скачать книгу бесплатно
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘They all came home to Mill Green at the end of the day and were stabled together.’ Sheffield gave up stag-hunting at the turn of the nineteenth century, complaining that ‘Essex is getting too built over’, but he rode to hounds until nearly eighty, when he took up golf instead. Long after his death a particularly vicious jump over a ditch and stream was still known as ‘Neave’s leap’.
Gertrude Neave, the epitome of a Victorian lady, was an accomplished pianist and also composed music. She came from a distinguished family, one of her relations being General Lord Airey, chief of staff to Lord Raglan, Commander-in-Chief of the British army in the Crimean War. He was, reputedly, the ‘someone who blundered’ over confused orders which led to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Gertrude and Sheffield had two sons and two daughters. The elder son, Sheffield Airey, born in 1879, was Airey Neave’s father; the younger, Richard, became a professional soldier and saw service in the Boer War, India and in Gallipoli in 1916. He also served in Ireland during the Troubles of 1920–22, and Airey may well have heard stories of ‘the Fenians’ from his uncle.
Airey’s father went to prep school in Churchstoke, in the Welsh Marches, and then (as befits the grandson of a Governor of the Bank of England) on to Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, to read natural sciences. He inherited his father’s fascination with Africa and the diseases spread by insects. In the years before the Great War, he travelled in 1904–5 on the Naturalist Geodetic Survey of Northern Rhodesia, and to Katanga as entomologist to the Sleeping Sickness Commission of 1906–8. On his return from Africa, he served in a similar capacity on the Entomological Research Committee for four years before being appointed Assistant Director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology at the age of only thirty-four. He was to hold the post for thirty-three more years and then took over as director in 1942, the year Airey escaped from Colditz, before retiring in 1946.
A big, dominant man with a moustache, Sheffield Neave was a distant figure, immersed in his scientific work and given to a Victorian aloofness from his children. After Airey’s birth, the family moved to a house in High Street, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where four more children were born: Averil, Rosamund and Viola, and then a second son, Digby. Dorothy Neave, descended from an Anglo-Irish family, played a traditional role in the family: she ran a comfortable if unostentatious household. There were servants and appearances to keep up but Dorothy was often unwell and died of cancer in 1943 when Airey was working for MI9. Airey’s daughter Marigold says that he did not have a good relationship with his father. ‘He was very much a scientist. Perhaps that is what made him not very easy to get on with. He was very remote, a very Victorian figure.’
(#litres_trial_promo) If not physically robust, Airey’s mother possessed a mental determination unusual in her position. ‘Grandmother was quite forward-looking, quite progressive for those days. She was a liberal with a small “l”,’ recorded Marigold. ‘His childhood was not very easy. His mother was very often ill. Officially, he looks very much like her, but he never talked about her. He talked about his father, but not in very glowing terms. He was a very strict character, powerful and good-looking: a strong face, very dark eyes. And physically he was very tough. It was a clash of personalities.’ Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, the Dam Busters war hero, friend and contemporary at Merton, would come to a similar conclusion. Neave, he wrote, was highly independent and always ready to follow his inner convictions. ‘No matter what the opposition, he would often do things that were a little wild, though always in rather a nice way and never unkindly.’ This trait endeared him to school and university friends, ‘but possibly had a different effect upon his father who one has the impression did not always give him the encouragement which inwardly he needed. Thus, at a very early age he learned to conceal his inner disappointments.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Airey Neave attended the Montessori School in Beaconsfield, a progressive school where his individuality was respected. In 1925, at the age of nine, he was sent to St Ronan’s Preparatory School in Worthing, Sussex. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, was a remarkable man who had played football for England, and captained the Corinthians, the famous amateur team. The essence of his educational philosophy was captured in the school prayer, known as Harry’s Prayer, which ran:
If perchance this school may be A happier place because of me Stronger for the strength I bring Brighter for the songs I sing Purer for the path I tread Wiser for the light I shed Then I can leave without a sigh For in any event have I been I.
Set in several acres on the outskirts of Worthing, St Ronan’s placed great emphasis on academic excellence, sport and self-development. In many ways an archetypal English prep school – numbering future air vice-marshals and an Asquith among its pupils – it was built in red brick and sat against the backdrop of the South Downs. Despite the usual rigours of such places, the school had a patriotic rather than militaristic air about it. There was no cadet corps but boys were taught shooting, and from time to time a former army sergeant – so old that he had been with Kitchener at Khartoum – came to the school to teach gymnastics and boxing. With their days filled, in the evenings boys were allowed to pursue their own interests. In Neave’s time, some of them built a primitive radio – a crystal set with ‘cat’s whiskers’ tuning. Others drew maps of imaginary countries, bestowing such nations with complex railway timetables. Essentially, they had to learn to make their own amusement, and learn to fend for themselves, all of which helped develop a form of independence.
In 1926 Stanley Harris died of cancer and his place was taken by his brother, Walter Bruce (Dick) Harris, then a housemaster at nearby Lancing College. If Airey was a better than average pupil he was not spectacularly so, and seems to have been suited to his first form which was ‘composed mostly of boys with plenty of ability, one or two of whom however have no great idea of work’. In 1925, he won a combined subjects prize, but in class 1A in 1927 he was fourteenth. By the following year he had crept up to eleventh, then ninth and finally sixth, with 1, 205 points. That autumn, he also won the Latin prize. The highest placing he received was third, but mostly he fluctuated around the lower end of the top ten. The boys were expected to take a full part in the life of the school. Airey played a waiter in the school play in 1928, and the St Ronan’s magazine observed: ‘A word must be given to Neave who by progressive stages became the perfect waiter.’ Praise indeed.
One contemporary at St Ronan’s recalls that Neave was a rather undistinguished small boy, neither games player nor leader nor scholar. He was teased mercilessly about his name. Others spoke warmly of him. Dick Harris described him as having been ‘a gentle child’; echoing that sentiment, Lord Thorneycroft, a contemporary in parliament, would much later describe him as ‘a very brave and yet gentle man’. His daughter Marigold insists that he hated prep school.
At the age of twelve, Airey went to his father’s old school, Eton, one of three boys to go from St Ronan’s in the Lent term of 1929. Eton’s long-serving head, the Reverend Cyril Alington, retired later the same year and his place was taken by Claude Aurelius Elliott, a Fellow and Senior Tutor of Jesus College, Cambridge. Unlike at St Ronan’s, at Eton the house system was everything. Neave’s house tutor was John Foster Crace, a classics teacher who had been there since 1901 but had only become a housemaster in 1923. He was ‘a reticent, reserved and inhibited bachelor with a reputation of being overfond of some of the boys’.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, he was a good teacher and ventured out of his reserve to produce Shakespeare on the school stage.
At Eton the emphasis was not just on academic brilliance but on sport and other ‘gentleman’s pursuits’ such as fencing and shooting. Scouting was also encouraged, including quasi-military activities such as signalling. As they grew older, boys joined the Officers’ Training Corps. Eton boys shot at Bisley, beating teams from the Scots Guards and the Grenadier Guards. The school was also a forcing house for politicians. In June 1929, a month after the General Election that brought Ramsay MacDonald into power at the head of an all-Labour Cabinet, the Eton College Chronicle recorded that seventy-six Old Etonians sat at Westminster, more than sixty of them as MPs. Predictably enough, only four of the MPs were Labour, while two were Liberal. Three Old Etonians were ministers in the MacDonald administration, including a young Hugh Dalton making his mark as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.
Public figures of the highest rank, including the King and international figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, paid regular visits to Eton. The atmosphere was unashamedly elitist. In Neave’s first year a particularly aggressive Etonian defined the expressive word ‘oick’ as ‘anybody who hasn’t been to Eton’. But when the school debating society considered whether ‘This House would welcome the resignation of the Government’, it was roundly defeated by forty-two votes to twenty, suggesting, perhaps, that the boys were more radical than their forebears.
The St Ronan’s magazine recorded that Airey ‘took remove at Eton, which is the highest form that a new boy who is not a scholar can go into’, and throughout his five years at the school he was competent rather than brilliant. He usually finished among the top half-dozen in his class and on one occasion won a book prize for academic effort, having, as Eton had it, been ‘sent up for good’ three times in a single term. Although the records suggest that he was a good runner, he did not shine at the school’s other traditional sports: cricket, racquets, fencing, soccer, rugby and rowing.
