The Lion at Sea (16 page)

When they returned to the warehouse, everybody but the Marine sergeant seemed to be asleep.

‘Get ’em awake,’ Kelly said. ‘I’m going to find a ship.’

‘Not a chance, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘They’re dead beat. They’ll not move much before morning.’

Kelly stared irritatedly at the crowded bodies at his feet. ‘Charming,’ he said. ‘That’s a great help!’

Setting a guard of men from the
Norseman
, he instructed them to make sure the others were quiet, then he and Rumbelo climbed to the top of the building to see what they could discover. Projecting beyond the roof, there was a clock tower where the machinery was still clacking away merrily. Through the window they could see right over the city. In the distance heavy shells were bursting in salvoes in clouds of dense black smoke, as every prominent building in the surrounding countryside was fired on – every château, church and windmill. The long straight road by which they’d brought in the survivors from the barn at St Nicholas had shrapnel shells sparkling above it now, and a wood they’d passed was speckled with white puffs of smoke. The Marine sergeant, surprisingly recovered after his meal, joined them.

‘The Germans wasn’t all that bloody good, sir,’ he said encouragingly. ‘There wasn’t many of ’em and they wasn’t very well trained anyway. They didn’t bother with infantry attacks. They just drenched everything with shells then the infantry wormed their way forward into the gaps. It was all artillery and it wasn’t possible to dig a trench because there was water a foot down, and we had to crouch behind bushes and trees.’

The German salvoes began to drop on the outer fringes of the city and the sergeant pointed.

‘Them’s the forts, sir,’ he said. ‘Five or six of them shells is enough to smash ’em. Casements and all. The Belgians threw in the towel. The water supply was cut and they had no materials or anything. Mind, there was one of our officers who got hold of a Belgian sapper officer and four privates and a Belgian boy scout, and between ’em they pushed charges into the machinery of around forty ships in the river. I heard ’em going off.
They’ll
not be leaving.’

Local shelling started again, and they could see the missiles landing in a nearby square with vicious cracks and flashes of brilliant light to hurl jagged splinters against the buildings and gouge out great gashes in the brickwork. A chimney collapsed and a roof slid down in a shower of tiles and a cloud of dust. Immediately the sergeant disappeared to warn his men to lie low.

Staring over the roofs, Kelly could see leafy enclosed country and a ring of observation balloons round the city. ‘That’s why they’re shooting so bloody well,’ he said.

From the other side of the tower they had a view over the river and the wharves. A ship was burning but there was no sign of
Norseman.

‘They’ve obviously decided the Germans have nabbed us, sir,’ Rumbelo said.

‘They’re not going to nab me if I can help it,’ Kelly said, and Rumbelo grinned.

‘Nice to know, sir. Because then there’s a chance they won’t nab me neither.’

The sun was well up above the roofs now and a few people had started to appear in the streets, heading west. At first there were only ones and twos and small groups but eventually they congealed into a mob that seemed to be totally dressed in grey. Then they saw that their black clothes were covered with dust, and they filed endlessly by, like a crowd from a race meeting, but in complete tragic silence. Every single individual wore an expression of personal sorrow, with a set staring face, every one of them carrying a heavy bundle in a mood of despair. Two young girls, hardly able to drag themselves along, were helping each other, their feet bloody from blisters; and a sick woman, already clearly dying, was being pushed past in a wheelbarrow by a sturdy daughter. Two old people struggled along arm-in-arm, clinging to each other as they’d probably clung to each other all their lives, and a small boy tried to encourage his mother, who was sinking under the weight of two babies.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Rumbelo sounded uneasy. ‘Oughtn’t we to be joining ’em, sir?’

‘With those lot below?’ Kelly said. ‘They couldn’t march another yard.’

As he spoke, he became aware of his own weariness. He seemed to have been on his feet for days now and the cobblestones had become painful to the soles of his feet. In the distance he could see a dock station, but it appeared to be deserted with a line of trucks, closely tarpaulined, waiting in a siding. Near it, tables stood outside a poplar-shaded café, but there was no one sitting at them and one of them lay on its side with two white chairs.

