The men calmed down and endured the rest of the appell.
Gary couldn’t care less about any of it. He just stood there huddled in a greatcoat that still bore the bloodstains from the day he had been captured a year ago, after only a few hours in combat. He did look for Ben Kamen. The men of the work kommandos tended to cluster together, separate from the ‘housewives’, as stalag slang had it, the men who remained in the camp. Gary couldn’t see Ben today.
Breakfast was a bowl of watery potato soup and a tin mug of the brownish liquid the goons called ‘tea’. Then the kommandos filed to the camp gates in their work parties, past the solid buildings that had once housed a headmaster’s office, and a medical room where nurses had searched little boys’ heads for hair nits, and now a German trooper with a machine gun sat in a corrugated-iron shed on the roof.
At the gates they loaded themselves on their lorries. A young man called Joe Stubbs saw Gary coming and made a show of helping him up into the truck. That was the standing joke with the lads, that Gary, at twenty-six, was an old man, in fact an old Yank.
It was a few miles from the stalag to the old Roman camp at Richborough, where the monument was slowly being built. The men endured the rattling journey in silence.
At Richborough Gary and his mates stripped off their greatcoats and jackets. They got to work. Gary had to mix concrete, shovelling sand and mortar into the maw of a grinding mixer. After a year all the men had long lost their flab. Their elbows and knees were prominent, their faces gaunt.
There were perhaps a hundred men working here, prisoners or civilian labour, in parties scattered around the camp. Richborough had been converted into a construction site, with ramps laid roughly down over the Roman ditches. A steady stream of lorries turned up through the day with rubble core and marble blocks and other supplies, to be unloaded by the workers. At the heart of it all was a forest of scaffolding, from which the four great feet of the double-arch monument were already rising.
It was turning into a dismal autumn day, the sky a grey lid, and a hint of the rain to come prickling in the air. The men grumbled, but Gary didn’t mind the work. The physical effort made it easier not to think. But you worked slowly; the stalag diet of spuds and swedes and the odd bit of meat didn’t provide enough fuel for anything more than that. It wasn’t a pleasant thought that the cold today was a foretaste of the winter to come; the last had been bad enough, and Gary had lost his fat since then.
The men worked, the guards patrolled. Mostly the guards were soldiers of the Wehrmacht. But today, maybe because of the Sea Lion anniversary, the Wehrmacht troops were supplemented by men in khaki uniforms. They had armbands bearing the swastika-on-George’s-cross symbol of the Albion protectorate, and when they spoke you could hear accents from Kent and Sussex and Hampshire and even London. These were the Landwacht, a German equivalent of the Home Guard, Englishmen who had volunteered to work for the protectorate authorities. When these characters had first turned up the prisoners had gone out of their way to give them a hard time, trying to knock off their tin hats with bits of hardcore, or spiking the muddy ground with nails embedded in bits of wood. But the Landwacht blokes responded with a ferocity not matched by the Germans, and there had been one occasion when Wehrmacht troops had had to intervene to stop a beating.
After the others were already at work, Willis Farjeon came sauntering over to Gary’s group, as blithe as you pleased. ‘Morning, pongos,’ he said brightly.
‘Watch your backs, lads,’ said Joe Stubbs.
‘Oh, don’t be like that, Stubbs, you love me really.’ Willis stripped off his coat and took a spade.
Joe Stubbs was only nineteen, a farmer’s son from Canterbury, a private who had been captured during the German advance after only a day’s active service and barely a couple of weeks’ training. To him, it seemed to Gary, war was the stalag, adulthood was being a POW. ‘Piss off, Farjeon,’ he said now, angry, nervous.
‘And the same to you, Stubbs, you lout.’ Willis came to work beside Gary. He was tall, rakish, good-looking in a David Niven sort of way. He wore his black hair slicked back, though where he got the Brylcreem from was a matter of rumour, and he had a fine pencil-thin moustache, black as soot. A fighter pilot shot down over Kent during the invasion, he looked mid-twenties but he might have been younger. He said to Gary, ‘And how’s our resident member of the Dunkirk Running Club this morning?’
‘What Stubbs said.’
‘Oh, now, now. I am aware you’ve been ignoring me, you know.’
Willis Farjeon made Gary squirm. Gary had found he simply couldn’t stomach a certain class of Englishmen, the public-school types as he thought of them, who sneered at everybody around them from the goons to their fellow prisoners. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Farjeon.’
Willis smiled, working as hard as the rest. ‘Ah, but I’ve things to say to you, or so I hope. We have a mutual friend, after all.’
‘We do?’
‘Hans Gheldman. The little Austrian?’
