by Bodie Thoene
“Would a chocolate bar do?” Mac offered, patting his pockets for the food pilfered from the NAAFI truck. “Or how about . . .” And he withdrew a jar of strawberry jam from his jacket.
It was probably cruel, but David could not resist opening the jar under Badger’s nose. The gauze twitched, and the big man said mournfully. “I must be a dead man, mates. Or I’m dreamin’. I can smell strawberries!”
***
The forty lather-flecked horses from the Ecole de Cavalerie carried double riders. Raymond and Gaston shared the bay gelding that had belonged to Sepp.
Two horses abreast in a column of twenty, the defenders of Lys approached the rubble of Dunkirk. The heads of the last footsore stragglers turned to stare after them.
“Cor! Hit’s a lot uv li’l boys! Brought their ’orses fer a bit uv polo wif Jerry!”
Gaston did not understand the English words, but he understood clearly the derisive laughter that followed.
Two sentries at the barricade stepped out in the road as the troop reined to a half. The dress uniforms of the cadets were torn and bloody, giving mute testimony to the action at the river, but these were still not like any uniforms the sentry had yet seen passing through Dunkirk.
“Cadet Officer Gaston Corbet.” Gaston saluted. “Ecole de Cavalerie.”
The BEF sentry rocked forward in surprise. Again the words were in English. “Looks like Napoleon’s chaps after Waterloo. S’pose we got us a bunch of ghosts, Bobby?”
“Jack! It’s those schoolboys who held Jerry off back at the river . . . at the hospital!”
“Ghosts. Like I said . . . thought they was all dead!”
“What do we do with them?”
“We can’t stop ghosts. Let ’em pass, I s’pose. Let ’em all pass.”
The sentry saluted Gaston smartly; then as the squadron trotted by he remarked, “Right. The new motto of the French Army. Let them pass .”
***
“You have to report your arrival so you can get on the list,” a sergeant at the western mole said, turning back the eighty cadets.
Twilight was gathering as the young soldiers of the Ecole de Cavalerie assembled outside the headquarters. While his fellows waited, Gaston was escorted into an office where a short, stocky British colonel was engaged in conversation with a subordinate.
At the sight of Gaston the colonel roared. “Good heavens! What are you supposed to be? Napoleon’s cavalry?”
“Cadet Officer Gaston Corbet. Ecole de Cavalerie. Ordered by Captain Paul Chardon to report for duty, sir!”
“The Ecole? I thought you were all dead.” The colonel’s French was very bad.
“There are eighty of us, sir. We will fight the Boche again if we can get out of here.”
The mocking smirk of the colonel vanished. He pulled himself to attention and snapped a salute. “Do you know you are heroes, Cadet Corbet?”
“No, sir.” Gaston’s eyes brimmed with emotion. “The heroes are the men who are still beside the River Lys.”
Minutes later, accompanied by the colonel, the eighty cadets marched to the head of the column of soldiers boarding ships on the western mole.
Small ships were ferrying men from the mole to the larger ships beyond the harbor. Three British fighter planes passed in formation overhead. Seconds later two more followed.
Andre, Gaston, and Raymond stood together silently on this last point of French soil jutting into the oil-coated waters of the Channel. How long would it be before they could come back to France? When would they face the German panzers again?
All hoped it would be soon. The cadets, conscious of the need to uphold the honor of their fallen comrades, marched proudly aboard the tug that carried them out to HMS Intrepid for the Channel crossing.
***
The high-pitched scream of an incoming artillery shell sent every man on the beach diving for cover.
Every man except Badger Cross.
Clutching his precious jar of strawberry jam, he stood and faced the sea as the wails of the French poilus were drowned by the boom and rumble of the explosion. A hail of sand and shrapnel fell down on the prostrate forms of the soldiers. The angry buzz of hot metal passed close by David’s ear to hiss into the dune.
Then silence.
Sounds resumed. The moans of the wounded. Choked sobs and the sounds of men retching with fear.
Then there was Badger.
David rolled onto his back to see who was alive and who was dead.
Badger’s shadow fell across his face. “Well, that was a close one,” Badger said calmly.
“Idiot!” David pulled Badger down onto the dune.
Badger was nonplussed. “I won’t eat it on French soil, and there’s an end to it.” He stood again and held the jar of berries heavenward, as if to offer thanks for a holy sacrament. “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”
“What’s he talking about?” Mac McGrath peered at the blind man suspiciously.
“I told you, he’s nuts,” David said.
“I won’t have my birthday tradition here with these Froggies. Tinman, get me out on the lorries. Out on the jetty there.”
“Tide’s coming in.”
“No matter. I won’t have my strawberries on this stinking beach. The roof of a sturdy British lorry. That’s the place for tea and cakes.”
Mac and David exchanged looks. Tea? Cakes? Mac touched his finger to his temple. “Bonkers.”
“I heard that.” Badger stretched out his hand and began to walk unescorted toward the sound of water. “I’ll have my birthday on the lorry jetty. And I’ll eat my strawberries and die a happy man. On English trucks. Good English-made trucks. A bit of England. Like a finger in the water pointing to England. To home. Off this bloody French ground. I won’t have it anywhere else.”
