The Beaches of Dunkirk

IT is too early to describe the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force as a composite operation and no one person can yet piece together a panorama of the fire-swept coast of France, from Calais to the beaches of La Panne, from which the British and French navies embarked 335,000 troops and carried them to safety. It has been described as a miracle; and certain factors of chance did undoubtedly operate in the Allies’ favor. Calm seas and occasional mist on certain days were an advantage. But wherein lay the miracle was the degree of stubborn courage attained by hundreds of thousands of quite ordinary men. Mere leadership, mere skill in organization, could have achieved nothing without this mass resistance to the fear of death and an unconquerable belief in ultimate victory. The tale of human valor outlives the causes that gave it birth, whether they are victories or reverses. The world’s tragedy is that war brings it to its most splendid flower.

The chalk cliffs of Dover made a curiously tranquil background in the early morning sunlight, with jackdaws cawing and circling, and the faint echoes of gunfire across the Channel whispering about the escarpment.

Away to the westward, alongside the pier reaching out from what was once the Lord Warden Hotel, were the funnels and smoke of transports and a hospital ship. They were pouring ashore their khaki-clad cargoes and stretcher cases, fruits of a night’s desperate garnering, and long trains crammed with men were sliding along the foreshore into the haze. But that was far away; one imagined rather than saw what was going on there. Here in the shadow of the cliffs were actualities — a destroyer limping in with a heavy list, spattered with splinter holes, making fast alongside to disembark hundreds of weary poilus, an armed trawler going out with a defiant toot of her siren, followed by a motor yacht painted gray. The owner-skipper, in the uniform of the Volunteer Reserve, was cleaning a revolver with a silk bandanna handkerchief. He hailed the crippled destroyer’s bridge. ‘What’s it like over there this morning?’ he shouted. It was his first trip. A bandaged figure replied with an impotent movement of his hand to his ears. He was probably deaf with gunfire and bomb explosions. ‘Not so funny!’ replied a man busy about a wire aft. ‘Not so bloody funny.’ The haze swallowed them.

There was another destroyer alongside. Her captain came out of his bridge cabin yawning. He was hollow-eyed and unshaven, but he had had nearly two hours’ sleep while they patched some splinter holes in his funnel and filled up with ammunition. Two hours in four days.

He climbed up on to the compass platform and glanced fore and aft. Men were standing by the wires. The first lieutenant was looking up at him expectantly from the forecastle. The sun was on his face. He was twenty-five and smiling.

‘All ready, Number One?’

The boy raised his hand. His teeth were very white in the sunburn of his face.

‘Cast off! Slow astern starboard.’

The captain slipped the strap of his binoculars over his head and glanced back once at the cliffs and the fields beyond, where the young corn was green. Then he turned seaward, his face a mask.

‘Well,’ he said to the navigator, who was a sublieutenant, ‘we’ve got a nice day for it.’

The lookout to port yelled the first air alarm as they neared the Dunkirk beaches. ‘Here they come,’ said the navigator grimly. The foremost guns opened fire; the hot blast from their muzzles swept over the bridge; the multiple pom-pom joined in. The captain had his glasses leveled on the beaches. They looked like a holiday resort thronged by a vast dun-colored motionless crowd. Fires were burning in the background under a pall of smoke.

He ignored the causes that made his own guns open fire. His immediate concern was the navigation of his ship in the treacherous shallows. The sea astern belched great columns of water into the air, and the ship lifted and fell again. He was listening through the roar of the explosions for the next sounding from t he leadsman in the chains. The ship was an easy target with barely steerage way on her. She shook with the recoil of the guns like a nervous horse. There were a sudden bright yellow flash and a cloud of smoke among the packed throngs ashore. Another bomb. The water was dark with men wading out waist-deep. He counted the ships inshore: three destroyers, their boats coming and going laden to the gunwales, and their guns blazing skyward; six trawlers, motor launches, motorboats . . . he lost count of them. The army had contrived to drive some lorries into the sea during the night and to build a sort of pier. There was a trawler sinking to the westward in a cloud of steam and smoke. Well, they’d have to fend for themselves. He glanced skyward, where there was a dogfight going on between some Spitfires and Heinkels. His guns ceased firing.

