The King of Dunkirk

by Dominic Fielder

  The King of Dunkirk.

  #KingofDunkirk

  www.kingsgermans.com

  The right of Dominic Fielder to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  By the same author

  Book One: The Black Lions of Flanders

  Book Two: The King of Dunkirk

  Praise for the Black Lions of Flanders.

  ‘The author has created a varied and excellent cast of characters from both sides of the conflict. He has a gift for characterisation…’

  Lynn Bryant – author of the Peninsula War Saga series.

  ‘I loved the cast of characters, which is diverse and extensive, so well-drawn that a reader can't help but identify with most of them, whether part of the Allied Forces or the enemy.’

  Simone Z Endrich – author of The Natural Son trilogy.

  ‘The storytelling is vivid, violent, and victorious. Fielder has brought this era back to life in his masterfully written and vastly entertaining tale.’

  Mary Anne Yarde – author of The Du Lac Chronicles.

  He draws you in from the first page and plunges you into late 18th century Europe. The Black Lions of Flanders is a feast for any history fan. Breath-taking and will change your mind about what it was like to live in Europe during this time period. A must-read!

  www.nnlightsbookheaven.com

  A dedication.

  To Moncrief and the war dead of 1793, whatever colour the uniform.

  To my family, my love as always.

  To Sarah, my editor, for the guiding hand that has once again steered me to the end, while having an eye on the future.

  To Neil Braddon and Neil Bosher for their friendship, feedback and the dreaded task of proof-reading,

  To Jen, another incredible cover and our recap on the Act of Union 1801. www.serifim.com

  To Adrian, without your maps to light the way, we are all lost. Find out more at www.adriangeorgeart.com

  To Mary Anne Yarde, whose advice is like having a publishing house fighting your corner.

  To all at the Shed (Noel, Neil, Neil, Nick, Eric, Steve, Mark and Justin) for their support, kind words and true friendship.

  And to you, for reading this story.

  No prince can ever be secure that has not an army of his own; and he will become wholly dependant upon fortune if in the times of adversity he lack the valour to defend himself. And wise men have ever held the opinion, that nothing is more weak and unstable than the reputation of power when not founded upon forces of the prince’s own; by which I mean armies composed of his own subjects or citizens or of his creation; all others are either mercenaries or auxiliaries.

  Machiavelli – The Prince.

  Prologue

  Rosendael: 9th September 1793

  The young soldier lay motionless, vacant eyes struggling to focus on clouds of blackened cinders that drift away on the eddy of a morning breeze. His woollen infantry jacket, drenched in cold sweat and dew, had once been a proud, bright scarlet. Now it reeked of the burnt flesh that lay around him. The movement of bloodshot green eyes and a mouth that gulped for air were the only signs of life other than the congregation of sand flies who busied themselves in the light of the new day.

  Memory and understanding returned.

  Another man had given his life so the soldier might live. Fingers edged up to a welt of congealed blood and sand. Pain throbbed across his forehead in response. Smoke had scorched his nose and throat. The blow to the head was the result of a body collapsing on top of his: a small price to pay for survival. Dragging the sleeve of his jacket across his face, the redcoat began to focus and organise his mind.

  A wooden canteen lay a dozen feet away, strapped to the side of his horse’s carcass. The violence of the explosion that had ripped through the battery of heavy siege guns had left nothing else alive. The soldier crawled over to retrieve canteen and musket, slumping back to the patch of ground next to the body that had shielded him. Sensation returned: every breath felt like a punch to badly bruised ribs. How long had he lost consciousness for? Two hours, perhaps three?

  The redcoat gulped back warm water. A first mouthful was vomited up almost as soon as it was swallowed; the second, slower and measured, felt sublime.

  He tried to picture the orientation of the land. In the last month he had travelled the roads and crossed its waterways in his service to the British engineer in charge of the siege artillery.

  North were the dunes and sea; the army had waited four weeks in vain for the arrival of the fleet. Today the bombardment of Dunkirk was scheduled to begin; even if the Royal Navy arrived, how could he hope to attract their attention?

