Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (63 page)

Maisie turned her tear-streaked face to him.

“Get out of here! Go!”

“But,” he stammered, taken aback; his anger instantly dissipating as he held his face in his hands, gripped by utter horror. “Maisie! Come with me! They’re after me!”

She continued to cradle Hans’ head, and he spluttered blood, spraying her clothes.

“Maisie, they’re after me, you’re not safe,” Jack shouted as loudly as he could, wishing only to get his sister out of the house and away.

“Go!” she screamed, a hysterical, piercing yell.

Jack’s face bunched up, running through a gamut of emotions before he focused on Hans, and his eyes grew cold. Without another word, Jack turned on his heel and dashed out into the cold air of the English day.

“Stay with me,” his sister sobbed in the hallway, her whole body convulsing with violent spasms. “Stay with me, Hans…”

Outside, Jack looked left and right, ascertaining the road was clear, and then he jogged back up the road as quickly as he could. Hauling his heavy bags across the desolate woodland and its dead trees, the weight of his collected items slowing his progress back to the car, Jack felt tears form in his eyes as the incomprehensible scenario he had just exited registered in his mind. Distracted, he stumbled through the ginnel, only dumbly noting as he neared its end that he was at the car.

Jack reached the vehicle, and a bullet whizzed by his head, not unlike the one that had almost hit Reinhard Heydrich only thirty minutes before. He yelled out involuntarily, dropping everything but the gun and ducking down, panick-stricken and feverish. With his back pressed against the side of the battered car, Jack faced the ominous woodland, which he peered at until he was certain there were no assailants hidden in its relatively shallow depths. He slid himself over to the front of the car, trying to judge the trajectory of the bullets that were being sent his way. Despite his composure, fear gripped him.

Having escaped the maelstrom of chaos that had been their assassination of Himmler and, he was almost certain, of Heydrich too, this was not the death he had in mind. Had Alan, William or both managed to defy the odds and flee, Jack had nurtured a very real hope that they could link up with Mary and disappear underground, together; victorious.

That quixotic hope was a forlorn one, and having already been dashed by the sight of the German in his mother’s house, it had been rekindled by his departure, despite the awful realisation of his sister’s fraternisation… only to be sunk yet again, and even more completely, by the sudden shock of this attack.

Jack raised his gun over the car bonnet, letting fly with four shots in the direction of the German troops.

“
¡
No pasarán!” The revolutionary screamed, partly out of habit, and in order to channel his rising fear into rage. It was an emotive cry, delivered with gusto.
They Shall Not Pass
had been the unifying call to action of the left. Now, it was tainted by tragedy; after Madrid, the city for whom that slogan existed, finally fell to the fascists in ’39 the group had vowed never to use it again.

More bullets zinged past the car with a sinister ring, shell-casings landing all around Jack’s crouched body, and – perhaps just for good measure – the wall directly opposite him at the ginnel entrance was peppered with shots. His imagination twisting sickly, delirious in the heat of battle, Jack imagined that the soldiers were trying to draw the silhouette of a giant smiley face of bullet holes on the wall for him.

Snapping out of his flight of fancy, he yelled again, spouting more anti-fascist slogans from Spain as he stretched his gun around the side of the car, firing shots at the soldiers or police with whom he battled. It didn’t matter to him. They were fascists.

A grenade landed on the pavement by the ginnel entrance; Jack was no more than eight or nine feet away, well within the range of its blast. He scrambled away, flinging himself from a crouched position around the side of the car and rolling away from the detonation, taking care to land behind the vehicle so that he wasn’t exposed to the Germans positioned in front. In the ensuing explosion, Jack’s brief feeling of relief was shattered as a bullet entered his left quadricep from behind, sending pain shooting through his system and spinning him out into the road.

“Fucks sake!” He screamed, letting out an agonised wordless yell of rage.

Bleeding heavily, Jack wriggled, trying to manouevre into position to fire back in the direction of the attackers to his rear, but just as he raised the gun in anger, another bullet passed through the sole of his left foot. The shot shattered nerves, and sent lightning bolts of terrible agony charging through his body with a vicious pulse. Stricken horribly, Jack rolled over and lay screaming in tortured pain, and then a mass of Germans swarmed upon him from both directions like terrible locusts in grey, dragging the shrieking, bloody partisan away to the nearest cross-marked car.

