The Gathering Storm (23 page)

With Ostende no longer an option, Judah directed our steps further along the coast toward Dunkirk, until we reached the Belgian seaside bathing spa of Nieuport. We were inside the British lines, but only just.

Over its long and storied past, Nieuport had been ruled by Flem
ish counts, Norman lordlings, and Knights Templar. It had been fought over by the Dutch, the French, and even the Spaniards.

Now the unfortunate Nieuporters might have to learn German as well.

When we reached the town square we might have walked into a dream. Belgian soldiers sat at tables in the plaza, swilling glasses of wine. Most had tied napkins to their gun barrels.

"What has happened?" Judah demanded. "Has the war magically

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ended? Have the Boche surrendered to the might of the Belgian forces?"

"Ah, no," returned an artillery captain. "Our great and wise king, Leopold, has ordered us," the officer waved expansively at his table of friends, who raised their glasses, "to cease fighting. He says to prevent unnecessary loss of life."

"And leave your Allies holding the bag," I heard Sergeant Walker
growl. "I'll be showin' you loss of life, me boy-o."

"Easy, Sergeant," Judah cautioned. "They do still have guns."

"To carry their flowers in, more like," Walker added before subsiding.

We held a hasty conference beside the town hall. "If our boys are falling back on Dunkirk, shall we push on for there?" Lieutenant Howard asked.

Judah squinted at the sinking sun. "Not tonight. We need rest and food. I'll scout for supplies. Sergeant, lead the way into the basement of the post office."

The building mentioned was a squat, ugly, one-story structure. "Can't we stay in a hotel? Or at least in the church?" I queried.

"The soldiers are already drinking," Judah said, looking at me with significance. "When the taverns on the plaza run out, they will ransack the hotels."

"I—I understand," I returned weakly. I had considered that the only danger to us was from Germans. "Why not the church, then?"

Judah pointed to the bell tower. "The Nazis tend to view towers as observation posts to be shelled or bombed," he said. "They don't stop to inquire what sort of tower it is. No, the post office is best for our purposes. The Germans, in their Teutonic way, pride themselves on making anything they capture work more efficiently than it did before. If they can take the post office intact, they will."

I felt even weaker and more discouraged than before. "Do you think they will? Capture Nieuport, I mean?"

The lines of Judah's grim face visible below the corners of his

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mask relaxed slightly. "Not tonight. And tomorrow we sail for England."

The girls applauded.

"Lead the way, Sergeant. I have some foraging to do."

"Want me to accompany you, sir?" Howard asked.

"No, you best stay together." Judah headed off toward the far end of the street.

We scoured the basement of the post office from one end to the other. The girls turned up three tins of sardines and a wedge of moldy cheese. When we opened one cupboard, we thought our luck had changed because the bottom shelf contained a large pottery crock of pickles.

Unfortunately the rest of the contents of the armoire was postal supplies.

The girls turned up their noses at the fare. "Sardines and pickles? Really, Aunt Lora, nobody can just eat that."

Within an hour Judah returned. He carried four roasted chickens and a pillowcase full of fresh baked bread.

"How? Where?" I marveled.

"Natural-born scrounger," he reported. "Turned up a case of champagne the Belgians missed. Traded the wine for a crate of cigarettes someone had taken from a looted supply truck. Traded the cigarettes for all this."

"Well done," I praised. "Kept none of the champagne or tobacco
for yourself?"

"Now's no time to be drinking," he said. "And I don't smoke."

After supper, when everyone was tucked in, Judah said, "Sergeant, I'll leave you on guard here. Lieutenant, I've a mind to recon-noiter over toward Dunkirk. Are you with me?"

"Count me in, sir," Howard said.

"Must you leave again?" I blurted, feeling myself color immedi
ately after I spoke.

"Thought we'd find our transport here," he said, "but all the boats are gone from Nieuport. We won't be away long."

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Fed and exhausted, the girls went immediately to sleep. Sergeant Walker posted himself at the head of stairs to keep watch.

By the light of an oil lamp Jessica nursed baby Shalom. The flickering flames streaked her hair in light and dark. It cast shadows across her profile as she smiled tenderly down at him, and illuminated her bare shoulder and the top of his downy head. She saw me watching and smiled. "You never know," she said.

"What?"

"How much God loves you until you have one of these of your own. Then you begin to understand."

Judah did not return until very late. Though his mask registered
no expression, his voice reflected worry. "You won't believe the scene
on the beach. This isn't a retreat. It's a rout. There must be a hundred thousand men—British and French—camping there, waiting to be rescued."

I tried to picture it and failed. "What's it mean for us?"

"Nothing good, I'm afraid. I quizzed a beachmaster. They're not taking any civilians. Every boat, every ship, every ferry and tug, is being pressed into service rescuing soldiers. They're coming from as far away as Scotland and the Isle of Wight."

"But no room for us?"

He squared his shoulders. "Something will work out. It has to."

I slept then. Later, when I groaned myself awake while trying to find a softer spot on the stone floor, he was still up, thinking or praying. I studied him.

It was impossible to not see the mask first. I admit that.

But now that I knew him—the man and not the wave of pity or revulsion or apprehension that the mask inspired—I saw much more. Now I saw Judah's strong jaw, his broad shoulders, his strong hands, and sensitive artist's fingers. I saw his courage, his compassion, his leadership.

In a half-waking, half-dreaming vision, I saw him cup my face in his hands and kiss me as I fell into the embrace of his eyes. The mask
played no part in the image at all.