  South were the network of canals and marshes; land firmly in the hands of the French by now. To the west was Dunkirk, still held by the enemy.

  Follow the coast east and head to Furnes. It was the only direction of flight that made sense.

  The redcoat was a King’s German and knew his duty. Survive, find the army and find his battalion.

  Furnes was twelve miles away; the French would be patrolling the road to Ghyvelde, the halfway point. Escape on foot would be near impossible. His body was still too exhausted from the events of the last thirty-six hours.

  He needed a miracle; he needed a horse.

  Remy Pasquier pushed blood-stained hands through a mop of lank brown hair. Thankfully his watch would soon be over. A bath, a hot meal, the warm body of a grateful woman and sleep were what he needed. The Sixth had patrolled throughout the night but had not followed up the retreating British. Instead, they had contented themselves with easy plunder. Every dragoon knew that standing orders forbade such practice. The reality was that only the careless or the greedy got caught.

  The appearance of the British ships curtailed the morning’s pilfering.

  A trooper had been dispatched a quarter of an hour earlier to alert Dunkirk to the presence of the enemy vessels. Pasquier worked with skilled efficiency knowing that time was against him. Liberty and fraternity were the watchwords of the age but equality was a virtue that rankled the looter. The man who risked his neck took the greatest share of the profit.

  With practised skill, corpses were quickly assessed. Back pack and pockets were searched for coins and practical necessities that might sell easily. He had several customers for an officer’s sword but when he reached the body of a young ensign, the scabbard was already empty.

  “Bloody thieves!” the dragoon muttered, slicing away with a small fishing knife at a finger that was reluctant to yield its prize of a thick gold band. Half a dozen teeth were deftly removed with small pliers, fillings glinting with promise.

  Flat against the peak of a sweeping dune tufted with marram grass, his sergeant trained a battered telescope onto jolly boats that wrestled in the swell, next to the hulls of two warships. The pilferer’s head twitched at movement in the corner of his eye as the telescope pointed back towards the town. A gruff voice edged with concern ordered him to remount. A column of riders, more dragoons from the Sixth, were approaching fast. The morning’s work had been poor pickings: nothing worth risking the noose for.

  As Pasquier’s wiry frame rose, the early morning light reflected off something in the sand near a group of bodies he had yet to search. Silver coins were scattered near a slumped body. Another officer, nearly a costly and careless error. There was still time, perhaps three minutes until the cavalrymen arrived. He walked the horse quickly over to the spot, looked left and right, suspicious of such an easy find. Three bodies were nearby; two sprawled near the corner of a trench and a third face down, near the body with the coins. Kicking each of these carcasses in turn, the dragoon stood poised to silence any signs of unwel
come life with his bloodied knife.

  Returning to the corpse, Pasquier removed his gloves to prize the coins more easily from the cloying sand and frisk the man’s thick blue jacket. With the instinct of a seasoned looter, he knew there were more. In vain, he tried to roll the body and for a briefest moment considered calling the sergeant but rejected the notion: this find might just be too good to share. He knelt quickly, removed his cumbersome brass helmet and reached under the body with his right hand, his face near the ground. Finger tips touched the edge of a leather pouch, he could feel the coins inside but dead weight pinned the prize. Pasquier grunted and fought for leverage, trying to move the lifeless torso just a few inches and wrap his hand around the pouch.

  His horse stamped at the ground impatiently. Pasquier sensed movement behind him. He twisted his arm free, rolled away and reached for the blade but all too late. A young redcoat, now more alive than dead, loomed over him and drove the brass butt of a musket square into the side of his face, shattering eye socket and cheekbone and driving bone fragments into his brain.

  Remy Pasquier, 6th Dragoon trooper and master pillager, collapsed into the sand, a lifeless, bloodied eye fixed on the pillar of smoke and ash drifting into the morning sky.