Gary frowned. ‘Hans Gheldman’ was the pseudonym Ben Kamen was using in the camp, hiding his Jewishness, posing as a second-generation émigré with an American mother. In the early days in the stalag Gary had quickly made contact with the escape committee crew and persuaded them to run up a fake set of identification documents for Ben. ‘I know Hans,’ he said cautiously.
‘Funny little chap, isn’t he? Always scared of something. Well, so would I be, stuck in a place like this with a German accent.’
‘Austrian. Hans is an Austrian-American.’
‘Yes, but men like Stubbs here are always going to suspect him of being a mole.’
‘Fuck off, Farjeon,’ said Stubbs. ‘They’d never stick a mole in with a Kraut accent. Even the goons aren’t that stupid. You’re more likely to be a mole than fucking Gheldman.’
‘How peculiarly perceptive he is,’ Willis said, speaking of Stubbs rather than to him. ‘Well, Hans is nervous. He does speak of you, you know,’ he said to Gary. ‘Quite often - your experiences before the invasion - how you lost your wife.’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Hans thinks it’s his business, and so it’s mine.’
‘Christ,’ said another man, leaning on his spade. ‘Look at that. Another lot of bloody Jugend.’ He said the word Jugend, ‘Youth’, in a cartoon way, as the English pronounced most German words they had borrowed during the occupation: Joog-end.
A party of boys, aged perhaps thirteen or fourteen, was being led by an SS officer across the site. They were all in uniforms, and wore swastika armbands. The officer waved his hands in the air, evidently describing the monument as it would one day appear. The Reich was reproducing an arch set up by the Romans to commemorate their own successful invasion of Britain two thousand years ago. It would be embellished with sculptures of the conquering German forces and their vanquished foes; there would be amphibious tanks and barges, Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The SS man had the boys line up before the stub of the arch, while a photographer snapped pictures, and a newsreel cameraman set up his tripod and panned across their smiling faces and up to the monument’s mighty legs.
‘Look at them,’ Willis said. ‘Aren’t they sweet with their little knees and their polished shoes?’
‘I had a uniform like that,’ Stubbs said. ‘Before the war. I was a Boy Scout.’ The scout movement, regarded as propagating anti-Nazi values, had been incorporated into the Hitler Jugend.
‘I bet you looked just as pretty as those darlings.’ Willis called, ‘Hello, little boys. Would you like some sweets?’
That made the boys look around, their smiles faltering, nervous. Some of the prisoners laughed. The SS man glared, and began to shepherd the boys away.
A Landwacht thug came by Gary’s group. ‘Back to work, you arseholes.’
Willis snapped him a Party salute, and picked up his shovel.
‘Maybe you are a fucking mole, Farjeon,’ Stubbs said. ‘You’re too bloody posh to be here, you sh
ould be in an oflag.’
‘I’ve been in oflags. I was in one near Canterbury.’
‘So why are you here now?’
‘I have the right father. My pop is a senior civil servant in Whitehall, or he was; I imagine he’s up in York now. You’ll never have heard of him, Stubbs, but he’s a big wheel in his own circles.’
‘So you’re a Prominente,’ Gary said.
‘And so are you. There are plenty of us around. We’re here in this commoners’ camp because they like to keep us close to the coast. Even you, I dare say, Stubbs, despite your low brow.’
‘My dad’s just a farmer.’
‘Yes, but he’s also a big cheese in the trade union movement, isn’t he? A mole, me? What a bore that would be. And besides, Stubbs, hasn’t it occurred to you that our Dunkirk Harrier here is much more likely to be a mole than I am? After all, Gary, you’re a foreign neutral. You could apply to the Protecting Power and get yourself out of here any time you like.’
‘The war isn’t done. My war isn’t done.’
‘Revenge, is that it?’
‘You leave him alone,’ said Stubbs. ‘The Yank’s all right. Every man in here keeps Jerry tied down that bit more, and good for him.’
Willis sneered. ‘Well, that’s what Danny Adams says to keep your dander up.’
Gary leaned on his spade and studied Willis, trying to understand him. ‘Like this all the time, are you, Willis?’
‘Like what? Camp? Camp in the camp? Well, why not? I do fit in rather well, don’t I? After all this is just like public school and we’re all faggots there. Or that’s what you think of me, isn’t it, Gary? That’s the cliche you see stamped on my forehead.’
‘I couldn’t give a fig who or what you are,’ Gary said.
‘Actually I’m just playing,’ Willis said. ‘I mean, what else is there to do?’
‘You could try and fucking escape,’ said Joe Stubbs.
‘Oh, what a bore all that is, stooging and planning, stealing and hoarding, digging away at tunnels, mucking about at appells, baiting the goons! No, that’s not for me. I’m playing, that’s all.’
