We dug ourselves in. The monastery disappeared. We could not understand how God could let it happen. We pledged ourselves to the devil and at the same time prayed to God. The sun went down. The sun rose. Time after time the ruins of the monastery were tossed into the air.
We lay each in his hole gazing out fearfully at the flame-covered, shell-devastated ground. How long yet?
A figure came tearing down the path towards us. A long leap and he landed in our hole.
It was Eagle. He was the battalion runner. He was breathing heavily. Mike gave him a thump.
"What's up?"
"The Battalion's wiped out, Herr Major," he gasped out between breaths. "No. 3 Company's been buried alive."
"Nonsense," snapped Mike. He beckoned to Porta. "You and Sven find out what's happened."
We picked up our machine-pistols, stuck a few hand grenades into the tops of our boots, clapped Eagle on the shoulder.
"Lead on, old jail-fart."
"I can't," he groaned and cowered in terror on the floor of our hole.
Porta dealt him a kick.
"Up with you, you fat swine. Perhaps you can't, but you will."
Eagle was almost beside himself with fear. We belaboured him with our butts. It was no good. We rubbed his face in the dirt, gripped him by the tenderest parts of his body, did everything we could, nothing worked. Yet what our brutality had failed to accomplish, Mike's voice of command achieved.
"Stahlschmidt," he roared. "Pick up your rifle and get going! That's an order."
Eagle shot to his feet, stood at attention in that rain of shells and barked:
"Jawohl, Herr Major!" And off he dashed, so fast that Porta and I had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with him. "Follow me," he yelled. Then he thought he saw an American, emptied his magazine into him, but it was only a corpse.
We ran across the contorted ruins, seeking funky cover in deep shell craters. We edged our way past pieces of red hot metal. A six inch shell tossed a corpse into the air: the remains of an Englishman. One foot dropped off and struck me on the back of the neck.
A warning whine automatically made us run. We became coated in slush. Only our eyes moved in the thick mud masks that now covered our faces. What had once been No. 3 Company's position was now a lunar landscape, out of which a single arm in a sleeve of camouflage cloth protruded like some lonely flower.
"A direct hit," Eagle explained. "I had just left the Company HQ, when it landed. It must have been a 12 inch."
"One can see it wasn't a rifle-grenade," Porta growled. Then his eye fell on an enormous dud lying in a shell-hole. "Have you seen that copper snozzle? Fine lot of dough there! Will you give me a hand if I gently remove it? There's at least three nights at 'Palid Ida's' there."
I gulped. The thought gave me a sinking feeling in my midriff. There wouldn't be as much as a button of us left, if that dud went off. But I didn't dare refuse. With our united strength we pulled the copper snozzle upright. Porta spat on it, made the sign of the cross over it, knelt three times. Eagle was deathly pale and I, no doubt, the same.
"Hold on to her now, or you'll have shat your last turd," commanded Porta, producing some tools from his haversack, which he laid out neatly beside the great shell.
We got 3d. a 1b for copper and there must have been at least 2 cwt of it on that monster. Porta and Tiny were avid collectors. They had had a whole lorryfull some time before. More than once they had crawled out into No Man's land and pinched the rings off the shells right in front of the American positions. But the other side had its collectors too, and it had happened more than once that rival groups had come to bitter blows over a couple of duds.
Thoughtfully Porta weighed a pair of parrot-beaked pincers in his hand. Just as he was about to take a grip of the point of the shell with them, there was a wail overhead that sent us diving for cover on the bottom of the shell-hole. Earth, stones, steel rained down over us. Cautiously we peered over the rim to see if that was all.
Porta spat and ordered Eagle to sit astride the shell. Eagle blubbed and begged for his life.
"This is murder," he squeaked desperately.
"Will be, if you don't do as you're told," said Porta dryly and began pulling on the pincers.
I got a grip with another pair and pulled in the opposite direction. Porta exerted all his strength, while Eagle tried desperately to keep the shell from shifting.
Porta groaned and sweat poured from his face, not the sweat of fear, but of exertion.
