The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  Brad unscrewed the petrol cap from the tank behind the cab and very carefully and gently he pushed a tennis ball bomb into the cylindrical spout, making sure its white fuse was showing. When he had done the same with all the vehicles, Katie and Rita retreated into the shadows of the houses and returned to the Humber where Robert and I were waiting.

  ‘That’s the village hall.’ Robert pointed to a concrete building with a corrugated iron roof that stood a little way back from the street line.

  Moments later, Brad came racing back from the hotel car park and pulled me, Katie, Robert and Rita down behind the car.

  The explosion was tremendous, yellow flames roared into the night sky and large parts of the trucks lifted into the air before crashing on the road. Debris fell around us and clattered onto the corrugated iron roof of the hall. And perhaps six German soldiers had died in the blast. We ran towards the double doors.

  ‘Wait,’ I hissed, ‘wait until at least ten of them get through the door before you shoot.’

  And then death came rushing quickly.

  We stood close, could not miss.

  The Germans were lifted up and thrown backwards like rag dolls by the barrage of shotgun fire. Brad Kaye was screaming at them. Robert calmly reloading. Rita held her gun at waist level, like it was a pistol. Within thirty or forty seconds, we killed or maimed many men, so many that the others in the hall realised that through the doorway certain death waited. Brad ran forward and threw three more tennis ball bombs inside the hall and would have followed their blasts if I had not dragged him back by the collar. From the direction of the hotel, we heard shouts and the sound of shots. We ran for the Humber and, as Robert gunned the engine, bullets tinged off the bodywork.

  ‘How many?’ said Brad, breathless, his chest heaving. ‘How many of those bastards did we get?’

  Once Robert had driven out of range, he slowed on the narrow road around the headland, his headlights swinging across the old woods, knowing that they had no vehicles to pursue us.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe twenty. They just kept coming. It was crazy.’

  Rita looked wild-eyed. ‘I shot eight cartridges. One barrel at a time. And I didn’t miss.’

  Robert rattled us across the cattle grid. By the fire in the sitting room, everyone was waiting, anxious for news, desperate to see us all return unharmed. Looking across the loch, they had seen and heard the explosions. Jenny MacDonald poured stiff drinks and, as calmly as I could, I set a rota for the night watch. At first light, they would come. Whatever was left of them.

  ‘I can’t go to bed. I won’t sleep.’ Katie was shaking, holding her whisky glass with both hands.

  ‘Let’s go up to the lookout and take the first watch.’

  With blankets around our shoulders and a candle flickering in a glass windshield, we looked down across the moonlit loch. The shells of the trucks were glowing red, smouldering and the village hall was ablaze.

  *

  ‘Why were there no sentries on patrol? Why did they sit in the trucks?’ screamed Colonel Stengel at an NCO. Shattering glass had injured him but he paid no attention to the bleeding cuts on his neck and face. ‘Bring me a report on the number of dead and wounded and a count of what weapons and ammunition we have left.’

  Stengel walked quickly down to the quay and looked across the loch at Darroch House. The building was in darkness except for a scintilla of light in a top-floor window. Pushing at the door of MacCaig’s shop, he was surprised to find it open.

  Spreadeagled on his bed, his wrists and ankles tied to the four corners of his brass bedstead, the shopkeeper heard footsteps stamping up the stairs. And he pissed himself.

  When Stengel tore off the gag and pushed his bleeding face close, MacCaig whimpered with terror at what seemed like a hellish apparition, a nightmare.

  ‘What were their names?’ the German demanded.

  He knew only Robert MacDonald, not the other man.

  ‘After they asked you where my men were billeted, did they say anything else to you? Anything that might be of use to me?’

  When MacCaig shook his head from side to side, Stengel grabbed his jaw tightly, pushing his jowls together, opening his mouth. Pulling his Luger from its holster, he shoved the barrel into it and pulled the trigger.

  *

  When I looked at my watch, it showed 2 a.m. and Katie was sound asleep on the mattress next to the dormer window. The candle shed a warm light, and in repose her face looked peaceful.

  Hearing movement outside the door, still very jumpy after the events of the night, I instinctively reached for the shotgun leaning against the wall.

