He tried to turn round but the steel jabbed into his neck. ‘I’ll blow your head off if you try anything stupid.’
‘You can’t have got a gun – even if you had you wouldn’t dare use it,’ the Canadian protested, the uncertainty flooding through.
‘You’re going to gamble your life on it?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Your rifle laid on the ground, very slowly.’
‘Or else?’
‘Or else you die, my friend.’
Shit, why did it have to be him? The war nearly over, soon back to the farm outside Calgary with lots of silly stories to impress the girls about how he personally beat Hitler and won the war. And there would be no damn medals for getting his balls blown off in this God-forsaken part of Britain, a million miles from the front. Slowly, very slowly, he bent down and placed his rifle on the ground.
‘Wise move, soldier.’
The guard didn’t even have time to stand erect. No sooner was his hand away from the trigger than he was hit from behind with the heavy metal bracket that had been wrenched from a camp bed and held against his neck. It wasn’t a very good imitation gun, but now it didn’t matter. They had a real one, and a guard’s uniform. All the tools they hoped they would need …
The brandy was flowing, and Churchill was once again in excellent humour. The women had withdrawn to another room, leaving the men to their own devices. In the absence of the ladies it had been confirmed that prices in the West End had indeed soared, and the only thing the whores were offering free was abuse.
‘It was the same during the last war,’ Muirhead confirmed, to the amusement of his guests. ‘Nothing changes.’
‘My dear sir, but it does,’ Churchill interjected forcefully, wagging his cigar across the table and scattering ash everywhere. ‘How well I remember, when I had returned from the Boer War, I received several very encouraging propositions from such ladies who made it abundantly clear that there would be no charge. I can only ascribe the present unhappy bout of inflation in the West End to a sad decline in values.’ He chortled along with the rest, enjoying his own joke.
‘That was rather special,’ Muirhead chided. ‘You had just escaped from a Boer prison camp and been chased across half of Africa by their army.’
This was why the Old Man enjoyed Muirhead’s dinners; the host always made a point of giving him plenty of scope for relating some of his favourite stories.
‘Why bother to escape, Winston? What drove you to it?’ enquired one of the guests.
And with scarcely time for a perfunctory cough of modesty, he was off. ‘The Boer’ – he pronounced it ‘Booa’, as if to emphasize the race’s reputation for thick-skinned stubbornness – ‘the Boer has so little imagination. A diet of maize and dried beef or, if we were fortunate, dried beef and maize – it was impossible! I would simply have faded away. So you see, my escape was not a matter of bravery. I had no choice in the matter. My stomach insisted.’ He smiled, using his fingers to pop a little cube of cheese into his mouth which he chewed with relish.
‘“Winston Churchilclass="underline" Dead or Alive”,’ Sir William offered.
‘If only the British electorate had wanted me as passionately as the Boers!’
While the other guests chuckled, Churchill paused to scratch his crotch with a total lack of self-consciousness. His table manners were atrocious. He had long ago ceased to bother about such trivial things, and when Clemmie had forcefully reprimanded him he had justified his behaviour as the self-indulgence of an old man. Anyway, he countered, it hadn’t caused any slackening in the flood of dinner invitations.
‘Seriously, Winston. If you had been captured you most certainly would have been shot, if only to discourage others. Why risk your life? Was it really that important?’
‘I never realized how important until I returned home, where I found that my escape had been the focus of the newspapers’ attention for weeks. Unwittingly I had become a hero, a symbol of national resistance, and my escape had succeeded in bolstering the determination of the entire country to continue with the war until victory. It is a matter of morale, and you cannot fight a war without morale. As one editor kindly wrote, “One man, by his actions and example, can so inspire a nation that he will light a fire across a whole continent”.’
There was an appreciative silence around the room and a look of sheer wickedness crept into the Old Man’s eye. ‘And, as I discovered, you can get a good discount into the bargain!’
The camp was in darkness. There were no lights along the perimeter fence and the only illumination came from within the old football changing rooms, which now served as a guard hut, and from the bright moon. But it was a blustery night with clouds scudding across the sky. Had any of the guards bothered to look they would have found shadowy figures flitting between the tents, playing hide-and-seek in the sporadic moonlight, but most of the Canadians were relaxing in the guard hut. There were just four guards on the main gate into the compound, and two patrolling the walkway between the double perimeter fence. Guard duty was a pain; there had never been any trouble and no prisoner in his right mind would want to escape back to the hell pit they’d just left in Europe. They were all, prisoners and guards alike, marking time till the fighting was over.
So when, from inside the shadowy compound, the pair patrolling the perimeter walkway saw one of their number beckoning to them, no suspicion was aroused. He had probably found two prisoners screwing or some other bit of fun to enliven the endless night hours of cold and boredom. They let themselves into the compound through a side gate in the wire; they didn’t even think twice that the gateway was shielded from the main guard house across the compound by the prisoners’ tents. After all, they hadn’t put the tents there. Even after they darted between two of the tents and came face to face with their fellow guard pointing his Lee Enfield straight at them, they were still not concerned. It was only when they heard the familiar click of a round being forced into the chamber that they realized all was not well, and not until the moon had squeezed briefly between the clouds and fallen across Hencke’s lean and determined face did they realize that this was not, after all, going to be their night.
‘But you’re …’ one gasped in sudden understanding. It came too late. They had already raised their hands and were being relieved of their weapons.
‘I … don’t want to die,’ the youngest guard blubbed as his wrists were tied behind him with a length of guy rope.
‘Keep your miserable mouth shut and you won’t have to,’ a prisoner responded. The young guard was almost relieved when he felt the gag pushed firmly between his teeth.
The guards’ legs were pinioned and they were bundled into the corner of one of the tents. It was only when the prisoners were leaving that one of them remembered. ‘You’re the miserable little bastard who held my head down on the table the other day, aren’t you?’ The youngster’s eyes, all that could be seen above the gag, showed large and white. He was petrified. ‘I’ll never forget that. You were laughing your head off.’ The prisoner stiffened and swung back a leg as if to smash the Canadian’s testicles. None of the other prisoners did or said anything to stop him; the guard deserved everything he got. But as the German looked at the whimpering body on the ground in front of him, he seemed to change his mind. He knew what it was like to be defenceless and scared. He spat in disgust and turned on his heel. Escape would be revenge enough.
A few minutes later a group of men moved towards the guard house, eight prisoners being marched sullenly along with three uniformed guards, rifles at the ready, escorting them from the rear.
‘Open the gate!’ one of the guards shouted. ‘Got a bunch of troublemakers who need a little gentle reminding of who’s in charge of this friggin’ camp.’