Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? (2 page)

A few minutes’ silence ensued while Ivan took in the magnitude of Sergei’s statement.

‘They are truly inhumane, comrade Sergei?’

The older soldier sighed and nodded his head.

‘They are, comrade, they are.’

‘But they will flee, Sergei, no? They know we are coming. Surely they will run?’

Sergei smiled.

‘They will run, comrade, but we will run faster and harder and for longer. We will hunt them down and catch them like rats and we will have our fun with them.’

Sergei reached across suddenly and gripped roughly between his comrade’s legs, taking his testicles in a vice-like grip.

‘These will be emptied of their stagnant milk by tomorrow evening, comrade. I can guarantee it.’

Ivan struggled with his friend’s firm wrist, tears in his eyes and a puzzled look on his face.

‘We will fuck their
Fraüleins
while their fathers and brothers watch, then we’ll kill them one by one. They’d better
run, comrade; they’d better run like the wind, run into the hands of those soft Americans.’ He sighed again. ‘But those Americans haven’t experienced what we have, comrade, those Yanks came into the war too late.’

The young soldier looked at his comrade, his mentor, the man who had looked after him like a father since their paths had crossed what seemed like years ago. He looked at the man who had saved his life on the battlefield on more than one occasion. He looked at a man whom he loved and respected as much as his father and was now advocating behaviour no different from the filthy Hun, the Nazi.

Young Ivan was confused. The fire before them crackled and spat out its tune. The embers were dying but still glowing brightly. Ivan reached across to the stockpiled wood and threw two large logs into the heart of the fire. The glow seemed to dull for a moment but Ivan and Sergei watched as slowly but surely a gentle flame began licking at the bottom of the new wood. The heat was instant. Ivan felt nothing.

‘Tell me, Sergei…’

‘Speak, child of the Union.’

‘These camps of death, do the birds still sing in these terrible places?’

Sergei frowned, unable to give an answer.

‘I mean… the birds, Sergei… surely they have witnessed everything? Do they still sing?’

Sergei let out a sigh.

‘You are becoming soft like the Americans, comrade. You’ll be writing poems next.’

‘I will wake early tomorrow and if the birds are singing everything will be fine. The birds Sergei… the birds… they will tell us.’

‘Be quiet!’ a voice cried out a few yards away. ‘Let us get
some fucking sleep before tomorrow; we need to save our energy for the German bitches.’

Sergei smiled. His teeth shone in the pale moonlight, and Ivan wondered how he had managed to keep them in such good condition given their diet and vitamin intake over the last few years. Hell, there was a time when they were battered down by the Germans without a crust of bread passing their lips for days.

‘You see, comrade, it is to be expected of you. Tomorrow you must do your duty. We must eradicate the Nazis off the face of the earth and keep going until we reach Berlin.’

‘Yes, the Nazis, Sergei, I agree, but all Germans can’t be monsters. Our comrades are acting like animals now; they are turning on defenceless villagers and old men and women.’

‘Revenge, comrade. Who can blame them? Who can blame us? The German civilians, those old men and women sat back and let it happen. The Russian people revolted when we were unhappy with our leaders; why didn’t the Germans?’

Ivan had heard enough. He had a feeling he wouldn’t sleep well that evening. He pulled his sleeping bag tight around his head, nestled a little closer to the fire. He was exhausted after the relentless march and just beginning to doze off when Sergei leaned over and whispered in his ear.

‘Tomorrow, comrade… and for many days and weeks after, we will show the German nation, the soldier, the civilian and the man, woman and child in the street what bad really is. The German will wish he’d never been born.’

To live on in the hearts and minds of readers is truly not to die

CHAPTER
ONE

J
oseph Horace Greasley had enjoyed life on his parents’ Leicestershire smallholding for as long as he could remember. He’d enjoyed milking the half dozen cows, tending to the hens and feeding the pigs, and he’d especially enjoyed looking after his father’s Welsh ponies.

