Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

  Evans waited, torn between getting back to his post and wondering what the Sarge was dreaming up. He watched the black form hesitate once more, then unlock the big double door and slide inside. Strange, what would Cole want in the Officers’ Mess at this time of night?

  A low-flying plane, probably one of the Potez bombers stationed nearby, reminded him there was a war on, and approaches to be watched, so he ran back to his post as quietly as he could, quickly forgetting Cole for the moment.

  Dawn was little more than a dirty smudge in the sky when the corrugated metal doors to the old storehouse that doubled as a barracks squeaked open. Captain Malone stood in the doorway, waiting a few seconds before he yelled at the top of his voice, the barking reverberating around the triangular metal roof supports, amplified by the corrugated roof. Evans opened one eye, cursing. He’d only been in bed two hours. You were meant to get a lie in after late stag.

  ‘Everybody up. Come on, look lively.’ Evans peeked out from under the blankets on the cot bed and noted the officer had come with a couple of Redcaps in tow and Sergeant Cole.

  Malone pointed his swagger stick at Evans, who had made no movement, and the Captain repeated the order, with more force. Reluctantly Evans slid out onto the chill concrete floor and started to dress.

  Across the room, Dobson dared to ask: ‘Is this an exercise, sir?’

  ‘Of sorts,’ Malone spat out. ‘Twenty-five pounds missing from the Officers’ Mess. A break-in, looks like.’

  The words should have sunk in right there and then, but Evans’s brain was too befuddled to make connections.

  ‘Stand by your bunks. OK, Sergeant,’ said Malone, summoning Cole forward.

  Harry moved through the dorm and began to point out men to the Redcaps, and beds were stripped, bedding piled onto the floor, lockers turned out of meagre belongings. Harry wandered casually over to Doyle, the Du Maurier merchant, who was looking at him from heavy, sleep-filled eyes. Harry opened the man’s locker. No cigarettes. No, not stupid enough to keep them there. He picked up Doyle’s .303 rifle and worked the action. The tightly rolled tube of notes, bound with a rubber band, came flying out, bouncing onto the floor.

  ‘Sir!’

  The Captain picked up the roll of money from under the cot bed, brandishing it in Doyle’s face. ‘I suppose you don’t know how this got there?’

  ‘Don’t know how it did, sir. Won some money at cards, sir. Dobson’ll back me up.’

  Dobson said quietly, ‘Fair and square, sir.’

  ‘But I didn’t put it in me rifle, no, sir.’

  ‘What was it you said, Cole?’

  ‘One of the missing notes had some ink spilt over it, apparently, sir. Blobbed across the note. Bar steward’ll swear to it.’

  Malone unrolled the tube and flipped through the pound notes until he came to one splattered with Parker & Co’s best blue-black. He snapped at the Redcaps, ‘All yours.’ Doyle, a genuinely puzzled expression on his face, was hustled away.

  The Captain turned to Harry. ‘Well done, Sergeant. Always one, eh?’

  In his best NCO tones, Harry agreed: ‘Yes, sir. There’s always one.’

  The rumours started a few days later. The Royal Engineers were being moved into Belgium. No, they were falling back to the ports, they were staying where they were. The Germans were suing for peace. Harry, his attentions elsewhere, wangled a day pass, rarer than Hitler’s balls now that something was finally starting, and went off to meet Julie.

  The summer weather had finally arrived and she was sitting outside a café on the main square of Croux, sipping coffee, looking neat and pressed in a white sleeveless blouse and pleated skirt. Her hair had been braided and put up, and she was wearing brighter lipstick than Maman usually liked.

  Harry pecked her on both cheeks before sitting. ‘Missed you.’

  ‘I missed you, too, Harry. So has Maman. She’s running low.’

  He ordered a beer and said, ‘Tell her I’m trying my best.’ Problem was, since he had staged the robbery to get rid of Doyle, security everywhere had been stepped up and already there were rumblings about the NAAFI cigarette inventory. He couldn’t risk it just yet. He’d been trying to find out where Doyle’s Du Mauriers were hidden, but to no avail; the men had closed ranks against him.

