Dave Dawson at Dunkirk

by Robert Sidney Bowen

"Have you seen my Father?" he asked the girlish looking man at the desk.

The girlish looking man didn't hear. He was talking on the telephone. Talking a blue streak with his hands as well as his mouth. In fact, in order to make full use of both his hands the clerk had dropped the receiver and was giving all of his attention to the mouth piece. He looked like he was trying to do the Australian Crawl right into it and down the wire to whoever was at the other end of the line.

Dave grinned and stood watching the clerk. The words came out like a string of machine gun bullets. Much, much too fast for Dave to line them up in a sentence that made sense. He caught a word here and there, however, and presently the grin faded from his face. He heard the name, Holland, and Belgium. He heard Nazi cows. He heard Maginot Line, and Siegfried Line. And a whole lot of the girlish looking clerk's personal opinions of Hitler, and Goering, and Hess, and Goebbels, and everybody else in Nazi Germany.

He did not hear a lot, but he heard enough, and his eyes widened, and his heart began to thump against his ribs in wild excitement. He banged on the desk and shouted at the clerk, but he might just as well have shouted at the moon. The clerk was far, far too busy trying to swim down the telephone cord.

Dave started to yell even louder but at that moment a hand took hold of his arm and swung him around. He found himself staring into the flushed, good looking face of Lieutenant Defoe. The French officer was breathing hard and there was a strange look in his eyes that checked the happy greeting on Dave's lips.

"Hey, what's wrong, Lieutenant?" he asked instead. "That clerk acts like he's going nuts. And, say, Dad isn't in his room. Not even any of his things."

"I know, mon Capitaine," Lieutenant Defoe said and held onto his arm. "Come. First we shall have some breakfast, and then I will explain all."

The fact that Defoe was there, and that the French officer had called him by the kidding title of My Captain soothed the tiny worry that was beginning to grow inside Dave.

"Okay, Lieutenant, I am starved at that," he said as the officer led the way to the breakfast room. "But, that clerk. He was shouting something about the Germans in Holland and Belgium, and.... Hey, my gosh! Has Hitler invaded the Lowlands?"

"Early this morning," Defoe said gravely. "Another of his promises broken, but we expected it, of course. Yes, mon Capitaine, now France will truly go to war. Here, sit there. Let me order. They are perhaps excited a little this morning, and I will get better results."