Atonement (34 page)

The woman
answered but he did not understand her. Again they were stumbling across the
field. He felt the pain in his side like a flash of color. The boy was in his
arms, and again the woman seemed to be dragging back, and trying to get her son
from him. There were hundreds in the field now, all making for the woods on the
far side. At the shrill whine of the bomb everyone cowered on the ground. But
the woman had no instinct for danger and he had to pull her down again. This
time they were pressing their faces into freshly turned earth. As the screech
grew louder the woman shouted what sounded like a prayer. He realized then that
she wasn’t speaking French. The explosion was on the far side of the
road, more than a hundred and fifty yards away. But now the first Stuka was
turning over the village and dropping for the strafe. The boy had gone silent
with shock. His mother wouldn’t stand. Turner pointed to the Stuka coming
in over the rooftops. They were right in its path and there was no time for
argument. She wouldn’t move. He threw himself down into the furrow. The
rippling thuds of machine-gun fire in the plowed earth and the engine roar
flashed past them. A wounded soldier was screaming. Turner was on his feet. But
the woman would not take his hand. She sat on the ground and hugged the boy
tightly to her. She was speaking Flemish to him, soothing him, surely telling
him that everything was going to be all right. Mama would see to that. Turner
didn’t know a single word of the language. It would have made no
difference. She paid him no attention. The boy was staring at him blankly over
his mother’s shoulder.

Turner took a
step back. Then he ran. As he floundered across the furrows the attack was
coming in. The rich soil was clinging to his boots. Only in nightmares were
feet so heavy. A bomb fell on the road, way over in the center of the village,
where the lorries were. But one screech hid another, and it hit the field
before he could go down. The blast lifted him forward several feet and drove
him face-first into the soil. When he came to, his mouth and nose and ears were
filled with dirt. He was trying to clear his mouth, but he had no saliva. He
used a finger, but that was worse. He was gagging on the dirt, then he was
gagging on his filthy finger. He blew the dirt from his nose. His snot was mud
and it covered his mouth. But the woods were near, there would be streams and
waterfalls and lakes in there. He imagined a paradise. When the rising howl of
a diving Stuka sounded again, he struggled to place the sound. Was it the
all-clear? His thoughts too were clogged. He could not spit or swallow, he
could not easily breathe, and he could not think. Then, at the sight of the
farmer with his dog still waiting patiently under the tree, it came back to
him, he remembered everything and he turned to look back. Where the woman and
her son had been was a crater. Even as he saw it, he thought he had always
known. That was why he had to leave them. His business was to survive, though
he had forgotten why. He kept on toward the woods.

He walked a
few steps into the tree cover, and sat in the new undergrowth with his back to
a birch sapling. His only thought was of water. There were more than two
hundred people sheltering in the woods, including some wounded who had dragged
themselves in. There was a man, a civilian, not far off, crying and shouting in
pain. Turner got up and moved further away. All the new greenery spoke to him
only of water. The attack continued on the road and over the village. He
cleared away old leaves and used his helmet to dig. The soil was damp but no water
oozed into the hole he had made, even when it was eighteen inches deep. So he
sat and thought about water and tried to clean his tongue against his sleeve.
When a Stuka dived, it was impossible not to tense and shrink, though each time
he thought he didn’t have the strength. Toward the end they came over to
strafe the woods, but to no effect. Leaves and twigs tumbled from the canopy.
Then the planes were gone, and in the huge silence that loomed over the fields
and trees and the village, there was not even birdsong. After a while, from the
direction of the road came blasts of a whistle for the all-clear. But no one
moved. He remembered this from last time. They were too dazed, they were in
shock from repeated episodes of terror. Each dive brought every man, cornered
and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not come, the trial had to be
lived through all over again and the fear did not diminish. For the living, the
end of a Stuka attack was the paralysis of shock, of repeated shocks. The
sergeants and junior officers might come around shouting and kicking the men
into standing. But they were drained and, for a good while, useless as troops.

