The Dearest and the Best

by Leslie Thomas

  ‘Whoa!’ shouted the man dressed as a woman. ‘Look what we got here – it’s the wanking navy. Late again!’

  Harry felt paralysed by the sight, its horror, its sadness, its shame. The sailors around him stood astonished. Trembling, like a man confronting a nightmare, he stepped forward. ‘Chaps –’ he began.

  His very tone of voice and the one word he ill-advisedly picked brought raucous reactions from the soldiers. ‘Chaps?’ demanded the female impersonator. ‘Who are you calling “chaps”?’ He advanced belligerently and produced a revolver from the ridiculous handbag he swung. ‘How d’you like a flash of the knickers, then?’ he screeched and lifting his skirt displayed a thick pair of thighs clad in ivory silk drawers. The audience behind howled with hilarity and the demonstrator turned to demonstrate how he had done it. Harry moved forward quickly and sensed his men move fractionally after him. But the blowsy mob leader returned in an instant and Harry found the revolver pointed directly at him from a range of four feet. He prudently stopped.

  Silence fell across the torn square, an enclosed silence, with the echoes of war, the resounding explosions and the crackle of fires still coming from all around. The soldiers in the group were all armed. The man with the shop window dummy let her fall over his shoulder and levelled his rifle. The wheelbarrow was set down and the lolling corpse carefully rearranged.

  Sweat was flooding Harry’s face and inside his shirt, trickling down his belly and loins. ‘I order you to lower those weapons,’ he said, his voice emerging like a croak. ‘Otherwise you can face the consequences.’

  Wrath now replaced derision on the painted face of the man at the front. ‘You . . . you order us. You ain’t seen a fucking German yet! We ’ave – plenty of the bastards . . . And you . . .’

  Harry believed he was about to shoot. He lifted his own revolver a fraction, ready to fire directly at the green-bloused chest. He was shivering, very afraid. Then, like a walk-on in some comedy, the first soldier wandered across from the table at the side of the square. ‘He’s all right, mucker,’ he assured the mob leader. He pointed at Harry. ‘He’s going to get us all home.’

  ‘Home?’ The word spread itself through the soldiers. ‘Home . . .? Home . . .?’ The astonishment on their faces indicated they had not even considered the possibility. ‘Home?’ said the man at the front, making it sound a very long word. ‘And how you going to do that, then? There’s no way to get in the port, I heard that already. So don’t try that on ’ere, mate.’

  ‘He promised,’ said the soldier from the table. ‘On ’is ’onour.’ He turned to Harry. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘We are going to the beaches of La Panne,’ said Harry succinctly. ‘In these vehicles. Embarkation is taking place there at this moment.’ It was only half a lie and it would do for the while.

  The new silence remained over the soldiers. Then the man with the tailor’s dummy picked it up from the cobbles and said, ‘Come on, darling, we’re going ’ome.’ A murmur of approval went along the mouths of the men.

  The man in women’s clothes let the pistol down slowly. ‘You mean it?’ he inquired. ‘You’re not bloody ’aving us on?’

  Breathing with relief, Harry said carefully, ‘It’s either that or you stay here and wait for Jerry.’ He pointed at the man’s costume. ‘And you wouldn’t want the Germans to come and find you looking like that, would you?’

  ‘No,’ shuddered the soldier. He was trembling like a man in shock. ‘No, I wouldn’t either . . . sir.’

  It was Andrews who finally organized the loading of the soldiers into the first truck. Cheerful and cherubic, he shepherded them aboard like a Sunday school superintendent taking children on an outing. They abandoned their strange clothes and accoutrements without fuss, suddenly sober and compliant, weariness hanging on them. The man who had been sitting at the café table with the teddy bear handed it to Andrews, who announced that together with Jesus Christ it would now be their official mascot.

  He said ‘Jesus Christ’ in a stentorian voice, surprising when it issued from such a squat man, and with such different intonation to the usual military use of the words that some of the tired soldiers looked curiously at him. But he knew when he had a willing audience and as they drove away, through the ragged streets, east towards La Panne, he had them singing with revived spirits:

  ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,

  A sunbeam, a sunbeam,

  I’ll be a sunbeam for Him.’

