Atonement (31 page)

“What’s
the plan, guv’nor?”

He did not
reply.

“Oh,
oh. Now you’ve offended her.”

Beyond the
ack-ack, they heard artillery fire, their own, some way further to the west. As
they approached the village they heard the sound of slow-moving lorries. Then
they saw them, stretching in a line to the north, traveling at walking pace. It
was going to be tempting to hitch a ride, but he knew from experience what an
easy target they would be from the air. On foot you could see and hear what was
coming.

Their track
joined the road where it turned a right-angled corner to leave the village.
They rested their feet for ten minutes, sitting on the rim of a stone water
trough. Three- and ten-ton lorries, half-tracks and ambulances were grinding
round the narrow turn at less than one mile an hour, and moving away from the
village down a long straight road whose left side was flanked by plane trees.
The road led directly north, toward a black cloud of burning oil that stood
above the horizon, marking out Dunkirk. No need for a compass now. Dotted along
the way were disabled military vehicles. Nothing was to be left for enemy use.
From the backs of receding lorries the conscious wounded stared out blankly.
There were also armored cars, staff cars, Bren-gun carriers and motorbikes.
Mixed in with them and stuffed or piled high with household gear and suitcases
were civilian cars, buses, farm trucks and carts pushed by men and women or
pulled by horses. The air was gray with diesel fumes, and straggling wearily
through the stench, and for the moment moving faster than the traffic, were
hundreds of soldiers, most of them carrying their rifles and their awkward
greatcoats—a burden in the morning’s growing warmth.

Walking with
the soldiers were families hauling suitcases, bundles, babies, or holding the
hands of children. The only human sound Turner heard, piercing the din of
engines, was the crying of babies. There were old people walking singly. One
old man in a fresh lawn suit, bow tie and carpet slippers shuffled by with the
help of two sticks, advancing so slowly that even the traffic was passing him.
He was panting hard. Wherever he was going he surely would not make it. On the
far side of the road, right on the corner, was a shoe shop open for business.
Turner saw a woman with a little girl at her side talking to a shop assistant
who displayed a different shoe in the palm of each hand. The three paid no
attention to the procession behind them. Moving against the flow, and now
trying to edge round this same corner, was a column of armored cars, the
paintwork untouched by battle, heading south into the German advance. All they
could hope to achieve against a Panzer division was an extra hour or two for
the retreating soldiers.

Turner stood
up, drank from his canteen and stepped into the procession, slipping in behind
a couple of Highland Light Infantry men. The corporals followed him. He no
longer felt responsible for them now they had joined the main body of the
retreat. His lack of sleep exaggerated his hostility. Today their teasing
needled him and seemed to betray the comradeship of the night before. In fact,
he felt hostile to everyone around him. His thoughts had shrunk to the small
hard point of his own survival.

Wanting to
shake the corporals off, he quickened his pace, overtook the Scotsmen and
pushed his way past a group of nuns shepherding a couple of dozen children in
blue tunics. They looked like the rump of a boarding school, like the one he
had taught at near Lille in the summer before he went up to Cambridge. It
seemed another man’s life to him now. A dead civilization. First his own
life ruined, then everybody else’s. He strode on angrily, knowing it was
a pace he could not maintain for long. He had been in a column like this
before, on the first day, and he knew what he was looking for. To his immediate
right was a ditch, but it was shallow and exposed. The line of trees was on the
other side. He slipped across, in front of a Renault saloon. As he did so the
driver leaned on his horn. The shrill Klaxon startled Turner into a sudden
fury. Enough! He leaped back to the driver’s door and wrenched it open.
Inside was a trim little fellow in a gray suit and fedora, with leather
suitcases piled at his side and his family jammed in the backseat. Turner
grabbed the man by his tie and was ready to smack his stupid face with an open
right hand, but another hand, one of some great strength, closed about his
wrist.

“That ain’t
the enemy, guv’nor.”

Without
releasing his grip, Corporal Mace pulled him away. Nettle, who was just behind,
kicked the Renault door shut with such ferocity that the wing mirror fell off.
The children in blue tunics cheered and clapped.

