Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  Just as Hodge was beginning to fear they had missed the Werewolf band, or were heading in the wrong direction, he saw a military lorry ahead. It had been repainted white and sported a makeshift painted red cross which was not going to fool anybody. Hodge hooted and waved a hand in the air to Lindsay, behind him.

  ‘The major’s calling to you, sir,’ Danny Rubin shouted from the back. ‘I think he wants you to stop.’

  ‘I bet he does,’ Hodge muttered to himself.

  As Hodge knew, Lindsay had already radioed for more men before they left Ludwigsburg. He wanted to stop now, confirm the enemy lorry’s position back to Flak by walkie-talkie, while they were still in range, then wait for reinforcements. Hodge felt sure that was Lindsay’s plan. He also felt sure the lorry would escape if they did that.

  Ahead of them, the German military vehicle looked like a large square box mounted on a chassis. There was a window high above the tailgate, other windows just visible at the side as the jeep swerved to the right.

  There was a good chance the Werwolf band did not yet know they were there.

  Hodge pulled the jeep hard left, then and then rammed the accelerator to the floor. For a second he feared he had miscalculated. Surely there was not enough space on the narrow country lane? But the jeep shot past the lorry with inches between them, maize from the fields scraping its offside.

  ‘Hold on, everybody,’ he shouted.

  Hodge got a hundred yards or so ahead of the lorry, then swerved hard round across the road, so he was blocking it. The lorry braked with a screech and came to a halt a few feet from the jeep.

  ‘Out of the jeep. Take cover, now,’ Hodge yelled. ‘Move! Move! Move!’

  He threw the jeep door open, ran round to the passenger side, yanked the passenger door open and pulled Barbara out.

  He yelled, ‘Follow me!’ to Rubin and the private in the back of the jeep. All of them ran for cover in the maize fields. It had been a fruitful summer so the maize stood thick and a good two feet higher than any human. It provided concealment, but no protection against bullets.

  ‘Keep standing and cover the lorry – the truck,’ Hodge shouted to Rubin and the US army private. As the soldiers understood, Hodge meant don’t flatten the maize and give yourself away. Both soldiers quickly found a vantage point to cover the German lorry.

  ‘Make your way deep into the maize, and then stand still,’ Hodge said to Barbara.

  ‘I’m staying here,’ she said. There wasn’t a flicker of fear about her.

  Hodge glanced at the lorry. Nothing. The windows at the side, he noted with relief, were too high to fire out of. They would have to come out sooner or later.

  It turned out to be sooner. At least three Werwolf had obviously jumped out of the lorry through the cab on the blindside. A hail of semi-automatic fire raked the maize, but much nearer the jeep than where they were hiding.

  ‘Hold your fire,’ Hodge said to Rubin and the private.

  Hodge made his way gingerly, but quickly, through the maize, back to the road. Lindsay had got his two men, de Lorio and one other, out of the jeep and had deployed them on the far side of the lorry. Hodge could see them through the maize. Like Hodge’s two men, they had their rifles aimed at the lorry but were not firing.

  ‘Major!’ Hodge called out, softly. ‘Major, where are you?’

  ‘Here.’ Lindsay was across the road. ‘Stay where you are.’

  Lindsay crossed back to Hodge’s side of the road, keeping behind his jeep as far as he could. As he did, a burst of machine gun fire tore into the maize from somewhere at the back of the lorry.

  ‘Jesus!’ Hodge said as Lindsay reached him. ‘They’ve got a machine gun.’

  They looked across at the lorry. The tailgate was now down.

  ‘Is that machine-gun mounted?’ Hodge asked.

  Lindsay wiped his hand across the back of his mouth. ‘Nah! Angle’s all wrong. And they wouldn’t have had time. But it’s bad enough they got a machine-gun. And they have automatics. We got these Springfield pieces of shit.’

  Hodge nodded. He knew the elderly Springfields were bolt-action. So they were outgunned as well as outnumbered. The maize fields, Hodge thought, would not provide hiding-place cover for much longer.

  ‘What are your thoughts?’ asked Hodge.

  ‘We sit and wait them out,’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Can you walkie-talkie back to Flak, with our new position?’

