A Game for Heroes

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We ploughed through the surf, the boy between us, and stumbled through the gap. The men who waited on the other side were military police, as conspicuous in their brass breast-plates as British army redcaps. There were four of them, three corporals and a major. Two of them took the boy from us, laid him down carefully on a stretcher and gave him some quick first-aid.

Steiner had walked a yard or two away, brushing sand from his coat. The major came forward and looked me over. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded in bad French.

I suppose he didn’t know what to make of me which was hardly surprising considering the clothes I was wearing and the jagged scar, that cut across the empty socket where my right eye had been and bisected the cheek, didn’t help much. I adjusted the eye patch.

Steiner answered for me. ‘Major Brandt,’ he said, ‘this gentleman is a British officer who has just sacrificed his freedom to save the life of a German sailor.’

And Brandt took it without a murmur, including the tone of voice. He hesitated fractionally, then turned to me and said in quite reasonable English. ‘You will please identify yourself.’

‘My name is Morgan. My service number is 21038930. My rank is Lieutenant-Colonel.’

He clicked his heels and produced a silver cigarette case. ‘May I offer you a cigarette, Colonel? You look as if you could do with one.’

I took it and the light which followed and drew the smoke into my lungs with conscious pleasure. It might, after all, be close to my last.

‘And now,’ he said politely, ‘I must ask you to accompany me to the Platzkommandantur in Charlottestown where Colonel Radl, the acting governor of St Pierre, will no doubt wish to speak with you.’

A nice way of putting it. I started forward and Steiner got in the way. He had the Russian field coat off and was holding it ready for me. ‘With the colonel’s permission,’ he said, a slight, ironic smile on his mouth.

It was only when I pulled it on and felt the warmth of the fur lining that I realized how cold I was. ‘Thank you, Sergeant-Major,’ I said. ‘For this among other things.’

His heels clicked together and the salute he gave me would have warmed the heart of the most demanding drill instructor the Brigade of Guards could have supplied.

I turned and followed the stretcher up the hill.

The drive into Charlottestown was the strangest experience of all so far. There were the cobbled streets, the houses that were a mixture of French Provincial and English Georgian, the gardens high-walled against the constant winds. Everything was the same as it had always been and yet not the same.

It wasn’t the concrete pill boxes, the barbed wire, the bomb damage down at the harbour, the more obvious signs of war. It was the signposts in German as well as English, the incongruity of seeing an SS man pausing to light a cigarette outside the old post office with a sign on the wall that still read Royal Mail and the sight of grey-green uniforms and cars with swastikas painted on them parked in a square with a name like Palmerston. It all combined to give a curious air of unreality to things, that I found difficult to shake off.

The field car dropped us in the square and departed with the injured sailor and we walked the rest of the way, climbing the steep cobbles of Charlotte Street, past shops that stood empty now. Windows were broken everywhere, paint peeling, and there was a general air of decay. Not surprising after five years of occupation.

The Platzkommandantur, headquarters of the German civilian administration, although there were few enough of them to administer on St Pierre, was housed in what had been the island branch of the Westminster Bank before the war. I’d had an account there, still had by all the rules, which made it an interesting experience to go in through the arched granite porch to the cool interior.

Three uniformed clerks worked industriously on the other side of the mahogany counter. The two sentries on either side of the door to what had once been the manager’s office were SS paratroopers and as hard-bitten a looking pair as I’d seen in many a long day, with an Iron Cross second class apiece and the ribbon for the campaign against Russia. They’d come a long way from Stalingrad or wherever it had been.

Brandt went in first and we waited. Steiner made no attempt to speak and stood at the window looking out into the street. Within a couple of minutes, Brandt called for him and he went in. I waited and the two SS men stared beyond me into space and then the door opened and Brandt reappeared.

‘Please to come in, Colonel Morgan,’ he said in English, and as I went forward he called the two guards to attention.

I think it was Radl’s physical presence that was the most astonishing thing about him. The sheer bloody size of the man. He must have been six foot three or four at least and couldn’t have weighed less than sixteen or seventeen stone.

