by John Harris
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you are now prisoners of the German Reich. The wounded will be properly cared for and all doctors and medical staff will be allowed to continue to attend them.’
It didn’t stop the corporal returning when he’d gone and removing their watches and money.
Allerton was not alone.
The dead lay all over the town, in hastily scraped graves in gardens and parks and among the sand-dunes. They sprawled along the tide line, floated face downwards in the shallows, and lay in the warm yielding soil all the way back to the frontier through the old graveyards of the earlier war, as far south as Beaurains and beyond. They huddled in the ditches, in the fields and in the streets of a hundred small towns and villages, among the wrecked guns and smoking vehicles and all the other detritus of a defeated army. Many more were entombed in the icy hulks of ships beneath the sea.
There were hundreds of them. Lieutenant-Commander Hough, of Vital was one, with Lieutenant MacGillicuddy and the rest of the ship’s company and the ship’s company of Eager and many other fine vessels. Even Dr Knevett, owner of Athelstan, was among them, because he’d finally insisted on crossing on the personnel ship, Scotia, and she was now lying on her side, a burnt-out wreck. Temporary Acting Corporal Rice hadn’t reached safety. Nor had Lieutenant Wren, of the York and Lancs. Captain Deshayes, of Angelet’s 121st, hadn’t made it either, and despite the efforts he’d made, nor had Private Favre. Neither had Sergeant Galpin, of the Engineers, nor Private Bawes, H, of the Worcesters, now bobbing gently in the cabin of Athelstan below the sea, or an unknown Cockney, still lying with his face covered by his helmet where Scharroo had left him on the mole. Or Joe Ferris or wee Alec Galt or Ordinary Seaman Didcot.
On the deck of the last ship to leave, Gilbert Williams was writing his report. It wasn’t very official and it wasn’t in triplicate. It was in pencil in Gilbert’s ungainly hand on a scrap of paper torn from an exercise book and he was finding it hard to write for the tears in his eyes.
‘I wish to report the loss of my boat, Daisy,’ he wrote down. ‘I put all my savings into her and now I have got nothing. She was run down by the tug, Gamecock. My brother, E Williams, is missing, also S Brundrett and K Pepper.’
Even now the water of the Channel was littered with rafts, rubber dinghies, motor tyres and small boats containing determined men who were set on reaching safety. One intrepid warrior of high spirits and great good humour, stripped to the buff and swimming five miles offshore, was picked up by a destroyer as he headed doggedly for England. ‘Sure you’ve got room?’ he gasped as they dragged him to the deck. ‘I was just getting into my stride.’
A few miles from him was the Queen of France, moving northwards under her brown lugsail. There was little wind and she moved sluggishly, but she moved, carrying with her: Private Angelet, of the 121st Regiment; Major Horndorff von Bülowius of the Spezialdienstabteilung of the 8th Panzer Division; Flying Officer Conybeare; Lance-Corporal Gow, still clutching the Bren; Private Noble; Sub-Lieutenant Hatton, just beginning to come to life; Marie-Josephine Berthelot; and Alban Kitchener Tremenheere.
They were all tired and stiff and chilled with lack of food and sleep. They stank because they’d had to remain unwashed in a fortnight of blazing heat, and their stained dirty faces were narrow and gaunt with strain. They looked like scarecrows, and they had little to say because a week or more of shouting above the perpetual din of Dunkirk had left them all croaking like jackdaws.
