'Bit early in the morning for that, Betty Grable,' murmured Danny Adams, the SBO, actually an NCO in this other-ranks camp, a blunt scouser of a sergeant-major.
The men calmed down and endured the rest of the appell.
Gary couldn't care less about any of it. He just stood there huddled in a greatcoat that still bore the bloodstains from the day he had been captured a year ago, after only a few hours in combat. He did look for Ben Kamen. The men of the work kommandos tended to cluster together, separate from the 'housewives', as stalag slang had it, the men who remained in the camp. Gary couldn't see Ben today.
Breakfast was a bowl of watery potato soup and a tin mug of the brownish liquid the goons called 'tea'. Then the kommandos filed to the camp gates in their work parties, past the solid buildings that had once housed a headmaster's office, and a medical room where nurses had searched little boys' heads for hair nits, and now a German trooper with a machine gun sat in a corrugated-iron shed on the roof.
At the gates they loaded themselves on their lorries. A young man called Joe Stubbs saw Gary coming and made a show of helping him up into the truck. That was the standing joke with the lads, that Gary, at twenty-six, was an old man, in fact an old Yank.
It was a few miles from the stalag to the old Roman camp at Richborough, where the monument was slowly being built. The men endured the rattling journey in silence.
At Richborough Gary and his mates stripped off their greatcoats and jackets. They got to work. Gary had to mix concrete, shovelling sand and mortar into the maw of a grinding mixer. After a year all the men had long lost their flab. Their elbows and knees were prominent, their faces gaunt.
There were perhaps a hundred men working here, prisoners or civilian labour, in parties scattered around the camp. Richborough had been converted into a construction site, with ramps laid roughly down over the Roman ditches. A steady stream of lorries turned up through the day with rubble core and marble blocks and other supplies, to be unloaded by the workers. At the heart of it all was a forest of scaffolding, from which the four great feet of the double-arch monument were already rising.
It was turning into a dismal autumn day, the sky a grey lid, and a hint of the rain to come prickling in the air. The men grumbled, but Gary didn't mind the work. The physical effort made it easier not to think. But you worked slowly; the stalag diet of spuds and swedes and the odd bit of meat didn't provide enough fuel for anything more than that. It wasn't a pleasant thought that the cold today was a foretaste of the winter to come; the last had been bad enough, and Gary had lost his fat since then.
The men worked, the guards patrolled. Mostly the guards were soldiers of the Wehrmacht. But today, maybe because of the Sea Lion anniversary, the Wehrmacht troops were supplemented by men in khaki uniforms. They had armbands bearing the swastika-on-George's-cross symbol of the Albion protectorate, and when they spoke you could hear accents from Kent and Sussex and Hampshire and even London. These were the Landwacht, a German equivalent of the Home Guard, Englishmen who had volunteered to work for the protectorate authorities. When these characters had first turned up the prisoners had gone out of their way to give them a hard time, trying to knock off their tin hats with bits of hardcore, or spiking the muddy ground with nails embedded in bits of wood. But the Landwacht blokes responded with a ferocity not matched by the Germans, and there had been one occasion when Wehrmacht troops had had to intervene to stop a beating.
After the others were already at work, Willis Farjeon came sauntering over to Gary's group, as blithe as you pleased. 'Morning, pongos,' he said brightly.
'Watch your backs, lads,' said Joe Stubbs.
'Oh, don't be like that, Stubbs, you love me really.' Willis stripped off his coat and took a spade.
Joe Stubbs was only nineteen, a farmer's son from Canterbury, a private who had been captured during the German advance after only a day's active service and barely a couple of weeks' training. To him, it seemed to Gary, war was the stalag, adulthood was being a POW. 'Piss off, Farjeon,' he said now, angry, nervous.
'And the same to you, Stubbs, you lout.' Willis came to work beside Gary. He was tall, rakish, good-looking in a David Niven sort of way. He wore his black hair slicked back, though where he got the Brylcreem from was a matter of rumour, and he had a fine pencil-thin moustache, black as soot. A fighter pilot shot down over Kent during the invasion, he looked mid-twenties but he might have been younger. He said to Gary, 'And how's our resident member of the Dunkirk Running Club this morning?'
'What Stubbs said.'
'Oh, now, now. I am aware you've been ignoring me, you know.'
Willis Farjeon made Gary squirm. Gary had found he simply couldn't stomach a certain class of Englishmen, the public-school types as he thought of them, who sneered at everybody around them from the goons to their fellow prisoners. 'I've nothing to say to you, Farjeon.'
Willis smiled, working as hard as the rest. 'Ah, but I've things to say to you, or so I hope. We have a mutual friend, after all.'
'We do?'
'Hans Gheldman. The little Austrian?'
Gary frowned. 'Hans Gheldman' was the pseudonym Ben Kamen was using in the camp, hiding his Jewishness, posing as a second-generation emigre with an American mother. In the early days in the stalag Gary had quickly made contact with the escape committee crew and persuaded them to run up a fake set of identification documents for Ben. 'I know Hans,' he said cautiously.
'Funny little chap, isn't he? Always scared of something. Well, so would I be, stuck in a place like this with a German accent.'
'Austrian. Hans is an Austrian-American.'
'Yes, but men like Stubbs here are always going to suspect him of being a mole.'
'Fuck off, Farjeon,' said Stubbs. 'They'd never stick a mole in with a Kraut accent. Even the goons aren't that stupid. You're more likely to be a mole than fucking Gheldman.'
'How peculiarly perceptive he is,' Willis said, speaking of Stubbs rather than to him. 'Well, Hans is nervous. He does speak of you, you know,' he said to Gary. 'Quite often – your experiences before the invasion – how you lost your wife.'
'It's none of your business.'
'Hans thinks it's his business, and so it's mine.'
'Christ,' said another man, leaning on his spade. 'Look at that. Another lot of bloody Jugend.' He said the word Jugend, 'Youth', in a cartoon way, as the English pronounced most German words they had borrowed during the occupation: Joog-end.
A party of boys, aged perhaps thirteen or fourteen, was being led by an SS officer across the site. They were all in uniforms, and wore swastika armbands. The officer waved his hands in the air, evidently describing the monument as it would one day appear. The Reich was reproducing an arch set up by the Romans to commemorate their own successful invasion of Britain two thousand years ago. It would be embellished with sculptures of the conquering German forces and their vanquished foes; there would be amphibious tanks and barges, Spitfires and Messerschmitts. The SS man had the boys line up before the stub of the arch, while a photographer snapped pictures, and a newsreel cameraman set up his tripod and panned across their smiling faces and up to the monument's mighty legs.
'Look at them,' Willis said. 'Aren't they sweet with their little knees and their polished shoes?'
'I had a uniform like that,' Stubbs said. 'Before the war. I was a Boy Scout.' The scout movement, regarded as propagating anti-Nazi values, had been incorporated into the Hitler Jugend.
'I bet you looked just as pretty as those darlings.' Willis called, 'Hello, little boys. Would you like some sweets?'
That made the boys look around, their smiles faltering, nervous. Some of the prisoners laughed. The SS man glared, and began to shepherd the boys away.
A Landwacht thug came by Gary's group. 'Back to work, you arseholes.'
Willis snapped him a Party salute, and picked up his shovel.