by Liz Trenow
‘I’m sure you are tired from your journey so I will not detain you this evening with too much detail about our itinerary for the next few days. Tomorrow we leave for Ypres and the battlefields. Nine o’clock sharp, please. The weather is set to be fair, but bring rain garments and stout shoes just in case. We will stop for breaks and lunch, returning to the hotel late afternoon, in time for you to change for dinner.’
‘You are all aware, of course, that this is not a tourist trip and you are not tourists. Some of the places we visit and the sights we see may be distressing but please be assured that I shall be on hand at all times to help and support you, and answer your questions. It may be more useful to think of yourselves as pilgrims, here to honour the sacrifice made by our soldiers and by the unfortunate citizens of these devastated lands. It is our duty to pay witness, and I know that you will be respectful at all times.’
He looked around the room.
‘Any questions?’
3
MARTHA
Martha was dreaming of food: soft sweet challah bread, made with real white flour, not the dry, tasteless Kriegsbrot filled out with plaster and sawdust. In her dream, the bread was mouth-wateringly aromatic and warm from the oven, its plaits shiny with egg glaze. There was another smell, too: coffee on the stove, the proper kind, not the ersatz variety made from barley, and on the table a jug of full-cream milk fresh from her brother-in-law’s farm, from the cows she’d once known by name. She sensed the comforting presence of her husband Karl by her side and opposite them, with grins splitting their faces, their two sons, Heinrich and little Otto.
‘Tuck in, boys,’ she said.
A hand shook her shoulder and reality flooded back with its familiar ache of loss, hunger and despair. There was no family as she’d once known it, no challah bread, no coffee, no comforting candlelight.
‘Mama! I need to pee,’ Otto whispered.
‘Can’t you hold it?’
‘No! I’m desperate.’
They were locked in a small, windowless cell lit by a single dim bulb. Scarcely eight feet square, with an oppressive smell of stale cigarette smoke and damp concrete, it had no furniture save the hard wooden bench on which she had, after many hours, succumbed to a restless sleep.
The train had arrived at the Belgian border around six o’clock in the evening. The connecting service would take just a couple more hours to Ypres and she had calculated that there would be plenty of time to find somewhere to stay, have a meal and make arrangements for their visit to the cemetery the following day.
But no one seemed to have informed the border guards about the Treaty of Versailles and the new freedoms of travel. As soon as they showed their German passports, Martha and Otto were roughly marched to a concrete building encircled with barbed wire and protected by armed men. There, they were told, they would have to wait to be interviewed by the head of the border security services before they could be issued with a pass into Belgium. They were led into this room and told to wait. The key clicked in the lock.
‘Are we in prison, Mama?’ Otto whispered. To survive during the harsh years of the war he’d learned to conceal his emotions. But with a mother’s intuition she knew, just from the slightest expression, how much he was suffering inside, and he still turned to her for comfort at times like this. Having seen sights and lived through hardships no child should endure, he had a particular terror of men in uniform.
‘No, they just want to make sure we have the right papers and we will be on our way,’ she said, trying to sound reassuring.
Half an hour went by. She heard the whistle of a train and the rumble of its wheels moving off into the distance and knew that they had missed their connection. They would probably have to wait until morning for the next one. Another hour passed. They shared the last provisions in her bag: a crust of bread and a boiled egg. At last, Otto fell asleep on her shoulder. She laid him down gently along the bench and then curled herself up, as best she could, head to head. She had not expected to sleep.
Now, as she levered herself into a sitting position, every bone and muscle seemed to ache. Once upon a time she could have slept anywhere but, at forty-five, her body felt too old for hard wooden benches.
‘I really need to go, Ma.’
‘Knock on the door, the guards will come.’ Her mouth was so dry. What would she give for that coffee she’d been dreaming of?
Otto knocked and called, shaking the door handle, but there was no response.
She stood stiffly and went to his side, calling through the keyhole in her best French. ‘Please, sirs, I beg you, let my son use the toilet.’
When there was still no reply she took off her shoe and pounded the metal door. It resounded hollowly through the building, and she began to fear they had been abandoned. But at last they heard footsteps and the door was unlocked. Otto was roughly manhandled outside to do his business on the ground, and then returned with the threat that if he didn’t shut up they would place him in a separate cell.
‘How long do you think we will have to wait now?’
There was no way of telling in this windowless, airless room whether it was night or day. ‘Could you see the dawn?’
‘The sky was pink.’
‘It’ll be a couple of hours more, at most. They will come to check our papers and we can be on our way.’ She wished she felt as confident as her words sounded.
*
Somewhere out there, over the border, was her precious elder son, Heinrich. In her pocket she clutched the small green leather box containing the medal his great-grandfather had been awarded for bravery. Her husband Karl had pressed the box into her hands in his last hours. By that time his skin was already tinged with the deep lilac colour that, everyone knew by now, meant recovery from the deadly influenza was unlikely.
‘Take this to Heiney,’ he’d croaked. ‘If I die, you must take it to his grave without me. It belongs with him. Promise me you will do this?’
