Scotland Forever
It’s
amazing, the places where this picture crops up.
Most recently in the dining room of the Rose Hotel in
Bunbury. A strange choice one might think. Hardly conducive to the digestion to
be chowing down on a Kansas City T-bone while sitting in the path of the charge
of the Royal Scots Greys. Those huge white horses with flared nostrils and
fiercely bulging eyes, their iron shod hooves threatening to trample you to
death. And the equally scary riders, ferocious looking red coated Dragoons,
their open mouths screaming a war cry, wielding wicked sabres, ready to hack
down anyone in their path.
It’s called Scotland Forever, but to me it’s always been The Charge of the Light
Brigade. That’s what my father told me it was and we always believe what
our fathers tell us, don’t we?
It was a good T-bone steak, medium
rare, and I was thoroughly enjoying it when the picture caught my eye.
“Scotland Forever!”
“I’m sorry dear?” My wife looked up from her poached
salmon fillet.
“Scotland
Forever,” I gestured with my fork. “The print on the wall.”
“Oh, I thought you were talking about the referendum.”
Which we had been. The news having come in overnight
that the Scots appeared to be the first and only race in history who, given the
chance of independence, had peacefully voted to remain united with their
erstwhile oppressors. Making an interesting comparison with independence
movements in other parts of the world – Eastern Europe being a topical example
- where such deliberations were more often accompanied by violence and
bloodshed.
And looking at the picture reminded me of something
that an old German had said at my father’s funeral, about how the ghosts of
past conflicts always come back to haunt us.
He was a farmer, my father, except for the few years in
his youth when he served as a squaddie in the East Yorkshire Regiment. Active well
into his late seventies, whistling a favourite dog behind a mob of sheep or
getting the cows into the milking shed. He seemed indestructible and it had
been a shock to receive a telephone call from my brother telling me that he had
passed away and of the arrangements for the funeral.
So it was in complete contrast to the heat of a Perth
summer that I shivered in the grey November drizzle outside York Crematorium. In
addition to the family and the handful of friends he had not managed to outlive,
there was a representative from the British Legion, come to convey their
respects at the passing of a former comrade, and an elderly German. I didn’t
remember my father having any German friends so I wondered what he was doing
there, until my brother took me aside.
“Mum invited him. He was a prisoner of war that Dad
met just after it ended. They used to be good friends, although that was mostly
Christmas and Birthday Cards in recent years. But he seems a nice enough old
boy. He came by taxi from Leeds Airport but I’ve said you’ll drive him back. Is
that okay?”
What could I say?
The memorial service was brief. My brother said a few
words, remembering the father and the farmer and relating some semi-amusing
anecdotes about his successes and failures on both counts. The man from the
British Legion spoke about his wartime service. Which was quite a surprise
really, as Dad never talked about the war, at least not to us boys. So I
listened with belated respect as the man outlined his record, which included
being among the first ashore at D-Day and then spearheading most of Monty’s
battles across northern Europe before being wounded and invalided out in April
1945.
It was still raining when we left the chapel. Mum had
elected not to receive his ashes, preferring they be scattered over the
crematorium’s garden, and we set off to the nearby Marcia Inn where my brother had booked a room for lunch.
Where there was another print of Scotland Forever!
The old German was standing in front of it, intently
studying the detail of the horses and the red uniforms, and I was able to study
him more closely. A slender man, of medium height, he had removed the dark blue
overcoat he had worn to the crematorium to reveal a neatly pressed charcoal
grey suit. His bony hands rested on the silver knob of a straight, polished cane
and I recalled that he walked with a slight limp as we had left the chapel. Evidence
of advanced age was wrought into the hollow cheeked, trench-traced face above
which a sparse stubble of white hair fought a rear-guard action. He turned as I
approached and appraised me with a pair of pale blue, impassive eyes.
“The Charge of
the Light Brigade.” I said, in answer to what I assumed he intended to ask.
“Vas?”
“Well it’s actually called Scotland Forever and it shows the Royal Scots Greys at the charge
of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War.”
“Whoever told you zat?” His voice was sharp, but not
unfriendly.
“My father.”
“Ach! And of course you vould believe him. But I am
sorry to correct you. The painting is, in fact, showing the Royal Scots Greys
at Waterloo. It was painted by Lady Butler. But the painting is quite inaccurate.
