It sat squat at the end of the airfield, black as the night around it. A bomber. From close up you could see the paint mottled with green in a shapeless pattern of camouflage. How it would stand out against the night sky, the moon and stars that throw its silhouette over the ground below!
I had picked my men. I made Taffy Andrews a corporal. I offered a sergeant’s stripes to Sam Levine, but he refused them. Harry Landon and Willie Garside were still the fastest men I could find, and Willie could move like a cat at night. Alf Milner came, eager, dependable, and immensely strong. Dodger Bates, the loner, had finally persuaded Fred Pike and Joe Stanhope to talk to him about explosives, and Frank Farleigh could read Morse faster than any man I knew. Nine men. Arthur Sywell qualified, not only because of Fred and Joe, but because he quickly picked up the technical side of the job we had to do. He could crawl silently, and that was a talent worth its weight in gold; he could shoot a bow and arrow, and knew about locks. Ben, of course, but I wouldn’t go without Ben. Captain Peter Derby as my official second-in-command. That was the way the Army liked it.
The Air Force supplied a crew of four, including a despatcher. They also sent a large thermos bottle of coffee and a bottle of brandy, which we left full with the despatcher.
In the hangar before we marched out to the plane, Ben Bolding held our last check. Each man had his own personal weapons, a knife, a bow with twelve arrows all needle sharp, six throwing pins. Each man had his own ration packs, sufficient vitamins and proteins for four days, all condensed, concentrated, dehydrated into a caramel-tasting chewing stick that if you weren’t careful would give you lockjaw. No man had cigarettes or matches. I was carrying cartons I would hand out to the resistance – any man wanting a smoke could apply to me. We all had morphia and the new elastic bandages and tubes of collodion for pasting over superficial wounds. We had the new powder for preventing infection, clips to ‘stitch’ together the open sides of deep wounds. We had no radio. Each of us had a pencil torch. Dodger, Fred and Joe carried the explosive. I carried a spare supply. I also had two pairs of women’s silk knickers. I found them more comfortable to wear than army issue, and they took up no room at all in the bottom of my pack.
Ben had the nylon rope, Peter the signal wire, we all had detonators and fuses, carried in wooden boxes, wrapped in cotton wool, in our inside pockets. We were wearing battledress, gaiters, Innsbrucker boots, jumping jackets that fasten under your crotch. We wore green berets and scorned the tin jumping hats. I had a piece of wire on two toggles fastened round my waist under the battledress sleeve, the sort of thing that before the war was used for cutting slabs of cheese.
The whole equipment was duplicated in three canisters that would be dropped independently on a second pass of the aircraft. Canisters, however, have a way of getting lost. I never trusted them.
We had all been passed by the doctor. We had all been to the lavatory. We were all shit-scared.
It was an old bomber. All the bombing equipment had been torn out of it, and two benches ran along the sides, tucked into the curvature of the side of the plane. It was impossible to sit upright. A one-inch metal rod ran down the length of the plane; from it rings hung like the clothing rail in a garment shop. As each man entered the plane, he took a ring and slid it along the metal rod. Since I would be the last to jump, my ring went first, and I found myself testing its strength. It hung firm and had been well greased. The plane had already been ‘warmed up’ when we climbed on board. There was no ceremony. There was no one at the airport to wave goodbye. We filed inside in silence, the door was closed and clipped, the plane taxied out to the runway, destination Belgium. This is it; no generals flashing medals at us exhorted us to valour; no chaplains with a grin full of teeth wished us God Speed. The pilot opened the throttle, the engines roared, the plane lumbered down the runway gathering speed, and then, impossible as it always seemed, the plane lifted up into the air and we were airborne. Each man clipped the hook on the end of his static line to the ring on the rail. That static line would jerk the parachute open when the time came to jump, and it was not a thing you wanted to forget to do. The inside of the plane hung festooned like a Christmas tree without the lights. The men sat back on the benches as best they could, cramped against the walls of the plane. I walked the length, looking at each one, ostensibly checking the static lines. They all smiled at me, in turn, as if I needed comforting. I said each man’s name as I came to him, inviting him to make a last comment. No one spoke back to me.
I haven’t written a lot about these men under training, because deliberately I had tried to expunge from my consciousness any individual characteristics they may have possessed. Psychologists talk a lot of nonsense about ‘the need to know your man’. I needed to know their capabilities, didn’t want to cloud my judgement with my own amateur and half-formed impressions of their characters. I knew they differed, by God how they differed. Taffy Andrews whom I’d made a corporal had been a lay preacher; but that wasn’t why he got promotion. I gave him the two tapes solely because he was able to do everything the other men could do a little better than they could do it, and had the urge to be a leader among men. Not a leader of men. I suppose the difference is that between a lay preacher and a qualified parson. Taffy didn’t want to rise above them, he wanted to take them with him. It made him an ideal corporal; doubtless it had made him a good lay preacher; but that was something I couldn’t know, and therefore didn’t want to be influenced by.
‘Harry?’ He smiled up at me, nothing to say. Harry Landon came of Scandinavian stock, big and jovial, the unsinkable Landon. Harry was a good all-rounder, and strong as an ox. But more than that, he was a happy man, the sultana in the sponge, the morsel that adds taste to the rest. I had only recently discovered by accident that Harry who, I knew, had been a poacher, was passionately fond of music, knew the scores of most works of the classic repertoire. Thank God I hadn’t known about that sooner; one of my set of built-in prejudices was that musicians and music lovers were soft people in general. How wrong I would have been in the case of Harry Landon! It would have been another factor to be overcome, an irrelevant reason for selecting someone in his place.
‘Peter?’ He too smiled. He knew what I was doing. In my place he would have done the same. Present yourself to each man in turn to give him the last chance to say, ‘I don’t want to come.’ Once that door was open and the lights came on, refusal would become ‘Desertion in the face of the Enemy’!
Willie Garside was playing with the rings of the parachute packed on his chest. It suddenly struck me that Willie lived off nervous energy, always on the move, never still, always questing with his eyes, seeking, searching. For what? He moved at night like a stoat, with tremendous economy. Flick flick his eyes always backwards and forwards. Restless. Like a cat. Always licking at himself.
