Rhanna at War Read online

  ‘Ma Brodie – mo ghaoil,’ Niall whispered brokenly and gently closed her eyes. He knelt beside her, too shocked to move. Deep within the crazily strewn heap of glass and masonry there came an almost imperceptible little sob. Holding his breath he cocked his good ear and it came again – the stifled ghost of a human voice. ‘Someone’s alive in here!’ he called to the long line of men who were expertly shifting rubble in the fashion of a human conveyor belt. They scrambled towards him and carefully began the arduous task of rescue. An hour later they came upon a small boy, so petrified he was unable to move or speak, his life saved by a massive beam that had jammed above him to form a wedge-shaped tunnel. Niall was slim and agile yet neither he, nor any of the other men there, were able to wriggle in through the narrow gap.

  ‘Haud on, I’ll get in there.’ Johnny Favour, named so because he was always willing to lend a helping hand, appeared at Niall’s elbow.

  ‘Johnny! I thought you were having a night with Shirley Temple!’ Niall grinned, feeling a great sense of unaccountable relief at seeing Johnny’s familiar, friendly face. He had changed his creased tweeds for a rather shiny navy-blue three-piece suit with a watch chain hanging from the pocket of his waistcoat. But he still wore his battered cap as proudly as a king might wear a crown.

  ‘I left the wife at the La Scala,’ he explained cheerfully. ‘She’ll be safe there and I’ll be better use here.’ He squirmed out of his jacket and handed it to Niall. ‘Guard it wi’ your life, son, it’s my best. I’ll get in beside the bairn and try to hand him out.’ He disappeared in through the small opening, and a moment later his voice floated out. ‘I’ll need help, the lad canny move. I’ll start making the hole bigger from this side. We’ll shore it up with some bits of wood.’

  Fifteen minutes later Niall was able to crawl in beside Johnny. The child lay in a bed of suffocating dust. He was a ghostly little figure with his face and hair coated in white plaster but Johnny was saying things that made him laugh and one side of his face bulged with toffee from Johnny Favour’s trouser pocket. His legs were pinned under a lump of concrete but he showed no pain and Johnny whispered to Niall, ‘At a guess I’d say the poor wee bugger’s legs are crushed. I’d be a lot happier if he was greetin’. Then we’d know he was feeling something. C’mon, let’s get to work.’

  The job of freeing the child was painfully slow but eventually his torn and bleeding limbs were exposed. Both men knew the child would never walk again.

  ‘Sod it!’ Johnny drew a grimy hand across his face. ‘Sod the bloody lot of them!’

  A First Aid party had arrived. One peered through the opening. ‘Can you get him out to us? We’ve got an ambulance waiting.’

  ‘Pass us a blanket,’ Johnny said tonelessly. ‘He’s shivering a bit.’ They wrapped the child carefully and then, at Johnny’s insistence, tucked the shiny navy-blue jacket round the small shoulders. ‘You’re a wee man now, son,’ Johnny grinned down at the boy’s pale face. ‘And just to prove it . . .’ he whipped off his battered cap and placed it on the child’s head. ‘There you are. It’s maybe no’ much to look at but it’ll keep your brains warm.’

  The little boy peeped out from the peak that came over his eyebrows. ‘Ta, Johnny. I’ll wear it when I’m playin’ football – well, when I’m doing my goalie. Goalies always wear a cap.’

  ‘You do that, lad,’ Johnny said. ‘Get going now. You get out first, Niall. Take his shoulders.’

  In a short time Niall was placing the boy into the arms of the First Aid party who bore him quickly away. Niall felt dizzy with relief. At least one small life had survived the holocaust, but what of the others? The boy’s parents? Old Mr Maxwell and his little Thermos flask and his assurances that he would be safe under the kitchen table. He would still be alive if he had stayed there! And Ma Brodie! The dear, big-hearted warmth of such a wee body – dead – and for what? He remembered the teapot still clutched in her hand, a symbol of a life that had cared unstintingly for everyone she met. What of Iain Brodie? Coming back exhausted from the fires. Back to what? His wife, his memories, all gone forever in a senseless waste of everything that made life tick sweetly for the average home-loving man.

  The ground trembled suddenly and the tunnel from which Johnny was just emerging caved in. He made no sound as he was first smothered in dust and then crushed under the tons of rubble that came down on top of him. When it finally settled there was no whisper of life and the men knew that Johnny had performed his last favour.

