WC02 - Never Surrender (21 page)

He sighed, sucked in a breath of sharp salt air, checked his watch. Time to descend once more to his underworld. As he put his pocket watch away, with his usual habit he raised his binoculars to the clock across the water.

His sigh turned to a soft moan of despair. Even through the smoke and glare it was unmistakable. A swastika was fluttering above the Hotel de Ville.

As they fell back, the defenders of Calais began to leave many of the landmarks behind. The Hotel de Ville, the theatre, the Gare Centrale, the Hopital Civil: all were now German. But the docks and the Citadel weren't. The Citadel of Calais was a towering construction of the stoutest walls built almost four hundred years earlier to guard against the English; the sons of England were to find many reasons to be grateful for the diligence of the medieval engineers.

It was a day not of ordered recollections but of images that would embed themselves into the memories of men for as long as they lived. Lace curtains fluttering in the breeze to reveal the snout of a Bren gun; the scorching heat of buildings as they burned around you; the slow realization that you hadn't eaten for two days and might never eat again; English soldiers finding cover behind an upturned Louis-Quatorze table while a Frenchman took his shelter behind the bodies of two dead comrades; foxholes being dug with helmets, with no time to dig graves; last rites; last breaths; whispered lies about relief columns; unarmed soldiers waiting their turn for a rifle, waiting for someone to die; images of soldiers drinking champagne not because they wanted to be drunk but because there was no water and their thirst was irresistible, and each man willing to exchange a crate of champagne for a handful of bullets.

Yet in the midst of the carnage there were civilians, dousing the flames as their houses burned, scurrying across bullet-racked streets to safer shelter, even opening their shops to hand out food to anxious customers.

Don and Claude witnessed this, and much more. As they stumbled onward, with Claude in ever-increasing pain, they saw an armoured car bearing a white flag stopping on the far side of the Pont Georges Cinq the German side. A civilian emerged and walked forward. He was an elderly man, bald with a neatly trimmed moustache and hooded, sorrowful eyes.

"Je suis le Maire de Calais," he told the guard manning the roadblock at the British end. "My name is Andre Gershell. I ask you to consider surrendering. For the sake of my people."

"It is for the sake of your people that we fight."

The Mayor looked wretched. The English were not to know it, but he had remained behind at the Hotel de Ville when most of those around him had fled. He wanted to do what he could to save his people and to save the old town around the port, which was being destroyed hour by hour; it wasn't for him to decide when the war that had fallen upon his town should end, but he could remind everyone of the costs of it continuing.

He requested that he be taken to the commanding officer. As he stepped forward, he passed near Don and Claude. Claude had spoken very little since the discovery of abandoned home, but as Gershell passed by he grabbed his sleeve. "Monsieur le Maire, excuse me. Do you know anything of my family, les Dubuis?"

But there were so many families. With a sad, exhausted stare, the Mayor shook his head and continued on.

Claude watched him disappear, his shoulders crumpled in despair, his head held low from the weight of exhaustion and shame.

"He is either a saint or a total fool," he whispered, 'to do the Germans' work for them."

"Why?" Don asked.

"Because he is a Jew."

It took only minutes for the Mayor to walk the couple of hundred yards to the Citadel. Brigadier Nicholson met him in the courtyard; their interview was brief. "If the Germans want Calais," the mayor was told, 'they will have to fight for it."

But they had bought themselves a little time. While the surrender talks were going on, a lull had occurred in the fighting. There had been other pauses, too. When the Germans had seen the British destroying their own tanks, they had thought it was all over and had relaxed for a while. They did the same thing when they saw the swastika flying from the Hotel de Ville, but that was still five hundred murderous yards from the Citadel. Then the German forward positions had been shelled by their own artillery, causing more confusion and delay. No German soldier wanted to die for a battle they thought was all but finished. Moment by moment, the day was being stretched towards dusk.

