The engine noise sounded far too loud with its reverberations hemmed inside the tunnel and the grind and clatter of the steel tracks conjured up the advance of the biggest tank in the world. Barnes looked at his watch again and then gazed ahead. They should be seeing daylight soon now if the map was anything to go by, and leaving the tunnel was going to call for some pretty careful reconnaissance. Barnes had absolutely no idea what the position might be on this sector of the front: what he had seen from the embankment gave him little cause for optimism as to what might face them once they reached the far end. One part of his mind concentrated on the probing beams while another considered the various possibilities they could encounter – calling on the one hand for a swift dash out into the open or, on the other, for a more cautious passage. As far as he could tell from the map, the railway emerged into open country with no sign of an embankment; there should be fields on both sides with the canal barring the way to the west, the way they wanted to go. They’d just have to see. The headlights were now beginning to sweep round a gradual bend. Somewhere round this bend they should see daylight, probably a first glimmer, then a distant archway. What that happens, Barnes told himself, I’ll halt the tank and go on foot for a recce. Just so long as we don’t have any trouble with Davis. He glanced down again and saw that Davis was sitting in exactly the same position, gripping the two-pounder as though his very life depended on it, a posture of such implacable rigidity that Barnes was none too happy about his gunner’s likely reactions.
‘We’ll soon be there, Davis,’ he said down the intercom. ‘Perm, get back to your seat just in case. Be ready to halt, Reynolds, as soon as I give the word.’
The tank ground on, the left-hand track rumbling over wooden sleepers while the right-hand track scattered pebbles, so that the tank was tilted very slightly to the right, the three sounds complementing each other – the throb of the engines, the grumble of the tracks, and the slither of pebbles. Abruptly, Barnes gave the order to halt, saying nothing more while he wondered how to break it to them. The headlights penetrated the darkness and then halfway along the full extent of their beams they splashed out over solid surface, a wall surface with boulders protruding from a scree of soil and rubble which resembled a landslide. This end of the tunnel was blocked, too. They were sealed off inside the bowels of the earth.
On May 10th the BEF had moved from France into Belgium and Barnes’ unit had moved with it. On May 10th, four hours earlier at 3 am, General von Bock’s Army Group B had advanced across the frontiers of Holland and Belgium with the express purpose of tempting the BEF and three French armies to leave their fortified lines. Before the end of the day the movement of these vast forces was quite apparent to London and Paris, but a third movement of even more massive forces had so far gone unnoticed.
At the point where Belgium, France, and Luxembourg meet lies one of the least known areas of Western Europe – the massif of the Ardennes range, a remote zone of high hills enclosing steep wooded gorges along which snake second-class roads. This was the sector of the huge front from Belgium to Switzerland which the French High Command had long ago declared ‘impassable’, and it was opposite this sector that they had placed their weakest forces.
During the early hours of May 10th General von Rundstedt’s Army Group A began its secret forward movement through the ‘impassable’ Ardennes, an army group more powerful than any the world had ever seen. It comprised a force of forty-four divisions, including the main mass of the Panzer divisions which contained over two thousand armoured vehicles. All night long the army group penetrated into the twisting defiles, drawing ever closer to the French border. The tanks drove in close formation, each vehicle guided by the hooded rear light of the tank ahead, an exercise they had practised over and over again. Seen from the air through the eye of an infra-red camera the German host would indeed have resembled a snake, or rather a series of snakes – armoured snakes threading their way through the darkness towards the Meuse near Sedan.
The leading Panzer division was commanded by a thirty-two-year-old general who had won his spurs – and his promotion – in Poland. His unit had led the Wehrmacht into burning Warsaw and now he looked forward to leading it into burning Paris. Without aristocratic connections, on sheer ruthless ability, the general had risen in a few brief years to command the very tip of the spearhead aimed at the heart of sleeping France. His was, in fact, the first tank, and now he stood in the turret erect as a fir tree, night field-glasses dangling over his chest, the Knight’s Cross suspended from his neck, his eyes fixed on the motor-cycle patrol ahead.
Under his high peaked cap his hawk-like face was calm and without a trace of emotion. His gloved hand rested lightly on the turret rim, without tension, to correct his balance as the huge vehicle made its way along the insidious road. He might well have been on manoeuvres, looking forward to the congratulations of the umpires later and a drink with his fellow officers in the mess. Except for the fact that the general neither smoked nor drank, and except for the further fact that he was leading the advance guard of the coming onslaught, confident that he was about to play a decisive part in the total annihilation of the British and the French.
The tip of the German spearhead reached the Meuse on May 12th, crossed it on May 13th, and by Thursday May 16th, the general was in Laon, deep in the heart of France. He led the advance still erect in his tank, still wearing the peaked cloth cap in spite of the earlier entreaties of Colonel Hans Meyer, his GSO, to exchange it for a steel helmet.
‘It won’t be necessary, Meyer. You will see,’ the general had said, ‘we "shall cut through them like a scythe.’
Meyer withdrew the helmet as he sourly recalled a conversation he had had with the general,a month earlier during the final war manoeuvres near Wiesbaden. To Meyer it now seemed that the conversation had taken place at least a year ago since already the Panzers were pouring over the pontoons across the river Meuse.
‘There will be two or three major battles,’ the general had said, ‘and these will take place soon after we have crossed the Meuse. We can expect the fiercest resistance for two or three weeks and then a total collapse of the enemy.’
‘I wonder,’ Meyer had replied dubiously.
The general was a little too confident for Meyer’s liking, particularly when he remembered that this commanding officer was a nobody whereas Hans Meyer was descended from one of the oldest families in East Prussia. One must move with the times, of course, and Meyer was only forty-three years old. As he watched the endless Panzer column advancing into the fields of France, Meyer reminded himself that he expected high promotion in this war and that this largely depended on the general’s good-will. So he must compromise, keeping his doubts about the general to himself.