Less than half a mile away, Maisie cradled the head of her lover in her bloodstained lap as he tried to speak.

“I love you,” she sobbed, stroking his burning face.

Through his pain, the young German forced his eyes to meet hers, one final exchange of pale blue between them, and then, gurgling as he attempted a final declaration of love, the bubbling blood frothed sickeningly in his mouth and throat, and in gasping agony, Hans choked through his last laboured breaths and finally died.

They hate us because we do not have their thoughts in our heads; we do not think their thoughts. We do not spend every day thinking somebody else’s thoughts. We think thoughts, and read books; they burn books, and Goebbels screams at the world the thoughts that they should think. And the part of the world controlled by their army Black Angels, the part of the world enforced by the rule of their guns, their Gestapo, their viciousness, that part of the world has to listen.

They began to think their thoughts, and then acquiesced when they killed and tortured those who did not think these thoughts.

Conformity became patriotic spirit and racial duty; dissent became blasphemous against the Gods of their blood, and their devil held aloft; their Hitler held in place by the jackboots, the truncheons and the guns commanded by the Himmler’s and Heydrich’s in the shadows.

Simon’s quill flashed across the pages of his diary for what he knew would be the last time. Oddly enough, he felt utterly at peace. The fear he had once expected was entirely absent; inevitability brought perspective, which brought calm.

Immanuel Kant wrote regarding morality: ‘a means to an end is by definition an immoral approach to take with people, human beings should always be considered an end themselves.’ Germany was a nation of philosophers and scientists. These new, coldly logical Germans disagree with Kant; we are all a means to an end, the end always justifies the means, and when their “end” entails a Europe free of blood they deem tainted and ‘untermensch’ – lesser, inferior – the means with which they achieve it are correspondingly bloody. What of morals now?

The new, cruel Germany took our island. Our whole world, everything we have ever known and loved, the places and people, have fallen under the control of a maniacal anti-Semite who preaches annihilation of his enemies – real and imagined –Europe suffers the bloody tyranny of his bloodthirsty SS private army, and its secret police. His SS chief Himmler, their pet ‘Blond Beast’ Heydrich and the historic German tasks they oversee that Goebbels tells the German speaking world over the radio is so necessary for the future survival of their people. The Europe they have created lines up dissidents, ‘racial enemies’ and political opposition against the wall, dressing up mass-murder as the ‘liquidation of partisans’ – crimes against humanity disguised as actions of war.

“Liquidation”… “Historic tasks”… “Enemies of our blood”…

How can there be racial enemies when underneath our flesh we are all the same people? How did the love of humanity and the horror we all felt at the suffering and destruction caused by the Great War transform into a Nordic blood fetish, into the machinations of sociopaths inciting a lost generation into bloodletting; violent language poisoning the souls of so many good men and setting Europe and our peoples at each other’s throats again, like rabid, feral dogs? How did an advanced, cultured nation and people such as the Germans come to view fellow human beings as an inferior sub-species and start to crush them underfoot? How did an entire society come to quietly accept the Gestapo arresting, torturing and murdering thousands of its own people; a few thousand men holding millions in a blood-stained grip of fear?

How, how, how… even as my own probable end approaches, I will never understand…

This is not for publication. I am not writing this to be distributed amongst the people, to stir people up to rebellion or revolt; Christ, I’ve done enough of that recently, even openly, and still people flock to join the Blackshirts. It is as though I am ranting nonsensically; where are all the people who mocked Hitler the raving anti-Semite, preaching his spiel and frothing at the mouth at every podium he screamed from; victim of the world, the perpetual victim of world Jewry and Karl Marx, despite unlimited power in central Europe? Now I am the undesirable. People are already pragmatically preparing for an endless fascist future, and adjusting their worldviews accordingly. Cynicism and adaptability reign. I am shunned; already the dissident, the one to upset the applecart. In the minds of my neighbours, who avert their eyes, they already see me being hauled away to the van kicking and screaming, handcuffed and black bagged; they already envision the questions that Gestapo men are asking them.

