by John Harris
He was still thinking about the future when a scout car came up alongside and an officer stood up in the back.
‘We’re moving?’ Horndorff said.
‘Yes.’
‘Why in God’s name did they stop us?’
‘Because the spearheads have had fifty per cent losses – battle and wear and tear – and they’re afraid of losing more in the flooded areas up by the Aa Canal.’
Horndorff made a derisive gesture. ‘The attack’s lost momentum,’ he said. ‘We could have collared the whole of the BEF’
The officer in the car shrugged. ‘It’s over now, anyway. First Panzers are on the coast, Second at Arnecke, and Sixth and Eighth near Hazebrouck. Twentieth Motorised are near Cassel and the Hoth Group’s trying to cut the Tommies off at Armentières. You’re to head towards Vitry. Lorried infantry and tanks up there seem to be in trouble.’
Horndorff reached for his microphone, and an hour later Vitry lay just in front of him over the brow of the hill. He could see houses and the spire of the church and, as he glanced at his map, he saw that it was on a crossroads, with one route leading directly north where the Tommies were trying to withdraw to the coast, the other east where they were still trying to scuttle back from their fatuous adventure into Belgium.
Something seemed to have gone wrong at Vitry, however, because in the open area in front he could see columns of smoke crawling skywards like black treacle and burning tanks and several tiny figures running back, their clothing on fire. As he watched, a rising pall told him another tank had been hit, but he was quite calm as he passed the word to the rear, giving the proper coordinates and calling for help from the Luftwaffe. Horndorff was a regular soldier, not a death or glory boy, and it wasn’t his job to get his tanks knocked out to capture a wretched little village.
Those Stukas that Horndorff was calling up were to have a profound effect on the life of nineteen-year-old Marie-Josephine Berthelot.
Although her home was at Saméaon far to the east, at that moment Marie-Josephine was in Bout-Dassons just to the west of where Horndorff waited. The last fortnight had been a nightmare of noise, smoke and terror, and she was wishing she hadn’t quarrelled with her family before she’d left Saméaon. Her parents had been unable to appreciate that the world had moved on from the days when a girl accepted without question whomever they put forward for a husband and, as she was a teacher of English, not a peasant, the quarrel had been going on for weeks.
‘I will not marry Monsieur Ambry,’ she announced flatly. ‘He is a dirty old man and I shall be leaving home.’ She’d put on her best cream coat and, without saying goodbye, had left at once for Esuires near Lille to stay with her friend, Isobelle Lemaître, until the storm had blown over. Her resistance had slowly weakened as the days had passed, however, and she had been almost prepared to go home when the first bomb had dropped.
On the night of 9 May they’d heard anti-aircraft guns and seen searchlights, and it had been reported that there was an air raid to the north-east. The following day they’d heard that the very thing they’d all been dreading had happened – the Germans had attacked.
From that moment, they’d seen aeroplanes all the time – none of them ever French, British or Belgian – and then the refugees had started. Finally there’d been French soldiers, and when they’d asked how things were going, the men had replied quite simply: ‘The Germans are coming!’ It had shocked Marie-Josephine to life at last. Esuires was no place for her.
She’d packed her belongings and gone to the bus-stop to go home. But suddenly there were no buses heading east and, deciding to head for relatives who kept a café at Vitry, she’d borrowed a few francs from Isobelle and taken the bus north instead. Vitry was full of refugees and when she arrived she learned that her parents were dead. The farm had been on the direct route of the panzers and the place had been razed to the ground. The news had shocked her but, because she was of hard-headed northern French stock, she’d dried her tears and accepted the fact that she was on her own.
The news that came in now was that the Belgians were collapsing and that Queen Wilhelmina of Holland was in England, and from then on the air was filled with noise and she’d soon found she could distinguish between bombs and anti-aircraft fire. The refugees had continued to pour past, ancient carriages driven by ancient coachmen and ancient cars with solid tyres and acetylene lamps, dusty from years of lying unused in country garages; priests, frantic women with children, farmers trying vainly to drive their stock. They were followed by soldiers in lorries with buckled mudguards, their faces stubbled and grimy. The rumours they spread that half the refugees were really spies or enemy agents were so widely believed that many refused to help them.
