The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  I could see doubt flicker across Kurz’s face. What, after all, would be the harm of a court martial? Perhaps more information might be extracted by questioning rather than other methods. It would also mean that responsibility for the fate of this man, and what he might or might not have done, would be shared. Schneider’s deputy, Captain Müller, could preside. And he would suggest they could involve this new militia raised from British soldiers who had seen which way the wind was blowing – the Department of Public Safety, or whatever it was called. Directives to include them as much as possible had been sent to every garrison in the occupied territory.

  The courtroom of the Berwick Guild Hall had seen centuries of grand ceremony in the long history of the town, and civic portraits of men in ermine, wearing chains of office, lined the walls. As we waited for the presiding officers to arrive, I looked around at this gallery of well-fed dignitaries from a long bygone age, from another country, a lost world. Suddenly the double doors behind me were thrown open and I heard the approaching clatter of jackboots on the wooden floor. Two soldiers walked purposefully past me and up to the dais where a long table had been set up. ‘Heil Hitler,’ said a German officer I did not recognise. But when I saw the other man, I was stunned.

  It was Colonel Murray, my commanding officer in Normandy. He took off his hat, laid it on the table, looked up at me for the first time and gasped, ‘My God. David!’

  *

  ‘There will be road blocks and sentries on all the approaches into Berwick,’ said John Campbell. ‘There were when it was still our regimental depot. The Germans will have probably strengthened them.’

  The two riders had kept to the north bank of the Tweed, skirting around Kelso and Coldstream, and they had at last pulled up their ponies at the entrance to the grand driveway leading to Paxton House, just a few miles from Berwick.

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Katie, thinking of the summer festivals – known as common ridings – held in Border towns. While there was much invented, mainly Victorian, tradition, the core of the unique events was ancient and involved a ride around the boundaries of the common land that belonged to each burgh, to check that surrounding lairds had not encroached. ‘Before the war, I rode the Berwick Bounds, the line of the border between England and Scotland. If memory serves, the Bound Road is not used at any other time. It’s well hidden by high walls and hedges on both sides and it takes riders very close to the town walls. It’ll take longer but be much safer.’

  Their ponies had sagged a little but because they had stopped to let them drink from streams, they were not yet blown. Katie and Campbell skirted Paxton village, splashed across the Whiteadder Water and quickly found the Bound Road. It climbed steeply up a slope above the flood plain with high banks on either side before it began its wide circuit around the common land known as the liberties of Berwick. Katie reckoned it would take only half an hour to reach the town.

  *

  ‘There is some mistake!’ I insisted, playing up the aristocratic gloss on my German accent. ‘My name is Oberführer Manfred von Klige and I have never seen this man before.’

  Kurz was smiling, shaking his head.

  In halting English, Captain Müller turned to Colonel Murray: ‘You know this man. You must tell us who he is.’

  For a long moment, Murray looked at me, and instead of answering the question, he asked one: ‘What has he done?’

  Müller explained that I had obstructed an officer of the Gestapo in making an arrest, falsely claimed that I had been sent to interrogate a prisoner, Lord Erskine, who had shot and killed Kommandant Schneider. And I fought with an officer of the Gestapo and attempted to disarm him.

  Murray and I looked at each for a moment, and I made a decision. ‘I am Captain David Erskine of the 1st Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘and I was privileged to serve in Normandy with Colonel Murray.’

  They would find me guilty whatever anyone said. What would be the point of Murray denying he knew me after blurting out my name? If he had, they would surely punish him too. And they could easily replace him in whatever role the Germans had invented.

  ‘There is nothing to be gained by continuing,’ said Müller, closing his wallet file. ‘You have admitted your guilt.’ He looked around the courtroom as if to invite comment and then banged down his gavel as a full stop to the proceedings. Except it was not quite the end. ‘Captain Erskine, you are guilty of spying and of treason against the state. The punishment for that is death by hanging.’

