Morning, Noon & Night by Robert Ryan

Author:Robert Ryan [Ryan, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480477605
Published: 2014-02-25T19:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

WHAT WAS THE POINT of having a Waffen-SS Abteilung, a battalion of Germany’s most blooded fighting troops, on your doorstep if you weren’t going to use it? Just a show of strength was all Pieter Wolkers had in mind, a big stick to wave over villages for future reference. Diels had resisted Wolkers’s plan for a week or two, and when he did finally put it to the Abteilung commander, SS-Obersturmführer Knochen, he found he was keen to let some of his men ‘stretch their legs’ as he put it. Wolkers had made sure Knochen understood him, that this was not a punitive action, simply ‘housekeeping’.

The village of Monveaux was still sleeping when the company of 150 men under Knochen pulled up their trucks two kilometres away from the main square. Surprise was everything. It was the same principle as the lightning searches of every passenger arriving at Lille station. That had yielded thousands of kilos of contraband goods and dozens of travellers with incorrect papers. Now Wolkers would see what the search of a whole village would generate. He had picked on Monveaux because of reports of suspicious characters in cafés and bars speaking English a few weeks previously.

Roadblocks were set up to prevent anyone entering or leaving, and the Obersturmführer spread his men into a loose circle, a man every few metres, until the village was surrounded.

The noise of the cockerels and dogs was joined by three sharp blasts on a whistle and the men began to close the ring, pausing to rip open every shed and barn they came to. The circle tightened as they approached the outskirts and the soldiers bunched into four-man teams, each one taking a house in turn, pushing the occupants out, to be herded to the central square, then gutting the house, looking for contraband, radios, fugitives, anything.

Wolkers and Knochen drove into the square and waited under the statue of Pétain as bewildered locals, mostly still in their nightclothes, drifted towards them. A machine-gun post at either end acted as magnetic poles, repelling the gathering crowd towards the centre.

The first crackle of gunfire made Wolkers start.

‘Relax,’ said Knochen. ‘They know what they are doing.’

More shots. A distant scream. ‘It’s a search mission,’ Wolkers reminded Knochen. ‘No instant reprisals.’

An older man with a livid bruise the shape of a rifle butt on his face staggered towards them, supported by his wife. They began yelling but Knochen signalled his Überscharführer to get them out of his sight. Wolkers began to feel uneasy. ‘Obersturmführer—’

Knochen silenced him with a wave. He was a young man and had been in the regiment since its formation, when its main duty was to guard the KZs, concentration camps, and keep order. So he was familiar with how to deal with civilians. His doubts about reprisals had been buried a long time ago. ‘I was thinking. We could transport all the men, evacuate the women. Burn the village. That would be a stronger example.’

‘No,’ said Wolkers feebly. ‘This will be quite enough.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.