The flak started. Welcome to Europe. The plane rose rapidly, jerking at our stomachs. The pilot kicked a rudder, and the whole aircraft yawed to the right, spilling men on the left onto the floor. They got up cursing, jerking themselves by the static lines, holding on, anticipating the next sickening sideways lurch. Don’t let there be a lot of flak. I’d ridden to the centre of France in planes swilling with vomit. Another burst. The plane leaped up in the air lifted further skywards by the explosion of the shell. Then we were in the middle of it, and the gunners found our range. Several holes were torn in the fuselage, one not six inches from my head. Ice cold wind whistled in. All hell was let loose as the pilot dipped the plane in a steep dive and we slid along and off the benches. For a while my head was pressed against the roof of the plane and legs came flailing past me. A boot caught me under the ear; thank God it was rubber shod. The pilot levelled off again out of the flak range, and we picked ourselves up and sorted out our static lines. Ben had caught his neck on one of the bar supports, a jagged cut bled copiously. ‘Just my luck,’ he raged. We dusted him with powder and stuck an elastoplast over the wound. It was the best we could do; he would come to no harm. The men were cursing the pilot good humouredly. The despatcher put his head through the partition into the pilot’s cabin, and shouted at him. The pilot shouted back but his words were lost in the noise. I checked there were no other injuries.
Out of the flak. The plane flew on an even keel, shuddering as it thrust its way through the air. We were near the dropping zone, my watch told me. I stood up, unhooked my static line, and went to stand beside the despatcher. The men knew the time had come. There was silence. The green light come on, winking. Each man checked his static line, pulled it tight against the metal rod to make certain the rings held. Each man swung his line from side to side. The rings clicked like the balls of an abacus. The despatcher opened the side door. There was a sudden roar of engine noise as he opened the door. There was a hand rail at the side of the door. The men stood up and shuffled along to the front of the plane in line, holding the parachutes tight to their chests with the left hand, right hand grasping the static line webbing to make certain it wouldn’t jam along the metal rod. I was holding my static line ring in my left hand, standing at the front end of the plane beside the despatcher. Ben Bolding was at the back of the line; our best pusher. If any men were to slip, Ben could push that entire line out of the plane in one run. The light stopped blinking and held steady. We were over the dropping zone.
The red light came on. Peter Derby away, Taffy Andrews, bad exit, off to the side, Sam Levine, Harry Landon, Willie Garside, Arthur Sywell. He turned sharply at the end of the run, swinging round with his right hand on the bar beside the door. Looks into my eyes, ‘God help me,’ he seems to say. I try to reassure him though there’s no time even for a handclasp as out he steps. Arthur’s static line flapped back and almost hit me in the face. It had been cut through. There would be nothing to open his parachute. Fred Pike came next and as he swung out and down I thought I caught the glimpse of the knife in his right hand. Certainly I saw his evil smile. His static line held taut, snapping the cord that secured the outer canopy of his parachute, the canopy came off and with it the pilot chute that yanks open the main chute. The main chute opened and Fred started floating down. Dodger Bates okay. Alf Milner stumbled as he went out through the door but the despatcher pushed him. Joe Stanhope jumped, a nervous bundle. The despatcher’s arm flashed across the cabin in front of Frank Farleigh and I heard him scream something. I looked down and out of the plane. Joe Stanhope was hanging on the bottom end of his static line, suspended twenty feet below the aeroplane, carried backwards by the tremendous force of slipstream racing past him. Damn, the cord that holds the parachute pack closed had jammed, and the outer canopy couldn’t release itself. If it suddenly gave way in that position, he’d pull the parachute against the tailplane of the aircraft and rip it to shreds.
Without thinking I pulled the knife out of my sheath, handed my static line to the despatcher, grasped Joe Stanhope’s line where it dangled out of the plane, and started to slide down it. The despatcher must have hooked my ring to the metal bar, and was now holding on to my line, paying it out inch by inch as I went down towards Joe.
Once out of the plane the force of the slipstream hit me, and my grip slid on the webbing. I curled my leg round it, crushing the webbing between the insole of my left boot and the instep of my right foot. Slowly I went down against the buffeting of the wind which threatened at each second to pluck me from the webbing. The climb down seemed to take for ever, though Ben told me later I went down like a monkey on a stick. When I could see my feet almost level with Joe, I swung them off his static line and slid down, holding only by my hands. The pull on my arms was something I’ll never forget, the weight of my body trebled by the force of the hundred and fifty miles an hour slipstream. When my face was level with Joe’s pack, I could see the trouble. The static line itself had wound round the outer pack of his parachute as he whipped out of the plane, and now he was suspended in a million to one chance loop that clenched the outer pack tight. I had about five seconds of grip left in my hands at that speed. I lifted my feet and pressed them against Joe’s parachute pack. As he swung out I could see his agonised face. I pulled with my hands, adding my weight to his weight to jerk his parachute through the knot of the static line. ‘Wriggle, Joe,’ I screamed at him, but of course he couldn’t hear me. I pushed frantically at his pack with my feet, pulling myself backwards against the static line. I could feel the pack start to slip, but already my hands had cramped, and I knew I would not be able to hold on much longer. There was only one thing I could do. I wound my left hand around my own static line, so that the webbing was curled around my left forearm, and then let go with my right hand. The jerk almost pulled my left arm from the socket. I took the knife from between my teeth with my right hand, reached down, and sliced through the cord which held the outer canopy. Joe fell out of the outer pack, downwards. I watched him go. The pilot parachute struggled out as he dropped, and then the main parachute suddenly tugged, blossomed out above him, hiding him from view. At that moment my left hand gave way; I could hold on no longer. I felt the jerk as my static line reached its end, and the pilot chute was torn from the outer pack. The main chute opened, and as ever the shock jarred my stomach. Joe was away to the right of me; I slipped air to try to increase my rate of fall, and veer the parachute after him. Soon I was not fifty feet from him, and below. He seemed to be falling free, his hands clutching nervously on the parachute cords, in the direction he was facing. If he kept his head and landed the way we had taught him, he would get safely down. I could see Ben Bolding silhouetted against the sky on the other side of him. Ben must have spilled a lot of air to get down that swiftly. I looked about me. No knowing where we would land. It seemed to me I had been dangling for ever on the end of that static webbing. The ground came rushing towards me. I had a little trick I did whenever I landed. As the ground came rushing towards me, I always drew myself up a foot or two into the parachute cords. This way, when I landed, I could drop free and the canopy didn’t immediately start to yank at me. Usually I was out of the harness before the fold of the chute had reached the ground. It was a good landing. I ran from beneath the chute towards Joe’s point of fall. He came in badly, forgetting what we had taught him of course. His legs were apart, one behind the other. Damn fool. He was lucky not to break something. Ben was at his side almost as quickly as I was.
