Otto's Phoney War

by Leo Kessler

  The Count did not seem to notice it. ‘Not to worry, Otto,’ he answered easily. ‘We’ve got clever books with all that sort of thing in them.’ His smile faltered for a second. ‘At least we should have.’

  ‘All right.’ Otto gave in on that point. ‘What about their positions? How am I going to discover them?’ Again the Count had his answer ready. ‘Mushrooms … you’ll be collecting mushrooms.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. Nobody ever notices a chap collecting mushrooms, it’s such a nice peaceful pursuit, and it blends in with the countryside. I mean everyone expects to see people collecting mushrooms when they’re in the country.’ Von der Weide leaned back and reminisced, ‘Many a time has yours truly stolen secrets dressed in the simple disguise of a mushroom picker. Why, only last summer – ’

  ‘But what if there aren't any mushrooms?’ Otto objected, restraining himself with an effort of willpower.

  The Count did not seem to hear. ‘You circle their positions,’ – his right arm was moving back and forth picking imaginary mushrooms – ‘apparently concentrating on the task in hand. Two mushrooms to the right of your basket indicate a machine-gun pit, three on the left side for a gun emplacement … ’

  Otto gave up. ‘Count,’ he said through gritted teeth, desperately trying to stop that flow of words, ‘thanks for the tips. But I think I’d better do it my way.’

  ‘Oh, all right, as you wish, Otto. I was going to offer you my best mushroomer outfit – I have two, you know. But seeming as you don't want help from an old hand … ’ The Count seemed genuinely hurt. ‘You’d better see Hirsch about your false identity papers etc.’ He thrust out his soft, well-manicured hand. ‘I won’t be seeing you before you go, Otto. I’m off on business to … err … Munster-Eifel.’ For some reason, the Count lowered his bright gaze for an instant, as if he were embarrassed. ‘So I’d like to wish you happy landings, now. I’m quite sure that you’ll be completely successful.’ His smile was back, and Otto wondered if it were really genuine this time.

  ‘Thanks, Meadow,’ Otto said, and then, as an afterthought, ‘If I come across mushrooms, I’ll bring you a basketful.’

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘In the old days,’ the sergeant said dourly, as he led Otto through the ruined, shell-shattered Lorraine village, its cobbled streets littered with the debris of war, ‘before folks like you and me got educated, they’d let your average hairy-assed old stubble-hopper enjoy himself when he captured a place like this.’ He turned his collar up against the cold gusts whistling down the main road. ‘You know, there’d be a high old time, raping the local ladies and looting the sauce from the cellars. Licentious soldiery and all that.’ He allowed himself a wistful smile, but Otto was too busy wheeling a rusty bicycle through the rubble to notice. ‘But not these days.’ He aimed a vicious kick at the dead cat that lay in his path and it sailed through the air like a hairy football to disappear through the shattered window of the French cottage opposite.

  ‘Goal?’ Otto ventured, looking across at his guide with a grin. The sergeant's moustaches didn't move, and Otto quickly wiped the smile from his face. I thought that was pretty quick, he complained to himself.

  His guide continued, no trace of a shiver in his schnapps-soaked voice, even in this weather. ‘No, these days, it’s all talk of liberation and freedom and fighting for national survival and all that sort of crap,’ he moaned. ‘So we haven’t conquered this goddam cow-town, we’ve liberated it.’

  ‘I think the “local ladies” would rather be conquered,’ Otto observed. This time he let out a bark of a laugh that echoed off the cottage walls a little too loudly. Again, not a response from his guide. Is he deaf, wondered Otto. He tried to cover the loud silence with a comment, gesturing as he did so, ‘Er, seems to me there isn't a roof left standing.’

  ‘Doesn’t worry me much,’ the sergeant said, staring at the naked beams with a professional eye, ‘I’m a slater by trade in Civvy Street. They can blast the roof off every house from here to Frankfurt, I wouldn’t mind. It’d keep me in fried tatties and bratwurst for the rest of me days,’ he finished, chewing on his moustache.

  ‘I expect it would,’ Otto said, thinking that the dour sergeant was the first sane person he had met in many a month. Then he remembered that in a few moments he would be entering enemy territory. This was no time for philosophising on the sanity of his compatriots. ‘What’s the drill now, Sergeant?’ he asked a little anxiously.

