by Bodie Thoene
Andre did not argue with the Belgian captain, but he thought about the roadblocks on the main highways from France to Belgium. He shuddered at the difficulty they would cause for advancing French and English troops, should Belgium and Holland call for their assistance.
The Ardennes. Andre pondered the rolling forest country as he continued toward Brussels. The French High Command had simply looked at the hills of the Ardennes through the dim eyes of generals who had fought in the last great war. The conclusions reached were logical according to the tactics of 1914–1918 trench warfare. It was not that the Ardennes was impassable to troops, but its twisting roads could not accommodate heavy siege guns. It was unthinkable to the old French generals that German infantry might be brought forward to fight without first having the advantage of artillery bombardment. Therefore, the German offensive against France would not come through the Ardennes. It never had. It never would. That territory was in itself a kind of Maginot. The French and the English were secure in that.
Who was Colonel Andre Chardon to question generals like Gamelin and Georges, or the British general Lord Gort? Yet he found himself glancing up through his mud-spattered windscreen at the gray skies and thinking of Stuka dive-bombers. A new kind of artillery. The narrow roads of the Ardennes meant nothing to the Luftwaffe. That thought made him uneasy.
Andre found no comfort in the visible preparations of the Belgian defenses. There were, he knew, seven hundred thousand men billeted in the beautiful hills of little Belgium. On the fire lanes leading off the main highway red signs announced that the area was prohibited to all civilian traffic. Steel gates and armed guards blocked the bridge approaches. A massive red steel fence ran up hills and down valleys for the entire length of the country in hopes of catching stray German tanks. Just in case . . .
A few miles beyond Dinant, the drizzle turned into a serious downpour. Twilight and then darkness descended like a curtain. Andre drove slowly along the back roads. Belgian troops were coming forward one brigade at a time. The troop lorries tracked red clay onto the pavement until it was as slick as ice. Andre peered cautiously through the windshield and cursed the vigilantes of Arlon who had kept him from his journey too long for safety.
There were explosive traps set every kilometer along the highway from Arlon to Brussels, land mines recently set in place, meant to destroy the road and halt any enemy advance. Andre noticed trenches cut from the center of the road to the shoulder and filled again as though someone were laying a pipeline halfway across the highway. Beside every trench stood a rain-drenched soldier with a rifle, warning Andre to reduce his already slow speed.
He came to an intersection where the soil in the trench had been churned to thick, gooey mud. There was a problem. Military vehicles had come to a stop on the crossroad. An angry officer was standing in the downpour, trying to figure the best angle with which to turn tractors, supply trucks, and an enormous 155-millimeter gun around the land mine.
“Who put this so close to our turn? Stupidity!” the officer railed at the sky. “Dig the thing up!”
The sentry eyed the booby trap with respect. What did he fear more: the little trench or the officer? “I cannot dig it up, sir. I do not know where the thing is. I am afraid to touch the string.”
The string was a feeble piece of twine set between two sticks. Under slight tension, it held back the trigger of the land mine—a very dangerous thing for vehicles on the road.
The officer handled the inconvenience. He ran a tractor back and forth over the brush beside the road, cutting an alternate path for all his machines. Within minutes the bottleneck was broken.
Now, Andre thought grimly, if the Belgians could so easily bypass their own traps, could not the German Panzerkorps think of the same solution?
Andre drove on after the military equipment, rolling through mud that was nearly axle deep. He tried not to look at the little string. He made himself think about things other than the simplicity with which the trap had been bypassed.
Following military trucks all the way, he finally reached Brussels close to midnight . . . and spent a restless night in his hotel.
Andre Chardon’s brother, Paul, watched with amusement from the top landing outside the Ecole de Cavalerie entrance hall as the army lorry squealed to a stop on the slick cobblestones in front of the steps.
