The Wrong Beach, a Short War Story of the 1944 Phantom Army
Harry Lacey stretched canvas over landing craft that would never sail while his brother's unit crossed the Channel to the real beach.
Fiction. An original short story by C.F. Cedar. The narrator and his friends are invented; the setting comes from the Law VII chapter of The Laws of Conquest.
I
Harry Lacey lay on a scaffold plank over the mud and hauled a canvas hull tight over its frame of pipe. The canvas was sodden and heavy, and it smelled of weed and wet rope. Lenny Shaw held the far end from the next plank and swore each time the wind lifted it. The pipe frame was cold and gritty under his palms, and the rope had rubbed two blisters through his gloves.
Every hull on this mooring would stay where it was. The landing craft rode at their moorings in the estuary with canvas stretched over the scaffolding, and they would never sail. They had the right shape. That was the whole job. The Germans across the water were meant to look at them and see an invasion.
"Shortest crossing there is," Lenny said, when the sergeant had gone off down the bank. "That's what the sergeant keeps saying. The German staff have said Calais for years, so they'll believe it."
Harry was not thinking about Calais. He was thinking about Tom, his older brother, who had been moved out of camp the week before with his whole unit and sent to a port nobody was allowed to name. Tom's last letter had come with the address blacked out. It said he had dry socks and that he would write when there was something to say.
Harry tied the canvas off on the stern cleat and looked across the water. The far shore was a low line he could cover with his thumb at arm's length. The sergeant had said the crossing was a little over twenty miles of water. Held up on a thumb, it looked like nothing.
II
On the morning of the sixth the sergeant came down the estuary road without his cap, and that was the first wrong thing Harry saw. He had the wireless headset slung around his neck, which he never wore outside the hut.
"They've gone ashore," he said. "Normandy. In the early hours." He looked at the hulls and not at Harry. "That's more than a hundred and fifty miles west of Calais. The Germans there are staring at nothing but water, and I want them staring at it all summer."
"Tom," Harry said.
"Nobody's told me where anybody is." The sergeant wiped his mouth. "Get back on the frames. The boats stay full until somebody says different. The general's standing in England, real as you or me, and the Germans rate him the most dangerous field commander we've got. They won't believe the boats have gone anywhere."
Harry climbed back up the scaffold. Up the bank, in the wireless hut behind the wire, somebody was already tapping out fuel requests and berth numbers for boats that existed only as canvas. The traffic was all meant for German listening posts to pick up. Harry understood then, the way a man understands a joke a beat late, that the wrong beach was the one he had been set to guard.
Tom was somewhere on the other side of the water that morning. Harry did not know which beach. Nobody had told him, and with the cold canvas stiffening in his hands, he knew that nobody would. He pictured the wireless hut with its tea going cold beside the key, and the men inside sending the same neat lies all day long.
III
The seam went at dusk. Harry heard it before he saw it, a short tearing noise like a sleeve coming off. A strip of stitching had opened along the side of the nearest hull, a pale gap as long as his arm, and in the failing light it showed the pipe ribs underneath. That was the one thing a hull was never meant to show.
Lenny came along the bank with the lamp. The dummy tanks lay on the grass beside them, rubber shapes that kept their square corners only while they stayed full of air. The valve on the nearest one had been hissing since noon. From the plank Harry could hear it, a thin complaint that never stopped.
"It's one seam, Harry," Lenny said. "Nobody's flying down to count the stitches."
"One seam," Harry said, "and the whole army turns out to be a bag of air."
By midnight the tank sagged at one end like a flour sack. Harry knelt in the wet grass with a foot bellows, a spool of waxed twine and a spare valve, and worked by the lamp with its tin shade. He stitched until his fingers stopped answering him. Then he pushed the new valve home, pumped until the tank stood up square on the bank, and bit off the last knot.
He did not think about Tom. He thought about the knot, and the next one, and the one after that, until the lamp guttered and the sky over the estuary turned from black to the color of wet ash.
IV
Through June the orders stayed the same. Keep the hulls tight, keep the traffic going, keep the far shore in view. Harry kept them. The estuary smelled of salt and cut grass, and the boats stood at their moorings, full and patient, and nothing came to sink them. He never learned whether a plane had come low enough to read a seam. He checked every morning anyway. Twice a week a corporal came down the road with a sack of spare valves and a clipboard, counted the hulls by name, and went back up without saying whether the count was right.
Tom came up the estuary road in July on the back of a truck. He was thinner and browner than when he had gone, with sand still crusted in the seams of his boots and a plaster on his chin. He stood on the bank a long time looking at the hulls before he said anything.
"What are they for?" Tom asked.
"Calais," Harry said.
Tom laughed once, then stopped. "There was sand in everything over there," he said. "In the tea, the bread, your mouth when you slept." He looked at the canvas for a while longer. "Did they believe it?"
"I don't know," Harry said.
"Me neither."
Harry walked him to the end of the plank. They looked across the water together. The far shore was a low line, a little over twenty miles off, and from where they stood it looked like nothing at all. Harry hoped the men on the other side were still looking at it too.