The Gates of Rutherford (13 page)

“As I understand it, Netherfield was quite mobile and he has a family to feed. Five children.”

“He is . . . mobile, as you put it. He had a foot injury, which has healed. A
bullet
in the foot, I might add.”

“You mean a self-inflicted injury.”

“It's impossible to say.”

“But you think it.”

“However the injury was caused, we took him back. He was difficult. Nervous. A lack of concentration. When one of the looms had a fault, he simply went off his head. Tripped and fell. Fractured his skull.”

“Where is he now?”

“The cottage hospital.”

“And his family . . . ?”

This was the bone of contention. Octavia had swiftly replied to the original message saying that his family should receive a proportion of Netherfield's wage while he was ill. William had replied that the mill was not a charity, and that it had been foolishness to employ the man in the first place.

“William,” Octavia said now, in a low voice. “There are men returning all the time with conditions like Netherfield's.”

“The man was of weaker character before he left, and is weaker now. He is unemployable, and a danger to others. There was only an
interruption in the loom, a blockage. Hardly a cause for demented behavior.”

Octavia narrowed her eyes. “You think he's bluffing.”

“I think he is a slacker.”

“And all men with that condition?”

“If you're speaking of neurasthenia . . . most probably.”

Octavia took a very deep breath. Slowly, she gathered her things together. She stood up. “I shall say good night,” she replied wearily.

She walked to the door, where she paused a second with her hand on the latch. Then she turned back and gave her husband a wan smile. “You're wrong to call it neurasthenia,” she said. “Neurasthenia is for officers. When it affects a lowly private like Netherfield, it's shell shock.”

She went out, and William listened to the sound of footsteps as she made her way upstairs.

T
he prisoners were singing.

They sang
Argonnerwald um Mitternacht
just as they used to. A marching song. In the midnight forest of Argonne, a sapper stands on guard; a little star high above in the sky . . .
Ein Sternlein hoch am Himmel stand . . .
So it went. A stamping, striding song about stars.

Frederick understood its sentiment, though. Standing on guard and looking up at a dark sky full of stars in the depths of winter, and wondering why it was—how it could be—that the stars still came out, and the moon filled from a new fingernail crescent to a full face, and how it was that the sun rose again in the morning, and the clouds raced overhead.

It had never seemed right that such things still went implacably on when everything was destroyed underneath those skies. He used to believe that one day the earth would simply stop. There would be no more stars, or clouds, or full moons, or sunlight. One day it would just start to rain fire and carry on until mankind was obliterated.
Like the Bible stories of floods and fire. Man deserved it. And if he didn't deserve it now, when would he?

He never knew that God existed in his soul until then. When others lost their beliefs, he held on to his. He believed in something other than himself, and he believed it because . . . well,
Ein Sternlein hoch am Himmel stand.
Stars stayed in the sky and the world rotated, despite everything. That was proof enough for him.

The rain continued here in England all the way through April. It was very wearing. They went out every day from Catterick and they got off close to the village, and they broke stones and they dug the route of the road. And sang. Someone told him that it was to make a better route through for the milk to be delivered to the station farther up the line: that there were farms around here who suffered in winter trying to get vehicles along the narrow gullies that passed for roads. And so, with all the others, he dug and hammered his way.

This morning, one of the guards had stood, hands on hips, when they were sitting drinking their tea from the glass bottles brought out from the camp.

“You're in England now. Sing English songs,” he told them. Did anyone know one, he asked. Nobody did. Frederick sat quietly, watching the guard's loathing gaze, and then he put up his hand. “There is one from the boat,” he ventured.

“From the boat? What boat?”

“If you please, from the boat when . . .” Frederick was still struggling with forming tenses in English. It was not a structured language like German. Verbs intruded into the middle of sentences. It was also full of idiosyncrasies. It was illogical. There were
rough
and
bough,
both pronounced differently although the spelling was similar
;
there was
felt
and not
feeled.
Now and again he could hear the original Germanic root in a phrase, but he wouldn't have known enough
to name it. And so he hesitated a little now. “If you please,” he repeated, “from the prisoner boat.”

