The Lion at Sea (15 page)

‘Good God, not yet! We’re here to take you off.’

‘Where’s the ship, sir?’

Kelly pointed and the sergeant shook his head. ‘They started shelling round there, sir. Not half an hour ago. Some of ’em dropped in the basin.’

‘Where are all the other men?’ Kelly asked.

‘There aren’t any others, sir. Us lot –
Hawke
battalion and Marines – was supposed to cover the withdrawal but we never saw the others again. I heard they was ambushed on a train at Moedecke and only a few got away. The rest surrendered or crossed over into Holland and was interned.’

‘There must be more, for God’s sake!’

‘Well, there might be, sir. But they’ll take some finding, because they’ll be hiding. Jerry’s expected any minute.’

Kelly made his decision quickly. He could see Rumbelo and the other sailors watching him and he knew exactly what they were thinking: Marines were ham-fisted, club-footed lumps who cluttered up any ship they served in. Despite a splendid record stretching back over the centuries, they were always an isolated entity whose legs were being perpetually pulled by the seamen for their clumsiness aboard ship. This was just another case of them getting themselves and everybody else into trouble and having to call in the seamen to drag them clear.

‘You’d better go and find them,’ he said. ‘Be back in an hour’s time. Bring everybody you can. I’ll wait here.’

The men disappeared none too
willingly but, as Kelly waited in the square, small groups of men in the peakless caps of the Marines began to appear. Among them were wounded, and several were without their rifles.

One man had marched all the way back from Moedecke. ‘They landed us still dressed in blue, sir,’ he said aggrievedly, ‘and re-equipped us on the dockside. Every man jack of us in an hour or so. It was a bit difficult with the boy buglers. They was so small. We went up to the front but you couldn’t see a bloody thing for the dust from the lorries bringing the wounded back. The shells was smashing the woods and villages and someone rigged up a live electric wire and we dug deep holes against cavalry, and a line of stakes in case there was a charge.’

‘Where are all the rest?’

‘Christ knows, sir! Zeppelins was above us all the time, directing the fire and dropping incendiaries, and the Belgian army was scooting down the Lierre road behind with most of their officers dead or wounded. We saw nothing but a few of our aeroplanes spotting for the guns.’ The Marine hitched at his pack with the resigned air of a dumb animal. ‘We marched through the city and crossed the river. Some of the chaps was so fagged they fell in and sank like stones. There wasn’t no food so we pulled turnips out of the fields to eat. We got a train at Stekens, with the Uhlans just behind us, and squeezed in where we could. It stopped at Moedecke. Some bastard had switched us into a siding and the Germans was waiting.’

The solder’s face was blank and exhausted as he continued. ‘There was an embankment and buildings full of three-pounders and machine guns,’ he went on. ‘All the women and kids started yelling, and it was a right old massacre for a bit. We tried to answer but because of the din you couldn’t hear orders. There was a zeppelin with a bright light just above us. We tried to get the train going but the driver and fireman had bolted and one of the stokers said the engine had been sabotaged. I shot a German when he tried to climb aboard but then the word was passed to surrender to stop the butchery of the women and kids. A few got away to Salzaete but some of us was cut off.’

The story was one of confusion and exhaustion and the Marine denied indignantly that he’d ever surrendered. ‘I didn’t feel like surrendering,’ he said. ‘I came back here because I thought the Navy would fetch us off.’

‘Well, they’re going to.’ Kelly said.

By now, he had collected around him eighty-odd Marines and sailors and the Marine sergeant was beginning to look more enthusiastic.

‘There’s a lot more along the road, sir,’ he pointed out hopefully. ‘Hiding in a barn full of hay at St Nicholas.’

‘Are they, by God? How far?’

‘About nine miles, sir.’

‘Christ, that’s a hell of a way!’ Kelly glanced at Rumbelo. ‘Can you drive, Rumbelo?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, I can. Just. I’ve had a few goes. Let’s get that armoured car we saw and see if we can start it.’

Watched by the exhausted, stupefied men who trailed after them like hopeful dogs, they dragged the two bodies from the armoured car and climbed in. It was little more than a tin box on wheels and full of dried blood, with a machine gun mounted on the stern. The Marine from Moedecke climbed in with them to handle the gun and show them the way.