  Niall’s mind was going numb with shock. He stared at the dull gleam of Johnny’s watch chain caught among the bricks, and everything swam in a watery mist. The rescue squad were telling him to get out of the danger area but he barely heard. He was thinking of the senseless waste of good lives. Just a short time ago some faceless nonentity had pressed a button and a bomb had dropped. The mind that guided the hand would forget quickly each press of the button, giving no concrete thought to the agony and grief invoked by just the flick of a finger.

  If Niall’s own thoughts had been more rational, if he hadn’t been so emotionally exhausted, he would doubtless have exercised more care in his movements. But his tiring feet were clumsy and he slipped on loose masonry. The beam that had saved the child dislodged from its precarious hold and came toppling down towards him. He tried to struggle upright but couldn’t and in a mesmerised trance he saw the whole thing in slow motion and lay helplessly, waiting for the blackness to engulf him. Hefty arms grabbed at him, dragging him away from the deadly hail of bricks and glass, but they weren’t quick enough, and the beam pinned his right arm into a bed of plaster, close to the spot where only minutes before a small boy had lain, too frozen with terror to do more than whimper like a lost puppy.

  Chapter Four

  Carl Zeitler, The pilot of one of twelve Heinkel bombers of Bomber Squadron IKG3, rocked gleefully in his seat. He squinted down through the Plexiglass panels of the gun cupola to the pink glow where the incendiaries and the rapid flashes of the H.E. bombs had split enormous craters in the ground and turned the little burgh of Clydebank into a raging inferno.

  The rest of the group were heading back to base; but Zeitler, in a gluttony of excitement, was taking the risk of making one more bombing run over the burning town. With skilled airmanship he steeply turned the lumbering bomber for a triumphant sweep above the murky clouds of smoke. The feeling of power was strong within him, and the rhythmic throb of the Junker’s Jumo 211 twin engines seemed to beat right into his heart, giving him a confident sense of security. He was an excellent pilot and, though he was barely twenty-five, already had an exemplary career behind him. He had brought his plane safely over Scapa Flow, Narvik and Dunkirk, with little more than some superficial damage to show for it. True, on one occasion his navigator had been peppered with flak and he had flown back to base with the dying man’s cries of agony filling the plane. Another time he had lost his rear gunner. No one had known he was dead till the ground crew had slid open the rear door and were bathed in the blood that gushed from the holes in the gunner’s face. Dunkirk! The remembrance of it always made Zeitler smile. All those stupid bastards strung out on the beaches like flies on a wall! Just asking to be picked off! He must have wiped out dozens of them. The French had been beaten and the Allied British had taken to their heels with their tails well tucked between their legs.

  Even as he turned to make the final sweep over Clydebank Zeitler felt echoes of the thrill Dunkirk had given him. His very bones shivered with delight and he threw back his wedge-shaped head in an arrogant smile. But anger mingled with his pleasure, anger at the British for still managing to remain on their toes despite the concentrated blitz. Europe had gone under like a drowning dog! All except the bulldog British. Despite the hammering they had taken those proud, clever bastards were still keeping their heads above water. For someone like Zeitler, tuned in to Hitler’s wavelengths like a well-programmed robot, the pill was a bitter one to swallow. Deep in his heart he admired the cool-headed British for the
ir fighting spirit and their admirable allegiance to the British Premier, Winston Churchill. There was a leader for you! A good soldier too, experienced in the fields of both war and politics. But Churchill was the enemy and Zeitler’s hot-headed fanatical devotion to his own leader, Adolf Hitler, soon blotted out his rare moment of level-headed thinking.

  He stared through the Plexiglass. The moon was beautiful, a cold bluish disc hanging in the sky. But Zeitler didn’t see it as an object to be admired. It was there in the sky to aid the success of these night attacks. This raid was strange, they had come quite some distance to reach this industrial complex in Scotland. The targets were the docks, shipyards and oil depots. Difficult. The target area was small over this point. The landscape showed a lot of dark patches that were fields. Spasmodic streaks of flak spattered up from the fringes of the town. It was all quite different from the big raids over London and Coventry. These night raids on England had caused terrible havoc, yet still she remained unconquered. The damned place had nearly been blown off the face of the earth but still Britain popped up smiling, each time with a new trick, a new defence, up her voluminous sleeve.

  The pilot’s thoughts made his pale blue eyes bulge with chagrin. Dark rings under his eyes made him look older than his twenty-five years, and normally the illusion was completed by premature balding, but with his head enveloped in his leather flying helmet the effect was lessened considerably. He removed a large, gloved hand from the control column to adjust his face mask. ‘Die Späten answers well, eh, Anton?’ Zeitler yelled through the intercom.

