Bell Harry Read online

  It was easy to see where a tunnel would be, if one was there. The crater nearest the cathedral was full of rubble. Half an hour of digging and we’d know if Bert Marden was telling the truth or not.

  Back in camp, we figured out how to do it. We’d have to go at night, when no one could see us. Take a flashlamp and a couple of spades, dig down and see what we found. We’d be AWOL, but what the hell? We’d be back in camp by dawn. No one would even know we’d been off base.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Dutch.

  ‘What if we’re caught?’ asked Billy.

  ‘We won’t get caught. Nobody will see us. And we ain’t committing no crime. Digging on a bombsite ain’t a crime.’

  Billy wasn’t sure about that. Neither was I. It might not be a crime, but it didn’t seem quite legal either. Digging in the cathedral, in the middle of the night.

  ‘No one will see us,’ said Dutch. ‘There’s no one there in the middle of the night. The place is a graveyard.’

  It was full of bodies, sure enough. Old man Marden had told us there was death in the tunnel. Three dead soldiers and the skull of this Becket guy.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Dutch.

  Billy didn’t want to know. Me neither. It had been a joke at first, but now it was something else. We couldn’t quite believe what we were hearing.

  But Dutch insisted. ‘I’ll get the flashlamp and the spades,’ he told us. ‘We’ll go tomorrow night. We’ll be in and out before anyone even knows we were there. Leave it all to me.’

  The next day passed slowly, like the evening would never come. We were off duty at five, but it wasn’t until after midnight that we slipped out of bed and followed Dutch to the back wall of the camp, where GIs used to meet their girls for R&R against the brickwork. Dutch was first over, then Billy dropping the spades to him in a couple of backpacks, then me in rear.

  It was dark as we hit the ground. There were no lights, because of the blackout. No people either. But the moon was out and we could see the cathedral, with the barrage balloon hanging over it to keep the Germans away.

  Dutch handed out the spades. We started out in single file, him leading the way. Twenty minutes later, we reached the cathedral and snuck in through the ruins to begin digging for buried treasure.

  It took much longer than we thought, but we found it in the end. There was an old tunnel in front of us, stretching out toward the cathedral, just as Marden had said.

  ‘You keep watch,’ Dutch told Billy. ‘Ezra and me will go down there and see what we can find.’

  We took our flashlamps and dropped down into the tunnel. We splashed along until we came to the skeletons at the end. There they were, just like Marden told us, the bodies, the ruby, the skull, the gold and silver all over the floor. Everything he had told us was true.

  ‘We’re rich!’ Dutch couldn’t believe his eyes as he flashed his lamp over the jewels. ‘Rich, Ezra. Yes we are. We’re gonna be rich men for the rest of our lives.’

  We took our backpacks off and filled them at once, cramming in all the gold and jewels we could see. We didn’t bother with the skull or any of the big stuff that we couldn’t carry. We just scooped up the ruby and anything else that would fit in the packs. We were so excited we hardly knew what we were doing as we crammed our pockets as well. Then we turned back down the tunnel and lit out of there as fast as we could go.

  It was getting on for dawn by the time we got back to camp. Dutch was first up the wall, then me, then the two of us leaning down and giving Billy a hand. We made it back in and headed for our bunks before anyone noticed we’d been gone.

  Dutch took all the gold and jewels. He shoved them into his locker and kept the key around his neck. We stripped off and got into our bunks. We were all tucked up just in time for the sergeant to find us when he came in a while later to turn the lights on and get the squad up for the day. We’d never even been asleep.

  It bothered me for the rest of the day, the thought of all that loot burning a hole in Dutch’s locker. What if anybody found it? What if somebody came in during the day and held a snap inspection?

  There’d be nothing Dutch could say, if they found him with a bunch of jewels and a big red ruby in his possession. He’d be for the stockade, five years at least, and maybe the rest of us as well.

  We got together that afternoon to discuss what to do. We had to get the jewels out of Dutch’s locker, that was for sure, but then what?

