The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  He’d known men who’d talked of women and children being shot without a second thought – their bodies thrown into ditches. At this moment, he felt like a traitor – he’d capitulated and stayed away in a foreign land for far too long. Why should this young guard talk to him? He’d allowed himself to fall into the hands of the enemy! Now he was trying to return, slip in unnoticed, and he didn’t even have the courtesy to have the passports ready for inspection. What sort of soldier had he been?

  Clearly inept.

  Hugo looked at the guard and immediately saw parallels with his younger self – so often detailed for guard duty rather than the flying training he’d been promised. He cast his eyes down at the guard’s boots, enquired: ‘Do you find your boots get very hot in this weather?’

  ‘Yes, very hot.’

  From the back of the van a young English voice piped up: ‘Are we at Oma’s?’

  ‘Ah, you think Oma has her own private policemen?’ For once on the long journey, Hugo was pleased that his ever-inquisitive daughter should interject at this point. His relationship with the border guard needed fresh impetus whilst poor Rene searched high and low for their passports.

  ‘Maybe?’ came the little voice, its owner unseen by the guard.

  ‘I have a daughter,’ he told Hugo.

  ‘I have a son also,’ said Hugo. ‘He is asleep. It’s a long way from England. It’s a long way from Cornwall. This is very important for them – for their education.’

  ‘Here! I’ve found them!’ An exultant Rene proffered the passports to the guard, who took them without acknowledgement to her or her efforts and proceeded to examine them in detail. Hugo’s passport was German and this made the difference.

  ‘They’re in order. Willkommen, Herr Mauer!’

  Hugo thanked him, started the engine and pulled away into traffic, so very pleased to have heard what he’d been hoping to hear ever since his capture nineteen years before; so pleased was he that tears welled, causing him to sniff and glance out of the side window for fear that his emotion might be picked up on by the family, the guard’s words echoing in his mind: ‘Welcome home, Herr Mauer!’

  ‘Marco’s going to be sick, I know he is!’ came the little voice from the back and, closing his eyes tightly as if pressing the shutter of a camera, Hugo Mauer found himself back in the past.

  *

  The only reason that the Rensburgs were saved from their cellar prison was the arrival at the farm of a hungry man seeking to trade an antique clock for any food they might have. Unable to get an answer at their door, he was about to break in when he heard faint shouts from a ground-level vent.

  *

  ‘What’s in this coffee? I feel sick!’ choked Karl as if he had just swallowed poison. ‘Rum. They’ve put rum in the coffee. Liquid courage,’ said Thomaz, smiling serenely, liking the very idea of the normally forbidden rum in an enamel pot of normally mundane coffee. This occasion, he felt, was like the Last Supper and hopefully what it was leading to would not be so tragic.

  ‘I thought it was to celebrate the commander’s birthday?’ quipped Hugo.

  ‘Dutch courage is what it is. This is what they mean by “Dutch courage”.’ Thomaz was happy – very happy. And he hadn’t killed anyone, at least not yet and not in cold blood.

  The combination of rum and coffee seemed to cause something of a very profound effect on Hugo’s interpretation of that evening in the Dutch schoolhouse. Looking across the table at his friends, he felt that he could also see himself from their viewpoint, as if he was also them – Karl and Thomaz – and that they were all one and the same. He wanted to take a picture of the scene and would have given everything he owned for a camera at that moment. Not that he normally had any interest in cameras.

  Despite their travails, their hard labour, their walking with aching feet and legs for kilometre after bloody kilometre, despite their fear that a battle was looming that might not go their way, they had survived this far, and their commitment to one another was stronger than ever.

  Hugo was impressed at how disciplined his friends were. They should all have turned savages by this point, tearing at meat and bread with their bare hands, gulping down alcohol by the metre. They should have captured women in the local towns and villages and brought them here for their depraved desires, yet here they were in an abandoned school, sitting upright with their uniform tunics tightly done up, their unwashed hair greased back over their scalps and tidy. It was as if they were still schoolchildren and the teachers expected them to be good, especially in someone else’s town.

