Black Camp 21 Read online

  The night before, out on the beach, there had been confusion. Here, there was none. In the Channel behind them, a line of ships heavy with yet more prisoners awaited their turn. Soon they would all be steaming back to France for more. Everything now depended on speed. Urged on by tired-looking soldiers carrying machine guns, Hartmann walked shakily down the wooden ramp watched by a small contingent of flat-capped dock workers.

  Two long lines of prisoners soon began to stretch out along the quay. Some still wore their metal helmets. Most sported crumpled military-issue caps pulled low over faces grained with exhaustion. Every one of them looked – and was – desperately young. When the British asked for names, they answered in whispers. Shuffling feet rasped nervously across the concrete. Not one man seemed capable of standing still. They’re afraid, thought Hartmann. I’m afraid. We’re all afraid.

  This time, there wasn’t far to march. For a mile, the cobblestoned quay ran straight towards the city. On their right was the oil-flecked sea, slurping back on the ebb tide. To their left, an unbroken wall of warehouses, shuttered by immense sliding doors. As they moved forward, Hartmann imagined a thump of triumph returning to the men’s stride. Just so long as you didn’t look too closely, they had done it. They were on English soil; a German army heading proudly towards London.

  Or somewhere.

  Inland, the sky danced with ragged silk balloons for the Luftwaffe bombers that no longer flew and the docks hummed to the industrious scurry of forklift trucks. As the wharf gave way to red-bricked terraces, the men’s faces brightened. Standing in almost every doorway, clusters of brightly dressed young women had come to watch the spectacle. Against their drab homes, they looked like spring flowers.

  A few yards ahead of him, Hartmann watched as Zuhlsdorff unwrapped his hand and waved it towards the spectators. When he added a blown kiss, a salvo of gestures and abuse flew back in his direction. Puzzled, he turned to his friends. ‘What’s she saying?’

  Hartmann leaned forward. ‘She says that even for a German, you’ve got a tiny dick.’

  From so close, every soldier had inhaled the perfume and seen the girls’ glossy, scarlet lips. Long after they had passed, each one would remember it. In an army of teenaged virgins, Hartmann guessed, most would be reminded of their mothers. All that came to his mind was Alize.

  Over eighteen months had passed since their wedding. Somewhere right now she‘d be wearing a dress and stockings. Beneath it, he could picture her breasts and the pale curve of her belly. If there was a child nearby, his child, he couldn’t picture that. Better not to try. In any case, the memory soon dissolved.

  Ahead of them was a dusty bombed-out patch of flattened ground. Around its edge, rusting iron poked from pyramids of shattered brick. A factory, or what was left of a factory. They’d hit one of them, at least.

  In its place stood a crude open cage ringed by clouds of barbed wire. Beyond that, he could see steam rising from a sleek black locomotive at the head of a dozen carriages, maybe more.

  In the compound, there were no tents, no fires, and no signs of makeshift occupation. Over the entrance someone had hung a sign: Welcome to England. Please drive on the left.

  Beyond the gate, a dozen elderly British officers shuffled papers and prepared themselves for the next boatload. Hartmann stepped forward and a painfully thin, middle-aged man rose from a chair to greet him.

  ‘Good morning. How was the crossing? Not too sick, I hope.’ Two pips: a lieutenant; sweet-scented hair tonic and an impeccable grasp of German. ‘We find most people get their land legs back pretty quickly.’

  Not hostile; not an ordinary soldier, much too warm and well spoken for that. An intelligence officer, maybe.

  ‘Someone’s given you a bit of a pasting. One of yours? Or one of ours?’

  Anxiety swam in Hartmann’s empty belly. Fixing his eyes on the black flanks of the train, he stared forward.

  ‘No need for an answer. Purely rhetorical. Don’t suppose you’d tell me anyway.’

  All through their training, the notion of defeat – or capture – had never once been raised. No one had prepared them for questioning. To have even mentioned the possibility would have been deemed treasonable. Somewhere, unexpectedly, a sleeping grain of patriotic defiance stirred.

  ‘I’m Max Hartmann. That’s all you’re getting.’

  The officer ran his pen down a list of names, and turned a page. ‘Max Hartmann? Unterscharführer, First SS Panzer Division? Do you mind if I sit down? I’m rather tired. You all rather blur into one.’

