by Colin Smith
There was little time to clear away the bodies before the next six were ready. After the first lot the rest knew exactly what was going to happen to them. Yet they all acted as if tonight they would be shot but tomorrow they would pick up their lunch boxes, kiss their wives and children goodbye and go to work again. They were neither blindfolded or bound but stood where they had been placed in front of the corpses of the last batch so that each time the firing squad had to take a pace or two backwards in order to take aim properly.
None of them tried to run from the headlights we had on them and escape into the darkness. On the contrary, some folded their arms across their chests and squinted into the lights and the silhouette of the firing party as if they were trying to call their bluff. It reminded me of Goya’s condemned rebels defying the French muskets in Madrid but less demonstrative, less Latin. I think the Czechs’ behaviour might have something to do with it all happening so quickly. Sometimes I could not make out whether they were brave or merely stupid. Perhaps it was a bit of both. Certainly their courage had not been drained by days in the condemned cell.
But it wasn’t easy to watch, I can tell you. For me, the worst moment occurred during, I think, the twentieth batch to go. As they were being led past me one of them looked me squarely in the eye and said, in not bad German either, ‘This is not right. Tomorrow it will be you.’ One of the young SS troopers who were escorting them, they weren’t included in the firing squad thank God, put his rifle butt in his back and urged him on but I could see it had unsettled the youngster. It unsettled me. Everybody on Heydrich’s staff was invited to watch but not everybody went: meat eaters avoiding the reality of the abattoir.
I didn’t stay for the demolition of the houses. I was almost dropping with fatigue and got my driver to take me back to Hradcin Castle. By then it was at least three in the morning but still a sultry Central European midsummer’s night lit up, like distant artillery fire, by the flash of flames from the blast furnaces at the Kladno steel works. As soon as we got away from Lidice, there was this smell of new mown hay in the air.
The Templer put the letter down. He was very moved by it. He stared across the valley at the Acropolis without seeing it. Sometimes he feared future generations would never fully comprehend just how revolting a task it had been, this long overdue cleansing of the blood and imposition of discipline. The strength of character that had been required to harden the heart and flush out the trichinae and bacilli and make a New Europe.
There was no doubt Heydrich would be greatly missed by the Party. The newspapers had been amazing. Valkyrie gathering Heydrich to Valhalla had been the least of it. Yet despite or because of his upbringing, he sometimes warmed to this sort of stuff. He enjoyed the notion that Odin remained the true German God and not the one with all that eschatological fire and brimstone baggage they had inherited from some Jewish schism.
The Czechs, he reflected, were undoubtedly the cleverest and most hard working of the Slavs but not, as a rule, fighters. Certainly nothing like the Poles who loved fighting almost as much as they did drinking and he had seen them at both. No, it was the British who had put the Czechs up to this. Nurtured, armed and trained them and provided the aircraft from which they parachuted home. He found himself thinking about the man at Lidice who, on his way to the spot where they had put the mattresses against the wall, had said, “This is not right.”
Of course it was right. An example had to be made; a terrible crime exacted a terrible price. Germany was not ashamed. The world had been told what had been done at the mining village. But was it enough?
Perhaps the man had a point. Even the terrorists were pawns in this affair. What was really needed was direct retaliation against a British target that was, at least nominally, of equal rank. An eye for an eye. A Reichsprotektor for a Reichsprotektor. Something say as easy to understand as the reprisals Hitler ordered after RAF bombers had incinerated medieval Lübeck. The Luftwaffe had hit back with the Baedeker raids, singling out any place of historic interest awarded three stars or over in the guide book almost every pre-war German visitor took to England. Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich and York had all been visited. More crimes against civilisation by the unspeakable Hun. But who had started it? What did they think Lübeck was? The Ruhr? He knew Norwich a bit too, a pretty little place but not Lübeck.
So a Reichsprotektor for a Reichsprotektor or his equivalent. It had an attractive logic. He scraped a match along the rock and lit a Players cigarette, booty from a warehouse in Piraeus the British had failed to destroy before they fled for Crete. He liked Players and this particular stock came in handy packets of ten just right for giving the small cigarette case he carried its twice daily refill. He inhaled deeply, dragging the smoke down into his lungs and blowing it out through his rather flared nostrils while he went back to his English translation of Morosini’s dispatches.
The bombardment started on the 23 September 1687. At first a certain Antonio Moutoni, Count of San Felice, commanded the artillery. The Republic had granted him several thousand ducats for the development of various infernal machines but his opening salvo arced over the target to land on the Venetian lines the other side, killing several of his own. Morosini sacked him. Then the Lieutenant from Lunenberg shows up. Five days after the bombardment started the German gunner had worked out the trajectory for his bullseye mortar lob and the Turks surrendered. His name is never revealed and no more is ever heard of the German gunner whose anonymity had, for the Templer, a certain reassuring familiarity. He had never met a Greek yet who did not blame the Turks for the destruction of the Acropolis.
