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Chapter 18

Wardt And The Rhine

The time was 22.00 hours, but the evening was still fairly light for the time of year. Somewhere in the distance an artillery duel was in progress and the muzzle flashes of the unseen guns flickered as pale orange smudges against the subdued grey of the evening sky like the glow from blast furnaces being tapped. From much closer at hand came the sharp crack of rifles and the occasional staccato rattle of light machine guns. The dull grey road to Wardt showed as a dark trough between waves of hawthorn hedges in a sea of undulating fields.
We had parked Roger Dog on the road but as close to the hedge as possible for maximum cover. The remote control cable was stretched from the drum on the front of the carrier, over the hedge, and across the front garden to where I crouched in the doorway of the house. My headset was plugged in to the end of the cable and hung around my neck so that I had both hands free to use my rifle. This practice was frowned on in official signal circles because it was inclined to cause a whistling sound at the receiving end, which sometimes made clear reception difficult; but we all did it because of its obvious convenience.
In the passage just behind me an officer of the Worcesters was questioning a corporal who had just returned from a reconnaissance of the village of Wardt with his section. The officer in charge of the patrol had not returned with the section. Having found the village heavily defended he had ordered the corporal to return to base with the section, saying he would follow in a few minutes. That was the last they had seen or heard of him.
The Worcesters attacked Wardt next morning and found the body of their officer spread-eagled on the edge of a slit trench in a field not far from the village. They then continued their advance across the fields towards the village while I and Captain McAllister, who was now back on the O.P. after his spell of relief by Captain Gibb, kept to the road. Alf and Nobby had been told to stay behind with the carrier until sent for.
The Worcesters approached a large, barn-like building in a field just beyond the one in which their dead officer lay. It was brick- built, with no windows, but had a pair of large wooden sliding doors at the front. It was most interesting to see how the infantrymen tackled it. While most of them quickly but quietly surrounded it, two others approached the doors and took a firm grip on the large iron handles. Standing with their backs to the doors and with their arms fully extended horizontally across them the two men awaited the officer's signal. A third man had positioned himself a few yards in front of the doors with his feet braced firmly apart and his Bren gun held cocked and ready to fire from the hip. The officer stood beside him.
The officer nodded. The two men heaved the big heavy doors open. The Bren gunner kept his weapon trained on the gradually widening blackness behind the opening doors. The tactics were unnecessary. The barn was empty.
As Captain McAllister and I reached the outskirts of the village we came across a German soldier sitting on the grass verge at the side of the road, leaning sideways against the hedge as though resting wearily, and with an unopened packet of sandwiches in his hand. He also had a hole as big as my fist in the back of his head. Leaving the corpse and his uneaten snack for someone else to deal with we continued along the road and found that it terminated in the rough stone village square. Houses bounded the square on three sides, while the church, with the village green in front of it, stood solidly at the far end as though keeping a parochial eye on its worshippers. A white sheet hung limply from one of the bedroom windows and a table cloth from one of the downstairs rooms. The place otherwise seemed to be deserted.
Moving cautiously across the square we covered every doorway and window 'just in case'. A lady appeared hesitantly at one of the doorways, then a second one appeared at another some seconds later; then a third; all smiling at us with the nervousness of uncertainty. We approached them carefully as they left their doorways and started walking slowly towards us. With a bit of German from us and a smattering of English from them we learned that the German troops had evacuated the place during the night and pulled back across the river, leaving only a few civilians behind. Thanking them for the information we assured them they had nothing to fear from us. They accepted the situation calmly enough, and for the rest of our stay in Wardt we did not bother them nor they us.
A big stone slab on the green in front of the church provided us with a seat on which to rest for a while, and it was as we sat there, having a good look at our surroundings, that a priest appeared from round a corner and walked towards us. We rose to our feet immediately out of deference to his calling but he smiled in a friendly manner and gestured as if to tell us it was not necessary. A big ring of keys was suspended from the cord around his waist and he selected one of the biggest and pointed it towards the church and turned it in a locking motion as if telling us he wanted to lock the church door. We smiled and shook our heads. The church steeple was the highest feature in the locality and the obvious place for our O.P. He accepted our decision with good grace and we conversed with him as best we could for a short time before he returned to his house. We heard later that he had refused to have the Nazi dead laid to rest in consecrated ground and had buried them in a field instead.
