Postcards From No Man's Land (3 page)

All this I remember with such perfect clarity, it makes my eyes water even now.

The next day, Monday, many more British soldiers arrived by parachute and glider. We watched the aeroplanes as they flew over Wolfheze. And as the day before, red, white, brown, green and blue parachutes filled the sky. A thrilling sight.

But by then some of the soldiers who had passed by on Sunday had come back, tired and dirty, and placed artillery guns in the meadow near the church, which they were firing all the time towards Arnhem. Mother made sandwiches, which we took to them, because they had so little food. They were very happy to see what they called ‘the second wave’ bringing in fresh comrades and supplies. ‘We’ll be okay now,’ they said, ‘soon have the Hun on the run!’ They explained that their orders were to capture the bridge at Arnhem so that the main army, which was coming up from Nijmegen, could cross the river and cut off the German army occupying Holland. It would help to end the war very soon, they said. They were cheerful and made jokes, teasing each other, and me too, and flirted after the sandwiches. So different from the Germans. But of course we were glad to see them, and that makes a difference. It was such a relief, no one minded that our electricity and gas had been cut off and that our lovely old village was being battered by bombs and shells. ‘The price of freedom,’ said Papa. He was restless, wanting to help but not knowing how. The air-raid precaution volunteers kept warning us to be careful and stay inside. It was too soon yet to be sure we were safe. German soldiers were in the countryside north of the village, where some fighting was going on. And the Resistance reported heavy fighting round the Arnhem bridge.

In the evening a neighbour told us that the Hotel Schoonoord on the Utrechtseweg, at the corner of the main crossroad in the village—one of our best hotels until the Germans commandeered it for themselves—was being prepared as a hospital for wounded British soldiers, and volunteers were needed to help. Already casualties were arriving. I wanted to go, but Papa said no. Nowadays, I suppose, I would not have asked, but then life was different. A girl in her teens did as she was told by her parents, and though I pleaded. Papa flatly refused. Since the night before he had not been as optimistic as Mama and me.

‘Why have the soldiers returned?’ he asked now. ‘Why have they set up guns in the meadow? Why are they firing them all the time? And why do they need to turn a hotel into a hospital, if the army will be here from the south tomorrow, as the gunners say? Why is all this happening if everything is going well?’

‘You know a battle is not a nice neat game you can plan down to the last detail,’ Mama told him. ‘It’s a messy business and unpredictable, it ebbs and flows, and people get hurt.’

‘That may be so,’ said Father, ‘but until we know who is ebbing and who is flowing and which part of the beach our house is on, our daughter is staying with us at home.’

Wasn’t it bad enough, he went on, that their son was out there somewhere, alive or dead no one knew, without allowing their only daughter to risk her life also? Did Mother want them to have a childless old age? Who would look after them then?

When Father was in such a determined and pessimistic mood Mother knew better than to oppose him. So at home I stayed with only Sooji, my childhood teddybear, to nurse while I watched the soldiers from my bedroom window. Every time one of their guns went off, the blast shook our house, rattling the windows and making the dust fly.

That night, for the second time, we slept with our
clothes on—or tried to sleep. The sound of fighting seemed to be all around us. And after a while more troops, along with jeeps and even trucks with caterpillar tracks, went by the bottom of our street.

By six o’clock on Tuesday morning there was a lot of noise. Soldiers from the guns came for water, and warned us that the Germans would probably start firing back, so we should be careful. They were right. Shells started exploding in the meadow and even near us soon afterwards. For the first time we sheltered in the cellar. The attack did not last long, but it dampened even Mama’s confidence a little.

But we had no time to brood. Almost as soon as the shelling stopped we heard a commotion upstairs. When we got there we found two soldiers in our front room holding a third man between them who was bleeding badly from a wound in his side. It was a shock to see these three men, who seemed to fill the room, in their dirt-covered battle-dress and bulky packs of equipment and clattering weapons, standing in their big muddy boots among our best furniture, and one of them dripping blood everywhere.

