As they returned to Dunkirk, military police were forcing everything on wheels into enormous car parks in fields outside the town, and all along the road an orgy of destruction was taking place under a vivid blue sky.
Engineers were handing out blocks of gun cotton and detonators for artillery officers to place in the breeches of their guns to destroy them, and in a beet field, where thousands of new vehicles were parked – Scammells, diggers, buses, engineering plants, limbers and lorries – men were smashing their petrol tanks and cylinders with sledge-hammers in a steady crunching sound.
As the jam of vehicles ahead brought the Austin to a stop, a provost lieutenant stepped in front of their bonnet, waving a revolver. ‘In here,’ he said.
‘I’m going into Dunkirk,’ Kelly explained.
The officer lifted the revolver. ‘In here,’ he repeated.
Kelly climbed out of the car, followed by Rumbelo and the other two, expecting that the four stripes on his sleeve would overawe the officer, but the lieutenant was adamant.
‘In here,’ he said once more.
Without arguing, Kelly pulled out his own revolver and pointed it at the officer’s stomach. Rumbelo did the same.
‘I have the authority of the admiral in charge of the evacuation and of Lord Gort,’ he said. ‘And I’ll happily shoot you if you try to stop me doing my job. And if you should just manage to shoot me first, my petty officer will do it for me. Now – do we go into Dunkirk?’
The officer blinked, startled, then he scowled, pushed away his weapon and waved them on.
The destruction stretched all the way back to Dunkirk, every dyke jammed with abandoned vehicles that stuck out of the water among the floating straw and the bodies of drowned animals, every road littered with cast-off equipment, caps and helmets. Dunkirk seemed to have grown more battered even while they’d been away and tall skeletons of buildings were silhouetted against a sword-cut of opal sky. Among them fierce fires raged.
As they drew to a stop, they could hear the hammering of guns from near the harbour, then another sound intruded, rolling in iron waves round the sky. As it increased, blending with it, they heard a growing howl.
‘Run!’ Kelly yelled and they all dived from the car for an open doorway. As they flung themselves down, the scream of the bombs grew to a shriek and the crash as they exploded seemed to lift the ground and hit them in the face. The air was filled with dust and acrid smoke and they could hear metal clanging to the cobbles. His face tight, the skin pulled taut, Kelly found his jaws were aching with the clenching of his teeth.
Unharmed but shaken, they scrambled to their feet to find the old Austin lying on its side against a wall half-demolished and with its hood licked by small tongues of flame. The din was tremendous and the water of the harbour and canals was dotted with splashes as shell splinters dropped from the sky. There were a few good omens, however. The French had started to join in the evacuation, though the town major’s office was bedlam, with what appeared to be dozens of officers all shouting the claims of their own units.
‘I must have the numbers,’ an officer at the desk was yelling. ‘I’ve got to know how many men there are!’
‘For Christ’s sake–’ the officer who yelled back at him was filthy-dirty, grey-faced and red-eyed with fatigue – ‘I don’t know the bloody numbers myself!’
As the dive-bombers returned, the arguing stopped while everyone tried to assess where the bombs would fall and then, according to what they’d decided, took cover or remained where they were, flinching at the crashes. The town major, an exhausted-looking colonel, didn’t even look round as the bombs exploded, and as Kelly explained what he was up to, he managed a thin smile.
‘Well, you blue jobs have got the destroyers coming across now like Number Eleven buses,’ he said. ‘And some chap’s found a pier we can use and we’re sending everybody along there.’
By now, the dock area was full of wreckage – a burning train, cranes knocked out of true by bombs, ambulances punctured like colanders with bullets and shell fragments, splintered carts with dead horses in the shafts, and torrents of scattered brickwork where buildings had fallen. The situation had clarified a little, however, because Tennant had got a wooden mole working and a control system had been set up with berthing parties, a pier master and sailors in the town to act as guides. Redirected from the beach, men began to arrive in large numbers and there were ships alongside the pier, with hundreds more men queuing to go on board them. On the beaches, there were more queues on the hard wet sand among the litter of equipment and abandoned greatcoats. There was no sign of the disorganisation they’d seen among the French, however, and everybody was patient. Nobody seemed to be terribly worried even and, though their attitude was one of disgust that they’d been beaten, they all seemed certain it wasn’t their fault and that, given another chance, they’d put it right.
