England Expects (Empires Lost)

by Jackson, Charles S.

  Lloyd moved to stand as a precursor to coming to attention as Trumbull reached the top of the stairs and opened the door to the tower deck, but the squadron leader would have none of it.

  “No, no – keep your seat, trooper,” he insisted with a wave of his hand. “I’m just wandering about – don’t mind me.”

  “Don’t mind at all, sir...” Lloyd assured genially, glad of someone to talk to and too experienced a soldier to be put off by a squadron leader’s rank. “Happy to have the company: ‘been a bit boring up here on my own.”

  “I’m sure it has been,” Trumbull agreed, inspecting the instruments Lloyd controlled with the well-faked air of someone who had some idea as to what their intended use was. “What is it you’re actually doing?”

  “On radar watch, sir: four hours of keeping an eye out for any aircraft heading our way and trying to decide whether they’re hostile or not.”

  “That little thing is a radar set?” Trumbull was impressed, although the technological surprises were no longer ‘amazing’ him so much. The control unit itself was a flat, dark screen set into the lid of a plastic, oblong box roughly the size and shape of a very large suitcase and coloured army green. Luminous green symbols flickered and disappeared across it like the science-fiction equivalent of unintelligible runes, first moving one way then another. The only radar installations Trumbull had ever seen were the ‘Chain Home Low’ stations that dotted the coastline and warned Fighter Command of impending attacks, and those towers of those were a good forty metres or so high – 130 feet tall in Trumbull’s world.

  “This one’s only a small set, sir: detection range is only about a hundred and fifty kilometres at high altitude, although that reduces significantly as you approach sea level. Those little green ‘V’ symbols are ‘visible’ aircraft along with their altitudes in metres and their relative airspeed in knots. We’re the small dot at the centre of the screen, and those static green lines are an overlaid map of The Orkneys and Scapa Flow.”

  “Metres and kilometres, eh…?” Trumbull said dubiously. He was aware of the European system of measurements but cared for it little. The conversions were simple enough with a bit of practice, but he couldn’t see the point of using such a complicated system when Imperial measurements were a viable alternative.

  “Hardly anyone uses the ‘old’ Imperial system where I come from, sir,” Lloyd grinned, suddenly noting one of the myriad differences that separated his world from Trumbull’s. “The British use metric as well now, and even the Yanks are starting to use it...”

  “Even the Americans…?” The pilot was inwardly a little disheartened by that news – he was as aware as was any informed man of the stubborn and reactionary nature of the American psyche. “My God, we must beat the Germans!”

  “No, sir – it’s not like that at all,” Lloyd laughed softly, thinking Trumbull must’ve feared the metric system forced upon its 21st Century users. “The world just decided it was a simpler system to use.”

  “If you say so, trooper…” Trumbull decided uncertainly, frowning at the idea. At that point the soft music intruded on his thoughts and he was drawn to the iPod sitting in its dock by Lloyd’s left arm. It was an almost identical model to the one Thorne carried with him, although the calibre of music playing there seemed an improvement at least to Trumbull’s ears.

  “The music, sir…?” Lloyd noted the officer’s interest. “It’s called an ‘iPod’…” he explained, sounding out the word more phonetically than was probably necessary. “Where I come from we use them, and devices like them, to carry music with us so we can listen to it any time we want.” The Green Day song Wake Me Up When September Ends played as Trumbull approached and had a closer look.

  “An ‘Eye-Pod’…?” Trumbull repeated the unfamiliar name as a question. “It plays music, you say?” He craned his neck to glance at the rear of the unit, as if the view from a different angle might somehow make the device’s inner workings more explicable. “Like a reel-to-reel tape player?”

  “Something like that…just a bit smaller, though,” The SAS trooper nodded with a grin, removing the iPod Classic completely from the dock to afford Trumbull a closer look, the music ceasing instantly. He handed the player across and the RAF pilot turned it over in his hands. At just a little more than 100mm tall, 60mm wide and just 10mm deep, the tiny music and video player weighed in at just 140 grams and felt incredibly light.

