When Dawson came to, the eastern sky was already lightening with the dawn. As the Austin staff car drew to a somewhat jerky stop, he distinctly heard the unmistakable calls of seabirds from somewhere overhead, and guessed that they had reached the coast, or were close to it.
He grunted, groaned and stretched. He’d slept for the entire journey, as far as he could remember, but he was a long way from being refreshed: the back seat was far too narrow to comfortably accommodate his bulky frame. His back and the muscles of his legs ached with a vengeance, and he’d somehow managed to crick his neck as well.
On the other hand, nobody was shooting at him, which made a change, so overall he still reckoned he was ahead.
‘We’re here, Corp,’ the driver called out, obviously having heard movement behind him in the car. ‘This is as far as I go.’
Dawson sat up slowly and then extricated himself from the back of the vehicle, his movements clumsy because of the aches and pains he was suffering, and made worse by the fact that he was rather larger than the designers of the car had perhaps expected any rear-seat passenger to be. He had no kit – all that had been lost in his and Major Sykes’s escape from Belgium – but he was determined to hold on to the Mauser and Schmeisser as long as he could, so he scooped them out of the back of the car as he emerged.
He straightened up with another groan as something clicked in his spine and looked around. The port wasn’t either as big or as busy as Calais, as far as he could tell, but there were still dozens of service personnel milling around purposefully, and numerous army vehicles of various sorts, either moving about or parked in somewhat straggly rows.
‘Now what the bloody hell am I supposed to do?’ he muttered.
‘Buggered if I know,’ the lance-corporal replied, entirely predictably, then shifted the staff car into gear and drove out of Dawson’s sight and, as it happened, out of his life.
Three minutes later, Dawson was standing rigidly to attention while a smartly dressed sergeant with a reddish complexion and a bristly black moustache shouted at his face from a distance of about 6 inches.
‘Don’t you bloody try and get smart with me, Corporal. Where’s your bloody rifle? And the rest of your bloody kit?’
Eddie Dawson stared into the middle distance for a couple of seconds longer, then gave him exactly the same answer as he’d done the first time he’d been asked the question.
‘In Belgium, Sarge.’
‘That’s what I mean by a smart, bloody, answer. Give me one more and you’ll find yourself on a bloody charge. We’re in France, just in case you hadn’t noticed. In bloody Dunkirk, in fact. So how the bloody hell did you lose your bloody rifle in bloody Belgium?’
‘I didn’t lose it. I dumped it because a Jerry bullet blew the stock to pieces. It was no good to anyone after that. In fact,’ Dawson added, recalling exactly what had happened in the Belgian forest, ‘it wasn’t actually me that dumped it. It was the bloke I was with.’
‘That doesn’t make it any better, Corporal. You don’t lend your bloody weapon to anyone, ever. You should bloody well know that. And if it gets damaged you bring it back and get a new one.’
‘Sod that for a game of soldiers,’ Dawson snapped, starting to lose his patience with the sergeant. ‘We had half the bloody German army chasing after us. No way were we going to bugger about dragging a broken rifle around with us. We had enough to do just getting away from them. That’s why I picked up this Mauser and Schmeisser.’
‘Sounds like another bloody tall story to me, Corporal, and you should think yourself lucky—’
‘Actually, it isn’t,’ another voice chimed in, and the sergeant spun round to find himself looking at a slim and somewhat dapper officer wearing major’s pips walking towards him, the effect spoiled somewhat by the officer’s obvious limp.
Like all NCOs – non-commissioned officers – in the British army, the sergeant clearly believed in the old mantra: if it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t, paint it – and snapped off a crisp salute accompanied by a loud ‘Sah.’
‘This corporal is with me,’ Major Sykes said, returning the salute in a markedly casual manner and stepping forward to stand near Dawson.
The sergeant switched his gaze between the hefty corporal with his craggy, hacked-from-the-living-rock features, and the slim and handsome officer from the Royal Scots Greys. Despite their clean uniforms, both men looked as if they’d been through a lot, the officer clearly nursing some kind of leg wound, while the corporal appeared to be just generally battered, with various cuts and bruises visible, and he too, in fact, also had a slight limp.
