Authors: Paul Dowswell
He knew it wasn’t patriotic but Axel felt exasperated with his rulers. First the farm labourers had gone to fight. Then most of the horses had been taken. Then the fertiliser to make explosives. How could the farmers feed people on what they had left? Now the whole nation was starving. He was sure that was why his mother had died. She had been working on a steam-powered threshing machine. Axel didn’t like to think about what happened. Something, her hair, her clothes, had caught in the drive belt. They wouldn’t let him see the body. Herr Meyer was convinced his wife was weakened by hunger. Too slow, too lethargic, to take proper precautions around that infernal machine . . .
‘Meyer, Becker,’ the
Feldwebel
’s voice barked up to them. ‘Report.’
The two boys cautiously peered over the stonework to scan the horizon. The sky was musty and clouded from the shelling, dirt particles still suspended in the air. They could still taste them. ‘Look, two hundred metres away – just over the brow of the hill . . .’ said Axel.
‘There’s hundreds of the
Schwein
heading straight for us.’ Erich couldn’t keep the fear from his voice. ‘They’re coming. Hundreds of them, two hundred metres.’
The
Feldwebel
called out, ‘Prepare to fire. Await my command,’ in a cold hard voice. His lack of nervousness steadied the men. High in their tower, Axel and Erich heard twenty rifle bolts crack back in a rapid rattle. ‘The shelling has stopped,’ said Erich.
An insistent buzzing reached their ears a second later. They both peered over the top of the tower.
‘Look, a fighter plane. Heading straight for us,’ yelled Axel.
He cracked back his rifle bolt and took careful aim at the nose of the plane. It was flying so low he wondered whether it would crash into the tower.
The roar of the engine almost blotted out everything else now. There was the snap of rifle fire from below, and the rattle of a machine gun. The
Feldwebel
was yelling that they should conserve their ammunition for the attacking Yanks, not waste it on a lucky shot at the plane. But no one heard him.
Axel’s finger tightened over the trigger. He felt its coldness, damp in the chill autumn morning. This was his first shot of the war. He aimed right at the central hub of the propeller and squeezed the trigger.
Eddie Hertz was reaching for the lever to drop his bombs. These aerial attacks were always a complicated business. Keep your eye on the horizon, watch out for enemy ground fire, make sure you weren’t jumped from above by a Hun fighter, choose your targets. Were you high enough to escape your own bomb blast? All of this, every second, you had to concentrate. His right hand found the lever. That tower. There were bound to be soldiers in it – probably a machine-gun nest. He’d take it out. He knew it was a medieval building – had stood there for six hundred years – but this country was full of churches like that, and sparing this one from the war was not worth the American lives he might save by destroying it. He pulled back the stick, certain he had enough distance to climb over the tower, and lifted the bomb release lever.
Free of its two twenty-five-pound bombs, the Camel immediately felt lighter in the air, but no sooner had Eddie began his evasive manoeuvre than the aircraft jolted in his hand. Something had hit the engine. He was absolutely sure of it this time. He could feel the craft struggle in the air, and already he was losing what little altitude he had. The bombs exploded almost simultaneously beneath him. Hot shrapnel peppered the plane.
Axel Meyer watched in amazement as a thin streak of black smoke began to pour from the climbing aircraft. He was so distracted he did not even see the two silver shapes fall from beneath its wings. Two great clouds of earth exploded behind the church and again he and Erich were showered with earth. The pilot had misjudged his drop, but Axel wasn’t thinking about that.