Smoke from the burning town filled the air with an appalling stench of dead and decomposing farm animals. The beach was dotted with wrecked vehicles but among them, amazingly, soldiers were playing football as they waited for ships to arrive, and despatch riders were putting on dirt-track races round a marked perimeter.
A chaos of rumour and uncertainty existed. In some parts of the beach, there were no French, yet in others small boats arriving to lift men to the ships waiting in the roadstead found nothing else. In one area, the poilus behaved steadily and intelligently, while in another inland Frenchman, unaccustomed to the sea, stood in the shallows wearing motor car inner tubes as lifebelts, shouting for help and working themselves up into a fury as they failed to understand that human beings crowding into a boat could set it so firmly on the sand nothing on God’s earth would move it until they all climbed out again.
‘One would think their precious boats were made of paper!’ one officer yelled in fury. ‘They are so afraid of them turning over.’
They were totally indifferent to the appeals of the British who, since few of them lived more than a hundred miles from the sea, had some knowledge of boats, and only D’Archy’s awesome hauteur damped their fury.
It was a babble of tongues, order, counter-order, rumour and counter-rumour, with the problem of languages increasing wherever the French predominated. With discipline all too often broken down, it was impossible to stop them rushing the boats but, as rumour piled on exhaustion to create confusion, at least they were beginning at last to arrive in a continuous stream. The chief problem, Kelly found, was keeping sufficient hold of enough of his staff to be able to despatch them to the points where the delays were occurring, to explain to the furious French officers what was happening and what was expected of them.
By the third day it was clear that Le Mesurier was drunk. Where he’d obtained the brandy he was drinking no one knew, but he stayed on his feet, red-eyed, unshaven and verbose with the Frenchmen with the verbosity of someone who had a perfect command of the language. It was obvious why he’d been free to join their party, because he was clearly on the way to being an alcoholic and some sharp-eyed doctor had spotted it when he’d offered himself for the army.
The queuing was continuous, not even stopping with darkness, and they obtained meals of bread and cheese from the ships that arrived and tried to snatch sleep in turns.
There was a monument on the promenade that seemed to separate the two armies. On one side were the British and on the other an enormous crowd of Frenchmen, among them many Moroccans who were resentful and bitter because they felt they were being left behind. Taking D’Archy, Kelly tried to bully them into moving to the mole, which seemed now to be working at tremendous speed, but they had set up a line of men with fixed bayonets and informed him that from that point on the promenade was reserved for the French. A Grenadier Guardsman was arguing with them, apparently willing to take on the whole of the French Army, but Kelly pulled him away and sent him into the city.
‘Get yourself aboard a ship,’ he said. ‘Leave that lot to me.’
But the French didn’t trust him and one of them even took a pot-shot at him. When D’Archy addressed them in their own language, however, a few broke away and headed for the town, but the rest remained firmly where they were, many of them drunk, and they had to leave them.
Tennant’s organisation was working well now, with a naval commander doing wonders as piermaster and Kelly’s group bringing in French units in increasing numbers. But the bombers were constantly overhead, operating at low altitudes, dropping their bombs and machine-gunning, and occasionally, where they’d been caught, there were swathes of dead soldiers propped against walls or stretched on the pavements, their big boots limp, helmets, gas capes or groundsheets over their dead faces.
All day a pall of smoke from the burning town and the blazing oil tanks at St Pol had covered the harbour but, as the wind changed, it drifted inshore, exposing the activity round the mole, and the bombers came in again and again, appearing from nowhere, stepped up in flights one above the other. Already, out in the roads, a ship which had brought landing craft to help with the loading from the beaches lay smoking and on fire, sinking slowly with a destroyer alongside trying to take off the troops she’d embarked. On the eastward side of the mole, two big paddle steamers, Fenella and Crested Eagle, were loading and against its inside face, opposite them, were the destroyers, Grenade and Jaguar, with six trawlers inshore of them and, astern, the personnel ship, Canterbury. Farther in were three more destroyers, Malcolm, Verity and Sabre, with the French destroyers, Mistral and Sirocco at the guiding jetty and Cyclone at the Quai Felix Fauré.
