Don and Claude were powerless. Their instincts were paralysed, their senses overwhelmed by sights, and sounds, and terrifying smells they could never have imagined. They did nothing. Some men managed to stumble from the lake, begging for their flames to be doused; others, further away from safety, screamed for mercy as their bodies began to melt. In tears, soldiers slowly began to raise their rifles and answer their prayers.
One of the burning men staggered from the pit of fire until he was standing only a few feet away from Claude and Don, the silhouette of a half-man, ablaze from head to foot like some Tudor martyr. He was swaying, begging them to shoot him.
It was Don who did it. Picked up one of the many abandoned rifles at the side of the road and pulled the trigger until the screaming had stopped.
It was some time before they were able to speak.
"I thought you didn't," Claude whispered hoarsely.
"I had to. It was the only way."
That is strange. That's exactly what I think, when I am doing my job," Claude sighed.
They resumed trudging, in silence, towards Dunkirk.
No sleep for Ramsay that night. "I can hardly keep my eyes open, days and nights roll into one and I have no idea whether it is sun or moon outside," he scribbled on a note to his wife Mag, before yet another interruption forced him to push it back into his desk drawer. His notes were the only form of contact he'd had with his wife for days, hurriedly scribbled devotions that betrayed desperate tiredness and hinted at the still more desperate nature of the task. In return, she sent him gingerbread and fresh asparagus from their garden.
The onward rush of crisis never ceased. Every day, every hour, brought a new test of stamina and ingenuity. He had never given up hope, not up to now, in spite of deadlines and odds that no man could beat. But they had taken away his best ships, the newest destroyers, every one, and told him to get by on scraps. What could he do? He didn't control weather or tides or cloud bases, let alone the Luftwaffe; now he didn't even control much of a fleet. Not for the first time in his controversial career, he felt betrayed.
He paced up and down his room, his shoes clipping on the rough concrete floor and echoing back from the whitewashed walls, a mug of tea that had grown stone cold in his hand.
For three days the soldiers of the BEF had struggled off the beaches by any means they could, in rowing boats, on launches, on rafts, out to the larger ships standing offshore. It was slow, so desperately slow, with thousands of men standing for hours up to their chests in water while they queued for their turn and were strafed from above. Some even tried to swim, but many of them didn't make it, their breeches and boots filling with water and turning to bags of cement.
The bodies floating in the water only added to the problems, along with the abandoned greatcoats and lengths of rope that swirled back and forth in the surf. They fouled propellers and caught on the oars, slowing things down even further. In this place, even dying didn't help.. Ramsay knew that might be the fate of the entire BEF. There were hundreds of thousands of them, still waiting, only a few miles away, out there in the darkness ah, so it was night. But on what day? He had no idea how long he had left: hours, another day or so? But however long it was, he knew he could never get them off the beaches like this.
It was time to gamble with his last card.
(Thursday 30 May 1940. William L. Shirer, CBS.)
Good evening. This is Berlin.
The great battle of Flanders, as it will probably go down in history, is rapidly nearing its end, the German High Command stated flatly today.
The first few lines from the daily High Command communique give the story. I quote: "The great battle in Flanders and the Artois approaches its end, with the destruction of the English and French armies still fighting there. Since yesterday, the British Expeditionary Force has been in a complete state of dissolution. Leaving behind its entire mass of war materiel, it is fleeing to the sea. By swimming, or on small boats, the enemy is attempting to reach the English ships lying off the shore on which our air force is falling with devastating effect. Over sixty ships have been hit by our bombs, sixteen transports and three warships sunk, and twenty-one merchant ships and ten warships damaged or set on fire."
That's how the German war communique today described it.
Earlier in the day, a special communique of the German High Command told of a great air battle over Dunkirk in which the German air-armada strove to prevent the British from extricating what is left of their expeditionary force by taking them back to England in ships. This gigantic air attack, apparently on a scale never before seen even in this war, took place yesterday afternoon after German reconnaissance planes had discovered a great fleet of English transports approaching the Franco-Belgian coast.. .
