Postcards from No Man's Land (The Dance Sequence)

by Chambers, Aidan

  James Sims:

  [Colonel Frost] gave the order for the advance on Arnhem and the rifle companies began to move off. We were to bring up the rear with our 3-inch [7.62 cm] mortars as their supporting artillery. A number of Germans had already been captured. Dressed in their best Sunday uniforms, they were, at that moment, probably the most embarrassed soldiers in the German army. They had been caught in the fields, snogging with their Dutch girl friends, and their faces went redder and redder by the minute as they caught the drift of some of the remarks the grinning paratroopers flung at them.

  ‘Right, on your feet!’ came a shout, and we moved off in single-file sections on either side of the road in what was called ‘ack-ack’ formation. The Dutch countryside was very neat and well kept for wartime, the roads being overhung with trees and the fields fenced off with wire. Houses were scattered here and there and the inhabitants came out with their children to wave to us and watch us pass. Jugs of milk, apples, tomatoes and marigolds were passed to us. They stuck the flowers in the scrim of our helmets and decorated our barrows with them. ‘We have waited for you for four years,’ seemed to be the limit of their English but the phrase was repeated over and over again by these smiling friendly people, who seemed to consider the war as good as finished now that we had arrived.

  We pushed on south of the Wolfheze district where we had landed, in the direction of Heelsum. The bracken-covered heath on each side of the road rendered our exposed thrust very liable to ambush, and indeed not far ahead there was a burst of small-arms fire which sent us scurrying for cover. Leading elements of the battalion had made contact with the enemy, but the firing soon stopped and we passed on. When we reached the scene of the skirmish the smoke and smell of cordite still lingered in the air. By the side of the road lay a tall fair-haired sergeant from the rifle companies; I recognised him as an ex-Guardsman who had been on the anti-tank gun course at Street when I was there. Now his face was blanched with pain and shock. He had caught a burst of machine-gun fire down one side of his leg and his comrades had bandaged him up before leaving him. As we passed we murmured words of encouragement and threw him boiled sweets and cigarettes. The next time I saw him was in Stalag XIB [prisoner-of-war camp in Germany], minus that leg.

  Yet another burst of fire sent us diving for cover again but this time it was our lads who had done the firing. A German staff car was stopped on the road, the windscreen shattered and the tyres shot to pieces. A German officer lay dead in one of the front seats. Beside him, hunched over the steering-wheel, was the driver. In the back was the body of another German officer slumped forward with his hand still on the shoulder of the dead driver. He had clearly been in the act of warning him when the British paratroopers had stepped out into the road in front of them and opened fire. The officer in the front seat appeared to be some sort of general, so this must have been a severe blow to the enemy. I approached the staff car filled with curiosity, for not only had I never seen a German officer before but I had never seen a corpse …

  My mother had told me as a child that if I traced the shape of a cross on the forehead of a corpse I would not dream about it. Gingerly I touched the stone-cold forehead of one of the German officers. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ yelled a sergeant. ‘Get mobile, you’ll see plenty more like him before you’re much older!’ [Sims, pp 60–2]

  An English and a Dutch clergyman came to the platform. A hymn was sung accompanied by a band Jacob could not see. O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, / O God, die droeg ons voorgeslacht, in nacht en stormgebruis. The sound of those thousands singing was swallowed up in the empty sky. Empty but for a solitary jet, high high up, its white vapour trail so straight and thin it might have been drawn with a ruler on the blue. Feeling its peculiar aptness, Jacob raised his camera and shot the view. A baseline of grass and graves and people, bordered by a line of frothy trees, above which the soaring blue with a diagonal white line stretching from the blue at top left to the green tree tops at bottom right.

  All around people had copies of the Order of Service with the words of the hymns. Where had they got them? He hadn’t seen anyone handing them out. He looked at Tessel. She smiled, turned to a couple of men standing on her other side, spoke to them in Dutch, and was handed the copy of the man next to her. The words were in English on the left and Dutch on the right. Be thou our guard while troubles last, And our eternal home. / wees ons een gids in storm en nacht en eeuwig ons tehuis!

