by Alan White
‘Yes, and what did he do? He had them at the point of a gun and made them turn round and lead them into their own lines. I think that’s an exact parallel with what’s going on here. I think that, if Helmut had the chance, he’d have marched us back to…’
‘It’s all “think” with you,’ Cliff burst out. ‘You don’t know, do you? You’re only guessing, aren’t you? The man who has the rifle has the power, and I for one don’t want to take any more chances than we have to. You can’t trust these Germans. Show me one single one you can trust, and I’ll show you a dead ’un. Now, let’s stop all this bloody arguing, and get on with what we have to do.’
‘We’ll put it to the vote,’ Tom Cooper said.
‘Oh damn it,’ Cliff shouted, as angry as he could be, ‘why do we have to put it to the vote?’
‘We’ll do whatever you say,’ I assured him, more quietly.
Cliff agreed with me, and said so, but Tom Cooper was determined this was one time he wasn’t going to lead.
When we saw he was adamant, Cliff gave in. ‘All right, what are we voting about?’ he said disgustedly.
I think if we’d been voting for the return of the chastity belt he would have said ‘yes’ without hesitation.
‘There are two simple alternatives – we either go back, or we stay here.’
‘No, there aren’t,’ I interposed quickly. ‘There are four alternatives. We three either stay here or we go back, or we four stay here or we go back.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ Tom Cooper said.
His decision was already made, on all four counts.
Cliff didn’t care what happened.
Tom Cooper took off his beret, and picked three straws from the floor.
‘First of all,’ he said, in a voice of infinite weariness, ‘we’ll vote for if the four of us stay here, or the four of us go back.’
He gave us each a straw, and we each put the straw in the palm of our hands, out of sight.
‘Broken straw we stay, unbroken straw we go,’ I said.
‘Right.’
Each of us put his hand into the beret, one by one, and he opened it slowly out. Two unbroken – one broken.
‘That’s settled. We go,’ he said.
My straw had been unbroken. I wanted to get the hell out of there, just as fast as I could. One of them wanted to stay, Cliff, or Tom Cooper?
Cliff wouldn’t give a damn whether we went or stayed. If Tom Cooper wanted us to go, I reasoned, he would have said so right out in the open. He wouldn’t have needed any straws.
‘Now we’ll settle the other matter,’ he said.
Again, he picked three straws from the floor, and again he gave one to each of us.
Helmut’s voice reached us as clearly and as crisply as the first words we had heard him utter in the barn.
‘I think I have the right to vote on this one,’ he said.
We all turned round. He was sitting almost erect, straining his weight awkwardly on his out-thrust elbow.
‘I think I have a right to vote whether you kill me or take me with you,’ he said.
He jerked himself into an upright sitting position and then, kicking forward with his feet against the tension of the piano wire, he hobbled on his buttocks across the floor of the barn to where we were sitting.
He looked horrible, but we offered him no assistance.
The blood had drained from his face, leaving his skin a pale greenish-yellow. His eyes were sunken into the cavities of his skull, his lips stretched back from his teeth exposing his upper gum. Blood had run from beneath the bandage across his lower lip. Now it dripped down his chin, like a red pointed beard. When he opened his eye fully, the iris was revealed bloodshot, and his wide-open pupil gave him the crazed look of a fanatic.
‘I think I have a right to vote on whether I should live or die, wouldn’t you think?’ he said. ‘Or I have the right to present evidence of why I should live, at least.’ There was no trace of pleading, no sign of supplication.
Oddly enough, it was Cliff answered him.
‘You gave away that right,’ he said, ‘when you volunteered to leave civvie street for this lot. You gave away that right every time you lifted a rifle against one of our lads. You gave away that right,’ he went on remorselessly, ‘every time you obeyed or issued an order, every time you so much as looked in our direction.’
He was staring at Helmut. ‘Don’t let us ever forget,’ he said, ‘that for every minute of every hour of every day while you are you and I am me, we are enemies.’
