Women at War

by Jan Casey

  It was lovely, but Annie had a stab of anguish straight to her heart when she thought that it should have been Walther throwing and catching his baby son. He looked more like his Vati every day, too. Frau Wilhelm and Annie remarked on it all the time, perhaps too often for their own good as they inevitably become mournful again. But how could they avoid what was so obvious and what they wanted to see? The little boy’s eyes were the same pale hazel as Walther’s; his nose had the same ridge running between the nostrils; his hair was the same dark brown. Even at this young age he had the same build as Walther and, best of all, Annie was convinced he had the same sunny personality and love of fun.

  Last week, she’d found Frau Wilhelm crying in the kitchen. She had a cloth in her hand and although tears streamed from her eyes and her nose was running, she had not faltered in her duty of wiping away the aftermath of the vegetables she had been scrubbing. ‘What is it?’ Annie had felt chilly with alarm. ‘Are you unwell?’

  Frau Wilhelm had sniffed and shaken her head. Annie could tell that her mother-in-law felt embarrassed to be caught in such a state of distress.

  Annie had taken her by the shoulders, looked into her face and asked her again, ‘Dear mother-in-law, what’s wrong? It’s okay. I still cry for Walther, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ she had conceded. ‘It is for Walther and…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Selfishly, for myself.’

  ‘You are the least selfish woman I know,’ Annie had said. ‘So please tell me.’

  At last Frau Wilhelm had rinsed the cloth and left it to dry next to the sink. ‘I worry that one day you will meet someone else and Herr Doctor and I will become insignificant to you. And Walti.’

  Then it had been Annie’s turn to cry. ‘Oh, no,’ she’d managed. ‘Never. I would never allow that to happen. Look at me,’ she’d said in a firm voice. ‘We will always be one and the same family. Do you understand?’

  Frau Wilhelm had wrung her hands and looked agitated. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to find happiness again. But whoever your next husband might be, he probably won’t want us.’

  Thoughts of a potential future husband had not crossed her mind. Now that she took a moment to consider that possibility it seemed highly unlikely. There was no longer any contact with her comrades from the university and she never spoke to any of the men who worked in the truck or diesel factories, especially after her frightening experience with Dietmar. Despite seeing another side to Horst, she shuddered when she thought of the Wehrmacht or the SS and knew if there were no other men on earth they would have to claim her screaming and kicking. ‘If,’ she’d told Frau Wilhelm, ‘I meet such a man one day, he will have to accept my situation completely or I will not accept him.’

  ‘Liebe Annie.’ Frau Wilhelm hugged her and held on tight.

  ‘And for now,’ she’d said, ‘Walti, Fred, you, and Herr Doctor are more than enough for me to concentrate on. And, of course, my memories of Walther.’

  They’d smiled at each other, wiped their noses and gone back to their chores.

  *

  Annie left the house early in the morning in the hopes that she could avoid the queues and find something edible to bring home. She thought the same thing every morning, but was inevitably faced with lines of weary women, hunger, fatigue and worry etched on their faces. Walti had begun to cry for food and it was the most sickening sound she had ever heard. She rocked him, gave him most of her rations, turned him on his tummy over her knees and rubbed his back hoping to give him some comfort. Other times he was quiet and listless, too tired to kick a ball or turn the pages of a nursery rhyme book. At night they slept in the same bed to keep each other warm and she lay awake, panic surging through her.

  She joined line after despondent line of women waiting and hoping, like her, for some kind of sustenance to take home. At Lange the Baker’s she stamped her feet, eager for the queue to creep forward. The woman in front of her had thinning hair that smelled sour and huge white flakes of skin on the shoulders of her coat. When she turned suddenly, Annie had to control a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes were deep in their sockets and ringed with purple stains, like squashed summer berries. Averting her face, Annie caught sight of her reflection in the empty shop window and realised that her own eyes were at least as ghoulish.

