Silence Over Dunkerque (11 page)

Half an hour, an hour, on they went. Finally they reached a crossroads where a stone marker bore the sign:
Calais par Coulogne,
5
k.

This was the back road they wanted, and there were but a few miles left. It was a winding country lane through tree-lined marshes on both sides. The Englishmen, pushing the heavily loaded cart, sweated in the hot sun. The dog panted on the pile of clothes. Nobody spoke; everyone was weary. On they went, the cart creaking and groaning beneath its heavy load. As they came to a sharp bend, there, unexpectedly, was the German army in battle dress advancing toward them.

The dog, knowing well friend from foe, gave two short, sharp barks.

On the right side of the road was a ruined and overturned Mark IV Panzer tank which half blocked their passage. To get by, someone had to give way, as there was not sufficient room for the files and the refugees to pass each other.

Instinctively the two Englishmen slowed down, intending to stand aside and wait. Not the girl. She sized the situation up and took command.
“Allons”
she ordered.

At the precise moment they reached the ruined tank, the head of the column, with an officer and non-com in front, arrived there also. Someone had to yield ground and it wasn’t that little Girl Scout.

Giving the officer a glance full of hatred that was not assumed, she tugged at her braids, tossed her head, and moved resolutely by. Less resolutely the English with the cart and the dog followed. It was a contest of wills. The officer started to wave them off the road, stopped, looked at her again, turned, hesitated, and gave an order to the
Feldwebel.
The non-com stood still, barked a command to the long column, which immediately swung to the edge as the girl pressed on.

There was real malevolence in her glance, a dislike of the invader all too plain. She did not disguise her feeling, and the Frenchiness of her was evident. It could not have been invented or assumed. To the officer, she was a native. So also were the men in sabots and smocks at her side.

Anyhow this was what the young
Hauptmann
decided as he stood under a poplar tree at the edge of the road watching them pass. He was tall, blond, with an agreeable face under his coal-scuttle helmet, trying hard to be liked. If he had any intention of checking their papers, the girl’s scornful look as she went by put it from his mind. Few men would have cared to accost her at that moment.

The troops beside the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, stood like a regiment being reviewed by a general officer. The dog half rose on her haunches at the top of the pile of clothes on the cart, and barked her distrust sharply. It was a convincing act, it was no act, it was the way the girl felt and the animal too. Her head in the air, the little figure in the khaki skirt stalked firmly past the German files standing beneath the poplar trees.

The Sergeant, less firmly, followed with the cart. He desired to imitate her look; it was not easy. Because here was a regiment on a route march exactly like his own. How often they too had lined the side of the road for a flock of sheep, a herd of cows, a farmer with a tractor or a mowing machine, waiting in much the same way as these men, to have them pass. These were soldiers, exactly like his regiment; the dependables, the casual ones, the shirkers, the timid youngsters trying not to show it, the youthful lieutenants, the older non-coms, the graying officer. It was interesting—and frightening, too.

He thought they would never reach the end of that column, every second he expected the officer to call out an order sharply and arrest them. Finally they came to the end. As they did, the dog half stood on the shaking cart, leaned back, and gave a lusty, hoarse bark. It was a perfect gesture of contempt toward the invaders.

I
T WAS CHAOS
and confusion on the Admiralty Pier at Dover those early days of June. Round the clock, soldiers of every regiment debarked. The men were quickly fed at the long tables in the rear and soon put on trains that were shunted away to make room for newer arrivals.

The twins, those days, were all over the place, early and late. “Dad’s coming back,” they told each other, “he’s bound to come back. He’ll come back all right.” They knew from their neighbor, the Cap’n, that the Sergeant had been seen on the beach with his men. So they were determined to be on hand to greet him.

Searching the long files of weary soldiers slouching along the jetty, watching carefully the faces of men leaning from the windows of the departing trains, they sought their father, continually on the lookout for the shoulder flash of the Wiltshires. Many Wilts had indeed debarked, but nobody could give them any news of the Sergeant. Yet day after day they ranged the crowded piers, sure that eventually he would be landing.

