Courtney's War

by Wilbur Smith

  When Gerhard and the other surviving prisoners from Sachsenhausen had arrived at Dachau, they’d been assembled into a line alongside their trucks. They were marched through a familiar landscape of bare earth, strewn with scrawny corpses, to a hut that looked, from the outside, exactly like the ones in which they’d been imprisoned at Sachsenhausen. But when the door was opened, Gerhard stepped into a room that seemed to come from a dream, a distant memory of the past made real. It was furnished with comfortable chairs, sofas, side-tables and lights with crimson satin shades. There were pictures of beautiful women on the wall, a carpet on the floor, glass in the windows and brightly patterned curtains.

  The SS officer who was waiting for them in the hut seemed amused by the baffled stares of the new inmates. “Our facilities are somewhat overcrowded at the moment,” he said. “But this unit is no longer required. You gentleman may be sad to discover that the original inhabitants have departed . . .”

  His wit received no response. The officer sighed irritably at his unappreciative audience. “For heaven’s sake, cheer up . . . This is the Dachau brothel.”

  They were placed in solitary confinement, locked in the rooms that the camp whores had once occupied, each of which contained the unimaginable luxury of a bed—a simple metal frame with creaking springs and a horsehair mattress—which felt like paradise to Gerhard after the crammed slave-bunks of Sachsenhausen. The food was better than Gerhard had eaten in months, with an entire bread roll in the morning, soup that had the occasional shred of carrot or potato floating in it for lunch, and a buckwheat gruel, dotted with scraps of gristly, fatty meat in the evening.

  Gerhard needed no conscious thought to make him eat. His body demanded it. But his physical condition was worsening as the typhus that had killed so many of his fellow prisoners took its hold on him. His body ached. He was gripped by burning sweats, followed by teeth-chattering chills. But when, after several days, the order was suddenly given to move out, he was still just strong enough to stumble out of the brothel and slowly, painfully, follow the others across the camp to where a motley convoy of trucks and old buses was drawn up.

  More prisoners were waiting: another hundred or so, around a third of them women, who had already been at Dachau when the Sachsenhausen transport arrived. A few were as malnourished as Gerhard, but most, like the prisoners from the Special Camp at Sachenhausen, merely looked thin by normal standards. To Gerhard’s eyes, they seemed enviably plump and well-nourished. He could hear several languages being spoken. Some, like English, French, Italian and Russian, he recognized. Others were less familiar.

  They were herded aboard the vehicles and Gerhard found himself in one of the buses. The seat was hard and his knees were jammed against the back of the seat in front. But after the squalor of the wagons and trucks that had brought him to Dachau, he had no complaints.

  The vehicles drove south, each one of them guarded by armed SS men. But their presence did not deter the passengers sharing information about themselves in whispered messages, passed up and down the bus when the guards weren’t looking.

  Gerhard learned that the prisoners with whom he was traveling included the former Prime Ministers of France and Austria, as well as a Mayor of Vienna and other political, military and industrial figures. There were also almost forty “Kin Prisoners,” as the Nazis had termed the wives and relatives of men who had been involved in the July 20th plot against Hitler.

  There was one rumor, which spread more quickly than any other through the convoy. The officers in charge had been overheard receiving their final orders, just before they left Dachau. One of those orders had been: “If, at any point on your journey, you are in danger of being captured by the enemy, kill all the prisoners.”

  Gerhard could hear the two men behind him, both speaking English, trying to decide whether the rumor was true or not.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” one murmured, keeping his voice low so that the guards could not overhear him. “Why would they have kept us alive all this time, only to kill us?”

  “Because the war is lost. We’re no longer any use to them.”

  “In that case why haven’t they killed us already?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing these animals do makes any sense.”

  “I say we are of use to them. We’re bargaining chips. They’ll threaten us, to make our countries give them what they want. But they won’t kill us. I’m sure of it.”

  The Englishman was speaking a little louder now. It was the only way he could make himself heard over the sound of Gerhard’s coughing.