The three crossed
to the other side and walked on under the line of trees. The sun was well up
now and it was warm, but the shade was not yet over the road. Some of the
vehicles lying across the ditches had been shot up in air attacks. Around the
abandoned lorries they passed, supplies had been scattered by troops looking
for food or drink or petrol. Turner and the corporals tramped through
typewriter ribbon spools spilling from their boxes, double-entry ledgers,
consignments of tin desks and swivel chairs, cooking utensils and engine parts,
saddles, stirrups and harnesses, sewing machines, football trophy cups,
stackable chairs, and a film projector and petrol generator, both of which
someone had wrecked with the crowbar that was lying nearby. They passed an
ambulance, half in the ditch with one wheel removed. A brass plaque on the door
said, “This ambulance is a gift of the British residents of
Brazil.”

It was
possible, Turner found, to fall asleep while walking. The roar of lorry engines
would be suddenly cut, then his neck muscles relaxed, his head drooped, and he
would wake with a start and a swerve to his step. Nettle and Mace were for
getting a lift. But he had already told them the day before what he had seen in
that first column—twenty men in the back of a three-ton lorry killed with
a single bomb. Meanwhile he had cowered in a ditch with his head in a culvert
and caught the shrapnel in his side.

“You go
ahead,” he said. “I’m sticking here.”

So the matter
was dropped. They wouldn’t go without him—he was their lucky
ticket.

They came up
behind some more HLI men. One of them was playing the bagpipes, prompting the
corporals to begin their own nasal whining parodies. Turner made as if to cross
the road.

“If you
start a fight, I’m not with you.”

Already a
couple of Scots had turned and were muttering to each other.

“It’s
a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht,” Nettle called out in Cockney.
Something awkward might have developed then if they had not heard a pistol shot
from up ahead. As they drew level the bagpipes fell silent. In a wide-open
field the French cavalry had assembled in force and dismounted to form a long
line. At the head stood an officer dispatching each horse with a shot to the
head, and then moving on to the next. Each man stood to attention by his mount,
holding his cap ceremonially against his chest. The horses patiently waited
their turn.

This
enactment of defeat depressed everyone’s spirits further. The corporals
had no heart for a tangle with the Scotsmen, who could no longer be bothered
with them. Minutes later they passed five bodies in a ditch, three women, two
children. Their suitcases lay around them. One of the women wore carpet
slippers, like the man in the lawn suit. Turner looked away, determined not to
be drawn in. If he was going to survive, he had to keep a watch on the sky. He
was so tired, he kept forgetting. And it was hot now. Some men were letting
their greatcoats drop to the ground. A glorious day. In another time this was
what would have been called a glorious day. Their road was on a long slow rise,
enough to be a drag on the legs and increase the pain in his side. Each step
was a conscious decision. A blister was swelling on his left heel which forced
him to walk on the edge of his boot. Without stopping, he took the bread and cheese
from his bag, but he was too thirsty to chew. He lit another cigarette to curb
his hunger and tried to reduce his task to the basics: you walked across the
land until you came to the sea. What could be simpler, once the social element
was removed? He was the only man on earth and his purpose was clear. He was
walking across the land until he came to the sea. The reality was all too
social, he knew; other men were pursuing him, but he had comfort in a pretense,
and a rhythm at least for his feet. He walked/across/the land/until/he came/to
the sea. A hexameter. Five iambs and an anapest was the beat he tramped to now.

Another
twenty minutes and the road began to level out. Glancing over his shoulder he
saw the convoy stretching back down the hill for a mile. Ahead, he could not
see the end of it. They crossed a railway line. By his map they were sixteen
miles from the canal. They were entering a stretch where the wrecked equipment
along the road was more or less continuous. Half a dozen twenty-five-pounder guns
were piled beyond the ditch, as if swept up there by a heavy bulldozer. Up
ahead where the land began to drop there was a junction with a back road and
some kind of commotion was taking place. There was laughter from the soldiers
on foot and raised voices at the roadside. As he came up, he saw a major from
the Buffs, a pink-faced fellow of the old school, in his forties, shouting and
pointing toward a wood that lay about a mile away across two fields. He was
pulling men out of the column, or trying to. Most ignored him and kept going,
some laughed at him, but a few were intimidated by his rank and had stopped,
though he lacked any personal authority. They were gathered around him with
their rifles, looking uncertain.