Paul’s three senior cadet captains also observed the arrival from across the square. Their poses—arms folded across their immaculate uniforms and their weight leaned back on their polished boots—spoke of distrust and disdain. It was obvious the idea of turning the cavalry school into a hospital—and an English hospital at that—was repugnant to them.
The driver’s door opened, and a tall, very British doctor emerged. “You are Captain Chardon,” he said in very bad French. “I am Surgeon Officer Roberts.”
Paul acknowledged the introduction. Roberts and his staff were to take over the now-vacant wing of the junior school, turning it into a Casualty Clearing Station for the British Expeditionary Force.
“And this is Chief Nurse Abigail Mitchell,” Roberts said as a passenger slid across the seat of the truck and stood gazing up at the imposing brick facade of the school.
Nurse Mitchell was tall—almost Paul’s height, in fact—and had dark brown hair and eyes. Her complexion was ruddy, outdoorsy, and she had the lean, muscular look of a horsewoman. Striking was the adjective that came to Paul’s mind. So striking, in fact, that he repeated it to himself, creating an awkward pause when he failed to respond promptly to Miss Mitchell’s greeting.
“You are very welcome,” he said. “I mean, I am also pleased to meet you.”
Paul shot a glance at the three students who were studying him intently. Was his bumbling shyness around women that easy to read, even from fifty yards away? He gave a peremptory gesture to Gaston, Sepp, and Raymond to come forward and present themselves.
“I want you to meet the ranking student officers,” he added, silently wishing that they would walk faster. By eye contact, he told each boy in unmistakable language to be on his best behavior.
When the three were introduced, each stepped forward, bowed stiffly, then stepped back to form an unbroken rank of disapproval.
“Right. I will leave it to you then, Captain Chardon,” Roberts said. “Miss Mitchell will do the inspection, and you two can discuss the necessary modifications.”
As Paul left to escort Nurse Mitchell through the school, he saw the three boys exchange another look of disgust. Modify the school to accommodate a British nurse? Unthinkable!
It was clear from the start that nurse Abigail Mitchell preferred the title Sister Mitchell. With great pride she wore the coveted scarlet cape of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service—QAIMNS for short.
Paul Chardon soon discovered that she was a formidable woman. On the day the war had been declared, she was only twenty-eight. But she had previously served in Calcutta, India, and then in Cairo. She had only returned to England two weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland and was among the first nurses to cross the Channel with the BEF.
Had she been a man, a Frenchman, she would have been a general, Paul thought as she strode through the corridors of the junior school, issuing immediate orders.
All mattresses in the dormitories were to be cleaned, aired, and sterilized. Every inch of window, wall, and floor was to be disinfected. Little schoolboys carried germs, she said, and what a pity it would be if some brave British soldier was saved from his battle wounds only to die of some lurking measles bug. And so it went.
The kitchen of the junior school, thanks to its tile counters and stainless-steel sinks, would be converted into an operating theatre. Shadowless lights would be rigged and a generator installed as a source of backup power.
Probably because of her years in the warm climates of the British Empire, Sister Mitchell seemed to have a morbid loathing of cold weather. At her command, tons of coal were laid in, enough to heat the entire Maginot for a year or more, Paul
thought.
The Casualty Clearing Station, or CCS, at Lys was set up to be the short-term holding component, receiving casualties from Field Dressing Stations and Advanced Surgical Units. Only urgent surgery would be dealt with in the field. All other cases were to be brought here, tended to, and then nursed until they were able to be transferred to the hospital ships a few miles away in Channel ports like Dunkirk or Calais.
Hardly a shot had been fired, but Sister Mitchell seemed to work under the assumption that the Ecole would soon be overrun with wounded men. With impunity, she recruited the school cadets to slave for her.
There were complaints.