So he sat
there in a daze like everyone else, just as he had the first time, outside the
village whose name he could not remember. These French villages with Belgian
names. When he was separated from his unit and, what was worse for an
infantryman, from his rifle. How many days ago? There could be no way of
knowing. He examined his revolver which was clogged with dirt. He removed the
ammunition and tossed the gun into the bushes. After a time there was a sound
behind him and a hand was on his shoulder.

“Here
you go. Courtesy of the Green Howards.”

Corporal Mace
was passing him some dead man’s water bottle. Since it was almost full he
used the first swig to rinse out his mouth, but that was a waste. He drank the
dirt with the rest.

“Mace,
you’re an angel.”

The corporal
extended a hand to pull him up. “Got to shift. There’s a rumor the
fucking Belgians have collapsed. We might get cut off from the east. Still
miles to go.”

As they were
walking back across the field, Nettle joined them. He had a bottle of wine and
an Amo bar which they passed around.

“Nice
bouquet,” Turner said when he had drunk deeply.

“Dead
Frog.”

The peasant
and his collie were back behind the plow. The three soldiers approached the
crater where the smell of cordite was strong. The hole was a perfectly
symmetrical inverted cone whose sides were smooth, as though finely sieved and
raked. There were no human signs, not a shred of clothing or shoe leather.
Mother and child had been vaporized. He paused to absorb this fact, but the
corporals were in a hurry and pushed him on and soon they joined the stragglers
on the road. It was easier now. There would be no traffic until the sappers
took their bulldozers into the village. Ahead, the cloud of burning oil stood
over the landscape like an angry father. High-flying bombers droned above, a
steady two-way stream moving into and returning from their target. It occurred
to Turner that he might be walking into a slaughter. But everyone was going
that way, and he could think of no alternative. Their route was taking them
well to the right of the cloud, to the east of Dunkirk, toward the Belgian
border.

“Bray
Dunes,” he said, remembering the name from the map.

Nettle said,
“I like the sound of those.”

They passed
men who could barely walk for their blisters. Some were barefoot. A soldier
with a bloody chest wound reclined in an ancient pram pushed by his mates. A sergeant
was leading a cart horse over the back of which was draped an officer,
unconscious or dead, his feet and wrists secured by ropes. Some troops were on
bicycles, most walked in twos or threes. A dispatch rider from the Highland
Light Infantry came by on a Harley-Davidson. His bloodied legs dangled
uselessly, and his pillion passenger, who had heavily bandaged arms, was
working the foot pedals. All along the way were discarded greatcoats, left
there by men too hot to carry them. Turner had already talked the corporals out
of leaving theirs.

They had been
going for an hour when they heard behind them a rhythmic thudding, like the
ticking of a gigantic clock. They turned to look back. At first sight it seemed
that an enormous horizontal door was flying up the road toward them. It was a
platoon of Welsh Guards in good order, rifles at the slope, led by a second
lieutenant. They came by at a forced march, their gaze fixed forward, their
arms swinging high. The stragglers stood aside to let them through. These were
cynical times, but no one risked a catcall. The show of discipline and cohesion
was shaming. It was a relief when the Guards had pounded out of sight and the
rest could resume their introspective trudging.

The sights
were familiar, the inventory was the same, but now there was more of
everything; vehicles, bomb craters, detritus. There were more bodies. He walked
across the land until he caught the taste of the sea, carried across the flat,
marshy fields on a freshening breeze. The one-way flow of people with a single
purpose, the constant self-important traffic in the air, the extravagant cloud
advertising their destination, suggested to his tired but overactive mind some
long-forgotten childhood treat, a carnival or sports event on which they were
all converging. There was a memory that he could not place, of being carried on
his father’s shoulders, up a hill toward a great attraction, toward the
source of a huge excitement. He would like those shoulders now. His missing
father had left few memories. A knotted neck scarf, a certain smell, the
vaguest outline of a brooding, irritable presence. Did he avoid serving in the
Great War, or did he die somewhere near here under another name? Perhaps he
survived. Grace was certain he was too cowardly, too shifty, to join up, but
she had her own reason to be bitter. Nearly every man here had a father who
remembered northern France, or was buried in it. He wanted such a father, dead
or alive. Long ago, before the war, before Wandsworth, he used to revel in his
freedom to make his own life, devise his own story with only the distant help
of Jack Tallis. Now he understood how conceited a delusion this was. Rootless,
therefore futile. He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be
a father. It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common,
therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were
screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary
life, a family line, connection. All around him men were walking silently with
their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of
this lot . . . They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally
conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. He would find
Cecilia. Her address was on the letter in his pocket, next to the poem.
In
the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start
. He would find his
father too. They were supposed to be good at tracking down missing persons, the
Salvation Army. A perfect name. He would track down his father, or his dead
father’s story—either way, he would become his father’s son.

