by John Harris
‘Why do you hate us so, Officer Conybeare?’ Horndorff asked bitterly as he crouched down.
Conybeare gestured with the pistol. Further along the bank there was a group of graves; on one of the crude crosses a woman’s hat of black straw with artificial flowers and red cherries hung grotesquely. ‘That,’ he said.
‘We didn’t want the war,’ Horndorff snapped. ‘It was forced on us.’ He tried to explain. ‘In Germany after the last war it was necessary to take whole barrow-loads of marks to buy a loaf of bread. Communism was at our doors. Do you wonder that we turned to Hitler?’
Conybeare didn’t know much about the conditions in Germany after the previous war. He’d only just been born, and even now he was still too young to be greatly concerned.
‘There must have been others,’ he said.
‘What others?’ Horndorff sneered. ‘Wretched people with nothing to offer but theories.’
Conybeare nodded understandingly. ‘We had a few of those ourselves,’ he admitted.
‘This is why Germany chose Hitler. He has Fingerspitzengefühl – how do you say? – intuition. He did great things for Germany.’
‘Like bringing her into a war?’
Horndorff had fallen silent again, faintly depressed. As far as he could see this wretched little boy with the black eye that made him look as though he’d been fighting in the school yard had now actually got him inside the British lines.
‘You must let me go,’ he said abruptly.
‘No.’
‘We are both intelligent men.’
‘I expect so,’ Conybeare shrugged. ‘In spite of your being a Nazi.’
‘I am not a Nazi,’ Horndorff pointed out. ‘I have never been a Nazi. I am a German and I believe in my country. We were right to go to war.’
Conybeare’s eyes flickered. ‘Perhaps you’re not that intelligent,’ he observed.
The day had not started well for a lot of other people besides Horndorff – among them Alfred Stoos, who was on the telephone to command control.
‘We need replacements,’ he was shouting furiously.
The man at the other end of the line seemed unperturbed. ‘You the stores officer?’ he demanded.
‘No.’
‘Commanding officer?’
Stoos choked. Schmesser’s successor was Hauptmann Dodtzenrodt and he was flying with Schlegel and the rest of the squadron. Dodtzenrodt had little love for Stoos whom he considered a heartless gong-hunter and, as commanding officer, it gave him a lot of pleasure to leave him on the ground. ‘No,’ Stoos said. ‘He’s flying.’
The man on the other end of the telephone was silent for a moment. ‘Then who the devil do you think you are to make demands?’ he said at last. ‘You Stuka people have had too much publicity. The 87’s not the egg of Columbus.’
As the telephone clicked, Stoos sat staring at it, his face red with rage. Then he snatched up his cap and burst out of the office into the rags of mist. Oberfeldwebel Hamcke saw him coming. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said bitterly. ‘Here he comes again!
The day had not started well for the admiral at Dover either. Almost the first news of the day was bad.
‘We’ve lost Abukir,’ his chief of staff informed him. ‘Coming from Ostend, with over two hundred soldiers and refugees.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘E-boat. Near the North Hinder light.’
There was silence for a moment. This new loss meant that for the first time the German Navy was attempting to interfere directly with the evacuation.
The staff officer, operations, coughed. ‘That’s not all, I’m afraid, sir.’
‘Go on.’
‘Queen of the Channel. She left Dunkirk at dawn. She had over nine hundred men aboard. She was bombed and sunk by a single aircraft.’
‘The admiral frowned. ‘What were the losses?’
‘Not as bad as might have been expected. The crew and passengers were rescued. There are a few other good omens, too. The French have started to take part. Admiral Abrial assembled a convoy. They lost Douaisien to a magnetic mine.’
The admiral rose and walked up and down for a while, his hands in his pockets, his eyes down and thoughtful. ‘What destroyers are over there at the moment?’ he asked.
‘Mackay, Montrose, Verity, Vital, Worcester and Anthony. Codrington, Grenade, Gallant, Jaguar and Javelin are on their way.
