by John Harris
He was awakened by voices and the clatter of feet along the deck, to see it was pitch dark. Leaving the wheelhouse, he saw men in naval uniform aboard the fishing boat, Daisy.
‘It’s no good, mate,’ a weary voice said. ‘We’re not going.’ There was a little muttering and as the sailors vanished a three-badge man stepped aboard Athelstan. ‘This one looks all right,’ he said. A young stoker appeared, who looked as though he’d just joined up. ‘Know anything about this kind of engine?’ the three-badge man asked.
‘Not a bloody thing,’ the stoker said.
‘I do, me dear,’ Tremenheere interrupted.
The three-badge man became aware of him for the first time. ‘Is she your boat, sir?’
‘No. And I’m not a “sir”, either.’
‘Better get ourselves introduced then.’ The three-badge man was formal and very proper. ‘He’s Smudger Smith and the kid just coming aboard’s Didcot. Answers to “Diddy”. I’m Nobby Clark. I was on survivor’s leave when they rounded us up. I was in Bittern when she was sunk off Norway and when we got back they sent us on fourteen days’ leave. I’d had eight when they recalled me. I’ll go and report we’re ready.’
Wednesday, 29 May
As the clock hands in Dover and in France passed the hour of midnight, the rearguard was taking up its positions. To the south, soldiers still clung to their strongpoints near Poperinghe and on the mound of Cassel, but they all knew the end was not far away.
The day began with a disaster, and to the offices in the galleries in the cliffs came the news that three destroyers had been lost in the very first hours.
None of this, of course, was known to the men on the beaches where by this time everyone was involved – padres, Pay Corps officers, military attachés and liaison and intelligence groups – all of them doing things they’d never expected to do and trying to do them without panic.
Among them was Basil Allerton. He and his men had just arrived in Dunkirk when the Stukas had turned up, and at the shout of ‘Take cover’ he had run for shelter to a coal dump near the station. The blast of the exploding bombs had blown him into a pile of coal dust and he’d emerged choking on the grit that filled his eyes, nose and throat.
The beach was one of hard wet sand, with miles of shallow water so that the ships had to stand well out. It had been quiet when they’d arrived, and littered with what seemed to be bodies but had turned out to be greatcoats. The silence had been eerie but now, it seemed, everyone had recovered his breath and the place was one vast inquest on what had gone wrong.
‘I suppose they outnumbered us,’ one officer was saying doubtfully. ‘After all, we seemed to do all right when we came up against ’em. I even heard that when the Durhams went for ’em with the bayonet they ran.’
‘The Durhams were lucky,’ another officer complained. ‘My chaps just had to sit and be plastered with mortars.’
‘We could have done with a few of those.’ The words came in explosive bursts of disgust. ‘And a few of those blasted sandbags they’ve stuck round the churches in London. They’d have done better to spend their bloody day of prayer making guns.’
Allerton listened without emotion. He was too tired by this time for emotion and he knew the complaints were the complaints of men who were worried that people would think they’d not done their best. The attitude of the other ranks seemed to be much the same, one of shame that they’d been beaten but full of certainty that it wasn’t their fault.
‘I’d like to meet that bloke who trotted out all them stories about their tanks being made of papier mâché,’ one of them was saying. ‘The ones we saw weren’t.’
There was a bark of laughter, then from somewhere in the darkness, someone started singing, not drunkenly but defiantly. ‘Look at the mourners, blooming well crying. Ain’t it grand to be blooming well dead?’
‘Shut that bloody man up,’ an officer’s voice called sharply and someone said ‘Dry up, Ted, for Christ’s sake,’ but the voice went on doggedly. ‘Look at the coffin, bloody brass ’andles–’
Eventually the singing changed to an incredible happy whistling, as though the singer had become absorbed in some job he was doing and had quite forgotten the circumstances; the unbelievable cheerfulness – the same cheerfulness that was still about him despite the defeat and the horror – the one thing that kept Allerton going.
