by Ian Mcewan
“What’s the plan, guv’nor?”
He did not reply.
“Oh, oh. Now you’ve offended her.”
Beyond the ack-ack, they heard artillery fire, their own, some way further to the west. As they approached the village they heard the sound of slow-moving lorries. Then they saw them, stretching in a line to the north, traveling at walking pace. It was going to be tempting to hitch a ride, but he knew from experience what an easy target they would be from the air. On foot you could see and hear what was coming.
Their track joined the road where it turned a right-angled corner to leave the village. They rested their feet for ten minutes, sitting on the rim of a stone water trough. Three- and ten-ton lorries, half-tracks and ambulances were grinding round the narrow turn at less than one mile an hour, and moving away from the village down a long straight road whose left side was flanked by plane trees. The road led directly north, toward a black cloud of burning oil that stood above the horizon, marking out Dunkirk. No need for a compass now. Dotted along the way were disabled military vehicles. Nothing was to be left for enemy use. From the backs of receding lorries the conscious wounded stared out blankly. There were also armored cars, staff cars, Bren-gun carriers and motorbikes. Mixed in with them and stuffed or piled high with household gear and suitcases were civilian cars, buses, farm trucks and carts pushed by men and women or pulled by horses. The air was gray with diesel fumes, and straggling wearily through the stench, and for the moment moving faster than the traffic, were hundreds of soldiers, most of them carrying their rifles and their awkward greatcoats—a burden in the morning’s growing warmth.
Walking with the soldiers were families hauling suitcases, bundles, babies, or holding the hands of children. The only human sound Turner heard, piercing the din of engines, was the crying of babies. There were old people walking singly. One old man in a fresh lawn suit, bow tie and carpet slippers shuffled by with the help of two sticks, advancing so slowly that even the traffic was passing him. He was panting hard. Wherever he was going he surely would not make it. On the far side of the road, right on the corner, was a shoe shop open for business. Turner saw a woman with a little girl at her side talking to a shop assistant who displayed a different shoe in the palm of each hand. The three paid no attention to the procession behind them. Moving against the flow, and now trying to edge round this same corner, was a column of armored cars, the paintwork untouched by battle, heading south into the German advance. All they could hope to achieve against a Panzer division was an extra hour or two for the retreating soldiers.
Turner stood up, drank from his canteen and stepped into the procession, slipping in behind a couple of Highland Light Infantry men. The corporals followed him. He no longer felt responsible for them now they had joined the main body of the retreat. His lack of sleep exaggerated his hostility. Today their teasing needled him and seemed to betray the comradeship of the night before. In fact, he felt hostile to everyone around him. His thoughts had shrunk to the small hard point of his own survival.
Wanting to shake the corporals off, he quickened his pace, overtook the Scotsmen and pushed his way past a group of nuns shepherding a couple of dozen children in blue tunics. They looked like the rump of a boarding school, like the one he had taught at near Lille in the summer before he went up to Cambridge. It seemed another man’s life to him now. A dead civilization. First his own life ruined, then everybody else’s. He strode on angrily, knowing it was a pace he could not maintain for long. He had been in a column like this before, on the first day, and he knew what he was looking for. To his immediate right was a ditch, but it was shallow and exposed. The line of trees was on the other side. He slipped across, in front of a Renault saloon. As he did so the driver leaned on his horn. The shrill Klaxon startled Turner into a sudden fury. Enough! He leaped back to the driver’s door and wrenched it open. Inside was a trim little fellow in a gray suit and fedora, with leather suitcases piled at his side and his family jammed in the backseat. Turner grabbed the man by his tie and was ready to smack his stupid face with an open right hand, but another hand, one of some great strength, closed about his wrist.
“That ain’t the enemy, guv’nor.”
Without releasing his grip, Corporal Mace pulled him away. Nettle, who was just behind, kicked the Renault door shut with such ferocity that the wing mirror fell off. The children in blue tunics cheered and clapped.
The three crossed to the other side and walked on under the line of trees. The sun was well up now and it was warm, but the shade was not yet over the road. Some of the vehicles lying across the ditches had been shot up in air attacks. Around the abandoned lorries they passed, supplies had been scattered by troops looking for food or drink or petrol. Turner and the corporals tramped through typewriter ribbon spools spilling from their boxes, double-entry ledgers, consignments of tin desks and swivel chairs, cooking utensils and engine parts, saddles, stirrups and harnesses, sewing machines, football trophy cups, stackable chairs, and a film projector and petrol generator, both of which someone had wrecked with the crowbar that was lying nearby. They passed an ambulance, half in the ditch with one wheel removed. A brass plaque on the door said, “This ambulance is a gift of the British residents of Brazil.”
It was possible, Turner found, to fall asleep while walking. The roar of lorry engines would be suddenly cut, then his neck muscles relaxed, his head drooped, and he would wake with a start and a swerve to his step. Nettle and Mace were for getting a lift. But he had already told them the day before what he had seen in that first column—twenty men in the back of a three-ton lorry killed with a single bomb. Meanwhile he had cowered in a ditch with his head in a culvert and caught the shrapnel in his side.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I’m sticking here.”