‘Keep these chaps together,’ Kelly told the sergeant. ‘We’ll be back. If they get scattered, they’ll not get taken off. Understood?’

‘Understood, sir.’

With a lot of grinding of gears and a series of ugly jerks, the armoured car began to move.

‘Easy when you know how,’ Kelly said cheerfully.

After a while, they found themselves on the edge of the city, heading down a long road on which the cobbles set everything in the armoured car rattling as if it were alive. There seemed to be no sign of fighting except for an occasional figure crossing the fields and odd groups of Belgian soldiers. In the distance they could see shells bursting and burning houses sending up huge columns of grey smoke into the sky.

‘Round the next bend, sir!’

A clump of trees hid the barn and, as the armoured car slid to a stop beneath them, faces appeared from among ruined farm buildings.

‘The Navy’s here!’ Kelly yelled.

There was a ragged cheer and exhausted, dirty men began to appear in ones and twos from the barn.

‘How many of you?’ Kelly asked.

A grimy unshaven corporal with a moustache like a walrus answered him. ‘About forty-odd, sir.’

‘Any more up ahead?’

‘Up ahead of us, sir, there’s only Germans. And not so bloody far up ahead neither.’

‘Right, form up. We’re marching off.’

The corporal looked worried. ‘Sir, we’ve got men here who couldn’t march another step. Their feet have gone. We’ve been marching ever since we landed and we ain’t had nothing to eat for two days.’

There was an old farm cart by the barn, covered with rusting machinery. Kelly made up his mind quickly.

‘Let’s have that thing on the road,’ he said.

‘There’s no horse, sir. It’s dead in the field. Shell splinter got it.’

‘Who said we needed a horse?’ Kelly slapped the bonnet of the armoured car with a clang. ‘I’ve got plenty under here. Get it unloaded, Rumbelo, and unhitch the shafts.’

There was new hope in the corporal’s face as he turned away. A dozen men managed to manhandle the old machinery off the cart and push it on to the road where Rumbelo was already busy under the back of the armoured car with a drag chain he’d found in a harness store.

‘Will it do it, sir?’ he asked.

‘Ought to.’ Kelly stared down the long straight road. ‘There are no hills and no bends. It might need a bit of shoving on to course here and there, but we ought to cover a lot of the distance. If we can reach the outskirts of the city they can be carried the rest of the way.’

They placed straw on the cart and hitched it by the chain to the back of the armoured car which Kelly, after a great deal of swearing and fumbling with the gears, managed to reverse. Exhausted and wounded men were lifted aboard and the rest formed up into a tattered little group behind.

‘Right,’ Kelly said. ‘Let’s go.’

The first two or three tries to start were failures but, after a while, with the engine screaming, he managed to jerk the cart into movement. There was a ragged cheer as they rattled slowly off along the road.

It was all of a mile before the road showed any sign of turning and, with the aid of crowbars and timbers that Rumbelo, with the thoughtfulness of a seafaring man with an eye to the future, had placed aboard, they managed to edge the cart on to its new course. Before long they were in the outskirts of the town where they had to cry quits because it was impossible to get the cart round the narrow corners. Lifting as many of the exhausted and injured men into the armoured car as they could, they drove them to where they’d left the first batch they’d found under the sergeant, to be greeted with wide grins and cheers.

Unloading them, they set off back to the cart, only to bump into the fitter men of the second group carrying their exhausted friends. Loading more into the armoured car, they set off back once more, to come to a jerking halt a quarter of a mile short.

‘Now what’s happened to the bloody thing?’ Kelly demanded. ‘Know anything about the clockwork in these things, Rumbelo?’

Rumbelo had lifted the bonnet and was poking into the tank with a stick. He held it up. ‘Petrol, sir. Dry as a bloody bone.’

They were near enough now, however, for the remaining men to be carried without difficulty and by noon, they found they had collected a hundred and fifty-one Marines and sailors. There were only a stumbling exhausted group, however, useless as fighting men. Many of them were vomiting for want of food and most lay on the hard cobbles of the square fast asleep.

Kicking them to wakefulness, Kelly led them back to where he’d left the pinnace. But the buildings along the quayside were blazing now and there was no sign of the boat beyond, a piece of wood floating in the scummy water with the ship’s name on it, and the body of the midshipman, terribly burned, bumping gently in its lifebelt against the steps. After a while, the pinnace’s stoker appeared. He was wet through and had a bandage round his head. He said the pinnace had been blown to pieces. He’d been flung overboard and had swum for the wharf-side only to see
Norseman
disappearing
downriver amid a flurry of shells.

