and that’s all the commanders would need to keep their swedes under cover. When you are closed down you can’t see bugger-all. Only tank crews understand how bloody helpless you feel with the lid on. You’re always convinced that there’s some sod of an infantryman farting about under your elbow with a bazooka. That’s all it needs to brew you, whether you’re in a Panther or a pantechnicon.’
‘I never realized that the visibility was so poor,’ said Pelling.
‘Good God, yes. And then there were those bloody ditches. I never saw any of those in the south, but as soon as we reached that bloody ditch country I’d do anything to avoid driving down even a long straight road in daylight unless we had the hatches up and the old Andie shouting left and right. It’s no picnic, I tell you.’
‘But you were hit.’
‘Yeah, funny that. Only time, too. That bugger in the second Mark IV let me have a 75-mm. armour-piercing over his shoulder as he went over the ridge.’
‘We heard it strike the armour.’
Wool chuckled. ‘I’ll bet you did; so did I. Made my head sing for a week and took about a quarter of a hundredweight of metal off the side of the turret. Gouged it out as neat as a chisel mark.’
‘We thought you were a goner.’
‘The whole inside of the tank lit up bright yellow. I could see my controls and the gears and stuff, brighter than I’d ever seen it before! Then it went orange and glowed red hot at the point of impact before it all went dark again. I thought I was going to brew. The old Sherman had a terrible reputation for brewing. Ronsons, they called them; automatic lighters, see?’
‘Didn’t they ask you about the damaged turret when you got the tank back to leaguer?’
‘You say leaguer, do you. My mob always said laager. No. Well, yes, they did, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want any trouble about it. They guessed it was me that brought it back, of course, but nothing was ever said.’
‘They must have thought it was an ambush, Mr Steeple.’
‘But who the devil’s driving it, sir?’
‘It must have been that little Corporal of yours, Steeple. The one who never stops smiling.’
‘He’s not one of my chaps, sir. I thought he was with you.’
‘Deserves a medal, whoever he is. I’d get your chaps together and pull back until first light, Steeple. You can’t defend this place with half a dozen Lee Enfields and a Bren. We can congratulate ourselves upon not going into the bag this night.’
‘Indeed, sir, or worse.’
Pelling’s voice was flat. ‘Or worse. Quite so.’ Was it fatigue that made him daydream so readily?
Thirty years ago it was, when I came closest to meeting my maker. Father Franco nodded, he’d heard the story before, as Father James well knew, but Compline was done and the evening still light. Here in the shadowy corner of the great hall the stories that he told seemed from another world. And yet Father James was not the only cleric who had been a professional soldier, and the things of which he spoke had taken place not many miles away from where the cliff-like monastery caught the harsh sunshine and tolled the hours of ceaseless prayer.
‘I’d have put you in for an M.M., Wool, but I had no idea of who you were.’
Wool was not impressed. ‘It’s all good and nice, you saying that now. I never got a medal, and what good would it do me, anyway? Frankly, I’m more interested in Munchy outlets.’
‘You saved twenty or more lives that night. Drove off an armoured attack, single handed. There’s not many men who can say that.’
Wool was scarcely listening. ‘She was a lovely bus, Cindy Four. Lucky tank, too. All four of us went through fifteen months without a scratch. Bert Floyd – the loader originally – copped it three days after being recrewed. It was only the gear-box that ever gave trouble, and I could handle that. I knew the smell of her: lovely. That night as I strapped tight into the seat and grabbed the sticks I could smell the leather and the oil that the sun had warmed during the day. The Betty Grable pin-up was still next to the visor, and so was the red-painted ammo box from Sicily where Andy kept his bottled beer and a pair of carpet slippers.’ Wool laughed. ‘If we’d ever had to abandon, Andy would have been dancing about a battlefield in slippers. And when she started – beautiful!
‘It broke my heart when they re-equipped us with Comets. I took Cindy back to the depot myself. I got special permission from the C.O. He said they were going for training, but the R.S.M. at the depot said they were to be sold for scrap. If I’d have had the money I’d have bought her. We tried to have a whip round but none of us had enough to even start. A bloody rotten shame,’ said Wool bitterly, ‘those Chevvy five by sixes were every bit as good as the V-8 jobs.’ He plucked Pelling’s sleeve and whispered, ‘I had to do for her myself.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘At the depot,’ said Wool. ‘I poured sand into her and pushed her up to full revs. She stalled, horrible. I’d brought the sand in my small pack. The boys all agreed with me. No one could get on with that gear-box except me, and Wilson’s turret had a lot of funny little ways that no one else would have understood.’
‘I wish I’d seen her,’ said Pelling quietly.
‘To you she would have looked just like any other Sherman.’
‘Oh, no,’ protested Pelling. ‘I understand what…’
‘You, you, you…’ spluttered Wool, ‘you thought she was a Churchill. It was you went there to blow her up!’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Pelling.
‘I couldn’t get you a job,’ said Wool. He sniffed loudly and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘So don’t build your hopes on me.’
There was no more to say. Wool started the car even before Pelling scrambled out. He accelerated so that the gravel rattled against the pumps and he swung out of the forecourt on to the main road with an agonized squeal of tyres.
Pelling waved, but Wool didn’t look back. He watched the car as it grew smaller upon the long straight road south.
Major Richard Winter was a tall man with hard black eyes, a large nose and close-cropped hair. He hated getting out of bed, especially when assigned to dawn patrols on a cold morning. As he always said – and by now the whole Officers’ Mess could chant it in unison – ‘If there must be dawn patrols in winter, let there be no Winter in the dawn patrols.’
Winter believed that if they stopped flying them, the enemy would also stop. In 1914, the front-line soldiers of both armies had decided to live and let live for a few weeks. So now, during the coldest weather, some squadrons had allowed the dawn patrol to become a token couple of scouts hurrying over the frosty wire of no-man’s-land after breakfast. The warm spirit of humanity that Christmas 1914 conjured had given way to the cold reality of self-preservation. Those wiser squadrons kept the major offensive