“Those lads there. They were about here yesterday and the day before. They’ve no right inside the barriers, y’know. Who are they?”

The MP with the red band around his peaked cap, trim, neat, clean, and shaved, in a well-pressed uniform, stood out in contrast to the debarking fighting men off the boats. He watched the Williams twins dart through the throng of soldiers, asking an occasional question, their faces upturned and anxious. The policeman to whom the question was addressed stood next to the MP and chuckled. He knew military policemen were not popular on that pier. The previous day he had seen one MP tossed into the harbor, because he wouldn’t allow troops to debark soon enough.

“Ah... those lads! Yes, they’re local boys; their mother runs a boardinghouse up on the Folkestone Road. That’s her, the lady coming toward us with the coffeepot in her hand. The boys’ father is a sergeant with the Wilts, and they come down every day hoping to find him. I should leave them alone if I were you.”

Wooden barriers had been erected at the end of the jetty to hold back the townspeople. Every one of those anxious women standing there with children beside them had a son, a father, a brother, or a husband with the B.E.F. They crowded against the fence ten deep for long hours every day. Others climbed boxes or barrels behind to survey the passing troops.

“You there... Northamptons! Have you seen my Bill! Corporal Bill Manners?”

“Sorry, couldn’t tell you, missis. But there’s more of our lot coming across later.”

“Coldstreams! Coldstreams! Where is K Company? Is K Company off the beaches yet?”

“They’re on a destroyer, love. Right behind us. There, see, that’s them docking in the Basin now.”

Occasionally you’d hear a cry of grief and despair as bad news was given or, less occasionally, a cry of joy.

“Tom!”

“Daddy!”

Then a weary, beaten man, often wrapped in a blanket in place of an overcoat, would stop short at the sound of that voice, peer hard at the waving arms and the faces behind that barrier, then run across and throw his arms around someone on the other side. It didn’t happen often.

Mrs. Williams, helping with the sandwiches and tea for the starving troops, got past the barricades in her Red Cross uniform. She stayed from early in the morning until midafternoon, went home for a few hours’ rest, then, leaving Penny to get the boys’ supper, returned for the long night watch. Each time she came up the steps of the house on the Folkestone Road, she hoped to see that familiar figure in khaki, or to hear the exultant shout of the girl, which would tell her that a postcard or telegram had come saying the Sergeant had landed at some other port. Each time there was only silence and a solemn-faced child alone in an empty house.

If Mrs. Williams was allowed on the pier, few civilians were. However, being boys, the twins knew a way of getting past the barrier and the policemen at each end. They sneaked around to the back of the railway sheds, over the tracks, climbed the jetty on the opposite side, and walked out to where the troops were pouring off the boats. Then all day they spent going back and forth, up and down, never seeing their father or anyone who could give them news.

“He’s got to come back, he’s bound to come back,” they said to each other. Yet after what they had seen of the beaches along the Dunkerque coast, they knew many thousands would never return.

Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 350,000 troops under fire from the Flanders coast, had been going on for over a week. Boats with British, French, and even a few Belgian soldiers were still lining up to discharge passengers at Dover. At other ports also—at Margate and Ramsgate, at Herne Bay and Deal in the north, along the south shore at Folkestone, and as far away as Hastings and St. Leonards, troops were being landed. This gave the family hope. They all felt convinced that the Sergeant would return.

That morning they stood on the Admiralty Pier, watching a destroyer edge into the jetty. Although hundreds of soldiers packed her rails for the first sight of home, other exhausted men slept in cramped positions on top of coiled ropes, across bulkheads, or on piles of knapsacks, many with their steel helmets across their faces. The planks of the ship were warped and uneven; twisted turrets on the gun deck showed what this vessel had endured. In the bow stood two sailors with a petty officer. One sailor had a curled rope in his hand, which he tried to toss to a man on the stone jetty. It fell short. A sailor beside the twins quickly fished it from the water with a boat hook.

On the bridge, or what was left of it, was an officer with a megaphone. The bridgework had been shot away, and as protection a barricade of ship’s mattresses had been wedged into place.

