They’d been captured together during the Seige of Tobruk in 1941. Their tank took a hit, and they all scrambled out of the smoke-filled interior, straight into the barrels of waiting Nazi guns. There was nothing to do but raise their hands above their heads and walk toward their captors.
“My legs feel like jelly,” Bill told Harry.
Harry smiled grimly. “At least we won’t have to get inside a tank ever again.”
They’d all laughed when one of the Nazi soldiers announced, “The war is over for you Tommies.”
“Blimey,” said Bill, “I didn’t think they actually said that. I thought that was just in the pictures.”
• • •
After a few weeks in a viciously guarded prison camp in Libya, where they all got the runs and shivered without blankets in the subzero nights, they were taken by boat to Sicily. The hold was so full of captured prisoners that many couldn’t fit below, and they had to lie like sardines on the deck. But Bill and Harry were delighted to be up on deck, surrounded by the blueness of the sea, as dolphins played beside the boat. Bill felt he could breathe for the first time in months as the sky stretched away above him. But no sooner had he acknowledged the world expanding than it contracted down again into the cramped quarters of a dark cattle truck that jostled and shook them all the way up through southern Italy, to the closed quarters, watchtowers and barbed wire of a prisoner of war camp.
Mussolini’s guards were kinder than the Libyans, and the food was better, but there was nothing to occupy themselves with from morning to night every long, long day, and nothing to protect them from being eaten alive by mosquitoes as soon as the sun went down. Some men passed the time by laying bets on the speed a lizard would climb a wall. Others tried to teach a group to speak a language or learn algebra. Harry went gymnastics mad. Bill shut his eyes and played an imaginary piano or sometimes made real music on the harmonica he’d had in his pocket when their tank was hit. Once, he and Harry tried to escape, climbing into the dirty laundry as it was being driven out of the gates. The threat of a firing squad, commuted to solitary confinement, made them decide never to try again.
“Let’s just concentrate on getting through this thing alive,” said Bill, and Harry agreed.
• • •
As the news of allied advances up the leg of Italy reached their camp, there was an undercurrent of buzzing excitement, and then the news that the Mussolini had capitulated. For a few days they talked about nothing but freedom and release.
“D’you reckon they’ll let us go home for a bit, or just put us back on the front line?” asked Harry. Bill was pretty sure they wouldn’t be sent home.
One morning the guards were gone, and just as Bill and Harry were certain they’d be liberated, trucks covered with swastikas pulled up, and new guards took over, speaking German now, not Italian. Hope of freedom vanished again, as they were rounded up and taken by cattle-truck trains, on the move for day after day, night after night, up through the Alps, and right across Austria and Czechoslovakia into Poland, to the giant camp at Lamsdorf.
Within the camp, the regime was similar to the one in Italy, with twice daily roll calls, cramped conditions, insufficient food and guards patrolling the fences with rifles. But Bill soon discovered that Lamsdorf was really an enormous processing center to provide labor for the factories, mines, quarries and forests of the Third Reich. It wasn’t just the Romans who needed slaves to run their empire. The Geneva Convention said captured officers weren’t allowed to be put to work, so they remained imprisoned for the duration of the war, but the NCOs and enlisted men like Bill and Harry could be sent out to Arbeitskommando labor camps, across miles of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and even into Germany itself.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Bill, scanning the watchtowers and barbed wire fences. “I can’t stand this no longer.”
He and Harry agreed they didn’t want to actively assist the Nazi war machine, so they wouldn’t make armaments or build tanks, or mine for the coal that drove the operation, but they thought they could live with themselves helping out with forestry and agriculture, so they signed up for a work detail at the Mankendorf sawmill deep in the Nazi-run countryside of Czechoslovakia. They were both city boys, and neither of them had ever cut down a tree or even seen a cow close-up.
It was freedom compared with the string of prison camps Bill had been in for three long years, ever since he was twenty. Here they were hardly under guard at all, just a rota of old soldiers and wire netting no more frightening than a tennis court, but nobody tried to escape because there was nowhere they could run away to. As Harry reminded Bill, they were more than six hundred miles from Switzerland, and all the way they would be surrounded by ardent and trigger-happy supporters of the Third Reich.
No wonder Bill was intrigued when their old guard and the captain both accompanied them to the farm for the first time. He couldn’t understand why they needed guarding here and nowhere else. Until he saw the girl and her mother. He glanced at Harry and thought the girl would be bound to fall for Harry’s charms, like they always did. But Harry was yawning, and the girl hardly gave him a second look.
Instead she met Bill’s eyes and held his gaze. He felt the horizon draw back all around him, and the sky lifted into blue.
Three
My job the next day was to lead the mare and hold her head while the hay wagon was loaded and unloaded. Bill and Harry were in the fields with the rakes and pitchforks, heaping the sheaves onto the back of the wagon to be taken to the farmyard where other prisoners were obeying my mother’s instructions for stacking the hay inside the barn.
The weather grew more and more humid until we were all slick with sweat. Even Bill’s whistling stopped, so I knew he must be tiring. I wanted to tell my mother that we were working the prisoners too hard, but her mouth was fixed in a line, and I knew there wouldn’t be any point. A dark cloud was building on the horizon. The time for lunch came, but she wouldn’t let us stop.
“We have to get the hay in before the rain,” she said in German to the guard.
I went around the men as they worked, giving them water and bread, but they only stood still for a few moments. Bill was out of breath, and his eyes were dark blue like wet slate. I thought it was strange that they changed color all the time, but perhaps I’d never paid so much attention to anyone’s eyes before.
Through the afternoon we continued, clearing up and down the rows, until more hay was in the barn than in the field.
Bill and I crisscrossed in the field, secretly smiling at each other whenever we passed. We all worked faster and faster, driven in an old battle of man against weather. The dark cloud covered the sun, dimming the light like evening, and the wind turned over the leaves on the oak.
• • •
Bill and Harry were pitchforking the last of the cut hay onto the wagon when the first flash of lightning lit the whole sky. The horse shied, and we all jerked our heads up. I comforted the mare and counted aloud, “Jedna, dvě, tři,” as thunder shook the hills.
“Three miles,” shouted Bill.
Kilometers, I thought.
“Just like Far from the Madding Crowd,” he yelled.
I smiled my incomprehension, holding tight to the bridle.