Wednesday 7th – Marta and Ivan – Spring 1941

Marta has finished crying. She’s still sitting on the wicker chair, her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms hugging her knees; a tight bundle of spent misery. Her eyes are wide, saucery. She feels – or imagines that she feels – the surface of her eyes drying, stretching, gathering dust, and the corners and the reddened lids getting sore. She sniffs up a long cold sniff of snot.

Nobody cares about me. But I don’t care. I can be by myself. I don’t need them.

The breeze through the pale spring leaves abates for a moment, and the sound of the flowing stream rises up above the sussing of the leaf rustle. There are starlings in the trees, whistling and chuckling, voices as clear as the hill-pure water and as guttural as its gurgling.

She thinks of Ivan that last summer, remembers the sunlight water-reflected on his throat, and the feel of his puny muscles under her fingertips. Remembers the day he wet himself with uncontrollable hysterical laughter when she held him upside-down: the slow spread of the wee on the front of his shorts, the saturation and drip; his humiliation; and how he’d forgiven her, creeping into her room later when she sat on the bed weeping with confused shame over what she’d done and putting his little arms as far around her shoulders as they would reach and laying his chin against hers.
She starts, blinks. She can hear Ivan’s voice as he runs up the grassy path, shouting out her name. She wipes her nose, feels the involuntary tears itching at the back of her sore eyes.

[…]

Mechelen’s Diary. Spring 1941.

April 18th: It’s stopped raining at last. After three weeks. Everyone’s sick of it, and sick of the smell of wet feet and uniforms. And socks and battledress that never dries out properly. And mud, mud, mud. It makes the actions awful, all the mud, and the ground saturated so that the excavations are difficult and unstable. But we press on of course. Always heading further east, up to the newly agreed frontier. Another few weeks, we calculate, and the last of our criss-crossing journeys will be over. This territory will be Slav-free, and we can all relax. Have a well-earned rest. Most of the boys have maintained a marvellous spirit and outlook, despite the heaviness of our work and the sheer distances and amount of work. We’ve attended more than twenty actions in the last month, mostly as active participants (but sometimes just on cordon duty), and it has taken its toll on some. But our unit has held up the best of all, I believe.

In some units – and I have seen this myself at first hand – there has been a …coarsening of some men’s behaviour. There always were some men who took pleasure in this work – in every unit. But they were a very small minority, and their behaviour was a clear departure from the general standard. Clear aberrations. (I remember, for example, Sergeant M. in our third platoon, who took pleasure in humiliating and then beating any bespectacled men. Only bespectacled men. Who knows what past slight or humiliation of his own this drew on? I remember how, on one action, he lined up three naked, bespectacled men, one behind the other, and made as if to shoot each man, until each man had soiled himself. After this he did actually shoot them, killing all three by firing through the first man and into the second and third with his machine pistol. I saw this myself. As Colonel J. was also present and did nothing, I did not consider that it was my place to intervene.)

But, as I say, this was clearly aberrant behaviour. Most of the men have retained their discipline, self-control and decency throughout the campaign. I see this as a powerful tribute to our army’s training and fundamental discipline. To have been through so many difficult operations, both in simple combat and in the difficult pacification and partisan elimination actions, and to have remained fundamentally decent and honourable. This is a great achievement, in my belief.

But, as I say, this has changed somewhat in recent weeks – at least in my judgement.

(c. 700 words)