If Britain Had Fallen (16 page)

Around midday the convoy stopped again and, while the officers were called forward to confer with the battalion commander, the men were given permission to take a short break. One jumping down from his truck and looking for a quiet place to relieve himself, wandered into the village
churchyard and, having refastened his buttons, was looking with interest at the war memorial in one corner when a girl came in, carrying a large bunch of flowers and, not noticing him, made for a newly dug grave not far away. She was, he realised, crying, but she was also pretty. Suddenly she seemed to realise he was there – she must, he guessed, have seen the lorries outside – for she turned to him, white-faced and with a bitterness he had not seen on anyone’s face since a Polish woman had shouted at him nearly a year before when he was dragging an old Jewess downstairs. That woman had been middle-aged and ugly, while this one was young and good-looking, but she gave him the same look of sheer disgust. She gestured towards the grave: ‘My father!’ she said. ‘He went out on patrol with the Home Guard last Thursday and got shot. You killed him! You filthy Germans! He’d never hurt anybody in his life. And now we’re all alone, mum and me!’ The girl began to cry. It was the tears that did it. The soldier instinctively moved forward to console her, but she impatiently flung his arm off and shrank away from him as if nauseated by his mere touch. In a moment he was indifferent to her revulsion, being suddenly conscious only of desire, and seized hold of her roughly, pressing his rough uniform against her thin dress. She struggled violently at first, pounding him with her fists and hacking at his legs, and then began to cry again. Suddenly she went limp as if losing interest in the struggle, and he pushed her down on the grass verge beside the gravel path to the war memorial and raped her. It was not, he had to admit, looking back, very pleasurable and the look she gave him as he got to his feet made even him, a hardened SS man, wince, but at that moment the whistle sounded from the road and he turned and hurried back towards the truck. His last view of her was of her lying on the ground, her skirt still disarranged, the flowers she had been carrying to put on her father’s grave lying scattered all round her, with great sobs bursting from her, her tears making even more unsightly a face badly bruised during the struggle. Two minutes later the advance had been resumed.

Due to the roadblocks, though many now were no more elaborate than a tree-trunk on a wheel which yielded easily to a wood-cutter’s saw, and the frequent punctures, the result of the broken glass scattered everywhere on the roads nearer the coast, it was late afternoon before the battalion approached Horam. Before they could enter it they ran into one more hold-up, a flame-trap mounted in the bank at a bend, which suddenly shot a jet of evil-smelling burning liquid straight across the road and caught the leading troop carrier full on the bonnet. The men reacted swiftly. Without waiting for orders, the troops in the affected lorry leapt out and deployed alongside the road, shooting two men they saw running
away, and the driver managed to put out the flames with an extinguisher. The vehicle, too badly damaged to use again that day, was manhandled through a gate into the nearest field and left for the breakdown unit at the rear of the convoy. Although no one had been hurt, the additional delay, including the time taken to allocate the men from the ruined lorry to other transport, infuriated the commanding colonel. His temper was not improved when he received orders to turn off the main A267 road, half a kilometre after passing through the town, down the minor road to the left leading towards the small village of Winter Hill, after passing through which he was to turn right again, down another secondary road leading into the main A272 from Uckfield to Burwash, which was, as he knew, the divisional objective. When he reached it he was to dig in, siting his companies to command the triangle of roads, like a river delta with its base towards him, immediately to his front. On his way he was to ensure that the surrounding area to his flanks was clear of enemy since it would lie directly behind the centre of the divisional position which was itself at the very heart of the whole front line.

The colonel recognised that he had been entrusted with a key point in the defences, likely to be an early target for an English counter-attack, but he looked with foreboding at the countryside between him and his objective. Unlike the broad open downland they had seen nearer the sea, this landscape was secretive and shut in, consisting of small fields interspersed with woodland. Everywhere there were small spinneys and coppices and many were close to the road, making it ideal for the small-scale ambushes in which the Home Guard specialised. The colonel knew by now the trouble that a few determined men could cause on these narrow country roads and, after the halt, he took up his usual position near the front line, not far behind the detachment of motor-cyclists who went ahead to ensure that the way was clear and to tempt any enemy lying in wait to reveal themselves prematurely.

