Young Lions

by Andrew Mackay

  Sam seemed to startle Alan out of his trance. They took off at full pelt, running out of the Square, the Germans in hot pursuit. The boys ran up the High Street dodging in and out of pedestrians on the pavement. They turned right off the High Street and into a side street. They hid in a narrow alley and they held their breaths as the German jackboots thumped past. The whistle blasts faded into the distance.

  “Phew!” Alan bent over with his hands on his knees gasping for breath. “That was a close call.”

  “‘A close call?’” Sam said incredulously, “you stupid bastard, you nearly got us killed!”

  “What are you so upset about?” Alan asked. “We got away, didn’t we?”

  “Listen, Alan, if I’m going to get killed, I’m going to choose the time, the place and the reason, not you,” Sam explained through clenched teeth. He was trying hard to control his temper.

  Alan could sense the warning signs that Sam was about to blow. “You’re right, Sam. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that…I feel so helpless.” Alan punched his leg in frustration. “Our girls with those dirty Hun bastards and our boys not yet cold in their graves…”

  “I know, Alan,” Sam said. “But we’re not beaten yet.”

  “What can we do?” Alan asked despairingly. “There are only two of us.”

  “Do you remember what Mr. Flinders told us in Greek?”

  “No.”

  “It only took the Greeks four hundred years to kick out the Turks.” Sam stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Tonight we’ll show the Huns that the British Bulldog can bite as well as bark.”

  The boys put boot polish on their hands and faces and got changed into their darkest clothes. They slipped into their blackened gym shoes that they had also covered with shoe polish. The boys carefully crept out of Sam’s bedroom window and climbed down the fire escape ladder. At the bottom of the ladder they tip toed up the path to the garden gate, wincing as they made crunching noises on the gravel path. Sam crossed his fingers and prayed that a German patrol did not happen to be passing. The boys reached the garden gate and gently eased it open. They kept to the shadows and cat walked to the Square, taking thirty minutes to cover a journey that would have usually taken them ten minutes. The boys approached the High Street and took cover in a darkened alley. Sam looked at his watch, shielding the face with his right hand so that no one would be able to see the luminous dials shining in the darkness. Half past ten. Thirty minutes until closing time. Ruthlessly enforced by the Military Police.

  At ten to eleven a lorry pulled up outside the “Chicken and Egg” pub, a favourite watering hole of the paratroopers in Hereward. The boys could hear the Military Policemen talking inside the lorry.

  At precisely eleven o’clock the boys heard the landlord’s deep voice bellow through the pub. But the landlord’s polite request to finish up merely seemed to encourage them to continue drinking. Raucous singing and drunken laughter wafted out from the pub. The paras did not seem in a hurry to come out.

  At five minutes past eleven the tailgate of the lorry banged open and the Military Policemen piled out. Following the command of their leader the soldiers drew their batons. The door to the pub opened and a shaft of light shot through the darkness illuminating the policemen. A drunken para staggered out and made his unsteady way around to the side alley that ran alongside the pub. Probably avoiding the queue in the inside toilet. He seemed completely oblivious to the presence of the M.P.s But Alan was not oblivious to their presence; in the split second that the policemen had been lit up he had noticed two things. The first thing that he noticed was that the policemen kept their rifles slung on their shoulders. That meant that they weren’t expecting any trouble. The other thing that he noticed was that the M.P.s helmets did not bear the winged eagle of the Luftwaffe, the paratroopers’ parent organization; it bore the crooked cross of the swastika and the runes of the S.S. For some unknown reason the S.S. had decided that it was their responsibility to ensure that the Luftwaffe adhered to the town’s Drinking regulations. Alan smiled to himself.

  The M.P.s charged into the pub like a rugby pack. The pub exploded like an anthill being kicked over and paras came pouring out in all directions and scattered to the four winds. The policemen who had entered the pub appeared to have been momentarily overwhelmed by the avalanche of escaping soldiers. However, they soon recovered from their temporary paralysis and rallied, charging out of the pub and pursuing their prey into the darkness. Some of the S.S. had caught the paras and were bringing them back to their lorry in handcuffs. Sam could tell from the tone of their voices that the captured men were protesting that they were not common criminals and it was neither necessary nor was it acceptable that they were being handcuffed.