‘I was scared he wasn’t going to make it up there,’ he said, by way of a compliment.
‘He had to,’ I said, ‘don’t forget he’s got a third of the explosives with him.’
Joe was rubbing himself down, trying to clear the parachute harness. Side by side we unclipped him, then took his parachute and ours and hid them beneath the hedge as best we could.
There was no time to hang about. The partisans would have to take a chance on finding the chutes before the Germans did.
Our destination was twenty miles away, over terrain not quite as difficult as the Course.
But first we had to find the rest of the troop.
I had forgotten all about Arthur Sywell until that moment. Thinking back, I couldn’t be certain I had seen that knife in Fred’s hand. The webbing of a static line can’t slash itself, and Arthur Sywell must have checked every inch of it while they were sitting in the plane. Of course it would be very simple for Fred to seize it as they were running along and slash it, holding the two ends together until Arthur Sywell actually jumped.
But what kind of man would do a thing like that? Arthur had told me how sick Fred had been when Arthur picked him up in Tottenham. Arthur, a policeman to the last, had acted on a hunch. He knew Fred had ‘scarpered’ and doubtless kept in touch with his old colleagues in the police, relying on them to tell him where Fred had gone. Fred swore he meant to come back to camp.
But what could I prove? And anyway, wasn’t Fred’s knowledge vital to the success of the job we had come here to do? Even if I knew Fred had murdered Arthur, dare I do anything about it until Fred had blown the vault? And, having blown the vault to give us access to so much information that could shorten the war and save so many lives, could I then indict Fred for having taken one life?
These were my thoughts as we found our bearings and set off for the original dropping zone. The code word was TIM, and the answer from the resistance would be BULL.
We had dropped in an area of trees and undulating ground leading down to the Meuse, known as the Hohe Venn. Liège was to our west, the German border and Aachen to the east and north, the Dutch border and Maastritch to the north, the Hohe Venn and Luxembourg to the south-east. Our original dropping zone, I estimated, was on the other side of the range of low hills almost due west of us. We gathered together, myself, Ben Bolding, a badly shaken Joe Stanhope, and Frank Farleigh. Ben had plotted our route with his compass; we were to aim straight across the valley to the woods on the crest of the hill. We set off in single file, Ben Bolding leading at a jog trot. My pack weighed about a hundred pounds. Hanging onto the webbing of Joe’s static line had wrenched my shoulder; I felt a dull ache beneath the shoulder blade I knew would get worse as the night progressed. We reached the wood entirely without incident. Once again, as always on these jobs, I wondered at our ability to descend out of the sky and move about undetected in country occupied by a foreign army. Up here in the Hohe Venn, the countryside was sparsely populated. Between here and Liège, however, the mining areas would be heavily occupied by German troops. The wood sat on the top of the slope, like a crop of bristly hair on a high-domed forehead. Here I estimated we were about a thousand feet above sea level. Behind us the Hohe Venn rose to two thousand feet, the foothills of the higher hills of the Ardennes. The wood was mostly oak and beech, with a few silver birch, but mostly they were poor specimens. This part of Belgium seemed unfertile, a contrast to the plains below and to the north. That, of course, was our principle reason for dropping here – on the other side of Liège, the fertile land meant a farm every five acres or so, the whole countryside dotted with small houses. Not many Belgians could be trusted; the years their country had been used as a convenient corridor by invading armies had not endeared the Belgians either to the Germans or the Allies. Mostly the Belgian people, more than any other Europeans, possibly with the exception of the Dutch, wanted no part of war, or of either army. We had strict instructions to skirt any farm we might run across. From aerial photographs and maps, however, the War Office boffins had created a route that would take us almost into Liège without coming across any known German military installations. We were to cross only two main roads, and the Meuse, and that we would do by our own log bridge.
We met our first trouble in the woods.
A patrol. Of Germans. From the uniforms I recognised them as Fallschirmjaegers, the German parachute troops. Fortunately they were looking the other way, but strung out across our path. From their present positions they would command the valley beyond. In that valley, I suspected the rest of our troop had landed. Right under the noses of the crack German regiment. They couldn’t have been there when our plane came over. With the short-barrelled automatic rifles they carried they’d have picked us off like coconuts at the fair. There were eight of them, a German section. We were four, one unseasoned. They were stretched out on the far edge of the wood in arrowhead formation, looking north. I wondered they hadn’t posted a rearguard, but when I looked to the valley past them, I could see why: partisans were scuttling about down there like ants, carting away parachutes. ‘Damned amateurs,’ I muttered. There was no sign of Captain Derby and the rest of my troop. Trust them, they’d gone to ground somewhere. They were professionals.
One of the Fallschirmjaegers had dumped his radio behind a tree. I saw him crawl back towards it. I was crouched in deep shadow where he’d never spot me.
Now the killing starts again. I had lost count of the number of men I had killed. Often, in England, I had nightmares, and all the men I had personally done to death would be ranged opposite me, each with eyes accusing. Of course, the only justification for taking a man’s life is that, if you do so, you will never have to take a life again. Each occasion is the last one. If I kill this man I will get to my objective and out again and the war will be that much shorter. It was a specious argument, as all must be that set your life higher than the life of any other individual. Arrogance says that because you can kill another man, you are morally right in doing so to protect your own life. What if the man you must kill to save yourself is another Doctor Schweitzer, or a Thomas Beecham, or a Dag Hammarskjoeld? I had drawn the bow from the sheath down my trouser leg, had bent it to fix the two end caps and the wire. I took an arrow from the other leg. Here we go again. Who is he? What is he, saint or sinner? What am I? I put the cleft of the arrow against the bow wire and drew back. He reached the radio. He had put on the headphones and was about to switch on. I let the arrow go. It’s not my decision. I am a servant of my master’s master’s master, and the servant of God has locked the ten commandments away for the duration of this human cataclysm we call the war. Now there is no ‘Thou shalt not’.
