Dunkirk Page 8

  The winter of 1939 was particularly cold, and soldiers’ living conditions were poor. Finding their barn overrun by rats, men of the Royal Corps of Signals built raised beds out of materials they had to hand – wood and telephone cables. Colin Ashford remembers washing and shaving in a freezing algae-filled pond as cattle drank from it. Percy Beaton of the Royal Engineers had to clean up a billet that French soldiers had been using. ‘There was excreta all over the place,’ he says. ‘The French had obviously wiped their backsides with their hands and wiped it down the wall.’

  And once British soldiers started to wear battledress, replacing the more formal service dress worn previously, their overall discipline declined. Battledress had no buttons to shine, and although boots still needed polishing, and cotton webbing still required blanco, soldiers were no longer, says John Williams, ‘the smart, button shining people we’d been the month before’.

  For some it was difficult even to look presentable. ‘My battledress was very dodgy,’ says Royal Engineer Fred Carter. In the quartermaster’s stores he had been issued with a uniform several sizes too big, and he tried to make all the necessary alterations himself. He was, unfortunately, not much of a tailor.

  Battledress consisted of a greenish-brown jacket and trousers in wool serge, worn by officers and men alike (although officers wore it open-necked with a tie). At this early stage of the war, it bore very few distinguishing marks or insignia. Officially, the only insignia allowed were slip-on titles on the shoulder (with a regiment’s name in black letters on khaki cloth), a plain fabric rank badge, and a plain fabric trade badge. Reflecting their elite status, Guards regiments were allowed to wear coloured shoulder titles. Helmets, meanwhile, could be worn with or without hessian camouflage covers.

  Such standardisation of uniform was intended to offer as few clues as possible to a curious enemy. (The only evidence of personal identity were the green and red identity tags worn round the neck, bearing the soldier’s name, number and religion.) This being the army, however, the rules were quickly tested. Some regiments continued to wear old-style metal shoulder titles, others wore coloured shoulder titles, and others still wore sleeve ‘flashes’ in different patterns and colours. So while the majority of British soldiers at Dunkirk would have looked uniformly spartan (particularly when wearing the plain, heavy greatcoat), there would have been plenty of exceptions.

  One exception was the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, the only British Expeditionary Force regiment to wear the kilt in France – despite being officially forbidden to do so. The tartan was known as Cameron of Erracht, although it would often have been obscured by ‘kilt aprons’. These were plain kilt covers, tied round the waist. With their prominent frontal pouches, they gave the wearer the air of a khaki kangaroo.

  Army food was rarely savoured. There was no Army Catering Corps until 1941, and according to George Wagner, the thickest bloke was usually picked to do the cooking. Wagner’s company cook, known as ‘Mad Jack’, was known for his indigestible curry. ‘Anybody who volunteered could become a cook,’ says Norman Prior of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who has memories of the unenthusiastic volunteers dolloping out lumps of Maconochies stew – that unloved, tinned staple of the last war.

  An alternative existed. British soldiers, raised on plain diets, were now in a country where food was savoured and celebrated, and where unusual animals were eaten with rich sauces. But, according to James Lansdale Hodson, the British were mostly unwilling to try anything new: ‘Some . . . who have the opportunity of having a lunch such as soup, sardines, veal and coffee, much prefer egg and chips. They don’t like omelettes much . . . It’s fried eggs the soldiers want, not scrambled eggs.’

  Scottish NCO Alexander Frederick paid five francs each evening for the same meal – a plate of egg and chips, a bowl of café au lait and a chunk of bread. Spending most of his spare time in a Normandy café run by a widow, John Williams had only one complaint: she could not fry an egg. ‘So I went into the kitchen one day and asked whether I could show her.’

  Not everybody conformed to the stereotype. Colin Ashford enjoyed trying new foods in Lille; the local cakes, he says, were far better than anything he ate at home. And he tried horsemeat and chips. ‘It was all right . . .’

