At that moment the engine coughed, sputtered, stalled, but they were ashore. The tow-lines were still taut as the tractor heaved at its immense load so Barnes jumped to the ground and ran forward to tell the farmer to stop. When the engine was switched off he thumped the Frenchman on the back and kept on thanking him regardless of the fact that the man couldn’t understand half he was staying. He stopped suddenly as he heard Colburn calling out urgently and when he turned round to face the quagmire his body went completely rigid and he froze.
The giant vehicle must have driven along the road while they were preoccupied with saving the tank. They wouldn’t have heard its motor because of their own engines and that of the tractor, and Reynolds, the only one facing the road, must have been too concerned with what was happening to notice the road. Worse still, the new arrivals could easily locate their position because Bert’s headlights were still on, to stay nothing of the tractor’s lamp. The moon had now risen and this enabled Barnes to make instant recognition of the huge vehicle and the silhouette of its load – a tank transporter with a tank aboard. As if to complete the process of recognition a soldier walked past the headlights of the transporter, a soldier carrying something which could only be a machine-pistol and wearing a pudding-shaped helmet. The Germans had arrived. It took a very short time for Barnes to recover from his stunned state, and this was replaced by an upsurge of cold, murderous fury. They had come all this way; they had lost Davis and Penn; they had almost lost their tank and their own lives a few minutes ago, and now this lot was poking its nose in to snatch it all away from them. Running back to the tank, he leapt on to the hull, grabbed a machine-pistol off the ledge inside the turret, and jumped down behind the tank. He spoke briefly to Reynolds and Colburn.
‘Wait here – behind Bert. Don’t switch the lights off – that will alert them.’
Then he was running back into the field, following as closely as he could the course the tank had taken when it first turned off the road. To avoid any risk of going into the quagmire he ran a little farther round than he thought was necessary, circling back so that he would come out on the road a good hundred yards behind where the transporter was parked. And as he ran his mind worked with icy detachment. How many Germans would there be? One transporter carrying one heavy tank to the repair shop: four men at the most, he guessed. Possibly only three – the Germans were short of ground troops. He dropped flat suddenly. The first soldier he had seen was standing in the field just beyond the grass verge, and now a second one had walked in front of the headlights and he was looking in Barnes’ direction. He didn’t think he had been spotted. He had kept his body crouched low and the moonlight wasn’t very strong yet, its illumination blurred by a faint white mist rising off the field. The second soldier joined his companion and they both stood staring across the field. They couldn’t be too worried yet because otherwise they wouldn’t have walked in front of those headlights, and they could have no reason to suspect the presence of hostile troops in this area. Had they done that in the first place they would never have stopped the transporter. A third soldier appeared and stood right in front of the headlights, his machine-pistol clearly visible. He walked forward to join the others.
Barnes was very close to the road now and when he stood up the road was only a dozen yards away. A curtain of mist floated between himself and the Germans and he ran forward, crossing the road and continuing several yards into the field beyond. When he turned, the bulk of the transporter shielded him from where the soldiers waited. Why didn’t they either investigate or go away? He found the answer when he looked back across the road and saw that the scene on the edge of the quagmire from that distance looked like anything but what it was. The lights of the tank were tilted downwards and he remembered the shallow slope at the edge of the quagmire.
The odd angle of Bert’s headlights gave the strange impression that there had just been a car crash. The turret of the tank was invisible and the light of the tractor was too far away to show up the tank’s silhouette. The Germans might well be imagining that there was another road just across the fields, and from the passive way they were standing by the roadside he felt certain that Bert’s engine had stalled just in time, otherwise they must have recognized the grind of the tracks. It was a tableau made to order, if only he could take advantage of it in time. He moved across the field towards the transporter, his boots making no sound on the grass.
He was close to the rear of the vehicle when he heard someone call out in German. Peering round the end he saw two soldiers still standing on the verge just beyond the front of the transporter while a third one made his way across the field, flashing a torch in front of him. The mist was blurring Bert’s lights now and hung over the quagmire like a noxious gas rising from the swamp. Was there a fourth man in the cab? The two Germans by the roadside presented a tempting target but Barnes waited. He had to try and get them all at once to avoid them scattering.
The soldier walking across the field had stopped, the machine-pistol tucked under one arm while he waved the torch with the other hand. The curtain of mist had drifted lower now and soon he would have to walk into it. He shouted across the field in German, waited, and then shouted again, several sentences. It was deathly quiet when he stopped shouting. The transporter’s engine had been switched off and the mist seemed to cover the field like a leather glove which smothered even the slightest sound. Barnes waited. The Germans waited. He was fairly sure that the soldier in the field was going to give up his search and return to the others, which meant that for a brief moment all three men might be close together. He hoped so because as he stood by the elevated ramp at the rear of the transporter an entirely new idea was developing at the back of his, mind, an idea which made it imperative that he would wipe out the whole German escort. Then he heard one of the men-who stood by the roadside call out; the soldier with the torch answered and began to move deeper into the field, sweeping his torch towards the mist wall which was now less than a dozen yards ahead of him.
It happened without warning. The German walked up to the remnants of a wire fence, paused at a point where two posts tilted at a drunken angle, the wire between them sagging, and stepped over the wires, walking forward again. Then he fell forward,; losing his torch which skidded sideways over baked mud, and shouted. His shout rose to a shriek of alarm. Jesus, thought Barnes, he’s in the quagmire. One of the soldiers by the roadside ran forward, flashing on a torch beam, while the other stayed to guard the transporter. It was at this moment that Barnes climbed silently up on to the side of the huge vehicle, creeping forward and taking up a fresh position behind the German tank. The soldier was running across the field now, waving his torch in front of him as his comrade in the swamp screamed his head off, a scream of pure terror. As the running soldier stopped abruptly his torch beam focussed on a horrifying sight: the first German was already up to his waist as the quagmire sucked him steadily downwards; his arms were waving frantically as he kept padding them down on the mud to arrest his sinking movement and he was still shrieking frenziedly. The third German by the roadside ran up to the transporter, feeling under the tank only feet away from where Barnes was crouched, pulled out a coil of rope and started running across the field. The soldier in the quagmire had sunk in up to the chest now, waving his arms high above his head, and only a few feet from where he struggled the lighted torch he had dropped lay on the top of unbroken crust. The man with the rope was close now and while he ran he held the rope coil ready to throw. As he reached the spot where the German holding the torch stood the struggling man sank lower, only his head and upstretched arms visible now, his voice an agonized moan. The rope was thrown, falling several feet short. The head in the swamp sank out of sight, the voice dying in a strangled gurgle, the vertical arms sliding under the surface, vanishing. Barnes wiped sweat of his forehead, slipped his finger back inside the trigger guard, stood up behind the tank and waited.