We'll Meet Again

.

.

June 27, 1945

British sector

Berlin, Germany

The RAF man picked his way carefully through the rubble of Berlin. Here and there, a spectre - some shell-shocked native, still small looking despite the bulk of wearing every article of clothing they owned to save leaving the things behind to be plundered by thieves - could be found listlessly wandering down pulverized streets, disappearing and reappearing around the few lone walls still standing, oblivious to the scorch marks and the never-ending haze of soot and even the smell of the bodies still buried underneath the crumbled landscape. Every so often, he would hear the sounds of some brash young Yank from the occupying forces off on a souvenir hunt with his comrades, but for the most part Berlin was now an eerily silent world.

Which is how he supposed he heard the singing.

"We'll meet again

Don't know where

Don't know when

But I know we'll meet again some sunny day"*

It lead him to the remains of what looked to be an old beer hall. Scrambling his way over a pile of debris just inside the door, the RAF man found himself in a large rectangular hall covered in wood panelling dark enough to be straight from the Black Forest, with floor and ceiling planks to match. He half expected to see a crowd of boorish lads singing the Horst Wessel song, stopping only long enough to mock the waiters in their lederhosen (or harass the waitresses in their dirndls) as steins of Löwenbrau and plates of pretzels, mustard and veal sausage were laid on the long wooden tables before them.

But now there was only one shattered English flyer, head down and arm wrapped around a nearly empty bottle of Schnapps, brokenly warbling for the empty room to 'please say hello, to the folks that I know.' "

"Hate to break it to you, old son," the RAF man said, "but I reckon Vera Lynn isn't going to be quivering in her knickers at the thought of competition from the likes of you."

The singer's head wobbly head lifted from the table and swivelled upwards while bleary eyes did their best to focus. It took a few moments, but a wide, cheery smile flooded across the dark-haired man's face. "Harry!" he breathed out in wonder, then hiccupped. "Would you prefer 'I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts' then?"

"Bloody hell, Martin my lad, but it's good to see you!"

A sad, wistful look passed over the other man's features. "Is it?" he asked, as if puzzled by such an idea.

Squadron Leader Harry Caldwell bent down and picked an empty bottle of Kirschwasser off the floor. "Good God, man, you're not drinking this bilge?"

"All the good shtuff is already gone."

"Three sheets to the blooming wind, are you?"

"Rubbish," Martin protested with a dismissive wave. "Bit squiffy is all."

"Don't lie to me, sunshine," Harry said as he pulled a chair over and straddled it, digging into the pocket of his greatcoat for a packet of fags. He lit one and offered the pack to Martin, who declined. "You're so far under the surface you're about to come through to flipping Peking!"

"No, Harry," his friend said, suddenly sounding more worn down than any man Harry had ever heard before in his life (and, after six years of war, that was saying something). "No, I'm just… tired, you know? So damned tired."

"I know, Flight Lieutenant, I know," Harry said softly, hoping Martin's rank might penetrate through the man's blitzed senses and help him pull himself together. "James told me." Harry's brother was with the British 11th Armoured Division. They had liberated the stalag Martin had had the misfortune to end up at just a scant six months before the end and then had gone on to free the poor souls at one of Hitler's special internment camps.

A place called Bergen-Belsen.

When Harry had heard of Martin's capture, he'd penned a brief letter to his friend. "Spot of rum luck, that," he'd written, hiding his desperate concern and worry behind that fabled British stiff upper lip like every man jack of them did, but it had nearly destroyed him.

Martin was an odd bloke - inscrutable might be the word. The best pilot Harry had ever seen, and damned dependable to boot, he'd become absolutely invaluable to the young Squadron Leader with his calm, unruffled, seen-it-all-before way about him, but more than that, he'd easily become Harry's truest friend. However, there was something secretive about the man as well. Despite being worth any ten superior officers, Martin never put himself forward - never tried to rise higher than he was, never took the credit for all the things he did, never talked himself up like so many of the young lads did - and even to Harry, his background remained mostly a closed book. Still though, it was digging a hollow spot in Harry's chest to see his closest companion look as lost and broken as he did. In all the years they'd spent working together, training together, and practically living on top of one another, he'd never seen Martin resort to drink to cope with the war. Before, nothing had ever fazed the man, but now, spindly and drawn, he looked diminished somehow. Defeated.

"What did they do to you, Martin old mate?"

"Wasn't what they did to me that's important, Harry," Martin mumbled, his head dropping to the table once more. "The Stalag wasn't anything to what we saw after."

"James said it was… bad." His brother's lack of description had worried him; James had aspirations to authorial greatness and was, if anything, usually an overly effusive correspondent.

"It was."

"Can you tell me?" They'd all heard that BBC bloke on the wireless when the place was found, saying how the dead and dying lay out over an acre. And how it was almost impossible to tell which was which.

