Silence Over Dunkerque

by John R. Tunis

  The dog, burrowing through the hastily collected crowd watching the scene, leaped upon him as he reached the sand.

  CHAPTER 11

  “WOUNDED FIRST! WOUNDED FIRST! Get back there, you men. Stand back. The wounded go first.”

  From the bridge of the destroyer beside the mole, a naval officer with a megaphone in one hand gave orders to the troops trying to board.

  Somehow the Sergeant had bullied and commanded those exhausted men to trudge back the six miles of sand to Dunkerque, where, so they were assured, a destroyer was taking off all casual troops. Now they felt that burning sensation behind the eyes, which comes from lack of sleep, and the utter weariness, which made every step seem like lifting a hundred pounds. Through the long night they had stumbled slowly along the beach, each one holding the shoulder of the man in front so as not to lose touch. Once they passed an officer standing waist-deep in water, signaling with a torch when a boat came in, so none would be upset by the rush of men. When he flashed, twenty men stepped forward. The Sergeant tried to get his men aboard, but was told to go down to the Dunkerque mole. As dawn broke, they reached the burning town, its shattered pier sticking out into the water. Sure enough, a destroyer was waiting.

  Although they could hardly believe it, the ship had steam up and was apparently soon leaving. There it was before them, not cruising slowly out to sea, but close at hand beside the mole. The mole itself was smashed and broken by bombs and by recent shelling, for the Germans were getting into the outskirts of town, but planking had been laid across the damaged parts, and the wounded were even then being carried aboard the waiting vessel. It was a happy and hopeful sight after those long hours of danger, to see that long, slim, graceful ship, reassuring with its powerful armament pointing toward the sky, guns of all kinds fore and aft. On the bow was its number, L 91. The Sergeant knew it was H.M.S. Wakeful.

  From the tail of the waiting lines on the beach the Sergeant and his little band could watch the wounded taken aboard, a process that seemed everlasting. All the while continual orders came down from the officer with the megaphone leaning over the bridge.

  “Stand back there, you men, stand back! Wounded first. The wounded embark first. Anyone attempting to get aboard before the wounded will be shot immediately. Wounded come on first.”

  As they stood watching, there was a shout, a land of commotion in the files, the noise of men’s voices, and a soldier, evidently crazed by the incessant bombing, left his place in line, unable to hold out any longer. Waving his arms and shouting, he dashed onto the pier, past the stretcher-bearers with their burdens, and leaping from plank to plank, raced for the destroyer. As he reached it, he started to jump from the pier to the deck of the ship, despite the restraining arms of several officers standing alongside.

  Shaking them off, he leaped into the air. A single shot rang out. The soldier toppled over backward into the water, clutching his stomach. Around his body the ocean crimsoned rapidly. Above, the voice of the naval officer continued in the same monotonous tone.

  “Walking wounded only. Walking wounded next aboard. Anyone else embarking will be shot immediately. Walking wounded next....”

  It grew lighter, and after a while the mist vanished. Now the wounded were all aboard, and the long lines of troops stretching back up the wide beach began to move. Inch by inch, foot by foot, with a slowness that for the Sergeant and his men was almost unendurable, they edged down toward the cracked masonry of the mole, to safety, to freedom, to the warship, and the open sea. And to home and England waiting beyond.

  As they moved forward the dog moved with them. Thinking about his men and himself, the Sergeant had forgotten the Airedale, who had never left his heels through the long dark night. Although many small, nondescript French dogs peered out here and there in the line from a soldier’s knapsack or from the top of a burlap sack carried over a man’s shoulder, this dog, he knew, would never be allowed on that destroyer. Not if she were the dog of the Commander in Chief.

  Yet there she was at his heels, trusting, confident, as only a pet can be, a dog that obviously had known only love and affection all her life, a family dog, not a hunting dog, gentle and understanding, an animal for children, big, clumsy, affectionate. And helpless. What to do?

