Ride Out The Storm (22 page)

A group of British cavalrymen appeared from a car park where they’d been dumping soft-skinned vehicles. They formed up in the road and began to march towards La Panne, swinging their arms, in perfect step, their heads up, their kit in excellent condition. They looked tired but they were well-disciplined, and a straggler, brushed aside as they tramped past, looked up. ‘The ‘Dirty Dozen,’ he jeered. ‘Cavalry: The Manure Collectors.’

A sergeant turned on him at once. ‘We’re the Supple Twelfth, my lad,’ he rapped. ‘Quicksilver, and don’t you forget it!’

Military police were examining documents but Scharroo’s newspaper pass got him through and he was able to vouch that Marie-Josephine had relations in La Panne.

‘She says they live in the Rue Isabey and she’s trying to reach them,’ he said.

‘She’ll be bloody lucky, mate,’ the military policeman muttered.

La Panne had been a favourite haunt of painters for years, a pretty place of parks and gardens, but it had been heavily raided. Houses were burning and there were charred wrecks of cars about the streets, scorching the trees and bushes. A few civilians were in their doorways, jeering at the soldiers, but there were not many and it seemed to Scharroo that he and the girl stood out like sore thumbs.

Dishevelled, exhausted men were resting on the sidewalks among the abandoned vehicles, and they eyed Marie-Josephine curiously, a few even managing a whistle. The sky was full of smoke and the sound of aeroplanes, but they all seemed to be over Dunkirk, and La Panne for the moment was quiet.

Using his press pass, Scharroo got himself inside one of the beach headquarters where a colonel in a gaily coloured forage cap was on the telephone to Dover on a line which was still amazingly uncut.

‘Where are our ships?’ he was demanding angrily.

‘You’ve got them.’ Scharroo could hear the answer quite plainly.

‘Have we?’ The colonel snorted. ‘You’d better come and look for yourself.
I
haven’t seen ’em.’

The shelling began to increase and they had to run for shelter. Then Marie-Josephine remembered that the Rue Isabey was on the western outskirts of the town and, rather than go back through the crowded streets, they took a road running behind the sand dunes where there were small hotels and boarding houses, many of them still closed from the winter, their shutters fastened and barred. On the sand in front, thousands of men waited. A few of the more energetic were scratching holes where they could shelter. Thousands more stood in the water cooling their aching feet, their boots in their hands. Two men, preferring not to wait for the navy, had collected barrels and were lashing planks to them to make a raft, absorbed in their task and indifferent to the danger. Nearby an officer, quite drunk, sat in a foxhole, holding an empty wine bottle. Down the beach another, dressed only in shirt and pants, was trying to drag a rubber dinghy ashore for a wounded sergeant whom four of his men were carrying in a blanket.

Indifferent to the noise, soldiers were wrapped in overcoats and even looted eiderdowns, snatching the first real sleep they’d had for three weeks, but queues had also formed near the water’s edge in long snake-like columns, and in the shallows tows of whalers and lifeboats were gathering. In front of them, by a Bofors gun, a subaltern was scanning the sky with a pair of glasses and the colonel in the gaily coloured fore-and-aft cap was now arguing with a Territorial officer who was climbing out of a car that he’d driven on to the sand.

‘Who’s the beachmaster here?’ he was demanding.

‘You’re lucky,’ the colonel said. ‘I am.’

The Territorial jerked a hand at the car. There were tennis rackets, golf clubs and two trunks in the back seat. ‘How do I get that aboard?’ he asked.

The colonel gave a bark of laughter. ‘You don’t. Except over my dead body.’

Where the man in the gay cap worked, the beach was impeccably controlled, and there was even a military policeman directing traffic, but in other parts the crowd seemed to mill about as it pleased.

A stray shell whined over and dropped fifty yards away. The lines dropped flat but the colonel remained upright and didn’t even stop directing the columns of men. Then the air seemed to fill with sound again and the lines round the beachmaster began to melt away. He glanced up at the sky and began to walk quickly towards the dunes, not attempting to duck or hurry. Men ran past him, but others simply dropped to the sand and lay on their backs, popping away with their rifles, while others plunged neck-deep in the sea for shelter and stood with only their heads and their helmets above the surface, looking murderously round for something to shoot at.

