WC02 - Never Surrender (35 page)

One last effort.

They would all go at once, descend en masse, take off the remaining men and be back home by morning before Jerry had even noticed. That's what they told themselves. Almost every man in Dover had made plans to spend the next day drinking himself to oblivion. Meanwhile, they waited.

But for Ramsay there was no rest. If daylight meant death for some, it might provide a lifeline for the hundreds of wounded in Dunkirk. They had been left behind rather than take up space that could be filled by fighting men, but now their chance had come: to be lifted off on hospital ships in daylight so broad there could be no opportunity for confusion or mistake.

Ramsay was a cautious man; he took no chances. He arranged for a signal to be sent in clear, from Dunkirk, one that the Germans would be certain to overhear. "Wounded situation acute. Hospital ship should enter during the day. Geneva Convention will be honourably observed. It is felt that the enemy will refrain from attack."

The signal was a British guarantee that they would not use the hospital boats to take off anyone other than seriously wounded, and an expression of hope that the Germans would reciprocate. There was only one way to find out if they would.

Early that afternoon, a hospital ship set out from Dover. Painted brilliant white, with a huge and unmistakable red cross upon it. Visibility was excellent. Long before it arrived in Dunkirk, a dozen German planes appeared above it, bombing and machine-gunning the unarmed ship until it was forced back to port.

Yet there remained the possibility that the attack had been a mistake, that the Germans might reassess, might reconsider. The fate of the desperately wounded depended on it. So Ramsay sent another hospital ship, the Paris. He watched from his balcony, sipping tea, as she was also attacked. Out of control, she fired distress rockets, which attracted the attentions of still more Luftwaffe planes. Nurses and medical orderlies were machine-gunned even as they clambered into lifeboats. Then the Paris keeled over and joined the other wrecks Ramsay had left at the bottom of the Channel. The wounded wouldn't make it, and he knew there would be many more of them before the night was over.

He wasn't an emotionally extravagant man, driven to wild gestures. He withdrew inside his warren to the desk from which he would command the rest of the operation. He lit a candle for the men who had yet to die for Dynamo and placed it in his saucer. It was a twelve-hour candle. It would be more than enough.

They were the most terrible hours that anyone had spent on the beaches. They were hours in which there was no navy, no help, and when hope itself seemed to have died. The sands and sea were strewn with wreckage, and those that were left behind began to feel they were of no more significance than the debris in the surf. The previous day there had been the fleet, now there was nothing but rumour, and ill feeling.

Henry Chichester had only narrowly survived his ordeal and he was still confused as he blundered along the beach, unable either to offer help or to accept it from those who offered it to him. He stumbled upon French troops getting drunk and cursing every Englishman, while English troops returned the spite in full measure, and raced motorcycles along the beach or waged large sums of money on which of the beachfront properties would next be hit by a German shell. Some hid their faces in fear, while others came to Chichester as a man in a clerical collar and asked for courage. But to all this, he was oblivious, shaking his head in confusion, which they took to be rejection. In their anger they sneered, mocked him, called him a coward.

It was Sunday. A day when men prayed for their souls. They begged him to help them but he could do nothing and hid away in the dunes, so they fell back on their own resources. They built an altar on the beach from discarded ammunition boxes and put a rough wooden cross upon it. Two small candles were placed in jam jars on either side. A captain began to lead them in prayers; he did his best but it was a desultory affair his grasp was uncertain and his lack of inspiration echoed through the ranks in front of him. Yet they were determined. They persevered, right up to the time that a flight of Me-109s swept along the beach and forced them to run for cover.

When the planes had gone, the men began to drift back to their makeshift altar. They had nowhere else to go, and their need was greater than their fear.

They tried a hymn, but the words foundered after the first verse and faded on the afternoon breeze. And then the Messerschmitts returned.

The men scattered like withered leaves in winter.

The attack also blew away the bewilderment and shock that had cluttered up Henry Chichester's mind. He woke from his confusion to find himself looking out at men in despair. They were in pain, they needed his help, and he knew about pain. He couldn't turn his back on them. The German pilots were turning for a third run, and as they approached once again he stepped out into their path and doggedly began to rebuild the altar, no hurry, like a cricket player waiting for the wicket to dry. Bullets spattered past him on either side, but he didn't flinch. He piled the ammunition boxes back on top of each other and tenderly replaced the cross. Another man crept forward and retrieved the candles from the sand.

As the growl of engines died into the distance, the Reverend Chichester found his voice carrying far across the beach.

"Lord, make us warriors for Thy peace. Give us courage in the face of danger and compassion in victory, so that we may build a better world."

Victory? It was about as likely as virgin birth but it was a welcome thought. A few hesitant souls began to return.

"Sin is around us and with us, but all shall be well," he declared. "And all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well." Others began to join in.

"Our Father, which art in heaven .. ."

Henry Chichester had no Bible, no book of prayer to guide him, nothing but a crude altar and his he might have said his faith, but that he no longer had. He had nothing but himself.

"Give us this day our daily bread, O Lord. For we know that the bread we shall taste tomorrow, whether it be back home with our loved ones, or with you, shall be the sweetest of our lives."

The words began to stir those around him. Curiosity caught them who was this man who had his own version of the Lord's Prayer?

"Give us the strength to deal with our sins, as we ask for the strength to deal with the sins of others."

"Amen," one of his new congregation muttered loudly, one eye on the sky, grateful that he wasn't being asked to struggle with the concept of forgiving other people's trespasses while he was still chewing on the exhaust fumes of a Messerschmitt.

"And lead us not into a time of trial for we are not as strong as you but deliver us from the grip of evil and those who carry evil in their souls."

