Owen Sheers - Resistance

Anywhere else and he might have let it be that way. Might have walked on and climbed higher up the slope as he went, so as not to hear her screams. He’d known it to happen so many times before, why shouldn’t it happen again?

Because he wouldn’t let it. Not here, not now. Because this valley could be different. He’d already begun to feel the faintest of turnings within himself this past week. He knew it was the valley that had engaged this turning and he wanted it to continue, this slow rotation inside him like the tumblers of a lock edging into place. If it went on for long enough, until the end of the war, then who knows? It might just unlock him altogether. It might still not be too late and he could finish his war a victor in every way. Over his enemies and over himself.

“Why are you here, Steiner?” Albrecht looked away from him again, out over the deep valley before them.

“I had no choice, sir.”

“No, here . Now. On this hill.”

“That house is silent, sir,” Steiner said, jerking a thumb at the radio pack lying on the ground behind them. “The whole valley is. I was looking for a signal.”

“And did you find one?”

“Not yet, sir. But I think I will higher up. Up there.” He pointed to above the source of the Olchon at the head of the valley.

Albrecht followed the line of his finger up to the horizon behind them, its edge dark against the opaque sky.

“Well, let’s see if you’re right, shall we?” Albrecht said, handing the binoculars back to Steiner and starting to walk up the slope, pressing the heels of his palms into his thighs. Steiner didn’t follow him but just turned and looked back down the valley instead, at the faint shape of Sarah moving between the bilberry bushes. Albrecht stopped his ascent and called down to him.

“She didn’t drop any bombs, private. None of them did. They’re farmers, that’s all. Let them farm.”

Steiner looked up the slope at Albrecht. There was something unsettled in his eyes. Albrecht met his stare, one hand resting on the holster of his pistol. A crow cackled from a tree below. A pair of ravens spun, ragged in the wind. Eventually Steiner bent to the radio pack, slipped one of its straps over his shoulder, and began climbing up the hill towards Albrecht.

“Come on,” Albrecht said when he was nearly with him. “You never know. If we get through maybe they’ll tell us it’s over. That we’ve won already.”

Steiner gave a resigned smile at the worn joke he’d heard so many times before, a hopeless wish thrown at reluctant radio operators across Europe for the past four years. Albrecht walked on. He felt strange. He knew it was right, in what he remembered of the real world, to be walking away from the farm woman as they were now. And yet he felt wrong, as if he’d denied the war its natural course, disturbed the calibration of events. It reminded him of when, as a boy, he’d taken a still-breathing mouse from the mouth of a hunting cat. He’d intervened in nature, hiding the bruised and bitten rodent in the garden hedge. But he’d known it was only temporary. That he was only keeping at bay, just for a moment, what he knew all too well to be inevitable. The cat would find the mouse, the wolf will find the lamb, and the war, like the river they walked beside now, would always rediscover its course, however much he wished to dam it with the insignificant pebbles of his own intentions.

They’re still here. Me and Maggie saw two of them today when we were doing her ewes. They were just looking at us and then they were gone. The officer and the tall one. Maggie was having none of it and set to with her shears harder than ever but it shakes me up every time, Tom. And what makes it worse is every time at first I think it’s you or William or Hywel. Still, only a week or two is what they said. Then once they’re gone maybe you can come back .

It’s still clear. The mornings all start off with mist, but then it burns through until it’s fine all day. The nights are cold, though. Frost every one for the last week. But then I suppose you know all this, don’t you? All the leaves have turned and every morning there’s new spiders’ webs in the grass .

Menna and Mary have got all their ewes down so they’re tupping too now. The whole valley will be lambing at the same time. Mary’s been hiding Bethan away ever since they came. I understand why she’s done that but I think she’s being too worried as usual. Apart from like today we see nothing of them .

I picked bilberries yesterday. I don’t know why. Habit I suppose. It seemed wrong not to. Once I get a moment I’ll try some jam with them. They won’t make much but it’ll be something .

Things have gone awful quiet, Tom. Reverend Davies was due last Sunday but hasn’t been up since over a month now. Maybe he heard they’re in The Court. Even so, you’d think he’d still come. None of us have had a chance to go into town. Maggie says the radio must have changed its waves or something because she’s getting nothing, not even music .

I think the old cockerel will have to go. The young one is causing too much trouble. His spurs are long enough. I was waiting for you to come back but I suppose I’ll have to do it. Best be rid of him before winter .

George pressed himself into the hedge until its thorns and twigs dug into the back of his head, clawed at his neck, and scratched up around his eyes. He felt the sting of a nettle brush across the back of his knuckles. He should have worn gloves. Not because of the nettles but because if they swung those torches this way, his hands would shine up like lanterns out of the dark. Edging the sleeves of his coat over his fingers, he held them there, tightly balled in his fists.

The patrols kept changing their routine. This was the third time he’d been caught out like this. So much for the Germans’ infamous love of order. That was the one thing Atkins had said he could rely on. Once they’d established a pattern they’d stick to it. But they hadn’t. Atkins had been wrong about so much. George was still here for a start. Still going out every night to check his drop points, to scribble observations on his dwindling supply of rice paper. In Atkins’s world he should be dead by now. Or on a train or in a cattle truck shunting and rattling south. But he wasn’t. He was still here. And he wasn’t the only one. Those messages kept coming and his observations kept going, disappearing from the drop points as if the walls and gateposts were in collusion with him, swallowing his information, digesting it into the landscape, preparing the country for when it would throw off these invaders scurrying across its back.

The operational units had been at work as well, which is why he was having to press himself into the hedge like this now. Ever since those two guards at the station had been killed, the young lieutenant at Pandy had made it his priority to find the men responsible. That’s why the patrols kept changing, he was sure.

They’d done a roundup of men in the area the same day they found the guards with their guts spilt over the road. George himself had been pulled out into the farmyard at home. He’d thought that was the end then. Or at least the beginning of the end. The lieutenant barking questions he didn’t understand into his face, the translator repeating them in a bored, irritable tone beside him. Why wasn’t he in the army? Where had he been last Thursday? His mother scrabbling in the drawers of the dresser for that medical report from four years ago. “Acute deafness in left ear.” That, at least, was something Atkins had got right.

George was sure if they weren’t under orders to keep the farms going they’d have taken him there and then. As it was the lieutenant listened while the translator read the report, eyeballed George for a few long, frozen seconds, then gave his sergeant the nod to clear the soldiers out of the yard. When they’d gone his mother sat against the trough and wept. His father had laid a hand on her back in a way George had never seen before, rubbing gently between her shoulder blades. When he’d looked up at his son, it was in such a way as to make George think perhaps his father knew everything after all. Or perhaps he was asking himself the same questions the lieutenant had asked. Why wasn’t he in the army? Why wasn’t he in the Home Guard? Why wasn’t he doing something, at least?