Night pressed hard against Dunkirk's harbor, a bleak blanket stitched with fog and the weak yellow of sodium lamps.
The tide whispered against the quay, a patient, indifferent witness.
Small motor launches bobbed in the black water like teeth in a gullet, waiting to take men across the Channel.
Men with documents folded into their pockets, with faces scrubbed raw by fear and contraband whiskey.
Men who had been leaders, ministers, staff officers, remnants of a Republic that had ended in six days.
On the jetty beneath a dead crane, a British intelligence officer moved like a ghost, checking watches, exchanging coded coughs, nodding to the men who clustered in the shadow of a piled stack of sacks.
They had organized the passage: low lights, false manifests, a small boat and a bigger lie.
Tonight was the last window. If they made it, they would be in England before dawn; if they failed, the list of captives in German files would read like a funeral roll.
