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‘You seem to have spent a remarkable amount of your naval career rescuing people from on shore,’ Ramsay commented. ‘Understand you speak good French.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, Winston’s a bit worried that the French are hanging back and he wants them bringing out in equal numbers. Unfortunately, they’re not very organised and we need to know why.’

‘Probably,’ Corbett said, ‘because there’s nobody over there who can speak their language. We’re not noted as linguists.’

Ramsay looked at Kelly. ‘I’d like you to go and sort it out,’ he said.

‘I’d hoped for a ship, sir.’

‘It’s everybody’s wish to distinguish himself at sea,’ Ramsay said dryly. ‘Unfortunately we’re more in need at the moment of people who can distinguish themselves on land. Tennant’s going across tomorrow as senior naval officer ashore. We need another.’

Kelly bowed to the inevitable. ‘I’ll go, of course, sir, if that’s where I’m needed.’

‘Good. You’ll need some staff. Any ideas?’

‘There’s a petty officer here, sir. He was with me in Antwerp and Domlupinu and Odessa. I know him well.’

‘He’s yours.’

‘Anybody else?’

‘Lieutenant-Commander Boyle, sir.’

‘He’s my secretary!’ Corbett protested.

‘He was at Odessa and Domlupinu, too, sir. Moreover, he speaks excellent French because he has a French wife and he knows Dunkirk.’

Ramsay rubbed his nose and gave Corbett a cold little smile. ‘It looks as if you’ve lost him, Cuthbert,’ he observed. ‘Very well, fix yourself up with transport across the Channel. Your job will be to contact the French Army and direct their men to the ships. You’ll find a bit of resentment all round because our people think the French have let ’em down by giving way and the French think we’re letting them down by pulling out. It’s up to you to sort it out.’

The harbour was packed with shipping. It had been designed originally as an anchorage for the old Channel Fleet, yet at the berths at the Admiralty Pier Kelly could see as many as eighteen or twenty ships moored in trots two and three deep. A hospital ship was unloading into a row of ambulances, and exhausted khaki-clad figures were stumbling ashore across her from other vessels. As he watched, a tug began to butt at a ship whose yellow bridge paint work was scorched by a great black scar where the steelwork was wrenched back like the lid of a sardine tin.

The office of the Director of Shipping was crowded and the naval commander behind the desk seemed to be at his wits’ end. When Kelly appeared, he simply waved him to the inner office where a naval captain was standing in front of a map, sticking flags into it, with a list in his left hand. Alongside him was a remarkably pretty girl in the uniform of a Wren.

‘Captain Verschoyle’s busy,’ she said immediately.

‘Not too busy to see me,’ Kelly retorted.

Verschoyle turned, stared at Kelly and began to smile.

‘Ginger Maguire, as I live and breathe,’ he said. ‘I heard they’d sunk you at Narvik.’ He gestured at the girl. ‘Beat it, Maisie. I’ll let you know when to come back.’

As the door closed, Kelly grinned. ‘I see you still know how to pick ’em.’

Verschoyle gave his superior smile and stuck another flag into the map. ‘I’d be a bloody fool if I let them fob me off with one with buck teeth and breasts like clockweights,’ he said. ‘Maisie used to be an actress, but patriotism or lack of plays drove her into uniform and she picked the Navy because her father was a chief petty officer in Nelson. She glosses over her background and she’s mastered her accent but I’ve noticed when we go aboard a ship she still tends to turn forward rather than aft at the top of the gangway.’

He saw Kelly looking round the office and gestured. ‘Don’t let this fool you,’ he said. ‘It’s only until this little bunfight settles down. After that, I suspect they’ll be needing everybody at sea who can handle even a pram dinghy because somebody seems to have made a proper balls-up of things, and we’ve finished up with the final socialist dream of plenty of money for social welfare but no fighting services.’ He jabbed another flag into the map, this time as if it were into a politician’s backside. ‘Si vis pacem para bellum. Well, now we’re up to the necks in the bellum we haven’t para’d for. What are you doing here?’

‘Just been landed with the job of naval liaison officer to the French Army.’

‘I hope you can run fast.’

‘I want a lift across with my staff, Cruiser.’

