‘You been on operations like this one before? I mean, to one of these places?’
‘A week ago Corporal Lewes and I were the first Allied personnel into a Nazi prison near Sell. Torture chambers, guillotines. Political prisoners, mainly. Pretty bad, eh, Jock?’
‘Makes you realize what we’re fighting for, sir,’ Lewes replied.
Mayne glanced back at Stein. ‘I take it you know what’s been going on out here? I don’t mean the prisons. That’s grim, but predictable. I mean the camps.’
‘When I was with the BBC, we broadcast the Soviet reports from Majdanek, the camp the Red Army liberated last July in Poland. The whole Nazi state was based on slave labour. Most of the factories, the munitions works, you name it. There were big area camps for labourers, and satellite camps at particular factories and installations. The aerial photos for the one we’re heading towards show an opening in the forest the size of a football field with a row of barracks and huts. You can’t see anything in the surrounding woods, but they could conceal a bunker or underground storage facility. The Nazis looted huge amounts of art and antiquities and hid them away. This might be one of those places. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Something a lot worse than slave labour has been going on,’ Mayne said, shouting again as Lewes geared down and then revved up around a pothole. ‘My SAS friend said he’d been into a camp near Bergen a couple of days ago, a place called Belsen. Just up the road from here. Frightful scenes, corpses everywhere. He said survivors had been force-marched from those places in Poland, brought here to work on clearing bomb damage in the cities. But after the Allies crossed the Rhine and broke through into Germany, the prisoners got dumped in these camps. Mass starvation, disease. Just so you know. We might see some of that today.’
‘We’ve just been following a whole truckload of medical supplies,’ Stein replied. ‘The DP organizations, for managing displaced persons, have been preparing for the refugee problem for several years now. They can deal with it.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ Mayne turned and looked at the road ahead. The rumble of artillery from the front line had receded, no longer audible above the roar of the jeep. The line of trees was only a couple of kilometres away now, but still seemed like a distant mirage. It was as if they were crossing some kind of empty quarter, a bleak, monotonous landscape that seemed to go on for ever. He suddenly wished it would stay that way. He wanted monotony. He wanted oblivion. He desperately needed sleep. He felt a yawning emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He had been feeling that a lot lately. He knew it was his frayed nerves, a fear of what every moment ahead might hold, a fear that for him the war might never end. It was as if he knew there was something still to come in the unravelling horror, in his own role in it, something his instinct told him. And as a soldier who had survived five years of war when almost all his friends had not, he had learned to trust his instinct, to rely on it. That was the rub.
He reached up and put his hand on his upper tunic pocket, which held the notebook, the passages of Homer he had carefully transcribed that afternoon with Hugh, on the mountainside above Mycenae. It had been the summer of 1938, the end of his second year as an undergraduate. They had scrambled down the slope to the ancient grave circle, and had sat reading Heinrich Schliemann’s account of uncovering the mask of Agamemnon. He remembered the fire it had kindled inside him. Then there had been the conversation with the old foreman who had known Schliemann, who had seen what happened that night when Schliemann and Sophia had stolen up to the citadel, when they had raised that mask. It had been his secret with Hugh, their pact. After graduating, they had been going to find it, to uncover what Schliemann had hidden. They were going to be a team. He was going to be the archaeologist and explorer, with Hugh in the library delving and researching and sending him on ever more quests, above all to solve the mystery they had heard about that extraordinary evening on the slopes of Mycenae.
All that had seemed a lifetime ago. And then this morning at HQ, those fleeting few minutes with Hugh. That drawing, made by the girl in the camp. Hugh had described it to him, then before the briefing he had unfolded the drawing and glanced at it while Lewes was fuelling the jeep. It could be coincidence. That symbol was hardly unusual out here. But not that way round. And not in those colours. Exactly as the foreman on the excavation had described it. He remembered Hugh’s face. It had been flushed, feverish. He wondered whether the malaria had caught up with him again. He wondered what his own face looked like. It made him wish he could cry. But they had stared at each other, suddenly excited, forgetting the war for a few seconds. It was just possible. And now Stein was suggesting that this camp might contain a secret bunker. Mayne twisted around, wincing as he jarred his shoulder. ‘Just out of curiosity. Have you MFAA chaps had any luck with stolen antiquities? What about the Trojan treasure of Heinrich Schliemann? It was a bit of a passion of mine before the war. What might have happened to it.’
