The Black Baroness (48 page)

For over an hour the trawler remained there taking survivors of the routed Army on board, then puffs of smoke issued from its funnel. It slowly turned and headed for England.

The sun was sinking but the evacuation still went on; as some of the boats sailed for home, others arrived to take off yet more
and more men. Gregory kept his eyes fixed upon the trawler until it became a little speck hidden by the gathering darkness, then at last he stood up and began to tramp through the heavy sand, towards the road. He would have given all that he possessed to be on that trawler with Erika, but the Black Baroness was still at large to wreak her evil will and he remembered Sir Pellinore’s injunction.

It was his business to ‘seek out and destroy the enemy’.

Gregory slept in a shallow dip among the sand dunes. When he awoke dawn was just breaking. Seaward and to the west, where England lay, the scene was still obscured by semi-darkness, but to the east against the foreglow of the sunrise the silhouettes of little groups of troops already stood out upon the higher ground.

By the time he had roused himself daylight had come to reveal once more the remnants of the shattered Army. For four days now the B.E.F., once lauded as the finest land-force, for its size, in the world, had been evacuating and only its tail-end now remained to be taken off. The men were sitting glum and silent in little groups along the grassy dunes or were straggling down to the shore, where with the coming of dawn the armada of small craft had once more appeared. Gregory distributed half his cigarettes among a group of them and spent a few minutes listening to their stories.

There was nothing splendid about them, nothing heroic; they were just beaten—beaten by marching—marching for mile after mile through those grilling days and ghastly nights—while being chivied from pillar to post by the superior forces of a well-organised enemy. No blame to them. They had been game enough when they had marched into Belgium, and where they had met the enemy they had fought with stubborn courage. Gregory knew from those to whom he talked that if at any time on that retreat they had been ordered to stand they would have stood; but they had not been so ordered and they were only regimental officers or rank and file and they could do
no more than obey the order to reach the coast somehow, destroy their equipment and get home.

The heroes of that chapter in British history were in the sky above, driving off Goering’s air-armada, and on the sea, in all those little boats manned by old salts from Deal or Dover, by young boys from the Kent and Essex coasts, by week-end yachtsmen, by chaps who had just ‘wanted to come too’, and by the indomitable personnel of the Royal Navy, the R.N.V.R. and the Mercantile Marine.

Gregory knew perfectly well that had the rôles been reversed the scene would have been just the same. After days of marching and strafing without sleep the sailors and the volunteers would have sat with a woebegone expression, examining their blistered and bleeding feet, while had the soldiers been the men manning the little boats they would have proved just as gallant rescuers. Their tragedy was that they had lacked brilliant, or even distinguished, leadership.

The captain of their ship, General Lord Gort, had gone home two days before, when the evacuation was still in full swing, because, as one haggard, wounded subaltern put it to Gregory somewhat cynically, ‘it was not considered that the men still remaining on the beaches constituted a command fitting for an officer of such senior rank’. He had been ordered home by the Government to report.

That report would doubtless appear years later in the history books, but Gregory did not feel that Mr. Churchill needed very much telling what had happened, and he did feel, remembering Nelson at Copenhagen, that there was a time to obey orders and a time to ignore them. He remembered, too, Marshal Ney, who had commanded the rearguard in the ghastly retreat of Napoleon’s Army from Moscow, and that Ney, personally, had been the last man to fire the last musket on the bridge of Kovno, after he had conveyed the remaining stragglers of the
Grande Armée
on to the safety of Polish soil.

He also thought of the Old Contemptibles; the men of Mons, Le Cateau and the Marne. That B.E.F. of 1914 had been only one-third of the size of the B.E.F. of 1940. The German equipment had been just as much superior then as it was superior now. The odds in favour of the Germans had been just as heavy, in proportion, against General French as they had been against Lord Gort, but French had fought the Germans to a standstill; Gort had gone home to report.

Almost physically sick with bitterness and fury Gregory left the men to whom he had been talking and plodded across the sand dunes until he reached a rise from which he could see the scene of desolation inland. Tanks, guns, ambulances, lorries, cars, motor-cycles, searchlights, Bren gun carriers, repair vans, aircraft tenders, listening apparatus, heavy howitzers, field cookers, petrol wagons, and every other conceivable type of army vehicle littered the scene in one vast higgledy-piggledy jumble for miles on either side of him and as far as he could see.

On reaching the road to Furnes he walked up to an abandoned tank, got the lid open and peered inside. Someone had evidently pitched two or three Mills bombs inside before leaving it, as the interior was just a mass of tangled and twisted machinery. He examined three or four others but they were all in the same state. At least the Germans would not be able to use them, but the number of tanks and guns abandoned there was so great that when they had the leisure the Nazis would be able to transport them home and present one to practically every town and village in Germany as an optical demonstration of the
Führer’s
complete and devastating victory over the hated British.

He walked on for about half a mile and came to another group of tanks, but these had had their tractors smashed so were also useless. A little further on, among a line of lorries which were half in and half out of the ditch, he saw another tank and had a look at that. At first sight it seemed to be all right, so he began a more thorough and very cautious investigation, as he thought it probable that some form of booby-trap might have been left inside it; but ten minutes’ careful inspection satisfied him that nothing in or near the solitary tank was liable to go off and blow him up. Getting into the driver’s seat, he proceeded to try to make it work.

He had never been inside a tank before and the mechanism looked horribly complicated, but he felt sure that a tank must function on the same principles as any other motor-driven vehicle. After experimenting for some time with the various switches and levers he gradually got the hang of the thing and, with a frightful jolting, succeeded in getting it out of the ditch on to the road.

