Dunkirk Spirit

by Alan Pearce

  ‘Splendid!’

  ‘And a bloody great French tractor-thing that we can use to block the road if it comes to that. And then all the food! I just wish we had some sound drinking water.’

  ‘My chaps don’t seem to like the Bren much,’ put in Nigel. ‘But they were totally delighted with the Lewis. Thanks.’

  ‘We love Brens,’ said Sandy. ‘Perfect for bursting German inflatable boats.’

  ‘I’m really looking forward to dinner,’ said Simon. ‘I’m ravishing!’

  ‘Ravished, darling!’ corrected Nigel. ‘No one could ever truly describe you as ravishing!’ He laughed. ‘As youthful as you are!’

  ‘I heard you found some Wiltshire bacon?’ inquired Simon, keen to think about food. ‘Any eggs?’

  ‘By the dozen, and four more chickens.’

  ‘Well, that’s breakfast sorted, then.’ Simon smiled inwardly. ‘And a breakfast beer, how perfect! Takes me back to Oxford.’

  ‘Six crates of Belgian beer,’ confirmed Sandy. ‘I rather like the stuff.’

  ‘And wine?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Just très ordinaire, I’m afraid. But plenty of it. Lucas is cooking the chicken in it.’

  ‘I know. I know. I can smell it!’ sighed Simon.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Lucas?’ asked Samson poking his head through the window and into the kitchen.

  ‘For you, d’you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. For me and the lads!’

  ‘Well, we have quite a menu this evening, my young sir.’ Lucas stood back from the charcoal stove and wiped his hands on a dainty tea towel. ‘For starters you can choose from a selection of tinned beetroot, tinned peas or tinned beans.’

  ‘Lovely!’

  ‘For your main course, you can have either MacConochie’s meat and veg with hard biscuits, or bully beef and tinned potatoes.’

  ‘Hmm!’

  ‘For desert, we have Nestles condensed milk, a selection of tinned fruit, from pears, peaches and plums. And to finish, should you have room, there’s a lot of some rather smelly cheese, served with French Army biscuits.’

  ‘And what’s that on the stove, there? Smells bloody great!’

  ‘That’s for the officers. That isn’t for the likes of you. And besides, I ain’t your blooming cook. You can come and help yourselves when the lieutenant says so.’

  ‘Then how about some of that rum, just to be getting on with? To give me an appetite!’ Samson showed his bad teeth through cracked lips.

  ‘What, ain’t you hungry already?’

  ‘Fucking starved! What d’you think?’

  ‘I think you just want a drink. That’s what I think.’ Lucas bent down, retrieved a gallon jar from one of the cases on the floor, and tipped some into a deep mug.

  ‘Don’t let none of the officers see this,’ he said, handing it through the window. ‘And bring the mug back.’ Lucas stepped away and turned to the other window, looking out to the north where the lieutenant and the others sat in the sun drinking sherry. Another ten minutes, thought Lucas, and I’ll serve dinner.

  Outside, one of the officers became suddenly animated as he pointed up at the sky. ‘Oh, look! There goes another one!’

  18:25 Wednesday 29 May 1940.

  Off Bray Dunes, France

  Sub-Lieutenant Kenneth Burnell of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve had a fair grasp of first aid. He had paid keen attention during the training course at the King Alfred base in Portsmouth. Some of what he did now was automatic. The rest was blind panic.

  ‘Look!’ he shouted to the soldier beside him. ‘You’ve got to apply pressure here.’ Burnell took a large piece of cloth and stuffed it into the sucking chest wound of the man’s friend. Bright pink bubbles foamed around the cloth as he forced it inside. Burnell surprised himself. Such a sight in his civilian days might easily have brought on a fainting fit or worse. The Atlantic convoys had cured him of any squeamishness.

  ‘Oh, bleedin’ hell! Is he gonna be all right?’ The soldier was as grey in the face as his wounded friend.

  ‘He will if you can keep the pressure up,’ shouted Burnell, far from sure himself. ‘Help me.’ He gently shifted the patient onto his side so the blood gushing from one lung did not fill the other and so drown the man. ‘If he goes red in the face…’ Burnell realised that the man’s friend was no longer paying attention. He shook him and shouted again. ‘If he goes red in the face, pull the dressing out and then bang it in again. Do you understand?’

