Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience

Occupation Duty

116 Occupation Duty “What made you think it was okay to bring us there, Sarge?” Al asks Nick Watts, his sarcasm an attempt to mask his broken voice. “Well, I wasn’t wrong, was I? Are you going to tell me we should have left these people for dead? What the hell is wrong with you?” The sergeant’s voice is tight, on the verge of cracking. But if it does, all the men will crumble—he’s sure of it. “He’s right, Al. Just shut up. If you’d been one of those prisoners, you’d have been mighty glad to see us, so just shut the hell up.” Dave’s words are raw. Like everyone else, he can’t quite clear his mind of the images from earlier that morning. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees their skeletal figures, skulls for faces with gaunt, hollow expressions, long devoid of hope. “We’ll never forget that, you know. It’ll haunt us for the rest of our lives. I hope you realize that,” Al says bitterly, dragging deeply on his cigarette. Dave’s patience snaps. He stands up, drags Al to his feet by the collar. “You little fuck,” he hisses. “Is that what you’re worried about? What about them? What’ll they remember?” Dave’s eyes bulge with rage. His arm arcs in a low-slung swing that will catch the shorter man on the chin, but Nick is on him, yanking his arms back, shoving Al out of his reach. “Enough! That’s enough! Al, get off to your bunk. Davy, take a walk.” With fists balled, Dave takes his orders and walks. It’s hell here, always with the same men, never a reprieve. He hates them and loves them—he’s nowhere without them but wishes he was somewhere else. The fatigue in his bones is deep—the only respite he can look forward to is returning to the comfortable home of his billet in Holland. Mind racing, he pans through the day’s events and realizes that investigating the appalling smell—at his sergeant ’s insistence—has made him feel better than anything he’s done during this war: for once, they had helped with deep compassion rather than leave violence in their wake. Despite the horror of what they saw and the stench of rotting corpses, they’d rescued more than three hundred Polish prisoners from Łódź and the surrounding area. Dave stops at the treeline, about two hundred metres from the German estate they’d commissioned as barracks. Hearing branches cracking underfoot behind him, he turns. 117 “Davy,” Nick says quietly, falling in step beside the younger man. “Thanks for coming to my defence back there, but you shouldn’t have lost your temper . Al didn’t mean it.” “He was out of line, Sarge.” “Yes, he was, but these are exceptional circumstances and we all step out of line now and again. He was out of his head, couldn’t help it, I don’t think,” Nick adds. “He’s right, though, isn’t he? It will haunt us for the rest of our lives.” Dave picks a stalk of field grass and uses his thumb and index finger to push the seeds up the stalk, just as he did when he was a young boy. “Yes, I reckon it will,” Nick sighs. He watches Dave catch the fat little kernels in his other hand and then crush them with his fingers. When Dave brings his fingers to his nostrils to savour the intensity of the odour, Nick is overcome by the simplicity of the gesture. He tries not to wonder if such simplicity is forever lost to him, clings to the idea that one day soon, he’ll be at home again, watching his own son pick field grass with untouched innocence. This page intentionally left blank ...