  Dunkirk Beach

  The First Lieutenant scanned the horizon again. By now the beach should have been alive with redcoats. King George’s soldiers were always glad to see the arrival of the Royal Navy.

  Whether the turn of the morning’s events had gone dreadfully wrong was impossible to determine in the half-light of dawn. Sand that would soon become golden white under the rising sun held its secrets in long dark shadows from bluffs and dunes that separated the beach from the inland. The view that motioned through the telescope changed from dark browns back to the deep blue of water. In the chop of the heavy sea, the jolly boat of HMS Thunder was making painfully slow progress toward the beach.

  The evening before, the commanding officer of Thunder, First Lieutenant Geoffrey Dowdes, had agreed a plan to send a party ashore with the commander of HMS Racehorse, who would no doubt be keeping a similar vigil. Since then, around three o’clock that morning, the skyline had illuminated with a massive explosion beyond the dunes, in the vicinity of the proposed landing site. Communications had been exchanged between the ships. The plan stood; his vessel, a Royal Navy mortar ketch, busied herself for action.

  Dowdes slammed the telescope shut and observed the broader canvas. Fires that had silhouetted the coastline the previous evening had been replaced by columns of grey smoke. To his right, smog from a myriad of chimneys and open hearths formed an early morning haze over the town of Dunkirk. He pondered the unknowns: too many for his liking. Small trails of steam drifted lazily from his mug of tea, each fresh curl swayed by the swell in which the Thunder was anchored as the officer battled the nagging doubt of having made an error of judgement.

  The small flotilla of three ships were anchored in order that Racehorse, a swift sloop which bobbed gracefully some three hundred yards off her bow, could protect Thunder and the HMS Argosy. This smaller vessel, the handmaiden to Thunder, was filled with the powder to service the two heavy mortars and waited in the gloom, a further three hundred yards to the starboard.

  Minutes dragged. Again, the telescope swept the water, gauging the remaining time and distance that the small craft, crewed with a dozen oarsmen and some half-dozen marines, had to travel. Ahead, half a mile to the east of Dunkirk, was the position held by the Duke of York’s army where a dark tower of dense smoke rose to veer east, pushed away on the westerly that had brought the flotilla in good time from Greenwich. The beach swept back into view; the improving light revealed the nature of the dark shapes on the beach. He fought the urge to recall the jolly boat, not that it would do much good, the craft was nearly landed and his men could gauge the situation more clearly than he could from twelve hundred yards distant.

  Lieutenant Byron Summersdale felt the jolly boat buck in the heavy surf and fought the urge to be sick. Being a Royal Marine was little or no assurance of being a good sailor. He craned his neck to see if he could spot the small boat from the Racehorse which was also charting a path to the beach but sprays of salt which drenched his tunic were the only reward for his efforts. Instead his gaze returned to the beach, aware that his men were looking at the same sight as him, no doubt wondering what fate awaited them.

  The boat dug into the sand; oarsmen nimbly bailed out left and right of the small craft to secure it. Careful not to fall over his own sword, Summersdale leapt into the surf, relieved to find the water no more than knee deep. His redcoated marines followed close behind and once out of the surf, worked to load their sea service muskets, the Royal Navy’s version of the redcoats’ ‘Brown Bess’. Practicality had changed wooden ramrods from iron, which corroded with exposure to sea-spray. Further economy removed the brass cap onto which a bayonet was fixed, at the fore of the musket. Their Lordships at the Admiralty would rest easier at the money saved, no doubt. Besides there was little call for fixing bayonets on board a ship. Silently, Summersdale cursed such economy, wishing he could issue such an order, as much for his own morale, as for any other reason.

  The beach was ghostly quiet, even the sea had calmed. The crew of the Thunder’s jolly-boat, feeling the vulnerability of sailors perched on an unfriendly shore, worked silently to make sure that the small craft did not beach itself in the receding tide. The Marines scrambled from wet sand that became dry and deep, sapping their energy in just a few paces. Along with their muskets, Summersdale’s men carried little else except for ammunition pouches and canteens. Still the sand clawed at their heels as they threaded a route through the first of the bodies. Summersdale slowed and knelt by the corpse of an officer.