The arrow took him, as I had aimed, under his left arm. It would go straight through into his heart. The quickest possible death. That was the only commandment. Kill swiftly, and as painlessly as possible. Only that way can you avoid becoming a brute, only that way can the effect of the bestiality of war be minimised. Each one of us was a professional killer. There were twenty or so partisans in that valley and though later when I met their leader, I might tell him to teach them not to behave like bloody fools, I had a responsibility at that moment to keep them, and my men they were helping, alive. The only way that could be done was to eliminate their aggressors. Cut the cant, I told myself, you mean kill the Germans.
Ben Bolding had drawn his bow, so had Frank Farleigh. Joe Stanhope had not yet learned the instinctive actions. Ben quickly held up three fingers, Frank saw him and flashed two. I would cover. Ben got his first three, one two three, just like that. Target practice, no more. All in the back of the neck. Frank got his two, but his bow twanged; he had the wire too slack. We ran forward out of cover. Two Germans left. Ben got one with a thrown needle at ten paces. I jumped the other just as he was about to empty his rifle into Ben’s side. He was tough. I saw the hate on his face; that’s where the Germans made their mistake. We taught to kill, they taught to hate first. Often the emotion clouded their vision, slowed their actions just that fraction. We stayed cool; I had no hate, only a purpose and a trained determination. He was tall, dark, about twenty-five, and tough. He bounced up from the ground like a rubber ball, catching me bent, my knife arm forward, off balance. He slammed his knee into my groin before I had a chance to knife him. My testicles seemed to explode with pain. As I went forward I saw his knee continue its swing up into my face. It would have smashed my teeth. I butted forward into his throat, sidestepped and slammed my hand into his neck, just below his ear. As he went down I chopped his neck again. He lay still on the ground at my feet. I was doubled up in agony. Ben came over and put his knife into the Fallschirmjaeger. Never take a chance. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, through clenched teeth, and hobbled away down the hillside. I wanted to find my men quickly, and get them as far and as quickly from that amateur band of partisans.
They were waiting in the wood on the next lip of the valley.
We Tim and Bulled, and I assembled them quickly about me. Captain Derby had broken his leg on landing. According to instructions, they left him; the partisans carried him away on the back of a horse cart. Arthur Sywell had candled. All parachutists hope that’s the way they’ll go. You jump out of a plane and your parachute doesn’t open. Some people say you die of heart failure the moment you realise your parachute isn’t going to open; but there were reports in 1943 of a parachutist who did the long drop into the snow on the side of a mountain, slid down the ice-cap beneath the snow and walked out alive a thousand feet later. He was lucky. If you candled onto hard ground they had to dig you up to bury you. I had seen three in my time; now I always packed my own parachute. We wouldn’t be digging up Arthur Sywell. Let him die peacefully wherever he was, killed in action. When I got back home I’d tell the brigadier, and the official machine would go swiftly into action, locating his next of kin. Damn it, I didn’t even know who that was. For a brief moment I wished I had taken the time to get to know that much at least about him; but that had never been my method and now it was too late for regrets. Let him die, mourned only by those who loved him; I had the lives of other men to consider. I had a job to do. What had they said of me? ‘That bastard’s almost human sometimes.’
‘Did you do it, Fred?’ I asked him, as we set off.
‘Do what, Major?’
The criminal mind. How little I knew about it! What a tortuous mind to seek revenge at such a moment.
‘He would have been useful to us; you might find yourself missing him.’
‘I’ll try not to cry, Major,’ he said.
Peter Derby and Arthur Sywell gone. Now only eleven. We set off for Liège, running. We had to be there before daybreak; nearly twenty miles to travel in four and a half hours. It was easy; how many times had we done the Course in training, and I had designed that course with this particular run in mind. Anyway, this was all downhill. The hundred-pound pack bit into my wrenched shoulder. It would be a long night.
Seven miles an hour. Run and walk. How much is that in kilometres? I looked around. We were all going well, despite the weights we carried. Even Joe was going well; Ben had worked on his boots day and night to get them right. Ben, of course, was going well, trundling along like a tractor in top gear, uphill, downhill, the same controlled step, light but firm, fast but stable. When we had been going for an hour I signalled a halt. Five minutes’ rest.
We squatted down in the shadow of a wood. Ben, Alf Milner and Frank Farleigh went deep among the trees. We were hull down in a dry ditch, a three strand wire fence without barbs behind us, a long pasture sloping steeply away in front of us. The moon was still up, and we could see the entire length of the pasture. Or so I thought. Willie Garside was on watch on the left, Dodger on the right. I was in the centre, not officially on watch, but as ever permanently, naggingly, alert. I took a strip of dried beef from the pack in the pocket on the left knee of my trousers. It tasted like leather, but I had seen men live for a week on it. I started to chew. Harry Landon was eight feet from me, lying on his pack jammed against the side of the gully. He had his feet up, and seemed already asleep. I noticed, however, his hand was on the handle of his knife, his left knee bent. When he came awake, he’d uncoil as fast as a snake and twice as deadly. That came from his poacher nights!
I had not seen the fold in the hill of the pasture below us, and the patrol making its way slowly along that fold. Now they came over the top lip, advancing in line abreast, eight feet apart. Germans. Dodger and Willie saw them the instant I did. We had three men in the wood. I hissed. Harry came awake, turning as he recovered consciousness, his eyes level with the crest of the ditch. Ten of them in sight, now twelve. To him they must have seemed like giants advancing towards us. I was certain the Germans had not seen us. We could not go back through the wire. Now fourteen. One of us could have done it in total silence, but we couldn’t hope all could do it. Any noise, the slightest suggestion of our presence, and the patrol commander would simply call out an estimated range and order his men to open fire. Seventeen. And those rifles would really cut grass. I could see they were all automatic, so close were they. Christ, twenty. And then no more.
