A Kiss for the Enemy (32 page)

‘Who's that!' It was a low, suspicious grunt, the only permissible mode of speech.

‘Captain Marvell. Which platoon's this?'

‘5 Platoon, sir. C Company's sentries just ahead. On your feet, lads.'

The column in front seemed to be moving again.

Men lurched to their feet, breathing their swear words, shifting the weight of their damp packs on their aching shoulders. At that moment a familiar sound sent them flat again.

‘Get down, get down!'

Nobody needed the order. The first German shells hit the Pimple at exactly the moment when B Company was beginning to file through the covering position established there. Whistle, crump, crack, whistle, crump, crack – this was no casual, harassing fire. Concentrated, intensive, it could mean only one thing. A German attack! A German night attack against a company in hastily adopted, temporary, positions, with another company passing through them, on the march to the rear. To emphasize that this was, indeed, the situation, the unmistakable sound of several Spandau machine guns cut the night air. The Spandaus were firing from the flank of the line of B Company's withdrawal – from the direction of the valley down which German tanks and infantry had advanced that morning towards the Battalion's rear, overrunning the hapless D Company.

With a good deal of relief Anthony heard Wright's voice in the darkness, near at hand down the track. Wright was shouting. There was no longer the slightest need for quiet.

‘Anyone seen Captain Marvell?'

‘It's Major Wright! Anthony heard a man mutter, wholly unnecessarily, to his neighbour. Anthony, without surprise, recognized the touch of relief, of confidence in the soldier's voice.

‘Captain
Marvell?
' Wright was bellowing.

‘I'm here!' Anthony moved as fast as he could in the darkness towards Wright's voice. On either side of the track men were crouching, lying, wriggling into fire positions, facing the general direction of the Spandau fire. The German bullets were for the moment passing harmlessly high. Their hum could be
heard by all and men burrowed as deep as they could into the ground, fatigue suddenly driven out by fear. Where C Company's positions were, only God knew. But perhaps Wright, also, knew? He was extraordinary, the instinctive warrior, whether in darkness or in daylight, whether wounded or whole. He seemed to know, like an ancient warhorse, an animal trained for war, where his and other troops were and should be, where an enemy was, what would happen – a minute before it did.

‘I'm here!'

He could tell Wright's shape from other shapes. The Company Commander was standing beside the track, oblivious to Spandaus. He must have just cracked a joke. From the crouching men beside him Anthony heard a round of grateful, nervous laughter. He heard Wright call –

‘And there's still three bloody weeks to go before Christmas!'

‘I'm here. It's Anthony.'

Wright grabbed his arm and immediately swore. His outline looked somewhat distorted. In the darkness Anthony saw some lighter-toned surface hung on Wright. Wright's arm was in a sling.

‘Are you all right?'

‘
Shut up
! Corporal Thomson's patched up my arm, I'm perfectly all right.' Corporal Thomson was the Company Medical Orderly, thought to have ambitions toward surgical practice and keen on demonstrating his skills. He was known, unkindly, to the men of B Company as ‘Crippen'.

‘Are you sure Crippen's done the right –'

‘Shut up, Anthony. And get down here.'

With his uninjured arm, Wright dragged Anthony down beside him, in the lee of a small cluster of rocks. Bursts of Spandau fire continued, sporadically.

‘Anthony, I want you to get back to Battalion Headquarters as fast as you can. I'm going to keep the Company here as they come back – dig them in on the reverse side of the Pimple.'

Already, as he spoke, men were moving on down the track and apparently branching off it under some sort of control. Anthony heard Sergeant-Major Phillips's voice.

‘It's obvious there's going to be a Jerry attack bloody soon. I'm not going to have it hit B Company strung along this
track. I've seen Freddie, agreed where we'll go.' Freddie Lang commanded C Company.

‘We've got guides on the track, to lead the platoons to their ground. I can't raise Battalion Headquarters. Wireless packed in, and two signallers hit an hour ago, bugger it! Freddie's telling them what's happening as well as he can.'

Richard Wright was known to have a poor opinion of Freddie Lang. Relations between the two companies had, consequently, never been close. But they needed each other now. There was a hiss and a crump, several times repeated along the way they had just come. More German shelling.