  Harry allowed a moment to watch with admiration and then turned his attention to the rest of the men and the vehicles. One of the hands had got the second one-tonner started and Harry instructed him to drive it carefully through the town with the other members of the naval party in two single files, one on either side.

  As they walked the whole spectre of the defeat was there to see, and the terrible shame, the ignominy that would be deeply known and wounding to the men who were present. They had been betrayed by politicians, by fifth columnists and traitors, some by their commanders, and now like lost and laggard lemmings they were left to make their way to the sea as best they could. They came through the deranged streets and squares of the ancient port, feet burned and blistered with walking through the summer heat, faces tarnished with blood and oil, some with their rifles, some with hardly any clothing. They wandered, scores at a time, each with the same bemused, confused, shocked expression that said this could not be happening to a British army.

  Men came in wriggling columns, trudging by the naval patrol and its vehicle, hardly sparing the sailors a second glance, and sometimes none at all. Harry found himself calling to deaf ears and attempting to attract the attention of glazed eyes. In the end he was merely pointing north and saying: ‘That way, lads, keep going. That’s the way to the sea.’ As if they did not know.

  The courage was chastening. Those who could still walk he allowed to continue, but then came a man pulling another on a milkman’s handcart. Harry ordered him on to the lorry and they carried the borne man carefully, for he was sorely wounded. When they started again, going back in the direction from which the pair had come, the soldier who had done the wheeling began to laugh emptily. ‘I’ve just walked all this way, miles and miles,’ he complained. ‘I should have sat down and waited.’

  They found no more drunken or wild men, just beaten and disillusioned warriors, tramping on until they reached the coast to fall face forward into the cooling sea, wallowing there like seaside bathers.

  A soldier rode a bone-thin horse, sweat dripping down its neck like soap, and across the rump were two others, lying flat on their stomachs, one hanging one way, one another. The horse saw the lorry and, its task done, it stumbled gently and without fuss on to its knees, depositing the rider on to the cobbles and causing the other men to slide off. The horse simply rolled on its side, as if to gain a more comfortable and becoming posture for death. It half raised its head once, looking hopefully towards the sailors in the truck, and then laid it quietly, inert among the debris. The two men on its rump began crawling towards the lorry on their hands and knees and the man who had ridden it, croaked: ‘Come on, will you! Help them! Help them!’

  The naval men carried the soldiers on to the truck. An army orderly whom they had found in the town was using up his supply of dressings and syringes quickly. Harry could hardly look at the stony faces of the injured men, but they were scarcely less frightening than the expressions of the walking troops that walked and walked, on and on. There were thousands. How could an army of such numbers just be reduced to this awful defeated crocodile? How would they ever get them from the port and from the beaches? An officer in a mud-streaked uniform walked along, still upright, beside his men. He and Harry saluted awkwardly. The soldiers trudged on. ‘Nearly there,’ encouraged Harry. ‘It’s less than a mile now.’

  ‘I know,’ replied the officer. ‘I can smell the ozone.’ He looked with compassion on the soldiers. ‘They’ve been marching like this for days. There’s been nothing to eat. The people woul
dn’t give us anything. They spat at us for running away.’ He looked pleadingly. ‘I don’t know what they expected.’

  Harry voiced his doubts about the embarkation. ‘The port is so damaged they’re only getting them off slowly,’ he warned reluctantly. ‘And I would think that only small boats will be able to get to the beaches. I can’t see how it can be done.’

  The officer sniffed. ‘These people,’ he said sharply, ‘will be glad just to bathe their feet.’ He saluted stiffly and dragged himself after his troops.

  Another vehicle appeared in the dust at the end of a long avenue. For a fearful moment Harry thought it might be the advancing Germans. But it materialized through the dusk as a bumping, bucking refuse cart, staggering along on a burst front tyre. It was loaded with silent soldiers.

