A Soldier's Tale

by M. K. Joseph

  There you are, he said, you’ll need that.

  And she thanked him, watching him with an embarrassed smile at the absurdity of it.

  He went back again round the outside of the house towards the front door. The rain had blown over, leaving the low sun warm in a clear late-afternoon sky, where a flight of Spitfires was making regular sweeps towards the German lines.

  He switched on the radio and went back to sit in the open doorway and smoke. There was a Forces Requests programme on; he found it dull and paid little attention, sitting there brooding and staring out at the landscape. Trees and hedges and low hills were beginning to take on a shadowy impenetrable look against the brightening western sky. He could not quite make out the figure of the watcher under the beech tree until the small flash of sunlight reflected on spectacles showed that it was the old man. He finished his cigarette, flipped the butt into the garden and began to dismantle his sten gun and clean its worn immaculate metalwork with an oily rag. He liked to have his gear in perfect working order, and besides, it might help to impress anyone who happened to be watching.

  (Of such small actions is war made. And this is the part that most war books get wrong. Trying hard to impress, they multiply the horror and glory, brutality and heroism, boredom and humour of war at the expense of its ordinariness. Most wars are just ordinary. Everyone, even in the worst of wars, must sleep about a third of each day, and eat two or three meals, and crap even if it’s only in a hole in the ground. Soldiers, like anyone else, catch colds and read the Daily Mirror and fall in love and trim their nails and play pontoon and listen to Frank Sinatra and change their socks. The sadness of wartime death and suffering is that they are embedded in these familiar things.)

  Presently she came in from the back of the house and began to move about in the kitchen. There was a scrape and rattle at the stove as she opened the grate and stirred the fire. He said nothing, but his hands were busily cleaning and refilling the spare magazines. When he had finished he put the magazines, with the cleaning gear, back in the pouch on his webbing belt and stood up, slinging it loose over his shoulder.

  He walked over softly and stopped behind her where she stood at the stove, stooping a little, stirring something in the enamel pot which began to have a savoury meaty smell.

  I’m sorry, Belle, he said. Truly, love. You were so close to me, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t mean to harm you.

  She remained with her back to him, stirring angrily at the black pot, saying nothing.

  I said I’m sorry, he said, like I told you, I don’t take a girl if she don’t want it.

  How can I choose? she said. Do not worry. I am disposable as you wish. And I will cook your supper.

  Be a good girl, he said patting her bottom under the thin green dress.

  She wriggled away from him, still angry but willing to be pleased.

  He went through the little passage into the bedroom, leaving both doors open. His pack stood neat and square against the wall, and he unbuckled it and took out the bottle of Calvados. He shook it and held it up to the light; still half full.

  Glancing down, he took in her dressing-table set in front of the window, with its litter of woman’s gear—pots and tubes and bottles, dabs of cotton wool, some stained with rouge or mascara, a good pair of silver-backed brushes—he knew the quality—with strands of long red-gold hair caught among the bristles. There was a small stand-mirror and, caught in the frame, a photograph.

  He slipped it out and looked at it. It was just a snapshot, but taken with some skill, and it showed the head and shoulders of a middle-aged man. The setting seemed to be a garden—at least, there was a blurred shape of trees in the background. He thought that the man must be quite old because there was grey in the hair and in the thick drooping moustache, but even more because of the suggestion of heaviness in the jowls and in what could be seen of the body. There was character in it, arrogance in the tilt of the thrown-back head and the folded droop of the eyelids—or was it just the glare of the afternoon sun?

  Back in the kitchen, he found her sitting at the table, arms folded under her breasts, staring down listlessly at nothing. From the sideboard he took two large wine glasses and poured a generous tot of Calvados into each one.

  Here, he said, try this.

  To his astonishment, she took the glass and immediately raised it to her mouth and knocked the drink straight back in a curiously man-like gesture. She didn’t even cough, and went back to staring at the table.

  Here, he said, you’ll do yourself an injury that way, my girl.

  He sat down beside her at the table. Reaching out his right hand he gently touched her under the chin and forced her to look up. Her clear eyes were reddened and watery, and he grinned at her.

  Don’t you do that too often, he said, or those beautiful eyes of yours will stay permanently bloodshot. Look at you, you’re a mess.

  Pouring her a much smaller drink, he pushed it across and lit a cigarette for her.

  Now drink that slow, he said, and I’ll join you.

  He sipped the dark golden liquid, feeling the fire of it travel down his throat.

  Otherwise, he went on, you might wind up like an old bloke my grandad told me about, what lived on smuggled brandy—that was far back in the days of smuggling from France—from here. Regular pickled in it, he was. Well, one night he went to blow out the candle as he was off to bed, and true as I’m here, he caught fire and blew up. Straight, he wrecked a whole row of cottages. Local people talk about it to this day.

  She gave a sniff of unwilling laughter, sipped her drink, drew on her cigarette and stared again at the table. He slid the snapshot across to her.

  Who’s this? he said.

  My father.

  I thought so. Got your nose. Dead?

  Yes.

  Germans?

  No, she said, but after a long hesitation, as if she wasn’t sure.

  What’s his name?

