Never Surrender by John Kelly

Author:John Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER NINE

THE ITALIAN APPROACH

On Sunday morning, May 26, William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for CBS News, visited a company of German engineers outside Lille, a French city on the southern side of the Allied pocket. Lille had seen some of the bitterest fighting of the campaign, but when Shirer arrived that morning, the engineers, who were scheduled to lay a pontoon bridge under fire in a few minutes, were lying on the edge of a wood reading Western Front, the German army newspaper. Shirer was stunned. Except for the dirty jokes and the rumbling of passing ambulances, the scene was as idyllic as any he remembered from his Midwestern boyhood. He took out his notebook and wrote: “Morale of German troops fantastic.”

The most charitable thing that can be said about the mood in London that Sunday morning is that after weeks of brilliant weather, nature had finally produced a day in tune with the national temper. The rain started a little after 5:00 a.m., and it was still raining at 7:00 a.m. when church bells began pealing across the city. A little later that morning, Harold Nicolson turned on the BBC to hear the war news. When it was over, he sat down and wrote his wife a letter. The Nicolsons were planning to commit suicide when the Germans invaded, and, as invasion now appeared imminent, Nicolson felt it was time to begin thinking about the practical aspects of the suicide pact. “You really ought to have a ‘bare bodkin’ [poison pill] handy so that you can take your quietus when necessary,” he told his wife. “I shall have one also. I am not in the least afraid of such a sudden and honorable death. . . . But how can we find a bodkin which [works] quickly and . . . is easily portable? I shall ask my doctor friends.”

Despite the rain, the city below Nicolson’s rooms at 4 King’s Bench Park was up early that morning. Across the empire, May 26 had been designated National Prayer Day. In India, tens of thousands of His Majesty’s Hindu and “Mohammedan” subjects had gathered in temples and mosques. In Australia, “overflow congregations” had attended services in Sydney and Melbourne; and in New Zealand, a crowd of three thousand, including the prime minister and his cabinet, had attended a service at Wellington town hall. And as Sunday morning made its way westward across the globe, there were prayer services in British Columbia, Manitoba, the Canadian Arctic, and at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.

In London, the churches and synagogues were particularly full. By 9:00 a.m., the streets in Whitehall had disappeared under a canopy of dripping umbrellas, and under the umbrellas marched representatives of every segment of British society: City stockbrokers in black bowlers; plump, pink-cheeked Colonel Blimps in uniforms “gorgeous with medals”; gossipy East End housewives; unemployed West End actors (four plays had closed and two openings had been canceled in the past week); shop girls in cheap Woolworth’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.