CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In the Rathaus the Burgomaster’s telephones were ringing continually: ‘01.39. Florastrasse. High explosive. Fifteen wounded, two dead. Mains intact. Road blocked.’
The telephonist bit her lip as she impaled her written message upon the spike with the others. She lived in Florastrasse.
‘01.40. Railway line near brewery. High explosive. No casualties. Railway blocked.’
‘01.41. St Antonius Hospital. High explosive. Unknown casualties. Mains intact. Road blocked.’
Munro’s cookie hit the St Antonius Hospital. It landed squarely upon the front steps of its neo-classical façade. The fine columns and the great pediment collapsed and some of the girders followed it. Luckily the front of the hospital consisted of offices, the main staircase, the lift, the inquiry desk and storerooms. One of the operating theatres was severely damaged too, although the boiler house below ground escaped. The heating system and hot-water supply were in full working order as soon as the broken pipes had been cut out of the system by screwing up the valves. The doorman lost one of his legs and a doctor suffered bad scalds on his upper body from the broken central heating. Two theatre nurses had to be treated for shock and small multiple injuries. Four patients were cut by flying glass. At the time it seemed a miracle that so little damage had been done to the hospital by such an enormous bomb.
On the other hand the raid had scarcely started yet and the damage to the steelwork had made the whole structure unsafe. More immediately, since the sloping ramps and the big—bed-size—lift shaft had gone, it meant that there was no way of evacuating the bedridden patients from the upper floors. In the wards the flashes of bombs and guns were lighting up the frightened faces of the trapped patients. The markers painted the sheets bright green and yellow and the shadows moved eerily across the floor and up the walls as the flares floated down upon the town. Everyone wanted attention: bed-pans, sleeping tablets, a drink of water or just a word of comfort. The ones that could walk insisted upon going to the toilet even though that was forbidden once the night shift began. They huddled at the window, these frightened, privileged, mobile few. One of the A Flight Lancs dropped a salvo near the Liebefrau church. Then Jammy Giles came across the town. ‘Bombs gone, Jammy. It wasn’t awfully good, I’m afraid.’ The explosion shattered more of the hospital windows and threw a dozen patients fulllength to the floor. The far end of Dorfstrasse was just hot rubble.
‘Get two dozen nurses from the dance,’ ordered Matron.
‘They are in the shelter,’ said the ward sister.
‘We need them here,’ said Matron.
Throughout Altgarten a special burden of responsibility had fallen upon men of experience. Luftschütz officials, transport workers, gas engineers, electrical fitters and telephone linesmen had all begun to take their orders from the men who had experienced in other towns air raids of this ferocity. The fire chief, for instance, was depending upon Johannes Ilfa’s eighteen months’ duty in Cologne to provide solutions to the problems that arose this night, but Ilfa knew that for many of the problems there were no solutions.
Altgarten’s population was about 5,000. For each person there was 30 gallons of water per day. A sum based upon a 15-hour day shows a total need for 10,000 gallons per hour. A town’s fire capacity was the margin of extra water for its fire brigades and for Altgarten this was calculated as double the normal rate. So Altgarten could produce 20,000 gallons of water per hour through its arteries until high-explosive bombs sliced those arteries and incendiary bombs by the thousand produced fires on a nightmare scale. To supply its water most of the town’s pipes were of 25-cm diameter, but the expensive new houses along Dorfstrasse and Mönchenstrasse all had bathrooms and so the next size of pipe had been fitted in those streets, and the next size was 35 cm. Small by big-city standards but tonight the large-capacity pipes along Mönchenstrasse and Dorfstrasse had become a vital defence in the battle of Altgarten.
As soon as the 2,000-lb high-capacity bombs fell on Mönchenstrasse at the Postgasse junction it was the Burgomaster’s strict order that the water pipes must be attended to before casualties or trapped survivors. The TENOs had arrived within four minutes and decided that the eighteen persons in the cellar were too near the centre of the explosion to have survived and they immediately brought out the largegirth canvas pipe sections. They kept a thin supply going until a bomb on Liebefrauplatz severed the junction. Still they continued with the repairs, working down the deep hole in shifts of four, each only being able to stand the work for five minutes at a time. They had dug down beneath the cracked pipe, slipped supports under it and hoisted it into position and then bound it with tape and glue. The men had been virtually immersed in liquid mud created by the water flow, for it would have taken the turncock half an hour of walking in a tight circle to close the main. Since water was coming from the pipe during the work the mud became more and more liquid and only by the quick-witted action of the winch operator on the stand-by lorry was Gerd Böll pulled out of the mud into which he had gone up to the armpits.
It was 01.46 when Jürgen Löwe, a Hitler Jugend messenger boy, arrived at the Rathaus. He carried his bicycle down the steps and propped it inside the sandbagged entrance.
‘The Mönchenstrasse water pipe has now been repaired.’
The Burgomaster nodded.
‘Heil Hitler,’ said the boy.
‘Heil Hitler,’ said the Burgomaster.
The waterworks master was dead. Now that the main pipeline was repaired the Burgomaster had to make a decision for which he had no training. The city stream passed near to the waterworks and then curved back to become what had once been the inner moat of the old town. Nowadays it was one of Altgarten’s most decorative features. Swans on the stream came majestically past the old timbered houses and a patient photographer could be rewarded by one of the most beautiful tourist views in the whole region. In summer the stream dwindled to little more than a gutter and in the last few rainless weeks there had been little more than damp weed there. But at least the stone canal was intact, if his most recent reports were to be believed. What was more, the irrigation valves could isolate the town section of it. If the Burgomaster deliberately pumped the water supply into the moat then the firemen would have a meandering supply of water right in the heart of the old town where the fire hazards were greatest. Each pump could take from the part of the stream nearest to the fire.
