Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

One of Hendriks’s people was a black man in the arse-end of an American provost’s uniform. He had a green operating theatre gown over one shoulder, and was carrying a small case. I said, ‘Wotcha, Cutter!’ as he walked up.

  He said, ‘Wotcha: that’s English for something I suppose?’ and, ‘I brought you a drink.’ This was as we walked down the steps. He gave me a half-bottle of bourbon.

  ‘Thanks. Does that mean we can get through to the hospital now?’

  ‘You can walk it in thirty minutes, although I wouldn’t try it. You’ll end up down a hole with a broken leg. There’s a lot of unexploded ordnance lying about as well.’

  ‘Grace Baker still there?’

  ‘She was when I left.’

  I don’t know what I had expected, but it was as if all of the air had been suddenly punched out of my body. The silence spread around Hendriks’s people as they reached the lower levels, and the people got a sight of them. Especially the Cutter. Ingrid stood up to face us. I said, ‘Tell your people that they are doctors: from the hospital. They can help the sick and hurt. They will not harm anyone.’

  She turned away from me, and spoke aloud. By this time the Cutter had reached her. When she had finished speaking he reached out, and turned her face gently into the best light, and told me, ‘I can tidy that up for a start.’

  Ingrid looked a little panicky. I told her, ‘He is a friend – my friend. He is a very good doctor. We call him Cutter.’

  She gave him the eye, and said perfectly, ‘You will not cut my head off?’

  Cutter said, ‘No. It’s far too pretty for that.’ His teeth gleamed in the light.

  I went to find James. He said, ‘It’s a funny old bloody world,’ about nothing in particular.

  ‘Yes it is, Major. I wonder what Les is doing now?’

  ‘Lugging your bloody supper around,’ Les said. He was above us on the steps, and fifteen feet back. ‘Where d’ y’ wan’ it?’ He had a rations box on each shoulder. It would be full of tins of corned beef.

  You can trust an officer to be ungrateful. James said, ‘I thought I left you to guard Kate?’

  Les said, ‘You can trust an officer to be ungrateful, can’t you?’ Then, ‘I left an Ordnance Corps type with her, sir. It was as far as your lorries could get. They needed me to show them the way across your brick field. There’s six of us will make two journeys each – it’s about a twenny-minute stroll if we’re careful, now nobody’s shooting at you – that will give you just about enough grub for tonight. They’ll get the rest through tomorrow. You’ll have to make do without the blankets for another night.’ James didn’t say anything. Les went on, ‘I trust that’s all right, sir?’

  James didn’t say anything. Not at first. Les put the boxes down when he reached our level. I helped him with them. Then James reached out and touched him on one shoulder.

  ‘Of course it’s all right, Les. Thank you. Thank you very much.’ They both grinned like a couple of bloody Spartans.

  After a couple of trips Les went back with his squaddies. Alan produced a couple of blankets from his pack, and spread them a few steps down from the doors, then closed up and battened us in for the night. I can still remember his face, half lit, high above us. He was smiling down at James introducing a circle of middle-aged Fraus to the mysteries of the Stovie as if he had been making it all his life.

  Alan called down, ‘An’ dinna ferget the handful o’ oatmeal, sir.’

  James waved back. He said, ‘I won’t, Sergeant.’

  That took seconds to sink in.

  ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir . . . I’m no Sergeant.’

  ‘You will be, when you get back to your regiment.’

  I had tucked myself up against a wall, in the dark. I had expected it to be cold or damp. It wasn’t. It was dry like the floor. Ingrid found me there. She squeezed alongside me, and pulled a heavy, old curtain around our shoulders. She hooked her arm tight through mine, and put her good cheek against my shoulder. We took a good couple of medicinal sucks at the Cutter’s bottle of bourbon. Her closed eyelids looked purply blue in the half-light. I closed my eyes.

