Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 1
It was, Private Danny Butterman thought, a good question. Even if it was coming from Pvt. Andrew 'Andy' Wainwright, who was in a filthy mood for a number of reasons, starting with the hole in his shoulder, and moving on to encompass a wide range of subjects concerning their current position somewhere in the squelchy arsehole of Lower Saxony, and ending with the fact that his cigarettes were wet.
“I dunno,” said Pvt. Andrew 'Andy' Cartwright, from behind a large, flopping square of paper which, by this stage, was basically composed of semi-solid wood pulp and hope. “Some fucker's trod on the map.”
“That weren't me,” protested Danny, noticing a certain trend of eyes turning in his direction.
“You show us another clumsy clodhopper 'round here with size 11 boots, an' we'll believe you,” snapped Wainwright.
“It was Jesteburg, wasn't it, Danny?” asked Lance-Corporal Tony Fisher, looking at him worriedly over his bent-up wire-frame glasses.
“That's what I heard,” said Danny. He put his pack carefully down on the sodden ground, and, figuring that its contents couldn't get any wetter than they already were, sat on it, propping his rifle against his knees. “He said, alright chaps, we're goin' to Jesteburg, just a quick stroll across this little park an' we'll be in HQ by teatime.”
“Poor sod,” said one of the Turners. “What a way to go.”
“Well,” said Andy Wainwright, snatching the soggy map away from his friend with his good arm, “this here map says the 'little park' he was on about's called Luneburger Heider, whatever the fuck that means, an' it's about fifty thousand acres.”
There was a silence.
“That's sort'f a long stroll,” said Danny.
“An' as for where we are in Luneberg Whateverthefuck,” added Wainwright, tossing the map back to Cartwright, who didn't so much catch it as prevent it from running through his fingers, “y'might as well shut your eyes an' spit on it, Butterman, an' we'll put an X where it lands, 'cause I en't got a clue.”
“I think it's north-west,” said Tony Fisher, slowly.
“Oh yeah? An' how did you deduce that?” sneered Andy.
Tony looked blankly back at him. Danny was worried about Tony, who walked and spoke all right and wasn't so much as scratched so far but still hadn't been quite the same, somehow, since Hannover. It was hard to tell, because this was, after all, Tony, Tony who before they'd joined up had been the only ARP in Sandford to get asked politely to stop volunteering because of how desperately inept he'd been, but something still seemed a bit off about his owlish stares and slow, catching-up sentences. It was like he was about five seconds behind the rest of the world, unable to make up the difference.
“Dunno,” he said. “Just a hunch.”
Cartwright snorted. “Gonna have to do a bit better than hunches, Fisher. You're s'posed to be in charge of us now.”
“What?” Tony transferred his dimly anxious gaze onto him for a moment, before his focus slid into the middle distance. “Oh. No... I don't think so.”
They watched him for a moment.
“Yeah, I think that's about all we're going to get,” said Wainwright. “Anyone got any better ideas?”
“Ooh!” said the talkative Turner, behind them. He was peering over his twin's shoulder. “Look at that, your compass still works.”
His twin mumbled something. Until they spoke, it was very hard to tell which Turner was which, these days. The events of the last few weeks had rendered them more or less identical, from their close-cropped hair to their muddy, disordered uniforms. If Evan hadn't taken a piece of shrapnel to the side of the face back in the Hannover clusterfuck, it would have been an impossible task to differentiate between the two.
Six of us, thought Danny, picking bits of feather from the webbing on his helmet. Six out of twenty-four. Two wounded, an' I dunno about Tony.
I dunno about any of us.
“North-west is that way,” grunted Owen, turning his compass in his hand and pointing towards a line of blasted trees. Although nobody had mentioned it out loud, the atmosphere in this 'park' was not encouraging. Everything had a sort of battered look, as if a lot of people had been this way before them. Except, if they had, where were they? Where were the remains of camps, the field lines, the vehicle tracks? The dead, deserted feeling all around them sat stubbornly at the back of Danny's mind, brooding away like a sullen frog in a well.
