The Day Gone By (53 page)

It took us a little less than three hours to get to Doullens; pretty good, I thought. Then we had to find out where the petrol dump was, for John had been unable to get a map reference. Farley and I were obliged to leave the platoon closed up and halted, and set off to find someone to ask. I wondered bleakly whether I ought, like Theseus, to be trailing a thread behind me. Would we ever be able to get back to them again? After a few minutes, however, we had the luck to spot a Pegasus directional sign beside the road, and not far away was the dump.

The platoon drove onto the heavy wire mesh doing duty for tracks surrounding the dump. Those who weren't wet through already were able to put it right now, for we had to get out and load up. We all had army groundsheets, of course, but anyone who has worn one in a steady downpour knows how little comfort they really were. The blokes loaded, the N.C.O.s loaded, I loaded. We crammed every jeep and every trailer as full as possible with petrol. (By this stage of the war they were British jerricans.) The corporal in charge of the dump asked me into his tent to sign the necessary papers, although he said it didn't matter how much we took. At length we were ready to return.

Going back was much the same, except that everyone was very tired, and hungry as well. We reached the company location - a field much like any other - and the platoon off-loaded the cans while I went to report to John Gifford. I felt we'd done rather well.

‘How much did you get altogether?' asked John.

I told him.

‘It's not enough.'

‘Sir, every jeep and trailer was bung full.'

‘Well.' John paused. ‘You'd better go back and get some more.'

‘Now, sir?'

‘Yes, please.'

I went back and gathered the N.C.O.s. They took it very well. They were a fine platoon but, setting that aside, I was beginning to wonder how much more they
could,
physically and mentally, do. Mere endurance was not enough. To drive a jeep and trailer in convoy you had to be reasonably alert, and more than reasonably in these conditions. Well, we would find out. I was clear about two things. To read the map and find the way was my responsibility and I dared not delegate it. It couldn't be done properly on a motorbike. But, secondly, I didn't think the N.C.O.s could go on safely riding motor-bikes much further. We might perhaps be able to manage with fewer, but some motor-bikes there obviously had to be. How few? Sergeant Smith thought five. I reckoned six. I asked the assembled platoon whether anyone thought he had the know-how to ride a bike in these conditions. One man volunteered. He was very young, a boy named Driver Sutton. I want to put it down here that Driver Sutton did everything a sheep-dog motor-cyclist ought to do throughout the whole of that nasty journey. He was excellent.

That left five other motor-bikes and a total of nine N.C.O.s. Sergeant Smith worked out some sort of turn-and-turn-about system to give everyone a stand-down during the trip, and off we set again.

It would be tedious to prolong this account; but we got there, loaded up and started back without accident. I was beginning to feel a sort of affinity with Captain Cook. That was the whole point - that he
didn't
have an accident - or only one, anyway. He must have had some first-class subordinates, don't you think? I recall two things about our return journey.

During the first run, we had all perceived along one length of the very dark road a vile smell - the smell of corruption. As we were coming back from the petrol dump for the second time, the rain gradually stopped and light came into the sky. We were now able to see what it was that was nauseating us. The adjacent fields were full of dead horses; cart-horses, most of them. Our Typhoons had destroyed all the Germans' motorized transport, and in their retreat they had commandeered horses and carts for their gear. But the Typhoons had got them, too. They looked so pathetic and pitiable, those great, innocent beasts, their legs sticking stiffly up at all unnatural angles and foul white bubbles blown from every orifice of their bodies.

We were just getting over this when suddenly Driver Farley said (just like a policeman) ‘'Ullo, 'ullo, what's this?' He had seen quicker than I. Three figures in uniform were approaching us down the slope of a field. They were Germans, evidently bent on surrender. We pulled up and I gestured to them to come up to me.

One was Luftwaffe. He looked like a veteran and turned out to be one, for I found in his pocket an iron cross (made of plastic) which bore the date ‘1939'. He also had a picquet pack which I've still got. The second was an infantry officer in jackboots, a mere child who looked about seventeen. The third was a Kaporal, black-haired and dour. I motioned them into the jeep and, when we came to the next small town, handed them over to the Maquis, in accordance with standing orders. That was the last we saw of them.

