by Hall, Ian
I was on a train!
I rolled over, to find my progress stymied by another body. “Hey, watch what you’re doing!”
“Shut up Bill, look at him. He’s worse than anybody.”
“Where am I?” I asked, although the sounds that emanated from my lips made no earthly sense to me. My new companions looked down, puzzled. I prepared myself better. “Where… are… we?”
“On a train.” The nearest one said. Bill, I think.
I shook my head, already knowing that. “Where… are… we… going?”
Another took up the story. “Well. Lofty here reckoned we were going to Canada to join up.”
“Shut up, Andy.”
Bill kept my gaze. “We don’t know. We were taken, put in jail for a few days, then put on this cattle car.”
My vision expanded, now seeing many more young men, some not-so-young, all looking miserable, all trying to make themselves comfortable on the dirty floor. It came as no surprise that I had no possessions; once again stripped clean by MacManaman and his trusty sidekick, Alfie the bastard.
Although the thought should have depressed me, I took comfort from my code name; Biggles would have taken the punishment like a man, and looked around for means of escape. Biggles and his close companion, Algernon, Algy for short.
“There’s a hole over here,” a man said, offering the chink of light to me. “Do you know Edinburgh?”
“Yes,” I crawled over, wincing at every move. Through the knothole I saw Seafield, and told the men. “We’re… going… west…” I said carefully.
We got to the outskirts of Edinburgh, maybe somewhere near Corstorphine when we stopped. I heard voices outside. My fuzzy head didn’t translate well, but good enough. “They’re… changing… trains… We’re… going… to… get… water…”
“You speak Jerry?” Bill asked.
I nodded, tapped the side of my nose. “Don’t… tell… them…”
Many men nodded, it seemed my secret was safe for the time being.
The door was slid open by the head and shoulders of an old man in a German uniform. He must have been sixty years old. “Wasser, trinken sie, alles.” Metal cups of luke-warm water were handed in, scooped from a bucket at his feet. The feeling on my mouth was unbelievable. First, there was a loosening, as the dryness was washed away, then pain as the water gained access to cuts on my gums. I winced, then slumped back on the side of the car, savoring my beverage. The old man then lifted the bucket up onto the floor of the car. “Für waschen?” he rubbed his face, then stepped back. Only then did I see the other guards behind him, shiny grey Schmeissers at the ready.
The man took away our toilet bucket, and returned it empty, the circular lid with the hole on, already dirty and soiled. “Waschen.” He indicated, and Bill duly washed the seat, wiping his hands on his trousers. It was nasty, but it had to be done.
When we’d used up all the water, the door closed, bolts slid in place, and the car was jostled as we joined another train.
I kept my cup, hiding it behind me. The old man hadn’t counted them as they were tossed into the bucket.
Minutes later, on the move again, we all vied for a look out the piss hole of the car. The red scaffolding of the Forth Road Bridge passed by at a slow pace. I got my chance to see, and looked in pride, the pinnacle of Victorian engineering.
Night fell as we journeyed north, and in darkness we stopped again, although I have no idea where. A cardboard box was placed in the car, and one of the men leaned outside the doorway, looking along the train’s length.
“Three cattle cars.” He reported back to us all. “There was just one in Edinburgh.”
The box contained loafs of bread, and with this the only offered food, we ate in silence, each of us recounting our story. Sadly many were similar; they had wanted to join up, some had phoned a number, and been accosted somewhere in the process. I’d got my proof; the Germans were skimming the barrel of possible resistance fighters, lifting the cream.
I kept my story simple, I had made an enemy of a Scottish turncoat, and paid the price.
The next day, when the next station was labeled as Perth, I surmised our night-time stop had been Dundee. “They’re gathering all the prisoners,” I said, my mouth feeling much better for the rest and water. In Perth we got gruel. I’m sure that somewhere the lady that had put it together had the best of intentions, but her choice of vegetables and proteins must have been severely limited; I tasted beef broth, onion, barley and little else. Nevertheless, the large pot left the carriage empty, every drop gratefully received.
