Field Gray (37 page)

GERMANY, 1954

T
o the west there was the town; to the east there were just green open fields; and in the middle was the railway line. The station, immediately south of the refugee camp, was—like every other building in Friedland—unremarkable. It was made of red bricks and had two red roofs—three if you counted the wizard’s-hat roof on top of the square corner tower that was the stationmaster’s house. A neat little flower garden was laid out by the front door of the house, and at the two upper-floor arched windows a neat set of flowery curtains hung. There was also a clock, a notice board with a timetable, and a bus stop. Everything was neat and orderly and just as sleepy as it should have been. Except today. Today was different. The capital of West Germany might have been the unlikely town of Bonn, but today—and no less unlikely than that—all German eyes were focused on Friedland in Lower Saxony. For today saw the homecoming of one thousand German prisoners of war from Soviet captivity, aboard a train that had left its remote destination more than twenty-four hours earlier.

The late-evening mood was one of high expectation, even celebration. A brass band was assembled in front of the station, and it was already playing a selection of patriotic music that was at the same time politically acceptable to the ears of the British, whose zone of occupation this was. Of the train there was as yet no sign, but that autumn evening several hundred people were assembled on the platform and around the station to greet the returnees. You would have thought we were expecting to see West Germany’s FIFA World Cup team arriving home, victorious, from the “miracle of Bern” and not a train carrying SS and Wehrmacht, none of whom had expected ever to be released from Russia and who were all of them entirely ignorant of the fact that Germany had won the World Cup or even that Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne, to whom they owed their freedom, was now chancellor of another German republic—this time the Federal Republic of Germany. But some local men, keen to remind the returnees of the chancellor’s crucial role in their delivery from captivity, were carrying a sign that read “We Thank You, Doctor Adenauer.” I wouldn’t have argued with that, although it sometimes seemed to me that the Herr Doktor was intent on becoming another uncrowned king of Germany.

Other signs were much more personal, even pathetic. Between ten and twenty men and women were carrying signs on which were written details of a missing loved one, and of these, that of an old bespectacled lady who reminded me of my own late mother, seemed typical:

I wondered how much she knew about what had happened at Kursk—that this place had been the scene of the largest and bloodiest tank battle in history and had probably marked the beginning of the end for the German army.

Others, perhaps less optimistic, were holding little candles or what looked like miners’ lamps, which I took to be memorials for those who weren’t ever coming back.

On the actual platform of the station were those, like myself, Grottsch, Vigée, and Wenger, whose role was more official. VdH and others veterans’ organizations, policemen, churchmen, Red Cross volunteers, British army soldiers, and a large contingent of nurses, several of whom caught my bored eye. All were facing south, down the track toward Reckershausen and beyond, to the DDR.

“Now, now,” said Vigée, noticing my interest in the nurses. “You’re almost a married man.”

“There’s something about nurses that always attracts me. I used to think it was the uniform, but now I don’t know. Maybe it’s just sympathy for anyone who has to do someone else’s dirty work.”

“Is it so dirty? To help someone who needs it?”

I glanced at the German policeman whom Vigée had brought along, so that if I did identify de Boudel, he might be arrested immediately and then extradited to France.

“Forget it,” I growled. “I just never had to blow the whistle on anyone before, that’s all. I guess there’s something about it I don’t like. Who knows?” I started on a new stick of gum. “If I see this fellow, what do you want me to do, anyway? Kiss him on the cheek?”

“Just point him out to us,” Vigée said patiently. “The police inspector will do the rest.”

“Why so squeamish, Gunther?” asked Grottsch. “I thought you used to be a policeman.”

“I was a cop, it’s true,” I said. “Several thousand midnights ago. But it was one thing arresting some old lag. It’s something else when it’s an old comrade.”

“A nice distinction,” said the Frenchman. “But hardly correct. It’s not much of an old comrade who sells his soul to the other side.”

There was a loud cheer along the platform as, in the distance, we heard the whistle of an approaching steam locomotive.

