The shell-bursts crept away as the German gunners turned their attention to the Battles, which had begun their bombing runs. Looking down, Yeoman thought that the bombers looked for all the world like flies, caught in a deadly spider’s web of fire.
The leading Battle dropped its pair of bombs, which exploded alongside a pontoon in a twin fountain of spray, and jinked away to safety, pursued by rippling shell-bursts. The second aircraft was not so lucky. Caught in the meshes of the flak, it exploded in a cloud of blazing fragments that fell hissing into the river. Its crew had no chance to escape.
A third Battle completed its bombing run. Yeoman saw a pontoon burst into the air in a fountain of wreckage, and cheered inwardly as the bomber raced low over the surface of the water, away from the flak. Suddenly, it heeled over on a wingtip and ploughed into the wood that stretched along the river bank, exploding in a mushroom of smoke.
Hillier’s voice burst over the radio. ‘Squadron, follow me, line astern! Go for the flak!’
Yeoman saw the squadron commander’s aircraft peel off and go into a steep dive, followed by the remainder of ‘A’ Flight. Five seconds later Rogerson led ‘B’ Flight in their wake, the Hurricanes hurtling down towards the glittering surface of the river.
The altimeter unwound with terrifying speed. Yeoman saw Callender’s aircraft, two hundred yards ahead of him, pull up suddenly and speed above the river bank, smoke-trails streaming back from its wings as the pilot fired at some unseen target. Easing back the stick, he saw the long barrel of a 37-mm flak gun pointing skywards from the western end of one of the pontoons, and gave a touch of left rudder to bring it into his line of fire.
The surface of the river blurred underneath his wings as he streaked over the water at less than fifty feet. He had a fleeting impression of German soldiers throwing themselves from the pontoon as his Hurricane bore down on them, and of the gun crew desperately trying to traverse their weapon in his direction. Then his thumb jabbed down savagely on the firing-button, and the scene shivered as the fighter trembled under the recoil.
His bullets churned up the water short of the pontoon. A slight backward pressure on the stick, and he saw his fire blasting into the river bank, throwing clods of earth into the air. A gunner, his legs cut from under him, threw up his arms and fell into the water. Machine-guns opened up from the opposite bank, throwing up cauldrons of spray around the racing Hurricane. Yeoman sensed, rather than heard, the ‘spang’ of bullets striking home in his fuselage, an instant before he pulled back the stick and sent the Hurricane rocketing skywards.
He went up to four thousand feet and turned. The Hurricane responded poorly and the controls felt sloppy in his hands. He knew that he had sustained damage, but how severe it was he had no way of knowing.
He turned away from the river, glancing behind as he did so. The sky above the Meuse was a mass of flak bursts, with insect-like aircraft darting and weaving among them. Sedan was over on his right. Below him, a narrow road led south-westwards, out of the wooded hills and into open country. A strange vibration shook the Hurricane, a weird drumming that made his spine shiver. He throttled back to safe low cruising-speed, but the shuddering persisted.
He was finding it impossible to maintain height, and the Hurricane was becoming more insensitive all the time. He sensed that it was only a matter of minutes before he lost control altogether.
He toyed with the idea of baling out, but he was already down to three thousand feet and losing height rapidly. A forced landing seemed to be the only way out.
Ahead of him, the foothills gave way to a series of rolling fields, bordering the narrow road. There was a lot of activity on the latter; he spotted a few vehicles, but the traffic on the road seemed to be composed mainly of people on foot, so he thought it unlikely that it was a German column. In any case, he had no choice but to get down as quickly as possible.
He decided to go for a belly-landing. He picked the largest of the fields and began his approach, pulling on his harness to tighten it and opening the cockpit canopy. With the hood open, he would have at least a fighting chance of getting out if the Hurricane went over on its back.
He was already flying into wind, a fact for which he was thankful. To land downwind or across wind with only marginal control would have been to invite disaster, and he had not enough height left to make any wide turns.
At five hundred feet he switched everything off, trimming the fighter for the glide. Sounds impressed themselves indelibly on his mind; the sigh of the slipstream, the metallic pinking of the inert engine.
