‘It’s twice as big as anything we’ve got.’
‘Not quite. But it’s big enough. The Major and I got behind one by mistake on the last trip. We hid in the field next to it until they decided to retreat. That gun is so powerful that every time they fired it, the fucking thing leaped back about ten feet. That’s more than fifty tons of tank going backwards. Come an’ ’ave a butcher’s.’
Les walked out on the smooth cobbles, and not on the grass verge. I reckoned he knew what he was doing, and copied him. Major England brought up the rear. Up close the tank was blackened by burning, but you could see that the circular door in its back plate was still closed, and in places some of its original ochre paint was blistered but still showing. There was already rust at the welded edges of its massive armour plate. As I walked alongside it I thought, ‘What the fuck does it take to stop one of these?’ and must have spoken aloud, because England said, ‘A gang of fourteen-year-old French boys with wine bottles full of petrol, apparently.’
He pointed out a mass of twisted metal around the front driving sprocket. ‘It’s so bloody big you can’t see what’s going on alongside, unless you’re hanging out of the top waiting to get shot. That’s what you call an original design flaw. Someone told me that the kids just walked alongside, fed a short length of iron girder between the track and the drive sprocket, and waited for it to throw its track.’
‘What then?’
‘They scrambled on top, and waited for Jerry to open the hatches. As soon as he did they tossed home-made firebombs inside – that’s soap which has been boiled up and liquefied, added to petrol in a one to two solution, if you’re interested – slammed the lids, and sat on them till Jerry stopped screaming.’
That explained one of the smells I’d picked up: gasoline. I wasn’t as familiar with the other.
‘That smell . . .’ I said.
‘Old dead things,’ said Les. ‘I didn’t think you’d have met that before, and you’re going to have to get used to it where you’re going. Look . . .’ He was already up on its scuttle, and reached out a hand to pull me up after him. I stood with him looking down into two small open hatches that once covered a driver and a machine-gunner. The inside of the vehicle was coated with a greasy black substance that smelled of petrol and burnt pork fat. The mainly black things sitting on the seats inside smelled of putrefaction: something rich and dusty that caught at the back of your throat. ‘It makes some folk throw up,’ Les told me.
‘I think I can understand that. Flying sometimes does that to me these days.’
‘. . . and I can understand that,’ Les said. ‘. . . It ain’t natural.’
I was fascinated despite myself. It felt oddly intrusive to be looking down on the corpses. The crown of both the skulls gleamed white as if polished, but elsewhere they were things of darkness: flesh and clothing, black and one substance. I tell a lie. The uniform was peeled back off the gunner’s shoulder. There was black stuff which could have been flesh or muscle, and then that sudden gleam of white again . . . ribs.
Les said, ‘When we first came by, they were untouched. Like little black jockeys sitting in here. Curled up like babies, and strangely shiny, an’ the smell was worse. Real tart. I guess the rats are getting into them now. I can see grooves in the skulls, can’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re gnaw marks. I’ve seen that in Italy too.’
‘What was all that about half a crown, that you and the Major were arguing about on the way here?’
‘He always bets me that the Frogs will have taken the bodies away and buried them. I always bet him that they won’t have done. Three–nil to me so far.’
Back in the car I switched on the radio again as Les turned us around on the cobbles without touching the verges. I tuned into the same US station at Spa. I heard the last few notes of ‘Weary Blues’, and when they started up again it was that fellow Sinatra singing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’. I knew immediately that, whenever I heard the song again, what I would be seeing in my head would be the inside of that damned tank and its foetal corpses. My dad brought memories like that back from the first lot: he used to call it going down nightmare alley. I knew that road now, and wondered where he was, and if he’d passed this way. Les drove slowly, as if he was watching for something, which, of course, he was. He stopped the car close to a jumbled heap of bicycles, which was a few yards off the road, and in the trees. He looked across at England, and said, ‘I’m not sure that the area’s been properly cleared yet. Would you mind if I strolled over and warned them, Guv’nor?’
‘No. Take Charlie with you, and show him the walk.’
‘What’s the walk?’ I asked him as we stood out on the road. We had to wait to cross because a column of light stuff – ugly little scout cars, and bren gun carriers – went bouncing past. It seemed to take forever.
‘Watch me,’ Les said, ‘an’ I’ll show you. It’s the way you walk through a minefield, if you haven’t a choice. Just let me go about six feet ahead of you, watch where I walk, and place your feet where I do. The walk’ll come naturally.’
We set off
