Arnhem

He felt his own survival seriously threatened when he found himself nervously leading a strange procession through the battlefield. Two German soldiers had carried wounded comrades to the Schoonoord under a flag of truce and now they had to be escorted back to their own lines. Heads would have to be put above the parapet, with no certainty that they wouldn’t be blown off. Cautiously, Pare set off on foot down Oosterbeek’s embattled main street, leading his two enemies and holding aloft a red cross flag. He was in no-man’s land and completely exposed. ‘Our airborne soldiers were barricaded into houses on one side and German soldiers in houses on the other. We walked between them.’ Would they hold fire? They did. ‘The battle ceased for a few minutes as we stepped gingerly over a row of mines that lay wired together across the road. Then a German soldier stood up, called the two men and they ran to him. I turned and retraced my steps, with my own men shouting at me and demanding to know what sort of game this was.’

But correct military etiquette could not always be counted on. While Dick Ennis was full of praise for the Germans for respecting Red Cross conventions and allowing free passage for the wounded, Ron Kent wasn’t so sure. He suspected the Germans of using the casualty stations as a means of infiltrating snipers into the British lines. He was also saddened at having to watch as ‘our wounded, escorted by our own medical orderlies and by Germans, were wheeled, carried or marched off to the dressing stations and into German hands as prisoners of war’. For Ennis, though, there was something moving in the sight of a jeep with three wounded men passing through the battlefield and all firing ceasing to let it through. ‘Two, lying stretched out in blood-soaked bandages, were Airborne and the third was a German, who sat with his legs dangling over the tail. He was no more than sixteen, wore horn-rimmed spectacles and looked as though he should have been behind an office desk. His face was covered in tears and sweat. His right arm was shot away at the elbow. He held the stump across his chest, gripping the end of it with his free hand; the blood squirting from between his fingers was leaving a scarlet trail behind the jeep.’ He was touched by the boy soldier’s distress but did not, he decided after some thought, feel sorry for him. Compassion was different from sentimentality. ‘I had seen too many of our own men horribly killed. I had heard the screams of their last agony. How could it be possible to sympathize with the men who had caused all this?’

The Tafelberg Hotel also housed a field hospital, and it was here that Anje van Maanen came to shelter when, as the battle for Oosterbeek reached its climax, British soldiers took over her house and advised her family to leave. Her doctor father, Gerrit van Maanen, had based himself in the hotel when the airborne invasion began, intending it to be a first-aid station where he could treat any local people caught in the crossfire. But then British army medics arrived and he worked alongside them. It was a tough business, and getting tougher all the time as the fighting closed in around the hotel. As Anje went in through its gates to find her father, she was shocked first by the dead bodies laid out on the veranda, then by what she saw inside, where every bit of floor space was taken up. ‘British soldiers lie everywhere. We have to step over the wounded in the foyer to reach the dining hall where the seriously injured are lying. It is silent. Only occasionally you hear a groan.’

Eric Davies, shot in both legs while trying to get to the bridge at Arnhem, lay prone and defenceless in the Tafelberg. His wounds were going septic despite the anti-infection powder the medics poured into them, and he could smell the onset of gangrene. But of more immediate threat to his life was the shelling from the Germans, especially first thing in the morning, in what the Airborne dubbed the enemy’s daily ‘hate sessions’. ‘Shells hit the roof above us, hell of a noise. I am almost deaf and suffering from slight concussion. On one occasion an explosion lifted me clean off the floor. Dust, dirt, stink and groaning bodies everywhere. Can’t move an inch to save my life. Wish I could sit up.’ He was a man suffering –‘these days are just indescribably, goddamned bloody hell’ – but also defiant and ready to fight on. ‘I am lying with my Colt .45 on my chest, determined to blast the first Kraut that walks through the door with a gun in his hand. However, this attitude is not popular with the other bods lying in this room. Later I bowed to general consensus of opinion and hid it up the chimney. Oh to be home!’