Scoundrels

by Victor Cornwall

  Do you see how I am developing my metaphorical language, Major? Warrior’s heart, lion’s heart. I’m letting the reader know exactly who I am without actually saying it. Take a leaf from my book and start jazzing your prose up a bit, as you’re coming across as a bit of a dummy.

  I must have lost consciousness again, and Rosie started to spiral down into the heart of Nazi Germany. This was a terrible cross to bear. Even today, part of me is ashamed that mine is the only penis to have brought down a Spitfire.

  __________

  I woke up close to the very village Cornwall had been aiming for, Schmugelhorn. The smouldering trees behind me told me Rosie had not made it. I wondered how I’d escaped the wreckage. Dumb luck I suppose.

  The stars were bright, and visibility was good, a real pain if one is keeping out of sight. Rather than skulk in the trees, I decided to head straight into the village and meet this crisis head on. It took me only a few minutes to get there and I crouched beside a woodshed to scope out the lie of the land. There was a loud ruckus coming from the bierkeller down the street, and I assumed that off-duty soldiers were letting their hair down.

  I assessed my options, lighting one of a very small stock of Escape & Evade Gold Seal, a special blend made with black paper that I’d had the Scoundrels’ tobacconist whip up for covert action behind enemy lines. I heard the door of the bierkeller open and a single Nazi officer stumbled out, rolling drunk. He began to stagger uncertainly down the street humming, of all things, the tune to Happy Birthday and laughing to himself.

  This was too good to be true. He could barely stand, the silly fool. He was my size – tall and athletic with a slender waist. I watched him as I finished my gasper, and then as he stumbled into the shadows I caught up with him and broke his neck. After I’d relieved him of his outfit I rolled him down a nearby coal chute. That’ll do nicely.

  Then I heard a single, strangulated cry. It was the noise of someone’s life ending. But not in the quiet, skilful way that I’d just demonstrated. I ventured back around the side of the bierkeller to investigate.

  Silhouetted in an upstairs window, I saw a figure I knew well getting dressed and examining his profile in the mirror. Good show! Cornwall lives. I had been about to take the fight to the Nazis on my own, but an extra pair of Allied hands was always useful, even if they were his.

  I threw a small pebble at his window, and the noise caught his attention. When I was sure he was looking, I ducked out of the shadows for a half-second. Cornwall started in surprise and signed for me to head north and meet him five hundred yards into the forest.

  thirty minutes later.

  Cornwall told me everything: his big entrance to the bierkeller, the singing, the strangulation. Despite its derring-do, his tale left me curiously deflated, especially when he finished by saying in a small voice, “it’s been a rough old evening.”

  “Are you sure you’re alright, Cornwall? Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?” I asked him softly, to let him know he could unshoulder his burden onto me.

  “Never better,” he said, shifting his weight and patting his chest as if warming up for a difficult innings. “Shall we crack on?”

  I’ll never know for sure if Cornwall had been in the service of Venus that evening, but as he bent over to grab his bag, I caught a glimpse of the seat of his tight-fitting Nazi brecks. They were smeared with an unspeakable filth, as if he were leaking downstairs. It looked like someone had stuffed a pork pie down his trousers and then kicked it.

  “Good lord, Cornwall, you’ve been-.”

  He cut me off, meeting my eye, his jaw clenched. “I’ll walk it off,” he said.

  A brave man indeed.

  But we had bigger concerns than Cornwall’s traumatic downstairs to deal with. When they discovered the dead Captain in the bierkeller bedroom, or the dead officer in the coal chute, or the smouldering wreck of Rosie, every soldier in the district would be combing the forest to find us. And neither of us had an invitation to Hitler’s geburtstag.

  “This won’t be easy,” Cornwall said. I nodded, and patted him on the shoulder.