We do not know how many German planes took part, but there were certainly hundreds of them in the air. The British, too, must have sent hundreds of planes into that battle because the Germans claim to have shot down sixty-eight British planes in this one engagement.
Dunkirk. Daylight. A place of dead beasts and dead men, some long dead, their bodies unearthed from old graves by the shelling, others yet to find a grave of any kind. Pieces of people's lives. The bodies of more than thirty convent girls outside a burning church, laid out in a neat line, like a choir. Many troops drunk, sitting at the side of the road as though on holiday, waving bottles, waiting for whatever; others in shops, scrounging, scavenging, looting, shoving loaded fists into their packs; and on every side destroyed trucks, and tanks, and cars, and crying cats, and evil smoke, and tangled trolley lines that spread across the roadways like a gladiator's net, and more bodies that were not in neat lines, and roads blocked by wreckage and rubble, and every soldier's pace marked by the crunching of broken glass, stepping over abandoned rifles and the bodies of those who had dropped them. One British soldier sailed along on roller skates, another carried a parrot in a cage, which made Winston bark.
And fog. Dunkirk was covered in a thick mist that kept the Luftwaffe at bay and the seas calm. Small mercies.
A corporal offered them a sip from his water bottle. Don choked: it was filled with brandy.
"Come far?"
"Calais."
"Jesus."
"What do we do?"
"Go to the beaches. Best chance, mate."
"I'd like a new uniform."
"Plenty around. Just pick up whatever you want. Don't mind the stains."
"You too, Claude?" Don asked.
He nodded. "Why not? I think we are fighting on the same side now, English."
"He's French?" the corporal enquired.
"Yes."
"Most of the French are over that way." He waved vaguely.
"We're together."
"But he's French."
"Nevertheless, we've come this far .. ."
"Look, you don't understand. You're English and it's' the corporal's eyebrows arched and he winked slyly 'you know, first things first. On the boats."
"You mean English only?"
"Froggies have got their own boats. Over there." He waved vaguely once more.
"Aren't we on the same side?"
"Are we ever?"
This time, I think."
"Please yourself. Your funeral." The corporal rebuttoned his breast pocket; something was hanging from it, glittering. Don remembered the looting.
"Anyway, I'm off," the corporal announced. "Best of British."
So they searched out uniforms and struggled eastward, to the beaches.
Nothing could prepare them for the sense of violation that hit them as they crested the final dune. They sank to their knees, knowing that everything they had dared, and seen, and risked, had been worthless.
The beach was broad and endless, and infested with men. All about them were the abandoned remnants of the vehicles that had carried them there cars, buses, tanks, bicycles, lorries, ambulances, and horse-drawn carts stuck in the sand and smoking, while the sea as far as they could see was littered with the bon
es of boats that would never take them off.
It was all so desperate. A line of trucks had been driven far out into the shallow water, one behind the other, to form a jetty across which soldiers clambered and alongside which, small boats nudged as they tried to pick them up. One steamer had deliberately rammed the beach, its engines still running to keep it straight, while soldiers used it as a bridge to the smaller boats that hovered at its stern. Improvisation. Hopelessness. Men swimming, disappearing; rafts being lashed together, then breaking apart; boats being rowed out to sea with nothing but scraps of wood and rifle butts. In the mist, a mile or so offshore, larger vessels waited, and waited, for this chaos to deliver up to them some form of catch.
"What's the point? Tell me, Claude: what's been the bloody point?" Don shouted in despair.
Whatever organization there was on the beaches seemed to be aimed at forming the men into long lines, swirling like sand snakes across the beach, doubling back on themselves time and again until the head of the snake had thrust itself into the sea. There it waited until it was almost submerged. But for what? It seemed so slow, so pointless. Even as they watched, two rider-less horses charged along the beach, splitting the snakes to pieces. If two nervous horses could achieve that, what might a squadron of Me-109s do?
