Horizon (6 page)

He turned to Johann and asked, “How soon can we reach this man?”

Johann’s smile came slowly back. “Twenty minutes on foot. Five minutes with the lorry,” he said happily. “It will be safe enough if we wear German coats. Perhaps there will be something you could bring back in the lorry.”

The officers looked at each other. “What could we bring back?” the colonel asked.

“The barracks in Bozen had much equipment.” Johann was grinning cheerfully, and the officers were smiling too: their guess had been right. The answer was guns.

“Come along,” the colonel said to Lennox. “I shall need you. And I’ll need a couple of other fellows. Pick out two of the toughest men here. Two who understand some German.”

Lennox obeyed without any enthusiasm. Hell, he was thinking, nothing ever goes the way you plan it. He would be stuck here for the rest of the war. He could see it coming. If the colonel had his way—and who was to stop a blasted colonel?—he would be left here in those mountains while the others marched south. If only he had been stupid, talked foolishly, pretended to know nothing about Johann or his language. Too late now: he had been the bright little boy, and his seven months of planning had landed him among mountains.

“I’d like to—” began the American.

“Sorry, old man. You’re needed here.” The colonel signed to two junior officers. “Cover that up with these,” he ordered,
pointing first to their commando uniforms and then to the pile of German coats. He was no longer worried. Now that the decision had been made he looked even happy, as if he were going to enjoy himself. Blast him, Lennox thought bitterly, and picked up a German coat and cap as the two lieutenants had done.

The two men he chose were Ferry and Merriman. (Stewart had to be passed over: his bandaged head would have been too conspicuous.) They were as excited as the lieutenants, and they had already covered their bleached uniforms with the German coats. They were smiling all over their faces as they left the hall. Johann, as happy as anyone, waited at the door. The colonel, strangely formidable in the German captain’s long military coat, turned at last from the two majors and walked towards Johann.

“Come on, there,” he said quickly, over his shoulder. “Step lively.”

“Yes, sir,” Lennox said. He looked at Stewart who was watching the departing men glumly. “You know where I’ve hidden my coat, Jock. There’s a good map, and some money and other things behind the loose board—the one that’s covered by that calendar I made. Perhaps you can use them.”

Stewart gave him a sharp look. “I’ll find a use for them,” he said. He clapped Lennox on the shoulder as if he realised this was the last time they would see each other. “It’s a damned shame,” Stewart said. “It’s...”

“Step lively!” the colonel yelled from the doorway.

Lennox nodded to Stewart, and then he was hurrying between the groups of men in the hall. He followed the colonel out into the night. Seven months, he was thinking bitterly. As
he passed two German-like sentinels in the courtyard, and heard them wish him luck, he was wondering whether he would have managed to escape this time, or whether he would have made just another ‘shot-while-resisting’ corpse. Third try was usually luck, it was said. But now he’d never know. He felt cheated. This thought was so busy rankling in his mind that he blundered in the darkness as he climbed on to the lorry, and the high mudguard struck sharply against his shin. He swore much more than was necessary, but at least he felt better. The colonel’s taut wrist pulled him safely on board, down on to a hard wooden bench, as the lorry started impatiently forward. It swung through the gateway, past the watch-towers with their machine guns and the swinging searchlights, past the masses of ten-foot high barbed wire. It jolted over the wooden bridge which spanned the deep, moat-like pit encircling the walls of wire.

“Do you smell that?” Ferry said in great awe.

“A tannery, I rather think,” one of the lieutenants said.

“Maybe,” Ferry said, and his voice was strained. He drew a long breath, as if to steady himself. “But it’s free air to me.”

The rest were silent. They huddled together as the lorry swung down the mountainside. The only sounds came from the wheels grinding over the loose stones on the surface of the road. The engine had been switched off. The lorry was running silently, depending on its brakes and Johann’s skilful driving, down towards the town.

Johann snapped his fingers to attract attention, and then pointed. The men’s eyes followed the quick movement of the boy’s outstretched arm, black against the dark-blue sky. The lorry was coming well down into the valley now. The road had twisted in long, serpentine loops as it descended through the vineyards. Homes had been few, and silent. All around were the dark silhouettes of heightening mountain peaks. Below them was the river Eisak, which the Italians had named Isarco, with its flat, narrow valley broadening as it reached the scattered lights of a town.

