The Doomsday Testament

While I had been fighting my war, Walter Brohm had been fighting his. The contest could only have one winner. Klosse’s face was pink with rage and he wore a new bruise on his right cheek. Brohm’s eyes shone with the eerie light of victory and he twirled my pistol on his finger as if he was Tom Mix. I retrieved it before he shot himself. ‘We make a good team, you and I, Leutnant Matt. Perhaps you should come with us to America?’ Somehow I restrained myself from wiping the smile from his face with the Browning. I signalled him to get to his feet and told him we had a job to do first. Strange how you can share your food and your blanket with a man, but still never really know him. Ted Jack, my wireless operator, had nursed me through two bouts of chronic dysentery, but because I was an officer I’d never called him anything but Sarn’t. Ted was one of those stolid, competent, uncomplaining types who are the backbone of the British Army. He had a wife and two children under five. Now I cradled his head in my hands, wondering at the weight of it, as the others watched me with the kind of look you reserve for a man standing outside a lunatic asylum who suddenly announces that he’s Napoleon. Sarn’t Jack’s eyes were half closed, the way most dead people’s are, but at least he still had eyes. Al Stewart didn’t even have a head. We hadn’t been able to find it. Klosse muttered something about being a gentleman and threw his entrenching tool down. Stan didn’t appreciate that and kicked him in beside the tattered, blackened remains of what was left of our four friends. The German looked at me for support. For answer I tossed Sarn’t Jack’s head at his feet and he got the message and continued digging. Even Walter Brohm didn’t complain. We put the bodies of our ambushers into the ditch. I didn’t want them sharing a grave with the men they’d killed. Apart from an older SS veteran who had operated the machine gun, they were probably aged between twelve and fifteen and their bled-out, marble-grey faces and surprised eyes made them look younger still. Just children. But they were Hitler’s children, indoctrinated since the day they started school to worship the Führer and programmed to give their lives for the Fatherland. Well, they’d got their wish. I looked down at them, the flies already feasting on the drying blood that stained their faces. One particular fly made its way slowly from one side of a staring opaque eyeball to another and I was surprised the dead boy didn’t blink. If you asked me then how I felt about killing children I would have told you that they weren’t children, they were the enemy, and the moment they had lifted their weapons and fired upon my friends they had forfeited their lives. But I knew that someday these dead boys would come and visit me in the night, the way all the men I’d killed do, and maybe then my answers would be different. At one point my hands started shaking and I kept them busy by replacing the magazine in the carbine I’d recovered from the wreckage of the first jeep. It made a sharp click when I pushed it home. The three men filling in the grave froze and their faces went almost as pale as the corpses in the ditch. Stan laughed.

We marked the grave with a makeshift cross and I scrawled the names of the dead on a page from the journal and placed it under a rock. When we were done, we drove on in silence until we were south of the town of Blumberg about four miles from the Swiss border. Stan parked the jeep along a forest track outside a small hamlet. I told him to make camp there and wait for me. At first I thought he was going to argue, but the discipline of his long service prevailed. Once he was organized I shook hands with him and got back into the jeep with the three Nazis. I’d spent two months before the war walking in this countryside to the west of Lake Constance, what the Germans call the Bodensee, so I knew the area well. We were on the northern edge of the Hoher Randen, the hill country that straddles the border between Germany and Switzerland, and beyond it, on the far side of Schaffhausen, lay the upper reaches of the Rhine. I drove two miles further up the track before I stopped again. ‘We walk from here,’ I told them. ‘When we reach the border we will be met by a representative from the US State Department who will arrange your onward journey from Switzerland.’ The Germans laughed, even Klosse, and talked about what they’d do when they reached America, what they’d buy and what they’d eat. They made me sick. ‘You are to say nothing to anyone, not even your guide about who and what you are,’ I told them. ‘Nothing.’ I stared at Brohm. ‘Nothing, Walter. You talk too much.’ He just grinned at me and clutched his briefcase tighter to his chest.