Never Surrender

Where had they gone, those people who only days before had been smiling, blowing kisses and shouting their encouragement as the 6th had made its way to the front? Now, on the way back, there was no greeting, no warmth, nothing but tired eyes that spoke of concern and even contempt.

Don’s unit were withdrawing to a suburb of Brussels called Boitsfort in a tight convoy consisting of fifty ambulances, water trucks, troop-carriers and other vehicles. A few refugees had begun to appear on the road in front of them with their cars and overladen carts. Progress began to slow, and a sense of fading order crept up on them. The 6th had seen no direct combat yet, but planes had begun to appear overhead, high in the clear sky, and they came from the east. They must have seen the convoy; you couldn’t hide an entire field unit, not with all their bright red crosses painted on the roofs.

They passed a single bomb crater at the side of the road. A dead horse lay beside it, the carcass still smouldering, its stench sweet: the first casualty of Don’s war. And moments later there were others, Belgian soldiers, a group of them at the side of the road, abandoned and bleeding. Some were badly injured from shrapnel wounds. They kept gesticulating towards the sky, but otherwise there was little sense to be had from them in their strange language, and no one seemed inclined to delay in order to discover more. The wounded were loaded into the back of the ambulances and other vehicles. First blood. Belgian blood.

Yet, that evening, Boitsfort displayed the air of a prosperous suburb whose mind was fixed on moving gently into the embrace of nothing more threatening than a glorious summer. The gardens were full of flowers, the restaurants and cafés crowded, the young women gay, even while in the back of Don’s vehicle a soldier was bleeding silently upon the floor. Someone mentioned they were passing near the battlefield of Waterloo.

The 6th drew up in front of an imposing building, the Hôtel Haute Maison. Inside the hotel a dinner-dance was in progress. Most of the male dancers were Belgian officers in freshly pressed uniforms, with women on their arms and champagne at their tables. As the British marched in bearing the bloodied casualties, a woman screamed, but in a moment the surprise was overtaken by a hurried calm. A Belgian officer began issuing orders to the hotel staff, the tables were cleared, the women ushered out, the band dismissed. The maître d’ passed calmly from table to table, extinguishing candles, removing bottles, everything else being swept up in the starched linen tablecloths so that it took only moments for the tables to be laid bare. The two largest of these were then positioned beneath the chandeliers, their tops scrubbed with disinfectant and transformed into operating tables. The walking wounded slumped into the dining chairs to wait their turn, while those who were beyond helping themselves were carried in on stretchers that were already stained beyond cleansing. The maître d’ brought in armfuls of clean towels and napkins to use as bandages, tears pouring silently down his cheeks. A priest arrived.

There was little time, often not enough time for the anaesthetic to take effect. More casualties arrived throughout the night, some civilian, all Belgian. The surgeons did whatever they could; often it was not enough. The dead were laid out in the ballroom.

War had at last caught up with Don.

Then, as the sun rose, the 6th were given fresh instructions. New orders. Fall back. Again.

‘How is it possible? How can it be that three armies have fallen back because of the approach of a mere handful of Nar-zi tanks?’

Churchill hunched over the map spread before him on the Cabinet table and held it down with his clenched fists. For many long moments he stood like stone as he studied what lay before him, refusing to believe. All day long he had been pacing up and down as reports flooded in of ever-spreading disaster, his head bent forward as though he intended to butt his way towards victory, but no matter how furiously he paced he couldn’t prevent disaster from catching up with him. The Dutch had surrendered, laid down their arms, given up. The Maginot Line was broken: the French were falling back, the Belgians with them, while the Germans had pushed beyond Sedan and were now halfway to the Channel. Luftwaffe bombers were now at airfields no more than thirty minutes’ flying time from the English coast. That morning he had been shaken awake by a telephone call from the French Prime Minister Reynaud. ‘All is lost,’ he had said in English. ‘The road to Paris is open. We have been defeated.’

And all through the day the calamities had continued.

‘Impossible!’ Churchill’s fists pounded the table and he exploded back into life. He turned to his right, to where Newall, Chief of the Air Staff, was sitting. ‘How many planes? How many planes do we have in France?’

‘Prime Minister, we had four hundred and seventy-four. I regret to tell you that as of this morning we had barely two hundred left still operational.’

