Black Camp 21 E-Book

Bill Jones

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 595

Beschreibung

SHORTLISED FOR THE MCILVANNEY SCOTTISH CRIME DEBUT PRIZE All over Britain, POW camps are filling up with defeated German soldiers. Every day, thousands more pour in on ships from France. But only the most dangerous are sent to Camp 21 – 'black' prisoners – SS diehards who've sworn death before surrender. Nothing will stop their war, unless it's a bullet. As one fanatic plots a mass breakout and glorious march on London, Max Hartmann dreams of the oath he pledged to the teenage bride he scarcely knows and the child he's never met. Where do his loyalties really lie? To Hitler or to the life he left behind in the bombed ruins of his homeland? Beneath the wintry mountains, in the hell of Black Camp 21, suspicion and fear swirl around like the endless snow.  And while the Reich crumbles – and his brutal companions plan their assault – Max's toughest battle is only just beginning. Inspired by terrifying actual events, Black Camp 21 takes readers on a gut-wrenching journey from the battlefields of France to its shocking climax in a camp which still stands today.

Leseprobe

BLACK CAMP 21

Bill Jones started his career as a print journalist, before establishing himself at Granada Television in Manchester as a documentary filmmaker. During a television career spanning thirty years he produced multi-award-winning programmes for ITV, BBC, Channel 4, PBS, National Geographic, Discovery, Sky and numerous other international channels. His films have been presented by, among others, Billy Connolly, Martin Clunes, Sir Trevor McDonald and Joanna Lumley.

In 2011 he wrote his first book, The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn’t Stop (Mainstream), which won Best New Writer at the 2012 British Sports Book Awards and was runner-up in the William Hill Awards. His second book, Alone: The Triumph and Tragedy of John Curry (Bloomsbury), was published in 2014, winning the Outstanding Writing award at the British Sports Book Awards, and a second shortlisting for the William Hill Awards. Both books are currently in development as feature films.

Born in Bridlington, Bill now lives in Ampleforth, North Yorkshire. Black Camp 21 is his first novel.

BLACK CAMP 21

Bill Jones

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

1

Copyright © Bill Jones 2018

The right of Bill Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978 1 84697 460 1

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 062 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset by 3btype.com

After D-Day, in June 1944, almost every able-bodied Allied soldier was fighting overseas. Within a few weeks of the invasion, over 250,000 war-hardened German POWs had been sent back to camps in Britain.

The prisoners were well fed and their guards were often a mixture of reservists, volunteers and policemen. Few of the camps were ready – most were still under construction – and the flood of men moved quickly from chaos to crisis.

Around 70,000 of the Germans had been classified by their captors as ‘black’ prisoners. These were SS fanatics, usually very young, who had sworn to fight on until death. For them the war was far from over. It was only just beginning.

During the latter months of 1944, the most dangerous ‘blacks’ were transported north to the Highlands of Scotland, to a camp which still stands today on the edge of the village of Comrie, exactly as it was.

It became known as Black Camp 21, and the truly shocking events that climaxed there in December 1944 provided the inspiration for this story.

For Kay – without whom, nothing.

Official Memorandum

From:

The Office of the Prison Governor

To:

Various

I wish to report that today, in accordance with the verdict of the Military Court (12/7/1945), we have carried out the execution of five German prisoners. Commencing at 9 a.m. – at half-hourly intervals – the men were hanged at His Majesty’s Prison of Pentonville by the state executioner, Mr Albert Pierrepoint. Each death was officially witnessed by myself, the prison chaplain and a qualified medical practitioner. In addition, there was a single (female) member of military intelligence in attendance. However, for obvious security reasons, I have omitted all names (including my own) from this memorandum.

There were only two incidents of note to report. Prisoner A – the first to be executed – was seen to spit in the chaplain’s face, following which he was heard to shout his allegiance to Adolf Hitler before the necessary restraints could be applied. Prisoner E – the last to die – requested a very short private conversation with the solitary female witness before the court’s judgement was executed. Given his extreme state of agitation, this permission was granted. Prisoners B, C and D went to their deaths in silence. Each of the condemned chose not to engage with the chaplain’s formal blessing.

Following pronouncement of death, the five men – aged between 19 and 23 – were buried in an unmarked prison plot. As I understand it, there are no plans for the bodies to be returned to Germany.

Dated this 6th day of October 1945

1

6 August 1944near Falaise, northern France

03:15 hours

There was no way to be sure, but tomorrow, thought Hartmann, it will be my birthday.

To keep himself amused, he tried to work it out, counting back to the last day when he’d known where he was. Things had changed so quickly.

Two months before, the men still celebrated their birthdays, necking stolen champagne from thick green bottles, sleeping off their hangovers under the stars.

Now, as he lay sleepless under his sludge-dripping tank, deep within another nameless wood, absolutely nothing was certain. Even if he was out by a few days, it didn’t matter. Most of the people he’d partied with were already dead, and the ones who still breathed barely spoke.

Still, if it was his birthday – and if he had a wish – he knew what he wanted.

The rest of them could bitch about hunger, making themselves puke with plundered fruit, or tossing hand grenades at runaway chickens. Hunger he could abide. Russia had taught him that. If he could be guaranteed just one thing – even for a single minute – he’d happily forgo his potato ration, even his precious sliver of sausage.

Silence was the thing. Silence was what Hartmann craved most – next to certainty – and only the dead were guaranteed both.

War was noise; and the noises were universally terrible. Hidden by the black canopy of oak above his shelter, shoals of enemy bombers droned in from the sea. Futile slices of tracer fire chased after them, followed by the occasional half-hearted squirt of a machine gun, while in every direction hot steel cooled and clanked like an invisible plague of robotic crickets.

Silhouetted by pools of paraffin light, he could make out tank crews repairing tracks and patching shattered sumps, and in the strange summer darkness every clunk and curse rang clear.

Nothing Hartmann did could shut it out. However tightly he buried his head in his arms, the sounds were still there. If his calculations were right – and if he slept – he would wake up a year older, but the noise would still be there. And by daylight it was always much worse.

The ear-shattering rumble of his Tiger; the screaming voices on his radio; the crashing trees and the horses galloping between crackling hedgerows; the rising whine of approaching fighter planes. The shells ripping through armour, followed by the pitiful sound of comrades burning.

For days – for ever, it seemed – they had been stumbling, leaderless, back towards Germany.

