by Bill Jones
‘No more. Stop, Erich, stop.’
Koenig’s fury had been so terrifyingly swift that Hartmann had been paralysed by its sudden ferocity. Down in the shadows of the hangar floor he could hear the mangled pleading of the Englishman, like a wet, soft moan; and he could see the black piston of Koenig’s arm pounding into the crumpled black shape at his feet.
‘Enough.’
Hartmann reached forward, seizing a raised fist and yanking back his friend’s head by the hair. As Koenig turned, there was a furious growl of resistance and his eyes blazed. In that moment, Hartmann wrapped both arms around him and clung on tight.
‘No more. That’s it. Relax. No more.’
From the cold floor, they could hear the beaten man’s ragged bloody breaths. Koenig’s scrawny body seemed inflated to twice its normal size, as if possessed.
‘Has it gone? Are you OK? Can I let go?’
Koenig nodded. There were specks of blood on his cheeks.
‘If you kill him, we’ll hang. Just like Sieber. And there’s no reason to kill him.’
‘It’s all right. It’s passed. You can let go. I won’t hurt him any more.’
Koenig shook his shoulders free, and took a step to one side. He was panting heavily, and his eyes reflected no light.
‘There’ll be others, don’t you think? Someone will come looking for him.’
‘We need to go.’ Hartmann was already walking away.
‘Wait. Hang on. Just one thing, Max.’ Koenig had spun back and was crouching down over the twisted shape of the British guard.
‘For God’s sake, no. No.’ Tilting his head back, Hartmann stretched his eyes up to the arched ceiling of the hanger. Stars were showing through a narrow strip of glass. He felt tired and beaten, an old young man still fighting a war he’d never truly been interested in. He felt dizzy too, and as he stumbled, his hand found Koenig waiting for him in the semi-darkness.
‘Careful, Max. You were nearly gone there. Too much excitement.’
‘You haven’t killed him?’
‘No. Promise.’
Hartmann let go of his friend’s arm and stood up straight. His head was clearing.
‘I just thought we might need these more than him.’ Koenig was wafting something under his nose: a box of matches and a fresh pack of cigarettes. He could smell the tobacco. He could already imagine the first hot coil of smoke travelling into his lungs, and the glad prospect steadied him.
Behind them, he could still make out the guard, but they’d moved away and it was no longer possible to see whether he was breathing. ‘You didn’t kill him?’
‘I didn’t kill him.’
There wasn’t time for more. Soon enough, when they were caught, he would find out. Before then, Hartmann presumed, there was a little more of their absurd race to run.
Within a few minutes, they were back in the sodden ditch alongside the road. No ambulances, no frantic truckloads of trigger-happy soldiers. At the top of the track, the doctor’s car was just as they’d left it, and when they freewheeled down the hill, it jerked obligingly back into life.
‘Left or right?’
Koenig was at the wheel. The sickly warmth of the engine was refilling the car. For once, Hartmann didn’t know what to say. In front of them was a main road. But he’d virtually no idea where it went. Or from where it came. Another aimless night of freedom might be about as good as it got. Looking across the road at the square block of the hangar, he thought of the man bleeding out on its concrete.
Miracles didn’t happen if you were dead.
‘Go right,’ he murmured. ‘Back the way we came.’
They were lost within minutes. Every road sign had been stripped, and their sense of direction foundered in the black bowels of the Wiltshire countryside. Three times they drove through the same village, struck by the giant grey stones that circled it and by the unutterable darkness lurking beyond its boundaries.
Strange humps and hills seemed to flank them at every turn. Church steeples rose like daggers through the haze of woodsmoke which hung over every sleeping hamlet. There was no traffic; there were no midnight stragglers; and to Hartmann, it felt as though they had surfaced in an ancient land, stripped of its present troubles and stalked by invisible ghosts.
When the petrol finally ran out, neither had spoken for over an hour.
‘What now, maestro?’
