by Bodie Thoene
But Mac had no difficulty withdrawing from the battle line. He saw more clearly than the French High Command that the real story of the war was developing between the Belgian town of Dinant and the city of Sedan in France.
He paid a thousand francs for a fifteen-year-old Delfosse sports car. It had no top and the seats showed more of the springs than the leather, but it also had a 3500 cc engine and the ability to cover four hundred kilometers on one tank of petrol. By driving all day, all night, and the next day, Mac hoped to be back in Nancy or wherever the action was on that side of the German advance.
His travel took him south from Brussels to Reims, where he stopped to gulp down some food before going on. The little auberge where he pulled over offered coq au vin and an ancient radio that whined and squawked like the ghost of the chicken in the stew as the proprietor attempted to tune in a recognizable sound.
In one of the passes up and down the cracked dial, Mac heard an English voice announce that they were repeating the words of new Prime Minister Churchill’s address to the House of Commons.
“One moment, Monsieur,” Mac requested. “I would like to hear what Monsieur Churchill has to say.”
The measured tones and carefully chosen phrases of Winston Churchill crackled through the warped, dusty speaker, but the power of his character was unmistakable:
“I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
***
The movement of soldiers and a harsh warning about mines placed along the Lys River toward France put Josie’s little entourage back on the main highway. The Jersey cow now carried five small children and the parakeet.
The Ecole de Cavalerie was fifty kilometers downriver and across the border in France. Josie looked at the slowly flowing stream that cut across the flatlands and imagined that this same water would be flowing past the Ecole at the exact moment she greeted Paul Chardon. The thought made the journey somehow more bearable.
They passed what remained of the town of Olsene, which had been bombed the night before. The metal girders of the rail bridge across the Lys was twisted like a giant pretzel. Warehouses, homes, and businesses still smoldered. Old people stood in the doorways of their windowless houses and watched with blank faces as the endless stream of people coursed through their main street. Some citizens of Olsene, with carts and little bundles tied on their backs, joined the great exodus.
Automobiles, with mattresses tied on their tops to stop bullets, bullied through the mass. And then there were the bicycles. Endless thousands of men and women and children who had cycled from Holland caught up with the flow just beyond Olsene.
But no mode of transportation was so fine as the Jersey cow. She not only carried the children but fed them as well. Yes, the creature moved slowly. The Dutch cyclists rushed past. But each evening she was led onto some grassy place and allowed to feed. By morning her udder was near to bursting again. Two pails a day were filled. Dozens of little ones were fed. She was a four-legged miracle coveted by all.
A few miles from Olsene the long-suffering column was met by shrieking flocks of British motorcyclists in goggles and leather helmets. They rumbled past, beeping their horns. Giving the thumbs-up sign, they shouted and waved at the children on the Jersey. Startled, the cow gave a low bellow and a little hop, sending all her passengers tumbling onto the ground.
Josie and the Belgian mothers gathered them up again. Set them on the cow. They were not hurt. It was nothing at all. What was a little tumble onto the road compared to the horror happening around them?
In Rotterdam thirty thousand died in one day of bombing. In Brussels fifty schoolchildren perished in one instant when a Messerschmitt emptied its machine guns into them. Beside the travelers the fields were littered with shallow graves of the nameless dead who had done nothing wrong except be there at the wrong time.
The conversation invariably drifted to the proper position to assume while being strafed. To lay outstretched on the ground meant more body surface exposed to the bullets. Best to stand upright, it was decided. Best to lead the cow and its passengers beneath the shade of a poplar tree and wait calmly.
Minutes later a white ring of smoke above the trudging column identified a Messerschmitt circling like a hawk. The fighter plane fell from the sky in perfect mimicry of a raptor’s attack, and the crowd on the road scattered like rabbits.
Bicycles were hastily abandoned in crumpled heaps as their riders took cover under hedges. Mothers, trying to track flocks of children, shooed some away even while calling others back. A car careened out of control and knocked down a man pushing a wheelbarrow even before bullets began to plow a harvest of destruction.
Trembling all over, Josie tried to sound calm as she grabbed Yacov so he would not take another fall and led the Jersey off the road and under the tree. She motioned for the children riding the cow to plug their ears with their fingers, as if this were all an elaborate game.
Standing perfectly still, with the Jersey behind the tree trunk and out of sight of the carnage on the road, Josie nevertheless peeked around it herself. An elderly couple, separated by the initial panic, tottered toward each other from opposite sides of the dusty lane.
The bullets of the ME-109 knit them together even as they touched, and as Josie ducked her head and squeezed her eyes shut, they fell into the embrace of death.
***
Only days after the fighting began, the students of the Ecole de Cavalerie were witnesses to an unusual event. They were turned out of their bunks at dawn and told to form into companies and march to the train station.
“I knew it!” Gaston exulted. “France needs us! We are going to the front!”
“Being sent away, more likely,” Sepp said, shaking his head. “They are not going to let us fight.”
A special train was on the siding at the rail platform. The cars were lettered 8 Chevaux Ou 40 Hommes. “Eight horses or forty men,” Gaston read. “We are going to the war in horsecars?”
