The Dearest and the Best

by Leslie Thomas

  James nodded. ‘Of course, Prime Minister. I will let you have my report as quickly as possible.’ He stood up. To his astonishment Churchill offered him a cigar, which, although he did not smoke, he took out of sheer confusion. Then the podgy hand came across the desk and he was surprised, as they shook, at its strength and warmth. He said: ‘Good morning, sir,’ and turned for the door.

  As he made to leave – at the door a secretary immediately hovered, waiting to alight in his place – the voice came from behind in a low boom. ‘And, Major Lovatt . . .’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If the soldiers ask, as they well might, why you are asking these questions, there is no need to make a secret of it. Tell them you are inquiring on my behalf.’ The smile unrolled across the face again. ‘I would like them to know I have thought of their plight.’

  Returning across Whitehall James once more became conscious of the order and serenity that had come over London. Always a sedate city, it had now become almost reposed. Everyone, it seemed, appeared determined not to move at anything more than a deliberate pace lest it should be construed as unbecoming panic. People walked in the shade of buildings as Big Ben sounded twelve-thirty. In the park there was to be a lunchtime concert, a famous pianist was to perform on a rough stage, and the people were already flocking there, sitting with their rationed sandwiches on the grass or on benches.

  A man was selling the midday editions of the three evening newspapers, with photographs and words of Dunkirk all across the fronts. ‘Drama tonight,’ intoned the seller, as he always had, even on the most humdrum peacetime day. ‘Drama tonight. Star, News, Standard.’

  There was drama indeed. James bought an Evening Standard, glanced at the front page and then turned inside. Smoke and escape at Dunkirk. Pictures of weary but smiling soldiers at Dover. Another headline on the page said: ‘Film-struck girl vanishes’ and another: ‘Body found in Epping Forest’. A third: ‘Derby to be run at Newmarket’. Other things still mattered.

  Returning to his office he rang for his secretary, Audrey, a clever and serious ATS sergeant who had left her husband, a brush salesman in the Midlands, to join up. James asked her to get him a sandwich and some coffee and to order his driver for two o’clock. He had some work to clear, then he would be going down to Dover.

  While she was gone he carefully read again the newspaper accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation. For all the bravery, the glory, the ingenuity and the miraculous execution of it, he could see defeat staring him in the face. It was not a retreat, it was a rout. He studied the photographs of the stained and strained soldiers, ill and exhausted, and thought back only a few days to the idiotic thumbs-up of the fresh troops pictured by War Illustrated as they landed in France. ‘On their way to Victory.’ He felt aggrieved, almost as if War Illustrated should have some serious explaining to do. He turned a page of the Evening Standard and saw one soldier, black as a minstrel and still putting up that dogged, hopeless, beaten thumb.

  Audrey returned. ‘They’re bringing in the Dunkirk men to Charing Cross Station,’ she mentioned casually but knowingly in her Birmingham voice. ‘There’s crowds down there watching them arrive. It’s like a blessed free show.’

  James sighed: ‘Wouldn’t they just,’ he said. He told her to cancel the car. ‘I’ll take a walk to Charing Cross instead,’ he said.

  He ate his sandwich lunch and went out again, cutting through the buildings of Whitehall. People were sitting below statues and sycamores in the public gardens, feeding the pigeons, feeding themselves. At Charing Cross he saw immediately that Audrey had been right. A crowd of civilian spectators pushed against the barriers, gazing at each ambulance and bus as it left the platform. Some of them waved and clapped at the buses and sometimes the soldiers within grinned and waved back, but mostly they returned the stares of the untouched spectators.

  A railway inspector came trudging to meet him. James introduced himself and said he would like to be there when the next train from Dover arrived. ‘Half an hour or so, that’s all, sir,’ said the man. ‘They’re coming in all the time. Poor fellows.’

  ‘What about this mob?’ asked James caustically, thrusting his head towards the civilians. ‘Can’t you do something about shifting them?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said the inspector, who was tall, mildly bent forward, and had neat grey hair. ‘Us or the police, or the military. But they’d only come back. Anyway, it could be a good thing for them to see the state of these boys. My lad’s in France. Was, anyway, God knows where he is now, I keep thinking I’m going to see him carried off one of these trains.’

