Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

He touches himself experimentally, but there’s nothing. He tries to think of Françoise. Fifi, as Schiller liked to call her, the whore he’d been half in love with in France. She’d been his first, though only Schiller had guessed (after seeing Karsten emerge so quickly on their first visit and whistling “Blitzkrieg!”), and he’d sworn to keep it a secret. The rest would never imagine it, Schiller reassured him. “You’re their hero, remember. You’re good at everything.”

Still, Schiller had made ribald fun of him over Françoise, encouraging the others to tease him — not about his inexperience, but his devotion. “Camouflage,” Schiller had whispered to him once. “If they make fun of one thing, they’ll never guess the real joke. Besides, it’s good for you to have an Achilles’ heel. They’ll like you more for not being perfect.” So Karsten had tolerated the jokes. Besides, he’d been such a fool for Françoise, he actually liked to be mocked on her account. As if the jokes made her more his, even when some of the jokers had probably had her themselves.

But then he didn’t want to have her like the others. He’d lost his virginity to her, but afterwards it felt like an anticlimax. As if he still needed to find something.

And so he’d set about wooing her, doggedly faithful, as if, having paid for her that one time, he had to prove he loved her. How he strove to prove it! He used to wait for her, for hours if he had to, while the rest took their turns with other girls. Françoise would come halfway down the bowed stairs, see him sitting there, and greet him wearily. “No rest for the wicked, hein? ” And all he’d do is take her for a drink, or if it was early enough, for coffee. Once he’d persuaded her, besought her really, to have dinner with him. “You have to eat, don’t you?” She’d been taken aback, as if it were an indecent suggestion, but that glimpse of real emotion, the thought that he’d finally touched her, had only made him redouble his efforts, until she’d relented, calling him a nag, mon mari —my husband — which, even in jest, filled him with hope (though she’d also been sure to make him promise to buy her dinner and her time). But when he thinks of her now, all he can see is her pouty picture in the hands of the Tommy on the beach.

They used to call their trips to the brothel “maneuvers.” Going on maneuvers, they told each other with a wink when it was their turn off-duty. Trench warfare. Bayonet practice. It was the language of victors, Karsten thinks now, of conquest. Back then, of course, the girls were the ones who surrendered.

The truth, he tells himself, making himself exhale, is that he never loved Françoise. It was the waiting for her in the brothel, the scrape of feet overhead, the opening and closing of doors as he sat in the parlor. The whispery bustle of a full house. Once, he turned to find Schiller staring at him, and he realized he’d been straightening the antimacassar on the arm of the sofa.

He rolls over in his bunk and lights the candle on the bedpost, pulls out another sheet of paper, and sets to writing his mother another letter.

AT LEAST in the morning there’s something to take his mind off his sleepless night. Someone wandering over the parade ground has found the hard-packed remnants of painted white lines, the traces of a football field. Karsten watches as men follow the marks hastily through the scrubby grass, dragging their heels through the dust until they meet at a corner, then another, until finally an entire pitch is unearthed. For a second, they stand around stunned, marveling as if they’ve dug up the remains of Troy alongside Schliemann. Football, here! And then there’s a flurry of calls to the guards for a ball. In the end, it’s the 150-percenters who secure one, appealing to the commandant — a grey-haired, florid-faced veteran who’d lost his right arm above the elbow — and cementing their position as camp leaders in the process.

A game breaks out at once, and Karsten finds himself in the midst of it, nudged forward by Schiller. Karsten’s not a skillful player, but his size and strength allow him to acquit himself respectably and as the game wears on, men who’ve hardly spoken to him since their capture are passing him the ball, calling him by name. Schiller, on the sidelines, takes bets and bellows encouragement, claps Karsten on the back during a pause when the ball flies into touch.

“Played.”

The ball comes to rest against the fence, and the men stare at it — the players and those gathered to watch the game. There’s a single strand of wire, a foot off the ground, that runs inside the fence, set back ten feet. They’ve been warned not to cross it.

“Let someone else,” Schiller says softly. Karsten hasn’t even been aware of the thought, but as soon as Schiller says it he can’t not run forward, stand at the wire, squinting up at the guard towers, a hand to his brow. They see him, he’s sure (the guards have been hanging out of the towers watching the game), but they make no move, and he’s damned if he’s going to ask their permission. Instead, he takes a deep breath and steps over the wire.

“Oi,” someone shouts, “stop right there.” But Karsten strides forward, pretending he doesn’t know English—“Halt! Bollocks, what’s German for ‘Halt’?”—his head down, intent on the ball. When he bends for it, he can smell the damp grass in the ditch on the other side of the wire, and as he rises again—“Halt!” “Yeah, what’s the German for it?” “ Halt! ”—he looks up at last at the land beyond the fence, the trees and then the bright steep slope of pasture. He’s been here for more than a day, he realizes, but he’s barely dared look beyond the camp, over the tar-paper roofs of the barracks, through the scribble of barbed wire topping the fences, and then only in glances, as if the outside world were too glaring to look at for long.

“No, idiot. The German for ‘halt’ is ‘halt.’”

“Fuck it is!”

Above and behind him there’s the dry snap of a rifle bolt, and he stands very still, staring at the view.

A shiftless, slovenly lot the guards seem to him, more jailers than soldiers. Karsten knows the kinds of men who draw such duty — shirkers and backsliders, the dregs of an army. There’d been one in his squad in basic training, Voller, the broad arse of the platoon, always bringing up the rear. he’d eventually been transferred to some sort of cushy guard duty. There’d been grumbling among the men, but Karsten had told them, “It’s for the best. You wouldn’t put a fellow like that in the front rank of a parade any more than you’d put him in the front lines. You wouldn’t want us judged by the likes of him. Stick him in the rear where he’ll be invisible.” He’d been relieved, in truth, to see the back of him, as if Voller were some shameful secret.

And what does that make me, he thinks, to be guarded by the likes?

He takes one more look through the fence, glances back over his shoulder at the guard tower and the other prisoners lined up silently. And then there’s Schiller, clapping impatiently. “Come on, it’s not halftime. Let’s get on with it.”

This is the form his gratitude takes, Karsten finally understands as he heads back. Looking out for him, vouching for him with the other men. All the little jokes to show that Karsten can be a good sport. All the little warnings.

He’s distracted during the rest of the game, letting the ball slip under his foot and then lunging into tackles. One clattering collision ends with the other player springing up, shoving Karsten—“ Now you want to fight, eh?”—the foul escalating into a dusty, panting tussle until the other man’s teammates pull him off. Karsten looks up from under his brows, hands on knees, and sees his own side standing back, watching. None of them have come to his aid. Even Schiller is silent.