Arnhem

However, although the perimeter was holding here, elsewhere it was creaking. It had to be tightened, and Kent received orders to fall back closer to divisional headquarters in the Hartenstein. The move was to be made in the dead of night. ‘We were also warned that the Germans had some of our smocks and parachute helmets and might attempt to infiltrate our position. They had already tried it in another sector.’ As he waited in his trench to begin the pull-back with his platoon, his spirits plummeted. ‘Curled up in that hole, I suddenly felt deathly tired and terribly alone.’ That day he had lost two of his best mates. One, a fellow sergeant, took bullets in both legs. ‘I knew his wife was expecting a baby in a month and I only hoped he would get back to her.’ Then there was the soldier he had been sharing his foxhole with, who had been hit and fallen back into Kent’s arms. ‘His eyes were wide and staring vacantly. His face took on a ghastly grey hue. I thought he had been killed outright.’ Kent had got him to a casualty station but then had to leave him, uncertain of his fate.

Now, alone in the trench, he missed his companion. He dozed and dreamt, a terrible dream of being buried alive, while that disembodied German voice from earlier in the day sounded in his ears. An officer came by and hissed at him to stay awake. ‘Oh, how I knew it,’ he said, recalling the moment years later. ‘As I write these words, I can feel the battle between my willpower and nature all over again.’ His willpower won, and he moved along his section’s foxholes with a quiet word of encouragement to all his men.

The company gathered in the dark for its tactical withdrawal. ‘A quiet roll call was made. One of my men was missing. I fumbled my way in the dark to find him still in his foxhole. I had to force him out of it. He was all for staying there and taking his chance when daylight came.’ The man was Jewish and a refugee from Germany, and was showing extraordinary courage just by being there with the Allied forces. Kent knew of a number of men with the same background and had enormous respect for them. Although they had Anglicized their names as a precaution in case of capture, some had faltering English and heavy accents that would have soon given their ethnic identity away. But this one particular man had lost his nerve or his reason because, against everyone else’s better judgement, he was bent on giving himself up. ‘I had no intention of letting him do so and I finally persuaded him he would be better off staying with us. Part of the persuasion was the cold metal of my Colt pressed against his ear and my promise that I personally would see him off before any German could do so. When the withdrawal started I kept him directly in front of me so that he could not slip away in the dark.’

That night march, as Kent called it, was more of a nightmare. They shuffled along in the pitch black over rough and unfamiliar ground, constantly in danger of losing touch with the man in front and wandering off course. It was a nerve-wracking hour of stopping and starting before they made it into the grounds of the Hartenstein and settled down to rest. ‘We lay in section lines among the leaves,’ Kent recalled, ‘which had already fallen from the trees. It seemed to me that autumn came early that year. I eased off my pack, lay my Sten close to hand, ready for use, and put my head down for a nap. As I did so I felt something soft and yielding beside me but thought no more of it. As dawn broke, we roused ourselves and I discovered I had spent the night alongside a dead German soldier. He was barely covered with a few inches of earth and leaves, and it was his hand, sticking out from his resting place, that I had touched. He cannot have been long dead, for there was hardly any of the stench of putrefaction which was to become so familiar to me in the days to come.’

He was glad to move on when his company relocated again in the early-morning half-light to a group of houses at a crossroads on the main Oosterbeek–Arnhem road. They were now on the more vulnerable eastern side of the perimeter. Surprisingly, Kent was positive, more so than he had been for a while. Strangely, he was closer now to Arnhem itself than he ever had been – or ever would get – and, paradoxically, he interpreted this as a sign of progress rather than the desperate shoring-up that it actually was. ‘Maybe in a day or so,’ he told himself, ‘we’ll hear that the Second Army have reached the bridge, that German resistance has ceased and that I can have that beer with my mate Bill Watts, promised back at the drop zone, after all.’