Centrepiece
Normandy's horror
Colin Welch
In vain 25 years later I searched with my son for the brickworks and the nearby wood in which, in June 1944, I was introduced to my new platoon. 'It must have been here... No, it doesn't quite fit. Perhaps there....' Restored, smiling once again, Normandy has effaced nearly all traces of her agony. Memory has to work almost unaided. It brings back to me now the soldiers' faces looking up at me from their slit trenches, apprehensively wonder- ing what fate had allotted to them for an of- ficer in place of the one (or two?) they'd already lost, wondering perhaps what the cat had brought in.
Casualties had been very high, and con- tinued so. Losses in North-west Europe look trivial as a proportion of the whole force involved, including a vast pre- ponderant tail which rarely heard a shot fired in anger. In this tail were many fit, ex- perienced officers and soldiers who, among other duties, as the campaign wore on and losses mounted, callously passed on to be minced up in the front line mere children, younger even than I was, bewildered, hard- ly trained at all. In Holland we got a big draft from the King's Liverpool Regiment. They looked mostly like the original Beatles at the very start of their career. I put two of them on a charge for being, not for the first time, asleep on guard. Well I knew the Colonel had at his disposal no punish- ment worse than these boys' daily lives. But I thought he might give them a lecture, fatherly or wrathful asshe thought fit. He asked them their ages. 'Nineteen, sir', 'eigh- teen'. He dismissed them, and turned to me. 'Weren't you taught never, never to put two young soldiers on guard together?' I replied that we had almost no old soldiers left. 'How old are you?' he asked. 'Twenty, sir' and I was dismissed too.
Also lurking in that huge tail, though for- tunately in lesser numbers, were psychiatrists who frivolously sent back to the front as 'cured' or malades imaginaires poor shell-shocked boys who, so far from being cowards, endangered their own lives and everyone else's by their tragic antics in full view of the enemy. My opinion of psychiatry has never recovered. No blim- pish colonel of either war would have behaved with such idiotic inhumanity.
In his exciting, thoughtful and infor- mative Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, Max Hastings reminds us that many infantry battalions suffered more than 100 per cent casualties in that Nor- mandy summer. My own battalion of the Lincolns, to which I was posted from the Royal Warwicks, lost, I think, 170 per cent
in the ten months from D-Day till my number came up in the Reichswald. These are typical first world war figures, unrecognised as such because we were relatively so few to begin with. In the first war the Warwicks had an admittedly excep- tional 48 battalions on active service; in the second, not much more than a tenth of that.
Looking down on that first day, never have I seen faces more tired and ill, tired from sleepless nights, ill from bad food and fear, haggard and wan, puffed out and in- flamed by ferocious mosquito bites. The men were unnaturally quiet, as if they were stunned or had seen ghosts. I don't suppose I looked too good either. Hours tossing about in a sickening dawn swell off Ar- romanches, followed by a day or two in a transit camp at Bayeux, must have left their mark.
Through this camp the authorities in their wisdom channelled not only rein- forcements like us for the front line but bomb-happy officers on their way home. 'It's hell up there,' shrieked one, the wreck of a once impressive major, his hand shak- ing so much he couldn't water his whisky. 'HELL, I tell you. Run for it! Get out while you can! It's HELL!' We tittered nervous- ly, shaken despite ourselves; and when the next day I looked down on those upturned faces it was not only with pity but with awe and humility. Here was I, woefully inex- perienced, with my shreds of military lore, lectures half-forgotten and field training frivolously scamped, supposed to 'lead' men who had endured what had driven other men, supposedly their superiors, mad. They had shaved too; their weapons were clean; their spirit was subdued but not broken. I bowed my head to them, and was also unnaturally quiet. A part of my educa- tion was about to begin.
All schools have their particular smell, a whiff of which, carbolic, polish or sweat, will bring back days long past. The smell of Normandy was death. Holidaymakers will know Normandy as a province of fantastic fecundity, with tiny fields and lanes, all steeply banked and thick-hedged, rich or- chards, old cottages and farm buildings of red brick and timber. You can hardly see ten yards in any direction, which led to many unpleasant surprises from Tigers and 88s invisible yet near enough almost to touch. Thick on the ground everywhere were fat animals, horses, cows, geese, ducks, chickens, pigeons and their blue- smocked peasant proprietors. It isn't military country: let loose a full-blast war in it, and the result is a gigantic abattoir, bodies everywhere, human, animal, theirs,
Spectator 2 June 19g4 ours, French, no chance to bury then], 031 stiff and hideously swollen, covered with white dust or mud, faces blown away. or dreadfully distorted, crawling with rotting, giving off that terrible sweet-sour stench which, once smelt, is not forgotten. Add to it the reek of explosives and burn- ing, of cider and calvados (which the soldiers drank too young, with results sometimes fatal) pouring from shatterel vats and stills. Add, in the tormented Clues' in Caen, Rouen, and others we saw later' the mephitic stink of sewers blown open t° tt hh ee ssek smells, Melles
What did this school teach?
aonrdy swtiell suhnt.vbeidr.den brings back Well, ob- viously different things to different people. I wrote 25 years ago in the Daily TelegraPh about some of the things it had taught lue,' Few will remember that, but I woulda care to bore even them twice. Above all think it imbued us with a deep, abiding and; to others, perhaps disproportionate hatrea of disorder, violence and anarchy. The fragility and preciousness of civil societY, as also the dire consequences of its collaPse, were indelibly impressed on us. In a way, we all became profoundly con- servative, keenly aware of what had been lost, desperately anxious to preserve what remained. Well do I know that most of the soldiers voted Labour in 1945, though there may be a distinction to be drawn betweell the front line, with its awe-inspiring .elt. perience of tragedy, and the progressive, argumentative, ABCA-lecture-infestingi barrackroom lawyer types behind it. I dog know. But certainly Labour, with its Pas: sion for order, fairness and regulation, of- fered then no sort of anarchy — on the e011- trary. Someone described Hitler's Reich as 'systematised anarchy'. It was against thaLt. we fought, against a Caliban-like revolt °A geed, lust, hatred, envy, cruelty and destructive rage. It also imbued in us a great love of Europe. Not in all of us, of course — s0111e could hardly wait to get out and stay out but in many of us, by whom the spectacle ot Europe prostrate, degraded, diminished, morally and materially ruined, could not he viewed coldly from outside. It hurt us Per- sonally and deeply, as if our own mother were lying there in pain and woe. Of course we didn't fight for the European Part°. ment as it is, still less for the CAP , or Brussels' swarming bureaucrats. Righti?' did Charles Moore in the Daily TelegraPh! ridicule politicians' claims that we did. But we did resolve that, so far as lay in °ur power, it must never happen again, that . Europe must be given institutions will would prevent another civil war and guar her against enemies without. What exists now is a mere ghost or parody of what vl.e sought: no one can look on it and think lus task well accomplished. But never shall we be untrue to the idea of Europe, nor turn aside from any road, however twisting and arduous, which seems to lead towards its being made real.
muddy,
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