Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  They were in the last stages now, and the French admiral was moving with his staff towards the sea. Behind them came an immense river of refugees and craven soldiers – French, Belgians, Moroccans, British – who had hidden in ruined houses from the bombing, to snatch the places of the desperate fighting troops. In a fury, Kelly mustered a group of Guardsmen, artillerymen, sailors and cavalrymen, and they formed a line at the end of the mole with two machine guns and their rifles at the ready.

  The mob had emerged from the cellars of the city in hundreds. They clutched bottles and a few of them were singing, but the smell about them was the smell of fear. Unmoving, Kelly kept his group across the end of the mole, forcing a gap in the crowd for the last few men of the rearguard who appeared, to pass through.

  ‘Thank you.’ A tall Guards officer, shaved and polished as if he’d been on parade at St James, but with eyes that were hollow with weariness, led his men through the line. ‘It’s nice of you to save us a place.’

  Behind the Guards were French soldiers led by a colonel who looked like the major they’d seen at Gyseghem – thin with age and as smart as the Guardsman. As he passed, he saluted gravely.

  Deaf to the yells of the mob, Kelly waited until it appeared there was no one else to come, then, forming his men up, the soldiers and sailors and three airmen he’d also acquired who were the survivors of a sunken RAF tender, he marched them down the mole and stood behind them with his revolver drawn to prevent them being swamped by the rabble that followed them.

  Two hundred thousand soldiers had passed down the narrow plankway to safety and, despite the darkness, the wind, the sea and the enemy shellfire and bombing, the river of men had hardly ever stopped. The mole had been wrecked and repaired again and again and the loading berths were blocked by sunken ships, and still they’d come. Because the flow was now intermittent, however, the vessels arriving were only fishing vessels, motorboats, and RAF rescue launches.

  Rumbelo stood in silence in front of him. Boyle’s face was drawn and agonised, and Kelly tried to imagine what they were thinking. Le Mesurier sagged against him. He had walked and run a hundred times to the beaches of Malo-les-Bains even occasionally to La Panne, and he was clearly finished, his face exhausted and puffy with booze.

  The queue edged forward and Kelly found himself jammed aboard an RAF pinnace as she edged from the pier and picked her way through the wrecked ships.

  As they swung out and passed the end of the mole, they saw the last weary men of the rearguard who had made it halt on the end. There were tears of misery in his eyes as he realised there would be no ships for them. The last of the personnel carriers had gone, with the paddle steamers, the fleet sweepers, the trawlers, the drifters and finally the destroyers. These men, both French and British, had stumbled into the town expecting to be picked up, but the monstrous army of cowards, lines of communication troops, transport drivers and the men of ancillary services who had not put their heads above the earth for days had snatched their places. They had never had any intention of fighting but they had also had no intention of standing back to give up their places to the men who had fought. As the pinnace, crammed with men and top-heavy, headed for the sea, Kelly saw the pale faces watching in anguish.

  A small motor boat had been sent in to take off a French general and his staff, and the picture burned itself into Kelly’s mind. There were still about a thousand men on the mole, men of proud regiments, and they stood at attention in the faint light of dawn with the flames throwing the faces and helmets into sharp relief, while the general and his staff, tears on their cheeks, saluted. It was only a gesture but Kelly thought, sometimes gestures could be bloody moving.

  As they reached the open sea in the last of the darkness, the recriminations began. Who had been responsible? Who had let them down? Where had the RAF been? Kelly stared ahead of him with narrow eyes, knowing perfectly well that the responsibility lay with the politicians and do-gooders who’d felt it wrong to kill men with big guns and big ships and big bombs, and had allowed themselves to believe the words of Hitler and Mussolini.

  He was cold and tired and the dirt had a strange mummifying effect on him, as if it stiffened his limbs and dulled his mind. Overhead he could still see the pinprick flickering of anti-aircraft fire inland where the RAF was still trying to bomb German troop concentrations.

