Arnhem

by John Nichol

  ‘We went back into the house and he showed me to the cellar stairs. I let him lead the way down – I didn’t trust anyone so I wasn’t going to go first. At the bottom was a fair-sized room lit by a single, flickering candle. By its light I could see a woman lying on a pile of cushions and blankets. She was about the same age as her husband. The sleeve of her dress had been ripped off and round her forearm was a blood-soaked piece of rag. She spoke no English, but just lay there looking at me with tears running down her cheeks. I removed the bandage, under which was a nasty jagged wound. It had stopped bleeding but she must have lost a lot of blood. I bound up her arm with a field dressing. All the time the old man was standing by saying, “My poor wife, my poor wife.” I looked round the cellar. There were no signs of food. We had none either, so it was impossible for me to help them. I told the man to stay with his wife and on no account to leave the house. But when I left, he followed me, practically on my heels, fully determined to go into the centre of Oosterbeek. It was useless trying to stop him, so we let him go.

  ‘We saw him picking his way along the centre of the road, knocking twigs and debris aside with his stick. We didn’t expect to see him again but, within an hour, he was back, and very distressed. He came right up to us and stood on the edge of our trench. He was crying, and his hands trembled. He spoke, though he was not looking at us. It was as though he was speaking over our heads. “The Germans,” he said, “they won’t let me in my ’ome. They say to kill me if I go into my ’ouse. My God! Kill me if I go in my own ’ouse!” He turned away and went back to his cellar and we didn’t see him again. I think the civilians suffered as much as we did.’

  Ennis was right. For Anje van Maanen, the fear she felt and the horrors she witnessed around her were never erased. Back at the start of the British invasion, she had seen her first dead body, a German soldier, and been shocked. She had been cycling to a farm to get some milk and noticed her neighbours walking around ‘queer-looking lumps in the middle of the road’. She shied away from them, ‘but my eyes are pulled towards a man lying on his back and staring at me with dead eyes. I scream and move away, only to stumble on another corpse, eyes closed, blood on his temples and his hands stretched backwards. It is all so awful, but other people don’t seem to mind.’ The reality of war hit her hard, whichever side was suffering. ‘These were men who lived and who loved and who did not want their lives to end this way. They are Germans, but I feel sick with misery at what has happened to them and I cry. I feel very subdued. I shall never forget this.’ Six days later, it was the British whose deaths she was witness to. As, face pressed up against the window of her house, she watched the hurried burial of a para, she was overwhelmed with sadness. ‘Is that what he was fighting for? To be put under the earth while his wife or fiancée far away at home has no idea that he is even dead?’ She couldn’t stop herself wondering if she was destined for the same fate.

  She went out to find bread and on her way home had to take shelter behind a wall. ‘A shell hits it and I fall flat on my stomach. When the attack stops I race home like a hurricane with the bread still tucked in my arms. I am completely out of breath when I reach the cellar, just as a really heavy attack begins. We hear an enormous whistle and bangs all around. Everything trembles. Tiles are falling from the roof. All we can do is wait, without moving, for the next attack. We are in the midst of the battle and it is terrifying. Only a few days ago I was running around with friends outside and now I am running for my life. I don’t want to die and be put under the earth with all the other pale, dead people. I have so much living still to do, things to see, things to experience.’ But she was unstinting in her praise for the paras. ‘The British fight like devils in their desperate longing to defend us and themselves. They cry over beautiful Oosterbeek that is ruined by others. They cry over Dutch civilians, wounded and killed. They think of us all the time.’

  There was loud knocking at the back door, and everyone’s first, fear-filled thought was that it must be the Germans. It turned out to be friends, the Aalbus sisters, who had gone to help at a casualty station. ‘They are in an awful state. The shells we heard came down right on top of the school where they were looking after patients. A British doctor shoved them underneath the desk and put himself in front of them to protect them from danger. When the shelling stopped there was just terrible chaos around them, blood everywhere, groaning people, the wounded hit a second time by this bombing and lots of them killed. So the girls tell us. They are broken and have fled to us.’ From outside, the thunder of the German bombardment of Oosterbeek started up again, ‘a cacophony of devilish noise that goes on and on. The house trembles and things fall down. It is so frightening. It is as if the world has come to an end. I can’t bear it any more. I am sure the Devil is outside and I am so scared and I can’t think of anything else but the shells and death.’

  At night, the claustrophobia of the cellar made sleep difficult. ‘Daddy’s feet are beside my pillow, so close I could bite his toes. Aunt Anke sits on a chair and dozes off and on. Mr Aalbus lies in a wine rack and snores lightly.’ As Anje fretted the night away, she was fortunately unaware of the full extent of the horror unfolding around her as, under relentless German pressure, the Oosterbeek perimeter contracted still more. But she must have had an inkling, because she recalled ‘a vague restlessness among us, a worry that something horrible is happening and we can’t do anything about it, but sit and wait. I try to pray and eventually fall asleep next to my daddy’s toes. Is this our last night in the house?’

