Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘I’ll get you out of this, Hans!’ Gary yelled. ‘I’ll get you out!’

  But now the guards came to grab him too. The hall erupted into chaos.

  IX

  23 September

  Gary found out that Ben hadn’t been returned to his barracks that night of the processing, or the next. And he learned that ‘RuSHA’ was the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt der SS, the SS’s Race and Settlement Office.

  By the Tuesday of that week, after the Sunday night-Monday morning of the SS processing, something was clearly up. The afternoon shift on the monument was cancelled, and the work kommandos brought home. There was a quick appell on the football field, where the stalag commander told them all they must make themselves as ‘presentable as possible in the circumstances’. There was even to be hot water all afternoon in the shower block.

  Then as the day ended, around six p.m., the prisoners were called out to another appell, lined up behind their senior officers.

  Gary tried to avoid Willis Farjeon, but the RAF man worked his way to him as the ranks formed up. ‘Evening, Dunkirk Harrier.’

  ‘What’s going on, Willis?’

  ‘Not a clue, old chap.’

  ‘And where’s Hans Gheldman?’

  ‘Ah. Don’t you mean “Ben? Oh, don’t look so shocked. He told me his secrets long ago. We have been close, you know. Well, he’s clearly been found out. Jewish, isn’t he? That cute little circumcised willy is a bit of a giveaway.’

  ‘I don’t know why the SS were looking for him particularly.’

  ‘It is a bit rum, isn’t it?’ Willis sighed. ‘Well, I’ll miss him.’

  ‘I ought to rip your fucking head off,’ Gary hissed.

  Willis blinked. ‘Well, that would be your privilege. But I didn’t harm him, you know. Oh, I pushed him around. That’s my way. But he took it, for that’s his way. Surely you know him well enough to see that. Submissive type, our Ben! We both got what we wanted, I think. But none of it matters, you know. None of it got in the way of his relationship with you.’

  Gary frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  Willis eyed him. ‘Oh, come, Corporal. It’s you he truly loves, poor Ben. Surely you know!’

  Gary, shocked, could think of nothing to say.

  The senior officers called them to attention. They were swung around and marched out of the camp, maybe two hundred men, most of the stalag’s occupants.

  They followed the route Gary was driven every day with his kommando to Richborough and the monument site. But tonight they walked the few miles. Trucks topped and tailed the column, armed troopers sitting in the bodies watching the men, and they were escorted by more guards walking alongside them, both Wehrmacht and SS, some with dogs.

  The evening was darkling, and the guards had torches. The air felt fresh, the sky cloudy but dry, and Gary thought he could smell the sea.

  Joe Stubbs called out, ‘How about a song, lads?’

  ‘Pack it in, Stubbsy.’

  ‘“The Huns were hanged, one by one, parley-vous ...’

  The Germans near Gary looked anxious.

  ‘That’s enough, Stubbs,’ said the SBO.

  ‘Oh, come on, sir. “The Huns were hanged, one by one, / Every bloody mother’s son, inky stinky Hitler too—’

  An SS officer came storming down the line. The marching men stopped in confusion; there were shouts. With a gloved hand the SS man grabbed Stubbs by the hair, dragged him out of the line and made him kneel. He pressed the muzzle of his Luger to Stubbs’s temple.

  Danny Adams was there immediately. He tried to stand between Stubbs and the German. ‘Don’t shoot! Schiessen Sie nicht!’

  The SS man glared at the SBO. Then he raised his Luger and slammed the butt down on the crown of Stubbs’s head. There was a crunch, like the shell of a boiled egg cracking. Stubbs crumpled face forward to the ground. Two Wehrmacht guards, regulars from the camp, hurried forward, picked him up and carried him to one of the trucks.

  Adams faced the SS man, his face black. ‘After the war, Standartenfuhrer Trojan. Nach dem fucking krieg.’

  The SS man just grinned. He wiped the butt of the Luger on the grass, and holstered it. ‘As may be. Tonight - no more of this.’

  The SBO turned to his men. ‘Let’s just get through this ruddy business without any more dramas. Form up. Attention! ...’

