Колин Форбс - Tramp in Armour

‘Pierre,’ shouted Barnes, ‘come down here a minute.’

The lad came down slowly, watching his feet as he slithered down the slope, not looking at what lay beneath him. Up on the bridge Penn still looked down, his face like stone. When Pierre reached the bottom he stopped and looked at Barnes, his hair freshly combed, his expression blank.

‘Take a good look, Pierre,’ invited Barnes. This is the war you were so eager to get mixed up in. When you reach your age group you’ll get called up – and it’s my bet the war will last long enough for that. But don’t ever think that it’s going to be fun.’

Pierre’s eyes wandered over the bodies, his face still devoid of all emotion. He stood very erect.

‘Take a good look,’ went on Barnes, watching him closely, ‘These are the bastards who machine-gun women from tanks and planes.’

‘Can I go now?’ Pierre asked coldly. He omitted to add the word ‘sergeant’.

‘Yes, go straight back to the tank and wait there with Trooper Reynolds. Perm, come down here a minute.’

He waited. Pierre had disappeared over the bridge when Penn reached the tow-path, his eyes blazing, his voice sharp-edged.

‘Did you have to do that to him?’

‘I had my reasons. Now find two machine-pistols in working order and as many spare magazines as you can. That’ll give us one each and they may come in handy.’

They worked in silence. Barnes counted the bodies and as far as he could make out the truck had carried a complement of twenty men including those lying in the field on the other side of the road. He would have liked to search the clothes of the officer who had undoubtedly sat in the cab beside the driver, but in; this jumbled horror such a search would have taken hours. Instead, he went back to the man without legs, felt under the body, and extracted his Army pay-book. Gustav Freisler, the 75th Field Regiment. At least that’s what he thought the long German word identifying the unit meant. He put the pay-book in his pocket. It would positively identify the unit when he reached the Allied lines and also he wanted the report of this poor devil’s death sent back to Germany via the Red Cross as soon as possible.

When they returned to the tank, Barnes spent a short time explaining to Penn and Reynolds how the German machine-pistols worked and he made them practise using them without magazines. While this was going on Pierre sat on the engine covers and gazed up at the sky without taking the slightest notice of Barnes. Penn practised with his pistol diligently and said hardly a word, climbing up into the tank when the exercise was over with an expressionless face. Only Reynolds seemed unaware of the coolness in the atmosphere and he spoke with conviction as he turned to get down inside his hatch.

‘Good old Penn. He can really use that two-pounder.’ ‘Good job he can – there were twenty of them inside that truck.’

Good old Penn. Reynolds was right there. If he hadn’t clobbered that truck with his first shot, the dead German officer might well be examining their pay-books now. But it was what lay ahead of them that was occupying Barnes’ thoughts now, and as he screwed up his eyes to check the late afternoon sky he felt sure that they couldn’t hope to get through the coming night without very serious trouble.

There was an element of danger in his decision, but Barnes took a calculated risk when he decided to spend the night by the river bridge. Since leaving the shelled truck by the canal they had experienced an evening of tension which had played havoc with their already strained nerves, and since both Penn and Reynolds had taken it in turn to mount guard during the four nights when Barnes lay unconscious at Fontaine, all of them were in a state close to physical exhaustion. Probably the factor which more than any other drained their resources was the knowledge that they were moving behind the enemy lines, that at any moment they might encounter an overwhelming German force which would easily annihilate them in a matter of minutes. Most of all, Barnes feared that they would meet a Panzer column head-on.

The rising tension made itself felt in different ways. Two hours had been wasted by the roadside when the engines broke down and they struggled to find and repair the defect. During this time Pierre, who had to leave the tank when they pulled open the engine covers at the rear, sat on the grass verge without speaking. Barnes suspected that even Penn was beginning to wish that he hadn’t been so keen to bring the Belgian with them, but he couldn’t be sure because the corporal himself was unusually silent. Reynolds worked stolidly on the engines, noticing nothing wrong, but then Reynolds was never oversensitive where atmospheres were concerned. They found the cause of the trouble eventually, repaired it, had a drink of water, and then moved on, leaving the road to circle round a town. So far they had avoided three towns by moving across open country in wide sweeps, returning to the road well beyond each town. This tactic, too, had caused an argument with Penn.

‘Why don’t we risk it?’ he had pressed. ‘We have Pierre and one of us can sneak in with him to get some news.’

‘We may have to do that later, but not yet,’ Barnes had replied firmly. ‘I want to have some better idea of where we are first.’

‘Doesn’t the map tell you that?’

The engine had just been repaired and before starting out again Barnes and Penn had wandered off into a nearby field as Reynolds made his final checks.

‘No, it doesn’t, Penn. We’ll go round this place like we went round the last one.’

From where they stood they could see the town in the distance. A tall church spire, several factory chimneys, a long line of buildings. A flight of Stuka dive-bombers crossed the sky very high up, heading for the north-west. Since leaving Fontaine they had stopped four times while enemy planes flew out of view. Irritably, Penn persisted.

‘But if you just trace the road down from Fontaine…’

‘Penn, the road we’re travelling on doesn’t correspond with the road we thought we were taking. It doesn’t correspond with it at all. We’re travelling south-west now, I know, but for a long time we were heading due south.’

‘The compass may be playing up. It does sometimes with all that metal…"

‘I’m going by the sun – that isn’t affected by the metal, is it?’

‘You mean we may have got back on to a different road when we made one of our detours?’

‘I mean there’s something damned peculiar about the whole business. So,’ Barnes spoke emphatically, ‘we’re not going near any town today. We’ll go round this place, wherever it is. We’d better get moving.’

It was very close to dusk when Barnes saw the bridge, a large stone affair with a broad span which could easily take two lanes of traffic. They were in the middle of open country miles away from anywhere and within half an hour they wouldn’t be able to move without putting on the headlights, a course of action he was anxious to avoid at all costs. As they came closer he noticed a copse of trees to the right of the bridge. He stopped the tank and went forward with Penn to investigate.

‘This might be a good place,’ Penn suggested. ‘Bridges are lucky for us. We could park Bert in these trees.’

But the copse was a hopeless cover. It was simply a handful of thin-trunked saplings staggered at intervals through the grass. No matter how they parked the tank, Bert would still be visible from the road, and it was the road which worried Barnes. Penn thought differently.

‘This is an ideal spot, particularly at night.’

‘Not correct, Penn. Any vehicle coming over that bridge from the south will swivel its headlights straight over this spot. We’ve been lucky so far — I think the German invasion has cleared all normal traffic off this road but that doesn’t mean Jerry won’t be sending more troops this way. We’ve got to find somewhere we can park Bert completely out of sight. Under that bridge might do the trick.’