Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The heat has lasted all week.

He sets the paper aside, lies back, propped on his elbows, staring up beyond the trees to the distant green hillside, imagining his body pillowed by that lush meadow grass. He still suffers from insomnia, the sleeplessness itself a kind of nightly prison, his bunk a narrow cell. His eyes, in the clouded mirror of the latrine, are shadowed by bruised circles of fatigue. Karsten glances around at the other men, stretched out on the coarse scrub of the parade ground. For just a second, it seems to him as if they could all be back in a public park in Munich or Berlin, picnicking on the grass, except that as far as he can see in each direction, it’s only men. They’re laid out like so many wounded, casualties of the battle of boredom, the “Sitzkrieg,” as Schiller has dubbed the grinding dullness of camp life, each day as unvarying as the rows of identical barracks behind them.

It’s been less than three months, Karsten thinks — and he has to calculate the dates a second time in his mind before he can quite believe it — but already time hangs heavier on them than a field pack.

The other men, he knows, have been fitfully energized by the new weekly film show that the commandant has instituted at their pleading. They’ve had two shows so far, a frothy aquatic musical and an ancient horror movie. They watched the former nonsense with rapt awe, so long had it been since most of them had seen a woman. Esther Williams was all they could talk about for days — Karsten even found himself picturing his Welsh girl in a sleek swimsuit — until the 150-percenters began to sneer, “What kind of a name do you think Esther is, anyway?” Frankenstein, shown the next week, drew a still larger audience, probably because the story was easy to follow without knowing the language, though also, Karsten suspected darkly, because it allowed the men to be afraid, gave them license to experience those fears they could never talk about to each other. It’s escapism, he knows, rather than escape, but he’s gone along with all the rest, if only to watch the newsreels.

They’re the price of the films, of course. Propaganda, the camp leaders have warned, encouraging the men to talk back to them, or over them, to throw Heil Hitlers up on the screen, or shadow puppets — yapping dogs, snapping crocodiles. The men greet the Pathé cockerel with sounds of frenzied clucking and shotgun blasts, like a crowd of schoolboys. When Churchill appears, or the long-faced King, they boo; when it’s de Gaulle, they hum the cancan. As if the war were some vaudeville show, Karsten thinks. He doesn’t believe the newsreels any more than the rest do, but they’re a forceful reminder that he’s only an audience for the war now, no longer an actor in it.

He picks up his letter again, touches the pencil point to his tongue. It’s a whole month since he’s last written. Not that the other men are any better — after the initial flurry of letter writing, they’ve all fallen off. Still, he feels dogged about it.

He might write her about the boy, he supposes.

Karsten hadn’t expected to see him again after the little planes had proved such a failure, but he’d been back within the week, hanging around the wire. So lonely, Karsten thought, even we’re company. Poor company at that. At least the boy had told him his name — Jim — if not the girl’s. Even as he’d slipped him the ship in a bottle, which he hoped might make the boy feel a little closer to his own father, he’d feared it wasn’t much of an offering. He’d watched Jim carry the bottle away with a sinking sensation, and when he didn’t return for the next couple of days, he presumed the worst — smashed to bits.

But then there he’d been, running to the wire, right up against it, shaking it so hard it rang, beads of rain flying from it. And he’d been shouting, bawling. Karsten had started forward before he’d made it out. “Murderers. Filthy bastard murderers!” He paused then. It was clear this time the curses were in earnest. His father, Karsten thought. But he went on nevertheless, and the boy actually backed away from him, though the wire stood between them, as if Karsten might somehow strike him dead anyway.

“What is it?” Karsten asked, and the boy told him, spitting it out, so breathlessly Karsten could barely follow.

“And you killed him,” Jim cried. “You lot.”

And then he’d started flinging stones, mud, and Karsten had been driven back out of range, shamed as much as anything by his initial relief that it wasn’t the boy’s father, at least. But then it came to him, watching the boy’s fury, that perhaps one death was a harbinger of the other.

Karsten had felt so terrible he tried to talk about it to Schiller in the mess the next morning.

“You didn’t kill him,” the other told him between mouthfuls of porridge. “Can’t be guilty for something you didn’t do.”

Karsten nodded, though somehow the very awfulness of it was that he felt guilty for something he hadn’t done. “Not guilt, then,” he tried. “Pity perhaps? Sorrow?”

“For the enemy?”

“For them. For us. I don’t know! Sometimes it feels like they’re all linked somehow, the losses, like a chain, one death coupled to the next, and the next, whichever side they’re on.”

Schiller sipped his coffee, made a face. “I often think how when Willi went down, he spilled his coffee. It must have been on the ledge below the firing slit, until I felt it splash me, you know, the warmth soaking my sleeve. The tin cup bounced across the floor. You don’t recall?”

“No.”

Schiller nodded. “Because it wasn’t coffee, of course. There was no cup. I only imagined it.” He stared into the oily blackness of his mug, gave a little shudder. “I don’t want to be a link in a chain.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “That’s why we surrendered, isn’t it?”

Jim had been back that night, joined by the rest of the boys, one of the gang again, standing right next to the albino, the crowd of them hurling abuse, mudballs, fallen branches. The men had hung back, weathered the storm until the guards had finally ordered the lads off.

Jim had kept coming, though, night after night, with the others and eventually alone again, growing quieter, glowering rather than raging, but still bright with hatred. It had been a week before Karsten could approach close enough to call out what he’d been thinking for days: “But you said he was missing. You don’t know he’s dead.” The boy blinked. “He could be a prisoner like us. My own mother thought I was dead when she didn’t hear. My own mother.”

Jim’s face had stiffened, grown masklike. He’d said nothing, but he left earlier than usual, and the next afternoon he’d been back at the wire, waiting.

When Karsten got close this time, he saw Jim had a black eye, a real shiner.

“Who did that to you?”

“Some lads,” Jim said sullenly. “At school.”

“But why?”

“Because.”

“Because of what?”

“Because I told them about Rhys, about him maybe being a prisoner.” He looked down at his feet, twisting in the dirt of the lane, and then up at Karsten. “What you said.”

“And they didn’t believe you?”

“No, they did. They believed it.” He glared at Karsten. “I didn’t say you’d told me.”

“But why did they hit you?”

And Jim said fiercely, “ I started it. ‘A prisoner?’ they said. ‘Doesn’t that mean he surrendered?’ They said being captured meant he was a coward. So I fought them.” He raised his small bruised fists, and for a second, before waving them aside, Karsten felt a thrill of pride in the boy.

“And they gave you that?”

“You should see them.”