He lit a cigarette. Like everyone else he had dozens of them, looted from NAAFIs or flung from lorries to stop the Germans getting them. The smoke killed the appalling stench coming from inland where he’d seen the bloated carcasses of three dead cows. There was also a dead cavalry horse along the beach. There had been whole groups of them on the sand when he’d first arrived, wheeling and galloping about and squealing in terror as the bombs dropped. One or two of them had been hit and the one along the beach, he’d been told, had been in the sun for three days now.
In his logical intellectual way, he felt he understood what had happened. It had been the unknown they were running away from. Fed by rumour, they didn’t know who was pursuing them, or how many, or whether they’d outstrip them. They’d all been caught by the contagion of bewilderment and ignorance, rumour had spread at every halt and no man had had any orders. Their only plan was to reach safety, and if there’d only been someone to shout ‘Halt! Do this! Do that!’ half their fears would have vanished. It had started with the French and spread to the BEF. In the slang of the moment, ‘Someone had made a cock of the washing up.’
The thought cheered him and he felt increasingly detached from the battle as hour became indistinguishable from hour. A trial of strength had taken place; the issue had been decided and graves had been scratched in the soil. Now there seemed to be a stalemate and, deciding death in defeat was easier than death in victory because there was no exhilaration in being on the losing side, he found he wasn’t afraid.
About him there was even a strange atmosphere of relief. To men who’d been bombed solidly for three weeks and had hardly had a decent night’s sleep in all that time, the beaches were a place to rest and they were snatching what they could. Allerton longed to join them and fling himself down but a brigadier, as immaculate as if he’d been on parade at Aldershot, had appointed him to command his particular strip of sand. The men about him were strangers but they were patient and sensible, and their discipline was good. They allowed themselves to be divided into groups of twenty-five, which was roughly what Allerton assumed would fill a boat, and had then tucked themselves out of sight among the dunes. He could hear them instructing newcomers what to do as they arrived.
‘You see the beachmaster, mate, and then you take your place in the queue. And don’t be in too big a hurry, either, because we’re first.’
By this time he had become indifferent to the drone of aeroplanes and the sound of explosions but, with his own men in a different part of the beach, the absence of familiar voices bothered him. Although the boats came again and again, he never saw the faces of the men who manned them and it was a little like living in a vacuum. Every now and then a flare was dropped which showed up the beach in a hard white light and then the bombs came down, most of them falling in the town with vivid green flashes accompanied by showers of sparks which reflected on the clouds and on the ripples on the flat surface of the water. Several officers had changed their heavy battledress for lightweight clothes and gym shoes in case they had to take to the sea. Allerton was wearing his best uniform, feeling he might never afford another, and he kept wishing he had the moral courage to strip to his underpants which were a much more sensible garb for swimming the Channel.
Because he was hungry and tired, he was also cold and his feet ached, while the dirt on his body seemed to have a mummifying effect. Several times he was tempted to slip aboard one of the rescue boats in the dark, but he hadn’t the courage to step out of turn, and eventually as he became aware that the light was changing, he realised that the sand was not brown but the colour of pearls, flat, wide and striped in black. T
here were frequent sandbars offshore and a few streams and breakwaters running from the land. Behind, the dunes were half a mile wide in places, heavily contoured and tufted with marram grass and, at that moment, littered with parked vehicles hub-deep in the soft sand and resting at all angles.
As the dawn came, he peered out to sea. The number of boats arriving had grown less in the last hour or so and had finally stopped; as the light increased, it seemed that the navy had disappeared. Other men were peering with him, standing in depressed groups in a soaking drizzle that had started, huddled in greatcoats and groundsheets, the water dripping off their steel helmets and laying beads of moisture on their eyebrows and moustaches and the down on their cheeks. Their faces were grey and strained and tense with expectancy. There were thousands of them, helpless, patient, hopeful, simply standing there waiting.
