by Liz Trenow
‘At this rate we’ll never find Heiney,’ Otto said, peering across the immense field. ‘Why don’t we split up? You go that way, I will go along here.’
‘You don’t mind going on your own? Are you sure?’
In his smile she saw once more the young man fast overtaking the child. ‘I’m fine, Mama,’ he said, his voice breaking into the bass register that no longer seemed to take him by surprise. ‘We just have to find him. That’s why we’re here, no?’
After a while the names seemed to blur into one. Müller, Schmidt, Schneider, Fischer, Meyer, Wagner, Becker, Schulz, Hoffmann, Schäfer, Koch, Bauer, Richter, Neumann, Klein, Wolf . . . Martha paused to stretch, scanning the great field of crosses, her eyes narrowing, unwilling to accept its harsh reality. These men were fathers, brothers, sons, all of them individuals whose families had loved them, and now they were left to rot beneath this black, foreign earth. Dust to dust. That dismal sentence. Nothing could be more final.
A hundred metres away Otto walked slowly and intently, his eyes scanning to left and right with fierce concentration, discharging his sombre task with the utmost attention. From this distance he looked taller, broader, his silhouette reminiscent of Heinrich’s.
Martha resumed her own search. Each time she read Weber – it was common enough and there were dozens of them here – her heart seemed to stop in her chest. Each time she saw that it was not Heinrich she felt simultaneously relieved and disappointed.
She heard Otto shouting: ‘Mama! Over here.’ With a pounding heart she walked as swiftly as she could over the uneven duckboards. In front of him was a tall wall of rough wooden planks set upright into the ground stretching twenty metres or so to either side. Slowly, her eyes adjusted and she saw that, covering each plank from top to bottom, were scratched names: dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. At the top was written: Kindermort, April 1915.
The blood seemed to congeal in her veins. It was a mass grave.
With the fierce concentration of a hawk tracking its prey, Otto had already begun to scan names, starting at the top of each plank and reading to the bottom before moving to the next. She took a deep breath and forced herself to follow his example, starting at the other end. As she read familiar names – of boys that Heinrich had been to school or college with, whose mothers had shared her grief when the dreaded news had arrived – a great weight of sorrow seemed to press down on her shoulders.
A single scratched name among so many others seemed to leap out against the dark wood. ‘Oh my dear Lord, it’s Hans.’
It was their neighbour’s son, the oldest of four, three of whom had died in the war, a small blond lad with a smile so endearing that it was hard to resist cuddling him. This was the boy who had spent so many hours in their home, passing winter evenings with chess games by the fire, or the long summer hours kicking a football around the garden. He’d been Heinrich’s best friend until their lives had taken separate paths: Heinrich to the Gymnasium for academic boys, Hans to the vocational school to become a carpenter.
And now they were together once more, joined by death, the great leveller. Pinning her gaze to the name, she whispered a short prayer for the boy she’d once known, promising that she would visit his mother just as soon as they arrived home. It would be comforting for her to hear of his resting place. She took up a small stone and rested it at the foot of the plank.
Surely Heinrich must be close by? She hungered for that moment of recognition as much as she feared it, but it did not arrive. Her eyes scoured the names until they burned, but there was no sign.
Heinrich was such a clever boy, as good at his lessons as he was in sports. After a late growth spurt he’d blossomed into a tall, handsome young man, popular with his friends and much admired by the girls. She would observe from a safe distance, with a mixture of apprehension and maternal pride, how they gathered round him giggling and flicking their plaits, fearing that he might fall in love and become distracted from his studies. They had such high hopes for him but, at seventeen, he seemed determined to defy their wishes and gave up his college place to join the army cadets.
‘Is it so wrong to want a bit of excitement?’ he’d shouted defiantly. ‘Who needs an education anyway? It’s just dull old books and libraries. I can do my learning in the real world.’ So you got your excitement, my darling Heinrich, right here, in the mud of Flanders. But where was he now? Otto looked up and shrugged, his face pale as chalk. ‘He’s not here, Mama.’
