Dunkirk Crescendo

by Bodie Thoene

  “Calais and Boulogne are fallen,” Lewinski said. “This General Guderian captured Abbeville and then swept north to take the Channel ports. By now he may have turned south again, Madame. We must be very careful, whatever harbor we enter for fuel.”

  Madame Rose stuck her lower lip out. Her mouth turned down as she considered the warning. “We have no compass,” she said flatly. “Give me a compass, and I can sail around the world in a bathtub. But I feel the lack of a compass. Beyond this estuary the Atlantic is a vast place. The Channel current could carry us away if we were to run out of fuel. . . . We must stay within sight of the coast, then cross the Pas de Calais.”

  Lewinski’s cheek twitched nervously at this remark. The narrow strait between France and England was sure to be filled with battleships, mines, and who could say what else?

  “Madame.” He bowed his head in a gesture like a gawky schoolboy studying an insect. “As I have explained, the entire French shore along the Pas de Calais is in the hands of the Boche. It will be far too dangerous.”

  “Yes, very dangerous,” she agreed.

  For an instant Rose seemed undecided. Was that a flash of fear in her eyes? Josie wondered.

  The shouts of Jerome and Henri and Georg pulled her attention as they emerged victoriously from the hold with a cane fishing pole in hand. Wearing his tall boots, Henri rode on the back of Georg, and the boys paraded to where the others sat together at the bow. The wind pulled hair back from newly freckled faces. Big ears stuck out. The boys were grinning—all of them.

  And the girls? Surrounded by cables and sitting in a pen of canvas, Marie and Juliette shared imaginary tea with the baby. As if it were all simply a great adventure, like ladies on the deck of an ocean steamer, they must have their tea.

  “Look how completely they trust,” Rose remarked quietly. She flexed her fingers and wiped the perspiration off her sunburned forehead. The cry of seagulls sounded as they circled overhead and then spun off toward the north. Her eyes narrowed as if she was hearing another voice.

  Some decision was made in that instant, Josie knew. Some thought, some vision, entered the old woman’s mind. She brought the Garlic about as if to follow the course of the gulls to the north along the seacoast.

  “The children may remain on deck. But secure them with lifelines,” Rose instructed. “The sea can be rough in the Channel, and they will certainly all be sick,” she added cheerfully.

  ***

  Mac pitched in to help with the building of still more of the improvised jetties. Since he was not a part of any unit on the beach, he figured that making himself useful would be remembered when it came time for getting out of here.

  He and a party of men from Royal Army Ordnance were dispatched to La Panne to round up more discarded vehicles. There had been a Stuka attack a few minutes before their arrival, and the most promising lorries were bombed out and smoldering.

  One truck had been overturned by the blast, but it appeared to be whole. If it could be righted, it would take its place as part of a pier.

  “’Fore we go to heavin’ on it,” an ordnance corporal said, “what say we look to see it isn’t full of bombs or some such?”

  The rear doors resisted tugging but succumbed to the blows of a fire ax. “Blimey,” the corporal exclaimed, staring. “This is a NAAFI lorry!”

  NAAFI was the source of personal items for the servicemen. The truck was loaded with all kinds of food and other treasures. Soon men were loading their arms with cartons of cigarettes, bars of chocolate, and new pairs of shoes.

  The corporal passed some jars to Mac. “Help yourself, mate. No use leavin’ it for the Jerries.”

  Mac stuffed a handful of chocolate bars into his jacket and added a tin of something without even glancing at it. There would be no more work done on the jetty by this party; it was clear. Mac went off to look somewhere else for a ride.

  ***

  How long Andre drifted in the open boat, he could not say. It was the noise of the breakers crashing ahead that roused him, and he saw at once the danger he was in. The lifeboat contained only a single remaining oar. Struggling against his still-overwhelming weariness, Andre rigged the paddle as a primitive rudder and used it to aim the bow of the craft toward the land.

