A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  “Me? Aha!” he gave a short rather brittle laugh. “I come from Riga. Do you know Riga? It is very beautiful. We Latvians are what is called a border people, which means that we have been ‘liberated’ very often. You know, perhaps, the story of the Alsatian boy who was recruited for the German army in 1942 and he was asked which side he thought would win the war. He answered that his great-grandfather had fought in 1870 for the French and lost, and his grandfather in 1914 for the Germans and lost, and his father in 1940 for the French and lost, and now he was going to fight for the Germans and he didn’t really know what to think. It was much the same with us, sometimes we were ‘liberated’ by the Poles, then by the Swedes, just lately by the Russians, and then lastly by the Germans. We were glad, very glad, for the Russian occupation had been very hard. My father was killed by the Russians and my mother died of grief—I think it must have been. Our people baked cakes and stood by the roadside and gave them to the German troops as they marched through our villages. The troops looked splendid, crack German regiments, and each soldier had a flower in his cap, and as I watched I knew that I had only one wish in the world and that was to get into uniform as soon as possible and to march with them. You see, I felt that this would be the only chance to take my revenge for what the Russians had done to my home. So I volunteered and, as my head had the correct Aryan measurement—my shoulders, my chest, the shape of my nose, truly Aryan, also I hadn’t flat feet—I had the particular honour of being recruited for the SS.”

  His slow voice had quickened, and I could hear him move in the darkness. He seemed to be leaning forward for his voice sounded nearer as he asked suddenly: “But where do you come from, Gnädige Frau? Are you German?” “No,” I said, “I’m not, my people come from Ireland.” “Ach, now I understand, the Irish, they are musical, hence your voice. You have a very sympathetic voice, Gnädige Frau. Perhaps it is because of your voice that I’m telling you these things—that and the funny expression you had on your face as you stood on the barrow outside the window. Then perhaps you can understand a bit the feeling. Your country, too, was occupied by the British. Your people were insulted, starved, murdered—but where was I?—oh yes, my Aryan contours, my hopes for revenge. Well, they told us that we could revenge ourselves on our enemies and they sent us to Poland. Not to fight the Poles, oh no, they had been defeated long ago—but to kill Jews. We just had the shooting to do, others did the burying,” he drew a deep, sighing breath. “Do you know what it means—to kill Jews, men, women, and children as they stand in a semicircle around the machine guns? I belonged to what is called an Einsatzkommando, an extermination squad—so I know. What do you say when I tell you that a little boy, no older than my youngest brother, before such a killing, stood there to attention and asked me, ‘Do I stand straight enough, Uncle?’ Yes, he asked that of me; and once, when the circle stood round us, an old man stepped out of the ranks, he had long hair and a beard, a priest of some sort I suppose. Anyway, he came towards us slowly across the grass, slowly step by step, and within a few feet of the guns he stopped and looked at us one after another, a straight, deep, dark and terrible look. ‘My children,’ he said, ‘God is watching what you do.’ He turned from us then, and someone shot him in the back before he had gone more than a few steps. But I—I could not forget that look, even now it burns into me.”

  The window I had climbed through would not close properly and a numbing cold seemed to be creeping upwards from my feet, but the voice, just a voice in the darkness, went on and on, sometimes pitched so low that I could hardly hear it above the creaking and rumbling of the train, sometimes raised to a note of near hysteria. He told me that he had resigned from the Death Commandos and joined the Waffen SS, the fighting SS units, and he told me of how he had tried to be killed, but his comrades had fallen around him and each time, by some miracle, he had lived. The ones with the photographs in their wallets, the frightened ones, and the ones with the dreams of the future, they were the ones who got killed, he said. Only those who didn’t care, got the Iron Crosses. Now he was going to the front, to his unit if he could reach it, otherwise anywhere, anywhere, did I hear, where he would be allowed to die.

