Lonely Sea by Alistair MacLean

Author:Alistair MacLean
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9780006172772
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1985-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Tillyer family had come a long, long way. Not so long, perhaps, in terms of actual miles - a moderately fast car could have covered the distance between the Fairey Aviation factory In Belgium, where Clifford Tillyer had worked as a technician, and the port of St Nazaire, in a day. But the Tillyers hadn't travelled across the smiling peacetime plains of Northern France in a fast and comfortable car: they had travelled, instead, across the war-torn chaos of a newly capitulated country, a country where demoralization, for the moment, was as complete as the defeat: and they had travelled either in overcrowded, haphazardly-routed refugee trains that sometimes covered only a few miles a day, or in the backs of trucks that crawled slowly along roads packed with thousands of refugees fleeing to the south.

The journey had taken a long, miserable month, but they had arrived at last: and as Clifford Tillyer, with his wife Vera and two-year-old baby daughter Jacqueline gazed out across the St Nazaire roads, crowded with Allied shipping which ranged from tiny minesweepers to great ocean-going liners all waiting to embark them and take them home to England, he felt that it had all been a hundred times worth while. The suffering, the fear, the privations of hunger and long sleepless nights all lay safely behind: before lay hope and freedom and home.

So, too, felt tens of thousands of others. No civilian refugees these others, but the last regiments of the British Expeditionary Force to France. Most of the BEF had already been evacuated from the continent. The miracle of Dunkirk was a fortnight old, and almost a third of a million men from these beaches were now safely home in England. Cherbourg, St Malo and Brest had been completely evacuated - a fantastic achievement in which 85,000 men had been snatched from the closing pincers of the Panzer divisions without the loss of a single ship or man. And now these men waiting along the banks of the Loire were almost the last to go. Men like Corporal John Broadbent, who had spent almost six weeks driving his OC from Rheims to the evacuation port and whose picture, published in the newspapers of the world, was soon to be known to countless millions: or like Sergeant George Young of the RASC, leaning against the brand new French bicycle which he had trundled half way across France, whose subsequent adventures in the next three days belonged to the realms of the wildest fiction.

But for Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent, the past, as it was for the Tillyers, was forgotten. The excitement of the immediate present, the promise that their turn would soon come for one of the dozens of tiny trawlers and minesweepers that were ferrying both soldiers and civilians out to the big ships lying offshore-these were all that mattered. Already they had been told the name of - and could clearly see - the ship that was to take them home: the LANCASTRIA.

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