The Scots Greys did not charge at Waterloo. They advanced at a quick walk. It
was too dangerous to do otherwise on the already broken ground of ze
battlefield.”
I stared back at him in open mouthed surprise. I felt
crushed, like a schoolboy whose errors have been excruciatingly exposed and
corrected by a sadistic teacher.
The pale blue eyes twinkled and the stern lips curved
into a smile of comprehension. “Forgive me, you are William’s younger son,
James, are you not? It is so many years since I have seen you zat I had
forgotten. History was not your father’s greatest interest. I fear I may have
confused him, and he you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t remember you at all. I must have
been very young.”
“Indeed you were, still a kleinkind, a toddler as you would say.”
“Did you visit us often, when we were children?”
“Not so often, our lives took quite different paths. And
I had not seen your father for many years.” He paused and his eyes took on a
wistful hue. “It is very good to be able to say auf wiedersehen to a former
comrade in arms.” He saw the quizzical look on my face and continued. “We
fought against one another but I never thought of him as an enemy. And he saved
my life, in more ways than one.”
“I didn’t know, is it a long story?”
“Not so long. But we have your father’s life to
celebrate and you have other guests. We will have some time on the drive to the
airport. Now, if you will please excuse me, I should like to say a few words to
your mother.”
I nodded and moved aside to let him pass. Then I
turned back to the picture. The Battle of Waterloo! And all these years I had
thought it represented the Charge of the Light Brigade. I wondered how my
father had come to that mistaken impression; but I would have to wait to find
out. It was time to circulate and say thank you to the mourners.
The rain had cleared by the time we finished lunch but
the short winter daylight was already fading. The traffic was light on the A54
although the evening rush hour would make for slower going around the Leeds
Ring Road. But we were in plenty of time for the flight to Berlin. The old
German sat in the passenger seat, his blue overcoat buttoned against the cold,
despite the warm air blowing from the heating vents.
“I am pleased to say zat your mother is looking very
well. Such a sad loss to her, to you all. Will she remain at the farm do you
think?”
His English was near perfect with only the occasional
hint of Germanic vowels and consonants. I grinned. “They’ll have to carry her
out in a box, just like my father. Not that it’s likely anytime soon.”
“And you? You are settled in Australia.”
“My wife is Australian, my children are Australian.
It’s been good to me. And I can visit Mum when I need to.”
“That is good, Ja. And …so … you would like me to tell
you about how I met your father and why he thought zat picture was of the
Charge of the Light Brigade?”
Yes, please. But not …” I thought of my father’s
reluctance to talk about his own wartime experiences, “if it is--“
“Too painful? Don’t vorry James, I have long ago
learned how to deal viz the demons in my past. I told you that your father
saved my life. That was in Normandy, when your father’s war was just beginning
but mine had come to an end.” He paused and sat silent for a few moments as if arranging
his thoughts.
“You might not think it from the television histories,
but D-Day was the easy bit for many Allied soldiers. The real fighting began as
they pushed inland where it was brutal, as deadly as anything I had experienced
on the Eastern Front. I was taken prisoner when my unit was cut off defending
Caen. I would have chosen to fight on and take my chances but our officer
ordered us to raise our hands. After disarming us some Tommie’s, commanded by a
corporal, marched us towards the rear. We almost never got there. On the way we
ran into a squad of Canadians sheltering in a wrecked barn. They were drunk and
trigger happy. They took one look at our German uniforms and suddenly there
were a dozen rifles pointing at us. I didn’t speak English then but I could
tell from their tone that the Canadians were telling the corporal to get him
and his men out of the way. Here it comes, I thought. All the way through
Russia with hardly a scratch and I’m going to die in a barn in Normandy. But I
didn’t. That corporal doggedly stood his ground, defying the Canadians to shoot
him. And perhaps they would have except for the appearance of an officer who
ordered them to lower their weapons. That corporal vas your father.”
He paused, giving me the chance to digest the
information.
“So he did save your life,” I said. “But why did the
Canadians want to kill you?”
“Ach, James, it is not always so easy judge men’s
actions during a war. The SS had shot some Canadians who were trying to
surrender. Perhaps they thought they could even up the score.
“But … were you.” I hesitated, unsure if I should be
asking such a question.
“In the SS? No,” said the German quietly. “But by then
we were all guilty.”
I gripped the
wheel and stared ahead at the road, starting to regret having initiated the
conversation.