  During his story I had found it increasingly difficult to listen. I had eaten practically nothing all day and the cold in the carriage was intense. As I fought wave after wave of exhaustion, my head kept falling forward and only the most startling points of his story penetrated the fog of sleep. The little fair-haired Jewish boy—the old Rabbi. Oh God, was it for these that Adam had done penance and maybe now, Peter, too?

  Some two years back I had been in a tram with Nicky when an elderly lady, with the Jewish star pinned to her coat had got up from her place so that my Aryan eight-year-old son could sit down. I had got up too and the three of us had stood silently looking at the empty seats. I had felt quite proud of my little gesture at the time. How utterly feeble it seemed now. Too much—too much. “You are silent, Gnädige Frau? You are horrified at my story?” He seemed very near. “No—no,” my own voice from somewhere far away; it seemed no longer my own. “I am not horrified, I think I pity you, for you have more on your conscience than can be absolved by your death.”

  And suddenly, for a second in time, the fogs cleared and it was as if Adam’s and Carl’s dying and Peter’s imprisonment seemed a splendid, glowing, real thing, absolutely necessary and right. “But others have died and may have to die for you,” I heard myself murmuring. I do not know if he heard, as I was already nearly asleep. The train rumbled rhythmically onwards into the night. Totteridge, where I was born—a village church—a small Chris collecting her weekly text at children’s service. Miss Osborne at the organ. “He died that we might be forgiven. He died to make us good. He died—He died—”

  I awoke twice before reaching Tuttlingen. Once, when the train jerked to a stop at a half-lit station, I realized that I was warmer and that my head was resting on something hard and uncomfortable. The man had moved and was sitting beside me, his greatcoat was over my knees and my head had fallen on to his shoulder. His SS shoulder tabs had been pressing into my cheek. In the half light I saw his face for the second time: perhaps I had been mistaken about that twitching nerve; it looked peaceful enough now anyway, almost childlike. His hand, with the signet ring of the SS, was resting on mine, and as I moved it closed with an almost desperate grip and then relaxed. I put my head back on his shoulder gently, so as not to waken him, and I slept again. The next time I woke, the carriage was empty and the train was moving. A grey, cold dawn lightened the window. I glanced involuntarily at the sky and the low snow-clouds scudding past. It was not going to be a very good day for an air-raid I thought, and so there was a chance that I might be home in my valley before evening.

  CHRISTABEL BIELENBERG,

  The Past Is Myself

  Kindness to a prisoner of war

  I think we were all glad to be paraded on the eighth of June, searched and marched to the station. I don’t think I shall ever forget the preliminaries to our departure: we must have been kept on the barrack square in the boiling sun for about three hours, every few minutes having to pick up our bundles and shift a few yards, all in accordance with some incredible system, quite incomprehensible to us, of counting us. The German Army, with all its qualities, cannot count; a squad of twenty prisoners will defeat any German NCO who will invariably find they are nineteen or twenty-one—and the officers don’t seem to be any better.

