The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  ‘It will be the Führer who demands unconditional surrender,’ he said emphatically. ‘And I will die knowing that the Fatherland and National Socialism will be triumphant.’

  Somehow, it seemed to me, vanity had broken down the colonel’s resolve to remain silent, to give away nothing. To face his death with the necessary dignity, perhaps he needed the comfort of a boast, the certainty of ultimate victory, something to give his death purpose. But Götterdämmerung puzzled me. It sounded less like a glorious Wagnerian reference, and more like a project or a codeword.

  *

  After the execution, once the watching POWs had been marched back to their barbed wire pens and I had dismissed the firing squad, I found myself more or less alone. Jeeps and trucks bounced up the east road into Caen and units of infantry marched past, but no one even cast so much as a glance at a tangle of dead Germans and a British captain.

  I found a deserted stable yard nearby and somehow its tack room had survived more or less intact. ‘Sit on the floor in that corner,’ I hissed at the SS colonel. Using my revolver to point where I wanted the German to go, I slid down the opposite wall.

  The faint smell of oiled leather, the wood-panelled walls studded with saddle racks and hooks for harnesses, and the fact that the only light came from a small window above the feed bins made this place seem closed, somewhere apart from the clangour of war and the roar of battles that raged only a few miles away.

  ‘What is your name, rank and number?’ I said.

  The German merely smiled at the formula.

  With my revolver in my lap and the likelihood that we would not be disturbed, I could wait, take my time. No one was going anywhere.

  ‘If you could untie my hands’, said the colonel, ‘I could offer you a cigarette. French, I am afraid.’

  He held his arms out straight, and once I had cut his bonds, he sank back against the wood panelling. Opening a silver cigarette case, he took one and slid the case across the floor. When the sharp, almost acrid blue smoke filled the space between us, the German began to talk.

  ‘I am Oberführer Manfred von Klige, formerly of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, recently seconded to the 21st Panzer Division and now, it seems, your prisoner. May I know your name?’

  His even tone and good manners prompted me to tell him. I wanted him to talk as much as possible, and an exchange rather than a one-sided interrogation might be a better tactic. After I gave him my name, rank and regiment, he seemed to relax.

  ‘Each Christmas, without fail, the Führer sends boxes to each man in our division. There are bottles of schnapps and excellent chocolate but, alas, no cigarettes.’ Von Klige looked away and smiled at the recollection. ‘He thinks cigarettes bad for our health, and so Reichsführer Himmler has to add a carton. He simply wants us to have a happy Christmas.’ Von Klige rolled the Gauloises between his finger and thumb. ‘The Reichsführer knows that even more than food or drink, soldiers need cigarettes.’

  Without much prompting or reciprocation, the German began to reminisce a little more, talking of his sunlit childhood on a family estate east of Berlin. ‘We had ponies and horses, and a room like this one where we all used to gather after supper. When I was a boy, I had always to groom my pony myself, clean my own tack and not leave these tasks to others. My father was insistent. I had a personal duty, a responsibility to do everything for my little horse.’

  I looked around at the saddles on their racks with the long stirrups hanging below them.

  ‘That saddle above your head is English, I think,’ he said, ‘perhaps used for hunting.’

  I turned my head to look up directly above where I sat, and in an instant von Klige lunged across the floor, caught the stirrup iron, pulled the saddle off its rack down on my head and snatched my revolver from me.

  Standing over me, still smiling, he backed away, to where he had been sitting a moment before. ‘Did you ever hunt?’ he asked as he sat down, pointing the gun at my chest. ‘Well, did you?’ When I nodded, he went on, ‘So, we share a love of horses, no? And you chose to come to a place like this because you are comfortable amongst all of the bridles, halters and saddles?’

  Like a cloud passing over a warm summer sun, the German’s expression abruptly changed, hardened, and he stared directly at me for a long moment. ‘But we are not alike, you and I.’ Shaking his head, von Klige continued, ‘No. You are clearly intelligent, and you have guessed that I have knowledge of something of great importance. I said too much when we marched from Caen. I should have said nothing of Götterdämmerung.’ Flicking his thumb to check that the safety catch was off, he aimed the Webley straight at me. ‘I am a man of honour, and that is a certainty that shall stay with me forever. But now, I think,’ the German said, ‘your guessing game has to stop.’

  I felt every muscle clench, tried not to close my eyes and then von Klige put the gun barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  21 July 1944

  The night wind blew rain in off the Atlantic. Back with the 1st Battalion, bivouacked in an orchard not far from Caumont, south-west of Caen, I blessed the rain and the break in the weather. Since we advanced southwards into Calvados, it had been oppressively hot and mosquitoes were a constant torment. Battle fatigues are not designed for comfort in warm weather and I authorised shirt-sleeve order for the men. Waiting is what most soldiers do most of the time and the regulars used it well; washing clothes, cleaning equipment, scrounging and foraging for food, writing letters home but mostly sleeping.

  In the previous days, as we moved through the farms and fields behind the front line, we found the landscape almost deserted. Any civilians we saw were invariably old people, often in forlorn groups, walking the sunken lanes behind the high hedges, trying to get out of the way. They seemed pleased to see us, though, and happy to see the back of the Germans. But I feared that the civilians caught in the battle zone had paid a terrible price for liberation: their towns and villages were often shelled to rubble and the farms looted and destroyed.