Horndorff had at last accepted that the war was over for him and was even beginning to feel that the Führer’s dream of a conquered Britain might not materialise after all. Private Angelet was wondering how he’d survive in a foreign land. Lance-Corporal Gow was wondering if they’d ever had a Frenchman in the Guards. Private Noble was staring at Gow, deciding that while he, Lije Noble, was a useless bastard, and was going to find himself a dead cushy job, the terrible Gow was going to get himself promoted and was heading for glory – and more than likely death. Sub-Lieutenant Hatton was thinking about Nora Hart and whether he’d ever dare to go to sea again. Marie-Josephine Berthelot was wondering just what would have happened to her if she’d married Monsieur Ambrey as her parents had wished, while Flying Officer Conybeare was considering the possibility of leave and whether any of the girls he knew would accept a date with him. Alban Kitchener Tremenheer’s brooding was the deepest of the lot. He knew what would happen to him. He’d be slapped in an ambulance and taken to a casualty clearing station where someone would ask his name and address and set his broken collar bone. Then they’d pin a label on him and send him home on the train. And with a broken collar bone, he knew there was only one place he could go. He could hardly exist without money and a broken collar bone anywhere else, and Number Thirteen, Osborne Road, Littlehampton, seemed a terrible prospect because Nell Noone would have him, sure as eggs.
As they sat in silence, occupied with their own thoughts and moving to the lift of the boat, Marie-Josephine laid her hand on Conybeare’s arm and pointed. He sat up and stared.
‘Boat,’ he said. ‘There’s a chap in it, waving.’
It was Clarence Sievewright, and he was growing worried by this time. He was still neat and hardly touched by the war, and as the Queen of France bumped alongside, he stepped from one boat to the other without even getting his boots splashed.
‘Quite an exciting war,’ he said in a masterpiece of understatement.
The others stared at him. ‘You don’t look as though you’ve seen so bloody much of it,’ Noble said.
Sievewright shook his head. He was a modest man and had no wish to make claims for himself that he knew would never stand up to inspection by this battered collection of human beings.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve not.’
As they pressed him to tell his story, Horndorff listened in baffled bewilderment. Raised on stern ideals of courage and duty, it seemed to him a matter of shame that a man could pass through such a holocaust as Dunkirk without going out of his way to become directly concerned with it. Yet, with the exception of the silent, bone-white man with the Bren, the other Britishers in the boat, their drawn dirty faces cracked in weary grins, seemed to regard the newcomer not as a figure of shame or even fun, but more as though he had done something remarkably clever. Their own attitude to the war came out in ribald admissions that they had been stupid enough to let themselves be swept up in the drama while Sievewright had all unwittingly shown an old soldier’s skill and cunning in avoiding disaster. This self-deprecation was something entirely alien to Horndorff’s upbringing, and the protest that broke from his lips at their wry laughter was also his protest at the unfairness of a fate that had allowed him – the expert, a man with years of training behind him – to be taken prisoner by a bunch of reluctant amateurs.
‘You English are mad,’ he exploded. ‘How can you laugh when you have just lost a battle?’
Conybeare shrugged, apparently unmoved at the thought of defeat. ‘Long practice,’ he said. ‘We always lose ’em.’
Hatton grinned. ‘Everybody expects us to,’ he added.
Noble had swung the boat on to course again now. He stared with a professional eye at the dipping bow and then up at the brown lugsail and permitted himself a sly smile, as though victory in war were not a matter of preparation, endurance and bravery so much as of craft and back-street cunning. ‘Except one,’ he said. ‘The one that matters. The last one.’
Epilogue
Alban Kitchener Tremenheere was dead right about his future and he did marry Nell Noone. The Littlehampton parish register shows that the wedding took place on 5 November 1940, just seven months before the birth of the first of two sons. As things worked out, he didn’t regret marrying Nell as much as he’d expected, and they lived on at Thirteen, Osborne Road, until the 1960s when they followed their children as emigrants to Australia.
James Barry Hatton, however, did not marry Nora Hart. Although after it was all over he repeated the proposal he had made she had
enough intelligence to know that what had happened between them was only the result of an extraordinary situation and in the end it meant nothing at all. He makes no bones about the affair and admits gratefully that she had more sense than he had. After the war he married the daughter of the managing editor of a Middlesbrough-based newspaper group, and the reference books now show him to be an editor and director himself. Nowadays he sails a little, but he never went to sea again during the war and ended his naval career on the staff of Sir Andrew Cunningham.
Rejecting what he considered the trivialities of his prewar life for the medicine he studied during his years as a prisoner of war, Basil Allerton became a doctor, and finally a pathologist specialising in leprosy. His base is the Mill Hill Centre, London, from where he regularly journeys all over the world on lecture tours.