  Billy and me were for giving them back, handing them over to the cathedral or maybe just dumping them someplace for someone else to find. We’d never expected to find anything when we dug into the tunnel. We’d just done it for the hell of it.

  We wanted to give the jewels back and forget we’d ever seen them. But Dutch wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Who we going to give them back to? The British don’t even know they’re lost. We give them back, the British will say “thanks, boys” and that’ll be that, nothing in it for us. And whose are they, anyway? Who do they belong to? Who says they belong to the British?’

  ‘They don’t belong to us, Dutch.’

  ‘They do now. Possession is nine tenths of the law. We found ‘em, we keep ‘em.’

  Billy wasn’t so sure, and neither was I. Jewels would be hard to explain, if the lieutenant spotted them in our kitbags. We couldn’t just say we found them someplace and couldn’t remember where.

  ‘We give them back, the British will want to know where we got them,’ Dutch pointed out. ‘You want to tell them we broke into the cathedral in the middle of the night? AWOL from camp. You want to tell them that?’

  No, we didn’t.

  ‘The British won’t miss what they never knew they had. They don’t have legal title. They can’t say the jewels are theirs, any more than we can. The jewels belong to whoever found them.’

  Billy and me still weren’t sure about that. But we didn’t have any other ideas either. It was all too difficult for us. More than we could handle.

  ‘So what are we going to do, Dutch?’

  ‘We hide them.’ Dutch didn’t want the jewels in his locker either. ‘We bury them someplace and come back for them later. After the war, maybe.’

  ‘After the war?’

  ‘You got any better ideas? You got something else you want to do?’

  Neither of us did. Burying them seemed as good an idea as any. Once the jewels were out of Dutch’s locker we’d all of us breathe a lot easier. That’s all we wanted, to get rid of the jewels so no one could tie them to us. The sooner the better.

  There was a training ground back of the camp, a wilderness area that belonged to the British army. It was where we did our maneuvers, digging foxholes and practising our attacks, honing our battle skills for the invasion of Europe.

  We knew it well because we’d spent a lot of time there, sleeping out sometimes and learning to fight in the dark. It was a good place to dig a hole and hide something you didn’t want found. There was nowhere better that we could think of.

  We went out there right away. Dutch took the jewels out of his locker and we got a look at them again, the first time we’d seen them in daylight.

  They were quite something, I can tell you. They were... I don’t know, I never saw anything like it in my life. There were diamonds there, and emeralds, and that big red ruby. All stuff given to this Becket guy, I suppose. I don’t know.

  Anyhow, Dutch took it all out of the locker and wrapped it up tight in a waterproof cape. He put the cape into an old ammunition box and then we marched out of camp with it, looking like we were on fatigue duty.

  We took a pair of spades with us, and an army compass, and headed up into the training ground. We kept going until we were out of sight of the camp, about three or four hundred yards away. Then we put the box down and looked around for somewhere to bury it.

  There was a little hollow in the bushes, a place easy to remember. We took a good look around, making sure the location was imprinted on our minds. Then we got busy with the spades, diggin
g deep down until we had a hole in the ground almost big enough for a man to stand in.

  Dutch and Billy dropped the ammo box in the bottom and began to cover it up again. We filled the hole in and stamped the earth down all around.

  We stood back when we’d finished while Dutch opened up the compass and hooked his thumb through the holding ring.

  ‘We’ll take bearings,’ he told us. ‘That way we’ll always know exactly where to come back to, even if we don’t recognise it on the ground.’

  We’d been taught how by the army. You lined up the compass on some distant object and made a note of the bearing. You did this on three different objects in different directions and then you could figure out where you were. I think it's called triangulation, or some such.

  The first marker was the cathedral tower. We were on high ground and the cathedral was in the valley below, but Bell Harry tower was still higher than us.

