The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

‘We gave the children crayons,’ Cameron said. ‘A drawing? It could have been anything. Not necessarily something she saw here, but maybe a fixation from her past, before the horror. What I was just saying. But I’ll do what I can. There’s a nurse who might help.’

  The jeep trundled on. The edge of the forest loomed larger now, forbidding, like the circuit walls of a dark citadel. Like the shadow-girt wall of Troy. Mayne glanced back at Cameron, who was staring into space. It was a look he had seen in young officers who had survived their first experience of battle, a look of shock, exhaustion, dulled fear and impossible responsibility, of being thrust into making snap decisions about who was to live and who was to die. Only here it was something far removed from the age-old rite of passage for the soldier. Here it was something utterly without precedent in their experience, in the literature of war they had grown up with, even the stories of their fathers, who thought they had experienced the worst that humanity could offer on the battlefields of the First World War, on the Western Front, at Gallipoli. It was as if that war, the war to end all wars, had been just the first act.

  Mayne remembered a painting he had seen in a ruined chateau in Normandy of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, of the victorious German leader Otto von Bismarck and the defeated Napoleon III sitting outside a tent, agreeing to cede Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. In a stroke they had destroyed the balance that had kept Europe peaceful since Waterloo. Was the horror that lay ahead of them now foredoomed that evening seventy-five years before, on the battlefield of Sedan? Or was it set in place millennia earlier, when men dispensed with heroes and champions and first learned to make untamed war? How could humanity have let this happen?

  ‘Stop here.’ Cameron tapped Lewes on the shoulder, and they came to a halt outside a cut in the treeline. Ahead of them the lane continued into the forest. Tangles of barbed wire extended off among the trees on either side. In front of them was a wrought-iron gateway, interwoven with cut branches and camouflage netting, and a partly concealed sentry box, empty. Attached to the gate was a white-painted sign with faded red letters: ACHTUNG!! SEUCHENGEFAHR ZUTRITT VERBOTEN!!

  ‘Warning! Danger of epidemic. Entrance forbidden!’ Stein translated.

  ‘Those signs are all round the perimeter,’ Cameron said. ‘They’re permanent metal signs, dating a long time before the last few weeks, when the typhus took hold. The Nazis really didn’t want anyone getting near this place. Seems odd for a labour camp, but maybe the SS just didn’t want the local population knowing how they were treating these people.’

  ‘Or what they were using them for,’ Stein muttered.

  Mayne looked around. There was nobody else to be seen. It was eerily quiet, but the smell was atrocious. Then he saw it. A bundle of rags against the barbed wire, about ten yards into the woods from the road, pressed up against the fence. A bundle that looked like tumbleweed, as if it had been blown there by a hurricane. Rags, with bony hands protruding through the wire, leathery feet hanging below. He stared in horrified fascination. His heart began to pound. How could this be shocking, after all he had seen, all he had done? He was a hardened killer. He could see this through. He held his hands against the seat, held them hard to stop the shaking, and turned away, facing the forest ahead.

  Cameron reached into a pocket and pulled out a little black book, a Bible. He stared at it, but kept it shut between his hands. ‘Jeremiah two, verse six,’ he said slowly. ‘ A land of desert and pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and no man dwelt.’ He looked up at the gate, squinting. ‘The padre with the soldiers at the crossroads gave this to me, just before you arrived. He saw the state I was in. Thought it might help.’ He shook his head, then reached over the door of the jeep and gently dropped the book on the ground.

  He handed Lewes a set of keys. Lewes got out, marched over to the gate and unlocked it, swinging out both doors so that it would be wide enough for the lorry to get through as well. Then he marched back and sat down again, switching the ignition back on, waiting for the lorry to pull up behind them. Mayne steeled himself and looked back at the corpse on the wire. A flash of sunlight lit it up, and for a second it seemed as if it were burning, a human torch. A torch on the battlements of Troy. Then the light went, and he stared ahead through the gate, down the dark tunnel beneath the trees. For a split second he was back beside the Bay of Naples, at Aornos, those unread passages from Homer in hand, searching in his mind’s eye for the sulphurous passage where the Trojan hero Aeneas had descended into the underworld, a passage from which there might be no return.

