A Soldier's Tale

by M. K. Joseph

  What for? I says.

  They say—they think I am too friendly with Germans, she says.

  Well, were you? I says.

  She shrugged up her shoulders and two patches of colour come back like flushes into her cheeks. She bit her lip. Then she says, Perhaps I am foolish. I had to live. But they will kill me.

  We’ll soon see about that, I says. Just watch my rear, Charlie. And I walked back down the path to the wicket and the three Frenchmen standing there. They all had black berets and baggy old clothes, and they wore those red, white and blue Resistance armbands and they carried old Lee Enfield rifles and ammo in bandoliers. A proper Fred Karno’s army they looked, standing there.

  What, I says, are you doing here?

  Now there were three of them, like I said, but they were all different. One was just a kid, with black hair and bright blue eyes. One was big and strong and stupid-looking. And one was thin and grey with stubbly grey hair and a few days’ growth of greyish beard and very pale eyes. He looked old and fierce like an old wolf. He was the one that spoke, quite well but with a very strong accent.

  Monsieur, he says, we are come to arrest that woman.

  Are you police? I says.

  We are of the Resistance, he says, proud-like.

  What’s she done? I says.

  Then the kid says something and they all gabbled away very angry till the old one told them to shut up. Then he says, Monsieur le Caporal, we have no quarrel with you, you are our friends and allies. That woman is an enemy to France.

  She’s French, isn’t she? I says.

  He makes a noise like an angry dog. She is traitor, he says, collabo, friend of Germans. Putain. Sleep with German officers.

  The big simple one gives a silly laugh and makes the finger sign. The old one snarls at him again.

  She goes with Germans, he says, and she is traitor. Informer. She betrays Resistance men to the Gestapo.

  And what will you do, I says, when you’ve arrested her?

  The old man said nothing to me, but the kid must have asked him what the question was, because when the old man told him the kid pointed his rifle and said, Boom boom, and the old man nodded.

  I turned and called out to her, You hear what they said about you? Is it true?

  She hangs down her head and says something in a low voice.

  Speak up, I says, I can’t hear you.

  Not true, she says.

  Then I begin to get an idea. Wait here, I says to them. I’m going to talk to her, and you shan’t take her until I tell you.

  Then they started all shouting together but I ignored them and walked off up the path.

  Charlie is waiting like the patient little bloke he is, and I says to him, I’m sorry, Charlie, I says, but I might just stay on here for a day or two. Would you mind very much waiting a little while and maybe doing a message for me? You don’t need to worry about that rubbish, I says, looking at the three of them jabbering away at the gate.

  That’s all right, Corp, he says—and I think he looked a bit relieved—I’ll just hang on here and have a smoke. You take your time and let me know what wants doing.

  (Saul told me all this part of the story without any indication of how he thought or guessed or felt. Of course, simple people don’t analyse their emotions. At best they give a token indication, like: Proper wild I was; or, I was scared, I can tell you; or, I rather fancied her. But for the most part they retell acts and speeches—I says this, I done this—in a compulsive recall and very often in a historic present tense, as if what memory holds is still happening now. They are not recalling but describing what is still present to them. It was all of this, an experience he had relived a hundred times, in speech and act. The emotions of it were just as real to him, and that was why he couldn’t describe them, for we can identify feelings and dissect motives only once they are passed. And then, at that particular time, there was something more. At least, that’s how I see it—that he was quite tentative and uncommitted, at that stage. He saw her as an available woman who might find it difficult to refuse him. He also saw her as a victim threatened by the three Resistance avengers, whom he disliked both as clumsy amateurs and as silly foreigners. Mainly it was his hunter’s instinct that was aroused, sensing prey and enemies, enjoying his own stealthy vigour, willing to follow a trail alertly, inscrutably, and see where it led.)

  Go inside, I says to her, I want to talk to you.

  So she goes in the door and inside there is this big kitchen with a black coal-range and a big, old woodbox beside it, and a scrubbed table and china set out on a dresser.

