“Charing Cross Pier,” said the traveler to the taxi driver, and when he arrived, lugged his bundles out to the pier’s end. He remembered it from something like eleven years ago, when a ship tied here had been the scene of one of the most fantastic entertainments in fashionable history. It was just before the great panic hit Wall Street and the great depression spread over the world; incidentally it was just before Lanny’s marriage to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes. What a lot of things had happened to him and to the world in those few years!
Now he sat on the end of a short pier and looked across one of the most written-about rivers of the world. There was a haze, and the water looked gray and dingy. On the far side was a solid line of stone piers and embankments, and behind them brick and stone houses-nothing but city as far as the eye could reach, and for miles farther. There were bridges, under which the traffic slipped, and Lanny noticed a peculiar phenomenon—nearly all the traffic was one way. Everything from tiny speedboats to river tugs with as many as fifteen or twenty cabin launches in tow, all gliding silently in the general direction of the morning sun. It was as if they had been seized by what the learned scientists call a phototropism, an impulse to move toward the light. Moths have it, certain flowers have it, and sea-urchin larvae when you drop chemicals into the water with them. What chemical had been dropped into the River Thames which had caused all the pleasure boats and the work boats to be seized with a common impulse to come chugging out of their houses and their basins and sliding down-current into the pale broad streak of sunlight on the dirty river?
VII
Lanny didn’t know exactly what he was watching for, and he kept his eye on every boat which came in sight near the right bank. He hoped that Rick’s might be large and safe, with a cabin for comfort; but no such luck—she was just an open launch with an engine in the cockpit under a hood, a steering wheel in front, and a row of seats on each side in which your guests sat while you went put-put-putting on the narrow stream to a tea party or a cricket match. Gar was her name, and she was about fifteen feet overall, Lanny judged. He knew it was no boat to cross the Strait of Dover in; but they would have a lot of company, and if they shipped more water than they could bail out with buckets, there would be some of the bigger fellows to pick them up.
The matter of importance was that here was Rick, sitting at the engine, with one leg stretched out straight as it had to be. It was an effort for him to get up, so he didn’t, but just waved his hat. At the steering wheel was another man, and the pair of them brought the small craft comfortably against the stone platform at the foot of this ancient wooden pier. “Hello,” said Rick, in his casual way. “This is Tom; he’s going back for another boat. You’re supposed to steer. Do you think you’re up to it?”
“I’ll learn by doing,” replied Lanny, with a grin. He had never owned a motorboat, but he had done his share of sailing, and the steering wheel wasn’t so different from that of a car. “I notice the traffic is all one way, so there won’t be much chance for collisions.”
“Tom,” who was somebody’s middle-aged handyman, took Lanny’s dunnage and stowed it in a dry compartment up forward. Then he got out, and touched his cap, saying: “Good luck, Mr. Rick,” and, to Lanny: “Good luck, sir.” The engine began its vigorous persistent noise for which there is no name, and by following Rick’s instructions Lanny managed to back and turn, and soon they were out in the current, reinforced by an outgoing tide.
On they went, under one bridge after another, past the endless docks and shipping of what had been for a century or two the greatest port of the world. To Lanny these sights brought back one of the unforgettable moments of his life, when he had got married to Irma by the captain of a freighter out in the North Sea, and they had waited at Thames Mouth for the tide, and then a long procession of dingy vessels had come up the river, dropping off, one here and one there, into the great basins where most of the docks were, and the warehouses and railroad terminals. Now everything was bound the other way; apparently all the small craft of the river and a good part of the medium-sized were putting out to sea.
VIII
There was plenty of time for talk. “I suppose you know we’re bound for Dunkirk,” said Rick; and Lanny answered: “I guessed it. I don’t mind the trip, but I’m worried because we can bring back such a small number of men.”
“We’ll not be bringing them back, Lanny; we’re to deliver them to the larger craft. We little fellows with shallow draft will be able to pick them out of the surf if it’s not too high.”