Slowly, in the carriage, I gained my strength, and my will to live again. I also vowed with every breath that I would kill both MacManaman and Alfie, his cohort. Both would receive a painful, agonizing death from my hands.
I encouraged the men to sit on either side of the cattle truck, leaving a path down the middle to stretch our legs and walk. Since some had been on the truck for three days, everyone saw the benefit and purpose.
The train swept over moorland for what must have been an hour, and from the position of the sun we guessed it was heading down to Stirling or Glasgow. All the men in our truck had been taken from the east coast, we had no knowledge of the area.
We stopped in the biggest railyard I had ever seen. Drizzle rain swept outside when the door opened, and I was shocked when we smelled the food on offer. A stew with real meat, cabbage, onion, and lumps of potato. Even the guards attacked the fare with gusto, smiling as the rain dripped off their coal-scuttle helmets and onto their already sodden greatcoats. In just shirtsleeves, I actually shivered at the cold. So much for a Scottish summer.
“Can we stretch our legs?” I asked as I slid to the front. I made a walking motion with my fingers, and pointed to the wet ground outside. “Entschuldigen Sie bitte,” I began, being both polite, and definitely catching the nearest guard’s attention.”Können wir nach draußen gehen?”
“Ihr Deutsch ist sehr gut.” He replied, smiling. He walked off to a nearby officer. When he came back, he looked pleased. “Nur drei männer , zwei minute.”
I turned to the men in the truck. “Three men at a time, you’ve got two minutes in the rain, enjoy.”
I savored my time, face upwards, letting the small droplets of rain bathe me. I swept it back into my hair, combed it with my fingers, felt the lumps from Alfie’s boots. Just the small time outside the cattle truck raised my spirits. When I got back inside I shivered some more, but somehow it was a good feeling. I placed my wet back onto the wall and rested.
Ten more men were loaded onto our car that night, filing aboard, heads down, already defeated. Men from Ayrshire, from Dumfries, men from the west who’d thought to join up and fight the Germans, now captive and broken.
We soon took off again, chugging slowly through the night, with many, many jostled stops, sitting in sidings, waiting on passing trains. When we arrived in a new siding in the growing light of a dewy morning, I saw a railway sign that made me shudder. From the shouts of the Germans outside, I knew we’d reached our final destination. As I jumped down onto the shingle, I looked around me at the surrounding misty moors around the village of Carstairs.
My Reluctant Return to Carstairs
We marched through the village, perhaps a hundred and fifty of us, German guards on either side, and slowly made our way closer to the high wire fences. Men already inside stood in silent tribute, yet their faces did not encourage me. Shaven heads, dirty tattered clothes, some barefoot; it did nothing to raise my spirits. Few stood upright, few expressions offered hope. As we filed through the gates, the rail guards stopped, handing over responsibility to our new overseers; surprisingly I noticed Luftwaffe badges, but the men were all on the other side of thirty, some way older. This was not the youthful cream of the German military.
All around me I heard shouts, ‘move’, ‘this way’, ‘hurry’, both in English and German. In time we were huddled together in a parade row, three deep. A colonel made his way to our fr
ont, then stood on a small podium.
“You have been brought here to work!” he began, his English clear and precise. “You will work hard, and get fed well. Those who do not work, will not be fed! Those who do not eat will die! Those who die will be scattered at your feet as a reminder of the cost of failure! Dismissed!”
As we turned to be marched away, I noticed the ash on the ground, how it clung to my shoes, then to my horror I saw a tooth, clear as day. “Shit!” I roared aloud. “We’re walking on human ashes!”
I’ve never been hit by the butt of a rifle before, and I hoped that day would be my first and last time. I’d seen it only at the last minute, but managed to turn my face slightly away from the blow. I staggered to one side as the pain ripped through my skull, only the crowding beside me stopped me from falling to the ground; I felt hands under my armpits, lifting me up, propelling me along. I staggered, slowly finding my footing, holding my temple, knowing blood pulsed from my wound.
