Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  Mutti went on fuming with indignation about him all evening. All during supper and afterwards, she kept getting up to look out of the window to check on Marlene. I could see she was becoming very anxious about her. In the end, she went out to see her in the garden.

  “She is still pacing up and down out there,” Mutti said, as she came back inside. “She does that in her cage at the zoo whenever she is feeling unhappy about something. That horrible dog has really upset her. I shall take her for a walk. That usually settles her down. I think that is what she needs. There is a lovely full moon out there. Will you come with us, children?”

  The truth is, I didn’t want to. I was warm where I was, and certainly did not want to go out there into the cold again. But of course Karli hardly needed an invitation. He already had his boots on, and was shrugging himself into his coat. “Can I hold her trunk, Mutti?” he cried. “She likes me to hold her trunk.”

  They were halfway out of the door already by now. I only went with them because I did not want to be left behind. I grumbled about it, I remember. “Do we really have to?” I moaned. But no one was listening to me. I made sure I was going to be as warm as I could be. I pulled my hat down over my ears, wrapped my scarf around me, and then grabbed Karli as he was going out of the door, and did the same for him, put on his hat and scarf because he hadn’t bothered. He hated me fussing over him. He just wanted to get out there and be with Marlene.

  Moments later we were through the gate and out into the park beyond, the snow bright with moonshine, and the whole world silent and peaceful about us. Karli was leading Marlene by her trunk, making his usual clicking noises and telling her to gee up, just like he had always done with Tomi back on Uncle Manfred’s farm. I noticed again something I had often noticed before, that when Karli was at his happiest, he limped much less. He was stomping on ahead of us through the snow with Marlene, and there was scarcely a sign of a limp at all.

  Mutti put her arm through mine as we walked. “Wherever Papi is, it is the same moon for him, Elizabeth,” she said. “Maybe he is looking up at it, right now, like we are.”

  That was the moment the dog came bounding out at us from under the trees, barking wildly. I saw at once it was the same Alsatian that had been tormenting Marlene through the gate. Mutti was running at him, clapping her hands and shouting at him, but the dog would not be put off, would not go away. Instead he circled round behind Marlene, snarling and growling at her. That was what made Marlene suddenly whirl around to face him, sending Karli sprawling into the snow. I ran to him at once and helped him to his feet. By the time I looked up again, Marlene was charging off through the snow, chasing the dog away, trumpeting as she went, her trunk flailing, her ears in full sail. And Mutti was stumbling after her, calling for her to stop. But I could see that there would be no stopping Marlene now, until she had either chased the dog out of sight, or had trampled him to death.

  TOOK KARLI BY THE HAND AND WE BOTH FOLLOWED Mutti, running through the snow after Marlene. But the snow was deep and we soon tired, and were reduced to a walk. Ahead of us the chase went on. However hard the dog tried to bound away over the snow and escape, Marlene kept after him. All the while her trumpeting was echoing through the park, and louder now in my ears than seemed possible – until I began to realise that it was not Marlene’s trumpeting I was hearing at all, but the sound of the air-raid sirens wailing over the city. I stopped to listen, to be quite sure my ears were not playing tricks on me.

  Karli gripped my arm. “An air raid!” he cried. “An air raid!” All I knew then was that we had to get to the shelter fast, as we had been taught. Ahead of us, Mutti too had stopped in her tracks. She was yelling out to Marlene to come back. Again and again she called, but Marlene just kept going. She was almost out of sight now in amongst the trees, as Mutti came stumbling back towards us.

  “There is nothing more we can do for now, children,” she said. “We shall find her later. We must get home, to the shelter. Come quickly!” She grabbed Karli’s hand.

  “No!” Karli cried, pulling away from her and turning to run. “No! We can’t! We can’t leave her. We have to catch her! I’m going after her. You go home if you like. I’m not coming.”

