A Kiss for the Enemy (54 page)

‘Perhaps so,' agreed Toni. The Colonel suddenly seemed indistinct and remote. Toni felt sweat on his face, and put everything he could still command into remaining upright.

‘Pray God,' he was conscious of thinking, ‘that he doesn't light a cigarette.'

The Colonel lit a cigarette, reeking, pungent. He opened a new line of persuasion. He seemed to consider, as if puzzled.

‘Do you like solitary confinement, Rudberg? You know it's been ordered for you so-called General Staff Officers. And there are no instructions to alter this – whatever the world situation. It will simply continue. Would you not prefer different treatment?' Toni tried to make out the outlines of the Colonel's face. It was becoming blurred again.

‘There are courses of instruction,' said the Colonel. ‘There is an anti-Fascist school. You could study. You would find it very interesting.'

Toni collapsed at that moment. He fell heavily to the floor of the wooden hut. A handful of snow was slapped in his face to revive him and he soon found himself again plodding feebly under escort towards the compound holding his own cell, through deep snow with aching limbs unaccustomed to movement, face exposed to the icy malice of the east wind.

‘I'm delighted – what wonderful news, Mrs Marvell.'

It was a poor telephone line and necessary to shout most sentences twice. Robert Anderson was, indeed, delighted. The Marvells had received a letter from Anthony. It was the last day of February. The letter had arrived with commendable speed, dated 19th of the month.

‘Of course he can't say much but at least it means that he's alive, he's in a camp somewhere. As you know, dear Robert, when you got back and came here and told us all about it at the beginning of January we couldn't help fearing that something ghastly had happened to him after you parted.'

‘I know. And you know how much I hated leaving him.'

‘Thank Heavens you
did
leave him! Still, it's been a bad two months! I expect the dear boy gave himself up and was put in punishment cells, as you told us would happen. And couldn't write! Brutes, aren't they! But still, he's alive, and it won't be long now, we're sure of it. We'll tell you if we hear again.'

‘Please do. I'm going back to the other side again quite soon, you know.'

‘My dear,
not
going back already!'

‘I want to. Apparently they need people with legal training to join the War Crimes Commission, which will be functioning in the occupied territory once we move into Germany.'

‘It doesn't sound a pleasant job, Robert.'

‘Pleasant – no, certainly not. But I think it may be worth doing. I've had five weeks' leave, you know, and I'm disgustingly fit again.' He arranged to spend a night at Bargate the following weekend.

That Saturday, after dinner in their small sitting room upstairs (Bargate had been abandoned by Americans but was still for the most part under dust sheets) John Marvell said,

‘Well, Robert, so you're going to be one of our avenging angels!'

Robert did not particularly relish the description.

‘I hope it's going to be better than vengeance. Crimes have been committed – horrible crimes. I don't think that's in dispute.'

‘Probably not,' said John, ‘but I doubt if the victors are the best people to try the perpetrators. When one thinks about the Russian front – about what the Soviets have done to people in their power – one's gorge rises at the idea of them sitting in judgement on anyone. For them, if not for us, it will be a matter of simple revenge.'

Robert thought it best to change the subject. His somewhat Puritan temperament was disturbed by the feeling that moral fervour might seem close to humbug in John Marvell's eyes. He said, with some diffidence,

‘I suppose you've heard nothing of your daughter? Of Marcia? I know what a worry it's been, the whole thing.' Robert had met Marcia often in the old days, Oxford days, London days. He found her fascinating. How long ago it seemed!

Hilda stitched away at her needlework. John said, ‘Yes, a worry all the time, naturally. But she'll survive. I've always had complete faith that she'll survive. Marcia will have done right in her own eyes, however hard it has been, and will be, to understand it.'

Hilda said, ‘And now Anthony's survived, too. We're very lucky, in a way.'

