by Owen Sheers
And then he was gone. He hadn’t been in the room for more than two minutes. He hadn’t even asked to search the rest of the house. Another hand closed the door. Sarah heard a few words of German, quick and impenetrable, and then the disjointed chorus of three sets of footsteps fading over the cobblestones and down the track. The dogs gave a couple of barks and once again she heard the shuffle of their chains. Then there was nothing. Just the unending rustle and hush of the river below the house and the wind playing a hollow note in the chimney behind her.
He shouldn’t have called after dark. He should have taken the old woman’s word and come back in the morning. But he had to check, that’s what Albrecht told himself as, flanked by Alex and Otto, he picked his way down the track from Upper Blaen. The long frozen puddles running between the peaks and ridges of mud crackled and split under their feet. Yes, he had to be sure. Not a single man in the valley. Because he hadn’t believed any of their stories. They hadn’t even kept to the same one. Farm sales, helping cousins, driving sheep to slaughter. They all seemed to have no idea. Such movement, such events simply weren’t happening anymore.
Otto and Alex walked on either side of him, one slightly ahead, one just behind, swinging their submachine guns in slow arcs as they walked. Albrecht noticed how the moonlight caught the thin barrels, slipping up and down the polished metal as the two men swung them, left and right, right and left. Their anxiety was understandable. However important it had been to check all the buildings in the valley, it was still irregular to be out after dark in new territory. But then everything about this mission had been irregular from the very start. Ever since he’d taken that motorbike over to SS Southern Headquarters over a month ago. An SS order to a Wehrmacht officer. He should have known then that he was going into unknown territory, in every sense of the word.
The meeting with the SS colonel had lasted no more than five minutes, but it had been enough for him to know this was no ordinary patrol. The colonel was evidently as unimpressed with the whole idea as Albrecht was confused.
“Read this,” he’d said, casting a cursory eye over Albrecht’s dirty uniform and handing him a slip of paper. The colonel’s own uniform was spotless; the leather straps polished to an ebony shine, his black tunic immaculate, the gold braids, intricate and bright. An Iron Cross hung solid at his breast. To have won that, Albrecht remembered thinking, he must have seen battle at some point. Once, early in the conflict, he must have known the fear, exhilaration, stench, and dirt of this war. His uniform must have known sweat, blood, shit, and soil. Once. But now it was unmarked, a peerless Nazi pattern of starch, insignia, and personal tailoring, typical of the peacocking SS. Unmarked, Albrecht noticed with some satisfaction, but for two light galaxies of dandruff dusting each shoulder.
“Any questions?” the colonel had asked without looking up from his desk. “The corporal outside has all the relevant maps and additional information.”
“Transport arrangements, sir?”
Only now, with just his eyes, without moving his head, did the colonel look up at him. “You’re to go to the transport pool and take what you need,” he said through a tight jaw. Perhaps he’d registered Albrecht’s surprise, or perhaps he just needed to hear his own explanation on the air, to convince himself once more that this order must be obeyed. For whatever reason, he relaxed his expression, gave a short sigh, and leant back in his chair before continuing. He spoke slowly, as if to a child.
“This has come from the top. Reichsführer SS Himmler. All of these special patrols have. The Führer himself is aware too. They both place great importance upon such missions. For the future of the Reich. In this case a suitably qualified officer could not be located within the SS. You, on the other hand, have all the necessary qualifications, as you can see. So to answer the question you were about to ask, that is why.”
Albrecht tried to imagine what bargaining had gone on between the Wehrmacht and the SS over this. Relations between the two organisations had been deteriorating ever since the end of the Russian campaign when the commanders of both had begun to detect the scent of victory. No doubt he was a chip bartered in a broader game. For the Wehrmacht to give him and his patrol up now, when the whole force of the invasion armies was being called upon, was quite something. For the SS to ask for a Wehrmacht officer to take on one of its own missions was unheard-of. For that officer to then be given the pick of the transport pool was most remarkable of all. Many Wehrmacht companies were already dependent upon captured or requisitioned British and American vehicles among their units.