D’Archy had mustered some five hundred French soldiers on the mole. Judging by the motor inner tubes they clutched, they knew little about ships and D’Archy was holding up a whistle. ‘When I blow this,’ he said. ‘You will squat down, with your steel helmets square on your heads. Do you understand?’
Despite the aeroplanes overhead, the loading went on and whenever any of them came near D’Archy blew his whistle and the French soldiers did as he told them with an orderly calmness that went oddly with the panic-stricken way they clutched their inner tubes.
But it couldn’t last. With the smoke blown clear, the whole group of shipping lay at the mercy of the Luftwaffe. Fenella was the first to be hit. One bomb went through her passenger deck to burst among the packed soldiers below and another hit the mole, sending lumps of concrete through her side below the water line. Jetties and gangways were blown away, and pushing among the crowding men, Kelly fought his way into the shambles past a gaunt-eyed man who was clutching the shreds of his right arm and who stumbled against him leaving a shining smear of red across the front of his uniform. Rumbelo, his face as impassive as ever, his helmet perched on his huge head like a pimple, was dragging a man with burning clothes ashore. More men, desperately wounded, scorched or burned, sometimes simply shrieking with shock, stumbled out of the holocaust but, despite the continuous machine-gunning that felled them in their tracks even as they struggled to safety, all the troops and stretcher cases were disembarked and placed on board Crested Eagle.
They had barely completed the job when Grenade was hit and swung away out of control to sink in the fairway. Then two trawlers were sunk alongside, and Canterbury and Jaguar were hit, and with ships trying desperately to move to the safety of the roads where they could manoeuvre, Crested Eagle was also hit in her turn.
Watching Crested Eagle blazing furiously as she was driven on to the beaches at Malo-les-Bains, Kelly felt numb. Stupefied with weariness, he could hardly make his mind function. They had pushed hundreds of Frenchmen aboard Fenella, promising them a passage to safety, then, as she’d been hit, had marshalled them all off again, hating and distrusting the British, and got them aboard Crested Eagle. God alone knew what they would think now; in the best French tradition, they’d doubtless claim they’d been betrayed.
Among them were the last of the seriously wounded. Even as they’d pushed them aboard Crested Eagle, it had occurred to Kelly that all these wounded they were struggling to save could help nobody, and certainly couldn’t help Britain. Most of them would never fight again, many would never even walk again. They had to forget them to save the fit and ablebodied. Even as he debated with himself what to do about it, instructions arrived that no more wounded were to be placed aboard ships and that preference was to be given to unwounded men or men who could get aboard under their own steam. It must have been an agonising decision to take but he knew it was right, though it was received with taut faces by Le Mesurier and the others.
‘These men have served their country well,’ one of the army officers argued.
‘They’ll serve it well again by not standing in the way of whole men who can carry on the fight,’ Kelly said. ‘It’s not a decision anybody wants to take, but a wounded man lying down takes up as much room as four men standing upright, and twice as long as ten unwounded men to put aboard. They’ve already stopped them coming off the beaches because they can’t climb nets and it takes too long to rig slings.’
The stretchers were now being placed in warehouses and shelters wherever they could be left out of the bombing, and a medical officer with a barrow loaded with champagne, watched over by a sergeant with a revolver, was moving among the wounded, offering drink and cigarettes, as though he felt there was now nothing else he could do for them. Behind the town, the convoys of ambulances had been stopped and temporary hospitals had been set up in schools and halls, where more RAMC men were working alongside French Sisters of Mercy.
Though the decision meant that the unwounded could now move more freely to the ships and the congestion the wounded had caused disappeared, it was still hard for Kelly to convince himself they’d done the right thing. When you were involved in a catastrophe, you inherited its grief and became part of it because it was a shared thing, a shared sorrow, a shared anger and a shared guilt.
