by John Harris
As Horndorff watched, the first German shells began to bracket the guns and he saw a truck flower into flame. Immediately, one of the batteries began to fire, rhythmically and slowly as though they were short of shells, then Conybeare jabbed with the pistol and they ran until they were clear, Conybeare awkward in the ugly farm boots.
Just ahead, a mob of men was filling the road at the entrance to a bar situated among a group of shabby red-brick buildings painted with a huge sign, BYRRH. Most of them were French but there was a sprinkling of English, too, and their uniforms were awry and they carried no weapons. They held bottles in their fists and were arguing loudly. As they saw Horndorff the shouting stopped and one of the Frenchmen turned and shook his fist in Horndorff’s face.
‘Assassin,’ he screamed, and as the cry was taken up, a man in stained khaki pushed to the front, his thin ugly face twisted in a snarl.
‘Bloody murderer!’ he said.
Horndorff glanced at Conybeare.
‘Keep walking,’ Conybeare said.
‘A la lanterne!’ The cry came out of the mob like a flung stone and, though he didn’t speak much French, Horndorff knew exactly what it meant.
The English soldier seemed to understand, too. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Lynch the bastard!’
Horndorff backed up against one of the buildings, determined not to show how afraid he was, and Conybeare took up a position in front of him. ‘This man’s my prisoner,’ he said. ‘I’m taking him to England.’
‘Never mind that!’ The English soldier’s face was full of hate. ‘We want him, sonny, and we’re having him!’
‘This man is my prisoner,’ Conybeare repeated. ‘I’m taking him to England.’ His voice hardened and his good eye flashed. ‘And you are speaking to a British officer! Stand to attention and salute! And don’t call me “sonny”!’
The soldier didn’t salute but his posture changed. He stood up straighter and began to fasten his unbuttoned blouse.
‘Listen–’
‘Sir!’
‘Okay, okay! Sir! Blokes like him have been shooting kids.’
‘This man is my prisoner,’ Conybeare said with a persistent patience. He raised the Luger and pointed it directly at the soldier’s chest. ‘I am taking him with me. If anyone tries to stop me, I shall shoot him. Even you.’ His voice rose and he began to speak in fluent French. ‘Je suis officier britannique. Cet Allemand est mon prisonnier. Je fusillerai l’homme qui lui fait du mal. Entendu?’
There was a dead silence, then one of the women in the crowd gave a nervous giggle. ‘C’est un brave, ça,’ she said.
For a long time the silence continued, then the British soldier jerked at his battledress blouse and turned away. ‘Aw, come on, he said. ‘Let the bastard have his bleeding prisoner.’
Sitting by his van in the thinning drizzle, his headphones clamped to his head. Leutnant Hinze could see beyond the dunes towards the sea. There was a dense cloud of smoke that came from the burning oil tanks, and in a strange eddy of currents it had now sunk to the level of the water. Half a dozen ships were manoeuvring towards Dunkirk, just beyond the range of his guns; and in the smoke, he knew, was a large transport. He’d seen her being fired on from Nieuport before the smoke had obscured her, and she’d overshot the harbour entrance in the murk.
He studied the dark cloud intently. His ability to concentrate was one of the reasons for his skill. There had been a sticky moment not long before when a group of destroyers trying to knock out the battery had dropped shells just behind them. In rapid succession a couple of dozen missiles had swished over their heads and burst in the fields a hundred yards away. In the silence which had followed they’d heard a cow which had been hit by a splinter, bellowing in agony.
‘Someone go and shoot that animal, please,’ Hinze had said politely.
He was still watching the smoke and now, to his delight, he saw the ship emerging from it to the west of the town, closing the range with every yard. She was a big vessel and appeared slowly, as though unaware that she was standing into danger.
‘Fresh target,’ he instructed.
The gun crews jumped to their positions and the telephone operator wrote down the orders.
‘Fresh target…HE… Charge three… Zero five degrees… Angle of sight, fifteen minutes elevation… Extreme range…’
In the quiet morning air he could hear the clang of the breeches.
‘Number three gun ready!’
‘Number one gun ready!’
‘Number two gun ready!’
