Читать книгу The Sons of Adam - Harry Bingham - Страница 46

The cardboard scale wavered and sank.

Tom stared at it with hungry eyes. His fellow prisoner of war, a Canadian from his uniform, cut a crumb off the left-hand slice of bread and transferred it to the other pan. The scale levelled out. The Canadian removed both slices and laid them on a cloth. There were five slices, all precisely equal. The Canadian withdrew his hands.

Tom reached for the slice nearest him, no matter that there was a woodchip clearly lurking in the black dough. The Canadian waited till everyone had chosen, then took the one piece remaining. The other men moved away. Tom didn’t.

‘Got the sawdust, huh?’

Tom shrugged.

‘New?’

Tom nodded.

This was his fourth day in Hetterscheidt, a prisoner-of-war camp a little way outside Düsseldorf. The camp was a bleak place of tin huts, bare earth, barbed wire, and guard posts. A thousand men lived there, sixty men to a bunkhouse. A stand of a dozen cold taps constituted the washing facilities for the entire camp. All men were made to work long hours and under constant supervision from the German guards, known as Wachposten. Tom himself had to smash rocks as raw material for a nearby soda factory.

But the accommodation wasn’t the problem. Nor were the taps. Nor was the work.

The food was.

One loaf of bread each day between five men and that was it. Nothing else. Tom was hungry already. For the first time in his life he’d encountered men close to starvation and he had just joined their ranks.

‘You can get to like the sawdust too,’ said the Canadian, folding his cardboard scale away into his bedding. ‘It’s something to chew on.’

There was something about the man that Tom instantly liked and trusted. ‘Tom Creeley,’ he said, holding his hand out and introducing himself properly.

The Canadian looked round with a smile. ‘Mitch Norgaard,’ he said. ‘Hi.’

They exchanged the information that prisoners always exchanged. Norgaard had been in Hetterscheidt since December 1915. Although in a Canadian regiment, Norgaard was actually an American citizen. He’d signed up because his mother was Belgian and he’d been appalled by the outrages committed by some German soldiers in Belgium during the first few days of the war.

‘So I figured I ought to sign up and let them commit outrages against me as well. I guess my plan worked even better than I hoped.’

‘You’re a Yank? I thought –’

‘Yeah, yeah. The Canadian regiments weren’t allowed to admit us. Well, they weren’t. But they did.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘Yeah, right.’

Tom filled Norgaard in on his own story: regiment, date of capture, work detail.

Norgaard nodded. ‘Red Cross?’ he asked.

Tom shook his head. ‘Missing, presumed dead,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding.’ Norgaard’s expression became deeply serious, as though Tom had just admitted to a terminal illness, which in a way he had. Most prisoners survived by supplementing their prison rations with parcels sent by the Red Cross from Geneva, but if you were recorded as ‘missing, presumed dead’ then the humanitarian bureaucracy had nothing to offer. ‘Thanks to your Royal Navy, Fritz can’t feed himself properly, let alone look after his prisoners. You won’t survive without food parcels.’

Tom shrugged and yanked at his waist. His belt was already fastened one notch tighter than normal and his trousers already beginning to balloon.

‘Friends and family?’ pursued Norgaard. ‘You should write. Get that “presumed dead” horseshit sorted out.’

Tom shook his head. ‘No.’

‘What the hell do you mean, no? You must have someone.’

Tom swallowed. He knew how serious his situation was, of course. But Alan had tried to kill him and he would be damned if he’d beg for help from the Montague family now. There was still his father, of course, but Tom knew how close Jack Creeley was to the Montagues, and writing to Jack was hardly different from writing direct to Sir Adam. He shook his head.

‘I won’t do it,’ he said. ‘I’d sooner die.’