  ‘I’m bloody hungry,’ a Guardsman next to him said. ‘I ain’t had anything to eat for three days.’

  ‘We could always eat each other,’ Kelly suggested. ‘But, as senior officer,’ he said, ‘I expect first bite.’

  It raised a laugh but it didn’t last long. Shells were still dropping in the fairway and, as they cleared the town, a fresh flight of Junkers 87s came down on them. For a while, the crash of bombs seemed to strip their nerves and leave them, in their exhausted state, shaking with fear. Vast splashes rose around them and the boats scattered in every direction. In the sea ahead was a mat of swimmers where a launch had been hit, then a bomb landed close alongside and the pinnace began to take in water. Discarding jackets and shoes, they began to slip overboard one after the other and swim to another pinnace which had avoided the worst of the attack.

  Rumbelo was puffing badly and Kelly and Boyle dragged him along with them. Le Mesurier was swimming alongside them and he called out cheerfully that he was all right, but when they were dragged aboard and turned round for him, he had vanished.

  Crammed with men, some of them wounded, most of them covered with oil, their faces haggard with weariness, the boat started to move off. Unaware of his rank, a worried sergeant snarled at Kelly to get a move on and he obediently edged further along the deck, huddling in the mass of exhausted men from the chilling wind that raced over the bow. They were all silent. Nobody felt like talking, all aware of the depression that came with the shattering knowledge of defeat. Above their heads loomed the black pall from the oil tanks of St Pol, stretching up into the air for 11,000 feet and a mile wide, two millions tons of the stuff burning like a furnace. It had the look of doom itself about it.

  Dover harbour was crowded to capacity, with loudhailers squawking as officers in command of ships demanded permission to leave or go alongside. The quayside echoed to the shouts of red-eyed soldiers begging cigarettes and the barking of dozens of dogs, which had attached themselves to them. On a wall someone had scrawled. ‘Well done, BEF’ and the man alongside Kelly sniffed audibly. ‘I thought we’d lost the bloody battle,’ he said.

  They had transferred to a big motor launch as soon as they’d cleared Dunkirk, and when the launch’s overworked engines had broken down, had been picked up by the trawler, General Roberts. Near the Kwinte Buoy they’d picked up the survivors of a French fishing boat which had hit a mine. The survivors had had their clothes stripped clean away by the explosion and almost every one of them was suffering from a fracture of the legs, pelvis or spine.

  The last ships were gathering outside the harbour as they arrived, personnel carriers and tugs, minesweepers from the North Sea and East Coast ports, coasters and short-sea traders, and boats with registrations from the Wash to Poole, while the destroyers whooped their way among them, setting the moored dinghies rolling and curtseying in their wake.

  Getting the trawler in through the difficult tide stream and the press of boats required an intricate feat of seamanship which Kelly, as an inveterate bad handler of ships in harbour, had to admire even through his weariness. Men were still trooping ashore from the preceding vessels, and ships crowded every berth, many of them marked by fire or scarred by splinters. On their decks silent shapes lay covered with blankets, waiting for collection, and as the living streamed on to the quays, civilians clambered past with stretchers and first aid equipment. Air raid wardens, indifferent to the mess it made of their own clothes, were struggling to help men covered with fuel oil. Others were clearing ships of dirt, pools of blood and equipment; and women, some in the uniform of the voluntary services, some in summer frocks and hastily recruited, were passing
round water bottles and telegram forms. They all looked hot because there was no wind and not a cloud in the sky, and many of them had faces that were wet with tears.

  More women were running a mobile canteen with cups borrowed from local catering businesses, handing out food they’d acquired from the city shops, working at full speed and totally indifferent to the near-nakedness of some of the men. Despite the constant harassment, they all kept their heads. French-Moroccan soldiers were struggling with a group of sailors who were complaining loudly that they’d stolen their gear, and there was no order because senior officers were mixed with the lowest ranks, among them French and Belgian refugees – even a few German prisoners who had somehow got themselves captured in the chaos.

