Weaver (14 page)

When she got to Bohemia Road she came upon the main flow of refugees, heading out of town, slogging it on foot with their carts and wheelbarrows and prams. They were a river of people.

There was a good bit of traffic, private cars and buses and lorries and ambulances, but at least everybody was driving the same way, to the north and out of Hastings, and there were police and ARP wardens to shepherd the pedestrians off the road to keep the traffic moving. A few bicycles threaded through the crowd; that was a sensible way to go, if you co
uld manage it. Mary saw one lad on a bicycle hanging onto the back of a lorry, pulled along as the vehicle ploughed forward.

The police and wardens were keeping the right hand lane clear, the lane heading back to town, but there was little traffic on it. George had said that the authorities had plans to avoid what had happened on the continent, when refugee flows had snarled up attempts to move military assets into place for a counterattack, and the police had been given maps with some routes marked in yellow for the use of civilians, others red for the military. It might have worked better, George said drily, if the maps had been printed in the right coloured ink.

Mary felt reluctant to join the shuffling throng, as if it would mean sacrificing her individuality. But there was no choice. She stepped forward, and found a place behind a boy pushing a barrow, before a mother with two kids in a pram, beside an old man leaning on a sturdy woman who might have been his wife. And then she could do nothing but walk with the rest.

They passed abandoned vehicles, broken down or out of petrol, briskly shoved off the road. She didn’t see many military vehicles. Mostly it was just people, walking. They trudged along with their children on their backs and their wheelbarrows and prams laden with luggage and pots and pans. They seemed stoical enough. Maybe the national myths of the bulldog breed helped them hold it together. Churchill’s rhetoric, still working its magic. But there were many with drawn faces and strange absent looks - plenty of trauma, even as this dreadful day got going. How strange it was, Mary thought, that only a couple of days ago she had woken up with all these people in a town where the milk was delivered and the post and papers arrived, and you could expect the shops to be open sharp in the mornings. Now all that was stripped away, and these British subjects were refugees, as simple as that, with no dignity and precious little hope. It was a scene of a population in flight, right out of H.G. Wells.

On the outskirts of town she passed a factory. Contained within a tall wire fence, it had once manufactured components for gas cookers, but had been turned over to munitions manufacture at the outbreak of war. Now it was being systematically vandalised. A handful of women dragged equipment out of the buildings and went at it with sledgehammers and iron bars. Every factory was supposed to have a plan to disable its equipment lest it fall into enemy hands. The women, in overalls and headscarves, drafted in to replace men lost to the forces, looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Perhaps it felt like a holiday, an end to the dull and dangerous work that had occupied them for the year of the war.

Once they got out of town towards the open country there seemed to be nobody in charge, no more police or ARP wardens, except a few who had joined the flight themselves. And still they walked, limping terribly slowly through these few miles to Battle. By now Mary was dirty, hot, thirsty, hungry, tired, and her feet ached; she felt dizzy from the lack of sleep.

A plane came looming out of the sky, following the line of the road, heading straight toward the column. The people slowed. Mary watched in disbelief.

‘I think it’s one of ours,’ said one old man.

The plane howled as it descended.

‘That’s a bloody Stuka!’ somebody yelled.

When the machine guns opened up people screamed and scattered. Mary threw herself off the road, into a field of stubble. Bullets sang off the road surface as the plane roared low overhead. Then a bomb fell with a devastating crash, making a kind of bloody splash in the crowd.

At noon the German column came at last into Windmill Hill. It was just a hamlet surrounded by farmland. Here Ernst heard challenges to the advance in his own language. Elements of the Thirty-fourth, who had landed at Bexhill, were already in possession.

The column broke. While sentries patrolled, the men gathered in little groups and sat around in the dirt, eating their field rations, massaging their bare feet and swapping horror stories of the landing.

A few men were detailed to break into the houses and to search the nearby farms. No food was found, no stocks of petrol in the barns, no horses, though some of the men emerged with souvenirs - a photograph of the King, English newspapers, a government leaflet offering advice about what to do ‘If The Invader Comes’, over which the men had a good laugh.

A motor car was found abandoned. A couple of the men spent some minutes trying to start it, but the rotor arm had been removed. Another man turned up a bicycle, so small it must have been meant for a child. But even that had been disabled, its front wheel bent out of shape and its chain snapped. Still the man tried to ride it, with his legs folded and his big knees sticking up in the air. He kept falling off, and raised a few laughs.

Ernst, wandering around, saw graffiti on one of the barns, painted in thick whitewash. There was a huge letter ‘V’, perhaps aping Churchill’s notorious gesture. And on another, more bluntly, the words ‘PISS OFF HUN’.

After an hour at Windmill Hill the column formed up, reinforced with the men of the Thirty-fourth and a few more tanks. The prisoners were sent down to Bexhill, with a detachment of guards. Ernst felt in good spirits as the column set off for several more miles’ walk along the A-road towards a place called Battle - so they were assured by the spotters. All the road signs had been removed from their posts, so the ordinary troops had no real idea where they were, in green English countryside that looked much the same whichever direction you marched.

They joined a major road at Boreham Street. Again the place was deserted, but the engineers came upon a petrol station. Adorned with metal advertising signs for Shell and Mobiloil, it was abandoned, but the engineers quickly discovered that one of the big underground tanks wasn’t empty. Soon they were siphoning off the fuel and filling up the trucks.

But after half an hour the first of the trucks coughed, and ground to a halt. The fuel they had taken had burned to a sticky sludge and was wrecking the engine. The fuel had been doped, with sugar maybe. Cursing, the engineers had to stop all the trucks that had been refuelled at Boreham Street, and fill them agai
n from the column’s own dwindling supply, brought from the continent. It was another delay, another hour lost, another vehicle ruined.