  Anton Büttger, bomb-aimer and commander of the aircraft, lay belly-down on a foam rubber pad in the nose of the gun cupola. The muscles in his jaw tightened and his keen blue eyes snapped like firecrackers. He guessed that the reason Zeitler was making the unnecessary fly-over was so that he could gloat. The destruction caused by the raid was pleasing him, exciting his cold, calculating emotions. Whenever bombs smashed into concrete, Zeitler showed his immense pleasure by sucking his breath and rocking his pelvis in a strangely sensual way. Though Anton couldn’t see Zeitler from his position, he now heard the familiar sucking sound. During a sortie Zeitler’s favoured expression was, ‘Don’t shit! Hit!’, a phrase Anton had heard through the intercom so many times in the last twenty minutes that the young commander couldn’t keep back his seething feelings of dislike for the pilot. Zeitler was so completely cast in the mould of so many hot-headed Nazis that he seemed to have no individuality, no character of his own. His personality was about as pleasing as a chunk of cold metal.

  ‘Go now, Zeitler,’ Anton ordered. ‘Make a mess of this one and your days in the air are numbered.’

  Zeitler hunched his shoulders, sucked his breath, and straightened the rudder. Soon the Heinkel was ripping through the cold night sky.

  Anton relaxed slightly. He tried not to think of the scene below but couldn’t keep the pictures out of his brain: the spilled blood, the cries of terror . . . the moments of death for the women and children. The hearts of the living would be filled with anger, frustration, compassion. He shuddered. It was easy to press the bomb-release button. Too easy. There was no challenge, no feeling that you had achieved something the way you did during air combat. He had joined the Luftwaffe because he loved flying. He had never imagined his career would one day turn sour on him. Up here in the vulnerable position of the gun cupola he always felt a certain measure of unease, often long after a raid was over. The bomb-aimer, and the gunners, perhaps, always had more on their conscience than the pilot. But it might be that not everyone felt as he did. He would rather be at the controls, but Zeitler was the better pilot and was arrogantly aware of the fact, using any opportunity to display his prowess and undermine Anton’s authority. In an odd kind of way Anton understood: he was younger than Zeitler, and had only recently taken over command of the plane. Zeitler had made umpteen bombing raids with the usual commander, Willi Schmitt, who had been grounded because of illness. Anton knew you had to fly with someone a long time to get in tune with him.

  ‘We have managed to make a pretty little bonfire!’ It was Zeitler again, his lips stretched in a gloating leer which the other couldn’t see but could feel. ‘Look! Down there, the flames leap high. An oil depot perhaps! Drop the rest of the high Es, Anton. Might as well put them to good use instead of wasting them in the sea!’

  Anton didn’t answer. His fingers touched the bomb button but he didn’t press it immediately. He knew he should. If he didn’t lighten the load now he might have to later . . . perhaps in a field, or an open stretch of water . . . or on a little country farm with all the people in bed, unsuspecting, unprepared . . .

  He felt very tired. The kind of dull, heavy tiredness that fills the veins with lead instead of blood. When this kind of exhaustion swept over him he remembered things he had thought forgotten: far-off days filled with happiness; small-boy days when his world was of green fields and golden corn; ambitions to be like his farmer father; the dreams of childhood. The grown-up Anton loved aeroplanes. When his father had spoken about cows or horses he had thought about aeroplanes, not so much about their operational functions as of their performance, engine power and attainable height. He thought about diving and banking, the sensation of zipping through lacy cloudbanks to the blue roof of the sky, and then looking down at the clouds drifting lazily over the world. His visions of flying hadn’t included war and the personal tragedies it brought, the raids over Berlin in the late summer of 1940.

  Late summer . . . his father out in the fields, working on after last light . . . his mother in the kitchen baking the bread for morning, the fragrant smell of it filling the room . . . his two little sisters, asleep upstairs. At least they’d had no time to know the terror his mother had known, buried in the rubble of the kitchen. She had lived for a short while after rescue, his father a few weeks, all because of one bomb, one stray British bomb that had missed the town and fallen on a little country farm . . .

  A sob caught in his throat and for a moment he didn’t care about the hail of flak that crackled in the air like sparks in the blackened chimney of a cosy farmhouse kitchen . . . ‘Take her up, Zeitler!’ he said in a slightly breathless voice. ‘The searchlights are on us!’

