Otto's Blitzkrieg

by Leo Kessler

  On the spur of the moment, Otto decided to follow the young sailors. They were healthy, high-spirited and uninhibited. If anyone would find the Swedes for him, it would be the sailors.

  The afternoon was spent heading from pub to pub the whole long length of Holderness Road which ran alongside the docks. At that time, the pubs were open illegally, charging prohibitive prices for the weak wartime beer. But the city’s watch committee and the naval authorities turned a blind eye to this breach of the law. They knew they had to keep the sailors happy for their brief spell of shore-leave. Certain local Methodist preachers worked themselves into a frenzy in the ‘chapels’, fulminating against this ‘devil’s work’ regularly. Every Sunday, in fact. Following the lads in-out-in-out, Otto knew none of this. He wasn't a student of peculiar English licensing laws.

  Otto knew he needed a cover, difficult when his pockets weren't lined with English money. A little quick thinking later, he developed the simple expedient of picking up a half-empty glass of beer and carrying it with him from pub to pub. But after his third half-pint of the weak gassy stuff, he found the whole thing unnecessary. Everywhere in the crowded, smoke-filled places, full of the shrieks of brassy dyed blondes and the gruff curses and calls of sailors from half-a-dozen nations, drink was thrust upon him by perfect strangers.

  After the sixth pint he found himself light-headed and wearing one of the sailors’ caps, staggering along with them, being addressed as ‘Dutchie’ for some reason he couldn’t recall, as if he had known them all his life.

  It was in the Ye Olde Black Boy that his world started to whirl.

  ‘The only good thing about Irishmen, is that a lot of them is dead,’ someone was saying pedantically. A wizened Chinaman offered Otto a slice of rabbit pie and a glass of rum, whatever they were. Further down the bar, a Norwegian ate a razor-blade, his mouth full of splinters and blood. ‘Irishwomen have got their legs the wrong way around,’ the pedantic voice continued. ‘What pox is sayin' tat?’ came an Irish-accented reply. A sailor walked through a glass door to the ‘gents’ when it was closed, and didn’t even pause when he smashed it to smithereens. An unassuming older lady took off her art-silk knickers and, crouching on top of a table, urinated into an ash-tray. The world whirled even more.

  ‘The Irish'd sell their nippers to get at the poteen, the potato-faced bastards.’

  ‘Whatever eejit's sayin' that shite about me homeland, he'll end up arseways in the jacks!’

  An old seaman with grizzled hair, took off his wooden leg in the urinal and sighed with relief. Otto was singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ in English, though up to that moment he hadn’t known he knew the words.

  A tart stabbed out her cigarette-end spitefully in the yellow of a fried egg, enjoying it, taking her time, her powdered face hard and set, as if she were burning out the eye of some hated rival.

  ‘There's nothing that a good old dray-nag can do which your average paddy can do better,’ the bitter pedantic voice persisted. ‘They say there was once a Paddy who got so pissed, when he was on a pilgrimage to Rome that he kissed his missus – and beat old Pope Pius's foot to pulp.’

  ‘Got yer, ye wee feckin' gobshite!’ A massive Irish lad, built like a brick shithouse, picked up a short-arse with glasses and smashed his head through the plaster ceiling.

  He sang Deutschland über alles and the sailors applauded, crying, ‘First time we’ve heard the Dutch national anthem… sounds familiar!’

  A woman with lips like a scarlet knife-flash across her white face gave him a feel under the table and said in a whisper, ‘Bah gum, tha’s carrying some weight about wi' yer. No wonder yer walking so bent-shouldered.’

  The pub whirled and whirled and whirled. And then he saw him. There was no mistaking that strangely fluffy-faced sailor without a nose, drinking straight out of an upturned bottle of schnapps. He staggered wildly towards him, and threw his arms around his saviour.

  ‘Svenska… Svenska?’ he gasped.

  ‘Ja, ja… tak… tak,’ the Swede said calmly and took another great swallow.

  Otto passed out in his arms happily, clinging to him like a drowning man would to a life-belt. He had found his Swede.

  CHAPTER 13

  Otto groaned, moved his head, wished he hadn’t, decided he was better off dead.

