Arnhem

If words failed Dick Ennis, then it fell to Robert Watkins to find the right ones to try to bring comfort to those bereaved by the mission. The 1 Para chaplain returned to base at Grimsthorpe Castle, a sumptuous Vanbrugh pile in Lincolnshire. The place was ‘tragically empty’, he lamented. For two weeks, he had sad work to do – letters, lots of them, many by hand. ‘I have no record of how many I wrote but this was a massive job. In the case of the known dead, I did hand-written letters for the whole brigade. For the missing and for those likely to be prisoners, I had to use typists, but we did include any known facts.’ Then there were the kit and the personal effects of men dead or missing to be sympathetically dealt with. ‘Every parcel was sorted through before it was dispatched in order to eliminate anything which next-of-kin would do better not to see.’ Somewhere, one particular mother was now opening the next-of-kin letter that her soldier son, 21-year-old Ivor Rowbery, had written to her the night before Market Garden was launched, the one ‘I hope you will never receive’.³ But she did. He died on the first day of the battle, and all she had now were his last words to her, telling her how he was willing to die simply to protect ‘my little world centred around you, Dad, everyone at home, my friends’. He begged her not to make herself ill with grief, which he suspected she would do. ‘All I want is for you to remember me and feel proud of me. You were the best mother in the world. I never had much money but what I have is yours. Spend it on yourself or the children, not on me. Goodbye and thanks for everything. God bless you all, your unworthy son, Ivor.’

Watkins, the padre, threw himself into his work liaising with families like Ivor’s and maybe even stretched it out a little. It had a secondary, private purpose – it helped him to come to terms with all he had experienced. He had brought out one group of walking wounded and then gone back across that treacherous river in a futile attempt to fetch more. He had had to swim for his life and his freedom. He felt the need to ‘unwind’, as he put it, a tame word for what today would probably be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress. He, like all those other men returning from the battlefront, was expected just to deal with the horrific films still running in his head, the nightly re-visits to experiences and sights he could never erase. The remedies were generally basic ones. ‘This was a time,’ Watkins wrote, ‘when many people were the better for going out and getting roaring drunk.’ This wasn’t available to him. ‘I do not drink, and I never touched Benzedrine pills. A lot of officers took them into battle, but I distrusted them. So it took me quite a while to stop living with the tension of the battle.’

On the surface, many of these men were unmarked. Family photographs of Bill Mollett, for example, on his return from Arnhem showed him lean and fit. But to nurse his mind and his emotions back to health, his thoughtful parents bought him a kitten, and this strapping paratrooper, a mature man of twenty-eight, carried the tiny creature about for weeks inside his smock. If this was a way of putting away all he had endured, all that fearful post-battle baggage, and reconnecting with a gentler world, then it was simple but effective therapy. Denis Longmate, aged eighty-seven now, is still troubled by memories. He was one of that small cohort of Dorsets who fought their way over to Oosterbeek from the south side of the river, the only section of the relieving Second Army ever to reach their target and join the fighting. By then, though, it was too little too late and, within thirty-six hours, he was on his way back and lucky to be alive. He never forgot. ‘I still see that scene on the river – bodies floating past me, screams for help. These were my friends …’ His voice tailed off into silence as he remembered. He still goes to reunions. ‘I have to, I just have to, to pay my respects, to visit their graves. Yes, I cry. I’m not ashamed of that. I shed a tear for my friends. It’s very sad, very poignant.’ A huge question hangs in the air. Was it worth it? ‘I’m proud of what the Dorsets, my regiment, did, and I’m proud of my role. But we suffered huge losses and achieved nothing. We felt that even at the time.’ But the stark reality that the sacrifice of so many lives was to no positive end did not make him angry or resentful. It just made him sadder and the losses more, not less, poignant.