Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(66)

FORTY


Berlin stands in the line of hungry men, who are stamping their feet and swinging their arms to keep warm. The allied prisoners of war are freezing and starving. They are too exhausted to be angry. There is no sign of the horse-drawn German army field kitchen that should be here to feed them. There will be no breakfast again this morning. The POW camp guards are irritable; they get fed from the same battered, food-encrusted pots as their miserable charges.

This is just a dream, he tells himself.

Then, If this is a dream why am I so cold?

His hand closes around the potato in the pocket of his greatcoat. He had found the potato around midnight, miraculously hidden under the layers of filthy straw, dirt and human waste that carpeted the floor of the shattered barn. Three hundred exhausted men were sleeping around him, crushed together in their misery but grateful to be out of the snow and freezing wind for the night. The potato reminded Berlin of home, his grandmother, and a time when he was safe and warm with a full belly. He had slipped the potato surreptitiously into his pocket and held it tightly through the night.

He lifts his face to search the morning sky for any breaks that might give respite from the sleet and snow. While sunshine would be welcome to warm their freezing bodies, clearing skies would also make them easy targets for roaming Sturmoviks, the Russian ground-attack aircraft responsible for their burnt-out lodgings and for the rocketed trucks and tanks they have passed along the road. The Russians fire on anything that moves, anything German or not, anything alive. Freezing snowflakes burn Berlin’s eyes but the grey sky and snow-covered Polish landscape merge seamlessly at the horizon, meaning they will be safe, at least for the first part of this day.

Behind the barn there is a stand of fruit trees, leafless and forlorn. Among the bare branches ravens are waking from rest. Berlin watches them, fat and sleek, eyes glinting, feathers shimmering through the falling snow. They will breakfast at their leisure while he starves, they will fill their bellies without the usual raucous squabbling over every morsel of dead horse or cow or dog or worse. It is a good time for carrion eaters.

The guards are shouting now and the line of POWs begins its slow shuffle westward back into Germany. Is this day six or day sixteen? Berlin wonders as he puts one foot in front of the other. Later, mid-morning, he hears the gunfire from somewhere ahead. Single shots, spaced – pistol or rifle fire – not the steady, constant rumble of the Russian artillery that comes from far behind them. Sleet is falling again and the prisoners keep their heads down. Berlin squints into the distance and sees the guards at the front of the column beginning to force the prisoners off the roadway and into the mountainous snowdrifts.

The order is coming down the line now, passing from one guard to the next. Berlin hears the word ‘Juden’ repeated. The march is stopped. The guard for their section begins pushing men off the road, his Mauser rifle held horizontally at chest height. The POWs protest, groan, resist, preferring the ankle-deep slush of the roadway to standing in the knee-deep snow of the drifts.

‘This is just a dream, you know,’ Berlin says to the nearest guard, but the man doesn’t seem to hear him.

Now a thin dark line appears over the crest of the hill ahead, moving slowly towards Berlin’s group of allied POWs. As the figures draw closer they can see there are actually two lines coming towards them. Berlin hears an angry murmuring building from the line of POWs ahead of him. On the right, approaching them as always in this dream, is a shuffling, stumbling line of people, many dressed in ragged striped tunics and pants. In the middle of the road, in a second line and out of the worst of the muck, are the SS men in their black uniforms. Most of the SS men Berlin has seen since his capture have been neatly turned out in tailored black uniforms, but this group looks tired and angry, their clothes crushed and dirty. They carry rifles and holstered pistols, or MP 40 machine pistols. Several have whips or clubs and they lay into their miserable charges at the slightest excuse, screaming curses and abuse.

‘Halt, halt. Turn away, face the hillside.’ The shouted orders come both in English and German from the prison camp guards. The POWs in Berlin’s group refuse like all the others to turn their eyes away from the road. The camp guards face the defiant POWs, keeping their backs to the column of Jews and SS men. Berlin wonders if they are possibly more concerned with looking away from what is happening on the road behind them than keeping an eye on their prisoners.

Berlin is shocked at the condition of the shuffling, silent Jewish prisoners as they draw nearer. He guesses they must have been driven out of a concentration camp as the Russians approached, just as the allied POWs had been driven out of their camp. Some wear battered shoes or wooden clogs but others are barefoot, or simply have rags bound around their feet. Their clothing is threadbare – thin, tattered trousers and a shirt or tunic, some open to the bitter, freezing wind, revealing gaunt, skeletal torsos. Their hair is close-cropped or shaven, their vacant eyes are sunk deep into the sockets, their cheekbones are protruding. He realises with a jolt that many of these walking scarecrows are women.

More shouting from up near the front of the POW column. Someone has fallen out of the line of Jewish prisoners and slumped beside the road. A man on his knees, exhausted head bent forward. An SS man lifts his rifle and fires a single shot. The body on the road jerks sideways, goes limp, a red smear appearing on the snow near the head. The Allied prisoners are angry now, screaming at the SS men, while their POW camp guards nervously try to calm them down.