by Bill Jones
But Hartmann hadn’t been listening. The only thing that mattered now was his letter. Idly, he traced circles in the condensation on the dining-room window. Beyond it, he could see prisoners splashing hopefully towards the gate through the sodden darkness. Something felt different – askew.
‘You can have my breakfast, Koenig. We’ll talk later.’
At the doorway he checked his pocket. The letter was still there. Although the rain had stopped, the air felt saturated, and the camp was swimming in brown water. Out on the farm, he knew, the fields would be turning to mud. Ditches would be flowing like rivers. With a feeling of dread, he turned towards the main gate.
Ahead of him, he could see the familiar crowd of hopeful workers. Twelve-strong work parties were already heading off on trucks. Even the policemen were there, helmeted and hidden under dripping blue oilskins. He was wrong. Everything was normal. A number three board was up on the wire, and his trailer was waiting.
Somewhere to the west, there was a last exhalation of thunder and a smudge of brightness had broken through the clouds. As the tractor edged away, it lurched violently in a water-filled pothole, cascading water over a furious policeman.
That was when Hartmann noticed. There were three motorcycle guards, not one. And the black-toothed adolescent wasn’t among them.
During the previous two days, he’d laboured in sunshine. Today, the earth sucked at his boots, and however hard he worked the cold never quite left him. Up on the lane, the guards seemed on edge, prowling restlessly with their rifles cocked. There was no banter, but the prisoners seemed happy in their silence. Without the sun it was impossible to gauge the time.
When this was over, he decided, a watch would be the first thing he bought. Hunger was a useful clue, and he was starving, but it could never replace a clock. Somewhere up in the clouds, he could hear planes buzzing. It was also starting to rain again, a steady drizzle from a drooping sky.
Hartmann stood up and stretched his shoulder muscles. Close at hand, he could hear the girl’s dog yowling, and from the end of the lane a sound like an angry wasp. Another army motorcycle, moving fast through the puddles.
As it drew nearer, the three guards on the lane stiffened. Across the width of the orchard, the other prisoners had stopped to look. Some were already emptying their pockets of stolen rations. The rest were stepping forward in expectation of a command. Everyone around the field had sensed the rising bubble of panic. For a moment, the soldiers conferred, and then the shouting began.
‘Up here, you fuckers. Now.’
Stumbling through the sticky mud, the prisoners assembled on the puddled lane.
‘There’s twelve, there’s twelve,’ someone was shouting. ‘Get them on the fucking trailer, quick.’
Hartmann hung back. She could come any minute. Where was she? What time was it? Everyone else was ready to go. The three riders were gunning their engines.
‘Get on the trailer, Kraut.’
‘I need to take a crap. Give me a minute.’
‘We don’t have a minute. Get on the trailer, or we’ll shoot you.’
‘We’re all hungry, you bastards. Can’t we at least have some food first?’
He heard the click behind him. They meant it. For some reason, everything had changed. Two of the guards were bustling forward. Around his feet, he felt the snuffling nudge of a warm presence. The girl’s mutt had come for its scraps.
‘Let me feed the dog, at least. OK?’
With his back to the soldiers, Hartmann put his hand in his tunic and bent down. There was a collar and it was tight. Maybe – just maybe – that would do. When he stood up, the dog was still growling.
‘Jesus. What did you give it?’
‘I had a sausage in my pocket,’ said Hartmann.
Even from a mile away, he could see something was wrong at the camp.
From every direction, the work parties were returning. Fraught-faced officers with loudhailers were barking orders, and the perimeter roads seemed clogged with mud-caked trucks. Although the rain had finally stopped, dusk was coming early. Every light around the wire had been switched on, and the giant spots on the towers had swung into action.
As he came through the gates, Hartmann could see hundreds of prisoners massing on the parade square, flanked by a single unbroken line of armed soldiers. There couldn’t be a hut that hadn’t been emptied. More and more POWs were pouring out. Soon the hundreds would be thousands, very few of whom were speaking. From such an extraordinary congregation, Hartmann suddenly realised, there was very little noise.
