by Bill Jones
Along the base of the fence, the earth seemed to explode in a curtain of dust. Tiny shards of stone flew in every direction, lacerating the men’s faces and slicing through their clothes. When the shocked prisoners looked up, a second volley ripped into the ground.
This time, there were screams. One man was holding his hands to a shattered eye. Another was looking dazed, as a huge crimson patch spread outwards from his groin. By his ear, Hartmann felt a whistle of air, which was followed by a soft, low thud. Eschner was down, clutching his thigh, and slick sheets of blood were flowing around his fingers.
‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’
‘Let me look.’ Hartmann pulled back the boy’s hands. There was too much blood to see.
Rosterg was reaching in his pocket for a handkerchief to pack the wound. ‘He’ll get looked after, Max. We’re finished here.’
‘Jesus. You and your fucking hankies.’
‘Just leave me. I’ll be fine.’ Eschner had rolled on to his side. His voice sounded strong. ‘Go. Go.’
As the soldiers prepared to fire again, the crush around the gate began to thin. Men with stretchers were already picking up the wounded, and the sodden prisoners were edging backwards towards their huts. Every shred of resistance had gone and the wet air was heavy with fine particles of dust. Within a few minutes, the last of them had slipped away.
36
As the troops dispersed, he could feel a bad cloud lifting from the entire rotten place. It was so pungent you could almost smell it.
Back in their huts, the ordinary soldiers would be rejoicing. For a week or two, at least, they could rest easy, cleansed of the spies and fanatics. No one from Goltz’s poisonous assembly would be coming back, and Christmas would no longer feel like an act of treason.
There’d be repercussions, certainly. Less food, less fuel and their footballs would be confiscated, but on both sides of the fence, dawn would bring relief. No one had been killed and the camp’s agitators were being swiftly shipped out. For the thousands who remained, there’d be letters from home, and a few exultant renditions of ‘Silent Night’.
Lucky bastards, thought Hartmann.
Their lives would be good – cold, but good. Even the damned rain had stopped falling.
Standing alone by the gate, he gazed out across the curved iron rooftops for the last time. Everyone else – including Rosterg – had vanished and the only sounds were the tanks and troop-carriers returning to their depots. Within a few days, the entire place would be ringed by razor wire, high-powered lights and dog patrols. No one would come close to getting out again.
‘You. Here. Now. Nazi scum.’
Hartmann raised his arms and moved towards the main gate, where a large crowd of soldiers was still gathered. He could hear relieved laughter beneath the grey cloud of cigarette smoke and steam that was rising from their wet uniforms. Most of them had shouldered their machine guns. Only a few kept their weapons trained on the solitary German as he walked towards them with his hands clasped over his head.
‘Stand over there.’
Any one of them could have spoken. It didn’t matter who. The rifle in the small of his back was telling him where to go, and he’d no intention of testing their resolve. One dead Kraut would probably make their night and Hartmann didn’t feel ready to be a dead Kraut just yet. Parked along the main road, he could see a fleet of trucks facing into the town. One by one they were filling with paras and leaving. As he walked out through the twin gates of the camp, he could feel the hot breath of their loathing.
‘You’re going to hell, you bastard.’
There were other comments – outside the range of his vocabulary – but he’d got the message.
At the corner of the barracks, a dismal band of fellow-conspirators was shuffling to keep warm. Under the lights of the departing convoy, Hartmann was shocked by their pitiful condition. Months of idleness had reduced them to a state of hollow-chested feebleness. Only one of them – Bruling – had retained any physical bearing. The rest were strangers to him; and each man was as defiantly indifferent to his presence as the British. No one would be safe here until they were all as far away as possible.
‘The others have already been taken. Gone.’
Hartmann didn’t respond. If Bruling wanted to get himself killed for talking, that was his business.
‘It’s as if they knew all along: who to look for, what we were planning.’
The recriminations could wait. Almost all of the trucks had left, and there’d been no fresh arrests. Up and down the wet streets, normality was returning. At a guess, Hartmann put the time at around 8 p.m. The day’s ration of coal would be working its magic in the huts. There’d be a song or two, and a steady trade in home-made liquor before the embers died.
Everyone would be talking about the night’s events. They’d talk of nothing else for weeks.
After an hour, their transport came, a sludge-green single-decker bus with muted headlights and a sliding door. When it opened, the smell of warm leather flooded out. There were thirteen soldiers for thirteen German troublemakers. Every window was shut tight and each prisoner was squeezed in with an armed guard alongside covering the aisle. No one was taking any chances, and so far no one – not even the square-jawed military policeman at the wheel – had said where they were going.
Another midnight mystery tour, then. Fine. Just so long as he wasn’t sick.
Through the circle he cleared in the wet glass, Devizes came and went. At the station, a train had just arrived, discharging men in suits and frisky couples into the dampness of the night. A little further on, soft gaslight fell through the door of a pub on to a party of carousing soldiers heading home with their berets hanging loosely from their epaulettes. Nothing was ever more than a snapshot framed, but he savoured each one, and the expectation of more along the way took his mind away from the stink of the polish. All around him, the prisoners were drifting off, shaken to sleep by the tremors which ran constantly through the ancient bus. When he returned to his window he thought, for a moment, that he’d seen the doctor’s house with its black car under the sombre trees, but when he craned back to be sure, it was gone.
