The Black Jackals. Iain Gale

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