Ride Out The Storm (4 page)

He had had a low opinion of Hitler and an even lower one of the French. They had been gloomy and suffered from a tremendous envy for British phlegm what they called
Le sang-froid habituel,
which Allerton translated in its turn as ‘Their permanent bloody colds’. The notices on the walls,
Nous vaincrons parce que nous sommes les plus forts!
had seemed spiritless, and he had been well aware that the common poilu endured the British only because the Germans were several degrees worse. Since every vice imaginable had seemed to be practised in the brothels that were Allerton’s concern, he had long suspected that the people who ran them would sell their country as quickly as they sold their bodies and when the Germans had crossed the border he had not been surprised to notice that their attitude was not the old-fashioned
Ils ne passeront pas,
but ‘Good God, already?’

To his surprise the British army seemed to be fighting well and its generals were keeping their heads, but they had been moving south-west for days now, sometimes waiting for hours in five-mile queues of traffic under the cold moon until someone cleared a crossroads. Every village was buzzing with rumours and there were said to be parachutists round every corner and fifth columnists in every bar.

Suddenly the war had become a holocaust such as Allerton could never have dreamed up even at his most imaginative. Everyone in France was terrified, everyone was exhausted and bewildered, and everyone seemed to be drunk – and he knew by now that it was because they were expecting defeat. Apart from making sure he emerged with a whole skin, he still wasn’t sure what his own attitude ought to be. As an intellectual, he felt he ought to have one, but ‘glory’ was a word that never seemed to cross the minds of the troops these days. His men still carried their football boots and clever books, but Allerton himself had long since decided that the selection of intellectual literature he’d brought to France, to give himself the detached and mildly bored air he admired, had become surprisingly trivial and he had thrown it all away. There seemed no place for such things in a situation where units were lost, telephone communications were broken and soldiers were taking to their own two feet because trucks failed to appear to pick them up.

As they approached St André there was a smell of summer in the air, a rich scent of blossom and young fruit, and the church bells were ringing as the old women from the farm cottages emerged in their black clothes for mass. Built on the curve of a small hill, surrounded by woods and near a river, by a miracle the place had so far not been touched, and after bombed Armentières with its mutilated dead, the red-tiled cottages ahead looked like a different world from the one they’d been living in for over a fortnight now.

Allerton was just looking forward to a halt and to drawing the clean air of the village into his lungs when he noticed his men pointing. Then, from the south, across their path towards Calais, he saw a heart-rending tide of refugees coming round the curve of the hill which had concealed them until the last moment, a vast black-clad column of people filling the streets and eddying into gardens and alleys like water from a burst dam.

They were Belgians and border French driven west by the fighting as their parents had been driven twenty-five years before, and within moments they’d swamped the column Allerton was with, and the trucks had to halt short of the crossroads in the centre of the village as the wave of misery lapped round them.

Some of the refugees were carrying a single blanket tied bandolier-fashion over the shoulder – all they’d saved of their worldy possessions – but some had still not yet been able to throw off the habits of a lifetime, and women struggled along in smart hats, fur coats, and dainty shoes that crippled their feet. They had no idea where to go or where to get information where to go, and their faces were distorted with terror.

Short of food and sleep, they were far too frightened to stop women with sore feet carrying exhausted children, old, and sick, all moving like frightened cattle. An old man was wheeling his equally ancient wife in a wheelbarrow and a group of women were pushing perambulators piled high with household goods. One of them suckled an infant as she trudged by, while a second child, not more than six years old, had harnessed itself to the perambulator and plodded forward like a small beast of burden. An overloaded farm cart, carrying a brass bedstead and a dozen old people, came to a halt on the rise to the crossroads, and as the way ahead cleared, the ancient animal between the shafts hadn’t the strength to start it again. In the gutter an old man had collapsed with fatigue and lay with his back against a suitcase. The two women who bent over him had faces that were taut with vexation, as though they were wishing he would die so they could continue. A child that had lost its parents was screaming with terror, and an elderly woman sat sobbing while her husband massaged her numbed feet and legs.