‘Good. Good.’ The admiral took another turn up and down. ‘We mustn’t forget the beaches, though. With small boats we might be able to pick up a whole division.’
The admiral’s ideas were echoed by the army itself, and those of the army by Basil Allerton. The blaséness which had enabled him at first to regard the war as rather a joke had slipped a little by this time because as he grew more tired he was growing more alarmed, too, not only by the things he’d seen but by the thought that he might even be killed.
They weren’t far from the coast now in the poor northern area of France, an ugly place of mean houses of red and yellow brick. To the south the countryside stretched flatly to the horizon in a landscape that looked more Dutch than French, and the road they were on ran along a high embankment above the flat polder land.
Rice and the others were making tea in the kitchen of an abandoned bakery and a few of the little unit’s lost sheep had returned during the night. The corporal, they thought, had been captured but, in their cheerful inconsequential way, they didn’t appear too worried and were more concerned with the time the water was taking to boil. Like all soldiers, when trouble had come they had simply shifted the responsibility to the shoulders of their officers. It seemed to Allerton that they were all taking the situation far too lightly and that he ought to find out what they should do.
Rather unwillingly, he decided to take the truck into the town. All along the road an orgy of destruction was taking place under the vivid blue sky. Engineers were handing out pound blocks of gun cotton and primer detonators to artillery artificers, and showing them how to place them in the breeches of their guns to destroy them. In a big beet field, thousands of vehicles were parked – all of them new – Scammells, diggers, buses, engineering plants, limbers and lorries – and, with a steady, crunching, chopping sound, men were smashing their petrol tanks and cylinders.
A provost officer stepped in front of Allerton’s bonnet, waving a revolver. ‘In here,’ he said brusquely.
‘I’m going into Dunkirk,’ Allerton protested.
The officer lifted the revolver. ‘In here,’ he said.
In a fury and still protesting vainly, Allerton drove into the park, but as he left, he found an abandoned motor-bike and, though he’d only ridden one once before, he mounted it and roared off triumphantly into the thinning mist, wobbling wildly and delighted to have thwarted the officious provost officer.
The destruction stretched all the way to Dunkirk, every dyke jammed with wrecked vehicles among the floating straw and the bodies of drowned animals, every road littered with abandoned equipment, caps and helmets. Dunkirk itself was a shock to him. He knew it had been bombed but had never realised how badly. Tall skeletons of buildings were silhouetted against a sword-cut of opal sky, and among the silhouettes fires raged. It was a forbidding spectacle and for a moment Allerton stood in silence staring at it, aware of the awful hammering of noise about him. Then, as he hoisted the motorcycle on to its stand to ask directions, he heard another sound that rolled in iron waves round the heavens. He dived under a stone seat as the crash of the bombs seemed to lift the ground and hit him in the face with it. Unharmed but shaken, he crawled out and decided that for his own safety he’d better find someone in authority.
The town major’s office was a bedlam, with what appeared to be dozens of men all shouting the claims of their units.
‘I’ve got to have the returns,’ an officer at a desk was saying. ‘I want a nominal roll. I’ve got to know how many there are.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ his harassed questioner shouted, ‘I don’t know
myself! Can’t we do that when we get to the other side?’
Every now and then, as the aeroplanes returned, everyone stopped, assessed where the bombs were going to fall and then, according to what they’d decided, took cover or remained where they were, flinching at the crashes.
‘I want a ship,’ an overwrought gunner officer was saying. ‘They said there’d be two every four hours. The timetable’s not being kept.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ the man behind the desk said, ‘the destroyers are coming over like Number Eleven buses. We just can’t get ’em in. The harbour’s been destroyed.’
‘I saw ships,’ the gunner snapped. ‘Alongside some bloody pier. I’ve been there. There were destroyers and what looked like a paddle-steamer.’
The man behind the desk looked up, startled. ‘Embarking troops?’
‘By the hundred.’
‘I wish someone would tell me! Sergeant Greene, for God’s sake, find out what’s going on, will you?’
‘Just what is going on?’ Allerton asked the man in front of him.
