Mechelen’s Diary: 1939.

September 21st: second week of recuperation and re-equipping – now based at P-v. How strange it is to be free from action and gunfire: as if the world is suddenly operating at a different speed and intensity. Suddenly we have realised all the faces that are now missing.

September 28th: Word has come that we will be redeploying soon. Some of the men think we deserve a longer rest, but I can’t wait to get back to the front. Whenever I read accounts of soldiers who said that war – combat – made them feel more ‘alive’, I always treated them with some scepticism, even after I had done my share of street fighting and learned what it feels like to hurt someone mortally, and to have your own life threatened. Now, though, I think I understand better: in those minutes on the battlefield, when your life is millimetres or seconds away from death at any moment, everything becomes very simple, and time seems to move so slowly that you can see every clod of flying dirt, every whiff of smoke, every shard of splintered timber. It seems like you are in a different kind of time, a state where everything flows together and you are supremely, unconsciously competent – your body moves almost without command. By contrast, life at the barracks seems terribly slow and trivial […expand, more conviction… “Jarhead” ?…].

We’re wasting our time here. We should be doing something to help.

September 30th: Colonel J. made a speech in the mess last night about the need for patience and forbearance while we regain our strength and organisation. Our brother soldiers are fighting victoriously, and we will rejoin them soon. Our service and sacrifices in the noblest of causes. All have given willingly of their courage, strength, and lives. Noble deaths that won’t be forgotten. We drank to our fallen comrades.

I’m afraid that I later became drunk and involved in a near fist fight with B, who I have always disliked – the feeling is a mutual one. Not very edifying behaviour for two brother officers – so much for nobility and solidarity. We shook hands this morning in Col. J’s office. B. will pay to have my uniform cleaned. It is all agreed and settled.

Monday - Mathilde at the café

An unmarked dark blue van with blacked out windows pulls up, partly obscuring the clothes shop and the people opposite. The Russian stands still and becomes quiet as three militia men in their khaki-green uniforms climb quickly out of the van’s side door and move around to the front of the van. Each militia man carries a machine pistol in a bulky holster, and has a side-handled baton held casually ready in their hand. The steel-grey of their guns had a sheen in the bright morning light, and Mathilde feels that familiar sense of bafflement and unreality, the chilling realisation that they have death hanging at their sides, right here in this street, twenty yards away. She feels suddenly uncomfortable and afraid, whereas before she had merely been interested in what was happening across the street.

The three militia men are frog-marching the Russian around to the back of the van. The young man has been crying, Mathilde can tell: big splashes of drying tears have darkened his lapels, and there’s dirt smeared wetly across his cheeks. His hands are cuffed behind his back, and he has a broad red mark on his forehead. Ellipses of blood curve down from his nostrils, meeting under his chin. Mathilde feels her heart go out to the man – she thinks of the scourged Christ in the illustrated Bible of his childhood [come back to this later?]. It’s like looking at a fellow child being beaten up by bigger children in the school playground, and feeling too frightened to intervene.

The militia men open up the side-door of the van, and the dark-painted interior frames the Russian as he climbs precariously up on to the bare metal floor, hindered by the inflexibility of his manacled arms. As he balances on the top step, one of the militia men hefts his baton, swinging it round like a baseball player awaiting a pitch, and smashes the haft [??] of the baton into the prisoner’s lower back. Mathilde is electrified by the man’s screech, and slams her big cup down into the saucer in shock and anger; the last of her coffee slops out. One of the militia men reacts to the clattering crockery and turns to look, taking a pace forward into the road and staring straight at Mathilde. The baton hangs in the militia man’s left hand, swinging slightly, and the right hand rests on the butt of his machine pistol. Mathilde meets his eyes for a split-second, internally secure in her indignation, in the equalities of citizenship, and in the right of peaceful, rational protest: she sees naked power and confidence glaring back at her. The militia man’s eyebrows are blonde, shadowed slightly by the peak of his riot helmet, and his mouth is set, lips parted in a challenging smile. Before she’s even thought about it, Mathilde is on her feet and moving towards the cafe entrance, hand in her overcoat pocket, reaching for her loose change.

Inside the café, as she stands embarrassed and shaky in front of the till, she realises that the three men at the corner table are all staring at her [note their Eastern/’Slavic’ appearance at first mention…]. They seemed, when she caught their expressions just before they turned away from her glance, to be aghast. As she leaves, their eyes follow her, and when she tries to pull the door closed behind her, one of them comes over and holds on to the handle, leans his face in close to hers and says, breathlessly and insistently, [in Russian?] “This is the treatment we receive all the time. How can it be right? You don’t think it is right, either, do you?” [this is her cue to go into a mountain of anticipation about the possible implications of this and of her involvement - all those fears that sometimes run through your mind in certain situations, and which never come to anything like what you feared they would do…eg near road accidents, imagined confrontations after a bad-mouthed motorist does a u-turn and follows you to the next junction…].

c. 1050 words