by Max Hennessy
As they drew to a stop, they could hear the hammering of guns from near the harbour, then another sound intruded, rolling in iron waves round the sky. As it increased, blending with it, they heard a growing howl.
‘Run!’ Kelly yelled and they all dived from the car for an open doorway. As they flung themselves down, the scream of the bombs grew to a shriek and the crash as they exploded seemed to lift the ground and hit them in the face. The air was filled with dust and acrid smoke and they could hear metal clanging to the cobbles. His face tight, the skin pulled taut, Kelly found his jaws were aching with the clenching of his teeth.
Unharmed but shaken, they scrambled to their feet to find the old Austin lying on its side against a wall half-demolished and with its hood licked by small tongues of flame. The din was tremendous and the water of the harbour and canals was dotted with splashes as shell splinters dropped from the sky. There were a few good omens, however. The French had started to join in the evacuation, though the town major’s office was bedlam, with what appeared to be dozens of officers all shouting the claims of their own units.
‘I must have the numbers,’ an officer at the desk was yelling. ‘I’ve got to know how many men there are!’
‘For Christ’s sake–’ the officer who yelled back at him was filthy-dirty, grey-faced and red-eyed with fatigue – ‘I don’t know the bloody numbers myself!’
As the dive-bombers returned, the arguing stopped while everyone tried to assess where the bombs would fall and then, according to what they’d decided, took cover or remained where they were, flinching at the crashes. The town major, an exhausted-looking colonel, didn’t even look round as the bombs exploded, and as Kelly explained what he was up to, he managed a thin smile.
‘Well, you blue jobs have got the destroyers coming across now like Number Eleven buses,’ he said. ‘And some chap’s found a pier we can use and we’re sending everybody along there.’
By now, the dock area was full of wreckage – a burning train, cranes knocked out of true by bombs, ambulances punctured like colanders with bullets and shell fragments, splintered carts with dead horses in the shafts, and torrents of scattered brickwork where buildings had fallen. The situation had clarified a little, however, because Tennant had got a wooden mole working and a control system had been set up with berthing parties, a pier master and sailors in the town to act as guides. Redirected from the beach, men began to arrive in large numbers and there were ships alongside the pier, with hundreds more men queuing to go on board them. On the beaches, there were more queues on the hard wet sand among the litter of equipment and abandoned greatcoats. There was no sign of the disorganisation they’d seen among the French, however, and everybody was patient. Nobody seemed to be terribly worried even and, though their attitude was one of disgust that they’d been beaten, they all seemed certain it wasn’t their fault and that, given another chance, they’d put it right.
Smoke from the burning town filled the air with an appalling stench of dead and decomposing farm animals. The beach was dotted with wrecked vehicles but among them, amazingly, soldiers were playing football as they waited for ships to arrive, and despatch riders were putting on dirt-track races round a marked perimeter.
A chaos of rumour and uncertainty existed. In some parts of the beach, there were no French, yet in others small boats arriving to lift men to the ships waiting in the roadstead found nothing else. In one area, the poilus behaved steadily and intelligently, while in another inland Frenchman, unaccustomed to the sea, stood in the shallows wearing motor car inner tubes as lifebelts, shouting for help and working themselves up into a fury as they failed to understand that human beings crowding into a boat could set it so firmly on the sand nothing on God’s earth would move it until they all climbed out again.
‘One would think their precious boats were made of paper!’ one officer yelled in fury. ‘They are so afraid of them turning over.’
They were totally indifferent to the appeals of the British who, since few of them lived more than a hundred miles from the sea, had some knowledge of boats, and only D’Archy’s awesome hauteur damped their fury.
It was a babble of tongues, order, counter-order, rumour and counter-rumour, with the problem of languages increasing wherever the French predominated. With discipline all too often broken down, it was impossible to stop them rushing the boats but, as rumour piled on exhaustion to create confusion, at least they were beginning at last to arrive in a continuous stream. The chief problem, Kelly found, was keeping sufficient hold of enough of his staff to be able to despatch them to the points where the delays were occurring, to explain to the furious French officers what was happening and what was expected of them.
