Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell?

by Horace Greasley

  The German guards didn’t fare much better as they nibbled on ration packs of biscuits and chocolate. Occasionally they would brew up a coffee and hand out packs of wrapped sandwiches. Not once did they make any attempt to offer any to the prisoners. Early that afternoon the roar of an aeroplane overhead forced the entire march onto its stomach. Horace swore it flew just a few feet over his head as he looked up and saw the Russian pilot take stock of the situation. The plane banked and swooped down again, this time peeling off about half a mile from the stranded men. He’d heard the stories of friendly fire, particularly where the Americans were concerned. This time he needn’t have worried.

  The plane flew past them, banked steeply and the roar of its engines filled the sky. Horace figured it was about three miles to the east as it swooped into a steep dive. It was then that they all noticed the focus of its attention. A German train laden with troops, tanks and an array of vehicles, too far away to be heard or even noticed by the prisoners and guards, crept slowly along the track on the long retreating road to Berlin. The Ilyushin 2 Shturmovik attacked the train with a faint roar from its 7.62mm machine guns and 30mm cannons. Another roar this time as the prisoners voiced their approval. The guards stood back and watched the spectacle unfold. They did nothing.

  Time and time again the Ilyushin 2 Shturmovik banked away and returned. The crew were accurate and sparing with each round as the German troops on board tried in vain to bring the plane down. Four or five separate plumes of smoke rose from the stricken train. It had come to a halt. The Russian pilot turned away, happy with the result. He flew directly above the line of prisoners, most of whom were now on their feet waving and cheering the plane. As the Russian pilot approached the assembled group of prisoners he performed a victory roll and disappeared from view over the forest that lined the road. It was the last they’d see of him. A few of the German guards cursed and swore but made no attempt to remonstrate with their captives. The other guards were visibly sullen, quiet… resigned to defeat and acutely aware they were in the last few days of the conflict.

  By nightfall the men were exhausted. That awful empty feeling inside that Horace remembered so well was with him again. It was with him again at breakfast time and at lunchtime the following day. The prisoners were getting restless and several talked openly about overpowering the guards and making their own way to the Russian lines. The German guards looked decidedly uncomfortable and their fingers hovered and twitched nervously oh, so close to the triggers of their rifles. It was only a matter of time before someone cracked.

  The makings of a mutiny were put on hold later that afternoon as the Germans made an announcement. They had decided to make camp near a small farmhouse by the side of the road. It looked deserted, as if the occupants had decided to leave in a hurry. The Germans said the prisoners were free to roam the farmhouse to search for food. They posted seven or eight guards on the perimeter of the farm with rifles cocked. Feldwebel, the German sergeant, gave notice that the guards on duty had been given clear instructions to shoot to kill any man who attempted escape. Horace was aware of the desperation in his voice. The situation had turned, and at that very moment Horace knew their captors would not hold them much longer. He feared the desperation of the situation; the tension in the air could be cut with a knife. The prisoners made a point of smiling and joking when in earshot of the guards. It all added to the strained atmosphere.

  Jock Strain walked up to Horace with a big smile on his face.

  ‘You used tae bide on a farm, Jim, didn’t ye?’

  ‘I did that, Jock. Why? What’s up?’

  ‘The lads have found a pig with a litter of wee piglets and they’re ravenous.’

  ‘What, the piglets?’

  ‘No the men, they…’

  ‘I know it’s the lads, you silly Scotch bugger,’ Horace laughed. He climbed to his feet, the idea of pork already playing with his sense of smell. ‘You get the fire prepared and I’ll find a knife.’

  Horace found an old boning knife in what looked like a makeshift repair shop at the back of the farmhouse. The memories of his father’s instruction to him as a 14-year-old had faded but quickly returned as he sent four of the piglets to meet their maker and went to work on preparing the small bodies for the fire. Another butcher from Derbyshire took great pleasure in helping him and within the hour the piglets were being spit-roasted on an open fire. The smell was like heaven on earth. He closed his eyes. The smell took Horace back into the small kitchen of 101 Pretoria Road, Ibstock. He was with Mum and Dad, Sybil and Daisy… he opened his eyes, smiled at Jock Strain holding a makeshift plate and a fork he’d found in a kitchen drawer in the farmhouse.