  The NCO looked at him. ‘You’re starting to talk like an officer already,’ he commented without rancour. ‘Drill?’ He sniffed. ‘Up that lane there, bearing north towards them hills. That’s the Lux frontier. But be careful, the Frogs are somewhere in position to your right on that tree-line, though if they’re smart, they’ll be tucked up nice and warm in their holes, drinking that red wine of theirs and toasting their sweaty frog feet.’ Otto couldn't help wishing he was there with them, sweaty feet and all. ‘It’s getting right back-end. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we didn’t have snow soon.’

  They had reached the edge of the village. A grey field, banked by hedges devoid of leaves curved away in front of them. The sergeant stuck out his hand, without taking the glove off.

  ‘All right, Herr Otto, this is as far as I go. Keep your nose clean. I won’t take my glove off cos I’m not an officer and gent, see.’ He winked, and his moustache seemed to leap half-way across his face in a vain effort to defect across the border.

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Suddenly Otto felt quite nervous. He would have dearly loved to have asked the NCO to stay with him a little longer, but he knew that couldn’t be. The man was impatient to be off back to their own lines and the warm underground bunker from which he had been detailed to escort this strange-looking civilian with his onions and ancient, squeaking Frog cycle through no-man’s land.

  ‘And if you get any of that Frog leg,’ the sergeant said, his face cracking into a lecherous smile, ‘don’t wash your salami. Bring it back and let me have a smell.’ He laughed in an open-mouthed, hacking kind of way and trudged off back the way they had come.

  Wow, thought Otto. And there I was thinking he was sane.

  For a long time, Otto stood there on the edge of the wet, dreary field watching the sergeant bustle back down the cobbles as if he were in a great hurry, feeling very exposed and very lonely; then when the NCO had disappeared around the corner, he remembered where he was and the danger he might well be in. Even at this moment some hidden Frenchman might be observing him through his field-glasses. Hastily, he swung round his bike, the handlebars laden with strings of onions that were already beginning to stink, and started to push down the track that led to Luxembourg.

  It had been Hirsch’s suggestion to have Otto slip through the tiny piece of French Lorraine held by the Wehrmacht as the result of a successful local offensive in late October, just after the end of the Polish campaign.

  ‘But it seems a very long way round, Number Nine,’ Otto had protested, using Hirsch’s old code-name because he had forgotten the new one.

  ‘Maybe to you, Sunray,’ Hirsch had said, pointedly using Otto’s new code-name. ‘But Lorraine is the backdoor and un-dangerous.’ He repeated the word again, as if saying it twice made it any less ridiculous. ‘From there you can make your way into Luxembourg and then cross the frontier into Belgium. It’s unguarded because they have had a customs union these many years. Much easier that way than going in through the front door. You can take it from me,’ he said with a knowing look, as if he knew the Belgian frontier like the back of his grubby hand, ‘Belgium’s border with the Reich is exceedingly well guarded.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Otto had conceded.

  ‘I suppose I am right,’ Hirsch had snapped and, assuming that Otto’s wan look indicated fear, he had pressed his arm firmly and said, ‘Correggio, caro, Otto. Remember, we must be as the Romans of old.’ He had clicked to attention, given Otto the fascist salute, and that had been that.

  Now, as Otto t
oiled up the narrow track towards Luxembourg, with a journey of nearly a hundred kilometres in front of him, he wondered a little uneasily whether Octavio (the little Jew had recently bestowed upon himself the imperial-sounding Roman name instead of the ‘Izzy’ that had been his for fifty-odd years) Hirsch had been mistaken.

  Well it's too late now to change the plan, he told himself, and pushed hard at this damn bike. Its front wheel squeaked plaintively, slid sideways in a puddle and collapsed. Otto, overbalancing, went straight after it. He looked up from the ground and blew mud from his nostrils. Pierre Kirschmeyour was his name, Luxembourg onion-seller his trade, and so it would remain until his mission was completed.

  The road north through Luxembourg City, Diekirch, Ettelbruck and a series of mean villages, which looked as if they might well have been abandoned years ago, seemed one long uphill slog that got steeper and steeper by the kilometre. On the first morning of his journey, he passed a sign for the local principality. Its motto read, ‘We want to be left alone.’ Half a mile later he tossed his stinking onions into the ditch. ‘Excellent cover,’ Hirsch had insisted. ‘Onion-sellers are always wandering all over the place. Besides you can make a very good secret ink out of their juice at a pinch.’

