WC02 - Never Surrender (20 page)

Some days earlier they had been instructed to prepare a contingency plan just in case. The war had been drawing closer; at first the battle front had been spread across several countries, but with every passing day it was being squeezed into a smaller corner of France. There were now only two ports left open to the British army: Calais and Dunkirk. Ramsay had spent the last few days shuttling anxiously between the maps on his desk and the brick-and-iron-railing balcony that formed the end of his tunnel where it emerged from the cliffs. From that balcony he could see it all. He had watched as Boulogne had disappeared in an evil smudge of shell-bursts and ash that had stained the horizon on what had been a cloudless day. Calais would shortly follow; he could see it with his bare eyes. All night long the flames had fought against the darkness, gaining ground, and first light revealed plumes of foul smoke rising high into the air. Through his binoculars he could see the clock tower on the Hotel de Ville staring at him through the smoke; automatically, he checked it against his pocket watch. The clock was still running. If only time would slow, run back for just a little, give them a few extra hours to prepare for whatever lay ahead.

But what did lie ahead? No one could tell him. Would the long-awaited advance upon the enemy begin, when they would be expected to ferry across vast quantities of new supplies to help the BEF on its way? Or would it be that other option retreat, rout when they would try to salvage as much as they could from the chaos of defeat?

Which would it be, what should they plan for? he had asked. Everything, they had replied. Just in case.

In case of what? They couldn't tell him. But as he looked through his binoculars at the carnage across the water and the first wave of dive-bombers going in for their attack, he knew without any measure of doubt what they were facing.

Disaster.

Don rubbed his eyes. He was having difficulty believing what he saw.

He had woken to find burnt paper and cinders falling around him like autumn leaves. Down one gutter of the street crept a tide of burning oil, while on the other side rushed water from a broken main. Fires blazed everywhere, smoke filtered out the early sun. A violence had been hurled upon Calais with such compelling force that nothing seemed to have survived intact.

And yet there was the owner of a cafe, setting out his tables on the pavement as if it were an ordinary day. He was elderly, stooped, the Croix de Guerre dangling from his waistcoat. Crazy, perhaps, but what else did he have to do, how else could he find distraction from what was happening around him? A body lay on the street corner, a civilian, amidst a scattering of rubble. When the cafe owner had finished laying out his tables he sat down with a bottle of cognac, raised a glass to his dead neighbour, and drank.

A far more extraordinary sight was that of the defenders of Calais. So far as Don could see, they consisted mostly of members of the 1st Searchlight Regiment. The principal task of a Searchlight unit was, as their name implied, to operate large searchlights in the hope of dazzling and blinding any low-flying and dive-bombing aircraft. They had practically no infantry training and were never expected to engage the enemy with anything other than giant torches. Yet here they were, manning positions against panzers, bloodied but not yet beaten.

Then a sight still more impossible. Infantrymen were amongst the Searchlights; at first Don assumed that they were perhaps training the Searchlights in the use of the Bren guns and the Boys anti-tank rifles that were being passed back and forth between them. But no, it was the other way round. It was the infantrymen who were taking instruction, soldiers of the Queen Victoria's Rifles .. .

Don and Claude had no more time to wonder at the extraordinary sights of Calais before the war caught up with them again. A single-engined Fieseler Storch spotter plane flew overhead, leaving a trail of white smoke to indicate the front of the British line. It had barely disappeared before the barrage began. Suddenly it seemed personal. The Stukas appeared to know precisely where Don and Claude were cowering and launched wave after wave upon them. Paving stones were tossed through the air, shards of glass formed themselves into terrifying volleys of missiles, and on all sides fragments of broken buildings tried to reach out and bury them. But this was merely the overture. The panzers picked up the score and began hurling flaming shells that bounced along the street, leaving trails of sparks as they ricocheted along the cobbles. The noise was so intense that it became impossible to speak; even when they tried, the dust filled their lungs and made them choke.

