Chapter Text
Paddy Mayne had thought himself well-versed in the horrors men choose to inflict on each other.
He’s been fighting in this war for five years, and he’d been no real stranger to violence before that; he’s seen and done things he’ll never speak of.
But there is nothing in the world that could have prepared him for this.
“A camp,” he echoes, and Jim Almonds nods.
“A camp, Paddy. That’s what they said.”
“A — prisoner of war camp?” hazards Johnny, but his face is grim.
“Something like that,” says Jim.
It is 1945, and the war is as good as won, but between victory and conclusion lie nine wide circles of hell penned in by sheets of barbed wire. The gates to the camp are propped open. Beyond the fence, Paddy can hear shouting.
“Right boys,” he says. “Once more unto the breach.”
. . .
Inside, the camp is full of skeletons. Only half of them are dead.
The other half lie slumped at the fence, propped against greying barracks, by the wheels of trucks. They don’t seem to understand that they’re being freed. They don’t seem to understand anything at all.
They’re wearing striped uniforms, ragged and worn through, like a sick pastiche of some British boarding school sleepover. They are so thin that Paddy knows, even now, half of the survivors won’t make it through the night.
As they jump down off the trucks, a soldier from the French regiment leans over and vomits stomach acid onto the bare ground. Paddy can empathise.
There are Allied soldiers everywhere, some guarding Nazis who kneel in the dust with their hands on their heads; some with med kits, bending over prisoners; some who just stare around, blank-eyed.
The scene has a surreal, nightmarish feeling – every man here will be changed by it.
“Who’s in charge?” he asks, and someone directs him towards two men across the other side of the camp.
It is obvious at once that they're in charge: loud-voiced, broad-shouldered, holding their chins like they're balancing a fucking teacup on their heads. They are surrounded by soldiers, Brits and French and Americans, and they are speaking to a man in uniform: shining black boots; stiff collar; exquisite English. He is a monster in a tailored jacket, and he appears to be giving them a tour.
“Ex-fucking-scuse me,” says Paddy, as he approaches. “Is this a liberation or a fucking picnic?”
The Nazi's eyes fall on him.
“The famed SAS,” he says, looking pleased. His eyes flit over Paddy, and then Jim and Reg and the others. “Just yesterday, I would have shot you on sight.”
Paddy gives him an incredulous look.
“The commander,” says the first general, an American with a waxed moustache and a well-fed glow that looks indecent in this prison camp. “Is assisting us by detailing the layout of the camp.”
He has his gun trained on the Nazi, so he’s not as stupid as he looks. Still, though.
“Perhaps he could assist us better if I shot him?” Paddy suggests.
The American snorts, but the officer at his side frowns - a toff in a suit who clearly recognises Paddy.
“We do this the right way,” he says, in crisp RP. “Col. Mayne, I’ll ask you to take your men and assist in the processing and medical intervention for survivors.” His expression tightens, a little. “We need all the manpower we can get.”
“We have finished most of them off for you,” says the commander. “I suggest bonfires – for the bodies,” he adds, helpfully.
At Paddy’s side, Reg shifts.
“Permission to punch him in the fucking face, Paddy,” asks Reg.
“Oh, punch away,” says Paddy, holding eye contact with the commander.
The man flinches a second before Reg hits him, hard.
He goes down in the dust. The American looks pleased, the Brit sighs.
“Mayne—”
“I know, I know,” says Paddy. “Geneva conventions.”
Though if ever there were a place that Geneva conventions didn’t exist, it is in this fucking hellscape.
. . .
They spread out.
Jim, Pat and a handful of the others set out for the far side of the camp, where a Red Cross contingent is already making headway among the female survivors. Paddy takes Bill, Reg and Johnny to the eastern fence, where a handful of Americans are passing out supplies.
Everywhere they look there are bodies. It seems impossible, unbelievable, the scale of it all, and yet no matter how long Paddy looks it doesn't change. We have finished most of them off for you. This is what evil looks like: ordinary people in suits; guards who were still shooting even after the first Allied trucks had rolled in; men who are following orders, men who have twisted their sense of humanity through so thorough a wringer that they no longer believe what they're doing is wrong.
This is how they get you: rhetoric and propaganda, hatred so casual it's almost routine. Disgust which becomes law which becomes genocide.
This is how you built a nation of monsters.
Paddy stops by the closest American – an older man, with glasses and dirt in his hair and stripes on his sleeve. There's a younger man stood by him. They’re white-faced, grim.
The older man is knelt, holding a bowl of broth in both hands, moving from one prisoner to the next. Behind him, the younger— a boy, really, looks as helpless as Paddy feels.
“What can we do?” asks Paddy.
“The eastern barracks,” says the first man, not looking up. “They need extra hands. Those who can walk, send out here. We’ve got stretchers for those who can’t.”
“Right,” says Paddy. He gestures behind him: Bill, Reg, Johnny, all looking sick below the dirt. They nod, resolute.
“Round up any pink triangles,” the man adds, half-absently. His hand is cupped very carefully to the face of the prisoner he's helping. As Paddy watches, he smoothes a little spit from the man’s chin. “We’ll deal with them later.”
Humanitarian – he is the very picture of the saving grace.
