Sunday 25th – Wednesday 28th: Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941 (token Christmas holiday efforts…

[This whole segment needs to do two things when it’s reworked/edited: (i) convey a sense of momentum and optimism – the war machine is at the height of its power, and it’s seemingly unstoppable…this campaign is yet another chapter of success and glory, the latest in a series of chapters that started unfolding in 1938; they should be overwhelmingly buoyant and confident, exhilarated with the way the campaign is going – this doesn’t really come across at all at the moment; (ii) emphasise the variety of character and backgrounds of this key group of personnel – their uniformly high levels of education and achievement in civilian life, their variety of experience and interests, and the range of their skills; and, particularly, how normal what they are doing has become for them – not that it doesn’t cost them anything, but rather that it has become their normal way of being, with all the ups and downs and changing attitudes that mediate, in waves, the things that you do in your everyday existence – key informing text here is Klee, Dresser and Riess.]
The sun is setting, and all the champagne has been drunk. The horizon is an incredible blaze of orange, grey, purple and gold.
Mechelen has joined them, fresh from a ‘situation update’ at the mobile command headquarters, and he’s in a foul mood. He doesn’t want to talk about what he’s been briefed on. All the officers sense this reticence, and they direct their attention past Colonel Mechelen while still according him the peripherally expressed respect that his rank commands. (Jan finds this very difficult: he feels as if his whole attention should be directed towards the colonel, despite the latter’s distance and disengagement. But every time he catches Mechelen’s eye, Mechelen looks away with a barely-suppressed scowl. Jan doesn’t know where to look or what to do, so he takes another swig of vodka from his mug. The alcohol will make him more mellow, and he will care less.)
[…] [?]
The twilight is a deep, dusty grey blue now, with a last streak of gold on the horizon, and the air is full of wood smoke and piercing, plangent birdsong. Jan closes his eyes and leans back against the door of the staff car, wishing that he could have a lie down and a nap: traversing such great distances is tiring, and the mixture of summer dust and heavy exhaust fumes that he’s been breathing in all day have dried out his mouth and nose. His nostrils are sore when he breathes in.
Mechelen’s adjutant moves around the semi-circle of officers, topping up their glasses and offering more savouries.
[…]
Jan knows a little more about the other officers now. Their recent close proximity to each other, away from the hermetic (?) atmosphere of the camp, has yielded some greater intimacy and self-exposure; whenever the convoys stop for rest breaks, he often finds himself standing at the edge of a field or above a ditch, pissing next to someone who seems to keen to share some thought or memory – the strange landscapes and novel scenes of violence and aftermath seem to encourage reflection, comparison and faux-philosophical reflections. Ordinarily Jan would eschew these kind of speculations, but here, in the turmoil and excitement of the front line, any kind of reflection and commentary takes on a deeper, more profound-seeming dimension, as if any island of peace and reflection is an attractive contrast to the instability and mayhem of the advance.
Major [H] is going to sing for them. In civilian life he was a university administrator, but he had a keen interest in music, and had taken part in many amateur music recitals, specialising in the 19th century Lieder repertoire. Standing in the dusk, with his hands on his hips, he prepares to run through some favourite songs.
The first song is called [‘Red Evening’], and there are a few ironic smiles as [H], unaccompanied, he sings the opening bars. His voice is even and strong, a rounded baritone that he propels powerfully through the evening air. As he sings, and the beauty of the melody and the strength and quality of his voice become increasingly apparent, a surprised, rapt silence falls over the officers.
[Schubert ??– Abendrot] …or…
In the red evening, when I stood at my sweetheart’s door,
She called to me in her sweet voice,
Like a robin’s song in winter through the trees,
And all the world was shrunk to the circle of our love.

Red sun and black trees, and my sweetheart’s hand in mine,
Red sun and black trees, and the song of our love.

