‘Dawson, Watson. Atten-shun! Quick march!’
Word of what had happened the previous evening had obviously reached the British encampment, and the sergeant who was now escorting the two sappers to the lieutenant in charge didn’t look at all happy with the situation. As the two men marched along, he muttered advice to them.
‘That Frog’s made an official complaint to the CO,’ he said, ‘and the lieutenant’s already talked to the other four soldiers who were there. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to see or hear anything. My advice is just play dumb, and pretend it was all normal.’
‘Thanks, Sarge,’ Dawson replied.
They halted outside the lieutenant’s tent and waited, standing at attention. After a few seconds, the officer emerged, wearing his cap and a serious expression, a sheet of paper in his hand.
‘Off caps!’
Watson and Dawson obediently removed their caps and stood waiting. Lieutenant Charnforth stopped in front of them, glanced at the paper he was carrying and then looked up at the two men.
‘A very serious complaint has been made against you two. A French officer has alleged that you both, but particularly you, Watson, were insubordinate and rude. That is bad enough, but he also states that when you left the Warndt Forest yesterday evening you tried to run him down with the truck, and deliberately drove into his staff car. What do you have to say to that?’ He stared expectantly at Watson.
The sapper looked puzzled, his face clouded. ‘I do remember seeing a French officer there, sir, just before we left. He asked what we were doing and we explained about clearing the mines. I don’t think we were rude to him, do you, Eddie?’
‘Eyes front! Don’t talk to Dawson,’ the sergeant snapped. ‘Talk to the officer.’
‘So you admit you spoke to this French officer?’
‘Oh, yes, sir, but neither of us was rude to him.’
Lieutenant Charnforth again looked at the paper he was holding. ‘The officer said you told him it was his problem if he didn’t like the tone of your voice. Do you remember saying anything like that?’
Watson again looked genuinely puzzled. Dawson repressed a smile.
‘No, sir, I don’t. Perhaps he simply misunderstood what we were saying. After all, he’s French and we were speaking English. But when we were talking to the officer, I do remember saying to Corporal Dawson that the mines were a problem, so perhaps that’s what he’s talking about.’
Charnforth stared at Watson for a few seconds. ‘Right, I accept that there could have been a misunderstanding – a few words misheard – but there’s no doubt about the damage done to the French staff car. I’ve seen it for myself. How do you account for that?’
‘That probably was my fault, sir. We were all in a hurry to get back here – we’d had a pretty horrible day out there – and I just started the lorry and drove off. I think I remember a bit of a crash as we went past that French officer’s car, but I didn’t think anything about it at the time. The ground was very rough, and I just thought the truck had gone over a bump, or something in the back had fallen over. If I did hit his car, I’m really sorry. It certainly wasn’t intentional.’
Lieutenant Charnforth looked from one man to the other, and prepared to accept the inevitable. The other four soldiers he’d already interviewed had all apparently been struck both deaf and blind during the incident in the forest, and had told him nothing. In the end, it was the evidence of six British soldiers against one French officer. And he was also well aware that the two sappers were the only people under his command who were capable of lifting the mines, so placing them under arrest wasn’t a viable option.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In the absence of any independent witnesses, there’s no way of resolving this matter. Just think yourselves lucky you’re not on a charge. But just let me say this. We’re supposed to be working with the French, not against them, so just be a lot more careful in your dealings with them in the future. Language can be a problem, but try to remember we are on the same side. And, Watson, just watch your driving. The front of that staff car was badly mangled, and it had to be towed away’. He paused. ‘On a totally different note, you both did a very good job yesterday in lifting those six mines. You’ll be going back to the same place today, and when you’ve finished this afternoon I want you to bring one of those mines back here. Make sure it’s safe, obviously, before you put it in the truck. We’ll need to get some experts to examine it and see exactly how it works. Anyway, well done, both of you. Shame there were so many casualties. Fortunes of war, I suppose.’ Charnforth glanced across at the senior NCO. ‘Right, Sergeant. Carry on.’