It was as good a direction as any. Slowly, they gathered up their things and picked their way over the battered heathland to the trees. On the other side, the fading sunlight picked out a vast expanse of open grassland, hills and hollows, clumps of leafless trees like blackened fists raised against the drizzling sky. Spring was coming late this year, dragging its heels in horror at what it found in its path, and the grass was yellow.
“What supplies have we got?” said Cartwright, as they stood under the dripping trees.
They pooled their resources. The answer turned out to be half a tin of biscuits, two full water-bottles, three tins of corned beef, and a potato.
Danny poked the potato, which had a shoot growing out of it, then resumed shaking rainwater out of his boots. He wrung out a sock, watching the water spatter on the sodden ground. “S'pose if we waited long enough, we'd have some more potatoes, at least.”
Wainwright shook his head. He fumbled his Taylor&Hobsons one-handed out of their case around his neck, wincing, and squinted through them at the distant slopes. “If we can get to Jesteburg,” he said, presently, “we can- fuckin' shit get down!”
Danny's knees were well-trained. They gave immediately, even before he had properly processed Andy's hiss with the upper layers of his brain, dropping him on the scratchy turf. Around him, the other five hit ground like a quintet of collapsing dominoes.
“Machine-gun nest,” said Andy, after a moment. He extracted his binoculars painfully out from underneath him. “Think we're out of range, just, but there goes that bright idea, Fisher. They're bang in the way, an' we'd never take 'em.”
“We got to get out of here,” said Danny, urgently. “When it gets proper dark they'll fire up a tracer an' see us, it'll be just like Bremen all over again!”
“Oh, look,” said Tony, vaguely. “That's a funny sort of stick, isn't it?”
They looked. Lying in a rough circle on the ground, like the world's most uncoordinated (and most dramatically lost) formation swimming team, they looked at the funny sort of stick in front of Tony Fisher. It was, indeed, a very funny sort of stick. It was poking straight up out of the ground, for a start, and it was smooth and straight, and it was a very deliberate sort of Y shape.
There was a thin thread of wire running between its upstretched arms.
“That's not a stick,” said Andy Wainwright. He was deathly pale.
“What do we do?” hissed Evan Turner. He was sweating. Slowly, as if he was hardly aware of what he was doing, he shifted and moved his head, turning the right side of his face and his good eye away from the stick. Owen had simply frozen where he lay, compass in one hand, damp dog-eared paperback in the other.
“Sit up,” said Wainwright, his voice twanging like a spring. Danny was suddenly horribly aware of how dark it was now, how silent the absence of birds or other living things made it. “Nobody fuckin' go anywhere, just sit up away from it, all right?”
Inch by inch, they did so.
“There's another one,” said Cartwright, in a sort of dull, plunky voice. Danny followed his line of sight and saw not one but two, two funny little sticks poking up bold as brass right in the middle of the area they had just walked across. Straining his eyes in the darkness, he picked out the dull too-straight shapes of a couple more.
“It's a miracle we didn-” he started.
“Shut up about miracles,” said Wainwright. His face was hard, set. “We've been fuckin' lucky is all. We shoulda been blown to buggery as soon as we set foot in here.”
“We're dead,” whispered Evan, his hands clamping over the dirty bandage over his cheek and eye. His twin stared at him, helplessly, separated from him by three metres of potentially murderous earth. “Stay here an' get shot or try to move and get blown up, we're dead men breathing, I'm so sorry, Owen-”
Danny stared at the darkening ground. “Maybe... maybe if, if right, if we went slow an' tried to set 'em off with, with a stick?”
“They're S-mines, Tubs,” snapped Wainwright. He was frantically patting his various pockets and bags with his good hand, trying to find a dry cigarette. “They got a range of twenty feet to kill, a hundred to wound. Din't no-one teach you nothin'?”
“It'd have to be one fuck of a long stick,” added Cartwright. “An' these things jump out the ground to 'bout dick height 'fore they go off. Happy fuckin' Christmas, love Hitler.”
“I'm so, so sorry-”
“Can someone shut that twat up?” Wainwright finally fished a damp cigarette-shaped relic out of the by-now disgusting sling supporting his shoulder, and curled around it out of the drizzle, attempting to light up with a single hand.
“Put it out!” Danny swatted the just-smouldering cigarette from his mouth. “They'll see us!”
“Hey!”
“He's right, mate,” said Cartwright, unexpectedly. “They'll have your nose off soon as see it.”
Wainwright glared at him. “Give me one good reason I should listen to some porky little gobshite-”
“If you a light a cigarette less than half a mile a from a well-entrenched German MG-42 squad, I'm sure they'll be happy to provide you with about twenty reasons per second,” said somebody.
There was a short, thoughtful, silence.
“What the fuck was that?” said Andy, getting slowly to his feet. The others followed him, using their rifles for support, taking care not to move their boots out of the footprint of their bodies.
Danny looked up, and for a moment he thought that maybe the first mine really had got them all and he hadn't realised it, because there were eyes in the trees. Pale eyes that caught the patchy rising moonlight and threw it right back out. Animal eyes, like a fox or a cat- but far, far too high, and the wrong shape-
And then the illusion fell apart, and Danny realised he must have been seeing things. It was only a man, after all. Just a single man, upright and stern-looking and wiry and all alone, in a uniform all of them knew immediately, even in the gathering darkness. Most importantly, another living human being, a welcome sight in this treacherous, alien place, except-
“Don't move!” yelled Danny. “Don't move, Sergeant, there's mines!”
“It's all right,” said the sergeant. He paused, took a deep breath in through his nose, and continued towards them. As they watched, half-hypnotised by horror and bewilderment, he stepped carefully over one of the visible mines as if it was an inconvenient loose curbstone, then edged sideways for a few yards, until he was nearly in their midst. “I know.”
They stared at him. He wasn't that tall, and his hair where it showed below band of his cap was very short and pale blond. His insignia wasn't familiar to Danny, apart from the three silver chevrons. Where Danny's own uniform had the red patch with GLOUCESTER on it big letters- probably, as Andy W had told him once, so they'd know where to send the body- this sergeant had nothing but an empty white circle.
The sergeant looked hard at them. His eyes raked scathingly over Danny, and Danny had the unpleasant sensation that he was being graded, judged, every scuff on his boots and rip and splash of mud on his battledress stored away for future reference. Which was a bit harsh, really, that level of implied disapproval coming from a single CO with blood all over his coat.
Oh, yeah, and there was blood all over his coat. Danny's eyes grew a little bit wider.
“Where's your commanding officer?”
“He's dead,” said Danny, as simply as he dared.
“Who's in charge?”
Danny pointed at Lance-Corporal Tony Fisher, who didn't appear to have noticed the newcomer at all. He was, in fact, currently sitting staring at a rock.
The sergeant looked at Tony. “Oh,” he said, after a moment. “I see.”
“Yeah, an' we're trying to get to Jesteburg, but-”
“You walked into a minefield, instead,” said the sergeant, sharply. He was all but standing to attention- partly pinned by their scrutiny, but mainly, this seemed to be just... well, how he naturally stood, as if he'd been born with a solid column of marble in his spine instead of white stuff and pink and grey goo and all sorts of other bits Danny really wished he'd never seen first-hand evidence of. Even his face looked sculpted, not that far past thirty and pretty good-looking but cold and too still and wary, suspicious as hell. Not really of them, Danny thought. Of the universe, perhaps.
“I saw you from the hill.” He turned his head, indicating the far-off, near-invisible rise to the west, where the sky still kept an ever-so-slight glow. “Thought you might need some help.”
“You saw us all the way over there?” said Danny, dubiously.
“Yes,” said the sergeant, shortly. The tone ruled out further questions. “In any case, listen to me, all of you.” He raised his voice slightly, for the benefit of the other five. “I can get you out of this, as long as you follow me exactly. One step off my route, and Jerry's another seven men towards victory. Do as I say, and we'll be in Jesteburg by dawn. What d'you say?”
“Yeah!” cheered Danny as loudly as he dared, and was amazed to discover that his voice was the only one doing any cheering or, indeed, doing anything much at all. He turned, confused, and saw that they were all regarding the sergeant with uncomfortable, sliding-off little stares, shooting each other charged glances when they thought he wasn't looking- which, considering that those weird pale eyes seemed to have the acuity of a hawk, probably wasn't the best of ideas.
“What?” he demanded. “You heard him, he can get us out! You saw him goin' over those mines!”
“Yeah, but...” It was Evan Turner who spoke, his voice still shaky, his face still wet under the bandages from sweat and tears, glancing guiltily at the sergeant as he did so. “Danny, did you see his eyes?”
The sergeant sniffed, very slightly, and shifted on his feet.
Danny blinked. “What? Yeah- but I just thought-”
“You hear stories,” said Andy Cartwright. Andy Wainwright said nothing, just retrieved the rest of his cigarette from the ground and tucked it back into his sling, staring at the sergeant in a squint-eyed, less-than-friendly manner.
You did indeed hear stories. They all had. Danny certainly had, and the reason why he hadn't immediately connected the vague rumours and campfire tales he'd heard with what he had just seen happening before his eyes probably had more to do with his upbringing, and in particular his father's deep distaste for gossip, than anything else. Stories were stories, and they could be amazing, could make life worth living, in fact, but it was no good relating them to the real world.
Oh, but these stories...
A rifleman from Quebec, only survivor of an artillery strike, muttering drunken warnings about the 'loup-garou'. A platoon of Dublin Fusiliers coming back from a disastrous assault with confused tales of being chased or led to safety by a pack of soldiers with weird, shining eyes who fought like madmen and vanished as quickly as they arrived. Words, German but eerily familiar, carved deep into a shattered wall in the remains of a bombed-out village. Strange sounds in the night over lonely battlefields, and things that looked like men in British uniforms walking out of deadly trap-zones, their eyes pale and glowing, and some said they had fangs, and fur...
“I heard they're monsters,” whispered Evan. “I heard they hunt soldiers down an'... an' kill 'em to eat.”
“I heard they're Nazi spies,” hissed Wainwright. “Cooked up in a kraut science lab. Those fuckers in Berlin'll breed anything with anything, so I heard.”
“I heard-”
“Shut up,” said Danny, and for some reason, they did. Maybe because it was so rare that Danny spoke like that, so hard and low and deadly. Danny couldn't really remember ever hearing himself sounding like that, but he was wet and cold and frightened and he really, really didn't want to die in bits in the middle of Germany's deadly answer to Hampstead Heath. “He's an officer! You can't go talking like that 'bout an officer! 'Sides, what choice've we got? You wanna stay here an' get shot? Yeah? Anyone? Evan? You want to pick a direction an' start walking, Andy? No? 'Cause I think I'd rather only maybe get killed an' it be despite someone with half a clue what they're doin' trying to help, than maybe get killed by being a stupid fuckin' arse who listens to fairy stories. You can all stay here an' play Musical Chairs with dick-exploding mines. I'm goin' with him.”
The sergeant blinked at him. He had not betrayed much expression when the others were talking about mad science and cannibalism, but now Danny thought he looked surprised, and a little gratified. As the other five gaped at Danny, he cleared his throat.
“You're all coming with me,” he said. “That's an order, thank you, Private. This area is a deathtrap, and it looks like you've lost enough men already. Come on.”
He took a few more deep breaths through his nose, paused, then turned and set off, stepping slowly and carefully across the wet heathland. Danny grabbed his pack and followed him, setting his own feet in the watery depressions he left in the grass.
The others exchanged frightened glances, but the universal panic of being left behind quickly started to kick in. Owen was next, helping up his brother, the two of them splashing into the deep imprints left by Danny like a pair of identical clockwork figures. That left the Andes and Tony, who was by unspoken agreement sandwiched between the two as they prodded him into the grim parade. Wainwright brought up the rear.
Part 2