  “Karli! Karli, don’t be silly! You come back here this minute, do you hear me?” Mutti was shouting after him, shrieking almost; but I could see it was pointless, that Karli had made up his mind. I started running after him then, so did Mutti. But he was already way ahead of us, and Marlene was by now no more than a shadowy shape moving through the trees, and then I lost sight of her altogether. We were catching Karli up fast, when, and not for the first time, he staggered, and fell to his knees, exhausted. Mutti and I were trying to help him up, doing all we could to persuade him that we had to get back to the shelter. He was still protesting, still struggling against us, fighting us, when we heard the sound we had been dreading for so long.

  The bombers.

  The bombers were coming. It sounded like a distant humming at first, then it became a droning, like a swarm of bees, a swarm that was coming closer, ever closer. We looked up. We could still see no planes. We could not tell from which direction they were coming because they seemed to be all around us, but invisible. Then, in no time at all, the sky above us was filled with a thunderous throbbing roar, so loud that I thought my ears might burst. Karli had his hands over his ears and was screaming. And then the bombs began to fall, behind us, on the city, on the far side of the park, on where we had come from, our street, our house. The whole world shuddered and shook with every blast. To me it felt like the end of the world had come.

  Now we had no choice. We all of us knew at that moment that there could be no going back. Mutti picked Karli up in her arms. He clung on and buried his head in her shoulder, crying out for Marlene. And we ran, we ran and we ran. We did not know tiredness any more. Fear alone kept our legs running. I looked up once more, and saw the planes flying across the moon. There were hundreds of them up there. By now the bombs were falling all over Dresden. We heard the whine of them falling, the crump and crunch of them, saw the flash of explosions, saw fires raging everywhere.

  There was no more argument, not about Marlene, who had disappeared into the night by now, and not about returning home to the shelter. Marlene we could do nothing more about, and it was obvious that if there was any way of escaping the bombs, it would be in the open country ahead of us beyond the suburbs, not in a shelter back in the burning city.

  It was the city they were bombing, not the countryside. We only had to keep going, I told myself. We would soon be out of the park, into the outskirts of the city, closer all the time to the safety of the fields and the woods beyond.

  We tried not to, but we had to stop from time to time, to catch our breath. And whenever we did, we would stand there, gazing back at the city. Our city it was, and it was being destroyed before our eyes. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky. Anti-aircraft guns were firing, firing, pounding away. But the planes just kept on coming, the blast of their bombs ever nearer, ever louder, roaring in our ears. The flames from burning houses and factories were licking high into the sky, leaping from one building to the next, from one street to the next, from one fire to another, each fire, it seemed to me, seeking out another fire to be with, so it could become an inferno, so it could burn more furiously.

  Time and again we turned away from it and ran on, partly because the heat was so intense, and partly because we could bear to watch no longer. We were out of the park by now, out on to the road through the suburbs. A sudden wind was getting up, a strong fierce wind that gusted in our faces as we walked. We leaned into the wind and staggered on through the snow.

  We followed the road to the top of a steep hill, and by then Mutti could carry Karli no further. She had to stop. We found ourselves on our knees in the snow, looking back down at the city, at the ring of fire that now encircled it entirely. Kneeling there, we heard quite distinctly through the drone of the bombers, the sound of shooting. And we could hear sc
reaming. One look at Mutti’s horrified face, and I knew this screaming for what it was, the shrieking of animals, of dying animals, and that it came from the direction of the zoo. They were shooting the animals. Mutti put her hands over Karli’s ears, and hugged him to her. She wept then, uncontrollably, as much in anger as in grief, I thought. Karli and I put our arms around her to do our best to comfort her. There we knelt, the wind searing hot on our faces now, while the shooting went on, and the bombs fell, and the city burned.

  In the end it was neither Karli nor me who brought her comfort. Instead it was the sound of breathing close behind us, and then, miraculously, Marlene’s trunk winding itself around us, enfolding us. That was a moment I remember so well, because all three of us burst out laughing, laughing through our tears. We had gone looking for Marlene, lost her, and now she had found us. We were on our feet at once, overjoyed, Karli kissing her trunk again and again, and Mutti stroking her ear, but telling her how naughty she had been to run away like she had. I looked up into Marlene’s face, and saw the fires of the city burning in her troubled eye. She knew what was happening, understood everything. I was sure of it.