  The soldier nodded but it seemed clear that he was becoming more concerned with his own safety. Burnell pulled himself upright and looked around. As a means of hitching home, this was not one of his better ideas. The Crested Eagle had taken four hits between the funnel and the engine-room. Thick black smoke swept around him. Fine grey smoke was rising from between the wooden planks of the deck. Burnell stood towards the stern and watched the wake. The steamer was turning in an ever-increasing circle. The giant paddle wheels to each side whirled ungoverned, tearing the surface of the sea and sending it back as brilliant white foam. Down below, the triple expansion engines were exceeding their manufacturer’s recommended revolutions and threatening to tear the ship apart. She was easily topping twenty-knots. All around him, men were in panic. Some simply stood and stared with bulging white eyes. Others ran from one part of the ship to another, hoping perhaps to find a patch of safety and thus escape the flames that now threatened to engulf the steamer.

  ‘What the hell are they doing on the bridge?’ wondered Burnell. He turned and pushed his way through the crowd. ‘Gangway!’ he shouted as he shoved men aside. A few short steps led to the open bridge. Burnell grabbed the rail and pulled himself up. Now he did feel sick. The entire bridge crew had been shredded. Not one body remained recognisable as such. The ship’s big wheel was shattered, too. Burnell stood aghast. He stepped forward towards the telegraph and tugged at the brass lever until it registered All Stop. There was no corresponding ding of the bell.

  The ship continued on at soaring speed. He looked for voice pipes but could see none. A new wave of horror washed over him. Around his feet, the deck lay thick with blood and gore. Curious grey-pink blobs of fat washed up against his shoes as the ship heeled over. Ahead of him, as the Crested Eagle tore on, the beach came into view. A few three-storey buildings lined the front. Smoke billowed from a dozen different points. On the sand, long lines he now knew to be men. Three or four more turns like this and the steamer would very likely run aground. Given the options, it was the best that could be hoped for now the fire had taken a serious hold. The wooden ship could count the rest of her life in minutes not hours.

  As she turned back out to sea, Burnell saw the sharp bows of a destroyer pressing towards them. From her bridge came a series of bright white flashes. Burnell read off the words. “Stop! We are coming alongside. Prepare to disembark troops. Repeat stop!”

  ‘Fat chance,’ thought Burnell. Men, many of them already soaked and covered in oil, looked over the rails and down to the foaming white water below. Many were wondering if they should take their chances now over the side or wait a while. Salvation seemed a long way off. The destroyer came back into view. Burnell could see it was Cameron. His heart gave a leap. She was reducing her speed now, and turning about ten-degrees to starboard, in an attempt to come alongside. Burnell waved and then realised that everybody else on deck was waving frantically, too.

  ‘The bridge is in ruins. That’s why she won’t stop,’ proclaimed the Skipper. He let his binoculars drop to his chest. ‘Suggestions, Number One?’

  ‘I say leave her, sir. She’s going to run aground at this rate.’ Gordon turned away from the Skipper and looked back towards the Crested Eagle. ‘Half ahead both,’ he called.

  The Crested Eagle was a beautiful ship. She now looked like a wounded animal in a blind panic. He raised his own glasses and picked out the men lining her rail. They seemed to be staring directly back at him. Gordon’s grandmother had been able to read lips but he had never bothered to l
earn. Now, he didn’t need to. He held the binoculars to his eyes. The effect was rather like watching a grainy film at the Odeon. The lenses helped separate him from the reality of a shipload of men on the verge of an agonising death.

  ‘Stukas, sir!’ shouted the lookout, jarring Gordon back to reality.

  ‘Sound the alarm!’

  Bells clanged throughout the ship and the gunners, who had been watching the tiny black shapes grow by the second, braced themselves as they traced the bombers progress.

  ‘Full ahead both!’ called Gordon.

  ‘Full ahead both it is, sir.’

  ‘Port ten.’ Cameron swerved away from the dying ship and into the path of the Stukas.

  ‘Shoot!’ And the guns blazed away.

  ‘No! No! Over ‘ere!’

