Monday 13th – Jan and Mechelen – Spring and Summer 1941

“Did you say something? Hmm?” says Jan, looking at the side of Mechelen’s face. Mechelen is staring off over the light-flooded fields. He seems to be thinking about Jan’s question, but he doesn’t say anything for a long time. Jan can see his lips twitching occasionally. Eventually, Mechelen says, “No, I didn’t say anything. I don’t know that I have anything left to say. Certainly nothing adequate for all of this. Let’s just watch the sunset together in silence, eh? Just like old times?”
Jan stares at Mechelen’s cheek, and how the mouth is pulled back on that side in a wry, twisted rictus grin. Mechelen takes a pull at his schnapps, burps again. Jan shakes his head.
[…]
Some more campaign recollections…fragmentary montage that brings us back up to date, compressing the progress into a tighter flow to reframe where we’re going next (the sweep)…this summer evening is just a poised pause on their journey East, whereas for the people in the next town, it’s the last supper…
[…]
The May sun has dried out the countryside after the spring rains. The dirt roads are hardening, and the fields will take the tanks’ weight. The trees are budding and blossoming, and the woods are incessant with bird calls and the lowing/grunting of large mammals. Soon the fledglings will be on the ground, their wings vibrating in supplication to their harassed parents.
The trucks are drawn up at the roadside, their engines running, while Colonel [X?] checks directions at the junction ahead with his interpreter and a local [peasant?]. This is the third stop of this kind that they’ve had to make today, and Jan is starting to share the men’s amused resignation about the Colonel’s abilities. He wonders – not for the first time – whether they’d all be better off if Mechelen were in command; whenever Mechelen is running an operation, all the logistical elements – navigation, supply, resource allocation, timetabling – seem to mesh [seamlessly].
He puts his head out of the cab window and looks along the flanks of the trucks, up toward the head of the column: the pulsing exhausts of the heavy diesel [?] engines are propagating short, rippling waves in the dense roadside vegetation, seen through a heat haze from the same exhausts. Men’s heads pop in and out of view from other cabs and [truck beds], and he sees men pulling faces, and rolling their eyes, and laughing, and shaking their heads. These looks and movements all say ‘Colonel [X] is hopeless’.
[…]
He sees that the edge of the road is marked with a line of fallen, blown, yellowed blossoms from the hawthorns that stud the verges in this part of the countryside, where small farmsteads are the typical unit of landholding, and where twisted trees and bushes are one of the most common forms of land demarcation; that, and the ill-kept ditches and water courses that barely supply the fields with sufficient irrigation. The locals supplement the weak flow with their manual labour: old women – especially – seem to be tasked with carrying water (in buckets, bottles, or small metal churns) and pouring it onto the raised seed beds.
Earlier in the spring, when the hawthorns had been in their fullest blossom, and when their rich musky smell had been strong in the sunken lanes, Jan had taken part in his first proper action. He finds it hard to believe that that first action was only [x/3?/4?] weeks ago.