As they proceeded down the long, straight road they soon came upon many signs of the previous day’s battle; shattered tanks, guns and Bren-gun carriers lay wrecked or overturned on the road and in the fields to either side of them. They had lost all their martial glory and looked now rather pathetic; as though they were just old toys that some gargantuan child had thrown down and kicked about in a fit of temper. The German mortuary units were evidently still occupied in burying the fallen from the holocausts that had taken place earlier, further east, as they had not yet come up. Here and there sprawled khaki or field-grey figures; some twisted or lacking limbs, others lying quite peacefully as though they had taken the afternoon off to sleep in the fields under the warm rays of the May sunshine. German and English dead and vehicles were inextricably mixed so that there was no pattern discernible in this aftermath of battle, except occasionally round an abandoned gun where a whole crew had been knocked out by a shell or machine-gunned from the air.
Gregory was not interested in the tanks, but he was interested in the bodies and, without allowing his companion to notice what he was doing, he carefully took mental notes about the position of several of the dead Germans who lay near enough to the road for him to see them clearly.
About six miles outside Brussels the farmer pulled up and said that his farm lay down a side-track to the left of the road. Gregory got down and, thanking him, continued on foot in the direction of Louvain; but when the wagon was out of sight he turned round and started to walk back again.
He kept a sharp look-out, as German staff cars and bodies of troops were passing every few moments in the direction of Brussels, and he knew that if he were caught at his ghoulish purpose he would be shot without argument. Leaving the road he walked along behind the hedge until he was within ten yards of the nearest body that he had marked down. He was now able to get a much closer view of it and having taken in all the details he gradually worked his way back through field after field to look carefully at the others; then, having made his choice, as it was only six o’clock he lay down under a hedge to take a nap until darkness should cover his further operations.
When he awoke the moon had risen, but it was low in the sky so its light was just enough to be excellent for his purpose without being sufficient to make it likely that he would be seen by the troops that he could still hear every now and again rattling along the road. Going to the body he had selected he unbuttoned the dead German’s uniform and exerting all his strength forced back the arms, which were already set in rigor mortis, until he could wriggle the tunic off the body. He next dealt in similar fashion with the man’s breeches, gaiters, boots and under-garments until the body was stark naked. He then stripped off his own clothes, stuffed them in the dead man’s haversack and put on his outfit so that if he were searched at any time he would not be wearing a single article of clothing which would have given away the fact that he was not a German.
The boots were a trifle large but otherwise the uniform fitted passably well, as Gregory had taken great care to select a man as near his own height and build as possible. Before he had set out he had realised that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack to try to find a dead Staff-Colonel, as such minor war lords are not killed in every battle and, even if he had been able to do so, it was a hundred to one that the Colonel’s uniform would have proved hopelessly ill-fitting on himself; so fit being more important than rank he had despoiled an Oberleutnant with the reservation that he would adjust the matter of his rank later.
As the officer had been shot through the eye his uniform was undamaged and passably clean, but his steel helmet proved too small so Gregory had to find another which fitted him better. He then collected the dead German’s automatic, spare magazines, gas-mask, Zeiss glasses, and other gear. By the time he had finished hanging things on himself his appearance in every detail was that of an Oberleutnant of the 153rd Bavarian Infantry Regiment, fully equipped in battle kit. He then set out on the trek back to Brussels.
Ahead of him now, on the far side of the city, the night sky was constantly lit with the flicker of guns and shell-bursts, while along the road down which he was walking the never-ending columns of German troops went forward to reinforce their comrades, it was half-past four in the morning when he at last reached the Metropole, and the night-porter, not having seen him go out dressed as a civilian, had no reason to express surprise because he came in dressed as a German officer. With a gruff ‘Gute Nacht’ he crossed the hall and went up to his room, where he doffed his borrowed plumage and got into bed.
Not having left any orders to be called he awoke late on the following morning, and his first sensation was one of uneasiness. It seemed as though some dire calamity threatened him; yet for a few seconds he could not think what it was that he feared. Then, like a light being clicked on in a darkened room, the awful truth seared with a blinding glare through his brain. Erika was dead.
For some moments he lay almost stunned again, but after a little he recalled his resolution of the previous day and, getting up, dressed in his stolen uniform. It was nearly twelve o’clock by the time he came downstairs and he saw that a number of German officers were already congregated in the lounge, chatting and laughing over their apéritifs. He made a quick survey of them but to his disappointment there was no one of Colonel’s rank present so, seating himself at a small table where he could keep an eye upon the door, he ordered a drink and sent for the morning paper.
It was now two double-sheets again, but a glance at the headlines showed that it was already under German ‘protection’. Dr. Goebbels’ men had lost no time in getting their claws on the Brussels Press. As Gregory’s eye roved over the heavy black print he saw with a little shock that it was Sunday, the 19th, as his periods of sleep in recent days and nights had been so erratic that he had been under the impression up to that moment that it was only Saturday.
