by Phillip Rock
THE FIVE POILUS and the tall Senegalese corporal had been crouching in the culvert all afternoon, and only the Senegalese was willing to join Albert in leaving it at dusk.
“The planes will be back,” one of the French infantrymen said.
“It’s getting dark,” Albert told him.
“The Boche are like cats.”
There was no point in arguing with them. Their nerves had been shattered by the Stukas and he couldn’t blame them. They were safe from the bombing inside the concrete tunnel and they were ready to surrender anyway. All of them, except the Senegalese, had thrown away their weapons. The ebony-black corporal slung his rifle over his shoulder and followed Albert out of the culvert and up the steep embankment to the road. It stretched away in the dark orange glow of the sunset like a road leading to hell. Shattered and burning trucks were littered around the craters along with the bodies of men and bomb-slaughtered horses. The eastern horizon glowed dull red from the flames of a burning village.
The corporal squatted on the road and turned his map to the flickering light of a blazing truck. His steel helmet was too small for his head and sat on top of it like a pot.
“Rheims. What is left of my regiment should be there. Yes. Rheims, I think.” He spoke good French with a musical lilt.
“Give me the directions for Arras,” Albert said, adjusting the pack a major of Chasseurs had given him to hold his gear and portable typewriter.
“That way,” he said, pointing a long finger to the west. “But I would not try for it, man. Damn Boche get you quick.”
“I don’t think so. They won’t move their tanks at night.”
“What is good at Arras?”
“The English should be there.”
The corporal stood up, drew a revolver from the pocket of his greatcoat, and offered it to Albert butt first. “Kill Boche.”
He shook his head. “Thank you, but no. I mustn’t carry a gun.”
The man looked mystified and returned the weapon to his pocket. “May your God go with you then, English man.”
He missed the Senegalese as he struck out on his own, missed the company of any man who had a gun and seemed eager to use it. He pitied the German who ran into the huge corporal in the dark. He took the right fork of the road, walking carefully around the interlocking bomb craters that the Stukas had created early that afternoon when they had first plummeted on the retreating French column. The craters stank of high explosives and death. There had been two trucks filled with men on this spot when the bombs had slapped into it like bullets into a bull’s-eye.
The narrow country road met the highway running south from Valenciennes and he could hear the movement along it long before he reached the junction. It was a sound that he had heard often during the past few days and hoped never to hear again. The sound of thousands of people fleeing from a battle that was quite impossible to flee from. They came in limousines and rattling Citroëns, in lumbering horse-drawn farm carts … on foot pushing wheelbarrows or baby carriages piled high with their belongings. He had even seen one man staggering along with a grandfather clock strapped to his bent back. This stream was no different from the others, except poorer. No limousines. No cars of any sort. Just weary people pushing carts through the darkness. He threaded his way through them and continued west on a silent, empty road. Shortly after midnight he reached a village that had been hastily abandoned and thoroughly looted, the cobbled street littered with bits of clothing, bed sheets, and broken crockery. He drank some water from the village pump, the handle making an unearthly squeal in the darkness. As he hurried on, a shape emerged from the shadows of a house at the end of the street.
“Haltez-vous! Haltez!”
He stopped, smiling to himself. The dreadful French pronunciation could mean only one thing … “It’s all right! I’m English!”
A shielded torch flicked a thin shaft of light across him.
“Keep your ’ands up, mate.”
There were two of them, short, stocky men in British battle dress, their hobnailed boots ringing on the worn stones as they came toward him. One of them held a rifle.
“Now then,” the man with the torch said, flicking it on Albert’s face. “What’s a civvy doin’ out ’ere?”
“The name’s Thaxton … A. E. Thaxton … correspondent for the London Daily Post. My credentials are in my jacket pocket.”
“Oh, they are, are they? Got a bloody grenade in there, too? What you think, Pincher?”
“I dunno, Bert. Chap I know says he saw ten Belgium nuns last week all wearin’ German bloody army boots.”
“That’s just a story,” Albert said.
“How would you bloody well know, mate?”
“Look, we’re wasting time. Check my passes.”
The papers were checked and the soldiers were satisfied. “Sorry, mate. You can get a bit windy out here on your lonesome. Where are you goin’?”
