S-Day: A Memoir of the Invasion of England

18

At midmorning the next day we crested the hill to see black smoke churning from a shattered farmhouse. Our driver accelerated the jeep through the gate and along a stand of oak trees toward the remnants of the house. He slowed near what was once the front door. This was the 1st Armored’s headquarters, and we arrived five minutes after the Luftwaffe had departed. Cordite was still in the breeze.

We climbed out of the jeep. I hurried after General Clay as he ran toward the house, stepping around masonry fragments, patches of roof thatch, splintered furniture, glass shards, a bed frame, and the twisted wreckage of a command scout car.

Half of the house was gone, blown out over the grounds. The stone shell of the other portion remained upright. Smoke rolled in and out of the remaining windows. A corner of thatch was on fire, but two soldiers on the roof were dousing it with an extinguisher. The section of house still standing was ragged with broken window frames and exposed beams. HQ company soldiers were removing casualties from the house, placing the dead alongside a rose trellis. We walked to the bodies.

General Clay said, “Goddamn it, the first body here is the 1st’s commander, Roger Franks. Not a mark on him.”

Franks’ wig had been carelessly tucked into his shirt pocket by one of the soldiers. Part of it hung out like a handkerchief. I was stupidly embarrassed for him.

Clay moved along the line, his cap in his hand. “And next is J. P. Thurow, his deputy. Jesus.”

Major General Thurow’s head had been vertically halved, ear to ear. His face looked up at us, but there was no head behind it. Blood stained the ground under the body.

Clay breathed rapidly. His face was the color of paper, which made his freckles stand out like tattoos. He said in a low voice, “Next is Bernie Holt.”

Colonel Holt was the 1st Armored’s G3, in charge of plans, training, and operations. His uniform was smeared with blood from cuffs to collar.

We walked quickly down the line of nineteen bodies, almost all of the 1st Armored’s command staff. General Clay had begun to limp. Two tents were being righted, where litter bearers were bringing the wounded for treatment by HQ medics.

Clay said quietly, “They hadn’t been here long enough for the Germans to pinpoint them. War is the province of chance.”

He did not say this to me particularly, although I was the only one within earshot. One of General Clay’s command peculiarities was that when the action heated up, he incessantly talked to himself. He caught me staring at him during one of his one-person talks, and he snapped, “Henry VI sang tunelessly throughout all his battles, so there’s historical precedent for you.”

We quickly crossed the grounds. The door was blocked by a fallen beam, so we entered through a piano-sized hole in a stone wall. Dust and smoke were still swirling in the air. Charred maps lay on the floor, and communications equipment was strewn about. In the turmoil of the ruined headquarters, several soldiers were trying to put the place back in order. They moved as if in a daze. One was sweeping with a broom, carefully avoiding the wounded. The other was methodically dusting a card table with a cloth.

Another soldier was leaning against a wall, blood running from a forearm. Coughing against the smoke, a corpsman knelt over him, applying a tourniquet to his biceps. A wounded officer was sitting in an overstuffed chair near the hearth. A bandage was wrapped under his jaw and secured above his head with an oversized knot that looked as if he tied it himself. He gazed out a window with unblinking eyes.

Clay high-stepped over fireplace tongs to him. “What’s your name, Lieutenant?”

The officer gathered himself. He rose unsteadily, and said through clenched teeth. “Lieutenant Gregory Sessions, signal officer, 1st Armored HQ, sir.”

“What’s your problem?”

“My jaw’s broken, sir.” He winced as he said it. Three lower front teeth had been broken off at the stumps. His flat nose was off-center and may also have been broken. “Got hit by some debris, a kitchen cabinet, I think.”

“Christ,” Clay said, “I’ve been hurt worse playing bridge with my wife.”

“Yes, sir.”

The general glanced at his wristwatch. “The 1st is supposed to launch our operation in fourteen minutes. Who’s in charge here?”

Sessions staggered, and Clay caught him by the arm. The lieutenant may have had a slight concussion. He replied weakly, “Major General Franks, sir, but he’s dead. So’s everybody else. They nailed us.”

Again Clay looked at his watch. He looked up, surveying the damage. He shoved his fist into his pants pocket. A moment passed. Then he said, “We’ve got thirteen minutes to put this headquarters together and launch the operation. I’m going to act as your divisional commander. Will you help me, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many signalmen do you have left?”

“Sir, we just got hit and I haven’t—”

Clay held up his hand. “I want you to find whoever is left and get a radio set up on the divisional and AEFHQ bands, and I’ll also need a ground wire with a green line. And a pack radio for the regiments. This room’ll stand for a while, so run the lines and antenna leads right into here.”

“Yes, sir.” Sessions staggered away. His resolve must have firmed as Clay’s charge settled on him, because he was walking more firmly as he disappeared down a hallway.

General Clay moved to the soldier wearing the tourniquet. Clay said, “Looks like you’re bleeding.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Looks like its mostly stopped.”

The soldier risked a glance at his arm. “Yes, sir.”

“Name, soldier,” Clay demanded.

“Corporal Samuel Johnson, sir, 1st Armored HQ intelligence clerk.”

“Corporals normally stand at attention when they are being addressed by a general.” Clay rocked back on his heels.

Johnson struggled to his feet, pushing himself against the wall and backpedaling until he was upright. His arm swayed loosely. Drops of blood fell to the oak floor. His face was pinched with pain.

Clay said, “That proves you can walk, then. My G2 is trailing me in a jeep. You will see that the maps and charts scattered around this room are in order for him when he gets here. I want you prepared to display positions, and I want you to find General Franks’ attack order. We’ll work from that.”

Johnson may have been bewildered, but he nodded his head with energy.

I followed the general over a pile of stones and masonry into a large dining room. The exterior wall had collapsed outward, and the rose garden was visible through the aperture. A chandelier had fallen onto the table. Crystal facets and broken light bulbs were scattered over the table and floor. A litter team was carrying away another of the wounded, loudly crushing the crystal under their feet. The injured man was a major, and his head and left eye were covered in a blood-soaked bandage.

“Hold there,” Clay ordered.

The stretcher bearers stopped immediately. Clay looked down at the wounded officer. “You don’t look too bad.”

After a moment, the major said, “I guess not, sir.”

“It’s just your eye, looks like.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hell, we’ve all got a spare eye, don’t we?” the general asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then get the hell off that stretcher and help me out.”

One of the corpsmen said, “Sir, Major Robley here isn’t fit to—”

Clay turned to him. “You carry the dead out of here and anyone too hurt to talk. You leave the rest to me. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Major Robley pivoted off the stretcher. I helped him to his feet.

Clay asked, “What’s your job, Major?”

Robley was in so much pain sweat had formed on his brow and was running down his face from under his bandage. He blinked his good eye. “I’m deputy commander, 19th Ordnance Battalion, 1st Armored.”

Clay pursed his lips. “Perfect. You are to bring me up to date on assembly positions.”

“Sir, I’m an ammo officer.”

“You ship metal rations to all your units, don’t you?” Clay asked brusquely.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you must know where they are.”

“Yes, sir,” Robley said doubtfully.

“Then get into the main room and prepare to brief me.”

Clay left the major and made his way further into the ruined building. I followed. In the kitchen we found another officer, a lieutenant who was lying on the checkerboard tile floor. He was on his stomach. A trail of blood crossed the black and white tile. He had crawled into the kitchen. A flying splinter had ripped a trench in his leg from ankle to buttocks. His eyes were open.

“Lieutenant, you look healthy, except for your leg. What’s your name and duty?” Clay questioned him.

The lieutenant looked up. “General Clay?”

Bracing himself on the edge of a cutting block, Clay knelt to him. “Your name and duty.”

“Lieutenant Chet Benson, liaison officer from the 1st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division.” His words were chopped with suffering.

“You are going to brief me on the 1st Armored’s attack order.”

The lieutenant groaned. “I’m going to die, sir.”

“You don’t have time for that.”

Benson gulped air. “I need morphine, sir.”

“I can’t rely on a briefing from a drug fiend, Lieutenant. A litter team will move you into the main room next to our charts. After we talk, we’ll see about a pain killer.”

The general made several more stops in the building, weaving around collapsed beams and stones and plaster, putting together his command. Assembled in the main room, the new 1st Armored HQ resembled a field hospital. Many were tended to by physicians and medics as they spoke with the general. Generals Lorenzo and Pinkney entered and immediately posted themselves at the restored map table. Clay wrapped his spectacles around his face.

Lieutenant Sessions met the deadline. Four minutes to launch hour, 1st Armored HQ was connected with its regiments, the remnants of the 4th Motorized, and the Canadians.

Clay paused as Lorenzo did his work over the map. He stepped back. He said to me, “The Canuck, Henry Bisset, and I came up with this counterattack last night.”

I was puzzled. “Where was I?”

“You were asleep. I looked in on you, but you seemed comfy, all curled up in your blankie, so I let you sleep.”

This was nonsense, but my face burned nevertheless. After the battle of Haywards Heath, I had retired at two in the morning, long after the miserable returns were in. I was exhausted, but General Clay had apparently worked through the night.

Lieutenant General Henry Bisset was commander of the Canadian I Corps. He and Clay had formulated the plan in the early hours of the day and had received approval from ACCSS. They named it Operation Redwood. At dawn orders had gone out to divisional headquarters. Now, after the disaster at 1st Armored’s HQ, Clay suddenly had to familiarize himself with Roger Franks’ implementation. For five minutes he listened to Major Robley and Lieutenant Benson. Then in the remaining minutes until launch, he issued a stream of orders. I logged them in my pad and carried them to the impromptu signal station.

Most of Lieutenant Sessions’ equipment had been placed on an ornate, leather-inlaid desk that had just missed being crushed by a massive beam. Signal officers were streaming in, bringing more gear and wiring it. David Lorenzo used coins to mark units on maps. The room began to look like a working headquarters.

Just before ten in the morning, the third day of the invasion, Clay stared at his wristwatch and counted off the remaining seconds. Then he said to Pinkney, “Go to it, Jay.”

Operation Redwood was underway.

Clay said, “Now we wait.”

A moment passed. He said, “The Germans call this maneuver Einkreisung, encirclement.”

I looked up from my pad, but he was talking to the air around us.

He went on, “The German is going to taste some of his own tactical medicine.”

I lowered my pad.

He said, “The Teuton loves this goddamn maneuver. Von Moltke, the brilliant Prussian field marshal, used it at Sedan on the River Meuse in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The maneuver is the very symbol of German military prowess, as if they invented it. Like hell. They stole it from Napoleon at Austerlitz.”

I should have remained silent. But, no. “Or maybe from the encirclement of the Royalist infantry at Naseby during the English Civil War.”

His jaw came out. “Or maybe from Genghis Khan at the Battle of Indus.”

I countered, “Or maybe from Hannibal at Cannae.”

“Jack, I have to take this crap from Winnie, but not from my ADC, who is five ranks below me and may go even lower.”

“Of course, sir.”

The general rejoined David Lorenzo. For the rest of the morning, Clay acted as a divisional commander. He made do with his battered ad hoc staff. When Lieutenant Benson fainted, Clay had a medic administer smelling salts, then prop him up at the map table. Clay spoke constantly with regimental commanders, guiding them from their assembly positions to the engagements.

I carried orders to the signalmen and their messages to Clay.

Occasionally, he would return to me, if only because it was more seemly than talking to himself.

At one point, he commented, “Armies move very slowly. That’s the shame of it.”

Later he said to me, “What the German won’t expect is the encirclement as counterattack. They don’t think that way.”

Still later he returned, his mouth moving before he reached me. “… so our aim is to prevent the German from turning yesterday’s tactical success into victory. Our counterattack has been launched while he is still dazed from our web, don’t you see?”

Operation Redwood was a double envelopment. The Wehrmacht was wheeling west from the beaches. AEF forces were grudgingly but surely giving ground. When Clay gave the order at ten that morning, the Canadians roared south from their position near London, and units of the 1st Armored drove north from the coast, all behind the Wehrmacht’s westerly moving line. The maneuver was an attempt to encircle the Schwerpunkt, to defeat it by cutting it off.

Clay predicted at one point that morning, “Redwood is going to cut the German throat, Jack.”

It should have. RAF Lieutenant Richard Ormsby’s ordeal at that moment tells why it did not.

I have mentioned that Ormsby spent many afternoons before the invasion napping under his Spitfire, his squadron too low on fuel and ammunition to go aloft for much training. His unit, 46 Squadron, and a handful of others, had been carefully hoarded, camouflaged under netting away from the RAF’s bomb-beaten runways, and were waiting for the moment when the RAF’s last line would be committed.

S-Day was that moment. But at the end of the day, 46 Squadron had lost half its fighters. On the third day of the invasion, at the start of Redwood, only four of the Squadron’s Spitfires were serviceable. By Ormsby’s own count, his Spit’s eight wing-mounted .303s had only forty shells in each of their belts. A couple of squeezes of the trigger. The armament officer had promised more, but lately there were more promises than shells.

That morning their squadron’s controller had held them on the deck until just before ten. Their orders were to supply ground support for the Canadian divisions about to move south. A preposterous notion, Ormsby thought. There were so many Luftwaffe planes overhead, he doubted 46 Squadron would even get to the Canadians, much less provide them cover.

Ormsby had not been out of his uniform jacket in three days. He had dispensed with his Irving suit because it and his harness fouled the cockpit’s wireless leads and oxygen tube. So he flew with the heater on full. He had two kills, a Dornier and, improbably for one as green as Ormsby, an Me 109. His ground crew had not had time to stencil them on the Spitfire.

He was so tired he had begun to see double. The lieutenant blinked repeatedly as, once again, he pushed his hands into his gloves and stepped to his plane. The ground crew pulled back the netting, which had branches intertwined in it. Ormsby climbed onto the wing and reached for the cockpit latch.

Yellow fire burst from the cockpit. Ormsby’s hands reflexively went to his face, and he lurched back on the wing. Another blast of yellow erupted from the far wing, then another. The engine housing suddenly foamed with fire.

Ormsby leaped blindly from the wing, landing hard, his right knee smashing into his chin. His arms still protecting his head, he rolled away from his plane. The burbling of the spheres of yellow fire was abruptly drowned out by his fuel tank exploding. The lieutenant was still rolling when the heat washed over him.

He sat up. The gutted frame of his fighter was sinking to the ground, its landing gear groaning as it twisted with heat and weight. The flattened tires billowed black smoke. His friend Captain Allen Best’s Spit was obscured by sheets of fire rising from its engine. And the captain’s plane was being demolished as Ormsby watched, the yellow orbs of fire breaking out in a trail from the prop to the elevator, tearing away panels of fuselage, ripping away the rudder, then engulfing the craft in flames. A Messerschmitt roared overhead.

A hundred yards north, pocks of earth shot skyward, then raced toward Ormsby as another enemy fighter made its run. The lieutenant pushed himself to his feet and sprinted to a sandbag bunker, then dove over the bags and landed on Allen Best, who was lying on his belly, his head between two bags.

Ormsby breathed deeply until he caught his breath. He said, “Incendiaries.”

Another German fighter swept over them, the whine of its engine abruptly deepening as it passed. Best looked up. His face had been pressed with such force against the ground that twigs and grit were stuck to it. He smiled sheepishly. “Christ, they pop.”

“Those Luftwaffe bastards love them, don’t they?”

All pilots did. The incendiaries’ yellow bursts on impact were a deadly aiming aid. And incendiaries seemed artful, laying a brightly lit pattern of destruction across the landscape.

Best brushed sand from his chin. “Well, we’ve joined the rest of our mates as pilots without planes.”

Ormsby stared at his plane, nothing more than a cylinder of churning fire, feeling the loss. He said sadly, “We’ll be better off on the ground today, I suspect.”

Ormsby and Best were not the only pilots to have just lost their rides. On S-Day, the RAF had 248 serviceable fighters. By the launching of General Clay’s Redwood, the number was down to 102.

With the aid of merciless hindsight, it is easy to see now that without Allied mastery of the air, without Lieutenant Ormsby and his companions blazing a trail for armor and infantry, General Clay’s counterattack was destined to fail.

Fail it did.

I have struggled with the telling of the next few hours more than any other part of this narrative. I was tempted to omit the incident altogether, but Jerry Ness of United Press recently broke the story, accusing General Hargrave and me of trying to cover it up. Now, with the story out, bludgeoning the general’s reputation, I must relate the entire episode, correcting some of Ness’s account, confirming some.

I admit to trying to bury the affair. My loyalty to General Clay, which I feel as strongly now as when I served him, demanded no less. In a telephone conversation with me, Ness countered that history insists on more from me, and he may be right.

General Clay’s conduct should be viewed from the perspective of the moment. He had just suffered four consecutive defeats: the destruction of the Ranger mission the night before S-Day, the collapse of the channel seawall, the breakdown of his islands of resistance defense at Haywards Heath, and the crushing of his counterattack, Redwood. The Germans were pummeling him.

The trouble was first confirmed when General Hargrave asked me where Clay was. By that time, three in the afternoon on May 31, AEFHQ had retreated to Haslemere, midway between Portsmouth and London, about eight miles east of the oncoming Wehrmacht’s front.

I replied meekly that he had gone for a walk.

Hargrave removed his pipe and stared at me. “Clarify that, Colonel.”

I cleared my throat. “He’s walking in the woods behind the caravan, sir.”

“What is he doing there?”

“I’m not sure, General. Thinking, perhaps.”

Hargrave’s small features became brittle. “Those bastard Germans are slamming us left and right and you’re telling me Clay’s out on a nature walk? You go find him and bring him back here.”

AEFHQ was in yet another manor house, this one on land carved out of a beech forest. The house was barely visible through the ivy that climbed to the roof line. The residence and its low-flanking outbuildings were surrounded by a yew hedge that opened at the north end of the property to admit a winding brook and at the south end to let it escape. A lawn edged the creek. Near the creek was a small pergola, empty of the wrought iron table and chairs that undoubtedly had been donated to the war effort. Sentries were posted on the perimeter of the property.

I crossed the lawn, bypassing General Clay’s caravan and the trailered AA gun and the HQ signal company truck that followed headquarters everywhere, and made my way to a gate in the stone wall. The last I had seen of the general, he had walked through this gap in the hedge into the trees.

The trail into the woods was dainty, with nothing rigorous about it. It was a lawn footpath, with borders carefully marked with decorative pebbles. Marble benches were located every fifty feet. The path was lined with hydrangeas and camellias and walls of rhododendrons, which were blooming blood red and dusk purple. The path aimlessly turned left and right for a hundred yards, then the trees opened overhead and the path ended at the bank above a shallow ravine. Below was a narrow pool. Two Canada geese drifted on the flat water. The war could have been a thousand miles away.

A bench overlooked the pond, surrounded by clipped lawn and begonia and lavender. General Clay was sitting there, his hands clasped between his knees. I hesitated, thinking he might be in prayer, as improbable as that was. I had never known the general to give even a passing reference to religion, except in several speeches, “because it makes a good finale,” he had said.

I waited fully two minutes. Finally I called out, “General, do you have a moment?”

He did not move, still staring at his hands.

I walked into the opening. “General Clay?”

He seemed not to hear me. His gaze shifted from his hands to the pool below. He bit his lower lip. Otherwise, nothing.

I walked over to him. “Sir?”

No response. I tapped his shoulder. “General Clay?”

He started, then looked up. “Jack.”

I stood at the end of the bench, waiting for further response. An alarm inside me trilled when the general turned back to the pool and said nothing more.

I moved in front of him, blocking his view. “General Hargrave is asking for you, sir.”

Almost without moving his lips, Clay replied, “Tell him to carry on.”

Then the general truly frightened me. He sighed, a long, hopeless, shuddering exhale, one’s last breath on this earth. I believed him incapable of such a noise.

“You alright, General?”

After several long seconds, he replied, “Jack, you head on back.”

Instead, I sat next to him on the bench. “What’ll I tell General Hargrave?”

There was only silence from him.

I was at a complete loss. The essence of Wilson Clay was his energy and willfulness, his stamina and wild intelligence. Yet there he was, brooding and still. He appeared frail. His jaw seemed to have grown the wattles of age. Mottled gray pouches under his eyes were newly prominent. His eyes were glazed. I had never before seen the general’s shoulders stooped, as if wearing a back-breaking pack. Without his animation, he seemed a shell of himself.

I tried again. “General Clay—”

“Jack, be quiet. Please.”

I sat next to him for one hour and forty minutes. Then military police arrived, deployed by General Hargrave to search for the general. I intercepted them at the edge of the clearing and sent them back. A few minutes later, Hargrave appeared. I tried to cut him off, but he brushed by me and marched to the bench.

“What in hell is going on, General?”

Clay raised his eyes. “I need some time to myself, Alex.”

“For Christ’s sake, we have a collapsing front. You can think while we try to put it back together.”

Clay said lamely, “You carry on for a while, Alex. You’ll do fine.”

Hargrave was dismayed. “General, we’ve got to…” His words died as he saw General Clay turn back to the pool. Hargrave glanced questioningly at me. I shook my head. Hargrave wheeled about and quickly disappeared down the footpath.

I returned to the bench. Another hour elapsed. The general’s gaze switched from the pond to his hands, then back. Otherwise, he was motionless. Each time I gathered the courage to speak again, his despairing stillness stopped me.

I had heard of commanders suffering immobilizing depressions after battle losses. Marlborough was plunged into despondency after the loss of two cities, Bruges and Ghent, to the French in 1708, and was incapable of command until Eugene came to his rescue. After his first defeat in ten years, at the Battle of Aspern/Essling in 1809, Napoleon’s mind was virtually paralyzed for thirty-six hours. Now the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force had been crippled by defeat and was sitting lifelessly while the battle raged nearby. I was overwhelmed by hopelessness.

General Clay abruptly rose from the bench and began back along the footpath. Aggravated by defeat, his limp rocked him side to side. I followed at a distance. His orderly, Charles Elliot, and his physician, William Strothers, had been watching us from under a tree. Elliot’s expression was immeasurably sad. They joined me as I walked behind the general.

Clay disappeared inside his camp trailer. Without an invitation, I entered after him. He sat on the settee and stared at a framed photograph of his wife. And there he stayed for another two hours, as motionless as a headstone.

One journalist has estimated that during the five hours General Clay was immobilized by depression, over two thousand Americans and eight hundred Canadians were killed. My response is that this calculation is sophistry, is “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” General Hargrave did carry on, and very well, as Clay was later to conclude.

But sitting in his trailer with him, watching as General Clay was consumed by despair, I slowly became enraged. I could here the bustle of command outside the trailer. The Wehrmacht was undoubtedly closer by the moment. And here was the American commander, glassy-eyed, his hands clasped together. Forlorn and pathetic.

His slight groan, as if he had just been injured, when there were thousands of truly injured Allied soldiers nearby, set me off. I rose from the wood chair across from him and yelled, “General, you need to get off your ass.”

His head jerked up.

I shouted, “You’ve got an army depending on you, and you’re sitting here doing nothing.”

His eyes dug into me. “Jack, get out of here.”

I was not to be put off. “Sir, you are needed.”

Moving with a lineman’s quickness, he rose from the settee, grabbed my shoulders, spun me around, and pitched me through the caravan’s door. Like a drunk tossed out of a saloon, I landed on my belly.

Colonel Strothers and Corporal Elliot helped me to my feet. Seething and humiliated, I dusted off my uniform.

I will not admit to being crazed with anger, as my next act suggests. But, then again, no one with an ounce of brains would have done what I did. It was dangerous and insubordinate. “And it made you look like a lunatic,” Strothers added later.

I ran toward a perimeter sentry. “You, Corporal. General Clay needs your help.”

The guard started toward the trailer.

I said, “He needs ten or twelve of your best men, right now.”

“Yes, sir.” He blew his whistle.

HQ company sentries ran from their posts on the outskirts of the manor grounds.

Carrying their M1s across their chests, ready for anything, they gathered around me as I started for Clay’s trailer. I improvised, “Headquarters is bugging out again. We have to leave the trailer, and we don’t want the Germans to get their hands on it.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered. He glanced at one of his men, as if he might have a further clue.

When we reached the caravan, I ordered, “You men line up along this side of the trailer. Hook your hands underneath. When I give the order, lift and shove. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant dutifully replied.

Colonel Strothers demanded, “Jack, what are you doing?”

The sentries arrayed themselves along the west side of the trailer, the side with the door.

“Ready?” I called out, grabbing the step under General Clay’s door. “One, two, three, heave.”

The trailer was hoisted to shoulder height, then with grunts and shouts from the sentries, was toppled onto its side. The trailer landed heavily, followed instantly by the crash of chairs and pots and the general hitting the inside wall.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. “You and your men are dismissed.”

They hurried away, talking animatedly among themselves.

“May I dismiss myself?” Strothers asked politely.

I nodded. He fairly sprinted away. Then I grabbed my hands behind my back, stretched my backbone to its limit, and awaited my fate.

I did not wait long. General Clay pushed open the door, now on the topside, and pulled himself through to a sitting position. His cap was over an ear, and he pushed it into place. He looked around.

His eyes came to rest on me, and he said, “You’d better tell me my trailer was just hit by a Luftwaffe bomb.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. This was done on my orders.”

“Are you goddamn bucking for a section eight, Jack?”

“I’d be in pleasant company, wouldn’t I, sir?”

He glared at me. His face may have changed color a time or two. Then he abruptly brayed with laughter, long and loud and convincing.

He swung his feet up through the door, crawled to the edge of the caravan, and slid down to the grass, laughing all the while.

He looked at me again. “Jack, I’m going to court martial you for attempting to assassinate your commander. You’ll help me with the paperwork, won’t you?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good. We’ve got some commanding to do first, though.” He led me into the manor house.

