Private's Progress

by Alan Hackney

  His battle drew finally to a close, and when he pulled out his watch he found it was half-past three in the morning. Weary, but intensely satisfied, he retired to his bed.

  *

  “You don’t get much idea in the dark,” said the agent as the convoy hummed along through the dim moonlight. “This road is at a very sharp angle to our line of advance, and there is no real concentration of troops this far forward, in fact no major force this side of Schloss Schimmel.”

  “Grand,” said Brigadier Tracepurcel. “Then it’s practically a cert that Pepi will be at home packing.”

  A faint line of lights closed towards them along the road and they held their breath as a line of German transport passed them going the other way. As the last vehicle went by Cox expelled his pent-up breath.

  “Good job they’re not very matey,” he said.

  “Fork left here,” said the agent.

  For nearly an hour they ran through country which became more and more densely wooded. The only sign of life was an old man with a bicycle and a great bundle on his back, pedalling slowly and without lights along the edge of the road.

  Eventually: “Stop here,” ordered the agent.

  Cox drew the Mercédès onto the verge. The three trucks pulled in behind, and Egan’s men dismounted quietly. The brigadier went again over the important details. Several of the men fell out to go into the bushes. After five minutes they got into the trucks again, and the party moved off once more, all lights off.

  “There it is,” pointed the agent at last.

  On the skyline ahead three fairy-tale towers jutted up blackly in the moonlight from the massive walls of Schloss Schimmel, showing over a black bank of trees. The Mercédès turned off on a dirt road and pulled up again. The lorries stopped close behind, and the men dismounted again. This time their German helmets and greatcoats were left in the vehicles. Although they carried German weapons, they were in British denim overalls and cap comforters, and only their teeth showed from their blackened faces.

  They fanned out and faded into the trees, up the slope towards the schloss. Stanley and the others stood by the car, listening intently. An owl whooped distantly, and Stanley froze. Then the silence came down again.

  They waited ten minutes, then Brigadier Tracepurcel held his watch close to his eyes, grunted and said: “Start up.”

  They got in, and the Mercédès surged up the dirt road, side lights on, round three bends and under the great walls of the castle. Cox drove to within ten feet of the gates, and the agent jumped smartly out as a sudden illumination hit them.

  There was a shout of “Halt!” but the agent waved his arm deprecatingly, banged on the gate impatiently and shouted: “Rasch! Aufmachen!”

  A door in the gates was opened and Hauptmann Wegweiser, flourishing his card, stepped unhesitatingly in.

  From outside they could hear the two sentries and a mutter of “Dokumente”, and then the main gates were opened.

  Cox pulled the Mercédès in, and the brigadier and Stanley, heart in mouth, stepped out to face the sentries.

  “General von Windpocken,” snapped the brigadier. “Der Wachtmeister ist nicht hier?”

  “Ja, Herr General,” said one of the soldiers. “Er kommt gleich.”

  The guard sergeant came hurriedly out of the gatehouse, blinking and fastening the top button of his tunic.

  “Now!” said the brigadier.

  Hauptmann Wegweiser cracked a pistol butt smartly down on the wrist of the sentry with the rifle, caught the weapon and turned it on the two men. The brigadier’s pistol covered the guard commander.

  “Kehrt Euch!” ordered the brigadier.

  The three men turned about.

  “The gate,” said the brigadier.

  Stanley ran to the doors and swung them open again. Within seconds Egan and his men came padding through. Four men were detached to hold the Guard-Room and the remainder disappeared to the inner courtyard towards the troops’ quarters.

  The place somehow reminded Stanley, in the dark, of the front quadrangle at Apocalypse.

  Stanley and the brigadier followed the agent to a shadowy doorway and up a flight of broad steps. They came soon to a corridor flanked with dark statuary and approached a door at the far end, from which came a gleam of light.

  “Pepi,” whispered the agent, jerking his thumb at the door.

  The brigadier nodded and stood for a moment holding the door handle. Then he turned it, flung the door open and plunged inside with his machine pistol.