“Arras.”
“Hop in with us, then. We were just pullin’ out when we ’eard you down at the pump.”
They were troopers of the Royal Lancers on a patrol in their Bren gun carrier. Albert got into the back of the squat little armored vehicle and they roared off, the caterpillar tracks chewing into the hard-packed gravel road.
Most of what was left of the British armor was in Arras, parked under dusty trees or scattered about draped with camouflage netting. The Luftwaffe had come over that day and dive bombed the town heavily. Some houses still burned at three in the morning and the streets were filled with the debris of shattered brick and plaster.
Major General Wood-Lacy’s HQ was in a garage off the main boulevard, a noisy place crowded with overtired tank officers clustered in front of a wall map—a Michelin road map of northern France that was pathetically inadequate for military use. Soldiers cursed the squawking, static-ridden radio sets and the nearly useless telephones. It was an atmosphere of chaos but no sign of despair. Fenton, looking drawn and haggard, sat drinking a warm bottle of orange soda behind an oil-stained desk cluttered with Renault parts.
“I’m bloody glad to see you, Albert.”
“Rather good to see you, too.”
“Where have you come from?”
“The Ardennes and Sedan … carried along in the retreat.”
“Rout would be a better word,” Fenton said in weary resignation. He took a swig of soda pop and handed the bottle to Albert, who took it gratefully. “With the help of some French tanks we stopped a panzer column cold today … about three miles out of town. Only an advance group so we probably won’t have the same sort of luck in a day or two.”
“Is the BEF digging in here?”
“Christ no. We’re just odds and sods. A holding action. Gort’s pulling the army back to the coast—if there’s still a coast left to fall back to. Jerry is between us and Paris and reached the sea today at St. Valéry and Noyelles. Nothing to stop them from rolling up to Boulogne and Calais. Bloody nothing.”
“And you’re to hold on here?”
Fenton lit a cigarette and then immediately stabbed it out. “A counterattack is in the works … hit the panzers’ right flank if possible … slow the bastards up a bit. Though how much we can slow them with sixteen medium tanks, some bloody useless lights, and a few odds and ends of infantry is not worth thinking about. ‘Hawkforce’ is the code name in case you want to write an obituary.”
Morning came, hazy with smoke. A Bofors gun in a little park across from the garage began to fire, followed by the nervous chatter of machine guns, the sound of the firing drowned by the howl of Stukas and the heavy detonations of their bombs. Albert, who had managed to find a spot to sleep in the bottom of the lubrication pit, was advised to stay there by a knowing sergeant. “You won’t find a better dugout, lad,” the man said. “As good a bomb shelter as they come.”
Albert ignored the advice and started for the narrow concrete steps leading from the pit. “I want to move out with Hawkforce.”
“Too late for that, son. Th
ey left before dawn.”
He spent the day being bombed, going hungry—except for some hardtack and weak tea—and attempting to get the story of the French army’s debacle in the Ardennes down on paper. The sergeant, who had fought near this spot during the last war, knew the value of a hole in the ground. A bomb, landing in the park, had sent splinters into the garage killing two radiomen. The radios were now down in the grease pit along with half a dozen signalers, and Albert barely had room to balance his typewriter on his knees.
The long day finally ended, and so did the Stuka attacks. At dusk, what was left of Hawkforce began to trickle back into what was left of the once thriving town.
“We scuppered a few,” Fenton said, climbing painfully out of the Bren gun carrier he used as a command car. “But it was a bloody balls-up just the same.”
“Are you all right?” Albert asked in concern.
The general removed his steel helmet and wiped his smoke-stained face with a handkerchief. “Just stiff as a bloody post and fucking dead on my feet. We knocked out a dozen of their tanks and gave their infantry holy fits, but we had to cut and run.”
“Attack again tomorrow?”
“No. We’re to pull everything out during the night and get across the La Bassée canal.”
“And then what?”
“Head for the coast … form a defense perimeter around Dunkirk.”
“Dunkirk?”
“Yes. I was there once. Dreary little town. Not much of a port either, so I don’t know what the hell the army will do there. Play in the sand I imagine until Jerry rounds us up.”
