The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  They’d been squatting in the lee of the sea wall, hands on heads, for what seemed like hours before Karsten felt the stiff tap of a muzzle on his shoulder. He’d looked up, opening the arms pressed to his ears, and realized the bombardment had stopped.

  No, not stopped—he could still make out the sizzle of shells high overhead—but the targets were more distant. Retreating, he thought. Nearer, there came the thin chatter of small-arms fire, then nothing. He heard his knees crack as he stood.

  “Think they mean to shoot us?” Schiller had hissed as they moved out, and young Heino muttered, “We deserve it.” Karsten had told them to shut up.

  Now, as they round the bluff and see the makeshift stockade before them, he notices their pace pick up, Heino’s bandaged right hand glowing like a lantern held up before them.

  From a distance, the stockade looks as if it’s built of driftwood, the barbed wire wrapped around it like seaweed, but close up Karsten recognizes the fence posts as the blackened stumps of their own shore defenses, shattered in the bombardment. Inside, he slowly lowers his arms, feeling the tight ache in them, the unaccustomed strain.

  It feels like freedom just to put his hands down.

  He stays close to the wire, walking the perimeter until he’s at the eastern end of the enclosure, nearest the sea. Between the hulks of beached landing craft, he watches the white lines of surf advancing one after another, listens to the gravelly draw of the tide on the sand.

  His father’s trawler had been lost at sea twelve years earlier, the body never found, and his mother had moved them as far inland as she could, but Karsten never stopped missing the water. His father had been a submariner during the Great War, and Karsten had joined the Kriegsmarine hoping to follow in his footsteps, only to be told he was too tall for a U-boat. He’d had to settle for the field-grey uniform of the naval infantry and a life overlooking the Channel from shore defenses.

  The squad had swum out there only last week, draping their uniforms over the tank traps and wire like washing on a line. What he’d give to run into the surf now, strike out through the waves, blinking in the salt spray. He shouldn’t have encouraged the men, of course. They were late back to barracks, but he was self-conscious of his new stripe, didn’t want to seem a tyrant. Besides, it was the first truly hot day of the year, and now he’s glad he let them.

  When he turns back into the stockade he sees what’s wrong at once. He, the boy, and Schiller are the only ones here. We’re the first, Karsten thinks, sinking down. The sand, when he touches it, still holds the silken warmth of the long summer day, but when he pushes his fingers below the surface, the grains are chill and coarse.

  HE HAD THOUGHT himself such a good soldier these past four months, had taken to the army as if his whole life, all eighteen years, had been leading up to this. Already in their initial week of basic training he knew he could carry more, march farther and faster than the rest. He’d been working as a guide for hunters and hikers in the Harz Mountains since the age of fourteen, and once he’d mastered the cadence of drill, the rest came easy. He’d hauled heavier loads for dilettante hikers—yards of coiled rope, ice axes in April, and once the head of a buck, a hunter’s trophy, the antlers gripped over his shoulders and the neck dripping blood down his back with each step. He’d hurried back alone before nightfall to skin the carcass and lug home forty pounds of venison for his mother.

  Even the petty disciplines of army life came naturally to him. He was used to taking orders. He’d been helping his mother run her pension in Torfhaus, at the foot of the Brocken, since his father’s death. Officers, to Karsten, were just demanding guests to be placated with good service. The pension was small and poor, the furnishings more threadbare each season—a great comedown for his mother—but it was always her proud conviction that so long as they were sticklers for cleanliness and neatness, the place could preserve a kind of rustic charm. She taught him to polish the silver, and then to iron and make beds with starched precision, all before he was ten, and he thanked her silently each morning at inspection.

  He’d feared it might make him enemies, how easily it all came to him, but in fact it made him friends, admirers. It helped that he was generous with his comrades, teaching them his mother’s tricks: dipping a rag in hot water before polishing shoes, kneeling rather than bending over to make a bed, ironing only the inside of shirts. They told him he should be an officer and he smiled shyly, though in truth he lacked the arrogance for command, was a natural NCO, the kind who fiercely mothers his men. They actually took to calling him Mutti for a time, and he told them, in return, they’d all make excellent chambermaids.

