Swordpoint (2011) (17 page)

The explosion lifted heads on the far bank.

‘We got a patrol across there, Sarge?’ somebody asked. ‘Yes, keep your eyes open for ’em. They’ll probably be on their way back.’

The first speaker was silent for a while. ‘Not them, Sarge. That was a mine. They just walked into it. You ask me, they’re napoo. Kaput. Finis.’

From across the water, German weapons had opened up, blindly spraying the bank. It sounded like all hell let loose.

The soldiers peered into the darkness. They could hear voices at the far side. They seemed almost opposite them.

‘Give ’em a go with the Bren,’ the sergeant said. ‘At least it’ll make the sods keep their heads down.’

As the Bren ripped out a short burst, a voice came from among the bushes just below them. It sounded angry.

‘For Christ’s sake, stop that firing! You almost blew our bloody heads off.’

Jago appeared, pausing just long enough to tie the dinghy to a tree. Between them, he and McWatters dragged Gefreiter Pramstrangl up the muddy slope to the footpath and there let him sprawl among the puddles.

‘He don’t look so good, sir,’ the sergeant said.

‘You should see the other bastards,’ Jago said. ‘Where’s the nearest transport?’

‘End of the San Bartolomeo road, sir. About two hundred yards in that direction.’

Aided by one of the sergeant’s men, McWatters hauled Pramstrangl to his feet and they set off after Jago who was already striding out in search of a vehicle. Though they didn’t know it, and Jago had no intention of letting them know it, his whole body was shaking.

There had been more than a touch of bravado in his volunteering yet again, and he could only feel that God’s hand had been in it somewhere.

By sheer chance, they’d put their dinghy ashore at one of the gaps in the German defences and someone endeavouring to reach them as they’d left had clearly stepped on one of his own mines.

‘There he is, Herr Hauptmann.’

Lieutenant Thiergartner turned and looked up at Captain Reis.

The injured man was lying in a heap on the mud, his life’s blood draining away into the river. He had trodden on a Schu mine, one of the Germans’ more delicately contrived inventions which flung up a charge to explode chest-high in front of its victim. Even if his chest hadn’t been punctured, he would still have been of little use to anybody because an eye was hanging out on one cheek and the other cheek was ripped open to show his teeth.

Alongside him, two grenadiers, one of them the farmhand Pulovski, were waiting.

‘Get him up here,’ Reis said.

Pulovski began to move to where the dying soldier’s head lay on the mud and Reis barked at him. ‘For God’s sake be careful where you tread, you damn fool,’ he snapped.

‘Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.’ Pulovski looked up, his simple face that of a sixteen-year-old boy, bright and helpful in the light of Thiergartner’s torch. In his life at home on the Thuringian farm, the most difficult thing Pulovski had ever had to handle up to joining the army was harnessing a horse. He had no mechanical bent and no idea of danger – though he was an expert shot and an excellent provider of extra rations, always knowing just where to look for eggs or rabbits or pheasants.

‘All right, pick him up,’ Reis said.

Smiling and full of willingness, Pulovski began to lift the wounded man, forgetting once more where he put his feet. Reis saw the other men moving back.

Nobody wanted to be too near if Pulovski set off a mine, and Reis himself edged away. Showing an unexpected confidence in the slow-witted countryman, Thiergartner didn’t move and Reis had to admire his courage.

As they got the man on to the path, Reis bent over him. There was little they could do for him.

‘What about the others?’ he asked.

‘One badly hurt, Herr Hauptmann,’ Thiergartner said. ‘God knows what they hit him with. A mechanical saw, by the look of his head. The other’s in the bushes. He’s already dead. There’s no sign of Pramstrangl.’

‘All right.’ Reis nodded. ‘See that they’re brought back, and inform the burial squad. You might also get in touch with headquarters and tell them to send a new relief party down. The Tommies wouldn’t have sent a patrol across if there weren’t something in the wind, and if there is we must be on the look-out for it.’