My impression was that he had been working in his shirt sleeves for he was still buttoning his tunic as I entered. I noticed several things in that first swift glance. The SS insignia on his collar and the medals, which included the Deutsches Kreuz worn on the right side in gold which meant it had been awarded for courage in the face of the enemy, and the Gold Party Badge which was only awarded to those who had been members of the Nazi Party before its accession to power in 1933.

And his face, with the great jutting brow and deep-set eyes, was the face of some fanatical Roundhead, the kind of man who could cry on the Lord with fervour, pray out loud on his knees and in the same breath, cheerfully interpret the master’s word as burning young women alive for witches.

He stayed in his seat, both hands on the desk. ‘Your name, rank and number.’

His English was poor and I replied in German. He showed not the slightest surprise and continued in the same language. ‘You can prove this?’

I fiddled about on the inside of my belt and produced my identity discs. I passed them across and waited as he examined them gravely. He put them down and snapped a finger at Brandt, not Steiner.

‘A chair for the colonel.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll stand. Let’s get it over with.’

He didn’t attempt to argue, but got to his feet, I suppose because it offended his sense of what was fitting that two senior officers should not be on terms of perfect equality, even if he did intend to have me shot that same afternoon.

He sat on the edge of the desk. ‘Owen Morgan? Now that I find interesting. Did you know that the lifeboat on this island bears that name?’

There seemed no reason to hide the fact. ‘After my father, I was born and raised here.’

‘So?’ He nodded. ‘That explains a great deal. You were here to find out what you could about the Nigger project.’

It was a statement of fact, well-timed and delivered in a perfectly normal conversational tone as he took a cigarette from a sandalwood box and lit it.

I didn’t bite. ‘Was I?’

‘Four of your companions are alive and in our hands. Two more were recovered from the harbour. One of them spoke a little before he died and what he said was informative.’

‘I’m sure it was.’

He carried straight on. ‘I presume you were landed separately somewhere on the south-east comer of the island, especially as two of my sentries have disappeared in that area. I am not asking, you notice, I am simply thinking aloud.’

‘Your privilege,’ I told him.

‘Allow me to continue, then. Your companions are in uniform, you are in civilian clothes from which I deduce that your task was to attempt to contact the local population for information.’ He almost smiled, which for him must have been quite a feat. ‘There are exactly five islanders left here, Colonel Morgan, and I happen to know that one way or another, they were all under surveillance last night. You wasted your time, your men made a mess of the business in the harbour and your gunboat, such a very British term, I always think, is at the bottom of the sea. Mission a failure.’ He said those words in English. ‘Isn’t that what they will stamp on the cover of the file?’

‘Something like that.’

He straightened, placing his hands behind his back. ‘You are familiar with the Kommand- obefehl?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Then you will know that under its provisions, all members of the so-called commando units must be executed as soon after capture as may be.’

‘You’re certainly taking your time about it.’

I didn’t even strike a spark. He nodded gravely. ‘As it happens this action is the responsibility of the commanding officer in the particular area and I am not he, Colonel Morgan. General Muller, the last governor, was killed by a mine four weeks ago.’

‘That was rather careless of him, wasn’t it?’

‘The new governor, Korvettenkapitän Karl Olbricht has not yet arrived.’

‘So you’re just filling in?’

He permitted himself that wintry smile again. ‘Something like that.’

‘And I can expect to be shot only when the real governor flies in to sign the paper? What happens in the meantime?’

‘You forfeit all privileges of rank.’ It was at this point that he sat down. ‘You work, Colonel Morgan. There is plenty of work for you here. You work in chains with the rest of your companions.’

There didn’t seem much point in quoting the Geneva Convention, but in any case, Steiner was speaking. ‘I must again stress the gallant nature of Colonel Morgan’s conduct this morning …’

‘Which is noted, Steiner,’ Radl said calmly. ‘You are dismissed now.’

Steiner stayed where he was for a long moment while I prayed for him to get out of it. His face showed real emotion for the first time since I’d known him and he started to speak again.

