But he made a mistake: it was a tight turn, and he hadn’t made allowances for his gun barrel sticking out ahead of him, which didn’t make the corner. He stuffed it into the garden wall. He had to back up, and swing again. He fired his main gun at us again as we turned out into the main street. The shell passed a foot behind the back window and at right angles to us, shrieking like an express train. I don’t know where it went. You have no idea how quickly the mind works in situations like that. As soon as we turned back onto the main street I knew that we would make it: the Tiger couldn’t possibly get all the way up that narrowing alley. Then there was one of those Hey, that’s not fair, moments. There was some fairly slow popping, which I didn’t at first recognize as the firing of a medium machine gun, and Kate shuddered. James said, ‘Ow!’ or made some noise like that, Les just gave a sharp intake of breath, and I felt a sudden dull pain in my upper right arm as the windscreen disintegrated away from us, and the window alongside me exploded.
Les said it for the third time, ‘Oh, fuck it!’
I leaned out of the car window, looked back and saw a motorcycle combination about twenty yards behind us. It had yellow lights dancing over the sidecar. That was the bastard in there shooting at us. I gave him back a full mag of the Sten held loose with my southpaw, and screamed aloud when he suddenly turned left at speed, and hit a house front head-on. The best sound in the world is the smack of motorcycle and flesh against good old German stone.
Then it was just Kate’s noise, and the wind racing past my open window. It was getting light. How long had all that taken? Not much longer than it takes to write. I put the Sten on the floor. My whole body was shaking. That’s when I saw for the first time that Les hadn’t any trousers or boots on. Behind me James gave a quiet chuckle. Les soon joined him. Then I did, too.
Eventually Les asked, ‘Major? He get you?’
‘Just a graze, I think, along my thigh. It’s a bit sticky, but there’s nothing broken and nothing pumping. What about you?’
‘In the arse again: I’m sitting in blood. Then it hit the seat frame before it went out through the glass. I think it got Charlie on the way.’
I realized that my upper right arm was numb. When I touched it I found a tear in my jacket, and there was some squishy stuff between my jacket and my shirt sleeve. James asked, ‘How far back to Löningen?’
Les said, ‘Thirty miles odd. With a bit of luck we’ll run into friends before then. Some Canadians were moving out behind us. They could have a field medical team with them.’
‘I can smell petrol,’ James said. ‘I don’t know if they got the main tank or one of the jerrycans in the boot.’
‘I’m not bloody well stopping to find out, sir,’ Les told him. ‘Not until there’s ten miles between us, anyway.’
‘Wouldn’t have dreamed of asking you, old chap. Stop at the first thing that looks like a nurse. I think we need a maintenance team. Do you really think that one bullet got all three of us?’
‘Pretty certain, sir. You all right, Charlie? You’re pretty quiet.’
‘Yeah. Fine. My arm feels numb. Will it hurt later?’
‘Ask me again in an hour, sir. Try to stay awake.’
Les was doing a job on us, calling us both by the regulation sir. Don’t let that kid you: he was the one in charge now. James said, ‘I’m still worried about that bullet. Do you think they have new homing bullets, and that one went for each of us in turn, one after the other?’
It was such a stupid idea that we didn’t answer him, so he mused, ‘. . . bloody magic bullet. I’d write that down if I could find my book, and Kate stopped leaping about.’
Les sounded almost fatherly.
‘You write it down later, sir,’ he told him.
The first thing that looked like a nurse was a nurse. We stopped at a checkpoint wooden barrier part of the way back to Löningen. We were pushed off the road to let a column of tanks go forward. A lovely khaki Bedford ambulance was on the other side of the road. A driver and a couple of nurses were enjoying fags alongside it. I got out of Kate, and stood upright by leaning against her bonnet. They laughed at Les, and pointed, when he climbed out, although men without trousers can’t have been that unfamiliar to them. Then, when he turned away from them to help James out of the back, they must have seen the black blood caked on his legs and buttocks. That was when they stopped laughing, and ran between the tanks to help us. I bent at the waist to lay my head on Kate’s warm bonnet, and went to sleep.
The next morning I found a heavy machine-gun bullet in Kate, in the wheel well where my feet had been. It was an odd shape: it must have been tumbling and running out of steam as it struck me, because although it tore a gap
