Lion Rampant by Woollcombe Robert

Author:Woollcombe, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE GREAT SWAN SONG

WITHIN a week, with “Bonne Chance” in our ears from the family in our villa, we were off. … It is an old story now; but it remains one of the moments of a lifetime.

We swept northwards. All the way a dark shadow receded before us, and the fleeting phantom of the Occupation became almost tangible. We followed a trail of hate the enemy had left behind them—whether France, Belgium or up in the Netherlands, it was always the same—exceeding anything we had imagined.

Most of the way we were carried by the R.A.S.C., by troop-carrying companies, supply companies, petrol companies, by anything with wheels that could be thrown together. Although in the general wake of the armoured spearheads, we went mainly off the beaten track, up roads where no previous British troops had passed. We motored preceded by our armoured reconnaissance units, ready to debus, deploy and fight a battle the instant we bumped anything. We drove through few towns at first, and through mile upon mile of flat, empty wastes of countryside. And when we were not motoring we were marching. Debussing to allow the lorries to go back for more infantry, and marching to the next embussing point for transport again. The story was told of a British and a German convoy driving together for miles by night, intermixed, each in the belief that the other was of the same nationality. Strange captured enemy vehicles made mysterious appearances among our columns, under the newly stencilled colours of our heraldry. And lost German soldiers sometimes broke into the roadway with their hands up.

We were all curious to see the battlefields of the first war, but we swished across all four years of them in two days, and saw next to nothing. The Somme we crossed somewhere west of Amiens. The first town of note we went through was St Pol. We crossed the Calais-Arras highway, and bending north-east we skirted close to Béthune and La Bassée, heading for Lille and the frontier, where enemy rearguards were reported. And at a halt near La Bassée we saw the only 1914–18 war cemetery of our journey, It was a small British one by the roadside where “A” Company’s lorries had stopped, and many of the Company jumped out and wandered bareheaded among the graves, carrying their steel helmets in their hands. A number of the graves were found to be of men of our own Regiment; and here, for just the ten minutes of a roadside halt, the streams of past and present crossed. The headstones had green moss growing up from their bases, like teeth untended, and the grass was unkempt, but nothing had been defaced.

Further northwards towns and villages became more frequent, and as we approached the dense industrial region around Lille and the frontier the acclaims of the population rose to an endless shout. Our progress took the appearance of a royal procession. It was fantastic. For mile after mile as we drove along, the people of every town, village and wayside hamlet seemed to be out en masse to cheer us.

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