  Julie closed her eyes to let the sun warm her face, and he realised again just how attractive he found her. Harry offered her a cigarette, which she refused, and lit up himself. From his pocket he took the small velveteen Van Roy’s box and placed it carefully on the table. Julie gave a small cry of surprise and reached for it, but Harry snatched it away playfully.

  He edged open the lid of the box, allowing her to see the edge of the band of white gold, the first glint of what, to any layman, looked like diamond.

  She hesitated, then frowned. ‘What’s that noise?’

  Harry glanced across the square. A Jeep had squealed to a halt and inside were a pair of regimental police with Evans, who scanned the café’s customers and quickly pointed out Harry to the Redcaps.

  Harry rose from his chair, and realised Julie hadn’t meant the noise of the Jeep, that she was looking skywards. The two policemen striding over the cobbles towards him broke step as they, too, raised their eyes to the heavens.

  Harry followed their gaze. He had now caught the alien sound, not the dull thrum of the Potezs, or the gnat-like whine of Dewoitine fighters, but a low growl. Harry scanned the sky until he found the formation, now almost directly above the village, twelve black cruciforms silhouetted against steely blue. As he watched, the leading three shapes dipped their port wings and began to slide from the sky. The rumbling engine noise was suddenly drowned out by the rising shriek of the dive bomber’s siren, and Harry felt a new kind of terror rise from the pit of his stomach.

  The first explosion was outside the square, a single, ear-punching eruption and a plume of smoke spiralling upwards as the Stuka swooped over them, its propeller wash blasting through the café, snatching at napkins and tablecloths.

  Julie was shouting at him, but he couldn’t hear her words. They reeled back as the second bomb took the patisserie and hairdresser’s opposite, reducing the frontage to matchwood and dust, the force of the shockwave flipping the Jeep onto its side and sending the Redcaps and Evans sprawling across the cobbles.

  Harry could feel something stinging on his face. He reached across to Julie, to grab her hand, his instinct to drag her away from this place.

  The third detonation lifted the cobbles and rained them across the plaza. One of them smacked into Evans’s head and his neck snapped to one side.

  Another glanced off Julie’s outstretched arm, snapping it. Then the glass-laden blast peppered her exposed skin and pushed everyone and everything deep inside the café, creating a bloody pyramid of bodies and furniture and crockery.

  When the smoke cleared, Julie stirred stiffly. With her good arm she reached up and stroked her face with her fingertips, feeling the bristles of glass and metal across her cheek, each one a locus of burning pain. Where was Harry? She managed to stand and, supporting her broken limb as best she could, picked her way among the tangle of groaning bodies and smashed furniture, but there was no sign of him. It was as if Harry had been vaporised.

  Part Two

  Eight

  Calais, France, May 1940

  THE RETREAT TO THE sands just outside Calais from the ruined little village of Coulogne took the best part of a day. Before he could leave the town, Lieutenant Anthony Neave was ordered to destroy the secret sound location parabolas that his Searchlight Battalion had brought over. Designed to detect the sound of enemy engines, they had proved next to useless, and it was with little regret that he overturned a French oil tanker and immolated the lot, only regretting the waste of fuel as the thick black clouds rolled through the village streets.

  The wind changed and the choking fumes followed his group as they fell back to the coast, a retreat covered by the resilient Colonel Goldney, who used Brens and a solitar
y anti-tank gun to slow down the Panzer advance. When Neave finally made the shore, he and his corporal, Dacre, and a group of volunteers from the Searchlights were ordered into town to help back up the rearguard action being fought along the Boulevard Leon Gambetta by the remnants of the Rifle Brigade, trying to thwart the German probings coming from the west.

  Neave led the men from the beach, trying his best to give them direction and confidence, even though he felt neither himself. His corporal, a proper soldier, should have been in charge, not a barrister like Neave—one who hadn’t even had time to practise before war was declared—who had never fired a gun in anger until today. Dacre had served in Borneo, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. He had actually been shot at with real bullets long before Calais. However, Neave was a product of Eton and Oxford and the Bar, the corporal came from a two-up-two-down in Stoke, so it naturally fell to the Old Etonian to get these men through the day in one piece.

