Airborne

by Robert Radcliffe

  The day passes in a blur of the usual activity. C Block houses some sixty patients under the care of three medical officers and twenty orderlies. More wounded arrive during the day, recovering ones are transferred to ‘convalescent’ wards, while two serious cases die. We work in shifts with proper time allocated for rest breaks and admin tasks such as writing up case notes. It’s a far cry from the madness of the Schoonoord but still very busy, with much the same work to be done. Only two noteworthy matters come up, three if you count the welcome arrival of Red Cross cigarettes. One is a briefing from Colonel Warrack; the other is news of Theo Trickey.

  He’s not housed on C Block, so as soon as practicable I send Jack Bowyer off in search, half expecting him to return saying Theo died in the night. But the news is he’s hanging on, firstly, and secondly I won’t have to perform neurosurgery on him as someone more qualified is doing it, thank God. The orderlies have given him odds of six-to-four against, Jack tells me cheerily, adding he’s arranged for Theo to be transferred to C Block after his surgery.

  Colonel Warrack’s briefing takes place in the officers’ mess at dusk. He begins with a summary of Market Garden statistics, which makes for sober listening. Of the 1st Airborne Division, he reports, that’s something over 10,000 men, just 2,500 have managed to withdraw across the Rhine following their heroic last stand at Oosterbeek. The rest, some 8,000, are casualties of war, either killed, wounded or captured.

  ‘Not the result Monty was hoping for,’ he goes on gravely, ‘although he says that with the bridges at Eindhoven and Nijmegen taken, the operation can still be considered a success.’

  A few glances are exchanged at this, but no one comments.

  ‘As for the wounded,’ Warrack continues, ‘around two thousand are now with us here at Apeldoorn, with this figure likely to peak tomorrow as the final casualties arrive. Now, I know we’re stretched, but we must do all we can to receive and treat them properly. And’ – he lowers his voice – ‘hold on to them, gentlemen, because the Germans plan to start shipping them out.’

  Mutters of concern circle the room.

  ‘I know, and I’ve complained to the commandant about it most strongly. But he’s adamant: this facility is needed for their own troops, so we’re to vacate it, ready or not. Apparently special trains are due at the railway station, and as our injured become fit enough to travel, they’ll be moved by rail to POW camps. In Germany. That process begins tomorrow with three hundred walking wounded—’

  He breaks off, holding a finger up for silence, and for a moment I wonder if he suspects the Germans of listening at the door. But then I hear it – we all do – like a far-off train passing, or a gust of wind through hills. The rumble of very distant artillery.

  ‘30 Corps.’ He smiles. ‘They may make it yet. And if they do we could be liberated in days. So we must try our best to keep everyone here for as long as possible.’

  ‘Daft laddie then, is it, sir?’ someone quips.

  ‘Precisely. The commandant wants lists of those fit to travel by noon tomorrow. Make sure he doesn’t get them: lose them, delay them, make minor injuries sound serious, demand second and third opinions, tell the lads to act sicker than they are. He’ll send his own medics to chivvy things up: be polite to them, and appear to be helpful, but slow them down, insist they make detailed examinations of every patient, insist they write proper reports, then misplace them, and make them do it again. In short, use your best delaying tactics, gentlemen, for every hour we hold up Jerry is an hour nearer to being relieved.’

  Fighting talk, and something of a Warrack trademark, we’d soon learn. Someone then brings up another matter of relevance.

  ‘What about escape, sir? Apparently the perimeter fence has weak spots, and some of the lads are desperate for a crack at it.’

  ‘Then they should give it a try, if they’re fit enough. But they must get approval from their CO first, and only in ones and twos: no mass break-outs or the Germans will come down hard.’

  ‘What about us?’ Cliff asks. ‘Can we have a go?’

  Warrack shakes his head. ‘Our duty is with the injured. Later, if the numbers fall, then perhaps we’ll consider it, but for now every one of us is badly needed, so I’m afraid I must forbid any escape attempts by medical staff. I’m sorry, but that’s an order.’

