‘I know it wasn’t. But he’ll feel let down.’
‘And how do you feel?’ Eva-Maria asked shrewdly.
‘Relieved.’
‘I thought so. Make him stick to his vines. That’s what he does best. No more speeches. It’s enough not knowing about Gerhardt. We don’t want more trouble.’
Elizabeth was grateful for a friend who knew her so well.
The van left soon after it was dark. It was a twenty-minute journey. Inspector Lucas sat in front with the constable who drove, and Sergeant Delaney and another policeman occupied the rear seats. They turned off the road when their lights picked out the distinctive wooden planked bridge that spanned the creek.
In the house the Mullers had finished their meal, and were washing up when the first flicker from the approaching headlights of the vehicle touched the windows. They could hear the van bounce on potholes in the dirt road, and the squeak of the brakes as it pulled up.
Elizabeth snatched up the pitifully small bundle of petitions, and put them in the meat safe. She came back to the table with a pack of cards, and spilled them out in front of Carl and Stefan. ‘Elizabeth — we have nothing to hide,’ he protested.
‘Perhaps not, but take some cards anyway.’
They each took a hand, and held them self-consciously. With mounting tension they heard footsteps cross the verandah. They waited for a knock at the door, but instead it was abruptly pushed open, and Lucas entered, followed by Delaney and the constables. He stood there, his cold eyes surveying them, amused.
‘Friendly game of cards, is that the idea?’
‘What do you want, Inspector?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘We didn’t hear you knock,’ Stefan said.
‘I don’t believe, under the emergency powers, I need to state what I want,’ Lucas said. ‘And I most certainly don’t have to knock.’
Stefan tossed aside his cards, and rose.
‘In that case, if your intrusion is lawful, will you please state your business, and then go.’
‘You’re either very brave,’ Lucas said, ‘or extremely stupid.’
‘We’ve broken no law.’
‘That remains to be seen. You’ve been a public nuisance. On your soapbox, making speeches against the authorities.’
‘You wrote down what I said. It was nothing illegal.’
‘Well, that may be decided, in due course. For now, we’re here to search your property, to see if you’re hiding any weapons.’
He gestured to Delaney, who produced a torch and went outside accompanied by the driver. The other constable made what seemed like a pretence of searching the house.
‘This is ridiculous, Inspector, and you know it,’ Elizabeth said, trying to remain calm.
‘Just doing my duty, Mrs Muller.’
‘We have no weapons.’
‘I’d hardly expect you to admit it, would I? Your husband did have a bayonet, which I confiscated at the police station.’
‘That wasn’t his.’
‘It was in his possession.’
‘But it belonged to whoever put that revolting figure on our land. You’ve never attempted to find out who did that. It might tell you who owned the bayonet — just supposing you want to know.’
Lucas made no reply. He seemed to be waiting for something, as he moved about the room, looking into cupboards and drawers. They watched with helpless fury. Elizabeth saw Stefan’s hands clench into fists, and she silently begged him not to lose his temper. Sergeant Delaney pushed open the door and came inside. He was carrying a dusty rifle.
‘Inspector …’
‘Well, well,’ Lucas said. ‘Where did you find that?’
‘Hidden under the verandah steps.’
‘That’s a lie,’ Stefan said heatedly.
‘Of course it’s a lie.’ Elizabeth rose to her feet alongside him. ‘We all know it’s a lie. You planted it there — as evidence.’
‘Now why should we do a thing like that?’ Lucas asked. ‘There won’t be a trial — so we don’t need evidence.’
There was a stunned silence, as his words began to register. Of course there’d be no trial, she realised. No one was tried under the War Precautions Act. There was no need for the rifle as evidence.
So why had they done this? It was a device, so they would have a ready explanation for the arrest. In case questions were asked. But by whom? Stefan was now a well-known vintner, but reputation had not helped others. Then why the unnecessary charade of finding the rifle? In case her father … That was it! She saw Lucas’s eyes probing her with quiet triumph, and knew he had decided to handle this with unusual care.