  ‘It’ll be another hour or so yet, Jock. Can you wait? Don’t want you to be getting food poisoning now, do we?’

  Jock grinned. ‘Sure, Jim. I can wait, though I doubt with the shite I’ve eaten over the last five years that a bit of raw meat would dae me any harm.’

  ‘Maybe not, Jock, but best to wait.’

  Jock’s smile disappeared as a German corporal seemed to appear mysteriously through the smoke of the fire. His rifle hung menacingly across his shoulder and he smiled as he spoke in broken English.

  ‘Smells good, ja?’

  Horace spoke in his best German. ‘Es riecht wunderbar’ – It smells wonderful.

  The corporal pawed nervously at the butt of his rifle as he broke into his native tongue. ‘Ich habe Anweisung von dem Feldwebel, ein Schweinchen fuer unser Essen mitzunehmen’ – the sergeant has instructed me to take one piglet for us to eat.

  Horace stood and took a step forward. The flames licked menacingly at his boots as he peered through the smoke. He gritted his teeth, held the bloody knife up in front of his face and roared at the startled man.

  ‘Sag dem Hurensohn, er bekommt nichts’ – Tell the son of a whore he gets nothing.

  Flapper took a step forward and positioned himself to the left hand side of Horace. Jock came from the other side with his fork held out in front of him as the German started trembling. He tried to regain his composure but it was hopeless. His facial muscles twitched. He tried to control them but the little operating levers and pulleys disobeyed the commands from the brain. He wanted to stand firm but was hardly battle-hardened and strong, having spent the whole of the war patrolling prisoner of war camps two or three miles from his home village. He took a step back and pointed his finger at Flapper. ‘You will all be shot, Arschloecher!’ – arseholes!

  As he turned around and hurried away Horace called after him. ‘Wichser!’

  Jock looked at him.

  ‘What does that mean, Jim?’

  Horace grinned. ‘I told him he’s a wanker.’

  ‘Your German is very good, Jim.’ It was Freddie Rogers. ‘But I’m afraid you might just have upset them a little. We’d better be careful, find a few more weapons around here and prepare a little welcoming committee if we are to hold onto the ham.

  ‘Upset them? I haven’t even fucking started,’ Horace replied. He looked over to Jimmy White, Flapper and Jock Strain and grinned. It was a schoolboy grin, an apple-scrumping grin, a look that said ‘let’s see how far we can push them’.

  ‘Jock, Jimmy, let’s get the bloody radio set up and let the Germans see us do it.’

  ‘You stupid Arschloch, Ernst! The Englanders will think we are scared.’

  ‘Yes, Ernst, and we are hungry. Where is the pig?’

  Corporal Ernst Bickelbacher suddenly felt very afraid. He’d expected a sympathetic ear when he returned from his confrontation with the prisoners, at least a little support. He’d expected his fellow soldiers to be angry, ready to teach the English dogs a lesson they wouldn’t forget. Now it was his fault and nobody seemed in any great hurry to get off their arses. And he’d heard on the prisoners’ radio that a million Russians were in Silesia liberating dozens of camps. There was no mention of what was happening to the guards of those camps but Ernst Bickelbacher could guess.

  Karl Schneid spoke.
‘What do you expect, sending the fucking country boys in? You should have sent a Berlin boy in.’

  Karl Schneid considered himself tougher than most of these bloody backwater inbreds. At least he had seen a bit of front line action before a bullet through a kneecap forced his posting to eastern Silesia. These soft bastards would bow to anyone, he thought to himself as the hunger pains gnawed at the lining of his stomach.

  Suddenly it was all too apparent to Ernst Bickelbacher. The war was lost. German against Englishman, German against Russian, and now German against German.

  ‘You are from Berlin, Karl?’

  ‘Ja! And proud of it.’

  Ernst Bickelbacher smiled, stared at his one-time colleague and spoke slowly but with dramatic effect. ‘Then I suggest you get back there quickly.’

  Karl Schneid pulled himself to his feet. ‘And why is that?’

