Just under an hour later, Dawson and Watson were on the move again. The sixth member of the German patrol had fallen victim to Watson’s MP 40 at almost the same moment as Dawson had used his machine-pistol on the soldier on the opposite side of the copse, which accounted for the last member of the six-man patrol.
And now the two men were much better equipped. They’d stripped the bodies of all the ammunition they had been carrying, and Watson had appropriated another Mauser K98k carbine, so each man was now armed with both a rifle and a machine-pistol, plus several stick grenades. And when Dawson had examined the body of the NCO in charge of the patrol, as well as his Schmeisser the man had also been carrying a Walther P-38 semi-automatic pistol in a belt holster, with a couple of spare magazines. Dawson took the lot, and slipped the holster onto his own belt. The Walther fired the same nine-millimetre Parabellum rounds as the Schmeisser.
They’d also dumped their eighteen-inch Lee-Enfield bayonets, which wouldn’t fit on the German rifles, and had each taken a Mauser bayonet and scabbard from the corpses. And Dawson had picked up a trench knife – a short-bladed single-edged weapon that was fitted into a boot scabbard and issued to Wehrmacht infantry soldiers.
But it wasn’t just weapons and ammunition that they’d taken. All of the German soldiers had been carrying metal water canteens – a much better bet than the fragile glass jars Dawson and Watson had taken from the farmhouse – and even a few bars of chocolate. They took two canteens each, topped them up from the jars, and all the chocolate that wasn’t covered in blood. And Dawson finally decided to abandon the mines. They were heavy and unwieldy and, realistically, if the two men couldn’t fight their way out of trouble with the weapons and ammunition they now had, a bag of German mines probably wouldn’t make any difference.
‘I know it’ll take a few minutes,’ Dawson said, ‘but I think we should try and hide the bodies. If we just leave them out on the field, the first German patrol that comes along here is going to spot them straight away. If we can conceal them in the undergrowth, that might buy us a little time.’
Together, they dragged all the bodies into the copse and dumped them in one of the most overgrown sections. They knew the smell of decomposition would soon attract scavengers, but the stand of trees was fairly remote, and hopefully nobody would find the dead bodies for a while.
Then they set off, and now they had three other things they hadn’t had before – a military map of the area, a pair of binoculars and a compass, all of which Dawson had removed from the sergeant’s body.
‘This map’s going to be bloody useful,’ he said, as they started walking, once again keeping close to a substantial hedge that ran more or less north-south. ‘I still don’t know exactly where we are, but as soon as we see some kind of distinctive geographical feature I’ll be able to work it out. And once we know that, we’ll be able to pick the best possible route to get across the border.’
Watson seemed somewhat subdued, and responded only with a grunt.
‘You OK, Dave?’ Dawson asked.
‘Yeah, I guess so. It’s just so bloody different to what I expected. I mean, back at Catterick on the range we were just shooting at a cardboard target shaped like a man. Then bayonet practice was against bags filled with straw. But between us we’ve just killed six men, and then there were the others in the forest earlier.’
‘This is war, Dave,’ Dawson said simply.
‘I know that, mate. I also know that all those Germans were doing their best to kill us, and if we hadn’t been fucking lucky and pretty good shots, it’d be our bodies lying rotting in a field somewhere. But it’s not easy, Eddie. It’s not easy at all.’
Dawson nodded. What Watson had said pretty much coincided with his own feelings. In the thick of the action, adrenaline took over, and he had acted the way he’d been trained to do, not seeing the enemy soldiers as living, breathing human beings, but simply as targets to be engaged with whatever weapons he had available.
But when he’d walked out into the field to recover the weapons and ammunition and other equipment they needed, he’d been appalled at the injuries he’d seen. He’d stared at the gaping holes torn in the bodies of the German soldiers by the bullets they’d fired, and in two cases the sight of their skulls almost literally blown apart, and it had taken all his resolve not to throw up.
No, Watson was right. It wasn’t easy, and war was hell on earth. But they had no option, and Dawson was sure that Watson realized that. It was kill or be killed, an old and perhaps trite expression, but in their circumstances nonetheless absolutely true. They were deep in enemy territory, where the hand of every man would be raised against them, where any German soldier would be perfectly entitled to shoot them on sight. The only way they were going to get out and back to the safety of their own lines was to stay out of sight as much as they could and, if they were spotted, to fight back with as much skill and ferocity as they could manage. Any other course of action would end in their deaths, and both men knew it.
‘I know, Dave, I know,’ Dawson said, trudging along beside the hedge and constantly checking all around them, ‘we’ve no option, mate, no fucking option at all.’
By the end of the afternoon, it was clear to both men that Dawson’s plan to cut across to the west and somehow work their way over the border back into France wasn’t going to happen – or, at least, it wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d hoped.