  The days pass as he predicts. Apeldoorn swells with the last of the Arnhem casualties, but also with German medics who strut about bossily selecting wounded for transportation. We do our best to hinder them, and have some fun in the process. Jack Bowyer is a natural at confounding the enemy, and our wounded groan so dramatically whenever a German appears that we almost believe them ourselves. My speciality is the thermometer-in-hot-tea schoolboy ruse. Every time a German approaches one of my patients I wave a thermometer at him. ‘Ernstes Fieber!’ I say, as Redman taught me, which means ‘severe fever’, and so they move on.

  But not for long, and soon it’s clear that time is running out, for by the second week half our injured are gone, and the sound of distant gunfire, which was always desultory, fizzles out altogether. A few of the fitter wounded manage to slip out under the wire, melting into the countryside in the hope of linking up with our forces or the Dutch Resistance, but hopes of being liberated by an advancing 30 Corps wither on the vine. Nineteen forty-four’s Allied offensive, it appears, rather like the mild autumn weather, is over, leaving us with nothing but the chilling prospect of a winter in captivity.

  Quite where becomes the next burning question. By now we’re down to the last few hundred wounded, and these are the more serious cases. Rumours circulate of special hospital trains to convey them to camps in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and all points east, and that doctors and orderlies will accompany them. Each day we scan the noticeboard to see who’s for the chop and who’s to be spared, and sure enough one morning a list goes up of the remaining wounded from C Block, and my name’s on it, along with Poutney, Redman, Bowyer and others. My heart sinks at the sight; only now do I realize how much I’m dreading the notion of prolonged captivity. Ten hundred hours next morning we’re to report. I spend my last day at Apeldoorn packing, gathering supplies, writing up case notes and preparing the wounded men for travel. Like me, many are understandably anxious.

  ‘So what’s this train like, Doc?’

  ‘Well equipped, I hear. Fast too. Should only take a day or so to get there.’

  ‘Where’s that then?’

  ‘Good question, Sergeant. Special hospital camp apparently. Top notch.’

  ‘Pity 30 Corps never made it.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Theo’s on the list too, although he remains critical, unconscious and dangerously ill with a high fever – not caused by hot tea. I kneel at his side to check him over and then jot down his condition: pallor grey, heartbeat irregular, temperature soaring, respiration fast and shallow. Adjusting his bandages, I recall how he was found, a single arm rising from among the dead during a moonlit meeting with a nurse in a garden. Emboldened by the memory, I take up my notebook again.

  Dear Anna,

  Well, it’s only been two weeks, yet feels much longer. I hope you are well, your father too, and that life in Oosterbeek is returning to some kind of normality. Our ‘lucky’ patient and I are still together, and on the move again, although I have learned nothing more of him, nor of our destination, except it is deeper into Germany which

  ‘It’s a wonder he’s still with us.’ A familiar figure appears from the shadows, wreathed in pipe smoke as usual.

  ‘Oh, Colonel, hello. Er, yes, it is. Heaven knows what keeps him going. Willpower perhaps.’

  ‘An example to us all.’ He hesitates. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I just wanted to thank you, Garland, before you leave, for everything you’ve done here, and at the Schoonoord. The 181st isn’t your unit, and I know how much you wanted to rejoin the 11th, but I’m grateful you decided to stay.’

  Ordered to stay a
s I recall, but now isn’t the time for nit-picking. ‘Sorry about Sykes, sir, running off like that. Will it go on his record?’

  ‘Not from me. If he made it back to his unit, and survived till the end, then all credit to him.’ He puffs on his pipe. ‘I’m not coming with you tomorrow, Garland, I’ve been asked to stay on and help Warrack wind things up.’

  ‘So I gather, sir.’

  ‘Colonel Alford’s in charge of your train. CO of the 133rd, a first-rate chap.’

  ‘I see.’

  He pauses. ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘Colonel Alford? Not at all, sir.’

