Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The windows of their barracks are shuttered and bolted from outside, but the sound sifts down to them through slatted vents under the roof. The throb of the engines might as well be a serenade, and long after the tune has faded, they lie still, hoping for the distant fanfare of bombing. There’s a long pause and then a scrape of bunks being pushed together, the soft grunts of men clambering up, one on the shoulders of two others. They can’t quite reach, so they call on Karsten, the climber. He pulls himself up, yanks at the louver until it comes loose, lowers it, pushes his head into the dark space. He can hear no more, but he hangs there for a moment smelling the air — he can just catch a tang of the ocean — taking deep huffs of it until someone else demands a turn. Men balance there all night, though they hear nothing else, craning for a glimpse of light at the horizon, of fires. When they do catch sight of something, it’s only the dawn, and they have to scramble to replace the louver before reveille.

It’s all they can talk about the next day, the planes overhead. Every barracks has heard it. The camp leaders are smiling, strutting a little. The men, for once, can’t wait for nightfall, as if the sooner they go to bed, the sooner the planes will come again. Except this time they don’t, not the next night nor the one after that, and when, on the third, they do return, the men catching the pulse of the engines for a few moments, like a snatch of some favorite tune, Karsten finds himself thinking not of the bombs the planes carry but of the men inside, of how they’re only a few hundred feet above, and of how by morning, if they survive, they’ll be miles away.

When he finally drowses, he dreams of pulling himself through the louver, climbing out onto the barracks roof, of reaching his arms up into the sky and catching hold of the undercarriage as a plane sweeps overhead. His uniform snaps like a flag in the wind. He imagines the sensation in his stomach as the plane unloads it’s cargo and bobs up, lightened. He watches the stick of bombs fall away beneath him, a curving line of fence posts, and as they drop behind, he watches the landscape dip and rise in waves until the plane crosses the white line of cliffs at Dover, like a halo around Britain, and there’s the sea itself glimmering between his feet. In his dream, dawn breaks, a flock of gulls scuds beneath him, and there are the beaches of France, flashing golden with shell casings. His arms should be tired, but they’re firm, not even shaking with effort, as if, rather than holding on, he is gripped in the talons of a huge bird. He pulls himself up, doing chin-ups for the sheer joy of it. Any minute now, he thinks, they’ll land, but no, the plane keeps speeding along over Alsace, the corduroy patches of vineyards, and then northeast until he knows where they’re headed by the mountains rising before him. Then they’re banking, dropping lower and lower until he can make out rivers, roads, Bergenstrasse, on the outskirts of town. He starts to windmill his legs, and then his feet touch in a puff of dust and he’s sprinting down the lane, running faster than he’s ever run, not home, not yet, but to the post office, to intercept his letters, to carry them home himself, smiling at how he’s outstripped them.

HE COULD ESCAPE, he tells himself in the morning. He should. What better way to redeem himself? He’s heard rumors the camp leaders are working on a plan, but when he tries to approach one of them, an older corporal called Sulzer, the man just shrugs.

“But it’s our duty,” Karsten tries.

“Don’t you tell me my duty,” the other sneers.

“I’ve heard talk of a tunnel.”

Sulzer stares off, shakes his head. Karsten studies him, unsure whether to believe him or if the fellow simply doesn’t trust him.

“Come on, boy,” Sulzer says finally. “Does it look like I spend my time digging in the dirt?” His uniform is immaculate, from the starched points of his shirt collar, like a pair of scissors at his neck, to the steely gleam of his boot tops.

“Besides,” Sulzer goes on, “our duty is to have faith in the Leader, to remain loyal. Why should we escape when victory is at hand? We need to sit tight, maintain discipline, and wait for the panzers to plough down that gate.” Karsten recalls that Sulzer has boasted about being in the SA from the start, working on the first autobahns, even claimed with a straight face that he’d been in Triumph of the Will, marching past the Leader with a shining spade at shoulder arms.

“I heard a rumor that Hess was being held in Wales,” Karsten blurts out. “One of the guards was talking about it. Did you ever meet him?”

“That turncoat? Fuck him! And what are you doing talking to guards?”

“I was eavesdropping. Trying to learn something. To help us escape.”

Sulzer sighs. He still has the submariner’s pale, almost translucent skin from living under artificial light for weeks on end, made all the starker against the dark wave of hair combed severely across his brow. It’s a pallor Karsten recognizes from old photographs of his father in uniform, on the mantel at home.

“What’s your problem, son? Don’t you believe in our final victory?”

Afterwards, Karsten tells himself he’ll go alone if he has to, but each morning he thinks, Perhaps there’ll be a letter today.

HE TAKES OUT his frustrations on the boys at the fence. In desperation, he hunts along the ground, scrabbling in the dirt for pebbles, and starts to fling them into the trees. They clatter off the trunks, crackle through the leaves. There’s nothing for a long moment — behind him in the silence he can hear the drag and crump of marching — and then the youngsters break. It’s as if the undergrowth is coming to life, rising up, and then they’re running, charging away uphill in panicked flight. Karsten, watching them flee, finds himself suddenly breathless. Most of them are just kids, ten-, twelve-year-olds by the look of them, but the others he sees are teenagers, not much younger than Heino. Or himself, for that matter.

He thinks he’s driven them off, walks away from the wire with his shoulders squared, writes to his mother about it — his third letter in a week — but the next night they’re back, more insolent, showing themselves, darting out of the trees to shake their fists or offer the men a two-fingered salute, before he charges the wire, roaring at the affront, and has the pleasure of seeing them fall back in fright. “ Renn! ” he cries. “ Renn! ”

“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Schiller warns him that night. The drill, he knows, had been interrupted by his outburst. “Besides, you’ll only encourage them. Why would you do that?”

“Why would you put up with it?” Karsten asks. “At least I’m doing something.”

“Frightening children.” Schiller snorts. “The war’s over for us. Too late to fight it now.”

By the next evening the boys have mastered their fear, greet him with a shrill chorus of their own: “Run, run!” And Karsten shakes his head, smiling grimly despite himself.

AND THEN at last he hears his name at mail call, shoves through the crowd, arm raised as if in the Heil Hitler. “Here! Here!”

“My dear son,” he reads to the others; he can’t wait but tear the letter open on the spot, proclaim it as if it were some vindication. “Thank you for your letters — a third has come this very morning — and thank God for your life. I had heard nothing for so long, I confess I had begun to entertain the worst.”

There’s a pause while Karsten takes a deep breath, and the others look away.

“Can you forgive me my faint heart,” he reads on, “or at least my tardy reply? I should have responded earlier but for a bout of cold or some such, brought on surely by my fears, but from which I am now on the mend, in no small part thanks to your fine medicine. To be sure, I hardly know how I might have survived these past dark days but for the kindness of our neighbors, many of whom, as you know, have also lost sons and husbands, and who comforted me greatly in my trial. Herr Florian, our postman — you’ll recall he lost a boy in the East last winter — was particularly solicitous, seeing me at the window and assuring me, even as he passed by, that there might yet be word. I could scarcely believe it, but then there he was last week with a funny little smile on his face, holding out your letter at arms length (I had warned him I might be contagious), and he’s been back each morning since. ‘Well, we know he wasn’t wounded in his writing hand!’ he told me today.”