Колин Форбс - Tramp in Armour

‘Don’t count your chickens.’

‘Chickens? Well, poulet roti might do at a pinch. It’s rather plebeian, of course.’

They chattered on for several minutes and Penn’s lively banter, plus the sight of the approaching town, revived Barnes, but soon he sent Perm down into the tank again as a precaution. It would be just their luck to meet another lorryload of German infantry leaving the town. He repeated his routine, scanning the hot blue empty sky, searching the surrounding countryside for signs of danger, and all the time the tank rumbled forward, taking them even closer to the unknown town, which he now had difficulty in seeing because the road was turning and the sun shone straight into his eyes.

As the town came closer he found himself shading his eyes more frequently, straining to catch the detail of the silhouette which looked oddly still in the blazing sunlight. Once again he checked his all-round observation and then quickly looked ahead, his hand forming a peak over his eyes, his sense of unease growing. This town had been badly bombed. What he had taken for buildings from a distance on closer inspection revealed themselves as stone fa9ades of irregular shape, and now he was sure that at least half the town was in ruins. But in a place of this size there must be someone left, someone who could tell him the name. And they must find more diesel. A tank running low on fuel was a sitting duck, its second weapon – movement – immobilized. He’d better break the news to them. He spoke quietly.

‘This place looks a bit of a wreck – I think Jerry has been here before us and he dropped a few carefully placed bombs.’

They were less than a quarter of a mile from the town now, a small town of possibly about thirty thousand inhabitants he estimated. He held his hand up again, screwing up his eyes, his mouth tight. It reminded him of pictures he had seen of Ypres taken during the First World War, although the one thing he did know was that they were many miles away from that ill-fated Belgian town. Grimly, he watched the advancing silhouette.

The outskirts had been gutted, no other word for it. The walls which were still standing were windowless, the upper frames like sightless eyes enclosing clear sky beyond. Halfway down the walls the scree slopes began, slopes of rubble and debris. These were relics of buildings and there was no sign of life anywhere – no women working in the fields nearby, no men clearing the mess out of the streets. Just nothing, nothing at all. And over the devastation there hung a curious atmosphere, a horrible silence which seemed even more unnatural in the bright sunny afternoon. Water, fuel, ammunition, food…

They crawled through the outskirts at minimum speed, hearing the tank tracks grinding their way over pieces of masonry, feeling the hull drop slightly as the stone was crushed to powder. Barnes ordered Reynolds to drive down the very centre of the rubble-littered highway as he anxiously watched the spectral walls of the bombed buildings they were passing, wondering whether they should turn back at once. It was by no means certain that the vibrations of the tank movement might not bring down one of those hanging walls. Some of them seemed to stay upright by a miracle of balance. Cautiously they edged their way round a corner and drove deeper into the town.

The devastation was getting worse, no doubt about that. Whereas before many buildings had at least one wall standing they were now entering an area of almost total annihilation. Any relationship between what Barnes saw and a town could only be visualized by stretching the imagination to its limits. He calculated that an area close to a quarter square mile was a sea of rubble. The rubble was arranged in cone shapes which rose up between huge craters, a scene more like a moon landscape than a town in northern France, and the going was getting worse.

‘Driver, halt. Keep the engines running.’

He gave Penn permission to come up and climbed down to the street, resting one hand on the hull and then snatching it off as the heat seared his flesh. Changing his mind, he told Reynolds to switch off so that he could listen carefully to hear whether he could detect any sign of life; he still found it hard to believe that a town of this size had been abandoned.

‘There’s always someone who stays behind,’ he told Penn, ‘someone who tries to make the best of it.’

‘The Panzers may have been through as well,’ objected Penn.

‘But they’re not here now, are they? If they have been this way they’ll just have passed through without occupying the place – that’s the sort of thing that’s happening from what you told me about the news bulletins.’

‘But no one would stay here – just look at the place.’

‘I know, but it may not be so bad on the far side. We’ll take a look.’

‘I’d be quite happy to clear out altogether, thank you.’

Penn was voicing the feeling of all three men. There was something horribly oppressive about the deserted town, as though it had been sacked by barbarians who had taken all the inhabitants away into slavery. On the far side of the rubble sea a wall swayed gently, leaned and toppled out of sight. They heard a dull thud and saw a huge cloud of dust floating upwards. Barnes was still listening when suddenly he was galvanized into action, ordering Penn down inside the tank, warning Reynolds to close his hood, leaping up into the turret himself and ramming on his headset as he issued instructions.

The tank headed into the heart of the rubble sea, threading its way between the cones, slipping down the slope of a crater, crossing the floor and mounting the other side. They were near the centre of the area before the first planes appeared, a squadron of Stuka bombers flying low. Barnes issued the order to halt in the middle of a wide crater, went down inside the tank, slammed the lid closed and waited. The first stick of bombs fell some distance away, growing fainter as they fell farther off. Perm’s voice was bewildered.

‘Surely they couldn’t have spotted us?’

‘No, I think they were coming here anyway. I wanted us well clear of those walls.’

‘But they’ve already smashed the place to bits…’

He stopped and they listened, staring at each other. The scream was starting again, the scream of a Stuka falling into a high-speed dive before it released its deadly load. Another stick was coming, but this one was different. The first explosion was a long way off, the next one closer, the third closer still, a frightful nerve-shattering crump. Penn began conducting an unspoken conversation with himself. It will be the next one that gets us, the next one… The bomb exploded in their ears and the shock wave was like a hammer-blow. The hull of the tank shook, wobbled, settled again. Then a fifth crump farther off. A sixth, fainter still.

‘They must be stark raving bonkers.’ Penn sounded indignant, a highly strung form of indignation. ‘They did the job last time – are they running out of space to store their perishing bombs?"

‘There’s an encouraging side to this,’ said Barnes, going on quickly as he saw Perm’s expression. ‘They must have come back to make the place absolutely impassable – which looks as though they’re frightened Allied reinforcements will be moving up here soon.’

‘Glad to hear it. I feel so much better, Sergeant, now you’ve told me that.’

The scream of another plane starting its dive commenced, a plane which sounded to be directly overhead, the scream rising to a crescendo as it came down as though the machine were out of control, a scream which sent cold water down Barnes’ spine. Then the explosions came, heart-shaking crumps landing all round them, pinpointing Bert’s position. Between explosions he heard another distant sound, a heavy thump. One of the remaining walls had gone. At least he had taken them clear of those insidious hanging walls. Barnes was well aware that the majority of casualties during an air raid on a built-up area are caused by the inhabitants being buried under collapsing masonry. He glanced at Penn to see how the corporal was standing up to the bombardment and Penn looked back, deliberately quivering the ends of his moustache in mock terror.