For a long time after that, Hartmann tried to calculate where they were. If he’d been able to see the sky, he’d have known, but the windows were small and impossible to keep clear of condensation. As the men’s clothes dried, the inside of the bus had turned into a hothouse. Every now and then, he saw the lights of a village or a small town, but nothing that told him where they were heading.
‘We’re stopping for a piss.’
The driver had been squirming in his seat for miles.
‘This’ll be the only stop.’
Everyone stood, relishing the cold thrill of air as the door opened and the driver stumbled out, tearing at his flies. In groups of two, accompanied by their minders, the prisoners stepped gratefully on to the grassy roadside under the broad silvery stain of the Milky Way.
In the weak light falling from the door of the bus, Hartmann waited his turn, smiling at the sighs of relief from the men. Suddenly, he felt desperately hungry, his appetite stirred by the wintry bite of ozone. The others would be starving too, but no one would ask. Food would have to wait. That’s what happened on mystery tours. Tilting back his head, it was easy to trace the familiar line to the North Star, hanging alone beyond the left-hand side of their deserted road. Hartmann checked it carefully.
When they settled back on the bus, and the door slid shut, he knew for certain which direction they were moving in. Black Camp 21 might be their ultimate destination – he didn’t doubt that – but right now, they were travelling towards London.
For the most part, the roads were clear and the country abed. Even in the built-up areas, Britain looked abandoned, as if its entire population had fled. Only the military were still up, coiling across the landscape in sinister convoys which required the bus to pull off and wait until their way was clear.
Glossy tanks on low-
loaders followed by streams of canvas-clad lorries were rumbling purposefully through the night. At times, they would be stuck for an age, counting yet another chain of camouflaged vehicles as it rattled past their stares. And when the bus could move forward again, the prisoners dropped back in silence, utterly indifferent to where they were going.
Hartmann was thinking too hard to sleep. For weeks, he’d pushed his other life to the very edge of his nocturnal reflections. And yet here it was again: the misplaced optimism, the blind faith, and the quiet delusion of invincibility enhanced by every last, miracle escape. Maybe everyone on the bus, even the Tommies, felt the same: that every new journey carried a seed of hope, a prospect of change. It might only be a fighting chance, a small chink in the blackness, but every man still standing had one.
Drugged by the exhaust, Hartmann finally drifted off. When he woke up, the sky was light and the bus was crawling into London’s suburbs. It had taken them almost twelve hours to cover less than one hundred miles and the city’s morning traffic was working itself up into a dignified frenzy.
As the city crush sucked them in, he stared out at the streets. Deadened by prison life, his senses were thrilled by the overflowing pavements and the scarlet buses crammed with people, by the press of a normal world he’d almost forgotten. If the rockets were still falling, he could see no evidence of it, and if the Allies were being slaughtered in an icy Belgian forest, then Britain seemed indifferent to the setback.
In every winter-dead park, the paths were a whirl of bicycles, and the open mouths of the Underground stations were disgorging office workers by the thousand, almost every one of them still clinging dutifully to their gas mask.
A little way ahead of them, he could make out the woody spread of Kensington Gardens, and among the trees, the roofs of the white palaces which ran along its edge. Everything was rushing back to him quickly now, and the bus was turning left beneath an archway of trees into a broad avenue, flanked by ornate buildings set deep behind high stone walls. At the far end of it, they turned sharply on to the ornamental gravel of a circular drive, ringed with evergreens. There was a second empty green bus parked ahead of them, and then he remembered everything.
The Cage. The London Cage. Sleep-deprived nightmares and a ruby brooch.
Events were coming full circle. Soldiers were yanking them off the bus and pushing them in through the huge oak doors to the dazzling nave of the hall. No reception speeches this time; just the tinny echo of their footsteps, followed by the uncompromising formalities of an ice-cold wash and body search.
Along one wall, he could see a heap of filthy prison outfits. The first busload had been processed already. As he stepped shivering from the shower, one guard held his head down while another rammed half a fist up his backside. Hartmann grunted, wondering if Goltz had liked it any better this time. When he straightened up, there were clean clothes and almost-new boots. All around him, naked boys were shivering with suppressed fury. When the last of them was dressed, they moved on silently, deeper into the labyrinth.
Like before, he was quickly disorientated. Whatever it had been, the building was a miracle of improvisation. Beneath ground level, stone vaults built for wine and cold storage had been re-engineered as cells and interrogation rooms. On the higher levels, there were glimpses of chandeliered ballrooms and mirrored walls covered in maps. In its heyday, he assumed, it had been some sort of aristocratic fun house. There were rooms within rooms within rooms. None of them was numbered, and at times even their armed escort seemed uncertain where they were going.
Eventually, they reached a long corridor with tall windows at either end. Through the glass, Hartmann could see the tops of trees. Doors along both sides of the corridor led into plain rooms with views out over the grounds. Although the windows were barred, there was a small sink and a wooden chair in the corner of each room. The beds looked new and the blankets unused. The name of each prisoner was already pinned to thirteen of the doors.
