Silence Over Dunkerque (7 page)

A sailor pushed and shoved his way through the massed troops on deck. He came toward them with a determined air.

“Can’t keep that dog aboard, mate. No dogs allowed; Captain’s orders.”

Before the Sergeant could reply, a shriek came that startled everyone. It was the ship’s air-raid alarm. He glanced up but saw no planes above. However, the sailor immediately turned and wormed his way through the crowd to his gun station aft. The noise grew louder, more penetrating. Still no planes were visible.

They were leaving the harbor by this time and getting outside, when he saw a squadron high in the heavens. A bomb fell a short distance away. A burst of water rose, the vessel rocked violently, many men were tossed to the deck. All about came the harsh sounds of the antiaircraft batteries forward and aft, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, last of all the noise of small naval pom-poms from a French frigate coming in to take their place at the mole.

The dog half rose and leaned heavily against him. He could feel her trembling. Or was it he himself? To be bombed now, to be sunk at this moment just when rescue seemed certain! Overhead a Stuka peeled off from the squadron and dived. He could plainly see the black cross on its wings. It roared down, shrieking hideously, and seemed to be headed straight for their destroyer.

He knew it only seemed that way, because the Channel was full of shipping, a target impossible to miss. The speed of the ship increased, soon she was offshore, weaving back and forth in evasive action. For a moment he almost welcomed the air raid. Nobody would have time to bother about the dog now.

“O
LD
B
ILL’S TAKING
Shropshire Lass
over.”

“Imagine that! At his age, too!” said the voice of a woman.

The twins, with hundreds of other Dover townsfolk, were standing beside the barricades on the Admiralty Pier searching for their father. Off and on the Williams family had been standing there three days, watching the exhausted troops tumble off the battered boats and onto the waiting trains drawn up in the station. At those two sentences behind them in the crowd, they looked at each other.

If Mr. Bennet was taking
Shropshire Lass
across to Dunkerque, they were going too.

Mr. Bennet, a neighbor on the Folkestone Road, was the former Chief Engineer of a P & O liner that journeyed from Southampton to the Far East. A bachelor, he had retired to his old mother’s house in Dover, in order to be with her. Actually he wanted to be near the sea. He liked to say that since leaving the company, he spent more time on the water than when he made a living there.

Mr. Bennet’s life on retirement was centered about one thing—
Shropshire Lass.
She was a beautiful boat, made according to his specifications the previous year by Leyton in Portsmouth. Built of teak on oak, she had a 30 h.p. Thorny-croft engine that could make eight or nine knots, slept four people, and had a galley where he liked to cook the dishes of the East to which he was accustomed. The year before war broke out, when the twins were fourteen, he had taken them on a shakedown cruise along the south coast, and by the end of that summer they felt they knew the vessel as well as Mr. Bennet did.

So three hours later, hidden behind a bulkhead forward, the twins heard shouts outside, listened to the engine turn over, and felt the boat move slowly from the harbor, gathering headway. They waited half an hour until they could feel the choppy waters of the Channel going thump-thump on the boat’s bottom, and finally, stiff and cramped, climbed out of the cabin and up to the deck.

It was brisk and windy, but as usual Mr. Bennet at the wheel was in his shirt sleeves and suspenders. As usual he had his faded P & O officer’s cap on one side of his forehead. A life preserver was slung negligently over one shoulder. His back was to the twins, for he was talking with the commander of a passing motor torpedo boat.

“Hope you can rely on that engine,” the naval officer shouted through a megaphone. “If it packs in and you lose contact with the convoy, heaven help you. We can’t.”

Mr. Bennet waved confidently and turned back to the wheel. His mouth opened when he saw the twins standing there, rather grimy and dirty. For a minute he said nothing.

Richard and Ronald stood blinking in the sunshine, feet apart, trying to shift with the roll of the boat, slightly dazed by the glare from the water after the semidarkness below.

“Well! Well, I’m damned. And who gave you lads permission to ship with me this time, eh?”

The twins, watching the shore line recede, were still dazzled by the sunlight, by the vast flotilla of boats, large and small, all around, everyone headed east. They observed the dinghy astern, wondering whether he might order them to row ashore.

