WC02 - Never Surrender

by Michael Dobbs

  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 stan
d 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.

  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."