  A colonel came to the microphone to read the lesson. Psalm 121 vv 1–8. I will lift up mine eyes to the hills : from whence cometh my strength. / My help cometh from the Lord : who hath made heaven and earth. Words, Jacob knew, as old as Shakespeare. Their plain beauty, winging out of the cornucopia of the amplifiers, decorated the trees and sparkled in the air. Suddenly, he felt proud of them, of the language that for the first time in his life he consciously claimed to himself as his own.

  Prayers were said. A second hymn was sung. Abide with me, fast falls the eventide: The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide: / Blijf mij nabij, wanneer het duister daalt, De nacht valt in, waarin geen licht meer straalt. A hymn Jacob had never liked. The heavy moan of its words and its cloying tune irritated him. Were it anything material he would want to kick it. Far from encouraging hope or giving relief, it seemed to him to wallow in the prospect of death with smothering sentimentality. Yet it was one of the most popular of popular hymns. Again the thousands of bilingual voices melded in the air and were lost in sky, some people, as is the way on such occasions, singing heartily, others hardly more than mouthing the words.

  The inevitable sermon followed, though called an Address on the programme. Or rather, not one but two. The mere thought made Jacob want to sit down, but that would mean subjecting himself to the infant view of feet and knees and overhanging bums, so he remained standing. Perhaps the clerics would have the decency to be brief. The English reverend spoke first. He had been with the 10th Battalion at the battle. At least he’d been there and done that. The strange contrast inclined Jacob’s attention to this ageing minister, so typical in sound and look, often mocked, of a Church of England country parson, soft spoken, mild mannered, studiously amenable, and the brutal mayhem he must have lived through fifty years ago. The Revd spoke of the men who had made their delayed anniversary jump yesterday. Talked about their training for it, each in tandem with a young soldier on whose knees the older man was instructed to sit. It wasn’t like that in my day, the Revd quipped, and Jacob thought of Ton and their conversation in the café the other night. Even here sexual phobia spreads its elbows in the nudge of a joke. Here where bodies lay side by side, buddied in death, as they were buddied in the life that made their deaths. He thought of James Sims and the ten thousand like him, some of them sitting here now, whose best memory of their time in a kind of hell was of what they called comradeship. That was what brought them here. And who would return year after year for fifty years to remember those who died and not call it love?

  With the predictability of sermons, the story of the gallant old men making their jump had to be conjured into a moral lesson. The magic words for this lesson were said by one of the young soldiers who had told his old partner, ‘Put yourself in my hands, relax, enjoy yourself, and trust me to land you safely on the ground.’ This, the Revd suggested, was just like life and just like God. What we had to learn to do was put ourselves in to God’s hands, sit back, enjoy life, and trust God to bring us safely to our destination. Or something like that. It was hard to be sure, for the Revd’s words seemed to vanish into the air just as the singing had. But at least the Revd had been mercifully brief. He was followed at once by a Dutch Roman Catholic priest, who read out in his own language what he had to say. During which Tessel leaned to Jacob and said quietly, smiling, ‘This is so like us Dutch. The English priest spoke as if without preparation and was amusing. The Dutch priest reads out what he wants to say and is very serious.’ But again was considerately brief.

  A final hymn. P
raise, my soul, the King of heaven, To his feet thy tribute bring; / Loof de Koning, heel mijn wezen, licht in het duister, wijs de weg omhoog. More cheerful, more a goer. They swung through its robust verses at a welcome lick, ready now for an end to the formalities.