  Burnell watched Cameron pull gracefully aside, sending a powerful wash towards the paddle steamer. Above, bursts of grey AA fire bloomed in the path of the dive-bombers. They came down regardless. The first bomb landed to within a hundred yards of the port paddle wheel. A towering wall of grey sea burst upward, sending the ship heeling over and altering her course. Burnell slipped on the deck and collided in a tangle of arms and legs against a bulwark. Men were now launching themselves up onto the rail and dropping into the fast moving water. The sound of the port paddle as it lifted clear of the sea clattered like a deranged threshing machine. A sound of splintering timbers and then the wheel began to break apart.

  The Crested Eagle continued to heel at a dangerous angle, forcing Burnell to place his palms flat on the deck for purchase. Another explosion brought the next deadly siren to its conclusion and the sea erupted again towards the stern, sending yet more filthy grey foam into the evening sky. Burnell was suddenly on his side and sliding along the wet deck towards the front of the ship. He felt the timbers below scream in protest as they came up hard against the compacted sand of the sloping shore. The Crested Eagle came to a very sudden halt. The smoke that had been seeping through the cracks in the decking now burst out in torrents. The ship may have ground to a halt but much of her superstructure continued to push itself forward. Steam burst in an enormous grey cloud from a point yards above Burnell’s head. The funnel gave a lurch and toppled forward, colliding with the mast in an intricate web of rigging. Burnell continued to slide across the deck.

  ‘That’s it! She’s aground now,’ announced the Skipper, looking back from his wing of the bridge. Cameron ploughed through the sea, tearing across her own wake, forcing the bows to rise and plummet.

  ‘Bring us in close, Number One. Let’s have some good men in the chains, and lower the boats.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘More aircraft, sir!’ shouted the lookout. ‘Different ones!’

  ‘We really are going to have to conserve our ammunition, sir,’ called Gordon above the din. ‘We won’t be able to keep this up for much longer.’

  Both officers looked into the sky. Now twin-engine fighters were swooping down, coming two-by-two in a giant swarm. As they swept between Cameron and the blazing steamer, the water between them erupted with bursts of cannon fire.

  ‘Mark five…deep four.’

  ‘I can’t get us in any closer, sir. And at this range we’re having no bloody effect.’

  ‘Ceasefire!’ called the Skipper and gradually Cameron quietened down. Gordon watched as the two whalers were swung away from the side and lowered with hast into the water.

  ‘Boats away, sir!’ he called

  ‘Then get us out of here, Number One.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Burnell clung to the rail looking down into the water. All around him men were clambering up, balancing momentarily, and then dropping down into the sea. Since grounding, the fuel tanks had ruptured and now the surface of the sea took on an iridescent sheen. It suppressed the few remaining waves and lapped over the heads of each man in the water, blackening and scalding, and leaving them gagging. Burnell let go of the rail and stood back. Cameron was pursing a zigzag course out to sea. Her two whalers were pulling hard now towards the men in the water. Burnell did not hear the Messerschmitt as it came racing along, barely ten feet above the surface. The water erupted and a momentary furrow ripped through the oily grey sea. Heads that had bobbed there moments before now disappeared. Those not hit increased their efforts to reach the whalers. Another Messerschmitt and another terrible burst of deadly cannon fire. Burnell looked up and saw dozens more circling above. The whole sky seemed alive with dark monsters. Out to sea, Cameron lay cloaked in fine blue-grey smoke as her gunners continued to chase targets in the sky.

  In the back of his mind, Burnell knew that the sea would catch fire. And then, when it did, it still came as a surprise. It came first as a blue flame, so small and so pretty, that it resembled the wind rippling across a field of bluebells. The flames raced across the surface, spreading with urgency all around the ship. As the flames reached each swimmer in turn, so their hair ignited in a bright yellow flare that fizzled and flickered until each man sank below the surface. As the flames reached out, so they suddenly licked up against the sides of the whalers. Oars were hastily unshipped, only to come away flaming like torches, dripping liquid fire back into the sea. As the flames grew in confidence, so they grew in size and intensity. Within an instant, the sea was aglow in brilliant reds, yellows, and dying blues. One by one, the men in the whalers stood upright. Many clutched at their heads as their hair, too, ignited. The whalers burnt an intense white that produced a thick black smoke. Burnell turned away horrified and ran towards the eyes of the ship. Hundreds of men were still lining her rails. The majority were screaming. The shore was a good three hundred yards away. Flames licked up the sides, toasting the foul air, and singeing the hairs in his nostrils. Young Kenneth Burnell had been married just six weeks.