THE SQUADRON THAT had been sent to France returned to Kentish Hill on the 25th of May—four pilots and a dozen ground crew on one of the last ships out of burning Calais. Every one of their Hurricanes had been destroyed, three of them by a German tank which had come bursting across their makeshift landing field all guns blazing. The survivors of the ill-fated squadron reported to Jolly Rodgers and were hastily packed off on leave.
“They were all in rum shape,” Jolly said, convening a meeting of 624 Squadron in the mess that afternoon. “The first thing one of them said to me—and I shall not tell you this man’s name—was that we might just as well pack it in. He told me that the BEF is bloody doomed now that Boulogne has fallen and Calais about to fall any minute. I will not tolerate that sort of talk as long as I am station commander. A squadron of Spits will arrive in the morning from North Weald and you will fly in concert with them. That’s all I have to say, chaps. Powelly can take it from here.”
Squadron Leader Powell then explained the current military situation in Artois and Flanders, enumerating the terrible facts as though summing up a case in front of a jury. “All plans for evacuating the army have been thrown out of kilter now with the loss of two major ports. They’re backed up against Dunkirk and Jerry has been bombing the port facilities there. The hope is that a few thousand men can be drawn off at night by destroyers, but even that may not be possible unless the Luftwaffe can be slowed down a bit. We have not one plane left in France that can do the job. It’s going to be up to us, and squadrons like us, here in England. The men coming in tomorrow from North Weald are all regulars and may not think too highly of the Auxiliary. I expect every man to show them that we’re second to none. All right, eat, drink, and be merry … for tomorrow we fly. If I can be excused my little pun.”
Pilot Officer Barratt looked puzzled as he walked from the mess with Derek. “What little pun was that, Ramsay?”
“Damned if I know,” he said, not caring to explain.
“Going to the Red Bull?”
“No … not tonight. Meeting someone in Watford.”
Or at least he hoped he would be. He hadn’t seen Valerie since their Sunday together at Burgate, although he had managed to get through to her on the telephone one evening. It had been impossible to make plans. The squadron had been on continuous stand-by since the debacle in France, never knowing from one day to the next if they would be sent across to back up the decimated regulars. Had not seen her, but had never stopped thinking about her, living over in his mind the all too brief time in that little room. The horsehair couch … the exquisite feel of her body in his arms. “You seem to be smiling to yourself a good deal lately,” had been the squadron leader’s comment one night at dinner. He was smiling now, hunched over the handlebars as he raced the motorbike toward her at seventy miles an hour.
The Jolly Huntsman was the RAF pub in Watford, filled with staff and “back-room boys” from the vast and secret Fighter Command headquarters and communications complex at Bushey Heath and Bentley Priory. It was crowded in the early evening. The saloon bar was exclusively for the upper ranks, mostly middle-aged wing commanders and group captains. The more lowly officers and NCOs of both sexes jammed the less stuffy public bar. He spotted Valerie standing at the three-deep bar drinking a sherry and talking with the officers he had seen at the ops building the week before. She saw him elbowing his way through the crowd and hurried to meet him. She looked impossibly beautiful to him and he had to restrain himself from sweeping her up and sending her sherry glass flying.
“Hello,” he said.
“And hello to you. This is a surprise.”
“It’s impossible to call first.”
“I know. Impossible to call you. I just got off.”
“Same here. First day we’ve been allowed off the base.”
She nodded. “I know. My friend Judy Davis works in sector control. She keeps tabs on your squadron for me. I was praying you wouldn’t be sent across.”
They stood in the middle of the noisy room looking at each other and being jostled.
“Anywhere we could go and be alone for a few minutes?”
Her eyes were steady on his face. “Is that all the time you have?”
“No … hours. Well, until midnight anyway.”
She set her drink down on a table and took his hand. “Come on then.”
He did as she asked and cut the engine before entering the drive, letting the bike coast to a stop in the shadows of the house.
“Mrs. Lamb goes up to bed at eight. My room’s on the top floor. The governess’s room in the days when Mrs. Lamb had need of one.”
“Is it all right for me to come in?”
“Of course it isn’t. Do be quiet on the stairs. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, trip over a carpet rod.”