  However, Jacob’s attention was elsewhere. While the hymn was being sung school children, both sexes, and between about eleven and sixteen years of age, all carrying bunches of flowers, came from the entrance, processing to the sides of the cemetery, from where they found their way, each to a grave, in front of which they stood at the ready. There was nothing stiffly formal about this, their clothing was colourful, casual and variously fashionable, they were well behaved and quiet but not regimented, purposeful but not po-faced, and only one or two showing signs of shyness. By the time the hymn was done, each had reached what must have been an appointed place. Here and there an adult, with teacherly authority or parental care, sorted out the ones who seemed uncertain or mistaken. While the Lord’s Prayer was recited, they stood before their graves like guardian angels, some hands in pockets, some heads bent, some looking around, some smiling at spectators on the fringe, but all aware of their role in this play of memory.

  James Sims:

  The now familiar smell of spent ammunition lingered in the air and a pall of smoke hung over the scene of what had clearly been a short sharp engagement. The riflemen had hurried on to the next objective … but they had left one of their number behind. He lay propped up against a wooden seat in a clearing overlooking the river. It was a pleasant spot, shaded by trees, with a beautiful view over the Lower Rhine, the sort of place where lovers plan their future and old men dream of the past. But today there were neither lovers nor old men, only a boy from a rifle company, his legs buckled under him and his helmet removed. The front of his battle-dress was soaked with blood, and someone with rough well-meaning had stuffed a white towel inside the front of his shirt in a vain attempt to staunch the wound. Out of a waxen face his eyes stared past us into eternity and we crept by as quietly as possible as though afraid of waking him from that dread sleep. [Sims, p 65]

  Lieutenant Jack Hellingoe, No 11 Platoon, 1st Parachute Battalion:

  … we just burst in through the doors of the nearest house and went upstairs, right into the loft. The Germans were spraying the houses; bullets were coming through the roof and windows, whizzing around the rooms inside and hitting the walls behind us. They were really brassing those two houses up.

  Private Terrett, the Bren gunner, bashed some slates off with the Bren and put the gun down on the rafters pointing through the hole. We could see straight away where the firing was coming from, from the houses and gardens up on the higher ground, only 150 to 200 yards away [137 to 183 meters]. You could easily see the Germans moving about there. Most of the fighting in Arnhem was at very short ranges. I told Terrett to get firing and I think he got a couple of mags off at least before the Germans got on to him and a burst hit him. It took the foresight off the gun, took the whole of his cheek and eye away, and we both fell back through the rafters, crashing down into the bedroom below. I wasn’t hit, but Terrett wasn’t moving at all. Someone slapped a dressing on him, and he was dragged away. I thought he was dead, but I found out many years after the war that he was still alive—a great surprise. He had lost an eye, but they made a good job of his face. [Middlebrook, pp 178–9]

  The moment was coming that Jacob knew about because Sarah had often told him of it, when children from local schools laid flowers on the graves in a ritual that had been enacted every year since the first memorial service the year after the battle, in 1945. Fifty years. The children who laid the first bouquets would now be sixty, sixty-five, Jacob calculated, old enough to be grandparents themselves; and their children who laid flowers, old enough to be parents of those laying them today. A floral family tree.

  He had watched to see who would stand by Jacob’s grave. A slim boy, perhaps thirteen, with close-cropped auburn hair that showed off a fine round head and oval, boy’s-still-girlish face, wearing a lovat green zip-up jerkin, rust-red shirt, light grey jeans, and Hush Puppy boots. He was carrying in his arms as if it were a baby a bunch of wild flowers. Jacob recognised blue harebells, rose mallow, some pink flowers Sarah called Laveterea, lavender-purple fire-weed, even some tall-stalked buttercups, and reeds with dark-brown cigar-like ends, all set off with ivy. No one else had such an unusual armful. When he arrived at his place, the boy inspected the gravestone’s earthy surround, bent and removed some fallen leaves, which, not knowing where else to get rid of them, he stuffed into a pocket of his jeans. Then he waited, head bent and still.

  Another Dutch minister said a few words about the children and thanked them for being there.