  A swell rose under the keel of the boat, and for an instant it surfed along the crest, propelled toward the shore. Then the wave outran Andre’s ability to keep in position, and he drifted again between the crests.

  A vagrant surge turned the boat half around and left it in danger of broaching. Desperately sweeping the oar, Andre forced a correction to the lifeboat’s course. It swung ponderously about, while Andre divided his attention between the shore ahead and the next wave racing up from astern.

  This time the crest of the breaker caught the full weight of the vessel, pushing it beachward, as if it had been fired from a cannon. Andre worked with frantic haste, expecting at any moment to be turned sideways and capsized.

  The instant the keel grated on the sand, Andre jumped out, leaving the lifeboat to the rough hands of the sea. He was safely back on shore, but where? He knew that the currents and the wind had driven him east toward Ostend, but how far east? From behind the spit of land on which Andre had grounded, he could not even see the smoke of the ruins of Dunkirk. All he could do was start toward the west and try to find another ship.

  Hearing sounds approaching the beach, Andre hid himself in the brush behind the dunes. A German soldier appeared out of a draw and walked toward the water, passing within fifty feet of Andre’s hiding place. The soldier was young and had his rifle slung across his back. As Andre watched, the rifleman took off his coal-scuttle helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “Fritz! Wo bist du?” the soldier called.

  Another German within hailing distance? Andre worried. What if there is a whole patrol?

  When the German had called twice more, a little white dog burst out of the shrubbery and ran to the soldier. “Fritz,” he scolded. “You bad dog!”

  The Wehrmacht trooper knelt down to scratch his pet’s ears. His Gewehr service rifle was still loosely hanging across his back.

  Andre rushed forward, striking the back of the German’s neck with his forearm and knocking him face-first into the sand. Pulling up on the weapon tightened the strap where it crossed the man’s throat and chest.

  Andre pressed his foot against the soldier’s neck and yanked upward on the rifle. The German’s hands fluttered around his throat, and then he lay still while the dog bounced around on the sand, yapping and barking.

  Andre removed the German’s rifle, cartridge belt, canteen, and helmet and faded into the dunes, heading toward Dunkirk. When he looked back, the puppy was sitting on the sand beside the body, pawing his master’s outflung arm and whining.

  ***

  One of Gaston’s antitank guns had been knocked out. He took personal charge of the other, using it to blow the rubber rafts out of the water. The problem was, for every boat that he destroyed, two more seemed to take its place.

  An SS sergeant stood on the stern of yet another inflated craft. With one hand he directed the boat toward the island with the tiller of the tiny outboard motor. With the other he fired his MG-34 from the hip. Gaston saw the man snarl as he snapped out orders to the two little rafts on either side. He was resourceful, that sergeant. The two flanking boats contained men with grenade launchers that lobbed explosives toward Gaston’s position, even as the sergeant sprayed bullets to keep the defenders from firing back. It was a well-executed attack.

  Gaston took particular pleasure in squaring the sights of the antitank gun on the sergeant’s chest. The 25 mm round toppled the German into the water. The rubber boat, left without a helmsman, skittered crazily over the river, like a spooked horse, before being punctured by the hail of gunfire and sinking in midstream. The other two boats turned back.

  Gaston called his runner to him. “I want you to carry a message to Captain Sepp. And when you have delivered it, stay
with him. Tell him that the attack here is increasing. I do not know how long we can hold, so I am going to blow the bridge between the island and the town, lest the Germans get it intact.”

  “Yes, Captain Gaston. Anything else?”

  Gaston looked off in the distance for a second. “Tell him to die gloriously.”

  36

  Singled Out

  Andre reached the outskirts of the Dunkirk Perimeter after dark. On the way he narrowly avoided two German patrols but eventually reached Nieuport Bains near the eastern end of the Allied-held territory. The beach was crawling with Germans preparing for a nighttime assault on the defenses.

  Ducking back out to the road, Andre found it to be unguarded. He jogged along the verge, ready at any second to fling himself into the brush. When he had covered a half mile down the darkened highway without seeing or hearing another person, a shot flashed from the darkness ahead and a bullet whizzed past his ear.

