The Black Jackals (3 page)

He was within thirty-five yards of them now, and still the air around him seemed to be thick with bullets, as if he were standing in a swarm of bees. He did not think that he had been hit, but then in the past few minutes he had really ceased to care and had begun to feel almost invulnerable. A sudden sense of euphoria swept over him. In the lee of the upper span of the ruined bridge he stopped and used the remains of a civilian cart and its dead horse for cover. German bullets thwacked into the horse's cadaver, sending sprays of blood in all directions. Lamb kept his head down and, taking two grenades from the bag, primed both. Then, holding one in each hand he released the levers, counted to four, half raised himself for a moment and, judging his target, threw them quickly, one after the other, conscious that his left arm would not be as strong or as able as his right. Ducking down, he watched them arc and saw them land. Then he covered his head. The blast rocked the bridge for an instant and was followed by screams.

Lamb took two more bombs from the bag and pulled their pins, careful to hold the levers down. He lifted his thumbs, counted and then rose again and threw them in swift succession. Two more explosions and a rattle of machine-gun fire told him that they had done their job. There was shouting in the German lines now, along with the screaming of the wounded. One of the bombs had burst off target, against the side of the bridge, sending a welcome column of brick dust into the air and obscuring Lamb from the enemy gunners. But as he prepared the next two grenades there was a burst of automatic fire and bullets smacked into the horse; one of them, bursting through its withers, touched him on the arm and tore open his tunic. He looked down and saw blood but was aware that it had merely grazed him. He stood now, hoping to get a better aim, ignoring the fact that he was more visible, and after releasing the levers and counting, hurled the two bombs towards the Germans. From behind him a welcome salvo told him that his men were still giving covering fire. Three grenades left. He was unsure what effect he had had thus far, but judging from the commotion he had connected with something. His heart was beating faster now, the sweat pouring off him. Half blinded by the dust, he primed two more grenades. The blood from his arm had trickled down his sleeve and was slimy in his fingers, almost making him drop one of the Mills bombs. Through the smoke he saw the figure of a tall German officer signalling to two men carrying a machine gun and pointing directly to him. Not hesitating, Lamb took his thumb off the lever of one grenade, let the seconds tick by and then threw it at the group. He did the same with the other bomb before turning and slinging it towards the half-dug-in gunners. He knew that he had hit them and that the immediate threat had gone, but they would lose no time now in pouring all their fire on to him and there was only one way back.

He pulled the last grenade from the bag and drew the pin, still holding the lever down. Then, turning, he began to run. After five paces he turned and found himself looking at the levelled rifles of a score of the enemy. Praying that they would miss, he counted to four, threw the grenade as the rounds began to whistle in and, not waiting to see the result, spun round and ran. Uphill now. Harder, but he knew that the explosion would cover him for a moment. Again the grass flew high as the bullets struck home. He felt a sharp pain in his heel and presumed he had been hit, but kept running. Now was not the time to stop and look at any damage. He was aware too of a growing ache in his arm where the bullet had grazed it and hoped that that was all that it was. He was nearing the trenches now and the German rifle fire had lessened, although the machine gun on his left was still firing. Where the devil was the Bren? Reaching the last few yards before his trench, he could hear the men cheering him on and then he was home, slithering down the side and thumping on the muddy floor. He could hear his breathing, almost as if it were another man's, and a steady thumping which he realised was his heart.

Fred Smart just stared at him. ‘Bloody hell, sir. That was fuckin' incredible – if you'll pardon my French, sir. Sorry, sir.'

Lamb grinned, happy and surprised to be alive and, wiping the sweat from his eyes with his bloody right hand, gasped for breath. ‘Thank you, Smart. How did I do?'

‘Pretty well, sir, I'll say. You blew that lot in the bridge to blazes and that machine gun that was setting up with them an' all.'

‘Did I stop them digging?'

‘You stopped them, sir. They won't be doing any more digging where they've gone.'

