The Black Baroness (23 page)

The next hour was spent by Gregory and the farmer carrying the remaining five patients along to the farm, where the farmer’s wife and daughter busily employed themselves making ready for the reception of the invalids. Fortunately, each stretcher in itself constituted a bed, and the surviving nurse, who had been in Gregory’s ambulance, was able to take charge of the patients.

During the whole business they hardly spoke as all of them were filled with a bitter, furious rage, which was utterly beyond expression, at the scene of murder they had witnessed. The farmer’s wife provided them with a meal and although Gregory would have liked to push on he felt that now that dusk was falling he and Gussy had better stay where they were for the night; so after they had eaten he went out and fetched two more stretchers as beds for them, leaving the dead bodies of their occupants on the floor of the second ambulance.

During the night there were sounds of distant firing, but how distant was impossible to judge, as the noise of the explosions echoed for miles up the deep valley. There was also the almost constant drone of aeroplanes overhead, but no bombs were dropped in their vicinity.

In the morning Gregory held a consultation with Gussy and they both decided that they could do no good by remaining where they were. The patients had warmth, shelter and food in the farmhouse and the nurse was quite competent to look after them until they could be moved; but the problem which faced the two Englishmen was that of transport.

After breakfast Gregory went out to have a look round the place and he found that in addition to several horses the farmer had a pony and trap, so he suggested that Gussy, who had ample funds, should buy it. The farmer was loath to sell, and on being pressed, demanded a price that was nearly three times the proper value, but Gussy had no intention of being caught by the Germans if he could possibly help it and during the early hours of the morning the firing had sounded considerably nearer, in consequence, although he was sulky at being rooked, he paid up without further argument, and with Gregory driving they set off towards Ringebu.

On their way they passed further detachments of British troops, but the sight did not cheer them particularly, as there were no heavy tanks in evidence and their numbers were not sufficient to justify any hope that they would be able to hold up the German column. At Ringebu they tried to get a train, but during the hour they waited on the station platform the only two-coach local which passed through, going north, was crammed with British wounded; so after buying enough food to keep them going for twenty-four hours they continued their journey in the pony-cart.

Soon they had more trouble with the Germans’ planes, as now that the battle was joined these were in constant evidence attacking British troop-concentrations wherever they could see them. For the German airmen it was a Roman holiday; except for occasional bursts from Bren guns they met with no opposition at all, so they were able to sail up and down in a leisurely fashion machine-gunning anything that took their fancy. Half a dozen times during the morning Gregory halted the trap in the best cover that he could find and lay doggo while fresh flights of Germans went over, and whenever he caught sight of a few khaki figures he was extra cautious. The Germans seemed determined not to give their enemies a moment’s rest and, in consequence, the British had been compelled to split up into little groups, which made their way in single file through the trees at the roadside or along the gullies where they could throw themselves flat immediately they were menaced by the Nazis.

By midday they reached the village of Graaho, where they halted to give the pony an hour’s rest and eat their lunch; and here they ran into a Staff-Colonel who was known to Gussy. Without saying very much it was clear the Colonel knew enough of the truth not to take too optimistic a view of the situation.

He said that the landings had been absolute hell as the weather had been lousy and nine out of ten of the men had been violently seasick; which had not helped matters, as the Germans had seized all the best ports and the British had been left only a few rickety piers at which to land. He added that they had met with a much stronger resistance outside Trondheim than they had anticipated and that the men were getting a bit fed up by being perpetually harassed from the air; but that, all things considered, they were in pretty good spirits and eager enough to have a cut at the enemy. On this optimistic note he drove off to get first-hand news of the progress of the battle that was raging further south.

By mid-afternoon Gregory felt that more could not be asked of the pony, so they halted at the village of Otta, having accomplished over thirty miles in the course of the day. Every inn in the valley was crowded out with refugees who had streamed north during the past fortnight, but the innkeeper found a cottager who was willing to let them a room with a double bed for the night and a stable for their pony.