  Once we camped down in the orchard, the first letters from home began to arrive, something that much cheered the men. Knowing that their families back home were safe was a great comfort in the face of the present danger. After all, what were they fighting for if not hearth and home?

  Never one to ‘bang on’, my father wrote something more like a report or an inventory. Although he did not explicitly state it, all seemed to be well at Abbey House. The lambing and calving had passed without incident despite there being little help on the farms, the hayfields needed rain and the locality had settled down for the summer with the merciful departure of the Polish Armoured Brigade. (There was a good deal of muttering amongst the Borderers when the popularity of the heel-clicking, polite and even exotic Polish officers had been hinted at in the letters from their loved ones.)

  What pleased me most about my father’s letter was not what he wrote but the image of him writing it. Drumming his fingers on his desk, sighing, chewing the stem of his pipe, often staring out of the bay window over the grass parks that led the eye down to the lazy bend of the Tweed, he would have taken an age to write the two pages of the tissue-thin airmail paper he had sent. But I was glad to have it, and for a moment I could feel the breeze off the river on my face.

  I wondered about another estate and another father a thousand miles to the east of Dryburgh, not far from Berlin. When von Klige killed himself, I am ashamed to say that I left his body and the ruin of his head in the tack room, only retrieving and cleaning my pistol. Several SS officers had committed suicide to avoid the humiliation of capture and here was another one. No one would remark on it. For days, I had tried to imagine what had gone on in his brain in the moments before he put a bullet through it. I suspect that he did not trust himself to remain silent under interrogation. The Germans tortured prisoners and perhaps he assumed the Allies would not hesitate either, especially if I had passed on my suspicions about the importance of Götterdämmerung. That was what he m
eant by honour. To keep it, to bring no shame to his family, he killed himself.

  At midday, a jeep bounced down the narrow lane by the orchard. ‘You are to come with me to Brigade HQ immediately, sir.’ I sat down next to the driver, a private in the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

  At the HQ, under an awning rigged up to keep the rain off, a field radio was crackling and around a broad table several senior officers pored over a map.

  ‘Erskine’ – Colonel Murray walked over to shake hands – ‘there’s a good deal of German radio traffic, much of it uncoded, and we want you to listen.’ He gestured towards a chair beside the operator, who slid me a notebook and pencil. ‘Gist of it is,’ said Murray, ‘there has been an attempt on Hitler’s life. On German radio this morning, he himself apparently gave details. Sounds like he was bloody lucky to survive.’

  5 August 1944

  In the morning air after rain, you could smell the earth and its rising goodness. Amongst the apple trees of Calvados, the soldiers had churned the grass to mud, but the musty sweetness was still there. Robotically checking over my equipment, making sure everything was in place and in working order, my mind would drifted back to the fields at Dryburgh and the soft, distant bleat of lambs from the high pasture beyond the river. The red earth of Berwickshire will be forever grained into my hands.

  The waiting was over. Orders had come down from Brigade HQ for a general advance. Morning mist clung to the orchard and did not lift until the afternoon. It muffled the gathering rumble of battle. Now supplied through the port of Cherbourg, General Bradley’s 1st US Army had been massing for days for an attack on German defensive formations. There was talk of a decisive breakthrough, a dash for the Seine and the great prize of Paris. British infantry and armour was to protect the Americans’ flank and prevent the enemy from mounting a controlled fighting retreat and an ability to regroup. Intelligence reports believed that at least two SS Panzer divisions opposed us, as well as artillery and infantry regiments. In the wake of the attempt on Hitler’s life, I feared the fighting would be fierce.

  Supported by infantry, the Guards’ tank division passed through our lines on its way to attack the village of Estry, astride a strategically important crossroads in the maze of lanes and tracks of the Normandy landscape.

  And then it was our turn.

  That day I was certain we would take casualties. Even though we had armoured support, an infantry assault against a defensive line that had repulsed the Guards’ tanks for three days would mean some of my men dying or being wounded. Having spoken to my band of Borderers, I had to find my own courage so that I could lead them into battle, lead from the front, something commanders had done for millennia.

  An hour before the assault was due to begin, we waited behind a blackthorn hedge for the order that would take us to the startline. We had been promised support from the Grenadiers’ tanks and their vicious flame-throwers, but in the pauses in the artillery barrage whistling over our heads, I could not hear any engine noise. Word came up the line that our armour was held up in the narrow, sunken lanes and could not break out of them by mounting the high, steep banks and hedges on either side. When I was told that they could not even get close enough to bring their guns within range of the village, I realised that we would be very exposed if we attacked without the armour.

  But we did. Our startline was a stream north-west of Estry and as the order to advance came, the defenders saw us, found our range and the barrage began. As mortars and shells exploded around us, the air filled with flying debris, clods of earth, limbs torn from shattered apple trees and their bizarre shrapnel of tiny, hard cider apples. But we took no direct hits and moved forward with great caution, knowing we could soon be close enough to take machine gun fire.

