The Gathering Storm

by Bodie Thoene

  The day, which had begun with such pleasant weather, had turned increasingly sultry. By sunset it was clear a thunderstorm was brewing out over the Channel.

  Since we had been walking all day, Gina and her friends were now genuinely tired. Despite Judah’s desire to have us push ahead as rapidly as possible, we just weren’t able to move any faster.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, eyeing the sky. “We’ll still make Dixmude by dark.”

  Judah kept us entertained by stories about the area. “Dixmude has a wonderful old parish church. Has a three-hundred-year-old painting: The Adoration of the Magi, by Jordaens.”

  “You sound like a Baedecker’s Guide,” I teased.

  “Studied the painting for a window I was building,” he said.

  I was struck again by what an amazingly complex man Judah was. An artist and a warrior.

  So was King David, I recalled.

  It was about this time we encountered the supply convoy. Our path intersected a road on which ten English lorries were parked. As we emerged from the brush, the guards fingered their rifles nervously. They only relaxed when they saw that women and children outnumbered the men, and that we had no weapons.

  Judah approached the sergeant in charge and explained who we were.

  The sergeant peered in the gathering gloom at Judah’s artificial features, then at Walker and Howard. “Didn’t get those in this war, did you?”

  “No, and we don’t want any new artificial parts, either.”

  “Not likely! You done your bit. Get back home and keep out of this. ’Course,” he added confidentially, “we may be headed home right behind of you, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Judah asked the sergeant to confirm the distance to Dixmude.

  “Blimey,” the sergeant in charge responded. “Is this the road to Dixmude? We’re s’posed to be headed for Ichteghem; however you might pronounce it. All these names like to strangle me, they do.”

  “Back the other way, I’m afraid,” Judah corrected.

  “Crikey!”

  The sergeant confided, “This is all a proper foul-up, this is! Three days ago we was in Surrey on a trainin’ exercise. Two days ago we shipped over, with these spare parts. Yesterday we drove halfway to Germany, like. Today it’s all busted up. Go here, wait, go back, go again.”

  “Sergeant,” Judah said with a tone of authority, “you seem to be way too free with giving information to strangers.”

  The sergeant grimaced. “You’re right! But we’ve not even seen a Jerry since we come here. Bein’ chased by phantoms for all I know.”

  The wind pushed the storm clouds toward us. There was the smell of rain on the air.

  “The Boche are real enough,” Judah said. “And they’re not far away.”

  The racing of engines alerted us to the arrival of more vehicles.

  “Hope that’s an officer what has the straight of it,” the sergeant said. “Best get your troop off the road,” he added to Judah. “We seen some folks get run over, like, so we have.”

  “Good advice,” Judah returned, and he directed us out of harm’s way through a gap in a hedgerow flanking the road.

  “We’ll wait here until the convoy moves off,” Judah said. “Then I think we can safely use the road. Be easier from here to Dixmude.”

  Jessica nursed Shalom. Lieutenant Howard took up a position at one end of our line and Sergeant Walker at the other, their backs to us six in the center, as if they were our personal guards.

  Judah continued watching the road.

  A motorcycle purred up to the head of the line of trucks and stopped. Just behind it was a staff car, followed by another motorcycle.

  In the gloom we heard the sergeant say, “Is that Captain Moody? What sort of helmet are you wearing?”

  There was no reply except for a sudden ratcheting sound.

  The next thing I knew Judah was pushing me down, hard, for the second time that day.

  Machine guns split the night, tearing apart the quiet and the darkness. Screams and cries of alarm echoed from the trucks. Shouted commands in German said to “Kill them all.”

  In moments that seemed like hours the carnage was over.

  We were all unhurt, flattened in the ditch, but barely yards away from the Nazi patrol that had just slaughtered twenty men.

  I heard boots crunch on gravel and saw the flash of an electric torch playing in and out of the line of lorries.

  Then Shalom squawked.

