Hugh nodded.
'Tommy,' he said, grinning slightly, 'there is some slyness to you, as well.' He laughed sharply, but not with a great deal of amusement.
'Which is probably a right good ling,' he muttered, as they walked faster, 'given what we're up against.
Whatever the bloody hell that is.'
The hulking Canadian took another few strides forward, and then asked, 'Of course. Tommy, one question does leap fairly swiftly to mind: What the hell sort of conspiracy could we be talking about?' Hugh came to an abrupt stop. He looked up, across the exercise yard, past the deadline, past the towers, the machine- gun crews, the wire, and the long cleared space beyond.
'Here? I wonder, whatever could we be talking about?'
Tommy followed his friend's eyes, staring out past the wire. He wondered for an instant whether the air would taste sweeter on the day he was freed. That was what poets always wrote, he thought: The sweet taste of freedom. He fought off the urge to think of home. Images of Manchester and his mother and father sitting down to a summertime dinner, or Lydia standing beside an old bicycle on the dusty sidewalk outside his house on an early fall afternoon, when only the smallest insistence of winter is in the early evening breezes.
She had blond hair that dropped in burnished sheets to her shoulders and he found himself reaching up, almost as if he could touch it. These pictures rushed at him, and for a single instant the harsh, grimy world of the camp started to fade from his eyes. But then, just as swiftly as they came, they fled.
He looked back at Hugh, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and so he replied, with only the smallest hesitation and doubt in his voice:
'I don't know. Not yet. I don't know.'
Kriegies did not die, they merely suffered.
Inadequate diet, the obsessive-compulsive manner in which they threw themselves into sports, or the makeshift theater or whatever activity with which they decided to while away time, the oddity of their anxieties about whether they would ever return home coupled with the ill-adjustment to the routines of prison life, the seemingly constant cold and damp and dirt, poor hygiene, susceptibility to disease, boredom contradicted by hope, which was in turn contradicted by the ubiquitous wire-all these things made for a curious tenuousness and fragility to life. Like Phillip Pryce's lingering cough, they were constantly being intimidated by death, but rarely did it come knocking with its harsh demands and fearsome requirements.
In his two years in confinement, Tommy had only seen a dozen deaths, and half of these were men who went wire crazy and tried to blitz out in the middle of the night, dying in the fences with homemade metal cutters in their hands, chopped apart by a sudden burst from a Hundfuhrer's machine pistol or a tower machine-gun crew. And over the years, there were a few men who had arrived at Stalag Luft Thirteen after suffering terrible injuries falling from the air and then inadequate care in German hospitals. The day and night constancy of the Allied bombing raids had limited the precious medicines and antibiotics available to the Germans, and many of their better surgeons had already died -in forward hospitals treating men on the Russian front. But Luftwaffe policy toward the occasional Allied airmen seemingly at risk from wounds or disease was to arrange repatriation through the Swiss Red Cross. This was usually accomplished before the unlucky flier succumbed. The Luftwaffe preferred terminally sick or injured kriegies to die in the care of the Swiss; then they appeared less culpable.
He could not recall an instance where a kriegie was buried with military honors. Usually deaths were handled quietly, or with some sort of informal moment, like the jazz band's honoring one of their own. He thought it surprising that Von Reiter would permit a military funeral; the Germans wanted kriegies to think like kriegies, not like soldiers. It is far easier to guard a man who thinks of himself as a prisoner than it is to guard a man who thinks of himself as a warrior.
At the dusty juncture formed by two huts and converging alleys. Tommy pointed Hugh in the direction of the medical services hut, and hurried down the narrow walkway between 119 and 120, which would take him to the burial ground. He could hear a voice coming from around the corner, but could not make out the words being spoken.
He slowed as he rounded the corner of Hut 119.
Some three hundred kriegies stood in formation beside the hastily prepared gravesite. Tommy immediately recognized almost all the men from Hut 101, and a smattering of other fliers, probably someone representing each of the remaining buildings. Six German soldiers carrying bolt-action rifles stood at parade rest just slightly to the side of the squares of men.
Trader Vic's coffin had been predictably nailed together from the light-colored wooden crates that delivered the Red Cross parcels. The flimsy balsa wood was the preferred building material for virtually every bit of furniture in the American camp, but Tommy thought with some irony that no one expected it to form the walls of their own casket. Three officers stood at the head of the coffin: MacNamara,
Clark, and a priest, who was reading the twenty-third psalm. The priest had been shot down over Italy the previous summer, when he'd taken his charge of administering to the flock of airmen in a light bomber group perhaps a bit too seriously, and had elected to fly on one of their runs over Salerno at a time when German antiaircraft troops on the ground were still active, and German fighters still plied their deadly trade in the air.
He had a flat, reedy voice that managed to dull even the famous words of the psalm. When he said, 'The Lord is my shepherd…' he made it sound like God was actually tending sheep, not watching over those at risk.
Tommy hesitated, not knowing whether he should join the formations or merely keep watch from the periphery. In that momentary pause, he heard a voice from his side, which took him by surprise.
'And what is it, Lieutenant Hart, that you expect to see?'
He turned sharply toward the questioner.
Hauptmann Heinrich Visser was standing a few feet away, smoking a dark brown cigarette, leaning back against Hut 119. The German held the smoke like a dart, lifting it languidly to his lips, but relishing each long pull.
Tommy took a deep breath.
'I expect to see nothing,' he replied slowly.
'People who go somewhere with expectations are generally rewarded by seeing what they anticipated. I'm merely here to observe, and whatever
I do see will be what I need to see.'
Visser smiled.
'Ah,' he said, 'a clever man's response. But not very military.'
Tommy shrugged.
'Well, then I guess I'm not a perfect soldier.'
Visser shook his head.
'We shall see about that, I suppose.
In the days to come.'
'And you, Hauptmann7 Are you a perfect soldier?'
The German shook his head.
'Alas, no. Lieutenant Hart.
But I have been an efficient soldier. Remarkably efficient. But not perfect. These things, I think, are not precisely the same.'
'Your English is quite good.'
'Thank you. I lived for many years in Milwaukee, growing up with my aunt and uncle. Perhaps had I stayed another year or two, I would have considered myself to be more American than German. Can you imagine, lieutenant, that I was actually quite accomplished at the game of baseball?' The German glanced down at his missing arm.
'No longer, I suppose.
Regardless. I could have stayed. But I did not. I elected to return to the fatherland for my