It might be thought that the momentous events away from the playing fields of Eton – the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s – would have passed him by. Indeed, the Eton College Chronicle of October 1930 suggested that the school was ‘terrifyingly remote from the ordinary concerns of life’, yet the same edition carried a spoof on a Communist takeover of the school, with references to ‘Herr Hitler’, and Old Etonians active in the higher reaches of politics would often return to talk to the school. In 1931, the fall of the Labour government amid economic collapse and the return of a national government under MacDonald greatly increased the number of Old Etonians at Westminster to 102, five of them in the Cabinet and nine more scattered in more junior ministerial jobs. It really did seem that being able to say one was an OE was a passport to power. Much has been said about the characteristics of an Old Etonian. A young OE might be considered arrogant, self-conscious, conceited, overconfident; the more mature species had become sober, active and intelligent, a leader of men; while in his dotage an OE might revert to arrogance and jingoism, but of a gentler kind. Neave was too reserved to fit the classic OE profile, but there was something of all those descriptions in him.
Before Neave left Eton he had an experience that few seventeen-year-old English boys of the period could expect to undergo. In September 1933 his parents sent him to Germany to brush up on the language. He was billeted with a family living in Nikolassee, west of Berlin, where he attended school with a boy of similar age who was a member of the Hitler Jugend. Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, when President von Hindenburg asked him to form a government as the leader of the largest single party, the National Socialists. Public and political opinion in Britain was slow to catch up with the terrifying prospect opening up in Continental Europe. Winston Churchill expressed admiration for ‘men who stood up for their country after defeat’. The Times asked sympathetically whether the street-orator would be an efficient ruler and the demagogue a statesman. They had their answer within weeks, when the Reichstag, the parliamentary building, was destroyed by fire. New decrees gave Hitler’s private army, the SA (Stürmabteilung), the power to gaol Jews and dissidents without trial. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau and by July of that year German citizenship was allowed only to members of the Nazi Party. Forced sterilisation of ‘inferior’ Germans was ordered. The terror had begun, but many in Britain believed that war could be averted through the League of Nations. Hitler withdrew from the League, yet still Germany remained a favourite holiday destination and Nazism even found admirers at home, particularly in the upper reaches of British society.
As a foreigner, Airey was excused from giving the Nazi salute when the teacher came into his class, but he was made to sit at the back, where he cut a bizarre figure in a ‘decadent’ yellow (Eton) tie with black spots and longer hair than his classmates. He felt something approaching contempt for the growing nazification of the school. Dietrich, the elder brother of the boy with whom he attended school, was impressed by Airey’s air of independence but warned that it was dangerous. On a railway platform at Nikolassee, Airey sniggered at a fat, brown-booted Nazi SA man. Years later, he recollected ‘the bloodshot pig-eyes of the stormtrooper glaring towards us’. Dietrich hastily manoeuvred him out of sight.
Dietrich was not a party member but he did belong to a sports club in nearby Charlottenburg. Airey joined as an honorary member. With his indifferent performances at school in mind, he volunteered for the relay race. A Festival of Sport was declared in September and his club was ‘advised’ by the authorities to field a team. At this relatively early stage of the Nazi takeover, Hitler had not stolen all sporting events as his own and marching in the torchlight procession was regarded as light-hearted and theatrical. Airey’s friend took him on the march in the face of official disapproval. He was dressed in ‘civvies’ and treated the occasion as something of a joke. His fellow marchers, however, did not: ‘As we joined the uniformed Nazis with their band, our mood changed,’ he recorded.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘I felt as if I was being drawn into a vortex.’ The march began at ten in the evening. Neave was in the centre, alongside Dietrich and directly behind a contingent of SA troopers in brown shirts and swastika armbands. Down each side of the procession, burning torches blazed. Initially, Neave admitted, he found the grandiose event thrilling. Crowds watched, their faces shining with excitement and pride.
Sportsmen who had been joking began singing; the mood became religious and the marchers expectant. On their parade from Lustgarten down Berlin’s Unter den Linden, they passed the Royal Palace of Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Ministry of the Interior, home of Hermann Goering’s newly established Gestapo. When Neave broke step with his fellow marchers, Dietrich rounded on him, but it happened again before they reached their festival site, the Brandenburg Gate. ‘I found it difficult to keep in step,’ he admitted. ‘Something subconscious was drawing me away.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The gate was floodlit and festooned with Nazi flags, resembling, he recalled, some gateway to Valhalla. As they marched towards the burned out ruins of the Reichstag, bands played the Horst Wessel song (the Nazi anthem) and Neave was caught up in the emotional turmoil that prompted cynical and doubting fellow marchers alike to give the Nazi salute. ‘Some were on the verge of tears,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, I realised that they were lost forever to the Revolution of Destruction, whereas I would escape.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Massed bands prepared them for a half-hour speech by Reichssportkommissar von Tschammer und Osten. Airey, the product of a civilisation at odds with the hysteria of Fascism, was bored. The speech was tedious and hackneyed, ‘a maddening anticlimax’. While he fretted, all around him the young intelligentsia listened to the brown-shirted thug with rapt attention, breaking into ‘Deutschland über Alles’ when the speech was over. Neave’s reportage of these events has something of ex post facto reasoning about it. A British teenager, even one educated at Eton, pitchforked for the first time into a foreign country undergoing such convulsions, is unlikely to have come to such sophisticated conclusions. Recollecting these events twenty years later, Neave invested himself with a remarkably mature social and political intelligence, all of which certainly made for a better story. Had his liberal-minded mother known about the reality of Nazism, Airey mused, she would have recalled him instantly. Looking back, he realised that Hitler was preparing the young people of Germany for a war that he had always intended. His youthful eyes had been opened to the dangerous neurosis sweeping Germany but it would be seven more years before he was swept into the net of depravity. He returned to school for the remainder of his final year, to a Britain more perturbed about the controversial MCC bodyline tour of Australia than events in Berlin.
Eton in late 1933 must have seemed an anticlimax after the convulsions he had witnessed in Berlin. His school record shows flashes of distinction rather than consistency. After Eton, an orthodox journey through Oxford – he had chosen to go to Merton rather than follow his father to Magdalen – into the law seemed to beckon. Of good academic repute built initially on the classics, the Merton to which Neave went in the autumn of 1934 was still steeped in Victorian tradition. As the age of adulthood remained at twenty-one, the college stood in loco parentis to its undergraduates and took its responsibilities seriously. Discipline was officially strict, though the authorities turned a blind eye to certain misdemeanours. For the first year students lived in. They had agreeable but austere rooms. There were very few bathrooms: each set had a chamberpot, emptied by the college scout who acted as valet and housekeeper. A normal academic day began at 7.30 a.m. when the scout brought hot water for washing and shaving, and undergraduates then had to attend a roll-call at 8.00, ‘properly dressed’ in socks as well as gowns over their normal clothing. They signed their names in a register in a lecture room in Fellows’ Quad, under the watchful gaze of the day’s duty don. Attendance at matins in the college chapel was an acceptable alternative to roll-call.
After a day of lectures and tutorials, they were free for the evening. Drinking in Oxford’s pubs was forbidden and the rules were enforced by bowler-hatted ‘bulldogs’ (university proctors’ assistants) who toured the watering holes accosting suspects. College gates were closed at 9.00 p.m., and after that students had to ‘knock up’ the porter in his turreted fifteenth-century gatehouse to gain admission. They were fined sixpence after 10.30, and a shilling after ii .00. If an undergraduate had permission to stay out after midnight – rarely granted – he paid a fine of half a crown.
This was all quite expensive for the mid-thirties, when a young man at Oxford could live comfortably on £250 a year, so the curfew was regularly breached by climbing over the perimeter wall back into college. Indeed, it was one of Merton’s traditional sports. Reputedly, twenty-eight break-in routes existed, the most popular being over the wall in Merton Street into the college gardens and then through the loosened bars of a ground-floor set of rooms, where it was customary to leave small change on the table of the hapless undergraduate who occupied the rooms. Dons discreetly allowed the bars to remain loose.