Hartmann didn’t reply. Through his window he could see a pointed grassy hill, rising sharply up from the roadside. The only sound was the engine, winding down like a dying clock. He opened the door and stepped out into thick grass shiny with dew. Another early frost was coming – he could feel it on his cheeks – and the sky was sparkling with faraway light.
From the boot of the car, he fetched the petrol can and a blanket. It was good that they hadn’t damaged the doctor’s Austin. Apart from the mud, it was fine.
‘We’re going for a walk.’
They didn’t stay on the road for long. Turning sharply away from a scattering of houses, Hartmann found a footpath heading south across a fast-tumbling brook, and then up towards the sharp ridge which cleaved the pasture from the sky. At the top, they stopped, panting from the effort and clouded in their own mist.
In front of them was a long, grassy mound of earth running back from a cluster of huge stones. As their eyes adjusted, they saw a gap, an entrance, and when he investigated Hartmann felt the cold draught of a grave.
‘It’s a burial mound with some sort of entrance chamber. If we’re lucky we’ll be able to wriggle inside it.’
‘You’re joking.’ Koenig tugged at Hartmann’s arm. Hartmann pulled it away. ‘You’re not joking.’
‘Let’s see if there’s any wood around first.’
There wasn’t much; a few gnarled branches snagged with sheep’s wool, a damp wooden box and a broken fencepost.
‘If we need more, we’ll look later. Now give me the matches.’
With a shrug, Koenig handed them over. Hartmann dropped to his knees between the two biggest stones and crawled slowly out of sight.
‘Pass me the wood and the blanket, then the petrol can.’
From the inside his voice sounded distant, unfamiliar.
‘I’ll get the fire lit, then you come in as well. It’s not bad. Honestly.’
Koenig sighed. Between the cracks in the rocks he heard a match fizz and die. Hartmann’s voice came back, muffled like before.
‘I’ve splashed the blanket in what was left of the petrol. Only a few drops. I just need one to catch. The fucking matches are soaked.’
There was a whoosh then, and a spouting of flames from the hidden cracks in the mound. Koenig sprang back. Wisps of burnt fabric were drifting skywards, along with the sharp smell of singed hair.
‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’
‘Come in. Come in.’
Koenig took one nervous look behind and obeyed.
Hartmann had been right. It was a bearable spot. By the light of the fire, he could make out a ring of mossy uprights supporting the immense tilted slab over their heads. Underneath them, the ground was dry, and there was just enough room to lean back and watch the smoke wriggle its way out into the night. As they settled, Koenig reached up and ran his fingers along the wet underside of their roof.
‘It’s probably been there a few thousand years,’ said Hartmann, his eyes locked on the glowing pile of wood. ‘I doubt it will fall on you tonight.’
After that they were quiet for a while, enjoying the warmth and the murmuring of the wind. In turns, they dozed or nursed the fire, eking out their precious wood as it hissed at them furiously from its bed of hot ash.
‘Are you awake?’
Koenig’s eyes were flickering, half-open, half-closed.
‘Have you still got those cigarettes?’
‘Sure.’ He lifted up his right buttock, and reached into his back trouser pocket. ‘Are you OK with flat ones?’
Hartmann laughed. Koenig had always made him la
ugh. Back on the clifftop playing band music. They’d roared together then. From some dusty shelf in his memory, he summoned the tune – a swing tune – and began to hum.
‘Remember this? You and me? Love’s young dream?’
Koenig smiled, lit two cigarettes, and passed one across. ‘Yes, I do. But you got married. Broke us up. I remember that too.’
‘I wasn’t aware we were a couple.’
A loose end stirred in Hartmann’s memory. Some throwaway remark from Goltz. You and your lover-boy, he’d said.
‘You never had a girlfriend, Koenig?’
‘Never had the time.’
‘You had the time. You had the uniform. I bet the girls were drooling over you.’
‘Nope.’
‘Not even in Russia? Or France? They had wagons full of tarts back there if you wanted them.’
‘Diseased hags, Max.’ A smouldering twig had fallen across Koenig’s foot, and he kicked it angrily back into the fire. ‘We were there to kill them, not fuck them.’ He took a last deep pull on his cigarette. ‘Or did you forget?’
