Arnhem

In another part of Oosterbeek, teenager Marie-Anne and her family were not so blessed. She was trying to chat to Len, one of the two English soldiers lodged in her house, over the kitchen table – not an easy thing to do, because she found his Cockney accent hard to understand – when there was a loud crash. ‘German!’ yelled Len – a word she had no trouble in grasping – and flung himself to the ground. She followed suit, as did her mother and Gerald, the other soldier. ‘The shells keep on falling. Outside everything is pitch black.’ Shrapnel and debris rattled against the windows. When the shelling died down, she found that more soldiers who had been outside had now made their way hurriedly into the house for shelter and were lined up in the corridor and spilling into the rooms. ‘There are now thirty soldiers in our house,’ she noted nonchalantly. ‘They have trenches at the back of the garden but remain mostly indoors, in our back room’.

Family life went on. Her mother cooked potatoes and apples, sparse supplies indeed. The cellar was prepared as a safe haven of sorts, with chairs, foot stools and rugs on the cold floor. The shelling had moved off but, every time he heard a crash, Len was taking no chances and was down those stairs like lightning. The younger Gerald, Marie-Anne noted, was braver and stayed upstairs in the sitting room unless a burst came very near. Increasingly, she was made to stay in the cellar – ‘The English are very concerned for our safety’ – and all the more so when the word went round that German tanks were coming. But she refused to stay out of harm’s way. There was work to do. ‘Upstairs, many of the soldiers ask for water and I help them to get it. I lost count of how many flasks I filled.’ She stood at the back door with Len, gazing at the red glow in the sky from hundreds of fires. She munched on some biscuits he brought for her and made tea. ‘He says he will warn me when the German tanks are coming and I must go down to the cellar then.’ More airborne soldiers were arriving all the time, so many that Len and Gerald were worried the Germans might begin to take notice. ‘They do not want us to risk our lives.’ In truth, it was much too late for that. In the mess that was now developing, there were no neutrals. Everywhere was a war zone and no one’s life was safe, as Kate ter Horst, more than most, must now have realized.

Overnight, her large house down by the river in Oosterbeek had turned from a tentative first-aid post for the British into a full-blown casualty clearing station. She had emerged from the cellar after a troubled and sleepless night, tossing and turning in the heat generated by the crammed-in bodies of her family and friends, to be ‘struck dumb’ by the transformation of her splendid home, and not a little alarmed. ‘The long corridor is filled with wounded, lying side by side on red-linen stretchers. There is just room between them to put down one foot and I get through to the kitchen with great difficulty. There, the large table is covered with dressings and bandages and a doctor is examining six or seven injured men on the granite floor.’ Wounds were bandaged after being treated with penicillin, the new wonder drug which the Allies (but, significantly, not the Germans) had for controlling infection and which had been in use for less than a year. ‘There is not much more to be done,’ Kate noted, ‘for there are no surgeons here. Orderlies give the patients morphine injections and write on their forehead the dose and the time.’

She continued her tour. ‘Wounded everywhere, in the dining room, in the study and the garden room, in the side corridor and even under the stairs and in the lavatory. There is not a single corner free of them.’ Every windowpane was smashed and every room unrecognizable because all the furniture had been hurled outside to make more space. But all she could think was that she needed to do more to help them, to be a better ‘hostess’, as she put it, in their hour of need. Despite protests from the army medics that they did not want to spoil her fine things, she insisted they strip the untouched family beds upstairs of mattresses, blankets and linen. Then she directed the padre to the preserved vegetables and meat in the larder. ‘Here, take it,’ she said. He declined. They wouldn’t take her food, he told her, ‘You’ll need it for the kiddies,’ and then he pointed hopefully to the sky to indicate that he was expecting fresh supplies to be arriving soon. She liked his quiet confidence. ‘I get a feeling of power and assurance that this army has everything, knows everything, conquers everything.’