CHAPTER 10
The order came to halt, and an hour after Bill had handed round his own version of a brew, Mr Nolan was pulling up in a jeep.

“Can I have a quiet word, Sergeant?”

Bill looked up. “Brew, sir?”

“Later, Hamilton”

Bob walked off fifty yards or so with Mr Nolan while we found enough tea to give his driver a cuppa. I kept an eye on Bob, and it was worrying how he moved and held himself as the officer spoke. Something shitty for us again, I guessed, just when it was all nearly over. It always seemed to be the same for us, right from when we first rolled onto that Bobbin track. Mr Nolan finished, Bob just standing shaking his head, shoulders slumped, and then there was an odd moment as Nolan held his hand out to Bob’s and shook it before they walked slowly back to us.

Bill held a mug out to Mr Nolan. “My mug, sir, but I rinsed it first. Sugar?”

“No thank you, Hamilton. I already have a bad taste in my mouth, and sugar will simply make it worse. Thank you for the tea”

Harry laughed. “Well, it’s sort of tea, sir. Wet and warm and with a hint of some sort of leaf, anyway!”

Mr Nolan grinned, but there were dark circles around his eyes and the firebrand who had addressed us all just a few weeks ago seemed burnt out.

“Gentlemen, I thank you for the service you have rendered for your country over the last years. We have seen, we have experienced, things best forgotten, but that is the nature of war. I have something to ask of you that for once I am indeed asking rather than ordering”

Ernie muttered something about never volunteering, and Mr Nolan looked up from the absorbing contents of his mug.

“Indeed, Roberts, indeed, but this is a different place and a very different world to the one we left in France. There are…”

He paused, and I realised how taut he was holding himself, how tense he was.

“Some of you may have heard rumours. The Soviets have given information, as have some of the French. The Dutch have been rather specific, and now we have our own confirmation. Hitler has been disposing of those he does not approve of”

I nodded at him. "Aye, sir. We’ve seen some of the farms that Jerry went through. Buried a family ourselves”

“Oh Barker, you are still so innocent, even after all you have been through. There is hope for this world, after all”

I was a little embarrassed by that, to tell the truth, but he was still speaking.

“We are not talking about farms or villages, gentlemen, we are talking about factories, factories for death. Jews, bumboys, gypsies, anyone who doesn’t fit into Adolf’s twisted little world. They gas them by the hundred and then burn the bodies. By the hundreds every day, Barker, day after day after bloody day. The arithmetic is simple. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, and we are talking about men, women and children, babes in arms, everyone. They gathered them together from all over Adolf’s empire and took them by train to their deaths, and in the meantime they didn’t bother with things such as feeding them”

He stared into his tea for at least a minute before speaking again.

“There has been some hard fighting for us, and we do not have the numbers we really need to take full control of what has been found. Yes, Hamilton, I can see it in your eyes: that smell. There is a place a little way ahead of us that I have seen and will, I truly believe, never be able to forget. Apparently it was a staging post for sending people to their deaths, and Jerry has not been too considerate of his guests. We are lacking in the necessary, as I said, and so a truce has been negotiated. Jerry is still there, and you will not antagonise him until we have sorted out this ungodly mess. That is why I am asking, rather than instructing. Marshal, we need drivers for tracked vehicles, for a start. The rest of you will be needed for general labour and anything else that may arise”

Harry looked puzzled. “Why tracked vehicle drivers, sir?”

An awfully deep sigh. “Bulldozers, Marshal. To move the bodies. Thank you for the tea, gentlemen. May I be assured of your willingness to help?”

Bob looked round at each of us in turn and got our nods. “Where do you want us to park up, sir? We can’t leave Ollie sitting around”

“I will gather the rest of your troop and then lead the way. You will leaguer just outside the guards barracks. Let them see how fragile their truce is. No baiting of Jerry, though. Let them each await their turn at the end of a rope, and trust me, they are mostly well aware of their future”

I slept fitfully that night, after my turn on stag, and was up before full daylight to get a brew on. An hour later, Mr Nolan was there, and the sound of Meteors starting up grew louder. We set off in column, which felt truly odd, for it would normally be an invitation to a gunner or a kid with a panzerfaust to have a go. I rode head out with Bob, and the smell of exhaust fumes, moist soil and dust was gradually but steadily overridden by something I never got rid of for the rest of my life.