Big, muscular Gaston, his face smudged with soot, his mouth turned down in indignation, and his uniform and tall riding boots filthy, reported to Paul: “Captain Chardon, I must protest the arrogant behavior of this arrogant Englishwoman! No wonder our countries have been so many times at war! The Englishwomen are much worse than the men, I think. Probably because they had a queen for so many years. Today Sepp and I were walking past from the stables to study for the calculus examination when she called down from the window that used to belong to the seven-year-old boys. You know the little boys sometimes wet their beds! Mon dieu, Captain! What a job! She put Sepp and me to work hauling down the mattresses and burning them in the field. Look at my boots! My uniform! I am a cadet officer, not a janitor!”
Paul considered the muscular young man with a disapproving eye. “I have told Sister Mitchell that every young officer in the Ecole is a gentleman and that we are all willing to help in whatever task she sets us to.”
This was not the truth, but Gaston was ashamed that he had complained. He apologized and went off to study calculus without further words on the matter. But from that day on, he walked to the stables the long way round the junior school.
Paul resolved to speak with Sister Mitchell about keeping cadets from classes and duties. But when he faced her, she beguiled him, thanking him for sending his “little chaps” round to help out with such an enormous task.
Well, what could he say? “Thank you, Mam’zelle . . . pardon. I meant to say . . . that is . . . merci, Sister Mitchell.”
Andre would have handled it better, Paul thought. Under the guise of having pressing business to attend to, Paul took refuge in the stables. There he explored matters he knew something about. Bowed tendons and the difficult temperaments of mares in heat were discussed with the school veterinarian, Lieutenant Rappollo. Rappollo, Paul discovered, had also been nabbed by Sister Mitchell to paint the ceiling of the receiving room. Three cadets had likewise missed a chemistry test and had received demerits when the stalls of their horses had not been mucked out.
All military order had been disrupted by this woman. Everyone was angry, and there were only three patients in the CCS. One fellow had broken his leg in a motorcycle accident. Another had a very bad appendix. The third had the measles, contracted elsewhere, and was in quarantine.
Paul had sent in his request for transfer to active duty, he confessed to Rappollo. The request had nothing to do with Sister Mitchell. He had, in fact, made it before she arrived. But now that he had experienced the fearsome Englishwoman firsthand, he hoped to face the German army very soon.
11
I’ll Be True to You
Standing upright in his half-track, German Wehrmacht major Horst von Bockman surveyed the encampment of his new command. To be the officer in charge of a reconnaissance battalion in the Seventh Panzer Division meant that Horst was responsible for over a hundred vehicles and the troops who manned them.
An armored car bristling with radio aerials pulled up alongside Horst’s location. General Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Seventh, got out and crossed to where Horst stood rigidly at attention. “At ease, Major,” he ordered. “This is not a formal inspection. Not yet, at any rate. I want you to drill your men hard in rapid deployment through wooded countryside. Troops employed in assessing an enemy’s strength on the field of battle must be able to get in, gather information, and return alive.”
“Jawohl, Herr General,” Horst agreed. “We’ll start immediately.”
“He talks like a textbook,” observed Sergeant Fiske after Rommel had driven away. “Where was he when we were fighting our way across the Vistula in Poland?”
“That is enough, Fiske,” Horst ordered. “No criticism of our commanding officer, if you please.”
Nevertheless, even in Horst’s mind, Rommel was something of an unknown quantity. He had been the commander of Adolf Hitler’s personal guard during the invasion of Poland but did not have a background in tank warfare. But Rommel had been convinced by what he saw in Poland that the onslaught of armored units would deliver the Allies into German hands, and he wanted to be where the most glory was to be won.
Horst believed he knew what was coming. The Seventh was bivouacked near the town of Kalenborn, close to the river Ahr. The Belgian frontier was only a scant eighty kilometers away. Studying topographical maps of the area, Belgium’s Ardennes Forest jumped to mind. Horst now knew that his aviator brother-in-law, Kurt Hulse, had been right. There would be no frontal assault on the Maginot defenses. The attack, when it came, would be through Belgium and Luxembourg, neutral or not.