  Twenty-Eight

  I guess that I awoke at about dawn. My left arm, with her right wrapped through it, had gone to sleep. She had half turned towards me during the night. My right arm was stretched across my chest and hers, and my hand was inside her grey ovies, against an amazing breast. She stirred as I removed my hand. There weren’t many people moving about . . . an uncanny quiet, disturbed by snores, and the occasional low murmured conversation. I was still rubbing the circulation back into my arm as I reached the steps. James was at the bottom of them smoking a cigarette: the smoke smelled like Turkish tobacco.

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘What O, Jeeves.’

  ‘You should save that for Les.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry old man. I keep forgetting that you had the operation.’

  ‘The operation?’

  ‘Made into an officer; they scoop most of your brain out – must be an operation. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t notice.’

  ‘That’s how you can tell; once they take your brain away, you never notice. Fancy breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, sir. What’s cooking?’

  ‘Dampers: flour and water pancakes. We still have loads of flour, and a big tin of jam for the kids: Les will bring the rest up today.’

  ‘How long will what’s on your lorries keep these people going, sir?’

  ‘ ’bout four days, if they’re careful. But that’s not the point. There will be a Supply Sergeant along as part of the package. He’ll have a radio man with him, and between them they’ll organize it into a regular supply run.’

  A shadow fell over us. It was Les. I looked up. Bright sun was pouring through the opened cellar doors, and I could only see him in outline.

  ‘It’s been the Major’s major contribution to war theory so far: instead of drawing all of the DPs together in hundreds of thousands, in ’uge camps and feeding stations, the Major worked out that we can save more of them by coping with smaller numbers in the areas we find them, using field kitchens. Two or three hundred at a time . . .’

  ‘DPs?’

  ‘Displaced persons. Remember that one; you’re going to hear a lot of it for the next few years. Europe is full of them.’

  ‘ ’morning, Les,’ James said. ‘You’re right: the next few years will see the biggest demographic changes in Europe since the Stone Age.’

  ‘Demographic?’ New word for me.

  ‘The numbers that tell you where and how people live.’ Even bloody Les knew it. Then he apologized. ‘If you hang around the Major long enough, you get to pick up long words.’ Then he sniffed. I didn’t mind.

  We climbed up into the sunlight. Blue sky and big fluffy clouds. A bit of a nip in the air. Like Pearl Harbor. Sanderson had washed and shaved, and was now going through a routine of callisthenics. Les sat down on the top step and examined Alan’s rifle, which was stowed in a narrow sack, like a holster. When the Scot came up, pulling his shirt on over a surprisingly clean singlet, Les asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘.303 Ross Rifle. Canadian job. Best sniper rifle in the theatre.’

  ‘That you? A sniper then?’

  ‘A marksman. Yes. I lost my taste for it eventually.’

  For the first time I noticed the dull khaki badge sewn on his shoulder under his regimental flash.

  There was a jeep parked at the cellar entrance: a jeep with a big black radio bolted into the back, above one of the wheel arches. A ghastly duet warbled back at us from it: it was ‘A Pretty Girl Is Just Like a Melody’. Les said, ‘It’s good, ain’t it? I got tired of all that Yankee stuff. This is coming from a British Forces station somewhere in ’olland.’

  No one answered him. Eventually James said, ‘Whatever happened to Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth?’ and before anyone could answer asked, ‘Anyone seen Cliff?’

  I offered to be the search party, and as I descended the steps
again I heard this: James – somewhat reproachfully I thought, ‘Whose jeep is it, anyway?’

  Les, ‘Our’n.’

  ‘You didn’t give them Kate in return?’

  ‘ ’course not, sir. What do yer take me for?’

  I heard Alan stifle a snort. Privates didn’t talk to Majors like that in his mob.

  Les went on, ‘I gave them fifty of Charlie’s dollars, an’ a couple o’ thousand bad occupation DMs. Kate would never have made it across to here, an’ I think the jeep’ll get us across to Charlie’s ’ospital without walkin’. I was thinkin’ of you, sir.’

  ‘That’s a load of old bollocks.’