"If it begins to fizz, run like bloody hell: Or we'll be enjoying the view from the top of the moon!" He let go of the pincers, spat on his hands and took another grip. "I'd like to meet the chap who screwed this on. I'd tell him something." He shoved his yellow top hat onto the back of his head, squinted across at Eagle who was as white as a sheet. "Are you comfortable, Stahlschmidt?"
Eagle gave a sob. "Blast the day I landed in this shitting company."
"Now she's coming," exclaimed Porta jubilantly and turned his pincers round. Having removed the cap, he knelt down and peered inside. Then he thrust his hand in.
I expected the thing to go off any moment. Nobody normal would dismantle a shell in that way, unless he was tired of life. Eagle bit his lips till they bled. His eyes were popping out of his head. He looked like a sick hen.
"Where the hell is the fuse?" swore Porta, his whole arm inside the shell. "I don't understand a fart of this. There's a mass of wheels and cogs in here. Now she's beginning to tick. Listen!"
"It's a time one," Eagle yelled desperately.
Porta lit his lighter to get a better look.
I came out in gooseflesh all over.
"Oh, shut up," he exclaimed, surprised. "Queer lot of shit inside here, and the whole lot's moving. It's like the guts of an alarm clock."
Eagle gave vent to a hoarse screech, leaped off the shell and took to his heels. Porta was too preoccupied with his interesting shell to notice. He hauled out a strip of asbestos, a tube that looked like glass followed, whereupon the shell began to whistle like a kettle.
I was seized with panic, flung down my pincers and ran, landing in a shell-hole twenty yards away. I peered back towards the great shell. I could see Porta's top hat going up and down like a pump-handle.
Five minutes passed. Then he beckoned to me.
"Come over and help, you funk-bag. I've got the clockwork out of her."
Somewhat faintheartedly I crawled back. Eagle had vanished. A pile of screws and wheels lay in front of Porta.
With a deal of baroque gaiety we went on dismantling the shell.
"Peculiar type," Porta said, wondering, "I can't find a fuse. There must be one in there somewhere."
"Do you think it can still explode," I asked, apprehensively.
"Must be able to," Porta said. "Let's hope she won't till we've got all the copper."
There was an impressive pile of it heaped between us, by the time Porta announced himself satisfied. His final act was to lie flat beside the shell and put his ear to it. "Now she's ticking again." He said, "Shouldn't we try to dismantle her altogether, so that we have some idea how these work? Be a bit dangerous in future, if we don't."
"Come along, for Christ's sake," I yelled, thoroughly frightened, and ran as hard as I could.
Shortly afterwards Porta came trotting along after me, weighed down by copper. Scarcely had he caught up with me, before the ground seemed to rise up to heaven and a wall of air knocked me flat. Our friend had gone off.
Porta crawled round searching for his top hat. He found it behind some scorched bushes. A splinter had gone right through it, tearing off the oak leaf band and cockade.
Eagle was lying at the bottom of a deep crater weeping. He was badly shocked. He became quite savage when he saw us. We had to hit him across the head with a spade.
Only forty men were left of No. 2 Company, which was commanded by the one surviving NCO. No. 3 Company had been wiped out altogether. No. 4 Company now consisted of seven men, of whom four were badly wounded. The Company Commander, a lieutenant aged eighteen, sat in a corner of the trench, an enormous bloody bandage round his belly.
"How's things, lieutenant?" Porta asked in his free and easy way.
The lieutenant made an attempt at a smile. He gave a machine gun beside him a pat and said:
"We're ready to receive them, when they come, the shits. They'll know we're here."
In the place that should have been No. 1 Company's position, we found a dozen machine-gun barrels sticking up from the ground and a heap of bloody lumps. That was all that remained of the Company.
Out of the 700-strong battalion only 117 were left. Then the reserves arrived, running the gauntlet of that gully of death. Shells kept ploughing into the monastery. An ammunition column on the serpentine approach road received a direct hit and bits of human body and truck, earth, stone and iron came raining down on all sides. Battalions and regiments vanished. New ones appeared. There was not one of us, who had not some wound. But only the dying were carted off. Gefreiter Knuth went to the Field Dressing Station with three fingers shot off one hand, but the doctor kicked him out. He had no time for "minor" injuries, nothing less than an arm.
Shortly after sunrise the shelling stopped. The holy mountain lay enveloped in yellow, poisonous fumes. We listened. A flute-like note we had not heard before: a new kind of shell?
