Ride Out The Storm (6 page)

He’d added another two German machines to his. score in the early days of the year and then, on 10 May, had been dragged out of bed after a noisy night when guns had been firing along the frontier to the east. ‘Wing’s in one hell of a stew,’ he was told. ‘The balloon’s gone up at last!’

They’d been expecting it a long time and for the most part the RAF was going to have to commit suicide with machines which were as out of date as the bow and arrow – ‘
Ganz ohne Bedeutung
’
–
quite negligible – they’d once been contemptuously called by a captured Nazi pilot.

There had been so many plots it had been hard to know which one to head for. Nevertheless, four more Germans had fallen to earth before Conybeare’s guns. Two others had limped home damaged, and he knew very well that more than one gunner would never pull a trigger again.

The day he bumped into Major Schmesser’s Stukas they had been ordered to patrol Lille at 10,000 feet but they hadn’t been there more than ten minutes when they were warned of activity near Courtrai had swung north-east. Five minutes later, Conybeare had seen forty Dorniers in close formation and above them squadron after squadron of 110s stepped up to 18,000 feet.

He lost the other Hurricanes as they went into the attack so he selected one of the 110s and dived on it. Pieces flew from the German machine at once and flames leapt from the engines, and he just had time to see it go down into a vertical dive when he heard a crash behind him and swerved to see another 110 coming at him. His engine started to smoke and a large hole appeared in his port wing and it was as he began to fall from the sky that the Stukas led by Major Schmesser were just pulling out of their dive. Conybeare’s machine was in no condition to get involved in another fight, but as the Stukas – always regarded as the fighter pilot’s dream target – lifted in front of him he couldn’t resist having a go.

His first burst killed Schmesser immediately and tore the arm off Unteroffizier Roehme, and his second killed Leutnant Fink. As Fink’s machine rolled over, Conybeare’s engine stopped and he could hear only the sound of the wind rushing past the open cockpit. Guessing at his speed because the indicator wasn’t registering, he chose a field, pumped his flaps down and went in with his wheels up. As the machine bounced and bucketed across the field in a cloud of dust and flying clods of earth, he thought it was going to turn over but eventually the tail fell back with a thump and everything was silent.

As he recovered his wits, his head throbbing from a welt over the eye, he saw wisps of smoke rising from the cockpit and, hauling himself on to the wing, he began to run. The bang blew him head over heels and, as he lifted his head, he realised he’d lost his eyebrows and that the bruise on his head was throbbing appallingly.

Rattling in his fifteen-hundredweight open truck towards Villers-sur-Grandie in the lowering sunshine, Leading Aircraftsman George Reardon was well aware of the time element involved. He had a matter of an hour and a half to get there, pick up Flying Officer Conybeare, and start back again.

He knew the road well because the squadron had had a forward landing field ten miles outside the village during the winter, but at Richepanne he ran into a French mechanised column entirely without march discipline which was pushing everything else off the road. Among the vehicles were a few infantrymen, dirty and unshaven, bits of wet cigarette hanging from their mouths, who seemed indifferent and philosophical, so that the British military policeman trying to sort out the confusion seemed incredibly smart by comparison.

‘You can’t go this way,’ he said. ‘Jerry’s got the road to Villers taped. You’ll have to go round by Girency.’

As he set off again, swinging right towards Girency, Reardon noticed a solitary figure walking towards him. It was a British soldier, dressed in immaculate khaki, which was a sight in itself just then. He wore his full equipment but carried no rifle.

Reardon pulled to a stop. ‘Where are you heading, mate?’ he asked.

The soldier, a slight fair man with spectacles, frowned, as though he weren’t sure.

‘West,’ he said.

‘I should head north,’ Reardon said. ‘You on your own?’

‘Yes. I was with 3MU, RASC. We were sent to do a job in Suchez.’ The soldier gave a shy smile. ‘The Germans dropped some bombs, though, and when I came out of the shelter the lorry had gone.’

‘You walked from Suchez?’

‘I’m used to walking. I was a Scoutmaster before the war.’

‘Where’s your rifle?’