So the matter was dropped. They wouldn’t go without him—he was their lucky ticket.
They came up behind some more HLI men. One of them was playing the bagpipes, prompting the corporals to begin their own nasal whining parodies. Turner made as if to cross the road.
“If you start a fight, I’m not with you.”
Already a couple of Scots had turned and were muttering to each other.
“It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht,” Nettle called out in Cockney. Something awkward might have developed then if they had not heard a pistol shot from up ahead. As they drew level the bagpipes fell silent. In a wide-open field the French cavalry had assembled in force and dismounted to form a long line. At the head stood an officer dispatching each horse with a shot to the head, and then moving on to the next. Each man stood to attention by his mount, holding his cap ceremonially against his chest. The horses patiently waited their turn.
This enactment of defeat depressed everyone’s spirits further. The corporals had no heart for a tangle with the Scotsmen, who could no longer be bothered with them. Minutes later they passed five bodies in a ditch, three women, two children. Their suitcases lay around them. One of the women wore carpet slippers, like the man in the lawn suit. Turner looked away, determined not to be drawn in. If he was going to survive, he had to keep a watch on the sky. He was so tired, he kept forgetting. And it was hot now. Some men were letting their greatcoats drop to the ground. A glorious day. In another time this was what would have been called a glorious day. Their road was on a long slow rise, enough to be a drag on the legs and increase the pain in his side. Each step was a conscious decision. A blister was swelling on his left heel which forced him to walk on the edge of his boot. Without stopping, he took the bread and cheese from his bag, but he was too thirsty to chew. He lit another cigarette to curb his hunger and tried to reduce his task to the basics: you walked across the land until you came to the sea. What could be simpler, once the social element was removed? He was the only man on earth and his purpose was clear. He was walking across the land until he came to the sea. The reality was all too social, he knew; other men were pursuing him, but he had comfort in a pretense, and a rhythm at least for his f
eet. He walked /across /the land/until/he came/to the sea. A hexameter. Five iambs and an anapest was the beat he tramped to now.
Another twenty minutes and the road began to level out. Glancing over his shoulder he saw the convoy stretching back down the hill for a mile. Ahead, he could not see the end of it. They crossed a railway line. By his map they were sixteen miles from the canal. They were entering a stretch where the wrecked equipment along the road was more or less continuous. Half a dozen twenty-five-pounder guns were piled beyond the ditch, as if swept up there by a heavy bulldozer. Up ahead where the land began to drop there was a junction with a back road and some kind of commotion was taking place. There was laughter from the soldiers on foot and raised voices at the roadside. As he came up, he saw a major from the Buffs, a pink-faced fellow of the old school, in his forties, shouting and pointing toward a wood that lay about a mile away across two fields. He was pulling men out of the column, or trying to. Most ignored him and kept going, some laughed at him, but a few were intimidated by his rank and had stopped, though he lacked any personal authority. They were gathered around him with their rifles, looking uncertain.
“You. Yes you. You’ll do.”
The major’s hand was on Turner’s shoulder. He stopped and saluted before he knew what he was doing. The corporals were behind him.
The major had a little toothbrush mustache overhanging small, tight lips that clipped his words briskly. “We’ve got Jerry trapped in the woods over there. He must be an advance party. But he’s well dug in with a couple of machine guns. We’re going to get in there and flush him out.”
Turner felt the horror chill and weaken his legs. He showed the major his empty palms.
“What with, sir?”
“With cunning and a bit of teamwork.”
How was the fool to be resisted? Turner was too tired to think, though he knew he wasn’t going.
“Now, I’ve got the remains of two platoons halfway up the eastern …”
“Remains” was the word that told the story, and prompted Mace, with all his barrack-room skill, to interrupt.
“Beg pardon, sir. Permission to speak.”
“Not granted, Corporal.”
“Thank you, sir. Orders is from GHQ. Proceed at haste and speed and celerity, without delay, diversion or divagation to Dunkirk for the purposes of immediate evacuation on account of being ’orribly and onerously overrun from all directions. Sir.”
The major turned and poked his forefinger into Mace’s chest.
“Now look here you. This is our one last chance to show …”
Corporal Nettle said dreamily, “It was Lord Gort what wrote out that order, sir, and sent it down personally.”
It seemed extraordinary to Turner that an officer should be addressed this way. And risky too. The major had not grasped that he was being mocked. He seemed to think that it was Turner who had spoken, for the little speech that followed was addressed to him.
“The retreat is a bloody shambles. For heaven’s sake, man. This is your one last good chance to show what we can do when we’re decisive and determined. What’s more …”
He went on to say a good deal more, but it seemed to Turner that a muffling silence had descended on the bright late morning scene. This time he wasn’t asleep. He was looking past the major’s shoulder toward the head of the column. Hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by the rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended horizontally, with a bulge in its center. The major’s words were not reaching him, and nor were his own clear thoughts. The horizontal apparition hovered in the sky without growing larger, and though he was beginning to understand its meaning, it was, as in a dream, impossible to begin to respond or move his limbs. His only action had been to open his mouth, but he could make no sound, and would not have known what to say, even if he could.
