For King and Country

Fifty yards or so from the guardhouse Morgan gestured everyone to the ground, and they all lay there waiting for the two-man patrol to reach the designated stage of their regular route. As they set foot on the near side of the bridge Morgan and Farnham rose to their feet and walked swiftly towards the windowless back wall of the railway hut turned guardhouse. Reaching it, they stood still for a moment, listening to the German voices inside. They sounded like they were having a good time.

At Morgan’s signal the two men inched their way round the end of the hut furthest from the bridge, hoping the door was open, as it had been when they broke camp an hour and a half earlier.

It was.

The two men on patrol had almost reached the other end of the bridge. Morgan took one step inside the door and another to his left, allowing Farnham an equal angle of fire. The two men had a fleeting glimpse of bareheaded, greatcoated men sitting round a packing case, cards in hand, before the silent fusillade ripped the scene to pieces, shredding the back and head of the man who was facing away from the door, spurting blood and brains in a welter of collapsing bodies. There was a sound like furniture falling, a moment of utter silence, and then they could hear the river once more.

They pulled two of the bodies out of their greatcoats, grabbed a coal-scuttle helmet each, and waited by the door. Glancing back at the four dead men, Farnham was struck by how young the faces looked. In a few days four homes in Germany would be getting letters from the Wehrmacht, and tears would be rolling down their mothers’ cheeks.

A wave of cold anger ran through him, anger at the bastards who had set the whole bloody mess in motion.

Morgan was looking at his watch. It usually took the guards five minutes to complete their circuit, which meant there was one to go. Straining his ears, he thought he could hear the faint drumming of feet on the bridge, and seconds later he heard their voices. Thirty yards, he guessed. Twenty, fifteen…

The two SAS men exchanged nods, and walked calmly out through the door.

One of the approaching Germans shouted out a question in a cheerful voice, and in reply Morgan’s Sten seemed to lift him off his feet. Farnham’s target died less dramatically, dropping like a stone as the bullets stitched a line from belly button to forehead.

They walked quickly forward, grabbed the bodies by the ankles, and dragged them back across the cinders to the makeshift mass grave in the guardhouse. ‘Call in the others,’ Morgan told Farnham.

They were already on their way, squeezing into the hut one by one.

‘Nice and warm in here,’ Beckwith muttered, feigning not to notice the pile of corpses around the stove. The faces of both Tobin and Imrie, Farnham noticed, were decidedly pale.

‘So far so…’ Morgan started to say, but at that moment all eight heads turned in response to the unmistakable sound of approaching heavy vehicles. In a move worthy of the Marx Brothers all eight men moved towards the doorway, causing a general scrum, and tipping Imrie off his feet and into the lap of a German corpse. He froze for a second, took a deep breath and clambered back up.

Meanwhile Morgan had asserted rank and claimed the view from the door. Two large lorries had drawn up in the station forecourt about a hundred and fifty yards away. Their uniformed drivers had already climbed down and were lighting cigarettes. A man in an officer’s cap was just disappearing into the station building.

‘Maybe he’s just stopped for a shit,’ McCaigh suggested hopefully.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Morgan decided. ‘Trev, Roger – get some coats and helmets on and start pretending to be guards. Robbie,’ he went on, looking out through the doorway, ‘form a line of defence. Two of you behind this hut, the other two behind the engine shed over there. If Jerry starts pouring out of those lorries and heading this way, start shooting.’ He pushed a lock of unruly hair back inside the beret and turned to Beckwith. ‘Come on, Morrie, we’ve got a bridge to blow.’

There was still no movement in the distant forecourt, though this time Morgan thought he could hear laughter from inside one of the lorries. The officer had not returned – if McCaigh had been right about his destination maybe the bastard was constipated.

As Corrigan and Imrie, suitably coated and helmeted, walked along the track towards the bridge, Morgan and Beckwith skirted round the pool of light, reached the bank of river some thirty yards downstream and then worked their way back along the water’s edge. Climbing up into the underslung girder was as easy as it had looked from the OP, and they encountered no difficulties crossing to the other side along the wide, L-shaped beams. The only real problem was a distinct lack of light, but then Beckwith had always claimed he could put together explosive charges in his sleep.