“Bolzano,” the colonel said.

“Bozen,” Johann insisted. Over his shoulder he said, “We shall halt the lorry soon, north-east of the town. The English officer and Lennox will come with me to see the man. That will only take ten minutes. The lorry will wait for us until we have seen him.”

“And the barracks?” asked the colonel. Quick work, Lennox thought approvingly: the colonel was picking up Johann’s way of speaking. He didn’t need a translator now to help with the South Tyrol dialect twist in the words. Then why, Lennox demanded of the dark sky, why did he bring me down here? To reassure Johann? Or had Stewart’s premonition been right? Lennox kept his gloomy silence, and listened to Johann’s polite but adamant refusal to go near the barracks.

The lorry should be left on a side road on the outskirts of the town. It was just there that this man from Bozen was waiting for Johann. And the man would be able to tell them whether it was safe to try to reach the barracks. (For the barracks, seemingly, lay on the south side of the town at the river’s edge. To reach it, they would have either to pass the station, which certainly had been in German control this afternoon, or to make a detour through the centre of the town.) Perhaps, Johann suggested with a smile, the barracks had even already been emptied of its arms and ammunition. The man at Bozen would know.

The colonel said nothing. But when Johann stopped in the shadow of some trees just where a rough track, emerging darkly from a small wood, joined the road they had followed Lennox could almost feel the colonel’s unwillingness to leave the lorry guarded by the four other men. His plan, like most bright ideas, seemingly excellent at the moment of discovery, was beginning to tarnish with each minute of delay. The colonel had started worrying again. The barracks were his chief objective: he disliked having them made into secondary importance.

“If anyone starts asking questions just remember to keep talking German,” he said to the men. “Your story is that the lorry has broken down on your way back to the station after
delivering the officers to the prison camp. Don’t shoot, unless you are desperate. Get rid of any curious stranger quietly.” The colonel looked round him. The countryside was peaceful, the isolated houses were dark and seemingly asleep even at this early hour. The lights in Bozen itself were scattered and dim: there were no shots, no shouts, to break through the deep silence of the night. The lorry was swallowed up in the trees’ shadows. Anyone passing along the road wouldn’t even notice it. All was well, so far. And yet his worry grew.

The colonel looked at the faint green numbering on his watch. “We’ve taken exactly six minutes to reach this point from the prison courtyard,” he said. “If Lennox and I aren’t back at the lorry in fifteen minutes flat, return to the camp. Remember to signal with your headlights as you approach it so that our guards will recognise you at once. Lieutenant Simmins, check the time.” The two officers compared their wrist-watches. There was a tightening in the faces of the waiting men.

Johann moved impatiently, and the colonel slowly left the lorry’s shadow. Lennox, at a sign, followed with equal reluctance. Johann was leading them into the wood by a well-marked path, so carefully cleared of trees and branches that Lennox realised it was as well-used as it was marked. It was only the black blanket of night, smothering recognisable shapes and distorting them into ominous shadows, which made this small wood seem so mysterious and dangerous. In daylight it would probably seem a very simple and innocent place.

When they had travelled less than a hundred yards (at first slowly, then more surely as their eyes became accustomed to the depths of shadows around them) and found themselves in a clearing Lennox knew his guess had been accurate enough.
The path had been merely the entrance to a beer-garden. For in the clearing before him were wooden tables and benches, and beyond these lay a two-storeyed wooden house built in the Tyrolese manner with broad eaves overshadowing its side walls. An inn. That’s what it would be: a nice, woodland place for a picnic or a family reunion.

A family reunion. Lennox’s lips tightened, and he stared at the chalet, still and shuttered, lit only by the clear stars which shone so brightly above the clearing.

The colonel had halted too, but he was watching Johann. “Is this the place?” he asked.

Johann nodded. He was already walking over the stretch of soft, fine grass towards the house. He motioned impatiently with his hand for them to follow.

