The Torch Bearers by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911591573
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was noon before the truck reached Singen. It pulled up outside the police station, the tailboard crashed down, and there was a ring of soldiers in the roadway with levelled rifles. The two who’d brought Jack and Trolley from the village ordered them out, and the soldiers hustled them inside, where they were separated and locked into one-man cells.

Now there’d be some interrogation, Jack guessed. Or a firing squad. In principle you didn’t believe in that outcome – not really, that the Germans would flout international law and the Hague Convention to that extent: but having been threatened with it more than once by men who clearly would have enjoyed doing it, you were aware it could happen. If, for instance, the Gestapo took you over: if they decided it was the thing to do, and reckoned they could get away with it.

Perhaps not this close to the Swiss border. People gossiped, and they’d be sensitive to the risk of publicity. Which only meant they might transport them elsewhere first…

The meal of leftovers in the village last night had been excellent, and their captors had been quite pleasant. They were some variety of Home Guard, and pleased with themselves for having pulled it off. But the food had been splendid. Here, it was thin soup and black bread, the soup tasting as if floor-mops had been wrung out in it. It was early evening by this time. Jack was considering the discomfort that the night ahead now promised – a plank bed and a single blanket, no pillow, under the glare of an unshaded bulb – when a guard unlocked the cell door and ordered him out, pushed him into a room where Cockup and Barmy, standing at ease and with a rifle covering them, brightened at the sight of him. He noticed that they both had cut lips, black eyes and bruises.

‘Hey, Jack’s the boy!’

‘Wotcher, me old cock sparrer!’

‘You stupid buggers…’

‘Barmy – what did he say?’

An officer at a desk in the corner had taken notes of this conversation, although it couldn’t have made much sense to him. And now Trolley was marched into the room. The seated officer scribbled a signature on a piece of coloured paper, banged a rubber stamp on it and then handed it to a sergeant. Then he rose, came over to stand in front of them with his hands clasped behind his back.

‘Speak German, anybody?’

Nobody seemed to have heard him.

‘Very well. I tell you this in English. You will be returned to your camp now, on the train. You will of course be under guard, and they will have orders that if you attempt escape, or disobey or cause other trouble, they are to shoot you dead. Is this now understood?’

Jack began, ‘Shooting unarmed prisoners, in terms of the Hague Convention—’

‘Silence!’

The officer’s face thrust close to Jack’s.

‘When you escape from the Offlag, was not one of you armed?’

Cockup said, ‘I don’t even know anyone called Ahmed.’

Jack said as the laughter ended, ‘Old drill rifle.

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