The Black Baroness (47 page)

On Friday morning Erika was definitely better, so Gregory was at last able to switch his thoughts to what was going on outside his immediate surroundings. Erika had been shot on Monday, the 27th, and the following morning Leopold had been denounced for his treachery by the French Premier, Paul Reynaud. World-wide indignation at the King’s act had been magnified by the fact that he had not even warned the British or French Armies of his intention, so that when his own Army had laid down its arms at midnight on the Monday the unfortunate British immediately to the south of them had had no opportunity to alter their dispositions to cover their suddenly-exposed flank. However, although the Belgian Army had surrendered
the Belgian people had repudiated their King and the Belgian Government had declared its intention of fighting on with the new slogan, ‘
Le Roi est mort
—
vive la Belgique!
’

With the defection of the Belgians the Northern Allied Army had been left in a position of grave peril. It was now fighting on three fronts and in considerable danger of being totally surrounded; so it seemed more obvious than ever to Gregory that Lord Gort and his French colleague would fling their armies forward in a determined attempt to break through and reach the Somme. They were reported to have some 400,000 men between them and with such a mass it was impossible to believe that under determined leadership a break-through could not be accomplished.

But by Thursday morning it had become clear that Lord Gort had no such intention. British units were already streaming back through Furnes towards the coast, and, in the afternoon Kuporovitch came back from a short walk to say that he had seen British troops occupied in destroying several supply-depots which had been established in the town.

He added that he had just heard that Narvik had been captured by a combined force of Norwegians and British, which made Gregory laugh for the first time in days. A small German force had hung out there for seven weeks in hostile country with the Norwegians shelling them from the surrounding mountains, and the mighty British Navy shelling them from the sea, while Allied troops perpetually harassed them from both shores of the fjord. Whatever German had commanded that show deserved a whole row of Iron Crosses and it was just one more feather in Hitler’s helmet.

When, on the Friday, it seemed that Erika’s youth and health would save her, Gregory went out to learn what he could about the situation. More and more British troops were pouring into the town down the road from Dixmude and Ypres and at the latter place a fierce battle was said to be raging. Having talked to several of the almost exhausted officers and men he learnt that Dunkirk was now the only port remaining in British hands, and, to his amazement, that an attempt was to be made to evacuate the whole of the B.E.F. from it.

This news gave him furiously to think. It now appeared that by moving Erika from Breedene to Furnes they had only gained a few days’ grace instead of securing her safety for a considerably longer period as he had hoped would be the case.

When it had become clear that no break-through was to be attempted Gregory had naturally assumed that the B.E.F. would dig in and hold the coast behind it until it could be reinforced from England. Its situation would then have been analogous to that of the Naval Division which Mr. Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had deliberately flung into Antwerp with great acumen and daring in the early weeks of the last Great War, only some twenty times stronger. That small force of almost untrained volunteers—the only land-force not under the control of the static Generals—had, under the personal leadership of the brilliant descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, played a not inconsiderable part in saving the Channel ports. The Germans, not knowing when it might be reinforced, had been compelled to detach three Army Corps to deal with it, as they dared not leave such a dangerous enemy bridge-head in their rear while they advanced into France Now, one would have thought, this great Northern Allied Army could have constituted an infinitely graver threat if dug in round Dunkirk; but apparently it did not intend to threaten anybody; if it could get there, it was going home.

Whether it succeeded or whether the bulk of it was destroyed before it could be embarked, the thing that affected Gregory personally as a result of the strange and alarming new ‘strategy’ was that the Germans would enter Furnes at latest before the week-end was past. Once more he had to face the agonising problem—should he just hope for the best and allow Erika to continue the good progress she was making, or should he again risk her life by attempting to evacuate her with the B.E.F.?

Dunkirk was only about eleven miles away along the coast so that afternoon he decided to go there and see for himself what was going on.

