Ride Out The Storm (14 page)

The din was tremendous now and Hatton could see the water of the harbour dotted with splashes as the shell splinters dropped from the sky. The howl of engines filled the air and the muffled crash of bombs seemed to lift the ship out of the water. On the bridge, he could hear Hough shouting above the racket.

‘Slow astern port! Hold her there, helmsman! Right–’ he abandoned navalese ‘–let her rip! Full ahead both!’

The paddle-steamer was about half a mile ahead of them when Hatton saw a tremendous flash of flame and a cloud of smoke appear on her port side. Almost immediately she began to settle in the water and he could see brown-clad figures jumping overboard. A destroyer was already moving up, its boats lowered and scrambling nets over the side, and
Vital
joined it at full speed, Hough swinging the stern to flatten the water. The boats were dropped and the nets flung down, and Hatton dragged gasping men on board as they climbed up, until he was exhausted and his uniform saturated. Several of them were badly wounded and he couldn’t make out how they’d ever managed to swim. As the last living man was dragged from the wreckage the nets were hauled inboard and the boats hooked to the falls. The other destroyer was already moving away.

‘All right, Hatton!’ Hough shouted down. ‘That’s it! Can you shove a few more below to clear the guns?’

The hum from the turbines increased and
Vital
’s
bow rose as her propellers bit at the water. The vibration that ran through her made her feel like a living animal. A soldier touched Hatton’s arm as he passed and indicated the sky. ‘They won’t be back for a quarter of an hour, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve timed ’em.’

Hatton managed a shaky grin and, wrenching at the peak of his cap, dragged it over one eye. Their arrival in Dover was going to set a few heads turning. ‘Excitement over for today,’ he agreed.

But it wasn’t quite and Hough was staring ahead, frowning. ‘Raft, sir,’ the wing bridge look-out reported. ‘Looks as though it’s made of an old door.’

The raft carried a Belgian officer and two grinning French soldiers who’d escaped from Calais, and they stepped aboard carrying their supplies – two tins of biscuits and six demijohns of wine. Also on board the raft was an ancient and very rusty bicycle.

‘The bastards were going to pedal across,’ Hatton said.

Jocho Horndorff came to wakefulness reluctantly. It still didn’t seem possible that he was a prisoner of war and he lay on his back staring bitterly upwards. The night before he’d considered quite cold-bloodedly bolting for the fields but, as he’d halted staring to either side of him, Conybeare’s voice had come, quiet but steady.

‘Don’t,’ he’d said.

Horndorff had exploded with anger. ‘You will never take me to England,’ he had shouted. ‘It will be dark soon and you can’t stay awake all the time!’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ Conybeare had said. He gestured at the vehicles by the side of the road, their engines wrecked. ‘I’ll find one that’ll lock.’

The accommodation he found had turned out to be a wrecked radio-van, its lockers rifled, its sets smashed, its side perforated with bullet holes.

‘Fully ventilated,’ Conybeare had announced. ‘In you get.’ Horndorff had climbed inside, his face red with rage, and had listened savagely to the bolt being driven home.

All night he’d heard the shuffle of boots moving past, with now and then a steady tramp as some unit, still retaining cohesion and discipline, had marched by. It hadn’t taken him long to realise there was no way out of his prison.

The shuffle and thud of boots was still going on now as the light increased, then Conybeare’s face, his bruised eye black and almost closed by this time, appeared at the small window that separated the rear of the van from the driver’s cabin. A portion of sausage and a piece of bread appeared. Horndorff took them sullenly. He was beginning to loathe Conybeare by this time.

‘My dear chap,’ he said, forcing himself to remain calm, ‘You realise that all this is a waste of time. Your troops are surrounded.’

‘I expect we’ll manage,’ Conybeare said. ‘And don’t call me your “dear chap”. I’ve told you before.’

As he opened the doors, Horndorff’s eyes blazed. ‘Suppose I refuse to get out?’ he asked.

