by Iain Gale
They moved slowly through streets clogged with human jetsam. Lamb was just beginning to wonder if they should abandon the trucks when the engine gave a sputter and died. He looked at Bennett. ‘I think we’ve been told something. Right. Everybody out.’
They left the two trucks on a road above the harbour and began to walk down, careful to retain some semblance of formation among the rabble.
They had been wandering for the best part of two hours and were near the quay when Lamb spotted a group of Jocks and among them a man he recognised: McCade, one of the sergeants from B Company of 1st Black Watch.
He accosted him. ‘McCade, isn’t it? Have you any news of Lieutenant Crawford?’
The man shook his head, solemnly. ‘Naw, sir. We were on the forward slope at St-Pierre-le-Viger. They came at us. Tanks. We lost fifty men in two hours. It was bloody murder. The anti-tank platoon was blown to bits, and Mister Telfer-Smollett with it. That’s when Major Bradford ordered us to pull out, sir. Had to leave half the wounded out there. It was a bloody tragedy, Mister Lamb, sir. There’s only 100 men left all told from the two companies. Colonel Honeyman was cut off from the battalion back at Brigade. We hav’nae seen him yet, neither. Good that you’re alive though, sir.’
So, he thought, Crawford was almost certainly dead, sacrificed so that he could get back to St Valéry and Madeleine. He felt like crying, or screaming with rage, or both.
Bennett brought him back from the abyss. ‘Sir, hadn’t we better get down towards the harbour? If we want a chance, sir?’
‘Yes, Sarnt, of course. Good luck, McCade.’
He felt strangely hollow. Up to now he had felt that in some strange way they were winning. But, with Crawford’s death, somehow things had changed. The stark reality of their desperate situation took possession of him. He steadied himself. But only just.
‘Bennett, we need to get down to the sea. Are we all here?’
‘Apart from those we left in the woods, sir.’
‘Right, let’s get through this mess.’
He pushed forward and pressed against the crowd of listless men that had gathered in the main square. His men followed on. It was extraordinary and terrifying, thought Lamb, how quickly and easily a well-organised and disciplined body of men could degenerate into a rabble in which the only ethos was ‘every man for himself and hang the consequences’. As if to echo his thoughts, at that moment, as they passed a small estaminet, three British soldiers rolled out onto the street. Hopelessly drunk and carrying bottles of wine, they were singing: ‘Roll out the barrel, let’s have a barrel of fun . . .’ One of them leered into Lamb’s face and Bennett gave him a shove which sent him hurtling back into the window of the café, smashing it as he fell inside. The other two went to help him and then turned on Lamb’s men. Bennett and Mays levelled their rifles at them and the men moved back, muttering, and helped their friend up out of the smashed shop front.
Lamb walked on with the others behind him. ‘Not a pretty sight, is it, Sarnt? An army on the brink of defeat.’
‘No, sir. Not pretty. But we’ll need them all, sir, just the same.’
Lamb knew it. This would be the core of the new army that must come back and liberate France. That was why it was so vital to get them off. Get them home.
They carried on through the mob, cursed as they went. The glow in the sky became a little clearer and Lamb caught sight of the sea, spreading out from the harbour under the blood-red night. As he looked, the surface of the water was thrown into chaos as dive-bombers came swooping down from the sky. The cacophony of voices in the town was punctuated now by explosions, and in the distance, perhaps half a mile off the harbour wall, Lamb watched as a plume of smoke rose to meet the overhanging black cloud. Somewhere on the shimmering stretch of water that separated the retreating British from their homeland and safety, the Luftwaffe had scored another hit on a ship, and with its destruction another of the few strands of hope that had been offered to the desperate allies had been swept away. A pang of utter despair swept through Lamb and he began to wonder whether they wouldn’t all be captured or killed. They had just turned into a small square where four streets met when there was a sudden shout and what looked like a platoon of French soldiers came running out of one of the side streets, yelling at them to save themselves.
Lamb shouted to Bennett and the sergeant, ‘Get ready. God knows what it is. Tanks, probably. Get everyone into cover.’