  Colonel Murray shook his head and, speaking very deliberately so that the German could understand, said, ‘Captain Erskine is not a common criminal. He should not be sent to the gallows. He is an officer in the British army and he is entitled to a soldier’s death.’

  I could see that Murray was playing for time, trying somehow to delay my inevitable fate. But at the time, it all seemed so distant. I had the sense that this was happening to someone else. I was a spectator, not the victim. From far away, I heard Müller say, ‘The war is over, Colonel. The sentence is clear.’

  At that, Murray exploded, banging his fist on the table. ‘I insist that a military punishment is carried out, a firing squad.’

  Somehow taken aback, and perhaps anxious to exhibit at least the show of cooperation with the new Department of Public Safety, Müller shrugged his shoulders. ‘It makes no difference to me. One o’clock today. At the parade ground.’

  *

  The haar had slowed the Grants’ progress down the Berwickshire coast. Between St Abbs and Eyemouth, there are many skerries, jagged reefs hidden just below the surface of the water. Alan did not want to avoid them by navigating further out to sea than he had to, both because it would make the short voyage longer and also there was a risk of being run down by one of the big merchant ships that plied the east coast sea roads. But to get his bearings, he needed to see the shoreline and only occasionally did the dark shapes of the high cliffs loom up out of the mist. After they had rounded the entrance to Eyemouth harbour, tacking with what wind there was further out to sea to avoid the vicious reefs at the harbour entrance, Alan set a course due south.

  *

  Levering himself up to the window embrasure, screwing up his eyes in extreme pain, Angus Wilson managed to sit down on the ledge. Breathing hard, his shirt soaked with sweat, he slowly stretched out his legs, looking for relief from his broken ribs. How he had managed to climb the spiral staircase of the tower, in total darkness, he could not say. Driven by the need to lie down flat, he had dropped down to his knees and failed to avoid crying out when he rolled to one side. Wilson had been completely unaware, dead to the world, when Campbell and Katie left the tower in the early hours.

  After drinking deep from a water canteen they had left him, Wilson looked out to the south over the crag and the fields below it. Mist still lingered in the river valley, clinging to the trees like smoke, forming and lifting as the breeze swirled. At the foot of the tower and around the crag as far as the eastern track, there was a fenced paddock, a handy place to turn out the ponies overnight.

  But it was empty. Wilson could see no sign of his pony, and when he turned to look around the upper chamber, his saddle and bridle had gone.

  *

  ‘Is there anything I can do, anyone you would like me to inform?’

  Colonel Murray had not been permitted to talk to me alone in the guard room next to the parade ground. We both glanced at Kurz and then the two soldiers standing on either side of the door. If I mentioned any names, they would be noted.

  ‘Would you please at least attempt to ensure that my father has a decent and respectful burial? His ancestors are waiting for him at Dryburgh, but I imagine that will be out of the question.’

  Murray nodded and told me he would do all he could.

  So much had been destroyed. London obliterated. A puppet king and a fascist government installed. It seemed trivial that I should grieve not only for my father but for the breaking of a line, a li
nk with a long past. And soon it would end entirely, with my execution, the extinguishing of the last of the name.

  *

  ‘That’s my dad’s boat! The gin palace.’

  Katie and Campbell were leading their ponies past the Nissen huts of a deserted army camp close to Berwick’s walls, perched on the cliffs above Fisherman’s Haven.

  ‘I’m sure it is!’ She pointed to the yacht bobbing at anchor in the little bay. Excited, relieved and anxious all at the same time, but unable to see for more than two hundred yards, Katie looked around but could make out no one and nothing in the eerie silence. Pulling her riding mac tighter and making sure her shotgun was completely concealed, she turned to John Campbell. ‘I just don’t know what we’ll find. Nothing good, I expect.’

  He nodded and, for some shred of reassurance, gripped the stock of his own shotgun tighter through the slit-pocket of his mac. ‘Just make sure the safety is on, miss, until you need it to be off.’

  Having been a soldier at Berwick Barracks, Campbell knew the ground well, even when the winter haar had set in. ‘We can’t risk trying to get into the town through the Cow Port, the gateway under the walls. It will be guarded. But I know another way.’