  His barracks mates prized Karsten for one more skill as well. He’d picked up a smattering of French and English before the war. The latter from a season in Hull, where his father had taken a job with a family of fishermen he’d worked with as a POW in 1919, until his mother, miserable among the enemy, as she called them, demanded they move back to Lübeck. The language had come back to Karsten in later years, chatting with skiers staying at his mother’s place—from whom he’d also picked up some serviceable French—and he’d kept it up watching American movies, Dietrich’s especially, until the ban in ’40. It was French his comrades wanted to learn, though—France was where they all yearned to be posted—in order to “meet the mademoiselles.” He hesitated at first, until they accused him of holding out on them, of wanting all the girls for himself, so he’d taught them Je t’aime, pronouncing it hoarsely, then covering his embarrassment by making fun of their accents.

  Schiller—he’d been one of their drill instructors then—had caught them at it and shaken his head. He’d been in France in ’40 and ’41, and they were still a little in awe of him, but someone had plucked up the courage to ask him if he knew any good pickup lines.

  “Combien?” he’d snorted, and left Karsten to translate.

  AS THE DUSK deepens, Karsten watches a line of British troops file up the beach into the darkness of the dunes. The column bunches near their stockade, those in front slowing to stare, those behind bumping into them. There’s some pointing, some laughter at their expense, some hissed name-calling. Karsten rouses the other two, dusts the sand from his uniform, and steps close to the wire. Several of the men glance away quickly, as if suddenly shy, and it gratifies him, this flinch.

  “Almost have to pity them,” Schiller mutters beside him.

  “Pity them?”

  “We’re out of it, after all.”

  It’s a shameful thought, and Karsten recoils from it. “They might shoot us yet.” He knows it’s unlikely—the stockade is proof of that—but at least it silences Schiller, the older man sagging back against one of the fence posts, sliding down until he’s sitting in the sand. And yet Karsten can’t quite shake the notion. Amid all the hundreds of men on the beach, only the three of them are no longer in the war. They, and the dead, gently nodding in the surf. He looks down the column of pale faces, counting heads. Every fifth man? he wonders. Every fourth? Every third? He’s a prisoner, their prisoner, yet for a moment he’s buoyed by an almost godlike sense of immortality.

  He glances around, abruptly guilty, but Heino is still slumped on the sand, cradling his hand, his back to Karsten and the British.

  The boy is underage, signed up at a recruiting station by some myopic or cynical veteran. There’s less than eighteen months separating them, yet Karsten sees him as a child, divided from the rest, not least by the virginity they’d guessed at and made fun of so mercilessly. The second of three sons, Heino joined up the day he heard his older brother was dead, killed by partisans in Yugoslavia, enlisting under a false name so his family couldn’t find him. Karsten had taken him under his wing, reasoning that by the time the boy was shipped back, it would only be a matter of months before he could enlist again. But he did make Heino write home (in return for an extorted promise to get him laid on leave), adding a note to his mother, at the boy’s bashful begging, pledging to look out for her son. Karsten had even int
erceded with Schiller on Heino’s behalf, back when Schiller was still sergeant. Wunderkind, Schiller dubbed the boy, but in his economical veteran’s way he hadn’t bothered to report him, and Heino had gone on to become something of a mascot for the unit.

  They never did get the boy laid, it occurs to Karsten now. And he hopes this is what Heino is brooding on.

  He’d ask Schiller’s opinion, but beside him he sees that the other has his eyes closed. Not sleeping, though, Karsten is sure. He wonders what Schiller’s thinking behind those lids. Probably wondering where his next drink’s coming from.

  In boot camp, Schiller had been a morose despot who’d never shown enthusiasm for anything except finding fault and cribbage (nagging them to play, gloating when he won, nagging them again when they quit in disgust). The men had been delighted when he’d been caught drunk one night, puking on the major’s roses, and stripped of rank. But they’d been dismayed when he’d been shipped out with them to France.

