Turbulence Part 22

More questions were asked, until finally Eisenhower turned to Montgomery. "Is there any reason we shouldn't go tomorrow?"

"No," replied Monty. "I would say-Go!" Leigh Mallory and Tedder were more hesitant, but Eisenhower over-ruled them.

Stagg told me that after that evening meeting Eisenhower came up to him privately in the corridor and said, "Well, we're putting it on again; for heaven's sake hold the weather to what you told us and don't bring any more bad news."

The further seaborne forces were already heading to France by the time Eisenhower spoke to Stagg, but it wasn't until about five that morning that the order to restart the rest of the invasion was actually transmitted. The poised power of the gigantic, wound-up military spring, already forward in its very nature, was at last unleashed.

For me it was all a bit more forward than I had imagined, for as soon as I got off the phone Jourdaine came running up to tell me that our division would actually go late that night (Monday), preceding the main invasion force, in order that the weathermen might send back their observations and their fast-moving paratroop colleagues secure essential positions.

"D minus one is kinda D for us," Jourdaine explained, and I could have laughed with the shock of it all. All this time I had been preparing for one day and now we were going the night before anyway. It seemed in the nature of turbulence that this should be so.

There was still a lot of preparation to be done, so far as my own survival went. His nostril hairs twitching as he spoke, Corporal Jourdaine briefed me about the forthcoming glider flight and issued me with a small radio and a personal psychrometer (it resembled a football supporter's rattle) together with some other instruments and an M1 carbine. Glistening with gun oil, the weapon was semi-automatic and different from anything I had shot with before, my experience of firearms being confined to small-bore rifles used to bag partridge and guinea-fowl for the pot.

"I've used hunting rifles in Africa," I said, picking the carbine up from the pile of equipment in front of me, trying to seem casual. "But never anything like this." I could smell the cordite on the armoury, like spent firework and metal; also a faint aroma of petrol and greaseproof paper, which was the gun oil overlaying it. I felt extremely uncertain as to whether I wanted these scents of childhood back in my consciousness; but the thing about our perceptions is that they make us their prisoners as soon as we experience them.

"Don't worry," said Jourdaine, kneeling down to sort out some straps that had become tangled in the pile. "It's not so different. But tell me, sonny, how come they picked you for this s.h.i.+ndig? Surely you guys must have militarily trained weathermen who operate forward in the field with infantry?"

"Well, yes, we do," I replied, giving vent to the odd feeling of national embarra.s.sment that, mixed with the crude stink of imperial memory, would come to be the default position in future years. "Some. We have some. But we've run out."

"Clean out, hey?" said Jourdaine, straightening up. "You know, that's the thing I've noticed most about you Brits. You've run out of everything. Lucky we came along to save you, huh?"

I ignored the jibe, which already seemed fair enough in truth, and listened hard while he took me through the weapon's safety drills, and then showed me how to strip and a.s.semble it. It was indeed not so very different from what I had learned from my father, but, as Jourdaine ominously warned, "These Garands can go wrong sometime, if you're not careful with them."

After explaining the weapon's operating limits, Jourdaine took me outside to a firing range and I had a go at shooting. It was fun to do it again after all these years, and I didn't do too badly in hitting the targets. In fact, my marksmans.h.i.+p didn't seem very much worse than that of the men around me on the range.

Jourdaine, who had packets of cigarettes strapped to each thigh, said it didn't matter too much anyway. "There'll be plenty of troops around us to do the shooting. Our job is to get the weather news back."

Around 11.30 PM PM that night, full of trepidation, I queued up with the others to board the giant fleet of planes and gliders. There were some nine hundred aircraft there, and three invasion-related airfields in Berks.h.i.+re alone. that night, full of trepidation, I queued up with the others to board the giant fleet of planes and gliders. There were some nine hundred aircraft there, and three invasion-related airfields in Berks.h.i.+re alone.

Coffee and buns were served to us by Waafs as we waited in the queue. They looked strange and ghosted there, ivorine amid the signal lights of the airfield and the swirling smoke from the exhausts of the lorries which had brought the troops and were now departing. The vehicles made me think of the inhuman grotesqueries taking place in Europe, of which people were now beginning to speak a little, in very muted tones.

The Yanks' comments to the girls were something to hear, each soldier outdoing the next in ribaldry as he shot his line. I remember I found myself fondly hoping that Gwen and Joan-Liss & Lamb, as they'd come to be known in their years of fame-would be among those holding out the trays carrying refreshments, but they weren't, of course. I wondered where Whybrow had sent them.