As the smoke and dust cleared, they could find no trace of the cafe proprietor and barely any trace of his cafe. On the corner lay the body of a young girl, her skirts blown up above her waist. There was no time to move her; a British soldier knelt and gently pulled her tartan skirt down over her knees.

As he rose from tending the dead girl, the soldier saw Don and Claude. He shouted something that was unintelligible against the roar of the new fires and waved anxiously to them. They shook their heads. He shouted again.

The defence of Calais had been planned around a series of shrinking perimeters. The first had been set at the pinch-points on the roads and bridges beyond the outer walls, with the second perimeter provided by the walls themselves. Now the commanding officer, Brigadier Nicholson, had ordered a further retreat, to positions in and around the medieval Citadel that guarded the western side of the harbour. Nicholson had done this because earlier that day he had received fresh instructions from the War Office. These instructions had been passed down and had filtered through as far as the soldier who was now waving at Don and Claude.

At last his words stumbled through to them. Something about pulling their fingers out. Because they were all going home.

When Colville walked into Churchill's bedroom a little after nine, the Prime Minister was sitting up in bed wearing a florid red silk dressing gown and surrounded by a shower of papers that had emerged from his Ministerial box. It took only a moment to gauge the old man's mood.

"Tell me, Jock. On whose bloody side Gort is supposed to be fighting?"

"Prime Minister?" "Calais is under blockade from the Germans and Gort's tanks are less than twenty miles away. So why doesn't he attack? Break through the encirclement? Punch a hole through the panzers from behind and send them limping back home? He keeps complaining that his nine divisions are about to be starved out yet he refuses to send even a couple of brigades to clear his supply lines through the port. What the hell is he doing?"

"He's under pressure along the entire front. It must be difficult to disengage."

"Damn his difficulties! The Germans seem able to dance around bloody France to their heart's content while our own tanks seem incapable of moving even a few miles."

"The situation in Belgium is looking very fragile; we've just had a report in from .. ."

He trailed off. Churchill was no longer listening. He was reading a note, and the hand that held it was trembling. It was a copy of a telegram sent to the garrison at Calais a few hours beforehand while Churchill was asleep. It was signed by a junior officer, and informed Nicholson that in spite of the previous instruction permitting him to evacuate his forces, there had been a change of mind. The junior officer reminded Nicholson that technically he was under the orders of the local French general 'who has ordered no repeat no evacuation'. This meant, the telegram continued, that 'you must comply for the sake of Allied solidarity. Your role is therefore to hold on .. ."

To hold on. Without assistance? Against overwhelming numbers of panzers? For the sake of "Allied solidarity'? Simply so that someone in the War Office could avoid a row with the French?

"Jock, to die for one's country is one thing. But to tell a man he is going to die for his superiors' convenience is an abomination!" Churchill was shouting, attacking the telegram in fury, ripping it to shreds. "Find out who sent this wretched scrap. Have him strung from the highest tower. I mean it! I will not have this. I will not have this! Do you hear?"

He threw himself out of bed and the entire contents of his Ministerial box cascaded to the floor.

Yet already it was too late. As Don and Claude made their faltering way back behind the new defensive line, they could see British tanks being set ablaze by their own crews, fuel supplies being put to the flame, truck engines being run without oil until their vital parts had seized. They couldn't know it, but even as they made their way inside the Citadel, an officer was hacking away at the cross-Channel cable that provided the only telephone link between Calais and England. The British army didn't want to leave behind anything that might be of use to the enemy, so they were smashing and destroying as much as possible, because they had been told they were going home. Their new orders hadn't yet made it through.

Ruth had read the newspapers quickly that morning. She had found little in them to detain her. Boulogne had fallen; the editorials were full of gloom about imminent invasion; and for the first time the names of women had begun to appear in the lists of those killed. But she noted that they were still advertising holidays in Paris with 'special rates for members of the Allied forces'. Oh, the English and their sense of humour.