Neave was undoubtedly one of the climbers, an unconscious rehearsal of his exploits at Colditz a few years later, and in captivity he must have mused on the irony of his position, where, for three years, he had perfected the art of breaking in rather than out. Once at Oxford, Neave quickly made his way to the worst company that Merton offered. He was elected to the exclusive Myrmidon Club, a group of undergraduates, never more than a dozen in number, who dedicated themselves to the good things of life. The club was founded in 1865, fancifully in emulation of George Bathmiteff, a Russian nobleman and Merton undergraduate who had dallied with a danseuse who wore a garter of purple and gold. Originally, its aims were to explore the Cherwell and other river systems, but with the advent of undergraduates like Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1870s the club soon became the haunt of young bloods. To perpetuate the memory of the danseuse, Myrmidons, named after the faithful followers of Achilles, wore purple dinner jackets faced with silver and white waistcoats edged with purple and gold. Their chief activities were eating and drinking, generally in each other’s rooms but also formally every term in their own dining rooms above a tailor’s shop in the High Street.
Within months of going up to Merton, Neave was inducted into the Myrmidons, at a meeting in the rooms of K.A. Merritt, a keen tennis player. Colin Sleeman, who was to become Captain of Boats and subsequently a distinguished lawyer and defence counsel at the Far East War Crimes Tribunal, was elected the same day. At that point the club numbered seven. They met regularly in Neave’s rooms for the following year, and in June 1936 he was elected secretary. The minutes show him to have been a conscientious but terse recorder of events. On 20 October 1936, the Myrmidons met in Mr Logie’s rooms, he wrote in a flowing (indeed, overflowing) Roman hand, and fixed the dates for lunch and dinner that term. It must have been a good meeting. Neave’s account, in a trembling hand, is full of crossings-out and emendations. He signed himself with a flourish and then underneath wrote ‘trouble’, without further explanation. On 5 February 1937, he recorded that the Myrmidons met in Mr Wells’s rooms and elected two new members. They organised lunch ‘for a date now lost in the mists of obscurity’, or perhaps the mists of Dom Perignon. The club now had nine members, and was ‘full’. The minute books are the only formal history of the Myrmidons’ activities, though they are still a legend for drinking and bad behaviour at Merton. Some idea of their academic application may be gained from the degrees posted in the college register. One got a fourth in geography, another a pass degree in mathematics; Merritt gained a third in history while Sleeman managed only a fourth in jurisprudence. The Myrmidons were capable of sottishness but were no more than undergraduate drunks. They invited Old Boys to their dinner, invariably held in London, where Neave had become a member of the Junior Carlton Club. They also aimed high in their guest invitations. As late as 1951, Winston Churchill, recently reinstalled as Prime Minister, wrote regretting that he could not attend their dinner because the pressure of affairs was ‘considerable’.
The Myrmidons also gained an eccentric reputation for literary interests, chiefly through Max Beerbohm and his friends who had been members in the 1890s. The Myrmidons are assumed to be the model for the Junta in Beerbohm’s gentle, witty Oxford novel Zuleika Dobson. In spite of being known as the ‘most virile’ of Merton’s clubs, they also had a cultured side, which showed itself most strongly in amateur dramatics. The Myrmidons scorned OUDS – the self-esteeming Oxford University Dramatic Society – in favour of Merton Floats, the college’s own theatre group, founded in 1929 by two undergraduates, Giles Playfair and E.K. Willing-Denton, the latter a ‘prodigiously extravagant and generous’ young man. This was, Playfair later recollected, a time of festive teas, luncheons, dinners, suppers and moonlight trips on the river followed by climbing over the wall into college. Willing-Denton, who spent his entire allowance in the first month, was noted for his ten-course luncheons. He and Playfair persuaded actors of the calibre of Hermione Baddeley to come down to Oxford, and Merton Floats enjoyed a succès d’estime in the mid-war years when the social scene was at its height. In 1936, Neave was secretary of Floats and his friend Merritt was president. Sleeman was the grandly titled front-of-house manager. They put on two plays: In The Zone, a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill set on the fo’c’sle of a British tramp steamer in 1915, in which Neave played the role of Smitty; and Savonarola, a play of the 1890s attributed to Ladbroke Brown, in which Neave appeared as Pope Julius II. Neave also found time to make three speeches at the Oxford Union, of which no record remains. On one of these occasions he found himself debating the merits of the previous week’s motion.
It was an altogether engaging life. Neave later admitted that he did little academic work at Oxford and was obliged to work feverishly at the law before his finals in order to get a degree. He graduated in 1938 with a third in jurisprudence and a BA. ‘The climax of my “Oxford” education was a champagne party on top of my college tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below,’ he wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) He remained thankful in adult life for the kindness and forbearance shown by his college during those profligate years. Life was never to be so insouciant again.
3 King and Country (#ulink_04c1e838-a60b-525f-8892-e4f1f30501a1)
In the febrile pre-war atmosphere of the 1930s, Oxford shared in the political polarisation that shook society at large. As early as February 1933, months before Neave went up from Eton, the Oxford Union carried a motion ‘This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country’. The vote was unambiguous: 275 to 153. Most undergraduates thought no more about their casual pacifism, but Winston Churchill expressed nausea at this ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal’. ‘One can almost feel the contempt upon the lips of the manhood of Germany,’ he added disdainfully.
Neave was not among the fainthearts. Unlike most of his university contemporaries he had seen the Nazis at first hand and did not like what he saw. However, unlike some of his contemporaries – including Denis Healey, a future Defence and Foreign Secretary – he did not embrace the fashionable left. He was emphatically a patriot and willing to fight for King and Country. Furthermore, he believed that a war with Germany was inevitable. In 1933, while still at Eton, Neave had written a prize-winning political essay analysing the probable consequences of Hitler’s rise to power and predicting the likelihood of war. Leonard Cheshire recalled: ‘On arriving at Oxford he bought and read the full works of Clausewitz, and when being asked why, answered that since war was coming, it was only sensible to learn as much as possible about the art of waging it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) To this alarming intellectual precocity, Neave, still in his teens, added military intent. While those about him flirted with the Young Communist League, he joined the Territorial Army at the tender age of nineteen. ‘It was fashionable in some quarters to declare that no one but a very stupid undergraduate would fight for his King and Country,’ he remembered later. ‘To be a Territorial was distinctly eccentric. Military service was a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and more tiresome.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He despised the phrase ‘playing at soldiers’, and took some comfort in the fact that those he contemptuously referred to as ‘decadents, fantastics and intellectuals’ were fighting for their very lives within a few short years.
In the meantime, his reading of Clausewitz was of little help on manoeuvres with an infantry battalion in the TA summer camp on the Wiltshire Downs. Neave remembered how he lay blissfully in the grass, a wooden Lewis gun by his side, listening for the sound of blank cartridges but concentrating more on the butterflies, identifying a small copper, a fritillary and a clouded yellow as his platoon clowned around on the edge of a chalk pit. ‘We were not prepared for war. We never are,’ he reflected. His daydreaming was rudely interrupted by a full brigadier kitted out for the First World War who shouted ‘Lie down there!’ as Neave began to stand up, feeling ridiculous in plus fours and puttees covered in chalk and grass. The imaginary conflict continued under a blazing sun. In the post-mortem on this ‘battle’, the brigadier raged at Neave, accusing him of choosing an exposed position for his men. Why had he allowed his left flank to go unprotected? Neave answered, with more nerve than diplomacy: ‘There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, sir, I posted it there.’ The brigadier was deflated and Neave was a popular subaltern in the mess that night. If he was aware that such manoeuvres were poor preparation for the gathering storm he was nonetheless proud to receive in 1935 a registered envelope from the War Office informing him that His Majesty King George V sent greeting to his trusted and well-beloved Airey Neave and appointed him to a commission as second lieutenant in his Territorial Army.
After graduating, Neave went up to London to read for the Bar. His first placement was in 1938 in the office of an old-fashioned solicitor’s in the City. Here he learned the basics of law in action. It had its entertaining moments. One summer evening found him, kitted out in bowler hat and umbrella, accompanied by a junior clerk, serving an injunction on a group of thespians in a church hall in Cricklewood, north London. The play, by a local author, libelled Neave’s client and the High Court injunction he served on the producer forbade its performance. The producer read the long legal document tied with green string, a familiar sight to journalists but evidently a great shock to amateur performers. ‘You can’t do this to us,’ he expostulated. ‘It’s against the law!’ Echoes of this farcical scene resounded in Neave’s memory years later, when he was called on to serve the indictment to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
Neave moved on to become a pupil in a barrister’s chambers in Farrar’s Building in the Temple, close to Temple Church, but beneath the superficial gaiety of the capital and the debutante season, war was rapidly approaching. In the late summer of 1939, a matter of days before war was declared, Anthony Eden, Minister for War, announced on the radio a doubling of the size of the Territorial Army. Airey and his cousin Julius were listening to the broadcast at Mill Green Park. Airey immediately proposed that they go and join up and the pair cycled off to the local Drill Hall in nearby Fryerning Lane. Julius Neave remembers that the recruiting officer said ‘That’s very nice of you. So, would you like to be soldiers, or officers?’ They replied: ‘Given the choice – officers!’ Both had what was known as a ‘Certificate A’, meaning that they had passed a proficiency test with the Officer Training Corps at school. As a second lieutenant in the TA, Neave would quickly have been called up in any event.