  James walked with him along the avenue between the barriers. He heard voices in the crowd: ‘Who’s he anyway?’ ‘Who does he think he is, General Ironside?’ ‘Some high-up. They ought to go and do a bit of bloody fighting themselves.’

  The inspector smiled sourly and as they walked on to the platform he said: ‘Same in the First War. This station was one of the showplaces of London then. And Victoria. People coming in evening dress to see the wounded soldiers carried off the trains. And that was regular. Every night at the same time. The blokes from the trenches used to just stare at the blokes in bow ties. They couldn’t believe it. It must have made them wonder what they were fighting for.’

  The large waiting-room and buffet had been turned into a casualty clearing station and James strode towards it. The inspector said: ‘I won’t come any further, sir. It upsets me.’

  James thanked him and went towards the waiting-room. The smell of ether caught him as he approached the double doors, its sickly scent issuing on to the platform. He stopped at the entrance and looked into a cavernous room. It was like a Hogarth print of primitive London. Men were lying in rows, on tables, on cots and on the floor. At one end were some ominous man-sized white boxes. He swallowed heavily. Then, to his astonishment, like some macabre puppet show, a head levered itself up from the middle box, followed by another from the next in line.

  ‘’Ere . . .’ called the first head. ‘’Ere . . . sister. ’Ow long you going to keep me in this bleeding coffin?’

  ‘I want to get out,’ confirmed the other head loudly. ‘I ain’t stayin’ in ’ere all day.’

  A medical corps captain saw James and came quickly over. ‘What are those?’ James asked him. ‘Those containers?’

  ‘Unfortunately, sir,’ agreed the officer impatiently, ‘they do bear a resemblance to coffins, but in fact they’re bed-boxes. They were put on the ships for the wounded and in a busy situation like this it’s a convenient way of transporting them.’

  ‘It can’t do very much for their morale,’ observed James.

  The doctor rounded his lips. ‘We’re more concerned with physical matters at the moment. Psychiatry can come later.’

  James accepted the rebuke. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I’m taking your time and you’re busy.’

  ‘Just a little, sir. I’d like to carry on.’

  ‘Please do. Would you agree to my having a few words with some of the chaps? Perhaps one or two who are not in too bad a way. Would that be permissible?’ He hesitated. ‘The Prime Minister particularly wants to know how they feel.’

  ‘Yes, I think he should,’ smiled the doctor ambiguously. ‘By all means. None of these fellows is in danger. We get the more serious cases away to hospital first. You could start on the two chappies in the coffins.’

  James grinned his acknowledgement and thanked him. He made his way round the outside of the room, skirting a bulky tea urn from which two aproned ladies were issuing cups of tea in thick railway crockery. At first he refused their invitation to have one. One of the women said cheekily: ‘Go on, sir. All uniformed personnel allowed free char.’

  He took the offered cup and, feeling very strange, he went to the first bed-box and looked down at the soldier lying there. It was just like surveying a body in its coffin. The soldier opened his eyes and looked up with consternation at the face looking down.

  ‘Blimey,’ he breathed. ‘It’s the brass.�
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  He attempted to sit up, but James told him not to bother. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked conventionally. The man’s face had been stitched.

  ‘Not too bad, sir. Got it in the leg and the mug. All I want is to get out of this box. I can’t stand it. I woke up and I thought I’d snuffed it.’

  Like some spectre from a horror story the man in the next container began slowly to rise. He looked around with curiosity and apprehension at James. ‘I’d like to get out too, sir,’ he pleaded. ‘It gives you the willies in ’ere. ’S all right if you’re dead, but all I got is a lump out of my bum and nettle rash.’

  James grinned and moved to him. ‘Nettle rash?’ he inquired. ‘That’s an odd war wound.’

  ‘I got it too, sir,’ said the first soldier, determined not to lose the officer’s attention. ‘Lots of the blokes did. Lying down in those French fields.’

