by John Harris
The appalling responsibility didn’t seem to worry Hough, and he was standing on the bridge eating a sandwich and calling his instructions through mouthfuls of corned beef. A paddle-minesweeper was on the beach just outside the harbour, burning fiercely, while another lay against the mole, its upperworks hanging over at an angle. In the darkness the town seemed to glow with fires.
‘Which side do you want the nets, sir?’
Hough pushed his glasses aside and picked up his sandwich again. ‘Neither. There are two destroyers off the beaches already. We’ll use the mole.’
As they threw their lines ashore, the naval commander who was acting as piermaster scrambled aboard. ‘Nice to see you back,’ he said.
As the blackness lifted and the greyness of dawn approached, the wind changed again. For days the sea had been as incredibly flat and motionless as a village pond. Men who knew the Channel and its treachery marvelled at the way even the gods seemed to be taking a hand in the struggle, the waves held within such tight bounds that the simplest manoeuvres were possible to frightened or unskilled men in unhandy boats.
But now, first as a stirring of the air, then as an increasing breeze, it began to blow in towards the shore from the north, and in the long shallows the surf rose. It was never heavy but, after five days, it was more than the exhausted men could fight. One after the other the small boats swung round and broached to.
The first to go aground were pushed off but the tide was receding quickly and those which followed were left stranded all the way from the foot of the mole to La Panne, small lopsided vessels lying on the drying sand.
Allerton was involved with one of them. When he saw it first it was still drifting, small and clinker-built and with a decked-in bow. A rope hung over the side and there was no sign of anyone on board. Across the stern were the words, Queen of France.
‘That thing looks as though it’s got an outboard engine,’ he said to Rice. ‘Think we could make it go?’
They stripped and began to swim, but the water was only shoulder-high and they pulled themselves aboard without difficulty.
‘It’s not an outboard,’ Allerton said disappointedly, hanging over the stern. ‘It’s only some sort of rudder.’
Rice opened a hatch amidships. ‘The engine’s here, sir. Know anything about ’em?’
They swung at the starting handle but nothing happened and hopelessly they searched the lockers under the stern for tools. Below a hatch in the covered-in bow was a small cabin with a single narrow bunk, with a mattress and a blanket. The Queen of France had clearly belonged to someone who’d not been able to spend much on her, and the few pathetic fittings lay on a folded sail under the narrow bunk.
After a while, however, Allerton unearthed a rusty screwdriver and an adjustable spanner also red with rust. They were just about to climb back to the deck when Rice, who had been poking about in the lockers, unearthed a primus stove and a packet of tea. There was also a tin of condensed milk and water in the kettle. As they lit the primus the first raid of the day started and Allerton looked up.
‘Might as well stay where we are, sir,’ Rice suggested.
‘As safe here as anywhere,’ Allerton agreed and, despite the racket ashore, they sat together, stark naked, drinking tea, until the noise died and the engines faded.
As they finished they felt the boat bump softly but they paid no attention to it until the kettle fell off the primus and they realised that the cabin was now at an angle. The falling tide had stranded the Queen of France solidly on the sand.
Subtly, because of the conditions and without any real instructions from anyone in authority, the evacuation had moved east. Several ships had been hit near the harbour entrance and the others were now trying to avoid the danger and, with nothing to shoot at, Leutnant Hinze and others like him round Mardyck and Gravelines switched to Dunkirk itself; working at extreme range, they managed to bring the loading berths under fire.
To the exhausted men on the beaches, the shelling was a new harassment. There was no food left now, and officers and men were eating from the same tin of bully beef and sharing the same biscuits and the same stale dregs of wine. A constant procession of haggard, unshaven soldiers moved among the abandoned vehicles and through the dead, doleful houses in search of some forgotten tin or loaf or biscuit. A few still bathed in the sooty water to clear their ears and eyes of the grit which had been flung up by the shells and bombs and bullets and drifted by the breeze. A few searched for fresh clothing. One man was washing socks in the shallows and drying them on a string tied to a wrecked ambulance, another was emptying radiators to get enough water to brew tea on a fire made with broken equipment. A few more kicked a ball about, and two despatch riders were racing each other up and down the beach, their eyes always on the sky for the return of the bombers. At the first salvo of shells, at the first sound of aeroplane engines, everything was dropped and there was a rush for the shelter of the dunes.
