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Authors: John Harris

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Swordpoint (2011) (28 page)

BOOK: Swordpoint (2011)
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‘They must be able to see us from San Eusebio,’ Yuell said, his head down as mud and small stones spattered down on them. ‘If we could only get an air strike on the place, we might get somewhere.’

But, even if they’d had the means to direct one, there could have been no help from the air with the cloud level below one thousand feet. Their position was growing desperate. Fletcher-Smith had been gone some time, but whether he’d succeeded or not nobody knew, and all they could do was hang on.

Crowding the tumbledown cowshed, the wounded lay side by side in the mud without benefit of stretchers or blankets. The doctor and the orderlies were giving morphia injections and writing in copying pencil on the injured men’s foreheads the time and size of the dose they’d given. O’Mara had been moving among them the whole of the night, his spectacles shining, his smile always present. Because of his calmness, men who’d schemed like foxes to avoid church parades had asked him to say a prayer for them, and more than one had gone to his Maker with Latin phrases falling on his fading hearing. Warley could only suppose it was because O’Mara was unafraid of death.

‘The apprehension of personal danger can be mastered,’ O’Mara said. ‘Once you accept that nothing worse than death can be expected.’

‘It’s a useful faith to have, Padre.’

O’Mara smiled. ‘Faith’s not just a guess at what lies beyond the clouds, my son. Sometimes I think that’s something that bishops and cardinals don’t always appreciate. To someone with faith, death’s only a step into a better world.’

‘It’s not the better world I fear, Padre,’ Warley admitted, his voice a croak because, after all the shouting of the night, it had finally whirred away into nothingness like a broken watch-spring. ‘It’s the step itself, the pain of the mortal wound.’

As they crawled across the bottom of the dip, the doctor was just putting a man’s arm in a splint while an orderly gave him a sniff of chloroform. One of the corporals had also just been dragged in, with one leg half-severed. The shock seemed to grip him, however, and he appeared to feel no pain. The morphia he’d been given hadn’t yet begun to take effect, but his leg was bleeding badly and the dressings had slipped. The doctor told Warley to hold a pad on it. Then, to Warley’s surprise, he opened his jack-knife and quickly cut through the fragment of sinew and flesh that still attached it. The corporal didn’t seem to feel a thing.

A great many of the injured were suffering from head or eye injuries because the fragments of shells and bombs bursting on the rocky slopes flew further. As O’Mara continued to move among them with his dwindling supply of water, he became increasingly conscious how essential it was that those men still lying in the open should be brought in.

‘I’m going to try to get the wounded in,’ he announced suddenly.

Yuell swung round. ‘Don’t be damn silly, Padre! It’s impossible.’

‘I’m going to try, nevertheless, Colonel, sir. Perhaps the Lord will cause the Germans to act with mercy.’

Yuell was about to reply when he was called to the other side of the dip and in the urgency forgot about O’Mara. Frowning, the padre stripped to the waist, finally removing his white vest. Then he replaced his shirt and tunic and attached the vest to his walking stick. Before anyone realised what he was doing, he had raised this impromptu flag and slowly begun to edge himself above the lip of the hollow. A burst of machine-gun bullets threw earth in his face and he blinked; then the gun stopped. Beyond the wire, they could hear shouts and gradually all the firing ceased and there was an almost unearthly lull in the battle.

‘You wish to surrender?’

The voice came clearly across the open ground.

‘I do not wish to surrender,’ O’Mara shouted. ‘I claim the security of the Red Cross, though I have no Red Cross flag. I am a Roman Catholic padre and I wish to bring in the wounded and give absolution to the dying.’

There was a long silence. Seeing O’Mara’s flag, Yuell had crawled back across the bottom of the dip.

‘Come down, Padre!’ he snapped. ‘There’ll be no surrender here.’

‘I’m not surrendering, Colonel, sir,’ O’Mara said calmly. ‘I’m a Christian appealing for mercy to men who are also supposed to be Christians.’ And with that he slowly straightened up and stepped outside the dip.

‘The buggers’ll shoot the sod,’ Puddephatt gasped.

‘Dry up,’ Warley said, his heart in his mouth.

The silence seemed interminable, and then a voice came from the German lines. It was Reis. By good fortune he’d joined Thiergartner to check that he was as secure as he said he was.