He looked at the map. There were so many fires: the Liebefrau church, the houses near the gasworks, the Volkschule, Nehringstrasse, the old market and the hospital Annex. Most of them would benefit from the stream being flooded. Now that the Mönchenstrasse pipe had been repaired they could take water out of the moat at one end of that street, pump it through the large-capacity Mönchenstrasse pipe and use it at the other end where the hospitals were.
On the other hand, the stream water was not fit for drinking and if he pumped it into the clean pipes of the town supply at Mönchenstrasse he would have to order all drinking water to be boiled for twenty minutes before use. That would be a great encumbrance to the hospital, soup kitchens and every living person in Altgarten. Furthermore, the water pipes would have to be cleaned next week and he would be called to account.
That was just one of the problems. He shuffled the memo slips on his desk. The Gasmeister had stopped sending messages by now. The gas was turned off at the gas holder. The oldest parts of the town, where they still used gas lighting, were in darkness. Here and there pockets of gas in the broken pipes were still blazing fiercely, but they would soon burn out. There would probably be no gas in the town for three days. Four times the NSV had phoned to tell him the vats of potato soup could not be ready because of the gas cut. ‘Then let them have cold soup,’ he finally snapped at them.
Ryessman called Schott, the electricity chief, whose report was brief and unequivocal. If the Florastrasse fires didn’t spread towards him and if the hospital generators kept going, the supply on the central net, ie, the city blocks to each side of Dorfstrasse from the hospital to the brewery, would be working. The rest of the town would stay dark except for the Wald Hotel and the TENO camp, which had their own generator. ‘At least that will guarantee the blackout for eighty per cent of the town,’ added the electricity master facetiously.
‘I don’t know when you last ascended from your cellar,’ said the Burgomaster coldly, ‘but half of the town is on fire. You could read a newspaper by its light, even as far away as Frau Förster’s sheds.’
‘If you would prefer me to be reading a newspaper at Förster’s sheds, Herr Bürgermeister, I will go there. But at present I am trying to keep the electricity supply of this town going in spite of losing my senior engineer and my most experienced foreman.’
‘Continue to do that, Herr Schott,’ said Ryessman angrily.
Actually Schott was being most restrained in his answer, for his chief engineer and foreman were laid out in his office. To get to his plans-chest he had to step over them. They had both been killed by the blast from one of Jammy Giles’ 1,000-lb medium-capacity bombs. They had fallen backwards and landed in a heap in the doorway of his room. With only a Hitler Jugend boy to help him, Schott hadn’t been able to get them up the steep cellar steps. So he had pulled the bodies into his office until a stretcher party could be spared.
In the Rathaus the Burgomaster ran his fingers along the course of the city stream: a blue mark on the map. A Luftschutzpolizei girl marked the map with a wax pencil as the reports came in: the southern part of the Nurses’ Training Centre was alight and they had had no reports from the Amputee Centre for some time. He suspected that the phone connection had gone and hoped the TENOs would be stringing an emergency line. If the fire jumped to the old buildings, then the St Antonius Hospital would be alight and that was packed with sick people. Some of them would be very difficult to move. He remembered that the electricity chief had made the hospital generator a condition upon which the supply of the central net would depend. Also he had said that the fire must not approach closer to the electricity station.
Electricity was still reaching the most vital sections of town: his Control Room at the Rathaus, the police station, the Emergency TENO Command Post they had set up next door, Party HQ with its soup, ration cards, blankets, money, etc, for the homeless. As long as the electricity on the central net worked, the phones would work, and there would be a chance for his town to survive.
He turned to the girl. ‘Put the city stream into the Mönchenstrasse pipes,’ he said. ‘And pump from the waterworks to keep the pressure going.’ The TENOs were at the waterworks. He was confident they could manage.
The Luftschutzpolizei girl at the phone nodded. She had never expected him to do otherwise. So many decisions were like that. She was talking to the TENOs almost before he’d finished saying it. They had already sealed off the junctions at Mönchenstrasse and Zillestrasse where the mains were severed. Now they began to pump the water into the moat. The surface started to move the way it did in winter. One TENO man was stationed up near the cemetery to watch in case the flow began to reverse. That would be dangerous, for from that point the sewage effluent was in the stream. An HJ cyclist went to tell the firemen at the hospital to run out more hose. Then he told the men near the cinema that they too could use a hydrant. Until now it had remained unused so that the hospital complex should get the pressure.
For nearly one minute they were rewarded with a highpressure jet that reached far into the fires of the Nurses’ Training Centre through the third-storey window. A muffled cheer went up from the firemen and police but it turned into a groan. What the Burgomaster could not have known was that the 2,000-lb bomb from Tommy Carter’s plane, which had landed on the corner near Voss, had caused concussion all along Mönchenstrasse. The cobbles made it difficult to see how much the camber of the street had increased. It was always a curved and bumpy surface but now some of the stones had been squeezed from the street like pips from a lemon. Under those cobbles at seven places the water pipes had opened at the caulking joints. These splits were now being made larger by the water from the city stream. Without a sign to show its going, Altgarten’s precious water was soaking into its sewers and draining away. The hoses went soft, limp and finally flat.
Even as the newly found water supply was failing and a fire messenger was running back to halt the pumps, HJ boys were pasting up typhoid warnings on the lampposts. All citizens must boil their tap water and milk before drinking it.
Now for the first time the sweet smell of the newly dead perfumed the warm streets. Few of Altgarten’s residents recognized it and some thought it might be a new sort of disinfectant, but old soldiers and TENO men glanced at each other and prepared the drums of chlorinated lime.