I could hear the matchbox opening. The stranger was trying to light one, but it just sparked and died. “No good. Must have got damp,” he said. “Usually reliable these matches are. Not to worry.” But I was worried. “Here goes.” He struck it again, again, and to my great relief, the match flared and lit up. Ma found her knitting needle almost at once – it had slipped down in between the seats.
I relished every moment that match lasted, and dreaded it going out. One more match left. I needed the story to stop me thinking about that. The match was already burning down fast.
“Is it true, really true, all of it?” I asked him. “What happened? What happened next?”
“All true enough, son. Wish it wasn’t,” said the stranger quietly. “It was like a curse on Billy’s life, hung heavy over him every moment of every day after that. He never told anyone else about it, except Christine. Everyone, all his friends at work, knew he wasn’t quite himself, could tell that he was sad deep inside, that he had troubles. They knew he’d been in the war, of course, what he’d done, the things he must have seen. Some of them, most of them, had been there too, seen the same things, things they only wanted to forget.”
He shook the match out. We were deep in darkness again, a darkness that was blacker than ever. But I made up my mind then that I mustn’t worry about it, just to listen to the story, lose myself in it.
“Billy’s pals in the factory, they understood,” the stranger went on, “or they thought they did. Like Christine, they did their best to cheer him up. But mostly they just left him be. They knew it was best. He went off every morning to the car factory as he had always done, did his job and came back home to Christine in the evenings, but all the time the thought of what he had done, or rather not done, never left his mind, not for a moment.
He didn’t speak any more about it, not even at home now, but kept it to himself, locked inside, as week by week, month by month the news in Europe got worse. What would Hitler do next? Where else was he going to invade? When would it be our turn? It was all anyone talked about these days. Everyone noticed the change in Billy. He seemed to live in a world of his own, distant from his workmates and friends, and distant too now even from Christine, unable any more to joke about his ‘glum time’ as he had before. They stopped going to the pictures, hardly ever went out. He even stopped his drawing, never got out his sketchbooks, not once, which Christine knew was the worst sign of all. He loved to draw. But not any more. For Billy every day now was ‘glum time’, and he never seemed to be able to lift himself out of it.
Christine never stopped trying. She just hoped that one day he would be able to leave his sadness behind and be the man she had once known again, the man she loved, the man she knew was still inside there, who had saved her life when she was little, and who she knew had only ever done what he thought was the right thing, and was now suffering for it.
And then in September, 1938 it was, a couple of years ago now – it seems like yesterday – Mr Chamberlain, the Prime Minister then, goes off to see Mr Hitler up in his mountain home, the Berghof they call it, at a place called Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, and does his best to do a deal with him. You remember that? Well, as we all know now – and we should have known it at the time – you can’t hardly do a deal with the devil, can you? So our Mr Chamberlain comes back home a few days later smiling all over his face, and waving his piece of paper, telling the world that everything was going to be just tickety-boo, that he’d sorted everything out with Mr Hitler, and that we’d all have ‘peace in our time’. Some peace we’ve had, right? We all wanted to believe it, of course we did. But most of us didn’t, and Billy Byron certainly didn’t.”
“Well, I never believed that Mr Chamberlain neither,” said Ma vociferously. “And what’s more, nor did Barney’s dad, nor his grandpa. If you ask me, he was soft in the head believing Hitler like he did. But Grandpa always says you can’t go blaming Chamberlain, any more than you can blame the poor old hen when the wicked old fox comes a-skulking around the henhouse. Only way you can look after the hens is to keep out the fox, or better still, go after him and kill him. And that’s what we got to do. That’s what Barney’s dad’s doing right now. He’s going after him. We’ll soon sort out that foxy Mr Hitler, won’t we, Barney?”
