Tramp in Armour (11 page)

'Now,' said Barnes briskly, 'time for supper. Penn, you take
up
temporary guard duty on the bridge while Reynolds brews up - I'll come up and relieve you as soon as it's ready. I wonder what the devil has happened to Pierre?'

He climbed down to the footpath and started to climb the
bank when he heard Pierre coming along the footpath from
upstream; the lad was carrying something in bis hands. When
he switched on his torch he saw that Pierre was holding a large
fish.

'I caught it in a pool higher up - we can have it for our
supper. There are many more - easily enough for one each.'

Penn paused, halfway up the bank on his way to the bridge.
'What a marvellous idea - my mouth's watering already. Pity we haven't some chips to go with them.'

'Give it to me!' Reynolds thrust an eager hand forward and Barnes remembered that the driver had been a fishmonger before he had signed on. 'I'll start cleaning it as soon as I get the brew-up going.'

'You really want raw fish for supper?' Barnes asked quietly.

'Raw?' Penn protested. 'We can cook the damned thing in no time.'

'There'll be no cooking here tonight. It's a warm evening,
the air's absolutely still, and a cooking smell could linger
round this bridge for hours. I'm not risking it. We'll have to
make do with tea and bully beef. We've got the French bread
Pierre brought, too,' he added.

'For Christ's sake!' exploded Penn.

'You're supposed to be up on that bridge keeping a lookout,' replied Barnes with deceptive calm.

'Sorry,' Penn spoke stiffly, turned away, and clambered up to the top of the slope.

Reynolds said nothing and went back to preparing a brew-up on his little stove. Barnes waited for the Belgian lad's reaction with interest. Putting his hands back behind his head, Pierre hurled the fish as far as he could downstream and sat down on the footpath, not looking at Barnes. Under the archway, Reynolds worked in silence, unpacking his spirit stove, inserting white metaldehyde tablets, applying a lighted match, and then replacing the metal cap over the flame. When he
went off upstream to fill his kettle he was gone for
several minutes and Barnes guessed that he had taken water from Pierre's pool so he could look at the fish.

The stove was not standard issue, but many of the items they carried, such as their sheath_knives, had never appeared on any official list of equipment: Barnes had long ago decided that his tank must be able to operate as a self-contained unit without the normal supply facilities when necessary, although never in his wildest theorizing could he have visualized a situation like this where they would find themselves behind the enemy lines, cut off from all contact with their own army, let alone their own troop. I took the right decision, he told himself as he thought of Penn's irritability and watched Reynolds' abnormally slow movements in preparing the supper. Those two haven't enjoyed more than four hours' sleep a night since we landed at Fontaine and today was no picnic. Until we get some rest none of us is capable of taking part in action against the enemy, so the only thing to do is to keep our heads down until we've recovered. I hope to God we get a peaceful night. He went up to the bridge to relieve Perm.

Too tired to talk, they ate in silence by the light of the nickering spirit stove -Pierre, Penn, and Reynolds sitting side by side along the pathway under the arch while the water gurgled past the tank's tracks. It was quite dark now and in the pale blue flame the tank looked enormous and strange, as though it stood in some war museum. Penn clapped a hand on the back of his neck and swore: it was after ten o'clock but the air was warm and muggy and the mosquitoes were active. He could hear one buzzing close to his ear and the blighter wouldn't go away. He hurried his meal, because until he had finished, Barnes, who was standing guard on the bridge, would have to go hungry. Now that he had got used to the idea, Penn rather liked the feeling of security of being tucked away under the bridge: it was like camping out in a cave, something he'd always enjoyed as a boy. He must remember to change Barnes' dressing and he'd insist on taking first guard duty on the bridge. It would make up for some of his grumbling during the day.

Half an hour later he had changed the dressing and had gone up to the bridge to mount guard. Barnes was sitting on the footpath as he put on his jacket again, thankful that the emergency dressing had been applied and feeling sufficiently better to appreciate his own state of incredible fatigue, but at least he felt more comfortable. As he dressed himself he looked sideways at Pierre. He had been conscious of the lad's fixed stare for several minutes.

'We may find somewhere to drop you off tomorrow,' he told him.

'That is for you to decide.'

'Yes, it is, isn't it? You'd better get some sleep now. We
may have a long day ahead of us.'

'Can I take my share of guarding the bridge, Sergeant?'

'We'll see. Shut up chattering now and get down.'

Five minutes later Pierre was stretched out full length along the path, his feet to Barnes' head, his back against the wall of the bridge, an Army blanket loosely draped over his body. Reynolds had finished washing up in the stream and was settling down at the foot of the bank on the other side of Bert. Normally, he was a restless sleeper and he had wrapped himself in his blanket for fear of throwing it into the water during the night, but he had hardly put his head down before he was snoring loudly, deep in a sleep of sheer physical exhaustion.

Barnes, on the other hand, felt exhausted but not sleepy. It was eleven o'clock and jn two hours' time he would take over guard duty from Penn and later hand over to Reynolds for the last turn. His mind raced round like an engine out of control: the great thing now was to find some really worthwhile objective, to give the Germans a tremendous blow on the nose. Without realizing it, he eventually fell into uneasy sleep, in spite of a tiny portion of his mind which desperately begged him to stay awake.

THREE

Friday, May 24th

'Sergeant! Wake up!
Wake up!'

Barnes opened his eyes instantly, blinking once, his hand
automatically closing over the revolver he had hidden under
the blanket.

'What is it, Penn?'

