‘Where’re you off to?’ I asked.
‘Heading up to Villeforte. We cleared it out yesterday.’
‘Can I hitch a ride?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll be two seconds.’
I ran into my room and grabbed my helmet, cameras and film, and raced back out to the stables. I jumped in the rear of the jeep, pulled my helmet down low and wrapped a scarf around my face as Abrams gunned the motor and we drove out of the yard up a muddy lane towards Villeforte. As usual the traffic was heavy, and going both ways — trucks, jeeps, half-tracks and a long column of German prisoners tramping sullenly back towards captivity — and it took us almost an hour to travel the two miles to the small town. Villeforte showed few signs of fighting. There was a large hole in the roof of the mairie and some of the bigger farms on the outskirts that had been used as strongpoints were pretty much levelled — shattered walls and piles of rubble — but there were no fires burning and the clock in the church tower was telling the correct time.
Abrams pulled into a supply dump and I hopped off, but not before I had covertly snaffled a red-cross armband that I found on the jeep’s floor.
‘When are you heading back?’ I asked.
‘In an hour. Give or take.’
‘Don’t leave without me.’
I wandered off, up the road to the town, slipping on my armband, feeling a sudden surge of excitement in me as if I were playing truant. I was certainly disobeying Bovelander; categorically ignoring his explicit order. Fuck Bovelander, I thought and then paused, as I saw a small unit of military police up ahead directing traffic. I turned right down a farm track and as soon as I was out of sight cut across a meadow heading for another road that would lead me to the town centre, aiming for the spire of the church. I climbed over a wooden fence. And stopped.
The body of a German soldier lay there, his head a battered turnip of blood, bone and hair. He was supine on flattened meadow-grass a few yards from a tall blackthorn hedge. I looked around, feeling a little dizzy. How had he been missed by the corpsmen? I took out my camera and snapped him lying there. My excitement had disappeared, replaced by a hyper-alert apprehension. It was my first picture as a war photographer. I moved on.
Dead German soldier, Villeforte, November 1944.
I wandered cautiously into the narrow lanes of Villeforte, all the houses shuttered and locked. Here and there on the streets were groups of soldiers, sitting, lounging, eating, smoking. None of them paid me any attention — my red-cross armband the perfect passport.
However, I was stopped by a sentry as I tried to enter the main square.
‘Sorry,’ the soldier said. ‘We got brass checking out the tank.’
I backed off and circled round. The tank? From another side street I managed to gain an oblique view of the square and I could see an enormous German tank — the size of a house, it seemed — painted a matt sandy-grey and apparently undamaged, with American soldiers clambering over it. I could hear excited chatter and the odd whoop of elation. I crept forward to a doorway and fired off a few shots. I’d never seen a tank this large — some sort of captured secret weapon? Was that another reason the press were being kept out of Villeforte?
German mystery-tank, Villeforte, November 1944.
I looked at my watch. Time to return to Abrams at the supply dump. I headed off down a sloping paved lane — I could see fields at its end. I felt elated, pleased with my initiative at going AWOL like this. I intended to do the same as Poundstone and apply to be reassigned to a different unit with a more accommodating CO. Bovelander wasn’t worth bothering about, he—
The air was suddenly filled with a curious combination of noise: shrill tin whistles and the ripping of stiff canvas. Then, from somewhere on the edge of town a volley of percussive explosions. I felt the blast sweep through the streets to tug at my clothes. I crouched down. Shouts. Then more shrill whistling and explosions. Within seconds there was a crazed reaction of firing, as if every weapon in Villeforte was being loosed off.
I ran down the lane to its foot and hugged the wall of the last house before the countryside began. I could see a wide ploughed field and beyond it straggling copses of leafless trees. Peering round the corner I saw a squad of GIs sheltering in a patch of garden behind a waist-high wall. Every now and then one of them would poke his head up and fire off a few shots at some target across the field towards a distant wood. I peered — I could hear some vehicles revving in the scrub by the trees and I thought I saw small figures in green-grey uniforms scurrying about.
I shouted at the soldiers and ran over, ducking down behind the wall.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Fuckin’ counter-attack. You a medic?’
‘What? Yeah.’
Artillery shells — ours, I assumed — began to explode in the wood across the field. Great towering billows of chocolate-brown smoke, then the shock wave rocking us. I watched a tree slowly fall — creaking, the tear of timber splitting — then the crash and blustering cloud of twigs and branches. The air was full of the fat-popping noise of small arms. Then bits of tile began to fly up in the air on the roof of the house behind us and shards fell tinkling on and around us. We all ducked down. I’m under fire, I thought, so this is what it’s like.
The man I spoke to had a stubbly beard and a circular patch on his arm with a star in it.
‘OK, fellas,’ he shouted. ‘We’re getting outta here.’
He pointed at the entry to a narrow sunken lane. ‘Let’s get our asses in there. I’ll check it out.’ And he scurried off towards the lane, running in a crouch. Nobody fired at him and he arrived at the entry to the lane, squatting down between its thick banks.
‘OK, come on!’ he shouted. ‘One at a time.’
More roof tiles behind us were hit. The shards fell with a fragile, near-melodic sound like a wind chime. Nobody moved. One of the men was looking at me strangely.
‘You a nurse?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘For fuck’s sake, come on, guys!’ the man in the sunken lane shouted. I rummaged in my kitbag and took out my other camera and fitted a 50 mm lens to it and wound the film on. The photographer in me was thinking: don’t miss this. A counterattack. Under fire. Don’t miss this.
The man in the lane shouted again but no one seemed very keen to follow the intrepid soldier and run the few exposed yards along the ploughed field, even to the evident security of the lane with its high banks. He waved and shouted once more and then suddenly, there was a boom of an explosion behind him and a great puff of smoke seemed to rush down the lane to envelop him. He fell down and his carbine went spiralling high up in the air to land twenty feet away. He stood up, apparently unhurt, and began to run back towards us, not bothering about his weapon, his pack banging against his hip as he raced for the cover of the garden wall. I peered over the top and took some shots of the wood. I could still hear the firecracker pops of rifles and machine guns but could see nothing stirring any more amongst the trees.
‘Get the fuck down!’ the running man screamed at me as he raced towards us. I swung round as he shouted and saw him hit, just a jolt that shortened his stride, and, entirely reflexively, my finger pressed the release button. He fell to the ground and others raced out to drag him back behind the wall. He was completely limp. They pulled him into the cover of the street that led down from the town square, and laid him against a wall, the men huddled round him, fumbling with his jacket and webbing. Click, I took another photo. Just at that moment I saw a half-track lurch into view at the top of the sloping street and I sprinted up towards it, having the presence of mind to thrust my camera back in its bag.