The area of timbered terrain called the Ardennes was not fortified because it had long been believed to be impenetrable to the movement of large numbers of men and equipment. That might have been true in the days of horse-drawn artillery and the painfully slow deployment of foot soldiers, but not in the mechanized days of 1939.
“Sergeant Fiske, contact the company commanders,” Horst ordered. “Give them my compliments and tell them I wish to see them in one hour.”
The boredom so prevalent among the poilus on the French side of the line was nowhere to be found in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. The Germans thought of themselves as the best soldiers in the world, and they were anxious to prove it, even if it meant continuous practice and drill.
Horst organized his command into recon patrols. Each unit had three armored cars and a screen of motorcycle officers. “Today’s drill will be to cover the area from here to Staffel,” he told his captains. “Each team will be assigned a route and an objective that are roughly equivalent in difficulty. The units will have to effect a crossing of the river—no using the highway, gentlemen! Sergeant Fiske will be in Staffel with the packets that represent the information you are to obtain and return to me here. Are there any questions?”
Captain Grühn raised his hand. “And what will the winning team receive?”
Horst grinned. “Did I not explain that? The unit that returns the fastest without any demerits will receive five-day passes for Christmas!”
The day following, Horst was in his half-track, roaming the dirt roads of the practice area. He seemed to be everywhere at once, correcting mistakes and preventing cheating.
“No, Lieutenant Gelb,” he scolded. “Go back and start over. You did not dispatch your motorcycles down that country lane about a quarter mile back. What if an enemy tank squadron had been waiting there to hit our main force in the flank? You are the eyes of the entire division; you cannot afford to have one eye closed!”
Horst managed to keep the tone of his reprimands light, even though the subject they were studying was deadly serious. In the back of his mind was the hope that all this practice warfare would never become real. Perhaps just the spirit and ability that they were demonstrating would convince the Allies that their only hope lay in embracing the bargaining table and avoiding the battlefield.
“No, Shultz! You cannot leave your artillery observer behind as a guard. Look—up in those trees—don’t you see that enemy machine gun? It has pinned down the entire advance. Think, Shultz, think! You need that observer to call in supporting fire, and you need him right now!”
In the end, it was the unit of eager Captain Grühn that carried off the honors. Arriving back at a tributary of the Ahr a bit behind schedule, they found that the narrow bridge was blocked by a broken
-down transport truck. Rather than give up, Grühn reconnoitered upstream and found a bank of dirt that projected over the stream. The captain delighted his commandant by jumping his 500cc BMW motorcycle thirty-six feet to the other bank.
“Bravo, Grühn.” Horst applauded. “You and your men have carried the day. You win the holiday passes.”
“Thank you, Major,” Grühn said. “What about yourself? Will you be going home for Christmas?”
Horst’s mind flashed to Katrina and their home. He shook his head to clear the images before answering. “No . . . that is . . . yes, I will be away for a few days. Taking care of some business.” Then, trying to recover some of the previous pleasant mood, he added, “By the way, you may tell your team that they especially deserve this victory.”
“Why is that, Major?”
“Because, to make things more interesting, I am the one who arranged for the truck to ‘break down’ on the bridge.”
The cold had settled over London tonight, but the nearness of Annie warmed David. In the moonlight, the Thames gleamed like a ribbon of tinfoil as it snaked past the wharves and under Tower Bridge. David had not intended to stroll so far when they left the Wairakei to walk Duffy along the Embankment, but he was glad for the distance. Although David had not told Annie, he knew that this was their last night together for perhaps a very long time.
By tomorrow morning he would be nearly to Tangmere, the airfield twenty-five miles west of Brighton, between the South Downs and the Channel. But he would not be there for long. Posted to France, his orders read. At Tangmere he was slated to join a formation of replacement pilots ferrying Hurricanes to the BEF. Once there, he would belong to 73 Squadron body and soul.
That was why David was taking his time tonight. He realized that when they turned back toward the Wairakei, it would mean their final good-bye was near.