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After no more than an hour's sleep, Judah went out again before dawn
seeking transport for us, but without success. When day approached, I insisted on going with him. Perhaps I thought I could plead with the British officers to save the lives of the children and my sister and nephew.

Even though Judah tried to describe for me the scene on the beaches
of Dunkirk, nothing he explained prepared me for the reality. He had said a hundred thousand men awaited rescue from Blitzkrieg, but the number had no physical counterpart for me until I saw it for myself.

Up and down the dunes, as far as could be seen—all the way to the billowing clouds of dense black smoke that marked the port of Dunkirk—the sand was covered with the figures of men.

Immense spirals of soldiers, like coils of living rope slowly unspooling toward the waves, awaited deliverance. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of British troops were in each curling figure. "And this is no more than half of them," Judah said. "The rest are embarking through the fires of Dunkirk."

Just as the dunes were alive with men, the Channel was bustling with ships. Every sort, every kind, from coal carriers to twenty-foot runabouts, plied the waves off the coast. The shallower draft vessels came up until their keels touched. Forty men scrambled aboard, and the craft pushed off again to ferry the fortunate few to larger vessels waiting beyond the breakers.

On this shore the tide receded immensely far out, exposing an expanse of wet sand that seemed to stretch halfway to England. Each ampersand of soldiers was crowned with an exclamation point formed by a makeshift pier: trucks, jeeps, passenger cars, all these had been driven onto the beach and muscled into place to form arms binding the land to the sea.

"When the tide returns," Judah explained, "the men leap from car roof to truck bonnet. Then bigger ships come in further and more soldiers can get off the beach more quickly."

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It was the blueprint of a fantastic machine cobbled together by a mad scientist.

A plane flew overhead. Judah pushed me down, but I contrived to watch just the same. All the men fell to the ground and burrowed into the sand, as if they could cram their entire bodies under their helmets.

Though a few men remained upright, futilely firing their rifles at
the intruder, this time the plane neither dropped bombs nor strafed. It winged its way out to sea and out of sight.

"A spotter, looking for bigger targets," Judah said. He gestured toward the Channel.

Far out on the horizon cruised the biggest vessels in the rescue flotilla: British war ships. "Those would make the biggest prizes for the Germans," Judah said.

"And in all this there's no place for us?" I know I whined as I asked it. It seemed impossible to me that amid the hundreds of boats I saw bobbing on the waves there was no room for the nine of us.

"Rescuing the army so it can fight again is the first priority," Judah said with resignation.

"Not for me," I returned.

Another plane arrived overhead, and this one had attack in mind. We ducked again as the bomb whistled down.

It struck in the damp sand halfway between two coils of men and exploded with a sodden thump.

No one was killed or even injured. The British soldiers, jumping to their feet, shook their fists and jeered at the pilot. "How'd y manage to miss us all, you near-sighted Nazi?"

"They should all be saved," I admitted, acknowledging the heroism and bravado. "But so should we."

"Let's get back," Judah said.

We tucked in and out of sight among the hillocks of sand and beach grass. In this game of hide-and-seek with the buzzing planes we almost missed our salvation.

A curl of rocks forming a tiny cove presented a question mark

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amid the chaos. And floating upside down in the pool, so far unnoticed, was a lifeboat.

I spotted it before Judah. "Could we use that?" I asked, pointing.

"Brilliant," he said, hugging me.

We ran toward it. "It's intact," he said. "We'll row out."

"Stay here," I urged. "I don't know how you'll do it, but don't let anyone else take it. I'll get the others." I shouted these words over my shoulder as I sprinted inland. I gave him no chance to argue.

"Come on!" I shouted to the seven in the basement. "We've got a boat," and, "Where's my knapsack?"

Without stopping to explain, I led the way up the stairs and out of Nieuport. Gina was on my back, Susan on Lieutenant Howard's, and Judith on Sergeant Walker's. Jessica carried Shalom.

Halfway to the edge of town a string of explosions sounded behind us. "Good timing," Howard asserted. "Germans are shelling Nieuport."

The last detonation, the closest of the set, drove me to my knees.
As Sergeant Walker helped me to my feet, I looked back: the post office had taken a direct hit. It had tumbled in on itself, forming a crater of bricks and mortar.

"Lousy aim," the sergeant noted.

It took all of the adults to heave the boat upright, then we bailed it out and loaded the children. There were only two oars that remained whole, and these were wielded by Judah and Lieutenant Howard. The rest of us seized broken fragments of boards with which to paddle.

We had been rowing for about an hour. It seemed as if we might
have to row all the way to England. If true, that necessity was fine with me. The more space we put between us and the Nazi-dominated continent, the better I felt.

At last we entered the shipping lanes. The crews of a pair of fishing trawlers, inbound for Dunkirk, waved and shouted to us, but Judah waved them off. "Pick us up on the way back," he yelled.

A mile farther out in the Channel was a cruising British

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destroyer. As we watched in horror, a squadron of German planes pounced on the ship.

Lightning bolts of anti-aircraft fire streaked upward from the warship.

Lethal eggs tumbled out of the bombers.

One of them at least must have struck the destroyer amidships.
There was a mighty crash, a whole series of additional explosions that made us duck our heads, and then the British vessel folded up on both
ends. It settled into the waves, sirens screaming. A fireball rose from the hulk, then a torrent of oily fumes oozed across the water.

The breeze pushed the strangling vapors toward us.