WC02 - Never Surrender (16 page)

"But why Calais?" he persisted.

"Because it is still free!" the Frenchman snapped. He drew deeply on his cigarette and his mood seemed to soften. "And because I live there. I want to see my family again before I die. Anyway, my brother still owes me money," he added, anxious not to display weakness. He threw away his cigarette and swivelled himself off the examination table. The doctor rushed forward with a crutch, anxious to get him on his way. The airman hopped on his good leg as gently as possible, then tried a couple of uncomfortable steps towards the door.

"You know Calais, Monsieur I'Anglais?"

"Oh, yes," Don replied. He'd seen it out of his bedroom window almost every day of his life.

"Good. We go."

Don wondered if, like the Frenchman, there was anyone he would want to see again before he died. As he helped him clamber into the jeep and gunned its engine, setting off with the rising sun on his right hand, he came to the conclusion there was no one. He had no one special in his life, no girlfriend, no loved one, no family at all. Except for his father.

Ruth Mueller had always had an agreeable relationship with her local butcher, Mr. Jarvis. In her eyes he was the embodiment of what an English butcher should be, with a heavily striped and slightly bloodied apron wrapped across a large stomach, above which his customers would always discover a welcoming smile. He wasn't like Watts, the other local butcher. Watts always' seemed to want to serve them short and would make up any discrepancy between what was on his scales and what was permitted on the ration by slicing off the smallest piece of meat and hoping it would be enough to make up the weight. You might end up with a chop and three additional grudging scraps, which in Ruth's case often meant scraps of fat. On the last occasion she had complained, and he'd made it clear that not only was she at liberty to buy her meat elsewhere but, in fact, he would rather prefer it. Since then it had always been Mr. Jarvis.

Mr. Jarvis had been more than fair. He could see from her appearance that Ruth was not well nourished and could tell the reason why from the way she had to scrape through the change in her purse. So when Ruth had asked him for scraps for her cat, offal that didn't fall on ration, he had on several occasions managed to wrap a kidney or a little piece of liver in amongst what he called the kitty bag so that both Ruth and the cat could eat that night. It didn't happen so often that it looked like charity, but frequently enough for it to make a difference. He was a good man, was Mr. Jarvis.

His customers, however, had grown less understanding. Nothing to do with the kitty bag; everything to do with the invasion in France. Ever since that morning, a conspicuous silence had fallen upon the other women when Ruth Mueller entered the shop. They would turn and stare at her, but not look her in the eye. Jarvis overcame the discomfort by raising the volume of his own voice to an even higher level than usual, greeting all the women together so that he didn't have to be polite to them one by one.

Yet this morning she had asked for some cat scraps and he had said it wasn't possible, he had none. Even though there was a tray of waste pieces in full view behind him.

The war had come to Pimlico.

The Frenchman had been right. Boulogne was next.

It came upon them with an awful suddenness for which they were still unprepared, and particularly so for Edward Halifax, dragged yet again from his bed. He found Ironside and other military men, equally bleary-eyed, standing around the old man's desk like schoolboys parading before their headmaster.

"The panzers have turned north," Churchill announced quietly.

And their weariness was gone. The Germans had a choice. They could have swung south to take on the retreating French and to fall upon Paris. But instead they turned north, to fall upon the British and the Channel ports. Boulogne would be next.

Quietly, privately, they had all prayed that the German panzers would sweep in the other direction, for in spite of their professional composure they knew that once the tide had set it would be impossible to turn. It would sweep the entire British Expeditionary Force away. They all knew that.

Except, it seemed, Churchill.

Halifax looked on with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment. The stubbornness of this man was beyond all reasonable limits. It was as though he were still fighting the battles of an ancient time when a cry of Shakespearean defiance from atop a horse might turn a battle on its end. But panzers were deaf; they didn't listen. They just kept coming.

"Where are the French?" Churchill demanded of his generals.

It was difficult to know. Telephone communication across the Channel had grown so desperate and disrupted that the only way of getting any manner of certainty was to fly someone over from the battlefield in France, by which time the information was already out of date. But they could tell what the French were doing, could smell it in their nostrils in spite of all the diplomatic denials.

They're falling back on Paris. Defending their own. Leaving the way open for the panzers."

"But they promised they would be counterattacking north," Churchill protested. "Weygand himself promised me."

"Only if we also counterattacked south to meet up with them. And Gort says he cannot."

"Oh, rid me of generals who will not fight!"

"He has a Victoria Cross, Prime Minister. I don't think his valour is in question," Ironside intervened.

"It's not his courage I question but his tactics. He's suffered less than five hundred casualties in the entire campaign, yet he withdraws. If he withdraws north and the French withdraw south, the laws of physics demand that the Germans will win. And when we have our backs to the sea, when our footing is sand and our reinforcements are nothing but the seagulls, what will the good Viscount Gort's tactics dictate then?"

Silence.

"He must advance! He must. We are all agreed that he must?"

You couldn't know with Churchill. He threw these suggestions out at his Chiefs of Staff and it was never clear whether he was stating a fact, issuing an order or seeking their advice. In his memoirs he would insist that he never did anything without their approval. In practice, he carried on until someone spoke up and objected. When they did, he would try to bludgeon and bully them into submission. He was always demanding action, even when the situation screamed out for prudence; he was perverse, it was his nature, like a tortoise trying to enter a hundred-yard dash.

"We are all agreed that he must," he repeated.

And no one contradicted him.

The French also insist that we send them several more squadrons of fighters," a voice ventured.

"Then we must try."

Yet now there was dissent. The Chief of the Air Staff spoke out. "If we send them more fighters, what difference will it make to the war in France?"

"It might keep the French fighting," Churchill snapped.

