The Steel Fist Read online

  Rifles around him smacked as men saw, or imagined, a target. Corporal Fysshe-Smith knelt and fired steadily. There was a third agonised scream from a few yards beyond the stream.

  The cloud moved and light began to filter through until once more the moon was revealed and shed its rays unhindered.

  Taggart was suddenly conscious that the captured Spandau had stopped shooting.

  He cupped his hands to his mouth.

  “Sergeant!”

  The sergeant’s voice floated back with a faint tremor. “All right, sir... bullet in the shoulder.”

  “Go back to the...”

  Sergeant Duff was not going back anywhere. He did not let his officer finish.

  “I’m all right, sir. Bloody Jerry sighted on my tracer. I can handle my Tommy gun.”

  Three dying men threshed about with their legs and arms, intermittently screaming through ceaseless groans.

  “Not like it is on the films, is it?”

  Taggart was amazed by the elation he felt.

  “The one I sniped went down like a log and stayed still,” Corporal Fysshe-Smith said quietly. He sounded pleased.

  “We don’t know where the buggers are.” Taggart peered around. “They may all have got back to the shelter of the trees or some of them may be hiding in hollows we can’t see in this kind of light, between us and the hump. I’m going to make my way round by the right, as I said, Corporal. Udall, go and tell the sergeant to lay on covering fire when the moon goes again.

  They waited five minutes with no shooting from either side.

  Have they pulled out? I hope they haven’t... am I mad? No. The Colonel said ‘bring a prisoner’: my job isn’t done yet.

  He watched the cloud that was sliding towards the moon. It touched. The effulgence began to fade. Darkness increased.

  Taggart launched himself out of the stream bed and scuttled in the memorised direction of a ditch.

  In the pitch darkness and the aftermath of killing — he was certain that one of those flailing, shuddering, shrieking creatures whose cries he could still hear had fallen to his bullets — he miscalculated. His foot met empty space and he tumbled heavily into a ditch. He was grateful for the snow that mostly filled it and cushioned his fall. But he went deep and an abundance of the damp cold stuff forced its way past his collar and cuffs, his gaiter tops and into his mouth, eyes and ears.

  He hauled himself out and waded on with snow up to his knees. The ditch branched half-right and he followed a new line. And so he made his way by ditch and crouching runs across folds in the ground until the moon showed again. He dropped into a shallow drain and waited until his eyes adjusted to the changed light.

  A man coughed. Taggart started. Another cough, a hawking and spitting. A coalscuttle helmet was limned against the sky. Its wearer spoke in a hoarse undertone and was answered in a growl.

  Taggart shivered. He recalled boyhood nightmares of bogeymen. He had been nurtured on Great War tales of atrocities read in his youth years after that war, and of war stories in boys’ comics. To boys of his generation the word “German” conjured horrors.

  Prisoners. Two of the bastards. German had been well taught at his public school and he had learned it for five years. He hadn’t a clue what these brutes were saying in dialect; but he could shout “Hände hoch” with the best of ‘em. “Hands up.”

  How to grab ‘em?

  I can’t make my rush at the pimple while they’re there. Don’t think I want to lumber myself with two prisoners. One’s going to be unlucky.

  He could see only the man he had first seen. The other was apparently squatting in a ditch.

  He set his Tommy gun to fire single shots and took aim. At fifteen feet the .45 bullet might penetrate a helmet; it would certainly deliver a knock-out blow. He had an Enfield .38 revolver as well as his four grenades, but the Enfield was a poor weapon.

  He waited until the German exposed head and shoulders, then shot him in the neck. The man fell with no sound except a vast exhalation like a giant sigh. The clap of sound echoed with exaggerated loudness. The muzzle flame flared too brightly.

  “Hände hoch!”

  Taggart had hurled himself out of the drain and lay prone with his submachine-gun pointing.

  The second German had incautiously reacted by leaping to his feet. He held a rifle. On hearing Taggart’s order he raised it. Taggart aimed at the rifle and fired. His bullet clipped it and flung it up and aside. The German gave a shout of astonishment and pain, dropped the rifle and clutched his left hand with his right.