Although the elegant animals had towered over him as a small boy when he’d replaced their salt licks in the stables, turned their hay and mucked them out almost every day, he had never ever been afraid of them. In turn they seemed more than happy to have the young boy messing about under their feet, feeding them daily and replenishing their water supplies. Joseph Horace Greasley was always known as Horace; his mum had seen to that from quite an early age. No way were people going to call him Joe like his father. She couldn’t comprehend why anybody would want to shorten people’s names.

Horace enjoyed the backbreaking manual ploughing of the fields, sowing the seeds and generally keeping the place ticking over so the whole family could reap the rewards of the 30 or so acres left to them by their grandfather many years before. Home was number 101 at the end of a row of miners’ cottages in Pretoria Road, Ibstock.

Horace, his twin brother Harold, older sister Daisy, young sister Sybil and baby Derick were luckier than most pre-second world war families at the time. Although rationing was yet to be introduced, times were still hard and even though Horace’s father was employed full time at the local pit, money was tight, to say the least. No matter. Horace and his father would see that the family was well looked after.

Joseph Greasley senior was a miner, a hardworking coalface worker who would get out of bed at 3.30 each morning to milk his cows before completing a ten-hour shift at the nearby Bagworth Colliery. As he set off for work a few hours later he would give young Horace a shake and though extremely tired and bleary-eyed, Horace would continue to pick up the chores where his father had left off. The animals trusted him; he was comfortable in their company, they in his. He was their regular feed master, the person who cleaned their beds and tended to their injuries, and they seemed to sense it. They were his animals; he was the luckiest boy in the school. Including the chickens and the ponies he had nearly 50 pets. The pigs were his favourite – so ugly, so dirty. Life had dealt them a raw deal but they were his favourites, no doubt about that.

John Forster who lived at number 49 on the same street had once boasted in class that he had seven pets: three goldfish, a dog, two cats and a mouse. Pah! Horace had put him in his place when he’d begun reeling off the names of the Welsh ponies, the cows, pigs and even the hens. Twenty-two hens at the last count and each one had a name.

Only they weren’t pets, Horace knew that, not really. Each November would end in an accepted sadness when his father killed a pig to supplement the family’s diet. The meat took them right through to Christmas and sometimes beyond. Horace understood, at least he did when he enjoyed the
regular weekend bacon sandwich or a ham joint on a Sunday afternoon complete with roasted potatoes from the fields and quite often an egg or two collected that morning.

It was the food chain, the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. Man needed meat and it just so happened the Greasley family had plenty of it walking around their fields. Horace would sit for hours after the pig kill (not through choice, but because it was kind of expected), rubbing salt into the meat to cure it. Hour after hour his father would come into the big open scullery where young Horace sat working on the body of his dead friend. His father would look at the meat, press into the flesh, occasionally take a slice off and after tasting it would announce, ‘More salt!’

Horace’s shoulders would drop, his fingers already red raw, swollen and stinging, but not once did he argue or complain. The pig that only a few days earlier had a name would be unceremoniously turned so that its arse pointed into the air, and another pound of salt would be expended into the body.

When the salting was complete his father would come into the scullery with a large boning knife and expertly take the pig apart. The hams would be removed and stored in a cool pantry just off the hallway and the sides of bacon would be hung up the flight of stairs that led to the family’s bedrooms on the first floor. It was a strange sight but that was the best place in the house to hang them, his father had often argued with his mother. It gets the through draught of the house, a constant flow of oxygen preserving the meat by many weeks, he’d explained.

Mabel didn’t argue for very long. She knew her husband was right and no other family in the street had meat on their table in such a plentiful supply. It just looked so unsightly, especially when she opened the door to the local vicar. The shame of it!

A week after one kill the priest, Gerald O’Connor, came calling. Mabel asked him in and as he walked into the hall he gave a disapproving look while following her through to the lounge. He seemed happier though after his cup of tea, though, after she’d sent him away with a 3lb joint of bacon that he swore he would turn into a huge pan of bacon broth at the forthcoming Christmas fundraising fair.

‘Hot winter broth,’ he announced gleefully. ‘Tuppence a cup.’

Mabel attended that fair several weeks later but try as she might, she couldn’t find the stall serving the bacon broth.