Soon afterwards, more German shells began to fall in the square and the streets about it, bursting with vicious cracks to blow in windows and slam shutters and send the cobbles flying like missiles. A cart pulled by a scrofulous grey horse had appeared, shifty-looking as though it were a criminal, but as the first shell exploded, the horse broke into a furious gallop, clattering off out of sight, dragging the remains of the cart away from the hole in the road where the driver sprawled and a wheel spun lazily before falling.

Several terrified rats began to bound across the square, like symbols of doom, and as the second shell kicked up the centre of the square in flying earth and stones, they were flung through the air by the blast like scraps of torn rag. The explosion came like the flash of a crimson flag, and yellow smoke curled as if it were the flirt of a dancer’s skirt. Somewhere out of sight a woman began to scream in a harsh monotonous howl, then there was another bang and the clatter of flying tiles and the screaming stopped abruptly. This third explosion was so close they could feel the force of it against the walls of the warehouse. A fountain of smoke and rubble rose from the corner of the square, and a shower of stones and dirt came down along the wall. A house fell outwards, leaning over the street, unbroken, and seemed to stay like that for the whole of a second before it crumpled and dropped in the road in a confusion of tiles and broken bricks. From the centre, a cloud of dust rose, spreading like a curtain, and the window frames rattled. Unexpectedly, because they had believed the little houses around them were all empty, a door opened and a woman with a child began to run across the square.

Kelly began to shout. ‘Come back! Come back!’

But a fourth shell landed a few yards from the third and, though it didn’t do much good, the shrapnel whipping across the square accounted immediately for the running figures. When they reached them, there appeared to be no bodily harm that they could see but the two lay silent, so close together, face to face, their fingers were touching.

As they carried the two bodies into one of the houses and laid them neatly on a bed alongside each other, the need to do something about the exhausted men under their charge became urgent.

‘We’ve got to dig up some sort of boat and bring it round here,’ Kelly said. ‘Then we might get ’em to struggle into it. Let’s see what we can find.’

There was a building on fire beyond the other corner of the square and, as they watched, the smoke grew thicker, dirty flecks of carbon drifting in the air beyond a ruby glow of flame. A little scorched breeze came, puffing up dust into the quivering air. A cardboard notice in the window of a house that said, ironically, ‘Welcome to the British, our saviours,’ flapped, then drooped again in the heat. From a long way off, to the east, a rumble came, less like artillery than the constant fall of heavy cases.

A few more Belgian stragglers appeared and they said that the German army was already in the city in large numbers. Kelly could still see Belgian tricolours about, however, and was inclined to disbelieve them. Then suddenly they heard the clatter of hooves and they slipped hurriedly into an empty house alongside and slammed the door behind them. Through a dusty window, they saw horsemen with lances and strange flat-topped headgear passing the end of the street into the next square.

‘Uhlans!’

The German cavalry, about fifty strong, clattered past, the pennants on their lances fluttering. Behind them came a squadron of hussars, strangely old-fashioned-looking in their frogged tunics and wide furred busbies. Behind the hussars was a long column of Belgian prisoners, many of them wounded, followed by German wagons and two or three field guns. As the column clattered across the cobbles, a Belgian who, judging by the scarf of office he wore, was an official of some sort, appeared and one of the Germans dismounted and handed him a sheet of paper which seemed to be a proclamation. Almost at once a drooping Belgian flag was hauled down and the German black eagle hoisted in its place. Companies of infantry began to file into the square, a monotony of field grey except for the red regimental numbers painted on the front of their helmet covers. They were so close they could hear their new leather boots and the harness of the officers’ horses creaking.

Then a car with trunks strapped on behind honked its way through, carrying two monocled staff officers, and orderlies holding drawn pistols. More Germans followed, in good order and at an odd slow pace, marching up the street, staring at the closed shutters and the wreckage their own guns had caused.