After lunch he and Kuporovitch managed to get a lift on a lorry and joined the slow, apparently endless procession of British Army vehicles which was now meandering along at the best pace it could make towards the west. Great havoc was being made among the columns by the German planes but, as they neared Dunkirk, for the first time they saw British planes in action.

The German air-armada was so great that it was impossible to count even a portion of it. There were several hundred planes in the air all at one time, but for once they were not having it all their own way; the British fighters streaked out of
the cloudless sky at them, flattened out, circled, zoomed up and dived again with their machine-guns spitting, and barely five minutes passed without a Nazi plane being brought down.

They arrived in Dunkirk at about half-past two but halted outside the town as bombs had reduced it to a complete ruin. Walking up on to the dunes to the right of the road, they saw an incredible spectacle. Scores of British destroyers and hundreds of small craft were standing in as near as they could to the long, sandy beaches. There were ferries, pleasure-steamers, private yachts, launches, fishing trawlers, life-boats and every conceivable type of vessel that could be driven by steam or oil, and snaky lines of khaki-clad figures were wading out through the shallow waters to be pulled on board them.

Yet for every man who was taken into a boat there were a dozen or more coming over the dunes from inland. Gunners, sappers, infantry, tank corps, A.S.C. drivers, officers, N.C.O.s and men were all inextricably muddled together in vast khaki crowds and it seemed utterly impossible that one-tenth of them could be saved by the little figures out in the boats who were working so desperately hard to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy.

In the sky above a thousand planes turned and twisted in furious combat. Fleets of bombers came over escorted by fighter aircraft and were broken up by the pom-poms of the warships. The bombs were released haphazard and few hit their mark, but the Messerschmitts swooped to machine-gun the beaches until the Hurricanes and Spitfires chivvied them away or sent them reeling down in a smoky spiral. Gregory thought that it must be the greatest air-battle that had ever taken place and he was overjoyed to see that although the British planes were far fewer in numbers they were decidedly getting the best of it. The Navy too, was doing a magnificent and entirely impromptu job of work with the help of those hundreds of volunteer seamen, but it yet remained to be seen if those organising the rescue would prove up to the task of getting away more than a fraction of the helpless soldiers who were now mere mobs of men with neither arms to fight nor any further stretch of land over which to run.

Gregory and Kuporovitch agreed that no military evacuation on so great a scale could ever before have been attempted and the only thing which made its success even remotely possible was the unbeatable resource of the British Navy, in
which Churchill had so clearly placed his confidence when faced with the collapse of the Army. They watched the astonishing, ever-changing scene for over an hour, then turned for home.

As there were no lorries going away from Dunkirk they had to trudge most of the way back to Furnes, but for the last few miles they got a lift in a Staff car. Gregory asked the officer who was in it how long he thought that the evacuation would take, and he replied: ‘It only started last night and if we can get 100,000 a day off it will be doing marvels, so it’s bound to be going on right over the week-end.’

It was clear now that if Erika was to be saved from the Germans the risk of moving her must be taken once more, but this piece of information decided Gregory to hang on for another day or two, so as to give her the maximum possible chance of regaining a little strength after her set-back.

All through the long, hot Saturday the B.E.F. staggered back through Belgium, many of them wounded and great numbers limping badly because they were so footsore from the terrific forced march that they had performed.

‘At all events, they’ve got good boots,’ remarked Kuporovitch, with the eye of a professional soldier, as he watched them from the garden gate.

‘Yes,’ sneered Gregory angrily; ‘our Generals learnt that it was necessary to equip their men with good boots in the Boer War, so perhaps they’ll equip them with tommy-guns when we have to fight the Germans again somewhere about 1960 and the Huns have armed themselves with something much more lethal.’

By Sunday afternoon Gregory felt that he dared delay no longer. The defences of Dunkirk had been reinforced by flooding, but at Furnes the stream of khaki had come down to a trickle of footsore soldiers. The ambulance was got out from the garage, and Erika was carried down to it; then, having taken leave of their kind Belgian hosts, they set off towards Dunkirk.