He put the book down and stared at the ruins on the other hill. He could just about make out the figure of a sentry, rifle slung, and it occurred to him that this was about as much as they would have seen of each other as they hurled their cannon balls across the valley. When he picked up the Morosini again he found he couldn’t concentrate and closed it. His mind was still full of his friend’s letter. Sitting suddenly became intolerable. He got up and brushed himself down though the rock was not all that dusty, which was why he had chosen it in the first place for he was careful about his clothes.
Apart from black civilian shoes, the only concession his uniform made to an Athenian summer were the light weight sandy yellow trousers he wore, new issue for the Mediterranean theatre and southern Russia. Above the trousers he had on the short black officer’s tunic with silver piping around the collar adopted by the Waffen SS armoured units though he had never sat in a tank in his life. Since he was tall and almost as narrow waisted as a twenty-year-old, it was a flattering garment on a man slightly older than the century. On his left breast was the Iron Cross he had won fighting the British about a quarter of a century ago. His tunic collar bore SS runes and four pips which indicated he was an SS Obersturmbannführer, the equivalent of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Wehrmacht.
The Templer’s headgear was the boat shaped black cap they called the Fliegermütze. He removed any possible traces of dust by slapping it against his thigh a few times, and placed it at rather a jaunty angle to the right of his head. Then he picked up his book and began his descent down the hill.
He passed an anti-aircraft gun, dug in and under a camouflage net, casually returning the salute of its half-naked crew who sprang guiltily to attention from where they had been lying about in their shorts, smoking and reading newspapers and letters from home. It was hard to blame them. There had hardly been a British aircraft over Athens in daylight for months.
These boys had conquered almost the whole of Europe and what they hadn’t conquered were either allies, like Italy or almost allies like Spain, or nervous neutrals with strong pro-German factions such as Sweden and Switzerland. England held out and waited for the Americans to come; but the United States had already been in the war for six months now and not yet recovered from the loss of half their fleet at Pearl Harbour. And, in the end, the English would see reason. Even Churchill’s notion of a civilised world made up of the English
speaking and the rest would not keep Britain isolated from Continental Europe forever. He hoped so because he knew it would be difficult to avoid being part of an army of occupation in England.
The Templer turned and treated the startled gun crew to one of his slightly lopsided grins which was meant to convey that he too had once been a young soldier and knew how irksome all the bullshit that surrounded senior officers could be. Then he walked on down the hill, his mind once more crowded with thoughts of appropriate retaliation for the death of Heydrich for whom, like his friend, he felt a deep sense of loss. The younger man had been a constant inspiration, a born leader. He had had a lot of affection for him.
And then it came to him, signals flashing between synapses. It was so obvious he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it before. And the great beauty of it was that some of the apparatus as already in place.
By the time he had got to the foot of the hill, and was approaching the place where his Mercedes and driver awaited, all the details were beginning to come together. It would involve activating Lang and his people earlier than intended but that was probably no bad thing because he was an impatient young man and quite likely to go off half-cock. Nonetheless, there had already been a successful trial drop of weapons and explosives at one of their agreed places in the Galilee and a second was scheduled. Well, they would be dropping something extra if he had his way. A Reichsprotektor for a Reichsprotektor! He had the perfect fit.
4 - A Hill Country Ride
Like the other two riders Calderwell was wearing one of the white, lemon-squeezer Stetsons the Mounted Police Striking Force had copied from the New Zealand troopers who in 1917 had been part of Allenby’s cavalry, along with the Australian Light Horse and his own Midlands’ yeomanry. Strictly speaking he was not entitled to wear it because the MPSF considered themselves shit hot and didn’t take kindly to impostors. But some time before his transfer to CID Calderwell had put in more than a year with them, they liked ex-yeomanry, and it was his own hat he was wearing. In the stirrups were his second best and most comfortable riding boots and across his chest a bandoleer with another fifty .303 rounds for the loaded Lee-Enfield in its saddle bucket. He also had his Webley but the MPSF insisted that every patrol member carried a rifle. Otherwise they were no more than a passenger.
These three horsemen made it difficult to believe that, not all that far away, in a desert smudged with engine oil, existed a war of machines where men turned into charcoaled corpses had rarely seen more than the dust of those responsible for their incineration. Silhouetted on the same Galilean skyline, a sortie of Crusader knights or Saladin’s cavalry screen must have looked much the same as Calderwell’s patrol.
In Tiberias, the mixed Arab and Jewish town where the MPSF had their main stables, he had been provided with a well set up grey gelding. It was bigger than he would have liked. The other two had been given the smaller Ruwallah bloodstock named after the Syrian tribe that bred them. But Calderwell knew that the grooms were working on the principle that the higher the rank the higher the horse and the grey seemed responsive and sweet tempered enough. After Jerusalem’s interminable desk bashing, he wouldn’t have minded if it was a mule.
Even when Calderwell had first ridden into this territory in the van of Allenby’s advance, his riding had always owed more to enthusiasm than skill. When he returned to Palestine the best part of a decade after he left it, tired of Coventry factory life he told those who bothered to ask (though this wasn’t half the story), Calderwell had been surprised how much he had to learn all over again. But learn he had, better than ever, with an ex-Lancers Sergeant Major barking at him to sit up straight in the saddle. Only a Lancer would want you to ride like you had a pineapple up your arse.