Next a general came past and looked us over, muttering words of encouragement to the lines of waiting troops-coffee-slurping, bun-eating boys from Nebraska, New York, Kentucky, all at a peak of physical fitness and mental readiness. The exception, I began to feel afraid. I started worrying whether I would get a spell of dizziness, but then to my great surprise I saw a familiar face pus.h.i.+ng through the khaki-clad crowd.

It was Sir Peter Vaward, wrapped in a gaberdine mackintosh so white he might have just been swept, whirlwind-swivelled, out of a snowdrift.

He held out his hand to me. "I just wanted to come up here, to see you off," he said, looking me in the face. "And to tell you something. Everything all right?"

"Yes, sir." I replied. "Well, a bit nervous, really. But you shouldn't have taken the trouble to come."

"It was no trouble, Meadows. No trouble at all. It was something I wanted to do. Stagg has told me how hard you have worked and that your work with Ryman numbers helped pinpoint the calm interval."

"In a manner of speaking, sir."

Uniformed figures moved past behind him, rippling like a landscape-half green, half glinting black. The signal light flashed from the makes.h.i.+ft control tower, illuminating Vaward's physiognomy like a clock face in the dark. The tower itself was just scaffolding and boards, somewhere for the chief loadmaster to step above the panoply of swaying green men, beyond whom stood, in serried ranks, the black forms of the gliders that would be charged with them.

"That's what he told me. And other sources corroborate it: you should know that counter-intelligence followed you to the Isle of Wight. All you forecasters have been closely watched over the past few weeks."

"I didn't know, sir. We knew we were being listened to on the phones but not..." It was unsettling to think spies had been traipsing around after us, but also faintly comic.

One of the Yanks was complaining about the hot cross buns-pointing out that for such an important operation it should have been doughnuts. The queues were very long and slow. Vaward and I were moving on as we spoke, but only by very small gradations.

"But it is other surveillance I have come to tell you about. Last night we decrypted a German signal from Paris expecting coastal winds that would make invasion too risky. Indeed, German naval craft putting out to sea to lay mines in the Channel were forced back into harbour by the stormy conditions. The point is, they don't think there will be a gap in the weather. They don't expect any Allied action for at least a fortnight. German commanders have been stood down. Weickmann's invasion watch team have nodded."

"That is very encouraging, sir. Those decoders deserve a medal."

"So do the forecast teams. Even you yourself, Meadows. But you won't get one, I'm afraid."

"Because of Ryman's death?"

Jostled by the pa.s.sing soldiery, Vaward rocked slightly, as if his two heels were trying to achieve synthesis.

"No, no. Because the success of the forecast-and it really does look like it might be successful now-cannot be identified with any one nation among the Allies, still less with a single individual. Just as failure couldn't have been either. But well done, Meadows. Really well done. Even downing the plane has turned out to be useful. Heinz Wirbel is proving rather a find-it's meteorology he loves, not n.a.z.ism. Any questions?"

"No, sir. Thank you, sir. It's very kind of you to have come."

I watched the white mackintosh disappear into the moving bodies: the swarming, variegated ma.s.s of troops which in that moment seemed emblematic of the stir of life, that circulation of bacteria into which all individuals must be subsumed.

I continued waiting with the others. With shuffling steps we approached our wooden gliders. These were fragile things, almost too beautiful to send into war. We downed our cocoa and gave the mugs to more Waafs with trays.

Lots of the Met section had haversack radios, with tall wire aerials. It was behind a soldier carrying one of these that I began mounting the small steps of the glider. Ducking down to enter the cabin (the radio man had had to bend his antenna into a curve), I took my seat in rows with the other men, surrounded by heavy packs, ammo boxes and other kit: trenching tools, gas masks, sacks of ration tins and hand grenades-and the rifles, of course.

n.o.body spoke much, we were too apprehensive, staring at each other's murky forms and sombre faces in the dim light of the cabin, our chests contracting and expanding in their tunics and webbing. Then the engines of the planes-mainly Dakotas-started up, filling the air with fumes and roaring.

The propeller noise of big planes is like a clattering-as if a rift is being made in the sky-and that is indeed what was happening, since the blades of the propellers were forcing apart molecules of air very rapidly. Thunder is a larger version of the same process, and what I heard that day was thunder. Chopped thunder. Air that was being rent, riven, cleft. All in vain, for new molecules quickly rush in to fill the gap.

Through the resolutely continuous medium of the atmosphere the sound waves travelled, cleaving together as they struck the eardrum. The membrane of my glider, too, was beating like a goat-skin drum. It pulsated with the rhythms of all those engines, making my diaphragm beat in response in my chest and my heart race accordingly.

