Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (7 page)

At 3 a.m. on 29 May the first troops of the 4th Sussex arrived on the hill. It marked the battalion’s final hours as a cohesive unit. Approaching the hill in the faint morning light, Bill Holmes and his comrades could see the outline of the monastery’s gothic stone walls. Beneath them, the steep road leading to the summit mocked the soldiers, who gasped for breath as they made their weary way past the queues of lorries all heading for the doubtful sanctuary of the monastery, with its boarded-up restaurant and shuttered souvenir shop. The lines of transport, nose to tail, wheezed just as desperately as the troops as they inched their way up the forbidding slope. Above them, the hilltop was crowded with troops all awaiting an assault they knew must come. They were not wrong.

In the words of Lieutenant Hodgins, an officer at the 131 Brigade HQ: ‘There was very little chance of any cover and the situation was the most unpleasant as the whole of the Mont des Cats was covered with troops.’
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His words hardly did justice to their situation. Once atop the hill the troops were subject to the most terrifying assault they had so far experienced. At 8.30 a.m., just as Bill Holmes and his mates reached the summit, the first artillery fire of the day commenced. Not waiting for the inevitable toll of casualties, they moved straight down to positions in the relative safety of the wooded hillside. Then, one hour later, twenty German warplanes arrived overhead, bombing and machine-gunning the troops clustered around the hilltop. Bill Holmes watched in awe as tanks fired flaming tracer rounds towards them to guide the aircraft circling in the skies. Their attack lasted a full thirty minutes. Once the planes departed, German mortars and tank guns opened fire on the infantrymen as they scrambled for whatever cover they could find. Again Holmes watched men dropping dead before his eyes as shell splinters and piercing shards of tree bark filled the air. From his position he could see the town of Cassel burning atop a nearby hill. Closer still, he could make out the ominous grey-clad figures of German soldiers in the fields around. Discarded uniforms and helmets littered the ground. Arms and ammunition were scattered everywhere. There was little the soldiers could do. If they stayed where they were they would surely die. Yet death seemed just as certain for any man who ran away. Indeed, where could they run?

It was little wonder the hillsides were so covered with troops. This one small area was crowded with soldiers: the 2nd, 4th and 5th Battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment, three battalions of the Queen’s Regiment, two battalions of West Kents and one of men from the East Kents. The commanding officer of the l/5th Queen’s Regiment ordered his men to move to positions clear of the hilltop to help stem the ever-increasing toll of casualties being inflicted on them. As the casualties mounted, their padre, Reverend Brode, moved out into the open to help them. Disregarding his personal safety, he tended the wounded and dying men. As a fellow officer of the battalion later described it, his ‘fearless example was a great encouragement to everyone’.
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At 10.30 a.m., with the death toll mounting and their situation hopeless, the order was finally issued for the entire division to abandon the hill. Sid Seal was at the 4th Sussex HQ when the signal came through: ‘We got the order “All troops withdraw from Mont des Cats to Dunkirk via Poperinghe. No transport to be taken. Travel in parties. Scatter if enemy tanks approach.”’

The withdrawal commenced at 11 a.m. The orders for the retreat towards Dunkirk made no reference to the wounded. For Sid Seal this could mean only one thing: ‘We were soon aware of how bad things were. The officer told us we were to leave the wounded where they were and that anyone wounded on the way back would be left behind. What we had to do was save ourselves. It was a real blow. Several of our chaps were left there. One of them was a good friend of mine, Bill Stone. We’d been in the Territorials together before the war. He’d had his leg smashed and I had to leave him there. He lost his leg.’

While some of the wounded were left behind to be taken prisoner, others were fortunate enough to escape towards the coast. It was all a matter of timing. Among them was Noel Matthews, a signaller from the Queen’s Regiment: ‘I was blown up twice. One shell landed slap-bang right beside the trench. I was half-buried. I struggled out of that and got myself into a shed. Then another shell came down and demolished the shed on top of me. It must have had bags of grain upstairs because it all collapsed on me. I was pinned against the wall. I thought this was like a film. The fact that I had almost been killed didn’t enter my mind.’ Dragged to safety, he was taken to the battalion aid post. Although seriously shaken, he was unwounded and later the same day was put on a truck. Rather than being deposited at the Mont des Cats, the truck he was in continued north towards Dunkirk. Had he been sent to the monastery for treatment his fate would have been very different: ‘I missed the bombing of the hill. Instead I reached De Panne in safety.’

