, I did the same, and the muddy, lumpy water actually tasted fantastic as it slid down my neck.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I declared after my third handful, resisting every urge just to take one more sip. “We’ll make it a priority to get some soon enough.”
We sat in silence once again, as we waited for the sun to dip beneath the horizon, anticipating the darkness once more. I found it amusing that the very darkness that had given rise to our closest shave yet, was the very same darkness that we were now praying for, as we tried to find some of our friends.
As darkness approached, we began to prepare ourselves. We ditched anything that was loose or that made a noise while we moved; we muddied our faces with the sodden dirt that lay at the bottom of the irrigation ditch and made sure that our revolvers had an even distribution of rounds.
The sun dipped below the horizon and we waited an hour or so more, really waiting for the blackness to take a hold on the village.
Moving along the field, adjacent to the main road, we slowly made progress towards the village, being careful not to bunch up too much, but also close enough so that we didn’t lose one another.
As we began to run out of field, we traversed over to the road itself, and began to walk very lightly, on our toes, to stop the solid sole of our boots from shouting out to the nearest sentry of our impending arrival. The village seemed to be totally unguarded, and as we made our way past the church, I hoped that the others were doing the same as me, shooting a quick prayer upwards that asked that we would soon find friendly faces in this neck of the woods.
We made our way to the middle of the village, where the square with the shops on began to open out onto a small green area, sporadically littered with benches and a water fountain at one end. From where we were, at the far end of the green, I could see a small fire, with a few men huddled around it, weapons slung across their backs, who in turn were surrounded by about five trucks. I couldn’t make out the type of uniform that they wore, or the weapons that they carried, and it had been so long since I had seen a British truck that I barely remembered what they looked like anymore.
I pulled out my binoculars that I had tucked down my undershirt and slowly pulled them up to my eyes. All I could see were slightly larger silhouettes of men, and the trucks were even harder to identify when they were magnified. To find out who these men were, we would need to get closer.
We edged towards them, down the cobbled street that led to the other end of the village. All of a sudden there was an almighty bang, and I waited for the inevitable pain that would accompany the sting of a sniper’s bullet. But nothing came.
Instead, I threw myself face down into the ground and I felt the two behind me do exactly the same. I rolled over to one side, to look up at the figure who had just pushed open the window shutters with such a force that I expected to see a German machine gun poking out at us, ready to catch us in an ambush.
But all I could see was a rather rotund woman, a red-faced one and I couldn’t make out if that was her natural skin colour or whether she was all worked up about something.
I soon got my answer as she began screeching towards the main square, met with laughter and jeering from the men around the fire.
“Get away from here! This is my home! …Germans took it before…think they can take it again!”
Her squawking meant that I was only able to catch snippets of what she had shouted, but it was more than enough to tell me what nationality the soldiers by the fire were. She finished her screaming with a flourish and I hoped with all my might that none of the Germans could speak any French as she added quite confidently:
“…trois soldats anglais ici et vous ne les avez pas vus!”
There are three English soldiers here and you haven’t even seen them!
I imagined that the Germans had got used to the heckling from the locals and that they didn’t even listen to the cries from incensed French wives, let alone bother to translate them.
I locked eyes with the woman and for some reason I felt compelled to offer her my thanks, even though she quite easily could have done far more harm to our cause than good.
After a few moments more of lying on the freezing cobbles, we began to make our dejected retreat back towards the irrigation ditch that had been our home for the previous few hours. It was there that we would reconvene our thoughts and decide what our next move should be.
“Well?” said Red, completely demoralised, “What now?”
“Well, I know where we are now,” I said, trying to appear more composed than I actually was, “so if we keep heading in a north-westerly direction, we should come to our frontline.
“Obviously we’ll have to skirt around this village first.”
There were nods of approval once again, but I knew we had to find the rest of the BEF, and pretty quickly, otherwise we would end up doing something out of sheer desperation that meant we’d all end up riddled with bullet holes.
We began the next leg of our trek in the darkness, using the fields as cover from the village as we made our way around it.
10
“I think we should stop soon,” quipped Alan, just as I took notice of the horizon beginning to burn an intense orange. He was probably right, we had been walking for most of the night, not really knowing which way would be safe anymore. As a result, we were becoming really exhausted, our pace having dropped so much in the last hour or so that we barely managed to cover three hundred yards.
“It’ll be broad daylight soon, we have to stop.” I agreed with what they were both saying, but I just couldn’t conjure up enough energy to acknowledge what they were proposing. From somewhere, an alien vo
ice responded, “Yeah, you’re right, we’ll get to that hedgerow over there and wait till sunset before we move again.”
I had felt tiredness before, I had been exhausted before, but I had never experienced the mental tiredness that I felt I was beginning to succumb to. Every time someone spoke, it would take me several minutes to register what they had said, the interim time between the speech and my response merely being a replay in my mind of what had just been suggested.
It felt like my brain was slowly giving up on me, made worse by the almost crippling thirst that I was sure all three of us were suffering. The spots of light in my eyes had grown to a point where I was finding it difficult to see, and all I was craving was another irrigation ditch to quench my thirst.
I didn’t vocalise any of my thoughts, but there was one that I tried to suppress more than the others; ‘How much longer would we be able to carry on like this?’
It led to the inevitable progression that, sooner or later, we would have to give ourselves up, for the sake of our lives and swallow our pride by going into the bag. Each time I suppressed it, I felt guilty, almost as if I thought the other two would want to give in, that they deserved it somehow, but I told myself that it was my dehydrated, exhausted brain playing tricks on me.
I headed up the trio, with Red behind me and Clarke bringing up the rear, when suddenly a cool, but heavily accented voice called out to us.
“You three, raise your hands. Stay where you are.” Instinctively and as if my tired mind wanted nothing more than to simply give up, I did what the voice told us to and I began to pivot on my heel. Red and Clarke had done the same as I had and were now being subjected to a disarmament by the short, stocky German soldier that had his pistol aimed in Red’s face.