Martin lifted his tired head again to look him in the eye, and that's when Harry was struck by a most peculiar and disturbing sensation. He wouldn't even consciously register it until decades later, when, browsing through a book his grandson had left lying about on the side table, he read the description of the man from Betelgeuse who wrote tour guides about outer space and, in times of distress, would subliminally hit another person with the sense of the sheer distance he was from home. Harry, nearing seventy by that time, would for some inexplicable reason think, "No, not distance. Age," and then throw the book down before shakily going to fix a gin and tonic for himself.

"Harry," Martin said, staring at him with those despairing, terrible dark blue eyes that held infinity behind them, "I have seen many things. More than you can possibly imagine. I have seen wars and plagues and plundering invaders and hideous murders. I have seen people tortured, impaled, raped, drawn and quartered, keel-hauled, and hacked to death with axes and swords. I have seen rotting heads on spikes and people left to die in cages hanging from posts. I have seen slaughter like you cannot imagine.

"But I have never seen the cold, brutal callousness of this. The Nazis…" Suddenly, Martin let out one quick, strangled sob, and for the first time, despite that disturbing sensation of peering into the endless eons Harry got when looking at him, he seemed like the same frightened young man all of his squadron mates were. "They industrialized murder, Harry," he said. "Murder factories - that's what those places were. They made killing efficient. This wasn't about hate or rage or even gain. It was no less than the cold and banal and thoroughly, breathtakingly inhuman attempt to remove another group of people from the face of the Earth.

"The things I saw, Harry… I can't even tell you." Martin raised the bottle of schnapps he'd been cradling like a child with a teddy, tipped it back and emptied it. He swiped his sleeve across his mouth and Harry was pained to see there were desperate tears streaming from his eyes. "And the rest of them… claiming not to know. Wanting us to feel sorry for 'em! Gods, Harry, you could smell the bodies burning from two miles away!"

Harry didn't know what to say.

"Thousands, Harry. Thousands. The bodies were piled up like little hills. Human beings thrown out like rubbish at the community tip," Martin went on. "And how many more of these camps has that bastard Hitler got?"

Martin suddenly whipped the now empty bottle against the wall, where it smashed into a shower of tinkling pieces. "And still the bastard never came!" he shouted.

"Who?" Harry asked.

"You know what?" Martin demanded, swaying a bit now as he pointed a finger at Harry. "Maybe he shouldn't come."

"Who shouldn't come?"

"No one man should have that much power. No, sir. Leaves us all at the mercy of your Hitlers and Stalins and Napoleons. That's not right. You leave'em unchecked, with no one to say no to'em, and look what you get! The prat as a prat was bad enough, but look at his father. And me! Look at me! I did bad things. Terrible things! No one to bloody stop me, that was the problem. And look at the stuff I didn't do! Didn't stop this! Didn't know about it, it's true, but I could have put more blasted effort into finding out. But I was complacent. Thought I was already doing my bit."

Harry gave up and tugged at Martin's sleeve, deciding to take the drunken man back to his billet. "C'mon, old son, let's get you home so you can sleep it off. People are going to think you're balmy if you keep on spouting rubbish like this."

"See, the problem is," Martin went on as if Harry had never interrupted, "Is that, even if you had a good ruler, the best bloody sodding King in the world, what happens after he's gone I ask you? The position is still there, still with all of the power it entails, and open to every monster willing to grab hold of it. And it's hard to bring down a man with that much power once he's got his grubby hands on it."

"You planning on overthrowing the King, then?" Harry asked wearily, still trying to pull his friend to his feet.

" 'S what destiny wants, the bitch. But why? What's old George the sixth ever done to me? Why should I oust him for the prat, eh? Even if he had shown his stupid, fat face, which he didn't!"

"Good heavens, Martin, you're not serious?" Harry asked.

"Why not?" Martin said, completely misunderstanding Harry's worry over his talk of ousting the King. "You know, I've asked myself when he will return, and if he will return and even whether I want him to return, but I've never asked, 'Should he return?'"

Harry rolled his eyes and started tugging his friend towards the door again. "Come along, Flight Lieutenant, bit of a kip and you'll be right as rain in the morning. So don't make me search out some American MP to drag you back."

"I tell you in all seriousness, Harry, I can't help but think that when that silly sod finally rises from the lake, perhaps, just perhaps, the world would be better off if no one was there to meet him."

For the rest of his life, Harry Caldwell would never understand why this one simple statement muttered by a weeping, drunken man in a deserted German beer hall had filled him with such sorrow and fear.

.

*"We'll Meet Again" Written and composed by Ross Parker and Hugh Charles and sung by British icon Vera Lynn, was released in 1939 and became one of the most famous songs of WWII.

Oh, and if you're curious about the RAF ranks, Squadron Leader would have been analogous to a Major in the British Army, and a Flight Lieutenant (despite the title) about equal with a Captain.