After lunch and the afternoon Appell – the camp roll call – Watson took a brisk turn around the main compound with Colonel Isbell, the Senior British Officer at the camp. The tall, elegant Isbell had been incarcerated for two years, but managed to keep himself whip-smart. His hair was neat and oiled, the uniform beautifully pressed and he was shod with the glossiest boots in the camp. Having a pair of dedicated orderlies at his beck and call helped in such matters, of course.
The compound echoed to the sound of hammers striking nails. A stage was under construction for the scratch orchestra that was being assembled from the inmates. It would double as an open-air theatre for the reviews that were proving so popular that no single hut could contain the ever-growing audience. The Krefeld Players had been forced to put on matinées of Two Merry Monarchs to meet the demand. At the moment the weather was benign, but winter could sweep back in just as rapidly as it had departed, scotching the idea of outdoor shows until spring. Still, the labour was a reward in itself for the prisoners, many of whom welcomed the physical exercise of sawing and hammering. Watson often wondered about the wisdom of not requiring officers to work; sometimes, enforced idleness could be as much a punishment as forced labour.
‘How is the patient?’ Isbell asked.
‘Hanson? He’ll live,’ said Watson of the new arrival who had tried to slash his own throat. ‘Most of the blood came from his ear. Krebs managed to get to him before he sliced through anything major.’
‘Good. You know he played rugby for England?’
‘He’s that Hanson? Scrum half for Cornwall? Played in the Olympics?’ Where, Watson didn’t bother adding, Australasia – basically the Australian rugby team – had slaughtered them 3–32.
Isbell nodded. ‘Yes. Graduate of Camborne School of Mines. He was captured making a recce into no man’s land for the most effective placement of explosives. Affected him quite badly, being captured. The Senior British Officer at Friedberg, his last camp, requested a transfer here as he felt the regime more conducive to his recovery.’
They had reached the innermost of the camp’s twin perimeter fences. Beyond them was a ploughed field, the soil stiff and cloddy and varnished with the evidence of the morning’s frost, its furrows awaiting the next crop of mangels. Further on was a copse, its skeletal trees tantalizingly close, the spindly branches seeming to beckon as they waved in the lusty breeze coming, fortunately, from the south. ‘Seems that at Friedberg he tried to walk into the kill strip,’ Isbell said, nodding at bare earth between the two fences. ‘Lucky he wasn’t shot.’
‘Perhaps he wanted to be shot,’ said Watson.
‘Only been in a few months, y’know. Wire fever usually takes longer to take hold,’ said Isbell. ‘Before men do anything quite so reckless.’
‘There is a particularly black sort of wire fever,’ said Watson. ‘I’ve seen men try to scale those fences in full view of the guards. And I’ve seen guards oblige them by shooting them in the back.’
‘Good Lord. In cold blood?’
Watson nodded.
‘Where was this?’
‘Karlsruhe camp.’
‘You complained?’
‘In writing. To the commandant and the Red Cross. Precious little good it did me.’
‘Well, whatever you call the fever, I think Hanson has it bad. The thing is, I knew his brother at school. I was wondering if you could keep an eye on him for me? Just until we can get him to snap out of it. Find him something useful to do?’
‘Such as?’
‘The Escape Committee. Always needs extra hands.’
The Escape Committee’s role was to dream up ever more elaborate ways to go over, under or through the wire. In truth, few succeeded. Hauptmann Halbricht might be a reasonable, some would say soft, commandant – there were far tougher camps in the system – but he was no fool. He also had the knack of swooping down on any plotters at the last possible moment, meaning the Escape Committee had to start all over again when its precious stock of forged documents, German marks, maps and railway timetables were confiscated. However, Watson was aware that the thought of escape, the minutiae of its planning and execution, kept many a man sane, even though the schemes might come to naught. And in some camps, the planning bore fruit – he had heard of men who escaped nine, ten, twelve times. And the exploits of those who made a ‘home run’ – including Lieutenant-Colonel Crofton Bury Vandeleur, the first man to ‘nip out’ from Krefeld, as he put it – became the stuff of legend around the camps.
‘Of course I will,’ agreed Watson. There was the flat report of a distant shotgun and a whirl of crows took to the air, looking like moving ink splashes against the pale blue sky. ‘It will give him a sense of purpose. Of continuing the fight.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘And once he is discharged from the infirmary, Hanson can come into my billet. There’s a spare bunk.’
‘Good man,’ said Isbell. ‘I appreciate it. Strange how some can’t take it, eh? Even a fit chap like Hanson.’
Watson turned his back on the outside world as the nervous crows settled on the branches once more, flexing their wings in anticipation of further flight. ‘Incarceration? The fact is, Colonel, none of us expected it. Death, yes. Maimed, gassed, also very likely. But this –’ he swept an arm across the expanse of the camp – ‘to be locked up as prisoners in Germany? They feel a failure, diminished as men.’
Isbell grunted as if he was talking rot, but Watson knew he understood. The man’s meticulous grooming and adherence to a strict daily routine was a way of keeping such thoughts at bay. Watson had his patients, and therefore a role to play. Everybody else had only time to kill, and it lay heavy with many of them. There were only so many football matches and concerts with pretty adjutants in frocks one could stomach.
‘And how are you bearing up?’ Isbell asked.
‘Me?’ Watson asked.
‘Burned, weren’t you? In one of those bloody useless tanks, I hear.’ The colonel was well informed. Isbell had been taken prisoner when the tank was still a glimmer in Churchill’s imagination. But the wire fences were porous, fresh prisoners updated inmates, and news in letters sometimes slipped by even the German censors. And then there was the camp ‘Marconi’, the gossip machine that spread information – some of it even true – about every inmate and, as if by magic, sometimes let news leap from one camp to another.
‘I was well cared for,’ Watson said, which was the truth. He had seen the propaganda posters of German nurses pouring water onto the ground in front of thirst-racked and wounded British soldiers, but his experience suggested it was just that: propaganda. When Watson had been blown out of the tank at Flers, he had been picked up by a German patrol in no man’s land and delivered to a field hospital where German nurses had dressed his burns and cared for him to the best of their ability. ‘There’s scarring, of course, but not too bad. And it’s on my back, so I don’t have to look at it. It’s healed well, for a man of my age.’
‘Good.’ Isbell pulled down his jacket and ran a hand down the buttons, although it was hardly creased. ‘There’s something you should know.’
‘About Hanson?’
Isbell took the major’s arm and guided him away from the small clump of men who had gathered at the fence to smoke and exchange news from their letters.
‘Halbricht had me into his office yesterday,’ said Isbell. ‘I expected the normal housekeeping, but he told me an exchange is being negotiated, whereby some prisoners will be released to spend the rest of the war in neutral Holland, in or around Scheveningen. They will play no further part in combat, but . . . well, it’s freedom, of a kind.’
‘And you are telling me this because . . . ?’
‘Halbricht says the first tranche will be any prisoners over the age of forty-eight. Which means you and Digby Rawlinson. Plus any medical men are also to be released, which means you’ve hit two sixes there, old boy. Time to leave the crease. It’ll take a few weeks to finish the formalities, apparently, but your name has gone forward, Major Watson. To all intents and purposes, you are going home.’