He trailed off, the blue eyes sliding downwards in an affectation of disquiet. Stanley rankled at the impertinence of the German officer, in leaving the issue vague – a matter of honour! Some of the more knowing of the assembled rolled their eyes; others scowled. It was no secret that SS and, it was said, even Wehrmacht conduct in Poland had been abysmal. The legitimate persecutions of Germans living in the lost lands of the ‘Polish Corridor’ that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany after the Great War, was used to justify embarking on an orgy of unadulterated violence and terror, news of which slowly seeped west. Fire, bullets, bombs and rope; the four weapons freely wielded by the SS in the excessive brutality of their campaign. However, some of the more naïve British soldiers looked uncomfortable or even ashamed; embarrassed by the ungentlemanly conduct with which they were being accused of waging war.
“Furthermore,” Stanley blustered, indignant. “I should like your word of honour as an officer and a gentleman, that the rumours we heard of an SS massacre of British POWs as the Pas-de-Calais front collapsed, is categorically not true, Sir!”
“It is categorically not true, Sergeant Hitchman,” Major Wolf instantly replied, unwavering and firm.
James noticed shrewdly that the younger officer who had read roll call had looked down at his feet, as though embarrassed. The major added, “Waffen SS participation on the battlefield initially caused elements in the Wehrmacht command to register their resentment, to effectively have the panzer formations folded into the army and the divisions absorbed. False complaints of SS military capabilities and conduct were a natural by-product, but ultimately fruitless as the Führer was most delighted with the performance of the Waffen SS, the military bearers of his political will, if you like, and as such, the regular army dissidents in question have been brought to heel.”
This was met by silence.
“Are there any other questions?” The major asked, affecting an air of innocence. At least, that’s how it looked to Tommy, who piped up.
“When are you krauts going to let us go home?”
Again, with uncanny sensory awareness and speed, Major Wolf’s icy blue eyes found Tommy, fixing on the young man with unwaveringly intensity. “I’m sorry, Private?” he asked softly. Shouting was unnecessary; the only sound heard was faint birdsong from the thin, sickly trees around the camp, their gnarled branches twisting grotesquely in living death.
Tommy was unrepentant, to say nothing of unfazed. Being under fire in the terrible German onslaught had changed the men; all were hardened, calloused by combat. Stung by defeat, but unbroken. The German sized him up impassively, calmly holding the cockney’s stare with an unwavering cool. Tommy did not drop his gaze. Major Wolf approached him, unhurriedly, the dull thud of the jackboots echoing slightly in the total silence.
Before the major physically reached Tommy, the British soldier preempted the threats he suspected would surely follow. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought darkly.
“I said when are we going to be let home. The war is over, unfortunately.”
The clip-clop of jackboots continued at the same maddening pace, until Major Wolf reached Private Tommy Watson of the BEF. Despite himself, at close proximity, Tommy began to feel uncomfortable. Wolf was roughly the same height – six feet – but with the jackboots, cap and the impeccably sleek uniform, medals on his chest visible through the open black trench coat, Major Wolf was an undeniably commanding figure. The icy blue eyes weighed him up and down, neutrally. Calmly. That terrible calm.
“Is it not customary in the British military to address a superior officer by his rank title?” he asked.
Tommy suspected that punishment would follow. In for a penny…
“As long as he’s in the military too,” he blurted.
At that, Wolf smiled; a small, toothy gesture. Perfectly neat, white teeth in a straight row. There was not an element of his personage that wasn’t kept immaculate.
In the shocked silence, he stepped forwards until he was unnervingly close. When he spoke, it was with the same awful calm.
“I hold the rank of Sturmbannführer, or ‘Major’, young Private. It applies throughout the SS. I served on active duty in the Waffen-SS; Czecho-Slovakia, and then Poland, where I commanded a panzer battalion, and then once again when we conquered Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Great Britain in the space of twelve weeks. Now, I have a new role. You will address me as Major, Private, and I will not ask again.”
Tommy willed himself to hold the major’s gaze, but wilted under their resolute will of steely blue.
“Private?” Wolf asked.
