Postcards From No Man's Land (13 page)

Silence. Jacob’s mouth was dry. Reaching for his drink, he had to steady the glass with both hands. The chill of the crisp liquid shocked his gullet and cut the heat of his stomach. He glanced at Daan, who was looking back at him
from the sofa, watching. Piercing blue eyes, handsome, inquiring, probing. Time and again since they’d met Jacob had caught Daan observing him like this. Why? What was he searching for? Was there something he wanted?

Jacob rubbed his damp brow with fingers still cool from his glass.

‘Nine days,’ Daan said. ‘The Monday after next.’

The announcement hit Jacob like a blow in the face. He could say nothing, not even that he did not know what to say.

Instead, tears, involuntary, unexpected, began to swamp his eyes till they brimmed over and trickled down his cheeks and dripped from his chin on to his chest. He made no effort to resist them or to wipe them away. He was not sobbing out loud or gasping for breath or snivelling or making any sound at all, and remained completely still in his chair, staring ahead in to the deep shadows that buried the other end of the long room. The familiar hated affliction—feeling awkward, foolish, inept, embarrassed—surged through him, but for once he did not care and paid it no attention. The mouse dream flitted through his mind. Then he thought of Anne Frank and of his visit to her house—no, not her house, her museum—that morning. And now this and these tears. All somehow connected.

After a while, Daan said with quiet hardness, ‘Don’t cry for Geertrui. She wouldn’t want it.’

‘I’m not,’ Jacob said with a flash of insight that came as he spoke the words.

‘Why, then?’

‘Because I’m alive,’ Jacob said.

GEERTRUI

I STILL REGRET
that Dirk killed the German soldier. As we struggled in the dark through the village, from house to house, from street to street, and from tree to tree across the park behind the Hartenstein Hotel, buffeted all the time by the thunderous bombardment of the British guns shelling the German positions, and soaked by the icy rain, I prayed—for I still prayed in those days—that no one would be killed. Not my brother Henk, not our friend Dirk, not our British ally Jacob, not myself, but not a German soldier either. There had been enough killing. I hated so much the evil of it all. It was as if a poison had risen in us and was ravening our souls.

We had almost escaped when it happened. Henk and Dirk had been friends since they were small children. They had played everywhere in this area and had walked and bicycled to each other’s houses many times by many different routes. They knew every millimetre of the ground between. That is why we felt so confident that we could find our way at night and in such dreadful weather, and avoid the Germans, who we knew were only sparsely dug in in the wooded area along the western perimeter between them and the British. We thought we had succeeded, were just beginning to relax, when there he was in front of us, suddenly rising out of the earth.

I do not think he had seen us. I think he stood up, perhaps only to ease his aching limbs or rearrange himself in his uncomfortable slit-trench. Whatever it was, I think he was more surprised by us than we were by him. And this is
what saved us. For luckily he hesitated a moment. Jacob was holding his gun ready to fire, as he had since we set out. But an hour or more of sitting on our garden trolley in the cold and rain had stiffened his already weak body. He did manage to point the gun, but his fingers were so frozen that he fumbled when he tried to fire. As he did so, the German came to his senses and raised his weapon. At that moment Henk let go of the trolley and flung himself at me, pushing me to the ground and falling over me, meaning to protect me. So I did not see what happened next, only heard the shooting of Jacob’s gun. When it was over I learned that as Henk flung himself upon me, Dirk grabbed the gun from Jacob, pointed it and pulled the trigger, hitting the German in the face and killing him at once. A farmer’s son, Dirk was used to handling a shotgun, but he had never used anything like Jacob’s British sub-machine gun. What he did, he did in the heat of the moment, by instinct. Just as it was Henk’s brotherly instinct to push me to the ground and protect me with his own body. We were lucky that the German had not spotted us before he stood up, we were lucky that he hesitated, we were lucky that Dirk moved so quickly, we were lucky that Jacob’s gun was ready to fire, and we were lucky that the gun’s mechanism worked properly despite the conditions. As so often at such times, especially in war, the outcome depended on luck. Not on heroism, if heroism depends on rational thought, for there was no time for thought. Only on the irrational, arbitrary, unjust nature of luck.

