Arnhem

by John Nichol

  Overnight, her large house down by the river in Oosterbeek had turned from a tentative first-aid post for the British into a full-blown casualty clearing station. She had emerged from the cellar after a troubled and sleepless night, tossing and turning in the heat generated by the crammed-in bodies of her family and friends, to be ‘struck dumb’ by the transformation of her splendid home, and not a little alarmed. ‘The long corridor is filled with wounded, lying side by side on red-linen stretchers. There is just room between them to put down one foot and I get through to the kitchen with great difficulty. There, the large table is covered with dressings and bandages and a doctor is examining six or seven injured men on the granite floor.’ Wounds were bandaged after being treated with penicillin, the new wonder drug which the Allies (but, significantly, not the Germans) had for controlling infection and which had been in use for less than a year. ‘There is not much more to be done,’ Kate noted, ‘for there are no surgeons here. Orderlies give the patients morphine injections and write on their forehead the dose and the time.’

  She continued her tour. ‘Wounded everywhere, in the dining room, in the study and the garden room, in the side corridor and even under the stairs and in the lavatory. There is not a single corner free of them.’ Every windowpane was smashed and every room unrecognizable because all the furniture had been hurled outside to make more space. But all she could think was that she needed to do more to help them, to be a better ‘hostess’, as she put it, in their hour of need. Despite protests from the army medics that they did not want to spoil her fine things, she insisted they strip the untouched family beds upstairs of mattresses, blankets and linen. Then she directed the padre to the preserved vegetables and meat in the larder. ‘Here, take it,’ she said. He declined. They wouldn’t take her food, he told her, ‘You’ll need it for the kiddies,’ and then he pointed hopefully to the sky to indicate that he was expecting fresh supplies to be arriving soon. She liked his quiet confidence. ‘I get a feeling of power and assurance that this army has everything, knows everything, conquers everything.’

  It was a brave and optimistic assertion on her part, because there were too many indications of the opposite. Her husband, who had come out of hiding when the British landed and shared her bed for one night of freedom, had reluctantly had to make himself scarce again because of the very real threat that the Germans would soon be back in control. Outside in the village, soldiers were manning a barricade they had strung across the street made of cars, household furniture and even a piano. Now, loud explosions were shaking the walls of Kate’s home, and a neighbour’s house was on fire. The wounded must have been alarmed, lying there helpless against whatever was happening around them, but there was not a word of complaint. She wanted to stay with them, but other loyalties called. ‘I must go down into the cellar, for five little ones are longing for me and trusting I’ll remain uninjured in order to protect them.’ She went to her children. Later, when the shelling subsided, she came back up. The effect of the German onslaught and the paras’ fight-back against it was clear to see, because now it was not just the ground floor that was overrun with wounded but the rest of the house as well. ‘The whole top floor is full and so are the stairs and the landing. An orderly tells me they are even lying in the attic.’ The only consolation was the gallons of English tea boiling away in the copper kettle on the kitchen stove, some of which was dispatched to the grateful family in the cellar.

  That evening, she managed to get to the back door, step outside and breathe in much-needed fresh air. She was revitalized, but not for long. As she cast her eyes around, ‘I see them for the first time – the dead. Six or seven of them, perhaps more, with tousled hair over their muddy faces. They lie like forgotten bags which have fallen on the path to the kitchen.’ But still she clung on to crumbs of comfort. Monty’s boys were ‘really quite near’, she’d been told. Best of all, ‘there are still no Germans in our house!’ She read the children a bedtime story, one they knew well and which would take their minds back to better times. As always, they laughed. ‘You are very brave,’ she told them. ‘It won’t last much longer and then we shall be free.’ For a treat, each got to take a cherry from the bottle of preserved fruit, and then she put out the candle. What tomorrow would bring, she did not dare to contemplate.