Somehow, I suppose, till that moment, the war, the fighting, had been outside, separate from us. Now suddenly it was happening right inside our home. Papa and I stared at them from the doorway as if turned to stone by the sight. But not Mother. She was always good in a crisis. It brought out the best in her. I once saw her round on a German officer who was inspecting our house to see if it was suitable as a billet for himself, and give him such a fierce dressing down, as if he were a naughty schoolboy, for daring to cross our threshold without cleaning his boots and removing his cap, that he decided not to honour us with his presence, but sent his corporal instead, who soon ended up living in our garden shed, saying he was more comfortable there rather than having to face Mother’s disdain every day. Now she did not hesitate one second.

‘Geertrui,’ she said, ‘bring warm water and disinfectant.’ And to Father, ‘Barend, bring the first-aid box.’ As she spoke she was arranging the cushions on the sofa and, as she had very little English, was saying ‘
Komen, komen
,’ and motioning to the soldiers to lay their comrade down.

When I returned with the water, they had removed all the gear and outer clothing from the wounded man, who was lying on the sofa, grimacing in great pain. Mother was kneeling by his side, inspecting the wound. Father had brought the first-aid box and was busy removing the man’s boots. The poor boy was no older than my brother Henk, his face was smudged with dirt and sweat, but even so I could see he looked deathly pale. His friends were talking quietly to him, trying to be cheerful, telling him he’d be fine now. One of them lit a cigarette, and held it to his mouth so he could smoke it without using his hands. He was trying to smile, but there was fear in his eyes, and he kept flinching as Mother tended him. The wound was terrible.

In the four years of our occupation, I had seen wounded soldiers only after the recent air raids, and then always at a distance. This was the first time close to. And what was more, close to in our own home, our reception room, where until now there had only ever been polite guests in their best clothes, and parties for St Nicholas and our birthdays and our parents’ wedding anniversaries. Happy times. Family times. Celebrations. Now, here was this heart-breakingly young man, his blood draining onto our sofa, his pain silently filling the room, along with the smell of sweat and grime, and the unfamiliar sweet odour of English cigarettes. I felt so sorry for him, lying there quite helpless, and wanted to hold him, and somehow to magic his pain away and give him back his body whole and lively, as it must have been hardly an hour ago. It was at that moment, too, that the awfulness of what was happening, and what had been happening to us for all those dreadful years, became clear to me properly for the first time.

Mother stood up and said to me, ‘Ask one of the others to come with us.’ I chose the one who looked oldest and told him in my best English that Mother would like to speak to him. He, Father and I followed Mother into the kitchen. She wanted me to explain that the wound was so bad she could not do anything to help, and that though she was not a doctor, she felt sure the poor man would die if he did not receive proper attention very soon. When I translated this, the soldier nodded. Now that he did not have to appear cheerful for the sake of his comrade, he looked weary and dispirited. His wounded friend was called Geordie, he said, the other one Norman, and he was Ron. They had been ordered to come to our house and ask to use it as an observation post, because our upstairs rooms had good views of the meadow and along our street. They feared the Germans might come this way. But they had been caught in the shelling, and Geordie had been hit by a piece of shrapnel. They must stay at their post. The only thing he could do was get a message back to their unit and ask for a medical orderly to be sent.

Patching up the wound would not be enough, Mother said. It needed surgery. Father agreed. ‘We hear a hotel in the village has been converted to a hospital,’ he said. ‘You must get him there.’ Ron did not know where the hotel was, so I explained: up the hill in to the centre of the village, less than a kilometre.

‘It would take both Norm and me to carry him that far,’ said Ron. ‘We can’t both leave our post, not even for a badly wounded man.’

‘Then the boy will die,’ said Mother when I translated. ‘It must be possible to do something.’

‘We could take him,’ I said, ‘Papa and me. We could push him there on the garden trolley.’

‘No,’ said Papa instantly. ‘It would be too dangerous.’

I said, ‘The shelling has stopped. And anyway they’re aiming for the guns. We would be going away from them.
We’ll be safe, Papa.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll go on my own. You must stay with your mother.’

‘Mama, speak to him, please.’

