No matter how long they stared at that wire, glowing a faint red in the moonlight, there was no way of knowing. Lees ordered them on. The cable seemed to dog their every step. Twice they turned off the main path, only to run into that red strand of wire once more. Lees sensed they were about to stumble into trouble. They neared the crest of a ridge and crept into the cover of a small copse. The wire was there, running dead ahead. They followed it, rounded a bend and came upon a heap of equipment lying by the path.
Lees spied a pile of blankets, a distinctive metal helmet, a leather ammo belt and a Mauser rifle: German stuff. He bent to finger the nearest blanket: still warm. The enemy had to be close. As quietly as he could, Lees handed the ammo belt and rifle to Dobson. They paused as he checked and readied the weapon. Fortuitous. One more of them was now a little better armed.
Lees signalled them on – five figures creeping silently as wraiths through the trees. They reached an area where the cover thinned out, and all five of them seemed to spy the enemy at the same instant. Barely ten paces ahead stood half a dozen German soldiers, gazing further across the mountainside. To one side knelt a signaller, speaking quietly into a field telephone. It was obviously some kind of forward observation position.
Lees and his men sank into cover. The standing figures stared ahead at shells bursting on a ridgeline some distance away. They were checking and correcting the artillerymen’s fire, seemingly oblivious to the presence of Lees and his men. Their weapons and helmets lay beside them on the ground, their eyes fixed on the distant explosions.
Lees figured he’d seen enough. He stole to his feet, Sten levelled at the enemy. Four figures rose with him, their weapons likewise readied. As if warned by some sixth sense, one of the Germans turned towards them. Lees pressed his trigger. Half the figures fell in a matter of seconds, cut down by long bursts of fire unleashed at close range. As the survivors tried to flee, Dobson hurled a grenade in among them.
With the route ahead now clear Lees burst through, vaulting over the fallen enemy figures. The others followed. They tore out of the woodland, racing along a path snaking along the ground. The terrain here was open, the track leading to a final line of low, rocky cliffs, which delineated the high point.
As they sprinted for that escarpment, a machine gun opened up from behind. Bullets tore past, as Lees and his fellows slithered and dived into cover, then darted onwards. Salvi seemed to be fully recovered by now. A born mountaineer, he made a desperate dash for a crevice in the rock-face, one that seemed to offer a final route through. As they sprinted for its uncertain embrace, fierce bursts of machine-gun fire cut the night to all sides.
Salvi led the climb, shinning up the near-vertical cliff, with Lees and the others right behind. They were some fifty feet up when the first shell whistled out of the night and tore into the rocks below. Several more followed, splinters of steel cutting through the air on all sides. With zero shelter and a precipitous drop below, there was little option but to keep climbing.
The shells kept coming. Probing with his finger tips, Salvi steered them to the very top, before darting into the shelter of some rocks. Moments later, Lees had crawled in beside him, and shortly the others followed. They wormed their way further into cover, lying there in utter exhaustion. No one could believe that they had made it through thus far, and unscathed.
From behind, they could spy the baleful red flashes of the German artillery. Ahead, silhouetted against the moonlight glimmering off the sea, lay the ancient port town of Menton, which was held by the Allies. Lees reasoned it would be far safer to press on towards ‘friendly’ lines come daybreak. They rested for an hour, until the stars faded in the lightening sky.
All seemed eerily quiet as Lees led the small party off, moving cautiously through the dawn light. A path ran along the ridge, perpendicular to the way they needed to go. They crossed it, pushing due south, reaching a strand of wire running along the ground. Lees stepped towards it, mouthing silent prayers: if mines had been laid on this stretch of front, he figured the wire would delimit the borders of the safe ground.
He stepped gingerly across. No shattering explosion met his footfall. They made one hundred, two hundred, then three hundred yards without mishap, when finally a burst of fire tore apart the silence. Directly ahead a machine-gunner had opened up, unleashing a burst of warning shots above their heads.
Lees threw himself flat on the earth. ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! We’re British!’
The voice that responded was the sweetest that he had ever heard.
‘Put that gun down,’ came a hard-edged, American-accented cry. ‘Advance one and be recognised.’
Chapter 4
From the shelter of the rutted field beyond the bullet-torn hedgerow, Major Farran saw the distinctive form of an SAS jeep nose into view, with the redoubtable Big Jim Mackie at the wheel. It was the most welcome sight that he had ever seen. They now had its vehicle-mounted machine guns to counter the Germans’ fire.
Under the cover of their smoking barrels, Farran and his men rushed the wounded Sergeant Roberts to the vehicle and bundled him aboard. Figures jumped on wherever there was space. The heavily laden jeep moved out, engine howling, its thick mud-eater tyres making short work of the ploughed field. Once they’d reached the nearby lane, the priority had to be to get as far away as possible from the hornet’s nest that they had kicked – and kicked hard – in Châtillon, and to get Roberts some medical treatment.
They headed for the nearest friendly farmstead. There, Farran himself proceeded to dress Roberts’ wounds, while he lay on the kitchen table and a bevy of farm-maids bustled about with hot water and towels. Once the SAS sergeant was stabilised, he was loaded aboard a vehicle and despatched to the nearest location where the Maquis were known to keep an operational field hospital. There, he’d be in good hands.
That done, Farran led his jeep column back through isolated country to their remote, deep-woodland base. Reports filtered in from Châtillon of one hundred German dead and many more injured, plus scores of trucks, cars and motorcycle combinations destroyed. Almost of more importance, the entire German force occupying the town was said to be preparing to withdraw from what it believed was advancing US troops.
Farran had lost one SAS soldier killed and several wounded. By anyone’s reckoning, the battle for Châtillon-sur-Seine had been a spectacular victory. The SAS’s official report – marked ‘SENSITIVE’ – would declare that ‘this must rank as one of the most successful sorties ever carried out by a small harassing force behind enemy lines.’
But Farran’s greatest fear now was reprisals. The Gestapo and SS were bound to learn of the attack, and they were known to wreak terrible vengeance on the locals, as ‘punishment’ for the role the Maquis may have played. He decided to make himself scarce. If his entire force melted away, it would lessen any chance of any such savagery. If no SAS could be found, who was to say it wasn’t forward elements of the US 3rd Army that had attacked the town?
He sent out a signal for his entire squadron to return to their woodland base: other elements had been out hitting a variety of targets. They gathered as one unit, boasting eighteen jeeps in all, before moving out to establish three separate bases, from where to plot further mischief and mayhem. They left behind them the one casualty, Parachutist Holland, who’d been killed in the initial stages of the battle. Unbeknown to Farran the enemy had found his body, which served to dissuade them from executing the fifty-odd locals they had taken hostage. As it was clearly a British-led raid, such reprisals against ‘the Maquis’ were deemed unjustified.
Farran led his patrol 150 kilometres east, to a patch of woodland not far from the town of Grandrupt-de-Bains. En route they reconnoitred key targets, radioing through coordinates for Allied airstrikes. ‘Urgent. Recced today railway station at 14H/373305 . . .’ read one such message. ‘Petrol train on track being used as refuelling point . . . Impossible attack from ground as 200 enemy with heavy weapons dug in . . . bomb whole area immediately to prevent escaping convoys from refuelling.’ There were many such messages.
Grandrupt-de-Bains