Chapter 5

Autumn brought a shift in the work crew after a summer of digging ditches and filling holes in the road. They moved into the fields, working behind the machines, sometimes harvesting by hand things like potatoes and garden vegetables. On random days the bouncers let the men take food home. He liked working into the evening on something that seemed real, feeling his sweat cool across his back as he pulled weeds and filled baskets of food for other people.

The people running things on the farms carried a tension about them, and several times the work crews were sent back into fields to pick up beans and bits of other crops that had been left behind on a first pass. Matthew heard some of the farmers talking about how little they would be able to keep for themselves. He recognized a few of the farmers as former tenants at Downton, but no one looked at him.

He started to wonder about the feeling of the town. Given his own skewed place, he couldn't be sure, but things seemed harsh, lean. The little family in the front house seemed more pinched, the older boy a little more frantic as he carried in bits of coal and gathered the smaller children out of the street any time army trucks rumbled past.

Peter Mills reappeared on the work crew. He looked right at Matthew on a Thursday evening as things broke up. Matthew met his gaze. Friday after signing in and showering he walked out of town back to the hill where he'd spoken with Mills during the summer. The landscape hadn't really started to turn colors in full yet but the change seemed within each bit of worn green and edges of yellow. The Abbey looked gorgeous, floating golden amongst the incipient autumn. Mills approached.

"You live dangerously."

"Not really," said the young man. "Don't suppose I have much left to lose, so can't get too dangerous."

Matthew looked around.

"My mother died last month."

"I am sorry."

"Thanks."

The lad sat down at the edge of the wood near the path.

"I just wondered if you could explain to me what happened in '37. Izzy was always confused. Her mother seemed so angry about it."

"Did she? Did they?" Matthew played with a twig, swishing against the dry leaves of the bush he sat behind. "Well, I don't know much of what happened, just my piece."

"That's what I want I guess."

"Why?"

"I'm trying to decide what I should do next. No one talks about any of it. Whether or not we're supposed to, no one talks. It seems that was the turn."

Matthew considered that. "I suppose when we mobilized that summer before the invasion, that changed the flow of everything. People thought the Franco-Russian pact created a check on expansion and we merely needed a show of force and perhaps a little poke of an intervention to check the German saber rattling. When the Germans remilitarized the Rhineland we were ready and waiting, quick to invade all of Germany."

"But it was they who broke the treaties."

"Yes, but what treaties. And we invaded the whole. And more to it, we were not ready, not us nor the French."

"The Netherlands?"

"I was in the division that was thrown into the Netherlands while trying to swing across the Rhine. Swing across the Rhine. That was doom right there."

"But wasn't that the plan?"

"Yes."

"Did you believe in it at the time?"

"I forget. No. Doesn't matter, anyhow."

Peter Mills looked at Matthew again.

"And so how did you come to support keeping going?"

"I don't know exactly. I ended up with a smaller more mobile unit for a while at the beginning and we covered a lot of ground in the chaos, several times ending up going through areas after the Wehrmacht and the SS and the rest had been through. Fighting for their homeland they took time and resources to kill civilians on the ground, sometimes their own people. More than once I saw ditches of bodies, families together, seemed like entire villages though it couldn't have been. Most of the dead seemed to be Jews, some gypsies, people with those badges on their clothing, but I couldn't tell. That was in only a few weeks' time. And the armies, they were just so ready, so good. Once we'd botched it, giving them the Rhineland, and access to other resources, to the east to oil, it seemed they would use the moment to build on strength and take Europe entirely. And then I would think about those villages." Matthew looked towards the boy but didn't see him. "When it became clear we were going to negotiate, I just wanted some assurance they'd seen it."

"Seen it, what do you mean, who?"

"I think it was the first war hanging over me. Then, the generals seemed so distant, unconnected from the slaughter, fighting, making us fight, with little reason. Seemed to me the Nazis were a reason, the civilians were a reason. If our generals hadn't known the old fight was not worth it, how could they know maybe a fight was worth it. I don't know."

"But you hadn't wanted to go to war, I thought."

