Trolley stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. It was so dark that Jack almost walked into him. The road—or rather lane—curved and dipped just ahead, and there were lights glimmering through trees down in the hollow.
At 2 am? In this rural wasteland? Two previous nights’ observation along the way had suggested that bedtime in these parts was about 8 pm.
“Village,” Trolley muttered. “We’d better skirt round it. What d’you think—left or right?”
This was the third night’s walking, after some nerve-punishing but in fact uneventful train journeys: first to Munich, and then to Ulm, where they’d changed for Tuttlingen, which was only about twenty miles from the Swiss frontier. Three nights was what they’d reckoned on, after they’d decided—with good reason—to hoof it over this last section. The plan was to walk by night and hole-up by day, living frugally off the remains of their food and keeping away from people or habitation; and this third night should bring them close enough to the border to make some sort of reconnaissance of it, either in daylight tomorrow or after dark. Depending on how it looked, they’d cross either tomorrow night or the one after.
By which time, they realised now, they’d be starving. Frugality was one thing: having bugger all to eat was another.
The other two had taken a train from Tuttlingen to Singen, which was bang on the frontier, but the odds were ten to one that by this time they’d be wishing they hadn’t. Jack thanked his own and Trolley’s caution, that earlier decision to travel in two separate pairs. The reason they’d advanced for this was that four scruffy-looking characters in one bunch would have been more noticeable, more alarming or suspicious to the eyes of respectable citizens or officials. This was a valid point, too, but there was another—that Morrison and Cockrace, who seemed to regard the whole thing as a lark, might well become a liability.
Which, as things had turned out, had been putting it mildly.
The moon had gone down an hour ago, and except for those lights down in the dip it was as black as pitch. Jack said, having thought about it, “I think this time we should keep to the road. Just sneak through quietly. Otherwise it’ll be daylight before we’re near the frontier. That’d mean another night, and we’d have to get food somehow.”
“What if the border guards have been alerted?”
It seemed a non-sequitur. The guards would be alert anyway. Unfortunately … “Oh, you mean if they’ve caught the others?”
“I mean border villages would have been warned too.” He nodded downhill. “This one included. Could account for lights burning.”
They were both tired as well as hungry—and knew it, made allowances for it when they got on each others’ nerves. The next step but one always looked as if it would be easy, but when you got to that point you found the snags, unexpected problems. The really colossal hurdle, of course, was going to be the frontier: back in the camp, planning this break, reaching the frontier had been the main worry.
“The place we do have to avoid is Singen. The odds are that those two are in the bag by now, probably have been for days. The Bosch know there were four of us, and it was Singen they were heading to, so that’s where they’d expect us to turn up. Sense?”
Trolley seemed dubious. Or slow-witted … “Could be. But I don’t see what—”
“This lane takes us wide of Singen: that’s one thing we know. So I say if we keep to it—not in daylight, obviously—we’ll be OK, with a bit of luck. But if we make a detour now and can’t get back to it—we could be blundering right into Singen before we know it!”
“Should have followed the railway line.”
“Straight through Singen?”
“Oh, damn it …”
Trolley sat down on the grass. Jack suggested, “If you’re certain you could hit this lane again the other side—then let’s detour. But personally, having seen how they loop around—and we might get on a different one …”
“We stick to it.” Trolley got up. Then: “Hey, the lights’ve gone out!”
“Well, that settles it.” Jack stared down into the hollow: and there wasn’t a glimmer now. “They’ve run out of booze, all hands pissed, turning in.”
“Let’s take a shufti.”
In file, quiet-footed on the verge. Trolley had the hedge on his left for guidance.
Until the railway-station incident at Tuttlingen, the whole thing had been quite easy, except for the strain on nerves. Every uniformed official had seemed a potential danger, but in fact their papers hadn’t once been asked for, and the forged rail tickets—Escape Committee again—had been accepted without a second glance. From the camp gate they’d marched past the dental surgery, round behind a row of houses and off down a side-road to a wood, where they’d buried the uniforms and the rifle. Leaves showering down would quickly have covered all traces. Then they set off in their separate parties and by divergent routes to the railway junction, from where a slow train left in mid-forenoon for Munich; in the camp they’d been tutored on train routines, and one of the tips was to travel only on slow ones, where papers were rarely inspected. The documents they were carrying might not have stood up to close scrutiny.
