Together, they half dragged, half lifted the two bodies out of the truck and lowered them to the road. Then they picked out a selection of weapons from the dead soldiers – the Schmeisser MP 40 was particularly prone to jamming and stoppages, so having a couple of spare machine-pistols each, plus all the magazines they could find, seemed like a good idea and, as they now had a form of transport at their disposal, the extra weight wouldn’t be a problem. They also took all the grenades the soldiers had been equipped with, and two more Mauser K98k rifles.
Finally, they removed a couple of the German coal-scuttle helmets from the bodies and tucked their British versions away in the cab of the truck.
‘It’s what people think, not what they know,’ Dawson said as he adjusted the chin strap. ‘And if we drive past them in Germany, in a German truck, both of us wearing German helmets, people will automatically think we’re Germans, despite the different coloured uniforms. They’ll probably assume we’re just from a regiment they’ve not seen before. That’s what I hope, anyway.’
‘Yeah, likewise. You want to drive, or ride shotgun?’
‘You drive,’ Dawson said. ‘I’ll map-read and keep my eyes open.’
Watson climbed behind the wheel and spent a few minutes locating all the controls. Then he pushed the gear lever into first and eased the heavy truck forward as Dawson lifted the drop-down barrier, which had still been in the lowered position. He stopped just beyond the barrier, waited for Dawson to climb into the passenger seat and then released the clutch. The truck lurched clumsily and the engine stalled, but his second attempt was better, and the vehicle juddered off down the road.
‘Which way are we going?’ Watson asked.
Dawson was bent forward, looking at the captured map, which he’d spread open on his knee, and the compass, by the light of his torch.
‘We’re heading north-west, and we’re on the main road that runs past Saarbrücken and Saarlouis and then goes through Saarburg and all the way up to a place called Trier, which is a long way further north than we want to go. I think it would be a bloody good idea to try and get off this fairly soon. The Germans are bound to be using the main roads to move their troops and supplies around, so we need to try and find some country roads we can travel along instead. Just give me a minute and I’ll see what other options there are. How’s the fuel level, by the way?’
Watson scanned the dimly lit and very basic instrument panel in front of him and finally thought he’d found what he was looking for. ‘If that is the fuel gauge,’ he said, ‘it looks like there’s about three-quarters of a tank.’
‘No problem. And even if the thing does run out of fuel, we’ll still be a lot closer to the Luxembourg border than we were before, so it’s a no-lose situation.’
The German truck lumbered on for about five minutes while Dawson studied the map, trying to choose the best route to get them as close as possible to the Luxembourg border before they tried to cross it. They knew the crossing itself would have to be on foot – trying to drive a German truck into neutral Luxembourg was never going to work, for obvious reasons, but if they could get to within about a mile or so, they should be able to cross back into France within days, maybe even that very day.
‘OK,’ Dawson said. ‘If we keep on going, we’ll have to drive right through a town called Fitten, and there might well be other road-blocks there. Now, there’s a junction coming up any time now. There probably won’t be any signposts, of course, but what we’re looking for is the road to either Biringen or Hilbringen. That’ll take us off this road and a bit closer to the German border, but that’s still a better option than staying on it.’
Less than five minutes later a junction loomed up on the left, and in the distance over to the west they could see a peak rising in the moonlight.
‘That high-point should be the Alte Berg,’ Dawson said, ‘so that’s definitely the right direction. That road might not be the one we’re looking for, but it’ll do. Take it.’
Watson swung the truck across to the other side of the main road and then drove down a much narrower road, actually more like a farm track, albeit one that had been covered in tarmac at some point in the past.
Dawson temporarily abandoned the map and just concentrated on studying his compass. ‘We’re going the right way,’ he said. ‘We’re now heading north-west, and that’s more or less the right direction, and I think I know which of the roads marked on the map this one is. Well, which one of two roads, actually.’
‘You know we’re in a moving vehicle made of steel,’ Watson pointed out, ‘so the reading you’re getting on that compass might not be entirely accurate?’
‘I know, and the metal around us probably is having some effect on it, but I still think it’s about right. Anyway, keep on going for the moment.’
The minor road swung left and right, the surface quality ranging from bad to poor, but the overall direction stayed fairly constant, which pleased Dawson, who now thought he knew exactly which road they were following.
‘I reckon we’re around half a mile south of Hilbringen,’ he said, ‘so just carry on. We should come across a main road – a crossroads – in about two or three miles, and that’ll be the road running from Fitten due west to Scheuerwald. We need to cross over that and carry on heading north-west, but the moment I think we’re getting close to the crossroads we’ll stop and check out the lie of the land. I definitely don’t want us to drive straight into another road-block.’
