1940

1940 is the year of the twin catastrophes that define the second and third parts of Atonement: the British army's retreat to Dunkirk, in which Robbie Turner suffers physical and psychological wounds, and the arrival of its casualties at a London hospital, where Briony Tallis begins her nursing training and confronts the consequences of her childhood lie. The year also marks the marriage of Lola Quincey and Paul Marshall, the final sealing of the conspiracy that sent Robbie to prison, and the moment Briony first attempts to atone by writing a confession. Decades later, in 1999, the elderly Briony reflects on how her 1940 drafts shaped the novel she would spend a lifetime revising.

The Retreat to Dunkirk

Part Two of the novel is set entirely during the retreat, following Robbie Turner as he walks across northern France toward the coast. He is separated from his unit after a Stuka attack, wounded in his right side by shrapnel, and accompanied by two corporals from the Royal Army Service Corps, Mace and Nettle. The three men cross the Bergues-Furnes canal, pass through a bombed village, and witness the systematic destruction of equipment and the corpses of civilians and soldiers alike. Robbie's wound becomes infected, and he suffers from fever and delirium, at one point hallucinating that he must capture a pig to secure water from a gypsy woman. He and Nettle eventually reach Bray Dunes, where they see the vast, disorganized beach crowded with thousands of waiting troops, and where Mace rescues an RAF man from a lynch mob. Robbie's thoughts throughout the retreat return obsessively to Cecilia's last letter, which contains the news that Briony wants to recant her evidence, and to her repeated promise: "I'll wait for you. Come back." He survives the journey, but the experience leaves him with lasting trauma.

The Arrival of the Wounded

Part Three opens in the spring of 1940, with Briony Tallis working as a probationer nurse at St. Thomas's Hospital. The wards are being emptied and prepared for a flood of casualties, and the atmosphere is one of "muted dread." On the day the first wounded soldiers arrive from Dunkirk, Briony is sent to carry stretchers, clean wounds, and assist with dressings. She removes shrapnel from an airman's leg, repacks the face of a soldier whose cheek has been shot away, and sits with a dying French boy, Luc Cornet, who mistakes her for a girl from his hometown. The experience transforms her understanding of nursing and of human suffering; she feels "an impersonal tenderness" that detaches her from the horror and makes her long to qualify. That same night, she receives a rejection letter from Cyril Connolly at Horizon magazine, which criticizes her novella Two Figures by a Fountain for lacking "the backbone of a story" and suggests that the girl at the window might "come between them in some disastrous fashion." Briony recognizes the indictment of her own evasions.

The Wedding and the Confession

In May 1940, Briony receives a letter from her father informing her that Paul Marshall and Lola Quincey are to be married. She attends the wedding at Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common, watching from the back pew as the couple exchange vows. She considers rising to denounce them, but remains silent, recognizing that her own testimony at the time had been to the contrary and that the legal verdict stood. After the ceremony, she walks to Balham to find Cecilia's lodgings at 43 Dudley Villas. There she meets Robbie, who has survived Dunkirk and is staying with Cecilia. In a tense confrontation, Robbie demands that Briony write a formal statement retracting her evidence, send a detailed letter explaining everything that led to her accusation, and go to their parents in Surrey to tell them the truth. Briony agrees, and also reveals that the man she saw by the lake was Paul Marshall, not Robbie. The meeting ends with Briony walking away, feeling "serene" and ready to begin the work of atonement.

The Long Aftermath

The elderly Briony, writing in 1999, reflects on the drafts she produced over the following fifty-nine years. The earliest version was written in January 1940, before the events of Part Two and Three had even occurred. She describes how she "set out to describe" the crime in the second draft of June 1947, and continued revising through multiple versions, the latest dated March 1999. She acknowledges that she cannot publish her "forensic memoir" while the Marshalls are alive, because they would sue for libel. In the final version, she chose to let Robbie and Cecilia survive and be reunited, even though the historical truth—that Robbie died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940 and Cecilia was killed by a bomb at Balham Underground Station in September of the same year—would have been "the bleakest realism." She calls this ending "a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair."