Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

Richard stared horizon-wards where might be the dilatory tide of his desire. He was now peaceful, almost numb in mind and body, caring little for recent turmoil, where so soon blankness was to be. He wondered dispassionately as to the time? About six o’clock, to judge by the western pyramid of opaque storm-grey cloud, a pale yellow sun breaking its peak into fragments and spilling itself in shaft after shaft of dim light down the triangle and on to the illimitable green and brown and fawn, burnishing it to a glimmering fantasy like the hues of a mackerel. Patches of blue sky were reflected in purple pools. And areas of mud were almost invisible for ships, their keels deeply embedded, as though a whole lurching fleet had suddenly flung themselves on their sides and were impotent ... ropes and nets and sails and tackle, old tubs and steamers and hulks. The scene was packed and spiked with masts. Behind the station, and its creak and flap of signals and gates and coal-trucks, a purple gasometer seemed to have entangled itself beyond redemption into the mournful landscape; and from an outjutting breakwater, the black finger of a donkey-engine pointed darkly, accusingly against the sky. The tide had turned, somewhere far out there; and in monotonous procession up a narrow flowing squiggle of silvery grey, the fishing-boats came in; their unclothed masts still gauntly upright; small dark figures of men hauling with ropes on either side, or gently paddling from the stern; small dark figures, penguin-height, standing patiently in rows on the mud, to receive the loads of fish. Round each dwindling bend another boat could be sighted; they might come in thus for ever, with nothing to break their soundless even progress. The sky was all grey now, and the grey and brown of the marshes hardly touched to pearliness. A throb in the air loudened, as a grey steel airship came pounding, slow and enormous, across the foreground. Dagon, god of fish ... god significant of grey steel wars....

From lethargic contemplation, Richard was being imperceptibly hypnotized by the subtle rhythmic excitement that pervades and hangs about an estuary; estuary which is not quite the sea; which leads to the sea; which opens out so wildly and generously from the mere width of a river. The fishing-hauls were in, and the men had vanished from the marsh; but to him it was still as though boat after boat were following the curve of the inflowing stream ... but dimly visible now ... the air was full of windless dusk, and a quiver shook the keels of the mud-locked fleet; soon they would begin to stir and lift....

II

The scream of a siren punctured the calm. Another one, from much nearer at hand, pressed down and swallowed the first long raucous shock of sound.

Richard knew the two blasts were signals of an air-raid impending. He had heard the Dunnes discussing the possibility of several during this week of harvest moon. A few lingering footsteps pattered to sudden quickness and silence. In the little town at his back, and all along the coast, he was aware of no panic, but of every person on the defensive; sucked back behind walls and shutters and curtains; braced to sturdy sensible resistance of the chance-monster and its grim selection. In the morning the population would emerge and stand about and gossip clamorously, with frequent repetition of the phrase: “Well, I was just——” “Yes, and I was just——” But now, all activity withdrawn and waiting....

Richard waited too, a few moments. Then, impatient of immobility, strolled along the path on his right. He was impressed by the absence of fuss on the part of the civil population. All very well for him who had no more fastenings on life; but these ordinary people appeared to take it so for granted that they should be disturbed in the midst of their daily business, to an encounter with such grotesque apparition as bombs and shrapnel and aerial torpedoes.... Their behaviour roused him to the same queer beating tenderness as when the blind discharged soldiers at the music-hall had been “still keen on things.” Some people were rather fine.... English people ... but he had declared out loud that he hated the English ... and so he had to die.

He went past the gas-works, and along the sea-wall which meandered through the marshes. Open country all around him now, and no noise but the swish of rushes, far-off gurgle and squirt of water, occasional plop of some small animal into the spreading pools. Was there always this black gaping rent of silence between the signal and the first gun-mutterings? It was Richard’s unique experience of an air-raid outside London; and an air-raid in London he had considered was altogether a second-rate affair.

“First line of defence,” he remembered Greville had called the belt of fortresses—Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Canvey Island, Tilbury and Gravesend. He strained his eyes towards the angles of crouching coast-line opposite him, in vain effort to distinguish them. First line of defence, he repeated once or twice exultantly—before he pulled himself up as a fool. What did such trivialities concern him now?

Hallo—was that firing out there? No.

Yes.