The Iron Stallions (13 page)

The raid seemed to go on for hours, while they clutched at the soil of the ditch, their fingers twisted in the long green grass. Through the chaos of sound, they could hear the cries of women, the screams of children and the shrill agony of an injured horse. The bombs seemed to be coming closer but just as Josh was convinced his final moment had arrived, the last bomb burst twenty yards away, then, as suddenly as it had started, the world was silent again.

The silence lasted for what seemed a full minute, uncanny and unbelievable, before the wailing started. As Josh lifted his head and climbed out of the ditch, he saw other figures, dazed and covered with dirt, plaster and pieces of brick, beginning to emerge, shaking their heads and straightening their helmets.

The village was now nothing but a mound of rubble, the splintered beams sticking up like broken ribs, the air filled with a red cloud of dust from pulverised bricks. The column of French cavalry was nothing more than a line of twisted, burning wrecks, and a French officer, his hair grey with plaster dust, lay half-buried by a pile of bricks, one hand clawing feebly at the earth as his friends struggled to free him. An old man and an old woman lay side by side, the old man’s coat blown open, the old woman staring at the sky, both shoes missing, a hole in her black stocking.

News came through later in the day that Holland had collapsed and Belgium was likely to follow. A sergeant observer of the RAF, trudging westwards, his hair stiff with dried blood, told them that the Advanced Air Striking Force was as good as finished. Seventy-one machines had taken off for Sedan two days before and forty of them had failed to return.

Rumour had it that a German thrust was developing in the south, though in the north the front seemed to be holding firm, and so far they had seen no retreating British, so that it came as a total surprise when Leduc appeared, his eyes tired, his face strained, to say they had been ordered to withdraw to the line of the Escaut.

‘We’ve not even been in action yet,’ Morby-Smith complained.

‘Don’t let that worry you,’ Leduc snapped. ‘I can promise you that you will be before long. The front of the First French Army’s been broken and it seems there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance of reinforcing it. The Belgians are trying to form a line near Louvain and the French Seventh Army’s falling back on Antwerp. If you’re the praying kind, you’d better say your prayers now.’

Thwarted and frustrated at not being able to find the enemy, they started heading backwards, beginning now to meet Belgian soldiers moving westwards as purposefully as the civilians.

‘I did this as a boy in 1914,’ one middle-aged soldier said in English as he trudged past. ‘Only then it was quicker.’

The column grew with every minute as more vehicles forced themselves in from side roads. In one village they saw the corpses of old men, women, girls, boys, and infants laid out in rows on the pavement in front of bomb-smashed buildings, as though placed there for burial by the authorities who had then bolted for safety as a new wave of bombers came over.

They knew the truth now. In the south on a front fifty miles wide the Germans had shattered the French army and tanks were heading at what seemed an incredible speed towards Amiens and Arras, clearly going for the coast near Abbeville to cut off the northern armies.

‘That bloody Maginot Line was useless,’ Morby-Smith said. ‘They just came round the end of it.’

They were still unwillingly in reverse, in front of them now the communication troops who had been following them as they headed east. Armentières had been heavily bombed and the inmates of the asylum were wandering through the streets, standing at the side of the road in brown corduroy suits, saliva running from their mouths. Bleak-faced Belgians watched the British pass through their villages, and, overwhelmed by misery and frustration, all they could do was call out ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be back!’

By this time, regiments were becoming hopelessly intermingled, but it seemed the 19th were never to be involved in the fighting. Then, as they reached Arras, they were turned into a field and a staff officer appeared, stumbling with weariness. ‘We’re going to put in a counter-attack southwards,’ he said.

‘What with?’ Josh heard Leduc say.

The staff officer shrugged. ‘Clerks, cooks and mechanics,’ he admitted. ‘But we’ve scraped up a few mixed groups and pushed them into the line. A big effort’s being made to join hands with the French in the south.’

Petrol tankers appeared and topped everybody up and the machine gun belts and radios were checked.

‘Mount and start up!’

Crews scrambled into their seats, signallers bent over their radios, gunners waiting by their weapons. Starters whined and engines roared to life, the glow of dashboard lights throwing vehicles into silhouette. They were on the start line by daybreak and waiting for the orders for the off.