To a man, they ducked into doorways and behind walls, waiting for the enemy.
The noise grew, but Lamb couldn’t make it out. As it grew closer it began to sound like a thousand running feet. No, he thought, they were hooves. For a moment he had the ludicrous notion that it might be a cavalry charge. After all, the French were using cavalry. Why shouldn’t the Germans try something so insane? Nothing would have surprised him now. But it was not a regiment of Prussian Uhlans that came screaming round the corner. As Lamb looked on, dumbstruck, dozens of mules, saddled with leather panniers, charged into the square.
Lamb stared at them for a moment, then burst out laughing. The mules rushed in and careered out as swiftly as they’d come, in all directions. Lamb turned to Bennett, still laughing. ‘They must have got loose. The French use them to carry munitions. Christ, I thought we were all dead.’
The mules continued to pour into the square. ‘There’s hundreds of them, sir. Bloody hundreds.’
What made the sight even more comical was that the mules were being pursued by French soldiers, their long coats flapping out behind them.
The British shouted at them, urging them on.
Smart turned to Perkins. ‘’Ere, what’s donkey taste like?’
Wilkinson piped up. ‘They’re not donkeys, they’re mules.’
‘Same thing, innit. What’s the difference? Anyway, what d’you reckon it tastes like?’
‘How should I know? I ain’t never ate a mule, you berk. Dunno, chicken?’
‘More like pig, I’d think.’
‘Well, either way, you’re not going to find out now.’
Behind them a series of breech explosions marked the end of an abandoned British battery. They were destroying their own equipment now, thought Lamb. ‘Hear that, Sarnt? We’ll be away from here soon.’
The narrow, twisting streets that gave so much character to the old fishing port were now filled with soldiers of all types, and it seemed to Lamb that every second house was ablaze. As they tried to make their way through the maze, a few yards in front a chimney pot crashed to the street below from a burning building, killing one man and injuring another. On the next block some beams from a half-timbered house collapsed into the column of men, showering them with sparks and burning cinders which set fire to their coats. Lamb despaired. At this rate they would be captured by the Germans before anyone had reached the beach. And he had still not had any word of Madeleine.
He found Bennett. ‘Come on. There’s a side street up there. Get the men down that.’
One by one they pushed the company away from the mob and into the narrower alley. But Lamb’s hunch had been right, for, small as it seemed, it debouched onto another street which the fleeing soldiers for the most part had not found, and there, down at the end, he could see the sea.
They reached the beach, and behind them the press of soldiers continued. Lamb led the way down to the shoreline and found shelter behind the sea wall. Slowly, but as quickly as they were able, the company crunched onto the awkward shingle and into the lee of the sea wall. Lamb waited until they were all assembled and then turned and faced out to sea. He could not see any ships, merely a fog drifting across the sea which reflected the glow from two tall plumes of red smoke emanating for the west side of the town. He sat down on a stone bollard, leaned against a wooden windbreak and almost without realising it fell into the deep and dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.
He woke amid a cacophony and opened his eyes. The fog had cleared a little and he could see that out on the sea lay three ships, two Royal Nav
y destroyers and a huge transport.
Above them, standing on the mole, a naval officer was yelling orders.
Lamb got to his feet and walked over to him. ‘Sorry, sir. Are we to get off? I’ve got about forty men.’
The man, the rank of Commander on his sleeve, looked down at Lamb. ‘That’s the plan, Lieutenant. It was planned to begin at 22.30 hours. Of course we need the transports first. And you’ll have to wait your turn.’ He turned back to the beach parties. ‘Lieutenant Hemans, can you get those boats closer in? See if someone can get those wounded onto that tug. Find Lieutenant Scott. Take a cutter out.’
There was another man standing close to the commander. Lamb stood and stared at him for a moment before climbing up, ‘Colonel “R”? What on earth are you doing here, sir? I thought you must be dead or captured.’
The colonel smiled: ‘Lieutenant Lamb. Thought I’d find you here somewhere. In the thick of it, of course. No, as you see I’m neither dead nor a prisoner. In fact I’ve been in England, trying to sort out this mess. You got through with the message, though. Well done.’
