The Sinking of the Lancastria by Jonathan Fenby Read Free Book Online Page A

and pressed it till he passed out.
    The party got into its truck, drove to the main road and turned left towards Rouen. His companions wrapped field dressings round Knight’s bleeding wounds. On the way, the truck sped past advancing Germans, and got across a bridge over the Seine to join British troops south of the river.
    Not wanting to be caught there, they headed off again, aiming for the ancient town of Beauvais. Hearing that the Germans had taken it, they went south towards Compiègne. However, that, too, was about to fall, so they drove to the walled city of Senlis where they handed some of their explosives to the French army to help blow up a house that would impede the defenders’ field of fire. In return, they were given a lot of nasty wine.
    They debated trying to get to Switzerland, but decided to drive the fifty miles to Paris, instead. On 11 June, on the way to the capital, Knight passed his thirtieth birthday. That night, they were put up in a farmhouse where they enjoyed a bath and a good hot dinner. Two days later, they got to the suburbs of Paris – just as the Germans were entering the city from the other side. So they decided to go west, reaching Le Mans on 14 June, and staying the night at a big British army dump that had been set up on the motor race track, the first part of their escape from Dunkirk completed.
    For some British units, the retreat was eased with the local wines or stronger alcohol. Military canteens and NAAFI stores had been left open, and men were taking what they could find. The driver of one air force lorry got so drunk that he could not stand up even after his head was held under a cold water tap. More soberly, others crammed sweets and cigarettes from Salvation Army shops into their kitbags. A Royal Engineers unit found a radio in one abandoned store, and got its first news of Dunkirk by listening to Churchill’s speech announcing that the BEF had been successfully evacuated from France.
    Outside Orléans, Sergeant Macpherson, who would share his life jacket with a man who could not swim as they escaped from the sinking
Lancastria
, was posted to an RAF base on a tributary to the River Loire at the village of Olivet. He and his colleagues regularly crossed the Loiret in a dinghy to what he recalled as ‘a road house with a funny English name’ to eat and drink white wine. Returning one night, Macpherson took up the stance of a Viking figurehead at the front of the little boat, brandishing two litre wine bottles; when his companions rocked the dinghy, he fell into the water.
    As the Germans advanced towards Orléans, most of the RAF men headed west. Left behind to burn the unit’s papers, Macpherson crossed the Loiret for the last time on his own in the dinghy to eat two pâté de foie gras sandwiches at the roadhouse, washed down by white wine. He finished off with liqueurs, each glass costing him the equivalent of three pence.
    While eating his sandwiches, he got into conversation with an American woman who had worked in a British servicemen’s club in Paris. She told him how bad the military situation was. Leaving her, Macpherson rowed back across the river to burn more documents. Then he borrowed a bicycle to go to a nearby village to collect food and drink. The road was crowded with refugees; at one point, a car knocked him off his bicycle.
    Macpherson drank more wine in the village, and then rode back to join the remaining members of his unit whom he found at the base eating enormous doorstep sandwiches of corned beef, and sharing huge mugs of strong, scalding tea. Feeling rather ill, he got into the back of a big French army lorry where he found a large armchair, in which he sat down to rest.
    Further west, life was uneventful for British troops stationed in and around Nantes, a major port sitting astride the wide River Loire, forty miles from the sea with elegant avenues and squares of eighteenth-century houses built on the proceeds of the slave trade. Jack Ratcliffe,