ARI 

   The first time I did not think her beautiful. Interesting, yes; not beautiful. She was too pale and too thin. Her hair was cut in a coif like a nun's. Her hair was beautiful, I thought. Two shining jet-black raven wings curved inwards across her pure white cheeks. Later, of course, I realised that she had what is often called, usually enviously, an alabaster skin. This is foolish, really: for alabaster is white, is certainly smooth and translucent, but it is also distinctly cold. It should never be used - in what pretends to be a compliment - to describe something very rarely beautiful. It conveys nothing of the reality of skin that is pure white, soft and smooth as silk, perfectly unblemished - but above all, that is fully, warm and alive. This is an extraordinary combination.
   We were both a little over twenty years of age. To stop me from falling sick with barrack-fever, my boss, my unusually generous boss, had sent me on a winter exercise in the south of Germany. I was to be attached to an infantry regiment: the Royal Regiment of Anglia. For those who may not know it, the Anglo part of Anglo-Saxon is derived from that part of England called Anglia. The Angles were Germanic tribes from what is now Schleswig-Holstein or Southern Denmark. They settled in England mainly around the sixth century, and their name is the real root of English and England. Partly, this may account for the strange affinity that at least some English feel for Germans, even when we and they are trying to kill each other. I am not sure that it works the other way around, their emigration, after all, was always westwards; but it is the case that some of our most famous warriors - the soldier-poet Robert Graves, the British flying ace Douglas Bader - are directly of German descent.
   I felt no enmity whatsoever towards Germans. I had no reason. They really can be somewhat humourless. They tend to take themselves too seriously, and then to regard the English as incorrigibly frivolous and likely to exaggerate. I know this because this is what I am most often accused of by my German friends; I protest to them in vain that the world is too dull without a little embellishment. They positively worship accuracy, and not only in machinery. But they are also an astonishingly energetic, intelligent, cultured, musical, at times very jolly, and inventive people. Of course I knew that they had done staggeringly stupid things, as well as staggeringly courageous. Not only their men at arms, but their townsfolk, women and workers, have performed prodigious feats in response to both ideas and plain mortal need; and of course I knew that their men at arms especially had also been cruel on a quite deliberate fantastic scale. Like the Romans two thousand years before, they had aimed not merely to conquer an empire, but also to empty and reform it by exterminating and enslaving entire people.
   But none of this could move me to hatred. If anything I had only a curiosity to know: what was it that impels us - by which I meant we humans: not them, the Germans - to act in this way. As a matter of history it was already becoming clear that the cost of lives of the Hitlerian adventure was less than half of the total that Marx's ideas had already cost. This was something I wanted to understand. What can cause an entire population not only to behave as if they are all mad, but also to eliminate everyone of their own kind who will not join them in the madness. This is happening now. It does not belong to history. It is a very human madness.
   By 600 AD these early German people occupied almost the whole of the east side of England, but the part that is now called Anglia is the flat and almost featureless farm land to the south, which eventually runs gently under the North Sea, first as salt-marsh, and then as mudflats which offer scarcely any resistance to its waves. When wind and tides combine the floods can be disastrous, but the soil is deep, rich and forgiving; the weather is generally warm and wet; and farming therefore prospers. Like most people where farming prospers, the Anglians are generally good humoured and generous, and its soldiers represent all these characteristics. They are good company.
   All told there were only about thirty of us. Two of the soldiers were also from my own company of engineers, and notionally under my command; but they took little notice of this formality, preferring to be treated as ordinary squaddies, and since there was an entirely competent Anglian sergeant and two of his corporals to make sure they brushed their teeth, got to bed early, and left the local girls more or less alone, so long as they kept out of trouble, I also left them alone. The purpose of the exercise was not show our soldiers snow. There is often plenty of snow in Anglia. It was, however, to show them snow on mountains, or, at least, on moderately steep slopes; and then, in the Army's fine democratic tradition, to give everyone the opportunity to learn to ski.
   Painstaking intelligence carried out - we hoped - by whole squads of James Bonds had established that the Soviets had more tanks, more guns, and plenty of short and medium range missiles too. But even more terrifying that the possibility of a full scale artillery and tank war - which we would at least hear coming - was the possibility of several divisions of ski-borne assault troops gliding silently across the border in the depths of some frozen North German winter's night - a threat to which we had nothing to match at all. And neither, of course, had the Americans. But they had the nukes. The thirty of us were to become a part of the British response to the ski-borne threat. We rather hoped that there would be more of us eventually.