“Well, it’s funny you should say that,” the stranger went on, “because all this time that’s just what Billy had in mind. The more he thought about it – and he thought about little else these days – the more he knew he had to put right what he had done wrong all those years before. Trouble was, of course, he didn’t know what to do, or even if anything could be done. And always at the back of his mind, there was still this last hope, that he could be wrong about this whole thing, that the Fritz soldier whose life he had spared might just have looked like Hitler, and been someone else altogether.
Then out of the blue comes this phone call, to the manager’s office at the Standard car factory where he works. Billy is on a tea break at the time, just sitting on his own and minding his own business when Mr Bennet, the manager, comes looking for him. All of a fluster he is. He tells Billy he’s got to come right away to the phone, now, that it’s a real emergency. So off Billy goes rushing up to the manager’s office, thinking that maybe Christine’s had an accident or she’s ill and in hospital or something. So he’s worried himself sick by the time he gets to the office and picks up the phone.
He recognises the voice on the phone at once. It’s someone whose voice he knows, but he can’t put a face or name to it, can’t work out who it is at all.
“William Byron? That you, Mr Byron?” says the man at the other end of the line. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I have something I have to tell you.” And Billy’s still trying to picture the face to go with the voice, and then the voice tells him, and he still can’t quite believe it. “This is the Prime Minister here, Mr Byron. Mr Chamberlain. I need to speak to you about a matter of some importance.”
“Billy was finding it hard to believe it was really the Prime Minster speaking to him. He didn’t know what to say. He was still trying to find his voice.
“You may know by now, Mr Byron,” the Prime Minister went on, “that I have been visiting Mr Hitler out in Germany recently, at his home in the mountains. While I was there he told me a remarkable story, which I believe to be true, and which I promised I would tell you upon my return, because it concerns you. He told me that towards the end of the last war his life had been spared by a Tommy, at the Battle of Marcoing, he said, in September 1918. It is a moment he has never forgotten. He later discovered, through a photograph in a newspaper, that the Tommy soldier responsible for this act of mercy was you, Mr Byron. He recognised you from a photograph of you receiving your Victoria Cross from His Majesty the King. He showed me the photograph himself. He still has it. Then he took me into his study, and showed me a painting he has on the wall. It is of you, Mr Byron, carrying a wounded man into a Field Hospital on your back, painted I believe by some Italian artist – I forget his name. A fine painting it is too. Dated 1918. Now it has since been confirmed to me that you did in fact carry a man into a Field Hospital just like that, and I am assured that what Mr Hitler has told me is very likely to be true. You were at the Battle of Marcoing, were you not?”
“I was, sir,” Billy replies.
“It was when you won your VC. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And am I correct in saying that you did indeed spare the life of a German soldier in this battle?”
“I did, sir,” says Billy.
“As I thought. Well, Mr Hitler, the German Chancellor, wants me to tell you how grateful he is to you, and to pass on his thanks and his best wishes. I have to say, Mr Byron, that what you did that day back in 1918, that act of mercy, might very well have helped to keep the peace twenty years later. Speaking of what happened that day to him, of how you spared his life, put Mr Hitler in a good humour. I am delighted to say that he spoke of you and of the British Army with ad
miration and respect, all of which greatly helped to bring our discussions to a closer understanding, and in the end, I believe, to a most successful conclusion. By this one act of human kindness, you may well have helped the cause of peace. Goodbye, Mr Byron, and thank you.”
That was it. He put the phone down.
As you can imagine, Billy walked home from the factory that day in a daze, a spring in his step, cock-a-hoop with new hope. All right, so the Fritz soldier whose life he had saved had been Adolf Hitler; but maybe, after all, just maybe, it didn’t matter. Perhaps he had done the right thing all those years before. And Hitler might not be the ogre that Billy and everyone else seemed to believe he was. The man did have a heart. Maybe there really might be ‘peace in our time’, as Mr Chamberlain had promised us, and if so, then he, Private Billy Byron, might even have helped to make it happen.”
“Chamberlain really phoned him up?” Ma interrupted him. “Just like that? How d’you know that? How do you know it’s true?”
