First of all, they were assured, they need have no fears about Falcone or the five guards who had been the last to desert from the camp, and who were the only Italians to see the revolt begin. For these men had been strong Fascists like the Commandant. They would never reach the town. (“We’ve taken care of that,” Johann said with a grin. “It is easier to kill them now than to have to search them out later.”)
Those who had deserted earlier in the day had slipped away, one by one, each thinking he was the only man with foresight in the camp. And so each would believe that the camp was still guarded by those he had left behind.
None of the Germans in the courtyard had escaped to give warning.
No house was near the camp, and no one in the town could have heard the shots.
No one would come to the camp tonight. The first arrivals would be at six tomorrow morning, when the daily food supplies were brought to the camp.
The staffs of the kitchen, commissary, and post office, who were civilians recruited from the town, generally arrived at seven o’clock each morning.
So much for the camp’s routine and personnel.
As to the town (“Bozen,” Johann said pointedly, as the colonel again made the tactical error of using the Italian form of Bolzano), only Italians had occupied the barracks until recently. After Mussolini’s fall some Germans had been placed in command. That was what caused the trouble in the town this afternoon. The Italian soldiers had said the war was over. They had put down their guns and tried to walk out. The Germans had shot at them. And then the Italian officers, who until then were not sure what they should do, had ordered their men to shoot back. There were not many Germans in the barracks so they were all killed. A number of Italians were killed, too, and the rest had left the barracks. Some of them had taken rifles and ammunition, but many didn’t. These had stripped off their uniforms, and had left their guns in the barracks. They were pretending now to be civilians.
The Nazis would probably take over the town, for they were already in firm control of the station and the railway to the Brenner Pass. They were playing a double game: they were backing the Fascist Italians, who were still working with the Nazis, and they were trying to win the support of the Tyrolese. Some of the Tyrolese listened to the Germans, believing that Hitler would free them from the Italians as his secret propaganda had promised for many years. But other men of the Tyrol only saw the Germans as new dictators to oppress them.
When Johann ended the colonel exchanged glances with the two majors. “At least,” he said, with a wry smile, “we are probably safe enough here for the next few hours. We have time to eat and finish our plans.”
One of the majors—he was an American wearing Rangers’ insignia—said, “But it’s a hell of a set-up.”
The other major nodded. “Absolutely.” He looked at Johann again. “It seems we have three kinds of Italians to deal with. Those who won’t fight at all; those who won’t fight against the Germans; and those who want to fight Germans. And there are two kinds of Tyrolese: those who are pro-Nazi, mainly because they hate the Italians; and those who hate the Nazis and who want to get rid of the Italians by themselves. That gives us five different sets of people to handle, not to mention the Germans.”
“Personally,” the American said, “I’ll be glad when we come up against the Germans. At least, you know what to shoot there.”
The colonel was still watching Johann. Half to himself he said, “If we only knew more about politics here we might be better able to—” He turned to Lennox. “Do you know anything about the political quarrels in this district?”
“A little. But Johann could tell you much more, sir.”
“If we had time...” the colonel said. “If I were sure of enough time...” He had started worrying again. “Pass out the food, anyway,” he said to the majors. “Share round any weapons you’ve found. Make a division of the men into those who are fit to travel and fight, those who are not. Find out their special branch of the service and decide how we can best use them.”
The officers hurried away. The colonel still watched Johann.
“Go ahead,” the older man said. He watched Lennox with thoughtful eyes.
Lennox said quietly, “Johann, who told you to give the prisoners information? Who told you to spread the news among the guards so that they’d desert? Someone you met down in Bozen, when you were off duty today?”
A careful look spread over Johann’s face, and wiped all the emotion out of it.
“Someone told you, didn’t he, Johann?”
Johann didn’t answer. I bet I’m right, Lennox was thinking. Johann was no fool; but there was a cleverer man than he would ever be behind all this.
“I must leave,” Johann was saying. “I must go now. I have told you everything. I must go.”
“To see this man?” tried Lennox.
Johann looked at him unhappily. “Our plans have changed. I must report,” he admitted.
“Changed? You mean the Germans who arrived here and are now killed have altered the plans?”
Johann said nothing.
“But, Johann, they are dead. They won’t inform. How can they alter any plans?”
Johann still said nothing.
Lennox looked at the officer. “Sorry, sir. That’s as far as we get.”
“You didn’t do badly. At least you’ve discovered the boy is part of an organisation. Pity he has suddenly shut up like this. Might have been helpful.”
Jock Stewart appeared with a rough bandage round his head and a stack of thick sandwiches in his arm. “Best chuck we’ve had here yet,” he said cheerfully, and handed out the slabs of bread with their generous slices of cheese. “Eyties’ larder,” he explained. “Soup is being heated now. Won’t be long, sir.” Then as Lennox took his allotted sandwiches, Stewart suddenly said, “Hey! I’ve got something for you. Didn’t get time to hide them before the Jerries arrived. There in my pocket. No. The left one.”
Lennox obeyed. He pulled out the German buttons which Miller had got for him. They gleamed in his soot-smeared palm.
“Not much good to you now,” Stewart said, with his usual combination of the practical and the obvious.
Lennox’s lips tightened as he looked at the buttons. And then he saw that both the colonel and Johann were staring at them too.
“When did you plan to leave?” the colonel was asking quietly, almost sympathetically.
“Tomorrow or the next day, sir. Before the moon grew too big.” Lennox made an attempt to smile. Suddenly he handed the buttons to Johann. “Perhaps you’ll find someone else who needs them.”
“They were for you?”
“Yes.”
“Not for Miller?”
“No.”
“For you? You were planning to escape?”
“I was.” Seven months of work, of planning, of worrying. Seven months of self-centred concentration. That’s what these seven months had done to him. That’s all they had produced.
Johann’s face changed. “Then you are the one we want. Please come. The man you were asking about wants to see you. Let us go at once. We are late. Very late.”
The colonel had understood part of these words. “He wants to see you?” He looked at the puzzled Lennox. “That means he wants to see the man who was determined enough to escape from this prison camp.” He paused for a moment. And then, with a mental jump which seemed at first inconsequential, he said, “I believe any man sent here had a record of escapes from other camps. And the corporal told me that any who tried to escape from here were shot if they were found. Is that so?”
“Shot while resisting arrest,” Lennox said bitterly. “Their bodies were sent back here to prove that to the others.”
“But escaped prisoners are unarmed: weapons are the one thing that a guard can’t be bribed to procure.”
“They were unarmed, sir.”
“I see.” The colonel was silent. Then to Johann he said very carefully, “Why does this man in Bolzano—Bozen, I mean
—want to see the prisoner who planned to escape? For what reason?”
Johann was undecided, hesitating, worried. And then, as if realising that the quickest way to end all this questioning was to give direct answers once more, he said simply, “We need him. To go with us into the mountains. We need him. When your armies will be coming up to the Brenner Pass we need someone who can”—he fumbled for the right word—“connect us with you.”
Lennox translated the boy’s sentences quickly. “Liaison officer is what he means, I think,” he concluded.
The boy nodded eagerly as he heard “liaison.” “That’s the word. We need liaison. We are working alone. We need someone to connect us with you, to tell you what we have done and why we have done it. Or else the Allies would think when they came that we were only joining the winning side, that we hadn’t earned the right to be masters in our own land.”
Lennox translated again.
“So that’s it!” the colonel said. Then, “Suppose we agreed to this, and gave you a liaison officer, would the man in Bozen help us now? When we leave here we will fight our way south to join our troops coming north. But we need more guns—many more. And we need help for the wounded who can’t travel with us. Can your people help them?”
Johann considered these problems. “Perhaps. I don’t know. He could tell you.”
“Who is he?”
“The man in Bozen.” And that was all Johann would say.
5
The colonel began eating his sandwich. In between bites he was talking to Lennox. He seemed to have forgotten Johann. By the time he had finished his ration of food he had learned that Peter Lennox was an infantry man, enlisted in the Territorials in August 1939, who had seen service in North Africa, Greece, Crete, and then in North Africa again. He had been wounded and captured in the fall of Tobruk. He had been held in two other Italian prison camps. Because of attempted escapes he had been transferred to this one.
The colonel was thoughtful for a minute. Then he asked suddenly, “What were you in civilian life?” Lennox hesitated, and then—steeling himself against the usual smile which his answer to that question always roused—he answered, “I used to paint.”
But the colonel didn’t smile. He looked at the shape of Lennox’s hands. He noted the mocking scar on the right hand. “An artist?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Know your way around, abroad?”
“Some places, sir.”
“Know Austria?”
“Yes, but not this part of the Tyrol.”
“You know the Northern Tyrol?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Know it well? Where did you stay?”
Lennox repressed a smile, remembering how little his travels had to cost. “I stuck to out-of-the-way places, sir.” Not Salzburg. Not Innsbruck. Not St. Anton. Not for me.
“Would you say that you would find the North and South Tyrol similar?”
Lennox stared. Whatever the reason for these questions he didn’t at all like it.
“Yes, sir. At least, I’ve seen many a Johann Schichtl in the North. I think the most obvious difference is in the shapes of the mountains.”
The colonel was still watching him carefully. He asked unexpectedly, “Didn’t you try for a commission when you joined the army?”
“I prefer this way, sir.”
The colonel smiled at that. He wasn’t so very surprised. He had already decided that this young man with the shock of brown hair, hard grey eyes, and unsmiling mouth had his own ideas about what he wanted to do. Probably he had chosen to be a private in the infantry because he obviously thought you suffered most as a private in the infantry. Well, if this man thought service was measured by suffering he certainly had served well. The colonel wondered for a moment if Lennox had been a pacifist in the nineteen-thirties. Probably.
And then the American major returned. His information wasn’t pleasant. There had been nine men in the hospital; three of them couldn’t walk. Of the other prisoners, twenty-three were weakened by malaria. Of the five wounded in the hall tonight, only two could travel. They, like the malaria cases, would have to be considered passengers. They weren’t fit for active combat.
The colonel’s face was tight and grim once more. He was looking at Johann Schichtl, as if his eyes could gauge the Austrian’s worth. When time was short you had to depend on your capacity to judge character by what you saw in a man’s face. The difficulty with Johann was that he was still a boy, without any definite character written on his round red-cheeked face. His blue eyes were honest and eager. His mouth was capable of two expressions: a friendly curve and a rebellious line. At the moment it was the rebellious line which straightened his lips and gave his good-natured chin an angry, disappointed set.
The colonel turned to Lennox, and spoke in halting French. “You knew him for some months. Did you feel you could trust him?”
“I didn’t trust him then, sir.”
“But you trusted him this afternoon.”
“Only since Miller was killed, sir.”
The colonel stared. “You don’t seem very clear about it,” he said sharply in English.
“Yes, sir,” Lennox agreed. The trouble is, he was thinking, when you tell people the truth they won’t believe you. If he had said he trusted Johann because he had helped them against a batch of lousy Fascists he would have lied. He hadn’t trusted Johann then. This afternoon Johann’s politics had run a parallel course with the prisoners’ hopes. That was why he had fought with them. You couldn’t trust a man whose only thought was politics: he was only your friend as long as it suited him. But there had been something in the way Johann had stood and looked at the dead Miller, something of real feeling and sadness which had jolted Lennox out of his cynicism. There was decent goodwill in this boy. He could be trusted.
The colonel looked gloomily at his watch. “The time is now almost eight-fifteen. By the boy’s information, we still have some hours of safety here. We shall have to trust him—that’s all. We need friends. We shan’t find them by refusing to meet them half-way.”
He turned to the American. “You and Major Cummins take charge. I’m going into this Bolzano, or Bozen, or whatever it’s called. I’ll see this man and get his help. If I don’t return by ten o’clock leave here. Don’t wait one minute after ten.”
