Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? (6 page)

‘Looks like you’re going to get all the fun, Cloughie.’

The young squaddie didn’t reply; he looked absolutely terrified.

Private Clough had been on the roof no more than ten minutes when they heard the unmistakeable noise of an aircraft swooping in from the west. The Messerschmitt ME 210 had been on a reconnaissance patrol, viewing and reporting back on the Allied troop movements. Nevertheless it was equipped with four 20mm cannons and a rear gunner in the tail with fully armed MG 131 machine guns. The pilot radioed through to the rear gunner: they were about to have some fun.

The plane banked steeply as the pilot held both thumbs on the buttons of the cannons high up on the joystick. He dropped the aircraft down another hundred feet or so and lined it up with the firebreak in the forest as if approaching a huge, long runway ready to land. This was going to be easy; take out a few of the English pigs and return home in time for supper.

Horace had to admit it was a frightening sight as the aircraft roared towards them no more than 80 feet from the ground. The noise was deafening as the aircraft sped towards the exposed lorry. Most of the section had taken cover in the forest; a few were discharging their weapons but couldn’t possibly hope to hit anything firing through the branches of the trees. Horace stood alone in the clearing, the 303 rifle butt tight into his shoulder, firing into the propellers of the plane through gritted teeth. At any second the Bren gun would open up a volley of shots and the plane would be brought down. And then it came; it was music to his ears, round after round from a machine gun. A beautiful sound, thought Horace, and he wished he’d been the man on top of the four-tonner.

Even closer now, Horace expected to see a plume of smoke, an explosion in the sky. But in a split second he realised to his horror that the gunfire was not coming from the Bren gun on the lorry but from the aircraft. Twenty metres ahead in the dust of the forest floor the bullets penetrated the ground with a dull thud. Horace stood directly in their path as they pounded the ground. Nearer and nearer they came, as if in a slow death motion.

He didn’t have time to think. The adrenaline urged him forward and his rifle kicked into his shoulder so much it began to ache. The two lines of bullets ripped into the roof of the four-tonner and ricocheted around his ears. And then…. blackness, as a searing pain in his skull sent Horace into unconsciousness.

Horace didn’t feel any better when he came round a few seconds later and found out what had happened. A medic had applied a bandage to a deep gash in his forehead and he had a bump on his head the size of an egg. At the last second a raw survival instinct had propelled him under the vehicle and he’d caught his head on the iron support bar that held the spare
wheel. He’d been so close to being killed: one bullet had gone straight through the khaki of his trousers, missing his leg by a fraction of a millimetre.

He’d stared death in the face. In fact, he’d given it one almighty slap in the chops. He had every right to feel shocked, numb even. He deserved to feel elated that he’d escaped with his life and pleased with the praise his colleagues were doling out. Even Aberfield had slapped him on the back and mumbled a few words of congratulations.

But he felt none of that, only disappointment. The one man he’d relied on had been Private Clough on top of the lorry. Two hundred rounds a minute that Bren gun could release and he hadn’t fired one shot. As Horace Greasley had stood alone in the clearing, firing shots at the Messerschmitt almost as soon as it had come into view, Bill Clough had shat himself, leapt the ten feet to the ground in one fluid motion and scampered like a frightened rabbit deep into the forest. Horace had faced the awesome firepower of the Messerschmitt alone, with only a single-shot repeating rifle against a fully armed aircraft with a rear gunner capable of ripping a man to shreds in a few seconds.

Horace had been lucky, of that there was no doubt. But he’d only stood there because he thought he was being protected by his mate. He told the sergeant to keep Bill Clough out of his way for a few days.

The whole section was loaded back onto the lorry and Horace was allowed to travel up front in the cab. Aberfield thought it wouldn’t be good for troop morale if Horace had suddenly started laying into one of his comrades.

Horace caught snippets of Aberfield’s conversation with the driver, but most of the time he just stared into the fields. Swathes of yellow corn were dancing to a tune on the wind. Occasionally he took note of another road sign that told him
they were retreating even further. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought, as he remembered the stirring lectures he’d listened to in the old clubhouse at the cricket ground in Leicester. The good old 2nd/5th Battalion Leicesters weren’t supposed to run and hide; that wasn’t what he’d heard from the officer as he’d described the glorious history of the regiment. And there wasn’t supposed to be a coward in the ranks – for that’s what Bill Clough was. How could he do that?

