Robert Forrest-Webb - Chieftains

He sighed.

It was surprising how big the interior could seem at times, like a bloody cathedral; especially when it was all in darkness. He could just see the dim outline of one of the crew’s Sterlings in its clips on the other side of the compartment. It seemed a hundred yards away… too far… the other end of a long tunnel. Even Sergeant Davis’s boots looked too small to be real, as though Shadwell was viewing them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Maybe I’m asleep, thought Shadwell. It’s all a bloody dream this caper, I’ll wake up in the quarters. No such sodding luck… I’m awake! Maybe everybody’s dead? DeeJay’s dead… killed by a secret death-ray… dead in his driving seat… his head lolling and his tongue hanging out! Inky’s bought it, too… lying there with his eyes bulging in their sockets and his stomach swelling with gases. And Sergeant Davis… sitting there… just sitting… his hands on the cupola control, locked in a death-grip… clutching. Shadwell’s thoughts were making him nervous. It was like sitting up alone, late at night, watching a horror movie. Shadows normally unnoticed, suddenly became threatening.

He spoke loudly, his voice echoing slightly. ‘It’s the same as bloody Suffield.’ The remark was less of a genuine observation than a plea for someone to answer him. The fear was growing and he was feeling isolated, and lonely. Suffield was the site of the NATO tank ranges in Canada, where the regiment had spent some weeks earlier in the year. Neither the landscape nor the present circumstanced justified the remark. The only link was the time the men had spent on night manoeuvres, firing at targets through the infra-red sights… and it was dark outside Bravo Two now! Dawn was just a thin pale band above the eastern horizon.

Shadwell, as loader, saw very little of the external action when the tank was in battle. He had a periscope of his own, but there was seldom time to use it; often he saw nothing except his racks of shells, the charges and the breech of the gun. If he attempted to use his periscope, everything had already happened by the time he got his eyes re-focused to the longer distance or adjusted to the change of light. It didn’t worry him too much. Sometimes he managed to see where the shells he loaded struck their targets, but if not he still found satisfaction in imagining the scene through the voices of the men on the radio or the Tannoy.

No one answered him, so he said bleakly: ‘Well, not exactly like Suffield; at least we haven’t had all our bloody gear shot to hell by our own infantry.’ He was remembering an incident that had happened on their last visit to the Canadian ranges. On the night before a combined armour and infantry exercise there had been a bar-fight between men of the regiment and a number of the infantrymen. The next day when the tanks had been advancing across the ranges, accompanied by the infantry using live rounds in their rifles, the tanks themselves had become targets. All the personal gear carried by the crews in the storage boxes on the outside of the hulls had been shot full of holes.

There was still no reply. Desperately he changed the subject. ‘There was supposed to be an old Clint Eastwood shitkicker in the barrack’s cinema tonight. I was going with the corporal’s daughter.’

Shadwell was a few months short of his twenty-first birthday, lightly built and thin featured. His home was a small council house semi on a Manchester estate. The youngest of a large family living in crowded conditions, his first night in army quarters had been an almost agoraphobic experience. He was a man whose friendships gave him as much anxiety as pleasure. ‘Are you asleep, Sarge?’

Morgan Davis said, ‘Yes.’ He could almost hear Shadwell sigh with relief at the sound of a human voice. ‘What’s on your mind, son?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ groaned Inkester, the gunner, from below Morgan Davis’s legs, ‘why don’t you take an overdose, Eric!’

Shadwell ignored him. ‘You think we’re going to have to fight, Sarge.’ It was a statement, not a question.

Morgan Davis decided to be honest. ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘What’s it going to be like?’

‘Magic,’ interrupted Inkester. ‘We take a few of them out, then retire to a new position before their artillery can range in on us, then we brew up a few more. When the odds are reduced, we push them right back to the Urals. It’ll be magic.’

‘Be quiet and go back to sleep, Inkester.’ ordered Davis. He spoke towards Shadwell in the darkness. ‘No one knows what it’s going to be like. It’s a new kind of war. All we have to do is to obey orders, and keep our heads down.’

‘My dad was in the last war,’ said Shadwell, in an attempt to prolong the conversation. ‘RASC. He got one home leave from Egypt in three years. Three bloody years, Sarge.’ It seemed like a lifetime to the young loader.

‘This war won’t last more than a few days.’

‘Just so long as I get a crack at a T-80,’ said Inkester. ‘Just one T-80 in my sight, broadside on… I dream of them, Sarge. A whole long row of them silhouetted on a skyline, moving along like ducks in a shooting gallery. Pop… pop… pop… there they go. Magic!’

The radio crackled. Sergeant Davis adjusted his headset, pulling it down tighter over his beret. ‘All stations Charlie Bravo, this is Charlie Bravo Nine.’ The troop leader’s voice was penetrating. ‘Stand to, and prepare for action. Load Hesh, and keep to your own arcs. Out.’

Davis acknowledged, and then switched on the Chieftain’s Tannoy. ‘Okay, lads, stand to. Shadwell, load Hesh.’ He didn’t give them time to question him. ‘It sounds like we’ve got a war…’

Inkester’s voice was pitched high with surprise: ‘Christ!’

‘Now take it easy… all of you. Inkester, no itchy fingers, wait for your orders. If someone’s going to start something, it’s not going to be Bravo Two.’

‘Loaded,’ bellowed Shadwell, his voice cutting through the still air.

‘You daft pillock,’ complained Inkester, loudly. ‘You bloody near deafened me! We all watched you load a minute ago.’

‘Shut up,’ said Davis. ‘Keep your eyes open, and stay alert. Hewett, everything okay your end?’

DeeJay revved the engine slightly and checked his gauges. ‘It all looks good, Sarge.’

‘Keep it that way.’ Davis dimmed out the compartment lights and leant his head back against the rest. He reached out and touched the steel of the turret with his fingertips. It was cold, damp with the condensation of the crew’s breath. He could feel the throb of the engine. Bravo Two! She was a good tank, reliable, responsive to the treatment she received from her crew. He remembered being told how it had been when the cavalry regiments lost their horses before the start of World War Two — men had wept as their mounts had been led away to be replaced by armoured vehicles. If the situation were reversed, Davis thought, he would have identical feelings… you got to know a vehicle, trust it, understand its likes and dislikes. He had never owned a horse, but three-quarters of a million pounds worth of Chieflain took some beating. The womb-like darkness and security of Bravo Two’s fighting compartment was comforting.

Any doubts which were in the mind of Captain Mick Fellows of the Royal Tank Regiment concerned not the rapidly developing situation, but the sanity of being placed in his present position by a foreign commanding officer. He felt sure the scheme in which he and his small unit of Rarden-armed Scimitars were involved, on detachment to the Armoured Infantry Division of the 1st German Corps, must have been devised by a lunatic with no concern whatsoever for the lives of his men.