  ‘But who should I write to?’ Otto had countered. Hirsch had not been listening.

  That same afternoon the rusty French monster followed. The bike had been throwing its chain every kilometre or so and besides the hills of the Luxembourg’s Switzerland, as the area was known by the locals, were too steep to ride up. He said goodbye without regret, marching on doggedly, an onion-seller without onions, and his feet burning like fire.

  By the evening of the first day, somewhere in the lonely hillside beyond the beer-brewing town of Diekirch, he was beat; and when it started to rain, a thin bitter grey drizzle as cold as a rich widow’s heart, he decided he’d had enough. He had to find a place to get his head down for the night.

  But there was not a house to be seen in that bleak and rolling countryside, and perhaps because the drizzle made him keep his gaze lowered, he did not see the smoke curling out of a hole in the roof of a seemingly abandoned barn. It was the only structure he could see in the gloaming, and he headed straight for it, imagining himself bedding down in warm, dry hay. He arrived at the tall door and wrenched at it, dragging it open with all his flagging strength.

  ‘Aha!’

  Bent half double under the strain of moving the door, Otto wheeled round, catching his head on the large wooden latch. ‘Aah – ’ he started in pain, and then carried it on in surprise. ‘ – aah!’

  A wizened little toothless tramp in ragged clothes sat on a bundle of straw, roasting potatoes on the prongs of a manure fork. He was smiling up at Otto with just one wild eye, making a gesture that he should take a seat near the smoking fire. ‘Tewwibwe weader for twamps and spies, isn’t it?’

  Exactly at that same moment, while Otto was attempting to recover from the shock of the surprise greeting, Count von der Weide lay in a tight abandoned drainage pipe to shelter from the grey drizzle and surveyed the darkening countryside to his immediate front.

  To the left there was the main road that led to Rad-Munster-Eifel, the walled medieval resort town of the area, while to the right there was the winding secondary road that ran through the sleepy little slated-roofed village of Rodert and into the thick fir woods beyond.

  Immediately to his front, however, lay the low and camouflaged concrete shape of the ‘Mountain-Nest’, as it was code-named, surrounded by the protective guard-posts, ‘Dora’, ‘Emil’, ‘Fritz’, ‘Arthur’, ‘Bruno’ and naturally ‘Caesar’. There had always to be something imperial about the places the Führer chose for his secret headquarters.

  He eyed the place from the end of the pipe, mentally penetrating the thick concrete walls, pinpointing the room occupied by Linge, the Führer s body-servant, with next to it the bedroom of the Leader himself. If he was right in his assumptions, the Führer would take his daily exercise, the walk with his Alsatian bitch, Blondi, just to the right of the bunker among the sparse young trees that had been planted to give the place additional camouflage. He closed one eye and squinted at the spot. The trees would present little problem, he told himself, even at this distance, which was over eight hundred metres. It was the closest he could get without running the risk of alerting ‘Post Caesar’, immediately to his front.

  Suddenly the Count started. There was the sound of slow footsteps like that of a bored man consigned to some wearisome, uninteresting task. He shuffled further back inside the pipe. A pair of highly polished black boots had halted directly in front of him. He hardly dared breathe. Had he been discovered? Suddenly the unseen guard broke wind. The boots turned, spread apart. Count von der Weide wondered what was coming. Then there was the hiss of hot urine escaping from a sorely tried bladder. A frothing stream of dark yellow liquid started to pour into the pipe.

  ‘Ooh, mother Mary, yes,’ breathed a tight and proper voice.

  The Count tried to turn his head and escape it. To no avail. The confines of the pipe were too tight. Numbly, his eyes closed, he accepted his fate. The liquid trickled down his bent head, along his tightly clenched nostrils and dripped off his chin. Finally his ordeal was over and the SS guard started to stamp away towards Post Caesar, growing ever smaller in the circle of grey light at the end of the pipe.

  The soaked Count watched him go. Then he squeezed up one eye again and sighted along the length of the pipe, as if he were holding a rifle.

  ‘Click,’ he snapped.

  At that moment the black-uniformed, helmeted guard slipped in the mud of the forest trail and sat down suddenly in the goo, cursing as he did so.

