Sicily, July 1943
My very dear Sarah, I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been able to write . . .
Paul’s fear and nausea fought for dominance in the hot, cramped interior of the landing craft, buffeted by wind and waves, juddering from the shells exploding all around. The stink of leather and cordite and rank sweat was overpowering. Next to him in the near-darkness a young lad was rubbing a coin and muttering ‘Oh God, oh Jesus,’ over and over, until a gruff voice told him to ‘Stow it.’
The floor of the craft bumped and scraped on sand and then jolted to a sudden halt, throwing the men forward. As they righted themselves, complaining, metal shrieked against metal, the door was lowered and Paul gulped in fresh air. A gargoyle face looked in, grinned and called, ‘Out you get, lads!’
Paul’s fingers, sweaty with fear, slid on his rifle as he stood up. It was time.
He stepped out gasping into thigh-deep, chilly brine, remembering in time to raise the gun clear as he dashed with the others to the wide beach. Moonlight, a canopy of stars, then the quiet sky flashed white and a great distant rumble shook the ground. Bullets cracked and the man ahead of him slumped onto the wet sand, a dark stain spreading like a halo. ‘Leave him, Hartmann. Get up the beach,’ the sergeant’s voice barked from behind and Paul staggered onward, tripping over abandoned kitbags and lumps of metal, blasts of sand scouring his face as he ran half-blind to the line of dunes ahead.
Writhing black smoke and flashes of fire. A thud and an earsplitting crack, and a wall of hot air flew at him, knocking him off his feet. For a brief moment he stared up at the uncaring stars, wondering if this was it, then he felt a meaty hand grip his collar, hauling him to his knees. ‘No sleeping on duty,’ the sergeant’s voice rasped in his ear and he blundered forward again, though every instinct shrieked at him to go back. He faltered, glancing round at the big man goading them on. To see a startling backdrop: great black shapes of ships on a jet-dark sea, the ships that had brought him here, their guns flashing fire, hurling shells over his head at an enemy he hadn’t yet seen. Above it all, a silvery barrage balloon was drifting free, its appearance strange, but calm and stately. It gave him courage to go on.
Soon he was plunging through soft cold sand, fearing a hidden mine or a loop of barbed wire at every step, though it seemed that the sappers had done their job. He passed the cruciform carcass of a fighter plane – one of their own, he noticed, briefly wondering about the fate of its crew. A new sound started up ahead, the mechanical repeat of machine gun fire, striking sparks up into the night, then came a roar as a tank overtook them on the brow of a dune to his right and swept onwards inland, its turret spitting bullets. They followed its tracks in the compacted sand, until they reached a lodgement the commando parties had established.
And suddenly Paul saw how close they were to the enemy. On a hillock the other side of a dip in the dunes nestled a concrete pillbox. Here and there on the crest of the hillock he could make out swarthy faces beneath bowl helmets, heard the Italians’ cries of dismay as the tank mounted the escarpment and did its deadly work. He recoiled at an explosion, raised his rifle, aimed at one of the faces and pulled the trigger. The face disappeared, but another rose to take its place. Returning bullets struck sand up in his face. Paul ducked, put out a hand to steady himself and was shocked to encounter an arm. Whosever it was he was dead and in the light of a flare he saw the man’s face. ‘Blackie!’ he gasped. The mild, steady man he’d fought beside in Egypt and Tunisia. Taken by a bullet between the eyes. Paul tasted bitterness. Blackie had a wife, two children at home. The thought stirred him into hot anger. He half rose and fired indiscriminately at the enemy’s dune, then stopped, aware that they weren’t shooting back. Instead, above their position poked a stick, a rag of white tied to it, fluttering in a sign of surrender.
‘Cease fire!’ someone shouted, and as a localized silence fell a dozen frightened Italian soldiers appeared over the top of the dune with hands raised and stumbled down into the dip. Paul saw Harry reach them first and obeyed his summons. Some of the platoon was directed into the enemy trench to collect up discarded weapons: Paul was set to tying the prisoners’ wrists. He was surprised by their sheepish air of relief, by the unpleasant coarseness of their battledress as he searched them for grenades. Then Harry ordered two corporals to lead them back onto the beach, where they’d be transferred onto a ship. Further along the dunes similar scenes were being played out. ‘Hoorah for King George,’ he heard one Italian call out and the man’s fellows gave a thin cheer.
‘Cowards!’ the sergeant hissed.
‘Why won’t they fight?’ Paul asked Harry, but Harry shook his head. As Paul’s spirits lightened, he heard Major Goodall cry, ‘Don’t think for a moment that this is the last of them.’
And on they forged, weaving their way from dune to hillock, using flares to light their path until they left the sand behind and entered a scrubby hinterland. Ahead were a suggestion of trees and the lumpy black shapes of farm buildings.
