INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  It was all very unpleasant. But then, the Snaiths had themselves exercised power, giving food to friends, withholding it from those in greater need. The Snaiths deserved their fate. Angus looked down at the photograph, where people stood in the village street, heads turned away, while the Jews were rounded up. How far, if really stretched, would one extend licence to the police? There would be no problem about guilt. Some small crime can be made to stick on most of us, if people set their minds to it. If all Snaiths were sentenced to wear some symbol – an equivalent appropriate to the Snaiths of the Star of David – on their jackets, would people say they were ‘getting away with it lightly’? Would the villagers of little Heaton have turned their heads away if the Snaiths within their midst were marched down the road with a few possessions in a sack over their backs? ‘Caught up with the Snaiths, then, have they?’

  Before the SS came to this village in Eastern Europe, would the Jews already have been in hiding? Or had they thought themselves, within the confines of their restricted lives, safe here? What must it have felt like? Whole villages had been razed to the ground in Russia and elsewhere. But that, terrible though it must be, was different from this scene, where the life of the village would go on peaceably enough once the Jews had been weeded out. It was the complicity of ordinary, decent people which made this crime so peculiarly dreadful. How had it ever come about that it could be regarded as irrelevant whether a person was innocent or guilty provided he was a Jew?

  He looked at them, standing there like so many sheep. Cry out, damn you! he thought angrily. When the pastors of the German Confessional Church had been taken away, the congregation had not stood idly by; they had gone into the street, singing hymns, loudly drawing attention to what was happening. The Jews were so passive. It was as if they colluded in their own destruction. The whole thing – the victims, the persecutors, the passers-by – was a monstrous act of collusion. He had thought this often enough in the past, had almost argued himself into a frame of mind where he could believe that the Jews had only themselves to blame.

  But now, looking at this photograph, it seemed that the faces did cry out! The terrible acceptance of all concerned in this unemphatic scene, cried out ‘Shame!’

  The photograph showed the moment of the dividing of the ways. The villagers would continue with the small change of daily life, talking in bread queues, walking a dog, bathing a baby. While those others, who would never see a quiet street again, or sit with families in a house, would move beyond the daily task, the common round.

  Had they understood what was ahead of them? The doleful little girl, dragging at her mother’s hand, had she been complaining about some toy left behind? And the mother, what had been her expectations? And Katia . . . When she, at some time past, stepped into that other street, had she already been as cowed as these people seemed? Or had she, restless, ebullient creature that she was, gone resentful at another diminishment of her freedom; though still imagining the nightmare to have an ending which would leave her with a stake in the future? It could not have been. Katia’s appearance would have marked her down. Had he himself not been aware of her ripening? In his mind, he saw her depraved, humiliated, the object of obscene sexual play.

  ‘I am assured your French will stand up to it.’

  Some poor devil had bought a trip abroad! It took him a few seconds to recall that it was himself.

  When he came out of the briefing, the sun was shining through rain, jewelling trees and roses in the gardens which surrounded the building. The gardens provided a setting of formal peace for this network of nerves and arteries which reached out across Europe. He would never walk happily in such gardens again; henceforth, visits to places such as Hampton Court would be accompanied by severe attacks of migraine.

  He wondered whether he should go up to London to see Irene; but decided he could not, after looking at that photograph. It would contaminate her. He decided instead to visit his Aunt Millie, whom he did not see as being in any danger of contamination.

  Melancholy thoughts absorbed him as he drove into Hertford. Melancholy had a fairly firm grip on him now. Perhaps it attracted certain events to him, or perhaps it was chance that when he parked his car the police should be questioning a motorist near by. A matter of petrol coupons was being debated. The motorist’s friends were showing a tendency to fade away. Angus sat in the car for a few minutes pondering the fact that respect for authority can create an atmosphere in which people cease to monitor the manner in which authority is exercised. Having satisfied himself that England was well on the way to fascism, he called upon his aunt. He was not, therefore, a witness to the knocking off of authority’s helmet and the disrespectful mêlée which ensued.