Marlborough emerged from his short depression inspired and went immediately on to his tactically brilliant victory at Oudenarde. Napoleon rebounded from his mental paralysis to lead his troops to victory at the Battle of Wagram.

General Clay roared back, too. The feat for which he will always be remembered was yet in front of him.

19

English courage when confronted by invaders has long been the subject of fanciful speculation. In A.D. 793, the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote that when the Vikings were rumored to be on their way, “Dire forwarnings came over the land…, and miserably terrified the people.” Written long after the event, this can be little more than conjecture. In 1771, Captain Guy Carleton forecast that “amidst the first panic terrors” upon the appearance of a French fleet on the horizon, “The people will naturally fly.” The French never came, and the people never flew.

In truth, no people are less alarmed or less easily cast down by reverses than the British. A mad rush, with Londoners choking the roads, sweeping away all in front of them in a frenzied and fearful stampede, never materialized. Instead, Londoners met the approaching disaster with their usual phlegm.

With the German horde at hand, British imperturbability was vast and, to me, unfathomable. Let me give a few examples. After the war, I spoke with Clyde Lamb, of Lamb Brothers, the Bond Street tailor. I asked him if he had given thought to fleeing the city. He made a show of furling his brow and staring at the wall in thought before answering, “I might have, had I not promised Sir James Stamford his four suits by the end of the week.”

I asked Professor Fenton Swain of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington why he was not tempted to abandon the city. Swain was the noted paleozoologist who had painstakingly over seven years reconstructed the bones of the dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii, measuring over eighty-five feet long. Astonished at the question, he replied, “What, and abandon Dippy?”

One episode was recounted by the London Times. The woman was unnamed by the newspaper, but among her circle was easily identified because the article carried the titles of several of her paintings. Apparently she could not determine a way to spirit her artwork out of the city, so two days after S-Day, she rushed into Sotheby’s and demanded of their lead auctioneer, Powell Prescott, that he immediately auction off her Pre-Raphaelite collection, which included John Everett Millais’ Garden of the Lady and William Holman Hunt’s The Stable of Christ. According to the Times, Prescott removed his spectacles and said, “Madam, to sell them now would be unseemly.”

Simon Durwin admits he had hoped to profit from the war. Durwin was the owner of a leading London wine shop, Durwin Wine Merchants on Brompton Road. He had kept in reserve hundreds of cases of his best product, waiting for the inevitable spiraling prices caused by war shortages.

“I waited too long,” he told me after the war. “I was pinched by my own greed, don’t you see?”

Durwin was tormented by his dilemma. “In my cellar I had the rarest Chateau Lafite and Chateau Margaux, the finest years. I had sixteen bottles of sixty-year-old Dom Pérignon. I had two thousand bottles of priceless…” His voice diminished as the memory bit him. “And after General Clay’s reverses, I knew German soldiers would soon be drinking the lot of it. It would be the drunken melee of the conqueror, an unthinkable blasphemy against those precious vintages.”

The wine merchant considered destroying his collection. “I actually had a hammer in my hand, intent on descending those steps and smashing each and every bottle. And then a better idea struck me.”

Durwin hastened down into the cellar and carried up the Dom Pérignon. He stepped into the street and passed them out one by one to surprised passersby. To each he said, “For the days to come.”

In the next three hours, he handed out his entire inventory. There was no rush from Londoners, no crowd with grasping hands thrust forward. Each took a bottle, nodded thanks, and carried on. I spoke with a number of recipients of Durwin’s largess. The bottles proved to be needed restoratives in the days ahead.

Elizabeth Stanhope’s mother, Beatrice, had labored on her daughter’s wedding for six months. As the joyous day approached, so did the Wehrmacht. Beatrice feared the celebration would not be attended by any of the hundred invited guests. She could hardly blame them. She, too, was tempted to run in front of the invaders, who had landed two days before the planned event.

The wedding was to be in the Chelsea Old Church, a portion of which dated from pre-Norman times. The nave, tower, chancel, and chapels were added over the centuries. In 1528, Sir Thomas More remodeled the south chapel, and all but that chapel had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. But just that chapel, with its glorious history and its bomb blast dust covering everything, would be sufficient for Beatrice Stanhope, if only her friends would fill it.

Fill it, they did. Of the hundred invitees, eighty-two attended. The wedding, with its rented cardboard cake for lack of sugar and flour, was a giddy success. Beatrice was doubly proud of the newlyweds when they postponed their honeymoon in the Cotswolds because they did not want to appear to be fleeing the city.

There were over forty thousand horses in Greater London early in the war. Thirty of them were owned by Jasper Anson, who was the proprietor of the Highpark Stable near Hyde Park. He employed ten stable boys and claimed his quarter horses were the finest for let in the city.

“No hobbling nags under my roof, I will tell you.”

The business had been in Anson’s family for four generations. Above the stable was a warehouse of bridles, halters, and harnesses, most not used since the automobile had come to London.

His horses’ fate was clear to Anson. “Some German mess sergeant was going to push them through a meat grinder and stuff them into sausage sleeves.”

So two days after S-Day, Anson began giving them away. “Anyone who needed a horse got one.”

Although there was no rush north, many London citizens—those who suspected German security services would soon be searching for them—knew it prudent to leave. Few cars and trucks had gasoline. Anson let it be known that he could make a few lorries useful again.

He told me, “Quarter horses aren’t draft animals, but they’ll do for a while. I put together twelve hauling teams, using old harnesses, some dating from the Crimean War, back when they were used on horses hauling artillery.”

“Last I’d see of them, my quarter horses would be pulling a loaded flatbed lorry, a family in the cab, all their possessions on the bed, and the driver perched on the bonnet trying to manage the reins.”

Anson admitted it was an odd sight. He stayed behind. “I had to look after my stable, even if it was empty.”

Clara Lowell had obeyed when ordered to “Dig for Victory,” and had planted a vegetable garden covering every inch of her yard near Osterly Park. Gardening was not her only contribution to the war effort. She had also been a member of the WVF, the Women’s Voluntary Service, a civil defense organization which, among other duties, aided in finding homes and clothes for evacuees.

“We called ourselves Widows, Virgins, and Spinsters.” She laughed. “But no one else dared.”

Most of her garden was still too green to harvest just after S-Day, and she feared the Germans would commandeer her produce. “So after months of lovingly tending my plantings, coaxing them from the ground, watering and feeding them, I ripped them all out of the ground, weeping all the while.”

Elbert Royden debated leaving London, but a wager kept him on his street in Mayfair and at his shovel and wheelbarrow. The morning after the first Luftwaffe bombs fell on London, early in the war, Royden and his neighbors gathered in his parlor and vowed they would never surrender their street to German explosives and that they would cart off every stone and pile of mortar and sweep up each speck of dust that might land on their street for the duration of the war. They bet themselves a bottle of Highland malt whiskey.

Many weeks Royden and his friends worked every evening until midnight, back-breaking labor with crowbars, shovels, wheelbarrows, and brushes. When I asked Royden why he did not desert the city, he replied in the tone I had become accustomed to, “Who would have continued our work on our street?”

I report here that at the end of the war, Royden’s avenue had lost three townhouses on one corner and four in the middle of the block. Other than those gaps, the street was in pristine condition. No mounds of rubble, no dust. Planters were in bloom, cobblestones were brushed, and windows were clean.

Royden concluded, “The Glenlivet made the entire effort worthwhile.”

By his own figuring, David Woodley lifted over four hundred thousand buckets of water during the war. “At the end of a night of it, my arms would hang down my sides like limp rags. I would not be able to lift a fork the next morning, could hardly shave myself.”

Woodley was a member of the London Fire Brigade. He was once a sailor, as were most brigade fire-fighters. He had trained endlessly on their new pumper. “It was a thing of beauty, a Dodge, made in America, ruby red, with brass nozzles and chrome plating on the mountings. We treated it like a royal lady.”

In May 1941, Woodley’s fire station in Chelsea was hit by a Luftwaffe bomb that demolished the pumper. “Could not be salvaged. We pitched the scrap metal to the Ministry of Works. There was no replacement to be had, not with the RAF needing Spitfires. So we fought the fires with buckets.”

Night after night, Woodley organized bucket lines among brigade members and pressed civilians. “I truly think we were more symbolic than anything else. Not much a bucket brigade can do against an entire city block on fire.”

If he was powerless against the blazes, why didn’t he flee London? I asked after the war.

He replied with the assurance of a man with a mission fulfilled, “We had nothing else, so we fought the bombers with symbols. It was an important fight, and I stayed for it.”

My personal lesson on British perseverance came from Rose Hadley. She was a Cockney, born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who proudly listed her trade as “washer woman.” Once a week Corporal Elliot dropped off General Clay’s and my laundry at her Cheapside shop. During our trip to London on the day before the invasion, Elliot drove by her shop to pick up the last batch of laundry. He returned to my office to say that Mrs. Hadley’s small business had been destroyed by fire and that she was nowhere to be found. He had seen her washing machine crushed under fallen rubble. We had grown fond of Mrs. Hadley.

Just when I thought Elliot might become teary, I heard this thunderous voice call out, “’Allo, darlin’s.”

Elliot spun to see Mrs. Hadley stepping into the office, dragging a child’s wagon filled with neatly folded uniform shirts and trousers.

The corporal cried out, “Mrs. Hadley! You’re OK!”

He rushed to her and clasped her in his arms.

She giggled and squirmed out of the embrace. “Ah, go on with you. It’s nothing your mother wouldn’t do.” (As with the Germans I interviewed, I’m translating. Her actual words were “Awr, gerwom wiv yer. Nuffink yer muvver weren’t do.”)

She had salvaged an old washing board, used a door as an ironing board, heated her irons over a fire in a pit dug in the debris, and was making deliveries in a borrowed wagon. She bade Elliot good-bye with “You Yanks like your shirts clean, I know that much.”

For me, Mrs. Hadley best represented London spirit in its time of crisis. Small courage was shown in quiet ways, thousands upon thousands of times each day.

We know now that a primary goal of the German High Command was to generate terror in the city and to start a massive, destabilizing exodus of frightened citizens that would leave London empty. It never came to pass. As General Clay seemed on the verge of losing his battle, Londoners had already begun winning theirs.

As far as I can determine, only one arrow was fired during the invasion. Roger Leeds, the elderly president of the Worthing Archery Club, let it fly, and as a result, he and the rest of Geoffrey Hurst’s guerrillas were added to the timeless scroll of English heroes. Today, ask any schoolboy in England to name his idols, and he’ll likely reply, “Geoffrey Hurst and Roger Leeds, and maybe Robin Hood.” Indeed, Fleet Street likened Hurst’s soldiers to Robin Hood’s band of merry men.

“I laughed at Leeds and his bow all those weeks of training,” Captain Hurst told me after the war. By then he was Sir Geoffrey. “The old bugger didn’t tell me he was the European archery champion three years running in the 1920s.”

By S-Day, Captain Hurst’s guerrilla cell had matured and was served by two signalmen, a clerk, and a storeman. They were supplied with a light ration of high explosives, ammunition, and booby traps. They had also been provided a base.

“Other strike forces—that’s what we were called by General Stedman, and I credited him with a sense of humor—had underground dugouts that had been excavated, roofed, and furnished with bunks and ventilation by the Royal Engineers. Ours was less opulent. It was an enlarged badgers’ sett in an abandoned chalkpit. I suppose badgers had lived there for fifty years. We walled off half their burrow and lived next to them. I’ve had worse neighbors.”

In their burrow, the guerrillas waited as the Germans rolled by overhead. “It was dark as pitch in there, and that old fool Roger Leeds kept poking me with his longbow. Panzers above, and one of my men was carrying a bow and arrows. I wanted to bawl.”

Hurst became a convert that night. The bow was made of yew and was six feet long. It could send a goose-feathered arrow three hundred yards with accuracy. “But Roger was less than thirty yards from his target.”

His target was a Wermacht sentry patrolling a home north of Worthing. The sentry’s squadron had collapsed in their bedrolls after the long channel crossing and the day of battle on English soil. The German guard was walking a random circuit around the grounds, his rifle hanging limply in his hand.

Hurst told me, “Just as he passed a poplar tree in front of the house, Roger’s arrow hit him, right through the neck, with such force that it pinned him to the tree. The German didn’t make a sound, just hung there limply and died. His rifle dropped to the grass.”

Gallant Robin Hood may not have behaved quite as Captain Hurst then did. His service knife between his teeth, Hurst crawled across the grass to the house’s front door. He carefully pushed it open. There were no lights inside. He heard the muffled breathing and turning and whimpering of exhausted men at sleep. The Wehrmacht infantrymen were scattered about the main room, two on davenports, the remainder on a Persian carpet.

Hurst moved silently to the first German. He gently put his hand over the sleeping soldier’s mouth and slit his throat. The man jerked and tightened, but made no more commotion than did his sleeping neighbors. After a moment, the guerrilla captain inched further along the carpet, passing by the next German, to the third enemy soldier. His knife worked again, its steel blade a soft glimmer in the darkness.

Hurst spent the next ten minutes dispensing death and granting life in an alternating pattern. His work done, he dragged himself through the front door, knowing Roger Leeds was covering him from behind a tree. The guerrillas escaped, the only casualty being Hurst’s stained clothing.

I have read an OKW report on Hurst’s action, written by the deputy chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, Colonel Hellmuth Hayn. The survivors of Captain Hurst’s attack awoke, terrified and aghast, each of them sandwiched between comrades whose necks were laid open. Their horror quickly spread to other German units. In Wehrmacht units near Worthing, all soldiers were put on watch-and-watch, where fully half the infantrymen were on guard at one time. Fear of the night became a contagion.

Geoffrey Hurst told me, “The Wehrmacht had not anticipated irregular warfare behind their lines, nothing like us, not so soon. Modern warfare is terrifying, and they had expected to move into regions where the English occupants were numbed and confused and preoccupied with surviving. The Germans hoped there would be little to fear behind their lines.”

They were wrong, with Captain Hurst and his men about. The Wehrmacht’s 4th Motorized Infantry Regiment, 20th Motorized Division, had landed in the second wave east of Brighton. One of their motorcycle squadrons was rushing to the front, a parade of ten motorcycles arrayed in pairs, along a lane near Storrington. They sped into Captain Hurst’s trap.

“We had never set off one of our fire barrels because of the shortage of petrol. General Stedman’s ordnance officers promised they would work, and we took their word on it.”

Hurst blew his whistle, and four of his men yanked the chords on the Flame Fougasses, driving small explosives charges into the barrels, which ignited the mix of lime, gasoline, and tar.

“They were like volcanoes, shooting out huge spumes of fiery molten liquid. The road was bathed in it. The Germans disappeared under the sticky, flaming mess. For a few yards, the motorcycles kept going, trailing fire. Then they went down, every one of them, caught in pools of fire, billowing flame and smoke. Several gas tanks blew. The road looked like a frying pan, sizzling and popping. The drivers flapped their arms and screamed, but the goo stuck to them, burning into them, twisting them up. It was a sight to curdle the blood.”

The assassination of Major General Albrecht Feldt was much cleaner. Feldt was commander of the Wehrmacht’s 20th Division, which landed in the second wave. Ever thorough, the Germans had brought their own currency. Feldt, whose troops had suffered from the Flame Fougasses and Hurst’s work with the knife, posted a reward of five thousand British occupation pounds for the capture of the guerrilla leader. On the third evening of the invasion, a local woman came forward, claiming she could name the guerrilla commander, that he was a neighbor who lived in Worthing.

The informer’s name was Adrienne Small, thirty-two years old, a waitress at the Steyne Gardens Hotel in Worthing, who had overheard parts of a conversation in the hotel’s restaurant just before the invasion. She was delivered to Major General Feldt at his field headquarters near Harrow Hill.

I interviewed Major Gerhard Wellner after the war. Wellner was General Feldt’s aide. He and several other 20th Division staff officers were standing around the general when Adrienne Small was brought to him.

“An informant may not otherwise have merited the general’s personal attention,” Wellner told me, “but General Feldt had been enraged by the guerrilla incident, the throat cutting. I served him for four years, and I never saw him so angry. He was taut with it. When General Feldt unsnapped his holster cover, I thought he was going to shoot her outright, without even questioning her.”

Wellner described the waitress. “I remember her hair best of all, for good reason as it turned out. Strands of it were in ringlets to her shoulder, but most of it was tied loosely behind her neck, quite breathtaking, brunette with traces of steel and straw colors mixed in. She had large eyes, freckles, and was rather frail. Her blouse was torn from the weapons search of her, I suspect. One of her eyes was blackened. I remember thinking she should have been frightened, but her eyes were lifeless.”

The general barked, “Tell me what you know. Who leads the irregulars? Be quick with it.”

“I want my money first,” she whispered.

Feldt nodded at Wellner, who withdrew a bundle of currency from an attaché case and passed it to her.

The woman turned the packet in her hand, squinting at it. “I’ve never seen money like this before.”

“It’s occupation currency,” Feldt said, reddening at her insolence. His balled fist tapped the butt of his Luger.

She read from the top bill, “‘British Occupation Pound.’ I don’t know if five thousand of these will buy a loaf of bread or a home.”

His mouth curling down and his fist rising, General Feldt stepped closer to the woman.

Major Wellner told me, “That’s when it happened. She was so quick she must have practiced and practiced the move. Her hand shot to her head to pull out the comb that had been holding her hair in place. It had tortoise shell tines, but attached to it was a blade the length of a finger. In one smooth, angry motion she brought it around and jammed the blade deep into General Feldt’s eye socket. He collapsed instantly.”

The knife had plunged through the socket to the German’s brain. He was dead before he was horizontal.

“One of the general’s guards immediately brought out a pistol and emptied the clip at her. She fell over General Feldt’s body.”

Wellner shook his head. “General Feldt’s death was a great loss, to the Wehrmacht and to me personally. I still miss him. He was a good soldier and commander, a man troops were proud to follow.”

The major added wistfully, “But perhaps it is just as well he did not live to see what was to come.”

Adrienne Small was one of Captain’s Hurst’s guerrillas. I asked Hurst if this had been a planned assassination.

“Planned to the last detail.”

I was intrigued. “Except for her escape. You must have known what would happen to her.”

The pain on Sir Geoffrey’s face made me regret my allegation.

“We had a plan to get her out,” he said. “But she was dead before we could do anything.” He breathed deeply, then added, “I haven’t told you that I married Adrienne a week before the invasion.”

It was Captain Hurst’s nature that he would extract a payment in kind from the Germans. Later that day General Feldt’s deputy ordered a reprisal for the general’s murder. Thirty Storrington villagers were dragged from their basement hiding places by soldiers of the 20th Division’s headquarters company.

Forest Grayson was among the captives. He recalled after the war, “The Germans prodded us with their rifle stocks toward the wall, yelling at us in their awful language. I was so frightened the fellow next to me, John Derwin the baker, had to take my arm and help me along.”

The villagers were lined up along an ivy-covered wall near the Anglican chapel. “We were the old, the lame, and the toothless. Not much of a retribution, really. They shoved us back against the wall. A Wehrmacht armored car watched over the operation, its machine gun pointing at us.”

Captain Hurst gave the specifications. “It was a Horch armored car, a four-by-four, with a crew of three and an MG 34.”

Grayson said, “Then the Germans formed a column in front of us, their rifles at the ready. I honestly cannot remember if I was weeping, or whether it was John Derwin. As I got older, I had begun to pray that I would meet my end with dignity. This wasn’t it.”

A lieutenant marched up. “He was full of purpose, that one. He yelled an order, and the soldiers straightened, their rifles at their sides. Then he gave commands, and the rifles came up. I was light-headed with fear, and I grabbed the hand next to me, Derwin’s maybe, or maybe it was the pub owner Matthew Trahern’s. And then, by God, the German soldiers just began disintegrating. That was my impression. Their heads popped open, their arms tore away, gaps opened in their chests, and they all spilled over backwards, kicking and bucking.”

The armored car’s machine gun had opened up, cutting through the firing squad.

“And I must be truly be old,” Grayson said, “because I don’t remember the sound of it.”

Captain Hurst added, “There was plenty of sound inside the armored car, I can assure you.”

Hurst and his men had found the armored car at the edge of town, with its hatch open and its crew inattentive. With a pistol in his hand, Hurst had leaped up to the engine housing, then dropped through the hatch.

“We had a ride, quick as a wink. But it was tight in there, with three of us, and the three dead German crewmen on the car’s floor, and Roger Leeds’s goddam longbow poking me all the time.”

Forest Grayson told me, “Well, I didn’t know it was Captain Hurst at the time, of course. But we learned soon enough, the whole town did. All of England did. He sure made the Germans jump, didn’t he?”

Hurst’s team and the other guerrilla forces in southern England were a costly diversion to the Wehrmacht. The Germans were forced to tie up many times the guerrillas’ number trying to protect themselves and locate guerrilla bases. But dash and daring could not fully recompense the guerrillas for their lack of men and supplies and arms. Seventy percent of them died before the battle for England ended.

English civilians could be likened, with apologies, to the hair on a dog’s back. The invaders landed, and the English rose up with acts of defiance great and small.

Ava Singleton, who had earlier been surprised to find that the paratrooper in her apple tree at the Goldings was a dummy, had surprises of her own in store for the Germans. They were in her pantry.

“My mother taught me to can fruit when I was a lass. I put up preserves every year. I cannot tolerate fruit canned in a factory. Stawberries, raspberries, I preserve them all, nice as ninepence.”

Like all other Britons, Mrs. Singleton had known the Germans were coming for many months. “So I canned some deadly nightshade berries. Made preserves out of them. I added raspberries to ease some of the tartness.”

I asked, “And you put them on shelf next to the strawberry preserves?”

She nodded. “But I labeled them in ink, plain as day. Each jar—there were six of them—had ‘Nightshade Preserves,’ on it. If whoever took those jars could not read the king’s English, he deserved what he got, and I wouldn’t fancy his chances.”

Apparently none of the soldiers of the Wehrmacht’s 5th Infantry Regiment’s Infanterischulzkampanie (a specially designated artillery unit attached to the regiment) could read English. On their way to the front the soldiers looted Mrs. Singleton’s pantry and spread her preserves over their black-bread ration.

Three of them died in agony. Another four were returned to the Continent on a hospital evacuation ship.

Mrs. Singleton added, “Serves them right, stealing from an old woman’s pantry.”

Coal miner Allen Lewes had spent two days walking and stealing rides from passing trucks, escaping his Northumberland coal mine and the Essential Work Order that had kept him there.

“I didn’t really know where I was, just looking for the war so I could be part of it.”

Lewes wandered south until he found himself behind German lines. When I spoke with him, he went to some length to appear to have been bumbling and lost, when in fact he moved with calculation and purpose, intent on inflicting damage on the enemy.

“I had in mind joining some crack British army unit. Me, a coal miner straggling in from the north. It strikes me as laughable now. So I found myself behind the German lines.”

I asked how one simply wandered behind the front.

“I went from burned-out house to burned-out house, always heading toward the smoke.”

He had no weapons, no training. “I was a bit angry, though,” he told me. “The bloody gall of those people, crossing the channel and landing on our soil like they owned it.”

Lewes waited until night. “I figured that burning gasoline down the hatch of one those panzers wouldn’t help them any. So I siphoned petrol from a lorrie into a gin bottle.”

The coal miner crawled through thickets to reach the tank, moving no more than a yard a minute, knowing there must be sentries around.

“Holding this bottle of petrol, a box of matches in my trousers pocket, staying under the bushes, it was slow progress. And I couldn’t see anything except this black metal mass in front of me, darker than the night. I could hear one of the panzer’s crewmen snoring from inside the turret, so I knew the hatch must be open.”

Night magnified sounds, and Lewes thought every twig he snapped would bring the enemy running. “I finally reached the tank and gripped a tread, then levered myself up the tank. I climbed over its trackguard, then onto the deck, then I stood alongside the turret. The hatch was open. Holding the bottle between my knees, I lifted the matches from my pocket and struck one against the box. I struck and struck it. It wouldn’t light. My crawl through the damp underbrush had made them all sodden.”

The Ausf E tank and its crew were safe, for the moment.

“So down I went. I couldn’t see anything, and my pants got caught on a spare track link stowed on the front. I freed my leg, then slipped down to the ground. The German kept up his snoring.”

I interviewed Lewes in a pub in Newcastle. He sipped his ale, then used his glass to point to others in the establishment. “A lot of these Geordies were stuck underground during the invasion. Not me.”

He ordered another ale. “Now, Mr. Royce, you would think that a box of matches would be the easiest thing in the world to find. But it took me three hours.”

Lewes visited four destroyed farm houses looking in the rubble for matches. He searched through fireplace utensils and in kitchen drawers. Finally, in the fifth he found a pottery jar where the family stored them. “I must have walked ten miles. Then back I went, the same route, through the stickers and thickets, this time with the matches in my shirt pocket wrapped around a handkerchief. Up the tank I went.”

The match fired on the first strike. “It sounded like a rasp on iron. But that German kept on snoring. I hauled back with my hand and threw the bottle through the hatch. I heard it crash, and I heard one of them inside yell. I dropped the match into the turret. Then I lit two more as fast as I could. I never saw flames inside the tank, because I didn’t want to wait. And I never saw smoke, because it was dark. I jumped down and sprinted away, too afraid to look back. I never learned what happened to that tank.”

After the war, I tried to ascertain what Lewes could not. I deduced that the miner carried on his one-man irregular war in the area of the Wehrmacht’s 1st Mountain Division. I spent two days studying the division’s after-action reports. Sure enough, an Ausf E, commanded by Lieutenant Gregor Marcks, 1st Battalion, 15th Panzer Regiment, attached to the 1st Mountain, suffered an interior fire, killing Marcks and his crew. The report concluded the fire was caused by a gasoline bomb.