It was still nerve-racking. Every time a German so much as glanced at them; or when some solid-looking frau left a carriage you’d imagine she was off to fetch a guard … Jack tried to convince himself that it was less dangerous than it felt: two men travelling by rail in wartime England dressed as he and Trolley were, would never have been stopped and questioned, so long as they had tickets. They’d simply have been ignored—in the good old British manner.
On the other hand, four prisoners had escaped. Wouldn’t they be broadcasting appeals to look out for them?
In Munich they dozed in a cinema until it was about to shut, then walked about the streets until the early hours when the train for Ulm was due to drag itself away. Slowly, like the first one. Cockup and Barmy were there on the platform: they looked as if they might have passed the time in some bar, and Jack and Trolley kept well away from them. It was about eighty miles westward, via a place called Augsburg; then from Ulm to Tuttlingen was southwest and slightly less far. They both catnapped, and looked surly when any fellow-traveller seemed disposed to chat. If the alarm had been raised this far afield, Jack hoped, nobody could have guessed these two unshaven, slovenly-looking creatures could be British officers. Touch wood …
The intention had been to take one more train journey, a short hop from Tuttlingen to Singen. The main object had been to get to the Swiss border as fast as possible, and the Escape Committee had agreed that the Germans probably wouldn’t anticipate such rapid movement. They’d be expecting men on the run to be making slow progress across country, keeping out of sight and probably heading for the frontier farther east, nearer the camp. Another advantage of using trains was that if they’d been able to go straight through as planned, their food would have lasted out well enough.
It was Cockup Cockrace who put the kibosh on it, on the platform at Tuttlingen.
He might have acquired a bottle of Schnapps or something, in Munich. Not that Cockup needed liquor to make him behave like a clown. He and Morrison were standing together on the platform, well away from anyone else; hunched against a cold wind, but talking and laughing, Cockup’s bray—it had been famous even in his own regiment, apparently—rising now and then to a pitch that made Jack and Trolley cringe. It also made some German heads turn—including those of a group of Luftwaffe a short way down the platform. Jack and Trolley turned to stroll further away, but Trolley, glancing back, froze like Lot’s wife.
“Oh, no …”
Cockup was doing the Lambeth Walk. Dragging Barmy by an arm, trying to force him to do it with him. Barmy protesting, pulling back, and—worse—glancing worriedly over his shoulder at the watching Germans. At this point there was an ear-splitting shriek as the train arrived: it was steaming in as Cockup finished his dance, the traditional shout of “Oy!” almost drowned by the chuffing and clattering and leaking steam, an
d the platform filling suddenly with people who’d been sheltering inside the station building. Cockup was roaring with laughter, helpless with delight at his own lunacy. Jack thought he’d probably been relishing the prospect of the story becoming legendary back home and in the Greenjackets’ mess—how Cockup Cockrace, on the run, had danced the Lambeth Walk on a German railway platform. This would be Cockup’s dream of immortality. But Barmy was yanking him along, making for the nearest carriage door as the train came to a stop: three of that Luftwaffe group had detached themselves from the others, were shouldering their way through the throng, obviously making for the same carriage.
Trolley muttered, “He’s round the bend. I’d say they’ve had it.” “So’ve we, if we get on that train.”
Wild horses wouldn’t have got him on to it. And with further consideration they’d decided to forget railways altogether. It might have been for the best, anyway; Singen was really too close to the border, there’d surely be identity checks on passengers. In the long run, Cockup might have done them a favour.
Ahead of Jack now, Trolley stopped. The road still curved and ran downhill into that dark hollow.
“Smell it?”