With unwonted frankness Anthony said,

‘You'll have nobody to take over if you stop one, Richard!'

‘Freddie and I will be together. Run both companies together while we're here, makes sense. If anything gets me he'll command both.'

‘Or if Lang is disabled,' thought Anthony, ‘you'll command both. That would be good.'

Wright said,

‘We must get the picture to Battalion Headquarters or there's no hope for anyone. At present the Battalion's sliced into small pieces.'

Anthony said, ‘Right!' still feeling it was wrong to send him. He said, ‘I'll tell Colonel Adam …'

Lieutenant-Colonel Adam Jenkinson commanded the Battalion. Another shell exploded, about fifty yards down the track below them on the route to Battalion Headquarters.

‘Colonel Adam's been hit. Shell, this evening. I don't know who's at Battalion Headquarters. I suppose Freddie will be taking command but the Adjutant hasn't been through. Anyway, Freddie can't get away from here at the moment. Obviously.

‘Get DOWN!'

More shells fell, and the German machine guns suddenly opened up again with sustained bursts.

‘Here they come, I expect,' said Wright in a matter-of-fact voice. B Company had been filing rapidly down and off the track during their conversation. Wright's system was working. Somehow, somewhere, in whatever confusion of darkness, he would get his Company in some sort of defensible perimeter
within supporting distance of C Company and would handle the Germans when they came. This sounded as if it would be very soon indeed.

‘Off you go, Anthony,' Wright said, still in his matter-of-fact tone. ‘Tell them what's going on. We and C Companies can't get back at the moment. We'd be caught on the run and the Jerries could drive wherever they like. If we can hang on till morning, here at the Pimple, somebody can make some sense of it all. We'll get word to them, somehow, that you're on the way back, but put it across, for God's sake, to whoever thinks he's running the Battalion tonight.'

Anthony knew that he spoke truth. The Pimple commanded all routes into what had been the Battalion area.

‘Off you go! Take Billings here with you. He's no good here, now we've got no bloody wireless. And look after yourself!' For the moment Wright sounded dubious. Private Billings, a spare signaller at Company Headquarters, loomed out of the darkness.

Feeling a deserter, Anthony moved down the track. Soon he and Billings were alone. He sensed rather than saw survivors of B Company filing off to the right, toward what Wright called the reverse side of the Pimple. There, he knew, the energy and the soldierly competence of Wright, supported by the intelligent anticipation of Sergeant-Major Phillips, would again make B Company a hard nut for the Germans to crack. And while those Germans dashed themselves like waves against the breakwaters of B and C combined companies on the Pimple somebody else – the Brigadier? the General? – presumably could and no doubt would find a way to restore the position in the Battalion's right rear, on the ground occupied until this morning by D Company. For as far as Anthony could imagine from his recollection of the map, from what he had originally seen of the ground, there could not be much – indeed was there anything? – between the Germans and Battalion Headquarters. Or, for that matter, between the Germans and the Battalion supply echelon in the woods far beyond: between the Germans and the heart of the brigade position.

Anthony had been once to Battalion Headquarters. It was in some caves, holes in a vertical rockface in the middle of woods. These woods stretched along the foot of the hill they had been defending, from which they had now climbed painfully down. They stretched, too, along the slopes running down from the Pimple, that bump to be passed in the night but now turned into an improvised fortress for B and C Companies. The caves were, Anthony thought, about one thousand yards from where he had left Wright. It was a long way in the dark. He moved as quickly as he could, stumbling now and then, pausing on occasion to ensure contact with Billings, hoping his sense of direction was not betraying him.

They had been moving for about ten minutes when there broke out behind them renewed and sustained Spandau fire and the sound of sharper explosions than the crump of shell or mortar bomb. Anthony looked back. The flashes were unmistakeable.

Grenades.