  “Just a little smaller, eh?” Trumbull have a wry smile. “And just how many thousands of songs does this little thing surely contain, I wonder?” He added with the hint of light sarcasm, choosing a number he expected to be a wild exaggeration.

  “About forty thousand sir, give-or-take…depending on the formatting of the music files of course…” Lloyd answered honestly, not catching the attempted humour in the question.

  “Of course,” Trumbull chuckled out loud at that, shaking his head in bewilderment and taking solace in the fact that at least the trooper hadn’t seemed to realise the joke had fallen flat and he’d made a fool of himself.

  He handed the iPod back to Lloyd, who in turn immediately placed it back into its speaker dock and restarted the music. Trumbull took time to actually listen to the music now as the song continued where it had left off. It wasn’t Cole Porter or good jazz, but there was a strangely hypnotic quality to it that appealed to the emotions more than to the mind. As the track ended, Trumbull couldn’t for the life of him work out whether or not he actually liked the stuff. It was certainly an improvement over the caterwauling, so-called ‘music’ Thorne had played in the F-35 on the flight up to Scapa Flow the day before.

  The song came to an end in that moment and the shuffle feature picked another Green Day song at random. The opening bars of ‘American Idiot’ issued from the speakers with substantially greater volume, and the RAF pilot gave a disapproving grimace, his unaccustomed ears again finding the raucous rock riffs of electric guitars quite unpleasant. Revising his initial assessment of the music, he gave the grinning trooper a sour look.

  “Are you certain we won this war?” He asked with a dubious frown, and Lloyd could only chuckle at that question.

  The barn was relatively small and barely larger than the main farmhouse to the north. It was also quite dark inside as Ritter slowly approached its half-open doors, the only visible light streaming in beams from the open loading bay in the loft above the doors, and through the multitude of tiny spaces between roof tiles and the wooden planks of the walls. Dust motes swirled and eddied in those sparkling streaks of illumination beyond the control of any noticeable breeze. Hesitating a moment, Ritter turned back toward Wisch standing a few yards behind him.

  “Take your men and stand back a dozen metres or so…” Ritter ordered softly, making no sudden movements as he spoke in soft, level tones. “Under no circumstances are you to come any closer or enter the barn without my express command…is that clear?”

  “Completely, Mein Herr…” Wisch nodded, beckoning to the three panzer crewmen standing nearby. All four men began to back away carefully.

  With a nod, Ritter once more began to move toward the opening, attempting to seem as if he suspected nothing. At the entrance, his hand rested upon the edge of one of the large, wooden doors as he hesitated momentarily, wondering how he should proceed. Although there was no immediate emergency, time was certainly of the essence. His flight was scheduled to take-off in just an hour and there was still a lot of pre-flight preparation to be made. The possibility of being late wasn’t a particular concern –he was the commanding officer after all, and could demand a little latitude as a result – however excessive tardiness would cause interest in potentially unwanted places and that kind of interest was something he could definitely do without. Although his conscious mind was as yet unaware of it, the beginning of an idea was forming in his subconscious that might’ve seemed unthinkable just two days earlier.

  Once inside, he spotted the hiding place Wisch had spoken of immediately although he cast
no more that a cursory glance in that direction as his eyes adjusted slowly to the alternating segments of darkness and light as beams of sunlight stabbed downward in sharp, clearly defined ‘pillars’. Most of the farm equipment inside the barn – an old plough, a threshing machine of primitive design and a few other pieces – seemed to be in disrepair or disuse. No one to use them, he supposed, since the father was dead. He forced that sentiment from his mind.

  Regardless of the atrocity committed here, he thought sternly, trying to be logical, it should be remembered this family was Resistance – they were spying on the airbase! My airbase! But the rationalisation instantly disgusted him: it sounded like something that might come from SS animals like Stahl and Barkmann rather than a man of honour and dignity.