Tanks, French as well as British, were to spearhead the attack, and, probing forward warily, Josh spotted a long line of humped shapes in the distance, moving slowly across their front.

‘Anvil One to Base.’ As Ackroyd pulled the scout car into the side of the road, Josh bent over the radio. ‘We have a column of German trucks ahead of us. There must be an armoured column somewhere about. We need the tanks.’

Light tanks appeared. Josh could still see the enemy column ahead on a raised road across the plain, lorries, infantry and what looked like anti-tank guns all facing the wrong way. As the tanks’ weapons roared out vehicles burst into flame and debris was flung sky high. Small figures started to run and the armoured cars moved forward to rake the column from one end to the other.

Reports were coming in now that Arras was surrounded, then information arrived that the armour had lost touch with the French tanks which were supposed to be helping, and Josh was ordered to bring them forward.

‘It had better be you, Josh,’ Leduc said. ‘They might not take notice of a subaltern. Tell them our tanks are waiting for them at Loigny.’

Heading north, Josh found eight French tanks outside the village of Verve. They were 32-ton Char Bs and they seemed to be shooting at something on the horizon, hammering away with their heavy 75 mm guns. Drawing up alongside the commander’s tank, he called out and a French major’s head appeared through the turret.

As Josh explained what he wanted, the Frenchman shrugged. ‘We’re too busy here,’ he said.

‘At Loigny,’ Josh yelled, ‘there are about a dozen German tanks, armed with 20 mill. guns. You’d better come or they’ll have overrun us and be shooting you lot up the arse.’

The Frenchman looked startled, then he grinned, waved and ducked into the turret. Leaving three of his tanks to deal with the lorries, he led the other five after Josh.

They met the German tanks sooner than they’d expected and Josh waited outside the village while the fight went on. By the time the Frenchmen had finished eight of the German tanks were on fire and the rest had bolted.

Moving forward, Josh could see no sign now of the German infantry but, looking into the valley, he saw upwards of twenty British light tanks. The CO’s machine, distinguishable by its pennant, was a little in front of the others, and driving towards it, Josh radioed that it was now safe to move forward. There was no answer and as he tried for the fourth time, a voice came on the air. ‘Come over here and join me. I’m by the trees. We’ve had a little trouble.’

Heading into the valley, he thought it odd that none of the tanks was moving or using its guns. Then, as he moved among them, sheltering all the time behind their bulk, he realised their guns were pointing at all angles and a lot of them had their turret hatches open, and that men were lying half-in and half-out of them. Blood seemed to be spattered everywhere and it dawned on him that every one of them had been knocked out by anti-tank guns hidden by a group of potato clamps.

The tank commander who had called him came on the air again. ‘We ran into an ambush,’ he said. ‘There aren’t many of us left. I’m going to have a go at those trees with my machine gun now. I think they’re full of Germans.’

As they opened fire on the foliage, men and pieces of equipment began to fall to the ground. They were either snipers or men who had taken refuge there when the tanks had appeared. By this time, field gun fire was falling close by and it seemed to be time to move. As the British tanks climbed the ridge they were met with a tornado of fire and one after the other they were knocked out. The survivors backed off, moving uncertainly as though their commanders didn’t know what to do next against the overwhelming German weight.

There was only one way to go and that was back through the array of wrecked tanks. They were facing all ways, their tracks run off the bogeys, their engines smoking, the ground scattered with the equipment they normally carried on the hull. It was like passing through a lot of ghosts because no one appeared; and, as he reversed, Josh saw that the side of the commanding officer’s tank he had been trying to radio had been blown in and he could even see the crew inside in a mash of blood, uniforms, splintered bone and torn flesh.

Leduc was in a grim mood as he reported back. ‘The counter-attack’s fizzled out,’ he said. ‘We’ve stopped the Germans but we can’t go any further. The whole bloody thing’s becoming a shambles. The Grenadiers have been decimated at Pecq, but the Coldstream are in a château there overlooking the river and managing to hold off everything that comes along.’