The sight of the first starving, exhausted soldiers who found their way to Daisy had shocked Kenny Pepper. They arrived in small boatloads, stupid with fatigue, so that he stared at them, wondering what had gone wrong, and it was only when he realised that Daisy was heeling under the weight of the men hanging on to her sides that he came to life. His reaction was instinctive. Daisy was in danger, and in a fury he punched at faces and pounded on helmets and finally grabbed a boathook and went along the side of the boat thrusting at them. ‘You get off there,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s have some order!’
It was as they pushed the soldiers aboard a destroyer lying in the roadstead that he heard his first yell of warning that aeroplanes were overhead. He turned to gaze at the lightening sky and suddenly realised he was staring at the enemy. All the numerous bangs and explosions he’d heard ashore hadn’t really meant much up to that moment. They’d been impersonal things involved in other men’s defeat, but those small glinting shapes above were trying to kill him, Kenneth Harry Pepper.
The destroyer’s crew started casting off and the coils of the bow rope dropped in loops round Kenny’s head. Then the warship began to move ahead at full speed, her wash setting the mat of boats about her rocking violently.
‘Let’s git out of here,’ Gilbert Williams shouted but, even as Daisy swung away, the first bombs came down.
‘Oh, Christ Jesus God Almighty!’ Ernie yelled, his wall eye swinging crazily as though it were loose in its socket.
One of the aeroplanes had come down so low in a screaming dive, it raced between the ships at masthead height. Kenny ducked behind the wheelhouse and swung round on hands and knees towards the ancient Lewis gun. ‘Give it ’em, Sy!’ he screeched in his high cracked boy’s voice.
But it was only when the aeroplanes drew off and the racket died down that he realised he’d heard no answering fire, and Ernie Williams was running along the deck.
‘Where’s that sodden Brundrett?’ he bellowed, snatching at the gun and swinging it round. ‘He hasn’t even taken the fucken cover off.’
A moment later, Kenny heard him in the engine room. ‘It’s your job,’ he was yelling at the top of his voice as he and his brother always did when they were angry. ‘You sodden get out there next time and start shooting!’
As he reappeared from the engine room and stamped to the little wheelhouse, his brows went down, his face flushed with anger. ‘Said ’e ’adn’t realised,’ he was shouting. ‘’Adn’t realised! Christ! With that row!’
Ten minutes later the aeroplanes were back again and as Daisy swung to starboard at full speed under Gilbert’s thick hands, Kenny saw a cockle-boat appear directly in front of them, wallowing in the wash of a passing ship. He snatched up the fender Ernie had been making in Dover and ran to the bow with it. It was heavy and Ernie had made it beautifully, taking care to get all the half-hitches even. As the gap between the two boats narrowed, Kenny swung it over the bows to take the shock. The two boats hit with a crash that almost flung him overboard. As he fell on his face on the foredeck, they we
re all covered with flying pieces of cork and the fender was only a flat bag.
‘Nice work, Kenny!’ Gilbert stuck his head out of the wheelhouse. ‘See you sweep them bits up when you’ve a minute, mind.’ He swung round to the stern. There was no sign of Brundrett at the Lewis again and he yelled to his brother:
‘You get on that bleeden gun, Ern!’
As Ernie swung the Lewis, another aeroplane roared over them and Kenny heard the reassuring clack-clack.
‘I hit him!’ Ernie yelled.
‘Nah!’ Gilbert shook his head. ‘Missed!’
As the aeroplanes disappeared, Gilbert called to Kenny. ‘Go and see what’s wrong with that fat sod,’ he said. ‘He must be deaf.’
Going below, Kenny found the engineer-cook half under the engine with a spanner in his hand.
‘Giving trouble.’ Brundrett had his head in the bilges, but Kenny could see his fat white cheeks quivering and it dawned on him that Brundrett was frightened sick and had chosen the position because it gave him the most protection from the bombs and bullets.