Mother looked firmly at Father and said, ‘Geertrui is right. It would take two. If you won’t have her with you, I’ll come.’

‘No, no,’ said Father, agitated now. ‘We can’t leave her alone with the soldiers. It isn’t right. It isn’t safe. I won’t allow it.’

Mother took Father’s hands in hers and said gently to him, ‘Think, my dear. We owe it to these people. They’ve come to help us. We must do what we can to help them. And think of our daughter. Isn’t it natural she wants to play her part? When this horror is over, what would you have her say, that she had to stand by and watch while others took all the risks? That when the moment came, she wasn’t allowed to help. And it is right, isn’t it, that we get this poor boy to hospital? Think if he were Henk.’

Just as Mother could never resist Father when he was hotly determined, so Father could never resist Mother when she was lovingly logical. He used to say he would have been nothing without her. They were so devoted to each other that I do not think they could ever have parted. Papa’s greatest fear always was that he would somehow lose Mama. Throughout the years of occupation he had been undaunted. But now that freedom was in sight (or so we thought at that moment) his nerve suddenly seemed to falter. It surprised me at the time, I even thought how weak he was. But now I am old in my turn, and have been through so much more than I had then, I think I understand. It is when success seems to be almost in your grasp that you become aware of how fragile is human existence, and of the unending possibility, almost the inevitability, of failure. And this makes you hesitate.

Father was silent for a while, then breathed a sigh.
‘You’re right,’ he said, and, cupping Mother’s face in his hands, kissed her delicately and with such privacy that I turned away. And heard Papa say quietly, ‘These years have been possible only because of you. I couldn’t survive without you.’ And Mother murmur in reply, ‘It won’t come to that, my dear.’

Then the bustle began. The trolley was prepared with blankets and cushions to make Geordie’s journey as comfortable as we could. Ron and Norman lifted him in. Goodbyes were said with our best attempts at cheeriness. And Papa and I set off towards Utrechtseweg and the Schoonoord.

On the way we met friends who were carrying a few possessions in bags. They had heard that the battle was not going well for the British at the bridge, so they were leaving their house because they were sure there would be fighting in the village and thought their cellar wasn’t sound enough to protect them. Further on we met a group of people loaded with baggage, all of them from Klingelbeekseweg, on the other side of the railway, not far from Arnhem. They told us that everyone who lived there had been ordered to leave by the Germans. But where should they go? they asked. They had also heard that people in Beneden-dorpsweg, which was on our side of the railway, were being cleared out too. Papa looked anxiously at me. We both knew without saying it that this news was all bad, for it meant the Germans must be pushing the British back from the town towards us. ‘We must hurry,’ said Papa, ‘and get back to Mother.’

As we approached Utrechtseweg the noise of guns was much louder, coming from the other side of the railway to the north of the village, about a kilometre away, as well as from the direction of Arnhem to the east. We were both breathless and sweating, as much from fear and excitement as from the exertion of pushing the trolley. Geordie was being bounced about, poor boy, because of us going so fast
over the cobbles. But he was unconscious, I think, for his eyes were closed and he made no sound.

The Schoonoord was an awful sight. The veranda where we had often sat for coffee was full of wounded men lying on stretchers, waiting to be attended. I was surprised to see a few German soldiers among the British. How could the British lie beside them so calmly, I wondered. One was even handing a German a cigarette. I was appalled! Inside, every room was packed with men lying on stretchers and mattresses and even on the bare floor. Because there were so many the hotel across the road had also been taken over. The smell of blood and dirt and sweat was almost overpowering. It turned my stomach. Women and even boys from the village were helping as best they could. I saw Meik and Joti, two friends from schooldays, washing wounded men, Meik as always in a hurry and Joti putting on her most cheerful face. The soldiers were amazingly calm and patient, even though some must have been in terrible pain. One young man, he could not have been older than I, had five open bullet wounds in his arms. While Hendrika, the daughter of the hotel owner and a schoolteacher in normal times, was washing the poor boy, they came to take him to the operating room. She dried him off and tried to stiffen him with hope before they carried him away.