While some units were able to move from their positions in relative safety, others were not so fortunate. Bill Holmes and the rest of D Company were among the latter. As he descended the hill, Holmes turned back to watch as the monastery was hit by incoming artillery fire. Doing their best to ignore the slaughter of their mates and the dedicated doctors and orderlies, the men of D Company moved around the south-east edge of the hill, beneath a canopy of trees, but failed to reach the assembly point chosen by Lt-Colonel Whistler. The fate of the wounded was not their concern. As they escaped, shells burst around them, a stark reminder that they could not linger on the hill.

As they withdrew, the troops were forced to scatter as a French convoy came under attack by low-flying enemy aircraft. With the battalion no longer operating as a cohesive unit, the remaining troops began to divide into small groups who made their way northwards without either interference or guidance from their officers. Sid Seal watched as his platoon split into two groups, one on each side of a hedge. He later discovered the other party were all taken prisoner before they reached Dunkirk.

In the chaos troops were found wandering around on the hill, uncertain of their orders. Officers who attempted to round up these stragglers found themselves left behind in the rush to escape the hail of incoming fire. Every soldier at the Mont des Cats shared fears and uncertainties familiar to soldiers throughout history. For most of them – teenage Territorials, barely trained militiamen, ageing reservists hastily recalled to the colours and the old sweats of the regular battalions – the only thing that had made military life bearable was standing shoulder to shoulder with their comrades. Even the most reluctant recruits had found a camaraderie they had seldom known in civvy street, realizing military service could be tolerable if they shared the burdens of life in uniform with their new mates. Yet, as the withdrawal commenced, this too was denied them.

In the days that followed, life became a lottery as the men streamed back towards Dunkirk. The first of the parties of Sussex infantrymen embarked from the beaches of Dunkirk the very same day they had left the Mont des Cats. For others the journey took days – meaning it would be years before they once more headed home across the English Channel.

There was a finality in the order given to Bill Holmes after they left the Mont des Cats. The sergeant had uttered the words that every soldier dreaded: ‘Every man for himself All they knew was that they should head towards the plumes of smoke reeling into the sky above Dunkirk. As some of his comrades tried to escape across country in vehicles that had survived the bombing, Bill Holmes decided it safest to remain on foot. He soon found himself separated from the main body of troops as he headed across fields to avoid the roads he knew would be full of Germans:I was with three lads. We walked away from the hill. As we were walking off we were talking. And all of a sudden a shell took my mate. It covered him – buried him underground. If we could’ve got him out straight away he would’ve lived. But we couldn’t, because we were being bombed and machine-gunned. I ended up hiding under a clamp of rotting mangels. There were two German planes firing at us, peppering the ground. I could feel the bullets hitting around me. How I escaped, I’ll never know.

In the chaos all that counted was survival. As Sid Seal headed towards Dunkirk his mind was filled with dread that he might be left behind. Having already been forced to leave some of his mates behind, he dreaded sharing their fate:On the way to the coast we came under fire and I got hit by a piece of shrapnel. It cut my hand and split my lip open. The front of my battledress was covered in blood. Oh God, I thought my time was up. Luckily it wasn’t a bad wound, but it bled a lot. But at first I didn’t know. I was relieved. I didn’t wait to get it dressed. I kept going. I could remember what the officer had said about leaving the wounded behind. But my one thought was that I would not be left there.

Every man who left the Mont des Cats that morning shared certain experiences. There were soldiers of all regiments and all nationalities mixed up in the retreat. By day they walked with their heads turned skywards in a desperate search for enemy aircraft. By night they walked in the eerie light of German flares, fired to illuminate the retreating troops. Scenes of chaos and confusion seemed to symbolize the entire retreat – corpses, burning vehicles, abandoned equipment, men who remained resolute and men who had abandoned hope. Everywhere they looked they saw ruined churches, their steeples destroyed to prevent their use as observation posts. All among them felt the quickening of the heart and dryness of throat provoked by fear. And all knew they would be lucky to survive.

