The Gates of Rutherford (5 page)

You're wrong,
Christine thought.
She is now.

But she knew better than to say so.

W
hen he reached England, no one ever asked him where he came from; only his rank, his regiment, and the place of capture. And no one ever asked him why he kept his hands clasped so tightly.

When Frederick Wilhelm Reinhardt had first been a prisoner on English soil, and when they saw that he couldn't hold a cup, and that he took so long to dress himself, and that he dropped almost everything they tried to give him—they sent him to a hospital somewhere on the outskirts of an industrial town, a small place of single-story buildings.

He was with another German, and he held his arm. But he was ashamed of the other man, who shambled his way across the yard so brokenly that it seemed he was drunk. They took him to a separate room.

Frederick was very sorry to have caused trouble. The doctors had not even asked him the reason for his agonizing hands. They only tried to reason or wrestle it out of him, opening his palms and
stretching the fingers and giving him a kind of exercise to do. He would obey—he always tried to obey—but often in an hour or so the clutching would come back.

The hospital, he surmised, had given up on him, after having written a great deal about him in notebooks. They sent him back to the other prisoners of war. And in time they all came here. They told him it was the north of England, and in the country. Not a city. He was glad of that.

Frederick understood in time that if he was not to attract attention, he must try not to hold his fingers together. If he had had more mastery of English, he would have tried to explain. But he had little English. Only a word or two. He was trying to learn more now that he was at a camp called Catterick.

Name and rank. Regiment. The first time that he had said his name when they arrived here, the officer writing at the table had looked up at him. “Frederick Wilhelm, eh?” he had said, and spat on the floor. “Like the Kaiser Wilhelm.”

It had been dark, and raining, and everyone was deadly tired from the journey, the English guards as much as them. Frederick had felt like part of some cattle shipment, or livestock of some other kind. Now he knew what the cattle felt like on the farm at home, and he wondered if his own face showed the same expression of exhausted bewilderment that he had seen when his family had shipped cows to market. He felt like a worthless beast, pushed onto trucks, shoved into straight lines. Dark and raining: that was his first impression of the POW camp.

He wanted to say that he was sorry to have such a name as Wilhelm. He had never liked it much himself. He wanted to tell them that they could cross it out of his records if they despised it so much, if it reminded them of the Kaiser. He would have no objection. But they wrote quickly, moving on to the next man, and shouldering him
aside. “I am from Holzminden,” he wanted to tell them. It seemed important. To hold on to the place he was born. But of course it wasn't important to the officer writing at the table. Only name and rank. And regiment.

When he saw that there were small villages here, and farms, he felt a kind of crushing longing. He felt his own language press on his tongue,
milch, landwirt, pferd.
Was there anyone here like him, someone who had been sent back perhaps, some farmhand wounded beyond use who had returned, whose soul had gone down in the mud?

Arriving here, all the prisoners had all stood in line and wondered what it was that they were expected to do in England. Backbreaking labor. Mine work, perhaps. They had waited all night that first night, most of them not sleeping despite the weariness. Anxiety had gnawed a sore spot in his heart. All night he had heard men shuffling around him, crammed into iron-framed beds, hearing the rain drum on the corrugated iron roofs.

Could it be worse than Flanders? Could it be worse than Munster? He had been at a railway station there about a year ago, waiting for transport. And a train had come in carrying British prisoners. There had been two women waiting on the platform, and when they saw the wounded being carried out, one woman had burst into tears, and the other had spat in the face of the nearest man.

He had not the heart to blame. He wouldn't blame a British woman either for doing the same. As the night went on, he had begun to worry what would happen when the daylight came. He imagined them all swept out the next morning, unfed, bullied, and taken somewhere. Did the British shoot those who refused to work? Did they shoot those who
couldn't
work? He flexed his hands in the dark, willing them to open up. He must be able to carry something, work at something, he thought. Panic almost suffocated him there in the dark. Would he starve, here among the farms, here in a green
country? Here among hills, in the kind of landscape that was so familiar to him?

But they had been marched out the next morning to a canteen, were given tea and bread and a sour kind of margarine, and marched again to the little station. Waited there, and been taken to the village, and set to work making a road. And although it had been raining in a drifting, misty fashion, it had been all right. Swamped by relief, and by memory, more than one man had stopped from time to time, both grief and relief escaping them. But they had stifled their gasps, hid their feelings even from those next to them, and had wiped their faces as if sweating and not weeping.

That day, he had learned new English words. Among them, “Waiting” and “Back up.” He understood that they had put the sergeant's temper up. Or “back up,” as he said. “You have put my back up, you . . .” Because he had not moved faster in the line, and because he had dropped the sledgehammer that had been thrust into his hands. And the rest of the sentence that the sergeant yelled he understood. Yes . . . “Fucking Germans” he understood already.

And he knew what “Mother” meant. He had learned that in a specific and memorable way. It wasn't so different to German, of course. “Mutter” and “Mother.” They revealed the Saxon background of both countries, the bloodstock that millennia ago both armies had sprung from. Saxons and Angles and Jutes. All the same, under the skin.