  A guttural, angry sound – almost a growl – was born and died in a second at the bottom of his throat. He was becoming frustrated by the conflict created between his old loyalties and the new one that was struggling to the fore, still unnamed, unrecognised and waiting to be fully realised. Although he was a master at tactical planning and military operations, Ritter despised complexity in the goings-on of day-to-day life – one of the reasons the military had so attracted him as a young man. Life in its essence, he believed, should be kept as simple as possible. Yet people – and life itself, sometimes – continually ‘conspired’ to prevent that and add complexity. That was something Ritter couldn’t tolerate and that SS bastard, Stahl, had just made his life exactly that. It was another not-insignificant reason for Ritter to despise him, and the lieutenant-colonel suddenly felt very silly sneaking about in this barn.

  “I know you’re here...Antoine…” He stated finally in clear, slow French, needing to search his mind for the name the boy had given. He directed the words directly at the place of hiding, nothing but soft gentleness in a voice that showed none of the apprehension or indecision he felt. “I understand you’re scared and want to hide, but I’ve very little time. I know what’s happened and want to help you if I can.”

  He didn’t talk ‘down’ to the child as he’d often observed other adults doing. His own experience of children was limited –his wife, Maria had given birth to just one child in their six years of marriage so far, and their son – Werner Josef – hadn’t lived beyond the age of twelve months. There’d been no evidence of why the boy had actually died, but infant mortality being what it was in the first half of the 20th Century, their doctor had simply diagnosed the cause as ‘Crib Death’; something that was exceedingly common and something that in more modern times would become known by the more medical but no less sinister or terrible title of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

  Ritter generally found it impossible to make the coy, childish and silly speech of others when relating to children. He believed, and to some extent had been proven right by his own experience relating to the offspring of others, that if one spoke to a child of reasonable age slowly, softly and clearly they’d often understand exactly what you were talking about…as long as they wanted to understand to begin with.

  “My unit must go away this afternoon and I’ve only a short time to help you...” For a few moments he thought there’d be no answer, and he momentarily feared that perhaps Wisch had been mistaken or had played him for a fool. Then he heard the voice. It was soft – so soft he might almost have missed it but for the hate and venom it contained.

  “You killed them...!” The acid, French tones cut Ritter in a way he’d never before experienced. “You’re all Nazis! You hurt them – you killed them...!”

  “You know that’s not true – I wasn’t there!” There was even the hint of defensiveness in Ritter’s tone as he spoke, so greatly did the child’s words sting him.

  “You were there! I saw you! You were there last night with the other Germans!”

  “I came too late to stop them. If you saw me, then you saw me hit the other one for what he did.” The German officer suddenly found himself defending his own actions – indeed his own heritage – in a way he’d never before been forced to by anyone at any other time in his life. To receive such vilification from a child no more than five years old was sobering and a matter for some concern.

  “He killed my mother…my sister! Kill him!”

  “I couldn’t – believe me, I wanted to but I couldn’t...” Ritter pleaded desperately. How could he explain such moral issues to a child who’d suffered so terribly, particularly when he wasn’t entirely convinced himself? “I wasn’t allowed to–”

  “You’re a monster like them!” Antoine screamed back defiantly, and there was an explosion of noise as he burst from the hiding place and tried to bolt past Ritter. The pilot was too quick even for the lightning speed of a child to elude at such close range, and one of his strong arms had encircled the boy’s waist in a second, preventing any escape. Antoine immediately began thrashing and screaming in Ritter’s arms, attempting to rain blows on the captor that held him from behind. Some of those blows struck home and although none of them hurt particularly, he was sufficiently unbalanced to send them both crashing to the hay-strewn, earthen floor. All the same, Ritter never once lost his grip.

  “You’re all right, Herr Oberstleutnant?” Wisch’s call came from just beyond the doors. The young NCO was concerned by the commotion.