For the generals there was always some kind of escape. They could flee into the forest with their cyanide pills and their pistols. The rest of them were stuck with their garbled orders and their mantras.

Fight to the last man. That’s what they’d always been told. Since they were kids, the same instruction: to the death.

Fight until the diesel runs out would have been smarter.

In the black void beneath his tank, Hartmann reached out a hand until he could feel its slick underbelly. Soon the fuel would be gone. Another two days; three at most.

He tried again to work out what the date might be, inching back closer in his mind to a day when he knew exactly what he’d been doing. Mid-May. Yes. He remembered it now. A good day. A happy day.

Everything had been certain then, when the spring roasted the pantiled rooftops, lighting up fields of apple blossom in a world he felt he owned, which he had risked his life to win.

It had been Koenig’s turn for a birthday, and the two of them had hijacked an open-topped staff car, driving it out along deserted roads to the Normandy coast near Arromanches. Hartmann had taken the wheel, allowing his friend to grin and yodel at the village girls.

‘You’re twenty now. Behave yourself.’

But Koenig had just laughed and shouted louder. ‘You’re not going to stop the car anyway,’ he yelled. ‘What does it matter?’

Both had worn their laundered uniforms: grey caps with glossy black peaks and double-winged eagles; drab slate-coloured tunics enlivened by a double lightning bolt gleaming against their stiff black collars.

Above the speeding black Mercedes, a lone gull looked down on the two men.

Each of them could smell the sea and sensed from the knotty swept-back hedgerows that they were near. Since neither had ever seen it before, Hartmann’s pulse drove him and them faster. All this was their land now, reawakening from its late frosts under their red flag; their swastika; their Führer.

Koenig, as always, had seemed absurdly high-spirited. Away from the front, his hair had thickened and the golden childhood mop Hartmann had always envied now riffled in a chill northerly wind.

‘You’re wearing the medal, Erich.’

Koenig threw his head back and roared. ‘I’m a hero. I’m a hero.’

‘Sure you’re a hero. But can you swim?’

When the road ran out, they parked, looking out in wonder across the grey waters of the Channel.

Hartmann had been the first down on to the sand, ripping off his boots and wading deep into the surf. Behind him, Koenig had loitered in the dunes, collecting sticks for a fire.

To the east and west, a smooth plain of sand stretched unbroken to a distant point where it seemed to fracture along its own blue horizon.

Because the tide was low, line upon line of weed-matted wooden breakwaters had been exposed, marching in from the sea. When Hartmann saw them, he turned back.

‘They look like men, Erich. They look like soldiers.’

But Koenig wasn’t listening. Up on the cliff edge, a pile of bleached driftwood was already burning strongly in the dry wind. From the car boot, he’d pulled a blanket, a hamper, two full bottles of schnapps, and a gramophone.

‘It’s Charlie and his Orchestra,’ he bellowed. ‘Get your arse up here, Max, and let’s dance.’

The sounds of a swing band drifted towards Hartmann in dreamy, disjointed phrases. Ahead of him, across a frigid expanse of sea, he could make out the English coastline. Surely they will never come, he thought.

Only a few hours earlier they’d driven behind a convoy of German sappers heading happily towards the coast, and up here, hidden within the marram grass, fresh concrete pillboxes were going up every day. Soon every grain of sand would be covered by a machine gun. From Kraków to Cherbourg, Hitler was building an impregnable fortress; a new frontier where nothing could ever die but the light.

Turning away from his thoughts, stirred by the icy water around his toes, Hartmann smiled. Above him on the ridge, silhouetted by orange flames, his friend was dancing alone.

Sometimes, it was true, Koenig scared him; most of the time, really, if he was honest. No one he’d ever known was possessed of such certainties, or such belief. And yet no one he knew was so joyously reckless either.

‘I’ve always been too old,’ he muttered into the breeze before stumbling up the cliff for his first waltz of the afternoon.

It hadn’t taken much. Neither of them had tasted alcohol for months and the schnapps quickly unravelled them. To the hissing melody of illicit jazz, Hartmann swayed in his underpants while his salt-wet trousers steamed on a branch.

‘May I have this dance?’ Koenig whispered with a theatrical flourish. ‘Or are you here with another man?’

Locked together for an hour, the pair had quick-stepped and tangoed. As the flames shrank to embers they slumped with their backs against a solitary tree and peered out over the deserted strand.

‘Happy birthday, darling,’ said Hartmann. There was a woozy slur in his voice.

‘Why, thank you,’ Koenig replied. ‘It’s been a wonderful evening.’

For a minute or two, neither could speak through the laughter. When they stopped, an awkward silence hung in the space between them.

Over two years lay between this and their last proper meeting. Away in the west, thick clouds were threatening, and as the breeze stiffened, red sparks peppered the gloom.

‘You should move your trousers, Max. They’ll burn,’ Koenig whispered.

Slowly, Hartmann stood up and pulled them back on. It was growing cold and the booze was souring in their bellies. Since they’d arrived, Koenig had removed only his cap, placing it carefully beyond danger. Now, as the wind refreshed the flames, even the medal on his chest seemed to be burning, and when Hartmann bent down to touch it, it was warm.

‘It’s a close combat clasp.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘The Führer presented it to me. In Berlin. The Führer himself.’

Hartmann rubbed the soft zinc between his fingers; a swastika over a crossed bayonet and stick grenade.

‘He has very small hands. They’re like an artist’s.’ Somewhere inland a guard dog was barking. Down below, the rushing tide had obliterated all but one footprint, and only a thin ribbon of beach held fast. ‘His voice was very soft too, Max. Soft but not weak.’

Hartmann released the medal. Silence waited awkwardly between them.

‘I’m sure he’s a great man,’ said Hartmann finally. ‘You only have to look at what he’s done for our country.’

With one powerful sweep of Koenig’s leg, Hartmann was down and they were both rolling towards the sea. As they went, ribbons of barbed wire hidden in thick, flowering gorse sliced chunks out of their clothing. Face to bloodied face, throwing breathless punches at the water’s black edge, neither man could gain an advantage.

‘You’re a German,’ screamed Koenig. ‘Show some fucking respect.’

‘I’m sorry, Erich. I’m truly sorry.’

‘We’re in a war now. You can’t be like this. If we kill more than they kill, we win.’

‘You’re right. You’re right.’ Hartmann had broken clear, and was panting heavily on the wet sand. ‘I was just never quite as good at maths as you were.’

From the beginning, they’d always fought; so viciously, sometimes, no one else could remotely understand their friendship.

Hartmann had been born in Vienna, the only child of a woman who’d strolled out of his life when he was three. As a small boy, he’d been solitary. As a teenager, he’d been sullen and argumentative, but there’d been no war then and his German-born father – a professor in law, and devoted Nazi Party member – seemed untroubled by Max’s adolescent unorthodoxy. Since the boy had no siblings, or mother, a little latitude was deemed necessary. And when it mattered most, his child had always been a model of convention. In early 1934, the two of them had packed their bags and moved to Munich where Max’s father rose quickly through the party ranks.

To his relief, like every good Aryan child, Max had joined the Hitler Youth, wearing his black shorts and necktie without resistance. At the summer camps, he’d even been happy, thwacking the drum in a marching band with such zest that his instructors thought him destined for the Schutzstaffel.

‘A son in the SS,’ Professor Hartmann had told him. ‘How I will sing on that day.’

On this, at least, father and son were united.

Hartmann had no issue with duty and – in the absence of anything better to do – proclaimed himself happy to die for Germany. Privately, however, the academic’s son felt stifled by the dreary company of his fellow teenagers, and struggled with indoctrination. If Hitler needed him to kill Russians, Poles, Americans – the British even – that would be fine. Just so long as it all ended happily, and the company improved.

And then, at a torch-lit Youth Rally in Nuremberg, he’d met Erich Koenig.

Lying next to each other on the competition rifle range, they’d matched shot after shot. For an hour, they’d shredded helpless paper targets, and when the trophy was finally presented for top marksman – in front of the brown-shirted thousands – both boys had stepped up to share the honour.

To the ranks of braying onlookers, they had seemed an improbable pair.

Where Hartmann was tall and languid, Koenig was muscular and short. Where Hartmann’s hair was sleek and black, his new friend’s ran wild and blond, matching a personality incapable of concealment. If Koenig felt it, he said it. Hartmann, on the other hand, inhabited a face sentried by anxiety; a face with such high cheekbones that his eyes lurked in permanent shadow. A young man preoccupied, it seemed, by difficult questions; an affliction which his new acquaintance found baffling.

That night they’d got drunk together for the first time. After two beers and half a bottle of stolen schnapps, Koenig had passed out with his head on Hartmann’s lap.

This is strange, Max had thought. The only things we share are our blue eyes and our uniforms. Erich is two years younger than me, and everything I am not. My father is an intellectual while Koenig’s carves headstones. My mother has disappeared. Koenig’s takes in other people’s washing. He is driven. I am led. He is fanatical. I am resigned. He is terrifying and yet he has a weakness for laughter which marks him out, makes him interesting. Somewhere inside this drunken eleven-year-old, Max had felt certain, beat a heart worth looking for.

Ten years later, he was still looking.

Down at the shore’s edge, on their knees, the pair had stopped fighting.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hartmann. ‘I should have known better. You’re too easy to annoy.’

Koenig shrugged. Every fibre of his uniform was ruined. He felt sick and tired and had nothing left to say. Turning away from the sea, he picked his way through the crushed undergrowth back up towards the car. At the fire, he kicked the ashes back into life, threw on the last handful of wood, and stood glumly waiting for Hartmann to reappear. Far away to his left, the early evening sky was glowing, and the chug of a hidden fishing boat had been picked up by the wind.

‘We should eat,’ he said, when his companion loomed over the ragged edge of the cliff. ‘You look like you’ve been in a war.’

Hartmann sagged back against the tree. ‘We’re not really friends, you and me. We’re like those breakwaters. We just hold tight and cling on to each other and hope there’s still something standing when the shit swirls away.’

‘You always were a miserable bastard, Max.’

Neither man laughed, but the warmth was building again and each of them wanted to talk. It had been a long time and there were more secrets even than before.

‘I thought you were going to die.’ Koenig had broken the silence first. ‘The last time I saw you there was a hole in your guts.’

Wearily, Hartmann’s fingers circled the scar through his damp tunic.

He’d been lucky. He knew that. For years they’d fired guns at bull’s-eyes. Then, in 1941, they’d started killing men. That spring, he and Koenig had been rushed into the 2nd SS Panzer Division – the so-called elite ‘Das Reich’ – and by midsummer they were poised in their armoured vehicles somewhere along Russia’s immense western border. Just them and three million others, each one certain of victory over Bolshevism.

Through clouds of flying insects, they’d swept east, across vast plains, silencing every bleat of resistance. By mid-October, the first snows were falling, and as troop-carriers floundered in brown slurry, slaughtered Russians had been thrown on to the mud like planks. Too clearly, Hartmann remembered the ruined faces, but it was the sound – of the tanks crushing each corpse – which kept him from sleep.

‘Did it hurt? Did you know what happened?’

‘I knew it was a sniper.’ He could still feel the flesh knotted thick around the old wound. ‘I wasn’t sorry to be going home.’

It was relief, not pain or guilt, which he’d felt the most. After botched front-line first aid, infection had torn through his body. For six days, he’d clung to life on a freezing, filthy train shipping the wounded back to the west.

In letters from Munich, his father had assured him that Communism was on its knees, but in his dreams Hartmann saw frozen tracks and frostbitten fingers and an endless quagmire highway paved with mutilated boys in uniforms.

‘I was lucky, Erich. I’d seen enough.’

Boiling sap was dripping from the charred stump of a branch.

‘You saw nothing,’ said Koenig.

‘I killed people. That was plenty for me.’

Koenig swallowed and spat into the flames. ‘You killed soldiers, Max. Russian soldiers. You fought to the rules. After you’d gone there were no rules.’

Hartmann stared into the flames.

‘They were animals out there. The partisans were nailing German soldiers to barn walls through their tongues. They were slinging them up with meat hooks through their cocks.’

‘You saw these things?’

‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we just heard. Rumours.’

‘We were in their fucking country. What did you expect?’

‘In the early days we shipped the prisoners back behind our lines.

Then, after a while, we just started killing them.’

‘You started killing them? You?’

Koenig had stood up, and was furiously stoking life back into the fire.

‘Fuck, Koenig. Fuck.’

‘No one seemed to care what we did. Or how we did it. Petrol, bullets, bayonets, fists. You were all right, Max. You were down the fucking Brienner Strasse drinking beer. Me, I was loving every second of it.’