  Lindsay shot him a respectful look. ‘Nope. I tried but we’re out of range. The reinforcements I ordered back in Ludwigsburg will have to work out where we are, I guess.’

  By now the rattle from the German semi-automatics and the machine gun was incessant, punctuated by the pop-pop of returning fire from the American Springfield rifles. Hodge and Lindsay were silent for a moment. They looked at each other.

  ‘We can’t wait much longer,’ Hodge said. ‘Have you noticed they’re not firing at the jeeps? They could easily take them out, but they haven’t. These are trained troops, SD or Waffen SS. They know what they’re doing. They want us dead quickly. Then they want the jeeps. They could be in Austria by this evening whether soldiers from Flak chase them or not. We have to kill them before they kill us.’

  There was a scream as one of the US soldiers on the far side was hit. Hodge thought it sounded like de Lorio.

  ‘Danny!’ Hodge yelled into the maize field. ‘You and the men cover me.’

  Hodge ran along the outside of the maize, on the edge of the road, until he was opposite the side of the lorry. He heard Lindsay shout, ‘Do not break cover! Hold your positions! Do not break cover!’

  Hodge reasoned that the man with machine gun was still in the lorry, which narrowed his arc of fire. He could see four or five Werwolf to the right of the lorry, but not ahead of it. That left a blindspot, more or less in the middle of the lorry, just behind the cab, where for a while at least, nobody could hit him. If he could get there. Hodge ironically thanked his artist’s training, which instilled the calculation of angles until it was instinctive.

  Running at a zig-zag crouch, firing his pistol at the Werwolf men as they fanned out toward the maize field, Hodge was about halfway to the lorry when bullets spattered into the road ahead of him. He dived and rolled over. The bullets were hitting the road all around him.

  He heard Lindsay shout, ‘Do not break cover!’ again.

  As he rolled up to a crouch again he saw Danny Rubin directly disobeying this order. Rubin had seen two Werwolf, incongruous in their shirtsleeves and baggy flannels, working their way forward to give themselves a wider arc of fire. They were seconds from a clear shot at Hodge.

  Running clear of cover, Rubin’s first shot with his rifle hit one of them in the chest. He then dived onto full length in the road to reload. He was now as exposed as Hodge, though at least he was on the ground. His second shot hit the second Werwolf in the leg, allowing Hodge to run as far as the side of the lorry.

  As soon as he reached it, he edged his way along to the open tailgate at the back and fired upwards. The Smith and Wesson fired three shots into the amazed machine gunner before he could react. As he fell, dead, Hodge climbed into the lorry and seized his machine gun.

  The lorry driver was still in the cab. He turned, nonplussed, terrified. For a second they just looked at each other. Hodge was unfamiliar with a German machine gun. He dropped it and fired two shots into the driver with the Smith and Wesson.

  Then he grabbed the machine gun again, dropped down to the road at the side of the tailgate, ran round the blindside of the lorry and, getting the machine gun going, fired in the general direction of the Werwolf nearest his own jeep.

  He hardly knew what he was doing anymore. He was high on adrenalin. Then he heard Barbara’s voice. He was terrified. For some reason he thought they had kidnapped her. But then the words arranged themselves in his brain.

  ‘They are surrendering,’ she was calling out. ‘They are giving up.’

  The seven Werwolf left alive were herded
back into the lorry with their hands up, under guard. The garage owner, Holzbauer, was one of them. Heinrich Wittemann, the guard from Hindenburg Barracks, was another. De Lorio was dead. Danny Rubin had a leg wound which did not look too serious. As they waited for the soldiers from Flak to find them, it was so quiet Hodge could hear insects buzzing in the fields.

  There was no sign of Karl Wagner.

  Chapter 16

  Ludwigsburg, Saturday September 1, 1945

  It had been a blazing hot week. Barbara and Hodge were again lying in the shade of the vineyards, in each other’s arms, but this time they were naked. He had been tender and considerate, putting her feelings and her pleasure before his. If she had had any doubts before, and she did not really think she had, they were certainly gone now.

