Читать книгу Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse - Len Deighton - Страница 14

There were many inhabitants of Altgarten who could remember it a half-century ago. By that time the cramped little houses built for the men who made the railway had become slums and although each doorstep had gleamed white and the curtains in each window were clean and pressed, few people then would have wished to walk through the town after dark. There was not enough work at the gasworks to help Altgarten’s poor and the unemployed stood on street corners and waited for their wives to return from scrubbing and washing and cooking in other person’s homes. Nor did the land provide for the desperate. In those days a wet spring would inevitably mean a hungry winter.

Now in 1943 the Burgomaster could look across a thriving town where never a hand was idle, although many of its menfolk were in far parts of the world. He saw them in the corridors of the Rathaus, for the Servicemen came here to have their leave documents endorsed and signed. Young Tornow had just come home on leave. He was now a Kapitänleutnant. He looked elegant in his dark-blue naval uniform with gold braid rings on his cuff and the snappy white-topped summer cap that U-boat captains favoured. Tornow’s father owned the Altgarten printing works and had servants, a fine house and a fast Mercedes car.

‘Hello, Tornow,’ said the Burgomaster, passing him on his way to lunch at Frenzel’s. ‘This is fine weather for you sailors, eh?’

Hans Tornow had grown used to such remarks. He had long since given up explaining that he was an accountant in the Paymaster’s department at Hamburg, a grim old building with tiny windows and inadequate lights. As for the ocean, he hated those occasions when he had to take cash to ships anchored in the Elbe, for even the slightest swell made him a little queasy. ‘Yes, Herr Bürgermeister, it’s sailors’ weather,’ said Tornow.

All Altgarten envied those citizens who had chosen that weekend to begin their holiday, for the weather promised to be superb. In spite of the thunder the black clouds had passed and it was sunny. No rain had fallen upon the town for over three weeks. The air was crisp and dry. For the last week the humidity readings had not risen above forty-five per cent and had gone as low as thirty. The old centre of Altgarten was principally of wooden construction and its timber was dry and contracted.

Winds up to fifteen miles an hour fan the flames of a large fire but a faster-moving wind can make even a small fire into a disaster. This day the wind came in gusts from the potato fields and orchards and the strongest gusts measured eighteen miles an hour. As a fire hazard the town of Altgarten had few equals.

The buildings in Dorfstrasse were parched and dusty and the once-red swastika flags that rippled in the wind had faded to a light pink in the sunlight. Many of the vehicles moving along the busy roads were horse-drawn and the horses hurried as they neared the end of the journey. From Frenzel’s a considerate drayman brought water for the two grey cart-horses that had delivered the beer and watched them as they drank greedily.

Fire fascinates men and fire services never run short of recruits. Johannes Ilfa had always wanted to be a fireman. It was an ambition interrupted at the age of twelve by a short-lived desire to enter the priesthood. In 1935, aged eighteen, Johannes had entered the Altgarten fire service as a trainee. A hard-working and intelligent son of a Bierkeller owner, he had risen in rank until in 1942 he had been selected for attachment to the Cologne brigade and had been on duty there during the night of May 30th, 1942, when the town was attacked by almost one thousand RAF bombers. In this and other attacks Johannes had seen terrible sights. In fact he had offered comfort and last rites to more people than had any priest in Altgarten. In one raid the previous winter a shell splinter had punctured his lung. For one month he was in hospital and then he was posted back to Altgarten. In smoke it pained him to breathe even now but he never mentioned this.

For Ilfa, membership of any Nazi organization was out of the question. He could still only see the Nazis as the coarse Bavarian toughs who frequented his father’s bar and staged fights in order to get away without paying their bill. If he must be a part of their war, then the fire service provided him with a way of fighting only the evils of it.

He was a battle-scarred veteran of twenty-six, a dark-eyed man with short hair which he kept carefully brushed and a large moustache of which he was quite proud. His teeth were even and white and so much water had kept his hands white too and lately his rank had enabled them to become soft like those of a girl. But his body was hard and his physical condition was excellent except for his lung. Over short distances his energy was exceptional and he had won many a bet to race younger firemen to the top of the practice tower with the hook-ladders.

He was a Gruppenführer, the senior man on the finest and newest engine in Altgarten. He sat beside the driver and directed his seven-man crew as they extricated pedestrians from under buses, pulled the electrocuted off live cables, sawed free young children trapped in railings and dealt with chimney fires and hayrick blazes.

Today the fire station was cool and quiet and the sun glinted on the polished brass hose fittings and on the engines. Respirators, gloves and steel helmets were lined up neatly. Under each hung the metal discs with the letters that enable messengers, hosemen, attack troopers and water troopers to be recognized in the smoke and heat of a fire.