By the third day it was clear that Le Mesurier was drunk. Where he’d obtained the brandy he was drinking no one knew, but he stayed on his feet, red-eyed, unshaven and verbose with the Frenchmen with the verbosity of someone who had a perfect command of the language. It was obvious why he’d been free to join their party, because he was clearly on the way to being an alcoholic and some sharp-eyed doctor had spotted it when he’d offered himself for the army.
The queuing was continuous, not even stopping with darkness, and they obtained meals of bread and cheese from the ships that arrived and tried to snatch sleep in turns.
There was a monument on the promenade that seemed to separate the two armies. On one side were the British and on the other an enormous crowd of Frenchmen, among them many Moroccans who were resentful and bitter because they felt they were being left behind. Taking D’Archy, Kelly tried to bully them into moving to the mole, which seemed now to be working at tremendous speed, but they had set up a line of men with fixed bayonets and informed him that from that point on the promenade was reserved for the French. A Grenadier Guardsman was arguing with them, apparently willing to take on the whole of the French Army, but Kelly pulled him away and sent him into the city.
‘Get yourself aboard a ship,’ he said. ‘Leave that lot to me.’
But the French didn’t trust him and one of them even took a pot-shot at him. When D’Archy addressed them in their own language, however, a few broke away and headed for the town, but the rest remained firmly where they were, many of them drunk, and they had to leave them.
Tennant’s organisation was working well now, with a naval commander doing wonders as piermaster and Kelly’s group bringing in French units in increasing numbers. But the bombers were constantly overhead, operating at low altitudes, dropping their bombs and machine-gunning, and occasionally, where they’d been caught, there were swathes of dead soldiers propped against walls or stretched on the pavements, their big boots limp, helmets, gas capes or groundsheets over their dead faces.
All day a pall of smoke from the burning town and the blazing oil tanks at St Pol had covered the harbour but, as the wind changed, it drifted inshore, exposing the activity round the mole, and the bombers came in again and again, appearing from nowhere, stepped up in flights one above the other. Already, out in the roads, a ship which had brought landing craft to help with the loading from the beaches lay smoking and on fire, sinking slowly with a destroyer alongside trying to take off the troops she’d embarked. On the eastward side of the mole, two big paddle steamers, Fenella and Crested Eagle, were loading and against its inside face, opposite them, were the destroyers, Grenade and Jaguar, with six trawlers inshore of them and, astern, the personnel ship, Canterbury. Farther in were three more destroyers, Malcolm, Verity and Sabre, with the French destroyers, Mistral and Sirocco at the guiding jetty and Cyclone at the Quai Felix Fauré.
D’Archy had mustered some five hundred French soldiers on the mole. Judging by the motor inner tubes they clutched, they knew little about ships and D’Archy was holding up a whistle. ‘When I blow this,’ he said. ‘You will squat down, with your steel helmets square on your heads. Do you understand?’
Despite the aeroplanes overhead, the loading went on and whenever any of them came near D’Archy blew his whistle and th
e French soldiers did as he told them with an orderly calmness that went oddly with the panic-stricken way they clutched their inner tubes.
But it couldn’t last. With the smoke blown clear, the whole group of shipping lay at the mercy of the Luftwaffe. Fenella was the first to be hit. One bomb went through her passenger deck to burst among the packed soldiers below and another hit the mole, sending lumps of concrete through her side below the water line. Jetties and gangways were blown away, and pushing among the crowding men, Kelly fought his way into the shambles past a gaunt-eyed man who was clutching the shreds of his right arm and who stumbled against him leaving a shining smear of red across the front of his uniform. Rumbelo, his face as impassive as ever, his helmet perched on his huge head like a pimple, was dragging a man with burning clothes ashore. More men, desperately wounded, scorched or burned, sometimes simply shrieking with shock, stumbled out of the holocaust but, despite the continuous machine-gunning that felled them in their tracks even as they struggled to safety, all the troops and stretcher cases were disembarked and placed on board Crested Eagle.
