A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  Reg eyed the colonel, wondering what to say. “You OK, Sir?” It sounded tame.

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Yes, fine.” He took another deep breath and looked back at the dead Germans. “Well, that’s four I’ve saved from the hangman and if you see any more armed Jerries wandering the camp you have my authority to just shoot them on the spot. Truce or not. Bugger ’em. Understand?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The colonel brushed past them without saying any more and headed back towards the open area by the admin block. Reg shouldered his rifle and followed the colonel. He looked back at the bodies lying in the mud. The German soldiers lay as dead as the figures in the filthy striped clothes sprawled all the way to the barbed wire fence over a hundred feet away. What kind of hell had they walked in to?

  But, as yet, they hadn’t seen the very worst of it. The barn was where the whale was kept. Daffin, Reg Manley and George Tanner had been detailed with a couple of others to check out the rear of the camp. Most of the survivors – those who could walk or at least crawl – were already close to the entrance. Further back into the camp they came across heaps of bodies ignored by those still stumbling towards their rescuers. A few would hide from them, ineffectively sheltering behind the hut ends, presuming, Reg guessed, that anyone in uniform was likely to harm them.

  He could hear Daffin by his side repeating, “This isn’t right, this isn’t right.”

  “I know, son, I know. I’ll be glad to get out of here. What a shithole.”

  A stink rolled out from the huts as dense as a thick London smog, hanging thick and liquid as if trying to smother the onset of the German spring. A continuous cloud of dust swirled backwards and forwards, wreathing the creatures in a ghostly aura as they wandered aimlessly between the huts. Beyond the wire, the season was beginning to flower with fresh, yellowed gorse and greening trees that surrounded the camp but in these barbed enclosures everything was dead and dying: the flattened remains of grass, the churned mud, the sticks of humans.

  Reg stopped at one woman who sat on her haunches. She had a full head of hair so he suspected she couldn’t have been here long.

  She reached out with her hand: “Wohin ist er gegangen, mein geliebter Sohn?”

  Reg bent over her. “What, love?” He looked into her face and saw a dark despair reflected in her eyes.

  “Warum habt ihr getötet meinen Sohn?” Her voice trailed off in a wail, her head slumping into the rags around her chest.

  He turned to Daffin. “How’s your German? What’s she saying?”

  “She’s asking you why you killed her son. I think she believes you’re a German soldier, Sarge.” Daffin looked at Reg who had taken a step back.

  “Bloody hell! Put her straight, Daphne. I don’t want anyone to think I’m a fucking Kraut.”

  Daffin spoke to the woman, placing his hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up and peered at the soldiers around her, a look of understanding finally coming to her face. She took hold of Daffin’s hand, gracefully lifting it from her shoulder and kissed it, holding it lovingly against her cheek, rocking back and forth on her haunches. Reg knelt beside her and took up her other hand, holding the delicately framed fingers carefully, frightened that they might break. She moved her face from hand to hand, alternatively kissing his and then Daffin’s. Reg could see her tears roll over the back of his hand and at that moment something broke inside of him. The touch of a woman had always eased his heart and even here, perhaps especially here, amongst all this death and decay, he felt utterly overwhelmed.

  A stir of feet behind him made Reg look around. The colonel, pistol out and pushing and shoving the camp commandant whose ankles were now shackled with a chain, was shouting at the prisoner: “You fucking bastard! What is this? What is all this? What have you been doing here, you bastard scum?”

  Reg watched as the commandant shuffled by. Just ahead he could see a photographer ready to take a picture and everything just blew over him: the French woman shot by her husband, the endless killing, the rotting cloud of humanity in this hell, those tears still wet on the back of his hand. He raised his rifle to his shoulder, eased the spring and pulled up a bullet into the breech. It was all so quick that Daffin fully expected his sergeant was going to shoot the camp commandant there and then. Reg simultaneously heard the click of the camera and the colonel barking at him, “Stand back, that man!”

  The procession had stopped and Reg sensed everyone was looking at him, everyone except the prisoner who stood stock still, facing away.