‘What did you say?’ Stein stared back at Mayne.
‘Schliemann’s treasure. King Priam’s treasure, from Troy. And whatever Schliemann and his wife might have secreted away from the royal graves at Mycenae.’
‘What do you know about that?’ Stein spoke sharply.
‘I worked on an excavation at Mycenae just before the war. With the British School of Archaeology at Athens. After Oxford I was going to become an archaeologist. We all heard the rumours that Schliemann had spirited stuff back to Germany.’
‘I know the story, but I don’t know anything more about it.’
Mayne grunted, and turned to face forward again as the jeep sped on. King Priam’s treasure. He had last thought about those passages from Homer on leave in Naples, almost a year ago, recuperating from his wound, sitting by the steaming fumaroles of Aornos, the fabled entrance to the underworld. He had wanted to see where the Trojan hero Aeneas had descended, where he had gone to hell and come back. But he had not read the passages then, and had returned to the crucible of war after that. Perhaps now those lines would help to assuage the emptiness he felt. The fall of Troy seemed to be happening all around him, had been happening for as long as he could remember. He had witnessed awful scenes of destruction, of indiscriminate death, men, women, children. He had been part of it. Maybe Homer would show him what he needed to see, help him make sense of the horror that had engulfed the world. Or maybe Homer would seem vapid, no longer meaningful, all talk of heroes and honour and pride. He felt the notebook in his pocket again. He would find somewhere to read it, later today perhaps. He took a deep breath. Lewes glanced at him, then nodded down the road. Lewes knew how close to the edge he was. ‘Up ahead, sir. I can see the roadblock.’
‘Right.’ Mayne steeled himself. They were coming to a junction with another road that ran parallel to the line of the woods, about a kilometre out from it. The road they were on continued beyond the junction toward the treeline. He noticed a kind of grey pall above the forest, like a rising mist, that kept the morning sunlight from streaming in. That was why the place looked so dark, forbidding. There must be a fire somewhere inside. They drew up to the junction. Four jeeps blocked the access routes, and Bren guns on bipods had been set up covering each road. A large sheet of canvas painted with the Allied white star recognition symbol had been laid on the adjacent field. Tactical Air Force might not have been told about covert intelligence missions, but they would have been told about the surrender of the camp. A couple of dozen soldiers had taken cover in the surrounding ditches, rifles at the ready. Mayne saw the shoulder flashes of the 66th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, an artillery unit that had been used as reserve infantry since the destruction of the Luftwaffe over the past weeks.
Lewes came to a halt and switched off the engine. Mayne jumped out and strode briskly towards a group of officers. A man saw him and detached himself from the group. He was wearing rubber boots and off-white dungarees over his battledress. He was of average height, and had pasty skin and a shock of blond hair. ‘Are you Major Mayne?’ He had a Scottish accent
, and seemed terribly young. Mayne nodded. The man looked relieved. ‘Good. I’m in medical charge. I’m supposed to take you in.’ He turned and watched the medical lorry draw up behind them, then pursed his lips and called back to the group of officers. ‘Captain Hamilton. You’ll have to block out the red cross on that lorry before it goes any further.’ He turned to Mayne. ‘I’m ready. We have to go now. The lorry can follow us.’
Mayne gestured at Lewes, who had lit up a cigarette beside the jeep. Lewes nodded, carefully stubbed his cigarette butt and pocketed it, then climbed back inside again and fired up the ignition. Mayne turned to the man before getting in. ‘How big’s your team?’
