The Dearest and the Best

by Leslie Thomas

  The man in the launch laughed. ‘Right you are, Sirius,’ he said. ‘I’ll go in close now. Wait for my signal. Then it’s up to you. Good luck.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ breathed Lampard. ‘The old tub is going to make history.’ He climbed like a boy to the wheelhouse. Lennie Dove glanced at him. ‘Stay on the wheel, son,’ said Lampard. ‘You’ve got the feel of her now. I might start shaking. I’ll talk you in.’

  They waited. It was a strange, isolated drama, as if what they were attempting was insulated from the great event that was taking place around them. The naval launch fired a green light. ‘Let’s have a try,’ whispered Lampard. ‘Slow ahead.’

  ‘Slow ahead,’ repeated the helmsman.

  As they manoeuvred the ungainly craft, the paddles waddling, so they saw the multitude of soldiers waiting bravely and patiently on the shore, lining up as if expecting some huge theatre to open its doors. ‘We’ve got to get in,’ muttered Robert. ‘We’ve got to get those chappies off.’

  He turned and climbed down through the hatch. ‘I think a little more music is in order,’ he called behind him. In the saloon Willy was pouring tea from an enamel pot into an array of mugs. Robert took one and then said, as if he had suddenly thought it was important for the boy to be informed: ‘We’re trying to get alongside the mole. If we don’t the entire show could be ruined.’ He moved towards the portable gramophone. ‘Wound up, is it, son?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Mr Lovatt. He’s brought some rotten records though. No dance music.’

  Robert picked up a record and examined the needle on the large silver pick-up arm. ‘Elgar,’ he announced, ‘is more suited for an occasion like this.’ He read the label. ‘March: Pomp and Circumstance,’ he recited.

  ‘Terrible row it is,’ sniffed the boy.

  Robert placed the record on the velvet round of the turn-table and pushed over the switch. The quiet opening of the military march sounded through the cabin. He changed the direction of the speaker-horn so that the music would go out on to the deck. He then made for the companionway steps, singing along with the tune:

  ‘Britons shall be free,

  March with me to Liberty,

  Brutes and braggarts may,

  Have their little day,

  We shall never bow the . . .’

  What Britons would not bow he never uttered because a blinding explosion threw the vessel sideways, as if a massive hand had struck it. It rolled and violently righted. The aircraft noise came afterwards. Then another detonation. Robert was knocked forward and gained his wind and his feet only to be knocked down again. The needle scratched all across the record and stuck in a groove which ran wildly sending out an animal screech.

  Robert got to his knees and reached the deck, his steel helmet fallen forward over his forehead. When he pulled it straight he saw that a huge hole had been bitten into the wooden mole. The vessel ahead, the old pleasure steamer, was on fire and the men were scrambling down her sides. Some of them were screaming and in flames. The naval launch was broken in half and there were bodies in the water where ponds of oil flamed fiercely.

  On their own vessel John Lampard was bleeding from a dozen cuts in his face. Ineffectually Robert attempted to wipe away the blood with a handkerchief, like someone half-heartedly cleaning a window. Lampard said: ‘There’s a first-aid box in the wheelhouse. Don’t mess up your handkerchief.’

  Robert brought the box out. The smoke from the burning oil filled his mouth, making him splutter and cough. As he began to wipe at the lacerations, Lampard sat slowly upright, staring unbelievingly through the blood. ‘Perhaps Elgar isn’t enough,’ he remarked sadly.

  A small drifter had materialized through the smoke and was courageously pulling aside the burning Gosport Queen. Petrie, in the wheelhouse of the Sirius now, was amazed to see the naval officer who had been in the destroyed launch standing quite jauntily on the wooden mole, calling through a loudhailer like a man coaching a boat-race crew.

  ‘Right you are, Sirius, come on in, now. Slow ahead, if you please, Sirius, slowly.’

  Petrie, with Peter Dove taking the wheel, edged the awkward paddle steamer inch by inch to the wooden mole. The paddles gurgled and turned, throwing up brown water and sand. The naval officer peered earnestly over the side of the wooden planks like someone looking for fish, and then got down on his stomach and looked even more closely. ‘Yes, yes,’ he called, lifting his head to shout through the megaphone. ‘Yes, very good, Sirius, I think you’re going to make it. Yes, splendid, very gently now . . . very gently . . .’