  On that loose and leaky defensive perimeter now establishing itself around Oosterbeek – enclosing a thumb-shaped space roughly a mile long and three quarters of a mile wide with the Lower Rhine at its base – a strong sense of mutual dependence set in. Esprit de corps was always a major part of para culture and, significantly, it survived intact when severely tested in the field. Arthur Ayers recalled how a message came to his section, holed up in the northern edge of the enclave, that food was running short at another one not far away. ‘The major immediately gave orders that half of our meagre rations should be sent to them.’ Casualties were arriving all the time, to be treated at an aid post in the cellar, as were remnants of parties who had tried to make it into Arnhem and been repulsed. But set against this was the heartening sight of more German prisoners. No wonder it was so hard to gauge how the fighting was really going and what the outcome would be. Victory still seemed perfectly feasible – indeed, likely – if you saw, as Ayers did, a large group of captured enemy soldiers being herded to the tennis courts at the Hartenstein Hotel, which were in use as a p-o-w cage. ‘The grey of their faces matched the grey of their uniforms,’ he noted, and was moved to pity. ‘Eyes were sunk deep in tired, battle-weary, dirty and war-grimed faces. They shuffled along, some reeling like drunken men. Their expressions showed the hopelessness of war when the mask is off.’

  Ayers waxed lyrical and philosophical at the sight of them. ‘For some the trials and tribulations of this world were nearly over, as their heartbeats slowly fade away and they sink into their last sleep. For them a white stone in a war cemetery will mark their last resting place. The others, some maimed for life, will, eventually, return to the country they fought for and probably be forgotten after a few years. Such is war.’ He imagined their bewilderment at having come to this. ‘Inspired by their leaders and forgetting the reason and cause for their actions, they go into battle intent on killing their fellow men, but the shine is dulled when a bullet rips into their bodies and they feel their life-blood seeping through their fingers. As they lie in the mud, they have time to think, to ask themselves what they are doing there.’ It was the soldier’s lament from time immemorial, and the truth was that there were thousands echoing it at that moment, on both sides. Perhaps the compassion that welled up in Ayers was a presentiment that, pretty soon, he would face the same fate as them.

  Twenty-three-year-old trainee solicitor Peter Clarke was also dug in on that northern flank, and his mind too was mulling over the nature of war, now that, rifle in hand, he was in the very thick of it. He was strongly religious, with a deep Christian belief, and felt torn between that and his desire to do his bit to defeat the evils of Nazism. With pals from his bible class, he had enlisted to train as a medic and was eventually posted to work on ambulances at an RAF station in Kent. He had always wanted to fly and the only thing that had stopped him applying to the RAF in the first instance was that his mother thought it too dangerous, ‘and in those days we took notice of what our mothers said.’ He also stretched his conscience into convincing himself that ‘there was a difference between using a rifle, which might be against my Christian belief, and flying a fighter, which would be killing from a distance.’ The lure of the air got the better of him and he applied to switch from medic to aircrew. It was a particularly brave decision, because he of all people knew the risks – he’d picked up the remnants of airmen who crashed on landing or take-off. He was accepted by the RAF for pilot training but then diverted by the army to the Glider Pilot Regiment. Thus he had come to a thicket at the edge of a wood on the outskirts of Oosterbeek and the personal decision of what to do with that rifle he was carrying. ‘I didn’t want to kill anybody, and certainly not to bay
onet anybody.’

  In their small sector, he and his unit were not well armed. ‘We had mainly rifles and a few Sten guns, but nothing of any significance apart from one paratrooper with a Vickers gun, which he used with tremendously good effect when some light German armour came towards us. He saw off this attack with gusto.’ ‘Gusto’ was what Clarke found it hard to summon up. ‘When it appeared necessary, I fired my rifle in certain directions, across this large field in front of us and into the woods, but I was not conscious of hitting anybody.’ He remembered the whole experience in the slit trench as like being in a ‘tiny little world’ of his own, the precise details of which time and trauma have erased from his memory. ‘We were in that trench with no idea about what was going on 50 yards away. Not a clue; you are just there on your own amidst this warfare, this battle.’ Unusually for men in such tight spots, he couldn’t even recall the name of the man beside him in that slit trench, though he thought he was probably a glider pilot like him. But he knew what got him through an ordeal that was to last a week. ‘I had a pocket bible with me and I read the 91st Psalm.’ Its words were comfort. ‘The Lord is my refuge and my fortress. In Him will I trust.’ Its resonance with his situation was unmistakable. ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’ His faith would not let him down. ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee … For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone …With long life will I satisfy Him, and show Him my salvation.’