Just a few yards through the wire, Koenig was waiting, his face wild-eyed with excitement. ‘Fuck. I thought I’d never find you.’
Not since the rallies had they seen so many Germans in one place. On the parade ground, robotic spears of men seemed to disappear in every direction, each one facing the same way.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Last night. There was some sort of escape attempt.’
‘People walk out of here every day. It’s easy.’
‘This was different. This wasn’t someone desperate for a pint or a quick fumble.’
‘Who was it? Goltz? Anyone we know?’
‘Two airmen. Luftwaffe. Definitely not SS. Both shot and killed.’
‘And that’s all we know?’
‘We know it was early this morning. Before dawn. And that no one seems sure how they got out.’
It was two hours before they moved or spoke again. The camp’s collective punishment was to stand in silence until further orders. If anyone had expected an official explanation, none came. Rumour would have to suffice.
In the distance they could hear doors slamming and the drumbeat of heavy footsteps. Beds were being dragged into the open air. Manholes and septic tanks were being probed. Search parties were rampaging through every hut.
He needed to know more. And quickly. Where was Rosterg when you wanted him? A British officer was yelling out hut numbers. Block by block, the prisoners were scampering back to their billets. The word was already out – no evening meal. Instead, they’d spend their time sorting out the mess. And after that a few games of rummy before lights out at 9.30. Hartmann envied them. Alone on his top bunk, listening to the crackle of the stoves, he sensed an unbridgeable chasm between their world and his. No one was concerned about the escape or the dead pilots. It was the lost meal and the confiscated cigarettes that hurt most.
‘Max. Wake up.’
He’d been dreaming. A girl in a red dress. In a hotel room.
‘Come on. Come on. Wake up.’
His eyes opened stickily. In the thick black of the hut, a hand was jerking his arm.
‘It’s me. Koenig. Shake your bones.’
Someone had left the wood burner door open. Backlit by the embers, he could make out Koenig’s face, smell the rank tobacco on his breath. Someone else was there too. A second shape. Hartmann rolled over and lowered himself quietly to the floor. ‘What the fucking hell do you want?’
‘We’ve got to leave. Now. Get your boots on.’
‘You’re crazy. Leave and go where?’
‘It’s Goltz. He wants us back.’
Down by the glow of the fire, Hartmann’s eyes had adjusted. The other person. It was the tall boy – Eschner – still wearing his prison black.
‘You. Jesus. Are you alone? Where’s Walther? Where’s Sieber?’
In the weak light, the boy looked a hundred years old. ‘Just me. There is no one else. Sieber’s dead.’
24
16–19 October 1944
The airmen had built the tunnel well. But it still hadn’t saved them.
Between the toilet block and the double outer fence there was just ten feet of open ground. To line the walls, they’d used sacking stolen from the farms. To hold back the tide of earth, they’d purloined timbers from the half-finished huts springing up all round the edge of the camp.
Pilots and engineers, Hartmann presumed. Practical men.
&
nbsp; While Goltz fantasised, they had got down on their knees and dug. Now two of its architects were cluttering a morgue and the guards were closing in on their escape route. From all directions came the echo of boots and voices. Every hut was being revisited and torn apart. Every manhole was being wrenched aside.
Through the line of ventilation holes above the toilets, Hartmann could see the first milky traces of dawn. It seemed strange to have invested so much time in a tunnel when the camp itself was a sieve guarded by incompetents. Digging out was scarcely less risky than walking out through the main gates. Perhaps it was an airman thing. Like everyone else he’d heard wild stories about RAF escapees. Why was it that fliers had such an unlikely compulsion to dig tunnels? Right now there wasn’t time to find out.
Dawn pinks were filling in the shapes around him. Rust-stained sinks along a wall, and the familiar line of buttock-sized holes perched over a filthy open drain. Two prisoners – men he didn’t know – were lifting a narrow section of the long wooden seat. Beneath it the gulley appeared wider, and clean.
‘Don’t worry,’ one of them was saying. ‘We diverted the sewer. No one shits over this end.’
A living smell, not unpleasant, was filtering up around their feet, fused with the caustic tang of disinfectant. Hartmann’s admiration was rising.