A grove of stunted olives, then rows of vines, grapes glistening amid the rustling leaves, a stink of manure, then the rough stones of a wall under Paul’s hand. The muffled barking of a dog started up. As they crossed the farmyard they heard the scrape of a door and a gruff voice shouted a challenge. A distant shell lit up the sky, revealing for a moment the burly figure of a gnarled old man brandishing a shotgun. A popping sound and the gun clattered to the ground as the man stumbled and sank down against the wall of his house, his palms clamped to his face. It was Ivor who stepped forward, lowered his smoking pistol, and Paul remembered something he’d once heard him say: ‘Shoot first, think afterwards. At least that way you’re alive.’ Ivor prodded at the farmer with his boot, but the man was dead meat. From its confinement nearby the dog continued its furious barking.
Ivor and Harry summoned Paul and he followed obediently as they stepped over the body and slipped inside the house. They checked the few simple rooms by the flame of Harry’s lighter, but instead of enemy soldiers they found only the old man’s wife cowering in the marital bed. When she saw them she knew at once her husband was dead and wept, bringing down a stream of curses on them.
‘Tie her up,’ Ivor said roughly, but when Harry glanced at him in disbelief he changed his mind. ‘Leave her be then. She has no way to summon help.’ They left the house and joined a party to search the outbuildings. There was no livestock. When they opened the barn door a desperate sheepdog kept them at bay until Ivor shot it, but all it seemed to be guarding was a mangy donkey and a rickety painted cart.
The moon had begun to sink in the sky as they moved on, following several tanks carving tracks across a field of tender plants. Paul knew they must soon turn east, their mission being to secure the port. The Italian defence had been weak, but where were the Germans, that was what they were all wondering. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before they found out.
As they tramped along in the greying darkness they sensed the massive presence of Mount Etna in the distance, its summit reaching higher than most of them believed possible, blocking out the stars. A familiar, pungent scent arose all around. A picture of the walled garden flashed into Paul’s mind, a sense of Sarah and safety. After a moment he realized what the smell was – the woody scent of thyme.
‘Get down.’ Harry’s low voice came to him on the hot, dense air.
Paul sank silently into a crouch, peering between gleaming vine leaves into the silvery darkness. There! Was that a man or a shadow? He raised his rifle, but to shoot was to give away their position. He had to be sure. The leaves sighed in a warm breath of wind then fell still. No one.
He watched Harry scamper to the shelter of a heap of rocks, so he rose and followed with the others. From the safety of this new position he could see the low wall of a farmyard and, there! Was that a movement at the other side, a glint of metal? His hand fumbled behind for the pocket of his kitbag and closed round a grenade. A signal from Harry and he bit out the pin and tossed the ball in a great arc, ducked and held his breath, praying that it wasn’t the farmer come out to take a piss.
The explosion momentarily deafened him, the blast shaking the ground. Then screams, and a boy’s voice crying for his mother before the Germans’ machine gun burst into life and a fireball lit up the vineyard in a sudden nightmarish glare. There were at least a dozen of them, he saw as he rose to lob his next grenade. Another burst of sound and light and the machine gun abruptly ceased. Instead, from somewhere behind and to their right, their own gun started up. There were shouts of panic from the farmyard, then a repeated command. He glanced at Harry for instruction, but Harry was sitting with his back against the rock, one hand clutched to his jaw.
‘Are you hurt?’
Harry did not reply, did not appear to hear him.
Paul reached out and pulled away the hand, expecting the worst, but there was no bloody wound and Harry simply looked up at him in surprise.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
Harry snapped back into life. ‘Of course I am,’ he said, staggering to his feet.
‘Shall we move in on them now? They’re retreating. I heard someone give the order.’
‘Yes, at once. Onto them, lads.’ The platoon surged forward shooting flame into the darkness, but when there came no returning fire they scrambled one by one over the wall. To find a ghastly scene: a mess of bodies and twisted metal illuminated by a burning straw bale which a fat farmer with a flamboyant moustache was valiantly trying to extinguish. Seeing British soldiers, he dropped his pail and raised his hands. The soldiers ignored him. Most rushed through in pursuit of their prey, but others stopped to collect up weapons. Paul remained to speak to a burly German soldier lying groaning, his leg beneath the knee a shattered mess of blood and bone.
‘Our doctors are coming. They will help you.’ He spoke to the man in his own language.
‘Deutsch?’ the man grunted, his face twisted with disgust. ‘Sie sind Deutsch?’ and when Paul didn’t answer, drew painful breath and spat at him.
‘Ja, and your fellows ran and left you,’ Paul said, wiping the spume from his face as the man’s angry gaze bored into him. It was not the first such occasion and he could never help a rush of shame. But nor did he avoid these situations, because since Egypt, when he’d first rescued a wounded German, he’d felt it to be something he should do. It made no rational sense, of course, first to try to kill a man and then to comfort him, but they were still his countrymen and he felt he owed them something.
