INCH by inch Edward Albert was sucked nearer and nearer towards the vortex of this ever more frightful war. He who had always dressed so carefully, became a jumble of garbage crouching on the links, a flattened Jack on the Green. . . .
If you had told him late in 1940, that in a year’s time he would be an invisible man crawling through the midst of a raid to some position of comparative personal security, with a deafening anti-aircraft barrage beating the wits out of him, and flares and parachutists and a number of gigantic troop carriers raining down upon him, he would probably have contrived some minor mutilation that would have absolved him from any active participation in that sort of thing A vague self-reproach floundered through the thudding and jumping in his brain.
“Bloody fool I been,” he muttered. u Never saw a thing ahead.”
That was his state of mind, within ten minutes of the moment that transfigured him into a national hero.
What happened was very simple. Tucked up at last under a bunker, Edward Albert felt secure from anything but a direct hit. There he could abide the issue, prepared to emerge either for surrender or the cheering when comparative quiet was restored. And then he became aware of men crawling discreetly up the other side of the bunker. He screwed his head round to look at them and perceived a gleam of bayonets. There were at least three of them. The heads whispered and waited for an interval. Then one of these shadowy men fired a shot at something ahead and a second jumped down within a yard of Edward Albert and pointed. They began to talk very rapidly — in Polish. But to Edward Albert, Polish and German were all one. The next man might tread on him and he’d be bayonetted for a certainty. They’d all stick their bayonets into him. With a wild yell he leapt to his feet and ran. They shouted something and ran after him. And right ahead he saw a group of dark figures struggling with parachutes and encumbrances. And they too were shouting German!
Germans behind him, Germans before him, and no quarter!
I have told my story badly if I have given you the impression that Edward Albert was an abject coward. Probably no human being who is properly nourished is that. Young children are easily terrified, but I am speaking of adults.
I have shown you a human being growing up in a debasing and discouraging social atmosphere, so that he was not so much born mean as had had meanness thrust upon him. All Edward Albert’s story, like the true story of every human being, is a story of resentments and rebellions, cramped and limited though they were. You have seen how he broke through his discretions and astonished Horry Budd. You have seen him astonishing the female of his species. Now, cornered as he imagined himself to be and hopeless, he broke through his cowering “instinct of self-preservation”, as they call it, altogether, and revealed himself a thing of frantic violence. His yell became a yell of despair and hatred. He leapt upon his fate. His green face and fluttering scraps of garbage bounding out of the night amidst the concussions of the battle must have had a nightmare effect upon those fumbling and uncertain young Nazis. He whirled his rifle round his head, smiting these dismayed and entangled men to the earth, beating them down, heedless of their belated cries of “Kamerad!” He had killed four men and disabled seven others before the three Poles who had been running after him came up to complete his victory.
“While we were waiting for supports to come up,” they testified, “he leapt out of the ground at our feet, shouted to us to follow him, and rushed the position the enemy detachment was trying to consolidate. . . . ”
It became apparent to Edward Albert that he was having his hand shaken by a Polish officer who spoke some English. The climax of the uproar within his brain and without, was past. Slowly but surely the realisation of what he had done dawned upon him.
He rearranged the facts with the same readiness with which he had accepted his triumph in the annual cricket match. The sunrise revealed the complete failure of the German attempt to test the strength of the Brighthampton coast defences. They had established no foothold. The mopping-up was over and there had been remarkably few casualties among the defenders. Mostly these had occurred among the exposed gunners on the beach beyond Casing East Cliff. A minimised account of the whole affair — lest panic be created — was released in the one o’clock bulletin. And Edward Albert, his heroism further developed by a liberal experience of Polish vodka, returned, weary, excessively dirty, drunk and triumphant to his home. Mr Droop and the pavement designer had preceded him. They had reported that he had been in the thick of the fighting with some Poles and Canadians, but he had not bee............