  They stroked each other’s faces and looked into each other’s eyes. Barbara laughed out loud. If this was what life was like, she wanted more of it.

  ‘You’re wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘So are you.’

  And then it all came back to her, as clear as day. The evening she had taken her father’s pictures to burn them, Wagner had led her into a side chamber, not into the main tunnel.

  ‘I know where Wagner is,’ she said.

  And as she spoke the nightmare inside her died.

  *

  The sunshine of that wonderful summer continued. Hodge was in Lindsay’s office, wearing his civilian clothes. He was not even sure he was entitled to wear his uniform any more, now that his discharge was official. Colonel Dawson, no less, had contacted his commanding officer at the Essex Regiment explaining Hodge’s ‘secondment to the US army for special secret duties.’

  There had been no problems, especially when Colonel Dawson mentioned that Captain Hodge was up for a US Army Medal of Honour, for an action in which one of his own men, Sergeant Rubin, was in line for a Purple Heart.

  ‘It was either that or a court-martial for flagrantly disobeying a direct order during a fire-fight,’ as Lindsay had laconically explained to Rubin, who had agreed with him.

  ‘Wagner didn’t put up any sort of fight,’ Lindsay said to Hodge, as they sipped at their beers. ‘He looked relieved to get out of that hole of a room. We arrested his wife as well, by the way. She was bringing food down to him.’

  ‘I still want him dead.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Lindsay said. ‘That’s why I said no when you wanted to come on the raid when we got him. Are you sore at me?’

  ‘Good God, no, John! You’ve got everything else right and you were right about that. We take revenge but we do it without hate. That’s how Barbara feels, so it’s good enough for me. If we hate them, they win.’

  ‘Exactly. Now and then we must build something so good this can never happen again.’

  Hodge was nodding. ‘Mind you, Wagner is a piece of shit even by Nazi standards.’

  ‘No argument there, man. His own men dumped him when they ran off. They could have taken him along, in that truck, when they skedaddled, but they knew they had no chance with the rest of the Nazis in Austria if they had him along.’

  ‘And talking of Austria …’

  ‘Yeah, we heard this morning. I was just going to say. It all worked like a charm. The minute he got your telex, Heinz Felfe telephoned Kaltenbrunner with the good news. The number was traced. They picked him up at a place called Altaussee in Austria. Then they moved for Felfe. He sent his best wishes to you, by the way.’

  ‘Cheeky sod!’

  ‘I hear Kaltenbrunner will stand trial. And Wagner. There’s a plan to put all the big-wig Nazis on trial together. I agree with that.’

  ‘Me, too. Let’s see Wagner hanged by due judicial process.’

  ‘It’ll happen. Oh, and more good news. Veronica, Felfe/Palfrey’s wife, has the hots for you. She’s written you three letters apparently, but they can’t be sent on to you. Probably too raunchy.’

  Hodge grinned. ‘I’m spoken for. Respectable married man to be.’

  ‘Oh really? Anybody I know?’

  ‘Piss off, John! Fritz, her father, will give her away, of course. Will you be my best man?’

  Lindsay smiled, crackling his moustache. ‘I’d be honoured to, John. And if you haven’t got anywhere better, you are welcome to have the wedding here. We can do everything. The service. The party. You and Barbara have both experienced our hospitality, in the cells. You know how good we are.’

  Hodge grinned. ‘Thank you. We’d love to get married here.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better ask Barbara first?’

  ‘Uh. Yes. Thanks.’

  Lindsay laughed. ‘But hurry up about it. They’re posting me back stateside soon.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’ Hodge really meant it. ‘And Barbara will be, too.’

  ‘So what will you guys do, John? Back to England, I suppose?’

  ‘Actually, no. Barbara can’t leave Fritz. And we couldn’t take him to London, at his age. She’ll stay working for the police. And I like it here. I’m learning German as fast as I can. I’ll find something too.’

  ‘We should drink to that.’

  Lindsay and Hodge waved their beers aloft.

  *

  As a wedding present, the United States Army gave Mr and Mrs Hodge the jeep Hodge had been driving around in. Lindsay thoughtfully arranged a spare distributor, in case of further vandalism.