  A squad of cavalrymen was forming up in threes, indifferent to the other soldiers.

  ‘We,’ their sergeant was informing them, ‘are the Supple Twelfth and don’t you forget it. We will not straggle, lose our ’eads or otherwise be’ave like ordinary soldiers. We are now going to the station and we will march. Is that understood?’

  As they clanked off, every man in step, the quayside emptied a little. Boyle and Rumbelo had vanished and Kelly could only suppose they’d gone in search of somewhere to get their heads down, so he sought out Verschoyle to inform him that the officer they’d snatched from his staff had vanished in the confusion.

  ‘I think he was killed on the mole,’ he said. ‘He was there when they got Fenella, Crested Eagle and Grenade.’

  Verschoyle studied him. He’d not slept more than a few hours in a week and was haggard with tiredness himself. Even his Wren looked worn-out.

  ‘Fish it out, Maisie,’ he said and she reached into a drawer to produce a flask.

  ‘I wish,’ Kelly said, coughing as the spirit burned his empty stomach, ‘that all those bloody politicians who spent the thirties cutting the services, all those dim-witted generals, admirals and air marshals who spent their time watching their pensions instead of watching the enemy, and all those bloody soft-minded buggers at the League of Nations who preached appeasement could just have been there.’

  Verschoyle gave him a tired smile. ‘You’ve obviously come out of it mentally unharmed,’ he said. ‘You still sound like Ginger Maguire.’

  He produced a lift to the Castle and, still in shirtsleeves, his wrinkled clothes drying on him, Kelly reported to Corbett who assigned a Wren writer to him to take down his report. She looked about sixteen and, after what he’d seen in Dunkirk, breathtakingly beautiful.

  As he left the office, somebody handed him a telegram and he read it dazedly, half-expecting it to inform him of the loss of Rumbelo’s son in Grafton. Instead, it announced the death of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Maguire, Bt., from a heart attack at his club in London. It had been sent by the club’s secretary to Thakenham and re-addressed by Biddy. Just then it didn’t really register.

  Two hours later, he headed back to the docks. Rumbelo and Boyle had appeared at the Castle, like himself still wearing the clothes they’d worn when they’d had to swim for their lives, but he was worried about Le Mesurier. Drunk or sober, he’d done a tremendous job and he was hoping against hope he might have turned up.

  Somebody gave him a lift to the docks in a staff car. Tugs were moving ships whose crews were fast asleep, doing the whole job themselves because it was impossible to wake the exhausted men below, and there were rows of stretchers along the small boat stage which sweating helpers were hoisting into ambulances. Women bent over the wounded, fixing labels to their battle-dress blouses, and one of them was holding a mug of tea to a man whose head was swathed in bandages. For a while Kelly stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. I know this woman, he thought dazedly. I’ve known her all my life.

  Despite his weariness, he felt a stab of pain at all the promise and pleasure he’d lost, and his thoughts scampered like frightened mice through his mind as he tried to make out how she came to be there when she should have been in America. Then, through a daze of exhaustion, he remembered meeting Mabel in London. She’d got off the Dover train, he recalled, and now he realised why.

  He felt like a guilty schoolboy up before the headmaster as he stepped forward.

  ‘Hello, Charley,’ he said.

  Part Two

  One

  Charley straightened up, frowning. At first she didn’t recognise him because he was wearing a pair of borrowed shoes that were too big for him and someone else’s jacket, then recognition came and, for a moment, there was anguish in her face. Finally her expression changed again to one that was devoid of both pleasure and displeasure.

  ‘Hello, Kelly,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ he asked.

  She guessed he hadn’t slept for a week. His face was grey and gaunt with fatigue, and he was stooping with weariness, but though her heart went out to him, she kept hold of herself and forced herself to answer calmly.

  ‘There was a war on. America was no place for me.’

