It was a typical main street in a typical high alpine village. The buildings lining either side of the street, solid, rugged, four-square buildings, looked as if they had been defying the bitter Bavarian winters for a long long time and intended going on doing so for as long again. Nearly all the houses were of the wooden chalet type, with great sweeping eaves and balconies running the full width of the front of the houses. A few were of comparatively modern construction, with shingled walls, large double-glazed windows and fancy wrought-iron grille-work, but most were very old and low, planked with rough adze-cut wood, and having the interlocking wall-beams projecting at the corners.
There were no street lamps but neither was there any attempt at a blackout. Elongated rectangles of light from uncurtained windows patterned the snow-packed streets. Beyond the far or southern end of the street, intermittently seen through the sweeping curtains of snow, a duster of bright lights seemed to hang suspended in the sky. Instinctively, almost, Smith stopped to gaze at this distant constellation and his men stopped with him. The lights of the Schloss Adler, the castle of the eagle, seemed impossibly remote, as unattainable as the mountains of the moon. Wordlessly, the men looked at them in long silence, then at one another, then, by mutual and still silent consent, moved on their way again, their boots crunching crisply in the beaten snow, their frozen breaths wisping away in the chill night wind.
The main street — the only street — was deserted, quite empty of life. Inevitably so, on so bitter a night. But if the street was deserted, the village was anything but: the sounds of laughter and singing and the babel of voices filled the night air and the nose-to-tail row of parked German trucks along one side of the street showed clearly enough just who was responsible for the singing and the laughter. For the training troops in the military barracks’ on the Blau See there was only one centre of entertainment for twenty miles around and this village was it: the Gasthauser and Weinstuben were jammed to the doors with soldiers of the Alpenkorps, probably the most highly trained combat troops in Europe.
Schaffer said plaintively: ‘I don’t really feel like a drink, boss.’
‘Nonsense,’ Smith said encouragingly. ‘You’re just shy at the thought of meeting strangers.’ He stopped in front of a Gastbaus with the legend ‘Drei Konige’ above the door. ‘Here’s a likely looking place, now. Hang on a minute.’
He climbed the steps, opened the door and looked inside. Down in the street the other five looked at one another, the same mingled apprehension and expectancy mirrored in every eye. Austrian Schrammel music, hauntingly and nostalgically evocative of a kindlier and happier age, flooded through the open doorway. The expressions on the faces of the men below didn’t change. There was a time and a place for Schrammel music and this wasn’t it.
Smith shook his head, closed the door and rejoined his men.
‘Packed,’ he said. ‘Not even standing room.’ He nodded across the street to another hostelry, the ‘Eichhof,’ a small, squat, beetle-browed building with adze-cut corner beams and an air of advanced dilapidation. ‘Let’s see what this has to offer.’
But the ‘Eichhof had nothing to offer. Regretfully but firmly Smith closed its front door and turned away.
‘Jammed,’ he announced. ‘Besides, a low-class dump unsuitable for officers and N.C.O.s of the Wehrmacht. But this next place looks more promising, don’t you think?’
From the pointed silence it was apparent that the other five didn’t think anything of the kind, and, in fact, apart from the factor of size, the third Wemstube looked remarkably like the ones Smith had just passed up. ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’, it was called, and above the sign was a snow-shrouded wooden carving of a wild deer.
Smith walked up the half-dozen steps to the front door and opened it. He winced as the blast of sound reached him, an almost physical assault upon the eardrums. Heaven knew the last two Weinstuben had been clamorous enough but compared to this place they now seemed, in retrospect, to have been invested in a cathedral silence. To the blaring accompaniment of a battery of discordant accordions what appeared, from the sheer volume of sound, to be an entire regiment were giving ‘Lili Marlene’ all they had. Smith glanced at his men, nodded and passed inside.
As the others followed, Schaffer paused in the doorway as Christiansen took his arm and said wonderingly: ‘You think he thinks this isn’t packed?’
