You can’t fall asleep, Ernest thought. We’re doing this for your benefit. He drove into a large mud hole, but even the jolt didn’t wake the colonel. Stopping would, but every field they passed was full of soldiers—drilling in formation, doing calisthenics, loading supplies, standing in line outside mess tents. One of them was bound to come over and ask them if they needed directions, so Ernest had no choice but to keep driving. Straight past everything the sleeping colonel was supposed to be to come over and ask them if they needed directions, so Ernest had no choice but to keep driving. Straight past everything the sleeping colonel was supposed to be seeing.
There was a village up ahead. Good. If there’s a garage there, I’ll stop for gas, he thought, but there wasn’t one on the village’s single street, and just ahead was, oh, Christ, a signpost. He wasn’t close enough to read it, but he could make out letters and arrows pointing in opposite directions. And there was no side lane he could turn off onto.
He glanced in the rear-vision mirror, hoping to God the colonel was still asleep. He wasn’t. And in a minute he’d see the signpost. “Look!” Ernest said, pointing off to the other side of the road. “Parachutists!”
“Where?” Cess said. He leaned across him to look, and the colonel followed his gaze.
“There,” Ernest said, pointing at nothing. “I hear the Americans are planning to land twenty thousand parachutists in the Pas de Calais area the night before they invade,” and while Cess and the colonel were gawking at the sky, he shot past the signpost.
He needn’t have panicked. Next to one arrow it read, “Berlin” and next to the other, “Good Old USA.”
He almost wished the colonel’d seen it, but when he glanced back, his eyes were closed again.
Ernest drove on another mile and then pulled the car to a jolting stop opposite an aeroplane-filled field. “I don’t think this is the right road,” he said. “We passed these planes before.”
“No, these are Hurricanes,” Cess said. “The ones before were Tempests.”
“No, they weren’t. I think we should have turned left at that last crossroads.” When Cess still didn’t catch on, he said, “We’re lost.”
“Oh,” Cess said, the light dawning. “No, this is the right road.” He opened the map out. “Look, here’s where we are. We came through Newchurch, and Hawkinge’s that way.”
“Here, let me see the map,” Ernest said, snatching it away from him and holding it so the colonel could see it. “Where did you say we are?”
“Here, just north of Newchurch,” Cess said, pointing. “See, here’s Gravesend, where we picked the colonel up. We came across to Beckley and then took the Oxney Road.”
Ernest sneaked a glance in the mirror. The colonel was looking intently at the map as Cess traced their route.
“And this is the road we’re on now. It takes us through Dover, and then we take the Old Kent Road to London.”
“You’re right,” Ernest said. He started the car and yanked on the gear stick. The gears ground. He jiggled the knob back and forth, trying to get it to shift, and it finally slid into reverse. He backed the car out onto the road and went on, past more camps and storage dumps and so many airfields he lost count, full of P-51s and DC-3s parked wingtip to wingtip.
“Good Lord, will you look at all this?” Cess said, sounding awed, and Ernest wasn’t sure that that was just for the colonel’s benefit. He’d known the D-Day invasion had been a massive project, but the sheer magnitude of the undertaking was impossible to get one’s mind around—thousands upon thousands of planes, tanks, and trucks, and tons of equipment.
As they drove, the colonel seemed to grow more and more ashen and to sink into himself, deflating like one of their dummy tanks.
He knows there’s no way they can win against this, Ernest thought. He wondered if that was part of the plan, if the purpose of this trip was not only to fool von Sprecht into believing they were invading at Calais, but also to show him the overwhelming might of the Allied invasion force and convince him of the hopelessness of the Germans’ resistance. If so, the plan was succeeding. He looked more defeated with every passing mile.
But he wasn’t the only one being affected by the sprawling tent cities, the squads and companies and battalions drilling in the fields and crammed into the trucks that passed them. I’ll never be able to find Atherton among all these camps and all these men, Ernest thought. Atherton could be anywhere, in any one of the fifty fields they’d passed or the hundreds of transit camps. There was no way Ernest could find him in the next five weeks— correction, three weeks—even if he dumped Cess and the colonel out of the car right now and started asking for Atherton at every Army HQ from now straight through to the fifth of June.
“A chap I met said there are a million men in this corner of England,” Cess said. “Do you think that could be right?”
No, Ernest thought bitterly, it’s two million.
“I mean, one would think Kent would sink under the weight. Perhaps that’s what the barrage balloons are for,” Cess said, pointing to hundreds of silver specks in the sky ahead. “To hold England up.” He grinned. “We should be coming to Dover soon,” he added, consulting the map.
Which meant Portsmouth. That meant they were on schedule, in spite of their late start. At least something was going right. At this rate they should be in London by three and he might still be able to deliver his articles to Mr. Jeppers before the Call’s deadline.
He’d spoken too soon. Half a mile on, they ran into a convoy of very slow trucks. They were behind a canvas- covered four-by-four that he couldn’t see around at all, and it was slowing down till it was scarcely crawling. “Can you see what’s causing the problem?” Ernest asked Cess.
“No,” Cess said, rolling down his window and leaning out. “We’re coming into a village. Burmarsh, I think.” The behemoth ahead slowed to a stop between a church and a pub, with no room to squeeze past on either side.
Cess leaned out again and then got out and walked past the truck to see. “It looks rather bad,” he reported, getting back in the car. “There are vehicles and tanks and artillery as far as one can see, and it doesn’t look as though they’ll move any time soon. Some of them are sitting on the bonnets of their lorries, drinking tea and eating sandwiches.”
