Swordpoint (2011) (21 page)

‘Oh, charming, sir.’ Warley folded up his writing materials. ‘It all sounds as though everything’s moving ahead very normally. As the Yanks say, “Situation normal, all fouled up.”’

His very willingness made Yuell feel guilty. ‘A Company will have to use the San Bartolomeo road after all,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to jump off from near the broken bridge and pick up the other companies on the other side. You’ll have to move off a couple of hours before everybody else with half your men. You’ll not be carrying your boats, of course.’

Warley smiled. ‘I trust not, sir. Not in addition to bridging material.’

Yuell wished Warley weren’t quite so amicable. ‘Tony Jago’ll have to bring them down the Capodozzi road and along the bank to you. He’ll also have to start before the rest, but he should have plenty of time to get organised before he takes the first wave across.’

‘Sir, isn’t he going to be fagged out? Hadn’t I better go across with the first wave?’

‘A good leader,’ Yuell argued, ‘isn’t selected for heroics, but for his ability to organise. Jago’s the man to take them across, with Deacon to follow up. For the moment, go and see the Engineers and find out what they want. Then get your people fed and watered, and move off. You might have to wait forward of the three-hundred-yard line on the San Bartolomeo road for Tony Jago. We can’t risk him missing you. I’ll just have to leave it to your judgement.’

‘Is
there anywhere to wait, sir?’ Warley asked.

Yuell shrugged. ‘Not much, I’m afraid.’

‘Things seem to have got a bit out of control, sir, don’t they?’

‘I’m afraid they have,’ Yuell admitted. ‘It’s nobody’s fault, really.’ Except, he thought, for a few of Heathfield’s people at Division who’d been slack. ‘It’s the weather chiefly, and that new crossing Army have planned further north. They’ve collared all the equipment and we’re just having to manage with what’s left.’

Warley’s men were bored, fed up and far from home, and when he explained what he wanted to Farnsworth, the CSM frowned. Warley knew exactly what he was thinking. Some actions went right from the start. Some never went right at all, and this seemed to be one of the latter.

As they assembled on the San Bartolomeo road among the sweating Engineers, behind them the Yeomanry’s tanks began to move. The whole area was a bedlam of noise, the sound of dropped hatches, the drum of the rain on canvas. Bundles, camouflage nets and bivouacs lashed to turret sides and engine decks softened the outlines of the great vehicles. Though they were Territorials – unpaid, Saturday-afternoon soldiers – they’d always been dead keen, with a history dating back to the days of the Napoleonic Wars. An apocryphal story about them was that when they’d been given their first tank, they’d applied to it the same zeal with which they’d once curry-combed and brushed their horses and had worked on it with emery cloth, metal polish and chamois leather so that in no time at all they’d transformed its mud-caked shape into a lump of glittering steel that blazed in the sunshine and blinded the stars.

Nevertheless, they were surprisingly good with their Churchill tanks, which everybody recognised at once from the design of the track. If Snow White were immediately recognisable by the seven dwarfs, a Churchill was recognisable by its eleven bogies, one advantage of which was that you could have a few shot off by the Germans and still be left with enough to support the tank.

Generators were throbbing and the whiff of petrol and exhaust fumes filled the air in the little orchard where they were deployed; the squadron sergeant was just completing the final adjustments to a carburettor while one of the crews finished a quick game of Brag. They seemed completely in control. They’d learned to move quickly and could cook a meal, pack their kit and be away in half an hour. And, since the early days of the desert when they’d more than once been chased away from their equipment by the Afrika Korps, they always made certain that there was at least the means for a brew-up, whatever else they left behind.

A truck that had been topping up their petrol tanks lurched away as commanders received the last details about routes and timings. Then the orders came.

‘Okay, mount and start up.’

Crews scrambled into their seats, wriggling into the hulls’ warm interiors out of the cold and the rain, signallers bent over radios, gunners crouched below the commanders’ feet. Starters whined and the engines roared into life, the flicker of exhausts coming in the darkness to throw the next tank in line into silhouette. Pinpoint tail lights illuminated white-painted air deflectors as the Yeomanry began to move.