The German drive continued with unabated vigour. Their spear-head had now veered almost due west, towards Si. Quentin and the Channel ports, so evidently their intention was to endeavour to sever the Belgians, the B.E.F. and certain French divisons just south of it from the main French Army; but Gregory did not view this new development altogether pessimistically.
In 1915 the Germans had followed much the same procedure. Although the way had been almost clear for a direct march on Paris, instead of wheeling down on to the French capital General von Kluck, who had commanded the right wing of the German Army, had suddenly turned west in an endeavour to seize the Channel ports before they could be reinforced from England.
In doing so he made the cardinal error of defying the first rule of strategy, which is that a commander should never march his troops across the front of an unbroken enemy. Von Kluck’s mistake had been due to the fact that he believed that he had broken the British at Mons and Le Cateau, and shattered them so severely that it would be quite impossible for them to take the offensive for many weeks to come; but, as it turned out, the British were by no means beaten. Together with the French Army which General Gallieni had rushed by omnibus and taxi-cab from Paris, they had faced about and, flinging their whole weight against Von Kluck’s exposed flank, achieved the victory of the Marne. That battle had robbed the Kaiser of both Paris and the Channel ports and, in the estimation of the most far-sighted strategists, deprived Germany once and for all of any hope of ever achieving complete victory, by giving time for the British Empire to mobilise its vast resources before France could be put out of the war.
It seemed to Gregory that a very similar situation was now developing, and that if Gamelin threw his reserves in at the right moment he ought to be able to take this new German thrust in the flank and perhaps roll the German Armies up in confusion right back out of Belgium, as swiftly as they had poured into it.
A small news item stated that Marshal Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old hero of Verdun, had joined the French Government as its Vice-President the previous night, and that, too, seemed a good omen, as the leadership of th
is great veteran of the last World War was well calculated to strengthen the resistance of the French troops.
Gregory sat there drinking for the best part of an hour and a half before he saw a Colonel come in; immediately the Colonel sat down with some other officers he got up and strolled out of the lounge.
Crossing the hall to the cloakroom he produced a fifty-franc note from his pocket, handed it to the elderly woman who was checking-in the coats and said casually: ‘All the pages seem to have run away, so I must trouble you to slip out and buy me a rubber sponge and a shaving stick.’
The woman looked at him in surprise and murmured: ‘It is not my business to run errands, Monsieur.’
‘Do as you’re told!’ snapped Gregory, suddenly changing his mild manner for that of the brutal invader.
‘But, Monsieur’ she protested, ‘I am in charge of the coats and the things that people have left here.’
‘Do as you’re told!’ he repeated harshly. ‘You Belgians must learn to take orders from your betters without argument.’
‘Oui, Monsieur, oui,’ the poor woman exclaimed nervously, and as she hurried away Gregory called after her: ‘When you get back you’ll find me in the lounge.’
Immediately she had disappeared he left the counter over which the coats were thrust and, walking a few paces down a side-passage, entered the door of the cloakroom. Most of the coats there were the field-grey great-coats of German officers; each had been neatly folded and placed in a large pigeon-hole, Gregory ran his eye swiftly over what appeared to be the most recent additions to the collection, as they were low down in the rack, and after pulling out two he discovered the Colonel’s. Producing his pocket-knife he swiftly cut the rank badges from the shoulders.
Next he pulled out several other officers’ coats one after the other, jabbed his penknife into them, making ugly slits, tore off buttons or badges and thrust them back into their pigeon-holes. The whole job was accomplished in less than five minutes, then he strolled back to his table in the lounge, where the old woman found him when she returned with the sponge and shaving-soap.
Thanking her with a haughty nod he tossed her five francs and sat on there for another few minutes; then he went upstairs and proceeded to affix the Colonel’s rank-badges to the shoulders of his own tunic in place of those of the Oberleutnant. There was no reason whatever why anyone should suspect him of the theft as he had camouflaged it so skilfully by mutilating a number of other coats as well as the Colonel’s. The cloakroom woman would excuse herself to their infuriated owners by saying that she had been compelled to leave her post to run an errand for another officer and the damage would undoubtedly be attributed to some unknown Belgian who had chosen to express his hatred of the Germans by this petty malice. The great thing was that now that he had secured both a passably fitting uniform and the right rank-badges he was all set to resume his activities as Oberst-Baron von Lutz once more.
After eating his lunch in a nearby restaurant, to avoid any chance of being involved in the scene which was certain to ensue when his victims reclaimed their coats, he spent the afternoon in the main streets of Brussels and at the railway station, carefully noting the regimental, divisional and corps badges of the officers and men whom he saw so that he could get a good idea as to which units were apparently being quartered in Brussels and which were passing through to the front. The battle, he noted, seemed to have drifted further west since the previous night, although the British heavies were still spasmodically shelling the station and certain road junctions outside the town. By evening he felt that he was sufficiently well-informed to enter into conversation with some of the German officers, and for that purpose he made a round of such bars as had reopened.