  Stanley, following him in, had a glimpse of two startled figures in shirt-sleeves bending over packing cases. The room was dazzling with silver and gold plate, heaped on furniture and floor, and glittering in the light of the chandelier.

  “Wie——?” exclaimed the stouter of the two figures.

  “Hände hoch!” said Uncle Bertram briskly, and they raised their arms above their heads.

  From outside came the sudden crackle of small-arms fire.

  *

  The loading of the four lorries in the garage of the Schloss was completed by three in the morning. The sullen group of prisoners was distributed among the troop-carrying trucks.

  “Good,” said the brigadier, as the last tailboard was fastened. “A two-hour run back will just time it right. Grand. Pity Pepi and his major were shot while trying to escape, but I had no choice. They’d have been up before a tribunal in any case. Where’s Cox? Right. Captain Egan, get them embussed.”

  Egan whistled in his sentries and the column of trucks formed up and moved off, following the Mercédès through the fairy-tale gatehouse and down the track to the main road below.

  Brigadier Tracepurcel settled back in his seat and lit a cigar.

  “Pepi’s stock was fairly low,” he remarked. “But I salvaged some very good ones.”

  After two hours the convoy halted at the roadside, ticking over. The agent walked forward and fired a red and then a green Very cartridge in low trajectories, one to the right, one to the left.

  A white answering cartridge soared up.

  “O.K.,” said the agent. He ran back to the car and the column moved forward at speed for the last half-mile to the laager of the 89th Tanks, now in position for the dawn stand-to.

  The trucks were dispersed over the area.

  “Now for breakfast,” said the brigadier cheerfully, taking his hip-flask with him.

  *

  Egan was dispatched with his men to deliver the prisoners to 692 Division’s cage, and the vehicles back to the R.E.M.E.

  “Thence, you arrange transport with 692 Div., embarkation for home included,” announced Brigadier Tracepurcel. “I shall supervise the captured material with Windrush here and get it back on the first instance to the War Office. You put up a good show, young man, and I shall see you get a mention.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Egan.

  “Grand. Now I’ll just make a speech of thanks to the chaps and you can get them cracking.”

  Egan’s men were in the lorries and ready to move off within the hour.

  “Well,” said Egan. “Good-bye, old boy. It was a good show, but I think you ought to have got something out of it. A mention would seem the very least.”

  “Survival is a great deal to be thankful for,” said Stanley. “However, congratulations on yours.”

  “Thanks very much, old boy,” said Egan. “Well, I must be off.”

  “Good-bye.”

  *

  By mid-morning the captured lorries with the art treasures had had their German markings painted out, and white stars roughly splashed on to replace them, and, with an armed escort on each vehicle, set off for Antwerp. Stanley rode in the cab of the second truck and slept most of the way.

  By nightfall they were bumping over the cobbles in Antwerp and into the turmoil of activity in the port area. They waited an hour while the brigadier negotiated for cargo space, and then threaded through the quays and the wreckage of demolished cranes to the ramp of a tank-landing craft. On
ce aboard, the escort was dismissed to the transit camp.

  “This one’s leaving for Sheerness in the morning,” explained the brigadier as the trucks were being chained down. “Sail at 0400 hours.”

  *

  Stanley ate a breakfast, which proved to be very temporary, with Uncle Bertram and a silent, bearded naval lieutenant who commanded the large, ugly craft.

  Afterwards he stood, pale and frozen on the superstructure, facing a stiff wind, and gazing miserably at the small flotilla of landing craft in the grey water around them and the escorting corvettes in the distance. Cox appeared from below and saluted.

  “Good morning, Cox,” said Stanley.

  “Good morning, sir. Nice and breezy. Very ’andy form of transport, really, these things. Permission to smoke, sir?”

  He took out one of the brigadier’s cigars.

  “Well, it was a successful operation, wasn’t it?” said Stanley.

