Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  At home, Papi did not like us to talk about any of this, about anything political – he was very strict about that. We all knew about the terrible things the Nazis were doing, but Papi always told me that our home should be an oasis of peace and harmony for us in a troubled world, that it only made Mutti angry or sad or both to talk about it, and that little Karli was far too young anyway to understand about such things. Besides, Papi would say, you never know who’s listening. But down on the farm on our holidays one summer – the summer of nineteen thirty-eight it was – Mutti and Papi, Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti, got into a long and heated argument. It was late at night, and Karli and I were already upstairs in bed. We heard every word of it.

  Uncle Manfred was banging the table, and I could hear the tears of anger in his voice. “Germany needs strong leadership,” he was saying. “Without our Führer, without Adolf Hitler, the country will go to the dogs. Like Hitler himself, I fought in the trenches. We were comrades in arms. My only brother was killed in the war, and most of my friends. Is all that sacrifice to be for nothing? I remember the humiliation of defeat, and how people starved in the streets after the war. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. Make no mistake, it was the government in Berlin, and the Jews, who betrayed the Fatherland and the army. And now Hitler is restoring our pride, putting things right.”

  I had never in my life imagined Uncle Manfred could be this angry. Mutti was furious too, and called him ‘ein dumkopf’ – in English this means a fool, or a fathead. She was saying that Hitler was a madman, that the Nazi regime was the worst thing that had ever happened to Germany, that we had many dear friends who were Jews, and that if Hitler went on the way he was going, he would lead us all into another war.

  Uncle Manfred, who was ranting now, and quite beside himself, replied that he hoped there would be a war, so that this time we could show the world that Germany had to be respected. Then, to my utter surprise, mild-mannered Aunt Lotti joined in, calling Mutti ‘nothing but a coward and a lousy Jew-loving pacifist’. Mutti told her in no uncertain terms that she was proud to be a pacifist, that she would be a pacifist till the day she died. Through all this, Papi was doing his best to try to calm things down, and said that we were all entitled to our own opinion, but that we were all family, all German, and that we should stick together, whatever our views. No one was listening to him.

  The argument raged on for most of the night. To be honest, at the time I didn’t understand much of what they were talking about – only enough to know that I was on Mutti’s side. Karli understood even less, but we were both so upset and surprised to hear them being angry with one another, and shouting like that. When I think about it now, I realise I should have been more knowledgeable about what they were saying. But I wasn’t, not then. I was just a teenage girl growing up, I suppose. Yes, I hated all the dreadful things I’d seen the stormtroopers doing in the streets, but the truth is – and I am ashamed of this now – that I was far more interested in boys and bicycles, than in politics – and more in bicycles than boys, I have to say.

  I do not think I understood just how serious the argument had really been, till the next morning. When Karli and I came downstairs into the kitchen for breakfast, Mutti had all the cases packed. She was in tears, and Papi announced grim-faced to Karli and me that we were going home. He said that Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti had decided we were no longer welcome in their house, and that we wouldn’t be seeing them or speaking to them ever again. Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti were nowhere to be seen. I shall never forget walking away down the road from the farm, knowing we’d never be coming back. Karli started crying, and very soon I found myself doing the same. It felt like the end of a wonderful dream. And that is exactly what it turned out to be. Only a year or so later, Papi came home one day in his grey army uniform, and told us they were sending him to France. It came as a total surprise to me. That was how the war began for us, the beginning of our nightmare, of everyone’s nightmare.”

  AYBE I WILL HAVE THAT DRINK OF WATER NOW,” LIZZIE said, reaching for her glass. I was only too pleased to hand it to her.

  “I think you’re tiring yourself,” I told her.

  “I am fine,” she replied firmly. “Quite fine. Just a dry throat, that is all.”

  “What about the elephant?” Karl asked her. “You haven’t told us about the elephant yet.”

