2007 - The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  The first letters from home start to arrive at the end of their second week in the camp.

  A bowlegged sergeant conducts the mail call, appearing from the guardhouse one afternoon, a sack over his shoulder and a wooden crate in his other hand. After all the weeks of waiting, the last few moments are the worst. The sergeant, perched on his crate, seems to have no grasp of the concept of alphabetical order, delving into his sack and pulling out letters at random, as if he’s Saint Nicholas himself, or drawing names for a raffle.

  But perhaps that isn’t such a bad idea, Karsten thinks, pressing close; a letter is a prize. And besides, the sergeant’s method gives them all hope until the very last, straining to make out their names in his terrible accent, and even then they make him turn the sack inside out and shake it before the tight circle hemming him in loosens.

  There’s nothing for Karsten that first day, but he’s buoyed nonetheless. Not long now. Besides, a letter to a barracks mate is almost as good as one to yourself, since you share everything in camp. Karsten listens to the lucky ones reading their letters that night and the next. But on the third night, the third day of mail with nothing to show for all his letter writing, he wraps his arms around his head in the darkness, distraught with jealousy.

  At least he’s not alone in that. Astoundingly, one of the letter readers has received a sausage in the first shipment, and later that night, when the men find him gnawing at it under his blanket—the smell gives him away—they make him sit at the table and saw at it with a blunt penknife so they can all have some. In the candlelight, it looks to Karsten as if the men are lined up to take the host. And indeed the shavings peel off, thin as paper, and dissolve on the tongue like communion wafers, a sacred taste of home.

  The fourth day, and no mail.

  The fifth, nothing.

  Karsten has written more letters than anyone—has begged for the stationery ration of men who don’t want to write—and yet day after day he turns away from mail call empty handed. He keeps it up, though, writing almost daily now, as if it’s his duty.

  He can tell from the replies that several of the men have taken his advice about not complaining in their own letters. I’m glad they’re treating you fairly, one wife writes. And yet gradually, hearing the letters they get back—we’re coping well, spirits are high, everyone has faith in our army — it becomes impossible for Karsten to quell the suspicion that these loved ones might be lying to them in return. What is it really like at home? How are they truly managing? The camp commandant has posted a newspaper—a two-day-old copy of The Times, ironed flat by one of the guards—on the side of the mess to keep them apprised of the course of the war, but the camp leaders have denounced it as propaganda and forbidden the men, especially those few with a little English, to read it. And now love seems to be further obscuring the truth from home. Even the others begin to doubt it, and resent Karsten for inadvertently putting the thought in their heads.

  “I know, I know,” Schiller says one evening. “We’re ‘protecting’ them. But do you ever think perhaps we shouldn’t have told them we’re prisoners at all? Said we’re still on the front lines, or better, told them we’re silting in a café in Paris. Wish you were here!”

  Karsten ignores him, but listening to the letters, he realises he can’t say for sure any more who is protecting whom. Another couple of days without mail and he hardly cares. Now the men read their letters softly, not looking in his direction, while he scribbles another.

  “What have you got left to tell her?” Schiller asks once, though not unkindly.

  He still can’t sleep, his thoughts turning to his mother over and over. He’s grateful, as if for mercy, when there’s finally something else to distract him. One evening shortly after lights out, he becomes aware of a stillness spreading over the barracks. Something other than the slow transition to steady breathing. It’s almost as though they’ve been waiting for something, Karsten thinks. He can’t make anything out himself yet. And then there it is, at the very edge of hearing, carried on the breeze, drifting in and out as on the tide, the distant drone of engines overhead.

  “Heinkels,” someone breathes, and Karsten wonders how the fellow knows—they’re all navy here. But he doesn’t ask, no one does; they want to believe it. “Heading up the Irish Sea,” another voice adds. A third: “Turning for Liverpool or Manchester.” They listen, rapt, as if to a radio, Karsten thinks, picturing his mother’s boxy Volksradio, her first set, the two of them kneeling before it.