‘Yes, sir. On caps. Left turn. Quick march.’
The two sappers marched about twenty yards from Lieutenant Charnforth’s tent, then the sergeant halted them. ‘Right, lads, you heard the officer. Sort your stuff out and then get yourselves back into that forest. There’s still no word about the French sappers arriving, so it’s down to you two again. We’re sending Tommy Blake and another three squaddies with you, and this time let one of them do the driving. And if you see that French officer, Watson, try to keep out of his way. He’s gunning for you.’
‘Right, Sarge. We’ll get moving.’
Tommy Blake pulled the truck to a halt and switched off the engine. The six men climbed out of the vehicle and stood in silence for a few moments, just staring around them. The sunlight streaming through the trees bathed the clearing, giving it a calm and peaceful appearance that was wholly at odds with the lethal power of the weapons that they all knew lay concealed beneath its grassy surface.
As before, there were a few – a very few, perhaps only half a dozen in all – French soldiers there, sitting and talking in a group on the far side of the clearing. There was no sign of either of the officers who’d been there the previous day, and the French soldiers still looked somewhat lost and directionless.
‘OK, Dave,’ Dawson said. ‘We know what we’ve got to do. If you want, I’ll start with the detector.’
‘That’s fine with me.’
Watson picked up the hammer and stakes while Dawson swiftly assembled the mine detector. He checked it was working simply by putting on the headphones, switching on the unit and passing the head close to the hammer Watson was holding.
‘OK?’ Watson asked.
‘Yeah. Bloody good signal. Let’s get to it.’
The two sappers grabbed the rest of the equipment and headed off towards the safe lane they’d started marking out the previous day. Dawson already had the mine detector working and was carrying it loosely in his right hand as they stepped between the two lines of stakes and cord, but he’d barely taken a step inside when he suddenly stopped and raised his hand.
‘Stop! Stop!’ he shouted. ‘I’m getting something.’
‘What?’ Watson demanded, coming to an abrupt halt. ‘You can’t be. We’ve already cleared this area.’
Dawson shook his head. ‘No. I’m telling you I’ve got a strong signal right here. There’s something in the fucking ground right in front of me. Here,’ he added, ‘you listen.’ He took off the headphones but didn’t shift his feet an inch, just continued to move the head of the mine detector slowly over the point where he’d detected the object.
Watson slipped the headphones on and listened for a couple of seconds, then nodded. ‘Bugger me,’ he said. ‘You’re right, but this is right in the middle of the cleared area. There’s no bloody way I could have missed it yesterday.’
‘We’ll sort that out later,’ Dawson said shortly, carefully placing a red wooden cross over the spot on the ground. ‘For now, let’s just lift the bugger and make it safe. Over to you, Dave.’
Dawson stepped back, away from the marker, and retreated to the truck to watch. The two sappers now knew enough about the mines that neither of them felt the need to use the field telephone.
Watson knelt down to start the removal operation. He dug his bayonet into the ground about a foot from the red cross and slid it forwards to locate the object, but then he stopped and stared at what he’d found. He swivelled round and looked back towards the truck where Dawson was waiting.
‘Eddie,’ he called out. ‘You’d better come and take a look at this.’
‘What?’
‘Just bloody come here, will you?’
‘OK, OK,’ Dawson muttered, and walked across to his fellow sapper.
‘I just dug the blade in here,’ Watson said.
‘I know. I was watching you.’
‘And this is what I found,’ Watson finished, raising the blade of the bayonet.
The turf was cleanly cut underneath and lifted easily, and Watson dropped it behind him.
‘So what?’ Dawson remarked. ‘What did you want to show me?’
‘You’re missing the bloody point, Eddie. All I did was slide the bayonet into the ground. I didn’t cut away the turf because I didn’t need to. It was already cut. Some bastard’s dug here very recently.’
