by Alec Waugh
Every so often, whenever the turn of the road or landscape was photogenic, the camera man would stop and fix up his tripod. They would suitably arrange groups of children to cheer and wave as the lorries passed. The villagers brought them out glasses of dark beer.
All the way back, as the light faded, the stream of cars poured forward to the frontier, moving at a steady pace, the intervals maintained; red-caps at every cross road, red-caps tearing past on motor-cycles to supervise the column. An occasional British aeroplane droned watchfully above them. There was no sign of a hitch, no breakdown; no congestion. He thought of the immense amount of staff work that must have been required, the planning, the drawing up of charts and time sheets, the hundred and one minute “Q” details that had had to be taken into account before this effect of smoothness could be achieved. The long stream of vehicles moved as a composite machine.
It sent a warm glow of pride along his veins. The British Regular Army had been small, but no one had ever criticized its quality. Well trained, well disciplined and well equipped, it was moving now to the same trial that its progenitors had faced twenty-five years ago. No one watching that column stream by in the dying sunlight could have had any doubt that in action it would acquit itself as well.
47
ARRAS. 11 MAY 1940
It was eleven o’clock. He had written up his notes on the previous day. Had he been a journalist with a column at his disposal, he would have been able to congratulate himself on a good morning’s work. But he was not a journalist. And he had not a column at his disposal, and there was no means of finding one. By the time this article got back to Paris or to London it would be dated as a “hand-out.” “I’m on the wrong track,” he thought, “I’m not here to do reportage. Other people are doing that. I’ve got to find the propaganda angle: to keep the men’s spirits up, to reassure the Belgians and the French, to act as a liaison officer, to explain and interpret the difficulties of each to each.”
He read over the twelve hundred words that he had written. They were good enough, but there was no point in them. He hadn’t learnt, he hadn’t begun to learn this new job yet. He’d been seeing this job in terms of the kind of writer he had been. He had to unlearn that, or rather to put that particular capacity to a different use. That was what total war was. You didn’t scrap machinery, you put it to a different use. The man who made razor blades could, with a slight adjustment of his machine, produce some spare part of an aeroplane. That was what he’d got to do, see things from another angle, treat different subjects in a different way. “I wasn’t looking for the right subjects yesterday,” he thought. “I will to-morrow.”
48
12 MAY 1940
The grey bleak streets of Lens were lightened on this Sunday morning by the long white frocks of first communicants. There was no sign of the war that twenty-five years back had turned these streets into a waste of rubble. There was no sign of the battle that so few miles away had been already joined. But over the frontier there were signs all right.
In Belgium thirty-six hours had brought their change. It was known now that the line was broken. At Tournai men were at work upon a railway junction that had suffered a series of direct hits the day before. A small burnt-out touring car had been pushed against a wall. In that car yesterday morning a party of two young women and their husbands had set out for a day’s picnic. A stream of army vehicles were moving northward at the regulation speed of twenty miles, but from the other direction there was coming another and faster stream of civilian traffic, of cars piled high with luggage, their bumpers painted an electric blue, with mattresses upon the roof.
They lunched at a small café at a cross-roads; they fixed their tripod at their side waiting for the right subject to appear. There were more civilian cars going south than there were military vehicles going north. They lunched lightly—an omelette, a bottle of red wine, a cheese. They imagined they were lunching cheaply. But a hundred franc note produced no change. He began to argue. “An omelette was only eight francs,” he said.
“Eight Belgian francs,” he was informed. Eight Belgian francs, and the Belgian franc stood at seventy. Seventy, he thought. But that was a subject for a hand-out. The British troops would need to have that explained to them. Otherwise they would start thinking they were swindled. And the Belgians needed to have it explained to them that the British soldiers would not realize that there was a difference of value between the French and the Belgian franc. There’d be bad feelings otherwise. “Article No. 1,” he thought.
But even so, he added to himself, an omelette and cheese and a bottle of wine and no change out of a hundred francs.
“What did the wine cost?” he asked.
“Twenty francs.”
“What?”
Twenty francs was now about six shillings, and it had been very casual claret.
“Let’s have a look at your list,” he said. There was not another wine under twenty-five. He stared at it in amazement. He had always thought of Belgium as a wine-loving country. The best Burgundies went there. Christie’s was always crowded when the contents of a Liège cellar came upon the market. From the gastronomic point of view he had always linked France and Belguim. But they weren’t so linked; of course, they weren’t. Belgium was not a wine-producing country. “Article No. 2,” he thought. The troops must be advised to order beer.
49
BRUSSELS. 12 MAY 1940
He had been ordered to report at the British Embassy; to ask for the Press Attaché: to get the line on the kind of hand-out that the Belgian Press was needing. The official whom he interviewed smiled wryly at his request. In another day’s time there’d be no room in the paper for anything but headlines.
“Just look at that,” he said.