Walter Boner Scharroo remained in London throughout the blitz and his attitude to the British improved even as his attitude to the Germans deteriorated. His broadcasts to America eventually became as famous as those of Quentin Reynolds. When the United States entered the war, he went through the Pacific campaigns as a war correspondent, distinguishing himself with brilliant stories for the Time-Life group. He was killed in an aircraft crash in the Philippines in 1950 while on his way to cover the war in Korea.
Hans-Joachim Horndorff von Bülowius married the girl who’d waited for him through five years of victory and defeat and ended up exactly where he expected to end up, as a colonel in the revived German Wehrmacht attached to the NATO forces. According to a recent article on him in Stern, he is now retired, influential, and still running the family estates.
Marie-Josephine Berthelot returned to France in 1943 – by parachute – and was in Paris at the time of the Liberation. She was decorated by de Gaulle and the British Government. She never went back to the North, however, and on marriage settled in Nîmes, not far from the Mediterranean.
As a much-decorated wing commander, Rupert Arthur Rokesby Conybeare was shot down on a fighter sweep in 1942 and taken prisoner himself. As one might have expected, he escaped and made his way home through Spain. He retired from the RAF as an air vice-marshal and still a bachelor. Oddly enough he is now an old friend of Jocho Horndorff and godfather to his daughter. When they once appeared together on BBC television in a programme on the anniversary of Dunkirk, they still treated each other with a certain amount of wary caution, as though they both might still expect surprises. Perhaps their friendship isn’t all that odd, because both are single-minded, stubborn and professional.
As might also be expected of him, Clarence Sievewright is still with the firm in Luton for which he worked before the war. He no longer keeps up his interest in Scouting and will sometimes sheepishly admit that the stories he tells nowadays of how he fought his way out of France have greatly improved with the telling.
Corporal Gustave Chouteau kept his promise to join the Resistance and remained with them until the fall of Paris. His favourite story – once published with appropriate pictures in Paris Match – is of how he and Marie-Josephine Berthelot, lying in the gutter alongside each other during the shooting outside Notre Dame when Charles de Gaulle attended the thanksgiving service for the liberation of Paris in August, 1944, discovered they had met briefly once before on the beaches of Dunkirk. To his great regret, he never again met Angelet who, he has since discovered, was killed as a sergeant only a few days before the liberation of the capital while fighting with Leclerc. It would have been pleasant, Chouteau always feels, if Angelet, too, could have been there in the gutter with him and Marie-Josephine Berthelot.
Private Noble, as he will tell you himself without a trace of shame, tried to make very sure that he was never in the front line again. He didn’t manage it, however. That touch of glory he’d noticed about Lance-Corporal Gow had rubbed off on him and after Dunkirk he was posted as a corporal to North Africa. When Rommel overran the British lines in what he calls the ‘Gazala Gallop’ of 1942, he and his lines-of-communication comrades found themselves with rifles in their hands. He did better than he expected and, much to his surprise, he ended the war as a sergeant with a medal and a lot of Gow’s mannerisms. He hadn’t changed a lot underneath, however, and when peace returned he was one of the first to see the opportunities in the sale of ex-Army lorries. He still lives in London – but these days at a rather more high-class address – and is now very respectable and very comfortably off. As one would have expected. He never forgot Gow, and his son bears the name of John Gow Noble.
It turned out he was dead right about Lance-Corporal Gow, too. He was promoted sergeant soon after his return to England and was eventually sent to what he always considered one of the less proud regiments of the British army to knock it into shape after it had been badly cut up in North Africa. It didn’t suit him, however, to be part of so ordinary a company, and, according to Noble, who went to a great deal of trouble after the war to find him again, he moved heaven and earth to get back to his own exalted sphere. He was with his own kind when he was killed in Germany in 1945 leading a company of Guardsmen after the death of its commanding officer. Regimental records show he had been recommended for the VC but Coldstreamers who remember him don’t seem to find it at all strange that he didn’t get it; not even posthumously. ‘It was what he was trained for,’ they say, ‘and they don’t chuck those things around in the Guards just for doing your duty.’