I thought Lewes would be ecstatic when I relayed my discovery to him.

Instead, he scratched his head and said, “I’ve come to think lately that miners who stayed underground contributed as much.”

Vicar Richard Richman had already killed one German with his Austin Twelve, running him over like a mole on the road. Two nights later he was roughly evicted from his chapel by a Wehrmacht infantry colonel. I had done my homework here, also, and was able to tell the vicar it had been Colonel Joachim Scheringer of the 14th Panzerauklärungsabteilung (armored recon unit), 35th Infantry Division. Scheringer used the chapel as a field headquarters.

“I watched from the choral pews in the balcony,” the vicar told me. “The colonel was with six or seven of his staff. They spread their maps over the communion table, shoving aside the goblets and candle holders, treating them as if they had no meaning. I thought I had left my anger on the road, with that German I had run my auto over. I hadn’t. Again, I was gripped by an unholy anger.”

Richman descended the stone steps from the balcony. The recon unit’s heavy and light armored cars were scattered about. “One had backed through the picket fence into the cemetery next to the chapel, pushing over headstones, some two hundred years old.”

The priest stepped outside, along the gravel path toward the cemetery. Wehrmacht medics were tending the wounded under a tent near the graveyard. Several of the injured soldiers had been quickly stripped of their uniforms and provisions.

“A small pile of clothing and weapons lay next to the tent. I looked left and right. Soldiers milled about. They saw my white collar and perhaps thought I was there to give last rites, and paid no more attention to me.”

They should have. The vicar removed a stick grenade from the pile of discarded clothing and weapons. Blood dripped from its wood handle. He quickly shoved it under his tunic and walked back to the chapel.

“I knew the colonel was standing under my stained glass window, and the realization of what I had to do crushed me. That window dated from 1770. It portrayed Christ as a shepherd gathering his flock, and at the edges were geometrical medallions, many quatrefoils and lozenges, in red and blue and purple and green. It was beautiful to behold, an inspiration to all my faithful, the pride of the parish.”

The vicar twisted the grenade’s handle, then launched it at the rose window. He missed.

“It hit the stone frame around the window, and fell back, landing at my feet with a soft plop in the grass. I was terrified.”

He snatched it up, wound up like a cricket bowler, and released it. This time his aim was true.

“To see the grenade smash through the window broke my heart.”

It did worse to the 14th Panzerauklärungsabteilung’s staff. Colonel Scheringer was killed instantly, as were three of his staff. Four others were wounded.

Still appearing to be his pious self and ignored by the soldiers who rushed toward the chapel to investigate the explosion, the vicar strolled into the weald.

“I hid in Agnes Smathers’ cellar. She is the woman to whom I regularly administer last rites. I’m pleased to report she survived the war and will probably outlive me.”

Other civilians called themselves to arms. Peter Rathbone was a beekeeper near Royal Tunbridge Wells. Dressed in his protective gear, he found a paper wasp nest under the eaves of his barn, tore it off with his gloved hand, walked fifty yards to an armored personnel carrier, shook it furiously, then tossed it into the open hatch.

His neighbors, with whom I spoke after the war, called it a foolish waste. A dozen Wehrmacht infantrymen were stung badly, but Rathbone paid with his life, shot in the back as he turned to run from the APC.

Wendell Thorley had learned his lesson about saving petrol the hard way. He was a machinist with his own shop and six employees. Because he was an essential worker, he was allotted extra ration points. Several months before S-Day, he had been stopped and required to prove his journey was necessary and that he was on the shortest route. He was on his way to the cinema. He was prosecuted, then acquitted by a compassionate judge. But the humiliated Thorley viewed the prosecution as a claim by His Majesty’s Government that he was not doing his part in the war effort.

From then on, he saved every drop of petrol he could, siphoning it from his automobile and storing it in a thirty-gallon drum. He swore he would put it to good effect some day. During the third night of the invasion, Thorley added five cups of metal shavings to the barrel, then rolled it to the petrol station near his shop. He left it near the pump, then hid in the glade across the lane. Next morning, four Wehrmacht motorcycle troops stopped at the station. The pumps were empty, but the fuel in the barrel smelled fine. They poured it into their tanks.

“I ran after them,” Thorley told me. “It took me a while to catch up with the buggers, but there they were, strung out along a quarter mile of road, each soldier kicking his starter or kneeling alongside his motorcyle, trying to find out the problem. Those shavings had stripped their pistons. I still laugh about it.”

The Moulten sisters would not claim to be as inventive. Edith and Edina Moulten were identical twins, Edith the older by seventeen minutes. They were widows in their late sixties who had taken to calling themselves by their maiden name after both husbands had perished, which they did within a month of each other. Both had silver hair and glittering, astute blue eyes. Their animation and their enjoyment of life and each other pared years away from them.

Edith was a telephone operator, an essential worker who was not moved north. Edina, who taught piano lessons in their cottage on the outskirts of Horsham, would not go without her. Both were secret port tipplers, drinking three or four glasses each evening after the last student departed. The sisters had seen the shortages coming and had stockpiled several cases of the fortified wine in their cellar.

A trap door under the throw rug in the sitting room led to the cellar. They hid their few silver serving pieces there. It was a cool place, ideal for storing summer fruit.

When they heard artillery, the twins climbed down into the cellar to wait out the danger. They could not pull the rug behind them over the trap door. Less than six hours later, the door was yanked open by a Wehrmacht infantryman.

“I have never been so frightened,” Edith recalled. I was interviewing them in their new flat in Horsham. “There he was, with a blackened face and big boots, his rifle pointing down at us. Edina here had taken to the drink a little early that day, so she fared better than I did.”

Edina gently slapped her sister’s knee. “A scoundrel, you are, sister.”

Edith went on, “They yelled ‘Rause, rause,’ at us. I don’t speak German, but I knew well enough what they meant. Edina and I started to climb up, and they pulled us the rest of the way through the door.”

“None too gently, either,” Edina clarified. “There were only two of them, both carrying rifles. Then,” she clasped the broach at her throat, “they threw me onto the sofa. I almost broke my leg.”

“You did not come close to breaking your leg, dearie,” Edith interrupted.

“Then the leader—he might have been a corporal or a major, I would not know—descended the stairs to the cellar and called out something. The other followed him down, and they opened one of our bottles of port. I could hear them chortling and carrying on.”

Edith’s voice broke as she added, “They just left us there, forgotten, two helpless old widows.”

Well, not quite helpless. The sisters acted with the special intuition twin’s share. They did not say a word to each other. Their piano was an upright on rollers. They leaned into it.

“I pushed so hard I thought my bridgework would pop out,” Edith told me. “But I knew we could move it, because every six months we did so to dust the floor.”

They rolled it three feet. Just as the piano reached the cellar, Edith threw the hatch into place. The twins pushed and pulled, and a pair of piano legs rolled into place on the hatch.

“We heard them yell, and we heard them hit the underside of the hatch with their rifle stocks. But they were trapped.”

I knew the answer from reading about it—the Moulten sisters were received as heroes by the king after the war—but I asked anyway, “Then what did you do?”

Edina replied, “I had never favored our window curtains, had you, Edith?”

She giggled. “No, not at all. So we set fire to them. Then to the sofa, then to newspapers we were collecting for salvage. We left the cottage just in time.”

Edith completed their story. “Soon the roar of the fire drowned out the Germans’ screaming. We heard the pinging of the piano strings as they snapped from the heat. Our home burned to the foundation. We lived with our brother in Crawley until the war ended. We miss that little cottage. But perhaps less so than we should, knowing there are two cooked Germans in the cellar.” She chuckled, “Cooked, and basted in port.”

These accounts have been representative samples, no more dramatic than a thousand others. English civilians did not take kindly to the Germans, and throughout Kent and Sussex they extracted their small tolls from the invaders.

20

“When did she begin to love him?”

The British historian Joseph Windham asked me the question after the war. He was working on a biography of Lady Anne Percival’s father, Earl Selden.

I answered rather testily that she never did love General Clay, that she was incapable of the emotion, that the very notion was preposterous. Lady Anne did not love, she devoured. And if she appeared smitten, it was only because she possessed a singular talent for presenting herself as she wished. Her infatuation was an act to suit her purposes, murky as those purposes were.

Windham replied, “Now that you’ve vented your spleen, I’ll ask again. When did she begin to love him?”

If love existed, it must have had a starting point, and I can recall several times when I may have witnessed its inception in Lady Anne.

It may have been at a British Army military hospital in Glasgow, which we visited during one of the general’s countless tours before the invasion. The hospital, a somber brick structure built as a woolen mill 150 years before, was filled with soldiers wounded in the North Africa campaign. Lady Anne had been appointed to something called the Women’s Hospital Advisory Committee and claimed it gave her the right to join us. On that day she led us into the long-term convalescence ward. British soldiers struggled upright in their beds or turned their heads toward us. A few rose unsteadily and saluted the general. They grinned at the honor. General Clay loudly greeted them, then walked slowly along the line of beds, speaking with them one at a time, shaking hands, returning salutes, patting shoulders.

He came to one soldier who was staring at the ceiling. A sheet covered him to his neck. He rapidly opened and closed his eyes and wet his lips in a mysterious syncopation, but seemed oblivious to our visit. Clay stopped at the end of his bed. Lady Anne, the British colonel who was the hospital director, and I gathered around him. Clay asked, “Tell me where the German got you, soldier.”

The wounded man did not respond, but a serviceman in a bed across the aisle called out, “The Germans had nothing to do with it, General. The chap is taking a few weeks off from the war, is all. A bit of a holiday.”

Another soldier, with a leg elevated in a cast, said loudly, “He’s supposed to be shell-shocked, general. But he eats fine, whatever is served. And he reads his mail. And you know how dreary it is on the front, sleeping on rocks and cactus, and having to put up with those pesky Germans.”

Someone else shouted, “Pigeon-hearted bastard.”

General Clay pulled at his chin. He lifted the chart from the foot of the bed and glanced at it. Then he leaned closer to the shell-shocked soldier. He said in intimate tones, yet sufficiently resonant for all to hear, “I’ve kept this a secret for decades, Private Sidwell, but this same thing happened to me in the Great War.”

A chorus of laughter came from the British soldiers.

One shouted, “Sure it did, General.”

“Right-o, General,” said another. “And I’m the Prince of Wales, just as soon as I can convince my doctor.”

The soldier with the elevated leg chortled, “You’re a real tonic, General. A regular Ben Lyon.”

Lyon was the radio comedian who appeared with his wife, Bebe Daniels, on the show Hi Gang!

Clay grinned at them, but held up a hand. “Let me finish.” He turned back to Private Sidwell. “It didn’t happen during the first artillery battle I was in, but the second, which I’ve always found curious. I was a battery officer, and we were trading rounds with the German. The sound was unbearable. It just collapsed my will. I was shaking so badly I could hardly give the firing sequence. And then one of my pieces was taken out by German artillery, splattered my gunners all over French soil.”

General Clay stood stiffly to his full height. He gazed at the ward wall, his mouth turning down. He seemed lost in the remembrance. “And then I just sat down on the edge of a crater and stayed there. I couldn’t move. I was taken to a hospital in Rouen and stayed there for three weeks.”

Lady Anne stared at him, indiscreetly, I thought.

“The dunderheads in the army didn’t understand the injury back then, and I would’ve been drummed out of the service if Alex Hargrave hadn’t covered for me. He lied on all sorts of reports and finagled the doctors at the hospital into doing the same. To this day, only four or five people know what actually happened to me, and where I was for those weeks.”

He turned to the wounded soldiers. He put an edge of mock belligerence in his voice, “And now you Tommies know, so don’t go talking it around, or my reputation will be shot.”

They called out, “Yes, sir.”

“I was hurt badly, but there was no blood. Same as this man here.”

“Yes, sir.”

The general may not have convinced them, but at least they quieted. Private Sidwell, blinking and running his tongue over his lips, gave no indication he had heard Clay. We moved down the aisle between the beds. The general spoke briefly with dozens of wounded soldiers. All the while I felt the deflected heat of adoration from Lady Anne, who at one point stumbled over a lamp cord because she had been unable to remove her eyes from the general.

I add, with admitted petulance, that I have searched records of the British war government and auxiliary organizations, and find no reference whatever to the Women’s Hospital Advisory Committee. I suspect she invented it to accompany him. The committee may not have been the only invention that day. I thoroughly searched General Clay’s records from the first war, and find no mention of a stay at a hospital in Rouen. Either Alex Hargrave superbly covered up the incident, or General Clay concocted the story on the spot at the Glasgow hospital.

This hospital tour may have been when her love began, or it may have been when General Clay and Lady Anne visited the lambing station on the earl’s farm. The general knew nothing about sheep and may have thought he was about to witness a shearing. As always, I followed at their heels.

The station was a squat barn with one wall open to the pasture. Stalls were filled with straw. The spring scent of alfalfa and the bleating of the Hampshire ewes and their newborn filled the barn. Three farmhands touched their caps to Lady Anne.

She led us along the sheep shed. “Have you ever seen a lamb come into the world, Wilson?”

The general looked sharply at her. “Born? I’ve never seen anything being born.”

“It’s an unforgettable experience,” she said.

The general shook his head. “I’ve gone a long way out of my way to avoid watching anything being born.”

“I thought you spent your childhood in the farm country,” she chided.

Clay replied, “My father was a banker, not a farmer. He had no stomach for this kind of thing either, the coward.”

Lady Anne exchanged a few words with one of the hands. The worker nodded and led her along the shed. We followed to a lambing pen, where another farmhand was tending to a ewe. He clucked and stroked the ewe’s head.

Lady Anne said, “May we watch, Bart?”

“Of course, ma’am.” Bart was about sixty years old and was wearing suspenders and pants tucked into his boots. “She’s about ready to drop. Just a few moments now.”

The ewe was on her side, her head in Bart’s hand. A rear leg was raised slightly. The animal lowered her head to lick herself, then returned it to Bart’s ministrations. She bleated feebly.

“What’s going on here?” the general demanded.

“Here it comes,” Bart said. He reached down, prepared to help if needed.

“There’s the lamb’s head,” Lady Anne said. “Look, its eyes are already open.”

“You’re doing just fine,” Bart cooed. “There’s a doll.”

Fascinated, I leaned against a post at the edge of the pen. I had seen kittens being born, but nothing else. No mistake, it is a bizarre process. Out came this wet and slimy wad, not recognizable as anything alive or cherished.

Lady Anne said, “I visit the sheep station every season, and love to watch…” Her voice wavered. She touched away a tear. “And every time I recall chances lost, of how my life might have been different, perhaps children.”

Lady Anne Percival as a mother was not an image that easily formed.

The lamb lay on the straw. Already it was raising its head and trying to lift a front leg. The ewe stroked her newborn with her tongue, cleaning and nudging it. Bart beamed.

Lady Anne pursued her theme. “I’ve often thought that had I been born into a commoner’s family, or had my schooling been less rigid, or had I not chased off to the Continent, my life would have been more fulfilling.” She exhaled slowly. “Wilson, do you ever have second thoughts? Do you ever wonder about another life, one you chose not to live?” She turned away from the ewe and lamb, searching for his eyes.

General Clay had disappeared. I turned with her, looking for him, a bit alarmed. I seldom had him out of my sight and was not comfortable when he was. I followed her down the aisle, looking left and right. Our pace quickened.

We found him sitting on a bale, his face as white as the ewe’s wool. His mouth was slack and his eyes were fogged. He was panting. His voice was a weak tremolo. “Jack, it’s your goddamn job to make sure I don’t see things like that.”

“Yes, sir.”

He stood unsteadily, bracing himself against a pen gate. “I mean, Jesus, I signed up as a general, not an obstetrician.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lady Anne put her hand under his arm to support him. He leaned into her and let her lead him out of the sheep station. I walked after them, but I stepped in a pile of sheep dung and had to stop and scrape it off my shoe using a pen slat.

I caught up to them at the door. She was still holding his arm and was gazing up at him. Neither spoke. She smiled at him in a proprietary way. When he turned to her, I could see the chagrin on his face.

As we neared her car, she said, as sweetly as I ever heard her say anything, “What a big baby you are.”

So the sheep shed may have been where she began to love him. Or it may have been at the country home of Arthur Stedman, who was hosting a reception for General Alfred Alexander, commander in chief of Joint Army Operations. The home was Isselhurst Castle in Kent. Two red brick turrets rose above a random array of Elizabethan and Tudor buildings. The estate was surrounded by apple and cobnut trees and by one of the premier gardens in southern England.

The garden was strictly formal, with geometric enclosures and axial paths. The areas were named the East Courtyard, the Nuttery, the Spring Garden, and the Rose Garden and were planted so that each area was particularly resplendent during one season. At that time of year the Spring Garden was filled with hellebores, peonies, lilies, and pots of blue clematis. The finest in Kent, the gardens offered a reprieve from thoughts of the coming battle.

Lady Anne must have thought them competitors. My clearest memory of her startling beauty is from that evening. She had gone to extraordinary lengths, it seemed to me, to eclipse her surroundings, both the gardens and the other guests. Because of the war shortages of soap and perfumes and cosmetics, many English women thought it unpatriotic to bother with one’s appearance. Lady Anne defied that notion altogether.

That evening at General Alexander’s home she wore a black silk dress that flared in even a slight breeze, its folds marking her passage by languorously wafting behind her. The dress was gathered around her waist by a black eelskin belt. Suspended from her neck was a diamond that Alexander’s ADC told me was named the Christiana Star. She carried a clutch ornamented with black beads and a spray of diamonds. Her sable hair was pulled behind her neck by a black ribbon. Her shimmering green eyes stole the Christiana Star’s glory.

She and Generals Clay and Stedman had gathered at the bar in the Spring Garden. Stedman sipped a highball. Clay spoke with his hands behind his back. Across a narrow table from them, a bartender arranged glasses and utensils and bottles of liquor and seltzer, occasionally mixing a drink for a guest who approached and made a request.

Talking with Alexander’s ADC, I had wandered too far from General Clay. I crossed the grass toward them, passing Clement Attlee and Lord Lindley and his wife. General Sutton of Fighter Command and his American counterpart General Ward Wallace were talking in another corner of the Spring Garden.

This next happened quickly. As I neared General Clay, I heard him say, “I never lose an argument. My rank of general assures that.”

She smiled and said, “You lose quite every argument you have with me, Wilson.”

General Stedman pulled a pipe and a packet of tobacco from his jacket pocket. He chuckled, “Wilson, you don’t have the strength to win an argument with Lady Anne. I doubt anyone in the kingdom does.”

She nodded at Stedman for the compliment and persisted, “Doubtless you have an easy time with most people you meet, Wilson, because your rank allows you to dominate. I dare say that a quarrel among equals daunts you.”

“Such as this quarrel?” Clay asked, an edge in his voice.

“You have not had the need to develop wit or humor or the art of the polemic, not when you can yell at your inferiors, and thus end all discussion.”

Stedman’s eyebrows rose. This was an uncomfortable spat. He had just joined Lady Anne and General Clay and had not heard how it began. Neither had I. Stedman looked around for a gracious escape.

Clay lifted himself on his toes. “Lady Anne, your ignorance of battle tactics assures you will lose this argument.”

“Changing the subject is a desperate ploy on our bumbling American friend’s part, don’t you think, Arthur?”

Clay said, “Every commander knows there can never be too many projectiles in battle or in an argument.”

With that, General Clay swiftly reached across the table for a bottle of seltzer. He brought it up, aimed it by tilting it back, then squeezed the handle.

A jet of foaming seltzer shot out of the bottle’s spigot and instantly crossed to Lady Anne. Water surged onto her, entirely hiding her face, then cascading down over her dress and shoes. Clay kept his finger on the trigger, and the torrent flowed and flowed, drenching her and falling over her clothing to the lawn. Droplets splashed away, a few landing on General Stedman’s uniform sleeve. The bottle finally hissed, and the stream sputtered and bubbled to an end.

Lady Anne’s mouth was open and her hands were held away from her hips. Her hair was plastered flat against her skull. Water trickled off her cheeks and her nose and ears. Her makeup ran down her face. Her silk dress looked like a damp washrag, a shapeless mess. Her handbag was on the grass. She could not utter a word.

Neither could General Stedman nor Clement Attlee nor the bartender nor any of the others.

Wilson Clay calmly returned the seltzer bottle to the table and said, “It appears I have just won that argument, does it not, Lady Anne?”

He marched away and I followed. If the more we love, the nearer we are to hate, as La Rochefoucauld said, then this may have been the moment Lady Anne began to love General Clay.

Or it may have been at her father’s funeral. Earl Selden died five days before the invasion. The service was performed at the family chapel. Generals Clay and Stedman attended, then walked with the family to the burial plot. Mist fell in long, trailing curtains that hid surrounding hills. Mowing of most cemeteries had been forgotten for the war, so the grass was long, and it soaked my pants to the calves. The first Earl Selden, who died in 1798, was buried nearby, the headstone speckled with moss and the engraving made shallow by age.

With the gasoline shortages and with memorial services having lost their novelty because of the war, few attended the earl’s funeral, no more than forty people. We huddled around the hole in the ground and listened to the bishop’s brief words. The casket was made of cherry because metal was too dear to put into the ground.

Anne Percival was stricken. She stood apart from other mourners, wearing a black wool coat with an upturned collar that rose to her ears. Several friends approached her to put a hand on her arm or to whisper a few words, but she might not have been aware of them. She stared only at the casket. Several times she sagged forward, as if the effort to stand were too much, and would catch herself with a quick step ahead. General Clay did not approach her.

There was nothing august about the affair, held out in a rural graveyard, with the thick, drenching haze and the almost rudely abrupt service. Even I, an American not attuned to the protocol of English nobility, felt this small ceremony was insufficient for an earl, who had served with distinction in the military and as a military theoretician later in life. His daughter may also have sensed the inadequacy of the parting, adding to her grief.

As pallbearers reached for the lines to lower the casket into the ground, a U.S. Army truck crested the hill to the east and rolled toward the cemetery. It was a 7.5-ton Mack with a tarpaulin-draped box and a white star painted on the door. The truck stopped at the graveyard. General Clay nodded.

American soldiers carrying M1s jumped from the back of the truck. A lieutenant climbed down from the cab and waved them into a line at the edge of the plot. The pallbearers slowly lowered the casket.

Lady Anne’s eyes moved to the soldiers. The lieutenant snapped an order, and the line of ten GIs came to attention. At an order, they brought their rifles up, pointed at the clouds.

“Ready, aim, fire,” the lieutenant ordered.

The rifles crackled.

“Ready, aim, fire.”

They sounded eleven times, bringing needed dignity and recognition to the ritual, a gift to Lady Anne from the general. The lieutenant ordered the weapons lowered. The soldiers stood at attention while the bishop ended the ceremony with another reading from the Bible.

Lady Anne shed her first tears for her father during the rifle salute, and that may have been when she began to love the general.

As I look back now, I realize that I have tried to diminish in my mind Lady Anne’s importance to the general. But Wilson Clay was a man bound by duty, and she did not sway him from it. My last visit to her home, Haldon House, proved this beyond all doubt. I will detail what I learned there later in this narrative.

Adolf Hitler’s plan was to dismantle Great Britain. Two thousand years of national evolution were to be reversed. The realm’s institutions were to be torn down, its society extinguished, its history suppressed, its people driven into vassalage. The kingdom was to be reduced to a colony.

The führer had counted on the terror of his coming to begin the disintegration. Frightened to their national soul, the British would disassemble their heritage themselves, abandoning it, destroying it, fleeing with it, hiding it, renouncing it. The cement of British national identity would be dissolved by the time of his triumphant march into London.

Hitler’s singular mistake of the war was to misjudge British character. As General Clay once delicately put it, “The Brits sometimes act like they’ve got corks up their butts, but they are steadfast, I’ll give them that.” This solidity and refusal to desert their birthright manifested itself time and time again.

Victoria Haselhurst, who had witnessed the fire bombing of Norwich and had begun a long walk toward her home in Ipswich, was evidence of this trait. She had slept that night in a barn with a dozen other Norwich refugees. The morning of the invasion she began south again.

“By midday, I was exhausted,” she told me after the war. “My dress was soaked through, my shoes were falling apart. I was soiled and hungry and angry and frightened.”

The roads had filled with troop trucks and tanks of the British II Corps rushing south. Long lines of displaced civilians walked both ways, north and south, no one knowing the direction of safety.

“I spent half the time lying in ditches alongside the road because German airplanes kept hitting the convoys. Every time I climbed out of a ditch, I would be covered again with stickers and weeds and mud.”

AACCS had determined that restricting movement of reinforcements to the hours of darkness would mean they would arrive too late. The drawn-out lines of British armored vehicles and trucks simply had to endure the Luftwaffe. Mounted AA guns fired back with little effect. High British losses were inevitable. Fields were shortly strewn with burning wrecks that had been pushed off the roads to allow other vehicles to pass. Smoke rose across Norfolk and Suffolk in evenly spaced columns marking the roadways.

“Most all vehicles were moving south,” Victoria Haselhurst recalled, “but one lorry in olive and brown camouflage rolled toward me coming from the direction of London. The road was narrow, so it had wheels on the shoulder of the road as it came. I could see the driver through the windscreen. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought peculiar. At that moment, I heard an explosion from behind me and I leaped into the ditch. An elderly fellow landed on top of me and shouted an apology as he crawled off. Others crowded the ditch.”

I asked, “What kind of planes were they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she replied.

“Strafing or bombing?”

She laughed lightly. Her blond hair had grown out from her war cut and fell almost to her shoulders. “I have no idea. I pushed my head into the mud in the ditch and did not lift it until the explosions ended.”