“When do we go home, Major Wolf,” Tommy mumbled, looking at the floor.
“As soon as the Führer deems it appropriate,” the SS officer said with a pleasant smile that did not quite reach his eyes. “In the meantime, any problems you gentlemen have settling in to life at St George no.5, please do not hesitate to bring to my attention any problems that you have, through Obersturmführer, or Lieutenant Hoffman, my immediate subordinate here at St George no.5 and the designated liaison officer between you enlisted men of the British Expeditionary Forces here, and the Schutzstaffel officer class.”
And as he began to briskly stroll back to the gates, he turned, briefly, to address the ranks of men, saluting as he did so. “Good day, gentlemen.”
Major Wolf turned back, and marched briskly through the gates leading back to the long brick building, which he entered, disappearing from sight. Lieutenant Hoffman, the officer whom had barked out the roll call, resumed the position left by the camp Commandant.
“Sergeant Hitchman, this company is yours to organise. Lunch-time in the mess.”
If Hitchman was taken aback, he recovered quickly.
“All right men. Dis…MISSED! Fall out!”
The men filed out in orderly fashion. Stanley surmised they were glad of the continuation of military discipline. In tough times, the military order was a comfort in and of itself. It was their salvation after catastrophe.
Tommy, Brian and James Wilkinson hung back. James Fletcher winked, muttering “fill me in later. I’m hungry.” They filed in just before Stanley, marching off to lunch like some strange training drill, under the still watchful eyes of the SS, and then they sat straight down at a table with Stanley.
“That’s not wise, Tommy old boy,” Stanley began. With ‘his boys’, he didn’t bother with military rank; he’d enlisted too, after all, and he enjoyed the affection they bestowed on him as the older man. Their collective bond was strong; had to be strong, after the Meuse, retreat, Dunkirk… capitulation.
“The last thing we need is to start antagonising Jerry while we’re fenced off here in the damned forest.”
“I was only saying what everyone was thinking, Sarge,” Tommy scowled.
James raised an eyebrow. “Aye… maybe there’s a reason no one else said it though? Oh, and uh… nice touch in disrespecting him.”
“Well someone had to stick up for us, and I didn’t hear your contribution you gormless nancy.”
“Ah, interesting choice of insult from a London boy.”
“What?”
“You soft southern bastard; London is nothing but plague, perverts and chimney sweeps. I’m not gonna be called a coward by Oliver Twist’s retarded uncle.”
“Yes you bleeding well are, you sheep-shagging scallywag.”
“Original Twist, the sequel.”
The flat, deadpan Yorkshire attitude and dry northern humour was his primary tool against the more headstrong cockney. Naturally sardonic, the northerner is often more than equipped for the verbal spats with their southern counterparts, whose lazy reliance on ‘caveman’ stereotypes often results in a verbal unravelling. Sarcasm is a weapon, and James was the brand of Yorkshireman that had difficulty answering the first question of the day in a serious manner. Tommy, too, came from a close-knit urban community, and carried its traits of easy argument and masculine chest-beating. Something about the debate just ap
pealed to the tribalist nature of an island people with imperialist goals; in lieu of external enemies, fight and hate each other.
James and Tommy – neither man harbouring any real ill will – both privately enjoyed their silly squabbles, and with the stress of war, had come to rely on the routine for its assuring familiarity. It gave them a semblance of home life, however slight. Being interned had, thus far, done little to change either man or the dynamics of the wider group.
“Shut up, you northern ponce,” Tommy snapped back.
“Shandy.”
“It’s grim up north…”
James nodded, supremely pokerfaced. “Shandy.”
“Pigeons, whippets and coalmines,” Tommy sneered, before reciting, “Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred, strong in’t’ arm an’ thick in’t’ head!”
“Compelling! Leeds United. Parks. Trees. Country pubs. Cheap beer. No shandy.”
“You’re not even from Leeds, you Yorkshire twat!”
Tommy’s voice betrayed angst. James was calm. The others suspected that he would have worn the same pokerfaced expression had he been part of the B Company 2nd Battalion that faced the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift.
“Shandy.”
