Bray Dunes
Bray Dunes, the beach near Dunkirk, was the terminus of the chaotic British retreat in late May and early June 1940, a place where Robbie Turner and thousands of other soldiers arrived after days of walking across northern France. It was not a scene of orderly evacuation but of rout, and its vast, empty sands became the setting for Robbie's final physical and psychological ordeal before he could be taken off the coast.
Geography and First Impressions
Robbie Turner, accompanied by Corporals Mace and Nettle, first saw Bray Dunes from a gap in the dunes after three hours of walking from the Bergues-Furnes canal. The beach stretched for almost a mile to the water's edge at low tide, and the sight was one of desolation and chaos. There were no boats visible apart from one upturned whaler rolling in the distant surf. A long jetty was actually a file of men, six or eight deep, standing up to their knees, waists, and shoulders, stretching out for five hundred yards through the shallow waters, waiting for vessels that were not there. The majority of the army wandered about the sands without purpose, like citizens of an Italian town in the hour of the passeggio. The only signs of official activity were lorries being lined up and lashed together to form a makeshift jetty, and individuals scooping sand with their helmets to make foxholes. The fresh damp breeze off the Channel restored Robbie to clarity after his feverish, dreamlike state, but the reality of the beach was a brutal anticlimax to his hopes of order.
The Resort and the Bar
To the left of the beach was the resort of Bray Dunes itself, a cheerful front of cafés and little shops that in a normal season would rent out beach chairs and pedal bikes. In a circular park with a neatly mowed lawn was a bandstand and a merry-go-round painted red, white, and blue. In this setting, another, more insouciant company had hunkered down. Soldiers had opened up the cafés for themselves and were getting drunk at the tables outside, bawling and laughing. Men were larking about on the bikes along a pavement stained with vomit. A colony of drunks was spread out on the grass by the bandstand, sleeping it off. A solitary sunbather in his underpants, facedown on a towel, had patches of uneven sunburn on his shoulders and legs. Thirst drove Robbie and the corporals into one of the bars along the front, where the shelves were empty of drink. The bar remained full of men held there by free cigarettes and the evidence of recent booze, the sweet smell of liquor rising from the sticky cement floor. It was in this bar that a mob of soldiers cornered an RAF man, holding him accountable for the absence of Spitfires and Hurricanes over the beach, and began to beat him. Corporal Mace rescued the man by pretending to carry him off to drown him, then running away up a side street.
The Cellar and the Night
After the rescue, Robbie and Nettle wandered the streets of Bray Dunes, eventually finding shelter in the cellar of a bombed house. The cellar was half open to the sky and had the appearance of a gigantic cave. Inside, men were propped in a sitting position around the walls, most of them asleep. Robbie sat on the concrete floor, and Nettle arranged his greatcoat around his shoulders. The rocking motion of daylong walking transferred itself to the floor, and Robbie felt it tilt and buck beneath him. In the darkness, he ate the best meal of his life—bread and saucisson—and tasted a sugared almond whose sweetness belonged to another world. He was too fevered and exhausted to sleep, and his mind drifted into a delirium of guilt and unfinished business. He imagined walking back the way he had come to bury the boy whose leg he had seen in a tree, and to ask the Flemish woman and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths. He shouted "no" in his sleep, waking others. Nettle told him that the navy was getting organized on the beach, that the boats were back, and that they would be marching down at seven. Robbie, falling into sleep, thought of Cecilia running out across the gravel to speak to him by the open police car door, and of her saying, "I'll wait for you. Come back." He promised Nettle he would not say another word.
Significance
Bray Dunes is the physical and symbolic endpoint of Robbie Turner's journey through the war, a place where the chaos of the retreat meets the sea. It is the site of his most extreme physical suffering—thirst, fever, a festering wound—and of his psychological breakdown, where the horrors he has witnessed (the leg in the tree, the vaporized mother and child) merge with his guilt and his longing for Cecilia. The beach is also a place of moral ambiguity, where soldiers turn on one another and where survival requires selfishness. It is from this desolate shore that Robbie will be evacuated, but the experience leaves an indelible mark on him, and the memory of Bray Dunes will haunt him as much as the prison cell he once occupied.