  It was. The next morning, the doorbell rang, and outside were dozens of desperate paras needing to barricade themselves in. The Germans were closing in, and they had to turn the Maanens’ home into a redoubt. ‘We ask if they could go somewhere else? Must our house be used as a fortress? Is it really necessary? They tell us yes. They need it badly. They tell us too that it would be better if we left. There is going to be a fight and if the Germans find out we have stayed hidden in the cellar they may well kill us.’ Then came that same old refrain that was supposed to deliver reassurance. ‘They say Monty will be here any moment now and we’ll be able to come back tomorrow.’ But the gloss had worn off this promise. As the family picked up their suitcases, buckets of water, blankets, pillows and coats and trudged down the road to the Tafelberg, the only place left to go, Anje was sceptical. ‘I think to myself, Monty can go to hell. He will never come.’

  Marie-Anne’s Oosterbeek house, meanwhile, was already full of British soldiers and had been for days. When they weren’t manning the walls and windows, they were sitting on the stairs and sleeping on top of the potatoes in the cellar, alongside her and her family. They were low on supplies. ‘Some parachutes were dropped yesterday. Most fell beyond the English lines and the Germans got them. Some landed in the meadow but the boys dare not go and fetch them because the firing is too heavy.’ She had developed a real bond with the men and was worried when one of her favourites, Len the Cockney, was showing signs of exhaustion and battle fatigue. ‘The shooting over our heads is very bad and he comes down from upstairs and sits with his head in his hands. I try to distract him by showing him some photographs, and he gives me a snapshot of himself in uniform with his youngest son as a baby in his arms. Mummy makes a place for him and he lies down beside her, holding her hands very firmly. Some time later he is called back upstairs. Another soldier tells us that Len is overwrought and thinks too much about home. Len comes down again and sits beside me on the bed. He is almost asleep. I tell him to lie down and he does so, while I sit at his feet. Then another soldier comes and calls him upstairs again. He rises and goes. I never see him again.’ Later, when she asked Gerald, her other favourite, how Len was, he changed the subject.

  But there was love as well as loss, affection as well as angst, in that Oosterbeek cellar, a form of bunker mentality brought on by proximity and the shared sense of danger. At twenty-one, Gerald was nearer Marie-Anne’s age, and he now sat beside her as she lay down to sleep, trying to soot
he and reassure her that ‘everything will be all right.’ The whistling of shells and the din of battle continued to terrify her, and he stretched out next to her to comfort her, the young man far from home and frightened and the teenager suddenly thrust into the maelstrom of an adult world. ‘We lie talking for some time. He starts to nibble at me, so I ask him if he is hungry. He laughs and then falls asleep. At first he wakes up when the noise is very loud, then he sleeps on. He must be very tired. Suddenly he starts talking in his sleep. He starts crying and puts his arms around me. I stroke his head and he quietens down again. He wakes up and smiles at me when he sees me looking at him. We talk for a bit, but he falls asleep again. I must have slept, too, but not for long. The night seems endless.’

  With their brother-and-sister intimacy, she and Gerald kept each other going, and if, in that intense atmosphere, there were some more romantic exchanges between them, then she never spoke of them. They laughed and romped around and tickled each other; when he wasn’t upstairs manning his post, they sat discussing classical music – ‘he knows everything about Mozart, Bach and Haydn.’ They shared the bed in the cellar again. ‘We both fall asleep. Then he turns round, puts his arms around me and calls, “Georgie, Georgie!” When he wakes up, he tells me that is his wife’s name. He falls back asleep with his head on my knees.’

  If Marie-Anne was like a sister to the men camped out in her home, then Kate ter Horst – her house now turned into a fortress and a full-scale hospital for wounded airborne troops – was a sainted mother to the hundreds finding refuge there. She would walk the makeshift wards, the vision of an angel, minister to the sick, pray with the dying, give aid and comfort, for all of which she was one of the best-known and most admired heroes of the Arnhem story. But she also had to be a mother to her own five children, terrified by what was happening to them and their home. When the fighting around the house was at its worst, she would draw them around her to sing songs and to look through a picture book by the light of a candle. ‘We hear the shrapnel bursting and the splinters rattling against the house. Even down in the cellar, the noise is painful so I put cotton wool in baby’s ears.’ When a frightened little one announced that she wanted to go back to the nursery to sleep in her own bed, Kate had to calm her while concealing from the child the fact that her bedroom now housed a dozen bloodied and bandaged men.

  As for the men, they were invariably anxious about her children, sending down treats of eggs or apples and sweets for them. Those manning the walls would sneak downstairs from time to time to connect with the semblance of family life still going on down there. Kate recalled – with guilt – how one soldier, his face and body black from powder and trench earth, came into the cellar and took her baby on his knee. She grabbed back the child because the man was so dirty – and immediately regretted the deed. ‘How could I? Perhaps it was the last time he would look into a child’s eyes.’ She wished she could have called him back and handed him her baby son to hold, but he was gone, back up the stairs to fight, his helmet on and his Sten gun under his arm, a moment of much-needed humanity lost.

