Weaver

XV

The sound of the tug engines died, and the barge drifted. At last, thought Ernst. It was two hours since his first glimpse of land. Since then they had run parallel to the shore, before finally turning and driving in.

The sound of the long battle raging along the coast was already huge. The men lay as low as they could, sheltered by the barge's reinforced walls. But Ernst risked raising his head and looked out over the barge's fortified flank, hoping for his first glimpse of Pevensey, his landing site.

There was a murky light now, and the coast was obscured by haze and drifting smoke. But it was chaos on land and on sea. Assault-troop barges like his own were sliding in towards the shore, jostling for a place to land. On the beach more craft were stranded by a tide that was already receding, the rubber boats and speedboats of the advanced detachments. The beach itself looked littered, as if by bits of seaweed, and it was striped by peculiar black bands that ran parallel to the shore. The invaders were under fire. Ernst saw a tower to his right, and the larger guns of a coastal battery were coughing somewhere to his left; shells hissed as they flew, and landed with crashing explosions, or threw water spouts spectacularly into the air. From the area directly ahead Ernst heard the bark of automatic arms fire, and he saw the bulky silhouettes of pillboxes, fire sparking from the slits drawn in their forbidding faces.

All this was screened by smoke and a spray of water thrown up by the shells. But it was clear that the coastal defences were not subdued by the advance troops, as they had been promised. The very pile-up of boats struggling to find a place to land proved that something had gone wrong, that the beach wasn't clearing as fast as it should.

The barge's unteroffizier turned in the grey light. He was younger than Ernst, but his left cheek was darkened by a huge livid scar, picked up somewhere during the Nazis' dash across Europe. 'All right, lads. Now, we've been over the drill often enough. The first echelon are clearing the beach. They'll cover us when we land, and in turn we'll need to cover the command companies. Then we'll organise into our assault companies, get off the damn beach and through the marshy rubbish further up, and then we'll be off into the hills before breakfast.' Even as he said this, everybody could see the plan made no sense. The unteroffizier was faced by rows of wide-eyed faces, many of them pale under their blacking. 'Right, check your lifebelt,' he said. This was a bulky item like a motor tyre you wore under your gear. Ernst had his tucked up under his armpits. 'Remember what the officers said. Don't stop for wounded. Somebody else will follow up for them. Your job is to advance. Don't forget that…'

A motor roared, and their barge, one of a group of four, ploughed forward once more. The tug that had brought them across the Channel had to stand out to sea; a smaller motor-boat was dragging them to land. Whether the plan was defunct or not made no difference. They were going in.

As they neared the beach the barge jostled with those around it, gathering in a throng as tight as in Boulogne harbour. But now they were coming into the range of the shell fire, and Ernst ducked down, into the cover of the barge's hull. The men were splashed with water thrown up by the detonations, and once by a hail of splinters from some smashed boat.

There were screams nearby, and a rip of metal. Ernst risked another glance. One of the barges in his group was ripped open and was tipping, spilling out its men. Its flank had snagged on a tangle of scaffolding jutting out of the water, revealed by the receding tide.

Shingle scraped, and Ernst's barge rocked. It was grounded. The bat-wing doors opened, and the ramp at the front of the boat was let down. The unteroffizier jumped up. 'Off! Off!-' The shot hit him in the mouth. The back of his head detonated, and his jaw hung down, flapping, as he tipped into the water.

The men ducked down again. But now some English machine-gunner got his range. The bullets stitched the length of the barge and through the bodies of men who cried out, one after another.

'Get out!' Ernst screamed. 'We're sitting ducks here.' He stood again, and men pressed behind him, trying to get off the barge. Ernst realised he would never get to the ramp. Without letting himself think about it, he rolled his body over the side of the barge and dropped into the water.

He was submerged in water a few feet deep. The water's own bubbling filled his ears. The sea was murky and cold, and the pack on his back, his boots, felt inordinately heavy. He could see others falling into the water around him, and one burly trooper almost landed on top of him. And he could see the bullets lancing into the water, creating trails like tiny diving birds. He thrashed, trying to find his footing. The pull of his lifebelt under his armpits helped him.