The next thing was petrol, as the tank’s supply was very low; but that presented no difficulty as there were thousands of reserve tins near at hand on the abandoned lorries. It took him
three-quarters of an hour carting the tins before he had the tank filled to capacity and had also collected a good supply of iron rations. He then picked up a piece of chalk from the roadside, got into the tank, closed down the lid and set off.

At first he found the vehicle terrifyingly unwieldy. It had an odd habit of swerving suddenly and heading for the nearest ditch, as though it preferred ditches to a metalled surface. After a few miles he accustomed himself to its idiosyncrasies but found the heat inside it stifling, and by the time he had reached the outskirts of Furnes he was sweating like a pig; so he stopped, opened the door and stripped himself to the waist.

His idea was to try to reach Paris, since he felt that he would stand a better chance there than anywhere else of getting on the track of the Black Baroness, but he had only a most rudimentary idea as to what was happening in his immediate vicinity. The officers with whom he had talked on the beach had told him that the French who had been cut off with them were covering the British evacuation by a rearguard action in the neighbourhood of the Mont des Cats, and he had no desire at all to run into the battle; so although it had meant going away from Paris he had thought it better to head for Furnes rather than inland, but at Furnes he felt that he could turn south-east towards Ypres without any great risk of becoming embroiled in the last desperate stand that was being made by the French.

The eighteen miles between Furnes and Ypres showed many traces of the British retreat. Here and there army vehicles which had been damaged by shell-fire had been left on the roadside. Once he passed a little group, a sergeant and seven men, wearily plodding towards the coast. Evidently they were the remnant of a party which had got cut off somewhere a few days before but had managed to make their way through the German lines under cover of night. A little further on a solitary officer came pedalling by on what was obviously a borrowed or stolen civilian push-bike, while every half-mile or so there were stragglers who from wounds or weariness had not been able to keep up with their units but were still doggedly endeavouring to escape from the Germans. By eleven o’clock, without any untoward incident, he entered Ypres.

A number of the houses had been wrecked by bombs or shell-fire, but by comparison with the tumbled heap of débris which Gregory remembered there in 1917 the town had hardly suffered at all. Turning south-west, out of the Cloth Hall,
Square, he took the road to Bailleul and, after a mile, seeing no more English or French, he knew that he was now coming into an area where at any time he might run up against the Germans. Pulling up, he got out and with the piece of chalk scrawled in large letters on the front of the tank: ‘NACH PARIS. HEIL HITLER!’ then got in again.

The Germans, he knew, would recognise the tank as of a British pattern but he had chosen it in preference to a car for the very simple reason that as long as he remained inside it nobody whom he passed would be able to see that it was driven by a man without a uniform, and he hoped that when the Germans saw the inscription they would assume that it was one of their own people driving a tank which had been captured from the British. It soon transpired that he had rightly judged his time in labelling the tank, as a few miles further on he came upon several parties of German infantry. Away to his right, beyond the higher ground, a battle was in progress. Out there towards Cassel the French were still making their last splendid stand and the Germans were moving fresh troops north-west, across the Ypres-Bailleul road, for the destruction or capture of this remnant of the great Allied Northern Armies which it had been decided to sacrifice in order to save Lord Gort’s forces.

In Bailleul he found much greater numbers of Germans, as an armoured column was passing west, from Armentières towards Saint Omer, so he was held up in the square for some time. But nobody challenged him and by half-past twelve he was out of the little town, made immortal to the old B.E.F. by the presence at its
estaminet
of the glamorous Tina, sweetheart of ten thousand British officers, who, so it was said, in the last months of the War had been shot as a German spy.

From that point on the roads were rarely free of Germans and now and again parties of them were marching back groups of disconsolate-looking French prisoners. Between Bailleul and Arras he was twice halted by German military police who wanted to know what he was doing with a captured British tank, but shoving up the lid he popped out his head and naked, sweating shoulders to call a cheery greeting to them in his fluent German and laughingly declare that the tank was a personal war souvenir of his General, who had ordered him to bring it along for the victory celebrations.

Arras was in poor shape as the British had fought there about ten days before, when the Germans were still pushing
troops towards the coast. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and the Germans had bombed the town severely. Not a pane of glass was left in any of the windows and many of the streets were half-blocked with rubble from the demolished houses; but that made Gregory more pleased with himself than ever that he had decided to journey to Paris—or as near as he could get to it—in a private tank, as the unwieldy old tin can could bump and clatter its way over all sorts of obstacles which would have been quite impossible for a car.

Even half-naked as he was, and with the lid up all the time, the heat in the tank was almost unbearable, so outside the town he drove off the road into a small wood and got out to have a rest. His trousers were wet through with perspiration and steaming from the heat, while he felt as limp and heady as though he had spent several hours in the hottest room of a Turkish bath. When he had recovered a little he made a meal off some of his iron rations then lay down in the shade of a tree. For over an hour he rested there out of the broiling sun and it was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when he once more climbed into his sardine tin, got it back on the road and headed for Bapaume.

At Bapaume, where he again ran into many Germans, he could hear the guns, somewhere to the south; so it seemed as though the French were still holding the line of the Somme and he knew that his next job was to find a way of crossing it. The road to Paris lay through Peronne, which was actually on the Somme, and he hoped that if the Germans had already captured the town he might succeed in crossing the river there; but as he advanced with one of the German columns he found many indications that he was once more nearing a battle-front. The column gradually dissolved to deploy into positions to which each unit had been directed. Carefully-concealed heavy batteries boomed from the fringe of the woods on either side, many of the fields were occupied by infantry who were resting, and further on the sharp crack of field-guns came from the dips between the rolling downs, while German aircraft were again circling directly overhead.

By seven-thirty he had reached the outskirts of Peronne to find that it was in the hands of the Germans, but evidently they had not yet succeeded in establishing a bridge-head across the river and the French were pounding the town so heavily that it was out of the question to attempt to go through it.