  I shut the door and she turns round quick at the end of the room and stands there with her arms across her chest and her hands gripping her shoulders, hunched, angry.

  Look, I says, I’m not going to hurt you. You don’t have to be afraid.

  What do you want? she says, but I thought I’d better not answer that one just yet.

  You’re in trouble, I says. I can help you if you let me.

  How can you help me? she says. What do you want?

  Suppose I just walked out, went back to camp? What would you do?

  She almost choked on that. They would kill me, she says, when they had finished with me.

  It’s Friday today, I says. My unit’s resting and I don’t think they’ll move before Monday, maybe later. So long as I’m around, they’ll never come near you.

  You can stop them, you alone? she says, sarcastic-like.

  Yes, I says, them and twenty more like them. Amateurs. Civvies.

  I was sitting at the table and taking out a fag. She watched me take it from the packet and tap it and put it in my mouth and light it. She licked her lips.

  May I have one of them? she says.

  So I passed her the packet and she lit one and her hands were shaking. The first drag she took down very deep, with her eyes shut, and coughed on the smoke as she breathed out. It must have been a long time since she’d had a fag, you could see that. Then she says, No matter how long you stay, they will be waiting. They hate me and they are very patient. They will wait.

  Why do they hate you?

  She didn’t answer that, so I says again, Why do they hate you? What have you done?

  You would not understand, she says. You English will never understand. The Boches have been here four years. We had to live with them.

  She turned round and stood at the side window, where they could see her.

  You had better go, she says, there is no help. The longer you make them wait the more angry they will be. Perhaps if it is done quickly—

  If I stay till Monday, I says, that’s two and a half days. All sorts of things might happen, they might go away.

  So she walked up and down the room in her old, green dress, still hugging her arms across her chest, and I let her alone, because even if she was what they said she was, well, she had her pride, I suppose. Though in the end she didn’t have much of a choice, did she? Then, it was funny, she says like making an excuse, There is not much food in the house.

  If that’s what’s worrying you, I says, just leave it to me. You hungry? I says, and she pulled a face and nodded.

  So I ask her straight, I says, You’ll let me stay then?

  She didn’t answer but she nodded and turned away.

  Then I opened the door and there was old Charlie sitting on the step, having a smoke and reading a comic book that he had picked up from a Yank.

  Charlie, my old china, I says, I got some jobs for you, is it all right?

  Sure thing, Corp, he says.

  I want you to go back to camp, I says, and ask Corporal Bird in the cook-house for a sackful of spare rations, enough for two till Monday and a bit to spare. Tell him to pick good stuff out of the ration packs, and plenty of it, because he owes me one, he’ll know why. Then, I says, get me my toilet gear and a towel out of my pack. And ask Micky Godfrey in the RAP for some french letters. And tell Sergeant Grice I’m doing a solo recce up in them woods we talked about and I�
��ll see him on Monday, but you know how to get me if I’m needed in the meantime. You got all that? I says.

  So he ticked off on his fingers, There’s the rations, and your gear, and the f-f-french letters—oh, and tell Sergeant Grice.

  That’s a good boy, I says, and bring all the stuff back here. And look in my big pack and get out the bottle of that Calvados wrapped in the spare shirt. And the packets of fags.

  Right ho, Corp, he says, and walks down to the gate. The three Frenchies stood there as if they wouldn’t let him pass, so I just held up my sten and waved it at them, and walked down to the gate. They stood back and let him pass.

  I stood by the gate watching him up the road, and then I turned and looked at them. I’d given them names now: Wolf-face and the Brat and Big Stupid. Wolf-face and the Brat were grinning at me, but angry-like, showing their bad teeth. Stupid just stared at me as if he couldn’t believe, or something.

  There’s nothing for you here, I says. I’m staying here for a while, so you’d better go away. Allay-vooz ong, comprennay?