There were thousands and thousands of them, all pressing against the military vehicles. Then Allerton noticed a Fieseler recce plane hovering over the village, humming like a dragonfly in the blue sky, and with a sudden horrified awareness of what was going to happen, he set his men to digging slit trenches in a field alongside. They were none too willing, but they were philosophical and still managed to laugh. Then a Heinkel roared over the village just above the church spire, lifting above the trees to the west. They heard the whistle as the bomb came down but it fell in the next street and Allerton’s batman, a cheerful idiot in spectacles called Rice, yelled out, ‘Foul! Send him off, ref!’

As the Heinkel disappeared and there were no more bombs, Allerton decided the single missile was all they need expect. He was just watching a mechanised regiment of French cuirassiers, hurrying past him in their four-seater cars and motor-cycle combinations to force their way through to the bridge, when the Stukas arrived, ten thousand feet up, bunched together in the shape of an arrowhead. Even as he saw them the point of the arrow seemed to wobble and the refugees started to run.

The sky came alive with bursting shells as the leading plane did a half-roll and went into a dive. It came down at a terrific speed, piercing the air with a maniac scream so that on a simple impulse they all hurled themselves down to hug the earth. No one spoke because they were all of the opinion that they’d been singled out individually for destruction, that nothing on God’s earth could stop the diving plane. As the first group of bombs landed, Allerton saw the ground heave among the clouds of yellow and grey smoke, like the sea in a heavy swell. Almost immediately a second plane came down, followed by a third and a fourth, and he felt the ground thumping him in the chest as it leapt under the concussion. There was a roar nearby as a house collapsed in a great billow of dust, and children started to scream as walls fell flat and tiles flew through the air, slicing viciously at living flesh through clouds of smoke that were lit with tongues of red flame.

The horror seemed to go on for hours, while they clawed at the earth, their mouths hanging open, their eyes blinking at every scattering of debris and pulverised earth. Dimly through the din, they could hear the incoherent cries of women and the shrill agony of a wounded horse. The last salvo of bombs burst only a few yards away. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the world was full of a silence which, after the din, seemed uncanny and Allerton and his men lifted their heads, breathing painfully and still trembling.

St André seemed to have been blown off the face of the earth. It was now nothing but scree slopes of rubble, and the air was filled with wailing in a strange rising and falling cadence that was broken almost immediately by the shouts of stretcher-bearers among the broken walls as soldiers ran from hiding places to do what they could for the injured.

The old man who’d been sprawling against the suitcase was dead now, his face the colour of grey mud splashed with red, and there was no sign of the two women. A French soldier, half-buried by cascading bricks, waited in silent agony, his black hair dull with dust, only the slow clawing of his fingers showing that he was still alive. Nearby, an old woman lay on her back in the gutter, staring at the sky, one shoe missing, her toes sticking through a hole in a black woollen stocking.

The schoolroom had been hit and from the rubble a sickening stench of blood filled the air. Alongside, indifferent, the unwounded gathered their senses and, brushing off the dust that covered their clothes, began to push past in dumb panic, ignoring the injured in their determination to escape. An old woman, her face bone-white and covered with blood, held a dead baby in her arms and shook her fist at the sky. By an iron calvary three small girls were praying on their knees, their hands clasped fiercely together. In an emergency where children were born, lost and killed by the wayside, no one took any notice. When someone yelled ‘Gas!’ and everyone started stampeding again, Allerton looked helplessly on, knowing it was nothing but panic or the work of a fifth columnist.

To some of the German pilots, like Major Karl Schmesser, of
3. Sturzkampfflugzeuggeschwader (Kurt Wolff St G 1),
the job they were having to do was distasteful. Schmesser believed in the Nazi Party because it had done things for Germany which ten years before he wouldn’t have believed possible, but he was by no means a heartless man and the policy of machine-gunning refugees and dive-bombing defenceless soldiers was one he hated. On others, like Leutnant Alfred Stoos, the fighting had had a different effect. Far from affecting his morale it excited him like a drug. Ten years younger than Schmesser, he was a tough young fanatic who felt no qualms of squeamishness, and he’d taken to the job without turning a hair.

