But the Kommandant removes the finger from his lips and points into the air above them.
“Look,” he says. “Look up there.”
James tilts his head back and directs his gaze to where the Kommandant’s hand is pointing. Up at the top of a fir tree there are a dozen or so birds balanced on the branches, chattering to one another.
“Cedar waxwings,” says the Kommandant. “Here by accident, do you think?”
James looks dumbly at the birds.
“They are not common to these parts,” continues the Kommandant. “They are what I think you would call an accidental.”
“Yes.” James looks at the sleek waxwings at the top of the fir tree. He has seen these birds in his reference books, but never in person before. Sometimes there are Bohemian waxwings in Britain, but never cedar waxwings. “Vagrants or accidentals. Often blown off their migratory routes by a storm.”
“In German we call these birds Seidenschwänze,” says the Kommandant. “It means ‘silken tails.’”
The waxwings are neatly groomed, their feathers slicked back as though with pomade.
The Kommandant waves his hand at the guards and speaks to them sharply in German. They retreat through the trees. James listens to their footsteps crisping through the leaves on the forest floor.
“I sent them away so we could talk freely,” says the Kommandant.
The waxwings chirp from the top of the tree, their overlapping sounds buoyant and cheerful.
“I thought you were going to kill me,” James says.
The Kommandant looks stricken. “No, no,” he says. “I just wanted to surprise you. I meant no harm.” He reaches out and touches James on the shoulder. “I wanted to stop the war, just for the morning, so we could enjoy the birds together. We are not so different, you and I.”
“In some ways, no,” James says. “But you can kill me if you choose, and I can do nothing to stop it.” He pauses, feeling his heartbeat gradually return to normal. “Your English is very good.”
“I lived in England.”
“When?”
“I went to Oxford. After the first war.” The Kommandant takes a cigarette case from the pocket of his coat. He opens it and offers it to James.
“Thank you, but I don’t smoke.”
The Kommandant withdraws a cigarette from the case, clicks the silver box shut, and returns it to his coat pocket. He lights a match, cupping his hand around the flame. James notices that the older man’s hand is shaking slightly.
“What did you read at Oxford?” he asks.
“Classics. I teach at the University of Berlin. Like you, I am not a soldier.”
How odd, thinks James, that this war and the last have been fought by classics professors and birdwatchers, gardeners and watercolourists.
“Christoph.” The Kommandant extends his hand and James shakes it.
“James.”
“Do you like the Seidenschwänze, James?”
“They’re very beautiful.”
The smoke from the Kommandant’s cigarette rises up through the tight canopy of trees. James watches it dissolve in the cool morning air.
“I lived in your country,” says the Kommandant. “For many years. Before I went to Oxford, I was a prisoner of war and worked on a farm. That’s where I learned my good English.”
“You fought in the first war?”
“I was a boy then and knew nothing of fighting. I thought the war would be an adventure.”
“A terrible adventure, I imagine.”
“Yes. For days, I fought on while all the men in my trench were dead or wounded. Finally the English soldiers simply walked across the muddy stretch of ground between their trenches and ours, and took me prisoner. One of the soldiers gave me some chocolate. I had been surviving on water. They called me a hero for holding the line, but really I was just too afraid to move.”
Christoph takes a pull on his cigarette.
“But working on the farm was very soothing. I liked the rhythm of tending to the animals. My time was attached to their needs. It made the days bearable.” He pauses. “How is your bird study progressing?”
“It’s going well,” says James. “I’ve logged a lot of hours watching the redstarts. The chicks are about to fledge. I worry for their safety when they leave the nest.”
“Yes, of course. It’s very difficult to survive in this world.” The Kommandant finishes his cigarette, stamps it out in the earth. “We should go back now. It is not a good idea for me to talk to you for very long.” The guards are leaning up against the sedan car. James can see them there as he and the Kommandant step out of the woods and start across the field. There’s an ease to the guards when the Kommandant isn’t around, in the way they slouch against the hood of the motor car, smoking. Their laughter spools like birdsong through the air towards him.
“They behave as men on a break from their jobs. They are not real soldiers either. One of them was a baker. The other worked on the railway.” The Kommandant sighs. “It might be a long war,” he says, “that we are all waiting out together. It might be a long time before Weber makes a loaf of bread again.”
The drive back to the camp is no different from the drive out, but James feels such relief at not having been shot that it translates into a sort of ecstatic happiness. He presses his face to the window and watches the countryside shudder past. The fields are just now emerging from their long winter sleep, the brown grass tipped green in patches, the sun pooling on the surface. He is suddenly touched by the Kommandant’s gesture of friendship, and cheered by the sight of the waxwings in the fir tree. It has been a most extraordinary morning. He must find some way to tell Rose about it.