Jago’s prisoner was the first thing that had gone right. Yuell had spent the whole evening worrying about the missing bombs and grenades and he was immensely grateful to Jago for his success.

‘I’ll see you get something for this, Tony,’ he said.

Jago shrugged. He knew he didn’t deserve a medal but it would be nice, he thought, to have a ribbon up like Warley. ‘McWatters, too, sir,’ he suggested. ‘If they don’t give McWatters something, you can send mine back.’

McWatters, who was a communist and was fighting less for the British Empire than to bring down the Fascist beasts who were standing in the way of world socialism, hadn’t much time for such baubles as medals and told Jago so.

‘Ah dinnae wan’ no medal,’ he growled.

He was going to be put down for one all the same, Jago thought, and even if he still refused it Jago had no intention of sending back anything of his own. What he’d said had sounded good, however, especially with Mr Zeal listening, because it would get back to the men and that sort of thing never did any harm. There was a lot that was false about Jago, but at least his courage wasn’t part of it.

Despite having gone through the desert and up the length of Italy doing the preliminary interviews of German and Italian deserters and prisoners, Lieutenant Marder still remained a bit of a hothouse intellectual. He was also too much inclined to look on the bright side, to jump to conclusions, and to believe what he wanted to believe. What was more, because he’d learned a few tricks, he’d begun to think he was clever.

It was one of the ill chances of the day that Gefreiter Pramstrangl
was
clever. He wasn’t sophisticated like Lieutenant Marder because he’d never been to university, hardly even to school, but he’d lived most of his life in the mountains and had the sharp wiliness of a mountain fox. During the winters before the war he had run a ski-shop at Igls and during the summers driven the tourist bus from Innsbruck. He took an immediate dislike to Marder because he looked so much like the haughty British tourists who’d so often treated him like dirt.

Marder had already got Pramstrangl’s name, rank and number. There was no need to ask for his unit because it was shown on his collar, and Marder knew all the collar insignia. He also firmly believed in what Caesar had said in Shaw’s play: When a man knew something, the chief difficulty was to prevent him communicating it to all and sundry. According to the Duke of Marlborough, no war could be conducted without early and good intelligence, and a good Intelligence officer, to quote another of Marder’s idols, had to be courageous, adroit, patient, imperturbable, discreet and trustworthy. Lieutenant Marder considered he was all the lot.

Now he studied Pramstrangl knowingly. Prisoners, he believed, were much more inclined to be communicative immediately after capture, if treated with kindness. The knowledge that he’d survived a violent meeting with an enemy filled with murderous intent always loosened a man’s tongue, and it was important to create a climate of confidence between the questioner and the questioned. He pushed a cigarette across to Pramstrangl who frowned warily.

‘I’m not a Nazi,’ he said.

‘You people never are, I notice.’ Marder smiled smugly, making Pramstrangl dislike him even more.

The interrogation was taking place in the Intelligence truck, which was like a newspaper office just before edition time. There was always someone arriving or a telephone ringing and men were working to get maps of the intelligence summary up to date. Marder glanced at the big 1/15,000 map where oblongs and squares denoted enemy minefields and blue marks indicated machine-gun posts, headquarters, supply dumps and trench systems. Then he opened Pramstrangl’s pay book. ‘Medal for the Einmarsch in Czechoslovakia. Medal for Poland. Iron Cross, Second Class, in France. Iron Cross First Class, in the Crimea.’ This wasn’t a new boy. He jabbed a hand at the map.

‘You were taken just here,’ he said. ‘What were you doing there?’

‘I was going to the observation post about thirty yards further along the bank.’

‘What were you observing?’

‘You people, of course.’

‘Don’t be impertinent!’

‘Well, what else would I be observing? The moon?’

Marder frowned. He jabbed at the map again. ‘This point here,’ he said. ‘Is it fortified?’

