by John Harris
The Cockney seemed convinced at last. ‘You ever been to Hollywood?’ he asked, and there was something in his thin face that indicated he’d spent many delighted hours in cinemas – probably when he was unemployed – watching a brilliant world of which he had no experience himself.
‘Once,’ Scharroo said.
‘Ever meet any of them film stars?’
‘One or two. I didn’t like ’em much. I guess they were selfish bastards.’ The conversation seemed faintly unreal with the bombs crashing not far away and the sky full of smoke and the sound of aeroplanes overhead, but then the whole evacuation had seemed more than slightly unreal from the beginning.
There was a long pause in the loading and some of the weary men sat down and went to sleep, indifferent to the danger, twitching and muttering in private nightmares. The concrete where they now stood was chipped and badly stained with blood. As they moved on again they saw the pier had been cut just ahead. Engineers had laid planks across the gap but they were unsupported and getting across was like doing a tightrope act.
‘Fair makes you giddy, don’t it?’ the Cockney said as they reached the other side. Scharroo said nothing, well aware that there was no going back now. The military policeman seemed to think so, too, because he hadn’t bothered to follow and was now walking back along the mole towards the town.
They had almost reached the end of the mole when the aeroplanes reappeared. They came over in waves and the din was tremendous, the crash of the bombs shaking the whole structure. Scharroo wanted to duck and run, but no one else moved and he had to stand where he was. The men about him were patient and silent, sucking at fags, their faces expressionless under the dirt and the lines of strain, and it still puzzled him that they couldn’t see that they’d lost the war.
At the end of the mole, he could see a trot of six destroyers all alongside each other, their multiple pom-poms forcing the planes to keep their distance. But a Junkers 88 was roaring crazily along the beach towards them, and the whole queue seemed to subside as men ducked. A naval commander at the end of the pier began to scream. ‘Come on,’ he was yelling. ‘Never mind that! Keep moving!’
Every vessel in the vicinity was firing now, and as the aeroplane roared past, barely masthead high, the rear gunner was so close Scharroo could see his helmeted head and the winking flashes as his gun fired. A few men fell, and he saw one drop with a scream between the ships and the jetty. No one took any notice or attempted to rescue him. ‘Come on,’ the naval officer kept yelling. ‘Faster! Keep coming!’
Then he noticed that the little Cockney was still bowed forward and, as the man in front moved on, he subsided slowly on to his face, his helmet falling off and spinning on its brim like a plate.
‘Oh, gawd, mate,’ he said as Scharroo bent over him. ‘I felt it get me. Right in the spine.’
Scharroo owed him nothing but he felt he couldn’t simply leave him there. As he turned him over, however, the soldier gave a harsh scream. ‘Oh, Gawd, no!’ he said.
The men behind were pressing past them now, stepping over the outstretched legs. One of them, weary to the point of blindness, stumbled against them and the little Cockney let out a yelp of agony.
Scharroo looked up, desperate to do something, and a man in ground sheet and steel helmet stopped alongside him. ‘I’m a medical orderly,’ he said. ‘Seventh Field Ambulance.’ He bent over the injured man, asking a few soft questions as he moved his feet. The soldier gave another harsh rasping cry and the medical orderly straightened up and shook his head.
Scharroo bent down. ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘He says it’ll be OK. Just lie still. I’ll wait here with you.’
He didn’t have to wait long and after a while the medical orderly stooped and opened one of the closed eyes.
‘You can go now,’ he said. Scharroo straightened up and without a word began to move down the pier again with the others, towards a fat flat paddle-steamer lying at the end. The medical orderly removed the dead man’s helmet and laid it over his face. Then he too turned and joined the queue.
As the sun sank lower, leaving a bloody trail across the torn land, Allerton moved along the line of the dunes. The experience of leading the blind man to the boats had stirred him enormously, and he’d felt unable to join a queue himself in case there were others. Among the marram grass he’d found several wounded. Three of them were unconscious, but a fourth was only slightly hurt and seemed to be out of his mind. Allerton led him down the beach, listening to his ravings.
