by Bodie Thoene
Josie took her place at the end of the line. Progress was slow. Past the red waxed disks and through the plate-glass window, she could see little Angelique sitting on the lip of the fountain with the doll. She appeared cool in spite of the hot sun. Her brown eyes were looking down affectionately at the porcelain face. It was a grubby porcelain face by this time, but Josie figured it would clean up as easily as the live children when they all arrived in Paris. The question at that time would only be if Angelique could be parted from the doll. Josie determined then and there that she would take the child to La Samaritaine and buy her any doll she wanted in the entire store.
But where was Madame Hasselt? Josie cast her eyes around the square, finally spotting the old woman with the cow and Juliette and Yacov standing in another long queue outside the public toilet.
Josie had just gotten to the counter and Madame Hasselt had just tied off the cow and entered the toilet stall when the shriek of an air-raid siren split the air.
Instantly the square had the look of an anthill stamped on by the foot of a giant. Men and women dove out of their automobiles and fought one another to run to shelter in basements and shops.
Then Josie saw Angelique. Fearless, oblivious, the little girl embraced the baby doll and remained on the fountain. Josie cried out and sprinted in an attempt to get to her. But the panic of the mob pushed her back. The snarl of Heinkel engines and the long whistle of bombs were almost drowned out by the screams of the terrified throng. But there beyond the window and the red wheels and the terror was Angelique.
Josie reached the door, only to be thrown back onto the floor as a large man charged in and dove for cover.
The first bomb exploded. Glass shattered, pocking the counter where she had stood. Buildings in the square unfolded like they were made of playing cards. The statue of Jeanne d’Arc collapsed, and tile from the church portico slid down onto it. The second bomb fell a block away, rocking the shop.
And then there was silence, as profound and terrible as if Josie had gone deaf. No moans. No cries for help. Was it over so quickly?
“Is everyone all right?” the cheese man asked feebly.
A dozen people got up slowly. Josie struggled to rise. The door of the public toilet opened, and Madame Hasselt, shaken but unharmed, emerged with Juliette and Yacov into the bright sunlight. The cow had broken her tether but stood serenely chewing her cud a few paces away.
And there was little Angelique . . . still beside the fountain . . . still clutching the doll. So very still.
She was dead, of course. Josie knew it before she stumbled, weeping, across the rubble to the girl’s body. Sinking to her knees, she picked up the doll and clutched it to her.
A small crowd gathered around her. Someone asked if Josie was the mother of the dead child.
“No.”
“What was her name?” a gendarme asked gently.
“Angelique.”
“Her surname?”
“I do not know. Her mother was killed on the road. There is nothing else I can tell you.”
From around the corner came a blind man, frantically tapping his way across the square with his cane.
“God pity the blind,” said the gendarme.
“The blind are blessed,” Josie replied.
15
A New Offensive Line
Since Seventh Panzer had broken out from the bridgehead across the Meuse, it had covered over fifty miles. Not content to be the command that breached the first Allied line of defense, Rommel pushed his men to remain in the forefront of the Blitzkrieg.
The French troops reeled backward in confusion, tangling the reinforcements that were rushed up to stem the rout. The French High Command wanted to draw a new defensive line along the Sambre River.
But the panzer advance followed so closely on the heels of the French retreat that key bridges were still intact. Such was the case when Lieutenant Shultz reconnoitered the highway that led to the river crossing at Aulnoye, just beyond the little town of Avesnes.
Horst assembled his company commanders, including Lieutenant Borger, who had replaced Captain Grühn, for an afternoon conference in Avesnes. “Just think, gentlemen,” Horst urged his officers, “Paris is only a hundred miles or so in that direction.” He waved his hand toward the southwest. “At our present pace, we could be in sight of the Eiffel Tower in four or five days.”
“Does the major think that will happen?” Borger asked.
“Unlikely. In my opinion, OKW wants to make the French thinkour objective is Paris in order to freeze troop movements while we actually strike westward. If we can completely cut off the Allied Army and trap them between us and our force in Holland, the war will be over in two weeks.”
A scout car roared into the village square, and an agitated Lieutenant Shultz jumped out and ran to the group. “Major, the bridge . . . the bridge is still intact!”
“Slow down, Shultz. Borger, give him a drink of water.”
When the excited outrider had recovered his breath, he explained that he had encountered no enemy soldiers before reaching a point from which he could see the Sambre. “I backed away as quickly as I could to come and tell you,” he said. “I did not want to use the radio in case the French intercepted the transmission.”
“How many defenders?”
“Only a handful.”
“Any tanks?”
“None that I could see. There was a line of trucks crossing the bridge that I think were full of retreating troops. They must not know we are so close or they wouldn’t be so unconcerned.”
There was no time to reflect, not a moment to lose. Horst could not even relay to his superiors what he intended. At any moment the French defenders would get news of the German advance and demolish the bridge. “Shultz, you take the lead. Borger, I will ride with you. Gelb, you send all your motorcycles with us, while you find General Rommel and inform him about this opportunity. Tell him that I will attempt to seize the crossing. Request that he send reinforcements at once. Everybody move!”