They had planned to travel together, once the war was over. They’d had no official confirmation of Heinrich’s death, of course; like so many families, they only learned the worst when their carefully penned letters had arrived back unopened with, scrawled upon them in red ink, the words Zurück an den Absender. Return to sender. Missing, presumed dead.
Fired by youthful idealism and nationalistic fervour, Heinrich, like all his college friends, had rushed to join up to serve the Fatherland as soon as he came of age. They were all so young, so talented, with so much to live for. But in their inexperience they had quickly fallen prey like game birds to the guns of French infantry and British riflemen.
The ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, that’s what it later came to be called, a defeat the German authorities never admitted. But Heinrich’s friends, returning with terrible physical injuries or the blank stares of the psychologically damaged, told their stories to nurses and teachers, who told others, who told Martha and Karl.
They had no idea where Heinrich had actually fallen except through stories from the families of the friends with whom he’d marched away with such optimism. It was among the gossip of bereaved mothers gathered in the bread queues that she first heard the word Langemarck, a dread place where, rumour had it, more than twenty-four thousand German soldiers, including those from Heinrich’s regiment, had died in just ten days. Word was that they were all buried in a special cemetery there.
Karl’s breath became shallow and laboured. It could only be a few hours now, and he was unlikely to live to see his dream.
‘I’ll find Heiney, I promise,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘He shall have Grandpa’s medals.’
‘Tausend Dank,’ Karl managed to utter before succumbing once more to the harsh, uncontrollable cough that stained the sheets with bright red mucus. ‘Ich liebe dich.’
They were his last words. She called Otto to her side and they watched hand in hand as the man they both loved so dearly, the man who held the centre of their world, slipped into unconsciousness and drew
his last breath.
*
That was back in October. The armistice came shortly afterwards but there was no peace in her heart, nor any in the country, either. Why had the generals caved in so suddenly, giving away so much when right up until that moment the newspapers had been full of German victories? No one seemed to know, or at least they weren’t telling. The Kaiser, in whom their hopes had been vested for so long, deserted them. How would their proud new nation ever recover? What was the point of it all, of so many lives lost for the so-called honour of defending what was now a weak, defeated country?
The terms of peace seemed only to rub salt in their wounds: the financial reparations, the loss of lands and the relinquishing of arms, like a series of punishments. The Allies claimed this was the reparation Germany had to pay for starting the war.
Rumblings of discontent had already started, blaming the generals, the communists and even the Jews for the country’s plight. Food and fuel were just as short as ever; families grieved, and bureaucracy failed to cope with the tide of administration for army pay-offs and disability pensions. Her beloved Berlin was a broken city. Thousands of citizens, their bodies weakened with malnourishment and the cold, succumbed like Karl to the virulent strain of influenza. It had been a bitter winter.
Still, the Treaty of Versailles had now been signed, travel restrictions were lifted and Martha was told, when she visited the Auswärtiges Amt, the Foreign Office, in central Berlin that there would be no problems crossing the border. Now she could make her pilgrimage to find her son, to carry out her husband’s dying wish and perhaps, just perhaps, find some peace for her own troubled soul.
Karl’s determination to find his son’s grave had, she knew, been fuelled by the sufferings of his grandmother Else, who had never recovered from the death of her husband in the Crimean War. No amount of medals for bravery could help her accept his loss. Right up until her own early death – as the result, the family all believed, of a broken heart – Else’s almost daily refrain had been, ‘If only I’d been able to visit his grave, to tell him I loved him.’ Martha had already resolved that she would not spend her own life carrying the double burden, Karl’s and her own, of such regret.
She knew, too, that Karl had suffered a deep and unacknowledged guilt of his own. Of course he was too old to be conscripted and he had a gammy knee, but many other men of his age had signed up. He and Martha, along with many of their friends, had watched in horror as the country seemed to be drawn inexorably towards war. In their eyes, the assassination of the Austrian archduke was just a flimsy excuse for the warmongers.
Yes, their army was powerful, highly drilled and well supplied, and right up until the last months it seemed they were, by some miracle, holding their own. Now, everyone wondered how Germany ever believed they could match the combined powers of Russia, France and Britain. And who could have imagined the scale of the losses, and the hardship and hunger it would bring to ordinary people?
Even knowing all of this, Martha suspected, Karl must surely have reproached himself that his son had died on the fields of Flanders, while he had stayed at home.
The loss of Heinrich hit Otto hard, she knew, but at least the boy had the comfort of believing that his much-revered elder brother had died a hero trying to save the great German Republic. However, that his father should also die, just before the announcement of peace, had been almost unendurable.
His childhood had been stolen by the war and even now, on top of having to cope with the usual agonies of being twelve, of the acne that had started to pock his face, of the newly long limbs that seemed to have a mind of their own, there was the constant fear of violence in the air.
Gangs of unemployed, hungry veterans roamed the streets of Berlin, bitter at the failure of the Kaiser to fulfil his promise to create a ‘country fit for heroes’, and sometimes clashing with demonstrations by communists demanding the utopia they called Bolshevism. The pavements were lined with food queues and beggars, and it wasn’t uncommon to encounter ordinary folk sent mad with grief and hunger.