  Kate split her time between her children and her patients, between heaven and hell, drawn in both directions, a heartbreaking choice between them on every occasion. ‘A little hand pulls at my skirt. “Mother, will you fetch my doll for me?” I risk the trip upstairs.’ She crept through the house – her own house – pausing in the corridors to find a way past the wounded on the floors and the rows of defenders at the windows. ‘Nowhere is there any glass in the windows, but, in spite of the violent draught, there is an unbearable stench of blood, sweat and dirt and the sweetish smell of the dead.’ She had brought a bottle of juice with her to quench the thirst of the wounded lying in rows on the floor of her large living room. ‘It is passed from hand to hand along all the stretchers and then comes back to me still half full. I am amazed by their selflessness and pass it round again. At the back, somebody gets up and helps his neighbour, who has no hands. “You are brave to be here,” one of the men says to me. Wounded and helpless as they are, they still feel themselves soldiers and better able to stand the war than a woman.’

  In the kitchen she came across a young doctor, his face pale and grave, who told her that the house itself had taken a direct hit and a wall was collapsing. And that was only the start. ‘The Germans are pressing nearer and nearer, and the ring within which the British are crowded near the Rhine is getting smaller and smaller,’ he informed her. Kate remembered how, as he delivered this seeming death sentence, ‘his hands hung between his knees and there was an expression of melancholy in his dark eyes.’ She noted a change of heart among the defenders still standing, a dip in their confidence. ‘They crowd together and make no show of going outside again. German tanks have been signalled. Are there many? From what direction are they coming? Nobody knows exactly. But there are tanks and they are approaching and that is enough.’

  Back down in the cellar, she felt the heat and stuffiness close in on her. ‘There are forty people in this hole and the atmosphere is unbearable. Suddenly the baby vomits in his little cradle. Everything is dirty, even his mattress and cushion. Tired and white, he lies in my arms. Soldiers are snoring on the stone steps. The Germans are all round us and are steadily drawing nearer.’ Like Anje van Maanen, she wondered if this would be her last night. The mothering instinct conquered her fears. ‘It is three in the morning but I find a basin and some warm water and bring it down to the cellar without waking anyone up. I am on my knees as baby plays in the water, his eyes, which have been so dull during the last few days, brighten up. Then I roll him up in a towel and he plays to his heart’s content, naked on my mattress. I give him a few spoonfuls of Ovomaltine,4 the last of the supplies, and take the basin back upstairs to the medical orderlies from whom I borrowed it. I tell them how happy the little fellow is and that he’s the only clean thing in the whole house.’

  For an operation that had begun in high hopes and the bright sun of autumn, the descent of Market Garden now into rain, mud and cold was a severe damper on morale. Glider pilot Dick Ennis’s trench was now a foot deep in liquid mud. Crouching there, the rain running off his helmet and down his neck, he thought he must have died and was in Purgatory, ‘and that this would go on and on for ever.’ He got to move to another trench, but only because the defenders were now so depleted in numbers they had to spread out to show at least some presence along the over-stretched line. He and another man dashed to what they thought was an empty trench but which turned out to contain the body of the previous occupant, his face buried in the mud. ‘We propped him up in a corner. In a pocket of his smock were a few cigarettes in a battered tin. We had one each and passed the tin down the line.’ When darkness fell, they took it in turns to creep out and scrape a grave in the earth. ‘We buried our comrade beside his own foxhole.’

  The next morning, from the woods opposite, they heard a heavy engine start and rev up to a high scream. ‘The trees swayed, and then fell straight towards us till they lay flat along the ground. The snub nose of a tank appeared, a Tiger armed with a flame-thrower.’ Another trench took the first blast of liquid fire. ‘We heard the screams of our men as the flames enveloped their dug-out.’ The tank now worked its way along the line, ‘vomiting fire’. With no anti-tank mortars to engage it, only rifles, resistance was futile. ‘There was nothing we could do. We jumped out of our trenches and ran back into the shelter of some trees.’ In reality, Ennis wasn’t so much running as just managing to stay upright and walk. ‘I had become so weak, my knees could barely support me and my lungs were tearing through my chest.’ He would be easy prey for the line of German infantry following in the tank’s wake.

  He made it to the trees and flopped into a trench in a clearing. The tank came relentlessly on, and he prayed, ‘Please, please, dear God help us.’ Then he spotted on one side of the clearing the camouflaged remains of a 17-pounder anti-tank gun, covered in branches. Its tyres had been blown off and the barrel was stuck in one position. But could it
be made to work? Its crew looked just as battered. One was dead and the other three dispirited, but Ennis managed to rouse them to action as the German tank came closer, its caterpillar tracks clanking into a position – ‘by a miracle, definitely a miracle’ – directly in line with the otherwise useless airborne gun. The tank was broadside on and just a few yards from the barrel when the gunner fired. ‘There was a blinding flash and a sound that killed all sound. The tank heeled over, its side obliterated by a gaping jagged hole. Slowly the turret lid opened, a head and shoulders appeared and then collapsed. The Hun sagged over the edge of his turret, blood gushing from his mouth and running down to the ground.’ The infantry following behind it wavered. Then they turned and ran. Ennis leapt from his trench and, despite a bullet wound in his leg, led a charge after them, the British troops firing as they went. He was proud to report that only ‘a small proportion’ of the enemy got away.