“Thanks,” I grumbled, keeping my gaze ahead, not trying to look to the side where I could see a grey shadow walk. I’d glimpsed a sergeant’s epaulette; I could feel his eyes on me as I walked. No confrontation was the better part of valor that morning.
Soon we came to a double row of large wooden huts. From the windows, I knew what they housed; the labor force. Glimpsed between the huts were the beginnings of more, some partly built, some having just foundations.
“Halt!” The sergeant beside me roared.
We duly stopped. Our hut was number thirteen. Wonderful.
Inside we witnessed the Spartan conditions of our confinement; bunks crowded the room, I counted twenty wide and at least ten beds long. Four hundred men in an area fit for fifty.
“Find beds. Empty beds haf no clothes on! Sleep!” our rifle-butt sergeant roared.
I found a low bunk near the north side, and settled on the mattress. The pillow smelled of sweat, but my body shut down on contact. With my head throbbing, I lay on my side and drifted to sleep as the men around me discussed their fate. If we didn’t work we didn’t eat. If we didn’t eat we died, and our survivors got to walk on our ashes.
Not the best thing on your mind to start dreaming.
I woke to being prodded. “James, wake up, it’s dinner time!”
It seemed we marched everywhere. Well, at first we shuffled, then when someone got hit and told to move faster, we soon got the idea. Inside the food-hut, we crowded along the side, being manhandled and prodded into line by eager rifle muzzles. I had no doubt they were loaded and ready to fire.
Dinner was one metal plate. I noticed cabbage and potato in the mix, little else. One thing though, the portion was on the large side. What it wasn’t, was tasty. That probably would have been too much to ask.
“You haf ten minutes!” the nearest orderly roared.
Yeah, cattle trucks had landed cattle right enough.
The next morning came after sun-up, having no watch, I had no real idea of time, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask our sergeant.
We had no breakfast, just led to a corner of the prison, led out through a side gate, and set to digging post holes. Not little ones either, we were directed by another prisoner. “Ten feet wide, ten feet deep.” We looked at an already dug one, water had gathered at the bottom.
Marks had been set off into the moor. They were obviously expanding the existing camp.
With ten picks and ten spades, we set to work. Those not actually digging got hessian bags filled with the clay-heavy dirt and directed to dump it outside the new cordon. We each took turns breaking ground; it was back-breaking, and slow. It took us, a hundred of us, a whole day to dig a complete hole.
By the time we’d finished it, we needed a ladder to climb out.
Surprisingly we were rewarded by kind words from the sergeant, who remarked to another guard how good we’d done.
As we marched back into the camp at the end of the day, however, he berated us for our efforts, telling us we’d die if we didn’t pull out act together. A typical prison guard.
We’d gotten the idea of dinner now, and didn’t need beaten into line; we stood docile, waiting for our turn for our ten minutes sitting down at the tables.
The next day we did more of the same, one more post hole in a whole line stretching onto the moorland. Around mid-day, I smelled a welcome aroma on the breeze; we were directly downwind of the main compound, and the kitchens.
“Bacon.” I said out loud. Soon we were all smiling, looking forward to the evening’s repast. When we took our loaded plate to an empty table, I searched the smell for bacon, but found none.
“What happened to the bacon?” I asked as I sat down.
“What are you talking about?” A voice from the table behind startled me.
I turned, seeing a stranger’s frown. “We smelled bacon today, do the guards get the good food?”
His face paled, and he turned away from me, no matter how I verbally prodded, he did not answer. Only when we rose, our bellies full, did he speak. “That wasn’ae bacon you smelled.” His Glasgow accent came across thick and proud.
I’ve never been a man who hurls easily, but when the penny dropped I felt like it.
I marched back to Hut 13 with a growing sense of failure. “We didn’t smell bacon today.” I repeated the man’s words, unable to come up with my own.
“I was there, I smelled it.” Bill said, protesting.
“Me too,”
“And me.”