So the attack was going in! The Germans, masters of infiltration and assault by day, were not particularly enthusiastic fighters by night. They must want the Pimple badly. They must have more ambitious plans for the morning. From the Pimple came a mighty clatter of machine gun and rifle fire. Anthony disliked himself for not being there. He felt extraordinarily lonely. After they had received the withdrawal orders in the afternoon Richard Wright had suddenly said to him,

‘You did very well, Anthony, it was a great help to know you were always being sensible in the right place. Thanks.' Then he had hastily spoken of other things. Anthony had been much moved. B Company was his family and they were at this moment, fighting it out on the Pimple. Without him.

‘Come on, Billings!'

Billings was making slow progress, although the inferno of noise from the Pimple might have provided strong incentive to move away from it as rapidly as possible. Billings was a clumsy, maladroit man, his fingers astonishingly competent with a wireless set, his other limbs ungainly and shambling. Wright found him irritating and had small patience with him.

They moved slowly on. The track fell steeply at this point. Anthony thought he remembered it.

‘
Get down
!'

The crack of the first shell's explosion was particularly sharp.

‘A high velocity gun,' a tiny part of Anthony's mind reflected. Seven shells exploded. Each felt as if it were about three yards away, but five out of the seven hit the track, or ground near it, higher up the hillside, hit the route they had already traversed. Anthony had burrowed into the stony earth, tried to make his bulk as minuscule as possible. The hot smell of cordite was everywhere, and dust thickened the night air. He thought he had probably been unduly precipitate in his reactions and was glad they had been unwatched except by Billings.

‘I'm getting windy,' he told himself with honesty. ‘Getting windy after that bloody hill.'

‘Are you all right, Billings?'

There was no reply.

‘Billings!'

Billings was not all right. Lagging a little way behind Anthony he had dived into some bushes beside the track. The third shell had killed him instantly. Billings' legs extended from the bushes and Anthony tripped over them as he retraced his steps. He picked himself up and shone his torch on the rest of Billings. There was a small wound in his throat: very small, almost surgical. There was little of the blood, grime, sickening ugliness of much of war: little of what the cry ‘stretcher bearers', the word ‘casualties' now evoked in Anthony's mind's eye after the long days on B Company's hill. Billings, by contrast, had gone with great neatness and consideration. The awkward, untidy man had been treated by death with curious courtesy, with marked exactitude.

Anthony stood up. On the hill he had lost men he had come greatly to care about. He had seen them die, watched them squirm and moan from wounds which must lead to death before they reached the Medical Aid Post after a jolting, agonizing, journey. He had thought, ‘I shall mind all this very much one day. But I can't feel anything yet. I haven't time. I've no feelings to spare.'

Anthony had not known Billings particularly well. He had found him dull and unsympathetic. Yet now the death of Billings hit him hard. He found himself hating the German
gunners who fired the shell which found Billings. The man was so extraordinarily inoffensive! So clumsy, so unmilitary, so patently allergic to soldierly duty except where it kept him with his beloved wireless set. Billings was a man of peace. There was nothing to be done for him now. Anthony left him, with his small, tidy hole in the throat and hurried on in the darkness, alone.

Anthony reckoned that another three hundred yards should take him to the area of Battalion Headquarters. He had already entered the woods, small, twisted trees for the most part, yet making darkness more impenetrable. There was no moon. He forced his eyes to do their best but he tripped and stumbled a good deal. Perhaps it was more than three hundred yards? One generally over-estimated how much distance one had covered in the dark. It would be getting light soon now. Already shapes were more distinguishable.

He started to count his steps. He reached 140, and then, to his profound relief, saw something move beside the track. Battalion Headquarters sentries! There was often disloyal ribaldry among the rifle companies at what was alleged to be the slackness of routine at Battalion Headquarters.

‘A few Jerry attacks would sharpen that lot up,' Sergeant-Major Phillips had observed with relish, after some doubtless apocryphal story of Battalion Headquarters' unsoldierly remoteness from real fighting.

‘It will be different now,' thought Anthony grimly. After the morning's fighting Battalion Headquarters sentries were likely to be not slack but jittery. He moved cautiously. There were plenty of precedents for being shot by one's own sentries. The password was on his tongue. It would be better to walk with a certain amount of noise. He was sure the movement he had seen was no more than thirty yards away. They should be expecting him, although it was such a confused night that one could not count on this vital information having reached the sentries.