  From the deck of the paddle steamer the crew watched the man on the mole with fascination. Fire and oily smoke were still all around. Explosions, far and near, sounded like drum-beats. Men were still being pulled, just alive or dead, from the water. But the naval man was only occupied with the calm business of getting the vessel alongside. Eventually, and with a scarcely contained joy, they felt the paddle steamer touch the piers of the mole. The naval man got to his feet in one movement like a gymnast who has finished a session of press-ups.

  ‘Good, good, fine . . . Well done, Sirius.’ He turned and called back down the wooden jetty. ‘Right you are, army. First section first. No rushing. And don’t fall down the holes.’

  In tired formation the first soldiers began to appear along the walkway. They had to climb across debris and skirt around the two big apertures made by the German bombs. Engineers were already bringing up railway sleepers to fill the gaps. The evacuation was going forward.

  The first soldiers reached the deck of the Sirius, stumbling, tumbling thankfully down, blind-eyed, black-faced, riven with despair and weariness. Robert could hardly believe it. This was the size of defeat. ‘Any more for The Skylark?’ called Petrie from the wheelhouse. The relief of getting the craft alongside had given him optimism.

  Some of the men laughed in a way, but most were too numbed to react. They went passively to corners of the deck and sat down in rows like obedient infants. Soon the deck was a cobble of helmets and heads. Willy Cubbins and Robert, the boy and the elder man, went below, reappearing with cigarettes and mugs of tea which the soldiers took gratefully, but still sharing the gifts with those around them.

  ‘Cast off, Sirius,’ called the naval officer. ‘Proceed to HMS Benbow. Two miles out. She’ll signal you. Disembark troops and then come back for another lot. Well done.’

  As the pot-bellied paddle steamer cleared the shore, the German planes came back, appearing like flattened hands in the sky. Three of them broke away from the formation and came in low with machine guns winking on their wings. There was nothing to do but to crouch.

  The bullets ripped into the deck of the Sirius, throwing men about like bales of hay. Smoke and screams were everywhere, the soldiers desperately trying to hide under any projection of the deck or pulling down the inadequate domes of their steel helmets. ‘Bastards,’ grated Petrie, getting up from the floor of the wheelhouse. Then, illogically, like a man with some secret plan: ‘Just wait. Just you wait.’

  They began to extract the casualties from the mass of men on deck. Four were corpses, bloodied ragbags, their faces fixed with the dismay of death. Eight more were wounded and they manhandled them below and laid them on the galley tables. A soldier stumbled out of the mass and said he was a medical orderly. They got together all the field dressings they could find and Willy Cubbins and Robert brought bowls and buckets of water. As they carried them, an odd team, Willy said, as if desperate to share a confession: ‘I go sleep-walking some nights, Mr Lovatt.’

  ‘Very dangerous thing to do,’ answered Robert.

  ‘I know. I have to wear a cow-bell on my leg.’

  The wounded men remained shocked and still, as if frightened to move in case they damaged themselves further, or unconscious, or just whimpering and shivering like men lying in snow. The medical orderly said they needed more dressings. ‘Lad,’ said Robert. ‘Go and see if any more of the chaps on deck have got field dressings. Anything will do. And we’ll have t
o start tearing up shirts and vests.’

  ‘All right,’ mumbled the boy. The wounds and the noise had unnerved him but he went on to the open deck again. They had sailed beyond the area of smoke and were now slowly making up the distance to where the aldis lamp from the distant destroyer called them under wan sunshine. ‘Anybody got any bandages?’ he called loudly to the men. ‘Or any vests?’

  At that moment one of the planes returned, anxious to make a final run before its efforts would bring it too close to the destroyer. Other vessels were chugging to and fro across the exposed sea, but the pilot made single-mindedly for the obese paddle steamer. He fired again as he drove the length of the ship. Men scrambled and screamed. There was a separate explosion at the bow where the grenade in a man’s ammunition pouch was hit and exploded, tearing the wearer almost in half and killing the man next to him. Shouting obscenities another man stood up and leaped into the sea and drowned while imploring the boat to return because he had changed his mind.

