Love for a Soldier

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Everything. Fritz must find you quite endearing.’

  ‘I won’t have you say things like that! It’s a disgusting familiarity—’

  ‘Sophia – drop down!’ Captain Marsh sank fast to his knees, then lay flat out. Sophia flung herself down beside him, then wondered in new despair why every response was so compulsive.

  They bedded their bodies in thick, cold pasture. The guns seemed to be rending the sky with thunder. It was a heavy, rolling noise from far off. And somewhere, planes were in the sky. Sophia wanted to put her hands over her ears. Captain Marsh was squinting. She followed his gaze. The pale grey ribbon of a farmland road split the earth, and on that road a car was travelling slowly, an open car. It was not possible to pick out its individual features, but Sophia had a feeling it was not unknown to her.

  ‘Is that – is that the car we immobilized last night?’ she whispered.

  ‘You mean the car I immobilized?’ he said pointedly.

  She realized he was sincere in his concern for her, genuinely worried about the questions she might be asked.

  ‘Yes – is it?’

  The little road snaked and wound, and the car seemed to crawl like a beetle. It passed them well to their right and disappeared as the road was lost in the terrain.

  ‘Yes, that was it, I think,’ said Captain Marsh. ‘Did you notice how slowly it was moving?’

  ‘Yes. With two people in it. Are they looking for us?’

  ‘They were German officers, one of them a woman. We almost bumped into them, you remember.’

  ‘They are looking for us, particularly for me,’ said Sophia. ‘The man is on my father’s staff. I recognized his voice last night.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think that you’ve elected to go through fire and water for Fritz. Are you so madly in love?’

  ‘That is between Fritz and me, and no one else.’

  ‘I’m intrigued, that’s all,’ said Captain Marsh. ‘I think we’ll wait a while before we move, then I suggest we get to those woods and hide there for the rest of the day. I did think of going by the river, but I’m certain we’re so close to Douai that we can cross the main road when it’s dark and be almost on top of the town. But what’s that?’

  He squinted again. He made out what had been indefinable before. A clearing between two stretches of woodland. There were buildings like tiny boxes on either side of the clearing. His searching eyes strained. Everything was in miniature at this distance, but he thought that what he was looking at on the clearing itself were three aeroplanes. He could not be sure, but he thought that was what three little objects might just be.

  ‘It’s an aerodrome, isn’t it?’ said Sophia, the same thought in her mind.

  ‘No. The layout isn’t right. And it’s a little too small.’

  She looked at him. His head was up, and his face in profile was strong and vigorous, his expression intrigued. He was a man of warplanes, she supposed, rather than of social graces. His mouth was very firm, very definite, and he was far removed from adolescence or boyishness.

  Abruptly, Sophia looked away.

  Chapter Twelve

  TIME WAS PASSING, and Elissa thought the day would run away from them all too soon.

  ‘Major,’ she said, gloved hands gripping the wheel as the car bounced over the death-defying surface of a road that had nothing good to offer the traveller except its eventual end, ‘the morning has gone and I feel we’ve achieved little more than part of a circular tour.’

  ‘Yes, it’s chastening to discover that keen endeavour can lead us nowhere,’ said Major Kirsten. ‘Apart from finding Sophia’s hat and a farmer who growled at us, we’ve drawn nothing each time we’ve stopped but a large, discouraging blank. We’ve no idea at all whether or not we’ve put ourselves between Douai and our quarry.’

  ‘We did at least make contact with Colonel Hoffner’s search party.’

  ‘Comprised of old and grey men, wandering about with an old and grey officer. I’m going to suggest our elusive pair have gone to ground again, that they’re hiding somewhere and waiting for darkness. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Of course?’ said Elissa, negotiating potholes with care.

  ‘I’m not yet completely discouraged by my inadequacies,’ said Major Kirsten, drawing in lungfuls of the cold, healthy air. The car was open to allow them maximum observation. ‘I think they’re so close to Douai that that’s the obvious thing to do. They won’t want to scuttle about like rabbits.’

