The White Guns (1989) (19 page)

Craven groaned, 'Well, I guess it's the bloody NAAFI for us after all!'

Ginger said, 'Poor little bastard. Not fair when it's kids some'ow.'

Rae lit a cigarette. 'You'll have me in bloody tears, you will!'

Ginger brightened up. 'Still, when we get goin' proper we won't 'ave to see no one else but Oskar!'

But behind the good humour Ginger was feeling uneasy. Somehow dirty.

Directed by Beri-Beri's appalling German and the liberal use of a map from the Royal Marines, the great car finally nosed along a cobbled road, flanked by trees and open fields, with here and there the glitter of a peaceful lake.

It was beautiful countryside after the ravages of Kiel, and the sights they had passed along the way. Ditches filled with upended vehicles of every kind. Half-tracks, their black crosses punctured by cannon fire or buckled like cardboard from attacking fighter bombers during the final rout. Cars and lorries, some equipped with their strange inflated gas-bags which had replaced petrol and diesel for all but the
Wehrmacht.

Marriott could smell the endless litter of wrecks, left where they had been pushed by the tanks to keep the road clear. There were still probably corpses buried amongst the debris, as there were beneath the ruined houses, in the smashed submarines and the mud of the harbour.

Considering he had arrived in Germany only a matter of days ago, Beri-Beri was a mine of information. He had been driven to Kiel from Denmark right down the full length of Schleswig-Holstein. It sounded a far cry from the harbour. Hans Andersen-style farmhouses and sleepy villages, darkly beamed inns and cobbled squares.

Marriott asked, 'Where are we now?'

Beri-Beri said, 'There's apparently a big fuel dump just a mile up this road. It missed the bombing – too far out in the country, I expect. The RN's taken it over for all of our vehicles.' He patted the seat. 'Including
this
one!'

Eventually they came to a heavily sandbagged and barbed-wired enclosure. There were armed sailors on the gates, and a guardhouse with slitted windows just inside.

One sentry saluted and checked their identity cards as well as examining the blue disc on the windscreen. It all seemed casually thorough.

The car advanced through the gates where several other khaki or camouflaged vehicles were waiting to be fuelled. German workers were employed for that, Marriott noticed, and because the petrol and diesel had to be pumped by hand it was taking a long time.

Beri-Beri said, 'Let's stretch our legs.'

'Can I help, gentlemen?'

They saw a stocky chief petty officer with the collar badges of the Supply Branch on his immaculate jacket, standing in the doorway of an office.

'Any tea going, Chief?'

'This way, sir.' The CPO added as an afterthought, 'My name's Hemmings, by the way, sir. I'm in charge here, at present anyway.'

The mention of tea made Cuff mutter, 'I'll wait by the car. I need something a bit stronger.' As he walked out he noticed a woman standing in another room across a corridor, her back towards him. She had strong hips, and her arms, which hung by her sides as if she knew he was watching her, were very tanned. Cuff liked what he saw and he stifled a chuckle as he strolled into the sunlight. Old Chief Hemmings must have his feet well under the table, unless she was one of the authorised staff here . . .

He saw their mournful little driver walking towards a large shed which had a protective canvas awning dangling over its entrance.

A man in overalls also saw the driver and waved his hands sharply.

'Bitte gehen Sie weg! Eingang verboten!'

The driver shrugged untidily and changed direction. Cuff smiled. Maybe the little sod was looking for a place to piss. Then he hoisted his belt over his belly and strode towards the canvas awning.

The same man tried to block his way but Cuff grinned and said dangerously, 'Fuck off, or I'll put you through that wall!'

In the office Marriott and Beri-Beri finished their tea.

'Thanks, Chief,' said Beri-Beri. 'See you around.'

''Any
time, sir!'

Marriott glanced at him. It was quite cool in the roomy office but Hemmings was sweating badly. It was pretty obvious he was glad to see them leave.

Cuff was leaning against the car. 'All topped-up. Ready when you are!'

They drove to the gates and then Cuff slapped his pockets and barked, 'Stop the car! I've left my cigarette case in the guard-hut!' They watched him stride back into the compound, his neck bulging over his collar as usual.