The whole thing seemed unbelievable and he couldn’t imagine for a minute that the Luftwaffe would allow them another day to get away with it. His heart sank again as ugly thoughts of captivity filled his mind. With daylight and a clearing sky, he knew the German planes would be back and he tried to shut from his brain the thought of the thousands of casualties that would result.
One of the first casualties of the day was Lije Noble.
A hot night had followed a hot day and he was tired, thirsty and coated with the dust that clogged his nostrils and throat. As he prowled round looking for rations the narrow road vibrated beneath his feet from the distant percussion of bombs and he could see the flicker of anti-aircraft fire in the sky like winking red pinpricks. Mortar fire thudded to the south and then a thin dry crackling sound came, like a machine-gun or exploding ammunition. Along the horizon there were a dozen fires, all big, one of them a village just across the fields.
In the dirty pink glow he saw a rat crossing the road and because he felt it was time he fired at something, he lifted his rifle and pulled the trigger. The bullet kicked up a spark from the cobbles and went whining across the fields, and immediately the air was filled with flying lead as a nervous patrol fired back.
He dived for the ditch and lay there with his head down. He’d left Gow and the others on the bank of the canal a mile behind him, having driven clean through the German lines during the night in an abandoned French lorry. Noble had been quite prepared to throw in his hand when they’d heard German voices ahead, but Gow had remained quite unperturbed and had collected pieces of farm machinery from a ruined barn and tied them to the stern of the lorry with ropes so that they’d clattered and clinked as they’d driven through the darkness. They’d made enough noise to wake the dead, the bouncing pieces of steel sounding vaguely like tank threads, and in the darkness no one had thought it wise to try to stop them.
As the scattered shooting about him stopped, Noble lifted his head and moved towards the burning village. The traffic had come to a halt outside it because a French corps in trucks held possession of the crossroads and was driving along three abreast, forcing everything else into the ditch. Mile after mile down the road the waiting column grew. Everyone was exhausted and the drivers were dropping asleep in their seats. As the last of the French passed, military policemen began to chase up and down, waking them, officers and men alike, with yells of fury, banging on their steel helmets with the butts of their revolvers. ‘Wake up, you bastard! Keep moving! Wake up! Wake up!’
As he watched the crawling procession start again, a shell screamed over from the east and he heard it explode a hundred yards away. For a moment the darkness was tense as he felt everyone waiting for the next, but the shell seemed to be a stray and nothing more came. But there were flames further ahead and an officer ran along the column shouting for a medical orderly, and Noble decided it was safer to disappear. The next shell might drop on Lije Noble.
He pushed between the vehicles and headed down a side road, and as he entered the village he could see that it was full of both French and British. At the village cemetery, a group of khaki-clad soldiers were forcing the locked gates. With them on the grass was a blanketed figure. ‘We’ve got to bury him somewhere,’ one of them was saying anxiously.
In the square a NAAFI canteen had caught fire and Noble joined the soldiers helping themselves to cigarettes. The cash box was just where he expected it to be, under the counter behind a carton of shaving soap, the last thing anyone was interested in just then, and to his delight he saw it was full of franc notes. Cramming them into his pocket, he snatched up as much chocolate and as many tins of fruit as he could carry and headed outside again.
On the outskirts of the village once more, he saw a group of drunken Frenchmen chasing a British soldier and, even as he watched, they started shooting and he decided it was time for him to disappear. The bushes at the side of the road hid him effectively but there were more of the Frenchmen than he’d expected and his detour was a long one. He found himself in a small patch of trees with a notice which said ‘Propriété Priveé’, but, since he didn’t know what it meant, he pushed on. As he stepped through the undergrowth he felt something against his foot and almost immediately there was the roar of a gun going off and he knew he’d been shot.
For a moment, he lay still, shocked, then he realised the pain wasn’t as bad as he thought, and he began to feel himself carefully. His trousers were torn and damp with pin-pricks of blood, but he didn’t seem to be badly hurt and it dawned on him he’d tripped off a shotgun which had been set for poachers and then forgotten in the confusion of the battle.
