by JH Fletcher
Franz looked over his shoulder. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Changing the magazine, that’s all.’
He did so, fired another burst.
From the wall beside the school a figure ran, head back, elbows pumping.
Franz pointed. ‘There!’
Horst had already swung the gun. Franz watched as the bullets raised dust from the surface of the road. They closed in on the running man. Enveloped him. Through his glasses Franz saw the spastic dance of the Frenchman as the bullets struck home. Arms and legs flew. He staggered drunkenly for a yard or two, still striving towards the shelter that now and forever would be beyond his reach. He fell.
‘See how I got him?’ Horst was exultant. He fired celebratory bursts at the house fronts. ‘Pow, pow, pow,’ he sang. ‘Take that, you bastards.’
‘Take it easy,’ Franz told him. ‘That barrel will be red hot, you keep firing like that.’
Around the corner of the school Rudi Behn came charging, the rest of the troop with him.
At once Franz reversed his previous order. ‘Keep firing!’
Once again the Schmeisser roared. Through the smoke Franz saw Rudi and the rest reach the furthest house and disappear behind it. He tapped Horst on the shoulder. The gun stopped. They waited. A group of men burst from the back of the house and ran. Without waiting for orders Horst swung the machine gun and pumped rounds after them but in a matter of seconds they had disappeared into the hedge dividing the line of houses from the open fields.
‘Get anyone?’
‘Don’t think so.’ Horst looked over his shoulder. ‘Want me to shoot up the hedge, Sarge?’
‘Leave it. It was the school we were after and it looks like we’ve got that.’
Franz went into the building. There were a dozen men inside, two or three wounded lying on the floor. They clustered delightedly around Franz, all talking at once.
‘Shut up! We’re pulling out. You’ll be forming patrols to sort out this bloody town, once and for all.’ He had been frightened; it was the first time he had realised it. Now he wanted to take out his fear on somebody. ‘Form up,’ he ordered them, bellowing. ‘And jump to it!’
Outside he talked with Rudi. ‘Any casualties?’
‘No. We got these, though.’
Three men cowering, white faced, hands on their heads.
‘We’ll give them to Muller. He’ll make them sing. Then we’ll get some street patrols out.’
But back at the barracks Scholz was not interested in street patrols. ‘We’ve been in contact with headquarters. Reinforcements are on their way.’
Franz had heard that story before. ‘With the Allies ashore in Normandy what reinforcements can they spare for a piss-willy little place like this?’
Scholz smiled triumphantly. ‘The 2nd SS Panzer Division is moving north. They’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll show these damn Frenchies who’s running this town.’
Combat boots heavy upon the bare boards, Sturmbannführer Dickmann prowled the interrogation room of the local police station, eyes on the group of men facing him.
‘Passed through Tulle yesterday. They’d been having trouble, too. Know what we did?’
His audience was a mixture. Mayor Lamartine, whose son had been one of those picked up at the farmhouse. The municipal engineer. Scholz, Franz, Muller. French and German. Enemies and fellow victims.
Dickmann laid his gloved hand on Lamartine’s shoulder. ‘I asked you,’ he said, razors in the soft voice. ‘What did we do?’
The mayor gulped. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We took ninety-nine men. Hanged them from lampposts down the main street.’ The image lingered in the room. ‘As an example.’ Prowling again. ‘Looks like the lesson hasn’t got home.’ His eyes focused on Franz. ‘Feldwebel?’
‘Sir?’
‘How many men have we got in the cells?’
‘Three we brought in yesterday. Eight more from a previous operation.’
‘Why are they still there?’
‘We are still questioning them.’
‘Got anything out of them?’
‘Quite a lot. But we’ll get more, in time.’
‘There is no time!’ Suddenly screaming. ‘We should be halfway to Normandy, not sorting out this nonsense! There’s a war on. Or hadn’t you heard?’
Franz stone-faced. ‘Sir.’
