(Second draft, of at least a dozen and more likely more: last updated 2/12/10; suggestions on readability, understanding & accuracy encouraged & acknowledged)
“Between the Devil and the Desert” (September 10, 1942, early to mid afternoon)
The young head nurse was being cooked. She could feel it.
In front of her was a small fire, where the crashed plane still burned—a fire fueled by the last remains of the plane’s petrol. Katherine had to use this to destroy the documents from the dispatch bag in the few minutes she had until the Germans arrived. Tossing first government documents and now even the civilian letters into the flames meant standing close enough that heat seared her face, hands, and the entire front of her body through the light summer uniform shirt and trousers.
From above the Sahara sun’s rays penetrated her khaki cap and would surely soon have her brain almost up to a simmer. The sand, inflamed by the sun into an acceptable substitute for burning charcoal, roasted her feet even through her shoes.
Neither Katherine nor the two nurses under her command could take shelter in the shade under the wings of the plane. She had to destroy the documents and they had to watch the horizon for the approaching Germans or anything else, after all they had already met one sandstorm that came upon them unexpectedly.
Mary and Joan had two advantages: they could hold up covers over their head to block some of the sun’s rays and they weren’t close to the fire. But they, too, could feel the beginning effects of being cooked—just a little more slowly than their new lieutenant.
Katherine was worried for them. She tried not to think of what was coming. Although nurses, all three of them now wore British uniforms and rank, so now they could look forward to spending the rest of the war in a German POW camp. But the alternative to becoming prisoners was to run out of water in this place near where people first came up with the idea of hell fires. That held no hope of survival. The crash had left them with no good choices: death or captivity.
Their pilot, Lieutenant Jeffrey Boyle, had done his best for them after the plane had hit the edges of the sandstorm and been blown south pushing them over enemy held territory as it used up their petrol and infested the machinery. Boyle had died when he crashed landed on this ridge: the most solid and reasonably level surface anywhere around. His map had showed this was a crossing point for the trading routes through the Sahara, routes now being used by the three invading armies. In route, they had seen a column heading this way.
The edge of the ridge dropped off to the north. To the west and south were small hills covered in thin scraggly buses and rocks of all sizes. Sand dunes were to the east and from that direction they could see a dust cloud—something big was moving towards them.
Mary shouted, “There!” and rushed up pointing east. “Katherine, I think it’s the German column we flew over just before we crashed.”
Katherine brought her brain back into some slight degree of focus to hear the subtext behind Mary’s words. While continuing to toss papers, Katherine clamped down on her own fear, rose above the overwhelming desire to cry, and mustered enough sense to answer. She spoke loudly so Joan could also hear, “In the Sahara, the Germans are our rescuers. Field Marshal Rommel’s troops fight a semi-civilized war, I hear. Our pilot knew that and actually seemed to have signaled the Germans as we passed over them. He died hoping those Germans would find us here, knowing they were our only hope.”
Mary remained unconvinced by Katherine’s analysis of the situation. To Mary the Germans were the enemy, almost another species. She had heard horrible things about this enemy both in this war and in the previous one 25 years ago near the beginning of the century. She would make made no allowances for Rommel and his troops to be different. “I’d rather die of thirst than fall into the hands of the Hun.”
Katherine, feeling half-dead, as befitted something nearly cooked, was too tired to argue, however, one of her uncles had once said she would argue on her deathbed; seems he was right. “You only think that because you’ve had a drink recently. We may end up spending some time in a prisoner of war camp but still—” She paused trying to continue the thought, looking for words, her brain wouldn’t give her so she finally gave up. “One disaster at a time. First, we need those Germans with their water and their transport.”
Her evaluation got an startling response from the third nurse, “Do we need two columns of Germans? I assume these are Germans as well.” Joan, as always, was calm and steady.
Katherine looked up from the papers to check out the new sighting, coming at them from the opposite direction, still too far away to see details. “At a guess, I would say that any column in this area would be German, or, maybe, Italian.” She paused to gather the energy she needed to look for another possibility. “The British could have something around here, but it would take tremendous good luck to run into them. And I don’t really believe in tremendous luck. You are right, two enemy columns may be more than we need.” Then she shrugged knowing there was no way to tell whether something would turn out to harm or benefit them in the long run.
She, who had reason to know what German troops looked like, thought the new column looked German as well. Each column momentarily disappeared behind dunes on the one side and dips in the terrain on the other. Both had probably both seen them, the plane and the fire. She looked back and forth where each had been. “They won’t yet have been able to see each other—but they might be in touch via wireless. No reason why they should necessarily know each other, Rommel has a hundred thousand men here and they can hardly all know each other.” She realized she was rambling and so changed her voice to reflect casual calm as she turned back to the papers. “Keep me informed if you see either doing anything other than continue driving straight towards us.”
Katherine sped up her burning; to be sure to finish everything well before either column was close enough to interfere; though they hadn’t been given much orientation before being sent into the war zone, it had been impressed on them not to let papers fall into the hands of the enemy. Knowing she would need a few uncooked brain cells to deal with the questions the Germans were bound to ask once they arrived, Katherine worried about devastating toll the heat was taking on her. She had to watch every word and gesture not to reveal either of the other two cultures which had formed her. It was bad enough to be British in this situation, the other two would add too much danger to the situation and to her various family members.
As she finished, glancing at where the German columns were, she called out to her team to gather them away from the plane and from their belongings to a more exposed area, “Come on over here. Sit down, make no sudden moves and keep your hands in sight. And take off your caps for a few minutes so they can see more clearly that we are all women. Make sure your Red Cross bands clearly show so they know we are nurses even though we are in uniform—the Germans don’t put their nurses in uniform and probably haven’t even seen any of the newly uniformed British nurses yet. And the trousers are going to throw them off since in Germany even more than in Britain, women just are not seen in trousers. The fact that we were put into trousers was a test to see if the nurses could operate easier enroute and maybe also in field hospitals.” They knew that but the trousers were on her mind as her entire being, all the training of three cultures, rebelled against wearing them, though she had found them comfortable. She took off her own cap and, taking the pins out of her hair, let down her braids, rubbing her hands up the braids to make her hair fuzzy, less attractive: it was instinctive when putting herself under the control of strangers.
The two columns had now obviously seen them. And Katherine could be absolutely sure each was German. Officers in the lead vehicles each had binoculars out and had each initially focused on the nurses by the downed plane. She waved first at one and then the other. That cued each of them to the approach of the other column. It seemed now that both were discounting the small group of nurses to concentrate on their counterparts.
Katherine could see that one of the German columns had a couple of lorries of heavily guarded prisoners. British prisoners? Some of them waved. Now she could tell: definitively British.
The two German columns got to the ridge within minutes of each other and the two German officers got out of their transports a fair distance from each other. The first sent a couple of guards toward the nurses. Then the two officers walked towards each other. Katherine had trouble hearing what they were saying at that distance, though at first they were talking loudly since they began their identification questions and answers while still some distance from each other. From the words she heard she deduced that one of the first things they discovered was that they were both Berliners. And she heard the name Heidelberg and figured one or both might be a graduate of that university or maybe had some relationship to that city. She stopped even hearing a word here and thereafter as they got close enough not to have to shout.
Soon they were laughing, a picture of German camaraderie, and she got the impression there was the beginnings of trust between them—why shouldn’t there be? Still she had had hopes that something would provide an opening for her team—not that she could imagine what kind of an opening might be possible.
As soon as the German guards got to the nurses, Katherine slowly put on her cap, smiling at the Germans, making sure no one saw her movements as threatening. Then she told her nurses to put their caps back on, slowly. The sun was merciless against bare heads—just as menacing as the armed guards around them.
A few minutes later the officer of the column with the British prisoners, a captain, no Katherine silently corrected herself, a Hauptmann—no, she corrected herself again, she was not a person who would know the military rank of Hauptmann—looked over in their directions and motioned to one of his guards who immediately understood to bring her, the head of the team, to them.
The designated guard had previously poked at the ashes to see if anything could be salvaged and now he picked up the empty dispatch bag and the rifle next to it and motioned Katherine to walk ahead of him. She moved with the listlessness she felt, not trying to hide her weakness. She wanted to be sure they continued to see her as no threat at all. She had a part to play that was only part of the truth: innocent, non-combatant and wholly British.
She felt the fear rising in her, fighting against the controlling clamp she had put on it. After all, she thought, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Oh, and death, dishonor, rape…. She tightened the clamp on her thoughts. Useless thoughts can lead to fear and fear doesn’t help when you have no power over the situation.
When they got to the German officers—the other column was commanded by a lieutenant (what Katherine knew was called a Oberleutnant). Her salute contained not only extreme tiredness but also a slight deference with lack of confidence that she deliberately projected, which was easy because she felt it. The most she got in return was a distasteful wave of his fingers from the captain/Hauptmann. They obviously didn’t believe in the military status of women in spite of her uniform and the pips on her shoulders. Hell, even the British were still trying to get used to women as officers.