Helmut smiled, thinly.
The smile seemed to infuriate Cliff, who made a move to strike him again. I blocked the move, but Helmut did not flinch.
‘Let him hit me,’ he said, ‘violence can strengthen the weak!’
I wasn’t going to give the bastard the satisfaction of making two of us watch the needless violence of one of our own kind.
‘Stuff it, Cliff,’ I said, as a command, ‘he’s trying to provoke you, and you’re falling for it.’
He relaxed, and sat glowering at Tom Cooper.
‘Why did you come here?’ Tom Cooper asked him.
It was too late, of course, to know we’d get the truth out of him, or to be certain of anything he said.
‘I don’t have to reply to that,’ he answered mockingly. ‘Wasn’t it you who quoted the Geneva Convention?’
Cliff made a move again to hit him, but again I blocked it.
‘We’re trying to determine if you came here to give yourself up to us, to kill us, or to try to take us prisoner!’
I looked at him. I hoped he knew he could talk to me on level terms without the fear of rampant animalism. I thought he knew that if I killed him it would be on his terms, one challenger to another. Tom Cooper would kill him from expediency, from the need to do so as a part of his plans for our self preservation. Cliff could kill him in anger. I think he realised that, but he was too conscious of his key role, too arrogant in it, to wish to abdicate its powers and pleasures so soon or so lightly.
‘Which of the three have you selected?’ he asked me. He didn’t mock, that would have been debasing. He had no need to mock.
‘We have come to no conclusion yet,’ I replied.
Tom Cooper could see the path our debate was taking, and felt uncomfortable with it. The German had me where he wanted me, but Tom Cooper couldn’t realise how much I would be willing to concede to get the right answer.
‘I don’t think that’s important,’ Tom Cooper said, coldly, as coldly as the certain smile on Helmut’s face. ‘When the time comes, we will either kill you, or hand you over to one of our field hospitals – but you can rest assured, the course of our lives will not be affected either way. If it amuses you to vote whether you should live or die, then vote by all means, but when you vote, realise that each one of us is voting from his own knowledge and experience and his estimate of the value or inconvenience you will be to us. If we feel you have value – you’ll live. If we decide you will be an inconvenience, you’ll die. And just so that you completely understand me, let’s not make it passive – I will kill you.’
The German was surprised. I too was surprised. I had cast myself in the role of executioner.
In a curious way, I wanted the role.
I knew I was the only one of us to whom killing had ceased to mean anything, the only one whose brutalisation was complete.
Mockingly, Tom Cooper took the wire cutters we always carried for barbed wire, the smail pocket cutters, and snipped through the bands at the German’s ankles. He looked into Helmut’s face, and then cut the bonds between his wrists.
Chapter Six
Helmut came forward and sat on the fourth side of the table on the other corner of the bale on which I was sitting. He rubbed his wrists.
Tom Cooper picked up a straw, and handed it to him.
‘Just in case you don’t know how to go about it,’ he said, ‘if you vote for the proposition, you put the straw into the hat unbro
ken. If you vote against it, you snap the straw with your thumb as you put it in.’
‘The secret ballot,’ Helmut said.
‘That’s right – the weapon of democracy.’
‘Without which neither the Star Chamber, the Spanish Inquisition, nor even Nazism could have begun.’
‘I could give you a quotation about motes and beams,’ Tom Cooper said, easily, ‘but I haven’t been reading the Bible much of late.’
He put the hat, folded, onto the table. With his left hand he drew it towards him, and then put in his straw. He passed the hat to me, and I put in my straw. I passed the hat to Helmut, and he put his hand inside it, containing his straw.
‘Let me make certain of this,’ he said. ‘If I leave the straw in here intact, it means you will kill me. If I break it, it means you will try to take me back with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Tom Cooper said. ‘The proposition on which we are voting is, shall I kill you.’