'Come up to the bridge - we've got company.'

Barnes had slept in his boots and now he sat up with the minimum of movement, glancing back at Pierre as he switched on the torch, shading it with his hand. Switching it off again immediately, he clambered to his feet and nearly fell into the river. Pierre lay in exactly the same position as when he had fallen asleep, one large hand resting limply outside the blanket. From the far side of the tank came a deep-throated snore. Reynolds was still putting his time to good use. Following Penn, Barnes climbed up the bank, digging in his toes and using his hand to follow the line of the wall. The illuminated hands of his watch, the watch he had borrowed from Penn, registered 1.30
am.
Another two and a half hours to dawn. And Penn had let him oversleep by thirty minutes.

Coming up on the bridge he stopped as a chill ran through him. The moon was up and through the palely illuminated night to the south a column of lights was advancing towards them. In the heavy stillness of the early morning he could faintly hear the purr of many engines. He made a quick estimate of the number of vehicles, stopped counting when he had reached twenty, which was only a fraction of the total number of tiny lights.

'Penn, go down and wake Reynolds -• quietly. Tell him to
get his damned boots on.'

'What about Pierre?'

'Don't wake him on any account.'

Barnes stood and waited, shivering a little from the cold.
The nearest lights seemed closer now, the sound of the engines
distinctly louder. This was no procession of refugees heading
for the bridge: he could tell that from the orderly advance of the headlights, just sufficiently well spaced out to allow the
whole endless column to move forward at a rate of about
twenty miles an hour. Cocking his head to one side he listened
carefully, but there was no sound of aircraft in the cloudless
sky. Standing there on the bridge he could hear the gentle
lapping of the river as it swirled round Bert in the cavern
below, but the water sound was now being muffled by the
steady revolutions of the motors of the approaching armada,
which he was quite certain now was an Army column of enormous striking power. British, French, or German? Their
very lives might hang on the answer to that question. A few
minutes later he was listening even more intently as Penn stood
by his side. No, he had not been mistaken. Above the engine
rhythms he could detect a familiar sound - the steady rumble
of tank tracks. They were standing in the path of an armoured
column.

Scrambling down the side of the bank, finding his way by
feel, he went in under the bridge and switched on his torch
briefly. Reynolds was up and standing on the same side of the
river as Pierre who had just laced up his shoes. The lad's hair
was freshly combed and he was staring up at Reynolds who held a revolver in his hand.

'They'll be coming over the bridge in a few minutes,' Barnes snapped. 'It may be a Panzer column. Whatever happens you both stay here until I come back. Get it, Reynolds?'

He looked meaningfully at the driver and then scrambled back up the bank to where Penn still waited at the northern end of the bridge, just in time to see the corporal leave the road in a hurry as he plunged down the far side of the bridge. Instantly, Barnes moved sideways along the bank and hid himself behind a thick clump of wild shrubs. The next moment he heard the buoyant burst of a motor-cycle. Lights flashed, crossed the bridge, swerved round the corner, and headed north, immediately followed by a second cycle. The lights of the second patrol briefly lit up the first and in the side-car he caught a glimpse of a seated soldier who wore a pudding-shaped helmet, a machine-pistol cradled across his chest. It was Jerry all right. Christ!

Instead of following the first patrol towards Fontaine, the second motor-cycle reduced speed, swerved on to the grass, its headlights sweeping over the shrub where Barnes lay, then stopped, its engine still running. The soldier in the side-car stepped out and the cycle drove off, leaving the sentry who walked back to the bridge. Barnes lay very still as the German peered over the parapet on his side. A powerful torch beam flashed on and swept over the bank where they might have taken Bert down by the direct route to the river
bed. Then it went out and he heard the sentry's feet march back to the end of the parapet. The torch flashed on again, pointing down the bank. It began to move forward and behind it feet slithered, recovered, and then started to feel their way down over the brambles. Barnes gritted his teeth. This was a thorough bastard.
He was going to check under the bridge.

Without a sound, Barnes brought his right hand up to his hip, grasped the hilt of his knife and withdrew it from the sheath. The sound of the oncoming engines was much louder. He would have no time at all to work this trick. He lay still, listening to the sentry moving down the bank, praying that Perm wouldn't open fire. The German was only a few feet from Barnes as he passed him and his feet were making a row as they trod through the undergrowth. Lifting himself carefully to his feet, Barnes moved across to the wall under cover of the sentry's shuffling feet, leaning out his hand to contact the stonework. Then he began to follow the German down, left hand on the wall, right hand gripping the knife. He had to finish him with the first thrust. He could see the silhouette of the sentry clearly against the torch glow: any second now the torch would swivel left and shine on the stationary tank. What the German's reaction would be when he found that under the bridge was really something for the book. Stealthily, he went down the bank. There was one horrible moment when he
nearly slipped, digging in his right heel desperately, his knife hand waving all over the place, but he regained his balance without the sentry hearing him. The German was about four feet ahead of him now, and beyond the bridge the purr of the motors grew steadily louder. He had to get a little closer. He stepped down farther and at that moment the German swung his torch sideways and the beam glared full on the menacing hull of the hidden tank, its two-pounder pointing downstream. Barnes sprang forward, knife held high, his body lunging forward and downward in one leap. The knife reached the sentry's back and stabbed clean through the greatcoat, penetrating the body deeply under the impetus of Barnes' violent thrust. They fell forward together on to the bank, the sentry groaning once as Barnes landed on top of
him. The torch splashed in the river.