by Ian Mcewan
Mace murmured, “You bloody well limp till we’re out of sight.”
But the land was flat for miles and there was no telling which way the sergeant might be looking, and they didn’t like to turn around to check. After half an hour they sat down on a rusty seed drill and watched the defeated army walk by. The idea was to get in among a completely fresh crowd, so that Turner’s sudden recovery did not attract the attention of an officer. A lot of men who passed were irritated at not finding the beach just beyond the canal. They seemed to think it was a failure of planning. Turner knew from the map there were another seven miles, and once they were on the move again, they were the hardest, the dreariest they had walked that day. The wide featureless land denied all sense of progress. Though the late afternoon sun was slipping through the trailing edges of the oil cloud, it was warmer than ever. They saw planes high over the port dropping their bombs. Worse, there were Stuka attacks right over the beach they were heading toward. They passed the walking wounded who could go no further. They sat like beggars at the side of the road, calling out for help, or for a mouthful of water. Others just lay by the ditch, unconscious, or lost in hopelessness. Surely there would be ambulances coming up from the defense perimeter, making regular runs to the beach. If there was time to whitewash rocks, there must be time to organize that. There was no water. They had finished the wine and now their thirst was all the greater. They carried no medicines. What were they expected to do? Carry a dozen men on their backs when they could barely walk themselves?
In sudden petulance, Corporal Nettle sat down in the road, took off his boots and flung them into a field. He said he hated them, he fucking hated them more than all the fucking Germans put together. And his blisters were so bad he was better off with fuck all.
“It’s a long way to England in your socks,” Turner said. He felt weirdly lightheaded as he went into the field to search. The first boot was easy to find, but the second took him a while. At last he saw it lying in the grass near a black furry shape that seemed, as he approached, to be moving or pulsing. Suddenly a swarm of bluebottles rose into the air with an angry whining buzz, revealing the rotting corpse beneath. He held his breath, snatched the boot, and as he hurried away the flies settled back down and there was silence again.
After some coaxing, Nettle was persuaded to take back his boots, tie them together and carry them round his neck. But he did this, he said, only as a favor to Turner.
IT WAS IN HIS clear moments he was troubled. It wasn’t the wound, though it hurt at every step, and it wasn’t the divebombers circling over the beach some miles to the north. It was his mind. Periodically, something slipped. Some everyday principle of continuity, the humdrum element that told him where he was in his own story, faded from his use, abandoning him to a waking dream in which there were thoughts, but no sense of who was having them. No responsibility, no memory of the hours before, no idea of what he was about, where he was going, what his plan was. And no curiosity about these matters. He would then find himself in the grip of illogical certainties.
He was in this state as they came round the eastern edge of the resort after three hours’ walking. They went down a street of shattered glass and broken tiles where children were playing and watching the soldiers go by. Nettle had put his boots back on, but he had left them loose, with the laces trailing. Suddenly, like a jack-in-a-box, a lieutenant from the Dorsets popped up from the cellar of a municipal building that had been requisitioned for a headquarters. He came toward them at a self-important clip with an attaché case under his arm. When he stopped in front of them they saluted. Scandalized, he ordered the corporal to tie his laces immediately or face a charge.
While the corporal knelt to obey, the lieutenant—round-shouldered, bony, with a deskbound look and a wisp of ginger mustache—said, “You’re a bloody disgrace, man.”
In the lucid freedom of his dream state, Turner intended to shoot the officer through the chest. It would be better for everybody. It was hardly worth discussing the matter in advance. He reached for it, but his gun had gone—he couldn’t remember where—and the lieutenant was already walking away.
After minutes of noisy crunching over glass, there was sudden silence under their boots where the road ended in fine sand. As they rose through a gap in the dunes, they heard the sea and tasted a salty mouthful before they saw it. The taste of holidays. They left the path and climbed through the dune grass to a vantage point where they stood in silence for many minutes. The fresh damp breeze off the Channel restored him to clarity. Perhaps it was nothing more than his temperature rising and falling in fits.
He thought he had no expectations—until he saw the beach. He’d assumed that the cussed army spirit which whitewashed rocks in the face of annihilation would prevail. He tried to impose order now on the random movement before him, and almost succeeded: marshaling centers, warrant officers behind makeshift desks, rubber stamps and dockets, roped-off lines toward the waiting boats; hectoring sergeants, tedious queues around mobile canteens. In general, an end to all private initiative. Without knowing it, that was the beach he had been walking to for days. But the actual beach, the one he and the corporals gazed on now, was no more than a variation on all that had gone before: there was a rout, and this was its terminus. It was obvious enough now they saw it—this was what happened when a chaotic retreat could go no further. It only took a moment to adjust. He saw thousands of men, ten, twenty thousand, perhaps more, spread across the vastness of the beach. In the distance they were like grains of black sand. But there were no boats, apart from one upturned whaler rolling in the distant surf. It was low tide and almost a mile to the water’s edge. There were no boats by the long jetty. He blinked and looked again. That jetty was made of men, a long file of them, six or eight deep, standing up to their knees, their waists, their shoulders, stretching out for five hundred yards through the shallow waters. They waited, but there was nothing in sight, unless you counted in those smudges on the horizon—boats burning after an air attack. There was nothing that could reach the beach in hours. But the troops stood there, facing the horizon in their tin hats, rifles lifted above the waves. From this distance they looked as placid as cattle.