Cuff slammed heavily into the office and realised that the woman he had seen across the passage was here too. She faced him, her buttocks against a table, her hands resting on its edge as if waiting to spring at someone. She wore a white blouse tucked into a skirt tightly tied with a leather belt. She faced him with a mixture of curiosity and defiance.

'You're back, sir?' Hemmings was on his feet, several printed forms slipping from his fingers and on to the wooden floor.

Cuff said sharply, 'Yes, I'm back right enough. What did you expect?'

Hemmings blurted, 'I must protest, sir!'

'Do so, and it'll be your lot!' Cuff reached into the passageway and dragged a long sounding-rod into full view. He saw Hemmings go pale and knew he had hit the mark.

'There's over an inch sawn off this rod, Hemmings.' He did not wait for further protests. 'So, with all this fuel in your charge, every time a loaded tanker pulls in you sound each well with
this,
right? That'll give you one-and-a-half-inches of diesel or petrol, all to yourself! And since every tank is about the size of a small bungalow I reckon you've got a nice little black-market business going here.'

'I have every right to a proper chance –'

'Balls!
This is it! Your
only
bloody chance! If I choose, I can take you in right now.' Then he looked at the woman, at the way her full breasts were rising and falling under the blouse. 'As for you, madam, I'm afraid it will be even less pleasant, but a lot quicker, I'm told.'

He heard the Mercedes-Benz horn blare like a trumpet and scowled.

'I found some engines in that shed too. Look like army spares to me.' It was so easy he almost laughed. 'I'm not some half-hard little ponce from university – I'm one of the blokes who
won
this bloody war!' The horn sounded again and he said, 'I'll come back shortly. We can do business,
if
you behave yourself.'

He crossed the room and put his fingers under her chin.

'There's no time right now, but –' He let his hand fall until his fingers were between two of the buttons of her blouse. He could feel her skin pressing against them.

And the whole time she stared right back at him; she did not even flinch as he touched her.

'After all, Chief Hemmings, you know what they say?
Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Frat!'
He tugged the blouse very lightly then swung away, his blood pounding so loudly he barely heard what Hemmings was babbling about.

Beri-Beri greeted him indignantly. 'You took your bloody time, Cuff!'

Cuff climbed aboard, careful to avoid Marriott's searching glance.

'Doing my best to set an example. Just what Meikle told me to do.'

In the doorway, the CPO watched the car roll on to the cobbled road. Over his shoulder he said brokenly,
'You bitch!
I'll fix you!'

She released her grip on the table very slowly, her palms wet with sweat. A close thing.

She replied in careful English. 'I think not. Not any more,
ja?'

Then she walked into the other room and stared at herself in a mirror. the British officer was big, ugly and probably violent. She touched her lips with her tongue.
But a man.

This time the dream would not release him, nor would the stark pictures fade or lose their horror.
Nearer... Nearer...
Marriott fought free of the sheets and tried to struggle upright in the bunk, his mind cringing from the sights and the soundless screams.

He stared for several seconds at the unknown face which was peering down at him. Round and youthful, with staring, frightened eyes.

The face exclaimed anxiously, 'Herr Leutnant!
Was ist los?'

Marriott felt his heart losing its rapid beat as his reeling mind tried to return to normal.

The unknown face was that of a German steward, one of the many carried aboard the accommodation ship. He saw his white jacket, splashed now with coffee which he must have dropped to the deck outside when he had heard Marriott's voice as he had relived the nightmare.

Marriott reached out and tried to reassure him, and himself.

'It's all right.' He saw no understanding.
'Ich brauche –
' But nothing would come. He darted a quick glance at the other bunk and let out a gasp of relief. He was sharing the cabin with a lieutenant commander who was doing something or other on the N.O.I.C.'s staff. Marriott had gathered that the man, old for his temporary rank, had been a stockbroker before the war. Not that he had really needed to be told. In the cabin he spent most of his time studying the stock-market share reports in whatever newspaper he had managed to get from one of the RAF's flights from the UK.

The steward seemed to have accepted that he was not dangerous or mad and offered politely, 'I bring
Kaffee,
Herr Leutnant!'

Marriott groaned and rolled over on the bunk. His pyjamas and sheets were clinging to him like a shroud.

He struggled out and crossed to a scuttle, then dragged it open. Sunshine without warmth. He peered at his watch. It was only five in the morning. He ran his fingers through his hair and after a momentary hesitation put his raincoat around his shoulders like a dressing-gown and stepped out on to the beautifully laid side-deck.