“H.M.S.
Javelin
... with 740 troops... 48 wounded... and 36 prisoners of war.”

Immediately the gangplank was fastened, the stretcher-bearers of the St. John Ambulance went aboard. They disappeared below, soon returning with the motionless, shattered, and bandaged figures. Once all the stretcher cases were ashore, the walking wounded came off. They staggered up the gangplank, limping along or helped by a comrade. The twins noticed there was order and discipline aboard this ship, as there had not been on some of those days during Operation Dynamo.

Next came a group of French soldiers in blue uniforms. With them were a number of dazed Moroccans, frightened and uncertain in this strange country. Then a file of surly Germans, obviously contemptuous of their captors. They were marched off under a strong guard and halted on the pier, where they stood surveying the general confusion around them with the scorn of the victor, sure of his ultimate triumph. Last the troops started to file up, casuals from what seemed to be every regiment and all branches of the service—artillery, infantry, machine gunners, antiaircraft units, engineers, and others.

The twins stood watching attentively. For you never knew; each boat might carry their father. Then a noise came from the deck.

An officer, clean-shaven and neat despite tears in his uniform, came up the gangplank, followed by a corporal playing a fife. It sounded shrill and clear above the turmoil on the docks; it could be heard over the commands and orders from the loud-speakers, the sharp, short whistles of the shunting engines, the shrieks and signals from incoming ships. The officer and the corporal were followed by the regiment—the Welsh Guards.

Somehow each man had managed to shave. Like everyone’s, their uniforms were torn, often in tatters, yet they were obviously a fighting unit still as they came quickly up the gangplank and reformed under their noncoms on the pier. Everyone had his helmet on, each man wore a gas mask on his chest, all shouldered a rifle. The Bren guns, shining and cleaned, brought up the rear.

The officer in charge gave a quiet command. In perfect order, the fife playing as if they were conquerors and not defeated soldiers evacuated from disaster, the column moved briskly down the pier, past the Red Cross tables loaded with food, past the welcoming workers ready to feed them, to their waiting train.

The mass of shuffling troops stepped aside to let them pass. Ronny and Richard observed that even the scornful German prisoners lost that insolent expression as the Guards moved off, in perfect step, to the railway carriages.

T
HE STONE PIERS
were far less crowded that afternoon. Operation Dynamo had been in progress almost a fortnight, and the flow of loaded boats was slowing down. Mrs. Williams, the boys beside her, had time to stop and chat with a sergeant major from the Wilts, who had just arrived.

“Know George Williams? Of course I know him. I should think I did. You his missis, eh? Well, if anyone gets out of Dunkerque, it’ll be him, lady. There’s lots and lots of men landing all up and down the coast, y’know. ’Tisn’t only here at Dover; we saw boats going into half a dozen ports. Don’t give up yet, he’ll come back to you. Did you know about the division, missis?

“No? I thought not. I might say it was our division, the Fifth, that held the Germans up on the Ypres Canal long enough for the rest of the boys to get through to the sea. Only for that, most of the B.E.F. would have been cut off. No Dunkerque, no rescue. The Royal Navy can’t very well sail on dry land. So don’t you give up, he’ll come through. He’s a keen soldier, is George Williams. By the way, anyone tell you what he did?”

“No,” she said eagerly. “No, I haven’t heard a word except from a friend who met him on the beach at Bray-Dunes when he was trying to get away. This friend offered to give him a ride back in a motorboat, but there was only room for one, and he preferred to stay with his men.”

“Ah, that’s George for you. It sounds like him. Well, he was out on patrol, covering the retreat one day, when he intercepted a German staff car, carrying two high-ranking officers. Inside was a brief case, with secret stuff in it. Top Secret, it was. They say it was a copy of the whole German Army invasion plans, disposition of troops, and everything. Allowed Lord Gort to spot our men and hold off the Panzers long enough for us to reach the coast. So, missis, your husband has been recommended for the D.S.M. I was at Regimental Headquarters, I know. I saw the papers go through.”

The Distinguished Service Medal! The highest decoration for noncoms, save the Victoria Cross.