The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ the following day in a message to Nicholson from Anthony Eden, which arrived at 2 p.m., stating ‘Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolising our continued co-operation with France. The eyes of the empire are upon the defence of Calais and HM Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.’

      That day saw the launching of the evacuation plan, Operation Dynamo. There would be no further reference to Allied solidarity, and the signal drafted in London that night by Churchill, Anthony Eden and the Chief of the General Staff, Edmund Ironside, was stark. It read: ‘Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.’

      Nicholson needed no exhortations to keep fighting. That morning, the attackers broke into Calais-St-Pierre and at 8 a.m. the swastika was flying from the Hôtel de Ville. Three hours later, the Germans sent the town mayor, André Gershell, to Nicholson at his headquarters in the Citadel to demand his surrender. His reply was that ‘If the Germans want Calais they will have to fight for it.’18 A German officer led a second deputation in the afternoon, which was similarly rebuffed.

      Neave spent the night of the 24/25th recovering from his operation in a ward in the cellars of the Hôpital Militaire. In the next bed lay a young Hurricane pilot who knew he was dying. He ‘could still speak and begged me to keep talking to him’.19 As it grew light, ‘his body shuddered and his mouth fell open. The orderly saluted and, for a few minutes, the ward was very quiet.’ He passed the rest of the day there, with the sounds of the fight piercing the thick walls and the occasional shell bursting in the vicinity, one of which showered his bed with broken glass. Outside, the defenders were being forced back street by street. Much of the town was choked with smoke and fire. In the early evening, the town was shaken by a prolonged artillery bombardment. Above the crackle of burning houses, Neave heard the ‘groans and cries’ of the wounded as they were brought down to the cellars.

      At 9.30 in the morning, Stuka dive-bombers descended on the town, and an hour later enemy troops began crossing the bridges to Calais-Nord. The bombs shook the hospital and in the basement ‘the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering.’ Just before 10 a.m., a bomb landed in front of the hospital, blowing in the main doors. Fear seized Neave. He was ‘terrified that with the next direct hit the wounded would be buried alive’. When the Stukas finally departed, he left his bed and found he could walk unaided. He decided to head for the Gare Maritime and find transport. He fixed on the hope that ‘it might still be possible to evacuate the wounded by sea. Anything was better for them than entombment in the ruins of the Hôpital Militaire.’20 He seems to have discussed the idea with an unnamed fellow patient, a corporal who volunteered to go with him. Dressed in what he could find – shirt, battledress trousers and steel helmet – he left the shelter. The hospital garden was a shambles of uprooted trees, with shattered masonry and glass lying around the graves dug for five riflemen who had died of their wounds in the cellar. The French military doctor commanding the hospital listened to his plan with amazement, telling him, ‘You are crazy, mon lieutenant. You do not know what is happening in the town.’ Neave repeated that the men would only be taken prisoner if they remained and insisted on his belief that it was still possible to get hospital ships in the harbour. ‘You are absolutely determined to sacrifice your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘I was not interested in anything of the kind,’ Neave recalled. ‘I was irrationally confident that I could get through.’

      The two injured men picked their way through the shattered and burning streets, Neave doubled up from the wound in his side and his companion limping. Calais-Nord was deserted after the dive-bombing, but as they passed the old fisherman’s quarter called the Courgain which abuts the Gare Maritime, ‘without warning, shells whistled and burst near us … The corporal vanished in the blinding flash and dust.’ Neave fell to the ground unhurt and crawled to the side of the street where, miraculously, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac from a cellar window.21 He drank from it and staggered on until he reached the Pont Vétillard swing bridge which led to the Gare Maritime, where he could see British troops of the QVR in front of the station.

      His ‘apparition caused a sensation’. However, the reception he got was cold. The rumours of spies and German agents were now treated as established fact and his identity card was inspected several times. His demand that transport should be sent to collect the wounded from the hospital cellar ‘was thought to be peculiar. Obviously I was either a fifth columnist or delirious.’ Neave’s pleas were ignored and he was packed off to another cellar, beneath the Gare Maritime, to join rows of wounded. The stay was short. The area came under intense mortar fire and he was soon moved to a tunnel under Bastion 1 of the enceinte, which had been transformed into a regimental aid post.

      At 4 p.m. the Citadel where Nicholson made his final stand fell. Shortly before, the Rifle Brigade fought their last gallant action around the Gare Maritime, with some units fighting literally to the last round. Lying on his cot, Neave heard ‘the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung on the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came field-grey figures waving revolvers.’22 His war as a fighting soldier was over. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots, fired at a spotter plane.

      3

       ‘In the Bag’

      The adrenaline that had carried Neave through his ‘suicidal’ stagger to the docks soon dissolved. His injury was serious and he had no choice but to accept defeat. He lay on his stretcher in the pungent gloom of the cellar ward, listening to the groans of his comrades, depressed, and fearful of what might happen next. In the morning, the Germans moved them to a makeshift field hospital in the Calais-St-Pierre covered market.1 There was nothing to do but brood and endlessly go over the details of the battle. The siege of Calais had taught many brutal lessons. Neave’s schooldays and TA experiences had made him sceptical of authority and disinclined to give those who wielded it unquestioning respect. The debacle could only reinforce that attitude. The heartache felt by Churchill and Eden over the decision to sacrifice the garrison was genuine. Nonetheless, their grasp of the situation had been tenuous and their reactions clumsy and slow.

      Neave looked and sounded like an Establishment stalwart, but his judgements were often robust when he delivered his verdict on events. ‘Churchill was often wrong about Calais,’ he wrote years later,2 citing as an example an intemperate memo the prime minister sent to his military assistant, General Ismay, on 24 May complaining of what he saw as the lack of enterprise in the defenders and the BEF in breaking the German siege. Churchill in time admitted the injustice of his remarks, but for Neave it was evidence of ‘the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall’.3 If anything, the performance of the army chiefs had been worse. Calais was a ‘melancholy story of … hesitation and bad staff work’, exemplified by the shambles of departure. The manner in which the QVR had been rushed to war was ‘shameful’. Their embarkation recalled the black comedy that suffused the adventures of Evelyn Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback ‘in which farce and tragedy are intimately combined’. The same went for the tank units, whose ‘orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.’

      On the other hand, among those fighting on the ground there were more than enough examples of bravery and devotion to duty, carried out in a spirit СКАЧАТЬ