  There were unfamiliar drinks on offer too. Estaminets were cafés serving alcohol where some men learned to drink wine and lager, while others settled for their usual dark beer. It was almost effeminate to drink light ale or lager, remembers John Williams. ‘Nowadays, I see Marks and Spencer full of wines and it makes me laugh when I think of the days when wine was something rather strange that the French liked.’

  And while Williams claims that British soldiers never caused any trouble, sometimes, of course, they did. In December 1939, a twenty-three-year-old military policeman, Lance Corporal Rowson Goulding, was charged with murder following a fight in an estaminet. A study of the court-martial transcript reveals some undisputed facts. Goulding and four colleagues were drinking together in the Café de la Mairie in Drocourt when they became involved in a brawl with locals. Chairs and bottles were thrown, and minutes later shots were fired in the street, and a local man, Fernand Bince, was killed.

  French witnesses to the brawl claimed that the soldiers were very drunk. They had started pouring their own drinks, breaking glasses, and taking cigars from behind the counter. When asked to pay, said the French, the soldiers resisted and started a fight. They were all eventually thrown out of the estaminet, but not before some of the locals – including Fernand Bince – had been injured.

  The soldiers, on the other hand, denied being drunk. They claimed that one of their colleagues had been injured in an unprovoked attack by a local man – which had led to the brawl. They said that they had helped to carry their injured colleague outside, and that Goulding had been particularly angry about the incident.

  Whichever version – if either – is accurate, it seems that Goulding then hurried back to his billet and seized a revolver from a colleague before returning to the café. Bince may too have fetched a gun before also returning to the café. There were no witnesses to subsequent events – but several shots were heard, and Goulding was seen dragging Bince down the street by the ankles. Bince died shortly afterwards in a British casualty clearing station. He had been shot once in the chest.

  The court martial found Goulding guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. But two letters in mitigation sit on the court file. The first was dictated by Bince’s mother and translated into English. She expresses the greatest sympathy for Goulding, and begs the authorities to show him mercy. ‘I would not have his mother weeping for her son as I do for mine.’

  The second letter, from the local mayor, also urges a reprieve. In touchingly flawed English, he writes: ‘It certainly is not because a man has committed a grave fault that we shall cease to love the British Army. In taking into consideration my request, you will foster further the love and, this is why, with my respect, I would ask you to be as clement as possible for this poor Corporal.’

  In the event, Goulding was reprieved. His sentence was commuted to life in prison. And these letters reveal a period when the French could forgive the British a great deal. As George Wagner says, ‘They used to look on us as though we were saviours.’

  But this attitude was not universal. When subaltern Anthony Irwin offered to mend a farmer’s roof after a piece of ack-ack shell had fallen through, he was rewarded for his thoughtfulness with a hysterical tirade from the farmer’s wife. Blaming the war on the British, she threw a pewter mug at Irwin’s head.

  The same officer was left in little doubt about French attitudes towards Germans. Billeted with a wine merchant and his family near Lille, one of the man’s daughters, a woman of about thirty, angrily described her experiences in the last war when two German officers had been billeted with them. Whenever the Germans were dissatisfied with their food or wine, they would grab her, force her to sit inside the washing boiler, and threaten to burn her until they re
ceived something better. She endured this treatment for two years. John Williams, meanwhile, found himself billeted with two elderly sisters who ran a post office. They too had housed a German officer during the last war, a man who would regularly get drunk and vomit on the stairs. When one of the sisters had called him a drunken pig, she had been hauled in front of the commandant and imprisoned for several weeks. Her sister, she said, had come to the jail every day and dropped bread through the bars.

  Yet for all the stories of German brutality, some of the current British troops could behave atrociously – not least of all those in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps. In December 1939, the British adjutant general noted that the pioneers’ behaviour was causing a deterioration in British relations with the French. The unit’s men were old (with an average age of almost fifty), they lacked discipline (they had more courts martial than any other unit in France), they were often led by second-rate officers, and they worked as untrained labourers.

