“Likewise John, likewise.”
Knocke and Von Arnesen, and for that matter even Anne-Marie Valois, had seen men die in strange and unfortunate ways, but what happened in front of their eyes was a new horror.
Positioned on the wall of the Upper Garden, directly above the return in which Soviet paratroopers huddled, they were covering any attempt to force a passage into the garden, either through the gateway in the north wall or over the top, as had been suggested by the English Major.
Most of the battlement walkways were covered with a tiled roof but a part of this section had seen one of only three hits sustained by the Château during a French artillery attack in early 1945. One shell had landed in the menagerie, killing an old Alsatian herdsman. The second had struck the roof of the Grand Bastion, penetrating but failing to explode. The third had struck the roof of the battlements above the return where Knocke and his party positioned themselves, removing it for a length of twenty metres and blowing away the stonework, leaving a marked elongated U-section removed, an area exposed and decidedly more easy to grapple than other parts of the ancient defences.
Olbricht concentrated on the scaling approach and kept taking quick looks through the portal, refusing to fire, in order to avoid drawing attention to himself and the others.
The grapnel sailed up unnoticed and dropped quickly down, striking the one-armed Engineer on his good shoulder. The metal tool struck stone, a sound that prompted the paratroopers below to haul on the line.
The stunned Olbricht found his right thigh suddenly dragged from him as it was pulled against the stonework by force applied from below. He was painfully pinned against the battlements, parallel with but two feet above the stone floor.
He resisted his pain until the paratroopers below pulled hard to test the line, causing two spikes to penetrate his flesh before exiting the other side and biting into the battlements.
A second grapnel flew over the wall and down the other side, overthrown in the excitement of the soldier using it. He pulled swiftly to bring the device into play.
The grapnel bounced back up the wall and flew across the floor, catching under Olbricht’s neck.
One spike penetrated the back of the skull at the base of the wounded man’s neck.
The scream of pain was silenced as powerful arms below tugged hard, pulling the spike into the soft cavity of Olbricht’s brain.
The dead man’s head moved rhythmically, in time with the climbing pattern of the second paratrooper to scale the wall.
Von Arnesen shot the first Russian as he opened the shutter, sending the lifeless body to fall upon those gathered underneath the ropes.
The second paratrooper grasped the stonework and hauled himself over, receiving two bullets from Valois’ handgun in the face. The impact threw the man off the battlement and into the lists below, striking soft flesh and causing more hurt to the attackers.
An object looped up over the wall and dropped into the Upper Garden. The explosion caught one of the French orderlies passing, penetrating his body with shrapnel and stone fragments. The man’s screams attracted attention and two intelligence agents dragged him away towards the Bastion.
As the sound of the wounded man decreased, the noise from the Northern Ward increased, as the paratroopers put in an attack, encouraged by support from two DP machine-guns. Knocke risked a quick look through an undamaged shutter and saw little by way of return fire from the Small Bastion.
Quickly realising the precariousness of their position he shouted to Von Arnesen to move back from the gap, and moved himself to cover the small entranceway from the Ward into the garden.
Before he was in position above, two paratroopers ran through and moved immediately to shoot down anyone on the wall guarding the spot where their grapnels hung uselessly. Knocke brought up his Sten gun and pulled the trigger, only to be greeted by silence as the weapon failed. Two short staccato bursts sounded close in his left ear and the Russians were thrown back like rag dolls, their lifeless bodies testament to the accuracy and calmness of Anne-Marie Valois.
Quickly she grabbed at the German officer’s weapon, removing the magazine and working the cocking lever before punching the magazine home again.
“Danke Madamoiselle.”
Anne-Marie dropped another paratrooper as he tentatively worked round through the entranceway, leaning over and firing into the top of his helmeted head.
A Russian grenade bounced through the opening, bursting and quickly concealed the three dead bodies as the chemical smoke spread rapidly.
Both Knocke and Valois quickly repositioned, moving to the west of the opening, just in time to fire down into hazy shapes swiftly running into the garden. Most dropped either instinctively or involuntarily, the former seeking cover as they rolled on the floor, the latter no longer caring.
A squeal came from Von Arnesen, hit in the act of killing two more paratroopers scaling the grapnel lines. One of them survived long enough to get a shot off with his heavy Nagant M1895 revolver, the 7.62mm bullet smashing Von Arnesen down as it clipped the femur on its path through his right thigh.
“I’ll go”, shouted the French agent, and she dashed quickly along the battlements to Von Arnesen’s side.
Swiftly unhooking the sling to her Sten, she wound the webbing around the German’s thigh to create a ligature. Needing something rigid to tighten the tourniquet, she slipped the near empty magazine out of her submachine-gun and inserted it in the knot, twisting it twice to tighten it further, much to the consternation of Von Arnesen whose pain resistance level was already being tested.
A burst of fire from Knocke’s position drew both their glances, but the man was still there; there were just more bodies in the dispersing smoke.
Slipping another magazine out of her waist bag, Anne-Marie primed her Sten.
“Danke Mademoiselle.”
“Keep it tight Jurgen. Can you manage here?”
“Jawohl.”
It was not a time for pleasantries and she swiftly scurried back along the stonework, leaving Von Arnesen propped against the wall covering the grapnels and silently promising anyone a painful death if they showed themselves above the parapet.
Two more smoke grenades tumbled through the entranceway, both perfectly positioned to cover the Russian’s next move.
A single arm flashed in the smoke and a more deadly object careened off the underside of the battlement roof, dropping between the two defenders.
Von Arnesen heard the shout and risked a look at his two comrades.
He saw a blur of movement through the smoke and the flash of the explosion.
The other grenades continued to produce smoke, further obscuring the parapet where two bodies lay.
Instinctively turning, he fired blindly at a noise he almost missed, sending yet another young paratrooper to the ground ten metres below.
Major Marion Crisp had been dragged away from the doorway, insensible, felled by the explosion of a grenade that did deadly work in the confined space at the bottom of the north stairs.
Enemy machine-guns were lashing the defenders, permitting the assaulting party to make it into the stairwell without further casualties.
However, the confined space then worked against them, funnelling them forward one by one. A ‘Deux’ agent dropped the first three, two bullets a man, piling the corpses on each other as momentum drove the dead flesh on.
Caught in the act of reloading his Beretta, the agents head jerked back as a burst from a PPS took his life, his body slithering down the stairs and adding itself to the pile accumulating there.
The second agent, having dragged Crisp up the stairs, turned to help and was dropped by the same weapon, his lifeblood rapidly washing the stairs onto which he fell.