‘And the medal?’ asked Hartmann quietly.

‘They were Bolsheviks. Scum.’ Koenig had slowed down. ‘People did what they had to.’

Hartmann reached inside his tunic. They were damp, and a little crooked, but his Gauloises were still intact. From the edge of the fire pit he picked up a glowing twig, lit two cigarettes, and handed one across.

‘French smokes.’ Koenig smiled. ‘One of the sweetest perks of our victory over the barbarians.’

In the thickening gloom, the wet paper sizzled and the blazing tips hovered like fireflies against the dark. From old habit, the two young men drew together, held the rich smoke deep, and released it in one long synchronised sigh. As their lungs emptied, Hartmann leaned across.

‘Don’t worry, Erich. I’m going to burn too, believe me.’

‘I’m not worried. I never worry. We’re all going to burn if we don’t win. Let’s go.’

While Koenig packed the car, Hartmann hoofed sand over the hot ash. It was a clear night, and the grey light of a full moon was flickering on the tide. To hide their dishevelled uniforms, both men had slung on their long army coats. With their caps on, they would pass muster. Recriminations were unlikely in any case. Since the war in the west had gone quiet, everyone had let themselves go a little. No one would look too closely, and people had lost the habit of asking questions.

‘Heil Hitler,’ barked Koenig with a questioning grin.

‘Heil Hitler indeed,’ retorted Hartmann. ‘Your new best friend.’

Driving north to the coast, the roads had been forlorn. After nightfall, it was as if the entire country had been abandoned.

Above the hungry churn of the engine, they could hear nothing. Every farm building stood black in its field, and the trees seemed to draw back from the accusing sweep of their headlights. At the centre of a crossroads outside Creully, an immense boar stood and watched as they swerved by.

‘He’s directing the traffic,’ mouthed Koenig.

But Hartmann couldn’t hear and wasn’t looking. In the dark, everything seemed so miraculously undamaged. In the dark, no one could see what they had done.

Shortly before midnight, they were back. Outside Koenig’s billet, on the woody fringes of Villers-Bocage, Hartmann stopped the car and silenced its engine. Without speaking, Koenig opened his door, walked to the back and began clearing the boot.

Through the twin columns of the headlights, mayflies swirled like angry dust. At the end of a long gravel drive, they could just make out a gloomy farmhouse and beyond that the murky shapes of weaponry beneath grim drapes of mottled camouflage.

‘This is me, then. I’m staying here.’

‘I’m another hour away,’ said Hartmann. ‘No one will notice I took the car.’ Somewhere behind them, a tawny owl was cooing; in rhythm, it seemed, with the cooling ping of the exhaust.

It would be good to be alone again. Koenig’s fireside confessional had troubled him.

Everyone half knew things or half heard things, but back home his father’s generation had their hands over their ears. What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. There were people in Germany, Hartmann had long ago concluded, who would prefer none of them to get back alive with their stories.

‘Take care,’ said Koenig, offering his hand. ‘It could be a long time.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Let’s be optimistic. They might never come. In three months, we might be home cracking a bottle together for my birthday.’ Hartmann eased out the clutch as Koenig stepped back.

‘I’ve just realised, Max. You’ve never really told me what you’ve been doing these past few years.’

‘You never asked.’ The car was inching slowly into the darkness.

‘Well? You’ve got two seconds.’ In a moment, Hartmann would be gone.

‘I got married, Erich. I think I have a child.’

2

6 August 1944

05:24 hours

With a nervous shiver, Hartmann stirred. Sleep had taken him by surprise, but not for long. Never for long. Since that night, he’d seen, and heard, nothing of Koenig. Since early June, the shit-storm had broken their army into pieces, and now, in the hollow beneath his tank, he recoiled from the person he’d become. Grease-knotted hair lay in clumps across his scalp. Around his neck, where the lice had taken residence, a minefield of red scabs seeped into a sweat-black collar. At the end of each filthy finger, he could feel the sticky scum of battle; blood, and engine oil, and the dark brown dust he’d been tearing through for weeks.

Wriggling from the shelter of the tank, he could see colour and shape forming inside the black silhouettes of the night. Daylight was advancing fast. Figures were moving everywhere in a half-crouch, and the hiss of boiling tea had joined the chorus of morning sound. Soon there would be an order of some sort. Shortly afterwards – if the previous days were anything to go by – it would be countermanded. Somewhere close by a radio operator was swearing furiously at his broken equipment. The Waffen SS, Hartmann thought. We’re not so impressive now.

With his back against steel, he searched his ragged pockets for a smoke. That, at least, would be in good shape.

His father had carried the silver cigarette case in the trenches, carving his name and a date – 11 November 1918 – deep into the inside lid. Now it had gone to war again, providing an elegant sanctuary for the last few things in Hartmann’s ownership that mattered. Dry matches, four Gauloises and a photograph.

As the match fizzed in his fingers, he drew the picture close to the flame. ‘Alize. Alize Hartmann. Talk to me,’ he whispered, before tucking the image carefully back inside the case.

As it always did now, the nicotine made him feel faint, and he closed his eyes to steady himself. There’d been too many days recently without food or sleep, and the scar of his old wound was stretched painfully tight across his shrunken belly.

Alize. How strange that it was his father who had reunited them.

Back in Vienna, they’d been accidental friends, no more. Once a month, Alize’s father had visited the Hartmann home in Leopoldstadt to cut the professor’s hair. And while the two men traded city gossip, Max would steer the barber’s daughter towards a sunlit warren of attic rooms, where they contentedly read stories to each other, or quietly ransacked chests stuffed with his mother’s old clothes.

They were a similar age, and she was blonde and pretty, but there’d been no letters – nothing had ever been said – and when the professor relocated in Germany the connection had been severed. Just occasionally, when Max saw a barber’s pole, he’d unexpectedly found himself remembering her. Other than that, the girl had vanished entirely from his life.

‘They’ve moved up to the north coast. Not sure where,’ his father told him, after receiving a brief postcard from his old friend.

‘What does he say?’ Max had asked.

‘He says to keep on top of the hairs in my ears.’

And then, just as suddenly, she was back.

She was now nineteen years old, ambitious, and had never left home alone before, nor expected to. But in the summer of 1942, as the bombing of Hamburg intensified, the city’s brightest students were being ordered south from the Baltic shores to the few places in Germany the RAF hadn’t yet blitzed. Improbably, Munich was still one of them, and to Alize Netzel, Professor Emil Hartmann represented two lifelines, being both a familiar name from her past and a chance to somehow complete her studies.