“You father prevented murder. For that he cannot be
faulted. Whether I or any of the men he saved that day deserved to die is a
matter for others, maybe for God, to decide. Anyway, on that day, for me, the fighting
was over. I was shipped to England and remained in a prison camp in Yorkshire until
the war ended. Then I vas allowed day release to work on the local farms. The
work was hard, the famers were hard men, but zey treated us fairly. We were not
allowed to return home while the Allied governments argued about what was to
happen to Germany. Stalin would have happily executed all German prisoners or
worked them to death with forced labour. And at the time I might have been
happy for him to do so. The news I received from Germany sent me into despair.
My entire family and all my friends had been killed. There was literally
nothing for me to return to.”
“And it was in Yorkshire that you met my father
again?”
“Ya, that is so. Initially we were not allowed to
fraternise viz the local people. Of course we got to know the farmers for whom
we worked but anything further was forbidden. But after a while the regulations
were relaxed and I was invited to a Christmas party. One of the men there looked
familiar but it took me some time to remember that he had been the corporal who
had stood up to those Canadians. Of course, I had learned to speak English by
then and I introduced myself to express my gratitude. It vas the start of our
friendship. He was a farmer and I was, by then, a skilled labourer at a time
when Britain needed as many willing hands as she could find. So I worked on
your family’s farm until my release and continued to do so as a free man. I had
nothing to go back to Germany for and your father had offered me the chance of
a new life in Britain. I could have stayed, as many Germans did. But life is
never so simple. After a time I began to compare my life in Yorkshire with what
I heard of conditions in my homeland, the Vaterland as we were not allowed to
call it anymore, and I knew I had to go back. Germany had to be rebuilt and who
else was there to rebuild it but those of us who, for better or worse, had
survived. And as we rebuilt our country so we rebuilt our own shattered lives,
although I can tell you zat bricks and mortar can be healed more quickly than broken
souls.”
“But you remained friends … with my father?”
“Just so. We visited each other several times in those
early years even though travel between Britain and the Continent was not so
easy as now. But not …” he shrugged his shoulders, “not so much in recent
years. It’s not, you understand, that we grew to be lesser friends. It’s just
that our lives moved in different directions. We had less in common.”
“He remained a farmer,” I observed. “But what about
you?”
“I became a teacher.”
“Of history? You seem to know a bit about history.”
“Mein Gott, no. Germany does not have a history, it has
only a past. Germany did not even exist as a nation before 1871. No, I did not
want to have to worry if what I was teaching conformed to the latest government
diktats of how the past should be interpreted. I taught mathematics and
science. There was safety in the certainty of numbers.”
We were approaching Whitmore and the turn off for the
ring road west towards the airport.
“Tell me about the painting,” I said. “How did my
father come to be confused about it?”
“Ach yes, ze painting.” And again there was a pause
while he gathered his thoughts.
“It is difficult to explain without giving you some
idea of how I felt then, about the war and Germany’s part in it.” He stopped
and I glanced across at him. He was staring out of the window as if seeking
inspiration from the grey skies and brown, muddy fields flashing past on either
side.
“You should realise, James, that what seems obvious
now, viz the benefit of hindsight, did not seem so obvious at the time, sixty
years ago, when I was growing up. Germany was a defeated and a deeply divided
nation. Defeated in body and spirit. A carcase being squeezed, as Clemenceau
the French Premier intended, until its very bones bled. Divided between rich
and poor, and between political extremists, the communists and the
nationalists. You vill have read about what ze Great Depression did to the
lives of ordinary people in Britain, or even in Australia. But in Germany! Ach,
conditions were truly terrible. Inflation wiped out the savings of ordinary
Germans and there was hunger and despair anywhere. The only messages of hope
that spoke to ordinary working Germans were those of the Communists and the National
Socialists – the Nazis. The Communists were well organised, Stalin saw to that,
and in 1932 it looked as if the they were going to win the next election. To prevent
that Hitler did a deal with the Army to get himself appointed Chancellor. And
with his hands on the levers of power, well you know the rest. But at the time
there were many who supported him. We saw what was happening in Russia. The great
political purges, the Show Trials, the liquidation of the Kulaks, the better
off farmers, and the catastrophic famines. These were common knowledge in
Germany and many saw the evil that was Communism and fought against it. Many of
them joined the Nazi party. I did.”
We had passed through a brief shower but now the last
rays of the setting sun emerged through a gap in the grey clouds shrouding the
Pennines, momentarily turning the wet road into a sparkling golden river. Then
the clouds swallowed the last of the sunlight and I flicked on the headlights.
“Does that shock you, James?” he asked. And then, not
waiting for a reply, continued. “It’s hard to explain to people today what it
felt like to live in Germany then, in the shadow of Communism. But that’s why,
in 1939, when I was old enough, I applied to join the SS Liebstandarte Division,
Hitler’s personal bodyguard. I was bitterly disappointed when they turned me
down as not being physically perfect enough. But I was determined to serve my
Fuhrer so I joined the Army instead. And when the war came I was proud to do my
part in defence of the Fatherland. You will question how invading Poland and
France contributed to its defence. But we believed Hitler when he told us that it
was a necessary preparation for the final showdown with the communists.
“And then, in August 1941, I marched east, confident
that we would soon be in Moscow and writing Stalin’s obituary. And surely you
must know that in those first few months the peoples of the Ukraine and western
Russia greeted us as liberators. They were glad to see the back of the communists
and the hated collectivisations that starved millions to death. I was in a
front line unit, advancing as fast as my feet and our horses could carry us.
And we marched and fought and marched on while the Russians died or ran before
us. And behind us? Well things were happening that it was sometimes best not to
ask too closely about. But it was us or the communists.
“And so, by October we found ourselves entering the
Crimea, the place where it vas said that Iron Crosses grew. But to get there we
had to cross the isthmus of Perekop, the narrow land bridge from the mainland.
The Russians had turned it into a killing field nicknamed the Tartar Wall. Iron
Crosses grew on the Tartar Wall all right. It’s where I won mine. The fighting was
so savage, so extreme that, even now, I am amazed that I managed to survive it.
But, eventually, the Russians gave way and we were able to move south into the
Crimea where the prize was Sevastopol. We were desperate to seize it and the
Russians equally desperate to hold onto it. Our only chance was to get there
quickly, before the retreating Russians had managed to lock themselves securely
inside. But it was already late October and the weather had turned against us.
It was very cold and wet and the rain and the mud slowed us down.
“And so, by the end of the month we finally got to the
outskirts of Sevastopol, arriving at a place you vill have heard of, ze little port
of Balaclava, nestled at the head of a narrow inlet hemmed in by steep hills,
almost like a little fjord. My unit was ordered to occupy the heights of a ridge
separating two valleys about a mile north of Balaclava. We scrambled up onto
the ridge and dug in, readied our weapons and prepared to sit out the night.
Just before dusk we spotted a patrol of Russian cavalry scouting along the
ridge to our north. Horses were no strangers to us on the Eastern Front, but
the sight of a troop of Cossack cavalry trotting along the distant skyline
seemed a throwback to an earlier time.
“It must have been close to All Hallows’ Eve, or what
you call Halloween, that night in the year when the dead have a final chance to
seek vengeance on their living enemies. Of course none of us cared about that. We
were only focussed on surviving the freezing night. The sky cleared towards
midnight and the temperature plummeted. The stars seemed to blaze in the sky
and crystals of frost began to glaze our helmets and the rocks amongst which we
were sheltering. Towards dawn even colder air sliding down from the northern
heights began to form a thick mist where it met the valley floor. From where we
crouched it looked as if the mist was rising out of the ground itself.
“And then we heard the clink and jingling of metal and
the snorting of horses. It vas a cavalry patrol approaching, hidden by ze mist.
But a gust of the morning breeze thinned it enough so that we caught sight of
them. There were no more than a half-troop and they were advancing in line as
if preparing to charge. The leader halted them when they were a little over 300
metres away and studied our position through field glasses. They must have
known we were there. We could have cut them down with our machine guns, but
that would have shown them how few we were, so we held fire. The slope up the
ridge to our position was quite gentle, no trouble to horses, but we had the
advantage of the cover of the rocks. Then the mist closed over the horsemen and
we stared blindly down the slope. We could hear the shouts of the troop leader,
or maybe it was their Commissar, exhorting them. We called down, ‘Come on Ivan,
what are you waiting for?’
“Then there was blast on a whistle, loud cheering from
fifty or so Cossack throats and the thunder of hooves as the horses gathered
momentum on the frosty ground. We opened fire, shooting blind into ze mist, hoping
that we were hitting them. And then they were upon us. I saw the leading horses
tear out of the mist galloping straight towards our position. But what had
originally appeared to be no more than a half-troop had greatly increased in number.