  That place had just been fantasy, myth.

  Now he was truly entering the gates of hell.

  11

  T he jeep accelerated past the gate and down the lane through the pine forest, the Red Cross lorry following close behind. Mayne braced himself for what lay ahead. The stench was indescribable. braced himself for what lay ahead. The stench was indescribable. After about two hundred yards the trees ended abruptly at a clearing about the size of a football pitch. About eighty yards ahead of them was a row of single-storey wooden buildings like army barracks, and at right angles to that another line of huts extended along the far right side of the clearing, obscured in smoke and haze. The lane went across the clearing through the line of huts and disappeared to the right, towards the far buildings. Two British soldiers with rifles and white kerchiefs over their faces stood guard where the lane passed between the huts. Mayne saw other forms milling about, as if in slow motion. Smoke was rising from several points on the open ground beyond the buildings, the smoke he had seen outside forming a pall over the forest. In the still morning air it lingered like a miasma over the camp, cloaking it, blotting out the sky. There seemed to be no noise, as if that too had been stifled. They drove forward at walking pace through a bare landscape, denatured, all vibrancy gone, only pastel shades of green and blue and brown remaining: the colours of decay, colours that matched the smell. It was a landscape of death.

  They passed a man sitting with his back to a tree stump, one arm extended, rested on his knee, as if begging. He was wearing the tattered remnants of a blue striped uniform, like a patient’s hospital garb, smeared brown. His hair was cut to stubble and his face was emaciated: his skin taut, yellowish-grey, his eyes sunk deep in hollow sockets. Mayne stared at him. There were no eyes in the sockets. The man was long dead. He realized what the other piles of rags lying all around were, little clumps of decay all over the clearing. He stared ahead. They drove past the guards between the huts and veered right, then drew to a halt behind a line of soldiers with their backs to them, holding rifles at the ready with fixed bayonets.

  Lewes switched off the ignition. Mayne could hear no talking, only a dull thumping sound. Through the line of soldiers he saw other people, around an open-backed truck. To the left a large pit had been dug in the ground, the size of a swimming pool. The pit was half filled with a grotesque entanglement of bodies, most of them naked, some with rags still clinging to them, a mass of skeletal limbs and wizened heads, hundreds of them. Two men in jackets with SS insignia were flinging in the bodies, one holding the fleshless ankles and the other the wrists, with the shaven heads lolling in between. Another SS man was in the pit, and another was on the back of the lorry, pushing the bodies to the rear to be taken off. Beyond the truck was a group of well-dressed men, women and children, evidently local civilians brought in to watch. The adults stood with arms folded, impassive, or too shocked to respond. One little girl was crying. Mayne and Cameron got out of the jeep. Lewes took out his unfinished cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply. He caught the eye of the nearest soldier, jerked a thumb at the bayonet on his rifle, then gestured at the SS men. ‘Why don’t you fuckin’ pig-stick ’em, mate?’

  The soldier turned. His eyes were dull, and his skin seemed to have taken on the hue of the place. ‘Later, mate. Don’t you worry about that. Later.’

  Mayne cleared his throat, trying to control his nausea. H
e turned to Cameron. His voice sounded muffled, distant. ‘These SS men, the guards. How on earth have they survived?’

  ‘We were amazed they were still here to surrender. But they’re arrogant and defiant. They seem to have no idea of the crimes they’ve committed. Utterly indoctrinated. For them, the Jews, the Slavs are all animals, and they don’t understand how we don’t see that too. They’re even rather proud of some they’ve kept alive, rich Jews that Hitler wanted kept as ransom to their families in the West. Like all gangsters, the Nazis were perfectly able to put profit before ideology. We’ve even got the commandant, an SS – Untersturmfuhrer. He’ll stand trial. It’s important we don’t kill them all. But there are others hiding in the forest, being hunted by the more able-bodied of the inmates, those who only arrived here in the last days. It’s a kind of ghastly no-man’s-land out there, as if the hell of this place is seeping out like an infectious disease. They especially loathe the SS-Helferin, the female auxiliaries. One of the women still at large is the Lagerfuhrerin, the camp leader. She seems to have been a particularly vile bully. They think she’s hiding in the woods. They want to rip her to pieces.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Mayne muttered, looking around.