  ‘Falling down more like it,’ put in the second man. ‘So dead tired we didn’t know what we was doing and it was dark. We just flaked out. Woke up with this lot . . .’

  ‘And sunburn and ants,’ interpolated the first soldier.

  ‘Copped them too. Ants as big as mice, eating us alive.’

  ‘How far did you march to reach Dunkirk?’ asked James. The first man hesitated. ‘March, sir? Well, we marched at first and then we just sort of stumbled along. Thirty-five miles our lot went, more or less.’

  ‘It seemed longer,’ added the second soldier. ‘We got no grub except apples and we had to go scrumping for them. The Frenchies didn’t want to know us. Wouldn’t give us a drink of water. Threatened us with shotguns and dogs.’

  ‘They were angry with you?’ said James.

  ‘Not half. But you can’t blame them. We was running away, wasn’t we, leaving them to Jerry.’

  ‘You were not running away,’ James told him firmly. ‘It was a strategic retreat owing to the collapse of Holland and particularly Belgium.’

  ‘It was no use trying to tell the Frogs that, sir,’ interposed the second man. ‘Even if we knew ourselves, and we didn’t. We didn’t know what was going on. Nothing. One minute everything was all right and the next we’re just a shambollocking shambles, if you’ll forgive the language, sir.’

  ‘How about the enemy?’ asked James. ‘Were you faced with tanks or infantry?’

  Both men peered over the edges of their boxes with comic astonishment. Each now waited for the other to speak. ‘Jerry, sir?’ said the first man eventually. ‘Never saw no sign of him.’

  ‘Not a hair of his ’ead,’ confirmed the other. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had. But we never saw him at all. It was like we was just running from nothing.’

  ‘We both got our nicks on the beach at Dunkirk,’ said the second, patting his posterior. ‘Playing brag and over he comes and strafes us. That’s all we saw of Jerry.’

  James said thoughtfully, ‘You’ll have a chance to see him soon, I expect.’

  The first soldier frowned but quickly relaxed it when the stitches hurt. ‘Here, sir? You reckon he’ll be here, in England?’

  ‘I think he might have some thoughts in that direction.’

  ‘Sharpish?’ asked the man. ‘Like in the next couple of weeks or something?’ The second man was listening intently, his chin resting on the edge of the box.

  ‘Sharpish,’ repeated James. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘We’ll stuff him,’ said the second man. ‘France is France but England is England, innit, sir?’

  ‘We’ll stuff him right enough,’ confirmed his comrade. ‘I’m not having him lay hands on what’s mine.’

  ‘Good,’ approved James gently. ‘That’s what I wanted to know.’

  He wished them well and made to move way. The first man essayed a comical salute, levering his head and hand further from the box. James returned the compliment. As he went away the first man called after him again: ‘But . . . sir . . . just make sure they don’t have any more capers like Dunkirk. That ain’t no way to treat a British soldier.’

  An hour later the next train from Dover arrived and James stood back, among some railway trolleys loaded with civilian luggage bearing coloured stickers for south coast resorts. ‘Peacehaven Grange Hotel,’ he read on one label. ‘Safe from the strains of modern living.’ Medical corps men began to unload the stretchers from the compartments as soon as the men who were able to walk had disembarked. He was glad to see there were no further bed-boxes.

  From the distant end of the platform he heard, over the steaming station sounds, the noise of tired men’s voices and saw that one squad of soldiers, who could still march, were leaving singing: ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing On the Siegfried Line’, a song that only a few weeks before had been rendered with a comic swagger and assurance now gone sour. They could hardly raise their voices, their strength as hollow as the promise. The crowd of civilians at the barrier prompted a cheer.

  A party of men in bandages, and on sticks and crutches, was shepherded to the roped-off station buffet and James, waiting so that he kept his distance, followed them there. He walked in through the heavy wood and frosted glass doors and at once saw the American girl, Joanne Schorner, who had sat next to him in the gallery of the House of Commons on the afternoon of Churchill’s first speech. That was three weeks before and it seemed like years. She saw him at the same time and after a moment’s hesitation smiled quietly. She was talking earnestly to a soldier propped up in one of the round-backed buffet chairs.