  Percy Beaton, a Royal Engineer who worked alongside a company of pioneers, was both protected and intimidated by them. ‘They looked on us as young and inexperienced soldiers,’ he says, ‘and they used to father us.’ But he was extremely careful not to cross them after witnessing their treatment of an unpopular sergeant who was bundled out of an estaminet and dragged face down along a cobbled street. Afterwards, says Beaton, you couldn’t recognise him. ‘Only two slits and a little bit of mouth.’

  Months later, during the latter stages of the retreat, John Williams halted a pioneer company as it hurried towards the coast; it was fleeing when it should have been fighting, and he said as much to the sergeant major running at its head. Unsurprisingly, the sergeant major disagreed. ‘We’re bloody well getting out of here!’ he said.

  ‘You should be bloody ashamed of yourself!’ said Williams. ‘You’re a sergeant major in the British army and you’re talking about getting out in the presence of all these men?’

  Several pioneers aimed their rifles at Williams; they threatened to shoot him. Shaking with fear, he raised his own rifle. ‘The first one who shoots, you won’t stop me firing this! Now which one of you wants to die?’

  Slowly, the pioneers backed down, and they took part in the defence.

  A while later, Williams saw the sergeant major lying on a stretcher, with half a buttock missing. ‘You said you were bloody well getting out of it, Sergeant Major?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m glad to see you are getting out of it!’

  Yet for all the problems they would face in the future, a theme can be deduced from soldiers’ accounts of the phoney war: it was a kind of holiday. ‘We didn’t think there was a war on,’ says Williams.

  British Expeditionary Force disciplinary records reveal very low rates of desertion throughout the period. In fact, after a warning was issued that troublemakers would be sent home to England, the behaviour of the Middlesex Regiment improved suddenly and noticeably.

  For Anthony Rhodes, an officer with 253 Field Company of the Royal Engineers, an understated individual, the phoney war was ‘amusing and interesting’. But he remembers a medical officer, an older man used to working hard in civilian life, for whom the period came as a great relief. It simplified the man’s life, which now consisted mainly of ‘eating, drinking, and what he called the carnal verities’.

  Jimmy Langley remembers his platoon’s delight, one Friday afternoon, on receiving their pay before the other platoons. Minutes later he was approached by his colonel, who expressed surprise at having seen No. 3 Company on a cross-country run. Langley stayed quiet, because what the colonel had actually seen was the company – with Langley’s platoon in the lead – running to the nearest brothel. It was a race that nobody wanted to lose.

  David Elliott, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, remembers Rue ABC in Lille as a narrow cobbled street with brothels lining both sides. The doorways were cut in half like barn doors, with the lower half closed. Venturing inside one such establishment, Elliott found a dance hall and bar, where girls in G-strings drank with soldiers before taking them upstairs. ‘It was a revelation to me,’ says David, ‘and to see two women together! Because even though I was nearly twenty-one, I don’t think I’d ever heard the word lesbianism . . .’

  ‘Human nature being what it is, you just couldn’t help yourself really,’ says Royal Artillery gunner William Harding. He gave ten francs to a woman at the bottom of the stairs (twice the cost of a plate of egg and chips) and found the experience disappointing. ‘The human touch wasn’t there.

  ‘I don’t want to sound vulgar or anything,’ Harding adds, ‘but what the girls used to do before you went in, they’d come out of a room, and with a bit of a rag, she’d open her legs and wipe herself out. And she’d throw the rag down amongst the blokes waiting to go up. And there’d be a scramble for that piece of rag.’

  There were clearly good reasons for staying away from brothels. Above all, there was the danger of venereal disease. Alexander Frederick had been warned by his father and other veterans of the last war to be careful about ‘using the facilities’. But when a medical officer showed him a series of pictures of infected male genitals, his enthusiasm for the facilities seemed to vanish completely.