  There was time to take her back up the beach in the dunes, shoot her with his revolver, and resume his place in line. The Sergeant had proved himself a brave man those weeks, yet he was not brave enough for this task. That soldier, who never questioned an order or ever failed in his duty under fire, could not obey the command his common sense gave him. One glance down at her trustful brown eyes, looking up at him with confidence, was sufficient to kill reason and common sense. She was too near him, too much a part of him. Together, side by side, they had endured the machine-gunning from the low-flying planes, fought through the suffocating smoke of the burning town, crouched closely on the sands at Bray-Dunes as the 155 mm. shells from the German batteries at Nieuwport sputtered and burst around them.

  Kill her he could not.

  Ever so slowly at first, then faster, the troops urged on by the destroyer officers moved toward the pier. Next, under orders they broke into a tired trot along the stone mole, jumping upon the planks joining the destroyed portions. Always the Airedale kept close to the heels of the Sergeant. Soon the head of the line was jumping onto the decks of the destroyer.

  “Can’t take that dog, Sergeant! No dogs allowed on board,” a naval officer yelled at him.

  His men were leaping down one by one, Fingers last of all. The Sergeant followed and naturally the dog followed him. She recognized no naval officer’s right to separate her from someone she loved.

  “Toss her back,” said the officer in blue uniform to a sailor. “Heave her back up there.”

  Two husky naval ratings reached for her as she scrambled after the Sergeant, who was pushed over to the port side of the ship by the swarm of men coming aboard after him. One sailor caught her by the tail. She let out a piteous yelp. Over his shoulder the Sergeant saw the sailors grab her and half shove, half throw her up to the pier above. He turned away, trying to lose himself in that mass of packed troops on deck.

  Immediately from above came piercing, protesting barks, hoarse and frantic. They cut into the Sergeant’s heart. War is for madmen, not for children and animals, he thought.

  She raced along the pier above, back and forth, her furiously pleading barks ringing in his ears. Had she not been so close, depended on him so much, most of all had she not been so like his Candy in Dover, he would not have ached as he did that moment. Cursing himself for lacking the courage to shoot the dog upon the beach, he tried to turn away.

  Destroyers didn’t tie to the mole, so as to be able to leave quickly in case of a bombing raid, and sailors at each end held the ship to the pier with hooks, just one rope tied loosely around a bollard. There were few men to come aboard now, and he knew the destroyer was ready to leave. Then he realized the dog’s barking had ceased. Knowing her, he felt sure she had a plan.

  Gently, slowly, the engines shuddered, turned over, took hold, and the ship began to edge slightly away from the pier. The two naval officers had left the gangplank, the sailors were ready to shove it away. From the mole an officer in khaki called out, “Fourth Division... anyone from the Fourth Division....”

  That dog, with her dog’s perception, had seen the naval officers leave the ship’s side. She ran back and forth, silent, watching. The Sergeant stood waiting, watching her.

  Above, on the mole, the Airedale gathered speed, raced along beside the ship, and with a sudden burst of energy leaped from the pier over the heads of the men lining the rails. She hit a soldier in the back and sent him knocking against his comrades. He turned, angry, ready to fight, but by this time she had twisted and edged through the crowd to find her Sergeant.

  “Down, girl... down... here... get down... down...” he said, as she attempted to leap up on him.

  The engines below were revolving, the ship slowly se
parating from the pier. One or two stragglers rushed out and jumped into the arms of the men on deck. The destroyer gathered momentum. Soon it was edging away from the dock, backing into the Channel, avoiding the wrecks in the harbor, spars and masts showing where ships had been bombed by the Luftwaffe.

  The sun had come out, the early morning light of a beautiful summer day shed a kind of magic over the waters. The sea was flat, the thick black smoke from the burning refinery made a lovely pattern along the shore line. That smoke, reaching to the heavens, was the smoke Mrs. Williams and the twins had been watching earlier from the Shakespeare Cliff in Dover.

  They were going home. At last. They were going home, all of them, even the dog.

  A sailor pushed and shoved his way through the massed troops on deck. He came toward them with a determined air.

  “Can’t keep that dog aboard, mate. No dogs allowed; Captain’s orders.”