***
“I assure you, Monsieur McGrath, this was all foreseen. It is a most well-planned and orderly retrenchment.” The captain explaining the fine points of how the French army had intentionally given up half a hundred miles of territory sounded convincing. His performance was somewhat diluted by the fact that he kept looking over his shoulder in the direction of the bridge.
“Then you would not mind if I filmed the movement of troops returning across the Sambre?” Mac studiously avoided using the word retreat. He had been warned that even a suggestion that the French army was in flight would mean the confiscation of his camera and possibly get him barred from the front.
“The passage of trucks is not . . . edifying. Why do you not wait until the Boche come to foolishly throw themselves against our defenses? That will be something to witness.”
“And when do you expect this battle to take place?”
“Not for two or perhaps three days. Everyone knows that an army cannot advance without artillery, and it takes many hours to move and set up the big cannons. No, Monsieur, the Germans cannot reach here before day after tomorrow. But then, I promise you, there will be something to see!”
“I notice,” commented Mac to the thin officer with the prominent Adam’s apple, “that your troops are setting up machine guns and wiring the bridge for destruction.”
“Ah yes,” agreed the captain. “Our engineers are very thorough. All will be in readiness long before the Boche arrive.”
***
When Horst’s column of armored cars and motorcycles arrived at the edge of the hill overlooking Aulnoye, the situation had drastically changed. A pair of machine guns flanked the near end of the bridge, and the ominous snout of an antitank weapon poked out of some brush on the far side. A half-dozen men emerged from the shadows beneath the bridge, each carrying a spool of wire. The strands were joined into a single braid, and one man began backing across to the western side.
The same tall fig
ure who had stretched the final strand of the demolition cord returned across the bridge and spoke to the gunners. The machine-gun crews broke down their weapons and hefted them to carry over.
The armored car of Lieutenant Shultz raced forward, spraying bullets from the gun in its turret. One of the French machine-gun crew turned toward the oncoming Germans and was shot down; the others dropped the tripods and weapons and fled.
The French antitank gun roared, and a shell shattered a tree trunk beside the road. Horst’s column was closing rapidly on the bridge, with less than two hundred yards to go. Rifle bullets pinged off the armor on the scout cars. A motorcyclist near Horst threw up his hands and crashed as a slug hit him in the face.
The antitank gun fired again, and an armor-piercing shell sliced through Shultz’s vehicle. The armored car slewed sideways in the roadway, then rolled over and over until coming to rest upside down.
“Jog left,” Horst ordered Borger at the controls of what was now the lead car. The maneuver was intended to spoil the aim of the antitank crew and spread out the targets. The Kfz 231s took advantage of an open area in front of the bridge to move apart, flanking the approach to the span.
The machine guns of the German attackers replied to the rifle fire. The antitank gun fired again, a high-explosive round this time, with deadly effect. The shell missed the front rank of German machines and landed in the middle of a group of motorcycles, killing three men.
The armored car to the right of Horst cut back into line with the roadway, attempting to make a crossing while the antitank crew was reloading. Halfway over, a high-explosive round took it squarely in front, flipping the vehicle over backward in a great gout of flame. Now the bridge was blocked.
***
A bullet went through Mac’s camera case where it sat on a tree stump. He dove for cover behind a wood fence, then hastily abandoned the spot when more bullets sailed between the gap in the rails to kick up small explosions in the dirt behind him. Crawling on his belly and pushing the camera ahead of him, Mac wormed his way to the reassuring shelter of a rock wall.
The French rifle fire that responded to the German MG-34s sounded puny by comparison. There was no chance for the poilus to reassemble their machine guns. The only effective weapon the defenders possessed, it seemed, was the 25 mm Hotchkiss antitank gun. It was keeping up a rapid and potent barrage that had already destroyed several vehicles in the charge down the hill.
Mac’s DeVry camera poked over the stones like the periscope of a U-boat. He continued grinding frame after frame of the activity around the scene, which his escort had dismissed as not edifying. Mac thought that the film would prove very educational. How was it that the Germans had arrived twenty minutes after the captain had pronounced that it would be at least forty-eight hours? And no artillery barrage had preceded this attack. The German motorcycles and armored cars that flung themselves against the defenses of the bridge were staking everything on the speed of their assault.
How had French intelligence failed so badly? Or was it a failure of imagination? The French General Staff had not been in Poland, nor had they been interested in discussing the tactics of Blitzkrieg. General Gamelin and his cohorts believed that the strength of the French army could resist the initial German offensive, after which the war would stalemate again until the Allied stranglehold on the German economy dragged them to the peace table.
That idea seemed as likely to explode as the armored car that had reached the midpoint of the bridge before being blown into a heap of flaming rubble. That was the whole picture, Mac decided. The antitank gun, like the French strategy, was adequate only if the foe did exactly what you expected. But German tactics, like the armored cars now spreading out across the town square and pouring their flanking fire into the French positions, were not so predictable.