  Above the heads of Karl and Thomaz a Spanish guitar hung on the wall: a teacher’s guitar maybe? Perhaps a teacher who used to accompany the children’s voices as they sang some merry ditty about the old Netherlands, its kings, queens and folk heroes. How they must have loved seeing their teacher remove that guitar from its hook on the wall so that they could play and sing.

  It might have been like that in Oberwinkel had the Nazis not replaced the school’s resident teacher. He was a good man. He’d have played guitar for them and sang of Germany and its heroes.

  The Nazis stopped that from happening.

  That night in the old school, had it not been for Oberfeldwebel Gondorf, the whole thing just might have descended into chaos, for he was the “teacher” who kept them in order. Teacher/chieftain of the tribe, older brother/veteran warrior, Gondorf stood no nonsense: a tough but likeable NCO whose natural charisma was proving him to be a great leader of men.

  Karl particularly admired him, though he tried to play this down, and it was he who would say that if Gondorf were captured, the Allies would soon fall under his spell and follow him rather than their own NCOs, staff officers, generals and the like.

  Gondorf was one of life’s natural movie stars in looks and voice; standing at 6’ 2” he was solidly built, with golden hair and green eyes. He was as much Polish as German through his mother’s line, and if he had divided loyalties he did not share them, but, of course, that was not surprising in Hitler’s Germany. A professional soldier, he was a signals instructor by trade and a paratrooper by training. He even wore a para’s smock; no one objected to such individualism in this woebegone Luftwaffe unit of mothers’ boys.

  He was there to whip them into shape, and he did his duty in this respect but without filling their souls with fascism, fear and dread. He taught them quietly and confidently, bringing all his experience to bear, yet showing none of the damage either mentally or physically that they would have otherwise expected. Not so much as a finger was missing, and the troop suspected that in Russia and later Italy he’d been parachuted in and then quickly brought home again for ceremonial duties – an Aryan idol to be paraded rather than sacrificed along with all the miserable ugly wretches, their bodies stinking up the never-ending graveyards of conquered territory.

  Karl was convinced of this thesis: Gondorf must have been saved by a homosexual Nazi because that’s what most Nazis were in his opinion and certainly sexual deviants. Thomaz, however, thought it more likely that Gondorf had married well and that it was his wife who’d brought him back from the Winter Line by insisting her handsome husband have a safe training job. Thomaz did not believe that most Nazis were deviant in any way.

  ‘Hugo? Thomaz?’ whispered Karl, nudging his friends. ‘Look at Oberfeldwebel Gondorf.’

  ‘Yes?’ They looked across the room at folk hero Gondorf – the defiant individual, an impotent cigarette dangling from his lips, his dress tunic stained and casually opened at the collar, a neckerchief tied around his throat and several days of beard growth that irritated him.

  ‘How old do you think he is?’ asked Karl.

  ‘Forty-five?’ replied Hugo, not really sure.

  ‘He looks it, doesn’t he? Truth is, he’s not much older than us.’

  ‘I hear he was at Monte Cassino with the First Paratroop Army before coming to us. H
e would use the Enigma machine for sending codes,’ said Thomaz.

  ‘The First Paratroop Army? They were all but annihilated,’ said Hugo confidently repeating the gossip he’d heard from someone better informed than he.

  ‘Then we needn’t worry because Gondorf is a lucky omen for us. He always survives conflict. He is always pulled out because he is a favourite of someone – someone who loves him enough to keep him safe. And if he’s safe, we’re safe!’ Thomaz was not called “naive Thomaz” for nothing.

  For his part, Karl was not so confident that “safe” was coming their way.

  ‘Tonight we say goodbye to our youthful good looks, my comrades, because tomorrow morning our job will be to reconnoitre again, and I’ve a feeling that this time it will not go so well, as the Americans are in this district. If Gondorf is a lucky omen then we’d better stick close to him. Our futures depend on it.’