Helmut withdrew his hand, then gave the hat to Cliff. Cliff blatantly held his straw between the tip of his thumb and his finger, at the end, and dropped it into the beret, unbroken, with no attempt at concealment. He smiled at Helmut while he did this, a supreme gesture of dumb insolence.
He handed the hat back to Helmut, who took it still folded, in both hands.
‘Now tip it over,’ he said, ‘and shake the straws onto the tabletop.’
Helmut slowly did so, and then withdrew the beret to reveal them.
Three were broken, one was unbroken.
I looked quickly at Tom Cooper, and saw him look at Helmut.
‘The one thing about democracy,’ Helmut said, blandly, ‘is that it can be adapted to meet any situation.’
I was almost stunned with admiration for him. He had beaten us fairly and squarely again. I had put my straw in unbroken. Regretfully, I had decided to take my chance on getting through our lines without him to help me. I was also quite certain that Tom Cooper had decided to do the same thing. But, in keeping his hand inside the hat, Helmut had taken the opportunity to break both my straw and that belonging to Tom Cooper.
Already he understood that Tom Cooper would not go back on the ballot, would not destroy what he believed in, the right of a man to express his thoughts, without fear, in private.
He knew Tom Cooper to be incapable of revealing how he had voted, or of asking me how I had voted. Of course, he was taking a chance – a chance that Cliff might rebel and shoot him out of hand. He was also taking a chance that I would volunteer the information for which Tom Cooper couldn’t ask me.
Tom Cooper turned to look at me.
I didn’t speak.
‘It would seem we all try to get back together,’ he said.
‘So it would seem,’ I said.
Cliff was furious with Tom Cooper and with me. He had not guessed what the German had done, or would certainly have killed him. I knew this feeling would not last. Cliff would accept the German’s presence among us once we had started to make preparations for getting back.
‘What about some grub?’ Tom Cooper asked him. He knew the way to make Cliff forget. Cliff got up and started to take tins of stew from his rucksack.
Tom Cooper got out his tool kit, and soon had the breech out of his rifle and had started to clean it. He worked slowly and methodically, looking every so often to where Helmut and I were still sitting at the table. Helmut had been trying to adjust his bandage more comfortably. I brought a mug of water, and washed some of the caked blood from his chin. When I had cleaned it, I offered him a cigarette. He accepted it. I took the matches out of my pocket.
‘Is it safe to smoke?’ I asked him.
‘You never give up, do you?’ he asked me, smiling.
‘I thought you might like to pay for your passage.’
‘With information?’
‘What else?’
Tom Cooper had stopped cleaning his rifle, and sat holding it across his knees.
There was a sudden silence in the barn. It was a silence that came not from the absence of noise – for we had maintained that kind of silence during our entire occupation. It was the heavy silence of anticipation, the clarifying silence that increases hearing and vision, heightens comprehension.
‘There’s no need to watch that hill,’ he said. ‘When the attack comes it will come from somewhere quite different.’
‘Then what were you three doing?’
As soon as I had asked, I could have wished to recapture the ‘you three’ and lock it back in my conscience.
‘I mean…’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, with the first trace of kindness I had heard him utter. ‘You mean, what was I doing? I came to give myself up.’
There it was. I tried to force my mind away from the knowledge of what the other two Germans were doing, what their hopes and intentions were. But thoughts and the knowledge they bring are instantaneous in the mental process.
‘You may ask,’ he said, ‘why I tried to surrender in such a dramatic fashion, and I will tell you. I didn’t particularly want to give myself up as a positive act of coming over to your side – I wanted to give myself, up to dissociate myself from our side. Do you know what I mean? I was a man who grows disgusted with his present, who walks out into limbo to think about the future. The vagrant who is not yet ready to look again at life to find if it can be acceptable to him. I knew I couldn’t find that limbo on my own, because there is no physical place where a man can put himself between the two forces we once represented. And as I watched you and him engaging in horseplay, it seemed to me that here in the very centre of this cataclysm, was what could be a limbo. This could be a pausing point, a breathing space between two… conflagrations.’ He had looked for the word in his memory, not wanting to use the ordinary word we used in thoughts of our situation.
