After Dunkirk Page 4

  “What?” Amélie’s voice caught. She whirled around. “Where is he?”

  “Gone. He knows he can’t stay here. I drew him a map.”

  Startled, Amélie could only utter, “To where?”

  “Best that you don’t know. If we are going to keep each other safe during this war, the less we know about what others are doing, the better. Learn that. Jeremy is a capable man, and he needs to get to safe ground, home in England.”

  Amélie sat with her eyes closed, not moving for a time. Then, fighting back tears, she leaned her head into her father’s chest. “How will he get there?”

  “He’ll have help. I can’t say more.”

  For several minutes, Amélie snuggled against Ferrand, who put his arm around her shoulders and held her. “He’ll be all right. I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh, Papa, I’m so afraid for him. I close my eyes and I see him, the way he was on the beach, and then when we brought him into the house, and after we cleaned him up. He was strong. When he woke up, he was gentle and nice.” Her chest convulsed with an involuntary sob as tears flowed down her cheeks. “I can’t bear to think that I’ll never see him again.”

  “There, there, ma cherie. You feel like you’re in love. This has been an emotional time for all of us, more so for you because you found and saved him.”

  “You saved him,” Amélie choked. She shook her head and straightened up, wiping her eyes. “I don’t know what I feel. I only know I—we—cared for him. He fought for us, and we risked our lives to save him. There’s goodness about him.” Her tears continued to fall. “I don’t want him to die.”

  4

  Two days earlier, June 8

  The northeast outskirts of Dunkirk

  Lance Littlefield stared in turn at each of his comrades circled inside a thicket at the edge of a dense forest. His stomach gnawed with hunger; his parched throat was thirsty for even a capful of water. How much longer he or any of the small group of soldiers of the 51st (Highland) Infantry Division could hold out was something he dared not think about. The guns had fallen silent a few days back; how many he no longer had the ability to count. The previous day’s storms had blurred his sense of time. He inhaled, fighting despair.

  Images of his family plagued him. His parents had been against his enlisting in the army amidst the inevitability of war, but he had been determined to do his bit for king and country, and so here he was in this desolate place.

  The situation had not been this way when he arrived, nor had he intended this place as his destination. The notion of fighting the Hun had appealed to him in a romantic way. As an adventurer, he sought challenge, undeterred by danger, and he had expected to be in the thick of combat. He had not expected to provide rearguard protection for an escaping army while pitted against overwhelming force, or then to have been abandoned along with his brothers-in-arms whom he fought for most, those to his left and right during battle.

  The young, gaunt faces around him were new to Lance. Like him, they had been separated from their units and scattered when the German juggernaut strafed, bombed, machine-gunned, mortared, and engaged with small arms and fixed bayonets as it rumbled through the last strands of British and French defenses on its way to the beaches at Dunkirk.

  Each of the lads had witnessed the capture and slaughter of thousands of their fellow soldiers, and they observed from barely concealed hideaways as prisoners were stripped of their arms and led away. Their faces, seeming old despite their youth, showed the shock of the brutality they had witnessed. No one smiled, and they clung close to each other for mutual support. Without asking them, Lance knew their thoughts, because they were his own. Will I ever see home again? Will I see tomorrow?

  Three of his companions were in almost catatonic states. One of them had been among roughly a hundred captured members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment who had been marched to a farm in Le Paradis. There, the SS Totenkopf Division machine-gunned their captives. At the first sound of gunfire, he had fallen to the ground and lay there with heaving breath and gushing tears while around him, his comrades screamed and groaned in agony as bullets ripped through their bodies. They fell over him, covering his face and uniform in thick splashes of blood. For hours, he lay there until the Germans departed and darkness allowed him to crawl out and escape into the underbrush.