It had seemed to be time to move further west and she’d just set off towards the bus-stop when the German aeroplanes arrived. She had stood, shocked and uncertain what to do, until a French soldier, diving at her, had knocked her flying into the ditch and she’d lain there with all the breath knocked out of her body, the man’s heavy frame across her in a way that might have terrified her if she hadn’t been already frightened out of her wits.
She lay with her arms over her head, her ears assailed by the shriek and clang of explosions, her eyes full of flashing light. Her body seemed to be lifted from the ground in a serious of jerks as the explosions occurred, and she was deafened, half-blinded and stupefied by the clamour, trying instinctively to claw herself under the ground away from the showers of stones, rubble, splintered wood and flying fragments of glass and pulverised soil.
As the ringing in her head died and she became aware that the din had stopped, she rose to her knees, her hair matted with dirt, her face caked with it, spitting it from her tongue as she tried to draw breath in what seemed an airless vacuum. The man who’d flung her down had already disappeared, running down the village street, and then she realised she could hear the crackling of flames and the high thin sound of someone crying.
She decided she’d better go back to the café to clean up, but it was only when she was on top of it that she realised it wasn’t there any more and that the screaming she could hear came from her aunt who was sitting by the roadside, her clothes blasted from her body. Her face was black with soot, her open wailing mouth a round pink hole, and one eye hung out on her cheek like a bloody ping-pong ball. Of her uncle there was no sign.
The British soldiers reached the village with their guns as her aunt died the following afternoon. They’d fought all the way back from Belgium and they were grimy, stinking and struggling under the dead weight of weariness. No one welcomed them because they’d soon learned that soldiers brought bombers, and Marie-Josephine spent a whole day and night in a cellar, shivering, hungry and frightened, her mind revolving again and again round the question, ‘Where shall I go now?’ The only other relation she knew of was an aunt in La Panne on the Belgian coast.
As she’d set off again, the road, its borders green with the first colours of spring, was already crammed with demoralised and distressed humanity toiling in the sunshine. In the distance the horizon was shrouded with smoke clouds from burning villages, and to the south she could hear the continuous rumble of guns, bombs and aircraft. In the fields beyond the crossroads there were dead cattle and broken trees.
Just ahead of her a woman was pushing a perambulator full of small children like pink baby mice in a nest. Alongside the woman a man stumbled along, bent under a load of bedding and blankets, and a sorry-looking mule trudged head-down between the shafts of a broken cart whose wheels shrieked for lack of grease.
They’d not gone more than half a mile beyond Bout-Dassons when a man just ahead turned and glanced up at the sky. His expression changed as he pointed and, swinging round, she saw the glint of sun on metal wings over Vitry where half a dozen aeroplanes nosed into a dive. Horrified, she heard the distant scream of the sirens and recognised them as dive-bombers, the symbol of treachery and mutilation; then the column broke like chaff before a wind. The man with the bl
ankets headed for the ditch but the woman with the perambulator was running ahead in a wild erratic scamper, the perambulator bouncing and rocking on the rough surface of the road. As the bullets passed her, chirping in a high strange note as they whined away, Marie-Josephine saw one of the children fall out of the perambulator and lie on its back, screaming. The woman didn’t seem to notice in her panic and went on running, then Marie-Josephine saw her stagger and her knees go limp almost as if they’d turned to rubber. Her hands dropped limply and the perambulator went rolling on by itself, curving slowly off the crown of the road towards the ditch. As it disappeared the woman stared after it, her hands at her side, her knees gradually giving way, then she collapsed in a puff of dust, and Marie-Josephine started running.
