Winter of the World (52 page)

He wanted nothing but to run away.

He turned around. His mind was blank of every thought but fear. He started to walk back the way they had come, towards the forest, away from the battle, taking long, determined strides.

Hermann saved him. He stood in front of Erik and said: ‘Where are you going? Don’t be a fool!’ Erik kept moving, and tried to walk past him. Hermann punched him in the stomach,
really hard, and Erik folded over and fell to his knees.

‘Don’t run away!’ Hermann said urgently. ‘You’ll be shot for desertion! Pull yourself together!’

While Erik was trying to catch his breath he came to his senses. He could not run away, he must not desert, he had to stay here, he realized. Slowly his willpower overcame his terror. Eventually
he got to his feet.

Hermann looked at him warily.

‘Sorry,’ said Erik. ‘I panicked. I’m all right now.’

‘Then pick up the stretcher and keep going.’

Erik picked up the rolled stretcher, balanced it on his shoulder, turned around and ran on.

Closer to the river, Erik and Hermann found themselves among infantry. Some were manhandling inflated rubber dinghies out of the backs of trucks and carrying them to the water’s edge,
while the tanks tried to cover them by firing at the French defences. But Erik, rapidly recovering his mental powers, soon saw that it was a losing battle: the French were behind walls and inside
buildings, while the German infantry were exposed on the bank of the river. As soon as they got a dinghy into the water, it came under intense machine-gun fire.

Upstream, the river turned a right-angled bend, so the infantry could not move out of range of the French without retreating a long distance.

There were already many dead and wounded men on the ground.

‘Let’s pick this one up,’ Hermann said decisively, and Erik bent to the task. They unrolled their stretcher on the ground next to a groaning infantryman. Erik gave him water
from a flask, as he had learned in training. The man seemed to have numerous superficial wounds on his face and one limp arm. Erik guessed he had been hit by machine-gun fire that luckily had
missed his vital areas. He saw no gush of blood, so they did not attempt to staunch his wounds. They lifted the man on to the stretcher, picked it up, and began to jog back to the dressing
station.

The wounded man cried out in agony as they moved; then, when they stopped, he shouted: ‘Keep going, keep going!’ and gritted his teeth.

Carrying a man on a stretcher was not as easy as it might seem. Erik thought his arms would fall off when they were only halfway. But he could see that the patient was in greater pain by far,
and he just kept running.

Shells no longer fell around them, he noticed gratefully. The French were concentrating all their fire on the river bank, trying to prevent the Germans crossing.

At last Erik and Hermann reached the farmhouse with their burden. Weiss had the place organized, the rooms cleared of superfluous furniture, places marked on the floor for patients, the kitchen
table set up for operations. He showed Erik and Hermann where to put the wounded man. Then he sent them back for another.

The run back to the river was easier. They were unburdened and going slightly downhill. As they approached the bank Erik wondered fearfully whether he would panic again.

He saw with trepidation that the battle was going badly. There were several deflated vessels in midstream and many more bodies on the bank – and still no Germans on the far side.

Hermann said: ‘This is a catastrophe. We should have waited for our artillery!’ His voice was shrill.

Erik said: ‘Then we would have lost the advantage of surprise, and the French would have had time to bring up reinforcements. There would have been no point in that long trek through the
Ardennes.’

‘Well, this isn’t working,’ said Hermann.

Deep in his heart Erik was beginning to wonder whether the Führer’s plans really were infallible. The thought undermined his resolution and threatened to throw him completely off
balance. Fortunately there was no more time for reflection. They stopped beside a man with most of one leg blown off. He was about their age, twenty, with pale, freckled skin and copper-red hair.
His right leg ended at mid-thigh in a ragged stump. Amazingly, he was conscious, and he stared at them as if they were angels of mercy.

Erik found the pressure point in his groin and stopped the bleeding while Hermann got out a tourniquet and applied it. Then they put him on the stretcher and began the run back.

Hermann was a loyal German, but he sometimes allowed negative feelings to get the better of him. If Erik ever had such feelings he was careful not to voice them. That way he did not lower anyone
else’s morale – and he stayed out of trouble.

