Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?

       Chapter Six

      When choosing a site for an airfield it doesn’t matter that the ground is not flat, for it can easily be levelled. The deciding factor is drainage. The inhabitants of Little Warley had always known that the potato fields to the east of the village drained into Witch Fen. The land between there and the line of ash trees at The Warrens is hard, fertile and as black as coal. Its subsoil is firm enough to take the weight of a bombing plane. So it was no surprise when, as war began, Air Ministry teams surveyed the place and pronounced it suitable for a Bomber Command airfield. After that came earth-moving machinery, concrete mixers and asphalt pourers. A tarmac cross was drawn across Warley’s countryside and around СКАЧАТЬ