As he had done in the first World War.
But now, in the aftermath of what he’d witnessed in the past few days—the firsthand carnage, the Stuka strafings, the heroism of both the soldiers and other volunteer civilians who, like his old partner Dr. Watson, had actually fought in battles—he found himself ill-equipped to deal with death on this scale, or with this immediacy.
This was a new world, a new reality, and for once he felt truly unprepared. His vaunted intellect and his prodigious powers of observation suddenly felt if not useless, then at least seriously marginalized.
And this made him realize that he was, quite literally, in the same boat as his fellow human beings. He felt this connection, for the first time in his very long life, in the very core of his being.
The emotive force of belonging.
Four days later, on May 30, Sigerson sat at the two-way radio in the lower cabin of the Doll, which was fighting high seas and a vicious tail wind.
Sigerson had no real memory of the last time he’d eaten or slept, of how many times they’d crossed the same expanse of water, of how many men they’d taken on board and offloaded, either at Dover or on one of the navy’s destroyers closer in. Over the radio, he’d established communications with many other boats and had heard many, many numbers bandied about. He didn’t know if he believed them—some twenty-seven thousand men saved the first day; eighteen thousand on the third.
It seemed impossible.
The Germans had sunk two large British battleships in Dunkirk harbor itself, but Dynamo operations were still going on off the mole to the south of it. A tremendous number of small craft were plying the Channel taking part in the rescue effort.
In light of this, the German commander Guderian had clearly begun to realize the mistake he’d made by not pursuing the defeated Allied armies when he’d first bottled them up at Dunkirk. Now, determined to stop the flow of troops reaching safety in England, the Luftwaffe had stepped up their bombing and strafing runs, and at the radio Sigerson was getting word of more and more casualties every few minutes.
As if the German advance and the stepped-up air attacks weren’t enough to presage disaster, the inshore winds at Dunkirk this morning—which had been atypically calm throughout the operation until now—were playing havoc with smaller boats such as the Doll. From across the Channel, Sigerson was busy fielding distress signals and trying to coordinate the rescue of several that had been blown onto either sand bars or the beach itself.
He was also picking up occasional chatter from the German command, reporting on the advance of Panzer divisions well into the ten-kilometer perimeter around Dunkirk. At the present rate, the city and its harbor and beaches would fall within a couple of days at most, dooming Dynamo and the thousands of men still waiting on the beaches.
Sigerson’s only contact with the outside world was the radio that Duffy’s brother-in-law had installed a few years back. It was a simple and rather primitive shortwave with a limited range that they’d moved to the relatively greater safety of the hold and off the bridge when they’d stripped the boat down for action. With the high winds and with the growing swell on the water, Sigerson’s reception was often spotty at best, but he had his charts spread out on his lap and could at least take note of the position of distressed vessels—he had spoken to six of them already—so that when they got closer, they could possibly direct other boats to the disabled crews. It was little enough, but at least he was doing something, although exhaustion struggled to claim him.
The Doll fell heavily into a deep trough. Its hull slammed into the water under them with a bone-shattering force and the radio cut out with a last squawk in the middle of a transmission from another boat that had been beached on the mainland by the wind.
While Sigerson had been working with the radio, both boys had been sleeping in bedrolls on the bench-like seats built into the hull. With the impact, George, the younger, rolled over and moaned, but remained sleeping. On the other side of the lower cabin, Harry, fifteen, sat up. “What was that? Are we hit?”
“We fell off a wave.”
The boy stretched around to look out the portholes at the pitching sea. Coming back to his surroundings here below, he yawned extravagantly, then pointed. “Is the radio bollixed?”
“For the moment.” Sigerson turned it off, then on, off then on. “A fuse must have come loose, although getting to it might be tricky until we’re a little more stable. Did you get some sleep?”
Harry broke a wide and weary grin. “What’s that?”
Sigerson smiled, too. “Yes.” Then made a joke. “At least we’re dry.”
“This is dry, then?”
