The Bar in Bray Dunes
The Bar in Bray Dunes is a seaside establishment in the French resort of Bray Dunes, near Dunkirk, that becomes the setting for a violent mob attack on an RAF man during the chaotic retreat of the British Expeditionary Force in late May 1940. It functions as a site where the collective rage and desperation of defeated soldiers find a scapegoat, revealing the breakdown of discipline and the moral corrosion of the retreat.
Location and Atmosphere
The bar is situated on the front of Bray Dunes, a cheerful resort with cafés, little shops, a bandstand, and a merry-go-round painted red, white, and blue. Inside, the bar is wrecked: the shelves behind the sandblasted mirror are empty, the taps are dry, and the dispensers dangle empty on the wall where inverted bottles have been wrenched away. The sweet smell of liquor rises from the sticky cement floor. Two suitcases propped open on the bar are full of cigarettes, but there is nothing to drink. The natural light is stained brown, as though by the absent beer. Men come in, are disappointed, and yet stay, held there by free cigarettes and the evidence of recent booze. The noise and press of bodies and damp tobacco air satisfy a homesick yearning for a Saturday night pub—this is the Mile End Road, and Sauchiehall Street, and everywhere in between.
The Mob Attack
Robbie Turner, Corporal Mace, and Corporal Nettle enter the bar seeking water. They find a tight wall of backs forming around a short man in an RAF jacket—a wiry little fellow with thick, unclean lenses in his glasses, who looks like a filing clerk or a telephone operator. The Tommies hold him accountable for the absence of Spitfires and Hurricanes over the beach. A globule of spittle hits the back of the man's head. An artilleryman gives him a hard push; a casual punch to the head sends him stumbling. A kick from a steel-capped army boot lifts him an inch or two. Someone stubs a cigarette on his head. The man does not shout for help, plead, or protest his innocence; his silence seems like collusion in his fate. A Welsh sapper produces a belt of canvas webbing, suggesting horrors. The mob's exhilaration is palpable, and the situation has reached a point where whoever throws the next hit must earn general approval by being ingenious or funny.
The Rescue
Corporal Mace barges through the crowd with a wild hollering yodeling sound, like Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan, picks up the clerk from behind in a bear hug, lifts him eighteen inches clear of the ground, and shakes him from side to side. Mace booms that he wants to drown the man in the bloody sea. As the crowd explodes from the bar like champagne, Mace runs not toward the sea but sharp left, up a narrow street that curves behind the shops and bars, away from the front. Someone thinks he sees Mace down on the sands, and for half a minute the crowd goes that way. By the time the mistake is realized, Mace and his man have vanished. The vast beach, the thousands waiting on it, and the sea empty of boats return the Tommies to their predicament. The crowd begins to break up; the RAF man is forgotten.
Significance
The bar episode crystallizes the moral collapse of the retreating army. The soldiers, having suffered repeated Stuka attacks and witnessed the deaths of comrades, turn their fury on a defenseless representative of the RAF, which they believe has abandoned them. The mob's righteous state of mind, its eagerness to be creative in cruelty, and the way individual responsibility falls away in the crowd all demonstrate how war erodes the boundaries of civilized behavior. The rescue by Mace, using theatrical bravado and deception, is a rare act of decency in a scene otherwise defined by collective savagery. The bar itself—a place of pleasure and escape now gutted and foul—mirrors the larger devastation: a resort town transformed into a terminus of rout, where the only remaining commerce is in cigarettes and the only currency is rage.