“You.
Yes you. You’ll do.”

The
major’s hand was on Turner’s shoulder. He stopped and saluted
before he knew what he was doing. The corporals were behind him.

The major had
a little toothbrush mustache overhanging small, tight lips that clipped his
words briskly. “We’ve got Jerry trapped in the woods over there. He
must be an advance party. But he’s well dug in with a couple of machine
guns. We’re going to get in there and flush him out.”

Turner felt
the horror chill and weaken his legs. He showed the major his empty palms.

“What
with, sir?”

“With
cunning and a bit of teamwork.”

How was the
fool to be resisted? Turner was too tired to think, though he knew he
wasn’t going.

“Now,
I’ve got the remains of two platoons halfway up the eastern . . .”

“Remains”
was the word that told the story, and prompted Mace, with all his barrack-room
skill, to interrupt.

“Beg
pardon, sir. Permission to speak.”

“Not
granted, Corporal.”

“Thank
you, sir. Orders is from GHQ. Proceed at haste and speed and celerity, without
delay, diversion or divagation to Dunkirk for the purposes of immediate
evacuation on account of being ’orribly and onerously overrun from all
directions. Sir.”

The major
turned and poked his forefinger into Mace’s chest.

“Now
look here you. This is our one last chance to show . . .”

Corporal
Nettle said dreamily, “It was Lord Gort what wrote out that order, sir,
and sent it down personally.”

It seemed
extraordinary to Turner that an officer should be addressed this way. And risky
too. The major had not grasped that he was being mocked. He seemed to think
that it was Turner who had spoken, for the little speech that followed was
addressed to him.

“The
retreat is a bloody shambles. For heaven’s sake, man. This is your one
last good chance to show what we can do when we’re decisive and
determined. What’s more . . .”

He went on to
say a good deal more, but it seemed to Turner that a muffling silence had
descended on the bright late morning scene. This time he wasn’t asleep.
He was looking past the major’s shoulder toward the head of the column.
Hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by the
rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended horizontally, with
a bulge in its center. The major’s words were not reaching him, and nor
were his own clear thoughts. The horizontal apparition hovered in the sky
without growing larger, and though he was beginning to understand its meaning,
it was, as in a dream, impossible to begin to respond or move his limbs. His
only action had been to open his mouth, but he could make no sound, and would
not have known what to say, even if he could.

Then,
precisely at the moment when sound flooded back in, he was able to shout,
“Go!” He began to run directly toward the nearest cover. It was the
vaguest, least soldierly form of advice, but he sensed the corporals not far
behind. Dreamlike too was the way he could not move his legs fast enough. It
was not pain he felt below his ribs, but something scraping against the bone.
He let his greatcoat fall. Fifty yards ahead was a three-ton lorry on its side.
That black greasy chassis, that bulbous differential was his only home. He
didn’t have long to get there. A fighter was strafing the length of the
column. The broad spray of fire was advancing up the road at two hundred miles
an hour, a rattling hailstorm din of cannon rounds hitting metal and glass. No
one inside the near-stationary vehicles had started to react. Drivers were only
just registering the spectacle through their windscreens. They were where he
had been seconds before. Men in the backs of the lorries knew nothing. A
sergeant stood in the center of the road and raised his rifle. A woman
screamed, and then fire was upon them just as Turner threw himself into the
shadow of the upended lorry. The steel frame trembled as rounds hit it with the
wild rapidity of a drumroll. Then the cannon fire swept on, hurtling down the
column, chased by the fighter’s roar and the flicker of its shadow. He
pressed himself into the darkness of the chassis by the front wheel. Never had
sump oil smelled sweeter. Waiting for another plane, he crouched fetally, his
arms cradling his head and eyes tight shut, and thought only of survival.