It was the last day and he was sitting in the Town Square in Ypres, outside a café drinking a glass of beer – he always remembered the beer from the war. A meal of egg and chips and beer was just about his only truly happy memory of his time as a soldier. He had his sketchbook out. He was drawing a cat that was sitting at his feet, gazing up at him, when he felt someone looking over his shoulder. It was the waitress. She spoke in broken English, asking if he was an artist.
“Not really,” he said, and as he spoke the pages of his sketchbook lifted in the wind, and flipped over, to a drawing he’d done that morning, of Christine as he’d last seen her, lying on a stretcher, her name written underneath.
The waitress was bending down, examining the drawings more closely. “Who is this Christine?” she asked.
“Just a little girl I once knew,” he told her. “It was a long time ago, in the war. She was an orphan, I think. I was a soldier then. I took her to a hospital.”
She looked long and hard at the drawings, turning the pages, and clearly becoming more and more interested all the time. Then she said quietly: “You have done many pictures of her. I think perhaps I may know this girl. If I am right, I was at school with her after the war, in the convent. Yes, this is Christine, Christine Bonnet, I am sure of it. You draw her very well.”
“You know her!” Billy said. “Where is she? Do you know where she lives?”
“Not where she lives. I do not know her well any more, but I think she was a teacher in the same school we went to together. Maybe she still is. I don’t know.”
Billy was waiting outside the school gates that afternoon. He recognised Christine at once, as she came towards him wheeling her bicycle.
“Hello, Christine,” he said, “you won’t remember me.” He did his best to explain, the words falling over themselves as they spilled out of him. She was taken aback at first. She didn’t remember him, not exactly, but she could remember, she said, a soldier carrying her along the road, and the Field Hospital and the doctor there, and the convent afterwards, where they had looked after her for the rest of the war. They walked and they talked. Billy had found his Christine.
To cut a long story short, Billy came back and back to see her every summer for the next few years, and then she came to Coventry to see him. They were married, and were happy. Each had their sadnesses, of course, each had no family, but each was a comfort to the other. After a while Christine found a job teaching in the local school in Coventry, where very soon the children, she said proudly, were the only children in the whole country who could count to ten in her language, in Flemish. They wanted to have children of their own, but it didn’t happen. Despite this, Billy and Christine were truly contented. They were alive, when so many they had known were not, and they had a home and a job to go to. And they had one another.
But then the old war came back to haunt Billy, and in a manner he could never have expected or imagined.”
The stranger paused then, taking a deep breath, almost as if he didn’t want to go on.
“Is there going to be haunting then? Is it going to be a ghost story?” I asked him. “I like ghost stories.”
“Shush, Barney,” said Ma. “Don’t interrupt the gentleman.”
“No, son,” he went on. “No ghosts in this story, I’m afraid. But in a way it was a haunting, a real live haunting, and it began in the cinema. Christine and Billy liked to go to the pictures. It was their great treat. They went as often as they could afford – adventure films were their favourites. Christine had taken quite a shine to a big Hollywood star called Douglas Fairbanks Junior.”
“I like him too,” said Ma. “Proper handsome, he is.”
“Just what Christine thought,” the stranger went on. “Anything he was in she had to see. Anyway, they were walking past the cinema one Saturday afternoon, the Roxy it was, and there was his name up on the poster. ‘Mister Robinson Crusoe, starring Douglas Fairbanks Junior.’ So they paid at the kiosk and went in to see it.
The cinema was dark as the usherette showed them to their seats. Up on the screen, the newsreel was showing already. There was a sudden chorus of hooting and whistling and booing from all around them, and once Billy and Christine were sitting down, they soon discovered why. There he was, up on the screen, Adolf Hitler, the German Führer, and as usual he was working himself up into one of his rages. All of a lather, he was, ranting and raving. Billy had heard him often enough on the wireless – everyone had – and he’d always switched him off, because he knew it upset Christine so much to have to listen to him. But now in the cinema, he couldn’t switch him off. They both had to sit there and listen to him, whether they liked it or not.
