On the previous day the whole of Holland had been submerged beneath the Nazi flood and the Dutch were now holding out only in the island of Zeeland. The Allies were maintaining their line from Antwerp to Namur but further south enormous pressure was being exerted on the French. German armoured columns had broken through at three points between Namur and Sedan and were still attacking in spite of the fact that 150 Allied planes had spent the entire day going backwards and forwards to their bases for relays of bombs which they had hurled on the advancing Germans and the road junctions.
At midday he dressed and went out into the town where, although the weather showed no signs of breaking, he bought himself a rubber raincoat as a precaution against a choppy crossing, then he returned to await events in the hotel lounge. At two o'clock a message arrived for him from the port authorities to say that instructions had been received from the Admiralty that he was to be given passage in one of His Majesty's ships which would be proceeding to Belgium, and that he was to report to the Admiralty Building, Harwich, at eight-fifteen that night. He cursed the delay but knew that he was lucky to have enough pull through Sir Pellinore to get taken across at all.
In the evening the news was no better. From Namur to Sedan there were a million men fast locked in battle and at the southern end of this vital sector the Germans were obviously getting the best of it. They were exploiting the breaches made in the French line on the previous day. It seemed that somebody had failed to blow up the bridges across the Meuse in the face of the advancing enemy so that they were now well over the river and had captured Rocroi, Mezieres, Sedan and Montmedy; while their advance units were now several miles south and west of these places, thereby creating a most dangerous bulge in the Allied line. However, the fact that the Germans had reached Louvain, in Belgium, gave Gregory considerably more concern. Louvain was less than twenty miles from Brussels, and Erika was in Brussels.
He arrived at the Admiralty Building punctually but his temper was not improved by the fact that he was left to kick his heels in a bare waiting-room for two and a quarter hours. At last a naval Petty Officer took him down to the dock and on board a destroyer where a genial Lieutenant-Commander received him and installed him in the wardroom with the casual invitation to order anything that he wanted from the steward. At 11.10 the destroyer put to sea.
After a little he dozed to the hiss of the water rushing past her portholes and to the monotonous whirr of the turbines. At one o'clock two officers came in so he roused up, drank pink gins with them and discussed the Blitzkrieg. They did not stay long and when they had gone he took another cat-nap. At a quarter to four the steward brought him bacon and eggs, toast, marmalade, and coffee. Soon after he had completed his meal the ship swung round in a wide curve and on looking out of one of the portholes he saw harbour lights paling in the dawn. Ten minutes later, having thanked his hosts, he was on the quayside at Ostend.
A passport officer gave him the latest news. The Belgian Army was fighting splendidly in the north and the British were holding the German attacks in the centre. The situation further south, however, gave cause for anxiety as the French Armies in the neighbourhood of Sedan were giving up more and more ground and seemed quite incapable of holding the terrific German attacks which were being launched against them.
Even at that hour the quayside was a bustle of activity. Hundreds of Belgian refugees were waiting to get away in the ships that were sailing for England or France. Among them moved many khaki figures, French and British officers and details who during these past few days had been making all the innumerable arrangements necessary for converting Ostend into a new forward base for the Allied Armies. Just as Gregory was passing out he heard his name called and turned to find that he was being hailed by a Guards Captain of his acquaintance, one 'Peachie' Fostoun.
'What the hell are you doing here?' grinned Peachie.
'Same as you, presumably,' Gregory grunted amiably; 'only I have somewhat more subtle methods of waging war. Have you just come down from the line, or have they made you a permanent base wallah?'
'They wouldn't dare.' Peachie flicked open his cigarette-case. 'I graciously consented to come down to arrange the Brigades' supply of caviare, but I'm going up again in about an hour's time.'
As it was still technically before dawn Gregory managed to raise a laugh. 'Don't tell me that the Army has at last gone in for code words, otherwise for "caviare" I shall write in reinforcements.'
'Have it which way you like,' Peachie shrugged.
'How are things going?' asked Gregory.
'They're lousy. This Fifth Column stuff would take the grin off the face of a clown in a pantomime. When we went into Belgium on Friday morning everything was grand; in every village the populace was waiting to give us the big hand. They chucked cigarettes and chocolate at us by the bucketful and at every halt the women kissed the troops until you couldn't see their mouths for lipstick, but by nightfall things weren't quite so rosy. There was still a hundred miles between us and the Germans but all sorts of nasty low-down tikes began to snipe us from the house-tops. Some of them even chucked hand-grenades in the path of our Bren gun-carriers, from the woods through which we were passing, and we began to think that it wasn't quite the sort of war that we had bargained for.
'The following day things became really unpleasant. German parachute-troops started to float down out of the sky by the hundred; the nearest ones provided good sport for some of our better marksmen with their Brens but the devils came over in such numbers that we couldn't account for one-tenth of them.
Then, apparently, the Boche started landing troop-carriers with horrid little howitzers and while the troops were proceeding along the road soulfully singing "Little Sir Echo, Hullo! Hullo!" you could never tell from one moment to the next when one of these things would start blazing off from a farmyard or behind a haystack.'
Gregory nodded sympathetically and the garrulous Peachie went on:
'I don't mind telling you, it got on our nerves a bit as, after all, it wasn't like real war at all, but just a sort of dirty assassination party. The further we went, the worse it got, until every time a young woman threw us a bunch of flowers we ducked as though there was a Mills bomb concealed in it; but at least it had one good effect—it made the men so angry that they were screaming mad to get at the Jerries.
'By Monday we'd contacted the enemy, and you can take my word for it that once the party started it was war with the lid off. We hardly saw a German but they came over in their tanks by the train-load.
We held the tanks all right, but the thing that is a bit shattering is their Air Force. Heaven knows what's happened to ours—we've hardly seen a British plane— but Goering's chaps are as numerous as grouse in August. The moment one has held a tank attack they come hurtling down out of the sky to play merry hell with their bombs; and they're not content with that, either; if they see a trace of movement they let fly with their machine-guns. It seems to me as though they are using dive-bombers for artillery. Anyhow, it makes it devilish difficult to hold on to any one position for any length of time; and if one gets a lot of casualties which necessitate a retirement their tanks immediately come on again; added to which, with all this trouble going on behind the lines one never knows when one's going to be shot in the back. It's not at all like any war that we've been taught to anticipate.'