‘Right, sir,’ the sergeant said, and saluted again.
As he turned and marched briskly away, Dawson turned to Sykes.
‘Am I, sir? With you again, I mean? And I thought you were heading for Calais, not Dunkirk.’
‘I was, but I got diverted. And you’re not with me, not this time. I just thought you had better things to do than stand there listening to that idiot trying to give you a hard time. The next ship to Dover leaves from here, not from Calais, so I’ll be on that one, with the Jerry demolition charge, so that I can tell the powers that be what we saw at Eben-Emael. The boffins there can take the device to pieces to find out how it works and decide what we can do about it. I’ll probably stay on the other side of the Channel until this leg has healed a bit better, but then I’ll be back. While I’m in Blighty I’ll be reporting on you and what you did. You might even find yourself in line for a gong, bearing in mind that you saved my life more times than I can remember.’
Sykes paused for a few moments, then shook his head.
‘Or you might get an official reprimand or find yourself facing charges of repeated disobedience and insubordination because of your consistent and stubborn refusal to obey any of my orders.’
‘I wasn’t going to leave you there, sir,’ Dawson said. ‘Orders or no orders.’
‘I know, and I’m grateful.’
Sykes extended a hand, and the big corporal shook it.
‘Thanks, Eddie. Seriously, you saved my life, but getting that demolition charge back here could mean you’ve saved hundreds of other soldiers from getting killed, and that’s far more important. And my report will reflect that.’
Dawson looked slightly stunned, not because of what Sykes had described, but because the officer had used his Christian name, the first time in his entire career in the army that that had happened.
‘Anyway,’ Sykes continued, ‘take care of yourself with whatever it is that you’re expected to do now.’
He released Dawson’s hand, clapped him on the shoulder, and then strode away, still favouring his injured leg. The major had only walked about 50 yards when a young lieutenant accosted him. They exchanged salutes, and after a very brief conversation Sykes turned around and pointed back towards Dawson. The lieutenant saluted again, and then began walking briskly towards the corporal.
‘This looks like bad news,’ Dawson muttered to himself as the officer approached.
‘Lance Corporal Dawson?’ the young officer asked as Dawson gave a somewhat weary salute.
‘Yes, sir.’
Then he just waited. Dawson had been in the army long enough to know that unnecessary conversation with any member of the officer class had a tendency to lead to additional work or duties. Before joining the Royal Engineers, he had spent five years in the Territorial Army, and he well remembered the advice drummed into him by the training corporal, a wizened and elderly – at least in Dawson’s eyes, which meant the man had probably been in his forties – individual who had seen it all and done most of it. ‘Don’t you never volunteer for nothing’ had been the man’s mantra, which, ignoring the double negative and the literal meaning of the phrase, still seemed to Dawson to be quite a good philosophy. And, like every other squaddie, he had heard all the stories about NCOs who would ask if anyone was interested in music because they needed a piano moving, or interested in food because half a ton of potatoes had just been delivered and needed peeling.
So he lapsed into an expectant silence while he waited for the officer, a clean-shaven man in his mid-twenties with dark hair, brown eyes and a tanned complexion, framed by slightly prominent ears, to deliver whatever piece of bad news he had in mind.
‘I understand you’re a demolitions specialist?’
That wasn’t exactly what Dawson had been expecting, and he nodded cautiously, remembering that the first conversation he’d ever had with Major Sykes had begun in a fairly similar way.
‘Before I joined up I was a mining and quarry engineer, sir,’ he replied, ‘so I do know my way around most kinds of explosives. If you want me to open up a new seam in a coal mine, then I’m your man, but I don’t think what I know makes me a specialist in blowing things up.’
The lieutenant – the name tag on his battledress jacket read ‘Barber’ – smiled briefly.
‘Not much call for coal mines around here at the moment,’ he said, ‘but there’s a strong probability that we will need you to do a bit of demolition.’
‘You mean the Germans have got here already?’
‘I didn’t say they were German structures, Dawson,’ Lieutenant Barber replied, ‘and I didn’t say they were anywhere near here. Come with me, and you’ll find out what we need you to do.’