When she arose—it might have been five minutes later—the north-bound truck was upended. Its cargo box had been ripped open. The truck was on fire, along with a burning Bren gun carrier and a Leyland Hippo truck that had been hauling a Cruiser Mark III tank. Craters had been blown into the roadway. Twisted fragments of the vehicles were spread over the fields and road.

Haselhurst told me she should have heard the cries of the wounded and should have rushed to aid them, but the glittering from the roadside pebbles at her feet transfixed her. She lowered herself to pull a sparkling object from a torn black velvet bag.

“I recognized it instantly,” she told me. “Any of the king’s subjects would have. It was the Imperial State Crown. I carefully lifted it to my eye. It was lighter than I would have thought, but I had to squint to look at it, so bright was the reflection off the stones.”

The crown was worn at all state occasions except the coronation, for which the monarch wears the St. Edward’s Crown. The Imperial State Crown was set with over three thousand stones, including the Black Prince’s ruby (given to the prince by Pedro the Cruel of Castile after the battle of Najara in 1367), the Stuart sapphire (first seen during the reign of Edward IV in the fifteenth century), and the Second Star of Africa (one of the nine stones cut from the enormous Cullinan diamond in 1908).

“And here this lass from Norfolk had it in her hand,” she recalled with a bright smile. “I was dumbstruck.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Why, I tried it on. When else would I be presented with that opportunity? The king must have a larger head than I, because it fell to the bridge of my nose. Then I began to think wearing the crown might not be appropriate, so I removed it.”

By then other refugees were scrambling after pieces of the crown jewels. The Royal Scepter, containing the 530-carat Star of Africa was found by a Norwich automobile mechanic. Intricately worked bracelets and plate were found in the ditch. Gold spurs made for Charles II’s coronation were recovered. The King’s Orb, dented but whole, was found in a furrow by a Norwich waitress. The Imperial Crown of India, made for George V to wear at the Delhi Curbar in 1912, was pulled from the burning bed of the truck by a public school student.

“A man wearing a smith’s apron found a finely wrought sword. I thought the bomb blast had destroyed it, but learned later it was the Sword of Justice, which had always had a broken blade.”

Haselhurst also found the jeweled Sword of State, but an elderly woman pulled it from her grasp. The sword had been damaged and several diamonds and rubies were left behind in the dirt. Haselhurst scooped them up.

“Within just a few minutes, all of it had been gathered. It had been a furious rush. We acted like looters.”

They were not looters. An Austin open-tourer command car found the wreckage. Major General Randolph Gilmore took it upon himself to collect the jewels, his ADC keeping an inventory.

The result of the collection may be the subject of English song a thousand years from now. Not one item was taken from the scene. The refugees lined up at Gilmore’s automobile and one by one handed over the treasures. The crowns, swords, scepters, orbs, spurs, and all the rest were deposited with the general, as were individual stones and pearls knocked loose from their settings. A number of jewels were not recovered until later in the day, when an entire acre of pasture was sifted by a regiment of British army soldiers directed by Edward Anson, the Oxford archaeologist.

One stone, and one only, was not found, a three-carat diamond from a crown made for Queen Victoria in 1887. The English now believe as a tenet of their faith in the monarchy that that diamond was not meant to be uncovered, that it was fated to commemorate the event by lying in that Suffolk field forever.

Self-proclaimed witnesses to historic events grow in number as the years pass. More people later claimed to have heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg address than could have fit within the range of his voice. The fall of the Bastille was allegedly witnessed by more Parisians than could possibly have crammed themselves into the nearby narrow streets.

So it has been with the King’s Ruse, as it was later named by the press. I made sure I spoke with a witness who knew what he was talking about, RAF Captain R. G. Essex, who flew the fabled Dakota from Croydon.

“I was not told of my mission until thirty minutes before take-off,” he told me after the war. “I pride myself on a steady hand, but, truth to tell, I became a bit agitated when I learned who my passenger would be.”

The passenger was to be His Royal Highness George VI, and the flight was to be to Dublin, then to Greenland, and on across the Atlantic. The monarchy was to be removed to Canada for the term of the occupation.

The king and Winston Churchill have given their versions of their meeting, and they are for the most part identical. At midnight of the first day of the invasion, the prime minister requested an audience with the king, who received him immediately. Royal residences in London had all been destroyed or damaged, so his highness was staying in an apartment at Hampton Court Palace, fifteen miles southwest of London. The palace had been a favorite residence of British monarchs for centuries, but Queen Victoria had opened it to the public in 1851. The palace had been reclaimed from the public when Buckingham Palace was destroyed.

The momentous meeting occurred in the palace’s great room. King George knew in advance why Churchill had come. The powers of the British monarch have been in flux since the Magna Carta and are not yet precisely defined. Neither of them could predict the outcome of their discussion.

After brief formalities, Churchill said, “Your Highness, the War Ministry has determined it is no longer safe for you to remain in Great Britain. We ask that you now fly to the Commonwealth of Canada, there to remain until the invader has been repelled.”

“I will share the fate of my people, Prime Minister, so I must refuse your request.”

“We had no doubt you would, Your Highness. I am charged with pointing out, however, that your reign, and indeed the monarchy, may end within a few days if you refuse.”

“I must refuse,” the king said.

Churchill increased the stakes. “Your capture or death would be a mortal blow to your subjects. To remain here would be a disservice to them and to our efforts to win this battle. Your duty is to leave your beloved island.”

“My duty—”

The prime minister brazenly interrupted, “As plainly as I can state it, your duty is to leave.”

That convinced King George, or so it seemed. He stared balefully at Churchill a moment, then nodded. Twenty minutes later he departed for the airbase. His queen and daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, would escape to Canada on a different plane.

Captain Essex resumed his account. “I was still putting the plane through its preflight when his highness boarded. He immediately entered the cockpit. I attempted to rise, forgetting that I had my straps on. He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back. My copilot, Captain Woodley, could not remove his eyes from him.”

The king then disappeared into the cabin to strap himself into a seat.

The Dakota waited for the escort fighters to take off, then rolled to the end of the runway. By then, several dozen Royal Air Force pilots, crewmen, and mechanics had heard that the king was taking one of their transports. They ran to the edge of the runway, waving and saluting. This was the crowd that would, by individual bragging rights, swell beyond credence in later accounts.

Just as Captain Essex pushed the throttle controls forward and the Pratt and Whitney engines roared, King George reappeared in the cockpit. “Captain, I want you to roll this plane to the end of the runway, then stop it there.”

“Sir?”

“I intend to get out.”

“But, sir—”

“Do not forget with whom you are speaking, Captain.”

“No, sir.”

Captain Essex told me, “Well, I had my orders, and I had my orders. I chose the latter.”

The Dakota rushed forward, and midway down the runway began to slow. The plane halted just short of the end of the strip. Captain Woodley helped the king with the ladder. He descended to the concrete.

Essex recalled, “After his highness told me what to do, I thought this must be some sort of plan, some subterfuge to fool the Germans, and that there would be a limousine waiting at the end of the runway to whisk his highness away. But there was no automobile, and no one waiting for him. There was no plan, apparently. He just walked across the concrete onto the grass, alone, and disappeared into the darkness, to the cheers of the RAF onlookers, who knew very well what they were witnessing.”

One can imagine the surprise of William Reed, a carpenter who lived near the airbase, when the king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland knocked on his door and asked for a bed for the night.

Reed told me after the war, “The king wouldn’t let me waken my daughter, Hannah, to give him her bed, so he slept on the davenport in the sitting room. I found an extra blanket for him.”

Asked about his decision to leave the airplane, the king mischievously explained after the war, “I decided I outranked a prime minister, even a Mr. Churchill.”

Evelyn Blaine determined that her small part of British heritage would not fall into German hands and that to allow Wehrmacht troops to bivouac in her cottage near Shepherd’s Close would be tantamount to trampling on the Union Jack. When the artillery barrages came within earshot, she began distributing to refugees the priceless foodstuffs General Clay had given her several days before.

She told me, “There was an endless stream of people passing my door, some leading heavily burdened horses, some carrying a grip in each hand, some with nothing but an extra coat over an arm. Tommy and I started giving out boxes and bags of food. We must have made a hundred trips between the cottage and the road carrying it all. We’d receive a smile or a nod or a brief word of thanks. Some were too dazed to reply, and I’d just tuck a bag of food under an arm, and they would walk on. Soon General Clay’s gracious gift was gone. I saved one tin of ham and a small bag of apples for Tommy and me.”

Mrs. Blaine returned to her sitting room for the last time. She took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote a note to her husband, Lieutenant Jeffrey Blaine.

“The letter had only three sentences. I told him we were traveling north, that his son and I would be at the Marble Arch in London each and every Sunday at noon until he found us, and that I loved him.”

She put the letter into an envelope and wrapped it in waxed paper, then placed it in her mailbox near the road. Then she told Tom to remain near the mailbox while she finished up in the house. It took her little more than five minutes to push her furniture into the center of the sitting room. From her sewing box she removed the cloth strips and patches she had hoarded over the months to mend their clothing. She made a small pile of them under her husband’s favorite item in the house, a well-worn wicker rocking chair. She lit a sulphur match and fanned the flame until it caught on the fabric.

She remembered, “I stood in the doorway until the furniture was well ablaze. By the time I reached the mailbox, smoke was pouring out the windows. I could not see through my tears, so my son took my hand and led me away, and we joined the others fleeing north in front of the invaders.”

Mrs. Blaine was one of many Kent and Sussex citizens who put the torch to their homes and belongings. The pall of smoke that hung over England from the channel to London during those days was not so much from battle as from the acts of thousands of civilians who destroyed their homes.

Some have said English citizens individually adopted a scorched earth policy, burning in front of the invaders so as not to provide them with shelter or sustenance. But I think they resolved that if they could not take with them their mementos and photographs and Bibles and family histories, all their treasured belongings, all the items that singled them out as English and marked their passage through this life as British subjects, they would destroy those possessions rather than allow the invaders’ hands to soil them.

Here, too, in ways perhaps less grand but no less profound than the king’s heroic gesture of remaining in England or the refugees’ gathering up the crown jewels, the English proved that their heritage would not be frightened away from them, that they would hold onto it fiercely, if only in their memories.

21

The prime minister deserved to be shaken. Instead, he stood near his chair in the war cabinet room, imperturbably chewing on his cigar, one hand casually in a jacket pocket.

“A deliberate assassination attempt by the Nazis, I think,” Churchill said. He could draw out the word “Nazi” until it sounded odious. “Had I been sitting here, it would have crushed my head.”

A plaster slab the size of a truck tire had dropped onto his chair, snapping off the backrest. The wall clock had fallen to the concrete. Other chunks of plaster lay about the room. One of the bell-shaped glass lamps that had been suspended from the ceiling had shattered. AACCS members swatted at the glass and plaster on the green cloth before placing their folders on the table. Dust was thick in the air.

“Your head is your least vulnerable spot, Prime Minister,” Clement Attlee said, lowering himself into the chair near Churchill.

Thirty minutes before the meeting was to have begun, a five-hundred pound bomb had gutted the government offices above the cabinet rooms, leaving only a twisted steel frame and a mountain of rubble. Debris filled King Charles and Great George streets. Several trees in St. James Park had been blown down. Royal Engineers had quickly cleared the stairs leading to the basement war rooms and had assured the Defense Committee that the hole in the ground was still sound. Telephone lines had been quickly reconnected.

The Flying Buttresses found their places. I once again sat behind Clay. Generals Barclay, Alexander, and Douglas, Lords Lindley and Erskin, and the other committee members took their seats. Many coughed against the dust. Churchill tilted his chair until the plaster fell off. He had been drinking tea in his quarters down the hall when the bomb hit. His coat was still wet from the spill. He carefully lowered himself to the seat, leaning forward so as to not lose his balance.

The prime minister’s face was a dispassionate mask. Only the dark stains under his eyes hinted at his sleeplessness and anxiety. He uselessly tapped his damp cigar on an ashtray and said, “It is the last day of May. The Germans have been on our island now for three days. I want to know the state of our preparations to throw them off. We’ll begin with your situation report, General Clay.”

Clay rose quickly and walked to the map of Sussex and Kent. I could tell he was moving with a rigor he did not feel, that his back, as straight as a dagger, was aching, and that only with concentrated effort could he remove the limp from his gait.

He said, “Discussions of throwing the Wehrmacht out of Great Britain are a bit premature, Prime Minister.”

Churchill pointed his cigar. “Don’t trouble me with trivialities, General. The Germans’ returning to the sea whence they came is as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me where they are this morning, then.”

Clay brought up a hand. “The Wehrmacht front is fluid due to the eruptive nature of its attacks. But generally the line as of 0700 today runs from Guildford southwest almost to Chichester in a great bow. We still hold Bognor Regis, Littlehampton, and Worthing, since they have been bypassed inland, and the German is behind them.”

“And your northern defensive positions?” Churchill asked.

“The line runs east from Guildford to Royal Tunbridge Wells, then across Kent to Faversham. My 5th Infantry still holds the area from Canterbury to the North Foreland, largely because units facing it are being diverted for the push to London.”

“In other words, the invading host has captured three-quarters of English soil between London and the channel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps seventeen hundred square miles of this treasured isle.”

“Yes, sir.”

Churchill pinched his nose. “And more by the moment.”

General Alexander said stiffly, “In fact, the Wehrmacht is within twenty miles of this meeting.”

Clay went on, “Our intelligence is spotty, but we believe now that fifteen divisions landed between Dover and Brighton. Their main thrust continues to be from their wheel, heading northwest to encircle the city clockwise.”

The general continued for several moments, reporting on estimated strengths of the enemy divisions. He then summarized, “We have bloodied them, Prime Minister. We are quite sure that our resistance at Haywards Heath came as a surprise, as was our Redwood counterattack.”

“But both failed utterly, did they not?” Lord Lindley asked. “The Germans are still on the march.”

Churchill cut in, “What are your casualties, General Clay?”

“My 1st Armored has suffered fifty-five percent casualties, and I should take it off the line.”

Alexander said tartly, “The enemy is advancing faster than your litter bearers can run to the rear.”

“Two of the 1st’s armored regiments have dissolved, as have a field artillery battalion and an armored infantry regiment. Normally tank losses are six times personnel losses, but we’ve been hit so hard that our troop loss is much higher. The Canadian divisions are heavily involved alongside the 1st, but they too are taking heavy casualties.”

Clay continued for a few moments, listing the devastation to his units. The 4th Motorized and 2nd Infantry divisions had been mauled, but some of their regiments were still operational and were retreating with some order north toward London, fighting with tactical counterpunches as they pulled back. The 35th Infantry, which had taken the brunt of the German XIII Corps beach assault between Dungeness and Folkestone, existed only on paper. Its commander, Major General John Hammond, had been killed, as had his deputy, Major General Mark Keyes, and the chief of staff, Colonel Henry Culligan. Colonel Walter Pelovik was in charge, but could not be contacted to be told so.

With casualties approaching fifty percent, the 2nd Armored was retreating in confusion behind Tonbridge, almost within Londoners’ hearing range of artillery. Clay continued by saying that his soldiers were inflicting damage on the enemy, that the Wehrmacht was not slicing through England unmolested, that the Germans may have fallen behind their own schedule, and that their objectives were proving harder to attain than OKW had anticipated.

AACCS Chief of Staff Allen Barclay asked pointedly, “But, General Clay, slowing them does not mean stopping them, does it? They are still advancing apace?”

“Yes, they are still moving forward.”

Clay returned to his chair. Gloom settled over the room as thick as the dust from the bomb blast. The meeting next heard from General Stedman on prospects of reinforcing the southern front. Elements of the British XI, IV, and II corps, so carefully placed along the eastern sea wall to halt the anticipated invasion from across the North Sea, were moving south, but Stedman said transportation facilities had been so badly damaged by Luftwaffe operations that progress was sluggish. Many British army units were reduced to walking south.

Churchill asked, “They will arrive too late, will they not, General Stedman?”

“Sir, it would take two weeks to move those corps south and into position, even under neutral conditions. With the Luftwaffe controlling the skies and with rail lines and bridges out, a longer time will be needed.”

“We don’t have two weeks,” the prime minister said softly. “Our men are going to be too late.”

The meteorologist, Group Captain Richard Swarthmore, reported next, moving to his map of the channel and carrying a clipboard. He pushed from his eyes an errant lock of hair. “Prime Minister, the low pressure system which I outlined at our last meeting continues to move our way. We have every indication from outlying reporting stations that a summer storm is gathering.”

Swarthmore glanced at his clipboard. “Seas off Land’s End are already six to seven feet with winds up to eighteen knots. This system will continue to move west, with predicted conditions at the German routes across the channel at level three to four winds with a thousand-foot ceiling.”

As usual, several Defense Committee members peppered Swarthmore with questions about the reliability of his forecasts. He replied that monitoring stations reporting through the Air Ministry and the Admiralty and the U.S. services at Widewing unanimously predicted declining weather conditions.

After the meteorologist was excused, Admiral Parker Gilford, commander in chief of the Allied Naval Forces, said, “The Kriegsmarine will have increasing difficulty resupplying the troops ashore, and further waves of troops will be slowed.”

There was discussion as to tonnage the German Navy would be able to land in the anticipated L5 gale. The estimated 150,000 enemy troops in England would require 1,500 tons of supplies per day. The Wehrmacht would surely suffer shortages, but the officers unanimously believed weather-imposed logistical problems would not significantly slow the enemy’s advance before it took London.

Churchill said finally, “Even the weather is too late.”

Reports were given by General Douglas and Admiral Gilford on the status of air and sea activity. Their services, or what remained of them, were being constantly pressed. They offered little good news.

Then Alfred Alexander motioned for the floor. He stared at his notes for a moment before saying, “General Clay, you said your 1st Armored had taken fifty-five percent casualties. When there are few alternatives, a division need not be immediately replaced until it has suffered seventy percent casualties.”

From my position, I had a good view of the back of Clay’s neck, a reliable indicator of his humor. It reddened. His words were clipped, “What is your point?”

Alexander said, “Can you say with certainty that the American soldiers under your command are putting forth their supreme effort?”

Clay glared at Alexander. “That is delicately phrased, in your noble English tradition, isn’t it, General? What you are asking is if my soldiers have their hearts in it, if my soldiers think this goddamn country is worth their American hides?”

“General Clay, those who fight in their own territory do so with metal in their backs. Your troops are in a foreign land and—”

Clay broke in, his voice clipped with emotion, “My soldiers, those wonderful men, have built their wall of the dead. I can ask no more of them than that.”

Silence fell on the meeting. Every British officer there knew Clay’s reference to the most famous incident of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where the dead reportedly lay in six-foot-high stacks.

Churchill said quickly, “We meet again this evening.” He rose from his chair.

Several Defense Committee members glanced tensely at Clay, then at Alexander. As Churchill gathered his documents, Alexander cleared his throat and said, “Prime Minister, there is a matter of command I wish to raise.”

As is always the case, one commander finds himself at the hard point of the enemy advance. To that officer belongs the fame and veneration or the condemnation and loathing. General Clay had yet to show mastery of any field. Recrimination had not often surfaced among these professionals, but with losses mounting and London in peril, it was inevitable. With apparent reluctance, the prime minister lowered himself to his chair.

Alexander had thin, bloodless lips, perfect for handing down a sentence. “I do not make this recommendation lightly, Prime Minister, and I do so fully aware of the sacrifice made by American soldiers. But General Clay has overseen the loss of our southern counties. Now that the enemy is at the gates of London, it is time to change the watch. I recommend that we ask President Roosevelt to remove General Clay from command.”

There was no movement in the room, not a cough, not a rustle of paper. The undulating, weak sound of an air raid siren on the street above filtered into the cabinet room.

Churchill formed a steeple with his fingers. He stared morosely at Alexander.

Arthur Stedman said, “That is premature, General Alexander.”

Churchill shifted his gaze.

Stedman added, “The German would be at Picadilly were it not for General Clay’s defensive maneuvers. His holding back regiments of his 35th Infantry and 4th Motorized from the sea wall—”

Barclay cut in, “Directly contradicting his orders from the committee.”

Stedman’s hand hit the table. “It has been absolutely decisive in slowing the Wehrmacht.”

“And then there is the raid by your so-called Rangers,” Alexander said. “Frankly, I was shocked to hear of it.”

Lord Lindley said, “We were perfectly stunned by the news.”

“Not only was it ill-conceived,” Alexander explained, “but you did not consult with anyone else in this room.”

Stedman again argued for Clay. “We do not yet know the consequences of the raid, General Alexander. Even though it was not successful on the surface, it may have thrown confusion into the Wehrmacht command.”

Alexander gave the smallest glance to Stedman, his subordinate. “General Stedman, your dogged defense of General Clay can be excused this time, since you have not as yet been apprised of Bletchley’s conclusion that the German headquarters for the invasion was nowhere near Holland, but in Normandy, and that the Rangers’ target building in Flanders was part of the ruse. The lives of those American soldiers were entirely wasted.”

Stedman was finally silent. So was General Clay. I could not see his face. This news must have been crushing.

Clay was to say later that he had been right about General Stedman, that he indeed turned out to be Clay’s Eugene of Savoy, his Stonewall Jackson, “not on the battlefield, as I had thought, but at that meeting.”

Alexander continued, “But I am speaking of more than mere competence.” He turned again to Churchill. “I am also speaking of stability. Not your reckless shooting of a Lee Enfield at that Messerschmitt, not your rash flight over the invasion beaches, both of which can be excused because some folly is par for Americans. But, General Clay, we have reports that you were incommunicado for a number of critical hours yesterday.”

Several in the room nodded.

With his eyes, Churchill dispensed permission to speak. He looked at Clay.

The general said, “Would you rather I did not deliberate about tactical moves, General Alexander?”

“You could not be reached. You cut yourself off completely, an utter abandonment of command.”

“I will not give a premature order. I insist on reflection. Yesterday I needed time alone to—”

Alexander shouted, “The issue is your health.”

Clay launched himself to standing and jabbed a finger at the British general. “You dare to question my sanity?”

Admiral Fairfax answered, “We need to investigate yesterday’s incident, General. Until then a replacement commander is in order.”

Alexander said in his steel voice, “I will not have the fate of this nation dependent on someone who may be having difficulty with his mental processes.”

The admiral added, “And you, General Clay, would not hesitate to strip command from someone who had floundered, who had failed in his mission.”

Churchill slapped the table. “That’s enough, gentlemen.” He took in the entire room, left to right. “General Alexander, I heard those rumors, but have no solid evidence of any instability on the part of our American friend here. I agree with Stedman that General Clay has accomplished an admirable delaying action, given his inexperienced troops and limited resources. He will remain in command.”

Once again he pushed himself up from his chair. He said, “We meet again this evening. Good day, gentlemen.”

The committee members returned papers to briefcases, gathered their pipes and cigarettes, and pushed themselves away from the table. A few spoke among themselves. Alexander glanced at his knuckles for a moment before rising. He had suffered a defeat, but was not one to do so quietly. He rose from his chair and left the room. The Buttresses paired themselves with their commanders and followed them out.

General Clay remained seated, his palms flat on the table. His eyes were locked on the prime minister as Churchill walked to the door. A patriot to his soul, Wilson Clay’s first allegiance was to the Stars and Stripes. But at that moment, I believe, he silently pledged himself to Winston Churchill. In light of what was to come, this allegiance will forever be the subject of heated controversy.

From the beginning of the war, British civilians had been called on to sacrifice and to endure. They did so willingly, with devotion to cause and country and with the certainty that righteousness exalts a nation. But many thought their years of noble abnegation were insufficient and idle, at least when compared to their servicemen’s hardships.

English civilians were impatient to spring into the breach, at least according to General Clay. “They were taut with it, ready to rush out in some crazed display of defiance to the German invaders.”

British journalists have taken to calling the populace’s two spontaneous and heroic acts of resistance the Day of the Barricades and Second Dunkirk. My postwar correspondence with American and English historians indicates the labels may stick. General Clay and I knew of these communal endeavors as they were occurring. I suggested to Clay they were nothing more than hysterical charges at windmills.

He shook his head and asked, “Jack, do you know who said, ‘Even when the likelihood of success is against us, we must not think of our undertaking as unreasonable or impossible, for it is always reasonable if we do not know of anything better to do’?”

I narrowed my lips in thought, then replied, “Buffalo Bill Cody?”

“Jesus H. Christ, Jack, sometimes I think you are on the moon and I’m down here running the war myself. It was Clausewitz.”

He ended the argument by saying that the Day of the Barricades and Second Dunkirk were simple operations, that brilliant military ideas are usually simple, and that I was always simple.

As events transpired, we were both half right. One of these exploits would play no role other than as a stirring lift to morale. The other would be crucial to the outcome of the invasion.

The Day of the Barricades was an impulsive revolt against the inevitable. The Wehrmacht was closing in on London. The city’s streets would soon be echoing with German jackboots.

“The very idea of Londoners allowing the Hun to pass freely into our city was repelling,” David Woodley of the London Fire Brigade recalled after the war. “We weren’t Parisians, after all. We had more fire in our bellies.”

Attempting to avoid a bloodbath, the War Ministry had issued instructions that Londoners were not to attempt to stop German armor. “Who made the decision to barricade the streets?” I asked the fireman.

“I know only that there was a rush into the streets all across the city. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million of us.”

Woodley made good use of his experience organizing bucket brigades. “I’m proud to say I had fifteen hundred people working under me. Quite the captain this old sailor was, if I may say so.”

With crowbars and picks, Woodley’s huge crew tore up King’s Road. Cobblestones were harvested in swaths from the street, requiring longer and longer lines of citizens passing them forward. The street stones quickly grew to a mound, then to a mountain the height of a two-story building.

