Mathilde, Monday, Home

She pauses with her hand on the gate. She can tell that there’s something wrong, but she can’t identify what it is. Most of her body has stopped involuntarily, but her eyes are busy, the lids blinking rapidly while she looks and looks at the house.

It’s the lights, of course: all the lights are on, upstairs and down, and most of the windows are still uncurtained. Aunt [Y] is irritatingly predictable about her curtain closing routine – as soon as the dusk has made a silhouette of the houses opposite she does her round, swishing everything shut against the night, even in the summer heat. Mathilde surmises that it’s some generational thing about privacy and not being visible in your own house from the outside. It’s not something that she’d feel comfortable discussing, since to ask about it might imply some kind of criticism of her aunt – and she could never criticise her aunt and uncle, as they have done so much for her.

Her heart starts that stupid, over-excited thudding, the precursor of panic that she knows so well. She presses her palm against a sharpish angle of wood on the gate rail, and does her slow breathing routine. It’s probably nothing – like when we had the water leak last year. On that occasion she had arrived home and found a strange dark van parked outside the house, and strange men sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Very disconcerting at first, but just a stupid passing worry when seen in retrospect. She’s never had anyone close to her die, and she dreads the prospect of Aunt Iris or Uncle Pieter dying. She especially fears how she will feel. She fears – what? She doesn’t know what she dreads, but she dreads the act of finding out. It’s that unknownness that disconcerts her – knowing that, some day, she will be in a space of time, and a definite location, confronted with the fact of death, and finding herself having to act, to take responsibility; but knowing too that she won’t be able to rehearse what it feels like.

She can’t think about it for too long. If she does, all the energy and enthusiasm seems to drain out of her, and the world greys and seems hopeless, evoking a similar emptiness and ennui to the one she feels when she travels into the city centre on a Saturday afternoon and is confronted by the sight of the city’s teenagers at large in the streets and shopping malls: that sinking feeling, the feeling that everything is going to shit, that there’s no cause for optimism – that this inarticulate, spotty, drink- and drugs-ridden generation, shouting and swearing in feral gangs under the bright lights of the shopping centre are the future of the nation. That thought makes her feel that the past was a waste of time, that bequeathing the progress of the past to these [equivalent of current lazy ‘chav’ or ‘pikey’ slang] means the end of something. [something here about the relative peace, harmony, community of the past – an idealised picture of her youthful vision of the world/of the nation…]

In the lighted windows, she can see that there are too many people in the house. So something must have happened.

She breathes out deeply through her nose, says “Fuck it,” aloud, and walks up to the open font door. Aunt Iris is in the hallway, a mug of tea gripped in her hand. She’s holding a plate of sandwich crumbs and pork pie crusts in her other hand. She turns and sees Mathilde’s frowning face.

“Oh, Mattie – there you are. It’s all right, but there’s been an accident.”

“Who to?”

“This morning. Uncle Jan. He’s in the hospital, and they think he’s going to be OK. Piet talked to the doctor just now, and he said it looks OK – as far as they can tell. But it looks OK.”

“What’s wrong with him? Who’s there with him?”

“There’s no-one there at the moment – everyone’s come back here for some tea. A few of us have been there most of the day.”

“Uh huh. How is he injured?”

“He’s got shock and hypothermia. They think he fell in the canal – or was mugged – ”

“Mugged? But not hurt?”

“No, they don’t think so – just some bruises. But he hasn’t been able to talk to anyone yet, so we don’t know. We’ll have to wait until he wakes up.”

“Is anyone going back there tonight? Can I come?”

“I don’t know if there’s much point, love – they said they’re going to keep him knocked out overnight, so I don’t think there’s much point being there, really.”

“OK.”

“Although…they might want some stuff taking in for him – some nightclothes and smelly stuff and things.”

“I could get that, then.”

“Would you, love? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Course not.”

Iris gives Mathilde a quick smile and pooches out her lips for a kiss.

Mechelen's Diary. Feb. 1941

It is interesting to see how people act in extreme conditions. Sometimes you think that you can predict how a certain person will behave in a particular set of circumstances. This is especially true of officers and the soldiers that they lead, I believe. It is one of the principles of traditional military training that, in the interests of discipline and efficiency, you reduce an individual’s ability – and inclination – to act as an individual. In our modern training, this principle is retained, even though we do encourage a high degree of initiative and autonomy: but this initiative and autonomy can only be carried out within the context of the conquering of the individual will by the individual soldier himself, and where the soldier’s desires are subsumed within the larger mass of the unit. In these contexts, we like to think that we can predict how our men will be. I certainly used to subscribe to that belief, and it’s a belief that I have retained through the extremes of combat in both the eastern and western theatres of operations. (For example: at our officer’s meetings and combat briefings, we often discuss which NCOs and squads should play which part in an operation, based on their record, characteristics and response patterns. This is simply good management, in my view.)

However, in the face of the evidence I have gleaned in the recent campaign, I am starting to modify this view. This is rather a worrying development for me – and for the army itself – since it is indicative of a coarsening of behaviour and of a potential drift towards unpredictability and indiscipline. If we do not establish acceptable and predictable grounds of behaviour, even in the most extreme and difficult circumstances, we risk losing the discipline and rigour that have been the hallmark of our corps, and of all of the campaigns that we have pursued these past three years.
A recent example springs to mind amongst the men of our sister unit, the (unit identifier deleted). This unit served alongside us in P and F, and many of their officers and men were decorated or mentioned in dispatches. I would rate their fighting qualities and discipline as equal to my unit’s throughout those campaigns.

However, as I say, in the recent occupation and mopping up actions in L., this unit, in my opinion (and, I might say, in the opinion of many of my colleagues) revealed itself in a very different light. This can only be remedied by swift action from its officers and, if necessary, from the senior commanders (I believe a statement will be forthcoming soon in this respect).

(c. 1270 words)