  The Arado jet carrying Konrad von Meerbach to freedom had landed as planned at an airfield outside Girona in the northeast corner of Spain, less than fifty kilometers from the French border. Konrad was met by a deputation of officers from the Brigada Político-Social, or BPS, the Secret Police unit established by the Spanish dictator General Franco in 1941. Himmler was pleased to answer Franco’s request for assistance, and the BPS had been established and trained with help from SS advisers. As a result, the BPS was only too happy to return the favor and help Konrad in his hour of need.

  “Madre de dios!” the senior BPS officer exclaimed as Konrad emerged from the Arado. He slipped into the German he had learned from his instructors to say, “I congratulate you, Count—what an aircraft! What a testament to German genius!”

  “Well, consider it yours. I have no further use for it. I’m sure you will obtain an agreeably high price if you let the Russians and Americans know that it is for sale.”

  “The Generalissimo would not like us making deals with communists.”

  “Need he ever know? I certainly won’t tell him.”

  The BPS man smiled. “Ah, Count, you are a man of the world, I can tell. Now, your transport is all arranged. We will drive you to Barcelona. It would be our great honor if you would join me and a few of my colleagues for lunch. Afterward we will put you on a train to Madrid, arriving in time to catch the sleeper service to Lisbon. Private compartments have been reserved for you on both trains.” He looked at his watch. “You are ahead of schedule. We could not believe it when you said how short your flight time would be, and yet . . . Incredible.” He gazed at the Arado once again. “Perhaps we should keep it for our own use, after all.”

  “It is entirely your decision.”

  “And what about . . . ?”

  Konrad glanced in the direction that the Spaniard had indicated and saw Sperling having a relaxing smoke after his flight. The pilot had done the von Meerbach family a great service, extracting both the Count and Countess from Germany and depositing them safely in their respective destinations. On the other hand, that meant that he knew where the search for either of them should begin.

  “Make him disappear,” Konrad said.

  “Of course.”

  He had an agreeable luncheon with like-minded souls, slept like a log on the train to Lisbon and checked into the suite he had reserved at a luxurious hotel on the seafront at Estoril. He sent a telegram to Zurich, telling Francesca that he was safe and asking her to join him as soon as the war in Europe had ended and it was safe to travel.

  That evening he visited the casino and had considerably better luck at the chemin-de-fer table than he had done the last time he was there. Konrad’s nation had suffered a crushing defeat. His beloved leader would soon be dead, if he wasn’t already. The Nazi Party to which he had dedicated more than fifteen years of his life was, for now at least, on the verge of annihilation. But he was alive, well, and very rich. He was in an excellent mood as he began piecing together a master plan of revenge, each component exquisitely dissected, as if with a surgeon’s knife.

  •••

  After her narrow escape from the bomb craters, Saffron accepted that it might be a good idea to stop and rest, for a few hours at least. But by five in the morning the first light of dawn was seeping into a stone-gray sky. She and Dunnigan ate a breakfast of tinned ham and biscuits, washed down with sweet tea. They boiled some water to wash with.
Dunnigan extracted a razor from a battledress jacket and shaved. And then they were on their way again.

  Over the next eighteen hours, Saffron was given a vivid snapshot of a defeated nation. The armies invading Germany from the west had sliced through it in several distinct columns, spreading out across the country, some adhering to a straight thrust into the heart of Germany, others wheeling north or south into every corner.

  Wherever the armies had marched, and been resisted, the wreckage of war was plain to see. But when traffic or road damage forced them off the autobahn onto the country lanes that ran alongside it, they would leave the lines of march and arrive in villages whose wood-framed, medieval buildings, straight from a book of fairy tales, were untouched by war. They drove past cows contentedly grazing in the fields, chickens in the farmyards, and pigs with fat bellies crusted with mud.