‘In five days? We have lost more than half our strength in five days?’ Churchill gasped.

‘The Germans have lost a great many more machines,’ the Air Marshal responded sharply. ‘But we are outnumbered. I’ve heard of three Hurricanes taking on flights of thirty or forty enemy planes. They fight magnificently, but the French fuel is poor, their landing fields a disgrace and their radio communications nonexistent. This morning we attacked the pontoon bridges around Sedan. We sent in nearly eighty planes. Thirty-seven of them failed to return.’ He glared defiantly at Churchill through exhausted eyes. ‘If the RAF is in peril it is not through want of courage. Or of sacrifice, Prime Minister.’

‘The French want more. They want us to send over more squadrons.’

‘To what purpose, Prime Minister?’ Newall countered. ‘If the French are already beaten it would be like cutting out the heart of the RAF and offering it on a plate to Goering. There’s no point in sacrificing our aircraft simply to help the French improve their terms of surrender.’

‘We must keep them in the fight! No surrender. If France were to fall …’

The thought was so terrible as to be inexpressible. He left it hanging half-formed before them. A military aide came in, offered a smart salute and with lowered eyes placed another map before the Prime Minister. An update from the front. It showed an arrow through the place where the heart of the French Ninth Army should have been.

‘Dear God,’ Halifax whispered from his seat opposite Churchill. ‘I despair.’

‘Despair does not appear on the agenda of this Cabinet, my lord,’ Churchill growled. ‘Why, there is opportunity in such chaos!’

‘Then it eludes me, Prime Minister,’ Halifax responded calmly. ‘Opportunity for what?’

‘For counterattack! To mobilize our forces and take advantage of their tired and overstretched panzers before they can recover. I remember the twenty-first of March 1918. All experience shows that after five or six days they must halt for supplies – I learnt this from the lips of Marshal Foch himself. Look, look!’ His finger stabbed at the enemy salient protruding into France. ‘Once more they have exposed their neck like a wretch stretched out on a guillotine. So let us grab the moment to cut it off!’

‘This time, I fear, the French are fighting with a decidedly blunt axe.’

‘Then what do you propose as an alternative?’ Churchill all but spat, his frustration bubbling over.

‘Prime Minister, I have neither your abilities nor experience in the military field. I leave the art of fighting to you and the late marshal.’ His artificial hand moved awkwardly across the papers set out before him on the table. ‘But I am a diplomat. That is a different game and perhaps we might play it with rather better fortune.’ He looked around the room, bringing the other Ministers and military men into the discussion. ‘At this point the impetus appears to be with Herr Hitler, but he is isolated, alone. If we can prevent other nations from siding with him we can perhaps help stem his progress. We all know that Italy is threatening to come into the war on his side. That would be a disaster which would threaten our Mediterranean possessions and make the situation of the French impossible. I suggest, with all the powers of persuasion I command’ – they all noted the implicit words of warning – ‘that the Prime Minister write immediately to Signor Mussolini and make it clear to him that we bear Italy no ill will, that the dialogue between us remains open, and that if the Italians have any cause for grievance with us it can be settled without turning the Mediterranean red with each other’s blood.’

‘Ah, play the Roman card,’ Attlee muttered.

‘You think it a sensible suggestion, Lord Privy Seal?’ Churchill enquired.

‘I do,’ Attlee replied. ‘Nothing to be lost from it.’

‘But what if he says he wants Gibraltar, or Malta, as prizes for his co-operation?’ Which he would, damn him, like any jackal.

‘Better that such issues be resolved across the table than across a battlefield,’ Halifax insisted.

Churchill stared at him; Halifax stared straight back. He had given his advice ‘with all the powers of persuasion I command’. In the muted language of Halifax’s world, the Foreign Secretary was announcing that he would not tolerate rejection. And Churchill could not withstand rebellion. He had no choice. Anyway, it was only a bloody letter.

‘An excellent idea,’ Churchill announced. ‘You have a draft for my consideration, Foreign Secretary?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then it shall be done.’

