He heard the bell again as he made his way along a row of firewood behind his cottage. He paused when the ringing came again, this time from behind a pile of branch-bracing poles. That cat is faster than he looks, he thought. The orchardist changed direction, stepping off the path and along a row of apple trees toward the braces. Then the chiming came from yet another direction, the road in front of his cottage. He turned, but turned again when the bell sounded once more from the toolshed.
Selwyn thought maybe one of his neighbors had also belled a cat. He returned to the path. He could see nothing, not even the outline of his toolshed, but his feet knew the route well enough. He had been born on the orchard and had lived all his forty-six years there, save two in a trench in France.
He came to the shed. As he suspected, the door had been pried open by the cat.
He called its name, “Willard.”
He was answered by the soft sound of the bell.
“Willard?”
He stepped inside, reached blindly, moved his hand along a shelf—which, to his surprise was still in place on the back wall—until his fingers found the fur of the cat.
The feline instantly began to purr, as it always did. He lifted Willard into his arms, scolded him a moment, and gently shook the cat’s bell, ringing it, as if that might teach it a lesson. He chuckled, then, stepped out of the shed, and was met with the tinkling of a bell—a second bell—a few inches from his face.
A rifle barrel cracked against his teeth, chipping one of them. A German commando stepped out of the darkness close enough for Selwyn to see him, which was also close enough to smell his breath. “They really do eat sauerkraut,” he told me. With his other hand, the German rang his bell. He said something in German, which Selwyn thinks might have been, “You sure as hell aren’t my sergeant.”
The paratroopers of the 7th Parachute had been given tin Christmas bells to identify themselves in the dark.
A second paratrooper appeared, then a third, cautiously ringing their bells. The crowd of German soldiers grew by the moment. Several tied Selwyn’s hands behind his back, then his feet together. They lowered him to the floor of the toolshed. They ignored Willard, who watched dispassionately. Selwyn was joined shortly by Sarah, who must have struggled, because she was trussed at her ankles and knees, and her hands were bound to a cord around her waist.
Increasingly hungry and thirsty, the Selwyns remained on the shed floor for twenty hours, long after the paratroopers had left. Willard stayed with them much of the time, but left frequently to journey to his food bowl near the back door of the cottage. The tom always came back, licking his whiskers and making the Selwyns even hungrier, happily rubbing against their tethered ankles. Using a hoe blade, the orchardist finally severed the cord around his wrists. He patted the cat a long moment before untying his wife, which did nothing for her mood.
As Sarah struggled to stand, she snapped, “That cat goes to the veterinarian after all.”
11
Even on the eve of battle, General Clay could sleep like a stone, a trait he shared with Alexander, Wellington, and Grant. I hammered on the caravan’s door several times and called out his name, then waited a moment, using the time to tuck in my uniform shirt. The general had been in bed less than two hours. Tiny red glows from the cigarettes of two sentries rose and fell near the rose garden.
The Germans lost the First World War in part because their vast military bureaucracy reduced them to fighting der Papierkrieg, the paper war, rather than the Allies. Clay insisted on a lean command, with many officers having direct access to him. One exception was that I always decided whether he should be woken. He trusted my judgment on that.
I beat on the door again and finally heard him switch on his lamp, my cue to enter. I found him sitting on his bed, already tying his boot laces.
A prelude would have been cut short. My voice rose uncontrollably. “Sir, General Lorenzo reports Wehrmacht paratrooper sightings near Battle, inland from Hastings. Others have been seen near Lewes, on the river Ouse, five miles north of Brighton, and more near Peasemarsh, near Rye.”
The general stood and quickly buttoned his uniform blouse. He did not look at me and appeared absorbed in dressing. His fingers, working the buttons, did not tremble.
I went on. “German gliders have landed near Stanford, just inland from Folkestone, near the roadway to Ashford. Another glider sighting has come from the town of Sellindge, two miles further inland.”
I wanted to shout that Sellindge was less than ten miles from where I was standing, watching the general calmly place his cap on his head. He pushed it into its distinctive angle.
He lifted his spectacles from the table and dropped them into his blouse pocket. “All in our sector, then?”
“Yes, sir, so far.”
He thrust out his chest. His head swiveled to me, so much like a tank turret in its steadiness and purpose that I thought I heard the hydraulics. His eyes were startlingly green even in the dim lamp light. “Is this the invasion, Jack?”
That question, that instant, looms large in my memory of all that was to follow. I dearly wish I would have answered simply yes or no, an outright guess. A fifty-fifty chance of being entirely prescient, of being to General Clay as Adam Cardonnel was to Marlborough, or Eichel was to Frederick II, the indispensible, shrewd, knowing aide.
And I wouldn’t have had to record myself here as a stammering bumbler. “Well, sir, I… I didn’t really have time to ask around. I was awakened just few minutes ago, too, and—”
General Clay brushed by me and left the trailer. I didn’t catch up until he rounded the rose garden. We ran along the veranda toward the French doors. From a hillock north across the pasture, a three-light searchlight section probed the sky, accompanied by a yellow crescent of tracer bullets from its companion M2 machine gun. When Clay reached the doors, he slowed to a measured walk before passing into the room.
At the time of Blenheim, a general acted as his own chief of staff, intelligence officer, and quartermaster, a solitary ordeal. In the subsequent two hundred years, the headquarters staff had evolved to a complex organization. Members of General Clay’s staff poured into the billiard room, quickly filling it.
David Lorenzo appeared not to have slept that night. His uniform was rumpled, his dark hair unkempt, and his eyebrows wilder than usual. He was leaning over a map on the billiard table. His deputy stood next to him, as did Captain Richard Branch, AFEHQ’s signal officer. In front of situation maps pinned to walls were General Girard and Clay’s chief of staff, Major General Jay Pinkney. One of Clay’s stenographers ran into the room, holding up his pants with one hand, his belt in the other. Lieutenant Mohandas Gupta hurried in. Gupta was a British Army signal officer from Calcutta, posted to AEFHQ, with whom I had eaten dinner a few times. Others rushed in, some donning articles of their uniforms as they ran.
Clay met General Girard at the signal station near my desk. Although most of Captain Branch’s equipment was in an outbuilding surrounded by sandbags, a teletypewriter we called a TWX, two wireless radios, and several telephones in leather cases were in carrels, manned by the AEFHQ Signal Company.