As he walked back he found he was moving further and further towards La Panne, finding stragglers, one or two of them drunk, one or two stupid from shell shock, and he sent all of them towards Dunkirk. Then he found he couldn’t stop and in his pity he began to move among the injured, trying to find food for them. When an officer came along the beach in a lorry loaded with champagne, offering it to anybody within reach, he took two bottles back to the wounded men.
‘I never tasted champagne before, sir,’ one of them said. ‘And it’s me birthday, too.’ His face was grey and Allerton knew he’d never see another.
Finding himself near the Queen of France, he recognised her at once. Gow was watching the sea creep slowly up the beach with all the flotsam and jetsam of the battle, and seeing Allerton, he immediately came to attention and slammed up a salute as though he were on parade.
‘Got it going?’ Allerton asked.
‘We will,’ Noble said from alongside the engine. ‘Know anything about ’em?’
‘If I did, she wouldn’t be here now. And neither would I.’
As Allerton moved away, Noble gazed after him. ‘That bloke’s had it,’ he said shrewdly. ‘He’s not going to make it.’
Gow began to walk round the boat, marching almost, in a stiff-backed, stiff-legged way as though he were on sentry-go at Buckingham Palace. The Bren lay on the bow where he could get at it, and he’d already used it once or twice against aircraft.
‘She’s a gey fine boat,’ he announced with pride.
Noble was just putting back the engine hatch, watched by Marie-Josephine, when Chouteau appeared. Gow, now standing on the foredeck, saw him first, appearing among the figures drifting aimlessly about the beach in the dusk. Angelet was in his arms and his rifle was slung over his shoulder. He stopped beside the boat and shifted the boy in his grasp. Angelet’s face was grey-white and the eyelids over his closed eyes were purple. His head hung limply against Chouteau’s chest.
Gow stared anxiously at him. ‘The wee boy,’ he said. ‘Is he deid?’
Chouteau managed a grin. ‘No, mon brave,’ he said. ‘He is asleep. He will sleep for a week, I think.’ He nodded at the boat. ‘What are you going to do with that?’
‘Go to England,’ Noble said, wiping his greasy hands on his trousers.
‘You will take him with you? He wishes to fight. I think he will probably kill many Germans for you.’
‘Does he know anything about boats? The bloody valve keeps sticking.’
Chouteau gave a vast shrug. ‘But, of course,’ he lied. ‘He is from Marseilles. Everybody in Marseilles is a sailor.’
He passed Angelet up to Gow who pulled him over the thwarts and laid him in the bottom of the boat. It was a difficult operation but Angelet never moved.
After a while, Marie-Josephine began to study the sea. ‘I think the boat begins to float,’ she said.
They waded into the dark water and scrambled aboard, Chouteau remaining by the bow, a shadowy figure with the water up to his thighs.
‘Come on, mon,’ Gow said. ‘Get in.’
‘Let us be certain that the engine marches first,’ Chouteau said.
Noble said a prayer, fumbled for the petrol switch and reached to swing the heavy flywheel. As the engine started in a low steady chugging, Marie-Josephine flung her arms round his neck and hugged him.
Chouteau pointed to the north. ‘That is the direction, mon vieux,’ he said. ‘If by any chance you should miss England you will come eventually
to the north pole, and that is still neutral.’
As he put his shoulder against the bow, the boat floated backwards and he walked with it, one hand on the stern, until he was chest-deep in the water.
‘Come on, mon,’ Gow said anxiously. ‘Get aboard.’
Chouteau smiled, then he was gone in the darkness. His voice came over the water. ‘This is my country, mon brave,’ he said. ‘I think I will stay behind and slit a few German throats.’
When Tremenheere came round it was dark and he found himself staring at the stars. He couldn’t see anything else, but from the motion of the deck beneath him he guessed he was still afloat – even if only just. He could smell burning and the stink of death so he knew he hadn’t gone far, and he reckoned that this business of getting himself blown off his feet was coming round just too often. He’d hardly heard a gun fired in anger in the other war, but now it seemed as if the whole German army were aiming at him personally.
His right shoulder was on fire with an excruciating pain and he had to lie still for a while, gathering his courage, before he warily inched his head up.
