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Tommy explained: ‘You could take the speed of those gyroplanes down to about thirty miles per hour, so there was a reasonably good chance of dropping a parcel near to Oxlund, so that he could almost touch it.’

Von Bahr did indeed drop emergency supplies with remarkable accuracy. Hot drinks, some rope, food and dry clothes landed in neat bundles agonizingly close to Oxlund. Tommy recalled:

I’ve seen the photographs and the nearest parcel seems to be only a couple of meters away, but he just couldn’t reach it. He got his arms free but he couldn’t reach the parcels because he didn’t have the physical force left to do so, even though he knew they were there. What I’ve never understood is why the bloody hell the pilot didn’t send someone down in a parachute, to save Kaj and Thorbjoern.

Kaj fought hard to free his legs and coat from the grip of the ice but he was still frozen fast. He flailed and lunged at the packages, knowing they were potential life-savers, but his increasingly frantic efforts proved futile. All he succeeded in doing was smearing more blood around himself.

By then, two little rowing boats had arrived, and they appeared to be less than a hundred meters away. But their bows were unable to cut through the ice, and already one vessel was in trouble, stuck after trying to carve a path through the massive slab to which Kaj was attached. When the other boat got near enough, someone threw a rope towards the stricken vessel; and once the first boat had been extricated by the second, they both rowed away while they still could.

It was almost the final nail in Kaj Oxlund’s coffin. First the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and his decision to resist it, had cost him his marriage. Now it was about to cost him his life. But he was not quite finished yet. Through sheer willpower and a mighty sideways lunge, he used his weight to free one leg. The momentum ripped his coat clear of the ice, and the other leg followed as his body rolled and collapsed in a heap. Almost as soon as he was free, though, he was glued fast again, this time horizontally. If he had been able to look ahead, he would have noticed that he’d moved a little closer to one of the bundles dropped by Rolf von Bahr. But he had no energy left to reach it. He knew the pilot was still watching him from above. He died knowing.

Chapter 32

CLOSING IN

WHEN TOMMY SNEUM looked back on his friend’s death as an old man, he did so with powerful and sometimes conflicting emotions. He didn’t feel guilty about sending Kaj Oxlund to his death. ‘It was war,’ he maintained, ‘and Christophersen had to go. Kaj agreed to it all. But I should have killed Christophersen when I first planned it.’ And, at his most bitter, he still felt anger towards the sole survivor: ‘Two died but that coward Christophersen left them to die. He as good as killed Kaj.’ At other times, though, Sneum suggested that all three men bore some responsibility for what happened to them on that awful march:

Oxlund’s military coat was so long it almost went down to his heels, and when he fell or even bent down it would have pressed against the ice. It became a solid block of ice, and he didn’t have enough power left in his body to pull his coat up. That’s easily understood. But they could all have made it if the Christophersen brothers had picked a shorter route across the ice, or they had all taken my advice to tie themselves together with the rope. They had about twenty meters of it.

Feeling more generous one day, Tommy said of Sigfred:

Christophersen was probably so tired and cold that he didn’t know what the hell to do in that situation towards the end, because confusion takes over and he wasn’t one of the tough guys. He may not have been able to see well or think clearly by then. As I understand it, the Swedish fishermen who got to Christophersen said there was no more room once he was on the boat, and Christophersen may have felt he was in no position to argue. I don’t know. I was still furious that he had left Oxlund, though.