Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  The rest was already history. The Panzer divisions and the infantry reinforcements were released from their positions in Calais and were waiting in Normandy on that overcast morning when a choppy, truculent sea offered up so many men to the slaughter. The thought that one man might have made this possible and everything that had happened since, even his own situation, huddled under a ledge on a barren winter hillside, a pair of headphones clamped to his ears, both numbed and excited Albrecht to the core.

  The excursions to higher ground were not just an opportunity for Albrecht to furnish himself with as much information as possible. They were also a chance for him to try and get closer to Steiner, to tune in to the younger soldier’s emotional frequency just as he tuned in to the voices of the airwaves. Steiner was the only direct witness of Albrecht’s reluctance to make contact with any of the surrounding command units. He was also the one member of the patrol who Albrecht anticipated would be most resistant to his plans. Steiner was more serious than Gernot and less damaged than Otto. Unlike Sebald and Alex he’d seen relatively little fighting. The death of his sister in a British air raid, meanwhile, still burned within him and he had not, as yet, been in the war for long enough to have his enthusiasm for the causes of National Socialism blunted. Out of all of them Steiner had the least to lose from rejoining the war, and it was this that worried Albrecht. As such, Albrecht was aware he needed a more intimate bond with the boy, so as to better prepare the ground for when the subsiding winter meant he’d have to reveal his intentions to the rest of the patrol. So when they weren’t listening to the radio, Albrecht encouraged Steiner to talk instead. At first he was hesitant, unused to such informality with a commanding officer. But he soon opened up, telling Albrecht more about his family in Hamburg. Both his parents were teachers, his father of maths, his mother of French. He showed Albrecht photographs of them, drawing them, curled and weatherbeaten, from his wallet. One was of the whole family in a garden. Steiner was there, his young man’s face just traceable under the last years of his boyhood puppy fat. His sisters flanked him, Hilda with dark hair and Margaret with blond. His mother stood behind them, a hand on each of her daughters’ shoulders. All three children wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth.

  As the radio reports became more optimistic, as London fell to both the winter and the German advance, Steiner began to speak more of his plans for after the war. He wanted to go to university and study sound engineering. And then he wanted to work in film. That was the future of sound, he told Albrecht, blowing into his gloved hands to warm his fingers, film sound. After the war he would travel the world with a film unit, sending their newsreels and films, all with detailed, intricate sound tracks, back to Germany from the far reaches of the Empire of the Third Reich.

  In return, although Albrecht said nothing of his future, he did share glimpses of his past. He told Steiner about his time at university studying medieval history and literature; how he had come to Oxford before the war to study for a doctorate and even about the subject of his thesis, the thirteenth-century Ebstorf World Map, destroyed just last year in an air raid. His mention of the air raid was purposeful, leading Steiner on to speak again of his killed sister. Albrecht listened and then shared his own stories of loss, telling Steiner how in one night both his parents and his fiancée, Ebbe, had been killed in the same raid over Dresden just months before the renewed Luftwaffe fought back the British bombers.

  Albrecht had lost his only photograph of Ebbe somewhere on the Russian Front, so he described her to Steiner instead, recalling her delicate bones, “like the hollow bones of a bird,” her sallow skin, her jet black hair cut short in the modern style. Closing his eyes he even described the curious half-twist of her smiling lips that had so caught his attention in the lecture hall at the beginning of his first year. Her name, he told Steiner, came from Old German. It meant the returning of the tide. And that is what he’d written to her in his last letter. That like her name, one day he would return to her. That after ebbing away on the retreating current of the war for so long, he would return, rushing back to her like the sudden tides of the flat Friesian coast they’d once run away from, holding hands on a summer’s day before the war. But he had not. He had not returned and she had died without him, burnt alive by a British incendiary bomb.

