The Green Gauntlet (12 page)

He was not by any means clear about what he would do after that except to hunt for transport of some kind that would enable him to get clear away from the area. This, he felt, was essential for two reasons. They would not be looking for him with such enthusiasm if he could put distance between himself and his point of escape, already ten miles to the north-east, and the chances of stowing aboard a vessel for Eire would improve very considerably if he could enter the area of a port like Plymouth or Falmouth.

He knew the country better than some of the men searching for him. His ability to read maps had been built into his initial training as a member of the Hitler Youth movement ten years ago and his seagoing experience had enabled him to memorise topographical features at a glance. The only map he possessed now was inside his head but it was none the worse for that. During his fifteen months of captivity and again, in the course of his two escapes, he had had many opportunities to study maps either smuggled into the camp in Cumberland, or displayed on railway stations he had passed through during his subsequent escapes. This ready availability of maps contributed to the unspeakable contempt he felt—and always had felt—for the British race. To his way of thinking their officials behaved with astonishing stupidity. They introduced an impenetrable blackout throughout the length and breadth of the country that made it very easy for escapers to move about at night, they removed the names of stations and carted away the sign-posts thereby causing themselves, and no-one else, endless confusion and frustration. They did not, however, take the elementary precaution of covering pre-war tourist posters at some of their transport depots, or making certain that school atlases did not find their way into prisoner-of-war camps. Clearly photographed in the brain of Shratt was the general layout of the entire western peninsula and this photograph had been there ever since he learned that he was destined to travel to Plymouth by train in the custody of a trio of yokels in uniform. He could have given them the slip before but had waited until he was within easy walking distance of the coast. Once he had smelled the sea and seen a catch of fresh fish at the junction a few miles back, he had gone into the station lavatory, climbed out of the window into a siding, displayed himself running east between two lines of open trucks, doubled back, and concealed himself in a canvas water tank until it was dusk. Now, in this kind of weather, he was already dry and was not even tired or hungry for he had enjoyed six hours’ sleep on reaching the Shallowford escarpment and had eaten his fill of fruit, vegetables and handfuls of corn gathered whilst crossing the open fields under the woods. For the first time since his last escape he felt confident of being the first German prisoner to escape from Britain. Von Werra had made it from Canada the previous year but Von Werra was dead, and Otto was confident that the Reich needed another hero to fête, cosset and promote, before sending him to make more inroads into Allied commerce. By now, he reasoned, he would have been among the most decorated of Admiral Doënitz’s stalwarts, the men to whom the Reich would owe its ultimate triumph after the hopeless rumblings of the Wehrmacht in Russia and the pitiable display of Goering’s Luftwaffe in the summer and autumn of 1940. For Shratt was not only a dedicated Nazi, fed and nurtured on the theory and practice of Teutonic supremacy. He was also a man who had come to believe the only certain way of beating Britain was to starve her to death and the latest shipping losses quoted in the camp confirmed him in this belief. No country, whatever its resources, could hope to replace an annual shipping loss of upwards of three million tons. By this time next year, by late autumn if the U-boat men attended to their duty, Winston Churchill would be in the mood to agree to a truce in the West in order that Germany could eliminate Russia. There would be plenty of time to finish the war against Britain and America once Germany had the entire resources of the Continent at her disposal. In the meantime the most important war aim in the mind of Otto von Shratt was to get home, have his picture in all the papers, and accept the command of one of Doënitz’s most up-to-date U-boats.