A couple of newspapers were lying on the table. They were four sheet issues. They were news and only news. The communiqués and the King’s message to the people. A speech from the Prime Minister. A list of instructions and restrictions. Regulations about black-out, and the serving of drinks; no alcohol was to be served at all. Restaurants were to close at nine. Friday night had been rather wild, the official told them.
So that was that, they thought. In that case they had better concentrate upon their camera. Not that there was a great deal here. They booked rooms in a small hotel by the main railway station. They fitted up the tripod on the balcony. They never saw the films they took, but there was little that could have proved of interest. Brussels was an open town, by-passed by troop movements. Outside the station was just such a jam of travellers and traffic as you could expect to find in a big city on a sunny Sunday.
They drove a little through the town. He had only been there once before, twenty years earlier, on a three-day visit when he had used Brussels as a centre from which to make tourist trips to the cathedral cities. He had no clear memories of it. He had a sense now of gracious spaciousness, of wide streets and open squares and parks, a provincial town of charm but of no great character. It was a warm bright afternoon. The people of Brussels seemed to be loitering lazily through the parks as though it were any other Sunday. Unless your eye were looking for it you would not have been conscious of the crowded cars packed with luggage, usually with mattresses upon the roof, that passed one by one every so many minutes, and always in the same direction.
Slowly the day waned and the light faded. They dined in a Flemish restaurant in a dark, low room, decorated like a beer hall. It was a large room, but it was almost empty. The manager came across to them carrying a Jeroboam: “You are the first British officers to visit my restaurant. You will allow me,” he said, “to offer you an apéritif?”
It was cold and sweet, like a Swedish punch without a kick to it. The manager shook his head when they asked to see the wine list.
“It would be too tantalizing, it would make your mouths water. I have the best cellar in the city. But I am only allowed to serve you beer. If you were to know what is in my cellar, you would have your dinner spoilt for you. Come b
ack in a few days’ time, restrictions will have been loosened then.”
The beer, though, was very good. As was the Vienna Schnitzel that went with it. They complimented the manager. He shrugged. He hoped that he would be able to continue to serve such dishes. He hoped that with all those troops arriving there would not be a shortage. “But we aren’t like the Germans in Denmark,” they assured him. “We’ve plenty. We bring our own food with us. You’ll find that you’ve more of everything since we’ve come.”
“Article No. 3,” he thought; “to reassure the Belgians that we shan’t be eating up their food.”
They ordered a second stein. They would have been well content to loiter on there over their coffees in the dusk of the raftered room. It was nine o’clock though and the new rules were rigidly enforced.
There was a blue-out in Brussels, not a black-out. It gave the city an eerie look. They paused irresolutely on the pavement. There was hardly any traffic now, only a few pedestrians. It was early to return to their hotel. They strolled towards what they assumed to be the centre of the town. They had remembered seeing what had looked to be a Ritz-Carlton-type hotel. They had some difficulty in getting into it. It looked like the first-class lounge of a Cunarder in the slump: an emptiness of gilt and columns and thick carpets, and one man in the corner with an “Edgar Wallace.”
“But we really can’t go back yet,” they said. Brussels was a capital. There must be somewhere they could go.
If there was, though, they could not find it. Commissionaires shook their heads. Taxi-drivers shook their heads. Even a couple of street-walkers refused to take them “somewhere where they could have a drink.” Back in his hotel bedroom where there were no black-out curtains, the electric light bulb had been painted almost as blue as the night-light in a wagon-lits compartment. He found, though, when it came to the point that it was quite easy to fall asleep at half-past nine.
50
FORWARD AREAS. 13 MAY 1940
They called at the Embassy next morning before moving west. There was an atmosphere of packing. The official that they had interviewed on the previous afternoon was gracious but uninformative. No, he could not say exactly where the line was now. The situation was fluid, but, yes, certainly we should be able to get accurate information at Louvain.
Louvain: a name that for four years he had heard in how many speeches, read in how many poems—it fitted into the simplest rhyme scheme—that for twenty years he had not once heard mentioned. Louvain in the news again, and once again as a deserted city.
All along the road leading out of Brussels they passed a stream, not of motor cars any longer, the cars had already gone, but of pedestrians in ones and twos: pushing, the majority of them, hand-carts or perambulators. Carts and wagons were high-piled with furniture. And troops on each side of the road were digging in.
Louvain was a silent city. Not a shop open, shuttered windows, empty streets. A strong-point was being constructed out of the War Memorial before the station. Weapon pits were being prepared along the railway line. This was the front line, they said, or at least they thought it was.
Two days before, Louvain had been bombed quite heavily. A section of houses had been cut right through. It looked like a propaganda film from the Spanish War. There was a small refreshment kiosk in the square. Its owners and clientele must have dispersed the moment after the bombs had fallen. There were plates there with unfinished meals and glasses half-full of beer. The signs of interrupted life gave him the same sense of the past that the ruins of Pompeii had. “Here there was weeping of old, there was laughter.” Time was relative. It was a question here of eighteen hours, in Pompeii of eighteen hundred years. But the impression was the same—of Me interrupted and abandoned.