Yet as she walked around the streets of London, so little seemed to have changed. Breastworks of sandbags had appeared at a few places around Whitehall, manned by soldiers with serious-looking guns, but they offered nothing but smiles and already seemed something of a tourist attraction. Crowds of boys gathered round, hoping for sweets. Londoners had been taking their own precautions, too. Removing pictures from the walls. Storing valuables. Preparing buckets of sand. But the shops in the West End seemed as crowded as ever almost more so with people spending money while they still could. They were preparing for invasion as though it were Christmas. Ah, the English!

Ruth wondered what it was like in Berlin. She had listened to one of the American broadcasters on her wireless last night, who had recounted just how normal Berlin seemed. The pavement coffee shops of the Kurfurstendamm were packed with people who seemed to have nothing more on their minds than their ice cream and ersatz coffee. Every theatre was open and packed, every lake and woodland outside the city teeming with excited families, the Tiergarten echoing to the sound of children's laughter, so he reported. No air raid since last September.

On the surface London seemed much the same, but Ruth sensed that something here was changing. The English were stubborn, didn't jump to conclusions, were slow to reveal their emotions. Yet there was a sense, which perhaps a foreigner could pick up more easily, of something going astray. The thrust south had been promised for days but still hadn't happened, and it was beginning to dawn on some that perhaps it never would, while the ridiculous sense of English fair play was leading some to conclude that because they had won the last one, perhaps it was Jerry's turn this time around. There was no obvious despair, but you could hear the rustle of growing doubts. The collective stiff upper lip was freezing solid, and the English marched along looking straight ahead, fearful of what they would find if they glanced to the side. Their belief in themselves was gently rocking.

And the English didn't seem to hate enough. She remembered how in the last war the Germans had been swept up in a tide of hate that had hurled their menfolk onto the barbed wire and at the throats of the enemy. The Germans seemed to have hidden depths to their ability to hate that the English simply didn't possess. Perhaps it was because the English had fought wars over so many centuries and had grown soft and complacent, while the Germans were so new to the game, more enthusiastic.

The Germans were not like these English. The English found bizarre fulfilment in their rose bushes and ridiculous sports, in their ironies and subtleties. The Germans had no subtlety. You could see that in their philosophy, which was full of abstractions and no good at debating the ethics of the torture chamber.

Perhaps that was why no one had stood up to Hitler. Not the Social Democrats, not the Catholics, not nationalists, not the old leaders, not the generals. There had been no civil war against Hitler, no war of any sort until Hitler himself had been ready to start one. And now no one else seemed ready to stand up to him.

Except Churchill.

The preposterous, pretentious, deeply flawed and drunk Winston Churchill.

And Ruth Mueller, of course.

The newspapers that morning had been full of rumours about the invasion. What would it be like if that happened? She had run from them once, and now there was nowhere else to run. She wouldn't get a second chance. That's why she had no choice but to do what she could to stand up to Hitler even if it also meant standing up to the tantrums of that ridiculous Mr. Churchill.

Ramsay slipped out onto his balcony to check the time. He no longer trusted his watch. The endless days spent locked deep inside the earth combined with the lack of sleep had begun to disorientate him; he needed to get out to make sure whether it was afternoon or the dead of night.

A blast of sunlight and salted breeze slapped him in the face and revived his senses. Beneath him, the three huge quays of the harbour jutted out into the sea, and between them craft of all kinds bustled about their work like bees around a hive. This was his hive and they were his bees, although there were many parts of this increasingly kaleidoscopic operation about which he knew little or nothing. It wasn't lack of interest but rather a matter of delegation; it was the only way to get things done with a small staff. Delegation required both judgement and faith and as every day had slipped past, it seemed to be requiring more faith than ever.

Across the Channel in Calais, it still continued. The glare of the sun made it more difficult to see with the naked eye, but it was possible even at this distance to hear the barrage of fire that was being laid down upon the town. They had told him to be ready for evacuation, then resupply, after which no one seemed able to tell him what to expect. But he knew what the troops in Calais could expect. Poor bastards.