‘Three nurses from an army casualty clearance unit, and six civilians from the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. We arrived yesterday afternoon. Have you heard of the other camp, up the road? A place called Belsen. That was liberated yesterday too. We’re all they could spare. At Belsen there are tens of thousands. Here, there are maybe two and a half thousand, about four hundred still alive. It’ll be half that by tomorrow morning. My name’s Cameron, by the way.’
‘ Two and a half thousand? You mean people?’
‘Ever been into one of these places before?’
‘Not like this.’
‘Two days ago I was a final-year medical student at Guy’s Hospital in London. The call came for volunteers and we were flown out immediately. I’ve discovered that two days can be a long time in war.’
Mayne said nothing, but sat back in the jeep. For the first time he allowed himself to think properly about where they were going. The empty feeling came back in the pit of his stomach. Cameron swung into the rear seat beside Stein, who nodded at him. Lewes gasped, his nose crinkled up. ‘Blimey. What’s that stink?’
Cameron looked up. ‘That’ll be me, I’m afraid. On my clothes. In my hair. I can’t smell it any more.’
‘Lord above.’ Stein turned away, a hand on his face. ‘What is it?’
‘Faeces, rotting flesh, burning rags, unwashed bodies. Sweat, old sweat. That’s the warm, sour, acrid smell.’
Mayne glanced at Lewes. ‘Time we got some air flow.’
‘Sir.’ Lewes released the clutch and the jeep jumped forward down the narrow paved lane towards the trees. The smell coming off Cameron disappeared briefly, but soon the air was full of it, a terrible stench billowing out of the place ahead of them. Mayne peered at the greyness above the trees again, and could see wisps of smoke. He had been right. There was a fire, and they were getting closer to it. He swallowed hard and twisted back to Cameron. ‘Why blot out the Red Cross symbol on the truck?’
‘It terrifies them. The people here. The SS doctors and nurses wore it when they carried out medical experiments. And they used it to delude the new arrivals that they were going for medical checkups when they got off the train at the camps. In reality they were being sent to the gas chambers.’
‘Gas chambers?
‘Do you remember the Soviet accounts of Majdanek, the camp in Poland they liberated last year?’
‘Colonel Stein and I were just talking about it.’
Cameron paused. ‘Most of the Jews here came from a place called Auschwitz. They’ve got a number tattooed on their wrists. They were force-marched west as the Russians advanced through Poland. What seems to have saved them from the gas chambers was the Allied bombing of Dresden. They were going to be used as work parties to clear the ruins. But as the Nazi machinery crumbled they were pushed into existing slave labour camps out here and abandoned. Some of the camps were Konzentrazionelager, like Belsen. Others were satellite camps, Arbeitslager. That’s what this one seems to be, some kind of forestry labour camp, originally using Soviet prisoners of war. What you’re about to see amounts to mass murder, nothing less, a horrible crime against humanity. But this place was not an extermination camp. Unless, that is, you count the daily summary executions, the medical experiments and all forms of bestiality meted out by the SS guards on these people.’
‘How on earth did they survive the other place, Auschwitz?’
‘They all talk about the end of the train track, the railhead. Some kind of selection took place. It’s as if everything after that is expunged from their memory. But the people who survived it had been selected as slave labour, living in a camp next to the gas chambers. Armaments, munitions, you name it. Some of them worked underground, in a salt mine converted to an aero engine assembly plant. It sounds like Dante’s inferno. A pit of hell. But not as bad as the hell above ground. It must have been a huge camp. And the gas chambers. We’re talking hundreds of thousands murdered, more. Men, women, children. And not just at Auschwitz. There were more of those places. They called them Todesmuhlen.’
‘Death mills,’ Stein murmured. ‘My God.’
‘What you’re about to see…’ Cameron looked down. ‘It’s like. ..’ He paused, struggling for words. ‘It’s as if Europe has been struck by a gigantic meteorite. I mean the Jews. What we see here, what we’ll only ever see, is like the residue round the edges of an impact crater, the detritus blown out of the middle. Everything else is pulverized, destroyed without trace.’
