She found that the big bomb had fallen slap bang on top of a large corner house on the High Street. Mary just stood and stared. A crater had been dug deep into the ground, and broken pipes and cables jutted out like snapped bones. The house itself had been sliced open, exposing the interiors of rooms, so it looked like an immense doll's house. In one upper storey room a big iron bed dangled perilously over the drop. There was an extraordinary, repellent stink, of dust, ash, burned meat, sewage.
People swarmed all over the smashed house. A fire tender was pulled up outside, and firemen grappled with a hose, spraying the lower floors with water. Men of a Heavy Rescue Squad were hauling their way through heaps of brick, trying to get through to rooms at the back of the house. Some worked with bare hands, and others laboured to get joists and blocks and tackles in place, to lift heavier beams and slabs of wall. They were already streaked with dirt and sweat.
And people were being brought out of the building, some walking, some not. Stretcher parties bore their inert loads, sometimes just on bits of planking. At hastily assembled first aid stations the victims were treated and marked with labels, a code Mary had come to know through her experience of such raids: X for internal injury, T where a tourniquet had been applied. Two kindly ladies from the WVS, in their bottle-green uniforms and felt hats, handed out the inevitable cups of tea, the reward for every 'bombee'. But others had been less fortunate. Mary saw a row of bodies lined up on the ground like fish on a slab. An ARP warden, a woman, was checking names off a list, and studying the bodies for identity cards and rings and other means of identification.
Somebody touched her shoulder.
It was George. His face was caked with sweat and dust and dirt, and blood was smeared over his dark uniform. He was speaking to her.
She shook her head. 'I can't hear you.' She tapped her ears.
He leaned closer and shouted, 'I said, what are you doing here? I thought you were in the shelter.'
'I couldn't stay.'
'If you're not going to a shelter, get out of town.'
'George, I can't go. Not while this is going on.'
'It's not your fight.'
She shook her head. 'But it's Gary's. Look, I'll go help those WVS women. I can pour a cup of tea.'
He eyed her, then stood back. 'All right. Your funeral.' He glanced at the sky. 'What time is it? The light's going. I don't think this is going to let up all night-'
There was another shuddering crash. They both staggered, and a bit more of the ruined property collapsed.
George ran off towards the latest catastrophe, blowing a whistle. It occurred to her that she should have taken the opportunity to tell him about Battle. But it was already too late.
She walked determinedly towards the WVS team.
XIV
20-21 September
Transport Fleet D sailed from Boulogne at 1800 hours on 20 September, S-Day Minus One. It was one of four fleets setting off that day, carrying Army Group A, the Ninth and Sixteenth Armies. From west to east, Fleet E was to sail from Le Havre, D from Boulogne, C from Calais, and B from Dunkirk, Ostend and Rotterdam. Fleet A, a figment of Wehrmacht planning, had only ever existed on paper. It was the beginning of an elaborate marine choreography, designed to land nine divisions, two hundred thousand men, on the beaches of southern England in three days.
Ernst's barge, one of a group of four, was towed by a tug out of the harbour. The men gripped the barge's reinforced sides, nervous even before they passed through the harbour mouth.
The noise was tremendous. The great guns at Boulogne had been shouting for hours, mighty twelve-inchers firing across the Channel to bombard the English defensive positions even before a single German landed, and when Ernst looked up he saw a curtain of shells flying across the sky above him.
The barge itself had been heavily modified, with concrete poured over the floor, the hull strengthened with steel plate, and the sharp prow replaced by bat-wing doors and a ramp at the front that would drop down to allow them to land. The wheelhouse was cut down and surrounded by sandbags. This barge was meant to carry grain down a river. Now it would carry seventy men and four trucks across an ocean. The barge lay low, and with every wave salt water splashed over the gunwales, soaking the men huddled inside it. The doomsayers said gloomily that the Channel surges could be twenty feet high. Every day of his training Ernst had been struck by the contrast between the sleek perfection of his Army equipment and the ramshackle nature of the transports that would take him and his gear across the Channel. The boatman, the binnenschiffer, laughed at the men's discomfort.
At last the barge joined its column. Ernst clung to the side and stared out. It was a remarkable sight in the fading light of the September day to be riding across a sea carpeted by barges and men, as far as the eye could see. Ernst's barge was one of two hundred in this column alone, towed by tugs and steamers, with an escort of heavier ships bearing supplies. While the barges carried the assault troops, the spearhead troopers, the Advanced Detachments who would be the first to land – the Heaven-Sent Command, the men called them – crossed in mine-sweepers. They would land in speedboats and sturmboats, fast, small, unarmoured boats made for river crossings. For them it would be a dawn landing, amphibious, two thousand men for each beach.
Fleet D as a whole would form a column more than a mile wide and twelve miles long – so long that the lead barges would be halfway across the Channel before the last boats left harbour. But the barges could travel at no more than three or four knots, and all the columns had to follow crooked courses, to avoid sandbanks and mines. The crossing would take long hours.
And even as the column pulled away from the harbour, the attacks began. Over Ernst's head Messerschmitt 109s were taking on Hurricanes, Spitfires and light bombers. Josef had said Goering had been trying to disrupt the RAF's command systems as much as ruin its planes and airfields; perhaps a weakened RAF was focusing its efforts where it thought it could do the most harm. For Ernst that wasn't a comforting thought.
They were not long out of the harbour when a Spitfire got through and flew low over Ernst's column, machine guns blazing. Ernst and the others cowered low in the barge, and the bullets clanged harmlessly from the hull's steel plates. The plane swept over, and when it pulled up Ernst saw how the metal skin over its wings wrinkled with the stress.
But it wasn't the RAF that Ernst feared most, as the evening darkened into night, but the Royal Navy.
For days before the barges sailed, the minelayers, protected by destroyers and E-boats, had been setting up a fortified corridor across the Channel, walled by minefields each a half-mile wide, and even now the U-boats, destroyers and torpedo boats, reinforced by ships taken from the French in Algeria, must be fighting desperately to repel the overwhelming might of the British ships. Sometimes Ernst thought he heard the booming voices of that other battle, far away, a battle on the sea just as one raged in the air. But Ernst's barge sailed on undisturbed.
The night folded over them, imperceptibly slowly, until it became starless and moonless under a lid of cloud. Some of the men were ill, though the sea was mild. They got absolutely no sympathy from the binnenschiffer, the only true sailor on the boat, a leather-faced forty-year-old river worker from Cologne. Occasionally you would hear bits of banter drifting across the ocean between the barges of the tow group, and ripples of laughter coming out of the dark. Some men huddled down and tried to sleep. Coming from one boat Ernst heard murmured prayers. The Nazis looked down on religion, but he doubted anybody was going to put a stop to that tonight. So you crossed the ocean in the dark, in bubbles of companionship, nothing but you and your buddies out on the sea. Ernst wondered if it had been this way for William's Normans, and Claudius's superstitious Romans a thousand years earlier still. But those ancient warriors had not had to endure this passage through a corridor of warfare, in the air and at sea.