  ‘Sir.’

  I found Cliff in a smaller vaulted brick space, at the very back of trog city. He was sitting at a bench topped by a surprisingly large, modern-looking frame of telephone switch-gear. He had stretched his arms on the bench, and cradled his head on them. I noticed that his shirt cuffs and collar were frayed, and that he could do with a haircut. He wasn’t anything like dead.

  Ingrid appeared at my shoulder: she moved as sneakily as James. She had something black and steaming in a cracked mug.

  ‘I brought him coffee. Not real.’

  Cliff sat up, and groaned. He looked at me on one side of him, and the girl on the other. She put the mug down close to his hand, and said, ‘It is not real.’

  He smiled. He said, ‘Neither are yours, Fräulein Michelin.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘Don’t worry love, bad English joke. Especially bad with your boyfriend standing alongside me.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Did I go to sleep? Must be getting old.’

  I asked him, ‘Did you hear Hitler?’

  That seemed to bring him up short. He said, ‘Thank you for the coffee, Fräulein. Do you think you could find a cup for my friend Charlie here?’

  What he was saying was, Sod off because I have something to say to Charlie that I don’t want you to hear, but he was doing it politely. Ingrid was brighter than either of us, when she said, ‘Of course,’ and turned to leave, she wasn’t talking about the coffee either.

  I said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Do you remember what I told you about Adolf a few weeks back?’

  ‘Yes. I wasn’t sure that I believed you then.’

  ‘You’d better, because the old bogeyman died a fortnight ago; peacefully and in his bed. Uncle Joe doesn’t want it announced until the Red Flag is flying over Berlin. The war stops when he stops: not before.’

  ‘And we agreed?’

  ‘. . . At Tehran. Sorry.’

  ‘Does James know this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And how many others?’

  ‘Maybe twenty Brits. No more. I don’t know how many Yanks. We won’t have told any of our other Allies.’

  ‘But you’ve just told me. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, old boy. I have a feeling about you. I just wanted to break the rules for once. Not very scientific, is it?’

  I said, ‘No,’ just as Ingrid came back to us. She held out a mug of ersatz to me. It was identical to Cliff’s: even cracked in the same place. That made me smile.

  I said, ‘You haven’t brought one for yourself.’

  ‘No.’ I wondered if she would smile more frequently as I got to know her better.

  ‘You will share mine,’ I told her.

  She said, ‘I thought that too.’

  Cliff said, ‘You’d better watch that one, Charlie. She’ll checkmate the lot of us.’

  She did smile for that. She recognized a compliment when she heard one. She insisted I take the first sip. The acorn coffee was bitter, and clung to the back of my palate. That’s exactly when I fell in love with her.

  Ingrid and I sat on the bottom step. Every time I turned to look up at the doors I could see motes of dust dancing in the light. There was just a slight tang of wood smoke from the brazier. Our shoulders were touching. I filled and smoked my pipe. An old man propped himself on an elbow to watch me. Ingrid coughed, but not because of the tobacco smoke: it was one of those coughs that clear your throat when you are about to say something dangerous.

  ‘There is an old Russian lady. She is here with her two grandchildren. She is determined not to be taken by the Russians. Isn’t that strange?’ She pronounced the words as Roossian and Roossians.

  ‘Sounds like a good idea to me. Would you stand around and wait for the SS if the boot was on the other foot?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘. . . if you were in the same position as her?’

  ‘I see. No. She told me something.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘She said to be careful. That it is too easy to become involved with someone who has been of great service to you. Someone who has perhaps saved you.’

  I let that hang in the air for half a minute.

  ‘She sounds like a wise old lady.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I think that it is possibly too easy for a man to become involved with a girl he has never even seen. Just a voice on a telephone.’

  She let that hang in the air for half a minute; then, ‘Why are you going to the hospital: is that as a result of a promise also?’

  ‘Yes it is. Several promises.’

  ‘A woman, also?’