When they arrive back in camp, he hurries down to the river to check on the redstarts. As he waits by the fir where he usually stands to survey the birds, he realizes that something is wrong. There is no activity around the stone wall across the river. Where only yesterday the adult redstarts came to the nest with food every few minutes, now there is no sign of the birds. The chicks have fledged while he was away with the Kommandant. And where baby birds in the nest do nothing but make noise—to persuade their parents to feed them—adolescent birds that have left the nest must remain perfectly silent for fear of attracting predators. The baby redstarts will be hiding in the trees and bushes near the stone wall, trying not to draw attention to themselves, but from this moment on they will be invisible to James, no matter how quiet he is or how much he watches. The young birds must stay hidden now in order to survive into adulthood. They will call out from their hiding places, and their parents will bring them food. Then, after a week or two, they must find new territory to occupy. They must find their own food.
James misses the chicks with a ferocity that surprises him. He is anxious for their survival and upset that he has missed his chance of seeing them. All these weeks of waiting and he still doesn’t know how many babies were actually in the nest.
THAT EVENING after curfew, when they are locked in their bunkhouses for the night, James lies awake in his bed, listening to the chatter of the other men in the room and thinking about his childhood on the farm. He remembers the dogs and the thick soup of mud in the yard, the warmth of the kitchen stove, the outline of the sheep on the hills at dusk. He remembers his mother with newly hatched chicks in her apron pocket, to keep them warm after they had the misfortune to be born during the cold winter months. And he remembers the birds—the kestrels over the fields; the sparrows near the house; the geometry of the swallows outside his bedroom window, and the way they cut and parcelled the air into shapes with the blades of their wings. The lifting/falling sensation of the birds crossing in front of the mullioned windows, so like the rise and fall of his own breath.
As a boy, James studied the field guides with their black-and-white illustrations of birds. It was always startling to see the colour on the real birds when he came across them on his rambles in the countryside. Perhaps this is why he was so drawn to the redstarts, he thinks.
Not just because they were available to him here at the camp, but because of the dramatic splash of red on their tail feathers, how the brightness of it astonished and cheered him every time he saw it.
“Where did you go this morning?” Harry’s voice rises up from the bottom bunk and interrupts James’s reverie.
“The Gardener saw you getting into the Kommandant’s sedan. Did they take you out to interrogate you about the tunnel?”
“No,” says James. “Actually, the Kommandant brought me to a forest to see some cedar waxwings.” Harry snorts. “I’m not an idiot, Hunter. But if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. As long as you didn’t give anything away.”
James does want to talk about the waxwings in the tops of the pine trees, wants to convince Harry, with the details of the morning, that he isn’t lying. But perhaps it is better that his story is so unbelievable, because there is danger in his friendship with the Kommandant. He doesn’t want to be seen as a collaborator by his fellow prisoners.
“I didn’t give anything away,” he says.
A WEEK after James was taken to see the cedar waxwings, Davis and the other tunnellers, having waited until after morning roll call, lift a wooden lid covered with earth, drop one by one through the trap door in the floor of bunkhouse 14, and begin their crawl to freedom.
They make it out of the camp. The Germans, it appears, did not know of their enterprise. That evening at roll call, their disappearance is discovered and there is a scramble by the guards to get after them with the dogs.
All night long, James lies in his bunk and hears the barking of the Alsatians. The prisoners in his room are silent, each man lying awake, willing the escapees through the woods, down into the town and onto a train, and then off the train again once safely in Switzerland. No one speaks. Their room in bunkhouse 11 practically vibrates with their combined prayers.
The escapees are captured the following day. While the prisoners are standing for evening roll call, the gates of the camp open and the men are dragged back inside the compound. Their clothes are ripped. One of the tunnellers has blood on his face from a gash above his left eye. They are pushed across the prison yard, made to pass in front of the men on parade on their way to the cooler, where they will be locked in solitary confinement for weeks as punishment. For all the individual industry in the camp, there is nothing to do in the cooler. No company or conversation. The long hours of solitude and inactivity carve into the soul of a man and alter him. The prisoner who gets thrown into the cooler after an escape is not the same man who returns to camp society after a month of being locked away.
“There are only eleven of them,” whispers the Gardener, who is standing beside James. “Thirteen went through that tunnel. Perhaps two managed to get away?”
“Davis is missing.” James feels his heartbeat increase at the thought that his young cabin mate has managed to escape.
But at the end of the line of the eleven living prisoners are four guards, two on either side of the two remaining men. The guards are dragging the prisoners by the arms. The prisoners are not moving. One of them is Ian Davis.
“Bastards,” says Harry.
The guards drop the dead men at the foot of the porch in front of the Kommandant’s office. Davis has been shot in the forehead. The other man has been shot through the chest. James feels bile rising in his throat and chokes to keep it down.
The Kommandant stands on his porch while the living escapees are dragged off towards the stone building that is used as the camp jail. He doesn’t say anything, just watches with the rest of them as the captured prisoners are hauled away. James notices that the Kommandant avoids looking down at the dead men lying on the ground at his feet. He says nothing at all during the whole event. It is the adjutant, a thin, jittery man with a permanent angry expression, who yells out at the assembled prisoners.
“See! This is what happens if you try to escape. There is no escape. You will not escape. This is what happens.”