But he could not help thinking. It seemed the approach through the Ardennes had not given the Germans the walkover victory they had expected. The Meuse defences were light but the French were
fighting back fiercely. Surely, he thought, his first experience of battle was not going to destroy his faith in his Führer? The idea made him feel panicky.

He wondered whether the German forces farther east were faring any better. The 1st Panzer and the 10th Panzer had been alongside Erik’s division, the 2nd, as they approached the border,
and it must be they who were attacking upstream.

His arm muscles were now in constant agony.

They arrived back at the dressing station for the second time. The place was now frantically busy, the floor crowded with men groaning and crying, bloody bandages everywhere, Weiss and his
assistants moving quickly from one maimed body to the next. Erik had never imagined there could be so much suffering in one small place. Somehow, when the Führer spoke of war, Erik never
thought of this kind of thing.

Then he noticed that his own patient’s eyes were closed.

Major Weiss felt for a pulse then said harshly. ‘Put him in the barn – and for fuck’s sake don’t waste time bringing me corpses!’

Erik could have cried with frustration, and with the pain in his arms, which was beginning to afflict his legs, too.

They put the body in the barn, and saw that there were already a dozen dead young men there.

This was worse than anything he had envisaged. When he had thought about battle he had foreseen courage in the face of danger, stoicism in suffering, heroism in adversity. What he saw now was
agony, screaming, blind terror, broken bodies, and a complete lack of faith in the wisdom of the mission.

They went back again to the river.

The sun was low in the sky, now, and something had changed on the battlefield. The French defenders in Donchery were being shelled from the far side of the river. Erik guessed that farther
upstream the 1st Panzers had had better luck, and had secured a bridgehead on the south bank; and now they were coming to the aid of the comrades on their flanks. Clearly
they
had not lost
their ammunition in the forest.

Heartened, Erik and Hermann rescued another wounded man. When they got back to the dressing station this time they were given tin bowls of a tasty soup. Resting for ten minutes while he drank
the soup made Erik want to lie down and go to sleep for the night. It took a mighty effort to stand up and pick up his end of the stretcher and jog back to the battlefield.

Now they saw a different scene. Tanks were crossing the river on rafts. The Germans on the far side were coming under heavy fire, but they were shooting back, with the help of reinforcements
from the 1st Panzers.

Erik saw that his side had a chance of winning their objective after all. He was heartened, and he began to feel ashamed that he had doubted the Führer.

He and Hermann kept on retrieving the wounded, hour after hour, until they forgot what it was like to be free from pain in their arms and legs. Some of their charges were unconscious; some
thanked them, some cursed them; many just screamed; some lived and some died.

By eight o’clock that evening there was a German bridgehead on the far side of the river, and by ten it was secure.

The fighting came to an end at nightfall. Erik and Hermann continued to sweep the battlefield for wounded men. They brought back the last one at midnight. Then they lay down under a tree and
fell into a sleep of utter exhaustion.

Next day Erik and Hermann and the rest of the 2nd Panzers turned west and broke through what remained of the French defences.

Two days later they were fifty miles away, at the river Oise, and moving fast through undefended territory.

By 20 May, a week after emerging unexpectedly from the Ardennes Forest, they had reached the coast of the English Channel.

Major Weiss explained their achievement to Erik and Hermann. ‘Our attack on Belgium was a feint, you see. Its purpose was to draw the French and British into a trap. We Panzer divisions
formed the jaws of the trap, and now we have them between our teeth. Much of the French army and nearly all of the British Expeditionary Force are in Belgium, encircled by the German army. They are
cut off from supplies and reinforcements, helpless – and defeated.’

Erik said triumphantly: ‘This was the Führer’s plan all along!’

‘Yes,’ said Weiss, and, as ever, Erik could not tell whether he was sincere. ‘No one thinks like the Führer!’

(ii)

Lloyd Williams was in a football stadium somewhere between Calais and Paris. With him were another thousand or more British prisoners of war. They had no shelter from the
blazing June sun, but they were grateful for the warm nights as they had no blankets. There were no toilets and no water for washing.

