Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

Presently it seemed to Richard that the creak of the voice and the pinkness of the head was mixing itself in with the very food he swallowed, poisoning it....

For the boy had reached that state where he felt himself acutely and personally responsible for every atrocity committed by the Hun enemy; his nerves shrank and cowered from each newly-printed horror or treachery or brutality, as from a thong laid across his bare shoulders. And there was always something—hospital ships sunk—English prisoners tortured—liner passengers drowned—poison gas—Zepp raids on non-combatants—wanton violation again and again of the code of decent warfare. Richard, tired out from the long day-to-day strain, only wanted the Germans for pity’s sake to stop—if but for a little while, to stop.... All England had dwindled to Mr Gryce, and there was no one but Richard himself to stand forward and answer for all Germany’s accumulating reproach!

He put up a gallant enough struggle to retain his fairness of vision. And presently his imagination, up to all sorts of tricks in these days, was able to see himself and his personality on the nerves of Mr Gryce, in exact replica of Mr Gryce on the nerves of Richard Marcus ... saw the irritation in the curve of his own stolid ill-tempered shoulders—the antagonism aroused by his out-thrust underlip and the butting carriage of his head.... “Always that boy! and a loyal Englishman has no option but to live in the same house, breathing the same air, eat and sit in the same room, tread the same carpet—it’s a disgrace!” Richard was so detachedly aware of this point of view that at certain hysterical moments of encounter he was not sure if he were driven out of the smoking-room by sight of that inevitable pink head, or whether he were banging the door with the hand of Mr Gryce’s fury because those Marcus shoulders were discovered humping in the armchair by the window.

He mistrusted an imagination as flexible. But the more he denied it and resented it, the more uncannily it functioned. Marcus of Winborough two years ago would have cut the present Marcus dead, dubbing him a freak ... he saw that too.

He was far from desire to defend the Germans. He examined their conduct generally, their methods of warfare, with that new impartiality of his; gave them their due of victory, resource, consistency and stubborn devotion to their country; and nevertheless came to a conclusion that whereas a decent German might be almost as decent as a decent Briton, a rotten German is immeasurably rottener than the rottenest Briton. The sinking of hospital ships, for instance; wantonly to plunge into icy death the broken suffering bodies of men who had once already, perilously and with infinite care, been dragged back to life, and only asked now to be let rest with their own people again in their own land. Nothing could condone the sinking of hospital ships ... and Richard had to clench his teeth on the longing to join hotly in the chorus of condemnation; as he had also to grind down the impulse to join the shouting when the news was good and glorious—“What have either of these to do with you?”

By unspoken pact, the Marcuses remained silent on these subjects, when in public; they did not gain much by the attitude, for people commented in whispers: “Have you noticed that they never have anything to say on our victories, or about the atrocities? Bound to have sympathies with the other side; wonder what they say among themselves?” On the other hand, if they expressed their perfectly spontaneous pleasure over an English feat of arms, and their quite unaffected indignation over a Hun outrage, they were instantly accused of hypocrisy and over-acting, and Mr Gryce said: “I like a German at least to be a German!”

It was a difficult problem, but on the whole, perhaps, silence solved it best. And Ferdie tried to impart to his son some of that placid philosophy which formed a firm basis to his more surface characteristics.

“My dear boy, what do you expect?—that in times like these the English will cherish us for our German origin? On the whole, they are lenient and fair-minded——”

“Yes, but they promised you—promised without reservation, that you should be as good as an Englishman, equal to any Englishman. And because it was the English who promised, we—you—we all thought it was all right ...” his tone was heavy with reproach for the country which of all countries had a reputation for welcoming and sheltering those refugees from harsher lands and laws.