‘I suppose … I suppose I, too, might have killed. If necessary. To gain my own escape.’

‘Not a defenceless old widow, you wouldn’t. That’s sheer bloody murder.’

‘Murder? Self-defence? A casualty of war? Who knows, Willie, what each of us is capable of.’ He shrugged. ‘It will at least give us an excuse for hanging on to that division of troops.’

‘An excuse?’

‘A bargaining chip, perhaps. I’ll not hand them over until I can be sure I can send them to Berlin.’

‘I … don’t understand. You’re using the troops against the Americans. I thought they were supposed to be used against the POWs.’

‘We must make the appropriate noises over the escaped Germans, Willie, but they are as nothing compared with the opportunity of reaching Berlin. I would willingly set free a thousand Germans and, yes, sacrifice a thousand innocent widows if it would give us Berlin.’

‘But there is no connection …’

The Old Man sat silently, gazing through the window.

‘I fail to understand, damned if I do.’ The tone was angry, hurt. ‘All the way through you seem to have had’ – he picked the word with care – ‘almost a sympathy with these escapees. Almost as if you identified with them. Excused them.’ Even murder, he thought, but did not say so.

‘I was once on the run myself, remember?’

‘Even so. This one’s a murdering war-trained Nazi, you can’t possibly identify with him. I still don’t understand.’ Or care for this, his tone implied.

‘There are many things we don’t understand, yet which have their purpose.’ And after that he would say no more.

They were overhead again tonight, as they had been for nights innumerable and ceaseless, wave after wave of them on their way to Leipzig, perhaps, or Hanover, or most likely Berlin. Down in the tiny cellar it was impossible to tell if they were British Lancasters or American B-17S, since the throbbing of heavy bombers sounded much the same when you had buried yourself as deep beneath the ground as you could go, but the two elderly women held each other’s hands for comfort and hoped the planes were British. The Americans were more trigger-happy and careless – or was it just plain skittish? – and liable to unload their bombs anywhere. The small town of Friesenheim had for centuries nestled comfortably in the security of the valley carved through Westphalia by the headwaters of the Ruhr river, but the valley ran west to east from what was left of the industrial complexes concentrated along the Rhine and acted as a highway for Bomber Command right into the heart of Germany. Friesenheim was on no one’s list of priority targets, but that hadn’t prevented it from being hit several times in the last month as bomber crews got into trouble, got into a panic, or simply got it wrong. In places like Friesenheim there was no such thing as the skill or the art of survival, it was nothing more than a matter of fortune. You crept into your shelters and stayed there for days on end until the weather was bad enough to keep the bombers away, not knowing how long your meagre food supplies were likely to last, sharing everything with the rats, your nerves shot to hell as the walls closed in and praying that you would be one of the lucky ones who wouldn’t die in this hole, or be buried alive, or be drowned as the sewers burst and flooded into your hiding place.

You spent a lot of time praying, because prayer was all you had to defend yourself, yet frequently even prayer was not enough. A few nights previously a rogue 10,000-pounder which had become stuck in its bomb rack was dislodged and dropped over Friesenheim by a USAF crew on its way home. The townsfolk were well sheltered and 133 of them, mostly women and children, had been packed into the ancient crypt which acted as an air raid shelter underneath the Evangelical church. The pastor had been conducting, encouraging all present to sing at the top of their voices in the hope that it would drown the noise of battle overhead. His wife scurried around serving ersatz coffee and comforting a baby born four days previously.

No one heard the bomb. The walls of the church were thick and the crypt deep, as was the fashion in the Mittelalter days during the long and glorious reign of Charlemagne when the first foundations had been laid. But there was a grille set in the ground at the back of the nave which was used to facilitate the passage of heavy objects such as coffins or casks of wine in and out of the crypt. It was only a small grille but the bomb had struck the grating at an angle, bouncing down the chute and into the crypt, where it exploded in the middle of the pastor’s choir practice. A fluke, a million to one chance, but in the confined space the devastation was appalling. Only twenty-three had been pulled alive from underneath the collapsed church and several of those had died in the days since, the local hospital long ago having run out of anaesthetics, of antibiotics, of trained doctors, and of hope. Of the pastor, his wife and the baby there had been nothing left but a memory.

The two elderly women found it hard to change the habits of a lifetime so, in spite of the evidence of the crypt, they huddled in their cellar and continued praying and hoping, smoking cigarettes made out of dandelions and listening to the radio. They found the radio of most comfort. It was their link with sanity, letting them know in the middle of the darkest night that life still went on somewhere outside their tiny, fear-filled world. Otherwise it would be easy to imagine that they were the only people left alive, that the rest of humanity had killed itself and they were left in the darkness as the last survivors of a mad, suicidal world.

Only the radio and the next wave of bombers brought them back to reality. And reality tonight was another interminable broadcast by Goebbels. As always it brought news from the war front and a call for still further sacrifice to resist the criminals threatening the homeland, larded with vituperative attacks on the nameless Jewish conspirators who had promoted the war and sought the extinction of the German race – although it was clear to most listeners that in recent weeks the emphasis of the news had changed, with reports from the battle fronts becoming briefer and more vague, while the denunciation of those responsible for the growing calamity grew ever more fantastic. Yet tonight there was something different, a new element in the formula. News of a massive break-out by German prisoners of war in England, ‘a powerful illustration that the spirit of our fighting men is not broken and clear proof of how vulnerable our enemies still are, even in their homeland. The British Tommies scurry around after escaped prisoners when the whisky-sodden war criminal Churchill would have them butchering German women and children. Even without their weapons, the unquenchable determination of our German soldiers is continuing to resist the onslaught of our enemies and helping to defend the Fatherland. Resistance, in all manners, at all times, must be our watchword!’

One of the women held a piece of loaf and hard cheese in her hand, all they had left until the bombing stopped and they could forage for new provisions. Tears were trickling down her cheek and falling on to the stale, dark bread but she seemed not to notice. She was staring into another world that she remembered from long ago, one which had long since been destroyed and which she knew she would never see rebuilt.

‘The British are sparing no effort to recapture our escaped German soldiers, but even after many days they have not succeeded. The entire country is on alert, looking out for one brave German whom all the might of the British cannot seem to apprehend. My friends, a new German hero has been born, a man who singlehandedly is defying thousands of British security men and tweaking the bulbous nose of Churchill. Even when thrown into one of the British torture camps he refused to submit. He continued to fight. His courage and devotion to duty never wavered. His resolution should be an example to us all. The whole of Germany salutes one of our bravest men. Peter Hencke!’