Atonement

  Turner was thinking this when Nettle gripped his arm and pointed. The commotion of the passing French column had covered the sound, but they were easy enough to see. There were at least fifteen of them, at ten thousand feet, little dots in the blue, circling above the road. Turner and the corporals stopped to watch, and everyone nearby saw them too.

  An exhausted voice murmured close to his ear, “Fuck. Where’s the RAF?”

  Another said knowingly, “They’ll go for the Frogs.”

  As if goaded into disproof, one of the specks peeled away and began its near-vertical dive, directly above their heads. For seconds the sound did not reach them. The silence was building like pressure in their ears. Even the wild shouts that went up and down the road did not relieve it. Take cover! Disperse! Disperse! At the double!

  It was difficult to move. He could walk on at a steady trudge, and he could stop, but it was an effort, an effort of memory, to reach for the unfamiliar commands, to turn away from the road and run. They had stopped by the last house in the village. Beyond the house was a barn and flanking both was the field where the farmer had been plowing. Now he was standing under a tree with his dog, as though sheltering from a shower of rain. His horse, still in harness, grazed along the unplowed strip. Soldiers and civilians were streaming away from the road in all directions. A woman brushed past him carrying a crying child, then she changed her mind and came back and stood, turning indecisively at the side of the road. Which way? The farmyard or the field? Her immobility delivered him from his own. As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had become a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally. Turner guided the woman through the gate. He wanted her to run with him into the center of the field. He had touched her, and made her decision for her, so now he felt he could not abandon her. But the boy was at least six years old and heavy, and together they were making no progress at all.

  He dragged the child from her arms. “Come on,” he shouted.

  A Stuka carried a single thousand-pound bomb. The idea on the ground was to get away from buildings, vehicles and other people. The pilot was not going to waste his precious load on a lone figure in a field. When he turned back to strafe it would be another matter. Turner had seen them hunt down a sprinting man for the sport of it. With a free hand he was pulling on the woman’s arm. The boy was wetting his pants and screaming in Turner’s ear. The mother seemed incapable of running. She was stretching out her hand and shouting. She wanted her son back. The child was wriggling toward her, across his shoulder. Now came the screech of the falling bomb. They said that if you heard the noise stop before the explosion, your time was up. As he dropped to the grass he pulled the woman with him and shoved her head down. He was half lying across the child as the ground shook to the unbelievable roar. The shock wave prized them from the earth. They covered their faces against the stinging spray of dirt. They heard the Stuka climb from its dive even as they heard the banshee wail of the next attack. The bomb had hit the road less than eighty yards away. He had the boy under his arm and he was trying to pull the woman to her feet.

  “We’ve got to run again. We’re too close to the road.” The woman answered but he did not understand her. Again they were stumbling across the field. He felt the pain in his side like a flash of color. The boy was in his arms, and again the woman seemed to be dragging back, and trying to get her son from him. There were hundreds in the field now, all making for the woods on the far side. At the shrill whine of the bomb everyone cowered on the ground. But the woman had no instinct for danger and he had to pull her down again. This time they were pressing their faces into freshly turned earth. As the screech grew louder the woman shouted what sounded like a prayer. He realized then that she wasn’t speaking French. The explosion was on the far side of the road, more than a hundred and fifty yards away. But now the first Stuka was turning over the village and dropping for the strafe. The boy had gone silent with shock. His mother wouldn’t stand. Turner pointed to the Stuka coming in over the rooftops. They were right in its path and there was no time for argument. She wouldn’t move. He threw himself down into the furrow. The rippling thuds of machine-gun fire in the plowed earth and the engine roar flashed past them. A wounded soldier was screaming. Turner was on his feet. But the woman would not take his hand. She sat on the ground and hugged the boy tightly to her. She was speaking Flemish to him, soothing him, surely telling him that everything was going to be all right. Mama would see to that. Turner didn’t know a single word of the language. It would have made no difference. She paid him no attention. The boy was staring at him blankly over his mother’s shoulder.

  Turner took a step back. Then he ran. As he floundered across the furrows the attack was coming in. The rich soil was clinging to his boots. Only in nightmares were feet so heavy. A bomb fell on the road, way over in the center of the village, where the lorries were. But one screech hid another, and it hit the field before he could go down. The blast lifted him forward several feet and drove him face-first into the soil. When he came to, his mouth and nose and ears were filled with dirt. He was trying to clear his mouth, but he had no saliva. He used a finger, but that was worse. He was gagging on the dirt, then he was gagging on his filthy finger. He blew the dirt from his nose. His snot was mud and it covered his mouth. But the woods were near, there would be streams and waterfalls and lakes in there. He imagined a paradise. When the rising howl of a diving Stuka sounded again, he struggled to place the sound. Was it the all-clear? His thoughts too were clogged. He could not spit or swallow, he could not easily breathe, and he could not think. Then, at the sight of the farmer with his dog still waiting patiently under the tree, it came back to him, he remembered everything and he turned to look back. Where the woman and her son had been was a crater. Even as he saw it, he thought he had always known. That was why he had to leave them. His business was to survive, though he had forgotten why. He kept on toward the woods.