  Willy, gripped by panic, stumbled across men, alive and dead, to get to the companionway. He felt himself pulled below and a stranger’s voice calling: ‘The lad’s bleeding. Here he is. Do something for him. He’s only a lad.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Willy heard himself babbling. ‘It’s all right. It’s only my pimples. It bleeds, see. My acne . . . It’s only my bleeding acne!’

  When the puffing paddle steamer made its second trip to the mole, Petrie, from the wheelhouse, saw that the evacuation was working. There were now half a dozen vessels alongside the flimsy structure, all of them taking on men. The fires still smoked and the planes made further runs, but the departures went on. ‘It’s going to work,’ said Petrie to Lampard who, patched and bandaged, had returned to the wheelhouse.

  ‘It’s time we had a share of the luck,’ said Lampard. He patted the wood of the superstructure as if in superstition or encouragement to the boat.

  It edged, like a plump and reluctant dancer, towards the mole once more. The queues of soldiers stretched far along it until they were diminished to dots in the distance. They waited with brave patience, each for his individual deliverance.

  ‘Why is she called Sirius?’ asked Petrie, eyeing the closing gap.

  Lampard grinned through the plaster cradling his jaw. ‘Named after the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. She was a paddler too. Got into New York a nose ahead of Brunel’s Great Britain.’

  The same naval officer was calling them alongside. ‘Hello, Sirius,’ he bawled through the hailer. ‘Welcome back.’ He looked up the mole. ‘Something different for you this time,’ he called, turning back to them. ‘Very different.’

  Along the mole tramped a formation of grim men in light blue uniforms and short boots. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Petrie as the others looked on astounded. ‘They’re Jerries.’

  ‘Take these Luftwaffe chaps off, will you, Sirius,’ called the man on the mole cheerfully. ‘Get them sorted out on deck. We’ll get you an escort, but we don’t expect a mutiny.’

  ‘I suppose it’s nice to return with prisoners,’ offered Robert Lovatt doubtfully after a long, stunned silence.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Peter Dove. ‘All our blokes waiting and we get a cargo of Krauts.’

  The Germans filled the deck space, sitting down silently and watching the amazing operation proceeding. ‘Here’s the escort,’ called the naval man who was enjoying himself. ‘Anybody speak Senegalese?’

  Along the mole came a dozen immensely tall black soldiers in French uniform. ‘They’re not armed,’ assured the naval officer. ‘Their rifles went adrift somewhere.’ The Africans clambered to the deck and stood regarding the Germans with a unanimous lack of expression. Their eyes were blank and white.

  ‘Righto, Sirius,’ called the man on the mole. ‘Off you go. Have a good trip.’

  At La Panne, to the east of Dunkirk, were some of the longest stretches of uninterrupted sand in Europe, dunes like waves gradually flattening as they reached the shoreline. The sea was shallow and calm. Soldiers bathed their feet in it like children at the peacetime seaside; others played football when there were no enemy aircraft above, and the sorties of the Luftwaffe were kept mercifully low because of loitering cloud, poor planning and the attendant RAF fighters. There was a church in the dunes, a makeshift cross in the sand and an amphitheatre for the congregation, many of whom had never before been to a place of religion. Others had dug foxholes in the sand, deep enough for protection, but not so deep that you could be buried alive by a random bomb. There the army, hundreds of thousands, waited to be picked up and taken home. Most of them played cards.

  ‘God,’ sighed Harry Lovatt looking out over the long scene. ‘How the hell do they expect to get this lot away?’ He drove down to the beaches. Great assemblies of men were leading off to thin queues imperturbably waiting to be put aboard the small boats, which could get close enough inshore, to be ferried out to the deeper water and larger ships. Men waded out to the boats, sometimes further than they could reach; some drowned without fuss at the last step, their bodies floating away to join others in the shallows.

  Outside the town the salient was holding, the British and French troops dug in, bravely and bitterly holding the line so that the majority could escape. The German tanks had not materialized; Hitler, with one of the aberrations that were his great weakness, had ordered them to halt, but the town was now within range of the German medium artillery and they sent a monotonous and deadly bombardment into its already burning ruins.

  Harry Lovatt’s party had been ferrying men to La Panne all day. He had driven the one-tonner himself with a clutch of dead-tired Belgian soldiers in the back. The moment their king had surrendered his country to the Germans they had begun to walk resignedly west.