They had barely completed the job when Grenade was hit and swung away out of control to sink in the fairway. Then two trawlers were sunk alongside, and Canterbury and Jaguar were hit, and with ships trying desperately to move to the safety of the roads where they could manoeuvre, Crested Eagle was also hit in her turn.
Watching Crested Eagle blazing furiously as she was driven on to the beaches at Malo-les-Bains, Kelly felt numb. Stupefied with weariness, he could hardly make his mind function. They had pushed hundreds of Frenchmen aboard Fenella, promising them a passage to safety, then, as she’d been hit, had marshalled them all off again, hating and distrusting the British, and got them aboard Crested Eagle. God alone knew what they would think now; in the best French tradition, they’d doubtless claim they’d been betrayed.
Among them were the last of the seriously wounded. Even as they’d pushed them aboard Crested Eagle, it had occurred to Kelly that all these wounded they were struggling to save could help nobody, and certainly couldn’t help Britain. Most of them would never fight again, many would never even walk again. They had to forget them to save the fit and ablebodied. Even as he debated with himself what to do about it, instructions arrived that no more wounded were to be placed aboard ships and that preference was to be given to unwounded men or men who could get aboard under their own steam. It must have been an agonising decision to take but he knew it was right, though it was received with taut faces by Le Mesurier and the others.
‘These men have served their country well,’ one of the army officers argued.
‘They’ll serve it well again by not standing in the way of whole men who can carry on the fight,’ Kelly said. ‘It’s not a decision anybody wants to take, but a wounded man lying down takes up as much room as four men standing upright, and twice as long as ten unwounded men to put aboard. They’ve already stopped them coming off the beaches because they can’t climb nets and it takes too long to rig slings.’
The stretchers were now being placed in warehouses and shelters wherever they could be left out of the bombing, and a medical officer with a barrow loaded with champagne, watched over by a sergeant with a revolver, was moving among the wounded, offering drink and cigarettes, as though he felt there was now nothing else he could do for them. Behind the town, the convoys of ambulances had been stopped and temporary hospitals had been set up in schools and halls, where more RAMC men were working alongside French Sisters of Mercy.
Though the decision meant that the unwounded could now move more freely to the ships and the congestion the wounded had caused disappeared, it was still hard for Kelly to convince himself they’d done the right thing. When you were involved in a catastrophe, you inherited its grief and became part of it because it was a shared thing, a shared sorrow, a shared anger and a shared guilt.
Yet, despite the horror and the unbelievable fatigue, there was a strange elation as they saw the soldiers carried away. Destroyers were coming in, as the town major had said, like Number Eleven buses, handled by their captains like pinnaces run by drunken midshipmen. By this time, French colonels were coming to Kelly for instructions, and he considered it a measure of their success. The very fact that they were succeeding beyond all their hopes kept them on their feet. Most people went to their graves without ever pulling out all the stops, and to work at full throttle for so good a cause as the survival of their country kept them all going – even Le Mesurier – long after they should have fallen exhausted. Fear excitement, anger and impatience produced different results from different people but responsibility simplified the problem, and success added the spice of comfort that condensed it to simplicity, so that there could never be any doubts about why they were there.
After the bombing, all movement on the mole had ceased. The harbour seemed to be out of action again and ships and men were being diverted to the beaches once more. The thought of throwing his hand in never occurred to Kelly, and it was obvious it hadn’t occurred to anyone else either. Calling in at Tennant’s office, he picked up the list of tragedies. Even the ships off the beaches hadn’t escaped.
‘Normannia, Lorina, Waverley and Gracie Fields sunk,’ he was told, ‘Pangbourne damaged, Wakefield and Grafton sunk–’
In his weariness, Kelly had hardly caught the name. Rumbelo’s son – his godson – was in Grafton.
‘Grafton?’
‘Torpedoed. She was full of troops.’
‘Casualties?’
‘Heavy.’
Suddenly the elation vanished. First Boyle’s tragedy, he thought, now Rumbelo’s. Sorrow was bearable so long as it was somebody else’s, but when it became personal, it was a different thing altogether. He tried to push it out of his mind and concentrate on what he was doing.