He laughed out loud. His first shot of the war and he had hit an American fighter plane. No one would believe him. He clapped Erich on the back. ‘Crack shot!’ he yelled. Erich slumped forward. Axel shook him. His helmet fell off. A gaping wound was oozing bone and brain from the back of his head. Erich’s eyes were open but he saw nothing. A piece of metal from the bombs must have caught him. Axel leaped to the other side of the tower and looked over. Five of his platoon were lying dead or contorted in agony. He searched the sky for the enemy plane and saw it desperately trying to maintain an even flight, with thick black smoke now pouring from its engine. Flickers of flame played around the exhaust vents too. ‘Burn in hell,
Drecksau
,’ shouted Axel. If that pilot ever got out of his machine, Axel was going to hunt him down and skewer him with his bayonet. Then he heard the
Feldwebel
’s order: ‘Select your targets. Wait for my order to fire.’ For a moment he had forgotten the American soldiers were coming too.
A few seconds after the explosion Eddie Hertz felt his legs begin to burn with a terrible sharp pain. He looked down to see his leather flying boots peppered with perforations, and blood oozing out of the holes. That wouldn’t kill him, at least not yet, but he dreaded to think what would happen when he hit the ground. The black smoke, which made seeing where he was going almost impossible, began to choke him. The words of that British song spun through his head:
Take the cylinder out of my kidneys
The connecting rod out of my brain . . .
He fought back a sudden urge to vomit. Maybe it was shock from his wounds. He felt slippery with sweat but chilled to the marrow. Eddie tried to turn his machine around, so he would crash close to, or even behind, the Allied lines. But halfway through his turn the Camel’s rotary engine coughed and spluttered to a juddering halt. In the sudden silence, he could hear shouting and firing from close by. His plane dropped towards the ground.
Eddie was lucky. When his engine cut out, he was already flying beneath tree level. He tried to keep the plane level, but the ground was uneven and there were even some fresh shell holes ahead. The aircraft hit the field with a splintering crash and Eddie was jolted brutally in his cockpit as the Camel’s flimsy undercarriage collapsed beneath him. He covered his head with his hands and waited for the grinding, screeching, splintering noise to stop. Eddie didn’t see his life flash before him, although everything did seem to be happening in slow motion. Instead, he kept thinking,
Is this it? When is that cylinder going to lodge in my brain? How much is it going to hurt?
He even had time to consider whether to peer over his guns to see if the Camel was heading straight into a sturdy obstacle like a house or a big tree, but he decided he would rather not know. All at once his aircraft was thrown into the air, as it hit a dip in the field and flipped over on to its front. As the plane juddered to a halt, Eddie lost consciousness.
The remaining men of Axel’s platoon turned their fire on the aircraft that had killed so many of their comrades. Bullets poured into the shattered canvas fuselage. The
Feldwebel
ordered his men to concentrate their attention on the advancing Americans. Even if they hadn’t killed the pilot, the fire that had caught in the engine surely would.
Some of the German bullets had hit home. Eddie Hertz was jolted from unconsciousness by a sharp stab of pain in his right thigh. He could taste the smoke from his blazing engine in his throat and sensed bullets piercing the length of his shattered craft. He also realised he was hanging upside down by his harness. Fortunately the Camel’s upper wing had held firm in the crash; otherwise he would have been decapitated.
Instinctively he punched the circular release on his harness and dropped like a stone. He only fell a couple of feet, but he felt weak with pain and nausea as his body landed clumsily on the ground. Seeing him fall attracted the attention of the Germans again and shots began to churn up the earth around him. Eddie saw he had crashed a few yards away from a large shell hole and began to crawl towards it with all his remaining strength.
As he dragged himself over the lip of the crater, a machine gun began its sweep and a bullet caught his right bootheel just as he flipped into the dirt interior. This time Eddie had been lucky.
Axel Meyer had seen Eddie’s miraculous escape. When the American soldiers had been repulsed, he was going to go into that crater and finish him off. But first they had to stop the incoming attack. He leaned over the tower ramparts and fired several rounds. He hadn’t a clue if he’d hit anyone. He couldn’t get out of the habit of closing his eyes whenever he fired and the rifle butt kicked hard into his shoulder.
The soldiers were near enough now to tell the men from the officers. Down below, the
Feldwebel
was ordering them to shoot the ones with the leather straps across their tunics, who were carrying pistols.