As they withdrew north, every town they passed through seemed nothing more than a heap of rubble. They were streaming back now through the pill boxes and trenches of the earlier war, passing iron corkscrews which had once supported barbed wire to hold back the Germans but now contained only cattle. For miles there wasn’t a tree taller than twelve feet where the barrages of the earlier war had blasted whole woods to nothing. The villages were empty, cigarettes left to burn themselves out on bar counters, glasses half-drained, games of cards and dominoes abandoned unfinished.

Josh and his crew slept in an unsanitary heap in a small town where songbirds lay dead in cages, rabbits in hutches and cats and dogs in back rooms, while abandoned cows bawled in the fields to be milked. In the station a bombed train lay in a pyramid of splintered carriages. On the grass alongside were khaki-clad bodies which had been dragged from the wreckage.

‘The Germans have reached the sea.’ Leduc appeared as they gathered together the next morning, their faces strained, their eyes red with lack of sleep. ‘They’ve taken Boulogne and they’re now heading for Calais. This is a hell of a war but I suppose we’d better make the best of it. It’s the only one we’ve got.’

That night the area round them was lit with the flashes of bursting bombs and shells and the flames of large fires. Tracer bullets and Very lights made Disney-like designs in the sky and they soon learned that the white rockets they saw indicated that the Germans had captured some new objective.

All round them were anarchic bands of French soldiers from the shattered Ninth Army, roaming along the lines of communication, looting bars and grocers’ shops for wine. Among them were the refugees, none of them with any sure haven of refuge, simply keeping ahead of the fighting, carrying or pushing their belongings in wheelbarrows or perambulators because by now their cars and carts had been abandoned in the vast traffic jams that choked every town and crossroads.

To their astonishment, on the St Julien road they ran into a German horsed cavalry patrol, bumping forward as if on parade. As the machine guns roared, the patrol dissolved, leaving dead men and animals. Late in the afternoon, the boot was on the other foot and two of Ellesmere’s cars were hit. A sergeant and two men were killed and one car was lost. The other was towed away under fire, its wounded commander still inside.

The confusion was unbelievable by this time. On one occasion, Josh and Ormonde kept a whole regiment of Germans at bay by popping up at different places on a ridge to fire, to make them think there were more of them than there were. On another, heading north-west at full speed, they came on a line of tanks by the roadside, their crews making coffee. It was only as they roared past that it dawned on them that they were Germans, and on the Germans that the armoured cars were British. By the time everybody had recovered from their surprise they were clear.

As they stopped, Josh remembered it was Sunday. At Braxby people would just be leaving the church.

‘My wife’ll just be taking the dog for a walk,’ Ormonde observed.

It was clear by this time that a defeat of enormous magnitude was taking place and their minds were all full of a lost war. But discipline had not slipped and the regiment was still holding together in the nightmare of the retreat. Morale should have sunk to zero but it hadn’t, and there was even a remarkably cheerful approach to things. The menace now was less the Germans than sheer exhaustion and at every stop, Josh and Orne went along the halted vehicles, hammering with the butts of their revolvers on the helmets of men who had fallen asleep at the wheel.

‘We’re to head for Dunkirk,’ Leduc informed them the following morning. ‘We’re hanging on to Calais by the skin of our teeth to keep them from coming up on that flank, and a mixed force of French, Belgians and us are holding round Nieuport. The Navy’s trying to mount a rescue operation.’

Furnes was a ruined, smoke-covered nightmare, littered with burning vehicles and abandoned equipment. In the fields outside an aeroplane smoked among a swathe of smashed-down trees, alongside it two broken bodies and a hand, separate from the arm, lying in a puddle. Another airman lay under his parachute, and nearby was a neat row of corpses, the burial parties working among them without interest.

An officer was speaking irritably to a padre. ‘Oh, Christ, stop worrying,’ he was saying. ‘He’s dead. Let him sleep. He won’t worry about going off without prayers.’

‘No,’ the padre said firmly. ‘But
I
will.’

The padre won the argument, and spadefuls of dirt were tossed on to the blanketed shapes. A mound of earth disappeared and the ground was flattened down. Somewhere in the distance a man was singing drunkenly and a long line of ragged wounded straggled past. The air was full of smoke, sweat, dirt and the smell of death. By a wrecked building was a pile of dead rats which had once inhabited it and a group of men were staring at them as if they were important, one of them, unwashed, unfed and lacking sleep, scratching himself slowly, his face full of sadness.