And these men were a small proportion of the total. The majority were on the beach, moving about aimlessly. Little clusters had formed around the wounded left by the last Stuka attack. As aimless as the men, half a dozen artillery horses galloped in a pack along the water’s edge. A few troops were attempting to right the upturned whaler. Some had taken off their clothes to swim. Off to the east was a football game, and from the same direction came the feeble sound of a hymn being sung in unison, then fading. Beyond the football game was the only sign of official activity. On the shore, lorries were being lined up and lashed together to form a makeshift jetty. More lorries were driving down. Nearer, up the beach, individuals were scooping sand with their helmets to make foxholes. In the dunes, close to where Turner and the corporals stood, men had already dug themselves holes from which they peeped out, proprietorial and smug. Like marmots, he thought. But the majority of the army wandered about the sands without purpose, like citizens of an Italian town in the hour of the passeg-gio. They saw no immediate reason to join the enormous queue, but they were unwilling to come away from the beach in case a boat should suddenly appear.
To the left was the resort of Bray, a cheerful front of cafés and little shops that in a normal season would be renting out beach chairs and pedal bikes. In a circular park with a neatly mowed lawn was a bandstand, and a merry-go-round painted red, white and blue. In this setting, another, more insouciant company had hunkered down. Soldiers had opened up the cafés for themselves and were getting drunk at the tables outside, bawling and laughing. Men were larking about on the bikes along a pavement stained with vomit. A colony of drunks was spread out on the grass by the bandstand, sleeping it off. A solitary sunbather in his underpants, facedown on a towel, had patches of uneven sunburn on his shoulders and legs—pink and white lik
e a strawberry and vanilla ice cream.
It was not difficult to choose between these circles of suffering—the sea, the beach, the front. The corporals were already walking away. Thirst alone decided it. They found a path on the landward side of the dunes, then they were crossing a sandy lawn strewn with broken bottles. As they were making a way round the raucous tables Turner saw a naval party coming along the front and stopped to watch. There were five of them, two officers, three ratings, a gleaming group of fresh white, blue and gold. No concessions to camouflage. Straight-backed and severe, revolvers strapped to their belts, they moved with tranquil authority through the mass of somber battle dress and grimy faces, looking from side to side as if conducting a count. One of the officers made notes on a clipboard. They headed away toward the beach. With a childish feeling of abandonment, Turner watched them until they were out of sight.
He followed Mace and Nettle into the din and fumy stench of the first bar along the front. Two suitcases propped open on the bar were full of cigarettes—but there was nothing to drink. The shelves along the sandblasted mirror behind the bar were empty. When Nettle ducked behind the counter to rummage around, there were jeers. Everyone coming in had tried the same. The drink had long gone with the serious drinkers outside. Turner pushed through the crowd to a small kitchen at the back. The place was wrecked, the taps were dry. Outside was a pissoir and stacked crates of empties. A dog was trying to get its tongue inside an empty sardine can, pushing it across a patch of concrete. He turned and went back to the main room and its roar of voices. There was no electricity, only natural light which was stained brown, as though by the absent beer. Nothing to drink, but the bar remained full. Men came in, were disappointed and yet they stayed, held there by free cigarettes and the evidence of recent booze. The dispensers dangled empty on the wall where the inverted bottles had been wrenched away. The sweet smell of liquor rose from the sticky cement floor. The noise and press of bodies and damp tobacco air satisfied a homesick yearning for a Saturday night pub. This was the Mile End Road, and Sauchiehall Street, and everywhere in between.
He stood in the din, uncertain what to do. It would be such an effort, to fight his way out of the crowd. There were boats yesterday, he gathered from a snatch of conversation, and perhaps again tomorrow. Standing on tiptoe by the kitchen doorway, he gave a no-luck shrug across the crowd toward the corporals. Nettle cocked his head in the direction of the door and they began to converge on it. A drink would have been fine, but what interested them now was water. Progress through the press of bodies was slow, and then, just as they converged, their way to the door was blocked by a tight wall of backs forming around one man.
He must have been short—less than five foot six—and Turner could see nothing of him apart from a portion of the back of his head.
Someone said, “You answer the fucking question, you little git.”
“Yeah, go on then.”
“Oi, Brylcreem job. Where was ya?”
“Where were you when they killed my mate?”
A globule of spittle hit the back of the man’s head and fell behind his ear. Turner moved round to get a view. He saw first the gray-blue of a jacket, and then the mute apprehension in the man’s face. He was a wiry little fellow with thick, unclean lenses in his glasses which magnified his frightened stare. He looked like a filing clerk, or a telephone operator, perhaps from a headquarters long ago dispersed. But he was in the RAF and the Tommies held him accountable. He turned slowly, gazing at the circle of his interrogators. He had no answers to their questions, and he made no attempt to deny his responsibility for the absence of Spitfires and Hurricanes over the beach. His right hand clutched his cap so hard his knuckles trembled. An artilleryman standing by the door gave him a hard push in the back so that he stumbled across the ring into the chest of a soldier who sent him back with a casual punch to the head. There was a hum of approval. Everyone had suffered, and now someone was going to pay.