  ‘Did you drop the bombs?’

  ‘Damn the bombs! Get her up!’

  The searchlights were criss-crossing into the skies, violating the blue-black reaches. Zeitler throttled forward and the Heinkel responded by gaining height steadily. But still the beams were on them, clinging like leeches to a leg. Something inside the pilot’s head, a built-in instinct of impending danger, warned him that this time his conceit had tempted Providence too far. His knuckles tightened on the throttles and he knew an unaccustomed rush of apprehension.

  In his place in the gun turret, Ernst Foch, the wireless operator, watched the flak and the searchlights through the Plexiglass fairing. Their time over the target-area was up, and now they would be heading back to base. Every sense in him was alert but thoughts of his family back home in Germany strayed briefly into his head. It had been an eternity since he had last set eyes on his pretty wife, Helga, and his small sturdy son, Franz. He wondered why it was sometimes difficult to remember their faces. Little scraps of dear, familiar things came to mind but the memories did nothing to soothe him. He wondered how long the war would last. Like Zeitler he was devoted to his country. From the age of fourteen he had been a member of Hitler’s youth movement, proud to wear his brown uniform and to carry a dagger like a man. His young mind had been very receptive to the Nazi regime, and he had felt part of a glorious system. But the softening influences of a wife and child had dulled his enthusiasm for mass regimentation. He didn’t want his son to grow into a puppet with a master-mind controlling his life. It took more than a uniform and a dagger to make a man. There had to come a time when common sense and the need for individuality came to the fore. He wondered about Zeitler up front in the pilot’s seat. The man was a brilliant pilot but a mindless fool otherwise. If
the Führer ordered every Nazi to burn piss holes in the snow in the sign of the swastika then Zeitler would be the first to open his fly.

  Far below, the gun crews on a Polish destroyer, docked in John Brown’s for repairs, stood by their ack-ack guns and sent an almost constant barrage of shells tracing upwards to the aircraft caught in the beams of the probing searchlights. The smoke from the fires made visibility difficult though John Brown’s shipyard was comparatively free of serious blaze.

  Jon Jodl, the lower-rear gunner, lay on his belly near the ventral sliding door, in front of the machine-gun housing. ‘Why is Zeitler hanging about?’ he thought. ‘Get out of it!’ He watched the flak shells exploding about him. Down here it was cold but he felt a trickle of sweat running between his shoulder blades. One of those shells was going to pierce the Perspex door or the stressed skin and plating shell at any moment. A tremor passed through his body and somewhere inside his thin frame a tightly coiled knot of nerves made him feel sick.

  At 1000 metres, Zeitler sought cover in a massive cumulus cloud, maintaining climb on his blind-flying instrument panel, and the searchlights and the tracers disappeared from view. Jon reached out to the tin can that was jammed between two metal plates and retched miserably into it. He was neither a coward nor a hero and he didn’t give a damn about the Führer and his greedy dream to conquer the world. All his life Jon had been plagued by feelings of inadequacy even though he had shown great proficiency in his academic studies. His very appearance was stamped with a studious sagacity, from his thin clever face to his long, tapering musician’s fingers. But he had never been ‘one of the crowd’ and he had always walked alone, though sometimes this introvert nature of his made him deeply unhappy. He had seen the German Luftwaffe as an escape to freedom, a chance to prove to the world he was as much of a man as the next. His big domineering mother had not approved. ‘You were not made for such things, my Jon,’ she had told him firmly. ‘You must continue with your music, it is what you were born for.’ But at the first opportunity Jon had taken himself off to an air crew training school. With his natural intellect and manual dexterity he had eventually passed out as an air gunner. The mathematics of airborne shooting had come easily to him, as had the required mastery of gun-assembly and fault-finding and an understanding of the intricate equipment inside an aircraft. All the other boys had wanted to be top pilots but not Jon. What he had chosen to do took courage enough. However, with the coming of war he quickly realized he didn’t have the ‘guts’ to cope with the rigours it brought. His tightly strung nervous system simply couldn’t take the strain. After all, his world was in Hamburg with his gentle little henpecked papa and his large, overpowering mamma who was like an indestructible mountain. All his life she had pampered him and he knew now that he wasn’t strong enough to break away from her shadow. ‘You were not made for such things, my Jon!’ Her words echoed emptily inside his head. But it was too late now, there was no turning back. Jon was at breaking-point but tension was such a familiar thing in his life he wasn’t aware that his crawling nerves were stretching tighter with every turn of the airscrews.