For a few moments they stood there racking their brains in anxious silence; then the King returned, followed by two strangers. Both were obviously German. The one had the thin, shrewd face of a diplomat; the other looked curiously out of his element in the dark lounge-suit that he was wearing, and Gregory felt certain that he was a General. They both bowed formally to Erika and marched stiffly behind the King to a desk in one corner of the low room, at which he plumped himself down, exclaiming:
‘Well, give it to me.’
The German who looked like a diplomat unlocked a flat black satchel that he was carrying and took from it two sheets of paper. One was a handwritten letter; probably, Gregory thought, a personal assurance from Hitler that if Leopold asked for an Armistice Belgium would receive generous treatment. The other had only a few lines of typescript on it and looked like a formal and unconditional request for a cessation of hostilities.
The King read the letter through, unlocked a drawer in his desk, slipped the letter inside and relocked it. He then picked up the other paper and reached out his hand for his pen. Suddenly Erika started towards him:
‘Not yet,’ she gasped. ‘I beg you not to sign that paper yet.’
The German in the dark lounge-suit took a step forward as though about to lay a hand upon her, but Gregory placed himself between them and stood there scowling at him.
‘Sire,’ Erika hurried on, ‘if you once put your signature to that paper you will go down in history as a traitor and a coward. You mustn’t do it—you mustn’t! If you cannot face the obligations into which you have entered you must let others do so for you.’
Leopold turned to stare at her. His face looked old and haggard, but his mouth was now set in a hard, wilful line that his entourage knew well as marking the pig-headed moods to which he was often subject. For a moment he remained silent, then he spoke:
‘I know perfectly well what I’m doing. This is my business—my responsibility. You and your friend …’ The rest of his sentence was drowned in the roar of a bomb.
Erika had gone round behind the desk and was close beside the King. As the bomb crashed she had been fumbling in her handbag. Suddenly, her blue eyes blazing, she pulled out a small automatic and thrust it at him.
‘Here,’ she cried. ‘Rather than betray your Allies, it is better that you should blow out your brains; and if you haven’t the courage to do that I’ll do it for you.’
Gregory heard her words but he was still facing the Germans and had his back towards her. He never knew if she was actually threatening the King with the pistol. At that instant, out of the corner of his eye he saw the curtains move. The Black Baroness stepped through them and in her hand she, too, held a pistol.
Even as Gregory sprang forward it flashed twice. Erika screamed, stood swaying beside the King for a moment, then fell right across him.
Gregory swung round in an agony of fear. He was just in time to see her fail before the two Germans flung themselves upon him. He stalled one of them off with a glancing blow across the face; but the other closed with him and for a moment they struggled wildly. There was a trampling of heavy feet; the sound of the shots had alarmed the armed sentry on the door. Thrusting the Baroness aside he dashed into the room and, covering both Gregory and the German with his rifle, yelled at them to put up their hands. Flushed and cursing they relaxed their holds. Erika had lost consciousness and the King now stood with her limp form in his arms.
‘You’ve killed her! You’ve killed her!’ he screamed hysterically at the Baroness. ‘I’ll have you shot for this.’
She had slipped the automatic back into the pocket of a little silk coat that she was wearing and she curtsied as calmly as though Leopold had offered to take her in to dinner.
‘As it please Your Majesty,’ she said in her soft, musical voice, ‘but when I came into the room I saw Madame Rostedal threatening you with a pistol and I was under the impression that I had saved your life.’
‘That’s a lie—a lie!’ roared Gregory. ‘You shot her deliberately, because you knew that she was trying to persuade the King not to sign that accursed paper. But I’ll deal with you later. For God’s sake, somebody get a doctor!’
Ignoring the threat of the sentry’s rifle he strode across to Leopold. Almost snatching Erika from the King’s arms, he carried her over to a sofa, where he knelt down beside her to see if she was dead or only badly wounded. There were two little round holes in her breast that were oozing blood, and as he knelt there staring at them there came the drone of a fresh flight of German bombers. The King, now overwrought beyond endurance, yelled at the sentry:
‘Get out! Get out—and fetch a doctor!’ Then swinging on the Baroness. ‘You, too, get out, I say. Perhaps you meant to save my life—perhaps you didn’t—how do I know? But get out of this room—get out, all of you!’
