Ride Out The Storm (30 page)

‘What about them things on your ’eads?’

The soldiers stared at each other then, almost to a man, snatched off their steel helmets and began to scoop.

As they neared
Vital,
they passed three large Carley floats, all tied together and all filled to capacity with men standing up to their waists in the water inside. Though
Daisy
was wildly top-heavy this time, they took them aboard.

Alongside
Vital,
however, the wounded couldn’t climb the nets, and slings had to be rigged to hoist them to the decks. Hatton climbed down to speak to Gilbert.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘No more of these, old boy.’

Gilbert looked indignant. ‘These fellers is ’urt,’ he said.

‘I can’t help it,’ Hatton said. ‘We can’t jeopardise the ship and all the men in her. They’ve had signals ashore about it. They’re being sneaked out by their pals.’

But when
Daisy
returned to the beach for the next trip, there was a soldier waiting with his arm missing, his whole left side swathed in bloody bandages. His face was grey white but he was still incredibly on his feet, supported by two of his friends.

‘They said no wounded,’ Gilbert mumbled, unable to look them in the face.

‘He’s not bad hurt,’ one of the men supporting the injured soldier said.

‘He’s lost his sodden arm,’ Gilbert hissed, trying not to let the injured man hear,

‘For Christ’s sake, mate, we’ll look after him!’

Gilbert glanced at Kenny and his brother. Then he nodded. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Just the one.’

But the one was the sign for more to appear and when they went out to
Vital
there were six of them, all unable to help themselves. Hough was furious as the slings had to be rigged and Hatton almost fell down the net to board
Daisy.

‘I said no more wounded,’ he snapped.

‘Christ, I can’t turn the poor sods back,’ Gilbert said. ‘There’s hundreds of ’em.’

‘Off we go!’

Lieutenant Wren, of the York and Lancaster Regiment, threw down the piece of wood with which he was patting his dug-out and pointed to the beachmaster.

Conybeare banged on the roof of Horndorff’s hole with the butt of the Luger. ‘Our turn, I think,’ he said.

Horndorff crawled out to see the beachmaster waving from the shallows and Wren gazing at his dug-out sadly. ‘Sorry to see the back of the old place,’ he was saying cheerfully.

Horndorff stared about him. He’d spent the whole of the previous day crouching like a dog in its kennel while Conybeare dragged up a box to block the entrance and squatted outside, holding the Luger and talking idly to Wren. He was furious at the humiliation, and desperately hungry. His lips were dry with the salty wind and the bite of the flying sand.

‘Officer Conybeare,’ he said bitterly. ‘I think you are a cold fish.’

As they headed for the sea the aeroplanes returned, and as the first bombs fell the alarm began to scream.

‘I think it’s designed to go off
after
the bombs drop,’ Wren said.

They splashed into the shallows where a motor boat was waiting. The guns of a destroyer half a mile away began to crash, and the sound was taken up by every ship within reach and every man with a rifle or a machine-gun until the racket was earsplitting.

‘Look lively, you lot,’ a man on the foredeck of the motor boat shouted as they struggled towards her.

‘Always thought paddling vulgar,’ Wren observed as they waded chest-high in the water. ‘Besides, I never did have much time for the seaside this time of the year. August’s the month.’

‘Who’s this bugger?’ The sailor on the boat’s foredeck was staring at Horndorff.

Conybeare sighed. ‘He’s my prisoner,’ he said. ‘I’m taking him to England.’

‘We ain’t taking prisoners,’ the sailor pointed out.

Conybeare frowned. ‘I am,’ he said.

As the bombing stopped, soldiers began to emerge from their holes and trenches and the cellars of houses, spitting out dust and gritty sand, to form queues once more.

Tired as he was, to Allerton the stink of blood and mutilated flesh seemed stronger than it had ever done. There was no escape from it, and scarcely a breath of wind to dissipate the still more appalling odour of the corpses that had been lying in the town now for days.