Horace rubbed the bandage on his head. The medic had been right; the swelling had gone down but Jesus Christ how it hurt. After an hour they stopped by a river and Aberfield ordered the troops to disembark. They were just outside the town of Hautmont on the river Sambre. An old stone bridge crossed the river there and as the troops stood on the west side they received their orders from Aberfield.

‘The bridge is of strategic importance, men, and we have good information that Jerry will be trying to cross it very soon.’ Aberfield was wearing his white mask again; his words almost faltered as he spoke. ‘There’s a German patrol headed this way. We have a good few hours by all accounts, so dig in and get camouflaged up.’

Horace and his comrades dug in for two days and two nights. They took turns to catch a few hours’ sleep but their rifles lay primed at the ready. The Bren guns were positioned on a small grassy knoll and manned by two of the older boys from the section. Aberfield was conspicuous by his absence, choosing to take up a position on the perimeter of the town with the radio operator. Halfway through the second day Aberfield and a sergeant returned with a dozen French loaves and an urn of warm milk. The men ate and drank voraciously; these were the first things that had crossed their throats for nearly three days. The battalion mess kitchen had been split from the company, its location unknown.

It was six in the evening on the second day when the mood of the commanding officers suddenly changed. The tension in the air rose to an unprecedented level as they were informed that a German patrol was minutes away from the bridge. Horace arranged his camouflage tight around his head and pulled the rifle butt into his shoulder. He controlled his breathing and listened to the sergeant explaining that they were only to open fire on his first shot.

Horace lay as still as he dared. He was aware of an eerie silence. The guns that had sounded in the distance, the lull of the traffic from the village that could be heard occasionally drifting in on the breeze seemed to have been frozen in a bizarre silent time warp. Even the birds had stopped singing as if somehow they knew.

Horace spotted the first German cautiously approaching the bridge a mere ten minutes later. The information had been good – at last, it seemed, someone on the Allied side was getting something right. His finger hovered over the trigger as he slowly lined up the V sight into the chest of the enemy soldier taking his first tentative steps on the bridge. Another five or six Germans came into view. Horace felt beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. He was about to kill a fellow human being, of that there was no doubt. He’d gone past the point of no return.

The first German soldier was now about half way across the bridge with at least a dozen of his compatriots treading nervously behind. Without warning a shot rang out behind him and the lead soldier’s head exploded like an orange, a fine red mist seeming to linger eerily above him as he fell to the ground. A volley of shots pounded into the patrol as Horace switched his sights to the second soldier. He squeezed the trigger, the rifle cannoned into his shoulder as the round discharged and the man dropped like a sack of potatoes onto
the parapet of the bridge. Instinct took over. He didn’t have time to contemplate the absurdity of war or the young man’s family back in Berlin or Munich, how they would react when told their father, son, brother had been killed in defence of the Fatherland. Horace took out at least another two and pumped two more rounds into a dying body on the bridge decking as the unfortunate man made a last-gasp effort for his rifle. The Bren guns completed a job well done. The German patrol had been massacred. Horace felt strangely elated… he had done his bit without hesitation. A few cheers broke out among the men. Horace remained quiet.

The sergeant major instructed Horace and three more members of the section to make safe the bridge – Army talk for ensuring that the Germans were in fact dead. Horace led the team of four – Ernie Mountain, Fred Bryson and section leader Charlie Smith – onto the bridge. His heart was pumping viciously now, a mixture of adrenaline and a little fear. He was sure the men following him could hear it. It was not unusual for a wounded or dying man to be clutching a live grenade, determined to commit suicide by blowing himself up along with any enemy in the vicinity. Horace had heard tales of dead Germans miraculously coming alive and taking out half a dozen careless Allied soldiers. He was determined to follow the job through and wouldn’t relax until every one of the soldiers lying bloody and still on the bridge was confirmed as dead.

