He looked north-west, to where the Allied armies must be slumbering this night, only a few miles away. The mood could not have been more different from the 1940 invasion, the last time he had been posted to the front line. In the last months, after the Stalingrad disaster and the mounting losses in the east, the Albion garrison had been steadily stripped of men and materiel. Now, who was left to face the Tommies and the Amis? Rear-echelon types like himself, who had spent much of the war on office work in Hastings, second-raters like Fischer, whose softness and sentimentality had blocked any chance of promotion, and eastern-front veterans like Heinz, damaged in body and mind. Them and a few prisoner battalions shipped over from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and whatever conscripts the SS had managed to drum up from the local population – Jugend, most of them, it was said. Second-liners, second-raters, prisoners and kids.
He thought he heard an owl call. He wondered if he might get some sleep tonight.
'Oh,' Fischer said. He was looking up, and orange light bathed his face.
Ernst turned. To the north-west he saw a signal flare, yellow-orange, climb into the sky from beyond the Allied line. The night remained silent. Even the men in the trenches fell quiet, like children watching a firework display.
Ernst asked, 'Another morning concert, do you think?' Just another example of harassing fire, if that was so.
'I don't think so,' Heinz said softly.
Then it started, a noise like thunder that smashed the silence. They all dropped on their bellies. Ernst pressed his face to the dirt and covered his head with his arms.
Birds rose into the sky, great flocks of them, alarmed.
The first shells landed somewhere to Ernst's rear. The ground shook with the impacts, as if huge doors were being slammed. These were high-explosive shells hurled from guns that might be miles away, a bombardment meant to destroy the German defences before a single Allied boot had crossed the First Objective.
It was only seconds since the silence had been broken. The screaming of the wounded began.
In a fragmentary lull, Ernst dared to look up. There was plenty of light now. Through the trees to the north-west the whole sky was in flames, from horizon to horizon. Smoke billowed up, illuminated by the sparking of the great guns themselves, and more signal flares scraped across the sky. It was a sudden dawn, rising hideously on the wrong side of the world.
He twisted. Behind him the neat zigzags and diamonds of the trenches had been broken by fresh pits, neat and round like craters on the moon, and fires were burning. Across this smashed-up landscape he saw engineers trying to reconnect severed wires, and medics struggling to get to the wounded, men buried in the trenches they had dug themselves. And more shells fell, the explosions seeming to burst up out of the ground. Ernst saw men thrown up in the air, men and bits of men, limbs and torsos neatly pulled apart.
A hand grabbed Ernst's shoulder and dragged him back under the cover of the trench's corrugated iron roof – it was Heinz, of course. A shell burst somewhere over Ernst's head, shattering the trees, and wood splinters hammered on the iron. Aiming for the trees was a gunner's tactic; you could kill and maim with shards of wood as well as with hot metal.
'July the fourth,' Heinz yelled through the noise.
'What?'
'July the fourth! Of course the Americans would start their war today. We should have known.'
Another shell screamed close, and they ducked again. And then came a new sound, a whooshing, screaming roar, and machine-gun fire pocked the dirt around the huddling men. It was an aircraft, a ground-attack plane, roaring along the line of the defences. Ernst saw by the light of the fires that the plane had red stars on its wings.
'That's a Shturmovik,' Heinz said. 'By Goebbel's balls, I never thought I'd see one of them again-'
There was a roar of engines, a rusty clatter of tracks.
'They're coming,' Fischer yelled over the din. 'Positions, lads!'
They had trained for this. Ernst grabbed a panzerfaust and rested it against the northern wall of the trench, the weapon raised at his cheek. Heinz was on one side of him, Fischer the other, prepared.
The forest ahead was full of smoke now, a bank of smoke and mist and dirt illuminated by lights. The men in the trenches were already shooting back, with panzerfaust grenades rocketing into the mist and the clatter of small arms fire. Though he could see no vehicles yet, Ernst saw trees felled, just pushed over and crushed under the advance.
Then the first of the tanks burst out of the trees and through the smoke barrier. It was like something mythical, Ernst thought, a monster emerging from the woods, from the cradle of all human fears. He could see something scrawled on its turret, white paint over the camouflage green: REMEMBER PETER'S WELL.
'Fire!' Heinz slapped Ernst's neck. 'Fire the bloody thing!'
Ernst hefted his panzerfaust, aimed, and fired. The roar of the rocket-propelled grenade was loud, the tube hot, and he could not see what damage he had wrought.
VIII
In Hastings George was woken by the sound of the guns. It was like thunder coming from the north, from far inland.
But the first thought in his head was that they were out of bread. He checked his alarm clock by the light of a pen torch. Not yet six thirty. Early, but he knew the baker's ought to be open at this hour. With any luck he could beat the queues. He turned on his bedside light; the power was down again, but there was enough light to see by. He slid out of bed. He'd got used to doing this without waking Julia. He pulled on his shirt and trousers.
She turned over, away from him, grumbling a little in her sleep. In the soft yellow light the skin of her long back was smooth, unblemished, the sheets draped over her like the posing of an artist's model. She really was quite beautiful, when she slept.
He slipped out of the room, went downstairs, used the bathroom, and pushed his bare feet into his shoes. He paused in the hall and glanced in a mirror, scratching at the grey stubble on his jowls. Then he turned the latch key, opened the front door, and stepped out, testing the morning.
He was in the shadows of the narrow, steep street, but the sky above was a deep blue, crusted with bits of cloud. The sound of the guns was louder out here, the noise echoing from the blank walls of the boarded-up houses. It was chill, dewy, but he'd survive outdoors for a few minutes without a coat. He pulled the door closed.
He walked down the road, breathing deep of the fresh air. Grass was pushing through the paving stones; clearing it was the sort of chore nobody tended to these days. The street was quiet, though he could hear a rumble of traffic off in the distance: heavy stuff, a throaty roar, military vehicles probably.
A door opened as he passed, and a woman emerged – Mrs Thompson, a Great War widow, fiftyish, he knew her slightly. She was clumsily pushing a baby's pram, piled up with goods and covered by a blanket. She locked her door and set off up the road, away from the coast, muttering to herself. For days the occupation authorities had been moaning about refugees getting in the way of military vehicles on the routes out of town in every direction. But the Germans in these latter days seemed to have no will to do anything about it, and George certainly wasn't going to try to resist the tide with his few officers. He worried a bit for Mrs Thompson, though. It would have been better for her if she'd stayed put in her home until it was all over, following the British coppers' quiet instructions.