Each soldier who made the march towards the coast had his own memories, sights he would carry like snapshots through his life. There were plenty of surreal scenes. Small trucks hung from the branches of trees, where they had been blasted. There was the vision of a drunken British soldier riding around on a carthorse, laughing as he waved his hat at the men he passed. Elsewhere troops watched as a traumatized horse swam up and down a canal, unable to escape the water, until it was put out of its misery by a soldier appalled by its plight. In the chaos one infantry officer found himself hitching a lift on an artillery gun tractor. He soon found the driver had little idea of his destination and appeared to be going around in circles.

Bill Holmes and his mates shared all these horrors as they marched silently past a column of burning trucks. The convoy had been bombed just minutes before, but no one had come to its assistance. As the marching soldiers turned to look, they could see the charred figure of a driver within each truck. Their desperate situation was reinforced as Holmes turned back to watch sappers blowing up a canal bridge they had just crossed. Now he was certain – they must surely be the last of the rearguard to reach Dunkirk.

In those final days thousands of men like Sid Seal and Bill Holmes finally reached the dubious safety of the Dunkirk perimeter. Once there, whether they slipped safely across the Channel in the reassuring hands of the Royal Navy, were mown down on the beaches by marauding German warplanes, were wounded or left behind to be taken prisoner – it was all a lottery.

As the men of the rearguard arrived in Dunkirk they entered a surreal world. Burnt-out trucks littered the verges on the outskirts. The entire town was surrounded by the wreckage of vehicles. It seemed bizarre to the arriving soldiers that drivers, who had so lovingly tended these vehicles, should now be destroying them. Soldiers stood in front of trucks smashing windscreens with rifle-butts, as others removed vital engine parts and threw them into ditches and canals. Lorries stood with their bonnets open, tangled wires, holed sumps spilling oil on to the road. Everywhere were cars with smashed windscreens and slashed tyres. Motorcycles, their petrol tanks cracked open by axe blows, lay in heaps alongside twisted bicycles. The ground was littered with the remains of smashed car batteries, abandoned on the roadsides along with the sledgehammers that had destroyed them. One soldier saw an officer seated upon a packing crate. The forlorn man was holding his head in his hands, unable to watch the destruction. The soldier realized it was his own brigade commander. Utterly dejected, the brigadier could not watch as his driver battered his staff car with a pick-axe. Vehicles were not the only victims of this destruction. Like hideous metal trees, the ruptured barrels of wrecked artillery pieces pointed skywards, as if taunting the natural world with man’s ability to wreak havoc.

Once within the town the soldiers were faced with mounting horrors. Dunkirk assaulted their senses. Burning buildings lined the roadsides and a dark pall of smoke and dust hung over the entire town, while at night a deep red glow filled the skies. The crackle of flames, the crash of collapsing buildings and the vicious pinging of exploding ammunition joined the hideous drone of aircraft and the shrieking of incoming shells to lay siege to their ears. The radiant heat seared the skin of the men walking these streets. They could smell nothing but the heavy smoke. Indeed, the retreating soldiers could taste the very air around them as they advanced through a rain of burning embers towards the port and its waiting ships. By contrast, burst water mains sent water pouring into the streets. It mattered little that the water mains had been shattered; there was no one left to put out the fires.

In scenes that had become chillingly familiar throughout the retreat, the corpses of men and animals lay unattended where they had fallen. No one troubled to cover the dead or record their names. The swollen forms of the horses that had pulled French gun carriages into Dunkirk lay beside the wreckage of their weapons. Taking no notice of the stench of death, the soldiers marched onwards, stepping over the corpses. As he looked around, in streets lit only by the fires, with tangled trolley wires above his head and twisted corpses beneath his feet, Bill Holmes couldn’t help but compare the scene to Old Testament tales of the wrath of God. It seemed that Dunkirk must be facing the vengeful wrath of its maker.