Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  ‘She’ll do,’ he said. ‘Wheel her in. What’s on your minds?’

  They glanced at each other and he knew exactly what their reply would be. ‘We want to get engaged.’

  Kelly’s smile died. ‘Seen your mother about it, Hugh?’ he asked. ‘After all, I’m not your father and it’s really nothing to do with me.’

  Hugh frowned. ‘I saw her,’ he said. ‘She had no objection.’

  ‘It seems to me she’s getting a jolly pretty daughter-in-law. What do you want for a wedding present when it comes off? I’m not very wealthy, but I could probably run to a small cottage somewhere.’

  ‘That’s generous, sir,’ Hugh said. ‘But we were wondering–’

  Paddy tugged at his hand and as he became silent she spoke. She had inherited a touch of the Irish accent that had never left Biddy and there was a great deal of her mother in her forthright manner.

  ‘We were wondering,’ she said, ‘if, while the war’s on at least, we could convert the stables into somewhere to live. They have two or three rooms above that used to be used by the grooms.’

  ‘And it’s handy for Portsmouth, Chatham and Devonport,’ Kelly smiled. ‘To say nothing of London.’

  ‘I’ll still be working at the hospital, so I’ll be able to get home and I can be here whenever Hugh comes on leave.’ She paused.

  ‘We’d pay properly, of course, because neither of us has any call on you.’

  ‘Don’t make a scrap of difference,’ Kelly said. ‘You’d better start getting on with it at once. In the meantime, I think we ought to celebrate, don’t you? And, with your brother at sea and your father doing mysterious things in Dover, I think we’d better have your mother in to join us.’

  The following morning Kelly took the train to London. Somehow the Admiralty had come to life. It had always hummed under Winston but until Norway it had always had the dead hand of the Chamberlain administration over it. Now, there was a new confidence because at last someone had recognised that the British people had sufficient intelligence and courage to face facts, and the battle in France was finally being spoken of as the major disaster it surely was. It was suggested immediately that there was work for him if he wanted it, and he was told to report to Dover Command.

  Because it was Sunday, the trains were running at their usual peacetime half-strength, and he had to wait what seemed ages. Young servicemen with their girl friends and wives filled the station, and he felt old and lonely. Thinking of Charley, he wondered what it must be like to be in America when your country was at war, and if it would be possible next time he was in New York to get in touch with her through one of the welfare organisations who sent comforts to British troops.

  He was still waiting at the gate when the Dover train came in and almost the first person he saw coming towards him was Mabel, Charley’s sister. She seemed to have shed a lot of the artificiality, which had been part of her personality, and there was a solidity about her he’d never seen before.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ she said. ‘Where did you spring from?’

  He told her what he’d been doing and her face changed. ‘It looks bad, Kelly doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘George’s in France. I hope to God he’s all right.’

  He tried to pump her on the subject of Charley’s whereabouts, but she was giving nothing away. ‘I can’t tell you, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if she’d wish me to.’

  He accepted the rebuke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘just give her my love when you’re next in touch with her.’

  She gave him a curious look, but said nothing, and he was aware of her watching him as he turned away and headed for the platform.

  As the train left London, Sunday cricket was still being played, and every road was full of small cars heading for the countryside. It seemed unbelievable that there was a war on, let alone a British army fighting for its life only a few miles away, and it reminded him of the indifference he’d seen in Santander. Would people still be so indifferent when the ‘last trump’ came?

  It was evening when he arrived in Dover and he was aware at once of the war intruding. The place was packed with people, and they all seemed bent on some urgent task. There were policemen and uniformed women welfare workers everywhere and it was obvious they’d arrived from other towns and cities in response to an appeal for help. The town seemed totally inadequate for what was going on, and it was clear the minute he stepped from the train that the place was being geared up for the evacuation of the Army from France. The station was full of lines of communications troops, footsore men with harrowing tales of being bombed and shot at all the way from Brussels to the coast, and the station entrance and forecourt were filled with more of them, standing in lost groups waiting to be told what to do.

