GRENADIER GUARDS

Evening Star, Issue 23729, 9 November 1940, Page 4

GRENADIER GUARDS

H3W THEY CAME BACK FROM FRANCE Now that the story of the Grenadier Guards’ retreat to Dunkirk has been told we can tell, perhaps, how they came back to England (wrote the London correspondent of the ‘ Manchester Guardian ’). They were almost the last to leave (the story may be told soon of the two regiments that covered their embarkation), and landed in England on the last day but one of the withdrawal. Men of every regiment had been landing for days, tired, dirty, unshaven. Each day’s arrivals looked more tired than those of the day before—they had had a day more fighting, a day more of being bombed, a day more of iron rations. At their port of arrival one was told how, when they had got into the boats on the other side, they had dropped whore they stood ami slept.

The Grenadiers had attacked with the bayonet a few hours before they were taken oil. "When they got on to their boats they sot to and shaved and cleaned their boots. On the quay at which they landed they fell in and marched oif to attention, rifles at the slope and wdth the Guards’ swagger. The major from a line regiment with whom 1 watched them kept jerking his hand and saying; “ It’s ridiculous. Have you ever seen anything like it? It’s ridiculous.” For hours afterwards ho was buttonholing strangers and saying: ‘‘Did you see the Guards? It’s ridiculous.”