iron pirate

by Unknown Author

  'For her,' he had said awkwardly. 'You'll meet her again, don't you fret.'

  Then he had marched away with some others, and Hechler had saluted without knowing why.

  After that it had been a matter of waiting and enduring. Christmas, with local children gathering outside the wire to sing carols. One of the U-boat officers had killed himself shortly afterwards. Hechler had withdrawn even further from his companions. They seemed alien; their war was not one he had shared, and he wished that Gudegast was still with him.

  He often thought of the others, men like Brezinka who had survived, and the doctor Stroheim who had last been seen tying his own life-jacket to a badly wounded seaman. The quiet hero.

  Then the time when the guards had fired their weapons in the air, and all the lights had been switched on.

  Hechler had accepted the end of Europe's war with mixed feelings. The time seemed to drag, and yet he almost dreaded his release. He had written to Erika Franke several times at the two addresses she had left for him, but had received no reply.

  His head lolled to the monotonous clank-clank-clank of the wheels and he stared through the window at some great white humps of land. He saw the khaki uniforms of British NCO's who were directing some tractors and a great army of German workers. He realised with a chill that the humps were all that was left of buildings, whole streets, now mercifully covered with the first snow of this bitter winter.

  Someone said, 'Nearly there! Home sweet home!' Nobody else spoke. One man, an infantry captain, was dabbing his eyes with a soiled handkerchief, another was trying to pull his threadbare coat into position. Home? There was not much of it left.

  Hechler thrust his fingers into his pocket as if to reassure himself that his pipe was still there. In his other hand he held the parcel which contained Gudegast's gift. It was a small portrait of himself, not aboard ship, but with some Scottish heather as a background. So typical of Gudegast, he thought.

  He felt his stomach contract as he realised that the train was suddenly running into the station. Again there seemed to be wreckage everywhere, the platform roof blasted open like bare ribs against the dull sky.

  He sensed a new tension all around him. Most of the soldiers had only just been released; many had come from the Russian Front, gaunt, despairing figures who rarely even spoke to each other. The train stopped with a final jerk and slowly at first, then with something like panic, the passengers spilled out on to the platform.

  Here and there were signs of occupation. Station direction boards in English with regimental crests on them. The bright red caps of the military police, khaki and air force blue, voices and accents Hechler had taught himself to know while he had been in the bag.

  He stared at the barrier beyond the mass of returning German troops. Police, service and military, a British provost marshal smoking a pipe and chatting with a friend. Further still, an unbroken wall of faces.

  He came to a halt, his heart pounding. Was this freedom? Where was his courage now?

  A solitary German sailor, the two ribbons whipping out from his cap in the chill breeze, dropped a package and Hechler picked it up.

  'Here!'

  The sailor spun round and snapped to attention.

  Hechler handed him the parcel, and they both stared at one another like strangers. Then the man gave a slow grin, and reached out to shake his hand.

  The saluting, like the war, was finally over for both of them.

  The girl, Erika Franke, stood by one of the massive girders which supported the remains of the station roof and watched the train sigh to a halt.

  It was the third one she had met this day, and her hands and feet were icy cold. Or was it the awful uncertainty? Not knowing? As each train had trundled into the station to offload its cargo of desperate, anxious servicemen she had seen the reactions of the crowd, mostly women, who waited there with her. Like her. She looked at the noticeboards which had once recorded the most punctual trains in the Reich. Now they were covered from top to bottom with photographs, some large, others no bigger than passport pictures. Addresses and names scrawled under each one. It was like a graveyard.

  Now as the first hurrying figures approached the platform gates and the line of military policemen, she saw many of the same women surge forward, their pitiful pictures held out to each man in uniform.

  'My son, have you seen him?' To another. 'He was in your regiment! You must have known my man!'

  She wiped her eyes, afraid she might miss something.

  A young British naval lieutenant with wavy stripes on his sleeve asked, 'You all right, Frauiein? I've got a car outside if

  She shook her head and replied politely, 'No, thank you.'

  A woman in a shabby coat with two photographs held up in front of her pushed past a red-capped policeman and asked that same question. The soldier brushed her away; he did not even look at her. He seemed embarrassed, afraid that he might recognise someone he had left in the mud with a million others.

  The girl watched the other wave of figures coming through the gates. Not many sailors, this time. She would come back tomorrow.

  She remembered his letters, bundled together, when she had finally returned home. It was all like a dream now, and the last flight to Argentina, an impossibility.

  She recalled the moment when she had climbed down from the Arado and into a waiting launch. She had felt nothing but a sense of loss. Even when German consulate officials had opened the boxes to find them full of broken fragments of coloured glass, she had thought only of Hechler, with every minute taking him further away, perhaps to his death.

  Leitner's aide had had hysterics when he had seen the broken glass. She had heard him shout the name of a petty officer called Hammer. Whoever he was, he must be a very rich man if he was still alive.

  The woman with the two photographs pressed forward. 'Please, sir! Tell me, please! Have you seen my boys?'

  The man stopped and took the photographs.

  The girl felt her heart stop beating. It was Hechler. For a long moment she stared at him without moving, taking in every precious detail. The lines were deeper on either side of his mouth, and there were touches of grey beneath his cap. He was wearing that same old fisherman's jersey under his jacket. He seemed oblivious to the cold.

  Hechler said quietly, 'I am sorry, my dear, I have not seen them. But don't lose hope -' He looked up and saw her and the next instant she was wrapped in his arms. He did not even see the woman staring after him, as if he had just performed a miracle.

  How long they clung together, neither of them knew.

  She whispered, 'It had to be the right train!' She ran her hand over him as if to reassure herself he was real. She saw the loose threads on his right breast where the Nazi eagle had once been, and looked up to see a new brightness in his blue eyes.

  He said, 'I knew I'd find you, my little bird. Somehow -'

  Some British sailors were waving and cheering as some of their companions boarded another train.

  Hechler put his arm around her shoulders and they walked out into the drifting snow.

  Once he glanced back at the station and the jubilant British sailors.

  Then he squeezed her shoulders and said softly, 'Like us, they're going home.'