UNDER THE BRIDGE

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 13, 30 July 1945, Page 11

UNDER THE BRIDGE

By

Black opaque, and in hundreds they interposed their darkness between

us and the smiling Cretan sky, shattered the summer’s peace with the death they carried, slew its silence with the roar of their engines and the punctuated thunder of the bombs. Each explosion overtook its predecessor’s echo, and merged with it to make a perpetual rumble in the hills.

Sometimes a shadow would pass directly over us, swiftly, with a flitting bat-like quality. The drone increased to a roar, and the plane would follow, bullets streaming with the undiscriminating prodigality of rain. Like rain on a gusty day. How long since I had seen and felt rain, refreshing rain not deadly, from grey, unhurrying homely skies not this lethal metallic rain.

Our hill overlooked the village on its left, on the right front the sea. The sea, smooth and untroubled, its calm a promise of permanence when this tumult should be silent, road home to the lands of rain. Crouched under the lee of the rock, nostalgia gripped me like a cramp, nostalgia for the past or for the future. Anything to be out of this moment where we were held by the slow, maddening pace of time. But not for long this mutiny of the heart. Madness to venture hopes on such a sea, to commit oneself to any-

thing but a prudent despair. Try to save your life certainly, but within the bounds of decency and dignity. And not expect to save it. Fighting was easier, dourer in despair.

Nothing much to do till the air quietened down a bit. There might be more parachutists to follow soon, the concentration was so fierce. But no ; it was the town that was getting it this time. Our share was only the overflow. They were solacing themselves for their reverses on the ground in an orgy of undirected destruction, an orgasm of rage and inflicted terror. Clouds of dust and smoke rose tranquilly, unfolding and expanding with leisure of time itself from crumpled homes and ruined walls. Flames groped up into the afternoon their red transparent to the day and then, as their mounting impetus declined, filmy and water-coloured but still bloodshot.

Just outside the village where the last houses straggled like lost children the road bridged a gully. I was watching the bridge. During raids the people sheltered under it. We had warned them to go away, not to wait. They were obstinate, they would not leave their homes. We told them the bridge would probably be hit, was a military objective, but the mete physical fact of its shelter, its mere bulk blinded them to its danger. They continued to go there.

That would have been bad enough. But now we all had a personal interest there as well. Angela and her grandmother would be there too. And Angela had somehow succeeded in making herself real to us in a way civilians are not usually real. They didn’t even belong to the town, but had come down from their village in the hills. They used to help us with food sometimes and do the washing. There was something about Angela’s smiling freshness, the beauty of her teeth and hands which made everything she did for us seem better than if some one else had done it. Seeing her

made you notice how good the weather was, and when you looked at the sea you would see how blue it was and the snow on the mountains inland would strike you in all its cold remote whiteness for it seemed the first time. On the old, leisurely standard I would have had time to fancy myself in love with Angela.

From where I was I could see the bridge perfectly. The gully ran out from the foot of our hill and in a straight line awav from us till it passed under the road. You could not distinguish individuals. But you could see them praying. They were all kneeling under it, the women and the children and the very old men. You could see them praying, making the sign of the Cross over and over again. Their fear was erect and dignified. For the hundredth time I admired the bravery of these Cretans, their steadfastness. Angela and her grandmother would be there, too, like the others afraid, as who would not be like them, calm and accepting, with a proviso of reserved revenge.

I felt so close to them that I was with them. I almost blessed myself, too, when they did. It was like the family rosary of long ago. But the devil “ who wanders through the world to the ruin of souls ” sought bodies, too. He was real and present. He was death, travelling with every bullet now broadcast from the air and guiding too haphazard chance, now sped from the cool intent of the sniper’s eye.

In spite of the intenseness of my presence with them I was aware, too, of the planes, could see them as one after another detached from the intricately weaving group and swept low with a rising roar over the prostrate village.

They would have been better off spread along the gully. But they might have a chance. The German hadn’t yet bombed any bridges to my knowledge. Saving them for himself. But this was a side road. It wouldn’t matter much to him. And to-day he didn’t seem to care much where he dropped them ; he was out to terrorize. By now the town couldn’t be much more than a chaff of mortar and rubble among drunken walls.

From over the centre of the town a bomber came sailing out towards the bridge. Slowly, very slowly. Above the outskirts they began to drop, swift and glistening where the light caught them. I watched them. The first struck the edge of the town. A series of explosions among the scattered houses. I heard them only. I was watching the last. I don’t think he particularly meant to hit the bridge. But it disappeared. The whole scene disappeared. It was as if I had become blind with smoke and dust instead of darkness.