Then he saw his arm was stuck out at a strange angle and it dawned on him he’d broken his collar bone.
‘Oh, Christ, Nell,’ he moaned. ‘Look what the bastards have done to me!’
As the Queen of France headed slowly out to sea in the darkness, it came as a shock to Lije Noble to discover there was more to handling a boat than he’d ever dreamed. There were no brakes for a start, and you couldn’t slow down, and when you aimed to pass round the stern of some grounded wreck, you invariably found yourself heading round the bow. He realised eventually that this was the action of the tide setting him along the coast and he began to make allowances to counter the effect, even stopping occasionally to make small experiments with the throttle and the old-fashioned rudder.
By the light of the flames, he could see there was flotsam everywhere – burned, charred and splintered boats, floating grass line, oars, spars, boathooks, planks, doors, rafts, lifebelts, overcoats and battledress blouses. And bodies. There seemed to be hundreds of them bobbing in ones and twos as the ships’ washes lifted them, gathering together in little conferences of the dead. ‘I wonder who’ll answer for this lot,’ he said.
‘The politicians’ll no’ take the blame,’ Gow observed. ‘And keep your een on yon bloody sea. We don’t want anything tae go wrong.’
‘Leave it to your Uncle Lije,’ Noble said. ‘I got her going nice and steady now, ain’t I?’
He beamed at Gow in the darkness but at that moment almost as though to prove him wrong, the engine faltered and died.
With night putting a limit to vision the German guns were quieter as Allerton walked back through the town.
Around midnight he found himself by a temporary hospital in a schoolroom. The doctors were working by the light of acetylene lamps and the headlights of trucks now, and there were several Sisters of Mercy and a few exhausted RAMC men.
A soldier bending over a stretcher rose slowly, and from the look on his face Allerton knew that the man at his feet was his friend and that he had died. ‘What a bloody war,’ he grated.
The place stank of antiseptic, cordite and dirty bodies, and seemed to be full of the bloodshot questioning eyes of the wounded, the sweat and tear-marks still on their grimy faces. A man was quietly dying in a corner, his face shrunken and thin, the skin taut over his cheeks and nose. Somewhere in the shadows another was mooing softly like a cow. Men muttered and groaned in the unquiet dark, and a horrible rattling noise came with deadly monotony. Every few minutes a match flared as someone looked at a pain-filled face where it stood out in stark outline in momentary incandescence. Then, unexpectedly, making Allerton jump, a shell-shocked man leapt up, cursing and shouting, his arms flailing. As he was dragged away, the doctor saw Allerton standing in front of him and assumed he was seeking attention. ‘What’s happened to your mouth?’ he demanded.
‘It’s all right,’ Allerton said. ‘That’s not why I’m here. I’ve got some wounded in a garage down the road.’
The doctor’s uniform was splashed with blood and he looked exhausted. ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing I can do. I’ve got two hundred and fifty here and more outside.’
Allerton turned away but the doctor called him back, his voice more gentle. ‘How about asking the Sisters of Mercy? They might help.’
Allerton went outside. The garden and the field beyond were full of wounded, dozens and dozens of them, and the Sisters of Mercy moved among them holding hurricane lamps, their bat-winged head-dresses sombre against the light. Several men were burying the dead in a corner, unwashed, unfed, devoid of sleep, scratching themselves as they stared with melancholy faces at the padre intoning the words of the service. Then a spadeful of dirt fell on the blanketed bodies and the mounds of earth round the graves began to disappear.
Allerton stopped one of the Sisters of Mercy, a mere girl with plain pale features and spectacles, her coif marked with red stains. There was something extraordinarily beautiful in her face that came from the spirit and as he explained his wishes, she paused for a moment, spoke to one of the older women, then turned back to Allerton and nodded.
‘Oui,’ she said.
At Dover, they were still trying to assess the losses of the day, balancing them against the numbers brought to safety. The news of the disasters made grim reading.
‘Keith,’ the SOO said, first listing the destroyers, the most precious asset of the Dover command. ‘Foudroyant. Basilisk. Eager. With Ivanhoe and Worcester damaged.’
He paused and the admiral lifted his head.