However unorthodox the order, at least he’d been right about not joining the offensive on London. Those first few days had been a real relief, for him and his men. To be taken away from the front, away from the fighting units. But since then their journey had been far from easy. Over a month of stop-start travelling, edging along behind the advancing front like a shoal of fish swimming in the wake of a whale. Several times they’d been drawn into the fighting, through necessity, as local commanders fended off enemy probes and counterattacks. His men had accounted themselves well on these occasions. The reports about young Steiner had been accurate. They’d all kept their heads, fought well. Nothing too foolhardy or panicked. Sebald had been as active as he always was, bandaging and plugging, trying to hold the pieces of men together under fire. Otto remained as silent as ever.
These moments of fighting had helped pull the patrol together. Experiencing the intensity of battle among unknown divisions and companies crystallised their identity as a group apart from the general flow of events. They were like a wandering band of players, a strangely privileged gang of vagabonds, the SS slip in Albrecht’s pocket always giving them licence and access. Suddenly they seemed to be moving through the war, not with it. Weaving through its veins and capillaries of supply lines and temporary locations rather than being pushed along at its vanguard, pressed against the enemy by the weight of it behind them.
They could never escape it completely, though. Even when they were travelling deeper behind the front through the newly occupied territories, the violence still stalked them. Insurgents were becoming active across the country, often once the fighting units had moved on and been replaced by the softer occupation divisions. Albrecht had witnessed the unearthing of such a resistance group himself, in the countryside outside Oxford. The city itself had fallen quickly. “The English would rather give up their women than lose their precious buildings,” Albrecht had heard one lieutenant remark. But outside the city sabotage activity had been increasing since its occupation. The railway dynamited; a high-ranking officer assassinated as he strolled on a village green. When they’d caught the men responsible they’d brought them to this same village green, an oak tree at its centre, the delicate shadow of a church’s spire falling across the closely mown grass. Albrecht watched the prisoners marched out under guard, stepping a slug’s pattern of footsteps through the shining dew. Five men. The oldest looked over sixty, the youngest less than twenty. They’d been beaten. Two of them carried another. They wore khaki dungarees over their civilian clothes.
A Gestapo officer looked on as the captain gave a brief account of these men’s crimes. An interpreter shouted his words to a small crowd, forced to watch, ringed by soldiers. Then the captain took a step back and nodded to the sergeant at his side, who in turn nodded to the two soldiers standing behind him. These soldiers walked forward to face the bowed heads of the five men lined up under the tree. Cocking their guns with one simultaneous slide and click, they machine-gunned them with a tight left and right spray. The spattering sound of the bullets rang off the Cotswold stone of the surrounding cottages and the sturdy walls of the church. As the soldiers lowered their weapons the echoes of the execution faded on the air. The men, who had been standing so still beneath the oak tree, jerked violently before collapsing, like puppets whose strings had been randomly yanked and then cut. A woman in the crowd fainted. Another howled, clawing at her face with her nails.
Later
that morning the captain who’d organised this execution took the Gestapo officer and Albrecht to inspect the buried base of the resistance group. He’d led them through a wood on a small hill. “This rabbit hole?” he’d said as they approached the trees, pointing towards a root-fringed hollow with his cane. “An observation slot. See how good the view is from here?” He turned and looked over the landscape, the oxbow of the river, the railway embankments slicing through the fields. “Very clever,” he said. “Very clever indeed.”
Inside the wood a couple of guards had cleared the leaves from a patch of ground. As they got nearer Albrecht saw that the thin grass was deeply scored with a neat square, as if a heavy box had been there for months. The captain nodded to one of the guards who bent behind a tree as if to pick something up. To Albrecht’s surprise the scored square slowly swung open, revealing the soft whirr of a dropping counterweight and the rungs of a ladder descending into a narrow brick-lined shaft. After a couple of seconds the whirring stopped, leaving the patch of turf suspended at an angle above the opening. The captain was obviously pleased with his little show. “Please, gentlemen,” he said. “After you. But be careful, that ladder is still slippery.”