  “Halt!” a voice commanded in English.

  Andre called back, “Don’t shoot! I’m French.”

  “Come in slowly then,” he was told, “with your hands in plain sight!”

  Andre was escorted at bayonet point to the field hospital, which doubled as the headquarters of the sector’s defense. “You are about to be attacked along the shore,” he told the lieutenant who interrogated him.

  “I have no doubt,” said the weary officer, running a hand over his stubbled face and rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “We’re trying to evacuate the nurses and the walking wounded.”

  A tall figure in a rumpled and bloodstained nurse’s uniform passed the cubicle and looked in at Andre’s oil-streaked face. The nurse turned back. “It is Colonel Chardon; is it not?”

  “Ah, Sister Mitchell,” Andre recalled. “So you are successfully withdrawn from the school. Do you know where I can find my brother? Has he already taken ship for England?”

  “Do you not know?” she asked. “He has refused to leave. He and the students of the Ecole are fighting the rearguard action so the rest of us can get away!”

  ***

  North by northeast the compass would have read if the Garlic had possessed a compass. Which it did not.

  This might have been a disaster had it not been for the resourcefulness of Jerome. An old, water-stained maritime chart was dug out of a musty locker. There was a spot of green mold marking Le Havre, and a tear through the inset map of Dieppe. But every shoal and sandbar that had been in the Channel seventy-five years ago, when the chart was printed, was marked for Madame Rose to study.

  It was after dark. Rose hugged the shoreline. By keeping the sound of the breakers always on her right, she stayed in touch with the coast. It was a trick she had learned in California, she said, to help navigate in fog.

  Here and there a wink of light from the shore gleamed out. She steered the péniche far enough from the shoals to be safe but near enough to land that if the wheezing engine of the ancient barge died, there still might be some hope of making it to shore.

  Thirty miles up the coast from Le Havre was the fishing village of Fécamp. It was here that Rose hoped to obtain fuel for the Garlic. She judged their progress as a tedious six knots. That meant five hours from Le Havre to Fécamp.

  Five hours had passed, and still her scouts had not spotted the lighthouse or the warning buoys that had been plainly identified on the chart as marking the entrance of the tiny harbor.

  Marie, blinking through the thick lenses of her spectacles, caught sight of a glimmer. She shouted cheerfully that the harbor for Madame Rose had been found. But it was merely the moving lights of some vehicle that, heedless of the blackout, had no covers on the headlamps.

  The breakers roared against the beaches to their right. The wind grew cold. Josie took Juliette, Yacov, and Marie below and covered them with coarse woolen blankets. Marie asked if Madame Rose would come to tuck her in. Would Madame Rose come and sing her to sleep and help her say her prayers?

  Explaining that Madame Rose was busy, Josie added that perhaps she would come later. She tried to stand in for the old woman’s nighttime ritual, but Marie was not content.

  “Madame Rose is steering the boat. The boat will rock you to sleep. Therefore, Madame Rose is rocking you to sleep.”

  This explanation satisfied Marie and she slept.

  Six hours passed. No harbor of Fécamp. Then seven. The engine chuffed onward.

  “We have missed Fécamp,” Rose said. “They blacked out their entrance lights and we sailed past them.”

  Josie wondered about the fuel.

  Lewinski taught Jerome, the five Austrian brothers, and the special children how to play a Polish tune on their whistles. They grew weary. Some went down to sleep out of the wind. Lewinski carried the boys who could not walk. He joked with them and asked Henri where he had gotten such fine boots.

  Josie thought that Lewinski was a very human fellow when he was pried away from his machine. He came up and played with his whistle, making a piping noise like a bird in a thunderstorm.

  The noise of the surf was more distant. Madame Rose corrected their course, bringing the vessel in parallel with the roar.

  Unable to stay awake any longer, Josie fell asleep against the heap of canvas of the sails. . . .