  ‘I just want them to get it over and done with. My main job now is dealing with the typhus. We need to get the inmates all back in the camp for scrubbing and delousing. If typhus spreads among the local population and then gets into the advancing Allied troops, it could seriously impede the war effort.’ He gestured at the SS men. ‘And there’s another factor. Doing this job, helping us, is also their survival strategy. The more enthusiastically they help, the less likely we are to take revenge. That’s what they think. And they’re probably right. With each hour that passes, the horror will become part of our landscape, will become almost mundane. It’s a ghastly thing to say, but true. It’s our own survival strategy, mentally. The emotions switch off. We get numbed to it, just as they did. And they know it’s a relief for us to have them do this appalling job.’

  Mayne stared at the scene, mesmerized, watching the SS men repeat the same odious task over and over again. It was like a medieval image of hell, like one of the punishments set in Hades to those condemned forever to repeat the same task, like Tantalus or Sisyphus. Only here the SS were not tormented by what they were doing. They almost seemed to be relishing it. He swallowed hard, and felt a cloying sensation at the back of his throat. He knew it must be the reek of this place, but he seemed no longer able to smell it, as if it had overwhelmed his senses. He suddenly felt tremulous all over, barely able to stand. He forced himself to concentrate on the scene, abstractly. He had tried his hand at painting before the war. He thought how he might frame the image, how he might capture his emotional response, refracted through his own experience. He watched a naked body sail through the air, a woman, her arms flung out before her, like a diver plunging into a swimming pool. But she was dead, and the swimming pool was a pit of rotting bodies. Mayne shook his head. Here, art as metaphor, art as suggestion, had no place. Here it could only be reality. Stark, unadorned reality. He turned to Cameron. ‘Is anyone photographing this?’

  Cameron shook his head. ‘This place is top secret until you chaps give it the all-clear. Only essential army and medical personnel are allowed in. Bringing in those civilians to watch was understandable, but burdens us even more. I warned the CO but he’d made his mind up. With the typhus risk, they’ll have to be interned, probably until the war is over. But the horror’s on record, if that’s what you’re asking. The Army and Film Photographic Unit is at Belsen. Come on. I haven’t got much time. I need to supervise setting up those hospital tents.’

  Mayne and Lewes followed him. Stein was still in the jeep, ashen-faced, wiping his mouth. Mayne could see that he had been sick. He climbed unsteadily out of the vehicle and followed them around the far side of the pit, towards the other line of barracks. On the open ground in front lay smouldering piles of rags, so impregnated with human grease that they burned like funeral pyres. They passed the entrance to the first of the barrack buildings, and Mayne stopped to peer in. It took him a moment to adjust to the gloom. All he could hear was the droning of flies. The air was fetid, humid. He had completely lost his sense of smell. He tried to look through the squalor, to remember what Cameron had said. They are human beings. The body nearest to him was naked, a man, the skin like parchment, discoloured with filth. He was lying on his back, his abdomen grotesquely hollow, as if he had been disembowelled, as if the life had been sucked out of him by that hurricane force that had blown the other man against the barbed-wire fence, the first body Mayne had seen in this place. His arms were outstretched, touching two other bodies that were curled up, facing away in opposite directions. Mayne saw no backdrop, only darkness, and as he stood aside to let the light in, the bodies seemed almost luminous, like a painting of Christ on the Cross and the two thieves. He swayed slightly, nearly retching. These were not images of atonement. These people did not die for the sins of mankind. They died horribly because the world had let it happen. He clenched his hands. This was reality. Stark reality.

  He pushed away from the barrack entrance and went to where the others were waiting for him, further along the building. Lewes offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. Stein turned to Cameron. ‘Before we go on. We know you’ve got to get back to your job. Is there anything more you can tell us? About what was going on in this place?’