  He walked a few steps into the tree cover, and sat in the new undergrowth with his back to a birch sapling. His only thought was of water. There were more than two hundred people sheltering in the woods, including some wounded who had dragged themselves in. There was a man, a civilian, not far off, crying and shouting in pain. Turner got up and moved further away. All the new greenery spoke to him only of water. The attack continued on the road and over the village. He cleared away old leaves and used his helmet to dig. The soil was damp but no water oozed into the hole he had made, even when it was eighteen inches deep. So he sat and thought about water and tried to clean his tongue against his sleeve. When a Stuka dived, it was impossible not to tense and shrink, though each time he thought he didn’t have the strength. Toward the end they came over to strafe the woods, but to no effect. Leaves and twigs tumbled from the canopy. Then the planes were gone, and in the huge silence that loomed over the fields and trees and the village, there was not even birdsong. After a while, from the direction of the road came blasts of a whistle for the all-clear. But no one moved. He remembered this from last time. They were too dazed, they were in shock from repeated episodes of terror. Each dive brought every man, cornered and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not come, the trial had to be lived through all over again and the fear did not diminish. For the living, the end of a Stuka attack was the paralysis of shock, of repeated shocks. The sergeants and junior officers might come around shouting and kicking the men into standing. But they were drained and, for a good while, useless as troops.

  So he sat there in a daze like everyone else, just as he had the first time, outside the village whose name he could not remember. These French villages with Belgian names. When he was separated from his unit and, what was worse for an infantryman, from his rifle. How many days ago? There could be no way of
knowing. He examined his revolver which was clogged with dirt. He removed the ammunition and tossed the gun into the bushes. After a time there was a sound behind him and a hand was on his shoulder.

  “Here you go. Courtesy of the Green Howards.”

  Corporal Mace was passing him some dead man’s water bottle. Since it was almost full he used the first swig to rinse out his mouth, but that was a waste. He drank the dirt with the rest.

  “Mace, you’re an angel.”

  The corporal extended a hand to pull him up. “Got to shift. There’s a rumor the fucking Belgians have collapsed. We might get cut off from the east. Still miles to go.”

  As they were walking back across the field, Nettle joined them. He had a bottle of wine and an Amo bar which they passed around.

  “Nice bouquet,” Turner said when he had drunk deeply.

  “Dead Frog.”

  The peasant and his collie were back behind the plow. The three soldiers approached the crater where the smell of cordite was strong. The hole was a perfectly symmetrical inverted cone whose sides were smooth, as though finely sieved and raked. There were no human signs, not a shred of clothing or shoe leather. Mother and child had been vaporized. He paused to absorb this fact, but the corporals were in a hurry and pushed him on and soon they joined the stragglers on the road. It was easier now. There would be no traffic until the sappers took their bulldozers into the village. Ahead, the cloud of burning oil stood over the landscape like an angry father. High-flying bombers droned above, a steady two-way stream moving into and returning from their target. It occurred to Turner that he might be walking into a slaughter. But everyone was going that way, and he could think of no alternative. Their route was taking them well to the right of the cloud, to the east of Dunkirk, toward the Belgian border.

  “Bray Dunes,” he said, remembering the name from the map.

  Nettle said, “I like the sound of those.”

  They passed men who could barely walk for their blisters. Some were barefoot. A soldier with a bloody chest wound reclined in an ancient pram pushed by his mates. A sergeant was leading a cart horse over the back of which was draped an officer, unconscious or dead, his feet and wrists secured by ropes. Some troops were on bicycles, most walked in twos or threes. A dispatch rider from the Highland Light Infantry came by on a Harley-Davidson. His bloodied legs dangled uselessly, and his pillion passenger, who had heavily bandaged arms, was working the foot pedals. All along the way were discarded greatcoats, left there by men too hot to carry them. Turner had already talked the corporals out of leaving theirs.

  They had been going for an hour when they heard behind them a rhythmic thudding, like the ticking of a gigantic clock. They turned to look back. At first sight it seemed that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road toward them. It was a platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slope, led by a second lieutenant. They came by at a forced march, their gaze fixed forward, their arms swinging high. The stragglers stood aside to let them through. These were cynical times, but no one risked a catcall. The show of discipline and cohesion was shaming. It was a relief when the Guards had pounded out of sight and the rest could resume their introspective trudging.