I shook my head, not quite knowing how to enlighten my comrades, their bellies freshly full of cabbage, potato and gravy. “It was people. Human bodies.”
I expected objections, protests, but all I got was silence. Somewhere deep down, maybe we all knew, but just didn’t want to acknowledge it. I let myself drift to sleep, but it didn’t come easily. Because of the smell, and how we’d breathed it in so eagerly, I knew I had dead humans in my mouth, my gut. I knew the feeling of sickness came on me from time to time, but I fought it, kept my stomach full, determined to live beyond the camp fences, determined to somehow realize a vengeance against such a regime.
On the following day we got a visitor. A woman walked across the moorland with a basket. The guard challenged her, but she walked on, stopping at our group. Inside the basket lay buttered bread and canteens of fresh water. Our guards let us eat at the post-hole site, and gave us a half-hour break to eat it in. I know it was fare way down the line of what I was used to, but I ate, savored, and worked on.
The lady walked off without a word. We all thanked her as she stepped away.
Even rain in the afternoon didn’t dampen my spirits.
Barney died the next day. It didn’t come as a surprise. He’d been the eldest in our cattle truck, and had never looked convincingly healthy. Under the watchful eye of one guard, four of us took a limb each and carried him to the building with the tall chimney, the source of the bacon smell. It got us away from the post-hole digging for a while; I didn’t care.
Inside however, I took mental notes.
Doorways from large shower rooms led to huge furnaces, and we added Barney to the already high pile. There must have been twenty people on the furnace tray, but the mechanism could have held double that number. To my chagrin I could not make out the use of such a feature; burning for burnings sake. Looking around, the furnaces didn’t seem to power anything, and that puzzled me.
On the way out, our guard was distracted, and I took the opportunity to look into a doorway on one of the shower walls. The door had a rubber seal, surely an over-the-top precaution against any water ingress. Then I looked at the floor of the shower room.
Flat, no run-off system, no drains, just concrete.
I took my conclusions back to our post hole, and ruminated on my discovery the whole rest of the day. At dinnertime I excused myself from the group and went in search of the man from a few days back. I soon found him, surrounded by his own comrades.
“Excuse me,” I asked.
“What is it?�
�� he didn’t even look up.
“The furnace, I was there today.”
“Aye, what o’ it?”
“The showers… what purpose do they serve?”
To my frustration, he laughed. “Oh you poor naïve soul.” He looked around his table, but the rest weren’t picking up on his humor. “This east-coast Bampot thinks there’s showers in the camp.”
“I say…” I started to protest.
“Shut-up, Bampot.” He cut me off, the humor drained from his face instantly. “Gas chambers don’t have showers.”
“Gas…?” I managed. “Gas chambers?”
“Aye, tomorrow’s Saturday.” I wondered what he was getting at. “We get Saturday off.”
I could hardly believe it. “We get a day off?”
“Aye, Saturday’s a special day, ye ken,”
“Okay…”
“Meet me at the fence tomorrow, East Coast. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“When?” I asked. “What time?”
“Oh, you’ll know it’s meeting time right enough.”
And he dismissed me with a wave of his hand. Seems I even had a new nick-name.
Saturday morning arrived slowly; I woke on my own rather than at someone’s command. When I got up, I crossed to my window and saw people outside, not marching, not going to work, just milling around, and talking.
It took a good hour to find him, but I soon saw the man in question. I strolled over, he stood at the inner wire limit, looking out to the main gate.
He did not start conversation, so I stood beside him, savoring the morning breeze, watching the mist chased off by the morning sun.
To our right a train arrived at the junction, plumes of dark smoke, releases of white steam. Through the few buildings of the village I could see three coaches, not cattle trucks, real coaches. “This is the third Saturday they’ve done this.” He said, following my gaze. Soon a ragtag of bodies were walking through the village like we’d done; men, women and children, most with one case or bag.
I counted a hundred and six.
They were stopped at the gate where barked orders came to strip. Well, that caused confusion. They protested, some men positioned themselves in front of their wives. The rifle butts soon disabused them of that maneuver.