David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Cameron cleared his throat. ‘Nicotinic acid and sulphaguanadine for diarrhoea. Mild cases, anyway. For those with beds in our makeshift hospital, we’ll try protein hydrolysates by nasal drip. But there’s a problem with injections. The sight of a needle terrifies them. They saw Nazi doctors inject dying people with petrol to make their corpses burn more easily. Just a few beats of the heart before it killed them, enough to circulate the petrol. But an excruciating death. The other inmates would have heard the screams, day in and day out.’

‘Jesus,’ Mayne whispered.

Stein turned to Cameron. ‘We’re not medical personnel. You know that. We need to find out why they were here. I don’t mean the arrivals from Auschwitz, I mean the original slave labourers. What was going on here, in the forest. Why the Nazis needed them. Can we talk to them?’

‘Of course. Many of them were educated people. Are educated people. We have to remember that. Are, not were. These are still human beings. What am I saying. My God.’ Cameron shut his eyes and put his hand to his face again. Mayne noticed that it was shaking, just like his own. The lorry edged up behind them, and Lewes slowly accelerated. Mayne could make out individual trees now. Cameron opened his eyes. ‘You see it in the children, the teenagers, those who were eight, nine, ten when they were taken, old enough suddenly to shine, as linguists, artists, poets, musicians. Children wrenched from that, but who still live the long days of childhood, where a day can seem like for ever. Endless days of anguish and fear, yet some of them preserve fragments of their past, before the horror. It’s like a lifeline for them. Trauma patients we were shown at medical school, shell-shocked soldiers, often focus on one event, one shocking experience. With these children, it’s as if the shocking event is too much, but they are able to bury it under one vivid memory of happiness, a memory powerful enough to anchor them against the horror. It can be the words of a song they repeat over and over again, or one image they draw repeatedly, or one phrase of a foreign language they’d been learning. I’m only talking about a few. Most have been too traumatized. Most are beyond our help.’

‘We’re looking for a girl,’ Stein said. ‘A teenage girl.’

‘A girl who made a drawing,’ Mayne said.

‘Something unusual in it,’ Stein added. ‘Something drawn very precisely.’

‘We gave the children crayons,’ Cameron said. ‘A drawing? It could have been anything. Not necessarily something she saw here, but maybe a fixation from her past, before the horror. What I was just saying. But I’ll do what I can. There’s a nurse who might help.’

The jeep trundled on. The edge of the forest loomed larger now, forbidding, like the circuit walls of a dark citadel. Like the shadow-girt wall of Troy. Mayne glanced back at Cameron, who was staring into space. It was a look he had seen in young officers who had survived their first experience of battle, a look of shock, exhaustion, dulled fear and impossible responsibility, of being thrust into making snap decisions about who was to live and who was to die. Only here it was something far removed from the age-old rite of passage for the soldier. Here it was something utterly without precedent in their experience, in the literature of war they had grown up with, even the stories of their fathers, who thought they had experienced the worst that humanity could offer on the battlefields of the First World War, on the Western Front, at Gallipoli. It was as if that war, the war to end all wars, had been just the first act.

Mayne remembered a painting he had seen in a ruined chateau in Normandy of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, of the victorious German leader Otto von Bismarck and the defeated Napoleon III sitting outside a tent, agreeing to cede Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. In a stroke they had destroyed the balance that had kept Europe peaceful since Waterloo. Was the horror that lay ahead of them now foredoomed that evening seventy-five years before, on the battlefield of Sedan? Or was it set in place millennia earlier, when men dispensed with heroes and champions and first learned to make untamed war? How could humanity have let this happen?

‘Stop here.’ Cameron tapped Lewes on the shoulder, and they came to a halt outside a cut in the treeline. Ahead of them the lane continued into the forest. Tangles of barbed wire extended off among the trees on either side. In front of them was a wrought-iron gateway, interwoven with cut branches and camouflage netting, and a partly concealed sentry box, empty. Attached to the gate was a white-painted sign with faded red letters: ACHTUNG!! SEUCHENGEFAHR ZUTRITT VERBOTEN!!

‘Warning! Danger of epidemic. Entrance forbidden!’ Stein translated.

‘Those signs are all round the perimeter,’ Cameron said. ‘They’re permanent metal signs, dating a long time before the last few weeks, when the typhus took hold. The Nazis really didn’t want anyone getting near this place. Seems odd for a labour camp, but maybe the SS just didn’t want the local population knowing how they were treating these people.’

‘Or what they were using them for,’ Stein muttered.

Mayne looked around. There was nobody else to be seen. It was eerily quiet, but the smell was atrocious. Then he saw it. A bundle of rags against the barbed wire, about ten yards into the woods from the road, pressed up against the fence. A bundle that looked like tumbleweed, as if it had been blown there by a hurricane. Rags, with bony hands protruding through the wire, leathery feet hanging below. He stared in horrified fascination. His heart began to pound. How could this be shocking, after all he had seen, all he had done? He was a hardened killer. He could see this through. He held his hands against the seat, held them hard to stop the shaking, and turned away, facing the forest ahead.

Cameron reached into a pocket and pulled out a little black book, a Bible. He stared at it, but kept it shut between his hands. ‘Jeremiah two, verse six,’ he said slowly. ‘ A land of desert and pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and no man dwelt.’ He looked up at the gate, squinting. ‘The padre with the soldiers at the crossroads gave this to me, just before you arrived. He saw the state I was in. Thought it might help.’ He shook his head, then reached over the door of the jeep and gently dropped the book on the ground.

He handed Lewes a set of keys. Lewes got out, marched over to the gate and unlocked it, swinging out both doors so that it would be wide enough for the lorry to get through as well. Then he marched back and sat down again, switching the ignition back on, waiting for the lorry to pull up behind them. Mayne steeled himself and looked back at the corpse on the wire. A flash of sunlight lit it up, and for a second it seemed as if it were burning, a human torch. A torch on the battlements of Troy. Then the light went, and he stared ahead through the gate, down the dark tunnel beneath the trees. For a split second he was back beside the Bay of Naples, at Aornos, those unread passages from Homer in hand, searching in his mind’s eye for the sulphurous passage where the Trojan hero Aeneas had descended into the underworld, a passage from which there might be no return.

That place had just been fantasy, myth.

Now he was truly entering the gates of hell.

T he jeep accelerated past the gate and down the lane through the pine forest, the Red Cross lorry following close behind. Mayne braced himself for what lay ahead. The stench was indescribable. braced himself for what lay ahead. The stench was indescribable. After about two hundred yards the trees ended abruptly at a clearing about the size of a football pitch. About eighty yards ahead of them was a row of single-storey wooden buildings like army barracks, and at right angles to that another line of huts extended along the far right side of the clearing, obscured in smoke and haze. The lane went across the clearing through the line of huts and disappeared to the right, towards the far buildings. Two British soldiers with rifles and white kerchiefs over their faces stood guard where the lane passed between the huts. Mayne saw other forms milling about, as if in slow motion. Smoke was rising from several points on the open ground beyond the buildings, the smoke he had seen outside forming a pall over the forest. In the still morning air it lingered like a miasma over the camp, cloaking it, blotting out the sky. There seemed to be no noise, as if that too had been stifled. They drove forward at walking pace through a bare landscape, denatured, all vibrancy gone, only pastel shades of green and blue and brown remaining: the colours of decay, colours that matched the smell. It was a landscape of death.