Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? (34 page)

As the Germans retreated, the men began a slow handclap and shouted and screamed every insult their basic German vocabulary could muster:

‘
Drecksau!
’ – Dirty pig!

‘
Hundesohn!
’ – Son of a dog!

‘
Arschloch… Hurensohn
…
Wichser
!’

One English insult rang out. ‘Bunch of cunts!’ It was Flapper. He beamed, his teeth glistening in the light of the flames. ‘Sorry, Jim, the old German is still a little rusty.’

‘I’m sure they get the drift, Flapper,’ said Horace. ‘I think they’ll understand.’

It was evident at first light that the Germans had already left. Freddie Rogers came back with the news. ‘I’ve seen where they camped last night and they’ve scarpered, no doubt about it. We’re on our own, lads.’

So what now? The prisoners simply marched along the road in the direction their German captors had been leading them the day before. The march was somewhat subdued and it unsettled Horace. It didn’t make sense. They were marching on a full stomach. Bacon and eggs, the first Horace had tasted in five years. The war was undoubtedly won – the swift exit of the German guards bore testimony to that. So why weren’t the men singing? Why weren’t they smiling? Why wasn’t Horace singing and smiling?

The crux of the matter was the great uncertainty. Were there still pockets of German resistance or aircraft in the area that wanted to take out the prisoners of the camps? Had their German captors joined forces with other regiments and units and were they simply waiting in ambush further up the road? And the Russians… What of the Russians? What were they
really like? Were they the barbarians and madmen the Germans had made them out to be? Horace and his fellow prisoners were about to find out.

Three hundred yards up the road a convoy of trucks rumbled towards the line of weary Allied prisoners. A large red star could clearly be seen on the bonnet of the first truck. The Russian officer spoke good English. Sergeant Major Harris took over proceedings and introduced himself with a handshake. The Russian officer was smiling, made a point of shaking a few hands and ushered his men towards the prisoners. Only now they were prisoners no more. A few of the Russian troops offered the Allies vodka from plain glass bottles and some of the men drank freely. Horace abstained. The atmosphere was all very pleasant, not what Horace had expected at all.

Sergeant Major Harris addressed the troops, informed them they were now officially repatriated and on their way to Prague in Czechoslovakia. He said they would be split up and put in different camps depending on whether they lived in the north or the south of England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales. From there they would be put on planes and taken to the RAF base nearest to home. It was over. They were free men.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

H
orace hugged his great friends, Jock and Flapper, Freddie Rogers and Chalky White. Some of the Russian troops joined in; it was all quite bizarre and too much to bear for the majority of the men who shed tears openly. Men who’d been incarcerated for more years than they cared to remember suddenly realised their days with each other were now numbered. Men who had been sick of the sight of each other fought back the tears and clung to their last remnants of friendship. For the first time they exchanged addresses and made plans for get-togethers and reunions. Freddie Rogers invited anyone who was listening to a weekend on the Isle of Man and promised the biggest party Douglas had ever seen. Horace pledged he’d be there.

Horace was wiping the tears from his face too. But they weren’t shed for his fellow sufferers; they were for his English Rose. He wondered where the hell she was and whether she was even alive.

It was a good six hours before the convoy of ten four-ton Russian lorries reached the patient men. They had waited so long for this moment. Time was no longer an issue. They’d smoked the last of their cigarettes as they sat in the early
evening sunshine, eaten the last of their chocolate and biscuits from the now almost exhausted Red Cross parcels. The men were assured that food, drink and cigarettes were in abundance in Prague. As they climbed aboard the lorries, more vodka was handed out and more handshakes were forthcoming from their Russian allies.

The date was 24 May 1944. Horace had been in captivity for four years and 364 days. Five years less one day.