He nosed closer inshore. The destroyer to the eastward, her decks crammed with troops, was hoisting her boats and turning northward. Suddenly she began firing. A German bomber was coming down out of the sun in a low power-dive. A great yellow sheet of flame and a cloud of smoke and spray obliterated the destroyer. Hell’s delight! They’d hit her! The steam began pouring from her exhausts. The plane had vanished. He gave his orders for turning to the rescue, and then saw a sloop and a flotilla of motor yachts closing the stricken destroyer from the northward. They could look after the survivors. He turned again to the beaches and presently stopped and lowered his boats.

His steward brought him a cup of soup and placed it beside him on the chart table. The steward was a Maltese, a little man with a black jowl jutting out under a shrapnel helmet. His eyes were like an anxious spaniel’s; his anxiety was not for himself but for his captain, whose strength must be sustained with soup.

‘Soup, sair,’ he urged with gentle insistence. He had a stout black-eyed wife and seven children in Valletta, but he had forgotten them. The figure in the duffle coat, staring through glasses at the beaches, was the centre of his existence, held all his loyal heart. ‘’Ot soup. Better drink, sair.’

The captain watched the boats toiling shoreward. God, the men were tired! He began calculating the number of trips they would have to make. A motor barge swung away from the improvised pier and came towards them, crowded with troops. That was better; now they could get on with it. More and more craft kept arriving from seaward. There was a rumble of gunfire out of the haze. Something kept intruding on his consciousness. A low voice at his elbow. He turned. What was it? Soup? What d’you mean, soup? The steward indicated the cup. ‘Better drink it nice and hot, sair.’ He smiled and drank absent-mindedly. ‘Thank you, Carlo.’ The destroyer that had been bombed had grounded on a sandbank and lay canted over with her upper deck half awash. The transfer of troops to the sloop and launches was going smoothly under a pall of smoke and steam. Along his upper deck men were broaching tins of corned beef and cutting loaves into hunks in readiness for the soldiers. They had been days on the business — it was settling down into a fixed routine. The young Volunteer Reserve surgeon came out of the after superstructure where he had his casualty station, and lit a cigarette, staring shoreward. Then a lookout shouted and the guns broke out again. The roar of the plane’s engines and the screech of the bomb deafened them as it hurtled down. The burst was like the flash of a fifteeninch gun ten feet away, annihilating thought and all sensation with a hell-hot blinding blast of steel fragments.

He picked himself up and held on to the chart table. His concern for the moment was the bargeload of troops approaching. They were safe. The first boat had filled up and was pulling back. There were splinter holes everywhere, but not much visible damage. The navigator was untouched; the lookouts and signalmen were disentangling themselves out of a confused heap of duffle coats and seaboots and shrapnel helmets, grinning sheepishly. Carlo was standing staring at something on the deck. The captain looked down and saw a crimson puddle. He was standing in it. A red puddle, spreading slowly. . . .

The barge came alongside and the men of the Expeditionary Force began climbing wearily over the rails.

His head nodded where he sat conning his ship back through the minefields. Again and again he forced open his leaden eyelids with all the will power he possessed. It was bad enough to have to fight this overwhelming desire for sleep, this tyranny of weariness; but he had to fight the surgeon too. ‘Better come below, sir,’ the youngster kept insisting; and now the first lieutenant joined in. ‘Let them carry you below, sir.’ But he was damned if he’d go below. He had a thousand men on board in his charge — a thousand exhausted soldiers who had fought a rear-guard action against tanks and bombers for a fortnight. He looked down at the decks where they lay already asleep in the security of their trust in him. This was the last phase of the rear-guard action, and, before God, you didn’t fight it by going below! He told the surgeon so while the lad was fumbling for the tourniquet to ease it. Already he could see the cliffs of Dover.

The cliffs and the sea and the sky blurred and darkened. Carlo, who smelt faintly of garlic, had his arm round the captain holding him upright.

The darkness deepened. Waves of faintness engulfed him.

‘Tell them,’ he said, ‘to send more boats . . . more boats . . .’ Then his chin dropped.

The first lieutenant and the surgeon tried to lift him down from where he hung across the binnacle.

‘No, no,’ insisted Carlo passionately, ‘I take him! I take his body, sair. Give him to me.’

The yacht-club telephone rang, and the elderly steward, unaccustomed to the sound of it, laid down his paper, removed his spectacles, and picked up the receiver. A man’s voice spoke authoritatively for about a minute.

