Read Online Ride Out The Storm by John Harris - Free Book Online

to see British troops setting fire to the stores they’d laboriously collected during the winter months, and it had suddenly made him feel nervous. As a city boy, apart from Cockney nerve, he hadn’t much he could offer in a situation that seemed to present certain difficulties. The army had merely showed him how to do pointless things with a rifle he’d been careful never to do since, and now somebody had taken a diabolical liberty with his safety.
    In fact, he’d barely started.
    By dark that night the whole front was alight with bursting bombs and shells. Two big fires were blazing, one in a petrol dump so that the smoke ascended in great rolling billows and, in the sky above, an incredible display of tracer shells had made weird designs through which an occasional rocket burst into a ball of brilliantly coloured flares. Among them were Very lights and all too often the white rockets which by this time he’d learned the Germans fired to indicate a success.
    Somehow it didn’t look right even to Noble.
    He’d slept in the van again and again, scrounging a cup of tea here and a bully beef sandwich there, spinning a yarn about looking for his adjutant to anyone who asked, but then the army had stopped and dug in again, setting up their Brens and the few mortars they possessed and Noble had seen Heinkels, Dorniers and Stukas in dozens. The only British machines he’d seen had been ancient Battles getting the chop one after the other with monotonous regularity, and once at a first-aid post he’d heard a bitter Lysander gunner, his tunic torn from top to bottom by bullets, complaining about the politicians sending him up in a machine whose only noteworthy characteristic was that it looked as though it had its wings on backwards.
    He had found it wise to continue at full speed, but near Seclin he had been caught up in a flood of retreating Frenchmen, a double row of horse-drawn vehicles and a double row of motorised vehicles – four lines altogether – that had forced him into the fields. He didn’t argue. They didn’t look the sort of men you could argue with. The drivers were unshaven, their clothes muddy, and there were no officers or NCOs. As they had passed they had managed embarrassed smiles that had sent a cold chill through Noble’s heart. This wasn’t just a quick nip back to re-form, he decided. It was a rout.
    As they turned the corner, one of the tanks, an ancient Model R35 which they used for training purposes, brushed against the last of the stragglers. A man screamed and fell and Noble’s eyes started out of his head as he saw how the treads had crushed his leg to pulp. A few of the soldiers stopped but the tank didn’t even pause, its tracks clawing a deep gouge in the turf, and as the rest of them pushed past, indifferent to the screams of the injured man, Noble started up the 15-cwt and began to bounce across the fields, his stomach heaving.
    Though he’d not worried at the time, he realised now that those sensitive antennae of his which warned him of danger had told him when he’d first arrived in France that something was wrong. The French had seemed slack and listless, and their officers had a habit of collecting bunches of flowers which they gave to their red-faced British liaison officers to carry. Noble hadn’t much time for officers of any nationality, but he’d suddenly found that when it came to comparison with the French he was prepared to stand up and defend his own with his dying breath. They were all bastards but, as bastards went, they weren’t bad bastards. And the British soldiers at least looked clean which to the dandified Noble with his soaped trouser-creases and forbidden pencil-line moustache, was important.
    As the long day’s fighting died and the rifle fire began to fade he managed to attach himself to a field company of Royal Engineers he found in a group of trees on the side of a low hill. They were all tired, dusty and hungry and were glad to hide their vehicles