A British artillery unit had struggled all afternoon to repair one of the guns spiked the previous day by the French. Towards evening they were ready to fire their first shell. There was a mighty explosion and much smoke, and for a moment the gun disappeared from view. When it could be seen once more, the barrel was leaning at a curious angle. Slowly, almost gracefully, the barrel fell to the ground with a hollow clatter and rolled away like a children's toy. A little down the line, soldiers from the Searchlight Regiment raised an ironic cheer, only to be rebuked by their sergeant major. "It's no laughing matter!" he insisted. He marched over to the artillery men to inspect the damage. When he returned he looked witheringly at his men. "They're laughin' their heads off, too. Ain't anybody going to take this bleedin' war seriously?"

It was just before last light that Don and Claude arrived at the Hopital Militaire in the shadow of the Citadel. It had taken them all day to make their way less than a mile, Claude hobbling in great discomfort, Don supporting him. The windows of the hospital had all been blown out; there was shattered glass everywhere and it crunched beneath their boots like puddles of ice as they made their way inside.

It was packed with pain, tragedy, sorrow, death. In every corner a story of sacrifice was being played out. Men moaned quietly as a priest muttered prayers in the ears of the dying; more wounded arrived as shell bursts continued their relentless shaking of the walls. Flies circled, inspecting every man.

"Can I help you?" a ragged nurse asked Claude.

The Frenchman looked at the sights that confronted him, tears in his eyes, and shook his head. "No, thank you. I'm not that sick."

John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, the Sixth Viscount Gort of Limerick, was not a popular man. Although as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force he occupied one of the most senior positions in the British army, he still had superiors. He also had senior men under his command who thought little of him. Partly this was because of his lack of strategic grip he always seemed to be counting the leaves instead of cutting a path through the forest, as one of them put it but largely it was jealousy. He had been promoted over the heads of many able officers because of his friendship with the Secretary of State for War, whom he'd met in a collision on a ski slope. The Secretary of State had long since gone, shuffled out of the pack, leaving Gort in an exposed position from where he could upset almost everyone. And he had. He had infuriated his Prime Minister, and he'd been the cause of the most bitter recriminations from the French for his failure to advance south. They were still insisting he should do so.

Gort had been over-promoted. He wasn't up to the job -not this job, at least. But there wasn't a man on the planet who was. And Gort was nothing if not brave, fearless in the face of hostile fire. He'd won the Distinguished Service Order with two bars in the First War, and a Military Cross. Oh, and there was that dark brown gunmetal Victoria Cross, too, which he'd won at the very end of the war when others were looking towards home fires and family reunions. They only handed out those things for acts of extraordinary valour, for self-sacrifice and extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy. But in those days the enemy was always in front of him.

His headquarters were in a small and undistinguished chateau at Premesques. He sat alone and in silence at his desk in the drawing room with a map spread out before him. Gort was a guardsman; that meant something. Duty. Obedience. Tradition. But as he'd grown older he'd found there was a higher duty that didn't always fit neatly alongside the other values. It perplexed him.

He paced up and down, fretful, before returning to the study of his map. He spent a long time poring over it. Then, early in the evening, he walked through to the small office next door where sat his Chief of Staff, Henry Pownall. His hand lay on his chest where his medals would hang.

"Henry, I've had a hunch. We can't attack south, it's impossible. And I don't like the smell of what we're getting from the front in Belgium. We need to fall back and reinforce our left."

"You do realize, sir, that's against all the orders we've had."

"Yes, I know that. All the same, it's got to be done."

"The French won't attack on their own."

"They won't attack at all. That's why it's got to be done."

Pownall sat quietly for a moment. He didn't disagree with Gort's analysis, but the- consequences would be enormous. It would mean the end of the BEF. "Disobeying a direct order from your superiors and the PM. They'll have their pound of flesh for that."

"Better a British butcher than a German one, Henry."

(Saturday 25 May 1940. William L. Shirer, CBS.)

Good evening. This is Berlin.

In the opinion of German military circles, the fate of the great Allied army bottled up in Flanders is sealed. The Germans believe that army, containing the flower of the French, British and Belgian forces, cannot now escape .. .