“What the fuck do I care what colour triangle they’ve got,” says Paddy. “This isn’t a fucking fashion show.”
As far as Paddy’s concerned, any man the Nazis have seen fit to lock up is a man who he’d like to get a stiff drink with. Maybe two.
The first soldier ignores him, but his companion shrugs.
“Pink triangle’s for queers,” he says, simply. “I’d say it’d be a kindness to take ‘em out back and shoot ‘em, but the boss says round ‘em up.”
Pink triangle’s for queers.
There’s a strange high ringing in Paddy’s ears. He can feel his knuckles tightening, skin stretched white and thin across the bone.
“Right,” he says, utterly flat.
The soldier is already turning away, bending to help another prisoner sit up. He has a boyish face, a wide, pleasant way of talking. He is young. He could have been anyone.
Paddy turns around.
The others are looking at him, tight lipped. There’s something too careful about the way Reg says, “Paddy—“
“You heard the man,” snaps Paddy. “Or are youse fucking deaf and colourblind?”
He turns and strides across the compound towards the barracks.
There’s a pause, and then three sets of feet come after him: Johnny, uneven and fast; Bill, contained fury; Reg, slower, heavier.
“It’s not right,” says Johnny, bursting into a little self righteous bubble of fury as he catches up. “Paddy, we’re supposed to be liberating—“
“Did you hear the order,” says Paddy, very precisely. “Or not.”
Inside, he is crushed glass, he is acid. Outside, he tightens his grip on his gun, and does not slow his feet. There’s a pause behind him, then they’re following again.
“We heard,” says Reg, quiet.
“Good,” says Paddy.
It isn’t the worst thing they’ve ever done.
It isn’t.
Paddy has done— terrible things. Unforgivable.
But this—
He draws steel over the raw, open wound behind his ribcage, and quickens his pace.
. . .
The stench in the barracks is indescribable. Sweat and piss, human excrement, vomit and misery and blood. It is animal and visceral, and as one they rear back as they walk in, and then move grimly forward, neckerchiefs pulled up a little over their faces.
In the first room, they find bunks, stacked three high and many more deep. In the bunks—
“Fuck,” says Johnny.
Paddy feels the abject obscenity of it quiver through the four of them. He cannot give into it, or they will not get through it. He shrugs on his Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Mayne voice: the one that snaps at heels still bleeding, the one that brooks no mercy.
“Check for any living,” he orders. “Leave the rest. That is an order ,” he adds, when Bill looks like he might say something.
It is— unspeakable.
There are so few left alive.
Reg carries them outside with ineffable gentleness. They go deeper.
Rinse. Repeat.
They work through two barracks, in this way. As they go, they pass other soldiers on the same godawful mission. Blank-faced men, Brits, Americans, in and out with breathing corpses in their arms.
Some of the prisoners can walk. Some ask for food, water.
Paddy does not look into the faces of the survivors: it is impossible to see them as something human and to still get through it.
The third barracks they enter is set slightly back. On their way in, a British soldier tells them it’s the “other prisoners”: political radicals; Jehovah’s witnesses… anyone the Nazis deemed “undesirable.”
Paddy knows what this means.
In these barracks, the prisoners are separated into rooms by colour, inverted triangles splayed across their chest, just over their hearts: red and black and purple, somehow obscene – the splash of colour strangely repugnant amidst the stench and the suffering. These men look at them warily as they make their way through, uncertain what this means for them.
Johnny shares his water bottle with a man whose tipped red triangle is rusty in the low light, and the man thanks him in tripping German, then French, then English. Paddy looks away at the sight of Johnny’s face.
At the far end of the barracks, there’s a room slightly away from the others, the door standing open.
Word has spread through the camp, and the survivors have begun to stagger out of the barracks, needing to see it with their own eyes. No one has come out of this room, and Paddy does not understand why until he walks in and sees the colour of the inverted triangles sewn across their chests.
These men are ghosts.
Something has splintered deep at the base of their spines, behind the eyes. They look at Paddy as he enters, but it is not the way you look at a man come to save you. It is the way you look at a tiger, when it’s wrested you from the jaws of a snake. They already know, Paddy realises, how this is going to go.
Another soldier is in the room.
It takes Paddy a moment to notice him, partly because of the darkness, and partly because he’s bent down, over another prisoner.
For a second, Paddy thinks he’s leaning down to help, and then — with a horror-flick slowness — he sees the man’s hand go to his belt.
He lurches forward, hand already on his gun and Reg at his heels, but then the soldier lets out a howl and staggers back.
“He fucking— bit me!” He yells, stumbling against Paddy, arm clutched to his chest. “They’re fucking animals.”
“Oh, we’re all animals here,” says Paddy and raps him hard with the butt of his gun.
The man crumples.
Paddy looks at Bill.
“If anyone asks,” he says, and Bill shrugs.
“Bit himself, didn’t he.”
Speaking of.
Paddy turns back to the man on the floor. He is knelt, head hanging down, shoulders heaving from the effort it had taken him to fight the soldier off. As Paddy watches, he spits blood on the floor.
He’d bit hard, then.
Good.
It’s dark in the barracks, but still, there’s something—
There’s something—
The wild shake in Paddy’s knees kicks in a split second before the man lifts his face to the light.