The propaganda of ten years, seeping into the mind of an already aggressive personality had simplified Shratt’s political thinking to the point of absurdity, but it had not eroded his abundant stock of commonsense as regards how to survive or how to conduct himself as a professional fighting man. His instincts were sharp and keen. His powers of observation were considerable. Above all, his physical stamina and resolution were unimpaired by the frustration of fifteen months behind barbed wire. In addition to all this he had something comparatively rare in the German soldier, an ability, indeed a preference, to act on his own initiative and make his own on-the-spot decisions and, if necessary adapt his plans to changing circumstances. Once having learned the rudiments of his craft at sea he had not found it necessary to go by the book. He had, in fact, thrown the book away for it was his experience that every separate decision was regulated by a specific set of circumstances and that circumstances were fluid and could flow in any direction. It was this basic characteristic that had enabled him to survive the sinking of his U-boat off Rosyth in the spring of 1941. Alone among the crew he had kept himself afloat in rough water for more than two hours, saved by a rubber flask of spirit and a lifebelt fitted with a luminous dial, gadgets he had thought out for himself when the superiors were too busy or too pigheaded to follow his advice. His initiative, plus his ability to convert his memory into a well-kept filing cabinet, had been the springboard of his two previous escapes and had he not been baulked by the sea barriers in all directions it is possible that he would have presented himself to the German Consul in Dublin months ago. He had, against all probability, got as far as the Liverpool docks on the last occasion and might have found a ship had not hunger forced him to focus attention upon himself by an act of burglary. Hunger was no immediate problem today but transport was and as he watched the last of the beaters top the slope, he made ready to descend into the valley and search the area for an unwatched car or motor-cycle. He was in no particular hurry and could assess the situation calmly. One way and another Otto von Shratt was a rare bird.

When the cries of the beaters grew faint on the far side of the hill he slipped out of his cleft and made a fast, crouching descent to the edge of the Mere where he was able to disappear again inside a rhododendron clump but continue to observe the track that led to the woodman’s cottage.

The woodman was not there. From his observation post high on the hill he had seen the man summoned into the open by the grey-haired old fellow who seemed to be in command of the detachment. But there was probably a woman around and there was nothing to be gained by inviting her outcry, so he moved very carefully along the fringe of the rhododendrons until he could look right across at the cottage and determine whether or not it was empty. He saw no woman, no movement of any kind within the area, but soon he saw something else on his immediate right that made him bob back into the leafy cave of the fronds. A ponderous man was plodding down the path beside the Mere, glancing left and right as he advanced. He did not look a formidable adversary. He was fat, old and short of wind. His mouth curved upwards in a permanent, rubbery grin. From his dense cover Shratt watched carefully, wondering if he was the laggard of the party over the hill. He was alone and carried a single-barrelled sporting gun of some kind held in the crook of his arm. Otto Shratt, a man destined for high rank in the German Navy, settled down to wait and watch.

III

H
enry Pitts had never taken kindly to military discipline. His First World War record was impressive for he served three years in France and had been awarded the Military Medal for gallantry on the liquid slopes of Pilckhem Wood, in 1917. But his sergeant’s stripes in that far-off war tended to come and go so rapidly that even Henry himself was sometimes not always sure of his rank. He was inclined to answer back. He was impassive in advance, imperturbable in retreat and his trench mates had thought of him as invulnerable but he was a man who, like Shratt, preferred to make his own decisions and dismiss directives as ‘bliddy lot o’ rigmarole’. Paul Craddock’s instructions to await the assembly of the reserves had struck him as just this and when his car was returned to him, and no-one else had arrived at the Command Post in Coombe Bay, he elected himself rearguard and told Smut Potter, who was lame, to tell anyone else who turned up to follow at their own convenience. Then, borrowing Smut’s single shot rook-rifle and a box of cartridges, he drove to the point where the cars were parked under guard, climbed the slope, and picked his way down through the timber to the path beside the Mere.