His head came up above the water, into air that was filled with shouting and the singing of bullets and the whistle of heavier shells. He thrust his hands beneath him, scraping them on the shingle, and at last got his feet under him and dragged himself up. Head down, hefting his rifle, he just ran forward. The going was hard, the stones slippery, the water dragging at every movement. There were bodies floating around him, some riddled by bullets, but some unmarked – men must be drowning as they tried to get off the boats. And he was cold, by God; that was something he hadn't anticipated.

At last the water shallowed, and he found himself crunching over slippery shingle. The beach was long and sloping. It looked an awfully long way to the pillboxes beyond the sea wall which still spat their spiteful fire. And the beach was already littered with men lying still where they had fallen, and by the wreckage of boats and barges.

Automatic fire hissed through the air. He threw himself flat. He landed heavily, his pack slamming between his shoulder blades like a punch.

He saw there was a low wooden wall only a few feet to his right, like a groyne. Men huddled behind it. He might get a bit of cover there, if he could reach it. He rolled towards the groyne, over and over, his pack bumping under his back. A stray bullet smacked into the shingle, only inches from his right eye, and a pebble splintered and peppered his face with a kind of shrapnel. He cried out, feeling the sting of blood.

But he got to the groyne. He pressed himself against the thick wood, which was dark and slippery with seaweed. It wasn't much protection, but it was better than nothing, better than being out there exposed on the shingle like a beached porpoise. The men already here were soaked, wild-eyed, some of them wounded. None of them was from his company.

He risked a look over the groyne. There was a pillbox directly ahead of him. He was right in its line of fire. He could not imagine the men inside it, fighting for their lives; it seemed like something superhuman, brooding, a slit-eyed monster spitting lead at him. Before it the beach was chaotic, cratered, men crawling or lying still, looking for cover in shell-holes or behind the wreckage of boats. He saw the black plumes of mortar fire, the crack of bullets, and toxic fumes and sprays of red-hot shrapnel rose up from shell falls. Overhead the aerial battle continued, much of it hidden by the murky low cloud. The RAF fighters dipped low enough to scour the men on the beach with their guns. And there were Luftwaffe planes in there too; he saw a Stuka dive bomber coming down to take on some English gun nest. There was a smell of cordite and salty sea spray and the rich, sickening tang of blood.

And there was a wall further up where more men crowded, seeking shelter, their soaked battledress dark. Ernst realised that he had joined one of the black lines he had seen from the sea: bands of black that were mortal men huddling behind whatever cover they could find, trying to stay alive.

It wasn't supposed to be like this, he reminded himself. Evidently the English resistance had been underestimated. A shot slapped the wood close to his face, and he ducked back down.

Well, he couldn't stay here. Looking around, he saw that others drawn up against the groyne had the same idea. One man, an unterfeldwebel, raised his arm.

Ernst moved with the rest. And for the first time since landing in England he raised his weapon and fired.

The troops advanced up the beach in turn. It was a long slog. It was a question of lift your head, take a shot to cover the rest, and then when they were firing take your chance to crawl a bit further forward, before ducking down again. Still the pillboxes fired. There were hazards on the beach too; Ernst nearly fell into a dugout improvised from a bit of drainpipe buried in the shingle, but the Englishman inside was already dead.

And then a mortar emplacement got its range, and the shells rained down on the beach all around Ernst. Men and bits of kit were thrown high in the air, men torn to pieces in an instant, their limbs scattered. Ernst found himself crawling desperately over the bodies of the fallen. You could even get a bit of cover, if you ducked down behind a corpse.

But gradually, he saw, inch by inch – life by life – the tide of the German offensive was rising up towards the defenders, and one after another their emplacements fell silent, put out of action by a rattle of gunfire or the pop of an explosion.

And as he climbed the beach, and the daylight gathered, he began to see the scale of the operation unfolding around him. To right and left, all along the four miles of this shallow beach as far as he could see, men were making their advance, fighting and dying, Twenty-sixth Division slowly achieving its objective. Back at the edge of the sea, beyond the litter of assault boats and splintered barges, more troop carriers were pressing to land, a great crowd of them still stuck off shore. But already the sapper companies were landing their heavier equipment. He saw mortars and machine guns being assembled, and a big PAK anti-tank gun, and even an anti-aircraft weapon. The first horses were landing, bucking nervously as they were led through the spray. There were even men struggling to drag the barges out to sea, so they could be towed back across the Channel to be loaded with the second wave.

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.