The Drawing of Lots at Rosendaël

Dunkirk perimeter, 2 June 1940. For ten days now, the British Expeditionary Force has been falling back towards the sea, caught in a pincer by the German advance across Flanders. Operation Dynamo is shipping tens of thousands of men back to England, packed onto the moles, the makeshift gangways and the little ships that have come from all along the south coast. But the embarkation is slow, the sky is thick with Stukas, and every place on a boat is fought over bitterly. At Rosendaël, in the city's eastern suburbs, your aid post — one of the Casualty Clearing Stations attached to the 12th — is overflowing with soldiers gathered up under fire.

You are a military doctor. Under your orders and those of your colleagues lie hundreds of badly wounded men: open fractures, amputees, the unconscious, the burned. Not one of them can stand, let alone cross the crowded pontoons or wait for hours out in the open on the beach. To move them would take a miracle; to haul them by force onto a ship would kill them, and would take up the place of able-bodied fighting men who might still be saved. The noose is tightening: the enemy will be in Dunkirk before long.

There remains the question no one wants to ask aloud. These wounded cannot leave, and they cannot be left alone, without morphine, without dressings, abandoned to their fate at the moment the city falls. Yet the medical staff could embark and reach England, where their hands are so desperately needed. You must decide within a few hours.