‘Nor Any Drop To Drink’

“So, you want to know why I didn’t want to visit France for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy landings?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here”, said Kevin Martin, a trainee reporter with the New Hampshire and Dorset Review, who was struggling to interview 90-year-old British veteran, Arthur Horton  at Westview Sheltered Housing in Portsmouth.  

“Well, I’ll  tell you something I’ve never told anyone before”, said Arthur, clearing his throat.   

“I wouldn’t be doing it now if our warden here at Westview hadn’t gone squealing to your newspaper. But I suppose I’d better explain myself to set the record straight”.

“Thanks, Arthur”, said Kevin. “I appreciate your time”.

“Hmm! We’ll  see about that! Anyway, what I’d told Mr Blabbermouth was that after we’d won the Battle of Caen and erected ‘Port Churchill’ at Arromanches, the bastard French refused to give us any drinking water”.

“What?”

“Yes! That’s right. When the 1st Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment  had embarked here  at Portsmouth I was even younger than you – barely  more than 20; a scared,  scrawny kid who had become an instant chain-smoker, trying to look  bigger, braver – and much older - than  my years.

“But I didn’t have to pretend for long. Twenty-four hours later I already felt old! Every time I think about it  I’m lost in a fog of cordite and ripped, burning flesh. I can even hear the moans of other lads my age, weeping for their mothers.

“As we landed and saw the dead and maimed tossed about in bloodied sea water near the shore, we couldn’t stop to help. So we just pushed the corpses and the injured men out of our way. We had no choice. We had a job to do”.

“But I don’t understand”, said Kevin. “At college, our tutors say  journalists write the first draft of history. Now you’re rewriting what the books say. Thousands of men like you helped to liberate Caen and Arromanches. This is what other D-Day veterans and world leaders have celebrated. But you’re saying that your intervention became self-preservation and that you weren’t welcome, anyway”.

“Oh, the locals wanted our help, make no mistake. They just didn’t want us hanging around begging for basics. Don’t forget, there were thousands of  soldiers and the war had been going on for almost five years. So when they saw us walking towards their homes they hid in the back or slammed their front doors in our faces.  They just wanted us to disappear once we’d done our job!

“But we – I - got over it. I grew up fast and got very hard. In the end I was even promoted to sergeant. I’m a great British patriot. If I was still young and healthy, despite everything, I’m sure I’d do it all again. But those at the top who were supposed to be running the show for the Allies kept dropping us in it. So the rest of us became like the lads who landed before me on Gold Beach – just swept up by the tide of events – tiny bits of wreckage bobbing on the sea.

“What happened to you after D-Day?”

“Things have gone a bit hazy in my mind, but all of us in our unit fought across Europe for what seemed ever-and-a-day until we reached Germany.

“But hang on!”, added Arthur suddenly, before Kevin could interrupt. “I’ve just remembered that I once got a free ticket to the official opening of the film, A Bridge Too Far as I’d fought in the real campaign in Holland that was code- named ‘Operation Market Garden’. It was as much a miracle for me that I got through everything with no more than a few scratches as it was when the Germans couldn’t blow up the bridge at Nijmegen because the wires to the detonator had been cut. I kept staring at the screen that night in town muttering ‘I was there, I was there’! Amazing, really!”

“Did you help to liberate any concentration camps”?

“Now that’s a good question. No, I didn’t. But before I was demobbed, I helped to form the guard for that bloody  murdering   sadist  cow,  Irma  Grese when she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint for her crimes at Belsen. It was thirsty work! We all went for a jar after the hangings. Albert liked his pint. That was a good day!”

“Arthur, you seem much more bitter about these events than a lot of other people your age. Why?”

“It’s not that I’m ‘bitter’. I’ve led a quiet life since the war. I’ve not done anything you might call ‘exciting’. I stayed single and kept busy as a carpenter. I’ve always been good with my hands and I’ve made a lot of furniture for myself. Funny though, despite my army rank, I never got far at work although I made sure I always did what I was told.

