German Autumn

Through the Forest of the Hanged Boys

Through the Forest of the Hanged Boys The forests heal their wounds more quickly than anything else. Here and there, of course, among the oaks there is an unemployed field-gun whose broken barrel stares morosely at the ground as if ashamed. The shells of small brown cars lie on the slopes like huge food-cans. Untidy camper-giants have been moving in a hurry through these the most assiduously well-managed of the world's forests. Still, the war has made its way most considerately between the trees and through the little villages: the latter experienced the bombing of the cities only as a kind of red aurora at night and felt the ground tremble and doors and windows rattle. The occasional house was, naturally, knocked out by mistake, and at this point the local tragedy would be concentrated. In the small villageby the Weser it was a dentist's house that was hit one spring morning during surgery hours and the dentist, the nurse and all thirty patients were killed. Out in the garden a man was walkingto and fro waitingwhile his daughter had a tooth pulled inside the house, and in the waiting-room sat his wife and his mother, who had also accompanied the girl to the dentist's so that she would not feel afraid. The man escaped as by a 93 miracle but his whole family was lost, and for the past couple of years he has been going round the village like a wandering Second World War memorial - the First World War memorial is to be found in a little grove between the bank of the Weser and the first house and is still the pride of the village. Like the forests, the villages have had time to lick their wounds. The wreckage of the dentist's villa has been cleared up but when the Sunday cinema is over people often saunter past the site and reminisce on the event, or they go up to the abutment of the bridge and stand gazing down at the autumn waters swirling round the pier-stumps. The bridge was blown up by hysterical SS lads at about five minutes past twelve. Their hated memory is still intensely alive in the village. 'Oh - sie haben gerv-u-u-ii-tef - Oh, they were furious, almost worse than the Poles. The defeat trailed through the main street of the village for two whole days: ragged and muddy soldiers from the Wehrmacht on bicycles or on foot and last in the queue the young boys and old men of the Great Assault, sniffling and stumbling through the mire of defeat. Of the victors people remember especially the dashing Scotsmen, about a dozen of whom lie buried in a piece of ground sloping towards the river, under white crosses bright as spring flowers in the wet autumn gloom. The village children play war-games in the porches of the cold overpopulated houses along with tattered refugee children from the eastern zone or from Sudetenland. Children in villages get up late in the mornings, trying to cheat the stomach into sleeping past a meal they cannot have. If one shows them a picture-book they will unfailingly begin to consult each other as to how they can best beat to 94 death the human figures or the animals shown on the pages. Small boys who have been twice bombed out of home, who can scarcely yet speak properly, pronounce the word i totschlagen> with gruesome precision. In the course of a single year the village by the Weser has had its population increased tenfold and new inhabitants are arriving all the time at these little brick houses which are already inflamed by the hate, envy and hunger of the overcrowded. In a tiny hovel with greaseproof paper instead of glass in the window lives Henry, a Sudeten-German boy who lost part of a leg in the war on the Baltic but who this year lost his heart to the Englishmen he works for. He has been given a watch by his English major and he reads Edgar Wallace in English during the night when it is too cold to sleep. In another little ice-cold room a German-Hungarian girl is allowed to borrow a bed at night. Through the day she helps out at the village doctor's house or wanders around on the southern bank of...