The Baroness bobbed again and withdrew without any sign of hurry, while the sentry ran to get the King’s doctor; but the two Germans did not move. The one who looked like a diplomat pointed at the paper on the desk, and said: If you will sign that now, sir, we can take it with us.’
The building shook as a new stick of bombs rained down, this time on the village. Seizing a pen, the King scrawled his signature, flung the pen down and shouted above the din: There! Take it! And for God’s sake stop this ghastly bombing!’
‘At once, sir.’ The German bowed stiffly as he picked up the paper. ‘We can get a message through to our headquarters in about ten minutes.’ His companion also clicked his heels and bowed, then they both marched from the room.
The King took out his handkerchief, mopped his perspiring face and walked over to Gregory.
‘How is she?’ he muttered.
‘Not dead—thank God!’ Gregory murmured. ‘But I’m afraid for her—terribly afraid. Both bullets got her through the left lung and it’s on the knees of the gods as to whether she’ll live or die.’
A moment later the doctor came hurrying in. He made a swift examination and said: ‘We must get her to bed at once.’
‘That’s it,’ nodded Leopold. ‘That’s it; do everything you possibly can for her. I shall be leaving in half an hour; this place has too many awful memories for me to stay here a moment longer than I have to, but I wish you to remain. Don’t leave Madame Rostedal until she is out of danger or—or …’ he trailed off miserably.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Gregory said quickly. ‘But by your recent act you have altered the whole situation; the Germans are now the masters in this part of Belgium. The Baronne de Porte heard what Madame Rostedal said to you. That will be reported; if she lives the Germans will take her into custody and directly she is well enough they’ll execute her. If she can possibly be moved I must get her away before they arrive here; so if you’re leaving yourself I should be grateful if you would have a car and chauffeur left at my disposal.’
The doctor shook his head. ‘Even if she survives she won’t be fit to be moved for several weeks.’
‘Never mind!’ snapped Gregory. ‘That is the least that His Majesty can do for her.’
Leopold nodded. ‘Certainly. Doctor Hobenthal, please to give orders that my ambulance is to remain behind with you.’
Two servants were summoned. They fetched a tall, threefold screen, which they placed on the floor near the couch, then they laid Erika gently on it and using it as a makeshift stretcher carried her from the room. The doctor had gone ahead and Gregory brought up the rear of the little procession; just as he reached the curtain he turned. The King was now alone and they faced each other across the room as Gregory said:
‘I understand why you did what you have done, and I am not without sympathy for you. It was quite plain to all of us that in your hour of trial you were not great enough as a man to bear the strain that fell upon the King—but the world will not; understand; and for all the years that are left to you your name will be held in contempt by all decent people.’ Then with bowed shoulders he stumbled after the stretcher-bearers who carried the dear, still, white-faced figure that was more to him than his own life.
All through the night he sat by Erika’s bedside while a hospital nurse, who was now in attendance, waited at its foot and the doctor tiptoed in every hour or so to make a new estimate of the patient’s chances. She was out of her physical body and attached to it only by the slender, silver cord, the breaking of which means the difference between sleep and death. It was impossible to say if it would snap and she would never be able to reanimate her physical form or if that tenuous, spiritual thread would hold and she would once again open her lips to smile or sigh.
When morning came there was no change, but the doctor and nurse could not persuade Gregory to go to bed, or even to lie down. As he sat there he was not thinking of anything—his brain seemed numb—but he felt no need of sleep and sat on, unmoving, as the hours drifted by. The air-raids had ceased by the time they had got Erika to bed and the King had departed with his entourage a quarter of an hour later, so it was now very silent in the Château.
Shortly after midday Erika opened her eyes and moaned. The nurse sent a housemaid running for the doctor. For ten awful minutes Gregory waited for the verdict. Then the doctor said:
‘There is nothing to tell you, my friend, except that now she has come round she stands a fifty-fifty chance. We shan’t know which way matters will go for at least another twenty-four hours, unless she has a sudden collapse, so I insist that you must now go to bed.’
Gregory agreed quite meekly, but with Erika’s temporary return to semi-consciousness his own mental powers came back to him and he wondered if Kuporovitch had survived the air-raids of the previous night, so he asked the doctor to send somebody to find out; then he undressed and got into a bed which had been made up for him in the next room.