  The men, shocked, angry, subdued, marched on into the night.

  Gary heard the murmur of the crowd even before they got to Richborough itself. The area inside the old Roman defences was a pool of light, illuminated by searchlights; in the shadows generators chugged. Somewhere off in the glare a band played, some sentimental German waltz.

  The prisoners with their escort were marched to one corner of the compound. Other groups had already formed up in the space around the monument; Gary saw units of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and SS, including a group with the distinctive armbands of the Legion of St George, the British element of the SS. There were even formations of the Landwacht and the Hitler Jugend, all standing proudly under Nazi banners. The flag of Albion flew, the cross of Saint George with a swastika roundel at the centre.

  The centrepiece of it all was the monument. Only a fraction of it had been completed, but tonight immense Nazi flags had been draped from the scaffolding. Powerful searchlights had been set up in a ring around the base of the four legs, so that their beams made an arch of light in the sky, a dream of the finished monument that might one day exist.

  Now more spotlights picked out a limousine, a Rolls Royce, gliding into the compound. SS troopers jogged alongside, automatic arms ready. The band hurriedly switched to an SS marching song. A ripple of excitement passed through the massed ranks.

  ‘Who the fuck?’ the British murmured.

  An SS officer stood before the stalag prisoners, and began calling names. As they were called, men stepped forward. Gary was shocked to hear his own name called.

  ‘Wooler. Corporal Wooler, G. Step forward, please.’ A man nudged Gary in the back, and he stepped out of the line.

  He found himself posted to a row of maybe a dozen others - one of them Willis Farjeon. The SS man and the SBO stood before them, the SBO sombre and angry, the SS man grinning. He was the same man who had clubbed Stubbs earlier, Gary saw.

  Willis said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Quite a show, eh?’

  The SS man overheard, and stepped over. Willis was taller than he was, and the SS man had to look up. ‘Oh, better than that,’ he said in fair English. ‘Wait and see! What a treat is in store for you fellows!’

  Danny Adams said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d speak to my men through me, Standartenfuhrer Trojan.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Trojan said dismissively.

  The limousine had pulled up at the base of the monument. A trooper opened the passenger door. Various senior officers approached the new arrival, saluting him.

  And then the newcomer came walking towards the British prisoners. Standartenfuhrer Trojan stood erect before the line of Gary and the others, and pulled his jacket straight. He looked immensely proud. Yet the man approaching was not prepossessing, despite the gaudy medals he wore. His body looked weak, his feet were pigeon-toed, his face round, his hair dark, his chin receding. He wore heavy round glasses that emphasised the softness of his face.

  Willis murmured, ‘That’s the Reichsfuhrer-SS. That’s bloody Himmler. What’s he doing here? No wonder these SS thugs look so pleased with themselves, Himmler himself coming all the way to this shithole.’

  Himmler, trailed by his entourage, shook hands with Trojan, who bowed, beaming. He waved his gloved hand to indicate the row of prisoners, and spoke rapidly in German. Willis murmured a hasty translation. ‘“A great honour Reichsfuhrer, welcome to our poor effort at a monument Reichsfuhrer, and blah blah, let me kiss your arse Reichsfuhrer ...’

  ‘How do you know German, Farjeon?’

  ‘Learned it when I joined the RAF. Useful if I ever got shot down, I thought. Wait... “Here are the m
en we have selected from among the Prominente prisoners for the Fountain of Life programme.“’

  “‘Fountain of Life?”’

  ‘The word is Lebensborn. Fine Nordic types all, says Trojan! That’s us, I guess. Bloody hell. Good Aryan stock!’

  ‘I don’t want to be “good Aryan stock,”’ Gary murmured.