Stanley sighed at the familiar argument. “All right, all right,” he interjected wearily; clipped Norfolk tones cutting through the distinctively accented north and south spat. James tipped his typically Yorkshire flat cap to the cockney, and looked to Stanley, who resumed: “We’re in a bad spot right now, chaps. A bad spot. The jolly good news is that we’re apparently a damn sight more worthwhile than the Poles, and the SS are being uncharacteristically nice. I say until we work out what the devil is going on around here; we do our best to keep it that way.”
“So what do we do?” Brian asked. It was the Yorkshireman that answered.
“Go to class and learn how to be a perfect Nazi. Learn some German while we’re at it.” James scowled. “Then we’ll be able t’order sauerkraut in Hamburg, and one of those giant mugs of ale without using a translator. Family ’olidays…”
“Hilarious guv’nor,” said Tommy sourly.
“No, it’s very much not,” the Sergeant said, and shrugged. “But given the circumstances… in all probability, he’s right. Let’s just see what our new SS friends like Major Wolf have in mind.”
James, unusually talkative but warming to his role as a sardonic commentator, looked over to the SS guard on duty in the dining hall. “I’m not looking forward to t’ next full moon.”
“The Land That Time Forgot,” the man intoned to himself, under his breath. The words were lost to the winds. As the gusts subsided at intervals, the sound of his footsteps echoing in almost total silence was unnerving; it felt like the main street of some remote Texan ghost town; a desolate chunk of humanity in the desert. Certainly not a central district of the capital of western civilisation; London, the city and beating heart of the world’s largest empire.
“For now,” he muttered again, verbalising his thoughts. All senses tingled; he was conscious of the rustle of leaves, shrill whoosh of the wind He crept on, through the eerily silent streets of Bloomsbury.
The windswept street on which proudly sat the Royal Oak public house was a cobbled, stony testament to hundreds of years of London history; the loves, lives, blood sweat and tears of the capital’s melting pot of people had bled themselves over the stones until they were etched into the very fabric of the city itself, becoming part of its eternal energy, ethereal and tangible alike. The road seemed indistinguishable from the multitude of identical streets around that part of Bloomsbury, reassuringly in the interregnum between fashionable and unintimidating to the common man, and was a welcoming enough place for the Londoner in need of a drink.
“Perfect,” old Arthur Speakman the landlord would say. “From the writers to these petit bourgeois the commies always chelp about, workers, students, graduates, locals to passing trade from the centre, we ’ave it all. We’re the hub.”
Famed for its group of resident writers and intellectuals that took the area’s name as their own, and with a hotpotch that covered all bases of the lower-middle and middle classes, Bloomsbury was, much like Camden, a mixed bag. It was not uncommon to hear a medley of dialects from around the capital spoken there; indeed, several regular voices in the Royal Oak had more than a hint of Bow Bells, as opposed to the more local twang of vowels and consonants that is fostered within the sound of the church bells of St Pancras and St George. The trademark garden squares that punctuated the dense mass of duplicate streets and the Royal Oak attracted clientele that often stretched from as wide as Camden to Covent Garden, right across the capital’s central districts. On summer’s days, with birdsong and sunlight brightening the appeal of the Bloomsbury garden squares, the Royal Oak pub was a heaving mass of booze-soaked Londoners whose city experience was only brightened by its energy.
But in these dark days, the once welcoming street had an eerie gloom to it, as though a cold shadow had crept in with the early autumnal winds and taken its people unaware. Its icy grip was wrapped around the hearts of every living thing in sight; even animals no longer lingered, their scurried patter through the shadows encapsulated the mood among the human populace, whose bowed heads and hesitant gait betrayed latent unease. Verbalised thoughts were shared cheerily enough; foreign invasion and occupation was not enough to quell black humour in England. Even death cannot crush the spirit in which it exists.
However, it would take more than banter to genuinely lift the mood. People were thankful that alcohol had not yet been rationed in the way that fruit was, yet the sight and sound of uninhibited laughter was long gone.
“Ten at bleedin’ night, would you credit it?”