Hinze kept his eyes glued on the ship. ‘Fire!’
As the guns crashed out, a flock of sheep set up a bleating, pigs squealed and he heard chickens cackling, as though every farm for miles had been violently stirred up.
The shells landed just short of the transport and she was obscured for a moment by the splashes.
‘Up two degrees,’ he ordered as the cases came out, smoking. The guns roared again and this time the shot went over. Hinze ordered a drop of a hundred metres in range.
‘Shot three!’
This time he saw a flash abaft the transport’s engine room on the port side and just as she disappeared into the smoke again, he saw her slow down and a huge column of steam appear through her engine room hatches.
With gunners like Hinze, the approaches to Dunkirk were shrinking, and at Dover the admiral was faced with a new decision. Since dawn seven more destroyers had been attacked by aeroplanes and two of them damaged, and to these problems was now added the fact that German guns were being brought to bear even on ships turning by the Kwinte buoy on the last safe route as they closed the coast near Nieuport.
‘Is the sweeping of the route by the Ruytingen Pass complete?’ he asked.
The commander, minesweeping, shook his head. ‘Not yet, sir.’
The admiral stared at the charts, neat, scrupulously tidy like his desk. Then, after a moment’s reflection as he tried to translate the thunder and smoke of battle into the rings and arrows of a plan, he brought out the answer like a rabbit from a hat.
‘Very well.’ He turned to the staff officer, operations, ‘send Jaguar, Gallant and Grenade to find out if we can use that route instead of the one by the Kwinte Buoy.’ He turned back to the commander, minesweeping. ‘And see that the sweeping goes ahead. What about the beaches?’
‘Calcutta’s back, sir,’ the staff officer, operations, said. ‘She loaded from drifters. She brought back twelve hundred men. The coasters are bringing them off in similar numbers. Thank God the weather’s holding. It’d be terrible if we had a force eight gale.’
Outside Dunkirk, there was firing from time to time, odd snapshots and an occasional burst of machine-gun fire, but not much else. Shells were screaming overhead in both directions and landing in the outskirts of the town. A battery was drawn up in a field on the right, and a barrier manned by military policemen had been thrown across the road by a farm building. By the wall there were a few German prisoners, dishevelled and dirty, and inside the doorway a military police sergeant was writing in a notebook. As Horndorff and Conybeare approached, the corporal on the barrier saluted and gestured towards the prisoners.
‘Shove him with that lot, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to let ’em go in the end, I reckon, because there’ll be no room for them.’
‘There’ll be room for this one, Corporal,’ Conybeare said politely. ‘I’m taking him to England.’ It was becoming a dogged repetition now.
The corporal stared at him then he turned and shouted. ‘Sarge,’ he roared. ‘We aren’t taking no prisoners across, are we?’
The sergeant appeared in the doorway and stamped across to Conybeare whom he saluted punctiliously. ‘Shove him with that lot, sir,’ he said briskly.
‘Not this one, Sergeant. I’m taking him to England.’
‘My instructions, sir–’
Conybeare’s voice became louder. ‘I’m sorry about your instructions, Sergeant,’ he said, ‘but this man is a panzer le
ader with the rank of major. I suspect he might be able to help us a great deal.’
It was his manner rather than his words that stopped the sergeant dead. ‘Yeh, I suppose so, sir.’
‘Then, thank you, Sergeant, I’ll keep him with me.’
The sergeant and the corporal watched them walk away. Then the sergeant glanced at the group of prisoners, back at Conybeare and Horndorff and finally at the corporal.
‘Round the bend,’ he said.
As he spoke the dive-bombers they’d been expecting ever since daylight, arrived.
The roads into Dunkirk were crammed with men now. As far as the eye could see across the fields there were long columns all heading north. They came from every direction and seemed to fill the bowl of land with the dust they raised, but then the Stukas fell out of the sky and the columns crumbled and broke for the ditches as the German planes came over.
Dropping to the field at Outreux, the returning machines brought back stories that turned Alfred Stoos’ stomach with frustration. As they unfastened their helmets and ran a hand through their flattened hair, the crews were light-headed with tiredness and unable to stop talking.