Quick glance up and down the line, our own line. Bad news travels fast, don’t they say? All my men had seen the Germans.
Only seconds of time had passed since I had first seen the Germans, but already I felt I had been watching their approach for ever. Damn the brigadier! With rifles it would have been so easy, so easy!
Back in the woods behind us, one of the three men finished relieving himself with the loudest fart I’ve ever heard. We all heard it, every one of us. The Germans heard it, though to them it was a faint noise on the breeze, unmistakably human in origin. The patrol commander raised his hand. They halted in an arc, the wings about five paces behind the centre. Well trained, as they halted they went down and virtually disappeared into the grass of the pasture. Though I heard nothing twenty safety catches would have been pulled, and twenty rounds, the first of twenty times fifteen in the magazine and other magazines easily available in pockets, were waiting for any slight sound to reveal itself. Willie and Harry were watching me. I had to make a decision. Which way would the Germans head? Would they come up to the wood then go through it? Would they approach it then turn left, or turn right? Toss a coin in the air and you’re dead. Make the wrong guess and you have twenty shadows on your tail.
Ben would have to look out for himself and the two men with him.
I pointed right.
We all started to move along the gully.
Now it comes – the long months of training. Remember Timble, all of you, and let no one stick his arse in the air. Remember Timble and get lower than the proverbial gnat’s knackers. This is the real thing, boys, and that’s not me out there with a hot rifle – it’s a pack of twenty Germans, all with mothers and fathers and wives and sweethearts, and they want to go home when the war has ended, just as you do, all in one piece. So keep your arses down! Somebody behind me slipped and there was a clink of metal on stone. Who the hell is carrying exposed metal? I heard the command snap in the air. He’d got the range too long – he’d overestimated but that’s easy when you’re looking up a hill. I wasn’t wrong about the bindiggers – proper little blood spitters they were, and bullets in the air above us like angry bees spitting in the trees above our heads, splitting twigs, smashing branches, ripping the woods apart in a teeth-hurting ratatatat of fire.
‘Keep your heads down boys and don’t panic,’ I prayed. We ran forward. The patrol commander was good. He detached the last third and the first third with a ten word command, and they spread out like bats’ wings and started to move across the front. They could move faster then we could since they made no great effort at concealment, relying on movement and firepower. They couldn’t know we didn’t have a rifle between us. I imagine they thought we were a bunch of partisans on a Boy Scout mischief patrol. Sod them! The centre third of the patrol bored forwards, the two wings sped to the side. We were trapped. When we realised it, I signalled the men to stop. Willie was a long time looking at me, and the men behind him detached themselves by a couple of paces, before they saw my signal and stopped. Dead still! Absolutely silent! Breathe through your noses. And Ben, stick a cork up the appropriate arse! Please!
The patrol commander had as good a command of his men as I hoped I had of mine. They stopped seconds after we did, lost themselves behind blades of grass. Six men bunched tighter than I would have allowed. A gap, wider than I would have allowed, eight men, a gap, six men. Check. And his next move would be mate.
I had the first move.
I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was going to do. I hadn’t a single clue. Three men in the wood. Or were they dead from that first high fusillade? The rest of us pinned down in a gully not four feet deep. One hundred and fifty yards away from us twenty Germans, who knew someone was there. They couldn’t know who but what did that matter? Bullets don’t discriminate.
No man alive can throw a knife a hundred yards, nor fire our kind of bow and arrow that distance. What could I do?
The German patrol commander was in no hurry. In his shoes, nor would I have been.
Sam Levine. Hand on my head. Good, he’s seen first time. Come to me! Keep your arse down, boy, or they’ll circumcise you again, this time from the back. Harry Landon. Hand on my head. On my head you silly bastard that means come to me, fast! When he got there I reached inside his two chest packs, took out a grenade, two grenades, three. Same with Sam. Share the six grenades, two each. Three slabs from Sam. Three detonators from my own field-dressing pocket, three coils of wire from my belt. Hand ’em round, one each. The boys know what to do. Daren’t talk, not even in whispers. Press my fingers together, palms of my hands together. God bless you lads, God bless us all, and keep our arses down. Ends of the wire to Dodger.
We set off, crawling. Straight towards the Germans.
I took the group in the centre, Sam on my left, Harry on my right.
Now you’re really in it. Body so flat on the ground you can hardly breathe. Left leg fully extended. Draw the right leg up, your instep flat on the ground. Bite with the inside of your instep and without raising your belly more than an eighth of an inch from the ground, push the whole of your body forward eighteen inches. Now your right leg is straight out and you bring your left leg forward, instep flat. Bite in and push. The grass waves all about you like a thousand beckoning hands. ‘Here I am, here I am.’ You hear your body grind over the earth, each crushing movement like the rustle of a million finger taps on kettle drums. Another eighteen inches forward. One potato two potatoes three potatoes four potatoes five potatoes six potatoes seven potatoes more. Remember when you used to play that game on the pavements when you were a little lad? And Uncle George Willie gave you a bottle of Tizer for cleaning his bicycle, and then bet you a shilling you couldn’t drink it in one go. You did drink it, and he never gave you the shilling, and several years later, when he’d got a car and was going out one Saturday night and had conned you into cleaning the car, you found a packet of three in the glove box and punctured all the ends with a pin. Uncle George Willie was killed at Dunkirk and left a wife and two. Were you the father of your own cousins? Now I’m crawling through this grass and I’ve gone about a hundred yards and it’s past time to lift my head, and when I do so I’ll either see sweet Fanny Adams, or a dirty big hairy-arsed German with his boots pointing at me and an automatic rifle ready to puncture my end. Cautious. No sudden movement. Head slowly up in the grass. Beret’s green and that’s a blessing. In the daylight you’d have to stuff your cap with grass to break up its hard lines, but moonlight has its own softening effect. Even Mavis looked lovely by moonlight, those long long years ago. Yes. There they are. You can’t see them, but you can distinguish the depressions in the grass where they lie. Head down and crawl and now count the steps. No hope to see Harry or Sam. Three individuals, all together with one purpose.