He explained the situation as it had been made known to the insiders. The harbor had been wrecked and mines had been dropped in the Channel by enemy aircraft. The great pier was being bombed, and might be burning by the time they arrived. The men would be on the beaches, and would wade out into the water as far as they could. “We may be under fire the whole time, and it’ll be pretty rugged. I’m not sure I ought to have asked you.”
“It’s my fight as much as yours,” replied the American.
For once, Rick could say that his government had acted promptly and efficiently. Two weeks ago the Admiralty had foreseen the possibility of trouble, and on the day before Holland gave up, the BBC had broadcast an order for all owners of motor craft of between thirty and a hundred feet length to register the same with the Small Vessels Pool. “That doesn’t include us; we’re just minnows—but I’m told they’ll let us go. I saw a couple of chaps setting out down river in canoes with outboard motors. Maybe they’ll put them aboard one of the larger vessels; they’ll be using washtubs over there, no doubt.”
What all Britain was praying for was a spell of decent weather. So far, the damned Führer had got all the breaks: continuous dry weather for his raid on Poland, and again for Holland and Belgium. Now, if only the winds would hold up for a few days, they might be able to save a good part of the British army. “But you know what the North Sea is; a storm can blow up in an hour and swamp all these little craft, and force the big ones away from shore. It can happen at the end of May as well as any other time of the year. God grant us a week’s respite!”
Rick wasn’t much on piety, as a rule, but this was one of the solemn occasions when an Englishman reverted to the faith of his childhood. “O, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea!”
IX
Past the tidelands and marshes of the lower Thames, they came in early afternoon to Sheerness, at the river’s mouth. All boats seemed to be concentrating at the pier, so they joined the immense flock—literally more than either of them had ever seen in one place, and certainly more kinds than they had known existed in the ports of Britain. There were coasters and fisherboats, drifters and tugs, speedboats and yachts, minesweepers, trawlers, and the fast new vessels called “sloops”; there were whalers, pilot cutters, target-towing boats; there was a ferry vessel which had taken railroad cars across the Thames, and which was now going to sea for the first time in its long career; there were fireboats and lifeboats—some old ones from ships which had been sunk years ago; there were ancient paddle steamers, the Brighton Belle and the Brighton Queen, converted to minesweepers; there were mud-scows with fancy names such as Galleon’s Reach and Queen’s Channel. The inhabitants of this little island had been a sea people since the earliest days recorded, and had built every sort of craft for every purpose; now, seized by the tropism called patriotism, they had come put-putting out from their coves and inlets, ready to do what had never needed to be done in all those previous centuries.
Some just went on their own, without any word or assistance. But Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson, former army flyer, was a man of discipline; he reported to a naval patrol, and was ordered to a place at the pier where boats were being checked and supplies handed out freely: parcels of food, first-aid kits, fresh water, fuel for the engines. Only one question: “Will you go to Dunkirk?” Each man must be fitted with a steel helmet and a gas mask—this set two amateur sailors to thinking about the seriousness of their venture. They might
have had a Bren gun on their foredeck if the Gar had had space for it.
They were told to proceed to Ramsgate, some thirty miles farther to the eastward, around the point which sticks out into the North Sea. It was pretty much like Derby Day on a highway, Rick said; a regular procession. Some boats were faster, and crept by them; others, such as fishing boats and barges, were slower. Well-bred yachtsmen kept their eyes ahead, and refrained from speaking to persons to whom they had not been introduced. It was a picture gallery of Englishmen, of every age and station: fishermen and sailors, boatbuilders and dockers, in America called longshoremen, and engineers, called machinists; yachtsmen and employees of yacht clubs, naval and professional people—anybody who had ever handled a boat or had listed himself with the “Small Vessels Pool.” The vessels they had brought, or had been assigned to, were as varied as their crews: some sleek and shining with chromium and brass and white paint, others rusty and weatherbeaten, with old tire casings hanging at their sides to serve as fenders.
