The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop
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stretched for eight miles. He had no artillery and a depleted tank force. Yet morale among the troops was good and had improved further as word spread that they would soon be on their way back across the Channel. At dawn, the first blows of the German assault fell on the QVR, holding forward positions on the south and south-west of the town. They were forced to fall back to the enceinte, which by midday had become the main defensive line.
During the morning, Neave was ordered to move his men from the eastern ramparts and wait in the sand dunes half a mile to the north, where hundreds of non-combatant troops were sheltered. It was an unsettling time. They were in the battle but not of it. ‘Calais had become a city of doom and I was not in the least anxious to remain,’ he wrote candidly afterwards.13 He was tired and nervous. For something to do, he walked down to the Gare Maritime, where the railway met the port, in time to see one of the transport ships leaving harbour. The scene stayed with him. There were twenty dead bodies on the platform, victims of the night’s shelling, and ‘the sad corpses, covered in grey blankets, had begun to stink.’ It was a clear day and he could see the white cliffs of Dover, so near but yet so far. Throughout the afternoon, German infantry, supported by tanks, attacked on all three sides of the perimeter, while shells rained down on the harbour area. The defenders fought with a ferocity that won the Germans’ reluctant admiration. By the early evening, they had only managed to break into the southern side of the town in a few places, at a cost of heavy losses of equipment, men and tanks.
In the early afternoon, Neave got his chance to join the fray. Green Jacket officers called for volunteers from the crowd of unemployed soldiers sitting among the dunes. He rounded up fifty from the Searchlights and they formed up at the Gare Maritime, before heading south along the dock road to get their orders at the Hôtel de Ville. It was a proud moment for men designated ‘non-fighting soldiers’. Marching off under the gaze of the Green Jackets, ‘not a man faltered. It would never have done to be seen to be afraid even though the shells were coming in fast over the harbour.’14 In the shadow of the gigantic clock tower of the Hôtel de Ville, Neave was told that he and his men were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th Rifles, who were holding a position by the western ramparts of the enceinte, which was under heavy attack from tanks and troops pushing in along the Route de Boulogne. They were led there by a staff officer through the deserted shopping streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which ran east–west across the centre of Calais-St-Pierre. The enemy tanks and machine guns had a clear field of fire down the boulevard, so Neave’s group moved west in the hot afternoon sun along a narrow parallel street. At some point it seems they could get no closer, and Neave led his men into a side street and left them in a doorway while he ‘moved gingerly into the boulevard itself’.
Ahead lay the Pont Jourdan, which crossed a railway line coming in from the south. It was held by the 60th and it was there he would have to go to get his next orders. It was the greatest test of his courage that he had faced until now and he was not sure how he would fare. ‘A steady hail of tracer bullets and some tank shells came flying over the hump of the … railway bridge,’ he wrote later. ‘They bounced off the paving stones in all directions as I clung for life to the walls of houses on the south side of the boulevard and crept towards the bridge. This was my first experience of street fighting and I was acutely frightened. It was difficult to understand how others could remain so collected under fire. Throughout the battle, the noise was so great that if you were more than ten yards away it was impossible to understand what was said to you.’15
Eventually, he reached the cover of the railway embankment that ran either side of the bridge, where he found Major Poole, the ‘B’ Company commander. Poole was a veteran of the last war, had been wounded, taken prisoner and escaped. Despite his great experience, Neave heard the anxiety in his voice. ‘I am afraid they may break through,’ he told him. ‘Get your people in the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. You must fight like bloody hell.’
This account comes from Neave’s book The Flames of Calais, which appeared in 1972. It intersperses his personal story, told with much detail and verbatim dialogue like the above, with the full story of the episode at every level, from decision-making in London and Guderian’s headquarters to platoon actions. The broader narrative is well supported by official documentation and participants’ accounts. But it is worth asking how accurate was his recollection of his own part in the story, thirty-two years after the event. There is no mention that he was working from a diary or semi-contemporaneous notes. Nonetheless, his account has the ring of authenticity. The recollections of combatants who were taken prisoner often have a fine-grained quality and an immediacy that is not so often present in other post-factum testimony. When removed from the battlefield and plunged into the tedium of captivity, he had plenty of time to obsess over events while the memory was still fresh. If the temptation for self-justifying adjustments to the narrative was strong, Neave appears to have resisted it. At no point in the story does he attempt to present himself as anything other than a tiny actor in the great events, often confused, frightened and ineffective, but always desperately concerned to do the right thing.
The right thing now was to obey Major Poole’s instruction and fight like hell. He returned to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, with bullets ricocheting around him, and found his men, now joined by two sergeants, crouched in the shelter of an ivy-covered wall. They were armed with only two Brens and some rifles. He ordered the sergeants to take up positions in the windows of the first floor of houses on either side of the street, from where they could fire on the German positions half a mile away on the Route de Boulogne. There followed a surreal episode of the sort that occurs with surprising frequency in the middle of battles. A door opened and a group of civilians scuttled past carrying the corpse of an old woman. There were other civilians about. The patron of a café near the bridge, proudly wearing his Croix de Guerre, spurned the mortal danger he was in to remain open, handing out cognac to anyone within reach and exhorting the defenders with a defiant slogan from the last war: ‘On les aura!’ (We’ll have ’em!)
There was danger behind as well as in front. A single rifle shot behind was followed by a shout of ‘Fifth column!’ After the battle was over, there would be many stories of mysterious gunmen appearing out of nowhere, some in German uniform, sniping at the defenders. They would reinforce the impression growing among many of the British troops that the French made unreliable allies. ‘B’ Company were deployed ahead on the far side of the railway bridge around an improvised road-block and facing down the Route de Boulogne. The Searchlights Bren teams reached their first-floor positions, smashed the windows and began to lay down supporting fire. Their eagerness and inexperience soon brought shouts of protest from the 60th on the far side of the bridge. Crouched in a doorway, Neave ‘could hear hoarse shouts: “F---ing well look where you’re shooting!”’16
In a lull in the fighting, he dodged across the boulevard to the corner of the Rue Edgar Quinet, a side street next to the bridge. From here he could see that the company’s position was critical and the weight of enemy fire seemed certain to break the defenders soon if they did not drop back. The situation seemed to improve a little when, at 4 p.m., one of the British cruiser tanks arrived at the railway bridge and fired two or three rounds towards the attackers. The German response was furious: ‘Tank shells and machine-gun bullets came thick and fast for twenty minutes. Ricochets off the walls and flying glass made my situation in the Rue Edgar Quinet … rather exposed … It was now without a sign of life, save for a young girl’s white face at a cellar grating. The wall which sheltered me had ragged gaps where mortar bombs had flung bricks into the street. I began to look for a safer position.’
He could see nothing but clouds of smoke and dust, and the enemy felt horribly close. The Searchlight men were firing through the lace curtains, bravely but inexpertly, endangering defenders as much as attackers. One of the Brens began to fire fitfully, then jammed. He was acutely conscious of his lack of training and his impotence, able only to observe and offer encouragement. The sun beat down and the air throbbed with the heat from burning buildings. His thirst became unbearable. He had to get something to drink. He decided to make a dash for the café. He waited for a