  When he looked back years later, Clarke was certain that his belief was vital to his survival. ‘I relied on my faith. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I felt that, whatever happened to me, my future was assured in the context of eternity. I think it would be much worse to be in that situation without any well-rounded faith to draw on. There was a very real sense that we might die or get seriously injured in that trench. You struggle to understand how you could come out unscathed.’ The other saving grace was that he found work that he could do wholeheartedly. Drawing on his earlier training as a medic, he organized a first-aid post for his sector. ‘I wouldn’t have been any good if they’d sent me out on patrol because I wasn’t trained for that sort of infantry work. But I did know how to treat the wounded, even if it was as much a padre’s job as a medical one.’ His memory failed him on how many people he treated. ‘Ten or a hundred? I haven’t a clue. Nor do I remember sleeping, though I must have done at some point. I was on my own with some basic first-aid equipment plus sheets, blankets, towels and a little food I found in a house. I could do only simple stuff like apply field dressings. Then the casualties were evacuated by jeep to a field hospital.’ So intense was this experience, so focused in on itself, that he was never sure where that field hospital was, though it must have been quite close. Orderlies would come to pick up his patients, though he didn’t know on whose orders. ‘I haven’t a clue how they knew where to come and collect them but at some point my unofficial aid post must have become an official one.’ Head down, concentrating on what had to be done, he managed to stay at his post until the bitter end.

  Ron Kent, meanwhile, on the western edge of the Oosterbeek perimeter, was running out of rations. All the company cook could come up with for breakfast was a dixie of boiling tea. He searched his pockets vainly in the hope of finding an overlooked scrap of food, half a biscuit maybe. Action took his mind off the emptiness of his stomach as the first shots and shells of the day hummed from a wood opposite. It was half-hearted to begin with, but the pace stepped up when a German mobile gun set up in the corner of the ‘killing field’ directly in front of the perimeter and lobbed in shells from a frighteningly short range. The paras replied with mortars, but they fell short. Kent watched in admiration as a comrade edged around the wood with a PIAT anti-tank weapon on his back. ‘He stalked that gun until he scored a direct hit and kept going until he could get in another shot to make certain it was out of action.’ The man picked up a bad stomach wound for his pains and, though he survived, would later become a prisoner of war. But, this apart, the dug-in defenders did very little. Kent ordered his men to conserve their energy and their ammunition. ‘My orders to the riflemen of my section were simple: “Fire at will if, and only if, you have a clear target.” The Bren would fire only on my command.’

  With the British firing largely at a standstill, an uneasy peace settled over the immediate area. When the German mortar fire ceased too, there was a blessed silence, a stillness in the eye of the storm. It was broken by a strange tinkling noise, an amplified sound that Kent likened to the tinny music he’d heard from ice-cream carts in his childhood. This unreal jingle gave way to a message from a loudspeaker somewhere in the distance. ‘Men of the 1st Airborne Division,’ said a man’s voice in halting English. ‘The game is over. Your comrades are being slaughtered. Your tanks will never reach you. Surrender now. Come out waving a white handkerchief. You have two minutes to decide whether you live or die. Surrender or tonight will be your last night on earth. You will never see your wives and sweethearts again.’