Cooking. Meat frying or grilling. Steak and onions? Pork? Delicious, mouth-watering … But at two in the morning—or it might be nearer three now—hard to explain.
“Not for us, Frank.”
“Wot, no fatted calves’ heads?”
“Try not to sniff. If we don’t press on, we’ll have another foodless day and night.”
“OK …”
Moving on down the hill, passing occasional farmsteads or cottages set well apart. At the bottom there was a tight cluster of dwellings, set around one larger building. The only light—Trolley’s hand rose to point as it, but he didn’t stop—was a thin streak of yellow between curtains in an upper window. Then a narrow, rutted lane led away to the left, with a smell of manure and animals in it: the entrance to a farmyard, probably. Trolley had paused: Jack murmured, “Keep going, Frank.”
“Roger …”
Cobbles under their feet now. And a black-and-white building leaning out over the lane so pronouncedly that only the willpower of centuries could have been holding it at such an angle. The smell of food was stronger here. They walked on—more slowly, finding it less easy to be quiet on cobbles. Around the side of the black-and-white building—the corner, as it happened, where the bend in the road was sharpest—was a wide opening: a yard, also cobbled …
The darker objects in it were tables and benches. Old, heavy timber. Feeling the edge of one gingerly, careful of splinters. Then goggling—at plates and mugs on the table. They weren’t all empty, either!
It was impossible not to stop. Nobody on earth could have been that strong-minded. Jack found a beer-mug that was half full: and the plates had bones and other debris on them. He had that mug in his hand, could hear Trolley gulping, and he was reaching with the other hand for a chop-bone that had a lot of meat on it when his elbow hit another—empty—mug. It span off the table, smashed loudly on the cobbles.
He’d gasped: and they were both still, listening, poised to run—but hoping anyone who’d heard it might assume it had been a cat. Leaving food lying around like this: didn’t they have rationing here? He was beginning to think they’d get away with it, there hadn’t been a sound. His hand moved again, and he’d just grasped that bone when the lights came on—all around the little yard, blinding … A voice bawled in German, and the last three words Jack recognised, having heard them before somewhere or other: “—oder Ich schiese!”
Meaning, “or I’ll shoot!”
Four other men—in front and to the left—two quite old, two middle-aged, and the fifth, the one doing the yelling, young but crippled, leaning sideways on a twisted leg. They all had sporting guns trained on
Jack and Trolley, the one in the doorway had been issuing further threats, and Trolley had his hands up.
“Better give up, Jack. Chap says if we’re good boys they’ll give us a meal while we’re waiting for the transport, but if we’re bad they’ll shoot us.”
In the past hour there’d been HF/DF transmissions from U-boats both ahead and astern of the convoy. Two of them Gritten had identified as operators he’d heard last evening, but there was one stranger … Harbinger was out ahead of the convoy, pushing northeastward at twelve knots, taking the starboard bow position with Paeony roughly on her port beam and the re-formed convoy nearly three miles astern. Astilbe had dropped back to the rear to oil; Harbinger had already done so, and it would be Paeony’s turn next.
He’d shifted Stella, Broad’s trawler, from the front of the convoy to the rear. In daylight Harbinger would be spending a lot of time up front here, or chasing shadowers.
Wind NW force four: sea moderate, visibility good. The promised bad weather seemed to be a long time coming.
Chubb told Mr Timberlake, at the binnacle, “We’re almost there. Skipper’ll say when to cut revs.” He dropped his voice to a low murmur. “A touch short-tempered. Overdue for a crashing of the swede, I’d say.”
Variation of “getting the head down,” sleeping … the gunner’s only answer was to glance across the bridge at his skipper’s back, then at Chubb again. Expressionless gaze out of red-rimmed eyes in the stubbled, long-nosed face. “All right. I’ve got ’er. Go and get your fat ’ead down.”
“Brekker first.” Chubb grinned, and smacked his lips. “If you left any, you old shite-hawk!”
“Eff off, Aussie.” Anywhere near the skipper, Timberlake’s language tended to be restrained. He bent his scrawny body to the voice-pipe. “Port ten.”