They walked
all afternoon until at last, a mile ahead, where gray and yellow smoke billowed
up from surrounding fields, they saw the bridge across the Bergues-Furnes
canal. All the way in now, not a farmhouse or barn was left standing. As well
as smoke, a miasma of rotting meat drifted toward them—more slaughtered
cavalry horses, hundreds of them, in a heap in a field. Not far from them was a
smoldering mountain of uniforms and blankets. A beefy lance corporal with a
sledgehammer was smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines. Two ambulances
were parked at the side of the road, their back doors open. From inside came
the groans and shouts of wounded men. One of them was crying out, over and
over, more in rage than pain, “Water, I want water!” Like everyone
else, Turner kept going.

The crowds
were bunching up again. In front of the canal bridge was a junction, and from
the Dunkirk direction, on the road that ran along the canal, came a convoy of
three-ton lorries which the military police were trying to direct into a field
beyond where the horses were. But troops swarming across the road forced the
convoy to a halt. The drivers leaned on their horns and shouted insults. The
crowd pressed on. Men tired of waiting scrambled off the backs of the lorries.
There was a shout of “Take cover!” And before anyone could even
glance round, the mountain of uniforms was detonated. It began to snow tiny
pieces of dark green serge. Nearer, a detachment of artillerymen were using
hammers to smash up the dial sights and breechblocks of their guns. One of
them, Turner noticed, was crying as he destroyed his howitzer. At the entrance
to the same field, a chaplain and his clerk were dousing cases of prayer books
and Bibles with petrol. Men were crossing the field toward a NAAFI dump,
looking for cigarettes and booze. When a shout went up, dozens more left the
road to join them. One group sat by a farm gate, trying on new shoes. A soldier
with crammed cheeks pushed past Turner with a box of pink and white
marshmallows. A hundred yards away a dump of Wellington boots, gas masks and
capes was fired, and acrid smoke enveloped the line of men pushing forward to
the bridge. At last the lorries were on the move and turned into the biggest
field, immediately south of the canal. Military police were organizing the
parking, lining up the rows, like stewards at a county show. The lorries were joining
half-tracks, motorbikes, Bren-gun carriers and mobile kitchens. The disabling
methods were, as always, simple—a bullet in the radiator, and the engine
left running until it seized up.

The bridge
was held by the Coldstream Guards. Two neatly sandbagged machine-gun posts
covered the approach. The men were clean-shaven, stone-eyed, silently
contemptuous of the filthy disorganized rabble trailing by. On the other side
of the canal, evenly spaced, white-painted stones marked out a path to a hut
being used as an orderly room. On the far bank, to the east and west, the
Guards were well dug in along their section. Waterfront houses had been
commandeered, roof tiles punched out, and windows sandbagged for machine-gun
slits. A fierce sergeant was keeping order on the bridge. He was sending back a
lieutenant on a motorbike. Absolutely no equipment or vehicles allowed. A man
with a parrot in a cage was turned away. The sergeant was also pulling out men
for perimeter defense duties, and doing it with far more authority than the
poor major. A growing detachment stood unhappily at ease by the orderly room.
Turner saw what was happening at the same time as the corporals, when they were
still a good way back.