He awoke at ten o’clock that night and found that somebody had put a dressing-gown on a nearby chair for him, so he got up, put it on and went in to see if there was any news of Erika. He found a different nurse, and Kuporovitch looking extremely woebegone, in the room, but the nurse had nothing fresh to report about Erika’s state, so he beckoned to Kuporovitch and they went outside to converse in whispers.
The Russian was suffering from such an appalling hangover that he could hardly think coherently, but he said that directly he had heard what had happened he made up his mind not to go to Paris yet; he could not desert his friends at such a time.
Gregory was glad to have his company and very grateful, but he pointed out that now that the Belgian Army had surrendered the Germans might be entering Ostend at any hour. Kuporovitch shrugged his broad shoulders and said that, after all, the Germans had nothing against him, so he had nothing to fear from them. On the contrary, it was Gregory whose life would be forfeit if he were captured. Gregory knew that well enough, but wild horses would not have dragged him from Erika’s side. All the same, he was extremely anxious to know how long they had, so he sent Kuporovitch off to pick up what news he could.
The Russian was away for about half an hour. When he returned he said that there were still a few officers of the Staff downstairs, who had told him that they did not think that the Germans would be in Ostend until the following afternoon. He had also arranged about a bed for himself in the now almost empty Château, and after partaking of a scratch meal with the doctor they went to bed about midnight.
Having slept his fill that afternoon and evening, Gregory got up several times during the night to inquire about Erika, but the nurse had nothing new to tell him. Early on the Wednesday morning, however, Erika became conscious for longer spells and was in great pain.
At eleven o’clock Gregory saw the doctor, who said that he thought that the patient now had a 3 to 1 chance of recovery.
‘And what will it be if we move her?’ Gregory asked almost in a whisper.
The doctor gave a little shrug. ‘If you were to do that the odds would be the other way; a 3 to 1 chance of death. I know the difficulty you are in but I cannot possibly take any responsibility for her life if you move her so soon.’
Gregory then had to make the most difficult decision he had ever been called upon to take. If she were once caught behind the German lines he knew that with all his ingenuity he would never be able to get her through, semi-conscious and at death’s door as she was; and he had not the least doubt that the Black Baroness had already reported her to the Gestapo for endeavouring to prevent King Leopold from signing the request for an armistice. Within an hour of German troops arriving on the scene Grauber’s men would have her in their clutches, her real identity would soon be discovered, and when that came out there would not be one chance in a thousand of her escaping execution when she was well enough to walk to the headman’s block.
It was that mental assessment ‘once chance in a thousand’ which decided Gregory, Twenty-five chances in a hundred were infinitely better, so he must take this horrible risk even though by his own decision he might bring about her death. Turning to the doctor, he said:
‘If she remains here the Germans will execute her for certain. Therefore she must be moved. Will you ask one of the servants to pack up some cold food for us from anything that remains in the larder and make arrangements for us to start at twelve o’clock.’
The Royal ambulance was a spacious and thoroughly up-to-date affair so there was ample room for the two nurses to travel inside with the doctor while Gregory and Kuporovitch sat beside the driver. With deliberate slowness they crawled along the coast-road back to Ostend and through it towards Nieuport and Furnes, making no more than ten miles an hour, and even less where they struck a bumpy piece of road. At Nieuport they pulled up and the doctor spent some time in a telephone booth. He came back to say that every hospital and nursing-home in Furnes was crowded with British wounded but that some friends of his had agreed to take Erika into their private house.
They proceeded on their journey, arriving at Furnes shortly after three o’clock. The doctor’s friends were a Monsieur and Madame Blanchard, a plump, prosperous, middle-aged couple, who received them with great kindness and did everything in their power to make the party comfortable. Erika was carried up to a bright bedroom hung with chintz, and the doctor and nurses were accommodated in the house. But there was not enough room for the others so it was decided that Gregory, Kuporovitch and the driver should sleep on three of the stretchers in the ambulance, which was housed in Monsieui Blanchard’s garage.
All things considered, the doctor thought that Erika had sported the journey well, but one of her wounds had begun to bleed again, and he told Gregory that moving her had set her back to a fifty-fifty chance. That night she grew worse; from a slight internal haemorrhage, and Gregory was once more driven almost crazy with anxiety as he sat at her bedside all through the long hours of darkness.