  ‘This is going to be tough on Daisy,’ he thought. He ran quickly up the anchor chains and dropped over the side.

  18:55 Wednesday 29 May 1940.

  Bray Dunes, France

  The Crested Eagle continued to burn and would continue to do so for many more days, providing yet another clear landmark off the beach. Periodically, small explosions could be heard from within her blackened hull as odd items such as tins of paint and varnish ignited. The sea was no longer afire. Now scores of bodies rolled facedown with the waves. Those that had made it to the shore, rolled and turned with the outgoing tide. Sub-Lieutenant Burnell of the RNVR lay amongst them.

  He turned over and propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes were sore and his vision blurred. His arms and legs shivered with shock and exertion. Out to sea, the Luftwaffe continued to bomb and strafe. He felt violently sick from the fuel oil. Burnell had such a serious aversion to vomiting that he had rarely allowed himself to be sick even in the worst Atlantic storms. He had no such compunction now. He turned on his side and spewed his heart out. After some time, when his head had stopped spinning and the desire to retch had subsided, Burnell pulled himself with difficulty to his feet. He tried to take stock. A crowd had gathered along the shore to watch the paddle steamer burn. A rich black smoke rose into the sky and then stretched back over their heads, fading to grey as it dissipated over the dunes. Thousands of men stood, sat or lay across the sand. Weeks of fighting, days of marching, and now they faced a dead end or just plain death. The fear and anxiety was reflected in every face that Burnell could focus upon.

  He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. Slowly he wiped the oil away from his eyes and mouth, wincing slightly at the tenderness of his skin. He spat again onto the sand. The noxious maritime fuel oil coated his mouth. At his feet, a seaman’s blue cap turned in the surf, the HMS on the band still shone a watery gold beneath the oil. Burnell took a few steps up the beach and turned to look out to sea. Four destroyers raced at speed a few miles from the shore.

  Around fifty ships and boats of all sizes milled around at their best speed in their efforts to avoid the bombers. Cameron swung towards the shore. She still
needed to offload her wireless gear and was seeking out a suitable craft to bring it inshore. She was chasing down a pleasure cruiser of around fifty tons. The boat seemed reluctant to stop. Eventually Cameron pulled alongside, hiding the cruiser from view. Burnell waited, watching the skies and willing away every Stuka and Heinkel.

  After an agonising ten minutes, the cruiser pulled into view. Two large crates had been lowered onto her raised rear deck. As the cruiser turned towards the shore, the crates appeared to slide awkwardly. Out of the corner of his eye, Burnell saw a stick of five bombs tumbling downward. They landed in an untidy cluster between Cameron and the cruiser. For an instant, Cameron was obscured from view as a towering mountain of grey sea roared into the sky. Burnell’s heart seemed to stop. Suddenly he relaxed. Cameron was turning hard to port and back out to sea, sending a prodigious white wake behind her. He let out his breath and felt the back of his throat burn. The cruiser had disappeared for an instant, too. Now she came tearing out of the descending wall of water and spray. Her upper deck as she turned briefly side-on appeared to have crumpled under the weight of the water. Just one crate was now visible. Burnell watched the cruiser pick up speed and aim for a point on the beach about five hundred yards to his left. He turned and trotted along the shore.

  ‘What, run her aground on an ebb tide? Are you off your rocker?’

  ‘Just do it, will you?’

  ‘I’ve got the owners to think about,’ shouted Charlie Lavender above the roar.

  ‘Just do it, man!’ The sub-lieutenant fought hard not to scream.

  ‘Right! You bloomin’ asked for it.’ Charlie opened the throttle wide and Phoebe’s bows lifted out of the water as she topped twenty-nine knots. The shore was approaching fast and Charlie called back over his shoulder. ‘Ted, I want the kedge anchor off the stern. Let her out fast when I say.’