Ride Out The Storm Read Online Free Page B

French. They had been gloomy and suffered from a tremendous envy for British phlegm what they called Le sang-froid habituel, which Allerton translated in its turn as ‘Their permanent bloody colds’. The notices on the walls, Nous vaincrons parce que nous sommes les plus forts! had seemed spiritless, and he had been well aware that the common poilu endured the British only because the Germans were several degrees worse. Since every vice imaginable had seemed to be practised in the brothels that were Allerton’s concern, he had long suspected that the people who ran them would sell their country as quickly as they sold their bodies and when the Germans had crossed the border he had not been surprised to notice that their attitude was not the old-fashioned Ils ne passeront pas, but ‘Good God, already?’
    To his surprise the British army seemed to be fighting well and its generals were keeping their heads, but they had been moving south-west for days now, sometimes waiting for hours in five-mile queues of traffic under the cold moon until someone cleared a crossroads. Every village was buzzing with rumours and there were said to be parachutists round every corner and fifth columnists in every bar.
    Suddenly the war had become a holocaust such as Allerton could never have dreamed up even at his most imaginative. Everyone in France was terrified, everyone was exhausted and bewildered, and everyone seemed to be drunk – and he knew by now that it was because they were expecting defeat. Apart from making sure he emerged with a whole skin, he still wasn’t sure what his own attitude ought to be. As an intellectual, he felt he ought to have one, but ‘glory’ was a word that never seemed to cross the minds of the troops these days. His men still carried their football boots and clever books, but Allerton himself had long since decided that the selection of intellectual literature he’d brought to France, to give himself the detached and mildly bored air he admired, had become surprisingly trivial and he had thrown it all away. There seemed no place for such things in a situation where units were lost, telephone communications were broken and soldiers were taking to their own two feet because trucks failed to appear to pick them up.

    As they approached St André there was a smell of summer in the air, a rich scent of blossom and young fruit, and the church bells were ringing as the old women from the farm cottages emerged in their black clothes for mass. Built on the curve of a small hill, surrounded by woods and near a river, by a miracle the place had so far not been touched, and after bombed Armentières with its mutilated dead, the red-tiled cottages ahead looked like a different world from the one they’d been living in for over a fortnight now.
    Allerton was just looking forward to a halt and to drawing the clean air of the village into his lungs when he noticed his men pointing. Then, from the south, across their path towards Calais, he saw a heart-rending tide of refugees coming round the curve of the hill which had concealed them until the last moment, a vast black-clad column of people filling the streets and eddying into gardens and alleys like water from a burst dam.
    They were Belgians and border French driven west by the fighting as their parents had been driven twenty-five years before, and within moments they’d swamped the column Allerton was with, and the trucks had to halt short of the crossroads in the centre of the village as the wave of misery lapped round them.
    Some of the refugees were carrying a single blanket tied bandolier-fashion over the shoulder – all they’d saved of their worldy possessions – but some had still not yet been able to throw off the habits of a lifetime, and women struggled along in smart hats, fur coats, and dainty shoes that crippled their feet. They had no idea where to go or where to get information where to go, and their faces were distorted with terror.
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