‘’Ow the ’ell do we get back now, sir?’ he asked.

‘God knows,’ Kelly said. ‘But we’ll think of something. In the meantime, let’s look for something to eat.’

Down a side street they found a deserted bakery full of bread and not far away an empty épicerie which supplied them with other food. Then the Marine sergeant discovered a small abandoned restaurant whose owners had disappeared, and three steaks lying on a table in the kitchen covered by flies.

‘I don’t like to be mean with food, sir,’ he announced quietly. ‘But I intend to have one of them meself, and since you’ve come to take us home, I reckon you and your coxswain ought to have the others.’

He cooked the steaks on a paraffin stove he found but, when they sat down at the kitchen table to eat them, to Kelly’s astonishment, the sergeant emptied a pot of jam over his plate and began to eat with gusto.

‘Felt like something sweet, sir, that’s all,’ he explained, faintly shamefaced.

A few of the Marines were a little drunk on wine they’d found, and it seemed to be time to move them on. But most of them could barely crawl. They’d force marched a matter of eighty miles and their feet were so swollen they couldn’t get their boots off, and they had to be half-carried.

‘We’ve got to find somewhere to hide ’em, Rumbelo,’ Kelly decided. ‘Until we can rustle up some sort of boat to get us downriver.’

‘And when we’ve found somewhere, we’ve got to get ’em there, sir,’ Rumbelo pointed out. ‘I reckon it’s going to be a case of forty blokes carrying eighty blokes. It can’t be done.’

Kelly stared round him. The population of Antwerp seemed to have sunk into the ground. Everywhere, every street, every building, every shop, seemed to be deserted, so that they felt like intruders in a town filled only with ghosts. Suddenly he remembered.

‘The bus, Rumbelo,’ he said.

‘The bus, sir?’

‘Yes, Rumbelo. The London red we saw. It’s built to carry around eighty-odd people. Why shouldn’t it carry eighty-odd tired Marines and jolly jack tars?’

The bus was still where they’d last seen it, an odd anachronistic sight on the cobbled streets, its top deck brushed by the leaves of an acacia tree.

‘You ever driven one of these things, sir?’ Rumbelo asked.

‘No. But I managed the armoured car and I reckon I can manage this.’

Kelly strode forward, suddenly full of confidence. For a change he was out of the reach of senior officers and was doing the leading himself. It seemed to suit him and his self-assurance grew by the second, so that he even began to enjoy himself, sure of his knowledge and ability and the certainty that a hundred and fifty-one men, exclusive of his own party, were relying on him to get them home. It was a formidable challenge for a young man without resources cut off in a defeated city, but he found himself responding to it with enthusiasm and even a certain amount of gaiety. This, he felt, was being alive.

‘Get the sick, the halt and the lame aboard,’ he said briskly. Then, climbing into the driver’s seat, he pressed the brass switch that engaged the battery.

‘Give her a swing, Rumbelo.’

To their surprise, the engine started clattering almost at the first heave at the starting handle, and with Rumbelo perched on the mudguard alongside him, Kelly cautiously depressed the clutch and pushed the gear lever forward. As they began to move, Rumbelo grinned.

‘Getting better at it, sir,’ he said. He turned and yelled into the cabin. ‘Pass down the car, please. No waiting on the platform!’

‘Dry up, Rumbelo,’ Kelly ordered. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’

Jolting in a way that jerked the wounds of the injured men they’d packed aboard, they rolled forward, the solid rubber tyres rumbling on the cobbles. Nobody complained, however, and there were even cheers and yells of laughter from the fitter men marching behind.

Eventually, they found a tall four-storey warehouse near the river and lifted the injured men from the bus inside, where they immediately fell asleep on the floor. Then Kelly and Rumbelo drove the bus to the water’s edge, put it into gear and jumped clear. With great satisfaction they saw it run down the slope towards the river with increasing speed and splash into the water, settle lazily on its side and finally disappear, leaving only the stern with the sign for Cricklewood above the water.

‘There’ll be a lot of people waiting in vain in the Edgware Road tonight, sir,’ Rumbelo grinned.