‘I, too, am a Catholic,’ he said. ‘You may collect your wounded, Father, but I have not the authority to allow you to evacuate them to the river. You have one hour and you must not approach our wire.’

O’Mara lifted his hand in a blessing, two fingers upraised; then he called briskly over his shoulder to Warley.

‘One hour, me boy! Better get cracking!’

‘Pick the smartest men, sir,’ CSM Farnsworth hissed. ‘Don’t let the buggers realise what it’s like here.’

‘You’re right,’ Warley said. ‘Corporal Gask, Rich, Martindale, Bawden, Duff, Parkin. You’ll do for the first party. Sar’-Major, round me up some more.’

Twice the stretcher-bearers went out from the dip, lifting the inert figures while O’Mara continued to stand bolt upright in No Man’s Land holding up the white vest on his stick. As the second party struggled back to the dip, Reis’ head appeared.

‘I could just knock yon hoor off from here,’ McWatters said, cradling his rifle.

‘There’ll be no shooting,’ Yuell snapped. ‘Not with the padre out there.’

‘You are a brave man, Father,’ Reis called.

O’Mara managed a smile. ‘I hope I’m a compassionate one, my son,’ he observed.

‘You have twenty more minutes,’ Reis said.

‘One more journey,’ O’Mara pleaded.

‘One only,’ Reis conceded. ‘After that you must not make any more.’

By the end of the hour, they had carried in everyone within reach who had survived his wounds and Reis fired a flare which soared above their heads.

‘Genug,’
he called. ‘That is enough.’

O’Mara waved. ‘We can ask no more, my son. The Blessing of God be upon you.’

‘And upon you, Father. Go now. I must order my men to fire.’

As O’Mara slipped back into the dip, Warley stared at him. ‘I never expected to see that, Father. It was very brave.’

O’Mara blinked. He looked a little startled at what he’d done. ‘The strength of any religion,’ he said slowly, ‘lies in the behaviour of those who practise it. It was nothing, my son.’

The firing didn’t start again at once, but after a while one of the German Spandaus let off a short burst, which another one took up. Eventually they were back to normal, nobody being particularly aggressive but nobody missing any chances either.

‘They’re a long time throwing in another counter-attack,’ Yuell said.

‘Perhaps they don’t think it’s necessary to risk lives, sir,’ Warley pointed out. ‘After all, it’s obvious we’re not going anywhere and that we can’t get back to the river. They’ve only got to keep up the pressure and we’ll run out of ammunition.’

There was nothing to do but wait. The hours passed slowly. By mid-morning there had still been no fresh counter-attack, and even into the afternoon the Germans had not gone beyond the use of gunfire and mortars. Then the lorries returned from Naples and the gunners at the other side of the river began to thicken up the smoke screen, confident now they could keep it going indefinitely. It proved a double-edged weapon, and soon after three o’clock the ominous grating of tanks was heard beyond it. First came the roar of engines followed by a clanking noise and what sounded like someone throwing gravel against a tin fence; then the crack of a high velocity gun. The shell burst just beyond the dip.

Everybody fell silent as soldiers must have done when Hannibal had appeared with his elephants, two thousand years before, or Murat had borne down with his glittering squadrons of horsemen.

The first tank lurched round a clump of rock, moving slowly, its gun swinging in search of a target. With everyone in the dip, there wasn’t much to fire at and the tank commander seemed uncertain what to do. Then a second tank approached, partly hidden behind the first. As they both drew closer, vanishing temporarily into a fold of ground, the man with the Piat anti-tank launcher laid down his weapon, scrambled out of the hole he was occupying with Syzling and Deacon, and ran towards the river.

‘You rotten bastard,’ Syzling yelled after him. ‘You bloody rotten yellow bugger!’

He and Deacon were manning a Bren just ahead of the dip to give support to the Piat team; but of these, one had been killed, a second wounded, and the third had just bolted. However, there seemed to be plenty of bombs and Deacon stared at the three-foot-long tube with its pistol grip and firing mechanism. There was a bomb alongside the open-ended trough, its detonator in place. As he well knew, infantrymen with Piats were difficult to spot and their tactical effects were profound, their mere presence inducing caution in tank crews who immediately started calling up infantry support; something that would not be easy here because the dip he’d chosen was a sound base and he and Warley and Jago had worked throughout the night to strengthen it.