He leaned on the rail and stared across the devastated harbour. The only movement was a far-off police-launch, while the partly submerged wrecks, and those already dragged to the 'Hinden-burg Graveyard' in the shallows, shimmered in the frail light as if they were no longer dead and useless.

Marriott rubbed his forehead. It was chilled with sweat.
How much longer?
He tried to jerk his mind from it, to think of all those lost times when rich, leisure-seeking Germans had stood at this rail. Probably at this hour of the day after a night of dancing and drinking. The women with their fine gowns and tanned shoulders, the music, and lights on the harbour.

A world which had gone for ever. And not just in Germany, he thought. He turned as the steward returned with the coffee-pot and cup, trying to conceal his surprise at Marriott's appearance. It seemed that German officers had been more conscious of their appearance before their subordinates.

'Thank you.' He saw the man watching the cup in his hand. It was just the usual coffee, which he had consumed in a thousand different situations, before and after an engagement, or in the club-like atmosphere of a shore-based wardroom. But to the Germans he had already realised it was something of a miracle. For years they had been forced to exist on
ersatz
substitute coffee which was allegedly made out of acorns. No wonder there were all the stories going around about a flourishing black market. Marriott had heard that the stewards employed by the navy even saved the leavings in cups and pots to be hoarded and used again like some precious discovery.

Even the sailors' clothing aroused surprised glances, and one lieutenant had told Marriott that the Germans had at first suspected that 'my lads had been decked out specially in real woollen gear just to impress them'!

So how had the German war machine lasted this long? Fighting the Russians on one never-ending front, the Allies in France, or smashing through Italy, without proper oil supplies; no wonder everything was
ersatz.
Their old allies, the Italians, had soon changed sides once Sicily had been invaded, and the Japanese had never really been regarded as true comrades in arms.

And yet it could have so easily gone the other way. Marriott sipped the hot coffee and allowed his gaze to wander around the harbour. Even here it was evident. The Battle of the Atlantic had turned in the navy's favour after years of hitting back and losing thousands of tons of shipping every week. But despite the devastation to German dockyards as in Kiel, the U-Boats had kept on appearing in the Atlantic. They had achieved this by spreading all their ship construction and using prefabricated parts which had been made in remotely situated factories and then transported and assembled far away from the danger zones. There was a large team of submarine experts here right now, they said, and discoveries of an even newer class of U-Boat had caused a few awed glances.

Somewhere a bugle blared, and from a nearby minesweeper Marriott heard the trill of a boatswain's call over the tannoy.

Then the quartermaster's voice, pitiless and uncaring for those he was rousing from bunk and hammock.

'Wakey, wakey, rise an' shine! All hands, all hands, rise an' shine! Hands off cocks an' on socks!'

He smiled despite his tense nerves. What did the Germans make of that, he wondered?

He yawned and decided to have a bath before the watch-keeping officers formed a queue.

Inside the cabin again he stripped off his night clothes and stared at himself in a mirror. Then he saw a newspaper lying on the other officer's neatly made-up bunk and glanced at it casually.

He felt the hard pressure of a chair under his naked buttocks and found that his hands were shaking. It was yesterday's paper. That meant that today's date ...

The cabin seemed to swim round in a wild dance, objects merging together, so that when the steward clattered the coffeepot and tray together beyond the door he felt like calling out, even as a last spark of sanity told him it was useless.

Today was the day. Exactly one year ago.

In his mind's eye he could see it all so clearly. A dawn like this one, the sunlight misty with smoke, not from underground fires and the sappers' clearance of rubble, but from guns. Guns from the sea, from over the horizon and beyond it. Barges spitting out thousands of rockets, hurling tons of high-explosives on to the Normandy coastline. The houses nearest to the coast were all ablaze, the shallows full of beached landing-craft, or those wrecked in the first attack. The troops were somewhere inland, the tanks swallowed up beyond the fires, leaving only the knocked-out ones as evidence of their contested advance. Others lay half-submerged where they had fallen from shelled landing-craft, their crews trapped inside.