  It was a soft, newborn infant protest at being squished, but it sounded as loud as a train whistle in the malevolence-laden darkness. I felt Jessica cuddle him close, trying to comfort him; difficult when her own breath was coming in short, scared sips and she was shaking.

  So was I.

  Gravel crunched underfoot again…closer.

  A bolt of lightning split the night, followed immediately by a peal of thunder that sounded as if it broke right on top of us.

  And then came the rain.

  I heard disgust in the German officer’s voice when he told his group to mount up. He added that they would find other convoys on which to pounce, and they moved off.

  But we did not dare move yet.

  By flipping the cart upside-down, Judah contrived a shelter for Jessica and the baby that also accommodated the girls by squeezing them under.

  The three men and I huddled miserably out in the rain.

  “Can’t we at least get inside the trucks?” I asked.

  “And if the Germans return and decide to take them along this time?”

  We remained in our hiding place. The rain finally stopped around eleven, but we were too stiff to move any further that night.

  16

  We never did reach Dixmude.

  The morning after the German attack on the British supply convoy Judah made us backtrack through the fields. We remained in the shadows of the hedgerows and away from the roads entirely. “We will stay safe as long as we can,” he said. “We’ll have to come out in the open to cross the bridge at Dixmude, but if we can remain under cover until then, we will.”

  I no longer questioned any of Judah’s decisions when it came to keeping us out of harm’s way. I did say: “You’ve never said where we’re going. I mean, how you plan to get us to England.”

  “Ostende,” he said, naming a Channel port about twenty miles away. “I have a friend who has a fishing smack there.”

  After the terrors of the night, Gina, Judith, and Susan traveled in a tight-knit band, seldom further than arm’s length from each other. When Susan swooped on something lying in the dirt, the object was passed from hand-to-hand before any of the adults got a look.

  Gina, who had it last, passed a military cap to Judah. Pointing to the skull and crossbones on the badge, she asked worriedly, looking around, “Did this belong to the Hitler men?”

  Judah took it. “No,” he said, reading the motto underneath the chilling emblem: “Death or Glory. It belongs to a British soldier—a Lancer. My old unit.”

  This was new information to me. I knew Walker and Howard had been in the same outfit in the Great War: the Highlanders. I had just assumed Judah had been part of the same force.

  What else did I not know about this enigmatic man?

  When we approached Dixmude we came upon a mob of refugees huddled together a quarter mile short of the bridge. “Why have you stopped here?” Judah asked.

  “The Britishers,” a portly Belgian replied. “They say the bridge is mined, and we’re too late to cross.”

  “No!” Judah exclaimed. Then, “Wait here!” and he ran forward.

  A series of dull thuds erupted from the crossing of the Yser river before he had covered half the distance. With typical British efficiency each span of the bridge collapsed inward on itself with a minimum of fuss.

  The girls watched the demolition with great interest and no trace of fear.

  In thirty seconds, where there had been a river crossing, there was now a heap of twisted girders and a trail of smoke.
>
  Judah stood on the bank and shouted across, “Oy! Hey, Lancers.”

  Someone bellowed back: “What d’ya want, chum? Miss your ride?”

  “We’ve got to get across.”

  “You and the whole German army. Why do you think we blew the bridge?”

  “I know. But how can we get to Ostende?”

  There was a silence and then: “Can’t help you there. Nazis are already in Ostende. We’re falling back on Dunkirk.”

  The Yser, though not a mighty current, was still too much for the children and Jessica and the baby to cross safely.

  “Is there another way?”

  Another consultation, then: “Follow the tracks of the trolley line. If you run, you can cross by their bridge. Best hurry, though. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Judah bellowed back. He urged our aching limbs into the fastest motion of the journey thus far. No obstacle was allowed to impede the progress of the cart for more than an instant before the combined strength of the three men hoisted it clear.

  It was one of the ironies of the spring of 1940 that the trolley tracks we now followed connected the interior of Belgium at Ypres with the seaside pleasure resorts of Ostende. We had started our escape near the one but could not return there. Judah thought we were headed for the other end of that excursion line, only to learn it was in enemy hands.

