'Spot on,' Captain Stoddart hailed from the quay, as his party took the lines. ' 1405. We've settled in at Zulu. Come on, Corporal. We'll get you up to Sierra.'
While the captain drove off the first batch of his section, Burns loaded up the trailer. By 1415 the Land-Rover was trundling along the £78 which led up the valley towards the Finnish border. As they crossed the Skibotn bridges, Stoddart pointed to the cliff brooding down upon them from the right. 'We're up there, Corporal. Uninterrupted arc of fire, first rate cover.'
'Hope we're as lucky in Sierra as you are,' Burns muttered. ' We're soft, sir, after all this time in the ship.'
Stoddart grimaced beneath his fur hat:
'You're not beefing then, for the compulsory doubling around the upper deck? The fish-heads enjoyed watching us, even if you lot didn't appreciate my concern for your fitness…'
The lift to position Sierra took four hours: two trips each way, carrying the nine-man section with its weapons and arctic gear. Considering that time had been spent drawing skis, boots and snow-shoes from the depot at Sorkjosen, eleven hours for the day's evolution without adequate transport, was good going, and would have been impossible without the fishing-boat. Burns set his first four men gouging out the snow-hole, as soon as Stoddart and he had decided upon the ambush position. There was no difficulty with the choice: one jagged snow-covered peak completely dominated the £78 where it crossed the river running from the small lake above the town of Helligskogen.
'Up there,' Captain Stoddart said, pointing, 'you can spit on 'em, if they try to force down the £78.'
While the Land-Rover returned for the last load Burns set up his gun positions and organized the camp. The road ran alongside the river some seven hundred feet below. The GPM/G (General Purpose Machine Gun), though it demanded a third of his section, could command the bridge from here; and the two-inch mortar could lob its bricks directly upon the road, like tossing a cricket ball from the deep field. It was a pity the GPM/G was being phased out, because it was a good gun… those birch trees, bending beneath their weights of snow, were sited right, wooding the ambush position from the road.
A couple of hours after the last glimmer of the dreary twilight had merged into darkness, they brewed up for the first time on the fire outside. He had insisted on spending a full hour collecting birchwood, because wood stock always disappeared too damn quickly — the eight-foot high stack should keep them going for a day. He repeated again, for the benefit of them all, the rules for arctic survival, so that even the thick 'uns could not forget: a frost-bite casualty would be on his own, a menace to all concerned, because no one could get him down to Zulu if the action got hot. The best bet would be to ask the village to take in the casualty, if he could be slid down to Helligskogen in time: from what Burns had seen, the natives seemed friendly enough.
'Gather round, you lot,' he shouted. The eight men dropped what they were doing and circled round the fire with him. Their rifles were stacked out in the cold, where the temperature was already down to -30°. The skis were rammed into the snow, ready for instant use: around the camp, they used their snow-shoes.
'I'll remind you about survival drill,' he said, ' before the captain gets back. These are your priorities,' — and he methodically checked off his list….
To fight in this hostile environment a man had first to survive when the going was tough — and on his own, if he had to. Conditions were brutaclass="underline" each year a percentage of trainees had to be shipped back to UK as 'unfit for arctic warfare' — the silence and the loneliness of these unfamiliar, harsh conditions wore a man down, affecting his psychology if he was poorly led. There was only one way to fight in the mountains: to attack the difficulties with an aggressive determination never to give up — that way, Marine Bloggs would get back to fight another day. Severe cold had a sinister effect and Burns never knew how men would react to it: some became bloody-minded, querying every order; other men became maddeningly rumbustious and jolly — more '
irritating, sometimes, than the aggressive cases…. Unless well-led, men would withdraw into mental cocoons, crave nothing else but to crawl into their sleeping bags. This attitude inevitably killed them.
Moving across the terrain in the ice and snow was often impossible. During white-outs the only safe drill was to hole up immediately and wait for the blizzard to end. Continuing the march was insane: men would either disappear over precipices or become totally lost. When the cloud shut down and merged with the snow there was no horizon, and a man became disorientated. He was entirely dependent on his compass and upon his pace-judgement: possessing only poor maps (out-of-date because they had not been re-surveyed since World War II, during which time forest plantations had changed the landscape) it was suicide to continue. Compasses were unreliable due to the proximity of the pole and to iron deposits. These stark conditions affected.the Russians as much as ourselves. The section listened to Burns in silence, the logs crackling, the spitting embers sizzling in the snow and sending up whisps of steam.
'When on your planks,' he reminded them, ' don't forget that it's a long time since you used them. Take it steady.' They grinned amongst themselves at the painful memories. Teaching a Royal Marine to ski was an experience. Raw novices, they hurled themselves down slopes for a fortnight until they were competent — they were magnificent.
They waited for the Land-Rover to return; only another two hours working on the snow hole and they could turn in for the night, except for the sentries. Burns hammered home the fundamentals about moving in this terrain: ' Don't get in a muck sweat working on these slopes — once you've sweated inside your clothing, it'll lose its insulation and you'll get frost-bite. Keep track discipline by skiing in only one track, so the aircraft can't spot us. When you're working, don't forget plenty of ventilation stops to prevent your sweating. Don't drink or eat heavily, but often and little. Our rations are scaled for forty-eight hours, but you're lugging seventy pounds on your backs, as well as carrying your rifles and our weapons. And when the action gets close, remember your grenades.' He glanced at Keith Hudson, the youngest in his section. 'How many seconds, Keith?'
'Four seconds, Corp.'
'And keep out of the road when you've chucked it — clears, a fifteen yard circle.' He watched them feeling for the grenades at their belts.
When fighting, the weather controlled everything, though the principles of war still applied. That was why he and Stoddart had taken care in choosing this tactical position, sited behind this outcrop, well in the lee from the wind which was certain to blow from the valley. Once the wind got up, temperatures dropped dramatically: at -15° the nose hairs began to freeze; at -25° the brain began to slow down; and at -30° it could take half-an-hour to don skis, two hours to break camp. At lower temperatures than that, righting stopped: survival was a priority for both sides.
'And don't forget the care of your weapons,' Burns said, as Paddy O'Malley dished out the hot tea. Paddy was the troop comedian — nothing got him down, but he was accident prone and Burns had to watch him.
'Keep the snow out of your rifles: when it freezes, the ice will jam up the working parts. Constant thawing and freezing affects even the toughest steel, so watch it. Don't take your rifles into the snow-hole, or the condensation will freeze when you come out… and what about your gloves, O'Malley?' The Ulsterman had once lost a glove on the top of a crest. If you touched the cold steel of your rifle, the skin of your fingers remained on the barrel. ' So keep your gloves on and leave your rifles, weapons and optical gear outside. And when you go into the assault on skis, if you can't fire from the hip, take your skis off before you go down to the prone position.