  “Lower that rifle, Sergeant! That’s an order.” The colonel still pointed the pistol at the shackled man. “We’ll deal with this bastard in due course. For the moment I need him to tell me what’s been going on here.”

  George spoke softly. “It’s OK, Reg. Leave it, eh?” He pressed his hand on Reg’s shaking arm, firmly pressing down. “Let’s see what we can do for these poor devils. Perhaps we can save one or two.”

  Later Reg said that if he had already seen inside the barn before that moment he wouldn’t have hesitated to pull the trigger. George said he would have given Reg a medal.

  Eventually they got to the back of the camp where they found two barns, one larger than the other, hard up against the wire of the perimeter. The smaller of the two had a metal chimney stack protruding some twenty feet from the roof. From the vent a light grey smoke curled into the bright air of the German spring.

  “So, what the fuck have we got here then?” George opened the door to the small barn and peered inside. “Looks to be some kind of furnace, an oven-type thing. Charcoal burner, perhaps? Wouldn’t put the Krauts down as wood gatherers and burners, meself.”

  Reg leaned forward, gingerly testing the heat on the outside of the oven. “Still warm. Let’s have a look then.” He picked up a rag nearby and gripped the metal handle of the oven door, swinging it downwards in a swift motion. A pair of bare feet lay visible on a shelf that disappeared into the darkness of the oven.

  “Christ!”

  “It’s a bleedin’ crem, George.” Reg slammed the door shut. “The bastards have been burning ’em. Look – there’s another oven the other end of the barn and they’ve joined the chimney stacks just below the roofline.”

  They looked up into the darkness where the two metal tubes joined together like grotesque giant’s legs before disappearing through the roof. One of the other soldiers, a train engineer back on civvy street, knew all about wear and tear on boilers and ovens. Quietly, he peered at the rusted metal and said: “By the looks of it, the bastards have been stoking these for months.”

  Tentatively they looked in the other oven which turned out to be empty, then they walked back out into the daylight and peered up at the chimney pipe that stuck out of the roof. A black crust encircled the top of the pipe, and a grey dust, streaked by a light rain that had fallen the night before, dribbled down the sides of the chimney.

  The larger barn had no chimney. The small group of soldiers stood immobile and silent, looking at its closed double doors. If Reg had said something like, “Fuck it, let’s head back to the front gate,” not one of them would have objected. How the hell was he to know what they would find in the barn? And that they would curse him for the rest of their lives for the nightmares that would wake them night after night, dripping in sweat?

  The double doors were held in place by a wooden swivel arm that sat on brackets fixed to each side. Reg looked at the doors and hesitated.

  “Let someone else do it, Sarge. I’ve had enough,” called out the train engineer, Jones.

  Afterward, Reg wished he’d listened, but the authority of the three stripes on his arm took over. Nine months of looking after his lads and he’d got most of them through it – and he had to go and bugger it up now.

  “Best check out this barn, lads, then we’ll head back. Can’t be worse than what we’ve seen already. Probably just a store shed.”

  He hesitated for a moment. Whatever that stink was that they had all smelt down
at that entrance of the camp was definitely worse here. He peered through the small crack where the two doors met but could see nothing in the total darkness inside. The smell made him double over for a moment, uselessly heaving into the fetid air.

  “Bloody hell!” He coughed, eyes watering. “Something’s chucking up rotten in there.”

  “Leave it, Sarge, eh?” Jones had stepped back a few paces.

  Standing back up, Reg reached for the wooden bar and swivelled it on its pivot so that it clapped against the slatted doors. Perhaps the doors hadn’t been hung properly or perhaps the whole barn had subsided towards the back because, once freed from the constraint of the wooden bar, the doors swung fully open on their own accord and fell back against the sides of the barn.

  A titanic wall of foul, dank air, rolled out over the soldiers.

  “Sweet Jesus, Sarge,” Jones was gagging into the crook of his elbow. “What the fuck is it?”