  The old man pulls himself up very straight and says, We do not go away, we wait. If you wish this ordure, you shall have her. You cannot stay here always. When you go we take her and make the justice. We are soldiers of the Resistance. We do not fear you, Monsieur le Caporal. We wait.

  What’s she done that’s so terrible? I says.

  Listen, he says, listen, and he is very angry. She was friend to the Boches, she make love to them. He shrugged. For that, perhaps the women shave her head, to make her shame. But this one, she had friends in the Resistance. She tells a German officer, then the Gestapo—twelve men—my godson—

  The old man was very angry and upset and I felt a bit sorry for him. The Brat must have caught on to what he was saying, because he began talking, shouting at me, what sounded like names of people.

  His cousin—friends—my pupils—

  You’re a schoolmaster? I says to him.

  Yes, I am school master. I teach English, I admire—I admired the English.

  Well, I says, I’ve made up my mind to stay, and that’s what I’ll do. I don’t care what she done. I’m staying here. When I go, you can do what you like with her.

  The old man translated this to the Brat, and the kid snarled at me and spat in the dust. But the old man just stared at me for a while, then he says, Very well, Monsieur le Caporal, real quiet he says it, and turns away. We will wait, he says. And he walks up the road with the Brat following him.

  Then Big Stupid comes to life. Cigarette? he says with a cheeky grin on his big face. So I took out my fags and counted out three, one for each of them, and gave them to him, and off he went after the others.

  I watched them go up the hill some way and settle themselves under a big old beech tree, on a bit of a bank by the roadside with a good view down the slope. Big Stupid shared out the fags, and they lit up and sat there, staring at the cottage. I stayed by the gate. Every so often I’d look round to see if she was still there, though she didn’t have much chance of running away. Each time I could see her watching me through the kitchen side-window, and what she was thinking about God knows, perhaps whether I’d just walk off and leave her.

  (And God knows what you thought, and what you’re thinking, Corporal Scourby, I reflected as I listened to him. Did he pity this trapped woman? Did he believe her accusers? I think he was a little sorry for both, as well as very contemptuous. Perhaps at this time he was moved by simple lust and by the thought of using this woman who couldn’t refuse him and couldn’t escape. And perhaps it was none of these things, but simply a hunter on the trail. In his unreflecting way he followed his instinct. At the moment his highest motive may have been no more than a detached curiosity.)

  Well (he went on) presently old Charlie comes back with the stuff, so I took it inside and laid it out on the table and made sure it was all there. Then he went off again, like the good little man he was, but he fixed to look in next day and see if we needed anything.

  While she was getting the supper I went for a clean-up. The bog was in the little hut at the end of the garden, and there was this sort of old dairy place at the other side of the house where I could wash. When I went to get a bucket of water from the pump, I could see someone standing under the tree up the hill, but it was too dark to see who it was in the shadow, only I think it was Big Stupid—I noticed that they left a lot of the work to him.

  So I had my wash and went back into the kitchen. She made quite a good meal of it, with bullybeef and tinned Russian salad. We drank some of the Calvados out of little glasses and she brought out a bit of that ripe French cheese. Only she didn’t like tea and she made some ersatz coffee, you know, acorns roasted and ground up, which tasted terrible.

  She’d done herself up and tidied her hair and put on a bit of lipstick, and with that heavy red hair she didn’t look half bad. We ate our supper and just talked about things, about what it was like during the war, and the bombing, and the rationing, and how the French felt about the Germans and how the British felt about the Yanks. But she didn’t really talk much about herself, and all the time her eyes never left me.

  It was getting dark slowly—you know how it was in Normandy, them long evenings and the twilight. She was cleaning up the table and I was standing by the door having a smoke when we heard the Jerry bombers coming over towards the beaches and we could see the ack-ack coming up from the ships in the bay, a proper Brock’s Benefit. Strange it was, too, because it made so little noise, at that distance.

