Free Ride Out The Storm by John Harris

harbour here’s full, and cross-channel steamers, coasters and barges are gathering in the Downs. Ramsgate’s filling up from the Thames and further north, and they’re on their way from every other port where they’ve got any.’
    The admiral nodded. He wasn’t given to using a lot of unnecessary words. He took the slip of paper the flag lieutenant passed to him.
    ‘This the total of men lifted?’
    ‘Up to midnight, sir. Nearly 28,000.’
    The admiral looked up, his narrow face keen. ‘A not unreasonable start,’ he said. ‘Considering they’re expecting only 45,000 in two days.’

    Nor was it. And now Alban Kitchener Tremenheere was ready to help. Not from any feeling of heroism or because he considered it his duty, but because it was as far as he could get from Nell Noone.
    As he made his few preparations, on board Vital – now edging alongside a tanker at Dover where Daisy also lay – Sub-Lieutenant Hatton was trying to screw his courage to the pitch he felt sure it ought to be screwed. Walter Boner Scharroo was walking stolidly north because the Germans had left him behind and it seemed the only thing to do. Lieutenant Allerton was also heading north. He hadn’t a map and didn’t particularly want one; the situation seemed so horrifying he wouldn’t have dared look at it. Hans-Joachim Horndorff was still waiting outside Vitry, and Marie-Josephine Berthelot, recovering a little now, was stumbling along without any sense of direction. Major Karl Schmesser and his gunner, Unteroffizier Roehme, or what was left of them, were still in the smoking remains of their aeroplane. The man who’d shot them down, Flying Officer Conybeare had abandoned hope of rescue because Leading Aircraftsman Reardon, who was to have picked him up, was lying in a ditch near Vanchette. Corporal Chouteau and Private Angelet were also tramping silently through the darkness, Chouteau’s face grim, Private Angelet whimpering soundlessly to himself. Captain Deshayes had long since given himself up while Favre, dressed in civilian clothes he’d found, was heading for Paris. Lije Noble was lying behind the wood ten miles from Lanselles, still shuddering with fear, and Lance-Corporal Gow of the Coldstream Guards, that tall expressionless man with the bone-white skin and the gingery Highland hair, had reached the line of the River Lys.

Monday, 27 May
     
    At dawn on 27 May, just as England was beginning to stir, German panzers were rattling north in a vast pincer movement. They were already too late, because there was still a gap ten miles wide through which the French and the British were streaming at full speed. In the west, however, the Germans were still moving along the coast and Leutnant Heinrich-Robert Hinze, in his curiously impassive, mandarin manner, was preparing himself for more shooting.
    Long before Calais had fallen, the outposts had been called in, the office equipment loaded into trucks, blankets rolled and the cookhouse piled into the mess wagon, with the contents of the first-aid post and the medical stores, and the battery was on its way towards Dunkirk.

    The presence of men like Hinze was confusing the position for the planners at Dover. Because of the shellfire and the increasing attacks of the Luftwaffe, ships were being forced to turn back and the signals that were dropping one after another on to the staff communications officer’s desk made it brutally clear that the short route to Dunkirk could not be used during daylight.
    ‘There are two other possible routes,’ the staff navigation officer was saying. ‘Route Y – eighty-seven miles long – runs to a point off Ostend and comes in west through the Zuydecoote Pass. Route X – fifty-five miles long – cuts across the Ruytingen Bank to a point between Gravelines and Dunkirk. There are mine-fields.’
    The admiral chewed at the earpiece of his spectacles. ‘Route Y. Is that mined?’
    ‘It might be, sir. We don’t know yet.’
    ‘We must take the