  This was a land of women, for all the men had been called away to fight. Once Saffron stopped to ask the way and found herself chatting to a lonely farmer’s wife who could hardly believe that her first experience of the invading enemy was an agreeable conversation with a fellow woman—and one who could speak German. She was exhausted by the years of conflict, just as women in England were, and devastated by the destruction of the Reich she had been assured would last a millennium.

  “I am old enough to remember the last war,” one woman said. “How could we have let the same thing happen again?” She looked at Saffron with an expression in which she could see the grief, bafflement, humiliation and anger of a spurned lover. “He lied to us. He told us we would be great again and like fools we believed him. And now this . . . How will we ever recover? Ah well . . .” She sighed. “People like me are the lucky ones. You got to us before the Russians. At least we are safe with you.”

  She offered Saffron some fresh milk, eggs and a piece of home-made cheese for her journey, and was thrilled when Saffron insisted on paying her with a five-dollar note.

  “This is better than gold,” she said.

  The first town of any size they came to was Bielefeld. It was an old medieval city, overlooked by a castle on a hill, with two tall Gothic churches, a fine town hall and an old marketplace surrounded by attractive buildings with steepled roofs. It had possessed a viaduct that carried the railway toward large marshaling yards, and a gas works, all of which had been strategic bombing targets.

  The damage was extensive across the city and when she saw the ruins of the railway viaduct, Saffron remembered newspaper reports she’d read only a couple of weeks earlier. This was where the most powerful bomb ever created by man had been dropped: the “Grand Slam” earthquake bomb, otherwise known as “Ten Ton Tess.”

  “Made a hell of a mess, didn’t it?” said Dunnigan, casting his eyes over the rubble to which the viaduct had been reduced.

  “What a waste . . .” Saffron mused. “Think of all the time, and thought and effort that went into designing that bomb, just so it could spread destruction.”

  “Not a waste from where I’m standing, ma’am,” Dunnigan replied. “Not if it made this bloody war one day shorter, or saved the life of one of our lads.”

  They drove through the hills of the Teutoburg Forest, past Dortmund and then south toward Frankfurt. They were in the American sector now and suddenly everything seemed to be on another scale. The Americans had more of everything than the British. Their trucks were bigger, the men inside them seemed better fed, better dressed and better equipped.

  “Aye, and five times better paid,” Dunnigan observed sharply. “Mind, we fought alongside the Yanks in Tunisia and they did all right. Not bad fellows, once you get to know them.”

  Whenever the Jeep became stuck in a jam of American traffic, Saffron found herself the object of the soldiers’ attentions. The sound of their voices, the open, unabashed way they had of presenting themselves, unlike the awkwardness and reserve of the British, made her think of Danny. But their good humor was so infectious, it was hard to stay gloomy for long, and she decided to treat it as light relief from what she feared might prove to be a distressing mission. It didn’t hurt that there was a constant supply of cigarettes, bottles of Coca Cola and chocolate bars provided by the passing Americans.

  “I’ll make a bloody fortune flogging all this when I get back to the regiment,” Dunnigan said, as the loot piled up in the back of the Jeep.

  The mood was different when they passed the long columns of German, which was almost as common a sight as the advancing Americans. Some groups still marched in order, as if determined to preserve their dignity as fighting men, even after the ignoble act of surrender. Others were amorphous crowds of men, shepherded by American military policemen.

  Saffron was struck by how many of the captured Germans were young boys, whose faces bore expressions of bafflement and shock brought on by the grim disparity between the promises of glory with which their masters had enthused them, and the horrifying realities of war and defeat. Beside them walked men old enough to have been veterans of the First World War, for whom the surrender of 1918 was being repeated in even more crushing circumstances. Most of the troops seemed healthy enough, though she spotted many bandaged heads, arms in slings and men swinging themselves along with crutches, while others bore their more seriously wounded comrades on stretchers, a man at each corner.

  Most still wore their peaked forage caps; some had greatcoats flapping about their legs; others walked with arms crossed over their chests to keep warm. For the weather remained cold and in places there was fresh snow on the ground.

