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

of the Royal Ordnance Corps, who worked as a clerk in a warehouse, recalled that the daily routine consisted of ‘drill, breakfast, drill, parade to depot, lunch, parade back, until 5.30 p.m., march back for mug of tea, bread and cheese, fill in sandbags to defend the city, working until dark’. On Sunday, they went to the Protestant church. Generally, they were ‘having fun, all men together’.
    Major Fred Hahn passed his time watching tennis at the city’s university stadium. A First World War veteran from Cheadle in Lancashire and commander of a divisional ordnance workshop, Hahn made contact with the local fraternity of Masons, and joined them in a group photograph, the Mayor sitting in the middle of the front row.
    Though the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, had warned that the British camps in Nantes would be bombed, there was no sign of the enemy. French newspapers and the radio reproduced optimistic military communiqués or simply told readers, ‘
Rien à signaler
’ – ‘Nothing to report.’ Everybody believed that the great Maginot defensive line along the traditional German invasion route would hold the enemy back with its huge concrete emplacements, heavy guns and underground railways. In Nantes, the British met at their club as usual, and life was calm.
    Then the refugees started to arrive on trains and down the roads along the Loire. The first, from Belgium, were no particular cause for concern – everybody knew fighting was going on there. But, before long, people began to come from northern France, and, one resident recalled, ‘horror of horrors from Paris’. Fifth columnists stirred up anxiety, and German planes flew over the city.
    Donald Draycott, the RAF ground crewman from Derbyshire who was to be surprised at how calm he felt as he watched people jumping off the sinking
Lancastria
, sensed some hostility from the local people when he visited the main theatre in Nantes. Also, ‘when a bus came along and the bus was pretty well full, they’d push you out of the queue and get on themselves,’ he recalled. But then, he reflected: ‘I think it’s part of the French characteristics, they did it to others as well.’
    Horace Lumsden, who had left school at fifteen-and-a-half to join the Ordnance Corps as a bugler and clerk, had been in Nantes since the first BEF base was established in the city in 1939. He had celebrated his twenty-third birthday there at the beginning of June. He found the French very friendly, particularly the wife of the owner of the Café des Jardinières, but he noted some friction, too. In part, this was because the British troops were better paid than their French counterparts, and so had more money to spend.
    There was also rivalry over female company. Many local men had gone to the front, leaving their wives alone. Some foreign soldiers had affairs with Frenchwomen – one resulted in the birth of a son months after the British had left. French families sometimes objected to these liaisons on behalf of the absent husbands or boyfriends. One of Horace Lumsden’s fellow soldiers was at a young woman’s house when a relative came round with friends. She was married, and her husband was away with his unit. The Frenchman beat the British trooper so badly that his face was reduced to a mass of pulp.
    Nantes and St-Nazaire had been used to bring supplies and vehicles into France since the outbreak of war, and the British set up a network of support and repair bases in the area. In the Gâvre Forest, they laid down a roadway of stones and concrete foundations for hangars and for two block houses. By a dirt track in another forest, a unit from the Royal Engineers went to work to build a railway line. Next to their headquarters was a small farmhouse. The farmer’s wife cooked the soldiers eggs and chips. Her 13-year-old son, Laurent Couedel, whom the troops called Laurie, watchedthe men at work, striking up a friendship as he chatted in French they could not