The man with the pile of blankets was there first. He appeared from the ditch, a sturdy working man in a cap and a ragged jacket, who scooped up the fallen child as he went. He arrived by his wife at the same time as Marie-Josephine and, as he turned her over, her head fell back and Marie-Josephine saw there were small welling patches of blood all over her clothing. The man was sobbing as Marie-Josephine turned to the ditch where the perambulator had disappeared.
It lay on its side and as she stopped on the road above it, she saw there were splintered holes in its side. The amount of blood turned her stomach over and she swung away abruptly and vomited weakly into the grass.
As the Stukas lifted into the sky again, Major Karl Schmesser was frowning deeply. The army was pleased with the confusion and dismay that was being spread by the policy of attacking the roads, but to Schmesser it seemed like sheer slaughter and, try as he might, he couldn’t fit it into the rules of civilised warfare. Holding the Stuka in a nose-up attitude he was narrow-eyed with self-disgust and decided that perhaps he should let Stoos fly after all, because this was the sort of work he was fitted for.
He glanced across at Schlegel and then at Fink climbing on his left. What Stoos said was quite true, he had to admit, but, though he had no great hopes of Fink ever becoming a successful pilot, it was Schmesser’s job to try to make him one. He swallowed, suddenly hating Stoos’ ardour, hating himself and the job he’d had to do, even for a moment conscious of doubts in the infallibility of German leadership.
As he was trying to thrust his thoughts aside, Unteroffizier Roehme, his gunner, banged him on the shoulder.
‘Achtung,’ he shouted. ‘Achtung, Spitfeuer!’
Unteroffizier Roehme was making the mistake many German airmen made, because there were no Spitfires in France and the machine diving from the sun was a Hurricane.
Its pilot, Flying Officer Rupert Arthur Rokesby Conybeare, was just twenty and looked sixteen. He was round-faced with smooth cheeks, his hair so pale as to make him anonymous. He didn’t drink and didn’t smoke and the only thing about him that indicated his dedication were the faint dark lines below his eyes which showed how tired he was.
He’d been in France since September the previous year, and he’d been flying in action on and off ever since. When he’d gone on leave at Christmas he’d already had five German aircraft to his credit and had hoped to be able to cut a dash with the girls in his home town of Harrogate in Yorkshire. Unfortunately, the girls in Harrogate had looked at his childish features and refused to take him seriously, and he’d returned to France aware of something his father had once said about the previous war that England didn’t seem like home any more.
He’d added another two German machines to his. score in the early days of the year and then, on 10 May, had been dragged out of bed after a noisy night when guns had been firing along the frontier to the east. ‘Wing’s in one hell of a stew,’ he was told. ‘The balloon’s gone up at last!’
They’d been expecting it a long time and for the most part the RAF was going to have to commit suicide with machines which were as out of date as the bow and arrow – ‘Ganz ohne Bedeutung’ – quite negligible – they’d once been contemptuously called by a captured Nazi pilot.
There had been so many plots it had been hard to know which one to head for. Nevertheless, four more Germans had fallen to earth before Conybeare’s guns. Two others had limped home damaged, and he knew very well that more than one gunner would never pull a trigger again.
The day he bumped into Major Schmesser’s Stukas they had been ordered to patrol Lille at 10,000 feet but they hadn’t been there more than ten minutes when they were warned of activity near Courtrai had swung north-east. Five minutes later, Conybeare had seen forty Dorniers in close formation and above them squadron after squadron of 110s stepped up to 18,000 feet.
He lost the other Hurricanes as they went into the attack so he selected one of the 110s and dived on it. Pieces flew from the German machine at once and flames leapt from the engines, and he just had time to see it go down into a vertical dive when he heard a crash behind him and swerved to see another 110 coming at him. His engine started to smoke and a large hole appeared in his port wing and it was as he began to fall from the sky that the Stukas led by Major Schmesser were just pulling out of their dive. Conybeare’s machine was in no condition to get involved in another fight, but as the Stukas – always regarded as the fighter pilot’s dream target – lifted in front of him he couldn’t resist having a go.