Mayne tried to keep focused. ‘In the camp. This one. Where we’re going. What’s the drill?’
‘Our priority is to treat them with DDT, to kill lice. The lice carry typhus. We spray and scrub them, in a kind of human laundry. The next stage is a makeshift hospital. The huts are too filthy, indescribable. We’re going to burn them. The Red Cross lorry should contain army tents and folding beds.’
‘You’ll set them up out here, away from the camp?’
Cameron shook his head. ‘Unless we’re ordered to evacuate, everyone stays inside. The horrible truth is that we can’t release these people. The risk of spreading typhus is too great. Already some of the healthier ones have escaped and are living rough in the forest. We need to get them all back and disinfect them.’
‘What about food?’
‘The first troops in here yesterday gave them everything they had. Standard British army compo rations, greasy pork in tins. Virtually inedible at the best of times. The soldiers watered it down into a kind of soup. It was well-meaning, but for some of the inmates it just brought on diarrhoea that killed them within hours. One thing that did work was tea. We’re brewing it by the gallon. The lorry’s also bringing sacks of Bengal famine mixture – sugar, dried milk, flour, salt, water. But for many it’ll be too late. Even the healthier ones, the small number who can take solids, are a problem. They keep half their food and hide it. It’ll just rot, and cause another health hazard. They simply can’t believe they’re being fed. They’re hoarding it for when the guards return and the nightmare resumes. I shouldn’t say it, but they’re like animals, hiding food and squabbling over it. There’s no morality here. It’s far beyond that. This is war, my friend. Not on the battlefield, but here. This is what war does.’ He covered his eyes with one hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely. ‘This is the first time I’ve actually tried to describe it.’
Howard gestured back at the Red Cross lorry, now trundling along the lane behind them. ‘And medicine?’
Cameron cleared his throat. ‘Nicotinic acid and sulphaguanadine for diarrhoea. Mild cases, anyway. For those with beds in our makeshift hospital, we’ll try protein hydrolysates by nasal drip. But there’s a problem with injections. The sight of a needle terrifies them. They saw Nazi doctors inject dying people with petrol to make their corpses burn more easily. Just a few beats of the heart before it killed them, enough to circulate the petrol. But an excruciating death. The other inmates would have heard the screams, day in and day out.’
‘Jesus,’ Mayne whispered.
Stein turned to Cameron. ‘We’re not medical personnel. You know that. We need to find out why they were here. I don’t mean the arrivals from Auschwitz, I mean the original slave labourers. What was going on here, in the forest. Why the Nazis needed them. Can we talk to them?’
‘Of course. Many of them were educ
ated people. Are educated people. We have to remember that. Are, not were. These are still human beings. What am I saying. My God.’ Cameron shut his eyes and put his hand to his face again. Mayne noticed that it was shaking, just like his own. The lorry edged up behind them, and Lewes slowly accelerated. Mayne could make out individual trees now. Cameron opened his eyes. ‘You see it in the children, the teenagers, those who were eight, nine, ten when they were taken, old enough suddenly to shine, as linguists, artists, poets, musicians. Children wrenched from that, but who still live the long days of childhood, where a day can seem like for ever. Endless days of anguish and fear, yet some of them preserve fragments of their past, before the horror. It’s like a lifeline for them. Trauma patients we were shown at medical school, shell-shocked soldiers, often focus on one event, one shocking experience. With these children, it’s as if the shocking event is too much, but they are able to bury it under one vivid memory of happiness, a memory powerful enough to anchor them against the horror. It can be the words of a song they repeat over and over again, or one image they draw repeatedly, or one phrase of a foreign language they’d been learning. I’m only talking about a few. Most have been too traumatized. Most are beyond our help.’
‘We’re looking for a girl,’ Stein said. ‘A teenage girl.’
‘A girl who made a drawing,’ Mayne said.
‘Something unusual in it,’ Stein added. ‘Something drawn very precisely.’
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