Vigée made a fist and pumped his biceps excitedly.

“Who gave you this tip, anyway?” I asked. “That de Boudel would be on this train?”

“The English Secret Service.”

“And how did they find out?”

The train was now in sight, a shiny black locomotive wreathed in gray smoke and white steam, as if a kitchen door in hell had been flung open. It was hauling not cattle wagons, as would have been more typical of a Russian POW train, but passenger carriages; and it was immediately plain to me that upon entering Germany, the prisoners had been transferred onto a German train. Men were already leaning out of open windows, waving to the people running alongside the track or catching bunches of flowers thrown up into their arms.

The train whistled again and halted in the station, and men in patched and threadbare uniforms stretched out to touch those on the platform amid shouts and cheers. The Russians had not provided names of the POWS on the train, and before anyone was allowed to get off they had to wait patiently while officials from the Red Cross entered each carriage and collected a list of names for the benefit of the police, the commander of the refugee camp, and the VdH. Only when, after almost half an hour, this task was completed were the men finally allowed to step down from the train. A trumpet sounded, and for a moment it seemed as though the hour had truly arrived when those who had been in their graves were truly resurrected. And when they came forth from the train in their battered field gray they did indeed resemble recently interred corpses—so thin were their bodies, so gap-toothed were their smiles, so white their hair, and so old their weather-beaten faces. Some were filthy and shoeless. Others appeared stunned to be in a place that was not filled with cruelty or surrounded with barbed wire and empty steppe. Quite a few had to be carried from the train on stretchers. A great stink of unwashed bodies filled the clean air of Friedland, but no one seemed to mind. Everyone was smiling. Even a few of the POWs were, but mostly they were crying like stolen children now returned to their aged parents after many years in a dark forest.

D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille could not have directed a more moving crowd scene than that which was taking place on a railway platform at a small town in Germany. Even Vigée appeared moved to the verge of tears. Meanwhile, the brass band started to play the “Deutschlandlied”—a few of the crazier-looking prisoners started to sing the forbidden words—and, across the fields, a couple of kilometers to the north in Gros Schneen, the local church bells rang out.

I heard one of the POWs tell someone on the platform that it was only the day before that they’d learned they were to be released.

“These men,” said Vigée. “They look like they’re back from hell.”

“No,” I told him. “In hell they tell you what’s happening to you.”

I had my eyes peeled, but I knew there was little real chance of seeing de Boudel in the crowds of people at the station. Vigée knew this, too. He was expecting us to have better luck when the POWs paraded back at the camp the next morning; it seemed that I was going to have to repeat my Le Vernet experience and inspect the men at close quarters. I was not looking forward to this and was hoping against hope that we might get lucky and spy de Boudel at the station—that I might see him before one of my old comrades saw me. To this improbable end, I went into the station and climbed the stairs to lean out of an upper-floor window in order to gain a better view of this mass of jubilant German soldiery. Vigée followed, then Grottsch, Wenger, and the detective.

I had not seen so many uniforms since the labor camp at Johannesgeorgenstadt. They swept across the platform like a sea of gray. Wearing his chain of office and dispensing schnapps from a double-sized earthenware bottle, the mayor of Friedland moved among the returnees like some Hamelin burgomaster surrounded by a plague of rats and mice. I could hear him shouting, “Your health!” and “To your freedom!” and “Welcome home!” at the top of his voice. Next to him a large Wehrmacht sergeant stood enfolding an old woman in his arms; both were weeping uncontrollably. His wife? His mother? It was hard to tell, the sergeant looked so old himself. They all did. It was hard to believe that these old men had once been the proud storm troopers who had carried Hitler’s mad Operation Barbarossa into Russia.

A woman standing next to me was throwing carnations onto the gray heads below. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day our boys finally came home. Germany’s heart beats in Friedland. They’re back. Back from the godless world of Bolshevism.”

I nodded politely but kept my eyes on the faces in the crowd below the window.