‘To say nothing,’ the SOO went on, ‘of the gunboat Mosquito, the minesweeper Skipjack, the tug St Abbs. Salamander and Prague also damaged, Scotia damaged and sinking, and Brighton Queen and the trawler Jacinta holed and stranded. Those are the ones we know about.’
He stopped to let the grim list sink in and the admiral frowned, well aware that the slaughter could not go on much longer. Up and down the roadsteads off the coast of France ships were on fire and sinking, and new wrecks littered the sandbanks all the way across the Channel.
‘Four destroyers sunk,’ he said. ‘Four damaged.’ He stared at a signal which had arrived from the Admiralty in London. ‘Discontinuation of the use of destroyers by day off the French coast,’ it directed, and then suggested the suspension of the evacuation at seven o’clock the following morning.
The admiral considered the problem. ‘I understand the French have formed a line behind our people,’ he said, ‘and we’re to retire through it.’ He picked up a list and studied it. ‘We must change the emphasis to night loading, and all small craft must work the beaches up to a mile and a half from the town. The harbour will be served by eight destroyers and seven personnel ships.’
The SOO frowned. ‘Some of them have been at it for a full week, sir,’ he pointed out.
The admiral was unmoved. ‘Then we must put fresh crews aboard. What’s the score for today?’
‘It’s going to be in the region of sixty thousand, sir. Most of those coming in now are French, but we’re having difficulty finding them and I understand there’s a little difficulty over language. Think we ought to put someone ashore who can speak French?’
The admiral shook his head. ‘I think they’ll have to manage now,’ he said.
Sunday, 2 June and Afterwards
Everything that would float was approaching the coast now, and odd pockets of men who had failed to get into Dunkirk were still being picked up from beaches outside the town. Small miracles were performed. Men adrift in dinghies made sails with clothing and waterproof capes, and in waterlogged engine rooms engineers stuffed holes with mattresses and stood waist-deep in water to watch their gauges. The Casino and the Kursaal were blazing now, and there were so many wrecks in the fairway by this time that boats were circling them for survivors – and sometimes finding them. Though the patient lines of men still waited along the length of the mo
le, ships were being hit again and again by shellfire and it was very quickly becoming clear that lifting at that point was too dangerous and the men must be turned about to file back to the beaches.
As the light increased, in the Queen of France, Lije Noble began to take off the lid of the engine hatch. Because no one had any matches, they’d been unable to examine it during the night. Now, in the first hours of the day, Noble stared at the old Ford engine and frowned heavily. To Gow, who was no mechanic, it looked merely like a squarish lump of metal with pipes attached.
As they peered at it, Angelet woke. The long blackringed lashes that many a girl would have given her eye-teeth for, fluttered and his head turned. His eyes fastened on his rifle lying alongside him and he snatched it to him at once and sat up.
‘Où sommes-nous?’ he demanded. Then he saw Gow’s face and just beyond him Noble’s and he smiled ‘Monsieur le Sergent,’ he said. ‘Et Monsieur Nobelle.’ He glanced around. ‘Où est le caporal?’
Gow gestured. ‘He didnae come,’ he said.
Angelet stared, uncomprehending, and Gow turned to Marie-Josephine. ‘Better tell him, Miss,’ he said. ‘You hae the French, I think.’
Marie-Josephine explained and Angelet’s big eyes blinked so that they thought he was going to burst into tears. ‘Que faisons-nous maintenant?’ he demanded.
‘Nous allons en Angleterre,’ Marie-Josephine said. ‘We’re going to England.’
‘Join the army,’ Noble said. ‘Fight the Jerries. Killay les Boches.’
‘Mebbe I could get y’in the Guards,’ Gow said stiffly.
Noble was staring at the silent engine again, then he swore and jumped to the petrol tank. There was a stick in the scuppers and he snatched it up and thrust it through the hole. It reappeared barely wet.
‘Oh, charming,’ he said. ‘Bloody charming!’ He kicked the side of the boat savagely. ‘Sodden old tub! The bloody fuel pipe’s come adrift!’ He gazed round him at the lifting sea. To a man born and brought up in the busy streets of London, it seemed the emptiest place in the world.