While, the guard showed the dispatch bag and told about the burnt papers, Katherine had a chance to check over her captors. She immediately deduced that the captain/Hauptmann was career military, she recognized the signs. On top of that he looked like a God-damned German propaganda poster with a seemingly crisp uniform, air of no-nonsense arrogance and the blond hair that peaked out from beneath his cap. And he had the bluest eyes she had ever seen; maybe it was just the bright desert light. He wasn’t quite tall enough, however, to be the perfect Aryan specimen — he just came closer than anyone she had ever met. How did his uniform look that crisp out here; she knew she was a mess even by her loose standards?
The younger, Oberleutnant, looking less crisp, less arrogant with brown hair and eyes would never put him on a poster by the German propaganda ministry. He looked more British, but then the two nationalities were closely related. During The Great War, about 25 years ago, the British royal family had changed its family name to disguise and reject its German roots and show that it had no relation left with the enemy of that war; the same enemy the British now faced again.
When the report ended, the captain/Hauptmann turned to her and demanded coldly, harshly, in just slightly accented English, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
Katherine knew he was trying to intimidate her with vocal tones that suggested cruel, heartless indifference. But she also recognized—was her brain actually working again?—that she was judging him by his appearance, believing the posters. Of course she had no other means by which to judge him. But she wanted to appear intimidated so she projected fragility, helplessness, confusion, and showed that she was out of her element. All of which was true to varying extents and it was the stereotype they’d easily believe.
She was not a person who fell easily into a pattern of obedience to authority, but she could pretend that temporarily, something she had learned early from the Roma, who often needed to deflect violence.
“My name is Lieutenant Katherine Bowman. I am the head nurse of a team of the two other British nurses with me. Our plane must have gone completely off course when we hit the edge of a sandstorm. The pilot tried valiantly to go around it when he saw it coming, but his maneuvers carried us south, way off course and we still hit the edge of it anyway. The plane never really worked well again.”
She paused to catch her breath and try to think what else she could tell them that would be not only innocent but disarming. She knew she was only allowed to tell name rank, number, but she really thought she had to explain what they were doing here and appear not to be hiding anything. She also knew it was easy to start down a road that led to giving out too much information.
During her pause the Oberleutnant asked in heavily accented but understandable English, “Are the English in such bad shape that they have started making nurses into military officers?”
“Last year British nurses were given an approximation of military rank although we are not in the chain of command and are still to be regarded as non-combatants. Oh, I think I am supposed to give you my serial number. It is 83163.”
The captain took back control of the questioning. “If you aren’t military, why did you burn the contents of the dispatch bag?”
“Our pilot tried desperately to give us some way to survive and so he signaled your column as we flew over. But before he died from the crash, he asked me to burn the contents of the bag. We are grateful for your rescue, but our dead pilot insisted that the documents be destroyed and I did as I was told.”
Katherine’s voice was breaking from drawing in the searing air through her mouth while she talked. Standing in the sun was making her feel faint. And the dispatch bag, which had been in the shade under the wing, was near her feet. She debated whether she’d be over acting but finally gave up and collapsed onto it.
The Oberleutnant took a step forward to reach out to try to catch her but when he noticed the higher ranking officer frown at him he stepped back.
“Sorry,” she said. “The heat.”
The captain shook his head. “You wouldn’t be so overheated if you hadn’t been standing next to the fire burning those papers.”
“Even though I am not in the chain of command, I do have to follow orders. Would you expect one of your own nurses to do differently even without military rank?”
“It seems suspicious.”
“If some of your nurses were in a plane that crashed in the desert, would you expect British columns that picked them up to be suspicious?”
“Our nurses wouldn’t be in uniform.”
“And your doctors?”
He frowned and changed the subject. “Where did you take off from?”
“Yesterday we left London. We were all asleep when we arrived at some base in the middle of the night. They gave us only a few minutes while they refueled. Never told us where we were. They never actually refused to tell us, but we were actually more concerned about stretching and grabbing something to eat and having a cup of hot tea.” She paused and then added. “I guess that is lucky now that we find ourselves in enemy hands although I doubt we have any airbases your people don’t know about.”
They didn’t seem to think it was important enough to push her on it right then.
She learned from their private conversation in German that the captain’s name was Kichner; the other was never addressed by name in her presence. And then they were all distracted.