“They must,’ Schaffer conceded, ‘have had them packed six deep in the other joints.’
They weren’t exactly stacked six deep inside ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’ but they might well have been if the music-swaying crowd of elbow-jostling customers has assumed the horizontal instead of the perpendicular. He had never, Smith thought, seen so many people in one bar before. There must have been at least four hundred of them. To accommodate a number of that order called for a room of no ordinary dimensions, and this one wasn’t. It was a very big room indeed. It was also a very very old room.
The floor of knotted pine sagged, the walls sagged and the massive smoke-blackened beams on the roof seemed to be about ready to fall down at any moment. In the middle of the room stood a huge black wood-burning stove, a stove stoked with such ferocious purpose that the cast-iron top cover glowed dull red. From just below the cover two six-inch twenty-foot long black-enamelled stove pipes led off to points high up on opposite sides of the room–a primitive but extremely efficient form of central heating. The three-sided settees–half booths–lining three walls of the room were of oak darkened by age and smoke and unknown centuries of customers, each booth having recessed holes for stowing newspapers rolled round slats of wood. The twenty or so tables scattered across the floor had hand-cut wooden tops of not less than three inches in thickness with chairs to match. Most of the back of the room was taken up by a solid oaken bar with a coffee-machine at one end, and, behind the bar, swing doors that presumably led to the kitchen. What little illumination there was in the room came from ceiling-suspended and very sooty oil lamps, each one with its generations-old patch of coal-black charred wood in the roof above.
Smith transferred his attention from the room to the customers in the room, a clientele of a composition such as one might expect to find in a high Alpine village with a military encampment at its back door. In one corner were a group of obvious locals, men with still, lean, aquiline, weather-beaten faces, unmistakably men of the mountains, many of them in intricately embroidered leather jackets and Tyrolean hats. They spoke little and drank quietly, as did another small group at the back of the room, perhaps a dozen or so nondescript civilians, clearly not locals, who drank sparingly from small Schnapps glasses. But ninety per cent of the customers were soldiers of the German Alpenkorps, some seated, many more standing, but all giving of their very best with ‘Lili Marlene’, and nearly all of them enthusiastically waving their pewter-capped litre Steinbechers in the air, happily oblivious, in that moment of tearfully nostalgic romanticism, of the fact that the amount of beer finding its way to comrades’ uniforms and the floor was about the equivalent of a moderately heavy rainstorm.
Behind the bar was the obvious proprietor, a gargantuan three-hundred pounder with an impassive moon-like face and several girls busy filling trays with Steinbechers. Several others moved about the room, collecting or serving beer-mugs. One of them approaching in his direction caught Smith’s eye.
It would have been surprising if she hadn’t. It would have been surprising if she hadn’t caught the attention of every man there. But there was no surprise. She did. She would have won any Miss Europe contest hands down if she had had a face other than her own which, though pleasant and plump, was rather plain. But any possible lack of attraction in that cheerfully smiling face was more than over-compensated for elsewhere. She was dressed in a gaily-patterned dirndl and Tyrolean blouse, had a hand-span waist, an hour-and-a-half-glass figure and an obvious predilection for low-cut blouses, that in terms of attracting local custom, must have been worth a fortune to the gigantic proprietor behind the bar. She drew a great deal of attention from the assembled soldiery, not all of it just consisting of admiring glances : if she weren’t wearing armour-plating, Smith reflected, she must be permanently black and blue. She approached Smith, brushed back her blonde hair and smiled, the gesture as provocative as the smile.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Dark beer, please,’ Smith said politely. ‘Six.’
‘With pleasure, sir.’ Again the provocative smile, this time accompanied by a half-appraising, half-lingering look from cornflower blue eyes, then she turned and walked away, if her method of locomotion could strictly be described as walking. Schaffer, a slightly dazed expression on his face, stared after her, then caught Smith by the arm.