The siren seemed to be a magic sound that froze the people of the magic kingdom. Night after night, sirens had sounded across the rest of Germany but never before in the Bavarian mountains. The war had arrived in the shape of a great air fleet, a dragon whose intention was to destroy the town below, not with fiery breath but with blast bombs and incendiaries.
As he stood in the hospital grounds, listening to the rise and fall of the electronic wail, Gabriel thought of Max. Max, who had planned to leap across his battered BMW motorbike if the sirens sounded and roar off to his Luftwaffe anti-aircraft batteries. Those havens of peace, full of soldiers grateful for a posting far from the hot war. He remembered those dugouts, domesticised with empty shell casings used as vases for wild flowers and each gun crew with its own adopted dog. Lazy days in the sun, cosy days in their shelters, listening to the rain.
Max had been a man Gabriel liked, but he had killed him without a thought. Not to save Hitler but because of what Max wanted – more war. More and more war. As the bombers approached, Gabriel envied him his belief in something. Max had been a patriotic German. Gabriel was beyond flags and drums, without fellowship in a lonely landscape.
Searchlights pierced the skies. People on the terrace behind him, looking up, shared the hope that the bombers were just passing over on their way to a bigger target. Gabriel heard the rising panic coming from inside, as the wards were cleared and patients were rushed to the shelters below. He would have helped but he could still barely stand. The terrace emptied and people called for him to come inside and take shelter but he ignored them. He was where he wanted to be. He was handing over to a god he no longer believed in. He had no idea what to do with the life he was in possession of, so if God wanted it back, so be it.
The first drone of an aircraft sounded, faded, came again and then was joined by others. The amphitheatre of the mountains batted the sound back and forth and then a searchlight skidded across the fuselage of a bomber before losing it again. The stick silhouette seemed impossibly high and Gabriel also now wondered if the fleet above was on its way elsewhere.
The searchlight found another aircraft and held it in a cone of illumination as a slow trickle of bombs began to fall from it, as if it was crapping on them, Gabriel thought. He knew the bombers’ tactics: first would come the high-explosive bomb to tear the facade off a building, and blow out the doors and window frames. Then would come thousands of incendiaries to fire the wooden roofs and expose the guts of the houses to heavier incendiaries. If enough buildings were torched, oxygen would be sucked into the sea of flames and, in the resulting fire storm, trees would be uprooted and people upended and all pulled into the furnace.
The air above thundered with hundreds of bombers and their bombs rushed to meet Gabriel with shrieks of joy. The carpet of grass beneath his feet began to bounce as if being beaten. The searchlights above ducked and weaved like crazy worms. The inexorable drone from the heavens was the sound of vengeance, and the bark from the guns ineffectual in response. The bombs became a rain and Gabriel found himself, without being aware of falling, full length on the grass. The sirens still wailed pointlessly, as if Obersalzberg itself was shrieking. Around him night became day, screams were ignored and paradise became hell. Gabriel waited for God’s decision.
The air raid left Obersalzberg a smoking ruin. The Nazis abandoned the town and Gabriel was left behind with the wounded. Within days of the pull-out, an American airborne battalion arrived, wearing eagles as their divisional flashes. Gabriel, with the last of his military vanity, changed from hospital pyjamas back into his SS uniform. It won him no friends among the conquerors. He was put into a POW cage – as the saying went, into the bag.
The Americans created a prisoner of war compound with wire and tents on the edge of the bomb-blasted town. From it, Gabriel could see the Berghof, ironically one of the few buildings left relatively unscathed by the air raid.
The paratroopers were wary of him. His SS flashes, ash-blond hair, blue eyes and duelling scar made him seem the essence of all they were fighting. He was given death stares and called ‘arrogant bastard’ if he strayed near them from his side of the wire. Then one day, he found himself looking at a woman who had wandered into his line of vision as he watched the horizon.
‘Hello Gabriel,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Cambridge.’
The Americans put him into one of their offices alone. When the woman came in, she was accompanied by a younger woman in a British Army uniform. Mrs Cambridge took a file from her.
‘This is my driver, Bangle. She’s a FANY, which is a regiment that just uses surnames, not ranks. I’m sure you understand.’
Gabriel did. The military was a tribe wherein all manner of peculiarities flourished.
Mrs Cambridge was still speaking. ‘I’ll introduce you properly later.’
The younger woman gave him a brief smile and left silently. Gabriel mused on a military force staffed by officers who introduced their drivers. Mrs Cambridge was looking at him, as if she could read his thoughts.
‘I’ve a lot of time for that young lady. She’s been there, like you, working behind enemy lines.’