  At the north end of the village, the SS had Panzers dug into protective emplacements, their turrets constantly traversing, searching for targets. There were 88mm guns, mortars and machine gun nests firing from the upper floors of houses. The area around the church, whose spire had been decapitated, was heavily fortified as a strongpoint. And hidden in the hedges, copses and trees, there were snipers.

  All of them were waiting for us.

  From the edges of Estry, I heard the creak and grinding of tanks turning. Had the Grenadiers reached the battlefield by another route? But then, swinging into the orchard rolled a Panzer with grenadiers running crouched behind it. Such was their determination, the defenders were counter-attacking. We withdrew quickly, but still found ourselves under mortar fire.

  It was clear to me that the SS simply refused to abandon this strategically pivotal village and, if they could, would in all likelihood fight to the last man, do what their Führer demanded. We were still in Normandy; it would be a long, hard fight to reach the frontiers of Germany.

  Orders at last came to withdraw all of our forces and the Grenadiers were sent to find a way to block the roads south in case the SS did try to escape. My men were exhausted, sleepless because of the mortar bombardments through the night and sickened by the ever-present stink of the dead cows rotting in the fields around the village. Estry was a charnel house.

  Two days later, the guns and mortars fell silent. Under cover of darkness, the Germans had withdrawn, almost certainly because they had run out of ammunition, food and probably, crucially, cigarettes. Slipping past the Grenadiers, moving south, looking for supply dumps, linking up with the SS Panzer-Division 21 and others, regrouping, they were clearly determined to fight on.

  To the west, however, Bradley’s 1st US Army were beginning to break out of Normandy. German forces were too stretched and too sparse to contain such a sustained and powerful thrust.

  South of Estry, we made our way through the farmland, carefully clearing the area of snipers and stragglers. Many of the men were much moved by the terrible suffering we saw in the fields. Cows stood stock-still, lowing in agony. No one had milked them and any movement of their bloated udders caused even more pain. Several of my Borderers had come from farm places and I allowed them to relieve the animals’ agony by milking them by hand, the milk splashing in warm jets on the grass. What reduced me to unashamed tears was the sight of a bay mare and its foal. In one of the small fields, the mare lay motionless, bleeding on the ground, probably killed in a crossfire coming from the surrounding hedges. In a hopeless circuit of loss and puzzlement, the foal was walking round and round its mother. So often had this orphan done this that there was a path worn in the grass. One of my men spoke softly to the young horse, stroking its withers, trying to tempt it away with handfuls of torn up grass, but the bewildered foal would not leave its mother.

  31 August 1944

  More than anything it was the music that lulled me. It drained the tension, washed like a warm and welcome tide over the images of slaughter. I sat in the corner of a vast, mirrored restaurant on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, not far from the Louvre, enjoying coffee and cake, listening to a young woman singing softly at the piano. She wore a flower in her dark hair. It sounded as though the song was in English, but the sort learned phonetically, with the words blurred together, something about waiting for a train to come in.

  After the breakout from Normandy, Bradley’s 1st US Army, General Patton’s forces, the Canadians’ and ours raced across central France to the Seine. Having learned the art of armed retreat on the Eastern Front, the Germans had pulled back in good order northwards, seeking the sanctuary of the Westwall, the much-strengthened Siegfried Line. On August 25th, Paris was taken without a destructive fight. The city of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, of the Place de l’Etoile and the Champs Élysées, the Left Bank, Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower had not been bombed to rubble.

  As a German speaker, I had been seconded to No. 30 Commando and the staff of Squadron Leader Godwin. In one of the few flashpoints, we were attacked when we captured a very grand château on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. It had been the HQ of Admiral Dönitz, the commander-in-chief of the German navy, and we discovered many tons of abandoned documents, a
huge cache that had somehow not been destroyed. My team and I were ordered to sort and catalogue them. I had also to help with negotiations. The German garrison had absolutely refused to surrender to the French Resistance and insisted that, as soldiers, they could only make a formal agreement with opposing officers, either the Free French Army, ourselves or, preferably, the Americans. For good reason, they were also terrified that they would be lynched by the crowds of Parisians who had flooded into the streets. My own view was that the formalities did not matter much but the heated arguments I witnessed told me that post-war politics was already crackling around the Paris streets like electricity.

  I have never been kissed so often and by so many different women as I was in Paris. ‘Vive l’Écosse!’ shouted one woman who embraced me – and with more than a peck on the cheek. After all that had happened on Queen Beach and in Normandy, I was proud to wear the regimental Glengarry that marked me out as a Scottish soldier. Paris exhaled with relief at the departure of Les Boches, the Gestapo, the strutting SS, and exulted in what seemed like a true liberation from years of oppression.

  And I exulted in clean clothes, a shave each morning, a bath each week and a billet in the Château de la Muette, Dönitz’s former headquarters. From the windows of a bedroom that could have slept twenty, I looked out over the Bois de Boulogne, its lush green grass, mature trees, broad walkways and not a hedge in sight. It was a very far cry from the bunks of the barracks at the regimental depot in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Autumn would tint the leaves soon but it was good to be alive in late summer in Paris.