‘Look. I fell in love, Erich. It wasn’t something I planned. No more than the wedding, or the kid that I’ve never seen.’
Neither spoke for a while then, and as the flames shrank, the walls around them appeared to shrink too, drawing them closer to the fading heat, and to each other.
‘My father would have disowned me, I think,’ mumbled Koenig. ‘His little boy had to be a hero. A good soldier. No distractions.’
‘You were good at it. You found it easy. I never did.’
‘It was fun. Always. The camps were fun. The uniforms were fun. The fresh air. It was our world and we were making it right. Better for us. Better for our parents. You thought that too. Don’t ever say you didn’t.’
‘You’ve been in France. You’ve seen this country. What can we offer them that would make them so much better? Nothing.’
‘You can’t talk like that.’
‘Where do you think all the Jews have gone, Erich?’
‘Have they gone? I don’t know. How would I know?’
It wasn’t Koenig’s fault. Hartmann knew that now. Their parents were to blame, that entire generation of imbeciles with their pushing and shrieking and clapping. Germany had never been so happy, that’s what they said. Germany had never been so great. They said it on the wireless. They said it on every wall. They said it until you could crawl and walk and talk and fight and couldn’t possibly think any other way. And once they’d thrown in a little fear – a dash of terror – the evil came naturally – so naturally, it felt ordained and good. Nothing to be ashamed of at all.
Just put on the uniform, my son. It will absolve you of all crimes. All the Führer asks is that you defend what he has built. Until the last one of you is standing.
‘Max.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s go home. Tomorrow. Let’s try and get back.’
‘Seriously?’
‘It’s what you want. That’s enough for me.’
Inside their tomb, the fire had gone out and a weak dawn sky was showing between the stones. Stiffly, Hartmann uncoiled himself and crawled outside. Food was what they needed most, but a little dry wood might buy them some time.
They had no money, no papers, no map. And Koenig would change his mind when he woke up.
Stretching his back, he saw a white coating of frost glittering out across the Downs, and when he moved forward the turf crunched under his frozen feet. The sun wouldn’t rise for an hour, but there was light enough to look back down in the direction of their abandoned car.
Something was moving towards them.
For a moment he thought they might be sheep, strung out in a line across the fell. But sheep didn’t talk. And sheep didn’t carry rifles.
‘What is it? What are we doing?’
Koenig had joined him, shivering and pale from the cold. When he followed the line of Hartmann’s gaze he saw thirty men, maybe more, advancing towards them in the strengthening light.
‘No time for breakfast then?’
Hartmann laughed, and wrapped his arm around Koenig’s shoulder. ‘Did you mean it? What you said back there?’
‘What did I say, Max? I don’t remember.’
Confidential Witness Report
27 Training Group RAF Yatesbury
Confidential Witness Report
I am a flying officer stationed at No. 2 Radio Flying School Yatesbury. On 21st November 1944, I arrived to find breakfast had been cancelled due to an incident during the night. Military security personnel were already combing the site for escapees, and a 48-year-old part-time military policeman was reported to be in a critical condition following a savage beating by a gang of German POWs.
Some attempt appeared to have been made to enter – and possibly start – one of the planes, but this would have been impossible as they require the help of ground staff using a mobile heavy duty power supply.
All of us were made aware that a number of small groups appear to have successfully broken out of Devizes camp in the past few days, just as they have from numerous camps up and down the country. All leave has been cancelled nationwide after a Luftwaffe prisoner was found attempting to board the ferry from Anglesey to Dublin. I am told he had broken out of Camp 184 on 17th November, and reached Holyhead on the train via Birmingham and Liverpool. No one seems quite sure how.
31
Late November to mid-December 1944
As they stumbled down the hill, a growing audience of men was waiting. Along the roadside, troops were tumbling from a line of trucks. They could make out radio noise above the sound of racing engines, and a platoon of armed men was jogging awkwardly up towards the ridge.