On the ninth morning, by which time the evacuation seemed to have been going on for a whole lifetime and beyond, he stood with Boyle in the doorway of their office drinking mugs of tea that Rumbelo had managed to beg from one of the destroyers. His face expressionless, Rumbelo had accepted the news of Grafton without the flicker of an eyelid. Lighting a cigarette, he’d disappeared about his business, pushing the dwindling group of sailors to greater efforts, making sure all the time that his officers were looked after, thrusting his private grief below the unperturbed demeanour that was the result of years of intelligent discipline.
His face gaunt, his eyes red-rimmed with sleeplessness, his feet swollen with standing, Boyle stared at Kelly wearily and, unable to look him in the face, Kelly turned to gaze at the dying city. Shells coming from the direction of Calais were bursting in the streets now and the beach was littered with wrecked ships and small boats. The sea front was a lurid study in black and red, a high wall of fire roaring with darting tongues of flame, the smoke pouring up in thick coils to disappear into the sky in a frightful panorama of destruction. The atmosphere had the stink of blood and mutilated flesh of a slaughterhouse. And still the Germans were pounding the ruins.
The losses continued to make grim reading. Keith Foudroyant and Basilisk, with Ivanhoe and Worcester damaged – valuable destroyers that Kelly knew they’d miss desperately when it came to the battle against the submarines, which would inevitably follow this debacle. The men marching in now had been in heavy fighting. There were a lot of wounded among them, the blood bright on their bandages. They were the last regiments, both British and French, to pull back, proud regiments of both nations, and they still carried their weapons and gave Kelly a smart eyes right as they passed. There was something about them that stirred him almost to tears. He’d lost the two British army officers he’d picked up, and D’Archy, considering his job done, had formally requested permission to rejoin his admiral.
‘What will you do, Archie?’ Kelly asked.
The Frenchman’s thin face cracked into a smile. Disappear,’ he said shortly. ‘We cannot evacuate the whole of France, you understand. Yet I don’t intend to stay here to be sent to a prison camp. I shall fi
nd civilian clothes and make my way to the base at Toulon. France will need men of spirit to keep our ships out of the hands of the Germans and prepare them for when the time comes to hit back.’
The Frenchman’s disappearance left only Le Mesurier, one of the naval officers and a mere handful of sailors. What had happened to the others nobody knew.
Troops still continued to trudge into the town through the Place Jean Bart and down the Boulevard Jeanne d’Arc past the ruins of the Church of St Eloi. Most of them now were French. Inland somewhere, there were still others, with the gunners of the rear-guard who would never make it, because the Germans were now too close and Ramsay, at Dover, knowing how desperately they’d be needed in the future, had reluctantly withdrawn what remained of his destroyers.
But the mole was working again now, despite the fact that it had been breached half a dozen times and repaired with planks and ladders again and again; offshore, small miracles were still being performed as men made sails with clothing and water-proof capes, and engineers stood waist-deep in waterlogged engine rooms to watch their gauges. The Casino was blazing and there were wrecks in the fairway circled by small boats on the lookout for survivors. Beyond those still on the mole, there were no known complete units left to be rescued, and Tennant had sent the signal, ‘BEF evacuated,’ the previous night.
The dead lay all over the town, in hastily scraped graves in gardens and parks and among the sand dunes. They floated along the tide line and lay in the warm soil all the way back to the Belgian frontier and through the graveyards of the earlier war. They huddled in ditches, in the fields and in the streets of dozens of small towns and villages, among the wrecked guns and smoking vehicles of a defeated army. Hundreds more were entombed in the cold hulks of ships beneath the sea.
During the night, the shelling had grown more intense and the German bombers seemed to be hovering above the town all the time. The din was deafening and Kelly and his little party were still on the move among the shattered streets, climbing over piles of bricks and timber and dodging the fires to direct the last men towards the mole. They were stumbling with exhaustion by this time, and when daylight came, Kelly found his party had dwindled to Boyle, Rumbelo and Le Mesurier. The others had taken advantage of the confusion to step aboard a ship, and he felt he couldn’t blame them, because no one could look forward to being a prisoner of war with equanimity. Officially the evacuation had ended. There was nothing to do from this point on but save themselves.