  Finally rations were issued for what we were told was to be probably a week’s journey. They consisted of 800 grammes of preserved meat between three, three Greek biscuits and half a loaf, short commons indeed for two days let alone seven. Fortunately we had still a small amount of bully which we had carried from Corinth, but the prospects didn’t appear bright. And indeed they would not have been had it not been for the generosity of the Serbian town of Kralejvo through which we passed on the third day of our journey. By that time our rations had to all intents and purposes been consumed, except perhaps for
a Greek biscuit or two which may have still remained uneaten. The front part of our long train was occupied by some Serbs who had been with us at Corinth. They, poor devils, were passing through their own country on their way to the prison camps. They, too, were short of food and knew that we were also and they managed to get a message sent on ahead to Kralejvo where we arrived with empty larders. There on the platform the full length of the train we found men and women with baskets of bread, cheese, bacon, butter and fruit, and as the train pulled up they started to pelt us with their gifts. Someone had organized well. The town had turned out in force and had spared none of its possessions, and as we caught the loaves which were being thrown at us like Rugby footballs we probably thought (if we had time under the hail of bread) that all this food could ill be spared from an impoverished Balkan town. The German guards didn’t know what to do. For some reason, difficult to explain, the young German officer in charge of the train did not want us to receive the food. I cannot understand why unless he was intent on starving us. He knew exactly how inadequate was the ration issue for the journey, but perhaps he resented the obvious sympathy of the Serbs. He stormed up and down the length of the train shouting his ineptitudes but no sooner had this ridiculous cocky military squall passed by than the guards closed their eyes and the stream of food started again. No one of us will ever forget the generosity of these kind people: had it not been for them we should have arrived at our Bavarian destination in a sorry plight. In our truck alone we caught fifty-one good sized loaves warm from the bakehouse as well as a quantity of most nourishing fat bacon full of everything which we were lacking in our diet. Men, women and children provided this manna in our desert and as the baskets emptied so the children ran back into the town for more, and before long others came with baskets of delicious ripe black cherries. One small girl with her mother, who was in tears, threw us some money. They would have given all they had, these poor people, I believe. They showered on us what we most wanted, food and sympathy, and as the train drew out of the station a group of women followed it waving their handkerchiefs, their eyes brimming with tears. No one of us will ever forget this last contact with humanity and, even though the incident is now a year old, it lives in my mind a vivid companion to a desire one day to be able to tell these people what their kindness meant.

  MILES REID,

  Last on the List

  Vienna 1945: a German prisoner of war returns home. An anxious mother asks if he has seen her son.

  The courage of Driver Gimbert

  It happened in the small hours of June 2, 1944. A March driver, Benjamin Gimbert by name, was rostered to take a trainload of bombs from March to Whitemoor by way of Ely and Ipswich. He had forty 500 lb. bombs in the first wagon, seventy-four more in the second, a load of detonators in the third, and after that some forty-eight more wagons all filled with high explosives. For an engine they had one of the War Department eight-coupled locomotives, one of the ugliest creatures that ever ran on a British railway.

  They started at 12.15 a.m. and made their slow way to Ely, through the Junction, and then on by single line through Soham to Fordham. All went well until they were approaching Soham, when the driver looked out and saw that the first wagon was on fire. He knew well enough what the train contained, and he and his mate might just have had time to get down and run for it. But they did not choose to do so for they were not that kind of men. He stopped the train carefully, well short of the station, and sent his fireman to uncouple the burning wagon from the rest of the train, remembering to tell him to take a coal hammer with him in case the coupling was too hot to touch. This was successfully done, and driver Gimbert then proceeded with his blazing wagon into the station, intending to take it some distance along the line, where it would be well clear of all buildings, to uncouple it from the engine there, while he and his mate hoped to be able to take the engine on to Fordham. The signal-box at Soham is on the station, and the signalman, seeing that something was wrong, came down on to the platform as his duty was. The driver hailed him, “Sailor, have you got anything between here and Fordham. Where’s the mail?” That question was never answered: at the moment of asking it the wagon exploded. It blew the engine’s tender to pieces, killed the signalman and the fireman, and Gimbert himself recovered consciousness lying on the far platform badly injured. Virtually every window in Soham was smashed and the station itself completely wrecked. The crater underneath the wagon was fifteen feet deep and sixty-six feet wide. For this the driver and fireman received the George Cross, the fireman, alas, posthumously; and there is of course no doubt at all that their courage and resource saved the town of Soham, for had that whole train exploded, as it must have done if the blazing wagon had not been uncoupled and drawn well away from the rest, there could have been nothing left of the town. One hardly knows what to admire more, the courage or the coolness, but—as what has already been said shows—there was hardly any driver who would not under the same circumstances have acted in exactly the same way. To-day the new Soham station carries a memorial plaque in honour of Fireman Nightall and Driver Gimbert, with the inscription, “The devotion to duty of these brave men saved the town of Soham from grave destruction.”

  ROGER LLOYD

  from S. LEGG (ed.),

  The Railway Book (1952)

  Return to the front. Victoria Station, London, during the First World War.