  Every taxi in the place seemed already spoken for and he set off on foot for naval headquarters. Oddly enough, the first person he met was Rumbelo, plodding out of the gates with an envelope in his hand.

  ‘What the hell are they using you for, Rumbelo?’ he asked. ‘Messenger boy?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Rumbelo’s face was sullen. ‘As if I was a newly-joined boy seaman or a bloody old barrack stanchion having to lean on his broom to stop himself falling down. Taking messages. That’s what I’m doing. How about getting me out of it, sir?’

  Kelly grinned, and told him of the celebration they’d had the night before. Rumbelo’s potato face lifted.

  ‘Honest, sir, I’m that pleased. How about you? Don’t you mind?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me, Albert, old son. He’s not my boy, and even if he were, it still wouldn’t be any of my business.’

  ‘I mean, me being only–’

  ‘Dry up, you old fool,’ Kelly said. ‘We’ve known each other too bloody long to worry about what we are. Biddy’s looked after my mother and then me, and you and I have been getting each other out of trouble ever since 1911. I can’t think of anybody better to be related to.’

  Rumbelo’s face went pink with pleasure. ‘I reckon you’d better see Admiral Corbett, sir,’ he suggested conspiratorially. ‘He’s here and, if anyone can, he ought to be able to do something for us – both of us.’ He was just on the point of moving away when he stopped again. ‘By the way, sir, Mr Boyle’s on his staff, and he looks down in the mouth, too.’

  Boyle was talking urgently into the telephone when Kelly pushed into his office. They’d served together in the destroyer, Mordant, and again in the battleship, Rebuke, after Boyle had switched to the paymaster branch. His wife was French; her family had bought a house at Dunkirk when her father had retired from the Consular Service and he was trying to find out what had happened to them.

  Corbett was deep in conversation with three other senior officers when Kelly was shown in, but he broke off at once. ‘Just the man I’m looking for,’ he said.

  He looked tired and admitted he hadn’t slept for three nights. ‘It’s just beginning to be difficult,’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve just heard Boulogne and Calais have gone, but Gort’s had the guts to decide to bring out the Army. And thank God, too, because if he doesn’t the war’s as good as lost. We haven’t another. Let’s go along and see Ramsay.’

  Admiral Ramsay, the C-in-C., Dover, who was organising the evacuation, was a man of medium size, quiet, and so unemotional he’d always been considered rather a cold fish. Before the war, he’d even been regarded as a failure because he’d disagreed with his chief and, throwing up his appointment, had been on the retired list when the demands of the war and his unquestioned ability had brought him back. His headquarters were in the galleries hewn by French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars in the cliffs below Dover Castle, and as Kelly was ushered in, the adjoining rooms were full of grim-faced men trying to bring order out of chaos. With the rumble of gunfire clearly audible, they were planning for emergencies.

  As they waited, Ramsay was sitting on the edge of a desk talking to his chief of staff. ‘We can no longer expect an orderly evacuation,’ he was saying. ‘What ships are
available?’

  ‘Keith and Vimy both hit at Boulogne, sir.’ The chief of staff looked at a list in his hand. ‘Both captains killed. Venetia also hit. Vimiera brought out one thousand four hundred men. The French lost Orage, Frondeur and Chacal.’

  Ramsay’s face was expressionless. ‘What about Calais?’

  ‘We lost Wessex, with Vimiera and Burza damaged.’

  Ramsay nodded. ‘Better get me a list of all available personnel ships, and we might even have to consider the all-out use of destroyers as lifting vessels.’

  As the chief of staff turned away, Corbett introduced Kelly. Ramsay stared at him in his expressionless way.

  ‘Maguire,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of you. You were at Bilbao and Santander in 1937.’

  ‘He was also at Chinkiang in 1927,’ Corbett pointed out. ‘And Odessa in 1920 and Domlupinu before that. He knows a bit about evacuations. In 1914 he brought a couple of hundred Marines out of Antwerp after the Germans arrived.’