  Bradley Kaye came in. ‘Can’t sleep neither,’ he said. ‘You want some company?’

  More than once I had been told that the night is coldest just before the dawn, but as we looked over the loch, waiting for the dark sky to turn grey and the Morar mountains to become a horizon, neither of us shivered. There was too much whirling around our heads.

  ‘In the morning, we’ll kill the rest of them,’ Brad said quietly, looking out of the window. ‘We’ll kill them all and then we’ll find Marilyn and Lisa. Okay?’

  Once again, we talked over the detail of what we had planned and how it had to change since the raid on Arisaig.

  ‘They now know several things,’ I said. ‘First and most important is that they cannot risk killing Feldman, you or any of the other scientists. And, from St Andrews, they know what you all look like. The rest of us are expendable. Extracting you and the others is a very difficult thing to achieve and while we’ve made it harder for them, that’s their objective. They won’t care about anything else.’

  7 January 1945

  Stengel had lost thirty-two men, either killed or so badly wounded by blast burns or shrapnel that they could not walk. Leaving behind a detail of two men to guard and care for the living and get help to bury the dead meant he had a force of twenty-six, including himself. And having lost all of his vehicles, they would have to attack on foot. At least their weapons and ammunition were largely intact. Stengel knew that while the shotguns had been devastating at short range, he and his men could approach close to the house without risk. The range of their own weapons was much longer.

  In the hotel dining room, the colonel mustered all of his men fit for duty. It was 5.30 a.m., still very dark, but he had calculated that dawn would break when they reached their objective. That was the time to attack, before defenders were fully awake and aware.

  ‘We will seek to set up the MG 42 machine guns directly in front of the house. Before we begin firing, Sergeant Fischer will take two men behind the house to see if they can break in from that direction.’ Having pinned a map to the wall, he went over his plans for a second time. ‘Remember, you now know that these people will fight. They are dangerous and they took us by surprise. But we are Waffen SS and vengeance will be ours. Heil Hitler!’

  *

  As a clear day began to dawn, the dark heads of the Morar mountains would be lit soon. Rafael and Jane Levinson joined us at the dormer window to take over the watch. They brought welcome mugs of tea and hunks of bannock and jam.

  ‘This is the day, is it not?’ said the old doctor, clapping his hand on Bradley’s shoulder. ‘Young man, I was told that you fought like a lion last night. We’re proud of you. Can you do that again today, do you think?’ Levinson smiled. ‘But whatever happens, Jane and I want to thank you both. In the last few days we’ve seen the worst and then the best of our fellow human beings. What greater privilege is there than to be with men and women who risk their lives for you?’

  On the edge of the gravel forecourt, we set up three firing positions behind a turf rampart revetted with fence posts. Behind them there were two more positions, in first-floor bedroom windows that could be lifted out when the time came. Between the close behind the house and the pine wood, there was no field of fire and so Katie and Jamie had no option but to patrol the fringes of the trees in case the perimeter was breached and any
Germans got beyond the trip wires and the stakes. Brad and I walked quickly down to where the ditch had been dug across the paddock, about fifty yards from the house. The day before, the sods of preserved turf had been laid over the latticework of a series of old trellises, and any evidence of ground disturbance had been hidden by scatters of fallen leaves.

  At each end of the ditch, Bradley had set up two large porcelain teapots filled with very volatile explosive and, as we primed them, we heard Rafael Levinson blow his whistle.

  On the road rounding Morroch Point, Stengel marched at the head of what was little more than a platoon. It was difficult at such a distance but I thought I could count about twenty men. All of them were carrying not only weapons but also wooden boxes of ammunition. I shouted down from the dormer that everyone should take up their positions, and for Miriam Griffith-Smith to take the children into a back bedroom, and on no account should they go near the windows.

  By the time I joined Alan Grant and Brad in the firing positions on the forecourt, I did not need binoculars to watch the Germans approach. I felt the fear rising in my throat, like bile. Perhaps it was the waiting. Better to react than wait.

  ‘They’re pulling down the dyke at the side of the paddock,’ shouted Robert MacDonald from an upstairs window. ‘They’re throwing down stones on the thorns in the ditch.’

