The Wraiths of War (13 page)

‘Do you speak English?’ I whispered, but the German soldier’s eyes were now screwed up tight as he continued to weep, and he seemed not to hear me.

I gripped his chin tightly in my muddy hand and forced his head up.

‘Open your eyes,’ I hissed, and then groped for the same words in German. ‘Offnen… offnen…’ What the fuck was the German for eyes?

But I didn’t need it. He got the message. His eyes, shimmering with tears, opened and he stared at me in stark terror.

‘Do you speak English?’ I repeated, and bared my teeth at him when he didn’t reply. ‘Answer!
Schnell!
’

He wasn’t being stubborn. He was simply too scared to speak. His lips moved, but nothing came out. I could see his face tightening with desperation as he struggled to make a sound, the flesh turning white and waxy as if the blood was draining out of him.

For fuck’s sake, don’t faint
, I thought. I smiled to try to put him at his ease, and spoke words that if I’d have been in his situation I wouldn’t have believed for a second.

‘I don’t want to hurt you. All I want are answers. Now, tell me – do you speak English?’

He nodded so vigorously that the muzzle of the gun scraped his forehead hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. He winced, and as if the sudden pain had awakened his voice, managed to whisper, ‘
Ein bisschen
… a little.’

‘A little may be enough. You understand what I’m saying?’

‘
Ja
.’

‘Okay. I’m looking for something.’ I released my grip on his face, my fingers leaving muddy streaks, and held my thumb and index finger a few inches apart. ‘A small black heart. Made of stone. About this big. You understand?’

He looked almost childishly eager to please. ‘
Ja
,
ja
.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘
Ja
.’

‘Where?’

In heavily accented German the young soldier said, ‘British soldier… he throw it. It… er…’ Carefully, evidently wishing not to antagonise me by making any sudden moves, he mimed the arc of a projectile with his right hand, which he then clapped softly into the cupped palm of his left.

‘Fell? Landed?’

‘Landed!
Ja
. Outside. Not far. This man…’ he indicated his unconscious companion with a grimace ‘…he go. Get it.’

My heart leaped. Could it really be this easy? Could the heart be in the possession of the unconscious man?

‘Does he still have it?’

The young soldier’s face fell. He was clearly sorry, albeit no doubt for his own sake, to give me disappointing news.

‘
Nein
.’ He wafted a hand. ‘Taken.’

‘Who by?’

He shrugged nervously, as if to let me know it wasn’t his fault.

‘
Kapitan
… how you say?’

‘Captain. An officer?’

‘
Ja
,
ja
. Officer.’

‘What was his name? This
Kapitan
?’

‘Heidrich.’

‘Heidrich?’ I tried out the pronunciation. ‘Kapitan Heidrich?’

The young soldier started to nod, then remembered the muzzle of my revolver was still pressed to his forehead. ‘
Ja
.’

‘And where is Kapitan Heidrich now? Where is the heart? Is it still here?’

‘
Nein
…’ Again he wafted a hand. ‘Away.’

‘He took it away?’

‘
Ja
.’

‘Shit. Where?’

The soldier turned the corners of his mouth downwards – an apologetic facial shrug. ‘Camp perhaps. This is most… like?’

‘Likely?’

‘Likely.
Ja
.’

My mind was racing. I had the sense that the heart was receding from me, that soon it would be unreachable – if it wasn’t already.

‘How far away is this camp?’ I asked.

Again that facial shrug. ‘Perhaps… ten kilometres?’

‘Ten kilometres. About six or seven miles?’

‘
Ja
,’ he said, though I suspected he had no idea what the equivalent was in miles and was agreeing simply to please me.

‘The camp is that way?’ I pointed back behind the German lines, in the opposite direction from where the British trenches lay.

‘
Ja
.’

‘There are communication lines from here to there?’

He looked puzzled at this, so I tried to indicate what I meant by drawing lines with my finger running back from the trench. ‘More trenches? Like this one? You travel through them to get to the camp?’

His face brightened with understanding. ‘Oh.
Ja
.’

‘How many men?’ I asked. ‘Between here and the camp?’