  Alcibiade.

  What?

  Alcibiade. She anglicized it for him, Alcibiades.

  Odd name, sounds Greek.

  He was a Greek and a sort of hero. My father used to tell me about him, he was proud of the name, my father. Alcibiade lived in Athens, and he was very rich and a crook and when he was young he was—you say, ‘queer’?—and had many lovers.

  She drained her glass with a little animated gesture. He silently poured her another and passed her another cigarette.

  Well, you know, Athens and Sparta had a big war, like France and Germany, and there was the King of Persia too, waiting, like Stalin. Alcibiade was good at war, so when the Spartans tried to make a peace he sabotaged it and went on fighting them. But presently he got into much trouble for some kind of sacrilege at Athens, and the priests cursed him, so he ran away and fought for the Spartans. He was a collaborator, you see. But he really had fear of no one. He slept with the Spartan king’s wife, and this made the king very angry. So he went back to Athens and won more battles for them. But in the end they lost, and the Spartans were the winners, like the Boches with us. So Alcibiade ran away to Persia. No one wanted him now. So one night the Persian king sent soldiers to surround the house where he lived. He was living with a whore, a woman who had been taken a slave in one of the wars. So there he was in bed with her, and the soldiers came and set fire to the house. But he was still a brave man. He wrapped a cloak around one arm and took his sword and he was all naked and he jumped through the fire. The soldiers were still afraid of him—imagine, one naked man—then they shot into him with arrows and spears till he died. Then his woman sold her jewels and her good dress—you know, every whore has one good dress—and she paid for his funeral.

  Who paid for hers? he said.

  She shrugged and stared down at the table and her empty glass. He refilled it and said: That was a good story.

  It means that all wars are the same, she said.

  The long sunlight was beginning to slide in underneath the clouds. He rose to his feet.

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sp; I’ll just take a turn outside, he said. That smells good, he added, nodding at the stove.

  The pots on the stove heaved and hissed. She jumped up and ran over to them and began to lift lids and peer inside and test something with a spoon and take everything off the heat because it was cooking too fast. The sad sulky woman turned into a busy housewife.

  Do not be too long, she said, soon the dinner will be cooked.

  At intervals, while writing Saul Scourby’s story, I have been re-reading Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et Grandeur Militaires and thinking about it. He was too young to serve in Napoleon’s armies and in any case he was a Royalist—he did his service in the postwar army sworn loyal to the Bourbons. But he had an extraordinary sympathy and understanding for those men who had grown old in Napoleon’s endless wars, and for what he called their ‘abnegation’—their selfless lives of duty and poverty, like some fighting monastic order. Listen:

  Well, during the fourteen years I spent in the army it was there only, and above all in the poor despised ranks of the infantry, that I found men of this classic stamp, men who carry the sentiment of duty to its ultimate consequences, feeling neither remorse for their obedience nor shame for their poverty, simple in manner and speech, proud of the fame of their country, while careless of their own, happy in their obscurity, and in sharing with the unfortunate the black bread they purchase with their blood.

  I’ve known men like that, especially among regular army NCOs. Saul was not the same. His patriotism was a tribal attachment to his own place; he was poor because he needed little beyond the satisfaction of his immediate needs; and his love of obscurity was the hunting animal’s instinctive preference for shadow and silence. But he knew how to share the black bread of bitterness in his own way, as you’ll see later.

  When he came back to the kitchen, the dinner was ready. She had taken tinned potatoes, sliced them and poached them in reconstituted milk with shredded cheese to make a sort of gratin dauphinois. The tinned steak-and-kidney pudding had been taken apart and remade into a delicious stew with dumplings. There was still some cheese left over to go with biscuits and the usual ersatz coffee.

  He praised her cooking and lapsed into what was, for him, an unusual silence. The woman’s contempt for him after the scene in the orchard, her measuring him up against her other lovers (no Boche did that to me), made him still angry and (rare thing) unsure of how to go on. He could have slung his kit and moved off, but after all he’d promised to take care of her till Monday morning, and she was entitled to count on that. His word was passed on it and besides, another day was another world, full of its own possibilities.

  Looking up he saw that she had propped her father’s photograph on the sideboard—even at the distance, he could see the family resemblance in that arrogant set of the head. Her eyes followed his, and she said: Do you want to know about him?

  If you like, he said, if you—that is, he’s dead, isn’t he? Like you told me. You don’t have to say any more, you know.

  I wish you to understand, she said patiently, about the Germans. That is what killed him, at last.

  While she talked she went on doing her chores, clearing the table and setting out the blue cups and making another pot of the bad ersatz coffee, her capable hands working away as it were on their own, quite separate from her sad brooding mind.

  Once things had settled down with the Germans—this was where it all started, back in the summer of nineteen-forty—the old people were resigned but young people like the ones she knew were pleasantly excited by all these Germans, young, vigorous, free-spending, above all victorious. For her father things had been hard at first, because the firm for which he travelled had been taken over for war-production. But then there was a shortage of young men about, so many rounded up or missing after the débâcle of June, and soon her father was able to take quite a good post in the syndicate of municipal transport. She was working too, as vendeuse in the big store, Au Printemps.