   The village was called Rettenberg, on the north-west shoulder of the Allgäuer Alps. It is certainly not the Himalayas; but the air is crisp and fresh, and for any Englishman, let alone an Anglian, it is respectably high. It is not at all the kind of place where lives should change - but the Fates, all three, have their own way of choosing. There is the one who spins one's life; the one who measures its length; and the one who finally snips it short or long. They have lovely names: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Robert Graves says that Atropos is the most terrible of the three because she alone cannot be avoided. All three, however, can also appear as one.
   Our accommodation was a large house on the edge of the village. It was rather like a hostel and probably in the summer months it was a hostel. But then it would be for ramblers, for these hills, minor Matterhorns to us, were far too meagre for the real skiing crowd. Although we had made most of the journey by train from the north of Germany, for our transport we had also been provided with two of the Army's standard three-tonners and a short-wheelbase Landrover. Both the men and the officers were to eat - and to drink - in the village inn. It was called Der Engel, the Angel.
   Most of the village inns in this part of the world seem to be called either angels or eagles. This particular Angel one was an imposing building, much of it of wood, with many stories under a long sloping roof. There was deep snow all around. Because there was so little traffic at this time of year, it was deep packed and still white on the roads, and in the fields and the ditches it was much deeper.
   One night one of the Anglians was so drunk that on the way back to our quarters he fell into a snow drift so deep, and in which he seems to have found his snow hole so comfortable, that he decided to spend the rest of the night there. This was his own account, quite naturally: more likely is that he was already practically asleep when he fell in. He was not missed - although he should have been - and when he appeared next morning in time for breakfast, a little damp and bedraggled, but otherwise perfectly unharmed, rather than as a deserter, he was greeted as a hero. He was not accustomed to this, and at first treated his cheering mates with a scowl; but cheered up when eventually he was persuaded that their admiration for his survival was real.
   The first night we arrived, entering the Angel's big wide low room for the first time was like walking into an earlier century: not the last one, further back, the 18th perhaps. This great room was very warm and brightly lit, and was all in timber: floors, walls and ceiling. It had that wonderful smell that old wooden rooms have when they have been lived in and worked in - and in this case eaten and drunk in - for a very long time by very many people, and yet beneath the daily smells of food, wood smoke and beer, there was still the sharp tang of cut pine and its tar.
   Almost directly opposite the door, in the corner of this big room in an alcove created by the bend of the stairs to the upper floors, and well out of the way therefore of the busy traffic to and from the kitchens and the inner rooms, was a sturdy pine table with a dark red cloth and a high backed settle behind. Seated there, looking curiously across the room as we entered, were two young women of about our age. Both looked to be in their early twenties. The taller one showed a rather stern expression but she had also dark curly brown hair in a cheerfully boyish cut. The other girl, beside her, was not sitting so tall, and she was playing absently with one of the beer mats that were kept ready at every table, spinning it over and over in her fingers like a conjurer practising a trick. The first impression was that she was very pale and thin and her black hair was cut short in points along her white cheeks. With these fine sharp features, the proud nose, white skin, strong chin, dark brows and dark eyes, I thought she looked like a witch. The German word for the witch is Hexe, and for a long time that is what I called her. Occasionally, I still do.
   These two girls were obviously staying in the inn, and had even been there already some time, for rather than the ski clothes of the very few other guest besides ourselves, they were wearing indoor dress. Each had on a white blouse, the taller girl with a fancy collar, the pale one, a plain collar, a woollen cardigan, and each also wore a long heavy skirt. The last was a sensible defence against draughts from the door; and that they might indeed be rather special guests was indicated by their table being placed in such a way in that corner of the stairs that they had really no contact with others. But they were also very clearly interested in the new arrivals: not necessarily eager to meet them, more in the way that patients in long term convalescence look with happy interest as the latest arrival is wheeled into their ward.
   Normally I would have been too shy to speak to the two girls at once - or even, quite possibly, to speak to them at all. My German was anyway still nearly non-existent. But the smart young Royal Anglian officer with me, I think his first name was Terry, but I have really forgotten, gave a little shiver at the sight of them, like a hungry leopard sighting a pair of sleek gazelles, and in an instant was leaning over their table to introduce himself, was shaking hands first with one then the other and no doubt asking them - his German was far better than mine - whether either had any need of late night English lessons. Whatever his real name, Terry was extremely sure of himself.   ¹ As I was writing this, at precisely this point, she phoned. She had been silent for nearly a year. She wanted to explain why. She explained. She wept. I wept too. You don't believe in magic? How unfortunate!