David let him weave toward the shoreline and in the direction of the jetty. Leaping to his feet as the whistle of a shell approached, David shouted, “Down, Badger!” and grabbed the blind man by the arm.
Badger resisted him, strengthened by determination. Shoving David to the ground, he waved his hands and pressed on in the general direction of the makeshift pier. “They can’t see me, Tinman,” he roared. “I’m invisible. . . .”
The last few words were lost beneath the shriek of the shell.
The sand erupted close by. But Badger walked on, unharmed, through the lethal rain of debris.
David jumped up and followed, suddenly filled with the eerie belief that blind Badger Cross, clutching his strawberries, had indeed become invisible to harm. An instant later they were joined by Mac, who muttered over and over, “Nuts. He’s nuts. We’re nuts. Nuts!”
David and Mac took Badger’s arms and guided him toward the jumble of troop lorries and equipment heaped in the water to make Badger’s little bit of England.
Behind them, geysers of soil and pulverized men leaped skyward in a dozen places along the dunes. In front of them was the lorry jetty, deserted and dismal, being swallowed by the returning tide. There were the remains of sunken ships, derelict and abandoned, and the drifting wreckage of men and machines.
A succession of explosions erupted one hundred yards up the beach. While David and Mac ducked and cringed, Badger pressed forward. There was a momentary lull.
“No worries . . . home today.” Badger raised the jar toward the Channel. “What’s that noise?”
David saw nothing, heard nothing. He looked over his shoulder, anticipating another barrage. “Your imagination.”
“No,” Badger insisted. “It’s there!” He stretched out a gauze-wrapped hand, now ragged and gray with dirt.
David followed the line of Badger’s arm along the jetty. Far beyond the end of the tide-washed equipment danced a dark speck.
“There is something. . . .” David’s voice trailed off.
Mac stripped off his jacket and waved it overhead.
“They’re still too far to see it,” David warned.
�
��The boat will come straight here.” Badger stepped into the water ahead of his companions.
The boat approached bow on, aimed unerringly toward the wharf. A black hull swelled into view, and a boxy superstructure reared itself above the swirl of the sea.
Far away thunder announced the nearing of another barrage, but David paid it no mind. The three waded into the surf and climbed onto a three-quarter-ton truck. David looked back to see other men staggering after them. Half running, half crawling, they emerged from the dunes until a new queue of several hundred snaked toward the water’s edge.
The lashings that secured the lorries were worn by the waves. The nose-to-tail formation of dark green metal beasts swayed with each new surge. A plank walkway, improvised from fence posts and scavenged driftwood, wobbled under David’s feet. In constant danger of pitching into the water, he helped Badger as they lurched from roof to roof.
“How many ships?” Badger cried.
David raised his eyes to count the formation of ships that seemed to suddenly materialize on the horizon behind the black hull of a river barge. How had Badger known there was more than one vessel coming? “I count a dozen!”
“How many men behind us?” Badger called the question over the tumult of artillery and the clanking of shifting metal against the tide.
From the veil of smoke wafting across the dunes still more ragged soldiers stumbled out until the number in the queue was perhaps half a thousand. They crept forward, struggling to climb onto the shifting pier.
“Five hundred, about,” Mac shouted as he leaped from the hood of one truck onto the swamped bed of another.
“How far to the end of the jetty?” Badger asked as David helped him across the gulf.
“We’re almost there. Two more lorries ahead and we’re home!”
The jetty groaned beneath the weight and movement of the troops. For an instant the roar of the German guns fell silent, only to be replaced by the more ominous hum of approaching aircraft engines.
A collective moan rose from the jetty. Faces craned skyward in dread. A few men jumped into the water and began to swim back toward the beach.
“Home today, boys!” Badger braced himself on the wood-plank walkway and raised the jar of jam as if it could somehow ward off imminent death.
David crouched and tugged at Badger, who swatted his hand away and faced the oncoming buzz head-on.
“Get down!” Mac cried.
Badger laughed and began to sing:
“The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain!
His blood red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?”
Then exclamations of joy resounded up and down the line.
“It’s the RAF!” A spontaneous cheer as a trio of Hurricanes roared in low from the sun and dipped their wings in salute as they passed overhead.
Guardian angels with Merlin engines, they circled above the beach as the school of French fishing vessels moved in.
David, Mac, and Badger reached the end of the jetty as hundreds more crammed in behind them.
“Here we are, Tinman. At the head of the line at last!” Badger opened his strawberries, dipped one unbandaged finger in to scoop out the red goo, and sucked it off.
“Happy birthday, Badger,” David said.
The three men sat on the half-submerged hood, their legs dangling in the water. “I had this vision.” Badger licked his fingers. “It was the ship . . . you know? The boat . . . the Lady of Avalon who carried off King Arthur. Always loved that part of the legend. Now, Tinman, tell me what you see.”
“I only wish I had my camera,” muttered Mac. “Nobody’s gonna believe this.” The newsman stood and shook his head.
“I’m not sure I believe it!” David whistled low at the incarnation of Badger’s vision.