“It was the hardest work of my life, passing rocks right to left,” Woodley remembered. “I tried to lead my troops in song to lift their spirits. The only tune that came to mind was ‘God Bless Charley, the Man Who Invented Beer.’ It worked well enough, and we sang with gusto.”

When the wall of cobblestones was judged sufficiently high, several iron window railings that the Ministry of Works had missed were cut apart, then placed as pikes atop the stones.

Woodley told me, “Largely because none of us had ever seen a panzer regiment in action, our new stone barricade looked impenetrable. We limped to our homes for dinner, exhausted, every muscle aching. I could not lift my arms to open my flat’s door or even to knock on it. They were utterly spent. I butted the door with my head until my wife let me in. I had a sizable blue bump on my forehead the next day.”

He may have taken offense when I grinned, because he added in the tones of a martyr, “So you can put in your book that David Woodley did not escape the war unscathed.”

George Portman was a veteran of the Somme, where he served with the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). The regiment was originally raised during Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685 from the Tower of London’s existing garrison. Portman told me, “Our unit was known to be singularly difficult to remove from positions we had set to hold.”

Portman claimed to be an authority at receiving artillery shells. “The Fusiliers took our share in the Great War. Surviving it makes you an expert.”

When he joined the thousands of Londoner’s excavating a trench and tank trap in Hyde Park, he immediately saw their folly. “They were digging under trees.”

I admitted I did not know the danger of placing a trench under trees.

“Neither did they. So I whistled between my fingers and gathered a few of them around. They were using garden hoes and coal shovels, all these fine Mayfair and Belgravia ladies, some wearing evening gloves up to their elbows. They had mud streaked on their faces, and their hair was damp with sweat. One woman was wearing a string of pearls over a leather apron probably borrowed from her gardener. Quite a sight. Another woman dug while her chauffeur waited on Carriage Road, the door of her Rolls Royce open for her return.”

Portman and I were sipping ale at the One for All Pub in London. He went on, “I told them our unit had learned the harsh lesson at the Somme. A nearby squadron was in a foxhole in an orchard. They were under the low branches of an apple tree. I was posted along an embankment near a road and saw what happened and will never forget it. I heard the shell coming in and looked up. The shell stuck the tree, which acted as an airburst. The fragments shot straight down like a grenade, killing six soldiers in the hole.”

What did the Hyde Park diggers do? I asked.

“I give them credit. They shuddered at my description, but I didn’t hear one groan or see one mouth turn down. They just marched fifty yards away from the trees and began to dig a new trench parallel to the old one.”

I had never seen a television receiver before I came to London. Hugh Young, owner of Marylebone Radio and Electronics, assured me there were over twenty thousand of them in London before the war began. He lived in a flat above his shop.

He told me after the war, “Our barricade was assembled in great haste, in a frenzy, really. We were swept up in the urgency of it all, and our efforts were fanned by fear and defiance. People emptied their flats of furniture to pile it in the street.”

Desks, dressers, bookshelves, mattresses, and rolled-up rugs were thrown onto the heap. Hanging flower pots, commercial display racks, closet doors, an antique secretary. Young remembered a long and varied list.

“My neighbors were offering their all for the barricade, and I could do no less. One at a time, I carted out my television receivers and tossed them onto the mound. Twelve of them, their glass screens shattering as more furniture was thrown onto the pile.

“You lost your entire inventory?” I asked.

“You would have to have been on Marylebone Street to understand our fervor for that barricade.”

Philip Little was a bus driver who recalled for me his blockade. “We made the barricade with what we knew best, our double-deckers. Me and Arthur Johns and James Sullivan and Harold Bass parked them side by side on Bishopsgate. You couldn’t have squeezed a leaf between them.”

I asked if a panzer couldn’t easily have pushed one of the double deckers out of the way.

“That was our next thought. So we flattened all the tires.”

“That still doesn’t seem enough,” I commented.

“Then we filled the buses with rubble. Stones and bricks and beams. They sank to their axles.”

“Even that doesn’t sound like enough.”

“Well,” Little said, “then I bashed out the front window and sat in my driver’s chair with my old Lee Enfield, waiting for the bastards.”

Sidney Blasingale sold gas-proof dog kennels, manufactured by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. “They cost four pounds, and I hadn’t sold many. I threw two dozen of them on the barricade, glad to be rid of them.”

Douglas Harlow owned the Victoria Street Cinema. “I was losing money because of the fourteen fire-watchers I had to employ. The cinema’s wide, flat roof seemed to attract the incendiaries, and the fire-watchers had to sit up there every night. Then I made the mistake of showing Opened by Mistake, which had a bad-luck reputation because three cinemas showing it had been bombed. The long queues normally in front of my cinema disappeared. So I directed my fire-watchers to rip out the rows of seats and add them to the barricade.”

Martha Hudson rushed out of her flat to find a barricade being constructed of thirty-gallon drums carted from a nearby Thames dock. Her neighbors’ plan was to make a wall of them, then fill them with water for weight. Hudson urged that many of them be filled with petrol instead. An immediate rush ensued to siphon the tanks of automobiles and trucks. Where a siphoning hose was not available, gasoline tanks were pierced with a nail or a screwdriver, and the spilling gasoline was collected in jars. Most autos were low on fuel, but slowly, jar by jar, six of the barrels were filled. Gasoline-soaked rags were inserted into the bungholes. “You Americans are fond of barbecues,” she told me after the war. “My neighbors and I had one planned for the first Germans we saw.”

The Day of the Barricades produced several anomalies, to my mind, but perhaps not to an Englishman’s. London was awash in bomb rubble, yet many of the blockades were of automobiles and furniture and material ripped from standing buildings. Perhaps Londoners were saying, “We’ll give it our best,” and their best was items of value. Many of the barricades were made of what had until then remained intact.

Another peculiarity, possibly explained by their history as an island fortress, was that at the center of the concentric circles of barricades was not the seat of government, the Houses of Parliament, but the Tower. Some unspoken historic pulse, sensed by all, decreed that the ancient citadel would be London’s last stand. Fireman David Woodley said, “England would fall only when the invader had planted his wretched banner atop the White Tower.”

Winston Churchill later told General Clay that Second Dunkirk will be recorded as one of the celebrated marches of all time, maybe the most celebrated.

Clay, who by then should have known better, said, “Surely not as great as Alexander’s march to Thebes, 240 miles in thirteen days.”

The prime minister looked up from his tea. He wore an expression of tired indulgence. “As great, and as great as Hannibal’s winter march over the Alps in 218 B.C.”

“But not as great as Scipio Africanus’ masterly march from Utica up the Bagradas Valley.”

Churchill came back with, “As great, and as great as Harold’s march from York to Battle in 1066.”

“But not as great as the march of Napoleon’s Grand Army to the Rhine, eighteen miles a day.”

“Greater, and as great as Marlborough’s march to the Danube, the finest military maneuver of the 1700s.”

Clay hesitated, cast his eyes at me as if I would help him, then sputtered something about the insignificance of precedent. In high color, he reached for the tea.

Churchill chuckled. “You keep coming back for more, Wilson. Your determination is to be admired. And pitied.”

Both would agree that Second Dunkirk was a marvel of tactics by those who knew nothing of tactics. No one knows who started the land bridge, but I interviewed several candidates after the war.

Lewis Stout was a wheat farmer with two hundred acres near Hadleigh, just inland from Ipswich. As soldiers from the 165th Infantry Brigade, 55th (West Lancashire) Infantry Division, filed past, some in armored personnel carriers, others on trucks, but many walking, Stout stood by the road and ladled water from a barrel on the bed of his truck to refill canteens.

“Our lads were exhausted and were marching on only their pluck. I served in the Great War, and I marched across France, and then back again. My feet have hardly recovered. So it struck me that in this day and age, no soldier should have to walk until he enters battle.”

The farmer abruptly lowered his ladle and shouted, “You Johnnies climb up here, and I’ll drive you as far south as my petrol will hold.”

Stout hauled thirty infantrymen to Chelmsford, almost to London. “Each one of them shook my hand as he left the lorry.”

Another farmer, Joseph Warren, witnessed a Luftwaffe strafing run tear up a Bedford three-ton truck’s engine. “By the time I rose from my cover behind a stone fence, the truck had pulled over. The driver pointed out to his lieutenant holes in the bonnet. The bullets had gone clear through the engine block. But I thought, this truck is still good, mostly.”

Warren ran to his barn, started his Austin tractor, and quickly drove it to the front of the Bedford. “The soldiers saw my purpose and used a chain to attach the tractor to the lorry’s axle. Then I told them to harness my two iron-wheeled hay wagons to the back of the truck. So we formed a road train and with a whoop, they climbed on.”

The farmer transported an entire company of the Royal Norfolk Regiment eighteen miles to the south, until the tractor’s fuel tank was dry. He said proudly, “My boys went on to win five Victoria Crosses, more than any other regiment.” At the end of the war, the regiment presented Warren with their Britannia badge, and he was wearing it on his wool cap when I spoke with him.

Peter Penry was a coal driver at Kingston upon Hull, on the Humber River. He filled his truck with soldiers of the 201st Infantry Brigade, Yorkshire County Division. “I carried them all the way to the Chilterns. But I hadn’t had time to clean my truck, you see.”

When the infantrymen climbed down, their uniforms were covered with coal dust. Their faces and hands were smudged. Some of them were spitting it out.

“I said I was terribly sorry,” Penry recalled for me. “But one sergeant told me that I had just saved them their supply of burnt cork. They marched away, quick as you please, looking more like chimneysweeps than soldiers.”

“I had a rural practice,” Dr. Calvin Shields told me, “with visits up to fifteen miles away, so I had an iron-clad reason for obtaining all the petrol I needed. I had a full tank for Second Dunkirk.”

Shields drove a Vauxhall Ten. He picked up six soldiers of the 131th Infantry Brigade, 44th Home Counties.

“They told me they had lost their platoon’s medical officer to a Luftwaffe fighter,” he explained. “So when we got as close to the front as an automobile could, I parked the car and followed them in, carrying my black bag. Their lieutenant said he hoped they wouldn’t need me, but was glad for the company.”

Walter McWhety was surprised when soldiers of the Wessex Infantry accepted his offer of a ride south. “I am a mortician. I was driving my hearse. They didn’t hesitate, just climbed right in. Made something of a joke of it.”

The mortician almost came to blows with the sergeant sitting next to him. McWhety would not explain the short detours he made as they drove toward London. He told me after the war, “I knew the location of every cemetery in that part of the country, and I didn’t think it right that Tommies heading for the front in a hearse should be driven by graveyards. Bad for morale and all.”

The sheriff of Nottingham, Charles Doane, also found himself avoiding fistfights. He stationed himself at the south end of a bridge over the River Trent, and refused to permit refugees fleeing north to cross.

“I knew from the Great War that all bridges must be one way, toward the front. There were too many soldiers and too many vehicles crossing the bridge to congest it with civilians rushing away from the battle. But I almost had a riot on my hands.”

Delbert Dolby owned a bicycle shop in Coventry. He rolled the bicycles onto the street and gave them away to soldiers of the 133rd Infantry Brigade, Home Counties Division. He told me, “To tell you the truth, I did not mind seeing them go. Those bicycles compared poorly with prewar models. There was no chromium on them, and they were painted black, every inch. There were no three-speed gears. Even the handlebar bells were tinny.” Dolby said the soldiers were nonetheless happy to receive the bicycles.

Through her cottage window, Joan Kerry watched British soldiers marching south. “An endless column, and they were so tired, tramping on and on. I wanted to help them, but felt useless, until my eyes fell on my violin.”

Kerry belonged to the Leicester String Quartet. “I played lead violin. My neighbor Dalia Jennings played second, and Terrance Barton, the chemist, played the viola. Our cello player was in the Royal Navy.”

She ran next door and ordered Dalia Jennings to grab her violin. She telephoned Barton, and he appeared within minutes, carrying his viola. The three of them joined the marching column.

“I asked the first soldier I came to the name of his regiment. He said they were the Yellow Bellies. I learned later it was their nickname, because their first colors had a yellow ground. He must have seen my confusion so he clarified by saying they were the North Lincolnshires. So I asked the name of their regimental march. The soldier, a sergeant I think, replied it was ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher.’”

Kerry looked at Dalia Jennings and asked, “The Lincolnshire Poacher?” Jennings shook her head, as did Barton. They had not heard of it. Kerry told me, “Mind you, we played Mozart and Bach and Schubert. I had never played any music with the word ‘poacher’ in it, I was quite sure of that.”

She asked the soldier to hum it. He did, and several other infantrymen joined him.

Kerry remembered, “Regimental marches aren’t the most complicated of music, but they certainly are thrilling. We swung into it gaily, the three of us.”

The Leicester String Quartet, minus one, marched fifteen miles with them, as far as the musicians’ legs would go. With the quartet setting the tempo, the Lincolnshires’ pace quickened, and their hearts hardened to the task ahead.

The Lincolnshires were no strangers to the forced march. The 10th Foot endured a 120-mile march across the Egyptian desert in 1801, for which it was awarded the Sphinx badge. This regimental badge was awarded to the Leicester String Quartet after the war. Joan Kerry stitched the design—a Sphinx atop the word “Egypt” atop a banner on which was the regiment’s name—onto a flag, and it now appears on a pole next to them at all their performances.

Mary Branscomb was a Red Cross volunteer, an American who had been assigned to dispense doughnuts and coffee to British units in the north. She and her crew of Doughnut Dollies operated a mobile canteen, called a clubmobile, a Ford van that opened to serve refreshments. “We gave doughnuts to them all, and what an education it was for a Seattle girl like me. We served dashing Polish cavalry officers, who had colorful uniforms from the last century, and knew only two English words, ‘girl’ and ‘bed,’ and always used them together. And Norwegians with their fresh faces and all that blond hair. And the French, who really were gallant, kissing our hands and everything.”

Branscomb saw the sweep of troops south and immediately offered her clubmobile as part of the caravan. “You can imagine my distress,” she told me after the war, “when eight soldiers of the 4th Highlanders boarded the van.”

She paused in her story for my reaction, but I had none.

She repeated emphatically, “The 4th Highlanders.”

When I shook my head, she replied, “Why, we were warned about the 4th Highlanders from the minute we arrived in Great Britain. They were a notoriously rowdy Scottish regiment, the bane of us innocent American girls.”

What happened in the canteen? I asked.

“Well,” she said, “nothing at all. They were dead tired and so anxious to get south that they sagged to the floor of the van and didn’t say anything at all, or do anything at all, except eat all the doughnuts.”

I teased her, “To have the 4th Highlanders all to yourselves and them too fatigued to raise a finger must have been a cruel disappointment.”

A touch of color graced her cheeks, then she smiled. “A little disappointing, I must admit.”

Woodrow Smith’s ancestors had been blacksmiths since before records were kept. “I believe that’s how we got our name, Smith,” he told me. His shop was near Cambridge, and I visited it after the war. The building was under the dark shadow of an enormous oak tree. The day I found him was bright with sun, and when I entered his shop I could see nothing but the fire in the forge. His son manned bellows. Smith’s anvils and hammers might have been two hundred years old. He told me he had also begun repairing automobiles and lorries but regretted it, preferring to shoe horses.

He said, “I was working on a tractor wheel, trying to straighten it, when a tank brigade began rolling by. My shop filled with dust as their treads dug up the road. My boy and I walked to the door to watch them pass. Just then one of the brigade’s Mark VI tanks broke a tread, and the tank drove right off the tread, its road wheels sinking into the road, and the tread gathering behind it.”

The 20th Armored, 6th Armored Division, was critically short of parts, as were all British Army units. The tank commander crawled out of his vehicle, and, cursing mightily, ran his hand along the tank’s front hull, where spare treads should have been stowed. Too hurried to push the disabled Mark VI off the road, the line of tanks behind him detoured around it, crushing the fence and rose garden of the home across from the blacksmith’s shop.

“I wandered over to the tank to examine the tread. Then I said to the tank commander, a sergeant, ‘I can repair this.’ He looked at me as if I had just granted him a pardon.”

Smith rolled his cutting torch to Donald George’s dump-truck, towed to the lot in back of the shop two days before so the blacksmith could replace a universal joint. He cut a replacement tread out of the truck’s bed. Within forty minutes, Smith had sized and drilled the steel and installed it on the track.

“The tank commander saluted me, and he and his crew were on their way. And the next day, when I told Donald George how the hole in his lorry bed came to be, all he did was congratulate me for being clever.”

Thousands of private vehicles and their drivers were offered to the British Army. The civilians viewed themselves as part of the lineage of citizen armies dating from the time of Cromwell.

At the front, hearing of the vast march south, General Clay thought it would fail. “The Luftwaffe is going to tear them up.”

German fighters took their toll on the English caravans, but far less than Clay had anticipated because most German aircraft were providing air cover at the front and because of the volunteers’ dispersed routes.

Still, General Clay reflected the common wisdom on that day when he said, “We won’t last until they get here. The British reinforcements will be a day late and a dollar short.”

22

We were in the Cub when General Clay turned to me and held up a palm, fingers apart. “Jack, soldiers hold in scathing contempt commanders whose armies seep like sand through their fingers. And those commanders’ names are quickly lost to history.”

Lost, except to generals such as Wilson Clay, who study their humiliation and shudder at their fate.

He said, “Cadorna and Kerensky during the Great War and Gamelin of this one, so recently at the head of once-formidable forces, have already been forgotten.”

As the Germans ground toward London, Clay feared he was about to join them. The condition of the American Expeditionary Force that Sunday will long be debated, with Clay’s detractors claiming it was still fairly robust. They paint him as unduly pessimistic, on the verge of panic, mistakenly believing that his army was dissolving. I was with him during those hours and will report fully here. I gained an idea how ludicrous stories about a controversial man originate.

Not even his critics deny General Clay had an unerring instinct for appearing where the action was hottest. The general insisted on visiting the front. “I cannot order soldiers to bear risk without sharing it,” he said.

From London we flew to headquarters of the 1st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division, arriving at ten in the morning, the fourth day of the invasion. The regiment had initially rushed east toward the invader, but once the Wehrmacht wheeled into them, it was forced to retreat. When we marched into his tent, we found Colonel Alan Hebert packing his duffel bag. His jeep driver was waiting with the engine running. The colonel pronounced his name “Ay-Bear.” Enemy shelling was distressingly close, and the ground shivered under my feet. Hebert’s shaving mirror swayed on the tent post.

An artillery veteran once told me to keep my mouth open during close shelling, lest my eyeballs pop out from a concussive blast. He may have been yanking my chain, but to be on the safe side I parted my mouth and left it that way. Doubtless I resembled a moron.

Clay said, “Colonel, your last report didn’t lead me to believe withdrawal was indicated. Explain your retreat.”

Perhaps startled by Clay’s unannounced appearance, Hebert stammered that the 4th Battalion had vanished and that he was without information on survivors, but presumed most were either POWs or casualties. His 3rd Battalion was pulling back in order. He was awaiting a report from his 5th Battalion and was going to meet with its commander at new headquarters at the rear.

General Clay questioned him. I am not a tactician, but overhearing them, I gained a clear impression from Hebert of puzzlement and passivity.

Clay demanded, “How many hours of ammunition remain?”

“I’m working on that, General. I’m waiting for—”

“And fuel reserves?”

His eyes flicked to the card table that served as his desk. “I’ve got Lieutenant Maynard checking on it, sir.”

“Franks ordered your brigade’s fuel to be resupplied by the 123rd Armored Ordnance two hours ago. Where is that convoy?”

“We are not in contact with them, sir,” Hebert answered. He spoke with a Louisiana drawl.

Small arms rattled nearby, followed by the blare of a heavy machine gun. A soldier yelled, but I could not make out his words. I heard the hollow bark of a mortar salvo.

“Colonel, I am relieving you of command.”

“Sir?” Hebert’s face was devoid of surprise. Apparently out of touch with the bulk of his command and ready to flee to the rear, he may have known it was inevitable.

“Where is your deputy?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Greeley is in the signal truck.”

Greeley opened the tent flap and entered at that moment, followed by a signal officer.

Hebert resisted. “Isn’t this something only my CO, General Franks, can do?”

“Franks does what I tell him,” Clay said, turning to the lieutenant colonel. “I’m ordering you to speak candidly. What has been wrong with Colonel Hebert’s command?”

Greeley made a small sound in his throat before saying, “At this time, sir, I don’t believe we have a choice but to pull back. But it seems our regiment is doing so a bit docilely, and with some confusion.”

Clay nodded. “Command of the 1st Armored Regiment is now yours. Pull it together.”

We left the tent. In light of General Clay’s widely known dislike of things French, a rumor circulated after the war that Hebert was cashiered simply because of his insistence on the French pronunciation of his name. This story ran in the Spokane Times, which Clay regarded as his hometown newspaper. I credit Associated Press with refusing to distribute this calumny. Nevertheless, the invention was accepted as truth by the credulous, stoking the controversy to come.

To my consternation, we then drove toward the sound of gunfire. I wanted to remind Clay he was a general, deserving of a desk, away from bothersome rifle fire, with his aide. The road was rutted, and my rear end received a pounding. We passed American APCs and artillery tractors going the opposite direction.

Clay said, “Goddamn retrograde operation, Jack.”

Our driver, Corporal Hubert Turner of the Royal Sussex Regiment, was home from Africa with a hand injury. He had told us it was a scratch and should not have put him on the hospital ship. I glanced at his right hand. He was missing three fingers. A Sten gun was tucked behind his feet. He had confided to me, “I’m not yet done with the Germans.”

The clamor of weaponry could be heard above the jeep’s engine. Clay pointed south, and we turned along a row of trees. A column of AEF troops marched raggedly toward the rear. When they saw the general, many looked away. We passed dug-in soldiers and two Shermans using a stone fence for cover. Shells hissed overhead. A hundred yards to my left, a fire ball erupted from the ground. Near it a cottage was burning, the flame whirling overhead.

Clay pointed again. We turned toward a squad of soldiers using a road embankment as a breastwork for their jeep’s pintle-mounted machine gun. Two soldiers were crouched behind their weapon, while a lieutenant leaned into the bank, binoculars at his eyes. Five others also rested against the embankment, their M1s pushed into the grass atop the slope.

Corporal Turner drove right up to the jeep. Clay hopped out, and I followed.

“Identify yourself,” Clay ordered.

“Lieutenant Bill Smolowe, 6th Armored Infantry, sir.” He was about twenty years old and had a shaving nick on his pink chin, and the look of an innocent.

A burst of rifle fire sounded from a glade beyond the burning cottage. A plane flew overhead, but smoke obscured it.

“What’s out in front of you, Lieutenant?” Clay asked.

“Sir, we think the enemy is over in those woods and maybe in the brush thicket in front of the trees.”

Clay bit crescents into his cheeks. “Why the hell aren’t you letting them have it?”

“Sir, we aren’t sure what their movement is at this point.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Lieutenant.” Clay brushed aside the gunner, grabbed the handles of the machine gun and pulled the trigger. The gun roared. Flame shot from the barrel and empty shell casings flew, some bouncing off my ankles. Clay slowly pivoted the gun as he fired. A private fed the metal link belt, hand over hand. When the 110-round belt was gone, Clay spun the gun’s handles to the lieutenant.

“Fire on infested areas, Lieutenant. If you wait to see the enemy before you fire, you’ll get his bayonet up your ass.”

The lieutenant nodded glumly.

“Get going, then.”

While the feeder hooked in a new belt, the lieutenant took the gunner’s position and lifted his leg to brace it against the side of the jeep. When the feeder nodded, the lieutenant yanked the bolt, then fired. The din rattled my teeth.

Clods of dirt jumped from the bank. A machine gun always attracts return fire. The infantrymen ducked. One of them pulled a grenade from his belt and held it in his hand, studying it. Clay jumped to the ground. Bullets cut the air all around.

He crawled up the embankment to the soldiers. “Men, you’ve got to fire your weapons.”

“Yes, sir,” several said.

A mortar round landed on the other side of the embankment. The ground trembled and dirt and brush rained on us. I think I was losing my hearing. I held my helmet on with both hands, as undignified a position as I’ve ever assumed.

One of the riflemen looked at me and asked, “You a lawyer or something?”

Clay said, “Men, after the Battle of Gettysburg, some Springfield rifles were found with as many as a dozen charges down the barrel.”

I wanted to yell at him, “For God’s sake, General, not now!”

Clay lectured, “In the noise and fire of battle, the soldiers just forgot to fire their rifles.”

“Yes, sir,” came from some of them.

“Now I want you to climb up there and fire. Marksmanship is a lot of crap. Fill the air with lead.”

They did so, firing repeatedly, their M1s sounding like toys next to the constant bawl of the M2 HB on the jeep. Clay waited until they began to change their clips. He used the lieutenant’s binoculars, then yelled over the bellow of the machine gun, “You men are firing too high. Too much front sight. Fire low.”

One of the soldiers looked over his shoulder at the general.

Clay yelled, “Your ricochets will frighten the German, and they do a lot of tissue damage when they hit.”

The infantryman turned back to his weapon. Clay patted him on the back and slid down the bank.

We returned to the jeep. Corporal Turner was gone.

Clay said as he lifted himself to the seat. “I figured that Brit wouldn’t last as my driver. The minute my back was turned, he ran forward and is now giving the German hell with that Sten gun he thinks I didn’t see. I wish I had a thousand like him.”

I drove us away from the line, my boot against the firewall. The story that General Clay spent the day acting as a rifle instructor, lost in the tiny technique of aiming an M1 while the island burned around him, is a blatant exaggeration. He was showing himself at the front. He said later, “Soldiers will not follow a man they think will let them die alone in the field.”