But it soon proved otherwise. When the sliding doors to the railcars were opened, down the ramps came two dozen proud, nervous horses. Following the cavalry steeds, a tiny pony was also led down the walkway.
“What is this?” Gaston wondered aloud. “Are we getting fresh mounts to ride into battle? Who gets the pony? Raymond?”
“Be quiet, you idiot,” hissed Sepp as a man dressed in the uniform of a Belgian cavalry officer saluted Captain Chardon. “These are not for us. This is the stable of the royal family of Belgium. Look! That is King Leopold’s stallion right there.”
The boys were detailed in pairs to walk the horses back to the cavalry school. “Brussels is not safe for them anymore,” Sepp said, “so they have been evacuated to stay here.”
“Fine thing,” Gaston muttered. “It is not right for trained horses or trained men like us to hide back where it is safe. Captain,” Gaston called to Paul Chardon, “will we be exercising these animals for the king?”
“Oh no,” Paul corrected. “This is just a rest stop for them until this afternoon. We will be sending them on, just as soon as more cars are coupled to the train to take our own broodmares.”
“Take them where?”
Paul eyed his young officers. “Farther south. Where it is safe.”
***
It was Juliette who found her. She was only six, and she was weeping in the field beside the body of her mother. Her name was Angelique, and she did not know where they were going, only that they had come a very long way from Ghent.
The mother, who had been a pretty young woman in her late twenties, was buried by an old farmer w
ho had an army spade tucked into the pile on his wheelbarrow. And Juliette, who knew about such things as dead mothers, mothers killed by all varieties of Nazis, let Angelique hold her doll.
Now the Jersey cow carried six children on her back. She did not complain. Josie thought of the two sisters in Paris and remembered the joyous laughter of the children at the orphanage at No. 5 Rue de la Huchette. Surely there would be room for one more little girl who would need to learn to laugh again.
How long would it be before Josie would feel happiness again? She could have wept easily. Raising her eyes from the hilltop, she looked across the miles and miles of road that wound down from Belgium to the border of France. There were the young and the very old, the very rich and the poor, the feeble and the strong—mingled together in one unbroken tide of terror. Numbering two million, this migration of fear marched against the Allied armies, blocking their road to battle more effectively than an enemy artillery barrage.
She glanced back. There seemed to be no beginning to the line. And forward: There was no end to it.
As Josie looked, she could see that Death, the very thing they were fleeing, marched patiently beside them all.
***
There was no missing the Red Cross symbol painted on the roof of the U-shaped, four-story, brick Ecole de Cavalerie. That is what the cadets and medical personnel said as they dug through the shattered right wing of the building after the lone Heinkel dropped a single bomb that collapsed two floors and left a gaping wound in the brick. Two hundred wounded were now dead. One British doctor, four nurses, and two orderlies had also been killed. But Andre Chardon, Paul’s brother, who was still recovering from his automobile accident wounds, had lived.
Paul Chardon dug through the rubble with Sister Abigail Mitchell and several hundred angry cadets, who took the attack as a personal insult.
The operating theatre was moved to the chapel. Summoned from the village by young Gaston during the emergency, Father Perrin and seventeen nuns from the church at Lys arrived to take the places of the fallen medical staff. There were no more refugees passing through the village. Now it was only the soldiers moving inexorably toward the coast. The civilian population had mostly fled to Paris, Mother Superior told Paul and Sister Mitchell. Was help needed to fight the unmerciful Boche with mercy?
There was no need to ask. Father Perrin was already busy administering last rites. The sisters helped salvage supplies and set up a treatment room. Raymond, his youthful face showing grief beyond his years, formed a burial squad and helped to lay out the dead in long rows.
That afternoon a doctor from Ghent, who had followed the river back to the village by boat, arrived at the docks in front of the town in hopes of acquiring provisions. When Sepp examined his papers and found that he was a physician, he brought the doctor to the chapel at gunpoint.
“But I am an obstetrician!” the man declared.
Sister Mitchell drew herself up in her most formidable pose. She spat the angry words out in English for Sepp to translate in French.
“The most esteemed Sister Mitchell says that you learned to set bones in medical school, Monsieur. You are Belgian, and many of the wounded are your countrymen. You will go to work with the rest of us or this young man—by which she means me—may suspect that you are a Nazi spy and will shoot you as a fifth columnist.”
Sepp jabbed the muzzle of his rifle in the doctor’s back for emphasis. Soon the Belgian obstetrician was delivering shrapnel from the bodies of French poilus as if he had stopped at the Ecole for that very purpose.
***
The battle Mac witnessed seemed to demonstrate that the Allied High Command had not been wrong in their assessment of French military muscle after all. After the German tanks rolled out of the forest and through the little town of Longwy, they were met with concentrated fire from the French cannons.
Mac stood beside the forward artillery observer, a calm, middle-aged man with a gray mustache and quick, darting eyes. “New coordinates, 75-10 to 78-4,” Captain Druot said into the field telephone. Then to Mac, “I’m sorry, Monsieur. Where were we?”
“I was saying that the accuracy of the French artillery is certainly being verified here today.”