The tunnel’s engineers had simply followed the route of a pipe that was already there. A week’s work, maybe two, and they’d enlarged it sufficiently for a prisoner to crawl through.
A dozen questions flooded into his head. No time for any of them. Somewhere nearby – only a hut or two away – a door crashed open. More beds were being turned over. An indignant squeal of protest ended abruptly with a thud. On every side, he was conscious of hard-breathing soldiers and the clatter of rifles on metal buttons.
For a final time, he looked down. The draught from the tunnel had blown out his candle. Close by, a single match scratched into life.
‘I think we’d better go, Max,’ said Koenig.
Just a few hours before – was that all? – they had been woken by the shivering boy. Back there, in the half-light of the stove, Hartmann’s blood had turned to slush. At his side, Eschner’s ghostly face was saying it again.
Sieber is dead. Sieber is dead.
The same three words, the same icy breath.
‘How? Who? What the fuck happened?’
Eschner had looked at them both in turn. His SS prison uniform – Hartmann’s uniform – was stained and torn, and in the hut’s deathly stillness they could hear the clacking of his teeth. Koenig passed him a blanket.
‘I . . . I found him in the toilet block. God, it was horrible. Tonight. A few hours ago. Less. Just hanging there and his eyes were open and . . . fuck . . . he was dead. He was fucking dead. Sieber was dead.’
Koenig’s hand clamped round the boy’s face. A few feet away, the dry joints of a bunk were creaking. Koenig’s hand clamped round the boy’s face. ‘You’re shouting. Don’t shout. We can fix this.’
A rank smell – like sour cheese – seemed to be seeping from Eschner’s skin.
‘You’re saying he’d hung himself? In my fucking clothes?’
Eschner nodded. There were tears running down his cheek on to Koenig’s hand.
‘I ran out. I was scared. I found Goltz. I woke him up and I told him.’ The boy swallowed, and wiped his face on a blackened cuff.
‘Go on.’
‘Goltz disappeared with a few others for a few minutes. When he came back he told me to come here. He said you’d know what to do. He said he wanted you back.’
‘And Sieber? What happened to him?’
Eschner looked up at Koenig, and then back to Hartmann. A tremor of cold pulled him deeper inside his blanket. ‘I came straight here. For all I know, he’s still hanging from a joist.’
He wasn’t the first. There’d been others.
Everyone in the camp had heard the stories. When the darkness became unbearable, a few strips of knotted blanket was all it took for the young lads who saw dismembered body parts in their nightmares. Just a few seconds jerking their legs over space, and they were free.
‘I’m sorry, Karl,’ Hartmann said. ‘I promised that you’d be safe.’
‘He seemed all right at the beginning.’ Eschner’s words were coming in short jumbled gasps. The boy seemed to be shrinking before their eyes. ‘It got horrible in there. Some people were horrible in there. You told us we’d get back.’
‘Who, Karl? Who was horrible?’
‘I never knew his name. The one with no fingers.’
Koenig’s hand was pressing on Hartmann’s shoulder. ‘We have to get back, Max. There isn’t time for this.’ He pushed his face close to the boy’s. ‘Strip. Let’s get this done.’
Everything was exactly as it had been. Slipping out under the army compound’s fence, the two men moved easily back towards their own huts. At the spot where Hartmann’s feet had first disturbed the wire a torn black roundel hung from a spike of metal above a ragged hole big enough to crawl through.
Over to his right, he could make out his old hut. Motes of ash were rising from a black chimney flue. Rosterg had sorted stoves for the SS too. Cosy times, indeed. Directly overhead, he could trace the pan-like outline of the Plough, and follow a line up its blade to the North Star. Where had he been the last time he’d looked at the stars properly? Russia? There’d been a full moon that night too.
Turning away from the smell of woodsmoke, he hurried towards the squat brick bunker of the lavatories.
‘You’re kidding me,’ groaned Koenig, stumbling alongside. ‘Goltz will kill us.’