“Stay here,” the colonel said quietly, grasping Lennox suddenly by the arm. “Keep in the shadows. I’ll do the bargaining. I think I’m getting the hang of the boy’s dialect now. If I need you I’ll call you. If I meet trouble I’ll fire a shot. Then you will get back to the lorry and tell them to make for the camp at once. All quite clear?”

“If you are expecting trouble, sir, then I’d better—”

“No. You get back to the lorry to warn them.” The colonel’s voice was gloomy. His thin face was white under the starlight, but there was a determined cheerfulness in the smile he gave Lennox. Somehow it depressed Lennox still more. But his resentment against the colonel was disappearing. He was beginning to understand the colonel. He was even beginning to feel sorry for him.

Lennox settled back into the shadow of a group of trees, watched the tall, thin figure hurry after Johann, and then
stared at the wood around him. “Rather he than I,” Lennox said to himself, as the officer followed Johann into the inn. He thought of the colonel’s gaunt white face, lined with perpetual anxieties, tight-lipped and cold-eyed with worry. That’s what responsibility did to a man. You could never make a decision without worrying whether it was the best one; you could never refuse a possibility without thinking of a lost opportunity. Whichever way you chose, you worried. Now the colonel was probably beginning to wish he hadn’t started on this plan of Johann’s. And yet, as Lennox waited, more nervously than he was willing to admit, he couldn’t see what else the colonel should have done. For the men in the prison camp had little chance as matters stood now: they hadn’t enough arms, they had wounded among them who couldn’t travel or fight, they didn’t know much about this countryside. The only alternative, as far as Lennox could see, would be for the band of prisoners to scatter and to look out each for himself. That would have been all right for Lennox or any who had been planning escape, but the others wouldn’t have much of a chance. And if any were captured then there would be no chance at all for them. The dead Germans in the little castle, up there on the hill behind him, would decide that.

Lennox stared at the wood’s shadows around him. He stared at the door of the silent chalet. He stared at the faintly glowing numbers on his wrist-watch. He held the revolver in the German coat pocket so tightly that his weakened hand grew quite numb. Six minutes, eight minutes. He shifted his weight and tautened as a twig broke under his foot. Eleven minutes. The door opened at last. He raised the revolver slowly, supporting his hand with his left fist. The colonel was there all right. And Johann. And
two other men—young men by their easy stride. As the group approached him he could see the strangers were wearing the usual dress of the South Tyrol—leather breeches, light-coloured wool stockings, shapeless felt hats, tweed jackets.

Lennox could see by the way the men walked that much had been decided. It didn’t need the colonel’s quiet “Everything laid on” to tell him that it had been thoroughly decided.

As they left the clearing to plunge into the wood the colonel was saying, “These chaps have already moved all guns and ammunition from the barracks—they knew the Germans would occupy it as soon as the railway was secured. The guns have been hidden in this wood, and these men are going to help us load the lorry with what it can hold. They say they’ve enough ammunition, too. They will take care of our wounded, and shelter them until they are strong enough to follow us. They will give us guides to help us bypass the German troops in this valley. After that we fight on our own to the south. If we move quickly enough we have a sporting chance to reach the Allied front before the Germans can reinforce the gaps which the Italians have left in their defence lines. God knows where our front will be before we reach it; it may be in Rome and moving northwards before the month is out if the Italians really rise up against the Germans. But wherever they are we’ll make a stab at finding them. We can’t go far wrong if we keep going south.”

Lennox said nothing for a full minute. Everything was settled, then; as fully settled as it could be. The men up in the castle had now, at least, a fighting chance. Sporting was the word that the colonel had used. Fighting would be nearer the truth. After his years of experience with the Italians Lennox wasn’t so sure that the Allies’ path to Rome would be made
easy for them. He was willing to bet that the colonel had not been fighting long in the Mediterranean theatre. The colonel still believed in the milk of human kindness.

“What’s the guarantee of good faith, sir?” he asked quietly. These Tyrolese had given too much without demanding something in return.

“You are. You are going up there with the boy, Johann.” The colonel pointed north-east where the black mass of jagged peaks rose beyond the river Eisak. “There is a plateau up there which they call the Schlern. You will stay there, keeping your ears and eyes well open, until some of our men can be dropped in to join you.”