Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

“And you know how angry Papa is when I ask him at all about Anna and Karl, though he used to love and eat largely of her Pflaumentorte and vex me by naming it better than mine. And yet not even a letter from me for the sixtieth birthday—vot vill she think? And she and I wiz ever only a year between ... but how can one write and say nothing about our Con ... though it will surely remind her again of the armer seligen Fritz—since how little while is he too ... my eldest and her youngest——” she sighed. “Perhaps—no—I will not tell zem—now.” And yet again: “Vot do you sink, David?”

“There’s Max,” he reminded her. “We’ve written to Max—and if he sees Uncle Karl——”

“Ne, Schatz, not now they have moved him to that camp so far away.... And one does not know vot to believe or not; they say—Otto says the Chermans do such terrible sings to the English prisoners—and the Phillips tell me too—it is almost unthinkbar—to cut off both the hands at the wrist——”

“Mums, Mums, when you’ve had letters through in Max’s own writing——”

“As if the dear boy would worry me by telling it in a letter....” sobbed Trudchen.

Richard emphatically felt the need of departure. And the Lord spared him an encounter with Otto in the hall.

He lunched, and then sauntered into the afternoon show at a music-hall, thinking to get rid of himself by plunging into a mass of people and a rattle of sound. But the dress-circle was filled with an atmosphere unusually attentive to the performers on the stage; and when the lights were raised during the interval, he perceived that the seats were mainly occupied by a large detachment from St Dunstan’s: men who had been blinded in the war; men who had been chosen haphazard for the greatest sacrifice of all. Richard wondered whether a single one of them had anticipated such a calamity as this; and whether, knowing, they would still have willingly exposed themselves; he had heard so many soldiers bound for the Front, half-jokingly prophecy their own death, or a broken nose, or a wooden leg; but—no, he had never heard the possibility of blindness joked about. Was this the secret fear they all carried in their hearts when they volunteered?

“Not a bad show,” he remarked to his neighbour, who immediately turned on him one immense rolling eye and a tiny glass one, and became confidential. He was a comical little chap, small and square, with a wide mouth, a skyward nose, and a knowing air that was enhanced by the appearance of a fixed wink. He informed Richard that he was the third of a trio; that he was his mother’s favourite, and his father’s favourite and the favourite of his two brothers; that one of his brothers had married a shrew and the other a slattern, and he alone had the perfect wife; and that the less fortunate twain were wont to say to him: “Jock, wish I ’ad yer luck!”... Moreover, he was the secret favourite of both the slattern and the shrew, and he ought by rights to have won the waltzing competition up at St Dunstan’s on Monday night, but his partner had fouled his chances by treading three times on his toe, and it was bluggy well the last time he was going to lug her round the room!...

“You brick!” muttered Richard in his heart, over and over again. Not only to be jolly and normal, but actually keen about things still—prizes, and your brother’s wife! not, as one instinctively imagined these martyrs of the war, pensive and resigned and uncannily patient, with a sort of pale upliftedness....

The jovial rowdiness in that portion of the auditorium was hushed as the curtain went up on a troupe of acrobats and dancers kissing amorous hands to the audience, from various inverted positions on the trapeze.