The Black Baroness (22 page)

They left the town a quarter of a mile ahead of the other two ambulances and streaked up the gradient of the valley road along which they had chased von Ziegler a fortnight earlier. When they had covered a bare three miles they heard the crash of bombs behind them but gradually the noise faded in the distance, and for the sake of the invalids inside it Gregory eased down the pace at which he was driving the ambulance.

‘Poor devils!’ he muttered, suddenly.

‘You were thinking of the troops and that Captain feller,’ said Gussy slowly.

‘Yes. I’d hate to have been in his shoes. I should have felt just the same about things myself. The very idea of retreating from the enemy without even firing a shot seems cowardice—particularly when one’s young and it’s against orders. I felt an awful cad trying to scare him into getting out, but I was right, you know.’

‘Um; I’m afraid you were. Infantry can’t possibly hold up an armoured column unless they are equipped for the job.’

‘That’s what makes me so livid,’ Gregory went on. They’re going to be slaughtered because the people whose job it was to equip them were still thinking in terms of war as it was twenty-five years ago; they stand no more chance against Nazi shock-troops than the archers of mediaeval times would have stood if they had been sent against the grenadiers and batteries of artillery which took the field at Waterloo, I wish to God the whole damned Army Council was in Lillehammer at this moment instead of that poor Captain and his boys!’

‘It’s no good getting excited about it,’ Gussy replied quietly, ‘and it isn’t really fair to blame the Generals.’

‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say,’ retorted Gregory, with swift sarcasm; ‘it’s not really the Generals’ fault; it’s the fault of the Treasury, with their eternal cheese-paring and
obstruction. Every time the soldiers ask for a new weapon the Treasury argues that it isn’t necessary and vetoes it on account of the expense. There’s a lot in that, but all the same …’

‘No,’ Gussy cut in. ‘The Treasury only does its job of protecting the taxpayer. Every Government department blames the Treasury for its own shortcomings, but all the Treasury actually does is to prevent waste and try to ensure that whatever money is available is spent to the best advantage. If you really want to know at whose door you ought to place the deaths of those young men who are going to die in Lillehammer tonight when they try to halt the advance of the German armoured column, I’ll tell you. It is the fault of the British public.’

‘The old get-out of collective responsibility, eh? No, that won’t do.

‘But it’s the truth, Gregory. The fact that we’re a Democracy gives us the right to elect our own Government. We’ve done so numerous times since the last war—and who did we elect? For years we kept that vain, visionary wind-bag, Ramsay MacDonald, in power.’

‘You mean Stanley Baldwin kept him in power,’ Gregory interjected.

‘I was coming to Baldwin. MacDonald was only a small-time Pacifist, who sold his Party for the shadow of Power; and Baldwin was clever enough to use him as a stalking horse. He didn’t mind the Loon from Lossiemouth posturing as P.M. for a spell now and then providing that he retained the real power himself, and either through Ramsay or as the acknowledged Chief he ruled Britain for fifteen solid years. He knew what was happening on the Continent—he admitted it in the House of Commons again and again—and made specious promises that the nation should be properly rearmed so that any threat of future aggression could be checked; but the only thing that those two cared about was remaining in power. They feared that if they went to the country with a rearmament programme they might lose their jobs, so they kept on promising but they did nothing whatever about it, and from having had the finest Air Force in the world Britain’s air strength was allowed to shrink to sixth place. They reckoned that they could count on peace continuing for as long as they were likely to hold office and that someone else would have the job of tackling Hitler when they’d gone,’

‘And they were right,’ said Gregory bitterly. ‘The conscientious objector died full of years and honours on a luxury liner, and the other patriot made a graceful exit after the Coronation, to the cheers of the assembled multitude, with an Earldom and a K.G. Just think of it—all that the Most Noble and Puissant Order of the Garter used to stand for. Doesn’t it make you utterly sick?’

