Ride Out The Storm (7 page)

‘Sight on that corner there,’ he told the others. ‘It’s two hundred and twenty yards away. I measured it this morning. At that range, even you lot ought to be able to hit something.’

He was already aware of Pacard glancing towards the rear, of Favre muttering with Burnecker, and Angelet whispering to himself. But Soustelle was standing just behind them now, quivering like an excited terrier at a rat-hole. Alongside him, Deshayes crouched behind a stone wall, keeping his head well down already, Chouteau noticed.

The dust cloud came nearer and Chouteau saw that it was slowing. As the first lorry came in sight, Soustelle lifted his revolver. The lorries drew nearer and Chouteau became conscious of his own breathing and
of Angelet praying in a high feminine voice. The birds seemed louder than ever in the stillness.

‘Come on, you old fool,’ Favre whispered. ‘Give the signal!’

As he spoke, there was a crackle of firing from the hedge on his right that was taken up immediately from the post on his left.

Soustelle was still standing with his pistol in the air to give the signal and Chouteau saw his face go red with fury. Then Pacard’s Hotchkiss started rattling and Burnecker’s weapon exploded close to his ear and he gripped his rifle and joined in.

Favre began to sob and Chouteau swung backhanded at him. Then a blast of Schmeisser bullets rattled and clinked against the brickwork above their heads and as Chouteau glanced back he saw Soustelle’s right leg buckle, then he pitched forward on his face, his helmet rolling off so that his thin grey hair moved in the breeze that stirred the dust.

The Schmeisser fire was rattling all round them now and they could hear bullets whining and cracking overhead. The Hotchkiss stopped and, as he reached out to jerk at the cocking handle, Pacard somersaulted backwards to sprawl among the scattered bricks. Chouteau swore and hammered at the breech to remove the damaged round that had jammed it.

‘That’s it!’ Burnecker said. ‘Deshayes has hopped it! He’s got Soustelle on his back and he’s putting on a hero act! I bet he doesn’t come back!
C’en est fait!
It’s finished!’

Turning his head, Chouteau saw men running bent-double across the fields, then another burst of fire rattled against the bricks and Burnecker disappeared over a low wall behind them, his booted feet sticking up in the air. Favre stood up, his mouth hanging open, and began to run, throwing down his rifle as he went. Angelet was still whimpering and praying but he was also still firing. Chouteau got the machine gun going again and the Schmeisser fire stopped.

But then he realised that the men on the left were also moving back across the fields, running for the trees, and that from among the forty or fifty men in the buildings around there was only an odd rifle still firing. Gradually even these stopped as the stouter-hearted men realised their numbers had dwindled to nothing and they were isolated, then Chouteau saw men standing up around him among the scattered walls, bewildered and frightened, wondering if they, too, shouldn’t join the rush for safety.

Then, over on the right, out of one of the windows, he saw a white sheet appear on the end of a rifle and begin to wag frantically. He glanced at Angelet. The boy was scrabbling among the bricks for Pacard’s ammunition pouches, sobbing and whimpering as his grimy fingers pawed over the dead man.

He slapped the boy’s shoulder. ‘Do
you
want to surrender, too,
mon brave
?’
he asked.

‘No.’ Angelet’s lip was quivering and there were tears in his eyes but he shook his head. ‘I’ll stay if you want me to.’

Chouteau grinned at him. ‘There comes a time,’ he said, ‘when death and glory begin to lose their point.’ He slapped the boy’s shoulder and jerked his head to the rear, ‘It’s time for
Système D.
’

‘
Système D
?’

‘
Débrouillez-vous!
’
Chouteau said. ‘Fend for yourself.’

Not only Private Angelet, of the 121st Regiment of Infantry, was worried about his future. So was Private Elijah Noble, of the 5th Field Company Workshops of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps who, one way and another, was suddenly having quite a war.