At first, however, all went well. The colonel followed their progress carefully on a large-scale English map seized by some enterprising officer from a stationer’s shop in Polegate, and the convoy had just crossed a tiny stream and was beginning to climb the slight rise leading to the village, when from round the bend in the road just ahead there came a sudden scream followed in rapid succession by the sound of two crashes. Almost before the order had been given the convoy stopped. The road was too narrow for the colonel’s car to overtake those in front, but he leaped down and ran forward to investigate, following hard on the heels of the group of men, known in SS fashion as his ‘bodyguard’, who rode in the truck immediately ahead of his.

The scene which greeted his eyes made even the colonel, who had seen many gruesome sights, shudder. One motor cyclist lay sprawling beside his machine, obviously badly injured. The other’s head, still in its steel helmet, lay near him but his motor-cycle, with its headless body still in the saddle, had roared on for several yards after he had been killed, before diving, the engine still at full throttle, into the ditch. The cause of the accident was not hard to find: a strong wire, probably cut from a roll used by a farmer for fencing his fields, had been stretched taut across the road between two trees, in a patch of shadow, just high enough above the ground to catch the neck of any unwary person coming fast round the corner. A car or lorry would probably have carried it away or broken it, a cyclist would not have been going fast enough to be seriously hurt, but to a motor-cyclist it was deadly, cutting through his neck like a cheese-slicer.

The moans of the injured man as he was carried away, and the sight of the dead man’s helmet with his still bleeding head inside it lying in the road as if mocking the whole German army, strengthened the colonel’s resolve. He had been ordered to pacify the countryside and pacify it he would. People who carried out acts of this kind must be taught a lesson. His company commanders, hastily called to an order group, were told to turn out their men and round up every civilian within a radius of two kilometres; men, women, children, old people, invalids, all were to be brought in and assembled in front of the church, the spire of which could be seen through the trees just ahead.

The people of Winter Hill had been expecting the Germans ever since the British Army had withdrawn, and when grim-faced soldiers in field-grey uniforms appeared outside their houses and cottages, battering on the doors with their rifle butts and bawling for them to come out, they were frightened, but not surprised. As, having turned the occupants out, the soldiers rampaged through each empty house, pulling curtains aside, thrusting their bayonets under beds and peering into cupboards, the residents assumed that the Germans were searching for British soldiers left behind during the retreat, or Home Guards waiting for darkness to attack them. But there was not a soldier, or a Home Guard, left within miles and the Germans’ behaviour was in a way reassuring. This was the way British people expected the ‘Huns’ – the almost affectionate term ‘Jerry’ was heard less often now – to behave and these large, brutal and uncouth men were instantly recognisable for what they were, the Nazis seen in a score of war films. They even, as they yelled at the civilians, sounded uncannily like ‘Fünf’ in the radio programme
ITMA.
At any moment one expected Tommy Handley to make some devastating witticism that would put them in their place.

