Swordpoint (2011) (29 page)

‘Better give the first ’un another for luck,’ Syzling said. ‘In case they come back an’ get it.’

Deacon helped with the bomb again, but this time it went off in the tube. There was a tremendous clang and Deacon was flung against the earth wall of the hole. When he came to, his head was ringing and his lungs felt full of acrid smoke. He pulled himself upright, coughing and retching, the sweat standing out on his face, the bile dribbling from his open mouth. Then he saw that Syzling was huddled in a corner with two enormous black eyes and small pieces of metal sticking in his face.

He looked dead, but Deacon realised he was breathing and decided he’d better try to get him to the stretcher-bearers. Their vicious little attack seemed to have shaken the Germans and, hidden by the smoke from the burning tank, he was able to get Syzling out of the hole and heave him on to his back. There was one more burst of firing, but even that stopped as Deacon fell into the dip where the orderlies took over.

‘Who is it?’

‘Syzling. Frying Tonight.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Piat blew up in his face.’

Collecting two men and several Bren magazines, Deacon squirmed back through the smoke to his hole, feeling curiously bereft. He’d been nagging at Syzling so long that to be without him was like losing a limb. He hoped there’d be no more tanks.

‘Oy!’ The voice made him turn and he saw Syzling running bent double towards him. ‘Catch ’old of this ’ere!’

‘This’ was another Piat and it almost flattened Deacon.

‘Where did you get it?’ he demanded.

‘They had one wi’ nobody to fire it.’

‘You’ve got a couple of lovely shiners, Syzling. You all right?’

Syzling looked dazed. ‘Me ’ead’s spinnin’ a bit,’ he said. ‘It’s addled me brain.’

‘You never had a brain, Syzling,’ Deacon grinned. ‘Nobody with a brain would have dared to do what you did.’

For once, Syzling failed to react with a protest.

‘Well, you ’elped,’ he admitted.

‘I’ll get you a medal for this, Syzling, if it’s the last thing I do.’

‘You ought to ’ave one as well, sir. You stood up wi’ me.’

Deacon was overcome. Sir! Syzling had finally managed it. At last he seemed to have got through to him. At last they were on the same wavelength.

‘I think we’ve got this business taped,’ he said.

Carefully examining Warley’s radio, the signallers had come to the conclusion that, with a cracked panel and the veins of the condenser shot to hell, they weren’t going to get much out of it, and they were too far from the river by this time to use the field telephone. But, with B and C Companies finally rounded up and the parts of another damaged set available, late in the afternoon they were able to announce that they’d managed to make one of them work. Yuell immediately ordered them to contact the Yellowjackets. ‘If we can get ’em to move up to us,’ he said to Warley, we might hang on and, if we can, they might get the tanks across.’

Warley thought the colonel was being bloody optimistic and, in any case, the Yellowjackets seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. By this time, however, Tallemach had pushed a group of Baluchi signallers and one of their sets across the river, and it was now possible to relay a message to the other bank and receive assurances that help was coming.

Giving the position of German mortar and machine-gun posts, they were also able to ask for artillery support and had the satisfaction soon afterwards of seeing the first shells landing among the wire just ahead. The guns were firing well, just clipping their position to land their missiles among the Germans. But then a new battery joined in, firing to instructions given in the fifty-six page orders where a weary clerk had misread the numbers, and three shells arrived far too close for comfort. They left shallow craters that were still smoking from the tremendous heat of the explosion when a moment later another salvo arrived, showering them with dirt and stones and wounding two men with fragments of rock.

‘For God’s sake!’ Warley was staring towards the other side of the river, as though by sheer will-power he could compel a change of range. ‘Haven’t we got enough shooting at us without those silly buggers!’

The radio squawked as Yuell sent off a series of angry messages, but the artillery didn’t appear to believe him and more shells arrived, still fortunately just ahead. It was twenty-five minutes – during which they all hugged the earth, sick with fear – before they could get the shooting stopped. Morale, raised by Syzling’s feat with the Piat, had slumped badly.

As the offending guns became silent, the German fire began to increase again, hammering at a point by the river. Turning his binoculars in that direction, Yuell was just able to pick out movement in the greyness round Capodozzi and at Foiano further east.

‘Must be the Baluchis supporting the Yellowjackets,’ he said.

The new attack had started in the early evening. The air was already thick with smoke, and though the sun had appeared briefly, it gave no warmth. With the clouds rapidly closing in again, it became impossible to make out what was happening, but the firing in front of them slackened a little as though the German weapons had had to be diverted. Then, as the breeze cleared the smoke for a moment, they saw the outline of the bank, scarred with craters, and boats ferrying men across.

‘The Yellowjackets must have done better than we did,’ Yuell observed. ‘They’ll be pushing towards us before long.’

But by the time it was growing dark, there was no sign of relief and the rain had started once more. They were wet, tired and more than a little frightened. Hunger, and the shadow of a prisoner-of-war camp hovering over them, added to their misery.

The Germans kept firing flares, as if expecting them to try to advance, and the battlefield was lit up in a series of fleeting glimpses. They were all thinking about their own artillery now because it had suddenly dawned on them that until they moved, the guns were as likely to hit them as hit the Germans.

‘I wish they’d shell the bloody general,’ Hunters growled.

A few of them managed to snatch a little sleep in catnaps, while others counted noses in the dark and tried to find out what had happened to everybody.

‘Where’s Pedlar Parkin?’ White asked. It was almost as if he missed Parkin’s baiting.

‘Ain’t seen ’im since we got down to t’ river,’ Rich said. ‘Musta got lost or copped it down there somewhere.’

There was a sudden silence because it wasn’t like Parkin to get lost.

