take long to resolve, thanks to the tank. But after that the resistance became more frequent, and over and over again the column ground to a halt. Often Ernst couldn't even see what was going on up ahead. He would hear the thump of explosions, the pop of small-arms fire, occasionally a roar as the tank let loose its main gun, and see the smoke of burning petrol. Sometimes they would see one or more of their own vehicles, disabled or burned out and shoved over to the side of the road. There were a few German dead, a steady trickle; Ernst saw the bodies at the side of the road covered by tarpaulins from the disabled trucks. Medics patched up the injured.
And the troops would stare as they passed a blown-apart pillbox of piled-up sandbags, or a cleared-aside roadblock made of concrete and lengths of rail track and concrete anti-tank 'dimples', lines of little cones. The weapons in the blown-open pillboxes and bunkers, seemed crude. Ernst saw one mortar that looked as if it might have been used against Napoleon.
On they went. Every bridge was demolished, and the scouts had to find them places to ford the streams. Elsewhere there were ditches, meant to stop tanks perhaps, and the weary men scrambled down one bank and up another. These assaults were petty, but they steadily eroded the column's manpower, and took out their vehicles and horses and used up their ammunition. And, more importantly, they were slowed down.
A horse was killed by a mine in a grotesque explosion that burst the animal's carcass, showering the men with bloody fur and shredded bits of meat. The men took a break as the engineers dealt with that.
Two British troops, wounded but alive, had been taken in this place. The men sat on the ground with their hands on their heads. They wore what looked like proper army uniforms, with flat steel helmets, leather gaiters, boots, greatcoats and leather belts. One had an officer's stripes. But their arm bands read HOME GUARD. These two were old, Ernst saw with a shock as he passed, their hair grey, their faces deeply lined – either of them old enough to be his own father, if not his grandfather. Perhaps the rumours that had been circulating since France were true, that the British forces really were badly depleted by the catastrophe that had overtaken them at Dunkirk. Old these fellows might be, and defeated and captured, but they sat up straight like soldiers, one with blood trickling into a closed eye from a head wound, and they stared every German in the eye.
'Partisans?' muttered one man.
'No,' the leutnant snapped. 'You can't be a partisan until your country has surrendered, Breitling. Until then these gentleman are to be treated as prisoners of war.'
'They should be fucking shot,' Breitling said. 'Fucking English. Why can't they just roll over like the French?'
'Don't let it get you down, lads,' said the leutnant. 'Look at what we're up against. Old men and boys, and weapons from a museum. When the Panzers get over here on Tuesday they'll roll up this countryside like a carpet.'
But later Ernst overheard the leutnant muttering with an officer about this slow progress, and how it was becoming important they found fuel before they exhausted the supply they had brought over from France.
For Ben and the other prisoners it was not an arduous walk. Stuck in the middle of the column and surrounded by guards, they plodded steadily along. They talked quietly, swapped their stories, and bummed furtive cigarettes from each other. They seemed resigned to their fate, Ben thought.
The prisoners had to shelter like the rest from the attacks by the resistance elements. This was another product of the war in Spain, Ben supposed, that great warm-up fixture where the Germans had learned how to machine-gun civilians from the air and the British had learned to make Molotov cocktails.
As the day wore on Ben's headache got worse.
One man helped him when he staggered. 'Just walk. It was like this in France, in the early days. March and march. You just have to get on with it. My advice is to think about something else.' He had a strong accent, barely comprehensible to Ben. 'You got a girl?'
'Not exactly.'
'Well, you're a bright lad. Do a crossword in your head. That's my advice.'
So Ben walked, trying to ignore the pain in his head. He tried to visualise problems in relativity, like Godel's beautiful rotating-universe solution of Einstein's equations. But the math kept sliding away from him, the tensors with their forests of suffices blurring into invisibility.
Soon he had trouble keeping up with the pace, and drifted to the back of the little group of prisoners. The German guards thumped him with their rifle-butts, yelling at him to keep up, and even rode into the back of his legs with their bicycle wheels.
The veteran protested: 'Hey, go easy, Funf. Can't you see he's ill?' That won him shouts in German that if he didn't shut up he'd be taken out of the line and shot. The veteran understood their tone, if not their words. 'The front-line corps who captured us were gentlemen. Not like this shower. Look at them, car mechanics and horse handlers, bottle washers and sausage makers. Scum of the earth, the lot of them.'
XX
Mary prepared to leave George's house before nine o'clock, this Sunday morning.
She sorted out her belongings. She slung her handbag under her coat, so it was less likely to be grabbed off her. She hesitated a bit about taking the research papers from the briefcase. The strange allo-historical questions she had been following since meeting Ben Kamen didn't seem to matter now, didn't even seem real, compared to the vast violence all around her. And yet not to have taken the papers would have felt like a defeat, as if she was giving up something of herself, a bit of her identity. So she stuffed the papers into her rucksack, along with her knickers and stockings.
Then she stepped out of the house, and once more locked the door carefully. Aircraft screamed overhead, making her flinch, but at least the town wasn't coming under attack this morning. She walked out of the Old Town, down the narrow, sloping streets to the coast road, and then headed west beneath the imposing West Hill, with its Norman castle and anti-aircraft gun emplacement. She meant to cut up past the rail station and then make for Bohemia Road, which would lead to the main road out to Battle.
The heavy-lift crews had been out clearing the streets of rubble, just shoving it aside and piling it up in bomb sites and any open spaces available. But most of the shops were shut up. Some had been left with their doors open, with signs saying 'Help Yourself'. There was no food or milk, nothing she could see that would be useful now.
She heard detonations coming from the direction of the harbour. It wasn't much of a harbour, just a fishermen's port, the sea walls built by the Victorians after centuries of struggle against geography, and now mostly silted up. But George had told her of plans to defend it with guns and torpedo tubes, and in the end to wreck it. Functioning ports were key for the Germans; without harbours it was going to be hard for them to land their heavy equipment, supplies and reinforcements. Yesterday at the start of the invasion they had launched a paratroop raid on Dover, which seemed to have failed, but today there was said to be a major battle going on around Folkestone.
When she got to Bohemia Road she came upon the main flow of refugees, heading out of town, slogging it on foot with their carts and wheelbarrows and prams. They were a river of people.
There was a good bit of traffic, private cars and buses and lorries and ambulances, but at least everybody was driving the same way, to the north and out of Hastings, and there were police and ARP wardens to shepherd the pedestrians off the road to keep the traffic moving. A few bicycles threaded through the crowd; that was a sensible way to go, if you could manage it. Mary saw one lad on a bicycle hanging onto the back of a lorry, pulled along as the vehicle ploughed forward.
The police and wardens were keeping the right hand lane clear, the lane heading back to town, but there was little traffic on it. George had said that the authorities had plans to avoid what had happened on the continent, when refugee flows had snarled up attempts to move military assets into place for a counterattack, and the police had been given maps with some routes marked in yellow for the use of civilians, others red for the military. It might have worked better, George said drily, if the maps had been printed in the right coloured ink.
Mary felt reluctant to join the shuffling throng, as if it would mean sacrificing her individuality. But there was no choice. She stepped forward, and found a place behind a boy pushing a barrow, before a mother with two kids in a pram, beside an old man leaning on a sturdy woman who might have been his wife. And then she could do nothing but walk with the rest.