The general had three command trucks, which were mobile signal stations. They were three-quarter-ton 4x4 Dodges, called officially T 214-WC 56s, and they looked like enlarged jeeps. The trucks were armored and crowded with radio and coding equipment and maps. Whenever they pulled off a road, the driver raised three antennas. Dodge supplied the same chassis as a weapons carrier.

Because Clay usually travelled in the Cub, he posted two of the Dodges at roughly the corners of his command and one in the center. Each truck had a branch AEFHQ staff, including signalmen, G2 officers, sentries, mechanics, and drivers. We called them AEFHQ West, Central, and East. Whenever we touched down after the invasion, the nearest truck would either be waiting or would rush toward us. We did not use them often prior to the German landings, because Clay typically flew directly to divisional or regimental headquarters. They proved their worth after S-Day.

I go to some lengths to mention them here, because their existence was a secret, so much so that journalists who now suggest Clay abandoned his command for the field were not aware, and probably will not be aware until they read this narrative, of the mobile command vehicles. Nor do they know of the many times that day General Clay and I went inside the vehicles. That morning after the visit to the 6th Armored Infantry, Clay and I spent the next fifty minutes inside Command West, during which he received or reviewed forty-three messages and issued sixteen signals. I still possess my notes as proof.

Then we set off again in the jeep. A map was on his lap. A jeep with a mounted Browning followed us. The general said to me, “We need to make a brief stop. Ordnance isn’t getting to the 27th Field Artillery.”

Moments later he directed me to cross a field toward a grove of trees. I was within fifty yards before I saw white stars that seemed to hang in the underbrush. Trucks were hidden there, almost invisible in their olive and brown camouflage, a white star on each door. To the east, across a shallow valley, a brace of Stukas, dots on the clouds, was diving out of the sky. I could not see their hapless target.

Clay was out of the jeep before I had it stopped. He carried a sheaf of orders. He called to the driver of the first truck, a General Motors deuce-and-a-half. “Name and unit, soldier.”

The driver, a corporal, peered out the window. When he recognized Clay, he hurriedly threw open the door and jumped to the ground to salute. “Sir, Milton Cook, Bravo Company, 19th Ordnance.” He remembered his cigarette, and spit it out.

Clay demanded, “Why aren’t you provisioning the 27th Field Artillery? I’ve got a copy of your goddamn orders in my hand.”

The corporal glanced at the line of trucks behind him. The crews were trotting toward us. The 19th Ordnance was newly raised. It resembled a high school class.

A lieutenant reached us first. He said, “Sir, I wanted to wait until the sky was clear of the enemy. We’re carrying explosives. An incendiary into one of these trucks would end us all.”

Clay pointed into the cab. “Get in there, Corporal Cook, and move over.” He turned to the lieutenant. “If you wait until the Luftwaffe goes home, you’ll be under these trees until geese crap pearls.”

The general climbed into the seat. The displaced driver looked doubtfully at him. Clay stamped on the starter pedal. With a growl, the GM lurched forward. I hastily jumped onto the running board and held onto the window frame. We rolled out from under the tree canopy into the field. The Stukas had disappeared. Smoke rose from their target, spreading across the ground like waves in the increasing wind.

Clay drove furiously. I glanced behind us. The column of trucks was following, five or six of them. Clay twisted the steering wheel, and we turned east, across deep furrows. I bounced crazily on the running board.

All war may be foolish, and some aspects of war more foolish than others. But the most asinine report that came out of the invasion, bar none, stems from that brief truck ride. The Los Angeles Tribune interviewed Corporal Cook after the war, then reported in an article that at times of stress General Clay would lapse into baby talk, that he would revert to his infancy. United Press picked up the story. An article in the Birmingham Sun, down in the land of Baptists, bless them, gave the general the benefit of the doubt by speculating that perhaps it was a biblical tongue rather than baby talk.

The entire account stems from that moment when the general turned to me and said through the truck window, “’Arf-made recruities, Jack, ’arf-made recruities.”

I nodded knowingly, but had to look it up later. Corporal Cook did not hear the general correctly, or perhaps he just did not know the poem. Clay was quoting Kipling: “When the ’arf-made recruity goes out to the East, / ’E acts like a babe an’ ’e drinks like a beast, / An’ ’e wonders because ’e is frequent deceased / Ere ’e’s fit to serve as a soldier…”

The general was referring to the youth and inexperience of his soldiers. I state categorically that Clay never spoke baby talk and am perturbed that I must even address such a breathtaking absurdity.

Clay frequently quoted Kipling. His favorite during the invasion was, “‘There are only two divisions in the world today: human beings and Germans.’”

We soon reached the remaining guns of the 27th Field Artillery. A battery of 105mm howitzers was already hooked up to its tractors and was pulling out. One of the guns was on its side, enveloped in fire. Three bodies had been pulled from the flames, then forgotten. Another battery was still firing. Its officer ran up to Clay. He was a lieutenant with his face blackened by cork, even in broad daylight.

“Report, Lieutenant.”

He was out of breath. He swallowed quickly several times. Howitzer blasts seemed to split my head.

“Letelier, 27th Field Artillery, sir. We’re laying them direct. No time for correction data or aiming points.”

“Good for you.”

“I’ve got an enemy armored regiment along my sights, but I’m down to six or seven rounds for each piece, sir.”

Clay said, “I heard you had those goddamn German tankers by the balls, so I brought your shells, personally.”

The lieutenant beamed. “Yes, sir. Thank you.” His right hand was covered with blood. I could not tell if it belonged to him or one of his artillerymen.

“You stay at your guns. I’ll get the stuff to you.”

The lieutenant sprinted back to his battery. Clay directed the truck crews to distribute howitzer shells, which took only several minutes since the ordnance squadron was extremely anxious to depart. Between the bone-jarring noise of our artillery, I thought I heard the distant grind of panzer engines coming closer.

Clay led the convoy away. He said to me through the window, “I like that artillery officer’s grit, Jack. See that he is decorated.”

“Decorated with what, sir?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Whatever you think is appropriate. And you find the name of the battery officer who was pulling out his howitzers, and you bust that chickenshit and put him on the boat.”

“Yes, sir.”

I later gave Lieutenant Letelier a bronze star, and I never found the fleeing artillery officer. I didn’t look hard, because if I could have, I would have been on his tractor seat next to him.

When we returned to cover, Clay gave orders to the ordnance lieutenant, who nodded eagerly, either inspired or chagrined by the general’s visit. Shortly thereafter we were again in the Cub.

Clay was peering at a map when Terry Norman said, “General, there’s some trouble below.”

“You got that right,” Clay replied without looking up.

Clay tipped the Cub’s wing to give Clay a better view. The pilot said, “I mean, right now, right below us.”

Clay pushed his nose against the window. “Those men are going to be blind-sided.”

I looked out the window. We were just east of Reigate. Below, three tanks were about to crest a tree-topped hill. I could not tell from their colors, but I presumed they were panzers. They were fanning out as they neared the summit. One tank pushed over a small tree and rolled on. Beyond the hill was a fleet of Canadian I Corps vehicles: several scout cars followed by three tanks and a dozen APCs and trucks. They had pulled off the road. A number of officers were conferring near one of the scout cars. Blue diesel exhaust hung over the convoy. The Canadians were about to be ambushed.

Norman said, “We don’t have time to patch through a radio warning, General.”

Clay replied, “Then let’s go sit on that German armor.”

The pilot grinned fiendishly, and the bottom seemed to fall out of the Cub. We plunged toward the ground. I gripped the back of Clay’s seat so hard my knuckles turned white.

The general said mildly, “Jack, you’ve got some of my uniform in your fist there.”

With an effort, I opened my hand.

We dropped toward the panzers. The terrain rose with sickening velocity. Just when I could make out the black cap of the German tank commander in his hatch, Norman pulled back the stick. The Cub’s struts groaned, or it might have been me. I glanced at the gauges. We were passing 180 miles an hour. Norman had once told me, in a fit of rancor about being deprived of a Mustang, that the Cub would fall apart if it ever broke 150. The fuselage creaked and the engine howled.

Norman banked the Cub into a tight circle over the panzers. He wagged the wings. With each roll the wings were almost perpendicular to the ground. My throat was packed with bile.

Around and around we went. The panzers were beneath me, then seemed to soar out of sight overhead. Then again they appeared below, to race away out of sight beyond the top of the Cub’s window. Intent on their prey, the German tank crews may never have known we were over them.

The Canadians saw us, though. Their tanks turned on their axes to cover the three-man antitank crews who ran toward the hill. Even at our height and despite Terry Norman’s gyrations with his plane, I could see their recoilless rifles. The Canadians disappeared into the trees fifty yards from the panzers. Norman calmed the plane. I swallowed and swallowed, desperately trying not to vomit down the back of General Clay’s neck.

We saw a flash, followed by smoke filtering up from the trees below.

Norman said, “One panzer down.”

“Let’s get going, Captain,” Clay intoned. “We don’t have time to direct traffic all day.”

I learned later that the Canadians successfully ambushed their ambushers. The three panzers never made it out of the woods. The Canadians of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Armored Infantry, did not suffer a single casualty during that brief engagement.

It would have been unlike General Clay not to mention his role in the affair, so he sent the Canadians’ commander, Henry Bisset, a telex: “General Bisset: I waved the wings of my plane at some of your soldiers this morning. Simple courtesy dictated a return salute, even from Canadians. s/Clay.”

Bisset’s return telex read: “General Clay: My soldiers did salute you. Did you not smell it? s/Bisset.”

We landed near Tonbridge, where AEFHQ Central met us. We spent an hour inside the truck. Again I take pains to mention that Clay received thirty-eight messages during this time and issued fourteen, all dealing with redeployment and resupply of his units. He also held radio conferences with the Defense Committee. Generals Girard and Lorenzo were also at the station, deliberating with Clay. When he spoke directly with the prime minister, he asked for privacy.

I therefore never had notes of that conversation, despite the insistence of several historians that I destroyed them.

When we emerged from the truck, we were surrounded by American soldiers, their rifles across their necks or hanging limply from their hands. Their uniforms were disheveled and a few were missing helmets or packs. It was a sea of haggard, frightened, defeated faces.

Clay waded into the soldiers. He called out, “What in hell are you men doing?”

None of them said anything. None broke pace to the rear. They would not look at him.

The general grabbed one of the infantrymen by his shoulders. “What’s your unit, soldier?”

The reply was meek. “2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, sir.”

Clay held the first soldier by his uniform while he roughly handled a second, jolting him to a stop. “What’s your unit?”

“2nd Quartermaster, 2nd Infantry, sir.”

“And you?” Clay demanded of another infantryman.

“2nd Recon Troop, sir.”

“Do you men know where the goddamn front is?”

No one said anything. The only sound was the shuffling of boots and distant artillery rounds. One of the soldiers was using his rifle as a cane. Another wore his arm in a sling. One infantryman was leading another who had a blood-stained bandage over his eyes.

Clay marched back to the truck. He grabbed a trenching spade from the pack of a passing serviceman, then smacked the flat of the blade against the command truck’s hood. He struck it several more times until he had their attention. The infantrymen turned to the general, reluctantly it seemed. I doubted they would be receptive to a rousing pep talk.

I consulted with David Lorenzo before transcribing here General Clay’s next words. The general’s brief oration to the river of men drifting past AEFHQ Central has been used against him. I wanted to check my memory of it against Lorenzo’s. We agree on the following.

General Clay yelled, “Your men’s units are mixed, and that means you are running in disarray, doesn’t it?”

He was not expecting an answer.

“I didn’t give the order for any of your units to fall back as far as Tonbridge. That means you are fleeing your posts. I didn’t bring you soldiers over here for you to walk away from your duty. Don’t you SOBs know that it’s cheaper to hold ground than to retake it?”

Again Clay was met with silence. Surly silence.

“And I goddamn guarantee you that I am going to retake what you’ve lost.”

His gaze singled out a soldier. “You, where in the goddamn hell is your Ml?”

The soldier muttered something.

The general ran at him. He fairly lifted him off the ground by his collars. “It is a dereliction of duty to abandon your rifle.” Clay spun to me. “Colonel, notify 2nd Infantry MPs to arrest this man, and anyone else found without his personal weapon.”

Lorenzo and I cannot deny that General Clay was in a fury.

“Your units are still at the front, but you soldiers have left them. Deserted them.” He drew a line in the dirt with his foot, like a boy challenging another to cross it. Then he turned again to me, the dispatcher of his orders. “Colonel Royce, you are to post headquarters company MPs along an east-west line right here. Any soldier crossing that line toward London without his unit will be dealt with summarily.”

That is the phrase he used, both Lorenzo and I recall clearly: dealt with summarily. I state emphatically General Clay did not say they were to be shot. Some analysts have gone so far as to assert that Clay established drumhead courts, that firing squads roamed between London and the front.

I personally issued the order over General Clay’s signature. It directed military police to detain suspected deserters. No more, no less.

The soldiers stared at him balefully. Clay’s jaw was thrust forward and his fists were on his hips.

One soldier, a corporal with a bloodstain on his sleeve, made a step to cross the line.

Clay said in a chilling voice, “Son, you had better believe that I am worse than the German.”

The corporal hesitated, inhaled loudly, then turned back. It is also patently untrue that Clay barked Frederick’s famous phrase, “Dogs, would you live forever?”

As if a DI had called an about face, the beaten formation of stragglers turned around and began treading south, again to face the invaders.

General Clay’s day up to that hour has been set forth with particularity, beginning with the morning War Ministry meeting in London until the showdown with his own soldiers near Tonbridge at three in the afternoon. I have done so to dispute irresponsible hearsay reports that the general had forsaken his command to fight as a common soldier, that he turned viciously on his own troops, that he was touching upon madness.

There is no question, though, that General Clay was achingly aware his army was disintegrating. His place in the military history he knew so well would be as an utterly defeated commander.

I personally investigated the death of Lady Anne Percival. In light of the charges bandied about regarding her and General Clay, I decided to dig and pry and then reconstruct her last moments. I will be called ghoulish, perhaps deservedly so.

Earl Selden’s home had been heavily damaged by artillery fire. My guess is that a shell entered the leaded glass rose window above the great hall and detonated inside against one of the masonry arches, bringing down the center of the building. Another shell streaked into the servants’ wing. Defenders must have made the manor a redoubt, because bullet pocks etched the exterior brick and stone in long strings and swirls. Inside the main entrance, a fragmentation grenade had scoured the slate floor and the hall woodwork with metal shards. The door had been ripped from its ancient iron hinges and was lying across a flattened yew near the walkway.

Although I visited the manor house a month after the battle, it had remained untouched since the combatants had departed, except for the quick visit by the burial service. Nothing had been looted or further overturned, nothing picked through by collectors or the curious. Much of the county was in ruin. Earl Selden’s ancestral mansion shared the same end as hundreds of others and as thousands upon thousands of more modest homes and shops. At the time of my visit, there were too many buildings destroyed and too many lives dashed for the recovery to have begun. The remains of the manor house stood unsteadily, empty and silent, in sorrowful contrast to the scintillating conversation and wild flirtation I had witnessed here.

I pushed aside splintered panels to make my way through the hall. Glass crackled under each footfall. A Chippendale giltwood mirror lay on the floor, the wood in a dozen pieces scattered around the floor, and the glass shattered. An oyster walnut-veneered longcase clock was on its side, the pendulum hanging out of the open case. A painting lay face down, its gilded gesso frame cracked. I lifted it and saw a portrait of an earlier earl, whiskered and frowning, but with an amused cant to his eyes. I could see Lady Anne in the portrait. I placed it on an exposed nail and carefully leveled it.

A beam had crushed a buffet in the dining room, but the china closet was intact. Not a plate or serving dish or sauceboat had been broken. A fire had begun in the main kitchen and spread into the servants’ kitchen. The stoves and coolers had been blackened. Wallpaper had curled and peeled with the heat. The fire may have been extinguished using the two buckets near the door. It appeared a grenade had been lobbed through the window and landed in a sink. Porcelain fragments covered the kitchen tile, and exposed water pipes rose from the floor like bent fingers.

I wandered next into the library, where General Clay and the earl had spent so many hours. I righted the globe. A bookshelf that had been against an outside wall had been overturned by a blast that had punched a hole into the room. Books were spilled across the carpets. The earl’s display cases were on their sides, the glass in long shards. His treasured Wellington letters were scattered about. I took a moment to gather them, finding sixty-two, and put them in his desk drawer. One leg of the Bosendorfer piano had collapsed. The instrument was at a sharp angle to the floor, looking undignified. A soldier had fired up through the window, raggedly serrating the hammered copper ceiling.

I searched the building until I found Lady Anne’s chambers, which were comprised of a bedroom, dressing room, study, and bathroom. Her rooms were more girlish than I would have imagined. The wallpaper was patterned in pink and green flowers, and a settee was covered in pink velvet. One wall of the study had been entirely covered with framed photographs from her youth. Most had fallen to the floor. They showed her in riding habits posing on numerous horses. There were bays and chestnuts and a palomino. She must have gone through horses like she went through men.

Her bedroom was dominated by a mahogany four-poster bed dressed in silk damask. She was not known to use this bed often. I peered into her closet, pushing hanging clothes along the bars one at a time, regaining a sense of her. I looked through an armoir and a William and Mary chest of drawers and a plumwood highboy, fingering her intimate items, feeling like a voyeur. I poked through several jewelry boxes. Necklaces and earrings, many with diamonds and other stones, were still in the small drawers. I realized I was delaying my search, putting off what I feared to discover. I snapped the drawers closed, and walked into her study.

Lyle Foote of the burial service had told me he had found her body in front of her rococo-styled desk, which I found out later was from the time of Louis XV, complete with the stamp “ASSNAT,” standing for “Assemblée Nationale,” indicating it had been confiscated from an aristocratic house during the French Revolution. Foote believed the concussion of a bomb or artillery round had blown her back, toppling her chair and spilling her onto the Chinese rug. Or, he said, the window frame hit her, or the cross beam that had cut her desk into halves had also crashed into her.

Foote said, no, he had not inventoried her effects. “Too many corpses to get under ground before they bloated to have time for the niceties.”

Her inlaid mahogany chair was on its side near the desk. A crystal inkwell was turned upside down on the rug, and a blue stain had spread under the well. I lifted one end of the beam and pivoted it away from the desk. The blotter was curved like a ladle from the weight of the beam. I opened several drawers until I found a small packet of letters from Wilson Clay. The cancellations showed them to be from dates earlier than I was looking for, but I put them in my jacket pocket. I continued to search through the side drawers, examining letters and mementos, bits and pieces of a life. I felt that at any moment, Anne Percival would appear in the doorway, scold me for being a nosy child, and slap my fingers.

The last place I looked was the center drawer, buckled by the beam. I tugged it several times before parts broke free. I pulled out pencils, stamps, paper clips, and, finally, the letter I had presumed existed.

An envelope was stamped with the AEFHQ logo. On it also, in General Clay’s handwriting, were her address and the words, “HQ Signal Co., hand deliver immediately. Clay.”

I pulled the letter from the envelope and unfolded it. It read in full: “Anne, I beg of you, leave Haldon House for London this hour. For the sake of your country and mine, my plans cannot be altered. Wilson.”

Then, after ten more minutes of searching, I found her response, which she either did not have the inclination or the time to complete. The sheet of paper had been blown into her bathroom, perhaps by the blast or by a later wind through the broken windows, and was near a basin stand. Her stationery was a bond so heavy that a pen might have caught in the coarse fibers. I could not tell from the condition of the paper if she had wadded it up to throw it away.

Her letter read, “Wilson, You will destroy England to save it. I will never leave Haldon House. I am the price you will pay if—” The letter was unfinished.

So my questions were still unanswered by their last correspondence, and that is why I had her body exhumed and examined by a Scotland Yard forensic pathologist. I admit I did not go through channels. I did not even attempt to find surviving members of her family to ask permission. I believed then, and still believe, that the demands of a precise record of the war demanded that I plunge ahead with the ghastly task. I convinced Henry Bartholemew, the pathologist, and Lyle Foote, the gravedigger, to assist me.

Foote walked us to the cite at the corner of the earl’s winter garden. England had far more bodies than coffins. Despite her wealth and standing, Lady Anne had been wrapped in a blanket and lowered into a pit. Foote said she must have released her servants, because hers was the only body found in the manor. Foote, Bartholemew, and I dug with gardeners’ tools. The others dealt with corpses as their professions, and worked quickly, but I gingerly hacked at the ground.

Foote’s shovel scraped the blanket. “There she is.”

They continued with their shovels, but a putrid scent escaped the folds of the blanket, gagging me, and I had to climb out of the pit and watch them work.

Foote wore overalls and a watch cap. He was about forty years old, but his face was prematurely creased and sagging, perhaps from the nature of his work. Bartholemew wore a suit shiny with age and a key chain across his stomach. He had left a black leather bag containing his tools and an apron at the side of the pit.

As they lifted her from the ground, Bartholemew reassured me, “She’s been here only a month. Even for an amateur like you, this won’t be too bad.”

He was wrong. They carried her body to the manor house.

The pathologist said, “With her dead four weeks, I won’t need a blood gutter around the table. Let’s use the dining table.”

She was laid out and unwrapped. I saw her hair, glistening as it always had, but when my eyes moved to her face, I had to look away and grab the table edge for support.

Bartholemew pulled a pair of gloves and several tools from his bag. He wrapped the apron strings around his waist and tied them in front.

He passed me his notebook. “You take notes, Colonel.”

I did, with a trembling hand.

He cut away her clothes, then said, “Desecrated muscles and deteriorated skin indicate death occurred about a month ago, as believed. Her joints are intact. There is considerable abdominal viscera rotting, with its odor.”

I was embarrassed for her, lying on her table, stripped of her clothes, shed of all the careful constructs of her life, her dignity, even her humanity.

Bartholemew said, “She had a both-bone fracture of her right arm. The radius and ulna are virtually severed by an impact that pierced the skin. Her right clavicle has also been fractured.”

He poked and peeled for a few more moments. I gradually discovered that I could watch this morbid process. The memory of Lady Anne became disassociated from the mound of decomposing flesh and bones on the table.

I asked, “Would those injuries have killed her?”

“Yes, if she received no care.”

Then I asked the question for which I had exhumed her. “Did she die before she received those wounds?”

He replied, “Any break produces a blood collection called a fracture hematoma. The blood clots, then the cells turn into a fibrous clot, a tannish, sticky substance like glue. The body deposits calcium there to repair the break. No evidence of that here.”

I took notes.

Bartholemew continued, “And a fracture tears periosteum off the bone. Had she been alive when these breaks occurred, there would be blood around the fracture ends.”

I looked up from the pad.

He concluded, “There is no blood. Her circulation was well stopped when her body received this trauma. She died of something other than these fractures, something other than the explosion that tossed her study and knocked her off the chair, something other than the falling beam, which may have hit her.”

Then I knew how she died.

Lady Anne had been sitting at her desk at five o’clock that afternoon, May 31, 1942, the fourth day of the invasion. I had come to understand her sense of herself, and she may have had the windows open as a dare and an invitation. There were several books about the room, so she may have been reading, or she may have been writing the letter to General Clay.

As Foote told me, “She was dressed for evening when I found her, just like you see her clothes on this table. Ready for the ball. Black dress and pearls. I didn’t even remove her earrings. Too busy.”

There she sat at her desk, braced by her ineffable calm and steely purpose, when the invisible cloud drifted in through her windows. She inhaled the poison several times and silently slumped forward onto her desk.

That is how I think of it, out of newly found respect for her memory. But Haldon House had been enveloped by the nerve gas tabun, and her death more probably involved vomiting, involuntary defecation and urination, and body-wrenching seizures.

She died in agony, as did thousands of her countrymen at that same hour.

23

The Luftwaffe had manufactured its Scapa Flow victory decorations before the operation. The medal depicted the black, upended bow of a sinking Royal Navy battleship in a bronze circle. The Luftwaffe—the entire Fatherland—was besotted with medals. Even so, Oberleutnant Franz Stenzel was proud of his Scapa Flow medal. He and his weapons officer, Fritz Cohausz, had pinned theirs to their jerkins just after receiving their new Stuka.

Staffel 4, II Stukageschwader (Stuka squadron), had been providing ground support from the captured RAF aerodrome near Guildford with endless dive-bombing missions in front of armor and infantry. Stenzel was rummy from his labors. Twelve sorties already that day, and almost five hours of daylight still remained. Each time, he returned with empty bomb racks and gun belts.

They were empty yet again as he banked for an approach to the airfield. Southern England had been blanketed by smoke since his countrymen had arrived. From Stenzel’s vantage, it seemed that hardly a structure in Kent and Sussex remained whole. Smoke rolled away from most of them.

Stenzel said into his mask, “I’m becoming an expert on smoke. Black smoke from vehicle oil fires. Gray smoke from fires that are still churning. White smoke from dying fires.”

“Kindly keep your eye on the road, Franz,” came from Cohausz.

They sank toward the runway. Smoke rolled across the concrete. Stenzel wondered at it, because firecrews should have quickly extinguished fires hazardous to air maneuvers. He nodded when he saw a fire truck near the north end of the runway. They were working on the blaze, but it would be a stunt landing, as difficult as his ditching in the North Sea a few days before.

He lowered his flaps. It appeared that some of the squadron was about to take off. The planes faded, then materialized in the haze. Mechanics were clustered around one of the Stukas. Perhaps an engine failure was holding up the entire squadron. It was unlike Stenzel’s squadron leader to allow delays. Perhaps it was the smoke. The Oberleutnant stuck his oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth. He motioned for Cohausz to do the same. He didn’t want the indignity of greeting his ground crew with a racking cough.