“And who gave you permission to come along?” His annoyance increased as he talked, and they knew he was getting angry. The Chief Engineer of the P & O
Rawalpindi
was used to handling lascar seamen and the tough gang in the engine room; he could lose his temper greatly to his advantage, as they were aware. When he needed something fixed on his boat, it was usually done, and promptly.

“Who said you might stow away, eh?” he continued. “That’s what I’d like to know. Tell me, how shall I ever explain to your mother if anything happens to you? This isn’t a picnic, lads, it’s a war.”

“We left a note for Mother; we told her we were going across with you in
Shropshire Lass.”

“And very thoughtful of you, I must say.” The old engineer shook his head. “I shall have to put you off somehow; she won’t have a moment’s peace until you return. That’s if you do! This is war, boys, not a pleasure cruise. It’s no place for you whatever. And you came aboard without my permission.”

It was Ronny who spoke. “Yes sir, yes, Mr. Bennet, we did. Y’see, sir, Father’s over there at Dunkerque with his regiment, and we wanted maybe to help him get away. So we just came along.”

The old Chief Engineer looked at them quickly. For a second he thought of his own father, and saw them differently. Wouldn’t he have done the same thing under the circumstances? This man had the faculty, rare among adults, of recalling how he felt at fifteen. For he was just fifteen when he shipped as a cabin boy out of Southampton on the old
Cathay
of the P & O. His father was then on the dole and out of work. Yes, Mr. Bennet remembered those days plainly enough; they had made a mark on his character. He remembered what it was like to be hungry, what it meant to the family to have one less boy at home to feed.

Suppose his own father had been trapped in that smoke on the shores of France, with Panzers closing in from all sides to take him prisoner! During a matter of seconds Mr. Bennet was a boy of fifteen, saying good-by to his father, walking down to the docks with a lump in his throat, and climbing the gangplank of the ancient P & O liner in Southampton Harbor.

He turned his back. “Eh then, since you’re here, you’d best get to work. You’ll find life belts under the bunks below. Ronny, you go down and tear up those old sheets and towels into strips for bandages. Ricky, make yourself useful opening up those tins of biscuits, get out the dried figs, and break up the chocolate bars. We were in such a hurry leaving, everything is in a mess, so take those sacks off the bunks; make ’em up clean. We’ll need ’em for wounded most likely. Look sharp now. This isn’t a pleasure cruise.”

In high good spirits the boys went to work, a load lifted from their hearts. Work was what they had come for. The sun shone, the June morning was bright and crisp, far off to the right was the smoke of the burning city. All around were other vessels, from old friends they knew, like the
Maid of Orleans,
a Channel steamer on the Dover-Calais run, to destroyers, torpedo boats, and Thames river launches and scows, towed by tugs. The convoy was making only four or five knots. Around them hovered the destroyers and several armed speedboats, rushing here and there like sheep dogs, keeping them in line.

When everything had been made shipshape, they came on deck and took the wheel while the Chief went below to brew hot coffee, which, with pieces of chocolate, made their noon meal. The twins were exhilarated. The course had changed slightly to the northeast, the sun shone brilliantly, the vessels around them danced in the breeze. The boys were happy to be aboard. They looked around, proud of the little vessel, familiar with it, too. On a metal plate over the entrance to the cabin were inscribed words they had often read and knew by heart. It was part of the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer, which Mr. Bennet had copied in French and English.

“O God, be good to me. Thy sea is so wide and my ship is so small.”

Shropshire Lass
was small compared to most of the flotilla. There were no water tanks, so a galvanized tankful had been rolled on before leaving, and edged into the cabin amidships, cutting down space considerably.

The boys observed that some of the boats around had a wide yellow stripe painted about their middle. “What’s that yellow stripe on some of the boats, Mr. Bennet?”

The Chief sipped his coffee. Without looking up he said, “Them as has the yellow stripe has been demagnetized, against magnetic mines, y’understand?”

The twins glanced over the fleet hastily. Fully half the convoy pitching and tossing in that swell had no yellow stripe, including
Shropshire Lass.
The danger of mines was something about which they had never thought; suddenly they became sober.

