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they practised rifle shooting and undertook guard duties. German planes flew very high overhead from time to time, but they saw no RAF aircraft. ‘This is a most peculiar war,’ Lance Corporal Chesterton thought, ‘nothing seems to be happening.’
    On the other side of the country, a few RAF units were still operating in eastern France, and men gathered at one airfield to see off the New Zealander ace, ‘Cobber’ Kain, a glamorous figure who had chalked up seventeen ‘kills’ of enemy planes and was engaged to a well-known actress. He was heading back to England for leave. Before departing, he gave a flying display in his Hurricane. As he made a low roll, the tip of one wing hit the ground, the plane crashed and Kain was killed – not having heard the news, men on the hull of the
Lancastria
would call desperately for him to fly in to shoot down the German planes strafing them.
    Some of those fleeing the enemy were caught in streams of refugees that were attacked by German dive bombers, their sirens sending out terrifying banshee screams as they swooped. A British dispatch rider found himself in a traffic jam at a village crossroads when the planes attacked. Swept from his motorcycle by the impact of the explosions, he landed beside a boy of about five whose legs had been blown off and who had been blinded in one eye. Taking the child in his arms, the soldier could see that he was dying in terrible pain; so he drew his revolver and shot him – the memory drove him mad.
    Many of the British troops moving from the east of France to greater safety in the west were in organised convoys of vehicles, or were put on trains. But some went freelance. A sergeant from an RAOC Light Aid Detachment stole a bicycleand rode across France from Lille; on the way, he saw a group of men from the Pioneer Corps attacking German tanks with their picks and shovels.
    At the wheel of his wireless truck, 21-year-old Leonard Forde became separated from his convoy as it headed out of eastern France. Strafing attacks forced him to jump repeatedly from the cab on his lorry, known in service slang as a ‘gin palace’. With his crew, he took to small roads to escape enemy attention. Life became a game of hide-and-seek. Reaching Le Mans, he began to operate the truck’s wireless monitoring gear. As his radio chattered away in high speed Morse code, he noticed that the strong signals all had German call signs. It was time to move further west.
    Wilfred Oldham’s Royal Signals unit had been sent to the Champagne town of Bouzy-sur-Marne to work with RAF detachments posted to eastern France before the German advance. He and his colleagues were housed in the premises of the Moët et Chandon wine firm: Wilf’s office was above the grape presses. Across the road was the headquarters of another great champagne house, Veuve Clicquot. The British bought champagne for nine pence a bottle.
    At the end of May, the unit was ordered to withdraw. Under the command of an Australian major, the men took a dozen new American-made lorries from an abandoned air force base, filling the tanks with petrol and arming themselves with a dozen Lewis guns. Having no idea of where to head, they wandered round northern France. On the way, they ran into some French troops who told them about Dunkirk. After reaching Le Mans, their commander suggested driving to St-Nazaire. Their improvised journey to the west was typical ofthe independent British units seeking a way out of France, ultimately taking them to the last escape hatch left.
    William Philip Knight, who would be so frightened by the sight of a man disappearing in flames below the oily sea off St-Nazaire, was a sergeant in a General Construction Company of the Royal Engineers and an explosives expert. At the Dunkirk evacuation, his six-man group was detailed to patrol the perimeter of a British position in a lorry loaded with explosives to use against the advancing enemy. On 1 June, they staged an ambush for German tanks