This Kentish shore was familiar to Lanny—seaside towns running into one another and forming a continuous line of villas and hotels. At one little inn he had sat under an arbor and eaten with Irma a prewedding luncheon of cold mutton and beer. The town of Ramsgate was where he and his bride-to-be had met the yacht Bessie Budd, and been taken out to sea in order to circumvent the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wanted sixty pounds for a special marriage license! Very gay it had all seemed at the time, but now a little sad to look back on. “Too bad we couldn’t have hit it off!” Lanny remarked.
But his friend had no sympathy with that kind of sentimentality. “Irma’s got what she wants, and you didn’t have it. So that’s that.”
X
There was a breeze springing up, and when they came round into the Strait of Dover there was a bit of a sea—at least so it seemed from the disadvantage point of a tiny craft. She began to pitch, and the spray shot over them, and they dug out their sea suits and put them on. Rick began to look rather pale, and Lanny, usually a “good sailor,” inquired: “Are you going to be sick?” The answer was: “I don’t know, but I’ll stick it, whatever happens.” They didn’t have far to go before they slid into the still water of Ramsgate basin, perhaps a quarter of a mile each way, and with hundreds of boats in it.
From that time on they were under naval orders; in fact, they had a regular Admiral—and assuredly no Admiral of the King’s Navee had ever commanded a more fantastic armada. The high personage—his name was Taylor—dashed about in a motor launch some thirty feet long, with twin engines and mounting two Bren guns; for a crew he had one sub-lieutenant, one stoker, and one gunner; but his flag gave him authority, and all his “small vessels” did what he told them. They were to wait until just before dawn and go in convoy; meantime their supplies would be checked again—they must have petrol for several days’ work at the beaches, and they must have enough food and plenty of fresh water. The navy was in a generous mood; they got real butter and live eggs, which had already become a rarity in London. They were advised to tie up and sleep for a while, and to keep their “tin hats” handy. A patrol ship passed out buckets of hot tea, priceless to Englishmen.
There wasn’t much order to the procession which set out in the early morning hours. No two vessels had the same speed, and the fast ones were not required to wait for the slow; they were soon spread out over the forty miles between Ramsgate and Dunkirk. Nobody had difficulty in finding the way, even in darkness, because there was a red glare in the sky, and when you got nearer you could see flames and pillars of thick black smoke. When dawn came, the convoy was scattered all over the sea in front and behind; they had been joined by red-sailed French fishing boats from as far as Caen and Le Havre, boats with pious names such as Ave Maria and Gratia Plena, Stella Maris and Ciel de France; also escaped Dutch and Belgian vessels, stout and stubby, called schouts. Here and there through the stream of vessels dashed patrol torpedo boats and destroyers on watch for submarines and enemy vessels; Lanny soon found that the wash from a destroyer was as dangerous to his puny Gar as anything German; he had to head quickly into the swells, and prepare to be pitched and tossed and covered with spray.
There was a condition in the Strait known as a “chop,” and open motorboats had no business being out there; poor Rick lost first his breakfast, and then everything else he had. It was hard for him to get up to the side of the boat, so he had to use a can, and just lie there by his engine, turning first pale, then yellow, then green. But there didn’t come a single groan from him, and he didn’t want Lanny to talk about it—just “carry on.” He didn’t have much to do, for the engine was a good one, and its pace, once set, continued for four or five hours. Rick knew about internal combustion engines because he had been a flyer, and Lanny because he had been driving a motorcar most of his life and had had to stop by the roadside many a time to tinker.