  In a sense, Karsten owes his recent promotion to Schiller’s disgrace. After the sergeant had been demoted, another corporal had been elevated in his stead, creating an opening. Karsten had only sewn the stripe on the month before, tongue tip pressed to the corner of his mouth. Heino had raised his arm, posed it, flexing as if showing off a new muscle, and the men had given a little cheer, though Karsten knew they meant as much to jeer Schiller. He tried to shrug off their congratulations, tell them it was just one stripe.

  “Maybe so,” Schiller growled. He was slumped in his bunk, drunk again, though no one knew where he got his booze, and he never offered to share. “It was the Führer’s rank, for all that.”

  To his surprise, Karsten has become wary friends with the older man. Contemptuous of them as he was in training, Schiller has always grudgingly admired Karsten’s soldiering, even using him as an example to the others, and Karsten, for his part, secretly envies the older man’s experience. He’s the only one in the squad, after all, to have seen action, though Karsten has never been able to push him for the details—has he killed, and if so, how many? He’d tried to bring it up once, in a bar on leave, and Schiller had raised his glass in a mock toast: “To innocence!” And yet the older man has quietly taken it upon himself to complete Karsten’s training these past weeks—teaching him “all the things they don’t tell you in basic,” how to handle officers, the men’s dodges.

  And I listened, Karsten thinks now, crossing his arms and fingering the stitches on his sleeve, and never said anything about his drinking.

  IT HAD BEGUN before dawn with the naval bombardment, the shells flung from somewhere over the grey horizon, missing them mercifully but spitting gouts of sand through their firing slits with enough force to sting their faces. They’d crouched down, cradling the guns, emptying their canteens over their faces to clear their eyes while the explosions walked overhead, white cement dust jumping out of the low ceiling, sifting down on them until they looked like bakers. Then came the planes, tearing by so loud Karsten thought the noise alone might kill them, rip them to shreds. Finally the landing craft, a long line of them pressing through the surf, throwing themselves onto the beach like spent swimmers at the end of a race.

  It wasn’t hard to kill the men in them, he found. He’d been so hungry for action, desperate for it after all the weeks of training. He’d actually hoped for an invasion, worried he’d missed his chance. And now here it was, and he felt, more than anything, relieved as he gunned down the distant figures, relieved and vindicated, jerking his sights from target to target, clutching at the trigger. Beside him Heino, feeding him the ammunition, was frowning with concentration, his fingers dancing over the belt as if over piano keys. Karsten felt a sudden uproarious pity for him, wanted to yell at him to look—look!—out the firing slit. You’re missing it!

  At least Schiller was getting into the spirit of things, roaring with excitement. Willi, the other gunner’s mate, was screaming right along with him, even though he detested Schiller, had been begging Karsten for a new assignment. But now it felt as if they were all coming together, their petty differences burnt off. He could see Willi sheltering behind Schiller’s fury, taking comfort in it. Why, Schiller looked as if he might drive the British off the beach with his contempt alone.

  But they’d kept coming, of course. Wave after wave, too many for them to keep up with. Karsten’s arms had begun to ache, a dull pain spreading from his hands, gripping the juddering gun, to his wrists, his forearms, all the way to his back, a hard pinch between his shoulder blades. It was heavy work, this slaughter. He began to feel an odd sympathy for the exhausted men slogging through the sand, envied them as they lay themselves down before his fire.

  And then Willi had been hit, his slack face suddenly looking like a child’s. Heino knelt beside him, and in quick glances Karsten watched him apply a tourniquet to Willi’s arm, stab him with an ampoule of morphine. It was a neat job, Karsten thought, Schiller would have approved, and only when Heino looked up, proud of his first field dressing, did Karsten lift his feet from the oily pool spreading behind Willi’s head.