‘This so-called charge is as false and dishonest as you are,’ she said, and felt the immediate antagonism directed at her. It chilled her. It was like the venom of a snake.
‘Take the prisoner out to the van.’
He snapped the order, and the constables each took an arm, giving Stefan no chance to speak as they marched him out. He made no attempt to resist, but was treated as if he was armed and dangerous. Carl started to rise, inflamed by the sight. Elizabeth put a restraining hand on his arm. Lucas, whose eyes missed nothing, saw this.
‘Very sensible. We don’t want anyone else arrested, do we?’
‘You’re not going to get away with this, Inspector. I hope you realise that,’ she said, with more conviction than she felt.
‘Of course,’ he managed to make it sound as if he had only just remembered. ‘Your father’s some sort of bigwig, isn’t he? Or used to be.’
‘I intend to ask him to use all his influence.’
‘I expect you will. But what have we done? Arrested a known troublemaker, who’s tried to get people to sign petitions. Disturbing the peace, you might call it, in time of war. And now found to be concealing arms. You say I won’t get away with it? Get away with what, Madam? I’m just doing my lawful duty.’
He went out. Elizabeth followed, and gasped as she saw Stefan now handcuffed, being flung roughly into the back of the van.
Lucas observed her obvious distress.
‘Steady,’ he called. ‘Not so rough with the prisoner. We must do our duty, but there’s no cause to upset his wife.’ He turned to her, with exaggerated politeness. ‘Very patriotic, these men. I’m afraid they get a bit narked with foreign agitators.’
Elizabeth stared at him. The smile did not reach his eyes. His look of satisfaction was unmistakable.
‘You malicious hypocrite,’ she said.
‘Get in the van, Sergeant,’ Lucas ordered, and when Delaney was gone and they were alone, he said, his voice quiet and cold, ‘Did you people really think he’d be allowed to stand up there, making speeches like that about us, in public? Threatening us. You should’ve had more sense, Mrs Muller. A woman like you — I’d have thought at least you would’ve known better.’
He climbed into the front of the prison van. The headlights dazzled her. She realised Carl had come out to join her. They stood distraught and helpless, as the van drove off into the night.
There was half an hour’s time difference to the eastern states, and William and Hannah were in bed when the telephone rang. Grumbling, William got up and found his dressing gown. He went out to pick up the extension that had recently been installed, then realised Mrs Forbes had answered the main telephone downstairs.
He could hear his daughter’s voice. Then there was distortion and crackling, and he couldn’t understand what she was saying. ‘What is it? Is that Elizabeth?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Mrs Forbes said. ‘It’s a very bad line, but I think she was saying something has happened.’
‘Lizzie?’ he shouted into the phone. ‘Are you there?’
‘Just a moment, please,’ an operator’s voice said, ‘we’re trying to contact the caller. Hold the line.’
‘I’m holding the line.’
Hannah came out wrapped in a silk robe, trying to calm him. ‘Don’t bellow into the phone, darling. It doesn’t help.’
‘Bloody inve
ntion,’ he said, now concerned at her late call and thoroughly agitated. ‘They keep telling us how marvellous it is. If you ask my opinion, the whole system is one big fucking muddle.’
‘Sir!’ came the shocked voice of the woman at the exchange.
‘I beg your pardon. I didn’t realise you were there.’
‘We are doing our best.’
‘I’m sure you are. Shall I keep holding on?’
‘I think we may have to ring you again — that is if the caller gets through.’
‘But what’s wrong?’
‘There must be a storm between here and Tanunda, from where the call is being made. I’m afraid we’ve lost contact.’
‘I’ll sit and wait then,’ William said.
‘It may be a long wait.’
‘Never mind. It’s my daughter. She wouldn’t be phoning so late, unless there was something wrong. I heard her voice, but couldn’t understand what she was saying. I don’t suppose you …’ he tailed off.
