Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

He wonders what he would send her now — a picture of the white cliffs of Dover, he thinks, and at once rejects it. As if he were on holiday, as if he were a tourist!

Dear Mutti, he tries again. Dear Mutti. Dear Mutti. Then, I am safe.

And after a moment that seems all there is to say. The one thing that will bring her comfort. He lays his pencil down, exhausted.

IN TRUTH, he had been relieved to see the white cliffs looming over the hold of the landing craft. More grey than white, they were the first sight of land over the high metal sides of the boat since the ramp had been drawn up, dripping, on the shore at Normandy, and the men welcomed it with a thin cheer, those few of them not bent over and heaving on their boot tops.

They’d sat in the beachhead stockade in France for two long days until, on the evening of the seventh, a lone Messerschmitt, the first they’d seen since the shelling began the previous dawn, dipped out of the twilight and strafed the beach. The slumped prisoners leapt to their feet with a roar, watching the twin plumes of cannon fire stitch across the sand, baying themselves hoarse, until the neat dotted lines had begun to leap towards them. The plane had pulled up at the last moment, only the fine grit thrown up by it’s fire pattering over them, but not before the cheers had died in their throats and they’d flung themselves to the ground.

The near miss had galvanized the British into getting them off the beach. They’d been reluctant to waste manpower on the prisoners, but it wouldn’t do to have them die in Allied hands, whatever the poetic justice of deaths under German fire.

So on the morning of the eighth, they were assigned to one of the empty landing craft that had already disgorged it’s men. They started gathering their few remaining possessions, but then a column of Tommies carrying stretchers came over the dunes and made for the ramp. “Hey, we saw it first,” some wag called, but then they noticed the arm of one of the men on the stretchers swing free, a grey uniform sleeve appearing from the blankets, and they pressed forward to the wire, calling names. A couple of the prone figures stirred, and one raised his bandaged head. The figure seemed to study them for a second, the gaps for his eyes the only dark spots amid the white bandages, and then lay back, silencing them. Karsten, watching from over another man’s shoulder, suddenly wanted to find Heino, who’d long since melted into the crowd, find him and shake him. That could have been us, he’d tell him fiercely, squeezing the boy’s bandaged hand until he yelped.

They had to wait most of the rest of the morning until another landing craft lurched onto the beach, and they looked on impassively as barbed wire was strung around the edge of it’s hold and the machine-gun mountings altered to allow them to overlook the cargo space.

“Off to invade England, lads,” someone quipped, but none of them laughed. A newsreel crew hurried up as they were embarking, and Karsten watched the men ahead of him, Heino among them, bow their heads. He nudged those on his left and right, coaxed them into wheeling round, marching backwards up the ramp to spoil the shots. “They won’t know whether we’re coming or going.” Only a few — the most exhausted and dazed — went along; Schiller, when Karsten called to him, just shook his head, less in refusal than disappointment, it seemed. Still, Karsten felt a small flush of victory as the cameraman threw up his hands. But then he was inside the stinking landing craft, the floor awash with the days-old vomit of the invasion troops. Gulls pecked at it, flying up screaming only when the men kicked them away.

“What guts!” someone cried, to laughter. But elsewhere, Karsten saw, the men were disgusted and fearful. He looked up at the machine guns. “We could all be slaughtered here and our bodies dumped at sea,” a man next to him whispered, and Karsten, reminded of their own hot guns pouring fire down the yawning throats of these craft, told him to shut up. “Oh, yes, sir! ” the man mocked.

And then the ramp swung closed on the littered beach, and the engines churned into life, sucking the craft back off the sand and starting it’s slow, wallowing turn, the waves slapping against the steel. With no view of the horizon from within the deep hold, their own vomit was soon mixing with that of their enemies, washing in and out of the oily bilges. They’d been too sick to be afraid after that. A queasy blessing, Karsten thought, a welcome distraction from the guns leering down at them.

The fear had returned soon enough on dry land. They’d been marched up from the docks under heavy guard, and for the first time Karsten felt himself truly in enemy territory. This was England. The guards even seemed more foreign than those in Normandy. There, at least, they had all, German and British alike, been strangers to France. Outside their bunker, the medic who had come to bandage Heino’s hand had passed around his canteen — the water tasting like champagne, so glad were they to be alive — but Karsten couldn’t imagine sharing a canteen with these guards, couldn’t think of anything he had in common with them. And beyond them he felt the crushing, suffocating sense of a whole nation’s hatred. he’d felt the raw edge of French resentment for les Boches before, of course — that insolent blankness — but there had been a place for them in France, albeit one made by money, in the cafés he’d frequented, or in the warmth of Françoise’s arms. Here he couldn’t imagine any place for himself, felt that each step he took into England was making him more hated.

After they’d disembarked, on the march up from the docks, he had seen figures in the distance, on rooftops, on ships in the harbor, walking the ragged cliff tops. They were just specks really, distant, barely distinguishable figures, but he’d hunched over at the sight of them as if they were snipers, flinching from walking sticks and raised arms. As they passed through the steep, narrow streets, there was some booing, and he found himself looking down, unable to meet the eyes of those watching.

The transit camp they were marched to was ten trudging miles outside the town, at an old racetrack. Rows of tents had been set up in the infield, and barbed wire laced around the rails. Jeeps circled the course where horses had once run, and instead of the flash of binoculars in the grandstand, there was the glint of fixed bayonets.

They had been herded into a long barn, divided into pens for the horses, judging by the stink of manure. Karsten was separated from Schiller and Heino, shoved into an enclosure with an assortment of men from other units. He’d kept himself to himself, squatting in one corner, ignoring the rest, but after a while one of them sank down cross-legged in the dusty straw beside him.

“What I’d give for a smoke,” the fellow muttered. “Don’t suppose you’ve got one?”

“Sorry.”

“Just as well, probably. I’d burn this whole shambles down, if I had a light.”

“How’d they get you?” Karsten asked. It was the inevitable, ever-present question; he’d already learned to ask it first.

Except this time the other fellow said, “Surrendered.” He ran a hand over his close-cropped head. “Never would have thought it.”

Karsten nodded miserably.

“You too, then?”

“Me? No. Knocked cold by a chunk of masonry during the shelling. Woke up with a gun in my face.” He could barely recall whose story it was, just how much he’d envied the fellow who told him.

“Lucky you.”

“Captured is captured.”

The other shook his head.

“Surrendered is the worst. You sure you…?”

“No.”

“Only, I heard.”