Dawson stood stock still, his heart pounding. His hope was that, in the darkness, the sentry wouldn’t be able to properly see either the outline of his helmet or the colour of his uniform, and might even mistake him for another German soldier because of the unmistakable shape of the Schmeisser machine-pistol hanging round his neck. He held the Mauser bayonet down beside his right leg, where it would be invisible to the approaching soldier.
The man barked something else at Dawson and gestured with the muzzle of his Schmeisser. Dawson turned further towards him, still keeping the bayonet out of sight, but otherwise didn’t react.
The German soldier stopped about three or four feet away, and shouted something else. Dawson had no idea what he’d said – the only word of the German language he knew was Achtung, and he wasn’t even sure what that meant – but he guessed the soldier might be asking for his papers. If the situation had been reversed, and Dawson had been on sentry duty and spotted an unknown man approaching, that’s what he would have demanded. So he reached towards the top right-hand pocket of his battledress, undid the button and slipped his fingers inside.
He pulled out a piece of folded paper, and realized it was the original printed order he’d been given, instructing him to report to Major Sykes at Cherbourg, what seemed like months ago. He extended his arm towards the German, but at that instant everything changed.
The sentry suddenly noticed something about Dawson – maybe his characteristic British helmet, or perhaps the design or the colour of his battledress – and snapped the Schmeisser up and into the firing position.
Dawson dropped the paper and immediately swung the bayonet towards the German, but even as he did so he knew that he was too slow – a lifetime too slow.
But before the enemy soldier could pull the trigger of his machine-pistol, a dark shape materialized behind him, and Dawson saw a sudden flash of steel. A hand reached over the man’s shoulder, wrapped itself around his mouth, jerking his head back, and simultaneously the gleaming steel blade of a bayonet ripped through his throat, tearing the life from his body as a spray of blood fountained upwards.
The German soldier slumped forward, his limbs twitching in his death throes. Behind him, Dave Watson lowered the man’s body to the ground, the blade of his bayonet dripping blood onto the surface of the road.
‘Thanks a lot, Dave,’ Dawson said hoarsely, as he stepped forward. He’d looked death in the eyes, and hadn’t much enjoyed the experience. ‘I owe you one. Let’s get him out of sight.’
While Watson cleaned the blood off the blade of his bayonet on the dead man’s clothes, Dawson picked up the sheet of paper – he knew that leaving that piece of evidence behind would be a really bad idea. And then, together, the two men lugged the body of the German soldier off the side of the road and into the adjoining field to the south. They dragged him about thirty yards, then dropped the corpse behind a clump of low bushes.
‘Somebody’s bound to find him pretty soon,’ Dawson muttered. ‘When the watch changes and another soldier arrives to relieve him they’re going to know he’s missing. All we can hope is that maybe they’ll think he’s gone AWOL.’
‘Maybe,’ Watson agreed, ‘but we’ll need to get rid of the blood on the road right now or it’ll be obvious someone killed him. I never thought he’d bleed that much.’
‘You must have cut through one of the arteries in his neck.’
There was a substantial dark stain marring the surface of the unmade road where the German sentry had met his untimely end, clearly visible in the light from the moon, but it was an easy job to toss a few handfuls of loose soil over it. That, Dawson knew, probably wouldn’t be enough to hide what had happened when dawn broke, but hopefully in the darkness it would be enough to conceal the stain. And, at the very least, even if the Germans discovered the dead body, they would still have no idea who’d killed the man or which way his attacker or attackers were going.
The two men checked in both directions that there were no more enemy soldiers in sight, then strode swiftly across the road and vanished through a gate and into the field that bordered the northern side.
The moon chose that moment to disappear behind a cloud, plunging the landscape into full darkness and, moments later, Watson tripped on the uneven ground and fell heavily, his equipment clattering and banging.
Almost immediately, there was a challenge in German from somewhere behind them.
‘Fucking hell,’ Dawson muttered, as he and Watson automatically ducked down into cover behind a low mound in the field.
‘They must have heard,’ Watson said.
Dawson risked a quick glance around the side of the mound, keeping his head pressed well down into the long grass that covered it.
The moon was emerging fitfully from behind one of the clouds that partially covered the sky. On the road, no more than thirty yards away, two German soldiers were standing and staring in their direction, their faces pale and anonymous blobs in the semi-darkness, their weapons – both were armed with rifles – held across their bodies. They’d obviously heard the two men, or at least heard the noise Watson had made, but didn’t know exactly who or what had caused it.
‘There are two of them,’ Dawson whispered. ‘Stay really still. They might just go away.’
But somehow that didn’t look likely. The two German soldiers remained immobile but obviously alert, clearly highly suspicious of the noise they’d heard, but apparently unwilling to venture off the road to investigate it.
‘If we move, they’ll see us,’ Dawson whispered, ‘and if they see us, they’ll shoot.’
‘Bugger,’ Watson muttered.
The two German soldiers held a muted conversation, then one of them moved slightly to one side and brought his rifle up to his shoulder to aim it into the field, while the other stepped forward, heading directly towards the mound behind which the two sappers had taken refuge.
And right then Dawson realized they were fresh out of options. They couldn’t use their bayonets or the trench knife, because the enemy soldiers had separated – they might be able to kill one of them that way, but certainly not the other. They’d have to use their guns, and use them now, while they still had the element of surprise. And then they’d have to run for it.