  He placed the bulk of his unit in a house overlooking the railway tracks, and he and Corporal Dacre went to establish a fallback position. Within seconds they were dodging through the rubble-strewn streets, the air zinging with bullets, the pavements exploding into vortices of dust where heavy machine guns had opened up. His corporal started zigzagging wildly, and Neave followed, his heart beating frantically, wondering if his first day of real war would also be his last.

  As they made the Place Albert, its central monument reduced to a heap of stones, a pair of Panzers appeared at one end. A British A9 cruiser wheeled noisily forward from a side street and fired, a well-placed shot that tore the tracks from one of the German machines. The second Panzer returned fire, rocking on its haunches with the recoil, its shell neatly slicing the turret off the A9, sending it whipping down the boulevard like a discarded saucepan. There were six crew in there. A chunk of wall exploded above Neave’s head, the shower of grit stinging his eyes, and the corporal tugged at his sleeve. They had to keep moving.

  He and Dacre pressed north, past small groups of Tommies behind makeshift barricades, heading for Calais Nord, the citadel and the harbour. The massive walls of the old fortress were disappearing under columns of smoke and dust as more German shells found their range.

  Fresh bullets smacked around them as they ran, and they found themselves among a group of elderly citizens staggering along the pavement, carrying an old woman, her dress stained dark round the middle.

  Whether they drew the fire onto the group or the gunner fancied some sport, Neave would never know, but the machine gun opened up from a rooftop and suddenly the street was dancing with shrapnel and ricochets and bodies were tumbling.

  Dacre pushed Neave into the doorway of a pharmacie, the shattered glass of the windows crunching as they slumped down. A pocket of the British Expeditionary Force fired from behind their barricades and the German gun fell silent. Out in the street most of the old people lay still.

  It was then Neave felt the blood trickling inside his tunic.

  ‘You all right, sir?’

  Neave looked down and gasped when he saw the raw mess of intertwined fabric and flesh on his left side. A little tremor of fright went through him.

  ‘Here, take this.’ The corporal passed over a flask and Neave took in the heady whiff of good cognac. Very good cognac, for a corporal, but this wasn’t a time for questions. He took a heavy slug. Dacre examined the wound and said, ‘I think it’s just taken a chunk out of your muscle. Be all right.’

  The corporal consulted his map. ‘No idea where the regimental aid post is. There’s a hospital up there, sir.’ He indicated towards the walls of Calais Nord. ‘Think you can make it? It’s about half a mile, maybe a little less.’

  A machine gun rattled again, finding the flimsy shelter across the street, the soldiers dancing until the firing stopped and they, too, lay motionless. ‘Can’t stay here,’ Dacre said calmly, but Neave was staring at the dead. The corporal touched his arm. ‘We can’t stay here, sir,’ he repeated.

  They ran, heads down, guns held low, weaving as best they could, the whine of stray rounds urging them forward. At the top of the boulevard there was a kink in the road, which took them out of the immediate line of fire. Beyond it was an infirmary, a gaunt, gothic building, with makeshift Red Cross flags fashioned from sheets dangling from each window. On the steps was an agitated group of civilians, mostly women, and in the centre of the mêlée a young olive-skinned nurse, clipboard in hand, tried to establish some kind of order. Her face was smudged with dirt, she had lost her cap, and sections of her dark hair had become unclipped, falling to her shoulders, but she still exuded a sense of calmness, the still centre in a whirl of panic and despair.

  Dacre propped his lieutenant up against the wall, lit a cigarette, and put it between Neave’s lips. Neave was sweating now, and not just from the run. He looked over at the confrontation on the steps and was surprised when the nurse detached herself from the group and walked over to them, reclipping her hair as she came.

  ‘You are hurt?’

  She was only a few inches shorter than Neave, slim, possibly too slim, it was difficult to judge underneath her uniform’s bib and short cape, her features and colouring more Mediterranean than those of northern France. She asked again: ‘You are hurt?’