Telling me to keep a sharp lookout for possible signs of the enemy trying to retake the village Captain McAllister went away to see if Alf and Nobby had arrived and found us a suitable billet.
Having walked slowly for more than three miles with it strapped to my back the radio seemed to weigh far more than its normal twenty-nine pounds, so to ease the weight I loosened the belt and shoulder straps and allowed it to rest on the slab. I was just beginning to appreciate the feeling of relief at being free of the weight when Nobby appeared round the corner at the other end of the square and beckoned to me. "Come on, Doug," he called. "We've found a good place round here." Shrugging into my harness again I picked up my rifle and started to walk quickly across the square as Nobby disappeared round the corner. I had gone no more than ten paces when a sudden rush of disturbed air was followed by the loud 'crump' of an exploding shell. A blast of hot air pressed against my back and a shower of small debris spattered around me. I stopped immediately and glance instinctively back. That stray shell had landed close to the stone slab I had only just vacated.
The billet Alf and Nobby had found was a good one. It was a large, solidly built house with a big square cellar and thick concrete walls. The strongly-built cellar was an important feature of most German village houses and farmhouses and could easily be converted into fortified strongpoints, as we had found to our cost. The stairs rose to the left of the hall, at the other end of which was a large wooden door. One would normally expect to see an ordinary domestic type door opening into the kitchen or some other ground floor room at the end of the hall but this one was a common ledged-and-braced door with a Suffolk latch and opened directly into a barn. A number of animal pens filled the wall on the left; the 'pen’ at the far end I correctly surmised to be the lavatory because of its full-1ength, ventilated door. A few scraggy hens scratched at the earthen floor and the whole place had the earthy smell of a farm instead of the domestic smells of a house.
The cellar was also the kitchen, with the usual big flat-topped iron stove at one end, behind the door, and a window at road level directly opposite. Concrete ledges served as shelves and were filled with big stone jars containing dripping, pickles and other items of domestic thrift.
Alf had parked the carrier alongside the window, and while he and Nobby started to prepare a meal for us I threaded the remote control cable through a broken pane in the window and brought it into the cellar so that we could use the radio from there.
That day passed fairly quietly except for one incident. I found it necessary to answer the call of nature and was sitting on the throne in solitary splendour when something spattered viciously against the outside wall like hailstones on glass, with no apparent source of origin. The sudden roar of an aircraft followed, but it was going away, not coming towards us. The roar diminished quickly in the distance but before I could fathom out what had actually happened the vicious spattering was repeated, again followed by the sound of a retreating aircraft. Then came Nobby’s frantic yell. "Doug, Doug, come quickly. We're being attacked!"
Grabbing my rifle in one hand and clutching my hastily pulled-up trousers in the other I hobbled rather than ran to where Nobby was kneeling by the open front window with the Bren gun resting on the sill. I pulled my braces hastily over my shoulders and knelt at the other side of the window to await developments. Nothing happened.
"It was one of those bloody jet planes," Nobby explained. "It had gone before I heard it coming."
It was only then that I noticed. "And what the hell were you going to shoot with THAT?" I asked.
He followed the direction of my pointing finger, and we both burst out laughing. In the excitement of the moment he had forgotten to put the magazine on the Bren.
The attack was not repeated and we spent the rest of the day cleaning and maintaining our weapons, checking the radios, checking and re-organizing the carrier, and ascertaining what supplies we would need when next we had to radio our requirements to Battery H.Q. We also made a brief tour of the infantry positions, and took our turns manning the O.P. I followed Captain McAllister into the church but then stepped quickly backwards as he turned suddenly as if he had forgotten something. As I did so something cold and hard pressed firmly into the back of my neck. I froze.
I held my breath, waiting for what might happen next. Nothing did. No one spoke. I remained quite still. The silence of the church had suddenly become dreadfully ominous. The pressure on my neck remained constant. It gradually dawned on me that there was no sound of breathing behind me. I forced myself to ease slightly forward away from the pressure of the cold thing at my neck, and when the pressure was not maintained I risked a cautious glance behind.
Instead of a German with a Luger there was a marble statue of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ in her arms. My neck had come into contact with one of the extended fingers!

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