The next day, Friday the 6th, I got word to transfer at once to the Prince Henry our sister ship as she was sailing forthwith for France. We took on troops that night – infantrymen – four hundred and sixty of them – one after another coming up the ship’s ladder until watching them coming made you dizzy. Stolid, cheerful, English faces – about half of them looked like boys in their teens. All were top-heavy with the weight of their equipment, staggering as they slid down the incline from the gangplank leading on to the ship’s deck, blundering about helplessly like cows caught in a too narrow lane. Their tin helmets covered with camouflage to look like leaves were like some stylized headgear of the kind worn by peasants participating in a fertility festival. The troops were very quiet as we steamed out of Southampton Water. They lined the deck looking back at the pattern made by the masts and derricks against a luminous evening sky. It was one of those moments, common in the war, when everyone shares the same thought. As the sun set we were passing to starboard the white romantic castle on the Isle of Wight where it stands among its woods. No one seemed to know what it was called or who lived there, and indeed it looked like a mirage across the calm waters of the Solent.
Saturday, 17 June, I woke, looked out of the porthole and was disappointed not to see the coast of France. I walked about rather miserably on deck feeling out of place and in people’s way. The Captain asked me up to his cabin and talked to me about ways of cooking Peruvian fish. I listened politely. The only thing I was interested in was whether I was going to be able to land without my pass. About eleven a.m. we sighted the coast of Normandy and anchored about five miles off the coast opposite the port of Arromanches. The landing craft came alongside to take off the troops. The Captain sent me a message from the bridge that if I liked to take a chance I could go aboard the landing craft but that if there was any delay in landing the troops the ship could not wait for me – I would have to find my own way back to England. What I needed in order to land was a uniformed escort. I asked B. whether he would go with me. The miserable little man hedged. I asked a moustached Guards officer in charge of troop landing. At that moment my acquaintance John R. whom I had met that drunken evening in Southampton appeared on board the landing craft. I thought he might prove a friend in need and clambered down the ladder among the lines of descending troops, the bottles swaying in my mackintosh pockets.
It was my first experience of the machine-like precision of the landing arrangements about which we read in the newspapers. The troops in the end were landed but there was nothing very machine-like in the process. By hollering from the bridge at every passing small craft asking for aid and by an exchange of insults with those who refused it, some craft which should no doubt have been taking troops off another landing craft was pressed into our service. Eventually, however, in the midst of shouts, orders, and counter orders, we reached a pontoon bridge and remained stuck there until nighttime when we got free and tied up to the bridge.
There is no natural harbour at Arromanches. The artificial harbour which has been constructed is known as the Mulberry and was full of small shipping – the bigger ships ride at anchor outside. It was crowded with troopships, a variety of landing craft, tankers, munition and supply ships, and small tugs in which are seated majors with megaphones who are supposed to have some control over the movements of the shipping. They dash about like sheepdogs. The majors shout down their megaphones in gloomy authoritative tones at the small craft which crowd the Mulberry telling them they must move out of this berth or tie up to that ship and above all keep a safe distance from their precious pontoon bridge which is their chief concern. The captains and crews of the hounded small craft curse and protest but in the end do as they are told.
John R. very kindly asked me to stay on board a Canadian-manned landing craft. Life on board is an intimate business. It has to be in a ship of two hundred and fifty tons – the three officers eat, sleep, and live in a cabin about forty feet by twenty feet in size. The galley opens on to one end of the cabin and the conversation of the crew is clearly audible when the communication trap is open. Life at such close quarters could be hell, but, in fact, it was carefree and cheerful. It was an efficiently run ship, but not run on any orthodox Royal Navy lines but in a peculiarly Canadian way – the lack of fuss and feathers, the humour, and the horse-sense with which the whole business is handled. This atmosphere was due in part to the officers. The Captain was a cool, reserved young man of perhaps twenty-three with serious tastes – Plato, War and Peace, Mill on Liberty were in the small bookcase beside technical books on navigation. He was an ideal Captain, with a simple, rather dry sense of humour, conscientious to a fault, but with an easy, direct way with the crew. The First Officer was a nonchalant youth, imperturbable in difficulties and dangers, easily amused and amusing. My friend, John, was the most unusual and most complex character of the three – a rich man’s son, quick-witted, enterprising, exuberant, and uncertain in temper. Between the three they knew how to run the ship and keep happy a crew of boys of nineteen, including a French-Canadian, a Dukhobor, a lumberjack, an ex-rumrunner, a Newfoundlander. They were a tough, good-natured lot who would have been impossible to manage by spit and polish. They enjoyed every incident and welcomed everything but monotony. It was an atmosphere of youth.