When they reached the outskirts of the town Gregory and Kuporovitch saw yet another fantastic sight. For miles and miles there stretched the baggage and the weapons of the once glorious British Army. Huge masses of supplies were being burnt and sabotage parties were putting tanks and guns out of action by removing their more delicate parts and smashing them with pick-axes; but not one-fiftieth of that vast sea of
vehicles, which had cost Britain hundreds of millions of pounds and months of toil by her sweating factory-workers, could be rendered permanently useless.

There was no bombing now. The R.A.F. had won a magnificent victory against the terrific odds and driven the Nazis out of the sky. Even the gunfire to the east had slackened as Hitler, having inflicted on the British Army the most crushing defeat in its history, had swung the weight of his main attack south once more, contemptuously leaving the rernnants of the B.E.F. to get home as best they could.

They drove the ambulance slowly up to the crest of the sand dunes. The spectacle beyond differed little from what it had been on Friday, except that instead of tens of thousands there were now only scattered thousands of men on the beaches, and that the foreshore was now black with countless thousands of rifles, tin hats, gas masks, haversacks, water-bottles and other items of the British soldiers’ fighting kit. The destroyers and the gallant little boats, manned by every type of seaman and civilian, were still standing by hauling soldier after soldier up out of the sea as though they had never stopped during the whole of the forty-eight hours since Gregory had first seen them.

Taking out the stretcher, they carried Erika down to the water’s edge, where every few hundred yards long strings of khaki-clad men were patiently queueing up and wading out chest-deep into the sea. Some were wounded, all were dirty and unshaven, but in spite of their plight their unquenchable spirit remained and they were still exchanging the typical witticisms which come from the British Tommy even in the grimmest circumstances; little cracks about ‘free bathing’ and ‘bringing the wife to Dunkirk for a holiday next summer’.

There were no formalities, no customs or passport controls here, but some of the men turned to stare curiously as Gregory’s party approached, for although there were quite a number of French and Belgian soldiers among the rabble, civilians were a rarity upon that hellish shore.

On that account Gregory felt that some difficulty might arise about his party being taken on board, so he waded in up to the knees and hailed a naval officer who was sitting in a small motor-boat near one of the queues, regulating its advance into the water.

The N.O. put in a little nearer to the shore to see what he
wanted, and lying with complete unscrupulousness, Gregory told him that his party consisted of an English lady who was hovering between life and death, a Russian who was attached to the British Secret Service, and four Belgians, a doctor, two nurses and an army chauffeur; and asked if they could be taken off.

His request was granted at once and the naval officer brought his own boat even closer in so that Erika’s stretcher could be carried out to it.

Ploughing his way back through the gently-creaming foam, Gregory knelt for a minute beside the stretcher to see how Erika was. There could be no argument any more about her accepting the hospitality of Britain while the war continued but she did not even know what was going on, as her lungs pained her terribly and the doctor had forbidden her to talk in case she brought on another internal haemorrhage. Her face was dead-white and her eyes closed.

After a moment he stood up and said to Kuporovitch: ‘You carry her out with the chauffeur, Stefan; I forgot to sabotage the car so I’m going back to wreck the engine, because I’m damned if I’m going to leave even an ambulance in running order for those blasted Nazis. Don’t wait for me but get Erika on board as quickly as you can. I’ll be seeing you later.’ With a nod to the rest of them he turned and strode off up the beach towards the ambulance.

When he got there he did not lift the bonnet of the engine but sat down on the crest of the dunes to watch the embarkation. He saw Erika’s stretcher lifted into the stern of the motor-boat and the two nurses, the doctor, Kuporovitch and the chauffeur hauled up out of the water after it. The motor-boat turned and sped out to a fishing-trawler that had the marks of German machine-gun bullets spattered all over its funnel. He saw the little party taken on board by bareheaded men in dark-blue sweaters. They were only little figures now and he could still make out Kuporovitch, who was standing at the rail in the stern of the ship, evidently anxiously waiting for him to join them; but he did not stir.