He and Rice had found their way back to the queue they’d joined the night before. It was standing in the water now, fixed, immovable, as though nailed there. No one spoke as they tagged on to it, everyone staring silently out to sea, waiting for the next boat. The dead weight of waterlogged boots and sodden clothes seemed to pin Allerton down. His trousers had ballooned out with water and felt as heavy as mercury, so that he was filled with dread that when the time came he’d be unable to move. Just ahead of him, a sergeant and a corporal were supporting a man who was barely tall enough to keep his chin above the water. Every time a swell came they lifted him bodily and, every time, he turned to them and said politely, ‘Thanks, Sarge. Thanks, Corp.’

The minutes seemed to tick by like hours and Allerton, who couldn’t see much for the men around him, began to be afraid he’d have to stand there half submerged for ever. A leaden depression took hold of him, as heavy as his own waterlogged body. The man in front of him seemed to be asleep standing up and Allerton found that he himself kept starting out of a warm coma that even the chill of the water couldn’t penetrate.

Suddenly, he realised a boat had appeared and some wag at the end of the queue, standing neck deep, started to shout – ‘’Urry up, mate, me feet are getting wet!’ They all edged warily forward again, the two NCOs in front supporting the small man. ‘Come on, short-arse,’ the sergeant said. ‘Nearly there.’

‘Thanks, Sarge. Thanks, Corp. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’ The politeness was intense.

As they moved further out, the water began to lap Allerton’s chin and the blind urge to reach safety drove him on until his feet just maintained contact with the bottom. Two sailors in tin hats were hoisting the men in front of him out of the water. It was difficult, because the soldiers were so weary they lacked the strength to climb unaided. The sailors didn’t spare them.

‘Get a move on, you sloppy bastards! Just because you’ve lost the bloody war there’s no need to hang about!’

The sergeant and the corporal pushed the small man up and climbed after him. Then the sleeping man in front of Allerton suddenly slipped away beneath the water. One moment he was there and the next he was gone, and Allerton found that in his weariness he was quite indifferent to his fate. He could just reach the boat with the tips of his fingers but when he tried to pull himself up, the weight of his waterlogged clothes made him as helpless as a sack of lead, and he hung there terrified of being left behind. Then two strong hands reached over and grasped his arm-pits. Another pair grasped the back of his trousers and before he had time to realise it he was head-first in the bottom of the boat.

On the deck of the destroyer, underneath a gun turret, he found himself with a lot of Frenchmen but then a head popped up out of a hatch in the deck. ‘This way, sir,’ it said. ‘You don’t want to be with a lot of French bastards. Come and have a cup of tea.’

The wardroom carpet was covered with treacly black oil, and here and there on the bulkheads were hand and feet marks and smears where grimy uniforms had rubbed. But a Maltese steward gave him a whisky and a sausage sandwich, and as he lay sprawled on a cushioned seat, uncomfortable but without the energy to move, the great burden of responsibility had gone from his shoulders. All the accumulated strain of the last few days had vanished and a sense of luxurious security flooded over him.

Hatton was working near the scrambling nets, shouting instructions through a megaphone to the boats as they came alongside.

Above him on the bridge, he could see Hough anxiously watching the sky, turning his head occasionally as a shell exploded on the beaches. ‘How many, Hatton?’

‘Damn near a thousand, sir.’

‘Just a few more.’

The wind was increasing a little now and Hatton could hear the boats’ crews shouting furiously at the soldiers. But no one argued, no one took offence. The soldiers seemed to accept that the job now was up to the navy.

On the bridge, Hough was moving anxiously from one side to the other, watching the floating wreckage and the long coils of floating grass line. Then his eyes flickered to the sky again. The lull had been a long one and he knew they had little time left.

‘Hurry ’em along!’ he shouted down. ‘Keep ’em moving!’

As they hauled the men aboard, one of the petty officers gestured. ‘Good God almighty,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’

Hatton looked up to see Thames barges passing them, broad-beamed and beautiful, heading towards the shore, their great spritsails soaring to the sky. As they glided past, a hospital ship, the sun on her sides, moved towards the harbour. A flurry of shells from Hinze’s battery at Mardyck screamed over to drop near her but she held her speed, heading towards the mole in stately fashion as though it were peacetime and there were nothing to fear. The sight took Hatton’s breath away.