  ‘Don’t think you have a choice right now, old boy,’ said Willis. ‘And as we’re standing ten feet from the Reichsfuhrer I’d advise you to hold your peace... We’re to be a symbol of the unity of Nordic races globally, and a demonstration of the theory that Nordic qualities rise to the top, even among prisoners and other riffraff ... Now he’s saying something else. Can’t quite get it. Something about a loom? A tapestry? That Standartenfuhrer - Trojan? - says he’s finally tracked down the one missing component, and the weapon that will cement Aryan supremacy for all future and all past is at hand ... Even for the Nazis this sounds a lot of guff. But look at old Himmler’s piggy eyes gleaming behind those glasses. Whatever this rubbish is, he loves it.’

  ‘What component?’

  ‘Him, I think,’ said Willis.

  Two beefy SS guards dragged forward Ben Kamen. He stood trembling before a laughing Himmler.

  X

  14 October

  Mary woke up to music from the Promi. The Nazi propaganda station was proving a furtive hit, even in free England. The announcer said that today was Hastings Day, yet another of the Nazis’ endless memorials - and another day off for the lucky denizens of the protectorate. Lying in bed, Mary wondered if Gary was allowed to listen to the Promi.

  Reluctantly she got up, to start another day without her son. But she had a faint hope that today might bring her that little bit closer to him.

  Her journey to Birdoswald on this October Tuesday, organised by Tom Mackie, was hopefully going to be relatively civilised. A WAAF driver picked her up from her lodgings in Colchester to drive her all the way to Cambridge, where she would take the main east coast train line up to Newcastle. And from there she would be driven further, along the line of Hadrian’s Wall to Birdoswald, where Mackie had his office.

  The car journey itself was a novelty. You hardly drove anywhere these days, such was the shortage of fuel. They passed lorries and a few packed buses in Colchester itself, but in the open country they saw few vehicles. There were plenty of road blocks though, barriers and barbed wire and pillboxes, manned by nervous-looking Home Guard types. After ten miles or so the WAAF had to stop to show her identification. She took it cheerfully. ‘More Home Guard on the road than traffic these days!’ she said brightly to Mary. She was rather jolly-hockey-sticks, very English.

  And as they set off again a squadron of planes, perhaps Hurricanes, came screaming overhead, flying low, heading south.

  Mary was oddly reluctant to leave Colchester, even for a couple of days. It was hardly a comfortable place; nowhere in England was, she imagined. But she was able to carry on her researches here, and she had her duties in the WVS, though they were less demanding now the bombing was reduced. And, only fifty miles or so from Gravesend, she was close to the Winston Line, the dreadful barrier that had cut the country in two, and so about as close as she could get to Gary.

  But for the best part of a year she had been badgering Captain Mackie of MI-14 for an interview on the subject of Ben Kamen and his historical conundrums. She had come across Mackie when he sent her a letter after the invasion, offering his sympathy about Gary, whom he had met in those final hours before the cease-fire. It had occurred to her to write back, for Mackie’s MI-14 seemed precisely the sort of organisation that might take seriously the mysteries she was uncovering, and figure out what to do about them. She could hardly be reluctant about taking up Mackie’s invitation now, even if it did mean she would have to travel to the other end of the country.

  She was nervous, though, about the hints of urgency in Mackie’s note. Something had changed, and she doubted it was for the better.

  The station at Cambridge was crowded. This was now the terminus of the east coast rail lines, King’s Cross in London having been abandoned-indeed blown up, it was said, like the capital’s other main-line stations. There were a few service personnel on the move from one posting to another, but mostly the crowds were a seepage of refugees from London, a flow still continuing after a year, women and children, old people and invalids, supervised by police and ARP wardens, all waiting for a train to the north.

  The WAAF saw Mary to her compartment, making sure her reserved seat had not been taken. Mary would have to share with a mother and her three children, and a couple of older men. The children seemed happy enough, plump little creatures dressed in layers of clothing, each with a colourful gas-mask satchel in the rack above. To them this was an adventure, a day off school. They squealed as the locomotive chuffed into life, and clouds of steam billowed back the length of the train. They made Mary smile.

  But the journey seemed long and slow, the overcrowded train hot. Mary peered out, trying to distract herself with a view of a country in the middle of its long war.