Fifty yards to go. Wet through. Right through to the belly. Elbows and knees wet. Pain in each groin, pain in each instep. Pain in my balls. Pain. Twenty-five yards to go.
Another five yards’ll be close enough.
That’s another ten of these instep-grinding, groin-pulling lifts, left right left. That’s it.
We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here!
Two grenades. Pull out the pin. Hold the handle. Let the plunger go down. Quiet, you noisy bastard. Put in the detonator. No fuse. Put the slab down on the ground. Put the detonator in the hole at the centre of the slab. Now put in the fuse. It fits. Right, take it out again. Careful. Crimp the detonator onto the end of the fuse. Nick the fuse along its side, breaking the coating. That’s it, squeeze your nail in. For Christ’s sake don’t move about too much. You’re only twenty yards from eight Germans, each with two bloody great lugholes tuned to receive the faintest sound. They’re just as crap-pants wary as you are. They want to get home, too. Now push the skewer into the ground. Okay Harry? Okay Sam? With luck we’ll be able to get back halfway. That skewer point is an earth. It carries the current back, throught the earth. Hardly seems possible, does it, a tiny electric current going to find its way back over a hundred and eighty yards of wet earth. Now stand the two grenades on top of the slab. That’s nice. They look well side by side, don’t they, like two vases! Each grenade has thirty-two fragments on its outer skin, thirty-two fragments of quarter-inch steel that snaps with razor edges all around. All ready? Check! Check everything – wire coming to fuse, fuse stripped, crimped into detonator, back out of detonator into skewer down through skewer into ground, and back through ground to that little box Dodger by now has in his hot hand. On the top of that box is a plunger, and when Dodger pushes down that plunger twenty thousand volts will come screaming along the wire you’ve been laying out while you’ve crawled. Guess what twenty thousand volts will do inside that little detonator! All all right! Move two paces to the right, Major, and you can fall out and return to base.
The crawl back took only half as long as the crawl out. It had to – those German rifles were pointing straight up my anus.
Harry had been back quite a while when I got there. His forehead was dry. Sam arrived after a minute, wet through.
No thumbs up, no Victory Roll, or ‘up and at ’em lads’ grins. Just a little quiet nod. All three of us had been too scared out there for heroics now. I put my pack on again, so did Harry and Sam, we took our positions in line, and I nodded to Dodger. He pressed down the plunger. Twenty thousand volts went screaming down the line, down three lines. Twenty thousand volts hit three detonators with a high intensity spark that shocked the detonators into explosive reaction, three explosive charges went,up, and six grenades exploded, as one. The Germans had started forward just before Dodger pushed the plunger. They must have been only five yards from the charges when they exploded. Another pace or two, they would have seen them and some would have lived. As it was, what the grenades didn’t get, we got, dashing madly across the green green pastures, faces black, knives gleaming in our hands, the rattle of death in our throats.
Ben Bolding and his two lads caught up a mile later. Alf Milner had missed castration by the thickness of a pencil. Frank Farleigh had been felled by the sergeant major after his fart – it had saved his life. Ben escaped from the wood at the far side, circled the hill, and was preparing to come up behind the flank of the German patrol when our grenades exploded. An hour later we were seven miles away.
Belfière himself picked us up on the other side of the main Aachen-Liège railroad. Ben Bolding damned near killed him. We were walking down a track between two farms. The rendezvous was to be at the far end of the track. I waited at the near end. Ben went down it with Dodger Bates and Willie Garside. A tree at the near end of the track was in the shadow of a larger one behind it. I climbed up the smaller tree. From there I could keep Ben in view all the way down the track. He stalked at one side, Willie Garside six feet behind him at the other, Dodger Bates behind Willie. We were three miles from Liège, and two farms were within a thousand yards of this track. It had been a horse ride before the war, I guessed. Ben was three-quarters of the way down, when a bush fluttered ten feet in front of him. It could have been my imagination; night vision plays its own tricks. Dawn was not far away, and the moon had already gone down. I could see as far as the end of the track but no more. Yes, the bush was fluttering, and there was no wind. I was just going to call my owl hoot, the most ludicrous bird imitation you’ve ever heard, when I saw Ben raise his right hand to waist height, palm flat downwards. Willie saw the sign and stopped. Dodger went to ground. Ben would be carrying his knife in his left hand. He dropped on the ground and I lost sight of him. Willie would be able to see him; he waited a couple of minutes and then started to advance, his left hand out palm downwards. Dodger stayed where he was, doubtless bow drawn, arrow fitted. Now it starts again, the hunted hunting, the hunter hunted. I felt sorry for the man in the hedge; he didn’t stand a chance against Willie and Ben. Willie drew further away from me, down the track, nearer to the man in the hedge. There was a scuffle at the back of the hedge and a man burst into view. Ben came out behind him, grinning. I had heard the strangled cry from up there in the tree. Ben must have had his forearm round the man’s throat, about to snap his neck when the sound burst from him. The man would never know how near he was to getting a knife in his kidneys. He was Roget Belfière.
I shook his hand. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said. It sounded so ludicrous, but what else can you say to a white-faced man, trembling from the narrowest escape he’s ever likely to have.
He didn’t speak, but led the way down the track. I could guess from his manner that no one was about, but nevertheless, we didn’t relax our vigil until we were in the barn, a mile from the bottom of the track.
When we arrived I introduced the men to him, then sent Alf Milner and Frank Farleigh out on watch. I was taking no chances. The barn, forty feet long, twenty feet across, was half full of old straw. The straw had been stacked and inside it a dozen small ‘boxes’ had been created, and a rabbit warren of passages. Twenty men could hide in that straw easily, move from one side to the other, get out of the barn through a dozen holes, up onto the roof, down into the ground. The rabbit warren passages Roget showed me extended outside the barn in the ground, four feet deep trenches covered with wood and sods of turf. The ends of these underground passages were located all round the barn at distances of a hundred feet or more, coming up in copses, under hedges. It was a location ideally suited to our purposes. There had once been a pigeon loft at the top of the barn with four windows without glass but covered with slatted wooden louvres. Anyone in that pigeon coop could look out over the entire countryside.