When the inhabitants were ordered to assemble in the churchyard, they assumed they were to be given a talk on how to behave by the German commander, who stood scowling by the churchyard gate, as each small group of new arrivals passed inside. He, too, looked remarkably like everyone’s stereotype of a Nazi officer, and already the heartless brutality of the Germans was causing some of those assembled there to dread what was to come. Some men, rounded up from the fields, were driven in front of them by a group of Germans with prods from their rifles, like cattle going reluctantly to market, and one soldier casually jabbed a pregnant woman, who could only walk slowly, in the stomach with his rifle butt and laughed as she stumbled. When a blind man, led by his wife, temporarily became separated from her and blundered into the churchyard wall, the Germans clearly found this a fine joke, until an officer standing watching gestured impatiently to them to steer the blind man towards the gate. Once inside, lined up on the space between the graves and in front of the porch, the older women were mostly silent while the younger ones, many of them in aprons, having been interrupted while preparing the family tea, were fully occupied trying to calm the small children clinging terrified to their skirts, or to soothe the babies they were carrying. Two women were pushing prams, but most had cradled their infants in their arms. One baby was still fast asleep but most, infected by the prevailing atmosphere, were wailing rather than crying, a thin, infinitely dispiriting sound that more than anything else made the people realise that they were wholly at the mercy of the Germans now lined up on the roadway facing them. One woman, holding a small boy by the hand, was bleeding from a cut below the eye, and weeping, while the child, a pathetic figure in pyjamas, dressing gown and sandals, obviously hastily pulled on, still looked half-asleep. She had, she told everyone who would listen, told the Germans her son was ill in bed and could not be moved, but they had paid no attention, and one had threatened to stick a bayonet in him where he lay if she did not get him up and bring him to the churchyard.

There were very few men. Many were already in the Forces or in the Home Guard, but most of those who lived in the village were at work in Heathfield or Horam, for Winter Hill itself offered few opportunities for employment. The Germans had discovered half a dozen farm labourers, one of them still in his rubber boots and white overalls, who had been cycling to do the evening milking, which had to go on war or no war, a farmer, the proprietor of the village shop, the licensee of the nearby public house, a few old men, one deaf, who had arrived last of all and was asking loudly what was happening, and, most surprised of all, a Ministry of Food official, in dark suit and black shoes, who, rather late in
the day, had been touring the district to check on emergency food supplies. Vaguely excited by the whole affair, and reflecting what a story he would have to tell the chaps when he finally got back to school, was a boy of fifteen, son of a local solicitor, having an unexpectedly prolonged holiday from his public school, which had delayed the start of its term because of the invasion threat.

The colonel, once it was clear that no more civilians were to be brought in, wasted little time. He gestured to one of his officers, who indicated to the men that they should move to one side of the churchyard; the fifteen-year-old boy, after a moment’s hesitation, followed them. The women and children, alarmed at being separated from their menfolk, found themselves ordered to enter the church, a small, massive-walled building, but with ample room for the sixty people who filed inside it. There was a little delay at the door while one of the mothers wheeling a pram stopped to unstrap her baby and lift him in her arms, but the German NCO standing nearby barked an order and one of the soldiers motioned her aside and pushed the pram in through the narrow door and past the font into the nave. She turned to thank him, but he merely stared at her without speaking and gestured to the other mother with a pram also to push it inside.

The sight of a German, however grim-faced, pushing a pram had raised the women’s spirits a little. They’re going to keep us here out of the way during the fighting,’ one suggested.

‘That’ll be it,’ agreed another. ‘I hope they get it over quick. My Jim’s over at Horam and he’ll be wanting his supper when he gets back, Germans or no Germans.’

‘More likely going to loot our houses,’ suggested a third. ‘Won’t do them much good. I hid all my valuables under the … no, I’m not going to say where … last Tuesday. I reckoned it wouldn’t be long before they got here.’

‘That’s defeatist talk,’ said another woman sharply. ‘I’ve a good mind to report you.’

‘Who to ?’ asked the other speaker, but before anyone could answer there came from outside the sound of a shouted order, followed by another order, and then a fusillade of shots, accompanied by a succession of sharp thuds as the bullets hit the outside wall of the church.

‘Mum, Mum! The Army’s come back,’ shouted one boy and then, suddenly, the truth dawned.

‘My God, they’ve shot all the men!’ screamed one woman. ‘My old man was out there. They’ve killed him, the bloody murderers!’

There was an outburst of talk and many of the women burst openly into tears; a few screamed, but everyone fell silent when the church door was thrown open and two German soldiers staggered in with a heavy crate, which they lowered into the middle of the aisle. One gestured to the women to move away towards the altar, while the other bent over the crate and began to run out from it a length of what looked like cord. Just before he reached the door he stopped and lit the fuse, then both men ran out and slammed the door behind them.