He did that facial shrug again. ‘Some. Er… not much.’

I frowned. ‘Is that the truth?’

Alarmed he said, ‘
Ja
,
ja
, is truth.’

It was going to be a tremendous risk, a ludicrous and foolhardy mission, but what choice did I have? I looked at the young soldier contemplatively. ‘I’d better go there then. Question is, what am I going to do with you?’

He seemed to understand that all right. His features seemed to sag, as if he had suddenly aged twenty years. He began to shake, and his eyes flickered upwards, towards the gun pressed against his forehead.

‘You say not hurt.’ His voice was a quavery whisper. ‘Please, please… I… I help.’

‘Relax,’ I said, but either he didn’t understand, or was too scared to register what I was saying. I raised a hand, palm out, the universal sign for
calm down
. ‘I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’m a man of my word. You understand?’

He looked at me like a frightened puppy. In the mud at our feet the dark-haired man groaned, shifted a little, then settled again. I was going to have to go, and soon, but I couldn’t leave the young soldier here to raise the alarm. Within minutes I’d have armed soldiers after me. I’d have no chance.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ I repeated, ‘but I’ll have to tie you up. Okay?’

Still he looked scared, but he gave a jerk of a nod, the muzzle scraping his skin again. I knew exactly what he was thinking. He didn’t trust me not to kill him, but his only choice was to follow my instructions and hope for the best, hope that this untrustworthy enemy would somehow, miraculously, spare his life.

‘Good lad,’ I said, and I took a step back from him, giving him room, while still levelling my revolver at his head. ‘Take off your uniform. Your jacket. And your trousers.’ I pointed at the items as I named them.

He frowned at me, troubled, unwilling. It was obvious he had understood my instructions, but was uncertain as to where this was going. There was a raw bindi-like spot on his forehead, rimmed in smeared, partly dried blood, where I had pressed the revolver against his skull.

‘I have no rope,’ I said. ‘So I must use your uniform. You understand?’

He nodded slowly, and then, even more slowly, began to unbutton his jacket.

‘
Schnell!
’ I hissed, my reassuring expression scrunching instantly into a scowl. ‘Quickly! Don’t take the piss.’

He got the message, popping open the buttons of his jacket and tugging it off in double-quick time, and then stripping off his trousers with such clumsy urgency that he almost slipped and fell in the mud. When he was standing, shivering in his long johns, I ordered him to lie on his stomach in the muddy water at the bottom of the trench, and then used his trousers to tie his legs together, his jacket to secure his arms behind his back. I also stripped off one of his stinking socks (seeing that the Germans were living in the same squalid and miserable conditions as we were was oddly heartening) and stuffed it into his mouth, securing it in place with the belt from his trousers. Then I did the same to his unconscious companion.

Before leaving I put the young soldier’s right boot back on his sockless foot, as it was bad enough leaving him lying in freezing water wearing just his underwear without having the added guilt that he might get frostbite so bad he’d lose his foot, or get his toes chewed off by rats. Then I rose to my feet and looked down on him for a moment. He looked pathetic, scared, and he was shivering with cold and fear. Even now he probably thought I was going to put a bullet in his brain. For a moment I thought about getting out my notebook and writing down his name, with the obscure intention of somehow compensating him at some point in the future. But it would have meant removing his gag in order to ask him, and I had wasted enough time already; I couldn’t afford to push my luck any further.

So in the end I simply said, ‘I’m sorry.
Auf Wiedersehen
.’

And then I left.

Notebook in one hand and revolver in the other (albeit concealed within the pocket of the German officer’s overcoat), I hurried through the communication trenches that led back from the front line to the German camp. The labyrinthine network of ditches was familiar to me because we employed a similar system on the other side of No Man’s Land. During the day and early evening the British communication trenches saw plenty of foot traffic, but at quiet times, like now, they were generally little used and therefore virtually unmanned – and I was relieved to discover, as I ploughed my way doggedly onwards, that the German trenches were no different. All the same, I knew I couldn’t take it for granted that I wouldn’t meet
anyone
on my journey. Walking miles along narrow, mud-filled ditches with heavy rounds of ammunition or pots of stew was such back-breaking, time-consuming work that there were frequent dug-outs along the way, which the ‘couriers’ could use for rest and recuperation. It wasn’t unusual for anyone tramping through the trenches, whatever the hour, to come across an individual, or perhaps a group, taking a lengthy breather – or sometimes, if the prospect of trudging all the way back to camp was too much for them, even bedding down for a night’s kip.