When we finally got back, the company had already up and gone. John had left someone behind to tell us where. The going was easier that day, even though we were all so sleepless; there seemed to be less on the roads. We caught up and that morning were among the first Allied troops to enter Brussels.

Guards Armoured Division, the spearhead of the Allied pursuit, reached Brussels on 3 September. Hard on their heels followed the ‘seaborne tail' of 1st Airborne Division, ready to go forward as soon as the airborne attack on Holland should begin.

I have been told that the liberation of Paris had nothing on the liberation of Brussels, and I can believe it. Every street was thronged with people, laughing, weeping, cheering, climbing on our jeeps and lorries, covering us with flowers and paper-chains, pinning red-black-and-yellow emblems and boutonnières on our airborne smocks; girls by the hundred kissing us, men pressing upon us glasses of everything you can imagine. (‘M'sieu, voilà, le vrai Scotch whisky! Pour ce jour je l'ai caché quatre ans! Vive l'Angleterre!') Everywhere the bells were ringing, bands playing. It was unreal — dream-like. I found, somehow or other, in my jeep, a pretty Belgian girl of about my own age - twenty-four. Her name was Janine Flamand, the daughter of (I think, having visited her home) a rather wealthy wine merchant. As we rode on, something amusing occurred which showed up my rotten French. The jeep was moving jerkily, as best it could, through the clamouring benediction, when Janine suddenly cried ‘Oh, j'ai perdue l'équilibre!' In all the hubbub I heard it phonetically as ‘lait qui libre', and wondered what on earth free milk could have to do with all this. I knew they were all ‘libre' now, but the ‘lait'? An idiom? Anyway, Janine got liberated good and proper. During the next ten days - and later - I had quite a lot to do with the Flamand family and liked them very much.

John Gifford, while certainly no killjoy, sat a bit loose to all this wild melarky. It was not only that he had the Company to be thinking of. It was, rather, that this kind of rapturous frolicking and emotional carousal with strangers wasn't compatible with his naturally impassive, self-possessed temperament. I have a memory of our being together one evening in some sort of club or dance-hall, with a band. We were continually being importuned to dance, of course, and John obliged with the best of them; but after a while the band struck up a conga. The conga of those days was an affair simple to the point of childishness. Everyone formed a line; you held the girl in front of you round the waist and the girl behind you held you round the waist. There might be a hundred or so people thus engaged. Then the chain cavorted rather ponderously round the room, flinging out right and left legs alternately as they went. I recall watching John's back, four places ahead of me. It looked what you'd call unco-operative and long-suffering. Later that night, when we were out of the city and snugly back in our village near Louvain, he pointed to the brightly coloured wooden Belgian emblem pinned on my shoulder and said quietly ‘I think we'll take these things off, shall we? We've liberated Belgium now.'

We were comfortable enough in that village, hearing and discounting military rumours; getting the vehicles - and ourselves - to rights after the rigours of the advance from Normandy; the blokes going into Brussels in relays for rest and recreation - rather more of the latter - and at last receiving letters from home. I found I could generally communicate what I wanted to in French, but understanding it was more difficult, because the locals spoke so idiomatically and quickly. The officers' billets were in a friendly farmhouse. I remember that one early afternoon it began to rain heavily. After a minute or two Yvette, the grown-up daughter of the house, came running in with her hands and shoes dirty from the garden and poured out to me a torrent of urgent French. ‘Lentement, mademoiselle, je vous en prie: plus lentement!' Yvette, hopping from foot to foot and drawing in her breath with hard-won self-control and patience, said ‘Les fenêtres' — (nod) — ‘de votre chambre' - (nod) - ‘sont ouvertes' - (nod) - ‘et la pluie -' The franc dropped, and I was half-way up the stairs.

Phil Bushby, our Workshops officer, was a much better linguist, and in the evenings used to read the local newspaper to get a bit of atmosphere. I recall him, after dinner one evening, reading out from the ‘Wanted' column: ‘“Bonne serieuse”: how would you translate that, John? “Steady girl”?'

It was all too short a rest and refit in the autumn sunshine. John, who was now acting C.R.A.S.C. of the seaborne tail (Colonel Packe being in England with Jack Cranmer-Byng, Paddy Kavanagh and the rest of the airborne element), was often summoned to conferences in Brussels. Returning one afternoon he sent for me.