Overhead a squadron of Spits, returning from Dunkerque, droned high in the heavens. They passed directly overhead; one, the twins noticed, had an engine missing. Before long it fell back, lost distance, began to smoke. It slowly came down near the fleet, lower and lower, until it struck the sea with an explosion a few miles distant.

Soon the parachute of the pilot could be seen. The other planes of the squadron had vanished, but he was descending in safety near the flotilla. Suddenly from the haze above appeared a Dornier with an iron cross visible on its wings. The antiaircraft guns of the protecting destroyers on each side of the fleet opened up, but they had to be careful not to hit the pilot parachuting to sea. The Nazi dived, the parachute crumpled, a black figure dropped like a stone into the water. The German plane soared back into the heavens and was lost to sight.

Now the twins understood. This wasn’t a picnic; it was war.

R
ICKY AND
R
ONNY
stood on the afterdeck of
Shropshire Lass,
frightened yet fascinated. The smoke from the burning city, thick, black, reaching to the heavens, was the same dark cloud their mother was anxiously watching that moment from the Shakespeare Cliff in Dover. In front of the twins the packed masses of khaki along the beach began to break and run in every direction as a fighter sweep of Nazi planes descended, so low the faces of the pilots peering over the sides were visible.

The lead plane dropped a stick of bombs that hit a huge glass-enclosed structure on the promenade, evidently a casino. It blew up with a roar. Bricks, pieces of glass, and fragments of stone and wood rose into the sky. Another bomb fell harmless in wet sand, and another in the sea, closer to
Shropshire Lass.

This was war. They began to understand. Never had the twins been so terrified. Fear conquered them, paralyzed them completely. They wanted to run, to jump into the water, to hide in the crowded cabin below, yet they were unable to move. Glued to the deck, they watched the stick of bombs skip across the water at a speed they had never imagined.

Nor was there time to take cover, if indeed there had been any cover available. There was not even time to hit the deck. A bomb struck the water thirty feet away, sending up a huge burst and rocking
Shropshire Lass
violently. Another, twenty feet beyond them, tossed the boat again. Her frame shuddered, groaned, protested, slapped the sea, pitched everyone around.

The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds. It was in those few seconds they learned the meaning of war. They had not known until then, nor in fact had the Chief.

“Now then, lads....” His voice trembled. It helped to observe how frightened he was also. “Now then, let’s have those last men aboard and get out of here.”

A French fishing dory, with the name
Corsaire II,
was tied alongside, transporting wounded from the shore. She bumped and banged her side as the explosions tossed the two boats angrily. The bunks on
Shropshire Lass
were full below, the floor of the cabin, not taken up by the water tank, covered with helpless soldiers. Others were in the cockpit, many with dirty homemade bandages about their legs and arms. Nobody said a word, yet the twins knew most of them were in pain.

Soon
Shropshire Lass,
which had twelve life preservers and was capable of packing in ten or a dozen persons, had twenty on board. More were still coming over the side. Finally
Corsaire II
cast off. The brave Frenchmen rowing her put out their oars and headed back to shore.

Up came the anchor, the engines started, while the twins handed out water, biscuits, dried figs, and chocolate to the men. For most of them it was their first drink and food in days; they were all quietly grateful.

But the boat was dangerously low in the water. So they crept cautiously through the wrecks on both sides, then outside past the big French destroyer, which was cut in two, both parts beached parallel to the shore. They overtook another French warship, limping slowly along under its own power. Now
Shrosphire Lass
was leaving the burning city behind. Running along the Mardyck Bank, they turned west, following the coast at a distance, for the Chief had been ordered not to take the direct route across, which would lead them into the middle of a British mine field. He stood beside the wheel, stopping now and then to peer over the side, watching the water ahead closely. Many half-submerged wrecks showed how dangerous the region was.

Moving with care, he placed the twins well up forward, one on each side, to warn him of floating mines ahead. A British destroyer, looking large, safe, heavily armed fore and aft, gradually overtook them, her signal lamps winking from the bridge. The Chief watched attentively with his glasses.