When the despatch rider had come through the trees, weaving in and out and ducking his head to avoid low branches, Private Noble had been counting his spoil. Called up not long before under the new Enlistment Act to become a National Serviceman, Private Noble – wrongly named, if ever a man was – had long since decided that the wisest soldiers were those who were near enough to a battle to be able to pick up a little reflected glory but far enough away to be safe. His skill had always lain in knowing how to make a comfortable bed from chicken wire, what to barter for eggs and how much to pay for
vin rouge.
He knew the best brothels and called the local
maire
by his first name, and he had a nice little racket going in changing francs into pounds when his friends went on leave and vice versa when they returned. The life, even if it were dead boring, was also dead profitable.

Brought up in the East End of London by a father with a sharp eye for the main chance, his school years had been spent mostly in playing truant while his mother had fought off the school attendance officer, and he had passed most of his time watching the little cheats his father had worked so that it was small wonder he’d found it easy to follow the same bent. It had come as a shock when the letter announcing his call-up had arrived and his first instinct had been to bolt. His father had jeered at him. ‘Garn, Lije,’ he’d said. ‘You’d be in dead trouble if you did and you can make money in the army as well as you can out of it.’

Noble had soon discovered the truth of his father’s words. Crown and anchor had emptied the pockets of less quick-witted men and when he’d taken over the job of one of the transport drivers, his future was assured. He’d known all the people in Shrewsbury, where his unit was stationed, who could use a joint of army meat, and all the publicans who’d swap a bottle of whisky for a few bags of army coal.

Since he hadn’t really taken to the dung-coloured spud sack rough-hewn by a one-armed tinsmith with which the army had replaced the Jimmy Cagney jacket he’d been in the habit of wearing, he’d taken it to a tailor and had it so fined off he could hardly lift his arms. He’d gone through the usual dodges of reporting sick to avoid church parades and fatigues and had not been in the slightest alarmed when his unit had moved to Dover Castle. Unfortunately he hadn’t been quick enough to catch on that he was going to France and before he knew where he was he’d found himself at the other side of the Channel.

Which was a bastard. Because until that moment he’d hardly known where France was and hadn’t been interested enough to find out. The French language seemed to consist of talking down your nose and waving your arms about and, as for the Nazis, they were obviously a rotten lot while Hitler was just dead common.

He’d looked up as the despatch rider had passed him.

‘What’s the buzz,
mon fils
?’
he’d asked.

‘The front’s given way at Cambrai,’ the despatch rider had said.

‘That’s a long way from here.’

‘Not the way the Germans are moving.’

‘Where are they?’ Noble asked, pushing forward a packet of fiddled fags.

The despatch rider had taken one of the fags and stuck it behind his ear under his helmet. ‘All over the shop. The whole bloody front’s moving back!’

As he’d kicked his machine to life again and roared off, Noble had stared after him, his eyes thoughtful. If the army was in retreat, he’d decided, there’d be barrowloads of cameras, field-glasses, tennis rackets and golf clubs lying around loose, because the winter had been so quiet everyone had imported something from England to make for comfort, and he’d lit a bent cigarette and walked slowly towards the 15-cwt van he drove. If he’d got to wade in tyrant’s blood he might just as well turn it to his advantage before he joined the waltz.

Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d collected an excellent assortment of abandoned weapons, field-glasses and typewriters, but south of Tournai he’d been startled to see British troops setting fire to the stores they’d laboriously collected during the winter months, and it had suddenly made him feel nervous. As a city boy, apart from Cockney nerve, he hadn’t much he could offer in a situation that seemed to present certain difficulties. The army had merely showed him how to do pointless things with a rifle he’d been careful never to do since, and now somebody had taken a diabolical liberty with his safety.

In fact, he’d barely started.

By dark that night the whole front was alight with bursting bombs and shells. Two big fires were blazing, one in a petrol dump so that the smoke ascended in great rolling billows and, in the sky above, an incredible display of tracer shells had made weird designs through which an occasional rocket burst into a ball of brilliantly coloured flares. Among them were Very lights and all too often the white rockets which by this time he’d learned the Germans fired to indicate a success.

