batman, so he would have trusted him with it. That was often the closest relationship, you know, officer and batman. Unspoken bond, all that.’
‘Were you ever close to anyone? Like that?’ Rebecca asked.
‘Me?’ Hugh paused, taken aback. ‘Good Lord. No. Not by then. Not like before the war. We… were romantic then. Naive. We even looked forward to war, to that bond amongst men we’d heard so much about. It was extraordinary, so soon after the Great War, yet it only seems to take a generation for men to forget. It’s as if war has become part of our nature, as if our biology has found a way to make us forget, to allow us to do it over and over again. It was General Lee, in the American Civil War, who said, thank God war is so awful, otherwise it’d be addictive. The difference was, the civilians in the Civil War saw the horror around them. We all knew terrible loss, our fathers, our uncles, killed in the Great War, but few of us in 1939 had seen carnage close up, seen death and dying. That might have done it.’
‘When you say we, you mean you and Peter,’ Rebecca said.
Hugh paused, looking down. ‘We were a small group. Close friends, at university. But yes. Peter was the closest.’
Dillen leaned forward. ‘Corporal Lewes. Why was he driving back to Corps Headquarters?’
Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I assumed they’d found something in the camp, perhaps in the forest. Peter had probably sent Lewes back for the usual follow-up team: extra riflemen, an interrogator, sappers for breaking into buildings, a bomb disposal expert, that kind of thing. The unit were a pretty impressive outfit and knew their stuff.’
‘Did anyone try to send word back to Peter? Did you? About what had happened to Lewes?’
‘I wanted to,’ Hugh replied. ‘I desperately wanted to. It’s all such a haze. I’ve been over it so often in my mind. I think by then the malaria was really clouding my thinking. I had a jeep and was going to do it myself. We didn’t have radio communication, of course. But events quickly overtook us. Corps HQ was concerned that the Germans might use the ceasefire to infiltrate the forest, to set up defensive positions and booby traps. We all knew what had happened to the Americans in the Hurtgen Forest, one of the nightmare battles of the war. The Hurtgen Forest was one of the nightmare battles of the war. There was not going to be a repeat of that. We already knew that the remnants of the German 2nd Marine Infantry Division were regrouping beyond the forest, along with a few survivors from an SS panzer training battalion and the 1st Panzer Grenadiers. All of them tough troops who fought to the death. There were probably only seven or eight hundred of them, but that would have been enough.’
‘The Teutoburg Forest, Varus’ legions in AD 9,’ Dillen murmured. ‘Three crack Roman legions totally annihilated by the Germans. Same neck of the woods, I think, in upper Saxony. You were pretty obsessed with it at school, always seemed to bring it up in class.’
‘Now you know why,’ Hugh said. ‘The problem was, the main road of our planned advance ran through the western edge of the forest. We couldn’t bypass it without big delays. We had to take that road. The ceasefire would only last long enough for essential consolidation, to strengthen our line for a massive push. That was the priority for Corps HQ, regardless of what Intelligence wanted. Sometimes we felt Intelligence actually would have preferred us to halt, so they could find as much as possible before the Nazis destroyed it. We knew there was a whole secret war going on that we knew very little about. But we were soldiers, and we just wanted the war won. And keeping the momentum going wasn’t just a matter of reaching Berlin before the Russians. We were all terribly apprehensive about what the Germans might have up their sleeves. We remembered Hitler’s “all or nothing” speech about the Reich at Nuremberg before the war. He’d already unleashed the V-2 rocket against London. You’ve no idea how terrifying those weapons were. We didn’t know about Nazi research into nuclear weapons then, but V-1 rockets with deadly gas or biological payloads would have been enough. And we knew that as long as there was a single fanatical Nazi at large, then all hell could be unleashed. That’s why we fought the war to the bitter end. That’s why our bombers flattened the cities. That’s why we killed the enemy until there was no one left to kill. We felt we were fighting a desperate battle for humankind, a battle against impending doomsday.’
‘So you never did try to find Peter,’ Dillen said.