  And so we waited. And we watched. On the higher ground of Keppoch Moor across the loch, a winter’s day was dawning. I could see the yellow light edging over the peat hags and the willow scrub by the shore. In the churn of emotions, concentrating and drifting, I kept seeing movements all around, but it was impossible to tell if it was the enemy, or birds, or my own imagination.

  Once all of the German platoon, and what they were carrying, were across the tumbled dyke, the tall officer I had seen talking to MacCaig led them directly towards us, making no attempt to spread out, walking erect and not crouching like advancing infantry.

  ‘They know we have only shotguns,’ I shouted. ‘They’ll come close to us. Hold your positions.’

  My God, I thought, what the hell do we do now? We can’t touch them, even if they are only a hundred yards away.

  *

  Marilyn woke as the sun touched the tops of the pine trees. She must have slept, at least a little, and Lisa shifted, warm, snuggling closer, grunting as her eyes opened.

  ‘Mom, my nose is cold.’

  Marilyn looked around and sighed when she saw a stream glint in the shafts of sunlight only twenty yards away. As she cupped her hands to let Lisa drink, she realised that the sweet, peaty water would help them find their way back. The stream will flow downhill, she thought, and we will find the shore, eventually. But as she pushed Lisa’s fair hair behind her ears and adjusted her Alice band to keep it in place, Marilyn looked up suddenly.

  In the distance, she could hear an extraordinary sound. Like ripping cloth, it was the sound of gunfire, machine gun fire.

  *

  Capable of twelve hundred rounds a minute, only pausing to change the belt of bullets fed into its chamber, the MG 42 was a devastating weapon. Stengel had his men set up both machine guns, and they were pouring fire at the white façade of the house, shattering windows, ripping out the frames, riddling the porch with bullets, pockmarking the walls as the white harling flew off like shrapnel. The sound was deafening and in the back bedroom, the children were screaming, half-crazed with fear. Miriam tried to cover their ears, pulling them to her breast. It seemed that the old house shook as this withering fusillade hit it without cease for five eternal minutes.

  As I kept my head down behind my turf and wood barrier, I remembered Sergeant Taylor, the landing craft and the first few terrifying minutes on Queen Beach.

  When the machine gun fire at last stopped, the momentary silence seemed far away as our ears rang, but it was suddenly split by a roar from Robert from the first-floor window.

  I looked up. The Germans were running at us, bayonets fixed, charging, like the clans at Culloden.

  ‘Brad!’ I screamed.

  Both of us took aim at the teapots planted at either end of the hidden ditch. The Germans were picking up speed, but not firing at us. They were trying to storm the house.

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted to Brad. ‘Wait!’ And then, ‘Now!’

  We fired. The pots exploded, the first Germans reached the fringe of fallen leaves, their boots went through the turf and a wall of fire leapt up and engulfed them. Explosives planted at the bottom of the ditch sent earth flying through the flames as most of Stengel’s men fell in, screamed, clawing at the turf to get out of the inferno they had run headlong into. Human fireballs, coated in burning paraffin, four of them twisted and writhed as they reached the near side. Through the flames, I could see that the officer had managed to stop in time, with three or four of his men. I heard the sharp report of his pistol as he put those screaming in the hellish pit out of their misery.

  *

  The sound of machine gun fire had stopped but Marilyn had followed the stream out of the pine wood and now, at last, she could see the loch in the distance and, below where she and Lisa stood, a plume of blue smoke rose from the paddock in front of Darroch House. About one hundred and fifty yards further, and their path would reach the drystane dyke that skirted the sheltering wood.

  ‘Stop! Do not move!’

  Marilyn turned around to see a German soldier pointing his rifle at her chest. Two others ran up the hill to join them.

  *

  I stood up out of the firing position to look at a landscape from hell.

  The paraffin incendiaries, and the fertilizer-fuelled explosives Brad had made, had been fearfully effective. The fire in the ditch raged on and the stink of burning flesh filled the air. Blackened bodies lay on either side. With the remnants of his platoon, the officer had retreated to the edge of the paddock where they had broken down the dyke, abandoning their machine guns.

  ‘All of them. All of them,’ shouted Bradley. ‘We need to kill all of them!’ His face streaked with mud, his hair wild, he seemed demented, a rage burning inside him.

