Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

They were squatting, fingers laced behind their heads.

The Tommy proffered his hand again, whispered something then, pointed at Schiller.

“What’s he saying?” Schiller hissed, almost losing his balance. “What the fuck’s he saying?”

“Trade,” Karsten told him dully. “He wants to trade you for the cigarette.”

“Trade what?”

“Your cap.”

“ My cap? ”

“He wants it for a souvenir,” Karsten said, looking at his feet. “To remember this by.” You’re going to get a medal, he wanted to shout in the Tommy’s face, stabbed with sudden envy.

Schiller was already pulling out the cap folded under his epaulet and handing it over.

He offered to share the cigarette. “Go on. That was a good deal. A souvenir! Who’d want to remember this shambles?”

The victors, Karsten thought, but after a second he took the cigarette and then held it out to Heino. “Take it,” he barked when the other hesitated. “You don’t know when you’ll see another.” And the boy had reached out his good hand.

Throughout the night, they’re visited by more souvenir hunters. Heino gives up his prized pack of dirty playing cards for a couple of squares of chocolate, which he gobbles down at once. Karsten trades his lighter for a cigarette and then waits stonily for the Tommy to light it through the fence for him. Karsten assumes they’ll run out of things to offer before long. But he’s wrong. The Tommies want everything and anything — epaulets, belts, even buttons — and when the prisoners shake their heads, the Tommies stop asking, stop bartering, start demanding at gunpoint.

Faced with the muzzle of a gun, Schiller gives up his watch, dangling by it’s strap like a fish by the tail.

“Spoils of war,” he says, shrugging.

“It was your father’s,” Karsten says. He has almost nothing of his own father’s, everything having been sold after his death to raise the money to move.

“Should have buried it in the sand,” Heino says.

“And ruined it!”

“At least the Tommies wouldn’t have got it.”

“That’s easy for you to say, you little shit,” Schiller hisses. “All you’ve got to lose is your fucking virginity.”

“Enough,” Karsten tells them, though privately he agrees with Schiller. The boy’s bravado rankles.

But Heino does have something more to lose, it turns out. Later, when they’re told to turn out their pockets by yet another “collector,” the boy balks at undoing the button on his breast pocket. The Tommy stands over him, nudging him first with the flat of his bayonet, and when the boy bats it away, with the point, pressing it to his chest until Heino gradually lies back in the sand under the force. Karsten waits until he sees the boy holding his breath, nostrils flared, eyes staring, before he reaches across him gently. The bayonet point picks at the brass button, then withdraws with a scrape, and Karsten undoes it, pulls out a couple of sheets of folded paper, hands them up.

“A letter,” Schiller says afterwards, shaking his head.

“It was to my mother!”

“And that’s worth dying for? How many times do you want us to save your life today?”

“Don’t use me as an excuse!” He pulls away from them, shoulders hunched and shaking.

Schiller rolls his eyes, but Karsten lets the boy cry, and only when he is quiet, goes over and lays a hand on his shoulder.

“I just never thought I’d surrender,” the boy murmurs. “Killed maybe, wounded, but never that I’d surrender. I wasn’t even afraid of that.”

“Well, you didn’t, did you?” Karsten takes a deep breath. “You were just following orders.” It seems to him as if it’s the only order he’s given since his promotion.

The boy glances over quickly, then away, but nods to himself.

A little later, he looks up at the guards beyond the stockade.

“You don’t think they know German, do you?”

“I doubt it.”

“Only,” he whispers, “there was some, you know, soppy stuff in my letter. I wouldn’t like them to laugh at it.”

“They won’t.”

“We killed loads of them, didn’t we?” the boy asks, brightening. “How many do you think?”

But Karsten is thinking of his own letters from home, the bundle of them tied together in his locker at the barracks. She’s proud of him, his mother has written. The first time she’s ever said so, he thinks. No matter how helpful he’d been around the pension, she thought it women’s work, beneath him. Even his labors for hunters and hikers were tainted by an air of servitude. “I used to stay in hotels when I was a girl,” she told him once. But now she boasts to the neighbors about his prowess on the range. She’s nagged him for photos, and when he sends them, she tells him how smart he looks, how handsome. She has them all lined up along the mantel, as if on parade. Good for business, she’s written, if there were any business. She’s just written to him about his promotion. If only the war lasts long enough, perhaps you’ll make leutnant. It was his father’s rank during the last war, his highest station in life, and achieving it, Karsten knew, would be a kind of redemption in her eyes. She was the daughter of a vizeadmiral herself, had traveled the world with him as a child. She’d met Karsten’s father at a navy ball in 1914 and married him a year later. He was from an old naval family too, and although only a junior officer, already making a name for himself in the new submarine service. “He’d have made kapitan, ” she told him once, “if he hadn’t got in trouble in 1917. He didn’t agree with the order to attack passenger ships.” She shook her head. “They wanted to court-martial him, except my father pulled some strings, had him reassigned to the surface fleet.” They’d both been at Scapa Flow in 1919 when the interned fleet scuttled itself. Karsten’s grandfather had gone down with his vessel, and his father had spent almost a year as a prisoner of war.

Karsten wonders how she’ll feel when she hears he’s a prisoner himself, what she’ll tell the neighbors. And then he wonders when she’ll be notified, and he quails at the thought of what she’ll think in the meantime.

His own turn to get fleeced comes a little later. He’d already given up his folded postcard of Torfhaus and the scallop-edged photo of the French whore, Françoise, the men liked to say he was in love with. “Who’s this fräulein, then?” the sergeant who’d taken it had asked. “Look forward to making her acquaintance, I will.” But Karsten had kept his head, not rising to the bait, submitting to it all calmly, with dignity he hoped, locking his eyes on Heino’s, showing he could take it.

But then the sergeant returns, moving among them by the flame of a cigarette lighter, until he finds Karsten, pulls him to his feet, makes him stand at attention while he picks at the stitches of his corporal’s stripe with a bayonet.

“A sergeant wanting corporal’s stripes,” Heino says, shaking his head.

It comes to Karsten slowly that their surrender wasn’t that one moment already past, at the mouth of the bunker, but somehow will go on and on. He wonders what more they’ll have to give up before it’s over. Everything but their lives, probably.

THEY’RE SILENT after that, the three of them, pretending to sleep in the darkness, though Karsten knows none of them are. They’re still, but it’s not the stillness of sleepers — he’s come to recognize the slow, flaring sighs of sleeping men after four months in barracks — but of listeners, their breaths shallow, punctuated by sniffs. The stillness of sentries, he thinks bitterly. He wonders what they’re waiting for, what they’re hoping to hear. He listens with them, straining to catch the sounds of battle, of a counterattack, but as far as he can tell the rattle and crump of the fighting is growing more distant, faint beneath the lap and suck of the tide. What he hears instead are the sounds the sand makes — the creaking near the waterline where it’s densest, the soft patter of the dunes where it’s finest — and the heavy breathing of the columns of men slogging through it, their occasional scuffs and curses. Even now, every few minutes he’ll hear the dull clout and scrape of a landing craft’s door slamming the wet sand, catch the hooded green glow of muster lamps. If he listens hard enough he can make out the slight sleigh-bell jingling of dog tags, of pack straps, of belt buckles.