Once again Dickmann addressed the group. ‘Why do you think you’ve had this trouble? Because you’ve been soft? No. Because you have been seen to be soft. I am going to do you gentlemen a favour. I am going to make the people of Gautier afraid of you.’ He smiled dangerously. ‘I am going to make them hate you.’
He turned back to the mayor. ‘Can you give one reason why I should not burn this town? And everybody in it? Can you?’
White-lipped, the mayor muttered something about hotheads.
‘You mean terrorists. People who seek to impose terror will be punished by terror.’ Gently Dickmann said, ‘I understand one of them is your son.’
Silence.
‘What do you think I should do with him? With all of them?’
Lamartine was weeping, not built to withstand terror.
‘We hang them. You hear? Hang them! Their families, too. If we feel like it.’
Again silence, broken by sobs.
‘I don’t have time to burn your town. More’s the pity. We’ll have a firing squad instead.’ Teeth were a pale grin. ‘Under the command of our Feldwebel here. And you, Mr Mayor, will read the sentence of execution.’
The prisoners stumbled, in some cases barely able to drag themselves along. On Dickmann’s orders the inhabitants of the town had been herded into the square to witness the killing. Grey-faced, they huddled together under the guns of the SS troopers.
Iron stakes had been driven between the cobbles. The men were tied to them. Behind them the statue of St Joan watched. The mayor stood alone. Tears ran down his face. He was shaking, shaking. Suddenly he turned towards Dickmann.
‘I beg you …’ His broken voice tortured the air. ‘He is my son! I can’t do it. Shoot me, rather.’
Dickmann watched his pain. ‘This town chose to rise up against its masters. You are the mayor. You are responsible. I intend you to remember this day as long as you live.’ He turned. ‘Feldwebel?’
‘Sir?’
‘What are we waiting for?’
Franz was unaware he had hesitated yet must have done. Suddenly Dickmann was at his side, speaking in his ear. ‘If you have no stomach for war perhaps I can help you. If you do not shoot these men I shall order my own men to do it. Then I shall take fifty more men and shoot them, too. You hear me? And one of them will be you.’
The blood was heavy in his veins, pulsed in his temples. The sun’s weight lay upon him. The cobbled square reflected its rays in a thousand splinters of light. Beyond the tethered men the marble figure of St Joan peered austerely, a stranger to pain. Yet she too had known the fire. Fire of the flame, fire of love. The voices that had summoned her: where were they now? All silent. As the watching townsfolk were silent.
Franz marched forward. Took his place at the side of the firing squad. The mayor swayed, mumbling, shaking. Even ten metres away Franz could feel the scalding tide of terror in Lamartine’s throat.
Franz moistened his lips. ‘Monsieur le Maire,’ he said. ‘We are ready now.’
He thought the man would fall, plead, weep. He thought they might have to carry him bodily to stand beside his son. But no. The mayor took a deep breath, straightening, unfolded the paper upon which the sentence of execution had been written. The expression in his eyes showed he lived in hell yet his voice was clear enough.
‘… In that the accused have been found guilty of attempting an uprising against the duly appointed government of which I am the representative …’
It was not the dying. Millions had died. In Normandy. In Russia. In England and Italy and Greece and North Africa. In Germany and Australia. Death had become commonpl
ace. What was dreadful was the ritual that mocked death and so life itself.
The mayor’s voice scratched the surface of the hot air. ‘I hereby pronounce sentence of death upon them by firing squad. Heil Hitler.’ At the last his voice failed, trailing off in a gasp that even Franz, standing so close, could barely hear. He saw Dickmann start forward. It was not beyond the SS officer to order the whole thing done again. It was an unbearable prospect. To prevent it he at once began barking the sequence of orders.