On a stifling July afternoon she’d boarded a train and inched fearfully towards the Bavarian mountains. That same evening, as the last snows glowed on the distant Alps, around four hundred bombers crossed the English Channel bound for the city where her parents lived. By the time Alize tumbled into Munich’s crowded Central Station, she was an orphan.

Hartmann’s father had known what to do. Since his wife’s departure, and with Max away at the eastern front, he’d felt lost inside an enormous house on the northern edge of the city.

He already knew too much about loneliness. Vienna was his true home, not Munich. For years, most of his furniture had been abandoned beneath sheets in darkened rooms. Outside his work – and the party – he had nothing. Alize Netzel’s tragedy would be his salvation; a small debt he could repay to the man who had once shaved his neck.

At the station, they’d embraced awkwardly. He’d carried her small bag back to his house, and when the news trickled south from Hamburg he made a promise to keep her safe. It was an arrangement that would suit them both. She was a diligent student with nowhere else to go. She could take the attic space, the house would rise from its slumber, and hopefully soon Max would be well enough to return home.

In fact, the professor’s son had been well enough for months.

Throughout the previous winter, he’d hovered on the brink of death, weakened by the sniper’s bullet which had blown a hole through his gut, and by the subsequent operation which removed an infected length of his intestine.

As the periods of delirium began to shorten, Hartmann had enjoyed thoughts of mutinous lucidity. To the fury of the nursing staff, he had taken to wearing his newly minted Iron Cross – a reward for he knew not what – pinned to his pyjama top. He was also overheard praising the valour and patriotism of the Russian army; remarks for which he was informally admonished by the surgeon who’d stitched him back together.

By the time he was strong enough to move, he had been back in Germany for almost six months. In all that time, there’d been no word from Koenig, and precious little reliable information on the fate of his fellow soldiers out in the cold. In all probability, Koenig was frozen dead in a ditch along with the rest of them. No one said it too loud, but the winter had won and the 2nd Panzer Division had been wiped from the face of the earth. Or so the half-rumours claimed.

No bad thing perhaps, thought Hartmann, whose convalescence now proceeded in a military hostel hidden within an anonymous leafy suburb of Berlin.

Throughout it all, his father had stayed in touch. Every few days, a letter came from Munich, and in each one the professor seemed a little more desperate for Max to return. And then suddenly – during a glorious run of August sunshine – Emil’s tone changed. Do you remember Alize? I’m sure that you must, wrote the professor. The war has caused her a terrible loss, and she’s staying in Munich now; here, with me in our house. You’d still like her, I think. She’s a bright young thing and we’re good for each other. I suppose neither of us really has anyone else! Come and see for yourself as soon as you’re strong enough. You’ll be amazed. I’ve even opened the curtains in the drawing room again . . . and I promise not to talk about politics.

A few days later, wearing his SS uniform, Hartmann arrived back in Munich. Inside the railway station, huge swastika flags hung scarlet from every upper floor window. Around him exuberant crowds of passengers flowed out on to the sunlit concourse where a brass band played patriotic tunes watched by grinning, cross-legged schoolgirls.

It felt incongruous to him that the British had spared the city for so long. Berlin might be the brains, but Munich had always been the bloody heart of this blighted enterprise. As he strode homewards, every building seemed to be a Nazi shrine.

Hitler had ranted here, Hitler had raved there; in the Braunes Haus, the Sterneckerbräu, and the Hofbräuhaus. Pictures of the Führer glowered from walls and windows and yet the city itself seemed curiously oblivious of the filthy war Max had been fighting. True, the streets had been cleared of Jews, but – as yet – only a handful of bombs had fallen to break the spell, and the dogs still ate biscuits here, not corpses.

‘You look magnificent,’ his father had said, after a tense doorstep embrace. ‘The war is going well then.’ It hadn’t really been a question.

‘Depends whose side you’re on, Father,’ Hartmann had muttered, as the professor carefully decanted champagne into a slender flute.

‘And whose side are you on, son?’

For a moment, over a toast, the two locked eyes. All around them, in the rambling rear garden, a warm breeze was lifting the scent off the lavender beds.

‘To survival,’ proclaimed Emil as the glasses chinked.

‘Of the fittest,’ replied Hartmann.

‘And to the Führer,’ said the professor, rising stiffly to his feet.

‘And to the Führer,’ whispered his son.

Later, when Emil’s lodger returned – standing quietly at the back door – she was struck by how alike the two had become: the same thick crush of dark hair; the same shadowed intensity around their eyes. When they turned and stood, she saw it again in their lean, strong bodies, and when Max spoke she discerned the same kindness that had rescued her from despair.

‘Come and join us, Alize,’ he said, reaching out for her hand. ‘Come and save us from an argument.’

‘You remember me then?’

‘Of course. They were happy days. And you haven’t changed a bit.’

Later on, she could remember little of their first moments together. One glass of champagne had made her drowsy, the airless weather was draining, and the professor’s son had seemed uncomfortable with small talk.

‘Forgive me,’ she had said eventually. ‘I have an essay to write.’

Lying on her attic bed, Alize felt the day’s heat building in her room. Through an open skylight she could still hear the men’s muffled voices, rising up on the warm air; father and son. At times it sounded like shouting, but she wasn’t sure, and in between there were long silences broken only by the sound of popping corks.

Working on her studies was out of the question. The professor’s son had unsettled her. It wasn’t just the whole Schutzstaffel thing. Men in the SS were supposed to have an aura, and like all her old school friends, Alize regarded the dark uniform as a potent lure. No, it was something else; something more intriguing. As a boy, he’d been brittle and awkward. Down there in the garden, he’d sounded wiser and more careworn than his own illustrious father. However perfectly his uniform had been tailored, he clearly wore it with unease. He had also become extraordinarily handsome.

All in all, Alize concluded, she would not be unhappy to see more of Unterscharführer Max Hartmann.

It was her good fortune that Hartmann felt exactly the same. Since his mother walked out, women had played so little part in his life he’d forgotten how to talk to them, and yet he couldn’t shake the image of her lustrous brown hair, her sorrowful expression and the polka-dot dress that clung to her with such distinction. Nor did he particularly want to.