During the six days that followed, Gregory slipped into an uninspired routine. The husk of the man was still there, as he stuck grimly to his determination to absorb himself in work, and every moment of his waking hours was conscientiously spent in restaurants, cafés and bars, wherever large numbers of German officers were gathered together; but it seemed that the shock of Erika’s death had numbed his brain and temporarily robbed him of all initiative.
After a comparatively brief stupor Brussels had gradually come to life again. Owing to the petrol restrictions imposed by the Germans and the dislocation of Belgian industry the traffic in the capital was still far below normal, in spite of the many German Army vehicles that were constantly passing through the streets, and the bulk of the civil population had the subdued, anxious air of people who had suffered a great bereavement—as indeed many of them had; but nearly all the shops were open again and the whole centre of the town was thronged with the thousands of Germans who were passing through or now quartered in Brussels.
Gregory found no difficulty whatever in entering into casual conversation with scores of officers each day and despite standing orders that they should not mention troop movements or casualties, even among themselves, the great majority of them ignored these regulations to discuss all phases of the war with the pseudo Staff-Colonel without the least restraint.
In those six days he learnt enough about individual units, and how they had fared in Hitler’s victory drive, to fill half a dozen dossiers; but the trouble was that none of the people he contacted were high enough up to be in a position to give away anything of major importance. He wanted to unearth something really useful before leaving Brussels in an attempt to get it through to British G.H.Q. or Sir Pellinore, and such items about contemplated operations as he did succeed in picking up were on each occasion ante-dated and rendered useless by the extraordinary swiftness of the German advance.
On the Monday they were at Cambrai and Peronne, and the French front in the whole of the threatened area had given way in a general mix-up.
On Tuesday, Amiens and Arras fell, while through a corridor between these two towns motorised detachments were rushed to seize Abbeville. By evening it was reported that they were threatening Le Touquet and had reached the coast, cutting the Allied Armies in two so that there was now a gap between them thirty miles wide.
On the Wednesday the French were said to have recaptured Arras, while the British were counter-attacking in force at Douai, so that the gap had been reduced to twelve miles; but the Germans had already poured great quantities of tanks through it and were disrupting the Allies’ communications right, left and centre, while enemy advance units had turned north and were dashing up the coast towards Boulogne and Calais.
On Thursday the Germans entered Boulogne and captured the town in spite of heavy shelling from the British Navy. On the north of the gap the British were now thrusting south towards Cambrai, between the Rivers Scarpe and Scheldt, while in the south the French were endeavouring to retake Amiens; the obvious intention of both armies being an attempt to reunite somewhere in the neighbourhood of Albert, thereby cutting off all the German motorised units which had broken through towards the coast.
On the Friday the Germans launched another hammerblow further east, in the Sedan sector, but it seemed that the French had got their second wind and were holding on there; and, although the German-controlled Press made no mention of any reverse, it was whispered among the officers in Brussels that the French had recaptured Amiens. The B.E.F. was reported to be fighting hard on the Cambrai-Valenciennes road, but the gap was nearly thirty miles wide again and German divisions were still pouring through it. The situation in Boulogne and Calais was obscure but the papers proclaimed confidently that they were in German hands and it seemed that for every sector in which they were temporarily checked they scored fresh successes in two others. So great, too, was the strength of the German Army that, in spite of all these offensive operations which they were conducting simultaneously, that day they launched yet another furious onslaught against the Belgians in the extreme north.
On the Saturday the situation became even more obscure. The Germans claimed the capture of Courtrai and Vimy while it was officially stated that the Belgian Army with the 1st, 7th and 9th French Armies and
the B.E.F. were completely cut off; but it was difficult to see from which direction Courtrai and Vimy had been attacked, as these French Armies and the B.E.F. now seemed to be fighting on several fronts at the same time, and, in fact, it became generally recognised that in the north all trace of any coherent line had now disappeared. Over an area exceeding 20,000 square miles of territory, some 3,000,000 armed men were in one colossal mix-up, with unit fighting unit, wherever it came upon the enemy, and out of this incredible confusion only one coherent plan now emerged—that the Germans were straining every nerve completely to surround and destroy the whole of the Allied Northern Army.
With every day that passed Gregory had believed that the German effort must slacken, and when he had learnt on the Monday that General Weygand had superseded Gamelin as the Allied Commander-in-Chief he had felt confident that the great strategist would find some way in which to avert the peril in which the Northern Armies stood. He had realised that Weygand would need several days at least to alter the disposition of his main forces, but that made Gregory all the more hopeful that when the blow fell the Germans would be too exhausted to counter it effectively, so that it might be carried through to a sweeping victory; but the end of the week came without any news of a great French counter-offensive. Even their efforts to break through from the south appeared to have lessened, while instead of the German effort petering out it seemed ever to increase in violence.
The Black Baroness Page 30