  When they climbed up onto the Elizabethan walls, Campbell led Katie past the graveyard of a squat little church. The haar seemed patchy, lifting in places as the sun climbed. Through a wrought-iron gate, they made their way between rows of headstones. And then it seemed that, like a stage curtain rising to reveal a set and a cast of actors, the haar disappeared.

  The silence was abruptly broken when a soldier shouted an order in German and a detail of six soldiers marched smartly out of the gates of the barracks. Very quickly, the Parade area began to fill with people. Katie grabbed a posy of flowers out of a jar by one of the gravestones. She noticed that there were soldiers mixed in with the gathering crowd, and that they were armed.

  ‘Look!’ Campbell pointed.

  Out of the gates came a further four soldiers, each carrying a corner of a stretcher. An officer walked beside them. They turned immediately left and stopped at a stretch of blank wall. Opposite them four more soldiers formed up in a line, at a distance of about ten yards.

  And then Katie and Campbell saw who was on the stretcher. Katie gasped.

  With one leg heavily bandaged, I was lifted out of the stretcher and made to stand unsteadily against the wall. The crowd of more than a hundred people were slowly marshalled into a semi-circle and, with her emotions churning, Katie joined them, with Campbell just behind her. They gently pushed their way to the front, the reluctant crowd parting willingly.

  ‘Miss,’ Campbell whispered, ‘there are an awful lot of them and only two of us.’

  At that moment, time suddenly seemed to shift and events took place in a dizzyingly rapid sequence. Captain Müller took up a position next to the four-man firing squad. He barked an order. They raised their rifles.

  Campbell and Katie thumbed off their safety catches.

  Müller raised his hand.

  And was shot through the throat by an arrow.

  VIII

  His throat gurgling, blood spouting like a fountain from his carotid artery, Müller pulled at his shirt collar, his mouth agape. As he fell, more arrows found their marks in seconds, one flying after another in rapid succession. Two of the firing squad fell to their knees, a third tried frantically to pluck an arrow from deep in his chest while a fourth soldier shot wildly in the air before his neck was also pierced. After a moment of stunned astonishment, chaos broke out. The soldiers in the crowd sprayed bullets from their submachine guns at the surrounding rooftops without any clear idea where the deadly archer was. Silent, almost invisible in flight, the arrows seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Behind the crowd, high on the roof of a tall church at the corner of the Parade, the archer suddenly revealed himself.

  Ululating, hollering and whooping, the little man fired more arrows, nocking each one with lightning speed, bringing down more soldiers. As others turned to fire on him, he scampered along the ridge of the church’s roof and the Germans raced across the Parade to give chase.

  Winded, open-mouthed at what had happened in less than a minute, Katie and Campbell ran over to the wall where I stood and carried me bodily towards the Cow Port.

  ‘Here. Let me help!’ Alan Grant ran out of the crowd, most of whom were following the German soldiers.

  Between the three of them, they carried me across the old golf course, scrambling down the cliff path to Fisherman’s Haven. Having splashed through the shallows and bundled me over the gunwale into the yacht with Eileen’s help, Alan hauled up the little anchor. With Campbell, he rigged a spinnaker sail to catch the wind once they had sculled out of the little bay.

  Meanwhile, a merry dance around Berwick’s huddled rooftops was leading most of the German garrison up and down the town’s narrow streets.

  With an extraordinary, animal-like agility, the little man scampered over the orange pan tiles, jumped across alleyways, leading the Germans in a wide circle, away from the cliffs and the coast. Then he raced at great speed along the top of the Elizabethan walls to the most northerly bastion. Skipping down the stone revetments to the open grassland and the abandoned army camp, he leapt on Wilson’s pony, gathered up the other two and galloped with them up to the beginning of the Bound Road, pausing to make sure the Germans continued their pursuit. He knew exactly where he was going and those behind him would find out, to their great cost.