‘Hartmann!’ Ivor’s warning voice. He spun to see the wounded German prising a pistol from the dead hand of an officer spreadeagled nearby.
‘Für Hamburg,’ the man cried. A shot and a scream as the pistol skittered across the stony ground. Paul stared at Ivor’s smoking gun, then at the German cradling what remained of his hand. His thoughts struggled for dominance. One kind of enemy had saved him from another, but the wounded German now had bloody stumps instead of fingers. Nausea rose in his gorge.
He nodded thanks to Ivor, then crouched and reached in his kitbag for his precious syringe. ‘A doctor will help you,’ he said again as he plunged the needle into the man’s thigh and watched the agony leach from the exhausted face. He was an older man, Paul saw with pity, possibly a labourer of some kind in civilian life. Even if he survived, what would be left for him after his leg was amputated and his hand maybe, too?
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Ivor muttered and, stepping over the bodies, they followed after the rest of their company.
The moon had set and they bivouacked in cold darkness behind a sheltering line of poplar trees. Paul lay listening to the whispering of the leaves as he waited for sleep to come. He’d become so worn down over the last two weeks that oblivion usually took him instantly, but tonight every time his eyelids closed, some thought or imagined sound would wrench him back to consciousness. There had been no let-up. After they’d overcome the first Italian defence they’d marched east up the dusty coastal highway under the blaze of the July sun. They’d taken the bridge at the port of Siracusa after a fierce battle in which reinforcements parachuted in had been massacred because of a series of stupid planning errors, a terrible memory that angered everybody still.
Taking Siracusa itself was easier. They had been amazed by the ready surrender of thousands of Italian soldiers, many singing cheerfully as they were led away to ships, clearly believing that their troubles were over. Paul did not wish that he was one of them; there was too much work for him to do. Instead he wrote to Sarah, describing his exotic surroundings, the big-wheeled carts painted with the faces of film stars or holy images, and how he’d helped rip down the posters and banners with Fascist slogans that covered the town’s public buildings.
Then it was time to march on to Augusta in their filthy battledress, their feet slipping with sweat in their boots, stopping sometimes to revive themselves on grapes growing in roadside vineyards or to barter cigarettes for oranges while brightly coloured birds and butterflies darted against a scorching cobalt sky.
Augusta with its whitewashed houses and pretty tiled roofs surrendered quickly, then that town too was behind them, but between the triangular vastness of Mount Etna and the coast they walked into trouble. The plain narrowed into a strip and there, finally, a German division was waiting for them. Soon Paul became habituated to a ravaged landscape strewn with the bodies of soldiers, the blackened ruins of warplanes; grew practised at diving for cover from falling shells.
As their advance slowed, the word came back. General Montgomery in frustration was dividing his army. Half were to march inland to forge a route round the great volcano. It felt a loss to watch them go, but everyone knew it to be a race against time to reach Messina at the eastern tip of Sicily and to cut off a German retreat to the Italian mainland. Now Paul’s company, amid the thousands of soldiers of the Eighth Army who remained, continued forward along the coastal strip, trying to push the Germans back. It was unforgiving territory, dotted with stone farmhouses, irrigation ditches and hiding places where the enemy’s anti-tank weapons might lurk to devastating effect. Every yard, every inch, had to be fought for and the casualties were legion.
Despite their bravery, the practised cockiness and the graveyard humour, Paul was noticing the different ways the stress of conflict was wearing them all down, whittling away any softness, or lightness. Even the youngest of them now looked much older than their years. It wasn’t simply the dirt etched into the grooves of their sunbaked faces, the scars of battle raking and roughening their skin, the weight of their tiredness, it was the loss of innocence registered in the hardness of their gaze. They’d seen horrors such as they’d never imagined from their childhood comics of heroism and derring-do. They’d seen dear friends cut down by random shards of shrapnel, or by careless bullets from their own side. They’d seen the corpses of little children and had had to avert their eyes and move on. They could see no reason behind any of these things, it was simply bad luck.
There was something else Paul was wrestling with, too. It was what the wounded German labourer had cried about Hamburg. Paul had asked the Major to find out what it meant.
Though he’d tried to put the incident behind him, the angry contempt on the German’s face sometimes rose in his mind. He realized now why he hadn’t recoiled from it, indeed, had felt a degree of sympathy. Contempt, he felt, was what he deserved, but not by reason of his origins. All he had seen and been made to do in this war had defiled and tarnished him. All right, he’d been merciful, had eased the man’s pain, but then he’d left him, had hardly noticed the bodies of the others at that farmhouse, the men and boys who would never go home.
It had been the next day that Major Goodall had broken the news to him. The RAF had recently conducted a bombing raid on Hamburg, so thorough and so brutal, it had effectively flattened Paul’s home city. ‘Our payment for Coventry,’ the Major had said grimly. ‘That’s how we’re to see it. I’m sorry, old man, but that’s how it is.’