The Black Boxer Tales by H.E. Bates

Author:H.E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Hessian Prisoner

It was towards the middle of June, in the year 1917, when Jasper and Clara Bird obeyed for the first time certain instructions written out for them by a little black major presiding over the camp for prisoners of war, and harnessing their white horse and cart, drove off a little before eight o’clock one morning to fetch the German they had hired with so much misgiving in a great extremity.

They often remembered that day. It was especially lovely: the air sultry with a menace of thunder and full of the singing birds as they drove away from the farm; the clear sky was alive with larks, and blackbirds and finches and yellow buntings were piping gently about the fields and in the thick trees, which were still sopped with dew. Like bass viols in an orchestra, bees had already begun to enrich and unify those sounds into a single immense harmony, the soft, throbbing concert of perfect summer.

It was hay-time. The sound of a horse-mower or a whetstone upon a scythe would echo across the valley; and even at that early hour of the day freshly-mown swathes were already turning white under the heat of the sun.

War had forced this small tenant-farmer and his wife to a crisis in their affairs; by instinct they feared and hated war, but recently its barbarism had brought calamity upon them. In times of peace and in the early years of war, they had employed two labourers and a boy of sixteen, but suddenly the boy had drifted off to make boots in an adjoining town, and the men had failed to convince the tribunal; and then the news had come that one was dead and that the other lay stricken by some nameless incurable disease, on strange and distant territory. The hopeless and chaotic inhumanity of war then became suddenly personal; war itself assumed, as it were, a physical shape, and for that shape they gradually conceived a terrible, vindictive hatred. Besides grief there arose the problem of how to replace the men, and they discovered that men were scarcer than gems. Women, dressed foolishly in smocks and breeches, were plentiful enough but they distrusted and despised them. And so for a long time they deliberated, until at last it appeared that nothing remained for them but to act as their neighbours had done; and finally, timidly and suspiciously, they applied for a prisoner of war.

Driving to fetch him for the first time they sat in silence. Their steadfast, honest, taciturn faces seemed uneasy and plunged in gloom. Leaning his arm on the disused umbrella-basket, the man drove in a desultory, almost indifferent fashion, and beside him his wife never moved except to chew a yellow bent or to finger, abstractedly, her dark hair.

Otherwise they looked, that morning, much as usual. The man was without a jacket and his stoat-coloured corduroys were held up by two leather thongs affixed in turn by thin nails for buttons. A panama hat, ripe

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