Arnhem

Inside the now-surrendered Tafelberg, the place teeming with German soldiers, this was a frenetic and frightening moment. Anje’s immediate concern, as it was for all the other Dutch civilians down in the cellar, was what vengeance the SS might exact on them. She had been scared for days but, as fire licked round the Tafelberg and the hated Moffen took charge, she was petrified. ‘We thought they might kill us all.’ The survivors of the Tafelberg waited, fearing these could be their last moments. ‘There is a lot of shouting and we are ordered upstairs to show our identity cards. There is panic amongst the men and the boys, lots of whom were in hiding from the Germans before all this started.’ They trooped nervously upstairs to the foyer and stood anxiously at the bottom of the hotel’s main staircase, waiting to see what would happen next. A local minister was with them and he stepped forward to ask permission to conduct a service. The Germans refused. Defiantly, he led everyone in a hymn anyway. ‘Abide with me,’ strained voices rang out, ‘Fast falls the eventide,’ sombre and uplifting at the same time. To Anje, to everyone, it was ‘a deeply moving moment. This is our last time with our airborne friends. Even the artillery outside keeps silent. It is as if a little bit of heaven has come down into this war.’

Just down the road in the Schoonoord Hotel, Padre Pare was also seeking spiritual comfort for his flock, now in mortal danger too. It being Sunday, he was preparing a service. ‘There was a piano, and a soldier started to tap out two hymn tunes. Suddenly there came the most tremendous crash outside and dust flew everywhere. The road outside was being shelled. An orderly had been hit by a piece of shrapnel, and was breathing his last. I laid my hand on his head, and commended his soul.’ This was the start of a barrage that lasted all morning. There was also a German sniper firing in at the wounded from a building opposite. ‘It was against the rules of war but no one could stop him. His bullets came in and made the patients squirm, but all we could do was keep our heads well down. A wounded RAF chap, who had baled out from his burning supply plane, was heard to state emphatically that he was an airman and had no desire to be in the Army, thank you very much.’ Yet all thoughts of rescue had not gone. Knowing little if anything about events in the outside world, ‘we still hoped the Second Army would come and relieve us. But in our hearts we knew that the situation was desperate. Casualties were still being brought in, and the water and food situation was going from bad to worse.’

Something had to give. That afternoon, by agreement, German medical staff arrived in white-painted ambulances to evacuate the most serious cases and take them to a proper hospital in Arnhem. The enemy medics invited the padre to go too, and he accepted. On the drive to the St Elizabeth hospital, he witnessed the calamity that had befallen the city. ‘The road was littered with wrecked cars. Most of the houses we passed had their windows smashed, and some had been totally gutted.’

The St Elizabeth, at which he now arrived, had been commandeered by the Airborne at the start of the operation, but for most of the ensuing battle was in the middle of German-held territory. SS officers were prone to marching in and trying to throw their weight about. But it remained largely a neutral zone, an island of mercy, staffed by a mixture of British and Dutch doctors, a German surgeon, German nuns, Dutch and English nurses, some Resistance fighters and a group of voluntary Red Cross assistants. Here heroic operations were performed under the most trying of conditions. Sometimes, German sentries stood guard in the busy and over-stretched operating theatre itself but, if the first incision didn’t send them packing, then the sight of the saw amputating limbs usually did. Pare toured its wards, jotting down the names of the wounded and offering words of comfort to each man. For all the misery and suffering there, he thought the place ‘a paradise’ compared with the ‘hot corner’ of the Schnoonord, to which he now returned. On the way back along those same rubble-filled roads, he saw, ‘to my great dismay’, more German tanks clanking their way towards Oosterbeek.