Supply of heroes, p.22
Supply of Heroes, page 22
“But it will never work,” Riley said. “The Irish regiments will never join Fritz, sir.”
“There’s more than one way for the Germans to use the Irish malcontents, Sergeant Major. The point is, the rebels have made their alliance. The Germans are taking them seriously. Colonel Bremer didn’t come here from Berlin on his own authority. To our great shame, London must needs look over her shoulder now.” He paused to let the statement sink in. Yes, shame. But then Tyrrell grinned suddenly. “Besides, why should I go to a prison camp where I’m not senior?”
“Don’t be foolish, Douglas,” Tyndale said. “You can’t travel the heart of Germany in jodhpurs and riding boots, with no weapons, no language, and alone.”
“He won’t be alone, Captain,” Keefe said, then faced Tyrrell. “If you’ll have me, sir?”
“Captain Tyndale is right about the risk, Lieutenant.”
“I don’t feature an officers’ camp, Captain. That’s a lot of Protestants in one place. Anyway, I haven’t got your problem with riding boots.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Riley said, “but how in the name of Jesus are you getting out?”
Tyrrell led the men behind the latrine shed. A space of six feet separated its back wall from the fifteen-foot barbed-wire fence that encircled the compound. He pointed to the waterfall across what remained of the sheep pasture. From where the men stood, it was a distance of only a hundred yards to the cascading stream, but two heavy belts of barbed wire at an interval of thirty yards blocked the way. “By tracking the stream,” he said. “It will take us down to the Mosel. From there we hop a barge.”
“But the wire.”
Tyrrell bent down and loosened his left boot to pull out Peter Towne’s wire cutters. He held them up in triumph. “Remember these? Don’t talk to me about my boots,” He looked across the field. “We go after dark. We can be across the barrier in ten minutes. The guard goes by only every thirty.”
“But he’ll see the cuts in the wire, even in the dark. They’ll be after you before you get a barge.”
Tyndale said, “Not if you and I go out with them, Sergeant Major, and then return, splicing the wire.” He looked at Tyrrell. “That way you’d have ’til morning before they know you’re out. We’d need your cutters, of course, to twist the wire.”
“I’d want you to have them in any case. You might want to try a break of your own later.” Tyrrell stared at his colleague, reading his fear. There would be no break attempt by Tyndale. Tyrrell touched his arm. “George, I appreciate it.” Tyndale looked awkwardly away and Tyrrell turned to Riley. “Sergeant Major, I want you to make it plain to the men that I’d never have left them if the Germans weren’t moving me on.”
“They know that, Captain.”
“Good.” He clapped Riley’s shoulder, then looked at his watch. “I’d better see what I can do about these jodhpurs, then, eh? What do you think, Lieutenant Keefe? Can our catch-as-catch-can quartermaster make us look like a pair of river rats?”
The easy part was crossing the field. It was a pitch-dark night and the only sound was the snapping of the wire cutters. To the four men it seemed like bell gongs, but in fact the clip-clip couldn’t have been heard a few dozen yards away. They crawled as quickly as they could. Tyrrell and Keefe wore soot-darkened identical clothing: the brogans, trousers, and multiple shirts of other ranks; they’d blackened their faces. At the second belt of wire, in brief ceremony, they shook hands with Tyndale and Riley, who set about at once retracing their path into the compound, stretching and fixing the wire as they went.
Tyrrell and Keefe crawled to the low brush that lined the edge of the stream; then they got to their feet, crouching low at first, and ran. Each had strapped to his waist, wrapped in oilcloth, a bundle of bread and cheese, as well as kitchen spoons, the one utensil the prisoners were allowed. But these spoons had been flattened and sharpened into oval knives. Tyrrell wore a coiled thirty-foot length of rope like a belt.
They followed the meandering stream with cuts and darts, as if racing the rushing water. The land sloped steadily downward.
Within a quarter-hour their course had brought them to the edge of a forty-foot sandstone cliff that overhung one bank of the Mosel. The stream funneled down into the river in yet another waterfall, and it was only by an act of urgent braking that the two, having given themselves over to a rush like that water’s, held back from jumping with it into the dark below.