   The girls were laughing, pleasantly enough, which could possibly mean that he had not asked yet for the key to their room; but I had already some experience of the tendency of young British officers to suppose that providence supplied even girls like these entirely for their amusement. I decided that I did not need to like Terry; but I was soon encouraged to try to like him just a little harder, when he confided over our dinner that he had already secured an entertainment for us both. The girls had invited us to join them later, at their table. We were not yet invited to their room, and indeed we never were, but the entertainment could hardly have been better suited to slow down Terry, who had all the amorous propensities of a ten-wheeled truck. It also helped me, his tongue-tied accomplice, for I was still grappling with the problem of constructing whole German sentences containing more than three words. The entertainment that the girls had chosen was the game that the Germans call Mikado, I have no idea why. The British - if they know it - call it Spillikins.
   Spillikins, or Mikado, is a game of great skill and concentration ideally played by two, four, or even more players, on any broad round table covered with a prickly woollen red cloth - which, as it happened, is exactly what we had. It only requires a handful of twenty or thirty long sharp thin sticks, like oversized toothpicks. It is a genteel game, which is perhaps why the British no longer play it very much. All that happens is that the spillikins are held vertically in a bunch in the centre of the table, then released so that they fall, of course, tangled together in a completely disordered heap. That is the easy part. This now being over, the hard part is to extract all the sticks one by one from the heap without causing any of the others, even by a fraction of a millimetre, to move or to tremble.
   All that week we played Mikado with the girls on every possible occasion, practically every night, and I was relieved to notice that Terry seemed to have accepted that this was all the trembling he was likely to experience. To my delight I had also learnt a useful three word sentence, which I could not only soon pronounce correctly, but could imagine as the first step to linguistic finesse.
   "Es hat gewackelt" was the sentence. Fiercely, triumphantly, aggressively, sonorously, apologetically - and on occasions of the greatest tension even sadly - this single simple sentence carried us through evening after evening of gentle delight, and whilst it did so, and whilst Terry chattered, and whilst our soldiers' muted and equally companionable roar filled the rest of the room with cheerful noise, I had the opportunity to study our opponents more carefully.
   The older sister was a handsome young woman, with a strong intelligent face, a steady gaze, cheerful smile and voice. She told us that she was already studying law, for their father was a Rechtsanwalt: Terry translated, a solicitor - in a small town near Frankfurt, but she was presently on vacation with her younger sister. The younger sister was of course the witch: although I had to admit that whilst she was currently being urged energetically by Terry to "Go-on: take a chance: quick!", as she was extracting a spillikin from its heap, a study in frowning concentration, the pink tip of her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth, my witch now looked about thirteen. She was recovering, they told us, from an illness - what it was remained unspecified: it was many years before I learnt that she had indeed been unwell, but an additional reason had been to remove her - at least temporarily from the attentions of yet another Lothario - and they were staying at the Engel because its owner was both an old friend and also a client of their father.
   With all this ridiculously unimportant but happy excitement, the younger sister certainly looked as if she had recovered from her illness. Terry's raillery together with the growing heat of the room had brought a flush of colour to her cheeks, whilst a curling lock of black hair fallen across her brow was blown impatiently aside which an upward puff of breath, and as she looked up at me with a triumphant sigh to show me that it was now my turn, I realised that she had simply astonishing green eyes.
      In fact, the thought continued, as she grinned at me in triumph - for all but the last few spillikins were now safely separated on the red cloth, but these few were balanced on each other so finely that this least touch would provoke the dreaded cry - she was actually beautiful to a quite astonishingly degree. Why had I not noticed this before? It was because she was not pretty. This one was used to, and would see at a glance. Nor was she handsome, like her sister, who had also more dignity, more reserve. The intense pallor I had first noticed, combined with the raven-black hair, had at first glance combined to produce an impression that was very nearly gaunt.
   But now I saw that besides a skin as clear and white as porcelain, she had perfectly shaped bones, the most beautifully elegant nose below strongly arched brows, gently formed delicious lips with dimples at the corners, and she could grin, finally, as she was grinning at me now, without restraint or artifice, just like a mischievous urchin. In short, I found I was in the company of the most enchanting creature I had ever met. I also knew all at once that I was in love. Just like that. Bang.
