'Can I go back to the stalag?' said Willis.
'No.'
There was a throaty rumble, a ragged cheer from the men. Adams looked around. The concrete wall of the bunker, riddled by Wolverine shells, was crumbling, revealing a dark interior shrouded by dust.
'No time like the present,' Adams said with a grin. 'At this rate we'll be in Hastings before the pubs are open. All ready? Go!'
Gary, Willis and Dougie scurried across the open ground towards the bunker, always keeping low, bullets singing around them. They lobbed smoke grenades ahead for cover. They were in an assault group of eight men, armed with grenades, sub-machine guns and daggers. They were followed by reinforcement groups with heavier weapons and flame throwers, and then by sappers with explosives and pickaxes, and finally by reserve units.
The going was slow. They all carried bits of a 'Bangalore torpedo', steel pipe crammed with explosive. It was awkward to carry, and Gary had always felt nervous of this crude bit of kit anyhow.
Willis, though, seemed fearless, as always. He soon outstripped Gary, and was one of the first to reach the fence. Gary watched as the sappers prised back the layers of wire. Amid a hail of covering fire, the men fitted the torpedo together, then pushed it through the wire.
The torpedo went up, detonating the mines. Earth was thrown up in a string of muddy fountains.
Willis was already scrambling ahead. Gary followed in Willis's tracks over the ground into the minefield, head down and feet tucked in under his body, praying that all the mines had been cleared. It was hard going. The ground was broken by trenches, and now it was churned up by the craters of the mine detonations.
At the wall, he and Willis threw themselves flat on the ground. The upper edge of the broken wall was only about three feet above them.
Gary glanced back the way he had come. More men were following under covering fire. They swarmed over the muddy, broken ground, looking oddly rat-like. Around them the sappers were working to clear more mines and to bridge the trenches for the tanks to follow.
Willis grinned, his teeth white in his blackened face. He hefted a grenade. 'Ready for a bit of the old Stalingrad two-step?'
Gary pulled out a grenade of his own. 'After you.'
Willis counted down on his fingers. Three, two, one. They pulled the pins out of their grenades and hurled them over the wall, and huddled during the double explosion. Then they stood up so they were looking over the wall, their Thompson guns raking fire into the room. A machine gun emplacement had been wrecked by the grenades. Two men lay dead, but another ducked out of an open doorway, firing a pistol at the invaders.
Gary and Willis swept their legs over the wall and clambered in.
They pushed forward, moving from room to room. It was a routine, throw a grenade, follow it up with automatic fire, then on to the next. Gary made sure he raked the walls and even the ceilings. Some of the rooms were crowded, and they used concussion grenades, smoke or phosphorus to cause confusion and panic, before wading in with their weapons, leaving behind corpses, wounded and prisoners. They had been trained up for this sort of operation by Soviet advisors, who had learned hard lessons about a new kind of infantry warfare in the streets of Stalingrad, and they had exercised in bombed-out districts of London.
The complex was quite elaborate, with communications gear and a range of weapons, including mortars and some larger pieces. The individual houses under their shell of concrete were connected by knock-through doorways and tunnels. Many of the rooms were lit only by slit windows in the concrete shell. Under one window, Gary found a sketch of the countryside painted on the wall, with ranging information for the guns.
He crashed at last through one more doorway, grenade in hand, ready to draw the pin.
A soldier of the Wehrmacht faced him, a torch in his hand, his arms aloft. 'Please.' The man swung his torch around. The room was full of people in civilian clothes, many of them women; their faces swam in the dark before Gary, their eyes wide, their mouths open. There was a stink in here, of urine and shit and vomit. The Wehrmacht man said, his English good, 'I am Obergefreiter Ernst Trojan. I am the only military personnel here. These are civilians. German civilians. There is no need to injure them.'
Gary hesitated. 'Don't I know you?'
Trojan stared at him. 'From Richborough? A Roman spear, a raid? Another life…'
'What the hell are these people doing here?'
'They are civil servants. Brought from Germany to Hastings to help run the protectorate. You see? They are clerks, telephonists, typists. When the counter-invasion came they were brought to this bunker for safety. Where else were they to go?'
'How about back to fucking France?'
Trojan actually smiled. 'Ah, the boats are reserved for SS and Party members.'
'That doesn't surprise me.'
There was a crash; the whole bunker shook, and the civil servants screamed as plaster rained down from the roof. Gary heard an engine roar, a grind of pulverised concrete, a scream of twisted metal. And then a big gun barked, unmistakably the Sherman's seventy-five millimetre.
Trojan said, 'Your tank is inside the stronghold – well, the game is up, yes?'
Gary heard English voices calling. 'Put it down!' 'Hands on heads!' 'Back up, against the wall. Back up!' The gunfire ceased all over the building, as if a rainstorm was ending.
XII
George, uniformed, plodded through the heart of Hastings, looking for Julia.
It was late afternoon. It had been a day from hell. And it wasn't over yet.
Not a single Allied soldier had yet set foot in the town. But the battle raged all around. You could hear the boom of the big guns firing out at sea as the Kriegsmarine struggled with the Royal Navy to keep open the evacuation corridor across the Channel. In the air, Luftwaffe fighters flying from France were trying to fend off the Allied bombers striking at the harbour. You could hear air battles going on inland too, as the RAF attacked the columns of German personnel and vehicles heading for the coast. Royal Navy ships out at sea were also using their heavy guns to strike at the harbour, but their accuracy was predictably poor. You would see great waterspouts thrown up where the shells fell short – and, worse, some of them fell into the town.
Caught in the crossfire, Hastings was having its worst day since the invasion itself. There were few civilians around, nobody out of doors who didn't need to be, and the air raid shelters built earlier in the war were all full once more. The ARP and the fire service, the WVS and Home Guard and ambulances were all out in force at each bombed-out house.
And meanwhile the Germans were all over the place. The town swarmed with Party members and SS, crowding to book places on the last boats to the continent, men who had so brutally imposed their own sort of rule now running in fear of the 'Tommies' and 'Amis'. And in these last hours the SS were going crazy. Bodies dangled from the lamp-posts of Hastings, most of them English civilians punished for some misdemeanour, but some in the uniforms of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, even the SS themselves. The only fresh soldiers George had seen thrown into the defence of the town today were the wretched children of the Jugend, and the Legion of St George, English volunteers fighting for the occupying army under the banner of the SS, men with no future.
For a policeman this final collapse of order was a nightmare made real. George felt as if he were the only sane man left in a town of lunatics. He longed to cut down the corpses from the lamp-posts, but he knew he dare not while the SS still had any vestige of authority.