Neither could General Stedman nor Clement Attlee nor the bartender nor any of the others.
Wilson Clay calmly returned the seltzer bottle to the table and said, “It appears I have just won that argument, does it not, Lady Anne?”
He marched away and I followed. If the more we love, the nearer we are to hate, as La Rochefoucauld said, then this may have been the moment Lady Anne began to love General Clay.
Or it may have been at her father’s funeral. Earl Selden died five days before the invasion. The service was performed at the family chapel. Generals Clay and Stedman attended, then walked with the family to the burial plot. Mist fell in long, trailing curtains that hid surrounding hills. Mowing of most cemeteries had been forgotten for the war, so the grass was long, and it soaked my pants to the calves. The first Earl Selden, who died in 1798, was buried nearby, the headstone speckled with moss and the engraving made shallow by age.
With the gasoline shortages and with memorial services having lost their novelty because of the war, few attended the earl’s funeral, no more than forty people. We huddled around the hole in the ground and listened to the bishop’s brief words. The casket was made of cherry because metal was too dear to put into the ground.
Anne Percival was stricken. She stood apart from other mourners, wearing a black wool coat with an upturned collar that rose to her ears. Several friends approached her to put a hand on her arm or to whisper a few words, but she might not have been aware of them. She stared only at the casket. Several times she sagged forward, as if the effort to stand were too much, and would catch herself with a quick step ahead. General Clay did not approach her.
There was nothing august about the affair, held out in a rural graveyard, with the thick, drenching haze and the almost rudely abrupt service. Even I, an American not attuned to the protocol of English nobility, felt this small ceremony was insufficient for an earl, who had served with distinction in the military and as a military theoretician later in life. His daughter may also have sensed the inadequacy of the parting, adding to her grief.
As pallbearers reached for the lines to lower the casket into the ground, a U.S. Army truck crested the hill to the east and rolled toward the cemetery. It was a 7.5-ton Mack with a tarpaulin-draped box and a white star painted on the door. The truck stopped at the graveyard. General Clay nodded.
American soldiers carrying M1s jumped from the back of the truck. A lieutenant climbed down from the cab and waved them into a line at the edge of the plot. The pallbearers slowly lowered the casket.
Lady Anne’s eyes moved to the soldiers. The lieutenant snapped an order, and the line of ten GIs came to attention. At an order, they brought their rifles up, pointed at the clouds.
“Ready, aim, fire,” the lieutenant ordered.
The rifles crackled.
“Ready, aim, fire.”
They sounded eleven times, bringing needed dignity and recognition to the ritual, a gift to Lady Anne from the general. The lieutenant ordered the weapons lowered. The soldiers stood at attention while the bishop ended the ceremony with another reading from the Bible.
Lady Anne shed her first tears for her father during the rifle salute, and that may have been when she began to love the general.
As I look back now, I realize that I have tried to diminish in my mind Lady Anne’s importance to the general. But Wilson Clay was a man bound by duty, and she did not sway him from it. My last visit to her home, Haldon House, proved this beyond all doubt. I will detail what I learned there later in this narrative.
Adolf Hitler’s plan was to dismantle Great Britain. Two thousand years of national evolution were to be reversed. The realm’s institutions were to be torn down, its society extinguished, its history suppressed, its people driven into vassalage. The kingdom was to be reduced to a colony.
The führer had counted on the terror of his coming to begin the disintegration. Frightened to their national soul, the British would disassemble their heritage themselves, abandoning it, destroying it, fleeing with it, hiding it, renouncing it. The cement of British national identity would be dissolved by the time of his triumphant march into London.
Hitler’s singular mistake of the war was to misjudge British character. As General Clay once delicately put it, “The Brits sometimes act like they’ve got corks up their butts, but they are steadfast, I’ll give them that.” This solidity and refusal to desert their birthright manifested itself time and time again.
Victoria Haselhurst, who had witnessed the fire bombing of Norwich and had begun a long walk toward her home in Ipswich, was evidence of this trait. She had slept that night in a barn with a dozen other Norwich refugees. The morning of the invasion she began south again.
“By midday, I was exhausted,” she told me after the war. “My dress was soaked through, my shoes were falling apart. I was soiled and hungry and angry and frightened.”
The roads had filled with troop trucks and tanks of the British II Corps rushing south. Long lines of displaced civilians walked both ways, north and south, no one knowing the direction of safety.
“I spent half the time lying in ditches alongside the road because German airplanes kept hitting the convoys. Every time I climbed out of a ditch, I would be covered again with stickers and weeds and mud.”
AACCS had determined that restricting movement of reinforcements to the hours of darkness would mean they would arrive too late. The drawn-out lines of British armored vehicles and trucks simply had to endure the Luftwaffe. Mounted AA guns fired back with little effect. High British losses were inevitable. Fields were shortly strewn with burning wrecks that had been pushed off the roads to allow other vehicles to pass. Smoke rose across Norfolk and Suffolk in evenly spaced columns marking the roadways.
“Most all vehicles were moving south,” Victoria Haselhurst recalled, “but one lorry in olive and brown camouflage rolled toward me coming from the direction of London. The road was narrow, so it had wheels on the shoulder of the road as it came. I could see the driver through the windscreen. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought peculiar. At that moment, I heard an explosion from behind me and I leaped into the ditch. An elderly fellow landed on top of me and shouted an apology as he crawled off. Others crowded the ditch.”
I asked, “What kind of planes were they?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replied.
“Strafing or bombing?”
She laughed lightly. Her blond hair had grown out from her war cut and fell almost to her shoulders. “I have no idea. I pushed my head into the mud in the ditch and did not lift it until the explosions ended.”
When she arose—it might have been five minutes later—the north-bound truck was upended. Its cargo box had been ripped open. The truck was on fire, along with a burning Bren gun carrier and a Leyland Hippo truck that had been hauling a Cruiser Mark III tank. Craters had been blown into the roadway. Twisted fragments of the vehicles were spread over the fields and road.
Haselhurst told me she should have heard the cries of the wounded and should have rushed to aid them, but the glittering from the roadside pebbles at her feet transfixed her. She lowered herself to pull a sparkling object from a torn black velvet bag.
“I recognized it instantly,” she told me. “Any of the king’s subjects would have. It was the Imperial State Crown. I carefully lifted it to my eye. It was lighter than I would have thought, but I had to squint to look at it, so bright was the reflection off the stones.”