  The second soldier in severe shock had witnessed a similar atrocity in which members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, captured near Wormhout, were forced into a barn. There, the Germans lobbed hand grenades into the outbuilding until no sound of life emanated. Finding himself physically unharmed but covered in blood, he lay still while the captors moved among the corpses, firing into those still showing signs of life. He continued to lay among his dead mates for hours after the Germans left, waiting for darkness and silence.

  The third was a medic who had been in the passenger seat of an ambulance and narrowly escaped into the woods when a squad of German soldiers fired on them, despite the Red Cross markings. The engine block had spewed smoke thick enough to conceal him as he jumped from his seat and plunged into the shrubbery, unseen. From there, and to his horror, he watched as the enemy secured the back door so that it could not be opened from the inside and set the vehicle on fire. Within seconds, screams filled the air as the wounded were incinerated.

  Not daring to move, the soldier could only cover his ears while tears streamed down his face. Then, the stench of burning flesh had assaulted his nostrils.

  All the men in this small group with Lance had seen huge numbers of their compatriots rounded up at gunpoint and marched to heaven-knows-where. Each had likely avoided detection because the Germans had their hands full managing the thousands of prisoners they had already taken.

  Some soldiers evaded capture by squirming behind shrubs, berms, hedges, and whatever concealment they could find, including massive numbers of dead bodies and the hulks of burned-out war machines. They headed away from columns of prisoners marching east under armed guard. In the dim light of dusk or dawn, from hearing the crack of branches or catching a glimpse of movement, they had found each other, recognized by their filthy olive-green British uniforms. For days, they had scavenged, only daring to approach garbage bins of the most isolated homes in the darkness of night and scurrying away at the sounds of barking dogs. In the mornings, they licked dew from leaves and sought water from wherever they could find it, including puddles in the road. Now grimy, unshaved, starved, thirsty, disoriented, and with no plan, they offered each other the only solace they could, company during shared misery.

  Numb, Lance realized after a time that, as a mid-level sergeant, he was the ranking member of his group. The weight of responsibility for these lives descended on his shoulders like a dark, heavy cloak. As he looked dully from face to face, he saw that some with sufficient presence of mind stared back, expectant, questioning, despairing, looking to him for glimmers of hope that they would live and find a way home.

  Home. The thought now seemed a surreal notion, a distant place remembered but real only in the sense that a dream was real, mercurial and wispy. Lance pictured his stepfather, tall, thin, a jocular personality who had nevertheless frowned on Lance’s choices in life. His mother was a prim and proper woman, always ready to help anyone who needed it, but seemingly incapable of deep emotional attachment, or at least the expression of it.

  Then there were his brothers, Paul and Jeremy, and his sister, Claire. Always-dutiful Paul, the eldest of the four siblings, had taken his mother’s personality. He had been the first of the brothers to enter the British Army, accepting a commission and leaving for London to serve. At last word, he was rising rapidly on the staff in the War Office, but his job seemed to be very hush-hush.

  Next came Claire. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, she had refused to let her status as the single female sibling interfere with her participation in whatever escapade her brothers dreamed up. Adventurous in her own right, she was the artistically inclined member
of the family, loving the piano and gifted on any instrument she picked up. She had been accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in London two years earlier and had lived there ever since.

  Lance was the third in line and had joined the army for reasons completely different from Paul’s. He had always sought adventure, shirking studies while in school, and as a result, his prospects for advancing scholastically were dim. That bothered him not in the least but inflamed his mother. Not that she would ever show it.

  He had enlisted as war clouds gathered, only informing his parents the night before shipping out. He had relished the training, earned quick promotion into the non-commissioned officer ranks for his natural leadership abilities, and looked forward to engaging the Hun in combat.

  Then there was sweet Jeremy, the baby of the family, a perfect blend of his older siblings. Jeremy was fun-loving but always respectful. He was studious and a gifted athlete, and while he enjoyed joining in Lance’s adventures, he never initiated them or pushed the limit. Having always been good with numbers, his choice of an engineering degree surprised no one. The shock had come when he had volunteered for service in the army to build infrastructure in France in anticipation of war with Germany.