  *

  In the weeks before setting off for the reunion, Hanne compiled a list of famous Bavarians, headed by Hugo Mauer, Oma Hanna Mauer, Beethoven, Mad King Ludwig II, Robert Wagner (she meant Richard), Levi Strauss and his brother Richard, Rudolph Diesel, Hermann Goering and Thomas Mann. This was not a definitive list.

  *

  It had been a long day’s driving and, although now in Germany, Oma’s house seemed as far off as ever when Hugo decided that it would be prudent to pull off the main road and camp on the edge of a wood for the night.

  ‘Tonight we sleep here.’

  ‘How far now to Oma’s?’ asked Hanne.

  ‘Not far. Tomorrow we will be there. Come on, Mum, pitch the tent with me. You children make yourself comfortable in the van.’

  *

  Rene would often tell Hugo about the work of Sigmund Freud and how his theory was changing the way people thought about themselves. She’d read about Freud in the Reader’s Digest while waiting at the dentist’s, but Hugo was having none of it, refuting Freud’s theories as a load of bunkum!

  *

  Hugo had woken that morning from a fitful sleep to see Karl and Thomaz still slumbering in a sitting position under the guitar and in the very same place they’d eaten. Someone had taken away the table. Maybe they’d removed the table to sleep on? He couldn’t recall for certain. Thomaz’s head was resting on Karl’s shoulder, their field caps pulled down across their faces in a vain effort to afford themselves some privacy at least. He thought their faces looked like shopfronts with the shutters pulled across. No business today.

  Of course, there would be business that day. The British and Canadians had suffered heavy losses at Arnhem, so now was the time to take advantage of the situation. Germany could negotiate with the Allies who were on the back foot. The propagandists were forecasting the Allies withdrawing to the sea and suing for peace. Hugo’s platoon may well have been hungry and tired, lacking in men and munitions, but it was still operational.

  There was a sense of hope and optimism that morning among the “filthy fifty” as they called themselves. They could at least give the Americans a hard time and, if there was support from a Panzer unit or artillery, there would be no stopping them. The Führer himself would give out the citations when news reached Berlin. This would be the platoon to save the Fatherland.

  The sun’s rays beaming in through – as yet – unbroken, cobwebby windows seemed a good omen.

  *

  Hugo’s favourite English language book was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, given to him by Wally Johns, Christmas 1950, as a device to help him learn English. Once Hugo had mastered the language, he was convinced that time travel would one day be possible.

  *

  By the time Hugo and Rene had finished putting the tent up in the dark wood it was ten o’clock exactly. Hugo would not have considered himself a watcher of time, but he was. His watch was his reference in life; its luminescent dials had seen him through the war and had come into his possession the day he left school to start work at the local agricultural merchants, an urgent gift from his elder brother who feared his younger sibling might be late without it and therefore let the family name down in the process.

  The watch – a Heuer – was travelling through time, ticking as happily as ever in 1963 as it had done in 1943. Treated with care as his brother had advised, it would require only occasional winding and in return would last him his lifetime and those of his children and even grandchildren. It was Swiss and efficient, and it was the same make as those favoured by the Luftwaffe air aces. Shining the torchlight on it now at precisely ten o’clock reminded him.

  It had one little flaw: a hairline fracture of the glass caused by the manic throws of a dying man.

  *

  In 1916, Germany becomes the first country to adopt Daylight Saving Time (DST). In 1944, Oberfeldwebel Gondorf uses DST for one, last advantage.

  *

  October 1st was the day the clocks went back. There would be an extra hour. Gondorf, leading his young recruits from the front, kept glancing at his watch, causing Hugo to wonder just what he expected to happen in the next few minutes. It was no good asking as the troop was now under silent orders, all following in line, not too close should the man in front tread on a mine. The only unnatural noise was the sound of leather boots trudging heavily on wet grass, the chink of gun metal catching metal uniform fastenings, the laboured breaths of tired, apprehensive men – the clumsy sounds of an army on the move. Not at all what Hitler had envisioned, but then again, he’d been a soldier of the trenches; and they’d only marched twice.