Details of Life on a Landing Craft
For breakfast pancakes the size of a large soup-plate with golden syrup. Drinking gin and eating chocolates in a high gale. Listening to German radio propaganda quoting Kipling’s “Tommy Atkins” to weaken our morale while German planes are overhead.
The perpetual booming of guns and falling of bombs from the mainland, the knowledge that the Germans are only sixteen miles away behind that cliff and yet here we might be in Canada.
The crew, “Keep your fucking shirt-tails out of the spuds.”
The pictures of pin-up girls and John saying, “if only they moved – it is having them suspended like that in one position that gets on one’s nerves.”
Sunday, 18 June 1944.
It began to blow hard and gale warnings were out. A fine drizzle blew against the portholes. We decided to go ashore and have a look at Arromanches, and walked the length of the rain-swept pontoon which was swaying and creaking in the high wind. No one stopped us at the shore end. No one asked me for a pass. I strolled ashore on to the beach-head in an oilskin coat – and was doubtless taken for a member of the crew. Arromanches looked like a stage-set that had been left out in the rain – a little cardboard backdrop of a French seaside resort, but badly battered about. Port authorities, town majors, naval officers in charge, have set up their quarters in the Hôtel de Ville and in the bigger houses of the town. We walked about among the closed and desolate little villas coloured grey and sand, or biscuit colour – coquettish little affairs – “Mon Repos,” “Doux Séjour.” The gardens were overgrown with rain-sodden roses, red and white.
The few remaining inhabitants were occupied in salvaging bits and pieces of their possessions or walking about among the débris of the invasion to see if they could find anything which would serve some useful purpose. We went into the church – a big, grey, empty church with a shell hole in the roof above the altar – otherwise intact and the windows unbroken. Before the statue of the Virgin – the usual chocolate-box figure wearing a bright blue mantle – were piles of white roses. There was a Roll of Honour “Mort Pour La France 1914–1918” – too long a roll for a village like Arromanches. No flowers before the statue of Joan of Arc, but St. Thérèse de Lisieux was popular.
Monday, 19 June 1944.
John and I departed by Jeep for the headquarters of the Third Canadian Division. This represented a considerable achievement on his part. He had bluffed the local brigadier into appreciating the importance of my mission, and I found that wherever we went he had built me up to almost embarrassing heights and I was greeted like a visiting cabinet minister.
It was another day of wind and rain with low cloud. We drove along excellent, hard-surfaced roads fro
m village to village looking for the headquarters. Along the roads went an unceasing stream of traffic, trucks, DUKWS, Jeeps, tanks, and interfering with this traffic was the occasional peasant’s cart. A red-faced old farm woman riding a bicycle appeared from behind a row of oncoming tanks. She had the same air of going – with a sort of desperate stubbornness – about her own business, which marked most of the local inhabitants. In this area the peasants did not seem to have been evacuated. The military say they are helpful and co-operative but not demonstrative. They did not seem much in favour of de Gaulle. In Bayeux two French officers have established themselves as representatives of the French Provisional Government. We saw their proclamations posted on the walls there side by side with those of General Eisenhower.
