Ten

 

The young lieutenant in command of the armoured car was watching the cutting as instructed when he saw the surface of the road climbing out of the valley beyond it suddenly explode. The earth shook and, at the same moment, a great flare of flame gouted from the rocks on either side of the cutting, and boulders leapt into the air to crash down and form a solid barrier that effectively jammed the narrow opening in the ridge. More explosions followed and tons of earth slid after them. Between the lieutenant and the rest of the column there was now a high barricade of stones and soil, and beyond it a deep trench had been blown in the road, across which he knew neither he nor anyone else would ever get anything less manoeuvrable than a tank. He was in trouble.

‘For God’s sake,’ he screamed. ‘Open fire!’

‘What at?’ the machine-gunner alongside him yelled. At that moment they saw a streak of smoke heading towards them, and in their last second of life they heard a thump on the bonnet of the armoured car. The explosion flung it to the side of the road as a heap of twisted metal and molten glass, its crew hurled from it like rag dolls. Only one man survived and he lay trapped and screaming as the flames edged closer.

As the rest of the advance group ducked their heads to avoid the falling debris, a blast of fire from what seemed hundreds of weapons started from the trees and shrubs along the ridge, the bullets striking sparks from the road and the rocks where they crouched and whining off into the distance. Another bazooka rocket finished off the troop carrier and a corporal, trying heroically to drag a Spandau into position, was lashed by the fire before he could set it up. A second man running to his assistance was lifted off his feet by another burst, and when a third man was killed the sergeant sensibly called a halt and they lay with their heads down, scrabbling with fingers in the earth behind every scrap of cover they could find.

‘Leave it,’ the sergeant yelled. ‘Leave it!’

Then, as the fire from the ridge suddenly lessened, he realized it had changed direction and that the weapons were firing into the valley beyond the blocked cutting. As he be-came aware of the volume of sound from the other side of the ridge, his jaw dropped and he realised that, despite what had happened, he and what was left of his men were probably luckier than they knew.

 

The first shot into the valley was a shell from de Frager’s anti-tank gun positioned above the blocked cutting, and a puff of dust erupted in the meadow just beyond the first tank as it began to draw back from the shattered strip of road. Behind the tank, the following vehicles, also brought to a sudden stop, had crashed into each other all the way down the column, and up on the ridge the Frenchmen could hear the shouts and yells of fury and fear.

Then the anti-tank gun fired again and there was more dust.

‘For God’s sake,’ Urquhart snapped, as if he could be heard at the top of the hill. ‘Raise the bloody sights!’

As the tank began to back away, the Germans were already jumping in dozens from the lorries and scrambling behind them for shelter. Their automatic weapons started to chatter, but they had no idea where the shells had come from and their firing was wild and largely directed across the open fields on their right towards the line of trees lining the crest. There was a thump as de Frager got the tank at last, and a column of oily smoke lifted into the sky to drift away in the breeze. The explosion had torn off the port track and the tank had slewed round and started to burn. The driver, his clothes on fire, fell out on to the road and was dragged to shelter by a group of soldiers who were frantically covering him with coats to put out the flames. The second tank, also trying desperately to back away, crashed into a civilian car just behind that was full of infantrymen, crushing it so that the screams of the injured men were added to the din.

‘Get that gun firing!’Von Hoelcke was standing by the side of his blazing tank, trying to direct the fire of the second tank.

‘They’re up by the cutting! For God’s sake, bring that damned gun to bear!’

Urquhart was still watching with narrowed eyes. Apart from de Frager’s shells and the shooting of the Germans, still no one had fired. Reinach looked at him eagerly.

‘Wait!’ Urquhart was gesturing with the flat of his hand. ‘Wait!’

De Frager’s gun fired again and was answered immediately by the whiplash of high velocity shells, but even now the Germans had not managed to pinpoint de Frager’s gun. The rattle of Spandaus was answered by the ripple of Brens from the ridge, the sound pouring down the valley in waves. Spent bullets sent leaves drifting down, and from near the tank they could hear someone screaming orders. Then Urquhart nodded at last and pointed, and Lionel Dring’s gun banged. A lorry went up in flames as it tried to pull out and turn, so that its blazing shape blocked the road. As he fired again, a second lorry followed, and square-helmeted men ran for shelter, heads down, their equipment bobbing at their hips. A wounded soldier was dragged away, his bare head lolling back, his arm round another man’s neck.