Orwell was arrested last night, and now surely, it is my turn to face their undying hatred of conflicting views, of dissident opinion, of unalterable intellect. We read books, and think thoughts. We write things.

They cannot let us live. They know it, as do we.

If this is to be my final line, I ask nothing of no one. All humans think and act as they see fit. Apathy overwhelms me. Tomorrow belongs to the jackboot; today, my last, I am the king of my own mind, the master of my own realm.

Simon raised his head, acknowledging sadly the lack of absolution and absence of satisfaction that he had expected from the conclusion of his final written entry. Just as he began to add a last line, a new conclusion, hoping to stoke his inner feelings with one final burst of prose, he heard a loud crash from downstairs as the door was kicked in. At that, he dropped a lit match into his calabash, and sat calmly behind the desk, trying to quell the overwhelming violence of his emotions and be calm in the face of the inevitable.

The bedroom door exploded. Three men, in trench coats and fedoras marched in, gazing at him with unfriendly, hostile eyes. The writer took in their visage; noting that they were almost caricatures of the Gestapo of popular imagination. They were cardboard cut-out villains, worthy of a place in one of Britain’s great novels of the past century.

“Welcome, brothers,” he said quietly.

Simon smiled at them, adding to their bemusement. Before they could act, the writer had raised his father’s Great War pistol from his lap, almost triumphantly, and held it to his own temple, breathing heavily. He stared with growing contempt at the cold-faced men facing him, his would-be captors, who to his mind were just as trapped as he was by the unforgiving system.

An old memory of a lakeside afternoon in summer came to mind, calming him, and the half-smile that split his boyish face widened.

“Heil Hitler!”

He clicked the trigger.

Scornful laughter rang out from the Gestapo agents, and the writer pulled the trigger once more, before the useless gun dropped from his grip, and shock seized him. Suddenly, another sensation crept up his spine; the very real, rising panic of fear.

One of the intruders approached the stricken writer, an ugly grin now playing across his own angular features.

“Heil Hitler,” he agreed; a sardonic, German-accented voice dripping with savage mockery.

The first swing of the cosh broke Simon’s jaw. The second, delivered expertly to the solar plexus took his wind, and with it, removed him from consciousness. Sharp pain cut through the shock and fear, and as he slumped over where he sat, Simon tried to embrace the descending darkness as renewed laughter rang spitefully in his whistling ears.

As though a daze had been lifted, Bill Wilson strolled the streets of his native London with more clear cognition than he had felt since
that
day, years ago, when the teenage boy had set out for France, thrilled with the prospect of battling the Jerries with his pals.

With violent, striking vividity, a series of buried memories resurfaced and flashed through his mind’s eye; burned onto the surface of his vision, oddly calming.

Maureen’s tears as she waved him goodbye; retreating away up the gangplank, turning, running back to give her one last hug, squeezing tight, squeezing so tightly…

Laughter on the ferry; John dancing in a sort of modified two-step into a tapdance…

Andrew, his brother, wrapping his arm around Bill and saying don’t worry kid, we’ll be home by Christmas, after we’ve given Jerry what for.

Crouched in No Man’s Land; bullets whizzing overhead, John lying next to him in the shellhole, his intestines hanging out and innards spilling with the torrents of blood, arterial spray covering Bill’s face as he tried in vain to help his friend, frantic, before putting him out of his misery with the bayonet, his first kill, John’s eyes dimming, his hand resting on Bill’s face, crying, bawling, dying, Bill collapsing against his warm, dead flesh; crying, bawling…

The Battle of the Somme; told to walk slowly, not to run, thousands cut down by Boche machine guns, thousands, twisted and flailing and screaming into the mud, to be eaten by swollen rats the size of small cats…

Looking over to his right; finally breaking into a run as everyone else was cut to ribbons by the monstrous, roaring guns; Andrew to his right trying to cut through the wire that artillery had failed to cut; riddled with bullets, twisting on the wire, trying to reach him and falling into a shellhole, trapped there.