Conybeare raised the Luger and pointed it at a point just to the right of Horndorff’s head. Horndorff stared down the muzzle and, when he still didn’t move, Conybeare calmly pulled the trigger. At the crash of the explosion, Horndorff flung himself down. The bullet had whacked through the side of the van within a foot of his head.

Horndorff straightened up, hating himself for ducking, hating Conybeare more. There was a strange placidity about him that worried the German who was beginning now to realise that this imperturbable boy was a great deal tougher than he looked.

Soldiers resting by the roadside eyed them as they passed. They’d clearly not yet lost their spirit and they were interested in Horndorff, wondering what sort of man had beaten them, what sort of man had thought out this new and ruthless science of war and collected the machinery to wage it.

‘What rat-hole did you get him out of?’ one of them grinned. ‘He’s my prisoner,’ Conybeare said. ‘I’m taking him to England.’

He accepted all the comments unsmilingly, his smooth young face lacking in humour. When he’d first captured Horndorff it had been as much as anything else a salve to his own pride – to make up for being shot down – but gradually, as time had passed, it had crystallised into an obsession. Now he meant exactly what he said. He was taking Horndorff to England and nothing except death or wounds was going to stop him.

Horndorff tramped on, frowning. ‘I think, under the circumstances,’ he grated, ‘that we ought to introduce ourselves. I am Hans-Joachim Horndorff von Bülowius. My family call me Jocho.’

‘Conybeare,’ the boy behind him said.

‘Your first name?’

‘Got three. Don’t like any of ’em much. Conybeare’ll do.’

Horndorff walked on in silence, snubbed. The fields on either side of them had been flooded and the morning was misty, the vapour hanging in chilly folds over a flat countryside that stretched endlessly towards the north. In the distance he could see a black pall of smoke hanging in the sky.

As his mind churned over means of ridding himself of Conybeare, he saw the men in front of him glancing back, then one of them pointed. Aeroplanes turned in the sky like flies and, as the tramping men began to scatter, Horndorff’s heart leapt. Conybeare wouldn’t get much response just now if he called for help.

As the soldiers crouched against the steep banks of earth, he could hear the planes above and behind him. He saw spurts of dirt leap from the surface of the road and move rapidly ahead.

But then he realised that with the flooded fields on either side there was nowhere he could run to and, choking on his rage, he turned and, still erect and indifferent to the bullets, walked slowly to the ditch where Conybeare waited patiently, as though he’d known all the time that Horndorff couldn’t escape.

‘Why do you hate us so, Officer Conybeare?’ Horndorff asked bitterly as he crouched down.

Conybeare gestured with the pistol. Further along the bank there was a group of graves; on one of the crude crosses a woman’s hat of black straw with artificial flowers and red cherries hung grotesquely. ‘That,’ he said.

‘We didn’t want the war,’ Horndorff snapped. ‘It was forced on us.’ He tried to explain. ‘In Germany after the last war it was necessary to take whole barrow-loads of marks to buy a loaf of bread. Communism was at our doors. Do you wonder that we turned to Hitler?’

Conybeare didn’t know much about the conditions in Germany after the previous war. He’d only just been born, and even now he was still too young to be greatly concerned.

‘There must have been others,’ he said.

‘What others?’ Horndorff sneered. ‘Wretched people with nothing to offer but theories.’

Conybeare nodded understandingly. ‘We had a few of those ourselves,’ he admitted.

‘This is why Germany chose Hitler. He has
Fingerspitzengefühl –
how do you say? – intuition. He did great things for Germany.’

‘Like bringing her into a war?’

Horndorff had fallen silent again, faintly depressed. As far as he could see this wretched little boy with the black eye that made him look as though he’d been fighting in the school yard had now actually got him inside the British lines.

‘You must let me go,’ he said abruptly.

‘No.’

‘We are both intelligent men.’

‘I expect so,’ Conybeare shrugged. ‘In spite of your being a Nazi.’

‘I am not a Nazi,’ Horndorff pointed out. ‘I have never been a Nazi. I am a German and I believe in my country. We were right to go to war.’