  ‘No, I mean this young man here. You had him transferred from D Block, so I assumed he was a friend, or acquaintance. From the 11th perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, I – That is he was found among the dead at the Schoonoord, and I sort of took him under my wing. I don’t know him at all.’

  ‘Beware that Chinese proverb, then. The one that says if you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for it for ever.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Good. Because as far as I’m concerned, your duty to this unit has been more than honourably discharged, and you’re free to consider your options, when the moment is appropriate, if you follow me.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I believe I do. Thank you.’

  ‘No, thank you, Daniel, and the best of luck.’ And with that he strolls away.

  *

  With just twelve months of peace remaining to the world, Carla and Theo settled in at the Burton Street boarding house in Kingston. Carla’s job at the barracks occupied her three days a week; the rest of the time she shopped and cleaned, helped Eleni Popodopoulos with the boarding house, or met up with the few Italian expats living in the district. Not all were sympathetic to the South Tyrolean situation, but one or two were like-minded separatists, and together they gathered in Eleni’s front room writing to community leaders, MPs, local councillors, churchmen, diplomats and anyone else they could think of, rallying support for the cause. At the same time she wrote weekly to her mother in Bolzano and jailed father in Trento, receiving long angst-ridden replies from one and only worrying silence from the other. Money was tight but seemingly not problematic, and meanwhile her social diary remained full, with the East Surreys adjutant Henry Winterbottom leading what Theo saw as an irritatingly large pack of suitors.

  ‘Who are these men, Mama?’ he would complain. ‘Why do they come here?’

  ‘Be nice to them, Theodor, they help us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They take care of our problems.’

  ‘What problems?’

  ‘You for a start! Your rooming, food, schooling, clothes, pocket money – these things don’t happen by themselves, you know. Anyway, these men are polite, they treat me nice, make me feel, you know, speciale.’

  ‘But what about Papa?’

  ‘He is gone, Theo. Left us without so much as one lira, threw himself down a mountain and vanished. He never helped us and never will. Everything is down to me.’

  At which point the discussion generally ended. And if over the months Theo noted a certain hardening of Carla’s heart towards Victor, his own schedule was probably too busy to dwell on it.

  He was an immediate hit at Kingston Grammar, walking in behind Clive Greenhough that first day to wide-eyed stares and gasps of wonder – tall, assured and exotic, like some foreign prince. Thanks to Nikola Angeletti and his Bolzano teachers, he was academically superior to his peers in most subjects, except maths, which still eluded him, and his grasp of English, which he learned to modulate from formal to colloquial. Outside the classroom he was equally strong, trouncing all comers at athletics, gamely learning football, and even sculling on the river. That winter of 1938 to 1939 he joined the chess club, the debating club and the drama club, for which he delivered a suitably typecast Mercutio in the Christmas production. He made friends: Romeo was played by a boy called Kenny Rollings who taught him snooker and called him Ted, and Juliet was a redhead called Susanna Price who dubbed him ‘Theodorable’ and kissed him on the cheek backstage.

  In the spring he joined the school’s Army Cadet Force and proudly donned the uniform of the British army – even if it was coarse and scratchy and smelled of camphor. Better yet his unit was affiliated to the East Surreys, which meant he wore their cap badge too. ‘If war comes,’ he told Kenny, lovingly caressing the badge, ‘I will fight as my father, and die bravely if I must.’

  Kenny shrugged. ‘If war comes God help us.’

  Carla also eschewed any talk of war. ‘You will go to college, master the business of retail, and become a successful owner of shops,’ she told him one evening in May.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Eleni added, ‘like that Mark and Spencer. He was penniless Polish chap, you know, and that Fortnum too they make huge bloody fortune for their family.’

  ‘Yes but if war does break out I must do my duty. Like Papa.’

  ‘Vic? Blimey! And anyway, boy, who your duty? You half-German!’

  ‘Shush, Leni, and he’s not, he’s half-South Tyrolean.’

  ‘What’s a difference, God’s sake?’

