by Bodie Thoene
The deserters rushed to every crack in the rough boards of the front wall. Unseen by any of them, Andre pushed out a loose plank at the back of the barn. He crouched beside the wall, examining the distance to the cover of the trees. It was too far and the Germans were already too close. The only shelter possible was the haystack. Andre flung himself across the intervening space, hoping that his rush had not been seen. He burrowed into the mound of moldy straw.
A shot was fired by the sniper upstairs in the barn. A German soldier fell, and replying machine-gun fire raked the front of the barn. The men inside fired back—a sporadic popping noise compared to the chatter of the MG-34s.
Andre steadily wormed his way deeper and deeper into the pile of hay. Even so, he could hear the shouts of the Germans as they encircled the barn. A fusillade of bullets soon poured into the farm building from three sides. The thin, flimsy panels were no protection for the deserters inside. Andre heard the cries as men were wounded. The feeble rifle bursts coming from the barn were reduced to fewer and fewer returns of the German fire. Finally they stopped altogether.
Andre could hear the poilus shouting for the Germans to stop shooting and they would surrender. The deserters were ordered to come outside and line up along the front wall.
The German officer in charge was obviously disappointed by their catch. He brusquely demanded to know if anyone remained in the barn. Only three dead men and two more too badly wounded to walk out, he was told. The structure was searched and the truth of the statement verified.
The SS commander ordered the prisoners to return to the barn. “You will be kept here until arrangements have been made to transport you.”
As the last French soldier was herded back into the barn, he turned to ask how soon assistance would be brought for a wounded friend.
“Here is all the assistance you need,” yelled the officer.
A French voice screamed, “Grenade!” and blasts of German machine guns began again. The grenade exploded with a roar, and new screams erupted from the barn. Andre heard a window crash as someone tried to escape, and he heard the shriek as the attempt was met by a rifle bullet in the face. The SS troops surrounding the barn took turns tossing in grenades. They laughed at the frantic efforts of the men trapped inside.
As the explosions died away at last, Andre heard the SS officer say, “Burn it!” There was a terrifying rush of footsteps as the Germans scooped up armloads of straw to dump inside the barn.
The amount of cover on top of Andre decreased. He was afraid to move, fearing that the least squirm would be visible. A fragment of hay slid down from his head, and Andre could see out! The toe of one of his boots protruded from the pile. Surely one of the Germans would see it!
A black-uniformed figure bent over the straw to gather another sheaf. “That is enough,” Andre heard the officer say. “Light it and let’s get out of here.”
For a reason Andre was never able to decipher, the SS troops did not set fire to the haystack, too. Perhaps their only thought was to cover up the evidence of their actions. He waited until the barn was a roaring mass of flames, then emerged on the far side of his hiding place. Andre ran into the woods, completely unharmed.
***
Sometime after midnight there was a lull in the shelling around the BEF Casualty Clearing Station at the Ecole de Cavalerie. It was the absence of explosions that awakened David Meyer from a shallow and troubled sleep beneath the table in the foyer of the church. Now the stillness of the night exposed the agonized pleas of the wounded.
Above him came the urgent voices of a man and woman. “Sister Mitchell, the Belgian king, Leopold, capitulated to the Nazis an hour ago. It is only a matter of time before they move to encircle us here.”
“We can’t leave our patients!”
“You must, Sister Mitchell! There is still time for you to pull your nurses back . . . the coast . . .”
“What about our wounded?” Her voice trembled with the horror of leaving over a thousand wounded soldiers to the Germans.
“We will take all we can! The rest we must leave to German mercy.”
“There is no mercy in the Germans, Major!” Her voice choked.
“Then we must leave them to the mercy of God!” the man insisted.
“I can’t desert them. . . .”
With a groan of agony, David slid out from under the table at the feet of the nurse and the BEF officer. “I’ve gotta get out of here,” he gasped.
The nurse blinked dumbly at him. “An American? What are you doing under there?” Her eyes flitted to his swollen arm and rigid, purple fingers.