  By now the naval party had collected a full load of wounded and lame men. Harry ordered the driver to turn and drive back to the beach. He called the rest of the party to halt and they sat on the benches of a small and strangely undisturbed park, to await the return of Andrews and the first truck. Fires were burning in the streets that turned off from the little square. A burst gas main sent a brilliant fountain of flame shooting as high as the houses. To his amazement Harry saw a woman walking unhurriedly along the pavement, picking her way over rubble; a stolid woman with a shawl and a shopping basket. He watched her and saw that she went to a shop at the corner of the park where other customers were emerging with loaves of bread. Hardly able to credit it, he got up slowly and walked to the trees at the edge of the park. Not only was there a bakery doing business, but a greengrocer was trying to arrange some vegetables on a barrow, and – Harry could scarcely believe his eyes – a bistro had its doors open at a corner and through that and a shattered window he could see there were customers drinking at the bar.

  As if going to view some psychic manifestation, he almost tiptoed across the street. As he reached the door his way was barred by two Frenchmen. No, he could not enter. There was no room, they said.

  ‘Monsieur,’ shrugged one man, ‘the English are escaping. We must stay. It is we who need the drink.’

  Eleven

  AT THREE IN the morning Lennie Dove was at the wheel of the paddle steamer. He was only now getting used to the feel of the strange little craft, and the other vessels, with scarcely a discernible light between them, made navigation a hazard. Several times during his spell he had heard voices calling out to each other in anger or in warning. But the difficulties were compensated by the luminous quality of the calm sea, almost glowing, and the surprising speed that the Sirius could make. They were at the front of the convoy and twice he had needed to call his brother, in the engine room, for a reduction of knots, because he saw the large stern of HMS Avalon towering close ahead.

  Lennie felt neither brave nor afraid. He would not have been anywhere else that night and, he knew, neither would his brother. His thoughts, however, wandered off to bright days fishing off the Isle of Wight, to nights spent having a silent smoke while they trawled the nets and waited for the mackerel to come, to clay-coloured afternoons in winter, working on the boat in harbour until it was time to go home in the four o’clock dark. It was peaceful then. He wanted those times to come again.

  But if he were not afraid, he had within him, as did his brother, a small relic of superstition, a residue of the suspicions of the sailor, particularly the fisherman, going through generations of men who had dealings with the mysterious sea. Between them this was unspoken, but it was there; no one should whistle aboard a vessel at sea, pigs and clergymen were unwelcome as passengers (an excuse, however, for a timely washing-out of the hull, after they had disembarked). Although they laughed in the crowd of the four-ale bar at sea-ghosts, crewless ships, mermaids and monsters, and liked to tell stories about them, at the expense of the gullible, alone on deck at night it was different. An odd, dark wave, a silent vessel passing close to, a nameless cry or shadows cast by the maritime moon, all held the possibility of unwelcome magic.

  Thus, towards the end of his watch, Lennie became uncomfortably aware of something moving and pale in the dark on the forepart of the ship, a white shadow against the luminous sea, and a whispering that just hissed above the wave sounds. As he stared at it there came the distinct sound of a little bell.

  He began to stare and sweat. There it was again, a white moving presence and a distinct tinkle. He tentatively reached out for the tube through which he could call the engine room. ‘Pete,’ he said, keeping his voice level. ‘Come up and ’ave a look at this.’

  His brother poked his head from the hatch and mounted the steps to the wheelhouse. The paddle steamer was splashing through the peaceful night scarcely lifting her bows to the waves. ‘There,’ said Lennie. ‘For’ard. Can’t make it out. It moves . . . and it’s got a little bell.’

  ‘A bell?’ Peter sniffed towards Lennie’s breath.

  ‘A bell,’ repeated Lennie. The tinkle sounded obediently. ‘There,’ said Lennie.

  ‘Christ, what is it?’ whispered Peter.

  ‘We’ll soon know – here it comes.’

  The pale shape moved towards them, humped, indistinct, but with the bell now jangling with every movement. Peter’s hand went to Lennie’s shoulder. As they watched, so it advanced along the rail. Then a face like ash lifted itself.

  ‘’Tis that daft boy,’ breathed Lennie. ‘The kid from London.’

  ‘What’s he doing with a bell?’

  ‘God knows.’ Lennie leaned out of the wheelhouse and peered down. ‘Sleep-walking,’ he announced. ‘And he’s got the bell fixed on his ankle.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Better get him back to his berth.’