‘For all the good it’s done. I’m afraid I was too late, sir.’
‘Not your fault. It was the bloody French. More precisely it’s the High Command and government in London that should answer for this. But of course they won’t, and it’s up to us to pick up the pieces. Fortune’s men were doomed from the moment they got to the Somme. At least my message gave him the chance to get some of them away.’
‘Some of them?’
‘You don’t think they’re all going to get off, laddie? That’s why I’m here, seeing how many we can get away. And now I’ve found you, you can help. You see, while the rest of the high command seem to want to believe that the 51st are as good as dead, I’m afraid I don’t. And of course I couldn’t pass up the chance to clobber a few of the Boche. Don’t know when we’ll get the opportunity again.’
He walked a short distance away from the commander and spoke close to Lamb’s ear. ‘To tell you the truth, Lamb, we’ve got a problem. Churchill needs a scapegoat. Well, not exactly that, a sort of sacrifice. You see the French are hopping mad about what happened at Dunkirk – one in ten French to British got away – and as far as they’re concerned this looks just the same. They don’t see it as very fair. So Churchill came up with a plan, and it stinks. He wants us to leave the Highlanders as a sort of trade-off with the French – a pledge of support, if you like, to appease their anger about Dunkirk. But I’m not wearing it. I plan to get off as many of them as we can. These men will be the backbone of the new army. I know what I said to you about your own men before, but these men, and yours now, the ones that have come through hell together, are tougher. General Fortune hasn’t cottoned on to Churchill’s plan yet, and he mustn’t. Of course poor Victor won’t be coming back. If I know him, and I do, he’ll stay with the majority of his men and be captured. But we’ve got work to do, Lamb, you and I. We’ve got to get some of them away, laddie, before it’s too late.’
Lamb was staggered. This was a level of politicking the likes of which he had only guessed might have existed within the army or the government. It only seemed to confirm everything that General Fortune had hinted at. He knew that Churchill had only become Prime Minister a few weeks ago, but for any politician to be prepared to sacrifice an entire division in aid of entente cordiale was obscene. Particularly as everything he had heard pointed to the fact that the French would sooner accept Nazi rule than lose another million men to save their country. It was a new way of fighting a war and it made him see, more than ever, just how outdated were the principles of so many of the men who were now his superiors. Churchill’s plan was clearly warped. But it was no more useless than their antiquated vision of lines of men advancing in a frontal assault against an enemy armed with weapons the power of which had never been seen. Clearly the men who were going to win this war for the allies, if it could be won, were those who had the power to mobilise the Royal Navy and attempt to get Fortune’s men away. Those men who issued orders to Colonel ‘R’, whoever they might be. And whoever they were, Lamb told himself, these were the men from whom he knew he wanted to take orders. For at present, the only men on whom he knew he could rely were those with whom he shared the everyday dangers of the battlefield. He realised that he had been staring at the colonel.
‘So what do we do now, sir?’
‘Take your men towards the east of the town. See what you can pick up along the way. Any likely-looking officer or NCO, bring him along. And mind now, I only want the best. I want people who are going to count when we get back home. I’m going to do the same on the west side, and circle round.’
‘And then, sir?’
‘Then, laddie, we’re going to get away further up the coast. There’s a place I know. I came here some years ago. A bit further east. Veules les Roses. There are cliffs, but hidden gullies lead down to a beach, and the Germans won’t know about those. The beach is big enough for the Navy to come in. Commander Elkins here knows all about it. Our rendezvous hour is 3 a.m.’ He looked at his watch. ‘That’s just over three hours’ time, Lamb. Think you can make it with whoever you’ve got?’
‘Of course, sir. I’ll be there.’
‘Good man. Get enough men away and you might end up keeping your company.’
A young lieutenant came hurrying up to the colonel. ‘Sir, there’s a Jerry battery up on the cliff to the west shelling the beaches. And we have reports that they’ve broken through in the west woods, by Les Tots.’
‘Where’s the general?’