There was barely room inside for the three men to move around, but the captain was determined to give his guests a full tour of his discovery. “The first, I am told?” he said, raising his eyebrows in inquiry to the Gestapo officer. “In England. No doubt there will be more, of course, but this is the first we’ve found. Yes, the first.” He repeated this confirmation quietly, as if reminding himself of the honour his statement implied. Albrecht and the Gestapo officer followed him as he moved about the base pointing out various features. Chippings of coke in the paintwork to absorb moisture; a deep steel tray at the foot of the ladder to catch and contain the blast of a grenade dropped down the shaft; ammo store; wireless position; an angled escape tunnel (blocked by his men in the process of the capture); six thin bunks piled three high along each side of a narrow chamber off the main area. “These,” the captain said, tapping a row of glass jars glowing faintly yellow in the lamplight, “are filled with the insurgents’ own urine. I believe they thought they could use it to confuse the dogs.” He flashed Albrecht a quick smile. “It didn’t work, of course.”
Of course. It was always of course with these party men. The captain, Albrecht could tell, had not always been a soldier. A merchant perhaps, a shopkeeper whose wife had left him. A cowed individual until membership of the Party straightened his back, put steel back in his nerves. A failed application to the SS, no doubt. He certainly relished his chance to impress a Gestapo officer. Whether he had or not was difficult to say. The Gestapo man remained silent throughout the tour of the bunker. Between his silence and the captain’s verbosity, Albrecht had felt suffocated, trapped. When they’d emerged back into the bright day filtered through the branches of the wood, he’d breathed deeply, anxious to fill his lungs with nature, with all that did not change. The damp musk of the mouldering leaves, the tang of the breeze already sharpening towards winter. The new air made him feel better, and as they’d walked out of the wood he’d tried to draw the Gestapo officer on his thoughts. The man carried on looking ahead from under the low peak of his cap as they strode across the field, wearing his assumed authority like an invisible armour. “Interesting,” he’d said at last. Albrecht could sense the captain behind them, trying to catch up to listen. “Very well built. Better than anything we’ve seen before. But then of course the British have had a long time to prepare for this day.”
Albrecht nodded but said nothing more. “This day.” He hated the way they spoke. Everything ordained, their quasi-biblical language, no trace of the months and years of failure, of the breaking of spirits and bodies. Just the inevitable march of time towards “this day.” Of course, he’d repeated again and again to himself as they’d made their way back to the village. “Of course, of course, of course.” The words wouldn’t go away. They chased each other inside his skull, the one collapsing into the other, faster and faster. He couldn’t rid himself of the phrase; the banal certainty of it chased him through his dreams. Of course, of course. He could not argue against it. He was part of it. The great “of course” of National Socialism. He thought of the English translation, and again the semiotic flexibility of the language struck him as so suitable. Of course. On course. He was travelling along the Nazi course, its route, its path. There was no getting off, there were no side roads. Everything was planned and was falling into place and there was nothing he, Albrecht Wolfram, could do about it, other than join the flow. Of course, of course. Even two days later as he lay down to sleep in the comfort and quiet of Oxford itself, this insistent mantra wore away at his mind, eroding his consciousness until he finally gave way to a fitful slumber.
Oxford had been a welcome diversion from their irregular journeying. They’d spent three days in the city, enjoying the rest, the feel of fresh linen against newly washed skin. Albrecht’s mind began to calm again. Freed from any specific duties, he allowed the men to explore the city. He watched them walk away down Broad Street, this little band he’d extracted from the flow of the war. Otto and Gernot walked a few yards behind the others, their heads tipped back, drinking in the strange beauty of the buildings, the grinning grotesques and the pipe-swallowing gargoyles. As they turned the corner at the end of the street, Albrecht saw Gernot stretch out an arm and point towards the skyline. He leant his other hand on Otto’s shoulder. Albrecht thought he saw Otto smile as Gernot peeled away into that peculiar laugh of his, the laugh that had singled him out for this mission in the first place.