  As soon as the paras discovered that the M.P.s were S.S. and not their own Luftwaffe Police the stakes of the game changed. What had begun as a glorified game of Hide and Seek for grown ups had rapidly become an Escape and Evasion exercise. The paras were playing for real. Groups of S.S. Military Policemen and paras were wrestling and grappling on the ground.

  Alan winced as he heard a sickening crunch as a baton crashed onto a skull. The fact that it was one German using a baton to attack another German did not make the sound any less disturbing.

  Sam turned around as he heard two M.P.s dragging the inert form of a para between them. The soldier’s feet trailed along the ground. Sam waited until the S.S. men had struggled past and then stepped out onto the street behind them

  “Kamerad?” Sam said.

  “Was ist das?” The nearest policeman stopped and turned around, still holding the para’s arm in his right hand. Sam stepped towards him and buried a knife in the man’s neck. A thick stream of blood jetted out covering Sam’s face. The man’s hand went up to his throat in a vain attempt to stem the bleeding.

  Sam withdrew the knife from the dying man’s neck. The other S.S. trooper’s eyes were wide with shock as he watched his colleague collapse to the ground. He let go of the para’s arm and desperately tried to unsling his Schmeisser. But it was a race that he could not hope to win. The policeman watched with impotent disbelief as Sam sawed his knife across his throat in a sideways motion. The M.P. slid to the ground and his eyes slowly closed as the life flowed out of him. Sam dropped the knife on the ground.

  “Turn him over,” Alan ordered, nudging the drunken para with the toe of his gym shoe. Sam used his blood soaked hands to turn the German onto his back. The soldier groaned. It was the last sound that he ever made. Sam stood up and moved out of the way. Alan picked up the dead M.P.’s Schmeisser and fired a burst of bullets at point blank range into the para’s front. The man’s chest exploded in an eruption of blood and bones.

  Sam turned towards the mob and fired a long burst at the S.S. lorry, knocking out its headlamps. Complete darkness. Raised voices and angry questions. A long burst at the M.P.s. Another burst into the confused mass of Police and paras brawling on the road. Bodies falling. Screams of the dead and dying. Sam unclipped two grenades from the dead S.S. trooper’s webbing. One into the back of the lorry where the para prisoners were handcuffed. Another into the jumbled mess of groaning and crying soldiers and M.P.s lying on the ground.

  “Time to leave,” Alan said.

  The boys knew that they didn’t have much time. German reinforcements would soon come to the rescue. Sam and Alan did not intend to be waiting at the scene of their crime when they arrived.

  Chapter Six

  “This is a summary of the investigations carried out by the Army Military Police team from London,” Wurth said. “I’ll spare you the details and cut to the total casualties:-S.S.: ten killed and three wounded. Total paratrooper casualties: eighteen killed and three wounded. 9 millimeter shell casings, shrapnel from two grenade explosions, paratrooper bayonets, Lugers and British Army Wembly revolvers were found at the scene of the incident. All S.S. w
eapons were accounted for. The report places the blame for the incident squarely on the shoulders of my paras and completely clears and exonerates the S.S.”

  Wurth screwed up the report into a tight ball and threw it into a corner of his office. “The regiment, the Luftwaffe and Goering will not stand for this. There’ll be hell to pay, you mark my words.”

  “And as for improving Inter Service relations? Don’t make me laugh,” von Schnakenberg said. “This judicial joke will put back Inter Service relations by at least five years.

  “Oberstleutnant, how’s the digging and photography of the corpses proceeding at Fairfax?” Wurth asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “It’s going well,” von Schnakenberg answered, “but it will take at least another month to complete.”

  “Well, I don’t have a month,” Wurth said. “I want it to be finished two weeks from now.”

  “Why?” Lindau asked.

  “Because I have received orders to bring my brigade back to Germany and I want to personally carry the evidence of the massacre back to Germany and give it to Goering myself. This information is too dangerous to entrust to a special courier.”