  An unlikely hero in the fight against venereal disease was Major General Montgomery, who issued a controversial memorandum. ‘If a man wants to have a woman, let him do so by all means,’ wrote Monty, ‘but he must use his common sense, and take the necessary precautions against infection – otherwise he becomes a casualty by his own neglect, and this is helping the enemy.’ It was the army’s job, Monty felt, to help soldiers remain disease free – by making condoms available for purchase, by providing ‘prophylactic rooms’ where men could clean themselves after an encounter, and by teaching soldiers enough French to buy condoms from a chemist and to ask directions to a licensed brothel. His memorandum was described as obscene by II Corps commander, Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, but significantly it was not withdrawn. ‘I received from [Brooke] a proper backhander,’ Monty later wrote, but ‘it achieved what I wanted, since the venereal disease ended.’

  For all the sexual activity tolerated – and tacitly encouraged – in France, there were plenty of young men shocked by such things. Before the war, Colin Ashford had studied Fine Art and graphic design at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art; he was now a private in the Highland Light Infantry, surrounded by people who swore incessantly, and whose only interests were drinking and sex. ‘I never realised,’ he says, ‘that there were so many men with such low intelligence. I remember one sergeant major, and when you spoke to him, you could almost see him thinking.’ Ashford and a few like-minded friends started using long words to befuddle the sergeant major. ‘He ought to go around with a wreath of flowers on his head,’ said a friend, ‘to let people know his brains are dead.’

  And beyond the fleeting sexual encounters, steady relationships and innocent flirtations took place. Percy Beaton ‘walked out’ for a while with a French girl who was chaperoned wherever she went. William Harding fell for a girl from Nantes ‘hook, line and sinker’, but the relationship seemed over after his battalion was moved without warning. Days later, Harding was told that he had a visitor. Excited, he expected it to be the girl, and hurried along to meet her. But he received a surprise. ‘It was her mum!’ he says. ‘She slung her arms round me and made such a fuss of me with tears running down her face.’ She berated Harding for going away suddenly, and told him how much her daughter was missing him. As the scene played out, Harding’s colleagues watched with glee. ‘I had a terrible time from the chaps,’ he says. ‘They were saying that I was getting in bed between the mother and daughter. Oh, the terrible things they were coming out with!’

  While the phoney war offered unexpected opportunities to British soldiers, it also had a symbolic resonance. These young men were living in, and later advancing and retreating through, areas where the last generation had fought and died. ‘My father was severely wounded with shrapnel,’ says Colin Ashford, ‘and I
was back in the same part of France.’ He remembers seeing the old trench lines, and visiting British, French and German cemeteries. And just as visitors today are affected by the architecture and size of the cemeteries, so Ashford and his friends were surprised and moved. The difference of course, is that today’s visitors do not fear a similar fate.

  As Ted Oates moved through Belgium, he passed the Menin Gate, engraved with names of the Great War dead, and nearby he spotted an ice cream cart. He was on a recce with his quartermaster sergeant, Sergeant Richardson, a veteran of that war, and they decided that they would pick up an ice cream on their way back. But when they returned, the cart was gone; a German raid had frightened it away. Sergeant Richardson would never return to England; his name is engraved on the Dunkirk memorial, a soldier with no known grave.

  Soldiers were not the only servicemen in France, of course. The Royal Air Force, that happy amalgam of army and navy spared the discipline or rigidity of either, was also there. Four squadrons of Hurricane fighters, superb aerial gun platforms, were sent out in support. Roland Beamont was posted, with 87 Squadron, to Lille. The squadron’s activity, he says, consisted of ‘endless patrols looking for enemy reconnaissance, but we very, very seldom saw them’.

  An Advanced Air Striking Force was also created and placed under French command. It consisted of two further Hurricane squadrons and eleven squadrons of medium and light bombers, and it saw rather more action. Billy Drake, flying a Hurricane with 1 Squadron, suddenly found a Messerschmitt Bf 109 coming at him. Despite it being his first encounter with the enemy, he managed to turn the tables; he was soon chasing the 109 as it raced away: