Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (18 page)

“Writing to a loved one?” The German had asked.

“Yes, my Nancy…” he hesitated, hating to ask. “Look, Lieutenant, when are these going to be sent? And when can we receive mail?”

“It will be taken care of. The same rules will apply to you boys when you get to send mail as we SS, though; they will be censored. Just as I cannot say certain things, nor can you.”

Tommy was shocked by his frankness, and more than a little grateful.

After a moment’s silence, Hoffman asked “may I sit down?”

Apologising instantly, Tommy gestured him to sit down. The Lieutenant did so.

“My girl is called Claudia,” he said. “Do you want to see? I have pictures.”

Pursing his lips slightly, the lieutenant took out a small leather wallet and handed it to Tommy with a relaxed smile.

“Yeah, she’s very pretty,” Tommy said, impressed. Blonde, wavy hair, full bosomed and smiling, the picture showed Claudia sat on Hoffman’s knee in the garden, two huge jugs of beer on the slab of wood in front of him. He was wearing civilian clothes; a white buttoned shirt, with a thick brown tie loosely hanging from a neck slightly exposed by his open top button. The strong jaw and unavoidably Nazi-stereotype features of Hoffman were as pronounced as ever, but with his girl and stripped of what James Wilkinson called ‘the skull and crossbones clobber’, the stern-faced SS man looked utterly peaceful, and free of inhibition. Claudia seemed to be caught mid-speech, and his young face was captured on camera, splitting into a wide grin as he watched and listened. They both looked happy. Drunk and happy, even.
Normal
.

“And you?” Hoffman had pressed. “Do you have a photograph of Nancy?”

Tommy slowly nodded, and retrieved it. Their personal items had not been confiscated. Many of the men kissed the photographs of loved ones at night, and said prayers. Tommy did so.

“She looks nice,” Hoffman said approvingly. “Are you happy?”

“Very,” he’d replied defensively.

“It’s very difficult to be so far away from home, isn’t it?” the Lieutenant remarked, sadly. “I miss them very much.”

“Them?”

“We have a daughter. Helga.”

Tommy smirked. “I guess she’s blonde?”

“I would be worried if she was not,” the Lieutenant smiled back.

He looked across at the camp’s yard and parade ground area.

“I’m glad to do this duty. Not just to improve my English, which is already very strong, but because it confirmed everything I thought about this bullshit war.”

Now Tommy was intrigued. He snorted, in the derisive style of Yorkshire James.

“Bullshit is right.”

“We’re not so different, Tommy. We’re the same.” Brooding, his pensive blue eyes swung back around to face Tommy. “Politics created a war when there need not have been one. My duty
here
means I mingle with English, and perhaps Scottish, Welsh and Irish – northern Irish? – soldiers. Normal men like me. We’re not so different,” he repeated thoughtfully.

Tommy was taken aback. “Well… I suppose not, Jerry.”

The SS-Obersturmführer glanced at him, and the British private winked. Hoffman grinned.

“Not at all, Tommy. Ha, of course, that
is
your real name.”

They chuckled.

“But seriously, ja? Just a group of normal men caught up in this struggle, both wanting to protect our fatherlands, our civilisation, and to go home to our women as soon as possible…”

Tommy smiled ruefully at that. Hoffman continued. “Surely we can both agree we prefer our women to war! Cigarette?”

“Yeah lovely, ta.”

They smoked in silence for a while, enjoying the quality.

“You have any other kids?” Tommy asked as he exhaled a thin cloud of smoke.

“Nine.”

“Bloody hell, nine kids?”

Hoffman chuckled again. “No. Not ‘nine’,” he said, holding up fingers. “
Nein
, mein England
soldat
, I have
no
other kids.”

“Can you imagine nine kids?
Strewth
,” Tommy pondered, exhaling the last drag of his cigarette. Chortling, Hoffman gave him another, which he lit it for him.

“Do you have
kinder
?”

Tommy’s eyes grew wistful, filmed by smoke. “Yeah, just the one. Vera. That’s my princess.”

Hoffman looked at the picture the Londoner passed him.

“She’s an angel. What a beautiful girl.”

He suddenly offered his hand across the table. No hesitation, no glance to check it was unseen; Hoffman took Tommy by surprise with the naked frankness of his gesture.

“I’m Walther.”

“Tommy.”

They shook, firmly, and the German grinned at him; a little conspiratorially, Tommy thought. His liking for the officer was growing.

“Why do you really bring us beer, and stuff?” he heard himself blurt.

The German betrayed no surprise at the question. Hoffman looked across the camp, puffing thoughtfully at his cigarette as he considered.