As Mac peeked through a gap in the stones that he hoped was too obscure for a bullet to find, an odd footrace developed. On the near side of the Sambre, the engineer who had been in charge of the demolition detail grabbed a rifle and sprinted onto the bridge. Across the river, another armored car slewed to a sideways halt, and a figure in a German uniform emerged to challenge the Frenchman for possession of the bridge.
***
“Knock out the gun!” Horst ordered Borger. He jumped out of the armored car to lead an attack on foot. Horst expected the bridge to disintegrate in front of him at any second. Surprise was lost and the delay was too great.
That was when Horst spotted the French officer in charge of the demolition detail sprinting toward the center of the bridge. It could mean only one thing: The charge had failed to explode electrically and the man was going to try to set it off by hand.
Horst fired his Luger and missed, then was forced to duck behind the stonework of bridge abutment as a stream of bullets sought him. When the shooting stopped, he jumped up. The French officer leaned over the center of the trestle, aiming a rifle at the charges below. Horst fired again, hitting the Frenchman in the leg and spinning him around. The man sagged against the railing but squeezed off a shot that passed between Horst’s arm and his body.
Tossing the now-empty pistol aside, Horst leaped for the French officer’s throat. The two men wrestled on the roadway, while the French antitank gun roared above their heads and the German machine guns chattered back. Another armored car exploded.
Horst hammered his fist into the Frenchman’s face. The wounded man swung his rifle up from the ground, and the barrel hit Horst in the side of the head, knocking him away. The French officer rolled on top of Horst and pressed his rifle across Horst’s throat.
A pool of burning gasoline spread out from the destroyed armored car. Horst could see the puddle of fire running closer and closer to his face. He could feel the heat as he struggled to breathe, to dislodge the weight pressing him toward blackness.
Flinging up his legs while grasping the Frenchman’s rifle as a pivot, Horst planted both boots in the man’s midsection and kicked. The force of the jolt broke the tug-of-war for the rifle and propelled the Frenchman through the air. He landed in the pool of fiery gasoline. His uniform blazing, the man jumped up, screaming. He climbed over the railing of the bridge and flung himself into the river.
The antitank gun exploded in a shattering roar. From back up the hill, a German PzKw-38 tank fired again, and its high-explosive round annihilated another pocket of French defenders. Two more PzKw-38s, made in the captured arms factories of occupied Czechoslovakia, moved out of the woods and flanked the scene, their machine guns tearing up the remaining cover on the west side of the Sambre.
A bit of ragged white cloth appeared on the end of a French bayonet. “Enough,” cried a poilu. “We surrender. La guerre est fini. The war is done.”
***
Mac continued filming as the 37 mm shells landed only a hundred feet or so in front of him. But when the tank commanders started walking the shell fire even closer to the stone wall behind which he had taken refuge, it was time to leave. The captain who was his chaperone was already back in the car and waving for Mac to hurry.
“Rejoin your units!” the officer was saying to a group of poilus who surrounded the car. They were demanding to be driven away from the Germans. “Find your commander at once!”
“What for?” one of them growled. “The officers are all either captured or dead already. I have no wish to join them. But you may, since you are so heroic!” The burly soldier grabbed the scrawny captain by the neck and, dragging him out through the car window, threw him to the ground.
“This is desertion! You . . . ,” the captain began, subsiding when three French rifles pointed at his bobbing throat.
“Be very still and we will not have to shoot you,” the chief of the mutiny promised.
“Hold on a minute,” said Mac, hurrying up. Two of the rifles swiveled to cover him. He displayed his camera. “I am not an officer, and I need a ride. How about it?”
“Why not?” the ringleader agreed. “It is time someone reported the truth ab
out this debacle.”
“You are betraying France!” shouted the captain in a brave tone, although he had not moved from the round.
The poilu shrugged. “Our ignorant generals betrayed France first. We are only following their lead.”
16
In the Path of the Advance
The distant crumps of artillery sounded like thunder booming out of a clear sky as Josie and Madame Hasselt led the Jersey cow through the ancient stone gate of the Flemish town of Courtrai on the fifteenth of May. Courtrai was situated along the River Lys. Across the border and a few miles downstream was the Ecole de Cavalerie, but the school seemed very much out of reach to Josie this afternoon.
Before the war, Courtrai had been famous for the manufacture of lace and table linen. Today it was the last major Belgian stop before the frontier crossing into France.
Now little Courtrai was overflowing with human flotsam. Old men and women and children all slept in the cobbled square and drank and washed in the public fountains.
The airfield had been bombed on the first day, as had the train station. But though the roar of battles was clearly audible, the ancient Flemish town itself was miraculously unharmed. It was clearly in the path of the advance, however.
For now, St. Martin’s Church, opposite the sixteenth-century belfry of the town hall, opened its doors to feed the hungry. The Church of Notre Dame was now a BEF Casualty Clearing Station, being filled hourly by freshly wounded soldiers from the front. In the chapel behind the choir men were being operated on beneath a Van Dyck painting called Raising of the Cross. The picture of suffering seemed appropriate in such a place, Josie thought when she was told about it. Rumor was that the Belgian army was being crucified by the panzers. The Germans had broken through the line at the Meuse, and a pall of gloom hung over the place.