For over an hour the trawler remained there taking survivors of the routed Army on board, then puffs of smoke issued from its funnel. It slowly turned and headed for England.
The sun was sinking but the evacuation still went on; as some of the boats sailed for home, others arrived to take off yet more and more men. Gregory kept his eyes fixed upon the trawler until it became a little speck hidden by the gathering darkness, then at last he stood up and began to tramp through the heavy sand, towards the road. He would have given all that he possessed to be on that trawler with Erika, but the Black Baroness was still at large to wreak her evil will and he remembered Sir Pellinore's injunction.
It was his business to 'seek out and destroy the enemy'.
CHAPTER 21
The Road to Paris
Gregory slept in a shallow dip among the sand dunes. When he awoke dawn was just breaking.
Seaward and to the west, where England lay, the scene was still obscured by semi-darkness, but to the east against the fore glow of the sunrise the silhouettes of little groups of troops already stood out upon the higher ground.
By the time he had roused himself daylight had come to reveal once more the remnants of the shattered Army. For four days now the B.E.F., once lauded as the finest land-force, for its size, in the world, had been evacuating and only its tail-end now remained to be taken off. The men were sitting glum and silent in little groups along the grassy dunes or were straggling down to the shore, where with the coming of dawn the armada of small craft had once more appeared. Gregory distributed half his cigarettes among a group of them and spent a few minutes listening to their stories.
There was nothing splendid about them, nothing heroic; they were just beaten—beaten by marching—marching for mile after mile through those grilling days and ghastly nights— while being chivvied from pillar to post by the superior forces of a well-organised enemy. No blame to them. They had been game enough when they had marched into Belgium, and where they had met the enemy they had fought with stubborn courage. Gregory knew from those to whom he talked that if at any time on that retreat they had been ordered to stand they would have stood; but they had not been so ordered and they were only regimental officers or rank and file and they could do no more than obey the order to reach the coast somehow, destroy their equipment and get home.
The heroes of that chapter in British history were in the sky above, driving off Goering's air-armada, and on the sea, in all those little boats manned by old salts from Deal or Dover, by young boys from the Kent and Essex coasts, by week-end yachtsmen, by chaps who had just 'wanted to come too', and by the indomitable personnel of the Royal Navy, the R.N.V.R. and the Mercantile Marine.
Gregory knew perfectly well that had the roles been reversed the scene would have been just the same.
After days of marching and strafing without sleep the sailors and the volunteers would have sat with a woebegone expression, examining their blistered and bleeding feet, while had the soldiers been the men manning the little boats they would have proved just as gallant rescuers. Their tragedy was that they had lacked brilliant, or even distinguished, leadership.
The captain of their ship, General Lord Gort, had gone home two days before, when the evacuation was still in full swing, because, as one haggard, wounded subaltern put it to Gregory somewhat cynically, 'it was not considered that the men still remaining on the beaches constituted a command fitting for an officer of such senior rank'. He had been ordered home by the Government to report.
That report would doubtless appear years later in the history books, but Gregory did not feel that Mr.
Churchill needed very much telling what had happened, and he did feel, remembering Nelson at Copenhagen, that there was a time to obey orders and a time to ignore them. He remembered, too, Marshal Ney, who had commanded the rearguard in the ghastly retreat of Napoleon's Army from Moscow, and that Ney, personally, had been the last man to fire the last musket on the bridge of Kovno, after he had conveyed the remaining stragglers of the Grande Armee on to the safety of Polish soil.
He also thought of the Old Contemptibles: the men of Mons, Le Cateau and the Marne. That B.E.F. of 1914 had been only one-third of the size of the B.E.F. of 1940. The German equipment had been just as much superior then as it was superior now. The odds in favour of the Germans had been just as heavy, in proportion, against General French as they had been against Lord Gort, but French had fought the Germans to a standstill; Gort had gone home to report.
Almost physically sick with bitterness and fury Gregory left the men to whom he had been talking and plodded across the sand dunes until he reached a rise from which he could see the scene of desolation inland. Tanks, guns, ambulances, lorries, cars, motor-cycles, searchlights, Bren-gun carriers, repair vans, aircraft tenders, listening apparatus, heavy howitzers, field cookers, petrol wagons, and every other conceivable type of army vehicle littered the scene in one vast higgledy-piggledy jumble for miles on either side of him and as far as he could see.
On reaching the road to Furnes he walked up to an abandoned tank, got the lid open and peered inside.
Someone had evidently pitched two or three Mills bombs inside before leaving it, as the interior was just a mass of tangled and twisted machinery. He examined three or four others but they were all in the same state. At least the Germans would not be able to use them, but the number of tanks and guns abandoned there was so great that when they had the leisure the Nazis would be able to transport them home and present one to practically every town and village in Germany as an optical demonstration of the Fuehrer's complete and devastating victory over the hated British.
He walked on for about half a mile and came to another group of tanks, but these had had their tractors smashed so were also useless. A little further on, among a line of lorries which were half in and half out of the ditch, he saw another tank and had a look at that. At first sight it seemed to be all right, so he began a more thorough and very cautious investigation, as he thought it probable that some form of booby-trap might have been left inside it; but ten minutes' careful inspection satisfied him that nothing in or near the solitary tank was liable to go off and blow him up. Getting into the driver's seat, he proceeded to try to make it work.
He had never been inside a tank before and the mechanism looked horribly complicated, but he felt sure that a tank must function on the same principles as any other motor-driven vehicle. After experimenting for some time with the various switches and levers he gradually got the hang of the thing and, with a frightful jolting, succeeded in getting it out of the ditch on to the road.
The next thing was petrol, as the tank's supply was very low; but that presented no difficulty as there were thousands of reserve tins near at hand on the abandoned lorries. It took him three-quarters of an hour carting the tins before he had the tank filled to capacity and had also collected a good supply of iron rations. He then picked up a piece of chalk from the roadside, got into the tank, closed down the lid and set off.