He crossed the dry stone wall that marked the field boundary in a flat glide, with plenty of height to spare. He resisted the temptation to push the nose down, to get out of the air fast. The field seemed to expand around him and he eased the stick back gently, raising the nose. The speed fell away rapidly as gravity took over and the Hurricane sank.
The jolt when the tail struck was surprisingly gentle. Then the fighter thudded down on her belly, careering across the field in a screech of rending metal and fabric. Yeoman hunched himself up into a ball, arms crossed to protect his face.
The Hurricane hit a ridge running across the field and bounced briefly into the air. It struck again and slewed round, shedding a wingtip. Yeoman was hurled forward brutally as the fighter reared up on its nose. For a long, agonizing moment it hung there, tail high in the air. Yeoman closed his eyes, convinced that the aircraft was going to topple over on its back. Then it settled, the right way up, with a spine-jarring crunch that knocked the wind out of him.
He groped for his harness release and unfastened it, shedding his parachute harness a moment later, and stood up painfully, bracing himself against the cockpit runner. The Hurricane was a mess, with only the cockpit and engine still intact. The tail had broken off and lay several yards away; the wings were crumpled and shattered. Yeoman shook his head, hardly able to comprehend that he was still in one piece, and levered himself out of the wreck, inhaling die fresh air gratefully. He still felt slightly dizzy from the fumes he had inhaled earlier; he would never know what had caused them now.
He took a few steps away from the shattered Hurricane and sat down, breathing heavily and feeling weak at the knees. A hundred yards away, people were milling around on the road. A small group broke away and ran towards him across the field, waving. He stood up shakily as they approached.
A burly, thick-set man wearing corduroy trousers and a vest was the first to arrive. Panting, he seized Yeoman by the hand and grinned at him. ‘Aviateur anglais?’ he asked. The pilot nodded, pointing to the roundels on the Hurricane’s broken fuselage.
The man broke into a torrent of French, from which Yeoman managed to pick out a few words. The gist of it, he gathered, was that the Frenchman wanted to know if he was hurt. He shook his head. The other clapped him on the shoulder and spat on the ground. ‘Ces salauds de Boches!’ he growled.
They moved down the hillside towards the road, the Frenchman insisting on taking Yeoman’s arm to help him along. His other arm was taken by a small, wizened man who sported a neatly clipped grey beard and a black beret. He tapped himself on the chest.
‘I am Etienne,’ he announced. ‘I fight in the war of fourteen-eighteen. I speak English good. I am Sergent-Chef signaller. I liaise with ’Ampshire Regiment. ’Ampshire Regiment bloody good.’ He winked. ‘You trust Etienne. I help you.’ He made a face. ‘French Army now — merde! Not like fourteen-eighteen army. We know how to fight, then. But Tommy kick Boche up arse, you see!’ Yeoman hoped he was right.
The road was crammed with refugees; men, women and children, moving in an endless column away from the thunder of gunfire in the east. It was the most appalling sight Yeoman had ever seen. It was the first time that the horror of war had been brought home to him; war that tore mothers and little children away from their homes and threw them, fear-driven, into flight.
He scrambled over a ditch and joined the human stream, wrinkling his nostrils as a smell assailed them: the sme
ll of sweat and terror. He wondered, with a sudden sense of horror, whether this terrible scene could ever be re-enacted in England. It was hard to visualize, but not impossible. Suddenly, he knew with absolute clarity that he had a purpose in life. Hitherto, he had regarded the enemy as men much like himself, just ordinary chaps who followed orders; that was probably true, but behind those orders was a deep-rooted evil which had to be fought at all costs. It was an evil that turned these ordinary people into desperate fugitives because of one man’s greed.
He looked at the faces around him, and read nothing but hopelessness. He stood by the roadside and watched them go by. An elderly couple passed him, the man bent almost double, dragging a small cart loaded with possessions. His wife walked beside him, her hand on his arm, the tracks of tears furrowing the dust on her face.