  She was standing close to me and I slipped my arm around her. She turned to me and I kissed her, but she didn’t seem to rise to it. So I pulled her close and kissed her real hard. Then I turned her and gave her a little shove towards the bedroom.

  (When he came to describe what happened between them Saul grew very reticent. Like most working-class people, he was careful with his speech. The newly emancipated words which a bourgeois intellectual or writer or student scatters around like verbal confetti had only a small place in his vocabulary. When he used them, they stood mostly for anger or contempt, not love or sex. And they were used mostly in speaking with men of his own class and age, not outsiders like us, nor women.

  And like most working-class men he was modest about his sex life, talking about it in fairly general terms. After all, he seemed to do pretty well at it, and had no need to boast or reassure himself. In part, I suppose, it’s a rather special form of territoriality—the animal is nowhere more at risk, more defenceless, than in the act of love. But it’s also a realization that this act, deeply serious to those involved, is an absurdity to onlookers. To watch it, even to describe it, is to impair one’s dignity. Voyeurs are people without shame or self-respect. So, in what follows, I’ve had to guess rather more than elsewhere, following out hints and broken sentences in a way he might hardly have approved. In those simple un-Swedish days, he believed in taking his pleasure in the old way, the woman face up in the dark, the man leading, the woman showing proper enjoyment and appreciation.)

  So with the noise of bombs and gunfire coming in gusts across the quiet and darkling countryside, they undressed and climbed into the big double bed in the inner room. He hadn’t had a girl, he explained, since the night they’d been called back to camp for the move to the concentration areas and the slow journey to the beaches. There was this ATS girl but she hadn’t been all that keen. Now he was excited and confident, he’d eaten and drunk well and the Frenchwoman was new and strange.

  But it wasn’t going right. She lay in his arms quite passively and let him caress her, but without response. Presently he pulled back from her and said to her crossly, You’ll have to do better than this, girl, or I’m not staying. I’ve never taken a girl that wasn’t willing for it.

  Still without saying anything, she pulled off the sheet and knelt over him and began to kiss and pet him. Suddenly, as he realized where her lips were going (I said that he was strait-laced, like most working men) he sat up and slapped her across the
side of the head with a full swing of his open hand, so hard that she tumbled sideways off the bed and landed sprawling on her backside on the floor.

  After the swift clap of the blow there was silence and the dying sound of guns. She was sitting up, her face and body pale smudges in the gloom.

  Qu’est-ce qui te prend, salaud? she cried out, hurt but dry-eyed, not weeping, and he found for the first time that her fluent English was broken up by strong feeling, whether of love or hate. Tu me prends pour une putain? She fought with herself for the words. What you want of me? You want me for a prostitute? I make a good prostitute. I do not love you but I can give you plaisir. What you want of me? Everyone want something of me. On se sert de moi comme pot-de-chambre. Je m’emmerde de tout ça.

  And then she began to sob, sitting on her arse on the bare floor, propping herself with one hand and with the other fumbling at her face to try and brush away the tears. He sat hunched in the middle of the big bed, hugging his knees under the old patchwork quilt and the worn sheet.

  You shouldn’t of done that, he said, I don’t like tarts’ tricks. I’ve never held with tarts.

  The angry sobbing went on.

  Look, he said, I don’t want no tricks, all I want is a bit of loving kindness with it.

  I cannot love you, she said, you are just a man who takes me because I cannot run away. You should leave me. Let them take me.

  What would they do to you? he asked. They’d give you a bad time, wouldn’t they, before they killed you?

  With one hand to her mouth, she moaned with fear, and there was a silence, then, Oh, what must I do? she said.

  He moved across and sat on the edge of the bed, near to her.

  First of all, he said, stop crying and come back into bed and forget about those bastards out there. I’m sorry I done that, he said, and I’d like to make it up to you if you let me.

  He reached out his hand to her. She held back for a moment, then took his hand and he helped her back into the bed beside him.