  Lance closed his eyes and let his chin drop to his chest. I hope Jeremy got out.

  Picturing his siblings was not difficult: they were images of each other with only those slight differences that family and friends used to distinguish between them. They were above medium height and build with variations of musculature dependent on their physical activity, meaning that Paul was thinner and softer than his brothers, athletically capable, but more inclined to study. Lance was rock-hard. Jeremy was, well, Jeremy, as physically talented as Lance but giving more time to his numbers than to following the physical regimen of his more rambunctious middle brother. As for Claire, despite the hours she spent practicing music, she spent almost an equal amount of time roughhousing with her brothers.

  Despite the differences between the siblings while growing up, they wrestled and boxed with their stepfather and each other, spent hours climbing among the cliffs on the shoreline, or played with a ball of some sort on the flat ground of their island home. They were each other’s best friends, and they idolized their stepfather.

  Paul and Claire had brown eyes, their brothers both had green. All four had straight noses, dirty-blond hair, and firm jaws.

  Their mother had her own peculiar warmth. It seldom expressed itself in long hugs or high blandishments, but she was always there, standing aside with a smile more detectable in her eyes than on her lips. She was at once apart from them and yet with them, and always doing small things that made life good—baking favorite desserts, bringing home a new board game, or just being there and helping when they worked through problems.

  Thinking about his mother now, an overpowering ache welled within Lance’s chest and he felt tears spilling down his cheeks, a recently frequent occurrence. Glancing up, he saw that some of the men noticed. He coughed and wiped his eyes.

  Without quite knowing why, he climbed to his feet. His impulse had been to rise abruptly, but he found the effort slowed by exhausted muscles and painful joints. On finally standing upright, his legs wobbled beneath him, and he found himself at a loss for words. He reminded himself that he was the senior man present and opened his mouth to speak.

  The sound that emerged was almost unrecognizable, a weak, unintelligible croak. He coughed to clear his throat and tried again, hearing his voice barely above a whisper. Looking about, he saw that he had gained the detached attention of the soldiers, their weary eyes, sagging skin, and drooping shoulders a testament to the deprivations they endured.

  Lance sucked on his tongue to pull whatever moisture he could muster into his mouth to wet his throat. Then, he tried for a third time to address the small group.

  “Chaps, we’re in a pickle.” He tried to grin but saw that his attempt at humor had bombed. “No help is coming.”

  Several of the men closed their eyes, and their heads dropped further. Some turned away. Lance saw that he had only plunged them into deeper desolation.

  He straightened his back as best he could and tried to put force in his voice. “We are British soldiers,” he said. “We have a mission. Our job now is to evade capture and get home.”

  Several of the men raised their eyes to meet his, some with a stray ray of hope, some with deep skepticism.

  “Just how are we going to do that, Sergeant?” one asked, his tone thick with sarcasm.

  “I don’t know,” Lance admitted, “but we bloody hell won’t do it by sitting in a circle with our jaws in the dirt.” Feeling a slight rush of energy from unknown reserves, he continued. “We are soldiers of His Majesty’s Army, and as the senior member present, I will ask you to please speak to me and your fellow soldiers with respect.”

  By their startled faces, Lance knew he had at least dented their senses. “The first thing we are going to do is get to know each other,” he continued. “Right now, all of you, get on your feet. That’s an order.”

  No one moved. Some turned away.

  Lance scanned the weary faces. Then he walked over to the soldier who had seen his comrades machine-gunned at Le Paradis. Despite his own shaky legs, he squatted in front of the man, really still a boy. “Where are you from?” he asked gently.

  The lad raised his eyes as if unsure that he was the person being addressed. “Aysgarth, sir. I mean, Sergeant.”

  Gratified that the soldier could still comprehend and respond, Lance pressed him. “Where is that?”