All of their clothes, even the changes, were damp through and through from their days on the water. After the third pickup, Sigerson stopped going overboard to guide the men. They saw what they needed to do and had no problem utilizing the ladder. Beyond that, order and discipline took care of the actual boarding.
Now Harry stood, stretched, walked back the four steps to the deck and on up. Sigerson slapped at the radio a few times. For a moment, his eyes closed. He’d almost dozed when he heard a thump—Harry jumping down from the deck. The boy was smoking a cigarette, no doubt a present from Uncle Duffy, and the smell of it nearly made Sigerson swoon. Harry took a drag, inhaled deeply, held it out for Sigerson. “Bit of fag?”
“Don’t mind if I do. Thanks.” Sigerson sucked in the welcome smoke and immediately felt the charge of the nicotine. Harry had dug a screwdriver out of his pocket and now peered around the back of the radio. Sigerson backed away, exchanged a puff of cigarette with the boy again, then sat down to watch.
“Uncle’s got some tools up top,” Harry said. “I feel better when everything’s working.”
“I do, too. I see you know about radios.”
“A little.”
In their days together, Harry had also told Sigerson that he knew “a little” about boats, and reading sea charts, and repairing engines, and navigation by both night and day. If you listened to the boy, you would guess that “a little” was a general level of knowledge, and you would be wrong. Sigerson thought back to the young London street urchins he’d often used to excellent effect in his regular work when he’d been young. If Harry knew a little about radios, Sigerson would let him get it running again.
Now Harry removed the back of the radio and started reaching in, checking connections. “Uncle says we’re fifteen minutes out, give or take. Doesn’t see no fighters yet. Probably the wind’s keepin’ them grounded, too.”
“Devoutly to be hoped,” Sigerson said. It was his turn with the cigarette and he took a last drag, then handed the butt over to Harry. “I’ve heard reports that Jerry’s made it to the beach in places already.”
“Bloody sods. How long do you reckon we got until they take the whole place?”
“A day, day and a half.”
“And how many men are left?”
“No one knows exactly. The radio transmissions are urging every available craft to keep coming. Perhaps as many as two hundred thousand men are still stranded.”
Abruptly, Harry turned from the radio. His mouth hung open in shock. “Two hundred thousand more?”
Sober, Sigerson nodded. “That’s what I have heard.”
“God’s teeth,” Harry said. “And here I was thinking we’d done some good.”
“We have.”
Harry shook the impossible number out of his head and went back to his work at the radio. Suddenly there was a squawk and then, quite clearly, a voice intermingled with the sound of weapons firing. “. . . under continuous attack since about two hours after dawn. I repeat, this is Colonel Bryce Hagin, with the 14th Highland Regiment, and we are pinned by German patrols. . .”
Sigerson was around at the front of the unit, working the controls. Hagin’s dispatch was one of the clearest he’d heard so far, and he flicked his “send” switch. “This is the Dover Doll. State your position, over?”
“We’re at th
e southern extremity of the Dunkirk strand.”
Sigerson turned to Harry. “Run up and ask your uncle how good we look to hit the southernmost beach.” Into his microphone, he said, “How many men are you?”
“Maybe sixty left. We’re pinned down in the ruins of an old fort where the sand juts out a bit. There’s a pleasant little brook.”
“I see it!” Harry was already coming back and yelled up from the doorway to the cabin. “Two o’clock, Uncle.”
“We’re coming in,” Sigerson said. “You should see us now. Try to get your men down into the water.”
“Are you serious? That would be suicide.”
“Have you another option?”
A pause, then Hagin said, “Bloody hell.”
Bloody hell was what it was.
Hagin had ordered a contingent of his men to stay behind among the walls of the fort and cover the rest of the unit’s retreat against the near constant barrage of the German infantry battalion dug into the sand only a dune away. Duffy, cautious of the inshore gale and the heavy surf, was only able to get the Doll to about forty meters of where the waves were breaking on the sand, breakers with enough power to slow the men down considerably.
