The Major's Daughter (39 page)

Epilogue

T
his, then, was Collie's war.

It was not much of a war when weighed against the death of millions, but years later, recalling her time in New Hampshire, this was the moment she spoke about. It was rare that she let the full recollection come to her, though she lived with it as a shadow every day for the remainder of her life.
August
, she sometimes thought at the oddest moments, kneeling in the garden, or bending to pick up a basket of laundry. Then for just an instant he would be there, her boy love, her first heart, her soldier true.

He was an Austrian and he had run north for his life, and she had traveled with him. That was the story she told to her children, to her grandchildren, but only at some late hour or in some setting that forced the memory on her. Her recollection rested on a single day spent beneath hastily cut branches, buried in a small hole on a hillside in New Hampshire, and she did not like to cheapen it by recounting it. That was Collie's war. And the first sight of him—yes, she could remember that, but in time, in the many years of her life, that memory mixed with others so that she could no longer count on its veracity. He was a shining boy, a handsome man, and she could still recite the poem.
The world becomes more beautiful with each day.
The paper transcription, his offering, lived in a small corner of her jewelry box, kept secret even from her husband of thirty-seven years, discovered, finally, by her two oldest daughters when they moved her into the nursing home.

There were times, many times as she grew old and brittle and sat in front of a gritty television garbled with static, that the memory reformed and changed. Mercifully, she could not always remember what had happened in those last moments against the Canadian border. She could no longer envision Gerhard's head breaking open like a fresh melon, his blood bleeding out into the water, his steps becoming ponderous in their final heaviness for a moment. She screamed then, but she no longer remembered even that with any clarity. Gerhard fell forward and the water reached up to receive him and his blood became a red flag opening in a wind close to the earth. It spread over her legs, and then the second bullet, or maybe the fifth, or tenth—how could she know?—came for August. She heard it in the chamber of the rifle, in the explosion of gunpowder, in the air, whistling and sharp, as it spread and entered him in the neck and ended his life. She held his hand when he fell forward and for many moments she stood in the water, his body slowly rolling downstream, its weight forcing her to follow him, one step at a time as his weight tumbled and pulled her. She yearned for her own bullet, but it never came. Then men splashed into the water and she felt herself pulled back and she refused to let go of August's hand. They broke her grip finally and she had screamed to let her go. She intended to follow his body into the water, back to the lake, but they would not permit it. The water rushed over his beautiful face and pushed his hair into a wedge behind his skull.

That's what she remembered. That was her war.

Afterward, of course, profound embarrassment. A long trip to her father's sister in Philadelphia. A convalescent visit to Estelle's home. Many hushed voices around her. It had been a rash, childish stunt, people said. It had been the result of immaturity and the loss of her mother. Young girls, they said, let their hearts get in the way. And for many years—in her productive decades filled with children and work, the endless cleaning, the meal making, the sick infant, the unmade beds, the open hampers—she had agreed with them. It was a folly of youth, is how she put it. It had been a foolish fling, one, looking back, that she must surely regret.

But she always understood that was not the whole truth. August had not been a folly. To believe that would be to believe her own life had been a foolish, meaningless passage of days. If she knew love now, then she must have known love then.

In her last years, after her husband died and when her children had gone off to pursue their own lives, and while she sat in the padded chair of the nursing home that harbored her for the final days of her life, sometimes in the late afternoon August returned to her. He was not the corpse rolling in the water then, not the slack hand in hers, but the young, gallant August, the sweet boy she had loved with all her heart. It was not wrong to remember that, she didn't think. Dozing, half surrendered to her afternoon nap, he sometimes appeared to her. He was a boy, just a boy, and he held out his hand—the same hand that she had clutched so desperately in those final moments—and smiled at her. Sometimes, in the deepest dreams, she went with him. They crossed the stream and they climbed the bank on the other side, and she turned to him and kissed him. And that was a different life, one equally beautiful in its way, and he led her northward into the new land, and she went with him, always with him.

I, also
, he said.
Ich auch.

T
his is a work of fiction set in a historical setting, and as a result I have felt free to invent elements as needed for the narrative. I have also rounded off certain square ends, made the timeline tidier or more convenient in places, and created events only touched on or suggested in historical accounts, all in service to the story of a young woman and man falling in love in that troubled and difficult period. I have softened much of the prison experience, or kept it from intruding too far into the narrative, because my focus rested primarily on the fate of the story's couple. Prison life, even under the best circumstances possible, was dire. Food was short; war reports came frequently, often carrying news hard to hear.

One small footnote. Near the end of the story, August and Gerhard attempt to escape to Canada. While we never learn the fate of the other Camp Stark survivors in this story, it should be noted that many German prisoners were indeed sentenced to forced labor in England. They found out about this final sentence only when they were already on board ship. To add to the cruelty, they thought they were going home when the ships were diverted to Britain. For many, this proved the final straw. Many German POWs took their lives by stepping off the ships at night. Even the prospect of drowning in the wild northern seas was preferable to the thought of more forced labor in a foreign land.

The fabric of this story was shaped and formed by my reading of
Stark Decency
by Allen V. Koop and Hartmut Lang. For any reader looking for a comprehensive account of Camp Stark, I cannot send you to a better source. For many years as a professor in the University of New Hampshire system, I had heard vague rumors about a camp, some sort of prison camp holding German soldiers, that existed during World War II in New Hampshire. The idea seemed preposterous to me, but gradually I learned of this singular chapter in the state's history. Reading
Stark Decency
gave me the first inkling that there might be a story worth telling not far from my own front door. In time, the scope of the German prisoner-of-war camps became clear to me, and I remained astonished that I had never encountered such histories in my years of schooling. My guess is that most Americans, if they think of prisoner-of-war camps based in the United States during WWII, usually recall the Japanese internment camps. In the years I have been working on this novel, I have come across many people who could not quite believe it when I told them German soldiers were incarcerated in a tiny village in New Hampshire a year prior to Hitler's final days.

Any errors in this historical account are entirely mine. The characters herein are fictional. Although I was impressed in many instances by the good nature and competency of some of the historical figures involved, I did not “base” my characters on any particular individual. I may say, however, that I was enormously pleased to find that the people of my home state—New Hampshire—acquitted themselves with great courage and decency during that era. I have always found the people of New Hampshire to be kind and levelheaded, and so it did not surprise me to read that they had been fair and evenhanded in their treatment of German soldiers. I am proud to say I would have predicted it.

In 1986 the people of Stark held a reunion with the former German captives. It was held in the town hall, a classic New England white building with trim lines and a woodstove as a source of heat. By a strange twist, the cowboy song “Don't Fence Me In” became a sort of anthem for the Germans and guards in the 1940s. At the reunion the former prisoners and their keepers rose and sang it together, most of them crying. Afterward many of the Germans and American guards confessed that their time in Camp Stark had been a highlight of their life. It was a decent place, where captives were treated humanely, and where two cultures, engaged in a horrible war, came together in unity. That was the spirit I attempted to capture in this story and to embody in the love between Collie and August.