Beside the coffee urn was a glass jar of cakes. He was about to take one, then remembered. Looting, it would be a bad example. Looting—there’d be a good many temptations to do that during the next few months. It would raise no doubt a considerable issue between civilians and troops. “Article No. 4,” he thought.
But already he had begun to wonder whether any of these articles would be ever written.
51
ARRAS. 14 MAY 1940
There was another alert that night. This time to be followed by a series of explosions. He saw beyond the railway line a sky red with fire. Among the buildings that were struck was the Hotel Univers. In the last war a German army used it as their H.Q. In this war it was used by officers visiting G.H.Q. and by G.H.Q. officers who had not yet found billets. Twenty-seven officers were sleeping there that night.
52
ARRAS. 16 MAY 1940
The greatest battle in the history of the world was six days old. The idleness of the long cold winter had been flung aside. In the war-room at G.H.Q. operational I.O.s. were putting in a twenty-hour day. Day and night, signal officers were decoding messages. Flags were being moved on maps. Lines were being drawn in chinagraph. The staff of I.C.(11), however, having arranged a picture gallery of nudes from La Vie Parisienne were throwing darts at it They were without direction and without information During the winter and the spring they had been the busiest section at G.H.Q. They were now without occupation. Their job for better or for worse was finished. They were awaiting orders.
53
BOULOGNE. 18 MAY 1940
Half of G.H.Q. went forward. Half of it went back. To a town honey-combed with fifth columnists and spies, a loudspeaker from the station broadcast the announcement: “Will all G.H.Q. officers report to the Imperial Hotel.”
Because he was sharing a room with the senior I.O.—a man of considerable distinction in private life—he was given a de luxe room on the sixth floor facing the sea, with a bathroom and a balcony. A notice beside the door priced the room at 120 francs. Remembering that in spite of the secrecy with which G.H.Q’s presence at Arras had been guarded, the Hotel Univers had been one of the Luftwaffe’s first targets, he did not fancy, after the loud-speaker’s indiscretion, that he would be allowed to enjoy these amenities for very long.
54
G.H.Q. BULLETIN. 19 MAY 1940
They had still no work to do. They sat, six of them, on the ground floor of a pleasant villa by the citadel, imagining they were getting their files in order. Before leaving Arras they had made arrangements to provide the B.B.C. in Paris with a daily G.H.Q. news bulletin. They had no information of any kind on which to base it. It was essential though to maintain the continuity of the series. He and the G.3 had taken it in turns to write it. It was his turn now.
“I suppose,” he said, “that I could draw some comparison between a battle like this and Naseby. I could say that the German tanks were behaving like Rupert’s horse.”
“It’s as good a line as any,” the G.3 told him.
55
HOTEL IMPERIAL. 19 MAY 1940
The first bomb pitched in the road outside; the second was a direct hit on the front of the hotel on the fourth floor, two rooms to the right of his. He was in bed when the first one pitched. He was on his face on the floor when a blast of air went through the room that after shattering the glass and frame-work of the window, blew the panelling of the door across the passage.
He rose, shook himself, went over to the window. In the street below a mail lorry was ablaze; an unmoving body was beside it. A lamp-post had been uprooted. A series of screams, that were like something seen rather than something heard, through which he could visualize the twitching of a body, came from beneath the bandstand. He pulled on his trousers and greatcoat and went below.
It was grislier than anything he had seen, grislier than Passchendaele in 1917. The lounge of the hotel was scattered with broken glass, with blood and stiffening bodies. In what had been the dining-room torn limbs were being dressed. The contrast between this atmosphere of the slaughter-house and the gilt of a luxury hotel made the scene grislier. He looked into the dining-room; a team of R.A.M.C. orderlies and a number of men with first-aid experience were at work upon the wounded. He would be only
in the way. He walked out into the street.
The lorry was still ablaze. But the figure by the bandstand had ceased to twitch. He found that his knees were shaking. Was this a mild case of shell-shock, he asked himself. It had been a considerable blast of air that had blown the panel of a quite stout door across a passage. “Or am I just cold, or is it nerves?” he wondered.
Prudence counselled him to go down into a shelter and get some sleep. But he remembered having read that if a pilot who had had a crash did not get into another aeroplane at once he lost his nerve.
“If I went down now,” he thought, “I might lose mine for good.” He had another look into the dining-room. No, there was not anything to do. He went upstairs. He brushed the glass out of his bed and got back into it.
He had received two days before a letter written in the handwriting in which sixteen months later, in his last week in London, he was to read an acceptance to dine on his last evening there. He read the letter over slowly; then read it through again; then he tried to sleep. All night it seemed, the guns were firing.