The steward said nothing. He was an old Navy man and had been a pensioner for a quarter of a century, but he recognized the note in the speaker’s voice. He waited till the end of the message.

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he said, and then added, ‘There’s only the one yacht here now, sir. The Wanderer. Motor yacht, forty feet long. There’s no crew, sir. Owner’s fighting in France. There’s a young lady on board at this moment —’

The voice interrupted him. He listened, turning the spectacles over in his knotted fingers, staring into vacancy.

‘Aye, aye, sir. I’ll do what I can. Old Navy man myself. They said I was too old to fight.’

There was no answer. ‘Hullo, sir?’ Silence. He replaced the receiver.

The Wanderer was lying at her buoy and there was no sign of the girl. He untied the dinghy lying at the jetty and rowed alongside. At the sound of the oars as he boated them the girl’s head and shoulders appeared above the companionway. She was flushed and had a scrubbing brush in her hand.

‘They want her, miss,’ he said simply. ‘They rung up from the Admiralty. Proceed to Ramsgate for orders. They’re taking every craft on the south coast.’

She brushed a lock of hair back from her damp forehead with her forearm. ‘I’m single-handed,’ she said. ‘Can you run the engine if I steer?’

‘You, miss?’ He hadn’t thought of that.

‘She’s full up with petrol. There’s water, too, and some stuff in tins to eat. Bring some bread.’

‘You know what it’s for, don’t you, miss? They won’t let a woman —’

‘They needn’t know,’ was the girl’s answer. She stood motionless, thinking. The ebb tide running past the strakes of the dinghy made a little chuckling noise in the stillness.

‘Bring a couple of shrapnel helmets. Get them from the A.R.P. people. . . . What about Johnnie?’

‘Johnnie?’ He turned that over in his mind. Johnnie was simple, but he was useful in a boat. Ashore he just sat and played with pebbles, but put him in a boat and he was all there. The club employed him to ferry people to their yachts and for attending to the moorings and odd jobs like scraping and painting. He didn’t speak very plain, but after all it wasn’t talk they wanted on the beaches of Dunkirk. Another aspect of the situation occurred to him. She seemed to take it for granted he was coming. ‘What about the club, miss? I’m the caretaker and steward.’

She had emerged from her reverie. ‘The club? What the hell does the club matter?’

He grinned, showing tobacco-stained fangs. ‘You’ve said it, miss. Give me half an hour.’

When he was halfway across to the jetty she hailed him again. Her clear voice was like a boy’s.

‘Johnnie will want a shrapnel helmet too.’

He nodded; she went below and fell to mopping up the mess on the cabin floor. She had decided to give the boat a scrubout because it occupied her mind, which, since she had had no word from France for three weeks, was inclined to imagine things. This was where they had spent the happiest hours of his leave—the happiest hours of their lives. And now, for all she knew, he was waiting on those hellish beaches, one of all those thousands of exhausted men, waiting under shell and machine-gun fire for succor from England. She flung the mop and scrubber into the bucket and jerked open a drawer. There was all his old kit: gray flannel trousers, sweater, an old shooting jacket, a yellow muffler. She would push her hair up under the shrapnel helmet. His pipes stuck in a rack over his bunk caught her eye. That would be the finishing touch. Keep one of those in her mouth when they got to Ramsgate, and talk gruff. She selected a blackened bulldog and experimented in front of the glass. It tasted utterly foul. . . .

Coming down channel, they overtook a convoy of motor yachts and followed them. She had the chart open in front of her, but the daylight was fading and there were no lights anywhere she could recognize. She had never entered Ramsgate from seaward — only from the railway station, once as a child, carrying her doll and a spade and bucket, in charge of her nurse.

She listened to the drone of the engine with satisfaction. Old Ferris had been a mechanician when he served in the Navy. It wasn’t so good at the start, but he was enjoying himself down in the engine room now he had picked up the hang of the thing. Every now and again he put his head out of the hatch with his spectacles on the end of his nose. ‘Running as sweet as a nut, miss,’ he announced.

‘Bravo,’ she answered.

Johnnie sat in the bows staring at the evening star. She tried to remember why she had brought Johnnie. He worshiped her like a dog, but that wasn’t the reason. It was because she felt she had no right to take an able-bodied man from his work in England; and on the spur of the moment she could think of nobody on the spot who was as handy in the boat. He and she used to take Johnnie away for the week-end sometimes. Johnnie washed up and looked after the boat when they went ashore. . . . She was one of the few people who understood what he said. He turned his head and smiled at her at that moment. It was the slow, confiding smile of a child. He hadn’t the remotest idea where he was going. He didn’t care. He just trusted her. She felt a swift pang of compunction, and stifled it, giving him back his smile. Reassured, he resumed his contemplation of the star.