The following afternoon, he was waiting in the garden again; alone, and wearing a white shirt, navy flannels and his father’s panama hat.

‘The army hasn’t changed me. I’m afraid soldiers are very dull.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’ She smiled. ‘But you don’t look like a soldier today.’

Both of them sensed that time might be precious.

On that second night, they had talked until dawn. On the third night, they’d ridden a tram into the heart of the old city and linked arms to navigate the cobbles through medieval streets. On the fourth, they’d danced drunkenly in a basement club, sharing cigarettes and brandy, before lurching back through the blackened city to the professor’s silent house. On the doorstep, they’d kissed deeply, and the following night Max had knocked softly on the attic door until it opened and Alize let him in.

Although for both of them the experience was new, necessity required rapid progress. At first, in the dark, they had proceeded only by the touch of trembling fingers. Then, under the muted glow of a paraffin lamp, they had examined each other’s bodies with the rapt concentration of the uninitiated; making love frantically, inexpertly, while moths battered their wings against the scorching glass.

‘I used to look forward to Saturday mornings in your house.’ The sheets were flung back. Hartmann’s right arm lay across her breasts.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he moaned. ‘Please don’t. It’s too embarrassing.’

‘You used to make me lie on my stomach on the floor to read a book . . .’

‘Enough.’ He had turned his head into the pillow.

‘. . . then you’d sit beside me and slide up my skirt until my knickers were showing.’

‘How could I forget? It was amazing. You wore silk.’

‘Did I? Was it? Really? You were twelve. I nearly told my father.

I didn’t know what to do.’

‘You do now . . .’

Later, as Hartmann stared silently at the girl’s pale skin, Alize had bent down to kiss the raw welt of his scar.

‘Will you tell me about it?’ she asked.

‘Not now,’ he replied.

For two days, they scarcely left the attic. Not until they were certain Max’s father had gone to work did they venture downstairs, wandering naked through sun-streaked rooms, stirring as if from a coma; looking for food but eating little and sleeping only when overrun by a languor neither could resist. For most of the time, they talked about their past lives. Not until the seventh night did the present contaminate their bubble.

‘I’m afraid I’ve rather run out of excuses,’ he’d said. ‘They want me at barracks.’

When she turned to kiss him the next morning, there was a note on her pillow. I think I may love you. I’ll be back.

It had felt empowering to pace back to the station through the Königsplatz in his Waffen SS uniform, and everywhere he looked, people had seemed genuinely happy. For those few unlikely days with Alize in Munich, he’d felt a faint stirring of enthusiasm for their war.

By the following evening, at a training camp west of Leipzig, that fragile optimism was floundering again in an organisation he scarcely recognised.

Russia had changed everything. Entire divisions had simply evaporated. Some people were saying that over a million had been killed and that two entire German armies were facing slow extinction in the streets of Stalingrad.

Koenig, he now knew, was not one of them. Somehow, his friend had made it back and dashed off a letter from his own secret training camp in Germany. Can’t say much and I can’t see us meeting for some time either. But I’m well, Max – I’ve got a medal – and very much looking forward to kicking the British next. See you when we parade through London, perhaps!

With a smile, Hartmann had folded away the note.

For everyone in the SS, old loyalties were being reassigned. After returning from Munich, Hartmann had been attached to the 1st SS Panzer Division, the so-called Leibstandarte, and from the clues in Erich’s letter Koenig was now in the 12th SS Panzer Division; him and all the rest of Germany’s death-or-glory teenagers. I’m so very relieved you got out of there, Hartmann wrote back that night. Everything’s all very top secret but I think you’re right. I think we might be heading west. What happened? How many Russians did you kill? Tell me over a beer in Soho some time. Fingers crossed this letter will find you. Love Max. There was no point in telling him about Alize. So far as he knew, Koenig had never had a girlfriend. He wouldn’t understand. PS I’m loving my toy tiger, he wrote instead.

The censors would delete the postscript anyway.

Every day now was spent inside a new weapon which made him feel like a young god. In the thick woodland around Wallendorf, Hartmann’s perennial misgivings were yet again in retreat.

The crews called it Königstiger – King Tiger. The top brass called it Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B – Tiger Tank 2.

Whatever it was, Hartmann could calmly obliterate a target from almost two miles, while incoming shellfire skimmed off its steel skin. Ancient trees crumpled in its path like supplicants, and its brain-deafening power ignited his dormant belligerence. If they could ever eradicate its endless breakdowns, if the air raids ever stopped, and if the factories could build enough of them, then maybe Koenig’s prediction would be vindicated. Maybe they would be rumbling towards Buckingham Palace in their tanks.

But then, as the summer receded, the Allied attacks stepped back up and the bombs began raining on Munich. If you can get here for a few days then I really think you should, wrote his father.

Over five months had passed without a word between Alize and Hartmann. The one time he’d started a letter, his words had stalled on the realisation that he barely knew her. I know what you think of me, the professor went on. But I’m not asking for myself. It’s Alize. She’s still here and she’s terrified. You must come. You have to come.

It had not been easy to get back.

Hartmann’s division – maybe the whole German army – was on standby for a move. No one was saying where. Quite probably, no one knew. This was Hitler’s private war, Hartmann had decided, as his train creaked through Munich’s outer ring of low-rise factories. For twelve hours he’d shivered alone in a compartment without light. Over the rooftops and the smouldering ruins he could make out the guard tower at the Dachau camp.

‘For queers and commies,’ his father had once told him. ‘And Jehovah’s Witnesses.’ Beyond that, he had not asked.

This time, the old city was different. There was no music in the Hauptbahnhof; no stalls selling flowers on the streets. The giant swastikas still flapped, but it was a raw wind which shook them into crimson ripples and carved shapes in the drifting snow along the pavement. Against the wintry sky, the shelled-out remains of the cathedral looked like a hag’s broken tooth. According to local folklore, it was the devil’s spirit, not air, which swirled around its ruined cavity and tunnelled deep into the icy hearts of shopkeepers. This is a city of demons, he thought, turning his collar up against the cold.

Once again, he had chosen to walk, using the time to examine his feelings. Perhaps it had been unfair not to tell them he was coming, but there’d been no choice. Two days’ leave was all he’d got. After that, he might never be back. And for all he knew, she’d forgotten about him already.

From the street, every window was black, and when he eased the front door open the hallway felt damp. Moving deeper into the house, he heard voices raised against the sound of music flowing from a radio. Quietly he tiptoed on, drawn by the melody and by the comforting smell of new-baked bread which streamed from the rear kitchen.

