Weaver

IX

The retreating Germans were leaving a mess behind them. Bridges were routinely blown, the roads churned up, the villages torched.

Gary's troop marched past a burned-out truck. The driver still sat behind his wheel, on the left hand side of this German vehicle. He had been reduced to a stick figure by the flames, just a blackened husk. His teeth gleamed white behind peeled-back lips, and his hands still clasped a melted steering wheel.

'Look at that.' Willis used his rifle to point at the driver's wrist, where there was a white band, a bit of flesh. 'How about that, Dougie? Some bugger's nicked this poor bastard's watch. How's that for heartlessness?'

'Shift your arses, ladies,' said Danny Adams.

The troop had to get off the road to let a column of tanks go by. The tanks were Shermans. They had bedsprings and other bits of iron strapped around their bodies with bits of rope. The junk was there because it caused premature explosions of the panzerfausts, rocket-propelled grenades. The troopers predictably mocked the tank crews as the vehicles rolled past.

Gary was glad of a chance to sit for a bit on the soft ground and have a smoke, although Dougie Skelland had a ciggie in his mouth most of the time anyhow. Their blackened faces were streaked with sweat.

'Just let them go by, lads,' Danny Adams said. 'A tank's all right. But what counts in war is feet on the ground. One bloody footstep after another. And that's us. Winning England back step by step. Come on, let's get on with it.'

They clambered back onto the road and carried on. The road surface had been churned up by the tank tracks, so you had to watch where you stepped.

It was mid-morning. After the dawn bombardment they had quickly broken through the smashed crust of defences behind the Winston Line itself, and now they were pursuing the retreating Germans hard, to give them as little time as possible to regroup. But Christ, he was tired, Gary thought; he'd been on the go for eight or nine hours already.

It could have been a lot worse. There were rumours that the Germans had concentrated their mechanised divisions in the east of the protectorate, to take on the Americans; in the fields of eastern Kent a massive tank battle was being waged, and the Germans' deep defence was concentrating on holding the major ports, such as Folkestone. But even here in the west the Germans were putting up a determined resistance, for which they had had three years to prepare.

Although lead units had already surged through the countryside there were plenty of pockets of Germans left, and the advancing troops knew they were surrounded by the enemy, by peril. In this closed-in landscape of fields and hedges and trees and lanes, there was little visibility. Every tree, every window of every one of these bucolic cottages could hide a sniper; every furrow in every field could shelter a machine gun nest or a mortar. Further out the Germans had some big guns emplaced which could spit their vicious shells miles, aiming for the dust plumes of the advancing columns. As a result the vehicles were crawling along at not much better than walking pace. The lead units had stuck signs to telephone posts and trees: GO SLOW. DUST MEANS DEATH.

Everything was mixed up. Sometimes you came so close to the enemy you would hear German voices, or the clatter of their horses' hooves.

But in the middle of all this, it was still England, and those civilians who hadn't fled were carrying on with their lives. Once Gary saw a tank detachment stopped to allow a farmer to drive his cows across the road for milking. Cows!

They came to an abandoned German position behind a crossroads, a complex of interconnected slit trenches protected by a minefield. The sappers had marked out a safe path with white tape. Gary saw a gruesome monument lying in the road: a human leg blown clean off at the knee, the booted foot shredded. Somebody had paid dearly for the path he followed now.

Danny Adams was poking in the dirt. 'Over here, lads. The trench has been pretty much stripped, but I think there are weapons. See, buried in the dirt where the wall collapsed?'

Gary went to see. 'Panzerfausts.' They had been trained up on these; it turned out that a panzerfaust's rocket-propelled grenade, designed to take out a tank, did a good job of smashing in the walls of a house.

'Come on, let's dig them out. I'll call for a truck.'

The trench itself was a bit of a mess, when Gary got into it. Grenades had clearly been used, you could see the cratering in the trench walls. Most of the bodies were intact, more or less, killed by the blast, but some had been ripped apart, and you had to watch where you stepped. In one place Gary saw that one fellow had fallen over another when he died, with bits of medical kit scattered around, bandages, syringes, even a stethoscope.

'A doctor,' Willis said. 'Killed as he treated another man, you think?'

'Looks like it.'

'Odd, isn't it? He stayed to do his duty, and got killed for it. Sort of thing that rather proves there's no God. Now then-' Using his rifle barrel as a scoop, he got hold of the stethoscope. 'That's a souvenir you don't see every day.'

'Yeah,' Dougie Skelland growled. 'You can use it to find out if you've got a fucking heart, you faggot.'

Danny Adams said, 'Shut up and get these panzerfausts stacked.'