  “Patience, patience,” Lizzie said, laughing. “You are just like Karli, just like him. Questions, always questions. The likeness between you is – how is it you say it? – uncanny. I was just coming to that part of the story.” She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes before she went on.

  “This was about the time Mutti went to work in the zoo, with the elephants. With so many men away at the war, the women were doing more and more of the men’s work these days. And anyway, now that Papi was gone, I suppose we must have needed the money. Papi came home every few months on leave, but each time he seemed to me to be more and more changed, a different man almost. He was thinner in the face, with dark rings under his sunken eyes. He would be sitting in his chair, Karli on his knee, and hardly saying a word. We never went boating together. Papi didn’t go fishing. He did not even listen to his beloved Bach on the gramophone. And he never laughed, not even at Karli’s tricks and antics.

  Then, as the war dragged on, year after year, Papi came home less and less. We heard he was in Russia somewhere, but we never knew exactly where. We had letters of course, but not that often. Whenever a new one did come, Mutti would read it out loud to Karli and me every evening before bedtime. We would have then what Mutti always called a ‘family moment’ together, holding hands around the kitchen table and closing our eyes to think of Papi. Then she would put the letter up with all the others on the mantelpiece, behind the photo of Papi in his uniform. The mantelpiece became like an altar to his memory.

  Karli would often ask us if Papi was dead in the war. Of course not, we told him. Papi was fine. He would be home soon, we told him. We told him anything to keep him happy, that it would all be over before we knew it, and everything would be back the way it had been. But as the war went on, hiding the truth was becoming impossible. The news worsened with every passing week. Food became scarce. More and more cities were being bombed all over Germany. We had more and more days off school because there was not enough coal any more to heat the classrooms. The Russian Army, the Red Army we called it, was closing in on us from the east. Refugees were flooding into Dresden. And the Allies, the Americans and the British, were already marching into Germany from the west. More and more husbands and sons and brothers were being reported dead or missing. It was common now every week, for one of our schoolfriends to learn the dreadful news that a father or a brother was not coming home. So of course Mutti and I began to fear the worst for Papi. We both feared it, I know we did, but did not dare speak of it.

  We used to listen to the radio every evening, Mutti and I. All through the war we had done this, listening for news from the particular battlefront where we thought Papi was fighting. They still tried to make bad news sound like good news – they were very good at that. But no matter what they told us, we knew, as everyone did by now, that the war was lost – that it was only a question of how quickly it would end, and of who would get to us first, the Red Army from the east, or the Allies from the west. We all hoped it might be the Allies – from the refugees we had heard such terrible things about the Red Army. In the end it was just too painful to listen any more to the radio, so we didn’t. We listened to the gramophone instead, and longed every day for the war to be over, for Papi to be home again with us. Every night before we went up to bed, Mutti would make sure that Karli and I said goodnight to Papi’s photo. Karli liked to touch it with his fingertips. I had to lift him up because he was still too small to reach it himself.

  I think I was often angry in those days – with the way the world was, I mean. And I am ashamed to say that sometimes I took it out on Mutti, blaming her for just about everything. I have n
o excuse for this, except that I was fifteen, and felt that day by day all my happiness was being taken from me. I felt hollow inside, empty, and angry. It is difficult to explain, but I felt as if I was all alone in the world, a world I used to love, and that I had come to hate. More and more I felt apart from everyone and everything, from my friends and family even, as if I no longer belonged. Like Papi, I could no longer even take pleasure in Karli’s playfulness. He went on joking and juggling just the same, with the world falling apart about us. I became more and more irritated with him, and with Mutti too. Mutti could see this, I think, and became all the more maternal and attentive towards me, which only made things worse, of course.

  We did not live far from the zoo where Mutti worked, so that in the dark of the evening, if I went out into the garden, I could hear the lions roaring, and the monkeys chattering and the wolves howling. I had taken to getting out of the house whenever I could. However cold it was, I would sit on the swing and listen to them. I would close my eyes, and try to imagine myself out in the jungle away from everything that was going on, far from the war and all this unhappiness. One evening Mutti came out to join me, bringing me my coat.

  “You’ll catch your death, Elizabeth,” she said, wrapping the coat around my shoulders. She began to tell me all about the animals we were hearing, their names, the countries they had come from, their personalities, who was friends with who, all their funny habits. And then she started talking about Marlene again, the young elephant she had almost adopted by now. I just didn’t want to hear about Marlene. Mutti was talking on and on about her with such deep affection, almost as if she really was part of her family. It occurred to me then, quite suddenly, that maybe this elephant was more precious to her than me and Karli.

  It was some years now since Marlene had been born, four or five maybe. Mutti had been there at the birth, and she was so proud of that, and prouder still when the Herr Direktor at the zoo said that since she was the one who saw her come into the world, then she should be the one to name her. After that it was almost as if Marlene was her baby. And in the last few days in particular, she had been talking about her all the time because she was very worried about her.

  Only a month or two before this, Marlene’s mother had become sick, and had died quite suddenly. So Mutti would be home late each evening, spending even longer hours now at the zoo, just to be with Marlene, to comfort her. Elephants grieve just like we do – Mutti had often explained this to us. She told us that Marlene needed her to be there with her as much as possible, that she had been off her food and depressed ever since her mother had died. And now there was a photo on the mantelpiece of them both together, Mutti stroking Marlene’s ear. It was right next to the photograph of Papi, and his letters, and I didn’t like that at all.

  Mutti had taken Karli and me with her into the zoo to see Marlene many times. It was true, she did seem sad and dejected. And Mutti was right, she was the sweetest elephant in the world, so gentle. She had such kind eyes. Her trunk seemed to have a life all of its own, and she rumbled and groaned almost as if she was talking, which always made Karli giggle. And whenever he giggled, that seemed to cheer Marlene up a lot. Karli and that elephant became the best of friends. It was the highlight of Karli’s life when Mutti took us in to see Marlene. They were so alike, those two – Marlene and Karli, I mean. Naughty, inquisitive, funny. Karli would talk to her as he fed her, as he led her about by her trunk. Like the best of friends, the best of soul mates they were.

  If I am honest I think I was a little jealous, and maybe this was why I was heartily sick of hearing Mutti going on and on about her confounded elepant. And here she was doing it again.

  “Do you hear that, Elizabeth?” she said, grasping my arm. “It is Marlene! I am sure that is Marlene trumpeting again. She hates to hear the wolves howling. I’ve told her that they won’t harm her, but she is all alone at night, when I am not there, and she gets frightened. Do you hear her?”

  “For goodness’ sake, Mutti!” Even as I was shouting at her, I knew I shouldn’t be. But I couldn’t stop myself. “There is a war on, Mutti, or hadn’t you noticed? Papi is away at the fighting. He’s probably lying there dead in the snow in Russia right now. In the city there are thousands of people starving in the streets. And all you can talk about is your precious Marlene. She is just an elephant, a stupid elephant!”

  Mutti turned on me then. “And if I talk about the war, will it bring Papi home? Will it? Will the bombing stop? Will the Russians and the Americans turn round and go home? I do not think so, Elizabeth. We are losing this war, and do you know what? I don’t care. What can I do about it? Why should I talk about it? How can that help? All I can do is look after my children and look after my animals, and I will do both, to my dying breath. To Marlene, I talk about you and Karli. To you, I talk about Marlene. Is that so terrible?”

  I had never seen her like this, and at once regretted my cruel words. We cried then, and clung to one another in the dark of the garden. It is strange how a moment like that can change things around. Until then, I had simply been her child, her daughter, and she my mother. Until then, we had confided in one another very little. Suddenly, we were opening our hearts to each other. This was when she told me what it was that had been troubling her so much.

