The best thing is that we have a nice new place to live. Addie told Doctor Etzmann that his eyes were failing in the shit hole (he actually used those words) we were living in. And, within a month, Doctor Sol (which is what I call him now, because it makes him laugh) had found us an apartment in the artisan quarter. The stairs are a bit of a climb, but it’s worth it because one of the rooms has a huge north-facing window and the light pours in through it. And when I lug the shopping up, the first thing I see is Addie at his easel turning that light into the special things that only he can see.
At the end of October Doctor Sol invited us to his daughter’s wedding. Addie was reluctant, at first. Despite everything, he still has a little grumble, just now and again, about “filthy rich Semites”. We were nervous too, of course. Neither of us had been to a Jewish wedding before, and we didn’t know what to expect. And it was a bit strange, what with the men and the women separated most of the time. Late in the afternoon, Rachel, Doctor Sol’s other daughter, and I were going to the lavatory. She giggled and pulled me towards a pair of doors that weren’t quite closed. Frantic music poured through the crack. I peeped in, and there was Addie, dancing with his arms around bearded men. He had a little round cap on his head, and he seemed really happy. Laughing. I realized I’d never seen him laugh before.
It nearly broke my heart.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in February 1908, aged eighteen, in the hope of gaining a place at the Academy of Arts. After several unsuccessful attempts to make it as an artist, he left the capital in 1913. However, his six poverty-stricken years there had helped to formalize his anti-Semitism – views which would form the basis of his policy when he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
THE BLUE-EYED BOY
Linda Newbery
“Oi, Brett – shift yourself!”
The voice seemed to float towards him from a distance. Brett’s eyes flickered open; it took a moment to remember where he was, why he was slumped against a hot window. The coach. He was on the coach. His mouth was open; he might even have been dribbling. The driver was slowing; they were entering a small town, a cluster of buildings around a brick church.
Joel already had his coat on, rucksack on his lap. “You were snoring!”
“Liar!”
“Wish I had earplugs.”
Brett blinked himself properly awake as the coach pulled into a car park. Mr Wade, head of history, was standing up front beside the driver’s seat, holding the mike.
“OK, this is Messines. We’ll spend an hour and a half here. We’re having a tour of the church – remember I told you the crypt was used as an aid post in the war? Then you can look at the museum. Back on the coach by four, everyone – and don’t forget it’s a church. No loud voices, no running, no inappropriate behaviour. Trudi, no chewing. Get rid of it.” He pointed to the bin bag by the exit.
Brett shrugged on his jacket and shouldered his rucksack, glancing up at the clumped-together church with its odd-shaped tower. The other places had been more like it: trenches, tunnels, that huge bomb crater. Mr Wade had told them to imagine themselves as young soldiers about to go over the top, and yeah, he really could. But this…
“Fierce fighting took place around here from the autumn of 1914 and all through the war,” Mr Wade was saying. “And see Messines Ridge there? Not a spectacular height, but it gave the Germans a commanding position. We’ll get a better view from the bell tower.”
Brett clumped down the steps behind Trudi. He wasn’t about to get excited at the thought of tramping round some dismal old church.
As the young priest left his lodgings, he wondered, as he wondered every morning, How long can it go on, this war? How much more can we take?
Winter would soon be here, the long dark days, and now the armies had dug themselves in as if no one expected to move far. Months ago, at the start, it had seemed the Germans would sweep right through Belgium, into France and down to Paris, but they’d halted here, brought up against the British and Belgian armies. Stalemate. But it had come at a terrible price.
Already the shelling had battered the town of Messines and the priest’s beloved church. It grieved him, gave him a physical pain, to see it damaged, surely beyond repair. When the war is over, he thought, we must build anew: build an even more splendid church, to stand against brutality and suffering.
And, now that the Germans had taken Messines, he was on the wrong side of the line. He could have fled, but Father Antonius said it was their duty to stay. They had to give help wherever it was needed. The farmers and their families couldn’t leave; nor could the people in nearby villages. The young priest had travelled in Germany before the war and spoke the language, so had been sent by Father Antonius to comfort and pray with the wounded soldiers who straggled back from the front line.
Soldiers! Some of them were hardly more than boys. They hadn’t chosen war, any more than the Belgians had, or the French, or the British. He prayed now as he walked, for these innocents caught up in the fighting, pitched against the deadly new machine guns that ripped flesh to pieces without even pausing for breath.
Now that the Germans had discovered the church crypt, they were using it as an aid post. The priest crossed himself as he approached the ruins and picked his way through the rubble of the cloisters. What would today bring? How many young men were up there on the ridge, healthy, full of vigour, who would tonight be groaning in hospital beds? Or, worse, lying in a makeshift morgue, awaiting burial? He shuddered. It seemed beyond human endurance.
God must have some purpose in this, the priest thought; he clung to that belief.
Down in the crypt, with its stone arches, the air struck cold. A morose group of Bavarian soldiers huddled there, drab and dirty in their field grey. Two sergeants – one on a camp bed, another shrouded in a blanket – were being tended by nurses, while the others waited. A young lance corporal, slightly built, dark-haired, sat on the steps, drawing in a sketchbook by the dim light from above. Only the man on the bed, who was groaning and barely conscious, seemed seriously injured. The nurses had only basic equipment: jugs of water, bowls, bandages, disinfectant.
The priest made his enquiries, expressed sympathy, offered help – though what could he do?
The elder of the two nurses seemed resentful of his intrusion. “They’ll be moved back to the field hospital,” she told him, “as soon as there’s transport.”
He nodded, understanding that space would be needed here for more casualties later in the day. He moved towards the young man on the steps, noticing a bloodstained bandage around one ankle.
“Good day, my friend,” said the priest. “You do well to occupy yourself, and take your mind away from your injury. May I see?” He leaned closer.
At first the lance corporal looked inclined to snatch his sketchbook out of view, but then, with a slight shrug, he offered it to the priest. In pencil, with a delicate touch, he had drawn the arches of the crypt, and the countess’s grave.
“Very fine!” marvelled the priest. “Fine work indeed! Are you an artist in civilian life?”
“Yes. I am.” There was something wary and guarded about this lance corporal. In his glance, shyness was mixed with arrogance.
“That’s Leo, that is,” said a corporal with a gashed head, wincing as the nurse dabbed at it none too gently. “You hardly see him without he’s drawing something.”
“Remarkable!” said the priest, handing back the sketchbook. “Well,” he added to Leo, “I hope you’ll soon be able to return to your artistic calling.”