He was posted to an anti-aircraft Searchlight Regiment and spent an unromantic six months in a muddy field in Essex learning his trade, before being dispatched to a searchlight training regiment in Hereford. It was hardly Clausewitz. An impatient Neave preferred to be in the field, like Rupert Brooke and his other war heroes of history. He was soon to have all the action he wanted, and more. In February 1940 he was sent as a troop commander to Boulogne, where the uneasy peace of the ‘phoney war’ reigned. Lieutenant Neave was placed in charge of an advance party of ‘rugged old veterans’ from the First World War, mostly industrial workers with some clerks and professional men, a ‘vocal and democratic lot’ who did not consider themselves crack soldiers but made up for lack of infantry training with a willingness to fight. They were equipped with rifles (though many had never fired one), old Lewis guns, a few Bren guns and the new Boys anti-tank rifle which none of them knew how to use. Neave’s troop, part of the Second Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment, was tasked mainly with operating searchlights in fields around large towns, dazzling bombers and aiding anti-aircraft gunners. The searchlight soldiers were held in little esteem, one Guards officer describing their contribution as ‘quite Christmassy’. An indignant Neave kept his counsel and waited for the underdogs to show their mettle.
He did not have long to wait. Military folklore says that Hitler’s decision to invade the Low Countries and France was made over lunch with von Manstein, Field Marshal of the Wermacht Gerd von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, over lunch on 17 February 1940. On 2 April, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain confidently told the Commons: ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ Early in the morning of 10 May, the Nazi Blitzkrieg on the Low Countries and France began. Under the brilliant direction of General Heinz Guderian, German panzer divisions smashed their way through the Ardennes, overrunning Belgium and striking deep into France. Within five days, Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, was telephoning Churchill to say: ‘We have been defeated.’ It was an appalling prospect. The British Expeditionary Force numbering hundreds and thousands of men, sent to oppose any German invasion, was in danger of being surrounded and cut off in northwestern France. The war for Europe was in danger of being lost before it had begun. Still, service chiefs in London judged that Hitler’s lines of communication had become so extended that a frontal attack on the Channel ports was unlikely. ‘It was not to be believed,’ wrote war historian Michael Glover, ‘that, within two or three days, they could threaten, far less capture, Boulogne and Calais. A week earlier the idea would have appeared equally fantastic to the German High Command.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
On 17 May, after a depressing summit in Paris with Reynaud and the French High Command, Churchill, now Prime Minister after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, ordered his chiefs of staff to draw up plans for withdrawal of the BEF. Guderian’s panzers were racing across northern France, making for the coast and the Channel ports. Neave and his searchlight battery were in Coulogne, a few miles south-east of Calais, right in the way of the German advance. He arrived there from Arras on 20 May, having squashed himself into a tiny khaki-painted Austin Seven with his large and belligerent driver, Gunner Cooper. His troops followed behind in 3-ton army lorries. As they drove through Lens and St Omer, the tide of refugees fleeing west increased. In the ancient town of Ardres, a woman shouted that they were cowards running away from the Germans and spat at the column.
Coulogne had seen British soldiers before. In the time of Henry VIII, when the English had occupied Calais, it was an outer stronghold. In the First World War, it had been a base camp. Neave quartered himself in the Mairie, in the town square. For the first night, they were spared the bombing that had sent the French fleeing for their lives. The young lieutenant imagined that his role in the forthcoming defence of Calais would be commanding his searchlight battery. He was just twenty-four, ‘unmilitary and with opinions of my own’. However, he also later vouchsafed that he and his men were ‘ready to die, or at least expecting to die’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Germans did their best not to disappoint them. As he dozed under a chestnut tree in front of the Mairie in the hot afternoon of 23 May, a German light attack aircraft scored a direct hit on the building, sending tiles tumbling down over him. It was nearly fatal. More mortar bombs exploded among the refugees, killing some of them and Neave’s dispatch rider, Gunner Branton. The casualties included a young girl. Neave noticed a British soldier gently drawing her tartan skirt over her knees to preserve decency even in death. The air raids were followed by panic rumours among the French that German armoured divisions were closing in, but a disbelieving Neave thought they might only be lightly armed reconnaissance groups. How could British High Command not know the whereabouts of Guderian and his tanks?
Searchlight detachments were ordered to converge on Coulogne, gathering a force of about sixty men for the defence of this ‘ghastly bottleneck’. Neave’s men dug trenches in the southern sector and put up rather inadequate roadblocks comprising furniture from the local school and the village hearse. Their work was hampered by the spate of fugitives from the battle zone, whose pathetic columns stretching up to half a mile long had been infiltrated by spies and fifth columnists. At one stage, Neave was forced to draw his .38 Webley revolver on a crowd of refugees threatening to break through the roadblock, prompting cries of ‘Don’t shoot, mon lieutenant!’ The German tank thrust reached them in the afternoon of 23 May but was held back for five precious hours by the Searchlight Regiment’s spirited defence of its HQ at nearby Orphanage Farm. Neave’s Bren gunners took part in this action, but almost fired on their own side until he moved them forward. After the farm came under intense artillery fire, the order to retreat towards Calais was given at about 7.00 p.m. Neave was told to go back into Coulogne to blow up a new piece of kit known as the ‘cuckoo’, a sound-location device which at all costs must not be captured. With a sergeant and a sapper, he tried valiantly with gun cotton to destroy the trailer on which the secret equipment was mounted. As they tried feverishly to carry out the order, two French aviation fuel drivers set fire to their tankers alongside. The ‘cuckoo’ blew up and Neave’s party escaped, choking on fumes from the blaze, to the Calais road.
They found only relative safety in the city. Guderian’s tanks had been briefly, and inexplicably, halted the previous week on Hitler’s personal instructions. His race to the sea might otherwise have been complete by this stage of the war, trapping and capturing the BEF gathering on the sand dunes of Dunkirk just up the coast from Calais. But now he was advancing at full speed and Calais was in the way of his main objective: the British army. His initial plan was to bypass the port and take Dunkirk with the Tenth Panzer Division, but a determined counter-attack by the British south of Arras on 21 May checked his drive, and the German High Command ordered Guderian to wait on the Somme, robbing him of the impetus that could have altered the direction of the entire conflict. Taking advantage of this breathing space, the British threw reserves across the Channel into Calais, elements of the Royal Tank Regiment, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles and the 60th Rifle Brigade. Their orders were unclear and constantly changing. Meanwhile, service chiefs began emergency planning for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 330,000 soldiers of the BEF from the sands of Dunkirk by the Royal Navy and a flotilla of ‘little ships’.
German artillery found their range on Calais docks as these reserves were landing and the siege of Calais began in earnest. The British High Command was in an agony of indecision: whether to fight to the death in the strategic port, dominated by fortifications dating back to the sixteenth century, or withdraw. Churchill had once described Calais as ‘simply an enceinte [fortification] protected by a few well-executed outlying fieldworks … it could certainly not be counted on to hold out more than a few days against a determined attack’. Indeed, at 3.00 a.m. on 24 May, the War Office telegraphed Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commander of British forces in the port, that it had decided ‘in principle’ on evacuation. Many British soldiers, including Neave, hoped desperately that that decision would be implemented. It never was.
As Neave related in his war classic, The Flames of Calais, it was impossible to sleep on the night he bivouacked on the dunes to the west of the town. He was aware that Calais would be surrounded and that a battle was imminent. Yet, throughout the night, rumours of evacuation grew. Neave was frank. ‘Calais had become a city of doom, and I was not in the least anxious to remain. I did not feel heroic.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Later that day, Churchill countermanded the previous decision: a War Office telegram decreed that Calais should be defended to the end, ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. Nicholson was instructed: ‘Select best position and fight on.’ The garrison of Calais, recorded Glover, was deliberately sacrificed to demonstrate Britain’s commitment to her allies, ‘but it was the last major sacrifice that Britain was going to make in that lost cause’.
