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 too weak to escape. While still recovering in a ward with four other officers in Calais, he was approached by a young French officer, Pierre d’Harcourt, working as a Red Cross orderly, who suggested substituting the live Neave for one of the dead patients who were regularly taken off for burial, but the plan came to nothing.9 Neave had ‘neither the nerve nor the physical strength to make the attempt’, but as his health improved he found that his morale remained low and his resolve weak. In June, he was moved with other wounded to Lille, where the Faculté Catholique had been turned into a POW hospital. The lorry carrying them broke down in the town of Bailleul, twenty miles short of their destination, presenting him with a golden opportunity. While the lorry was being repaired, ‘I wandered unguarded through the streets with other wounded survivors of Calais,’ he wrote. ‘We were welcomed at every door, food and wine was pressed on us, and many offered to hide us from the Germans.’ Lille would become a centre of resistance in Northern France and, had he accepted, there would have been a high chance of success. Instead, ‘At sunset, as the crowds waved and threw flowers in the main square … I suffered myself, to my shame, to be driven off to hospital in Lille.’
Why such meek acceptance? Writing in 1969, he declared that ‘though my thoughts had already turned to escape and its organisation, the weeks in hospital seemed to deprive me of all initiative.’ He also suggested that lack of ‘military training in such matters’ had played a part in his vacillation. He was man enough to admit that ‘this was not a heroic episode in my life.’ He went on to propose that his inaction had in a way been providential, for ‘had it not happened, I might never have escaped from Colditz to England and gained the experience which enabled me to plan the escape of others.’ Once again, amid the dark clouds, Neave could see the silver lining.
In the improvised hospital in the Faculté Catholique, a ‘sombre, red-brick affair with stone floors and a smell of wounds and disinfectant’, he met a man who would later become his partner in the great enterprise to get Allied servicemen out of occupied Europe.10 When they were reunited in London, he recalled how he had last seen him: a ‘pale and strained [figure], playing cards in one of the wards. I remembered his high forehead and bright eyes as he sat on his bed dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers.’ Captain Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards fitted Neave’s romantic ideal of the British warrior. He was slim, intelligent and apparently without fear, and had been captured at Dunkirk.
The Coldstream’s orders were to hold up the Germans while the evacuation was under way. Langley was a platoon commander with ‘3’ Company, 2nd Battalion. The company was led, with what feels today like lunatic determination, by Major Angus McCorquodale, who gave orders for any officer who showed an inclination to retire to be shot. Langley described later how a captain commanding a unit on the company’s right came over to announce that he was planning to withdraw. The Germans were massing for an armoured assault on a bridgehead they were holding and his men were too exhausted to resist.11 McCorquodale ordered him to ‘stay put and fight it out’. The officer replied that his orders from the commanding officer were to retire as and when he saw fit. McCorquodale was having none of it. ‘You see that big poplar tree on the road with the white mile stone beside it?’ he told him. ‘The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree we will shoot you.’ The captain departed and McCorquodale picked up a rifle and ordered Langley to get one himself. ‘When I returned with mine he said “Sights at 250. You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree …” We had not long to wait before the captain appeared, followed by two men. They stood for a long time by the tree and then the captain walked on. Both our rifles went off simultaneously: he dropped out of sight and the two men ran back.’ This ruthlessness matched the determination with which the company did its duty. Langley was a marksman and accounted for many Germans before losing his arm to a shell. McCorquodale died at his post.
Langley did not let his injury delay his departure. While in Lille, he managed to contact local resisters who got him out of the hospital and
