by Helen Bryan
The excited children whooped and waved at the departing Hurricanes. “Three cheers for the RAF, then! Hip hip…hooray!” The mothers wiped trembling hands, still wet, on their aprons, feeling faint at such a close shave.
In his study Oliver Hammet had heard the planes through the open window, but the crash jerked him to his feet. Abandoning the next day’s sermon, he hurried to unlock the cabinet under the vicarage stairs where the Home Guard kept the de Balfort guns.
At Ashpole Cottages Albert handed Nell his hoe and joined the publican Harry Smith who hobbled past, leaning on his walking stick. The farmers’ sons had enlisted and gone, so it was just the three who gathered at the village hall to wait for Hugo de Balfort. Ten minutes later he screeched to a halt in a battered shooting brake. The Home Guard was assembled.
The older children clamored to help find the Heinkel, but their mothers wouldn’t let them out of their sight.
In the muggy August heat, the Home Guard set off in their shirtsleeves. The War Office had promised them rifles, but they had not arrived. Hugo and Oliver were armed with the de Balfort hunting rifles and a handful of ammunition. Albert Hawthorne carried a scythe he had honed to razorlike sharpness, and Harry Smith brandished his stout knobbed walking stick, which he called a “fool killer.”
If a German plane was shot down, it was the Home Guard’s job to find the wreck and either verify that the occupants were dead or, if any German airmen were alive, to arrest them and wait for an ambulance or the military authorities to take them away. War Office directives stressed the danger of allowing shot-down Germans to escape into the countryside where Nazi sympathizers would be prepared to shelter and assist them while awaiting the invasion. The War Office’s orders were unequivocal: there must be no escapees. If a German refused to surrender or tried to escape, he must be shot.
Combing the downs was tiring at the best of times, and Hugo’s shooting brake was too decrepit to be useful on the uneven terrain, so the men had to go on foot. The downs were bigger than they looked. What appeared to be a gentle rise and fall from a distance became a series of steep climbs and hidden folds, but mindful of their duty, the Home Guard went as fast as they could. From time to time they paused to catch their breath while Hugo scanned the countryside through his binoculars.
“First time one’s been shot down so near,” puffed Albert. “We’re in luck, might actually catch the buggers ourselves. Good sport, I’d say.”
Harry Smith gave up, unable to climb any farther on his bad leg. “Sorry, lads,” he puffed, red in the face, and collapsed onto a rock bent over his walking stick. “If you find anyone, chase him past me. I’ll give the murdering bastard something to remember England by!”
Hugo hurried on ahead of Oliver and Albert. Oliver knew he drove himself hard on Home Guard exercises because he had been rejected for active service. Albert had to fit his Home Guard duties around the train schedules, and eventually he turned back to meet the three forty-seven from London. He wanted nothing so much as to find a German trying to escape, he grumbled. He’d give Fritz a taste of his scythe, see fear in the man’s eyes.
With the exercise he got in the Home Guard, Oliver had become tanned and was easily the fittest of the four, but as the youngest member, he normally let the other men set the pace. As a clergyman, he had not been obliged to join the Home Guard, but with so few able-bodied men available he had felt it was his duty. When Albert was gone he ran ahead to join Hugo, who looked done in, face white as a sheet and panting hoarsely as he swatted away swarms of midges. “It’s nothing really, lung collapsed on me when I was a child. Do very well with just the one—army should have taken me.” He doubled over, gasping for breath.
“Have a rest.” Oliver shifted his gun and put his free hand on Hugo’s shoulder. “Sit down. I’ll go on ahead and you follow when you’ve got your breath back.”
Oliver hurried on up the steep path at a faster pace. He was enjoying the exercise until he reminded himself that he was supposed to be looking for Germans.
At the top he saw that the downs were deserted, except for a few antiaircraft guns covered with camouflage nets. No one was manning them, and he realized he was on his own as he pinpointed the Heinkel’s location by a rising column of smoke, barely visible against the gray sky. He scrambled over a rise toward it.