The howl of engines increased as Scharroo flung Marie-Josephine down and fell on top of her. A bomb landed nearby and he caught the sulphurous smell of the explosive and heard the clatter of tiles landing on the promenade. The air was full of sand and grit and, as he watched, a big ship – the biggest he’d seen so far – was hit amidships and an enormous cloud of smoke burst upwards.

Then three black-painted aeroplanes began to scream along the beach, their guns going, the bullets throwing up the sand in a rippling wave. Their bombs exploded with shattering force but there were few casualties and Scharroo realised that the sand was cushioning the effects of the explosions. Only here and there groups of men ran towards a silent figure caught by the machine guns.

As the din stopped, he became aware of Marie-Josephine moving beneath him. She was face-down, her hair among the marram grass, her head beneath his shoulder, and as she turned over he was aware of the feel of her all the way down his body. Her foot was hard against his ankle, one shin against the muscle of his calf, one knee like a small wedge in the side of his leg. The inside of her thigh was against his and she was staring up at him with unblinking black eyes.

He pulled himself to his feet quickly. ‘I guess we should go look for your relations,’ he said.

They moved back from the beach into the streets. Food was in everybody’s mind and men were wandering among the abandoned vehicles and into gardens and ruined houses in search of something to eat or somewhere to sleep.

They found the Rue Isabey at last and the house they were seeking, a small neat place with a garden and trees. It seemed to be full of men in khaki. Scharroo called to a soldier sitting on the lawn shaving in the sunshine, apparently impervious to the destruction about him. ‘Where are the owners?’ he asked.

‘Owners?’ The soldier’s head turned. ‘I’ve not seen any owners.’

The bombing Scharroo and Marie-Josephine had watched was the first German reaction to the clearing of the sky and the change of wind.

Field telephones shrilled on the aerodromes the Luftwaffe occupied. Messerschmitt 109s went up to provide top cover against the RAF’s spoiling attacks while 110s and Junkers 87s and 88s were bombed up frantically in the afternoon sunshine and went roaring across the fields, their propeller washes flattening the grass, their crews still adjusting their harness as they lifted into the air.

But not Stoos.

He had reached a point of apoplexy by this time. ‘You said this afternoon,’ he was screaming at Oberfeldwebel Hamcke.

‘Herr Leutnant–’ Hamcke was nearly out of his mind with weariness ‘–it’s not possible!’

‘It
must
be possible! It
must
be done!’

‘Sir, if I had another dozen men I couldn’t do it before tomorrow now. Hauptmann Dodtzenrodt came back with his petrol tanks punctured and took the men off the job.
He
wants to be in the air, too, Herr Leutnant!’

Stoos saw the possibility of the decoration he’d set his heart on fading rapidly. The war couldn’t last much longer. The French were on their knees and the British were being cut to shreds. ‘I’ll see the captain,’ he snarled and, spinning on his heel, stalked off towards the tent that did duty as squadron office.

Hamcke stared after him. ‘That man’s mad,’ he said. ‘Stark staring mad! He seems to think they can’t win the war without him.’

It was beginning to seem at Dover that they might, however, and the Admiralty had decided that the senior naval officer at Dunkirk was in need of someone offshore to help him.

‘The wind’s changed, sir,’ the staff officer, operations, reported. ‘The smoke’s blowing the other way and the Germans are giving it all they’ve got.
Clan MacAlister
’s
been hit and she’s on fire. They think they’ll have to abandon.’

The admiral chewed at his spectacles, then he moved to the fragile iron balcony that jutted from the old casemate in the cliff. The lowering sun was filling the day with golden light, and below him he could see the ships arriving and departing, and the movement of vehicles towards the harbour. It was possible to hear the crash of bombs from across the Channel coming as dull thuds that pressed on the ear.

‘They’ve stepped up the air attacks,’ he said.

‘That’s what the signals say, sir.’

It required no signals for Tremenheere to know that the air attacks had been stepped up. There had been one in operation when they’d arrived and from then on they’d seemed to come every fifteen minutes with ten-minute intervals between them.

‘Like bloody clockwork,’ Clark observed wonderingly as they headed towards the harbour yet again.