It was not until midday the following day that the crisis had passed and during that afternoon and evening she took a decided turn for the better. On the Thursday night, for the first time since reaching Furnes, Gregory was able to crawl into his stretcher-bed and sleep.
On Friday morning Erika was definitely better, so Gregory was at last able to switch his thoughts to what was going on outside his immediate surroundings. Erika had been shot on Monday, the 27th, and the following morning Leopold had been denounced for his treachery by the French Premier, Paul Reynaud. World-wide indignation at the King’s act had been magnified by the fact that he had not even warned the British or French Armies of his intention, so that when his own Army had laid down its arms at midnight on the Monday the unfortunate British immediately to the south of them had had no opportunity to alter their dispositions to cover their suddenly-exposed flank. However, although the Belgian Army had surrendered the Belgian people had repudiated their King and the Belgian Government had declared its intention of fighting on with the new slogan, ‘Le Roi est mort—vive la Belgique!’
With the defection of the Belgians the Northern Allied Army had been left in a position of grave peril. It was now fighting on three fronts and in considerable danger of being totally surrounded; so it seemed more obvious than ever to Gregory that Lord Gort and his French colleague would fling their armies forward in a determined attempt to break through and reach the Somme. They were reported to have some 400,000 men between them and with such a mass it was impossible to believe that under determined leadership a break-through could not be accomplished.
But by Thursday morning it had become clear that Lord Gort had no such intention. British units were already streaming back through Furnes towards the coast, and, in the afternoon Kuporovitch came back from a short walk to say that he had seen British troops occupied in destroying several supply-depots which had been established in the town.
He added that he had just heard that Narvik had been captured by a combined force of Norwegians and British, which made Gregory laugh for the first time in days. A small German force had hung out there for seven weeks in hostile country with the Norwegians shelling them from the surrounding mountains, and the mighty British Navy shelling them from the sea, while Allied troops perpetually harassed them from both shores of the fjord. Whatever German had commanded that show deserved a whole row of Iron Crosses and it was just one more feather in Hitler’s helmet.
When, on the Friday, it seemed that Erika’s youth and health would save her, Gregory went out to learn what he could about the situation. More and more British troops were pouring into the town down the road from Dixmude and Ypres and at the latter place a fierce battle was said to be raging. Having talked to several of the almost exhausted officers and men he learnt that Dunkirk was now the only port remaining in British hands, and, to his amazement, that an attempt was to be made to evacuate the whole of the B.E.F. from it.
This news gave him furiously to think. It now appeared that by moving Erika from Breedene to Furnes they had only gained a few days’ grace instead of securing her safety for a considerably longer period as he had hoped would be the case.
When it had become clear that no break-through was to be attempted Gregory had naturally assumed that the B.E.F. would dig in and hold the coast behind it until it could be reinforced from England. Its situation would then have been analogous to that of the Naval Division which Mr. Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had deliberately flung into Antwerp with great acumen and daring in the early weeks of the last Great War, only some twenty times stronger. That small force of almost untrained volunteers—the only land-force not under the control of the static Generals—had, under the personal leadership of the brilliant descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, played a not inconsiderable part in saving the Channel ports. The Germans, not knowing when it might be reinforced, had been compelled to detach three Army Corps to deal with it, as they dared not leave such a dangerous enemy bridge-head in their rear while they advanced into France Now, one would have thought, this great Northern Allied Army could have constituted an infinitely graver threat if dug in round Dunkirk; but apparently it did not intend to threaten anybody; if it could get there, it was going home.
Whether it succeeded or whether the bulk of it was destroyed before it could be embarked, the thing that affected Gregory personally as a result of the strange and alarming new ‘strategy’ was that the Germans would enter Furnes at latest before the week-end was past. Once more he had to face the agonising problem—should he just hope for the best and allow Erika to continue the good progress she was making, or should he again risk her life by attempting to evacuate her with the B.E.F.?
Dunkirk was only about eleven miles away along the coast so that afternoon he decided to go there and see for himself what was going on.
After lunch he and Kuporovitch managed to get a lift on a lorry and joined the slow, apparently endless procession of British Army vehicles which was now meandering along at the best pace it could make towards the west. Great havoc was being made among the columns by the German planes but, as they neared Dunkirk, for the first time they saw British planes in action.