  He had expected nothing more, felt he deserved no more, and began to turn away, but she put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m looking for a naval officer. Name of Le Mesurier. Don’t suppose you’ve seen him, have you?’

  In his weariness, his tongue stumbled over the words and her heart swelled with compassion. ‘I think you need some sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I expect someone will find me a bed.’

  She produced a key from her pocket and gave him an address. ‘Go to my place,’ she said. ‘There’s a bed there. If I hear of your officer, I’ll let you know.’

  He wasn’t sure in his weariness how he found himself on the doorstep of her flat. The place was small with only a living-dining room, but it was neat and full of sunshine and chintz. On the window ledge was a silver frame containing the photograph of a man in an RAF wing commander’s uniform. It was a strong, intelligent good-looking face, but in his tiredness Kelly missed its significance.

  Immediately opposite the door was a table bearing a whisky decanter and, in a daze, he sloshed half a tumbler of the spirit into a glass. Going to the bathroom, he splashed water into it from a tap and began to drink. Then, staring around him, he became aware of toothbrushes, face cloths and silk stockings hanging from a small clothesline. He gazed at them, only dimly aware that they belonged to Charley – his Charley – the Charley he’d wanted to marry all his life and who once had wanted to marry him. Then weariness swept over him. He couldn’t remember when he’d last closed his eyes and he went in search of a bed.

  Stumbling through a doorway, he found a small room where there was a double bed spread with a flowered cover, and it looked incredibly comfortable. As he emptied his pockets, he found the telegram he’d been handed at the Castle and stared at it dully. So the old boy had gone at last, he thought. He’d begun to think of him as immortal. Then he realised that it meant that he’d inherited the title. Unexpectedly, when he’d forgotten all about it, he’d suddenly become Sir Kelly Maguire, Baronet.

  He tried to think about what it meant but he was too tired and he thrust it from his mind without much effort. Then he realised that the bed he was about to climb into was Charley’s and, though he’d been in a few women’s beds in his time, he’d never been in hers, and it seemed so wrong he turned round and headed for the settee. He was just about to sit down when he realised he was filthy dirty and stank of sweat and smoke and blood, so he found a blanket in a cupboard and lay down on the floor instead.

  When he came round, he was in the bed. How he’d got there he had no idea, but somebody had stripped his clothes off and he lay staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what had happened. As he tried to recover his wits, the door clicked and he saw Charley looking at him.

  ‘How did I get here?’ he asked.

  ‘I put you there.’

  ‘Dragged me?’

  ‘You walked. Sleep-walked would be a better description.’

  She disappeared and return
ed, grave-faced and unsmiling, with a tray.

  ‘I expect you could do with a cup of tea.’

  It was a trite sort of remark and, under the circumstances, terribly English, but somehow, it seemed to steady a world in danger of whirling off its axis into insanity. And, after all the salt water he’d swallowed, the vast swig he’d taken from Verschoyle’s flask and the enormous whisky that had followed his mouth felt as if he’d been weeks in the Sahara.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I could.’

  As she poured the tea, he studied her under drooping eyelids. She was a beautiful, dignified woman, not very different from when he’d last seen her, but with a clear wariness about her that made him feel wary in return, and he didn’t know what to say. It was seven years since he’d last seen her and thirteen since they’d ruined their lives by marrying the wrong partners.

  He could see himself in the mirror opposite, gaunt with tiredness, his eyes circled by dark shadows, his chin blurred by a three-day-old beard. She didn’t seem to notice, however, and sat on the end of the bed. She was wearing a blue dress that matched her eyes and she looked so beautiful he wanted to weep for all the wasted years.

  ‘Your officer doesn’t appear to have turned up,’ she told him quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shrugged. ‘He was a brave man.’

  For a moment, they were silent, unable to find anything to say. It was as if they were strangers and it bothered him because once they’d shared all of each other’s secrets. He didn’t know a thing about her now, he realised, nothing beyond what he could see.