Pramstrangl studied the map. Since it ought to be obvious even to an idiot that the point would be fortified, he didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t admit it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

‘And this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Minefields? Where are they? Here and here along the bank?’

‘Yes.’ All this was obvious too, and Pramstrangl saw no point in backing away from it.

‘What about the approaches to San Eusebio from this direction?’

Pramstrangl hesitated before answering. He didn’t like the Nazis. He was a good Austrian and had loathed them since the day they’d walked into his country in 1938 for no other reason than that they believed it needed their special brand of efficiency.

But his wife and two teenage daughters lived in Steinach, which was just north of the Brenner Pass on the route from Rome into Austria, and having seen what the war had done to Italy he had no wish for it to do the same to Steinach. The longer, therefore, that the fighting remained outside Austria the better. Much wiser to let the Germans be knocked out in the north by the Russians or the RAF, or by the Second Front which they all knew was bound to come before long, and hold the enemy back in the south.

He pointed to the rough ground to the east of San Eusebio. It was full of machine-gun nests because the Germans believed that the Allies would never try a frontal attack but would approach from the side.

‘Not much there,’ he said. ‘They’ve got Russians there. Conscripted men. They’ve just arrived. There are some Czechs there, too.’

Marder’s heart leapt. Nobody had heard of defecting Czechs and Russians on this front before. It seemed to indicate a shortage of troops.

‘Here?’ he asked and Pramstrangl nodded.

‘What about the river bank?’

Pramstrangl shrugged, chiefly to give himself time to think again.

‘Not much,’ he said eventually. ‘They haven’t the weapons because they’re withdrawing them. They’re building a new line near Valmontone.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, it’s clear you’ll break this one eventually–’

‘Where does the line go?’

‘Along the mountains towards the Adriatic.’

‘You sure of that?’

‘I was up there with a lorry last week. They’ll pull back when the pressure here gets too much. They’re saving the troops for when you get to Germany.’

Pramstrangl decided this was a stroke of genius because it was just the sort of thing the Nazis would do.

Marder pushed the map across. ‘Machine-gun nests,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

Pramstrangl almost smiled. This one was a pushover, he thought.

Lieutenant Marder was elated when he reported to Yuell. He had watched Pramstrangl being marched off to where a lorry was waiting to transport him to Division, then turned to find the colonel waiting for him. He spread a map across the blanket-covered table and opened his notebook.

‘Machine-gun nests, sir,’ he said. ‘Here, here and here. This route from the end of the San Bartolomeo road should be easy. There are only Russians and Czechs there.’

‘I didn’t know there were Russians and Czechs on this front,’ Yuell said.

‘They’ve just come,’ Marder pointed out. ‘We’d better inform Division, because it surely means our job’s going to be easier than we thought. In fact, he said that with a bit of pressure the Germans would pull back. They’re already constructing a new line along the mountains.’

After lunch and a long talk with Heathfield, Yuell decided to get his company commanders and the artillery, armour and engineers together again, to go over the final details.

He explained what Marder had told him. ‘Personally,’ he ended, ‘I’m inclined to think he’s a bit too optimistic and I’d warn you about rushing your fences. However, you all know how to go about things by now, so I’d suggest you do exactly that and move with care. Don’t imagine that just because you’ve been told there’s nothing in front of you, there won’t be.’ He looked at Jago who, as the only man who’d actually crossed the river, was also there. ‘What about you, Tony? Can you add anything to what we know?’

‘Only that the stream runs surprisingly fast, sir. There’s quite a lot of drift.’

Yuell nodded. The plan was clear in his mind, clarified by pad jottings and lines, arrows and symbols drawn in chinagraph on the talc of his map. ‘Let me say straight away,’ he went on, ‘that I think this is a pretty hasty operation we’ve been handed. I suspect the other side of the river – this side, too, for that matter – is more covered by mortars than we’ve been told, and I think we can expect the usual reception in the forming-up areas. Finally, the place is stiff with mines and we have no guarantee that they’ll be lifted before we go in.’