  Of course none of them thought for one minute they would get a loaf of wheat bread or rye or pumpernickel. What they were hoping for was much more basic than that. A teaspoon of yeast or a handful of flour or the crust of a three-day old bread roll left over from either the barracks or one of the factory canteens. But not today – Frau Lange locked the door from the inside, turned the sign to read closed and shook her head; Annie thought she saw her crying. So they turned en masse and made their way to join the queue plodding towards the entrance of the next shop along. She craned her neck to see if the women coming out had anything that looked worthwhile and there did seem to be the promising shapes of tins and packets in their bags, so she waited patiently.

  She knew that this general store would not have had much delivered but would be dependent on handouts for most of their provisions. It was not possible, though, to go on like this much longer as the Wehrmacht themselves were looking rangy and bedraggled. A group of them, trying to walk like bulls despite their lack of meatiness, pushed into the store and came out rattling tins of coffee and pressed pork under the women’s noses. A bent, frail woman, older than Frau Wilhelm, broke the line and shuffled towards the market, but the soldiers circled her, taunting her with filthy, degrading names. One of them held out a tin of peas and just as the woman made a grab for it, the despicable man pulled it back. His comrades cheered him on and he repeated the nauseating show with all the goods he had stolen from under their noses. Annie felt as if she would vomit, but strode up and pulled the woman free. ‘How would you like that to happen to your own mothers? Or grandmothers?’ she chastised them. ‘Shame on you,’ she shouted, her chin in the air.

  For a split second they did look humiliated, but then they turned on her with jibes of what they thought she would do with them to get her hands on a packet of dried egg. She felt very frightened, her prominent bones rattling in her thin frame, but she held her nerve, huffed at them and steered the older woman away. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ the woman repeated, bowing her head. Annie watched her hurry away and wondered what she would do next time if no one came forward to help her.

  Then she tried her luck at the newsagent’s where they sometimes had goods like biscuits and tea for sale. The queue was only eight-deep so she thought she might be successful. The woman before her was a clerk in the Town Hall who used to be the type never to have a hair out of place – plump and well-turned-out. Now she was neither. She began to chat to another woman and the gist of their conversation was that they didn’t hold out much hope of anything at the newsagent’s, but mentioned foraging in the forest. Annie’s eyes widened and she listened closely – she’d never heard of such a thing. It sounded feral and dirty and… godforsaken. Was that what they were now? Forgotten people scouring the back roads like animals? Stooping to pick through roots and branches for anything to put in their mouths? If they had come to this, she thought, then she was truly frightened for their lives and their souls.

  She couldn’t listen to any more so made her way to the marketplace. Nothing there either. Guilt and remorse ate through her when she recalled how she had refused to buy the scrawny, ulcerated chickens on display there last year. If only they were available now, she would take one without hesitation.

  There was nothing left for her to do. So with a heavy heart and a growling stomach, she made her way to the forest. And what she saw there was truly shocking. The day was already darkening when she arrived and as she stepped into the undergrowth, all light seemed to be left behind. She waited for her eyes to adjust and when they did, she could make out grey shapes bending and stretching behind every copse of trees. There were scuttling sounds and the crack of twigs breaking, the low murmur
of voices pointing out fallen nuts and festering mushrooms. ‘There!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘By your foot.’

  ‘I cannot see.’

  ‘There. Quickly, before someone else gets it.’

  Steeling herself, she moved towards the dense interior and made herself known. Women with children, a few older or disabled men, stopped for a minute and stared. One or two who she’d seen around the town nodded then resumed their hunt. She joined them, finding acorns, berries, digging roots with her hands, pulling up weeds, brushing leaves and thorns away from her face and out of her hair. A man whose trousers were held up with a piece of string caught a mouse and without any compunction, bashed its head against a tree. The creature let out a thin squeal and its captor threw it into his bag.

  It began to rain, but they carried on until they couldn’t see a thing. Then she followed everyone back to Ulm feeling repulsed and proud of herself in equal measures.

  ‘Annie!’ Frau Wilhelm was beside herself when she came in cold and dirty and pale. ‘We have been so worried. What has happened?’