The view that presented itself beyond the dark slash of the river, even in the moonless night, required a different kind of eyesight than the hazards at their feet. Tyrrell and Keefe stood in silence, except for their ragged breathing, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the vista. Immediately beyond the river the land shot steeply up, the famous Mosel wine-growing hillsides. Just on the far bank stood a pair of eerie cone-shaped structures like haystacks, but made of stone.
“What the hell is that?” Keefe asked. Everything unfamiliar was a threat.
“Medieval cranes,” said Tyrrell. “For unloading cargo, long since obsolete. And if you look closely there, you can see the line of the towpath that parallels the river. Barges have been plying this water since Caesar. They used horses on that path to haul the vessels upstream. Still would, probably, but horses are pulling carts in the army now or have been slaughtered for meat. Traffic on the river is probably all powered anyway.”
“How do you know about it? Have you been here?”
“On the Rhine, student days. Enchanted river; its hills are full of monks, dragons, castles, robber barons, and lovelorn maidens. Everyone did the Rhine.”
Not in my school, thought Keefe.
As if reading him, Tyrrell slapped his shoulder. “Now’s your chance, Lieutenant.”
Each stared hard at the strange world below them.
“Look!” Tyrrell pointed downstream at lights.
“A village,” Keefe said.
“No, the lights are moving. Navigation lights. They’re moving away from us. That’s a sizable barge, Keefe. Just what we want to see.”
Tyrrell traced the line of the river with an acute focus of mind and eye. Finally, pointing upstream, he said, “There it is.” A mile away loomed the black silhouette of an enormous bridge. From the shape of its eight arches, two of which spanned the navigation channel, he knew it was the ancient Roman bridge. One side of it was anchored on the bluff of the same red sandstone cliff on which they stood. Above the bridge the faint glow of sky marked the city of Trier.
Keefe said, “The openings between the pilings of that bridge seem too bloody narrow for coal barges to get through.”
Tyrrell pointed at the lights again. “But there goes one now, Lieutenant. It cleared the bridge. The bridge is what we need. We can do this dry.”
“Thank God, Captain, because I can’t swim.”
Tyrrell led away from that revelation by turning and heading upstream, along the cliff’s edge.
More than once he stumbled, or Keefe did, causing the other to reach quickly. They stayed close together, and at certain points when they had to descend the steep sides of ravines, then scale them, they held on to each other physically. When they climbed up onto a deserted roadway that ran up to the bridge, they collapsed against a stone wall to rest. Tyrrell looked at Keefe, his blackened face streaked with oily perspiration, his weariness apparent. It was one of the few times Keefe’s age registered. In truth, he wasn’t that much older, but the exertion was taking more out of him than out of Tyrrell. That relative weakness in an otherwise strong man moved Tyrrell. Keefe met his eyes and Tyrrell felt their friendship open like a blossom.
Keefe grinned. “We’re going to make it, Captain. I can feel it.”
Tyrrell nodded, but he had to look away. An unfamiliar emotion choked him, and he thought of Pamela. Her image calmed his anxiety. Realizing that he would see her and Timmy and Anne, that he would see his father and Jane and Cragside again, he felt released from a grief he had never acknowledged. Throughout his time on the Front and in the camp, he had assumed their deaths. Not theirs, he saw at last, but his own. “Let’s go,” he said.
They stole up the steep approach road, gaining even more altitude above the river. The tower of the Hauptmarkt in the town square came into view on their left, and at the point where the approach road joined the main road running from the city to the bridge, they could see into the heart of Trier. Before venturing onto the road they hid in the shadows, watching. A few dozen yards to the right, where the bridge proper began, was a small guardhouse, but it was dark and silent. In Trier there were a few lights showing, but no vehicles, and, in a period of five minutes, signs only of two or three citizens, heads ducked, hurrying home. The city was asleep. In silhouette, above the rooflines of the houses, were the market tower, the looming mansard shape of the Rathaus, and the great spires of the cathedral that held Christ’s cloak, the prize of gambling soldiers.
