CHAPTER 9
Fighting doesn’t stop while you stand round and grieve. It keeps on and on, for any particular human being is just another piece of kit to be used and discarded. We waited those six hours in the snow by a mortar section, one of whom tended to the burn on Harry’s neck. Wilf…

The first shot had entered from the left side, just aft of his hatch, and the wave of shit it brought with it had done terrible things to him, things I will not describe. Some of the mess had blown past him to catch Harry, who had been incredibly lucky, and then the round, which was clearly plunging fire, had smashed through our hull and second starboard road wheel before making a large hole in the ground. It had almost gone right through where my legs were, it was only the angle that saved me. If it had struck anything harder it would have turned, bouncing round the inside of our tank. I found bits of metal stuck in the sole of my right boot, mixed in with other stuff I didn’t want to think about, as well as a couple of singed holes near the ankles of my suit. The second shot had gone right through the left side of the turret. That one would most definitely have ended us all. Once more, it was down to Bob and his clearsightedness.

We hitched a ride on a Morris back to the comforts of a REME depot and a debrief as Harry was looked after by some QRANCs who seemed to be in an advanced state of hero worship. It struck me then how artificial our little world was. Out at the sharp end as we so often were it always seemed as if we were entirely alone, just the messages on the Net to tie us to others. Even when we were lying up, with other tanks and crews within sight, we still felt isolated, wrapped in our steel. I looked over at Ernie as he spoke to some Greenslime chap, and I realised how it must be for him. Bob was almost always head out, and me, Harry and poor dead Wilf had our periscopes and hatches. I remembered how I had felt those first days, the certainty that some red-hot streak was going to come tearing through my gunsight and into me, and there was poor Ernie, nothing to see but my back and the breech.

I began to cry at that point, and Bob saw, came over and just held me till I had finished. The Intelligence bod started to say something about not being finished, and Bob looked straight at him till the officer turned away.

Bob whispered into my ear “Saves on the court-martial for telling him to fuck off, lad”

There was a mess tent attached to the REME lads’ little depot, and with very few words of explanation a sergeant messed in with corporals and lance jacks and we were simply left in peace to get stinking, blind drunk. Somebody wrapped us in blankets as the night continued its course when we had already fallen by the wayside, and I heard afterwards that our pet Greenslime officer had had a Road to Damascus moment. The MPs came, they saw, they were persuaded to turn the blind eye.

That was hard to deal with, harder than most of what we had to put up with. Those boys meant well, and by God we appreciated their efforts, but they really thought they understood what we had been through, and the truth was that they didn’t and never would. They tried, they cared, but ours was a club with a dreadful membership fee.

We got leave, purely because of Harry’s neck, and spent it in some town or other whose name I can’t remember. I was a bit out of touch with the world just then, and when we were presented with a new face at the tent we had been assigned, six days after Wilf’s death, I wasn’t best disposed.

“Is this Seven One?”

Ernie looked at the kid with the glasses and the acne in the painfully new battledress. “Fuck off, son. We’re on leave”

“Er, I’m assigned to this crew. Told to report and await issue of replacement vehicle. I’m… I don’t know what I should do. Do I bring my kit in?”

Ernie looked over to Bob, and Bob shrugged. “We knew it was coming, lad. Can’t duck it forever. Get your kit, boy”

That was the first we saw of Philip Jenkins. We buried him less than a fortnight later, after the weather had cleared and the Typhoons had finally been able to start killing Germans again. Philip died from a shot through the head while pissing against a tree. He had an aversion to a bucket inside Ollie, our new vehicle, he said. Obsessed with hygiene and always washing whenever he could, he had stepped away from Ollie, wriggled his little chap out, and his brains had gone all over his shoulders and the leaf litter beneath his feet. That was Philip.

In the end, though, Jerry had shot his bolt, and more and more we saw him hands up rather than trying to kill us. We still came up against the occasional die-hard, now with Bill up front, but they were fewer and fewer in number, even when we crossed that final border.

Mr Nolan called us all together.

“Gentlemen, thank you. We have been together for a long time now, and we have left far too many friends by the roadside. This is it: we are in Adolf’s own country, on his own land. That means things will be different. Now, I know some of you have enjoyed the rewards of liberating friendly nations from the hand of the enemy. I absolutely know that some of you found time to liaise rather more closely than others…”

Was he staring at me? I blushed anyway.

“This is different. This is Germany. We have killed their sons and husbands—“

A voice called out “Nowhere near enough of the fuckers. Sir!”

Mr Nolan smiled. “Point well made and taken in the spirit it was intended, Scott. And that is the essence of it. We are not liberating these people, we are invading and subjugating them. So, if a child asks for chocolate, imagine what its father has done. If livestock is available for the pot, the farmer’s livelihood is of no import. Private property is not to be respected for its own sake. There will be no fraternisation, no charity, no pity. They started this: we will finish it, and we will fucking well finish them! Any questions? No? Start your engines at 1000 hours”

I felt he was over the top, and did my best over the next few weeks to show that we were different. We were the Good Guys, as the films had it, the cowboys in the white hats. That was what those nurses had thought of Harry, a wounded hero, and I knew that he had managed, wounded or not, to have his way with at least two of them, which made our return to the line rather timely, but still: we had fought this war for the right reasons, and we should demonstrate that fact to the Jerries.

That ideal lasted all the way to April. We were in our usual place, out at the front, and it was so different. We weren’t on the stag for other tanks or guns any more but for stupid kids with panzerfausts, teenagers still caught up in the dreams of some failed bloody painter from Austria. My own dreams died as we approached some sort of camp. Bill was the first.

“What the bloody hell’s that stink?”