After Dunkirk

and country, and so here he was in this desolate place.
The situation had not been this way when he arrived, nor had he intended this place as his destination. The notion of fighting the Hun had appealed to him in a romantic way. As an adventurer, he sought challenge, undeterred by danger, and he had expected to be in the thick of combat. He had not expected to provide rearguard protection for an escaping army while pitted against overwhelming force, or then to have been abandoned along with his brothers-in-arms whom he fought for most, those to his left and right during battle.
The young, gaunt faces around him were new to Lance. Like him, they had been separated from their units and scattered when the German juggernaut strafed, bombed, machine-gunned, mortared, and engaged with small arms and fixed bayonets as it rumbled through the last strands of British and French defenses on its way to the beaches at Dunkirk.
Each of the lads had witnessed the capture and slaughter of thousands of their fellow soldiers, and they observed from barely concealed hideaways as prisoners were stripped of their arms and led away. Their faces, seeming old despite their youth, showed the shock of the brutality they had witnessed. No one smiled, and they clung close to each other for mutual support. Without asking them, Lance knew their thoughts, because they were his own. Will I ever see home again? Will I see tomorrow?
Three of his companions were in almost catatonic states. One of them had been among roughly a hundred captured members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment who had been marched to a farm in Le Paradis. There, the SS Totenkopf Division machine-gunned their captives. At the first sound of gunfire, he had fallen to the ground and lay there with heaving breath and gushing tears while around him, his comrades screamed and groaned in agony as bullets ripped through their bodies. They fell over him, covering his face and uniform in thick splashes of blood. For hours, he lay there until the Germans departed and darkness allowed him to crawl out and escape into the underbrush.
The second soldier in severe shock had witnessed a similar atrocity in which members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, captured near Wormhout, were forced into a barn. There, the Germans lobbed hand grenades into the outbuilding until no sound of life emanated. Finding himself physically unharmed but covered in blood, he lay still while the captors moved among the corpses, firing into those still showing signs of life. He continued to lay among his dead mates for hours after the Germans left, waiting for darkness and silence.
The third was a medic who had been in the passenger seat of an ambulance and narrowly escaped into the woods when a squad of German soldiers fired on them, despite the Red Cross markings. The engine block had spewed smoke thick enough to conceal him as he jumped from his seat and plunged into the shrubbery, unseen. From there, and to his horror, he watched as the enemy secured the back door so that it could not be opened from the inside and set the vehicle on fire. Within seconds, screams filled the air as the wounded were incinerated.
Not daring to move, the soldier could only cover his ears while tears streamed down his face. Then, the stench of burning flesh had assaulted his nostrils.
All the men in this small group with Lance had seen huge numbers of their compatriots rounded up at gunpoint and marched to heaven-knows-where. Each had likely avoided detection because the Germans had their hands full managing the thousands of prisoners they had already taken.
Some soldiers evaded capture by squirming behind shrubs, berms, hedges, and whatever concealment they could find, including massive numbers of dead bodies and the hulks of burned-out war machines. They headed away from columns of prisoners marching east under armed guard. In the dim light of dusk or dawn, from hearing the crack of branches or catching a glimpse of movement, they had found each other, recognized by their filthy olive-green British uniforms. For days, they had scavenged, only daring to approach garbage bins of the most isolated homes in the darkness of night and scurrying away at the sounds of barking dogs. In the mornings, they licked dew from leaves and sought water from wherever they could find it, including puddles in the road. Now grimy, unshaved, starved, thirsty, disoriented, and with no plan, they offered each other the only solace they could, company during shared misery.
Numb, Lance realized after a time that, as a mid-level sergeant, he was the ranking member of his group. The weight of responsibility for these lives descended on his shoulders like a dark, heavy cloak. As he looked dully from face to face, he saw that some with sufficient presence of mind stared back, expectant, questioning, despairing, looking to him for glimmers of hope that they would live and find a way home.
Home. The thought now seemed a surreal notion, a distant place remembered but real only in the sense that a dream was real, mercurial and wispy. Lance pictured his stepfather, tall, thin, a jocular personality who had nevertheless frowned on Lance’s choices in life. His mother was a prim and proper woman, always ready to help anyone who needed it, but seemingly incapable of deep emotional attachment, or at least the expression of it.
Then there were his brothers, Paul and Jeremy, and his sister, Claire. Always-dutiful Paul, the eldest of the four siblings, had taken his mother’s personality. He had been the first of the brothers to enter the British Army, accepting a commission and leaving for London to serve. At last word, he was rising rapidly on the staff in the War Office, but his job seemed to be very hush-hush.
Next came Claire. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, she had refused to let her status as the single female sibling interfere with her participation