Lammas Night (7 page)

He sighed and raised the field glasses to his eyes again. Outside, the intermittent drizzle had mostly ceased since his arrival at the tower, but mist continued to draw a shifting grey curtain over everything but the harbor itself. From the breakwater, nearly two miles out, all the way to the vast, curving Admiralty Pier embracing the southern edge, the four-square-mile basin of Dover's port seethed with ghost-vague vessels of all sorts and sizes, military and civilian. Beyond the breakwater, only sometimes visible, the unflagging procession of ships coming to and from the port moved in a ceaseless, silent ballet. Very low, just at the threshold of hearing, the blasts of the big guns shelling Dunkirk rattled the windows with manmade thunder.

Closer in, pattern and planning became less apparent but no less efficient. Along Admiralty Pier, where Graham could never remember seeing more than six or eight cross-Channel steamers in peacetime, he now counted more than twenty vessels of various kinds, from destroyers and packet steamers to torpedo boats, fishing smacks, and minesweepers like the
Lydd
—some of them tied up two and three abreast when there was no other space. Arriving ships nosed up to the crowded piers only long enough to disgorge antlike masses of soldiers, who swarmed along the docks to be swallowed up by waiting trains and coaches and whisked away to safety. When the ships were empty, tugs nudged them out to an oil tanker moored in the center of the harbor to take on fuel for yet another run.

Collingwood finally rang back around eight to say that the
Lydd
was expected sometime after ten. Graham relaxed a little, and William seemed to take the news with his usual nonchalance.

But by nine, the renewed drizzle beating against the windowpanes became so oppressive that neither of them could bear to wait out the remaining hour there. Soon Wells was driving them down Castle Hill in the rear-seat splendor of the royal Rolls, gliding unchallenged past sentry posts and gradually into the port facility itself. The rumble of trains and the urgent din of the bells on departing ambulances mingled with the whistles and hoots of the tugs and the whooping of incoming destroyers, all of it overlaid by the murmur of massed human voices, surging and receding.

They had to wait for nearly ten minutes while a train laden with troops pulled out of the staging area close by the pier, and another backed into position from a siding. Another time, they gave way to a procession of ambulances. Beyond, a hospital train waited while teams of stretcher-bearers and other medical personnel efficiently guided the wounded and injured aboard at the far end.

Eventually, Wells eased them to within two hundred yards of the landward end of the pier and parked between two ambulances—as close as even a royal duke might get despite the assistance of the regimental sergeant-major of Guards, who had jumped up on their running board for escort when he recognized the car's chief occupant. Graham glanced at the prince with a roguish grin as Denton came to open his door.

“I fear we've brought the wrong car if you wanted to keep a low profile,” he said as bystanders began to notice car and escort and cast surreptitious glances into the car's interior. “They aren't fooled by the uniform.”

William shrugged and gave a casual wave and a smile to a pretty Red Cross volunteer who had done a startled double-take as she passed.

“Well, it worked better up at HQ, but I daresay you're right. Why don't I play prince for a while and inspire the troops while you and Denny see about the
Lydd
? No sense all four of us traipsing out to the pier, is there? I suspect my presence might be a liability in such close quarters.”

With a chuckle, Graham stepped out into the drizzle and slammed the door, buttoning up his mac as he and Denton began making their way through the crowd, heading toward the pier. When he glanced back a minute later, William was shaking hands with an ambulance crew and chatting with the pretty volunteer, Wells at his heels.

Shaking his head, Graham smiled to himself and jogged a few steps to catch up with Denton. A pretty girl and the prince's resigned statement of duty had been convenient excuses, but ignoring his own comfort to mingle with the evacuation personnel and raise morale was quite in character for William. The prince was at his best when he was interacting with people, exercising the qualities of leadership for which he had been bred. It was part of what had made him such a first-rate agent. Wistfully, Graham considered what a king he would have made, had things been different.