  Saffron’s mind turned to Gerhard. Was he walking across Germany somewhere in a column such as this? Was he bound for incarceration in a camp deep in Russia, never to return? Perhaps he was dead.

  Whether he was alive or not, she felt herself resigning to never seeing him again, and perhaps that was just as well. What man could tolerate being so humiliated and brought low in the eyes of the woman he loved?

  As the evening was drawing in, they came to Frankfurt. Or rather, they came to a wasteland that had once been a city called Frankfurt, but was now a desert of ashes and rubble.

  Saffron had become accustomed to bomb damage. But even in London, the city was a functioning, living entity where people could live and work and carry out the normal activities of modern life. The lights went on when you pressed the switch. The water ran when taps were turned. But this was desolation so total that she could not imagine how any of the shadowy figures walking along the lines of what had once been streets, or picking through the rubble of shattered buildings—looking, she supposed, for possessions, or perhaps people that they had lost there—could possibly have survived the Armageddon that had been visited upon them.

  Dunnigan was driving. “Maybe this’ll teach ’em, eh?” he said. “Maybe now they’ll learn to give war a rest. And if this doesn’t do it . . .” He sighed and looked at Saffron. “Give us a cigarette, pet. Reckon I need one . . .”

  She didn’t make a fuss about being called “pet” instead of “ma’am.” There were times, and this was one of them, when they weren’t a captain and a sergeant, but a man and a woman in a car, traveling through a strange land in which none of the old rules applied.

  “Thanks,” Dunnigan said, taking the cigarette. “You’re right, you know . . . about all this smashing things up. I’m sick of it. Just makes me want to get back to my farm.”

  They passed through Frankfurt and onto the autobahn for Munich as quickly as they could. This time they did not stop for the night but kept moving, taking turns at the wheel while the other slept.

  In the first light of day, they arrived at Dachau.

  •••

  They smelled the camp before they saw it, a thick, cloying scent that became at first nauseating and then all but overpowering: the reek of raw sewage mixed with the putrefaction of a myriad of unburied bodies. It was the aroma of human annihilation.

  Saffron had to slow the Jeep to a walking pace as they approached the gates of the camp. Ahead of them a long queue of Ger
man civilians was walking slowly down one side of the road, escorted by American soldiers. Only as they came closer did they realize that the civilians were being marched past corpses, an unbroken line of them, some showing signs of fatal wounds, their skulls half blown away, but most dead for no obvious reason. Except that when she looked again, the corpses were little more than skin and bone, garbed in striped rags.

  “The Yanks are making them witness what their blessed Reich was all about,” said Dunnigan.

  “But they’re not, are they?” Saffron said, for almost every pair of eyes, men and women alike, was fixed firmly forward, unable to confront the truth of what had been done in their name.

  Saffron entered Dachau and forced herself to look, though the shock of what she saw was so great that her mind struggled to make sense of it. Her impressions fragmented into disconnected images, like random pictures crammed onto a ruined gallery wall.

  She saw SS men, still in their uniforms, with corpses draped across their shoulders—literal bags of bones—as they took them to huge open pits for burial. A group of local dignitaries were forced to watch as a bulldozer pushed the dead—tens, hundreds of them—into one of the pits. An American soldier, not much more than a boy, with vivid red hair and freckles across his nose, ran to one of the camp guards, who was returning from the pit to fetch anther body, and shouted, “You dirty Kraut bastard!” then started hitting him with wild, uncontrolled punches. The guard made no attempt to defend himself and threw up into the dirt. Two other Americans grabbed their buddy and dragged him away.

  Saffron walked to a hut. Another GI—older, unshaven—held out an arm to block her as she was about to open the door and said, “Believe me, you don’t want to go in there, ma’am.”

  “I’m looking for . . .” Saffron’s mind whirled. Who am I looking for? What am I doing here? She pulled herself together and said, “I need to speak to whoever’s in charge.”