  James went to the buffet where three grimy infantrymen were sitting at the bar, drinking tea and half-heartedly biting thick sandwiches. One had a bandaged head, one had strapping across his chest and the third had both his arms in slings, like a boy with two sailing boats. The others took it in turns to put his sandwich to his mouth. James approached them casually and motioned them to remain where they sat.

  ‘No appetite?’ he asked, nodding at the unenthusiastic sandwiches.

  ‘Not much, sir. Not now,’ answered the man with the dressed head. ‘We got lots of grub at Dover and they gave us some more at Ashford Station. All these ladies dishing out tea and Oxo and sandwiches. Even when you’re starving there’s only so much room inside.’

  ‘Throwing apples and pears,’ said the second, a crack of a grin showing. ‘One of our platoon got wounded by somebody hitting him with a bag of Christmas nuts. Nearly took his eye out. Not a scratch at Dunkirk either.’

  The man with the strapped chest lifted his cup of tea and said suddenly: ‘I could have done with this a couple of days ago, sir. Walked God knows how many miles, sweating hot, trying to bring as much of my gear as I could, and when I get to the boat at Dunkirk in the end I go downstairs and there’s this civvy steward, white coat, the lot, polishing glasses in the bar. The boat was rocking with the bombs. My tongue’s hanging out and I ask him for a drink and he says – blimey, I can hardly believe it now – he says that he can’t serve alcoholic drinks while the ship is in port!’

  They all laughed and James said: ‘That’s what keeps us going, I expect. Not flapping, keeping things normal.’

  The middle soldier soured. ‘Like looking out of the windows of that train coming here. It made my blood boil, sir, it did. Everything like it was, washing on the lines, blokes doing their gardens . . .’

  ‘But . . .’ interposed James. ‘Surely . . .’

  ‘Right, surely, sir,’ put in the man firmly. ‘But you don’t expect to come back and see playing fields full of blokes in white playing perishing cricket.’

  James grimaced. ‘No, no, you’re right. I feel the same way. But they’re probably factory workers on night shift, service units or something like that.’

  ‘Then I wish they’d go and play their games somewhere else and not next to the railway line,’ argued the man. He added more softly: ‘It looks bad.’

  James thanked them and wished them well before moving along the tables. Some men were sitting, heads in hands, as if they feared they would topple off, others were
propped asleep against the walls. He talked to another half a dozen men before accepting a cup of tea over the buffet counter. The American girl had finished talking to the soldier and she came towards him smiling slightly. ‘We seem to meet in the strangest places,’ he said.

  ‘Are there any other sorts of places in this war?’ she asked.

  She accepted a cup of tea from the grey, bundled woman behind the bar with a smile which tightened as she tasted it.

  She persevered, taking the next sip carefully.

  ‘You’re writing for your newspaper,’ said James. ‘I saw your article on the evening of the day we met.’

  ‘A lot has happened since then,’ she observed grimly. She looked around the big room with its ragged men. ‘This is terrible,’ she said. ‘It makes me want to cry.’

  ‘But we’re not finished, you know,’ he told her, his eyes firm, keeping his voice unhurried. ‘Not by a long way. I hope you will tell your readers in America that.’

  ‘You’re not going to know what I tell my readers,’ she replied, just as firmly. ‘Read it in print.’ Seeing his expression she added: ‘If I thought you were finished, I wouldn’t be here now.’ Again she looked about them: ‘These guys still think you’re going to win. Not lose, not draw – win!’ She nodded across the crowded area: ‘That little guy over there says he ended up in a cellar with the Mayor of Dunkirk. He called him the buggermaster, if you’ll excuse me, but he meant it well. He said the mayor was wearing his chain and all his regalia and he thought this was pretty impressive. The mayor told him that the French fleet would win the war in the end.’

  James almost said: ‘Yes, but on whose side?’

  Two hours later they left Charing Cross Station together. As the Dunkirk men came out tiredly marching, some singing, or in buses or ambulances, so the homegoing London office workers passed them going in the other direction.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Joanne. ‘It’s something I can’t figure. A great calm seems to have settled on everyone.’