At 3:00 a.m., a dispatcher on motorcycle interrupted the festivities. The roar of his BMW approaching the fires quelled the laughing and shouting, and he dismounted, raised his goggles, marched straight to Himmel and offered a stiff-armed “Heil Hitler.” The Colonel, who was now sweating and red-faced from spinning out a Bavarian jig, immediately stilled himself, scowling as he tore open the envelope.
He stepped closer to a torch and squinted for some time at the missive. Then, he folded it and placed it into his tunic pocket. The men watched him, quietly drinking their beers, and he shrugged and smiled wanly as he dismissed the messenger.
“Well, my comrades,” he said at last. “There is a time to laugh, and a time to kill...”
* * *
The Commando traveled from the onset of dawn, and all throughout the following day and well into the evening. With our staff car in the lead, we first set out northeast for Regensburg, then made northwest for Erlangen, and Himmel hardly spoke at all but to issue short directional orders. Save the cook, Heinz the armorer and a single private, the entire complement was along, yet none of us but the master knew our destination. This in itself was unusual, for once a mission was afoot, the Colonel customarily shared each detail that might aid success in martial tactics. Yet on this terribly long day, Edward and I suffered in his silence, left to ponder only the bomb-ravaged countryside and count the horses drawing caissons and supply carts toward the distant fates of other men.
I had, by this juncture, enough experience to assess a task by virtue of its preparation. When the Colonel ordered lightweight loads of personal battle harnesses, weapons and field caps, it was likely to be a lightning effort and mercilessly short. And by counterpoint, should he insist on satchel explosives, support mortars and helmets, my bowels cringed with the certainty of artillery and heavy resistance. However, on this day the unit was posting far from its headquarters, and it might well be tasked additionally while en route, so everything but the kitchen trough was aboard our trucks, making an educated guess quite impossible.
However, what chilled my spine and set my mind to racing over every imaginable fantasy on this excursion was the order Himmel had snapped at me just prior to embarkation.
“Leave your pistol, Shtefan.”
I had looked at him then, touching the butt of my holstered weapon possessively. The sidearm that I had so initially despised had become something of an amulet.
“Might I not need it, Herr Colonel?” I asked.
“Leave it. I do not want you to have it today.”
I obeyed, of course, and had reluctantly relegated the tool to my footlocker. And based upon some instinct, I did not even attempt to carry the Leica that had made itself a necessity heretofore.
With dusk, we were on the road to Schweinfurt, carrying on deeply into the heart of Germany. With each kilometer, we extended the range from any possible front, a fact that further stirred my curiosity into a whirlpool of discomfort. At last, and sometime close to midnight, the moon rose above the hills and hued the high, frothy clouds with fringes of silver, and we turned from the main road and wound our way up into the deep forests of the Hassberger. There, thousands of pines stabbed at the pale night sky with black and spiny spears, and it seemed that there was nowhere left to go but the looming cap of a windswept mountain.
A pair of dim headlights flashed then, a signal that briefly illuminated a broken road among the forest. Edward slowed the staff car and picked his way along this rising passageway, its shoulders eerily shadowed by the towering trunks and needled branches of the enormous trees. Our headlights then fell upon the flanks of a similar car, yet unlike our own field Kübelwagen, this one was enameled in a deep and polished black, its swastika emblem perfect and unmarred, its chrome fixtures buffed to a gleam. Four officers sat like expressionless mummies inside the car, their heavy leather coats and black peaked caps the calling cards of Gestapo. One of them raised a gloved finger and crooked it, and their car turned and made up the slope, and we followed.
We broke into a large grassy clearing at the crest of this height. A cold wind ruffled the wild meadow, and the moon made its greenery into a ghostly pale blue, and in the distances far below the dim lights of townships flickered like star clusters in undiscovered galaxies.
The Gestapo vehicle halted at the fringe of this clearing. Edward parked a bit to its rear and flank, as if avoiding some sort of infection by contact. Our lorries slowly gathered to the left, and I could hear the canvas flaps snapping up and the men mumbling and stretching their cramped limbs as they hopped to the wet ground. For some unexplained reason, there were no shouts of command, only whispers as if in a rectory.
Edward and I stayed in place as Himmel got out of the car, meeting his Gestapo counterpart halfway between the vehicles. My master pulled his orders from his pocket, and the conversation that was carried to me on the wind I shall not forget.
“What is this exactly about?” Himmel asked without so much as a greeting.
“You have your orders.” The Gestapo officer looked not at my commander, but simply gazed out over the night’s panorama.
“And I shall follow them, as always,” Himmel growled. “And as always, I will know the intent of my mission before its commencement.”
The Gestapo officer did not turn his head nor change his expression. He merely placed his hands behind his back, and lifted his nose as if sensing something foul on the wind.
“These men are British and Canadian flying officers,” he said. “They have escaped from Stalag Luft Six.”
“Then why not simply return them to Stalag Six?”
“They have escaped four times. The rest are to be furnished a lesson.”
Himmel lifted his chin a bit, then nodded once in understanding, if not heartfelt compliance. He snapped open the order sheet and pulled a pen from his pocket.
“Sign the orders, Hauptmeister,” he said.
The Gestapo officer turned to him, raising an eyebrow. “They have already been signed by the Führer.”
“Then you should have no issue with signing them as well.” Himmel’s tone left no quarter for quarrel. He extended the papers and the pen. The Gestapo officer snatched them up, signed them with a scrawl and handed them back. He then marched to his staff car, leaned inside and placed a radio handset to his head. I watched my Colonel as he turned and strode off to Captain Friedrich, who had now formed our men into the ranks, where they waited with their weapons slung, stamping their boots a bit to ward off the bitter chill.
It was not long before the strain of heavy engines reached us. More headlights appeared from the far side of the wood, and a pair of unmarked trucks made their way into the clearing. As they stopped, a small unit of Luftwaffe field security guards hopped from the trucks, opened the tailgates, and began helping the passengers down onto the grass. These men, perhaps thirty in all, were dressed in all manner of civilian coats and sweaters, some with torn woolen trousers and more than a few missing a shoe here and there. A pair of the prisoners had apparently been wounded somehow, as white soiled bandages were tied about their arms and thighs. None of them had shaved or washed in at least a week. All of them were blindfolded.
It was then that my heart began to hammer in my chest. Until that point, I had not truly fathomed the conversation between my master and this arrogant secret policeman, and now my mind could not accept what my intestines began to grasp. This was not possibly the mission that had been thrust upon us at the climax of our merriment. It could not be that a hero such as Himmel would be