And so . . . “Mother.” One day in January in France in 1916 he had fallen into a task that was not his, but which his officer insisted upon by way of screams and slaps, to accompany a missionary seconded to the lines.

It had been snowing. The British had advanced the day before, and been beaten back, and there were pockets of wounded and dead all over. Their own, and the enemy. They had come upon a British
boy, merely a boy. Seventeen or eighteen, he had guessed. They laid him out on a piece of trailer waiting for the horses to come to take the wounded. They chose the wood because this boy's back seemed to be broken. The missionary read from the Bible, and all the time Frederick could see the boy's eyes flitting from the Bible to the missionary's face, and back again, and then to himself. Occasionally he would let off a volley of words. The first that they heard were angry. The final few were quieter. And finally, the boy said the word that Frederick knew was “Mother.”

It was not said in any kind of crying way. It was said with delight, and the boy's face had broken into a smile, a smile of astonishment as if he had seen something that they could not. Frederick thought about that often.

He dozed a little now, leaning his head surreptitiously against an iron pole that supported the station roof. Every morning they came here, a group of thirty or so of them, and were taken along the little railway line that crossed the barrack yard and out alongside the river. When they got to just outside a small village, they were off-loaded. The road that was being laid between the village and one farther along passed through a small place with a lovely church and a large wooden gate with a canopy over the top. A strange word for it, another he had learned—“lych-gate.” He had asked just yesterday what it was called. “What do you want to know for, Kraut?” “I should like to know. It is good . . . nice.” “Nice, is it? Got any churches where you come from?”
Gott einig . . .
is that what the man had said? Surely not. It didn't make sense anyway. “Got any . . .” Maybe that was it. But, if so, he still couldn't fathom it. The guard had laughed. “Church, don't you know church?”

He knew church.
Kinder, Kuche, Kirche.
The litany of the hausfrau, the good German woman. The good German family. He didn't speak. Didn't answer back. He smiled.

“You don't know nothing,” the guard had said, in a cheerful and triumphant fashion. The English were strange. They insulted you without malice.

An hour or so later, he had tried again while they were allowed to rest. They were given water and they sat on the side of the road, on deep grass verges by the same church. He had pointed again at the gate. “Is called?”

“What—the lych-gate?”

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

Lych-gate, lych-gate.

He liked being out of the camp. He supposed they were a long way from anywhere—from ports, from cities. If you ran—tried to escape—you would be walking for many miles. And over high ground. He could see hills in all directions. The houses were spread far apart, and a man on his own would be captured in no time.

He didn't want to go back, anyway. Not very much. His father had died years before, and his mother and Matthau ran the family farm. He had been his father's boy, and he felt there would be very little for him when he did eventually get back.

Perhaps he was wrong, he wondered.

Perhaps his mother cried for him . . .

At the end of the day, the train came back. It was like a kind of clockwork toy swaying along the single track. There were sixty or seventy trains a day. The open trucks were to transport the prisoners wherever they were designated to go; the closed ones often brought wounded to the camp's military hospital.

There were over seven hundred beds in that hospital—such as it was, not a brick institution, nothing fancy or large or established—but hundreds of half-brick, half-iron huts. He pitied the men inside them. The huts were cold; he knew that because he delivered coal sometimes to the big pot-bellied stoves. The staff liked to open
windows to keep infection down, to circulate air, to extract the fumy dust of the fires. He had taken coal to the stores outside the hut walls, the bunkers that abutted the hut walls, and he could hear the striking clatter of iron beds on linoleum floors and the footsteps of the scurrying nurses.

He had been lucky not to be wounded. It was just his hands. . . .

Frederick Reinhardt closed his eyes, thinking,
It is April now.
April. The month of blossom. The month of green leaves.

April . . . that was the same word in English and German.

•   •   •

F
our days after Charlotte's wedding, William and Louisa were back at Rutherford.

William had taken a motor taxi from York, as it was difficult to find a train that ran according to the timetable now. He said nothing to the cab driver; he was tired of sociability; he wanted his own bed. Louisa, too, seemed sunk deep in her own thoughts; he wondered if it were that Charlotte had been married when Louisa was the elder sister, but he did not know how to ask his daughter this. He watched her staring out of the cab window; if she caught his gaze, she smiled back at him immediately, but he could not help thinking that there was something secret in that smile, something closed to him.

Eventually, she took his hand as the cab sped out from York and into the darkening countryside. “Are you feeling well, Father?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Looking forward to being home?”

“Yes, indeed. And what are you going to do with yourself this week?” he asked.

“I've promised Dora Henistbury-Falle that I shall help with the friendship sale that sends parcels to Yorkshire regiments. You know, chocolates and clothes and things.”

“Ah, yes.”

“And yourself, Father?”

“Lord Lieutenant's lunch. Seeing the land steward about the manning levels at the farms. Busy enough.”