“Ah,” said the guard. “Go on then. Sing me a British song, bloody Jerry.”

Frederick had sung in the choir at school, but for a very long time his voice hadn't sounded as it had done as a young man. He had once had a pleasing baritone—or so he had been told—but chlorine gas from the trenches had got to his throat. It had never been the same since then. He began softly, “Pack up your troubles . . .”

But he faltered. The guard laughed, and carried on at full volume. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and—” He swung one arm around at them all. “Well, what is it?”

“Smile,” Frederick whispered.

“Too bloody right. Smile, smile, smile!” They all looked at him, and he yelled back at them. “Can't fucking smile at all, can you? Never seen a German smile, not one of you!”

It wasn't easy to smile. Frederick agreed with that. The guard walked up to Frederick and looked him up and down. He put his head to one side, considering him acutely. Frederick was four or five inches taller, and so he tried to shrink inside his clothes, hunch his shoulders, and make himself smaller.

“What's that wi' yer hands?” the guard asked.

“I am sorry . . .”

“Never mind sorry. What's that holding stuff like you do? What's that for?”

Frederick shrugged. The guard suddenly caught hold of his wrist and pulled one hand high up and shook it, as you would a toy. “Tha's got five fingers, tha's got a thumb.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So why dost tha hold it like a bloody girl?” And he kicked a spade at the side of the road. “Pick it up.”

Frederick did so. There was a stirring in the seated men behind them, a rustling. No one had ever asked him why he clutched at things to get a grip on them, why he had such trouble holding them, why they slithered through his grasp. But the men guessed at the reason even so. He had devised a way of holding any implement with both hands, like a child might do, and using a spade more like a hoe than a shovel. Scraping at earth.

“See?” the guard said. “Hold it proper, why don't you?”

He wondered if the guard had ever been to France. He thought perhaps not. The man was perhaps mid-thirties, but he had a vacant air. He was disinterested and viciously sarcastic by turns. Aimless and disorganized in the head, Frederick thought. When the officers came along he obeyed them like a dog, with his mouth hanging open.

“I try,” Frederick murmured.

The guard guffawed. He brought his face close to Frederick's. “Don't think I don't know tha game,” he warned. “Lazy Kraut.”

Tension swelled the moment. The shuffling behind them increased. Frederick was suddenly afraid that his compatriots might stand up, might rush the guard. “There is another,” he ventured. “Another song I know a little. To sing.”

“Yeah,” the guard responded. “And better you all bloody learn it. I'm bloody sick to death of Argonny or whatever it is.”

Frederick had heard this next tune in the docks; the melody had impressed him. “Roses are shining in Picardy . . .” he began. He didn't know the verse, only the refrain with its haunting sound. “In the . . . in the . . .” He didn't know the meaning of this next word, and it was difficult to pronounce. “In the huzz of the silber dew . . .” He corrected himself, his voice failing. “Silver dew . . .”

He stopped. The guard's gaze was fixed somewhere past Frederick. Shadows crossed his face like the flickering of a silent film, black and white, black and white. “The 'ush,” he said finally. But it was not
that, Frederick knew. It was “hush,” like water, like breath, like breeze. Hushing, ssssh, like a mother with a child. Hush. . . .

But it was “'ush,” the sibilant “h” removed, the word blunted, in a Yorkshire voice.

Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Frederick stood with his hands by his sides. They were all, every man of them, defeated by the loveliness of the song.

Finally, the guard stirred himself. “Get up,” he told them. “And get on.”

On the way back to Catterick, Frederick stood with his shoulder to the side of the truck as it swayed over the narrow gauge. Conversation lapped over him like breaking and receding waves; he was far away.