  “This is what we’re for,” I reminded him. “Let’s make the club proud.” During the war, you could take any young Briton and give him a mission to track down a terrifying new weapon, and he’d shake you by the hand and swear to do it right. But not many of those fellows would have the aplomb to parachute into the Black Forest in black lace, infiltrate a Nazi pub full of Nazi bastards, and then take a rogering from a Nazi Captain, before breaking his Nazi neck. That’s Cornwall for you, displaying the kind of knackers that mean Britons never ever shall be slaves.

  That said, as well as the above, he had neglected to bring a map of the area, so it could have gone even more wrong. Fortunately Castle Klunghammer was so imposing that it could be seen, crouched on a precipice, from twenty miles away.

  I won’t dwell on the hours we spent yomping through those godforsaken trees in the dark. The place was nowhere near as charming as even mediocre British woodland, like, say, the Forest of Dean. Still, we knuckled down, made tracks right through the night and arrived just south of Castle Klunghammer at dawn.

  Castle Klunghammer, dawn

  It was a hell of a sight. The castle was a colossal black stone edifice that seemed to grow organically out of the cliff face. At a recent Mess Hall quiz night, ‘Castle Klunghammer’ was the correct answer to ‘name the most impenetrable castle in Germany.’ From our vantage point in the drainage ditch where we’d laid up to rest, we could see why.

  Klunghammer’s foundations sat on a rocky outcrop above the trees. The castle had only one entrance and arrowslit windows. It was constructed of slippery black granite polished to a gemstone-like smoothness, so that purchase upon the walls was impossible. Crack S.S. troops with German Shepherd dogs guarded the single gate that led to the bottom of the cliff upon which the Castle was built. All plants and trees upon the cliff had been burnt away so that lines of sight were absolutely perfect. Over three hundred soldiers were garrisoned in four separate buildings to the north, south, east and west of the castle. The sheer number of personnel at the foot of the castle foundations meant that the guards only ever did thirty-minute shifts, during which they had been trained not to blink. If they did they were shot instantly by a second set of guards whose only job was to check they were guarding properly. In turn, a third set of guards guarded the second set of guards, and shot them if they didn’t shoot the first set of guards quickly enough.

  All personnel visiting Castle Klunghammer had to climb the mile and a half long path that was strewn with floodlights, checkpoints, double gates, barbed-wire barricades, holding areas and secure fencing. Visitors on this mile and a half pathway were scrutinised at all times, and killed by snipers if there was even the slightest doubt as to their identity. Even as we watched, a bread delivery boy was shot through the temple. He’d answered to the name ‘Gunter’ when his identity papers marked him as ‘Gunther’.

  Vehicles that were given access up to the castle had first to be disassembled back to their individual engine and body parts, and laid out in a neatly labelled pile. In some cases the metal parts were rendered down into iron ingots again, before being recast and re-soldered back into shape, just to make sure there was nothing untoward about them. The Germans carried this work out with steely efficiency. There were also explosive charges dug into the walls of the cliff, extra machine-gun nests a third of the way up and near the top, of all things, a moat. It was quite astonishing what the German engineers had managed to achieve with Klunghammer, and if we hadn’t been at war we’d have applauded their ingenuity and skill.

  The snipers lay on top of each of five watchtowers. They took aim at anything that moved. In fact many of the guards found it more convenient to hold their cigarettes above their heads, so the snipers could simply shoot the ash away, rather than tapping them in the usual
manner. The enemy had thought of everything. It was almost impregnable.

  Almost.

  Major, taking back control of this story is of course the only way I can guarantee it is told properly. I have been awake for the last thirty-six hours and have run out of Ritalin, my weapon of choice against the spectre of my failing memory. Cacahuete has not yet come back from his tour of the local primary schools, where he scores new tablets from children who cannot sit still.

  So I must pause this story again while I go to bed and recover. Despite your many flaws, I know you to be, broadly, a man of honour. I request in the strongest possible terms that you DO NOT continue this account where I have left off. I am sending this chapter so far to you on this understanding. My next letter will be with you in a couple of days, please do not put pen to paper before then.