Radl cut in on him again and gently, perhaps because of that Knight’s Cross that hung from Steiner’s neck, the one medal for valour they all respected, the one that meant the wearer shouldn’t really be here.

‘You are dismissed, Steiner.’

Steiner saluted, swung on heel and Radl said, ‘You may take Colonel Morgan to join the others now, Brandt.’

‘Hasn’t anybody bothered to tell you how the war’s going?’ I said. ‘In case they didn’t, it’s just about over and your side lost.’

Punctilious to the last, he saluted me gravely. I laughed in his face and walked out.

We drove up to Fort Edward on the point above Charlottestown. It was the largest of the four Victorian naval forts built in the eighteen-fifties during the period when the English government of the day was worried about its relations with France.

There was a sentry at the gate beside a machine gun in a sand-bagged emplacement and he waved us through the granite archway with Victoria Regina and the date 1856 carved above it.

Inside, grass grew between the cobbles which was nothing new, but several concrete gun emplacements were and there were trucks parked across the courtyard and a notice that indicated the presence of some kind of artillery unit. We got out of the field car and Brandt waved me on politely towards the wooden doors of the old blockhouse which stood open.

One of his police corporals hurried ahead and when we went inside, he had the leg irons ready. Brandt turned, face pale, and said in English, ‘I am sorry, Colonel. A bad business, but a soldier’s duty is to obey orders.’

‘Get on with it, then,’ I told him.

The corporal dropped to his knees and quickly snapped the steel collars around my ankles and tightened them with a screw key. The chain between them was a little over two feet in length which allowed me to shuffle along at quite a reasonable rate.

‘Where to now?’ I demanded.

Brandt led the way without a word. We mounted the stone steps at the side of the blockhouse to the lower ramparts and walked towards the end of the point. As a boy of fourteen I had stood up there once a thousand years ago and watched the sea take my father. Now it was an artillery position and the walls were considerably knocked about, presumably by the naval bombardment of the previous year.

I could hear someone singing softly in German, a slow, sad old song from the first war. Argonnerwald, Argonnerwald, a quiet graveyard now thou art. We mounted to the second terrace and surprised a young sixteen year old masquerading as a soldier, who lounged beside an ammunition store, his rifle against the wall.

He jumped to attention rigidly and Brandt sighed and patted him gently on the head. ‘One of these days, Durst, I will really have to put you on a charge.’

I liked him for that, which is something to be able to say about any kind of a military policeman. He unbolted the door and stood to one side. ‘Colonel,’ he said.

I moved in, the doors closed behind me. There was plenty of light in there from the old gun ports. Plenty of light and good sea air and rain pouring down the slimy walls. They were all waiting to greet me. Fitzgerald, Grant, Sergeant Hagen and Corporal Wallace. So Stevens and Lovat had been the unlucky ones, depending, of course, on how you looked at it.

‘Christ Jesus, it’s the colonel,’ Hagen said.

Fitzgerald didn’t seem to be able to think of anything to add to that and I smiled amiably at him. ‘What was it your orders said? You will not repeat not attempt to land or provoke any incidents of a kind liable to alert the enemy to your presence. Enjoy yourself, did you?’

If he’d had a gun, he would have shot me dead, but all he did have was his fine aristocratic pride and it wasn’t going to allow him to quarrel with riff-raff like me. He walked to the other end of the room and sat down.

Grant took a quick step towards me, those great hands of his clenched, forgot his leg irons and fell on his knees.

‘Now then, Sergeant,’ I chided him. ‘That’s the trouble with you Rangers, No respect for rank.’

I scrambled up to the old gun platform. Rain drifted in a fine spray through the open ports and I produced my faithful waterproof tin, selected a cigarette, lit it and tossed the tin down to Hagen.

The view was really quite magnificent. On a good day it was possible to see Guernsey on the horizon thirty-five miles to the north-east, but not on a morning like this. And to the north-west, a hundred miles or more away across the Channel was the Cornish coast and Lizard Point where it had all started. Four days ago. It didn’t seem possible.