Verschoyle smiled. ‘You have an incredible gift for diving in at the deep end. How many have you got?’

‘So far, two. Seamus Boyle and Rumbelo.’

Verschoyle grinned. ‘I saw Boyle yesterday and Rumbelo a couple of days ago, so I had a feeling in my bones you’d turn up before long.’ He glanced at the list in his hand. ‘You’d better go across in Wolfhound. She’ll be leaving tomorrow. Tennant’s already booked a passage aboard her. You under him?’

‘No,’ Kelly said briskly. ‘I’m under me.’

They spent the night searching for French speakers among the sailors arriving in Dover to offer their services, and before morning had found seven men and five officers from the training establishment, King Alfred, plus one of Verschoyle’s staff and a middle-aged Guernseyman called Le Mesurier, who had once had his name in the newspapers for sailing single-handed at the age of seventeen to Malta during his school holidays. Running out of funds at Malaga on the way back, his boat impounded, his charts confiscated, his credit stopped and a guard put on his boat, he’d traced a map from an atlas at the library, floored the guard with a sack of oranges he’d pinched from a market for food and reached home literally on his last orange pip. Since he spoke fluent French and claimed to know Dunkirk and the surrounding countryside as well as Boyle, with the aid of one of Verschoyle’s staff they fitted him up with a reserve sub-lieutenant’s uniform to give him authority and attached him to the group.

‘I hadn’t really intended to join up,’ he bleated. ‘In fact, when I volunteered for the army they turned me down.’

‘You haven’t joined up,’ Kelly said shortly. ‘Just been disguised. If you find you like it, you can join when we get back.’

When they arrived at Dunkirk, steel-helmeted, their uniforms dragged out of shape by webbing belts and revolver holsters, the place was burning and most of the harbour facilities were in ruins. The bombing appeared to be continuous and the information they received was alarming to say the least because the Belgians had just surrendered, leaving a huge gap in the Allied lines.

There were hundreds of them at the station with more hundreds of French, standing among heaps of rifles, packs and helmets, bewildered and prepared to lay down their arms. There were a few who were not prepared to march meekly into captivity, however, and Le Mesurier managed to persuade them to head for the beaches where a slow lifting had started by ships’ boats. Eventually, even those who had been prepared to give up began to straggle off.

It was a beginning and they set up an office close to that set up by Tennant, but it soon became clear that out of the five officers Kelly had picked, two had so little French they were useless and one was so frightened he refused to move from the harbour. Kelly sent them home on the ferry, Queen of the Channel, and recruited instead two army Intelligence officers and a French naval captain called D’Archy with a title and a grand manner to go with it. D’Archy was only part of his name and the rest went on for so long, ‘Archie Bumf’ was the nearest they could get to it and that was how he was known.

Enlisting the assistance of a few sailors from bombed ships, Kelly posted his men at strategic points leading to the beaches and left Boyle to look after them while he set off with Rumbelo and Le Mesurier to find out what conditions were like. The town had already descended into chaos and telephones were not working. The streets were full of rubble and burning vehicles and dazed French soldiers, too far gone in shock to be able to help themselves, stood in groups, watching as the British poured in. Some of the British units had also disintegrated and thrown away their equipment and rifles, but there were still some with long histories, great traditions or simply good officers, who appeared complete with kit and arms, their heads up and marching in step. The chances of getting them to safety already seemed problematical and it was becoming increasingly obvious that an idea Tennant had had to embark them all from the beaches was the only way to do it.

It was too late to do much that night beyond seeing Abrial, the French Amiral Nord, so Kelly sent Boyle off to try to trace his in-laws.

‘Find ’em, Seamus,’ he said. ‘We’ll get ’em on a ship somehow.’

Admiral Abrial looked exhausted because he had been conducting his operations for a week before anybody had thought of evacuation, but, though the French Navy seemed to be functioning well, the French military staff seemed to have lost all control of the situation and were still calling for an all-out attack southwards to cut off the German spearheads, something which was quite clearly impossible.

‘They seem to know nothing of the decision to evacuate,’ one of the British liaison officers informed Kelly. ‘It doesn’t appear to have been passed down by the High Command.’