  “Not finished yet,” said Cox. “Still, innit lovely, this sail? Just now I nearly broke my bastard neck. One of these ’ollow-chested matelots with a bucket, swabbin’ down, and I slipped up all of a sudden. This matelot says, ‘I just cleaned over that deck, matey,’ he says. ‘Now you’ve gone and littered it up.’ I said, ‘It’s ’orrible bastards like you get chivved in Pompey, late at nights. I only want to find the ab-o-lutions.’ ‘You what?’ he says. ‘The abolutions,’ I said; ‘I don’t ’ave to get vulgar, do I?’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you mean the ’eads. First on yer left.’ But honest, when I got there you never got any peace and quiet. All rumblin’s and tidal waves, with the boat goin’ up and down.”

  In the afternoon they passed the Nore Light, and, with hootings of sirens, put in to Sheerness in a mournful mist. It was only by being strenuously unpleasant that the naval lieutenant dissuaded Brigadier Tracepurcel from bringing the craft into harbour.

  Cox drove the four lorries off the ramp and lined them up by the railway tracks on the quayside. The brigadier organised three Service Corps drivers and handed Stanley a sheaf of documents.

  “You’ll ride in the first and be in command of the convoy,” he said. “The drivers will be here for you in about three-quarters of an hour. Don’t disclose the nature of the loads. Cox will drive me up to Town in the fourth truck now. I want the minimum delay. Get the other three up as soon as you can and handed over at the Horse Guards. Report first thing to me tomorrow at the War House. All quite clear? Grand. Here are some cigars for the journey.”

  He drove off in the truck and Stanley waited for his drivers.

  They arrived grumbling, and had obviously been expecting a free evening. They kept strictly to speed limits and halted without orders exactly an hour and fifty minutes after starting.

  “I don’t want any halts,” said Stanley to the moody man beside him, just about to switch off the engine.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the driver firmly. “Permission to fall out for a Jimmy Riddle.”

  The other two had pulled up behind and were already puffing at cigarettes by the roadside.

  Stanley dismounted and accosted them.

  “If you’ve all relieved yourselves we’ll start up again,” he said.

  They nipped out their cigarette-ends truculently and went back to their cabs. One of them cleared his throat with a bitter parody of a genteel cough.

  They drove in silence all the way. Having made a disciplinary stand, Stanley felt unable to flout regulations by smoking in the vehicle.

  At the Horse Guards the duty officer signed for the three trucks with a bad grace.

  “It’s all very well saying lock the things up,” he grumbled. “Do you realise I’ve got to sort out the M.T. sergeant, get three other trucks out of garages and into the vehicle park, and get your bloody trucks in, get the bloody garages locked and reorganise the bloody P.A.D. picket?”

  He was surly and, it seemed to Stanley, quite unnecessarily haggard. An edge of pyjama poked over the collar of his battledress blouse.

  “Yes, yes, I know it’s not your fault,” he went on. “But I’ve got to fix those chaps of yours up in one of the Guard-Rooms, too.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “THIS IS A pretty good book too, old boy,” said College Sid appreciatively. “A common or garden dictionary. Thousands of amazing facts for the inquisitive lad. For example, do you know what a febrifuge is?”

  “I couldn’t say, old boy,” said Herbert.

  “Well, it says: A cooling drink. Suppose a bloke said to you: ‘Come in, old boy, have a febrifuge’?”

  “Extraordinary thing,” said Herbert.

  They were sitting in the bric-à-brac-littered parlour behind the shop.

  “You’ve got some jolly good books in the sixpenny box, old boy,” said College Sid. “What about this Life Story of Ida D. Sankey, The Singing Evangelist? And this Temperance Recitations seems wonderful value for the money. You ought to read some of these, really. In the Mahdi’s Grasp was pretty exciting, too. I read that yesterday.”

  “I can’t seem to get on much with this one,” said Herbert, reposing on a faded chaise-longue. “It’s called The Two Babylons, or the Papal Worship Proved to be The Worship of Nimrod and His Wife.” He put the book back in the threepenny box. “These chaps are a bit late, it’s gone nine.”

  At this time the brigadier was opening a large oblong parcel on the carpet of Philip’s and Catherine’s lounge.

  “I wonder what your opinion would be on this,” he said to Philip.