The dusty column walked on in a silence that was almost eerie, broken only by the rumble and squeak of cart-wheels, the tramp of feet and the occasional sob. Yeoman began walking too, flanked by Etienne and the burly Frenchman, whose name he never learned. He knew that the road he was on led to Vouziers, which he calculated was about fifteen miles away; there was an Allied command post in Vouziers, from which he ought to be able to contact Châlons. He hoped fervently that the defences on the Meuse would hold for a little longer; if they did not, it was very likely that the refugee column would be overtaken by German tanks.
A sudden cry jerked him out of his thoughts. He took another step forward, and collided with a young woman who had been walking in front of him, pushing an ancient pram piled high with belongings. Part of her load had fallen sideways into the road in a clatter of pots and pans. She knelt in the dust and scooped them up, bundling them into a blanket. Beside her, a little girl of four or five years old clutched at her skirt and began to wail. The tide of refugees split in half and flowed round them, never pausing in its weary trudge.
Yeoman stopped. Etienne tugged agitatedly at his arm, clearly anxious to be on his way. The pilot shrugged him off and bent down, helping the woman to collect her scattered things. He gathered up the bundle and placed it securely on top of the pram, smiling at her. She smiled faintly at him in return, nodding her thanks, the weariness and despair showing in her face. Yeoman appraised her closely and decided that she was a typical French peasant girl, pretty in a rustic sort of way, but with her cheeks and forehead already showing lines that denoted a daily round of toil in all weathers, and the anxiety of eking out a living from a meagre patch of soil. She wore a grey dress of rough wool, darned black stockings and unsightly clogs, but she held herself proudly, and the eyes that looked into Yeoman’s were grey and steady. Her hair, what could be seen of it, was tawny. Most of it was hidden under a scarf.
The little girl was still crying. She was a miniature of her mother. Yeoman dug his hand into his trouser pocket, his fingers locating a piece of chocolate which he had put there earlier that morning. It was partly melted and sticky. He unwrapped it carefully and offered it to the child. She turned away shyly at first, but her mother whispered something in her ear and she reached out and took the sweet, putting it to her mouth and surveying the pilot with wide eyes. Yeoman laughed and took the child gently under the arms, swinging her high in the air and settling her on his shoulders. She squealed with delight, her mouth covered in chocolate.
They set off once more, the little girl perched on Yeoman’s shoulders and the woman pushing the pram. Etienne trotted alongside, chattering away to her. After a while he turned to the pilot, wiping an imaginary tear from the comer of his eye.
‘Her name is Chantal,’ he said. ‘She tell very sad story. ’Er ’usband is killed on Maginot Line in winter of thirty-nine. She work farm with father, but he die last month. She not have anywhere to go, now Boche come. Very sad.’ He shook his head in sympathy.
Yeoman trudged on in silence, wondering how many thousands of times the girl’s personal tragedy would be multiplied before this war was over. They walked for three hours without pause, Yeoman and Etienne taking turns at carrying the child. From his conversation with the Frenchman, Yeoman gathered that the Germans had been dropping leaflets over the border areas and putting out hourly radio transmissions for the past five days, all carefully designed to spread panic among the civilian population. It was not hard to spot the reasoning behind such a move. With the roads clogged with refugees, the Allies would find it virtually impossible to rush reinforcements to the front to contain an enemy breakthrough.
Yeoman’s neck still pained him badly, and he quickly discovered that flying boots were not designed for long-distance walking. His toes felt like red-hot coals. He was glad of Etienne’s company; the little Frenchman talked continually, apparently unaffected by the thirst and dust that caused Yeoman’s tongue to stick to the roof of his mouth, and his cheerfulness helped to take the pilot’s mind off his own physical discomfort.
They passed through a small village — or rather what had once been a village, for the bombers had been there before them. The place was a wilderness of shattered houses, the timbers of their roofs pointing starkly towards the sky. Stretching along the main street of the village, and for a hundred yards beyond it, was the remains of a French transport column. Some of the vehicles were still burning and smoke drifted up the street in an oily cloud. The refugees stumbled through it, picking their way round the wreckage, coughing in the acrid fumes. The human debris had been cleared away, but much of the transport had been horse-drawn, and here and there the poor creatures lay in twisted heaps, still entangled in their harness. It was a sickening sight, and Yeoman was glad when the village was behind them.
