The Truth is Dead (6 page)

At the end of October Doctor Sol invited us to his daughter’s wedding. Addie was reluctant, at first. Despite everything, he still has a little grumble, just now and again, about “filthy rich Semites”. We were nervous too, of course. Neither of us had been to a Jewish wedding before, and we didn’t know what to expect. And it was a bit strange, what with the men and the women separated most of the time. Late in the afternoon, Rachel, Doctor Sol’s other daughter, and I were going to the lavatory. She giggled and pulled me towards a pair of doors that weren’t quite closed. Frantic music poured through the crack. I peeped in, and there was Addie, dancing with his arms around bearded men. He had a little round cap on his head, and he seemed really happy. Laughing. I realized I’d never seen him laugh before.

It nearly broke my heart.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in February 1908, aged eighteen, in the hope of gaining a place at the Academy of Arts. After several unsuccessful attempts to make it as an artist, he left the capital in 1913. However, his six poverty-stricken years there had helped to formalize his anti-Semitism – views which would form the basis of his policy when he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

THE BLUE-EYED BOY

Linda Newbery

“Oi, Brett – shift yourself!”

The voice seemed to float towards him from a distance. Brett’s eyes flickered open; it took a moment to remember where he was, why he was slumped against a hot window. The coach. He was on the coach. His mouth was open; he might even have been dribbling. The driver was slowing; they were entering a small town, a cluster of buildings around a brick church.

Joel already had his coat on, rucksack on his lap. “You were snoring!”

“Liar!”

“Wish I had earplugs.”

Brett blinked himself properly awake as the coach pulled into a car park. Mr Wade, head of history, was standing up front beside the driver’s seat, holding the mike.

“OK, this is Messines. We’ll spend an hour and a half here. We’re having a tour of the church – remember I told you the crypt was used as an aid post in the war? Then you can look at the museum. Back on the coach by four, everyone – and don’t forget it’s a
church
. No loud voices, no running, no inappropriate behaviour. Trudi, no chewing. Get rid of it.” He pointed to the bin bag by the exit.

Brett shrugged on his jacket and shouldered his rucksack, glancing up at the clumped-together church with its odd-shaped tower. The other places had been more like it: trenches, tunnels, that huge bomb crater. Mr Wade had told them to imagine themselves as young soldiers about to go over the top, and yeah, he really could. But
this
…

“Fierce fighting took place around here from the autumn of 1914 and all through the war,” Mr Wade was saying. “And see Messines Ridge there? Not a spectacular height, but it gave the Germans a commanding position. We’ll get a better view from the bell tower.”

Brett clumped down the steps behind Trudi. He wasn’t about to get excited at the thought of tramping round some dismal old church.

As the young priest left his lodgings, he wondered, as he wondered every morning, How long can it go on, this war? How much more can we take?

Winter would soon be here, the long dark days, and now the armies had dug themselves in as if no one expected to move far. Months ago, at the start, it had seemed the Germans would sweep right through Belgium, into France and down to Paris, but they’d halted here, brought up against the British and Belgian armies. Stalemate. But it had come at a terrible price.

Already the shelling had battered the town of Messines and the priest’s beloved church. It grieved him, gave him a physical pain, to see it damaged, surely beyond repair. When the war is over, he thought, we must build anew: build an even more splendid church, to stand against brutality and suffering.

And, now that the Germans had taken Messines, he was on the wrong side of the line. He could have fled, but Father Antonius said it was their duty to stay. They had to give help wherever it was needed. The farmers and their families couldn’t leave; nor could the people in nearby villages. The young priest had travelled in Germany before the war and spoke the language, so had been sent by Father Antonius to comfort and pray with the wounded soldiers who straggled back from the front line.

Soldiers! Some of them were hardly more than boys. They hadn’t chosen war, any more than the Belgians had, or the French, or the British. He prayed now as he walked, for these innocents caught up in the fighting, pitched against the deadly new machine guns that ripped flesh to pieces without even pausing for breath.

Now that the Germans had discovered the church crypt, they were using it as an aid post. The priest crossed himself as he approached the ruins and picked his way through the rubble of the cloisters. What would today bring? How many young men were up there on the ridge, healthy, full of vigour, who would tonight be groaning in hospital beds? Or, worse, lying in a makeshift morgue, awaiting burial? He shuddered. It seemed beyond human endurance.