The American major was looking worried now, in his turn.
“The wounded?” he asked.
“If I get back there will be a plan for the wounded. This man in Bozen will have to take care of them. That’s the price I’m going to ask for the man who is going up into the mountains as liaison officer.”
“Why not send someone else in your place to Bozen?” the American suggested.
“Because I’ve to make the decision about leaving a man with these Tyrolese. It’s my responsibility. Besides I want to know just what we might expect when our armies reach this part of the country.” The colonel smiled faintly as he added, “I am not at all so necessary for leading a party to the south. You and Cummins can do that as well as I could. And if I go myself to this man in Bozen then we are showing we are in earnest. We’ll get the quickest results that way.”
He turned to Johann and asked, “How soon can we reach this man?”
Johann’s smile came slowly back. “Twenty minutes on foot. Five minutes with the lorry,” he said happily. “It will be safe enough if we wear German coats. Perhaps there will be something you could bring back in the lorry.”
The officers looked at each other. “What could we bring back?” the colonel asked.
“The barracks in Bozen had much equipment.” Johann was grinning cheerfully, and the officers were smiling too: their guess had been right. The answer was guns.
“Come along,” the colonel said to Lennox. “I shall need you. And I’ll need a couple of other fellows. Pick out two of the toughest men here. Two who understand some German.”
Lennox obeyed without any enthusiasm. Hell, he was thinking, nothing ever goes the way y
ou plan it. He would be stuck here for the rest of the war. He could see it coming. If the colonel had his way—and who was to stop a blasted colonel?—he would be left here in those mountains while the others marched south. If only he had been stupid, talked foolishly, pretended to know nothing about Johann or his language. Too late now: he had been the bright little boy, and his seven months of planning had landed him among mountains.
“I’d like to—” began the American.
“Sorry, old man. You’re needed here.” The colonel signed to two junior officers. “Cover that up with these,” he ordered, pointing first to their commando uniforms and then to the pile of German coats. He was no longer worried. Now that the decision had been made he looked even happy, as if he were going to enjoy himself. Blast him, Lennox thought bitterly, and picked up a German coat and cap as the two lieutenants had done.
The two men he chose were Ferry and Merriman. (Stewart had to be passed over: his bandaged head would have been too conspicuous.) They were as excited as the lieutenants, and they had already covered their bleached uniforms with the German coats. They were smiling all over their faces as they left the hall. Johann, as happy as anyone, waited at the door. The colonel, strangely formidable in the German captain’s long military coat, turned at last from the two majors and walked towards Johann.
“Come on, there,” he said quickly, over his shoulder. “Step lively.”
“Yes, sir,” Lennox said. He looked at Stewart who was watching the departing men glumly. “You know where I’ve hidden my coat, Jock. There’s a good map, and some money and other things behind the loose board—the one that’s covered by that calendar I made. Perhaps you can use them.”
Stewart gave him a sharp look. “I’ll find a use for them,” he said. He clapped Lennox on the shoulder as if he realised this was the last time they would see each other. “It’s a damned shame,” Stewart said. “It’s...”
“Step lively!” the colonel yelled from the doorway.
Lennox nodded to Stewart, and then he was hurrying between the groups of men in the hall. He followed the colonel out into the night. Seven months, he was thinking bitterly. As he passed two German-like sentinels in the courtyard, and heard them wish him luck, he was wondering whether he would have managed to escape this time, or whether he would have made just another ‘shot-while-resisting’ corpse. Third try was usually luck, it was said. But now he’d never know. He felt cheated. This thought was so busy rankling in his mind that he blundered in the darkness as he climbed on to the lorry, and the high mudguard struck sharply against his shin. He swore much more than was necessary, but at least he felt better. The colonel’s taut wrist pulled him safely on board, down on to a hard wooden bench, as the lorry started impatiently forward. It swung through the gateway, past the watch-towers with their machine guns and the swinging searchlights, past the masses of ten-foot high barbed wire. It jolted over the wooden bridge which spanned the deep, moat-like pit encircling the walls of wire.