But if Hans was here, Dieter, Christian and Peter, all those bright-eyed college boys who had joined up with him, surely Heinrich must be here too? Had he died somewhere else? But her neighbour had been so sure . . . She forced her mind back to the task in hand. Patting the bag hanging from her shoulder, feeling the bulge of the small leather pouch, she remembered her vow to Karl.
‘Let’s search for a little longer, so we can be absolutely sure. We’ve come all this way.’
It was when they’d started again, in another section of the graveyard, that she saw in the distance a large black four-seater car pulling up by the side of the road at the far end of the cemetery. For all their civilian summer wear of pale linen jackets and green felt alpine hats she knew at once from their upright bearing and the way the three men jumped to attention when the boss barked his orders that these were either policemen or soldiers, probably officer class, in plain clothes. Whatever had brought them here? Had they come to arrest her for spying?
But they showed no interest in her or Otto. In fact, they barely glanced in their direction, and after a few moments she allowed herself to breathe again. Two of the men, holding clipboards, set off along the boardwalks and seemed to be writing down names from the crosses and grave markers. The other went with the boss, who had a pronounced limp and walked with a stick. Otto, whose ears were sharper than her own, whispered, ‘I swear they’re speaking German, Ma.’
‘Just ignore them.’ She was not going to be deflected from her task now, not after coming all this way, not after the trials they’d been through to get here. They turned back to their search, but after a few minutes she became aware of footsteps approaching along the boardwalk behind her.
‘Good afternoon, madame.’ He spoke French but with a clearly detectable German accent in a tone that, while friendly enough, was clearly not to be denied.
‘Sir?’ she said, turning to greet him.
The man took off his hat and made a small bow. ‘If it is not too bold, may I enquire as to the purpose of your visit?’
‘My son and I are seeking the grave of my nephew, whom we believe to be buried here,’ she replied.
‘Aha.’ He stroked his moustache, distracted for a moment. ‘What regiment was he in?’
She hesitated. ‘May I ask why you wish to know, sir?’
A slight smile tipped the corners of his mouth. ‘Forgive me, madame. I should have explained my purpose. We have been given permission by the Belgian government to visit on behalf of a new charity, the Volksbund, which is being set up to make a formal record of German war graves. Our aim is to trace all those who gave their lives in this conflict and to ensure that their sacrifice is properly commemorated.’
‘You are from Germany?’
He saluted, clipping his heels. ‘Commandant Johan Albrecht, at your service,’ he said in German.
Otto tugged at her arm. ‘Ask him to help us find Heiney.’
‘Your nephew?’
She nodded. No point in admitting the deception now.
‘We can certainly check if we have any record.’
‘I am Martha Weber, and this is my son Otto,’ she said, even now uneasy speaking in her own language in public, for the first time since entering the country.
‘We have some files in the car, if you would care to accompany me?’ he said.
As they followed him, Otto took her hand and squeezed it. ‘They’ll find him for us, won’t they, Ma?’
‘I hope so,’ she whispered back.
One of the other
men – the one with a neatly trimmed ginger beard – was summoned to the car and ordered to open the capacious rear compartment. Inside, they could see several dozen ring-binder files in military grey.
‘Please tell us the name and regiment of your nephew, and the date of his death if you know it.’
She told him all the details she knew, and explained that her sister had never received formal notice of his death, so she did not know a specific date. The two men turned back to the car, sorting through the files until he found the one marked on its spine V–Z.
He laid it on the bonnet of the car and began to flick through the pages. Each side of paper held typed columns of names, hundreds on each sheet. The list of Webers, when he reached it, seemed to occupy several pages. ‘Do you have a second name and date of birth, please?’ He returned to the search, running his index finger briskly down each column.