It was quiet and cool down here. Pottering along the shore he almost forgot his purpose in entering the woods and watched a moorhen teaching her chicks to swim inshore of the islet. It was years, he reflected, since he had been down here, for his farm lay at the other end of the estate and the last visit he could recall to this section of the woods was during his courting days, when he had walked the buxom Gloria, long since laid in her Cornish grave, along this very path of a summer evening. The memory of youth suffused him. His rubbery grin expanded as he remembered her half-hearted squawks of protests when he had, as he himself would have put it, ‘rinned up an’ down the scales a time or two’. The filtered sunlight and the chorus of birdsong induced in him a sense of peace and fulfilment, particularly when he reflected that he had already outlived Gloria by a decade and had since married Ellie who had proved a great contrast to Gloria. Half-consciously he compared their merits and de-merits, Gloria’s inclination to nag and her capacity for hard work, Ellie’s amiability, offset by her virtual uselessness as a farmer’s wife when removed from bed or the cooking stove where she was adequate. Luxuriating in his memories he strolled along the path as far as Sam Potter’s cottage and pausing there remembered that Sam kept a barrel of home-brewed cider under his kitchen-sink. The thought increased his sense of well-being exorcising the final traces of Otto Shratt from his mind. He raised his head and bellowed ‘Sam! Where be ’ee, Sam?’ and getting no answer dropped his hand on the catch of the gate in the picket fence.

It was the gate-fastening that set in train everything else that happened in the Valley that afternoon. Had it lifted easily he could have opened the gate without setting aside his rifle. As it was he had to struggle with the rusted tongue of metal and to do this he was obliged to use both hands and a certain amount of force. Sam had not used that gate in years. Behind the cottage was a broken paling and he entered and left his garden via this section.

The gate opened at last and giving Sam another hail Henry went round to the wash-house and through into the scullery. His memory had been accurate. There was Sam’s barrel and when he held a
mug to the tap cider gushed out as though eager to be at Henry’s service. It was very good cider indeed, Sam having got the recipe from his gypsy mother, Meg. It was, Henry decided, the best drink in the world on a hot summer afternoon after a walk over an incline of two hundred feet. He had no fears that Sam would resent him helping himself. The Potters were an open-handed lot and Henry’s friendship with Sam went back to Victoria’s reign. He smacked his lips, murmured ‘Here’s to ’ee, Sam’, and drank his second mug. By the time he had half-finished his third it would have taxed his powers of concentration to recall what circumstances had brought him here on a lazy summer’s afternoon. He sat on Sam’s kitchen chair, his weight thrown back, his gumbooted legs thrust forward, savouring and remembering, plucking incidents at random from a crowded past, and then his eye fell on a discarded newspaper and a headline that read, ‘
Russians Throw Back Kharkov Attack
’.
With a mild jolt it brought him back to his duty. He washed the cider mug, put it on the draining-board, and waddled out into the sunshine and round to the front gate. Automatically he reached down for Smut’s rook-rifle. It was gone. There was nothing there but a tall clump of nettles, the topmost leaf dipping slightly under the weight of a cabbage white butterfly.

IV

O
tto Shratt began to formulate a new plan before Henry had entered the cottage. In the next few minutes he had all but shaped it, dividing it into stages like a man planning a long and complicated journey on a miserly budget. With a gun in his hand he did not have to comb the area for unguarded transport. He could ambush any car that came by and force the driver to take him north instead of west, for almost at once he isolated three advantages of an abrupt change of route. In the first place no-one would expect him to double on his tracks and enter a more thickly populated area. In the second place he was familiar with the Liverpool dock area, having skulked in the district for several days during his second escape. Thirdly he was persuaded that his chances of stowing away on an Irish-bound vessel would be far more favourable in the north than in the west.

The key to the revised plan was the gun. In ten seconds flat he was out of his screen, across to the fence and back again. The weapon was not impressive, a .22 rifle with a single shot action but it was loaded and as a persuader it was as good as a Luger or a sub-machine gun. Contemplating it Shratt’s dreams of fame and freedom expanded. He saw himself being driven the length of England by cowed civilians whom he could jettison in lonely stretches of country so that the forces of pursuit, catching up with them one by one, would be frustrated and confused. Petrol might prove a problem—he knew it was strictly rationed—but a gun could be made to produce petrol and food and money and anything else he might need on a sustained cross-country jaunt. With mounting confidence he moved along the margin of the little lake, crossed the main path, and climbed the long, timbered slope of the south-facing ridge where he could look down on a large sprawling house approached by a tree-lined drive and backed by an orchard and a yard. Like the woods the place seemed deserted and the prospects of finding transport there seemed to Shratt promising. He went on down, using the orchard hedgerows for cover.