  Anything was better than this Father, Mother and Holy Ghost of a headache that he had. It was as if red-hot skewers were boring slowly through the back of his head in the general direction of his eyeballs. His mind played repeats of Pastor Mueller's fiery speeches at a volume that wobbled his earlobes: ‘We are but Mortal Men... Strayed from the Straight and Narrow Path... I hope my, er, girth will fit... Girth will fit... Girth will fit...’

  But even through the blinding pain, he was becoming aware of a strange swaying motion and a kind of rusty, creaking sound. Was it the effect of all that English beer – ‘ale’ they called it? Perhaps it had rusted up his joints and every time he moved, he squeaked?

  With an effort of naked willpower, he opened his left eyelid, moving it up over his red eyeball like an ancient, slow elevator. Now he could see! What could he see? Nothing. Just an expanse of dirty white wall. He decided he had passed out in the Ye Olde Black Boy urinal he had visited. He let the eyelid slip closed once more.

  Time passed. Otto ached and ached.

  The strange motion and squeaking sound continued. Slowly it began to dawn on him that he couldn’t be in a urinal. Piss comers didn’t squeak, though they could appear to move to a drunk. Where in three devils’ name could he be?

  He considered the answer to that question at great length. For a dying man, he told himself, he seemed to be taking everything very calmly. Perhaps when one was about to die, one achieved a certain calmness of the soul. Yet –

  Again he opened one eye. Now, in spite of what appeared to be a red-hot vice pressing together what was left of his drink-sodden brain with relentless inexorability, a room began to take shape in front of him.

  The wall was not blank as he had thought at first. It was dotted at regular intervals with lines of rusty bolts, which seemed a little strange. Bricklayers did not normally put rivets in their walls. His blurred gaze moved carefully along the rivets. A faded portrait hung there, a cheaply coloured flyblown thing of a skinny-faced man in uniform. Vaguely it reminded him of the octogenarian King of Sweden.

  He took his eye off it. Whoever it was, the man obviously didn’t approve of him; he could see that from the look on the ancient wizened face. His search stopped abruptly. On a rack, there was a lumpy life jacket looking like a pair of stranded female bosoms. Just beyond it was a funny round window, splashed regularly with dirty green water, obviously by someone armed with a bucket outside.

  Suddenly, horrified, Otto realised what the creaking and swaying was. He instantly knew where he was. ‘Great bucket of shit, I’m in a tank!’

  The door crashed open at that moment.

  The ‘Svenska’ stood there, grinning drunkenly, a Royal Navy cap perched on the back of his shaven head, a tray balanced precariously in his big bony hand. Behind him, Otto caught a glimpse of a swaying green seascape.

  ‘De whole gang is here!’ he chortled in pidgin English and put the tray down at Otto’s side. His twitching nostrils were assailed by the smell of fried fish. His stomach did a sudden back-flop. Now his headache was forgotten, but his guts were beginning to rebel violently. He forced himself to reply to the Swede.

  ‘What gang?’

  Svenska pulled out a half-bottle of whisky from his back pocket and took a tremendous swig.

  ‘Ja! Everybody. De Navy boys… De Irishman… De hoors… de very busy now in de crew’s quarters… oh, yes and de policemen from de docks.’ He smiled, as if in fond recollection. ‘Wat a party! Even de Kapitan got drunk and de first-mate had hard job finding the end of the estuary. Damn fine party, yessir. Dutchie!’

  ‘You mean I’m on board a ship!?’

  ‘Ja, ja, damn fine ship – Svenska ship!’

&nbs
p; ‘But where are we going?’ Otto blurted out.

  ‘Where we go, Dutchie?’ Svenska repeated a little stupidly and just caught himself from overbalancing as the ship swayed violently. ‘We go Sweden… if we don’t sink, ha, ha!’

  ‘Sweden!’

  ‘Ja, ja, Sweden. Funny ting. Dem dock boobies de was surprised as well when I told ’em. Want go over side. Over side in middle of North Sea! Ha ha!’ He took another tremendous swig of the whisky. ‘Now you eat fish.’ He opened the cover and Otto turned pale. What looked like a small whale lay there in a sea of thick, burnt, rancid oil. ‘Svenska fish. Good. Eat. Now I go and get Kapitan out of lav… Got stuck after party.’ Then he was going, still drinking, of course.