  Kelly began to see the direction the conversation was heading. ‘Nearer a hundred,’ he said quickly.

  ‘You seem to have spent a remarkable amount of your naval career rescuing people from on shore,’ Ramsay commented. ‘Understand you speak good French.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, Winston’s a bit worried that the French are hanging back and he wants them bringing out in equal numbers. Unfortunately, they’re not very organised and we need to know why.’

  ‘Probably,’ Corbett said, ‘because there’s nobody over there who can speak their language. We’re not noted as linguists.’

  Ramsay looked at Kelly. ‘I’d like you to go and sort it out,’ he said.

  ‘I’d hoped for a ship, sir.’

  ‘It’s everybody’s wish to distinguish himself at sea,’ Ramsay said dryly. ‘Unfortunately we’re more in need at the moment of people who can distinguish themselves on land. Tennant’s going across tomorrow as senior naval officer ashore. We need another.’

  Kelly bowed to the inevitable. ‘I’ll go, of course, sir, if that’s where I’m needed.’

  ‘Good. You’ll need some staff. Any ideas?’

  ‘There’s a petty officer here, sir. He was with me in Antwerp and Domlupinu and Odessa. I know him well.’

  ‘He’s yours.’

  ‘Anybody else?’

  ‘Lieutenant-Commander Boyle, sir.’

  ‘He’s my secretary!’ Corbett protested.

  ‘He was at Odessa and Domlupinu, too, sir. Moreover, he speaks excellent French because he has a French wife and he knows Dunkirk.’

  Ramsay rubbed his nose and gave Corbett a cold little smile. ‘It looks as if you’ve lost him, Cuthbert,’ he observed. ‘Very well, fix yourself up with transport across the Channel. Your job will be to contact the French Army and direct their men to the ships. You’ll find a bit of resentment all round because our people think the French have let ’em down by giving way and the French think we’re letting them down by pulling out. It’s up to you to sort it out.’

  The harbour was packed with shipping. It had been designed originally as an anchorage for the old Channel Fleet, yet at the berths at the Admiralty Pier Kelly could see as many as eighteen or twenty ships moored in trots two and three deep. A hospital ship was unloading into a row of ambulances, and exhausted khaki-clad figures were stumbling ashore across her from other vessels. As he watched, a tug began to butt at a ship whose yellow bridge paint work was scorched by a great black scar where the steelwork was wrenched back like the lid of a sardine tin.

  The office of the Director of Shipping was crowded and the naval commander behind the desk seemed to be at his wits’ end. When Kelly appeared, he simply waved him to the inner office where a naval captain was standing in front of a map, sticking flags into it, with a list in his left hand. Alongside him was a remarkably pretty girl in the uniform of a Wren.

  ‘Captain Verschoyle’s busy,’ she said immediately.

  ‘Not too busy to see me,’ Kelly retorted.

  Verschoyle turned, stared at Kelly and began to smile.

  ‘Ginger Maguire, as I live and breathe,’ he said. ‘I heard they’d sunk you at Narvik.’ He gestured at the girl. ‘Beat it, Maisie. I’ll let you know when to come back.’

  As the door closed, Kelly grinned. ‘I see you still know how to pick ’em.’

  Verschoyle gave his superior smile and stuck another flag into the map. ‘I’d be a bloody fool if I let them fob me off with one with buck teeth and breasts like clockweights,’ he said. ‘Maisie used to be an actress, but patriotism or lack of plays drove her into uniform and she picked the Navy because her father was a chief petty officer in Nelson. She glosses over her background and she’s mastered her accent but I’ve noticed when we go aboard a ship she still tends to turn forward rather than aft at the top of the gangway.’

  He saw Kelly looking round the office and gestured. ‘Don’t let this fool you,’ he said. ‘It’s only until this little bunfight settles down. After that, I suspect they’ll be needing everybody at sea who can handle even a pram dinghy because somebody seems to have made a proper balls-up of things, and we’ve finished up with the final socialist dream of plenty of money for social welfare but no fighting services.’ He jabbed another flag into the map, this time as if it were into a politician’s backside. ‘Si vis pacem para bellum. Well, now we’re up to the necks in the bellum we haven’t para’d for. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just been landed with the job of naval liaison officer to the French Army.’