“Well, orders for one. But it makes sense to me, anyway. I don’t know what your politicians and media were saying before all this, but in Germany, nobody wanted a war with England. Just France and Poland, to reclaim our land and pride. The English are brothers. The Führer himself has always said so.”

“Fair enough,” Tommy shrugged, once more impressed by the lieutenant’s candour.

The SS officer stole a glance at the Englishman, and chuckled. “Do you mean that?” And before Tommy could protest, he interjected smoothly, “I know it all seems quite a bit crazy, as you say. Some of our boys were confused. Those of lesser brains and wit. Our beloved Dr Goebbels took England’s enmity quite personally, Tommy, and for a year he tried his best to stir up eighty million people to hate you…”

Inquisitive, his eyes again sought those of the cockney; the two men held each other’s gaze for the final exchange.

“What about
you
? Are you ok?”

“I’m ok, Jerry.”

He nodded, recognising truth in the words. “Good. No need for any of us to worry, ‘mate’.” He winked at Tommy, amiably. “Things will work out for the Saxons of Europe the way things are meant to.” And at that, the British soldier looked away so as not to betray his confusion.

Hoffman stubbed his cigarette out on the side of the barrel, and crushed it underfoot.

“OK, I must go. A German soldier is never off-duty, or so they tell us!”

He rose to his feet, and shrugged. “Speak to you soon, Tommy.”

“Yeah, see you soon pal…”

Obersturmführer Hoffman placed another cigarette down on the table for him, and then walked back across the grass to speak to Sergeant Stanley Hitchman, who’d just emerged from the barracks clutching a paper the Germans had given him. They spoke for a minute or so, with both men visibly and audibly chuckling several times, and then Hoffman strolled on to a different barrack. Smoking the neatly rolled German cigarettes that the lieutenant had left him, Tommy had watched him all the way.

It had been around the time when the scale of the Dunkirk disaster was becoming widely known that William had been summoned to meet with the Colonel.

They’d never met before, nor had he heard of him. Nothing in his, Mary or Jack’s personal lives had suggested that such a meet could, would or was going to take place. Alan was busy trying to reconnoitre with non-party members of old who’d helped lead workers strikes, trade unionists and other Spain vets who’d become disillusioned with the party. But this was a colonel of the British Expeditionary Force. This was no haphazard plan to gang up to sabotage dock work or factories, concocted by ideological opponents or simply English workers stirred to rebellion of the coming invasion by some form of base patriotism; an islander’s tribalistic reaction to foreign threat. This man had a colonel’s epaulettes adoring his shoulders. It was contact from The Establishment. No, this was something else.

“No pasaran,” Jack had told him solemnly, teasing. William laughed.

“Yeah
yeah
, no pasarán, old boy. Eyes up. Look after the lass.”

Whistling to himself in the sun, William went on alone, striding away with purpose to the meeting while Jack and Mary went to wait in a nearby tavern,
The Sherlock Holmes
, nestled away from the main streets around Trafalgar Square. It was a convenient drinking hole for whenever they needed to meet around Westminster and anywhere in the central section, west of the Embankment and river; most importantly, unlike many pubs around Soho, Covent Garden and the government quarter from Trafalgar Square to the Victoria Tower Gardens, it was quiet, and most definitely free of spies and informants.

As they reached the square, Jack and Mary had peeled off wordlessly, and the young Scot was left in the windblown national landmark, in a sea of pigeons, heavy gusts throwing his entangled hair up across his face. Having separated from his best friend and lover, William strolled through the square, taking a prolonged look at Nelson’s Column; symbolic, a monument, free for soon-to-be the last time? Will it be hauled away to Berlin or Nuremberg soon, piece by piece? William considered it, glancing around at the quiet, almost sombre square; a grim foreboding was keeping many indoors, or fleeing north. The difference Dunkirk had made; if only evacuation had been possible. William watched the pigeons pattering about the base of the monument, in their comical drunken goosestep. The thought of Hugo Boss-clad
Schutzstaffel
men of the Waffen-SS clip-clopping their way through the square, goose-stepping the symphony of a thunderous roar of thousands of jackbooted feet was almost too much to bear.

From Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the
Horst Wessel Lied
; from Wagner to the banal beer hall brawler marching songs, and the current favoured patriotic symphony of martial music and marching feet. No matter how many countries Hitler brings down, William thought, none will fall as far as Germany already had.