Yet, despite the horror and the unbelievable fatigue, there was a strange elation as they saw the soldiers carried away. Destroyers were coming in, as the town major had said, like Number Eleven buses, handled by their captains like pinnaces run by drunken midshipmen. By this time, French colonels were coming to Kelly for instructions, and he considered it a measure of their success. The very fact that they were succeeding beyond all their hopes kept them on their feet. Most people went to their graves without ever pulling out all the stops, and to work at full throttle for so good a cause as the survival of their country kept them all going – even Le Mesurier – long after they should have fallen exhausted. Fear excitement, anger and impatience produced different results from different people but responsibility simplified the problem, and success added the spice of comfort that condensed it to simplicity, so that there could never be any doubts about why they were there.
After the bombing, all movement on the mole had ceased. The harbour seemed to be out of action again and ships and men were being diverted to the beaches once more. The thought of throwing his hand in never occurred to Kelly, and it was obvious it hadn’t occurred to anyone else either. Calling in at Tennant’s office, he picked up the list of tragedies. Even the ships off the beaches hadn’t escaped.
‘Normannia, Lorina, Waverley and Gracie Fields sunk,’ he was told, ‘Pangbourne damaged, Wakefield and Grafton sunk–’
In his weariness, Kelly had hardly caught the name. Rumbelo’s son – his godson – was in Grafton.
‘Grafton?’
‘Torpedoed. She was full of troops.’
‘Casualties?’
‘Heavy.’
Suddenly the elation vanished. First Boyle’s tragedy, he thought, now Rumbelo’s. Sorrow was bearable so long as it was somebody else’s, but when it became personal, it was a different thing altogether. He tried to push it out of his mind and concentrate on what he was doing.
On the ninth morning, by which time the evacuation seemed to have been going on for a whole lifetime and beyond, he stood with Boyle in the doorway of their office drinking mugs of tea that Rumbelo had managed to beg from one of the destroyers. His face expressionless, Rumbelo had accepted the news of Grafton without the flicker of an eyelid. Lighting a cigarette, he’d disappeared about his business, pushing the dwindling group of sailors to greater efforts, making sure all the time that his officers were looked after, thrusting his private grief below the unperturbed demeanour that was the result of years of intelligent discipline.
His face gaunt, his eyes red-rimmed with sleeplessness, his feet swollen with standing, Boyle stared at Kelly wearily and, unable to look him in the face, Kelly turned to gaze at the dying city. Shells coming from the direction of Calais were bursting in the streets now and the beach was littered with wrecked ships and small boats. The sea front was a lurid study in black and red, a high wall of fire roaring with darting tongues of flame, the smoke pouring up in thick coils to disappear into the sky in a frightful panorama of destruction. The atmosphere had the stink of blood and mutilated flesh of a slaughterhouse. And still the Germans were pounding the ruins.
The losses continued to make grim reading. Keith Foudroyant and Basilisk, with Ivanhoe and Worcester damaged – valuable destroyers that Kelly knew they’d miss desperately when it came to the battle against the submarines, which would inevitably follow this debacle. The men marching in now had been in heavy fighting. There were a lot of wounded among them, the blood bright on their bandages. They were the last regiments, both British and French, to pull back, proud regiments of both nations, and they still carried their weapons and gave Kelly a smart eyes right as they passed. There was something about them that stirred him almost to tears. He’d lost the two British army officers he’d picked up, and D’Archy, considering his job done, had formally requested permission to rejoin his admiral.
‘What will you do, Archie?’ Kelly asked.
The Frenchman’s thin face cracked into a smile. Disappear,’ he said shortly. ‘We cannot evacuate the whole of France, you understand. Yet I don’t intend to stay here to be sent to a prison camp. I shall find civilian clothes and make my way to the base at Toulon. France will need men of spirit to keep our ships out of the hands of the Germans and prepare them for when the time comes to hit back.’
The Frenchman’s disappearance left only Le Mesurier, one of the naval officers and a mere handful of sailors. What had happened to the others nobody knew.
Troops still continued to trudge into the town through the Place Jean Bart and down the Boulevard Jeanne d’Arc past the ruins of the Church of St Eloi. Most of them now were French. Inland somewhere, there were still others, with the gunners of the rear-guard who would never make it, because the Germans were now too close and Ramsay, at Dover, knowing how desperately they’d be needed in the future, had reluctantly withdrawn what remained of his destroyers.