It would take nearly four hours to reach Prague. Several of the men got steadily drunk. It seemed that despite the rationing of cigarettes, bread and even bullets and vodka were always in plentiful supply. A few Russian soldiers had joined the Allies in the back of the four-ton truck and one led the singing. They sang for hours. One slightly built Russian sang just about every folk song in the entire history of his country. The ex-POWs interspersed his songs with their own renditions of ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, ‘The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’, and Flapper sang a terrible croaky version of ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’. The Welshmen sang about the hills and the valleys and a lone Irishman lamented about lonely prison walls and a young girl calling to him. He sang about the fields far away and about how nothing matters when you are free. He sang like a nightingale. Horace listened to the lyrics; the song told of a nation downtrodden, of a man sent a million miles from the only place he had ever known, away from his family, away from his home for little reason. Horace was aware of a solemn young Russian soldier with tears rolling down his cheeks as the Irishman sang to a hushed and respectful audience. As he finished, the troops broke out into a spontaneous round of applause and begged him to sing again. He declined.

It was all too much for Horace. For him there was no celebration, no songs he could draw on that told of the
futility of war, of the wickedness of mankind and of humiliation, genocide and desperation. No one had penned those words; no one had composed such a song. No one sang the lyrics of a forbidden love in impossible circumstances; no words… no words.

As they approached the outer districts of Prague, half the truck wallowed in a drunken sleepy stupor while the rest seemed to struggle just to focus on the man sitting opposite. Everyone except the lone silent Russian. Horace couldn’t blame the men, couldn’t and wouldn’t deprive them of this moment, yet it seemed he was one of very few sober persons on board.

As Horace climbed from the back of the lorry the scene that unfolded before him was like something from a horror film. Every Russian soldier appeared to be drunk – even the driver that climbed from the cab clung to a bottle of vodka. As he bounced into a lamppost Horace wondered how they’d ever made it to Prague in one piece. The streets of Prague were littered with dead or dying bodies, dead German soldiers hung from lampposts burnt to a cinder, and the smell of petrol and burning flesh lingered in the still evening air. Horace watched the tattered, blackened corpse of an SS soldier swinging eerily from a protruding metal shop sign.

‘There are many Germans hiding in the city, comrade.’

It was the English-speaking Russian officer who had liberated them and who had conversed with Sergeant Major Harris.

‘I will not stop them. They must have their revenge. The Germans have slaughtered my countrymen by the million.’

A group of Russian soldiers had found a young German girl cowering in a coal bunker underneath an ironmonger’s shop. The name on the shop had been a giveaway: Herbert Rosch. Herbert was her father, German by birth, his wife Ingrid a native
of Prague, a proud Czech. Herbert detested the Nazi regime as much as his wife did. They had fallen in love and married in 1928. Both had been burned alive from a lamppost an hour earlier as their only daughter had watched in horror from a small slit window below ground. She’d covered herself in coal trying to escape the mob but a young Russian soldier had spotted a piece of exposed flesh. Her face was blackened from the dust. She was no older than 16. The Russians threw her to her knees.

‘What does she know?’ cried Horace. ‘She was a child when the war started. Please, make them stop!’

The Russian officer turned away as one of his sergeants began unbuttoning his trousers. His comrades cheered as he waved his large erection in front of the girl’s face, his comrades ripped and clawed at the girl’s clothes until she was naked. She was unceremoniously thrown across the sidecar of a motorcycle combination and two of the men forced her legs apart. As the sergeant moved in behind the screaming girl and inserted his fingers roughly into her vagina, Horace lunged towards her in a vain effort to offer some protection. From nowhere the all too familiar feeling of a rifle butt connected with his temple and he was aware of the ground rushing towards him at a speed difficult to comprehend.

When he came round an hour later, Flapper relayed the story. The sickening spectacle had sobered him up rapidly. At least 20 Russians had vented their sexual frustration and fury on the poor girl as they’d taken turns to rape her. A Russian general had eventually put her out of her misery with a bullet through the back of the skull. The onlooking crowd had cheered the execution.

‘They’re as bad as the Germans, Jim. You didn’t see the worst of it.’

Tears streaked Garwood’s face. The muck and grime from the march ran in tiny rivers down the big man’s face.