  “Yes I’m all right, damn you!” Ritter bellowed wildly back, still struggling with the boy as they both sat splay-legged on the ground, one in front of the other. “Piss off!” The intensity of the matter at hand precluded any other phrase that might’ve so concisely summed up his intent.

  “Let me go!” Antoine screamed hysterically, fighting all the while against the officer’s iron grip. “They’ll kill me too! Let me go!”

  “They won’t kill you!” Ritter spoke over the boy’s cries. “They won’t kill you, or harm you in any way – I’ll see to that.” Whether it was the steely sound of the pilot’s voice at that point or whether the boy just ran out of strength was impossible to tell, but the struggling definitely began to subside.

  “I saw…!” He wailed, his voice returning to a normal volume. “They made me see…! I saw…!” And the entirety of what the boy meant suddenly struck home.

  “Mein Gott...” Ritter moaned softly, reverting to German in his horror. “God in Heaven…!” He cradled the boy gently now as Antoine began to cry, turning to bury his face in Ritter’s shoulder. “Dear God in Heaven.” He could only repeat the phrase once more, devoid of anything useful he might say that could possibly respond to that shocking revelation.

  ‘…You’re just like them…!’ The boy had screamed in accusation because he’d not killed Stahl. ‘…You’re just like them…!’ As the pain and disgust washed across him, the boy sobbed against his chest and Ritter found he couldn’t stop the tears either. In that moment, he believed the boy was right.

  6.

  Opening Moves

  Airfield at St. Omer

  Northern France

  Sunday

  June 30, 1940

  Ritter was once again completely composed by the time Staff Flight and I/ZG26 were ready for take-off, the twenty-six mottled-patterned heavy-fighters waiting in two rows of thirteen at the near end of the airstrip. All the trucks but one had already left, beginning their afternoon journey to the train station, and the last was waiting under Ritter’s specific orders.

  Ritter himself was in the communications room, just as he’d been first thing that morning. This time however he wasn’t reporting to Fliegerkorps. In that hectic thirty minutes since he’d found the boy, a wild and irrational idea had taken root within his mind; one that a calm and logical Carl Ritter well might’ve dismissed as ludicrous only a few weeks or even days before. Had he been consulted, Willi Meier certainly would’ve considered his commanding officer mad. The captain hadn’t been consulted at all however: the first person other than Ritter to know of his idea was eventually to be the man he was trying to get in contact with at the other end of the phone.

  The main base switchboard shared t
he room with the radios and Ritter had instructed it to be cleared of everyone save himself and the operator on duty. The non-com was astounded when his CO indicated who he wished to speak to, but a moment or so later he was nevertheless attempting to put Ritter in direct contact with Reichsmarschall Kurt Reuters.

  At first they met with little success – the all-powerful military principle of ‘chain of command’ saw to that – and it took Ritter himself getting on the phone before the sergeants and lieutenants they initially encountered at the other end began to take notice. After ten minutes of discussion and argument, which included the ‘dressing down’ of a truculent army major that in all probability would see Ritter end up on a charge, he was finally put in direct contact with Schiller, the Reichsmarschall’s aide.

  “This is Generalleutnant Albert Schiller speaking, Herr Ritter: what is it you require of the Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht?” The tone was inquisitive but also detached, with almost a faint hint of amusement.

  “Herr General, thank you for your time: I must speak with the Reichsmarschall immediately – it’s extremely important.”

  “May I inquire as to the nature of this ‘importance’?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s a matter I can speak of only with Reichsmarschall Reuters.” The matter-of-fact tone of Ritter’s gentle rebuttal hid the fact that his initial rush of adrenaline had subsided to be supplanted by fear and uncertainty, and he was quickly coming to his senses regarding what he was actually doing. As he waited desperately, images of not only being refused audience but also of a court-martial flashed through Ritter’s mind in the seconds before Schiller finally gave his considered answer.