God must have some purpose in this, the priest thought; he clung to that belief.

Down in the crypt, with its stone arches, the air struck cold. A morose group of Bavarian soldiers huddled there, drab and dirty in their field grey. Two sergeants – one on a camp bed, another shrouded in a blanket – were being tended by nurses, while the others waited. A young lance corporal, slightly built, dark-haired, sat on the steps, drawing in a sketchbook by the dim light from above. Only the man on the bed, who was groaning and barely conscious, seemed seriously injured. The nurses had only basic equipment: jugs of water, bowls, bandages, disinfectant.

The priest made his enquiries, expressed sympathy, offered help – though what could he do?

The elder of the two nurses seemed resentful of his intrusion. “They’ll be moved back to the field hospital,” she told him, “as soon as there’s transport.”

He nodded, understanding that space would be needed here for more casualties later in the day. He moved towards the young man on the steps, noticing a bloodstained bandage around one ankle.

“Good day, my friend,” said the priest. “You do well to occupy yourself, and take your mind away from your injury. May I see?” He leaned closer.

At first the lance corporal looked inclined to snatch his sketchbook out of view, but then, with a slight shrug, he offered it to the priest. In pencil, with a delicate touch, he had drawn the arches of the crypt, and the countess’s grave.

“Very fine!” marvelled the priest. “Fine work indeed! Are you an artist in civilian life?”

“Yes. I am.” There was something wary and guarded about this lance corporal. In his glance, shyness was mixed with arrogance.

“That’s Leo, that is,” said a corporal with a gashed head, wincing as the nurse dabbed at it none too gently. “You hardly see him without he’s drawing something.”

“Remarkable!” said the priest, handing back the sketchbook. “Well,” he added to Leo, “I hope you’ll soon be able to return to your artistic calling.”

The young man nodded, and thanked him. The priest was struck by the steely blue of his eyes. A fire burned there, a longing. And the priest’s heart filled with compassion for these young lads whose lives were being taken from them, to be gambled in this huge game of chance.

“And here,” said the guide, “you see drawings and paintings by wounded German soldiers.”

This wasn’t Brett’s idea of a museum – junk shop, more like. Just a shabby collection of letters, bits of uniform, rusted grenades, ancient black and white photographs. The paintings weren’t much either: fussy drawings and splodgy watercolours. Churches, graveyards, trees. The only one he liked was a drawing of a dog – flop-eared, rough-coated, bright-eyed. It reminded him of Bobby, his nan’s fox terrier.

That night, in the hostel near Ypres, he sat with the other Year 10s for the daily writing-up of their journals.
We stopped at a church
, he began, and that was about all he could think of. He glanced across at Trudi, who was writing busily. Leaning across, he read:
The best bit was when Joel found the grave of his great-great-grandfather in the German cemetery.

Yeah. He could put something about that. The grave of Gefreiter Samuel Goldstein, ranked among countless others like soldiers standing to attention, was the only one marked with a star.

“What’s that for?” Brett had asked.

“It’s a Star of David,” Joel said. “To show he was Jewish.”

“So are
you
Jewish then?”

“Course. Didn’t you know?”

Brett shrugged. Didn’t matter one way or the other.

“So you’re German?” Trudi asked Joel.

“Half. My dad’s family have lived in Berlin ever since eighteen hundred and something. They own a whole load of jewellery shops.”

“Cool,” said Trudi.

“So, wait.” Brett was trying to keep up. “If we were in the war – like,
now
– you’d be on the other side?”

Joel grinned. “You got it. Faster than a speeding bullet.”

Joel’s great-great-grandad was killed in 1914
, Brett wrote, and added, copying Trudi:
His name was Samuel Goldstein.

Next day, returning to the crypt, the priest found no patients at all – just the two nurses, cleaning and tidying, making ready. High on the ridge, the guns had been rumbling since first light. It was bitterly cold. The priest wished the nurses good day, and asked after yesterday’s casualties, the Bavarians. They’d been sent down to the field hospital, he was told. The younger nurse, the pretty fair-haired one, coloured up; he guessed she’d taken a fancy to one of the soldiers. It would be the blue-eyed boy with the intent gaze, he felt sure.