Moments later he was looking down on a smoldering mass in a green fold of the hills. His hand tightened on his gun as he scanned the downs for anyone running from the wreckage. Could he kill a man—even a German? Oliver had taken it as a matter of faith that, for the present, God and the prime minister were on the same side and he was duty-bound to obey the government’s orders. He also felt it would be hypocritical to pray for England’s military success when he was too squeamish to confront the enemy.
The smell of burning hit his nostrils and he spotted what looked like two dolls in gray uniforms on the ground. It was the first time he had seen a downed plane outside newsreels. He braced himself for Germans living or dead as he hurried down toward the crashed plane. He prayed that any who were alive would surrender and that he would not be put to the test by having to shoot them.
A fierce blast of heat hit him as he approached the wreck, gagging on the smoke and then a horrible smell. He wadded his handkerchief against his nose, but the stench grew worse as he drew nearer—a horrible mixture of burning fuel, burning rubber, and what he knew instinctively was burning flesh. He thought airmen must be trapped inside—certainly the gunners at the back. The heat was too intense to allow him to get closer and see inside, so he searched for the two figures he had seen from above. Finally he tripped over one and saw the other lying nearby. He guessed they had either been flung from the cockpit, which hung smashed open, or had crawled away from the flames. Oliver bent over, shielding his face and eyes with his arm.
The man he had stumbled over was clearly dead. He lay facedown, singed boots awkwardly pigeon-toed in. His head lay at an impossible angle. The leather cap was split, and something oozed round the edges onto the ground. Oliver was no stranger to death in cottage bedrooms or at the local hospital, but he had never been confronted with it in so violent and deliberate a form. What terror the airmen must have endured as the plane went down. He struggled into the scorching heat toward the other figure.
It moved. The man lay twisted on his back. He had pulled off his helmet, but his hair was gone, burned away from his oozing scalp. As he inched through the blistering heat and the fumes, Oliver could see the man’s chest heaving as he gasped for breath. Blood covered the raw head. It had been more than two hours since the plane went down. The man turned his face toward Oliver. There was a hole where his nose had been. Oliver wondered if he had been conscious all that time.
As he looked at the man lying on the ground, any desire Oliver had felt for revenge on the enemy melted into despair and anger that human beings should make such suffering for one another. He wished he had thought to bring some water. He dropped his gun and fell to his knees beside the man.
In the distance the three forty-seven whistled as it left at the station in what was, at that moment, another world. Then there was no sound but the crackle of flames.
The German stirred. He opened a blue eye. His eyebrows and eyelashes had been burned away too. “Wasser,” he moaned. Oliver groped helplessly for the German he remembered from university—he had read Goethe. The German croaked something else. Oliver caught “Frau.” The man pawed helplessly at his breast pocket. “Bitte,” he whispered. Oliver took his hand gently. It felt as if the bones inside were broken. For lack of anything else to do, he began to recite the prayer for the dying.
“Bitte,” whispered the man again, staring intently at him with one blue eye. “Fotograf.” He touched his pocket with their clasped hands. At last Oliver understood. Frau. Wife. He interrupted the prayer, reached in the man’s pocket, and withdrew a snapshot of a pretty young woman with fair hair in braids round her head, sitting on a rug and holding a child. It looked as if they were
in a garden or a park, having a picnic. The little girl was laughing and the woman was smiling down at her. He tried to close the man’s fingers round the photograph, but they wouldn’t work, so Oliver slipped the photograph between the man’s fingers and held it there.
“Kristina,” the man whispered raggedly, “liebe Frau.”
Oliver saw blood trickle from the corner of his mouth. Then he gave a shudder and died.
Oliver felt unbearably tired. He had conducted too many funerals lately, the latest for two brothers crushed when their airfield mechanics’ hut took a direct hit. The family had been wild-eyed with grief, and a local farmer’s daughter at the back of the church had sobbed uncontrollably on her mother’s shoulder. She had been engaged to one of the boys, who had left her expecting a baby. The villagers had condemned her as no better than she should be and cold-shouldered her and her family.
He wanted to rage at God. What is it You expect me to do in the face of all this killing and human despair? I have buried local lads killed by other young men like these two and laid them in the graveyard next to the men from their families who died in the Great War and whose names are on a memorial plaque in the church. Now we will bury these men, and somewhere in Germany their families will weep and there will be more names on other memorials. All across Europe people are killing each other, girls cry over their unborn fatherless babies, and God-fearing people blindly reject the gift of a new life. Eventually all that’s left of civilization will be names on gravestones. Why?
As he thought of the scene before him being replayed day in and day out, the slaughter at Dunkirk, Poland, Belgium, France, and everywhere else, Oliver felt an overwhelming urge to lie down beside the dead man and sleep.
A clap of thunder roused him. He glanced up and saw Albert and Hugo coming toward him. Lightning flashed over the coast and the wind blew harder. Time to get off the downs.
“Tonight for once they’ll sleep in Hythe—the Civil Defense in London too, while this storm lasts,” said Albert. Everyone followed the weather anxiously now, dreading clear spells. Bombing was at its worst then, because the enemy could navigate easily, especially when there was a moon.
“Pray the storm keeps up along the coast,” said Oliver, forcing himself to stand as the first drops of rain sizzled on the hot metal. Over the sea he saw more flashes and heard another threatening rumble of thunder.
“Come on. No use standing about up here to get struck by lightning,” said Hugo. “I’ll contact the police to collect the bodies before any children find them. I’ll phone from the vicarage, if I may. Suppose we’ll get stuck with burying them.”
“Amazin’ how Jerry always knows the clear nights to cross the channel,” Albert muttered.
Hugo was looking sick. “He got it wrong today. Have you ever thought what we’d do if we actually captured a German and he tried to escape? Could you shoot?”
“If he tried to run away,” Albert fingered his scythe, “yes,” he said in a firm voice, thinking of Nell and Margaret Rose.
Suddenly Oliver knew with absolute conviction that, having watched the German die, he could not. Whatever happened, even if it were to cost him his own life, he would not kill another human being. He squared his shoulders. His duty was clear. He would continue to pray for the armed forces, but as far as he was concerned, whatever the government’s orders, his first duty was to God and the preservation of life. To be certain of something, he thought, even in the most horrible circumstances, was strangely comforting. Like being in quicksand and suddenly finding a rock under your feet. He offered up a silent prayer of thanks.
15.
Crowmarsh Priors,
September 1941
War, thought Muriel Marchmont crossly, was a noisy, inconvenient business. Planes chasing each other overhead, shattering the peace of the afternoon, the dreadful air raid siren, whose shrill summons they all had to obey, no matter when it sounded. And this rationing; coupons and points were so confusing. First it had been sugar and butter and meat, and then before one knew where one was, one needed coupons for cheese and eggs, bacon, and even clothing.
The cook, Mrs. Barkins, had given notice at Christmas and gone to work in a shipyard, of all places. Mrs. Gifford had been obliged to fill in, but cooking was not her forte. Now indigestion kept Lady Marchmont awake at night. And while Mrs. Gifford struggled in the kitchen, the house became more and more untidy. Housemaids were not to be thought of: they had all gone to work in munitions factories or as bus conductresses.
Lady Marchmont thoroughly sympathized with those friends of her late husband who laid the blame for this misconceived war with “foreigners,” especially the French and the Poles, who had influenced Churchill. Surely things had reached a point where it was in England’s best interests to make peace with Germany. She would have liked to shake politicians until they saw sense. And all the intractable young people for whom she had made such suitable plans. Were any of them prepared to be guided by their elders? Were they the slightest bit grateful? Age made Muriel easily vexed. She hardly knew whether she was more irritated by Frances’s refusal to help Alice make herself attractive to Oliver or by Alice’s cowed look and pale face. Hugo, she knew from Leander, had not yet proposed, and Frances had gone up to London twice without telling her. As for Oliver…
The last straw had been Oliver burying two dead Germans in the farthest corner of the churchyard. She had rung the bishop to protest that they were most probably Lutheran and as such had no business in an Anglican graveyard. The bishop, who had dealt with Muriel Marchmont before, temporized, hemmed and hawed, said it was wartime and the deed was done, and the Church authorities were not keen on exhumation. Finally he had sent her into a lather of fury by suggesting she pray for her enemies. She had slammed down the telephone, which brought on a dizzy spell.