But the mole was working again now, despite the fact that it had been breached half a dozen times and repaired with planks and ladders again and again; offshore, small miracles were still being performed as men made sails with clothing and water-proof capes, and engineers stood waist-deep in waterlogged engine rooms to watch their gauges. The Casino was blazing and there were wrecks in the fairway circled by small boats on the lookout for survivors. Beyond those still on the mole, there were no known complete units left to be rescued, and Tennant had sent the signal, ‘BEF evacuated,’ the previous night.
The dead lay all over the town, in hastily scraped graves in gardens and parks and among the sand dunes. They floated along the tide line and lay in the warm soil all the way back to the Belgian frontier and through the graveyards of the earlier war. They huddled in ditches, in the fields and in the streets of dozens of small towns and villages, among the wrecked guns and smoking vehicles of a defeated army. Hundreds more were entombed in the cold hulks of ships beneath the sea.
During the night, the shelling had grown more intense and the German bombers seemed to be hovering above the town all the time. The din was deafening and Kelly and his little party were still on the move among the shattered streets, climbing over piles of bricks and timber and dodging the fires to direct the last men towards the mole. They were stumbling with exhaustion by this time, and when daylight came, Kelly found his party had dwindled to Boyle, Rumbelo and Le Mesurier. The others had taken advantage of the confusion to step aboard a ship, and he felt he couldn’t blame them, because no one could look forward to being a prisoner of war with equanimity. Officially the evacuation had ended. There was nothing to do from this point on but save themselves.
They were in the last stages now, and the French admiral was moving with his staff towards the sea. Behind them came an immense river of refugees and craven soldiers – French, Belgians, Moroccans, British – who had hidden in ruined houses from the bombing, to snatch the places of the desperate fighting troops. In a fury, Kelly mustered a group of Guardsmen, artillerymen, sailors and cavalrymen, and they formed a line at the end of the mole with two machine guns and their rifles at the ready.
The mob had emerged from the cellars of the city in hundreds. They clutched bottles and a few of them were singing, but the smell about them was the smell of fear. Unmoving, Kelly kept his group across the end of the mole, forcing a gap in the crowd for the last few men of the rearguard who appeared, to pass through.
‘Thank you.’ A tall Guards officer, shaved and polished as if he’d been on parade at St James, but with eyes that were hollow with weariness, led his men through the line. ‘It’s nice of you to save us a place.’
Behind the Guards were French soldiers led by a colonel who looked like the major they’d seen at Gyseghem – thin with age and as smart as the Guardsman. As he passed, he saluted gravely.
Deaf to the yells of the mob, Kelly waited until it appeared there was no one else to come, then, forming his men up, the soldiers and sailors and three airmen he’d also acquired who were the survivors of a sunken RAF tender, he marched them down the mole and stood behind them with his revolver drawn to prevent them being swamped by the rabble that followed them.
Two hundred thousand soldiers had passed down the narrow plankway to safety and, despite the darkness, the wind, the sea and the enemy shellfire and bombing, the river of men had hardly ever stopped. The mole had been wrecked and repaired again and again and the loading berths were blocked by sunken ships, and still they’d come. Because the flow was now intermittent, however, the vessels arriving were only fishing vessels, motorboats, and RAF rescue launches.
Rumbelo stood in silence in front of him. Boyle’s face was drawn and agonised, and Kelly tried to imagine what they were thinking. Le Mesurier sagged against him. He had walked and run a hundred times to the beaches of Malo-les-Bains even occasionally to La Panne, and he was clearly finished, his face exhausted and puffy with booze.
The queue edged forward and Kelly found himself jammed aboard an RAF pinnace as she edged from the pier and picked her way through the wrecked ships.
As they swung out and passed the end of the mole, they saw the last weary men of the rearguard who had made it halt on the end. There were tears of misery in his eyes as he realised there would be no ships for them. The last of the personnel carriers had gone, with the paddle steamers, the fleet sweepers, the trawlers, the drifters and finally the destroyers. These men, both French and British, had stumbled into the town expecting to be picked up, but the monstrous army of cowards, lines of communication troops, transport drivers and the men of ancillary services who had not put their heads above the earth for days had snatched their places. They had never had any intention of fighting but they had also had no intention of standing back to give up their places to the men who had fought. As the pinnace, crammed with men and top-heavy, headed for the sea, Kelly saw the pale faces watching in anguish.
