‘We need to establish the pattern,’ Dawson said, ‘so let’s start by marking the spot where we pulled that one out.’
He took a small wooden stake and hammered it into the ground a few inches from the hole Watson had dug to remove the weapon, then retreated a few yards as his colleague donned the headphones and switched on the mine detector.
‘I’m continuing the sweep you started,’ Watson said, and began walking slowly, moving the head of the instrument over the ground, as he worked his way from one side of the track to the other.
He’d only covered about ten feet when he stopped abruptly. He moved the detector very slowly over a spot directly in front of him, then changed position slightly and repeated the process.
‘I think that’s another one,’ he said, raising his voice. Mirroring Dawson’s previous actions, he noted the spot where the signal from the buried object was strongest, and placed a red cross over that exact location.
Dawson prepared to remove the second mine and make it safe, while Watson walked back over to the Morris truck to observe and make notes. Knowing the type of weapon they were dealing with made the task of extracting it a lot quicker. Once he’d established exactly where the trigger was located, Dawson was able to dig down in a circle around it, and within five minutes he’d removed the mine, inserted a bolt through the hole in the metal plunger and placed the weapon beside the first one in the ditch.
Watson drove another stake into the earth to mark the original position of the mine, and then resumed his clearance procedure.
It quickly became a routine and, within about an hour, Dawson and Watson had found and removed a further four mines, which they stored in the ditch with the first two. The cleared lane was now marked with half a dozen wooden stakes and white tape, and studded with other stakes that showed where the mines had been positioned. By then, the soldiers who’d accompanied them had brewed some tea, and the two sappers stopped working and sat down at the back of the lorry for a drink and a smoke.
‘I can see the pattern now, Dave,’ Dawson said, lighting another cigarette. ‘They’ve laid them in groups of three, starting more or less on the right-hand side of the track and then angling across to the opposite side. Then they moved about twenty feet forward and repeated the line, this time from left to right, so it’s a kind of open zig-zag that covers the whole of the track through the forest. You’d have to be bloody lucky not to step on one of them if you were walking through here. Any sizeable force would be cut to pieces.’
‘Yeah,’ Watson agreed, ‘and, now we know how they were positioned, it should be a lot quicker to find the rest of them.’
‘As long as the Jerries stuck to the same pattern, yes. If I was laying a minefield, I think I’d alternate them a bit, just to keep the enemy sappers on their toes.’
Watson looked at him. ‘Thanks for that, you cheerful sod. But you’re right – we mustn’t make any assumptions. We’ll take it slowly and carefully, and check everything.’
Dawson looked at the area they’d cleared so far, which looked pathetically small compared to the acres of forest that surrounded them.
‘Just looking at that,’ he said, ‘and bearing in mind there are exactly two of us here, I reckon it’ll take months to clear a path all the way through. And that’s assuming that the bloody mine detector keeps on working.’
‘Don’t forget what that lieutenant said. The French are supposed to be sending some of their own sappers out here to help us.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it. When I –’
At that moment there was a loud bang from somewhere well over to the right of the safety lane, almost at the edge of the clearing. Watson and Dawson spun round to look, and saw a sight that both of them knew instantly would stay with them for ever.
About seventy yards away, a French soldier had wandered towards the undergrowth, perhaps looking simply for a place to have a crap, and had clearly stepped on one of the buried mines.
As the sappers – and everyone else in the clearing – watched, a black object shot out of the ground from just behind the soldier, reached about level with his waist and almost immediately exploded, the sound an echoing blast that dwarfed the first explosion.