There is something unreal about the whole scene that stormy Tuesday evening at Dunkirk; one flyboat with no guns and its mast unstepped, another with no running rigging, another waterlogged and on its beam ends in the mud of the canal; some barges left uncaulked and already beginning to leak; others whose seams started the minute they were loaded; and the soldiers being tumbled into the sound barges like sacks of wheat, laughing incredulously when they saw the bare coffin-shaped boxes in which they were expected to put to sea.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 726