Next morning they went to the railway station in a second attempt to get a train, but all the previous day the Germans had been bombing up and down the valley and they had obtained direct hits on the track on both sides of Otta, so until the line was repaired trains could not now get through from either direction. Returning to the cottage at which they had spent the night, they harnessed the pony and set off once more up the seemingly interminable valley.

They had to follow the same watchful procedure as on the day before, since the German aircraft were again active, strafing and bombing almost without intermission. Fortunately, the road was almost empty, as the farming community of the rich Gudbrandsdal Valley were staying ‘put’. The Germans were to the north and to the south of them, so there was nowhere for them to go, except up into the snow-topped, inhospitable mountains to the east or west. The refugees who had flooded the valley earlier in the month apparently felt the same, since they seemed to have abandoned any attempt at further flight and stood about in groups at the roadside and in the villages, waiting anxiously for the latest rumours and speculating as to whether the Germans would be arriving in a few hours or if the British would succeed in holding them back.

At Broendhaugen Gussy bought some more food while
Gregory talked to some British Tommies who were connecting field-telephone lines with the installation in the tiny village post-office, The men knew little of what was going on but Gregory was not surprised at that; as a subaltern in France in the old war he had often had to wait until the newspapers arrived from home to learn if an attack of two or three days before in a neighbouring sector had proved a success or failure.

The men grumbled because the German planes constantly interfered with their work, because their own Air Force was apparently at home, in bed asleep, because their sheepskin jerkins hampered their movements, because of the cold and because their rations were late in arriving; but Gregory was not at all perturbed by their attitude. He knew that the British Tommy is a born grouser and that the only time when his officers need worry about him is when he sits still and says nothing. Naturally, they did not like being bombed and machine-gunned, but in all other respects they were rather enjoying themselves. With their extraordinary facility for overcoming suspicion among foreigners by a cheerful grin and graphic gestures they had already made friends with the local inhabitants, and one of them was nursing a baby while the woman who owned the little general shop in which the post-office was situated was cooking them a meal in her kitchen.

When Gregory told them that he was going to Dombaas they said that he had much better stay where he was, as they had come up from there on a truck that morning and the place was in ruins. As it was the railway junction at the head of the Valley the Germans had been bombing it almost without cessation for the last forty-eight hours. However, Gregory knew that if he meant to get to Andalsnes he had no option, as it was only by going through the junction that he could get on to the road to the port; so, having eaten a scratch meal, he and Gussy wished the soldiers luck and set off once more.

They could see where Dombaas lay long before they got there as the situation of the little town was indicated by a mile-high column of smoke. When they drew nearer they saw that fires were burning there which it was far beyond the capacity of any small-town fire-brigade to put out, even with the assistance of the military; and while they were still half a mile from the nearest houses a flight of German planes came over to unload yet another cargo of bombs, which added to the havoc and confusion.

British military police were directing traffic along a side-road that skirted the town, since it was quite impossible to go through it, but the side-road was already a quagmire, as it had been churned into a sea of mud by British tanks, and cars were now having to bump their way over the fields that lay at the sides of the worst stretches.

They had accomplished another thirty miles, and it was now well on in the afternoon, so they pulled up at a farmhouse about a mile to the west of Dombaas. Every room and barn was crowded with refugees from the nearby town, but they managed to find a corner in one of the outbuildings in which to shelter for the night. It was very much colder up there than it had been down in Lillehammer and they would have suffered severely had it not been for the human warmth of the unfortunate Norwegians who were packed like sardines into the wooden building. There was nowhere at all in which they could stable the pony, so while Gussy kept their places Gregory secured a feed of hay for the animal and rugged it up on the lee side of the barn.

There was little sleep for them that night; it seemed as if Goering had turned the whole of the German Air Force on to Dombaas. Explosion after explosion shook the earth as the bombs rained down with rarely more than ten minutes’ interval between salvoes.