  The windows of their barracks are shuttered and bolted from outside, but the sound sifts down to them through slatted vents under the roof. The throb of the engines might as well be a serenade, and long after the tune has faded, they lie still, hoping for the distant fanfare of bombing. There’s a long pause and then a scrape of bunks being pushed together, the soft grunts of men clambering up, one on the shoulders of two others. They can’t quite reach, so they call on Karsten, the climber. He pulls himself up, yanks at the louvre until it comes loose, lowers it, pushes his head into the dark space. He can hear no more, but he hangs there for a moment smelling the air—he can just catch a tang of the ocean—taking deep huffs of it until someone else demands a turn. Men balance there all night, though they hear nothing else, craning for a glimpse of light at the horizon, of fires. When they do catch sight of something, it’s only the dawn, and they have to scramble to replace the louvre before reveille.

  It’s all they can talk about the next day, the planes overhead. Every barracks has heard it. The camp leaders are smiling, strutting a little. The men, for once, can’t wait for nightfall, as if the sooner they go to bed, the sooner the planes will come again. Except this time they don’t, not the next night nor the one after that, and when, on the third, they do return, the men catching the pulse of the engines for a few moments, like a snatch of some favourite tune, Karsten finds himself thinking not of the bombs the planes carry but of the men inside, of how they’re only a few hundred feet above, and of how by morning, if they survive, they’ll be miles away.

  When he finally drowses, he dreams of pulling himself through the louvre, climbing out on to the barracks roof, of reaching his arms up into the sky and catching hold of the undercarriage as a plane sweeps overhead. His uniform snaps like a flag in the wind. He imagines the sensation in his stomach as the plane unloads its cargo and bobs up, lightened. He watches the stick of bombs fall away beneath him, a curving line of fence posts, and as they drop behind, he watches the landscape dip and rise in waves until the plane crosses the white line of cliffs at Dover, like a halo around Britain, and there’s the sea itself glimmering between his feet. In his dream, dawn breaks, a flock of gulls scuds beneath him, and there are the beaches of France, flashing golden with shell casings. His arms should be tired, but they’re firm, not even shaking with effort, as if, rather than holding on, he is gripped in the talons of a huge bird. He pulls himself up, doing chin-ups for the sheer joy of it. Any minute now, he thinks, they’ll land, but no, the plane keeps speeding along over Alsace, the corduroy patches of vineyards, and then north-east until he knows where they’re headed by the mountains rising before him. Then they’re banking, dropping lower and lower until he can make out rivers, roads, Bergen-strasse, on the outskirts of town. He starts to windmill his legs, and then his feet touch in a puff of dust and he’s sprinting down the lane, running faster than he’s ever run, not home, not yet, but to the post office, to intercept his letters, to carry them home himself, smiling at how he’s outstripped them.

  He could escape, he tells himself in the morning. He should. What better way to redeem himself? He’s heard rumours the camp leaders are working on a plan, but when he tries to approach one of them, an older corporal called Sulzer, the man just shrugs.

  “But it’s our duty,” Karsten tries.

  “Don’t you tell me my duty,” the other sneers.

  “I’ve heard talk of a tunnel.”

  Sulzer stares off, shakes his head. Karsten studies him, unsure wh
ether to believe him or if the fellow simply doesn’t trust him.

  “Come on, boy,” Sulzer says finally. “Does it look like I spend my time digging in the dirt?” His uniform is immaculate, from the starched points of his shirt collar, like a pair of scissors at his neck, to the steely gleam of his boot tops.

  “Besides,” Sulzer goes on, “our duty is to have faith in the Leader, to remain loyal. Why should we escape when victory is at hand? We need to sit tight, maintain discipline, and wait for the panzers to plough down that gate.” Karsten recalls that Sulzer has boasted about being in the SA from the start, working on the first autobahns, even claimed with a straight face that he’d been in Triumph of the Will, marching past the Leader with a shining spade at shoulder arms.

  “I heard a rumour that Hess was being held in Wales,” Karsten blurts out. “One of the guards was talking about it. Did you ever meet him?”