  I think it was Marlene’s sudden unexpected reappearance that gave us all fresh hope, new strength, Mutti most of all. “Well, children,” she said, brushing the snow off her coat, “we have no house to go back to, and certainly there will be very little left of the city. So I have been thinking. There is only one place we can go to. We shall go to the farm, to Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti. It is a long, long way to go on foot, but there is nowhere else.”

  “But you and Papi,” I said. “You told us we could never go back to the farm, not after…”

  “I know,” Mutti told him. “But we have no choice, have we? We shall be needing food, shelter. They will look after us, I know they will. It was a family row we had, that is all. I am sure everything is forgiven by now, and that we can all put it behind us. When we get there, they will welcome us in with open arms. It will be fine, I promise you. You will see.”

  “Elizabeth?” Karli said, his hand stealing into mine. “Elizabeth? Why do they do this terrible thing? Why have the bombers come?”

  “Because they are our enemies, and because they hate us,” I told him. “And because they are brutes. To do this they must be brutes, the Americans, the British, all of them.”

  “But why do they hate us?” he asked me.

  Mutti answered for me then, and I was glad she did because I had no answer to give him. “If they hate us, Karli,” she said, “it is because we have also bombed their cities. What we are seeing now is a world gone mad, children, a world full of brutes, all intent on killing one another. And we should not forget that we are all responsible for making it happen, for letting it happen.”

  As we turned and walked away, we had to cling on to one another, so that the wind did not blow us back towards the city, towards the fire – the gusts of wind were so strong. I remember Karli looking up at me, and pointing at the trees. “The trees in the gardens, they are shaking, Elizabeth,” he said. “I think they are frightened of the wind. They want to run away like we are, but they cannot. Why is the wind blowing so hard? Why is it so angry?” Not even Mutti had an answer to that. Karli was crying then, crying for our burning home, and maybe also for the trees we were leaving behind, that could not run away.

  So began our long trek through the snow, along a road that was quickly becoming ever more clogged with dozens, hundreds, then thousands of others like us, streaming out of Dresden, all of us desperate to leave the city behind us. When I looked back – and I tried not to – Dresden was no longer a city any more. Rather, it looked to me like one vast bonfire, where fire caught fire with fire, a fire whipped up by a mighty wind of its own making, that buffeted our faces, that was doing all it could to stop us from escaping, all it could to suck us back into the burning city. There was the stifling stench of smoke all about us. Karli was finding it difficult to breathe sometimes, and kept having to stop to cough the smoke out of his lungs.

  Mutti and I were worried that it might bring on one of his asthma attacks, but thankfully it did not. And still the planes came. Still they dropped their bombs.

  That was the longest night of my life. I had never before witnessed human misery on such a scale. It is the sound of a people in despair that I shall never forget: the weeping, the sobbing, the screaming and the praying. How fast we all wanted to get out of the city that night, and how slowly we were moving. We shuffled forward through the cold and the dark, most of us on foot, but many on bicycles, in cars, lorries, farm carts, everyone jostling to find some way to get ahead, to move just a little faster. So many were desperate to find someone dear they had lost, and so many were wrapped in bandages and were crying out in their pain.

  It was like a walk through hell, and it seemed never-ending. Only the military convoys and ambulances were able to find a way through, honking their horns at us, waving us all aside. We longed with every moment to be out of the blazing suburbs and into the welcome darkness of the countryside. Everyone on that road knew that there was safety in that darkness. I think that was all that kept us going.