Tonight the German Command, in giving us a general picture of the situation as it sees it, stated categorically that the Allies cut off in Flanders and the Artois now have no more possibility of breaking out of their trap. As the High Command stated it, quote: "The end of the enemy here is imminent'. How many Allied troops are cut off? German generals at the front to whom I put the question earlier in the week said about a million. Well-informed circles in Berlin think it may be a little higher than that. Roughly, they estimate the trapped armies this way: four hundred thousand Belgians, five hundred thousand French, two hundred thousand British .. .

Although he didn't suspect it, Tiny' Ironside's fate had been sealed since the bruising encounter with the young officer from Calais. The chaos wasn't entirely Ironside's fault, but as Chief of the Imperial General Staff it was his responsibility. That went with the job. Everything was his responsibility, not only Calais but Boulogne, the BEF and the entire buggeration factor in France. Decent man, Churchill thought, even a friend, so far as such things went, but responsible.

And he had been invited to join Churchill for dinner. He very much wished he hadn't.

He sat opposite Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, with Churchill at the head of the table. The Prime Minister wasn't speaking. He hadn't said a word all through the soup, which he hadn't finished, and they had to wait until the beef and a third glass of wine had arrived before they were offered anything more than grunts. Then:

"Blackness. Nothing but an interminable trail of sorrows leads to this door and I suspect you have more sorrows for me, Tiny."

It was just the three of them, informal, first names, say what you like after all, he would. Yet Ironside chose not to dispute his Prime Minister's gloom.

"Where would you like me to start, Winston?"

"Bloody Belgium."

"Bloody, indeed." A slight resetting of the lips, a straightening of the back. "They've broken through. Either side of Courtrai. The Belgians are in retreat, the Germans driving forward. At some points they are probably less than ten miles from Dunkirk even as we talk."

Churchill, who had been toying with his beef, now pushed it away untouched. Most unusual. Two anxious, exhausted eyes raised themselves from the table. "What do you think will happen?"

"The Belgians will collapse. Either they will be swept aside by the panzers, or they will throw in the towel. Probably the latter my information is that King Leopold has lost the appetite for the fight. Which means it will happen sooner rather than later."

'"It"? What does "it" portend in this context?"

Oh, how the smallest of words could contain as many nightmares as a man could ever dream .. .

'"It" means .. . the end. Defeat. Unless somehow we can keep a foothold at Dunkirk. Fetch back some of the BEF. Live to fight another day, perhaps." His tone made it clear that he thought this was as likely as stumbling upon moonshine in the middle of the day, yet, even before the echo of his words had died away, two fists were pounding upon the table.

"How is this possible? How can it be that one man, with not a single ally, can force his will upon the whole of Europe when we, with all our leagues and ententes and alliances, have been dragged to the brink of disaster? Austria. Czechoslovakia. Poland. Holland. Norway. The Netherlands. Now Belgium. And next France." The cutlery jumped afresh with every name in the litany. Suddenly the crashing ceased and he was jabbing a finger.

"You see, Tiny, I sometimes think that there is a streak of defeatism amongst our General Staff, that they simply don't want to fight. They think That Bloody Man is invincible. But they're wrong! He's never been tested. He's a paper Caesar who has never faced the trial of true steel. Never been an English schoolboy."

Schoolboy? What the hell did that mean? Both Ironside and Eden glanced at Churchill's glass, trying to remember how often it had been raised. The man swept on.

"But now the hour has come. We discover the breaking point, not only of him, but of ourselves. You see, he is deluded. Grossly deluded. About us! Every experience he has suggests that the British will not fight this war. He saw that we entered it were dragged into it only with reluctance. Since then we have contested it barely at all. But what if we did? There's the question. What if Old England were to rise up and roar its defiance? What if we were to show him that we are lions and not terrified lambs?"

"But what does this all mean, Winston?" Eden interjected, alarmed by the cascade of romantic outpouring and afraid that the old man was, after all, entirely too old.