On Horace’s 14th birthday – Christmas Day 1932 – his father presented him with his first gun: a 410 Parker Hale single-shot shotgun. It was his reward for his long hours toiling on the farm, his father’s way of saying thanks. Harold got a couple of books, an apple, an orange and some nuts, and Sybil, the oldest sister, got nothing. She was too old, his mother had explained. Daisy and Derick fared slightly better: a little wooden train for Derick and a dolly – or was it a dolls’ house? – for Daisy. Horace only had eyes for one thing… his hands trembled with excitement as he handled the gun.

It had been torture waiting to fire the first shot. His father had made the family sit down to a Christmas breakfast of bacon and eggs, hot buttered rolls and steaming hot tea with the obligatory teaspoon of whisky that was a Greasley family tradition each Christmas morning. The Parker Hale sat atop the Welsh dresser, almost taunting him. Between each bite of bacon or a mouthful of hot bread he looked at his father, then the gun, then back to his father again.

‘Remember, it’s not a toy,’ his father told him as they walked up to the small copse at the far end of the farm, each footfall crunching on the frozen earth. A dusting of snow like icing sugar covered the ground and the trees.

‘You must treat the gun with respect. It’s a killing machine – rabbits, ducks, hares, even humans.’ He pointed to the weapon Horace held tightly in two hands while trying to ignore the penetrating cold of the steel and wishing he’d run back for his woollen gloves. But even if he’d been marooned in outer Siberia at –40 degrees, there was no way he was going back.

‘That gun will kill a man, remember that, and watch where the hell you point it. I catch you pointing it at me and I’ll crown you with it.’

Over the coming weeks his father taught Horace all about his new acquisition. He taught him how to take the gun apart, how to clean it and what size cartridge to use when hunting different sizes of animal. But most of all, his father taught him to shoot. They spent hours shooting at targets pinned to the trees and tin cans sitting on tree branches and fence posts. Horace shot his first rabbit after only four days and his father took it back and showed him how to skin and clean the animal ready for the pot. The family ate rabbit pie that evening and more than once Joseph senior advised the family that the food they were eating was down to Horace. Father and son’s chests had swelled with pride.

His father explained how important it was to kill only for meat and how wrong it was to kill just for the sake of it. Horace grew to be an expert shot and could take out a starling or a wren from 50 yards. But each time he did, and he did so only occasionally, he suffered from guilt. He’d taken a pot shot at a young robin one day, never believing he would hit something so small. The robin’s feathers exploded as the lead shot tore into its tender flesh and it fell from the telegraph cable onto the grass below. Horace whooped with joy as he ran over to examine his kill. His joy turned to anguish as he picked the small bird up in his hand, felt its warmth. Why? he
thought to himself as a trickle of blood oozed onto the palm of his hand and the robin breathed its last breath. Why did I do that? What was the point?

From that day onwards, he vowed, he would never to shoot at a living creature unless it could be cooked and eaten. He would break that vow in 1940 in the fields and hedgerows of northern France.

The following year Horace left school, along with his twin brother Harold, the two H’s as they were affectionately known. They were not inseparable as some twins. The simple truth was that they were different. Academically, Harold was brighter than Horace, always at the top of the class or thereabouts, and loved books and study. Horace hovered about the middle of the same class and longed for the end of each school day so he could hunt on the farm, tend to the animals or cast a roving eye towards the pretty girls on the short walk home.

Jobs were at a premium in 1933, the year a certain Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, but within days of leaving school Harold’s academic achievements secured a much sought-after position in the ironmongery department of the local Co-Operative. There he joined his older sister Sybil in gainful employment, adding most of his wages to the family budget. The Greasley family now had three wages coming into the house. Mabel made fresh bread, baked cakes and almost overnight, a fruit bowl appeared in the middle of the kitchen table with exotic fruits such as bananas and oranges from hot countries overseas.

Horace had just returned from yet another hunting expedition. He couldn’t wait to tell his father he’d dropped a running hare from 90 yards. Number four shot, he was about to explain, when his father announced he’d found Horace a job.