It was a bugger of a war, he decided.
The same kind of thought was filling Tremenheere’s mind. It would be all right, he kept telling himself as Athelstan chugged steadily on through the darkness. Some big shot would turn up eventually and the thing would sort itself out. In the way it usually did, of course, with the big shots still on top and Alban Tremenheere still on the bottom where he’d always been.
When daylight came it started to drizzle and they seemed to have lost all the other boats that had left Dover with them, but they were still on course and Athelstan’s engines were pulling well. They were two miles offshore and the land lay like a silent line along the horizon, just emerging from the night.
‘That looks like the place,’ Nobby Clark said.
But just then three British destroyers appeared on their quarter and the crash as they opened fire seemed to lift their feet from the decks. They heard the rushing scream of the shells passing overhead and there were several small twinkling flashes on the shore in the very place where they’d been heading.
They turned about without even bothering to discuss it and eventually found themselves off the breakwater at Dunkirk. The sky was overcast and there was a great pall of smoke hanging m it, darkening the sea. It was the funeral pyre of a dying town and they could hear the mutter of battle further inland. All the time, passing them in the opposite direction, boats were going home, singly and in groups, at speed or with spluttering engines, all crammed with that dun mass of troops, every inch of deck and cabin space filled with them.
The pall of smoke had a glow at its base where fires burned among the debris. There were flames everywhere, and wrecks lay in the roads and off the beaches. Deciding the bombers wouldn’t waste any more bombs on her, they lay alongside a burning trooper until they could get their bearings. The explosions inside her were nerve-racking and they kept expecting the whole thing to go sky-high, but then Tremenheere managed to pick out the line of surf, and, beyond it, great black masses that sprawled across the sand, stretching from the dunes behind the water’s edge like dense forests. At first they puzzled him, then he realised they were men. As they stared, a destroyer half a mile away suddenly started firing – whango, whango, whango – and Didcot pointed. ‘Up there, Nobby,’ he said.
Staring up, Tremenheere saw puff-balls of smoke against the sky as the anti-aircraft shells burst. At first he couldn’t see what they were firing at, then he saw an aeroplane among the low cloud and as he stared he heard the scream of a bomb. The sea heaved upwards
in vast rumbling explosions that flung spray across the decks and he threw himself down on the safe side of the wheelhouse, his arms clasped round his head.
As the sky cleared, Jocho Horndorff was still Conybeare’s prisoner. Surrounded as they were now by men, any attempt to run would have left him riddled with bullets, and his only chance, he knew, was to dodge away in the confusion or the darkness and lie low somewhere until the British had gone.
He’d tried to lull Conybeare into a friendliness he might have taken advantage of, but the night before he’d still been locked in the coalhouse of a half-demolished house, while Conybeare sat with his back to the door. He’d emerged filthy, humiliated, and furious with his captor.
‘You realise, of course,’ he said harshly, ‘that you will never get me to England. You no longer even have an army. It is ausradiert – blotted out.’
Conybeare was unperturbed. ‘Army’s always a bit slow to learn,’ he agreed.
Horndorff became silent. They were passing groups of soldiers resting by the roadside but, despite the deathly weariness of their faces, they showed no sign of panic. Up ahead he could see dive-bombers falling out of the sky and dropping their bombs among the flames and smoke, and it dawned on him that if he didn’t do something about it soon, before long they’d be dropping them on him.
Batteries of guns were forming up for the rearguard, but there was a complete absence of cover among the beet-fields and he found it hard to accept the cold-blooded heroism of the men digging the gunpits. Immediately the guns started to flash through the dust and smoke, half a dozen observation posts would plot them for counter-fire.
The batteries’ trucks were dotted about the field in an attempt to make the bombers think it was one of the vast parking areas that were building up outside the town and in a dry ditch behind the guns, a command post had been set up. Officers and men were digging together, stripped to the waist, indifferent to the incessant flights of bombers that were beginning to appear overhead, thirty at a time, in a monotonous noisy wave of destruction.