‘If the bastards hit us, we’ll go up like a bomb,’ Smith, the young stoker said nervously. ‘All them cans of petrol we’ve got on board.’

Didcot glanced at Clark. ‘Think they’d give us survivors’ leave, Nobby?’ he asked.

Clark’s head turned. ‘What for?’

‘Well, if we came through that lot, we’d have bloody well survived, wouldn’t we?’

Clark shrugged. ‘Me,’ he said. ‘I’m still worrying about me leave from
Bittern.
’

They could see the outline of the town, a desolate huddle of ruined buildings and the stark bones of houses. By the harbour entrance, there were the remains of ships, half-submerged, some of them still burning, but despite the destruction destroyers were still loading against the mole along which, in incredible order, long queues of men plodded, shuffling forward towards safety.

Outside the entrance, minesweepers were at work and all around them on the oily water, small boats moved among the looming bulks of bigger ships. Out at sea, a big vessel was burning, the flames clawing away at her insides and showing through her ports and the holes in her sloping decks. She’d settled low in the water since they’d seen her hit, the sea around her a litter of wreckage, smashed lifeboats, lifebelts, ropes, planks and boxes.

As they went in to the pier they could see the masses of men still on the beaches, stretching to the water’s edge, tens of thousands of them, waiting in huddled groups or organised queues that ended in lines of bobbing heads among the surf.

The pier cleared for a moment and Clark took
Athelstan
in quickly. As soon as she bumped alongside, men began to scramble aboard squatting down where they could.

‘Didn’t you know there was a war on?’ one of them asked. ‘Where you been?’

‘This ain’t the first evacuation I’ve been in, mate,’ Clark retorted. ‘What have you lot been doin’ to allow a thing like this to happen?’

Some of the soldiers seemed to think the war was over and one or two had clearly given up trying. The rest cheerfully let off their rifles at every plane that came over. The guns started to bang again but Clark seemed impervious to danger.

‘How are we getting on?’ he demanded.

‘Seventy-five below. Sixty-seven on deck.’

Clark turned. ‘Jesus,
how many
?’
He swung round and pushed the soldiers off the ladder. ‘Tell Smudger to handle them gears gently, Alban. She’ll be a bit tender.’

They were just going astern beyond the end of the mole when both engines inexplicably died and Clark swung round, his face alarmed, as Tremenheere dived for the engine room hatch. Smith, the young stoker, was pressing the self-starters in a panic, his eyes bulging with anxiety. Tremenheere thrust him aside and moved between the engines, checking oil pressures and fuel.

As they drifted, a midshipman in charge of another boat, who looked about fifteen, shrieked at them in a high boyish voice and hurled a rope. More by luck than judgement it fell across the deck and Clark made it fast, and a few moments later they were bumping alongside a drifter. As the deck emptied, Clark pushed his head into the cabin. ‘All right, you lot. Your turn now.’

A petty officer who was counting the soldiers stared. ‘Christ, where did you shove ’em all?’
he demanded.

As the last man departed and they began to throw their kit after them, Didcot glanced at the sky.

‘Wind’s changed,’ he observed. ‘Dive bombers’ll be back.’

The black pall was drifting inshore now, exposing two big paddle-steamers on one side of the mole and two destroyers, two trawlers and a personnel ship on the other. Beyond them there were two more destroyers flying the French tricolour.

‘Here they come!’ Didcot shouted, and aeroplanes appeared from nowhere, hundreds of them, it seemed, stepped up in flights one above another.
Athelstan
’s
engines were still refusing to start, and Tremenheere had just come on deck with the news when a bomb hit the nearest paddle-steamer, and a second hit the mole to send huge lumps of concrete whirring into the water. The paddle-steamer was already listing towards the jetty and men were scrambling over her rails, stretcher cases being hurried towards the other ships without even stopping. Two trawlers were in a sinking condition and one of the French destroyers was on fire, burning so fiercely they could feel the heat across the water. She cleared the harbour under tow, only to sink just beyond the entrance. The second paddle-steamer was just slipping her lines when she too was hit, and sickened by the destruction, Tremenheere saw men stepping into the water to swim ashore. Then, as the drifter on which they’d loaded their passengers moved forward to pick up survivors, another bomb exploded under her stern and she also turned turtle and sank.