  Suddenly the Count smiled to himself. It seemed to be a good omen, he couldn’t help thinking. Five minutes later he had gone, leaving the Mountain Nest to disappear behind him into the grey drizzle.

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘Ami, I’m cawwed,’ the toothless little tramp said, stretching out a dirty hand and breaking the heavy silence.

  ‘Kirschmeyour,’ Otto said thickly, remembering his new name at the very last moment. ‘I’m a Luxembourg onion-seller.’ The tramp quickly shut his one eye. Otto guessed it was supposed to be a wink. Next second Ami was pulling down the corner of his eyelid.

  ‘See any gween in there, comrade, eh?’ he quipped, obviously not believing Otto’s story one bit. ‘Here,’ he pulled one of the blackened potatoes off the end of the manure-fork and handed it to Otto, who yelped with pain.

  ‘Shit,’ he cursed, ‘its red hot!’

  ‘Dere’s sawt in dat tin dere, if you want it,’ the tramp said unfeelingly. ‘I’m a child of de fwontier,’ he continued in a grandiose style, apropos of nothing. ‘Grandmoder a Fwench whore to de Metz gawison, Gwandfader a wecwuit in de Pwussian Foot-Artiwwery, Year ’88 and a chimney-sweep in civvy stweet, dat goes widout saying.’ He winked at Otto knowingly, waving the manure fork as if conducting his story. ‘He poked Gwandma wew enouf, aw wight. My owd moder was de wesuwt, and of course, she fowwowed in de famiwy twadition. In 1918,’ he started up again, ‘when de Amewicans marched into Metz after de Battle of de Argonne, she was dere waiting for dem at de Porte des Allernands, with open arms – and other things, too, if you get my meaning.’ he finished, conspiratorially.

  Trying to catch up, Otto spluttered through the burning-hot mouthful of potato that he got the general idea.

  ‘Pwegnant by the end of the week and I am the wesult, a chiwd of the fwontier, as usual in dis awea, fader unknown. So I caw mysewf “Ami” … short for “Amewican”, you know?’

  Finally getting a hold on his hunger, Otto nodded he did.

  His tale completed, the little tramp beamed at Otto, a disconcerting sight with that large single eye fixed on him. For a while they ate in silence while the wind howled outside and the rain lashed against the dirty cracked panes of the abandoned barn; but Otto kept stealing secret glances at his wrinkled, bronzed face, asking himself whether he had re
ally heard those first cheerful words, ‘Terrible weather for tramps and spies.’ Had the little tramp really said them?

  But he had, for when Ami was finally finished with his stolen baked potatoes and had begun filling his little shag-pipe with tobacco, his casual question about who Otto was working for – ‘de Fwench or de Jermans’ – indicated that his hearing had not been at fault thirty minutes before.

  ‘What do you mean, working for them?’ he asked, feigning indignation.

  ‘Come off it, comwade,’ Ami said easily, taking a deep contented draw at his pipe, his single eye resting lazily. Suddenly he sat bolt upright, fiddling inside his voluminous jumpers, talking all the while. ‘But wot a siwwy gentuwman I am fogettin' my speaking impediment.’ Whipping a dark brown curve out of his jumpers he began fitting it into his mouth. ‘And finawwy heew we have: de transfowmashun – of Ami – into a real gentleman!’ he finished off, his speech a suddenly understandable neutral German accent. ‘Now then, where was I?’ He shoved his pipe back into his mouth, puffing as he talked. ‘Aw of us gents-of-de-woad awound here sew odd bits and pieces of infowmation to both sides of de fwontier. Dere’s many a good chicken dinner and witre of wine I’ve had on de stwength of de Maginot Wine and de Westwall too.’

  Otto had had enough. He put on a stern voice. ‘Look, Ami, could you just speak clearly for me? You're half stuffing your face with that pipe!’

  Ami's one eye grew larger than Otto had yet seen it. Slowly he took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Excuse me, mister Manners! Well then, I'll continue. And if mister Manners has a further issue with old Ami, he should take it up with the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. As I was saying, in winter it’s selling information here and there that keeps your average gent-of-the-road out of the shitting workhouse with all those damned nuns with their bobbing and scraping and saying your prayers and ringing shitting bells all the time.’ He sniffed indignantly. It ain’t godly some of the things those white swans want you to do for a plate of pea soup and a bit of sour black bread.’