As he drew closer, he stopped. The door was half open. Sitting at the table, oblivious of Max’s presence, his father sliced an imaginary conductor’s baton through the air. With her back to him, Alize was pulling a tray from the oven. From across the room, he felt washed by the sudden surge of sweet-smelling heat.

And when she turned, he saw, and knew everything in a heartbeat.

3

6 August 1944

06:10 hours

In his wood near Falaise, another match was scorching his fingers.

As the phosphorus spluttered, he pressed his lips to the photograph before gently folding his father’s silver case and returning it to his pocket. Only half of his last cigarette remained. From its end hung a comma of ash which crumbled over his hand as he sucked hard and filled his chest. Clamping his teeth tight, he held the breath for as long as he could. Before the war, three minutes would have been easy, but hunger had made him weak.

As his lungs collapsed, water stung his eyes, and thin geysers of smoke began leaking out between his teeth. Soon enough, he would have to stir himself. One more drag and it would be gone.

All around him, he could hear the deep rumble of tanks firing up. Hidden by the trees, crews of men were slipping through their hatches and shutting themselves in. From where he sat with his back to the trunk of a fallen oak, he could see two officers stretching a map across the grass and, as he listened, the crackle of mild panic began to hop from radio to radio.

Two more minutes. One last drag.

Behind closed eyes, he remembered the bubbling coffee and the sibilant whisper of burning gas. He could see his father turning off the radio and striding out of the kitchen. Between her extended hands, Alize was holding three golden discs of flatbread on a tray. For the first time – that he’d seen – her hair was tied back and her anxious face appeared flushed from the heat. Silently, Hartmann had followed the girl’s eyes down across her flour-dusted apron.

‘You should have told me sooner.’

‘I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what you’d think.’

After that, they had embraced stiffly, each one encumbered by their ignorance of the other.

‘Are you pleased?’

‘Never more so.’

They’d been lovers for a week, and strangers ever since. Now she was carrying a child he might never see. Wiping tears from his face, he cupped her chin gently in his hand and kissed her.

There were no doubts in Hartmann’s mind that the baby was his. Nor had his feelings for Alize been diminished by the shock. If anything, silhouetted in the kitchen’s glow, she seemed more alluring and noble than she had in the summer; more desirable than she had when he was twelve.

In a war from which he felt hopelessly disconnected, Alize might just be his salvation.

‘We have to make this right. Before I go back. Agreed?’

Alize had nodded silently.

Naturally, Max’s father had pulled a few strings. In Munich, very little stood in the way of a good Nazi, and Professor Emil Hartmann had always been one of those. As January snow deepened outside on the deserted Marienplatz, his only son and Alize stood before a desk inside the city’s immense town hall, and took their vows watched by rows of empty chairs. When they left, Hartmann carefully wrapped his full-length SS winter coat around his new wife’s shoulders. Behind them, on the building’s ice-crusted façade, the giant painted marionettes of the Rathaus glockenspiel were clanking into action.

‘It’s a love story,’ said Hartmann, pulling Alize close. ‘A local Bavarian duke marries his dream princess and organises a joust in honour of their love.’

‘Does he always win?’

‘Without fail. Every day for a hundred years.’

There’d been no honeymoon, no reception, and within a few hours of the officiation, Hartmann was trudging back towards his unit in Leipzig.

All the previous night, shunning sleep for speculation, the pair had chased futile plans into the morning. Only two things seemed certain: that the child would be born in the spring and that its father would not be there.

‘You can’t stay in Munich,’ Hartmann had argued. ‘It’s too dangerous now.’

‘My mother had a sister in Cologne. If she’s still alive, I could try there.’

‘Do anything. Leave the country if you have to.’

They had not seen or heard from each other since.

Two days later, Hartmann’s division had been sent back to the Eastern Front, a black horde of men and machines heading towards humiliation in Kharkov. On the day of his first wedding anniversary, Hartmann’s tank was immobilised in a muddy swamp, going shell for shell with four Soviet T-34’s. By the time he was recalled to Germany – miraculously intact – there’d been no news of Alize for fifteen months, and just one short note from his father which had travelled halfway around Europe before it found him. I think maybe you were right after all. We are losing this war. Don’t worry about Alize. She’s well and has travelled to have the baby at her aunt’s in Cologne. I do hope you get a chance to see it. I’m going back to Vienna until this wretched business is over. Take care. Heil Hitler.

Hartmann looked at the date. March 1943. It had been sent over a year before. Somewhere in Germany, he had a wife and a child he knew nothing about.

Even if he’d known where to start, Hartmann was powerless to look for them. In the company he kept, sentimentality was a weakness and secret misgivings were dangerous. Among the SS fighters of the Leibstandarte, the collective belief in glorious victory remained absurdly high. Events in Russia had been down to bad weather, nothing more. No other explanation was permitted.

It wouldn’t benefit Hartmann to reveal that his waking thoughts languished on the image of a baby boy – or girl – learning to walk in a city shattered by nitro-glycerine. And in any case, leave of any kind – compassionate or not – had ceased to be an option. Throughout April, the shattered remnants of the 1st SS Panzer Division had been recuperating in Belgium, swollen each day by hundreds of juvenile recruits, whose training often fell to Hartmann and whose callow patriotism filled him with ungovernable sadness.

‘How old do you think I am?’ he’d asked one pencil-thin volunteer on his first day

‘Thirty-ish,’ the boy had replied. ‘Maybe more.’

‘And why do you think we will win the war?’

‘Because we are Germans. Because we are right.’

When the spring ripened, however, the warm breath of early summer lifted him, and the army began to move. Down every road, groaning columns of tanks and trucks crawled towards the French coast. It felt good to be warm and busy. It felt good to sleep in the open under the ancient constellations. As they progressed, the men travelled through a landscape which seemed indifferent to their presence. In the flat dark fields, people were still working, their backs bent to the stubborn lines of seedlings which rose towards skies untroubled by clouds.

By the middle of May, a huge contingent of SS and Wehrmacht divisions had assembled in the hedge-bound countryside south of Calais. Around the clock, the ground quaked with the movement of artillery, and in the dazzling daylight skies the air buzzed with friendly fighters.