Lloyd was digging a hole with his hands. He had organized some of the Welsh miners to make latrines at one end of the soccer pitch, and he was working alongside them to show willing. Other men
joined in, having nothing else to do, and soon there were a hundred or so helping. When a guard strolled over to see what was going on, Lloyd explained.

‘You speak good German,’ said the guard amiably. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Lloyd.’

‘I’m Dieter.’

Lloyd decided to exploit this small expression of friendliness. ‘We could dig faster if we had tools.’

‘What’s the hurry?’

‘Better hygiene would benefit you as well as us.’

Dieter shrugged and went away.

Lloyd felt awkwardly unheroic. He had seen no fighting. The Welsh Rifles had gone to France as reserves, to relieve other units in what was expected to be a long battle. But it had taken the
Germans only ten days to defeat the bulk of the Allied army. Many of the defeated British troops had then been evacuated from Calais and Dunkirk, but thousands had missed the boat, and Lloyd was
among them.

Presumably the Germans were now pushing south. As far as he knew, the French were still fighting; but their best troops had been annihilated in Belgium, and there was a triumphant look about the
German guards, as if they knew victory was assured.

Lloyd was a prisoner of war, but how long would he remain so? At this point there must be powerful pressure on the British government to make peace. Churchill would never do so, but he was a
maverick, different from all other politicians, and he could be deposed. Men such as Lord Halifax would have little difficulty signing a peace treaty with the Nazis. The same was true, Lloyd
thought bitterly, of the junior Foreign Office minister Earl Fitzherbert, whom he now shamefully knew to be his father.

If peace came soon, his time as a prisoner of war could be short. He might spend all of it here, in this French arena. He would go home scrawny and sunburnt, but otherwise whole.

But if the British fought on, it would be a different matter. The last war had continued more than four years. Lloyd could not bear the thought of wasting four years of his life in a
prisoner-of-war camp. To avoid that, he decided, he would try to escape.

Dieter reappeared carrying half a dozen spades.

Lloyd gave them to the strongest men, and the work went faster.

At some point the prisoners would have to be moved to a permanent camp. That would be the time to make a run for it. Based on experience in Spain, Lloyd guessed that the army would not
prioritize the guarding of prisoners. If one tried to get away he might succeed, or he might be shot dead; either way, it was one less mouth to feed.

They spent the rest of the day completing the latrines. Apart from the improvement in hygiene, this project had boosted morale, and Lloyd lay awake that night, looking at the stars, trying to
think of other communal activities he might organize. He decided on a grand athletics contest, a prison-camp Olympic Games.

But he did not have the chance to put this into practice, for the next morning they were marched away.

At first he was not sure of the direction they were taking, but before long they got on to a Route Napoléon two-lane road and began to go steadily east. In all probability, Lloyd thought,
they were intended to walk all the way to Germany.

Once there, he knew, escape would be much more difficult. He had to seize this opportunity. And the sooner the better. He was scared – those guards had guns – but determined.

There was not much motor traffic other than the occasional German staff car, but the road was busy with people on foot, heading in the opposite direction. With their possessions in handcarts and
wheelbarrows, some driving their livestock ahead of them, they were clearly refugees whose homes had been destroyed in battle. That was a heartening sign, Lloyd told himself. An escaped prisoner
might hide himself among them.

The prisoners were lightly guarded. There were only ten Germans in charge of this moving column of a thousand men. The guards had one car and a motorcycle; the rest were on foot and on civilian
bicycles which they must have commandeered from the locals.

All the same, escape seemed hopeless at first. There were no English-style hedgerows to provide cover, and the ditches were too shallow to hide in. A man running away would provide an easy
target for a competent rifleman.

Then they entered a village. Here it was a little harder for the guards to keep an eye on everyone. Local men and women stood at the edges of the column, staring at the prisoners. A small flock
of sheep got mixed up with them. There were cottages and shops beside the road. Lloyd watched hopefully for his opportunity. He needed a place to hide instantly, an open door or a passage between
houses or a bush to hide behind. And he needed to be passing it at a moment when none of the guards was in sight.