Haggard, weary, unshaven, they went out the following morning to find that their pony and trap had been stolen. Gussy was furious. As a rich man he had an extremely well-developed sense of the rights of a property-owner and the fact that he had paid through the nose for the outfit made him feel even more bitter about it; but Gregory accepted the incident philosophically. He pointed out that Gussy could hardly have expected to get the pony and trap back to England with him and he would probably have had to give it away in any case when they reached Andalsnes. He suggested that the best thing they could do was to go out on to the road and try to get a lift on one of the British Army lorries.

For the best part of three hours they stood shivering at the roadside trying to induce the drivers of the occasional vehicles that passed going westwards to stop and give them a lift; but the men all shrugged their shoulders with a helpless gesture and drove on. At last one of them pulled up half a mile down the road to examine his engine so Gregory raced after it and
tackled him. He then learnt why the others had refused to stop. The orders were that the troops were to treat the civil inhabitants with every consideration and render them every possible assistance which did not interfere with their own duties; but they were forbidden to give any refugee a lift on an army vehicle.

Gregory pleaded that as he and Gussy were Englishmen they were in an entirely different category, but the driver refused to risk it. He said that if Gregory could get an order from an officer he would take them willingly, but not otherwise, and on the lonely stretch of road no officer was available.

As Andalsnes was over seventy miles away it was not a jolly prospect to set out on foot, but Gregory decided that it was the only thing to do, so they started to trudge down the long, bleak road which followed the line of the railway upon which no trains were now running.

While they plodded on round curve after curve that disclosed seemingly endless vistas of misty mountains they discussed the military situation, although they knew little about it. As far as they could judge there was probably only about a Brigade operating in the Gudbrandsdal Valley, and from what they had heard it seemed that the British had not as yet penetrated to the Osterdal Valley at all; so if the Germans were coming up that as well, and bad no opposition to face, it seemed quite on the cards that they might come round behind the British somewhere south of Trondheim; in which case the British would be caught between two fires.

Gussy remarked how lucky it was that a great mountain-range separated the two valleys, as otherwise the German Eastern column might have crossed the watershed and made a descent direct on Dom baas, thereby cutting the British off days earlier and much more effectively. But owing to the snow on the heights, and the almost impassable roads, that, fortunately, seemed out of the question.

Gregory devoutly hoped that Gussy was right, but it seemed to him that the whole German drive was being conducted with such brilliant initiative that he would not have put anything past the German General Staff, and about three o’clock in the afternoon his pessimistic forebodings were confirmed through a totally unexpected happening which proved an extraordinary stroke of personal good luck for them both.

At the wail of a Klaxon behind them they moved to the side
of the road to get out of the way of an oncoming car, automatically turning their heads as they did so. As the car raced by Gussy caught a glimpse of its solitary passenger; it was his friend, the Staff Colonel, and the Colonel was looking straight at him. A hundred yards further down the road the car slowed up and, as the Colonel had no hesitation in breaking a regulation for two Englishmen, one of whom was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, they were taken aboard.

As soon as they were settled they gave the Colonel an outline of their adventures during the forty-eight hours since they had last seen him, and asked how things were going.

He looked tired and despondent and said quite frankly that he did not at all like the look of things. The fact that the Germans were able to come and go in the air without the least opposition was proving little short of disastrous. Our men were game enough, but no sooner had they established themselves in a position than the Germans bombed them out of it and machine-gunned them from the air. The company of Leicesters in Lillehammer had been almost annihilated and their supporting troops had fared little better. For the past two days the Germans had been driving ahead, up the Gudbrandsdal Valley, smashing all resistance with their tanks and aircraft, while they had raced up the Osterdal Valley to Tolgen without meeting any opposition at all, so that they were now only about seventy miles south of Trondheim. Worse; with almost unbelievable daring they had launched a four-pronged attack over the mountain-range and were already reported to be nearing Dombaas and Stoeren. Orders had been issued for an immediate withdrawal from the Gudbrandsdal, but with the railway cut in a dozen places and the Dombaas road-junction rendered impassable by constant bombing it was going to be touch-and-go as to whether the British would succeed in getting out of the trap.