Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

He’d feared it might make him enemies, how easily it all came to him, but in fact it made him friends, admirers. It helped that he was generous with his comrades, teaching them his mother’s tricks: dipping a rag in hot water before polishing shoes, kneeling rather than bending over to make a bed, ironing only the inside of shirts. They told him he should be an officer and he smiled shyly, though in truth he lacked the arrogance for command, was a natural NCO, the kind who fiercely mothers his men. They actually took to calling him Mutti for a time, and he told them, in return, they’d all make excellent chambermaids.

His barracks mates prized Karsten for one more skill as well. He’d picked up a smattering of French and English before the war. The latter from a season in Hull, where his father had taken a job with a family of fishermen he’d worked with as a POW in 1919, until his mother, miserable among the enemy, as she called them, demanded they move back to Lübeck. The language had come back to Karsten in later years, chatting with skiers staying at his mother’s place — from whom he’d also picked up some serviceable French — and he’d kept it up watching American movies, Dietrich’s especially, until the ban in ’40. It was French his comrades wanted to learn, though — France was where they all yearned to be posted — in order to “meet the mademoiselles.” He hesitated at first, until they accused him of holding out on them, of wanting all the girls for himself, so he’d taught them Je t’aime, pronouncing it hoarsely, then covering his embarrassment by making fun of their accents.

Schiller — he’d been one of their drill instructors then — had caught them at it and shaken his head. He’d been in France in ’40 and ’41, and they were still a little in awe of him, but someone had plucked up the courage to ask him if he knew any good pickup lines.

“ Combien? ” he’d snorted, and left Karsten to translate.

AS THE DUSK deepens, Karsten watches a line of British troops file up the beach into the darkness of the dunes. The column bunches near their stockade, those in front slowing to stare, those behind bumping into them. There’s some pointing, some laughter at their expense, some hissed name-calling. Karsten rouses the other two, dusts the sand from his uniform, and steps close to the wire. Several of the men glance away quickly, as if suddenly shy, and it gratifies him, this flinch.

“Almost have to pity them,” Schiller mutters beside him.

“Pity them?”

“We’re out of it, after all.”

It’s a shameful thought, and Karsten recoils from it. “They might shoot us yet.” He knows it’s unlikely — the stockade is proof of that — but at least it silences Schiller, the older man sagging back against one of the fence posts, sliding down until he’s sitting in the sand. And yet Karsten can’t quite shake the notion. Amid all the hundreds of men on the beach, only the three of them are no longer in the war. They, and the dead, gently nodding in the surf. He looks down the column of pale faces, counting heads. Every fifth man? he wonders. Every fourth? Every third? He’s a prisoner, their prisoner, yet for a moment he’s buoyed by an almost godlike sense of immortality.

He glances around, abruptly guilty, but Heino is still slumped on the sand, cradling his hand, his back to Karsten and the British.

The boy is underage, signed up at a recruiting station by some myopic or cynical veteran. There’s less than eighteen months separating them, yet Karsten sees him as a child, divided from the rest, not least by the virginity they’d guessed at and made fun of so mercilessly. The second of three sons, Heino joined up the day he heard his older brother was dead, killed by partisans in Yugoslavia, enlisting under a false name so his family couldn’t find him. Karsten had taken him under his wing, reasoning that by the time the boy was shipped back, it would only be a matter of months before he could enlist again. But he did make Heino write home (in return for an extorted promise to get him laid on leave), adding a note to his mother, at the boy’s bashful begging, pledging to look out for her son. Karsten had even interceded with Schiller on Heino’s behalf, back when Schiller was still sergeant. Wunderkind, Schiller dubbed the boy, but in his economical veteran’s way he hadn’t bothered to report him, and Heino had gone on to become something of a mascot for the unit.

They never did get the boy laid, it occurs to Karsten now. And he hopes this is what Heino is brooding on.

He’d ask Schiller’s opinion, but beside him he sees that the other has his eyes closed. Not sleeping, though, Karsten is sure. He wonders what Schiller’s thinking behind those lids. Probably wondering where his next drink’s coming from.

In boot camp, Schiller had been a morose despot who’d never shown enthusiasm for anything except finding fault and cribbage (nagging them to play, gloating when he won, nagging them again when they quit in disgust). The men had been delighted when he’d been caught drunk one night, puking on the major’s roses, and stripped of rank. But they’d been dismayed when he’d been shipped out with them to France.

In a sense, Karsten owes his recent promotion to Schiller’s disgrace. After the sergeant had been demoted, another corporal had been elevated in his stead, creating an opening. Karsten had only sewn the stripe on the month before, tongue tip pressed to the corner of his mouth. Heino had raised his arm, posed it, flexing as if showing off a new muscle, and the men had given a little cheer, though Karsten knew they meant as much to jeer Schiller. He tried to shrug off their congratulations, tell them it was just one stripe.

“Maybe so,” Schiller growled. He was slumped in his bunk, drunk again, though no one knew where he got his booze, and he never offered to share. “It was the Führer’s rank, for all that.”

To his surprise, Karsten has become wary friends with the older man. Contemptuous of them as he was in training, Schiller has always grudgingly admired Karsten’s soldiering, even using him as an example to the others, and Karsten, for his part, secretly envies the older man’s experience. He’s the only one in the squad, after all, to have seen action, though Karsten has never been able to push him for the details — has he killed, and if so, how many? He’d tried to bring it up once, in a bar on leave, and Schiller had raised his glass in a mock toast: “To innocence!” And yet the older man has quietly taken it upon himself to complete Karsten’s training these past weeks — teaching him “all the things they don’t tell you in basic,” how to handle officers, the men’s dodges.

And I listened, Karsten thinks now, crossing his arms and fingering the stitches on his sleeve, and never said anything about his drinking.

IT HAD BEGUN before dawn with the naval bombardment, the shells flung from somewhere over the grey horizon, missing them mercifully but spitting gouts of sand through their firing slits with enough force to sting their faces. They’d crouched down, cradling the guns, emptying their canteens over their faces to clear their eyes while the explosions walked overhead, white cement dust jumping out of the low ceiling, sifting down on them until they looked like bakers. Then came the planes, tearing by so loud Karsten thought the noise alone might kill them, rip them to shreds. Finally the landing craft, a long line of them pressing through the surf, throwing themselves onto the beach like spent swimmers at the end of a race.

It wasn’t hard to kill the men in them, he found. He’d been so hungry for action, desperate for it after all the weeks of training. He’d actually hoped for an invasion, worried he’d missed his chance. And now here it was, and he felt, more than anything, relieved as he gunned down the distant figures, relieved and vindicated, jerking his sights from target to target, clutching at the trigger. Beside him Heino, feeding him the ammunition, was frowning with concentration, his fingers dancing over the belt as if over piano keys. Karsten felt a sudden uproarious pity for him, wanted to yell at him to look— look! — out the firing slit. You’re missing it!