  Author’s note

  Most of the characters in this story are real. The background to the story – the reconstruction of Ludwigsburg and the work of Major John Lindsay and Wilhelm Keil – is pretty much what really happened.

  Fritz Ketz continued to paint his delightful expressionist paintings until his death in 1983. To me, every one of them represents a victory over the Nazis.

  Michael Dean, March 2014

  Acknowledgements

  Some of the books I read or consulted while writing this story, in no particular order, were: Wṻrrtemberg in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus by Paul Sauer; Hunting Evil by Guy Walters; Erlebnisse eines Sozialdemokraten by Wilhelm Keil; Stuttgart 1945: Kriegsende und Neubeginn by Andreas Förschler; Wir haben wieder aufgebaut: Frauen der Stunde null erzἂhlen by Antonia Meiners; Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Burma; and The End: Germany 1944-5 by Ian Kershaw.

  Magic City

  Michael Dean

  For Naomi (I think you know who you are …)

  There are no lessons in life for beginners.

  Rilke

  1

  In the middle of September 1971, Marcus Himmelfahrt, a slope-shouldered youth with long black hair, a beard and thick glasses emerged, blinking and dreamy, from a railway station. The railway station was at the top end of Myliusstrasse, but Himmelfahrt did not know that. He knew which country he was in, West Germany, and which town, Ludwigsburg, but that was all.

  He gazed out at a new land and a new life — the excitement inducing the need for a leak. He had peed on the train, frequently, copiously, while the countryside of Belgium and Germany flashed past unheeded. But his need now was as strong as ever. He turned on his heel, swinging his pack onto his back, and returned to the station.

  Late afternoon commuters streamed past him, rushing to catch local trains home to the smaller towns and villages — Kornwestheim, Bietigheim, Asperg — or further on to the nearest city, Stuttgart, the capital of the region of Swabia. Himmelfahrt vaguely registered the streams of dividing and re-dividing travellers, but missed the shabbily dressed guest workers, fading into the background in their national groups, pressing together just inside the station entrance.

  The guest workers gathered every day at dusk to talk longingly of home in their mother tongue. One of them, a grey-haired Italian called Maurizio Simeone, gave Himmelfahrt a comradely smile, because the youth looked so new and so raw and so lost. Himmelfahrt did not see him, and so missed his smile.

  He found the Gents, peed comfortingly and returned relieved, to recontemplate the new land and new life outside the station. The autumn cold chilled through
his sky-blue, drip-dry shirt and thin jeans. He heaved the backpack higher and meandered left, where a path snaked into the car park. He skirted glossy lozenges of German high-tech vehicles in comfortable, rich colours, many of them (Daimler, Mercedes, Porsche) made here in this part of Swabia, a brief fast car ride from the station.

  Stomach-churning panic rose in Himmelfahrt; this was wrong. Lost already. He found a straight path back to the side of the station, keeping close to the sooty building, his one certainty in an unknown world, not taking his eyes off it until he regained the front entrance he had started from.

  He took his backpack off and put it at his feet. He peered vaguely round. There a few yards away, was a tiny old man, like an elf in a fairy story. The homunculus was staring at all the travellers leaving the station concourse, looking more and more agitated. As if energised by the little man’s fear, Himmelfahrt put his backpack on again and strode up to him.

  ‘Herr Biedermeier?’ he said.

  The tiny fellow, apparently delighted, jerked into animation, grinning and nodding vigorously, waving his hands.

  ‘Ja, ja,’ he said, ecstatic at the correct identification. ‘Biedermeier, that’s me. And you must be Mr …’

  ‘Hill,’ said Marcus Himmelfahrt. And then, in faltering German, shaking hands. ‘My name is Mark Hill.’

  *

  Himmelfahrt was renting a room in the home of Herr and Frau Biedermeier. Herr Biedermeier made to carry his backpack for him, which Himmelfahrt, with friendly hand-waving, naturally refused. Near the start of the short bus ride to their home, Herr Biedermeier indicated the language school, Sprachschule Stikuta, where Himmelfahrt was to teach, but then the little man settled into uneasy silence, suddenly sad.