Arnhem

The British soldier directed Ennis away from the bank, across a meadow, to a road. He had made it. The ordeal of Arnhem and Oosterbeek was over, and he was alive. He kept walking – rough going over gravel without the boots he’d jettisoned in the water. ‘A chill wind was blowing, and our soaked clothes clung to our bodies, setting our teeth chattering.’ Then he was at a farmyard and entering a large barn ‘full of our men, all laughing and talking, a lot of them in various stages of undress. Tins of hot rum were thrust into our hands and we were given a thick round of bread on to which a steaming concoction of mixed vegetables was poured. We just couldn’t believe it. We didn’t have to share our ration. It was glorious! We had nearly forgotten how to eat – we just wolfed it down.’ Outside, he saw the comforting shape of a British tank, pulled off the road. One of the crew was leaning out of the turret smoking a cigarette. ‘You blokes just come from over there?’ he asked, pointing in the direction of the river. ‘Yes,’ he was told. ‘Been a bit sticky, hasn’t it?’ the tank crewman observed. ‘You’re okay now though.’

For Ron Kent, however, things were far from okay as he lay in the teeming rain and cold north wind for hours, waiting for his chance to cross. ‘Every now and then the area would be lit up by German flares, and we pressed our faces to the ground and prayed we would not be spotted. Occasional mortar bombs exploded in our midst and, from time to time, green tracer bullets criss-crossed as the Germans combed the area. At other times, they would arc across the river in answer to the heavy machine-gun fire from the other side that was trying to give us cover.’ The waiting went on. He thought of his older brother, who had been in similar circumstances at Dunkirk. ‘I had never felt so close to him as I did then.’

At last, as he edged closer to the water, his moment came. A boat manned by Canadian sappers pulled in, he waded into the icy water up to his knees and scrambled his men on board. They were across in minutes and scrambling again, this time up the high walls of mud on the south bank. He was proud of himself. ‘I had not discarded one item of equipment and my Sten gun was still in working order with a full magazine to snap into it if need arose.’ But that need was behind him. What lay ahead, beckoning him, was a line of hurricane lamps planted in the ground, directing him and the 2,000-plus other evacuees to safety. Figures appeared beside the track to urge them on with reassurances that it was ‘only a few hundreds yards more’. In fact, it was a 2-mile slog to Driel. ‘Along the way, a rumour told us of a hot meal, a blanket, cigarettes, chocolate and rum waiting for us. It sounded like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I walked for what seemed hours, wet, tired and hungry and with my stomach still knotted with tension. Finally, I arrived at a farm and joined a long queue of several hundred other chaps waiting outside a barn to see if the fairytale would come true.’

It didn’t. The frontmarkers like Dick Ennis had eaten to their heart’s content, but by the time Kent got to the barn, shuddering with cold and fatigue, the hot food was gone and so had the blankets. All he got was a slice of dry bread, three cigarettes and a tot of rum – meagre reward for eight days of hell. This did nothing to alleviate his unhappiness at the outcome of his endeavours. ‘I was still sick at heart at the failure of the operation.’ Transport had been promised but that had vanished too, and he joined a stream of survivors slowly foot-slogging their way south down the road towards Nijmegen. But he was ‘pleased as Punch’ to be alive and free, when thousands of dead and captured comrades were not. He was tired physically and mentally, but the para spirit kicked back in. ‘Endurance is a mental thing. Some have it, some don’t. Endure and survive. Endure and survive. I threw back my head, took in great breaths of cool air and broke into the easy loping stride we had cultivated in training all the way to Elst.’