Tyrrell motioned at Keefe, then darted into the roadway toward the bridge, Keefe following. Though they stepped lightly, their boots made muffled sounds on the cobblestone road, and that was what gave them away.
Just as Tyrrell was about to draw even with the guardhouse, he heard a loud bang from it and then a further noise, and then startled voices that were cut short at once. Tyrrell and Keefe instinctively leapt over the stone railing onto the grassy edge of the sandstone cliff. They were just short of the point where the bridge soared away from the cliff on its own timeless supports. They crouched, dead-still, against the stone, on top of each other. Tyrrell was immediately aware of Keefe’s breathing as too loud, and he had to check an impulse to order him silent. They waited.
For some moments there was nothing.
Tyrrell raised his head far enough to peer between the stone balustrades. The door of the guardhouse opened tentatively, and all at once a figure dashed from it, a girl clutching her skirts and running back toward Trier, disappearing into the night like a Rhine River nymph. Tyrrell nudged Keefe so that he could watch too as her lover then followed, a boy struggling with the straps of his lederhosen as he ran after her.
“Holy Mother of God,” said Keefe.
Tyrrell laughed quietly and whispered, “You Catholics! How do you know that’s who it was?”
“She’s still a virgin, Captain, from the look of pain in that fellow’s face.”
“He’d be Joseph, then. An apparition!”
Keefe pressed Tyrrell’s arm, an unprecedented familiarity. “I told you we’d make it.”
They leapt the railing and scurried out onto the bridge, staying low. Their silhouettes above the balustrade would have been visible up and down the river. Even in the lee of the railing, as they moved along it, the wind from the river valley tore at them, and the cold air sliced their lungs. When Tyrrell stopped, Keefe ran into him.
Tyrrell craned over the railing, then retreated half a dozen paces toward Trier. “Here we are.”
The bridge towered seventy feet above the water, but even from that height the whoosh of its passage was audible. They were positioned above the center arches, which spanned the channel. Tyrrell pointed down at the base of one pillar. “A buttress, see it?”
“Yes. Twenty feet above the water.”
“The thing is pointed like that to break up the ice floes in the winter, to keep the ice from building.”
“It should do us nicely, Captain. There’s ample ledge there.” Keefe traced the formidable stone face of the pillar, spying the crevices between the enormous blocks of purple stone. At regular intervals on the corners, he saw strapping iron clamps. He was looking for foot- and handholds. Directly below them was a strange form bulking out from the vertical surface.
“What the hell is that?”
“We’ve had Joseph and Mary,” Tyrrell answered. “That’s Jesus.”
“What?”
“A stone crucifix. You see them on bridges where boats have gone down. Those pillars obstructing that current have finished off more than a few, you can bet. I never knew whether they hung their crosses asking God to remember the dead or to spare the living.”
Keefe, ever sensitive, heard the hint of condescension. Tyrrell spoke about the river piety as if it were a strange cult of primitives.
He said, “It’s enormous, Captain. It looks to be more than life-size. We can use it for a ladder, right down to that ledge.” He grinned at Tyrrell. “If it’s not against your religion.”
“Jesus saves, Lieutenant, that’s what I believe.” He efficiently uncoiled the rope from his waist and secured an end of it around the solid stone balustrade. He threw the other end over and they watched it fall in a slow curl until it snapped out at its full length. “God damn it!” said Tyrrell when he saw that the rope was a good ten feet short of the crucifix.
“Close enough,” said Keefe. “We can drop. It’s a stout-looking cross.”
“Right. I’ll go first. Wait until I’m down.”
“Wrong, Captain. We both go now.” Keefe pointed toward Trier. A lorry with glaring head lamps had appeared in the roadway and was picking up speed as it approached the bridge.
Tyrrell went over. At first he tried working his feet into the crevices between blocks of stone as he lowered himself, but it was too slow. He gave all of his weight to the rope just as Keefe joined him on it. The rope groaned but held.