(#litres_trial_promo) British troops trapped behind the nineteenth-century fortifications could not throw back Guderian’s panzers. The best they could do was hold up the Nazi advance so that Operation Dynamo could be implemented.
On the ground, the men were beginning to realise the way things were going. They needed no explanation. ‘It was now time to forget about evacuation and show what “non-fighting soldiers could do,’ Neave reflected. With fifty volunteers from his men, he formed up with newly disembarked troops of the Rifle Brigade and marched to the eastern ramparts. As he marched, he thought of others who had moved up the line. ‘This was it. Everything before was of no consequence. But would I pass the test?’
His orders were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th on the south-west of the town centre where a German breakthrough appeared imminent. A staff officer led them through the deserted streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which was under fire from German tanks and machine gunners advancing up the Boulogne road. Neave left his men in the shelter of a doorway and stepped nervously into the boulevard. Tracer bullets and even tank shells rained down as he made for the Pont Jourdan railway bridge. He clung for dear life to the sides of the houses as he crept towards his objective. This was his first experience of street fighting, and he was not ashamed to admit that he was acutely frightened. Reaching the bridge, he was called down to the railway tracks below by Major Poole, commander of ‘B’ Company. Poole ordered him to get his men into the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. ‘You might fight like bloody hell,’ he admonished.
Neave and his men, armed only with rifles and two Bren guns, took up position in the houses and opened fire on the German positions on the Boulogne road. Their inexperience showed, as regulars of the 60th fighting at the other side of the bridge shouted ‘F—ing well look where you’re shooting!’ Amid the firing, the proprietor of a café at the end of the street, wearing the Croix de Guerre from the First World War, coolly dispensed cognac. In mid-afternoon, a British tank made a brief appearance, prompting a furious response from the Germans, a savage bombardment which pinned Neave down in the Rue Edgar Quintet, a normally quiet street with a girls’ school, but now deserted. The only visible sign of life was the face of a frightened girl at a cellar window.
As the afternoon wore on, Neave began to feel the lack of combat training for battle: his reading of Clausewitz had not prepared him for street fighting. The heat from the sun and blazing buildings produced an unbearable thirst. He longed to get back to the café. He waited for the firing to lift and was about to cross the road when he felt a ‘sharp, bruising pain’ in his left side. He collapsed to the pavement, rifle clattering. A concerned soldier shouted from a window: ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Neave did not reply but pondered uselessly whether it was a sniper or a machine-gun bullet. He realised he could still walk, and, doubled-up, staggered across to the café. His most pressing fear was that the Germans would break through and he would be left behind and taken prisoner. It was a common fear shared by all. British combatants had a confused but horrific picture of the fate of prisoners taken by the Nazis. Death in action they understood but the stories of concentration camps made them fear capture even more. The café proprietor brought him a large measure of cognac, while a medical orderly inspected his wound. Through a half-faint, Neave heard him say: ‘You’re a lucky one, sir. ‘Arf an inch from the ‘eart.’
The orderly and a Frenchman helped him to his feet and began walking him to an aid post where they met a young officer of the 60th in a scout car, Lieutenant Michael Sinclair. Sinclair pointed out an improvised Red Cross ambulance. After an argument about where they should go, the French driver took Neave to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent in the Rue Leveux, where he was diagnosed as having a ‘penetrating flank wound’ needing an operation. Neave still feared capture and was carried protesting to the operating theatre ‘where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloises cigarettes, awaited me’. In his recovery ward, Neave could hear the shelling intensifying. The Germans had taken the town hall, which now flew the swastika. Beside him, a mortally wounded young Hurricane pilot begged him to keep talking. He died as dawn broke on 25 May and Neave folded his arms. Shells fell closer and closer, among the mulberry trees in the hospital garden and in the street outside, smashing the hospital windows. With the other wounded, he was taken down to the cellar while the battle raged outside. Two fellow officers of the Searchlights and several gunners were killed. At 2.00 p.m. that day, 25 May, Anthony Eden telegraphed Brigadier Nicholson with the instructions to maintain his defiant stand. On this occasion, there was no mention of ‘Allied solidarity’, the expression which had infuriated Churchill as being entirely the wrong way of motivating British soldiers to fight. This time the appeal was to Empire and regimental loyalty: ‘The eyes of the Empire are on the defence of Calais,’ Eden urged. Nicholson rejected two German proposals of surrender: ‘The answer is no as it is the British army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.’ Deep in his hospital bunker, Neave heard progress of the battle as more wounded were brought in. Calais was on fire. At 9 o’clock that evening, Churchill and Eden came out from dinner and ‘did the deed’, ordering Nicholson to fight to the end. Churchill told his doctor, Lord Moran, ‘I gave that order; it was my decision, althought it sickened me to have to do it. But it was Calais that made the evacuation at Dunkirk.’ For years afterwards, Churchill was unable to speak of Calais without emotion.
As dawn broke on Sunday 26 May, it was plainly only a matter of time before the Germans overran the old town and the port area where British forces were still holding out. The evacuation had been cancelled, though some wounded were still being taken off under heavy shelling by motor torpedo-boat. Stuka raids again hit the hospital. Around Neave men lay badly hurt and blinded. He recollected that the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering. Yet the British laughed and laid bets on when the bombers would reappear. In mid-morning, their position became untenable. A Stuka’s bomb fell by the main doors of the hospital, blowing them in and showering debris on the wounded. Terrified that the next direct hit would bury them all alive, Neave decided to make a break for it. He could walk, with difficulty, and if he could reach the Gare Maritime he might be among the wounded being taken off. With the admonition of the French medical officer ringing in his ears, Neave and a corporal who volunteered to go with him crawled out beneath the great double doors into the burning streets. He had no idea how badly the situation in Calais had deteriorated. Whole streets were ablaze as they made their halting way northwards to the harbour station. Neave was doubled up with the pain of his wound and his companion limped badly. Thick smoke choked them both. At the junction with the Boulevard des Alliés, they turned east and continued through eerily silent Calais-Nord. Suddenly, shells burst around the pair as they passed the Courgain. Neave was not hit but the corporal ‘vanished in the blinding flash and dust’. Falling to the ground, Neave crawled to the side of the street. From a cellar window, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac. He drank, and lurched on alone to the lighthouse where he encountered troops of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in front of the station, staring down their guns as he struggled to join their ranks. An officer barked at him to hurry up and listened in disbelief to his extraordinary story. Calais had been expertly infiltrated by German fifth columnists and the QVR were taking no chances. Neave’s identity card was carefully scrutinised as yet more cognac was dispensed. He looked round at scenes of devastation. Amid the debris lay the bodies of dead British soldiers. He was hurried to the first aid station below the Gare Maritime, where more wounded lay. Soon after, intense shelling forced them to find deeper cover in a tunnel under the port’s Bastion 1.
After the Stuka and artillery bombardment of the morning of 26 May, it was only a matter of time before the Germans took Calais. Guderian arrived in person to direct the attack, and street by street British forces were pushed back into an enclave around the port. The Citadel fell at 4.30 in the afternoon, and the commanding officer, Brigadier Nicholson, was taken prisoner. He did not surrender his forces, however. In fact, the garrison never surrendered. Split into small groups, the men were hunted down piecemeal and killed or captured when their ammunition ran out. The Gare Maritime was evacuated, soldiers taking refuge in the dunes. Some remained on top of Bastion 1, above Neave, firing on the Germans, but their position was untenable and they surrendered. Lying in one of the underground rooms, Neave could hear the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung to the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came the enemy, field-grey figures waving revolvers. A huge man in German uniform wearing a Red Cross armband put him gently on a stretcher. He was a prisoner of war. It was a sad ending to a desperately fought battle.
Outside the bastion, British troops were ordered to scatter and try to escape in small parties, an instruction interpreted as ‘every man for himself’. Just before 8.00 that evening, Eden messaged his officer commanding: ‘Am filled with admiration for your magnificent fight which is worthy of the highest tradition of the British army.’ The message never arrived. By then Nicholson was a prisoner and the gallant stand of his men was over. Less than three hours later, troops of the BEF began disembarking at Dover from the beaches of Dunkirk.
