Slapton Sands (29 page)

Compton's set-up was necessarily different from what it would have been in the field. He'd drilled hundreds of green troops in the effective disposition of machine guns as weapons of offence, entrenchment and ambush. There was no scenario, no disposition on which he had not schooled the recruits. But today's task was very specific. They were the Germans, today. They were the bad guys defending the coast of occupied France. They would present the field of fire that would greet the assault force arriving in their amphibians. It would, as ever, be a live-fire exercise. It would replicate battle conditions as accurately as was possible. General Clark, safely ensconced in Marshall's little black book of officer preferment, had said the words. ‘A soldier is always green unless he's been under fire,' Clark had said. And the words had become gospel. They'd be under fire today, all right. Johnny Compton and the guns under his command would see to it.

According to the manual, each heavy-weapons squad comprised a corporal leader, machine gunner, assistant machine gunner and four ammunition bearers. But today, at Slapton Sands, the squads under Lieutenant Compton were not Americans in the field. Squads of three were sufficient to operate each gun. The guns were in emplacements fanning to either side of the sangar from which he would
coordinate and direct his defensive fire power. Two of them were in pillboxes. It was vital that the assault force practised its technique for overrunning prepared German defensive positions. The rest were behind redoubts and berms or dug into foxholes. It was equally vital that the Americans landing in France could quickly identify the source of machine-gun fire and learn to deal with it swiftly and at economical cost.

Now, he could hear the first of his men digging with picks and shovels into the unprepared positions on the landward side of their metalled coast road. He watched the others walking along the road from the base in a straggle of relaxed chatter, under their burdens of equipment. Chatter was OK. Chatter was probably good. He wouldn't have thought so once, but something had broken, or merely become benign in Johnny Compton, especially in the hours since the beating in Paddington that he considered should have killed him. He honestly believed, on this spring morning, that he could make something of his life, of the opportunities he'd been delivered.

It wasn't so much the fights. What soldier didn't occasionally fight? Though the fights, in truth, were unbecoming to an officer. They were bad enough for a lieutenant. For a captain, they'd be worse. He could curtail the fights, though, he was sure. The women would be the bigger test. If he could only keep away from the whores.

Compton saw that one of his squads was struggling to establish a clear field of fire from the position plotted on the
preparatory map he'd given them. Four hundred yards to his right, they were attacking unyielding earth with a pick and casting nervous glances in his direction. Johnny smiled to himself. Now would be a good time to demonstrate his quality of leadership, his new-found tolerance, the expertise hard won when he served Uncle Sam's Cinderella army in Guam, in Cuba, and in Texas on the Rio Grande through a jumpy, tequila- and mescal-fuelled posting he didn't care to recall all that closely in precise detail. He waved a salute to the sergeant commanding the hapless squad, smiled, and saw the man's shoulders settle into a posture of relief. He smelled the ripening smells of good country, liberated by the warmth of a spring sun. There was word that Harry Butcher would be observing today. Fitzpatrick had sought Johnny out last night, high on expectation and Benzedrine, and told him so. Butcher was Eisenhower's right-hand man. Butcher had the ear of the supreme commander. Butcher was the key to automatic promotion for a man anyway doing a captain's job.

‘There was a fuck-up here while you were away,' Fitzpatrick had confided, in that incontinent way men on Benzedrine had of becoming altogether too pally and garrulous to keep a secret properly, ‘so things had better go like clockwork tomorrow.'

Compton had nodded. ‘Sir,' he'd said, confining his reply to a single word. But it had been hard not to smile.

Each gun was aimed at its target by a traversing and elevating mechanism, calibrated in millimetres and always
referred to by the heavy-weapons squads as the T&E. One millimetre of elevation represented a yard's height or depth differential over a thousand yards of range. Nobody had really addressed the conflict in scales of measurement between the continental and imperial systems. But to Compton that didn't matter. You relied on tables to tell you about angles of fire. And Johnny knew the tables by heart. Many gunners liked to open with a burst ranged low and left of the target and then calibrate their gun accordingly. It was a technique that worked well enough on the target range, if you were parsimonious enough with that first burst to accommodate the quartermaster. But it wouldn't work for Johnny, today, firing over the heads of American boys. His machine-gun bullets needed to be close enough to make them wince, to encourage them into crouching urgency, to make them aware of the zipping pattern of death sewn inches above their heads. But he did not want any of his squads to cut a boatful of them down at the knees, just to find the range.

