Angel of Mercy

Most war heroes bore me. He who orders others into fire may be canny, but is seldom a hero. And for those who have to fall to become one I have little use. If you hate your life, it’s no big deal to throw it away. One way or another, all of us will eventually manage to leave the stage, even without rehearsing. Though we may not believe it.

Nevertheless, one of my heroes is from the last world war. I neither know her name nor exactly where she lived. Only that it was on a farm somewhere in Normandy.

Years ago I traveled through that part of France. Maybe I even saw her place. I recall a rough landscape, green and fairly flat, cut up by folds, plots bounded by fieldstones and gray houses crouching under the vastness of a northern sky.

It was a hot day in late summer of 1944, a few weeks after the Allied landing. The war was in its last throes. Hitler’s troops were pulling back and had already left the area. The arrival of the English was expected any hour. She was standing in the courtyard when a man trotted up to her, a single German soldier, sweaty and dirty. A straggler, separated from his unit, a tired warrior who had fought all the way from Africa to northern France, for four long years, an old man at twenty-three, with that absent something in his eyes that some veterans call the thousand-yard-glance. But she must have seen in him just the lost child, the hounded, frightened animal shaking with fear and exhaustion.

I remember scenes of the German retreat from France, second hand. How Wehrmacht and SS requisitioned food, dragged off livestock under the curses and laments of farmers whose last goats were taken. Or shot for fun. A beaten army, plundering its way eastward. Wounded lining the roadsides, columns of trucks rolling past them at top speed, laden with higher officers’ personal booty – antique furniture, paintings and carpets, stolen in castles and museums.

He asked her for water.

She led him into the kitchen and invited him to sit down. He leaned his carbine against the wall and fell into a chair. It was cool there in the kitchen. Pleasant. She got out a pitcher with milk and the half loaf of bread left over from the morning, pushed both toward him and poured him a glassful. He was so exhausted, he had to use both hands to drink. Shortly thereafter, three men came in.

One of them was the farmer, the other his brother, and the third their cousin. Maybe it wasn’t her husband, but her uncle. Or her father with the two hired hands. Who knows. The three eyed the uninvited guest and whispered. The German sat apathetically at the table and had enough to do just keeping awake while he chewed. Until one of the men took his rifle, pointed it at him, and levered a cartridge into the chamber. Now he understood what they had been talking about.

He was their last chance to grab a crumb of glory. They would drag him out and beat him to death. Or shoot him. Then they would put him on display in front of the door. As proof of their courage. So that the neighbours could come to congratulate them and the English soldiers would laugh, pat them on their backs and hand out cigarettes. It had been a mistake to ask for water here. In less than an hour, the flies now circling over the milk would be crawling in his eyes.

That’s when the woman begins to shout. She goes straight to the man with the rifle, slaps him in the face, right and left, and tears the weapon from his hands. Seconds later, diesel motors roar outside. English lorries rumble up to the house. The German jumps up in panic. She lays her hand on his arm:

"Reste la! La guerre est fini pour toi."

But my father rejected her offer, obeyed his reflex, grabbed the rifle. She let him out through the back. He ran away.

Most men run away from freedom.

As he repeated her sentences, he laughed with a brief sob. Then he shrugged his shoulders, weighed the air in his hands, and looked at me. His eyes were big and brown and wet.

"You understand?"

Only this much, I thought: There was one who didn’t go along with the game. Who resisted the madness around her. Who gave you milk when you asked her for water. And bread. The bread of mercy. Who granted you the option to stop killing. But didn’t hold you back. To live you had to decide for yourself. She was truly free. More human than you and I or the Brits and the guys in her kitchen. She is the first hero you have ever told me about.

Aloud, I just asked him why he didn’t stay. Out of fear or shame?

He chewed dryly, shrugged his shoulders, said he didn’t know anymore. His glance fled, somewhere into emptiness, while his jaw muscles danced. He was afraid the English would shoot him, he explained a few seconds later. After all, they were advancing. When you’re advancing, you can’t take prisoners. Prisoners are a burden. You have to watch them. That binds time and strength.

"They couldn’t take any prisoners..."

Whether and how often he killed his own prisoners remained his secret. They way he replied to my question grants me at least the choice to believe he didn't.

I don’t know how many Frenchmen were abducted to Germany for forced labour in 1944 and starved behind camp fences. And whether the woman knew that when she rescued the trembling animal in master race uniform and let him go. Or if she regretted it later.

Maybe she did it because her son carried slugs for shells twelve hours a day in a munitions factory near Hanover and she prayed that a German mother might have pity on him and show mercy. So that her child lived and she would see it again.

Or she did it for herself and the gods. Because hospitality is holy, holier than revenge and hatred.

I have no idea.

But when I open the newspaper today, grow weary from what I read and think, "Our species really is a dead end of evolution. It’s high time we departed from creation," she consoles me.

Because I know: in the midst of all the insanity, there is also kindness. Or at least there was once. Enough courage not to betray oneself by bowing to the murderous standards of apparent sense. Enough hope to set love against the deranged constraints of the the moment. Out of love for oneself. Humans can do that. Sometimes.

Sure, some may say, "So what? What do you want, you fool? Women are practical. She just didn’t want to have to mop the Kraut’s blood from her kitchen floor while the men got drunk on her doorstep and let themselves be celebrated as resistance fighters. She wasn’t generous, she was indolent. What you call kindness is utterly arbitrary, sheer fluke. If a fart pains you, you pull the trigger. If you’ve just had a relaxed fuck, you put away the piece. It’s as simple as that."

Maybe so. Yet one thing is certain: Without her grace, I wouldn’t be here, and the bones of the man who later became my father would rot, forgotten in what once was enemy territory.

That’s pretty simple, too.