The wisdom of the decision to hold Calais to the last man has been hotly debated for sixty years. Neave, who endured the entire bloody nightmare (and whose courage earned him a Military Cross), was naturally partisan, and devoted his most polemical book to the issue. The stand at Calais against impossible odds can be compared with other actions in the history of war, he argues. ‘All through the episode there runs a thread of poor intelligence and indecision.’ Reinforcements were landed too late to do little more than block the town entrances. Tanks were deployed, but not in numbers to hold back the Blitzkrieg. Neave blames those who failed to supply the War Office with up-to-date information on Guderian’s dash for the coast, during which he was pursued and bombed by the RAF. ‘Coordination of intelligence with the RAF had evidently a long way to go,’ he remarked tersely.
Neave also complained of an air of defeatism in the War Office, whose top echelons had evidently decided that most of the BEF had already been lost and troops were needed much more urgently for the Home Front than in the defence of Calais. The fault for the loss of Nicholson’s brigade, he insisted, lay with ‘higher authority’, the General Staff which was obsessed with getting the BEF back to Britain and had no plan for Calais. ‘Indeed, it was not clear who was in charge of the operation.’ In addition, few commanders ‘since the days of Balaclava’ had issued such suicidal orders as Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Adjutant-General of the BEF, who had ordered tanks to attack Boulogne when it had already been lost. Given Neave’s ancestry perhaps the reference to Balaclava was not the most appropriate.
Churchill was in no doubt that the last stand at Calais was vital for the success of Operation Dynamo which allowed the British army to fight another day. In the British press the defenders were lionised as heroes. Writing in The Times, Eric Linklater argued that the death struggle waged over four days halted panzer troops who would otherwise have cut off the retreating BEF: ‘The scythe-like sweep of the German divisions stopped with a jerk at Calais,’ he wrote. ‘The tip of the scythe had met a stone.’ Guderian himself and the respected historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart disagree with this poetic verdict. In his war diaries, the German general insisted that the heroic defence of Calais, while worthy of the highest praise, had ‘no influence’ on the development of events at Dunkirk and did not delay his advance. Neave is withering on this point. ‘One thing is indisputable, the Tenth Panzer Division was delayed at Calais for four days and not by Hitler,’ he wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) Guderian, he claimed, was covering up for his failure to take the port earlier, as he had planned.
Liddell Hart argued, somewhat patronisingly, that Churchill was obliged to justify his decision to sacrifice the Calais garrison, but questioned whether it had the outcome asserted by the wartime premier. The panzer division that attacked the port was only one of seven in the area and had been deployed ‘because it had nothing else to do’. The gallant stand was nothing more than ‘a useless sacrifice’, Liddell Hart maintained. Neave was plainly infuriated by this view. He contended: ‘There was nothing useless about the stand at Calais. It hampered Guderian during crucial hours, especially on 23 and 24 May, when there was little to prevent his taking Dunkirk. It formed part of the series of events, some foolish, some glorious, which saved the BEF.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Glover suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes, though strangely he finds it ‘irrelevant’. Nicholson’s brigade had to be sacrificed as a gesture to shore up the crumbling Anglo-French Alliance, even though it was already doomed. ‘At least it made an epic for Britain at a time when all was defeat and withdrawal,’ he writes condescendingly.
(#litres_trial_promo)
At the time, however, the military merits of the battle for Calais were far from Neave’s mind. He was about to experience at first hand what he and his men had most feared: Nazi incarceration. He nearly did not make it. On the morning of 27 May, after surviving another night in the bastion tunnel, he was taken by ambulance into the centre of Calais. En route, the vehicle was rocked by a burst of shellfire that forced the crew to take cover. Ironically, this was offshore ‘friendly fire’, from the cruisers Arethusa and Galatea, bombarding the investing German forces. The ambulance restarted and he was dumped on a slab in the covered market of Calais-St Pierre as if he was a piece of meat. In this makeshift field hospital, his imprisonment began.
4 Capture (#ulink_9130ac53-c9c9-5c1b-9f59-4d662792800d)
Neave hated being taken prisoner, at the age of twenty-four, at the very start of the war. It was not just fear of the unknown. German front-line troops, soldiers like himself, had behaved well towards the wounded but it was the Nazis he dreaded. Furthermore, there was a psychological dimension to his capture. A prisoner of war, he discovered, suffers a double tragedy. Most obviously, he loses his freedom. Then, since he has not committed a crime, his spirit is scarred with a sense of injustice. Neave articulated this resentment as a bitterness of soul that clouded the life even of strong men. ‘The prisoner is to himself an object of pity,’ he argued. ‘He feels he is forgotten by those who flung him, so he thinks, into an unequal contest. He broods over the causes of his capture …’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Despite his wound, Neave determined not to fall into this psychological trap. Well-versed in the escape stories of the First World War, he quickly set himself to thinking how to avoid being sent to a prison camp deep in the heart of Occupied Europe, where escape would be much more difficult. Though hospitalised, he was still only thirty miles from England, and much of France was still free of Nazis. Flight was not impossible: Gunner Instone, of Neave’s Second Searchlight Battery, was already busy escaping through France and Spain after knocking out two sentries.
His wounds were too serious, however, to attempt an escape from the hospital to which he was moved, unless he had help. Out of the blue, a French soldier, Pierre d’Harcourt, who had evaded capture from his tank regiment by posing as a medical orderly, offered a solution. Neave could abscond from the ward he shared with four other officers by posing as a corpse. Allied prisoners were still dying, and d’Harcourt, a Red Cross volunteer, could smuggle him out of the hospital in an ambulance in place of a deceased officer. It would not be easy. German guards checked the bodies before they were removed for burial in the Citadel, where Nicholson’s men had fought so bravely. Nor do the plotters seem to have given much thought to disposing of the spare corpse. They hatched extravagant plans to steal a boat and flee across the Channel, but before their ideas could be translated into action d’Harcourt heard that the prisoners were to be evacuated further inland to Lille in late July. The plot had to be abandoned. Nonetheless, Neave found the experience of escape planning very good for morale. It occupied his fertile brain and gave him hope. The elusive d’Harcourt vanished to Paris, where he was active in the first escape lines for Allied prisoners through Unoccupied France before being captured. He spent four years in the notorious Fresnes prison and Buchenwald concentration camp before being liberated, half-dead, in 1945.
En route to Lille that July the German lorry carrying the wounded broke down. This mishap seemed to offer a chance to escape. While the lorry was being repaired, Neave and other walking wounded survivors of Calais wandered around the streets of Bailleul, without guards. The local people offered them food and wine, and some offered to hide them from their captors. The French spirit of resistance was already showing itself within weeks of capitulation, but Neave did not avail himself of these offers. He admitted later that he lacked not just the physical strength but also the nerve to seize the opportunity. The weeks in hospital had sapped his will. ‘My vacillation cost me dear,’ he wrote, ‘but at this time there was no military training in such matters.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In the warm summer evening, French people threw flowers and bid them goodbye from the main square of Bailleul, and Neave felt ashamed at his inaction. Subsequently, he vindicated his hesitation. Had he got away so soon, he argued, he would not have escaped from Colditz and would not have been in a position to help others emulate his example. It was perhaps a questionable piece of rationalisation after the event, to square his conscience with this unheroic episode.
Once in the Lille hospital, his thoughts again turned to flight. This time he planned to escape with Captain John Surtees of the Rifle Brigade and a Corporal Dowling of the Durham Light Infantry. A young Frenchwoman who brought food and flowers to the wounded promised to help. Once out of the hospital, they would get civilian clothes, take the train to Paris and live incognito in a Left Bank pension. It did not seem dangerous, but it was not a very well thought-out escapade for the trio had no papers and practically no money. Senior officers later upbraided them for putting the other wounded men at risk of reprisals had they got away.
In August 1940, the prisoners of Lille hospital, or at any rate those judged to be walking wounded, were taken on a long march east to their destination in a POW camp. They trudged through Belgium ‘from one foul transit camp to another’ before arriving at the mouth of the River Scheldt. There, they embarked on a huge, open coal barge for a three-day journey up the Waal and the Rhine to Germany. Neave felt he was on a voyage of lost souls crossing into the unknown. Life was over. As they passed under the bridge at Nijmegen in Holland, a young woman waved at the prisoners; as she did so, the wind caught her clothing, lifting her skirt and with it the spirits of the men. Neave, although overcome with despair, could not but admire the insouciance of the average Tommy, who never gave in, never lost heart.