  Yours sincerely,

  Major Arthur St. John Trevelyan

  Hellcat Manor

  Great Trundleford

  Devon

  15th October 2016

  Dear Major,

  What a strange request. You ask me to stop contributing to this story when I was not only there, but making most of the running.

  I’m instructing you to remove any sordid allusions to the lengths I went that night in order to secure the uniform I needed. I’ve run this past Massingberd Q.C. and he agrees that if you continue in this vein I will soon have legal ownership of your memoirs as well as my own.

  You should also know that I have forwarded your work onto a Harley St. psychiatrist of my acquaintance, who is convinced you are suffering from a serious narcissistic personality disorder. He has checked six out of the seven diagnostic criteria necessary to have you put in the funny farm.

  I suggest you get some rest Major, so please put yourself back to bed and ask Cacahuete to bring you some cocoa and valium before you read this.

  __________

  CHAPTER 11

  Das Scheisseberg

  Castle Klunghammer, 1943

  “You’ve got to be joking. This is your plan?” I asked Trevelyan incredulously as I peered into the dark circle of the large-diameter pipe.

  “It’s not ideal, I admit. But if you can think of any other way to break into the castle, then speak up now,” he said, bristling.

  I looked at my watch again and waited as another tsunami of thick brown slurry gushed out of the castle’s sewerage system. Neither of us spoke for a while. We were both desperately trying to find an alternative, but deep in our hearts we knew that our only way in was through those pipes. “There’s more… detritus than you’d think,” I mused.

  Trevelyan had the look of someone about to fit, his eyes rolling up into his head, but I knew him well enough to know he was doing mental arithmetic.

  “There’s over three hundred men in that castle,” he said, “and assuming the cooks serve breakfast at six, this pipe will be pretty congested until, what? Eight o’clock?”

  “Depends on their metabolisms.”

  It’s well known that the German diet is one of the richest on Earth. Even during the war, the Allies did nothing to stop the national consumption of huge quantities of black bread, sausagemeat and sauerkraut. As far back as the fourteenth century, German sewers have needed to deal with astonishingly dense effluent. As a result the pipes are twenty-five times the diameter of their British equivalents. These pipes need to cope with what sewerage workers call Scheissebergs, giant lumps of coagulated faecal matter that clog the system.

  Presumably the Nazis had forgotten that it was possible for a man to clamber up inside the poo pipes. Then again, maybe not. After all, who would be prepared to do such a thing?

  That didn’t mean it was easy though. We huffed a bit, and kicked the soil and kept on looking at the pipe, but we both knew we had to go in. I had a final look to check where the pipe went. From where we stood it snaked over ground for a bit before disappearing into the solid granite cliff. I followed its invisible path upwards and saw it emerge briefly, about a thousand feet up before plunging into the bowels of the castle.

  Three things were playing on my mind. One: it was an awfully long way. Two: it was steep. Three: it was going to be chock full of Nazi poo. I began to feel a little depressed about how this was turning out.

  Then we got on to the grisly job of tossing a coin to see who’d go first.

  __________

  I would go first.

  I crawled into the dark pipe, and began to shuffle upwards, fighting back a couple of early retches which would become a regular feature of the ascent, providing us with an unpleasant soundtrack to our largely silent endeavour. The stench was horrendous. I tried to stay calm and focused but was unable to shut out the smell. I decided to ignore the effluvium around me and for a while this worked well. Apart from some foul, sticky matter gathering around the soles of my shoes, I managed to stay relatively clean. But after a few minutes of walking gingerly, the pipe began its steep incline, zigzagging up towards the castle. We were forced to get on to our hands and knees.

  That’s when the first wave hit me. It was a semi-solid Scheisseberg about the size of a fridge.

  Perhaps it was the acoustic tremors of our retching, or the vibrations from our footfalls, or perhaps it was just bad, bad, really bad luck; but this dark, vile piece of devilry was not the kind of fresh, free-flowing effluent which could be sidestepped. It must have been up there for years, growing slowly as it gained mass with each new pull of the chain. Waiting. Growing. Biding its time for the moment two British soldiers would climb into its fetid lair. Holding off until it could finally dislodge itself and slide down the pipe, a pitiless creature, to devour us.