“Because Billy told me himself,” said the stranger. “All of it. And Billy don’t lie. Like I say, I know him, I’ve knowed him just about all my life. He keeps a lot to himself, but he don’t lie. He don’t make stuff up. He’s not like that.”
“Is that the end of the story?” I asked him then. To be honest, I was disappointed. I wasn’t that bothered if the tale was true or not. I liked exciting endings, and to end on a phone call wasn’t exactly exciting, no matter who it came from, whether it was a Prime Minister or not.
But more important, I remembered then that there was only one more match left, and the train was still stuck in the blackness of the tunnel. I needed the story to go on, to be longer. I needed something to take my mind off the darkness.
“No, it’s not the end,” the stranger replied. “But that would have been the best ending, son, wouldn’t it? The happy-ever-after ending. Peace in our time. No more war. That was the ending Billy wanted, the ending we all wanted. I wish I could make it a happy ending for you. But one way or another, things didn’t quite work out like that, as you know. They often don’t. Otherwise Coventry wouldn’t have been blitzed, and your house would still be standing, and you and I wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t be telling you this story. The ending may not be the ending you want, son, but I can promise you one thing: it won’t be the ending you expect.”
He paused for a while before he went on. “Anyway,” he began again, “it looked like things would work out, for a while at least. Billy was almost his old self after that phone call. He began drawing once more – birds mostly, in particular a woodpecker that came again and again to the garden, black and white he was, with a flash of bright red behind. Christine was overjoyed at the change in him. She had her Billy back.
They started going out to the pictures again. But the trouble was that every time they went, there was another of those newsreels to sit through, and every time they showed soldiers on the march, German soldiers, thousands of them, and Hitler was up there on the screen and he wasn’t talking peace. Still, despite that, Billy went on hoping for the best. S’pose we all did. But then – when was it? – in March last year, 1939, Hitler marches his soldiers into Czechoslovakia, occupies the whole country, and Billy knows then what we all knew, that his jack-booted army wouldn’t stop at Czechoslovakia. We all realised now, and Billy did too, that the piece of paper that Chamberlain waved in the air that day was worthless. We’d all been fooled. We’d all believed what we wanted to believe, what Hitler wanted us to believe. But after the invasion of Czechoslovakia we all knew the truth. We all knew what was coming. It wasn’t a case any more of if there was a war, it was when.
Time and again Billy and Christine saw him on the newsreels in the cinema, Hitler shaking his fist at the world, Hitler swaggering, hectoring, bullying, threatening. Billy saw the endless parades of strutting, goose-stepping soldiers, of tanks rolling by, the skies full of warplanes, and always Hitler was standing there, revelling in his power, and hungry for more. Billy knew for sure what we all know now that here was a tyrant, a man of evil, who had only one thing in mind – to make war, to conquer and destroy.
All Billy could think now was that somehow this man had to be stopped; that twenty years before he had done the wrong thing and now he must do the right thing. He had to right the wrong he had done. He decided once and for all what he was going to do. He thought of the thousands, and millions maybe, of little Christines out there. It would be just like it had been before in the last war. He had to stop the suffering before it began, that was all there was to it. He had no choice.
Billy went alone, never said a word to Christine. He just walked out of the house early one morning as if he was going to work. But he didn’t have lunch in his bag. He had other things. He had his passport and papers, some money, and hidden away in the false bottom of the suitcase, the pistol from the biscuit tin under the bed. In his jacket pocket he had his lucky black pebble from Bridlington. He had his box of pencils and his sketchbook too, and his little folding stool strapped to his suitcase. He had everything he needed.
They were all part of the plan. He had thought it through, down to the last detail. Billy knew he would need all the luck he could get for the plan to work. He’d left a note on the mantelpiece, telling Christine that he had something he had to do, something that wouldn’t wait, that he would be back in a couple of weeks or so. In the note he asked her to go to the factory to tell Mr Bennet that he’d be off work for a while, to tell him it was his gammy leg giving him trouble again, to tell him he was sorry. She wasn’t to worry, he wrote. He’d be back, and he loved her. He always had done, and he always would.”