With the lights s.h.i.+ning through the membrane and all the dark faces sitting about, the scene was reminiscent of a firelit pow-wow in the miombo miombo woods that skirt Lake Nyasa. I remember one occasion so thick with drumbeats it made the whole glade reverberate, as if each tree had a voice. woods that skirt Lake Nyasa. I remember one occasion so thick with drumbeats it made the whole glade reverberate, as if each tree had a voice.

There was a lurch. Somebody whooped. We began rolling behind our Dakota on the runway, faster and faster until, seconds after the motorised plane, the glider took wing and, with an exhilarating, volatile movement, was lifted into the air. The sound of air rus.h.i.+ng over us was astonis.h.i.+ng, like a giant blowing over the plane in a constant stream.

My head was sweating in my helmet, going alternately hot and cold as the sweat came and then evaporated. I tried to imagine the relative turbulence around the Dakota and the glider, and how the air flow round one affected the air flow round the other, but I could not concentrate.

We seemed to circle for an age. I looked at my watch.

It was D-Day after all.

01:00 hrs.

H-hour minus 5.

Six.

Out of the window I saw hundreds of planes and gliders, silhouetted like geese against the moon. One by one they peeled off, heading in triangular formations for the coast and Normandy. I felt my face pull as the glider accelerated. The radio aerials warped down the cabin like windblown corn.

Beneath us the surface of the Channel was covered with the shapes of s.h.i.+ps, clearly visible in the moonlight. I had never seen so many: more than six thousand, apparently. Surely the German spotter planes would see them? It was too late now, anyway. We needed the moonlight to ensure low tides and visibility for airborne landings. It was that requirement, I recalled, which had really pushed out the odds against the right weather.

Overall, staring down at the silver stream of moving vessels and trying to judge the weather, I felt the forecast was vindicated. I was not to know that the surface wind speeds were above the Admiralty's minimum conditions and that the sea was rough and men were being sick and that much worse was to come during the run-in at the five beaches, with s.h.i.+ps and landing craft facing steep seas and even stronger winds. Winds gusting up to 25 mph mph, Beaufort 5 or 6.

I could hear the boom of artillery and bombardment in the distance, and presumed the barrage had started. The man on my right took a dagger out of his boot and sliced up a lump of cheese. He offered me some, but I couldn't eat. Jourdaine, on my left, unwrapped some chocolate, its foil glinting in the dim light. I declined that, too: I already felt queasy from the cocoa. I wondered if anyone else felt the same. A lot of the men around me had their helmeted heads c.o.c.ked to one side, as if listening for something.

At first the flight was surprisingly calm-we were almost three thousand feet up when the Dakota released us. As dawn broke light filled the plane, and then I understood what the men were listening for. There was a stuttering of guns. Flak began to burst around us in mushrooms of dark-brown smoke.

Somebody said, "Here it f.u.c.kin' goes."

"I wanna go home," said someone else.

"Easy boys, easy," shouted Sergeant Loadmaster Iwiss from down the cabin. He was wearing a leather jerkin with a fur collar. "Ready for the drop now."

We swerved to avoid the anti-aircraft fire, which was bursting outside like fireworks.

"Blow noses!" came the order.

We all held our noses and blew, as we had been told, to relieve pressure on the ears. My heart was racing as we swooped downward. I had good reason to be frightened. At Southwick I'd seen aerial photos showing anti-glider stakes dug into the Normandy countryside. Somebody had nicknamed them 'Rommel asparagus'. Nine-metre long staves of sharpened wood-not the sort of thing you want to land on.

I could see the sea glittering in the half-light-changing angle and coming closer as we levelled out. We must have been going at nearly 150 mph mph. Then the pilot deployed his brake parachute and we were jammed forward in our seats, bodies straining against belts. I heard the sound of somebody vomiting.

There was a hard jolt as we hit the ground with terrific forward momentum. Something tore into the fuselage. Rommel asparagus: a shaved spear ripping through the bottom of the cabin, with the glider's broken nosewheel attached. It carried on ripping through the bottom of the flimsy craft, opening it up like a zip fastener. We were thrown about, some kit was lost through a void in the floor-and I was impaled at the top of my thigh.

At first it wasn't painful but I gasped all the same, looking at it in astonishment and grabbing my pierced groin either side of the wound. It was as if a tree had started growing out of my flesh. I could see open muscle fibre round wood, and then a gleaming white fragment of bone, which just seemed like another piece of wood. All slathered with blood.

n.o.body heard me call. Everyone was shouting and cursing. Out of the window I saw other gliders begin to pitch up at odd angles in the dunes, as if they were models thrown by children. We are landing far too near the sea, I thought; we should be much deeper in than this. Has anyone else been stabbed by a stake like this? My trouser leg started to fill with blood. Then the pain started. Now with a spreading cold blackness, as if someone was pouring ink into the padlock of my left eye, I felt myself begin to faint.

