Dennis Wheatley - The Black Baroness

Ten minutes after passing the first batch of French troops the taxi entered Etamps. The town was crowded with the retreating Army and Gregory thought that the men looked hopelessly beaten as they lay in groups on the pavements or stood drooping with weariness beside their vehicles. From that point on he was constantly passing units which were falling back to take up fresh positions behind the Loire, and he had also caught up with the tail-end of the vast civilian army that bad left Paris on foot the preceding day or in the slower vehicles that morning. The refugees were inextricably mixed with the retreating troops, causing great delay and confusion. Nevertheless, the taxi-man managed to keep up a fairly good pace by winding his way in and out among the moving column and they reached Orleans at seven o'clock.

The town had been bombed and a large part of the main street lay in ruins so they had to circumvent it by taking side-turnings until they reached the great bridge over the Loire, which was badly choked by the retiring troops. It was three-quarters of an hour before Gregory could get across; and the road south of the bridge was little better. At any moment he expected an officer to order him off the road altogether as it was a matter of vital necessity that the troops should reach their new battle positions before dawn, but apparently the refugees were so numerous and the military so tired that the officers responsible for keeping some sort of order on the roads had long since abandoned the uneven struggle.

He who shouted and swore got through, while he who did not got pushed into the ditch. Fortunately for Gregory his driver possessed a fine flow of argot and, urged on by the thought of the promised reward, he cursed without discrimination the unfortunate civilians and the weary soldiers who got in his way.

Twenty miles south of Orleans the pressure eased a little, as the troops became less numerous, and now that night was falling many of the refugees had drawn off the road to snatch a few hours' sleep before proceeding further. From ten miles an hour they were able to increase their pace to fifteen, and at a little before midnight they entered Tours. In spite of their good start the first hundred and twenty miles of their journey had taken them nine hours.

Tours had been the headquarters of the French Government for a short time after it had left Paris and in consequence the town had suffered appallingly. Many fires were still burning and several streets in the centre of the town were now only a mass of ruins. Weaving a way through the columns of refugees had been tiring work, and although Gregory had been feeding his driver with some of the things in his picnics-basket, by pushing them through the front window of the cab, he felt that the man deserved a rest; so they pulled up at a small cafe that had remained undamaged and was still open.

It was crowded with refugees, rich and poor jostling together; haggard-eyed women in expensive fur-coats, pot-bellied bourgeois round-shouldered Jews, officers, soldiers, workmen in blue overalls and children of all classes and all ages; some pathetically silent and some angrily complaining of their woes.

Among them Gregory saw a British R.A. Captain, so, having secured cups of hot coffee for his taciturn driver and himself, he asked the gunner if he had any news.

It transpired that he had heard the nine o'clock broadcast issued by the B.B.C. That morning the Germans had launched a fresh attack, west of the Saar, against the Maginot Line, but it had been repulsed with heavy losses. The 17,000-ton armed liner Scotstoun had been sunk by a U-boat, but a British airman had succeeded in getting a direct hit with a heavy bomb on the German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst while she was lying in Trondheim harbour. On balance it sounded not a bad day, if one ignored the fact that the Germans had that afternoon entered Paris.

However, the Gunner Captain was in a state of angry gloom or which he had good reason. He had been detached from the 51st Division some days previously, for special duties, and when he had endeavoured to rejoin his unit he had learnt that practically the whole Division had been scuppered.

British troops which had been re-landed early in the week had done their utmost to hold a line from Barentin, along the little River Saone, to the sea, in order to prevent the Germans reaching Le Havre; but the French on their right had let them down and, although the bulk of the British had been got off in a new evacuation, two brigades of the 51st Division had been cornered at Saint Valery. Some of Britain's most famous regiments had been there, including the Gordons and the Black Watch, and with the utmost valour they had fought unbroken in a desperate ring; but when at last their ammunition had run out their commander, Major-General V. M. Fortune, had been compelled to surrender, so six thousand of our best men had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

Gregory felt that this was a very different business from the ignominy of Dunkirk, where a quarter of a million men had been ordered to throw away their guns and baggage. In this case there had been tremendous odds against a few thousand infantry unsupported by tanks, heavy artillery or aircraft, and having fired their last shot before surrendering those splendid Highlanders had done all that was humanly possible, maintaining untarnished the magnificent record of the Glorious 51st. Nevertheless, it was yet one more grim act in the colossal tragedy which had been unfolding before his very eyes day after day these past terrible weeks.

He offered the Gunner a lift in his taxi to Bordeaux, which was gladly accepted, and running again through side-streets they came out on the road to Poitiers. It was now one o'clock in the morning and Gregory thanked his gods that he was making this part of his journey at night, as he had reached the area where even greater numbers of the refugees who had left Paris ahead of him were making their way south.

The road was never entirely clear of that endless column which had its origins in all the desolated cities of Holland, Belgium and Northern France, to be swollen during more recent days by another two million evacuees from Paris; but thousands of them were now passing the night in the fields, as could be seen from the small 'bivie' fires and moving lights Which from time to time threw up stationary cars, vans and carts piled with baggage and household belongings; and Gregory knew that had it been daytime their numbers would have rendered the roads absolutely impassable.

At dawn they passed through Poitiers and, halting south of the town, had some more food from Gregory's hamper to sustain themselves. Daylight now revealed the full tragedy that the last week of the war had brought about. The procession of luxury cars alternated with aged farm-carts; yet every few hundred yards vans, cars and lorries had been abandoned because they had run out of petrol, and on both sides of the road the endless ribbon of higgledy-piggledy makeshift camps continued.

All through the long, hot morning they stopped and started, stopped and started, but by mid-day they reached Angouleme, where during a short halt they picked up an R.A.F. sergeant-pilot and an A.S.C.

private, both of whom had got themselves hopelessly lost.

In the cafe where they had found these two Gregory learnt that the new German thrust, directed at the western end of the Maginot Line on the previous day, had, after all, proved a success. The Huns were clean through, and their armoured columns were now racing east in an attempt to cut the whole Line off from the main French Army.

After leaving Angouleme the traffic became a little less congested and at a quarter to five in the afternoon the taxi pulled up outside the Hotel Julius Caesar on the outskirts of Bordeaux.

Taking leave of the three men to whom he had given a lift, Gregory handed the taxi-driver his bonus.