The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  For a while, little was said. Staring through the sparks from Campbell’s ingenious fire, I could see that it was an open sky, the Plough clearly visible in the north. Perhaps the shock of all that had happened was still distorting perspectives but I imagined I could see our bright fire by the shushing waves and the recess below the ancient cliffs from a great distance, high in the dark, winter sky. While I dozed for a few moments, dreaming of endlessly falling, the others sorted out blankets and the spare foresail we might need to rig if it began to rain.

  Katie sat next to me and, thank goodness, very close. ‘Come on, sleepy head, wake up. We all need to talk. We can’t stay here like five Robinson Crusoes. We have to work out what to do.’

  What followed was a sobering, realistic appraisal. ‘Our old life is gone,’ said Alan Grant. ‘None of us can ever return home.’ We had all survived, at least, and Campbell assured me that Angus Wilson would be all right – he had a huge extended family and somehow he would find his way to the help he needed, either from them or from close friends. But the world we now inhabited had no place for us. Campbell made a bad joke about Robin Hood and Maid Marion in the greenwood. But he had a point. We were outlaws. And it was not only the Germans we needed to avoid. Good and decent people like Colonel Murray had persuaded themselves that there was no option but to collaborate.

  ‘I saw the atom bomb explode. And I was two hundred miles away,’ I said. ‘What can we do with that sword of Damocles hanging over us?’

  Katie sat up suddenly, an expression of extreme annoyance creasing her brow. ‘I’ll tell what we can do, you great lump. We can have children. You and I. Somewhere. We will find somewhere. And we can bring them up as good and decent people. That’s what we can do, you idiot.’

  My mouth opened and closed again. Alan Grant roared with laughter and Eileen smiled.

  ‘Well,’ I stuttered, ‘that certainly is a plan.’

  Katie punched me hard in the shoulder. ‘But we’d have to be married first.’ She punched me again, even harder.

  ‘I’ve only got one good knee, so if it’s all right with you, I’ll sit still and not kneel.’ There was a moment of hushed silence, it seemed. ‘Katherine Elizabeth Grant, will you marry me?’

  28 December 1944

  When the dawn light crept across the moorland on a windless morning, the smoke spiralled high into the sky, visible for miles around. In the air floated the tang of peat, and the dense, earthy scent greeted the little man as he emerged from the tangle of Bleaklaw Moss. He did not have long to wait. Having climbed like a cat up one of the tallest of the Scots pines, he looked east to the line of the Roman road. He could see movement, about a mile and half away. They were coming. Two German army vehicles had pulled up at Whitton Edge, where the C-road carried on and the old road made by the legions branched off towards the hills. The smoke would bring them, the little man was certain, and he was ready for them.

  Bent on vengeance, determined to make an example after their humiliation in Berwick in front of a crowd, the Germans had also prepared. One of their vehicles was an armoured car, known as a Panzerwagen. It was equipped with a turreted cannon that that could fire a withering blast of two hundred rounds a minute and over a much longer range than a submachine gun. Its crew of four had seen too many of their comrades skewered by arrows on Berwick Parade and were furious that this man-boy had led them up the Tweed Valley, laying false trails, sometimes evading capture at the last moment. Maybe they had at last run him to ground.

  Behind the Panzerwagen trundled a small truck carrying twelve grenadiers and their sergeant. Feldwebel Horst Bultmann had endured the dishonour of captivity at the Black Camp at Comrie after his regiment surrendered in France. The taunts of the Polish guards stung him often, especially after the failure of the Ardennes offensive. But in the end the Führer had not failed them.

  Through his binoculars, Bultmann could make out a low cottage sheltered by pine trees on three sides. When the Panzerwagen and the truck came as close as they could, having ripped through the Roman road-bed that had endured for two thousand winters, he called a halt. The smoke over the moorland had cleared as a breeze blew down from the western hills. Between the road and the cottage lay about four hundred or five hundred yards of more or less level ground, tussocky, perhaps boggy in places, but no real barrier. Bultmann climbed up on the turret of the Panzerwagen and, focusing his binoculars more sharply, he was astonished by what he saw. Sitting cross-legged on the ridge of the cottage roof was the little man who had killed so many of his comrades in Berwick.