The German air-armada was so great that it was impossible to count even a portion of it. There were several hundred planes in the air all at one time, but for once they were not having it all their own way; the British fighters streaked out of the cloudless sky at them, flattened out, circled, zoomed up and dived again with their machine-guns spitting, and barely five minutes passed without a Nazi plane being brought down.
They arrived in Dunkirk at about half-past two but halted outside the town as bombs had reduced it to a complete ruin. Walking up on to the dunes to the right of the road, they saw an incredible spectacle. Scores of British destroyers and hundreds of small craft were standing in as near as they could to the long, sandy beaches. There were ferries, pleasure-steamers, private yachts, launches, fishing trawlers, life-boats and every conceivable type of vessel that could be driven by steam or oil, and snaky lines of khaki-clad figures were wading out through the shallow waters to be pulled on board them.
Yet for every man who was taken into a boat there were a dozen or more coming over the dunes from inland. Gunners, sappers, infantry, tank corps, A.S.C. drivers, officers, N.C.O.s and men were all inextricably muddled together in vast khaki crowds and it seemed utterly impossible that one-tenth of them could be saved by the little figures out in the boats who were working so desperately hard to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy.
In the sky above a thousand planes turned and twisted in furious combat. Fleets of bombers came over escorted by fighter aircraft and were broken up by the pom-poms of the warships. The bombs were released haphazard and few hit their mark, but the Messerschmitts swooped to machine-gun the beaches until the Hurricanes and Spitfires chivvied them away or sent them reeling down in a smoky spiral. Gregory thought that it must be the greatest air-battle that had ever taken place and he was overjoyed to see that although the British planes were far fewer in numbers they were decidedly getting the best of it. The Navy too, was doing a magnificent and entirely impromptu job of work with the help of those hundreds of volunteer seamen, but it yet remained to be seen if those organising the rescue would prove up to the task of getting away more than a fraction of the helpless soldiers who were now mere mobs of men with neither arms to fight nor any further stretch of land over which to run.
Gregory and Kuporovitch agreed that no military evacuation on so great a scale could ever before have been attempted and the only thing which made its success even remotely possible was the unbeatable resource of the British Navy, in which Churchill had so clearly placed his confidence when faced with the collapse of the Army. They watched the astonishing, ever-changing scene for over an hour, then turned for home.
As there were no lorries going away from Dunkirk they had to trudge most of the way back to Furnes, but for the last few miles they got a lift in a Staff car. Gregory asked the officer who was in it how long he thought that the evacuation would take, and he replied: ‘It only started last night and if we can get 100,000 a day off it will be doing marvels, so it’s bound to be going on right over the week-end.’
It was clear now that if Erika was to be saved from the Germans the risk of moving her must be taken once more, but this piece of information decided Gregory to hang on for another day or two, so as to give her the maximum possible chance of regaining a little strength after her set-back.
All through the long, hot Saturday the B.E.F. staggered back through Belgium, many of them wounded and great numbers limping badly because they were so footsore from the terrific forced march that they had performed.
‘At all events, they’ve got good boots,’ remarked Kuporovitch, with the eye of a professional soldier, as he watched them from the garden gate.
‘Yes,’ sneered Gregory angrily; ‘our Generals learnt that it was necessary to equip their men with good boots in the Boer War, so perhaps they’ll equip them with tommy-guns when we have to fight the Germans again somewhere about 1960 and the Huns have armed themselves with something much more lethal.’
By Sunday afternoon Gregory felt that he dared delay no longer. The defences of Dunkirk had been reinforced by flooding, but at Furnes the stream of khaki had come down to a trickle of footsore soldiers. The ambulance was got out from the garage, and Erika was carried down to it; then, having taken leave of their kind Belgian hosts, they set off towards Dunkirk.
When they reached the outskirts of the town Gregory and Kuporovitch saw yet another fantastic sight. For miles and miles there stretched the baggage and the weapons of the once glorious British Army. Huge masses of supplies were being burnt and sabotage parties were putting tanks and guns out of action by removing their more delicate parts and smashing them with pick-axes; but not one-fiftieth of that vast sea of vehicles, which had cost Britain hundreds of millions of pounds and months of toil by her sweating factory-workers, could be rendered permanently useless.