With daylight came the enemy planes, bombing the larger vessels and machine-gunning the little ones as they roared on; the bullets made a line like a plowshare rushing at you, a scary sight. Anti-aircraft fire opened up from every vessel which had a gun, and presently came the British planes; there were dogfights in the sky, and now and then one of the planes would plunge into the sea, or race away streaming black smoke behind it. Rick knew the different types, and would say “Messerschmitt” or “Spitfire.” He had always insisted: “Our planes are better, our men are better; the only question is, have we enough?” This time, apparently, the R.A.F. was going all out, and made it hot for the “Jerries” from dawn to dark. A great show to watch, but rather hard on the nerves; they put on their helmets, and made themselves as small as possible while shell fragments spattered the sea about them.
XI
Ahead lay Dunkirk, once a peaceful fishing port and summer resort for the French and those who liked French food and conversation. There were two parallel jetties running out to the sea, with a lighthouse at the end of one. Also there was a long mole, and inside it many small basins and docks. The port was still held by the British rearguards, being constantly bombed and shelled by the enemy. Huge fires were burning, including oil depots and ammunition dumps; a black pall of smoke hung over everything, and an incessant clatter of explosives large and small was never out of any man’s ears, day or night. Not all these explosions were a danger to the crew of the launch Gar, but they were all a danger to somebody, and an imaginative person like Lanny Budd couldn’t get away from that thought.
Some of the larger vessels, bound into the port, had to take a roundabout course which had been marked with buoys, for the enemy had dropped mines in the regular channel, and kept dropping them into each new channel that was discovered and marked. Such is war: move and counter-move, one set of brains matched against another set, and the victory going to the better. Or was it necessarily the better? The idealist in Lanny Budd kept asking, and trying to figure out some way whereby the two sets of brains might manage to combine against their common enemy, the blind forces of nature. Even amid the hell of Dunkirk, Lanny kept thinking about that! When he voiced it, Rick said: “I’ll not combine with any Nazi brain!”
Little boats were not going into the harbor; little boats could approach the beaches, where the water was shallow, and men could wade out, in some places a quarter of a mile before they were up to their necks. The orders to the Gar had been brief: “Go wherever there are men on the shore, and bring them out to the nearest larger boat.” They moved slowly past the mole, and on to the eastward, where there stretched a beautiful wide beach on which children had built sand castles and men and women had browned themselves in scanty bathing suits. Now the entire beach was crowded with khaki-clad men—more men, Lanny thought, than he had ever seen in one place in all his life; but then he remembered the Parteitag in Nuremberg, where more than a million Nazis had been assembled on the great airfield in one of those demonstrations which the genius of the Führer and his Doktor Goebbels had devised. Now those same men of Nuremberg were here, shelling and attacking day
and night; overhead they were coming down in screaming dives, machine-gunning their enemies, who stood and took it because there was no place to go and nothing else to do.
As far as the eye could see, the beach was dark with men, and they formed thick lines coming out into the water—wavy, irregular lines, marking the presence of sand bars and shoals. All night they had hidden in the dunes, but now they saw the ships, and not all the power of the Luftwaffe could keep them out of the water. They had been marching and fighting for almost three weeks, and many were wounded and bloody; all showed pitiful signs of exhaustion—haggard faces, red-rimmed eyelids, trembling lips. Some stumbled, and had to be lifted and held up by their comrades.
Lanny and Rick found their job quickly enough. A good-sized tug had come in ahead of them, towing behind it a bunch of wherries and dinghies, perhaps a score. The tug had crept in as close as it dared and then cast anchor; the master called to Lanny: “Sir, you can save a lot of time for us if you’ll take this tow in.” The Gar backed up and the towline was made fast to her stern; oarsmen from the tug got into the boats, one for each; the engine set the water to boiling, and slowly the bunch of boats crept in toward the beach. The men on the sand bars started coming closer, many up to their necks; and when the boats were cast loose, the oarsmen started dragging the men in. There was no panic, no confusion; a subaltern took charge and gave the orders; they brought the wounded and got them in first. Whatever number the oarsmen specified, that number was put in, and the boat was turned and rowed out to the tug. When the tug was loaded, it took the load out to one of the steamers and then came back for more.
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