“Billy got on the train in Coventry that morning, knowing exactly what he was intending to do. He had found out all he could from the library, from the newspapers. He knew where he was going. That had been simple enough to work out. He had decided that near Hitler’s mountain home in the Alps, the Berghof, near Berchtesgaden, where Mr Chamberlain had gone before, would be the best place to do it – he’d seen photographs of that place and of Hitler walking his dog in the snow, with the mountains and the forests behind. He had read that Hitler went there as often as he could. But exactly how it was to be done, where and when – he knew that would depend on keeping to his plan, on fate, and on his own patience. He only knew it had to be done, had to be tried, whatever the consequences.
So he took the train to London, and then the boat across the Channel to Calais. He didn’t doubt for one moment as he was leaving that this was the only thing he could do, but as he looked out from the stern of the ship at the white cliffs of Dover, he wondered if he would ever see them again. It wasn’t likely, he thought. In his mind it was as if he was going over the top again, just gritting his teeth and doing what had to be done. He knew then that the chances of survival were not good. What will be, will be, he thought. It helped, in a way, that he began to feel seasick then – he had forgotten how that felt after all these years. His stomach churned with the roll of the ship. How he wished he had stayed at home. The sight of the French coast lifted his spirits, but the waves kept heaving until they were in port.
The French Customs official hardly gave him or his passport a glance, and soon he was in Paris, and on the train down to Munich. At the German frontier in the middle of the night it was a very different matter altogether. Everyone in the carriage was questioned by a frontier policeman, passports and papers scrupulously examined. He seemed courteous enough with his questions. But Billy felt the threat behind every one.
“And why are you coming to Germany, please? What reason?”
“I’m an artist,” Billy told him. “I am going walking in the Alps, drawing the mountains, the wildlife, the birds.”
The policeman demanded to see his work.
Billy showed him his sketchbook.
He seemed satisfied, impressed even. “Good,” he said, “very good. You will like our mountains. They are very beautiful, the most beautiful in the world. And now your suitcase,
please? I have to see your suitcase.”
Billy opened it for him, his heart pounding in his ears.
The policeman picked up the pencil case first, and opened it. Then he took out his pyjamas, and his socks, all his clothes, examining them all closely. He pulled out everything, emptied the suitcase entirely, then felt around the bottom of it, the false bottom, with the pistol hidden and taped underneath it, right under his searching fingers.
Time itself seemed to slow during those moments, so that the moments became minutes. At last, he seemed satisfied. “You travel with very little,” said the frontier policeman. “Welcome to Germany. Heil Hitler!”
And that was it. Billy could breathe again.
Munich station was full of soldiers, full of policemen. So many people seemed to be in uniform, even some of the children too. There were swastikas everywhere, worn as armbands, hanging on buildings. A military band was playing somewhere, the thumping of drums and clashing of cymbals, echoing around the station – drums of war, Billy felt. The more he looked about him, the more he could see that this was a country making ready for war, on the march. It only confirmed in him his determination to go through with what he had in mind.
He didn’t stay in Munich any longer than he had to. He could feel there were watching eyes everywhere. From Munich he caught a bus to the mountains. He rented a room in a quiet village he had found on the map, just a few miles from Hitler’s house in the mountains – far enough away, he hoped, not to arouse suspicion. The important thing, Billy knew, was to be inconspicuous, which was not easy. He was obviously foreign, obviously English, and a tourist. So to begin with, he played the part he needed to play, going nowhere near the Berghof, just going out walking every day, sitting down on his stool and sketching somewhere near the village, till everyone got used to seeing him about, seeing him intent on his drawing.
An Eagle in the Snow Page 6