  At first the young German soldiers and the young French girls went by, eyeing one another and smiling at one another in the streets and squares. All the good, well-brought-up young girls, that is. There were the other kind, of course, the girls down round the docks; the conquerors found ready welcome there.

  It was in July, as the long evenings began to shorten a little, that she was out walking with two friends near the little park some way from her home. The three of them often went out together because they complemented one another and, as women know, that is very flattering—one, Marie, a pale blonde, one, Yvonne, very dark, herself, Belle, a lustrous copperhead. Young German soldiers often looked at them appreciatively and longingly as they swung in step along the boulevards, watchful, provocative, caring for no man. The soldiers would hail them in broken French: Bonsoir mamzelle, vous promenade mit mir?

  This time it was different. A very beautiful Mercedes purred up alongside and kept pace with them, and a voice asked in good French whether the gracious ladies would be kind to three lonely pilots. Everything would be quite as it should be, just to drive into the country, to an inn near the river, to take a glass of wine and then return just as they wished.

  She turned to the agreeable voice and found herself looking straight at the driver of the car, this young fair-haired airman with eyes as blue as flax-flowers. With him, one beside him and the other in the back of the open car, were his two friends, both handsome, both dark (they were playing the same trick, but he was the one who showed to advantage by it), all in the smart blue-grey uniform of the Luftwaffe, with smiles like a private uniform too.

  Marie and Yvonne held back, but she, always the bold one, stepped forward and smiled at the fair-haired airman. No, they were very kind but, it was late, people might talk—

  But what harm—? no one need recognize them, soon it would be dark, the inn was very tranquil.

  Still, she hesitated, turned back, argued with her friends in broken sentences and shrugs and giggles. Still Marie and Yvonne held back and the young Germans waited, smiling, putting in encouraging words.

  Then she, Belle, suddenly stepped up to the car, and the dark young man on the inside front jumped out and helped her in, sitting between the two of them in front, while her friends took their places on each side of the third young man in the back. There was much blushing and giggling. Then the blond driver put his foot down and the beautiful car roared off up the boulevard and presently the streets fell behind and the country breeze tossed their hair, copper, pale and black.

  The driver’s name was Gustav Schellenberg; the other beside her was Karl Altmann, and the quiet one in the back was Rudi something. So they drove out into the country and drank champagne at an inn by the river. Rudi played the piano and the young men sang together in clear loud German voices, while the locals kept away from them and stared and muttered. When they drove back the harvest moon was out, Belle found herself alone in the front seat with Gustav, while the other four squeezed in the back, all very friendly.

  After that they went on meeting, three and three, near the little park when they could, not every day, for the young pilots were stationed somewhere near Rennes, and sometimes when they were on duty they came in too late to get away for the evening.

  The days shortened; the summer glory faded; the young faces, looked at by loving eyes, began to show tired lines; the radios playing ‘Wir Fahren Gegen England’ began to have a jaunty and slightly desperate sound. One evening in September, as the nights began to chill, they saw only two heads in the approaching car, and Rudi something wasn’t there. After that dark Yvonne didn’t come out with them any more; they met two and two.

  There was a small, quiet hotel overlooking the river at Vernon, where they went regularly. The patron and his wife were servile, obsequious, well paid. They went there at first to drink and talk as before, then, naturally enough, to keep a couple of rooms, and spend long afternoons together when they could.

  One afternoon, as they drove up to the hotel, she noticed a man staring at them fro
m the little terrace of the hotel. He had a square red face and grey hair en brosse and gold-rimmed glasses, and with him was an ugly woman, no doubt his wife. Only (by an odd flash of memory) as Gustav took her in the bed did she remember the red face and the glasses as Monsieur Beauvoisin, her father’s boss. Hours later, when they came out, of course the ugly couple were gone.

  At the end of the week her father came home early, looking old and very grey. He had been curtly dismissed by Monsieur Beauvoisin, whose son had lost an arm at Calais, and who thus had a better claim on the job—he was, after all, a grand mutilé de guerre, while Belle’s father was a mere ancien combattant.

  But another job was available, behind the counter in a post office, smaller, poorer, but enough for him to hold his head up and, as winter drew in, to go down in his shabby overcoat to the café on the square, to meet old friends and spin out frugal cups of coffee and play dominoes and checkers with other anciens combattants, for a time. Then Monsieur Beauvoisin must have talked to someone who talked to someone.

  One night—it was early in the New Year, of nineteen-forty-one, that is—he went to the café as usual. And then, as he walked in and the door swung to behind him, into the room full of yellow light and steam and the smell of Gauloises, the talk stopped. People, his friends, looked at him strangely, sideways. He sat down at one of the marble-topped tables. Guyot was sitting there, whom he had known since the lycée, with the checkers set out before him, the white pieces politely turned towards the chair opposite, waiting for a game. Papa hung up the shabby overcoat and sat down thankfully in the empty wooden chair, easing off the old galoshes which hurt his feet (there was slush on the pavements outside). With a familiar gesture he reached out and made the first move, looking down at the board. A chair ground on the tiles. Without a word, Guyot stood up and walked away to another table.