Ducking down the road to the second tank, whose commander was still uncertain of the direction of the firing and was busy demolishing the rocks near the cutting, von Hoelcke started pointing wildly to the escarpment on their left. As the Spandaus started to shred the trees, Urquhart heard someone yelp. Glancing round, he saw Yvon Guélis being dragged away, blood across his face and chest. Dr Mouillet bent over him and, in a fragment of time, Urquhart saw Ernestine’s jaw drop and Marie-Claude’s face bleak and white with shock.

Turning back towards the fight below him, he squatted behind his Bren, his back still against the stump of tree. A German, his arm limp at his side, began to stumble back instinctively towards the shelter of Néry. Other men, trying to get away from the flying splinters of metal and stone, began to follow. Among them were the crew of von Hoelcke’s tank, shouting and gesticulating angrily. A few more men, less shaken by the shock of the attack, were underneath their vehicles, pointing towards de Frager’s position and the hill at the top of the meadow on the other side of the road, where it might be possible to circle round among the trees along the ridge to the cutting.

Frobinius was yelling to the commander of the second tank. ‘Off the road,’ he shouted. ‘Get up there? Get those bastards with the gun!’

The tank driver reversed his starboard track and the blunt nose swung. The gun was still pointing to the cutting, still firing as the tank lurched into the fence and edged off the road. In front of it, the land fell away into the shallow dip filled with undergrowth, brambles, nettles and bright green grass, and as the tank’s nose dropped, the gun seemed to whip as it dipped with it. Then, as the tank moved into the hollow, dragging the fence with it, its tracks began to throw up watery mud and, before its crew knew what had happened, its bogeys were hub deep in thick black slime. The commander’s head appeared.

As it jerked into reverse, Urquhart sat up. ‘Now,’ he said and, lifting a Very pistol, fired a signal cartridge across the valley. As the red light burst, he swung the Bren in front of him, lined up on the tank and pulled the trigger. The tank commander, his head up, instinctively watching the flare, slid out of sight inside the turret. Then, as Urquhart’s gun fired again, the whole escarpment above the road burst into flame.

 

From his position further down the hill, Neville saw everything with shocked eyes as if it were magnified, its colours multiplied and doubly gaudy. Just below him, a lorry slewed sideways to a halt and a man jumped out and started to run. Three more men followed, and he recognised the last one as Hössenfelder, the dumpy Westphalian who had appeared at the farm to help, the little man whose love of the soil had driven him to work even for the French.

Gaudin’s elder son, taut and bitter since the murder of his brother, lifted his rifle. As Neville turned to stop him, Urquhart’s warning came back to him and he choked on the words in his throat. As the rifle cracked, Hössenfelder’s running feet grew slower and his body leaned further and further forward before he finally went down, his body sliding along the surface of the road. As he came to a stop, he rolled over, and Neville could see tar, melted in the hot sun, smearing his face.

Caught in the flank behind their vehicles where they’d been sheltering from the firing from the cutting, men went over like shot rabbits. The tank in the dip was swinging wildly now, its tracks having difficulty gripping the sticky mud formed by the diverted spring and the leaking dam on the slopes above. Then Dring’s gun fired again and the tank caught fire. The hatches opened and the crew began to scramble clear. The first man out reached down to where another man was pushing up the body of the commander, but a Bren burst caught him across the waist and he fell headfirst into the turret. As the flames took hold, an incandescent flare shot upwards from the hatch, and someone inside started screaming.

At the back of the column, down in the valley, a command car driven by a cypher clerk from St Seigneur was trying desperately to turn on the narrow road to head back to the safety of Néry. As the driver fought with the wheel, a lorry-mounted machine-gun behind him began to fire at figures running among the trees on the higher ground alongside. One of them fell but was snatched up and dragged out of sight; then an explosion behind them sent the high bank of the road toppling down across the road and on to the bonnet of the car.

‘Get rid of it,’ the lieutenant in command of the group screamed, but as his men jumped from their lorries with shovels and began to tear at the loose earth, a series of cracks made them look up. Greyish smoke was drifting away between the trees and half a dozen tall firs were teetering across the blue skyline above them. As they ran for safety, the trees crashed down across the road in a cloud of dust and flying twigs, the last one falling across the trapped car to pin the driver in his seat with a broken spine. As men ran towards him, machine-guns started firing from the trees and a phosphorous grenade landed among them. Car, driver, rescuers and all disappeared in a cloud of white smoke and stabbing flame.

