the retreat to Dunkirk

The retreat to Dunkirk is the central historical event of Part Two of Atonement, a desperate, chaotic withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force to the Channel coast in late May 1940. For Robbie Turner, the retreat is not merely a military disaster but a personal ordeal that strips him to the bone, forcing him to confront the physical and psychological wreckage of war while clinging to the hope of returning to Cecilia Tallis. The narrative follows Robbie and two corporals, Mace and Nettle, as they walk cross-country toward Dunkirk, a journey that becomes a descent into a landscape of horror, exhaustion, and moral ambiguity.

Causes and Background

The retreat is precipitated by the German army's rapid advance through France, which cuts off the British forces from their supply lines. Robbie, a private soldier in the British Army, is separated from his unit during a Stuka attack at the beginning of the retreat, losing his rifle in the process. He acquires a revolver and a rear-area map from a dead captain of the West Kents, and he is joined by Corporal Mace and Corporal Nettle, two townies from the Royal Army Service Corps who are lost in the countryside and depend on Robbie's navigation. The three men are bound together by necessity, not rank, and they follow Robbie's lead as he attempts to guide them to the coast.

The Journey and Its Horrors

The retreat is a catalogue of grotesque and haunting images. Robbie sees a child's leg, severed cleanly above the knee, wedged in the fork of a plane tree twenty feet up, a sight that he cannot shake and that later merges in his fevered mind with the memory of the French boy he imagines was killed in a bombed cottage. He witnesses a field of slaughtered cavalry horses, hundreds of them in a heap, and a smoldering mountain of uniforms and blankets. The road is littered with abandoned equipment, disabled vehicles, and the bodies of soldiers and civilians. At one point, a French cavalry officer dispatches each of his horses with a shot to the head while his men stand at attention, a ceremony of defeat that depresses everyone's spirits. The three soldiers pass five bodies in a ditch—three women and two children, their suitcases lying around them—and Robbie forces himself to look away, determined to survive. He is wounded in his right side by shrapnel, a piece of metal that he can feel moving inside him when he walks, and the wound becomes infected, causing him to run a fever that blurs his perception of reality.

Psychological and Physical Toll

Robbie's physical suffering is compounded by psychological torment. He is plagued by thirst, blisters, and the pain of his wound, and he experiences periods of dissociation in which he loses his sense of continuity and identity, finding himself in the grip of illogical certainties. He becomes convinced that he must go back to retrieve the boy from the tree, and he hallucinates that he is carrying the twins, Jackson and Pierrot, across the park. His only anchor is Cecilia's last letter, which he carries in his top pocket, and her repeated promise, "I'll wait for you. Come back." This promise becomes a mantra that he recites to himself as he walks, and it is the sole reason he continues to survive. The letter also contains the news that Briony Tallis, now a nurse, wants to recant her false evidence, offering Robbie the possibility of being cleared. This prospect of a rebirth, a triumphant return, gives him a taste for life that he thought he had lost.

Encounters and Moral Choices

Along the way, Robbie faces a series of moral choices that test his commitment to survival. He and the corporals encounter a major from the Buffs who tries to conscript them into a doomed attack on a German machine-gun position, but Mace and Nettle talk their way out of it with a mock recitation of orders from GHQ. Later, Robbie helps a Flemish woman and her son during a Stuka attack, but when she refuses to move, he abandons them to save himself, and they are vaporized by a bomb. He is haunted by this decision, and in his fevered state, he imagines returning to ask the woman for forgiveness. He also witnesses a mob of soldiers preparing to lynch an RAF clerk in a bar in Bray Dunes, and he and the corporals stage a rescue, with Mace carrying the man out of the bar under the pretense of drowning him. These episodes reveal the erosion of conventional morality in the face of overwhelming chaos, and Robbie's own struggle to retain his humanity.

Arrival at Dunkirk and Aftermath

After days of walking, Robbie and the corporals cross the Bergues-Furnes canal, where they are stopped by a fierce sergeant from the Coldstream Guards, but they manage to pass by pretending that Robbie is wounded. They finally reach the beach at Bray Dunes, where they see thousands of men waiting in the surf for boats that are not there. The beach is a scene of aimless chaos, with soldiers wandering about, digging foxholes, and getting drunk in the cafés along the front. Robbie's fever worsens, and he is taken by Nettle to a cellar where they spend the night. In his delirium, he shouts "no" and wakes the other men, and Nettle tells him that the navy is organizing the evacuation and that they will be marching to the beach in the morning. Robbie's last coherent thought is of Cecilia, and he remembers her words to him by the police car: "I'll wait for you. Come back." He falls asleep, and the narrative of the retreat ends with the promise of evacuation, but the reader later learns that Robbie died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, a fact that Briony, as the author of the novel, chooses to conceal in her final draft.