It shocked Kenny that Brundrett could be afraid, because in the stories he read it was only the enemy who ever felt fear, but when the aeroplanes came again and again, tearing at his nerves with the din, he began to see it wasn’t all that difficult. The crash of the bombs seemed to strip the flesh from his nerves and leave him shaking. Vast splashes rose in the shallows and he saw ships start to back out from the harbour in a hurry and men scattering like disturbed ants on the beaches as the high fountains of sand rose. There was still no sign of Brundrett and as the aeroplanes came down once more, he saw the bombs falling in uneven lines as though they were about to drop one after another along Daisy’s deck. In the sea ahead there was a mat of swimmers where a boat had been hit and he saw a destroyer, taking desperate evasive action, plough through them at full speed, the brown shapes rolling over by the stern as she slewed round to set Daisy rocking with her wash.
Gilbert was staring bleakly at the disaster, then he came to life with a start and gave Kenny a shove. Having something to do helped, and as the aeroplanes came down yet again in another numbing attack he saw Ernie swinging the gun round. There were no tracers in the pan and it was impossible to tell where the bullets went.
‘Missed the bugger,’ Ernie snarled.
In the shallows nearby a cutter was floating empty, its crew blown overboard, and an officer took it over. Crowds of soldiers immediately rushed it and began to clamber over the stern so that the officer had to stand on the foredeck yelling at them to distribute their weight evenly. As it moved towards Daisy, it was so low in the water it looked as though it would capsize.
The rattle of rifles and the solid whango-whango-whango of the destroyers’ guns came in a deafening chorus that almost lifted Daisy from the sea. Then the skipper of the cockle-boat they’d hit yelled that he had engine trouble and asked for a tow, and Kenny made the line fast over the bollard as Daisy went ahead.
At that moment there was a tremendous explosion from aft and, as they crouched behind the wheelhouse, a hail of wood splinters and blazing wreckage fell about them, stirring the water and skating through the air to clink and thud on the deck. Lifting their heads as it stopped, they saw there was no sign of the cockle-boat or her crew – just the tow rope trailing in the water astern.
Kenny gaped at it, his mouth slack, then Gilbert Williams swallowed, his adam’s apple jerking. ‘Get that rope in, kid,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘Afore it gets round the screw.’
As he pulled in the frayed rope, Kenny realised his hands were trembling. He tried to get a grip on himself, but the trembling persisted and he had to stand for a moment to get over it.
This wasn’t at all how he’d expected war to be. The drawings in the magazines he’d read had never shown men being blown to pieces so small that no trace of them could be found, had never shown them run down by their own ships, had indicated nothing of the terror or the weariness of exhausted and wounded men. They’d never explained that blood could stain a deck so that it was impossible to get rid of it with the deck scrubber, or how an injured man screamed when he was flung down by the swing of the boat. They’d never conveyed the stink that was drifting off the stranded ships, a compound of burning wood and burning flesh and putrefaction that filled the nostrils and was almost possible to taste. No, this wasn’t a bit how he’d imagined war.
It wasn’t how Scharroo had visualised it either.
He and Marie-Josephine had spent the night clutching each other for warmth in a hole in the sand dunes. As daylight came, Scharroo had released himself gently and sat up stiffly. A moment later Marie-Josephine stirred and, as she sat up, too, Scharroo ran a hand over the stubble on his chin and offered her a cigarette. She was dark-eyed with tiredness and her face was pale, but the fastidiousness in her nature drove her to find a comb in her pocket and automatically drag it through her hair.
‘It’s time we were going,’ Scharroo said.
Eddies of breeze were coiling wisps of black smoke down towards the sand, and Scharroo could smell an acrid smell of burning which was touched with the scent of pine trees that he remembered from his youth. Marie-Josephine was peering narrowed-eyed towards the sea and for a while he stood watching her. She’d dropped the stained cream coat to the sand and stood straight and slim and small, the breeze blowing her hair about her face, her thin flowered dress flattened against her figure and legs. He said nothing, enjoying the lull in the bombing, with the luxurious feeling of safety and the sight of a pretty girl among all the misery and terror. He studied her fresh-complexioned face for the hundredth time, the large evasive eyes that were sometimes sullen and sometimes as hard as agate with determination. Behind the gamin there was a rapidly maturing woman who knew exactly what she wanted.