On the bridge above them Corrigan and Imrie had stopped to light cigarettes and were now leaning over the parapet, puffing away as contentedly as their German predecessors had done. Away to their right the lorries were still sitting in the forecourt.

The striking of a match betrayed the position of the missing officer. ‘The bastard’s standing on the platform,’ Imrie suddenly realized.

‘Maybe he’s waiting for a train,’ Corrigan said flippantly.

A few seconds later the two men were staring at each other, suddenly aware of what that might mean.

Thirty yards away, crouched behind a corner of the stone-built engine shed, Farnham was mentally sifting through the same implications. If the lorries were there to meet a train, then the chances of it arriving either just before or just after the bridge blew up were pretty good. But was there any way to take the train down with the bridge? He couldn’t think of one. It was already too late – Beckwith would have the time pencils in place by now. They would have to trust to luck.

The mingled smell of coal, tar and oil was heavy in Farnham’s nostrils, taking him back to his schooldays and the frequent illicit trips to Bishop’s Stortford engine shed which he and Tubby Mayne had made. Fifteen years ago now. A lot had happened in that time. The Depression, the War, marriage, growing up. Tubby had been killed in the Battle of Britain.

He looked at his watch – Morgan and Beckwith had been under the bridge for almost fifteen minutes. And then he heard the train whistle in the distance. It was still a few miles away, he thought. Probably approaching one of the three tunnels that lay between San Severino and Tolentino.

Under the bridge Morgan had heard it too, and the same possibilities had occurred to him. But by this time Beckwith had placed all the charges and was now scurrying through the girders, squeezing the detonators on the black-coded time pencils. As the ampoules shattered, the acid began eating into the thin wire, and in roughly ten minutes – the ‘roughly’ was a sore point among users – the wires would break, releasing the springs and slamming firing pins into initiators, exploding the charges and hopefully, in this case, dropping the bridge into the river.

Morgan could hear the wheeze of the approaching locomotive. It couldn’t be much more than a mile away.

Beckwith was only a few feet away now, breathing heavily as he reached for the final device. The last thing Morgan heard was his sergeant’s mutter of frustration, and then the charge went off, tearing Beckwith limb from limb and hurling Morgan himself against an iron girder with the force of a hurricane. Both bodies dropped into the surging river.

Thirty yards away Farnham spun round to see the bridge still standing, the smoke clearing to reveal Corrigan on the far bank, pointing at something in the water. He just had time to notice that the German officer had vanished from the station platform when the man re-emerged in the forecourt barking orders at the standing lorries. There was a sound of boots hitting the ground.

Realizing he’d been holding his breath, Farnham took in a gulp of cold air and tried to think. As far as he could tell the best way out was the way they’d come in – the only alternative was to retreat across the bridge and then they’d be trapped between cliff and river.

‘Get across to Neil,’ he told Tobin, who was crouching wild-eyed beside him. ‘Tell him to keep Jerry at a distance. I’m going to check the bridge.’ Without waiting for an answer he launched himself across the space towards the river’s edge, reaching it just in time to see what looked like a severed leg bobbing beyond the circle of illumination offered by the searchlights. On the far bank Corrigan and Imrie were gazing hopelessly at the water, and for a few seconds Farnham felt equally paralysed. The sound of the approaching train mingled with the clatter of boots in the forecourt and the guttural shouts of the German NCOs.

He forced himself to think. Morgan and Beckwith must have been under the bridge long enough to place and prime all the charges, but Farnham was certain that only one of them had exploded. The bridge would probably still go up, but when? There’d been no discussion of which time pencils would be used – making sure everyone was on the same page had never been one of Morgan’s strengths. If they made a run for it now the Germans might have time to save the bridge, but could he ask the others to die holding them off when he wasn’t even sure the bridge was going to blow?

He gulped in another lungful of air and decided he couldn’t. ‘Get back over here,’ he shouted at Corrigan and Imrie, who both looked at him stupidly for a second and then started clambering back up from the water’s edge.

A second later the Germans opened fire, presumably in response to the silent Stens of Rafferty, Tobin and McCaigh.