  When Josie awakened, it was still dark, and the shudder of the Garlic had stopped. The engine was silent. The vessel rocked gently on the swells. The crash of the breakers had shifted to the left side of the craft. Had they turned back? Had the engine failed?

  “Out of fuel,” Rose said to Lewinski when his mellow voice called from the nest he had made for himself beside the anchor.

  “Will we be caught in the breakers?” His voice was calm.

  “I think not. The current has us. We are somewhere between England and France, drifting very slowly toward America.”

  For hours the disabled Garlic floated in the current of the Channel. There seemed to be no help for it. Josie asked Madame Rose if they could put up the masts and pull up the sails.

  “Step the masts and hoist the sails,” Rose corrected. “No, dear, I’m afraid not. Even with everyone onboard, we are still not enough for a task like that. We will certainly fetch up somewhere. But don’t lose hope,” Rose told her. “Look how far we have come in this old tub of a ship.”

  The night itself gave no cause to feel frightened. The engineless boat was never completely quiet. The ancient hull creaked and groaned like a poor old soul with the miseries—definitely a complainer.

  Josie found herself wondering how far the barge had traveled in its lifetime, how many ports it had visited, how many strange cargos it had carried. She would bet that it had never seen passengers like this assortment, no matter how exotic its past.

  A low hum joined the squeak of the rigging. It grew in volume. The source of the noise was a puzzle. It seemed to come from all around, all at once.

  “Rose?”

  “I hear it, too,” Rose said.

  A gray hull loomed out of the darkness on the Garlic’s port beam. Madame Rose clanged the signal bell, the only warning device the barge carried. The clamor loudly pierced the stillness.

  A foghorn bellowed from the new ship—an angry sound. The prow of the vessel swung away from the Garlic, missing by fifty feet but still too close. Josie felt as if her heart would jump out of her chest.

  Another horn blasted from the other beam of the barge, then another from astern. “It’s a whole fleet!” Rose said. “Light the lantern, Josephine. Now it doesn’t matter who they are. We don’t want to be run down!”

  In response to Josie’s lantern, the first ship came alongside. Her bow said that she was the Lotte, and the square box of her pilothouse forward of the cargo boom said her home port was Harfleur.

  “Fishing trawler,” Madame Rose remarked.

  The children, awakened by the noise, poured up on deck.

  “What has happened?” Jerome asked. “Are we there yet?”

  A spotlight beam from the Lotte played over the deck
of the Garlic, making Josie and the children squint.

  “Mon dieu,” a voice said in French. “What is this? A floating nursery school?”

  “A kind of Noah’s ark,” Rose called back. “We are out of fuel. Can you spare us some?”

  “No, but we can give you a tow.”

  “Where are you bound?”

  “Does not everyone know? We are the fishing fleet of Harfleur, bound for Dunkirk to rescue our boys from the Boche!”

  ***

  The dunes north of Dunkirk bore the imprint of thousands of tramping boots.

  The tide was out, exposing a jetty made of lorries. A hundred yards up the beach two more piers had been constructed of freight barges that had been run aground and the bottoms knocked out. High and dry, they were now out of reach of the swarm of little ships, yet long lines of men stretched beyond them into the water.

  From the hills down to the water, the sand was littered with clumps of newly arrived men. Fifty or a hundred in a group, they gathered around their unit’s leader as if they were scouts on a campout.

  David and Badger joined a group of half a hundred from an artillery regiment. They were a sullen company, having retreated without ever firing a shot. The regiment had moved forward into Belgium on the first day of Blitzkrieg. But because of the refugees clogging the roads, they had stopped short of their preassigned position and withdrawn in the face of the German onslaught.

  They had been withdrawing ever since.

  Now they had been forced to abandon their weapons as well. An artilleryman who had been trained to fight from behind the breech of a cannon has no purpose in life when he has no artillery to fire. These men felt the shame of never having inflicted damage on the enemy. More than any group David had met, this regiment had accepted the stigma of running away.