‘Amen to that,’ Watson muttered.
Ten minutes later, they saw a few lights some distance ahead of them. Watson immediately slowed and stopped the truck, killing the vehicle’s headlights and turning off the engine as he did so. For a moment, they sat in silence, the only sound the ticking of the truck’s engine as it started to cool.
Dawson took out the binoculars and studied the scene. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘From what I can see, it looks like that’s the main road. There are a couple of vehicles – they look pretty big, so they’re probably army lorries – driving along it, and heading west, towards the border.’
‘What about road-blocks or troops?’ Watson asked.
‘None that I can see right now,’ Dawson replied, still staring through the binoculars. ‘Hang on a second. Let me just take a look down the road we’re on, see if there’s any sign of anything there.’
Bracing his elbows on the dashboard in front of him, Dawson focused the binoculars on the road, and as far as he could he covered the whole length of it from where they were parked at that moment right up to the main road itself. The moonlight helped a lot, because the tarmac surface was clearly visible, and the only sections he couldn’t cover were those where the ground dipped down or the road moved behind clumps of trees or bushes. But what he didn’t see were any German soldiers, or any stationary vehicles that might indicate the presence of a road-block.
Dawson waited until the two vehicles he could see had moved well out of sight, then nodded to Watson.
‘OK, Dave. I think we’re clear. Let’s get moving, but keep the lights switched off, just in case.’
Watson started the engine, engaged first gear and got the vehicle moving again. He was now more used to the fierce clutch, and the truck hardly lurched at all as he accelerated away. The moon was still out, and the winding road clearly visible, but Watson kept the speed down to little more than walking pace, to ensure he’d be able to stop well before any potential danger they might encounter.
The last section of the minor road, before it climbed up a gentle slope to intersect the main road that crossed it at right angles, was almost straight, and again Dawson told Watson to stop the truck while he checked the land ahead through the binoculars.
After a couple of minutes he lowered them and shook his head. ‘If there is a checkpoint up there, I’m buggered if I can see it. The junction looks clear, and there’s no sign of any traffic moving along the road in either direction.’
‘So we go?’
Dawson nodded. ‘Yes, let’s go. But get ready just in case I’ve missed something.’
Watson nodded, reached down into the cab beside him and picked up a Schmeisser. He checked the magazine was fully loaded, a round ready in the chamber, then slung the weapon around his neck. It might interfere with his driving, but it would be ready for immediate use, which was far more important.
Dawson placed one machine-pistol on the seat right beside him, between him and Watson, then took another one, checked that as well and held it ready to fire. Then he again nodded to his companion. ‘Let’s go.’
Watson accelerated away, up the slope towards the main road, looking all around him for any signs of danger, while beside him Dawson did exactly the same, his machine-pistol aimed over the front of the truck.
They reached the edge of the main road. Watson drove up onto the much better surface. ‘Which way?’ he asked, looking ahead and expecting to see another road heading north. ‘I thought you said this was a crossroads.’
Dawson glanced in both directions. ‘It is on the map,’ he said. ‘Hell, just go left, and put the bloody lights on. If anyone sees us driving without lights in the middle of the night on this road they’re bound to try to stop us.’
Watson hit the light switch, then swung the wheel and accelerated, moving the truck over to the right-hand side of the road, looking ahead for any sign of a junction.
Dawson used his torch to check the map again, but the scale was too small to show the exact shape of the road junction. It looked like the road they’d driven up connected with an almost identical minor road going north, but there was no sign of it that either of them could see.
‘I think we’re getting too close to the border,’ Dawson said, after a couple of minutes. ‘Do a U-turn and we’ll try the other way.’
Watson obediently swung the truck round – the road was just wide enough to allow him to turn the vehicle in a single manoeuvre – and headed back the way they’d come.
‘That’s where we drove up,’ Dawson said, pointing to a junction on the right, ‘so the other road should be somewhere on the left.’
Watson steered the truck over to the left-hand side of the main road and slowed down slightly as both men stared ahead.
‘There it is,’ Dawson said, pointing with the barrel of his Schmeisser.
Just coming into view was a narrow road that led away somewhere to the north.
‘Got it.’ Watson swung the truck out towards the centre of the main road, to give him enough room to make the turn, then steered to the left. The truck lurched and bounced as it left the comparatively smooth surface of the main road and onto the rutted and uneven minor road, but that didn’t bother either man.
‘Thank God for that,’ Dawson said. ‘I felt really exposed up there on that road. I was expecting a road-block or a truck full of German soldiers any second.’
