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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781495640209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 611 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
They had left the lowlands and were climbing steadily on the narrow road that wound dangerously round the high flank of the mountain. Below them was the steep fall to the river rushing loud and boisterous under the overhang of ice and the bare branches of the alders. Above was the heave of the mountainside with its swathes of black pines, beyond which the snow ran clear to the summit and the blue of the midday sky.
The jeep skidded perilously on the icy surface and Sergeant Willis wrestled it away from the drop. They stopped, got out and jacked up the wheels to put on the chains. While Willis was fitting them, grunting and cursing at the cold, Major Mark Hanlon stepped out in the middle of the road and looked up at the mountain.
Straight ahead of him was a broad gap in the pines. On either side the dark trunks rose like pillars in an ancient nave and their diminishing perspective drew his eyes onward and upward to the sharp line where the sky and the saddle met. Under the trees, the snow was stained brown with fallen needles, but beyond, it was a white dazzle broken only by the grey of rocky outcrops and the organ pipes of the distant Grauglockner.
Then he saw the skier.
He was right on top of the ridge, a tiny black puppet, with his head in the blue sky and his feet in the white snow. Hanlon took the fieldglasses from the case round his neck and trained them on the motionless figure.
A moment later the puppet began to move, slowly at first, thrusting himself forward with his stocks, then gathering speed as he hit the steeper fall. At the first outcrop he checked and made a tight turn that brought a whistle of admiration to Hanlon's lips. The glasses showed the wild flurry of snow and the precarious angle of the skier's body. Then he righted himself again and headed downhill in a long, diagonal schuss, straight for the opening in the pines. When he reached them, he would be doing seventy miles an hour.
Hanlon's shout of surprise brought Willis racing to his side and together they stood and watched the wild, suicidal plunge down the dazzling hillside. He did not check or turn at the humps, but took them, flying like a skeleton bird, his stocks trailing like wing-tips to balance his landing.
The two men watched him, breathless, waiting for the fall that would send him tumbling and broken down the slope. But he did not fall. He came onward, faster and faster, until they could see the grey of his uniform and the green flashes of the Alpenjäger regiment and the rifle slung between his shoulder-blades and the gleam of his polished pistol-belt.
Hanlon lowered the glasses for a moment and looked at Willis in surprise. The war was over, months now. All Austrian units were reported to be disarmed and disbanded. The Occupying Powers were spreading their authority into all the corners of the land. What was this one doing, armed and in battledress, in wild career down the mountain?
Hanlon raised the glasses again. The skier was nearing the end of his run. He was going like the wind and they saw that he would overshoot the clearing and end up behind the barrier of pines. A moment later they lost him and they stood, staring up through the colonnade of trees, waiting for the crash and the cries. But there was no sound, except the thunder of the river and the faint whisper of the wind in the branches.
It was perhaps thirty seconds before the skier came into view again, sliding easily down the transverse slope behind the grove. He was carrying his two stocks in one hand while the other held his rifle at the trail. At the focal point of the long perspective of trees he stopped, dug his stocks into the ground and stood watching them. A shaft of sunlight fell on his face and they saw the lean sunken jaws darkened by stubble and the red weal of a freshly-healed scar running from eye to chin down his right cheek.
Hanlon raised his hand and shouted in German:
"Grüss Gott! Come down here a minute! We'd like to talk to you."
Before the words were out of his mouth he saw the rifle thrown up — as a trapshooter throws it — fast, sighting and swinging in the same movement. He yelled and threw himself against Willis to drive him off balance, but before they hit the ground the shot rang out, and as Hanlon rolled spinning towards the shelter of the jeep he saw more bullets chipping up the ice by his face and heard the wild echoes thundering round the valley.
He wrenched his pistol out of its holster and eased himself cautiously back in the shelter of the bodywork. The echoes were still shouting from hill to hill, but the clearing was deserted and Sergeant Willis lay on the road with a bullet in his head. When Hanlon bent over him he saw that he was dead and that the blood was frozen already on his cheek and on the ice beneath him.
After a while he stood up, finished putting on the chains, let down the jack and hoisted Willis's body into the jeep. Then he climbed into the driver's seat, started the engine and drove, very slowly, up the mountain road towards Bad Quellenberg.
Bad Quellenberg — so the legend says — was founded by a holy hermit named St Julian, who lived in the mountains with the deer and the bears and the eagles and the golden pheasants for company. He was a gentle man, it seems, a kind of Gothic St Francis, whose life was a protest against the violence of his times. When a stag was torn by a wolf, Julian struck the rock and a stream of warm, healing water gushed out, a perennial medicine for man and beast.
The legend suffers a little from the historians. There were men here in the Bronze Age. The Romans traded salt over the mountain roads from Salzburg and mined gold in the high passes of Naasfeld. The Goths were here and the Vandals and the Avars, and all of them, for health or comfort or cleanliness, bathed in the warm waters from which the town takes its name — Mountain of Springs.
Martin Luther came here too, but there is no record that he bathed. He seems to have spent most of his time hiding in log farmhouses high up on the slopes where the chamois came to graze in the bitter winter weather.
An enterprising peasant built an inn and a post-house at the neck of the pass, where travellers from Carinthia might change their horses and eat venison steaks and pinch the bottoms of the peasant girls before crossing into the troubled land of Salzburg, where Wolf Dietrich sat in his stone fortress with a crozier in one hand and a naked sword in the other.
Later, much later, a church was built and a monastery school, and a straggling town began to line itself down the banks of the torrent that gushed out of the mountain and went tumbling through the widening gorge into the lowlands. The inn became a hotel and canny Viennese and Salzburgers moved in to build guest houses and shops and terraced gardens and bath huts fed from hot mineral springs in the heart of the mountain.
The buildings spread themselves in a huge terraced amphitheatre round the throat of the valley, dwarfed by the peaks of the Grauglockner and the Gamsberg.
Later still they drove a tunnel through the mountain to make a railway link with Klagenfurt and Villach and Trieste and Belgrade and Athens. With the railway came Baedeker and Thomas Cook, so that soon Bad Quellenberg blossomed like a gentian patch under the golden rain of tourism.
They came in the summer to take the waters, to sit on the terrace for Kaffeeklatsch, to walk under the pines on the promenades, to flirt in the evening while the orchestras played Strauss waltzes and the peasant troupes came in to dance the Schuhplattler and play the zither for local colour. They came in the winter for the ski-ing and, in between, for the shooting, so that the hoteliers grew fat and the peasants rich and the woodcutters were hard put to it to feed enough pine logs into the mills to keep pace with the building.
High up in the mountains they built a power station to light the town and electrify the railway. When Austria was annexed to become a part of Greater Germany, the Party pundits came here for holidays and the youth groups marched singing through the valleys and Reichsmarschall Göring arrived, resplendent as a peacock, to sun himself and take the baths.
Then came the war, with England first and later with Russia, and the youth of Quellenberg were enlisted into Alpenjäger regiments and sent off to the Eastern front. As the years went on, the little forest of headboards grew and grew in the churchyard of St Julian. The hotels were turned into Lazaretts for the wounded and the shops closed one by one because there was nothing to sell and nobody with money to buy.
The trains ran erratically because Villach was bombed and Klagenfurt and the junctions at Salzburg and Schwarzach. When they did run the compartments were full of haggard, bitter men pulled back from the U dine and from Greece. The trucks were loaded with battered vehicles and guns that were useless because there was no fuel to run them and no ammunition left for the breeches.
Finally, there came a day when they heard on the radio that Germany had surrendered. The Quellenbergers gathered in the streets and the wounded sat up in their beds in the big hotels and on the lips of each one was the same frightened question: What now?
No one was in a hurry to answer them because Bad Quellenberg was a small place, a bath town, a cure resort, of no military or economic importance. So they waited, stunned and fearful, for a month, two months, until a company of troops arrived from Occupation Headquarters at Klagenfurt. The captain was a towheaded youth with a wispy moustache and cold eyes. He presented himself and his orders to the Bürgermeister.
The Sonnblick Hotel, largest in Quellenberg, would be evacuated immediately and prepared as a headquarters for the Commander, Occupation Forces, Quellenberg Area. The commander himself would arrive in forty-eight hours. The Bürgermeister would see to it that all preparations were complete by that time.
The last maids were being hustled out of the corridors, the first guard was being mounted outside the entrance, as Major Mark Hanlon drove up the mountain pass with a dead man at his side.
Bürgermeister Max Holzinger stood at the big picture-window of his lounge and looked down over the pine tops to the snowbound valley.
It was a prospect that had rarely failed to please him: the broad meadow-reaches with the river winding like a black snake between the stripped alders, the log barns crouching under their snowy roofs, the thin lines of the fences, the peasant village huddled round the spire of the old church, the pines marching like spearmen along the mountainsides, the high saddles rising for ramparts against the world outside, the defiles with their treacherous mists and down draughts. No gunfire had startled the eagles nesting on the crags. Men had died, to be sure, in Russia, in Rumania, in Hungary, in Crete. His own son had died with them. But their dying had been a distant thing. Its tragedy had been dwarfed by the towering majesty of the mountains.
The Party leaders had come here to relax and play. The wounded had been sent here to recover — and forget if they could. Right to the end, Reichsminister Göbbels had controlled the Press and the radio, so that the pogroms and torture chambers and concentration camps became musty legends, and the tally of death, defeats and ruined cities reached them only as travellers' tales, fearful but far away.
Life in the valley had followed the old, old pattern. Winter passed and the meadows were green again and the sleek cattle grazed halfway to the peaks. The peasants came still to the market with milk and meat and eggs. The convalescents walked in the dappled sunlight of the promenades, and made love to the hungry girls in the grass. The sound of the axes rang cheerily enough from the timber slides, beating out the time for the melody of the running waters. At summer's end there was the mowing, when the women in bright dirndls tossed the grass into sheaves and hung it on the drying poles, fragrant as apples. And when the first chill returned to the hills the cattle were brought down, garlanded with the last flowers, the best milker crowned with a headdress of blooms and tinkling her bells in triumph.
Bells! They too were part of the life of the valley — part of its peace: cowbells clapping dull yet musical from the high meadows, sleighbells in winter, the angelus floating out from the church tower, morning, noon and evening, small silver bells when Father Albertus carried out the body of Christ for the blessing of the crops, the ominous slow tolling of the passing knell, more and more frequent as the end of the war drew near.
The mountains caught at their chimes and shuttled them back and forth, weaving a pattern of sound which was like the pattern of the old faith, familiar, repetitive, threatening and cajoling by turns, often ignored but never quite forgotten.
There had been a time when orders had come from the Party to silence the bells and send them as a gift to the gunsmiths, but he had set his face against it as he had set his face against so many other demands, and in the end he had won. It was a small victory when you laid it against the great compromise to which he and others had committed themselves. But he was glad that he had won it, because the bells had helped to maintain, almost to the end, the small illusion of peace in the valley.
Now there were no illusions left. The ramparts had been breached, the conquerors were coming in. A blond boy with a handful of troops sat in the hotel where Reichsmarschall Göring had lodged and a nameless man with an ominous title was driving up the road to become the new ruler in the mountains.
Bürgermeister Max Holzinger wondered how he should greet him and how he would be answered. One thing he knew with certainty: he must preserve his dignity, because dignity is the last possession of the conquered.
He had been conquered before and he understood how important it was.
In the first war he had fought in a Carinthian cavalry regiment and he still walked stiffly from the bullet that had smashed his knee. He knew what it meant when a man could talk only of the battles he had lost and of the inglorious survivals of defeat. V ae victis! It is only the victors who are absolved by history.
Better than any, he knew that this time would be worse than the last. The ghosts were rising now in accusation. The living were crawling out of the cellars and the concentration camps. The judges were assembling already, lean and pitiless. Men like himself who had closed their eyes hopefully and too long were to be joined as accessories in the indictment. They had eaten the fruits of conquest, now they must be crammed with the dust of defeat.
He stared out across the white valley and wished the day were over.
He was a man of middle height, black haired in spite of his fifty years, with a lean, intelligent, Magyar face inherited from his mother, who was a Harsanyi from Buda before she married Gerhardt Holzinger from St Veit on the Glan. He himself had married a girl from Hamburg, tall, blonde, deep-bosomed, and the son she had given him had died in the first descent on Crete. She had given him a daughter too, dark, slim and vital. They had named her Irmtraud, because Valkyries were in fashion then, but the name matched oddly with her restless gipsy beauty. She was twenty-six years old, ripe to be married, but all the men she might have wed were dead or prisoners, or wandering lost and leaderless about the country.
He turned back from the window and saw them both sitting in their chairs, watching him.
His wife was working placidly over a piece of embroidery, but her hands were unsteady and her troubled eyes flickered back and forth from the work to himself. Her hair was greying now, and her waist thickening, but she was still strong boned and firm bodied, for all the years and the griefs. A vague regretful desire stirred in him as he remembered their youth together and wondered about their future.
Irmtraud sat sprawled in a deep armchair smoking a cigarette. She was dressed in a ski-costume that emphasised her long, slim legs and her flat belly, and the thrust of her youthful breasts. Her full mouth quirked into a malicious smile and the expression in her dark eyes was half hostile, half amused.
Holzinger wondered how one explained these things to the young — defeat, despair, betrayal and disillusion!
He faced them squarely, straddling a little to ease the weight of his stiff leg. He spoke quietly, piecing out the phrases with care, as if afraid they might mistake his meaning.
"I think you should both understand our situation."
"I'm sure we do, Max," His wife's deep, placid voice reassured him.
He shook his head.
"I'm afraid it's worse than you think, Liesl."
"How much worse?" His daughter sat up suddenly and her voice was sharp with curiosity.
"As a Party member I shall most certainly lose my job. Our money and property are liable to confiscation."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Second Victory"
by .
Copyright © 1958 The Morris West Collection.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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