PROLOGUE

       A Fine Morning to Die in

      The bodies started to come in with the tide just after dawn, clustered together, bobbing in through the surf to the beach a hundred feet below my hiding place.

      The bay was called Horseshoe for obvious reasons. As a boy, I had swum down there on more occasions than I could remember and there was an excellent beach when the tide was out. An inhospitable shore now though, seeded with mines and choked by barbed wire strung between rusting steel lances. No place to be, alive or dead, on a cold April morning.

      It was raining slightly and visibility was not good in the dawn mist so that even Fort Victoria on its rocky point a quarter of a mile away was barely visible.

      I took a cigarette from my waterproof tin, lit it and sat there watching more bodies float in, but not from any morbid curiosity. It was impossible for me to leave the shelter of those gorse bushes before nightfall. If I attempted to move in daylight, capture was certain on such a small island, especially now that my presence was known.

      Five years of war had left me indifferent where death was concerned, even to its uglier aspects. The time when a body had any emotional effect was long since gone. I had seen too many of them. The fact of death was all that mattered. Down there, British and German floated together and at that distance, it was impossible to distinguish between them, which proved something.

      Another wave slopped in, flinging a body high in the air, casting it farther up the beach than the others. As it landed, a mine exploded, tossing it up again, arms flailing wildly as if there was still life there. What was left was flung across the wire to hang like raw meat.

      It was perhaps ten minutes later that the next one floated in, supported by a yellow life-jacket. The sea retreated with a great sucking noise, leaving the body face down. It seemed to move slightly. At first I thought I was mistaken. A trick of the light or the fact that even in shallow water, it behaved differently from the others because of the inflated life-jacket.

      But I was wrong, for as the curtain of green foam slopped in again, an arm was raised to claw at air and I seemed to hear a faint cry as the man was pushed towards the wire.

      For the next two or three minutes, succeeding waves failed to reach him. He lay there as if exhausted, then tried to push himself up as a great comber roiled in and flattened him. When it receded, he was still alive, but there could only be one end to the game that was being played down there.

      I crouched in the shelter of the gorse bushes, waiting for something to happen. Anything that would make it unnecessary for me to play at heroes. It came from an unexpected quarter, the fold in the cliffs on my right from which a narrow track dropped to the beach.

      I heard voices first, calling excitedly, then half-a-dozen men appeared and paused on the brow of the hill about fifty feet above the sea. They were Todt workers, a few of the poor wretches brought over from France to labour on the island’s fortifications. This lot were a road gang from the looks of them and carried picks and shovels. There were no guards, which wasn’t unusual. The island, after all, was as effective a prison in itself as could have been found anywhere.

      They seemed to be having an argument, then one of them moved ahead and started to slide down the slope to the beach below. He dropped the last ten or fifteen feet into soft sand, picked himself up and approached the wire. He was a brave man, and closer to death than he perhaps knew.

      Another great wave rolled in, washing a second body into the minefield. There was a sudden eruption and for a moment, the sea boiled. When it drew back, I was surprised