That morning, however, in his self-confidence he’d allowed himself to be caught off guard by three Hurricanes which had turned up from nowhere and shot his machine out of the sky. With his oil tank holed and his instruments and radio shattered, he’d only just managed to escape with his life, but such was his moral toughness he was mentally untouched, his only wish to get back into the air at once.

Unfortunately, however, the speed of the advance had left them without machines to replace the ones that had been lost and the mechanics were having to perform miracles of repair. They’d started at Gütersloh in Germany and moved from airfield to airfield until they were now at Outreux, south of Guise. They’d moved so fast they had few creature comforts left and were living in tents and flying from bumpy grass fields. The
Flughafenbetriebskompanie,
which flew in their supplies of fuel, bombs and ammunition in Ju.52s, had been bombed by the French in one of the few successful missions they’d carried out, so that spares were suddenly hard to come by.

Stoos stared at the cranked-winged aeroplane he’d brought back, with its spatted wheels and Jumo engine. The
Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke,
he sometimes thought, might have done better for him. Because it had hitherto been employed only against undefended targets he’d felt the Stuka was better than it was but in the last week he’d discovered how wrong he could be.

His hand moved across the hole the British bullets had torn in the swastika painted on the tail surface. There were more holes in the fuselage, one, it seemed, in each circle of the number, D/6980.

‘How long?’ he demanded.

Oberfeldwebel Hamcke, in charge of the tented hanger, slapped to attention. ‘A long time, Herr Leutnant. We can’t perform miracles.’

‘You’d better try!’

Hamcke watched the officer as he stamped away. ‘
Sondermeldung
,’
he said. ‘
Leutnant Stoos ist angekommen!
Special announcement: Leutnant Stoos is here! The last of the warriors! The trouble with that one is that he can feel his Knight’s Cross at his throat and it bothers him.’

Stoos had accepted Hamcke’s information with bad grace and now he went to see Schmesser to demand a replacement. ‘I can’t sit on my backside, Herr Major,’ he complained, ‘until someone in the rear echelon wakes up to the fact that there’s a war on. Why can’t I have Fink’s machine? He’s not as experienced as I am.’

‘And never will be if we take him off flying every time anyone gets shot up,’ Schmesser said.

‘Schlegel’s then, Herr Major! I could do more damage than he could.’

Schmesser stared at Stoos, suddenly disliking him. The boy seemed to delight in killing. ‘Schlegel’s reliable,’ he said shortly.

Stoos stamped back to the makeshift hangar where the mechanics were working over his machine. If D/6980 wasn’t in the air again quickly, he decided, somebody was going to suffer, because he’d heard that army units were already pushing east along the coast from Calais.

They certainly were – among them Leutnant Heinrich-Robert Hinze, before the war a teacher of mathematics in the
Schiefferswegakademie
in Hanover.

Hinze was no Nazi. He wasn’t even a soldier, but he had been on the reserve when the Führer had gone into Poland, and as Alfred Stoos was working off steam at Outreux, he was placidly jogging along beside the driver in an Opel staff ear in front of his battery. He was an inoffensive-looking man with pale hair and eyes and no ambition for glory whatsoever. All he wanted was to return to Hanover and his wife and two children, and go on teaching mathematics.

His fellow officers regarded him something of an oddity because he spent his spare time doing maths problems for pleasure, didn’t join in their drinking and had little interest in ultimate victory. Nevertheless, they also regarded him with a certain amount of awe because he was clear-headed and never got excited. He was not given to self-analysis and introspection and knew little about ballistics or the stresses inside a gun beyond what the figures told him, but he seemed to control his spotter and his director and rangefinder with great skill, and his team, with their clinometer and range-to-elevation and deflection instruments, were highly skilled despite Heinrich-Robert Hinze’s prim old-maidish looks. He rarely smiled, and was just about as different from Alfred Stoos as it was possible to be, but, because he so regularly and with such ease hit his targets, he was known to the battery as Bob the Nailer. He was now moving up under instructions from Army Group A to set up his guns as far forward as possible to cover the approaches to the coastal ports.