On the farther side, groups of French soldiers were sitting by the roadside, many of them displaying bloodstained bandages. Inert bodies, covered by army blankets, provided mute testimony of the effectiveness of the air attack. The troops seemed dazed and bewildered, staring blankly at the refugees as they shuffled slowly past One man stood in the road, spittle drooling from his open mouth, chin sunk on his chest, his hands making aimless fluttering movements; he was clearly deranged. ‘Sauve qui peut’ he kept muttering to himself. ‘Sauve qui peut!’
His voice rose to a scream, following the refugees along the road. ‘Sauve qui peut!’
Sauve qui peut. Every man for himself. That, reflected Yeoman as he tramped on, seemed to be a slogan that was sweeping through France like wildfire in this May of 1940.
It was late afternoon now, and scattered cumulus clouds helped to cut down the savage heat of the sun. Yeoman, in common with the refugees, was terribly thirsty, and it seemed like a godsend when the column reached a bridge that crossed a small stream. There was hardly more than a trickle of water, running between banks of dried mud, but the refugees flung themselves on it and drank greedily, filling whatever utensils they could find. Yeoman quenched his thirst and washed some of the caked dust from his face, feeling a lot better. Above all he wanted to bathe his swollen feet, but he knew that if he took off his boots he would probably not be able to get them on again.
The column moved off once more. Some distance farther on, they passed a signpost that told them Vouziers was still eight kilometres away.
They were all tired now and even Etienne had fallen silent. Yeoman kept looking back, hoping for a sign of military transport heading their way, but all the French army vehicles that passed them were going in the opposite direction. In any case, although the pilot might have flagged down a lift it was unlikely that he could have taken his two companions and the child along with him, and he felt obliged to see them at least as far as Vouziers in safety.
The little girl was fast asleep now, cradled in Yeoman’s arms as he walked. Etienne came alongside and indicated that it was his turn to take her. Yeoman handed her over gently, sighing with relief and flexing his tired muscles.
He looked back yet again. The column was strung out along the road almost as far as he could see, the elderly and infirm having gradually been overtaken.
The fighters came out of the west, from a di
rection no one expected, diving out of the sun. There were six of them, Messerschmitt 109s, and they blasted over the heads of the refugees like a whirlwind. Everything happened in seconds, but to Yeoman time seemed to hang suspended. He screamed at those nearest to him to get off the road and lie flat. They looked at him un-comprehendingly. He pushed at Chantal and Etienne. The woman tried to drag her laden pram with her and the pilot pulled her harshly away from it. The next instant he was almost trampled underfoot by a horde of screaming, panic-stricken people as the fighters returned, streaking along the road from the opposite direction and firing as they came. The woman was swept away from him. He tried to reach out to her and fell headlong, striking his forehead painfully against a cart-wheel. A line of machine-gun fire exploded along the surface of the road, throwing up a whirlwind of dust and stones. People fell screaming, thrashing in agony as the bullets cut into them.
Horrified, Yeoman raised his head and saw Chantal’s little girl, running up the road with short, uncertain steps. Somehow, she had struggled clear of Etienne’s arms. She wailed in terror. Yeoman struggled to his feet and lunged towards her as another Messerschmitt came boring in, the bark of its cannon and machine-guns drowning the nightmare cries of pain and fear.
In front of the pilot, a small figure rose from a cluster of sprawled bodies. It was Etienne. Blood poured from a wound in his shoulder; his beret had gone and his white hair streamed out as he hurled himself on the child, bearing her to the ground and covering her with his body.
A burst of fire missed Yeoman’s pounding feet by inches. He cried out in horror as the bullets tracked across Etienne. The little Frenchman jerked once and then was still.
The Messerschmitts flew away. Yeoman stumbled forward and knelt beside Etienne, trying to shut his ears to the gasps and moans of the wounded and dying. Tenderly, he turned the Frenchman over. Blood poured over his hands. Etienne opened his eyes. There was a kind of wonder in them. He smiled, tried to say something, and died.
Hurricane Squadron Page 9