A small motor boat had been sent in to take off a French general and his staff, and the picture burned itself into Kelly’s mind. There were still about a thousand men on the mole, men of proud regiments, and they stood at attention in the faint light of dawn with the flames throwing the faces and helmets into sharp relief, while the general and his staff, tears on their cheeks, saluted. It was only a gesture but Kelly thought, sometimes gestures could be bloody moving.
As they reached the open sea in the last of the darkness, the recriminations began. Who had been responsible? Who had let them down? Where had the RAF been? Kelly stared ahead of him with narrow eyes, knowing perfectly well that the responsibility lay with the politicians and do-gooders who’d felt it wrong to kill men with big guns and big ships and big bombs, and had allowed themselves to believe the words of Hitler and Mussolini.
He was cold and tired and the dirt had a strange mummifying effect on him, as if it stiffened his limbs and dulled his mind. Overhead he could still see the pinprick flickering of anti-aircraft fire inland where the RAF was still trying to bomb German troop concentrations.
‘I’m bloody hungry,’ a Guardsman next to him said. ‘I ain’t had anything to eat for three days.’
‘We could always eat each other,’ Kelly suggested. ‘But, as senior officer,’ he said, ‘I expect first bite.’
It raised a laugh but it didn’t last long. Shells were still dropping in the fairway and, as they cleared the town, a fresh flight of Junkers 87s came down on them. For a while, the crash of bombs seemed to strip their nerves and leave them, in their exhausted state, shaking with fear. Vast splashes rose around them and the boats scattered in every direction. In the sea ahead was a mat of swimmers where a launch had been hit, then a bomb landed close alongside and the pinnace began to take in water. Discarding jackets and shoes, they began to slip overboard one after the other and swim to another pinnace which had avoided the worst of the attack.
Rumbelo was puffing badly and Kelly and Boyle dragged him along with them. Le Mesurier was swimming alongside them and he called out cheerfully that he was all right, but when they were dragged aboard and turned round for him, he had vanished.
Crammed with men, some of them wounded, most of them covered with oil, their faces haggard with weariness, the boat started to move off. Unaware of his rank, a worried sergeant snarled at Kelly to get a move on and he obediently edged further along the deck, huddling in the mass of exhausted men from the chilling wind that raced over the bow. They were all silent. Nobody felt like talking, all aware of the depression that came with the shattering knowledge of defeat. Above their heads loomed the black pall from the oil tanks of St Pol, stretching up into the air for 11,000 feet and a mile wide, two millions tons of the stuff burning like a furnace. It had the look of doom itself about it.
Dover harbour was crowded to capacity, with loudhailers squawking as officers in command of ships demanded permission to leave or go alongside. The quayside echoed to the shouts of red-eyed soldiers begging cigarettes and the barking of dozens of dogs, which had attached themselves to them. On a wall someone had scrawled. ‘Well done, BEF’ and the man alongside Kelly sniffed audibly. ‘I thought we’d lost the bloody battle,’ he said.
They had transferred to a big motor launch as soon as they’d cleared Dunkirk, and when the launch’s overworked engines had broken down, had been picked up by the trawler, General Roberts. Near the Kwinte Buoy they’d picked up the survivors of a French fishing boat which had hit a mine. The survivors had had their clothes stripped clean away by the explosion and almost every one of them was suffering from a fracture of the legs, pelvis or spine.
The last ships were gathering outside the harbour as they arrived, personnel carriers and tugs, minesweepers from the North Sea and East Coast ports, coasters and short-sea traders, and boats with registrations from the Wash to Poole, while the destroyers whooped their way among them, setting the moored dinghies rolling and curtseying in their wake.