Warley watched them trying to get into position. Although Yuell had spread the newcomers through his battalion, there were too many inexperienced men in his company, among them Second-Lieutenant Taylor who even still showed an inclination to salute CSM Farnsworth.

If they were called on for the small extra effort that would produce results, would they fail because of inexperience?

As Warley’s half-company began to move off down the tarmac road towards the broken bridge, they looked like hump-backed dwarfs threading in and out of the waiting lorries. Weighed down with timbers and girders and Bailey panels – as well as with Brens, Stens, rifles, two-inch mortars, Piats and radios – they slithered and splashed their way through the mud and puddles; grey and shadowy shapes in the mist that rose from the rain-saturated fields. In addition to everything else, they all carried ammunition but, though each rifle was loaded, there was no round in the breech in case an accidental discharge should alert the Germans. Bayonets were not fixed, but Warley intended they should be as soon as they reached the river bank.

The road seemed to be packed with vehicles and they couldn’t understand why the Germans didn’t shell them.

‘The bastards are just waiting till we get nearer,’ 000 Bawden said. ‘So they have a better chance of hitting us.’

‘Pity it ain’t like cricket,’ the other Bawden said. ‘Then we could call it off. Rain stopped play.’

‘“Il faut combattre,”’ Fletcher-Smith said, ‘“avec bon courage et gai visage.”’

‘What’s that mean?’ Hunters asked.

‘That we should be going into battle with good courage and a cheerful face.’

‘Up your kilt, you twit,’ Hunters snorted. ‘Think I enjoy contemplating having a nebelwerfer stonk drop on me?’

Warley listened to their grumbling with an affectionate warmth. Many of them had been with him for a long time now. He knew every one of the old hands, their faults, their failings, who was reliable and who wasn’t. When they’d met for the first time, in a state of extreme wariness, his own nervousness had kept him too much on edge to make an idiot of himself, while they’d hidden their doubts about him behind blank faces. Thanks to Farnsworth, Warley had kept out of trouble. It had been possible in those days to conduct a whole conversation with Farnsworth answering nothing else but ‘Sir!’ though the wealth of meaning he could put into the word had always made it clear just what he felt.

In the end, because Warley had been willing to learn, he had won a good friend who’d been a help to him in his inexperience. How much they’d both succeeded in what they were trying to do had been shown by an incident in Bardia when, on pay day, Warley had failed to secure the fastening of the bag containing the money and it had flown open, scattering notes to the wind. Yuell had given him a hard look when he’d reported the disaster, informed him that the losses would have to be made up out of his own pay, and wished him luck. Within an hour, almost every note had been handed in – greasy little balls clasped in the same dirty hands that would shortly be held out to receive them back. Warley had felt close to tears.

Yet it was his job now to lead these men across the river, knowing perfectly well that some of them would not return. Every time orders for battle were issued, it was implicit in them that some of the men trying to carry them out would very likely soon be dead.

In the growing darkness, he could hear Syzling whining and the shrill indignation of Lieutenant Deacon. It probably wore Deacon down, but at least it was good for the morale of the rest of the Company.

The poor bastards belonged to an unlucky generation. Civilisation, Huxley had said, depended on the patience of the poor, but some of these men had been asked to endure too much. The older ones among them had spent their childhood suffering the shortages of the First War and, after putting up with the Depression of the Thirties, with unemployment, the means test and the half-witted antics of mindless politicians, they were now in another war which those same politicians had made – and almost lost for them before they’d even started. It hadn’t been much of a life, when you considered it; yet now, soaked, tired, cold, deprived of hot food, despite their grumbling they showed no sign of faltering.

Plodding through the rain, he wondered how much longer the struggle for Cassino would go on. In the whole of Italy, perhaps no name implied so much sorrow. After it was all over, no doubt the histories would say it began that day in January when the Americans made their first unsuccessful crossing of the Rapido, and that it had ended on the day when the monastery was in Allied hands. To a man involved in the event, however, it was merely one more heave in the struggle and the day any battle started was the day when a mortar bomb killed a friend; its end came when they carried him from the field on a stretcher or stuck him in a hole and covered him with earth.