There was a great lack of co-ordination, and a chaos of rumour and uncertainty, but they managed to make a start by getting a few shocked poilus to join the queues on the beaches.

Boyle returned about midnight. He looked tired and strained, and was dirty from clambering across ruins all evening.

‘There was no one there,’ he said. ‘The house was full of British soldiers. They were sleeping in all the rooms – even in the garden – but they knew nothing, and there were no neighbours to ask because they’d disappeared too. Thank God, my wife’s in England. She’d had it in mind to bring the kids over for a summer holiday.’

It seemed important to contact Gort so, leaving Boyle in charge of the operations round the docks, the following morning Kelly acquired a small Austin staff car with a faltering engine and, taking Rumbelo, Le Mesurier and D’Archy, joined the endless queues heading for La Panne. He didn’t expect any problems because he knew Gort well and had worked closely with him in Shanghai in 1927.

The town, a favourite place for painters for years, had been a pretty place of parks and gardens, but now houses were burning and there were charred wrecks of vehicles about the streets. Air raid wardens were collecting bodies, and civilians stood at their doorways jeering at the soldiers as they tramped past the small hotels and boarding houses, their rooms still locked after the winter, their windows shuttered and barred. Thousands of men waited on the sand, a few digging shelters in the dunes, more standing bootless in the shallows to cool their aching feet. A few were trying to construct rafts from planks and barrels, absorbed in their task and indifferent to the danger.

British Army Headquarters had been set up in a château surrounded by pink and white apple blossom and the green of young corn just outside the town. There were soldiers everywhere and lorries and pennanted staff cars were parked down the gravelled drive and round the ornamental pond that fronted the building. A French horse artillery regiment clattered past as they arrived, the drivers shouting and lashing at the horses, the gunners clinging grimly to the limbers, ammunition trailers, mess carts and wagons. The whole area seemed to be seething with movement, and there was a constant flow of figures towards the sea. Grey-faced with tiredness, they tramped silently past, dragging their lurching stragglers and wheeling their wounded in barrows, their sergeants chivvying them like sheepdogs. ‘Keep the steps, lads, it’ll help! Keep the step!’ Exhausted despatch riders, their strained faces blank as zombies, roared up and down the columns, and alongside the road French soldiers were digging trenches for their final stand and covering them with branches from a nearby orchard to hide them from the German dive bombers.

The château was filled with worried-looking officers. Of them all Gort seemed by far the calmest. He looked a lot older than when Kelly had met him in Shanghai, but he still had the same sturdy figure, his thick legs astride as if rooted to the ground. There had been a tendency among the intellectuals of the army to regard his appointment as C-in-C with dismay because he fussed over detail and ran his headquarters in spartan style. ‘Oh, Gort, our help in ages past’ Kelly had heard several times, and it hadn’t been uttered without sarcasm.

As they shook hands, Kelly explained his mission and Gort gestured. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the French have distinguished themselves in the fighting, but hardly in other ways. They’ve ignored instructions to destroy their vehicles before entering the perimeter and they’re now disregarding orders for beach and road discipline.’ He frowned. ‘They always were arrogant enough to believe they knew best, of course, but until the 29th nobody seems to have received any orders about embarkation at all, and Abrial seems to be showing signs of obstructing the departure of all fighting troops. Understandable, I suppose, because he feels they belong in France.’

‘How many are we expecting to bring out?’

‘Thirty per cent of all troops engaged. At least, that was the first estimate but I’m inclined to be more optimistic now. I’ve given orders that all the best-trained men and officers are to go first. Originally I sent non-combatant troops but now I’m sending key men of all ranks and all units because we’ll need them to rebuild. Pownall’s gone, and Brooke will go before long. Alexander stays with the rearguard, because I’ve been informed that I’ve got to go, too. The PM says it’s in accordance with correct military procedure and that on political grounds it’d be silly to be captured.’ He frowned. ‘All the same, I can’t say I like it.’

He agreed to provide a document enabling Kelly to cut through orders to try to move the French. ‘So long as it hasn’t been agreed that they’re part of the rearguard,’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve assigned the Guards and our best troops to the job, and the French have agreed to do the same. There’ll obviously be little chance of getting them all out, but that’s something we have to face.’