‘No. If you employ ambitious and unscrupulous men as the managers of your business you must not grumble when you find out one day that they have robbed the till. But you put your finger on it just now when you said “the cheers of the assembled multitude”. I remember those cheers for Baldwin at the time of the Coronation very well. Honest Stanley had just sacked his King and the public felt that he had handled a tricky situation remarkably well. Handling tricky situations was his long suit. Read your
Hansard
and see how for year after year he effectively spiked the guns of men like Churchill and Beaverbrook, causing them to appear to be ambitious trouble-makers when they were really only trying to bring home to the nation the frightful peril into which it was drifting. But honest Stan got away with it every time—and the public cheered him for it.

‘And that, Gregory, is the point I want to make. It was the Nation that by the exercise of a free vote put him in power and kept him there. People like you and I who knew a thing or two may have been alarmed at the manner in which he completely ignored the growing power of Hitler, but we didn’t want another shilling on the income tax, and we hadn’t the guts to vote Socialist; while the people who don’t pay income tax were just as much to blame; they took what he said for Gospel because they preferred to watch a football match or go dog-racing rather than take an intelligent interest in the international situation for themselves. You and I and all the other millions of men and women who voted for the Baldwin-MacDonald combine, from 1923 to 1937, are the criminals responsible for the situation of those boys of ours in Lillehammer today. That, Gregory, is the terrible, inescapable truth.’

Gregory sighed. ‘God! What a comment on Democracy!’

There was little traffic on the long, winding, mountain road except when every few miles it curved down to a place where the valley broadened out and they passed through a village. Occasionally a German aircraft hummed high overhead. They
were used to that, since during the whole of their stay in Lillehammer German planes had passed up the valley several times a day on reconnaissance flights; but now Gregory kept a wary eye upon them as he knew that von Ziegler would have reported the presence of British troops in Lillehammer and so at any time the Nazis might start aerial attacks on the British lines of communications.

By four o’clock in the afternoon they had covered about twenty miles and entered the village of Holmen, to which the doctor had said he meant to evacuate the patients as there was a cottage hospital there, so in the market-place Gregory pulled up. They had passed several detachments of British infantry outside the village and a temporary halt had been made by a battery of artillery in its square, from which Gregory concluded that this was the head of the main column for which the company at Lillehammer was acting as advance guard. While they waited for the other two ambulances to come up Gregory and Gussy got off the driver’s seat and, waylaying a lieutenant who was crossing the square, told him what was happening further south.

The lieutenant said that he was already aware of the situation as a field wireless had just come in to say that the British in Lillehammer were now in actual contact with the enemy, but that they had no need to worry as the main force that had been dispatched down the valley, of which his unit formed part, would soon be moving up in support; then he left them as the order ‘prepare to march’ was given.

They watched the column pass and found that, it consisted only of a battalion of infantry, a battery of artillery and half a company of R.E.s with a mixed collection of vehicles bringing up the rear; which greatly perturbed Gregory as he had expected that it would be a much larger force—at least a Brigade, or possibly a Division. Its tail end had hardly disappeared when the doctor arrived with the other two ambulances, so Gregory and Gussy went over to him. He was just about to give them directions how to reach the cottage hospital when Gregory said:

‘I don’t want to butt in, but there must be another cottage hospital further up the valley, and if I were you I should take your patients on there.’

‘But why?’ protested the doctor. ‘Your troops were already at Lillehammer when we left and many more of them have just
gone by, so the valley will now be held. We may have to put up with air-raids, but apart from that we shall be safe enough with twenty miles between ourselves and the Germans.’

‘Twenty miles is nothing to fast tanks,’ said Gregory bluntly; ‘they could cover that in an hour; and without wishing to appear disloyal to my own people I doubt very much if these lightly-equipped troops will be able to hold up a German armoured column for long. We must get behind something much heavier before we can consider ourselves really safe.’

‘I see,’ replied the doctor thoughtfully. ‘In that case, then, perhaps we’d better drive on to Ringebu.’

Accordingly they proceeded north once more. They had covered about five miles when they heard a faint but distinct thudding behind them and Gregory looked at Gussy.