Only last month she’d sat opposite a woman on the tram counting out loud as she held up her fingers one by one: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, and then again, one, two, three, four, five. As other passengers began to smile between themselves, embarrassed by her eccentric behaviour, the man beside her spoke out: ‘Do not laugh at my sister, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am taking her to the asylum. She has lost five sons, all killed in action, and her wits are gone.’
Sometimes Martha imagined that she herself was also losing her mind. Her body was starved, ever since the British had decided to win the war with their ‘hunger blockade’. Even the peace treaty hadn’t made much difference. Farmers continued to hoard food and only the rich could afford to pay their extortionate prices, made worse as the Deutschmark devalued, becoming more worthless by the day.
Much as she loved the Fatherland, it was no place to live at the moment. She tried to look into the future but could see nothing but bleakness. The private ladies’ college where she worked as a part-time French language teacher had closed during the war and its doors had never reopened. Learning an enemy tongue was well down anyone’s list of priorities, and would be for the foreseeable future.
Otto was all she now had left in the world, apart from a few cousins scattered across the country with whom she had never been close. Her parents were long dead and her own brother had emigrated with his wife to America in 1910. He’d prospered there, working for an engineering firm in Chicago, and had pleaded with her and Karl to join them. We’ll come later, they’d promised, after the boys have finished school and college.
Then, when war was declared, all correspondence ceased. It pained her deeply that his adopted country had gone to war against her own and that its might and wealth had been the cause of Germany’s terrible defeat. Since the armistice none of her letters had received a reply. She longed for his news, to hear he was safe.
It was only her concern for Otto’s welfare that got her out of bed each day. He gave her a reason for living. In spite of her anxieties, planning this trip to Flanders had given her a goal. A small legacy from her father was probably enough to pay for both of them to travel, so long as they were prudent. At least then she could discharge her promise to her beloved Karl and perhaps help Otto understand, to give him something to remember of his brother.
*
They heard the tramping of hobnail boots. A key clanked in the lock and she found herself blinking in a shaft of harsh daylight as the door opened and three uniformed men entered.
The next half hour would decide their fate: whether they would be allowed into Belgium or sent back to Berlin, with her dream turned to ashes.
4
RUBY
Ruby collapsed onto the soft, wide expanse of the bed, grateful to be alone at last.
Her head was reeling. The day had presented such a cacophony of new sights and sounds that she could barely take it all in. It was as though she had somehow taken on the mantle of another person – the other Ruby was surely still at home in her small childhood bedroom with her neat suit and blouse, washed and carefully pressed, on a hanger on the back of the door ready for work tomorrow?
But this was a new version of Ruby, who had travelled to London and then crossed the sea to this tattered seaside town and an old-fashioned hotel with its curiously formal staff, its starched white napkins and bland food served with such pride. Who seemed to have attracted the attentions of a complete stranger: an American woman, brash, overfriendly and bold as brass. And here she was now, this other Ruby, with her small, battered suitcase, in this cavernous room with its dark wood furniture and tapestries on the walls depicting unsettling medieval scenes of knights and dragons.
The double bed felt enormous; she had never slept in one, save for the honeymoon. She shifted position, trying to make her neck more comfortable; the curious sausage-shaped pillow stretched across the full width of the bed but didn’t seem to support her head a
t all.
Was she really here, in Belgium, the country Bertie had come to defend, where he had fought so bravely and where he had, almost certainly, died? At home, every step she took, every place she visited, every meal she ate and every person she met reminded her of Bertie. These were things they had done together for so many years that she could not imagine life without the presence that she felt of him, night and day. But it was only now she realised that although, as John Wilson had said, she was here to honour the sacrifice Bertie had made, she had barely thought about him since leaving Dover.
Guiltily, she went to her case and took out the photograph, the one of their wedding day that sat by her bedside at home and which she’d slipped into her case at the last minute. He looked so young in his army uniform, his curls shorn into a severe haircut beneath the cap; she was wearing the pale lace-trimmed dress that had cost a fortune and never been worn since. It was a beautiful garment, hanging flatteringly from her shoulders and draping in layers down to her calves. Her own slightly lighter brown curls were held back in a bun beneath a jaunty hat with a ribbon that matched the dress. They were both smiling, self-consciously, as bidden by the photographer.
Gone. All gone.
*
The next day dawned grey and muggy. Breakfast was a strange affair of coffee so strong and bitter that Ruby recoiled at the first sip, along with crispy bread rolls, thin curls of pale butter served in a saucer of iced water, and the choice of an anonymous red-orange jam or yellow sliced cheese.
‘In France they do fabulous flaky pastries called croissants that you’re supposed to dunk into your coffee. I was hoping for some of them. But no, here it’s plain bread and cheese,’ Alice complained, a little too loudly. She seemed to have attached herself, but Ruby didn’t really mind. It was better than sitting alone, or enduring the self-absorbed litanies of sorrow from the other couples.