  And he was waving.

  *

  Raking through the embers of the fire at the foot of the sandstone cliff, Alan Grant added more kindling and set a billycan to one side, to warm some water.

  Waking slowly, with Katie folded close under a quilted blanket beside me, I smiled and asked if he and Eileen had got much sleep.

  ‘Glenlivet helps. I see your fiancée is still sound asleep.’

  Carefully cradling her sleepy head to one side, I managed to lever myself upright. With Campbell’s help, I unwound the dressing on my thigh and braced myself for the icy waters of the North Sea. The wound had closed, mercifully, but there was a worrying yellow tinge around it. ‘That’s from the bullet,’ said Campbell. ‘Close range.’

  The tide had refloated the Grants’ yacht and we decided to wade out to it, hang onto the gunwale for a moment and wade back. When we made it back to the beach, I was gasping with the shock of the cold.

  After Katie accepted my proposal – with a kiss, not a punch – and we raised a glass to celebrate something good, there was a discussion and a decision. Eileen Grant made the excellent and obvious point that we would soon run out of food, to say nothing of Glenlivet. We needed resources, and also somewhere safe to lie low. I added that my name would have been circulated around the German garrisons in Scotland and the north of England, and anyone with me would be assumed to have been complicit in the remarkable events in Berwick.

  ‘What about Aunt Jenny and Uncle Robert in St Andrews?’ said Katie, stirring immediate undergraduate memories of summer drinks in their garden. ‘They have a big house and we can reach the town by boat.’

  Alan Grant remembered that his sister had said something about St Andrews being fortified, trenches dug on the banks of the Swilken Burn, across the fairways of the Old Course. ‘I shouldn’t think we can just sail into the harbour,’ he said.

  *

  Bultmann was enraged at the cockiness of the little man, but he tried to think like a soldier. The cottage was beyond the range of the Panzerwagen. They would need to get within at least two hundred yards, closer if possible, for its devastating rate of fire to be anything like accurate. But would the moorland be sodden, boggy and treacherous? Was that why the little imp on the roof was taunting him and his men? Arrows would not fly further than his weapons would shoot, and so this would be a game of caution and patience. All the Germans had to do was get close.

  Bultmann did not notice that the smoke had clung to some of the tussocky patches and that it lingered in the hollows.

  As a line of soldiers, their submachine guns at the ready, began to move, a high-pitched whistle pierced the clear air. Over the trees flew four buzzards, calling piou-piou to each other. Bultmann shouted to his men to ignore these distractions and look to their fronts, and he signalled to the driver of the Panzerwagen that he should advance. The engine noise seemed to break into the quiet and the line of soldiers moved slowly. The little man sat motionless on the roof. Very soon, he would be in range. But still he did not move. Surely they had him now. Bultmann looked along the advancing line, waved his arm for them to speed up, charge towards the cottage and begin firing.

  That was when the first soldier fell into the inferno.

  For many hours, the little man’s invisible peat fire had been burning underground across the moorland. Where the surface crust was thin, a man’s weight would break it and he would fall into a red-hot fire.

 
The first soldier screamed as the ground seemed to crack under his feet and he was taken down into hell. He had fallen up to his waist, smoke puffed out around him, his face blistered in the updraught and the fierce heat roasted his legs and lower torso. When a comrade ran to help him, he too broke though, this time sinking up to his chest, his arms waving frantically. Where the blazing layer of peat was thin, some men burned only their legs and could scramble out, very badly injured. The cries of others lasted only a moment as they were completely submerged in a smouldering pit of unspeakable agony.

  Bultmann stopped dead in his tracks, not moving, staring at the ground around him. But he had the presence of mind to turn round and signal to the driver of the Panzerwagen to stop immediately. Terrified, retreating from a landscape of dead and dying men, roaring with pain as their bodies burned alive, he tested the ground with every step, petrified that the fires would claim him. He reached the safety of the vehicle and climbed onto it as the awful sound of living death echoed across the moorland.

