Ride Out The Storm Read Online Free Page A

them, as efficiency had been drilled in.
    The officer was telling off three men to escort the English soldiers to the rear now and the sergeant was moving among the German dead, getting their names from their identity discs.
    ‘Four,’ he announced.
    ‘Leave ’em,’ the officer ordered. ‘And get the wounded sent to the rear. It’s time we moved on.’
    Shouts sent the soldiers running back to the lorries. Scharroo followed them, but the front of his Opel was crushed, as though one of the tanks had caught it as it had turned. The lorries were beginning to move again now, stirring the dust in the afternoon sunlight, and as they jerked forward they crossed a trail of blood where one of the wounded had dragged himself from the road to safety.
    The Englishmen were stumbling to the rear now, pushed into line by their guards, and the German dead had been laid in a neat row at the side of the road for the labour battalions following behind to collect. As he passed them, Scharron noticed that one had golden hair and that his mouth was stained with the red juice of cherries.

    While Scharroo was still staring at the dead German, Lieu-tenant Basil Allerton, temporarily attached to the Field Security Branch of Intelligence in the Third Division of the BEF, found himself near the village of St André just to the north of Armentières. After nine months on active service during which the war had seemed only a bore, he was beginning to wake up to the fact that it was instead a dead weight of disaster.
    When the German attack had started, with the magnolias out and the fields showing green with new corn, he and his unit had moved into Belgium with the rest of the British army, only to move all the way back again very soon afterwards and a great deal faster. The rumours that the Belgians were cracking had seemed to be well and truly home out when, as the frontier guards had started evacuating themselves as forcefully as the civilian population, they had very swiftly been joined by a large proportion of the Belgian army, some of them apparently getting into their stride so fast they hadn’t even stopped to put on their boots.
    Far from being a real warrior, before the war Allerton had taken a dilettante interest in poetry and intellectual plays, but because it had become the fashionable thing to do after Munich, he’d joined a territorial unit and as a result, rather to his surprise, had found himself in France.
    Disliking the discomfort of the infantry, he’d found himself a comfortable niche with Divisional Intelligence and had worked through the bitter winter in Caepinghem, a small town near Lille, his office a crowded flat in a tenement block. With the baker and the milkman calling it had been pleasantly domestic, and Allerton’s work had seemed chiefly to consist of marking all the brothels on a map because VD was increasing – a fact which the padres blamed on bad morale and Allerton more realistically on bad luck – keeping an eye open for gun-runners along the Belgian border, and giving to regiments newly arrived from England lectures on security which they promptly ignored. His staff had consisted of a sergeant, a corporal and twelve men, all territorials who were supposed to have been picked for the job because they were better educated than their friends. In fact, they were self-important, given to reading clever books that had no meaning, and considered themselves far too intelligent to go on parade. Allerton was easy-going with them, however, and, convinced that soldiering was not a job for adults, had allowed them to put up two stripes at night to impress their French lady friends, while he spent most of his time teaching a willing girl with a flat in the Grande Place how to speak English with the aid of an ancient phrase hook which contained such gems as ‘Why will you not kiss Mary? Because she is smoking and I am wearing a celluloid collar.’
    He had had a low opinion of Hitler and an even lower one of the