Nobody has ever claimed that the back of a British army lorry is a comfortable place to sleep. Or even to travel in. Especially when the lorry in question is bouncing over a rutted and largely unmade road because the driver is in a hurry.
But Eddie Dawson, lying on a pile of old sacking that smelled quite strongly of lubricating oil and covered in a thin and scratchy army blanket that he’d found when he climbed up into the vehicle, was so knackered that within a few minutes of setting off he was already in the kind of fugue state that exists between wakefulness and sleep.
The only good thing about that particular journey, from the outskirts of the Ardennes Forest in France to the English Channel, was that at that precise moment it was nowhere near the fighting. And he had seen and been involved in more combat over the previous few weeks than he had expected to face for the entire war, unless it ended up lasting for years. The Germans had invaded Belgium and the Netherlands two days earlier to face the combined armies of the Allies – French, Belgian and British troops – but what nobody had anticipated was that the Germans would then successfully advance into France through the Ardennes region. That upland area was widely believed, at least by the French, to be impenetrable to armoured vehicles, and especially to tanks, because of the forests along the border. Events had already proved the French to be completely wrong, as Dawson had witnessed first-hand: he had faced everything from Wehrmacht troops intent on ending his personal war in the most violent manner imaginable, to main battle tanks trying to do the same thing, only with much bigger guns.
But the German advance into France was still largely tied down near the country’s northern border. The chances of the lorry being stopped by enemy troops were almost nil, and there weren’t even many Allied troops in the area: they were all in positions further to the east and north. As the lorry bounced and rattled its way west towards Calais, the countryside around the vehicle was almost eerily quiet, the only indication of the ongoing conflict was the dull rumble of artillery fire from tens of miles behind, a sound more like a distant thunderstorm than anything else.
Or at least it was quiet for the first half an hour or so. By that time, Dawson had dropped off, so that when the driver of the Austin staff car, coming up fast from behind the truck, started sounding his horn in long, repetitive blares, he somehow managed to weave the sounds into a dream that had him standing on the deck of a Royal Navy vessel making the journey back across the Channel to Dover from France, and sounding its siren in greeting or warning as it approached the safe harbour.
That happy, if wholly inaccurate, image lasted a bare few seconds, and ended abruptly when the driver of the lorry rammed his size-ten hobnailed army boot violently onto the brake pedal as the staff car swept past and slewed to a stop in front of him. The heavy braking slid Dawson bodily across the floor of the truck and slammed him head first into the steel partition behind the driver’s cab. That woke him up immediately, and angrily, and he staggered to his feet muttering threats and curses.
He realized at once that the vehicle was stationary, and briefly wondered if the truck had been involved in an accident, but he quickly dismissed that notion because he definitely hadn’t heard the sound of an impact or felt anything like that. He guessed it was just a piece of really bad driving, nothing more. But in that case, why hadn’t the truck started moving again?
Before he could do anything about it, like climb down and pin the driver against the side of the lorry and hammer his head against the steel until he got some answers, a head wearing a British army helmet appeared at the back of the vehicle above the tailgate.
‘You Dawson?’ the man demanded.
‘Yes. Who wants to know?’
‘I do. Now get your arse out of there. There’s been a change of plan.’
‘Might have bloody guessed,’ Dawson muttered. ‘Fucking army.’
He picked up the Mauser rifle and Schmeisser MP40 sub-machine gun that he’d liberated from a couple of German soldiers, now deceased, men that he and Major Sykes had encountered once they’d escaped from the doomed Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael. The stock of Dawson’s British-issued Lee-Enfield had been shattered by a German bullet as they neared the Allied lines. They’d dumped the useless rifle, and had taken the two German weapons and all the ammunition they could carry because they’d had no alternative.
‘So what’s going on now?’ Dawson asked, as he followed the soldier – who he could now see was a lance corporal, just like Dawson himself – towards the front of the truck.
‘Buggered if I know, Corp,’ the man replied. ‘I was just told to stop this lorry, get you out of it and then deliver you to where I was told you had to go.’
The reason for the truck’s sudden stop was then immediately apparent: an army staff car, commonly known in the forces as a ‘tilly’, from ‘utility’, had stopped sideways on across the front of the vehicle, virtually blocking the entire width of the road.
‘I’m supposed to be going to Calais,’ Dawson said.
‘Not any more you’re not,’ the lance corporal replied. ‘My orders are to get you to Amsterdam.’
‘In Holland?’
‘Unless you know of a different Amsterdam, yes.’
‘What the bloody hell am I going there for?’
‘Buggered if I know,’ the man repeated. ‘You know the rules, mate. Always obey the last order. Getting you to Amsterdam was the last order I was given, so that’s where we’re going. Or rather, that’s where you’re going. I’m just taking you to Dunkirk, because driving through Belgium to get to Holland ain’t going to work. The country’s full of bleeding Jerries heading for France, our lot trying to stop them, and the Belgies trying to keep out of the way of both of them. I suppose there’ll be a boat or something at Dunkirk to take you the rest of the way up the coast.’
Dawson shrugged and shook his head. As he walked towards the staff car, the truck driver leaned out of his side window and shouted at him.
‘So what am I supposed to do?’ he asked.
The lance corporal turned towards the truck, and Dawson knew immediately what he was going to say.
‘Buggered if—’ he began, but Dawson interrupted him.
‘Just go back to where you picked me up,’ he suggested. ‘Find the officer or the NCO who’s in charge of transport and tell him what’s happened.’
The truck driver muttered something under his breath, then with a protesting metallic crunch from the gearbox he shifted the lorry into reverse and began backing down the road, looking for a stretch of road that was wide enough for him to turn the vehicle round.
Dawson opened the passenger door of the staff car, put his weapons on the floor behind the driver’s seat and then started to climb into the back of the vehicle.
‘Oi, that’s for officers only,’ the lance corporal protested. ‘You can ride up here in the front, with me.’
Dawson just looked at him.
‘I haven’t had a decent sleep for about a week,’ he said, his voice low and dangerous. ‘I’d just got my head down in that truck when you started sounding your bloody horn, so I’m going to lie down on the back seat of this tilly and try and get some sleep. If you don’t like it, that’s your hard bloody luck. So just shut up, get this thing started and drive.’
The lance corporal looked at Dawson – who was at least 6 inches taller than him, built like the proverbial brick shit house, and clearly running on a fairly short fuse if the expression on his face was anything to go by – and just nodded.
‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he murmured as he opened the driver’s side door.
‘Right now,’ Dawson said, ‘I don’t care if it matters or not. That’s where I’m going to be, so get used to it.’
A few seconds later, the driver put the staff car into gear and accelerated hard up the bumpy road, probably trying to make the ride as uncomfortable as he possibly could for his passenger.
But the broad leather seat in the back of the car felt like a feather bed to Dawson after the unyielding steel floor of the lorry he’d just climbed out of, and within a couple of minutes he was, again, sound asleep.