  *

  ‘We’ll have to cross the Firth of Forth at night,’ said Alan Grant. ‘There’s too much traffic during the day.’

  Earlier, he had walked up to the village of Cockburnspath to make a reverse charge call to Jenny, his sister, in St Andrews. She had warned him that the town was crawling with soldiers – ‘unpleasant thugs’ – and that the harbour was closed. In fact, the university was also closed down. These thugs had arrived one morning at Robert’s office in the physics department and instructed him to move and to hand over the keys to all the laboratories. All of his colleagues were also summarily ejected and instructed not to return, for any reason.

  Alan asked Jenny to make a call for him. He knew Alistair Charters from the Royal Forth Yacht Society, and could he please arrange a berth for him at Crail harbour, assuming these things were still possible? With fair winds, helpful currents and a great deal of good luck, they might arrive in the small hours of tomorrow morning. And from Crail, they would somehow find their way to St Andrews.

  *

  Few of the soldiers trapped in the blazing peat died quickly. With a submachine gun, from the turret of the Panzerwagen, Bultmann put those going through a living hell out of their misery, close comrades all of them. In the Black Camp at Comrie, the loyalty of all the SS men to the Führer, and to each other, had become even more intense. With one exception. Sergeant Wolfgang Rosterg had visited great dishonour on all of them when he said he believed the war was lost. After a court martial, he was hanged. The British and the Poles made some arrests but no one betrayed their oaths. These men had understood the meaning of honour.

  ‘We need to get closer,’ Bultmann shouted to the driver. ‘Go slowly and be prepared to reverse. Do it!’ Surely with three axles and six big wheels, the armoured car would not sink. The question was: fast or slow? ‘Maximum speed, now!’

  When he saw the vehicle begin to move, the little man stood up on the ridge of the roof, walked to the chimney and climbed onto the mantle so that he could see better what was happening. And, suddenly, the turret cannon of the Panzerwagen opened up. It was devastating, shattering the windows, flattening the door and ripping away stonework. And making the man lose his balance and fall backwards off the roof.

  Bultmann had realised that the ring of fire was not broad and the armoured car came to a stop by the walls of the shieling. Behind it, the German found the body of the man, curled in a tight crouch, as though he was asleep. For some reason, Bultmann was reluctant to touch this strange creature, even though he wanted to feel for a pulse. It would be much better to take a captive rather than a corpse back to Berwick. When the German prodded the body with his boot, two buzzards exploded out of the sky, dive-bombing him, making him stagger backwards until he caught his heel on a root and fell.

  When he got back up, the little man had gone.

  *

  ‘We’ll do it by the lights.’

  Gloaming had fallen and Alan Grant was tacking against the wind, guiding his yacht out of Pease Bay and into the busy sea roads of the Firth of Forth. In the half-light, Alan could not have too many lookouts. Fearful that we might be seen by the coastguard, he had not rigged bow or stern lights. The light he really needed came from the string of lighthouses on the shores, rocks and islands of the great firth.

  ‘It’s exciting, David.’ Katie was perched on the edge of the berth where she’d made me comfortable. ‘Back to St Andrews. Trips down memory lane. Even if everything else has changed, the three streets won’t have.’

  That thought, and the gentle swell of the sea and the sway of the boat, lulled me. Our time at university was like a Christmas scene in a glass bubble: captured forever, unchanging and idyllic.

  On deck, Alan blessed the good weather. Winter storms could blow up suddenly in the firth, whipping blinding spindrift off the tops of big waves driven by the strong east winds across the North Sea. But that night they had little more than a stiff breeze coming out of the south-west, enough to billow out the sail but not soak the open deck. It was cold, though, and in her yellow oilskins, Eileen was shivering. ‘Go below, darling,’ Alan said. ‘John and I will manage.’