  He removed a sheet of corrugated cardboard and exposed a vigorous painting of market stalls in the Dutch tradition.

  Philip became animated.

  “Vermeer,” he said instantly. “Though I don’t know this one. Where did it come from?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Uncle Bertram. “Take a look at these.”

  Holbein, Corot, Monet, Van Gogh, Van Dyck, a Rubens.

  “There’s no doubt about these,” said Philip, entranced.

  “Would you like that Vermeer?” asked Uncle Bertram. “It would seem a reasonable fee for an expert opinion on the others.”

  Philip subsided into an armchair, glassily.

  Uncle Bertram lit a cigar unperturbedly and crossed to the fireplace.

  “Some nice sewers there,” he remarked, indicating Philip’s unsold canvas, framed now forlornly on the wall. “Quite takes me back. I had a hand in blowing some up in Munich earlier in the war.”

  “You’re the first one they’ve evoked,” said Catherine.

  “I like it,” said Uncle Bertram. “Roll it up and I’ll take it for three hundred in oncers.”

  “Sold to the gentleman with the shifty look,” said Catherine, unhooking it and holding out a hand.

  Uncle Bertram handed over three packets.

  “Well,” he said, buttoning his overcoat, “I must leave you now; I can’t stay for a drink, but have some loot when I’ve gone.”

  He pulled a bottle of Benedictine from his pocket and dumped it on the Vermeer.

  “Cheerio,” he said.

  “Sayonara,” said Catherine.

  Philip was still gazing at the painting when Uncle Bertram went out with his parcel.

  He roused suddenly as the door clicked.

  “But he mustn’t be let get away with it,” he exclaimed distractedly.

  Catherine pushed him back in the chair.

  “Resume your seat, Young,” she said firmly. “Look carefully at this unearned income.” She waved the three packets of notes at him. “You don’t imagine for a minute that any masterpieces are going to be lost to posterity, do you? Can you really see Uncle Bertram as a picture hoarder? They’ll be back in circulation again just as soon as he gets his money. In a couple of years they’ll have been bought in great excitement at Christie’s or in New York and triumphantly featured in the world’s galleries. And your Sewers couldn’t be in better or more appreciative hands. Relax, as my Americans say, and have a Benedictine.”

  Philip sighed heavily.

  “I th
ink I shall,” he said.

  *

  “There we are,” said Herbert, rising to a tap at the back door.

  The brigadier and Cox were let in.

  “Ah, good evening,” said the brigadier in a businesslike fashion. “The truck is outside the yard gate. Let’s have a hand in with the stuff.”

  “Evening,” said Cox. “Nice place you got here. ’Ow are you, my old Sid? All right? Me? Mussengrumble.”

  A vigorous twenty minutes saw the truck off-loaded into the back of the shop. By midnight a complete inventory had been made and the gold bullion weighed. Herbert’s seedy back parlour was transformed by the glitter of wealth.

  “Christmas day in the workhouse,” said Cox admiringly.

  “Right you are,” said Herbert to Uncle Bertram. “I’ll make my phone calls to confirm.”

  While he rang his contacts College Sid poured drinks into a curious selection of cut-glass beakers which, as a preliminary, he dusted with his coat-sleeve.

  “Have a febrifuge,” he said.

  “Oh, ta,” said Cox. “Not my usual, but I’ll have a bash.”

  Herbert handed over a sheaf of post-dated cheques and several packets of bearer bonds.

  “Grand,” said Uncle Bertram. He handed round cigars and ran quickly through the cheques.

  After a second drink the visitors took their leave.

  *

  Stanley retired, exhausted, to the flat near the School of Oriental Languages. There were several letters for Purbeck and Hammersley-Forsyth, but none for himself. He searched for pyjamas, and Lord Purbeck’s spare mosquito net lurched out at him from the wardrobe and floundered at his feet. Several of their less precious acquisitions—a Reserved notice from the Café Royal, a green wooden chair from Hyde Park, and a tobacconist’s nobbly rubber doormat with “Erinmore Curly Cut” on it—these forlorn survivals stood incongruously among the busts.