And now it was not just Cossacks charging at us. In addition to the uniformed
regulars there was an even greater number of partisans. Dressed in archaic,
tattered uniforms, with odd shaped helmets and wielding old fashioned sabres.
Their horses, big fearsome beasts were mostly white. Some had pushed in amongst
the ranks of the Cossacks and more were pressing up from the rear. There were
too many and they were too close. We shot down dozens but more rode on rolling
over our position and heading up the ridge line to the next one. It was
hopeless. I knew I was going to die. We were surrounded by a press of kicking
beasts and savagely hacking men and it was only a matter of time. A huge
partisan in a tattered red jacket charged at me, screaming a war cry in a
language I could not understand. I aimed my rifle at his chest, pulled the
trigger and swore in frustration as the hammer clicked onto an empty chamber. I
grasped it by the barrel and raised it like a club. I parried the first blow
but the force of the slashing sabre sent me reeling and before I had time to
recover the second cut came slicing towards my head. I ducked but it caught me
on the shoulder. I fell and must have smashed my head against a rock because
that’s the last thing I remember.
“Those Cossacks and the partisans did their job well.
They drove us back from our positions at the same time as a Russian infantry
column, reinforced with a few tanks, swept up the northern valley. It was a
desperate affair. But those left alive managed to scramble back to safety,
dragging the wounded with them. I survived and awoke in a field dressing
station with a nasty sabre cut to my shoulder. I had ducked just enough and the
blow was a glancing one, but it took several weeks before I was declared fit enough
to re-join. By then my regiment had been destroyed in the assaults on
Sevastopol and I was sent back to Germany and assigned to a training battalion.
“And after that I thought little more about the action
until, one day after the war, I went with your father to Leeds to watch a
football game. We had some time before kick-off and decided to pay a visit to
the Leeds Museum. And that is where I first saw it. Lady Butler’s painting of
the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo. The white horses, the red coated
dragoons, the bearskin topped helmets, the big cavalry sabres. I could almost
feel the agony of the sabre slicing into my shoulder and it struck me, like a
thunderclap, that it was not partisans that I had seen charging towards me,
tearing that pre-dawn mist into shreds, but men like these. And then I began to
shiver in horror at the realisation that I what I had seen were these men. Not
living, but risen from the dead to fight alongside the living. Men who had once
fought the Russians but were now risen to help defend Mother Russia in her
mortal struggle against a common enemy. And in that moment my horror turned to
absolute despair as I realised just how much the German people had offended
against God and the forces of nature. We had earned their hatred and they had
summoned the dead of our enemies to help the living to defeat us. All of that I
realised as I looked at the painting and recognised in it the British Dragoons
that had charged at me on that late October morning just north of Balaclava. Not
partisans, but the risen bodies of Dragoons that had fallen on those same
positions 87 years before, almost to the day. And of course I was able to go to
the library and check. Sure enough I discovered that Dragoons of the Scots
Greys had been part of the Heavy Brigade of cavalry that had won a famous
victory at the Battle of Balaclava. But British defeats are sometimes more
glorious and it is the ill-fated charge of Light Brigade later that same morning
that you all remember.
“But I had seen them, those Dragoons and to me, with
the scene burned into my memory, they looked exactly as Lady Butler pictured
them in their scarlet jackets on big grey horses. And I can still remember the
screamed war cry of ‘Scotland Forever’ as the sabre hacked into my shoulder.”
I had glanced across at him several times as he
recounted his tale. His face had set into a chilling, pale mask and his eyes
appeared to be fixed on a point in the distance; but I knew that he was not
seeing the road or the headlights of the cars flicking past. Now he turned to
me, his eyes blinking back tears.
“Your father saw me staring at ze painting and I tried
to explain to him what I had seen. But he was a practical, rational man and he
thought I was being fanciful. Everything he knew about Balaclava he got from
Tennyson’s poem which he knew by heart. For him it was always the Light
Brigade. But the Hussars and Lancers wore blue at Balaclava and I know what I
saw.”