“So where’s the RAF?”
A hand whipped out and slapped the man’s face, knocking his glasses to the floor. The sound of the blow was precise as a whip crack. It was a signal for a new stage, a new level of engagement. His naked eyes shrank to fluttering little dots as he went down to grope around his feet. That was a mistake. A kick from a steel-capped army boot caught him on the backside, lifting him an inch or two. There were chuckles all round. A sense of something tasty about to happen was spreading across the bar and drawing more soldiers in. As the crowd swelled around the circle, any remaining sense of individual responsibility fell away. A swaggering recklessness was taking hold. A cheer went up as someone stubbed his cigarette on the fellow’s head. They laughed at his comic yelp. They hated him and he deserved everything that was coming his way. He was answerable for the Luftwaffe’s freedom of the skies, for every Stuka attack, every dead friend. His slight frame contained every cause of an army’s defeat. Turner assumed there was nothing he could do to help the man without risking a lynching himself. But it was impossible to do nothing. Joining in would be better than nothing. Unpleasantly excited, he strained forward. Now, a tripping Welsh accent proposed the question.
“Where’s the RAF?”
It was eerie that the man had not shouted for help, or pleaded, or protested his innocence. His silence seemed like collusion in his fate. Was he so dim that it had not occurred to him that he might be about to die? Sensibly, he had folded his glasses into his pocket. Without them his face was empty. Like a mole in bright light, he peered around at his tormentors, his lips parted, more in disbelief than in an attempt to form a word. Because he could not see it coming, he took a blow to the face full-on. It was a fist this time. As his head flipped back, another boot cracked into his shin and a little sporting cheer went up, with some uneven applause, as though for a decent catch in the slips on the village green. It was madness to go to the man’s defense, it was loathsome not to. At the same time, Turner understood the exhilaration among the tormentors and the insidious way it could claim him. He himself could do something outrageous with his bowie knife and earn the love of a hundred men. To distance the thought he made himself count the two or three soldiers in the circle he reckoned bigger or stronger than himself. But the real danger came from the mob itself, its righteous state of mind. It would not be denied its pleasures.
A situation had now been reached in which whoever threw the next hit had to earn general approval by being ingenious or funny. There was an eagerness in the air to please by being creative. No one wanted to strike a false note. For a few seconds these conditions imposed restraint. And at some point soon, Turner knew from his Wandsworth days, the single blow would become a cascade. Then there would be no turning back, and for the RAF man, only one end. A pink blotch had formed on the cheekbone under his right eye. He had drawn his fists up under his chin—he was still gripping his cap—and his shoulders were hunched. It may have been a protective stance, but it was also a gesture of weakness and submission which was bound to provoke greater violence. If he had said something, anything at all, the troops surrounding him might have remembered that he was a man, not a rabbit to be skinned. The Welshman who had spoken was a short, thickset fellow from the sappers. He now produced a belt of canvas webbing and held it up.
“What do you think, lads?”
His precise, insinuating delivery suggested horrors that Turner could not immediately grasp. Now was his last chance to act. As he looked around for the corporals, there was a roar from close by, like the bellowing of a speared bull. The crowd swayed and stumbled as Mace barged through them into the circle. With a wild hollering yodeling sound, like Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, he picked up the clerk from behind in a bear hug, lifting him eighteen inches clear of the ground, and shook the terrified creature from side to side. There were cheers and whistles, foot-stamping and Wild West whoops.
“I know what I want to do with him,” Mace boomed. “I want to drown him in the bloody sea!”
In response, there rose another st
orm of hooting and stamping. Nettle was suddenly at Turner’s side and they exchanged a look. They guessed what Mace was about and they began to move toward the door, knowing they would have to be quick. Not everyone was in favor of the drowning idea. Even in the frenzy of the moment, some could still recall that the tide line was a mile away across the sands. The Welshman in particular felt cheated. He was holding up his webbing and shouting. There were catcalls and boos as well as cheers. Still holding his victim in his arms, Mace rushed for the door. Turner and Nettle were ahead of him, making a path through the crowd. When they reached the entrance—usefully, a single, not a double, door—they let Mace through, then they blocked the way, shoulder to shoulder, though they appeared not to, for they were shouting and shaking their fists like the rest. They felt against their backs a colossal and excited human weight which they could only resist for a matter of seconds. This was long enough for Mace to run, not toward the sea, but sharp left, and left again, up a narrow street that curved behind the shops and bars, away from the front.
The exultant crowd exploded from the bar like champagne, hurling Turner and Nettle aside. Someone thought he saw Mace down on the sands, and for half a minute the crowd went that way. By the time the mistake was realized and the crowd began to turn back, there was no sign of Mace and his man. Turner and Nettle had melted away too.