‘There’s talk of a stand.’
‘What with?’ an RASC officer behind them demanded. ‘Where are the ammunition and supplies? I’ve seen none. We’re getting out.’
Allerton wandered outside again, in a state of stupefaction. He hadn’t realised the campaign was over. But then he realised that it explained all the destruction of trucks, cars and motorbikes, all the men burning records and throwing away what clothes they couldn’t carry on their backs. When he returned to his men they were all crouching in the doorway of the bakery watching a burning ammunition truck in which charges and shells were exploding above the howl of a jammed horn. Even as he braked, the truck blew up, sending pieces of metal whirring in all directions. The blast knocked him off the motor-bike which continued under its own power into a ditch and disappeared beneath the water. He picked himself up and saw Rice running towards him.
‘You stand a good chance of getting killed round here,’ he said.
Rice offered him a slice of bully beef and a stale cream bun from the bakery, and Allerton took them without considering the mixture at all odd.
‘Are they going to take us back to England, sir?’
‘They’re trying. There’s a rumour that if we get to the beaches the navy’s sending in boats to take us off. How long will it take you to get ready?’
Rice grinned. ‘We’re ready now, sir. We thought you’d find out what to do.’
It startled Allerton that they’d had so much confidence in him, and suddenly he loved their honest ugly faces. When he’d first arrived in France he’d considered himself a cut above the rest of the army and regarded with a certain amount of contempt the rough and ready soldiers whose incoherent statements he’d had to listen to and sometimes had to read. Now, however, amidst the paralysing insanity of bombing, shelling, hostile agents and anarchic bands of French soldiers shooting their officers and holding villages to ransom for food, he found he was taking a different view of them all. The generals in this war actually appeared to know what they were doing, and the regimental officers, NCOs and men suddenly seemed an extraordinary mixture of cheerfulness, humour, blasphemy, piety, gentleness and sheer guts that he could not imagine any other nation in the world producing. For the first time, he felt proud to be among them.
‘I think we ought to shove off,’ he said. ‘It’s getting to be rather a dismal party. Form the chaps up.’
Rice gaped. He’d not been on a parade since arriving in France. ‘Form them up, sir?’ he said. ‘There are only nine of us. And we’ve no NCO.’
Allerton shrugged, showing off a little. ‘You’ve just become one, Rice,’ he said. ‘Will corporal do?’
Clarence Sievewright was also trying to behave like a soldier but even now he was still behaving more like a Boy Scout.
He had once again spent the night entirely alone. In that countryside of flat fields and dykes there were few farms and villages, but eventually he’d found a small brick building and had managed to break the lock with the spike on his jack-knife. There had seemed to be a great deal of rusty iron inside that he took to be farming implements and the fire he’d built wouldn’t have warmed a rat, but he’d felt better with food inside him and, making himself comfortable, had bedded down on the floor.
Waking early, he filled his mess-tin from a ditch and cooked the remaining potato and some slices of a beetroot he’d found. It wasn’t much but it helped, and he felt that in the chaos and the confusion he was putting his Scouting knowledge to good use.
He was running short of matches now, and he wasn’t really sure that, despite his experience, he could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. However, in his pack he still had his emergency rations and two large army biscuits he’d found on the road. A tin of them had dropped off a lorry and been crushed to dust by the traffic that followed. Only two of them, projected somehow from the debris to the grass, had survived and he’d pocketed them against the time when he’d no longer have anything to cook.
Having eaten, he once again went through his equipment to decide what to throw out but, concerned that he’d be charged with its loss, decided to keep it all. He felt much happier when he found a discarded French rifle in the grass. There were five rounds in the magazine, and as he might eventually have to fight, he shouldered it and set off north once more.