"To me! to me!" Sergeant Iwiss bellowed. "Jourdaine, see to that man. Call medics. Get moving! Will somebody find out where the h.e.l.l we have landed?"

I could feel the heavy wet of the blood in my trousers, flowing freely now; the material was like a bag filling up. My mind became misted, the rucksack radios rose like saplings. A brightness-Jourdaine's flashlight?-enfolded me from the right, beginning to dilute the inkiness in my head. I felt I must be...

"Think it might be his femoral, Sarge."

I didn't know...

His light. The darkness on the left side of my head seemed to be yearning to merge with his light. What the brain was summoning, I suppose, unable to cope.

I heard Jourdaine say 'two' into his radio, then some other digits and something about a dog. I glimpsed his grasp, wet from my blood, on the black handset as he said it. Hu Hu...a...bu, the radio squelched back, as if searching for intelligibility. Then, and clearly, Who? Who?

I thought I was going to die. Jourdaine repeated our unit number. You're miles off the grid You're miles off the grid, came the static-soaked reply, conveyed through the magic wand of the aerial.

Stars began to dance on the cusp of my left retina, along with little black motes. Then these whatchamacallits were swallowed up by the stars and the darkness in my head received what it required, novel immunity from itself.

Light!

It filled my field of vision. Different letters of the alphabet, fluid like molten metal, shone within this light. Fiery letters, jumping jacks, seven from this side, seven from that, eight from another place. Because of the eight, I weirdly thought, there is no longer any separation, no longer any discord. Because of the eight, the Ilala Ilala can sail out of the Lake Nyasa horizon and take me home. can sail out of the Lake Nyasa horizon and take me home.

Jolly good fellow. Jolly good fellow. Found again. Found again. Still the furline. Still the furline.

Those were the strange words which repeatedly came into my half-closed mind as, partially loosed from the world, I watched myself descend the Ilala Ilala's bent steel ladder. Probably it was some confused image of the fold-out steps of the glider, as I was being insinuated out by medics. They laid me on a stretcher on the ground, and gave me a shot of morphine.

They then tied tourniquets and tried to plug the wound in my groin. I resolutely remained in Africa. I will stay in Africa, I told myself, till the pain is gone. Next I was put on a stretcher and lifted, and then some Germans-I presume they were Germans-started firing at us. Little stabs of flame. Ducking their heads, my carriers were almost clipped by raking machine-gun fire as they ran erratically with me, each jolt ripping through the obscuring curtain of morphine. I pa.s.sed out as I was carried hither and thither like that, as I was borne along by brave American medics jogging along in the jumble of the dunes and the general confusion, the smoke-screens and the mortar crumps and the chaos of barbed wire and concrete emplacements.

I came round, or half came round, several hours later; I don't know exactly how many, but it must have been quite a few as the amphibious landings were now well underway. The medics had moved me back to a first-aid post in some dunes above the a.s.sault beach next to which we had mistakenly landed. Other wounded men sprawled around me, some moaning gruesomely, some cracking coa.r.s.e jokes, most silent, all alike in ignorance about what was going to happen. Though some faces were greyer than others, it was as if we were all waiting, with utter parity of probability, for either one of death or life.

The beach below was congested with vehicles and men who had driven or jumped off landing craft further out, the ramps of their vessels having had to open in heavy swell. In the shallows, a tank was blazing and a vicious tidal stream was carrying away dead and drowning men. Further out, there were s.h.i.+ps as far as I could see. On the beach, under drifting clouds of smoke, crawling snake-lines of men were creeping up towards the dunes, behind a few successfully landed tanks. We were too near the German line for them to make much headway. A big gun was banging at us every few minutes, making my eardrums ache and sending vast columns of sand into the air, which then rained down, abrading our skin like gla.s.spaper.

Jolly good fellow. Jolly good fellow. Found again. Found again. Still the furline. Still the furline.

Discrete iterations, carrying the fervid mind on hollowed-out canoes up the continuum of the lake, to Monkey Bay. Where the fishermen sit cross-legged to mend their nets. Where the pestle pounds maize in the mortar. Where the iridaceous ixia iridaceous ixia grows, following its own instructions. Where, marbled and mottled, studded, speckled and spangled, the lineage of Vickers flourishes. grows, following its own instructions. Where, marbled and mottled, studded, speckled and spangled, the lineage of Vickers flourishes.

