The Snow Goose (1941), a story by the American writer and journalist Paul Gallico, captures the view of Dunkirk as a miracle quite literally. The protagonist is Rhayader, a hump-backed hermit-artist living in a lighthouse on the English coast, where he has established a bird sanctuary. A young girl, Frith, brings him an injured goose. The artist and the girl nurse the goose back to health. Seven years pass and Frith, now a young woman, continues to visit the goose, who returns every year to the sanctuary. On one visit she discovers Rhayader outfitting his boat for the journey to Dunkirk. As she bids him farewell, she realizes that she is in love with the man.

The rest of the story is narrated by British soldiers recounting the extraordinary appearance of a goose hovering protectively over a small boat as it rescues soldiers through the night and by a British naval officer who spots a small boat with a dead pilot and with a goose perched on the deck of the boat drifting on the sea. The story concludes with the return of the goose to the sanctuary and Frith's recognition that the goose's flight embodies that of Rhayader's soul.

This story enjoyed great popularity in England and America, providing both consolation and uplift in the early years of the war. In that respect it is a representative example of the popular literature of the period, combining sentimentality with a vaguely spiritual theme. Similarly, in William Wyler's film adaptation of Jan Struther's (1901-53) Mrs. Miniver (1940), the husband of the heroine leaves in the middle of the night to sail his boat to Dunkirk. The film was an enormous success in England and America, winning the Academy Award for best picture in 1942.

Elleston Trevor's (1920-95) The Big Pick-Up (1955), written 15 years after the event, takes a more realistic view of the evacuation. The Big Pick-Up tells of the attempt of three soldiers in the chaos of a hurried retreat to find their company. When one of the three is killed, they connect with four other troops who are also cut off from their company. The leader of the group, the resourceful, steady Corporal Bains, displays the cool command and common sense that enables them to reach the beach. As they are being taken out to a ship, their boat is hit by a torpedo. Picked up by a barge, they eventually reach, in the words of one of the men, "'ome bleedin' 'ome."

The Big Pick-Up is a fast-moving, worthy war story. Its characters--the stoical leader, the quivering, fragile young man always on the verge of a crack-up, the salty working-class types who use wit and mechanical ingenuity to survive--are recognizable stock figures but well drawn in a story filled with exciting incidents. Added to these virtues is its efforts to de-romanticize the events it describes.

From both a literary and historical perspective, the outstanding depiction of the evacuation and its immediate aftermath occurs in Ian McEwan's (1948- ) Atonement (2001), a beautifully written, riveting tale of guilt, penance, and forgiveness. The overall story deals with the consequences of a young girl's overactive imagination, which result in the humiliation and imprisonment of an innocent man who becomes the lover of the young girl's sister. Four years after the incident, in 1939, the man, Robbie Turner, is released from prison to serve in the army, where he participates in the retreat from Dunkirk. In the meantime the young girl, Briony Tallis, stung with guilt and shame for the suffering she has caused, becomes a nurse in an army hospital treating the Dunkirk evacuees.

The descriptions of the evacuation are breathtakingly vivid, as in this account of a dive-bombing attack on the road to Dunkirk, following Robbie's unavailing attempt to help a Flemish woman and her child:

The blast lifted him forward several feet and drove him face-first into the soil. When he came to, his mouth and nose were filled with dirt. He was trying to clear his mouth, but he had no saliva. He used a finger, but that was worse. He was gagging on the dirt, then he was gagging on his filthy finger. His snot was mud and it covered his mouth. . . . He turned to look back. Where the woman and her son had been was a crater. Even as he saw it, he thought he had always known. That was why he had had to leave them. His business was to survive, though he had forgotten why. He kept on towards the woods.

One incident on the evacuation beach illustrates McEwan's skill in integrating history into his fictional framework. An angry mob of British soldiers, furious over the apparent lack of support from the RAF, gather around a lone British airman and come very close to killing him. In its picture of an innocent victim condemned by appearances (in this case, his RAF uniform), the incident echoes the earlier injustice, Briony's false accusation against Robbie.

Similarly, in the hospital scenes, which we see through Briony's eyes, the accumulated pain and suffering, often described in excrutiatingly precise prose, suggests that she, as well as her patients, undergoing a penitential purgatory, although the book is not weighed down with thematic symbolism. On the contrary, the author never loses sight of the advice Briony receives at the beginning of what will later prove to be a successful career as a writer, "Your most sophisticated readers may be well up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I'm sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens." Atonement combines psychological depth, eloquent prose, and a powerful narrative line. In addition, as a fictional recounting of Dunkirk and its aftermath, it belongs in the front ranks of modern historical fiction.

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