There were a great number of soldiers coming towards him and Axel wondered whether he ought to stop firing from up there in the tower. Stop drawing attention to himself. These Americans were taking heavy casualties as they advanced, and he could not believe they would be happy to accept the surrender of the men who had just been killing them. He was sure there was going to be a massacre. This was how his life would end. At the point of an American bayonet. They were just fifty metres away now. He decided to keep his head down. Stay up there and hope they’d all forget about him.
Over in the crater, Eddie Hertz heard voices near by – American voices!
‘Hey, fellas,’ he yelled. ‘Come help me out.’
Two helmeted heads appeared over the brim of the crater. Doughboys. One of them began to negotiate his way down the side of the crater. Then Eddie heard a harsh voice. ‘C’mon, you sons of bitches.’
The soldier shouted, ‘We’ll be back!’ His face was flushed with excitement. Eddie thought he looked like he was having the time of his life.
Back in the tower Axel heard the command he was dreading. ‘Meyer, Becker, come down to the trench here.’ Axel was seized by panic. Should he pretend to be dead? But something compelled him to obey, and he ran two at a time down the spiralling stone steps of the tower and joined those of his comrades who were still alive.
High above the crack and rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire, Axel could hear the now familiar whistle of incoming shells. Surely the Americans would not be firing on them if their own men were so close to their lines? But the shells were coming from a German artillery battery close behind them. The first salvo devastated the row of advancing Americans. They crumpled and faltered, and as more shells began to fall they turned and ran.
Axel’s squad could not believe their luck. The barrage stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun, and in their excitement some of them began to storm out of their foxholes and ditches and chase after their fleeing foe. The
Feldwebel
shouted angrily that they should remain at their posts, but caught up in the moment, they ignored him. Axel was one of the few who stayed.
Eddie Hertz had been covered by waves of falling soil and stones. He marvelled at how he escaped that bombardment. Maybe, like lightning, shells never fell in the same spot twice. He dragged himself forward with his elbows, further into the crater. It was against all logic but it made him feel safer. But the further he moved into its centre, the more he found himself pulled down by the wet, crumbling earth. And now the shell fire had stopped and the air began to clear, he could smell something hideous. There was a body close by – a German soldier, by the look of it. He had been there for a while and rats had already eaten away at his face. The teeth were bared in a macabre grin. The skin protruding from the sleeves of his jacket was starting to turn black. Eddie choked at the stench and placed a sleeve over his nose. Breathing through that made him feel momentarily better, but he had to get away from that corpse.
He scrambled further down the crater, not realising that the bottom was filled with thick mud. Eddie turned around in the quagmire – desperate to escape its oozing grasp. He started to climb up again, but his wounded legs began to sink beneath him. The more he moved, the more he sank into the boggy earth. Eddie froze and fought back a mounting despair. He had felt lucky to have escaped his plane. Now he wasn’t so sure.
10.00 a.m.
The sniper had shaken them all. Will could see it in their faces. And now they could hear shooting and explosions in the middle distance, somewhere over to the south. That didn’t help.
Jim was being extra terse with his commands. He needed to be stern. He sensed the men’s fear too. The last thing he wanted was to have them panic and flee like frightened rabbits. Then they could be picked off one by one. Together they could concentrate their fire on any threat.
‘I’ll carry on at point,’ said Jim, continuing to place himself in the most exposed position and putting hope and courage back into his patrol. ‘Now keep those ears flapping and no unnecessary talking. We’re going t’make our way back to the platoon. Fritz probably has several snipers in these woods. We’ll report back and get the artillery to blow this place to splinters.’
Will felt a huge sense of relief when Jim announced they were going. He was desperate to be away from this gloomy forest. He was convinced that hostile eyes were watching him, or worse, even at that moment, someone had him in the cross hairs of a telescopic sight. He had to force himself to stop wondering if these were the last thoughts he would ever have.