“Ah, yes,” replied the officer modestly, taking credit for the entire operation but showing humility at the same time. “The Germans cannot advance into such a conflagration.”
It was true. The eye of Mac’s camera registered three PzKw-IIIs turned to flaming wreckage in the field outside the town. The others turned about and scurried back toward cover as fast as their clanking treads could carry them.
The barrage of sharp, angry sounds from the 75 mm cannon continued cracking. As Captain Druot whispered into his mouthpiece, the sights of the bombardment lifted. The fountains of dirt from the rain of shells pursued the German machines with an effect that was almost comical.
“But of course, artillery cannot do it alone.” Druot waved toward an echelon of French tanks that had emerged from around the base of the hill. “Our guns can keep the Boche from taking a position and can even retake an objective. But cannon shells cannot hold a position all alone, you see.” He spoke of the 75s with great affection and seemed to be apologetic for the fact that artillery alone could not win the war.
The French armored unit, a mixed force of fast-moving Somuas, tiny two-man Renaults, and one gigantic, lumbering 32-ton Char approached Longwy. They opened up with their machine guns, chasing a pocket of German riflemen out of cover. The Char, carrying a 75 mm weapon of its own, launched a round of such force that the clock tower of the city hall was demolished with one blow.
The German tanks, trying to regroup on the far side of the village, were still being routed by the French artillery. “We have superior artillery and, as you have noted, Monsieur McGrath, clearly equal quality of armor. The courage of our foot soldiers is undoubted. In what respect are we not the match of the Boche?”
The first Stuka dropped out of the sun, followed by three more. Single-minded weapons that carried men on their backs, the dive-bombers fell toward the formation of French tanks. Pulling out of their swoops much lower than the approved height of three thousand feet, the German pilots risked being caught in their own detonating explosives, but the effect was one of firing at point-blank range.
The Char, standing out on the bare field like the Eiffel Tower stands above the skyline of Paris, was singled out first. A five-hundred-pound bomb, released at a thousand feet above the tank, impacted directly on the cannon of the Char. The French machine disappeared in a roar of smoke and flame. When the shower of debris had fallen and the fumes cleared, nothing remained but the barrel of its weapon and a pile of charred metal.
In quick succession, the other Stukas attacked the tank formation. Then it was the turn of the French armor to run for safety. But there was no safety. From their aerial perspective, the German warplanes could pick out the tanks wherever they fled. Unlike the artillery barrage, it was not possible for the French machines to retreat out of range. The dive-bombers pursued them wherever they went.
Mac saw the German troops and their armor advance back into the town recently vacated. Druot, still calm and matter-of-fact in the face of the reversal, issued new coordinates to the guns.
As soon as the French 75s opened up again, new waves of Stukas dropped toward the white streamers from the firing cannons. As if tired of chasing tanks, the dive-bombers unloaded their deadly eggs on the French gun emplacements instead.
One after another, the barking noises of the 75s ceased. Although Druot cranked the telephone and called each of four batteries in turn, he received no further response. A Stuka, returning from having destroyed the pride of the French artillery, spotted Mac and the captain in their exposed position on the hill.
The gull-winged warbird flattened out its dive, skimming the hilltop with its machine guns blazing. Mac threw himself into a slit trench as a furious line of bullets stalked him.
When the gunfire stopped, Mac risked a gl
ance out of the trench. The artillery observer’s body reclined on the ground as if he had chosen a pleasant afternoon to watch the passing clouds. In his fist Captain Druot still grasped the handset of the telephone. His sightless eyes stared upward, registering forever a lesson harshly learned: the part of the war in which the French were no match.
***
It was a tiny village with some unpronounceable Flemish name. Josie did not attempt to say it. Traffic was snarled in the center of the square around a fountain and the statue of Jeanne d’Arc. Josie felt an amused revenge against the loaded vehicles that had streaked past them on the main highway earlier in the day. Their horns blared to no avail. They were stuck, while Josie and Madame Hasselt led the little Jersey in and out of the mess with ease.
Some of their larger group had broken off, taking their children with them on a different route to France. Now there were only the cow, Josie, Madame Hasselt, Juliette, Yacov, and solemn little Angelique still clutching Juliette’s baby doll.
There were shops open in this unpronounceable place. A miracle!
The provision of Madame Hasselt’s ham was gone, the chocolate consumed. The cheeses in her pack were moldy. Here was opportunity to obtain food enough to get them to the border at least. It was worth braving the traffic and the reflected heat off the cobbles.
Josie headed to the cheese shop, which still displayed enormous red waxed wheels in the window. Madame Hasselt was left in charge of the bovine and the children. She removed the three little ones from the back of the cow and let the beast drink slowly and with great satisfaction out of Jeanne d’Arc’s fountain.
The queue at the cheese shop was long, but the great rounds of cheese would last awhile yet. The proprietor, in fairness to all, allowed only two pounds per customer. Out of fairness to himself he charged exorbitant prices. People paid him willingly, gratefully. Better to sell the stuff now than to let the Nazis have it, the proprietor remarked. At this, men and women eyed one another uncomfortably. Could the old fellow really mean he believed the Germans would get as far as his cheese shop?