  “Herunter... down!”

  The dazed German’s left hand was dripping blood onto the snow. He fell to his knees. Bullets from the hummock whistled past. He fell prone.

  “Kommen Sie hier.”

  The German wormed forward.

  Taggart slid back into the drain and the German followed, then found a field dressing and bandaged himself. Taggart saw that he had lost half of a finger.

  Now what? He’s going to hamper my charge up the pimple.

  Jerry knows I’m here. He’ll be coming for me. Don’t want to lose my prisoner. Must attack the pimple. Must drive Jerry off it... kill some more of the buggers.

  Taggart was not in the habit of using profanity. It occurred to him that fighting for his life — and the lives of the men for whom he was responsible, perhaps even more — was bad for his language.

  Only one thing to do.

  “Nehmen den Helm ab... take the helmet off.”

  The German, his face still twisted with the pain of a throbbing hand, looked amazed.

  “Nehmen meinen?”

  “Ja. Sofort... at once.”

  The German bared his head.

  Taggart rapped him sharply on the base of the skull with the barrel of his Tommy gun. The german subsided against the side of the ditch.

  Taggart removed the slings from the rifle and the dead man’s Schmeisser. He bound the prisoner’s hands behind his back, and his ankles together.

  He took stock of his surroundings, noted landmarks and left the drain. He began to rush the hummock, firing from the hip. He saw and heard Corporal Fysshe-Smith lead his men forward at a run. He heard the forward Bren and some rifle fire open up.

  There were shots behind him. Tracer leaped at him. He dropped to the snow and burrowed into it.

  The corporal arrived, panting, with Udall and another man.

  Udall, reproving, said “You should have let me come with you, sir.”

  “I’m all right.”

  In the moonlight there was more than the usual wry cynicism apparent on the corporal’s face.

  “They’ve cut us off, sir. They left only two men on the pimple. The rest are between us and the back stop.”

  “Then we’ve got ‘em ambushed. Like ham in a sandwich. Oh, sorry, I should have said like Kosher chicken.”

  The corporal dispensed Taggart. “Ham is very suitable for these thugs, sir.” He had lost family and friends in concentration camps.

  “I’ve got to pick up my prisoner.”

  “Your prisoner, sir?”

  Even Fysshe-Smith’s studied coolness was slightly heated.

  “He’s trussed up in a drain. We’ll follow my tracks back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  What else could the corporal say? Amazed, reluctantly admiring, acquiescence was demanded.

  Some brisk shooting was in progress.

  On the way to find the captive, Taggart asked “What casualties?”

  “Sar’nt Duff and Johnson hit, sir. Maguire killed. Howden wounded pretty badly... has to be helped to walk.”

  The captured German had come to. He glowered at Taggart, who told Udall to release his feet and pick up the Schmeisser.

  They began a careful, crouching progress towards The Maginot Line. They could follow the progress of Sergeant Duff’s party’s retreat by the sporadic firing.

  They were a hundred yards from the back stop Bren gun when bullets hummed past them while they crawled bet
ween a ditch and a low ridge.

  The prisoner began to laugh.

  Taggart rounded on him.

  “Do you want another bump on the head?”

  “You will never get past my friends. There are twenty-two of us.”

  “If he said what I think he did, sir, tell him I’ll lay him a hundred to one we do.”

  Nothing wrong with my corporal’s morale; or the others’, who chuckled.

  “It isn’t going to be a gift, Corporal. Jerry’s well positioned. And we’re outnumbered, even though we’ve killed half a dozen.”

  The fight between Sergeant Duff’s party, hampered by a badly wounded man and two lightly — how lightly Taggart wondered — wounded, including the sergeant, had become fierce. Weapons rattled in frequent fusillades.

  If they don’t get back to the back stop — God! Are they carrying Maguire’s body? — we won’t, either.

  “I’m going to work round their flank and draw fire. Then you rush them, Corporal.”

  Taggart set out. He became aware of Udall’s breathing. “I didn’t tell you to...”

  “I’m coming, sir.”

