Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The next time the ball flies out of play, Karsten jogs to the sidelines and tells Schiller to take his place. He doesn’t wait for the other’s reply, just turns away from the game, back towards the fence.

The camp is at the high end of a valley, he sees, spread out across a deep shelf. There are the remains of a slate mine to the north, the hillside scraped back to the purple stone, a pile of waste slate like a burial mound beside it. The slope to the east, craggy cliffs interspersed with steep spills of scree, isn’t much less barren. But to the south, separated from the longest side of the parade ground, by a narrow lane and a stand of hawthorn trees, a grassy hillside rises to an angled ridge. It’s here the locals gathered, and it’s here that Karsten finds himself drawn. What’s over that ridge? he wonders as he drifts back and forth along the wire.

HE’S THERE, one evening later that week, when he spots the local boys, hiding in the trees, spying on them. Something about their furtive scrutiny enrages him, almost as much as the obliviousness of the other men. They’ve been prisoners for less than a month, and already they’ve relaxed their guard to the point of being ambushed by children.

He glares into the trees as if to say, I can see you! And when that elicits nothing more than a shivering of leaves, a shifting of shadows, he cries out, “Show yourselves. Little cowards!” Cries out in German, as though speaking to himself, not them.

In the mess he complains to the others, but they shake their heads. “They’re just boys,” Schiller says with a note of impatience. “What do you care about boys?”

“It’s like you’re on duty,” he adds when Karsten goes back to the fence, what Schiller teasingly calls “the front.”

Schiller himself has joined the evening drill organized by the 150-percenters. It’s proudly rumored that they’ve even impressed the commandant with their smart precision. The 150-percenters have gone so far as to offer him the Heil Hitler; the gesture is officially banned, but the major has overlooked the audacity. Makes him feel like a general, the men say. The joke is that he’s returning the salute with his phantom limb. At any rate, he seems content to turn a blind eye to the 150-percenters’ excesses — one fellow, rumored to be homosexual, has had both hands smashed in a door frame so he can’t even fuck himself — in return for an orderly, disciplined camp.

“You’ll join us if you know what’s good for you,” Schiller tells him darkly.

Karsten knows he’s right, yet he can’t tear himself away from the fence, even when he feels the ground beneath him tremble with stamping feet. On the march from the Dover docks they’d run a gauntlet of schoolboys perched on a railway bridge who spat down on them, heads jerking back and forth, as the column passed below, until the men’s shoulders and hair shone with saliva. “Filthy British weather,” the fellow beside Karsten had muttered. At the time Karsten had been too shocked to feel much more than despair, but in memory the moment makes his scalp crawl. These boys aren’t spitting, of course, but he feels their eyes on him. And he thought he’d bested them by throwing back the cigarettes!

THE FIRST LETTERS from home start to arrive at the end of their second week in the camp.

A bowlegged sergeant conducts the mail call, appearing from the guardhouse one afternoon, a sack over his shoulder and a wooden crate in his other hand. After all the weeks of waiting, the last few moments are the worst. The sergeant, perched on his crate, seems to have no grasp of the concept of alphabetical order, delving into his sack and pulling out letters at random, as if he’s Saint Nicholas himself, or drawing names for a raffle.

But perhaps that isn’t such a bad idea, Karsten thinks, pressing close; a letter is a prize. And besides, the sergeant’s method gives them all hope until the very last, straining to make out their names in his terrible accent, and even then they make him turn the sack inside out and shake it before the tight circle hemming him in loosens.

There’s nothing for Karsten that first day, but he’s buoyed nonetheless. Not long now. Besides, a letter to a barracks mate is almost as good as one to yourself, since you share everything in camp. Karsten listens to the lucky ones reading their letters that night and the next. But on the third night, the third day of mail with nothing to show for all his letter writing, he wraps his arms around his head in the darkness, distraught with jealousy.

At least he’s not alone in that. Astoundingly, one of the letter readers has received a sausage in the first shipment, and later that night, when the men find him gnawing at it under his blanket — the smell gives him away — they make him sit at the table and saw at it with a blunt penknife so they can all have some. In the candlelight, it looks to Karsten as if the men are lined up to take the host. And indeed the shavings peel off, thin as paper, and dissolve on the tongue like communion wafers, a sacred taste of home.

The fourth day, and no mail.

The fifth, nothing.

Karsten has written more letters than anyone — has begged for the stationery ration of men who don’t want to write — and yet day after day he turns away from mail call empty-handed. He keeps it up, though, writing almost daily now, as if it’s his duty.

He can tell from the replies that several of the men have taken his advice about not complaining in their own letters. I’m glad they’re treating you fairly, one wife writes. And yet gradually, hearing the letters they get back— we’re coping well, spirits are high, everyone has faith in our army —it becomes impossible for Karsten to quell the suspicion that these loved ones might be lying to them in return. What is it really like at home? How are they truly managing? The camp commandant has posted a newspaper — a two-day-old copy of The Times, ironed flat by one of the guards — on the side of the mess to keep them apprised of the course of the war, but the camp leaders have denounced it as propaganda and forbidden the men, especially those few with a little English, from reading it. And now love seems to be further obscuring the truth from home. Even the others begin to doubt it, and resent Karsten for inadvertently putting the thought in their heads.

“I know, I know,” Schiller says one evening. “We’re ‘protecting’ them. But do you ever think perhaps we shouldn’t have told them we’re prisoners at all? Said we’re still on the front lines, or better, told them we’re sitting in a café in Paris. Wish you were here!”

Karsten ignores him, but listening to the letters, he realizes he can’t say for sure anymore who is protecting whom. Another couple of days without mail and he hardly cares. Now the men read their letters softly, not looking in his direction, while he scribbles another.

“What have you got left to tell her?” Schiller asks once, though not unkindly.

HE STILL CAN’T SLEEP, his thoughts turning to his mother over and over. He’s grateful, as if for mercy, when there’s finally something else to distract him. One evening shortly after lights out, he becomes aware of a stillness spreading over the barracks. Something other than the slow transition to steady breathing. It’s almost as though they’ve been waiting for something, Karsten thinks. He can’t make anything out himself yet. And then there it is, at the very edge of hearing, carried on the breeze, drifting in and out as on the tide, the distant drone of engines overhead.

“Heinkels,” someone breathes, and Karsten wonders how the fellow knows — they’re all navy here. But he doesn’t ask, no one does; they want to believe it. “Heading up the Irish Sea,” another voice adds. A third: “Turning for Liverpool or Manchester.” They listen, rapt, as if to a radio, Karsten thinks, picturing his mother’s boxy Volksradio, her first set, the two of them kneeling before it.