  Annie tried to play down her retelling of the queues, the soldiers, the forest but Frau Wilhelm was horrified. She ran for Herr Doctor who said he thought she was in shock so she was dried, fed thin soup by the trace of a fire and in lieu of hot, sweet tea, told she would have to make do with a shot of brandy. At last, she thought, something was going in her favour. It did the trick and helped her shivers so, happily, Herr Doctor prescribed another.

  Whilst Frau Wilhelm fussed and fretted, Herr Doctor told them he had heard about the foraging from patients attending his surgeries with stomach cramps, headaches, skin rashes and vomiting.

  ‘We must do all we can to make sure you do not have to do this again,’ Frau Wilhelm said.

  ‘I thought we had,’ Annie answered.

  Frau Wilhelm did not say anything, but took the bag into the kitchen, emptied the contents into the sink and picked over the spoils of her hunt. She did not throw any of it away.

  Annie’s feet remained blocks of ice and she was sent to bed under as many blankets and eiderdowns as Frau Wilhelm could find. With sagging eyelids she listened to Walti calling, ‘Walti wants Mutti.’ But Frau Wilhelm shushed him with promises of a story and the last of the watery soup.

  Before she succumbed to sleep, Annie forced herself to write about what she had seen and heard, felt and undergone that day. If she didn’t, she might convince herself in the morning that she had dreamt it, rather than knowing she had lived through a most horrendous nightmare.

  *

  31 December 1944

  I refuse to insult this book with writing the trite message we used to greet each other with on this date every previous year. There is no time or energy for such superficial sentimentality. Herr Doctor is under the dust and debris of his surgery. Most of Ulm has been razed to the ground. The rubble is so thick and deep that walking through it is almost impossible. God alone knows when or what we will eat next.

  Despite her grief, Frau Wilhelm carried on with household duties and minding Walti whilst Annie spent most of her time looking for food. They had to, there was nothing else they could do. Frau Wilhelm spoke of Herr Doctor with great sadness and when she had time to sit, she wrung her hands in agitation. They both tried not to cry, but kept soggy, balled handkerchiefs up their sleeves as without warning they would fill up with tears. All of their men had been taken from them and poor Walti was growing up without a father, grandfather or uncle to look up to.

  Frau Wilhelm also cried for her cherished, spotless, old-fashioned home. The one she’d lived in for most of her life with Herr Doctor and Walther. Annie knew she dwelled on everything they shared there together and how she built such a warm, comfortable sanctuary for them as a family. Annie remembered how she generously gave up her trinkets and cuckoo clock, dark patterned carpets and much-loved kitchen to spend time helping her after Walther died. It must have been difficult enough for her to do nothing more than pop backwards and forwards to her own territory, but now there was not a brick left of her house to go back to. Nothing. Not a photograph or teaspoon or door handle or towel or rake could be salvaged. And not a trace of Herr Doctor although they know he had been there when the bombs hit, treating patients with what little he had. How Oma’s little house – Annie’s little house – escaped the devastation they had no idea, but they did not take that good luck for granted.

  Amongst the wreckage in the streets, Annie sometimes glimpsed minute pieces of life as it had been lived – the handle of a coffee cup, a torn bookmark, a length of string very like the one that man in the forest had used instead of a belt, a dog’s collar, part of a brooch, a child’s bone teething ring. Somehow those things made her cry harder than the colossal demolished pit that used to be Ulm.

  She could not comprehend that terrible air raid. Although the authorities would never admit it, they all felt sure it was nearly over so why did the Allies decide to punish them in that way? If they weren’t worth bombing years ago then why now when they were already on their knees with hunger and illness and exhaustion? If they could see them as they were in their everyday lives – dragging themselves around, living from hand to mouth, frightened, cold and on the brink of madness, they would take pity on them. But they were human beings so they must surely be able to imagine their plight?