‘They were everywhere,’ he heard Schlegel saying. ‘There must have been two British divisions and a French army corps all jumbled up together, nose to tail every bit of the way.’
‘And the harbour full of ships,’ Dodtzenrodt threw down his helmet and lit a cigarette. ‘A great raft of them at the end of the mole. Wie em gewaltsamer Flussübergang. They’ve brought up everything they’ve got.’
As the crews moved off to snatch a bite of food, Stoos stumbled away across the grass, hardly able to see in his rage.
‘Herr Leutnant,’ Oberfeldwebel Hamcke replied wearily to his question, ‘we’re doing our best! We’re cannibalising Oberleutnant Bronowski’s machine for spares.’
Stoos’ heart leapt. Bronowski had returned the previous evening, wounded by anti-aircraft fire from a destroyer, and had crashed on landing.
‘The radio works, Herr Leutnant,’ Hamcke explained, ‘and we can use the instruments. But we’re still short–’
Stoos didn’t hear the explanations, only the fact that D/6980 was not yet ready. ‘How long?’ he demanded.
‘Sir–’ Hamcke’s eyes were ringed with shadow and his face was dark ‘–we’ve been at it all night!’
‘How long?’
‘This evening, I hope, sir.’
‘This evening? Gottverdammt! You know the Führer’s words. Räder müssen rollen fur den Sieg. Wheels must roll for victory. Also müssen fliegen die Schwingen. So must wings fly.’
Hamcke stiffened and his mouth tightened mutinously. ‘Herr Leutnant, we can’t perform miracles.’
‘Midday,’ Stoos said.
‘Impossible, sir!’
‘This afternoon, then.’ Stoos swallowed angrily and turned away, his hands clenched so tightly his fingernails dug into his palms. The battle would be over by the time he took any part in it!
Indeed, by the middle of the morning, the rear-guard had already begun to move back. It was under heavy shellfire, and now that the dive-bombers had found them they were making their preparations to pull out when dusk gave them obscurity.
Lance-Corporal Gow was still among them. He’d found a smashed Bren carrier and from the litter of bloody equipment in the rear had produced a bi-pod, spare barrels and magazines, and a few Mills bombs which he’d passed on to Chouteau and Angelet. He was waiting now on the canal bank by the village of Bijghem, near Furnes, where the Guards had set up their strong-points. Another canal converged not far from his position, as well as the roads from Ypres and Nieuport, and Gow was well aware of its importance. With him there were a few men from assorted regiments and the two Frenchmen.
At first light they’d seen moving dots in the fields in the distance which they knew were Germans, but a battery just pulling back past them had opened up and the ground spouted orange flashes. When the smoke had drifted away there were no moving dots, and now the Germans were cautiously waiting for them to leave so they could inch a few yards further forward. Every now and then a rifle banged or the Bren chattered but, after the fighting along the Lys, the Germans were no longer over-keen to try their luck.
Alongside Gow, Angelet crouched over his rifle, his eyelids drooping with weariness; just beyond him, Chouteau, in whose face there was the same enduring look there was in Gow’s.
Chouteau saw Gow studying him and grinned. ‘Moi, je m’appelle Chouteau,’ he said. ‘Gustave Chouteau. La Légion Etrangère. Foreign Legion. Comprenez?’
Gow nodded. ‘Me – Gow. Jock Gow. Coldstream Guards.’
‘Les Gardes?’ The Frenchman’s eyebrows rose. ‘Oh, là là! Comme moi. Big – great warrior, n’est-ce pas?’
Gow’s bone-white face cracked and his ginger moustache lifted in what passed with him as a smile. He’d learned very little French because he firmly believed that, to speak to a Guardsman, foreigners ought to learn English, and he produced one of the few French words he knew. ‘Oui,’ he said.
He glanced down at his boots. They were scuffed and worn but he’d also found an abandoned side-pack in the wrecked Bren carrier that contained boot-polish, blanco, a button stick and shaving gear and he’d pounced on them as though they were gold. His battered footwear now shone, his belt was clean again and his chin was scraped to the bone. He looked and felt like a Guardsman once more. The wish to be clean sprang simply from a pride in his unit, his home, the one thing that was bringing the BEF to the coast. He gave his boots a rub with his handkerchief, watched by the Frenchman who like most French soldiers was prepared to go as far as cleaning his rifle but no further, then reached out and gave the barrel of the Bren another loving wipe.