  Before the Sergeant could reply, a shriek came that startled everyone. It was the ship’s air-raid alarm. He glanced up but saw no planes above. However, the sailor immediately turned and wormed his way through the crowd to his gun station aft. The noise grew louder, more penetrating. Still no planes were visible.

  They were leaving the harbor by this time and getting outside, when he saw a squadron high in the heavens. A bomb fell a short distance away. A burst of water rose, the vessel rocked violently, many men were tossed to the deck. All about came the harsh sounds of the antiaircraft batteries forward and aft, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, last of all the noise of small naval pom-poms from a French frigate coming in to take their place at the mole.

  The dog half rose and leaned heavily against him. He could feel her trembling. Or was it he himself? To be bombed now, to be sunk at this moment just when rescue seemed certain! Overhead a Stuka peeled off from the squadron and dived. He could plainly see the black cross on its wings. It roared down, shrieking hideously, and seemed to be headed straight for their destroyer.

  He knew it only seemed that way, because the Channel was full of shipping, a target impossible to miss. The speed of the ship increased, soon she was offshore, weaving back and forth in evasive action. For a moment he almost welcomed the air raid. Nobody would have time to bother about the dog now.

  PART II

  THE TWINS

  CHAPTER 12

  “OLD BILL’S TAKING Shropshire Lass over.”

  “Imagine that! At his age, too!” said the voice of a woman.

  The twins, with hundreds of other Dover townsfolk, were standing beside the barricades on the Admiralty Pier searching for their father. Off and on the Williams family had been standing there three days, watching the exhausted troops tumble off the battered boats and onto the waiting trains drawn up in the station. At those two sentences behind them in the crowd, they looked at each other.

  If Mr. Bennet was taking Shropshire Lass across to Dunkerque, they were going too.

  Mr. Bennet, a neighbor on the Folkestone Road, was the former Chief Engineer of a P & O liner that journeyed from Southampton to the Far East. A bachelor, he had retired to his old mother’s house in Dover, in order to be with her. Actually he wanted to be near the sea. He liked to say that since leaving the company, he spent more time on the water than when he made a living there.

  Mr. Bennet’s life on retirement was centered about one thing—Shropshire Lass. She was a beautiful boat, made according to his specifications the previous year by Leyton in Portsmouth. Built of teak on oak, she had a 30 h.p. Thorny-croft engine that could make eight or nine knots, slept four people, and had a galley where he liked to cook the dishes of the East to which he was accustomed. The year before war broke out, when the twins were fourteen, he had taken them on a shakedown cruise along the south coast, and by the end of that summer they felt they knew the vessel as well as Mr. Bennet did.

  So three hours later, hidden behind a bulkhead forward, the twins heard shouts outside, listened to the engine turn over, and felt the boat move slowly from the harbor, gathering headway. They waited half an hour until they could feel the choppy waters of the Channel going thump-thump on the boat’s bottom, and finally, stiff and cramped, climbed out of the cabin and up to the deck.

  It was brisk and windy, but as usual Mr. Bennet at the wheel was in his shirt sleeves and suspenders. As usual he had his faded P & O officer’s cap on one side of his forehead. A life preserver was slung negligently over one shoulder. His back was to the twins, for he was talking with the commander of a passing motor torpedo boat.

  “Hope you can rely on that engine,” the naval officer shouted through a megaphone. “If it packs in and you lose contact with the convoy, heaven help you. We can’t.”

  Mr. Bennet waved confidently and turned back to the wheel. His mouth opened when he saw the twins standing there, rather grimy and dirty. For a minute he said nothing.

  Richard and Ronald stood blinking in the sunshine, feet apart, trying to shift with the roll of the boat, slightly dazed by the glare from the water after the semidarkness below.

  “Well! Well, I’m damned. And who gave you lads permission to ship with me this time, eh?”

  The twins, watching the shore line recede, were still dazzled by the sunlight, by the vast flotilla of boats, large and small, all around, everyone headed east. They observed the dinghy astern, wondering whether he might order them to row ashore.