They didn’t need a light. Sieber’s body was still there; utterly motionless, one half in darkness, the other whitened by the moon. His one visible eye was twisted upwards towards the makeshift noose. Beneath it, the boy’s tongue hung obscenely across his chin and the contents of his bowels were still dripping from his bare feet.
‘He’s not wearing his boots. Why would he walk across here without his boots?’
Koenig wasn’t listening. He was staring at the corpse. Rocked by a faint zephyr, it was turning gently away from the moonlight. As the face slid into blackness, Sieber’s dulled eye appeared to swivel in Koenig’s direction.
‘Jesus. How am I going to wear that now? It stinks.’ He grabbed Hartmann’s arm, pulling him urgently towards the fresh air. ‘Come on, Max. He’s fucking dead. That’s all that matters.’
Koenig was wrong. Sieber could badly hurt them all. Whatever happened now, his body mustn’t be found. Not in their camp, anyway. Goltz would be working on that, for sure. In the meantime, only Hartmann would wonder how he’d died. Maybe he had strung himself up. Somehow he didn’t think so.
‘Shall we knock?’
They were standing at the door of Hut 6. Inside, they could hear the low drone of voices. As they stepped through, it stopped, and a dozen faces turned from the nearer stove. Side by side, Hartmann and Koenig walked towards the heat. A tall figure – Mertens – peeled away from the fire-watchers to greet them.
‘Look what the cat dragged in.’ Zuhlsdorff was holding up his maimed hand in salute. Applause was circling the hut. With a shuffle of feet, the circle widened, and the pair stepped close to the wood burner where more faces sharpened in the crackling light.
Bruling was there, offering a gentle nod of recognition, and further back, a pair of detached silver discs seemed to be floating in the darkness: Rosterg, Hartmann presumed. Nothing would be discussed without Rosterg.
Only one of the group was sitting: Goltz. Not on a chair, on a wooden box from which he rose slowly and stepped forward to shake their hands.
‘Welcome home.’
Inside the stove, pine sap was boiling and popping like gunfire. Above it, a line of wet clothes was turning crisp in the rising current of warm air.
‘You’ve seen Sieber?’
Koenig looked uncomfortably at Hartmann. Hartmann nodded. ‘What happened to him?’
�
�It’s a mess which we are dealing with. As we speak, he is being cut down; his SS prison black is coming off and his army colours are going back on.’ Goltz stopped abruptly. He seemed even more pale, unwell. Agitated. ‘His body will be returned to the army compound and strung up from a ceiling in his own latrine. In so far as anyone cares, it will look as though he killed himself there.’
It was perfect. No one would investigate another suicide. No one would care. One less mouth to feed and – eventually – a formal letter home. If there still was a home.
‘What happened to him?’
‘You’ve seen what happened to him, Hartmann. He died.’
‘Was it Zuhlsdorff?’ Hartmann looked towards the space where the teenager had been standing.
‘Listen. Sieber isn’t the fucking problem any more. Sieber isn’t why we’re here.’ Goltz clicked his fingers. Rosterg stepped forward. ‘Tell them. Quickly.’
‘Gentlemen. Good morning. I’m afraid we don’t have long.’
The flames in the stove were dying. No one moved to replenish it. There was no wood left to burn.
‘Please don’t ask me how I know, but there are now over three hundred prison camps in Britain. At a conservative guess, that means there are three hundred thousand men like us scattered around the country. That’s not counting the ones who’ve been shipped across to America. Or indeed the ones arriving in the Channel ports today, tomorrow, the day after. New camps are going up everywhere. Overnight, sometimes. The entire system is stretched to breaking point, and the British are trying to react to a problem they never properly anticipated.’
‘The point, Rosterg. Get to it.’
‘The point is that I hear things. I read things. Bits of paper, telephone conversations. Further north, there’s already been trouble. Riots, breakouts. Shootings. No one is segregating the new arrivals properly any more. Black prisoners. White prisoners. All mixed up. That’s good for us, very bad for them. But there’s something else too.’
‘V2 rockets?’ asked Bruling.
‘Still falling everywhere. But no, not that.’
‘What, then?’
‘Some of the most recent arrivals are saying the Allied invasion has stalled.’