Farnham began zig-zagging his way back towards the shelter of the guardhouse. He was about halfway there when a second charge went off behind him, and then a third. He turned to see a huge cloud of smoke rising to obscure the cliffs beyond as the far end of the bridge, with what sounded eerily like a huge sigh, sank heavily into the river.

As the smoke cleared he could see Corrigan and Imrie climbing shakily to their feet on the far bank. The bad news was that they couldn’t get back across; the good news was that neither could the Germans. Farnham gestured to them to escape along the tracks and after only a few seconds’ hesitation Corrigan flashed a thumbs up and turned away, pulling Imrie after him.

Farnham resumed his run towards the guardhouse, just as a hail of bullets swept over his head. The train was now entering the station, pouring a dark plume of smoke at the sky and half drowning the sound of the German guns. With something akin to a leap of the heart Farnham realized that it was going to pull right through the station, effectively cutting them off from the German troops who were inching their way forward from the end of the platform.

Reaching the shelter of the guardhouse, he opened up with his own Sten and saw a German fall, though whether from his or Rafferty’s fire he couldn’t tell. The Italian locomotive was still coming forward, and at this rate it might even reach what remained of the bridge.

‘The boss and Morrie are dead,’ Farnham told the others. The edge of panic had disappeared and he now felt almost supernaturally calm and collected. ‘Corrigan and Imrie were on the other side of the river when the bridge went down. They’re making their own way home. We’re going out the way we came in. OK?’

The others nodded at him.

The train was almost on top of them. ‘So let’s go,’ Farnham said, leading off at a run towards the line of trees beside the river. To their left two more charges went off on the broken bridge, momentarily eclipsing the deafening hiss of the braking locomotive.

The train was composed entirely of closed and lightless wagons, and once away from the bridge area the four SAS men found themselves cloaked once more in the relative safety of darkness. They raced towards the road, occasionally stumbling over rough pieces of ground, expecting to hear gunfire behind them at any moment, but the German troops were either very green or unusually disorganized, and none came. Reaching the road, Farnham resisted the temptation to seek the safety of the high ground they already knew, instead ploughing on through the orchard opposite. From this they emerged into an open field, which in the darkness seemed to stretch for miles.

This was the escape route they had decided on earlier that night in the OP. If anyone got separated from the party the plan was to rendezvous a quarter of a mile north of the tiny hill village of San Giuseppe, which was itself about six miles east of San Severino. The spot in question might be a swamp or a local trysting place – their map was somewhat limited, to say the least – but if Corrigan and Imrie escaped from the Germans then that would be where they’d expect to find their comrades waiting.

And then they could all cheerfully hike their way to the sea.

Farnham suddenly felt cold all over. The remaining radio had been in Corrigan’s bergen, and that was still lying where Corrigan had left it, on the floor of the railway hut. They had no way of contacting the Navy, and if they missed the pick-up there would be no second chance. How could he have been so stupid?

As they tried to hurry across the wet field, slipping and sliding in the mud, he told himself it was done, and there was no point in dwelling on the fact. They still had forty-eight hours to go, or two whole nights. The Germans would be looking for them, but they couldn’t have that many men in the area, and with any luck the Anzio landing – which would be starting in an hour or so – would give the enemy something more important to think about.

He became aware that Rafferty had stopped a few yards ahead of him. ‘The railway’s only just over there,’ the younger man said, pointing to a dark line of bushes away to their right. ‘Don’t you think we’d be better off walking down the track than wading through all this muck? Just for a while, anyway. They can’t follow us with their lorries, can they? And if they try backing up that train we’ll hear it coming.’

It was a good idea, Farnham realized. Rafferty’s brain seemed to be working better than his own. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

The four men struggled across the last thirty yards of mud, bulldozed their way through the line of bushes and on to the track. Away to the right, they could see nothing of the station half a mile away – only the faint yellow glow which hung above it.

As they started walking in the opposite direction Farnham tried to think himself into the mind of the ranking German. He would know the intruders couldn’t have got far, but he would have no idea of their direction, and the night was dark enough to hide an army. As regards the four of them, he would wait for daylight before casting a net. As regards the other two, Farnham realized with a sinking heart, he would immediately seek to slam the door on their escape route.