Apart from a few desolate sheep, every living eye was on the two tramps coming towards them, shoulder to shoulder and somehow radiant in the breaking sun.
There’s nothing else up there, Hartmann wanted to tell them. No hidden army. No spies or secret weapons. We are it. However ruined we look, we are the sum total of your enemy – filthy, hungry and weak. And too bone-tired to care. In his back, he felt the disgruntled prod of a rifle, then another.
‘They’re feeling humiliated,’ he whispered to Koenig. ‘This won’t be pleasant.’
But Koenig was already being dragged away to the open back of a lorry. And as Hartmann watched, he too was surrounded by a ring of menacing faces and hauled on to the cold metal flatbed of a canvas-topped army truck.
Outside, a hand banged on the tailgate. He could feel the prop shaft turning, and see the light shut out as a wide cloth flap rolled down from the roof. Even before the first rifle butt smashed in, he was hunched, his head pulled into his chest, his knees drawn up to protect his groin.
In the darkness, it was impossible to count how many were beating him, or know whether they were British or American. From every direction there were boots and fists. When he twisted from one, he rolled into another. Later on, blinded by his own blood, he recalled a hard wooden cane slashing at his neck.
The guard, he thought. The guard must be dead.
Finally, bored by his lack of resistance, they stopped. Sensing that it was over, Hartmann allowed his mind to wander over his body for damage. No teeth missing; just the same set of war-battered ribs which felt like hell and a face that was starting to bulge in all the wrong places.
For a second time, there was banging outside. Two more silhouettes were clambering in out of a blaze of light and suddenly they were moving. Up through the gears, two opposite lines of swaying figures sitting either side of their captive, oblivious of the thin bead of blood which ran out under their boots across the floor of the wagon until it curdled unseen on a rusty hinge.
When the canvas flap gusted up, he caught a glimpse back down an endlessly straight road towards a lake of mist. Stretched out along it, he could count the train of army vehicles and one black car – an Austin – pebble-dashed with dirt. Seeing it there, Hartmann’s swollen face began searching f
or a smile that wasn’t possible.
It had been quite an adventure, he thought. He’d sort of enjoyed it.
It was funny now he could see things in daylight. The two of them had travelled virtually no distance at all, lost in a gigantic maze of their own confusion.
When the truck stopped, he was half asleep. A chorus of excited voices was nagging at him, and hands were pulling at his jacket, shaking him awake. His left arm was numb, and when he sat up it drooped uselessly at his side. As the blood flowed back, he flexed all his fingers and felt the mess around his eyes.
There was dirt in the wounds, but nothing was broken and he could see. Once the bells stopped ringing in his ears he’d be fine. Hopefully, Koenig had come through it too. If he’d mustered any resistance, he’d quite probably be dead.
Outside, a fresh line of soldiers was unhinging the tailgate. The loose flap had been tied back, revealing a throng of brown serge twisted in his direction: a hundred armed men or more, unsure whether to be jubilant or scared.
Beyond the flotilla of parked trucks, he could make out turreted redbrick barracks, and beyond them, the familiar wire outline of their camp. They were back at Devizes. A gap was opening between the soldiers; three British officers with pips and peaked caps alongside a bored-looking American in pressed combat fatigues. The American was smoking a cigar.
As best he could, Hartmann stood upright and stared into space.
‘Well, you’ve given us the run around, and that’s for sure.’
It was one of the British officers.
‘I presume you must be either Max Hartmann or’ – he looked down to consult his papers – ‘Erich Koenig. Would I be right?’
‘I am Unteroffizier Max Hartmann.’
It had been a long time since he’d spoken his own name.
‘Of the First SS Panzer Division?’
Hartmann remained silent. Nothing he wanted to say would have made sense.
‘No matter. You’ve been a very naughty boy and will be treated accordingly. Four weeks’ solitary confinement. Behave yourself, you’ll be out for Christmas. One fart out of place, and you’ll discover that we’ve lost the key. Verstehen Sie? Do you understand?’