Peter Rhodes on Arnhem, snow-cycling and plenty of snouts in the trough

As when we reached the junction where one group of paras had seen their pal struck by a German bullet which ignited his phosphorous bomb. They could no nothing but watch as he burned to death. When people say: “Great-grandad never talked about the war,” they should perhaps ask themselves, how can anyone introduce their memory of the hideous death pyre of a comrade into a peacetime family chat?

It was a bitterly cold week for that Arnhem pilgrimage. On the last day, on a frosty autumn evening, we followed the route taken by the battered British troops, from their last stand at Oosterbeek. They had crept in single file, each man in the pitch-black holding the smock of the man in front, to the bank of the Rhine where they made their escape either by small rafts or by swimming.

It was a privilege to be there, trudging in the darkness with a few of the lads of '44, by then middle-aged men determined to keep the Arnhem story alive by talking to us journalists and contributing their jig-saw pieces of memory to the bigger picture. Like the veteran mortar man, wounded and taken prisoner who told me: “The fighting was magnificent but the planning was atrocious . . .it was too stupid for words.”

An icy education. One crisp, snowy morning in Arnhem, I watched as a Dutch woman mounted her bicycle. It is a well-known fact that some European countries are far better prepared for hard winters than we Brits. Back home, anyone trying to get on that bicycle on that snowy road would fall flat on their backside. So let us watch and see how the Dutch do it. She fell flat on her backside.