A Kiss for the Enemy (44 page)

‘Do you think we could find an outhouse, some roof or other? It's rather tempting not to step out for the woods in this downpour.' The shop, the unaccustomed shelter had given them an appetite for cover. Their previous night's refuge was an hour's march away, in the wrong direction. Robert developed the theme.

‘If we're going to take a train we could do it here. The first one we see. Get clear of the place. Then we could change trains at some big place and catch something going west.'

‘That means going north, to Hanover.'

‘Or south to somewhere else. Trains through any big station are bound to be unpredictable because of air raids.'

‘I agree. Let's take the first train to anywhere that gets us clear of Villingen. Which will probably now mean first thing in the morning.' The woman in the shop had looked at them curiously. She had seemed puzzled at their explanations, despite the frequency with which foreign workers could be found travelling throughout the Reich. Anthony's imagination was always vivid. Was she at that exact moment talking to the local policeman (a friend, Anthony explained to himself morbidly, a frequent visitor) –

‘I had two young fellows in here this afternoon. Two Dutchmen – on their way to a new job in the Ruhr. Engineers or something. Said they'd been turned off a train in Hanover and couldn't get another till tomorrow, so were looking round the neighbourhood. Sounds odd, doesn't it? In the middle of a war! And why come to Villingen? It's not a beauty spot!'

And the policeman would be responding, importantly,

‘You are right to tell me all this!' And he would step off sharply to alert the police station and ‘the usual authorities'. Perhaps it would be best, after all, to make haste to the woods. They walked on as the rain came down harder. Villingen straggled. They had thought to be leaving it but instead seemed to be approaching its oldest quarter. It was close on six o'clock.

‘Look at that!'

To their left in the failing light was Villingen railway station. They were surprised by its size. It seemed to have an extensive goods yard. They remembered the warm response of the woman in the shop to any implication that Villingen was an insignificant place. Villingen had industry, a busy population. The railway station matched it.

It also, they soon discovered, had a small waiting room. Dimmed bulbs lit a number of benches. An ancient, uniformed figure was moving between them. There seemed to be no passengers. Perhaps the last train had left Villingen.

But the waiting room looked tempting. There was no slackening in the rain, Anthony marched up to the aged official and addressed him with confident respect.

‘We are two Dutch workmen,
Herr Stationsvorsteher
, we have to catch a train early in the morning –'

Anthony doubted whether the old man deserved the dignity of stationmaster which he had ascribed to him but it did not seem to go amiss.

‘We are engineers. Can we rest on the benches here until morning? We have nowhere in Villingen to go.'

‘A train early in the morning?' said the old man. He looked shrunken and slow but his uniform of blue and gold was impeccable, his pride in Villingen station clear from his bearing. He looked at Anthony and Robert frowning, but Anthony thought that the frown was more of concern at his own difficulty with unpredictable events than suspicion of his visitors. ‘Early
in the morning? That must be the Kassel train, the southbound train. It stops here at 5 o'clock. It stops at every station.'

‘Exactly! It is that train we have to catch.'

‘You can sleep on the benches here,' said the old man graciously. ‘There will be nobody here until shortly before the arrival of the train from Hanover. Your train. But the room will be locked. You will be locked in. And the lights, of course, will be out, except for one bulb over there in the corner.'

They thanked him warmly. ‘It does stop at every stop, that is right?' said Anthony.

‘Every stop. For an express you would have to go north to Hanover. Your train stops all along the line –' he reeled the stations off. They bowed their gratitude and the old man moved away, raising his hand in salutation and farewell.

The first bomb fell at twenty minutes past four in the morning. Robert and Anthony simultaneously heard the screech of bombs and the thunder of gunfire, rolled off their benches and threw themselves violently to the floor, hitting it as the explosion deafened them. Dog-tired, neither had heard the alarm.

There followed a sequence of crashes, and the rumble of falling masonry. The station was lit by the flames of fires. As they lay on the waiting room floor Anthony found himself trembling. He was ashamed of his reaction to an air raid, deriving from 1940, but he could not help it. He had grown almost accustomed to shelling, but the familiar rush and scream of a descending bomb brought sweat. Robert seemed unmoved. They were, it appeared, still alone in the waiting room.