  “Heathen bastards,” he cursed, his mind racing.

  A neat, round hole in the side of the skull was thick with congealed blood. Death had been recent, perhaps at the time of the explosion. His eyes dropped involuntarily to the what was left of the mouth where sand flies crawled in the air morning air. Most of the lower jaw was missing. Deep and deliberate blade marks had prized out teeth. On the right hand, a finger had been hacked off, a wedding ring no doubt. He fought to control nausea brought on by the journey in the jolly boat. Feeling horribly exposed on the open expanse of beach only worsened matters.

  “A month’s pay for the first of you to pouch one of these scum, lads.”

  The shore party lurched forward again. Moving in a column of twos with Summersdale at the head, they picked a careful path through the dead redcoats until they saw the lone horseman, three hundred yards away and closing at the gallop.

  “Halt,” the lieutenant growled. “Marines on the left, kneel and make ready.”

  Redcoats to the left of the column dropped to one knee, cocking their muskets without further instruction. Lieutenant Summersdale gripped his long straight sabre. The redcoats on the right of the column had also trained their muskets at the approaching figure but had remained standing.

  Two hundred yards.

  One hundred and fifty; the figure was waving and shouting, his uniform was impossible to distinguish but the helmet with a horse-hair plumed peak was that of a French dragoon. The rider, approaching fast with the sun behind him, showed no signs of slowing.

  One hundred yards; Summersdale chose a marker, a line of dried seaweed on the beach. That far and no further. If horse and rider hit the soldiers at speed the redcoats would be cast about like nine pins.

  Fifty yards; still he could not make out what the man was shouting.

  At thirty-five yards, the horse galloped over a green smear of dried seaweed. Summersdale gave the command to fire.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bitter taste of victory.

  St Amand: 7th May 1793

  The warm air was rich with the sights and sounds of insects carrying out their frantic activities in the calm of a late spring evening. What traffic there was on the road that wound through the Flanders countryside close to the Fren
ch border were mostly wagons, private traders or those hired by the Commissary General. An army that was well fed, paid and had snatched victory from a certain defeat, eased the path to selling what little surplus the locals could spare. The man who had played a large part in that victory, according to the opinion of others, could share little of the celebratory mood that had blossomed after Rumes.

  Von Bomm had absented himself from an invitation to the Duke of York’s table, to face the accusations of Baumann, his captain in 1st Grenadiers. Charged with disobeying a direct order in combat, Baumann had demanded the satisfaction of a court martial. The horse trotted an easy gait towards the 1st Grenadiers’ camp and von Bomm felt the sap within him rise. He had bested a Baumann before, he would do so again. A rugged, youthful complexion, powerful physique and blonde hair swept rakishly forward under his Korsisch hat, the young bachelor’s easy manner made von Bomm the focus of attention for the eligible ladies of Hanover.

  He had fought three duels in his life. At eighteen he fought for the honour of an older woman who he thought he loved, three years later he fought to avoid a scandal when a woman had become besotted with him and alleged scandalous behaviour. That incident had been a clarion call for the handsome bachelor to amend his ways or at least try. There had been minor indiscretions along the way but for the last four years Erich von Bomm had led a more considered life.

  Then there was the matter of Sophia; a simple misunderstanding.

  He had found the daughter of a well-respected judge on the side of the road; her carriage having broken down. Offering the shelter of his buggy, he had ferried the poor girl home but when Sophia had left his care and retired to the safety of her father’s house, von Bomm had found a bag containing her dancing shoes. A sixth sense had made him open the bag and he found an unsigned note detailing an elopement. To return the bag to the front door risked the lovers’ secret plans being discovered; this did not sit well with von Bomm’s more romantic notions. In the height of the storm, he had attempted to scale a trellis framework to a window where a candlelight had recently been lit, only to be discovered in the act of ascending by a family servant.