Deacon continued to stare at the Piat with growing fascination, realising as he did so that it could cause a considerable slowing down of operations which normally thrived best on speed. He turned towards Syzling.

‘Shut up swearing,’ he snapped, ‘and get hold of the bloody thing!’

‘Oo?’ Syzling said. ‘Me?’

‘Why not, for God’s sake? You’ve been trained.’

‘I’ve forgot it all.’ Syzling scowled. ‘Besides, I’ll get killed. You ain’t got a chance of getting a ’it at more than a ’undred yards. I’ll ’ave to wait for ’im to get closer and I’m not that daft. That bugger’s got another one be’ind ’im and they’ll be on the look out for me. Anyway,’ he went on aggrievedly,
‘I saw one ’it by a Piat down in Sicily an’ all it did was blow the bloody ’atches open. The crew just shut ’em again and went on like nothing ’ad ’appened.’

Deacon shifted uncomfortably. What Syzling said was only too true. Not only did the bomb sometimes fail to stop a tank, sometimes it also disproved the theory that the blast from an internal explosion was lethal. After further badgering, however, Syzling eventually had to admit he could just possibly still remember how to use the weapon.

‘Well, look slippy, you idiot,’ Deacon bellowed, despairing even now of ever getting Syzling to call him ‘sir’. ‘The bloody thing’ll be on top of us soon.’

Syzling lifted the Piat and peered anxiously over the edge of the hole. The leading tank was just coming into view again, and Deacon felt himself shivering. It looked as big as a house – huge, dark and angular – its great gun probing ahead of it. His face twitched and he tried in vain to stop it.

‘If you don’t get on with it,’ he hissed, ‘the bloody thing’ll run us down!’

Laboriously – incredibly slowly, it seemed to Deacon – Syzling managed to check the missile.

‘And this time,’ Deacon went on, his nerves twanging with tension, ‘don’t lower the muzzle or you’ll lose the bloody bomb as usual.’

‘I’m trying, aren’t I?’ Syzling said.

‘Okay.’ Deacon struggled to hold on to his temper in case he panicked Syzling. ‘Give it a bit longer till he’s nearer, but for Christ’s sake don’t leave it too long!’

‘I wish you’d shut up,’ Syzling wailed. ‘You’re putting me off! I can’t concentrate!’

‘You never could.’

‘I’ll bloody well aim it at you soon!’

Deacon was so startled at this little mutiny he fell silent while Syzling took a deep breath and stood up in full view of the Germans. The range was around sixty yards and the explosion seemed to be on the tank’s starboard track. They saw the flash and the puff of smoke, then a curling metallic snake as the track ran off the bogies. Deacon’s eyes almost fell out of their sockets.

‘You hit the bloody thing!’ he cried, like Syzling standing bolt upright in amazement.

‘Well, you shut up for once,’ Syzling explained patiently. ‘That’s why. Nobody ever gives me time to think.’

The tank’s gun fired and the shell burst just to their left in a huge cloud of smoke, scattering mud and rock.

‘Give it another for luck!’ Deacon yelled excitedly.

This time Syzling’s shot landed just in front of the tank, raising another huge cloud of smoke. Once again the tank fired, but the shot whistled over their heads and sailed down towards the river. Then they saw the crew climbing out. As they jumped down, they opened up with Schmeissers but they didn’t appear to be certain where the Piat was and, as Deacon fired the Bren, they all disappeared from sight, either dead or wounded. There was a roar of enthusiasm from the dip.

‘Now the other!’

‘Other what?’ Syzling demanded.

‘The other tank, you gormless idiot! It’s coming up!’

‘Well, shut up then,’ Syzling said peevishly. ‘And pass me one of them bombs.’

It was a new experience for Deacon to be told what to do by Syzling instead of the other way round, but in the excitement of the moment he didn’t even notice. As Syzling fired again, the second tank was just turning as if to retreat and it immediately burst into flames. Beyond the smoke they saw the crew running, their clothes on fire. Deacon shot them down, and then he and Syzling grabbed each other and shook hands, grinning.

BOOK: Swordpoint (2011)
13.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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