“But not as great as the march of Napoleon’s Grand Army to the Rhine, eighteen miles a day.”
“Greater, and as great as Marlborough’s march to the Danube, the finest military maneuver of the 1700s.”
Clay hesitated, cast his eyes at me as if I would help him, then sputtered something about the insignificance of precedent. In high color, he reached for the tea.
Churchill chuckled. “You keep coming back for more, Wilson. Your determination is to be admired. And pitied.”
Both would agree that Second Dunkirk was a marvel of tactics by those who knew nothing of tactics. No one knows who started the land bridge, but I interviewed several candidates after the war.
Lewis Stout was a wheat farmer with two hundred acres near Hadleigh, just inland from Ipswich. As soldiers from the 165th Infantry Brigade, 55th (West Lancashire) Infantry Division, filed past, some in armored personnel carriers, others on trucks, but many walking, Stout stood by the road and ladled water from a barrel on the bed of his truck to refill canteens.
“Our lads were exhausted and were marching on only their pluck. I served in the Great War, and I marched across France, and then back again. My feet have hardly recovered. So it struck me that in this day and age, no soldier should have to walk until he enters battle.”
The farmer abruptly lowered his ladle and shouted, “You Johnnies climb up here, and I’ll drive you as far south as my petrol will hold.”
Stout hauled thirty infantrymen to Chelmsford, almost to London. “Each one of them shook my hand as he left the lorry.”
Another farmer, Joseph Warren, witnessed a Luftwaffe strafing run tear up a Bedford three-ton truck’s engine. “By the time I rose from my cover behind a stone fence, the truck had pulled over. The driver pointed out to his lieutenant holes in the bonnet. The bullets had gone clear through the engine block. But I thought, this truck is still good, mostly.”
Warren ran to his barn, started his Austin tractor, and quickly drove it to the front of the Bedford. “The soldiers saw my purpose and used a chain to attach the tractor to the lorry’s axle. Then I told them to harness my two iron-wheeled hay wagons to the back of the truck. So we formed a road train and with a whoop, they climbed on.”
The farmer transported an entire company of the Royal Norfolk Regiment eighteen miles to the south, until the tractor’s fuel tank was dry. He said proudly, “My boys went on to win five Victoria Crosses, more than any other regiment.” At the end of the war, the regiment presented Warren with their Britannia badge, and he was wearing it on his wool cap when I spoke with him.
Peter Penry was a coal driver at Kingston upon Hull, on the Humber River. He filled his truck with soldiers of the 201st Infantry Brigade, Yorkshire County Division. “I carried them all the way to the Chilterns. But I hadn’t had time to clean my truck, you see.”
When the infantrymen climbed down, their uniforms were covered with coal dust. Their faces and hands were smudged. Some of them were spitting it out.
“I said I was terribly sorry,” Penry recalled for me. “But one sergeant told me that I had just saved them their supply of burnt cork. They marched away, quick as you please, looking more like chimneysweeps than soldiers.”
“I had a rural practice,” Dr. Calvin Shields told me, “with visits up to fifteen miles away, so I had an iron-clad reason for obtaining all the petrol I needed. I had a full tank for Second Dunkirk.”
Shields drove a Vauxhall Ten. He picked up six soldiers of the 131th Infantry Brigade, 44th Home Counties.
“They told me they had lost their platoon’s medical officer to a Luftwaffe fighter,” he explained. “So when we got as close to the front as an automobile could, I parked the car and followed them in, carrying my black bag. Their lieutenant said he hoped they wouldn’t need me, but was glad for the company.”
Walter McWhety was surprised when soldiers of the Wessex Infantry accepted his offer of a ride south. “I am a mortician. I was driving my hearse. They didn’t hesitate, just climbed right in. Made something of a joke of it.”
The mortician almost came to blows with the sergeant sitting next to him. McWhety would not explain the short detours he made as they drove toward London. He told me after the war, “I knew the location of every cemetery in that part of the country, and I didn’t think it right that Tommies heading for the front in a hearse should be driven by graveyards. Bad for morale and all.”
The sheriff of Nottingham, Charles Doane, also found himself avoiding fistfights. He stationed himself at the south end of a bridge over the River Trent, and refused to permit refugees fleeing north to cross.
“I knew from the Great War that all bridges must be one way, toward the front. There were too many soldiers and too many vehicles crossing the bridge to congest it with civilians rushing away from the battle. But I almost had a riot on my hands.”
Delbert Dolby owned a bicycle shop in Coventry. He rolled the bicycles onto the street and gave them away to soldiers of the 133rd Infantry Brigade, Home Counties Division. He told me, “To tell you the truth, I did not mind seeing them go. Those bicycles compared poorly with prewar models. There was no chromium on them, and they were painted black, every inch. There were no three-speed gears. Even the handlebar bells were tinny.” Dolby said the soldiers were nonetheless happy to receive the bicycles.
Through her cottage window, Joan Kerry watched British soldiers marching south. “An endless column, and they were so tired, tramping on and on. I wanted to help them, but felt useless, until my eyes fell on my violin.”
Kerry belonged to the Leicester String Quartet. “I played lead violin. My neighbor Dalia Jennings played second, and Terrance Barton, the chemist, played the viola. Our cello player was in the Royal Navy.”
She ran next door and ordered Dalia Jennings to grab her violin. She telephoned Barton, and he appeared within minutes, carrying his viola. The three of them joined the marching column.
“I asked the first soldier I came to the name of his regiment. He said they were the Yellow Bellies. I learned later it was their nickname, because their first colors had a yellow ground. He must have seen my confusion so he clarified by saying they were the North Lincolnshires. So I asked the name of their regimental march. The soldier, a sergeant I think, replied it was ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher.’”
Kerry looked at Dalia Jennings and asked, “The Lincolnshire Poacher?” Jennings shook her head, as did Barton. They had not heard of it. Kerry told me, “Mind you, we played Mozart and Bach and Schubert. I had never played any music with the word ‘poacher’ in it, I was quite sure of that.”
She asked the soldier to hum it. He did, and several other infantrymen joined him.
Kerry remembered, “Regimental marches aren’t the most complicated of music, but they certainly are thrilling. We swung into it gaily, the three of us.”
The Leicester String Quartet, minus one, marched fifteen miles with them, as far as the musicians’ legs would go. With the quartet setting the tempo, the Lincolnshires’ pace quickened, and their hearts hardened to the task ahead.
The Lincolnshires were no strangers to the forced march. The 10th Foot endured a 120-mile march across the Egyptian desert in 1801, for which it was awarded the Sphinx badge. This regimental badge was awarded to the Leicester String Quartet after the war. Joan Kerry stitched the design—a Sphinx atop the word “Egypt” atop a banner on which was the regiment’s name—onto a flag, and it now appears on a pole next to them at all their performances.
Mary Branscomb was a Red Cross volunteer, an American who had been assigned to dispense doughnuts and coffee to British units in the north. She and her crew of Doughnut Dollies operated a mobile canteen, called a clubmobile, a Ford van that opened to serve refreshments. “We gave doughnuts to them all, and what an education it was for a Seattle girl like me. We served dashing Polish cavalry officers, who had colorful uniforms from the last century, and knew only two English words, ‘girl’ and ‘bed,’ and always used them together. And Norwegians with their fresh faces and all that blond hair. And the French, who really were gallant, kissing our hands and everything.”