  “And who gave you permission to come along?” His annoyance increased as he talked, and they knew he was getting angry. The Chief Engineer of the P & O Rawalpindi was used to handling lascar seamen and the tough gang in the engine room; he could lose his temper greatly to his advantage, as they were aware. When he needed something fixed on his boat, it was usually done, and promptly.

  “Who said you might stow away, eh?” he continued. “That’s what I’d like to know. Tell me, how shall I ever explain to your mother if anything happens to you? This isn’t a picnic, lads, it’s a war.”

  “We left a note for Mother; we told her we were going across with you in Shropshire Lass.”

  “And very thoughtful of you, I must say.” The old engineer shook his head. “I shall have to put you off somehow; she won’t have a moment’s peace until you return. That’s if you do! This is war, boys, not a pleasure cruise. It’s no place for you whatever. And you came aboard without my permission.”

  It was Ronny who spoke. “Yes sir, yes, Mr. Bennet, we did. Y’see, sir, Father’s over there at Dunkerque with his regiment, and we wanted maybe to help him get away. So we just came along.”

  The old Chief Engineer looked at them quickly. For a second he thought of his own father, and saw them differently. Wouldn’t he have done the same thing under the circumstances? This man had the faculty, rare among adults, of recalling how he felt at fifteen. For he was just fifteen when he shipped as a cabin boy out of Southampton on the old Cathay of the P & O. His father was then on the dole and out of work. Yes, Mr. Bennet remembered those days plainly enough; they had made a mark on his character. He remembered what it was like to be hungry, what it meant to the family to have one less boy at home to feed.

  Suppose his own father had been trapped in that smoke on the shores of France, with Panzers closing in from all sides to take him prisoner! During a matter of seconds Mr. Bennet was a boy of fifteen, saying good-by to his father, walking down to the docks with a lump in his throat, and climbing the gangplank of the ancient P & O liner in Southampton Harbor.

  He turned his back. “Eh then, since you’re here, you’d best get to work. You’ll find life belts under the bunks below. Ronny, you go down and tear up those old sheets and towels into strips for bandages. Ricky, make yourself useful opening up those tins of biscuits, get out the dried figs, and break up the chocolate bars. We were in such a hurry leaving, everything is in a mess, so take those sacks off the bunks; make ’em up clean. We’ll need ’em for wounded most likely. Look sharp now. This isn’t a pleasure cruise.”

  In high good spirits the boys went to work, a load lift
ed from their hearts. Work was what they had come for. The sun shone, the June morning was bright and crisp, far off to the right was the smoke of the burning city. All around were other vessels, from old friends they knew, like the Maid of Orleans, a Channel steamer on the Dover-Calais run, to destroyers, torpedo boats, and Thames river launches and scows, towed by tugs. The convoy was making only four or five knots. Around them hovered the destroyers and several armed speedboats, rushing here and there like sheep dogs, keeping them in line.

  When everything had been made shipshape, they came on deck and took the wheel while the Chief went below to brew hot coffee, which, with pieces of chocolate, made their noon meal. The twins were exhilarated. The course had changed slightly to the northeast, the sun shone brilliantly, the vessels around them danced in the breeze. The boys were happy to be aboard. They looked around, proud of the little vessel, familiar with it, too. On a metal plate over the entrance to the cabin were inscribed words they had often read and knew by heart. It was part of the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer, which Mr. Bennet had copied in French and English.

  “O God, be good to me. Thy sea is so wide and my ship is so small.”

  Shropshire Lass was small compared to most of the flotilla. There were no water tanks, so a galvanized tankful had been rolled on before leaving, and edged into the cabin amidships, cutting down space considerably.

  The boys observed that some of the boats around had a wide yellow stripe painted about their middle. “What’s that yellow stripe on some of the boats, Mr. Bennet?”

  The Chief sipped his coffee. Without looking up he said, “Them as has the yellow stripe has been demagnetized, against magnetic mines, y’understand?”

  The twins glanced over the fleet hastily. Fully half the convoy pitching and tossing in that swell had no yellow stripe, including Shropshire Lass. The danger of mines was something about which they had never thought; suddenly they became sober.