A little after nine the following morning, Dawson and Watson climbed into the back of one of the Morris lorries and sat down opposite each other on the wooden bench seats that ran along either side. Four other soldiers jumped up after them and sat down.
Between them lay half a dozen dark-green ammunition boxes filled with packets of RDX plastic explosive. In another box were a couple of dozen detonators, little more than slightly modified blasting caps, and in an open wooden crate several rolls of cable and a couple of hand-cranked generators that would produce the electric current needed to fire the detonators. Beside them lay a smaller wooden case marked ‘fragile’ and secured by two metal clasps. Inside that was a mine detector – a flat plate that would be attached to a wooden handle and powered by a battery – together with its various cables and headset. Two slightly modified Tele Set Mark V field telephones in their metal cases, a couple of spades, three hammers, pliers of various sizes, fifty or so wooden posts, flags, warning signs, small red-painted wooden crosses, and balls of white tape to mark out areas cleared of mines completed the outfit.
A few seconds later the truck engine started, and the vehicle lurched forward, the driver swinging it in a wide circle to clear the other lorries, and bounced over the rutted field towards the road. The men in the back clung on, then relaxed slightly as the truck reached the tarmac surface.
‘I knew I shouldn’t have bloody volunteered, Eddie,’ Dave Watson said.
Dawson smiled, though Watson’s view wasn’t dissimilar to his own. ‘But look on the bright side,’ he said. ‘At least all we have to worry about is finding and destroying a few mines. With any luck the Germans won’t be shooting at us as well.’
It wasn’t a long drive. Less than half an hour after the Morris lorry had driven away from the British army camp, the vehicle left the road and began making its way down a track, the driver reducing his speed considerably. And a few minutes after that he pulled the lorry to a stop and switched off the engine. One of the soldiers dropped the tailboard, and they all climbed down.
Dawson looked around. The area seemed to be almost deserted, with just a small number of French soldiers standing in a group at the edge of the large clearing where the Morris had stopped.
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ he asked the driver.
The soldier gestured in front of the truck, where a barrier had been placed across the track, bearing a round sign with the word ‘Halt’ printed on it. ‘This is definitely as far as we could go, mate,’ he said.
‘This is a bit odd,’ Dawson muttered to Watson. ‘I wonder why those Frenchies are just standing about.’
As he spoke, two French officers appeared from a track that snaked into the forest and walked towards them.
The British soldiers saluted as they approached. The officers returned their salute and then one fired a sentence at them in high-speed French.
Dawson shook his head. ‘We do not speak French, sir,’ he said, enunciating each word slowly and carefully.
The French-speaking soldier who’d accompanied the two sappers – a lance-corporal named Tommy Blake – stepped forward and spoke to them, somewhat haltingly. The exchange continued for a minute or so, almost every word meaningless to Dawson, though he guessed that the repeated words mine terrestre and mine dormante probably meant landmines and unexploded mines.
Finally, Blake turned to Dawson and Watson. ‘It seems clear enough. The French have already lost a couple of men – one killed, the other badly injured – as they started to advance through the forest. It looks as if the Germans mined that bit over there’ – he pointed to the east of where they were standing – ‘because that’s the obvious route for an invading force to use. The slopes on either side of it are pretty steep and covered in trees, so it’d be difficult to move trucks or tanks along them.’
‘That’s why the French troops aren’t doing a lot,’ Watson commented. ‘There’s no point in them digging in if they’re going to keep advancing, but they can’t actually do that until the mines are cleared. That does make sense.’
‘Right. So what do they want us to do?’ Dawson demanded.
‘They’d like you to start clearing a track through the centre of the forest, wide enough for a truck to get through. That’ll save the French forces from having to go around the perimeter of the woodland.’
‘Starting from where?’ Watson asked.
‘At the edge of this clearing, just over there.’ Again the soldier pointed.
‘Right, Dave,’ Dawson muttered. ‘Best we get going then. Do you want to start with the detector?’
‘Might as well.’
The two sappers removed their webbing and battledress tops – for what they were going to do, they needed to be as unencumbered as possible – and retained only their bayonets. The two French officers and the British soldiers stood in a half-circle and watched while Watson opened the wooden box, removed the components of the electric mine detector and began assembling it. Meanwhile, Dawson grabbed one of the shovels, a hammer and a handful of the wooden stakes and walked over towards the point that the French officers had indicated. A post had been driven into the ground bearing a skull and crossbones symbol and the written words ‘Danger – mines terrestres’.
He saw immediately where at least one of the mines had been positioned. Just to one side of the track, perhaps twenty feet beyond the warning sign, was a small hole in the ground and a large red stain that showed where the French soldier unfortunate enough to have stepped on the weapon had fallen.
Dawson stopped about twenty yards away and studied the area carefully. He was looking for any signs that the ground had been disturbed, but there was nothing immediately obvious. The probability was that the mines had been placed some months ago, maybe even longer, and the undergrowth had by now completely obscured their positions. There were several small glistening fragments scattered around, and he bent down and picked up a few of them. They were ball bearings – the shrapnel from the mine – together with a few small shards of steel that Dawson guessed had probably come from the casing of the mine itself.