"That is a possibility, Prime Minister. No more than a possibility. Yet one thing we all know for certain," the Air Chief continued, taking a step forward like a matador approaching a bull, 'is that if we lose more fighters in France we will ruin any chance we've got of effective resistance when the Germans invade here."

They all heard it. When. Not if.

"We can't win this battle in France," he continued, 'and if we try we could end up losing the entire war."

The moment of silence that followed seemed to stretch to eternity. With a single phrase their nightmares had ventured into the open. They might lose this war.

Churchill's impatience sprang forward. "Rut if we do nothing we might lose the entire British Expeditionary Force." There was an edge of frustration in his voice; Halifax thought it bordered on desperation. "We must give the French every encouragement to fight."

"Yet the French insist it's the British who are not fighting." The argument was going round in circles.

"So Gort must move south. Better the BEF goes down fighting than be swept onto the sands. And let us promise the French more squadrons. A symbolic gesture of alliance."

"We must not send them to France," the Air Chief objected, clearly incensed.

"Then base them in Kent and Sussex," Churchill growled.

"But that would greatly reduce their flying time over France."

"Which will greatly reduce their rate of attrition. I thought you would welcome that."

"What will the French say?" Halifax joined the fray. "How can we promise them fighters, yet keep them in England?"

The French High Command is so confused it doesn't even know where its own armies are, let alone the R.A.F. Let us not confuse them any further. We simply won't tell them."

It was breathtaking duplicity. If only he could fool the Germans so easily. The British Prime Minister had become little more than a card sharp.

At that moment a phone rang on a desk in one of the far reaches of the room. An admiral strode to pick it up, listened carefully, then held the receiver out at arm's length in some puzzlement.

"They say it's our commander in Boulogne."

Amidst the chaos of submarine cables that crossed the Channel, a circuit had at last been completed. It wouldn't last for long. Halifax watched in bemused horror as, with surprising energy, Churchill sprang across the room to grab the phone. Moments later he was engaged in a heated discussion about which end of the quay the troops should be fighting from. He barked orders, then listened, but not for long, before he was shouting once more.

"Commander, if there are so many tanks massed in front of you, it should be easy enough to hit a few!"

Then the connection went dead. Boulogne was gone. Churchill was left looking at the phone trying to will it back to life.

The war was being played from hour to hour, without any plan, and every hour it was getting worse. Halifax was decided. This was, indeed, madness. It could not go on.

(Thursday 23 May 1940. William L. Shirer, CBS.)

Good evening. This is Berlin.

I returned here from the front a couple of hours ago after a four-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive from the Belgian border. Berlin, I must say, seems a little quiet after three days of hearing the big guns go off and the heavy bombs exploding ... Correspondents of the three American press associations and I had quite a time of it making ourselves heard on the telephone with our reports last night because of the noise of British bombs and the German anti-aircraft guns nearby. Actually, the British bombers were aiming for an important military objective about a hundred yards from our hotel. They kept at it all night, and were always warm, so to speak, but not hot. The nearest they hit was about four or five hundred yards from the hotel, and though the bombs jarred us, they did not jar us enough to break any windows .. .

During the day, at least on the Belgian front west of Brussels, where we were, the Allies do not do any bombing. And one of the things that impressed me most was the picture of the German army bringing up men, guns and supplies, jamming the roads with them for miles and miles behind the front, without hindrance from the Allied air forces. I'm convinced that the ease with which the German Command has been able to bring up reinforcements and guns and ammunition, and at an unbelievable speed, is one of the reasons for the German success so far.

I understand that this is not the case on the other side because of the deadly work of the German air force behind the Allied lines. This state of affairs gives the Germans a tremendous advantage even before the battle starts .. .

It was only forty miles, yet they had spent two days trying to get to Calais and still they weren't there. They might never make it.

It was partly the roads, of course, flooded to impassability with refugees. An entire nation seemed to be on the move. Teachers, nuns, bakers and sweeps, bureaucrats who had fled their bureaux and policemen who had long since given up trying to police; they came in lorries, on tractors, in carts, on foot; horses pulled cars and children pushed their own prams until they came together to form vast eddies of humanity that swirled across every route. They had only one thing in common, these refugees, their terror of the advancing Germans. They came from all points and were heading they knew not where, choking every route with their despair.

The refugees were one reason why it seemed to Don that he might not make it. The other reason was the bloody Frenchman.

The sous-lieutenant Don still hadn't been entrusted with his name seemed intent on discovering more to complain about with every passing mile. If it wasn't Don's driving it was the despicable nature of the British-built jeep as it coughed and choked its way in low gear through the press of those around them. More than once Don thought about leaving him to fend for himself, or at least handing him over to the next detachment of French troops.

The troops were everywhere, standing around or squatting disconsolately in villages and at crossroads, even sitting in roadside cafes and simply waiting. It was from the soldiers that Don and the Frenchman got their supplies of fuel. It seemed they had plenty to give away. But none was carrying arms.

It was as Don was filling up with more purloined petrol that he saw an artillery unit disconsolately spiking their guns.

"Why are they doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"Destroying their weapons."

"They appear to have forgotten to give you any weapons at all," the Frenchman snorted in contempt.

"I'm noncombatant."

"Like the rest of your countrymen."

"We all came to France to do our bit."

"Ah, there speaks a true Englishman. Happy so long as his battles are fought on someone else's ground. Just like the last war."

"That's enough! My father fought in France. We left millions of dead behind."

"And your government seems determined not to repeat that experience. Is that why they have refused us planes and sent only four miserable divisions?"

"Ten! We sent ten."

"Ten? France has more than a hundred. But as we say, the English will always fight to the last Frenchman."

"I've been driving all day and I don't see too many bloody Frenchmen fighting for anything!" Don retorted.