Dunkirk evacuation

The Dunkirk evacuation, the desperate retreat of the British Expeditionary Force to the Channel coast in May–June 1940, forms the harrowing backdrop of Part Two of Atonement, where Robbie Turner, newly released from prison and serving as a private soldier, must survive the chaos, terror, and moral ruin of the collapse in northern France. The narrative follows Robbie, accompanied by two corporals from the Royal Army Service Corps, Mace and Nettle, as they walk cross-country toward the coast, navigating bombed villages, Stuka attacks, and the disintegration of military and civilian order. The retreat is not merely a historical setting but a crucible in which Robbie's trauma, his longing for Cecilia, and his bitter reflections on Briony's betrayal are forged into a single, unbearable pressure.

Causes and Background

The retreat was precipitated by the German army's rapid advance through the Ardennes and the collapse of Allied defenses. Robbie, separated from his unit during a Stuka attack, had lost his rifle and taken a revolver from a dead captain of the West Kents. He also carried a wound on his right side, below the rib cage, about the size of a half crown, where a piece of shrapnel remained lodged. The wound was not severe at first, but the skin around it was red and there was something inside that he could feel move when he walked. The three soldiers—Robbie, Mace, and Nettle—had been walking for two or three days, following a path that meandered through fields and woods, using a rear-area map Robbie had taken from the dead captain. The map was his only privacy in their company.

What Happens

The journey is a sequence of horrors and small mercies. Early on, Robbie saw a leg in a tree—a mature plane tree, only just in leaf, the leg twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee, with no sign of blood or torn flesh. The corporals made a dismissive sound of disgust and refused to be drawn in. Later, they passed a field of cattle with a dozen shell craters, fragments of flesh, bone and brindled skin blasted across a hundred-yard stretch. They crossed the Bergues-Furnes canal, where the Coldstream Guards, clean-shaven and stone-eyed, manned sandbagged machine-gun posts and silently despised the filthy rabble trailing by. On the far side, white-painted rocks marked a path to an orderly hut. They walked through a village where a shoe shop remained open for business, the shop assistant displaying shoes to a woman and her little girl, paying no attention to the procession of retreating soldiers and refugees. They encountered a French cavalry officer dispatching each horse with a shot to the head, the horses patiently waiting their turn. They were stopped by a major from the Buffs who tried to conscript them into flushing out a German machine-gun nest from a wood; Mace deflected him with a mock recitation of orders from GHQ. A Messerschmitt 109 strafed the column, and Robbie helped the RAMC captain with stretcher parties. They dug a grave for a boy of fifteen or so, a crimson stain on the back of his white shirt spreading from neck to waist, and buried him. They passed five bodies in a ditch—three women, two children—their suitcases lying around them. A Stuka attack killed a Flemish mother and her son, vaporizing them into a perfectly symmetrical inverted cone of a crater. Robbie, who had tried to drag them to safety, was lifted by the blast and driven face-first into the soil. He later found the crater and absorbed the fact that there were no human signs, not a shred of clothing or shoe leather. The corporals pushed him on. They reached the beach at Bray Dunes, where thousands of men wandered aimlessly, and a long file of soldiers stood up to their shoulders in the water, waiting for boats that were not there. They found shelter in a cellar, and the next morning, Nettle told Robbie that the navy was getting organized, the boats were back, and they were going home.

Consequences and Aftermath

The retreat left Robbie physically and psychologically shattered. His wound became infected, and he ran a fever that caused periods of delirium and hallucination. He experienced a waking dream in which he lost all sense of continuity and found himself in the grip of illogical certainties—for example, that he must capture a pig from an old gypsy woman in order to get home. He also suffered from a profound sense of guilt and shame, feeling the full ignominy of the retreat. He thought of the French boy asleep in his bed who had been vanished by a bomb, and of the indifference with which men could lob shells into a landscape. The retreat also deepened his bitterness toward Briony, whom he could not forgive, and intensified his longing for Cecilia, whose last letter—with its news that Briony might recant—he carried in his top pocket. The experience of walking across the land until he came to the sea became a kind of mantra, a rhythm that sustained him. The retreat was the terminus of a chaotic rout, and it confirmed for Robbie that the war had made guilt cheap: everyone was guilty, and no one was. The only thing that mattered was survival, and the hope of returning to Cecilia.