‘It was in the lorry.’

‘If I were you,’ Reardon said, ‘I’d find another. You might need it. And you’d better step out. Jerry’s not far away. I’ll be back before long. I’ll look out for you. My name’s Reardon.’

‘Mine’s Sievewright. Clarence Sievewright.’

It suited him, too, Reardon thought as he put the truck in gear.

A few miles further along the road, Reardon began to pass soldiers trudging back, their heads down, their bodies bowed with weariness, and among them now were some in British battle-dress.

‘All right up front?’ he asked.

‘At the moment,’ he was told. ‘But it don’t pay to sing and play the piano much.’

At Vanchette, three miles short of Villers, the soldiers moving back had disappeared and the roads had emptied, and he was surprised when a tall figure in khaki stepped out of a hedge and put up a hand.

‘Hold it, mon,’ it said. ‘You cannae go doon there.’

Reardon frowned. ‘I’ve got to. One of our pilots was shot down near Villers. He’s waiting there.’

‘Well, me, John Gow, of the Coldstream Guards, is telling you that you cannae.’

‘I’ve got to.’

‘Listen, mon–’ Gow was a tall sullen sliver of a man with white skin and white eyebrows, and a nose and cheeks that were burned red by the sun ‘–y’oughta know that when the Guards say you cannae get through, you cannae get through. Our lot’s behind yon hedge there and I’ve been put here to stop anything coming up.’

Reardon looked Gow up and down. He was not very old but behind him there were nearly three hundred years of discipline and pride. Reardon had once been on an aerodrome at the beginning of the war when a battalion of Grenadiers had arrived in the neighbourhood and, because they had to show the rest of the Services that they were something special, they’d taken over the parade ground twice a week to perform the ritual saraband the army called foot drill. The high screech of the officers and NCOs and the stiff puppet-like turnings and stampings had seemed a little stupid at first to men trained in the free-and-easy atmosphere of a technical outfit, but, as they’d watched they’d realised that these tall ramrod-straight men who wore their hats over the noses to force their heads up possessed something that made them envious that they didn’t possess it, too.

‘OK, Gow.’ He admitted defeat. ‘I got it.’

‘I am no’ “Gow”,’ the Guardsman said coldly. He touched his sleeve. ‘
I
am “Lance-Corporal Gow” and you address me as such.’

Reardon gestured. ‘Wrap it up, mate,’ he said. ‘I’m here to pick up my officer, not stand about arguing.’

Gow stared at him with bright icy eyes then he pointed. ‘You’ll have to go by Banfort. And just look out. We’ve been expecting yon bastards down by here for the last hour.’ His bony white face cracked into what by a vast stretch of imagination might have been called a smile. ‘And they’ll get a gey fine surprise, mon, when they arrive. We found a convoy of abandoned RASC lorries and they were full o’ land mines.’

The hum of engines came even as he spoke, and as Gow trotted off, his boots heavy on the road, Reardon became aware that he was right under the Germans’ noses and that the chances of Flying Officer Conybeare being picked up were growing slimmer all the time.

He’d just backed the truck into a gateway when the Germans turned the corner, two scout cars mounted with machine guns, two motor-cycle combinations and three lorryloads of troops. The blast of fire from the Guardsmen hit them just as their wheels detonated the row of land mines.

One of the motor-cycle combinations and one of the scout cars disintegrated, their crews hurled through the air like limp bags of bleeding straw. The other motor-cycle combination and the other scout car curved into the ditch, their crews already dead or dying. Behind them, the driver of the first lorry was hit in the chest and throat and died at the wheel, and the men in the back bolted for the ditches, several of them going over like shot rabbits before the Guardsmen’s fire. Out of sight, they brought their weapons to bear, and Reardon had just swung from the gateway and moved the gear lever into neutral on the way to second for a quick getaway, when a burst from a machine gun caught him in the shoulders and neck, shredding his windpipe, in bubbling gouts of blood. The truck slowed down as his foot slipped off the accelerator, and rolled gently towards the side of the road where it came to a stop, its wheels against the verge. The last thing Reardon thought about as the light went out of the day was that Flying Officer Conybeare was going to be lucky if he didn’t end up in a prisoner of war camp.

Baudain was a deserted village with a single street of one-storey houses. From the huddle of bricks where he crouched, Corporal Gustave Chouteau, of the 121st Regiment of Infantry in the 25th Division of the French Seventh Army, studied his officer. Captain Deshayes was an overweight reservist who owned a packing business in Limoges, and Chouteau knew perfectly well that if the Germans came he wouldn’t be over-anxious to die. He had a solid bank account, a string of young children and a wife whose family owned a department store in Clermont-Ferrand.

Life or death was a matter of supreme indifference to Corporal Chouteau. He had no bank account, no wife and no children. All he possessed to make him different from his fellow men was a period of service in the Foreign Legion that had left him with a face deeply lined by the African sun. His return to civilian life and the Reserve had not been happy because he’d noticed something very different about the France he’d left some years before: Everyone had suddenly seemed to be afraid of the Germans, a result, as Chouteau well knew, of twenty years of Ministers who took more notice of their mistresses than they did of their constituents, and of the nerveless ruling of the same old gang who changed positions in the government as though they were playing musical chairs.

Chouteau glanced again at Deshayes. He was standing in front of the major, Soustelle de Louis. Soustelle was a regular soldier, thin, spare and greying, who in Germany would have been at least a colonel but in the weariness that had gripped France since 1918 had remained only a major while lesser men with better connections rose over his head.

‘Command reports that lorried troops are heading this way,’ he was telling Deshayes. ‘They’ve been turned aside near Vanchette and they’re trying to feel their way round. We must stop them.’

Deshayes was nodding but Chouteau noticed that he’d gone pale and was chewing at his lip.

‘Your men are in position?’ Soustelle asked.

‘Yes, Major.’

‘I hope you have some good ones,’ Soustelle said, and Chouteau knew exactly what he meant. In spirit most of the soldiers around him were like Deshayes, boys newly called to the colours or middle-aged men with families and good jobs who were unlikely to consider dying before their children and their wives. Pacard, sitting behind the Hotchkiss, was a baker by trade; Angelet, on his right, a mere youth who’d been an assistant in the millinery department of a Marseilles store. Favre was a journalist from one of the weird little magazines the capital had always managed to throw up, given to Leftist politics and considering himself a cut above his fellow soldiers; and Burnecker, a big talker and a better boaster, was a fascist if ever there were one.

The afternoon passed slowly and Chouteau was beginning to wonder whether he could persuade Deshayes to send someone to the village to find some beer when he heard the sound of Soustelle’s car and the screech of brakes.

‘They are here,’ he announced cheerfully, his thin face alight with optimism.

He moved along the line with Deshayes who was licking his lips nervously. As he stopped at Chouteau’s position, he glanced along the barrel of the gun where Pacard crouched.

‘Good,’ he said, ‘Good!’ Then he saw the pale-blue and white ribbon that Chouteau wore on his breast, a relic of the campaigns in North Africa. ‘At least, you know
your
job,
mon vieux
,’
he grinned.

As he vanished, Favre began muttering. ‘Old fool,’ he said. ‘Who wants to sacrifice his life these days? It’s out of date.’

‘Especially against the Germans,’ Burnecker added. ‘He belongs to the past.’

‘So will you, my friend,’ Chouteau said quietly, ‘if you don’t shut up.’

He turned his back on them contemptuously. ‘Observe,’ he said, pointing. ‘You will see dust over the hedges there. That, I suspect, my friends, is the enemy.’

He glanced to right and left where other outposts were dug in under the hedges, then Soustelle came back with Deshayes. ‘Don’t fire,
mon vieux
,’
he said to Chouteau, ‘until I give the signal.’

Chouteau nodded, and they went on waiting, aware of the distant sound of lorry engines and the singing of the birds among the houses about them. Somewhere in the distance, they could hear the dull rumble of artillery and somewhere overhead the drone of a flight of aeroplanes. Chouteau didn’t look up. He had his eye firmly fixed on the moving cloud of dust.