A paratroop major swung his gas mask over his head.
"G-a-s, g-a-s!" The warning cry went up from man to man. The shells exploded with a strange sort of pop and out welled a greeny-yellow vapour.
We began to cough. It stung our lungs. Our throats were sore. We felt we were choking. Our eyes smarted. One or two went off their heads and leaped out into space.
"G-a-s, g-a-s," the alarm was passed from shell-hole to shell-hole.
We tore off our helmets and dragged our masks over our faces. The glass steamed up, blinding us. We sweated, felt the iron fist of fear gripping our throats. Now bayonets glinted at the end of our rifles. We were ready for a desperate fight.
Day was turned into night. We looked ghastly with our black masks over our faces.
It was not gas, but smoke shells. That was bad enough. Several men were suffocated by this "harmless" smoke screen.
Then they came. Sure of victory. The first thing we heard was the death-promising clank of tank-tracks. Dense shoals of them emerged waddling out of the smoke. Their great snouts dived into shell craters to struggle out again up the almost vertical sides. The clattering steel tracks crushed dead and wounded alike. They had their hatches open, commanders standing erect in the turrets, looking round for victims in the greeny-yellow venomous smoke, grinning, sure of victory.
"Go to hell, kraut, here we are with the Shermans!"
They fired off a broadside, a hurricane of fire, and showered the ground with their machine guns. Their flamethrowers spat out at a company of grenadiers that were squeezing petrified against the wall of rock.
But they had reckoned without us tank men in our new role of infantry. They could not rattle us with their clattering tracks. We knew how to deal with such vermin. Heide knocked his LMG's legs into position with his underarm, adjusted the visor. We screwed the caps off our hand grenades, stuffed them into our belts, sticks up. The rings we pulled out with our teeth.
The roaring steel monsters were quite close now. A crazy hatred took possession of us. Now we were going to exact vengeance for the thousands of shells they had been flinging at our heads.
Tiny came running up with a bunch of hand grenades under each arm. In his right hand he had a T-mine. He stopped a few yards in front of a Sherman, flexed his knees and threw the mine. It brushed the face of the young commander in the turret. A tremendous explosion. The commander was flung out and up into the air. The great tank turned a somersault and lay,--its tracks working wildly in the air.
Tiny was already at work on the next. Porta was hanging over the cannon of another. He dropped two grenades with the pins out into the barrel, then rolled off. The tank passed over him, but he knew the trick of squeezing flat to the ground and he was not even touched. The next moment he was up on the rear platform of another.
Heide took up position between the rollers of a burned-out tank, covering us with his machine gun.
The Americans stopped. They did not understand what was happening, as one after another of their tanks was transformed into a funeral pyre.
"Allah-el-akbar!"
The Legionnaire's battlecry rang out again.
"Vive la Legion!"
He dragged a tank-commander from the hatch of his turret and tossed his hand grenades in instead.
I took hold of a T-mine and heaved it at the nearest Sherman. It caught on the track and hung there. The blast flung me back under a burning tank, where two charred bodies lay. Up! On again! Another mine.
The next moment we were fighting hand to hand. Wild, implacable murder.
A torn-off tank turret landed with a crash among us. Half the tank commander was still in the hatch. The gun was spinning round like a top. Bloody sheafs of flesh.
Mike came storming up, a pistol in one hand, a samurai sword in the other.
"To me and follow me," he roared.
Paratroopers, infantrymen, grenadiers, gunners, stretcher-bearers, antitank gunners and a padre followed the bawling major with the samurai sword.
The Legionnaire, Porta and Tiny caught him up. Between them they had Eagle. He was bareheaded, having lost his helmet, his legs were going like drum sticks. He must have been right off his head, but he fought like a lion. He had one of the new English automatic rifles with a bayonet at the end, which he stuck into everything that came his way.
Some Indians stuck their hands in the air. They had turbans. The next moment they were spinning round like live torches.
Heide was yelling savagely. He had picked up a dead storm-trooper's flamethrower.
Wild confusion reigned at Divisional HQ. An orderly officer, spattered with blood, was standing in front of One-eye and his chief-of-staff, reporting the position.