  It wasn’t a mine that shattered the silence; it was a smell – the smell of rotting flesh. The farm they were approaching was in ruins; the decaying carcasses of its “live” stock lying bloated in what remained of the yard – the farmer missing, perhaps dead, perhaps taken for forced labour. That had been Jan Rensburg’s fate that day, though unknown to Hugo, Thomaz and Karl. Saved from confinement in the cellar, only to be taken by a Wehrmacht unit with direct orders from Berlin to take him and others that morning for removal to Germany for forced labour.

  Hugo wondered to himself just who had killed the cows? People were starving all over Holland – starving in the true sense of the word. Famine is the best description. Had the SS been here first? Were the Americans denying the Germans food by slaughtering the livestock?

  He didn’t even know whether this was a German farm or a Dutch farm. He’d been told that morning that their objective was to take over a German village close to enemy lines, close to where the Americans had placed their artillery. They were expecting trouble and the extra hour would give them an advantage was what they were told.

  He heard a faint voice behind him.

  ‘What’s that disgusting smell?’ It was Thomaz addressing no one in particular.

  ‘You most likely,’ replied Karl.

  ‘Dead cows in that farm over there.’ Hugo gestured with his head.

  ‘Trust farmer’s boy Hugo to notice that.’

  Hugo rounded on his friend: ‘How could anyone not notice the smell of rotting animals?!’

  A furious Oberfeldwebel Gondorf turned to urge quiet by drawing his forefinger across his neckerchiefed throat. He’d lost his sense of smell at Monte Cassino.

  *

  Hugo rarely boasted in company, but he was only too happy to show off his Heuer watch to anyone who showed an interest.

  *

  Hugo reckoned his Heuer watch had not stopped since that day on October 1st 1944. Nineteen years seemed like yesterday. He thought for a second or two about abandoning the visit to Oma and driving on to Switzerland to congratulate the TAG Heuer factory on manufacturing such a perfect timepiece. It might even make the papers in Switzerland and Britain. “Cornish-based, German-born flower grower and former Luftwaffe POW takes his watch home to the factory that produced it.” They could use it in their advertising. They might even want it in their museum. He wanted to tell Rene bu
t she was already asleep, or appeared to be.

  He studied the back of his hand in the half-light. A bigger hand and wrist than that of the young Luftwaffe soldier attached to the Second Paratroop Army. He’d replaced the watchstrap in 1949 at a jeweller’s in Penzance. The strap – Italian leather – was expensive in its day but came highly recommended by the jeweller who said it was a perfect match for such a fine watch and that it would last for many years.

  Before sleep overcame him, in the quiet dark of the wood, he thought he heard the children in the van – devoid of parental discipline – being silly. Or maybe, he speculated with dread, he could hear the ghosts of 1944 calling for his return.

  *

  Hugo’s favourite English language film was the first one he ever saw: A Matter of Life and Death. He took Rene to see it as a first date. Though he understood little of the dialogue, he made a point of watching it whenever it was on at a cinema. He identified with David Niven’s character, Sqn Ldr Peter Carter, believing that he, too, had “borrowed” extra time on Earth – time that, it could be argued, he was not entitled to.

  *

  The houses in the village were alight – flames and rising smoke from smashed roofs, walls and windows, craters making the ground appear like the devil’s own golf course, automatic gunfire and tracers engaging the advancing party causing them to drop to the ground.

  ‘Everybody, get down! Now!’

  Gondorf gesticulated for a crawling advance toward the carnage ahead. Incoming rounds made sure that his men remained as they had been trained to do under such circumstances – on their bellies.

  Craters enabled some cover but rifle fire from a house was becoming evermore intense and succeeding in the objective of stopping the advance and keeping heads in the dirt. Gondorf suspected they were encountering the Americans – a presumption based on the distinctive sound of American small arms fire, which he knew only too well from Monte Cassino. Maybe Canadians? They were known to be in this district; but possibly British, though following the debacle at Arnhem he doubted it. If it was the free Polish then each man in the recce party had better fight to the last because the Polish would not take German prisoners alive. There was even a slim chance of it being the Prinses Irene Brigade. They, too, would fight to the death.