For Albrecht the city struck a more unsettling note. It was certainly a welcome return, to see his old haunts again, to find himself remembering the streets and shortcuts of the back alleys. But his memories were tinged with the echo of regret. A regret for lost time, for that year he’d spent here, out of the world that had been at that very moment racing so inevitably towards this; his return six years later, the heels of his jackboots clicking over the broken flagstones of silent college cloisters.
While the men roamed the parks and colleges of the city, Albrecht spent the three days roaming the stacks of the Bodleian Library running beneath its streets. Together with a surprisingly pliant English archivist, he’d gathered a useful collection of books relevant to his mission. He wanted to learn as much as he could before he arrived, but he was also driven by a more general sense of pleasure at being among books again. It had been so long; the weight of words in his hand, the promises of opening pages. For years he’d been able to carry only a couple of volumes with him—a battered copy of Rilke’s sonnets, von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Now for three days he had the stocks of the world’s greatest library spread out before him and like a desert wanderer stumbling upon an oasis, he drenched himself with the smells and textures of the printed page.
As always it did not last long. Advances in the west meant they could continue their mission, and on the fourth morning they packed their belongings in the staff car and joined a convoy heading out of the city. Their lodgings had been more than comfortable. The rooms of a professor whose name had appeared among the thousands of others tightly printed in the Gestapo’s Black Book. The professor had been taken for questioning in his pyjamas on the morning of their arrival. The patrol moved in half an hour later and found his quarters just as he’d left them, food in the larder, fresh flowers on the table, and a record slowing on a windup gramophone, the needle softly thudding in the final groove. When they left three days later Albrecht hadn’t been able to resist, and as Alex started the car he’d loaded the gramophone and a kit bag of recently introduced 33rpm records onto the backseat. Alex raised his eyebrows and said something Albrecht couldn’t catch above the rumble of the passing traffic. “Well,” he’d shouted in reply, “we’ll need something to keep us entertained up there!”
The roadside bomb had been a sudden and brutal reintroduction back into the war. They were just a few miles outside the city
when it happened, the convoy snaking through the B roads between the Cotswold villages. The troop carrier in front of them had taken the force of the blast, its front wheels torn from the chassis, the driver’s cab and the canopy set ablaze. Some shrapnel hit the left wing of their own car. Alex had to swerve violently to avoid the suddenly stilled truck and the men falling from its rear, cloaks of flame fluttering from their burning uniforms. Another piece of shrapnel hit Albrecht. Luckily the piece of metal ricocheted off his helmet, but the force of the impact still knocked him unconscious. He came to lying beside the road with the searing light of Sebald’s pencil torch burning in his eyes, a thick plume of smoke rising into the sky behind him.
The unearthing of one resistance group was never enough. For the rest of their journey they encountered the aftermath of numerous incidents of sabotage and murder. Even last night, when they’d billeted with a young lieutenant down in Pandy, they’d been told about the killing of two young guards at the station. And not just killing either. Stabbed in the neck, then disembowelled, their livid purple and yellow entrails spread out on the forecourt beside them like macabre gifts for the afterlife beside bodies in a grave. The young lieutenant was still visibly shaken. He’d seen the murdered guards himself and he vowed to Albrecht he’d find the men responsible and kill them.
And now the patrol had arrived here; a remote and manless valley. They would have to be careful, although Albrecht knew they were probably in the safest place of all. Resistance groups rarely operated near their own homes. There was a pattern to insurgency. This was something they’d all learnt over the last five years of the war. Regardless of nationality, creed, language, the same patterns always seemed to apply. As if this last act of defiance were such a deeply woven instinct that it crossed all borders. The tactics of winning wars differed from army to army, from general to general. The tactics of snapping at the heels of your invaders, however, were always the same. Albrecht saw no reason the British should be any different from the Dutch, the French, the Poles, or the Belgians.