Even when there was nothing, or virtually nothing, to weigh you down, the trenches were a nightmare to negotiate. Each trudging step, through a quagmire of clinging mud, which often oozed up to your shins or higher, was a thigh-straining effort. When there had been a lot of rain it could sometimes take an hour or more to walk a mile. And unluckily for me, there
had
been a lot of rain recently, but no matter how bad it was I knew I couldn’t afford the ‘luxury’ of a six-hour plod. At best I had three or four hours of darkness left, and if I was going to get to the German camp before Reveille at sunrise (or whatever the German equivalent was), then I was going to have to get a shift on. Therefore, despite the fact that I was already knackered both from the crawl across No Man’s Land and the stress of the last few adrenaline-pumping hours, I forced myself not just to walk but to jog – or at least to try to maintain a half-decent pace given the fact that the mud caking my boots and sticking to their soles made my feet feel as if they were encased in cement.

As it turned out, I met only one pair of men on my journey. They were sitting hunched in a dug-out with what looked like chunks of cooked meat – possibly sausages – in one hand and tin mugs in the other. They both looked filthy and exhausted, and their eyes were half-closed as the steam from their mugs coiled around their whiskery faces. At my sudden appearance they both sat up, startled. Then one of them said something in German, albeit in a respectful rather than confrontational tone, presumably having clocked my coat. I muttered, ‘
Guten abend
,’ and hurried by without slowing, flapping my notebook in the hope they would assume I had an urgent message to deliver and couldn’t stop to chat. I had no idea what customs or protocols I might be breaking, both with my greeting and my notebook waving, but the men neither challenged nor pursued me.

I think if I’d have been in their position I wouldn’t have given my actions much notice either. Certainly from the British perspective, there was such a changeover of staff at the front line that a stranger in an officer’s coat would simply be assumed to be another new officer come to join the fun. Besides which, if the Germans were like us, they would be dull-eyed and dull-witted through boredom, lack of sleep, the dreadful conditions and the sheer exhaustion that followed periods of extreme stress. Such a combination tended to lead you to lower your guard, accept things at face value. It would never have occurred to me to think that a British officer could in reality be a German soldier who had crawled across No Man’s Land to undertake a private mission which involved him journeying deep into enemy territory. Such a thing just didn’t and wouldn’t happen. No soldier would be crazy enough to do something like that – not even the crazy ones.

Maybe because I was so strung out, I started to giggle at that thought. And I kept on giggling intermittently, until, after what felt like a good two hours since I had left the young soldier and his companion trussed-up in the mud, the muddy walls flanking me gradually began to get lower – or, perhaps more accurately, the ground beneath my feet started to rise like a slope or ramp. I was so shattered by this point that I had to bend forward at the waist and clutch my thighs to keep going. As I slowly ascended, the muscles in my legs not just protesting but screaming hotly at the extra effort, I felt like a miner emerging into the light after spending days underground.

Not that it
was
light, mind you. If it had been I’d have been screwed. Reaching the top of the ‘ramp’ I found myself in an open field looking down from the top of a gradual slope at a sweep of countryside below. The vast night sky that seemed to fill eighty per cent of my vision was so awash with stars that tilting back my head to look up at them made me feel dizzy. The effulgence above only made the earth below seem blacker, so much so that it was hard to pick out details. There appeared to be a clump of woodland about half a mile directly ahead of me, to the right of which was a cluster of what looked like buildings, tents and vehicles that I guessed was the German camp. A few lights were glowing from somewhere within it, but they were by necessity sparse and dim. If the German camp was like ours I knew it would be makeshift, its perimeter fencing perfunctory at best. With all those miles of trenches between the camp and the Allied forces, there was no need for high security. The danger came not from enemy raids, but from bombs dropped by enemy aircraft.