Don and Claude sat in the sand, their last remaining energies smothered by dejection.
Don felt shamed at being part of anything that could be reduced to the sort of rabble he saw in front of him, and along with the shame came a violent surge of anger at the lies he had been told about the war. But he also now knew that he, too, had told lies about this war. Memories began crowding in upon his thoughts the girl on horseback, the young officer in the farmhouse, the blazing, pleading soldier experiences that had ripped apart the stark moral certainties he had taken before the Tribunal. And it made him wonder if it had ever been truly a matter of conscience, or had his moralizing been little more than malice, intended for no higher purpose than to get back at his father? Don was a young man who had painted for himself a picture of life filled with vivid colours and decisive brush strokes, but it bore no resemblance to anything he had seen in the last few days. He gasped. Had it been only days?
Beside him, Claude slept, but Don couldn't settle. He lay struggling with his emotions, feeling insignificant, until the afternoon sun began to evaporate the mist that was hanging above the sea. As it did so, he saw the horizon filled with a mass of tiny black dots. They drew closer, and slowly began to take shape and meaning. Small boats of every description.
Fishing smacks. Drifters. Trawlers. Scows. Cement-carriers. Cabin cruisers. Motor launches. Sailing barges. Cockleboats from Leigh-on-Sea and barges from the River Thames. Even grain-hoppers and mud-dredgers. An armada of little ships. Don didn't know it, but he was watching Bertram Ramsay playing the last card in his pack.
Operation Dynamo was supposed to be a state secret. Some hope. Thousands of people were watching it from the clifftops above Dover, and many more had heard whispers. Word got around.
The loudest of those whispers came from the men who ran the Small Vessels Pool at the Ministry of Shipping. Ramsay had demanded small boats and it was their job to obtain them. Every yacht club and boatyard on the south and east coasts got a call. Did they have any self-propelled pleasure craft stout enough for the Channel? Anything from about twenty-odd feet in length? Ah, good, how many? Ready for sea? Then how soon could they be ready? Could they sail on four hours' notice?
They were interested in boats, not excuses. It didn't matter whether owners were away or fees had not been paid; if they floated, they were commandeered.
Individual owners were telephoned, almost apologetically, in the English way. "It's for the boys in France," they were told confidentially. "They may need to borrow your boat. They might need to borrow you, too. No experience in the Channel? Doesn't matter, old chap. No charts, no compass? And the old girl needs a lick of paint? Not a problem. By the way, do you have any friends who enjoy a bit of a sail?"
So they gathered, at Tilbury, at Sheerness, and at Ramsgate. Hundreds of little boats. They came, some with polished brass, others dressed in mud and rust, with names like Grace Darling, Girl Nancy and Auntie Gus, manned by whoever was available. Some of the crews were professional seamen, fishermen, life boatmen naval reserve, familiar with the ways of the sea, but many were civilians, simply weekend sailors who came expecting little more than a lap around the harbour. Many of them had no idea they were going off to war.
Ramsay's requirements were simple. He had ships with a large capacity that could wait offshore, and he had more than three hundred thousand troops waiting on the shore. What he needed was something in between, boats that were small enough to get to the beaches and fast enough to get off again in as short a time as possible, a sort of nautical taxi service. Because, up to now, it had been a complete shambles.
In Dunkirk it was every man for himself, and every boat. The rules of evacuation were made up as they went along, but often it seemed there were no rules at all. Many of the little boats were swamped, as too many men tried to board or the surf got too high. Some were damaged by collisions or shells or bombs, others simply broke down and were abandoned. In spite of the efforts of the beach marshals there was little order on the beaches; soldiers tried to clamber aboard weighed down with everything from dogs to crates of NAAFI cigarettes and other forms of looted booty, even a live goose.