On the Néry side of the fallen trees, the drivers of the vehicles crowding up from the village were also trying to turn to escape from the firing higher up the valley. One or two broke clear and were already pushing their way back to the village alongside the jammed column. But as they reached the first of the houses, they found themselves facing the last of the vehicles leaving the Chemin de Ste Reine. Two of them collided and blocked the road and the whole lot became hopelessly jammed near the burning barn where the smoke drifted thick and golden across the glaring sunshine.

‘They’ve closed the road!’ The yell was taken up on all sides. ‘Turn round!’

In the narrow streets, however, it was impossible to change direction. A man, frightened and drunk on brandy looted in Rolandpoint, kicked in the door of the nearest house and, snatching up a burning plank from the blazing barn, tossed it inside. One of Frobinius’ men, cut off from his group after the retreat from the Chemin de Ste Reine, caught the spirit of the thing at once. This was the sort of occasion when he knew exactly what to do.

‘Burn them out,’ he roared. ‘Burn out the French filth!’

Bursting open the next house, he flung in an opened jerry-can of petrol and hurled a grenade after it. The crash of the explosion and the whoof of the petrol going up blew out the windows and flapped the shutters, and smoke poured out in a thick cloud. Another drunken man ran into the church and sprinkled petrol among the pews. Yet another let fly with his Schmeisser at the altar, and the intricate carved and painted figurines leapt and toppled, wooden heads and arms flying through the air. The great metal pipe from the stove, running across the church like the bowels of a submarine, collapsed in a cloud of rust and soot. Then the Henri IV window fell out and flames began to rise as still more German soldiers dragged benches forward to feed the blaze.

The door of Mère Ledoux’s bar was smashed down and when they found no drink, the Germans fired at the shelves, and glasses and bottles leapt into the air. A moment later, flames started there, too. Reinach’s home followed, then Balmaceda’s studio, the Gaudin farmhouse, and Dréo’s smithy where the work of destruction was made easier by the embers still glowing in the forge.

It was only when half the village was alight that it dawned on the infuriated Germans that they were endangering their own escape. The smoke and flames had been caught by the breeze and were roaring across the street. With the Americans pushing into St Seigneur and the routes from the south jammed by troops fighting to get north, there was now only one way out of Néry and that was to the north-east.

Already groups of men, abandoning their vehicles, were drifting on foot up the Rue des Roches and the Chemin de Ste Reine. Indifferent to the shambles which had started in the Fond St Amarin, their only concern was to get through to the Mary-les-Rivières road beyond and on to Belfort. Not many of them did.

 

By this time, the third tank had been stopped by Yves Rapin’s bazooka and the column was becoming a tangle of burning vehicles. Since the attackers were thirty feet above their heads and overlooking them, it was almost impossible to bring the 88s to bear. An attempt was made, only to be defeated by the mortar fire coming over the trees. The bombs dropped among the lorries, killing men, tearing away limbs, and smashing more vehicles.

The commander of the fourth tank tried to bring his gun round but a fresh shower of grenades came down from the cliff. Several of them burst against the turret and one went straight into the open hatch. The thump of the explosion was followed by silence. The crew of the third tank had already abandoned their disabled vehicle and run for shelter.

Lorries were still trying to turn off the road, and one or two of the smaller ones had swung into the dip alongside in the hope of reversing direction there. But the dip had become a bog and not one of them managed it. Only one small tracked vehicle managed to reach a ridge of stones built as a cattle crossing, but it was promptly hit by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire and stopped, burning furiously, to block up the only escape route.

Alongside Urquhart, Sergeant Dréo was hammering with the old mitrailleuse, his bullets punching holes in the sides of vehicles and dropping men. Guardian Moch, still wearing his ‘Anthony Eden’ hat, was shooting as if he’d lived all his life as a huntsman. Dring and Ernouf, in shirt sleeves, were handling their long rifles expertly as they talked and smoked, while Stens and Brens rattled from the shattered cutting where a wildly excited Patrice de Frager was hopping about between the rocks and trees, shouting orders. A group of hated Miliciens in their distinctive uniforms became a sitting target, and automatic weapons opened up on the struggling mass as they tumbled from their trucks. The frenzy was infectious; cheering started and a few heads popped up.

‘Get down,’ Urquhart yelled furiously. ‘Get down, you stupid bastards!’