‘I suppose they're going for the factory. Let's hope they're accurate.' Anthony risked a muttered sentence in English.

‘Perhaps it's a railway junction or vital goods yard!' Robert grinned in the darkness. He had got to his feet and was standing at the door which opened towards the road they had walked along. The door was glass-panelled and barred.

‘I'd say they must be hitting those houses we saw opposite the factory. Burning like hell. It's hard to tell but –'

‘DOWN!'

Anthony saw Robert's figure framed against the night sky,
upright, unmoved. Next moment there was a crack like a thunderclap and the sound of glass smashing and splintering. A great rush of air swept the waiting room. The one dimmed bulb was extinguished and the place was lit by flames alone. All windows had been simultaneously blown in.

‘Are you all right?' Anthony heard Robert shout. It was, he thought with a fleeting twinge of resentment, typical that Robert, who had been standing and by all the rules more vulnerable, should have been the first with a solicitous enquiry.

‘
Schweig du, Dummkopf
!' he yelled. The station staff would soon be on the scene and they had best not find two British officers discussing in English the exploits of the Royal Air Force.

‘Damn! Damn, Damn, Damn!'

Robert moved swiftly to him.

‘Anthony, your leg!'

‘It must have been a bit of flying glass. Nothing much.' Blood was soaking fast into his left-hand trouser, high up. He felt little. Robert put an arm round him. They were whispering, although the roar of fires and the high-pitched drumming of anti-aircraft gunfire made it unnecessary.

‘Sit down. I've got my torch.' He knelt by Anthony.

‘They seem to be going back to England, thank God!' It was true that no bombs sounded to have fallen in the minute that had elapsed since the windows splintered and flew.

‘Let's have a look.'

Anthony could still feel little. He spoke softly and urgently.

‘Robert, listen. Nobody must see this. They'd haul me off to a dressing station, first aid post, whatever they have here. They'd find my tally –'

An escaping prisoner always carried his tally, his prisoner of war identity disc. In the last resort it was supposed to be his salvation. Escaping prisoners of war could hope to be treated as such. Unidentified strangers masquerading as foreign workmen could expect to be dealt with as spies. Jan Vogt's papers would not stand expert inspection. Gestapo inspection.

‘We'd both be done for. We must catch that train. It doesn't matter where it goes. We'll take tickets to Kassel. We must get clear of this place.'

‘Can you walk?'

‘I think so.' But he knew that he was bleeding freely. He felt giddy. He made a brave attempt to stand. Not bad. They each had a small medical pack in the rucksack and Robert produced it.

Anthony said – ‘I'll keep a look out. They must
not
find I'm hit. They're too damned conscientious.' He lowered his trousers. He tried to say something about the idiocy of being hit three times in the legs in one war, but a wave of nausea hit him and he couldn't attempt the feeble joke.

There was a great deal of blood. Robert worked efficiently, applying a field dressing to the outside of the upper thigh where the wound was apparent. Anthony gasped at the pain. He could feel it now all right.

‘Morphia?'

‘No, I can cope.' He didn't dare dull the senses further. Thank God Robert was exceptionally deft.

‘You'll have to try putting weight on it, old boy. We've got to find out what we can do.'

At that moment, there was a rattling at the door and a loud call. They recognized the deep tones of their friend of the previous evening.

‘My windows! My windows! Are you safe, you two Dutchmen, both of you?'

Anthony was pulling up his trousers. The pain was now excruciating. The old man was picking his way across the waiting room through broken glass. There was dust everywhere. He was unlikely to move fast, but he had a torch and he would see blood.

‘Ah, the swine! Most of the bombs hit the factory, and Rosendorf next to it! The swine!'

‘Will the Kassel train come?' said Anthony in as level a voice as he could manage. The old man peered at him irritably.

‘One cannot know for certain. If they attacked Hanover –'

His eyes and torch went to the floor.

‘What's that? You were hit?'

‘A bit of glass scratched me. It's nothing.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Quite sure,
Herr Stationsvorsteher
.'