So far there had been no alarm. Johannes Ilfa was lecturing the full eighteen-man complement of the Altgarten fire brigade upon the various types of RAF bombs. On the classroom table there were dummy examples of the small phosphorus canister, the 30-lb phosphorus bomb, the 250-lb liquid fire bomb (benzol and rubber) and the hexagonal 4-lb incendiary stick bombs.

‘The 30-lb phosphorus bomb is 810 millimetres long. You’ll recognize it by its dark-red colour and a broad light-red band around the body,’ read Johannes Ilfa aloud from an instruction book. He smiled. ‘Unless of course it goes off.’

Some of the firemen laughed a short quiet nervous laugh. ‘Pieces of flaming phosphorus will fly thirty metres or more and will keep floating down for fifteen seconds, so don’t run towards it too quickly. If you get the smallest piece of flaming phosphorus anywhere upon your clothing you must immediately remove that clothing and douse it thoroughly in water. Then scrape it all off, otherwise it will ignite again as soon as it comes out of the water.’

A fireman asked a question. ‘How do you do that in the middle of an air raid?’

‘I don’t write these handbooks, I just read them.’ He paused. ‘Just don’t get any of the damned stuff on you.’ He rubbed his moustache nervously. He’d seen phosphorus bombs and they horrified him.

Some of the students wrote in their notebooks. Any one of them was liable to be assigned to one of the fire services in the Ruhr, in which case he would need to know what the war was like.

‘That’s the end of the lecture,’ said Johannes Ilfa looking at his wristwatch. The senior fireman called the class to attention and when Ilfa had gone he dismissed them for lunch. Seven of the men lived sufficiently near to eat at home and they hurried to the cycle shed to collect their bikes.

The fire station was at the unfashionable end of Mönchenstrasse. Two young Waffen SS soldiers cycled past it on their way to the shops of Dorfstrasse. The Scheske twins were just eighteen and until last month they had never been more than five miles from their native town of Insterburg on the Pregel in a distant part of East Prussia. Here in the extreme west of the homeland, so near to Paris and Brussels and Amsterdam, about which they had read in their schoolbooks not long ago, there was so much to see. Even this cycle ride into Altgarten to fetch some razor blades for the guard commander held promise enough for both boys to be carrying their new Exacta cameras.

They were shy lads and did not respond to the teasing their Slavic name drew from the race-conscious SS men stationed at the Wald Hotel camp. Everything about the new Nazi Germany was an adventure. Together they had been the mainstay of the Hitler Jugend choir back home and at party celebrations they were invariably chosen to augment the SA men’s choir. Alas, at their camp in Altgarten there was no choir. Mausi had suggested that they find out if there was a choir at the Liebefrau church, but luckily Hannes was in time to prevent him making a complete fool of himself by suggesting such a thing in front of the other SS men.

So now they sang lustily as they cycled through the town. It was the chorus that often ended the Party meetings back home.

‘When the SS and the SA

March up in formation. Taratata!

Firm is the stride.

Firm is the pace,

Left two three four, everyone wants to join

And so one marches today through every little town

And every German girl dreams of this today

Because the black SS and the brown SA

Have what pleases everyone today

And it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.’

They finished it in polished harmony. ‘We’d better hurry,’ said Hannes, ‘or we’ll miss lunch.’

‘What must we buy?’

‘The commandant’s medicine from the druggist, razor blades for the guard commander, a smoking cure for the fat fellow in the cookhouse and I want some colour film.’

‘If we missed lunch we could take some photos of the old market place where the vegetable stalls are.’

‘Good idea, let’s miss lunch.’

An elderly Saxon TENO engineer named Ueberall – Fuchs to his friends because of his red hair, now turning grey – had also decided to miss lunch. He waited as the two cyclists passed him before crossing the road. ‘Nazis,’ he muttered under his breath as he heard the song they sang. He’d heard it as the prelude to many a brawl in which he invariably found his friends ranged against the singers. That was when Fuchs had worked as a diesel fitter for a boat company on the Elbe. As a young man he’d been a keen trade unionist and even now he worried that old documents would be found and bring him under police scrutiny.

Fuchs was a huge man with giant’s hands and a square jaw, but his shrill Saxon voice did not belong to such a man. He, more than anyone else in the pioneer battalion, disliked military life. The previous year some skilled engine fitters had been released to factory work but Ueberall’s application had been turned down. Now he looked forward only to his card-playing evenings, for it was the nearest thing to being a civilian that he’d managed to find in the Army. He liked his two friends very much: Gerd Böll had been a college professor and Oberzugführer Bodo Reuter never had occasion to remind him that he was also his senior officer.

Fuchs Ueberall often missed lunch, and almost always it was in order to play skat. All three men wondered sometimes what they had in common besides a similarity of age and outlook, a lack of family responsibility and an easily renewed faith that they would win the next game. But, as Gerd said one day, wasn’t that enough to have in common?