Hugh paused, swallowing hard. He shook his head. ‘The schedule when Peter and Lewes left HQ for the camp only allowed a thirty-six-hour ceasefire. A five-hundred raid by the RAF was planned on the forest the following night. But as we were recovering Lewes’ body, an SAS patrol came down the road, my own chaps. They’d bivvied that night on the far edge of the forest and had watched small groups of German troops moving in, with Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets and what looked like demolition charges, probably for taking down trees over the road. They confirmed what Corps feared would happen. So the whole schedule was brought forward. The decision had already been made to clear out the camp anyway, and that was done in a matter of hours. The RAF raid was advanced to that night. One and a half thousand tons of airburst high explosive, as well as incendiaries and four-thousand-pound impact HE. The camp was obliterated. The forest as far as the nearest firebreaks burned for weeks, a total firestorm. The German army units that had infiltrated the forest ceased to exist. But the road through was clear for our advance. Corps HQ had got the result they wanted. Probably hundreds, even thousands of Allied troops spared.’
‘But no sign of Peter and the American,’ Rebecca said quietly.
‘It was all down to me. I was the one who took the intelligence about the German troop build-up from the SAS patrol to Corps HQ,’ Hugh replied. ‘It was my responsibility. I could have decided to process Lewes’ effects first. An hour’s delay in passing on the intelligence and it would have been too late to reschedule the bomber raid. It might have given Peter a chance to get out, if he was still alive. But I went straight to HQ. That’s the worst thing. I was responsible for Peter’s death. Five years cheating death on the battlefield, and it was something I did that killed him. I’ve tried so hard to block it off, all my life, but I just can’t.’ He put his head in his hands, and took a shuddering breath. Rebecca leaned over and put her hand on his. He let his hands slip off his head and looked at her, his eyes red-rimmed. He took another deep breath, straightened up and wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely, clearing his throat. ‘Stupid of me. Embarrassing. Not like me at all. Anyway, all that’s history now, isn’t it?’
‘Peter might well have been dead already,’ Dillen said. ‘If there were enemy troops in that forest, and renegade SS camp guards. That might have been why Lewes was driving back alone.’
‘And he would never have forgiven you if you hadn’t taken that intelligence straight back,’ Rebecca said. ‘From what you’ve said, he was the kind of guy who would have put the lives of all those men way ahead of his own, the soldiers who would have died fighting in the forest if the Germans had been allowed another day to get established.’
‘What happened to the drawing?’ Dillen asked.
Hugh blinked hard, wiped his eyes again and cleared his throat. ‘I put it in my battledress tunic pocket. After I passed on the SAS intel to HQ, everything was a whirlwind. HQ was packed up immediately and moved out. I knew Peter’s fate was sealed, but I hadn’t yet connected myself with it. I’d passed on the intel without thinking. It was my absolute duty. And I was in a poor way, really. Then the malaria really whacked me, dropped me stone cold. Next thing I remember was coming to in a hospital in France three weeks later, hearing the church bells ringing. The war was over.’
‘And you still had the drawing?’ Rebecca whispered.
‘Carefully folded with my belongings,’ Hugh said. ‘And I still have it. Over there, on my desk.’
‘Can we see it?’ Dillen asked.
Hugh gestured at the table. Rebecca got up and went over, scanning the papers. She pointed at a yellowed sheet of notepaper beside the computer screen, and Hugh nodded. She carefully picked it up, and stared at it, then looked at Dillen, her eyes wet with tears. ‘These two people, holding hands. I know they’re the girl’s parents, because
…’ Dillen stood up and put his hand on her shoulder. She sniffed and wiped her eyes, looking apologetically at Hugh. ‘Stupid of me, now. Sorry.’ She swallowed, and blinked hard. ‘It’s just that when I was a little girl, her age, I grew up without my dad, and my mum had sent me away to my foster parents in America to keep me from the Mafia world she’d grown up in. I often used to daydream, and I drew pictures like this. We were always together, holding hands, we three.’
Hugh stared out of the window. ‘She would have been about seventeen when I saw her, but this is like a drawing made by a child, a little girl. After the war, I found out that most of the children I saw in those camps had survived Auschwitz, where they had seen their parents selected at the railhead for immediate gassing. Those children had been kept alive for some reason. I was told that this girl was in the orchestra. And worse. There was a
