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At first he found the vehicle terrifyingly unwieldy. It had an odd habit of swerving suddenly and heading for the nearest ditch, as though it preferred ditches to a metalled surface. After a few miles he accustomed himself to its idiosyncrasies but found the heat inside it stifling, and by the time he had reached the outskirts of Furnes he was sweating like a pig; so he stopped, opened the lid and stripped himself to the waist.

His idea was to try to reach Paris, since he felt that he would stand a better chance there than anywhere else of getting on the track of the Black Baroness, but he had only a most rudimentary idea as to what was happening in his immediate vicinity. The officers with whom he had talked on the beach had told him that the French who had been cut off with them were covering the British evacuation by a rearguard action in the neighbourhood of the Mont des Cats, and he had no desire at all to run into the battle; so although it had meant going away from Paris he had thought it better to head for Furnes rather than inland, but at Furnes he felt that he could turn south-east towards Ypres without any great risk of becoming embroiled in the last desperate stand that was being made by the French.

The eighteen miles between Furnes and Ypres showed many traces of the British retreat. Here and there army vehicles which had been damaged by shell-fire had been left on the roadside. Once he passed a little group, a sergeant and seven men, wearily plodding towards the coast. Evidently they were the remnant of a party which had got cut off somewhere a few days before but had managed to make their way through the German lines under cover of night. A little further on a solitary officer came pedalling by on what was obviously a borrowed or stolen civilian push-bike, while every half-mile or so there were stragglers who from wounds or weariness had not been able to keep up with their units but were still doggedly endeavouring to escape from the Germans. By eleven o'clock, without any untoward incident, he entered Ypres.

A number of the houses had been wrecked by bombs or shell-fire, but by comparison with the tumbled heap of debris which Gregory remembered there in 1917 the town had hardly suffered at all. Turning south-west, out of the Cloth Hall, Square, he took the road to Bailleul and, after a mile, seeing no more English or French, he knew that he was now coming into an area where at any time he might run up against the Germans. Pulling up, he got out and with the piece of chalk scrawled in large letters on the front of the tank: 'NACH PARIS. HEIL HITLER!' then got in again.

The Germans, he knew, would recognise the tank as of a British pattern but he had chosen it in preference to a car for the very simple reason that as long as he remained inside it nobody whom he passed would be able to see that it was driven by a man without a uniform, and he hoped that when the Germans saw the inscription they would assume that it was one of their own people driving a tank which had been captured from the British. It soon transpired that he had rightly judged his time in labelling the tank, as a few miles further on he came upon several parties of German infantry. Away to his right, beyond the higher ground, a battle was in progress. Out there towards Cassel the French were still making their last splendid stand and the Germans were moving fresh troops north-west, across the Ypres-Bailleul road, for the destruction or capture of this remnant of the great Allied Northern Armies which it had been decided to sacrifice in order to save Lord Gort's forces.

In Bailleul he found much greater numbers of Germans, as an armoured column was passing west, from Armentieres towards Saint Omer, so he was held up in the square for some time. But nobody challenged him and by half-past twelve he was out of the little town, made immortal to the old B.E.F. by the presence at its estaminet of the glamorous Tina, sweetheart of ten thousand British officers, who, so it was said, in the last months of the War had been shot as a German spy.

From that point on the roads were rarely free of Germans and now and again parties of them were marching back groups of disconsolate-looking French prisoners. Between Bailleul and Arras he was twice halted by German military police who wanted to know what he was doing with a captured British tank, but shoving up the lid he popped out his head and naked, sweating shoulders to call a cheery greeting to them in his fluent German and laughingly declare that the tank was a personal war souvenir of his General, who had ordered him to bring it along for the victory celebrations.

Arras was in poor shape as the British had fought there about ten days before, when the Germans were still pushing troops towards the coast. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and the Germans had bombed the town severely. Not a pane of glass was left in any of the windows and many of the streets were half-blocked with rubble from the demolished houses; but that made Gregory more pleased with himself than ever that he had decided to journey to Paris—or as near as he could get to it—in a private tank, as the unwieldy old tin can could bump and clatter its way over all sorts of obstacles which would have been quite impossible for a car.

Even half-naked as he was, and with the lid up all the time, the heat in the tank was almost unbearable, so outside the town he drove off the road into a small wood and got out to have a rest. His trousers were wet through with perspiration and steaming from the heat, while he felt as limp and heady as though he had spent several hours in the hottest room of a Turkish bath. When he had recovered a little he made a meal off some of his iron rations then lay down in the shade of a tree. For over an hour he rested there out of the broiling sun and it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon when he once more climbed into his sardine tin, got it back on the road and headed for Bapaume.

At Bapaume, where he again ran into many Germans, he could hear the guns, somewhere to the south; so it seemed as though the French were still holding the line of the Somme and he knew that his next job was to find a way of crossing it. The road to Paris lay through Peronne, which was actually on the Somme, and he hoped that if the Germans had already captured the town he might succeed in crossing the river there; but as he advanced with one of the German columns he found many indications that he was once more nearing a battle-front. The column gradually dissolved to deploy into positions to which each unit had been directed. Carefully-concealed heavy batteries boomed from the fringe of the woods on either side, many of the fields were occupied by infantry who were resting, and further on the sharp crack of field-guns came from the dips between the rolling downs, while German aircraft were again circling directly overhead.

By seven-thirty he had reached the outskirts of Peronne to find that it was in the hands of the Germans, but evidently they had not yet succeeded in establishing a bridge-head across the river and the French were pounding the town so heavily that it was out of the question to attempt to go through it.

Turning off the road Gregory headed west and went on for about two miles, keeping a small ridge between himself and the river, then ran the tank up to the crest of the ridge to see what he could make of the situation. He was not long left in doubt. A French .75, concealed in a wood somewhere on the opposite bank, immediately blazed off at him. One shell screeched over and burst about ten yards to his rear; a second pitched thirty yards in front of him and dead on the line. He did not wait to make any further investigation but, heaving the tank round, rattled off back down the far side of the ridge again.