by Owen Sheers
“You have a scar on your left shin approximately two inches long,” he said, still looking out over the fields. “You fell out of a tree when you were six years old and broke your arm. You have some scarring on your right lung, the result of a bout of pleurisy when you were twelve. You’re slightly deaf in your left ear, possibly also as a result of the fall from the tree.” He turned to look at George. “Incidentally, this is what they’ll cite if you accept my proposal. Unfit for duty due to deafness.” A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth again. “You see, George, I know more about you than you do about yourself.”
He held out the Bible. “Are you sure you don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say? I’ll be honest, I think you’re making a mistake if you don’t.”
George looked back at Atkins, meeting his stare. He bit his lower lip. Atkins kept the Bible held out towards him but said nothing further. George took his right hand out of his pocket and laid it on the leather cover.
“Good lad,” Atkins said, “now repeat after me …”
And that was how it began. In a field four years ago, Atkins reciting by rote, in a tone that reminded George of when they said the Lord’s Prayer at school, the Oath of Allegiance, the Defence Act, and the Official Secrets Act. At the end of each sentence he paused for George to repeat his words. When they’d finished Atkins put the Bible back in his jacket pocket, asked George to sit down, and told him everything. He told him about Operation Sea Lion, Hitler’s directive for the invasion of Britain. About the government’s plan for a resistance movement to be activated in the event of such an invasion. He explained to George how this organisation, the Auxiliary Units, would live or die not just on its weapons and its training but also on its information, on its eyes and ears. How, if George was willing, he could be part of that listening and watching machine, running messages, observing enemy troop movements. Atkins talked like this for over half an hour, explaining everything in the fullest detail. He wanted George to understand completely, to leave no part of this possible future he was describing unexamined. He returned again and again to the need for absolute secrecy. “No one must know we’ve had this conversation, George; no one. Not your mother or father, your sister, your friends. It’s the same for everyone. Even the men in the operational patrols will only know the other men in their patrol. You won’t know who they are and they certainly won’t know about you. Understand?”
The resistance wouldn’t try to halt the German advance, Atkins explained. That was the job of the army and the Home Guard (George thought of his uncle and his grandfather doing drills in the school yard last week, their uniforms sagging at the knees, broom handles over their shoulders). No, the resistance would retreat to underground bunkers that were, as they spoke, already being constructed by the army. Once the Germans had passed, they’d attack them from behind, sabotaging supply lines, planting roadside bombs, ambushing isolated military posts. The units would not give up, he assured George. “They’ll be well supplied and they’ll be well trained. They’ll give Jerry a bloody hard time, believe me they will.” The reprisals would be severe. Hostages executed. Whole villages wiped out in revenge. The resistance, Atkins told him, would not survive. And neither would he. If the invasion was successful, in the end they would all die. “Fourteen days, that’s what you can expect. Around fourteen days of activity from the date of the invasion.” He looked at George from under his tweed cap, the multicoloured feathers of the fishing flies quivering in the breeze. “Still up for it?”
George averted his eyes from Atkins’s gaze and looked down at his feet for a moment before looking back up at him. “Yes, sir,” he said, frowning.
Atkins leant forward. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ you know? Mr. Atkins is fine.” Then, giving George a tap on the shoulder like a judge striking his gavel to signal court out of session, he stood up and put on his jacket. Reaching into an inside pocket, he drew out a sheaf of papers.
“These are for you. This is rice paper. It’s edible. Only ever write your observations on this. If you think you’re going to get caught, eat them.” He tore off a corner and handed it to George. “Try a bit, not as bad as all that. Bit like the gum the Yanks chew.”
George bit off a piece of the paper and chewed on it as Atkins unfolded another sheet. It was illustrated with hand-drawn symbols: rectangles and triangles patterned with shaded crosses and chevrons. “These,” he said, “are the insignia of every German unit from the Hook of Holland to Cap Gris Nez. I want you to learn them all by heart. I’ll test you on them when we meet next week, so make sure you do learn them, George. You might need them even sooner than that.” He handed the sheet to him. “That’s all for now,” he said, then turned away and began walking back across the field towards the lane. “I’ll see you next week,” he called over his shoulder.