To me it seemed that in the same instant that Henk pushed me to the ground he was pulling me to my feet again, and we were scurrying as fast as the trolley would allow through the trees and away from the gunfire and exploding shells and the dead German soldier and away from any of his comrades who might have been hugging the earth for dear life in their trenches nearby. As it was the shells of our allies which were making them keep their
heads down, I suppose another piece of luck was that we were not killed by what military politicians nowadays so wittily call ‘friendly fire’. (Will there never be an end to the cynical misuse of language by those who rule us.)

When at last we reached the farm at about three o’clock that morning, our reception by Mr and Mrs Wesseling was not as warmhearted as we might have hoped. Of course they were glad to see their son and to know that he was alive and unharmed. But they had not wanted him to run off and help the British in the first place and, I’m sorry to say, blamed Henk, because they believed he had persuaded Dirk to do it against their wishes. To be fair, I cannot blame them. Dirk was their only child. His mother was beside herself at the thought of losing him. Now he had returned from what his father called his ‘pigheaded prank’ in the middle of the night, bringing with him not only the friend who was in their bad books and the friend’s sister, but also a wounded British soldier who could not look after himself and whose presence was a death warrant with all our names on it if the Germans found him with us. In the circumstances, we could not expect them to be overjoyed at our arrival.

Jacob was in a poor state, almost unconscious and in great pain. We got him inside and cleaned him up and changed his sodden clothes for some of Dirk’s, which fitted him well because they were alike in size. After that, Henk and Dirk and I cleaned ourselves and changed in to dry things. Nothing much was said while this was going on. The Wesselings were good, practical country people who disliked upsets and displays of emotion and who responded to such a crisis with calm efficiency, doing what had to be done to restore life to everyday normality and order, whatever their thoughts and feelings about the difficulties we had inflicted upon them.

As soon as we were all ready, Mr and Mrs Wesseling
took Dirk and Henk with some food in to the parlour to discuss the situation, leaving me to tend to Jacob. Together we sat by the kitchen range eating wonderfully fresh bread, and pea soup which I fed to him because his hands were still not adept enough to handle a spoon. After the deprivations of the previous days this seemed like heaven. Heaven to be warm and dry again, heaven to feel well fed again, heaven to be out of danger and away from the noise of guns and bursting shells, heaven to be in a clean, well-ordered home with its comforting sights and sounds and smells. But not a heaven I could completely enjoy. For I thought of Mother and Father still trapped in the hell we had just escaped, with unknown perils still to face once the British retreat left them exposed to the Germans’ wrath. I prayed for them as I sat back in my chair and stared in to the fire.

Which is the last thing I remember before being woken by Henk hours later. Heaven had proved too much for me. After days of weariness and anxiety which I had not allowed myself to give in to, food, warmth, safety, and the comforting silence had sent me to sleep, a sleep so sound and deep that I had not heard the Wesselings and Henk return to the kitchen, where they had found Jacob as well as myself dead to the world, and had decided it was best to leave us where we were till morning. Mr and Mrs Wesseling had retired to bed. Through the rest of the night first Dirk, and then Henk, had kept watch from upstairs windows for any sign of approaching Germans. Only when the family was getting ready for the day’s work did Henk wake me with coffee, and quietly tell me what had been decided.

You will not know what a Dutch farmhouse was like in those days, so I must explain you, if you are to understand how we lived and what happened the next few weeks.

Like most of our farmhouses, the Wesselings’ had a large cowhouse attached to it. Both buildings had their own entrances, but you could get from one in to the other on the
inside by a connecting door in the dairy, which was convenient for bringing in the milk. The cowhouse was big enough for twenty or more cows, in two rows along the sides, each with its own standing-place, head to a manger, tail over a gutter for the manure, and an aisle between the rows wide enough for a hay cart, which entered the shed by big double doors in the end of the building. Above the cows, under the arch of the roof, a gallery ran all round, where hay and unused equipment were stored. The gallery was reached by a ladder, which, at the Wesselings’, was tied by its top rung to one end of the gallery. From its lowest rung a rope went up through a pulley attached to a crossbeam in the roof, by which the ladder was swung up in to the roof, out of the way, when not in use.