  “That turncoat? Fuck him! And what are you doing talking to guards?”

  “I was eavesdropping. Trying to learn something. To help us escape.”

  Sulzer sighs. He still has the submariner’s pale, almost translucent skin from living under artificial light for weeks on end, made all the starker against the dark wave of hair combed severely across his brow. It’s a pallor Karsten recognises from old photographs of his father in uniform, on the mantel at home.

  “What’s your problem, son? Don’t you believe in our final victory?”

  Afterwards, Karsten tells himself he’ll go alone if he has to, but each morning he thinks, Perhaps there’ll be a letter today.

  He takes out his frustrations on the boys at the fence. In desperation, he hunts along the ground, scrabbling in the dirt for pebbles, and starts to fling them into the trees. They clatter off the trunks, crackle through the leaves. There’s nothing for a long moment—behind him in the silence he can hear the drag and crump of marching—and then the youngsters break. It’s as if the undergrowth is coming to life, rising up, and then they’re running, charging away uphill in panicked flight. Karsten, watching them flee, finds himself suddenly breathless. Most of them are just kids, ten-, twelve-year-olds by the look of them, but the others he sees are teenagers, not much younger than Heino. Or himself, for that matter. He thinks he’s driven them off, walks away from the wire with his shoulders squared, writes to his mother about it—his third letter in a week—but the next night they’re back, more insolent, showing themselves, darting out of the trees to shake their fists or offer the men a two-fingered salute, before he charges the wire, roaring at the affront, and has the pleasure of seeing them fall back in fright. “Renn!” he cries. “Renn!”

  “You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Schiller warns him that night. The drill, he knows, had been interrupted by his outburst. “Besides, you’ll only encourage them. Why would you do that?”

  “Why would you put up with it?” Karsten asks. “At least I’m doing something.”

  “Frightening children.” Schiller snorts. “The war’s over for us. Too late to fight it now.”

  By the next evening the boys have mastered their fear, greet him with a shrill chorus of their own: “Run, run!” And Karsten shakes his head, smiling grimly despite himself.

  And then at last he hears his name at mail call, shoves through the crowd, arm raised as if in the Heil Hitler. “Here! Here!”

  “My dear son,” he reads to the others; he can’t wait but tears the letter open on the spot, proclaims it as if it were some vindication. “Thank you for your letters—a third has come this very morning—and thank God for your life. I had heard nothing for so long, I confess I had begun to entertain the worst.”

  There’s a pause while Karsten takes a deep breath, and the others look away.

  “Can you forgive me my faint heart,” he reads on, “or at least my tardy reply? I should have responded earlier but for a bout of cold or some such, brought on surely by my fears, but from which I am now on the mend, in no small part thanks to your fine medicine. To be sure, I hardly know how I might have survived these past dark days but for the kindness of our neighbours, many of whom, as you know, have also lost sons and husbands, and who comforted me greatly in my trial. Herr Florian, our postman—you’ll recall he lost a boy in the East last winter—was particularly solicitous, seeing me at the window and assuring me, even as he passed by, that there might yet be word. I could scarcely believe it, but then there he was last week with a funny little smile on his face, holding out your letter at arm’s length (I had warned him I might be contagious), and he’s been back each morning since. “Well, we know he wasn’t wounded in his writing hand!” he told me today.”

  “I should say!” Schiller laughs, but Karsten is frowning at the letter. “Well, what else? Go on!”

  “It’s nothing,” Karsten says. “Foolishness.”

  Someone makes the wet smacking sound of kissing.

  “Oh, my boy, my boy!” Schiller cries in falsetto, plucking the letter from Karsten’s hand. “Come on! We’ve been waiting for this as long as you.” He waves the white page before him, lets Karsten snatch for it once, twice, and gives it up at last only when Karsten holds out his hand.