I hated the need to spend a day in the barn, exposed, vulnerable. Straight in and straight out – that was my way; but on this job there wasn’t the time to drop in and get to the objective in one night. We couldn’t have landed any closer to Liège than we did for fear of being spotted coming down. The journey had to be broken somewhere close enough for us to get to the location and do the job during one night, and that meant holing up during the hours of daylight. More than that, however, it meant entrusting yourself and your men to the care of other people. The burden of command is weighted by the amount of responsibility you must leave with other people. I had never approved of involving the Belgians in what we had to do – I would have preferred to make our own way to the target, relying on our own planning and skill to get us out again.
This job, dammit, couldn’t be like that. Time and distance were against us. As Ben would have said, it was a right cow!
Ben was sniffing round the barn like a lost ferret. He came across to me. I could tell he was dissatisfied.
‘We’re taking a right old chance here, Major!’ he said.
I shrugged my shoulders. He must know I had considered the dangers, but the alternative of hiding in the hedgerows near the town was too tricky. We’d done it once before, near Innsbruck in Austria. It was in the thick of winter. When the time came to go to Innsbruck to do the job, half the men were incapacitated by frostbite. I wasn’t taking any such risks again. Lying about in hedge bottoms is no way to prepare men for the rigours of a job. They needed to relax, needed to be warm, to get some food in their guts. The barn was warm and cosy, seemed safe enough and was reassuringly easy to get out of. By the first light of day, my men were all hidden in the straw caves, doubtless fast asleep, except for the two on guard.
Belfière and I went over his briefing, over and again. He checked my specially drawn maps and aerial photographs; all were substantially correct. At nine o’clock Ben Bolding came from his hiding place, his hair filled with straw, and went to find Harry Landon and Willie Garside to relieve the two guards.
‘That man has a built-in alarm clock,’ I thought.
It was a love of his men, a deep feeling of compassion for them, that wouldn’t let him rest totally while other men watched for him.
‘You are not afraid, monsieur?’ Roget asked me.
I turned to him. He was afraid, I could see that, and respected him for it.
‘Yes, I’m afraid, but I’ve learned to live with it.’
‘So have I,’ he said, ‘but it’s not easy when you grow older.’
My shoulder throbbed, my testicles ached from the Fallschirmjaeger’s kick. Life, at that particular moment in time, was not very precious to me.
‘Go, sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ll keep watch. But don’t forget to wake up again. Your canisters will soon arrive. We can unpack them and bring them in, but it’s you who must ignite them!’
‘Watch the detonators,’ I said.
‘I was watching detonators, mon enfant, when your sacred mother was looking for her first hatpin.’
I slept like a log without dreams, until four o’clock.
Did you ever hear of the Flying Gages, before the war? I was the gripper, you know, the lad who swings out on the bar up there in the top of the tent and catches the others, the flyers. Of course in those days it was more gripping than catching – all this diving and jumping, that’s modern stuff. In ’38–’39 we had a great act. Of course we weren’t brothers and sister like the posters said; Ronnie and me had started in the halls with a double knockabout comedy act. That wasn’t setting the house on fire and the bookings was dropping off and then one week in Bradford we met Amy who was doing an arobatic act with her sister Elsie, the two Roses they called themselves, and Elsie had got pregnant and that left Amy on her own. Ronnie seemed to take to her from the first, though meself I couldn’t see what he saw in her, and when Elsie went out of the business because the gin and epsoms didn’t work, Amy come in with us and we got a booking in Potters One Ring in Morecambe. Ronnie and me travelled a waggon in them days, but it wasn’t long before I was kipping on the grass outside since I’ve never seen the fun in watching two other people having a go and anyway it isn’t healthy with a third party, is it? And then, to cap it all, when we was down in Sittingbourne they went off together after the matinee up to the registry office in Chatham and made it legal. Which was hunky dory by me since she was coming on nice in the act and there wasn’t too much of her to grip.
Like I said, I was the gripper. I’d climb the Jacobs up to the top, spotlight on me if they could get it to work which wasn’t often, and swing backwards and forwards on the lead trapeze – we call ’em bars. I’d do all the usual that looks hard but isn’t if you keep yourself fit and sleep with your hands outside the blankets, hanging from my knees, from my toes, from my heels, you know, all that stuff. I’d take the applause for that lot and while the customers was clapping Amy and Ronnie would get up there and the light would switch on to them, again if they could get it to work. We had three bars. One at the far side, one in the middle I hung on, and one on the platform where Amy and Ronnie stood. The bar at the far side, away from the platform, had a thin rope on it, and you could pull that rope and get the bar to swing. No, I’m getting ahead of myself. The next part of the act was that I’d start swinging the bar I was on, then Amy would get out on the bar by the platform, and swing down to meet me. I’d grip her, and we’d do a bit of clever stuff of her whirling around beneath me while I hung by my knees. We’d do the toe-to-toe hang, you must have seen that, and we’d do the bit with the rubber between the teeth and her twisting. When she’d done I’d swing her back up to the platform, and then Ronnie would come down for the heavy stuff, some very fancy swinging. Meanwhile, and now we can talk about that third bar I was telling you about, Amy would have that third bar swinging on the end of its thin rope, judging it just nice, and then I’d throw Ronnie and let him go. The audience thought every time he was a goner. There’d be a gasp from below, maybe a scream or two, because the light was on him and none on the swinging bar, and as far as they could see he was heading nowhere, fast. We never worked with a safety net, you see. Well, almost out of nowhere there’d be this bar. Ronnie had done his two and a half by this moment and he’d come out of it straight and grab the bar. And they always went crackers below. If you never hear that shout when they think you’ve cheated them out of a fall, you’ve never heard nothing. Half of ’em with you, admiring your skill, half of ’em against you, but all of ’em shouting blue bloody murder. Well then Amy’d take off and I’d grip her, give her a couple of fancy whirls, throw her to Ronnie, and that was that, end of act. We was fully booked, I can tell you.