  The end had come quickly then, the hitch in their fire when Willi went down, enough to let the British close to within grenade-throwing distance. Karsten recalls the sound of them hitting the walls of the bunker—he’d thought, for a moment, they were throwing rocks—and then one had flown through the slit and Heino chased it around the concrete floor like a mouse. He heaved two more back while Karsten wrestled with a jam in the breech, before the first bright spear of the flamethrower lanced through the firing slit, boiling across the ceiling.

  A moment later a second shot unfurled down the passageway to the rear of the bunker. Karsten heard the breathy roar of it first, felt the warm gust of oily fumes, and just had time to push Heino aside, knock Schiller down before the flower of flame bloomed in their midst. He and Schiller lay there, one atop the other, even after the fire washed back down the corridor, watching the flames dance on Willi’s head. They looked so lively, licking his ears and temples, it was hard to believe he was dead, until they smelled the singed hair.

  Schiller had clutched him then, started screaming. Karsten stared at his lips, trying to make out what he was saying, deafened by the stammering guns. And then Schiller had put his lips to Karsten’s ear: “You have to tell them. You’re the only one. With your English. You have to tell them we surrender.”

  Karsten had tried to shove him away when he understood, but Schiller hugged him like a drowning man.

  “If not for me, for the boy!”

  Heino was huddled in the far corner, shaking. Karsten thought he was wounded, crawled to him. “Where is it? Where?” He tried to pull apart the boy’s arms, wrapped tight around his knees, and then he saw Heino had soiled himself. The boy’s face was dark with smoke below his close-cropped fair hair; the tears rolling down his blackened cheeks looked like oil.

  There seemed to be a lull outside. Maybe the enemy thought the last burst had killed them all, maybe they were summoning up their nerve to rush the bunker. In the stillness, Karsten heard the thought distinctly: I can save him.

  Climbing to his feet, sagging against the blackened doorway, he tried to call out, but broke down coughing in the stink of gasoline from the charred walls. Schiller was there at once, pushing their last canteen on him with fumbling hands, making him gulp the water down. Karsten tried again, hanging his head a little farther into the passage this time, the English thick as paste on his tongue. “Can you hear me?” But there was nothing, no reply, though no flame either, and he knew he was going to have to go down the passage to make himself heard, down the narrow concrete tunnel in which there’d be no way to dodge the fire.

  He put a hand out to steady himself and jerked it back. The walls were hot, and when he sucked his fingers he tasted soot. He looked back at Schiller, saw he was gripping his rifle, and for a second Karsten thought he was going to force him out at gunpoint, until Schiller shook his head, a sick expression on his face. “For me,” he mouthed,
and Karsten knew he meant to put his lips around the barrel, to kill himself rather than face the flames.

  Karsten stumbled down the passage then, every second expecting the rush and flood of flame to wash over him, calling out as he went, wondering if they could understand him. The slit of light ahead, tinged red by the sun, looked like tensed lips. Finally he heard something from the end of the tunnel: “Come on then, if you’re coming!” And it seemed miraculous to speak the same language as men he had just been trying to kill, who might kill him any second, the words passing between them faster than bullets.

  He hurried the last few steps into the light, remembering at the last moment to raise his hands.

  It was so bright after the dimness of the bunker. It made him think of those long summer evenings when he’d come out of a theater, shocked to find the day still blazing, as if it should have somehow ended, faded to black, with the film. The light made his eyeballs feel swollen and raw, and he blinked and squinted until he could make out half a dozen men, rifles trained on him, and at their center a burly fellow in motorcyclist’s goggles with a tank on his back, and before him the blunt black muzzle of the flamethrower, the delicate blue bud of the ignition flame at it’s tip.

  There was a long moment of silence. Karsten must have imagined it, but he could have sworn it was possible to make out the hiss of gas, the ticking of the fuel cylinders. Standing, swaying slightly in the scarred portal, it seemed as if something more were required of him, something more formal. But under the scrutiny of the several pairs of eyes trained on him, he found himself tongue-tied, like those times in front of class when he’d forgotten the lesson he was supposed to have by heart. He felt himself grow hot, and he realized that beneath the sweat and grime he was blushing. And then it came to him, the correct phrase, rising out of memory.