Sunday 1st: Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941

On the tram, rattling through the dusk, Lise rests her hand on his, but in a dutiful rather than an affectionate manner: her palm is tense, only the barest amount of skin actually touching his. Her nails look dark in the tram’s dim interior light, and she keeps her face averted, so that he can only see her hair, the curve of her cheek, and her right eyelashes against the backdrop of the grime-shrouded window. He can feel her stiffness. Although he wants to say something that will re-establish a mood of relaxation and jocularity, he doesn’t know how to. He tries forming the words inside his head, but they feel brittle and pathetic, and he has no confidence in his ability to speak them to her. So they journey into town in this irritated, resentful, hypersensitive silence.

[…]

When Lise’s father had arrived at the architect’s office where Thomas worked, that fine summer morning in ’37, Thomas had known immediately that Lise was dead: there was something about the apologetic way that the old man was holding his hat in front of him, and the way that his eyes flickered from side to side; Thomas saw this across the pale blue, cool, sun-suffused room, and he knew. No.

[…]

4. [Mechelen?] In the morning, waking up in his first billet on this enemy soil with a muzzy, alcohol-induced headache, Mechelen draws back the gauzy curtains and looks down onto the neat grass and flower gardens of the hotel’s (rear) grounds. The sun is well up in the sky, but it’s early yet, and the only sounds come from the kitchens, where plates clack and oven doors slam. The summer morning air is bright with light, [slightly misty and luminous]. [Full of radiance and hope].

He takes his breakfast down on the rear terrace, where the smell of creamy roses overlays the bitter smell of his coffee. The residual hotel staff bring him sausage, bread, cheese and purple-black jam whose flavour he can’t quite place; the label is in Cyrillic script, and he’s none the wiser after subvocalising the words phonetically. The jam is delicious, though – sweet and pip-filled, and smooth against the crusty fresh bread and cool butter. It’s a morning to savour: to savour the solitude and quiet; to savour the flavours and smells in the air; to savour the sense of success and imminent victory.

He’s known other mornings like this, when, for a short while, he felt as if he was at the still centre of something huge and powerful; he remembers the Polish-Lithuanian campaign starting in the mist and light rains of September, sheltering with his troops under dripping tarpaulins, and seeing the wet, wind-shivered countryside from under the constrained, dark perspective of his metal helmet: glimpses of the brown-uniformed enemy melting away into the trees or behind farm buildings; the rain sheening the blue-grey metal of artillery pieces as their crews set them up; the fountains of earth and flame as the woods, buildings and enemy troops were blasted into splinters and fragments; the invigorating sound of aeroplane engines approaching when the weather cleared; and the whistle and concussion of the bombs above and through the succession of small towns that fell to them so rapidly.

He remembers how quickly they had all realised that the campaign was going to be over in weeks – days, maybe – and how their confidence and belief – in themselves, in their leadership, in their equipment and organisation – had developed in exponential leaps with the rapidly accumulating series of victories. The humiliating mass surrenders of their opponents, and the obvious inferiority of their tanks, artillery, air force and light weapons, had also contributed to the already well-developed sense of national/racial superiority embedded in their collective psyche.

It was all over by the end of September. The cessation of fighting coincided with a drier spell of mild weather, and he remembers sightseeing in one of the newly-surrendered cities, [strutting] through the white-stoned streets in his best pale grey-blue dress uniform, enjoying the sensation of being one of the powerful [how this status was indicated by people’s behaviour, and perhaps how it seemed a little embarrassing and bogus at first…but you got used to it.] The local people seemed to disappear into the shadows of doorways, or blend into the stonework: all you seemed to register were the buildings themselves (with their [distinctive building styles] and baroque carved wooden embellishments) and your fellow countrymen; only the other men in uniform seemed to exude any sense of dynamism and life – the locals just wanted to fade away to invisibility. [emblematic image/vignette??]

[That had been a different kind of a campaign, of course, when he was still part of the regular fighting formations, before the ad hoc units of Order Police and Security Police had been consolidated into the Special Commandos. Before he’d been wounded in France, hospitalised, and subsequently reassigned – to his chagrin – to rear echelon duties.]

The French campaign had started so promisingly for him. The early spring of 1940 had been such a beautiful one, and everything had seemed to have been held in suspension after the victory in Poland-Lithuania the previous autumn. There had been a frenzy of diplomacy and political manoeuvring, of course, but most people – including many of the rank and file in the armed forces – had thought that the threat of war in the west was just a bogeyman being created by politicians and the press, and that nothing substantial was going to happen. Most people thought that a diplomatic accommodation would be reached, and that the Imperial forces could re-equip and refocus on the true enemy in the east, with a further campaign there, beyond the old borders of Poland-Lithuania in a couple of years.

It was thus something of a sobering surprise when the mobilisation orders came through in April, and the attack plans had indicated a multiply-pronged attack in the west along a broad front from the Channel in the north to the Alps in the south.