Chapter Two
The station gave Sam no hint of his true location.
Somewhere in Germany? ‘Willkommen in Berlin!’ the sneering military police officer shouted.
A lie, of course: this was no welcome, and he surely wasn’t in Berlin.
No civilian passengers, for a start. But then, he had come to believe that Germans were no longer capable of telling the truth.
He’d thought that ever since the Munich debacle and the ensuing invasion of Poland: Britain had been lulled into trusting them in the first place and look where that had got them.
He counted the number of men guarding them on the platform. Too many to attempt an escape, he concluded.
He had been captured at Albert, in France, as his platoon retreated to the evacuation point on the beaches of Dunkirk.
He would probably endure a lifetime of reliving the moment he’d been caught.
His platoon had been overrun by the advancing German army.
The battle for survival was vicious, with bullets piercing the air and shells exploding all around them.
Young men fell like lifeless mannequins as the French inhabitants scurried for safety.
He had been determined to fight through it, knowing it would break his fiancée Moira’s heart if he did not.
Suddenly he had seen a young child, her dress covered in dust and her little body shuddering with terror.
She was alone in the rubble as bullets ate chunks out of the brick wall behind her.
He had hesitated, her vulnerability making it impossible for him to drag his eyes away.
He had wanted to scoop her up in his arms and whisk her to safety, knowing he would probably die in the act.
He didn’t get the chance. The bullet that pierced his leg brought him back to his senses and onto his knees and he was quickly captured at gunpoint.
As he was dragged away a distraught Frenchwoman ran past him.
He hoped the woman was the girl’s mother and imagined her carrying the child to safety.
He did not glance over his shoulder to see it.
He wanted a happy ending for them, his own fate far too bleak to imagine.
That was some days ago — or was it a week?
His new life as a prisoner of war had begun and already he was losing sense of time.
At least he was not alone, although he had discovered that travelling with fifty men squeezed into one cattle wagon was hardly a pleasant experience.
It was said they were being taken to Poland, but no one knew the truth.
Rumours soon ignited and swirled around, but he suspected that most weren’t based on fact.
After all, the prisoners would be the last to learn what was happening.
He shifted his toes inside his boots and shuffled his feet.
His joints were stiff, as if he had aged twenty years, but the wound in his leg was not as bad as he’d first feared.
He hoped it would not fester like some of the wounds the other prisoners had.
They had already stopped at several passage camps along the way, but the breaks had been few and far between.
A journey with no food or place to urinate degraded a man and aged him.
Add a few lice in for fun and you’d soon have a weakened, submissive soldier, boiling with revenge and hatred inside.
Not good circumstances for optimum wound healing.
‘Hey up,’ said another POW beside him. ‘Something’s up.’
An overweight stationmaster hurriedly crossed the platform from his office and began speaking to one of the guards.
The guard’s expression tightened and he quickly relayed the message to one of the military police.
The atmosphere changed. The prisoners and their armed guards were ordered sharply off the platform.
Herded out of the station and down a narrow neighbouring lane no more than twenty yards away, Sam could still see the platform, which was now largely deserted except for a few German officers.
And he hated every one of them. They waited in silence, looking down the track in anticipation.
A new waiting game had begun, but this time it was for someone more important than a rudimentary string of carriages carrying hundreds of bedraggled soldiers.
Minutes later, the sound of an approaching train renewed the platform guards’ alertness.
They stood to attention, backs ramrod stiff, with gleaming buttons and polished shoes.
A large black train rolled into the station and came to a smooth halt.
Behind the engine was an open wagon carrying anti-aircraft guns manned by black-uniformed SS guards.
Sam braced himself. A black, sleek train manned by SS and protected with heavily armoured plating could mean only one thing: someone very powerful was on board.
His eyes hungrily scanned the carriages for the high-ranking officer.
There were four carriages in total, followed by another open wagon carrying manned artillery guns to protect the rear.
Who could it be? The black paintwork of each carriage gleamed in the sun, but it was the third that snared Sam’s attention.
Adolf Hitler himself was sitting at a table by the window, plain as day, being served drinks and a meal.
He appeared oblivious to the hundreds of dishevelled prisoners waiting nearby like cattle herded into a pen.
Instead, he was quite relaxed, as if he was on a first-class day trip to Brighton, waving away one choice from the menu and choosing another.
A tall officer in pristine uniform entered his carriage, saluted and spoke to him for a few minutes.
Time seemed to slow as Sam watched the surreal scene unfold, Hitler accepting his meal without any acknowledgement to the waiter.
Even the birds in the trees above him appeared to fall silent.
Yet, Sam thought, despite the armour and pomp around him, the immense power he held, the death and destruction he’d caused, Hitler, hunched over his meal, eating, with the occasional dab at his mouth with a napkin, was a great disappointment.
In that moment, Sam felt that both he and the world had somehow been duped all along.
Hitler was nothing but a mediocre man with an unquenchable thirst for dominance and he should have been stopped years ago.
Sam felt almost as if he could see the evil emanating from him, like a stench that could be tasted and had the potency to linger long after he’d gone.
Once, people had failed to see this evil, believing it could not exist in a man’s soul.
They had been wrong not to learn from history.
The past was littered with bloody tyrants who had abused their positions of power and killed at will for their own misplaced gains.
It was already too late by the time world leaders realized what Hitler really was and that mistake had been fatal, costing countless lives.
That was the reason Sam was standing there now, wounded, dirty and hungry — fearful of what was yet to come.
A new train with more cattle wagons arrived soon after Hitler’s train had left, and they were immediately herded onto the platform again and inside the carriages until they were squeezed in so tightly that there was only a little standing space.
Sam found himself in the corner of one of the wagons with a view of the outside, albeit through the slits of one of four ventilators which were sited at each corner.
The journey began again, rattling and rocking its way through Germany.
Eventually the train came to a stop again.
He looked through the vent. His gaze skimmed the empty platform beside his own train, across the two concealed rail tracks, and came to rest on the purpose-built passengers’ platform opposite.
The railway spur had temporarily brought ordinary passenger trains and industrial transportation into close proximity and he watched in silence as the platform gates opposite opened and men, women, soldiers on leave and children arrived to wait for their trains.
How different their situations were, he thought.
At best the people appeared oblivious to the prisoners; at worst they ignored them.
His gaze stopped on a young woman. She was pretty, with blonde hair cut to her shoulders and a slim build.
Beside her stood a slightly younger man who shared similar features and wore a crisp new army uniform.
They sat down on a bench and the young man produced a sketch pad from his rucksack and began to draw.
The young woman watched his sketch begin to emerge before her gaze wandered up to his face and then further afield .
. . to a family . . . to a bag carried by a man .
. . to a child that brought a sad smile to her lips .
. . to the waiting cattle wagon. Her smile faded and a slight frown on her forehead formed — perhaps it had dawned on her what might be inside.
He felt compelled to reach out to her with a finger through the vent.
She would not see it, he knew, among the many carriages; she would not want to help even if she did.
But there was sadness in her face which gave him hope that one day reason and common sense would come to the German people and they would demand an end to the war.
The woman stood, and for a crazy moment he thought she was going to cry out against the crowded conditions they were in.
Then a new passenger train arrived, slicing between them, and he knew how foolish his thoughts had been.
Her train had arrived and she was preparing to embark.
It was madness, but his disappointment was as real as it was ludicrous.
* * *