From the back of the boat by the ladder, Sigerson watched as Hagin’s unit—in a crisp, double-time line—broke into the water, guns held over their heads, and struggled to make headway in the shifting sand on the bottom, through the heavy chop. It was very tough going, and their weapons didn’t make it any easier. Most of the other troops they’d picked up over the past few days had abandoned their ordnance, but this group seemed determined to keep it with them, carrying Bren guns and boxes of ammunition, rifles, Mills bombs, artillery belts slung over their shoulders.
The first man had just reached the boat, was reaching for Sigerson’s hand, when a line of machine gun fire from out of the dunes dappled the waves. He and the next three men behind him spun and fell as the water churned into shades of red.
“Down! Get down!” Sigerson yelled to his boys. “Below decks! Now!”
The next hand he gripped made it to the ladder and aboard, then spun on the boat, took a position behind the bulkhead, and began firing back at the enemy. Perhaps ten men made it aboard before another volley took a couple more in the close water, then another two.
The dead bodies were floating now, tossed by the chop, and the men had to negotiate them as they tried to reach the safety of the boat. Two more of Hagin’s men had mounted the bridge of the Doll and were returning fire from there, and for some minutes there seemed to be a lull in the German’s attack.
Hagin’s men took full advantage, breaking from their cover now behind the fort and into the water, still in organized lines.
Sigerson couldn’t help but admire the discipline.
Now, on the Doll, Hagin’s men were firing from three or four locations. But the boat was also beginning to take concerted return fire from the shore. Ironically, this seemed to be good for the men in the water, and perhaps it had been Hagin’s orders—to draw fire from the men who couldn’t defend themselves as they tried to gain the boat.
Most of the men aboard had crammed themselves down below, and when that area had filled, they hunched low on the deck, taking some measure of safety from the hull. Even so, at least five men had been wounded and lay moaning or screaming in pain and shock on the deck. As Sigerson glanced over, a bullet took off half the head of the shooter on the stern next to him. The man pitched overboard, his place immediately taken by another of Hagin’s troops.
A machine gun volley raked the lower structure of the bridge and Duffy yelled down. “We’ve got to get out, Sigerson, or we’re all gone.”
In desperation, Sigerson saw that the last of the men, maybe fifteen of them, had left the fort. And a hundred and fifty meters behind them, a row of German troops broke from the shelter of the dunes and began a charge, firing as they came. “Give me two minutes!” he yelled. “We’ll get them on board.”
The German charge, it turned out, was the Brit’s salvation. The advancing lines of Panzer troops blocked the shooting angle of the machine guns that had been inflicting such devastation on Hagin’s men. All of the last group but one made it to the ladder and then aboard. As the last man came over, soaked and bloody from an arm wound, he straightened up and saluted. “Colonel Bryce Hagin,” he said. “Thanks so much for stopping by.”
Then Duffy revved the engine. They jerked forward, and Sigerson grabbed Hagin to keep him from flipping out of the boat, into the chopped up and bloody sea.
Though they continued to take sporadic fire from shore, most of the men lay either on the deck, protected by the hull, or in the lower cabin, and they took no further casualties—although the Doll was peppered at the bridge and the waterline—until they were blessedly, finally, out of range. Riding low in the water with the load of human cargo and the heavy seas, the Doll was regularly taking water over the bow at the way Duffy was pushing her, and now he pulled back on the throttle and brought the craft down to a more reasonable cruising speed.
Despite his wounded arm, Hagin himself had mounted the bridge and remained standing up there next to Duffy, staring back toward the shore. The man who’d taken over the stern firing from the soldier who’d been killed was sheltering next to Sigerson on the deck. Now he sat up, glanced back behind them, turned to Sigerson. “We owe you, grandpa. Thanks.” He smiled and put out his hand. “Wilkes.”
“Sigerson.”
Both men got to their feet. Beyond them, other men were starting to move, and Wilkes immediately fell into a leadership role. “I want the wounded men brought down below out of this weather and made as comfortable as possible.” He turned to Sigerson, asked with a quiet efficiency. “Have you any medical supplies on board? Drugs? Blankets? Anything at all like that?”
