When he reached the head of the beach, he had to crawl around anti-tank obstacles, big concrete cubes. And then he came to the barbed wire, already snipped and pulled back by the first wave of engineers.
At last he was almost under the face of that damn pillbox itself. It was sheer concrete that glistened as if still moist. A man rushed it, lobbed a grenade through that slit, and ducked down. The grenade detonated with a dull thud, smoke and fire billowed briefly from the slit, and the pillbox was silenced. Ernst cheered with the others, wishing he could have thrown the grenade himself.
And then one more push and he was on grass, the beach at last behind him.
He heard a throaty roar. He turned, lying on his back, breathing hard.
An amphibious tank was coming out of the water, its snorkel raised like an elephant's trunk, a monster rising from the deep. On a day of extraordinary sights, this schwimmpanzer was the most remarkable. But a wounded man, lying behind a heap of corpses for cover, was right in its tracks. He screamed and tried to crawl out of the way, wriggling. But the tank driver could not see him and he was crushed into the shingle. His guts were forced out of his mouth and his arse, like toothpaste from a tube.
XVI
Ben Kamen watched the landings from the look-out post, high on the walls at Pevensey Castle.
From horizon to horizon, as the sun rose, the beach was alight with the spark of firing. Shells came in from the sea too, where the German ships were firing on the coastal defences. There was even fire coming from big guns on the continent, massive rail-mounted Bruno-class, perhaps. And one by one the gun emplacements and Martello towers and anti-tank ditches and pillboxes that had been so hastily manned during the summer were silenced.
Ben glanced around the interior of the fort. He was at the west gate, a relic of the Roman fort. The Roman curtain wall surrounded a cluster of medieval buildings, a lesser fort within the mightier ruin. It was this vast expanse of enclosed space that had inspired William of Normandy to make his landing here, when he had made his own invasion; it had been a defensible place to land his troops that first crucial night nine hundred years back.
Well, the sea had receded since then. And now, after all this time, the fort had been adapted for another invasion, another war. The castle was host to a garrison that included Home Guard like Ben, and British and Canadian regular units. Pillboxes had been built into the ruins of the keep, and the towers of the inner bailey had been fitted out as a garrison. It was very odd for Ben to see the characteristic slit gun port of a modern pillbox cut into what was obviously medieval stonework, itself built of reused Roman masonry.
But it was the same all the way along the English coast. Martello towers had been pressed into service, more than seventy of them, hefty structures thrown up before the time of Napoleon when the British feared invasion by the French. Now, after a hundred and fifty years of patient watchfulness, many were falling silent after only hours of use.
'We're not going to stop this lot today, mate,' said Johnnie Cox. 'Not this way anyhow.' Johnnie was a Canadian.
Ben shrugged. 'Yeah, but that wasn't the point, was it?' He was aware of a faint Canadian inflection in his own voice; he had a habit of taking on the accents of others, in an unconscious strategy to fit in. 'This is the coastal crust; it's just supposed to slow them down. But when the counterattack comes-'
'What counterattack? General Brooke doesn't have the men, I'll tell you that. If the BEF wasn't locked up in jail on the continent-'
Ben shook his head. 'You know, Johnnie, I've got to know a few soldiers in my time in England, and they're all miserable bastards. But you take the biscuit. Don't the Brits have any chance?'
'Well, maybe one. It all depends on how tough they are.'
'Tough? What do you mean?'
'You got your gas-mask with you?'
XVII
It took until noon before Pevensey Bay was secured, with the railway line crossed at the halt, and the road to Bexhill taken, and the assault groups were at last able to form up, ready to move out. The tide had long since turned, and the barges and motor boats were desperately trying to reach the sea, for they were needed to bring across the second echelon, but they were having trouble finding clear water through the wreckage of boats and the tangles of corpses. The casualty rate must be high, Ernst thought, a quarter, a third of this first wave lost; he was lucky to be alive. But he had been forced to watch many comrades die.
And then, after all that, four hours after Ernst landed, the gas came.
Just one shell was dropped by a Blenheim bomber, onto the beach where Ernst himself had landed. It seemed to detonate harmlessly, causing few casualties. But then the gas spread, and men fell, crying out, clawing at their eyes and their blistering skin. Those officers with experience of the first war knew what this was: mustard gas. Fear spread through the ranks of the men, still massed tight on the beaches. They scrambled for gas-masks, fearing they might have been ruined by immersion in the sea.
But there was only that one plane, that one shell. Perhaps this attack was carried out by a rogue unit, disaffected officers of the RAF. The British did not quite have the inhumanity to use this last resort – or, some said, the courage.
Whatever, the incident served only to enrage the men. Ernst felt it himself.
He was in the group that took Pevensey Castle. The defences here were feeble, and surrendered quickly when a flame tank, a flammenpanzer, forced its way through the west gate. Ernst was one of the first into a garrison that had been built into the ruins of the inner bailey, and he himself took several prisoners.
One small man, dark, in the uniform of the Home Guard, dared to speak to them in German: 'Welcome to England.' Ernst used his rifle-butt to club him to silence.
XVIII
22 September
Around seven a.m. on the Sunday morning, the day after the invasion started, the raids let up for a bit.
The WVS coordinator was a plump, brisk woman of around fifty called Mollie. She practically shoved Mary away. 'Get some rest. You're no use to anybody dead on your feet. I dare say the Jerries will be at it again when you come back.'
So Mary complied. After all, she hadn't slept at all on the Friday night, had worked all Saturday, and had stayed awake that night too.
She picked up her stuff, her rucksack and handbag, the briefcase that she'd taken to slinging around her neck on a bit of string, and she stumbled home, to George's little terraced house in the Old Town. It took her only minutes to get there. It shocked her, actually, how close to home all this destruction and injury and death was. It was as if the whole of the war had focused down on this little bit of England, into her life.
The house itself looked intact. But the front door stuck when she tried to open it, and she had to barge it with her shoulder. She felt the frame splinter as the door gave way. The corridor was dark, and the light didn't turn on when she snapped the switch. Everything was quiet, eerily so after all the commotion outside. The carpets were covered with a patina of plaster dust. For Mary, lacking sleep, it was very odd to be here again. When she'd left on Friday night she hadn't really expected to come back, not for a long while.