Tramp in Armour (3 page)

'This tunnel won't be straight, you can bet your life on that, so keep your speed down to five miles an hour or less and watch for bends. I'm going up into the turret to help guide you. What's the matter, Davis?'

The burly gunner with the squarish face and red hair had a
hunted look and an air of tension radiated from him. He opened
his mouth and closed it again without speaking.

'Come
on,
spit it out, man,' snapped Barnes.

'You'll think it's stupid, Sergeant, but I've always had a
horror of tunnels. I was a miner once, as I told you. I was in a
colliery disaster in 1934 - we were locked in for five days and
we thought we'd been buried alive ...'

'Well, Davis, this happens to be a railway tunnel and we'll
be through it in ten minutes, so get your mind on your guns.
You never know,' he smiled grimly, 'we might meet a Panzer
division coming up from the other end.'

He had reached the turret and given the order to advance when the hollowness of his joke struck him. If the Germans had just happened to break through at the other end, it might seem a very good idea to send tanks along the tunnel in the hope of taking Etreux on the flank. He decided that he'd better keep a close lookout ahead and his mind began to calculate the possible effect of two-pounder shells exploding inside the railway tunnel. The powerful headlights penetrated some distance into the tunnel and soon Barnes was warning Reynolds of a curve in the line. Now that they were away from the battle area the driver had rolled back the hood from the hatch and jacked up his seat so that his head protruded above the hull like a man in a Turkish bath cabinet. The journey along the tunnel was eerie and strange, the grind of the tracks and the throb of the engines echoing hollowly, probably very much like riding through a mine shaft, Barnes thought, and he glanced down into the compartment below. Penn was still fiddling with the wireless set as though hoping to perform an act of faith, but Davis sat rigid as a stone behind his guns, his body thrust hard into the shoulder-grip, his hand on the two-pounder's trigger. Undoubtedly, Trooper Davis' idea of a private hell was meeting a Panzer column deep underground.

The engine noise sounded far too loud with its reverberations hemmed inside the tunnel and the grind and clatter of
the steel tracks conjured up the advance of the biggest tank in the world. Barnes looked at his watch again and then gazed ahead. They should be seeing daylight soon now if the map was anything to go by, and leaving the tunnel was going to call for some pretty careful reconnaissance. Barnes had absolutely no idea what the position might be on this sector of the front: what he had seen from the embankment gave him little cause for optimism as to what might face them once they reached the far end. One part of his mind concentrated on the probing beams while another considered the various possibilities they could encounter - calling on the one hand for a swift dash out into the open or, on the other, for a more cautious passage. As far as he could tell from the map, the railway emerged into open country with no sign of an embankment; there should be fields on both sides with the canal barring the way to the west, the way they wanted to go. They'd just have to see. The headlights were now beginning to sweep round a gradual bend. Somewhere round this bend they should see daylight, probably a first glimmer, then a distant archway. What that happens, Barnes told himself, I'll halt the tank and go on foot for a recce. Just so long as we don't have any trouble with Davis. He glanced down again and saw that Davis was sitting in exactly the same position, gripping the two-pounder as though his very life depended on it, a posture of such implacable rigidity that Barnes was none too happy about his gunner's likely reactions.

'We'll soon be there, Davis,' he said down the intercom.
'Perm, get back to your seat just in case. Be ready to halt, Reynolds, as soon as I give the word.'

The tank ground on, the left-hand track rumbling over wooden sleepers while the right-hand track scattered pebbles, so that the tank was tilted very slightly to the right, the three sounds complementing each other - the
throb of the engines, the grumble of the tracks, and the slither of pebbles. Abruptly, Barnes gave the order to halt, saying nothing more while he wondered how to break it to them. The headlights penetrated the darkness and then halfway along the full extent of their beams they splashed out over solid surface, a wall surface with boulders protruding from a scree of soil and rubble which resembled a landslide. This end of the tunnel was blocked, too. They were sealed off inside the bowels of the earth.

On May 10th the BEF had moved from France into Belgium
and Barnes' unit had moved with it. On May 10th, four hours
earlier at 3
am,
General von Bock's Army Group B had
advanced across the frontiers of Holland and Belgium with the
express purpose of tempting the BEF and three French armies to leave their fortified lines. Before the end of the day the movement of these vast forces was quite apparent to London
and Paris, but a third movement of even more massive forces
had so far gone unnoticed.

At the point where Belgium, France, and Luxembourg meet lies one of the least known areas of Western Europe - the massif of the Ardennes range, a remote zone of high hills enclosing steep wooded gorges along which snake second-class roads. This was the sector of the huge front from Belgium to Switzerland which the French High Command had long ago declared 'impassable', and it was opposite this sector that they had placed their weakest forces.

During the early hours of May 10th General von Rundstedt's Army Group A began its secret forward movement through the 'impassable' Ardennes, an army group more powerful than any the world had ever seen. It comprised a force of forty-four divisions, including the main mass of the Panzer divisions which contained over two thousand armoured vehicles. All night long the army group penetrated into the twisting defiles, drawing ever closer to the French border. The tanks drove in close formation, each vehicle guided by the hooded rear light of the tank ahead, an exercise they had practised over and over again. Seen from the air through the eye of an infra-red camera the German host would indeed have resembled a snake, or rather a series of snakes - armoured snakes threading their way through the darkness towards the Meuse near Sedan.