They were singing – ‘
Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein, Fest steht und teu die Wacht am Rhein–
’
and the voices came steadily to the beat of their feet in the hoarse confident words that Kelly had last heard in Kiel. By this time the square was becoming choked with vehicles and soldiers. As fast as it emptied on one side it was refilled from the other, and an orderly stood by a statue, holding four horses, his mouth open, bored and apathetic, and it occurred to Kelly that only a man sure of victory could look like that. A group of cyclists were erecting telephone wires across the end of the road and more men were tossing sandbags from the windows of a hotel, where they’d been jammed in the hope of a last stand. They were plumping into the street in clouds of dust, and nearby a soldier was setting up tables outside a café and German officers were already taking seats and calling for someone to bring them coffee.

‘I suspect it’s time we weren’t here,’ Kelly muttered, and they moved through the shabby little house, looking for a way out.

Forcing open a back door into a small yard containing a mangle and a tin bath, they climbed the wall into a set of allotments, and, reaching the road, began to run: Back at the warehouse, they found the sound of the Germans arriving had wakened sleeping men who were sitting up in ones and twos and reaching for rifles. Kelly gestured to them to remain where they were and the Marine sergeant went round them, pressing the over-eager back to the floor.

All night they remained hidden in the warehouse. From time to time groups of refugees struggled across the square, all heading west, and the rumble of artillery went on all next day. Occasionally it grew louder in a deep drub-drub of guns, an incessant wavering tumult of steel and explosive, on the outskirts of the city. Occasionally, they saw Germans, one group of whom halted at the far side of the square, pulling up with a whine of limber joints and axles and the shudder of wheels on the road. As the jostling of the trucks ceased, it left a curious silence, in which the distant rumble seemed louder than the men and the stamping horses and the creak and jingle of harness. Field kitchens arrived to cook a meal, the smell drifting into the warehouse to set the hungry Britons licking their lips.

‘I could eat a mangy pup,’ Rumbelo said wistfully.

As dusk came once more, Rumbelo and Kelly set off again to the waterside. A last sword-cut of yellow light silhouetted the buildings and the columns of smoke climbing up over the stricken city. There was no sign of resistance now but also no sign of the Germans in great strength. It was clear time was running short, however, because eventually German naval forces would arrive to take over the port. Together they climbed on to several deserted ships, but it was all too obvious that the naval officer the Marine sergeant had told them about had been aboard, with his engineers and his Boy Scout, and their cylinders hung in split and shining wreckage.

‘Can’t we rig a sail or something, sir?’ Rumbelo asked. ‘Or pinch a ship’s boat?’

‘As a last resort. But I’m responsible for about a hundred and fifty men now and I want something bigger than that.’

They decided to separate and meet back at the warehouse. The streets were dark when Kelly returned and, as the eyes all swung to him as he slipped through the door, he shook his head silently.

Rumbelo hadn’t returned and Kelly waited impatiently, wondering what had happened to him. Nobody had any cigarettes left now and they were all hungry, dirty and tired. By the time Rumbelo had been gone for an hour, Kelly began to wonder if he’d lost his way, and when another hour passed he began to worry that he’d been caught by a splinter from one of the shells the Germans were dropping into the city and was lying wounded in a doorway somewhere. He was just about to set off to find him when Rumbelo appeared, his eyes excited.

‘Sir, I’ve found a fishing boat! One of them wooden jobs! Like a Lowestoft trawler, only much bigger with an engine. She was full of soldiers but they’ve gone into the town. There’s only a couple of sailors and perhaps a couple of soldiers left with her. We ought to be able to take her over. She’s only a few streets away.’

Kelly nodded. ‘Right, Rumbelo Let’s see what we can do. Let’s have that stoker off the pinnace.’ He turned to the Marine sergeant. ‘I want half a dozen men you can rely on. And, for God’s sake, see that everybody’s kept awake so that as soon as you hear from us you can get ’em moving. Quick!’

‘Right, sir. Think we’re going to make it home?’

‘We’re going to have a bloody good try,’ Kelly said. ‘Being taken prisoner’s a rotten way to start a war.’

Followed by Rumbelo with his half-dozen men armed with rifles, they crept out close to the walls. The streets were silent with the silence of death, though they could still hear the cracking of shells in the distance.

Occasionally, they came across the bodies of Belgian soldiers lying in the road covered with greatcoats, capes or groundsheets, their limbs decently composed, their great boots sticking up in ungainly fashion, and once two men sitting by a wall, killed by blast, a startled look on their darkening faces.