‘Dick, three of your glider-borne jeep sections are to go back to England today, as soon as they can be got ready. Will you see to it now, please?'

‘Am I to go too, sir?'

‘No.'

‘Does it matter which sections go?'

‘You can decide that yourself.'

‘Is it for -'

John looked at his watch, looked away and then at the papers in his hand. I saluted and set off for C Platoon lines.

There was no section of the seven in the platoon with which one would seize the opportunity to part. Sergeant Smith, Sergeant Potter and I decided to put seven bits of paper into a beret and draw three out. The three names which came out were Corporal Bater, Corporal Pickering and Corporal Hollis. Level-headed and cool, they got their men together and were off within the hour. I was not to see them again until well after the end of the war.

A few days later we found ourselves once more on the road, in and out of the company of Guards Armoured Division, each of whose vehicles bore their cognizance of an open eye. We were getting to know the sight of that eye. Slowly, we moved about forty miles north-eastward, towards the border with Holland. Around and ahead of us were heavy concentrations of troops and armour - that much we could tell. Most of us passed that night dozing in our jeeps, though some were lucky enough to be invited, subject to instant call by their mates, into their homes by the friendly Dutch. We were in Limburg, a little south of what was then called the Escaut Canal, but which I see is now called (in
The Times Atlas)
the Kempisch Canal, and about thirty miles south of Eindhoven in Holland.

The following morning, 17 September 1944, John Gifford told his officers what was going to happen. We were on the threshold of a major operation code-named Market Garden. ‘Market' was the airborne part and ‘Garden' was the land offensive. The intention was to get the Allied 2nd Army, in one blow, across the Rhine and into northern Holland. This was expected to finish the war before the end of the year. The operation would begin early that same afternoon, soon after one o'clock (1300 hours), when the first lift of parachute and glider-borne troops would arrive from England.

The airborne army, three divisions strong, was due to land in relays during the next forty-eight hours, at different places along the fifty-odd miles between Eindhoven in Brabant and Arnhem in Gelderland. Not far east of its great delta at Dordrecht and Rotterdam, the Rhine divides into two arms - the Waal and the Neder Rijn - each a formidable river in itself. Only a few miles south of the Waal runs the river Maas. The 101st American Airborne Division were going to seize Eindhoven and the road leading northward to Grave. Meanwhile, 82nd American Airborne Division would capture the bridge over the Maas at Grave, and also Nijmegen, with its great bridge (the biggest road bridge in Europe) over the Waal. The star role, however, had been given to 1st British Airborne, who would in a few hours be in possession of the bridge over the Neder Rijn at Arnhem.

2nd Army, of which we were a very humble part - non-combatant, really — would attack that same afternoon, to synchronize with the airborne landings. They would advance on the axis of the Valkenswaard-Eindhoven road, linking up with 101st American Airborne. From there they would go on northward to Grave, cross the Maas bridge held by 82nd American Airborne, reach Nijmegen, cross the Waal and by Tuesday evening 19 September, be at Arnhem. There, then, our lot would meet up with Paddy, Jack Cranmer-Byng and also, no doubt, Corporals Bater, Pickering and Hollis. John said that the planned final objective of the whole operation, once 1st Airborne and the land forces had linked up at Arnhem, was Apeldoorn, about fifteen miles north. After that, the High Command (S.H.A.E.F.) would assess the situation and (as Captain Stanhope in
Journey's End
says to his sergeant-major) advance and win the war.

This was heady stuff. This was what airborne soldiering was all about; a swift, dramatic blow to finish the enemy for good and all. The Allies had total air supremacy - not a Jerry ‘plane in the sky. The Germans had already been smashed to pieces in Normandy and had retreated to Holland without offering further resistance. Their morale was plainly shattered. 1st Airborne was now to play a major part in the Allies' triumph: it would be a gâteau promenade of appropriate distinction.

I passed this information on to the four-sevenths of my platoon who were still around. I have never known morale higher. The men were excited and eager to go. About mid-day the company had a hot dinner and then waited about in the fine, slightly hazy autumn weather.