“I stopped to get this splinter out of my arm,” David grimaced. “No time for that now.”
Sister Mitchell reached down to help him to his feet. “At least you can walk.”
The foyer, the nurse, and the officer swam before his eyes. He felt his knees buckle as the dull complaint in his arm changed to a scream.
“You won’t get a mile unless we see to that thing.” She clucked her tongue. “Nasty.” She touched his index finger, and he choked off a cry. “Your fingers look like cow teats with a bad case of mastitis.”
This was the boss lady, David guessed. He nodded in a jerky motion as nausea knotted his gut again. “Cow . . . yeah. Swell.”
“Swollen all right. Quite.”
Ten minutes later, the sleeve of his uniform cut away, David lay on a table in a side chapel of the sanctuary. The walls were lined with memorial tablets to honor the dead of the last war who had been trained here at Ecole de Cavalerie. The floor was littered with the wounded of the new generation of an old battle. What would their fate be with the Luftwaffe sinking British hospital ships at Dunkirk? David gazed at the carpet of wounded as though they already lay beneath a garden of white crosses. Young men, like him, who had fought, been wounded, received care, and now what did any of that mean to them? They were as dead as if they had been left to bleed to death on the field of battle. Dead men. Boys, who had not even begun to live.
Back home their mothers watched for ships streaming back to England and prayed their sons were on those ships. Young women like his Annie waited for word and hoped that the names of the men they loved would not be on the lists of dead, wounded, or missing. And what about the troops assembled on the beaches of Dunkirk? They looked over their shoulders and wondered about the comrades they had left behind. They looked ahead at the glassy sea and wondered if they would reach the shores of home again. They looked up through the smoke over Dunkirk as the Messerschmitts strafed them on the sand and in the water. . . . But at least they had hope.
There was no hope for the men left behind in No. 10 CCS at Ecole de Cavalerie on the River Lys. Located between Dunkirk and the German panzers, the school would be overrun and the river crossed in the German drive to the coast.
Sister Mitchell was still clucking at the enormity of the sliver of shrapnel. “Not too deep though. You’re lucky. This will hurt a bit.” Chatting cheerfully in an attempt to keep his mind off the pain, she grasped the exposed end of the six-inch metal splinter and pulled. It seemed to grind against his bones as she jerked it loose.
The room swam around David.
She happily held up the splinter, then tossed it into a metal bowl.
David groped for the bowl and threw up for what he hoped was the last time. “It didn’t hurt that bad going in,” he gasped.
With a touch of her finger she pushed him back on the table and poured iodine onto the wound. “An American RAF pilot. My heavens. Thank God we have you. Well, you’ve done your best. Most important thing now is that you get yourself back across the Channel. Back to Britain. Fly against the Hun again. You’ll need to have this x-rayed when you get back. Make sure we haven’t left anything in there. Our chaps will fix this properly for you when you get across. Eighty percent of all the wounds we treat are from shrapnel. Yours is no worse than most. This will do for now. The pain would have knocked you out if we hadn’t removed it. What’s your name?”
/> “David Meyer . . . Tinman, they call me,” he replied through clenched teeth as she wrapped the arm in gauze.
“Tinman, is it? Lots of our lads stopping in here every hour asking the way to the coast. You can hook up with one of the lot and off you go! To Dunkirk!”
Then from a shadow beneath a Gothic stone pillar came a muffled cry. “Tinman! Is that you, Tinman?”
A figure with hands, arms, and head swathed in bandages sat bolt upright on a canvas cot. He resembled a mummy sprung to life. “Tinman. Is it you? It’s me! It’s your old friend, Badger Cross. Am I ever glad you’ve come along!”
Then the explosive joy of Badger crumbled into desperation. He stretched his gauze-mittened arms out in the general direction of David and Sister Mitchell. “Take me with you, Tinman! Get me out of this stinking hell! Please, old chap! I can’t see . . . but I can walk. Walk me back across the Channel, will you? Point the way; I’ll walk on the water, like Saint Peter! No hard feelings, Yank. Just don’t leave me here to the Nazis!”