  ‘Yes, an English woman. She was in an air raid in England, became unwell and ran away to hide. First she ran to France, and then in Holland and now in Germany. She saw many dead children, you see, and was pregnant herself . . .’

  ‘Your child?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have seen dead children.’

  ‘I thought that: sometimes you have sad eyes.’

  She took my hand, and drew invisible signs on its palm with her forefinger.

  ‘You promised to marry her, this woman?’

  ‘I once asked her to marry me, and she laughed. Then she said Yes, but only after the war, and only if I could find her. It feels like a promise.’

  ‘So you will find her, and marry her, this woman?’

  ‘No. I will find her, and ask her to release me from my promise.’

  ‘That is because you stopped loving her when you met me?’

  She could have been mocking me. Was she laughing at me for being insincere?

  ‘No. I think I stopped loving her even before I spoke to you. Loving her enough to marry her, anyway. It is like having a memory of having loved her.’

  Big pause. I racked my brains to work out if anything had been lost in translation. Then she asked, ‘She had a child?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so. I have heard reports that there is a baby travelling with her.’

  I watched the dust again, dancing in the shaft of daylight.

  ‘If you no longer love her, why are you going to meet her?’

  ‘A promise is a promise. I also promised Mr Clifford that I would find her, and ask her to take the baby back to England.’

  ‘His baby then?’

  ‘No. He made a promise to her parents.’

  ‘So many promises.’

  ‘Yes. So many promises.’

  Her finger on my palm stopped moving.

  ‘Will you make me a promise?’

  ‘No.’ She looked away from me, but I hadn’t finished. ‘I do not have to. I am here.’

  I couldn’t bear the way the old man stared at me. I knocked out my pipe, refilled it with tobacco, and offered it to him with a box of matches. He sat up eagerly, and shared the smoke with a man alongside him. He was even older, if anything. While I watched them smoke I told her, ‘Would you believe that I might already have a child; a German child?’

  ‘You had a German lover; already?’

  ‘No. Not already. I found a little boy – with a lot of dead German soldiers. One was his brother.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I gave him to an innkeeper’s wife. I promised her that if she could not find his people, that she could send the child to me.’

  �
��You told me that you don’t make many promises, Charlie Bassett. I think perhaps you make too many.’

  ‘Did your wise woman tell you that?’

  ‘She did not have to. I am here.’ It was a soft voice, and full of promise.

  The men finished my tobacco, and handed the pipe and matches back. The older of the two spoke in rapid northern German.

  I asked Ingrid, ‘My German’s not that good. What did he say?’

  ‘I am not going to tell you.’

  The old man laughed, and spat a few more words. They sounded coarse. When he smiled his front two teeth were missing. I remembered the French family again. There must have been homeless front teeth scattered all over Europe.

  ‘He lost his wife in an air raid a week ago. She was eighty-two. It was their wedding anniversary.’ I smiled at the old man then. I left her at the bottom of the steps, still chatting with the two old men.

  Les asked me, ‘You ready then?’

  He had the jeep radio tuned to a news broadcast. Something about the RAF attacking German merchant ships trying to escape from Germany with SS soldiers on board. The commentator could obviously see the weapon strikes, and was getting very excited – as if he was describing a football match.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks. As much as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘Mr Clifford coming?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. What about the Major?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll give him a whistle. He’s sitting down the steps with that Scotch guy he promoted. They’re exchanging recipes like a couple of girls. You walked right past them on the way up.’

  ‘I didn’t see them.’

  ‘Well; you wouldn’t, would you? You got that glazed look in your eyes.’

  He didn’t have to whistle for James. The Major must have seen me climbing by, and followed me. He popped out of the cellar like the March Hare.

  ‘What’s that? Charlie in love? Are you in love, Charlie?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like love.’

  ‘You’re not an expert, old boy, compared to us: but explain . . . what does it feel like?’

  ‘It just feels like it’s all over.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The bit of my life that includes chasing girls, and that sort of thing.’