The officers were disembarked to take up residence in Oflag IXa at Spangenburg, near Kassel. Their place of incarceration was an imposing Schloss with a vaulted gateway, moat, drawbridge and a clock tower. Here the men could walk round the battlements and on a clear day take in the view of farmland and distant hills.
Spangenburg reminded Neave of school – a school to which their fathers might have been sent. In a sense he was correct, for indeed they had: the castle had been a POW camp in the first war. The new boys, like the previous generation, slept in two-tiered bunks with straw palliases and coarse blankets. It was August, one year into the war. Years of imprisonment stretched ahead of them, and initially Neave resigned himself to his fate. He filled in the time with composition and meditation, writing half a fantastic novel about the life after death of a Regency peer, a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets and an essay on eccentrics for the camp magazine. He soon discovered the limits to the literary taste and sense of humour of English officers. His articles were rejected as unsuitable. The days thus passed wearily, and when he came to write his accomplished account of his adventures he preferred to draw a veil over these early efforts.
There were few attempts to escape. On one occasion, the officers who got away were captured and beaten up by drunken German civilians. Surprisingly, escape was considered bad form by the senior British officers, who had successfully imposed a pre-war army system of discipline and class values inside the camp. They argued that escape for one or two men would invite reprisals on the hundreds left behind, and even threatened unsuccessful escapers with court martial, though they were not in a position to carry out the threat. Low morale and poor rations also contributed to the ‘anti-escape’ attitude.
However, in the autumn of 1940, Red Cross parcels began arriving, improving health and lifting spirits. Would-be fugitives could now hoard ‘iron rations’ to sustain them during any planned flight. Opportunities for escape also increased in December 1940 when Neave and others were moved to a new camp in the wooded village below the castle. They were closer to a Stalag, a camp for non-commissioned officers and rank and file, who went on working parties outside the wire where the prospects for escape were more frequent. Neave, by now bored by the deadening routine of reading, talking and waiting for Red Cross parcels, sought to transfer himself to the Stalag. Life in the new camp brought new frustrations. The prisoners were closer to society and woke every morning to the sounds of the farmyard. Such proximity sometimes made them feel part of normal life but at the same time reminded them they were not. Here, Neave passed the winter ‘in discomfort, but without great suffering, unless it were of the soul’. His stomach became accustomed to the meagre prison diet, and he was unable to eat a whole tinned steak and kidney pudding doled out to each prisoner on Christmas Day.
Before his plan to transfer to a Stalag could be implemented, however, Neave and his fellow POWs were suddenly transferred in February 1941 by train to Poland. Their destination was an ancient, moat-encircled Polish fortress on the River Vistula at Thorn (modern-day Torun), part of the huge encampment of Stalag XXa. (They later learned that they had been moved to this inhospitable spot as a reprisal for alleged ill-treatment of German prisoners in Canada.) At Thorn, officers were quartered in damp underground rooms, with little opportunity for exercise and none for escape. The fact that they were in Poland, a country about which they knew little, and hundreds of miles further east, made flight even more difficult. It was a soul-destroying existence, enlivened only by the daily rendition of ‘Abide With Me’ at sunset by a group of British orderlies on the drawbridge above the moat. Despite his imprisonment, Neave, who had been confirmed at St Ronan’s, did not lose his Christian faith, as some did. He later remarked that the singing of this hymn ‘was the only moment of hope and reality in all our dismal day’.
The main compound, for several hundred British NCOs and men, was three miles away. Neave quickly realised that this site was his best hope of escape. Several of the men from his own Searchlight Battery captured after the fall of Calais were in the hutted camp, and he communicated with them through working parties that came every day to the fortress. As required by camp discipline, Neave took his plan to the senior British officer, Brigadier the Hon. N.F. Somerset DSO, MC. He proposed to escape from the hut used by a captured British dentist to treat POWs. The ‘surgery’ consisted of a treatment room, waiting room and a lavatory behind it with a corrugated iron roof. Neave, with his co-escaper Flying Officer Norman Forbes, planned to slip away from the dentist’s hut, and then hide for a few days among the teeming throng of ‘other ranks’ inside the camp, before making a break from an outside working party. Neave’s fellow officers in his room mocked his plan, but it was approved by Brigadier Somerset. He was ‘paired’ with Forbes, an RAF Hurricane pilot who had been shot down over the French coast, because he spoke fluent German. It was an excellent match. Forbes, Neave decided, was of original mind, more practical than himself and a man of great determination.
Theirs was not the first escape bid. Several other officers had tried to get out of Spangenburg, and three Canadian flying officers dressed in fake Luftwaffe uniforms had almost succeeded in stealing a German aeroplane to fly to neutral Sweden. They had swapped places with men on an outside working party to reach the aerodrome and were only detected by their ignorance of German. Tougher controls on movement in and out of the fort were introduced after that but Neave was undeterred. He bought a workman’s coat and pair of trousers from a British officer who had given up thoughts of escape to read for a law degree, and a fellow officer with artistic skills made him a forged civilian pass, identifying him as a carpenter from the town of Bromberg.
Neave was not very thorough in his escape plans. For instance, he had no travel papers for the hazardous 200-mile journey across Poland to where he believed the Soviet front lines to be, nor had he much money, only a few Reichsmarks and a ‘medieval faith’ that his store of tinned food and chocolate would see him through. Escaping east was a doubly dangerous business. The Soviet authorities looked with deep suspicion on Allied escapers. They sometimes interned them, or worse. As Neave noted: ‘Few British soldiers who reached the Russian lines during this period were heard of again.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The pair planned to make contact with the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, with a view to linking up with the Red Army on the Russian armistice line at Brest-Litovsk. Alternatively, and rather fantastically, they hoped to do better than the Canadians by stealing an aeroplane at Graudenz, north of Warsaw, and flying to Sweden. Neave had two copies of a sketch plan of the aerodrome.
As he lay on his bunk bed, day after day, Neave fantasised about freedom. His sole desire was to be free of the terrible monotony of the fort. Once outside and under the stars he imagined he would care little what happened to him. He dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest, alone in the world. He would be happy if he could be free if only for a while. Such daydreaming indicated an obsessive desire to get out, one sadly unmatched by the organisational planning required to sustain a successful escape. On 16 April 1941, Neave and Forbes joined the small detachment of officers being marched to the dentist’s surgery. It was a warm spring morning, with signs of new growth in the fields around. The prisoners joked with their guards: ‘Back home by Christmas!’ an unsuspecting German ribbed Neave. ‘Certainly!’ he replied, laughing.
Everything was ready at the dentist’s. Under the roof of the lavatory hut, Neave’s go-between, an army sergeant, had hidden bundles of wood for them to collect as part of their deception. The dentist treated Neave’s gums with iodine and he divulged their escape plans. The dentist smiled and shook his hand. Back in the waiting room, Neave waited until 11.00 a.m. before asking to go to the lavatory. The attention of the guards outside was distracted by a fast-talking prisoner. Once inside the lavatory hut, Neave took off his greatcoat and hid it where the wood had been secreted and waited for Forbes. His companion swiftly joined him, and at a low whistle from the sergeant they strolled out with their bundles, wearing unmarked battledress uniforms. They walked unchallenged towards the main entrance of the camp, joshing one another as they walked, in the habit of British POWs. The German guard on the gate, who was chatting to a British corporal, showed no interest in them. He was not on the lookout for people breaking into the camp. Neave and Forbes walked casually to one of the huts, where Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards ushered them to their new quarters at the far end. There they discussed plans for their concealment with Neave’s former Searchlight Battery Quartermaster-Sergeant Kinnear. Their disappearance would be discovered as soon as the dentist’s detachment was recounted, and the pair would have to hide in the hut for several days until the German search parties were called off. They lay on their bunks savouring the moment, before Thornborough called them out to watch the entertainment. By now the guards had realised they were two dental patients short, and a hullaballoo ensued. Neave and Forbes, each equipped with a brush and pail as part of their escape props, looked on as heavily armed soldiers set off for the woods with maps and dogs, in pursuit of the men watching them from inside the wire.