  “I should confess,” Karsten reads stiffly, “as you might guess from Herr Florian’s joke, that I have let it be understood—not so much a falsehood as an assumption I’ve not contradicted—that you are injured. And who’s to say not? You have spared me the details of your capture, and I think I know my boy well enough to say if you were wounded you’d spare me that worry, too—don’t even begin to deny it.”

  “Ha!” someone cries. Karsten doesn’t look up. “You will think your mother foolish or frightened to imagine such heroic scars for you, but it is more pride than fear. There are those, you see, who blame our men in France for the invasion, call you and your fellows names I will not repeat here. I assure them that knowing my son as I do, you must have fought until your last round, until things were hopeless, or until you were ordered to set down your gun. But try not to think too ill of such folk. It is their despair and fury that speaks, and I must confess I have myself cursed those who lived while I thought you died.”

  He can feel the silence around him now, the stillness of the men.

  “But now I can tell them all, the doubters, the faithless, Never fear! I thought my boy lost, and he has been returned to me. Just so will France, which some fear lost, be ours again, I’m certain. The Leader himself has assured us of our eventual, destined victory, a day made all the sweeter to me now for knowing it will reunite us.”

  There’s a long pause and then Karsten reads, “Your loving mother,” and the men melt away as if ordered to dismiss.

  Only Schiller pauses as he passes. “Tell me again. Who are we protecting in these letters of ours?”

  They don’t hear the planes that night, or the next, or the next. Before long the barracks begins to fill again with the furtive sounds of sleepless men.

  Karsten doesn’t talk to anyone, or anyone to him, for days after the letter. But it’s his mother’s rebuke that stings him most. He finds himself focusing especially on her faith in the Leader—an echo of Sulzer’s—and his failure to share it. He knows why. She’d let slip once—though she vehemently denied it later—that his father, the former leutnant, thought Hitler a jumped-up windbag: “A corporal? Might as well be led by a cinema usher, a bus conductor, a park warden!”

  “That was before the Reichstag fire,” his mother insisted. “Your poor father didn’t live to see it, but everything changed after that. That was Herr Hitler’s true election. That’s when he really became Leader, even to those who didn’t vote for him.”

  Another time, she accused his father of being a snob.

  But really, Karsten knows, her own favourite until ‘41 had been Hess, Hitler’s grave deputy. She’d been crushed when he’d flown off to England. That traitor, she would spit in later years, but to Karsten it always seemed as if Hess had betrayed her personally, as much as the country.

  He wishes
he could talk to someone about this, suspects it’s just as well that he doesn’t. As it is, listening to the other men, he realises how little they actually say to one another.

  There’s been no mention of the absent planes, for instance, he realises as he stands at the fence one morning and stares up at the high hillside, watching the flock drift across it like a cloud across a clear sky. He’s been fascinated by the sheep ever since he saw the shepherd gather them once, marvelling at the way he whistled commands to his dogs, sending them racing in long curving arcs to flank the flock, head it off. Like a general running a campaign, he told himself at the time, almost picturing the arrows of attack and retreat laid over the grass. And then he understands why the men don’t talk about the planes: they know what it means. The lines are being pushed east; the front is moving farther and farther from them. They’re falling out of range of their own air force.

  Now when he watches the shepherd working the sheep, the flock pressing together, rippling over the hillside, he can’t help thinking of a great white flag. He tries to call the dogs himself, putting two fingers in his mouth to whistle, others around him taking it up, but even the nearest dog only stops for a moment, cocking its head, and then, with a flick of the ears, dismisses them, races on.

  Eleven

  Constable Parry sternly warns them all at the pub the week after the Germans arrive that they’re not to gawp at the prisoners. He’s paid a courtesy visit to the camp, met with the CO. “Prohibited by the Geneva Convention,” Parry tells them, swelling with pride. It’s not every day he gets to enforce international law. “The major’s required to protect the men in his custody from violence, vigilantism and injurious public curiosity such as might serve to make them subject to scorn or ridicule.” The grave effect is reduced by the constable’s smile of triumph at the end of this speech, like a child who’s just recited a lesson from memory.