  Dutch took a bead on it with one eye closed and called out the numbers, while Billy wrote them down. Dutch made sure to check what he’d written after he’d finished, because Billy didn’t write too good, even for an orange picker.

  The second marker was an old windmill on the skyline, east of the cathedral. The third was in back of us to the northwest. Tyler Hill. I’ve never forgotten that name, for as long as I’ve lived. Tyler Hill. Same name as mine.

  Dutch took the bearings on all three and Billy wrote them down, one by one. Then Dutch copied them out so we each had a set of our own, in case we got separated in the future.

  Dutch went even further, himself. He got the numbers tattooed on the back of his hand a few days later, where they could never get lost. The way he figured it, a bit of paper could easily disappear, but a tattoo on his hand was there forever. He’d always know where to look, if he couldn’t remember what the bearings were.

  It was the end of May by then. We didn’t know it, but we didn’t have much time left in Canterbury. The invasion came on June 6, the Allies storming ashore in Normandy, of all places.

  We’d expected Calais, because that was the shortest way across the Channel, so it took us all by surprise when we woke up that morning and heard the news. Normandy! Wasn’t a guy in our whole outfit who even knew where Normandy was.

  Of course, we forgot all about buried treasure as soon as we knew what was happening. The invasion was the only game in town. We couldn’t think of nothing else. There wasn’t nothing else to think about.

  We got orders to move at once, the orders we’d been expecting so long. We packed our equipment and loaded it onto the trucks, everything we were going to need in France.

  There wasn’t time to say goodbye to Ivy, or Bert Marden, so we left a note for her on the camp gate, telling her we were going and it had been nice knowing her. Then we climbed aboard the truck and headed out the camp, on our way to join the invasion in France.

  Or so we thought. In fact, it was several weeks before we got anywhere near France. We went to Dover that day, and to someplace else the next. Kept moving from one place to another, driving in convoy all across Kent.

  We were here, there and everywhere, marching, counter-marching, stopping for a while, then hitting the road again until we thought it would never end.

  We got real mad about it, moving all around while the real action was happening the other side of the Channel. We couldn’t figure it out at all. We thought the war was going to be over before we got a chance to see any combat.

  In fact there was a reason for what was going on. We were part of a deception plan, which we didn’t know at the time. The Germans thought Normandy was just a trick and the real invasion was going to come at Calais. It’s what you’d have expected to happen.

  Our job was to keep them thinking that way, marching up and down and keeping real visible so their spies would report a lot of troop movements in Kent.

  The longer the Germans thought the real attack was coming at Calais, the longer they’d keep their troops there, instead of sending reinforcements to Normandy. And the quicker we’d win, in the end. It was smart of us, when you think about it.

  Anyhow, we got to France soon enough — the fourth of July, as it happened. Two days later, we were in combat for the first time, on the road to St Lo.

  There was a farmhouse outside a village, full of Germans. We were sent forward to clear it, first time any of us had ever even seen a German, let alone tried to kill one.

  We done fire and movement, like we’d been taught, one squad advancing while another stayed put and gave them covering fire. It didn’t work like it had in training. The Germans hadn’t read the script. They had a machine gun someplace, we couldn’t see where.

  Every time we tried to move, it opened up and sent us running for cover again. There wasn’t a darn thing we could do about it, because we didn’t even know where it was.

  We called up mortar fire in the end, bombing the farmhouse to pieces until the Germans were forced to withdraw. They took the machine gun with them, which was okay with us. We’d had enough of war by then, every one of us. We’d seen as much combat as we ever wanted to. Three of the boys in our squad had been killed in the attack. One of them was Billy.

  I didn’t find out about it until afterwards. I was too worried about my own skin to think about anyone else. It wasn’t until after we’d cleared the farmhouse and were taking muster by the barn that we noticed Billy was gone.

  No one had seen him die. We went back across the field and there he was, lying face down in the brush. He’d taken a bullet between the shoulder blades and the shot had come out all over his chest.