  Otto hastily clapped the cover down on the monstrous fish, as if it might be tempted to swim away, feeling his stomach heave and sway frighteningly.

  ‘Ooooh,’ he moaned in a contorted mixture of torture and rapture. His insides were ready to erupt at any moment. But even as he fought back that horrible feeling of nausea, his heart leapt with joy. He had done it. He had got away.

  Then he was sick.

  BOOK 2 – OUT OF THE BAG

  CHAPTER 1

  It was getting dark as the express from Kiel started to run into Hamburg. Already the lights twinkling across the broad silver expanse of the Alster, the port’s inner lake, were beginning to click off one by one as the blackout curtains started to be drawn, and the anti-aircraft crews based along the banks were busying themselves with their searchlights, readying them for the Tommy bombers they had been expecting – in vain – since September 1939.

  It was a moody Otto, dressed in the cheap blue suit the supercilious embassy third secretary had bought him in Stockholm, who stared out of the window at the elegant white-stucco villas that lined the lake. His initial euphoria at having escaped from England had vanished to be replaced by worry and bewilderment at his sudden change of circumstances. He was back in his homeland, that was true, but what could he expect here? What were the authorities going to do with him? He frowned, his mood seemingly echoed by the dismal clatter of the train’s wheels over an iron bridge, as they now began to enter the inner city.

  In Stockholm the day after the ship had somehow managed to dock – both the captain and the first mate were blind-drunk as usual, still running on the whisky bought by the case on Hull’s black market – Svenska, the crew, the happy sailors, Otto and the bewildered boobies, as Svenska insisted on calling the two dock policemen, had one final terrific binge.

  Next morning they had all shaken hands a little sadly, very hungover, croaking, ‘See you after the war,’ and such hopeless pieces of wit as, ‘Give me regards to Mr Churchill,’ and ‘Tell old ’Itler not to bite any more holes in the Axminster, will yer,’ and trailed off to their respective embassies to arrange some sort of passage home.

  ‘This is gonna take a lot of ruddy explaining to the missus,’ one of the policemen had grumbled, retrieving his helmet from the blonde girl who was wearing it and precious little else, and doing up his flies. ‘By heck, and I bet she’s still got me breakfast in t’oven!’

  And that had been the last Otto had seen of his shipboard companions.

  The officials at the German embassy in the Swedish capital had received him frigidly. The elegant young secretary in the dark jacket and striped pants had looked at him through his monocle as if he might well have crawled out of the panelled woodwork. He had stood there on the parquet floor, carefully avoiding the Savonnerie and Aus-busson rugs with his clumsy hobnailed English Army boots. Indeed, he had felt very much out of place in those surroundings.

  Even the Führer, dressed in his simple brown uniform on the big portrait, seemed awkward, hanging there among the Watteaus and Fragonards on the walls.

  ‘You say you actually escaped from an English prisoner-of-war camp, my man?’ the foppish young official had exclaimed and then tittered discreetly behind the cover of his limp-wristed white hand, as if he were afraid of showing his teeth. ‘How droll, how perfectly droll.’

  ‘I’ll perfectly droll you, you powdered-arsed pansy – ’ Otto had begun angrily, but already the young man in the striped pants had disappeared into some inner office, from which, in due course, came suppressed titters, as if he were relating the impossible tale to others of his kind.

  He was interrogated for a full forty-eight hours by an old man who kept an unlit cigar in his mouth all the time he spoke, and wore a green ankle-length coat which creaked every time he moved, and had Gestapo written all over his leathery, old lecher’s face. The ordeal had finished rather abruptly, and he was suddenly on his way back to Germany with a fourth-class rail ticket, a packet of liver-sausage sandwiches his only luggage.

  Things had changed dramatically at Flensburg on the German-Danish border. While the train halted for custom and pass formalities (at that time the Third Reich still kept up the pretence that Occupied Denmark was an independent state), his wooden-benched compartment had been invaded by a group of excited Army officers and Party officials, led by the local Kreisleiter, an enormously fat man, who bulged out of his chocolate-brown uniform, the upper of his double chins resting on the immense roll of fat below like a head pillowed on a cushion. He had clicked to attention in front of an astonished Otto, bellowed ‘Heil Hitler’ from a mouth filled with gold-teeth, and cried, ‘And the Führer is right after all. England is no longer an island.’

