A Soldier's Tale Read Online Free

wait.
    What’s she done that’s so terrible? I says.
    Listen, he says, listen, and he is very angry. She was friend to the Boches, she make love to them. He shrugged. For that, perhaps the women shave her head, to make her shame. But this one, she had friends in the Resistance. She tells a German officer, then the Gestapo—twelve men—my godson—
    The old man was very angry and upset and I felt a bit sorry for him. The Brat must have caught on to what he was saying, because he began talking, shouting at me, what sounded like names of people.
    His cousin—friends—my pupils—
    You’re a schoolmaster? I says to him.
    Yes, I am school master. I teach English, I admire—I admired the English.
    Well, I says, I’ve made up my mind to stay, and that’s what I’ll do. I don’t care what she done. I’m staying here. When I go, you can do what you like with her.
    The old man translated this to the Brat, and the kid snarled at me and spat in the dust. But the old man just stared at me for a while, then he says, Very well, Monsieur le Caporal, real quiet he says it, and turns away. We will wait, he says. And he walks up the road with the Brat following him.
    Then Big Stupid comes to life. Cigarette? he says with a cheeky grin on his big face. So I took out my fags and counted out three, one for each of them, and gave them to him, and off he went after the others.
    I watched them go up the hill some way and settle themselves under a big old beech tree, on a bit of a bank by the roadside with a good view down the slope. Big Stupid shared out the fags, and they lit up and sat there, staring at the cottage. I stayed by the gate. Every so often I’d look round to see if she was still there, though she didn’t have much chance of running away. Each time I could see her watching me through the kitchen side-window, and what she was thinking about God knows, perhaps whether I’d just walk off and leave her.
    (And God knows what you thought, and what you’rethinking, Corporal Scourby, I reflected as I listened to him. Did he pity this trapped woman? Did he believe her accusers? I think he was a little sorry for both, as well as very contemptuous. Perhaps at this time he was moved by simple lust and by the thought of using this woman who couldn’t refuse him and couldn’t escape. And perhaps it was none of these things, but simply a hunter on the trail. In his unreflecting way he followed his instinct. At the moment his highest motive may have been no more than a detached curiosity.)
    Well (he went on) presently old Charlie comes back with the stuff, so I took it inside and laid it out on the table and made sure it was all there. Then he went off again, like the good little man he was, but he fixed to look in next day and see if we needed anything.
    While she was getting the supper I went for a clean-up. The bog was in the little hut at the end of the garden, and there was this sort of old dairy place at the other side of the house where I could wash. When I went to get a bucket of water from the pump, I could see someone standing under the tree up the hill, but it was too dark to see who it was in the shadow, only I think it was Big Stupid—I noticed that they left a lot of the work to him.
    So I had my wash and went back into the kitchen. She made quite a good meal of it, with bullybeef and tinned Russian salad. We drank some of the Calvados out of little glasses and she brought out a bit of that ripe French cheese. Only she didn’t like tea and she made some ersatz coffee, you know, acorns roasted and ground up, which tasted terrible.
    She’d done herself up and tidied her hair and put on a bit of lipstick, and with that heavy red hair she didn’t look half bad. We ate our supper and just talked about things, about what it was like during the war, and the bombing, and the rationing, and how the French felt about the Germans and how the British felt