A guard ran up. “Die Englander,” he said, pointing towards the edge of the ridge. She realized that a British column must be coming in below them at the bottom of the ridge and wondered if it could have seen the smoke from any angle it would have had before the fire had gone out—had the column been traveling at the base of the ridge and was that why they hadn’t seen it before?
So, if the British hadn’t seen the crash, what were they doing here? Hadn’t she said it would have taken tremendous good luck to run into the British. Wrong on two counts as this luck wasn’t good. Bloody damn bad luck! The Germans had the high ground and were unseen and probably unsuspected! She could have cried in frustration, but her body had no moisture to spare on tears and no energy for any expression of any emotion except fear and she dare not start down giving into that.
The two German officers rushed off to the edge of the ridge to check out the column. Captain/Hauptmann Kichner spread the word for quiet. Mortars were already being set up by the Oberleutnant’s men. The British column would be a sitting duck if it got well within range before they started firing and that was surely the tactic for which they were preparing.
Such thoughts came naturally to Katherine who had an uncle who was an army general.
The mortars were being assembled close to where she still sat on the canvas dispatch bag. Three were set up and primed as the operators went back and forth from a truck for shells.
Too bad, she thought, one of the British military prisoners wasn’t where she was now. They could probably have gotten to a mortar to fire off a warning shot and saved British lives, maybe dozens of them.Only she, too tired to stand, a nurse, not a soldier, only sh was close enough.
Hell, the only thing she knew about mortars was a five minute explanation from her uncle’s Lieutenant Adjunct who showed her how one worked back when she was 15. Such a simple weapon to use, just carefully drop the shell down a primed tube. She had even picked up a shell—those things were heavier than they looked.
Five minutes back on that army firing range hardly qualified her to do anything. Her captors would probably just shoot her if she tried to run towards a mortar and the British column wouldn’t even hear such a shot over their transport engines.
And at the moment she could hardly lift her empty hand to shade her eyes for more than a minute. No one could expect her to do anything. Not her British superiors—but then also not her German enemies, either.
If she hadn’t used up all her strength and energy already, though, it might appear to have been set up by some powerful but unseen Spirit just for her. At another time and place, she might be able to do something. But she could barely stand and she felt faint from the scaldingly hot heat which sapped her more and more with each breath she took and each additional moment she spent under this unrelenting sun. She wasn’t getting stronger sitting here as even through the bag, heat penetrated up to her from the sand below.
Breathe, she ordered herself. Focus on breathing slowly, deeply from her belly through her nose, clearing her mind of background nonsense. The way she she had been taught to prepare to walk a tight rope or do a difficult piece of juggling. Breathe one. Breathe two. Breathe three.
But the thoughts broke through: What if they punished her nurses if she tried something? Breathe one. Breathe two. Breathe three. It was a crazy thought, anyway. Absolutely crazy. Both the idea and her. She had once read that people had gone crazy under the Sahara sun. She could hardly suspect that she was immune. A good brain gone bad, such a shame! She should be locked up. Oh, yeah, the Germans were planning to do just that!
But crazy ideas sometimes succeeded just because they were so unexpected
Breathe one. Breathe two. Breathe three. It seemed almost as if this had been set up for her by Those who arrange such things to test mortals—sometimes to tempt them into horrors but sometimes to offer them something unique and rewarding, a way out of a terrible situation if they do it right. Which was this? She must not fall victim to the hubris of thinking all the spirits were on her side. They were rarely on anyone’s side for long, angles and demons were the same thing in the long run. They had their own agendas that mortals could hardly personalize with any understanding of the larger picture.
But she did believe two Spirits were on her side and watched over her: her father, who died when she was seven and whose presence she had sensed ever since, and her grandmother, who died saving her when she was 12.
Breathe one. Breathe two. Breathe three. Slowly.
Even the fact that she was dead tired and everyone knew she was totally exhausted would work in her favor since people wouldn’t think she could do it even after she started running.
Breathe one. Breathe two. Breathe three.
Without willing herself to do so, Katherine actually found herself envisioning how she would do it. Considering the chances, looking for variations, picturing everything step-by-step. Her vision kept being interrupted by the thought that she was not only risking her own life but the lives of her nurses. No, Rommel’s troops wouldn’t do that. Probably. Maybe. But these same German troops under different commanders on the Eastern Front were easily killing women, children and other innocents. Jews and anyone else who got in their way. Its easy to kill those you don’t believe are on your level.