  Cameron stared hard at the ground, then looked up. Mayne noticed how pale he was, his eyes bloodshot. Cameron pointed to a long, low mound on the other side of the clearing, against the line of the pine forest. ‘Just a few things. Over there, that’s where they buried the Soviet prisoners back in ’41. Hundreds of them, used as labour to build this place, then shot.’

  ‘That’s four years ago,’ Mayne murmured. ‘Yet you say most of the Jews here arrived from Auschwitz only in the last few months. What was going on here before then?’

  Cameron took a deep breath. ‘All right. It may as well be me who briefs you. This should have come from the intelligence officer with the AA regiment, but I couldn’t see him anywhere when we came through and I haven’t got time to hunt for him. At any rate, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you any more than I can. When we arrived, he interrogated the camp commandant, the SS-Untersturmfuhrer. I was there, as a witness. The IO was a newly commissioned replacement, been out here about as long as I have, with a smattering of Italian and fluent French. Wrong theatre, wrong war. Typical army foresight. I was the only German-speaker. I said I could spare ten minutes, no more. People were dying as we spoke. I’m supposed to be a doctor. A doctor .’ Cameron rubbed his forehead, suddenly distressed.

  ‘All right. Go on,’ Mayne said.

  ‘The commandant said it had been an Arbeitslager, a labour camp, for forestry workers. There are tracks leading off from the compound into the forest, and he said they were used by work parties. He said the wood-cutting operations wound down last year and after that the camp was used to house rich Jews, the ones Hitler intended to use as bargaining chips with the Allies. According to this man, they seriously believed they could use Jews in this way as recently as a few months ago, only shelving the idea when the Allies crossed the Rhine. God know what other desperate schemes the Nazis had prepared.’

  ‘That’s what we’re interested in,’ Mayne said. ‘Anything you say might help.’

  ‘All right.’ Cameron nodded, more collected now. ‘The SS-Untersturmfuhrer said that for this reason the camp had only ever housed a relatively small number of healthy inmates: first the fit young men selected for forestry work, and then the members of wealthy Jewish families, who were well fed and looked after. He claimed he only arrived as a replacement commandant six weeks ago. His job was to remove the remaining inmates and shut the camp down.’

  ‘Remove?’ Mayne said.

  ‘Remove. You can guess what that means. But we didn’t have time to pursue that. We wanted him to talk, not clam up.
That’ll doubtless come up at his trial.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘He said they were totally unprepared for the influx of Jews marched here from Poland, and had no way of dealing with them. But take that with a pinch of salt. He seems to have had a full team of seasoned SS guards, including the female camp leader. It wasn’t chaos in here until the final week or so. Before then, they seemed perfectly able to inflict a systematic regime of brutality and sadism.’

  ‘The story seems plausible,’ Mayne said slowly. ‘But it doesn’t account for the extreme secrecy of the place, those signs outside warning of epidemics.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘There’s something else. I spoke to one inmate who claimed to be the only survivor from the earlier phase of the camp, a man the SS used as a cook. Evidently quite a good one, a trained chef. He’d been here since at least ’42. He was some kind of common criminal, a Frenchman from Marseille, not a Jew. I didn’t think he was a particularly savoury character. He said that when the new commandant arrived, the SS shot everyone still in the camp, stripping them naked and throwing them into a ditch over where the Russians are buried. He said that with the new commandant and guards, none of them would have known of his cooking skills and given him special status, so he survived by hiding in the barracks and then commingling with the new influx from Auschwitz when they arrived, disguising himself as a Jew. They were all supposed to be kept alive for the work gangs in the cities, but that never happened. He was one of the healthier inmates when we arrived, and he went straight to me, evidently trusting the idea of a doctor more than a soldier to talk to.’

  ‘Why was he keen to talk?’ Stein asked.

  ‘The other inmates knew he wasn’t Jewish,’ Cameron replied. ‘They were suspicious of him. He knew they’d finger him. He wanted to assure us that he wasn’t a former SS guard disguising himself. He also thought that by showing us he wasn’t Jewish, we’d give him preferential treatment. A bit of an anti-Semite. He had short shrift from me there, I’m afraid.’