  It was an awful sight. I went down on my knees when I saw him and cried like a baby. I still do, sometimes. Can’t get it out of my mind.

  But there was no time to worry about Billy. We were in combat again next day, and a couple of days after that as well. We were all too busy staying alive to worry about the dead. There were too many other things to think about, far more important than Billy.

  It was a week before I killed me my first German. We were in bocage country, lots of little fields with hedgerows and sunken roads, all crawling with Germans. We were moving up toward a crossroad, with orders to recon the position and check it out for the enemy.

  They were there, sure enough — the other side of the hedgerow. I know, because I looked through a gap in the hedge and came face to face with one, about three feet away.

  He was just a kid under the helmet, younger than me. A little blond kid, couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. He should have been in school at his age, not staring bug-eyed at me through a hole in the hedge.

  We brought our guns up together, but I fired first. Took him out with a head shot, right through the lip. I couldn’t have missed, at that range.

  I killed other Germans too, after that. So many in the next few weeks that I lost track after a while. They were just shapes in the distance, most of them. The first is the only one I remember, because he had a face. The rest were just shapes, like targets on the range.

  I nearly got killed myself, plenty of times. The worst was near Soissons, on the way to Belgium. We were in another fire fight when I made a stupid move and ran right into Dutch’s line of fire, darn near got killed by somebody from my own side.

  A couple of bullets whistled past me before I knew what was happening, closer than anything the Germans had ever managed. It happens a lot in war, casualties from friendly fire. Something you can’t avoid.

  Dutch himself got hit about a month later, on the road to Aachen. The Germans were counter-attacking with Panzer tanks, trying to close the gap in the line. I can tell you now, there’s nothing worse than watching Panzers coming straight at you, nothing between you and them and no way of stopping them coming.

  We had an anti-tank gun, but there were too many of them for that. The tanks just kept on coming, their turrets swivelling from side to side as they searched for targets.

  We did stop them in the end, but not before Dutch took a shell splinter in t
he leg, right through the fleshy part of the thigh. It was the end of the war for him. Nearly the end of his life as well.

  The wound wasn’t as bad as it looked, but we didn’t know that at first. It looked real bad, is all I can say. Blood everywhere, and Dutch screaming with pain because we’d run out of morphine and had nothing to give him.

  He looked like he was going to die and there wasn’t nothing any of us could do except stand there and watch him.

  We got him back to the dressing station soon as we had a chance. I helped with the stretcher, although it wasn’t my job. Dutch was still screaming, clinging to my arm and begging me not to leave him.

  ‘Stay with me, Ezra,’ he begged. ‘For Christ’s sake stay with me, make sure I’m okay. Don’t let them dump me. They’ll just dump me if you don’t stay with me. You stick with me, Ezra, make sure I’m okay.’

  ‘I will, Dutch, of course I will.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘It’s all right, old buddy. I’m with you. It’ll be okay.’

  I did stay with him, making sure he got seen by the surgeon. They cut the pants off of his leg and assessed the damage, decided he was going to live. The nurse gave him morphine to calm him down and told me they'd fix him up real good, no chance of gangrene setting in.

  He might have died if we hadn’t gotten him back to the dressing station. But he was safe now, they’d make sure of that. He was going to be okay.

  So I left him there and went back to the war. It was the last I saw of Dutch for a while, because he never came back to the 1051st. He was sent to England and hospitalized in Portsmouth. By the time his wound had healed, the war was over, so he never had to rejoin his outfit.

  It was September 1945 before I got back to England myself. I was on my way home by then, one of the first to get my discharge from the army. I’d been in the war right from the start, so I had more points on my card than most. First in, first out was the deal, when it came to GIs going home. Seemed fair enough to me.

  I had a week in England before the ship sailed, so I went down to Canterbury first to see Ivy Marden and find out how she was. I guessed she’d want to know about Billy and Dutch, and I ought to be the one to tell her what happened to them. Better that than her finding out from someone else.