Where Eagles Dare

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

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