Arnhem

When he looked back years later, Clarke was certain that his belief was vital to his survival. ‘I relied on my faith. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I felt that, whatever happened to me, my future was assured in the context of eternity. I think it would be much worse to be in that situation without any well-rounded faith to draw on. There was a very real sense that we might die or get seriously injured in that trench. You struggle to understand how you could come out unscathed.’ The other saving grace was that he found work that he could do wholeheartedly. Drawing on his earlier training as a medic, he organized a first-aid post for his sector. ‘I wouldn’t have been any good if they’d sent me out on patrol because I wasn’t trained for that sort of infantry work. But I did know how to treat the wounded, even if it was as much a padre’s job as a medical one.’ His memory failed him on how many people he treated. ‘Ten or a hundred? I haven’t a clue. Nor do I remember sleeping, though I must have done at some point. I was on my own with some basic first-aid equipment plus sheets, blankets, towels and a little food I found in a house. I could do only simple stuff like apply field dressings. Then the casualties were evacuated by jeep to a field hospital.’ So intense was this experience, so focused in on itself, that he was never sure where that field hospital was, though it must have been quite close. Orderlies would come to pick up his patients, though he didn’t know on whose orders. ‘I haven’t a clue how they knew where to come and collect them but at some point my unofficial aid post must have become an official one.’ Head down, concentrating on what had to be done, he managed to stay at his post until the bitter end.

Ron Kent, meanwhile, on the western edge of the Oosterbeek perimeter, was running out of rations. All the company cook could come up with for breakfast was a dixie of boiling tea. He searched his pockets vainly in the hope of finding an overlooked scrap of food, half a biscuit maybe. Action took his mind off the emptiness of his stomach as the first shots and shells of the day hummed from a wood opposite. It was half-hearted to begin with, but the pace stepped up when a German mobile gun set up in the corner of the ‘killing field’ directly in front of the perimeter and lobbed in shells from a frighteningly short range. The paras replied with mortars, but they fell short. Kent watched in admiration as a comrade edged around the wood with a PIAT anti-tank weapon on his back. ‘He stalked that gun until he scored a direct hit and kept going until he could get in another shot to make certain it was out of action.’ The man picked up a bad stomach wound for his pains and, though he survived, would later become a prisoner of war. But, this apart, the dug-in defenders did very little. Kent ordered his men to conserve their energy and their ammunition. ‘My orders to the riflemen of my section were simple: “Fire at will if, and only if, you have a clear target.” The Bren would fire only on my command.’

With the British firing largely at a standstill, an uneasy peace settled over the immediate area. When the German mortar fire ceased too, there was a blessed silence, a stillness in the eye of the storm. It was broken by a strange tinkling noise, an amplified sound that Kent likened to the tinny music he’d heard from ice-cream carts in his childhood. This unreal jingle gave way to a message from a loudspeaker somewhere in the distance. ‘Men of the 1st Airborne Division,’ said a man’s voice in halting English. ‘The game is over. Your comrades are being slaughtered. Your tanks will never reach you. Surrender now. Come out waving a white handkerchief. You have two minutes to decide whether you live or die. Surrender or tonight will be your last night on earth. You will never see your wives and sweethearts again.’

Some paras replied with obscenities. ‘Go f*** yourself, Jerry,’ they chorused, with suggestions on where the man on the loudspeaker could shove his own white handkerchief. But Kent was not alone in feeling perturbed by what he had just heard. ‘Something turned over in my stomach and quietly died,’ he admitted. He felt calm rather than distressed, ‘calmer in fact than I had felt for days’, but this, paradoxically, was because the threat of what was to come seemed very real. Resigned to his fate, if that was what it would be, he told himself, ‘This is it. This is where your death or glory stuff gets you.’ But then the defiance snapped back in, the pride asserted itself. He wasn’t going down without a fight. If the enemy thought they could just walk over him, well, let them try it. The bluff was called, and rightly so. ‘We expected all hell to be let loose at us after that but, apart from renewed mortar fire, to which we had become accustomed, nothing happened.’