Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“I should say!” Schiller laughs, but Karsten is frowning at the letter. “Well, what else? Go on!”

“It’s nothing,” Karsten says. “Foolishness.”

Someone makes the wet smacking sound of kissing.

“Oh, my boy, my boy!” Schiller cries in falsetto, plucking the letter from Karsten’s hand. “Come on! We’ve been waiting for this as long as you.” He waves the white page before him, lets Karsten snatch for it once, twice, and gives it up at last only when Karsten holds out his hand.

“I should confess,” Karsten reads stiffly, “as you might guess from Herr Florian’s joke, that I have let it be understood — not so much a falsehood as an assumption I’ve not contradicted — that you are injured. And who’s to say not? You have spared me the details of your capture, and I think I know my boy well enough to say if you were wounded you’d spare me that worry, too — don’t even begin to deny it.”

“Ha!” someone cries. Karsten doesn’t look up.

“You will think your mother foolish or frightened to imagine such heroic scars for you, but it is more pride than fear. There are those, you see, who blame our men in France for the invasion, call you and your fellows names I will not repeat here. I assure them that knowing my son as I do, you must have fought until your last round, until things were hopeless, or until you were ordered to set down your gun. But try not to think too ill of such folks. It is their despair and fury that speaks, and I must confess I have myself cursed those who lived while I thought you died.”

He can feel the silence around him now, the stillness of the men.

“But now I can tell them all, the doubters, the faithless, Never fear! I thought my boy lost, and he has been returned to me. Just so will France, which some fear lost, be ours again, I’m certain. The Leader himself has assured us of our eventual, destined victory, a day made all the sweeter to me now for knowing it will reunite us.”

There’s a long pause and then Karsten reads, “Your loving mother,” and the men melt away as if ordered to dismiss.

Only Schiller pauses as he passes. “Tell me again. Who are we protecting in these letters of ours?”

THEY DON’T HEAR the planes that night, or the next, or the next. Before long the barracks begins to fill again with the furtive sounds of sleepless men.

Karsten doesn’t talk to anyone, or anyone to him, for days after the letter. But it’s his mother’s rebuke that stings him most. He finds himself focusing especially on her faith in the Leader — an echo of Sulzer’s — and his failure to share it. He knows why. She’d let slip once — though she vehemently denied it later — that his father, the former leutnant, thought Hitler a jumped-up windbag: “A corporal? Might as well be led by a cinema usher, a bus conductor, a park warden!”

“That was before the Reichstag fire,” his mother insisted. “Your poor father didn’t live to see it, but everything changed after that. That was Herr Hitler’s true election. That’s when he really became Leader, even to those who didn’t vote for him.”

Another time, she accused his father of being a snob.

But really, Karsten knows, her own favorite until ’41 had been Hess, Hitler’s grave deputy. She’d been crushed when he’d flown off to England. That traitor, she would spit in later years, but to Karsten it always seemed as if Hess had betrayed her personally, as much as the country.

He wishes he could talk to someone about this, suspects it’s just as well that he doesn’t. As it is, listening to the other men, he realizes how little they actually say to one another.

There’s been no mention of the absent planes, for instance, he realizes as he stands at the fence one morning and stares up at the high hillside, watching the flock drift across it like a cloud across a clear sky. He’s been fascinated by the sheep ever since he saw the shepherd gather them once, marveling at the way he whistled commands to his dogs, sending them racing in long curving arcs to flank the flock, head it off. Like a general running a campaign, he told himself at the time, almost picturing the arrows of attack and retreat laid over the grass. And then he understands why the men don’t talk about the planes: they know what it means. The lines are being pushed east; the front is moving farther and farther from them. They’re falling out of range of their own air force.

Now when he watches the shepherd working the sheep, the flock pressing together, rippling over the hillside, he can’t help thinking of a great white flag. He tries to call the dogs himself, putting two fingers in his mouth to whistle, others around him taking it up, but even the nearest dog only stops for a moment, cocking it’s head, and then, with a flick of the ears, dismisses them, races on.

CONSTABLE PARRY sternly warns them all at the pub the week after the Germans arrive that they’re not to gawp at the prisoners. He’s paid a courtesy visit to the camp, met with the CO. “Prohibited by the Geneva Convention,” Parry tells them, swelling with pride. It’s not every day he gets to enforce international law. “The major’s required to protect the men in his custody from violence, vigilantism, and injurious public curiosity such as might serve to make them subject to scorn or ridicule.” The grave effect is reduced by the constable’s smile of triumph at the end of this speech, like a child who’s just recited a lesson from memory.

“Bloody hell,” Harry says. “Hear that, Mary? The buggers have only gone and written a law against making fun of someone.”

Parry ignores them, asks Jack to lift the ban on soldiers and invite the major and his men to the pub. “This is a new bunch, after all. Got to let bygones be bygones.”

Esther’s resigned to it. She knows that Jack needs the cash.

“They’re still English,” Arthur points out.

“I’ll vouch for these,” Parry tells him. “They’re policemen themselves, after a manner of speaking. Brother officers.”

“Just so long as the long arm of the law reaches into their pockets,” Jack says.

Parry ushers the major and a captain, the camp medical officer, into the lounge the very next night. The doctor is a rumpled heap of a man, but it’s the major who draws the eye. He’s missing an arm, his right, below the elbow, a polished swagger stick clamped under the stump, the brass ferrule at it’s tip winking in the lamplight. Jack, the constable is politely explaining to this personage, was also wounded in service of his country, and Jack slaps his leg.

“Where was it, Jackie?” Parry calls, and Jack tells him, “The Somme.”

“How about you, Major?”

“County Mayo,” the major says flatly, and the bar stills, the long silence measured in the drip of the pumps.

“He’s a Black and Tan,” Esther hears someone murmur behind her in Welsh. Even she’s heard of their bloody exploits in Ireland. Arthur and some of the other nationalists, she knows, have a grudging admiration for the IRA, some of whom were held in Welsh prisons in the twenties.

“What can I get you, gentlemen?” she asks stiffly.

The major glances past her at the bottles lined up against the wall. “Would you happen to have a drop of Madeira?”

There’s a faint ripple of laughter through the bar, and he glares around balefully while Esther glances at Jack in confusion, mouths, “Madeira?”

“Somewhere round here,” Jack tells her, feeling under the bar and pulling out a dusty bottle. He waves her over, whispers, “I only keep it for the ladies on Boxing Day.”

Esther sets out two glasses, starts to pour, but the major holds up a finger—“If I might”—lifts the bottle in his one good hand, and carries it over to the corner table, the captain following with the glasses. They proceed to drink their way through the entire bottle, the locals looking on with mounting interest, less at the stolid captain, who seems unaffected, than at the major, who rapidly becomes the worse for wear, red-faced and listing, and yet never relinquishes his hold on the swagger stick tucked in his armpit. “It’s like a death grip,” Harry marvels. Even when the major, having called for another bottle and been told apologetically by Jack that he’s just drunk the only one, staggers to his feet and calls for their driver, the swagger stick stays impressively erect, as Mary notes.