  As he turned the vehicle in a semicircle on the firmer ground before the loose sand began, Harry saw a British army officer and two men approaching. ‘Sub-Lieutenant,’ the officer called breathlessly, ploughing through the sand, ‘how many serviceable vehicles are there in the town? Any idea?’

  The man was a Royal Engineers captain, burned by days of exposure and dark-ringed below the eyes. There was a quartermaster sergeant with him and another NCO.

  ‘There are vehicles left all over the place, sir,’ Harry replied. ‘There’s a whole lot, dozens, in a field waiting to be burned.’

  ‘Right, that’s what I hoped,’ said the captain. ‘We’re going to try something. We’ve got to get these men off the beach quicker than this. The damned war will be over by the time we get everyone away at the rate we’re going.’

  Harry waited. The officer was peering backwards down to the water’s edge and the waiting lines of troops. ‘We’ve laid a bit of a track with various stuff from here to the shore, as you can see,’ he said. He half-turned to the quartermaster sergeant. ‘Let’s just see if it works better than the steamer.’ He nodded out to a pleasure boat lodged in the shallows. ‘It was worth a try,’ he sighed. ‘But it didn’t succeed.’

  He seemed so weary that he had to make a conscious effort to continue. ‘What I need now,’ he said, ‘is for this vehicle and a lot of others to be driven over the track and down to the shore – and then into the sea, which is now at low tide, as you can see. All the way, as far as she will go until she stops.’

  Harry smiled with appreciation. ‘We’re going to make a sort of pier,’ he said. ‘So we can reach the bigger boats.’

  ‘Brighton pier it is, son,’ agreed the engineer with a tired sort of joviality. ‘Right, let’s give it a try, shall we. Will you drive?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Harry. ‘It will be my first command at sea.’

  ‘All right, let’s see you shipwreck it.’

  Harry coaxed the heavy lorry forward, over the strips of webbing, matting, metal and wood laid like two long carpets on the sand, and far out down to the edge of the tide. Soldiers gathered like spectators at a demonstration, cheerfully urging him on. He gritted his teeth and went into the sea, the lorry’s h
igh nose keeping well clear of the water, the wheels churning through the shallows. In first gear he forged ahead, five yards, ten yards, fifteen, twenty, until with a hurt groan and a rush of steam the vehicle stopped. He tried again but it was dead. He climbed down from the cab and dropped up to his chest into the cold water, waded back to the shore and walked up the long wet beach.

  His view from there took in a wide arc of the great beach. Orders were being called across the sands and sections of the formerly idle army were moving towards the dunes and already bringing forward tail-boards and sideboards from stranded lorries, planks of wood, lengths of canvas and, from somewhere, some wooden railings were carried forward with an urgency born of new and sudden hope. Leading-seaman Andrews was already bringing the second truck towards him. He could see him singing like a choirboy behind the windscreen. He drove it hard into the light oncoming waves and stopped immediately behind the first lorry. A third vehicle was already making its way down the dunes and another parallel twin track was being laid over the sand fifty yards away by the now eager soldiers.

  By dusk there were three lines of vehicles reaching from the high water mark to the low water mark and just beyond. As the tide came in Harry stood, drinking tea from an army mess tin, and grinned with the engineer as he saw that the plan had worked. Foot by foot the vehicles in front were engulfed by the surrounding water until only the canvas roofs of those at the fore remained above the surface. The tide at La Panne had one of the longest reaches in Europe and by the time it was nearing its fullness the ingenious pier was thrust far out into navigable water.

  ‘Here come the boats,’ nodded the engineer in the evening gloom. ‘Now we’ll see if it really works.’

  Indistinct shapes chugged towards the leading submerged trucks and slowed and stopped easily. ‘Sixpence round the bay,’ said the captain softly as if remembering with pleasure something from long ago. ‘Here they go.’

  From the sands a thin line of men came from the great congregations further back as a run of wool comes from a ball, and began to move to the first trucks. Climbing on the tail-boards they moved forward, clambering over the cab roofs, and then tramping along planks of wood placed like a walkway across the stanchions of the roofs. It succeeded beautifully, the lines moving forward quickly, the outlines of the men standing up against the fading sky.