‘How many, Barry?’

The call from the bridge attracted his attention and he noticed that Hough had got around at last to calling him by his first name and felt vaguely flattered.

‘Well over a thousand now, sir.’

Hough was staring at the sky. ‘Just this lot then,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of things.’

The bus conductor’s rigmarole was wearing a little thin by this time but the petty officers and sailors were all using it now – ‘Pass down the car, please. No standing on the platform. Plenty of room inside–’ and the weary soldiers seemed to appreciate the joke.

Then, just when he was so absorbed he hardly noticed the guns start in the distance, Hatton heard the klaxon go and heard Hough shouting.

‘Get ’em on board, Barry,’ he was roaring. ‘Jerry’s back.’

As the ropes dropped and the last man was dragged from the scrambling net,
Vital
began to pick up speed, a boat still attached by her rope bucking in the wake so that the men in her began to shout with alarm.

‘Cut that boat adrift,’ Hatton yelled and he saw a sailor reach out, knife in hand.

The sky seemed to be full of aeroplanes now and Hatton’s cars throbbed with the din they made. The sea was erupting in great gouts of water that dropped across the decks, drenching the crouching soldiers and the running men in blue, and the guns were yammering in an insane chorus.

Up ahead a mat of small boats was clustered near another ship. At first Hatton thought
Vital
was going to plough through them, but the telegraphs clanged and she began to go astern, the storm of bombs still dropping about her, the brilliant sunshine picking up the lights as the fountains of water dissolved into a rainbow-hued spray. She was just beginning to swing her stern towards the west when there was a crash and a blinding flash, and the ship seemed to leap out of the sea. As she flopped back like a landed fish, vast columns of water collapsed across her, drenching him, and he was surrounded by thundering steam and showers of ancient soot from the funnel.

He had been trying to bring some order into the chaos near the nets and it was this that saved his life. Flung against the torpedo tubes, he clung to them for a moment, his steel helmet awry, while his wits settled back to normal amid the roar of the engine room blowers and the hysterical yapping of one of the dogs that had got on board.

Deciding he’d probably be needed on the bridge, he began to make his way there, but as he reached the ladder, one of the chief petty officers collided with him and they made their way up together, fighting to pass each other in the confusion of the moment.

The bomb had hit B turret which was hanging half over the side with great splashes of blood on the blistered paint. The bridge was an even greater horror. Flying steel splinters had riddled it until it looked like a colander. The navigating officer was lying in a corner, looking as though someone had fired a gigantic shotgun at him, his whole body and face full of red holes all pumping blood. The yeoman was curled up like a foetus, moaning.

The captain, the imperturbable Hough, had been hit by one of the flying splinters and a slice of his skull sheared off as cleanly as if by a knife. His tin hat lay near his head and his brains were oozing bloodily into it.

With daylight Didcot had returned to the gruesome task of clearing the obstruction under
Athelstan
’s
stern. Tremenheere had lit his pipe and was staring towards the beach. The sands looked pearly white, the grass waving on the dunes behind. The crowded ranks were still moving in incredible order to the water’s edge, and in the shallows boats were being worked laboriously out to tugs and launches, their bows dipping sharply as they reached the surf, their crews pulling fiercely to combat the current.

The smoke from burning buildings was depositing a layer of fine ash and cinders on the water, which was black and greasy with patches of iridescence that marked the grave of a ship or an aircraft.
Athelstan
’s
crisp planks were now scarred by hundreds of hobnailed boots, the paintwork was scratched and chipped, and here and there was a smear of blood. The big cabin was full of sand and water, and the cushions were stained with salt. The stove had long since ceased to work and the engine room was like a pigsty. With the habit of years, Tremenheere was wondering how long it would take him to clear it all up again, when Didcot stopped what he was doing and flung up an arm. Almost at once they heard the alarms go on the destroyers.