  Frau Wilhelm reminded her that the bombs destroyed the Gallwitz barracks. ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ she asked, trying to convince herself as well as Annie.

  ‘It would have been, when the men in the barracks were more than starving spectres,’ Annie retorted, thinking of the Wehrmacht wandering around, what was left of their torn uniforms hanging off them, looking disorientated and rudderless. She sighed and flopped into a chair, bouncing Walti on her lap. ‘I don’t know any of the thinking behind it,’ she said. ‘None of us do. But couldn’t they have made a show of it instead of retaliating in such a cruel way?’

  ‘I know, Annie,’ Frau Wilhelm agreed. ‘A couple of military hospitals were obliterated, too. Herr Doctor—’ she choked when she said his name ‘—would never have sanctioned any hospital being bombed. All those poor helpless people. All the medicine and bandages and equipment. The nurses and doctors. It’s unthinkable. Herr Doctor could have used all of that in his surgery if it hadn’t been… If he wasn’t…’

  She could not carry on and Annie hugged her, knowing the conversation would have to come to an end. But her mind kept racing and to herself she acceded that the truck factories and diesel plant were fair play – if it was nearly over then wrecking those kinds of places would accelerate the process. But their homes, shops, the market, their friends, their families, what little they had – everything was dust. Thank goodness the Minster was relatively unscathed and could offer a roof to the thousands who had lost their homes. That was where she would go to beg for some of the minute portions of food being distributed to the most needy. She would take Walti with her to prove she had a child who must be fed.

  *

  As always there were those worse off than them. They, at least, had a house to live in, a fire to keep them warm when they could get fuel and a kitchen to cook in when food was available. Of the thousands left homeless after the air raids, some sheltered in the Minster, some in any sort of makeshift shelter they could find or build, others had taken to walking towards places they thought might have more to offer like Munich or Berlin. Annie had seen them with the little they owned on their backs or in sacks, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. How they had the strength to get anywhere was a mystery to her. And others set up camp in the forests.

  She’d seen them when she’d been foraging. They lived in industrious groups, clearing away swathes of undergrowth and using bits of sheets and tarpaulin to provide cover. Or they sat in twos and threes around fires on which they roasted creatures she couldn’t identify and didn’t want to think about. Most regarded her with hungry indifference, some looked antagonistic until she passed b
y without exchanging a word. One woman had picked up a large, pitted stone and stood with it primed and ready, daring her to intrude on her space. ‘There’s nothing here worth having,’ she’d shrieked. ‘Go away.’ So Annie had turned and hurried away as she’d been ordered.

  But one afternoon she heard a shout, ‘Young Frau Wilhelm.’ Annie didn’t recognise the voice and couldn’t see anyone so spun around and around until a waif pushed her way through a clump of bushes and appeared in front of her. It took her a minute to recognise the child as Gisela, the little girl who’d helped them after Walti was born by delivering their rations. But gone was the thick hank of hair and in its place was a shaven scalp, which she scratched until Annie thought it would bleed. The pink cheeks were replaced by sallow hollows, the dimpled knees by bones so sharp they almost pierced her skin. Her mouth was stained green.

  She held out her hand to Annie and said, ‘Come with me.’

  To Annie’s shame, she hesitated. For one thing she could see the child was filthy and crawling with lice. For another she wondered if she was taking her to where she would be assaulted for the few berries and nuts in her bag. But that was not the way she wanted to live her life, by being suspicious and insular. That was not how she wanted the world to be so thought she must make a stand based on her principles and morals. She squared her shoulders, beckoned for Gisela to lead the way and followed at a short distance.

  They stumbled over fallen tree trunks, through muddy streams, around crudely built camps. ‘Gisela,’ Annie said. ‘Why is your mouth green?’

  Gisela turned, wiping her face on her ragged sleeve. ‘I am sorry, young Frau Wilhelm. It is grass.’

  Alarm surged through her. ‘Grass?’ she said. ‘You have been eating grass?’

  Gisela nodded her head. ‘Sometimes we have nothing else.’