feet he had put a nest with three blue-green eggs. Whatever its faults, as August had told him, ‘No one would guess it was a first attempt.’ Willi turned it round proudly.
‘You saw the heron just now?’
‘I’m going to get married again, Willi.’
‘That’s good, sir.’
‘To my housekeeper.’
‘That’s wise, sir. At our age a man wants a sensible woman, not a flashy piece of skirt.’
August smiled. ‘I’m afraid that many of my friends might say that she is a flashy piece of skirt, Willi. She’s an RAD girl, not much older than my son.’
It was Willi’s turn to be embarrassed, but August didn’t care about anything. He was enjoying the warm feeling of being in love. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of German brandy. He poured a slug of it into the Stabsfeldwebel’s chocolate.
‘Drink up, Willi,’ said August Bach. ‘Let’s think ourselves lucky that we are not flying with the Tommis. For tonight, I have a feeling, we shall have a remarkable success.’
‘Success,’ echoed Willi and drank his chocolate and brandy.
For some time they sat in silence, drinking and watching the shadows lengthen and the blurred sun drop towards the misty ocean.
‘There was no mail?’ He knew there was none. Had there been any, it would have been placed upon his desk-top as it always was. ‘None,’ said Willi.
‘He’s an inconsiderate little bastard.’
‘He’ll be all right: bright lad, lots of combat behind him. You know how quickly you’d hear.’
‘He can look after himself; I was thinking only of his promotion. He’s been a Sturmmann for over a year and the lowest ranks live like pigs in the front line.’
‘Promotion is slow in the Waffen SS units.’
‘I wish like hell he wasn’t in an SS unit,’ said August.
‘I’d feel the same if it was my boy.’
‘Only because they don’t get enough rest between combat.’
‘Of course,’ said Willi. ‘I understand.’ He got to his feet and stood correctly at attention again. ‘If the Oberleutnant permits … there are the personnel and ration returns.’ The old NCO had moved from intimate chatter to the absurd third person of the Kaiser’s army.
‘Carry on, Willi. I’ll be along soon.’
He spent a few minutes looking through a trayful of paperwork. It could all wait until tomorrow, he decided. He put on his long black leather overcoat. The wind whined gently as he opened the door.
The sea was blood-red by the time Oberleutnant Bach walked along the wet sand to start work. He walked as slowly as he could. He picked up pieces of seaweed and a tern, stiff with diesel oil. Once he thought he saw a hedgehog among the dunes and waited five minutes for it to reappear but it didn’t.
From the sea’s edge the futuristic shape of the radar aerials was awesome even to him. He could easily pretend that he had just emerged from this sea upon some Atlantis where the technics were a century ahead of anything he had known. The metal graticule, as big as a large house, that swung gently from side to side was codenamed Freya. August remembered that Freya was a Nordic goddess whose watchman could see one hundred miles in every direction by day and by night. It was a fair description of the Freya radar device and August reasoned that if he could work that out, then so could the British Intelligence. (In fact he was correct. Dr R. V. Jones worked it out and reported to the Chiefs of Staff accordingly.)
Not far away were the two shorter-range, but more precise, giant Würzburgs. They were like electric bowl fires as big as windmills. They too swung gently around the horizon but always returned – like the Freya – to point westwards to where in East Anglia the Allied bomber airfields were but half an hour’s flying time away.
Gently August put the dead tern back on the sand. It was 22.00; the Tommis were not even in the air yet and when they were the Freya would give warning. The sand crunched underfoot. He kicked a hole in it and the sea appeared there as if by magic. Eggs for tea and a walk along the silent beach in the evening sunlight; Hansl and Anna-Luisa would love it here. After the war they would live somewhere remote. This was a fine rich country. Even with a hungry Wehrmacht gnawing at it for years there were still eggs and milk and sometimes cream. A few months ago Willi had come back from Zuidland with a whole sheep. August had checked the ration returns and the petrol sheets but had found no discrepancy.
From the tops of the dunes one could see fields of vegetables and greenhouses just like Altgarten. But here in the spring they had eaten them. The soups had been brimful of vegetables and meat and he had not complained, nor even investigated. He told himself he would have found nothing amiss anyway. The truth of it was that he was a bloody awful officer. That’s why he had never risen above Oberleutnant. And that was why he was strolling along the strand with a pair of Zeiss 16 × 40s, soft shoes and an old sweater, instead of besieging Leningrad in full battle order.
Still, thought August, one war is enough for any man. In the first basinful also he had been happy. Flying his Albatros twice a day and living on good food and wine in a fairy-tale château on the Meuse. Wouldn’t any spoiled young brat fresh from university give his life for a chance like that? That’s just what a lot of them did give. Who knows why any survived, except that suddenly the brain feels anew the prick of self-preservation that deserts young men for a few years and so makes heroes possible and wars welcome.
He raised his glasses to the naval gun bunker. Upon it sat a tern. He flicked the binoculars into focus and watched with pleasure as it searched its wings and preened itself. Suddenly there was the rumble of the emergency generator being tested. The bird rose alarmed and flew out to sea until August lost sight of it.
The sea mist had thinned considerably but the light was going fast. Reluctantly he put his glasses into the case and entered the T-shaped hut and its plotting-room.
Had August been able to see eighty-five kilometres to the north he would have seen the coastal convoy and the anti-aircraft light cruiser Held continuing steadily on their course. The guns they had fired at Löwenherz and Himmel were long since cleaned and readied for action but there had been no other interruptions and, as ‘Admiral’ Pawlak had predicted, they were now halfway to the Hook. The convoy had moved closer to the coast here, for the danger from wrecks was lessened and the danger from Allied aircraft increased.
This piece of coast was still enveloped in a thin streak of mist but the sunset had turned it bright gold, ‘like a Turner’.
‘Like a what?’
‘A painting by Turner, just a swirl of golds and reds and orange, a sort of land of ghosts.’
‘You give me the creeps you do, Dikke. You know what your trouble is, you read too many books, and books will get you nowhere. Now come away from that porthole and listen to what I’m saying and we might get ourselves another ring round the gun.’
The plump boy from Königsberg went and sat on the bunk where ‘Admiral’ Pawlak with his mouth full of cheese was explaining about gunnery. On the wall of the storeroom there was a bright disc of light moving upwards as the sun sank lower and lower.
‘It’s rhythm – no one ever teaches you that but that’s the secret of a high rate of fire – rhythm.’ He broke off another piece of cheese and put it in his mouth. ‘Now take that starboard number two gun, that loader waits for the breech to clear and then leans in with the next shell just like they teach you at gunnery school. That’s all very well for demonstration work or target shooting but when you have a plane taking evasive action like this morning’s one did you’ve got to anticipate.’
‘When I was at training school, one of our crew caught his hand in the breech.’
‘Well, he must have been a slow-witted