“This is chaos,” said the detective, whose name was Moeller. “How the hell are we supposed to find anyone in this? The next time we have prisoners arriving here, they’d do better to bring them on buses from the border station at Herleshausen. That way we might at least establish some kind of order. You’d think this was Italy, not Germany.”

“Let them have their chaos,” I said. “For fourteen years these men have endured discipline and order. They’ve had a belly full of it. So let them enjoy a moment of disorder. It might help to make them feel like human beings again.”

Flowers, fruit, candies, cigarettes, schnapps, hot coffee, hugs and kisses—every sign of affection was showered on these men. I hadn’t seen so much joy on the faces of so many Germans since June 1940. And two things were clear to me: that only the Federal Republic could claim to be the legitimate representative of the German nation; and that no one regarded any of these men—whatever crimes and atrocities they might have committed in Russia and the Ukraine—as anything other than heroes.

But equally clear was the reality of the problem now facing me. For among the lined, grinning faces of the men underneath my gaze was one I recognized from Johannesgeorgenstadt. A Berliner named Walter Bingel whom I had befriended on the train from the MVD prison near Stalingrad. The same Bingel who had seen me leaving the camp in a ZIM saloon, accompanied by two German communists from K-5, and who assumed that I’d made a deal with them to save my skin. And if Bingel was on the train, then quite probably there were others from Johannesgeorgenstadt who, thanks to him, would have the same memory of me. It was beginning to look as if Inspector Moeller might be obliged to arrest me, too.

Vigée’s keen eyes saw mine lingering nervously on Bingel’s face. “Recognize anyone?” he asked.

“Not so far,” I lied. “But to be honest, these men seem older than their years. I’m not sure I’d recognize my own brother down there. If I had a brother.”

“Well, that’s good for us, isn’t it?” said the Frenchman. “A man who has spent the last six or seven years working for the MVD ought to stick out from the rest of these uncles. After all, de Boudel is merely posing as a POW. He hasn’t been in a labor camp, like them.”

I nodded. The Frenchman had a point.

“Can we get a copy of that list of names made by the Red Cross?” I asked.

Vigée nodded at Moeller, who went away to fetch one. “All the same,” he said, “I don’t think he’ll be using his real name, do you?”

“No, of course not. But one has to start somewhere. Most police work starts with a list of something or other, even if it’s a list of what you don’t know. Sometimes that’s as important as what you do know. Really, detective work is simple, it’s just not very easy.”

“Don’t sweat it,” said Vigée. “We always knew that finding de Boudel at the station would be a long shot. Reveille at the refugee camp tomorrow morning. That’s where I’m pinning my hopes.”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” I said.

We watched Moeller struggling through the crowd of men to one of the Red Cross officials. He said something, and the official nodded back.

“Where did you find him?” I asked.

“Göttingen,” said Vigée. “Why?” He lit a cigarette and flicked his match onto the heads of the men below, as if he wished to express his contempt for them. “Do you think he’s not up to this?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Maybe he’s not the detective you were, Gunther.” Vigée blew out his cheeks and sighed. “All he has to do is arrest the man you identify. There’s not much to being that kind of a cop,
n’est-ce pas?
” he sneered. “Perhaps you should give him some tips. Tell him your forensic secrets.”

“They’re quite simple, too,” I said. “I used to get up in the morning and go to bed at night. And in between I’d try to keep myself busy and out of mischief.”

“Really? Is that all you have to offer? After how many years of being a detective?”

“Any fool can solve a crime, Frenchman. It’s proving it that wears you out.”

Moeller started back through the crowd to the station door but found himself making little or no progress. He looked up and, seeing Vigée and then me, threw his hands up and grinned helplessly.

I grinned back and nodded affably, as if recognizing his difficulty. But all the time I was looking at him I was trying to gauge what kind of policeman I was going to be dealing with when, the following morning, Walter Bingel identified me as a collaborator and traitor.