The Road Between Us (35 page)

One stands and walks towards the tree behind which Lehague is concealed. Wondering whether the Frenchman has seen him, Charles adjusts the sights on his rifle by a couple of clicks and takes a bead on the German. Though he did some rifle training in the RAF, he has never killed a man before, and the gun feels heavy and dull in his hands. A trickle of sweat stings his eyes and he rubs them with his sleeve. He can feel the knots in his back and taste the hot bile in his throat, the sour tumult of his gut. A mosquito is singing around his ears and neck and, as he waits for it to bite, he feels his awareness of his surroundings intensifying: the snapping of twigs, the rustle of leaves. He tries to remember if he has pulled back the bolt on his rifle. Does it have a safety catch? He looks up and, for a panicked moment, realizes he can no longer see the German.

Then a man’s shape looms up. His steps are faltering, as if he is unsure where the ground is. When he reaches the tree he unbuttons his flies and, swaying slightly, starts to urinate. Charles watches as Lehague slips his commando dagger from its sheath, stands and, in a single fluid movement, lunges at the German, covering his mouth with one hand while stabbing the blade firmly into his gut with the other. He twists it as he withdraws it before stabbing him twice more in quick succession.

As if helping an elderly patient, Lehague supports the man as he sinks to his knees. He then dips back behind the tree. Charles watches as the German remains poised, encircling his wounds with his hands, as if wanting to draw attention to them. His eyes then roll back in his head and he falls forward with a groan. When the others hear the dull slap of his face hitting the tree root, they look up and, no doubt thinking he has passed out from drinking, cheer.

When the remaining three start singing again, Lehague emerges from behind the tree and, crunching pine cones underfoot,
advances at walking pace towards them, his Sten gun cocked at his hip. One looks up with confusion in his eyes and stops singing. A second later, as he fumbles for his rifle, Lehague shoots him with a sustained burst that produces flame-licks from the muzzle of his gun. In their shock, the other two raise their hands.

Charles gets to his feet and runs into the wood. He then stands guard over the prisoners while Lehague rummages in his haversack. When he produces a length of rope, Charles wonders for a moment if he intends to lynch the men, and is relieved when he cuts off two lengths instead and uses them to tie the prisoners’ hands behind their backs.

Lehague makes them kneel and studies them for a moment before kicking the nearest on the shoulder, forcing him to roll over on his side and knock the other one off balance too. He lifts them up again by their hair and circles them.

‘
Parlez-vous français?
’

The men do not answer. With their heads bowed they look like errant schoolboys awaiting a caning outside a headmaster’s office. One of them spits to the side.

‘Charles, ask them if they attacked the French convoy.’

‘
Habt ihn den Französichen Konvoi angegriffen?
’

When the men still do not answer, the major picks up the kepi one of them had been wearing and, with his other hand, grabs the nearest German by the hair, raising his head so he is forced to stare at the cap. He then tosses it on the ground, unbuckles his revolver from its holster and, as he walks behind the two men, slowly and deliberately loads its chamber with six metallic clicks. He cocks it and presses the barrel to the back of the first prisoner’s head.

‘No!’ Charles says, levelling his rifle at Lehague.

Without looking over at Charles, Lehague says: ‘This does not concern you, Artist.’

When Charles does not lower his gun, Lehague looks at him. The prisoner kneeling nearest them turns his head towards Charles and looks up as well. His eyes are cold and feral. There is no fear in them. Instead his expression is serious and thoughtful, as if in deep
concentration. He then snaps his head so that he is facing forward again, composing himself for what is to come.

Without taking his eyes off Charles, Lehague squeezes the trigger. A shot leaves deafness in its wake and the young German slumps forward, his body in brief convulsion. There is a neat hole in the back of his head. Smoke wisps out of it followed by blood that pulses softly into his hair. The other prisoner does not look at his fallen comrade, but he is shivering now. Lehague takes a step towards him and, still staring at Charles, pulls the trigger again. The second German falls sideways on top of the first and the two look like they are children cuddling up to one another in their sleep.