When he had joined up, three years ago, the corporal in the Saxon regiment had told him that the British would not fight much longer. They had been in a train, like this, traveling to Flanders. It had been night, and many were asleep. He himself had been in a state of nervous excitement. He had watched the towns go by, one after the other. Comfortable and busy towns, then mountains, and stretches of marsh. Glimpses like photographs, quickly erased. The ribbon of a river. The railway crossing where a girl was sitting holding the reins of a wagon, alone. The spires of churches.

“One day none of us will fight,” the corporal had told him. “We'll get up like we did in 1914. We climbed over the trench and we met them in no-man's-land.” He had reached into his pocket, and brought out a metal tin. “See that? From an Englishman. From London.”

It had once held playing cards. Now, the corporal fished out a cigarette and held it, unlit, between his teeth. “We heard them calling, ‘Good morning Fritz, good morning Fritz.' Louder and louder. Christmas Day. And then, ‘How are you?' We called back. We said, ‘All right.' They called us to come over there, and we called back that
they would shoot us. And then—” The corporal indicated the cigarette in his mouth by lifting his head. “Come and get some fags, Fritz.”

Frederick had heard this story, but not believed it. But then, he had never heard it from anyone who had been there.

“We got over our trench. They did too. It was a bright day. Not snowing, but snow on the ground. As I walked my boot went through ice, and there was something under my boot . . .” He pulled a face. “I carried on, and the British man shook my hand. Imagine that! We shook hands. We had no cigarettes to give them, so we gave them . . . what do you think, what we had plenty of?” He laughed. “Cheese. We gave them cheese. There were about twenty of us out there, and all the others on both sides were standing up and cheering.”

“And you think . . .”

“I think one day it will happen again. But nobody will go back in the trenches. We'll all sit down and stay there until the war stops.”

Frederick couldn't see that, but he said nothing. At that moment, feeling the battle coming closer to him, he had wanted to get it over with. Fight, shoot. He didn't want to shake hands because he thought that might prolong things. If he could just get a bullet in someone, then . . .

Ah, that was over two years ago, he thought. Two years, and the corporal was long dead.

He had never seen goodness at all in France; he had thought it had been wiped out of mankind. Men, in the frenzy of battle, were capable of treading on their dying mates. Shells tore holes in man and mule and horse and house alike. Nothing was sacred, not even churches. Not even graveyards. The Somme was not pretty; it was a mud bath. He had watched one day as a wagon, pulled by two horses, and carrying six men, had drowned in mud. Tell anyone that and they wouldn't understand you. They wouldn't think it was possible.
Those who had gone to help were sucked down by it, and lucky to escape with their lives. The wagon had vanished into a shell hole deeper than its wheel rims, deeper than its body. The last horse put its head above the mud until only its nostrils remained, and then it too was gone.

That's what he carried in his mind. When he had seen those drownings he had wanted to murder all over again, but afterwards each time that he witnessed a fresh horror the need to kill lasted less time. Eventually, the futility took hold him, and he had felt nothing much.

It had taken this place—this place of trains and the hutted, miserable rain-soaked camp—this place of a new road, this place of a small farm—to make him think that there might be some goodness left in the world.

•   •   •

I
t had happened on the day, last week, when they had been given a new job. The tarmacadam to surface the new road hadn't come; and anyway, it was raining too hard. Instead, when they got off the train they had been turned to their right, not their left. They had marched for about two miles, never knowing where they were going.

The straggling houses on the outskirts of the village passed first. On one gate two children hung, watching in fascination. One little child was about three years old, he had guessed. She held a bunch of weeds in her hand. Perhaps the children had been playing at gardens, or brides, or whatever it was that little girls played. Their hair was plastered to their heads in the rain, but they seemed not to care. From inside the cottage came the smell of soap and the rattle of a scrubbing board. His mother used to do that, he had considered. Life went on the same everywhere.

Others in the marching line stared at the girls. Not out of any malice, but because it was some time since most of them had seen children. Most of all, their own children. As the line wound to its end, Frederick had heard the mother calling. Afterwards, the men in the last of the line had told him that she had come running out in a panic down the garden path, and snatched the girls up.