The Sound of His Horn by Sarban Read Free Book Online Page B

course--subscribe to the convention that we are living in the hundred and second year of the First German Millenium as fixed by our First Fuehrer and Immortal Spirit of Germanism, Adolf Hitler."
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    5
    It amazes me now that I preserved so unruffled a faith in my own sanity all the time I was at Hackelnberg. Perhaps I did it by achieving a kind of suspension of judgment: I was in a set of curious circumstances for which I could find no immediate and satisfying explanation, but there must be an explanation and I felt I should eventually arrive at it by patient observation and reasoning. I felt an immense patience in myself. Perhaps that was a legacy of the prison camp; you can't plan and execute a tunnelling project without having or acquiring patience. Still, it is surprising how easy I found it to leave this whole matter of chronology in abeyance. The Doctor believed he was living a hundred years after the war, I believed I was living in it: time would show which of us was right. Time, yes, and space too. If I could go about a bit and see the other people at Hackelnberg, I felt I should soon know one way or the other.
    Yet, of course, I reasoned from my inner conviction, even supposing the Doctor was right, that would not prove that I was mad. The Doctor thought I was suffering from some harmless delusion, but there would be another possible explanation: might not my unconsciousness have covered a century of time? Might I not have slept in the forest now called Hackelnberg for a hundred years like Rip Van Winkle in the Catskills?
    Well, you'll probably say there was no doubt about my state of mind if I could consider such an explanation seriously. But what is a man to think when he feels so well, so balanced, so sane, and above all, when his senses are working so perfectly and he is taking such a lively interest in everything round him? Never in my life had I been so intent on observing and memorising everything I saw. I tell you, my memories of what I saw at Hackelnberg, what I felt and did there, are more vivid and real to me than anything else in my whole life.
    It was all so real, and--though it's a queer thing to say, seeing what happened--so interesting.
    I don't mean that all the discoveries were pleasant. They were not by any means. In fact, they would have appalled me if I had kept leaping back and forth across the time-gap, as it were, to look at them with the eyes of 1943. But I didn't do that. I accepted the apparent history of the last hundred years as known to Hackelnberg, and later, escape meant not escape in time, but escape in space. The problem was to get across that fence of rays again.
    After all, facing it honestly, could a humble Lieutenant of the Royal Navy in mid-1943 have been blamed for admitting, to himself, that Germany might win the war? It looked uncommonly as if she'd already won it, to us, in our prison camp. And if she had won it, and a hundred years had consolidated her victory, then the leaders of the Nazis were literally lords of the world. And the Nazi bosses, as we all knew, had in them the makings of most fantastic tyrants, whose extravagances of despotism when the world was theirs would make the annals of Roman Emperors and Mongol Khans read like the minutes of a Parish Meeting.
    Unfortunately, if you look at it that way, I landed in a secluded part of the German Empire, a private preserve from which I had no chance of observing what had happened to the world in general. I could only deduce the world-wide and absolute power of the lords of the Master Race.
    In practice, I was the prisoner-patient--guest, he chose to call it--of the Herr Professor-Doktor Wolf von Eichbrunn, but I was left in no doubt that the ultimate disposal of my person was at the discretion of the Master Forester, Count Johann von Hackelnberg. I did not much like the way all the hospital staff lowered their voices and cringed slightly when they spoke the Count's name. I remembered the Night Nurse's frightened