  “When do you leave, sir?” Lindau asked.

  “On Remembrance Sunday.”

  The two figures waited in the alley that led off Market Street. It was eleven o’clock at night and off duty S.S. soldiers were beginning to leave the “Duke of Normandy” pub. They were a rowdy bunch and the first group was singing the ‘Horst Wessel’, the Nazi marching song, at the top of their voices. There were too many of them. The waiting men let them stagger by. Gradually the pub emptied. Two S.S. men weaved their way across the road from side to side, leaning on each other’s shoulders for support. As they approached the alley, a man in black stepped out in front of them blocking their path. The S.S. troopers shuddered to a stop. The remaining man stepped out behind the S.S. soldiers. They could neither go forward, nor could they go back. They were trapped.

  “What’s going on?” One of the storm troopers asked.

  The S.S. soldier crumpled to the ground as a heavy object crashed into the bridge of his nose. A fountain of bright crimson blood sprayed onto the face of the other S.S. trooper. His legs were kicked out from under him before he could react. That was the signal. Both attackers piled in to their victims, punching and kicking the S.S. troopers in a frenzied and furious assault. They only stopped when the S.S. men stopped struggling.

  The two men tied the hands of the S.S. soldiers behind their backs and quickly stripped them. They dragged a small bucket from the alley and prized off the lid. A noxious smell escaped from the bucket. The men turned the unconscious S.S. men onto their backs and spread eagled their legs. They dripped two large paintbrushes into the bucket and put them between the S.S. troopers’ outstretched legs. The S.S. men screamed in pain as the paintbrushes touched their skin. Their tormentors continued to ladle on the liquid despite their victims’ desperate pleas to stop. They only stopped when the S.S. men were completely covered from head to toe and from back to front. Each of the men slit open a pillow and emptied the contents onto the S.S. soldiers. The two men stood above their victims and allowed themselves a savage smile of satisfaction. They turned their backs on the unconscious men and disappeared into the night.

  The next morning, the blood splattered body of a young paratrooper was found at the bottom of Hereward Cathedral. His wounds were consistent with those of having fallen from a great height. It appeared that following a night’s drinking at “The King Arthur” pub he had decided to carry out an impromptu sight seeing tour and had climbed the many hundreds of steps to the battlements at the top of the Cathedral tower. He had been slightly the worse for wear and he appeared to have lost his footing as he peered over the parapet and had fallen to his death. Friends and eyewitnesses said that he had left the pub shortly before closing time to urinate outside (the pub’s toilets were out of order) but he had not returned. His paratrooper wings had been ripped from his jacket. It was possible that they had been torn during the fall. Inside his pocket was an “Ace of spades” playing card bearing the skull and crossbones emblem of the Fourth S.S. Infantry Regiment. His friends could not recollect the young para ever having expressed an interest in playing cards and he certainly had not mentioned ever having any friends in the S.S.

  “Look at them,” Alan said smugly,” the bastards can barely stand the sight of each other.”

  The boys sat on a bench in the Town Square observing a group of half a dozen paratroopers staring at a similarly sized section of S.S. soldiers. The two packs were warily circling each other like two rival gangs of schoolboys in the playground. As Alan and Sam watched an S.S. trooper suddenly lunged across the short gap separating the two groups and punched the closest para in the face sending him flying backwards through the air. A full scale fistfight erupted as the S.S. soldiers and paras piled in. Paratroopers and S.S. troopers who had been strolling across the Square minding their own business witnessed what was going on and quickly decided to make it their business and joined in to help their comrades.

  “Christ!” Sam exclaimed, “We really stirred up a hornets’ nest the other night!”

  “We set a fox amongst the chickens!” Alan laughed at his own joke and Sam joined in.

  The boys heard whistles being blown. “Uh-oh, here come the Keystone cops!” Sam said. S.S. and para Military Policemen were running across the Square, blowing their whistles and drawing their batons. Lorries were driving into the Square and were disgorging their Police reinforcements. Sam noticed that Army M.P.s were making no attempt to become involved and seemed quite content to allow their counterparts in the other two services deal with the situation. And the situation was quickly changing. A minor street scuffle involving a dozen men was rapidly escalating into a major riot involving several hundred. Attempts to break up the fight was not helped by the fact that dozens of Grenadiers and other Army soldiers were standing on the sidelines laughing and shouting, cheering on their champions like a Roman mob watching gladiators in the Colosseum.