It was shit, it was rotten meat, it was old socks. It was, in the end, indescribable and at the same time utterly foul. There was wire, and there were Germans, and there were…

There were figures. Some of them were moving, some weren’t. Many of the still ones were naked, and they were so thin I felt I would see through them if I held them to the light, bellies touching spines, faces…

I wasn’t the only one crying. We dismounted, and Bill went for one of the German guards as Mr Nolan called out a sharp “No!”

The Jerry glared at Bill, and Bill glared back, but he stopped, made a rope-tug gesture at the bastard and then spat at his feet before turning away. Bob was next to me, and I realised he was trembling. I squeezed his shoulder and called out to our officer.

“Where do you want us to start, sir?”

He indicated some Morris wagons a hundred yards away. “Give a hand offloading the crates over there, if you would. Marshal, with me, please. We have a dozer for you”

Harry sniffed loudly as he tried to hold his own tears in check. “Bit tricky steering it through this lot, sir”

“No, Marshal. Harry. The bodies are around the other side of the camp”

I looked at the death lying scattered and gaunt before me, and asked myself what exactly Mr Nolan was describing. Nolan called back as he led Harry away.

“Oh, and do not feed people. It will kill them”

I didn’t need to ask how he knew that, and when Harry came back at the end of the day he wouldn’t talk about what he had seen. We set the guards to clearing up the dead I could see. Bastards.

The next day, a trio of jeeps arrived with some staff officers, followed by a line of Bedfords. They were packed with civilians and accompanied by a group of military police, real ones this time. Harry nodded in a satisfied way.

“There’s a town just over there, lads. Happen as they don’t seem to have a sense of smell. I says to Mr Nolan, how about we get some of those Jerry bastards out to lend a hand? There’s loads to do, and they did this, they should get their fucking hands dirty”

“What’s to do, Harry?”

He looked at me for a long and dreadful moment. “Picking up and stacking, Ginge. Picking and stacking”

Ernie and Bill took stag for most of that night, and the next morning, I saw three more bodies naked in the yard beyond the barracks we were parked next to. They all looked much better fed than the others. I looked at my mates, and all I got back was a flat stare from Ernie and another spit on the ground from Bill.

In the end, after too many awful days, the medical staff began to get hold of the situation. We sprayed everyone with DDT, we gave them showers. They were moved to a nearby tank depot, and then we burned the whole place to the ground and I really wished we could have burned the Jerries with it.

I was told later that there were nearly fourteen thousand unburied dead there. Fourteen bloody thousand. More and more died as the RAMC did their best, but finally the tide turned and people started getting better rather than simply dying more slowly.

The war didn’t stop elsewhere, of course, but things were moving on at a rate I hadn’t expected. At the start of May, we had another visitor, a full colonel, and he called all of us into the traditional hollow square as a large number of MPs moved towards the German barracks we still sat by. Germans, unarmed now, were being rounded up and marched away. The colonel had the usual bray, but this time he seemed cheerful beyond any previous experience I had had of officers. Normally they tried to joke, or make light of things, but it was always an affectation, like that lieutenant in Normandy. Matthew? Godfrey? Whatever his name had been, this officer was genuinely bubbling.

“Stand easy, men. You may smoke. I have news for you. This morning, on Luneburg Heath, Monty signed a document with the Germans. All German forces in the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark have surrendered”

The cheers went on for several minutes, and lads were hugging each other and shaking hands. The colonel waited, smiling.

“Oh yes, one other bit of news: four days ago, someone rather resembling Mr Chaplin killed himself. The bastard is dead. We are all going home at last!”

More cheering, and another pause, before a more serious tone crept in.

“We still have a problem, men, and it is not one we have hitherto paid much attention to, and that is Ivan. He is advancing towards Denmark, and that is not somewhere he would be welcome. Accordingly, we have a little operation for you. The gentlemen over there are from REME, and they will be adjusting your steeds. They will, in simple fact, be removing the governors from your engines to allow you the full speed of which your mounts should be capable”

Harry said “What?” a bit too loudly, and the colonel heard. “What indeed? There is a wonderful network of modern roads in this little corner of Hell, and we shall use them. We already have flying columns en route for the Baltic, but they are devoid of heavy arms and certainly of armour. You will provide it”

Harry pushed it a bit harder. “Aye, sir, bit it’ll bugger tanks”

“Yes it will, my man, but tanks can be replaced. Soviet control of Denmark is not something our lords and masters will find palatable, and I rather suspect the Danes would concur. Jerry will not hinder this operation, but it starts as soon as the artificers are finished. This is pivotal work, men, absolutely vital. Please give it your finest efforts. Dismissed!”