They were scheduled to hit the beach at nine o'clock. He had studied the tide tables for this part of the coast, as well as the tables governing the angle of their T&E. The range was eight hundred yards, and the initial burst, before they stopped to reload and re-calibrate, would give ground clearance at that range of seven feet. Twenty-four guns, two hundred and fifty rounds in every can. That was a full automatic burst of close to seven thousand rounds. It wasn't quite the welcome Field Marshal Rommel would be
planning for them in France. The men coming ashore today in their Higgins boats would not be strafed by fighter patrols or hit by shells from self-propelled guns and waiting tanks. But as they waded ashore and started to pick their way between the percussion caps buried in the sand to simulate landmines, it would certainly do wonders for their concentration.

His squads had been in position for thirty-five minutes when Compton saw the LSTs broach the horizon. Through his binoculars, he saw well-drilled crews swinging them out on davits and then lowering the packed landing craft into the water. The Higgins boats, thirty-five men to a boat, manoeuvred into position on the water and then came shorewards in a row as precise and disciplined as a line of advancing infantry. He whistled and looked at his wrist-watch. He'd been given a new wristwatch from supplies. They were right on time. Damn, it was impressive. He picked up his steel helmet, put it on and adjusted the chinstrap, just as the shells from the naval batteries over the horizon began to shriek their approach, signalling their softening up of the German defences. The shells fell on the sand, short of the road, short of where Compton and his men were snugly dug in. It was a rehearsal, after all. But the series of big explosions ripped craters in the sand and shingle, sending stones zipping and clattering into the granite face of Compton's sangar, filling his eyes with grit and his body with the jerking, percussive reverberation of heavy artillery. Then the bombardment ceased and
Compton looked through the firing slit. The dimensions of the beach looked somehow wrong to him, and a moment of anxiety troubled his mind. Just the bombardment, he thought, dismissing his niggle of doubt. Shakes everything up. Distorts things slightly. Alters the perspective. He didn't need his binoculars now to see the line of Higgins boats. He could see spray churn and spatter off their steel ramps as the craft rose and dipped on the swell towards the shore. He could see the sun glint on helmet edges where the green camouflage paint found no purchase on shiny steel.

The machine-gun fire command was given in six stages. Lieutenant Johnny Compton stood. This was his moment. ‘Prepare to fire,' he said, giving the alert. He was glad that his voice sounded strong, full-lunged, with natural authority. ‘Front,' he said, giving the direction. In his peripheral vision, he saw the appreciable sight of alert squads hunkered over their guns. ‘Amphibious infantry assault,' Compton said, giving the target description. The Higgins boats were almost on the beach. In pure spring light, across shell-cratered sand, he thought they looked very close. ‘Range, eight hundred,' he called out. ‘Traverse and search,' giving the method of fire. ‘Rapid fire,' giving the engagement command. On the beach, the ramps were coming down. Men were wading with rifles at port arms and above their heads in columns five and six abreast into the surf. ‘Fire!' Compton said.

And he watched as soldiers began to jig and shudder in the surf and the foam on wavetops turned red with the
terrible clatter of bullets leaving muzzles and entering men and killing them. Killing them in a red, tattering swathe, soaking the sea with them. Killing them all, it seemed to Johnny Compton, who had given the last order he would ever utter. Killing them all.

It was still light when Alice left the pub. She didn't really mind going back to the cottage in Strete in the dark. It was the thought of arriving there in darkness that bothered her.

Before leaving the pub, she tried to reach Sally Emerson. Emerson picked up her extension on the first ring.