***
After spending all night in the woods and catching a fitful hour’s sleep in the trunk of a hollow tree, Andre emerged into the morning light of the twenty-eighth of May. A village lay in a fold of the hills just ahead. The smoke from the chimneys curled lazily into the sky. There was no activity in the town and no guards patrolled the streets, but he crept cautiously along a line of hedge between a dairy and a blacksmith shop anyway. Since he had been lost before the encounter with the SS, and his evasive maneuvers had taken him several different directions, he now had no idea which side of the front line he was on.
A road sign near the edge of town gave directions in two languages. Ypres it said, and below that, Yperen. That the city was identified in two languages meant that he was in Belgium. The distance given to what was still an Allied-held strongpoint seemed to suggest that it was safe to show himself.
Andre went to the door of the house in front of the dairy. He had only a few coins in his pocket, but perhaps it would be enough to buy some milk. He had eaten nothing since noon the day before, and he was famished.
After he knocked twice on the door, there was a long delay before anyone answered. The woman who finally came saw his stubbled, dirty face and his torn and stained uniform and screamed.
There was a commotion in the back of the house and a man emerged, holding an antique fowling piece. He presented it in Andre’s face and demanded that he clear off at once. “We want none of your kind around here.”
“My kind?” Andre repeated blankly. Then, remembering the way he looked, he explained. “I am not a deserter. I had a brush with the Boche and escaped. Where is the local commander? He needs to know—”
“Get off with you, I said, before I shoot!”
Andre could not believe his ears. “I just want to buy some milk.”
“I said go!” the man announced with finality. He cocked the shotgun with a serious air.
Andre raised his hands in submission and walked backward away from the house. He thought that the man must be crazy. Perhaps the town had been vandalized by deserters and Andre’s appearance was too suspicious.
As he reached the main street of the village, the church bell began to ring. It pealed over and over again in a joyous, swelling sound. The doors of the houses flung open, and people suddenly appeared where none had been before. They were all smiling and talking in excited tones.
A group of Belgian soldiers appeared on the corner just ahead. They had no helmets or weapons, and their tunics were undone. They were laughing as they talked and smoked.
As Andre approached, they regarded him curiously. “What is happening?” he asked.
“Have you not heard?” a young, almost beardless private said. “The war is over! It was on the radio. The war is over!”
“The war is . . . ?” Andre was incredulous. Had he somehow slept more than one night, like a figure in a fairy tale? Or was he not awake and this was a dream now? “The war is over?” he said again.
“Yes, man,” repeated the private, laughing. “King Leopold was just on the radio. You can believe it. The war is over.”
“But how? Why?”
A flicker of movement caught Andre’s eye from the second story of the house on the corner. A heavyset woman was vigorously waving a white sheet as if airing the bed linen. But then she hung it over the railing and pinned it in place.
Suddenly Andre understood. “Belgium has surrendered.” He groaned.
“Sure,” the private agreed, staring at Andre as if he were an escapee from a mental hospital. “That is what we said: The war is over.”
“Not for me,” Andre said wearily. “Not for me.”
26
The Evacuation Corridor
The sudden and unexpected capitulation of the Belgians created a massive immediate problem for the French and British soldiers in the evacuation corridor. Twenty miles of front from Ypres to the sea, supposedly guarded by the Belgian forces, were now unprotected. It was a gap through which all of Wehrmacht Army Group B could have swept unopposed. If it were not for Lord Gort’s willful disobedience—if he had not sent British troops north, in direct contradiction of his instructions—the evacuation would have been crushed.
As it was, General Bernard Montgomery’s Third Division stepped smartly into the hole left by the Belgians and took over the guard duties. They made the remarkable maneuver in one night, before the Wehrmacht had time to exploit the opening.
When Andre arrived at Ypres, he found out that General Gort had moved his headquarters from Premesques to Houtkerque. The new command post was out of Belgium and back in French territory. Significantly, it was only a dozen miles from the Channel.
