LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Sixteen

      Oberleutnant August Bach, who knew nothing of the letter his cousin had written to him and would in fact never know of it, walked along the soft beach in the evening light. One thousand suns bounced upon the wave-tops and the sound of the sea was harsh and constant.

      It was the coldness of the sea that formed the water particles in the air – twenty thousand of them in every cubic inch – by cooling it to dew-point. So along the shoreline the incoming air became cloud and moved inland and became warm enough for the cloud to disappear. Patches of mist brooded in the cold trees and made the taller dunes into tiny desert islands. On the strand where August walked the mist was churned by the wind to reveal the golden horizon and then wrap him again in its cottonwool.

      Deep-rooted yellow poppies and sea-sandwort struggled for life against the shifting sand that exposed their roots one day and buried their heads the next. Along the high-water mark nature’s usual debris had collected: edible urchins like battered shaving-brushes, cuttlefish bones, channel wrack, some of it dried and blackened, the mussels pounded loose from the endless steel stakes that extended out into the ocean and pointed at England. There was other flotsam too: pieces of packing-case with cryptic stencil marks, a few dozen squashed oranges and a burned piece of yellow lifejacket. Over everything there was thick shiny oil that added a sour smell of decay to the brisk salt breeze.

      Bach tapped the loose sand from his boots, climbed a short flight of wooden steps and opened the door of the shack in which he lived. At first his men had thought him mad for commandeering this ramshackle hut perched high upon the dunes. It had been an equipment store for the Dutchmen who had planted the dune grass and maintained the sea wall. Bach had had it lined with insulating material and supported on new metal beams to make it dry and free of rats. Inside there were books, a stove, a simple Luftwaffe bedstead, an old armchair and a table at which he worked. The few men under his command privileged to see the place at close quarters recognized now the wisdom of his choice. His Luftwaffe signals company numbered one hundred and fourteen men, with him their only officer. He was quite happy to live and eat with them, but men who obey orders need a chance to complain without an officer to overhear. His little hut, half a kilometre from the other buildings, gave them that chance. He unlocked the door and let himself in. His desk was placed near to the window from which he could see the beach and ocean when the weather was clear. Willi, his second-in-command, had lit the stove, for even on a summer’s evening there was dampness in the air that made the bedding cold and edged the lenses of his binoculars with tiny spots of moisture. He filled a kettle from the tap at the washbasin. The pipe rattled like a machine gun and the water was warm from its journey through the hastily laid water pipe that went along the sunny dunes to the main building.

      He treasured these few moments alone as he came to terms with this environment. He remembered Anna-Luisa and felt a warm contentment at his memory of her. He knew that once the Stabsfeldwebel arrived and work began he would no longer be able to give himself to these sentimental emotions. He wiped the lenses of his field-glasses and walked to the rear of the hut. From this window he could see back across the dunes to the radar buildings and, when it was not misty, all the way along the coast to the tip of the tall radar aerials of the next Himmelbett station.

      He focused the glasses upon a clump of grass and waited for the mist to move. Just a fidget of wing and a stretch of long neck was for a moment higher than the edge of a nest. The grey herons were still there on the dune side. They usually stayed close to fresh water, especially in the summer, but since this coast had been made a prohibited area the wildlife had become more active. These had laid their eggs in May. Now it was almost time to go. He wondered whether they would return next winter. He felt that they were an omen.

      Satisfied that all was well with the herons, he began to change from his uniform into old, more comfortable clothes. He pulled off his high boots, using the home-made wooden clamp behind the door. When the kettle began to hum gently he called Willi on the phone.

      ‘A cup of chocolate, Willi,’ he said.

      ‘Thank you, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said the man at the other end. August chopped the coarse chocolate pieces into chips, melted them in the boiling water and beat the mixture until it was frothy.

      August was watching his Stabsfeldwebel marching along the dunes when the heron returned. It was a huge ungainly bird with curiously slow and mechanical wing movements that made it seem man-made. Its legs trailed behind it and from its beak there hung an eel. The bird in the nest gave a croak of pleasure and raised its head to look. Always one or other of them remained at the nest. ‘Kroink’; it circled the main buildings. Perhaps the great radar aerials attracted the birds, thought August, as it flew across the face of the Freya. White mist wove through the intricate metalwork like skeins of soft raw wool through a comb and the aerial moved gently, scanning as far as, and farther than, the enemy coast. Sometimes it even detected RAF planes that never left the English sky.

      Willi Reinecke knocked briefly and waited for permission before he entered. He carefully brushed the wet sand from his jackboots and stood correctly at attention. The steaming cup of chocolate waited for him on August’s desk but first the two men enacted the ritual of salutes and greetings of rank that was a necessary prelude to all military intercourse.

      Willi Reinecke was a tall thick-set man of indeterminate age. Born in Hessen-Nassau, the promise of work in the steel industry of the Ruhr had drawn him north as a young man, but, unemployed and desperate, he had finally joined the Army. He still had a lot of hair. It was greying at the sides in a distinguished way that would have looked right on a banker. As a youngster he had been quite a ladies’ man, but a grenade had exploded on a parapet while Willi was still looking over it. His nose had split open, his cheek was a maze of scars, and one ear was missing altogether, which is why he grew his hair long. A veteran of the Moscow battles, August had guessed when he had first been posted here, but the Stabsfeldwebel had growled ‘Verdun’ and only then did August realize that his second-in-command was a lot older than he liked to admit.

      They had disliked each other on sight. Reinecke was a senior NCO of the old school. Twice August had seen him kick a man who had dawdled and he would not hesitate to clobber anyone who looked as if he might argue. These incidents had made the first trouble between them. At first August had tried to explain that the personnel he commanded were Luftwaffe technicians, not cannon-fodder, but that had no effect. Finally August had decided to fight with Reinecke’s weapons. He gave the amazed Reinecke a blistering dressing-down and ordered him to parade each shift an hour before their work commenced. At that time there were six shifts – manning the radar machinery was tiring for the plotters working in darkness and gruelling for the men exposed to the sea breeze – and so Reinecke found himself on parade six hours out of the twenty-four.

      The lesson was not lost on the stubborn old man and, after a month of the new régime had convinced him that August was quite prepared to continue the same schedule for the war’s duration, he called for a truce. He did this when August was away on a two-day course in electronics. The Oberleutnant returned to find that the draughty little hut in which he had elected to live had been completely remade. It had been equipped with furnishings stolen or borrowed from goodness knows where and a large double-glazed window had been fitted to facilitate August’s bird-watching. From that moment the two of them had tried to work together, and in that curious way that happens sometimes to people with such contrasting beliefs and backgrounds they had become very close. When August Bach understood the man better he realized that his tyranny was matched by a concern for the welfare of his men. Willi Reinecke was not above stealing, lying and even falsifying documents to ensure

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