Oflag VI prisoners' trek to the east began on the last day of February, 1945, the day Anthony's letter reached Bargate. There was no formal warning beyond the announcement that all prisoners would parade next day, with their authorized belongings for ‘a routine move'. Some of this move would be performed on foot, most by train. Enquiries of the camp guards – with whom, as in Oflag XXXIII, relationships had been established varying from tolerant detestation to corrupt geniality – produced no information. They had, it was clear, none to give, were ignorant and fearful of their own future. It seemed
that most if not all of the staff was to accompany the prisoners. It also seemed that, at any rate as an Officers' Prison Camp, Oflag VI was closing down and reopening, name, staff and all, in a new place. This was a migration.

‘Our chaps will be across the Rhine in a few weeks and here soon after,' said one of Anthony's messmates confidently. As in all camps there were plenty of illicit wireless sets and news on the progress of the war was as good as Allied communiqués permitted. The prisoners were comfortably aware that they were significantly better informed than their captors. They did not, however, know what their captors planned for them. ‘Are we going east, Fritz?' Every guard was bombarded with the same question that day. The answer, invariably was a sour shrug of the shoulders. Yet where else could they go? The Russian offensive seemed to have come to a halt in East Prussia, in Silesia, on the Austrian border. Presumably the next heave would take it to Berlin, to the Elbe, to the heart of Europe. Meanwhile, within the shrinking confines of the Reich, there was more room to the east than in the west. But not much.

‘They'll want to keep us as bargaining counters as long as possible,' said Matheson, a lugubrious Scot from Dornoch who played a useful part in camp life, being so pessimistic in all circumstances that his fellow prisoners found it essential to contradict him by voicing exaggerated hopes and thus actually sometimes felt them.

‘They'll not want us to be liberated if they can hang on to us,' Matheson said sadly. ‘We're cards in their hand. We'll be going east.'

‘How strong a card in Hitler's hand do you reckon you are, Jock? Mightn't he have other preoccupations, with half Germany lost and the rest going shortly?' But they knew he must be right. They could not be sent west, with the Allies now closing up to the Rhine: while in the south it sounded as if the Americans had already punched a hole into the Palatinate, and presumably would soon be advancing on Bavaria. To the east the move must surely be: although by now it could not possibly be for far.

And the journey, in bitter March weather, turned out to be to a camp in Saxony, a pleasant enough place when the weather improved, secluded in woods on the borders of Silesia. The
prisoners marched for fourteen painful miles and were then packed into an inadequate number of bitterly cold railway carriages for a journey which took fourteen hours to cover, Anthony reckoned, only some two hundred miles. The new camp was now to be given the same title as the old, ‘Oflag VI', although it already existed as a temporary officers' camp and was overcrowded, swelled by intakes from other camps, evacuated like themselves before the advancing tide of Germany's foes. Colonel Bressler, moving with them, was Commandant.

Food, like space, was desperately short – a consequence, all recognized, of the breakdown of the transportation services of the Reich. Red Cross parcels, those blessed alleviators of hunger, had now, it seemed, ceased to arrive. The end, they all knew, could not be far away but they did not know in what shape they would be when it came. The camp took familiar form – the same regular rows of wooden huts, the same German guard compound, the same inner and outer perimeter wires, the same watch towers. But here was no talk of escape – that was all done with. Nerves were increasingly frayed as hunger bit, as men became more querulous, as all waited for others to exert themselves and finish the war.

When first brought back to Oflag VI Anthony had been sentenced to six weeks in the punishment cells. His punishment was at first mitigated by admission to the camp hospital, to recover from the attentions of Pieck and Schwede, and from a reopened thigh wound. Then the sentence was held in suspension for the move to Saxony. On arrival there he was interviewed by Bressler and told his sentence would again be suspended.

‘Any indiscipline, any reports of improper behaviour, Captain Marvell, and you will immediately be confined – to carry out the full period of your punishment, added to any further sentence which it might be my duty to impose.'

Bressler had looked at Anthony over the top of his spectacles. His voice, as ever, seemed to boom from somewhere half-way down his chest. Behind the pebble glasses Anthony fancied he saw a glint of amusement. Who would be imprisoning whom at the end of Anthony's nominal sentence? Anthony doubted whether Bressler had the slightest illusions. He looked at the Commandant with respect and liking. The man had saved him.