Twice Calderwell had been ambushed in these hills. On the last occasion the rebels had blocked a narrow trail with a wall of loose stones and opened fired as soon as they had dismounted to pull it apart. Luckily their rifles and ammunition were mostly rubbish, stuff they had scavenged from the retreating Turks twenty-five years before. Even so, it had taken 20,000 British soldiers to put an end to it and they would probably need a lot more if the Germans could equip the Mufti’s disciples with decent weapons and slip the leash at the right time. “Worth a couple of tank divisions to Rommel.” Davison had said. Temporarily subdued it might be but the Galilee was still mostly hostile territory. West of Tiberias they had been obliged to make a detour around the village of Lubia, birthplace of a Mufti liegeman who had followed his master into Berlin exile and even by local standards a community particularly ill-disposed towards servants of the Crown.
The Palestinian sergeant, who was in the lead because he was the only one who knew exactly where they were going, stopped and allowed the others to catch up. “We are close,” he said, patting his horse’s neck. “Maybe ten more minutes.”
Above them they could see the rocky lips of the Horns of Hattin. Now the track they were on narrowed and began to rise quite steeply. They reached the edge of a little spur of land from which there was a good view of the verdant Galilean plain over a thousand feet below and the distant shimmer of the famous inland sea itself which the Jews in Tiberias preferred to call Yam Kinneret. The last stretch had been a hard climb for the horses and they were blowing. They continued to ride in single file. After the sergeant came Calderwell and then a young Christian Arab Constable, a handsome lad until he opened his mouth to reveal a dental shipwreck.
It was almost midday and they had been in the saddle for about six hours. As they climbed the breeze which had fanned them on the lower slopes had transformed itself into a stiff, moaning wind and they made sure their chinstraps were down so that it pushed their lemon-squeezers no further than the backs of their heads. It was a warm wind with a lot of dust in it and gave them little respite. On those few occasions when it did subside, flies buzzed about their ears, drawn by the mingled sweat of horse and man. As they got closer to the Horns a murder of grey and black Asian crows rose into the air and then, cawing nosily, descended out of sight towards the lower ground. “I think they have a sheep or a goat,” the sergeant said.
Calderwell nodded and rode on. The last time he was here it would have had them pulling their rifles out of their saddle boots and perhaps sending a scout ahead on foot to see what had startled the birds. But most of the surviving rebels had thrown the towel in. All that was left were a few bandit gangs and they were already a local tradition when the Good Samaritan was trying to pick up the pieces. Knowing this, Calderwell was surprised to find his right hand resting on the stock of his rifle. He pulled it away and told himself not to be so bloody windy.
The mouth of the old volcano, choked by the ashes of its last vomit, had become a little plateau of about a mile square. The track to it took them up to the lip and then descended down a grey slope of shale and small boulders. As they went down the ears on Calderwell’s gelding went back and he felt the horse begin to tremble. He reined in and stroked its neck. As he did so he did so he heard a sudden scurrying among this scree, then a frightened squeak and turned just in time to see the sand coloured fur of a rock weasel disappear down a crevice. They rode across the plateau towards some rheumatic looking olive trees on the far side. On the way he noticed the charred remains of a recent and big looking wood fire. When they got to the ancient olive trees the sergeant dismounted. “We must walk,” he said. “It’s difficult for the horses.”
They tethered them beneath the silvery leafed olives and the Arabs took their rifles from the saddle boots before descending a rocky spur that led away from the filled crater. Calderwell didn’t bother. He had his revolver. There were boulders as big as small tanks here, spewed up in the lava flow of the volcano’s death rattle. The land fell sharply away, almost a cliff and Calderwell found it hard on the knees as he went down it, placing his feet sideways, mindful that the smooth leather soles on his riding boots’ could easily take his feet from under him. From their rocky lairs blood-eyed lizards, some as big as baby dragons
, noted this intrusion into their ancient kingdom.
It was near some of the bigger stones that the crows, now circling on a low thermal, had been congregating. As the sergeant suspected it was a goat, a female that had died shortly after giving birth to the two kids whose coats were still visibly matted with afterbirth. Whether the birds had allowed the suckling kids to die before disembowelling them along with their mother was impossible to say. They were covered in flies.
Close by, partly hidden by a large rock, was another murmuring swarm. Calderwell could just make out some white fur or hide. He walked over. The hide looked flimsy, dried out, shivering in the wind. Then he realised that it was not a hide at all but a piece of white cotton. A piece of white cotton that was part of the ankle-length gebalaya shirt being worn by a young Arab male who was lying on his back with his knees bent and some kind of cloak trapped beneath him. There was a neat bullet hole in his forehead, blue at the edges, and it looked like the birds might have started on one of his eyes.
“You poor little bugger,” whispered Calderwell. There was no doubt in his mind who it was.
5 - Haifa