  “It’s…” The soldier started to reply and then had to stop to think. “It’s in the middle of the country, in North Yorkshire. It’s a tiny place.”

  “Is it beautiful?”

  A slow smile crossed the soldier’s face. He nodded. “It is. Just a stop in the road, really, but I grew up there.”

  Lance clasped his shoulder. “What’s your name?”

  “Private Tobias Stewart.”

  “What does your mother call you?”

  “Toby.”

  “Toby it is, then. Do you want to go home, Toby?”

  The young soldier nodded, and Lance saw a spark in his eyes and slight color appearing in his slack jaw.

  “I’m going home, Toby,” Lance said. “If you’d like to come with me, would you please stand and wait for me over there?” Lance pointed to where he had begun speaking.

  With excruciating effort, Toby climbed to his feet and ambled to the place Lance had indicated. He stood on unsteady feet, but Lance saw that he had set his jaw.

  Lance sought the soldier who had witnessed the massacre with the hand grenades. Before Lance had even kneeled in front of him, the man struggled to his feet.

  “I’m Private Ian Chapman, Sergeant, and I’m from Hoylake in Merseyside on the west coast. I’m going with you.” He made his way across to stand with Toby.

  Lance turned to a third soldier who, without prompting, used his rifle to help himself to his feet. “Corporal Derek Horton. I’m ready.” Using the weapon as a crutch, he limped over to Toby and Ian.

  Watching him, Lance called after him, “Corporal Horton, what’s wrong with your leg?”

  Horton turned and, looking sheepish, he replied, “It’s nothing, Sergeant. I sprained it jumping into a ditch.” He grinned through mud-streaked lips. “That was better than munching on incoming artillery.”

  Lance managed a slight smile and turned to face those still seated. His attention fell on the medic sitting alone and apart, his eyes almost vacant. Lance moved over and sat down beside him.

  For a moment he said nothing. The medic did not look up.

  “We’re going home,” Lance said gently. “Would you like to come with us?”

  The medic did not stir.

  “What does your mother call you?”

  No response.

  Feeling his own despair rising, Lance looked around. Horton, Chapman, and Toby stood together awkwardly, Horton still leaning on
his rifle.

  Forcing his aching muscles, Lance stood up and looked about. The battle had long since moved past them and they were no longer within earshot of enemy soldiers. He glanced at those remaining seated and then back at the trio waiting for him.

  Suddenly, he summoned all the energy he could muster and yelled as loud as his weakened condition allowed, “Medic! Medic!”

  Startled, the soldier at his feet looked up, eyes wide, and whirled around, searching.

  Lance reached down and grabbed his collar. “Over there,” he called, pointing at Horton. “That man has a wounded leg. He needs you. Now!”

  He yanked on the medic’s collar again. “What’s your name?”

  The man looked confused.

  “There’s a soldier over there who needs first aid. Do your job. Help him.”

  The medic looked slowly over toward Horton and started rising to his feet. Lance reached down and helped him. “What’s your name?” he asked again.

  “T-Tickner,” the medic stammered. “Private Kenneth Tickner.”

  “Well, Private Tickner, take care of Corporal Horton, and get ready to go with us.”

  Now standing on shaky legs, Tickner looked into Lance’s face. Then he turned to Horton and stumbled toward him.

  Lance shifted his attention to the remainder of the group. They regarded him with expressions ranging from gaping to startled. Some started the painful climb to their feet. Then, without another word, the entire group got up and clustered around Lance, awaiting his direction.

  “Good,” he said. “From here until we get home, we are each other’s closest friends.” He made his next statement to the medic. “Private Tickner, you’ve got a big job ahead of you. We have a long way to go, and you have to keep everyone healthy.” He then addressed the full group. “Get acquainted. Learn each other’s names and backgrounds. First order of business — we’re going to find food and clean water.” He looked around at the haggard faces staring back at him with traces of hope. “And then we’re going home.”