Lehague walks up to Charles and puts a hand on his shoulder. He then crouches down and stokes the fire. A smell of blood cloys the damp night air for a moment. Charles is still staring at the bodies, awed at how lives can end so politely, with so little fuss.

Rumours are beginning to swirl around the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp like lampshades and chairs in a tornado. The Americans have invaded southern France. They are about to meet the Allied forces advancing down from the north. They will be here soon, to liberate the camp and punish the hated enemy.

But, for Anselm at least, there are worrying signs and portents also. Something has happened to the Commandant. He hasn’t been seen for weeks. Summoned to Berlin? Sent to the Eastern Front? Arrested? Promoted? Who knows? Perhaps he is
kaput
. The Commandant had intrigued him and chilled him in equal measure. He had grown used to his fearful presence, had come to admire his strength, his Teutonic dignity. Without him he has no protector.

His replacement is about to arrive and he has orders to oversee the evacuation of the entire camp. There is to be a forced march across the German border to Dachau. Only the sick will be left behind.

Anselm tries to summon Charles’s face, but it has hardened and dried. Cracks have begun to appear across its surface. The sensual lips are turned downward. The glitter in the eyes has faded and
the wide brow now suggests the skull beneath. It has become a stranger’s face.

Yet he still feels in his gut that Charles will come for him, as if it is ordained.

He also feels that the resentment that has been building up among his fellow inmates over the past few months – at his preferential treatment, at his collaboration with the enemy – will surely erupt soon. The camp feels a colder and darker place. He knows revenge from the other prisoners is coming because of the space they leave around him. No one will meet his eye. He is toxic. Contaminated. He has never felt more vulnerable.

It happens at night. They come out of the gloom without a word, and as he feels something heavy – an iron bar perhaps – across his back, he sags to his knees with a grunt. The heavy object is smashing into his mouth now, breaking his teeth and splitting his lips like cooked sausages. Kicks and punches follow. A clog drives hard into his stomach, draws back and strikes again in the same place, pushing the breath from his lungs and causing a purple-pink bloom of pain to open up around his heart. He hears his own nose break with a pop. Then the clean snap of bone.

There must be a dozen of them. Fleetingly, he can see the prisoner’s stripes on their arms as he curls up into a ball. As he cannot will the pain away, he absorbs it. A fist hits hard into the bone below his eye. The toe of a boot tears the cartilage in his knee. There is a taste of iron in his mouth. He knows they will not stop now until he is dead, and he prays that this release will come sooner rather than later.

III

FOR NINE DAYS, THE PANZERKORPS, UNDER THE COMMAND OF THE
monocle-wearing General Heinrich von Lüttwitz, have been tenacious in their defence of Nancy. Though they are outnumbered, they still hold all the approaches to the Moselle, the river dividing the city, and, thanks to this advantage, they have managed to repel two crossing attempts by the US XII Corps, one in daylight, the other at night.

The Americans are under the command of Manton S. Eddy, a major general who favours round, metal-framed glasses and a pistol worn in a shoulder holster on the outside of his bomber jacket. He has ordered a change of tactic. There is to be an encircling manoeuvre with simultaneous attacks on the north and south of the city. The Battle of Nancy, he has predicted, will be over by the end of the day and leaflets are now being dropped by the USAAF over the town. They invite the Germans to agree to an honourable surrender.

It had been hoped that, for symbolic purposes once more, the 1st Free French Division could liberate the town, as they did Lyon a fortnight earlier in the balmy end days of August. It had, after all, been two French officers who, for the benefit of the news cameras, met thirteen miles west of Dijon three days earlier on 11 September: one representing Operation Overlord, the campaign in the north, the other representing Operation Dragoon, the south.
Their handshake, as their jeeps met and they leaned over their bonnets, closed the last escape route for the Germans in the south and west of France.

But the Free French soldiers, along with the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, as the Resistance has now officially been renamed, are pinned down on a mist-shrouded hillside overlooking one of Nancy’s main bridges. And the sun has gone down.

For the past three weeks Major Lehague and Charles have been attached to them. And as the American artillery bombardment of the past hour is answered by a salvo from the German self-propelled guns positioned either side of the bridge under camouflage nets, Charles wishes he were anywhere else on earth.