   I had often wondered what it would feel like. It is like stepping from one room into another, from a darker into a brighter world, empty to full, uncertain to certain, knowing at once that one can never go back: that one never will, and will want, to go back. And all this time all that I could actually say to her that was not more than five or six single word, and one sentence: and although it was true that I could say it now in various tones of voice, even to me, in my present euphoria, this did not seem a very solid foundation for continued friendship.
   Our soldiers' ski-training was undemanding of them as it was of us. Their regimental training officer clearly expected them all to return to their battalion each able to combat on skis whole regiments of Soviet tanks. Fortunately no-one seemed to have suggested we combine this learning how to ski with a live-firing exercise in killing tanks. This would have depleted the battalion at least as fast as trying to stop any Russian assault.
   Terry, it turned out, almost inevitably, had been skiing since he was six. This was why his Regimental Training Officer had put him in charge of his men. No-one had thought to ask me when I was last in Gstaad or Saint Mo. I was, inevitably, one of the majority who had never skied in his life, and so every morning after breakfast I would join the soldiers outside our accommodation where we would all strap on our skis, pick up a long rope tied to the back of the vehicle with our lunch-time stores and be towed slowly up a road to the top of the nursery slopes above the village; and from there we would all slide, slither, or tumble, gloriously or ingloriously, all the way down to the bottom, where we would wait until the truck arrived to tow us up again.
   But the British squaddy is an amazingly adaptable specie, and far sooner than might be thought credible, nearly everyone could ski, after a fashion; and the best part of the day came to be the late afternoon, for now we could scorn the nursery slopes and would ski at what always seemed an incredibly dangerous but exhilarating speed all the way back down the long road to the village.
   Apart from a few cuts and bruises, mostly self-inflicted, we only had one truly ski-related accident. It happened at a point in the road where it turned sharp left. Those of us who were following were horrified to see one Anglian ski straight on. He flew across the snow-filled ditch with scarcely a dip, and then went through several strands of barbed wire fence. It should have turned him into a bloody spaghetti, but he had lost control because he was falling backwards, and was completely horizontal by the time he reached the fence. Its barbs were certainly worth every penny of the farmer's money, for they tore most of his clothes right off his body. They fluttered from the wire in strips. He flew onwards, now half naked, having felt that it was most of his flesh that had been stripped from his bones, and he was found still on his back in the snow with his eyes tight shut, both hands clasped over his crotch in gratitude that it at least was still intact and with an expression on his face of horrified anticipation. He was waiting for the pain to arrive to inform him of what he had lost.
   Since Anglia is mostly flat, to many of the soldiers the mountains around us were themselves objects of fascination. The first Saturday night that was supposedly their own, a number of the Anglians - together with my two engineers - failed to appear for dinner. A search party returned without them. Eventually, by now late at night, one of their friends was persuaded to explain that he thought they might have "gone for a bit of a walk, like"; and almost at the same time a breathless soldier came in to say that he thought he knew where they were. Outside into the bitterly cold night, sparkling with frost and stars, he pointed upwards at a most improbable angle. "I think that's them, up there."
   In their ordinary clothes and shoes, although at least one, when we got them all back, was wearing winkle-pickers, they had decided to walk over the mountains to Switzerland. It was true that Rettenberg was surprisingly empty of girls, but they were headed in the wrong direction for Switzerland. Over their mountain was Austria, but the border was nearly ten miles from Rettenberg.
   Surprised to find that their adventure harder than they expected, as it was also getting dark, they soon made another discovery. If climbing up a slope of ice and snow begins to become impossible, going down will be impossible. Unable to go up, or down, they had therefore done their best thing at least to stay warm. They had traversed sideways until they were unable to go any further, and then, with their backs against a cliff they had sat down, huddling together to keep warm, and had set fire to two pairs of boots for warmth and as a signal.
   With the great black immensity of the mountains behind them, they were amazingly lucky that this tiny red glimmer was seen at all. Within an hour, a crack German mountain rescue team had assembled, assured us unsmilingly that the whole party would be dead by morning where they were, and then set off to bring them down. Three hours later they were all unsmilingly returned. The regiment subsequently received a bill. Mountain rescue is expensive.