She had been sadly mistaken in extending her patronage to Oliver. He had forgotten what he owed her and was behaving in far too independent a manner for her liking. Mild-mannered as he was, he had become a figure of authority in the village. The war had matured him. The boyish look had disappeared and he now juggled services, christenings, the Mothers’ Union, the parish accounts, visiting the sick, and the Sunday school rotas more or less efficiently with his Home Guard duties. A naturally shy man when he first came to Crowmarsh Priors, he had wrestled for days to perfect a sermon, delivered diffidently with much stuttering. Now, with less and less time to spend at his desk, his sermons were much more affecting because he spoke with simple conviction from the heart, another source of irritation to Muriel, who disliked the low church evangelical streak that had lately been in evidence. Oliver had developed a knack of making a connection between daily and biblical events, which had proved comforting in these difficult times to everyone but herself.
Though a Roman Catholic herself, Evangeline Fairfax had dragged Tommy, Maude, and Kipper to a special children’s service, at which she had confided to Frances that Oliver reminded her of the colored preachers in New Orleans: “In a minute he’ll shout, ‘Amen, brothers and sisters!’”
Worst of all, Oliver had shown a disgraceful laxity in upholding village moral standards. Several babies had been born to unmarried mothers, the fathers being either away fighting, killed, or missing in action. Oliver had visited them all and, with some difficulty because the girls were so ashamed, persuaded them to let him baptize their children. Muriel Marchmont was shocked when she learned that he planned to do so at the font in full view of the congregation at morning service, as he did the children of lawfully wedded parents. She wrote a furious note ordering him to do nothing of the kind and assumed that that would be the end of the matter.
On the Sunday Oliver had designated for the baptisms, she was astonished to see several girls with babies at the back of the church, looking nervous but at least present. Oliver had preached a most persuasive sermon about new life being a gift from God that should be especially welcome in the midst of war and death. It had people looking shamefacedly at each other. Several
middle-aged women who had lost their sons to the war and were longing to acknowledge their grandchildren burst into tears. Such was Oliver’s authority that afterward most of the congregation went to admire the babies. There were offers of outgrown prams and cots, and Constable Barrows promised to carve each child a set of building blocks. The young mothers smiled tremulously, and one remarked bravely that her boy resembled his dad.
Muriel had been outraged almost, but not quite, to the point of speechlessness. She paused in the door, in front of fellow parishioners queuing behind her to shake Oliver’s hand. “It won’t do! Babies out of wedlock won’t do, I tell you. Send them away—lock them up! I won’t stand for it, young man!” she spluttered furiously. She ordered him to promise he would never do it again.
Oliver listened patiently. Then he imprisoned Lady Marchmont’s gloved hand in both of his and replied for all to hear that it was his duty to baptize every child in the parish as long as he was vicar. “Have a peaceful Sunday,” he added.
For once she had been silenced. He had told her publicly that she was wrong! No one had ever dared speak to her like that. Behind her, people grinned at their feet. Lady Marchmont and her tirades were wearing, and they were pleased someone had stood up to her. Aside from the matter of the fatherless babies, she had been particularly nasty to Tanni Zayman because she was “foreign,” and everyone in the village was fond of the young woman, whose husband was doing important war work, and her sweet-natured little boy.
How brave of him, thought Frances. She smiled radiantly and winked at him as she trailed out behind her godmother, who announced in a loud voice that she would send for her solicitors the next day to make alterations to her will.