The fury of the shelling is cold and mechanized, and he can feel in his bones the intense shock waves it is causing in the ground around him. As the barrage creeps closer, he finds himself instinctively hardening his muscles in an attempt to defy the jagged, burning teeth of the shrapnel. The shells are like molten furies screaming through the night air, turning it liquid, sucking away their very oxygen. When he finds himself covered in half an inch of soil and branches, he crawls to the twisted body of a nearby French soldier and takes his helmet from him. Half the man’s face is flapping off the bone.

After crawling back to his foxhole, Charles takes off his beret, stuffs it in his tunic and puts the helmet on, leaving the chinstrap dangling loose. The wet, splintered smell of fir bark is being diluted by the less sharp smell of blood.

Some of the French militia around them who have practised combat only with blank ammunition are now learning something which Charles has already learned: that you cannot train for the noise on a battlefield; that it paralyses thought. They are finding it impossible to communicate, even with sign language. One man in a trench about five yards away is curled into a foetal position and is sobbing.

During the bombing raid on Biggin Hill, Charles had wondered why strangers were trying to kill him. Why they hated him. Why it
felt so personal. But now, as he hears an explosion so loud and tumescent it seems to fill every atom of his body, he feels more composed. Either the next salvo will leave me vaporized, he thinks, in which case I won’t know anything about it, or it will leave me injured. And if you are going to get hit, it is best to be hit by hot mortar fragments, because they sear the wound shut.

The next sound gets inside him, making his teeth ache and carrying down to the balls of his feet. It is a screech of metal tearing through metal: a tank exploding. Realizing from the pungent smell that the man in the foetal position has emptied his bowels, Charles looks up to see that a shard of shrapnel has torn his skull in half. He is dead but is still holding his brains in with his hand, in a gesture that looks almost apologetic.

After five minutes, the German bombardment ends and, from behind his position, Charles hears the hollow, answering crump of a French howitzer. Feels its fearful concussion. He watches the soaring plunge of the shell through the night sky and listens to its downward whistle. As he thinks about the Germans it has landed on, a strange primordial ecstasy stirs his limbs for a moment before leaving numbness in its wake.

The smoke clears and he looks down at Nancy once again as it burns. In the fields directly below him he can see the silhouettes of cattle stampeding ahead of the flames now engulfing two Panther tanks. Charles watches as a bomb bursts, a yellow tongue leaps and a third Panther is flipped over on its back like a turtle.

Another bombing run is under way and the planes are being caught in the sweeping arcs of searchlights. Charles sees the bombs oscillate as they fall. A building shudders and looks as if it is about to collapse but then settles back into place. Another does fall and Charles watches as it blocks the narrow street below, sending up a cloud of brick dust. The masonry produces swirling patterns that are like abstractions. German stretcher-bearers emerge covered in a pale grey film. An impression of rain is given by the molten lead dripping from the roofs, and then the city disappears once more behind black smoke.

Charles fingers the magazine on his carbine, removes it, clicks it into position again, and points the muzzle in the direction of the bridge. As sweat trickles down his back, he scans the German lines for signs of white flags. Why aren’t the mad bastards surrendering?

On the contrary, when a flare goes up, the Germans counter-attack, their bodies seemingly frozen as though in a stroboscope. The French soldiers around him send them back with rapid volleys, their red tracer bullets like luminous blood in the darkness. Once more Charles’s gun feels too heavy in his hand. He isn’t sure he can persuade his muscles to pull the trigger.

He becomes conscious of Lehague’s short frame further along their foxhole. As he listens to the Frenchman shouting out orders, he recalls his words in the wood. This does not concern you, Artist. Had he been right? No. He now realizes he has to make this his concern, his fight. He has to earn the right to get Anselm back. If he can help win this battle, he tells himself, hasten its end even by a minute, he will be entitled to see Anselm again. And if he dies, he will ask that his heart be cut out and sent to Anselm. Who should he tell? Lehague? No, he can’t do that. Lehague would despise him if he knew his secret.