   One evening later that week the two girls and I went for a walk out beyond the village and along the road up the valley. We were alone, arm in arm, the witch on my right, her sister on my left. We did not need to speak. Fresh snow scrunched under foot. The night sky was spectacular. Star-light alone lit up the snow fields which rose on either side in a smooth and ever-steepening curve up to the tree-line high above the meadoes, and somewhere up there, far above us, someone with a trumpet was playing Mozart's lullaby. The high pure notes were as clear in the still cold air as in a concert hall, whilst above us and ahead of us as we walked the stars that make Orion, the Hunter stride strongly across the sky shone brightly with perfect steadiness, and the jagged line of the mountains seemed to be the path beneath his feet.
   It was a night of real magic and tremendous beauty. As I write this now I can feel the warmth of her side against mine, the weight of her arm on mine, occasionally a strand of her hair would brush my cheek and I would catch the sweetness of her scent. We had not even kissed. Orion has stalked me through the years since then to give me many a surprise, appearing suddenly in the night-sky in winter, as if he has spent the rest of the year hiding behind the earth. Wherever I am, I am always surprised, and my foolish heart gives a jump as I remember where I saw him first and who I was with.
   It soon became a habit to walk with the girls in the bright sunlight of the late afternoons. My schoolboy German was slowly reappearing, and they delighted in teaching me a set of the most useless words imaginable. They were also the most difficult to pronounce. Eichhörnchen, was one. It begins Ike-hurn- and then ends with a noise almost impossible to reproduce in English. It means a squirrel. I have never yet found a use for it in ordinary speech; but then I suppose this only shows a failure of inventiveness. "My goodness," I might have said on many an occasion, "these jolly little squirrels are interesting to talk about, aren't they?" "Ist es nicht sehr interessant über diese kleinen frechen Eichhörnchen zu reden?" Or as the witch would say, being Hessisch, "Gelle?"
   Transformatorhäuschen is another handy word. These are the little mediaeval-looking houses that dot the German countryside. They contain, as one might guess, the transformers which reduce the voltage of the overland power to something less dangerous for the home. Even now I rarely pass one without my lips are forming their name, but I have never found use for it either. Mind you, squirrels are often found near to them. And suddenly, like Mozart visualising an entire symphony all at once, great possibilities occur to me. What a great pity I never thought of that before. "Eine grosse Schade", I would say about almost anything that disappointed, always to the girls' huge amusement. It does not mean quite the same thing in German, but they could never get me to understand why.
   Charlie was the name of the soldier who spent the night in the snow. He had of course a proper name, but everyone in his regiment called him Charlie. This was affectionate, because Charlie was simple. Many Army regiments used to make room for men like Charlie, giving them a home, a family and friends and, most of all, an appreciation of their efforts, which otherwise they would never have; and in return they gave their regiment their loyalty, dogged devotion to whatever simple duties they may be given, and sometimes they give their lives.
   On one evening there was that very general state of happiness occasioned by good company, good food, lots of beer, and much loud but tuneful singing, when I noticed a long trickle of blood running across the wooden floor. Charlie was its source. He was nodding happily to the music whilst holding his left arm under the table. Bright red blood was flowing from wrist and over his fingers into a great crimson pool under his chair, but on being discovered he only nodded conspiratorially: " Oi don't want t'spoil the fun".
   He had dropped one of the big litre glass mugs the beer was served in. It had been empty, and he had been too late to reach it before it hit the floor, but he had then plunged his hand inside the shattered glass which had peeled back the flesh of his forearm to expose the tendons beneath. The pain must have been atrocious. All that concerned Charlie was that he should not to be a nuisance.
   To get him to a doctor turned out to be a problem. We had only one Landrover, and no-one was really fit to drive but me, and so whilst two other soldiers sat in the back on either side of the happily crooning Charlie, his hand a fat cocoon of blood-soaked towel, I drove down the icy mountain to the nearest military hospital, which at three in the morning received Charlie kindly, stitched him up, sedated him, and put him to bed. On our way back to Rettenberg his two mates rewarded me with stories of all the various adventures Charlie had got into over the years. He was a great favourite, I heard, with the local ladies in his regiment's home town, because he spent his wages mainly on copulation - although he had such a mammoth organ, looking, one of them told me in awe, "like a bloomin' elephant's trunk", that sometimes "it were free"!
   The next morning this was not something I thought I needed to tell the girls. Within another day it was finally time for us to leave. I hoped that both would come to see us leave. Our waiting lorries were almost invisible in the fog of their exhausts. The witch did not appear. But sister did. She gave me a quick, warm hug - then their address and telephone number - and I promised I would see them again. Soon.

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."
5/02/05

If you have arrived from an external link click here.