Arnhem

It wasn’t, of course, only soldiers risking their lives inside that Oosterbeek perimeter. There were the local people too – those, that is, who had not fled. Caught in the middle of the mayhem, many were bewildered and afraid. From his trench, Dick Ennis saw an old man in his seventies step out gingerly from a nearby house, carefully close the smashed front door behind him and make his way over. ‘He was very neatly dressed. His face, with its finely trimmed goatee beard, struck me as very clean. I had seen nothing but dirty faces for days.’ In broken English, the man explained that he and his wife had been forced to take shelter in the cellar of the house he had just emerged from but his own home was actually half a mile down the road in Oosterbeek village itself. He must, he insisted, go there to fetch some things. ‘We knew it would be madness for him to walk openly up the road. He wouldn’t get more than a few hundred yards without being hit by shell splinters or a bullet. He was in danger even where he was standing now.’ Ennis told him to go back to his cellar and wait until the street was safer. The man protested. ‘I must go to my house. There’s something I need.’ He stopped when Ennis once again pointed out the danger, went back to the house and closed the door – but within minutes was out on the street again. ‘I must go to my house,’ he continued. ‘We have not eaten for three days and my poor wife is hurt.’ Ennis decided to take a look for himself.

‘We went back into the house and he showed me to the cellar stairs. I let him lead the way down – I didn’t trust anyone so I wasn’t going to go first. At the bottom was a fair-sized room lit by a single, flickering candle. By its light I could see a woman lying on a pile of cushions and blankets. She was about the same age as her husband. The sleeve of her dress had been ripped off and round her forearm was a blood-soaked piece of rag. She spoke no English, but just lay there looking at me with tears running down her cheeks. I removed the bandage, under which was a nasty jagged wound. It had stopped bleeding but she must have lost a lot of blood. I bound up her arm with a field dressing. All the time the old man was standing by saying, “My poor wife, my poor wife.” I looked round the cellar. There were no signs of food. We had none either, so it was impossible for me to help them. I told the man to stay with his wife and on no account to leave the house. But when I left, he followed me, practically on my heels, fully determined to go into the centre of Oosterbeek. It was useless trying to stop him, so we let him go.

‘We saw him picking his way along the centre of the road, knocking twigs and debris aside with his stick. We didn’t expect to see him again but, within an hour, he was back, and very distressed. He came right up to us and stood on the edge of our trench. He was crying, and his hands trembled. He spoke, though he was not looking at us. It was as though he was speaking over our heads. “The Germans,” he said, “they won’t let me in my ’ome. They say to kill me if I go into my ’ouse. My God! Kill me if I go in my own ’ouse!” He turned away and went back to his cellar and we didn’t see him again. I think the civilians suffered as much as we did.’

Ennis was right. For Anje van Maanen, the fear she felt and the horrors she witnessed around her were never erased. Back at the start of the British invasion, she had seen her first dead body, a German soldier, and been shocked. She had been cycling to a farm to get some milk and noticed her neighbours walking around ‘queer-looking lumps in the middle of the road’. She shied away from them, ‘but my eyes are pulled towards a man lying on his back and staring at me with dead eyes. I scream and move away, only to stumble on another corpse, eyes closed, blood on his temples and his hands stretched backwards. It is all so awful, but other people don’t seem to mind.’ The reality of war hit her hard, whichever side was suffering. ‘These were men who lived and who loved and who did not want their lives to end this way. They are Germans, but I feel sick with misery at what has happened to them and I cry. I feel very subdued. I shall never forget this.’ Six days later, it was the British whose deaths she was witness to. As, face pressed up against the window of her house, she watched the hurried burial of a para, she was overwhelmed with sadness. ‘Is that what he was fighting for? To be put under the earth while his wife or fiancée far away at home has no idea that he is even dead?’ She couldn’t stop herself wondering if she was destined for the same fate.