Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

At least Schiller was getting into the spirit of things, roaring with excitement. Willi, the other gunner’s mate, was screaming right along with him, even though he detested Schiller, had been begging Karsten for a new assignment. But now it felt as if they were all coming together, their petty differences burnt off. He could see Willi sheltering behind Schiller’s fury, taking comfort in it. Why, Schiller looked as if he might drive the British off the beach with his contempt alone.

But they’d kept coming, of course. Wave after wave, too many for them to keep up with. Karsten’s arms had begun to ache, a dull pain spreading from his hands, gripping the juddering gun, to his wrists, his forearms, all the way to his back, a hard pinch between his shoulder blades. It was heavy work, this slaughter. He began to feel an odd sympathy for the exhausted men slogging through the sand, envied them as they lay themselves down before his fire.

And then Willi had been hit, his slack face suddenly looking like a child’s. Heino knelt beside him, and in quick glances Karsten watched him apply a tourniquet to Willi’s arm, stab him with an ampoule of morphine. It was a neat job, Karsten thought, Schiller would have approved, and only when Heino looked up, proud of his first field dressing, did Karsten lift his feet from the oily pool spreading behind Willi’s head.

The end had come quickly then, the hitch in their fire when Willi went down, enough to let the British close to within grenade-throwing distance. Karsten recalls the sound of them hitting the walls of the bunker — he’d thought, for a moment, they were throwing rocks — and then one had flown through the slit and Heino chased it around the concrete floor like a mouse. He heaved two more back while Karsten wrestled with a jam in the breech, before the first bright spear of the flamethrower lanced through the firing slit, boiling across the ceiling.

A moment later a second shot unfurled down the passageway to the rear of the bunker. Karsten heard the breathy roar of it first, felt the warm gust of oily fumes, and just had time to push Heino aside, knock Schiller down before the flower of flame bloomed in their midst. He and Schiller lay there, one atop the other, even after the fire washed back down the corridor, watching the flames dance on Willi’s head. They looked so lively, licking his ears and temples, it was hard to believe he was dead, until they smelled the singed hair.

Schiller had clutched him then, started screaming. Karsten stared at his lips, trying to make out what he was saying, deafened by the stammering guns. And then Schiller had put his lips to Karsten’s ear: “You have to tell them. You’re the only one. With your English. You have to tell them we surrender.”

Karsten had tried to shove him away when he understood, but Schiller hugged him like a drowning man.

“If not for me, for the boy!”

Heino was huddled in the far corner, shaking. Karsten thought he was wounded, crawled to him. “Where is it? Where?” He tried to pull apart the boy’s arms, wrapped tight around his knees, and then he saw Heino had soiled himself. The boy’s face was dark with smoke below his close-cropped fair hair; the tears rolling down his blackened cheeks looked like oil.

There seemed to be a lull outside. Maybe the enemy thought the last burst had killed them all, maybe they were summoning up their nerve to rush the bunker. In the stillness, Karsten heard the thought distinctly: I can save him.

Climbing to his feet, sagging against the blackened doorway, he tried to call out, but broke down coughing in the stink of gasoline from the charred walls. Schiller was there at once, pushing their last canteen on him with fumbling hands, making him gulp the water down. Karsten tried again, hanging his head a little farther into the passage this time, the English thick as paste on his tongue. “Can you hear me?” But there was nothing, no reply, though no flame either, and he knew he was going to have to go down the passage to make himself heard, down the narrow concrete tunnel in which there’d be no way to dodge the fire.

He put a hand out to steady himself and jerked it back. The walls were hot, and when he sucked his fingers he tasted soot. He looked back at Schiller, saw he was gripping his rifle, and for a second Karsten thought he was going to force him out at gunpoint, until Schiller shook his head, a sick expression on his face. “For me,” he mouthed, and Karsten knew he meant to put his lips around the barrel, to kill himself rather than face the flames.

Karsten stumbled down the passage then, every second expecting the rush and flood of flame to wash over him, calling out as he went, wondering if they could understand him. The slit of light ahead, tinged red by the sun, looked like tensed lips. Finally he heard something from the end of the tunnel: “Come on then, if you’re coming!” And it seemed miraculous to speak the same language as men he had just been trying to kill, who might kill him any second, the words passing between them faster than bullets.

He hurried the last few steps into the light, remembering at the last moment to raise his hands.

It was so bright after the dimness of the bunker. It made him think of those long summer evenings when he’d come out of a theater, shocked to find the day still blazing, as if it should have somehow ended, faded to black, with the film. The light made his eyeballs feel swollen and raw, and he blinked and squinted until he could make out half a dozen men, rifles trained on him, and at their center a burly fellow in motorcyclist’s goggles with a tank on his back, and before him the blunt black muzzle of the flamethrower, the delicate blue bud of the ignition flame at it’s tip.

There was a long moment of silence. Karsten must have imagined it, but he could have sworn it was possible to make out the hiss of gas, the ticking of the fuel cylinders. Standing, swaying slightly in the scarred portal, it seemed as if something more were required of him, something more formal. But under the scrutiny of the several pairs of eyes trained on him, he found himself tongue-tied, like those times in front of class when he’d forgotten the lesson he was supposed to have by heart. He felt himself grow hot, and he realized that beneath the sweat and grime he was blushing. And then it came to him, the correct phrase, rising out of memory.

“How do you do?” he asked, and the rifle barrels trained on him began to bob and weave, and he saw the men were laughing, shaking with it.

“Oh, that’s a good one, Jerry! That’s priceless, that is. How do you fucking do yourself?”

He had to lean back into the entry, clinging to the scorched camouflage netting, to call the others out. Schiller fairly ran to him, but Karsten had to order Heino out when he hung back — ashamed of having shat himself, Karsten thought. The boy appeared at last with his hands up, his right raw and bleeding. He’d tried to beat out the flames on Willi’s head.

IT’S LIGHTENING faintly on the beach, the posts of the stockade becoming visible against the sky, and Karsten thinks it must be dawn. Nearby, he hears the rasp of a match and a guard’s face flares in the gloom, then vanishes as if blown out, the light shrinking to the smoldering tip of the cigarette. Enough to draw a bead on in the darkness, though, and Karsten finds himself holding his breath, waiting for a shot. But there’s nothing. When he looks back at the sky, he realizes the red glow to the east is fire.

In the immediate aftermath of their capture, after they’d seen to Heino’s hand, one of the Tommies had offered a cigarette, holding it under Schiller’s nose, and when Schiller reached for it, closing his fist and yanking it away.

“What’s he want?” Schiller muttered out of the side of his mouth.