They didn’t understand exactly what he was saying, of course, but like everyone else in the cinema, you got the gist of it, from the hysteria of his voice, from the hate in his eyes and those clenched fists of his punching the air. He was up there in his uniform on the podium at some huge torchlit rally, the kind everyone there had seen before, where there were thousands upon thousands of soldiers in the same coal-scuttle helmets Billy remembered so well from the war all those years before. The crowd was hanging on his every word, like they was all hypnotised or something. Then they were roaring their approval, mad with feverish adoration, they were. Like thunder their cheering was, every one of them arm-outstretched in that stiff, straight-arm Nazi salute. And Hitler stood there basking in it all, wallowing in every moment of it, thumb hooked into his belt, saluting back, surveying his troops and looking for all the world like he was some Roman emperor.
As Billy and Christine watched, both chilled to their hearts at what they were seeing, Hitler waved the crowds to silence, and on he went with his tirade, every sentence punctuated by wild gesticulations. But the people in the Roxy cinema that day weren’t silenced. They were laughing at him, mimicking him, mocking him. And before long, Billy and Christine were laughing along with them, determined like everyone else there not to be cowed by this crazed maniac.
Then – all of a sudden, it was – there was no sound on the newsreel, just the pictures. Hitler was reduced to silence. There was only his face up there on the screen, contorted and full of fury, mouthing his hate. Every unheard word was somehow more fearful than ever before. The whole cinema fell silent. Looking up at him now, Billy didn’t need to hear his voice to hear what he meant, to understand what he had in his mind. His face said it all. His eyes said it all, those dark staring eyes. They were looking at Billy now, right at him and only at him – that’s what it felt like – and he could see the evil intent in them. If ever a look could kill.
It was at that precise moment, as their eyes met in the cinema, that Billy felt he had met this man before, not on screen, but face to face. And when Hitler raised his hand and brushed his hair back from his forehead, he knew at once who it was, and where they had met, and remembered everything that had happened between them.
Christine clutched his arm, looking away from the screen, then buried her head in Billy’s shoulder. Billy realised that everyone in that cinema was feeling as she did. It was fear, the kind that gripped your body and soul and wouldn’t leave you. No one whistled any more, no one hooted, no one laughed.It was as if everyone in the cinema was holding their breath, waiting for what was to come, dreading the horror of it, but knowing that there was nothing that could stop it, because this man, this Hitler, was going to make it happen. But Billy knew more. All the while Billy looked up into his eyes, and could not look away. All the while he was wondering if what had come into his mind could possibly be true. The more he looked into those eyes, the more he realised that it was, that there could be no doubt about it. That man, that warmonger, was up there now, able to spew out his hatred only because Billy had spared his life all those years before, after the Battle of Marcoing.”
The stranger fell silent. The train breathed on, as if it had been listening with us. As if it was waiting to hear more. In the silence of the carriage, the darkness closed in again around me. I grasped Ma
’s hand and held it tight.
“Well I never!” said Ma. “Would you believe it?”
“If Billy believed it,” the stranger told her, “then I do too.”
“Could you light another match?” I asked him. “It keeps getting darker in here.”
I heard the stranger fiddling with the matchbox, heard it slide open. I was longing all the while for the light.
“Here goes,” he said. The match struck once, twice. Sparked. But no light. “Third time lucky,” he muttered.
And it was too. The flame flared, lighting his face, lighting the darkness, driving it away.
“There, Barney dear,” said Ma. “It’s all right, see? Nothing to worry about.” But there soon was, because the light was dying all the time. And then it was gone altogether. “Go on with the story, mister,” Ma said. “Barney’ll like that, won’t you? Make him feel better.”
“Whatever you like, missus,” he said, and began the story again.