The weeks dragged on, weeks of boredom mingled with rumour, but marked for all by hunger, with the feebleness and irritation it engendered. Small jealousies and resentments had always loomed large in prison. Now they threatened to become insupportable.

Meanwhile more evident daily was the terror of the German guards as news – filtered news, censored, born of rumour, but vivid and gathered with fearful eagerness – reached them of a renewed Soviet offensive.

‘These lads are scared stiff of the Russkies,' said Matheson with relish. ‘They know what's coming to them!'

Fritz – at least one of the guards was called or nicknamed Fritz in every camp – was a local man, a Saxon. Fritz was also loquacious and well-informed – a Hermann, thought Anthony, with something like nostalgia for Oflag XXXIII and its well-ordered, decently nourished existence. Fritz took grisly pleasure in relating to the prisoners the stories rife in Saxony as the rumours from the Front grew ever worse and the population of the neighbouring villages shivered and waited. They waited with mounting panic for the Red Army to break through the fragile screen of the Wehrmacht: a screen assisted, at its last gasp, by
Volksgrenadier
formations, groups of the elderly and the very young, enrolled under threat of instant execution, pitifully equipped with an armband and a rifle, shown on maps at the Führer's Headquarters as battalions and divisions. All knew that a mass flight westward was the only way to avoid a frightful fate: but any movement of the population had been expressly forbidden, and Party officials had been armed with draconian powers to prevent it. In the neighbourhood of Oflag VI, Fritz told them, stories were rife of what would happen when the Red Army arrived. Despite the regulations some refugees had slipped westward and the tales they told made folk shudder.

‘Ten, twenty, thirty fellows will rape a woman. Then they'll shoot her if she's no good for any more. Or, if it's a Panzer unit, they often loop a rope round her, attach it to a tank and drive along with her bumping behind until she's finished. It seems they like that, it amuses them.'

‘What about the men, Fritz?'

Fritz, with a certain show of delicacy, said that men – young men, boys – were also sexually assaulted and murdered if the inclination took their enemies which it often did.

‘And anyone else is likely to be shot. Straight away. And of course it's not only the girls that are treated like that. It's old women, children, the lot.'

‘Well, Fritz,' someone remarked, ‘look what you did to them!'

But, in fact, the prisoners in Oflag VI were shaken by what they heard. Fritz would grunt and shrug his shoulders. ‘Who had done what, and when?' he said to himself, uneasy and uncertain. Anthony listened to Fritz's tales, thought about the fate of Europe and the end of the war as sharply as any of them. Every reflection, general or personal, now sickened him.

He tried to accustom his mind to the worst on the subject of Anna. He told himself every day that she must have been executed – executed because of his own errors. Those brutes would have grabbed her immediately they knew he had been at Schloss Langenbach. It was his foolishness that had betrayed her. He felt little elation at the prospect of liberation, and small concern at the imminence, it seemed, of Allied victory.
They
would not have been scrupulous about getting proof of Anna's involvement.
They
would not have been slow in inflicting the penalty. No Allied advance would be likely to help Anna. Fritz told them that the Anglo-American air raids were worse than ever, turning whole cities into deserts. No air raid was likely to liberate Anna. It might be merciful if she died in one, but it was unlikely. From every direction death and horror threatened each of the people he loved, or had already overtaken them.

‘Marvell's pretty odd, these days, he's got worse,' his companions would murmur to each other. Anthony had no close friends from earlier times in Oflag VI. He made no attempt to discover congenial spirits. His remoteness was resented here and there. ‘Toffee-nosed bugger' one or two muttered. But the prisoners had other concerns. They were, on the whole, tolerant.

‘Marvell had a bad time after recapture, I gather. He was wounded in an air raid when on the run, lay up for a long
while, then got knocked about by Gestapo thugs. He doesn't want to talk about it.'

He didn't want to talk about it. It was not important to anybody. There were, in this camp, no plans for escape, no long-term studies, projects or entertainments for which a man might expect to be enlisted. Everybody was waiting, bored, discontented, anxious for whatever the ultimate defeat of Germany might bring. One solitary, more or less, made little difference.