His first burst killed Schmesser immediately and tore the arm off Unteroffizier Roehme, and his second killed Leutnant Fink. As Fink’s machine rolled over, Conybeare’s engine stopped and he could hear only the sound of the wind rushing past the open cockpit. Guessing at his speed because the indicator wasn’t registering, he chose a field, pumped his flaps down and went in with his wheels up. As the machine bounced and bucketed across the field in a cloud of dust and flying clods of earth, he thought it was going to turn over but eventually the tail fell back with a thump and everything was silent.
As he recovered his wits, his head throbbing from a welt over the eye, he saw wisps of smoke rising from the cockpit and, hauling himself on to the wing, he began to run. The bang blew him head over heels and, as he lifted his head, he realised he’d lost his eyebrows and that the bruise on his head was throbbing appallingly.
Rattling in his fifteen-hundredweight open truck towards Villers-sur-Grandie in the lowering sunshine, Leading Aircraftsman George Reardon was well aware of the time element involved. He had a matter of an hour and a half to get there, pick up Flying Officer Conybeare, and start back again.
He knew the road well because the squadron had had a forward landing field ten miles outside the village during the winter, but at Richepanne he ran into a French mechanised column entirely without march discipline which was pushing everything else off the road. Among the vehicles were a few infantrymen, dirty and unshaven, bits of wet cigarette hanging from their mouths, who seemed indifferent and philosophical, so that the British military policeman trying to sort out the confusion seemed incredibly smart by comparison.
‘You can’t go this way,’ he said. ‘Jerry’s got the road to Villers taped. You’ll have to go round by Girency.’
As he set off again, swinging right towards Girency, Reardon noticed a solitary figure walking towards him. It was a British soldier, dressed in immaculate khaki, which was a sight in itself just then. He wore his full equipment but carried no rifle.
Reardon pulled to a stop. ‘Where are you heading, mate?’ he asked.
The soldier, a slight fair man with spectacles, frowned, as though he weren’t sure.
‘West,’ he said.
‘I should head north,’ Reardon said. ‘You on your own?’
‘Yes. I was with 3MU, RASC. We were sent to do a job in Suchez.’ The soldier gave a shy smile. ‘The Germans dropped some bombs, though, and when I came out of the shelter the lorry had gone.’
‘You walked from Suchez?’
‘I’m used to walking. I was a Scoutmaster before the war.’
‘Where’s your rifle?’
‘It was in the lorry.’
‘If I were you,’ Reardon said, ‘I’d find another. You
might need it. And you’d better step out. Jerry’s not far away. I’ll be back before long. I’ll look out for you. My name’s Reardon.’
‘Mine’s Sievewright. Clarence Sievewright.’
It suited him, too, Reardon thought as he put the truck in gear.
A few miles further along the road, Reardon began to pass soldiers trudging back, their heads down, their bodies bowed with weariness, and among them now were some in British battle-dress.
‘All right up front?’ he asked.
‘At the moment,’ he was told. ‘But it don’t pay to sing and play the piano much.’
At Vanchette, three miles short of Villers, the soldiers moving back had disappeared and the roads had emptied, and he was surprised when a tall figure in khaki stepped out of a hedge and put up a hand.
‘Hold it, mon,’ it said. ‘You cannae go doon there.’
Reardon frowned. ‘I’ve got to. One of our pilots was shot down near Villers. He’s waiting there.’
‘Well, me, John Gow, of the Coldstream Guards, is telling you that you cannae.’
‘I’ve got to.’
‘Listen, mon–’ Gow was a tall sullen sliver of a man with white skin and white eyebrows, and a nose and cheeks that were burned red by the sun ‘–y’oughta know that when the Guards say you cannae get through, you cannae get through. Our lot’s behind yon hedge there and I’ve been put here to stop anything coming up.’
