David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘Unquestionably,’ Hugh replied. ‘That’s the horror of it. Europe in 1945 was like a huge Aladdin’s cave. How could we possibly have found it all? Buried bunkers, lake beds, disused mines. And it ties in with missing works of art. What you were saying about Schliemann’s diaries, James. It’s the same thing. It’s as if there’s a void. With the art, we know what’s missing. We know the names of the canvases.’ He pointed to a faded print above the fireplace. ‘Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, from Krakow. That’s a pre-war print I had on my wall at Oxford. Peter gave it to me, actually. It’s one of dozens known by name, vanished. And if that’s known to be missing, what else is there we don’t know about? I’m not talking about art and antiquities. It could be the biggest legacy of the Second World War, and the most terrifying. Where it might be, and who might get hold of it. For some of us, for me, that war still rumbles on, not just because I can’t get it out of my head, but because it’s unfinished, as if there’s a gigantic concealed bomb under Europe with the clock still ticking.’

‘Tell us what happened to Peter,’ Dillen said. ‘That final day.’

Hugh paused. ‘I wasn’t terribly well that morning. A recurrence of malaria, something we’d both picked up in Egypt. Only a few hours of shivers and hot flushes, but enough to make me a liability in the field. I knew that the nurse in the camp, Helen, saw there was something wrong, but I didn’t want to ask her, not in that place with all those poor children dying, needing her every second. But when I returned to Corps HQ after leaving the camp, the MO checked me over and I was temporarily grounded, reassigned to Corps Intelligence. Bloody nuisance, you know. There’s nothing worse than being pulled from your chaps. But there was nothing else for it. At least they kept me in touch with our ops by putting me in charge of recovering effects from anyone killed behind enemy lines. It was pretty important, in case there was anything the Germans might use, or any intelligence being brought back. A few hours after Peter had left to go to the camp, an army spotter plane reported an overturned jeep beside the road leading back from the camp. An accident, a pothole in the road. It was Peter’s jeep, but it only held the body of his driver, a Corporal Lewes. I was puzzled to find that he had that drawing made by the girl in his pocket. I knew the colonel in charge of 30 AU had given it to Peter when I’d handed it in to Corps Intelligence earlier that morning, before he and Lewes set off for the camp. I’d already shown it to Peter.’

‘Was that the last time you saw him?’ Rebecca said.

‘We only had a few moments, in the middle of a busy HQ tent, with a howitzer battery blatting away behind us. Not much time to say anything, let alone hear what we were saying. Not that it mattered, perhaps. There was a flash of exhilaration in his face, and that’s what I remember. He was in a pretty bad way, too. But enough of that. You want to hear about the drawing. Peter would have been very careful with it, I’m sure. But then Lewes was his batman, so he would have trusted him with it. That was often the closest relationship, you know, officer and batman. Unspoken bond, all that.’

‘Were you ever close to anyone? Like that?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Me?’ Hugh paused, taken aback. ‘Good Lord. No. Not by then. Not like before the war. We… were romantic then. Naive. We even looked forward to war, to that bond amongst men we’d heard so much about. It was extraordinary, so soon after the Great War, yet it only seems to take a generation for men to forget. It’s as if war has become part of our nature, as if our biology has found a way to make us forget, to allow us to do it over and over again. It was General Lee, in the American Civil War, who said, thank God war is so awful, otherwise it’d be addictive. The difference was, the civilians in the Civil War saw the horror around them. We all knew terrible loss, our fathers, our uncles, killed in the Great War, but few of us in 1939 had seen carnage close up, seen death and dying. That might have done it.’

‘When you say we, you mean you and Peter,’ Rebecca said.

Hugh paused, looking down. ‘We were a small group. Close friends, at university. But yes. Peter was the closest.’

Dillen leaned forward. ‘Corporal Lewes. Why was he driving back to Corps Headquarters?’

Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I assumed they’d found something in the camp, perhaps in the forest. Peter had probably sent Lewes back for the usual follow-up team: extra riflemen, an interrogator, sappers for breaking into buildings, a bomb disposal expert, that kind of thing. The unit were a pretty impressive outfit and knew their stuff.’

‘Did anyone try to send word back to Peter? Did you? About what had happened to Lewes?’

‘I wanted to,’ Hugh replied. ‘I desperately wanted to. It’s all such a haze. I’ve been over it so often in my mind. I think by then the malaria was really clouding my thinking. I had a jeep and was going to do it myself. We didn’t have radio communication, of course. But events quickly overtook us. Corps HQ was concerned that the Germans might use the ceasefire to infiltrate the forest, to set up defensive positions and booby traps. We all knew what had happened to the Americans in the Hurtgen Forest, one of the nightmare battles of the war. The Hurtgen Forest was one of the nightmare battles of the war. There was not going to be a repeat of that. We already knew that the remnants of the German 2nd Marine Infantry Division were regrouping beyond the forest, along with a few survivors from an SS panzer training battalion and the 1st Panzer Grenadiers. All of them tough troops who fought to the death. There were probably only seven or eight hundred of them, but that would have been enough.’

‘The Teutoburg Forest, Varus’ legions in AD 9,’ Dillen murmured. ‘Three crack Roman legions totally annihilated by the Germans. Same neck of the woods, I think, in upper Saxony. You were pretty obsessed with it at school, always seemed to bring it up in class.’

‘Now you know why,’ Hugh said. ‘The problem was, the main road of our planned advance ran through the western edge of the forest. We couldn’t bypass it without big delays. We had to take that road. The ceasefire would only last long enough for essential consolidation, to strengthen our line for a massive push. That was the priority for Corps HQ, regardless of what Intelligence wanted. Sometimes we felt Intelligence actually would have preferred us to halt, so they could find as much as possible before the Nazis destroyed it. We knew there was a whole secret war going on that we knew very little about. But we were soldiers, and we just wanted the war won. And keeping the momentum going wasn’t just a matter of reaching Berlin before the Russians. We were all terribly apprehensive about what the Germans might have up their sleeves. We remembered Hitler’s “all or nothing” speech about the Reich at Nuremberg before the war. He’d already unleashed the V-2 rocket against London. You’ve no idea how terrifying those weapons were. We didn’t know about Nazi research into nuclear weapons then, but V-1 rockets with deadly gas or biological payloads would have been enough. And we knew that as long as there was a single fanatical Nazi at large, then all hell could be unleashed. That’s why we fought the war to the bitter end. That’s why our bombers flattened the cities. That’s why we killed the enemy until there was no one left to kill. We felt we were fighting a desperate battle for humankind, a battle against impending doomsday.’

‘So you never did try to find Peter,’ Dillen said.

Hugh paused, swallowing hard. He shook his head. ‘The schedule when Peter and Lewes left HQ for the camp only allowed a thirty-six-hour ceasefire. A five-hundred raid by the RAF was planned on the forest the following night. But as we were recovering Lewes’ body, an SAS patrol came down the road, my own chaps. They’d bivvied that night on the far edge of the forest and had watched small groups of German troops moving in, with Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets and what looked like demolition charges, probably for taking down trees over the road. They confirmed what Corps feared would happen. So the whole schedule was brought forward. The decision had already been made to clear out the camp anyway, and that was done in a matter of hours. The RAF raid was advanced to that night. One and a half thousand tons of airburst high explosive, as well as incendiaries and four-thousand-pound impact HE. The camp was obliterated. The forest as far as the nearest firebreaks burned for weeks, a total firestorm. The German army units that had infiltrated the forest ceased to exist. But the road through was clear for our advance. Corps HQ had got the result they wanted. Probably hundreds, even thousands of Allied troops spared.’