The old man nodded, relieved. He shuffled off and they heard him unlock the door to the platform. After a little he
brought a lamp and hung it in a corner. They sat down again on the bench in the near-total darkness. Five minutes later two other travellers appeared, exclaiming loudly at the broken glass, the absence of windows.

‘I think,' murmured Robert, ‘we'd better make ourselves scarce till the train comes.' Anthony nodded. The pain in his thigh was throbbing and he dreaded movement but they needed to distance themselves from fellow passengers. It had, he thought, looked a clean wound and clearly it hadn't broken a bone or, he supposed, cut any nerve. And as the bleeding seemed to have stopped, he presumed it had missed a principal artery. But he felt as if he could only walk a few yards. With Robert's unobtrusive help in the darkness he stumbled on to the platform and they found a merciful bench at the far end. And there Anthony sat in silence as a long, cold hour passed and as he made up his mind what he had to do. But the time for telling Robert was not yet.

The Kassel train was only seventy-five minutes late at Villingen. Robert had bought tickets for Kassel, leaving it open for them to decide how far actually to travel.

‘We must get clear of this place,' Anthony had urged.

It might be best to go a short distance and then change trains and travel north again, go to Hanover where surely there would be a direct westbound train.

Robert helped Anthony aboard. He looked, Anthony could see in the cold half-light of a November dawn, more anxious than at any time since escaping. Before they mounted the train he whispered –

‘Old boy, I really think – you've got to survive, we know the risks and all that, but I really think you ought to get to a doctor.'

‘Quiet!' They found wooden seats beside each other as the train puffed slowly southward.

‘We'll be unlucky to get a search. Small, workmen's train, early, stops everywhere.' Anthony was muttering to keep his own spirits up. His head was aching and he supposed that soon fever would set in. It grew lighter.

The train stopped at a station every few miles. They sat in
silence. One or two old men got in, with a gruff ‘
Tag
,' and settled in various corners. It was still possible to talk – to murmur softly. Anthony's watch showed that they had travelled for two hours from Villingen. He touched Robert's sleeve.

‘How far do you think we've come?'

‘We're moving very slowly. Forty miles? Not more.' Neither wished to evoke conversation by looking at maps or appearing uncertain.

‘Yes, forty miles perhaps. I don't think we aroused enough suspicion in Villingen to –' He gasped suddenly. Pain shot through his thigh like a white-hot rapier.

‘Listen Robert. Very carefully.'

Muttering, still holding Robert's sleeve tightly, Anthony told him the bitter truth. He, Anthony, could not go on. He knew his wound must have proper medical attention, and soon. There was no hope of getting that and evading detection.

‘I'll try, of course. Dutch workman bombed and all that. But we both know it won't work. Pretty soon I'll be rumbled.'

Robert was silent. He knew that it was so. Anthony was whispering still, urgently.

‘The important thing is to separate. There's no reason why you can't make it on your own. Your German's all right. Your leg's holding up well. Make for the Ruhr in small trains, changing as often as you can. Take most of my money as well as yours. Get out before you get into the Ruhr itself and start walking towards Holland. Then hope for the best. The war seems to have settled down on the Dutch-German border.'

‘I'm not going to leave you.'

‘Yes, you are. You've got a sporting chance. I've got none. The essential thing now is to separate. I'll try to lie low long enough to keep them off your scent. If I can.'

‘I'd really rather –'

‘Oh, for God's sake,' said Anthony, hitting him where he knew he could hurt, ‘don't act as if you're windy of being on your own! I'm going to get out at the next station. Keep travelling. And good luck.' He did not look at Robert again, and was unsure exactly how he himself got off the train and limped away from the platform of a little station, five minutes later. It was a small place and at ten minutes to eight on a
wintry morning there was, by some miracle, no attempt to cross-examine him on why a ticket to Kassel had been so wastefully misused. Every step a torment, he moved slowly away from the station. He had forgotten, in his pain and preoccupation, to notice the station sign and had no idea where he was. A café would soon be open:
ersatz
coffee, but hot. Then – he could not think far ahead. Suspicion might destroy him at any minute now. But every minute carried Robert a little further down the line.