Now I’ve got to have a bit of a digression on the personal side of things. Ronnie and Amy was doing very nicely and since I’ve never been one much for the girls – not that I’m bent or anything – everything between the three of us was grand. Sometimes they’d be a bit stiff in the joints after going at it all night, or whatever young married couples do, but thank God there was still no sign of ’em needing a pram.
I used to go downtown a lot, wherever we were playing, looking in the shops, going to the pictures if we didn’t have a matinee, and buying steak. I’ve always had a right hunger for steak. Well, one day I was coming out of the butcher’s when I ran into Amy and being sociable, I asked her into the boozer for a drink. We had a couple or three and that was that. Honest. Nothing more than a couple or three drinks in a boozer and me with three pounds of steak in my lap. Back to the circus we went at midday closing time and I thought no more about it for a while. I was sharing a waggon them days with a lad who rode a one-wheel bicycle and was booked around the same circuit we was.
I was just frazzling up my steak when Ronnie comes stalking in the waggon and without saying a word he cops me one right across the chops. Then he looks down at the front of my trousers and knees me right up the crotch. It damn near crippled me. ‘You didn’t wash it off properly,’ he was shouting. ‘I can still see the stains.’
‘What bloody stains?’
Well, the long and the short of it was that marriage had made him a jealous sod and somehow he’d got the impression I was having it off with his Amy. When he’d smelled that couple or three drinks on her he assumed I’d got her drunk and had shoved her over in the grass on our way back. It had never entered my head to touch her. I tried to quieten him down, but he was like a dog with the rabies. We did the show that night – well, that’s the first rule, isn’t it – but it was bloody awful throwing her about and him looking daggers at me, handing her up and down knowing every time I touched her he was thinking I was having a quick feel at something that didn’t belong to me. What’s more, it got worse and worse. All the time he watched her and watched me, and nothing we could ever say would ever convince him I wasn’t slipping it into her the minute his back was turned. He even tried to change the act so’s he could be the gripper but I wasn’t having that.
This is how serious it was – I even took a little Arab girl from a balancing troop to try to show him I wasn’t interested in Amy. One night after the show I asked him and Amy to come to the waggon later to have one, and arranged it that when they came up the stairs, this little Arab girl and me, bless her heart, was on the job together. Damn them both, I thought when they came into the waggon, and I went right on and finished it before I got off the bed, pretending I hadn’t seen them; the panoramic sod turns to Amy and says, ‘Oh, aye, been having a threesome, have you?’
That was when I knew we’d never change him; and we couldn’t go on the way we were. The dead funny thing is that, all this time, Amy and me hadn’t so much as looked at each other. We daren’t. Somehow, though, his jealousy brought a link, like a bond of sympathy between us, and we began to be right good friends. Oddly enough, for the first time I could see why Ronnie’d fancied her.
One Thursday after the matinee when we had no evening performance I made up my mind to have it out with him for once and for all – tell him that if he didn’t pack this jealousy lark in, once we’d done the week in Northallerton, I would bugger off on my own. As a gripper I could work any act, anywhere. Their waggon was parked on the outer ring. It was about eight o’clock. Their light was on as I walked across. Ronnie was a great reader; he’d have a book spread out and Amy’d be sewing and I’d slip her the wink to go and see her Aunt Fan, and Ronnie and I’d have it out, once and for all.
I walked up the steps of their waggon. I didn’t knock, well, you don’t, do you, in that mood? ‘Now look here Ronnie!’ I was going to say. But she was stripped off on the side of the bed. She’d been having a bath in the tub and the water was still steaming, and she was sitting there naked on the side of the bed cutting her toenails.
She looked up, saw me. ‘He’s gone down the town,’ she said. ‘We’ve had another flaming row and he copped me one and now he’s gone down the boozer. He says he’ll be back after closing time and cop me another one.’ She showed me the bruise that was developing. On her neck. It wasn’t the first she’d had since he started this jealousy caper. I felt so sorry for her, being knocked about by a brute as ought to know better, and her so gentle and tender and soft to the touch and loving and arms about me and crying softly on my shoulder my neck my cheek and then biting my lip and before I knew it I was in her, right up to the hilt. What she was doing to me and I was doing to her I didn’t ever want to stop. And it didn’t stop when it should have, we both knew that.
When he come home she was lying on the bed asleep; of course he checked up on me and I was playing cards with the bike lad and it must have looked as if we’d been playing all evening. I should have had it out with him that night, but I couldn’t. Not with her the way she’d been and me not wearing anything I should have been. I was going to tackle him the following night, after the show.
Friday night we did the show as usual, and I could feel her hot and soft when she swung down to me. When we got to the twisting bit, she slipped the tip of her tongue in my mouth, ever so quick. We got through all that, and then he came down, like a ton of bricks. I brought him round and round, lifting him, spinning him, dropping him. She’d started the far bar swinging, and I went into the last sequence. The final part of it was three whirls, right round the bar, before I chucked him. It’s the gripper decides how far a flyer goes. You have to vary the chuck according to how far you think the bar will be on its arc when he gets to it. It was my intention to chuck him just that bit too far, right out of our lives. I’d thought about nothing else all day. It was an easy solution to all our problems, wasn’t it; I mean, he was out of his mind with jealousy. Here it comes, the last swing, into the arc, pull a bit to correct, straighten him, and let go. At the last minute, I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. I could have chucked him right out of our lives. But at the last minute, I held him back and aimed him straight for the bar. It was beautifully timed, like all my throws. He came out of the loop and the bar was there, between his hands. His hands clasped the bar – the crowd was roaring as usual – the bar took his full weight and he started to swing away from me on the first part of the pendulum and then he started to scream and when the pendulum swing reached the far end and he should have came back his hands slid from the bar and he went down down. When they picked him up his thigh had been driven up into his ribs and his spine had snapped.
She’d spread vaseline on the bar.
The forensic police lads found her pot, compared the two, came up with some of her hairs in both. You probably read about it in the papers? Luckily war broke out before they got her to trial and she died anyway having the baby. All I can think about is the way she felt that night, and the way she looked stark naked cutting her toenails.
The baby died too. That’s why I joined.