‘Load …’
‘Aim …’
In the blazing light of the square a coolness. As he listened to this stranger’s voice bellowing, his eyes were focused. Upon a contorted watercourse, empty of water, twisting through a landscape of tumbled rocks, sepia and red and blue, a sun violent as rage. The sun’s heat was deflected by a tree, gigantic and silent, whose massive branches stood over him. To shield him. To protect him in this hour.
Now and in the hour of our death. Now and in the hour. Now.
‘Fire!’
‘I love that dress.’
It was impossible that life could go on after what had happened yet two days after the executions here he was, sitting in the cafe with a young French girl he had been seeing off and on since he was posted here. That is what we must do, he thought. Savour each moment to the full while we still can.
Marie smiled uncertainly, smoothing the fabric of the dress. In the past she had always chattered fit to deafen the sparrows yet now said nothing. It wouldn’t do. Franz needed voices, laughter to forge an instant’s forgetfulness. Silence had become the enemy.
‘Talk,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘Anything. That dress, if you want.’
She smoothed the fabric with a self-conscious hand. ‘Tell you what?’
‘What you paid for it. Where you got it. Anything.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
To take my mind off reality. But did not say it. Sitting here chattering about nothing was reality, too, a reality more wholesome by far than the traumas of war.
‘Do you really like it?’ Appealing to him.
‘It’s wonderful.’
You are using her, he thought. The news from the north gets worse by the hour yet you sit here and pretend that nothing is happening at all. This is where the war has brought you. Nothing has any meaning, neither the future nor Marie nor what is happening in Normandy. The tree I imagined while I was giving orders to the firing squad … I have dreamt of it so often. It’s not just a tree, it’s a symbol. Of grace. Of hope. Yet I’d cut it down for firewood if it meant survival. That has become the only thing that matters. Because I have believed too much and now believe nothing.
He smiled at her with lying eyes, placing his hand on hers. ‘You know I care for you.’
She stared at him, eyes unfriendly. ‘Don’t give me that.’
‘I’m not —’
‘You’re only here so you can kid yourself nothing’s changed, that there aren’t going to be any tomorrows. But tomorrow’s almost here, isn’t it? For both of us.’
He did not want to believe her. ‘If we have to leave here —’
‘Yes?’
For the first time he realised how much older her eyes were than the rest of her. ‘I’ll take you with me. If you like.’
She smiled cynically. ‘Don’t talk crap.’
‘I will do it.’
‘They won’t let you.’
‘They won’t be able to stop me.’ He saw she still did not believe. ‘I will. I promise.’
The make-believe held for four more days. The official news said there had been great victories in the north and huge numbers of Allied troops had been drowned trying to re-embark off the Normandy beaches. There were great storms in the Channel, the news said, and the invasion fleet had been wrecked.
‘I told you, remember?’ Captain Scholz said. ‘I said we would throw them into the sea.’
Franz did not believe; nobody did. There had been too many lies.
‘What do you think, Sarge?’ Rudi asked him.
‘I do what I’m told. If it’s a great victory, good. If it isn’t …’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it, either way.’
‘They say there’s a hundred thousand men ashore and more coming every day.’
‘Not the way Scholz tells it.’
‘They say their planes are blasting our boys off the map.’
‘They shoot rumour-mongers in this army,’ Franz said. ‘Or hadn’t you heard?’
‘What do you think?’ Rudi said. ‘Really?’
Franz glanced about him. There was no one close enough to hear them. ‘I think we’re in the shit.’
That night someone defaced all the Waffen SS posters in the square. Whoever had done it had scrawled all over them in red paint. Les Boches sont foutus.
‘I wish,’ Rudi said. ‘I wouldn’t mind being foutu-ed. By a fifteen year old, for preference.’ He clenched his right fist, thrusting his arm up and down like a piston.
‘You get any offers, it’ll more likely be from the maquis.’
A thought to be scared of.
‘If they told us the truth it wouldn’t be so bad,’ Rudi complained. ‘But they treat us like morons.’
‘If we weren’t morons we wouldn’t be here.’