We went by car over a good portion of the bridgehead – a windswept country of high bare ridges and big fields studded with rough wooden poles, as protection against gliders. The German warning signs still left beside the roads, the skull and crossbones and the word Minen. There was hardly a field in which there were not either tents or supply dumps – soldiers naked to the waist washing in a wet field, hospitals marked with red crosses, petrol dumps and stores stacked in rows – one of “our” airstrips thick with planes grounded by bad weather. Until the day before, the country had been a dust bowl, now it was being transformed overnight into mud. Our road led through Bayeux and a dozen small Norman villages. I went into some of the shops in Bayeux. It was pleasant to be among French people again – so willing to make every small negotiation into a conversation. They seemed to have lots of food in the shops and luxury goods. The people were full of smiles, glad to see us but not emotional.
The main street was decorated with tricolours, but the demonstrative period, if there ever was one here, was over.
General Keller’s headquarters were only a couple of miles from the German lines and at one point we nearly took a wrong turning in our Jeep which would have brought us out behind the German lines. There was little sign of enemy activity except for the almost casual booming of guns. The Headquarters are in the grounds of a château, not in the house itself – a small formal eighteenth-century stucco house – but in the park and gardens. The General, who was living in a camouflaged truck concealed in a mound in the park, emerged on my arrival looking ruddy and confident, just as a General should look, and clad in a khaki pullover and breeches. He talked like a General saying that his men were “in good heart.” He summoned a circle of officers and some men standing in the damp park. I read them the Prime Minister’s message of goodwill as drafted by me. The General expressed gratification and sent a message to our people at home. I thought his enthusiasm rather muted, and I do not think that the name Mackenzie King makes the military heart beat faster.
I asked one of the officers whether I could go along the line to see my cousins, Peter Smellie and John Rowley, who were with their regiment a mile or two away. He said that a moving vehicle on that road might attract enemy fire to their position and wondered sarcastically whether they would want to see me in these conditions. I said probably not.
A day or two later after my return to the beachhead at Arromanches I ran into Bill Wickwire who was in Roley’s regiment and he told me that Roley had been very badly wounded. He had last seen him swathed in bandages from head to foot on a stretcher. He had been returned to a hospital in England as an emergency case. I was now desperately anxious to get back to England to see him, but for the remaining four days we were storm-bound tossing in a landing craft against the pontoon bridge or tied up to a larger ship in a storm-tossed mass of small shipping where a furious north-west gale blew incessantly. We could not cross the Channel by day because of the danger of enemy planes. To manoeuvre at night was difficult and dangerous. Next to us a destroyer out of control was beached. Two tank landing craft were broken up by the storm. All the time until the last day, apart from my worry about Roley, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Outside – hostile coast, a sweeping gale, clouding skies; inside in the small wardroom we drank gins, told stories, and listened to the wireless until four days later the weather became calm and we were able to return by night to England.
10 July 1944.
It is as if this had been not one war but half a dozen short wars with intervals of truce in between. The last truce ended about one month before D-Day. Since then we have been steadily on the stretch and one begins to add up the reckoning as the end of the war approaches. Roley, wounded, perhaps not beyond cure – Gavin Rainnie, so physically alive, so solid, so racy of health and vigour, blown up in his landing craft before he even reached the beaches – Enid Grant sitting in her farm at Oddington waiting with lessening hope to hear news of Jack who is missing. Jock Colley and Victor Gordon-Ives killed.
The buzz-bombs go on – that poor little Grosvenor girl has her face full of hundreds of fragments of glass from the shattered window in her flat.
Elizabeth and Margery have both had their houses blasted and are trying to think it worthwhile to start again.
13 July 1944.
Morale much improved – we are getting used to the buzz-bombs and also fewer are coming over. People are beginning to come to life again – to ring up their friends and to go out to restaurants. I heard my first fresh piece of scandal today – a healthy sign. Anne-Marie has returned to the Ritz with a new hat and a new admirer. Life marches on.
There goes an air-raid warning. I have been completely unmoved by these buzz-bombs – I was more scared by the early raids at the beginning of the war.
