The zeppelin died a minute later, nosing into the ground like an enormous pig hunting for truffles, engulfed in flames. From what he could see through the thick tangle of branches and dead leaves, it was soon surrounded by English people, running across the fields. He thought he had heard a bugle. He’d started to wipe away the black smudge of oil on his face before thinking better of it and spreading it around for camouflage instead.
Inside that inferno, his fellow crewmen were all already incinerated, except, as it turned out, for one. He could never be sure but for some reason he thought it was the rear gunner, Otto, whom he saw crawling away from the wreckage, writhing like a worm on the ground. A few of the English had looked on as one of them—a burly bearded man—had stood over him and then stabbed a pitchfork through his back. Kurt had felt the pain as if it had been his own body.
But wasn’t this exactly what he had always been told about the barbaric English people? Wasn’t it one of them—a man he would never be able to know, or to exact his revenge upon—who had killed his brother Caspar in some Belgian battlefield? And an English pilot who had shot down his brother Albert’s plane over the Channel? The night he’d been told about Albert, while sweeping up the factory floor in Stuttgart, he had sworn to make the English pay, and the next day, sneaking out of the house so that his parents would not stop him, he had fudged his real age and enlisted in the air corps.
Propping himself up on one elbow, he looked out again at the house. All was silent and dark. His stomach growled from hunger, and he licked his chapped lips. He wondered what time it was. Late enough that everyone would be safely asleep? Inching his way across the loft, his feet felt for the rickety wooden ladder. Climbing down, he was careful not to put too much weight on the broken ankle, or to do anything to disturb the barn’s only other occupant—a gray owl with a baleful glare.
He cracked open the barn door, waited several seconds after the creaking had subsided, then poked his head out and looked all around. A light wind was making the bucket swing above the well. He went to it, lowered it quickly, and drew it up half-filled. He gulped the cold water down, feeling it run down his chin, onto his chest, under his torn shirt and scorched leather flying jacket. Bending his head, he poured the rest over his bristly blond hair and scrubbed the remaining oil from his face. Then his hunger couldn’t wait any longer, and he limped around the side of the house to the scullery door, where a refuse bin was kept. Inside it, he found a veritable treasure chest—scraps of fatty beef, potato skins, bones from which the marrow had not yet been sucked, the hard rind from a very aromatic cheese. He stuffed some in his mouth, the rest in his pockets, and made sure to leave the lid off the bin; that way, if they noticed that the bin had been pillaged, they’d attribute it to animals.
After another quick survey of the yard—the only thing stirring was a rabbit, foraging in the herb garden—he scurried back to the barn. The owl, perched on a beam overhead, fluttered its wings and hooted three or four times. “Schlafen,” Kurt said softly, “schlafen sie gut”—then clambered up the ladder to his hiding place. He flopped back onto the hay, his ankle throbbing from the exertion, and he clutched his leg hard, just above the knee, to keep the pain from traveling. Staring up at the rafters, he wondered, how long could this last? How long could he stay undetected? How long would it be before the English people, whose savagery he had read about in all the German newspapers and had now seen firsthand, found him and finished him off, just as they had the rear gunner Otto?
One thing he knew—he could expect no quarter, and should give none in return.
CHAPTER FIVE
“And where will you be off to now?” Wells asked, as he helped Rebecca off the train at Charing Cross Station.
“The office of the magazine, I think.”
“Have you got a piece to turn in?”
“Much better than that!” she exclaimed with a wide grin. “I’ve had a personal interview with none other than Herbert George Wells himself.”
“What?” he protested. How had he forgotten that she was a journalist? “You are not going to attempt to capitalize on a personal encounter, are you? Everything said at the rectory was strictly off the record.”
She laid a hand playfully on his sleeve—a gesture whose intimacy was not lost on him—and said, “Oh, I’ll honor that. But may I not at least boast of having been invited to your house and even spending a night under your roof?”
“You might be wise,” he said, mulling it over, “to leave out the part about spending the night.” He already had a reputation that he was trying to live down, nor did he wish to see her inadvertently do any damage to her own. “But I give you permission to admit the rest. Just make me out to be madly dashing.”
“That won’t be hard at all.”
With a quick peck on his cheek, she turned away, and he stood still to watch her go. She was small in stature, but carried herself with a winning assurance as she made her way toward Trafalgar Square and its bustling crowds. He noticed young men turning their heads as she passed, and just when he was ready to move on himself—his appointment was in ten minutes—she swiveled her head, caught him staring, and wagged a finger. He blushed, despite himself. When would he learn?
Although the building that housed the War Office had been built in 1906, it was a vast neo-baroque affair, trapezoidal in shape and punctuated by dozens of spires, with over a thousand rooms and probably twice as many windows. He made several wrong turns and went up and then down a couple of wrong staircases, before finding the Ministry of Military Information. But even then he thought he must have gotten it wrong, because slouched in an armchair by the desk was his brash, outspoken friend Winston Churchill.
“What on earth are you doing here?” Wells said, shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Has the Admiralty office thrown you out for insubordination?”
“No, no, I am what you might call on loan. To Colonel Bryce,” Churchill said, indicating the tall, lean man standing stiff as a ramrod, his khaki uniform adorned with a neat row of medals, behind the desk.
Wells greeted him, too, and took the remaining chair. The office was a perfunctory affair, with wooden filing cabinets along one wall, a scuffed linoleum floor, and glaring overhead lights—as ordinary as the outside of the building was not.
“In fact,” Churchill said, “it was my idea to bring you in.”
“Should I be pleased?”
“You shall soon find out,” Churchill said, deferring to Bryce, who cleared his throat, and passed to Wells a yellow copy of the Evening News, a halfpenny London paper whose color distinguished it from its more respectable full penny competitors. “I’m sure you saw this at the time it was first published.”
Wells glanced at the section outlined in red pen and said, “Yes, of course.” It was a piece entitled “The Bowmen,” by Arthur Machen, a popular journalist and author of gothic tales. It told the incredible tale of some British soldiers, fighting a rear guard action at a key salient in the line, who were about to be overrun by a German assault. Just when they thought all was lost, one of them had called upon St. George, who had descended with a heavenly host of angelic archers, dressed in medieval garb, to come to their defense. Wells had thought it a workmanlike piece, though its placement in the paper had puzzled him; instead of appearing on the page where short stories and imaginative items were printed, it had shown up in the news section.