  Taggart knew that obstinate tone. No order would keep Udall back.

  Taggart had to prod his prisoner from time to time, who moved reluctantly, deliberately hindering them. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t hurry.”

  Taggart could manage that in Sixth Form German. “Remember the Geneva Convention. You are not allowed to shoot prisoners.”

  Taggart could follow that, too. Cheeky swab, he thought. He’s only about nineteen. An old sweat would have come more willingly.

  Time stretched now that they were so near to safety. Taggart’s nerves became jumpy. Once again he fancied enemy shapes where only shadows were.

  Fire erupted from a hollow in the snowy ground. Bullets cracked close to their ears. The German ducked and fell flat. Taggart threw a grenade... and another.

  He fired his last white flare and the back stop Bren opened up. He prodded the prisoner to his feet and propelled him with a hard shove in the small of the back. Everyone shambled forward. Corporal Fysshe-Smith and his companion had caught up while Taggart drew fire. They were on his left and shooting steadily.

  In another minute they all flung themselves down beside the rear Bren gunner and rifleman.

  The sergeant’s party arrived, panting. The badly wounded Howden was being supported, one leg bandaged. The sergeant humped the dead man.

  “We’re not there yet,” Taggart said. “I’ll go ahead and find the trip wires for the mines. And to give the password. The chaps in the advanced posts will be trigger-happy, I know.”

  He knew something else, too. The enemy had taken him by surprise at the moment when he gave the order to attack the pimple. They could spring another surprise yet: there could be no certainty that they had not infiltrated past the unseen back stop and were waiting among the anti-personnel mines and anti-tank obstacles, the barbed wire.

  His patrol wouldn’t be home and dry until the steel door of the casemate from which they had sallied forth clanged shut behind them.

  And it was the very men who manned the casemate, with 47 millimetre anti-tank guns and machine-guns, who might sweep them with fire at the last moment, mistaking them for the enemy.

  He told the prisoner to take his helmet off and told the sergeant to keep him well back.

  “We can’t afford mistaken identity at the last moment.”

  Taggart led a cautious approach and shouted the password, “Bonzo”, from a safe distance.

  The Colonel bred pugs, and the archetypal pug was Bonzo of the cartoons. It put an incongruously homely seal on what had been a terrifying ordeal.

  Two

  “I don’t like North Country comedians at the best of times.” Dempster almost made a profession of being provocative. His real profession was the stage; and, as he liked to point out, with assumed grandeur, “the silver screen”: he had played four minor parts in Elstree productions. “Not bad at twenty-three” he liked to suggest.

  Their company commander had migrated south from Northumberland a decade ago, so Taggart cocked an eye at him for his reaction. None was manifested.

  Dempster continued needling. “There’s a cult in The Profession about all the leading music hall comedians. It’s sacrilege to denigrate them. I grant you, I adore the great Cockneys as much as anyone: Dan Leno, Little Titch, Nellie Wallace, Lupino Lane. But that bloody George Formby with his latest drivel, ‘Imagine me in The Maginot Line, Sitting on a mine in The Maginot Line’... I ask you.”

  “What d’you ask us, George?”

  Taggart, in an uncomfortable chair in what passed for an officers’ mess in a large fort — literally “large work”, to the French, “grand ouvrage” — encouraged Dempster to be difficult. Outrageous? More often than not. Taggart had a fine sense of well-being after the night’s adventure. He felt relaxed and confident. Master of himself. He was the only officer in the regiment, let alone the battalion, who had been in battle in this war.

  “The man is a low comic...”

  The Major, indifferent to criticism of Lancastrians, cut in. “Geordie comedians are very clever, George. You effete southerners don’t appreciate them because you don’t know the dialect. But why shouldn’t George Formby be a low comedian and proud of it? He’s a good pro, isn’t he?”

  The customer was always right, because he paid for his seat. A company commander merited the same indulgence because he dished out all the dirty jobs; like doing Orderly Officer, checking inventories, making one responsible for the sanitary squad. Anyway, Second Lieutenant Dempster was not short of tact.