“Billy had seen enough up on that screen,” the stranger continued. “He just got up and walked out of the cinema. Christine went after him. Out in the street Billy walked on home not saying a word to her. Back home he sat in his chair all that evening and stared into the fire, still not speaking. He didn’t touch his supper. Christine knew better than to ask him what the matter was. He would be like this from time to time. He’d often joke about his moods, afterwards, when they were over – his ‘glum time’, he called it. He liked to be left alone when he was like this. He would come out of it sooner or later and be himself again. Christine was used to it by now. It was the war that haunted him, she knew that much. She tried all she could to cheer him up, but nothing seemed to work.
This time, she knew something was different. Billy’s glum time went on day after day, week after week, for so long, that Christine began to wonder if it would ever end. She wondered if he shouldn’t go to see the doctor, but didn’t like to suggest it. It would upset him, and he was upset enough already.
It wasn’t until one night a month or so later that he told her at last what had been making him like this. They were lying in bed, side by side, in the darkness – each of them knowing the other could not sleep – when Billy came out with it.
“It were him, Christine,” he said. “In the Roxy, up on the screen that night. Can’t be no mistake about it. I’d know those eyes anywhere. You can’t forget them. He looked at me out of that newsreel just like he did all those years ago, in the war, it was. And did you see how he pushed his hair away from his forehead, with the flat of his hand? He always does that, don’t he? I never seen no one else do it like that. It were him. I know it was. It were that Hitler.”
Christine didn’t understand what he was talking about. In all the time they had been together, ten years or more by this time, he had scarcely ever spoken about the war. Neither of them had. She knew about his medals, of course, about how famous he’d been, years before – and she was proud of him too, prouder than he was – but she’d never seen them or asked to see them. The medals, like the memories, were hidden away, the war hardly ever mentioned these days. To talk of those terrible times was only to bring them back. They both longed for the memories to fade. They both wanted to look to the future, to forget the past. It had been, over the years, like an unspoken pact between them, never to speak of the war. But now, for the first time, Billy did.
“I got something I have to tell you, to show you,” he said. He turned on the light, got out of bed, pulled the biscuit tin out from underneath it, where he kept his few bits and pieces from the war: the photographs of his pals, the pistol he had taken off a German officer who had surrendered to him at the Battle of Marcoing, his lucky black pebble from Bridlington he’d had in his pocket, that had kept him safe. There were his medals too, and the cartridge from the last bullet he had fired in the war, the warning shot he’d fired over that German soldier’s head. An unknown German soldier then, but not any more.
He laid the medals out on the bed in front of her. “This one is the Victoria Cross,” he explained to her. “Don’t look like much, do it? Not shining like the others. Plain old ribbon too. But this is the one all the fuss has been about. They gave me this one, the King did, because of a battle I was in, near the end of the war, it was, near a little village called Marcoing, not that there was much of it left. Well, the fighting was all over, and me and the lads had done what we had to do. There was lots of dead and wounded, ours and theirs, but more of theirs, and we had taken dozens of prisoners.
“Anyhow, all of a sudden, we see this Fritz soldier and he’s just standing there as the smoke clears, ten yards away, no more, rifle in his hand. And I tell the lads not to shoot, cos he don’t look as if he’s going to shoot us. And we’re just looking at him and he’s looking at us. It was so quiet, Christine. The quiet after a battle is the quietest quiet there is. None of us moved, not a muscle, nor did he, no one did. None of us spoke. Just stood there like we was all in a dream, like it wasn’t real. And then I fire this pistol into the air and wave him away, tell him to go home. He nods at me, brushes his hair off his forehead and walks off.
“It were him, Christine. It were Adolf Hitler, I swear it was. I looked into his eyes up on that screen that evening in the cinema, and they was the same eyes. That Hitler, he don’t look at you like other people do. He looks right through you, and that Fritz soldier was just the same. I never forgot his eyes. It was him, no mistake. D’you know what that means, Christine? I could’ve shot him there and then, done for him once and for all, and now that man is going to drag us all into another war. You listen to him. I know he is.”