20 July 1944.
Elizabeth’s house in Clarence Terrace has been hit by a blast for the third time. She has at last decided to move out now. All the ceilings are down and all the windows broken. She and Alan only escaped being killed by a chance. I hate the disappearance of Clarence Terrace – so will her other friends. It was the last house in London which still felt like a pre-war house. There was always good food, good talk and wine (as long as wine lasted), and a certain style. Then I liked the house itself with its tall, airy rooms and good, rather sparse furniture. I suppose they will re-open it after the war if it is not hit again. Elizabeth’s nerves have been under a terrible strain, but she is resilient and if she can get away and get some rest she will be all right. In the midst of it all she is still trying frantically to write her novel.1
12 August 1944.
Fine weather, victories, the falling off of buzz-bombs (bugger bombs as Mrs. Corrigan innocently calls them) have improved everyone’s spirits. There are bets that we shall be in Paris by the end of September. Meanwhile the casualty lists get longer, and we who need good men in Canada are losing some of our best.
Lunched today with Anne-Marie at the Ritz. She had on a little hat with a crêpe veil – a mockery of a widow’s peak. I think she is mourning her lost love, although she hides her scars and her scars never seem more than skin deep.
Elizabeth has moved to Clarissa Churchill’s1 flat, as her house has been blasted once too often. It is high up in a monstrous new block of flats overlooking Regent’s Park. She likes the flat which is full of Clarissa’s empire furniture, gilt, and maroon velvet – too palatial for the size of the flat. Elizabeth is writing a short story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and told me about it in an excited way while I lay on a sofa looking out at the sea of green tree tops with here and there an isolated high building.
18 August 1944.
Dined with Michal Vyvyan. He says that to go on fighting the Germans is a waste of men and that people who continue a war after it has ceased to be necessary are as criminal as those who started it. We now dispose of superior power, therefore it is no longer necessary to deploy it militarily. We are like people who hold all the good cards in a bridge hand and insist on playing it out card by card instead of just throwing in the hand and writing down the results. He says we could have had a cessation of hostilities any time in the last six months.
19 August 1944.
The hatred of the more intelligent English upper classes for the age
they live in is profoundly discouraging, though less irritating than the shallow optimism, perfectionism, and venom of the Left.
I never seem to put a foot wrong with Jews. I feel at my ease with them. They are more human and more mentally honest than most Gentiles and their minds are alive. Beyond this in my own case there may be a blood connection. I wonder?
I was brought up in the tradition of gentlemanly English culture but it is not deep in my blood. I have not got the English love of things done in due order. Sometimes I think that the English do not care a pin about justice. What they like is seemliness.
2 October 1944. Ottawa.1
Drove out to the Fishing Club up the Gatineau Valley to which a small group of civil servants belong – younger men – some of them temporary wartime appointments – a very pleasant group – intelligent, unaffected, kind-hearted, and hard-headed. At the Fishing Club the day was overcast with a gun-metal sky, the trees just beginning to turn. I think of this country not as young but as old as nature – ante-dating Athens and Rome – always these hidden lakes and waiting woods.
13 October 1944. Wolfville, Nova Scotia.2
The one street of Wolfville is lined with autumn trees – golden filters for sunlight, but there has not been much sun. It is overcast, cool and windless. The old-fashioned, white clapboard houses are so pretty that the village just escapes being a tourist picture postcard. Sandwiched between these charming, early Victorian, Cranford houses are the tall, fretted wooden villas of the eighties painted in liver and mustard and the comfortable, shingled, styleless, modern houses with big windows and roomy verandahs. Wolfville is built on a slope – from the woods the orchards spread down to the backs of houses on one side of the street. Behind the houses on the other side the slope ends abruptly in a steep bluff – below are marshes and mud flats stretching into the basin of Minas, an expanse of shifting tides and colours – a mirror for sunsets. Beyond this sea-inlet Cape Blomidon stands up nobly.
Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783) Page 21