Page 43

He knew what those boys would do because he would have done it himself at their age.

They’d obey orders and they wouldn’t give up.

They’d throw themselves at the American soldiers with their hands empty once the bullets ran out, acting as if they possessed some superhuman skill.

They’d turn the town into a war zone rather than let it surrender.

And if they weren’t captured or killed doing that, they’d run into the mountains and keep fighting until they were picked off one by one.

It can’t happen; I can’t let it. This won’t be a repeat of the last time the regime sucked me back into its web.

That certainty ran through his body as fast as the fever had swum through his blood.

He could no more stand by and watch Viktor turn the town’s streets red than he’d been able to stand by and do nothing at Dachau.

But this time he had a chance to see it through.

He got to his feet; forced himself into a soldier’s rigid posture.

And when one of the boys looked his way, he smiled and beckoned him over.

‘Foraging skills will keep you alive when you’re on the march miles from anywhere and your supplies have run out, which they always do. Who’s got the mushroom identification kit?’

They’d been walking along the damp riverbank for two hours, and Pascal badly needed to stop and rest, but he didn’t want the boys thinking he was weak in any way.

They had to believe he was a brave officer committed to the cause and helping them to fight for and win it if his plan had any hope of success.

You are required to report back to Dachau at once to assist with an immediate prisoner evacuation. Please contact SS Hauptsturmführer Weiter’s office to confirm the time of your return.

The summons had arrived a week earlier, on the twenty-fourth of April, luckily while Viktor was out of the house, or he would have driven Pascal back to the camp himself.

Pascal’s first inclination would have been to let him – not because he had any intention of co-operating with a march that was intended to kill as many of the prisoners as possible, and which he couldn’t stop, but to try and warn Leon and his men to stay hidden while it set out.

It didn’t take him long to realise how futile that was.

He’d been away for over a month and no longer knew how the crowded camp functioned.

As hard as it was to let go, he had to hope that at least some of the prisoners would have built their hiding places and learned the warning signs for themselves.

He was far more use now in Unterwald, providing he managed not to get himself executed as a deserter.

‘I am so sorry, but perhaps my last communication didn’t get through to the correct channels – I know how busy you all must be.

The typhus returned, you see, and I suffered a relapse.

The doctor hopes I’ll be out of bed more permanently soon, but if you could allow me a few more days’ rest, I’ll be much more use to you. ’

Lina, the camp commandant’s secretary, was a motherly sort who had been very taken with Pascal’s good manners.

She also hated to bother her boss with the administrative issues he preferred not to be involved in, and she thought she could manage on his behalf.

She’d poured her sympathy down the telephone line when Pascal rang and spoke to her in a voice that barely made it as far as a whisper.

Then – ‘in the strictest of confidence of course’ – she’d given him the details of the march’s route so he could meet up with it as soon as he was able.

And given him a way to deal with Viktor’s boy soldiers.

The prisoners were being transferred to a holding camp at Tegernsee and then on to the ?tz valley in the Alps, to build a new network of tunnels there according to Lina, although she had no idea what for.

Pascal did. He’d heard the proposed scheme mentioned a number of times while he was at Dachau – and with increased urgency when the orders to draw up evacuation plans came in.

The mountain facility being built in the Alps was intended to be a test area for rockets and aeroplanes which could fly at supersonic speeds.

That anyone in the German High Command thought that capability was still needed at this stage in the war struck Pascal as the definition of insanity.

But whether the testing area was ever used or not, he doubted many of the inmates would be able to complete the arduous walk there.

And it was the evidence of that which – although he dreaded what they’d find – he needed the boys to see.

Viktor had been stunned, and initially suspicious, when Pascal had offered to take the youngest members of the Volkssturm on a riverbed walk to teach them survival skills.

But the boys – whose hero worship Pascal had encouraged no matter how distasteful he found it – quickly won their mayor round, especially as Viktor was arrogant enough to believe he’d won Pascal’s loyalty back.

Which was why Pascal was now two hours into a carefully planned walk he hoped would uncover more than mushrooms and edible berries.

‘What’s that – over there? It looks like a body.’

That was everything Pascal had hoped and feared they would find. But he didn’t hurry over to where the boys had started to gather. He wanted them to make the whole of the discovery for themselves.

‘Why are they here where there wasn’t any fighting? And why aren’t they wearing uniforms?’

The bodies the boys were staring at were lying where they had fallen along the edge of the road leading to Bad Tolz, half in and half out of the daisies and clover sprouting up from the long grass.

Some were face down, with bullet wounds visible in the backs of their necks.

Some were gazing lifelessly at the sky, broken by hunger and exhaustion.

One of the boys started to count them, but the line of corpses stretched out endlessly down the long road and he soon gave up.

Then the wind changed direction and they all sprang back, their hands clamped across their mouths as the sweet scent of the flowers became something far darker.

‘Who are they?’

The boy asking the questions was Pauli. He was no longer smiling proudly and standing tall the way he had in the market square while his mother wept and applauded. He looked much younger than twelve.

Pascal had only glanced for the briefest second at the bodies; he hadn’t wanted his eyes to fill with tears and betray him. He was terrified he’d see a familiar face and crumple. He also needed the emotional response to come from the boys, not from him. He kept his gaze on Pauli as he answered.

‘They’re prisoners, most probably from the camp at Dachau. Russians, Poles, some Jews. It’s likely they were being marched to a new location.’

He waited for them to flinch and harden as he listed the names they’d been taught to loathe, but they were too shocked at the spectacle to remember how callously they were supposed to react.

‘Why are they all so thin? They don’t look real; they look like skeletons with clothes on.’

The second boy – Niko – rubbed at his own well-padded arm as he asked, as if he was trying to make a connection between his fledgling muscles and the stick figures piled up along the roadside.

Pascal took a deep breath. He wanted the boys to do that.

He wanted to provoke empathy, not hostility or a disgust born out of long-ingrained lessons.

He wanted the boys to feel that the bodies – who looked like anything but – had once been people just like them.

‘No, you’re right – they don’t look real.

But they’re as real as you are, I promise.

They look like skeletons because they’ve been deliberately starved in the prison camp and deliberately worked far too hard for their weakened bodies to manage.

And probably because a lot of them were already very ill when they were forced onto this march, too ill to be walking anywhere in fact. ’

He waited for one of them to dismiss the treatment as being all the dead men had deserved. His spirits rose a little when that didn’t happen.

‘But that’s not honourable. That’s not how we’re meant to treat prisoners.’

Honourable . A word he’d finally learned was both a blessing and a curse.

It didn’t surprise Pascal that it was Pauli who had taken refuge in it.

He’d been brought up in a military household – he imagined Pauli had heard the same heroic stories from his father growing up that he had.

And now it was time to rip the scales from the boy’s eyes and worry about the consequences later.

‘No, you’re right with that too – it’s not.

But it’s what we do; it’s what we’ve done throughout the entire war.

To people who don’t have the “pure” blood you’ve been taught about but that doesn’t actually exist. To people who we’ve decided are different from us and therefore have no rights and no value. ’

He paused, but none of them started arguing with his choice of words, so he decided to hammer the lesson home while he had their attention.

He gestured to the road and told them to look at the corpses again, even though they protested.

And he ran everything Noemi had said to him and he’d ignored because he’d thought he knew better through his carefully chosen words.

‘There’s too many bodies to count here. There’s too many to count everywhere. And what you need to understand is that this is where National Socialism – the system of beliefs we’ve all been following for the last twelve years – really leads.’

The boys stayed silent; they turned their backs on the bodies and stared at his face. He couldn’t read their mood, but he couldn’t stop talking.