  Bickelbacher could smell Schneid’s breath, stale… like he would imagine poison to smell.

  ‘Tell me why,’ Schneid demanded.

  ‘Because the Russians are there right now, Karl, and they are having the time of their lives avenging the deaths of their countrymen.’

  ‘No! I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true; I heard it on the prisoners’ radio.’

  ‘The prisoners have a radio?’

  Ernst Bickelbacher nodded slowly. ‘The Russians will be fucking your wife in the street as their comrades wait their turn.’

  Karl Schneid lunged forward and grabbed Bickelbacher by the throat. Bickelbacher made no attempt to resist or fight back. Far better to be throttled here and now than wait for the Russians, he thought to himself as several of his fellow guards joined the mêlée.

  Karl Schneid panted hard as two powerfully built colleagues held him by the arms. He stood in front of Bickelbacher and cursed and swore. Bickelbacher stood in the shadows and made no attempt to respond. He hadn’t resisted, hadn’t swung a punch in anger. No one seemed to notice as Bickelbacher unbuttoned the clip from the holster of his Luger. He placed the barrel in his mouth and squeezed the trigger.

  Jimmy White, Jock, Flapper and Horace had managed to dismantle the radio in the few short minutes they’d been given to vacate the camp, concealing the parts around their bodies. It took no more than 15 minutes to reassemble the radio at the farm and another two minutes to tune it in. A power source and wiring had been found in a farm workshop. They didn’t bother with the headphones this time. Now the radio was on loudspeaker and the reports could be heard by just about every prisoner.

  There were almost three hundred Allied prisoners in and around the farmhouse that night. There were no more than 20 German guards. The prisoners found an array of various weapons: pitchforks, knives, an axe, a sledgehammer and clubs of various shapes and sizes. One of the prisoners found a box of six-inch nails and some of the men had hammered them through lumps of wood so that four inches of the nail protruded from the other end. Then the prisoners heard a shot in the distance and prepared for a German assault.

  False alarm.

  The prisoners took it in turns to patrol and eat, ready to call out to the others at the first sign of a German guard. The German delegation arrived after about an hour. As they walked cautiously towards the fire Horace turned the volume up to full. The diaphragm of the speaker vibrated, distorting the well-spoken tones of the presenter from London. Horace turned it down a notch or two so his voice could be heard with perfect clarity. There were eight German guards, rifles slung across their chests, held menacingly in front of them.

  Horace remained seated as he chewed casually on a piece of pork. He looked up at the nervous-looking men.

  ‘Guten Abend, meine Herren. Das Essen ist gut heute Abend’ – Good evening, gentlemen. The food is good tonight.

  ‘The radio is good too,’ added Jimmy White, holding a rusty pitchfork. ‘The Russians are all over Silesia, it says.’

  Horace stood and took a few steps forward. Slowly he raised his knife to the face of the German officer. The smell of slightly overcooked meat permeated the cool night air and lingered tantalisingly on the breeze. ‘Care for a piece of pork, my friend?’

  Horace almost felt sorry for the man. Almost, but not quite. His position was hopeless, a few German rifles against the wrath and fury of a crudely armed mob. Unknown to him, his personal protection unit was slowly retreating behind him, leaving him exposed and vulnerable. He almost sensed it as he spoke, desperately trying to retrieve an ounce of dignity from the situation.

  ‘My men have eaten, there is no need.’ He took a step back, tried but failed miserably to raise a smile, a last shred of dignity. ‘We will leave at first light. Eat well, gentlemen. We have a long day ahead.’

  As the Germans retreated, the men began a slow handclap and shouted and screamed every insult their basic German vocabulary could muster:

  ‘Drecksau!’ – Dirty pig!

  ‘Hundesohn!’ – Son of a dog!

  ‘Arschloch… Hurensohn… Wichser!’

  One English insult rang out. ‘Bunch of cunts!’ It was Flapper. He beamed, his teeth glistening in the light of the flames. ‘Sorry, Jim, the old German is still a little rusty.’

  ‘I’m sure they get the drift, Flapper,’ said Horace. ‘I think they’ll understand.’

