GRENADIER GUARDS

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 December 1940, Page 10

GRENADIER GUARDS

HOW THEY CAME BACK Now that the story of the Grenadier Guards’ retreat to Dunkirk has been told we can tell, perhaps, how they I came back to England (wrote the i 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 where they stood and slept.

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