  Clouds of steam were swirling around the train’s wheels. Two men in blue overalls had wrestled an overhead canvas tube into its boiler. At the yank of a lever, water bulged through it, hissing and foaming as it spilled across the shining metal.

  ‘I’m from Munich, if that helps. I really can’t tell you any more.’

  The lieutenant smiled. ‘It seems there’s a fellow missing from your ship.’

  A third man had clambered into the train, and the grating scrape of his shovel was followed by a soft whoosh of exploding coal dust.

  ‘Sorry about the racket. It never stops all day. Filthy old things really.’

  Hartmann’s gaze was locked on the activity around the locomotive; anything to distract himself from what he knew was coming.

  ‘Does the name Wirz mean anything to you? Heinz Wirz? Young chap? Infantryman? Just turned eighteen? I’m told you knew him.’

  ‘Told by whom?’

  ‘So you do know him, then?’

  Suddenly, Hartmann felt terribly weak. Who’d seen him? When? He remembered soldiers at the back of the ship but Wirz was fish food by then. So who else? Rosterg? Goltz? It would suit them to have a fall guy; to send out another warning. Or was it that fuck Zuhlsdorff?

  No. They wouldn’t do that. Not to one of their own. Not yet. The clown behind the desk was bluffing. He’d got no name, no witnesses, no body. Then he thought of Wirz, chewed up by the propellers. There wasn’t going to be any body.

  The lieutenant was waiting for a response. Hartmann looked down into his eyes and met sadness coming back from a face riven with deep, tired creases.

  ‘We’re asking everyone,’ said the Englishman. ‘Don’t look so worried.’

  ‘I didn’t know him. I’m sorry that I can’t help.’

  ‘That’s a pity. You know, I spent a summer in Munich once. Nineteen twenty-four. It was long after the war. I’d got out of the army and I was in a university choir. We sang songs by Schubert in the cathedral. Every day was the same. Endless glorious sunshine. Wonderful. There was a glockenspiel on the town hall. Charming little thing. We’d watch it ring every day at five. You must know it? We took a train across to Salzburg, and I stood in the room where Mozart was born.’

  Hartmann looked down at his own boots. From nowhere, a dry wind was bearing the trace of freshly mown grass and in his left toe end there was the beginning of a hole. Two world wars. The man in front of him had seen them both. And it wasn’t hatred he was transmitting; it was despair.

  ‘Do you have any idea how much I want all that back?’ asked the lieutenant.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘And how exactly is that?’

  ‘Because I was married there.’

  Behind them the train was ready. One of the engineers was wiping his blackened face on an oily, wet towel.

  ‘Where are you sending us? Am I allowed to ask that?’

  Taking his weight with an arm on the back of his chair, the officer stood. ‘In the next few hours, most of the people here will be leaving on that train and going to a prison camp. When they get there they’ll be fed and watered. They’ll even have bloody books to read. You’ll be on that train too, but – as the cohort of murdering thugs – you won’t be going to that particular holiday camp.’

  ‘I didn’t harm Wirz.’

  ‘Whatever. You will be taken from here for proper questioning, along with all your charming friends, and after that you might, or might not, find
yourself in a camp.’

  ‘May I ask you to do one thing, Lieutenant?’

  ‘No, you may not.’

  For a few seconds, the officer peered into the prisoner’s bruised face. ‘Next,’ he shouted, and Hartmann was escorted from his presence.

  After that, for once, things happened quickly.

  Inside the compound, they were searched and resprayed with disinfectant. A food table had been set up, serving mud-coloured tea which the prisoners drank while the guards marshalled long lines of men along the fencing closest to the train. Every name in every line was checked, and then checked again.

  Looking around him, Hartmann could see that his own line was the shortest; no more than a couple of dozen men and almost all of them SS. Most of them had made the journey together from the compound in France. A few yards away he could see Goltz and Rosterg, but there was no sign of Zuhlsdorff.

  ‘You won’t find him,’ mouthed Rosterg, shuffling closer.

  ‘Why not? Where the fuck is he?’

  ‘He’s made a judicious switch of identity. I’m told he’s temporarily joined that lot.’