“Sir?”
Atkins turned back, one eyebrow cocked.
“Sorry. Mr. Atkins.”
“Yes, George?”
“How will I know where to meet you?”
Atkins gave another of his sudden smiles. “Better start checking those drop points, hadn’t you, George?” Then he turned away again and kept walking towards the gate, the smile shedding from his face immediately. He hated this. Too much like fattening lambs for slaughter. This boy, he looked so young. With his dusting of a moustache, his sunburnt ears, his fair hair cut under a bowl by his mother. What chance did he stand? But then what chance did any of them stand once the beachheads were breached? Just 167 anti-tank guns in the whole of the country, museums being ransacked for three-hundred-year-old canons. He glanced back at George as he climbed over the gate into the lane. He was already back at work, the bracken bowing before the swing of his scythe like Japanese courtiers before their emperor. Atkins knew he had to do this. What else could they do? But that didn’t mean he had to like it. He mounted his bicycle and cycled on down the lane, the rhythmical swish of George’s scythe rising and falling as he passed him on the other side of the hedge. It was he, Atkins thought, him, “Tommy Atkins,” with his secrets and promises, not George, who should be holding that scythe.
The meeting with Atkins had happened too quickly for George to think on the consequences yet. His head was light, open, and he swung his scythe with a renewed energy. He felt exposed, as if a layer of skin had been shaved from him, bringing him into closer contact with the world. The blade’s edge against the young stalks of bracken, the calligraphy of the swallows above him. Everything seemed clearer, brought into a sharper focus. Just over an hour ago the war was a different country, the contours of which he’d traced through the newspapers, in radio reports. But now he was involved, connected. He had the strange sensation of his life simultaneously diminishing and expanding under the impression of Atkins’s words, and for the second time that week, he felt older than his seventeen years.
“George! George, you lazy bastard! Get up!”
His father. His father who had slept, snoring all night, while he was out running messages. His father who now thought his twenty-one-year-old son was a lazy good for nothing as well as a coward, always yawning, tripping over his boots, and knocking things over.
He got out of bed, nausea swelling through his belly. His eyelids felt lined with sandpaper.
“I’m coming! Be down now in a minute!”
Dropping to his knees he reached under the bed. He pulled out some bags of old clothes, a train set he’d had as a boy. Then he put his arm deep under again, his head resting on the mattress, like a farmer feeling for the hooves of a lamb in the womb. His fingers groped about the knots and cracks of the wooden floorboards before touching the smoother polish of the case. He drew it out. It was long and narrow, like the cue cases of the snooker players he’d seen waiting at the bus stop to go into the club in town. Flicking the latches with his thumbs, he opened the lid slowly, as if it was a music box, pulled away the oily rag inside, and lifted out the rifle. He tested its mechanism, the slide of the bolt, the trigger weight, then took a narrow br
ush from inside the case and pulled it through the barrel. Resting it across his knee, he fitted the telescopic sight and silencer, then lifted the stock to his shoulder. With one elbow resting on the bed he bent his head to the eyepiece of the scope. The crosshairs wavered for a moment, the view through the telescopic sight swinging from half, to crescent, to full moon before coming to rest on the pencil mark he’d drawn on the far wall of his bedroom. He held them there, counting in his head. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Relaxing his thumb he squeezed his finger until he felt the click of the trigger. The crosshairs trembled slightly as if shaken in a breeze, but kept their bearing on the pencil mark on the wall. He breathed out slowly, just as he’d been instructed. Not by Atkins, who didn’t like guns, he knew that now, but as the other man from British Intelligence had taught him. The other man who’d also come to visit George one day that long hot summer four years ago.
GUIDE ON HOW TROOPS ARE TO BEHAVE IN ENGLAND
1. A firm and cautious attitude towards the civilian population is to be adopted; correct soldierly behaviour is a self-evident duty.