As the column approached Battle the country became more difficult, with narrow valleys and low hills, a carpet of fields and hedgerows and copses - ideal cover. The men proceeded cautiously, as silently as possible. Sheep grazed calmly, watching the column pass.

Suddenly they came under heavy fire; it just erupted all around them. Leutnant Strohmeyer got a bullet in the arm, and swore furiously. The vehicles pulled off the road, and the men dived into the ditches by the road. A hail of bottles came spinning out of the woods. They were Molotov cocktails; they splashed where they fell, mostly harmlessly.

‘I wonder where they got the bloody petrol,’ Breitling muttered.

It was late afternoon by the time Mary approached Battle itself, where the refugees had been promised a convoy of vehicles would be waiting to take them further. There were many walking wounded after the Stuka attack, people moaning as they struggled to take one step after another. Mary did her best not to think of those left behind.

But an immense plume of flame rose up above Battle, bright in the sky of this late September Sunday. Mary heard the pop of guns and the deeper booming of artillery, and planes stitched the air. The walkers stalled. Mary heard muttering. But they could not go back; they plodded forward, for there was no choice.

They approached a crossroads. The road signs had been dismantled, but Mary heard mutterings that this was the transverse road that ran just south of Battle, joining two places she’d never heard of, Catsfield to the west and Sedlescombe to the east. The refugee flow pushed on across the road junction.

But just as Mary reached the junction there was a roar of some heavy engine. People screamed and scattered back out of the way. Mary was knocked to the ground in the crowd; she landed heavily.

A tank came roaring across the junction, heading from west to east. It stopped with a grind of gears, bang in the middle of the junction. It had a square black cross on its turret. An officer, his head and shoulders protruding from the turret, stared with astonishment at the people before him.

All that Sunday George picked up bits of news from the folk coming and going at the town hall.

There was a ferocious battle for Folkestone. The defenders were mostly a New Zealander division. Far from home, they fought well, but by two in the afternoon the Germans had taken the town. But the retreating troops blew up the harbour with its wharves and cranes.

Some German units had made it over the Channel today. But the hinge of the invasion would come overnight, when the bulk of the second echelon would try to make it across to their landing points at dawn on Monday. In advance of that a major battle was unfolding in the Channel. The RAF was strafing the flows of shipping and bombing the embarkation ports, all the while battling it out with the Luftwaffe, and trying to fend off bomber attacks on London and other inland cities. Its resources spread thin, the RAF was near collapse, so the rumours went. The Royal Navy also had split objectives, with a mandate to protect the Atlantic convoys even while the invasion was underway. But today the Home Fleet was fully deployed in the Channel. The destroyers and torpedo boats were taking on the Kriegsmarine, and were getting among the lines of barges and tugs returning from England.

And in Hastings, the Germans were here.

The first German troops arrived on bicycles at about six in the evening. They were soldiers, Wehrmacht as far as George knew, and they must have been scouts. They cycled casually, their rifles on their backs. They were unopposed. George stood at his post at the door of the town hall just off Queens Road, in his police uniform, helmet on, his canvas gas-mask bag slung over his shoulder. The scouts looked him over but otherwise ignored him.

Next came more infantry. They moved cautiously, walking so they hugged the walls to either side of the street, their rifles raised. They peered at upstairs windows, evidently fearful of snipers. But some of them kicked in the front doors of houses or smashed shop windows, and went in to emerge with clocks or bits of silver. After them came a motor-cycle detachment with route signs in German, replacements for the signs long taken down, cardboard placards which they strapped to lamp-posts and nailed to doorways.

Then followed a group of military policeman, the feldgendarmerie, with some junior Wehrmacht troopers. The MPs studied the town hall, and glared at George. Muttering in German, they picked out the building on a map. They ordered two of the soldiers to remain here, evidently on sentry duty. Then they strode on.

The men posted here looked at George, but, seeing he had no weapon and no intention of impeding them, got on with their work.
They took a hammer and nails from a canvas bag, and nailed a poster to the town hall door. When they were done they took up their own position by the door, lounging, ignoring George, sharing a cigarette.

George glanced at the poster. It read,

It was signed by Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, ‘Army Commander-in-Chief’. George supposed that where the Germans had up to now been a blank faceless mass, an amorphous enemy, now he would need to learn names such as this. He turned away.

Shortly after that, a more substantial column came rolling through the town: a couple of tanks, trucks, men on foot, horse-drawn carts and weapons. The troops looked weary to George; he saw salt stains on their boots.

At the head of the column was a rather fine car, a magnificent Bentley, silver grey. George wondered where they had liberated this beauty from - he could see why its owner hadn’t had the heart to follow orders and disable it. A Wehrmacht soldier chauffeured it for a man in a black uniform, accompanied by a woman in a similar uniform, with bright blonde hair.

The car pulled up outside the town hall. The driver opened the car for the officer and the woman; the two sentries smartened up and saluted, military style. The man in black responded with his right arm outstretched. ‘Heil Hitler.’ It was the first time George had ever seen a Nazi salute, save in the newsreels.

The man and his woman companion approached George. ‘Well, well,’ the woman said. ‘A British bobby! Years since I’ve seen one of these specimens. And look, Josef, he’s not afraid of you.’

‘Good for him,’ the man said, also in English. ‘Constable, is it?’

George felt confused. The man’s accent was German, but the woman’s was icy upper-crust English, Noel Coward stuff. And there was something very unsettling in the way she stared at him: blonde, tall, she was extremely beautiful. He said, ‘I am Police Constable George Tanner, number—’

The man waved him silent. ‘Yes, yes, man, I can see your wretched number on your shoulder board. I am Standartenfuhrer T
rojan, and this is Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash. We are of the Schutszstaffel. That is the security service you may know as the SS. Do you understand me?’