Arnhem

As for the men, they were invariably anxious about her children, sending down treats of eggs or apples and sweets for them. Those manning the walls would sneak downstairs from time to time to connect with the semblance of family life still going on down there. Kate recalled – with guilt – how one soldier, his face and body black from powder and trench earth, came into the cellar and took her baby on his knee. She grabbed back the child because the man was so dirty – and immediately regretted the deed. ‘How could I? Perhaps it was the last time he would look into a child’s eyes.’ She wished she could have called him back and handed him her baby son to hold, but he was gone, back up the stairs to fight, his helmet on and his Sten gun under his arm, a moment of much-needed humanity lost.

Kate split her time between her children and her patients, between heaven and hell, drawn in both directions, a heartbreaking choice between them on every occasion. ‘A little hand pulls at my skirt. “Mother, will you fetch my doll for me?” I risk the trip upstairs.’ She crept through the house – her own house – pausing in the corridors to find a way past the wounded on the floors and the rows of defenders at the windows. ‘Nowhere is there any glass in the windows, but, in spite of the violent draught, there is an unbearable stench of blood, sweat and dirt and the sweetish smell of the dead.’ She had brought a bottle of juice with her to quench the thirst of the wounded lying in rows on the floor of her large living room. ‘It is passed from hand to hand along all the stretchers and then comes back to me still half full. I am amazed by their selflessness and pass it round again. At the back, somebody gets up and helps his neighbour, who has no hands. “You are brave to be here,” one of the men says to me. Wounded and helpless as they are, they still feel themselves soldiers and better able to stand the war than a woman.’

In the kitchen she came across a young doctor, his face pale and grave, who told her that the house itself had taken a direct hit and a wall was collapsing. And that was only the start. ‘The Germans are pressing nearer and nearer, and the ring within which the British are crowded near the Rhine is getting smaller and smaller,’ he informed her. Kate remembered how, as he delivered this seeming death sentence, ‘his hands hung between his knees and there was an expression of melancholy in his dark eyes.’ She noted a change of heart among the defenders still standing, a dip in their confidence. ‘They crowd together and make no show of going outside again. German tanks have been signalled. Are there many? From what direction are they coming? Nobody knows exactly. But there are tanks and they are approaching and that is enough.’

Back down in the cellar, she felt the heat and stuffiness close in on her. ‘There are forty people in this hole and the atmosphere is unbearable. Suddenly the baby vomits in his little cradle. Everything is dirty, even his mattress and cushion. Tired and white, he lies in my arms. Soldiers are snoring on the stone steps. The Germans are all round us and are steadily drawing nearer.’ Like Anje van Maanen, she wondered if this would be her last night. The mothering instinct conquered her fears. ‘It is three in the morning but I find a basin and some warm water and bring it down to the cellar without waking anyone up. I am on my knees as baby plays in the water, his eyes, which have been so dull during the last few days, brighten up. Then I roll him up in a towel and he plays to his heart’s content, naked on my mattress. I give him a few spoonfuls of Ovomaltine,⁴ the last of the supplies, and take the basin back upstairs to the medical orderlies from whom I borrowed it. I tell them how happy the little fellow is and that he’s the only clean thing in the whole house.’

For an operation that had begun in high hopes and the bright sun of autumn, the descent of Market Garden now into rain, mud and cold was a severe damper on morale. Glider pilot Dick Ennis’s trench was now a foot deep in liquid mud. Crouching there, the rain running off his helmet and down his neck, he thought he must have died and was in Purgatory, ‘and that this would go on and on for ever.’ He got to move to another trench, but only because the defenders were now so depleted in numbers they had to spread out to show at least some presence along the over-stretched line. He and another man dashed to what they thought was an empty trench but which turned out to contain the body of the previous occupant, his face buried in the mud. ‘We propped him up in a corner. In a pocket of his smock were a few cigarettes in a battered tin. We had one each and passed the tin down the line.’ When darkness fell, they took it in turns to creep out and scrape a grave in the earth. ‘We buried our comrade beside his own foxhole.’