  ‘You’re quite convinced they’re acting in collusion?’ said Elissa.

  ‘I’ve a feeling, that’s all. Look, do you see that wood up there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elissa, ‘we passed it on its other side an hour ago. There’s a barn, too. That must be the barn Colonel Hoffner’s men told us they’d searched.’

  ‘They also told us there was a girl working in the barn, a dirty and impudent French girl. Elissa, have you ever seen any kind of a French girl parading dirt?’

  ‘Not all over her face,’ said Elissa. ‘The officer said she looked sluttish with dirt.’

  ‘I’d have liked to see under the dirt myself,’ said Major Kirsten. ‘Pull up and we’ll take a walk.’

  ‘Another one?’ said Elissa. They had been pulling up and taking walks frequently. But she came to a halt. ‘Major,’ she said, as they alighted, ‘if we leave the car here, is it possible we shall lose the new distributor head?’

  ‘If that happens, Elissa, I shall dig a hole for myself and leave you to erect a suitable headstone. We’ll risk it. In fact, should our mad friend be around, let’s tempt him. We can keep the car in sight. If he does appear, we might then discover if he and Sophia are running for the car together, or if she’s being dragged.’

  They walked to the barn over fields lying fallow. There were a great many fields lying fallow. Everything farmers needed, including seed, was in short supply, and despite the amount of pasture available they had seen nothing in the way of livestock.

  Major Kirsten startled Elissa by asking if she had a service revolver.

  ‘No, we aren’t issued with weapons of any kind, Major –’

  ‘Don’t be alarmed. I’ve my own revolver in an emergency. In my coat pocket, not my holster.’

  Elissa was alarmed, however. She hated the thought of shots being exchanged. But the adrenalin was still flowing, and a sense of excitement still prevailed. She had not yet experienced a really close relationship with a man. She supposed she had been courted once, by a customer who visited the Munich bookshop regularly. He was a friendly and talkative intellectual, she a painfully shy woman of twenty-two. He was just a little too friendly at times, always contriving to touch her when there was no one else in the shop. She began to dislike it, together with his assumption that she could not wait to be kissed. Her reactions worried her. She confided in her mother, a warm and companionable woman.

  ‘Do you look at men, Elissa?’ her mother had asked.

  ‘Mama, of course I look at them.’

  ‘Do you like what you see?’

  ‘I like what I see in some men. I dislike what I see in others.’

  ‘Then don’t worry. You’re discriminating, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with that. Society expects a woman to behave in a set way, to be grateful to any man merely for noticing her. Be discriminating, my dear, rather than in a hurry. It’s better to wait until you’re forty before you marry than to take the wrong man at twenty-two.’

  ‘Forty? Forty? Mama, who would marry a woman of forty? Why, even at twenty-two I’m already an old maid.’

  Her mother laughed.

  ‘What you think is a problem, Elissa, is only a sensitive instinct for what you know is right and what you know is wrong. Too many women marry the first man who asks them. You’ll marry the man you know to be right for you. And you aren’t an old maid. You’re very nice. So take your time. The man you eventually choose will have no cause for complaint.’

  Elissa came to as Major Kirsten, walking beside her
, brushed her arm with his. It was the lightest of contacts, but it made her say something to herself. Forty? I can’t wait until I’m forty. I’ll wither.

  ‘Lieutenant, you’re far away.’

  ‘Yes, a little, Major.’

  ‘Ah, some young man, I suppose, at Headquarters. Preferable to a mad British airman. Now, the barn.’

  They reached it and he entered without checking his stride, his hand in his coat pocket. Elissa followed. The barn was empty. She was not too happy when he climbed the ladder to the loft, but she thought perhaps he did things like that to give his handicap something to think about. He climbed down again.

  ‘Nothing, Major?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing. We’ve drawn another blank.’ He smiled ruefully, and she liked him very much for his maturity. Outside, the day was cold but fine. The clouds were brisk in the sky, the patches of blue sharp. Elissa was aware of the warm pleasure of companionship.