Watson grinned at him, then turned his attention back to the twisting and poorly surfaced road in front of them. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take this, will you?’ He lifted the Schmeisser from around his neck and passed it over to Dawson, who checked that the safety catch was on, and then stowed it between them in the cab.
Dawson checked the map again. ‘If this map is accurate,’ he said, ‘that road was the biggest problem. We shouldn’t have to cross or go along any other main routes, so with any luck we won’t run into any road-blocks. But we’re almost bound to see German troops somewhere around here, because we’re still pretty close to the French border.’
‘So where are we heading for now?’ Watson asked.
‘This road swings round further to the north pretty soon,’ Dawson said, again looking at the map, ‘and it goes through a village or town named Nohn. With any luck, that’ll be deserted, just like that other village we saw a while back, Rammelfangen. It was full of Jerry soldiers, but all the local inhabitants had buggered off.
‘Anyway, from Nohn, the road turns back towards the north-west and goes through Orscholz, Kesslingen and Münzingen.’ He stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar German names. ‘Or there’s another road – it’s a shorter route – that we could use, but it’s probably going to have more enemy soldiers on it because it’s closer to the French border. That runs almost due west from Orscholz through Borg to Wochern.’
‘I’d rather take the pretty route if we’re less likely to meet any Jerries,’ Watson said, steering the truck around a bend.
‘Good thinking. Me too. So just keep going along here for the moment.’
‘How far is it to this Nohn place?’
‘A couple of miles. We should be there in a few minutes.’
In fact, the road surface started deteriorating considerably almost as soon as Dawson spoke, and Watson was forced to slow down the truck to little more than walking pace as he drove over the worst of it. The truck was built for hard work, but they really didn’t want to have to cope with a puncture or a breakdown, so taking it slowly seemed like their best option.
Minutes later, and almost without realizing it, they were driving through the silent and deserted streets of Nohn. One moment they were in open country, and then what Dawson thought was a barn appeared on the right-hand side of the road. They drove past it, followed the road around to the right and found they’d entered the village itself.
‘Bloody good job there wasn’t a Jerry road-block,’ Watson muttered. ‘We’d have driven straight into it.’
‘Or gone straight through it,’ Dawson suggested, ‘but you’re right. I thought we were still way out in the countryside. It just shows we need to keep a sharper lookout. If there had been enemy soldiers waiting there, we’d have been sitting ducks in this tin can.’
They drove out the other side of Nohn without incident, without seeing a soul, not even an animal. The truck lumbered on through the night along the road that still, as far as Dawson could tell from his compass, was heading roughly north-west. Orschloz was, like Nohn, totally deserted, though this time they stopped a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the developed area and checked it with the binoculars before they drove in.
At the far end of the village Watson pulled the truck to a stop at a fork in the road and looked across at his companion.
‘Right,’ Dawson said, holding the map so that Watson could see it. ‘It’s time to make up our minds. That road’ – he pointed at the left-hand branch of the forked junction – ‘is the most direct route. That’s the one that goes due west, through Borg to Wochern. The other one is the long way round: that’ll get us to Luxembourg about five miles north of the French border.’
Watson glanced at the map, then at the two choices in front of them. ‘What do you think? I mean, we’ve seen nobody since we crossed that main road. This whole area seems to have been completely abandoned.’
Dawson nodded. ‘I know, but we’re about five miles from the border here. I’m pretty bloody sure that if we get very much closer to it we’ll start running into Jerry patrols. I vote we take the right-hand fork and head north-west through Kesslingen and Münzingen, and stay a good few miles clear of the border. It’ll add a bit to the journey, but I still think it’ll be safer.’
Watson didn’t reply for a few seconds, then nodded. ‘Yeah. Let’s keep on the pretty route. We’ve got all night, and all day, come to that.’
‘Actually,’ Dawson said, looking over to the east, ‘there’s not much of the night left. It looks to me like dawn’s about to break. We need to get a move on. We can’t risk moving in daylight once we’re near the border, because there’ll certainly be more patrols. We need to find somewhere to hole up for the day.’
He looked back at the map. ‘We’re at Orscholz now. Kesslingen’s only about another couple of miles away, so let’s get there quickly as we can. We can either find somewhere to hide there, or forge on to Münzingen. OK?’
‘OK,’ Watson replied, put the truck into gear and swung the steering wheel to the right.