But things were not different and not easy. At dock level, the turmoil and sheer scope of the harbor operation became even more apparent than they had been from Castle Hill. Here the sense of dismay was almost overpowering—for though the evacuation from Dunkirk was going very well, it could not alter the fact that the BEF had just suffered a resounding defeat. Only as Graham scanned the faces of the soldiers streaming past him, disembarking from a shell-scarred cruiser tied up at the end of the pier, did he begin to truly understand the enormity of what these men had just survived.

Some still clung to their weapons and other bits of equipment, but more often they appeared fortunate merely to have gotten
off
the distant beach. All of them were battle weary. Most wore looks of stunned resignation. Many were injured.

One man in tattered and salt-stained remnants of a battledress collapsed to his hands and knees and kissed the rain-slick boards of the dock before being helped to his feet by a tightlipped comrade in arms. Another stumbled from the dock clutching a bullet-scarred helmet to his chest, tears streaming down his face.

Two others supported a third between them, who kept raving about bombs and drowning. Medics intercepted them and gently led the distraught man to one side, while his shipmates continued reluctantly toward the waiting train. A small party of fusiliers, identifiable only by the battered insignia on the cap of their sergeant, marched smartly off the pier and toward the waiting train as if they trooped the colours before their King, though only four of the seven still carried weapons, and one very young looking lance corporal appeared ready to burst into tears at any moment.

Men with minor injuries were shunted aside to first-aid stations for evaluation and treatment by Red Cross personnel. Stretcher-bearers and medical teams waited to take off the dead and badly wounded who were still aboard as soon as the ship cleared. Most of the men simply shuffled past in varying attitudes of numbness and fatigue, dejection gradually changing to guarded hope as army and navy personnel and civilian volunteers drew them toward hot tea and sandwiches before putting them on the trains and coaches queued up at the railhead.

Even in the greyed fog and drizzle, a constant bombing threat remained. The plan all along the coast, wherever troops were disembarking, was to disperse them quickly to hidden staging camps deep in England's heartlands, to rest, mend, and be reoutfitted for reorganizing the shattered British Army. Graham knew the theory—he had sat in on enough of the planning sessions—but only now was he seeing the practice firsthand.

Still slightly overwhelmed, he sent Denton on ahead to make inquiries while he continued to watch the disembarking troops. The man was gone quite a long time, but he was smiling when he reappeared at Graham's side.

“
Lydd
rounded the North Goodwin Light almost an hour ago, sir. That makes her less than an hour out if all goes well.”

“Well, that's something, anyway,” Graham replied. “Did you find out anything else?”

Denton shook his head. “Not much, sir. A communications officer said he thought she had some dead and wounded aboard, but that's all he knew—other than some wild rumor about
Lydd
having sunk one of our own ships.”

“I'm afraid that rumor isn't so wild, Denny. I heard the same thing earlier this morning.”

They had at least an hour more to wait, so Graham asked Denton to bring tea back to the car for everyone and went to find William. Damp and cold, the prince was quite ready to return to the car. They warmed their hands around cups of strong, bitter-tasting tea that Denton distributed with apologies, but Graham could not bear to sit still for very long. Soon he and Denton left for the sea wall to watch with field glasses again; William remained in the Rolls with his aide. It was well past ten o'clock before the
Lydd
finally made an appearance.

Graham swept the rails repeatedly with the glasses as the battered minesweeper eased through the harbor entrance, but he was not surprised that he could not spot Michael. The rails were jammed with faces, and Michael was but one of many. When the ship finally nosed into her allotted space and berthed, a few eager souls scrambled over the rails and leaped onto the dock without waiting for lines to be made fast and gangplanks set in place, but Michael was not among them. Ellis had said he was injured, so Graham did not expect him to be among the first to disembark.

But one look at the faces of the men now beginning to stream past was sufficient to convince Graham that they were going to have to watch very closely for their quarry. Handing off the glasses to Denton, he motioned him to a position on the opposite side of the pier so that Michael would have to pass between them.