The leading Panzer division was commanded by a thirty-two-year-old general who had won his spurs - and his promo
tion - in Poland. His unit had led the Wehrmacht into burning Warsaw and now he looked forward to leading it into burning Paris. Without aristocratic connections, on sheer ruthless ability, the general had risen in a few brief years to command the very tip of the spearhead aimed at the heart of sleeping France. His was, in fact, the first tank, and now he stood in the turret erect as a fir tree, night field-glasses dangling over his chest, the Knight's Cross suspended from his neck, his eyes fixed on the motor-cycle patrol ahead.

Under his high peaked cap his hawk-like face was calm and without a trace of emotion. His gloved hand rested lightly on the turret rim, without tension, to correct his balance as the huge vehicle made its way along the insidious road. He might well have been on manoeuvres, looking forward to the congratulations of the umpires later and a drink with his fellow officers in the mess. Except for the fact that the general neither smoked nor drank, and except for the further fact that he was leading the advance guard of the coming onslaught, confident that he was about to play a decisive part in the total annihilation of the British and the French.

The tip of the German spearhead reached the Meuse on May 12th, crossed it on May 13th, and by Thursday May 16th, the general was in Laon, deep in the heart of France. He led the advance still erect in his tank, still wearing the peaked cloth cap in spite of the earlier entreaties of Colonel Hans Meyer, his GSO, to exchange it for a steel helmet.

'It won't be necessary, Meyer. You will see,' the general had
said, 'we "shall cut through them like a scythe.'

Meyer withdrew the helmet as he sourly recalled a conversation he had had with the general,a month earlier during the final war manoeuvres near Wiesbaden. To Meyer it now seemed that the conversation had taken place at least a year ago since already the Panzers were pouring over the pontoons across the river Meuse.

'There will be two or three major battles,' the general had said, 'and these will take place soon after we have crossed the Meuse. We can expect the fiercest resistance for two or three weeks and then a total collapse of the enemy.'

'I wonder,' Meyer had replied dubiously.

The general was a little too confident for Meyer's liking,
particularly when he remembered that this commanding officer
was a nobody whereas Hans Meyer was descended from one of
the oldest families in
East Prussia. One must move with the
times, of course, and Meyer was only forty-three years old. As
he watched the endless Panzer column advancing into the fields of France, Meyer reminded himself that he expected
high promotion in this war and that this largely depended on
the general's good-will. So he must compromise, keeping his
doubts about the general to himself.

Once beyond the Meuse the Panzers met with only sporadic resistance - the frantic firing of a few shells from artillery pieces, a rattle of machine guns, an irregular thump of mortar bombs falling somewhere. The general drove his division forward non-stop along the main road, thundering across France in a cloud of dust while the early summer sun beat down on the iron column. Away from the road, women working in the fields stopped to watch that dust cloud which rose like a smokescreen against the hot blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, the sky cloudless, the sun building up the intense warmth which suggested leisured ease rather than total warfare. Some of the women thought that the dust cloud marked the progress of a French column, although it was travelling in the wrong direction. Others stood and wondered, a feeling of depression and fear clutching their hearts, but still not able to accept the fact that the German army had broken through.

For this is exactly what it had done - it had broken clean through the French lines where the Ninth and Second Armies met - the least defensible point along any continuous front. And so far, since the dive-bombers had smashed all resistance on the west bank of the Meuse, there had been no fierce battles, none at all. Because the general was young, in the prime of life and endowed with enormous funds of energy and optimism, his sixth sense was beginning to tell him something. It was a matter of keeping going, of not stopping for anything. This mood was not shared by Colonel Hans Meyer.

There was an ugly scene when the general's tank halted
briefly in the centre of a French village. Behind him four more
heavy tanks rumbled into the square and halted, their huge
guns revolving slowly round the upper windows of the old
square, menacing even the thought of resistance. Meyer
climbed down from his tank and approached the general, who
remained in his turret, still standing erect, his face expression
less as he handed down his map.

'Meyer, the patrol has taken that road,' he pointed with his
gloved hand, 'but is it the right one? They have assured me
that it is - what do you think?'

Meyer examined the map quickly, looked round at the exits
from the square, consulted his own map, and handed the other
back to the general.

'I'm sure they are right, sir.'

'We'd better check with the locals. You speak French. That
man over there - ask him.'

The general took off his glove, unbuttoned his holster flap, extracted his pistol, and pointed it at a middle-aged man with a grey moustache. It was an astonishing scene: the sun shining down so that it was almost hot, the inhabitants standing in the old square rigid with fear, like waxwork figures out of a tableau. Only five minutes earlier they had been going about their daily routines with a touch of anxiety but with no real fear. Then it had happened - the scared boy running into the square shouting something about a huge dust cloud. He had hardly finished telling his story when the motor-cyclists had flashed across the square, tyres screaming at the corners, vanishing as they raced off to the west. People had come out of their houses at the commotion, completely bewildered. A woman had seen German soldiers in the side-cars, helmeted figures carrying machine-pistols. Arguments had broken out. She must be mad, must be seeing things. And while they argued and wondered the general had arrived with five tanks. The village was paralysed as he unsheathed his pistol and aimed it.