"I didn't. Partly, I didn't know them until I was back on the continent. Mostly, though, in the mess of war I think it matters how it starts, did you try to avoid it or did you seek it out." Matthew looked again over to the Abbey. "But then, once it started, with the lust uncorked, it seemed walking away would just give them more power. And letting them have more power would be a wrong given what they were prepared to do. So I thought we should stay, figure out a way to fight or support others to fight on."

"So how did that become such a problem?"

"My unit stayed functioning after some others began to fall apart. I started with a battalion in my old regiment, but took them with me into a reformed reconnaissance regiment when I ended up in command. After a couple of weeks we folded some other companies into the unit and I had command of the equivalent of three battalions. The men wanted to fight, at least be part of something that made sense. Ragged platoons and squads would wander into anything like a command post and take orders. I felt we had an effective force and that we should try to use it. The general in charge of the division did not. I proposed a retreat to a set of defensible positions that would give us time to decide whether to fight or withdraw by sea. He ordered me to stand down and wait for armistice terms. I insisted he give me orders personally. Very proper, but a challenge nonetheless. We had a staff meeting and I proposed my plans in front of the remaining officers. I thought my regiment could hold long enough to allow a pull out by sea of at least the rest of our division and the units remaining to the west of us. He relieved me of my command."

"Could you have won?"

"No, not won, but we could have given space to save a good chunk of the army. Instead we gave up most of our weapons, all our armour and transport support. Even most of the aircraft on the continent. Insanity."

"So you were disgraced by being relieved then on the eve of what became peace? That doesn't really make sense to me."

"Well, but it was messy of course. The regiment had been informed and I was fairly sure the X-O had been given command. My emotions were high. I went back to my command alone by car when I should have stayed under the generals' eyes. When I got there a German Panzer group had already entered the area but a lot of our men hadn't laid down their weapons. They wanted to fight, many of them had made a choice to keep fighting when they could have faded into the countryside, walked away from the obvious defeat."

Matthew remembered the scene with a stinging clarity, a picture view on the past in a way he didn't really access any more. As he'd driven along into his regiment's command area, he'd seen the troops from the Panzers massed, waiting with good discipline. The men, especially the men from his old battalion, milled in an ugly way. His executive officer, Barnes, now in command, stood in the right place, but to Matthew's eye clearly shaken. A German major ordered the British to form up and stack their weapons. Barnes didn't respond right away. A German lieutenant came up to Matthew with several enlisted men, pointing their weapons at Matthew, pushing him back against his car. The men started to mass in tension, and the Germans stiffened. Several tank turrets swung in line with the command area. His name came out from the crowd and he looked to Barnes.

Just over an hour before Matthew had offered to sacrifice them all to give other men a chance to escape and maybe fight again. Now he was sick at the thought he'd see them wiped away in a ridiculous, useless fit of frustration and misplaced loyalty. Matthew saw the German colonel most likely in command and called across the field in German, which confused everyone. After an angry focused glare and a brief exchange between them in German, the colonel allowed him to speak, to tell the men Barnes was in command and had his support, that it was a bitter end but they must follow orders and hope for the best. The men calmed and the German colonel walked over and directed Matthew back into his own car, putting in two German officers to drive him away.

He was talking too much.

"I don't know what went on, really, except things were volatile and the regiment almost refused to surrender arms in the middle of a fully armed Panzer column and I ended up driving away with some of the German officers. I was at once opposed to armistice and complicit with the enemy."

Matthew had been taken to an old prison inside western Germany, near a prison camp. He sat alone in a cell with a metal shelf for a bed and a hole for a toilet. If he pulled himself up to the barred window he could see the camp but couldn't tell if any of his regiment were there. The camp emptied rather quickly but he stayed, desperately sick before the new year. The next weeks were a haze and he was at Downton before he knew what had happened.

"I got sick in prison and was sent home later. That was the end of it for me."

The young man didn't look satisfied but he nodded.

"I think I understand the last war. You went then, too. That was more by choice, perhaps." He looked over as Matthew nodded. "What would you do now?"

Matthew looked at him.

"What if you could?"

The lad had posed a better question. What if he could?

"If it can be won, the war will be won from outside Britain. I suppose I would get out," said Matthew.

"Can it be won, do you think?"

"Perhaps.