  Some paras replied with obscenities. ‘Go f*** yourself, Jerry,’ they chorused, with suggestions on where the man on the loudspeaker could shove his own white handkerchief. But Kent was not alone in feeling perturbed by what he had just heard. ‘Something turned over in my stomach and quietly died,’ he admitted. He felt calm rather than distressed, ‘calmer in fact than I had felt for days’, but this, paradoxically, was because the threat of what was to come seemed very real. Resigned to his fate, if that was what it would be, he told himself, ‘This is it. This is where your death or glory stuff gets you.’ But then the defiance snapped back in, the pride asserted itself. He wasn’t going down without a fight. If the enemy thought they could just walk over him, well, let them try it. The bluff was called, and rightly so. ‘We expected all hell to be let loose at us after that but, apart from renewed mortar fire, to which we had become accustomed, nothing happened.’

  However, although the perimeter was holding here, elsewhere it was creaking. It had to be tightened, and Kent received orders to fall back closer to divisional headquarters in the Hartenstein. The move was to be made in the dead of night. ‘We were also warned that the Germans had some of our smocks and parachute helmets and might attempt to infiltrate our position. They had already tried it in another sector.’ As he waited in his trench to begin the pull-back with his platoon, his spirits plummeted. ‘Curled up in that hole, I suddenly felt deathly tired and terribly alone.’ That day he had lost two of his best mates. One, a fellow sergeant, took bullets in both legs. ‘I knew his wife was expecting a baby in a month and I only hoped he would get back to her.’ Then there was the soldier he had been sharing his foxhole with, who had been hit and fallen back into Kent’s arms. ‘His eyes were wide and staring vacantly. His face took on a ghastly grey hue. I thought he had been killed outright.’ Kent had got him to a casualty station but then had to leave him, uncertain of his fate.

  Now, alone in the trench, he missed his companion. He dozed and dreamt, a terrible dream of being buried alive, while that disembodied German voice from earlier in the day sounded in his ears. An officer came by and hissed at him to stay awake. ‘Oh, how I knew it,’ he said, recalling the moment years later. ‘As I write these words, I can feel the battle between my willpower and nature all over again.’ His willpower won, and he moved along his section’s foxholes with a quiet word of encouragement to all his men.

  The company gathered in the dark for its tactical withdrawal. ‘A quiet roll call was made. One of my men was missing. I fumbled my way in the dark to find him still in his foxhole. I had to force him out of it. He was all for staying there and taking his chance when daylight came.’ The man was Jewish and a refugee from Germany, and was showing e
xtraordinary courage just by being there with the Allied forces. Kent knew of a number of men with the same background and had enormous respect for them. Although they had Anglicized their names as a precaution in case of capture, some had faltering English and heavy accents that would have soon given their ethnic identity away. But this one particular man had lost his nerve or his reason because, against everyone else’s better judgement, he was bent on giving himself up. ‘I had no intention of letting him do so and I finally persuaded him he would be better off staying with us. Part of the persuasion was the cold metal of my Colt pressed against his ear and my promise that I personally would see him off before any German could do so. When the withdrawal started I kept him directly in front of me so that he could not slip away in the dark.’

  That night march, as Kent called it, was more of a nightmare. They shuffled along in the pitch black over rough and unfamiliar ground, constantly in danger of losing touch with the man in front and wandering off course. It was a nerve-wracking hour of stopping and starting before they made it into the grounds of the Hartenstein and settled down to rest. ‘We lay in section lines among the leaves,’ Kent recalled, ‘which had already fallen from the trees. It seemed to me that autumn came early that year. I eased off my pack, lay my Sten close to hand, ready for use, and put my head down for a nap. As I did so I felt something soft and yielding beside me but thought no more of it. As dawn broke, we roused ourselves and I discovered I had spent the night alongside a dead German soldier. He was barely covered with a few inches of earth and leaves, and it was his hand, sticking out from his resting place, that I had touched. He cannot have been long dead, for there was hardly any of the stench of putrefaction which was to become so familiar to me in the days to come.’