  Having Steiner close at hand also meant Albrecht was able to dampen the boy’s enthusiasm in response to the increasingly triumphal German broadcasts. By retuning the radio to the faint transmission of the BBC, he could counter the German claims with the British reports, well known among German soldiers to have a history of being closer to the truth. Albrecht still remembered when it was pointed out to him, early in the war, that the Nazis’ massive tallies of sunk Allied shipping actually outstripped all the ships ever built in the world. Nodding his head grimly throughout the BBC reports, he’d translate for Steiner, carefully undermining the previous German transmission, allowing them some degree of credibility but always leaving the picture several shades bleaker than at first painted. Again he was thankful no one else in the patrol spoke English.

  “That’s it!” Steiner had exclaimed when they heard the report of Hitler’s visit to Parliament Hill in London. “It’s over. We’ve won. The war’s over.”

  “No,” Albrecht had said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Not quite. They haven’t said that yet. There’s been no surrender. London has fallen, that’s good, but it isn’t over yet.” Steiner had looked at him, failing to understand his pessimism. He knew that older soldiers like Albrecht had been waiting for this day for years. “Soon though,” Albrecht had continued, giving Steiner’s shoulder a tap. “Soon, for sure.”

  What Albrecht said was true. There had been no official British surrender. There was still fighting in the Far East and new unrest in Russia. America was, in theory, still in the war, although now impossibly stretched on all fronts and under siege from a growing band of reinvigorated isolationists at home. The Führer’s visit to London was strange too. Why no description of Wehrmacht divisions marching up the Mall? Hitler addressing the world from outside Number 10 Downing Street? Could it be that only certain areas of the city could be guaranteed as safe? That the lightning visit was, in fact, a desperate measure in an ongoing war of propaganda? But Steiner was also right. The war would, officially at least, soon be over, and what would Albrecht do then?

  In the end both the thawing of the winter and Sebald’s intuition of Albrecht’s intentions forced his hand. Towards the middle of February they woke to the sound of dripping water. The temperature had risen above freezing for the first time in months and the icicles outside their windows were melting. It was like waking from a long dream. For the past three months all of them had settled into the winter and The Court. Alex had thrived, the contact with animals and with Maggie reviving a part of him long numbed by the war. Gernot, meanwhile, had proved ever more resourceful and inventive in the kitchen. Both he and Steiner had asked Albrecht for some English instruction, which Albrecht had given them. Their interest was, no doubt, fuelled by their chaste glimpses of Bethan, which always provoked a bout of friendly rivalry and banter between the two younger soldiers. Albrecht was more than happy to encourage their distant admiration of the farm girl, especially in Gernot, in whom he’d recognised a growing infatuation with Bethan beyond a young man’s bravado. Otto had begun to speak again.

  Sebald, meanwhile, had visibly softened. The years of patching bits of men’s flesh together under fire had taken their toll, and he’d arrived in the valley as tightly wound as a spring. But over that winter, something loosened inside him. A keen amateur artist before the war, he began making sketches of the views around them and even of the other members in the patrol. It was as he was sketching Albrecht while he read beside the fire on the evening before the beginning of the thaw that Sebald first gave an indication that he might approve of Albrecht’s as yet unspoken plans.

  “Did I ever tell you about Hermann?” Sebald said distractedly, not looking up from his sketchboo
k.

  Albrecht paused in his reading. They were the only ones in the room. Gernot was whistling in the kitchen, Otto was on sentry duty, and Alex and Steiner were upstairs. “Hermann?” he said. “No, I don’t think you did.”

  “A doctor I knew at the start of the war. Well, I only met him a few times really, taking men back to a château we were using as a holding hospital.” He paused, frowning over a patch of shading. “But I got on with him. Look back down, will you?” Albrecht did what he said, looking back down at the book, an English biography of the poet Walter Savage Landor, the stamp of the Bodleian Library faint inside its cover.

  “We used to share a quick smoke while our boys were transferred. I’d give him the lowdown on them, which ones would be going home.” He stopped sketching and looked up from his pad. “I should have known then, I suppose. Every time I said that, ‘Seven tickets home in this lot, Hermann,’ that kind of thing, he’d look, well, terrible. Sick.”