Breathe one. Breathe two. Breathe three. Her mind reeled with the choices she had before her.
It came to her that she had another advantage: Even German soldiers, especially those under Rommel, might hesitate to shoot a nurse. All soldiers knew they might one some day need a nurse so the women in white—now in khaki—usually had a special status with soldiers. Plus they might not assume she had any chance, which would mean they wouldn’t feel threatened by anything she could do. Knowing the advantages made a decision harder!
She decided to trust herself to the precarious hands of whatever Spirits were out there and see what the situation was when she was taken back to her nurses as she was sure she would be. Just in case she walled off her sense of fear which was great enough that left unchecked might make her hesitate where she couldn’t afford to
Through the calm she had artificially engendered, she heard Captain Kichner order her taken back to her nurses. The guard offered her a hand to help her up and she was grateful for it. He motioned his rifle in the direction of her nurses, a path directly behind the mortars. She moved in compliance with a slight smile of resignation, innocence, vulnerability, and helpless fragility. Falling into his preconceptions, it was believed intuitively.
The first mortar was unmanned with both operators back getting more shells. Now or never, she had to make her choice.
The guard was nowhere nearly alert enough to react appropriately when she broke into a run toward the ridge and the unmanned mortar.
Only one of the Germans reacted immediately, but she didn’t know that as she had to run all out and at the same time she had a lot to judge. She would only get one chance. She vaguely heard the order not to shoot, but she was focusing solely on her objective, committing herself completely — it no longer mattered that she was sure there was no hope of success. Hope was now irrelevant.
Kichner had issued the order not to shoot as he began to run-–-he didn’t shout, but his order reached everyone in the area. A couple of soldiers were closer to her than he, but they couldn’t quickly figure out what she was doing or what they should do about it.
The German captain was right behind her as Katherine grabbed the shell firmly with both hands then continued on two steps, bent over the short barrel and without a pause dropped it smoothly. That was as far as she had planned, she had ignored the fact that her momentum would carry her in front of the mortar or onward over the cliff.
Just before the mortar fired. the captain grabbed her arm sharply, braking with his right foot, pulling her back and down with him into a slide. The shell missed Katherine’s cheek by less than an inch, burning her face. The sound of the explosion roared in her ears, stunning her momentarily. Kichner, fighting the laws of gravity and thermodynamics using his whole body, along with her extra weight, digging in his feet against the inertia pushing both of them towards the edge.
She realized only vaguely what was happening as they came to a stop, the captain swinging him up, used his right fist to strike her as he pulled her away from the precipice.
While Katherine was dazed by the blow, still stunned by the sound of the explosion and choking on her own blood, Kichner stood up grabbing both her hands and dragged her two steps away from the cliff. He forced her slightly upward to her knees onto the burning sand but that was just one pain that fought for her attention. He crushed her hands as he pulled both to the top of her head ignoring the fact that she was choking. Just then, the Oberleutnant ran up. Katherine barely heard his words through the ringing in her ears and and had trouble understanding them using her battered brain.
Before he could get off his first indignant syllable, Kichner accepted full blame as he pulled her away from the edge. She just had consciousness enough to listen to the German in which he told the other officer, “This was all my fault. She was my prisoner. It was my guard who was assigned to her, and I am the highest ranking officer here and it was my choice to try to stop her physically instead of just shooting her—I thought she was going to only try to wave at the British and that wouldn’t have been seen and therefore would have done no harm. None of this will be blamed on you. I can’t believe I was taken in by a mere woman!”
Katherine realized Kichner judged rightly that the Oberleutnant had indeed been afraid he would take the blame in all this, especially since it was his men who had left the mortar unguarded. The captain’s acceptance of the entire responsibility caught him off guard and since his main objection had been answered, he was momentarily mollified and wasn’t quite sure what to say next.
Before going on to the next chapter please take one minute to make at least one comment (see below) on this chapter - whatever you are thinking at the moment. If you want, you can use “anonymous” as the name, abc@abc.com as the email address and “none” as the website. Thank you very much for taking the moment to leave a comment.
See Chapter 2, Mid Afternoon of Day One
Copyright 2007-2010 by B. E. Warne: All rights reserved.
For those writers who would like to see the differences between the first and second drafts, we have kept a version of the first draft for instructive comparison.
Comment moved from previous version of this chapter:
Well, it’s starting off okay. I do want to know more.
From Day 1-Begin: Devil & Desert, 2008/10/13 at 12:27 PM
Posted by anonymous on June 18th, 2009.