No one could hear him above the din, and a boy in a group of excited youngsters running wildly along the lip of the escarpment was seen and caught by a machine-gun burst from the road. He was lifted off his feet and flung down in front of his girlfriend, his head almost torn from his shoulders. Another boy, his eyes glassy with the shock of battle, stared at the body then stood up, a grenade in his fist.

‘For Christ’s sake, Reinach!’ Urquhart stormed, infuriated by the blind courage the French boys were showing. ‘Tell them to cut out the heroics!’

But he was too late and the boy was hit in the legs. Spinning round, he fell across a bush, which slowly sagged and deposited him in the grass, watched by the girl who was still frozen into immobility with horror.

One of his friends began to crawl towards him but suddenly he stopped yelling and, rolling with difficulty on to his face, his trousers shining with the blood pouring from his thighs, reached for the grenade. His hand scrabbled weakly about in the grass before he managed to clutch it. Then he began to crawl forward again, his face torn by the bush and ghastly with his agony. At the edge of the escarpment he forced himself to his knees and wrenched at the pin of the grenade. It landed under the petrol tank of a lorry which went up like a bomb.

‘Got the bastard,’ he sobbed, and fell back in the grass writhing with pain. ‘Merde,’ he moaned as he was carried away to safety. ‘My legs! Oh, God, how they hurt!’

Close by the burning lorry, a troop of horses pulling a gun and terrified by the flames and the explosion, began to rear and plunge in a confusion of twisted leathers and shouting men. The gun swung across the road, its wheels caught in the rusty barbed wire that edged the tarmacadam. Urquhart jabbed at Sergeant Dréo and yelled in his ear. The flash of eyes in response showed all the bottled-up hatred of four years. The old machine-gun swung and one after the other the horses dropped, their heavy legs threshing in the roadway, their bodies effectively forming a barrier against either advance or escape. Dréo went on firing until the last of them was still.

Below them, Frobinius was screaming at the naval lieutenant who, now that Fregattenkapitän von Hasbach was incarcerated in the cellar of the Château de Frager with Klemens and General Dannhüber, had taken over command of what he had cheerfully called the Marine Cavalry. He was not so cheerful now because Frobinius was pointing at the silent trees at the top of the sloping meadow at the right-hand side of the road beyond the dip.

‘Get up there,’ he was yelling. ‘Horses can cross that mud. Get up the field and among those trees. Get on to the ridge and come round behind the bastards!’

The lieutenant didn’t think much of the idea but he was willing enough. Having been a sailor until a few weeks before, he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he should do and his men were equally in the dark. Cavalry charges, he knew, were usually delivered with a sword or a lance and the sheer momentum of the swiftly-moving weight of a hundred or more horses. He had no idea how to deliver a charge with rifles, but he drew his pistol and tried. He got his men into some sort of order in the smoke, his unskilful sailors wrenching at their nervous mounts. Then, as he waved his arm, they began to form into a ragged line and plough through the brambles and undergrowth in the bog, avoiding the disabled tank and the burning scout car.

As they moved clear of the undergrowth, the firing from the cliff caught them. A horse screamed and went down, shot through the spine, its rider leaping clear as the agonised animal tried to drag itself away, trailing its hindquarters. More horses fell and riders toppled from the saddle. Then mortar bombs began to land among them, and they opened out, leaving three animals struggling on the grass and a man climbing to his feet and limping away. They kept going, however, and from the top of the escarpment Reinach stared across the valley. ‘It’s up to Verdy de Clary now,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope he can wait.’

Urquhart’s eyes narrowed. ‘He’ll wait,’ he said with the confidence of a soldier in the durability of army training.

The horsemen were halfway up the slope when the whole line of the trees where Verdy de Clary waited burst into flame. More horses went down and the whole line lost cohesion. In a moment there were a couple of dozen dead and dying animals scattered across the grass, their riders running back to the road, and more horses galloping away with empty saddles.

The sailors struggled back. One of them had been kicked in the chest by a wounded animal. As he was helped to shelter he was breathing agonisedly in terrible snoring whispers, choking on his own blood under his shattered ribs. Several of the riderless horses trotted back with them, mingling with the lorries and scattering men in their panic until the machine-guns brought them down.

Furious and sickened by the butchery, the lieutenant limped to the shelter of a wrecked tank. ‘Whose damned silly idea was that?’ he snarled.