Christopher Priest - The Separation

One night towards the end of the war, in January 1945, the air raid siren sounded and the floodlights surrounding the compound were abruptly extinguished. It had happened dozens of times before, so this was nothing unusual. According to the rules of the Kommandant, prisoners were to stay inside their huts and not to move into the compound for any reason until after the all-clear had sounded and the lights were switched on again.

We knew though that the German armies were retreating on all fronts, that the Luftwaffe as a fighting force was almost defunct, that the Russians were advancing at formidable speed across the northern plains of Europe. The British and Americans were poised to cross the Rhine. When that happened, the only question would be which of the Allied armies would reach us first. We were certain the war could not last much longer. The Kommandant and his rules were still a powerful presence, but we no longer feared for our lives. Small freedoms crept inexorably around us, presaging the larger liberty that lay ahead.

I had been out for a stroll around the compound late that afternoon, the weather fine and still. After dark the sky cleared and a full moon was high overhead. The air was bitterly cold but there was hardly any wind. It was possible to stay outside without feeling the worst effects of the cold. I was restless inside the hut, so that night, when the lights went out, I pulled on a thick pullover and a coat. I moved in the darkness from my shared room within the hut, down the short corridor to the main door. In defiance of the Kommandant I stepped out quietly into the Appell compound, where the roll-call was taken every morning. The dark, tall trees pressed in on all sides, beyond the camp barbed wire. The wooden watch-towers were outlined against the sky. I breathed the air in deeply, feeling it sucking down sharply over my teeth and throat, a bracing coldness. I stood on the hard, bare gravel by myself, listening to the sounds of the night. I could hear some of the guards talking restlessly; somewhere the guard dogs were barking; there were quiet sounds from many of the huts. Few of us could relax when we knew an air raid was expected.

I stood alone in the gravelly compound for about five minutes. After that, some of the other men emerged one by one from the huts and walked out into the compound to stand with me. I knew everyone in our part of the camp by sight, but in the unlit square the men were just dark shapes. We acknowledged each other in English, muttering tentatively, not wanting to draw the attention of the guards. Most of the British prisoners were RAF officers and most of those were Bomber Command aircrew. In the same camp, but in their own huts largely by choice, were Polish, French, Czech and Dutch officers who had flown with the RAF. The Australians, Canadians, Rhodesians and New Zealanders tended to mix with the British. We were a cross-section of what the Allied air force had become. There were also many American crewmen, who were kept in a separate compound of their own, but a few of them had managed to transfer themselves across to our part of the camp, and they mixed in with us. The Yanks were popular with everyone but they were generally more fretful about being held prisoner than any of the Europeans. I think some of them still saw the war as a European sideshow, something they had been called in to help with, not a war that was truly their own. They were a long way from home. Their food parcels were bigger than ours and contained foods and treats that seemed to us exotic, but all the Yanks who were with us were generous, so we readily forgave them that sort of thing.

That night we all stood together silently in the dark, watching the sky.

A few minutes after midnight we heard the first sound of engines, far away and high above us. In silence we scanned the sky, hoping for a glimpse of the planes. The sound grew louder, a deep-throated roar, a throbbing noise that was more felt than heard. The aircraft came steadily closer.

Then someone said, ‘There they are!’ and we turned to look away behind us to the west. Against the stars, against the moon-bright sky, the distant bombers began to appear. At first they came singly, then in increasing numbers, high and tiny, flying relentlessly on. The stream thickened and widened. We tried to keep a count of them: fifty, a hundred, two hundred, no, more over there, at least five hundred, maybe six or seven! We craned our necks, looking and looking, expertly identifying them from the engine sounds as Halifaxes and Lancasters, bombed up and ready. The bomber stream went on, a seemingly unstoppable flow, unchallenged, dreadful, unhesitating. The droning of the engines seemed to blanket everything else. In the moonlight we could distinguish the Luftwaffe camp guards emerging from their command positions, standing as we were standing, staring up at the sky.

The bomber stream passed over us for twenty minutes, rocking us with the deep, pulsating sound of their engines, a terrifying armada in the moonlight, until finally the tail-end bombers flew on and out of our sight. Silence slowly returned.

I stood in the dark, feeling as if I was straining to catch the last particles of the engine noise, the last tiny pressure of the droning sound the planes had made.

One by one the other men returned to the warmth of the huts, but I stayed put. Soon I was alone, standing in the open space at the end of the ranks of huts, my head tilted back, searching the sky. I was shaking with cold.

How many more cities did Germany have, that the Allies might visit to destroy? What was left? Who could still be alive in those flattened ruins, those acres of turned-over wreckage and rubble, cold and broken, overwhelmed?

Once again, thinking of the war’s futility, I remembered the prisoner everyone thought was Rudolf Hess. I had not at that time forgotten the man I met at Churchill’s behest, half out of his mind, a captive in a foreign country, clinging to the past, offering a kind of future that no one wanted, that no one was prepared to discuss with him. I had not solved the mystery he presented - perhaps no one ever would.

I was to glimpse him again in the months ahead, though only in the newsreels. Towards the end of 1945, by which time I was back in England, the Nuremberg war crimes trials began and the man who looked like Hess appeared in the dock with the other surviving Nazi leaders. He sat in the front row between Goering and Ribbentrop, wearing an inane, friendly expression - there is film of Goering openly mocking Hess, who sat through most of the trial without the translation headphones, quietly reading books. Whereas most of the Nazis received the death penalty, Hess was given a life sentence, his crimes mitigated by his attempt in 1941 to forge a peace. He vanished from public gaze after the end of the trial, going behind the walls of Spandau. Once there, he was not seen again. He was never again in his lifetime called by his own name: from the moment the sentence was handed down he was addressed invariably as Prisoner 7. When his death was reported in 1987 I was shocked to discover he had remained alive until then, but shocked as well that I had all but forgotten him until the news broke.

By January 1945, it was irrelevant whether or not he was an impostor, or even whether he had tried to bring a genuine peace proposal to Churchill. Peace was not made in 1941 and the war went on, becoming immensely more dangerous and complex than it was when Hess flew to Britain. In that long winter of 1945 the war was at last heading towards its bitter end, and for people like me all that really mattered was how soon I would be able to return home.

Dreams of escape, which had once charged the thoughts of the prisoners of war, became dreams of repatriation. After the Americans finally arrived to free us from the camp we were soon being transported by trucks to the north of Germany, where the British army held the ground. From there we were flown back in small groups, crammed uncomfortably into the fuselages of the same bombers in which many of us had flown.