  And the high point of the ceremony arrived. The children stooped and laid their flowers at the feet of the gravestones. The silence as they did this was more tense with emotion than at any time so far. The air shimmered with it. Jacob could not take his eyes from the boy by his grandfather’s grave, who laid his flare of blooms just as everyone else did, but then with careful delicacy spread them in a fan of colour as if arranging them in a vase. When he had finished, he leant back on his haunches and surveyed the effect, bending forward two or three times to improve the show by adjusting some of the blooms. He did this with such patient concentration, as if entirely on his own, that Jacob felt he was watching someone absorbed in a private act, and should turn his eyes away.

  The boy was still on his haunches, the other children by this time standing in their places, when the English Revd recited the traditional poem to the war dead by Laurence Binyon. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old … We will remember them. / Zij zullen niet oud worden, zoals wij, die het wel overleefd hebben … wij zullen aan hen denken. A bugler sounded the Last Post and Reveille, the notes so tangible and plangent they were written on the staves of the trees. Then the band played the British National Anthem. And it was over.

  A brief suspended pause, a typically English hiatus when no one wanted to be first to move lest they be thought pushy and forward, or worse, might embarrass themselves by doing the wrong thing. But then came an audible collective sigh as the strain of all their best behaviour was exhaled, before people started talking, laughing, walking about, greeting each other, introducing one to another, peering at the inscriptions on gravestones, stooping to give solemn attention to particular memorials, taking photos. A kind of party got going that reminded Jacob of summer fêtes Sarah made him go to in her village, though the general mood was still modestly polite, this being the place and the occasion it was. The kids who had laid the flowers were quickly surrounded by adults, parents, relatives, friends their own age, and the British visitors: the focus of everyone’s pleasure and attention now, as if this was after all their occasion, like a vast communal birthday party with a surplus of foreign grandparents. Foreign but not foreign. Another strange note that gave the day its tune: the Brits were the guests here, yet occupied the place as if it were their own front garden, while the Dutch, whose land it was, behaved as if they were visitors from next door sharing a neighbours’ family party. And so they behaved one to another as both hosts and guests, owners and visitors, with the graves as background and the children as diversion.

  Hendrika van der Vlist, 23-year-old daughter of the proprietor of Hotel Schoonoord, Oosterbeek:

  Someone is calling: some Englishmen want to see us. A jeep with a doctor and an N.C.O. orderly is standing in the front garden.

  We are asked to get the hotel ready to be used as a hospital within an hour’s time.

  ‘We’d love to do so, but it is a terrible mess inside and we are without staff.’

  ‘Ask the people in the street for help,’ the doctor says.

  ‘All right, we shall do our best.’

  Then suddenly we remember that there is no longer any electric light in the house. Last night [Sunday] the Germans destroyed the connection.

  Perhaps light was shining from some windows. They may
have thought this the way to stop it.

  But it does not matter.

  The pudding is left on the table, untouched. We have other things to do. First I run to our neighbours across the road for help, then to our other neighbours. On crossing Utrechtseweg I see, in front of Dennenkamp estate, English soldiers lying flat on the road. They are aiming at Germans who have entrenched themselves in the manor-house.

  Explosions are also heard from Pietersbergseweg [the hotel was on the corner of Utrechtseweg and Pietersbergseweg]. Here Germans are in the house called Overzicht. War is close upon us.

  But there is no time for reflection.

  Provided with a broom, a pail and a mop, everyone comes running in readily, glad to be able to help. If the Germans against whom we malingered and sabotaged for four and a half years, could have seen us.

  Men and women, young and old, are working hard. An hour is so short! Mother takes the lead downstairs, I try to settle things upstairs. ‘Would you be so kind as to sweep the floor. Then you could mop it up.’

  ‘Kaja, a big job for you. All that rubbish has to be taken to the dustbin. What shall we do with that beautiful portrait of Hitler? [The Germans had used the hotel as a billet for their soldiers.] Well, if you want you may keep it—don’t you think it is a nice souvenir! Alternatively you might smash it.’