The other item that he had been issued was far more welcome: a Luger. However, Strasser had forbidden him any ammunition, so the pistol was not much better than a club. Strasser had said that was just as well, as the Luger’s capacity to jam meant that it made little difference whether it had bullets in it or not. Naturally, Lockhart would have preferred to have been properly armed, but it was reassuring to be carrying a gun again.

The group had three nights in Danzig before visiting their first POW camp, Stalag XXa near Thorn, a few hours south. Except for Lockhart, the men found the break an opportunity to sleep with nearly every dockside prostitute. Even the normally abstemious Butcher had struck personal gold by finding a half-Japanese girl. Lockhart was in no mood to stop them, reasoning that a sexually satisfied Pugh, Butcher and Worstead would be a little more relaxed and malleable. Lockhart was slightly surprised that Worstead cheated on Beth, but he didn’t ask. It made him think there was no Beth, that the whole story had been a lie, but then he knew that many men did not see whoring as cheating, especially away from home in wartime. Even if Lockhart had been the cheating kind, however, he would hardly have been tempted by what was on offer—mostly young Polish girls beaten and abused by German sailors, emaciated and riddled with God knows what.

Danzig was a grim place, Lockhart thought. Colorless and cruel, beaten down and cold, its soul broken. Sailors everywhere, green from malnourishment, and the occasional submariner, pasty from months under the Baltic. What had once been a proud port was being raped by the war, abused and spat out. It was fucked, thought Lockhart, there was no other word for it. Its women, its buildings, its pride—all were being gruesomely fucked until they were dry and cracked. Soon it would be empty, just a churning mass of black fog, steel, concrete and flesh. And sitting on top of this industrial corpse, its fluids seeping into the gulf—the drip tray under a stained dissecting table—would be the inevitable swastika, flapping wildly in a hollow gale.

The city made Lockhart feel nervous. It felt like the future, or how he imagined it—an absence of warmth and love, no freedom, and just a waiting, a longing even, for death. The future would be modern and yet barbaric, a new type of paganism, complete with its soot-rimmed chimneys and its new tortures. The human would be a unit, a statistical unit that would work to build the heartless dark glory of the Nazi corporate state, an eyeless beast that ate its own offspring, their sinews stuck in its bloodied and worn teeth as it gorged.