大象传媒

I was a signaller in the Royal Artillery maintaining signal lines on the Escaut canal in Belgium, south of Tournai. On May 20th 1940 I was downstairs in the Observation Post watching the Germans in a wood half a mile away. They started crawling towards us through the long grass. I was leaning out of the window firing at them, but was driven back by a burst of machine-gun fire coming in through the window; I was more excited than frightened. A Warwickshire sergeant ran in, flopped down' looked at me and said 'How's your father?' Supposing this to be a rhetorical question I said 'He was all right when I saw him six months ago; why?' He pointed to his mouth and said 'He made these teeth!' My father was a dentist in Warwick and I told him about this encounter when I returned home; he remembered the man as a reservist living in Warwick. A company of the 2nd Battallion was massacred by the SS at Esquebeque a week later.

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