Synopses of John Harris Titles
Published by House of Stratus
Army of Shadows
It is the winter of 1944. France is under the iron fist of the Nazis. But liberation is just around the corner and a crew from a Lancaster bomber is part of the fight for Freedom. As they fly towards their European target, a Messerschmitt blazes through the sky in a fiery attack and of the nine-man crew aboard the bomber, only two men survive to parachute into Occupied France. They join an ever-growing army of shadows (the men and women of the French Resistance), to play a lethal game of cat and mouse.
China Seas
In this action-packed adventure, Willie Sarth becomes a survivor. Forced to fight pirates on the East China Seas, wrestle for his life on the South China Seas and cross the Sea of Japan ravaged by typhus, Sarth is determined to come out alive. Dealing with human tragedy, war and revolution, Harris presents a novel which packs an awesome punch.
The Claws of Mercy
In Sierra Leone, a remote bush community crackles with racial tensions. Few white people live amongst the natives of Freetown and Authority seems distant. Everyday life in Freetown revolves around an opencast iron mine, and the man in charge dictates peace and prosperity for everyone. But, for the white population, his leadership is a matter of life or death where every decision is like being snatched by the claws of mercy.
Corporal Cotton's Little War
Storming through Europe, the Nazis are sure to conquer Greece but for one man, Michael Anthony Cotton, a heroic marine who smuggles weapons of war and money to the Greek Resistance. Born Mihale Andoni Cotonou, Cotton gets mixed up in a lethal mission involving guns and high-speed chases. John Harris produces an unforgettable champion, persuasive and striking with a touch of mastery in this action-packed thriller set against the dazzle of the Aegean.
The Cross of Lazzaro
The Cross of Lazzaro is a gripping story filled with mystery and fraught with personal battles. This tense, unusual novel begins with the seemingly divine reappearance of a wooden cross once belonging to a sixth-century bishop. The vision emerges from the depths of an Italian lake, and a menacing local antagonism is subsequently stirred. But what can the cross mean?
Flawed Banner
John Harris' spine-tingling adventure inhabits the shadowy world of cunning and espionage. As the Nazi hordes of Germany overrun France, devouring the free world with fascist fervour, a young intelligence officer, James Woodyatt, is shipped across the Channel to find a First World War hero…an old man who may have been a spy…who may be in possession of Nazi secrets.
The Fox From
His Lair
A brilliant German agent lies in wait for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. While the Allies prepare a vast armed camp, no one is aware of the enemy within, and when a sudden, deadly E-boat attacks, the Fox strikes, stealing secret invasion plans in the ensuing panic. What follows is a deadly pursuit as the Fox tries to get the plans to Germany in time, hotly pursued by two officers with orders to stop him at all costs.
A Funny Place to Hold a War
Ginger Donnelly is on the trail of Nazi saboteurs in Sierra Leone. Whilst taking a midnight paddle with a willing woman in a canoe cajoled from a local fisherman, Donnelly sees an enormous seaplane thunder across the sky only to crash in a ball of brilliant flame. It seems like an accident…at least until a second plane explodes in a blistering shower along the same flight path.
Getaway
An Italian fisherman and his wife, Rosa, live in Sydney. Hard times are ahead. Their mortgaged boat may be lost and with it, their livelihood. But Rosa has a plan to reach the coast of America from the islands of the Pacific, sailing on a beleaguered little houseboat. The plan seems almost perfect, especially when Willie appears and has his own reasons for taking a long holiday to the land of opportunity.
Harkaway's Sixth Column
An explosive action-packed war drama: four British soldiers are cut off behind enemy lines in British Somaliland and when they decide to utilise a secret arms dump in the Bur Yi hills and fight a rearguard action, an unlikely alliance is sought between two local warring tribes. What follows is an amazing mission led by the brilliant, elusive Harkaway, whose heart is stolen by a missionary when she becomes mixed up in the unorthodox band of warriors.