Behind their wall of concrete, no one expected an invasion. After dark, the troops traded cigarettes for cheese with the local farmers, before marinating themselves in smoky village bars. During the long, dusty days, they read battered paperbacks and gorged on stolen wine.

Every morning, to stave off the boredom, Hartmann and his four-man tank crew took their Tiger out on manoeuvres, swerving through hedgerows and dodging phantom enemy action. Inside their armoured shell, each of them already felt indestructible, but he drove them tirelessly until each could read the others’ minds, and until he was absolutely certain that no one could possibly do it better.

And then he had seen Koenig.

Out of nowhere, in a dusky town square – Hartmann couldn’t remember its name – he’d heard his friend’s rollicking laughter. A minute later Koenig was stepping out from a crowd, utterly undiminished, crushing his hand and swallowing him whole in a stubbly embrace.

‘You made it then, Max. And you didn’t take a desk job either.’

Twisting free of Koenig’s arms, Hartmann stepped back and examined his boyhood companion. He looked tanned and fit. Over by a packed bar he could hear a group of men singing hymns. A mighty fortress is our God. ‘I’d have missed the creature comforts.’ He grinned.

‘You know your problem, Max? You’re too fucking serious.’

‘You know yours? You talk crap.’

‘Ha. It’s good to see you. It really is.’ Koenig looked up at the clock on the church tower. ‘Tomorrow maybe? A day out?’

‘I could get my hands on a car.’

‘Sounds promising. It’s my birthday, too. I’ll be expecting something lavish.’

‘Open-topped and a straight run to the seaside?’

Koenig wrapped his arms round Hartmann again, and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I met the Führer, Max. He spoke to me.’

09:34 hours

Funny that, thought Hartmann.

If he was right, the sun was blazing down on his own birthday this time, with no gifts in prospect, and no waltzing on any clifftops. All around him, sheets of netted camouflage were being rolled back from assault guns and tanks. The last drops of fuel were being shaken from battered jerry cans. Meat rations were being traded for bullets. Hay was being stuffed into lorry tyres so riddled with holes they could no longer hold air.

With every passing minute, as the sky brightened, the scene grew more pitiful. Blackened faces tight with worry; shredded uniforms; and, buried within the ragged chaos, the unknowable split between those who secretly wanted only to survive, and those who dreaded the unpardonable shame of imprisonment.

Few people were expecting victory, whatever they said.

Only two weeks after his day at the seaside with Koenig, the Allies had surged across the same Normandy sands they’d wrestled on. By the time the 1st SS Panzer Division – and Koenig’s 12th – had entered the battle zone, it was too late.

During the daylight hours, British planes vaporised them at will. During the night, shocked survivors regrouped and prayed for coherent orders that never came.

Near Carpiquet village, Hartmann had watched Spitfires cutting down infantrymen like corn. It no longer mattered that they fought like cats; that the German tanks were superior; or that Hartmann felt invincible inside his Tiger. Everyone was on his own now. If it had ever existed, the centre was falling apart, and a forest of men was falling back on what was left of their homes in Germany. Along the way, both sides were losing their heads.

Somewhere near Caen, Hartmann’s patched-up group of tanks had cornered a dozen Canadian foot soldiers and slaughtered them in a field. Two days later, he’d seen four Germans pulled from a broken-down truck, pushed to their knees and shot through the head. Everywhere, rumours swirled like the fires that burned in every ruined village. On some days it was said they were turning the Allies back. On others – on most – they were crumbling towards oblivion. South of Soliers, he’d helped wipe out twenty British tanks. Behind the German lines, deserters were being bound to trees and executed. As fuel supplies dwindled, tanks were abandoned and torched. A thick veneer of oily smoke blanketed the skies, and every verge was littered with jettisoned machine guns and the dead who had once carried them.

Hartmann shuddered and pulled himself to his feet. From what he could tell there were five working Tigers including his own, plus one commandeered Citroën van and one decrepit old bus. During the night, their section leader had vanished, leaving a befuddled deputy whose hearing had been destroyed by a bomb-blast.

Koenig would have found all this funny. Koenig would have known what to do. But then Koenig was probably dead.

‘Unterscharführer Hartmann. Where are the enemy? Which way should we go?’

He turned round. It was the same skeletal teenager he’d trained back in Belgium. ‘We’ve met before?’

The boy nodded and clicked his heels sharply together.

‘Do you still think we’ll win the war?’ said Hartmann.

‘Yes, of course. Nothing has changed. We are still Germans.’

Nearby, two dishevelled riflemen were stuffing a wooden handcart with blankets and apples. Another was defecating in full view of his comrades. Sitting in the back of the bus, a young army grenadier was playing a Viennese waltz on a looted violin. On his head was a plain black Frenchman’s beret. On his lower forearm – exposed when he raised the bow – was a freshly tattooed heart.

‘You’re good,’ said Hartmann. ‘Where did you learn?’

‘I taught myself. Can’t you tell?’

‘What happened to your helmet?’

‘I think this suits me better.’

Hartmann moved away. The boy carried on playing. Overnight, two men had died of their wounds and their corpses were being heaved into a ditch under a buzz of flies. From the top of the bus, a wounded paratrooper was scanning the skies for enemy planes. Where his left ear had once been there was a hole, and his neck was crusty with dried blood. Apart from Hartmann, there was no one left to tell them what to do.

‘We need to be going,’ he said.

To his astonishment, everyone obeyed him. Even the violin fell silent.

12:00 hours

By midday, there had still been no sign of the enemy.

Hartmann’s tanks had flanked a long narrow lane winding east; three on one side, two on the other. After weeks of sunshine, the rutted dust was easily stirred and by keeping to the edges of the fields they made themselves harder to spot. Between the tanks, in the centre of a tree-lined track, crawled the rest of the ramshackle convoy.

Forty men maybe, Hartmann calculated; fifty at most. Some of them, he knew, were desperate to die fighting: the younger ones, mostly; teenagers with eyes that were dead already. The rest lay awake all night desperately trying to remember their childhood prayers.

By early afternoon, they’d covered twenty dread-filled miles and everyone was still alive.

Without instructions, Hartmann had chosen his route well. Beneath a thick cover of leaves, they’d remained invisible to the Typhoons criss-crossing in the blue above. Whenever he’d heard one, the lookout on the bus had screamed them to a stop. Frozen under their green canopy, the men’s eyes widened, engines were stilled and guns bristled from every window until the danger was past.

In the beginning, someone had usually thrown up. Now they were used to it.