  When the Scheisseberg struck I think I halted its movement momentarily, giving Trevelyan precious seconds to scuttle into a recess. But for me it was too late. All I could do was to close my eyes and hold my breath, lean forward and press-on through its fudge-like mass. It just kept on coming, assimilating me into its guts, dividing then forming again around me, before continuing on its journey. Trevelyan told me later that it was the length of a tram.

  This was one of the lowest points of My War.

  We pressed on.

  __________

  The Scheissebergs kept coming. Some were easy to avoid, but with most I simply had to take the hit. I tried to imagine I was on the rugger field, shrugging off tackle after tackle. I tried to imagine I was braving Atlantic breakers on a Cornish beach. I tried to imagine I was on the floor of the Rivoli ballroom skillfully sashaying past other couples with a gal in my arms. This didn’t work. I was caked in the stuff.

  Behind me, Trevelyan was unscathed. He seemed to have a kind of sixth sense about what was travelling down the pipe, and always managed to find refuge in an inlet or recess until the effluent had passed. Sometimes he simply cowered behind me, using me as a storm wall. By the time we had reached the last bend in the pipe I was in a dreadful state.

  We found a sluiced area with a manhole cover and paused for a moment to gather ourselves, before climbing up the metal rungs and into the bowels of Castle Klunghammer. I turned to look at Trevelyan, who apart from the odd bit of muck on his shoes looked like he could have taken a table at The Savoy without any raised eyebrows from the maitre’d.

  But I could tell by his grimace that I was not a pretty sight. He told me later that only the whites of my eyes were visible.

  I cranked open the manhole cover and raised it just enough to see a pair of polished jackboots walking away down a tiled corridor. I breathed the sweet Nazi air. We had made it.

  After checking the coast was clear we climbed out cautiously to find we were in a maintenance room full of hot water tanks and boilers.

  “Right,” I said, “let’s follow the hot water pipe and try to find a shower. I’d rather not fight Nazis while covered in their shit.”

  Luckily this part of the castle was
quiet. Clearly Hitler’s party guests had not all arrived yet. The pipes led us to a large, tiled locker room that was deserted, and our spirits lifted further when we found two showering cubicles side by side. Even better, we found soap, towels and racks of spare uniforms in various sizes.

  We were just about to strip off and get in the showers when we heard some jovial whistling and singing from an annexe nearby. Trevelyan and I froze and waited. The singing continued.

  The sound was coming from a small room that was occupied by a visiting Colonel. He was sat on the bed, removing the grime from his toenails with a small metal spike, singing away merrily. If we turned on the shower next door we’d give ourselves away and I really needed a shower.

  I didn’t mess about. I rushed him and snapped his neck before he could scream. Trevelyan shoved his corpse into a wardrobe.

  We closed the door and went back to the locker room. We both stripped off and jumped into adjacent showers. I turned the lever and tilted my head back, awaiting the fresh, cleansing flow of hot water to wash away the filth. Nothing happened. The squeaky handle turned, but no water came out. It was broken. From Trevelyan’s cubicle I could hear the heavy gush of piping hot water, with great billows of steam rising. “Hurry up!” I called out, “My shower isn’t working!”

  Trevelyan was humming. He couldn’t hear me over the powerful jets, and I certainly wasn’t going in there to tap him on the shoulder. He’d killed men for less. He spent fifteen minutes in that shower, and when he finally emerged he was pink and glowing. “Water’s just run out,” he said shrugging his shoulders.

  “What?”

  “It just stopped. You not bothering?”

  I could have throttled him there and then. I double-checked the shower, turning the lever. No water. I took a couple of deep breaths. My mercury was rising and so I simply stared at the floor for the next few seconds trying to regulate my breathing.