I knew exactly what he meant. I had had exactly these feelings about our barn, but had had no cause, nor would have had the ability, to express them.
‘The vital thing I had to do, however,’ he said, ‘was to preserve the situation within this barn as it was. I knew my arrival could cause the conflagration to occur here, within these four walls. But if I could take command of the situation, I could at least control the rate of it.’
Tom Cooper and I both knew he was right. Had we been able, we would have ended his ‘limbo’ as he called it, just as I had ended the search of his two compatriots.
‘For what reason did you want to “dissociate yourself from your side” – I believe that was the phrase you used?’ Tom Cooper asked.
‘A very simple one,’ Helmut said. ‘I am a perfectionist. I cannot tolerate inefficient people. My unit had become inefficient!’
It was as simple as that for him. Plus A equals efficiency, minus A equals nothing.
A sudden chill had come to the inside of the barn, and the heat of the day was over.
It was the start of one of those long European evenings, evenings made for bicycling through the quiet French countryside seeking the best of many samples of vins du pays. It was an evening for dressing in a soft suit, as pleasurable after cardboard khaki as is your chin after a barber’s shop shave. It was an evening for holding, in the woolly cardigan sleeve, the long arm of a well-scrubbed girl, or for drowsing on a haystack with a black-haired, hard-nippled, pouting, reluctant hiker. For gins and tonics and lemonade shandies. For MG motor cars, or for pottering about in the sand of a north-eastern beach at ebb tide, looking for rock crabs and coloured sea shells. It was an evening for being with someone you had known all your life, for a slow, comfortable journey to someone dear to you.
It was light in the barn, as if the inner walls had stored the light as well as the heat from the day’s bright sun.
I walked across to the door, without fear. I could believe Helmut that no one could be near. I looked out across the fields.
Two men lay dead out there, and I had killed them. So what?
The song of the moment, the last time I had been able to li
sten to a song, had been, ‘You can stop me from holding hands, make me listen to your commands, you can say “no – no”, honey, that’s all right, I’ll get even with you tonight, ’cause you can’t stop me from dreaming.’ I’d heard it played bravely in a blacked-out ballroom, last time I was in London, sung wistfully if somewhat tunelessly by the dance-band singer, a frightened young girl destined to dream for a while of a rich paradise, and to awaken too soon in a chromium-plated series of semi-detached pregnancies.
I had hummed the song all the way through when I became conscious of the sound coming involuntarily from me, the ridiculous, meaningless words that comforted me with their banality.
Cliff had prepared supper. It was our well-tried favourite, M and V stew, to which he had added strips of bacon from our emergency rations. He had crumbled into it oatmeal biscuits to give it body, and had then poured in a large measure of the cognac he seemed never to be without. He kept it in a silver flask looted from a Dutch house – his ‘glint’, he called it.
He had not set the table. He had cooked in a large copper jam-making pot we had found in the barn, and brought this steaming to the table on which our mess tins had been piled. There was even a place for Helmut, so quickly and completely could Cliff accept the inevitable.
Cliff ladled portions of his ‘Bœuf militaire’, as he called it, into each of four of the mess tins and set them on the top of the packing-case table. Each took his place at the tableside, Helmut glancing at us for a lead. Neither Tom Cooper nor I started. Cliff took his seat, and then, his hands crossed, he bent his head and recited slowly, with meaning, ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ There was a silence of many seconds.
‘One of these days,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘one of you bastards is going to have the decency to say “Amen”.’
Helmut didn’t think anyone had noticed his hands locked beneath the edge of the packing-case, nor did he know I had seen his lips frame an ‘Amen’, though the word remained inaudible.
I had never seen Cliff, born and bred a complex Baptist, eat anything approaching a meal without calling for a Blessing – not a biscuit, nor even a bar of chocolate when chocolate, as it so often did, replaced food.
