Weaver by Stephen Baxter Page B

further up where more men crowded, seeking shelter, their soaked battledress dark. Ernst realised that he had joined one of the black lines he had seen from the sea: bands of black that were mortal men huddling behind whatever cover they could find, trying to stay alive.
    It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he reminded himself. Evidently the English resistance had been underestimated. A shot slapped the wood close to his face, and he ducked back down.
    Well, he couldn’t stay here. Looking around, he saw that others drawn up against the groyne had the same idea. One man, an unterfeldwebel, raised his arm.
    Ernst moved with the rest. And for the first time since landing in England he raised his weapon and fired.
    The troops advanced up the beach in turn. It was a long slog. It was a question of lift your head, take a shot to cover the rest, and then when they were firing take your chance to crawl a bit further forward, before ducking down again. Still the pillboxes fired. There were hazards on the beach too; Ernst nearly fell into a dugout improvised from a bit of drainpipe buried in the shingle, but the Englishman inside was already dead.

    And then a mortar emplacement got its range, and the shells rained down on the beach all around Ernst. Men and bits of kit were thrown high in the air, men torn to pieces in an instant, their limbs scattered. Ernst found himself crawling desperately over the bodies of the fallen. You could even get a bit of cover, if you ducked down behind a corpse.
    But gradually, he saw, inch by inch - life by life - the tide of the German offensive was rising up towards the defenders, and one after another their emplacements fell silent, put out of action by a rattle of gunfire or the pop of an explosion.
    And as he climbed the beach, and the daylight gathered, he began to see the scale of the operation unfolding around him. To right and left, all along the four miles of this shallow beach as far as he could see, men were making their advance, fighting and dying, Twenty-sixth Division slowly achieving its objective. Back at the edge of the sea, beyond the litter of assault boats and splintered barges, more troop carriers were pressing to land, a great crowd of them still stuck off shore. But already the sapper companies were landing their heavier equipment. He saw mortars and machine guns being assembled, and a big PAK anti-tank gun, and even an anti-aircraft weapon. The first horses were landing, bucking nervously as they were led through the spray. There were even men struggling to drag the barges out to sea, so they could be towed back across the Channel to be loaded with the second wave.
    When he reached the head of the beach, he had to crawl around anti-tank obstacles, big concrete cubes. And then he came to the barbed wire, already snipped and pulled back by the first wave of engineers.
    At last he was almost under the face of that damn pillbox itself. It was sheer concrete that glistened as if still moist. A man rushed it, lobbed a grenade through that slit, and ducked down. The grenade detonated with a dull thud, smoke and fire billowed briefly from the slit, and the pillbox was silenced. Ernst cheered with the others, wishing he could have thrown the grenade himself.
    And then one more push and he was on grass, the beach at last behind him.
    He heard a throaty roar. He turned, lying on his back, breathing hard.
    An amphibious tank was coming out of the water, its snorkel raised like an elephant’s trunk, a monster rising from the deep. On a day of extraordinary sights, this schwimmpanzer was the most remarkable. But a wounded man, lying behind a heap of corpses for cover, was right in its tracks. He screamed and tried to crawl out of the way, wriggling. But the tank driver could not see him and he was crushed into the shingle. His guts were forced out of his mouth and his arse, like toothpaste from a tube.

XVI
    Ben Kamen watched the landings from the look-out post, high on the walls at