Marie-Josephine was looking worried, however, and at last her problem burst out of her. Her chin lifted and she swung round to face him. ‘I think I will go to England,’ she said.
Scharroo flung down his cigarette. ‘England, for Christ’s sake! Why? The war’s going to end soon.’
Marie-Josephine shook her head, quite certain in her mind that he was wrong. France had been down before but she’d always recovered and, with true Gallic arrogance, the girl couldn’t believe that God would permit such barbarians as the Germans to conquer a nation as cultured, as noble, as intelligent, as gallant as the French.
‘I think not,’ she said.
She gestured at the wreckage-littered beach. Ships were appearing now and dozens of small boats were moving between them and the patient queues of men like beetles on a pond. ‘They do not go to all this trouble if they wish to surrender, I think,’ she pointed out.
What she said made sense. Scharroo had never had much time for the British but the effort that was being made to remove their army clearly didn’t seem to indicate any immediate intention to give in.
‘I do not wish to remain in a defeated country,’ Marie-Josephine went on. ‘In my town, all was occupied by the Germans in 1914. It is occupied in 1870 also. I do not think I wish to live like that.’
Scharroo frowned. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said. ‘If the British go on fighting, the war might go on for years, for ever. You’ll never come back.’
She shrugged. She was more peasant than she thought and possessed a peasant’s straight-thinking contempt for vacillation. ‘Perhaps that is better than to be ruled by Germans. I will encourage someone to take me with them.’
Scharroo stared towards the sea and the hurrying boats. At that moment the destroyers’ guns began to fire and he saw small puff-balls of smoke appear in the sky near a group of glittering dots that he knew were aeroplanes.
‘By God,’ he shouted, as they started to run for the dunes, ‘you’ll be lucky.’
Luck was what Stoos needed, too, just then.
It was not his idea of military glory to sit in his tent awaiting a court martial. He’d had to wait though the whole of the previous interminable day, watching the machi
nes taking off and landing, their crews strained and silent now with exhaustion. Schultze and von Ahlefeld had failed to return and that morning Dziecielski had returned wounded, his gunner dead in his seat.
‘They’re shooting us down like rooks,’ he’d said as they’d lifted him from the cockpit.
Stoos had spent the morning alone, eating alone, waiting alone. He couldn’t drag himself away from the aeroplanes and went to watch every time they took off and landed. In the mess tent he sat in silence, preferring not to answer questions, and no one bothered him as they swallowed their cold hock and French wine and grabbed what food they could cram into their mouths before the next call came.
Dawn had arrived with mist in the fields, so that the trees stood out like ghostly shapes and the stark lines of the Stukas had been softened into blurred bat shapes. His feet in the dewy grass, Stoos stared at the sky. He could hear aeroplanes droning overhead towards the beaches from the German border or further to the south where the knuckled hills of the Somme protruded from the mist.
As he stood with his hands in his pockets, brooding, an engine started up, rising to a scream as the mechanic revved it against the brakes. The sound made Stoos shudder with anticipation, then his shoulders slumped again as he realised it didn’t concern him. He lit a cigarette, one of the English ones they’d captured, drew a few puffs and then threw it away. As he did so, he became aware of his gunner, Wunsche, standing behind him.
‘Will they let us fly, Herr Leutnant?’ he asked.
Stoos shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. I have been grounded.’ As Wunsche vanished, Stoos wandered disconsolately towards the hangar. D/6980 was standing outside, the mist beading the cockpit cover.
Hamcke was by the entrance watching him, and Stoos forced himself to ignore him and walked round the machine, starting at the tail as he’d been taught, checking the fuselage, flaps, ailerons and lights. After a while, unable to resist the temptation, he climbed on to the wing and eventually into the cockpit, and sat there, the sun on his neck, deep in thought, thinking of Warsaw and Rotterdam and the roads from Brussels. The dive had never ceased to thrill him.