Postcards From No Man's Land (22 page)

‘Yes, I know. Of course, Geertrui can tell you quite a lot, but that’s not what you mean and anyway is only how she remembers it. And memory—. Well, memory is not to be trusted, in my experience. Memory tells what happened the way memory wants it to have been. This is my opinion anyway.’

‘That’s what my father says. He always accuses my grandmother of inventing my grandfather. He says the man she talks about isn’t the one who existed, but the man she
wishes he had been.’

‘And what does Sarah say to that?’

Jacob laughed. ‘She hits him with the frying pan.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. Metaphorically … Figure of speech?’

‘
Ach
, yes,’ laughing, ‘I see! Yes, I imagine she does. Oh, but now you must look, because we are passing the fields where the men landed.’

A broad flat area of ground, blond after harvest, trees along its far-off edges, and some, silver birches, here by the railway. Almost exactly as he remembered in photographs taken from the air during the landings and from the ground soon afterwards. For a weird moment what he’d read came together with what he was seeing and he felt he was there, not now but then, not nineteen ninety-five but nineteen forty-four. With his grandfather, a man then only a few years older than he, now. Daan’s age in fact. He looked up at the sunny cloud-rising sky, and thought: Jumping together into the up there not knowing what danger lay waiting in the down here.

James Sims:

An American crewman came back and told us we were going down to seven hundred feet [214 metres] for the runin. We put on our close-fitting helmets and adjusted our rubber chin guards. We hooked up and then heaved the kitbags containing six mortar bombs, pick, shovel, rifle and small pack on to our legs, securing them with special web straps. As each of us had at least a hundred pounds [46 kgs] of equipment we would be sure of a rapid descent and little oscillation, and would be a difficult target for enemy machine gunners. We stood upright and closed up behind one another in single file. Our right hand held the kitbag grip and our left was on the shoulder of the man in front. Someone cracked, ‘Pass right down the car, please!’ Another joker plucked at my parachute and said, ‘Blimey,
cowboy, this isn’t a chute, it’s an old army blanket.’

It was essential that we followed the man in front out quickly as any hesitation could mean we would be hopelessly scattered on the DZ. Lieutenant Woods stood framed in the doorway, the slipstream plucking impatiently at the scrim netting on his helmet. The red light glowed steadily and then the green light winked on. ‘Go!’ The lieutenant vanished. We shuffled along the heaving deck of the Dakota … three … four … five … an American crewman had set up a cine camera and was filming our exit … six … seven … eight … a chap from Maidstone half turned and shouted something with a grin but it was lost in the roar of the engines … nine … ten … eleven … through the doorway I could see a huge Hamilcar glider on tow right alongside us; one wing of it was on fire but the glider pilot gave the thumbs-up sign … twelve … thirteen … fourteen … the man in front of me hunched over slightly as he went out. Almost before his helmet disappeared I jumped but the slipstream caught me and whirled me around, winding up my rigging lines. I was forced to let go of my kitbag grip in an effort to try and stop the winding up process, for if it reached the canopy I was finished. The roar of the aircraft engines had been cut off and for the first time since leaving England I could distinguish other sounds. All around me parachutists were disgorging from Dakotas and I found myself in the middle of a blizzard of silk. The parachutes were all the colours of the rainbow; and it was an unforgettable sight. I was conscious of taking part in one of the greatest airborne descents in the history of warfare but this exhilaration was tempered by the trouble I was in. Luckily the twisting rigging lines had reversed their motion and I spun beneath them as they unwound. I did not feel much like an eagle as I fell—the experience was more like being hanged. Although my canopy was now fully developed I faced another problem. My right leg hung straight down with the kitbag on it and I was quite unable
to reach the grip to pull it up again.

Down below was a scene of orderly confusion as myriads of ant-like figures scurried over the DZ towards the different coloured flares marking battalion rendezvous areas. The sounds of shouts and shots drifted up, punctuated by bursts of machine-gun fire. The Americans had dropped us right on target and I had no difficulty locating the yellow flare, which showed where the 2nd Battalion was forming up. Everywhere order was developing out of seeming chaos as the airborne soldiers quickly organised themselves. The ground, which a moment before had seemed so far beneath me, came spinning up at an alarming rate. I was not looking forward to the landing, as my leg still dangled helplessly below me, weighted down with the kitbag. We had been told that to land in this way would almost certainly result in a broken leg, and any second I was going to find out.