“Afraid not. All gone long ago. We’re ferrying, that’s all.”
“That’s plenty, don’t get me wrong.” He went back to his men, grabbed the one nearest to hand. “Roger, first thing we’ll need some makeshift tourniquets. See to that, would you?” Roger nodded, stepped back to the cabin entrance and disappeared down into it. Wilkes came back to Sigerson. “How long do these crossings take?”
Sigerson had noted the slowdown as the boat strained for stability in the rough water and he kept his voice low. It wasn’t the best news he could be delivering, especially for the seriously wounded. “At this speed, about four hours. If the wind drops,” he added, “it could be quicker.”
Wilkes nodded and raised his voice to his troops. “Below decks for the wounded and those helping them, please. Everyone else, up here, find some comfortable patch of deck and curl up for a bit of a kip. Tea in Dover at sixteen hundred hours, give or take.”
Breaking a grin at the badinage, Sigerson was just turning when he heard the engines cut to dead slow. His brow clouded and he looked first up to the bridge, then—the memory of diving and strafing Stukas still fresh—back toward the receding shoreline. He heard a crisp voice from above. “Wilkes.”
Wilkes stepped out from the cabin doorway, looked up squinting into the bridge, saluted. “Sir?”
“How many men have we left?”
The young lieutenant didn’t even need to count. “Thirty-two able bodied, sir. Five wounded, not including yourself.”
“And our supplies?”
“Supplies, sir?”
Hagin’s voice sharpened. “Guns, man. Pistols, rifles, ammunition, grenades. I know bloody well we left the radio on the beach. But what else have we got?”
“I’ll need a minute, sir.”
“All right, then. Take one. Just.”
Wilkes’s face mirrored Sigerson’s own reaction over the peremptory tone—impatience, frustration, even a flash of anger. Then his expression softened into one of tolerant good humor. Wilkes had undoubtedly grown used to his commander, though he took him very seriously indeed. Immediately, he went below to take the measure of their firepower, although Sigerson couldn’t imagine what they
could need it for now.
For his part, he made sure that Harry and George were both unhurt, up and moving, then he mounted the ladder to the bridge. In the minute or so since Duffy had cut the engines, they’d stopped making any forward progress whatsoever, and now the Doll hung bobbing in the turbulent chop. Looking up as he mounted, Sigerson saw blue in the sky again—many, many dark scudding clouds, but also traces of blue between them. A moment of unsullied bright sunlight washed the deck. At the top of the ladder, Sigerson stepped onto the bridge. “Are we all right?”
“We’re fine.”
Sigerson said, “We seem to have slowed down on our rush to Dover. Some of the men down below are anxious to get home.”
Duffy eyes were gray and distant. “Talk to the colonel.”
Sigerson nodded, turned and saluted. “Colonel Hagin. How’s your arm?”
“Useless. But it’s merely a flesh wound. It doesn’t matter a whit.”
“Sir, we’re beginning to treat the wounded down below,” Sigerson said. “They’re putting together some makeshift bandages as well as they can. You might want to stop down there and have somebody look at you, get you fixed up.”
“I’m fixed up, as you put it, well enough. To the contrary, Mr. Sigerson, is it? You might want to refrain from giving orders to superior officers who’ve got serious work to do.”
Sigerson’s eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared. “That was a suggestion, sir. Not an order. You are of course free to do as you please.”
“I’m aware of that. And you need to be, as well.”
Churchill may not have stood upon rank or lack of it for any of the mission’s volunteers, but Sigerson had no illusions about whether a genuine British colonel outranked an old man like himself culled from the rolls of the retired, and Hagin seemed to harbor none either. If Sigerson were going to question the legitimacy of Hagin’s takeover of the craft, he’d have to shoot him, and though he was angry and appalled at the colonel’s attitude, he wasn’t prepared to do that. So he merely nodded. “Of course, sir. Apologies.”
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes Page 15