  ‘I hope you can run fast.’

  ‘I want a lift across with my staff, Cruiser.’

  Verschoyle smiled. ‘You have an incredible gift for diving in at the deep end. How many have you got?’

  ‘So far, two. Seamus Boyle and Rumbelo.’

  Verschoyle grinned. ‘I saw Boyle yesterday and Rumbelo a couple of days ago, so I had a feeling in my bones you’d turn up before long.’ He glanced at the list in his hand. ‘You’d better go across in Wolfhound. She’ll be leaving tomorrow. Tennant’s already booked a passage aboard her. You under him?’

  ‘No,’ Kelly said briskly. ‘I’m under me.’

  Seven

  They spent the night searching for French speakers among the sailors arriving in Dover to offer their services, and before morning had found seven men and five officers from the training establishment, King Alfred, plus one of Verschoyle’s staff and a middle-aged Guernseyman called Le Mesurier, who had once had his name in the newspapers for sailing single-handed at the age of seventeen to Malta during his school holidays. Running out of funds at Malaga on the way back, his boat impounded, his charts confiscated, his credit stopped and a guard put on his boat, he’d traced a map from an atlas at the library, floored the guard with a sack of oranges he’d pinched from a market for food and reached home literally on his last orange pip. Since he spoke fluent French and claimed to know Dunkirk and the surrounding countryside as well as Boyle, with the aid of one of Verschoyle’s staff they fitted him up with a reserve sub-lieutenant’s uniform to give him authority and attached him to the group.

  ‘I hadn’t really intended to join up,’ he bleated. ‘In fact, when I volunteered for the army they turned me down.’

  ‘You haven’t joined up,’ Kelly said shortly. ‘Just been disguised. If you find you like it, you can join when we get back.’

  When they arrived at Dunkirk, steel-helmeted, their uniforms dragged out of shape by webbing belts and revolver holsters, the place was burning and most of the harbour facilities were in ruins. The bombing appeared to be continuous and the information they received was alarming to say the least because the Belgians had just surrendered, leaving a huge gap in the Allied lines.

  There were hundreds of them at the station with more hundreds of French, standing among heaps of rifles, packs and helmets, bewildered and prepared to lay down their arms. There were a few who were not prepared to march meekly into captivity, however, and Le Mesurier managed to persua
de them to head for the beaches where a slow lifting had started by ships’ boats. Eventually, even those who had been prepared to give up began to straggle off.

  It was a beginning and they set up an office close to that set up by Tennant, but it soon became clear that out of the five officers Kelly had picked, two had so little French they were useless and one was so frightened he refused to move from the harbour. Kelly sent them home on the ferry, Queen of the Channel, and recruited instead two army Intelligence officers and a French naval captain called D’Archy with a title and a grand manner to go with it. D’Archy was only part of his name and the rest went on for so long, ‘Archie Bumf’ was the nearest they could get to it and that was how he was known.

  Enlisting the assistance of a few sailors from bombed ships, Kelly posted his men at strategic points leading to the beaches and left Boyle to look after them while he set off with Rumbelo and Le Mesurier to find out what conditions were like. The town had already descended into chaos and telephones were not working. The streets were full of rubble and burning vehicles and dazed French soldiers, too far gone in shock to be able to help themselves, stood in groups, watching as the British poured in. Some of the British units had also disintegrated and thrown away their equipment and rifles, but there were still some with long histories, great traditions or simply good officers, who appeared complete with kit and arms, their heads up and marching in step. The chances of getting them to safety already seemed problematical and it was becoming increasingly obvious that an idea Tennant had had to embark them all from the beaches was the only way to do it.

  It was too late to do much that night beyond seeing Abrial, the French Amiral Nord, so Kelly sent Boyle off to try to trace his in-laws.