As he wasn’t needed here, he decided to walk the three miles by road to the hospital, well back from the German line. Words of comfort and cheer, a prayer, might do the men some good. Sometimes he was called upon to deliver last rites, or hear a confession. But he did not reach the field hospital that day. Father Antonius intercepted him in the ruins of the town square and directed him to a nearby farm, where a local woman was dying from pneumonia.

Next day, he set off into the biting wind. The hospital was a cluster of tents, the ground much muddied. Someone was groaning horribly; another voice pleaded for morphine. The sister, too busy to be interrupted, frowned and shook her head at the priest.

Then a man recognized him and called out; it was the corporal who had spoken to him in the crypt. His head and arm swathed in bandages, he propped himself up painfully in his truckle bed.

The priest hurried over. “How are you, my friend?”

“As well as can be expected,” said the corporal with a grimace. “We lost Leo, though.”

“What?”

“He died this morning.”

“Died?”
The priest was aghast. “But I thought his wound was only slight!”

“Sepsis, they said. Took hold very quickly.”

The priest crossed himself, and prayed silently. Although he’d seen Leo only once, the thin face and yearning blue eyes had seared themselves into his memory.

“He started raving,” the man went on. “Insisted on being moved away from the bloke in the next bed – reckoned he’d be contaminated. The nurses moved him along the tent just to give us all a bit of peace. Then they both died, anyway.”

“It is God’s will,” said the priest.

The corporal nodded without much conviction. “He was a funny chap, Leo. Brave as a lion – rescued his officer last month, dragged him in under heavy fire, cool as you like. But he kept himself to himself. His drawings, though… He gave me one.” He gestured towards his pack, which lay near by on the tarpaulin floor. “Have a look. That pocket there.”

The priest unfastened the flap and took out the folded paper inside. It was a drawing of a dog – a flop-eared terrier, rough-coated, bright-eyed.

“Loved animals, Leo did,” said the man. “That stray dog turned up near our lines. Foxy, Leo called it. Wouldn’t be separated from it. Fed it from his own rations.”

The priest looked at the pencilled signature. “So his name wasn’t really Leo, then?”

“No!” The man laughed. “That was just my nickname for him. Leo, short for Leonardo. Our own little Leonardo da Vinci. Why don’t you take it? You’ll look after it better than I will.”

In Ypres the three teachers were rounding up the Year 10s, who were investigating the marketplace’s cafes, bars and chocolate shops. Chocolate could wait till tomorrow, Mr Wade insisted, shooing them along. Tonight they were heading for the Menin Gate, and the last post ceremony.

Arriving early, they had time to look at the Memorial to the Missing, a massive arch of brick and stone that spanned the road, each face carved with thousands and thousands of names.

Mr Wade gave the usual lecture about behaving respectfully during the short ceremony: no chewing, pushing, shoving or even talking. “It takes place at eight every evening, and it’s a solemn occasion. Yes, Trudi, I know it’s ancient history to you. But it’s important to remember the World War. The War to End All Wars, people called it; and, well, there
have
been wars since, of course – Vietnam and Iraq to name just two – but none that involved as many countries as the World War. Not since the peace treaty of 1918.”

A small crowd gathered by the arch; police on motorbikes stopped the traffic. Then uniformed buglers, three of them, sent out into the spring evening their plaintive notes, which seemed to lodge in Brett’s chest, and wrench at him. Tears sprang from his eyes; he blinked them away before anyone saw.

It was over in minutes, then the crowd dispersed and the traffic flowed again.

“Is that
it
?” said one of the girls. “That’s why we’ve come all this way?”

Mr Wade made himself tall and took a deep breath, ready to explain all over again.

Brett nudged Trudi and Joel. “Come on! Let’s make a dash for it.” If they were quick, they’d find a chocolate shop that was still open.

The funeral was conducted by an army padre. There were three to be buried, in simple wooden coffins, and only three other mourners besides the priest: the young nurse and two patients from the hospital, one on crutches. The corporal was too ill to attend. It was a brief, almost businesslike service. There were so many burials that this was a routine event. A chill wind cut in from the east, beneath a cloudy sky. Up on the ridge, the guns boomed. Prayers were said, responses mumbled. Tears coursed down the cheeks of the young nurse.