Somehow it didn’t look right even to Noble.

He’d slept in the van again and again, scrounging a cup of tea here and a bully beef sandwich there, spinning a yarn about looking for his adjutant to anyone who asked, but then the army had stopped and dug in again, setting up their Brens and the few mortars they possessed and Noble had seen Heinkels, Dorniers and Stukas in dozens. The only British machines he’d seen had been ancient Battles getting the chop one after the other with monotonous regularity, and once at a first-aid post he’d heard a bitter Lysander gunner, his tunic torn from top to bottom by bullets, complaining about the politicians sending him up in a machine whose only noteworthy characteristic was that it looked as though it had its wings on backwards.

He had found it wise to continue at full speed, but near Seclin he had been caught up in a flood of retreating Frenchmen, a double row of horse-drawn vehicles and a double row of motorised vehicles – four lines altogether – that had forced him into the fields. He didn’t argue. They didn’t look the sort of men you could argue with. The drivers were unshaven, their clothes muddy, and there were no officers or NCOs. As they had passed they had managed embarrassed smiles that had sent a cold chill through Noble’s heart. This wasn’t just a quick nip back to re-form, he decided. It was a rout.

As they turned the corner, one of the tanks, an ancient Model R35 which they used for training purposes, brushed against the last of the stragglers. A man screamed and fell and Noble’s eyes started out of his head as he saw how the treads had crushed his leg to pulp. A few of the soldiers stopped but the tank didn’t even pause, its tracks clawing a deep gouge in the turf, and as the rest of them pushed past, indifferent to the screams of the injured man, Noble started up the 15-cwt and began to bounce across the fields, his stomach heaving.

Though he’d not worried at the time, he realised now that those sensitive antennae of his which warned him of danger had told him when he’d first arrived in France that something was wrong. The French had seemed slack and listless, and their officers had a habit of collecting bunches of flowers which they gave to their red-faced British liaison officers to carry. Noble hadn’t much time for officers of any nationality, but he’d suddenly found that when it came to comparison with the French he was prepared to stand up and defend his own with his dying breath. They were all bastards but, as bastards went, they weren’t
bad
bastards. And the British soldiers at least looked clean which to the dandified Noble with his soaped trouser-creases and forbidden pencil-line moustache, was important.

As the long day’s fighting died and the rifle fire began to fade he managed to attach himself to a field company of Royal Engineers he found in a group of trees on the side of a low hill. They were all tired, dusty and hungry and were glad to hide their vehicles away from the dive-bombers that had harassed them continuously for days. There was an observation balloon hanging on the horizon in the east, but it was far enough away not to worry him, and the woods were full of diagonal stripes of sunshine. The men were brewing tea on small fires, and the cooks, white aprons over their battle-dress, were bent over petrol cookers. After the adventures of the last week, the wood had for Noble the comfortable feeling of home and he dug into the back of the 15-cwt and produced his haversack. There was a bottle of cognac in there with a box of cigars, and he decided he might as well make a pig of himself.

The observation balloon that Noble had noticed was over Lanselles ten miles away, but it was high enough to be able to cover a lot of country, and it was with the high-powered 10x60 Zeiss binoculars on his chest that Leutnant Dieter Steinhoff, of the 3rd
Fesselballonkompanie
of the Engineers, first saw the drifting yellow cloud. He studied it for a moment, then he nudged his companion, Unteroffizier Distl, and pointed.

‘Tommy column,’ he said.

The dust was hanging over a road that led up the side of the only hill for miles around and on top of the hill was a small clump of trees, unexpected in that bare landscape. Steinhoff noted down the co-ordinates and map references, then, passing the slip of paper to Distl, he lifted the glasses again to watch.

‘
Alle Mann auf Gefechtsstationen
,’
he grinned. ‘All hands to battle stations.’