By this time the boats were all assembled or inflated, and had been laid out in lines among the trees near Capodozzi. As Yuell’s men fell in alongside them, they were shivering with the cold and damp and looking curiously tall in the grey haze. Because they had to carry the boats themselves, they’d had to turn out much earlier than expected and start off down the road from Capodozzi before full dark. Beyond the three-hundred-yard line they were facing the prospect of another long haul when the whistles went, while Captain Jago’s men faced an even longer one to the broken bridge where the rest of Warley’s men would be waiting. As he watched them, Yuell knew they were angry – not with him, but with the staff who hadn’t taken enough care.

While he waited for the order to move off, he was called to the telephone. It was Tallemach. ‘I understand the Yellowjackets are ready,’ he said. ‘Are you?’

‘As far as bad weather and bad luck have let us be, sir. We can go.’

‘Good. I’ll be in touch with you all the time. I only phoned to give you my best wishes.’ Yuell was about to put the phone down when Tallemach spoke again. ‘I have to confess I’m a bit worried,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned that they got a second mule string going with what’s left of the grenades and mortar bombs but some idiot sent it down the wrong road. I’ll do my best, though, Edward, I promise you. I know you need them and I’ll get them to you so that the follow-up wave can take them across.’

His words didn’t encourage Yuell. He was already affected by the tenseness and uneasiness of his men. How the Yellowjackets were faring he didn’t know, but he could only assume that their problems had been much the same as his own. They would soon find out when they linked up on the other side of the river.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to go. He hoped that by this time Warley’s company were approaching their position and were not too exhausted.

‘All right,’ he said to Peddy. ‘We’d better be off.’

It was a quiet way of starting but it was typical of Yuell not to make a fuss. He suspected his men preferred it that way. They didn’t like dramatic leaders given to vivid gestures, any more than they liked signs of uncertainty. The British soldier was different from any other soldier in the world. American officers liked to put on a show of toughness and the French a spirited performance of elan, dash, panache, whatever you chose to call it. Most of the Germans he’d seen tried to appear efficient and ruthless, while the Poles believed in tempestuousness, as though, defeated in their own land, they had to prove they’d not lost their honour. The Italians were merely apologetic and lacking in backbone. The sort of officer the British soldier liked best was quiet, unassuming, able occasionally to address his men by their first names without losing their respect. They tended to puzzle the officers of other armies because, all too often, those who were most professional chose to appear thoroughly lacking in know-how.

The tanks were edging forward now, ready to take up their positions on the strips of wire matting which had been laid in loops like railway sidings in the fields that the Engineers had cleared of mines, so they could run on at one end and off again at the other as soon as the Sappers had completed their Class 40 Bailey bridge. They had still not emerged from the trees behind San Bartolomeo, waiting for the men who were to lead them to the matting with shaded lamps. As soon as the infantry were across, it was expected they would be able to support the artillery with their guns until the time came to move.

Behind the tanks, the artillery waited. It was their job to drop shells on the known German positions overlooking what would be the bridgehead and to ring the area with a curtain of high explosive to prevent counter-attacks. A Very light from the opposite side would be the signal for them to lift their fire to the German positions higher up the slopes.

From his observation post, Brigadier Tallemach was staring across the river. Directly opposite the end of the San Bartolomeo road, beyond the railway line and the road to Rome, flat ground ran inland to an escarpment which would provide some protection. Beyond this was a winding road, already torn by artillery fire. Above it, a further half-mile back, stood San Eusebio with its heavily scarred church tower. The church itself was a wreck, a mere skeleton in which Mass was now said beneath the open sky. They’d had to shell it because they suspected the Germans were using it as an artillery observation post. Even now they couldn’t be quite sure that the Germans weren’t still using what little was left of it; especially the tower which tottered precariously but had so far defied all their efforts to bring it down.