The prayer had begun to carry new meaning for Henry Chichester. It wasn't what he'd been taught, but for the first time he was expressing it rather than repeating it, digging deep for something inside rather than reading off a page. If the words were of any importance, they had to be relevant here, in the midst of carnage, and not just during the rituals of his safe, comfortable pulpit.

"For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen."

A chorus of amens rose from those around him. They looked towards him, expecting more.

"Can we take Communion?" one of them asked.

"But how can we? I don't have .. ." He stopped himself and the flow of excuses he was about to pour upon their hopes. "Wine, does anyone have some wine?"

"Cognac, father? Will that do?" A soldier thrust his water bottle forward.

"I think the Lord might understand rather better than your sergeant major."

"But, vicar, my sergeant major thinks he is the Lord."

"The Lord is in us all, even a sergeant major. Even in you, Private. So what about bread, then? Biscuits? I'd settle for a couple of bars of chocolate, even. Yes, better still, chocolate. And while we let it melt, let its sweetness remind us of why we're here. For God, and for our families back home."

It wasn't intended, and it wasn't taken, as lightheartedness They understood what he was up to, trying to banish their dread, to open up the mysteries of the ceremony so that they could come to it with open hearts and not simply in fear. They didn't need the ritual, and suddenly Henry Chichester realized he didn't need it, either. As he blessed the cognac and a few bars of chocolate, more men began to gather round and kneel in the sand, strangers who didn't know him but knew only his words. As they showed their belief in him, Henry Chichester began to discover a new faith in himself.

None of them moved away, even after he had finished with Communion. There had to be some final word before they parted. He suggested a hymn. So they sang "Jerusalem', drenched with the imagery of England. Those who didn't know the words sang the tune. Deep, proud male voices raised in celebration of their homeland across the sea.

No one expected them to be able to carry the hymn for the second verse, but as the melody faded into the sound of the rolling surf, another voice a robust, distinctive tenor -picked it up.

"Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!"

For a moment, Chichester was perplexed. He knew that voice, though it had grown stronger and more precise since the last time he had heard it.

"I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand .. ."

The Reverend Chichester's own fine baritone wrapped itself around the other and the two voices reached out across the sand. It would be remembered by many men who were present as the moment when, for just a few beats, the madness stood aside and they thought of something other than defeat.

Till we have built Jerusalem," they sang, In England's green and pleasant land."

As they finished, Claude turned to Don from the top of their nearby dune. "So, that is your father. You know, it would be helpful if he walked on water, too."

The room was dark. He was at the open window, looking out across Horse Guards with only the glowing tip of his cigar to disturb the blackout.

"The last night, Jock. Ramsay says the sailors can't take any more. Beyond all human endurance."

They've been working without rest for days. I don't know how they've handled it."

"With belief that what they are doing is right. There is no other way. Otherwise war is nothing but barbarism."

"The Germans raided Paris today for the first time."

"And the panzers will not be far behind. You know, I got down on my knees to pray that their eyes would turn away from Dunkirk."

"I've never imagined you as a pillar of the church."

"No, but after this I might agree to become a flying buttress."

He brooded for a while, listening to the sounds of a city at sleep.

"What happened," he asked, 'in Paris?"

"The French were taken by surprise. Their pilots were all at lunch. Only four machines even got off the ground. Four out of forty."

"We can no longer rely on the French. Soon we shall be on our own."

"Thank heavens we've got so many of our soldiers back. And thank God for our poor sailors."

"Tonight, we are all sailors."

Love like rotting fruit. Sweetness that springs from a stone. Don knew his father was a different man. At first he hadn't wanted to believe it, to recognize the character who had so captured the imaginations of the men on the beach and shaken the cobwebs from their souls, but in the end he'd been no more able to deny it than had his father. Henry Chichester was reborn in that hour upon the sands, and the scars of his previous life fell from him like rags.

And Henry knew his son had changed, too. He could see it in the eyes eyes that were so much like Jennie's.

For the first time that either of them could remember, Don and his father were able to look back on their lives without feeling like Orpheus and ruining everything. Through the rest of the evening and into the night, they talked mostly about Jennie. Don hadn't realized, he'd lost track of days and dates, but it was his birthday. They had twenty years to make up, and Henry began at the very beginning, with stories of Jennie. How they had first met, when Jennie was a nurse who had healed so many of his wounds after he'd come back from France. Why he had been so attracted to her: the passion and stubborn intensity that she had passed on to Don, and the freckled nose. How they had both wanted to build something new and fresh in a world devastated by war, and how deeply he had come to love her in the two short years they had together.

Jennie had kept them apart all these years; now, as the colours of the evening slipped beneath the horizon, her memory brought the two people she had both lived and died for back together.

The armada returned that night. In spite of everything, the boats came back. Destroyers, minesweepers, drifters, skoots and many more, searching for more survivors. All four of them made it onto a tugboat: Henry, Don, Claude and Winston. It seemed almost insultingly simple after the struggles of the previous days; there were many fewer to take off now, so many others had already gone. They clambered out along one of the provost jetties built from trucks and gratings and onto a tug that already held a hundred others.

It was not to be a night of great sacrifice in numbers of ships, not in comparison with earlier times. The Germans still fired their guns and sent over their planes, but it was a quarter-moon and the enemy's instinct to kill lost its way in the darkness. There were still mines, of course, and fear of torpedoes, but, for most, the night went well.

They left behind them a harbour filled with dead ships and dead men. As Henry and Don looked back they could see the cruelly twisted ruins of Dunkirk standing out against the flames that were destroying it, while the oil-covered water glittered like tinsel.

Ahead of them lay England, although they could see none of it no lights, no features, nothing but black night through which they would have to find their way home, and that was no easy task, for the escape routes through the shallows off Dunkirk and the minefields that surrounded them were narrow and busy with a confusion of other ships.