‘You're a workaholic,' Alice said.

‘I hope you're calling me long distance. From sunny Pennsylvania.'

‘That soldier identified by the partial print?'

‘Lieutenant Compton.'

‘Did your American embassy friend find out anything about him you haven't told me?'

‘He's dead, Alice. He died at Slapton Sands.'

‘Anything?' Alice could hear Emerson rifle through papers. The detective coughed to clear her throat.

‘There's a comment on his file written by a Colonel Fitzpatrick, dated April 1944. Just says that Compton's antipathy towards prostitutes might be connected to the manner of his father's death. Compton senior died of renal
failure, but the cause was syphilis, apparently contracted in France in the final stages of the Great War. Got furlough. Got laid. Got unlucky.'

‘Sounds like a direct quote.'

‘I'm reading what's written in front of me.'

Alice nodded.

‘Compton's father was a hero, by the way. But I told you that, didn't I?'

‘You did,' Alice said. ‘Thanks.'

‘Take care, Alice.'

‘Everyone tells me that, lately. Is that, like, a figure of English speech?'

‘No. It's a piece of advice.'

She walked back to Strete along the beach. It was late, and the sea and sand wore that luminescent, late light, as though they were being vividly imagined, more than lived, in some dream she was having of them. The tide line was a thick trail of debris and glossy, dark-green weed. Walking it, she could single out artefacts amid the stones and shells and flotsam from boats. She sat on her haunches and picked at something that had caught her eye. It was a small, rust-covered button. It could have been a tunic button from a uniform. But it could have been anything, she thought, discarding it, brushing rust smears from her fingers on the legs of her jeans.

There had been two separate tragedies. The one Rory Carnegie had told her about had happened first. That explained the bodies that Carnegie, her Colorado veteran
and other independent sources reported being washed up on the beaches of Devon beyond the military exclusion zone around Slapton Sands.

The second incident had happened on the beach itself. It was the aftermath of this event that her Colorado veteran had almost stumbled on on his hungover return from leave in London. It was this event, or its aftermath, that Jane Cartwright recalled in remembering the two hysterical troops sent to gather what medical supplies they could from a local cottage hospital.

Carnegie had not underestimated the number of bodies in the water. That attack and sinking had claimed about half of the total number of lives she believed to have been lost. You could allocate blame in the convoy attack. The Americans should not have been using an open radio frequency for their communications. The British should have sent the destroyer escort they had promised. The troops aboard the LSTs should have been drilled in the use of their life jackets. But it was the enemy who had attacked. It was an expensive lesson learned and reflected badly on Poon, the American admiral in overall charge of the naval contribution to Operation Tiger. But it did not really amount to a scandal.

So what had happened on the beach? It had to be friendly fire. Alice could only imagine casualties in their hundreds being inflicted by large offshore naval batteries laying a creeping barrage at the wrong time, or in the wrong place. But Johnny Compton had been an infantry soldier
and a relatively lowly soldier at that. How could he have been instrumental in the deaths of seven hundred men? What could Compton's ghost be trying to scare her away from finding out?

She was only sure that she would not now find the answer at Slapton Sands. It lay in a file she had failed to access. Armed with a name, she might be able to source fresh information from somewhere. Sally Emerson's old college pal at the American embassy could be a useful contact. She would have that drink with Emerson when she got back to Canterbury and see if there was some way an introduction could be engineered.

Away by the coast road, she could see the small obelisk erected by the US army in tribute to what the people here had endured in having to leave their homes during the war. Even armed with her existing, incomplete knowledge, she thought the British government might erect a very substantial monument to commemorate what the Americans who trained here had done for them in liberating Europe. She walked closer to the stone tribute and looked at it. It was modest, but more dignified for the modest isolation of its size on the ground where it stood. She brushed a hand against the stone, which wore a fine, polished grain against her fingertips. The face of the obelisk, fully shaded from the sun, was almost cool. It cast a shadow, now, in this late part of the day, longer than its height, caught in the descent of the sun.