  *

  Having sipped a fiery tot of Eileen Grant’s brandy, lying on one of the berths with my injured leg slightly raised, I found myself unable to hold back the tears. It was the shock, I think, rather than the pain, although that was bad enough. I wept for my father, for his stubborn courage and biblical sense of justice, for all the things we had left unsaid, for the destruction of our world and the triumph of evil, and for the violent death he had suffered trying to come to the aid of his only son. Facing the firing squad, less than an hour before, I found myself unafraid to die. And that was because I felt that all my courage had left me, all the fight had gone. Katie kissed my forehead and I began to freefall into a deep sleep.

  ‘We can’t dress that wound.’ said Alan Grant,‘and it’ll need to be kept clean. All we have is a first aid kit.’

  Having caught a westerly wind, the yacht was scudding over a calm sea, making good progress northwards, past the high cliffs, the ramparts of the spectacular Berwickshire coast.

  ‘There are only two hours of light left. If we can get around St Abbs Head soon, with the wind directly behind us, we might make it to Pease Bay. There’s a good, secluded, sandy beach where I can run her aground.’

  *

  By the time the little man reached the edges of Bleaklaw Moss, he had left his pursuers behind, but not too far behind. Once he had untacked the ponies and stowed their saddles and bridles in the shieling, he quickly set to work. In a wide semi-circle around the old cottage, its sheltering copse of Scots pines and the hidden entrance to the moss, he had spent time in the summer digging into the peat banks on the moorland. Having cut out a series of long, rectangular clefts, he had stuffed them with dry moss and lichen, brittle leaves and twigs.

  The light in the west was failing fast, the sun falling behind the Cheviot watershed and so he lit a pine resin torch. At each cleft, he fired the tinder so that by the time he had finished, there was a long arc of dark and billowing smoke stretching across the moorland.

  In the long night to come, the fire would reach far into the peat beds between the Roman road and the shieling, making them smoulder, making the very earth burn. When morning came, the Germans in their armoured cars would be able to see the smoke from far away. And then they would come for him.

  He would be waiting.

  *

  When the tide began to ebb from the broad sands of Pease Bay, Alan Grant was dismayed to find that his beloved yacht was becoming increasingly uninhabitable. It was not designed to ca
rry five people and it must have been the extra weight that made it slew to one side on the wet sand.

  Darkness was gathering fast and Eileen and Katie took as much food and drink and as many blankets as they could carry. ‘We used to picnic at the foot of the Old Red Sandstone cliff when you were small,’ said Eileen. ‘There’s a deep recess that will keep us out of the worst of the wind.’

  After they had helped me out of the boat and deposited me with my back against the sandpaper-like rock, Campbell and Alan went off to forage for driftwood. My job was to sprinkle some paraffin over the few sticks and twigs they had picked up near the mouth of the recess. I smiled at their thoughtfulness in involving me, making me feel useful in whatever piddling way. The recess where I sat was an impressive, elemental place, worn out of the high cliff by aeons of high tides.

  As I rested, the throbbing in my leg eased. We agreed that the dressing should come off in the morning and Campbell volunteered to help me wade into the icy seawater as the tide came back. It was not a moment I was looking forward to but the water would help clean the wound and we would redress it with any clean bandaging that could be salvaged and the cotton wool and antiseptic from the yacht’s first aid kit.

  After half an hour of dragging driftwood across the deserted beach, a decent blaze was crackling, sending sparks spiralling up into the darkness. Campbell had been on a commando training course at Spean Bridge, near Fort William, and had been taught how to build what he called a ‘lateral fire’. Instead of the traditional cone shape, he set out a longer and narrower fire so that the big branches that he and Alan could not cut would be burned. With our backs to the cliff and out of the winter wind, we sat more or less in a line, our faces lit by a generous glow. The yellow sandstone at our backs danced with shadows. Instead of gin in the gin palace, Alan Grant kept a supply of Glenlivet, and Eileen found some decent glasses. Soon, more than the fire was glowing as we passed around drams and what had come from the Grants’ Christmas larder.