  ‘Mama, but listen—’

  ‘No, Theo, you listen.’ Suddenly she was speaking Ladin, a language they rarely used and no one understood, including Eleni. ‘Your duty is to me, to your poor grandparents, and the oppressed peoples of your birth. You have no right to leave me for a war that is not ours. I will never permit such a thing, do you understand? And that is my final word.’

  But six weeks later, to her horror, Theo was called up to the territorial reserves. Within minutes of the letter arriving she was dialling the barracks on Eleni’s new telephone.

  ‘Henry, for God sake, what ’appen?’

  ‘Calm down, Carla,’ Winterbottom soothed, ‘everything’s fine.’

  ‘Calm down! Are you crazy? You promise nothing like this ever ’appen!’

  ‘Well, that’s not strictly true, is it, old girl? Our arrangement is that the regiment contribute towards the cost of his upkeep and education, in return for his services as a reservist. And that’s precisely what’s happened. It’s called sponsorship.’

  ‘But you promise no danger, never!’

  ‘I promised to keep an eye out for him, and make sure he gets in no trouble, which is precisely what I’m doing.’

  ‘What you mean? It says here he mus’ report to this, this, two/six territory thing! He’s sixteen, for God sake, Henry, he still a schoolboy!’

  ‘It’s the 2/6th Territorials, Carla. They’re reservists, back-room boys. There’s no danger, don’t you see? I fixed it. He finishes school next month, and doesn’t report until he turns seventeen in the autumn. Even then he’s a Territorial, a part-time reservist, you know, weekends and evenings and so on. He can carry on as before, go to college, get a job, whatever you want!’

  ‘What if war ’appen?’

  ‘Hardly likely,’ Winterbottom scoffed. ‘You must’ve heard Chamberlain on the wireless. But in the unlikely event, he’ll be posted to some depot in Wales somewhere, hump stores for a bit, then leave with a good service medal and carry on with his life. He’ll probably be out within a year.’

  *

  The Apeldoorn hospital train turns out to be the real thing: long, modern, with tiered bunks for the injured, a galley for hot food, a well-equipped operating theatre and proper accommodation for medical staff. We embark that afternoon, about three hundred injured plus thirty medics and orderlies, all under the command of Colonel Alford. Before boarding we’re lined up on the platform and given a stern lecture by our escorting officer, a German major, who explains in clear English that we’re free to move through the train to treat our injured, as long as nobody attempts anything ‘foolish’, by which we assume he means escape. Infractions will be dealt with severely, he adds. We officers are then shown to our carriage, which is two from the rear, and introduced to our guard, a gormless-looking corporal we christen Boris.

  S
everal hours pass. We settle the injured, a meal is served, but the train stays firmly in Apeldoorn Station. Redman quizzes Boris, who tells him nothing will happen until after dark, as it’s too dangerous, thanks to: ‘your verdammt Royal Air Force!’ Sure enough it’s long after dusk when we feel the jolt of an engine being coupled; a few minutes later doors slam, whistles blow and we jerk slowly into motion.

  Very slowly. The train’s carriages are connected by little observation platforms at either end; shortly after departing we wander out on to ours to see what’s what.

  ‘East,’ Cliff pronounces, peering at the tiny collar-stud compass that we all carry as part of our escape kits. These are sown into the linings of our uniforms and include silk maps, a few gold coins and a hacksaw blade. I suspect we’ve all been checking them privately; mine’s intact less the blade which Cliff and I used for amputating in the Schoonoord.

  Gradually, and with the train still moving at a snail’s pace, houses and streets give way to open countryside. A thick mist has descended; the night is dark and overcast. Five of us are crowded on to the little platform.

  ‘It’s too good to be true,’ Redman mutters.

  ‘Too good to pass up, you mean.’

  ‘Down these steps, stand at the bottom, wait for a bend, then jump, tuck and roll. Easier than exiting a Dakota.’

  ‘What about the guard’s van?’

  ‘Time it right, go at an embankment or ditch and they’ll never see.’