‘Yon bastards’ll learn a thing or two, if they come,’ he said, and though Chouteau didn’t understand a word of Gow’s thick dialect, he knew exactly what he meant
‘Oui,’ he said. ‘Vraiment.’
Gow was just wishing the Germans would come so he could shoot a few, when he heard Noble’s voice behind him. Noble had disappeared the previous night and it had been Gow’s firm impression that they’d never see him again. His face was pale and, as he approached, Gow saw he was limping.
‘Don’t you ever stop fiddling with that bloody gun, Gow?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘And look at them boots. There must be quarts of spit on ’em!’
Gow frowned. ‘It wouldnae do you no harm to polish your boots.’
Noble stared at his feet. ‘They’re all wore out,’ he said.
‘Nor do y’have a crease in your pants, and no blanco on yer webbing.’ Gow’s eyes glinted as he snatched the rifle from Noble’s hand to squint down the barrel. ‘Your bundook’s dirty, too,’ he announced. ‘You could plant potatoes in there, mon, and yon foresight’s lousy with spiders and cobwebs and dairty filthy rust.’
Noble stared. Gow took his breath away. He was an elemental force, understanding not much beyond a punch in the teeth, and nothing would ever change him. But Noble was a Cockney, supple, tough and moving with the wind because that was how he survived, and nothing would ever change him either.
‘I’m not looking forward to a hero’s death as a prize for me patriotism,’ he said.
‘Where’ve you been, anyway?’ Gow asked. ‘And for why are ye standing there like a wet hen, mon? Get your heid doon.’
Noble shrugged and, pulling a sandbag forward, produced a handful of army biscuits, a white loaf and a tin of bully beef.
‘Bully again,’ Gow said. ‘It’s coming oot o’ ma ears.’
‘Wait, you ungrateful soldier you,’ Noble said and from his blouse he began to bring out sweet biscuits and tins of fruit and chocolate. ‘Dessert,’ he said. ‘Will it do?’
Gow stared at Noble. He was still surprised to see him back. ‘Aye,’ he said grudgingly. ‘It’ll do.’
Noble knelt awkwardly and as Chouteau reached out for the loaf he pushed his hand away. ‘Less o’ that, mon camarade,’ he said. ‘I
will donner une partie à chaque homme. Savvy?’
Chouteau nodded and nudged Angelet. ‘Wake up, mon vieux,’ he said. ‘We’re going to eat.’
Gow was studying the loaf. ‘Where’d you get it, you bluidy scrounger?’ he demanded.
‘Where you think? I pinched it. There’s Robin Hood, Robin Starch and robbin’ bastards. I’m one o’ them.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘I saw this feller–’
‘You pinched it? Off one of your comrades?’
Noble was unmoved. ‘Listen, mon fils,’ he said, ‘he was belting up the road like he’d got ten legs. You’re still here, fighting off them nasty rotten ’Uns, aren’t you? I thought you needed it more’n he did.’
As they began to eat, tearing at the food like famished wolves, Noble glanced round him, suddenly aware how few of them there were. ‘Where’s all the rest of the fellers?’ he asked.
‘What fellers?’
Noble looked at Gow in disgust. ‘Don’t say we’re on our own,’ he said.
‘There’s enough.’
Noble snorted. ‘Trouble with you, Gow,’ he said, ‘is that you’ve got the light of bloody glory in your eye.’
Gow’s solemn face cracked a little and he nodded to the distance across the canal. ‘Them bastards winnae come out o’ yon trees till we let ’em,’ he said.
He studied Noble, still puzzled. He’d seen plenty like Noble in the last few days. Some of them had conveniently lost their units, some even their rifles. But, though Noble’s rifle and his person were a disgrace even to a Territorial, he was still among those present.
‘What did ye do in Civvy Street, Noble?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Do all right at it?’
Noble had a feeling that Gow, whom he’d always assumed to be a man without humour, was pulling his leg. ‘Yeh. Okay,’ he said.