Lost in thought, he strolled on sedately through the square and around the deserted roundabout, breathing in an uncommonly fresh lungful of central London air as he gazed down Northumberland Ave to the Embankment, passed the War Office and Charing Cross Station and, almost warily, to Whitehall no.7, the altogether more anonymous, nondescript address that he’d be cordially invited to by a “Colonel C.G.” Unlike the great War Office that separated the two main roads leading west from the Thames to Trafalgar Square, the entrance to the no.7 offices was next to an unprepossessing restaurant, closed, its lettering faded on the black paint of its frame. Inside the modest doorway, a short, smiling brunette of around 30 took his coat in the undecorated threshold, and showed him to a surprisingly cramped corridor upstairs, and thence, a small office, occupied by the man to whom he’d been summoned.

The Colonel was short. The first though that entered William’s mind, as the man rose from behind a desk to shake his hand, was that he rather resembled a neat little spy and secret policeman from Franco’s Spain that they’d encountered, which was an unpleasant instinctual first impression to have, though the decided friendliness of the Colonel’s greeting dispelled his intuitive dislike just as quickly as it had appeared. But even as he heard himself agreeing to the two fingers of whiskey that the Colonel was pouring into a glass for him, sliding it across the desk, William’s mind drifted back eighteen months to times best forgotten.

The Fifth Columnist in question to whom the Colonel bore resemblance had worn a tatty, short leather jacket improvised with a fur lining, thickly collared with some kind of heavy material, which was probably expropriated. With his neat, narrow moustache and slicked back hair, he was a younger, sharper featured General Franco in miniature. Seen on leave at the Hotel Falcón – a go-to for POUM militiamen on leave in Barcelona – and up and down the Ramblas at all the favourite cafés of the Socialist Workers Party and the anarchists, CNT and FAI alike – he’d resembled many of the fierce little Italian militiamen in Catalonia, who were by and large, an illiterate mob of worker peasants yet ferocious and loyal to a man – perhaps made moreso with Fascist Italy and their countrymen occupying nearby Mallorca, in their support for Franco’s uprising. This man, though, had been unmistakeably Spanish. He was a familiar, engaging face, and then the neat little man had vanished in the uneasy aftermath of the May Days fighting, and the insanity that followed. Treachery, good men incarcerated, quiet murders. No disappearance was thought much of; it was taken for granted that any missing face was languishing in what amounted to overcrowded dungeon cells; so many young men, flung into squalid imprisonment to rot away like an animal by the same side that in most cases they’d travelled hundreds of miles to Spain to fight for.

But after escaping northwards from Catalonia and out of the fascist nightmare that Spain had become; they’d seen the neat little man in Banyuls. It was an uncomfortably pro-Franco southern French town, full of the suspicious and hostile glares from a populace foreign to the war but with seemingly instinctive and natural predisposition towards the victors against whom the now-ragged English visitors had fought. But Mary was in a terrible state; she had survived the retribution of her capture, but the horrific conclusion to her struggle left her a hollow shell of the fiery woman of passion they’d known, and they too were emotionally fragile. They needed rest, sanctuary.

And so, the languorous group, as though trapped in some nightmarish dreamlike state, sought refuge in the nearest drinking establishment they could find. It was a quiet bar with sun-faded wooden café chairs and tables, filled with Frenchman playing card games, for the most part clean and wearing good quality clothes; there he was. He’d spotted them too, of course – they were a conspicuous addition to the clientele in their weathered jackets, bearing the obvious burden of the war that had raged south of the border for three years and whose slaughter was not yet at an end. They stared in disbelief back across the bar, to where he was sat engaged in what looked like a hearty, wine-soaked debate with a group of rotund Frenchman, putting the world to rights with an unmistakeably high familiarity with all present. Evidently he was some kind of intelligence gatherer for the Falange; the quintessential Fifth Columnist, though whether his loyalties were as such due to fascism, Franco or the Catholic Church they would never know. He’d winked at William, and waved over to the group, oily, hair still slicked but altogether more distinguished in appearance. Even
suave
. William felt the sensation of being physically winded, just seeing him in the flush of his personal victory. As they stared in astonishment, the little man gave an anti-fascist signal from across the room, which proved so uproariously funny to the Frenchmen that the whole bar collapsed into paralysing shouts of raucous laughter, in what seemed to the recent war-escapees like a sick parody of helpless hilarity in humourless days, as though the ugly townsfolk of Banyuls were permanently under-humoured, resulting in deeply inappropriate moments of release, such as this disturbing mockery of all the merciless slaughter wrought by cruel usurpers, at their expense. The group quickly stepped out, restraining a livid Alan and making straight for the train station to flee, to put the nightmare behind them, to lose themselves in the comparative anonymity of Paris and thence, home.