Arnhem

Before transport arrived to take them to the hospital at Apeldoorn, the men whispered their goodbyes to Kate, whose ministrations had been such an inspiration. They were still positive, assuring her that this was a temporary setback, and ‘the great Army will be here in a week’s time!’ Did they still believe it? Did she believe it? It seems just possible they did. Another Oosterbeek resident, fifteen-year-old Marie-Anne, with the British soldiers gone from her house too, was nonetheless convinced that they would be coming back over the Rhine ‘very soon’ and hung on to that belief until the end of October. As for the Airborne, many of the wounded did their best to avoid being declared fit to travel and flung on a train to Germany in the hope that the German lines would yet be overrun by a victorious Second Army. For now, though, it was time to go. Kate had one last act of kindness to perform when two of the patients told her they had no trousers. She dashed back inside to raid her husband’s wardrobe for them, but as she came out a German officer stood in her way. ‘Enough!’ he barked at her, and his hostility was a warning of how much the situation had changed. She watched the line of Airborne as they trailed away. ‘Any of them who can walk at all, must walk. Whoever has two legs to walk on must drag another along. And so they march forth. We hardly dare to look at them any more.’

At the Schoonoord Hotel, it fell to padre George Pare to tell the wounded men in his charge that the last fighting remnants of the airborne army had gone, leaving them behind. A sergeant-major confessed that he didn’t have the nerve to break it to them. ‘It’s the worst news they will ever get,’ he told Pare. ‘You’ll have to do it.’ The padre, deeply depressed himself by this unexpected turn of events, had a heavy heart as he began his round of the wards. ‘Everyone tried to take the calamity in good heart,’ he recalled, ‘but the news was very bitter.’ He found it difficult to keep up a cheerful and positive pretence. In the end, ‘I was relieved to finish the whole miserable business.’ All of a sudden, there was new activity in the Schoonoord, now that the long siege was over. The Germans arrived in large numbers and were cooperative, even the unpredictable SS. Ambulances rolled up to the front door to take the patients to hospital in Apeldoorn. Spirits began to rise. Going into captivity was not good, that was true, but, looked at another way, ‘the battle was over and we were still alive. In the circumstances, that was a lot to be thankful for.’

One by one, the pockets of wounded dotted round the battlefield went the same way. Glider pilot Peter Clarke, who once trained as a medical orderly, had been running his own first-aid post close to the Hartenstein Hotel for several days, largely on his own. It was his ‘little sanctuary giving comfort and kindness’, and the task had focused his mind and eased his Christian conscience by keeping him from having to kill. He was offered the chance to escape on the evacuation, but declined. ‘It crossed my mind that, as a trained glider pilot, I really ought to try and get back, but it seemed more important to be saving lives. I had four casualties to look after, and I wasn’t going to clear off and leave them in the lurch.’ The thing he most feared was an enemy attack on the house and a grenade coming hurtling in through the window. Instead, he heard German voices outside and opened the door to be greeted – ‘very courteously, I must say’ – by a German officer. ‘I saw the casualties off and then I went “into the bag”. My war was over but it was a relief to me that these chaps were going to be taken care of.’ Afterwards, he doubted if his presence had been essential and that if he had chosen to join the retreat, those casualties would have been treated any differently. But, then again, ‘giving comfort was as important as anything else in those last few hours, somebody just being there with them. That totally justified my staying.’