Dawson watched the approaching German soldier as he strode closer to the mound of earth they were using for cover. When the man reached a point about ten yards away, Dawson tensed and rested his finger on the trigger of the Schmeisser – the machine-pistol was the obvious weapon to use at such close quarters.
But then the German stopped. He stood on one spot for a few seconds, scanning the ground in front of him and all around. Then he shrugged, turned away and walked back to the road to rejoin his companion.
Again, the two Germans exchanged a few sentences, and this time both men heard a couple of the words clearly.
‘He just said something about Geräusche,’ Watson said quietly – he’d done a basic German course the previous year. ‘That means “noises”, and then he used the word Schlachtrösser, which means “horses”. Maybe he thinks that noise was made by some of the horses they’ve been using to pull the carts.’
‘Christ, I hope so. I don’t want to kill anyone else unless it’s unavoidable.’
For another few seconds, the two German soldiers chatted together on the road, then both lit cigarettes and walked away, side by side, heading west and away from the two sappers.
Dawson and Watson waited a couple of minutes after the two enemy soldiers had vanished from sight, then both stood up slowly and carefully.
‘Right,’ Dawson said quietly. ‘Let’s get the hell away from here before they come back, or start wondering where the sentry is.’
‘I’m right behind you.’
Dawson made a very quick check of his compass, the illuminated pointer and cardinal markers dimly visible, then led the way through the field to the north. Just as they reached the far side of it, both men stopped. They’d heard a sudden noise from directly in front of them, on the opposite side of another hedge, a deep snort, like a man with a really bad cold.
‘Fuck me, not again,’ Watson muttered, as he seized the pistol grip of his Schmeisser MP 40.
‘Wait,’ Dawson whispered and crept over to one side, where he could see a narrow gap in the undergrowth. Holding his machine-pistol ready, he looked through the space he’d found. For a few seconds he just stared at the sight beyond. Then he stood up and turned back to Watson, a grin on his face.
‘That German was right,’ he said. ‘This field’s full of horses.’
‘Thank God for that. Let’s move.’
The two men squeezed through the gap and started walking. There were about twenty horses in the field, big friendly shapes, tethered in lines. Some were standing and eating, others lying down, and all looked inquisitively at the two men as they made their way past them.
‘Shame we can’t borrow a couple of them and ride off into the sunset. Or perhaps the sunrise, in this case,’ Watson said.
‘Yeah, I was just thinking about that. But there are no saddles or bridles and – I don’t know about you – but I don’t know how to ride a bloody horse. We’re much better off on foot.’
About an hour later, they came to a stop again, this time because they were standing on the southern bank of a river. Dawson pulled out the map and used his small torch to study it for a few moments.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘this section of the river looks fairly straight and it’s lying north-east to south-west, so I think we must be somewhere here.’ He pointed at a position on the map close to a town named Rehlingen. ‘This river branches off the Saar just to the north-east of here, and runs all the way down to the border near another town named Niedaltdorf.’
Knowing where they were helped, but what they had to do was get across the river, which was wide and looked deep.
‘Is there a bridge somewhere?’ Watson asked hopefully.
‘Yeah, several of the bastards, but I think our best bet would be to head north-east and cross it here.’ He again pointed at the map.
‘That’ll take us pretty close to Rehlingen, and that looks to me like a main road as well,’ Watson said, peering at the map. ‘Sure that’s a good idea?’
‘I’d prefer to cross the river somewhere else, but we already know that the area closer to the border is well guarded, so going in that direction might be a worse option. I’m just hoping that the bridge near Rehlingen won’t be guarded.’
Dawson replaced the map in his pocket and the two men started walking along the bank of the river, keeping a sharp lookout, as they had been ever since the Warndt Forest. The ground was sloping gently upwards, but the going was fairly easy, and the moonlight was sufficient for them to see.
Ten minutes later, Dawson held up his hand and stopped. ‘There’s the bridge,’ he whispered, pointing ahead of them.
In the monochrome moonlight, they could see a structure of stone and steel that spanned the river about 200 yards ahead, a coat-hanger-shaped bridge that obviously carried a road from one bank to the other. They could also see an army truck – it looked like about a three-tonner – parked at the nearer end of it, and dimly visible were the shapes of several soldiers standing near the vehicle.
‘Bugger,’ Watson whispered. ‘What do you reckon? Has the truck broken down, or is that a checkpoint?’
Dawson didn’t reply, just ducked into cover and stared at the scene through his binoculars. After a few moments he lowered them and glanced at his companion.
‘It looks to me like a road-block,’ he said. ‘I can see what looks like a wooden barrier across the road beside the truck. And that,’ he added, ‘just might be good news for us.’
Watson looked quizzically at his companion. ‘Explain that,’ he said.
‘Those troops will probably have been ordered to stop and check the papers of any pedestrians or drivers who want to cross over that bridge. It’s just about midnight now, so they’re probably also quite tired if they’ve been there for several hours, so maybe their concentration will be starting to go.’
‘So what?’
‘So all their attention will be focused on checking people crossing over the bridge, and they probably won’t be quite as alert as they should be, so hopefully they won’t notice us crossing under the bridge.’
Watson looked from Dawson to the bridge, and then back again.
‘Oh, shit,’ he muttered.