of the ragged path he had blasted through the wire to the water’s edge. He waved and I called out to him sharply.
‘Careful – no guarantee you’ve got them all.’
‘Only one way of finding out.’
He walked through as calmly as if he were taking a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park, pausing only to kick a ragged nest of wire out of the way and splashed towards me.
There was a sudden roar of an engine as a VW field car appeared and braked on the brow of the hill. Several soldiers got out and started down towards the beach. Steiner ignored them.
‘I’m sorry about this, but there is little I can do now, you understand that?’
‘Naturally,’
‘Have you any weapons?’
‘My knife only.’
‘Give it to me.’
He slipped it into his pocket and got a hand under the young sailor’s arm. ‘Let’s get him out of here before he dies on us. This business might help you considerably.’
‘With a man like Radl? You must be joking.’
He shrugged. ‘All things are possible …’
‘In this worst of all possible worlds,’ I misquoted. ‘You look after Simone, that’s all I ask, and forget that last night ever happened. Just keep her out of this. Don’t waste your time on me. I’m a dead man walking, we both know that.’
‘You sacrificed yourself to save a German seaman. That must count for something. Even Radl has been known to listen to reason on occasion.’
‘From a sergeant-major?’ I laughed. ‘Not a habit of many colonels that I’ve known in most armies, including my own. He’ll show you the door and more than that.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said softly. ‘Never that, my friend,’ and he was no longer smiling.
We ploughed through the surf, the boy between us, and stumbled through the gap. The men who waited on the other side were military police, as conspicuous in their brass breast-plates as British army redcaps. There were four of them, three corporals and a major. Two of them took the boy from us, laid him down carefully on a stretcher and gave him some quick first-aid.
Steiner had walked a yard or two away, brushing sand from his coat. The major came forward and looked me over. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded in bad French.
I suppose he didn’t know what to make of me which was hardly surprising considering the clothes I was wearing and the jagged scar, that cut across the empty socket where my right eye had been and bisected the cheek, didn’t help much. I adjusted the eye patch.
Steiner answered for me. ‘Major Brandt,’ he said, ‘this gentleman is a British officer who has just sacrificed his freedom to save the life of a German sailor.’
And Brandt took it without a murmur, including the tone of voice. He hesitated fractionally, then turned to me and said in quite reasonable English. ‘You will please identify yourself.’
‘My name is Morgan. My service number is 21038930. My rank is Lieutenant-Colonel.’
He clicked his heels and produced a silver cigarette case. ‘May I offer you a cigarette, Colonel? You look as if you could do with one.’
I took it and the light which followed and drew the smoke into my lungs with conscious pleasure. It might, after all, be close to my last.
‘And now,’ he said politely, ‘I must ask you to accompany me to the Platzkommandantur in Charlottestown where Colonel Radl, the acting governor of St Pierre, will no doubt wish to speak with you.’
A nice way of putting it. I started forward and Steiner got in the way. He had the Russian field coat off and was holding it ready for me. ‘With the colonel’s permission,’ he said, a slight, ironic smile on his mouth.
It was only when I pulled it on and felt the warmth of the fur lining that I realized how cold I was. ‘Thank you, Sergeant-Major,’ I said. ‘For this among other things.’
His heels clicked together and the salute he gave me would have warmed the heart of the most demanding drill instructor the Brigade of Guards could have supplied.
I turned and followed the stretcher up the hill.
The drive into Charlottestown was the strangest experience of all so far. There were the cobbled streets, the houses that were a mixture of French Provincial and English Georgian, the gardens high-walled against the constant winds. Everything was the same as it had always been and yet not the same.
It wasn’t the concrete pill boxes, the barbed wire, the bomb damage down at the harbour, the more obvious signs of war. It was the signposts in German as well as English, the incongruity of seeing an SS man pausing to light a cigarette outside the old post office with a sign on the wall that still read Royal Mail and the sight of grey-green uniforms and cars with swastikas painted on them parked in a square with a name like Palmerston. It all combined to give a curious air of unreality to things, that I found difficult to shake off.
The field car dropped us in the square and departed with the injured sailor and we walked the rest of the way, climbing the steep cobbles of Charlotte Street, past shops that stood empty now. Windows were broken everywhere, paint peeling, and there was a general air of decay. Not surprising after five years of occupation.
The Platzkommandantur, headquarters of the German civilian administration, although there were few enough of them to administer on St Pierre, was housed in what had been the island branch of the Westminster Bank before the war. I’d had an account there, still had by all the rules, which made it an interesting experience to go in through the arched granite porch to the cool interior.
Three uniformed clerks worked industriously on the other side of the mahogany counter. The two sentries on either side of the door to what had once been the manager’s office were SS paratroopers and as hard-bitten a looking pair as I’d seen in many a long day, with an Iron Cross second class apiece and the ribbon for the campaign against Russia. They’d come a long way from Stalingrad or wherever it had been.
Brandt went in first and we waited. Steiner made no attempt to speak and stood at the window looking out into the street. Within a couple of minutes, Brandt called for him and he went in. I waited and the two SS men stared beyond me into space and then the door opened and Brandt reappeared.
‘Please to come in, Colonel Morgan,’ he said in English, and as I went forward he called the two guards to attention.
I think it was Radl’s physical presence that was the most astonishing thing about him. The sheer bloody size of the man. He must have been six foot three or four at least and couldn’t have weighed less than sixteen or seventeen stone.
My impression was that he had been working in his shirt sleeves for he was still buttoning his tunic as I entered. I noticed several things in that first swift glance. The SS insignia on his collar and the medals, which included the Deutsches Kreuz worn on the right side in gold which meant it had been awarded for courage in the face of the enemy, and the Gold Party Badge which was only awarded to those who had been members of the Nazi