Behind enemy lines, he thought. This was to be the reinventing of Gabriel Zobel. Not a man who willingly volunteered for the SS, not an idiot carried along by events, fused to a situation he’d wandered into without foresight. Now he was to be someone with a side, a cause, someone like Lorelei. A believer.
Mrs Cambridge opened the file and began to tell him about his life now. ‘You’re going to have a commission in the French Army, in one of the Foreign Legion regiments. It will be backdated to 1940. So you’re Free French, understand?’
Gabriel did and nodded.
‘The Frogs are short of heroes, so the commission comes with a Croix de Guerre, and by the way, we’re giving you a Military Cross.’
More tin. He seemed to hear her as if she was speaking to him over the radio. Her voice came and went, his head full of smoke.
‘We told you about the assault in the Ardennes,’ he interrupted her. ‘We warned you.’
‘Possibly, but that’s something that need concern you no longer, and it’s a matter you can’t share with your American hosts. Do you understand?’
Gabriel did.
‘Now,’ the woman continued, ‘we’ve located you, Herman Koch the milkman and Katarina Sporrier the courier…’
Gabriel interrupted. ‘I never met the courier; Lorelei kept her identity secret.’
Mrs Cambridge smiled softly. ‘Actually, you did once.’
Had he? He hadn’t known. He wondered where and when.
‘Which brings us to Lorelei Fischer. She hasn’t surfaced?’
Gabriel breathed deeply. ‘She didn’t make it. The bombing.’
He didn’t want her memory turned over and investigated and pulled apart.
Mrs Cambridge wrote something silently in her folder with a slim, gold pen. She finished and looked up. ‘We’ll get you out of here into somewhere more comfortable. My driver will stay in Bavaria in case you need anything while I get things moving. For a start, I’ll need your measurements for your new uniform. Do you know Gieves and Hawkes?’
He didn’t.
‘Tailors. Rather good at military togs. You’ll look quite dashing as a major in the Foreign Legion. Very Beau Geste.’
His father’s spirit would be happy. His son was in the Legion, as he’d been. He banished the thought; he knew he had to stop serving the ghost.
‘With a uniform and papers, you can move about freely. Oh, and you’re owed rather a lot of back pay by the French, and a resettlement grant by the British. You won’t be financially embarrassed.’
He was still thinking about serving in yet another army. ‘When will I have to report to this French regiment?’
It was all beginning again.
Mrs Cambridge smiled and shook her head. ‘The commission is to give you a history, not a future. Bide your time here and in a month or two you’ll be decommissioned. Gabriel,’ she said, using his first name to gain his eyes. ‘It’s over, you’ve survived. No more postings, no more duty. You’re home and dry. Free.’
The word was too big to take in, alone.
‘War,’ Mrs Cambridge said, ‘burns ambition faster than buildings. Millions of men will return home with no more desire left in them than to have a square of lawn to mow at the weekends. They will have come through the storm and will believe their patch of grass is enough, but they’ll be wrong. They’ll wake up one day and find the world is being run by lesser men.’
Gabriel, who had no idea what to do with this new word free, listened.
‘This last year, all we’ve heard from above is that victory requires one final push, but actually it’s peace that requires that final effort of the will. It will seem wrong, inappropriate, ungrateful to survive and yet want something more. But Gabriel, you will need to do something with yourself. Do you have any ideas, plans? A dream?’
The dream was dead. Plans were something you did over a map. And ideas hadn’t been encouraged so far in his life.
‘I thought I’d go back home, to Switzerland. To my hut.’
‘And do what?’
He shrugged. ‘Sheep,’ he said.
He sensed her inner shudder at the suggestion of sheep.
‘Forgive me, but I think that will be a mistake. You’ll sit down by a log fire in your Shangri-La, doze off and when you wake up you’ll be middle aged. Too late for anything and trapped. My driver, young Lavender, is the same as you.’
Lavender, Lorelei, Lorelei, Lavender. He bounced the names around his head and listened to them echoing away.
‘She’s suffered a bereavement and it’s knocked the stuffing out of her. All she wants to do is sit in her house in Lambeth and lick her wounds. But the girl is top notch and I can’t bear to see another good woman wasted. I’ve got her to agree to go to Canada. To pick up the threads of life again there. It’s a big country with new opportunities. I think you should consider Canada, Gabriel. If you still want snow and cabins I believe it has them, but it also has cities and the whole place is raring to go. Europe will be in mourning for a generation, a shell-shocked continent drowning in ghosts and shades.’
And unquiet spirits, he thought.