It was the grumble of an old man; taking advantage of a lull in the wind, he retrieved a thin wooden pipe from the multifarious interior of his great coat, and emptied a tiny clump Dunhill tobacco from a crinkled pouch into its small opening. “Bloody curfew. Makes you feel like a bleedin’ child.”
The swarthy man, sat beside him on the garden square bench, murmured his agreement.
“Be indoors at closing time; anyone caught out after a pint liable to be denaa’nced… makes your heart bleed, don’t it?”
The weatherbeaten Londoner took a thoughtful toke on his cheap cigarette; some low end brand from the black market, which variously did and did not taste of tobacco, depending on the week. Its red tip and the two silvery smoke plumes were the only lights in the square.
~
Leaves noisily fluttered over his feet as the dark figure clad in thick woollen fox-fur-collared overcoat crept over the cold, dry cobbles, stepping smartly past the public square which he watched warily; too many times had he wandered unwittingly past some assailant hid in undergrowth, or from the shade of a tree. The two old men ceased their grumbling instantly, on hearing his footsteps, and raising themselves up as quickly and quietly as possible, they silently crept away. The silent figure paused behind the square’s foliage that grew over that section of fence, waiting until satisfied that he was alone. Crossing the empty road, with the Royal Oak in sight, he kept to the shadows, quiet steps echoing horribly loudly to his ears in the silence of an eerie London night.
The wind all but flung Jack Harrison into the public bar of the Royal Oak as he shuffled in; recovering his poise, impassive, wary. The 1930’s had taught him that he lived in times in which walking through the wrong door with the wrong look was a potentially fatal mistake, and on this occasion, as ever, caution prevailed. The young man surreptitiously glanced left and right in a quick appraisal of the scene, but his poise visibly relaxed as he strolled loosely towards the bar, leaning on it with a practised casual air.
Strange memories of Spain loomed up in his mind. In Catalonia; ears pricked for the dialectical or behavioural idiosyncrasies of an outside spy. Here and now; familiar but occupied ground; informants replacing a ‘fifth column’; the four columns in power, holding the country to ransom in an iron grip. The odious and mali
gnant unspoken presence of the secret police lingered in the air like a foul smell of death. Jack had lived through similar times – the bitter, cannibalistic internecine intrigues of Republic Spain, and following fascist victory, the police round-up squads that later became Franco’s Brigada Político-Social. They, however, had nothing on the Gestapo with regards to combining competence with murderous intent.
“All right?” Jack intoned to no one in particular.
There was a non-committal grunt from the two older men. The old barman polishing his glass smiled; a wide split in the middle of a ruddy face.
“No worries,” Jack muttered. “Don’t all get up.”
The Royal Oak’s public bar was all wood; known as one of the finest looking pubs for miles around, its owner took great pride in its appearance. What had been a well-stocked bar ran along a wide public bar, around the corner of which stood a grand piano, to Arthur’s back. There was nothing in the old pub landlord’s manner to suggest he was aware of Jack’s presence, lounging casually at his bar with a nonchalant air. Instead, he turned to serve the bleary eyed regular who lurched to the bar behind him, adjacent to where Jack stood.
“Pint of stout, Arthur,” he mumbled, three days of stubble evident on his strong chin. Arthur served him with a smile.
“There you go, Super,” he said kindly. “This one’s on me.”
The unshaven man nodded, seeming to barely hear him. He was former Superintendent John Thomas of the London Metropolitan Police, and had been relieved of his job when the SD background checks of police officers in southern England unveiled him as a former card-carrying communist party member. The SD was the intelligence service of the SS, set up by Reinhard Heydrich and a sister organisation to his Gestapo in the ‘Reich Security Main Office’, which was now the responsible body for UK police policy and direction, as well as Germany’s own secret, political and criminal police forces.
They’d not arrived in force yet, but their jurisdiction held; Heydrich’s position as INTERPOL President transcended national boundaries, with the help of German military conquest. John Thomas had been rapidly flagged, with a speed that dismayed him. Told to go home, the veteran policeman was advised in strong terms by a stern, tall young blond man in SS uniform to not attempt to leave the capital “pending further investigations.”
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 4