These men were even more distraught than the others. All were weary beyond reckoning, many without sleep or adequate food for days. Exhausted before they even reached Dunkirk, their ordeal had been compounded by the long wait on the beach. The shelling, strafing, and bombing only added to the battle traumas already suffered.

And just when they thought themselves safe, death had sought more of them in the Channel. Many had spent long hours in the water before being picked up, watching their comrades suffering and dying around them. All things considered, Graham doubted there was a man among them fit for duty just then.

Michael certainly was not. When he finally appeared, limping heavily and with a bloodstained bandage around his left upper arm, he was almost unrecognizable. The brown eyes burned like coals in the sunburned face. The flaxen hair, plastered to his head, was stiff with salt, as was his ill-fitting uniform. He wore no unit or rank insignia, and he had somehow lost his boots.

“Michael?” Graham called, grabbing at his elbow as Michael walked right into him.

Staggering, Michael glanced up at him dazedly—at Denton approaching—then gave almost a sob and collapsed against Graham. He was a dead weight for just an instant as Graham tried to hold him, but then he got his feet under him with an effort and managed to stand. As Denton wedged a shoulder under one of his arms and helped support him, Graham withdrew enough to strip off his mac. Michael was shivering with cold as he turned dazed eyes on his chief.

“I don't know when I've ever been so glad to see someone,” he whispered, his voice harsh and raw in the drizzle. “Who found me? How'd you know I was on the
Lydd
?”

“How do you think?” Graham muttered under his breath. “Here, have my mac. You're going to be lucky if you don't take pneumonia on top of everything else.”

Michael started to protest, but Graham put the damp mac around his shoulders, anyway, as he and Denton began walking the exhausted man slowly back toward the car.

“You're just damned lucky we didn't rely on
my
contact,” Graham continued in a low voice. “I'd located you on the
Grafton
, but by the time I got here, she'd been hit. I think it was Audrey who finally found you. Prince William and his aide are with us, by the way, so watch what you say. We've got his Rolls.”

The prince and Wells had both gotten out of the car as the three approached. As Wells opened the back door on the left, William pulled off his warm naval greatcoat and put it around Michael, letting Denton take away the soggy mac.

“Don't argue, just get in the car,” the prince murmured as Denton tossed the mac in the boot.

Michael obeyed meekly, almost collapsing as he slid across to the center of the back seat and wrapped up in the coat. Graham scrambled in after him, signaling Wells to start the motor as William went around and got in from the other side. The prince's faithful sergeant-major jumped onto the running board again to escort them as Wells backed the car gingerly into the flow of traffic.

“Get some of this in you and then tell me where you're hurt,” Graham said, giving Michael the tepid cup of tea that Denton handed over the front seat. “Sorry it isn't very hot.”

Michael was shaking as he gulped the first few swallows, eyes almost closed, but then he began to get hold of himself as he clutched the half-empty cup between his hands and his body warmed beneath the royal greatcoat. The car eased past the train, shedding their sergeant-major, then headed north in the direction of Castle Hill.

“I'll be all right,” Michael finally said in a still-shaky voice. “I took some shrapnel in the arm—yesterday—I think it was—but it mostly just aches now. God, I'm cold!”

“How about your leg? You were limping rather badly.”

“I don't think it's broken. Some wrenched muscles and bruising, maybe. I got it wedged in some debris trying to pull somebody out. He drowned, anyway.”

“Has a medic seen you?” William asked.

Michael shook his head and gulped another swallow of tea. “Someone looked at me on the
Lydd
, but I think he was only a corpsman, sir. That's all a little hazy. There were so many others worse off.…” He lowered his eyes and stared into the cup dazedly; then whispered, “I think the worst part was the
Comfort
.”

“The comfort?” Graham asked.

“A ship. She was one of ours.” Michael drew a deep breath, his face mirroring the horror of the memory. “The
Lydd
sank her. They thought she was an E-boat, I suppose—the one that hit the
Grafton
—and they—they—”

He managed to swallow, his throat working painfully, and William rescued the precariously clutched cup and handed it back up to Denton.