She climbed ashore in the dusk, the awful pipe clenched between her teeth, and was confronted by a man in the uniform of a lieutenant commander.

‘What ship?’

‘ Wanderer.’ Nobody had ever called the Wanderer a ship before. He would have liked that.

‘What is she?’

‘Forty-foot motor cruiser.’

‘Armed?’

She shook her head. Other owners of yachts were crowding round asking for orders.

He glanced at her shrapnel helmet.

‘Well, you’d better collect some rifles and life belts. First-aid outfit, too, if you haven’t got it.’

‘Then what?’ She stuck her hands in her trouser pockets, making her voice as gruff and laconic as possible.

‘La Panne. Time it so as to get there in the dawn. Take off all you’ve got room for each trip and transfer them to something bigger. Stick it as long as you can, and good luck.’ He indicated a gap in the barbed wire, where she supposed rifles and life belts were obtainable, and dismissed her from his mind.

She went back to the edge of the jetty and hailed old Ferris. The harbor was crammed with the dim forms of boats manœuvring for berths alongside. Beside her on the pierhead was a soldier with a Bren gun mounted on a tripod.

‘Ferris,’ she called down to the Wanderer, ‘come ashore with me and collect some rifles and life belts.’ The soldier sidled up beside her.

‘Here, Skipper,’ he muttered, ‘rifles ain’t no use. Take me and this Bren gun. Wait till its dark and I’ll slip down and come along with you. They won’t miss me till I’m back.’

She grinned delightedly. He would know about rifles, too. She had never fired one in her life. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Tanner’s the name, Skipper. You’re a sport.’ She felt a bit of a sport.

The sky line was like the edge of the Pit. To the westward the oil tanks of Dunkirk were a sullen blaze that every now and again leaped upwards like the eruption of a volcano as a shell burst in the flaming inferno. Fires glowed dully along the coast, and shore batteries blinked white flashes that reached the ear as dull reverberations like distant thunder. The searchlights wheeled about the low-lying clouds into which tracer shells were soaring.

They had solved the problem of navigating to La Panne by following a paddle steamer that had half a dozen lifeboats in tow. The whole night was full of the sound of motorboats’ exhausts. There was a young moon peeping in and out of the drifting clouds, and it revealed the indistinct lines of little craft far and wide, heading in the same direction.

Johnnie sat entranced by the spectacle, crowing huskily at intervals. Tanner, having mounted his Bren gun in the stern, gave her a relief at the wheel. He said it was much the same as driving a car. She practised loading the rifle under his tuition. Old Ferris visited them at intervals, calling her ‘Skipper.’ It didn’t matter what Johnnie called her, because nobody could understand what he said.

‘You’re a bit young for this game, eh, Skipper?’ asked Tanner. ‘How old are you?’

‘About a hundred,’ she replied with a gruff laugh. And in that moment, before the dawn of hell’s delight, she felt it.

The dawn came slowly, revealing the small craft of the south coast of England covering the Channel like water beetles on the surface of a pool. Pleasure steamers and yachts, barges, scoots, wherries, lifeboats, motorboats, rowing boats, and canoes. . . . Fishermen, yachtsmen, longshoremen, men who had never been afloat in their lives, millionaires and the very poor, elderly men and lads in their teens, answering in a headlong rush the appeal for boats. Boats for the beaches and the last of the Expeditionary Force.

Somehow she hadn’t thought about the dead. Her thoughts were entirely occupied with the living. It wasn’t till Johnnie began making queer noises of distress and pointing down into the shallow water that she saw them — the men who had been machine-gunned in the shallows, wading out into the water to reach security. They were still there, some floating, some submerged; in an odd way they seemed to convey resentment at the disturbance of their oblivion by the passing keels.

She called Johnnie to her side. ‘Take the lead line and sound over the bows. Call the soundings. Nothing else matters. Do you understand, Johnnie? Nothing else matters. I am here.’