[verse, chorus…]

[Reveries?]
[1] Fisher, with vodka fumes rich in his nostrils when he belches, is still thinking about Beatrice and Gabriella, and about his two children: William is seven, and Julia is five. Beatrice often says in her letters that they miss their daddy, and they are the thing that he will find it hardest to give up – to let go of when the marriage ends. It must end: he cannot live without Gabriella. If he didn’t think that there was some time in the future when they will be together, he would not want to carry on living. But the children are difficult…
He almost hates Beatrice now – the thought of her fills him with sadness and disgust, a strange physical revulsion that makes him want to shiver, and to be free of all of these old burdens. It seems so unfair that he should be tied in this way, now that he has found the woman with whom he really should be sharing his life. But he also remembers the way that Julia clung to him on the last night of his leave and said “Please stay, daddy.” And how, for that moment when her little hands were clutching the lapels of his jacket, he had actually wanted to stay. In the morning, though, with the children asleep in their beds, breathing quietly under their covers, it had been easier to focus on the comparison between Beatrice and Gabriella, and to see the truth of what he knew he really wanted.
[2] Mechelen is angry because his unit is going to be held back in reserve for a week or two: the high command have deemed it necessary to blood some of the new groupings in the immediate aftermath of the advance, and to keep Mechelen’s troops back for later operations. Apparently they believe that Mechelen’s unit put in a ‘tired’ performance during their most recent sweep.
Mechelen knows where that ‘tired’ label came from – that little shit Becker, the recently-appointed camp/special operations inspector. Becker had been on site during their latest action, wandering around with his clipboard with a pencil tied to it, constantly straightening his tie and pushing his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. Fidgety little bastard. If that little fucker had done half as much service as most of my men…but he hasn’t. Straight out of training school and passing judgement on what we do – when he knows fuck all about anything. Fuck it. It makes you wonder…
Shaking his head, Mechelen waves Jensen over through the gloom and asks him to light the oil lamps, then swirls his vodka in the flickering, strengthening yellow lights. The first swig refreshes him, and by the time he’s finished the glass he can feel the clear alcohol penetrating his veins, bringing a sense of relief and reinvigoration to his body.
[H] starts to sing his second song. Mechelen had only half-heard the first one, though he’d recognised the tune. He tops up his glass, twists the base of the vodka bottle into the crumbly earth and dust underneath his canvas chair, and looks into the dusk, where [H]’s eyes and teeth are glinting in the oil lamp light as he sings. Mechelen never realised, until now, just what a fine singer [H] is: the notes are clear and pure, his breathing is even and well-timed, and he projects the sound around the group in a dignified, controlled manner. Mechelen taps his thumb and forefinger on his knee, picking up the rhythm of the music, imagining that he is the best informed of the officers when it comes to musical matters, and convinced that only he is picking up the subtleties of rhythm and phrasing in [H]’s performance. He smiles, realising slowly what a privilege it is to hear music-making of such a high quality.
[H]’s second song is another familiar one: a well-known poem set to a traditional tune. The poem is about the careless days of a young man’s life, before the cares of the world or of love have darkened his outlook and weighed him down with the tedious burdens of work or emotional upset; when all he needs to relax are the wild woods and streams of the homeland, where he can fish and hunt and roam free in the same way that the generations before him have done. It’s an archaic idea, somewhat ludicrous in the age of automobiles, mechanised warfare, heavy industry and mains electricity, but there is enough charm and tradition in the words and music for the thing to resonate in a way that a printed treatment could not do. It helps that the stars are coming out, that there’s a warm breeze carrying the smells of night, tobacco, and cooking through the air, and that the men are all drinking, and quite far from home – conditions in which nostalgia and idealised romanticism can flourish.
[H] holds the last note of the song, lets it fade down into the hollow summer evening. In the last resonance of the note, between the released tension of the melody and the drained dynamic of the shape of the song, Mechelen hears another transition to silence, one which he heard as a ten-year-old in the cold, echoey interior of the church at L_en, when the last vibrations of the strings of a cello, a viola and two violins heralded the dreaded end of the concert, and the audience, hushed, waited for the sound to fully die away before letting their percussive applause crash around the dark wooden interior, flickering the candlelight.