  While Otto had tried to comprehend that enigmatic statement, he had found his hand being pumped heartily and his back slapped by the whole jovial, noisy bunch, who herded him to a first-class compartment, obviously emptied hurriedly for his benefit, with a bottle of French champagne resting in an ice-bucket and selection of cold cuts and sausages set on the little table, the like of which Otto had not seen since that day he had been so rudely kidnapped from France the year before.

  What does it all mean? he asked himself then, and it was the same question he was asking himself now, as the long express train began to draw into Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof, lit like a cavern in Hell in the darkening light.

  With a final metallic clatter of its wheels, as if it wished to continue but was being forcibly restrained, the locomotive came to a halt. Otto stared out of the window and wondered what he should do. He knew no one in Hamburg, had five Reichmarks given to him by the embassy people, and was slightly befuddled on the French champagne. So while the other passengers fought their way out through the crowds of soldiers and civilians everywhere, he remained seated.

  On all sides the enormous locomotives, painted with the slogan of the year, ‘Wheels Must Roll for Victory’, belched steam to the accompaniment of the loudspeakers blaring out military marches, interrupted at regular intervals by a flow of destinations.

  ‘Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, Rome…’ the very place names indicated the immensity of Hitler’s new Empire, while the constant ebb and tide of troops symbolized the means of establishing that Empire and maintaining it.

  From his window, he could see paratroops in their camouflaged smocks, black-uniformed tankmen, SS infantry with their death’s-head badge and silver collar runes, elegant flyers from the Luftwaffe, men of the Kriegsmarine with their long beribboned caps: soldiers, sailors, airmen on all sides, who, together with the roar of the enormous locomotives, the blare of martial music, seemed to stand for the whole vulgar, powerful, vain world of the Third Reich. It was everything Otto had hated since his days at Stralsund. His mood of depression increased considerably. What in hell’s name am I going to do, he asked himself.

  His decision was made for him one moment later. Before his suddenly wide-open eyes, a red carpet was being rolled the length of the platform right up to the door of his compartment. Hurriedly he got to his feet. Outside a military band, steel helmets gleaming in the lights, was beginning to file up to the train. Obviously someone very important was still to get off. They were going to give a big ‘civic welcome’ to somebody. He better get out of the way quickly.

  Clutching his cap, he
reached for the door, opened it – and staggered to an abrupt stop as if he had just run into a brick wall.

  Immediately to his front at the other end of the length of red carpet, there was a small group of high Party officials and officers, heavy with medals, ornamental daggers, swords, and swastika armbands. To the right of the carpet there was a battery of microphones, to its left a crew of cameramen and press photographers, with, extending out in a line on both sides, shivering bare-kneed boys and girls in Hitler Youth uniform, holding little swastika flags at the ready.

  ‘Holy Strawsack!’ Otto gasped in sudden panic. ‘I’m in the Führer’s way!’

  Wildly he looked to left and right for a means of escape, but officials were beaming at him to his left and right. He started wondering where those black-uniformed thugs were. He'd seen them accompanying Hitler back in Holland when he'd received his Iron Cross Second Class. Perhaps it was Goering they were expecting, all lipstick and rouge, his chest weighed down with innumerable medals; or even the club-footed Doctor Goebbels, surrounded by his female star mistresses, always a head taller than he was; even the gloomy miserable Hess peering out from beneath his thick bushy eyebrows like a bewildered, lost savage from some patch of primeval jungle.

  And then a shiver passed over him. Maybe it was the dastardly Himmler, head of the SS – the man who wanted Otto's head on a platter for defiling that idiot Dirk van Dongeren's mistress. If Himmler was anywhere to be seen, Otto would be in for it! Out of one prison and straight into another.

  But no, there was no one else here except – Otto did not complete the thought.

  The immensely tall drum-major had raised his baton high, as if he were about to brain somebody with it. He brought it down sharply. The brass band clashed into a thunderous rendition of ‘Heil Dir im Siegeskranz!’ sending the pigeons flying up to the glass roof in protest.