  “Should have known what?” Albrecht asked, looking up at Sebald.

  Sebald went back to his sketching. “He was being asked to kill them.”

  “Who?”

  “Those boys with the home-ticket wounds. Hermann had been ordered to kill them. Bad for morale, apparently, seeing young men with no legs on Potsdamer. Hardly the Party’s ideal of blitzkrieg, is it?”

  “I don’t understand; how do you know this?”

  “It was all in his note,” Sebald said, licking his thumb to smudge the background of his sketch. “He cut his own throat.”

  “Hermann?”

  “Yes. He was a good soldier, you see. Followed orders. But he was a good doctor too. Injecting young men with lethal doses of morphine, well, he couldn’t do that. So he killed himself instead.”

  “Cut his throat, you say?”

  “Yes. I never understood that either.”

  “Were other doctors ordered to kill wounded men?”

  “Oh yes. But not many of them did. And not for long. The order was recalled. If only Hermann had waited. But he didn’t.”

  Albrecht tried to catch Sebald’s eye, but he was still sketching. He didn’t know why he was telling him this.

  “You think he was wrong?” Albrecht eventually asked.

  Sebald glanced up from his pad. “Hermann? No, he was right, of course he was. But there were other ways around that order. You know how it is. There always are.” He went back to his sketch again but carried on speaking. “His duty was to his patients. They were worse off without him. He should have thought of them over himself.”

  “But he was thinking of them, wasn’t he?”

  Sebald looked directly at Albrecht, but into his eyes, not merely at his face as he had done for his drawing. “No,” he said. “He saved himself. He wasn’t saving them. Just himself.”

  The next day the thaw gathered pace. The valley was both shrinking and expanding about them, the river swollen and the lanes flowing with water. It was a clear day, the sun burning warm in a blue sky. Albrecht knew he could wait no longer. That evening, bolstered by what he thought to be Sebald’s implicit approval, he gathered the whole patrol in The Court’s front room and told them.

  In the end it was easier than he’d expected. He’d failed to appreciate how over the last three months the men under his command had come to trust him in a way he would never understand. He had also misjudged the effect upon all of them of time away from the war. No gunfire for months. No dugout sleeping, no crouching over your haunches emptying your bowels under mortar fire. And most importantly, no fear. No expectant death. Life had returned to them, the prospect of a continuing life after the war, and it was Albrecht who’d led them to this perspective. It was like a drug, and having tasted this hope, this expansion of the self through the years ahead, none of them was willing to give it up. None of them, except Steiner, whose voice was the first to break the silence in the room following Albrecht’s announcement. Made more confident by their conversations on the hillside, the young soldier spoke to Albrecht with a surprising directness.

  “But wouldn’t that make us absent without leave, sir? That’s a court martial offence.” The other men all turned to look at Steiner, flickers of tension passing across their temples. Albrecht could sense their unspoken willingness to go along with his plans, but Steiner’s question was enough to plant a seed of uncertainty. An anxiety that they were disobeying a higher authority that would, one day, have its vengeance upon them. Albrecht tried to ease these worries, casting his and now what he hoped to be their shared intentions in the most innocent of lights.

  “I am not,” he told them as they sat round The Court’s large table, “talking about disobeying orders of any kind. As you all know we have completed our mission here, and completed it well. No doubt at some point because of this, Western Headquarters will come looking for us soon enough. But until then all I am proposing is that we do not draw unnecessary attention to our presence here.”

  He paused to cough into his hand, as if to demonstrate the strain and duress through which all of them had already put their bodies.