As his finger stopped she felt her heart stop with it. He paused for an agonising moment before saying to his boss, ‘Please take a look at this, sir.’ The pair of them peered at the entry for a few seconds before Herr Albrecht cleared his throat and turned to her with a surprising smile on his face.
‘Frau Weber, your nephew may not be dead after all. Our records show that he was captured by the French in September 1915. He would almost certainly have been taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he would have stayed for the rest of the war.’
‘Captured?’ What did this mean?
‘He’s alive!’ Otto’s shout, close beside her, made her start. ‘Heiney’s alive, Mama!’ It made no sense. Could it really be? Not dead? Was this another of her crazy dreams?
‘But his letters were returned . . .’
‘Didn’t you hear what the man said, Ma? He wasn’t killed, he was captured,’ Otto shouted, jumping up and down beside her. ‘So he must be alive, somewhere.’
‘But if that’s the case, where?’ She held out upturned palms, pleading for an answer.
‘Please, Frau Weber, you must understand. The chaos of war may take years to sort out.’
‘We have already waited. For four long years,’ her voice cracked. She swallowed hard.
‘You will have to ask the authorities once you return home,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘But I don’t understand. If he was taken prisoner, surely someone would know? Why were his family not informed?’ Martha asked, desperate now for someone to tell her the truth. Was he alive, or was he not?
‘May I make a suggestion, sir,’ ginger-beard murmured.
‘Speak up, man.’
He stepped forward, clearing his throat. ‘As you are aware, I was also held in a French camp, sir, so I know from experience. They were often overwhelmed by the numbers and their records were chaotic. I also know that some of our men were so traumatised that they lost their minds; didn’t even know their own names. So it would follow that they are probably still assumed to be missing.’
By now the other two men had joined them; one nodded in affirmation.
‘What are you saying, man?’ the boss interjected. ‘If you had no papers and couldn’t even remember . . . ?’
‘That is what I am saying, sir. My point, precisely. Some prisoners were taken alive but could not even identify themselves.’
‘Then where would they be now?’
‘In a sanatorium, sir, being treated. We can surely put this lady in touch with the right authorities.’
Otto tugged at her arm once more. ‘Do you hear, Ma? Heiney could be in a hospital somewhere.’ She had only been once to such a place, visiting Karl’s grandmother, bless her soul, in her last days. She remembered the patients bound to their beds, torsos wasted, skulls skeletal and eyes vacant, like lost souls. She could not bring herself to visualise Heiney like that. But where there was life, surely there was a glimmer of hope, however small? If only they could find him and bring him home, they might be able to nurse him back to health.
‘But what is it that they suffered, that they do not even know their own names? Is there no cure?’ she managed to ask.
One of the minions asked permission to speak.
‘Sergeant Stein, at your service.’ He made a small bow. ‘I too was in a prisoner-of-war camp with other enlisted men. With us were some who, they said, had suffered what they called shell shock. It does strange things to the brain but so long as some parts of it are still functioning, the doctors believe that, with time, they might recover their faculties. My comrade played chess with a young man each day whose mind seemed completely gone; he couldn’t speak and his hands shook so much he kept knocking over the pieces, but he was still a brilliant player. None of us understood it.’
The clearest vision appeared in Martha’s head: her husband Karl and ten-year-old Heinrich at the table by the window, the sunlight glinting off the boy’s blond hair like a halo. She’d been enjoying this perfect scene when Heiney had suddenly jumped up, scattering the board and pieces onto the floor. ‘I hate chess,’ he’d shouted, and stomped off upstairs. Later, he became a keen player, but then so did almost every boy at his age. They played between lessons and after school, neglecting their homework.
‘What did he look like, this chess player?’ Otto’s voice squeaked with urgency.
‘Like all the rest of us, son. We were worked so hard and had so little to eat, our hair fell out, our cheeks fell in. I suppose we may never know who he was, or whether he ever recovered.’
‘All boys play chess. It would be too much of a coincidence,’ Martha said, trying to ignore the way her heart fluttered in her own chest. Could it possibly be?
