The Colonel
By BRUCE RENTON
THE middle-aged gentleman was really an ex-enemy colonel with a false name. The emigre needed some money, told a policeman, and had him arrested. But that seems rather a dull and insufficient explanation, like the report that was sub- mitted at the time to higher authorities. One likes, in retrospect, to believe that there were, on that day, more mysterious forces at work than an emigre's financial embarrassment and a soldier's inclination to do his duty ; and that no man could die as casually as that, without causing the world some polite wonder, or perhaps leaving it a little conscious-stricken.
The informer closely followed the pattern of a Yugoslav war- produced student. He had spent the latter part of his education deserting from army to army, wangling his way out of a firing- squad, then escaping from a concentration camp. Now he was an emigre, peddled dope, and slept with old women. He was the more distinguished by a post-war kleptomania. He was consequently always in jail ; and I was always telling the Austrian police lies to get him out. According to the rules of the game he ought to have served a short sentence each time. But it was obvious that a prison could never help him ; besides, the Law takes itself so seriously at times that it gave me profound personal pleasure to be able, for once in my. life, to let a thief out of prison. The only thing that could have cured my up- rooted young friend, the emigre, would have been to grant him a respectable status in the community. If he could have become overnight a doctor, a lawyer or a lecturer at the local university he would never have stolen again. But he felt himself cheated of all that, and now he was only a nomad rat, from whom moral behaviour was not expected anyway. I felt a certain kinship with the emigre. We were both push- ing our real selves out of sight all the time ; we were both ham actors in the pantomime the war had created for us. We were really in the universities of Oxford and Belgrade all the time. All this was a dream, a game. The only difference was that he played the role of informer and I that of policeman. When the Austrians arrested him, he used to get indignant, and shout, as they dragged him through the streets, " I am a student of philo- sophy," as if he had not quite grasped what was going on. Frustrated and helpless, he had reached a point when, in order to prove that he was still a vital force in the world, he would have sunk to the lowest crime or risen to the heights of heroism. What he did do was this.
He walked into the office and said, " If you like, I will make you a major." From the way his lips were trembling I could see that he was bursting with information. His attitude irritated me ; it reminded me of somebody I disliked at school. " I don't want to be a major," I said petulantly. Then he told me about the colonel. " High on the list of war criminals," he burst out. " Seen him in the capital scores of times. . . . He's just around the corner having coffee." -At least this broke the tedium of life and added a little selfish glamour. It was like living in a film, I always hoped, only some- how one never quite reached that level of fiction. Perhaps this time it would be different. Perhaps the colonel would fight it out in the café. Just the two of us behind the tables, counting our bullets, like two bandits in a Wild West bar. I wish I had left him there drinking coffee with his daughter in an Austrian café. They were on their way to South America. I was ruining all that. Yet I did not want him. Nobody really wanted him except a few personal enemies in his home town. Why had I not told the emigre to buy himself a drink and forget about it? The emigre was hiding in a doorway when we went out. For a second I caught sight of his white face. It was the stricken face of Judas.
During the interrogation we delicately ignored the crux of the whole situation: what precisely were his war crimes? We were so pleased that somebody else would have to find that out. Whatever they had been, he would have remained for me a tired, middle-aged man whom I could have left with his daughter. I think that the emigre and I were taught a prayer that day, " Lord, forgive us for having sent a war-criminal to his doom." The daughter blamed herself, saying that her father had wanted to drive straight through the town, but that she had wanted to have coffee. We had all got ourselves entangled in a spider's- web. We would each leave something behind in it,, and the spider would eat the colonel. Perhaps the spider was Justice. Now it was all over. The colonel and I were in a prison-cell not far from-the Austro-Yugoslav border. Outside birds were singing and through the bars we could see the Carinthian hills. All the forms had been filled in ; soon the transport would arrive to take him across the frontier. The colonel was smoking. Then, quite unprompted, he started to talk about success. I was staring out of the window and only half-heard him. I think he said it was only fright that made people struggle for money and power at the expense of more precious things, that he had killed himself long ago, and that what happened to his body now was a mere formality.
When the transport pulled up outside the prison I went out- side to make arrangements. When we came back in, we saw that the colonel had cut his veins. The M.O. patched him up a little, then we sent him across the border.
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