He turned his head again to stare out of the window
and I wondered if he could still see the ghosts of those Dragoons, galloping
across the Yorkshire country side in the fading light. Then he turned back to
me. “But the story does not end there, James,” he continued. “After Stalin died
Khrushchev decided to hand ze Crimea to the Ukraine, a state Stalin himself created
out of Soviet territory for the purpose of garnering compliant votes at the
fledgling United Nations. God knows why Khrushchev did it. There was no
strategic or military logic to it. Quite ze opposite, he had just handed the
best naval base in the Black Sea to another country. Which was fine as long as
they were all bound together in the Soviet Union. But now? The Soviet empire has
crumbled and there are a jumble of new republics on Mother Russia’s borders. But
the ogre of nationalism only slumbers in the breast of the bear. It won’t take
much to wake it. A little agitation from the Ukrainians for closer ties with
NATO and the European Union and … maybe the Crimea will once again be a
flashpoint between empires. It took the British and French a year to capture
Sevastopol. It took our 11th Army six months and when the Russians
returned in 1944 it took them almost as long to recapture it. The number of
Russian dead from those battles is incalculable. Far too many for Russians to
ever think of the Crimea as anything less than sacred soil. And that doesn’t
take into consideration the countless Tartars, Germans, British, French, Turks
and others who have fallen in that blood soaked peninsula. Maybe some of those
dead will have to rise again. But whose side will they be on next time?”
The light was almost gone as we pulled off the ring
road and drove past Bramhope village. I could see the lights of the airport terminal
off to the left, across the wintry darkening fields and the jets making their
final approaches over the brooding mass of the Chevin. The German reached into
his jacket pocket and pulled out a medal. I recognized it as an Iron Cross. He
held it out to me. “Vould you like it? I cannot hand this on to anyone in my
family. It’s too painful a symbol. But perhaps you would like to have it. I
thought at one time of giving it to your father. But he wanted to forget the
war. He wanted us all to live in peace in a new Europe in which the old
enmities were buried and forgotten. The only battles worth fighting are now on
the football field, he would say. ‘We went one up in 1966 and you’ve pulled
back a couple since then. But there’s still the second half to go.’”
He smiled at the recollection. “But it’s not so easy
for me. I was, for a time anyway, a loyal Nazi. I believed in Germany’s
destiny, in the righteousness of a German victory. Now? Now I know that it was
never to be, and for very good reasons. But as the memories fade some of those
reasons seem less apparent. You cannot bury the past like you can bury its dead.
It always come back to haunt you. Like a half forgotten country that each
generation has to rediscover for itself.
“You know James, most people imagine that history flows
in the direction of a future that they hope will be better than the past. But that
is an illusion, merely part of our desire to impose order and meaning into our
lives. We look for a pattern in history to reassure us that good will
eventually triumph over evil. But will it? There were times when I really
believed that what happened during the war could never happen again. But now
I’m not so sure. It’s not just in the Russian bear where nationalism is stirring.
I see chauvinism and xenophobia re-appearing in many places. It’s a mistake to
think that history has the power to make us better men. We make our own history,
for good or evil.” He paused and stared at the Iron Cross in his hand. “And
this medal reminds me of that sorry fact, that when we let it, evil will
triumph over good.”
I pulled into the approach lane for the departure
terminal and stopped in a waiting bay. The rain had started to fall again. I
knew that I ought to say something, if only to acknowledge that I had been
listening, but the enigmatic complexion and profound emotion of the old man’s
story had left me struggling for comprehension and for words to adequately
express my reaction. Then I felt a reassuring hand on my arm.
“Thank you for listening to the ramblings of an old man.
And thank you for the lift, I hope I have not bored you.”
“Not at all, I’m very glad you were able to come to
the funeral.” My face flushed as I mouthed the phlegmatic and totally inadequate
rejoinder. To cover my embarrassment I walked around to open his door and to help
him out. He swung his legs around, accepted the help of my arm as he stood up
and stretched to ease the stiffness.
“It vas no trouble. He was a good man, your father. He
saw the best in everybody, even when it was not always deserved. I can find my
way from here, there is no need to wait.”
“Will you be okay?”
“Yes, thank you. The flight to Berlin is quite short
and my daughter will meet me at the airport.”
He held out his hand, the Iron Cross was in the palm
with the red, white and black ribbon looped over the fingers.
“Please take it James and think of an old soldier from
time to time.”
He pressed the medal into my hand and then shook it
vigorously. “Ouch!” He grimaced and
grabbed his shoulder with the other hand, rubbing at the soreness.
“Old war wound.” The grimace melted into a smile.
“Scotland Forever! You von’t forget, now, vill you?”
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