Getting the trawler in through the difficult tide stream and the press of boats required an intricate feat of seamanship which Kelly, as an inveterate bad handler of ships in harbour, had to admire even through his weariness. Men were still trooping ashore from the preceding vessels, and ships crowded every berth, many of them marked by fire or scarred by splinters. On their decks silent shapes lay covered with blankets, waiting for collection, and as the living streamed on to the quays, civilians clambered past with stretchers and first aid equipment. Air raid wardens, indifferent to the mess it made of their own clothes, were struggling to help men covered with fuel oil. Others were clearing ships of dirt, pools of blood and equipment; and women, some in the uniform of the voluntary services, some in summer frocks and hastily recruited, were passing round water bottles and telegram forms. They all looked hot because there was no wind and not a cloud in the sky, and many of them had faces that were wet with tears.
More women were running a mobile canteen with cups borrowed from local catering businesses, handing out food they’d acquired from the city shops, working at full speed and totally indifferent to the near-nakedness of some of the men. Despite the constant harassment, they all kept their heads. French-Moroccan soldiers were struggling with a group of sailors who were complaining loudly that they’d stolen their gear, and there was no order because senior officers were mixed with the lowest ranks, among them French and Belgian refugees – even a few German prisoners who had somehow got themselves captured in the chaos.
A squad of cavalrymen was forming up in threes, indifferent to the other soldiers.
‘We,’ their sergeant was informing them, ‘are the Supple Twelfth and don’t you forget it. We will not straggle, lose our ’eads or otherwise be’ave like ordinary soldiers. We are now going to the station and we will march. Is that understood?’
As they clanked off, every man in step, the quayside emptied a little. Boyle and Rumbelo had vanished and Kelly could only suppose they’d gone in search of somewhere to get their heads down, so he sought out Verschoyle to inform him that the officer they’d snatched from his staff had vanished in the confusion.
‘I think he was killed on the mole,’ he said. ‘He was there when they got Fenella, Crested Eagle and Grenade.’
Verschoyle studied him. He’d not slept more than a few hours in a week and was haggard with tiredness himself. Even his Wren looked worn-out.
‘Fish it out, Maisie,’ he said and she reached into a drawer to produce a flask.
‘I wish,’ Kelly said, coughing as the spirit burned his empty stomach, ‘that all those bloody politicians who spent the thirties cutting the services, all those dim-witted generals, admirals and air marshals who spent their time watching their pensions instead of watching the enemy, and all those bloody soft-minded buggers at the League of Nations who preached appeasement could just have been there.’
Verschoyle gave him a tired smile. ‘You’ve obviously come out of it mentally unharmed,’ he said. ‘You still sound like Ginger Maguire.’
He produced a lift to the Castle and, still in shirtsleeves, his wrinkled clothes drying on him, Kelly reported to Corbett who assigned a Wren writer to him to take down his report. She looked about sixteen and, after what he’d seen in Dunkirk, breathtakingly beautiful.
As he left the office, somebody handed him a telegram and he read it dazedly, half-expecting it to inform him of the loss of Rumbelo’s son in Grafton. Instead, it announced the death of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Maguire, Bt., from a heart attack at his club in London. It had been sent by the club’s secretary to Thakenham and re-addressed by Biddy. Just then it didn’t really register.
Two hours later, he headed back to the docks. Rumbelo and Boyle had appeared at the Castle, like himself still wearing the clothes they’d worn when they’d had to swim for their lives, but he was worried about Le Mesurier. Drunk or sober, he’d done a tremendous job and he was hoping against hope he might have turned up.
Somebody gave him a lift to the docks in a staff car. Tugs were moving ships whose crews were fast asleep, doing the whole job themselves because it was impossible to wake the exhausted men below, and there were rows of stretchers along the small boat stage which sweating helpers were hoisting into ambulances. Women bent over the wounded, fixing labels to their battle-dress blouses, and one of them was holding a mug of tea to a man whose head was swathed in bandages. For a while Kelly stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. I know this woman, he thought dazedly. I’ve known her all my life.
Despite his weariness, he felt a stab of pain at all the promise and pleasure he’d lost, and his thoughts scampered like frightened mice through his mind as he tried to make out how she came to be there when she should have been in America. Then, through a daze of exhaustion, he remembered meeting Mabel in London. She’d got off the Dover train, he recalled, and now he realised why.
He felt like a guilty schoolboy up before the headmaster as he stepped forward.
‘Hello, Charley,’ he said.