He looked out over the top of the trench and surveyed his handiwork. In the centre of the bridge lay the bridging party, six of them, all dead. Beyond, where the Germans had been entrenching positions, were more dead, and he could see wounded being carried back by enemy medics. Across to the right a crew lay about its mangled machine gun. He had killed perhaps twenty men, all told. More importantly, though, he had stopped the enemy digging in positions and crossing the river. For the present.

Smart looked at him. ‘Hadn't you better get that wound dressed, Mister Lamb? Get Thompson to have a look at it, sir.'

Private Thompson, aside from being in charge of the anti-tank rifle, was also the platoon medic, and while every man carried a field dressing he had charge of the medical supplies.

‘No, Smart. It's nothing. Just a graze.' However, he wasn't so sure. He felt the twinge in his foot and looked down to see that the back of his boot had been shot off. Fearing the worst, he quickly bent to see what damage had been done and was relieved to see that although covered in blood his heel had only been nicked. Looking back at his arm, though, he could see that what he had thought a mere graze might well be something worse.

He unbuttoned the cuff of his tunic and rolled up the sleeve, then did the same for his shirt. In his forearm just below the elbow was a neat gash where the bullet had torn through the cloth and into the flesh and muscle. It had not gone deep, but enough to cause him discomfort and to restrict his use of the muscles.

‘Damn.'

Smart held back the tunic and began to swab at the wound with some gauze. ‘Looks clean enough, sir. I'll get Thompson, though, and we'll get you fixed up back at Company.'

Lamb shook his head. ‘I have no plans to move to the rear just yet, Smart. We've got unfinished business here.'

Smart stopped swabbing and listened: ‘They've ceased firing, sir.'

Lamb listened. It was true. Since he had regained the position the Germans had ceased fire. He wondered why. He saw Bennett running across to him, careful to crouch down as he did so.

Valentine came close behind him. ‘My God, sir. That was the most heroic thing I think I've ever seen. Well done, sir.'

Lamb smiled. ‘Well done you, Bennett, with that covering fire. And you, Valentine. All of you. Where's Corporal Mays?'

‘Bren's jammed, sir. He's trying to fix it now. Perhaps you should 'ave a look, sir.'

The men were well aware that in civilian life Lamb had been in charge of a motor garage and respected his expertise with engines, which on more than one occasion had proved useful in camp.

‘Yes, perhaps I should.'

He started as Smart's final swabbing touched a particularly sensitive area of the wound in his arm. Bennett saw it. ‘You're hit, sir. Not bad, is it?'

‘No, Sarnt. Not that bad. I'll live.'

Valentine, who was squatting at the edge of the trench, looking with interest at Smart's handiwork, spoke. ‘Have you noticed they've stopped firing, sir?'

‘Yes, and we were wondering why.'

Valentine smiled. ‘Perhaps they're just frightened in case we're all as mad as our Lieutenant.'

Bennett glared at him but said nothing.

Smart, winding a bandage around Lamb's arm, piped up, ‘That's it. I reckon you've terrified them good and proper, sir. They didn't know what they were up against. Perhaps they're packing up now to go back to Germany like good little Huns, sir.'

They laughed. But Lamb did not smile. He was looking back down towards the bridge. ‘No. I think they're just waiting.'

So they waited. For two hours they sat in the afternoon sunshine, drinking strong, sweet tea thick with powdered milk. Lamb listened to them chatting. The conversations ranged over football, their girls and some film with George Formby that had them laughing in the aisles, and it seemed almost as if for them the war had ended here. Some of them, he rightly guessed, would be praying that by some miracle it had. One of them, Butterworth, the platoon wit, even suggested that Mr Churchill had been on the telephone to Herr Hitler and told him that he might as well go home to Berlin because their Mister Lamb wasn't going to give up his bridge.

Lamb laughed with them at that.

They had grown closer during the course of the last few months and he had come to know their individual characters and idiosyncrasies.

