“SMOKE!” Dopey yelled.
There was a pause until Spider judged that line of sight between the trench and the suspected firing point was sufficient.
“GO!”
Perhaps the sniper was now dead? But if not he was unlikely to have moved on as his last victim had emerged from this trench carrying ammunition boxes, so it was a potentially good source of targets.
Dopey did not leave the trench the way he came in, he left the far end and rolled again, pausing only to check that the smoke was where it should be before slithering quickly downhill to where the boxes had landed.
The smoke was thinning out by the time he had tossed the last one the remainder of the way to the gun pit and rejoined the rest of the crew.
They were none of them regular soldiers, although Dopey Hemp had served a tour attached to The Queens Regiment in Iraq. They were all three of them part timers from Britain’s Territorial Army, a diverse mix in terms of background, education and employment in their day jobs, far more so than amongst the ranks of the regular army. ‘Dopey’s’ given name was Mark and he was a barman by trade, pulling pints in a pub in Dedworth on the outskirts of Windsor. He didn’t know what Spider Webber’s Christian name was, but Spider was a machinist somewhere on Slough Trading Estate. The gunner was Roger Goldsmith, a real estate agent from Eton Wick and young man lying dead in the trench behind them had been a college student in Maidenhead.
Dopey and the others from 2 Wessex who were on loan to the Light Infantry were filling dead men’s shoes, and in their case manning one of the 2LI Machine Gun Platoon ‘gimpies’, the L7A2 General Purpose Machine Guns.
The carefully recorded bearing and elevation sight settings were not written in Dopey’s hand and they did not ask what had happened to the light infantrymen who had been the original crew, the sandbags lining the gun pit were torn and ripped in places from an air bursting artillery round’s shrapnel, but the rain had washed away the blood.
Now back in the gun pit the barrel of the GPMG glowed red, the rain hissed and sizzled on the metal but the fire mission in support of 1CG’s left flank company was complete.
It is possible for the barrel of a GPMG to become white hot with constant use, and with that the barrel will warp and become unusable, but before that occurs then rounds will cook-off in the breach due to the heat. Three spare heavy barrels are part of an SF kit and carried in a thick woven bag of ’37 Pattern webbing, and it is but the work of a moment to replace a barrel that is glowing red orange with that of a spare.
According to the SASC, the Small Arms School Corps, the hot barrel should be placed to one side and allowed to cool naturally in order to prevent the metal eventually becoming brittle. But at one side of the gun pit stood a 16” high aluminium storage tin that had once held twelve shermouli para illum tubes, it was now brimming with rainwater and had two heavy barrels for the ’gimpy’ sticking out of it. Had it not been raining and the locale arid, then the tin would have been filled with the crew’s urine and the pungent odour of a public urinal on a hot summer’s day would have hung in the air.
A wonderful tool is a soldier’s urine; it has softened boot leather for centuries and cooled barrels since the invention of gunpowder.
In a cramped shelter bay dug into the side of the gun pit Roger was working on the third barrel with a wire brush from the weapons cleaning kit, also a webbing bag. Carbon builds up rapidly in the SF role and if unchecked it will adversely effect accuracy as it fills the rifling grooves. The barrels gas regulator also collects carbon residue each time a round is fire and this eventually leads to stoppages.
Having once cleaned the inside of the barrel Roger removed the gas regulator and carefully placed this, along with its two small semi-circular lugs into an old compo ration tin. He dropped them into two inches of clear fluid that was already in the tin where they fizzed. If the SASC frowned up the method of cooling the barrels that the Berkshire men employed, then they would be seriously upset with the regulator being immersed in rust remover. Nothing, however, removed carbon quite as quickly and thoroughly as an acid solution. The gunner was far more concerned with husbanding his limited supply of Jenolite than he was of the SASC’s wrath.
The position had a field telephone with a direct line to a man-portable telephone exchange at company headquarters and he reported the death of their ammunition carrier to the D Company 2LI CSM.
“What was his full name?” the CSM asked.
“I dunno sir, his surname was Crowne.” Dopey replied, pausing to look at the other two, almost indiscernible in the dark.
“Fucknows.” Spider offered unhelpfully, and Rogers shrug went unseen in the darkness at the back of the shelter bay.
A few months ago they would all have been greatly embarrassed at not knowing the name of one of their unit who had been killed, but that was then and this was now.
“He was a new guy…and we are down to six boxes of mixed link.”
“And smoke!” Spider reminded him.
The CSM could be heard calling out to the Q Bloke at the other end but the company’s quarter master sergeant’s reply was a mere nod. He was a busy man this day.
Dopey hung up the old fashioned handset and sat beside Spider on empty ammunition boxes in the entrance to the shelter bay, their boots squelching in the mud with each movement as the boxes of 7.62 ball ammunition were opened.
They were all deathly tired, and not just from lack of sleep. Fear produces adrenaline and adrenaline has a toll on the body but they squatted, silently creating fresh belts using spent links. There would be no tracer rounds in these belts so they would be carefully stored in the boxes the rounds had come from and placed with similar belts as their final ammunition reserve.
“Anyone got any scoff?” Roger asked “Me stomach thinks me throats been cut.”
Dopey fished out a small tin from a cardboard ten man ration pack beside him, tossing it across.
Roger worked his compo tin opener industriously in the dark interior of the shelter bay before giving the contents an exploratory sniff.
“Bacon Grill? What kind of grub is that for a good Jewish boy?” he grumbled “Hasn’t this man’s army heard of religious diversity?”
There was the usual banter that went on between soldiers who lived in each pockets day in and day out. Complete irreverence towards each other’s religions, football teams, school and home towns. Only family was sacrosanct.
At the end of the day nothing outside of their small circle was going to save them from harm, they had only each other and the absolute trust that came with that. Professional motivators are fond of stating “There is no ‘i’ in Team” but if they had consulted each member of the team they would realise their error.
“I trust them, and I won’t betray their trust in me.”
Roger tried to feign offence at a remark, but he failed and joined the other two soldiers giggling like demented schoolboys at the bad, and very old joke, before bending the newly removed lid of the tin slightly and using it to scoop the contents into his mouth, taking care not let his tongue touch its jagged edge.
When Roger finished his cold, al fresco repast he stamped the empty tin and lid flat.
“Stick a brew on Spider”
“Bollocks…what did your last slave die of?”
“Disobedience” Roger replied “and make mine three sugars, mate.”
As handy as the pocket sized army issue solid fuel cookers were, the hexamine fuel gave off poisonous fumes in confined spaces so Spider pulled his camping gas stove from a bergan side pouch and set it up. Each man contributed their water bottles to the filling of the ‘kettle’, a circular L2 Frag grenade storage container. The lid and fastener kept soil and dirt out, and the heat in for quicker boiling.