They glided toward the airstrip. Stenzel nudged his stick with his knees. The rolling smoke and the sock at the far end of the runway indicated the wind was blustery. The pilot could feel it in his controls. The haze parted, and he was startled by the closeness of the runway. The Stuka bounced, cracking its pilot’s teeth together. “A perfect three-point landing, four times,” he told me after the war.

He throttled back, and his Stuka slowed. He guided it toward a fuel truck waiting for him. He would undoubtedly return to the sky in moments.

Cohausz said, “I hope the controller lets us leave the cockpit. I’ve got to pee.”

Stenzel drew his plane nearer to the other planes and gave a thumb’s up signal when he recognized Schwartz at the controls of the nearest dive-bomber.

“I had not noticed anything remarkable, but suddenly everything was wrong,” he recalled. “Schwarz was leaning forward over his stick, motionless. Another pilot lay on his wing. The crew of mechanics, who I had thought was repairing a plane, was prostrate on the ground. No one moved.”

Stenzel turned the plane toward the hangar, the north portion of which had been heavily damaged before the invasion. A dozen, maybe twenty, Luftwaffe pilots and crew were sprawled before the opening as if they had been cast out of the structure by a strong wind.

“And only then did the color of the smoke register on me. Not black or grey or white. It was a faint yellow-green.”

Cohausz realized it also. He yelled, “Get us out of here, Franz.”

Stenzel does not remember making any firm conclusions about the haze passing before him like veils, but he spun the Stuka around and headed for the end of the runway. With a hand, he pasted his mask against his face. He glanced west. He saw no fires, only the ominous haze. Bodies of the fire-crew were scattered across the pasture. He threw forward the throttle.

A moment later they were again airborne. Ground support required arming twice for every fueling. His last touchdown had been for bombs and shells. They would soon be low on fuel. For thirty minutes they searched behind friendly lines for a landing zone free from the green smoke. They could not find one.

For the second time in a five days, Oberleutnant Stenzel put a Stuka down in the sea. He and Cohausz were rescued by a hospital ship an hour later, but not before Stenzel lost his Scapa Flow medal as he scrambled out of the cockpit and jumped into the channel.

All Wolfgang Kleber knew about England he had read in translated Sherlock Holmes stories. The land was a place of bog and murk and unstable people. The hand of God had helped Kleber up the beach, but now, deep within a Sussex forest, God had disappeared, leaving him with the exhausted survivors of his platoon.

Because trucks could not penetrate the woods, the soldiers were acting as mules. Wurmbach was laden with a tripod. Detmers was carrying the mortar and Busse its base. Busse stumbled over an exposed root, almost sinking to the undergrowth. Luth was burdened with ammunition boxes. Bringing up the rear, all Kleber carried was his pack, respirator case, rations, and rifle.

Kleber had yet to see a bog or any murk, but the woods were eerie enough, with the trees rustling in the wind and the muffled sounds of explosions coming from all directions. He hoped the platoon leader knew where they were; unable to see more than ten meters ahead, Kleber had no idea. When the soldiers in front of him disappeared in the trees, Kleber increased his pace. They were descending a wooded ravine.

The English woods at last fulfilled Kleber’s Sherlock Holmes–fired expectations when a turbid haze reached for them from between the trees, following the contour of the land, descending into the ravine.

“It came at us in long cords, winding around tree trunks as it poured into the small valley.”

Clutching his face, Luth fell, buried beneath his ammunition cases. Detmers screamed, “Gas! Gas! Get out—” His words were choked off as he sank to the ground.

“I thought God was finished with me, but I was wrong,” Kleber told me after the war. “Burdened with equipment, my friends were thirty seconds slower than I in opening their gas mask cases. And they were deeper in the ravine, where the clouds were thick. They began spitting and gagging, and that made them fumble with their equipment. I had mine on, tight over my face, before any of them.”

Detmers, Buse, Wurmbach, and the others in the platoon died of suffocation within minutes. Wolfgang Kleber sat in the woods alone for two days.

“I almost went mad with thirst, because I was afraid to remove my mask.”

He did not know the phosgene persisted in the forest less than a quarter of an hour.

Lieutenant Del Mason did, but hoped not to have to test the knowledge. Mason was the practical joker with the flour near Royal Tunbridge Wells. He commanded a battery of 4.2-inch mortars. His CWS platoon had been held in reserve, always retreating, but at that hour had been rushed to the line. Mason had received the next order with disbelief, and in a breach of decorum demanded confirmation from Lieutenant Colonel Rhone, rather than asking Company C’s captain. Rhone radioed “Obey your orders,” so the lieutenant broke open the canister cases.

Mason admits his command of the battery was a fumbling, myopic affair. “It’s tough to see out of a gas mask, with the glass misting over. And I had on rubberized boots and gloves, and a cape over everything. It was stifling and awkward. It felt like I was wading in a stream. Everything slowed down. And I was shaking with what I was about to do.”

Mason tested the wind, then checked that the battery crew was buttoned up in protective gear. He could hear the roar of battle beyond the ridge, perhaps four hundred yards away. He gave the order. His crew, looking like beached seals in their gas cloaks, let the phosgene shells fall down the mortar throats. The mortars yelped. Working like machines, his crew lifted shells and let them plunge, lift and drop, lift and drop.

“Then, maybe four minutes later, the unseen battle over the rise quieted, as if someone had placed a muffling blanket over the area. I felt sorry for the bastards, really.”

Sergeant Gottfried Pfaffinger yelled into the turret voice tube, “Left forty, Erich, then steady.”

Yet his Panzerkampfwagen trundled straight ahead, plowing over an apple tree, then another. Pfaffinger thought he had seen a target just west of the orchard, glimpsed between curtains of smoke.

“Erich, left forty,” the sergeant shouted over the wail of the engine, “and be quick about it.”

The tank rumbled straight ahead, deeper into the orchard. Pfaffinger wiped the vision block. The apple trees were old and gnarled, with their branches propped with poles.

“And the fog, of course, the fog, rolling between the trees.”

Pfaffinger was from Freiburg and had a Swabian accent, which to other Germans sounds lisping. “I remember thinking England has fog too, like we do.”

Pfaffinger told his loader to investigate. The loader disappeared into the belly of the tank and never returned.

“Then I looked below,” the sergeant said during the interview. “There was a green, cotton haze in the driver’s compartment. I squinted at it. My hull gunner was slumped over the radio, and Erich Ruhland was being held up only by his steering levers. His gas mask container was opened, but he hadn’t had time to get it out. He might have yelled, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise of the engine. My loader was there also, fallen to the deck. The poison had entered through the vent and had settled below and didn’t rise.”

The tank commander frantically climbed back into the turret and threw a mask at the gunner. They wrestled them on, then abandoned the tank.

Pfaffinger and the gunner ran through the orchard, searching for a way out of the deadly cloud. “Through the haze, I saw another panzer that had butted against a high stone fence. The tank was tilted almost upright on the stones, its treads whirling uselessly away, like a wind-up toy. Its entire crew must have been surprised by the gas.”

Pfaffinger furled his brows a moment, then told me, “You know, that’s my most frightening memory of the war, the utter hopelessness of that panzer, grinding futilely away at an English garden wall.”

Flugmelder (Aircraft-Spotter) Rolf Ruckteschell had been at sea for six years. On the fourth day of the invasion, he was aboard the naval supply vessel Dithmarschen, lying three miles off Brighton. The ship was transporting rations and ordnance. Channel weather had deteriorated over the prior twenty-four hours. Dithmarschen was stalled off the coast because the surf had severely slowed the resupply operation.

“I remember having to lean into the port rail against the wind.” Ruckteschell told me after the war. “I had gained some knowledge about weather, gazing at the sky all day looking for British airplanes, which was the easiest duty in the Kriegsmarine, because the Royal Air Force was about out of planes by then. But I had never seen anything like that fog, not on the channel or the North Sea, not anywhere.”

Brighton was still held by Allied troops, as the Wehrmacht was avoiding cities as too costly to take. German units had pivoted inland behind the city.

Ruckteschell said, “The fog began at the eastern edge of the city, and the blustering wind quickly carried it east along the shore and over the breaking waves. The haze drained the coastline of perspective.”

The spotter raised his binoculars. “Then I saw the artillery burst over the beach, with grass-green gas erupting from the shells while they were still airborne. I could see some of our barges and landing craft vanish into the cloud, too late to reverse engines and pull back, their crews already dead.”

Ruckteschell added, “I hadn’t been ill since my first days onboard a ship, years before. But I was sick then, sick for my fellow sailors disappearing into that lethal mist.”

When General Stedman read the first draft of this manuscript, he brought to my attention a gap in the narrative. I had yet to touch upon the German invasion command. The reason was pardonable, I thought: I had not yet found any survivors. After my conversation with Stedman, I spent another two weeks searching Germany for a witness to the Wehmracht forward command. I found one, Corporal Joachim Zenker, who had been a sentry posted to von Rundstedt’s Army Group A headquarters. Under von Rundstedt was the entire Wehrmacht invasion force except those units hitting the British VI Corps at Lyme Bay west of the Americans.

Army Group A’s headquarters that day were at a country house near Wisborough Green, southwest of Horsham. The house was in an elevated position near the hamlet and in the middle of a five-acre garden. The house was thirteen miles east of the furthest German advances. It was also fourteen miles, one hundred yards, east of the U.S. Army’s 13th Field Artillery Brigade.

Corporal Zenker guarded the home’s front gate, once wrought iron, he guessed, but removed and contributed to the British war effort. He walked idly back and forth between two brick gate posts, a Schmeisser submachine gun hanging from a leather strap over his shoulder. Zenker had never seen anything like this country house, with its paddock, grass tennis court, chapel, and five secondary cottages. The corporal had not been inside the main house. “To be under a roof was not my position in the Fatherland’s war effort,” he told me after the war. “I stood in the wind, just looking at the place, knowing that inside huge decisions were being made by von Rundstedt, who nodded at me once, I think.”

Corporal Zenker’s view of the house was along a hundred-yard driveway, which was bordered by azaleas and lady’s mantle in front of purple-leaf maples. “I could see right down the drive to the front entrance, where more sentries were posted among scout cars and a few black sedans.”

The artillery shell hit midway down the drive. “An enormous explosion. I jumped a meter off the ground. I expected to see a crater the size of a tank in the ground when the smoke cleared. Well, it cleared, and there was nothing to see.”

Zenker debated leaving his post at the gate to investigate. Moments later, the guards at the door were on the ground, “scratching at the pebbles, as if digging a foxhole with their hands, and kicking. I decided I’d better have a look.”

The corporal ran toward the house, passing the blackened ground where the shell had landed. When he saw the maples were still standing, instead of blown over by the blast, he knew the nature of the shell, though not the nature of the chemical, tabun, the nerve gas that cannot be smelled or seen. He removed his gas mask from its canister on his service belt. “I’d only put it on three or four times in drills. Never comfortable with it. I wasn’t even sure it worked.”

He passed three sentries, now dead from suffocation induced by the gas. He peered into one of the sedans. Its driver was spilled sideways on the seat, still twitching and jerking. Zenker pushed open the house’s door. “The heaviest door I’ve ever opened, I thought then. But I discovered that a major had fallen against the inside of it, his legs splayed out in front of him. I pressed my mask to my face. Bodies were everywhere, in front of maps pinned to the wall, draped over desks, one officer hanging out a window. Several were still having convulsions. Vomit was everywhere. An aide had opened a case of gas masks, but hadn’t had time to issue them or get one on himself. Five or six of the masks were at his feet.”

Von Rundstedt was wearing his modified piped field service tunic. Instead of collar patches normally worn by a field marshall, he favored the parade uniform collar patches worn by infantry officers below the rank of general. In his hand was his interim-stab, the everyday version of his field marshal’s baton.

“And he was dead, all that Prussian military grandeur, very dead,” Zenker recalled. “Trying to breathe, the field marshall had clawed a hole in his neck with his fingers. Two of his fingers were inside his neck. I wondered who would lead us now.”

The 13th Field Artillery Brigade was the only unit capable of delivering the shell that far behind enemy lines, so the origination of the killing shell was not hard for me to figure out. The gas shell had been delivered courtesy of a 4.5 Gun M1, which weighed six tons and fired a fifty-five-pound shell. The gun was near the tiny village of Bramshot, and von Rundstedt’s headquarters was about two hundred yards inside the gun’s maximum range.

I spoke with one of the brigade’s battery officers, Lieutenant Dennis Pritchard. He said, “CWS companies were shelling them close in, and we had a number of big gas shells, so we decided to hit their reserves. I figured, why let our heavy shells go to waste? Why not give some anonymous German assholes some time-on-target? I didn’t have target coordinates. We just raised the barrel and let them have it.”

In other words, the shell that devastated the Wehrmacht command was a lucky shot. Pritchard was unaware of his gun’s accomplishment until I told him after the war. He was then a shoe store manager in Moline, Illinois. He replied, “The hell you say.” And that’s all he said. “The hell you say.”

I witnessed General Clay give the order to use phosgene and the nerve gas. The suggestion by the British historian Forbes Wooden that I have denied giving interviews about the event to boost sales of this narrative is specious and undeserving of comment except to say that I was determined to have my recollection appear in its entirety, not edited to support one hardened viewpoint or another.

The most controversial question of the invasion, and perhaps of the war, was with whom did Clay consult before deciding to use the gas? I do not know. I have a theory, which I will press on you later in this chronicle, when all my evidence has been set forth.

The first I knew of his decision was the instant he gave the order. AEFHQ’s forward headquarters that hour, 4:45 P.M., Sunday, May 31, 1942, was near Woking, twenty miles southwest of the City. The western edge of General Clay’s command was at Woking. Beyond that lay the British V Corps. If the Wehrmacht had pushed west beyond that town, tactical decisions regarding defending against the German encirclement would have passed to a British corps commander.

So Clay ordered the chemical shelling just before such a decision would have been taken out of his hands. Many post-invasion critics say it was never in his hands.

Headquarters near Woking was in the barn of a destroyed country home. Present were I Corps’s Alex Hargrave, the 2nd Infantry’s Burt Jones, G2 David Lorenzo, and others.

When signalman Captain Branch called out, “General Clay, General Alexander on the wireless,” Clay growled, “What does he want?”

Branch’s head came up from his equipment. “I’m a lowly captain, sir. It’s not really my place to ask the C in C of Joint Army Operations what he wants.”

“Ask him anyway. He’ll expect no less from an American.”

After a moment, Branch said, “Sir, he wants to discuss transfer of field defense command to General Durward of British V Corps.”

Clay said, “Tell him I’m unavailable.”

“Sir?” Branch asked in a pleading tone. “He’s right here on the line.”

“Tell him I’m out using the two-holer.” Clay turned to me. “Alexander could get under my skin, given enough time.”

I followed the general toward Alex Hargrave. Midway, Clay stopped and his hand shot out to brace himself on a bale of hay, as if he were faint. His knees were shaking.

I quickly stepped to him. “Sir? You okay?”

He might not have heard me. He took a long breath, then began again toward Hargrave. He said. “Alex, I’m ordering Yellow Boy.”

United States Army lieutenant generals do not like to be heard to gasp, but that is precisely what escaped Hargrave. “Yellow Boy?”

“Right now. Pass it through.”

“General, do you have the authority for such an order?”

“I’m your superior,” Clay said in a wintry tone. “Do as I tell you.”

Hargrave’s small features were a blank of perplexity. He breathed stertorously. “General Clay… Wilson, do you realize what you are doing?”

“Fully.”

“You will be the first commander in this war to break the 1925 convention against its use.”

“Pass the order to your divisions, Alex.”

Hargrave gripped the upturned fruit crate that was acting as his desk. “I must ask to see your authorization from General Marshall or the president in Washington or from the prime minister.”

“Are you failing to discharge an order from me, Alex?”

Generals Lorenzo and Jones were motionless near the barn door. The field telephone dangled from Captain Branch’s hand.

“Let me see the command from Washington or London, sir,” Hargrave said, holding out his hand.

Clay at that moment resembled a brawler. Chin down, shoulders bunched, fists clenched, neck thick and corded. He said in a voice dark with both rage and regret, “Alex, for failure to follow an order of your superior officer, you are relieved of command.”

Hargrave said softly, as if in the presence of the dead, “Don’t do this, Wilson.”

“You are dismissed.” Clay turned to the door. “Burt, are you still following your commander?”

General Jones replied stiffly, “Yes, sir.”

“Then you are promoted to I Corps commander. Issue Yellow Boy to your units. Tell me when it is underway.”

“Yes, sir.” With a last glance at Hargrave, Jones rushed to Captain Branch’s signal station.

Hargrave whispered, “For the love of God, don’t do this, Wilson. Think of what you will release upon the world.”

Clay spun on his heels. As he brushed by me, he said, “Follow me, Colonel Royce, immediately.”

I hurried after him to one corner of the barn. That command, to follow him, was the most urgent he gave me during the invasion. I feared he was going to test me as he had General Hargrave.

I had forgotten that I was nothing but his sounding board. He squared himself, nodding toward Burt Jones who was bent over a radio with Captain Branch. Clay fairly snarled, “You know why I’ve gone to Yellow Boy, don’t you, Jack?”

I was breathless from the spectacle of a commander ordering use of an outlawed weapon and from General Clay’s taut dismissal of his friend of three decades. “Sir?”

His voice softened. “When the crap begins to fly in Washington and London, no one is going to listen to anything I have to say.”

“What?”

“I think I’ve caught the German celebrating, Jack.”

“What?”

If I weren’t such a scrupulous reporter, I would make myself sound brighter throughout this narrative.

“The German has had his way for four days now, and he has begun to celebrate. He can’t help it. It’s human nature, loath though I am to credit the German with that. History teaches the danger of celebrating early.”

Then I understood him. He was going to justify himself before the court of his aide-de-camp, who was known for paroles and concurrent sentences.

“The kaiser lost his head during the first hours of the Somme in 1918 and raised the hurrahs of victory.”

I wanted to search for a box of gas masks. I couldn’t remember if I had ever been issued one.

“And the Austrian Archduke Charles after the victory at Aspern/Essling was so elated he became incapable of decision.”

I asked in a rush, “Sir, do we have gas masks? Where do we keep them?”

Clay continued, “And the Hessian, Colonel Rall, was so overconfident that he was dead drunk when Washington was crossing the Delaware toward him.”

“Maybe the quartermaster would know about the masks. I don’t think I’ve ever had one on.”

“Jack, for Christ’s sake, you aren’t listening. Forget about the goddamn gas mask a moment.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied dubiously.

“Overconfidence will throw a commander off his pace, Jack. Just before the battle, Napoleon said Waterloo would be a picnic. Bonnie Prince Charles had an unfounded belief his five thousand followers were invincible, and they were destroyed by the English in 1746. And you wrote about Burgoyne in that interminable thesis of yours. So you know that he was enthusiastic before Saratoga and that the colonials destroyed his army.”

My God, was that German gas from a retaliatory strike coming through the barn door? No, just dust blown by the wind.

“The German has had his way too long. Do you get my point?”

“What?” Maybe General Lorenzo knew where our masks were. He seemed to know everything.

“The German is overconfident. He has allowed himself to stray about three feet too far from his gas mask. So I’ve got him by the balls.”

Burt Jones left the signal station and walked toward us.

I said, “By the nose is a better metaphor in this case, sir.”

As a courtesy to you, the reader, I have omitted many of General Clay’s historical references from this narrative, although, I admit, it may not seem that way. This one is included in full because it struck me as forced, a bit frantic. He was pitiful and poignant, thinking he had to justify himself to me.

Jones said, “The orders are out, General Clay. The first shells are on their way.”

When Jones had retreated, the general said, “Jack, the Great War showed that if troops are expecting a gas attack, casualties are less than two percent, but if the enemy is surprised by chemicals, the casualty rate is seventy to ninety percent.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I think I’ve surprised them, don’t you?”

Indeed he had.

Poison gas does not discriminate in favor of civilians, of course.

The Haslemere Savings Bank was managed by John Lind. Haslemere is midway between London and Portsmouth. Wehrmacht troops had passed through the town while Lind and a teller had hidden in the bank’s cellar. When the scattered firing and artillery bombardment had lessened, they cautiously climbed up to the ground floor to peer through the window to the street. Several other civilians had ventured out. There were no Germans to be seen, until a three-vehicle convoy rumbled down the street. They were armored cars, Lind decided, and clearly German, since he saw a coal scuttle helmet poking from one of the hatches.

Then an apple-green vapor swept down the street as if it were the armored cars’ exhaust. Lind told me, “Early in the war, the greatest fear was of gas. I knew instantly what the cloud was. Bertie and I ran into our old Chubb vault and closed the door. We waited as long as the air in the Chubb held out, about an hour. Then we emerged. The gas had vanished, but it was an anguishing sight that met us.”

Lind stepped outside onto the sidewalk. Five bodies lay there. “I knew most of them. Mrs. Able, the butcher’s widow. Peter Smythe, a carpenter. Harold Laidlaw, our solicitor. Others, all dead. I started running along, stopping every few steps to turn over and recognize the dead. It was a grisly business, Haslemere’s citizens sprawled along its lanes. And I thanked God I had sent my wife and child north.”

Near Reigate, the Heavy Rescue Service found three greyhounds inside Paul Lewis’s Anderson bomb shelter, which he had constructed to be virtually air-tight. The dogs were alive and hungry. The bodies of Lewis and a fourth greyhound were ten feet from the shelter’s entrance. He had attempted to save one too many of the animals.

Alfred Sedgwick remembers his survival with remorse. He and eight other pipefitters and machinists heard screams from outside their Reigate Waterworks machine shop. He recalled, “One look, and we knew what was what, the poison cloud coming at us with the wind.”

Sedgwick and the others ran to the back room where the gas masks had been stored for three years. “In 1939, there were more masks in Surrey than people. But they had been shuffled around over the years. And the eight of us found only two of them, stacked in their buff-colored boxes. Only two.”

Sedgwick and the others drew lots, using lengths of wire. “Reggie Merrill and I drew long ones. Six of our friends did not. Dreadfully frightened, they ran from the shop, trying to keep in front of the cloud. Their bodies were found a stone’s throw from the waterworks. I’ve never forgiven myself for not finding a better way. I feel as if I sent them to their deaths.”

I asked Sedgwick what that better solution would have been.

He shook his head. “Something. Anything. I’m alive, and they’re dead. It doesn’t seem right.”

Maude Bruce was a nurse in Reigate. “We had just placed the last of the wounded and ill from our small hospital on lorries. One moment our town was full of retreating American soldiers. The next moment they had disappeared.”

Enemy armor and infantry skirted the town on their march north. She saw them at the edge of her village, glimpses of panzers and camouflaged trucks barely visible in their own dust. Firing came from everywhere.

“It was too late for me to escape to London,” she told me during an interview, “and the fighting seemed to be north anyway, so I walked the other direction, toward the Mole.”

She walked along the River Mole, a winding, seemingly aimless creek. Along the banks she was hidden from most of the German units above. A few Wehrmacht troops might have spotted her, she thinks, but battle-pressed infantry do not have time for wandering civilians.

“There might have been twenty of us along the river bank, trying to stay out of harm’s way. I was trying so hard to make myself small, to disappear, that I didn’t see the clouds of gas so many survivors remember.”

Maude Bruce suddenly felt her throat restrict, as if a hand had been clamped around it. “My first thought, actually, was that a German had snuck up behind me and grabbed my throat. Then my lungs seemed to fill with fire, and I thought I’d been shot. I thought, this is what being shot must feel like.”

She collapsed into the mud of the river bank. “As providence would have it, my face fell into a bushel of moss. I was never unconscious, I don’t think. I turned my head once, and my nose filled with a sweet hay odor, and I knew it was poison. I pushed my face further into the moss.”

The river moss acted as a filter. Maude Bruce survived. When she rose thirty minutes later, the banks of the River Mole were dappled with bodies.

The English way with happy euphemisms at times fails them. The hospital for the criminally insane at Royal Tunbridge Wells was named Royal Tunbridge Wells Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Interred there were four King George VIs, two Napoleons, at least one Mary, Queen of Scots, and ninety others.

I spoke with Dr. Robert Longstreet, superintendent of the hospital. “My assistants and I tried, we really did. We had more than enough gas masks, but not enough strength. As soon as we would get a mask on a patient, he would yank it right off. Many just could not understand the danger. We lost forty-five patients, many dying with their masks in their hands.”

At another hospital, this one near Guildford, Edwin Perkins felt fortunate for his injuries. Perkins had been badly burned a day before. He had been placed under an oxygen tent. The toxic gas seeped through the hospital windows.

He remembered, “An orderly convulsed, coughing and clawing at his neck. One of the doctors rushed into the ward, and he fell, too. And I saw other patients writhe and cough and then be still. But I was immune to it, and it took me a moment to understand. I was under the oxygen tent. It saved my life once, and it saved me again.”

Graham Gilmore was spared when he sealed himself inside his grocery’s meat locker. “After about ninety minutes, my choice was clear. I had to risk stepping outside or freeze to death.” Out he went, and the gas had dissipated.

Roger Crighton was director of the Wheelerstreet Cemetery and Mausoleum, near Godalming. When a shell landed near his west garden, a green cloud raced toward him in the wind. He locked himself inside the mausoleum. “The lichhouse saved me.”

Clara Roe of Albury, three miles southeast of Guildford, rolled up the windows of her automobile and closed the vent. She told me after the war, “I saw a wisp of lime green air come through the vent, so I took off my blouse and jammed it in there.”

I remarked that this was quick thinking.

She blushed. “I wasn’t through removing my clothes. When a puff of it came through the floorboards, I removed my skirt and lay it over the boards, and sat on it. Then I took my stockings off and pushed them along the bottom of the passenger door to stop another wisp. I sat there as naked as I ever care to be for twenty minutes until the cloud cleared. I felt quite the doxy.”