2. Strict reticence will be observed when conversing with the local population. Enemy intelligence will be particularly active in occupied territory, endeavouring to obtain information on installations and measures of military importance. Any thoughtlessness, boasting, or misplaced confidences may, therefore, have the direst consequences.
3. Acts of violence against orderly members of the population and looting will incur the severest penalties under military law; the death sentence may be imposed.
4. Works of art and historic monuments are to be preserved and protected. Any disparagement of the religious practices of the country will be punished.
5. The soldier will be provided with all essentials by his unit. Unnecessary purchases are to be avoided. Any private purchases by individual soldiers are to be paid for in cash. Any wastefulness is harmful to the unit.
6. Unnecessary interference with the economic life of the country is to be avoided. Factories, workshops, and offices are not to be disturbed; except where operationally necessary, such places may only be entered by soldi use of stocks of petrol, oil, machiner operational area exceptions ma unit commanders from batt
7. Goods of all kind
The print ended in a ragged sepia burn mark, like an aerial photograph of a coastline. Captain Albrecht Wolfram of the 14th Panzergrenadier Division let the Wehrmacht pamphlet fall from his hand. Its owner wouldn’t have any use for it now, not if the state of the book was anything to go by. He watched it land in the mud at his feet, then, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses, he lifted his head to look about him. There’d been heavy fighting here as there had been all along the southern coast. The smells of cordite, burnt flesh, wood smoke, and petrol still hung heavy in the air, while the sky over the Channel was dark with the thick plumes of the oil slicks the British had lit to slow the progress of their landings. The charred invasion pamphlet was just one of thousands of pieces of debris that scattered the ground; boots, a burnt-out armoured car, empty cans of food, a child’s bicycle, its rear tyre melted by the heat of a recently extinguished fire. Inside the house behind him one of his men had found a letter and wedding ring pinned to the wall with a knife. The writer lay beneath them, his pistol still in his hand, a band of white skin around one of his dirty fingers.
Albrecht leant back against the picket fence and drew a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his tunic. A couple of Stukas passed low overhead, their engines screaming. He glanced up at their crooked wings, acknowledging them with the slightest of twitches about his right eye.
Albrecht was patting his other pockets for some matches, the cigarette balanced on his lower lip, when he saw the dust trail of the dispatch rider rise along the road ahead. As the motorbike got closer he recognised the uniform of the Waffen SS. He took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and pushed himself away from the fence.
“Captain Wolfram?” the dispatch rider asked him, removing his goggles, leaving his face a clown’s mask of grime, pale circles about his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Telegram from regional headquarters.” He handed Albrecht an envelope bearing the SS stamp, saluted, and turned on his heel. Albrecht returned his salute and watched him kick the bike into life before racing back up the road, the growl of its exhaust another seam in the montage of engine noises all around him.
Albrecht felt his stomach turn as he opened the envelope and pulled out the thin sheet of telegram paper. He’d been expecting something like this, hoping he might be called back to Intelligence, but from his own commanding officers perhaps, or the staff at Southern Headquarters, the Gestapo even, not from the SS. Why would they be contacting him? They had their own translators just as they had their own everything. When he’d registered as a fluent English speaker before the invasion, he’d hoped for an easy position with the liaison units or, even better, safely behind a desk at HQ. But he couldn’t expect something like that from the SS. Nothing was ever easy with them. He unfolded the telegram slowly, as if it contained something that might bite him.
He read the order twice. The typewriter ribbon needed replacing. The letters were chipped and bitten, every “R” faded, ghosts among crowds of the living. Like every order he’d ever read, it was dry and direct. Report to Southern Headquarters immediately. He’d expected that. It was always immediately, even here on the fringes of the front line. Even here where the smell of burnt flesh still thickened the air.
REPORT TO SOUTHERN HEADQUARTERS IMMEDIATELY STOP SELECT FIVE MAN PATROL STOP SUPPLY NAMES RANKS SERVICE RECORDS STOP
He glanced at the necessary permission from his own regiment’s HQ stapled to the back of the order, then looked again at the telegram. A patrol. He hadn’t expected that. Whatever it was they wanted him for, it wasn’t translating documents in a back room at HQ or explaining orders of civil obedience to cowed town mayors. No, a patrol meant he’d be moving. But where?