  “It’s not so much his turn that I’m criticising, sir. It’s the bogus idea people at home have about what goes on out here.”

  Dempster, resting thespian thanks to the war — he had never been sure of a monthly pay check before — paused; for dramatic effect.

  “Go on.” Major Eugster looked like everyone’s favourite uncle and at this moment he sounded like him.

  “Well, to begin with, I’m sure the general impression is that The Maginot Line is an unbroken reinforced concrete fortification running from Belgium to Switzerland. And what have we got?” Another pause.

  “Tell us, George.” Taggart sounded lazily indulgent.

  “A barbed wire fence running from the Luxembourg frontier to the Rhine, and then a few miles more, round the corner. Punctuated by forts five kilometres apart; and interval casemates which can only give flanking fire. People imagine that these forts are luxuriously equipped and the B.E.F. is leading a sybaritic existence in them. Clowns like Formby propagate the idea. I’m all for security, but it ought to be made known to the great British public that the British Expeditionary Force is holding a line well to the north of The Maginot. And only a few, carefully picked... er...” Dempster began to grin, betraying his hand, “elite units have been admitted to Monsieur Maginot’s — I suppose there was a Monsieur Maginot? — fortifications, to keep the entente cordiale going.”

  “Elite, eh? Does that include you, young Dempster?” The Major sounded amused.

  “I said elite units, sir. Personalities don’t enter into it.” Laughter of the derisive sort, from the officers of B Company.

  “Andre Maginot was a first class War Minister in the early twenties. I think his Line is a very sound means of defence,” the Major said, being serious now. “Twelve kilometres depth of defence along the Franco-German frontier looks pretty effective to me. Don’t forget there’s continuous barbed wire along the frontier, then closely spaced advance posts between one and two kilometres behind the wire: concrete bunkers with forty-seven millimetre anti-tank guns and twin Reibell machine-guns, with more wire and rows of lengths of railway line two metres high, embedded in concrete, to stop tanks; backed by another seven-metre depth of wire over anti-tank mines. And twenty men to man each post. Then trip wires to set off anti-personnel mines behind the advance posts, covering the ground all the way back to forts like this one.�
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  Taggart, in his indulgent mood engendered by the pride he felt since his fire fight with the enemy, sounded almost as avuncular as his company commander.

  “I think George is suffering from claustrophobia, sir.”

  “Not at all. I’m used to small spaces — a stage —hemmed in by large numbers of people: an audience...”

  “Do you attract large audiences in the kinds of play you appear in?” Taggart interrupted.

  More laughter from their friends.

  “I’ll ignore that, Rodney. What I object to is the spartan living conditions. These forts, whether they’re grands or petits ouvrages, are huge: miles of wide tunnels connecting underground barracks, generating plants, command posts, magazines. The whole place bristling with artillery, even howitzers, mortars and machine-guns. Garrisons of two hundred to twelve hundred officers and men. Why on earth couldn’t the Froggies give us all somewhere decent to sleep, eat and be comfortable off duty?”

  “Because,” said Taggart, “as long as a Frenchman is well fed and gets his litre of red wine a day, he’s indifferent to other creature comforts. I’m surprised you haven’t suggested a red light section for every fort as well.”

  “I have never needed to have recourse to professional services,” Dempster said loftily. He paused. “Happily, a large proportion of attractive actresses are... er morally uninhibited.”

  “What have morals got to do with it? Immorality, to me, means pinching coins from a blind beggar’s cup, or maltreating children.”

  “Very well, Rodney; I won’t beat about the bush: sexually uninhibited.”

  “That’s better. And what else don’t you like about The Maginot Line and the British public notion of it?”

  “Those damnable anti-personnel mines, for a start. I don’t mind telling you, while I was waiting for you to come back from patrol last night... early this morning... I kept getting the squitters with worry that one of you would step on one. They’re a diabolical concept. Trust the Froggies... well, who else would think of a mine that’s thrown up by a trip wire to burst at the height of an average man’s head?” Dempster shuddered. “Never did fancy the idea of decapitation. Even seeing the site of the block at The Tower of London gave me the willies.”