  The sights were familiar, the inventory was the same, but now there was more of everything; vehicles, bomb craters, detritus. There were more bodies. He walked across the land until he caught the taste of the sea, carried across the flat, marshy fields on a freshening breeze. The one-way flow of people with a single purpose, the constant self-important traffic in the air, the extravagant cloud advertising their destination, suggested to his tired but overactive mind some long-forgotten childhood treat, a carnival or sports event on which they were all converging. There was a memory that he could not place, of being carried on his father’s shoulders, up a hill toward a great attraction, toward the source of a huge excitement. He would like those shoulders now. His missing father had left few memories. A knotted neck scarf, a certain smell, the vaguest outline of a brooding, irritable presence. Did he avoid serving in the Great War, or did he die somewhere near here under another name? Perhaps he survived. Grace was certain he was too cowardly, too shifty, to join up, but she had her own reason to be bitter. Nearly every man here had a father who remembered northern France, or was buried in it. He wanted such a father, dead or alive. Long ago, before the war, before Wandsworth, he used to revel in his freedom to make his own life, devise his own story with only the distant help of Jack Tallis. Now he understood how conceited a delusion this was. Rootless, therefore futile. He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father. It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection. All around him men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot … They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. He would find Cecilia. Her address was on the letter in his pocket, next to the poem. In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start. He would find his father too. They were supposed to be good at tracking down missing persons, the Salvation Army. A perfect name. He would track down his father, or his dead father’s story—either way, he would become his father’s son. They walked all afternoon until at last, a mile ahead, where gray and yellow smoke billowed up from surrounding fields, they saw the bridge across the Bergues-Furnes canal. All the way in now, not a farmhouse or barn was left standing. As well as smoke, a miasma of rotting meat drifted toward them—more slaughtered cavalry horses, hundreds of them, in a heap in a field. Not far from them was a smoldering mountain of uniforms and blankets. A beefy lance corporal with a sledgehammer was smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines. Two ambulances were parked at the side of the road, their back doors open. From inside came the groans and shouts of wounded men. One of them was crying out, over and over, more in rage than pain, “Water, I want water!” Like everyone else, Turner kept going.

  The crowds were bunching up again. In front of the canal bridge was a junction, and from the Dunkirk direction, on the road that ran along the canal, came a convoy of three-ton lorries which the military police were trying to direct into a field beyond where the horses were. But troops swarming across the road forced the convoy to a halt. The drivers leaned on their horns and shouted insults. The crowd pressed on. Men tired of waiting scrambled off the backs of the lorries. There was a shout of “Take cover!” And before anyone could even glance round, the mountain of uniforms was detonated. It began to snow tiny pieces of dark green serge. Nearer, a detachment of artillerymen were using hammers to smash up the dial sights and breechblocks of their guns. One of them, Turner noticed, was crying as he destroyed his howitzer. At the entrance to the same field, a chaplain and his clerk were dousing cases of prayer books and Bibles with petrol. Men were crossing the field toward a NAAFI dump, looking for cigarettes and booze. When a shout went up, dozens more left the road to join them. One group sat by a farm gate, trying on new shoes. A soldier with crammed cheeks pushed past Turner with a box of pink and white marshmallows. A hundred yards away a dump of Wellington boots, gas masks and capes was fired, and acrid smoke enveloped the line of men pushing forward to the bridge. At last the lorries were on the move and turned into the biggest field, immediately south of the canal. Military police were organizing the parking, lining up the rows, like stewards at a county show. The lorries were joining half-tracks, motorbikes, Bren-gun carriers and mobile kitchens. The disabling methods were, as always, simple—a bullet in the radiator, and the engine left running until it seized up.

  The bridge was held by the Coldstream Guards. Two neatly sandbagged machine-gun posts covered the approach. The men were clean-shaven, stone-eyed, silently contemptuous of the filthy disorganized rabble trailing by. On the other side of the canal, evenly spaced, white
-painted stones marked out a path to a hut being used as an orderly room. On the far bank, to the east and west, the Guards were well dug in along their section. Waterfront houses had been commandeered, roof tiles punched out, and windows sandbagged for machine-gun slits. A fierce sergeant was keeping order on the bridge. He was sending back a lieutenant on a motorbike. Absolutely no equipment or vehicles allowed. A man with a parrot in a cage was turned away. The sergeant was also pulling out men for perimeter defense duties, and doing it with far more authority than the poor major. A growing detachment stood unhappily at ease by the orderly room. Turner saw what was happening at the same time as the corporals, when they were still a good way back.

  “They’ll fucking have you, mate,” Mace said to Turner. “Poor bloody infantry. If you want to go home to the crumpet, get between us and limp.”

  Feeling dishonorable, but determined all the same, he put his arms round the corporals’ shoulders and they staggered forward.

  “It’s your left, remember, guv’nor,” Nettle said. “Would you like me to pop my bayonet through your foot?”

  “Thanks awfully. I think I can manage.”

  Turner let his head droop as they were crossing the bridge so he saw nothing of the duty sergeant’s ferocious gaze, though he felt its heat. He heard the barked command, “’Ere, you!” Some unfortunate just behind him was pulled out to help hold off the onslaught which must surely come within two or three days, while the last of the BEF was piling into the boats. What he did see while his head was lowered was a long black barge slipping under the bridge in the direction of Furnes in Belgium. The boatman sat at his tiller smoking a pipe, looking stolidly ahead. Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps. A line of washing which included women’s smalls was hanging out to dry. The smell of cooking, of onions and garlic, rose from the boat. Turner and the corporals crossed the bridge and passed the whitewashed rocks, a reminder of training camp and all the bull. In the orderly hut a phone was ringing.