  It was evident at first light that the Germans had already left. Freddie Rogers came back with the news. ‘I’ve seen where they camped last night and they’ve scarpered, no doubt about it. We’re on our own, lads.’

  So what now? The prisoners simply marched along the road in the direction their German captors had been leading them the day before. The march was somewhat subdued and it unsettled Horace. It didn’t make sense. They were marching on a full stomach. Bacon and eggs, the first Horace had tasted in five years. The war was undoubtedly won – the swift exit of the German guards bore testimony to that. So why weren’t the men singing? Why weren’t they smiling? Why wasn’t Horace singing and smiling?

  The crux of the matter was the great uncertainty. Were there still pockets of German resistance or aircraft in the area that wanted to take out the prisoners of the camps? Had their German captors joined forces with other regiments and units and were they simply waiting in ambush further up the road? And the Russians… What of the Russians? What were they really like? Were they the barbarians and madmen the Germans had made them out to be? Horace and his fellow prisoners were about to find out.

  Three hundred yards up the road a convoy of trucks rumbled towards the line of weary Allied prisoners. A large red star could clearly be seen on the bonnet of the first truck. The Russian officer spoke good English. Sergeant Major Harris took over proceedings and introduced himself with a handshake. The Russian officer was smiling, made a point of shaking a few hands and ushered his men towards the prisoners. Only now they were prisoners no more. A few of the Russian troops offered the Allies vodka from plain glass bottles and some of the men drank freely. Horace abstained. The atmosphere was all very pleasant, not what Horace had expected at all.

  Sergeant Major Harris addressed the troops, informed them they were now officially repatriated and on their way to Prague in Czechoslovakia. He said they would be split up and put in different camps depending on whether they lived in the north or the south of England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales. From there they would be put on planes and taken to the RAF base nearest to home. It was over. They were free men.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Horace hugged his great friends, Jock and Flapper, Freddie Rogers and Chalky White. Some of the Russian troops joined in; it was all quite bizarre and too much to bear for the majority of the men who shed tears openly. Men who’d been incarcerated for more years than they cared to remember suddenly realised their days with each other were now numbered. Men who had been sick of the sight of each other fought back the tears and clung to their last remnants of friendship. For the first time they exchanged addresses and made plans for get-togethers and reunions. Freddie Rogers invited anyone wh
o was listening to a weekend on the Isle of Man and promised the biggest party Douglas had ever seen. Horace pledged he’d be there.

  Horace was wiping the tears from his face too. But they weren’t shed for his fellow sufferers; they were for his English Rose. He wondered where the hell she was and whether she was even alive.

  It was a good six hours before the convoy of ten four-ton Russian lorries reached the patient men. They had waited so long for this moment. Time was no longer an issue. They’d smoked the last of their cigarettes as they sat in the early evening sunshine, eaten the last of their chocolate and biscuits from the now almost exhausted Red Cross parcels. The men were assured that food, drink and cigarettes were in abundance in Prague. As they climbed aboard the lorries, more vodka was handed out and more handshakes were forthcoming from their Russian allies.

  The date was 24 May 1944. Horace had been in captivity for four years and 364 days. Five years less one day.

  It would take nearly four hours to reach Prague. Several of the men got steadily drunk. It seemed that despite the rationing of cigarettes, bread and even bullets and vodka were always in plentiful supply. A few Russian soldiers had joined the Allies in the back of the four-ton truck and one led the singing. They sang for hours. One slightly built Russian sang just about every folk song in the entire history of his country. The ex-POWs interspersed his songs with their own renditions of ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, ‘The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’, and Flapper sang a terrible croaky version of ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’. The Welshmen sang about the hills and the valleys and a lone Irishman lamented about lonely prison walls and a young girl calling to him. He sang about the fields far away and about how nothing matters when you are free. He sang like a nightingale. Horace listened to the lyrics; the song told of a nation downtrodden, of a man sent a million miles from the only place he had ever known, away from his family, away from his home for little reason. Horace was aware of a solemn young Russian soldier with tears rolling down his cheeks as the Irishman sang to a hushed and respectful audience. As he finished, the troops broke out into a spontaneous round of applause and begged him to sing again. He declined.