Jamie nodded.
‘Then your grandfather probably killed my brother.’
The room seemed to go cold and Jamie felt Sarah’s hand close on his beneath the table.
‘I’m sorry.’
Werner shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. Erich was seven years older than me, loyal and brave; he died fighting for what he believed, but he killed a lot of my friends and he gave me this.’ He thumped his leg and they heard the sound of hollow plastic muffled by his thick Tweed trousers. ‘You have heard of Werewolf?’
‘My grandfather mentions it in his journal. Some kind of Nazi guerrilla organization.’
The old man shook his head. ‘A joke. Broken-down SS like Erich leading boys who should still have been at school against men with machine guns and tanks. He was convalescing here, after being wounded in the head on the Ostfront, when the local gauleiter ordered him to organize a Werewolf cell and harass the enemy. I was fourteen years old and frightened. Just a boy. Hitler was dead. People said the war was finished, but Erich would not believe it. I just wanted it to be over and be at home with my mother. You are surprised? You thought we were all fanatics in the Hitler Jugend?’
Jamie smiled politely.
‘There were nine of us. Myself, Erich, my friend Pauli and a few others from the school. We made camp in the woods on the other side of the road – like being a boy scout except we had a machine gun and a few old Mauser rifles and a couple of fausts. Truth is, I think the war had driven Erich mad. He said we should take the fight to the Amis. Some of the boys started crying. I told him: “No we are going home.” He was my brother, I thought he would listen, but he screamed that I was a traitor and hit me in the mouth with his pistol. When I said I would not fight, he shot me in the leg.’ He turned to Sarah. ‘Do not be sorry for me. I was fortunate. In Erich’s eyes I was guilty of mutiny and he had every right to shoot me dead or string me up from the nearest tree. It happened to many. Of course, the other boys were too frightened then to do anything. They carried me to this house, my mother’s house, and left me here.’
Werner slurped at his coffee and licked his lips.
‘Mama did her best with the leg, but when the gangrene came . . .’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘But that was later. Three days after Erich wounded me I heard the shooting and the explosion, over there. I wanted to go, but I couldn’t move and I think Mama would have stopped me in any case. But I could see from the window the jeep burning and the flashes of the tracer rounds from the woods. When the firing stopped I was torn. Should I be elated at my friends’ victory? Was I a coward, who had walked away from them? And what would the Amis do when they discovered this thing? Erich had boasted about a place in France that the SS had taught a lesson, and I had heard him talking in his sleep about things that happened in Russia that freeze my blood even now. Surely the Amis would burn our farm and hang us all? Then the shooting started again and I knew that the weapons doing most of the firing were not German. It only lasted for a moment. Then silence. All I could hear was Mama sobbing. I think she knew even then that Erich was dead. A few minutes later there were four or five individual shots. Very slow, very deliberate. Each one like a punctuation mark. I knew they were shooting the wounded. Before they went, the Amis buried their dead and left our boys for the crows.’
‘They shot wounded children?’ Sarah demanded incredulously. ‘But the war was over. They knew that.’
‘Oh, yes, young lady, they shot little Pauli and the rest. I saw the bodies when they were brought here to be buried. You say the war was over, but war doesn’t end just because someone says it is ended. It finishes when people stop shooting at each other. Erich’s war was only ever going to finish when he was dead. The pity is that he took so many good boys with him.’
Jamie struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. He had read Matthew’s account of the ambush as a heroic charge against a determined enemy and superior odds. The references to boys and children were clear enough, but somehow, in reading the journal, his mind had only absorbed one side of the story. Matthew’s enemy had been hard-eyed fanatics, however young. They had struck, like cowards, from the forest and he had paid them back in their own coin. Only now, as old Werner rummaged through a drawer and produced a sepia-tinged picture of a grinning schoolboy football team, did he fully understand how young they had been. Had Matthew looked into an injured child’s eyes and pulled the trigger? If he had, it turned everything he had learned on its head.
‘I’m on the right, the big lad with the blond hair. Star centre forward. Pauli is the dark-haired kid in the front row. He was a good pal, Pauli. A good pal.’