For a policeman this final collapse of order was a nightmare made real. George felt as if he were the only sane man left in a town of lunatics. He longed to cut down the corpses from the lamp-posts, but he knew he dare not while the SS still had any vestige of authority.
In the end he spotted Julia close to the town hall. Here a line of muddy-looking men, probably resistance brought in from the country, were being roughly lined up against a wall by the SS. The wall was already pocked and splashed with blood. A nervous-looking SS officer walked along the line offering cigarettes and blindfolds. A gang of civilians, watched over by armed Waffen-SS, stood by uneasily, no doubt detailed to remove the bodies when the work was done.
Julia, in her uniform, stood watching this spectacle, her arms folded.
George hurried to her. 'Julia, for God's sake-'
'George.' She turned to him, oddly calm. 'I've been expecting you. Believe it or not, I'm glad to see you.'
'What do you mean? – Look, everything's unravelling. The British will be here in an hour. What's the point of this? Can't you stop it?'
'I could not if I wished to. These deaths mean nothing.'
He saw the bleak coldness in her then. In some sense none of this was real to her; the men being shot might have been mannequins. He wondered, not for the first time, how he had managed to share her bed for three years. 'The game's up,' he said. 'You won't get out of here. It's already too late.'
'I don't think so.' He felt something press at his belly. It was the muzzle of her silver pistol.
'You can't be serious-'
'I have a car waiting,' she said. 'You see how it'll work. Our two uniforms will get us past any barrier we are likely to encounter. And if we cross into Allied territory I will change out of my uniform – I am English after all; we can concoct some story or other.'
'My job is here. I'm a copper, for Christ's sake.'
'Well, you will be a dead copper unless you do as I say, and what good will that be to anybody? I will kill you if you refuse, you know.' And he knew she was telling the truth. 'Come with me now…'
There was a commotion among the doomed men. One of the civilians waiting to process the bodies, a burly older man, came rushing forward, limping a bit, breaking past the line of SS men. George could hear him call, 'Jack! Jack Miller! It's me!'
'Dad? No… go back…' There was horror in the younger man's voice, even as he embraced his father.
A young SS man came up, pistol drawn, and tried to pull the older man away. But he stood his ground, hanging onto his son. 'Shoot him and you shoot me, you black-hearted bastards.'
The SS man tried a bit longer, and the son tried to push his father away. But the old man was stubborn. At length an officer snapped an order, and the trooper pushed the old man against the wall beside his son. Father and son clung to each other, both weeping now, until the rifle shots echoed.
XIII
The German prisoners were marched along the coast road from St Leonards into Hastings. It was evening now, the sun casting long shadows through air laden with dusty smoke from the bombings. And as the day ended, so did the battle, it seemed. The gunfire on the land had stopped, though you could still hear the deep guttural booming of ships' guns rolling in from the sea like distant thunder.
This was a road Ernst had walked many times, but never as he walked it now, one of a hundred or so prisoners, all stripped of their helmets and weapons, and some of boots and belts taken by the Tommies as souvenirs, walking with their hands on their heads. Nobody spoke, and it was hard to tell what the men thought as they plodded along. Ernst himself longed for sleep. But aside from that he felt only relief that he was alive, and that he would presumably see out the rest of this wretched war in a prisoner-of-war camp rather than be shipped off to an even more brutal front. Relief, mixed with a good dose of shame, that so many had died where he still lived.
On the outskirts of the town they came on a German column that had evidently been caught in the open by RAF planes. The tanks, guns, trucks, horse-drawn carts were blown up and burned out, and bodies were littered everywhere, sprawled over dashboards or dangling from the back of the trucks. Horses had died too, their great bodies smashed and splashed. You could see where some vehicle, a bulldozer perhaps, had cut right through this mess to clear it, leaving track-marks stained with engine oil and the brown of drying blood. The men walked through with eyes averted. You could shut out the sights but not the smells, the endless stink of blood and cordite and oil and soot that seemed to soak through all of this corner of England. The Allied guards allowed the Germans to lower their hands and hold handkerchiefs to their faces.
It was only a hundred yards past the destroyed column that they started to come into the town.
British flags hung out of the windows of the houses, and Ernst wondered where they had been hidden all these years. People leaned out of upstairs rooms and shouted at the British troops as they walked by below, women came out with trays of tea, and the soldiers were given kisses and handshakes. One girl in bright lipstick called as they passed, 'Any Americans? Have a go, Joe! Any Americans here?'
Heinz plodded beside Ernst, hands clamped to his head. 'All this only a hundred paces from the dead. What's the word I'm looking for?'
'Surreal.'
'That's the one.'
They were walked along the sea front road. The beach, to the prisoners' right, was littered with the wreckage of boats and bodies, spread over the shingle. An old man was picking his way among the corpses, taking watches or wallets or even just cigarettes. Ernst wondered where the British police had vanished to; the 'coppers' he had got to know wouldn't have tolerated such disrespect. As they walked on Ernst heard the sound of a violin, played jerkily but sweetly. The tune was a simple one, but familiar: 'Lili Marlene'. 'Just as Alfie Miller used to play,' he murmured to Heinz, but Heinz didn't care. Some of the marching Germans began to hum the melody, or even sing the words, softly. After a few paces some of the British guarding them joined in.
They were marched to the Marine Parade, beneath West Hill with its brooding castle. It was crowded; people were congregating, looking for somewhere to celebrate, and there was a sound of laughter, as if some vast party were about to start.
The prisoners were halted and lined up regulation style, backs against a wall, too far apart to be able to conspire, faced with armed guards. It was a relief just to be able to lower your arms.
An English officer called out, 'Now you chaps just hold your horses here while we work out where you're to be kept for the night. I know there's no fight left in you, any more than in me, so let's just get through this business without any more drama. All right?' He called to a German officer, a hauptmann, who translated this for him.
Ernst leaned against the wall, exhausted, relieved he hadn't been called to translate.
Still the violin played. It was coming from the sea front. Ernst looked that way. He saw a boy playing, at the centre of a circle of English soldiers, the smoke from their cigarettes rising up around them. They were drinking, watched tolerantly by a couple of MPs. The boy seemed to be in the uniform of a Jugend. And now there was a fuss, as a girl with a shaven head tried to break into the circle, shouting. It was very remote, and Ernst couldn't make out what she was saying.
Heinz, a couple of yards away, called to him, 'Hey, Ernst. It's the second time today we've run into the bloody Miller family.'
'What do you mean?'