  All night long we trudged on, but as the hours passed, the road became even more congested – mostly refugees, on foot like us, but many more now, it seemed, pulling carts loaded up with old people or children, their possessions piled around them. As the growl of the bombers at last died away, the air was filled with whimpering. It was as if the whole world was in mourning. By first light there was the shuffling of feet to be heard, and creaking cartwheels and occasionally a neighing horse. Looking back over my shoulder from the top of a hill, it seemed to me like a gigantic funeral procession.

  It was mostly one-way traffic. But at dawn, more convoys of trucks filled with soldiers came roaring past on their way back into the city, motor-cycle outriders waving us frantically to one side. They were the first to take any notice of Marlene, some of them pointing at us and staring, as they passed us by. As for our fellow refugees, maybe they had been too dazed, too traumatised, or just too tired, to pay much attention to this young elephant that was wandering along with them. A few of the children were curious, but everyone, including the children, was subdued. There were no smiles of excitement amongst them, only a dull amazement.

  I have no idea how far we walked that first day of our long march – probably only a few kilometres, but it felt like a hundred. We had no food, no water, only the snow by the roadside to eat. And progress was still painfully slow. We were simply a part of a long wretched trail of refugees that was filling the road ahead of us and behind us as far as the eye could see. Sometimes the road became so jammed we could scarcely move at all. That was the worst of it. We seemed to be getting nowhere. Arguments were breaking out. Tempers were fraying.

  Karli, though, seemed quite happy to be tramping alongside Marlene, holding her trunk and talking to her all the time. He did not once complain, about his leg, about his wheezing, about the cold. I wish I could say the same for myself. My feet were in agony, my ears ached, and I was longing for something to eat, anything. When I mentioned any of this to Mutti, which I did, often, she would just put her arm around me, and say with a gently reproving smile and a shrug, “Me too, Elizabeth, me too.” It did not help, it did not make me feel any better.

  Sometime in the afternoon of that same day – we were walking along a road through a pine forest, I remember, and were making even slower progress than ever – Mutti suddenly took Marlene by the ear, and without any warning, led us off down a forest track away from the road. The walking was at once more difficult here, the going more arduous, the snow deeper, but at least we weren’t dragging along with hundreds of others, being endlessly held up. Karli kept asking her why we were going this way. I did too, but Mutti wouldn’t answer.

  “Just keep walking,” she told us. Some of the other refugees back down on the main road were shouting out after us, telling us we would get lost in the forest. Mutti paid them no attention, but just
walked on without answering, without even looking back. “I don’t want any of them following us.” she said. “We’re better off on our own.”

  After a while, once we were well out of sight of everyone on the road, she stopped and told us what she had in mind. “Papi and me, children, when we were young, when we were first married, before you two came along, we used to cycle all the way from the city out to Uncle Manfred’s farm. On the main road it was a very long way round. Papi was good with maps, and he discovered this short cut. So after that we always came this way. On our bicycles it was a whole day’s hard ride. On foot I think maybe we could do it in two, but we must not stop. We shall get too cold if we stop. Best of all, children, there is a stream only a couple of hours ahead, where Papi and I used to sit and have a picnic. We may not have the picnic, but we can drink all the water we like, can’t we? We will just have to imagine the picnic, that’s all. And maybe we shall find a house somewhere, and can beg some food, you never know. One thing is for certain, we were never going to find either food or water back down on that road. And travelling that slowly, it was going to take us for ever to get to the farm. We may have a bit of a hard slog ahead of us, children, but we shall manage. We have got to, haven’t we? And once we get to the farm, we will be warm as toast, and we shall have all the food we can eat. You remember how Aunt Lotti piles the plates? And there’ll be hay in the barn for Marlene. All our troubles will be over, you will see.”

  The thought of a drink of water, and the hope of food, must have given new strength to my aching legs. I strode on ahead up the snow-covered track. I heard the stream before I saw it, a great rushing torrent tumbling down off the hillside and into a pool of bright water. I could see it was iced over in places. The water was freezing of course, but we didn’t mind one bit. Marlene stood in the pool and drank there right with us, sloshing her trunk about in the water, loving every moment of it, as we were too.