No one likes the adjutant. He seems half crazy and operates at a fever pitch, always yelling and stamping around.
The Kommandant turns and walks back into his office. James thinks that perhaps he doesn’t like the adjutant either, or the killing of the prisoners.
“Were they running?” he whispers to Harry. “Didn’t they stop when the guards yelled?”
“They weren’t running,” says Harry. He spits in the earth at their feet. “They were shot in the front, not the back. Executed.”
Were they shot simply to send a message to the rest of the prisoners? Was Ian Davis’s life worth nothing more than that? James has the uneasy feeling that perhaps the Germans did know of this new tunnel after all, and that the entire episode was staged for the benefit of this warning, the opportunity for the guards to kill some Allies.
THE DEAD men are buried outside the wire, the mounded earth of their grave visible from James’s bunkhouse window. He tries not to notice it every time he looks out the window—tries to focus on the sky, the clouds—but it is always there, in the bottom corner of every scene, a heavy underscore to the drifting clouds or the upright slashes of the pines.
Ian Davis’s bunk is not yet filled by another prisoner. His model village, in its cardboard box, sits on the pillow, waiting to be posted.
James almost writes to Rose about the escape, but he doesn’t want to worry her, and anyway the letter would pass through a German censor who would, he knows, delete any reference to it.
AFTER THE escape attempt, James doesn’t see the Kommandant again. He remains in his office, doesn’t come out to stand on his little wooden porch during roll call for a week after the killings. And then, the week after that, the prisoners are informed that they are to move and become part of another camp, with another Kommandant already in place there. The Kommandant at their Oflag is to remain behind with a few of the guards until he has orders to transfer elsewhere.
The prisoners are told about the move at the last minute. They’re given half an hour to grab their belongings and what food they have left from the Red Cross parcels and assemble in the yard to begin the march. They are not told how far away the next camp is, how long they will be walking.
James wraps his notebook with his redstart findings in the piece of canvas the men in his bunkhouse have been using to remove the kettle from the stove, and puts this package at the bottom of his rucksack. On top of it he places the letters from Rose and his parents, the German bird guide, and Davis’s box with his model village, and on top of that he puts the last of a meat roll, some biscuits, a few squares of chocolate. It is not enough food for more than one meal. He hopes they won’t be on the road for days.
“It must mean the Jerries are on the run,” says Harry, stuffing a paperback novel in each jacket pocket, so that his uniform bulges like a packhorse. “They’re probably moving us deeper into the heart of the Fatherland. Here’s hoping the new camp is bigger and not as barren.”
But James doesn’t think of this camp as barren. He will miss the river, and the tree where he stood to watch the redstarts, and the old stone wall where they used to nest, and even the dark ashy colour of the limestone buildings in the rain. The new camp could very well be worse than this one, have less in it, especially if Harry is right and the Germans are on the defensive.
They march out of the camp gates four abreast, with guards positioned at the front and rear of the long line of prisoners.
They walk all morning and then stop for half an hour while the guards come down the line with buckets of water and a ladle. It’s hot out, the sun directly overhead, all the men sweating in their filthy uniforms.
James crams a few biscuits into his mouth while he’s waiting for his ladleful of water. He offers one to Harry, who is standing beside him in the line, but Harry shakes his head.
“Too thirsty,” he says. He lights a cigarette. “Lovely day for a walk, though, isn’t it?”
“A walk, not a march,” says the Gardener, on the other side of James. “My b
oots aren’t up to this. They’re falling apart.” He holds up a foot to show James and Harry how the sole of his boot has come away from the leather uppers and flaps open like a duck’s bill.
They keep on for another few hours. James has blisters on both heels, making every step painful. He tries to forget about his feet, about the walk, about his body, and thinks instead about the redstarts, the ease and lightness of their flight above the river. He wonders where they are now, if any of the chicks survived into adulthood. And he wonders—absurdly, he knows—if any of the redstarts will remember him and miss his devoted vigil at the river.
The men start around a long curve in the road, deep woods on either side of them.
Harry leans over and whispers to James, “I’m going.”
“What?”
“When we get to the middle of the curve, the guards will have either gone around it or not reached it yet. They’ll be out of sight. I can just step off the road and into the woods. They won’t notice I’m gone until you get to the new camp. I’ll have hours on them.”
“But you’ve always thought the tunnels stupid! You’ve only ever stayed in your bunk, reading. You don’t want to escape.”
“I’ve just been biding my time,” says Harry. “Tunnels are a waste of energy, but this—this is an opportunity.” He puts a hand on his friend’s arm. “Be a sport and move over a bit after I’m gone so they don’t notice the hole in the line.”
“Harry.” James doesn’t know what to say. Harry Stevens has been his closest friend in the camp. He was counting on them seeing out the war together. What will he do without Harry in the bunk below, reading his novels and making snide remarks? Harry, always cheerful, making James feel better simply by virtue of his good nature. But James can’t very well ask Harry to stay just because he will miss him. He can’t ask him to stay just because James does not want him to go.
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