  They gingerly stepped across the shadow line, adjusting their eyes to the comparative darkness.

  “Oh, oh, Christ!” George had turned away and moved behind the rest. Reg could hear him being sick.

  Reg stood, mesmerized, transfixed by what he saw. Here, once more, was that whale from his childhood encounter on the beach. Festering, rotting, smelling, rippling in all its grotesque size, rising high above him all the way to the roof of the barn and filling the whole space between the two side walls. His first thought was “How the fuck did they get a whale in here? I mean that’s just stupid, isn’t it? Absurd. A whale, dragged 100 miles inland and dumped in a camp shed?”

  And then he saw the hands. And the feet. The gaping mouths, the yellow skin, the filthy, shit-stained arses, the glassy webbed eyes, human bodies so entwined that not one body existed by itself. A cat’s cradle of rotting humanity. But there was nothing human about this monstrous pile. Nothing at all.

  Jones took a couple of steps closer to the monstrous heap, his hand clapped over his mouth and nose. “Jesus, Sarge. They look as if they’re moving. Are they still alive?” He turned back to the sergeant and Daffin. “They’re riddled with lice and maggots. That’s what’s moving!”

  To Reg the whole pile seemed to be rippling in some grotesque roiling wave, vainly attempting to break out of the barn, rolling over him and spilling out onto the sandy beach of the camp.

  “Out. Out! Come on. Out!” He turned and went back into the light. George was already some way off, Jones and Daffin hurrying to join him. “First of all, let’s shut these doors.” Reg took one door and Daffin the other. Bringing the two together, neither of them looked back at the horror of the darkness inside but the image was already burned on their minds and they knew it would be there for evermore.

  Back at base that evening, Daffin and Reg sat by the entrance to the tent, their hands circling their respective tin mugs of tea. Daffin’s fingernails clicked in a regular rhythm against the tin mug as he stared down the road towards the camp they had left that afternoon. George came round the side of the tent and lowered himself into a folding canvas chair by Daffin’s side, pulling hard on the remaining stub of his cigarette before flicking it into the darkness. For a while none of them said anything. Around them other tents had been erected close to a large building that had been used for administration by the Germans. The British were unhappy to find that there were still Germans soldiers walking around, freed under a local amnesty agreement. It had been difficult for George to stop himself rifle-butting each and every one of them but his commanding officer said that if they were going to rescue any of the poor sods from the camp then they were going to use the Krauts to clear up their own mess.

  George sighed, irritated by Daffin’s tapping on the tin mug.

  “Daphne, mate, give it a rest. Click, click, click. Driving me fuckin’ mad.”

  He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and grunted when he discovered what turned out to be the last one. He lobbed the empty packet onto the burning embers of a small wood fire and lit the cigarette with the glowing end of a smoking stick he had picked from the edge of the fire. He stubbed the ember into the ground and listlessly scraped straight lines in the loose dirt at his feet.

  “Daffin.” George tapped the stick on the ground, bouncing the end between the lines he had made, flicking up little spurts of dirt. Daffin looked up, surprised by the sergeant’s use of his proper name. “Daffin?” The sergeant repeated the name, looking over towards him, his eyes screwed up against the smoke curling from the cigarette. “Where’s that from then? Not English, is it?”

  Daffin flicked the dregs of tea from the mug onto the smouldering fire which hissed with the flecks of water, immediately vaporizing them. He was grateful for a diversion from the memories of the camp.

  “French, Sarge. French.” Daffin stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets. The April evenings still carried remnants of the winter cold.

  “French? You mean I’ve been in charge of a Froggie all this time and I didn’t know it?” Tanner laughed, holding the cigarette between his fingers, nervously flicking the end with his thumb nail.

  “Less a frog, Sarge, more like a dolphin.” Daffin left the explanation hanging in the air, waiting.

  George looked towards him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Daffin’s a derivation of ‘dauphin’, Sarge, the French for dolphin.”

  “Well, what do you know?” Reg laughed, shaking his head. “Dolphin, eh?” He placed a cigarette back between his lips, repeating to himself, “Dolphin. Dolphin.”