Christine did what she could to talk him round. It could have been someone else, she told him. Maybe it just looked like him. It was a long time ago. Memory plays tricks on you. You mustn’t think such things, you’ll make yourself ill. And anyway, maybe there won’t be another war, you don’t know. No one does.
In the weeks that followed, Billy tried his level best to make himself believe her. He so wanted to, more than anything else in the world. He tried all he could to get the whole idea out of his mind altogether. But he couldn’t. That newsreel in the cinema kept playing itself over and over inside his head. Every time he heard that voice on the radio, every time he watched a newsreel, it only made him surer that he had to be right. Every time he saw a photo in the newspaper he would look into those eyes and he would know there could be no mistake. No matter how often Christine tried to argue him round, how often she told him it couldn’t be true, he knew it was, and insisted it was. In the end she could see there was no changing his mind.
But even if it was true, she’d tell him then, it wouldn’t be his fault, because he had only done what he thought was the right thing at the time; to be merciful was good, surely, even towards an enemy. And anyway, how could he have known that the soldier he had spared would turn out to be a monster? But nothing she said could make him feel better about what he had done. Billy clung to the one faint hope still left to him, that the Fritz soldier might just possibly have been someone else – small, black-haired, with a strange way of brushing his hair off his forehead, with dark staring eyes, but someone else. Just maybe, maybe, he kept telling himself, Christine could be right. His memory might be playing tricks on him. After all, it was, as she had so often reminded him, a very long time ago now.
But then even that last faint glimmer of hope was taken away from him. Billy went one morning to the library to take some books back, and he happened to notice the title of a book up there on a shelf as he walked by. Adolf Hitler, it was called.
He took the book down and opened it. There were a few pages of photographs in the middle. Every one of them made his heart beat faster, and one of them in particular.
It was a photo of a group of German soldiers in the war, all in their caps, posing for the camera, a brick wall behind, all unsmiling, all looking directly at the camera.
Billy recognised Adolf Hitler at once, slightly apart from the others, at the back, t
he smallest of them.
The Fritz soldier, the soldier whose life he had saved. Below was his name. Corporal Adolf Hitler. No question now, no possible doubt about it. It was him.”
“On the way back home from the library, book in hand, Billy passed by the newspaper stand outside the station. The newspaper boy was shouting out the headlines. ‘Hitler marches into Austria! Hitler invades Austria!’
Billy stood there in the street, knowing for sure now that he was responsible for this, and for whatever Adolf Hitler had done or might do in the future. He could have stopped him twenty years before at the Battle of Marcoing, and he hadn’t. He knew, as many others did too by now, that sooner or later, Hitler would turn his attention to Britain, that it was only a matter of time.”
“And he was right enough there, wasn’t he?” Ma spoke suddenly, interrupting him out of the darkness. I thought she’d been asleep again, but I was wrong. “I mean, just think of it,” she went on, “if that friend of yours, that Billy – Billy Byron was his name, right? – if he had pulled his trigger that day, then maybe we wouldn’t be at war now, and Barney’s dad wouldn’t be fighting in the desert, and Dunkirk wouldn’t have happened, nor the Blitz in London, or Coventry. All those people dead. It’s all down to him. To lousy bleeding Adolf. We’d still have our home. Grandpa would still have his beloved horse, his Big Black Jack. One bullet, that’s all it would have taken, one bullet, and none of this would have happened, would it? This story, hope you don’t mind my asking – don’t want to be rude or nothing – but you sure it’s true? Don’t sound very likely, if you ask me. You couldn’t strike another match, could you? Can’t seem to find my knitting needle.” She was fumbling around on the seat beside me looking for it. “When is this train going to move?” she said.
An Eagle in the Snow Page 5