And yet despite the din and the casualties, the sight of ships being straddled and apparently destroyed, then emerging through the spray and smoke, their guns high-angled and shooting inland to cover the advancing armies, there was an unspoken feeling that given time and luck they would eventually win a total victory.

The waiting and the foul-ups were behind them. The impossible reality that they had succeeded in taking all their beach-heads at the first attempt had got home to them. Thousands of vessels great and tiny, millions of men with all the weapons and transport to support them had been got ashore. The rest was up to the generals and the air marshals. Marriott's boat had been working offshore near Arromanches, liaising between the British on Gold Beach and the Canadian Third Division at Juno.

To this day Marriott was unsure what exactly had happened after the collision. The tide had been on the ebb, and the first bombardment of the day had made all thought almost impossible.
Or perhaps I won't let myself think about it.
The bridge of the MGB had been packed, for apart from the usual team they had been carrying five Canadian officers, who had been planning where they would build fresh supports for the tank reinforcements which were expected the next day. A very early breakfast before things
hotted up,
as the coxswain had put it. The usual passing round of cigarettes and tobacco pouches, nervous grins, waves to some of their consorts as they rode above their sleek silhouettes on the oily water, thoroughbreds amongst the flotsam of war.

Beri-Beri's had been the nearest boat when Tim had yelled that there was an obstruction in the water. A huge anti-tank device, missed or ignored by the frogmen who had worked even before the landings to destroy them.

'Wouldn't get me doing that job!' someone had said. 'Posthumous VC if all goes well – Jerry firing-squad if it doesn't!'

Marriott had felt it immediately and had used the contesting power of his screws to fight clear of the hidden iron girders.

He was on his feet now, oblivious to his shivering nakedness.
'We must get her off!'
He spoke aloud, as he had on that day a year ago. 'Number One, prepare an anchor and the boat lowering-party. We'll kedge her free before it's too late!'

But it was too late already.

An abbreviated whistle, then a violent bang, salt water cascading all around, soaking, ice-cold, tasting of cordite.

Beri-Beri's boat had come about and was standing bows-on, increasing speed, while an armed trawler was also steering towards them.

Tim had called, 'She's hard and fast, sir!'

Marriott remembered running along the after deck so that he could see the jagged tank-trap shimmering just below the surface, like a creature from a horror film.

In no time at all it would be impossible to free her. The sea was dropping lower every minute.

In his mind he could still hear a loud-hailer across the water.
'Bale out!
The bastard's got you zeroed-in!'

One more try.
Spoken or thought, he did not know. There was just a chance at full power to rip her free. It would mean a dockyard job but –

It had all stopped right there.

He had jammed one foot on the bridge ladder when a shell had hit it on the opposite side. Shaking like a drunk he had dragged himself up the rest of the way and had felt his stomach collapse at the sight. The bridge was already ablaze, signal flares and belts of machine-gun ammunition joining in a shattering chorus over and amongst the corpses.
Corpses?
They had not been even that. Bloodied rags and gruel, burning clothing, blue and khaki, and something which still clung to life, which was screaming, and continued to scream for an eternity after the flames had engulfed him. No arms, his face gone, it could have been any one of them.

The next shell had hit the hull directly abeam. Even now Marriott still believed he had seen it ripping across the water towards him. Witnesses had agreed it was a flat-trajectory shell, the sort mounted on or used against heavily armoured tanks.

Marriott could not recall hearing anything. Or perhaps there had been no more to hear. The fire had burst up from the engineroom and he had seen vague figures running about the deck or vanishing over the side, burning like human torches.

She had gone down quickly, her bows dipping and spurting out compressed steam from the fires between decks even as Marriott had found his first lieutenant pinned under the derrick used for hoisting ammunition and loading stores. The steel had been raw in the sunny haze, cut clean in two by the shell as it had exploded.

They had lain with their faces pressed together while the flames had spurted along the deck towards them.

Tim Elliott, his first lieutenant and friend since they had commissioned the boat together.

Marriott had been unable to believe it. How could it be? He must have pleaded, shouted his name a hundred times, unable to accept that the eyes were without understanding. That there was barely anything left of him below the waist.

Two seamen had dragged him to the side and together they had fallen into the sea. The rest were blurred incidents. A last, dull explosion, then groping hands, dragging at his burned skin and torn clothing, the feel of a boat backing and thrashing away from flaming fragments.