During their time ‘underground’ before the British arrived Dirk and Henk had built a hiding place in one corner of the gallery. First they erected walls made of wood from old boxes. Then they stacked bales of hay in front of the walls and piled loose hay over the bales. In the other corners they made similar stacks of hay, so that all looked very much the same. To enter their hiding place you forked loose hay from the bales and had to know exactly which bales to pull away to reveal the gap in the wooden walls. If you knew what to do, getting in and out was quick and easy. Of course, the Germans expected people to hide in hay. But unless they were very suspicious or had been tipped off, they only poked about with a hay fork or a bayonet and rarely took the time to dismantle a whole stack. It was too much trouble—and hard work.

Inside the hiding place, there was enough space for a double bunk, a small table with a couple of milking stools beside it for seats, and storage space made of orange boxes stacked one on the other, their open ends facing out, where were kept food and drink, basic utensils like knives and forks, plates, mugs, spare clothing, books, a chess set—everything they needed to survive for a day or two without
emerging. There was also a makeshift lavatory with a tight-closed lid. In the slope of the roof just above head height was a skylight, which provided fresh air, and from which, by standing on one of the stools, you could view the surrounding country on the front side of the house. A cosy little den, in fact. They liked it so much I think they even preferred it to being in the house. Do boys ever grow up?

Naturally, they were expected to work for their living. The Wesselings had lost all their labourers. There was far more to do than Mr Wesseling could manage on his own. So Dirk and Henk looked after the cows, milking them, feeding them, cleaning out the manure, which was inside work and did not expose them to any chance visitor. They worked the machine in the dairy that separated the cream from the milk for making butter. They fed and cleaned out the horses and pigs and hens. When it seemed safe to do so, they repaired broken drains and did whatever other odd jobs Mr Wesseling wanted done. Part of the farmhouse and outbuildings was protected by a row of trees, which helped break the wind blowing across the open fields. So it was fairly safe for them to work on that side of the farm, so long as one of them kept a look-out. A long track led from the main road, through the fields to the house. If anyone was seen approaching, there was enough time for Dirk and Henk to run in to the cowhouse and hide in their den. But just in case we were taken by surprise they had made a temporary bolt hole in each of the outbuildings. ‘We’re like rats,’ Henk said to me once when I was visiting in the days before the British came. ‘And we’re just as hard to catch!’ Dirk said. They were both grinning widely, as if they were enjoying themselves, which I think they were. Boys again, defying authority.

The danger was not only from squads of Germans coming with an official permit to search the place, but also from individual soldiers, or two or three together in their spare time on the hunt for food or delicacies they couldn’t
buy in the towns. They were not supposed to do this, it was strictly against orders. So they would behave with elaborate politeness and good humour, knowing that if the farmer complained to their officers, they would be in trouble. Especially they wanted Mrs Wesseling’s homemade sausages and her young cheese, but eggs and butter too, and fruit. They would pay well or barter with wristwatches or other items they thought might tempt a farmer or his wife. Because they were not supposed to be there, these unwelcome visitors were easy to handle, but it was important they saw nothing suspicious which they might report to their superiors, who would then certainly arrive with an official search party. Or which, just as bad, they might use to blackmail the farmer into giving them whatever they wanted whenever they cared to turn up. For who knows, they might only be pretending to be ordinary off-duty soldiers hunting for food, while actually being on the hunt for clues to Resistance activity. Most suspicious of all would have been two fit young men hanging around the buildings or any sign of more people being present on the farm than could be accounted for.

It was not only German soldiers who came calling. Dutch people from the towns, where food and fuel were in short supply, would arrive begging for help. In the months after the battle, during the Winter of the Hunger when things became desperate and even the Germans were in difficulty, so many came trudging up the track we almost had to defend ourselves against them. And though these were our own people, we did not dare trust them. Any of them might have been members of the NSB (
Nationaal Socialistische Beweging
), the Dutch Nazi party—that shameful blot on our history, which we try to forget but should always remember, for it reminds us of what, without vigilance, any of us can become. Those people would have given us away out of fanatical ideology, that eternal scourge of the human race. But others, the majority of our nation,
which we like to think is the most honest in all the world? When people are desperate they behave as they never would in better times. It is easy to condemn such behaviour, but only if you have never been in such circumstances yourself.