Within a couple of hours of leaving the copse, Dawson had identified three geographical features that had suggested their location, and then a village named Kerlingen which they’d studied through the binoculars and which had confirmed exactly where they were. They’d covered rather more distance than he’d expected, almost ten miles in a straight line from the Warndt Forest, and were now lying up in a wood on a low hill, overlooking another village called Rammelfangen.
The problem wasn’t their location, which was a bare two miles from the Franco-German border, it was the fact that, between them and that border, the area seemed to be swarming with German troops.
Back at the British camp on the outskirts of Dalstein, Lieutenant Charnforth had told them that the French had mounted an assault across the border, covering a front that was wide but not very deep, and had met with little resistance from the German forces. The trouble was, all the troops they’d seen so far were German, not French.
‘Any Frogs down there?’ Watson asked hopefully, lying beside Dawson in the undergrowth on the edge of the wood.
‘Fuck all, mate. Wall-to-wall Jerries as far as I can tell.’ Dawson lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’
Watson took the binoculars and began surveying the narrow plain that lay below the hill.
‘Charnforth told us the French had captured about twenty villages that the Germans had abandoned,’ Dawson remarked. ‘Looking down there at Rammelfangen, I reckon it’s completely deserted. No sign of any French troops, and all I can see everywhere else is Germans.’
‘The French probably buggered off as soon as the Germans arrived, which is what you’d expect, given their record. First sign of trouble and they’re off.’
‘They’re not that bad, are they?’ Dawson asked. ‘I thought the French army was pretty tough.’
‘You think about it,’ Watson said. ‘In Britain we celebrate a string of military victories, but all the Frogs do is mourn a bunch of glorious defeats. And you don’t see any of them down there now, do you?’
‘Can’t argue with that.’
‘If you’re reading that map right, we’re a mile or so from the border, so if Charnforth’s information was right, those should be French troops down there, not Jerries. So, like I said, if the Frogs ever were here, they’ve obviously buggered off now.’
Dawson nodded and looked back over the view below them. The ground sloped away gently from the hill to the level fields that lay to the west. A few scattered buildings – farmhouses and farm cottages and the occasional barn or machinery shed – studded the landscape, and roads and tracks meandered alongside the hedgerows. It could almost have been a view of England, perhaps somewhere in the West Country or Wales or even the Borders, except for the troops.
Most of them were too far away – moving about close to the woodland that lay on the opposite side of the wide valley – for Dawson to see them clearly, but through the binoculars the coal-scuttle helmets and grey-green uniforms of the Wehrmacht troops were completely unmistakable. They hadn’t tried to do an accurate count, but at a rough guess Dawson estimated there were about 200 German soldiers in front of them, plus about a dozen lorries and a hell of a lot of horses, apparently being used both as pack animals and also to pull carts loaded with supplies. But the number was frankly irrelevant. There was no way he and Watson were going to be able to slip past that concentration of troops without being noticed. And shot, obviously.
Watson lowered the binoculars and rested his chin on his hands. ‘We ain’t going that way,’ he stated.
‘Damn right,’ Dawson agreed. ‘In fact, we ain’t going anywhere any time soon. There are too many troops coming and going down there for us to risk leaving this wood in daylight. I think we’ll just have to hole up here until dark and then try and slip away.’
‘Which way?’ Watson asked.
Dawson looked at the German map which he’d placed on the ground right beside him. ‘I think we need to move further north. In fact, I think we need to try to get all the way up here’ – his fingers traced a route on the map – ‘to the border with Luxembourg.’
‘And then cross into France?’
Dawson shook his head. ‘No. I think our safest route might be to cross into Luxembourg itself. I doubt if that border’s heavily guarded, because Luxembourg’s neutral, and it’s not really got a military machine. The Germans would hardly be worried about an attack from that direction, and once we’re in Luxembourg I’d guess that crossing the second border, the one into France, would be a lot easier.’
Watson looked at the map, at the route Dawson was suggesting, and nodded. ‘It’s not even that far to go,’ he said. ‘I mean, we’ve covered about half the distance already. So as long as we can avoid the Jerries once we leave here, we should get to the Luxembourg border by tomorrow evening, something like that.’
‘As long as we don’t meet any more trouble on the way, yes,’ Dawson agreed. ‘Though with our present track record, that’s probably not very likely. Anyway, we’ll go slowly and quietly and hope for the best.’
‘And we keep on heading north, I suppose?’
‘Maybe north-east to start with,’ Dawson replied, ‘depending on what we find when we get out of this wood. What we have to do is avoid any contact with those troops, so we might even have to head east to get clear of the area, and then swing round to the north.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I guess we’ll find out in about three or four hours, when it’s dark enough to move.’