Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'It was beginning to itch a little.'

'Good. At the very least I want to see some scratch marks for what you put me through to get this. I've never been so scared.'

She opened a kitchen drawer and took out a letter that she now handed to me. 'I'll finish making that coffee, while you read it.'

To the west there was the town; to the east there were just green open fields; and in the middle was the railway line. The station, immediately south of the refugee camp, was – like every other building in Friedland – unremarkable. It was made of red bricks and had two red roofs – three if you counted the wizard's-hat roof on top of the square corner tower that was the station master's house. A neat little flower garden was laid out by the front door of the house, and at the two upper-floor arched windows a neat set of flowery curtains hung. There was also a clock, a noticeboard with a timetable, and a bus stop. Everything was neat and orderly and just as sleepy as it should have been. Except today. Today was different. The capital of West Germany might have been the unlikely town of Bonn, but today – and no less unlikely than that – all German eyes were focused on Friedland, in Lower Saxony. For today saw the homecoming of one thousand German prisoners of war from Soviet captivity, aboard a train that had left its remote destination more than twenty- four hours earlier.

The late evening mood was one of high expectation, even celebration. A brass band was assembled in front of the station and it was already playing a selection of patriotic music that was at the same time politically acceptable to the ears of the British, whose zone of occupation this was. Of the train there was as yet no sign, but that autumn evening several hundred people were assembled on the platform and around the station to greet the returnees. You would have thought we were expecting to see West Germany's FIFA World Cup team arriving home, victorious, from the 'miracle of Berne' and not a train carrying SS and Wehrmacht, none of whom had expected ever to be released from Russia and who were all of them entirely ignorant of the fact that Germany had won the World Cup or even that Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne, to whom they owed their freedom, was now chancellor of another German republic – this time the Federal Republic of Germany. But some local men, keen to remind the returnees of the chancellor's crucial role in their delivery from captivity, were carrying a sign that read, WE THANK YOU DOCTOR ADENAUER. I wouldn't have argued with that, although it sometimes seemed to me that the Herr Doctor was intent on becoming another uncrowned king of Germany.

Other signs were much more personal, even pathetic. Between ten and twenty men and women were carrying signs on which were written details of a missing loved one, and of these that of an old bespectacled lady who reminded me of my own late mother seemed typical:

DO YOU KNOW HIM? UNTERSTURMFUHRER RUDOLF (ROLF) KNABE. SECOND 9TH SS PANZER DIVISION 'HOHENSTAUFEN' (1942) AND SECOND SS PANZERKORPS

(1943). LAST HEARD OF AT KURSK, JULY 1943.

I wondered how much she knew about what had happened at Kursk; that this place had been the scene of the largest and bloodiest tank battle in history and had probably marked the beginning of the end for the German Army.

Others, perhaps less optimistic, were holding little candles or what looked like miners' lamps, which I took to be memorials for those who weren't ever coming back.

On the actual platform of the station were those, like myself, Grottsch, Vig e e and Wenger, whose role was more official. VdH and others veterans' organisations, policemen, churchmen, Red Cross volunteers, British Army soldiers and a large contingent of nurses, several of whom caught my bored eye. All were facing south, down the track toward Reckershausen and beyond, to the DDR.

'Now, now,' said Vigee, noticing my interest in the nurses. 'You're almost a married man.'

'There's something about nurses that always attracts me. I used to think it was the uniform, but now, I don't know. Maybe it's just sympathy for anyone who has to do someone else's dirty work.'

'Is it so dirty? To help someone who needs it?'

I glanced at the German policeman who Vigee had brought along so that if I did identify de Boudel, he might be arrested immediately and then extradited to France.

'Forget it,' I growled. 'I just never had to blow the whistle on anyone before, that's all. I guess there's something about it I don't like. Who knows?' I started on a new stick of gum. 'If I see this fellow what do you want me to do, anyway? Kiss him on the cheek?'

'Just point him out to us,' Vigee said patiently. 'The police inspector will do the rest.'

'Why so squeamish, Gunther?' asked Grottsch. 'I thought you used to be a policeman.'

'I was a cop, it's true,' I said. 'Several thousand midnights ago. But it was one thing arresting some old lag, it's something else when it's an old comrade.'

'A nice distinction,' said the Frenchman. 'But hardly correct. It's not much of an old comrade who sells his soul to the other side.'

There was a loud cheer along the platform as, in the distance, we heard the whistle of an approaching steam locomotive.

Vigee made a fist and pumped his biceps excitedly.

'Who gave you this tip anyway?' I asked. 'That de Boudel would be on this train?'

'The English Secret Service.'

'And how did they find out?'

The train was now in sight, a shiny black locomotive wreathed in grey smoke and white steam, as if a kitchen door in Hell had been flung open. It was hauling not cattle wagons, as would have been more typical of a Russian POW train, but passenger carriages; and it was immediately plain to me that upon entering Germany, the prisoners had been transferred onto a German train. Men were already leaning out of open windows, waving to the people running alongside the track or catching bunches of flowers thrown up into their arms.

The train whistled again and halted in the station, and men in patched and threadbare uniforms stretched out to touch those on the platform amid shouts and cheers. The Russians had not provided names of the POWs on the train; and before anyone was allowed to get off they had to wait patiently while officials from the Red Cross entered each carriage and collected a list of names for the benefit of the police, the commander of the refugee camp, and the VdH. Only when, after almost half an hour, this task was completed were the men finally allowed to disembark. A trumpet sounded and for a moment it seemed as though the hour had truly arrived when those who had been in their graves were truly resurrected. And when they came forth from the train in their battered field grey they did indeed resemble recently interred corpses – so thin were their bodies, so gap-toothed were their smiles, so white their hair and so old their weather-beaten faces. Some were filthy and shoeless. Others appeared stunned to be in a place that was not filled with cruelty or surrounded with barbed wire and empty steppe. Quite a few had to be carried from the train on stretchers. a great stink of unwashed bodies filled the clean air of Friedland, but no one seemed to mind. Everyone was smiling, even a few of the POWs, but mostly they were crying like stolen children now returned to their aged parents after many years in a dark forest.

D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille could not have directed a more moving crowd scene than that which was taking place on a railway platform at a small town in Germany. Even Vigee appeared moved to the verge of tears. Meanwhile the brass band started to play the 'Deutschland Lied' – a few of the crazier-looking prisoners started to sing the forbidden words – and, across the fields, a couple of kilometres to the north in Gros Schneen, the local church bells rang out.