  Once inside his aunt’s house, Angus discovered that authority had suffered a graver blow than any being inflicted on the county constabulary at this moment. ‘Your poor mother has been distracted trying to get in touch with you,’ he was informed. His mother was invariably distracted. His Aunt Millie, on the other hand, maintained an air of unruffled, if often inappropriate, calm. She told him with commendable composure that his father had been badly wounded. His boat had been sunk (she spoke as if it was something he played with in his bath) and he was in hospital in Plymouth – the natural consequence of such infantile capers.

  For the first time that he could remember, Angus was more concerned for his father than his mother. Without his realizing it, his hatred of his father had become one of the mainstays of his life.

  ‘What does Mother mean by “badly wounded”?’ he asked, his tone conveying an uncharacteristic criticism of his parent.

  ‘One of your father’s sailor chums has been in touch with her. He does sound to have made rather much of your father’s injuries without being specific.’

  ‘There is nothing I can do.’ Angus realized with relief that fate had performed yet another office for him; whoever must sit by his father’s bedside, or console his mother, it could not be he.

  ‘I have been posted,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but that was before your father got himself into this mess.’

  ‘That will make not the slightest difference to HQ.’

  ‘Surely, on compassionate grounds . . .’

  ‘Not when I have two sisters. Who is with Mother now?’

  ‘Cecily. A broken reed if ever there was one.’

  ‘Daphne is in London somewhere. She will have to cope with this. She is the one who is devoted to Father.’

  ‘I have never thought of Daphne as being “devoted”. And, in any case, it is you that your mother wants.’

  ‘You must reassure her. Aunt Millie. You are always so good with her. And she has probably exaggerated. It will be better if I don’t try to get in touch with her immediately. She will accept my absence much more easily as a fait accompli.’

  ‘Are you off abroad on this jaunt?’

  ‘No, no. But I have to go north tomorrow. With any luck, I shall be back again in a month. Try to console her with that, be a dear.’

  ‘Yes, all right. Your uncle always used to say you didn’t manage these things well. You’ll be too early for grouse. I don’t know about trout. Your uncle used to trout fish all the year – but I sometimes thought this was an excuse for getting away.’

  Angus was not entirely cowardly in his motives. This mission was one in which he dared not fail. He was not so positive in his thoughts as to imagine any act of his could redeem the past; but to turn aside would have been yet another rejection of Katia. The business of his father’s injuries, and the effect on his mother, could be dealt with on his return – if he returned.

  The rain had stopped, but clouds were brimful of further grief. The smell of rotting vegetation was as strong as if all the stale cabbages in the world had been dumped here and boiled. Bodies must not suffer a similar fate. The funeral pyre was lit and soon, in the camp below, men could see the smoke rising.

  The body, lying stiff on the bamboo stretcher, a rice sack over head and shoulders, was
lifted and placed on the pyre. The bugler sounded the Last Post. Here, by the pyre, as in the camp below, men stood silent for a few moments.

  When it was over, another wooden cross was driven into the yielding mud. Ben laid his wreath. Between the tall grasses and fallen leaves which bound it together, he had twisted a few yellow lilies and blue-trumpeted convolvulus.

  In a few weeks, the monsoon rains would be over. The best time of the year lay ahead. ‘Why couldn’t he have held out?’ he said to the MO as they walked back to the camp in the rear of the funeral party.

  The MO said, ‘He made a good end.’

  ‘I can’t believe it, you know.’ Ben looked at the MO as though the fact of Geoffrey’s death was something that had been thrust upon him against his better judgement. ‘It doesn’t seem at all credible to me.’ He stopped, overcome with weakness and emotion, and the MO waited quietly beside him while he recovered himself.