  Close to London the autumn fields were littered with burned-out vehicles and wire loops, protection against paratrooper or glider landings. The Home Guard manned pillboxes and trenches at every junction and bridge and level crossing, waiting to destroy the rail line in case the Germans should start advancing again. There was a logic to the defence, with stop lines running parallel to the coasts in case the Germans attempted any secondary landings, and other lines cutting across the country to impede any advance out of the protectorate. But Mary felt nervous at the thought of the heaps of mines and explosives the train must be passing through.

  In the stations where they stopped there were lots of uniforms, of the conventional services of Britain, the Commonwealth and the US, and of Britain’s vast volunteer armies, like Mary’s own WVS. Mary didn’t like the transformation of Britain into a country of uniforms. It was as if the German way of thinking had infected everybody, as if the Germans had already won.

  And the towns were scarred by the war. Though repair work was underway, you could see gaps in the terraced streets, holes colonised by weeds rather than people. There were defensive emplacements everywhere, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons. And factories were hastily being erected, relocated from London and the south. There was plenty of labour to do all this work; all of England’s major towns had taken refugees from London, homeless and unemployed.

  Outside the counties of the protectorate itself, it was the capital that had suffered most severely from the invasion. London was in English hands, but, bombed and oppressively threatened, it was slowly bleeding to death. Its people and factories were being shipped out, its docks barricaded or blown up, and its many state functions transplanted elsewhere: York was now the seat of government, Manchester was Britain’s financial centre, the royal family had migrated to Holyrood in Edinburgh, and the seat of the Church of England had been moved to Liverpool. London’s museums and galleries had been stripped, their precious contents scattered and hidden. The city itself was turning into an abandoned museum, with only its immovable architectural treasures remaining.

  There were some commentators who said that London might never recover from this cruel shutting-down - George Orwell, for instance. ‘Oh yes it will,’ Mary had heard the old crusties say in the Colchester pubs. ‘We’ll ship the Cockney buggers back ourselves.’

  So the journey passed. Everybody was quiet, save for the children. Mary thought she understood why people were subdued. All the adults in the carriage faced an uncertain future. And everybody in England had lost somebody in the war, even Mary, who didn’t belong here at all.

  It was a relief when the train pulled into Newcastle, and she was able to leave the stuffy compartment, to find another perky WAAF waiting for her on the platform.

  XI

  15 October

  Wednesday morning at Birdoswald was clean and sharp, the start of a bright fall day. Tom Mackie had requisitioned the farm
house here to serve as his base of operations, he told Mary as he welcomed her from her hotel. But as he escorted her around the site, Mary saw how the farmhouse nestled at the heart of much older ruins, the remains of a Roman fort set on a bluff of high ground.

  ‘I can see why the Romans came here,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, a military man would make the same decision again. Birdoswald - actually they called it Banna - was an integral part of the system of defence based around Hadrian’s Wall. Housed a thousand troops at its peak. Seems they had to drain the land, clear a forest, and import the limestone to build it. Kept the peace for three hundred years - which, if you think about it, is longer than modern Britain has existed, since the Act of Union. We’ll be doing well if we last so long, eh?’

  They walked back to the farmhouse. ‘Rather ugly, isn’t it?’ Its most recent renovation was Victorian. The architects had added crenellations, amid a general look that Mary thought of as ‘Gothicised’. ‘But they reused Roman stone. I can show you an altar of Jupiter that’s been built into the wall of a stable. And there’s evidence of occupation of the site before the Romans ... But I apologise,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For treading on your toes. You’re the historian, after all.’

  ‘Not at all, Captain. I’m impressed you know so much.’

  ‘Well, history’s always been something of a hobby of mine. I took nat sci at Cambridge - that is, natural sciences, specialising in physics. But I did do rather well at history at my school matriculation. And I’ve been somewhat keen to find out more about the history of this place since your researches directed me here.’

  Something of a hobby. Somewhat keen. After so long in Britain Mary was used to decoding the circumlocutory language of upper-crust types like this Captain Mackie: the more self-deprecating the words, the deeper the passion. ‘I’m flattered you took me so seriously. To open up a new Military Intelligence branch here, all on my say-so.’