Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

“But I’ll make her take me somehow—in the end——”

A man must have a country to call his own. To know his own. So much the war had taught him. Other lessons it might have held for others; but for him this special groping agony of nowhere belonging.

Internationalism ... brotherhood ... that was all very well; men had hailed it, and believed in it; had let the careful drawing of boundary be slurred; had forgotten to set stern limits to their sense of humanity ... had merged the significance of birthplace to freer, more casual interpretation: The world is my birthplace.... Men had wandered, drifted, flung themselves down in alien places. Why not? The subconscious trust in the brotherhood of nations had urged them to such courses.

And Internationalism had failed them. Each country was tightly puckered again to self-sufficiency. Internationalism had no country to give her devotees during a European war. No country but No Man’s Land ... desolate sodden track without end or beginning, neither land nor sea ... to Richard, almost asleep, came a vision of the estuary echoed somewhere in space and in deeper shadow ... greyer fog ... shapes stumbling about it, hunting for cover, some wailing loudly, some silent and bewildered.... He was himself a wraith, one of the betrayed ... and there were others vaguely familiar....

Voices calling, and receiving no answer, calling again and again ... red-cheeked waiters, vaguely seen in pre-war days, vaguely disappeared after 1914—they were all here, paler now.... And here the cobbler to whom Richard had given Aunt Stella’s shoes ... and Trudchen and her sister Anna, seeking each other, missing each other.... Otto Rothenburg squealing loudly that he was British.... And now Richard, in his travellings, bumped up against Gottlieb Schnabel, who shrank from him and shrank away into the murky gloom ... and turned into Captain Dreyfus—“I wonder why?” That legendary soldier who had killed his own brother on the opposite side—he was native of No Man’s Land; and his brother, the sticky brown gouts dripping from both his shot arms—And: “You here too?” said Thomas Spalding to Richard, and held out a hand.... A cloud of fog seemed to roll between them.... Thomas Spalding was lost again.

Children of No Man’s Land—of Denmark and Norway and Sweden and Spain and Holland, entangled haphazard in one belligerent country or another, condemned haphazard as pro-German, pro-English.... Their bewildered avowals disbelieved and mocked.... “Who are the neutrals? there are no neutrals—the world is at war....” Born in one place, reared in another, married in a third—“which is your country?” No Man’s Land is their country ... we shall meet them in No Man’s Land.... “An artist has no country”—artists without number groping their way through No Man’s Land, thinking they are walking straight ahead and out of it, not knowing that in the darkness and the smiting din they are walking round and round in circles....

“I have no son!” voice sombre and deep from the shadows; a proud old man, this, naturalized English, hating Germany, eighteen-forty-eight refugee.... He sent his son to be killed at Gallipoli, and now they are interrogating his loyalty—“Have you a son at the Front?” “I have no son!” He will be accepted at his own word and valuation, or not at all. The dead boy is too dear to stand for mere pledge and security....

Little distracted figures plunging hither and thither, some of them frantically waving a sheet of paper—“Look—Look,” but there is no escape from No Man’s Land by naturalization ... in despair the papers are thrown away—flutter whitely in the gloom “like a paper-chase,” Richard thinks.

He is hunting for David, in frantic need of comradeship. “Is it you? Or you?” thrusting away each white distorted face as it looms towards him. But David is not here—David was once of No Man’s Land, but now no more.... Zion has him, wholly and completely. David is a Jew, and the Jews have been granted a cause and a kingdom.... Of no avail to seek for David in these grey spectral fogs. The noise is louder and louder—no definite sound, but an intensified cosmic thudding which can be heard when body and soul are alone and listening.... Richard is aware of loneliness drenching him like vast breakers—must he stay here for ever?

“Lord, sir—that don’t matter ... you’re one of us all right!” It is Corporal Plunkett’s voice which bursts the nightmare vision ... and drags him back to the sea-wall by the estuary....