  In the days following his mother’s death, Ben had walked about the house, looking in rooms as a person might who is engaged in a treasure hunt. But there were no clues. Apart from its cleanliness and order, her personality had not expressed itself in her home; it had remained her secret and she had taken it with her. They had loved each other, but had found no way of expressing that love; and they had lived too close to know each other very well. It would hardly be true to say that he had missed her. She had left a blank in his life, disturbing as a half-completed sentence which poses a question that will never be resolved.

  His mother died a comparatively young woman; he might have expected years of her company. But he had seemed to accept her death stoically. Geoffrey had died of cholera in a camp where seventy-three men had perished in the epidemic. Yet Ben, who had helped to nurse him at some risk to himself, was totally unprepared for his death. ‘We were going on a walking holiday when we got out of here,’ he told the MO, as though their conjunction with Offa’s Dyke was fixed and immutable as stars in the firmament. And, since his friendship with Geoffrey had become his universe, so it had seemed.

  The MO put his hand on Ben’s shoulder and guided him forward. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘He was a damn fool! If he had looked after himself he would be alive now.’ He felt Geoffrey’s death as a desertion.

  When he got back to the camp, Ben saw that Tandy had been through Geoffrey’s few possessions. There was nothing there of value to Tandy, but he had come across the drawings. ‘You’d best get rid of these,’ he advised Ben. ‘Or you’ll be in trouble, with some of the choice things you’ve written about the Nips.’

  ‘Then I’ll be in trouble.’

  Tandy shrugged. ‘All right. I shan’t give you away.’ This was probably true, since there would be nothing to gain by betrayal and Tandy was not vindictive. ‘Just so long as, if they’re found, you take the blame, see?’

  ‘I’ll take the blame.’

  The bedding was soaked by the rain which had fallen during the day, but the drawings, wrapped in part of an old gas cape, were still dry. Ben resolved that they were going out of the jungle with him, or they were going to be buried with him. He wrapped them up more securely, knowing it would be some time before he could bear to look at them again.

  That night he read the Old Testament. Reading material was limited, but there were other possibilities open to him – such as Agatha Christie or the New Testament. He sat in the ring formed round the fire. While the fire flamed brightly he was able to read – familiarity with the text seemed to enlarge the print. The men on either side of him had formed a debating group and took their discussions seriously. The future of parliamentary democracy was in question tonight. Somewhere beyond the circle of fire a Scots soldier with a good, strong voice was singing ‘Bonnie Mary of Argyle’.

  The Old Testament had a special appeal for Ben. It abounded in people who did dreadful deeds and yet were not necessarily rejected by their fellows, or, it seemed, utterly damned by God. The great David sent a man to his death so that he might have his wife. Much such a man would have thought of stealing his neighbour’s rations! David had been caught out, of course. The prophet had drawn a picture of a man he had not recognized, and then had come the denunciation, ‘You are that man.’ But David was also the man who had loved Jonathan.

  The flames were sinking by the time Ben closed the Bible. Men were drifting away, though a few zealots remained to argue the case for a socialist state. Across the river, an Australian emergency party had been called out. No doubt in protest, they were singing as they went, ‘They’ll be dropping thousand pounders, when they come . . .’ A few voices on this side of the river sympathetically took up the refrain. Ben wondered if the Japs thought it was some kind of Anglo-Saxon hymn to the night.

  As he lay on his sodden bedding, he thought about what was to become of him. In his present state of shock and bewilderment, the choice seemed to lie starkly between life and death. He thought of Tandy as representing life and the MO death.

  Sometimes the MO came out with one of the work parties and returned to complain about conditions. He seemed to have decided against life, so the mechanics of survival played little part in his behaviour. He made gestures others feared to make and he got away with it. Even the Japanese respected him. When Ben first met him, he had dismissed this man’s unfailing courtesy as ‘easy enough if you are a product of the public school system’. He had waited for the facade to crumble; but it seemed the façade was the man.