  Katie came running around the side of the house to see what had happened, and was horror-struck at how effective our defences had been.

  I felt it was safe to pull back to the house, for the moment. Suddenly I felt parched and in the kitchen, its floor strewn with shards of shattered glass and wood from the window frame, we gulped water, looking all the time out at the paddock. The Germans had charged the house because they could not risk killing the American scientists. Now their numbers were reduced to only three and they had no more options open to them, except retreat. But Brad was right, although his motives were his own. We had to capture or kill the officer and his two men. If they made it back to Arisaig, they would call for reinforcements.

  When I found Professor Feldman and his wife, both of them white with shock after the machine-gunning of the house, I told him that whatever happened, Katie and I had to get away soon. I asked him to keep my fishing bag safe with its contents: my journal and his document. Robert joined us to say that the Humber was ready. Our plan was to race out of the policies and cut off the Germans’ retreat at Morroch Point.

  But it turned out that they were not about to retreat.

  The officer and five of his men were marching up the paddock towards the house. When I came out of the porch, I saw Alan and Jamie holding Bradley Kaye by his arms as he struggled and kicked at them. When the officer halted his men, only twenty yards from us, I saw that they had Marilyn and Lisa with them. Their hands had been tied behind their backs and the Germans had put nooses around their necks.

  The little girl was sobbing, whispering, ‘Mommy, Daddy,’ over and over.

  XIV

  ‘Go! Go now,’ hissed Robert MacDonald. ‘There’s a rowing boat moored just beyond the headland. Go! Both of you.’

  While all eyes were on Marilyn, Lisa and an enraged Bradley Kaye, Katie and I slipped back into the house, found the fishing bag and left by the back d
oor into the close. I still had Jamie’s revolver and pouch of ammunition.

  ‘Where is the boat, Katie?’ She pointed west towards the ocean, to a scatter of rocky islets in Loch nan Ceall.

  And we ran.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ I said. Katie sat in the stern of the rowing boat while I pulled on the oars towards Arisaig quay. ‘Just look at me. Or look at where we’re going.’ In truth, as I looked over her shoulder, I could make out little of what was happening in front of Darroch House. Inevitably our people would be forced to surrender, but perhaps one or two, like us, had escaped. Maybe more, maybe none. But I could not dwell on that. For any of it to mean anything, Katie and I had to get safely to Edinburgh, to the US consulate and to Averill Thomson and his ambassador.

  I hoped against hope that he was indeed a stand-up guy.

  As we came alongside the quay, I reached out to grab one of the mooring lines strung out along the side and pulled us close. The village was in chaos. Debris from the explosions lay everywhere and the hall was a smoking ruin. What came as a surprise – and a relief – was that no one was about to watch our passing. At least, no one I noticed.

  Such as it was, our plan was to walk the coast road to Mallaig and hope we could catch the ferry to Oban. From there a train could take us to Glasgow and on to Edinburgh. Anything and everything could go wrong, but it seemed to me that we had no other option. It was a desperate gamble, a last throw, but to go in the opposite direction, take a train to Fort William, was much more likely to meet difficulties if the Germans called on reinforcements, as they surely would.

  We walked in silence up the hill out of Arisaig and on past the moorland at Keppoch. Drifting once more, lulled by the hypnotic, metronomic rhythm of putting one foot in front of another, I thought of days long ago, of the first time I had seen this place. For me, the road to Mallaig winds along the most beautiful coastline in the world. At school, we were blessed to be taught by a classics master who instilled in me not only a love of language but also a love of the West Highlands. One Easter, he brought six of us to Morar to stay at a youth hostel at Garramor, not far from where Katie and I were walking. The landscape captured my young heart, the road turning and rising up to show me long vistas across the ocean to the islands of Rum, Eigg and Muck and to the grandeur of the Cuillin ridge on Skye. But the detail, close to, of the little coves, the white-sand beaches, the undulating dunes and all the colour of their flora meant that this place was not just cold, majestic spectacle, like Glencoe or the Torridon mountains. It had gentleness, softness and everywhere were the benign, light touches of human hands. All those sunlit years ago, I felt that God had taken my hand and I walked with him in the Garden.