Independent, irregular zigzag was called for, while getting her up into the station vacated by Astilbe. You simply ordered the wheel this way or that, from time to time. It would be much more confusing to a U-boat that was drawing a bead on you than a regular zigzag would be, one that could be timed with a stopwatch and its turns anticipated.
From where he stood, Timberlake had only a three-quarter rear view of the captain, who was on his high seat with his glasses at his eyes; hunched, uncommunicative … Down below over a snatched breakfast, Matt Warrimer had made some similar observation to Chubb’s—that the skipper ought to be getting some kip now, before the next lot of trouble started. The sods might hold off till dusk, but on the other hand they might not, and right now they were doing a lot of talking. Harbinger and her captain had done three hours’ hard work since dawn, on top of a sleepless night; now there was nothing to be done for a while—at least until both corvettes had finished oiling—but he seemed rooted to that chair.
Timberlake took the wheel off, steadied her on due north. He hoped the skipper was going to remember to tell him when to reduce speed. Something about the way the old man was hunched suggested he might bite your head off if you interrupted his thoughts unnecessarily.
There’d been a lull in the action after about 2 am, and in fact nothing more of any significance had happened, except the odd contact and a few depthcharges dropped here and there; but they’d remained closed-up at action stations until after dawn. Timberlake had had a couple of hours’ rest between then and breakfast and taking over this watch, and during that time the convoy had been re-organised into seven columns instead of eight. Harbinger had been tearing round like a sheepdog, pausing here and there for the skipper to have loud-hailer conversations—with the William Law’s master, for instance, congratulating him on the way he’d turned out of his column and put the fear of God into an attacking U-boat: he’d asked the Law’s skipper, “Want a job in the screen? We’re a bit thin on the ground, you know …” He’d been full of praise for Kyle, captain of the Opal, then mildly critical in a discussion over TBS with Guyatt of Paeony. Two ships had been sunk during the night: the Sally Joy, number eight-four, who’d been hit by two fish early on, and the Dragoman, whose highly incendiary cargo of chemicals had ignited and burnt her down to the waterline in less than half an hour. She’d loaded the stuff in Port Elizabet
h, was all Matt Warrimer knew about it. Three-quarters of the Sally Joy’s crew had been picked up by the trawler Gleam and the rescue ship Leona, but only seven crewmen and one junior engineer had survived from the Dragoman. They owed their lives to the Opal, who’d pushed in so close that her own paintwork had blistered and some of her crew were suffering from burns. Most of the freighter’s boats had been incinerated on their davits, and the survivors had all been in the one boat that reached the water, its timber already smouldering. Kyle had since transferred them to the Malibar, whose master had been advised by Harbinger’s doctor on how to treat their burns.
“Starboard ten.”
“Starboard ten, sir …”
“Guns.” The skipper spoke without lowering his binoculars. He’d have heard the watch changing over, but he hadn’t once looked round. “Come down to revs for nine knots. And make the zigzag more frequent and erratic.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Don’t hog the whole watch, either. I want Carlish to get his hand in.”
“Midships.” The gunner glanced round. “Take her now, Sub, if you want.”
The convoy had started with four vacant billets. One had been taken last night by the Burbridge, but with two ships lost there’d been five holes in the pattern, which had also become somewhat straggly, by dawn. So one column had been done away with. The skipper had ranged up alongside the commodore’s Chauncy Maples to discuss the reorganisation, then plugged up and down moving ships like pieces on a chessboard.
The Burbridge should really have had red crosses on her sides. Warrimer had been on the bridge when the skipper and commodore had been chatting, and Sandover had told him that the passengers were mostly convalescents or wheelchair patients being repatriated from a military recuperation centre near Durban. The commodore’s reason for mentioning it had been that the Burbridge’s master had offered to take on board any wounded survivors in need of medical care; he had a doctor and a team of nurses looking after those convalescents.
The Torch Bearers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 5 Page 19