“At one time I went up north to make coffins for the Co-operative Society but I came back here as it’s where I belong. Now”, added Arthur, wiping his eyes, “it won’t be long before someone makes a box for me”.

----------------

This story first appeared as Little Water, Less Love in the July 2014 edition of Live Encounters magazine (http://liveencounters.net/?p=7860) edited by Mark Ulyseas, a faithful supporter of Israel and all matters Jewish.

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Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood – 27 June 2014)

‘She’s Got Them – Under Her Skin!'

Dr. Ludovic Bouland gripped a scalpel between his right thumb and forefinger, using his left hand to smooth the wide rectangle of flesh he was about to cut.

“Madame Nul de Nulle Part – Mrs No-one from Nowhere”, he muttered, arcing his arm over the prone form on the dissecting table before him, “my work here will give you posthumous fame and glory! The skin off your back is to serve as the binding for an important book, Des Destinées de L’âme – Destinies of the Soul. This is  a profound meditation on the soul and life after death by my dear friend, the distinguished essayist and poet, Arsène Houssaye”.   

But the doctor’s reverie was interrupted by a shrill, disembodied female voice.  

“You, who cup my corpse in the palm of your hand, how can you know what Heaven has ordained for my soul or the after life? You seem to cherish books more than living beings. Why is this?

“Here, where I now dwell, there is neither time nor space that you could recognise. Yet we know everything – past, future, good and evil.

“In the time to come the world will learn that my husband flung me into the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris,  claiming falsely  that  I  was an ‘hysteric’. This was after I’d told his mother that I  had caught him in our bed with his mistress!

“So before dying unattended of a sudden stroke, I spent my prime years lying in the gloom on a thin straw pallet with inadequate food and no visitors.

“All this, mark you monsieur, was while  my husband enjoyed sex with the over-fed, hideously painted cuckoo which had usurped my place and laid her putrid eggs on our goose-feathered mattress!

“Now I can tell you that within the first score years of the 21st century, savages living in what is presently named the Ottoman Administration  of Iraq, will burst into a police officer’s   house, hack off his head and tell the world ‘this is our football. It is made of skin’. The world, Monsieur Le Docteur, will become less human than you, a polished Parisian clinician and bibliophile, could possibly imagine.

“Before that though, in the mid-years of the 20th century, millions of people will be incarcerated in prisons far worse even than the hospital where you’re dissecting me, only to be starved, beaten, tortured, gassed then burnt. These barbarities will occur simply because the victims have not conformed to a peculiar notion of sterile purity.

“What will follow? Eternal arguments on earth as to whether these ghost people – like me, given numbers instead of names  – also had had their skins reused – to cover a cigarette case, maybe – or to make a nice lampshade, perhaps two. I’ve yet to extract the truth from another so-called doctor, Josef Mengele, who was chief among the faux surgeons in these hellish prison camps”.

But Dr Bouland was unmoved by her speech. Surely, he mused,  he was hallucinating, having spent much too long in the deepest bowels of the hospital, butchering human flesh.

“This book”, he said aloud,  “will be bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament will be stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, the viewer will easily distinguish the pores of the skin.

 

“It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. Compare it, for example, with the small volume I have in my library, Séverin Pineau’s De Integritatis & Corruptionis  Virginum  Notis  - (The  Characteristics of Integrity and Corruption of Maidens).

 

“This is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac. A book about the human soul deserves to be dressed in a human covering. It seems more fitting, somehow,  like  the  confessions  of   criminals bound in their own skin.

“That reminds me, Madame. Are you sure your husband was the guilty party?Perhaps I should start to investigate who you really were”.

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Author’s Note: Houghton Library at Harvard College, USA is the main repository for the university’s rare books and manuscripts. Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’âme(FC8.H8177.879dc), bound in human skin, is considered to be among its most sinister. 

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Natalie Wood

(© Natalie Irene Wood –14 June 2014)