Arnhem

Morale had not been helped either when SS troops invaded the sanctity of the hospital. An orderly, Private Tom Bannister, thought his last moment had come.³ ‘They marched all of us outside and lined us up with hands on heads near the garage we were using as a mortuary. It looked as though this was it.’ With their backs to the wall, it was hardly a time for humour, but the chap standing next to Bannister looked across and grinned. ‘Well, there’s one thing, Tom,’ he said, indicating the mortuary, ‘they won’t have far to carry us.’ But, thankfully, no firing squad appeared, no lorry pulled up with a machine gun mounted on the back. After an inspection, the relieved medics, a little surprised still to be alive, were dismissed back to their work. But the SS weren’t finished. Para Reg Curtis, his leg shattered by a mortar shell, was lying at the top of the main stairway of the Tafelberg when there was a shuffling below him, a shouting of orders in German, and troops in grey came dashing at the double up towards him. ‘A sinister-looking bod about twenty years old led the way and was coming right at me. I found myself looking straight down the barrel of his Schmeisser automatic, his trigger finger shaking like billy-o. He was glaring at me with red beady eyes. “Christ, this is it,” I thought. I had heard of other wounded being shot up. But I didn’t bat an eyelid. My luck was in, he passed me by, and with two other SS wallahs went into a room leading off the landing and started shooting out through a window.’

This was a direct contravention of the agreed articles of war, and the senior British medical officer, a colonel, came roaring up the stairs, cursing the Germans for firing their weapons from a clearly marked Red Cross building and violating its neutrality. He demanded they stop. This confrontation could have gone either way. ‘The SS men looked defiant and sullen,’ the watching Curtis recalled. ‘They paced up and down, glaring at everyone, their fingers playing hesitantly over their automatics. But they obeyed, if reluctantly. Then they started scrounging for cigarettes, trying each man in turn. One came up to me and demanded “Zigaretten?” but though I had two hundred tucked under the blanket and had a half-smoked dog-end in my hand, I said, “No, mate,” all innocently. He shrugged his shoulders and sloped off. After a short while, the SS troops were gone, and our own men were back in charge.’

It was strange to ‘have the enemy in the building one minute, and quickly replaced by our own combat men the next’, but that was the nature of this close-quarter battle. ‘Huns captured our aid post and then lost it to our boys,’ noted Eric Davies. ‘More and more casualties being brought in, Germans too. I gave one a cigarette and told him to cheer up, but he looked forlorn. Unlike one of our chaps next to me. His fingers have been blown off but he is coolly smoking a fag held between the bloody stumps. Summed up the airborne soldier, I thought. Spirits are still high. We know that we are better than the enemy no matter what.’

The seeing-off of the SS troops was a boost to everyone’s morale – and there was more food for the soul when a local minister called the Dutch civilians together for a religious pep talk. ‘He says we owe it to the English to be brave and to carry on,’ Anje noted. ‘We have to do our very utmost. God will be with us in this hell. We return to our posts, cheered up a little bit.’ Out of the blue, there was physical sustenance too. ‘Suddenly, there is a shout. There are some sheep in the road outside. After a prolonged debate about whether doctors are allowed to take up weapons in these circumstances, one of them goes out and shoots two of the animals and they are brought inside to the kitchen. Soon the most delicious smell of roasting meat wafts through the Tafelberg and everybody really cheers up. We take plates of mutton to the patients, and it is touching to see their grateful faces. Some Tommies are so self-effacing they refuse the food. But we insist that they eat now, for who knows when the next time will be?’ Finn, she noted with special pleasure, ‘got most of the bones and is under the kitchen table with them’.