No one was sharing. Hartmann was alone.
For the rest of that day and night, he waited. Occasionally, there were movements beyond the door, but nothing that made any sense. On three occasions, he was brought food, good food. On three others, he was escorted to a single lavatory at the end of the corridor. As the darkness came, he looked out of his window and waited.
Below him, foot patrols were circling in the gardens. Further away, he could see the warm glow of traffic flowing outwards from the city. All day, he’d listened for the fairground music he’d heard before, but there’d been nothing. It was winter and the golden horses would all be swaddled in canvas. When the city fell quiet, he lay on his bed and stared at the cracks in the softly rippled coving.
And then, just before dawn, they came.
Before he realised what was happening, both of them were in and the door had been closed quietly behind them. An older man with leathery skin was leaning against the wall. The young woman – Helen Waters – had taken the chair and pulled it forward until her stockinged legs were right up against the end of the bed. Both of his visitors were in civilian clothes.
‘You were asleep.’ She smiled. ‘That’s an improvement on last time.’
‘And now you’ve woken me up. Thanks.’
Hartmann studied the man’s wind-beaten face. The last time they’d met he’d been wearing a colonel’s uniform. What was his name? Alexander Scotland. Yes. This was his place, his project: Britain’s secret experiment with the dark arts, with its own brand of civilised coercion.
‘What are you going to do to me this time? Dripping taps? Loud-speakers playing Wagner for days on end?’
‘Ah. We hadn’t thought of that one. That really would be a trial.’ He, too, employed Hartmann’s language perfectly. ‘In actual fact, you’ll be leaving us in a few hours. All of you. We’ve completed our assessments. We’ve just come to say goodbye.’
‘You haven’t assessed me.’
‘Not really any need, is there, old boy? Anyway, that’s Helen’s honour. Not mine.’
‘So let me guess, you’re giving me a one-way ticket to the mountains?’
‘Naturally. What else? We’re hardly going to send you all back to a normal camp to stir things up again.’ Scotland took a step forward. ‘But listen. If you play your cards right, we could make that a return ticket.’
‘Nothing happened in Devizes. You stopped it. You knew it was coming. You had information. All of us in this room know that.’
‘Yes, we did. But now that in itself is an issue.’
Scotland had moved back against the wall. Something out in the garden had caught his eye.
‘Your Goltz chap is obsessing about why it all went belly up. Seems as though he won’t rest until he finds out who betrayed him.’
‘But you know who it was.’
They were talking in riddles. Hartmann’s brain was starting to hurt. Each of them knew the truth was between the words, not in them.
‘Yes, we do.’
‘And you’ll still let that person travel with Goltz, even though he’ll probably be killed?’
‘We have to, Max. If we pulled him out, it would be too obvious. If we leave him in, we might stop whatever you lunatics try next.’ Scotland was patting his pockets. ‘I’ve been rude. Would you like a smoke? Or some morning tea?’
Hartmann reached out a hand for a cigarette. From her small handbag, Helen produced a gold-plated lighter. Soon all three of them were wrapped in their own smoke.
‘I’m afraid it’s impossible to get any sensible information out of Germany, Max. We tried, but I’ve not been able to get any news of your wife,’ said Helen.
‘This isn’t turning out to be much of a deal really, is it? Not for me, anyway.’
‘I’m not sure what I can say.’
‘Don’t say anything, then.’
‘Is there anything at all we can do for you?’
‘Let me go?’
But she was already standing up, brushing the ash from her skirt and cr
ushing the stub in a single elegant movement. With a kind look, she offered Hartmann her hand, which he took, feeling the soft warmth of her fingers on his palm.
‘Why do you call this place a cage? They keep animals in cages.’
‘You just answered your own question,’ said Scotland. ‘Some we train. Some we study to see how dangerous they are.’
‘And the animals you can’t train? What happens to them?’
‘Have a nice trip, Max. I hear it’s a magnificent journey.’
BBC Radio Bulletin
17 December 1944
The Germans have mounted a series of counterattacks on the Western Front allowing them to re-cross the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium.
On the second day of what now appears to be a full-scale offensive, the Germans are attacking with tanks and aircraft along a 70-mile front guarded by American forces in the Ardennes region.
The German Commander-in-Chief in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, has ordered his troops to give their all in one last effort. He said: ‘Soldiers of the Western Front, your greatest hour has struck. Strong attacking armies are advancing today against the Anglo-Americans. I do not need to say any more to you. You all feel it strongly. Everything is at stake.’
The United States Army Air Forces claim to have shot down 97 Luftwaffe planes overnight, and 31 of their own aircraft were lost. According to the reports, the Luftwaffe put up ‘what was probably its greatest tactical air effort since D-Day’.
37
The daylight was still fresh when they unlocked his door.
Out in the gardens, the birdsong rang clear above the city’s returning tide, and the air – even in his quarters – carried a reviving, wintry bite. Along the corridor, and through the floorboards over his head, he could hear the clatter of dislocation. One by one, the rooms were emptying, and from the window he could see the same two green buses, puffing fumes across the drive.