Jolly good fellow. Jolly good fellow. Found again. Found again. Still the furline. Still the furline.

To block out the pain, and the appalling sights, and the noise and smell of exploding munitions, I had begun to tell myself a fantasy.

Vickers is a famous dog now, long dead but fabled for his wandering through Nyasaland in the wake of the mudslide, in vexed search for a place where the lost master, i.e. my pa, might be found again. He is renowned too for his barred and brindled progeny, which are prized by local hunters for their facing down of marauding lions and for the silence they keep when the kudu appears in the bowman's view.

Helpless, with a dressing plugged in my groin, I watched large numbers of troops being swept off their feet while wading through the breakers. Some drowned. Those who reached dry land were often near exhaustion. At that moment, I instinctively felt our forecast had failed, my optimistic feelings from the plane quite gone.

Unable to watch, or rather opening and closing my eyes, I kept returning to the protective coc.o.o.n of my African fantasy, remembering how the kudu meat was always divided, each hut getting its portion. The animal's gyre-like horn would be gouged out and polished (it has tremendous sound-carrying power and is used for sending messages from village to village, or for summoning warriors during war). The antelope's skin-reddish brown with white, grey and bluish stripes-will be sc.r.a.ped with a stone and mounted to dry in the sun on two staves, which are thrust into the ground to make an X.

I opened my eyes again, to see a jeep struggling in the sand, its wheels revolving in about two feet of water. It eventually came free and began manoeuvring round a pile of logs, one of the many types of obstacles the Germans had placed on the sh.o.r.e. I picked up someone's binoculars to watch, only to see that the logs were in fact bodies. Somehow the driver got round them but shortly afterwards the vehicle received a direct hit from a sh.e.l.l. They were raining down everywhere now, together with intense mortar fire.

Cras.h.!.+

A large sh.e.l.l, falling in the water, caused a plume of white fluid to rise up, as if a whale had spouted. Still I refused to be startled out of my dream, which I followed as if under the influence of a detective story, or some other composed mystery of that sort.

It could not be sustained. On the beach, a different sort of influence was doing its dreadful, unignorable work, as follow-up waves of the a.s.sault came in from new landing craft. Many were foundering. Landing craft were being hurled onto the beaches by the waves, smaller ones being swamped even before they could touch down. Others, flung upon underwater obstacles, were holed and beginning to sink. I realised that the onsh.o.r.e wind was not just above the permissible limit laid down by the Admiralty, it was near the actual physical limit which would have made landings impossible.

We really had taken a very great risk with the weather. Although the achievement of tactical surprise was undoubtedly due to just-tolerable conditions, the weather was seriously reducing our ability to exploit that surprise. Men disembarking from those landing craft that did get through were being forced to jump, rifle in hand and weighed down by kit, into a milling ma.s.s of water, only to find the dead of earlier units floating alongside them.

Although the sh.e.l.ls fell near enough to make the marram gra.s.s tremble, I seemed to be out of danger in the dunes, in that sandy saucer full of wounded men. But I wasn't feeling so good. Knots of pain were rising from the tangled b.l.o.o.d.y mess of my groin. I disciplined myself back into the African fantasy, the comforting subst.i.tution of time and s.p.a.ce into which I had been hurling my consciousness to stave off the spasms.

A strange business. It was as if, in trying to suppress everything that was going on around me, I had gathered two different places and times under a single weather. Scientifically impossible, to mix these two distinct realities under the one sky, but that was what was happening in my head.

At any rate, it appeared I was to be drawn into the variegated dog-pack's evening gathering in the surf, stepping out of that hideous nightmare of war into a timeless irradiance of evening sun. I could be there now as I write-not on the Habbakuk Habbakuk, nor in a scratchy, blood-soaked, screech-filled dune in Normandy, but on softer, whiter sand in Africa.

Small green waves are clinking over my feet, bribing me to get up and walk. I know you, old coin, that song you make. I take the bait and rise. Somewhere the lake stretches smooth as baize to the Mozambican side, somewhere I recognise; I begin strolling towards the dogs further down the beach. Already the gap is diminis.h.i.+ng. As I walk, sunset is closing down, one by one, rugged ridges of cloud. Soon only a bronzish sliver of sun will be left, a tawny skein being stretched ever tighter by the pulling string of time.

And suddenly, now, I remember where all this came from. Something about a dog. Jourdaine calling the medics on his radio, speaking the codewords for our respective units, as I lay pinioned in my seat back on the glider, bleeding, thinking I was going to die.

"h.e.l.lo, Pi Dog," was what he said into his handset. "This is Black Dog."