I waited for it to clear. For reality to reassemble. The cloud settled into the grey-green olives on either side of the gully. The bridge was still standing. The bomb had fallen in the gully on the far side. I began to breathe again. And then I saw that the group had changed. They were no longer kneeling. Their small dark knot had opened out like a flower. There were shapes scattered in a semicircle this side of the bridge, still. The bomb blast must have travelled along the gully like an express train through a cutting. Still, I thought at first; but after a while I seemed to discern movement. It was not a movement of whole bodies, a stirring of limbs rather, of extremities, faint and painful like the movements of a crushed insect whose antennae still grope out pitifully with a hopeless, gallant wavering to life.

This was the bare slope of the hill. The red clay showed through the thin soil and the olives were few, thickening only at the bottom. And the planes were as active as ever. It was impossible to get down. And anyhow we had a position to hold.

Afternoon became evening since time moved even in that eternity. And day diminished into dusk. The racket slackened. Only an occasional rifle shot or burst of machine-gun reminded the twilight silence of its brief tenure. Silence like us and them was normal.

I told the others I was going down. They were to cover me across the open patch. I slipped out from cover, and, holding the tommy-gun, bolted for the olives. No firing, no vicious swish of bullets. I made my way through the

olives, along the lip of the gully. The dusk was deeper in the olives. The hill held its bulk before the sun.

As I approached the bridge I hesitated. I knew what I was going to see. And there had been so much of it in these last days. I stopped and listened. Not a sound. That eternal, suffering grey of the olives, the agony immobilized of their gnarled trunks anticipated and accentuated what must be in the gully. The silence, the patient silence and the dusk, but mostly the silence, were too much. It was silence of mangled bodies, a silence of negation and death. There was no life in the gully. Pain, perhaps, frozen into immobility, but no life. If I should see it as well, bodies caparisoned in all the bloody trappings of a violent death, blood and grotesque distortions of the body’s familiar pattern, it would be too much. Not as if it were new. The very familiarity of the distortion, the blasphemy of it, would prove final. I did not want to see any more. I did not want to see Angela, her grandmother,

others I had known. Or if I did see them and did not recognize them. But perhaps there was something one could do. I listened again. Not a groan or sigh. There was much to do, much fighting yet. One must fight for one’s sanity as well as one’s life. I hesitated. In sudden horror I knew there was something else dragging me to the edge. Appetite for frightfulness as well as revulsion. Death squatted within the hollow like a presence, its emanation came up, grisly, dragging at me. I felt the hair on the back of my head stiffen. I took two steps forward. My eyes saw but my brain would not see. I turned and ran.

At the edge of the olives I halted. My knees were like jelly, with a hot trembling. I waited. Then ran again across, up over the bare slope. It was with relief I heard the bullets searing their tunnel through the air. At the rock I turned and dropped into cover, a soldier again. And the bridge and the gully of bodies waited in my memory.

DAN DAVIN —A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The short story, Under the Bridge, is reprinted from the Penguin New Writing, No. 13, and was written by Daniel Marcus Davin, a New-Zealander. A drawing of him is reproduced on Page 11. A novel, Cliffs of Fall, written by Dan Davin in 1939, was published in May of this year ; several of the more responsible English journals reviewed it critically, but not unfavourably. Comparing the theme of this ‘‘remarkable first novel” with Dreiser’s An American

Tragedy, the Spectator commented that “ since execution is not equal to conception, Cliffs of Fall is a failure, but a brilliant one, for the author has passion, a quality which is more rare and more valuable than competence ” ; “ . . . in its final section nearly reaches great heights of poetic imagination ” ; “ The author has some of the matter-of-fact brilliance which makes the novels of Graham Greene so impressive, he too can depict the seedy and the violent in terms which do not depend on mere realism.”

Mr. Davin’s book,” The New Statesman and Nation said, “ is a failure, as certainly as it is an honourable failure ” (differing from “ the majority of first novels by talented young men [which] are dishonourable successes”). Commenting on Mr. Davin’s “ admirably courageous ” choice or treatment the reviewer considers the author “ will so far.”

Dan Davin, born in 1913 in Invercargill, left New Zealand in 1936 as a Rhodes Scholar ; he was at Balliol College, Oxford, until 1939’ During the war he served with 2 N.Z.E.F., fought through the campaigns of Greece and Crete (when he was wounded), and later rose to the rank of major. Early this year he was released to take up a position with the Oxford University Press. In 1939 he married a New-Zealander, Miss Winifred Gon ley, and they have two children. He has contributed poetry and prose to English periodicals.