  ‘There’s no French girl here now, is there, with or without a dirty face,’ she said.

  ‘She’s gone. Back to the farmhouse, or simply gone? Simply gone, I think.’ Major Kirsten’s thoughtful look appeared. ‘They’re not far from here, our fugitives, I’m certain. Not unless they’ve risked a bold entry into Douai, and I doubt that. They’re waiting. But where? Shall we take a look inside that wood?’

  They took a look. The wood was not far from the barn. The trees reached upwards in search of the light they partially denied to the haven, which seemed full of shadows. Elissa was a little wary, a little on edge, the wood enclosing them in silence. She had a feeling for atmosphere, and there was an atmosphere. Were they here, the English pilot and Miss von Feldermann? Major Kirsten scoured the place, hand in his coat pocket. Elissa called softly to him.

  ‘Major,’ she said, as he came up, ‘I think they were here, but I think they’ve gone now. Look.’

  On a little patch of ground between trees were eggshells and the remains of a fire built of twigs. The ashes were grey. Major Kirsten’s unblurred eye gleamed.

  ‘Ah, so?’ he said.

  ‘So?’ said Elissa.

  ‘Well, you and I know, even if others don’t, that our pair of flying pigeons stole some eggs. You’ve found what’s left of them. Now we must find the pigeons themselves.’ Major Kirsten gave her shoulder a light pat. She was proving a very intelligent assistant. It was a pity, he thought, that he was not young and handsome and whole, for she was also proving delicious in her appeal. She even blushed at times. Very delicious. ‘Come along, Lieutenant.’

  Elissa wished he would not call her that, not when he called her by her name so often. They left the wood and scanned the rolling fields in the direction of Douai. Nothing disturbed the view.

  ‘We’ll use the car to retrace our route and put ourselves closer to the town,’ said Major Kirsten. ‘We must find them, Elissa, and take Sophia back to her father. That’s as necessary as getting our lunatic locked up.’

  On the way back to the car, Elissa said, ‘You don’t think we should take her to the man she loves?’

  ‘General von Feldermann has reservations about that young gentleman. He considers him socially irresponsible. That might do for the first six months of a marriage, when irresponsibility seems like lovable gaiety, but it won’t do for a lifetime.’

  ‘The war has given a very short lifetime to some marriages,’ said Elissa.

  ‘It has not allowed some to even begin.’

  ‘That is a sadness,’ said Elissa. ‘Miss von Feldermann’s marriage is important to her parents, of course?’

  ‘It’s important to them that she marries a man they consider suitable. Parents have an excessive interest in that sort of thing. Fortunately, my own parents not only approved of the choice I made, but considered my wife Anna to be far too good for me.’

  ‘I am so sorry about her,’ said Elissa, who knew his wife had been killed in a road accident several years ago.

  ‘The worst is over,’ he said.

  The car awaited them on the crumbling road.

  ‘You will marry again, perhaps?’ said Elissa.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ he said.

  They boarded the car.

  Elissa said, ‘I wouldn’t like to be responsible myself for preventing Miss von Feldermann from marrying the man she loves.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Major Kirsten.

  ‘You’d like, then, to help her reach Captain Gerder?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Major?’

  ‘I’d like her to give herself time to think more objectively about him. She may then change from an impulsive young lady into a thoughtful and discriminating one.’

  ‘Discriminating?’ said Elissa, reminded of her mother’s words.

  ‘It can happen. Women do become discriminating, although it takes time.’

  ‘Men are discriminating from birth?’ smiled Elissa, starting the car.

  ‘Heavens, no,’ said Major Kirsten. ‘Most men are idiots from birth and remain so. The ordained task of women is to make what they can of them.’

  ‘Major, that isn’t true.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ he said, ‘as you’ll discover if you’re rash enough to marry one. You’ll need all your feminine intelligence in making a passable adult of him. I think you’ll manage. You must, for the world relies a great deal on the improving and civilizing qualities of women.’