About the time that Sievewright was getting into his stride, Tremenheere was shutting down Athelstan’s engines and she lay drifting in the slight swell that was running. Outside Dover harbour, destroyers whooped their way among the crowded vessels and dashed in the direction of the sun, setting the moored boats rolling and curtseying and bouncing against each other in their wash. As fast as they went, others returned out of the glare in ones and twos and groups, tiny dots on the shining surface of the water. There were men on them who’d marched half-way across France; dirty, dishevelled men, their faces black with oil, coal-dust and smoke, their eyes bloodshot with weariness. Some of them were without uniforms, some were without rifles, but for the most part they still managed to wave and even raise a cheer.
Tremenheere watched them pass in a grim, pathetic, heroic stream. Of the little flotilla that had left Littlehampton with Athelstan some had fallen out long before they’d even reached Newhaven. More had failed to start that morning. The last of them was just shutting off its spluttering, overheated engine, so that the flotilla fell silent with only the lap of the waves against the hulls and the slap of the halyards against the masts for company.
The silence was broken almost at once when a naval launch, which had met them at Folkestone and led them in, roared to life again and hurried towards them like an excited terrier with a bone in its teeth. An officer was standing on the bridge, a megaphone in his hand. ‘Is Doctor Knevett on board?’ he was shouting.
Knevett waved and the officer gestured. ‘A tender will be picking you up, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s need for you ashore.’
As Knevett received his orders, Hatton’s hopes of behaving like a soldier returning from the wars were not being fulfilled.
They’d headed slowly back, steering north-east, MacGillicuddy, the chief engineer, still concerned with his doubtful bearing. Near the Kwinte Buoy they’d been following a small French fishing vessel when it had hit a mine and they’d felt the shock through the whole ship. They’d picked up the stupefied survivors, some of them women, their clothes stripped from their bodies by the explosion. Almost every one of them was suffering from fractures of the legs, pelvis or spine.
‘Shock of the deck coming up to hit them,’ the doctor said in flat tones. ‘Just as if they’d jumped on to concrete from a thirty-foot wall.’
As they’d turned west, an unending stream of vessels had passed them going south – destroyers, personnel carriers, and tugs. There were minesweepers from North Sea and East Coast ports, yard craft, coasters and short-sea traders, Deal beach boats and the Sues, the Three Sisters and the Two Brothers, boats with registr
ations from the Wash to Poole, some of them still manned by the men who’d stood in peacetime on the harbour walls shouting, ‘Any more for the Skylark?’
Dover harbour was crowded to capacity, and working Vital in through the difficult tidal stream and the press of boats was an intricate feat of seamanship.
‘We’ll be going alongside at once,’ Hough announced. ‘Get down there, Hatton, and make sure they don’t move until we’re alongside. We want no rushing, but make it fast because we’re going straight back again.’
There were none of the admiring eyes Hatton had expected. The whole area was a scene of ordered confusion, with loud-hailers squawking as officers demanded permission to leave or moor. The quayside resounded to the cries of red-eyed soldiers begging cigarettes and the barking of the dozens of dogs which had attached themselves to the troops. The only sign of approval was a notice someone had erected, ‘Well done, BEF.’
‘Well done?’ a soldier near Hatton said. ‘I thought we’d lost the bloody battle!’
As the gangplanks were thrust out, a soldier scrambled ashore, kissed the stones of the quayside, and did a little jig. Then the civilian helpers began to clamber on board with stretchers and first-aid equipment, and women began to pass round water bottles and telegram forms, or struggled to help with men covered with fuel oil from sunken ships. ‘What was it like?’ they asked.
‘First-rate,’ one irrepressible life-of-the-party said. ‘I’ve learned to swim.’
Some of the older women were in uniform but some were mere girls in summer frocks, who’d been hastily recruited, and their faces were drawn and wet with tears. They all looked hot because there wasn’t a breath of wind, not a ripple on the water, not a cloud in the sky, and there were none of the cheering crowds Hatton had expected because the police had cordoned off the docks in case the Luftwaffe attacked.
A group of French-Moroccan soldiers were struggling with half a dozen sailors who were yelling in red-faced fury that the Moroccans had stolen their uniforms, and Hatton saw a woman talking in a low desperate voice to a hawk-featured man in a turban who wanted his arm bandaged because his friend’s had been bandaged too.