Halifax nodded his gratitude. For a moment he tried to convince himself that perhaps it would work after all, this ill-conceived administration led by the charging bull that was Churchill, with himself to guard the gate of the corral. And suddenly Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, was speaking. A fragile man, in Halifax’s view, and his predecessor as Foreign Secretary until he had fallen out with Chamberlain over appeasement and flounced out of the Cabinet. Now they were all back together around the Cabinet table, as uneasy as ever. Halifax sat back as Eden reported on his attempts to raise an army of local volunteers to defend the homeland.

‘From all corners they have come forward,’ he said in his precise, over-trimmed voice. ‘In every town and every village, bands of determined men are gathering together for duties on the home front, arming themselves with shotguns, sporting rifles, clubs and spears …’

Dear God, thought Halifax, is this what it has come to? The greatest empire in the world defended with clubs and spears? And by fools?

He looked around the table, from man to man, from failed politicians to failing military commanders, and knew he had been wrong. This ill-conceived and misconstructed machine could not be made to work. It was written on all their brows. Britain had already lost the war.

Don was confused. The BBC announcer had told them that Allied forces were counterattacking all along the front. Germans were being repelled at the Sedan salient, he claimed defiantly. So why were the 6th moving back once more?

A few hours earlier there had been a trickle of refugees on the road in front of them, but now it had swelled to a stream that meandered as far as his eye could see, like a tangle of fishing net caught at the edge of the surf. It slowed the 6th’s progress to a crawl. The radiators that had frozen throughout winter began to overheat, and just after noon the convoy pulled into a farmyard for water and a little rest. Don hadn’t slept in thirty hours.

They were only miles from the border, almost back where they had started. Bizarrely, as they drew into the farmyard, they found a huge tent festooned with coloured banners in the neighbouring field. The circus was in town. Around the tent, the people of the circus were practising their arts, balancing on tightropes, juggling, tumbling, even washing down an elephant.

‘What am I to do?’ the circus owner explained. He was short, like a Toby jug, sad, with a huge moustache. ‘I have three elephants, several lions, my wife’s mother and eighteen other relatives. Where could we possibly go?’

No one else had an answer, either. As they rested, Don noticed a young girl, the owner’s daughter, riding around a makeshift ring balancing on the backs of two white horses. She waved. He waved back. The show must go on.

And so did the 6th, more slowly than ever as they approached the border. A mile beyond the farmhouse they had to manoeuvre around two British Matilda tanks that had broken down. Don had heard there was a lot of that. He’d heard many things about the BEF – that equipment was in short supply, badly packed and often sent to the wrong units; that the tanks had no wireless sets, that they were no match for the German panzers; that the twenty-five-pounders had arrived in France untested and unfired; that … well, there came a point when you didn’t want to hear any more.

He didn’t hear the Luftwaffe, either. He was aching from lack of sleep and the constant grinding of low gears had left his ears ringing. Up ahead he could see that the column had come to a complete halt. Civilians were looking up into the sky and pointing; a few soldiers began firing their rifles. Then, from behind, came the dull crump of explosions, and suddenly the refugees were on the move again, scattering to the sides of the road and throwing themselves behind every available tree and piece of cover. When he saw tracer fire ripping the trees to shreds, Don decided to join them, head down in a ditch.

And so the 6th survived their first encounter with hostile fire. Little damage was done on that occasion; most of the attention of the Luftwaffe appeared to be back down the road, from where Don could see a column of smoke rising, the only mark upon a cloudless sky. The circus tent must have seemed like a military bivouac from the air.

As Don and the others began to emerge from their hiding places, they became aware of the sounds of a commotion. Screams. Shouts of dismay. Hooves clattering on the metalled road. Drawing ever nearer. Suddenly two white horses, their eyes red with fear, flew past. They were dragging something behind them, tangled in the reins, bouncing off the tarmac.

Don ducked behind a tree and was sick.

In Joe Kennedy’s view, it had been a splendid evening. Dinner at the Italian embassy, theatre, a new flirtation, then back to Beaverbrook’s for a drink. Beaverbrook’s door just along from the Ritz Hotel was always open and awash with good company and gossip. The two men were excellent companions and Kennedy was a frequent house guest at Beaverbrook’s country home at Cherkley, where he had fallen into the most pleasurable habit of sleeping with one of Beaverbrook’s research assistants. All in the line of business, of course; she would whisper in his ear all through the night, then write him a weekly letter full of her own endearments and the press man’s private news. Keeping abreast, as the ambassador put it.