‘He’s moved his HQ from the west of the town, sir, about half a mile south of the railway station. Opposite a church.’
‘Good. I’ll remember to keep out of his way. Lamb, remember: 3 a.m.’
‘Sir.’
Cool as ever, the colonel walked back over to Commander Elkins and began to talk to him. Lamb climbed down from the mole and ran over the beach to where his men were still sheltering. ‘Right. We’re heading up to the east. And we’re going to try and get as many off as we can. The Navy’s coming in and we’re due to go at three in the morning. See if you can pick up any others – any men who look as if they can handle a fight.’
Wearily, the company began to move across the beach. Every few minutes a shell would come crashing into the sand and rocks. They were being fired at from the German battery on the west cliffs, and it seemed pointless to try to take cover. Lamb thought it was a sign of the men’s fatigue and the dangers of the past few weeks that they just seemed to ignore them. In any case, if one had your name on it you were a gonner anyway. That was what all the old sweats said.
As he walked on, Lamb gazed at the transports moored outside the harbour. There was a whine of engines and, looking up, he saw the Stukas come in. They fell like vultures from the sky in a vertical dive, their sirens blaring out in a banshee wail, bringing terror to the soldiers on the west beach. Now was the time to take cover, he thought; French and British troops clasped their hands to their heads and pushed themselves deeper into the sand and shingle. But it was not the infantry that the Stukas wanted today, and their bombs began to fall out at sea. Two ships were hit, one of them badly. There were explosions on board. Lamb kept on walking and watching. He passed a British soldier who shook his head and looked at him with hollow eyes. ‘That’s the Hebe II blown up,’ he said. ‘All my mates, gone.’
A gun opened up from the cliff above them, an 88, sending a huge shell towards the transports. Lamb could not bring himself to watch any more, but heard the explosion echoing in from the sea as another of the ships, Helix II, with eighty soldiers on board, was hit. In front of him another man was sitting on a rock, his face a mask of tears.
Behind them a house burst into flames as the fires reached its gas supply and a huge explosion took the building away.
More shells were landing close now. One dropped fifty yards behind him and Lamb signalled to Bennett to take cover. He ran and found himself with Valentine, sheltering
in the shadow of the town war memorial, a square stone base topped with a towering statue of a 1916 French poilu, his arm raised to heaven. Looking up at the plinth he saw the names on the roll of honour. There were hundreds of them. Good God, he thought, in the same sort of seaside town in Sussex or Kent you might find thirty or forty names killed in the Great War. But here a generation of the town’s young men seemed to have been wiped out.
Valentine saw him. ‘You’re thinking the same as me, sir, aren’t you?’
‘What’s that, Corporal?’
‘You’ve just realised why the French don’t want to fight any more – why we’re all here in this little seaside town trying to get back to England. It’s because they lost so many men last time. They won’t carry on, sir. Not after that. That memorial says it all.’
Lamb knew he was right. That was why the French had collapsed, and he hoped that when it came to her turn to face the Germans, perhaps on her own soil, the British people would not have the same feelings.
They were on the east side of the town now, and after a climb found themselves by a medieval church surrounded by a walled cemetery. Lamb spotted several men in Balmorals holding the perimeter and hailed them, ‘Who are you?’
A sergeant answered, ‘Pretty much all that’s left of 1st Black Watch, sir. There’s an ammo dump up here, sir. Rations too. But you’d better be quick, sir. We’ve just found it, and my lads are pretty nifty at scrounging.’
Lamb saw an officer moving between the gravestones, a subaltern from A Company whom he last recalled seeing at the regimental dinner. ‘Where’s your CO?’
‘No idea, Lieutenant. Haven’t seen him for hours. Think he was caught at Brigade. Could be in the bag.’
‘What about Lieutenant Crawford?’
‘Last I heard he was getting it bad at St-Pierre with what was left of C Company and then we lost touch with them.’ He turned to his men, and Lamb watched with interest as he organised the perimeter defences of the cemetery, placing the men with care and fortifying whatever he could with stones, debris and anything that came to hand. He thought of Crawford. What a terrible loss he was.