The two sappers stared at each other as realization suddenly dawned.
‘You mean somebody dug a hole since last night and put a mine in it? Some bloody Jerry soldier?’
Watson shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon there’s any fucking Germans within five miles of here. And if there were, they wouldn’t be buggering about planting mines. They’d be planning a full-on assault against the Frogs to drive them back across the border. No, this was some other bugger. Do me a favour, Eddie. Just go and check how many bloody mines there are in that ditch over there.’
Dawson walked back towards the truck, then crossed to the shallow ditch where they’d stored the mines they’d dug up the previous day. The count didn’t take long, and Dawson’s face was grim as he walked back over to Watson.
‘There’s one missing,’ he announced. ‘We lifted six, but there are only five there now.’
‘I bloody knew it. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Watson demanded.
‘Capitaine Marcel de St Véran?’
‘Got it in one. That bastard was here after we left last night – we know that – and we really pissed him off.’
‘Well, you fucking did. You shouldn’t have driven into his car,’ Dawson said.
‘Yeah, Eddie, but that was just a public argument that got a bit out of hand. This’ – he pointed at the ground where the red cross marked the location of what both men guessed was the sixth mine – ‘this is potential murder.’
Dawson shook his head. ‘I can’t bloody believe it.’
‘What? That that fucking Frog would try to kill us by planting a mine in an area we’ve already checked?’
‘Yeah. What a fucking extreme way to settle a score.’
Watson looked back at the ground. ‘We’d never prove it was him, you know.’
‘I know that. He’d just bloody deny it, same as we did over what happened out here last night. Fucking lucky I had the detector working when we walked over here, otherwise I’d probably have trodden on the bloody thing.’
Dawson walked back to the Morris truck and briefly explained to Tommy Blake what they’d found.
‘You think that Frog captain put it there?’ Blake demanded.
‘Seems most likely, yeah,’ Dawson replied. ‘Dave really hacked him off last night, and I think he decided to pay us back in the worst bloody way he could think of. And if the mine had gone off, he’d be fire-proof. Everybody would just assume we’d missed it when we did our first sweep. Nobody would’ve bothered counting the mines we’d already lifted.’
Dawson turned back to see Watson walking over towards him, the mine held firmly in his left hand, the trigger pointed away from his body.
‘Really fucking easy to get out,’ Watson said. ‘The others were a struggle, but this one popped right out, as if it had only been put there yesterday, which it bloody had been, of course.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Blake asked, as Dawson slid a bolt through the hole in the trigger assembly to make the mine safe again.
‘Right now,’ Watson said, ‘I don’t bloody know. We can’t accuse the Frenchie of doing it, because we’ve got no witnesses and no proof. And he’s an officer and an aristocrat and we’re just a couple of ignorant bloody squaddies. If we said anything, everybody would just think we were trying to get our own back on him. Probably best to just ignore it.’
‘Bugger that,’ Blake muttered. ‘If it was me, I’d find a time when he was by himself somewhere and I’d ventilate him with a round from my Lee-Enfield. If anyone found out, I’d say it was an accidental discharge.’
‘Too quick, mate,’ Dawson snapped. ‘A knife in the guts. That’d be my choice for him.’
Standing beside him, Watson nodded. ‘I’ll get rid of this,’ he said, gesturing at the mine in his hand. ‘I’ll put it back in the ditch with the other buggers for the moment, but we should take all of them back to camp when we leave, just to make sure this can’t happen again.’
‘Good idea, Dave. And Tommy’ – Dawson turned back to look at Blake – ‘if St Véran shows up here again, keep your eye on him, and keep your bloody rifle handy – and loaded – just in case the bastard tries anything else.’
As soon as Watson had replaced the mine in the ditch, the two sappers walked back over to the cleared lane.
But before they started walking down it, Dawson switched on the mine detector and carried out a full sweep of the entire width, as if it was new ground, just in case, but didn’t find anything.