It was never going to be pretty. All that Ramsay could do was to throw as many boats as possible at the long miles of beaches, and hope that they might make a difference. Because, at the present rate of evacuation, the BEF was doomed.
Viscount Gort sat in a hard, upright chair, looking out through billowing lace curtains to the sea beyond. On the broad stretch of beach between him and the sea he could see tens of thousands of men, and he knew that hundreds of thousands lay a little further to the west. But to Viscount Gort, this was the loneliest place on earth.
Gort knew he would be blamed for the defeat of the BEF. Arguably, he had given the British army its only chance of survival by defying the stupidity of those politicians and desk-warriors who had given the order to launch the drive south, but such delicacies were for historians. For today and for all who lived through it, he was the man who had led the BEF to its ruination. He was its commander, and it was upon his shoulders that the responsibility would fall. He didn't know yet how heavy that burden would be; he would have to wait and see. So that is what he did. He waited. In his headquarters in a seaside villa near La Panne, some eight miles east of Dunkirk.
With every passing hour they brought him more complaints, honed to razor sharpness on the desks in Whitehall. The latest was that the army wasn't where the boats were. He could scarcely believe the pettiness of it. He had marched them back from the jaws of hell, through conditions where most other armies would simply have surrendered, and now the navy couldn't get its bloody boats to them. Well, he was damned if he was going to ask his men to march one more mile. They'd done enough. The navy could come to them. It was nothing but sheer ineptitude on their part. That's what he'd told London, and in precisely those terms. Ineptitude.
So they demanded still more. Now it was that the boats should take a larger number of Frenchmen. More political nonsense. How many times had he told them that every Frenchman put in a boat meant one more Englishman left behind? The French had the whole of France to creep back into, so why had they squashed into Dunkirk? He'd even had to offer the French an equal share of the eastern mole, and all they'd done was protest that the mole was a French mole and what business did he have in offering them anything that was already theirs. To hell with it. If they were so keen on their wretched mole, why hadn't they expended a little more effort in defending it?
God, it was such a mess. Everything he'd worked for in his life lay in ruins. He didn't know what would pain him more, other men's condemnation or their pity. As events battered him ever more mercilessly, he clung to the instincts that had mad
e him what he was: a brave soldier. He was going to get his men back or as many men as he could. And while that happened, he was going to show them that he, at least, had not deserted them. He was going to stay right where he was, do his duty as best he knew how, until they were all on board. Then he would be the last Englishman home.
The beach marshals in charge of the evacuation weren't having any of it. "No French. French have their own ships," Don and Claude were told, but no one could tell them where. It wasn't anyone's job to know. And it wasn't the job of the English to evacuate any but their own.
"And no bloody dogs."
That decided it for them. There was an armada out there, but they wouldn't be allowed to use it, not together. They had to find their own boat.
Boats, boats, everywhere they looked there were boats. Many of them were upturned and semi-submerged and more with each passing hour as the wind came in from the sea and the surf began to rise. Some had been riddled with bullet holes or smashed in collisions, others simply capsized and abandoned. It became clear to them why so many had been abandoned when they tried righting one of the waterlogged boats. It couldn't be done. Claude's ankle was still weak, Don's arm useless, and it wasn't long before they were soaked and dejected from their repeated forays into the sea. Every time they tried, they were knocked down, either by the waves or by the boat they were trying to catch, and every time they hauled themselves back up the beach they used up a little more of their strength. Turning over a capsized boat, even a small one, was simply beyond them. But they had to continue trying; there was no other way.
It was the surf that came to their aid in the end, washing close to shore an upturned lifeboat that had probably done duty on an excursion ship. It was small enough for them to turn upright, although it took several attempts. Then they had to bale it out and drag their prize painfully to the shore. Claude had twisted his ankle once more with the effort, but tried to disguise the fact until he collapsed as soon as the lifeboat grounded on the sand.