As he knew it would, the rope played out well above the mammoth stone crucifix. Tyrrell dangled from the end of the rope, his shoes a bare five feet above the Christus. Seen close, even from that angle, it was clear that the figure was half again life-size and it made an easy target. Its head was tilted to the side over the left shoulder, the classic posture. Tyrrell swung his weight slightly in that direction and then dropped. His legs straddled the head of Jesus, instead of landing on it. He caught the stone protrusion full in the crotch, and the pain of the jolt was made infinitely worse by the carved spikes of the crown of thorns. The pain was gone in an instant, though, replaced by fear as he started to fall backward. He clutched the shoulder of the statue, swung down across its chest, and held, but he still felt himself falling. The crucifix itself had begun to give.
But then it held too, and he realized he was safe. Gingerly he shinnied down the cold naked figure, and from its bent, bloodied knees he dropped to the six-foot triangular ledge of the pointed buttress. Another twenty feet below that was the raging black river. A fine spray hit Tyrrell’s face, cooling him, and only then did he realize how, even in that chill, he’d been perspiring.
He looked up and saw Keefe dangling from the end of the rope. “Go gently,” he called. “That cross . . .”
Keefe dropped at that moment in much the way Tyrrell had, but when the mass of his body hit the head of the Christus, its rusted iron clamps ripped away from their bolts and the entire stone crucifix pulled from the pillar, Keefe riding it.
As it fell away, he reached back for the bridge, but there was nothing to grab. Tyrrell saw the mass of stone coming down on him, a great hulking, hideous monstrosity, arms outstretched, face tormented, wounds gushing, chiseled mouth agape to shriek. And then Tyrrell saw at the last instant those powerful legs of the stocky Irishman shoving off from that pillar, pushing the mass of stone out over the river so that when it fell, it would not hit him.
There was no shriek. Keefe fell without screaming—Tyrrell would always be certain of this—because his scream would have given his comrade away. There was nothing for Tyrrell to do but flatten himself against the smooth sandstone pillar, lest the statue crush him. It and Keefe missed by inches; if Keefe hadn’t pushed away from the bridge, Tyrrell would surely have been crushed. As it was, a corner of the crucifix struck the narrow ledge on which he stood, and for an instant he thought the miracle had happened, that Keefe had landed safe.
No. Like that the massive stone figure and Keefe were gone. The swirling river swallowed them without a splash. At once Tyrrell was on his hands and knees, leaning out from the ledge, stretching down as far as he dared. He saw nothing. But he knew what the men knew who’d hung that cross centuries before: whatever went into that water was never coming out.
Without a thought for its futility or its risk, he began to cry as loudly as he could, “Bernard!” He cried Keefe’s name like that. “Bernard! Bernard! Bernard!” But the name, like the man, was soon swallowed in the empty vastness below him.
At some later point, in the middle of the night, a laden coal barge came down out of the Saar Valley fast. The bargemaster had to maneuver his huge vessel expertly if he was to slide beneath the arches of that bridge without smashing into its buttressed pillars. Kalter Druck—cold pressure—is what they called it, the phenomenon by which a heavy craft slides without friction along a watery decline at an even faster clip than the river current.
He had to stare ahead at the flat prow of his barge from his vantage at the helm high in the stern of the vessel. He was aiming for the dark hole of the center span, darker than the others because it opened on the far distance of the river. He thought he was on course, but as he drew nearer it disoriented him terribly when he could not see the ancient crucifix. By the time his careening vessel had lurched into the fierce whirlpool just above the bridge, where the water blocked by the buttresses ran back against itself, the absence of the cross terrified him. Like his father and grandfather before, he had never passed through the hazard of Trier without reverencing God’s name at the sight of His Holy Son.
This meant the barge was going to hit. The current would throw it sideways into the bridge, and in minutes it would be smashed to pieces and he would be drowned.
For the barest instant he closed his eyes.
The stout rag-and-rope bumpers on the starboard prow of the barge kissed the buttress, but made the channel, sliding home like a ferry into its slip. The bargemaster registered the triumph in his spine, and he let out the traditional yelp—“Holla ho!”—as he soared through the center arch of the bridge.