Andre caught a ride with some British artillery forces being withdrawn toward Dunkirk. When he came upon them, they were completing a sad but very necessary project: destroying their equipment. Cannons were packed with explosives and their barrels destroyed. Papers, money, uniforms, and supplies were heaped up, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze.
The trucks needed for the withdrawal were loaded with men and lined up for the move. All the other vehicles, like those that had towed the heavy artillery, were drained of oil and water and then left running. It was a strange, weirdly pathetic scene. The great machines shuddered and shook, like the dying convulsions of faithful elephants.
Halfway between Ypres and Noordschote, the column ran into a German tank that emerged without warning from a side road. It struck the center of the convoy, blasting a lorry loaded with men into a flaming heap of rubble.
The front half of the column roared away, leaving the following line of vehicles trapped by the burning debris on a road too narrow to quickly turn around. The soldiers jumped out of the canvas-covered transports and took cover in the ditches as machine-gun fire sprayed the bushes.
Once again Andre found himself burying his face in a muddy drainage ditch. The British Tommies had almost nothing with which to fight back. The rifle fire they used to defend themselves did nothing but bounce off the PzKw-II. It rolled forward, shoving the burning hulk of the truck out of its way, then pivoted sharply and moved again toward the line of men cowering in the ditch.
Every time its main gun fired, a 20 mm shell spelled the end of another truck or troop lorry. Soldiers near Andre, seeing no escape from being crushed by the oncoming tank, jumped up and tried to run into the woods. Every time they did so, the probing fire of the machine gun sought them out and cut them down.
On the other side of the road from Andre, a soldier had somehow located a Boyes antitank rifle. This shoulder-fired weapon propelled a shell supposedly capable of penetrating tank armor. As the machine gun mowed down those in front of it, the Tommy with the Boyes rifle popped out. He threw the weapon up and loosed three rounds in quick succession. The impact of the recoil knocked the soldier down, and he lay against the trunk of a tree, groaning with the pain of a dislocated shoulder.
But at least one bullet had penetrated a thinner part of the armo
r. It must have killed or wounded the driver, because the tank’s engine gave a bellow like an outraged bull, and the tank slewed sideways in the roadway.
Next to Andre another panicked soldier jumped to his feet and attempted to run. Even though the PzKw-II was temporarily incapacitated, its machine gun was still active. The man had only taken two steps when his body toppled across Andre’s legs.
Pushing the weight of the dead man off his knees, Andre’s hand came in contact with a heavy pouch that had fallen from the Tommy’s shoulder. It was a sack full of grenades.
The tank sat idle in the middle of the road, its engine rumbling. No one moved in the ditches anymore, and the German machine seemed to be searching for its next victim.
Mistaking the inactivity for opportunity, fifty yards down the road a British truck roared backward out of the ditch. The driver frantically whipped it back and forth across the pavement, attempting to turn around and escape.
The slumbering tank snorted and lumbered forward, its snout pivoting to bring the guns to bear. Lying absolutely still as the tank passed, Andre hugged the sack and steeled himself for what he had to do next. At the moment he was even with its treads, he ripped open the pouch of grenades and began pulling the pins. Two at a time, he yanked the safety rings free until eight live explosives hissed in the bag.
Andre sprinted across the road behind the tank. He threw the pouch as hard as he could underneath the center of the PzKw-II, between its treads. Flinging himself over the shoulder of the road, Andre rolled into the ditch. All the time, as the seconds were ticking past, he wondered if the tank would be clear of the pouch before it exploded.
Someone inside the PzKw-II must have spotted Andre’s dash. The tank turned abruptly, its left tread stopping as the right side clanked ahead.
It was in this position when the grenades exploded. There was a muffled roar that seemed to swell in volume—like a peal of thunder, heard at first far away, that grows as it rolls over the land. Even in its death, the German tank was a lethal weapon. Steel shards, fragments of its corpse, whizzed off into the woods. Several more British soldiers, who were unwary enough to watch the explosion tear the machine to pieces, were impaled with fragments of its armor. Andre lay curled into as tiny a space as he could manage until after the last chunk of metal and detonating shell had whined by.