He turned his attention to the site of the explosion, staring at the area directly around the hole. Something about it bothered him, quite apart from the fact that a man had either died or been seriously injured there, but it took a few seconds before he realized what it was.
All the mines Dawson had worked on before had been designed to explode on contact, the force of the detonation erupting from the ground and creating a funnel-shaped blast wave centred on the weapon. But what he was looking at seemed to be very different. The foliage had been shredded and torn at about waist-height, with almost no damage above or below that level, and he had no idea what kind of mine could have caused that pattern of destruction.
It was obvious he’d have to wait for Dave Watson before he could get any closer. They’d need to scan the area using the mine detector, because there was no other way of telling where the minefield actually began, or how wide it was. The French soldier who’d triggered the weapon might have walked past a dozen of them before the weight of his foot caused that first mine to detonate, so there was no way Dawson was going to take even a single step forward.
Watson walked up beside him and stopped.
Dawson glanced back to see the soldiers and the French officers waiting some distance away, now using the Morris truck as a shield. ‘That’s the first one, Dave,’ he said, pointing. ‘That bugger caught one of the French soldiers – you can see the blood on the ground near the hole. And look at where the blast hit the trees and bushes.’
Watson peered at the shredded undergrowth for a few seconds. ‘Christ, yes. Looks like it exploded about three feet off the ground. What the hell kind of mine could do that?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Dawson said, and opened his hand to show Watson the ball bearings he’d picked up nearby. ‘This looks to me like pretty standard anti-personnel shrapnel to me, but that explosive pattern is new. Do you suppose the mine was fired into the air first, then detonated?’
‘A kind of air-burst, then,’ Watson mused. ‘Mines are nasty bastards anyway, but that’s a bloody devious twist. Typical of the fucking Jerries.’
He paused and looked at the woodland around them, deceptively peaceful in the early morning, the sunlight streaming through the trees that fringed the clearing, and transforming the grass into a bright emerald carpet.
‘Right, then. We’re doing bugger-all standing here looking around. Let’s get started. Where’s the safe zone? Is there one?’
Dawson shook his head and pointed at the warning sign the French had erected. ‘It looks to me as if once that mine went off, they just dragged the body away, knocked that sign together and stuck it in the ground. Bloody lucky they didn’t hammer it down on top of another mine.’
‘So they didn’t do any sort of clearance or checking?’
‘Not that I can see, no. There are no tapes or stakes anywhere.’
‘Well, at least that means we don’t have to check that they’ve done it right.’
Watson put the headphones of the mine detector around his neck. He checked all the connections, then switched on the unit. He placed his bayonet on the ground, ran the head of the detector over it, and nodded when he got a good strong signal from the unit.
‘I’ll start right here,’ he said. ‘That’ll establish a base line and then we can move forward.’
‘Got that,’ Dawson replied. ‘I’ll mark it both sides.’
Watson nodded, and pulled the headphones up to cover his ears. He moved the detector slowly from left to right and back again as he walked to the right-hand side of the track leading through the forest.
‘That’s far enough, Dave,’ Dawson said, raising his voice so that Watson would hear him through the earphones.
The other man nodded and waited while Dawson took a wooden stake and hammered it home close to where he was standing. Dawson attached a length of white tape to the stake and let it dangle on the ground. That established the right-hand side of the cleared lane they would drive through the woodland.
Watson continued scanning the ground as he walked back to a position on the left-hand side of the track, where Dawson repeated the process with another stake. Those two stakes formed the base line, and would give them a distinct starting-point for the remainder of the cleared lane.
Watson waited for Dawson to attach the tape, then started covering the ground towards the wood along the left-hand side of the track. He checked about six feet, then nodded to Dawson, who drove in another stake and tied the tape around it. Then Watson crossed to the opposite side of the track, checking the ground all the way, and again Dawson drove home a stake.
The two men quickly established a routine, and within half an hour they’d extended the cleared lane to a length of about fifty yards, and Watson hadn’t detected a single mine. But all that meant, of course, was that the Germans had buried them further into the woodland, because there was no doubt they were there.
‘Your turn,’ Watson said, pulling off the headphones at the right-hand side of the lane.
‘Right.’ Dawson took the mine detector, checked that it was still switched on, then settled the headphones comfortably over his ears. He stepped forward, swinging the instrument left and right, but taking care to keep the sensitive head – the flat plate – parallel with the ground and only a couple of inches above it. That was essential to give the coils embedded in the head the best possible chance of detecting any metallic objects buried in the ground.
The first two passes he made across the lane were negative, the detector registering nothing at all. But half-way across the track on his third pass, as he swung the instrument to his left, the noise in his earphones suddenly increased dramatically and he stopped immediately.
‘Dave,’ he called out, ‘I’ve got something here.’