as they passed the old fisherman’s quarter called the Courgain which abuts the Gare Maritime, ‘without warning, shells whistled and burst near us … The corporal vanished in the blinding flash and dust.’ Neave fell to the ground unhurt and crawled to the side of the street where, miraculously, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac from a cellar window.21 He drank from it and staggered on until he reached the Pont Vétillard swing bridge which led to the Gare Maritime, where he could see British troops of the QVR in front of the station.
His ‘apparition caused a sensation’. However, the reception he got was cold. The rumours of spies and German agents were now treated as established fact and his identity card was inspected several times. His demand that transport should be sent to collect the wounded from the hospital cellar ‘was thought to be peculiar. Obviously I was either a fifth columnist or delirious.’ Neave’s pleas were ignored and he was packed off to another cellar, beneath the Gare Maritime, to join rows of wounded. The stay was short. The area came under intense mortar fire and he was soon moved to a tunnel under Bastion 1 of the enceinte, which had been transformed into a regimental aid post.
At 4 p.m. the Citadel where Nicholson made his final stand fell. Shortly before, the Rifle Brigade fought their last gallant action around the Gare Maritime, with some units fighting literally to the last round. Lying on his cot, Neave heard ‘the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung on the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came field-grey figures waving revolvers.’22 His war as a fighting soldier was over. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots, fired at a spotter plane.
3
The adrenaline that had carried Neave through his ‘suicidal’ stagger to the docks soon dissolved. His injury was serious and he had no choice but to accept defeat. He lay on his stretcher in the pungent gloom of the cellar ward, listening to the groans of his comrades, depressed, and fearful of what might happen next. In the morning, the Germans moved them to a makeshift field hospital in the Calais-St-Pierre covered market.1 There was nothing to do but brood and endlessly go over the details of the battle. The siege of Calais had taught many brutal lessons. Neave’s schooldays and TA experiences had made him sceptical of authority and disinclined to give those who wielded it unquestioning respect. The debacle could only reinforce that attitude. The heartache felt by Churchill and Eden over the decision to sacrifice the garrison was genuine. Nonetheless, their grasp of the situation had been tenuous and their reactions clumsy and slow.
Neave looked and sounded like an Establishment stalwart, but his judgements were often robust when he delivered his verdict on events. ‘Churchill was often wrong about Calais,’ he wrote years later,2 citing as an example an intemperate memo the prime minister sent to his military assistant, General Ismay, on 24 May complaining of what he saw as the lack of enterprise in the defenders and the BEF in breaking the German siege. Churchill in time admitted the injustice of his remarks, but for Neave it was evidence of ‘the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall’.3 If anything, the performance of the army chiefs had been worse. Calais was a ‘melancholy story of … hesitation and bad staff work’, exemplified by the shambles of departure. The manner in which the QVR had been rushed to war was ‘shameful’. Their embarkation recalled the black comedy that suffused the adventures of Evelyn Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback ‘in which farce and tragedy are intimately combined’. The same went for the tank units, whose ‘orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.’
On the other hand, among those fighting on the ground there were more than enough examples of bravery and devotion to duty, carried out in a spirit of humanity and cheerfulness, to preserve the reputation of the British Army and sustain Neave’s belief in the nobility of the profession of arms. His admiration for Claude Nicholson – his spirit of defiance and loyal attempts to execute the confused orders arriving from across the Channel – bordered on hero worship. His devotion to his memory was intensified by the tragic nature of Nicholson’s end – dying in Rotenburg Castle, as a prisoner of war, in June 1943, at the age of forty-four.4
The defenders of Calais had much to feel proud about. They had accepted a hopeless situation without complaint and had fought with great effectiveness and determination. Once again, upper-class men were learning that gallantry was not the preserve of the privileged. Neave recalled how, at a corner of the Rue Edison, Captain Claude Bower of the 60th Rifles had defended a barricade of vehicles and sandbags for hours until he fell, mortally wounded. The street was lashed by machine-gun fire, which made it seemingly impossible for stretcher-bearers to bring him in. Then ‘Rifleman Matthews drove in a truck across the open street. He backed it into position to rescue Bower, but he was already dead. Matthews removed several others badly wounded, and got away unscathed. Those who witnessed this wonderful achievement never forgot it.’5
Six years before, in his school essay making the case against pacifism, Neave had expressed the hope that no Briton would fight for France. Now he and a host of his countrymen had done just that, giving their lives and liberty in defence of a French town. The same could not be said of many of the French troops. Hundreds sheltered in cellars while the battle raged. There was some redemption, though, in the performance of a hard core of patriots, who fought almost to the last man on the ramparts in defence of Bastion 11, determined to preserve ‘the honour of France’. Neave chose to see these men as the true representatives of their nation. He would come to rely on their sort – and their female counterparts – when organising escape and evasion networks on his return to the war.
With capture, Neave had his first encounter with Germans since his 1933 visit to Berlin. The soldiers who guarded him and the medical orderlies who tended his wound seemed civilised enough. But as he recuperated and thought about the future, ‘It was the Nazis I dreaded, not the front-line troops who behaved well to the wounded.’6 He claimed to have remembered the First World escape stories he read as a schoolboy and that his ‘thoughts turned quickly to the chances of avoiding the inevitable journey to a prison camp’. At this early stage, when German control had not yet set hard, escape was easier to pull off and less hazardous than it soon became. Some of the defenders did manage to get away. A group of forty-seven men who had taken shelter under a pier in the port were picked up under fire by the Royal Navy yacht Gulzar in the early hours of 27 May.7 A young Searchlights officer, Lieutenant W. H. Dothie, after leading a dogged resistance from the village of Marck, east of Calais, was finally captured, but escaped from a prisoner-of-war column and eventually made his way back to England after an epic journey by foot, bicycle and boat.8
The impulse to escape, and his adventures trying to do so, are a central part of Airey Neave’s story and identity, and he wrote about them extensively. However, the account was delivered in fits and starts, over a long period and in different forms. Thirteen years after he broke out of Colditz, he published They Have Their Exits, which became a bestseller. He returned to the subject again in 1969, with Saturday at MI9. The first book skates over the period between capture in Calais and arrival at his first proper prisoner-of-war camp, Oflag IX-A/H, in the castle of Spangenberg, deep in central Germany. In the second, though, he faces the episode squarely, owning to the low spirits and doubtful nerve he suffered in the months after Calais. Neave felt sharply the ignominy, not only of the debacle, but of his own insignificant role in the defence, and his recollections are tinged with a faint sense of shame. It was compounded by a feeling that he had not moved quickly enough to try and get away.
Initially, he was