Owen Sheers: Resistance

The meeting with Atkins had happened too quickly for George to think on the consequences yet. His head was light, open, and he swung his scythe with a renewed energy. He felt exposed, as if a layer of skin had been shaved from him, bringing him into closer contact with the world. The blade’s edge against the young stalks of bracken, the calligraphy of the swallows above him. Everything seemed clearer, brought into a sharper focus. Just over an hour ago the war was a different country, the contours of which he’d traced through the newspapers, in radio reports. But now he was involved, connected. He had the strange sensation of his life simultaneously diminishing and expanding under the impression of Atkins’s words, and for the second time that week, he felt older than his seventeen years.

“George! George, you lazy bastard! Get up!”

His father. His father who had slept, snoring all night, while he was out running messages. His father who now thought his twenty-one-year-old son was a lazy good for nothing as well as a coward, always yawning, tripping over his boots, and knocking things over.

He got out of bed, nausea swelling through his belly. His eyelids felt lined with sandpaper.

“I’m coming! Be down now in a minute!”

Dropping to his knees he reached under the bed. He pulled out some bags of old clothes, a train set he’d had as a boy. Then he put his arm deep under again, his head resting on the mattress, like a farmer feeling for the hooves of a lamb in the womb. His fingers groped about the knots and cracks of the wooden floorboards before touching the smoother polish of the case. He drew it out. It was long and narrow, like the cue cases of the snooker players he’d seen waiting at the bus stop to go into the club in town. Flicking the latches with his thumbs, he opened the lid slowly, as if it was a music box, pulled away the oily rag inside, and lifted out the rifle. He tested its mechanism, the slide of the bolt, the trigger weight, then took a narrow brush from inside the case and pulled it through the barrel. Resting it across his knee, he fitted the telescopic sight and silencer, then lifted the stock to his shoulder. With one elbow resting on the bed he bent his head to the eyepiece of the scope. The crosshairs wavered for a moment, the view through the telescopic sight swinging from half, to crescent, to full moon before coming to rest on the pencil mark he’d drawn on the far wall of his bedroom. He held them there, counting in his head. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Relaxing his thumb he squeezed his finger until he felt the click of the trigger. The crosshairs trembled slightly as if shaken in a breeze, but kept their bearing on the pencil mark on the wall. He breathed out slowly, just as he’d been instructed. Not by Atkins, who didn’t like guns, he knew that now, but as the other man from British Intelligence had taught him. The other man who’d also come to visit George one day that long hot summer four years ago.

1. A firm and cautious attitude towards the civilian population is to be adopted; correct soldierly behaviour is a self-evident duty.

2. Strict reticence will be observed when conversing with the local population. Enemy intelligence will be particularly active in occupied territory, endeavouring to obtain information on installations and measures of military importance. Any thoughtlessness, boasting, or misplaced confidences may, therefore, have the direst consequences.

3. Acts of violence against orderly members of the population and looting will incur the severest penalties under military law; the death sentence may be imposed.

4. Works of art and historic monuments are to be preserved and protected. Any disparagement of the religious practices of the country will be punished.

5. The soldier will be provided with all essentials by his unit. Unnecessary purchases are to be avoided. Any private purchases by individual soldiers are to be paid for in cash. Any wastefulness is harmful to the unit.

6. Unnecessary interference with the economic life of the country is to be avoided. Factories, workshops, and offices are not to be disturbed; except where operationally necessary, such places may only be entered by soldi use of stocks of petrol, oil, machiner operational area exceptions ma unit commanders from batt

7. Goods of all kind

The print ended in a ragged sepia burn mark, like an aerial photograph of a coastline. Captain Albrecht Wolfram of the 14th Panzergrenadier Division let the Wehrmacht pamphlet fall from his hand. Its owner wouldn’t have any use for it now, not if the state of the book was anything to go by. He watched it land in the mud at his feet, then, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses, he lifted his head to look about him. There’d been heavy fighting here as there had been all along the southern coast. The smells of cordite, burnt flesh, wood smoke, and petrol still hung heavy in the air, while the sky over the Channel was dark with the thick plumes of the oil slicks the British had lit to slow the progress of their landings. The charred invasion pamphlet was just one of thousands of pieces of debris that scattered the ground; boots, a burnt-out armoured car, empty cans of food, a child’s bicycle, its rear tyre melted by the heat of a recently extinguished fire. Inside the house behind him one of his men had found a letter and wedding ring pinned to the wall with a knife. The writer lay beneath them, his pistol still in his hand, a band of white skin around one of his dirty fingers.

Albrecht leant back against the picket fence and drew a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his tunic. A couple of Stukas passed low overhead, their engines screaming. He glanced up at their crooked wings, acknowledging them with the slightest of twitches about his right eye.

Albrecht was patting his other pockets for some matches, the cigarette balanced on his lower lip, when he saw the dust trail of the dispatch rider rise along the road ahead. As the motorbike got closer he recognised the uniform of the Waffen SS. He took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and pushed himself away from the fence.

“Captain Wolfram?” the dispatch rider asked him, removing his goggles, leaving his face a clown’s mask of grime, pale circles about his eyes.

“Yes.”

“Telegram from regional headquarters.” He handed Albrecht an envelope bearing the SS stamp, saluted, and turned on his heel. Albrecht returned his salute and watched him kick the bike into life before racing back up the road, the growl of its exhaust another seam in the montage of engine noises all around him.

Albrecht felt his stomach turn as he opened the envelope and pulled out the thin sheet of telegram paper. He’d been expecting something like this, hoping he might be called back to Intelligence, but from his own commanding officers perhaps, or the staff at Southern Headquarters, the Gestapo even, not from the SS. Why would they be contacting him? They had their own translators just as they had their own everything. When he’d registered as a fluent English speaker before the invasion, he’d hoped for an easy position with the liaison units or, even better, safely behind a desk at HQ. But he couldn’t expect something like that from the SS. Nothing was ever easy with them. He unfolded the telegram slowly, as if it contained something that might bite him.

He read the order twice. The typewriter ribbon needed replacing. The letters were chipped and bitten, every “R” faded, ghosts among crowds of the living. Like every order he’d ever read, it was dry and direct. Report to Southern Headquarters immediately. He’d expected that. It was always immediately, even here on the fringes of the front line. Even here where the smell of burnt flesh still thickened the air.