  “For weeks now, I have not been sleeping at nights, and do you know why this is, Elizabeth?” she said. “It is because I should be worrying about Papi, and you and little Karli. And I do, I do. But not enough, and this makes me feel so bad. There is always something else I am thinking about because it is terrible, so terrible that I cannot put it out of my mind.”

  “What, Mutti, what?” I asked her.

  She led me away from the house then, to the garden bench set against the back wall – the bench where she and Papi always used to sit on summer evenings when they wanted to be alone. Karli and I used to watch them from our bedroom window, and always wonder what they were saying. Sometimes, I remember, little Karli would pretend to smoke, mimicking everything that Papi did, until he had us both in fits of laughter. I think it was the first time I had ever sat there on the bench with Mutti. I was in Papi’s place, and it felt very special.

  Mutti held my hand tight as she talked to me. “The Herr Direktor at the zoo, Elizabeth, he called us in together, all the keepers, everyone – this was a month or two ago. He told us he had something very serious to tell us. Until now, he said, Dresden has not been bombed. Almost all the big cities in Germany lie in ruins: Berlin, Hamburg, Köln. Thousands upon thousands are dead. Only Dresden has been spared. But sooner or later, he told us, the bombers are sure to come, and so we have to plan for this. So far we have been lucky, but our luck cannot last for ever. Why should Dresden be special? When the bombers do come, we are well prepared. We all have basements or shelters to go to, and they are deep, so deep that many of us will have a good chance to survive. We know where to go. We have all done our air-raid drill. But the animals, he said, have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. If the zoo is hit by the bombs – and in a raid this is very likely – then it is possible that many of the animals might escape from their cages and find their way into the city. The authorities say this cannot be allowed to happen.”

  “What will they do with the animals then?” I asked her. “Will they take them away to somewhere safe?”

  “I am afraid not,” Mutti replied. “The Herr Direktor told us that very regrettably, it has been decided that we must destroy most of the animals, especially the big carnivores, the lions and tigers and the bears, and also the elephants – any animal that might be a threat to the people in the city. I know this is a dreadful thing to have to do, he told us, but if the worst comes to the worst and the bombers do come, then we shall just have to do it. We have no choice. We should prepare ourselves. That is what the Herr Direktor said, Elizabeth,” she cried, almost in tears by now. “To prepare ourselves! How can I prepare myself to stand by and watch them shoot Marlene? Tell me that. I cannot bear the thought of it, Elizabeth. I just
cannot.”

  “And will the bombers come, Mutti?” I asked her.

  She did not reply at once. “I am afraid so, Elizabeth,” she said. “If I am honest – and I think you are old enough for me to be honest with you – I can see no reason why they should not come. Sooner or later they must come. We all know this.”

  I think I had never been so frightened in all my life as I was at that moment. Mutti tried to comfort me all she could.

  “I should not have told you, I should not,” she whispered, holding me close. “But do not worry. Whatever happens, I shall look after you and little Karli. The air-raid sirens will give us plenty of warning, and the shelter is very near, isn’t it? And it is so deep that the bombs cannot reach us down there. We have practised it so many times. We shall survive this, I promise you. You, me, and little Karli. They can send all the bombers they like, and we will survive. And I make you another promise, Elizabeth. I shall make sure also that Marlene survives with us. I will not let this war take from me all those I love.” She wiped away my tears then, as she held me at arm’s length, brushing the hair from my eyes. “Believe me, all will be well, Elizabeth. Now let us go inside, and say our goodnights to Papi.”

  So that is what we did. In the morning all three of us found ourselves together in Mutti’s bed. Mutti said she had slept better that night than for a very long time. At breakfast, she told us that from now on that is how she would always like us to sleep – together. She was happier than I’d seen her in ages, and so was I. As we left the house that morning, she kissed me goodbye, and then whispered something in my ear as she hugged me. “I have had an idea, Elizabeth, in the night, a wonderful idea, a grand idea. A secret.”