Conybeare’s eyes flickered. ‘Perhaps you’re not
that
intelligent,’ he observed.

The day had not started well for a lot of other people besides Horndorff – among them Alfred Stoos, who was on the telephone to command control.

‘We need replacements,’ he was shouting furiously.

The man at the other end of the line seemed unperturbed. ‘You the stores officer?’ he demanded.

‘No.’

‘Commanding officer?’

Stoos choked. Schmesser’s successor was Hauptmann Dodtzenrodt and he was flying with Schlegel and the rest of the squadron. Dodtzenrodt had little love for Stoos whom he considered a heartless gong-hunter and, as commanding officer, it gave him a lot of pleasure to leave him on the ground. ‘No,’ Stoos said. ‘He’s flying.’

The man on the other end of the telephone was silent for a moment. ‘Then who the devil do you think
you
are to make demands?’ he said at last. ‘You Stuka people have had too much publicity. The 87’s not the egg of Columbus.’

As the telephone clicked, Stoos sat staring at it, his face red with rage. Then he snatched up his cap and burst out of the office into the rags of mist. Oberfeldwebel Hamcke saw him coming. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said bitterly. ‘Here he comes again!

The day had not started well for the admiral at Dover either. Almost the first news of the day was bad.

‘We’ve lost
Abukir
,’
his chief of staff informed him. ‘Coming from Ostend, with over two hundred soldiers and refugees.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘E-boat. Near the North Hinder light.’

There was silence for a moment. This new loss meant that for the first time the German Navy was attempting to interfere directly with the evacuation.

The staff officer, operations, coughed. ‘That’s not all, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘Go on.’

‘
Queen of the Channel.
She left Dunkirk at dawn. She had over nine hundred men aboard. She was bombed and sunk by a single aircraft.’

‘The admiral frowned. ‘What were the losses?’

‘Not as bad as might have been expected. The crew and passengers were rescued. There are a few other good omens, too. The French have started to take part. Admiral Abrial assembled a convoy. They lost
Douaisien
to a magnetic mine.’

The admiral rose and walked up and down for a while, his hands in his pockets, his eyes down and thoughtful. ‘What destroyers are over there at the moment?’ he asked.

‘
Mackay, Montrose, Verity, Vital, Worcester
and
Anthony. Codrington, Grenade, Gallant, Jaguar
and
Javelin
are on their way.

‘Good. Good.’ The admiral took another turn up and down. ‘We mustn’t forget the beaches, though. With small boats we might be able to pick up a whole division.’

The admiral’s ideas were echoed by the army itself, and those of the army by Basil Allerton. The blaséness which had enabled him at first to regard the war as rather a joke had slipped a little by this time because as he grew more tired he was growing more alarmed, too, not only by the things he’d seen but by the thought that he might even be killed.

They weren’t far from the coast now in the poor northern area of France, an ugly place of mean houses of red and yellow brick. To the south the countryside stretched flatly to the horizon in a landscape that looked more Dutch than French, and the road they were on ran along a high embankment above the flat polder land.

Rice and the others were making tea in the kitchen of an abandoned bakery and a few of the little unit’s lost sheep had returned during the night. The corporal, they thought, had been captured but, in their cheerful inconsequential way, they didn’t appear too worried and were more concerned with the time the water was taking to boil. Like all soldiers, when trouble had come they had simply shifted the responsibility to the shoulders of their officers. It seemed to Allerton that they were all taking the situation far too lightly and that he ought to find out what they should do.

Rather unwillingly, he decided to take the truck into the town. All along the road an orgy of destruction was taking place under the vivid blue sky. Engineers were handing out pound blocks of gun cotton and primer detonators to artillery artificers, and showing them how to place them in the breeches of their guns to destroy them. In a big beet field, thousands of vehicles were parked – all of them new – Scammells, diggers, buses, engineering plants, limbers and lorries – and, with a steady, crunching, chopping sound, men were smashing their petrol tanks and cylinders.