  Neave nodded.

  She examined the side of his tunic and probed as gently as she could. ‘I can’t tell how bad. Not without cutting it away. It needs cleaning.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the desperate crowd at the entrance to the hospital. ‘We are full in there. Not one centimetre of space, Lieutenant.’

  Neave was staring into her eyes. There was the slightest of casts to one of them, but the imperfection had a strange effect, making it feel as if the gaze was drilling into him, almost pinning him to the spot. Perhaps he was giddy through loss of blood.

  ‘We should get you to the Gare Maritime. There is a medical station in the tunnels off platform one. Orderlies are tending British and French wounded there. You know where it is?’

  ‘I can take him,’ said Dacre. These were his last words as the shell blast pitched him into the street, little columns of smoke rising from his ruined body.

  Neave came to with a roaring in his ears and found himself on top of the girl. He stuttered an apology. ‘Mam’selle, I … I …’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said brusquely. With an expert movement, the nurse rolled him off her, pulled him to his feet and started forward. Neave looked back at his corporal. The round had detonated inside an apartment block and the blast had channelled out through the windows, killing Dacre outright, but leaving them alive. Neave made the nurse stop for a second, so he could retrieve his rifle and say a small prayer for his corporal.

  As they crossed the street, an old van, its bodywork pocked from small arms fire and the windscreen webbed with cracks, slithered to a halt inches from them. A helmetless French soldier was at the wheel, his eyes wild. The nurse spoke to him, rapidly and with a tone that brooked no argument, and the next thing Neave knew he was being helped into the back, to lie, gratefully, among rotting shreds of cabbage.

  The aid post was a vaulted niche in the huge station wall, perhaps eight feet deep, full of medical supplies, water canisters and half a dozen wounded. Others were laid out on the low continental-style platforms, some clearly dead or dying, the occasional sharp whiff of decay suggesting some had been deceased for a while now.

  Wagons-lits were sitting at each platform, the carriages heavily punctured with holes from strafing Stukas. A derailed hospital train had jack-knifed across the approaches to the station, its doors left hanging open where the wounded had been lifted out and walked, dragged or carried the last few hundred yards. Nothing would be moving in or out of the Gare Maritime by rail, that was clear.

  Neave was laid at the entrance to the tunnel, with a view of the ruined quays down at the port, their cranes sprawled at drunken angles. He could glimpse stacks of apparently abandoned equipment. Only much later would he discover that they consisted of piles of
three-inch mortars, supplied with two-inch rounds, of machine guns so tightly packed in mineral jelly it would take 48 hours to have them operational, and of radios without crystals. Worse, an entire motorcycle unit had been landed, while their machines were still at Dover.

  Within the harbour breakwater, a number of ships lay half submerged, waves lapping over their warped decks. Out at sea, nothing was visible, just the thin line of the Dover cliffs, shimmering like a mirage. No rescue craft, no destroyers, no Royal Navy to pull them from this fire. The last ship, the Kohistan, its deck covered with wounded, had left hours before. No more would be coming. Something else Neave would find out later—Churchill had ordered the garrison to fight to the last, to buy precious time for the events happening further east at Dunkirk. They were to be sacrificed. From the streets of Calais-Pierre to the south he could hear the unknowing soldiers of the BEF, the 60th and the Rifle Brigade, refusing to give an inch. Answering them, the deep whump of German Panzers and mortars.

  Neave was drifting in and out of consciousness as the young nurse cut open his battle dress.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he managed to ask her.

  She hesitated for a moment, as if this were privileged information. ‘Odile.’

  He nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh God, no. Not again.’ Odile stood up and covered her ears.

  The Stukas were swooping once more, tossing bomb after bomb after bomb onto the soldiers of the QVRs and the 60th along Gambetta and around the canal.

  Columns of fresh smoke pinpointed the spots where the explosives had detonated, curling up from the general haze that had obscured all the landmarks apart from the citadel and the tip of Notre Dame to the immediate south of them. Odile knew that, somewhere beneath this veil of smoke, the infirmary must have taken direct hits. She began to cry.