There was no bombing now. The R.A.F. had won a magnificent victory against the terrific odds and driven the Nazis out of the sky. Even the gunfire to the east had slackened as Hitler, having inflicted on the British Army the most crushing defeat in its history, had swung the weight of his main attack south once more, contemptuously leaving the rernnants of the B.E.F. to get home as best they could.
They drove the ambulance slowly up to the crest of the sand dunes. The spectacle beyond differed little from what it had been on Friday, except that instead of tens of thousands there were now only scattered thousands of men on the beaches, and that the foreshore was now black with countless thousands of rifles, tin hats, gas masks, haversacks, water-bottles and other items of the British soldiers’ fighting kit. The destroyers and the gallant little boats, manned by every type of seaman and civilian, were still standing by hauling soldier after soldier up out of the sea as though they had never stopped during the whole of the forty-eight hours since Gregory had first seen them.
Taking out the stretcher, they carried Erika down to the water’s edge, where every few hundred yards long strings of khaki-clad men were patiently queueing up and wading out chest-deep into the sea. Some were wounded, all were dirty and unshaven, but in spite of their plight their unquenchable spirit remained and they were still exchanging the typical witticisms which come from the British Tommy even in the grimmest circumstances; little cracks about ‘free bathing’ and ‘bringing the wife to Dunkirk for a holiday next summer’.
There were no formalities, no customs or passport controls here, but some of the men turned to stare curiously as Gregory’s party approached, for although there were quite a number of French and Belgian soldiers among the rabble, civilians were a rarity upon that hellish shore.
On that account Gregory felt that some difficulty might arise about his party being taken on board, so he waded in up to the knees and hailed a naval officer who was sitting in a small motor-boat near one of the queues, regulating its advance into the water.
The N.O. put in a little nearer to the shore to see what he wanted, and lying with complete unscrupulousness, Gregory told him that his party consisted of an English lady who was hovering between life and death, a Russian who was attached to the British Secret Service, and four Belgians, a doctor, two nurses and an army chauffeur; and asked if they could be taken off.
His request was granted at once and the naval officer brought his own boat even closer in so that Erika’s stretcher could be carried out to it.
Ploughing his way back through the gently-creaming foam, Gregory knelt for a minute beside the stretcher to see how Erika was. There could be no argument any more about her accepting the hospitality of Britain while the war continued but she did not even know what was going on, as her lungs pained her terribly and the doctor had forbidden her to talk in case she brought on another internal haemorrhage. Her face was dead-white and her eyes closed.
After a moment he stood up and said to Kuporovitch: ‘You carry her out with the chauffeur, Stefan; I forgot to sabotage the car so I’m going back to wreck the engine, because I’m damned if I’m going to leave even an ambulance in running order for those blasted Nazis. Don’t wait for me but get Erika on board as quickly as you can. I’ll be seeing you later.’ With a nod to the rest of them he turned and strode off up the beach towards the ambulance.
When he got there he did not lift the bonnet of the engine but sat down on the crest of the dunes to watch the embarkation. He saw Erika’s stretcher lifted into the stern of the motor-boat and the two nurses, the doctor, Kuporovitch and the chauffeur hauled up out of the water after it. The motor-boat turned and sped out to a fishing-trawler that had the marks of German machine-gun bullets spattered all over its funnel. He saw the little party taken on board by bareheaded men in dark-blue sweaters. They were only little figures now and he could still make out Kuporovitch, who was standing at the rail in the stern of the ship, evidently anxiously waiting for him to join them; but he did not stir.
For over an hour the trawler remained there taking survivors of the routed Army on board, then puffs of smoke issued from its funnel. It slowly turned and headed for England.
The sun was sinking but the evacuation still went on; as some of the boats sailed for home, others arrived to take off yet more and more men. Gregory kept his eyes fixed upon the trawler until it became a little speck hidden by the gathering darkness, then at last he stood up and began to tramp through the heavy sand, towards the road. He would have given all that he possessed to be on that trawler with Erika, but the Black Baroness was still at large to wreak her evil will and he remembered Sir Pellinore’s injunction.
It was his business to ‘seek out and destroy the enemy’.