  “We have fought well in this war, all of us.” He looked at Steiner, trying to tell him with his eyes as well as his words that he need not feel any guilt. “But now the war has changed. It is ending. A German victory is certain. Because of this I should tell you I feel my duty too has changed.” He glanced at Sebald but the medic was looking down at the table, arms folded. Had he misjudged their conversation the previous night? Even if he had it was too late now. “My duty is to you now,” Albrecht continued. “Not towards victory. We will still be vigilant, of course, but we will not be reckless. I truly believe it is in Germany’s greater interest that all of you return home to your families, your hopes, unharmed and alive.” He looked at Steiner again and was met by the young soldier’s frowning face, intent upon his every word. “They say London has fallen, but there are other cities. These people have their backs against the wall. I think we all know it will take longer than they say. I also know that every one of you, if you had to, would still fight, and fight well, if it was asked of you. But as yet, no one has asked you and until they do I see no reason why any of you should risk everything now, when we are so close and you have already given so much.”

  He paused, allowing his last words to hang in the air.

  “If any man does want to rejoin the regiment,” he concluded, sitting back in his chair, “that is, of course, his right and he would have my blessing. All I would ask is that he do so at no risk to the other members of this patrol.”

  Albrecht had no idea how this could be done, but he felt it had to be said. That he had to leave a door apparently open, even if they all knew what he asked was impossible. The offer was unnecessary anyway. At the end of his speech, Steiner had looked towards Gernot. The two of them had become close over the last months. Steiner valued this friendship and admired Gernot’s lighter ease with the world. He looked up to him in many ways, and that was why, when Gernot gave the slightest of indications to Steiner that he agreed with his captain, Albrecht knew it would be all right. Gernot’s deepening interest in Bethan meant any concerns he might have about Albrecht’s intentions were eclipsed by more powerful desires. He would not leave the valley now unless he had to. And if Gernot stayed, so would Steiner.

  One by one, with the slightest of nods, each man agreed to what Albrecht had proposed. There was just one condition, voiced by Gernot.

  “What about our letters, sir?” Their letters. The letters they had written over the long nights of the winter. Of course they would want them posted, so their families and loved ones might know they were safe, that they had survived the invasion and would be coming home soon.

  Albrecht nodded, smiling at Gernot. “Don’t worry about them,” he said. “I’ll send them myself.”

  And that was why, two mornings later, when the snow had reduced to uneven patches on the valley’s slopes and ragged strips skirting the fields, Albrecht kick-started the motorbike and rode down the lane towa
rds the railway station at Pandy. It made sense for him to be the one to take the letters. As an officer he was less likely to be stopped or questioned, he was the only fluent English speaker, and because the patrol’s silence was his initiative, it somehow seemed apt that as a concession to this, he be the bearer of their voices to the outside world.

  Albrecht was willing to accept the responsibility, but only because he had no intention of delivering the letters. To him, it was madness. What was more important? These men’s families being informed of their safety or that safety being ensured by their silence? He still went through the routine of censoring the letters, omitting any mention of their position or whereabouts, but purely for the sake of the younger soldiers, for whom, he realised, it was vital they believe their words were going home even if they weren’t.

  At first he’d intended to ride the motorbike just far enough for its engine to no longer be heard at The Court, until he was out of sight and sound of the patrol. But the sensation of its speed, of movement after so many days of stillness, caught him unawares. It was another bright day, sudden on the senses. His taste and smell, although still blunted, were both improving, and he could just make out the steeliness of the air as it rushed past him. Snowdrops were budding in the banks of the hedgerows and the steep sides of the valley were baring their nerves, the brooks and streams swollen white with the thawing snow and ice. All of it got the better of Albrecht and he rode further than he’d planned, beyond the mouth of the valley and on down the narrow lane towards Llanvoy.

  Albrecht had already stopped the bike and was about to dismount when he saw a young man cycling up the lane towards him. A brief wave of panic overtook him. This was the first person outside the patrol and the farm women he’d seen in over three months. There was no one else around, not even a house or farm in sight. A story from his days in Holland at the start of the war came back to him, about a cyclist in the Dutch resistance whose quickness of drawing and firing his pistol from the saddle was so feared that soldiers took cover and cocked their rifles whenever a lone man on a bicycle approached. But then Albrecht remembered where he was, who he was meant to be. He resisted the urge to twist the throttle and ride away and stayed put, the motorbike’s engine thrumming under him as the young man leant over his handlebars to tackle the gradient of the slope.