He looked back over his shoulder. The rest of his section had retained their positions, rifles trained on the bridge. He hoped they were as accurate a shot as he was, as he became acutely aware that his own body now stood in their line of fire. As he and his three colleagues now took up their positions, rifles trained on the German corporal’s head. Horace propped his rifle up against the bridge wall, knelt
down and studied the German’s breathing – or rather the lack of it. He had watched the first body the whole time during the slow-paced walk over the bridge. Nobody could hold their breath that long, thought Horace. He took hold of the soldier’s uniform, one hand on the shoulder and one on the lapel of the tunic. Slowly but with a forced action he fell backwards and the German soldier exposed his body and face to the three men’s rifles. The shout went up.

‘Clean.’

Horace breathed a sigh of relief. They took it in turns as they made their way over the bridge, carefully examining each body. They’d shot well. Not one German was alive. His colleagues were smiling now, visibly relaxing as one by one the enemy soldiers were pronounced dead. Young men – 18, 19 years of age. Boys.

At the far end of the bridge something extraordinary happened. It was Horace’s turn again to approach the body, the last one, and the men adopted their now familiar positions, rifles at the ready. The German soldier lay in a pool of crimson. Fragments of skull bone, tissue and brain had splattered the wall of the bridge. Horace did not even take the time to gauge the breathing of the man. He was clearly dead and his body lay grotesquely twisted in an unnatural position face down in his own blood. Horace knelt, trying to avoid the steaming, sticky pool. He went through the motions.

‘Clean,’ came the cry.

‘What’s that?’ The section leader was pointing at the dead man’s midriff.

‘It’s a belt with writing on.’

The soldier bent down to take a closer look as the rest of the men lowered their rifles. He studied the writing.

‘
Gott ist mit uns
,’ he spelled out slowly.

‘What does that mean?’ Horace asked. He looked over to
Ernie Mountain, who spoke a little German. Ernie removed his tin helmet and scratched at his forehead.

‘Well, fuck me… unless I’m mistaken it means “God is with us”.’

‘What God do they worship then?’ asked the section leader.

‘They’re Christian,’ replied Ernie.

‘Fuck off, they can’t be. They’re evil bastards.’

Horace sat on the small parapet of the bridge as the conversation continued. The men were genuinely amazed as it was eventually agreed that the Germans – the Nazis, the Huns – actually worshipped the same God as good old Tommy.

Horace shook his head. It had never crossed his mind before. They’d read the reports, listened to the radio and watched the Pathé newsreels in cinemas up and down the country. This nation, these men, the soldiers and the SS seemed determined on world domination, intent on ethnic cleansing and eradicating anything that didn’t meet their ideology. They seemed to go against everything that the good book preached, yet here was proof they worshipped the same Lord – Jesus Christ, God, the big fellow – as the men, women and children in England.

Horace stared into the faces of his stunned comrades. They weren’t religious men, far from it. But they’d been brought up in decent family homes and schools, with morning worship and prayers at night as they settled down to sleep and, no doubt, Sunday school too.

‘God understands German?’ Ernie asked.

Horace nearly collapsed with laughter.

‘Apparently so. And French and Russian and Polish too.’

‘But he’s on our side, not theirs,’ said Fred Bryson as his brow furrowed. He looked around at his comrades as if expecting one of them to solve the puzzle right there and then. Four men. Four men who until that day hadn’t ever believed,
hadn’t ever imagined that a Nazi could possibly worship Our Father, couldn’t believe that they’d find hard evidence such as the belt they had just stumbled across.

Horace pointed to the body. ‘Hasn’t done that poor fucker any good, has he? Probably thought he was invincible with that belt on, probably thought he was afforded a little extra protection.’

Fred spoke. ‘But the padre, he said we…’

‘Don’t go there, Fred,’ interrupted Horace. ‘It’s all a pile of shite and now you know it for sure. Just think about it. Think about it when you say your prayers tonight.’

The men turned around and trudged back across the bridge towards their section. Fred Bryson lingered for a moment then removed the soldier’s belt. As he walked back to join his colleagues he threw the belt over the bridge wall and down into the swollen river below. He didn’t know why, it just seemed the right thing to do. This man didn’t deserve to be buried with such a fine Christian inscription… let alone one in German.