Atonement (21 page)

I'm going to rush down with this to the Balham sorting office in the hope that it will be across the Channel before the weekend. But I don't want to end on a sad note. I'm actually very excited by this news about my sister and what it could mean for us. I enjoyed your story about the sergeants' latrines. I read that bit to the girls and they laughed like lunatics. I'm so glad the liaison officer has discovered your French and given you a job that makes use of it. Why did they take so long to find out about you? Did you hang back? You're right about French bread – ten minutes later and you're hungry again. All air and no substance. Balham isn't as bad as I said it was, but more about that next time. I'm enclosing a poem by Auden on the death of Yeats cut out from an old
London Mercury
from last year. I'm going down to see Grace at the weekend and I'll look in the boxes for your Housman. Must dash. You're in my thoughts every minute. I love you. I'll wait for you. Come back. Cee.

H
e was woken by a boot nudging the small of his back. ‘C'mon, Guv'nor. Rise and shine.'

He sat up and looked at his watch. The barn entrance was a rectangle of bluish-black. He had been asleep, he reckoned, for less than forty-five minutes. Mace diligently emptied the straw from the sacks and dismantled his table. They sat in silence on the hay bales smoking the first cigarette of the day. When they stepped outside they found a clay pot with a heavy wooden lid. Inside, wrapped in muslin cloth, was a loaf and a wedge of cheese. Turner divided the provisions right there with a bowie knife.

‘In case we're separated,' he murmured.

A light was on already in the farmhouse and the dogs were in a frenzy as they walked away. They climbed a gate and began to cross a field in a northerly direction. After an hour they stopped in a coppiced wood to drink from their canteens and smoke. Turner studied the map. Already, the first bombers were high overhead, a formation of about fifty Heinkels, heading the same way to the coast. The sun was coming up and there was little cloud. A perfect day for the Luftwaffe. They walked in silence for another hour. There was no path, so he made a route by the compass, through fields of cows and sheep, turnips and young wheat. They were not as safe as he thought, away from the road. One field of cattle had a dozen shell craters, and fragments of flesh, bone and brindled skin had been blasted across a hundred-yard stretch. But each man was folded into his thoughts and no one spoke. Turner was troubled by the map. He guessed they were twenty-five miles from Dunkirk. The closer they came, the harder it would be to stay off the roads. Everything converged. There were rivers and canals to cross. When they headed for the bridges they would only lose time if they cut away across country again.

Just after ten they stopped for another rest. They had
climbed a fence to reach a track, but he could not find it on the map. It ran in the right direction anyway, over flat, almost treeless land. They had gone another half hour when they heard anti-aircraft fire a couple of miles ahead where they could see the spire of a church. He stopped to consult the map again.

Corporal Nettle said, ‘It don't show crumpet, that map.'

‘Ssh. He's having his doubts.'

Turner leaned his weight against a fence post. His side hurt whenever he put his right foot down. The sharp thing seemed to be protruding and snagging on his shirt. Impossible to resist probing with a forefinger. But he felt only tender, ruptured flesh. After last night, it wasn't right he should have to listen to the corporals' taunts again. Tiredness and pain were making him irritable, but he said nothing and tried to concentrate. He found the village on the map, but not the track, though it surely led there. It was just as he had thought. They would join the road, and they would need to stay on it all the way to the defence line at the Bergues-Furnes canal. There was no other route. The corporals' banter was continuing. He folded the map and walked on.

‘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, travelling 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, towards 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 armoured 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 grey 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 armoured 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 civilisation. 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 grey suit and fedora, with leather suitcases piled at his side and his family jammed in the back seat. 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 pretence, 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 anapaest 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 towards 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 moustache 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.