“Well?” Badger croaked impatiently.
David clambered to his feet. “She’s not a magic boat from Avalon. More like Tugboat Annie, but she’ll do.” David waved broadly as a low, broad-hulled barge chugged up to the jetty. It was piloted by a thickset woman with a scowl that would have made the Führer cringe. On her shoulder perched a large white rat, who studied the approach intently.
“Give a hand!” The woman’s voice was as gruff as a stevedore’s. “You think we’ve got all day? Lewinski! Step lively with those ropes!”
Tending the bow rope was a gangly, red-haired apparition wearing a gas mask. At the stern was a slim, pretty, sunburned woman who shouted at Mac McGrath, “Where’s your camera?”
He shrugged, pointed at the water. “Thought you’d never get here.” He laughed with relief, then caught the cable, tying it off to the grill of the lorry.
As the Hurricanes boomed overhead, the faces of a half-dozen children popped out of the hatch. The old woman at the helm scowled down at them until they vanished again, then waved to the assembled troops to begin embarking.
Arthur Badger Cross led the men on board.
***
The Royal Navy MTB 102 cruised slowly by the Dunkirk shore, just as the ninth day of the greatest military rescue in the history of the world was ending.
Over the loud-hailer of the motor torpedo boat the sailors called out in both French and English, “Is anyone still there? There will be no more boats. Is anyone there?”
A pudgy figure emerged from the cellar doors beside a demolished house. In one hand he waved a bottle of champagne. “Here,” he said. “Do not forget me!”
When he was hauled aboard, he smelled of brandy, wine, and pâté de foie gras. Over his shoulder he carried a bag that jingled suspiciously like silverware. “Poilu Jardin, at your service. I was a guest of the mayor of the town. Perhaps you know him? A great capitalist, but a friend of the common man!”
***
While the others slept in heaps of exhaustion, Gaston and Andre sat quietly together in the stern of the destroyer Intrepid.
What disturbed Gaston most were his thoughts about the heroes who remained behind: Captain Chardon, Sepp, the other cadets . . . they would not be remembered long. Perhaps in fifty years the battle of the Ecole de Cavalerie would be a forgotten fragment of the story of Dunkirk—lost in some dusty archive.
“So many . . . who will know them?” Gaston asked bitterly.
Andre sat without speaking for a long time. “Dust of heroes,” he whispered at last. “God will know you!”
EPILOGUE
Heaps of bones once moved by the proud breath of life
Scattered limbs, nameless debris, chaos of humanity,
Sacred jumble of a vast reliquary,
Dust of heroes, God will know you!
War memorial at Louvemont
Journalist John Murphy sat beside Mac McGrath in the packed, airless gallery of the British House of Commons as Winston Churchill summed up the Miracle of Dunkirk.
Over 300 thousand troops had been removed from the beaches of France by a heroic civilian navy of little ships.
The Garlic, which had carried Josephine Marlow, Richard Lewinski, and a company of assorted refugee children, including Yacov Lubetkin, did not lose even one passenger in the escape from Paris to the haven of England. Piloted by Madame Rose, the survival of the precious human cargo of the Garlic was perhaps among the greatest miracles of that day. Now Madame Rose and the children were on their way to the farm in Wales where Elisa Murphy and Lori Kalner and the others lived. Word had even come that Madame Rose’s sister, Betsy, and the other orphans of No. 5 Rue de la Huchette had likewise escaped the Nazis’ clutches.
Mac considered how quickly their lives had changed. The past days had made it clear that time was too precious to waste.
Richard Lewinski had been shuttled off to an undisclosed British government intelligence site to continue his work deciphering the Nazi codes. The countless Allied victories that would come from his survival were yet to be told.
Josie was reunited with Andre Chardon within hours of her arrival in England. They married the same night in
a little chapel in Hampstead.
Mac and Eva likewise determined to marry by the end of the week. Together they would travel to Jerusalem to take Yacov Lubetkin home to his waiting grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Lebowitz.
Eva had held the child and whispered to Mac, “I will continue to pray for his sister. For his family in Poland. We Jews believe that if even one Jewish life is saved . . . to save even one . . . is like saving the whole world. Could it be that everything—everything—can be changed for the good by even one life? Can it be, Mac? It must be so. That in God’s eyes even one is as precious as the universe. Only one can make such a difference in the world that someday evil will be defeated.”
Mac had not believed it before Dunkirk, but now? Who could deny that only one person could change the course of history and eternity?
Dust of heroes, God will know you!
And so, lives that seemed so horribly interrupted by tragedy and war paused only long enough to take a breath and then continue on at a more rapid pace.
All these thoughts were fresh in Mac’s mind as he listened to the stirring words of the British prime minister.
Winston Churchill praised the heroism of the civilian sailors and marveled at the massive accomplishment but warned that wars were not won by evacuations. Even so, God had given England and the world another chance.
It seemed to Mac that the fate of the free world had somehow turned upon the hinge of Dunkirk’s miracle. Somehow, Churchill said, England would survive the storms of tyranny that beat upon her shores. His words of hope and courage in the face of so great a disaster were heard around the world:
“We shall go on to the end! We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!”