He made guttural noises, pointing at Tanner, who was blazing away with the Bren gun at a Heinkel overhead that had bombed a trawler astern of them. She held him with her eyes. ‘Nothing else matters, do you understand?’ He picked up the lead line and went forward obediently. She put her lips to the voice pipe. ‘Go very slow, Ferris.’

‘Go very slow,’ repeated the old man.

She crept inshore. The beach was pitted with shell craters out of which men came running, wading out into the water to meet them. From the sand dunes more men stumbled, helping the wounded. The whole foreshore was alive with men and boats, and the smoke from the Dunkirk fires flowed over them like a dark river.

At three and a half feet she would stop. It was the least they could float in. She listened to the strange cries Johnnie emitted as he hauled in the dripping lead line, understanding them perfectly.

Presently, her mouth to the voice pipe, she gave the order to stop. Tanner was having trouble with the Bren gun and swearing in a ceaseless flow of incomprehensible blasphemy. Old Ferris, complete in shrapnel helmet and life belt, climbed out of his hatch and came towards her, lighting his pipe.

‘They said I was too old to fight, but — ‘

‘Get back. We’re in four feet. I must keep working the engines.’ A bomb burst among the men wading towards them. She shut her eyes for a moment. ‘Keep on sounding, Johnnie. What water have you got?’

‘Fraghfaph-ah-ah,’ crowed Johnnie.

‘Good boy. Keep it going.’

The Bren gun broke out afresh. Tanner, having cleared the jam, opened fire again, chanting oaths like a denunciatory psalm. ‘Slow astern, Ferris.’

Another cluster of men wading to their armpits had reached them.

Johnnie looked back at her and pointed at their sun-scorched, puffing faces. No doubt existed in his mind that it was all something to do with his leadline achievements. He was delighted. Somewhere out of sight a German fieldgun battery opened fire, the shells whistling viciously overhead.

She searched every face as they came splashing and gasping towards her and somehow contrived to hoist each other inboard. She took sixty or seventy at a trip and transferred them to the nearest vessel lying out in the deep water; she had hitherto believed that the utmost capacity of the Wanderer was a dozen. Backwards and forwards they went under exploding bombs, under machinegun fire and whining shells. Tanner ran out of ammunition and they went alongside a destroyer, where he got another case and a spare barrel for the Bren gun. She lost all count of time, all fear, all feeling. Sometimes she interrogated weary men: Had they seen his unit? Had they ever heard his name? They shook their heads and begged for water. She had none left.

Then suddenly it seemed that the beaches were empty. She didn’t know that the men were being marched westward to Dunkirk, where the French and British destroyers were crowding alongside the mole and embarking troops in thousands under shellfire. Except for a few scattered units moving west, the beaches were empty. The task was done; but where was he—Oh Christ, where was he?

The Bren gun had been silent for a long time, but she hadn’t noticed. Now, turning to look seaward, she saw Tanner lying beside it with his knees screwed up into his belly. She ran aft and knelt beside him.

His eyes sought hers out of his gray face. ‘ I bought it, Skipper. Sorry. . . . Got a drop of water?’

She raised his head and held it against her breast. ’There isn’t any water left.’

His eyes were suddenly puzzled. . . . He moved his head sideways a little and then smiled, and died, ineffably content.

They followed a big gray coaster back to Dover. Old Ferris got a spare red ensign out of the locker and tucked Tanner up in it. He didn’t mind Tanner’s being killed, having been disposed to regard him jealously as an intruder into a nice little family party. Moreover, he disapproved of his language. He walked forward to the wheelhouse. She was moving the spokes of the wheel slowly between her blistered hands. Her shrapnel helmet lay on the chart beside the valiant briar pipe. She was aware of the old man beside her and of having reached the end of her tether at one and the same moment.

Old Ferris kicked Johnnie, asleep at her feet, into wakefulness. ‘Take the wheel,’ he said gruffly, and held her as she pitched, sobbing and exhausted, into his arms.

They berthed alongside the Admiralty pier and she climbed ashore to find someone who could give them fuel and water. The quays were thronged with troops in thousands, being fed and sorted out into units and entrained. A hospital ship was evacuating wounded into fleets of ambulances. She stepped aside to give room to the bearers of a stretcher and glanced at the face on the pillow.

He had a bandage round his head and opened his eyes suddenly on her face.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she announced in a calm matter-of-fact tone. She felt no emotion whatever.

He smiled. ‘Well, here I am,’ he said.