  We made good headway up the East Lothian coast, passing the Barns Ness light on the left-hand side, prompting Alan to peer through the darkness for his next seamark. Soon, the pale white cliffs of the Bass Rock loomed up, the ancient guano of thousands of generations of gannets visible even on a winter night with only a crescent moon. Taking a bearing on the light that flashed on the flank of the rock, Alan began to change course, moving almost due north. This was the trickiest part of the short voyage. He guided his yacht into the sea lanes over the Rath Grounds, where many tons of herring were caught during the August draves. But this was December and a very different sea might be waiting out of the lee of the land.

  Very carefully, Eileen lit the primus stove and, in its glow, she looked for a moment at Katie dozing. How beautiful her girl was, how content amidst all this turmoil: together now with her true love. Even though the war meant they saw little of each other after graduation, she never thought theirs was just a university romance, something that would not survive the winds of the real world. In fact, it had been the brutality of an all too real world that had brought them together. There was at least that consolation. Having brewed some hot cocoa and put away the primus, Eileen took two mugs on deck for John and her husband.

  Alan pointed to his right. Through the darkness, there was a scintilla, a tiny pinprick of light. ‘I think that’s May Island. We should see the harbour lights of Elie, Pittenweem, Anstruther and Crail soon.’

  But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a huge black shape seemed to rear in front of the yacht out of nowhere. Travelling east, picking up speed before it reached the open sea, a merchant ship was bearing down fast on the much smaller vessel.

  Shouting at Eileen and Campbell to duck, Alan pulled the boom around sharply. To have any chance of avoiding a collision, he had to shift his course north-west. Thinking they were about to be overwhelmed, they looked up at the lights on the big ship’s prow. And then we were hit hard by its huge bow-wave. But mercifully, it did not knock us down. If the wave had hit us abeam, on the side of the yacht, it would have probably capsized. But instead Alan kept his own bow straight enough to the northwest to meet it and cut through. However, when we careened down the other side of the wave, as the merchantman passed us, the sea almost washed all three of them off the open deck.

  Holding onto lines Alan had rigged along the gunwales, Eileen and John Campbell began bailing as fast as they could. Katie insisted I stay put in my bunk. On one leg, I’d be more than useless – a liability. Katie emerged from the cabin with a billycan and they frantically scooped up as much water as possible from the slippery deck. At the same time, Alan saw that, somehow, the near accident had pushed us much closer to the cliffs of May Island and, pulling the boom back over, yelling at the others to duck once again, he reset his course northwards.

 
John Campbell’s Morse code was rusty but when he saw the dot-dash of a torch being clicked on and off, he thought he could read C-R-A-I-L.

  ‘That will be Alistair Charters on the harbour wall,’ Alan said. Even though it was black-dark with no street lights on in the fishing village, he risked his powerful lamp and it played off the ancient yellow sandstone blocks that had kept the sea at bay for centuries.

  After threading his way through the narrow entrance, Campbell pushing at the sandstone wall with a paddle to keep the hull away from it, we tied up close to the sea-steps. At the top, Alan shook hands with Charters, the torchlight making introductions a little theatrical. ‘Thanks for turning out so late. We much appreciate it.’

  I managed the steps with difficulty, Campbell behind me in case of mishap. Katie stayed in the cabin with Eileen, gathering together what we might need and stowing what we would not.

  ‘Well, now,’ said a voice from the darkness behind Charters, ‘what a jolly little party.’

  In an instant at least half a dozen powerful torches snapped on. My heart sank. After all we had been through.

  ‘You are all breaking curfew. And by some distance. You are all under arrest,’ drawled an aristocratic, very English voice. ‘Good evening. We are officers from the Department of Public Safety. Bit of a mouthful, I know,’ continued the polite, invisible man. ‘Some people call us the Vigilantes. Rather prefer that.’

  A tall man in a black uniform emerged into the light. A beret with what looked to me like a British regimental badge was crammed over his floppy hair. The deliberate, even languid manner matched his voice. ‘You will all accompany us to the Tolbooth. Immediately, if you please.’

  I turned to look at the top of the sea-steps, but Katie and Eileen must have heard the exchange and they stayed hidden in the yacht.