Lying on their bunks, or hiding beneath them during hut searches, the escapers waited and waited, tortured by fears that a stool pigeon in the camp might give them away. It was clear from their repeated searches of the huts that the Germans believed they were still in the camp, and their helpers in the warrant officers’ hut (‘a homely place’, Neave observed, spick and span as a British barracks) risked severe reprisals if they were unearthed. They were anxious to get someone back to England to report their plight, as rations were inadequate and some POWs had not survived the long Polish winter. ‘Their selflessness touched me deeply,’ Neave recorded. During their three-day stay, they mixed as equals, without reference to rank, united by a common objective to defy the enemy.
Early in the morning of 19 April, Neave and Forbes fell in with a working party of more than a hundred men and marched out of the camp into the countryside, singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘The Quartermaster’s Stores’. The next stage of their escape had been worked out by their camp hosts. They were to hide in a hay barn, and make a final break for freedom at night. Meanwhile, they worked under the gaze of armed guards, filling palliasses with straw. At one stage, Neave, stopping work to seek out a hiding place, feared he had been identified by a German officer who ordered him to get on with his job and kept him under close surveillance thereafter. But the day passed without incident, except that the food lorry brought two extra men to take their place on the return to camp. In the late afternoon, a corporal motioned Neave and Forbes to their hiding place in the rafters of the barn. Here they stayed until ten that night, silent and unobserved. Then they concealed their army uniforms in the hay and donned workmen’s clothes, complete with Polish ski caps made from army blankets. They had now become Volksdeutscher, or German nationals, who had been sent to live in eastern Poland by the Nazis.
One of the barn doors was padlocked but the other was secured only by a wooden bar held in place by twisted wire which the corporal had already loosened. It was the work of moments before they were out in the open farmyard. Through the dark, they could make out the farmhouse, which was used by Germans as a mess. A dog growled and then barked, and they froze as an officer looked out to satisfy himself that there was nothing untoward, before bolting the door. Clambering over a high wooden fence, they could make out the profile of low hills where the Germans had an artillery firing range. They walked quickly across marshy ground, fearful of the noise of tracker dogs and torchlight pursuers, but they had got clean away. Neave rapturously breathed the fresh air of freedom. ‘It was like walking on air,’ he remembered. They stumbled through a landscape pockmarked by shell holes. Their route took them into a wood, along rides between the trees towards the town of Alexandrov, some twenty miles distant. Occasionally, they saw lights and once, near a small settlement, a dog disturbed the night silence. They hurriedly took refuge in the dark banks of trees.
It was hard work. The heavy rucksack of tinned food dug irritatingly into Neave’s shoulder, while beneath his thin workman’s clothes he sweated in thick Red Cross underwear. By 4. 30 in the morning they had covered ten miles, and stopped to fortify themselves with chocolate and an apple. A cold wind sprung up, bringing rain. Swinging his tins of sardines and condensed milk on to aching shoulders, Neave and his companion trudged on. There was no mistaking the amateurish nature of their enterprise: ‘These were the pioneer days of 1941, when escape was not a science but an emotional outburst,’ he admitted later. ‘I thought of an escape as a kind of hiking tour … as for Forbes and myself, we were tramps or hoboes, glad to be at large.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
Dawn found the pair by the railway line which ran from Podgorz and Sluzewo, checking their compass to keep on a southeasterly direction to Warsaw, 150 miles away. They tramped on, bypassing Alexandrov and keeping to the fields to avoid German patrols. The early morning rain turned heavier, soaking and dispiriting the pair. They took refuge in a Polish farmhouse, where two young women watched wordlessly as they stripped naked and dried their clothes before the open fire. Resuming their march through sodden fields, they came upon evidence of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg on Poland in the autumn of 1939: Polish army helmets perched atop rough white crosses, burned-out farmhouses and barns, a shattered chapel with a crucifix broken in two. At nightfall, lost in a labyrinth of cart tracks, they sought shelter in another Polish farmhouse. A farmworker listened to them ask the way to Wlocawek (German Leslau), smiled and answered in English. The farmer there was ‘Tscherman [German] … very bad’. He suddenly appeared, shouting at the farmworker as if he were a dog, and the escapers fled. Deeper in the countryside, they came on another farm, where they were welcomed by the old man of the house and his two daughters. Neave stood awkwardly in the living room, pointing to his soaked and torn trousers. The old man spoke to one of his daughters and she left the room, returning with a pair of peasant’s corduroy trousers. They had no fly buttons and Neave cut off the buttons from his painter’s trousers for the girl to sew on, which she did, blushing and giggling. No money changed hands. Neave was conscious of the dangers the family ran in helping them. Another Pole came to warn that the German farmer was looking for them, and fear was evident in the way they talked. ‘A great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror,’ Neave recalled. ‘Was it to destroy these simple lives that I had escaped?’
(#litres_trial_promo) They could sleep in the barn, said the old man, but they must leave at dawn.
After a fitful night in the hay, the pair resumed their forced march to Wlocawek. Neave shaved by a stream and cooled his blistered feet. He reflected how oddly domestic it seemed, using Elastoplast to dress his sores. By mid-afternoon on their second day of freedom, they reached Wlocawek. Resting by the River Vistula, they were spotted by a German officer, who went away without speaking. Once in the town, they were overwhelmed by the ubiquity of Nazi flags and emblems, even above the doors of workmen’s cottages, until they realised the date: it was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. In Wlocawek Neave witnessed an act of thoughtless Nazi brutality: a young SS thug assaulted a Jew wearing the Star of David on his back for not saluting his troop, sending the man flying into the gutter and his hat across the road. No one dared pick it up. That evening, they again sought refuge at a farm but realised they were among the enemy. The family was German, the boy of the family sporting a swastika belt bearing the legend Gott Mit Uns. They escaped into the cover of a pine forest and huddled together for warmth, worn out by their ordeal.
By the third morning of their escape, Neave was in a state of physical exhaustion. The regime of a poor diet and lack of proper exercise during almost a year of captivity was taking its toll. He felt that he had ‘lost his feet’, which had deteriorated to ‘raw stumps’ dragging along the ground. Their pace slowed. Hauling themselves painfully along rough tracks, they halted from time to time to sleep and regain their strength. Apart from a lonely woodman, they met no one. They crossed the Vistula by a rail bridge taking the line south from Plock, and in the evening approached the village of Gombin. It was empty and unwelcoming. They stumbled on the road to Warsaw, looking for shelter but finding none. The pair lay down in a ploughed field, endeavouring to sleep but waking regularly to keep their circulation going. Their reserves of chocolate had gone, forcing them to eat a revolting mixture of condensed milk and tinned sardines. ‘I thought the night would never end,’ recollected Neave.
When it did, they set off without breakfasting but with as much vigour as they could muster to reach their goal, Warsaw, by nightfall. Trudging across interminable ploughed farmland, they reached the agricultural town of Itow, thirty miles from the capital. Beyond Itow they would be in the frontier zone of the General-Government of Poland, the remnant of Polish territory left between the Russians and western Poland handed over to German nationals. They had no papers to enter this zone and only a haphazard idea of where the actual frontier lay. Three miles further on from Itow, they came to another run-down village, and asked a woman where the border was. Nervously, she replied ‘It is here’, and fled. Pain and weariness conspired to rob them of vigilance as they walked through the village, towards the frontier post alongside a guardhouse, which was apparently unmanned. They strode through the gate, straight into the arms of two watching German sentries sitting by the roadside, rifles by their sides. They did not have the strength to run away. The soldiers, remembered by Neave as big, stupid and fresh-faced, asked them for their papers. Forbes, the German speaker, admitted that they had none. But everyone had to have papers to cross the General-Government, the soldiers insisted. Surely these men knew that. ‘We were only going to visit our mother, who is sick in Sochaczew,’ said Forbes. ‘This is my brother.’ They were led into the guardhouse where a German official, a whip hanging on the wall behind him, bawled ‘Attention, Polish swine!’
He then instructed the sentries to take Forbes outside while he interrogated the exhausted Neave, who mumbled his prepared explanation that he was a Volksdeutsch from Bromberg. Desperate with fatigue, his brain refused to function. He forgot his limited stock of German and spoke haltingly. The official laughed and brandished the whip in his face. Neave stuck to his story, hoping to give time for Forbes to make a run for it. ‘I could not. I no longer cared that I was caught again or even if this brutal official were to flog me to death,’ he admitted.