Wham! I hit the deck with a terrific jolt, but all in one piece, and immediately struggled out of my parachute harness, slicing through the cords that held my kitbag to pull out my rifle. That was the first priority. In the distance time-bombs exploded, sending up great fountains of earth. They had been dropped twenty-four hours previously in an effort to persuade the Germans that this was just another bombing raid. Some hopes! [
Sims pp
55–7]

Moments later they arrived at Oosterbeek, the station no more than a suburban halt in the bottom of a deep cutting, the platform newish looking, no buildings, only a shelter. A few people got off with them, some carrying flowers, but not the crowd Jacob had expected. Weren’t there to be many at the ceremony? Last year the BBC news had shown a thick mass of people crammed in to the cemetery, but that had been for the fiftieth anniversary.

They climbed the steps to the road. Here more people were on the move, across the bridge over the railway and
right, in to a road marked by a discreet signpost, ‘Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery’. Well-heeled detached houses, very like an English middle-class private estate: ample well-treed gardens, some with tall clipped hedges, some with fences, the bourgeois battlements of privacy, neatly cut grass verges by the road, trees lining the side where the railway ran in its cutting. The same railway along which the paratroopers had tried to make their way into Arnhem, only to be stopped by the Germans and surrounded in the village. But these houses would not have been built then; it would have been wooded country with the village starting on the other side of the tracks.

After two or three hundred metres the road turned sharp left. Up ahead, cars and coaches were parked among trees that formed a forecourt. Two square brick towers with arched doors in each side stood at the entrance to the cemetery. To his left, over a chain-link fence that struck him as somehow inappropriate, and a border of low bushes on the other side, Jacob could see the expanse of the cemetery, the regimented lines of regulation-shaped white gravestones almost obscured by a packed crowd of spectators. Only when he and Tessel were inside and had found themselves a place on the fringe could he also see that the centre of the graveyard, a wide grass cross formed by the layout of the graves, was completely filled with old people seated in rows and facing a canopied platform at the centre of the cross, the men mostly in blue blazers and many in red or blue berets. For a moment he felt it was as if they had just got up out of the graves to attend a concert. And, he thought, in a peculiar sense they had, for these must be the survivors, their wives and, no doubt, the wives of some of those who had not survived.

He was astonished at the thousands of people (six, ten?) who were gathered in this parade ground of the dead. 1,757 graves, he learned, 253 of them belonging to unknown soldiers whose remains could not be identified. And these
still being added to as more remains were found in forgotten burial plots intended during the battle as temporary graves.

Tessel took his arm and edged them down the line, squeezing apologetically past people who blocked her view.

‘We should get as close as we can to your grandfather’s grave,’ she muttered. And then she stopped and pointed. ‘There, you see, in the third row, with the red rose bush almost as high as the gravestone.’

‘Yes, yes. I see.’

‘Your grandmother and Geertrui planted the rose the last time they were here together. Daan comes to prune it and feed it twice each year.’

The sight put a silence on him. He had seen photographs. (This is your grandfather as a little boy. You used to stand just like that when you were his age. This is your grandfather as a young man with his motorbike. He was a terror then. This is your grandfather just before we got married. He was so handsome. Here we are on our last holiday together at Weston. This is your grandfather in his uniform.) And he had liked that. Used to pore over them, wishing he had known the man whose name he bore and who he was supposed to resemble in so many ways. But this—standing here near his grandfather’s grave bearing the bones of a young man not much older than himself—this was not the same. Photographs were no more than a trace of shadow, not the thing itself, not the person.

There in front of him, two body-lengths away and his own height below, was a reality. The body. Or what was left of it by now. The body but not the man. In some way he had never faced before, never thought of before, he knew at once that what was left of the man, what was essential of him, was not under the ground with the physical remains. What there was of his grandfather was standing right here in his grandson’s town boots peering at the dead man’s grave.

The thought was unnerving, as if a ghost had
materialised inside him. He took a deep breath and looked away, up into the sky. By now the sun was fully out, in a dome of cloudless blue arching above the carpet of seated survivors fringed with a border of people standing five or six deep, from babes in arms to old men with walking-sticks. Nearby, a squad of young paratroopers in their red berets and camouflage jackets, a pair of middle-aged women in bright Sunday best, a troop of boys in their Nikes, a bevy of girls in white T-shirts and jeans, three men in grey suits, their jackets over their arms and their sleeves rolled up. All quiet. Not entirely silent. Not hushed as in church, not subdued as at a funeral, not reverential or passive, not even still, for there was movement here and there, comings and goings, and a constant trickle of new arrivals joining the throng. But no bustling officials, no fussing, no hint of pomp and circumstance. They were waiting, and yet they were not waiting. Rather as if what they were waiting for was already with them. There and not there, he thought. Being and not being. Absent presence.

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
]