Soldier No More by Anthony Price Page A

“—I remember going to the Odeon Cinema in town that day, with Jim’s wife Mavis, my sister-in-law … my Charlie didn’t want to go, ‘cause that was after he’d been invalided out, and he never wanted to see war films after that, only films with Betty Grable, and it was a war film that was on that day—I can’t remember what it was—it was an American one, though … but I went with Mavis, anyway.” She nodded at Roche, as though it was necessary to quote Mavis as corroborative evidence. “And in the interval the lights went up, and the manager—the cinema manager— comes on the stage and says ‘Will all mothers with young children under the age of fourteen take their children outside—and all children, and anyone of a nervous disposition please go outside with them—because we’re going to show these newsreel films that it’s better they shouldn’t see. And then they can come back afterwards when it’s over.’ And so Mavis had to go out of course, because she had young Jimmie with her—“
    “Young Jimmie who’s in the army now, is that?” inquired Wimpy politely, with only the merest hint of irony.
    “Not in the army sir—a Royal Marine Commando, he is.”
    “That’s right—of course! He was the one who went in at Suez last year?”
    “Port Said, sir. And that mad he was when he came back—wouldn’t stop talking about it, even though my Charlie didn’t like it, and went off and wouldn’t listen! But he says to me, young Jimmie does, ‘We were winning, Auntie—going through them like a dose of salts—and they wouldn’t let us go on!’—that mad he was! You should have heard him, sir!”
    Wimpy nodded. “Yes. Perhaps I should have.”
    “Doing very well, he is. A sergeant now, and he’s thinking of putting in for a commission and making a career of it.”
    “In spite of Suez?” Wimpy caught himself. “Sorry, Clarkie—you were in the cinema on VE-Day—?”
    “Yes, sir … Well, of course, young Jimmie was only a nipper then—he was eleven years old, or thereabouts, must have been—so Mavis has to take him out. And she wasn’t very pleased, either! ‘You tell me what happens, Ada’, she says … And … then they showed these films of the camps, where all the people were dead, poor souls—with arms and legs like matchsticks, and the bones showing through … just skin and bone, they were—I never saw anything like it in my life. Great piles of them, with the legs and arms hanging out—you couldn’t hardly credit it, not unless you’d seen it—like scarecrows, poor souls.” Ada Clarke shook her head, still only half-believing the evidence of her own eyes after a dozen years.
    “Yes, Clarkie?” Wimpy jogged her gently.
    “Yes, sir. Well… I thought—I can still remember what I thought, like it was yesterday—“ she looked at Roche. “I thought ‘he hadn’t any right to do that, did Hitler’. I mean … killing people, that’s bad enough, when they haven’t done you any harm—but doing that to them … that’s not right .”
    Roche waited.
    “And then I thought—it’s funny, but we had this German couple to stay at the house, friends of the Master, Mr Nigel—before the war…and they couldn’t have been nicer … and I thought, they couldn’t have known about this, not Herr Manfred and Frau Clara—they wouldn’t have stood for it—they would have put a stop to that if they’d known about it, they would.”
    Out of nowhere, unsought and unbidden, the memory of the report on the Siberian camps and the recent Hungarian deportations came to Roche. It wasn’t true to say that he hadn’t believed the report; rather, he had accepted it on a level which had somehow rendered belief irrelevant to his own personal existence, his own reality.
    But he had stood for it. Or … he had not stood against it: he had felt as anonymous, as removed from cause and effect, as guiltless as a bomb-aimer far above a darkened city, Hamburg or Dresden or Coventry or