Eventually, he reached the cover of the railway embankment that ran either side of the bridge, where he found Major Poole, the ‘B’ Company commander. Poole was a veteran of the last war, had been wounded, taken prisoner and escaped. Despite his great experience, Neave heard the anxiety in his voice. ‘I am afraid they may break through,’ he told him. ‘Get your people in the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. You must fight like bloody hell.’
This account comes from Neave’s book The Flames of Calais, which appeared in 1972. It intersperses his personal story, told with much detail and verbatim dialogue like the above, with the full story of the episode at every level, from decision-making in London and Guderian’s headquarters to platoon actions. The broader narrative is well supported by official documentation and participants’ accounts. But it is worth asking how accurate was his recollection of his own part in the story, thirty-two years after the event. There is no mention that he was working from a diary or semi-contemporaneous notes. Nonetheless, his account has the ring of authenticity. The recollections of combatants who were taken prisoner often have a fine-grained quality and an immediacy that is not so often present in other post-factum testimony. When removed from the battlefield and plunged into the tedium of captivity, he had plenty of time to obsess over events while the memory was still fresh. If the temptation for self-justifying adjustments to the narrative was strong, Neave appears to have resisted it. At no point in the story does he attempt to present himself as anything other than a tiny actor in the great events, often confused, frightened and ineffective, but always desperately concerned to do the right thing.
The right thing now was to obey Major Poole’s instruction and fight like hell. He returned to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, with bullets ricocheting around him, and found his men, now joined by two sergeants, crouched in the shelter of an ivy-covered wall. They were armed with only two Brens and some rifles. He ordered the sergeants to take up positions in the windows of the first floor of houses on either side of the street, from where they could fire on the German positions half a mile away on the Route de Boulogne. There followed a surreal episode of the sort that occurs with surprising frequency in the middle of battles. A door opened and a group of civilians scuttled past carrying the corpse of an old woman. There were other civilians about. The patron of a café near the bridge, proudly wearing his Croix de Guerre, spurned the mortal danger he was in to remain open, handing out cognac to anyone within reach and exhorting the defenders with a defiant slogan from the last war: ‘On les aura!’ (We’ll have ’em!)
There was danger behind as well as in front. A single rifle shot behind was followed by a shout of ‘Fifth column!’ After the battle was over, there would be many stories of mysterious gunmen appearing out of nowhere, some in German uniform, sniping at the defenders. They would reinforce the impression growing among many of the British troops that the French made unreliable allies. ‘B’ Company were deployed ahead on the far side of the railway bridge around an improvised road-block and facing down the Route de Boulogne. The Searchlights Bren teams reached their first-floor positions, smashed the windows and began to lay down supporting fire. Their eagerness and inexperience soon brought shouts of protest from the 60th on the far side of the bridge. Crouched in a doorway, Neave ‘could hear hoarse shouts: “F---ing well look where you’re shooting!”’16
In a lull in the fighting, he dodged across the boulevard to the corner of the Rue Edgar Quinet, a side street next to the bridge. From here he could see that the company’s position was critical and the weight of enemy fire seemed certain to break the defenders soon if they did not drop back. The situation seemed to improve a little when, at 4 p.m., one of the British cruiser tanks arrived at the railway bridge and fired two or three rounds towards the attackers. The German response was furious: ‘Tank shells and machine-gun bullets came thick and fast for twenty minutes. Ricochets off the walls and flying glass made my situation in the Rue Edgar Quinet … rather exposed … It was now without a sign of life, save for a young girl’s white face at a cellar grating. The wall which sheltered me had ragged gaps where mortar bombs had flung bricks into the street. I began to look for a safer position.’
He could see nothing but clouds of smoke and dust, and the enemy felt horribly close. The Searchlight men were firing through the lace curtains, bravely but inexpertly, endangering defenders as much as attackers. One of the Brens began to fire fitfully, then jammed. He was acutely conscious of his lack of training and his impotence, able only to observe and offer encouragement. The sun beat down and the air throbbed with the heat from burning buildings. His thirst became unbearable. He had to get something to drink. He decided to make a dash for the café. He waited for a lull in the firing and was about to run when he ‘felt a sharp, bruising pain in my left side. I collapsed to the pavement, my rifle clattering.’ He tried to get up and found that he could still walk.
He staggered across to his original destination, the café on the corner, and took shelter in the side street, gratefully accepting a large cognac from the proprietor. A bespectacled medical orderly appeared, opened Neave’s battledress and examined the wound. He pronounced him lucky – the bullet had passed half an inch from his heart. The orderly’s cheerfulness and inclination to ‘talk professionally about the condition of the wound’ grated on Neave’s nerves. His great fear was ‘that the Germans would break through in the next few minutes, that I should be left behind and captured’. He swore at the medic and ordered him to take him to the next street. There they were joined by a Frenchman and between them they walked him away.
There was no sign of a regimental aid post (RAP), and he knew the nearest hospital was a mile away. He was calmed by the arrival of a scout car carrying a young officer of the 60th, Michael Sinclair, who like him was captured and ended up in Colditz, where he was shot dead while trying to escape in 1944. Sinclair ‘smilingly drew my attention to a van flying the Red Cross’. The improvised ambulance, ‘smelling strongly of stale vegetables’, carried him at high speed back into the centre to the Pont Georges Cinq, the central of three spans that connected Calais-St-Pierre to Calais-Nord. They halted by a group of soldiers seeking directions to the 60th’s RAP, but no one knew its whereabouts and an argument broke out as to which of the three hospitals in town he should be taken to.
Lying in the back, listening to the confused voices, Neave ‘was suffering more from anger than pain’. He was still tortured by the thought that he might be captured. ‘My chief interest,’ he admitted frankly, ‘was in evacuation by sea to England.’ Eventually it was decided to take him to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent only a few hundred yards away in the Rue Leveux, under the eastern wall of the Citadel. He was unloaded under the supervision of the 60th’s medical officer, Lieutenant A. F. Stallard, who after examination told him he had received a ‘penetrating flank wound’ that would require an operation. He was ‘carried, protesting, into the dark interior of the hospital where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, awaited me’.
Beyond the ramparts of Calais, great strategic events had conspired to cancel all hope of evacuation. Throughout the day, the realisation had penetrated the heads of those directing events in London that the BEF was facing extinction. Unless it could be saved, Britain’s continuation in the war was seriously in doubt. Calais now assumed a new and different importance. It had become a key element in the struggle to bring the BEF home through the port of Dunkirk, thirty miles to the north-east. Their job was to drag the 10th Panzer Division into a fight to the last ditch, man and bullet, in order to delay it moving north and adding its weight to the enemy forces closing on the 200,000 beleaguered British troops.
Although