Gary thought that was possibly the truth of it. There were plenty of ‘whackies’ in the stalag, as the British called them, men driven slowly mad by their imprisonment. Usually it manifested itself in manias, for excessive exercise maybe, or insane escape attempts, or you would see swings of mood, manic happiness crashing to sullenness and depression. He tentatively labelled Willis as a ‘whackie’, then. His baiting and cruelty had no end save for Willis’s own entertainment; for a prisoner, there were no ends. But still he could be dangerous, if he really had got close to Ben.
Now there were wolf-whistles, and the men paused again. ‘Christ,’ Stubbs said. ‘It’s that SS bird.’
The SS officer who had escorted the Jugend was returning to the monument with a woman at his side, tall, also in a black SS uniform, her hair beneath her peaked cap golden. The prisoners saw very few women. Even some of the guards turned to watch her pass.
Stubbs groaned. ‘Look at the way she’s swinging that arse.’
‘Yeah,’ a man said, ‘she’s doing it for you, Stubbsy, she’s noticed you.’
‘Hey, look at old Matt!’
Henry ‘Matt’ Black was in the next party, shaping facing stones. He was another private, a kid no older than Stubbs. He had actually pulled his pants down and had his fist around his stiff cock.
‘He’s always doing that, bloody Matt,’ Stubbs said. ‘Never got his hand off the thing.’
‘Everybody does it,’ somebody said.
‘Yes, but not bold as you please in broad daylight.’
The guards were already closing in on Black, and the men yelled, urging him to finish himself off before they got there, as if it was a race.
VII
That evening there was a lot of activity in the camp. Staff cars came and went through the gates, delivering staff in SS uniforms, and boxes of equipment marked with swastikas and Gothic script which they carried into the assembly hall. The men were excited by all this activity, and the escaper types speculated on what they could steal.
But underneath the excitement Gary sensed tension. Whenever there was any break in routine you always worried that what was already a bad situation was about to get worse. Especially when the SS showed up. Even the regular Wehrmacht guards seemed nervous.
Gary made his way to Ben’s barracks. It was just two old classrooms knocked together. The school gear was long gone to be replaced by the stuff of a POW camp, bunk beds and stoves and light bulbs dangling from the bare ceiling, and little cupboards made by the prisoners out of bits of scrap wood. But you could still see the mark on the wall where the blackboard had once hung, and sometimes, Gary was sure, you could smell the chalk.
Gary found Ben. He’d hoped to get a chance to talk to him. But Ben, ‘Hans’, was holding court at the centre of a little group of men, banging on about Einstein, general relativity and the life and death of the universe. Even Willis was sitting on a bunk, smoking a skinny cigarette and listening.
It was always like this inside the camp. The kommando system split the prisoners into two groups, two subcultures. In the kommandos you had the work, and a change of scene, and some fresh air, and the comradeship of those you worked with. The housewives, stuck in the camp, had turned it into a kind of talking shop. They painted and sketched; they kept diaries; they put on stage shows and choral concerts; they organised seminars on everything from German military insignia to surrealism to quantum physics. They even paid each other in lagermarkenfor their performances. It was just another sort of escape, Gary supposed.
And then, too, there were the love affairs. There was a lot more of that than Gary had expected; the stalag queens who painted their faces and dyed their lips with beetroot juice were just the surface. This was what you got, Gary thought, when men could only turn to each other for comfort. Now he watched Willis watching Ben, and he wondered what the truth was between the two of them.
He waited a bit, but seeing he wasn’t likely to get a chance to talk to Ben before lights-out he cleared off, went for a piss and to brush his teeth, and made for his own barracks.
When lights-out came Gary was lying in his bunk. He listened as the stalag creaked its way into the night, a crowded ship. The twenty or so men in the room with him snored and sighed; you slept badly, no matter how tired you were, and only a few of them were asleep at any moment. Sometimes during the night you would hear soft sobbing. But there was no bunk-hopping tonight.
The school’s old sash windows had been wallpapered over for the blackout, but the paste was cracking now and the paper peeling, so that Gary could see something of the night outside. There was an occasional splash of brilliance as a searchlight beam crossed the face of the building. The noises of the camp continued, the sharp clip of a patrolling guard’s boot, a cry as some whackie or other failed to find peace. But as the hours wore on his senses seemed to expand to fill the night, and he could hear the call of an owl, a rumble of distant traffic, the drone of a Messerschmitt patrolling somewhere over Kent.
And tonight there was something new, unfamiliar German voices talking softly, the voices of the SS working through the night. He wondered how many other inmates listened to the same conversations, and how fearful they were.
It was no surprise when the call for an appell came in the middle of the night.
VIII
Few of the men still owned watches, but one man, holding his wrist up to the glare of a searchlight, said it was after three a.m.
The men pulled their way out of their bunks, looking for their trousers and coats and socks and clogs - no boots in the camp, to impede the escapers. Then they clattered down the stairs, bumping in the dark.
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