He took his shoes off in the entry hall and they reached her spacious room without incident. She bolted the door behind them. “Safe and secure. Sorry I can’t offer you a drink. I have some oranges, though. One of the group captains brought a bag back from Gibraltar.”
He placed his hands on her shoulders and stroked the sensible uniform cloth which covered the vibrant flesh beneath. “I don’t need a drink … nor an orange.”
“No,” she whispered. “Neither do I.”
The bedside lamp threw a feeble light, tinged rose by the silk shade. She straddled him, thighs pressed tightly against his hips, back arched in ecstasy. He gazed up at her and ran his hands across the downy softness of her belly. “I love you, Valerie.”
She bent down to him and touched his face. “Please don’t. I don’t think I could bear it if I fell in love with you.”
His hands cupped her breasts, the taut nipples. “I think you are now … a little bit.”
“A bit, yes … some. Making love. I’m not made of stone.”
“Christ, no.”
“You touch my heart, Fat Chap. I wish you didn’t.” She raised her hips and lay beside him, her face cool against his chest. “The terrible thing about the place where I work is that I will always know where you are … what you’re doing … what happens to you. I made a vow with myself that I would never take a fighter pilot for a lover.”
“God’s little jest. I wanted to join my father’s regiment, the Royal Marines, but the RAF grabbed me out of the Cambridge air squadron. If I had been a marine I never would have met you again. That, my darling Val, is fate for
you.”
“Yes,” she whispered, stroking his body lightly with her fingertips. “I know all about fate.”
THE SQUADRON FLEW at twenty-two thousand feet, three thousand feet below and a good way behind the faster Spitfire squadron that had joined them early that morning from North Weald. The smoke from Dunkirk was a thick, greasy black plume twenty miles to the south of them. Sector Control was vectoring them to cross the Belgian coast over Nieuwpoort to intercept the German bombers before they could reach the bridgehead and the nearly defenseless troops jamming the beaches.
The radio crackled in Derek’s ears. Squadron Leader Powell’s voice. “This is Fox leader. Angels two zero. Bandits. Don’t break till I do. Echelon starboard. That’s the good lads.”
Derek glanced down and ahead. The German bombers were two thousand feet below and five miles ahead—a great black swarm of them in tight formations. Fifty at least. High above them were the Messerschmitts, whirling like bees as the fifteen Spitfires made their first slashing pass through them. That was the strategy. Spits to hit the fighters … Hurricanes to break up the bomber formations. They had flown a long way from Kentish Hill and had a long flight back. Derek checked the fuel gauge. Ten, fifteen minutes. That was the time they could safely stay over Belgium.
“Tally Ho!” Powell yelled over the R.T. “Buster!”
Wing over and down in a sickening plummet toward the packed masses of the bombers below. Dorniers. Pencil-thin bodies and short stubby wings. Derek flicked on the gunsight and turned the firing button from safety. Tracer whirling up from the German top gunners. Twitchy, he was thinking. Wasting ammunition. The green-and-black bombers grew larger with frightening rapidity. He picked one out, staring at the gunsight glow reflected on the windshield … the huge body … the black crosses filling the sharply etched lines. He pressed the firing button and the Hurricane shuddered with the recoil of the eight guns. Tracers thudding home, bits of the German’s portside engine whipped away. Don’t tarry … don’t tarry … on and through … pick another. He was being hit … tracer coursing past the cowling. The sound of snapping metal behind him. A Dornier turning to his right. He fired ahead of it, holding down the button. Perfect deflection shot … the bomber flying straight into the bullet stream … the plastic greenhouse of the nose exploding into a million fragments. A clean kill. “Got one, Skipper!” he screamed over the radio. And then he was past them all in a wind-shrieking dive toward the green land below. Back on the stick, fighting the pressure on the wings. Out of it … the blood draining from his head … chin pulled down to his chest. He blacked out for a second and when his head cleared he was climbing back up. Ten thousand feet … fifteen … twenty. No sign of the bombers or his squadron. Voices over the R.T. “Got the bastard!” “Look out, Johnnie!” “I’m behind you, Skipper.” “Break left … break left!”