‘I heard something,’ the operator said.
‘Could you tell me what it was? Or is it against the rules?’
‘It’s against the rules.’
‘Oh, well …’
‘But I distinctly heard her say, “Daddy, please help me.’” Please help me.
She hadn’t called him Daddy in years. He felt a sense of dread.
He and Hannah made a cup of tea and waited.
In Tanunda the telephone exchange closed down for the night. By then Elizabeth and Carl could see the electrical storm over the eastern hills. There was nothing they could do, except go home and wait for the morning.
They took him into a large cell at the back of the police station, where they undid the handcuffs on one wrist, and before he realised what they intended, his hands were again secured, but this time behind his back. That was when he knew what to expect.
The constables each had a truncheon. He could see Lucas, a figure at the doorway, almost in silhouette as Sergeant Delaney turned out the main overhead lights, and they began to hit him.
‘Not his face, boys. No marks on his face,’ Delaney warned, and then he turned and joined Lucas. They stood watching the first flurry of blows. The policemen were both country boys, strong and physical. They began by using their fists, and occasionally their boots, and after that came the sickening thud of the truncheons.
Lucas and Delaney went out and shut the door behind them.
PART FIVE
THIRTY ONE
The shell landed like a damp squib and then exploded, spraying earth over the men crowded in the trench. But the shower of dirt and even the shrapnel was less of a problem than the fetid water and the mud they stood in, day after day, so their boots were always sodden and the feet inside them grew septic and abscessed. The mud lived on them and their uniforms, and would not go away.
Harry sometimes wondered at his insane ambition to be a part of this battlefield, to join this ragged army of hollow-eyed, shell-shocked and disgusted men, angry at the patriotic fervour that had brought them here to this awful piece of ground in France, which had already been won, then lost, then won again, at the cost of over two hundred thousand lives.
They were talking of half a kilometre.
Five hundred metres of pock-marked ground, where nothing grew, or would grow for a generation. Five hundred metres of blood, and the ghosts of young men on both sides who had died, some in agony, some without warning, all hoping they were fighting and dying for a better world.
Harry and those few of his friends still alive no longer accepted that. They confessed to themselves, in their cramped, stinking dugouts, that it was a heap of bullshit. They had been lied to, and misled. The politicians who exhorted them to do their duty should be here, and made to die, face down in the putrid mud.
They were all very angry. They felt completely betrayed.
He never wrote of this in his letters home — just supposing they ever reached home. To his parents he wrote of the vineyard, and how he hoped 1917 had been a good harvest, and he expected by now the vines would be pruned back and bare of leaves. These were things he could speak of, from this unspeakable place. He sent best wishes to Carl, his love to Maria, and hoped that all was well in the valley. He felt sure it was. It was such a peaceful part of the world.
Sitting in the mud, in the stink of death, among the lice and the rats that were a part of their daily life, he believed the Barossa remained pristine and untouched; he saw it as a terraced paradise, where the rows of grapes grew thick like bushes, and the creek meandered through the rich and abundant landscape dominated by the magnolia on the hill. From where he sat, with a tiny patch of dank sky and dripping rain, the valley he once disliked now seemed like heaven.
He wrote to Hannah and his grandfather of his last leave in England, and meeting Kate Brahm by extraordinary chance at a concert at the Albert Hall in Kensington, and how they had only recognised each other after much scrutiny — on her part, because she could not believe he might be here in Europe, and on his, because she had changed so much and looked very grown up, and attractive. He added, casually, that she was with her fiance, Rupert, and they had all had supper together.
The letters home were not about the way he felt, or the days he lived through. They were circumspect, designed not to cause alarm. It was only to Kate that he wrote the truth.