He went to headquarters, found everything in confusion. Men were running in all directions, piles of papers were burning in the yard at the back of the office and Captain Scholz told him they had received orders to pull back.
‘Pull back where?’
‘To the Vosges.’
Franz stared. The Vosges mountains were five hundred kilometres away. ‘So we’re giving up the whole country?’ He remembered the firing squad, the hundreds of other firing squads. The thousands of men, women and children dead who might have lived. And now this. A retreat that would throw away everything that the army had achieved since 1940. ‘Just like that,’ he said.
‘When the line is stabilised we’ll be back,’ Scholz said.
Franz no longer cared whether Scholz believed what he was saying or not. The retreat and making sure he survived were the only things that mattered now.
‘Is everyone pulling out?’
Scholz drew himself up. ‘None of your concern —’
‘Because if they are the roads are going to be jammed. We’re likely to be held up if we don’t get moving now.’
The tiny mouth worked nervously. Being held up might mean having to fight the maquis and no one wanted anything to do with that. ‘All units are to move independently. We shall rendezvous at —’
He mentioned the name of a town but Franz did not bother to listen. With the occupation forces all pulling back it would be a miracle if they got away at all. The chances of meeting up again in a town on the far side of the country were too remote to think about.
‘Please give me my orders, sir.’
Scholz glared. ‘Isn’t my word good enough?’
‘If I haven’t got a piece of paper the feldgendarmen will probably shoot me.’
‘Nonsense.’
He gave him his orders, nonetheless, scrawling them on a piece of paper and stamping them, meticulously, with the regimental stamp. Franz took the paper, folded it and placed it carefully in his breast pocket and buttoned the flap. He saluted formally. ‘Thank you, sir.’
In the yard a queue of vehicles was waiting at the pumps. He cursed under his breath. Petrol had been in short supply for months; with all these vehicles ahead of him he’d be lucky to get any at all.
‘Over here, Sarge …’
He turned. Rudi beckoned to him from the cab of a light truck. He went across to him.
‘How’d you get hold of this?’
Rudi winked. ‘First come, first served.’
‘I’m surprised they let you.’
‘Told them you’d requisitioned it, didn’ I? Orders, I said.’
‘Fuel?’
‘Full. And a couple of big drums in
the back.’
‘Good.’ Franz remembered what he had promised Marie but there was no time for rescue operations. She’d have to take her chances along with the rest of them. He climbed into the cab at Rudi’s side. ‘Let’s get moving, then.’
They drove to the main road and turned towards Lyon. Gautier vanished behind them.
Ten kilometres later they were caught in a line of slowly-moving vehicles. It had started to rain and on either side of the road the countryside was grey and featureless. Helmeted figures stared morosely from the rear of the truck in front.
‘Ever been in a retreat before?’ Rudi asked.
‘In Russia.’
‘What was it like?’
‘It was hell.’
The truck in front of them stopped. They stopped, too, their bonnet almost touching the tailgate.
‘Der Scherzer was right, wasn’t he?’ Rudi asked. ‘The joker?’
‘What joker?’
‘The one who scrawled on the posters? The one who said we were foutu?’
‘Scholz says we’ll be back.’
‘Scholz is an idiot.’
‘I could have you shot for saying that.’
‘But you won’t.’
‘Why are you so sure?’
‘Because then you’d have to drive the truck.’
They drove across France to the Vosges Mountains where the armies were re-grouping. Franz and Rudi stuck together but that was the only good thing that happened. Everyone knew they were finished yet the fighting continued. The odds against them were impossible. They fell back, regrouped, fell back again. Air attacks tore the heart out of their units. Towns were flattened by bomb and shell. Winter gave way to spring. The war went on. At night the sky was lurid with flames from the devastated cities. There were children in the line now and old men, veterans of the First War and maybe earlier, units thrown together to plug gaps that could no longer be plugged. And still the war went on.