  ‘Don’t wake him,’ warned Lennie. ‘He might jump over the side.’

  Peter climbed down and took the boy, clad in striped pyjamas, to the companionway and, bell still sounding at each step, led him down below. Lennie turned the wheel a fraction. A sliver of dawn was coming up over the far rim of the sea. He began to laugh at himself.

  Willy Cubbins pushed his head cautiously from the companionway of the paddle steamer and looked out in astonishment on the amazing scene of sea and shore. The Sirius was lying off Dunkirk’s east mole, a pier built out as a sea protection, not meant for the use of ships or men. The sky was blotched with smoke, through which, like fairytale patches of a man’s trousers, areas of striking blue showed, and sometimes beams of wry sunshine.

  The boy looked first towards the port. Explosions rumbled from the distance, low burping explosions. He could see the fire sprinkling the harbour front, and what he first took to be fences or groynes, men lining up on the beaches. Then he gazed about him at the sea. It was like some mad regatta, ships and boats cramming the oily water. Far out, big grey war vessels waited in silhouette. Close in, busy launches moved, apparently haphazardly. Between the two were coasters and cruisers, ferries and fishers, tramp steamers and other craft to which he could not put a name. He wondered where the Germans were.

  Robert Lovatt, steel-helmeted and rubber-booted, appeared around the wheelhouse. ‘Like Cowes, eh, son? What a sight indeed. Like St Crispin’s day. Something to tell your grandchildren.’

  ‘I ain’t got any,’ said the boy.

  Peter Dove and Petrie came around the deck. Lennie was on the wheel. Lampard was taking a sleep. Petrie said: ‘Looks like they’ve decided to try and get a vessel alongside the mole, Mr Lovatt. They’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Never get nothing but a trickle of men through the jetty,’ put in Peter. ‘You can see that from here.’ He patted Willy on the shoulder. ‘You all right this morning, son?’

  The others looked puzzled. ‘I can make some tea if you like,’ said the boy and went below.

  Peter said to Robert: ‘He was sleep-walking last night. He had a cow-bell tied to his foot.’

  ‘That’s to stop him falling overboard,’ mumbled Robert absently.

  As he said the words a flight of three German fighter bombers came from nowhere, at a hundred and fif
ty feet, and dropped a straddle of bombs. A forest of water erupted between them and the soldiers on the mole half a mile away. The boat rocked like a cradle.

  ‘Missed,’ said Peter. No one else said anything.

  ‘They’re trying to get the Gosport Queen into the mole,’ pointed out Petrie.

  Lampard appeared, blinking, on the deck. ‘Ah, that’s who she is,’ he said. He raised his glasses. ‘Lovely old thing. Remember the evening trips she used to run to Ryde? Beer and a band on deck.’

  The pleasure steamer was edging closer and closer to the mole, the wooden breadth only five feet, the water depth hardly more. They watched as, a foot at a time, the steamer eased in. At any moment she could be aground.

  ‘If she sticks they’ll never get her off,’ said Peter. His brother shouted from the wheelhouse, ‘They’ll never get her alongside there. There’s not water enough.’

  Lampard, watching the manoeuvre through his glasses, said thoughtfully, ‘Sirius might do it, though. Otherwise those troops are going to be stuck there.’

  Petrie said: ‘We ought to have a go, didn’t we?’

  From the hatch behind them issued the disembodied sound of a gramophone record. Willy Cubbins had put it on. Robert began to smile. ‘Nice touch, Elgar,’ he beamed at Lampard. ‘A sense of occasion.’

  ‘I only have the Pomp and Circumstance Marches and the Summer in the South overture,’ answered Lampard. He abruptly turned and picked up a loudhailer. A naval launch was coming on a course which would take her to within calling distance. ‘Ahoy there!’ Lampard bellowed. ‘Have you got a moment?’

  The pinnace slowed to the unseamanlike question. In the midships was an officer in a huge blue jersey and thighboots. ‘What is it, Sirius? Do you want to have a try? I was just coming to suggest it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Lampard. ‘We just might get in. We only need half a cupful.’