  Alongside them, the crowd of Wehrmacht prisoners had swollen beyond the perimeter of the compound. None of them would notice a stranger – all of them were strangers – and by the time they did, neither Zuhlsdorff nor the fate of Heinz Wirz would be of interest to anyone. Among that huge chattering body of ordinary soldiers, only one thing mattered now and it wasn’t the anaemic boy with half his fingers missing.

  ‘So much for his noble sense of duty,’ Hartmann commented.

  ‘Maybe Goltz wanted him in there. Eyes and ears. I’m not sure. Ask him yourself.’

  He wouldn’t bother. Everyone knew they were bound for a camp. None of them cared where. It was a camp, and Zuhlsdorff would probably vanish into penal oblivion like the rest of them.

  For the first time in weeks, certainty had re-entered the soldiers’ lives, mixed with relief and an absurd feeling of excitement. A few hours before, these same figures had slouched green-gilled on to English soil. Now, wherever Hartmann looked, he could see contented faces. Strangers were forging instant friendships. The long hours of uneasy silence were being blown away by an upswell of happiness, rent with wolf-whistles and laughter, and lifted even higher by the fistfuls of cigarettes handed out with the tea.

  Beyond the wire, the black train was wreathed in snarling coils of steam. From his cabin, the driver stooped down to talk with two British officers. After a swift exchange, they stepped back and the engine juddered forward until the first carriage was in line with a crude gateway in the fence. Two explosive hoots of the whistle followed, and Hartmann’s line was ordered to board. For a moment, they hesitated, before responding to the command with a strut of defiance.

  Across the entire square, conversations swiftly faded. Everyone wanted to see them. A dozen rifles had been trained on the exit, and one by one the ‘black’ prisoners stepped through the fence and sharply up into their carriage.

  None of them had expected this.

  Off a narrow corridor, sliding wooden doors opened on to cushioned first class compartments, into which eight prisoners were bundled, sitting four a side, beneath meshed luggage racks and smoky glass-shaded lamps. As he sat down by a window, Hartmann caught his reflection in the bevelled wall mirror above the opposite seats. At least three weeks had elapsed since he’d last seen himself. Now there was a tramp returning his scrutiny. Only his blue eyes still shone. The rest was a grizzled catastrophe of beard and bruise.

  With a groan, he slumped back. Outside, behind the armed soldier in their corridor, he could see streams of prisoners heading for the remaining carriages. For the second time that day he was puzzled. According to the British officer, only a small number were being sent for interrogation. And yet hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers were pouring into the other carriages.

  For the first time, Hartmann took a look at his travel companions. Six were SS. The other – the man now staring serenely back at him – was wearing the greasy pullover of a German submariner.

  ‘It’s simple. At some point, we’ll stop. They’ll detach the other carriages, and everyone on this one will be taken on to wherever it is they’re taking us.’

  It made sense. Hartmann’s eyes widened. ‘You’re a mind-reader.’

  ‘It’s a trick you learn on U-boats. When you’re not allowed to speak, you learn to hear what a man’s thinking.’

  He was Josef Mertens. He was twenty years old, and back home his parents worked the fields around the rolling hills of Bickendorf where a childhood in the country had clearly imbued him with monastic calm. Behind his brown eyes there seemed to be no anger, and despite his broad muscular frame the sailor’s body language transmitted no obvious threat. Folded across his lap were the huge hands of a man who knew the land. Everything about him oozed levels of self-contentment Hartmann had believed extinct.

  All that’s missing, he thought, is a prayer book.

  ‘And now you’re thinking: why is he here?’ Like his face, the young man’s voice was gentle.

  ‘You’ve done it again. Yes I was.’ Hartmann’s eyes flicked to their companions in the compartment. ‘You can see clearly why we seven are all here. SS . . . captured in France . . . landlubbers. So spot the odd one out.’

  ‘It’s good to be a mystery.’

  Quietly, he told them he’d been a submariner for less than a year. When U-741 had been launched in Danzig the previous December, the farmer’s son had been one of its forty-nine-strong crew. A new volunteer, he’d been ranked Gefreiter, just one lowly notch up from an English able seaman, but no less desperate to destroy Allied ships than the officer-aristocrats whose eyes were pinned to the periscopes.