‘It sounds as though the Boche have spotted that British column and are giving it the works.’

Gussy nodded. ‘That’s about it. I wonder, though, that we haven’t seen some of our own aircraft by this time.’

‘There’s not much hope of that, I’m afraid. Von Ziegler told me that they’ve secured all the landing-grounds in Norway, so the only support that our troops will get is from the Fleet Air Arm in the neighbourhood of the coast.’

For half an hour they drove on in silence, another German plane droned overhead, then a sudden rat-tat-tat struck their ears. Gregory needed no telling what that meant. It was the sound of machine-guns, and next second a sharp ping-ping-ping of bullets striking on metal came from their immediate rear.

Gregory was still leading the small convoy and they were running along a low stretch of the road which here was only a few feet above the level of the broad river. The mountains rose steeply to his right but to his left there was a shallow ditch and then a belt of pine-trees between the road and the water. Without an instant’s hesitation he swung the ambulance round, charged the ditch and bumped violently over the bank into the fringe of the wooded strip, pulling up with a jerk just before his bonnet came into collision with a tree.

‘Oh, my arm!’ gasped Gussy as the ambulance jolted to a halt.

‘You’re lucky still to be able to feel it,’ muttered Gregory somewhat unsympathetically. ‘If I’d stayed on the road another minute we would probably both have been shot through the head.’ Scrambling down, he dashed round to the back of the ambulance to see if any of his passengers had been hit.

There was a line of ten neat, round bullet-holes in the roof and seven or eight of the bullets had gone through the body of an old lady who had been admitted to hospital with a broken thigh during the previous week. Blood was still pouring from her on to the occupant of the lower berth but she had died almost instantaneously and neither the nurse, who was riding inside, nor any of the other three passengers were hurt.

Leaving the nurse to cope with one of her charges who had given way to a fit of hysteria, Gregory ran out on to the road. The second ambulance had charged a telegraph pole. The driver was lying over his wheel with blood pouring from his head, and the doctor, who had staggered out on to the road, fell dead at Gregory’s feet; but the third ambulance seemed to have escaped, as it was streaking along the road half a mile away.

The solitary murder-plane had turned and just as Gregory put his hand on the quivering driver’s arm it came streaking down again for a second attack on the now dispersed convoy, Dropping to his knees he wriggled underneath the ambulance. With a hellish clatter the machine-gun opened fire and bullets streaked into the roof above his head. There was a loud wailing cry, an awful gurgling shout, then silence as the plane ceased fire and zoomed up again. Gregory felt a warm splash on the back of his neck and knew that it was human blood dripping through the floor-boards.

Crawling out, he got open the door and in one glance took in the shambles that Hitler’s disciple had made during his evening’s sport. Two of the patients were dead, riddled with bullets, and the young nurse was writhing in agony with half her face shot away.

There was little that he could do for her except to find the doctor’s bag and give her an overdose of morphia. She was losing so much blood that he knew she would be dead long before he could get her to any place where her life might have been saved by proper attention, so he had no hesitation in sparing her what pain he could, Having thrust the morphia pellets into her mouth he sat there in a pool of blood on the floor of the ambulance, holding the poor girl’s hands until her moans ceased and her remaining eye glazed over.

Gussy and the other nurse had joined him. The driver was now dead. The other ambulance had not come back as the man who drove it was doubtless scared out of his wits and now
intent only on getting his own passengers and himself to a place of safety; but Gregory and the nurse, with Gussy’s one-handed aid, managed to get the two unwounded patients out on to the roadside. Gregory then went back to his own car. To his fury, he found that it was stuck. Owing to the trees on either side he could not turn it, and the bank over which he had charged was too steep for him to back it up. Having told Gussy how he had ditched himself, he set off at his long loping stride along the road for help.

Three-quarters of a mile further on he found a farmhouse among the trees. The farmer was quietly working in his yard and had probably heard the machine-gunning but known nothing of its object or results. When he saw that Gregory’s clothes were soaked with blood he dropped his pitchfork and came out at once on being beckoned from his gate.