  Sam and Alan were doubled up laughing. They weren’t the only civilians who found the situation funny. Several groups of people were also standing around the Square pointing and giggling at the sight of their Aryan Overlords scrambling and scrabbling about in the dust and the dirt like common criminals fighting over food scraps.

  “Come on, Sam,” Alan grabbed Sam’s blazer as he stood up. “We’d better leave. I’ve got to go to tea.”

  “Alright,” Sam wiped away tears of laughter.

  Alan turned around. “Oh, hello sir,” he said in surprise.

  “Hallo, Alan. Hallo, Sam,” Peter Ansett, Alan’s Housemaster said.

  How long had he been standing behind them? Alan asked himself.

  “Hallo, sir,” Sam said. How much had he heard?

  “Enjoying the entertainment, are we?” Ansett asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Alan answered. “It’s better than watching Laurel and Hardy!”

  “Before you laugh so much that you wet your trousers, boys,” which only encouraged the boys to laugh some more, “you might take time to remember that you should never laugh at another person’s expense.”

  “Even if they’re the enemy?” Sam abruptly stopped laughing.

  “Even if they’re the enemy, Sam. Remember, every one of those boys is a mother’s son.”

  “Yes, sir.” Who is this man?

  The boys were shocked into silence. Mr. Ansett, Sam’s History teacher, Alan’s housemaster – a collaborator?

  “Are you going to tea now, Alan?” Ansett asked.

  “Yes, sir.” He was too flabbergasted to give more than one syllable answers.

  “Then I’ll walk along with you if I may. Goodbye, Sam. See you tomorrow in History.”

  Alan did not even acknowledge Sam’s reciprocal farewell and walked
home on automatic pilot, lost in his own thoughts with his mind in turmoil. How far had this “live and let live-treat others as you would have them treat you” nonsense spread? How many more people had become infected with this defeatist disease? How many more people had Ansett managed to contaminate through his classes? Was Ansett a passive collaborator or an active traitor pushing and promoting the Nazi view that Britain should take its rightful place alongside her continental brothers in the New European Order? Did Ansett agree with puppet Prime Minister Mosley’s Government of National Unity’s message of peace and reconciliation? Whatever the answer was, however deep Ansett’s treachery ran, he would have to be carefully watched. From now on. Alan would have to be especially careful when he sneaked out of his boarding house in the future. And if the risks became too great then Ansett would have to be cut out like a cancer before his sickness could spread any further.

  “I have agreed to hold a Remembrance Day Parade at the request of the Royal British Legion in the interest of Inter-Service Unity and put the bad blood of the past few weeks behind us,” Schuster explained. “A chance to bury the hatchet and smoke the peace pipe. This can be a day of reconciliation between the three services and also a day of reconciliation between the British and German peoples. People without politics remembering our War dead together, praying that THIS war will be the war to end all wars.”

  “Masterful, sir,” Zorn said with grudging admiration. Word would get to London if Schuster allowed the parade to take place and if it was successful, word would get to Berlin. Or perhaps Schuster would tell his old comrade in arms, Hitler, himself? This parade could be the prototype for a program of reconciliation between the conquered countries and Germany. Schuster was a wily old fox. It was evident that he wished to extend his interests and influence from the military world into the world of politics. What would happen to old soldiers when the war was over? After all, the war wouldn’t last forever. A man had to start carving out his niche in the post-war world now. When it was all over it would be too late. Schuster would not be content to remain Military Governor of Hereward. But Military Governor of England? Or perhaps even of Britain? Now that would be something. Perhaps Zorn should attach himself to Schuster’s rising star? Zorn asked himself. His thoughts wandered. Brigadefuhreur Zorn, Military Governor of London. He smiled. Yes, that would do nicely, thank you. Or perhaps he should start carving out his own niche?