  THE SEND-OFF

  Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way

  To the siding-shed,

  And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

  Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

  As men’s are, dead.

  Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp

  Stood staring hard,

  Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

  Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp

  Winked to the guard.

  So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

  They were not ours:

  We never heard to which front these were sent.

  Nor there if they yet mock what women meant

  Who gave them flowers.

  Shall they return to beatings of great bells

  In wild train-loads?

  A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

  May creep back, silent, to still village wells

  Up half-known roads.

  WILFRED OWEN

  CRASHES

  Therapeutic benefits of a crash...

  It is a curious fact that, in at least two known instances, railway accidents have exercised a directly curative effect. The Rev. W. Woods, formerly of Leicester, assured the writer that a collision in which he had the good fortune to be had an immediate and most salutary influence upon his nervous system. Similarly a gentleman who wrote in November, 1869, to the Times, stated that a few days before he had been threatened “with a violent attack of rheumatic fever; in fact,” he said, “my condition so alarmed me, and my dread of a sojourn in a Manchester hotel bed for two or three months was so great, that I resolved to make a bold sortie and, well wrapped up, start for London by the 3.30 p.m. Midland fast train. From the time of leaving that station to the time of the collision, my heart was going at express speed; my weak body was in a profuse perspiration; flashes of pain announced that the muscular fibres were under the tyrannical control of rheumatism, and I was almost beside myself with toothache... From the moment of the collision to the present hour no ache, pain, sweat, or tremor has troubled me in the slightest degree, and instead of being, as I expected, and indeed intended, in bed, drinking tinct. aurantii, or absorbing through my pores oil of horse-chestnut, I am conscientiously bound to be at my office bodily sound.” The writer humorously adds, “Don’t print my name and address, or the Midland Company may come down on me for compensation.”

  ANON

  Social benefits of a crash...

  One of the effects, we will not say advantages, of travelling in a long car may be to promote sociability. �
�An American,” says a St. Louis paper, in an article on native politeness, “may not be so elegant at a dinner party, but he will not ride half a day in a railway car without speaking to the fellow-passenger at his elbow, as the Englishman will.” “No,” remarks an American critic, “indeed he will not: ’fore George he will not. How often, oh, how often, have we wished that he would! But he won’t. He will pounce upon a stranger whom he has never seen before in all his life, and talk him deaf, dumb, and blind in fifty miles. Catch an American holding his mouth shut when he has a chance to talk to some man who doesn’t want to be talked to.”

  But sociability in Pullman cars may, especially under certain circumstances, take more demonstrative forms. “I have never,” observes another traveller, “got so well acquainted with the passengers on the train as I did the other day on the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. We were going at the rate of about thirty miles an hour, and another train from the other direction telescoped us. We were all thrown into each other’s society, and brought into immediate social contact, so to speak. I went over and sat in the lap of a corpulent lady from Manitoba, and a girl from Chicago jumped over nine seats and sat down on the plug hat of a preacher from La Crosse, with so much timid, girlish enthusiasm that it shoved his hat clear down over his shoulders. Everybody seemed to lay aside the usual cool reserve of strangers, and we made ourselves entirely at home. A shy young man, with an emaciated oil-cloth valise, left his own seat and went over and sat down in a lunch basket, where a bridal couple seemed to be wrestling with their first picnic. Do you suppose that reticent young man would have done such a thing on ordinary occasions? Do you think if he had been at a celebration at home that he would have risen impetuously and gone where those people were eating by themselves, and sat down in the cranberry jelly of a total stranger? I should rather think not. Why, one old man, who probably at home led the class-meeting, and who was as dignified as Roscoe Conkling’s father, was eating a piece of custard pie when we met the other train, and he left his own seat and went over to the other end of the car and shot that piece of custard pie into the ear of a beautiful widow from Iowa. People travelling somehow forget the austerity of their home lives, and form acquaintances that sometimes last through life.”