Then, precisely at the moment when sound flooded back in, he was able to shout, “Go!” He began to run directly toward the nearest cover. It was the vaguest, least soldierly form of advice, but he sensed the corporals not far behind. Dreamlike too was the way he could not move his legs fast enough. It was not pain he felt below his ribs, but something scraping against the bone. He let his greatcoat fall. Fifty yards ahead was a three-ton lorry on its side. That black greasy chassis, that bulbous differential was his only home. He didn’t have long to get there. A fighter was strafing the length of the column. The broad spray of fire was advancing up the road at two hundred miles an hour, a rattling hailstorm din of cannon rounds hitting metal and glass. No one inside the near-stationary vehicles had started to react. Drivers were only just registering the spectacle through their windscreens. They were where he had been seconds before. Men in the backs of the lorries knew nothing. A sergeant stood in the center of the road and raised his rifle. A woman screamed, and then fire was upon them just as Turner threw himself into the shadow of the upended lorry. The steel frame trembled as rounds hit it with the wild rapidity of a drumroll. Then the cannon fire swept on, hurtling down the column, chased by the fighter’s roar and the flicker of its shadow. He pressed himself into the darkness of the chassis by the front wheel. Never had sump oil smelled sweeter. Waiting for another plane, he crouched fetally, his arms cradling his head and eyes tight shut, and thought only of survival.
But nothing came. Only the sounds of insects determined on their late spring business, and birdsong resuming after a decent pause. And then, as if taking their cue from the birds, the wounded began to groan and call out, and terrified children began to cry. Someone, as usual, was cursing the RAF. Turner stood up and was dusting himself down when Nettle and Mace emerged and together they walked back toward the major who was sitting on the ground. All the color had gone from his face, and he was nursing his right hand.
“Bullet went clean through it,” he said as they came up. “Jolly lucky really.”
They helped him to his feet and offered to take him over to an ambulance where an RAMC captain and two orderlies were already seeing to the wounded. But he shook his head and stood there unaided. In shock he was talkative and his voice was softer.
“ME 109. Must have been his machine gun. The cannon would have blown my ruddy hand off. Twenty millimeter, you know. He must have strayed from his group. Spotted us on his way home and couldn’t resist. Can’t blame him, really. But it means there’ll be more of them pretty soon.”
The half dozen men he had gathered up before had picked themselves and their rifles out of the ditch and were wandering off. The sight of them recalled the major to himself.
“All right, chaps. Form up.”
They seemed quite unable to resist him and formed a line. Trembling a little now, he addressed Turner.
“And you three. At the double.”
“Actually, old boy, to tell the truth, I think we’d rather not.”
“Oh, I see.” He squinted at Turner’s shoulder, seeming to see there the insignia of senior rank. He gave a good-natured salute with his left hand. “In that case, sir, if you don’t mind, we’ll be off. Wish us luck.”
“Good luck, Major.”
They watched him march his reluctant detachment away toward the woods where the machine guns waited.
For half an hour the column did not move. Turner put himself at the disposal of the RAMC captain and helped on the stretcher parties bringing in the wounded. Afterward he found places for them on the lorries. There was no sign of the corporals. He fetched and carried supplies from the back of an ambulance. Watching the captain at work, stitching a head wound, Turner felt the stirrings of his old ambitions. The quantity of blood obscured the textbook details he remembered. Along their stretch of road there were five injured and, surprisingly, no one dead, though the sergeant with the rifle was hit in the face and was not expected to live. Three vehicles had their front ends shot up and were pushed off the road. The petrol was siphoned off and, for good measure, bullets were fired through the tires.
When all this was done in t
heir section, there was still no movement up at the front of the column. Turner retrieved his greatcoat and walked on. He was too thirsty to wait about. An elderly Belgian lady shot in the knee had drunk the last of his water. His tongue was large in his mouth and all he could think of now was finding a drink. That, and keeping a watch on the sky. He passed sections like his own where vehicles were being disabled and the wounded were being lifted into lorries. He had been going for ten minutes when he saw Mace’s head on the grass by a pile of dirt. It was about twenty-five yards away, in the deep green shadow of a stand of poplars. He went toward it, even though he suspected that it would be better for his state of mind to walk on. He found Mace and Nettle shoulder deep in a hole. They were in the final stages of digging a grave. Lying facedown beyond the pile of earth was a boy of fifteen or so. A crimson stain on the back of his white shirt spread from neck to waist.
Mace leaned on his shovel and did a passable imitation. “‘I think we’d rather not.’ Very good, guv’nor. I’ll remember that next time.”
“Divagation was nice. Where d’you get that one?”
“He swallowed a fucking dictionary,” Corporal Nettle said proudly.
“I used to like the crossword.”
“And ’orribly and onerously overrun?”
“That was a concert party they had in the sergeants’ mess last Christmas.”
Still in the grave, he and Nettle sang tunelessly for Turner’s benefit.