Wayne Sandon crawled through a manhole into a sewer in Royal Tunbridge Wells. “After gagging for half an hour, I thought to myself, no German gas can be as bad as this sewer, so I climbed out. The poison was gone.”

Lord Walford hurriedly descended into the wine cellar of his country home five miles north of the Duke of Norfolk’s castle at Arundel. “I felt entirely safe, even snug, in that dark, warm cavern, with my wine collection. Then, after five minutes, I decided my faithful servants deserved to join me. I emerged to find them madly running around coughing in this distracting manner, and I had to fairly tug them into the cellar. Five of us were down there for two hours. It was exceedingly close, and we had little to talk about. Now that I think about it, I should have offered them something to drink.”

General Clay’s toxic clouds burst forth along a north-south line roughly corresponding to the western borders of Surrey and Sussex. More poison clouds erupted along the northern German front, in a sweeping east-west arc twenty miles south of the Thames. The freshening wind both aided and hindered the gas, moving it along but also diluting it.

It might have been worse. English civilians hid in basements, under blankets and laundry, in closets and pantries, under rugs, in bomb shelters, anywhere that seemed proof against the deadly wind. Some of these spontaneous shelters worked, and many civilians had gas masks.

The gas dipped down here but not there, puddled in one home but missed the neighbor’s house, streamed along one village lane but ignored another.

Most civilians had already moved inland. Only essential workers and the brave, ignorant, or foolish had remained.

Despite all this, the carnage was appalling. Latest estimates for noncombatant deaths due to the chemicals are approaching 22,000. The number of wounded is much higher, and may never be accurately determined.

At 5:30 that afternoon, General Clay said grimly, “Not one goddamn further inch of English soil is going to fall to the enemy, Jack. Mark my words.”

He was right. His ghastly tactic stunned the Germans. Wehrmacht fatalities were staggering. Their front froze. The vaunted blitzkrieg shuddered to a halt, choking and thrashing.

24

My last council of war—unless one counts my current membership on the board of UCLA’s student newspaper—occurred the next evening in the hole in the ground. Winston Churchill called us to order by tapping an ashtray on the green cloth.

I do not believe General Clay had the slightest idea whether this meeting would be triumphant or recriminatory. It certainly began badly, though, when Churchill nodded at General Barclay, who said, “We will have a moment of silence for General Crawford Douglas.”

Clay’s head snapped up. He had not known the Allied Air Forces chief was dead.

Barclay said quietly, “Douglas was killed in a retaliatory phosgene strike while visiting a forward base. The gas bomb was delivered by a Luftwaffe dive-bomber.”

During that silent moment, Clay’s eyes went from man to man, judging his support. I could not determine a tally.

Churchill ended the tribute abruptly, “General Clay, will you report?”

Clay began aggressively, “Our situation is vastly improved since last we met.” He stepped to the map of southern England. “The German advance, which was gaining a mile of English territory every hour, is dead in its tracks.”

Clay spoke for several minutes, repeatedly sweeping his hand across the map, wiping away the Wehrmacht. He concluded, “We believe the Wehrmacht divisions, including the 28th, 8th, and 6th Mountain, which were spearheading the encirclement drive, and many of the encircling second-wave reserves, including the 7th and 8th Panzer and the 20th Motorized, have ceased to exist as fighting forces.”

I am not sure of this, but despite the solemnity in the room, I believe that Winston Churchill grinned demonically at that moment. With the pretense of planting his cigar in his mouth, his hand quickly rose to cover the smile.

Clay went on. “The German has suffered exceptionally high casualties. Those Wehrmacht soldiers who escaped with their health have been rendered almost useless by the sudden plunge in their morale. They no longer have the will to take your land.”

“How do you know the state of German morale?” General Alexander asked.

“Interviews with POWs. Captured soldiers tell my G2 that the Wehrmacht infantry is morose and haggard, paralyzed by the sudden reverse.”

General Stedman asked, “How many POWs do you have?”

“Too many to count. I suspect my men have snatched more Germans in the last twenty-four hours than have been captured by all prior Allied efforts in the war.”

I swear Churchill grinned again behind his hand.

“We have noted that a generalized Wehrmacht retreat has begun. The withdrawal may not have been ordered by OKW, but it is the result of battlefield reality. We are also noting a peculiar phenomenon. Many of the Wehrmacht regiments and battalions seem to be acting independently of command, seemingly without coordination.”

Arthur Stedman said, “We think we know the reason. Bletchley’s direction finders report an abrupt end to the concentration of signals coming from a position southwest of Horsham. They conclude a major Wehrmacht headquarters was destroyed in the gas attack, a corps or even an army headquarters.”

Applause or congratulations would have been too much to expect from the British, who usually have chilled water in their veins, but this news should have produced at least a few clucks of approval. The room was leaden with silence. And, to my mind, it screamed with the as yet unasked question to Clay: Who authorized the gas?

The prime minister said, “We’ll hear now from Captain Swarthmore.”

The weatherman entered with a brisk walk I had not seen before. He quickly took his spot in front of the map. His dark eyes seemed to dance. He said, “I have good news.”

Swarthmore outlined conditions on the channel, which continued to deteriorate. Swells were approaching seven feet, with twenty-knot winds that would hold for a minimum of thirty-six hours.

Churchill asked, “Are you saying that the German landing operation will be entirely interrupted”

Swarthmore replied with prickly pride, “I am a meteorologist, Prime Minister, not a sailor.”

Alexander said, “We do not believe a single Wehrmacht regiment has been able to land since noon today. Certainly no armor can make it to shore.”

After Swarthmore left the room, General Stedman reported on the enemy landing at Lyme Bay in Dorset, where the Wehrmacht’s momentum seemed to have slowed in sympathy with the devastation on the main front. No gas had as yet been used in Dorset, but no British troops were without their masks.

Then Stedman outlined efforts to reinforce the Clay’s AEF and the Canadian I Corps with British units from the north. Before the chemical assault, Second Dunkirk, the heroic and impulsive rising of the English citizenry to transport their soldiers, seemed foolish. But with Wehrmacht forward units in gasping, stumbling disorder, the civilian land bridge might make a difference, Stedman said. Rather than in precise military columns of march along narrow, Luftwaffe-pocked roads, the army was being moved south in wide waves by British volunteers. General Barclay shook his head at the wonder of it.

Lord Lindley finally broached the subject that had hung in the room like the gas itself. “General Clay, may I inquire as to your authority to use the chemical weapon?”

“I am commander of the American Expeditionary Force,” Clay answered. “I ordered the gas.”

The minister for coordination of defense pressed, “You intentionally misunderstand my question, General. Who allowed you to be the first in this war to use chemical weapons?”

General Clay spread his hands on the table, a gesture of endless patience and reasonableness. “My army was on the verge of extinction. I had no alternative.”

“Your alternative would have been, at the very minimum, to consult with us,” Clement Attlee said. “You took it upon yourself to breach a treaty that has kept the world free of chemical battlefields for two decades.”

“Mr. Attlee,” Clay responded, his voice still level, “had I not used the chemicals, von Rundstedt would right now be delivering his orders from the chair you are sitting in.”

Lord Lindley said, “We should not engage in profitless speculation—”

Clay cut him off, “And all your asses would be in Canada by now.”

“My dear chap—”

“This group would be a shamed, defeated, impotent government in exile, just like the Poles who issue their useless communiques from London.”

I noticed that the politicians, not the military men, were grilling Clay.

Lindley said icily, “You are aware, General Clay, that your Congress and administration are in an uproar. There are members of your Congress calling for your summary arrest. General Marshall is under intense pressure to resign because he chose you to lead the AEF. Even President Roosevelt is mired in controversy, with your newspaper reporters shouting questions at him and some senators claiming he must accept the ultimate responsibility for your acts and step down. The wire traffic between here and Washington has brimmed with it.”

Attlee brought his chin up. “General Clay, one question has fairly consumed me since I learned of your use of the gas. Did you consider the English civilians who would surely perish? Did you give them a thought?”

Clay said softly, “I did.”

Attlee asked in an old man’s voice, “Do you in any way share our anguish over their fate?”

“I do.”

This was inadequate atonement for Lord Lindley. “General Clay, there is a possibility you will enter history as one of its great military criminals.”

“Horseshit. You gave me a job, and I did it. Now stop your whining.”

Lindley blinked as if Clay had spit at him.

A code clerk entered the room and gave a message to the prime minister. Churchill’s face darkened as he read it. He looked up, “General Clay, this is from Marshall in Washington. You have been relieved of command of the American Expeditionary Force. General Hargrave is now its commander. You have been ordered to Washington.”

Clay’s face was impassive. A long moment passed. Then his mouth twitched, and his eyes became glassy. He blinked several times. He was struggling with himself, I could tell. He inhaled slowly. When he pursed his lips—that expression I had seen so many times—I knew he was in control.

He reached for his Pall Malls and dropped them into his pocket. He gathered his papers, then pushed himself up from his seat. I rose with him. General Alexander nodded. I learned later that Alexander had spoken over the telephone with President Roosevelt and had encouraged Clay’s removal. All eyes were on Clay, but, once again, I found them unreadable.

Clay walked to the door slowly, to hide his limp. He turned to them. “You people need some advice.” His voice was as strong and as true as a warning tocsin.

Lindley cleared his throat, dismissing Clay.

“You may think your resources are depleted and your soldiers are exhausted, but you must pursue the enemy with utter ruthlessness into the channel. No battle is won without the coup de grâce. Do not make the mistake of thinking you have won anything yet.”

Clay’s hand was on the door handle when Winston Churchill said magisterially, “You are advising us not to make the error General Meade did after Gettysburg, in failing to aggressively pursue the broken Confederate army.”

Clay’s eyebrow rose. “Yes.” Again his hand went for the door handle. But he paused and said, “Or, as a better example, the French failure to pursue the Austrians after Wagram.”

“Or, even better, Marlborough’s failure to vigorously pursue the French after Malplaquet.”

Clay countered, “Or, better than Marlborough, General Howe’s failure to pursue Washington into Manhattan Island.”

Puzzled AACCS members looked left and right, left and right, following the match.

“What you are suggesting,” Churchill said, his eyes locked on Clay’s, “is that we act as Napoleon at Austerliz did, when he ordered his artillery to smash the frozen Satschan Pond, so the Austrians fleeing across it would break through and drown.”

Clay came back with, “Or as the English did after defeating the Jacobites at Culloden, chasing them in a spree of death and mutilation.”

The prime minister paused, his next volley on his tongue. But it would not come. His brows sewn tightly together, he stared at the fan on the wall, then at the damp end of his cigar. “Well, my memory has failed me for the moment.”

Clay smiled briefly. “Then this meeting wasn’t a total loss.”

I followed him into the hallway. We were stepping up the stairs into the London weather when Clay said to me, “He gave me that one.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“He let me win, as a gift. And you can write in your goddamn diary, which will likely prove the ruin of me, that I said so.”

General Clay had nothing to do with the British victory that followed, so I have little to report. The storm lasted three days, during which few German men or supplies landed and Luftwaffe sorties were severely reduced. The phosgene and the tabun and the weather worked together to cripple the Wehrmacht’s operation. Then the British army crushed it. Ten days after they landed, the last German was thrown off the island.

But not to return to the beaches would leave General Clay’s ledger unfilled. He met the enemy there, and it is fitting I describe how the invasion ended there.

Winston Churchill and General Stedman took Clay’s advice to heart, or, more probably, they were of the same mind all along. There was no repeat of Dunkirk, where the Germans strangely let a British army escape. The beach fighting was less a battle than a vengeful melee. I interviewed a number of German survivors.

Sergeant Waldemar Rasch, who had seen his entire ten-man squad fall rushing up the beach, witnessed the same thing when he returned to the beach. “Even though the seas had lessened, the evacuation was chaotic. The beach resembled a crowd at a rally, thousands of soldiers milling about. There was nothing to do but wait for a ship or a barge. All that we held of England then was the beach, a narrow band between the water and the British. And the British were angry.”

American units had received the brunt of the invasion and had been pulled off the line. The pursuit was made by the British. After the slapdash rush south, many British soldiers could not find their regiments. They fought in spontaneously formed units.

Rasch was ten feet from the surf, in a line of riflemen waiting to climb onto a barge. His new squad had seven men left. Then a shell landed at the waterline. “I believe it was just one piece of shrapnel that tore through five of them in line, ripping through the first soldier’s groin and rising as it blew back, through four more, then ripping off a portion of Hans Handlisch’s head. He had been standing in front of me. With them all down at once, I was next in line to board. I did so quickly.”

Alwin “Ajax” Oesten piloted a forty-foot French riverboat that normally plied the Seine. He told me, “We were using everything that floated, and that shallow-keeled boat wasn’t made for chop. I put it right up to the surf, then swung hard to port, and signaled the waiting soldiers to board. I wasn’t expecting them to come all at once.”

Infantrymen frantically waded out to the boat, some casting away their rifles and kits to climb aboard. “Forty or fifty of them suddenly grabbed my starboard rail. I yelled, but they wouldn’t let go of the boat, and it listed. That made it easier to climb on, and when they did, the boat tilted further. Finally, it foundered, rolled right on over. A few, including me, jumped free, but many drowned under the hull.”

Able Seaman Gustav Foerster was a deckhand on a Kriegsmarine tug. Before the invasion his barge had hauled gravel, so it was easily capable of sustaining the weight of the three hundred soldiers he was taking home. “I thought we were clear of the carnage,” he told me later. “We were churning away from the beach, leaving the turmoil behind, when an artillery shell struck the barge athwartships. When the smoke cleared, a few soldiers were standing fore and aft on the barge, but nobody in the middle, just pieces of them, and the barge was awash in blood.”

At Pevensey Bay, Sergeant Hugo Brinkmann was pushed into the sea by a mass of soldiers. “It was like the bread riots during the panic in the early thirties. A weaving, pulsing throng, pushing and pushing. I was pressed deeper and deeper into the water. I don’t think those at the back of the pack knew we were in trouble. They shouldered those in front of them to get away from the beach fire. Some soldiers were trampled under foot, others forced into the water.”

Struggling against the tumultuous mob of soldiers, Brinkmann threw away his gas mask and scraped off his boots. “We were packed so tightly that I couldn’t bend to get out of my pack, so I cut it off with my knife. Just as I did, my feet no longer touched the bottom and waves washed over my head. All around me were the thrashing and gasping and crying of soldiers. Many drowned before they could break free of the horde. I was pulled under by desperate hands, but I kicked free, and kept kicking until I was away from the pack. A barge glided by, and several soldiers pulled me on board.”

At Rottingdean, just east of Brighton, the remnants of Corporal Max-Eckart Schuur’s company, once a spirited unit of 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Division, attempted to surrender. Schuur rigged a white flag made from a flour sack to his rifle and with three others crept to the crest of a hill and waved the rifle back and forth.

“There was a pause in the Tommy fire,” he recalled. “They yelled something at us. I stood up slowly, still waving the rifle. The others put their hands in the air. Just then, Lieutenant Pruess ran toward us, cursing and waving his Luger, calling us cowards.”

The Wehrmacht had been ordered never to surrender. Some officers, fresh to the front, were still burning with the spirit of the Fatherland. “Pruess yelled that we were traitors and wagged his pistol in front of us. I said, ‘Lieutenant, haven’t you got eyes? We are one minute away from being annihilated.’ He turned red and sputtered something, then brought up the pistol. I believe he was going to shoot me.”

He did not have the chance. “I smashed the butt of my rifle alongside his head, and he collapsed. We left him there, the fool. I held up the white flag again, and my friends and I walked toward the British line.”

Bernhard Schenk was pulled onto a minesweeper, then in turn helped others behind him. When the boat was filled rail to rail with soldiers, the pilot threw the throttle forward, and it churned away from the beach. “I thought I had escaped. My joy at leaving that hellish island made me forget the shells overhead and the soldiers we were leaving behind. I wanted to dance. I was free. Then a heavy machine gun found our boat.”

A steady stream of bullets turned the pilothouse into chaff. The wheel station and the pilot disintegrated. “The mate rushed to the wheel, but there was nothing remaining to control the ship. The boat was out of control.”

It veered right in a long circle, toward France and freedom, then toward the open channel to the west, and finally, agonizingly, back to the English shore. It powered over Wehrmacht soldiers, living and dead, then rammed the shore.

“I jumped into the surf, and swam away from the beach. I was picked up by a motor torpedo boat a few minutes later.”

Lieutenant George Quedenfeldt’s platoon had survived almost intact the entire invasion. Thirty-five of them entered the channel water toward a Kriegsmarine supply ship fifty yards offshore. The ship’s mate had signaled that it could get no closer to the shore. The platoon began swimming, stronger swimmers helping the weaker.

Quedenfeldt told me, “We were halfway there when a British machine gunner opened up. The water boiled with bullets, and my soldiers began bursting apart. The water seethed with bullets and blood. A bullet ripped off my left arm just below the elbow, and a corporal pulled me along. Only twelve of us made the boat. The screams still wake me at night.”

Rudolf Liebe won a bronze medal in the hundred-meter freestyle at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Artillery and rifle fire had chased away most of the Kriegsmarine ships and barges. Liebe had been pinned to the ground in a dune thicket near Dymchurch. He told me after the war, “The air overhead sang with British shells. I looked up, and I swear the sky was rippling with all the projectiles. If I stood, I would have been mowed over by random shots. But I saw the last ship pull away from the shore, leaving me. I had to take a chance to reach it.”

Liebe sprang upright and sprinted toward the water, stumbling over bodies and waving an arm to alert that last ship. “They either did not see me or decided it was too risky to bother with me. I waded into the surf, then dove forward. My arms glanced off a body. I started stroking to sea, but every few seconds I’d bounce into another body. All around, the water was squirting with shells. I was awash in bodies, more dead German soldiers than waves, it seemed. Germany’s best, a sea of them, rising and falling with the swells.” Liebe swam for six hours until he was pulled from the water by the crew of the Erwin Wassner, a Kriegsmarine submarine depot ship.

Liebe believes he may have been the last German soldier to leave British soil.

25

I was the last person to see Wilson Clay alive. Two days after being removed from his position as the American Expeditionary Force’s commander, he and I were in his Grosvenor Square flat packing his belongings for his journey home. Our gas masks were nearby. The Luftwaffe had dropped several phosgene and mustard gas bombs on the city, but Londoners were well prepared, and there were few casualties. Rain was falling against the window.

Clay was packing his military treatises into a sea trunk when he looked up and said, “Jack, I haven’t had much to do these past few days, as you know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So I read your journal.”

I was aghast. “Sir?”

“Even though it makes me appear a pompous know-it-all, it’s fairly accurate.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But how about doing your old commander a favor by omitting reference to my so-called Mystery Flight with Lady Anne. The public can do without that.”

“I will, sir.” There was a time when my word was my bond. An accurate account is of more consequence.

Wee Wee was sleeping at the general’s feet. Before she died, Lady Anne had sent the pekinese in her Bentley to the general’s London flat, maybe as punishment. They had taken a liking to each other.

He continued, “How many times have I busted you in rank this past month?”

I laughed. “Twelve or thirteen.”

“What a nightmarish, topsy-turvy army career you’ve had.”

I laughed again.

“Well, your roller coaster ride isn’t over yet.” He fished a small envelope out of his pocket. He opened it. “Here are your silver birds. In what may be my last official act in England, I’ve promoted you to full colonel.”

I was nonplussed, then thrilled. He brusquely removed my silver oak leaves and replaced them with the eagles.

I said, “You can bet I’ll push through the paper on this right away.”

“I already have, Jack.” He patted my shoulder and said, “And just remember, if Napoleon had been born two years earlier, he would have been Italian, since Corsica was ceded to France just before his birth.”

I nodded. To this day, I have no idea what he meant by that.

He returned to his packing. He was not a collector of mementoes, and he had little more than the few articles he brought to England. He picked up the copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations he used for writing speeches and tossed it to me. “I’m giving this to you. You need it more than I do, I’ll guarantee you that.”

He carefully wrapped his framed family photographs. He stared for a long while at one of his wife. Then he abruptly said, “Jack, invading England was the German’s first mistake. It won’t be his last. We’ll see the end of him, and it won’t be long.”

As in so many other things, General Clay was correct here, too. As all world citizens know, with less than a year to recover from the debacle of the English invasion, Hitler next swept into Russia. From that moment, his days could be counted. Bloodied and softened on the endless Russian steppes, the Germans could not mount an effective defense to the Allied D-Day invasion, launched from the very English shores the Wehrmacht had briefly held. I wish Clay could have celebrated the war’s triumphant end with the rest of us.

Several questions dogged me while I compiled this narrative. The first was whether the general’s relationship with Lady Anne Percival colored his battle judgment. Her tragic end is clear evidence that it did not. He knew she would be at her country home, and he knew the poison cloud would sweep over it. If he were capable of causing her death, then it is inconceivable anything she did in her life would have influenced his conduct of the battle.

Another question was the prime minister’s role in the use of the gas. I do not have any more proof than I have already set forth. In the hours before the chemicals were released, Clay conferred over the telephone with Churchill after having waved the rest of us out of hearing range, something he had never before done. At our last Defense Committee meeting, while some were searching for the guilty, the surreptitiously smiling Churchill seemed ready to dance a jig at the Wehrmacht’s appalling fate. I also believe General Clay had been intensely loyal to the prime minister from the moment Churchill resisted pressure to dump Clay. It would have been true to General Clay’s character to gain approval from Churchill, then deny Churchill knew anything about the use of the gas to spare the prime minister the political strife.

About seven o’clock that evening, I noticed that General Clay’s packing had slowed. He was taking longer and longer to do less and less. He was being exceedingly careful, gently blowing dust off a few books, polishing a silver picture frame with his sleeve, scratching the back of Wee Wee’s neck. He was acting like a man with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

He looked up from a small album of photographs and said, “The only goddamn thing of any worth my father ever taught me was that if there’s enough blue in the sky to make a pair of sailor’s trousers, it’ll be good weather tomorrow.”

“Sir?”

“Well, he didn’t teach me enough, it looks like.” He placed the album in a trunk. “Jack, you know me better than anybody but my wife. Do you know why you and I get along so well?”

I was immensely gratified. “I have a few ideas.”

“Spare me them,” he replied. “We have the same perspective on history. You can grasp why I did what I did.”

“I can?”

“No general worth a damn is going to scratch his ass while the enemy runs over him. You didn’t see me scratching my ass, did you?”

“Not once, sir.”

He limped toward me, holding an envelope he had drawn from a back pocket. “I want you to give this to my wife.”

A bell of alarm sounded. “You are leaving tomorrow for Washington, sir. Why don’t you take it with you?”

“It’s a new draft of my will. With the Luftwaffe out in force, trans-Atlantic crossings are risky. No sense having that document and me on the same flight.”

I took it from him.

He reached for his uniform jacket. “I’m going to Mayfair to pay my respects to General Crawford’s widow.”

I rose and started for the armoir.

“No need you coming along,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly.”

He had not had a driver since being removed from command. He also had little use for my services. Still, I found his going out alone unsettling. He deserved an entourage.

I bid him goodnight and returned to packing his trunk. After a few moments it was full, so I strapped and locked it, then returned to a book I had been reading.

At 8:30, I was startled by a booming knock. I crossed to the door and opened it. Two American MPs were standing there. One said, “Colonel Royce, there’s been an accident. It’s General Clay. Will you come with us?”

The blackout hid London as we passed through the city. I do not have a clear memory of that drive to Hyde Park. I did not see the crumpled car until our jeep had stopped. A rescue truck was there, as well as an ambulance and another military police jeep. But no one was frantically rescuing the occupant of the car, no prybars or winches or the loud orders of rescue organizers, so I knew what I would find. Wilson Clay, so conscious of the past, had just entered it.

The automobile, an Austin, had smashed into the trunk of a roadside tree, thrusting the radiator back to the firewall and propelling Wilson Clay through the windshield and against the tree. His body lay on the crushed hood. Blood covered much of his head and had matted in his hair. I bent close. His eyes were open and unseeing.

I bubbled, “General Clay, please, no.”

An MP casually lit a cigarette and said, “He’s about as dead as I’ve seen anybody, Colonel.”

A memorial service was held in the remnants of Westminster Abbey three days later. Winston Churchill and General Stedman attended. The general’s body was then flown to Washington, where it was buried in the military cemetery at Arlington. I took Wee Wee home with me to California. Six years have passed since the night General Clay died, and I still grieve for the man.

He may have taken his own life. Investigators determined his car was traveling close to sixty miles an hour when it hit the tree. And the envelope he gave me did not contain a will, but a letter to his wife. Margaret Clay told me later it was a love letter. I could not ask to read it, so I do not know if it was a good-bye letter, too. I have no idea why General Clay would have me deliver the letter if he thought he was going home the next day.

On the other hand, the roads that night were slick from the downpour. Street lamps had been extinguished for the duration. Londoners will attest to the hazards of driving during the blackout. And Clay was a fighter, unlikely to let a moralizing commotion in the States send him to his end. He would have viewed it as too easy.

I believe, and I prefer to believe, that his death was a mishap on a dark and slippery road. I have no more details, so I end my conjecture.

Some have suggested Clay’s death, whether suicide or an accident, carried the scent of justice. He would heatedly reply—I can hear him dictating his response and ordering me to put it in my journal—that every great captain has learned from his predecessors. Charles XII from Alexander. Napoleon from Frederick. Foch from Napoleon. Clay learned from them all, and the lesson was that in defeat was disgrace.

His actions will be a source of controversy for years. For Wilson Clay, there was no debate, no hesitation. He was a soldier who would vanquish the enemy. He would not abide history recording him as a conquered warrior, and so it will not.