  “Eh, Sarge? Not with you.”

  “My little joke, son. Don’t worry. Just my little joke.” He continued to shake his head, lowering it so that Daffin could see the crown of his skull bent over his feet. “So how come you’re French and in the English army. University type, weren’t you?”

  “My father was French – fought in the first war. Caught some shrapnel at Passchendaele and was sent to a field hospital where my English mother was a nurse. Thinks she was the loveliest thing he had seen and the rest, as they say, is history.” He patted his jacket pockets, trying to remember where he had put his cigarette packet. “Haven’t got a spare fag, have you, Sarge? Looks as if I’m fresh out.”

  “Sorry, son. I’m just smoking my last one. Can have a drag on this if you like. I’ll have it back though.” George handed over the smouldering cigarette. “So your parents – still alive, are they?”

  “Thanks, Sarge.” Daffin leant over and took a couple of quick drags from the proffered cigarette before handing it back. “Yes, still alive, living in Cambridge. My father had been shipped back to Blighty for an operation and, by chance, my mother was on the same boat. They kept in touch and by the time he had recuperated fully the war was over. His parents had been killed in the bombardment of Bethune in 1918 and the house flattened so he had nothing to go back to. Next thing you know, they’re married and moved back to the Fen country and I turn up in 1921.”

  “And Reg, you, me and brother Kraut,” George indicated with a nod of his head as a German soldier sauntered past towards the admin building, “end up in this shithole clearing up their debris. Look at us. You should be back in university and I should be running my father’s garage, taking over his business, keeping it in the family. He had a heart attack last year and can’t do a thing. Garage is shut and trade’s gone. Everything’s gone to pot, Daphne, gone to fuckin’ pot.”

  George took a long drag of the cigarette and then offered the stub end to Daffin who shook his head. Taking one last suck at the remaining nub, George flicked it into the fire. Automatically reaching for a cigarette packet in his jacket, he realized that he had run out. His fingers scoured the inside of the pocket just in case one cigarette had dropped out – but the only thing they touched was a piece of glossy card. Catching it between two fingers, George pulled out the card and turned it towards the firelight. The flames reflected in the little photograph of Steffi. He grunted.

  “See this, Daphne.” He handed over the photo. “First came
across it in the bogs at Sway just before D-Day. An officer showed it to me; said he’d taken it off the body of a dead Kraut in the North African desert.” He paused as another German passed along the path. Raising his voice he said, “Can’t be too many dead Krauts for my liking!” Pointing and singing, “The more, the fucking merrier!” he watched the retreating back of the soldier as he disappeared beyond a corner before turning back to Daffin.

  “So how come you’ve got this now, Sarge?” Daffin turned over the picture to read the words on the back.

  “Week or so after I met this officer he was flat on his face – what was left of it anyway – in a French field. Mortar took half his head off and I was the only other bastard around so I salvaged his ID cards and that little photo from his pockets.” He shrugged. “Just kept it. I don’t know why. Hardly a good luck charm, is it; two dead soldiers in its wake?”

  “Bit of a looker, isn’t she? I like the little play on words and the flower in her hair.” Daffin handed back the photo.

  “That’s the trouble with you clever-dick university types. You know bleedin’ everything. I was looking forward to telling you that story about the forget-me-not.” He laughed, tapping the face of the photo. “Perhaps I should chuck it. Burn it before I become its next victim?” He laughed, hovering it over the fire, the picture barely being held, hesitating.

  “Bit of a shame if it ended its life here, Sarge. Come a long way, hasn’t it?”

  George played the photo between his fingers, holding it by one corner. The flames from the fire reflected in the glossy surface of the photo, lighting up the girl’s face. He looked at her closely and wondered if she was still alive and if she had come to terms with her loss of her soldier boyfriend. Had she found a new man? Wherever she was now, she was in a better place than this hellhole, that’s for sure. He hesitated for a moment more and then curled his fingers over the photograph and put it back into his jacket pocket.