大象传媒

Normandy 9 July 1944

Two of our men lay dead in the field. They lay on their backs, with their still faces turned towards a steel-blue sky from which the blazing July sun scattered its powdered gold over the Normandy countryside.

The older man was a sergeant, perhaps in his early thirties, and his bronze complexion told of a healthy outdoor life. His eyes were wide open, and he wore a puzzled look, as though he did not quite understand what had happened to him. His bright yellow anti-gas armband was knotted at his throat like a Scout's neckerchief. There was no mark visible to show how he had died.

The younger man, a private, appeared to be no more than a teenager and he, too, wore his anti-gas armband like a neckerchief, but his eyes were tightly closed and a happy grin suffused his fresh young face, as though he was enjoying a particularly pleasant dream or had been struck down while laughing at a joke. He looked so full of life and fun that I half expected him to leap to his feet at any moment and make some humorous comment; but a shell splinter had sliced a triangular piece of bone from the middle of his forehead and exposed part of his brain. A big ugly fly was crawling over the wound, its wings spread upwards from its metallic blue body, rubbing its legs together as though in gleeful anticipation, and jabbing its sucker on to the brain cells with obvious relish.

This was my first time in action on the Forward Observation Post (OP) and my troop commander, Captain Roy Woodward, and I were with the advance company of the 1st Worcesters, whom we were supporting. These were the first dead Tommies I had seen at close quarters and the sight of that fly made me feel a bit sick.

In the surrounding hedgerows, sparrows chirped an incongruous requiem. We left the field by the top right-hand corner and came on to a narrow earth track that dipped steeply to the left with the terrain and disappeared in a right-hand curve only a few yards from the field. In the village hidden in the valley a vicious fight between British and German tanks and infantry was in progress. Armour-piercing shells that had missed their targets whirred breathlessly overhead to expend themselves uselessly in the far distance, and the sporadic firing of machine guns was accentuated by the reverberations in the surrounding hills.

A burst of machine gun fire tore through the hedge where the track curved; scattering leaves like an autumn wind, just as a man appeared round the bend. The man dropped to the ground. He did not get up.

The moment I arrived at the OP to report to Captain Woodward as his replacement signaller, a German shell scored a direct hit on a wireless truck of the Royal Signals and killed all six men in it. The dead men were buried near the hedge where they had died. A few moments later a sniper's bullet spat spitefully into the ground near my feet as I fastened the jerry-cans of petrol more securely on to the back of our Bren gun carrier. That was only a mild prelude to what life on the Forward Observation Post was to be like.

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