  ‘If I were to accept all that as true,’ said Elissa, ‘it would mean, Major, I believe myself to be a superior being and you to be an idiot. I’m sure there’s something in the German Military Code which forbids any such belief. Which way are we to proceed on this road?’

  ‘The way we came, so turn round, please, Lieutenant,’ said Major Kirsten. He was smiling.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE BROAD COPSE, nestling in a dip, was thick with bush, shrub and tree. Winter had stripped the deciduous members, but not the evergreens.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Sophia.

  ‘So am I,’ said Captain Marsh, examining his aching finger as if he could put it out of its misery by eating it.

  They had shared four eggs after frying them in a discarded tin lid in the wood where she had lost her temper and earned the assault on her lips. Their new shelter lay a hundred metres from an old, neglected dirt road. Away to the right, some three hundred metres away, was what Captain Marsh had picked out from afar, a small Luftwaffe repair establishment, its workshops humming with activity. Its perimeter, a succession of posts supporting a high wire-mesh fence, was built inside a boundary of fir trees, which provided a camouflaging effect. The sheds lay on each side of a grass runway. Three planes were visible. They had been moved, Captain Marsh thought, since he had first spotted them. Each was standing just inside sheds. Since Richtofen’s squadron operated not far away, the repair facilities probably supplemented its on-the-spot amenities, no doubt currently overloaded. Captain Marsh squinted from just inside the copse, picking out what details he could at this distance. He could see no guards. But he thought he could make out a sentry box at the near end of the perimeter, where there was a wide gap with no trees fronting it. That, obviously, was to allow planes to take off. He thought two of the machines were Fokker triplanes. The third looked like an Albatros D5a, the latest and best from the manufacturers.

  ‘I’m also not very warm,’ said Sophia, but it was mainly her restless nerves that had her stamping about.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He turned from his concentrated scrutiny and joined her, taking off the greatcoat and placing it around her shoulders, adding its warmth to that of her snug-fitting leather coat.

  ‘No, I’m not as cold as that,’ she said, and gave the coat back to him.

  He regarded her worriedly. She turned away.

  ‘Sophia?’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself,’ she said.

  ‘I have to,’ he said, ‘I’m responsible for the situation.’

  ‘We’re both responsible now,’ said Sophia. ‘In any case, I think
that in your place I might have acted just as you did. It would have almost been a challenge, and challenges can provoke one. So don’t feel too concerned.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you, but you worry me. Are you becoming uncertain about your decisions?’

  Uncertain? How could she be uncertain, she thought, when she knew that the alternative meant she would finish up under the close and confining protection of her mother? Her mother would guard against what she would consider future flights of fancy. Flights of fancy were not in accord with the traditional behaviour of her class. They were mistakes, and mistakes of that kind were all to do with giving in to impulses without considering the consequences. She could hear her mother now, understanding but disconcertingly analytical.

  ‘Sophia, my dear, you have never known what you really want. Your wishes relate only to passing enthusiasms. You wished to paint, did you not, when you fell in love with the genius of Monet? Nothing else mattered except an arrangement which enabled you to study art. It proved boring all too soon, I believe.’

  ‘No, not boring. I never said it was boring. I only said I felt inadequate. In acknowledging that, I acquired humility. That’s not such a bad thing in a person, humility.’

  ‘It isn’t, as long as you know when to show it. Humility before God exalts a woman. Before man, it diminishes her. You fell in love with some forgettable Austrian count, did you not, and showed him a deplorable amount of humility in your desire to be all things to him.’

  ‘Mama, I was seventeen and impressionable, and he was wickedly fascinating.’

  ‘Even at seventeen, I thought you intelligent enough to see through a man like that at once. But your feelings, as always, ruled your head, dearest.’

  ‘Mama, my feelings are important to me. My feelings tell me I don’t want to marry any of the men you’ve suggested to me. They’re all old men.’

  ‘Old? They’re all comparatively young.’

  ‘I mean they’re old in their behaviour. They’re all stiff, pompous and correct. I’d rather marry an artist, or a poet.’