Because of what they’d found in Nohn and Orscholz, they weren’t surprised when they drove into Kesslingen to find that village, too, was deserted. ‘I think this is as far as we go tonight,’ said Dawson. ‘There’s another main road just this side of Münzingen. I’d rather try and cross that at night. I don’t want us to get half-way down the road and find ourselves looking at a bunch of Jerry trucks heading straight towards us, and us with nowhere to go. Let’s find a barn or something and get our heads down.’
On the northern outskirts of the village, down a side street that was little more than a well-trodden track across the rutted ground, they spotted a farm outbuilding with sagging double doors secured with a rusting chain and an equally rusted padlock.
‘That’ll do, I think,’ Dawson said, picking up his Schmeisser. ‘I’ll go and check it out. Turn the truck round, so you can back it in if there’s room inside.’
Dawson strode down the track towards the outbuilding, the machine-pistol held ready in his hands, glancing in all directions as he walked and listening intently for any sound that seemed out of place.
The small barn, or whatever the building was, was about twenty feet wide and forty feet long, the rear of it separated from the side of a small house or cottage by an open yard. There were other houses nearby, but none of them closer than about fifty yards. Dawson first checked the house, trying both doors – which were locked – and peering inside through the ground-floor windows. There was no sign of life, and the property had an indefinable air of emptiness, of abandonment.
He checked the rear and both sides of the barn, then walked around to the front of the structure to examine the doors. Watson sat in the truck, the engine idling, the rear of the vehicle facing the barn, ready to reverse inside. Dawson slung his Schmeisser over his shoulder and carefully examined the chain and padlock. It only took a couple of minutes to break in using his trench knife, and he pulled open one of the double doors and looked inside the building.
Even in the faint light of the early dawn, he could see that the structure was almost empty. The floor was covered in straw and dirt, and a few straw bales were visible at the back of the building. The walls were hung with a variety of tools and equipment, with other tools – spades, forks, hoes and scythes – leaning against them. He guessed that the building might have been used to store produce, because he couldn’t detect any smell of animals. But whatever its function, it would do very well for what they needed.
Dawson turned back, pulled both doors wide open and beckoned to Watson. In minutes, the truck was inside the barn, engine switched off, and the two sappers had pulled the doors closed.
‘I’m knackered,’ Watson said.
‘You’re not the only one, but we can’t afford to both fall asleep together. Let’s grab a bite to eat, and then I’ll take the first watch, OK?’
They had some of the hard dried sausage left and split it between them, washed down with water, and finished their meal with half a bar of German chocolate each. High-class grub it wasn’t, but it was food, and that was all that mattered.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a hot meal and a mug of tea,’ Watson muttered, as he finished the last piece of chocolate.
Dawson nodded. ‘I’d even pay money for a bowl of that fucking awful stew back at the camp. And for a hot bath. Christ knows what we smell like after – however long it’s been – wearing this stuff.’
‘No,’ Watson said, ‘but we’re alive, and that’s a hell of a lot more important. Right, you’ll stay awake, then?’
‘Yeah. I’ll take a walk around the village first, just to get the lie of the land, then I’ll come back here. If I think I’m falling asleep I’ll just walk around the barn, or step outside again. But if I know I’m falling asleep, I’ll wake you up. OK?’
Watson nodded. ‘I’ll rack out on those straw bales in the back there.’ He walked over to the truck, picked up one of the Schmeissers and walked over to the rear wall of the barn, took off his German helmet, webbing belt and his battledress jacket and lay down.
Dawson crossed over to the doors and peered outside. He had to keep moving if he was going to stay awake. He pushed the door open just enough to step through the gap. Then he stopped and listened to the silence. Apart from the birdsong all around him, there was no other sound at all, or none he could detect. It all felt empty and deserted. And that, he reflected, as he walked along the track back towards the largely unmade road that ran through the village, was just what they wanted.
But he still took infinite care, checking everywhere, using his eyes and ears. But within ten minutes he knew absolutely that he and Watson were the only two human beings in the village.
It was small, just a collection of perhaps forty or fifty properties scattered along both sides of the narrow country road. There was a kind of village square off to one side, with a couple of small shops so completely shuttered and barred that he couldn’t even tell what they sold, and a village water pump. Many of the houses had official-looking notices displayed, which Dawson guessed might be warnings against looting. He checked the doors of a few of the houses – not to go inside, just to make sure they were empty – but every one was locked.
He walked all round the village, then retraced his steps to the barn, checking all around him as he did so. While Watson slept, Dawson would take the opportunity to refill their water bottles at the pump, which would give him something to do, and help to keep him awake for a little longer. He might even try and find a bucket or tub or something and take the opportunity to strip off and wash some of the grime from his body while he was at the pump.