Atonement: Part Two

When they reached the level crossing, after a three-mile walk along a narrow road, he saw the path he was looking for meandering off to the right, then dipping and rising toward a copse that covered a low hill to the northwest.

But there was something in there. He could feel it move when he walked. A piece of shrapnel perhaps.

She had a gnarled, man-in-the-moon face and a wild look.

Turner felt, for the first time, the full ignominy of the retreat.

Being here, sheltering in a barn, with an army in rout, where a child's limb in a tree was something that ordinary men could ignore, where a whole country, a whole civilization was about to fall, was better than being there, on a narrow bed under a dim electric light, waiting for nothing.

He kissed her, lightly at first, but they drew closer, and when their tongues touched, a disembodied part of himself was abjectly grateful, for he knew he now had a memory in the bank and would be drawing on it for months to come.

One field of cattle had a dozen shell craters, and fragments of flesh, bone and brindled skin had been blasted across a hundred-yard stretch.

The air was gray with diesel fumes, and straggling wearily through the stench, and for the moment moving faster than the traffic, were hundreds of soldiers, most of them carrying their rifles and their awkward greatcoats—a burden in the morning’s growing warmth.

The only human sound Turner heard, piercing the din of engines, was the crying of babies.

Meanwhile he had cowered in a ditch with his head in a culvert and caught the shrapnel in his side.

Glancing over his shoulder he saw the convoy stretching back down the hill for a mile.

Proceed at haste and speed and celerity, without delay, diversion or divagation to Dunkirk for the purposes of immediate evacuation on account of being ’orribly and onerously overrun from all directions.

Proceed at haste and speed and celerity, without delay, diversion or divagation to Dunkirk for the purposes of immediate evacuation on account of being ’orribly and onerously overrun from all directions.

That black greasy chassis, that bulbous differential was his only home.

A fighter was strafing the length of the column.

’Twas ostensibly ominous in the overview
To be ’orribly and onerously overrun.

The convoy was moving at its old inexorable pace.

Here she was, offering a possibility of absolution.

A soldier with a bloody chest wound reclined in an ancient pram pushed by his mates.

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 sights were familiar, the inventory was the same, but now there was more of everything; vehicles, bomb craters, detritus.

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.

The men were clean-shaven, stone-eyed, silently contemptuous of the filthy disorganized rabble trailing by.

The boatman sat at his tiller smoking a pipe, looking stolidly ahead.

Suddenly, like a jack-in-a-box, a lieutenant from the Dorsets popped up from the cellar of a municipal building that had been requisitioned for a headquarters.

He tried to impose order now on the random movement before him, and almost succeeded: marshaling centers, warrant officers behind makeshift desks, rubber stamps and dockets, roped-off lines toward the waiting boats; hectoring sergeants, tedious queues around mobile canteens.

Nearer, up the beach, individuals were scooping sand with their helmets to make foxholes.

In this setting, another, more insouciant company had hunkered down.

There were five of them, two officers, three ratings, a gleaming group of fresh white, blue and gold. No concessions to camouflage.

When it was finally secure in the tiny sty in her back garden, the old woman brought out two stone flagons of water.