  “What now?” I asked. Oddly I felt no anxiety at the imposed changes. I was confident Judah would work out alternatives.

  “Just cross the river,” he said. “Figure out the rest after that.”

  The gorge spanned by the trolley line bridge was neither deep nor terribly wide, but it was completely exposed. We would have to pick our way over for about a hundred yards.

  Given what we had experienced with the German air assault on the train and the slaughter of the British troops on the road, none of us were eager to go.

  “No choice,” Judah said. “Lieutenant, Sergeant: we’ll carry the cart all the way. Too bumpy otherwise, and we can’t risk it getting stuck between the ties.”

  “Yes, sir,” both men returned.

  “I have a better idea,” Jessica challenged. “I can walk. Carry the cart with our supplies, but you’ll not carry me this time. And I can manage Shalom.”

  Lieutenant Howard crossed first, checking to see if any explosives were attached to the frame of the span. “They haven’t made it here yet,” he reported as he trotted back. “Come on!”

  There was planking along one side of the bridge for a narrow footpath, but it was scarcely broad enough for one person. The spacing of the ties was too great for the girls to cross without leaping.

  “Here’s what we do,” Judah said. “Jessica, you go across first. Now, Gina, you line up behind your aunt Lora, with your hands on her waist. Judith, you behind her, and Susan, you last. You four are pretending to be the last trolley for the seacoast. Ready? Go.”

  And that is how we shuffled across the bridge.

  Even without the weight of mother and child, the three Tin Nose troopers had to set the cart down midspan to change and get better grips. That was when the first mortar round landed in the river about a hundred paces away. Falling without warning, the first news of the shell’s arrival was its detonation and the eruption of a geyser of water.

  Jessica was already across. I was only a few paces behind with my parade of ducklings when the second shellburst struck the far bank where we had stood just moments earlier.

  The cart, in an exhibition of just what Judah feared, wedged a wheel between ties and refused to move. “Leave it,” he ordered, as the sergeant wrenched at the handle. “Run!”

  When all of us were across, we did not stop to look back but pushed on into the thickest brush we could find. We never did know if the shelling came from Germans or the British.

  What we did know was that all of our supplies were lost with the cart. What remained was in the knapsack on my back: my precious teacups, and very little else.

  With Ostende no longer an option, Judah directed our steps further along the coast toward Dunkirk, until we reached the Belgian seaside bathing spa of Nieuport. We were inside the British lines, but only just.

  Over its long and storied past, Nieuport had been ruled by Flemish counts, Norman lordlings, and Knights Templar. It had been fought over by the Dutch, the French, and even the Spaniards.

  Now the unfortunate Nieuporters might have to learn German as well.

  When we reached the town square we might have walked into a dream. Belgian soldiers sat at tables in the plaza, swilling glasses of wine. Most had tied napkins to their gun barrels.

  “What has happened?” Judah demanded. “Has the war magically ended? Have the Boche surrendered to the might of the Belgian forces?”

  “Ah, no,” returned an artillery captain. “Our great and wise king, Leopold, has ordered us,” the officer waved expansively at his table of friends, who raised their glasses, “to cease fighting. He says to prevent unnecessary loss of life.”

  “And leave your Allies holding the bag,” I heard Sergeant Walker growl. “I’ll be showin’ you loss of life, me boy-o.”

  “Easy, Sergeant,” Judah cautioned. “They do still have guns.”

  “To carry their flowers in, more like,” Walker added before subsiding.

  We held a hasty conference beside the town hall. “If our boys are falling back on Dunkirk, shall we push on for there?” Lieutenant Howard asked.

  Judah squinted at the sinking sun. “Not tonight. We need rest and food. I’ll scout for supplies. Sergeant, lead the way into the basement of the post office.”

