The Monument

By SIMON RAVEN

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/mil, one summer I had to take my platoon of anti-tank gunners to fire a week's course bathe ranges at Hohne, some fifty miles beyond t over. We enjoyed this outing, if only uecause it took us beyond the central control of the battalion, and all went well until one after- tnoi.ort, having finished firing early, 1 decided to 1! the platoon to see the Belsen memorial site, 1! the platoon to see the Belsen memorial site, ,-"Ich Was only a few minutes' journey from our :411P. I could tell the Platoon Sergeant dm- PProved of this scheme, and I ought to have needed the unspoken warning; but I was still at)ung enough to be keen on 'educating' my men, t attributed the sergeant's attitude to his wish

;) spend the rest of the afternoon asleep. To

,elsen the platOon would go, I said, and to nelsen it obediently went. it Just before one . reaches the memorial site to self, there are two ruined and evil huts, said still have formed part of the original camp and „,11,1 inhabited by some unwholesome-looking chickens. Then, when one enters the site proper, trite Passes through some informal clumps of which, and.on to a broad path, on either side of toulch, carefully cut and tended, square flat- 2Ped mounds mark the mass graves. Set by the 'b °?nds are boards proclaiming that here are buried three thousand men and women of many nations, here two thousand, here five. At the d of the path is a tall and not uncomely inonument bearing a simple Latin inscription which remarks on man's inhumanity to man and seems to hope that something better may come of it all. This inscription (partly in order to show off, partly out of a genuine desire to `educate') I translated to such of my platoon as were near enough. I could tell they were not enjoying themselves, and indeed I had not in- tended them to, but by now there was something about their expressions—a sort of glum and resentful indifference — which indicated dis- pleasure of a very different kind from what I had anticipated. I had the sense not to comment, however, and moved back towards the entrance along a second path, this one being flanked not only by further mass graves but also by occa- sional small stones, mostly engraven with the Star of David and which, I gathered, had been set up in memoriam by relatives after the war. My soldiers straggled behind me in grim silence. By the time we left the site it was clear that I had made a very bad mistake indeed: true, the men's faces had ceased to be set and resentful; but they now broke into forced and sneering grins, and all of them joined in an exchange of fierce and spiteful obscenities of an order en- tirely alien to their normal happy bawdry.

, The next day, worried by this reaction, I asked a young National Service corporal of high intelligence and trust what he had thought of our expedition. He had found 4, apparently, infor- mative and distressing—rather as 1 had hoped.

But the men? I asked. His own gun-crew and the others? He now became• exceedingly uneasy; there was clearly something he could say, even thought important and therefore wished to say, but he was not sure how I would take it and was inclined to remain silent rather than risk my response. I tried to encourage him, assured him that I would not be offended or take advantage of his confidence.

'They seem to think,' he blurted out at last, 'that it's nothing to do with them.'

'But how could anyone think that?'

`They don't remember the war very clearly, sir. And then—well, it's a bit hard to explain—

they were taken in parade hours, so they connect it all with work, with the Army, something official, you might say, specially laid on for them.'

'But how does that alter the facts? All the evidence of death?'

'It's very hard, sir. . . . Put it this way. Before you came here, you told them how to zero these guns. You drew diagrams and you explained it. Then, when we got on the range, you and the sergeant and 1—we actually did it with one of the guns to show them. It worked on the target as you said it would, and they were satisfied. They believed in it, sir. But as far as they're concerned, sir, all that's only for parade hours. It doesn't count any other time. Work it may do, but in normal life it means nothing to them. Most of them are being demobbed in a few months anyway, and even the regulars will soon move on to something else, back to a rifle com- pany or into the stores. . . . See what I mean, sir?'

`Yes. But how do you apply this to what we saw yesterday?'

'Same sort of way, sir. It happened in working hours. You took them and showed them and told them what the Latin bit meant. They be- lieved you all right. But that happened on parade. Doesn't count any other time. And any- way, it was all so tidy somehow. All tidied up now, sir. Nothing to do with them.'

'Then why did they look so bloody miserable?'

'Because while it was going on it was nasty. Like a long run in full kit—something nasty, something to do with the Army, and so some- thing for which you were to blame, sir, do you see? Needn't have happened else, you see.'

'But they reacted even worse. They looked . . . vicious.'

'That was because—I'm sorry, sir—they near hated you for it. They might not love you for a long run in full kit, but they'd understand it's your job to make them ,do it. They think it wasn't your job to make them look at . . . all that. And there was another thing.'

`Oh?'

'Some of the stupider ones—not many, but one or two—didn't get it quite clear. They thought that because the Germans are going to have an army again and be our allies, you took them there to shoe• them how strong the Ger- mans could be. They didn't think you meant to show how the Germans had been wicked, but how they could be powerful. . . . But I've ex- plained to them, sir, and you shouldn't worry. After all. most of us weren't more than eight years old when the war ended. . .