‘At first I thought it was just the German girls they were raping. In a strange way I could understand that. But it didn’t make any difference Jim. Anything went. They raped the Germans and the Czechs, the Poles and the Slavs – and their commanders just looked on. Young and old, it didn’t matter, Jim. They raped them on the pavements and in the doorways of shops and any poor bitch even suspected of having a pint of German blood in her was executed right there on the spot when she’d served her purpose.’

Garwood was crying now, sobbing like a baby.

‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Jim. It shouldn’t have ended this way.’

Horace held him as his tears flowed too.

They arrived at the holding camp on the outskirts of Prague shortly after midnight. Despite fears that they’d be split up, Horace and Garwood, Jock Strain, Dave Crump and Freddie Rogers had managed to stay together. They’d be separated in a few days, they were told, so make the most of it. A Russian soldier was assigned to their billet and slept in their dormitory. It was the young man who had sat in tears on the truck that had brought them to Prague. Horace studied him as he sat on a bunk and stared into space. His eyes were sunken and hollow; they told of horror and suffering. He carried the worries of the world on his shoulders.

Horace approached him. ‘You speak English, my friend.’ It was a statement, not a question.

The Russian nodded. ‘How did you know?’

Horace placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘The song of the Irishman on the truck, it moved you to tears.’

The Russian stood. ‘It did, comrade, it did. He sang of the free birds singing. It was beautiful… he sang like the bird in the song.’

Tears welled up in his eyes once more.

‘And why does that sadden you so much?’

The Russian sighed as he paced the wooden floor. ‘I have been to a place where the birds do not sing. I have been to a place called hell.’

‘What is your name, soldier?

The young Russian looked up. ‘Ivan… my name is Ivan.’

Things resembled normality the next morning. The Russians were sober, most nursing hangovers, and many Allied men complained about the worst headaches they could ever remember. Flapper Garwood had spent his hours of slumber in a nightmare hell reliving the events from the night before. Horace had managed to snatch just a few hours’ sleep, his dreams drifting between the heavenly vision of Rose and the all too real picture of a battered, bruised and murdered teenage girl. How on earth could the exact same female form appear so different, arouse such different emotions in a man?

Then he heard it: a roll call. Would you believe it? A bloody roll call, Horace thought to himself as he stood on parade and shouted his name, regiment, rank and number to the English-speaking Russian corporal. It was to be expected, he supposed. The Russians would need to split the men into regiments or even counties in order to arrange the required number of planes to Britain.

After a huge breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages and toast they were told they were free to roam the city but warned there might still be pockets of German resistance holed up in the suburbs. They were given a generous amount of money and told to be back in the camp by nightfall. Ivan accompanied them.

The streets were strangely quiet and there was little to do. They managed to find a few cafés with a supply of overpriced
Czech beer and a few of the men managed to seek out the numerous Czech prostitutes still doing the rounds.

Horace sat in café Milena with Freddie, Ivan, Jock, Ernie and Flapper, and nursed a small glass of beer for three hours. Jock and Freddie had upped the pace a little and Flapper was drinking like there was no tomorrow, trying to block out the memories from the night before. Ivan stuck to coffee. It was just after noon when they heard the commotion from outside. A Czech burst into the café; the barmaid relayed the gist of the conversation in broken English. Two German SS men had commandeered a Russian T34 tank. It would be their swansong, their last, suicide mission, and they were determined to kill as many Allied soldiers and destroy as much of Prague’s historic architecture as possible as they blasted at anything and everything with the 85mm guns.

Russian tanks had surrounded the SS men and blocked off their avenue of retreat, but the Germans were putting up a good fight. The tank rumbled and roared towards café Milena. Horace and his friends took a step back as a frenzied mob seemed to crawl over the tank like ants on a dead fly. Incredibly, inexplicably the tank seemed to slow down.

‘He’s out of fuel,’ Freddie Rogers offered by way of an explanation.

Sure enough, as Rogers uttered the words the tank seemed to splutter, a plume of black smoke puffed from the rear exhaust and the tank came to a halt 20 yards from the doorway of the café. The friends watched as the crowd battered and prised and jemmied at the turret of the tank, using anything and everything that would let them get to the enemy inside. Horace could only imagine the fear the SS men inside the tank would be feeling.