  The building mentioned was a squat, ugly, one-story structure. “Can’t we stay in a hotel? Or at least in the church?” I queried.

  “The soldiers are already drinking,” Judah said, looking at me with significance. “When the taverns on the plaza run out, they will ransack the hotels.”

  “I—I understand,” I returned weakly. I had considered that the only danger to us was from Germans. “Why not the church, then?”

  Judah pointed to the bell tower. “The Nazis tend to view towers as observation posts to be shelled or bombed,” he said. “They don’t stop to inquire what sort of tower it is. No, the post office is best for our purposes. The Germans, in their Teutonic way, pride themselves on making anything they capture work more efficiently than it did before. If they can take the post office intact, they will.”

  I felt even weaker and more discouraged than before. “Do you think they will? Capture Nieuport, I mean?”

  The lines of Judah’s grim face visible below the corners of his mask relaxed slightly. “Not tonight. And tomorrow we sail for England.”

  The girls applauded.

  “Lead the way, Sergeant. I have some foraging to do.”

  “Want me to accompany you, sir?” Howard asked.

  “No, you best stay together.” Judah headed off toward the far end of the street.

  We scoured the basement of the post office from one end to the other. The girls turned up three tins of sardines and a wedge of moldy cheese. When we opened one cupboard, we thought our luck had changed because the bottom shelf contained a large pottery crock of pickles.

  Unfortunately the rest of the contents of the armoire was postal supplies.

  The girls turned up their noses at the fare. “Sardines and pickles? Really, Aunt Lora, nobody can just eat that.”

  Within an hour Judah returned. He carried four roasted chickens and a pillowcase full of fresh baked bread.

  “How? Where?” I marveled.

  “Natural-born scrounger,” he reported. “Turned up a case of champagne the Belgians missed. Traded the wine for a crate of cigarettes someone had taken from a looted supply truck. Traded the cigarettes for all this.”

  “Well done,” I praised. “Kept none of the champagne or tobacco for yourself?”

  “Now’s no time to be drinking,” he said. “And I don’t smoke.”

  After supper, when everyone was tucked in
, Judah said, “Sergeant, I’ll leave you on guard here. Lieutenant, I’ve a mind to reconnoiter over toward Dunkirk. Are you with me?”

  “Count me in, sir,” Howard said.

  “Must you leave again?” I blurted, feeling myself color immediately after I spoke.

  “Thought we’d find our transport here,” he said, “but all the boats are gone from Nieuport. We won’t be away long.”

  Fed and exhausted, the girls went immediately to sleep. Sergeant Walker posted himself at the head of stairs to keep watch.

  By the light of an oil lamp Jessica nursed baby Shalom. The flickering flames streaked her hair in light and dark. It cast shadows across her profile as she smiled tenderly down at him, and illuminated her bare shoulder and the top of his downy head. She saw me watching and smiled. “You never know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “How much God loves you until you have one of these of your own. Then you begin to understand.”

  Judah did not return until very late. Though his mask registered no expression, his voice reflected worry. “You won’t believe the scene on the beach. This isn’t a retreat. It’s a rout. There must be a hundred thousand men—British and French—camping there, waiting to be rescued.”

  I tried to picture it and failed. “What’s it mean for us?”

  “Nothing good, I’m afraid. I quizzed a beachmaster. They’re not taking any civilians. Every boat, every ship, every ferry and tug, is being pressed into service rescuing soldiers. They’re coming from as far away as Scotland and the Isle of Wight.”

  “But no room for us?”

  He squared his shoulders. “Something will work out. It has to.”

  I slept then. Later, when I groaned myself awake while trying to find a softer spot on the stone floor, he was still up, thinking or praying. I studied him.

  It was impossible to not see the mask first. I admit that.

  But now that I knew him—the man and not the wave of pity or revulsion or apprehension that the mask inspired—I saw much more. Now I saw Judah’s strong jaw, his broad shoulders, his strong hands, and sensitive artist’s fingers. I saw his courage, his compassion, his leadership.