Aside from Bennett and Mays, there was Smart, his batman: ever-loyal Fred Smart, still living at home with his parents in their little cottage in Godstone; Butterworth, a giant of a man with hands that looked clumsy but were able to strip down a Bren gun faster than any other man in the platoon; Tapley, the runner, short and slight, with a weasel's face and deep brown eyes, Tapley the lady's man who could charm a pint of milk or a bottle of wine from any French girl. Perkins was the dedicated soldier of the group, gritty and uncompromising and more convinced than any of them of the urgency of crushing Hitler. Hughes was the great thinker, always mulling over some problem or other that the rest of them might have missed. His solutions tended to be right, and Lamb had him marked down as a possible future corporal. Short and stocky, George Stubbs the mortar man was always singing or humming to himself – the old favourites, mostly, songs that helped to calm his shaky nerves: ‘Pack up Your Troubles', ‘It's a Long Way to Tipperary', ‘The Siegfried Line'. But lately he had begun to favour some of the more recent popular songs, George Formby in particular. ‘Imagine Me on the Maginot Line'. That always got them all laughing. Wilknson mostly, always keen for a joke. Most of them practical.

And then there was Valentine. Lamb smiled and shook his head. He closed his eyes, and was even beginning to think that he might take some rest, when he heard it – a low rumble which quickly grew in intensity until the ground seemed to shake. Christ. They were bringing up their tanks.

Instantly he shouted down along the line and back towards the woods, ‘Sarnt Bennett. Enemy tanks to our front. Bring up the anti-tank rifle.'

He thought they would try a crossing now, while they had surprise on their side and they think we're shaken. But if we can stand our ground we might just hold off the first wave. We can't really destroy tanks. No hope of that with what we've got to hand. But if we can take out as many of the infantry as we can before we pull back, then at least we'll have done something to atone for the deaths of those poor blighters in the river.

He yelled towards the rear and saw the Boys anti-tank rifle gunner and his mate sitting in a nearby slit trench lining up the slim-barrelled weapon on a make-believe target on the opposite bank. ‘Thompson, hold your fire with the Boys until you can get a clear shot. 500 yards. No more.'

There was an answering ‘Sir'. Lamb cast a pitying look at Thompson. The recoil from the anti-tank rifle was well known. He took out his binoculars from their canvas case on the right of his belt and scanned the road again and the trees on either side. Then he saw them. There were two in the lead. Panzer Mark IVs, by the look of them, with small triangular pennons flying and the squat angular turret and short-barrelled cannon that he recognised from the silhouettes on the recognition charts at the officer training school. His stomach felt suddenly hollow, and he could feel himself sweating. More tanks were following on behind. A whole squadron, perhaps more. And he knew that save for the single anti-tank weapon, the less than reliable Boys anti-tank rifle, they were powerless against such armour. Certainly, when it had first been introduced four years ago, it had been able to penetrate the armour of any tank, but tanks had come a long way in four years, and Lamb knew that against the machines facing them, the best the Reich could muster, it would be almost useless. Even their grenades, the egg-shaped Mills bombs developed in the last war, would merely bounce off the hulls. All they would be able to do would be to rake the ground around the advancing vehicles with small-arms fire as the infantry crept forward in the lee of the tanks and try to keep their heads down as the shells crashed in.

He yelled again, ‘Wait for it, lads. It's the infantry we're after. Wait for the . . .' He had not finished his sentence when there was a whoosh from the opposite bank and a shell flew towards them, hitting the bank just to their front, its explosion sending up a cloud of earth and foliage. ‘Keep down. Keep your eyes on the road.'

Another shell flew in, closer now, and there was a yell as a shard of shrapnel hit one of the platoon. Lamb kept looking at the road. The tanks had pulled up now and were just sitting there, lobbing their shells across the bank. Of course, he thought, there's no need for them to move forward. They think they can just blast us out, and they probably can. They must know we don't have any heavy weapons.

Two more shells came crashing into the position, and one hit home. Lamb looked at where it had landed and was aware of a jumble of bloody bodies and the noise of men in agony. He wondered whether he had been foolish to stay here. Perhaps they should have pulled back as Battalion had ordered. Perhaps the colonel knew best after all. Lamb began to doubt himself, and then banished the thought. Something inside him said that they had to make this count. They had to take out some of the enemy to atone for killing the civilians, except now he had been responsible for the death of his men. Perhaps, he thought, it's too late. They have us pinned down. How can we retire now? If only their infantry would come forward.