“Bray Dunes,” he said, remembering the name from the map. Nettle said, “I like the sound of those.”
They passed men who could barely walk for their blisters. Some were barefoot. A soldier with a bloody chest wound reclined in an ancient pram pushed by his mates. A sergeant was leading a cart horse over the back of which was draped an officer, unconscious or dead, his feet and wrists secured by ropes. Some troops were on bicycles, most walked in twos or threes. A dispatch rider from the Highland Light Infantry came by on a Harley-Davidson. His bloodied legs dangled uselessly, and his pillion passenger, who had heavily bandaged arms, was working the foot pedals. All along the way were discarded greatcoats, left there by men too hot to carry them. Turner had already talked the corporals out of leaving theirs. They had been going for an hour when they heard behind them a rhythmic thudding, like the ticking of a gigantic clock. They turned to look back. At first sight it seemed that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road toward them. It was a platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slope, led by a second lieutenant. They came by at a forced march, their gaze fixed forward, their arms swinging high. The stragglers stood aside to let them through. These were cynical times, but no one risked a catcall. The show of discipline and cohesion was shaming. It was a relief when the Guards had pounded out of sight and the rest could resume their introspective trudging.
The sights were familiar, the inventory was the same, but now there was more of everything; vehicles, bomb craters, detritus. There were more bodies. He walked across the land until he caught the taste of the sea, carried across the flat, marshy fields on a freshening breeze. The one-way flow of people with a single purpose, the constant self-important traffic in the air, the extravagant cloud advertising their destination, suggested to his tired but overactive mind some long-forgotten childhood treat, a carnival or sports event on which they were all converging. There was a memory that he could not place, of being carried on his father’s shoulders, up a hill toward a great attraction, toward the source of a huge excitement. He would like those shoulders now. His missing father had left few memories. A knotted neck scarf, a certain smell, the vaguest outline of a brooding, irritable presence. Did he avoid serving in the Great War, or did he die somewhere near here under another name? Perhaps he survived. Grace was certain he was too cowardly, too shifty, to join up, but she had her own reason to be bitter. Nearly every man here had a father who remembered northern France, or was buried in it. He wanted such a father, dead or alive. Long ago, before the war, before Wandsworth, he used to revel in his freedom to make his own life, devise his own story with only the distant help of Jack Tallis. Now he understood how conceited a delusion this was. Rootless, therefore futile. He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father. It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection. All around him men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot . . . They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. He would find Cecilia. Her address was on the letter in his pocket, next to the poem. In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start. He would find his father too. They were supposed to be good at tracking down missing persons, the Salvation Army. A perfect name. He would track down his father, or his dead father’s story—either way, he would become his father’s son. They walked all afternoon until at last, a mile ahead, where gray and yellow smoke billowed up from surrounding fields, they saw the bridge across the Bergues-Furnes canal. All the way in now, not a farmhouse or barn was left standing. As well as smoke, a miasma of rotting meat drifted toward them—more slaughtered cavalry horses, hundreds of them, in a heap in a field. Not far from them was a smoldering mountain of uniforms and blankets. A beefy lance corporal with a sledgehammer was smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines. Two ambulances were parked at the side of the road, their back doors open. From inside came the groans and shouts of wounded men. One of them was crying out, over and over, more in rage than pain, “Water, I want water!” Like everyone else, Turner kept going.
The crowds were bunching up again. In front of the canal bridge was a junction, and from the Dunkirk direction, on the road that ran along the canal, came a convoy of three-ton lorries which the military police were trying to direct into a field beyond where the horses were. But troops swarming across the road forced the convoy to a halt. The drivers leaned on their horns and shouted insults. The crowd pressed on. Men tired of waiting scrambled off the backs of the lorries. There was a shout of “Take cover!” And before anyone could even glance round, the mountain of uniforms was detonated. It began to snow tiny pieces of dark green serge. Nearer, a detachment of artillerymen were using hammers to smash up the dial sights and breechblocks of their guns. One of them, Turner noticed, was crying as he destroyed his howitzer. At the entrance to the same field, a chaplain and his clerk were dousing cases of prayer books and Bibles with petrol. Men were crossing the field toward a NAAFI dump, looking for cigarettes and booze. When a shout went up, dozens more left the road to join them. One group sat by a farm gate, trying on new shoes. A soldier with crammed cheeks pushed past Turner with a box of pink and white marshmallows. A hundred yards away a dump of Wellington boots, gas masks and capes was fired, and acrid smoke enveloped the line of men pushing forward to the bridge. At last the lorries were on the move and turned into the biggest field, immediately south of the canal. Military police were organizing the parking, lining up the rows, like stewards at a county show. The lorries were joining half-tracks, motorbikes, Bren-gun carriers and mobile kitchens. The disabling methods were, as always, simple—a bullet in the radiator, and the engine left running until it seized up. The bridge was held by the Coldstream Guards. Two neatly sandbagged machine-gun posts covered the approach. The men were clean-shaven, stone-eyed, silently contemptuous of the filthy disorganized rabble trailing by. On the other side of the canal, evenly spaced, white-painted stones marked out a path to a hut being used as an orderly room. On the far bank, to the east and west, the Guards were well dug in along their section. Waterfront houses had been commandeered, roof tiles punched out, and windows sandbagged for machine-gun slits. A fierce sergeant was keeping order on the bridge. He was sending back a lieutenant on a motorbike. Absolutely no equipment or vehicles allowed. A man with a parrot in a cage was turned away. The sergeant was also pulling out men for perimeter defense duties, and doing it with far more authority than the poor major. A growing detachment stood unhappily at ease by the orderly room. Turner saw what was happening at the same time as the corporals, when they were still a good way back.
“They’ll fucking have you, mate,” Mace said to Turner. “Poor bloody infantry. If you want to go home to the crumpet, get between us and limp.”
Feeling dishonorable, but determined all the same, he put his arms round the corporals’ shoulders and they staggered forward.
“It’s your left, remember, guv’nor,” Nettle said. “Would you like me to pop my bayonet through your foot?”
“Thanks awfully. I think I can manage.”
Turner let his head droop as they were crossing the bridge so he saw nothing of the duty sergeant’s ferocious gaze, though he felt its heat. He heard the barked command, “’Ere, you!” Some unfortunate just behind him was pulled out to help hold off the onslaught which must surely come within two or three days, while the last of the BEF was piling into the boats. What he did see while his head was lowered was a long black barge slipping under the bridge in the direction of Furnes in Belgium. The boatman sat at his tiller smoking a pipe, looking stolidly ahead. Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps. A line of washing which included women’s smalls was hanging out to dry. The smell of cooking, of onions and garlic, rose from the boat. Turner and the corporals crossed the bridge and passed the whitewashed rocks, a reminder of training camp and all the bull. In the orderly hut a phone was ringing. Mace murmured, “You bloody well limp till we’re out of sight.”