  For a few months, it had gone perfectly. In March they’d sunk their first warship, and, back on shore leave in Cherbourg, Mertens had gorged on schnapps for a week. By the time his hangover had gone, U-741’s luck had disappeared too.

  ‘We were down there for days when absolutely nothing happened and we’d begun to think we were invulnerable. Everyone does. Even when they got a trace on us, we always managed to escape. Then a few days ago we got sloppy.’

  While he’d been speaking, Mertens had scarcely shifted. His enormous fingers remained knotted across his thighs, and when the train engaged gear, sending a deep groan along its entire length, he seemed transfixed, indifferent to the explosive chuffs which filled the train with steam and speckled its occupants with soot.

  Once the engine had achieved a fluid rhythm, he resumed. Everyone in the compartment was listening.

  ‘It had been getting scarier for weeks and after their invasion it got worse. We kept hearing of other U-boat sinkings. We should have known better than to cruise so close to France on the surface. Anyway, we got spotted just after dawn by an English boat. August sixth it was. Not sure what type. Frigate? Corvette? The light was poor; we saw it late, and we’d barely started to dive when it hit us with a whole load of depth charges.’

  ‘But you got out?’ Hartmann was hanging on every word.

  ‘Pure luck. We weren’t deep. I was standing near the hatch. One of the explosions blew it open, and I swam to the surface.’

  ‘Any other survivors?’

  ‘The British waited. They even circled the slick for an hour. But I was the only one.’ Outside, the light through the windows flashed green. The train was galloping quickly through a wood of ancient oak.

  ‘The day you were captured. That was my birthday. I was captured that day too.’

  ‘A lot of us were,’ muttered a voice in the corner.

  ‘Many happy returns. Belatedly,’ said Mertens.

  After that, no one else spoke again for a while.

  As Hartmann gazed out over the rolling fields, the pieces fell into place. Back in Germany, they’d been reassured that their submarines were a technological miracle, light years ahead of their rivals in the sea. On their own they could win them the war, which meant that Mertens was on the train bec
ause of what he knew. Or what the British thought he might know. Poor bugger. He was probably in for a kicking.

  But there was something that still didn’t fit. U-boat crews had a reputation for being fearsomely loyal to Hitler, like the SS, except in Kriegsmarine blue, but brutality wasn’t something he could sense in this tranquil farm boy. Even so, it would be wise to be careful. It was what you were, not what you wore. And that could cut both ways, for good and for bad.

  He stood up and eased open the small sliding window. Summer scents blew in over the stinging swirl of cigarette smoke. It was a beautiful country studded with anonymous white-painted stations, the names of which he would never know. Liss. Liphook. Mousehill. Godalming. Each one rendered anonymous to protect this same landscape from men like him. Alongside each one, women worked in huge allotments. Glowing tubs of pink blossoms punctuated every platform, and the rich golden fields were peopled with spiky stacks of corn and men swinging oiled scythes.

  For Hartmann, it simply wasn’t possible to imagine a war being fought across these placid chalky hills. It seemed inconceivable that Goltz wanted the fight to go on. With a premonitory shudder he turned back to look at his dozing companions.

  From the fields, the labourers saw only a locomotive racing away from them under its own glorious cumulus of steam, but the train was like a black worm snaking towards the heart of an apple.

  As the morning dragged on, the train became insufferably hot. All communication with the other compartments was forbidden and each compartment was watched by its own armed soldier. There was no food, and only limited water drawn from jerry cans at the end of the carriage. When the prisoners wanted to urinate, they were escorted to the nearest lavatory by a guard. When they got there, they found the doors had been unscrewed and taken away. Endless delays ate at the men’s patience. From the angle of the sun, Hartmann felt sure they were heading towards London, but at times it would have been quicker to walk. At Dorking, they’d boiled outside the station for two hours, and in Reigate, clods of horse shit had been thrown through their open window.

  By early afternoon, they’d squealed to a halt in a maze of sidings. Above them they could hear transport planes and the shrill trajectory of Hurricanes. Ahead of them on the main line, a gang of men was battling to switch three sets of points. Looking down the train, Hartmann could count nine carriages, each one with faces crowded curiously at the windows. Once the railway workers had scrambled clear, the entire snake switched on to a branch line running along a deep embankment crowded with silver birch.