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Erik could have cried with frustration, and with the pain in his arms, which was beginning to afflict his legs, too.
They put the body in the barn, and saw that there were already a dozen dead young men there.
This was worse than anything he had envisaged. When he had thought about battle he had foreseen courage in the face of danger, stoicism in suffering, heroism in adversity. What he saw now was agony, screaming, blind terror, broken bodies, and a complete lack of faith in the wisdom of the mission.
They went back again to the river.
The sun was low in the sky now, and something had changed on the battlefield. The French defenders in Donchery were being shelled from the far side of the river. Erik guessed that farther upstream the First Panzers had had better luck, and had secured a bridgehead on the south bank, and now they were coming to the aid of the comrades on their flanks. Clearly they had not lost their ammunition in the forest.
Heartened, Erik and Hermann rescued another wounded man. When they got back to the dressing station this time they were given tin bowls of a tasty soup. Resting for ten minutes while he drank the soup made Erik want to lie down and go to sleep for the night. It took a mighty effort to stand up and pick up his end of the stretcher and jog back to the battlefield.
Now they saw a different scene. Tanks were crossing the river on rafts. The Germans on the far side were coming under heavy fire, but they were shooting back, with the help of reinforcements from the First Panzers.
Erik saw that his side had a chance of winning their objective after all. He was heartened, and he began to feel ashamed that he had doubted the Fuhrer.
He and Hermann kept on retrieving the wounded, hour after hour, until they forgot what it was like to be free from pain in their arms and legs. Some of their charges were unconscious; some thanked them, some cursed them; many just screamed; some lived and some died.
By eight o'clock that evening there was a German bridgehead on the far side of the river, and by ten it was secure.
The fighting came to an end at nightfall. Erik and Hermann continued to sweep the battlefield for wounded men. They brought back the last one at midnight. Then they lay down under a tree and fell into a sleep of utter exhaustion.
Next day Erik and Hermann and the rest of the Second Panzers turned west and broke through what remained of the French defenses.
Two days later they were fifty miles away, at the river Oise, and moving fast through undefended territory.
By May 20, a week after emerging unexpectedly from the Ardennes forest, they had reached the coast of the English Channel.
Major Weiss explained their achievement to Erik and Hermann. "Our attack on Belgium was a feint, you see. Its purpose was to draw the French and British into a trap. We Panzer divisions formed the jaws of the trap, and now we have them between our teeth. Much of the French army and nearly all of the British Expeditionary Force are in Belgium, encircled by the German army. They are cut off from supplies and reinforcements, helpless--and defeated."
Erik said triumphantly: "This was the Fuhrer's plan all along!"
"Yes," said Weiss, and as ever Erik could not tell whether he was sincere. "No one thinks like the Fuhrer!"
ii
Lloyd Williams was in a football stadium somewhere between Calais and Paris. With him were another thousand or more British prisoners of war. They had no shelter from the blazing June sun, but they were grateful for the warm nights as they had no blankets. There were no toilets and no water for washing.
Lloyd was digging a hole with his hands. He had organized some of the Welsh miners to make latrines at one end of the soccer pitch, and he was working alongside them to show he was willing. Other men joined in, having nothing else to do, and soon there were a hundred or so helping. When a guard strolled over to see what was going on, Lloyd explained.
"You speak good German," said the guard amiably. "What's your name?"
"Lloyd."
"I'm Dieter."
Lloyd decided to exploit this small expression of friendliness. "We could dig faster if we had tools."
"What's the hurry?"
"Better hygiene would benefit you as well as us."
Dieter shrugged and went away.
Lloyd felt awkwardly unheroic. He had seen no fighting. The Welsh Rifles had gone to France as reserves, to relieve other units in what was expected to be a long battle. But it had taken the Germans only ten days to defeat the bulk of the Allied army. Many of the defeated British troops had then been evacuated from Calais and Dunkirk, but thousands had missed the boat, and Lloyd was among them.
Presumably the Germans were now pushing south. As far as he knew, the French were still fighting, but their best troops had been annihilated in Belgium, and there was a triumphant look about the German guards, as if they knew victory was assured.
Lloyd was a prisoner of war, but how long would he remain so? At this point there must be powerful pressure on the British government to make peace. Churchill would never do so, but he was a maverick, different from all other politicians, and he could be deposed. Men such as Lord Halifax would have little difficulty signing a peace treaty with the Nazis. The same was true, Lloyd thought bitterly, of the junior Foreign Office minister Earl Fitzherbert, whom he now shamefully knew to be his father.
