The Black Jackals

Chapter 6

It took Lamb a little time to digest what had just happened. He had walked in thinking that he was at the end of a mission to deliver a message, and had left charged with another much greater task. How, he wondered, had that been managed? How had he got himself into this mess? Now, rather than heading north to find his regiment and try to get back home, he had been ordered to take his men west by a colonel whom he knew only as ‘R’ to find a general commanding a Scottish division cut off from the main force and to tell that general that his men were to fight to the death.

He shook his head and spoke out loud to himself as he walked from the corridor into the buzzing atrium of the mayoral building: ‘You stupid bugger.’ No one heard him.

It wasn’t, he thought, as if he would ever avoid such tasks. He was only too keen to prove himself and would have volunteered for anything that might help his country. But this really did seem a ludicrous errand, and for all he knew as hair-brained as the last. Why, he wondered, should he really trust the colonel – Colonel ‘R’ or whatever his name was – any more than the brigadier? Certainly the man had seemed more compos mentis than Dewy Meadows, but he wondered if he had lost the ability to tell any more. Everyone seemed as mad as each other in this strange kind of warfare.

But, he reasoned, what alternative did he have? To go against what had effectively been a direct order and not to deliver the message to General Fortune and head north to find the regiment? Who knew where that might land him? Fortune might never know to fight on. He might try to withdraw south, deeper into France. Then they would risk losing an entire division if France fell. This was not what Lamb had really expected his war to be like. He had seen himself at the head of a platoon, leading from the front, as he had done with the German column, not on an errand to find some brass hat and tell him to retreat. But if that was to be his role, then so be it. They all of them had some part to play in overthrowing the Nazis, however small and apparently insignificant or crazy it might seem.

He found the platoon on the far side of the park, away from the area being used as a temporary morgue for the victims of the air raids. They were sitting on the grass, smoking and chatting. Bennett saw Lamb approaching and stood up. ‘Officer present. Put those fags out. Snap to it.’

The men grumbled and stood up, grinding their cigarette butts into the grass. Lamb reached them. ‘Stand easy. We’ve been given new orders. We’re heading west.’

The men stared at him. Corporal Mays spoke. ‘Sorry, sir, but I thought we was trying to find the battalion. Haven’t they gone north?’

Bennett stared at him. ‘Mays.’

‘It’s all right, Sarnt. Yes, Mays, you’re quite right, they have, and yes, we were – heading north that is. But all that’s changed, I’m afraid. We’ve just been given an important job to do. Fresh orders from on high. In any case I doubt very much whether we’d find the battalion now. From what I’ve just been told the situation is really very fluid at the moment.’

Bennett smiled at the expression.

Lamb went on. ‘So let’s get to it, shall we? We need to make for Arras. That’s about thirty-five miles away. We’ll see how we do and try to find a billet on the way.’

But Valentine hadn’t finished. ‘May I ask, sir, what the nature might be of this “important job” we have to do?’

Lamb detected the sarcasm in his tone, but didn’t show his annoyance. ‘No, I’m sorry, Corporal. I’m afraid that I can’t tell you that. At least not yet. Suffice it to say that it is important and we should feel honoured to have been given it.’

Valentine smirked in that way that irked Lamb so intensely. He ignored it and turned to Bennett. ‘All right, Sarnt, let’s get on. We don’t want to be caught in any more air raids here.’

Unsure of his bearings, Lamb retraced their steps through the ruined town amid the sound of more explosions as more streets were torn down by the Royal Engineers, and they found themselves back at the crossroads. The MP sergeant had gone, to be replaced by another whose efforts, to judge by the jam of trucks and staff cars on all sides, were meeting with a similar lack of success. Leaving the chaos behind, Lamb wheeled them to the left, through the sad, dusty streets, into the Rue St Martin, past broken houses and the smashed possessions of their absent occupants lying across the cobbles. Ahead of them a long line of refugees stretched away far down the road. For a change, though, there were none of the usual accompanying files of British soldiers, and they seemed to be the only unit heading south west. Lamb was hardly surprised. If the British were to use this road it would be to fall back on Arras, and according to the major they were not planning to go anywhere at the moment.

They marched at a steady pace, in single file, with each section or weapons group of the platoon travelling on alternate sides of the road, passing the slow-moving civilians, who hardly gave them a glance, so caught up were they in their own private miseries. No one spoke and there was no sound save for the steady tramp of the men’s boots and the clattering and jangling of the pots and pans hanging from the civilian carts. As they reached the outskirts of the town and the shattered buildings began to give way to open fields and trees, Lamb fell back to his usual position on the march in the ‘O’ group, with Smart and with Valentine and Briggs, the commanders of number two and three sections, close behind with the two runners.

They had gone no more than a mile down the road when they heard it. From directly behind them a series of explosions tore through the afternoon. They turned and saw the skies behind them above Tournai filled with a swarm of black aeroplanes and watched the bombs falling like evil confetti from their open bellies. As they hit the ground the earth shook, flames leapt up and great columns of black smoke rose high above the city.

Smart summed up all their thoughts. ‘Christ. Poor devils.’

The refugees had seen it too, and a terrible wailing now began to come from them. Their homes were being torn apart, and friends and family they had left behind were dying with the British under the black rain.

Lamb turned back to the front. ‘Come on. Nothing we can do about it now.’

He wondered if the colonel and the major had found shelter, and the frustrated MPs. The town would be even more chaotic after that lot, he thought, and for an instant the idea came to him again of abandoning the colonel’s madcap mission. Perhaps the man had been killed. Who then would know about his order? But the idea passed as quickly as it came, with a feeling of guilt at having even considered it. He had been given an order and it was vital that he should transmit the colonel’s message to General Fortune, though yet again he wondered at why a mere colonel should be giving a message to a general. And what on earth was all that Colonel ‘R’ business about, he wondered. It was like something out of a novel by Childers or Buchan. For a moment Lamb wondered whether he might be being drawn into something more complex than merely delivering a message. But then he thought the better of it and dismissed it as fantasy.

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