It was easier now that he could write purely as a friend, knowing she was committed to her Englishman who had helped win the boat race for Cambridge, and was now a captain instructing troops at Camberley — who would undoubtedly survive the war, go into the city like his father, and marry Kate. Rupert was amiable and friendly: he confided to Harry that while he wanted her to continue her career, he felt that two children, a flat in London, and a country house in Oxfordshire were the ingredients for an ideal marriage.
Harry didn’t mention in his letters that he hated this cheerful paragon — instead he wrote, just to her, about the way things really were.
Dear Kate,
Yet another dreadful day along the line to hell. Yesterday we gained one hundred yards and lost five thousand men. I expect the Germans have lost the same. That’s a lot of men for such a small amount of territory. I used to run the hundred yards at school, in about eleven seconds. Yesterday it took us fourteen hours.
I keep seeing these photographs of old men in heavy trenchcoats with medalled caps, and I realise they are our generals. What most concerns me is the inevitable question: do they care? After all, their lives are nearly over. Ours are — we hope — just beginning. Although if you look around here, you might doubt that.
A month or so later he wrote:
I look at the grotesque caricatures of Germans in the Bulletin and newspapers sent from home, and feel revolted. I think Norman Lindsay and his drawings are a disgrace. I hear he struts around Sydney as a Bohemian, but I think he has much to answer for in his depictions of German people. The ones I know are not like that. My father’s not like that. Not a scrap like that. He’s a civilised and decent and rather gentle man, who loves my mother. But I haven’t the guts to come out and say so. I’ve only ever told one of my friends apart from you. I finally plucked up courage to tell David. Of course, as his sister you’re going to ask what he said. Well, I’ll tell you. He refused to be surprised. Typical David. Told me it was worse being Jewish. (I can’t agree with that, though it was meant kindly, and probably the reason why we’ve always been closest and best friends.) God knows what the brass here would say, if they found out I was half-German. I’d probably be relieved of my command of this platoon, and sent back in disgrace to Aldershot. It sounds marvellous. Should I summon the troops and inform them my dad’s a Kraut?
Affectionately, Harry
P.S. Re: mention of my platoon above, did I tell you I’ve been made a lieutenant? It’s only because we’ve run out of officers. They all love to polish their Sam Browne belts and their pips, and the enemy snipers have such a field day picking them out, that God’s square mile is
full of officers and gents. However, I don’t intend to polish anything, or make myself a target. I’m not really an officer, or a gent. I take after my grandfather, who’d be deeply offended to be described as either.
P.P.S. If you ‘re writing to your brother, tell him to ignore any sweet old ladies with white feathers, and finish his medical degree. Tell him this is a dreadful place, and anyone who volunteers to come here is totally barmy. Which very much applies to yours truly…
He explained that he could freely write such things, because he was now in charge of censoring the mail for their battalion. We’re not supposed to inform the loved ones at home what a mess this is, he told her, and admitted he hated the job of reading private letters and trying to censor them. He rarely did read the letters, let alone use a pencil to edit, but his platoon, not knowing this, forced themselves to be cheerful and optimistic to their families. He told her they sometimes made the war sound like a combination of a training exercise and a bush picnic.
Harry needed the solace he found in expressing the exact way it was, and there was no one else he could confide in but Kate. He knew it was unfair on her, and he sometimes tore up the letters, but it was like the release of writing a diary in which he was able to put down the truth. As conditions deteriorated, his letters grew more intemperate.
We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, a dead man’s gas protector, a German’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood, and partly splattered with a comrade’s brains. I hate to write such things, but I cannot tell my family -yet I feel someone must know. If only to inform people when I’m dead. Why should some of those safe at home not be told what it’s like. I mean the ones who were so keen to send us here. I want the middle-class ladies who hand out white feathers to know that several of my friends are raving mad. One lived for two days with his head split open and his brains visible. Thank Christ he’s dead now. I’d like to tell politicians that I met three officers out in no-man’s-land the other night, all rambling and completely insane.
A Bitter Harvest Page 35