‘Peace in our time.’ 000 Bawden spoke next and as though he’d been brooding on something for a long while. ‘That bastard with the moustache and umbrella. When he came back from Munich. Remember? Fat lot of bloody peace we’ve seen since then.’

‘I notice ’
e
didn’t join up and pick up a rifle,’ Martindale said, sucking at an empty pipe.

‘They never do, them lot,’ Henry White said, his mouth as empty as a cavern. ‘They’re good at declarin’ war, but they never join up an’ fight it.’

‘They did at Waterloo, ’Enry,’ Rich said, as though he considered it his duty in Parkin’s absence to take over the baiting. ‘Napoleon was there. You musta seen ’im.’

‘I ’eard,’ Puddephatt said solemnly, ‘that the Argylls caught a chameleon in North Africa.’

‘What’s that got to do wi’ it?’ Rich asked.

‘Nothing. They put it on one of their kilts. It settled it champion. It couldn’t manage nothing more than a mucky brown, they said.’

‘Well, could
you?’

‘I’m not a chameleon.’

‘Even if you were.’

The argument dragged on as army arguments always did, pointless, witless, following no particular line, getting side-tracked whenever they lost the gist of what they were talking about. But it took their minds off their misery, the hunger and the cold, and the dead and wounded in the bottom of the hollow. As darkness finally enveloped them, every single weapon seemed to stop firing within a matter of minutes and there was one of those strange lulls that occasionally fall on a battlefield.

And then, someone started to sing in a foxhole over on the left. The voice came out of the darkness, shrill, almost falsetto, the accent ill-educated but quite plain. They could all hear it and knew that the Germans could hear it too.

‘Now the day is o-over, night is drawing nigh,

Shadows of the e-evening flit across the flippin’ sky.’

‘It’s Pedlar,’ White said, his empty mouth grinning.

The arguments stopped and men smiled, pleased that A Company’s fool was still around. Even Yuell, crouching with Warley near the radio, stopped and listened.

The voice came again, doggedly.

‘When this bloomin’ war is over,

Oh, ’ow ’appy I shall be,

When I gits me civvy clo’s on,

No more soldierin’ for me.

No more church parades on Sundays,

No more askin’ for a pass,

You can tell the sergeant-major

To stick it up ’is bloomin’ arse.’

There was a dead silence as the song finished; then from the German lines they heard a faint cheer and someone shouted. ‘Encore!
Noch einmal!
More, please!’

The invisible Parkin was silent for a while, then his voice came again. ‘Thank you. Thank you, one and all. And now from my extensive repertoire—’

‘The monkey and the baboon sat upon the grass,

And the monkey stuck its finger up the baboon’s…’

‘That’ll do!’ Yuell was still smiling as he shouted. ‘We’ve all enjoyed it, but they might be trying to find out where you are. You’ll probably get a mortar bomb on you.’

‘No!’ A voice came from the direction of the Germans. ‘It vas beautiful. Perhaps you would like us to sing for you.’

‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ Warley said. ‘Stopping the war to collect wounded and singing serenades while we try to kill each other.’

But there was no more singing because suddenly a German Schmeisser opened up, ripping off a burst like the tearing of a giant sheet of linen. Other weapons followed it. They could see the flashes and tried to make out what the Germans were shooting at. They soon found out because the remnants of two companies of Baluchis, who had crossed the river during the afternoon, fell into the dip. Tall, good-looking men with smooth faces and glittering black eyes – and well known to the Yorkshiremen who’d shared more than one nasty moment with them – they were loaded with ammunition and carried rations in sandbags.

‘Tik hai, Johnny,’ Corporal Gask said in his frozen-faced way.

‘Tik hai.’ The lance-naik he addressed beamed at him. ‘Very nasty war, sir.’

The officer in command was a captain, his major having been badly wounded in the crossing. ‘We’ve been clinging to that bloody bank all afternoon,’ he said bitterly. ‘I thought we’d never get going.’

Yuell stared round at the Baluchis beginning to disperse into the dips and holes to right and left.

‘Is this all there are?’ he asked.

‘What’s left of two companies, sir. They sent the other two over at Castelgrande to reinforce the Yellowjackets. Whoever it was who sent us across in broad daylight must have been mad. We could hardly move for the ammunition and the grenades.’

Yuell’s head jerked up. ‘You’ve brought grenades? Who sent them?’

‘We just helped ourselves. I think they were part of a load that went missing somewhere. We found the muleteers wandering round in the dark asking where they should go and we decided the best place was here because we heard that our other two companies at Castelgrande are still pinned down close to the river. When do we move forward, sir?’

Yuell looked at Warley. ‘I doubt if we do,’ he said.

They were not to know how small the gains at Castelgrande had been, or that the other two companies of Baluchis, thrown across there in support, had proved of little value against the intense German fire. The Yeomanry had tried once again to work their tanks down to the river, but the shelling was frustrating every effort made by the Engineers and a vehicular bridge had not even been started. The Engineers were now merely fighting to stay alive until the next effort could be made; while the tanks had been obliged once more to move back behind the hills, and the Baluchis, their colonel wounded, were pinned down in the low, wet water-meadows, utterly naked to enemy observation.

To confound the scene further, Brigadier Rankin, in an excess of bull-headed zeal, had committed not one of his battalions but two – the Birminghams and the Rajputs – and seen them both decimated. His last battalion, the Punjabis, who might have helped Yuell, had also been sent up to Castelgrande but, with disaster already in the air, had not been committed. Like the Baluchis the previous day they had taken part in neither action, wasting the whole of the daylight hours in the wet hen tactics of moving backwards and forwards. A desperate attempt to move from Castelgrande towards San Eusebio to link up with Yuell had been completely defeated, and in no time the whole group, including the remnants of the Yellowjackets, were back on the river bank.