The thump and crumple of artillery rose again in the near distance and a thick rumble signalled the arrival of a Panzer division from around the corner of the hamlet they’d taken that morning. All around him the machinery of battle ground on regardless, of him, of anything.
Albrecht watched as the tracks of one of the tanks clipped the fence of the house next to the one he stood beside, plucking the wooden stakes from the ground as if they were candles from the icing of a cake. An infantry company followed the tanks; boys’ faces numb under steel helmets. One of them glanced at Albrecht as they passed, but there was nothing in his eyes. He was going forward, Albrecht was staying here. That’s all they said. You will live today, I may not. Except, of course, Albrecht was going forward now. He too was going on, not back. Isn’t that what a patrol meant? That they were sending him forward. Again. Just when he’d thought they would get a chance to rest.
He turned and looked at his own men sitting against the walls of the cottage behind him. Some of them were lying on its lawn, already asleep despite the massive groaning of the tanks and the muffled punches of the field guns. Lying like that they looked disturbingly like the corpses they’d passed on the roads as they came up this morning and Albrecht found himself staring at their chests, watching for movement to assure himself they hadn’t just given up and died.
A five-man patrol. For what purpose he didn’t know, but wherever it meant going at least it wasn’t here. It could be somewhere worse, of course, but right now Albrecht couldn’t imagine that. Where could be worse than here? Not in hell yet, but waiting to enter it, on the brink. Ahead of them, beyond the towns and villages of Kent, lay London, a battered city filling every hour with what was left of the Allied armies and, to Albrecht’s mind, even more dangerously, a fleeing population with their backs to the wall.
If they’d done this four years ago when he was first conscripted in ’40, after Dunkirk, then perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad. For several months back then an invasion of England
had seemed imminent. As a fluent English speaker Albrecht had been posted to Wehrmacht Intelligence in Belgium, where he’d observed the massing of troops, the arrival of Italian flyers, and the conversion of hundreds of Dutch barges into makeshift landing craft. On one evening, while strolling by the docks in Antwerp, he’d been shown an entire warehouse of English signposts. There were thousands of them, leaning together along each wall, their destinations all pointing in the same direction: Tonbridge, Sevenoaks, Ludlow. The next day he’d even watched the “Invasion of England” being filmed in advance for the newsreels at home, entire battalions emptying onto St. Anne’s bathing beach as the cameras whirred from the decks of boats and along the beach itself. So unquestionable was the impending event this film was meant to represent that officers buying jewellery in town would often replace the ring or the necklace they’d been examining and walk out the door, telling the owner they’d find something better in London next week instead. But then, despite the Führer’s assurances, the invasion date slipped from August 15 to September 15, before eventually disappearing from the plans of High Command altogether. Albrecht was posted to Holland, and then, after a personality clash with a superior officer, to a fighting unit at the vanguard of the Russian offensive. It was, Albrecht knew, intended as an execution posting, but he’d survived, as much to his own surprise as that of his superiors. And not just survived either. He had, over the course of that terrible campaign, discovered something of a talent for leading men in combat, for killing, for garnering the respect and even love of those under his command. It was these men, the men of his company, whom he thought about now as he looked over the devastated scene before him, recognising how much better it would have been for all of them if the dummy invasion he’d seen filmed in Antwerp had been followed closely by the real one. England had lain exposed then, belly up. There were no Americans. But now this wounded island was only exposed in the way an injured lion or bear is exposed. Vulnerable, but rageful and thrashing too. Open to its enemy and to the very extremities of aggression as well. Albrecht knew London. He’d walked its narrow streets, felt its buckled, broken history seaming under his feet. He knew what attacking that city would be like. It would be boiling at every turn, with resentment, with anger, with desperation. It would fall, of course; it seemed they all did in the end. Even Moscow and Stalingrad had fallen. But how many of them would it swallow first? How many of them would have to tip themselves into London’s jaws before the city finally choked on their blood running in the veins and arteries of her streets?
