He had released the grip of his machine gun only twice that night, each time to urinate. His hand was so cold he could not tell where his fingers ended and the machine gun began. And he had to pee again. Stubbs had an enormous fear that the next time he left the fortification to urinate, the Germans would be on them, and he would be without his weapon.
And, goddamn, he was tired of squinting out at the channel. He yearned for a view of anything that wasn’t interrupted by a machine gun sight or framed in barbed wire. Nothing but water and waves and darkness and fog all night. And the cold. He was sick of it.
Thank God it was getting lighter. The black had turned to purple, and now streaks of blue were lightening the channel. He could see beyond the crashing waves.
“You awake, Stubbs?” the staff sergeant yelled for the twentieth time.
“Yeah, Sarge, I’m still here and awake, goddamn it to hell.”
“Where would you rather be, Stubbs? With Mommy and Daddy at home in—where you from, Stubbs? Boise? That’s right, Boise—with your radio on and a tuna casserole in front of your face? That where you’d rather be, Stubbs, rather than out here having a fine old time with your new friends in the U.S. Army?”
The sarge might be an idiot, but he was a good guy. This razzing would have to do instead of clearing the Browning’s barrel. “You got that right, Sarge.”
“Me, too, Stubbs. Even if it was your mommy and daddy and even if it was in Boise goddamn Idaho.” He pronounced it “Eye-day-ho.”
Rupert Mitchum, Stubbs’ feeder, laughed, and the squad joined him.
They appeared as if by sleight of hand out of the fog, all at once, covering the water up and down the English Channel as far as the eye could see.
It must have been every ship in the German navy. And they were all headed for Private Douglas Stubbs.
He could not say a word, nor could anyone else in the platoon.
Finally, Stubbs muttered, “Aw, goddamn it.”
The fog—surely it was a smokescreen—was suddenly lifted by the wind. More than he could count, ships of all sizes, led by tiny, buzzing landing craft skipping across the waves toward his platoon. Hundreds of these craft, already close enough for him to make out the individual Wehrmacht soldiers who crowded them.
So many ships Stubbs wondered why the German soldiers just didn’t walk across the channel on them, ship to ship, like a pontoon bridge. Every square yard of water seemed occupied by a German vessel.
Then the Kriegsmarine battleships and cruisers began their shore bombardment, their barrel flashes hurrying the light of morning. Stubbs heard the whistle of the shells, then the molar-rattling roar as they detonated. He tried to dig in lower in the sand to wait. His machine gun seemed to shrink. It was impossibly small, a toothpick. He hoped someone along the line had thought to notify headquarters. He mouthed good-byes to his parents and his kid brother.
“Aw, goddamnit,” he said again.
13
Wilson Clay’s hour was up, and he had promised to call the prime minister. The billiard room was still in a state of controlled tumult, but many eyes were on the general.
“I still don’t know, Jack,” he said as he lifted the green phone. “I thought I would, and I don’t, goddamn the German anyway. Winnie is going to chew my ass.”
As he put the receiver to his ear, the lights in the room snapped off, dropping us into darkness. With curtains over the windows and French doors, no moonlight entered the room, and other than a few black shadows, I could see nothing.
“Captain Branch, I’ve lost the phone connection,” Clay called out. “Get me through.”
“Yes, sir.”
The dogs barked. They were in their normal frenzy, howling and yipping.
A sulphur match sputtered. An oil lamp with a glass flume was lit by a signalman near his station, its wick flaring brightly until he replaced the flume. The lamp’s glow meagerly lightened that end of the room, but left the rest of us in murk.
Clay ordered, “Captain Swain, will you kindly see what is going on.”
Gordon Swain was commander of headquarters company.
A sentry at the veranda doors answered, “He’s already gone to check into it, sir.”
Clay left his desk for the north doors, his hands in front of him to ward off unseen people and officers. I walked after him. He pulled aside the curtains and stepped onto the cobblestones.
The sky was filled with slivers of ice, flashing and dancing in the silver moonlight. It was late spring, and I was astonished. It couldn’t be ice. Yet this ice or snow or confetti filled the air, drifting and rolling, so thick it blocked my view of the stone rail around the veranda. The stuff sparkled and glinted, rushing with wind currents, landing on the porch stones and swirling into soft mounds. I felt I was in one of those water-filled glass balls that you shake to obliterate Santa with snow. It landed on our shoulders and hair, our eyelashes and ears.
“Chaff,” Clay observed.
“Pardon?”
“Antiradar. Strips of aluminum foil dumped overhead, probably by the Luftwaffe.”
I had never heard of this defense. If it disoriented me this well, it must have been excellent against radar. The chaff diminished the world to the general and me, insulating us, and surrounding us with a sparkling gaiety I didn’t feel. I swatted at it.
I returned with the general to his desk inside. He had ribbons of aluminum in his hair, which caught the lamp’s yellow light, making his head appear to have serpent’s scales.
Clay lifted the phone and said again, “Signal, put me through—”
The dogs abruptly halted their insane barking. It had never before been completely silent at the manor. I had thought no force on earth could stop those miserable dogs from yammering.
I was spooked, but Clay looked at me and shrugged.
He resumed, “Signal, get me—”
The pounding of a machine gun came from the garden. The blackout curtain over the French doors billowed into the room, suddenly stitched with holes, and the plaster above my desk shattered and fell to the floor, snapping off the cue chalk holder. We threw ourselves onto the floor, except for the general, who gazed disdainfully at the damage.
“Get down, everybody,” Alex Hargrave yelled unnecessarily.
Several M1s returned fire outside.
General Clay said, “I’m just trying to make a phone call.”
I felt foolish, looking up at him. Three HQ company soldiers ran into the billiard room, bumping into desks in the darkness. Two were carrying Thompson submachine guns, the other an Ml. They surrounded General Clay and pushed him to the floor.
“Excuse us, General,” one of them said. “Orders.”
Clay landed on his rump. “Orders from whom, goddamn it? I give all the orders around here.”
“We’ve got to keep you safe, General,” one explained.
Clay tried to rise, but one of the bodyguards put a hand on his shoulder. “Please, sir. Just for a minute, until we figure out what’s going on.”
From the roof came a crash, then a splintering sound, and another crash.
Clay said, “Go see what that is, Jack. It doesn’t sound good.”
No, it didn’t. I didn’t complain I was not a combat soldier, that I was an academician, and not a brave one at that. I crawled away from the desk on all fours, passing other HQ personnel crouching behind desk and cabinets, out the door into the hallway. I rose to my feet and ran up the broad stairway to the second floor, hoping I didn’t bump into anyone coming down. I couldn’t see a thing.
General Clay’s physician, Colonel William Strothers, joined me as I climbed the narrow stairs up to the servant’s quarters on the third floor. He was carrying a flashlight and a .45. I hadn’t thought to arm myself.