‘I am afraid there is not much more we can tell you,’ Herr Albrecht said.
The sergeant was scribbling on a scrap of paper, which he handed to her. ‘This is a sanatorium you might try,’ he said.
‘Thank you, gentlemen, you have all been most helpful,’ Martha said.
From the corner of her eye she could see Freddie and Ruby standing by the ambulance at the other end of the cemetery, looking in their direction. ‘But our friends are waiting and we must leave you now.’
They had walked a hundred metres or so when Otto asked to see the address.
‘Not now,’ she whispered. ‘They are waiting.’
But he refused to move any further until she relented. He read the words on the scrap of paper and then, before she could stop him, turned and sprinted back along the boardwalk towards the men still waiting by the car. Within moments he had returned to her side, panting heavily, and grinning from ear to ear.
‘What was all that about?’ she whispered.
‘Tell you later,’ he said.
25
RUBY
‘Quite a little tonic this, looking at all these dead Germans.’
‘Freddie! For heaven’s sake.’ He was trying to pass it off as a joke, but she knew he meant it. ‘She’s very brave to come all this way for her sister. I hope they find him.’
They sat in silence, watching Martha and Otto crisscrossing the graveyard. He pulled out a tobacco pouch and a packet of papers. ‘Could you make me one of your excellent roll-ups?’ She rolled it and lit it with a match from the crumpled box he’d handed her. In the still air, the cloud of exhaled smoke drifted slowly around their heads and the smell of it conjured up a powerful, painful presence, as though it were Bertie and not Freddie by her side.
A longer silence this time. ‘You got me thinking, you know,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
He looked away sheepishly.
‘C’mon, Freddie. You aren’t usually this mysterious.’
‘Well . . .’ He paused, took another drag and began again. ‘It might be time to go home. Get on with my life instead of burying my head in the past.’
‘That’s a big decision.’
‘Made for me, really, by this old bird.’ He thumped the steering wheel. ‘Gotta get her home.’
‘I thought you said you were just looking after it for someone else?’
‘Yeah, but the se
cret’s out now, and my mate’ll get clobbered when they hear about it back home, as they surely will. He was given orders to bring her back across the Channel, but he hid her away and told them she was lost, stolen or summat. I think he had an idea to give her a new livery and plates, you know, use her for tourist trips. Anyway, that never worked out – he had trouble getting the plates and raising the cash to get her repainted. Then his pa got ill and he had to rush home. But now she’s out and about someone will report it, sure as eggs are eggs. Rumours spread like a rash in these parts. I’ll have to deliver her back to the UK sharpish so he don’t get arrested for theft.’
‘That makes it stolen goods, Freddie! You decided to risk that?’
‘It was for you, really,’ he said, with a crooked smile.
‘How are you going to drive with just one arm?’
‘Holding the wheel with me knees while I change gear,’ he said breezily. ‘No problem.’
‘Sounds dangerous to me,’ she said, realising too late how stupid she sounded. Nothing could ever be more dangerous than what he and his mates had been through on the battlefields.
Half an hour passed in companionable chatter, and then a further quarter of an hour.
‘Wonder where they’ve got to?’ Freddie said, twisting in his seat. And then, ‘Hang on a sec. Who the hell are they talking to?’
She peered past him to see, in the distance, a full quarter of a mile away, a large black car beside which were standing four men, from whom Martha and Otto were apparently taking their leave. ‘Look, they’re heading back. We’ll soon find out.’
Then, ‘Now where’s the boy going, for heaven’s sake?’
‘He’s a good little runner, I’ll say that for him.’
As the couple arrived back, the boy looked very pleased with himself.
‘Did you find your nephew’s grave? Who were those men?’ Ruby asked.
Something about Martha’s demeanour made her seem years younger, even girlish, with a smile that lit up the whole of her face. ‘No grave. Prison.’
‘He was a prisoner of war?’ Freddie spluttered. ‘After all that?’
