Best Foot Forward: The Autobiography of the RAF's Other Legless Fighter Pilot by Colin Hodgkinson

Author:Colin Hodgkinson [Hodgkinson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2017-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

Part 6

“How You Must Hate the Germans!”

The German colonel held the bedclothes high in his gloved hand and stared silently at my body. My sight was reduced to a single vitreous slit in my right eye, but he was close enough for me to see him in detail. Had my face allowed it I might have smiled. This was a faded caricature, the picture of the Prussian officer with which mothers frightened their children in the First World War. Everything was there from the waisted coat, glistening boots and square, cropped head to the immovable monocle and an expression of efficient disgust.

As I watched him his expression changed. It gave way to doubt, then wonder, finally settling for something that was not far removed from fear. He dropped the blankets, turned round and looked at me squarely for the first time. I was a most unlovely sight. My upper jaw was fractured and internal lacerations, spreading from the right-hand corner of my mouth to the ear, had blown up my face like a balloon. The mottled swelling had pinched away my eyes; my lips were a crooked pout and a two days’ growth of red bristle sprouted from my cheeks.

But it was not these injuries that interested my colonel. It was what he had seen under the blankets: my legs, or rather my lack of them. He bent forward, bringing his face closer to mine. The surface of his monocle reflected, minutely, the rectangle of barred window behind my bed. When he spoke his voice was sad, almost humble.

“Sie hassen die Deutschen sehr, nicht wahr?”

I nodded gravely at this gibberish: manifestly the wrong reaction. He straightened abruptly and his face came to attention. Someone gave a military shout, my four guards clicked their heels and the colonel marched stiffly from the room.

I looked at the German sister in bewilderment. An elderly woman, all in starched white, kind but cold, it was to her, perhaps, that I owed my life. It was she who had dressed my wounds and dribbled warm milk – the only food I had taken for more than two days – into what was left of my mouth.

Doctors, I suppose, had examined me and I must have been given drugs, for I remember no intolerable pain. Those forty-eight hours, during which I floated back to full consciousness in frightening spasms, contained nothing but the smell of ether, a sense of despair and the figure of this woman, now in focus, now a blur, approaching or retreating in the wintry light.

I had great confidence in her. She had told me in my first lucid moments where I was and why I was there – in a German military hospital in St. Omer, as a result of a “bad accident”. That had been a perfectly adequate explanation at the time, and I had sunk back into stupor quite satisfied. But when next I emerged its implications were forgotten.

What was the meaning of these barred windows, and of these four

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