  On one of the first comparatively cool days in December they were passing lumps of rock down a long human chain. Owing to some human frailty further up the chain, the supply broke down for a few blessed minutes. The clouds were high now, like sky palaces, forming and reforming.

  ‘You know,’ the MO said, and stopped. It was a habit of his which Ben found excessively irritating. The MO looked around him at the riot of wild flowers which, even at the onset of winter, carpeted the jungle, before he went on, ‘This is the place where the whole of my life’s work was meant to culminate.’ He could never let such a pretentious statement stand without qualifying it; and immediately, talking fast and apologetically, he continued, ‘Such as it is, of course . . . my work, I mean. I would never have made a good GP. I’m hopeless at diagnosis. Here, it’s easier – if it’s not cholera, it’s malaria, or one of the dysenteries, or pneumonia . . .’ Ben interrupted what threatened to be a lengthy catalogue of tropical diseases, ‘And if you make a mistake, your patient won’t report you to the BMA.’

  The Japanese guard lashed Ben across the shoulders with his stick and screamed, ‘Speedo! Speedo!’ It was the fact of there being nothing to speedo about which was fraying his nerves. Later, they discovered that an overhanging boulder had been dislodged, cutting a swathe through prisoners, one of whom was killed, and injuring a Japanese guard. As a result of this delay, they had to stay out longer than usual and it was late in the evening when the party made its weary way back to camp.

  This long day’s work had taken its toll of Ben, who had not been well since Geoffrey’s death. On the way back he felt dizzy. He had pains in his back and legs and could hardly stand up straight. The MO made him stop and rest. Ben wondered whether the cooks would keep food for him; he did not care much.

  ‘So, you’ve decided to die in this place,’ he said, feeling within himself the sickness which might dissipate his own will to live. ‘Is that what you are telling me?’

  The MO had been a plump, florid man; he had lost a third of his weight, but still looked well set-up in comparison with most of the men. Ben’s remark shocked him.

  ‘No! I haven’t decided anything. It is simply that when I came here, I recognized the place at once. Not externally – I have never imagined anything like this. I’m not an imaginative man. It was inside myself – an interior condition that was waiting for me. Do you understand?’

  ‘No.’ Ben got up. His head didn’t like the movement involved; it hammered an angry protest to his legs, which promptly buckled.

  ‘I don’t understand my
self when I speak about it,’ the MO said, as he supported Ben down the track. ‘I’m not particularly articulate.’ Ben did not think anyone should be allowed to be as humble as this. ‘Action,’ the MO said, ‘is all that I have ever really understood.’

  ‘You have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat?’ Ben asked sardonically.

  ‘I don’t know that I would put it like that.’ He sounded offended. Ben was sure that if he had had the energy to raise his head, he would have seen the frown, and the perplexed look in the pale blue eyes. The man hadn’t Tandy’s sense of humour; but he suspected he was being mocked.

  Ben was glad enough of his support on the way down. The MO took him to the hospital and gave him quinine tablets. ‘If you’re no better in the morning, you must report here.’ He also offered some of his own food. His orderly hovered in the background, prepared to make a meal of Ben if he accepted. He need not have worried. Ben could not face food. Even so, the man followed him outside to tell him that the MO and his fellow doctors would be up most of the night because there had been a bad accident when a temporary bridge collapsed.

  ‘The silly sod shouldn’t have come out with us,’ Ben snapped.

  ‘He has to, then.’ The man primped up his little rosebud mouth. In civilian life he had been a dresser, and his attitude to the MO was much the same as to the great actors with whom he claimed to have worked. ‘How can he know the conditions you work under if he doesn’t see for himself?’

  ‘Why doesn’t he get Colonel bleeding Brown to move his fat arse off his office stool? He’s the camp CO.’

  ‘Do be realistic, dear!’

  Back in the tent, Ben’s sick mind went over and over the conversation they had had on their way back. Amid all the verbiage the MO had talked, there had been something which made sense of a sort.