Red Devils

16

The British had continued to hold back the German advance, even reverse it for a time, but the battle was taking its toll. Sergeant Daniel Phillips was losing track of the days. He seemed to have been stuck in this damned spot forever. He and his men had taken over a derelict farmhouse just east of Namur, and from there they’d beaten back the advancing enemy again and again and again. Each time the Germans seemed to just keep coming. Phillips had, for a while, wondered if they’d been fighting those unstoppable undead monsters he continued to hear so much about. It was reassuring to see that when he shot a man these days, he still stayed down.

‘All right there, Sergeant?’ Private Harry Wilson asked, nudging Phillips in the ribs.

‘I’m all right, Wilson,’ he answered quickly. Instinctively. Better to give an immediate and flippant answer like that than to get bogged down in reality. It was hard being out here like this, damn hard. They all felt it, and it wasn’t getting any easier. ‘Keep talking will you, there’s a good chap.’

‘But you’re usually telling me to shut up, sir,’ he said in his broad Yorkshire accent. His voice was deep and wide. It sounded too old for the soldier’s youthful face.

‘I know, but occasionally I like to hear you talk rubbish. It reminds me of home.’

‘Hear a lot of rubbish at home did you, sir?’

‘That’s not the point I’m making and you know it. Your accent is irrefutably British.’

‘As is yours, sir. Yours is a bit more proper than mine, that’s all.’

‘It’s not about status, it’s about geography,’ Phillips told him. ‘Now tell us some of your bloody awful jokes. It’s Christmas, after all.’

‘Very well, sir. Why did the penny stamp?’

‘Because the thruppenny bit,’ someone shouted from another corner of the ransacked farmhouse kitchen.

‘Very good,’ Wilson laughed. ‘Right, try this one. What did the sea say to the shore?’

‘Nothing, it just waved,’ another voice offered from the other side of an open door.

‘We’ve heard these all before,’ a third man said.

‘I came here to kill Germans, not tell jokes,’ Wilson reminded them. ‘You don’t win wars by telling jokes.’

‘And thank goodness for that,’ Phillips said, chuckling to himself. ‘With your jokes we wouldn’t have a hope in hell!’

For the moment, the farmhouse was filled with noise and good cheer.

In war, everything can change in a heartbeat.

Phillips and his men were resting. Fred McCarthy was on lookout, watching from the hayloft of an adjacent barn. It had been quiet these last few hours, and Private Neville was due to relieve him in thirty minutes or so, so he allowed himself to lie back in the shadows and close his eyes for the briefest of moments. It was all clear outside, not a soul to be seen in any direction. He wasn’t going to sleep, he just wanted to rest for a while and get out of the icy breeze which gusted through the open hatch.

Private McCarthy had chosen the worst possible moment to lower his guard. When Neville stepped out of the farmhouse to cross the short distance to the barn, he thought his eyes were deceiving him. They had to be. How could so many of them have got here so quickly and so quietly? Hundreds of men approaching, revealed by the moonlight.

But this was no illusion. The ungodly Nazi army had reached the western front.

‘Attack! We’re under attack!’ McCarthy shouted, and he doubled-back to the farmhouse when he saw several of the figures up ahead break into awkward sprints and come hurtling towards him. By the time he’d made it indoors his comrades were crowding every available window, firing at the shadowy shapes which swarmed silently nearer.

Sergeant Phillips took up position and began firing. ‘Hit them with everything we have,’ he shouted to his men. The moonlight struck the frost and snow and made everything appear brighter than it should have at this early hour. Phillips took aim and fired at one man who’d chosen to move criminally slowly. He hit him square in his chest, knocked him off his feet. But then he picked himself up again and continued his unsteady advance.

Phillips knew exactly what this meant.

The undead.

There were hundreds here, and there would be thousands more marching behind them.

From his hayloft look-out, Private McCarthy could see untold numbers emerging from the forest.

There’d be no more sleep here tonight.