The Impossupe'


ThE IMPOSTURE.
Maurice Rowdon,
Via Giulia 102,
Rome, ITALY.


The Russians had moved out of Graz, further north, and
our job was to occupy it and establish some sort of he-Nazi-
JVA fication/ system, more lenient than it would be in Germeny/
because the Austrians had shown themselves less bitter enemies.
My regimen t took billets in a small village outside Graz called
Maria Trost, a quietf sweet) place full of wooden, balconied
houses and inns.
The War had not long ended. New s had C ame thr ough of the
concentration camps.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been
put in gas ovens, tortured, burned to death, starved an d mutil-
ated in experiments. These included women and children. We
heard the story of a Woman whose feet had been tied together a
few minutes before she was due to give birth to a child. Nearly
all the Jewish population of Europe had been wipedx out. It
was nearly the extermination of a Whole people.
We had come to Maria Trost from Carin thia, near the Yugo-
slav border, where we had lived in barns, with hay being gathered
all round us. We took our meals, about eight of us, in a room
JA of a farmhouse/and used to watch the hay being brought in, across
the space in front of the house where two elm trees grew, with
benche S
wooden DEEEARES and a table under them. At this table, nearly
all day, an old man used to sit, the owner.of the farm. He
also watched the work, saying hardly anything, his eyes small
and
and bloodshot staring like gritty little pellets S traight
before him. He said he thought these stories abbut the concen-


tration camps were ridiculous, and laughed. We said that
too many reports were c'oming in/. from all over Germany and
Poland, from English, French, American and Russian troops, for
them to be doubtful.
And there were photographs. There was
also a film being shown at every town and village in Germany,
to which attendance was compulsory. But it hadn't reached
Austria yet.
The old man laughed, and shook his head. He spoke slowly
to his daughters an d seemed to be mocking us in a quiet way.
He wasn't the slightest bit afraid of us, though we we ere the first
troops in his area. He told us' that every army brought its own
propaganda, an a this was ours. Only a fool W culd believe it, he
said. The Germans had had the ir propaganda, and this wa S ours.
It was quite absurd 'to imagine that Germa ns or Austrians W culd
organise camps in which thousands of people W ere left to die of
starvation, much less tortured or put into gas ovens. They were
children's tales, like all propaganda tales, fit for the very
simple, and intended for them. But he-hed-atvod-too-tung and
seen-too-much: CWe were-young, he said, and our credulity was
understandable. His little pellet eyes didn't çhange. They
had a certain sly, side-glancing quality which made me distrust
him, but perhaps this was because he refused to believe in the
camps.
pafter two or three weeks we were moved to Graz ar nd ne ver saw
him aga in. In Graz there were different stories. The Russians
had raped most of the women, and over ninety percent had venereal
disease.
In Maria Trast where wé billeted a drunk Russian soldier
had emptied a magazine of machane-gun bullets into the church at
the top of the hill and then fired four or five shots into a bed-


room whe re a woman and her child lay. The bullets had missed
them, it was said.
There were piles of filth outside some of
the buildings. Over Graz there was a dry, surfeited a ir.
Everything was pretty "an d in order, the damage was slight, but
The preseut
a desolation had taken hold. This seemed not to be real
timep
but a period of waiting far the future, when peace would really
come.
One day my driver took me into Graz---I was an officer and
I had to visit another regimental headquarters. We were in a
Ric. Jeep. The end of the War made me feel rather tired. - We had
raced back into Italy for a last campaign in the north, our
third, after a rest in the Lebanon, and the War ended before our
V 7 columns reached the 'B' Echelons of the forward troops. This was
hed-been-eesy
What we had wantedf it>RAXXTXEESRESXHEBIE topredict. C om thomwey-
2 battieli H tes movea on the operational map during pe-prevtours-few
mooke-fout at the same time the happin ess d idn 't (seem enough to
match
xmatth the occasion. The h eart was quite still. I even had a
sense of disappointme nt. I had wanted to do scmething really
4 last
fu Italy
remarkable in this battie campaign/ and fekt thwarted of S omething
essential that I wauld always miss: perhaps it was death, which
I had been sure would ge t me this time, b.ecause I had already had
too many lucky escapes. It was a gi ddy and ridiculous feeling,
of a relief conceived in the brain rather than felt, and th e sense
of something having been snatched awayo It made me restless, and
life seemed quite meaningless without war.
But for the first time in nearly three years my s tomach felt
easy. There would be no more front-line assignme nt S. There
would no longer be that special dai rk smell of rotting cattle
which had pervaded all of Italy. A long time had passed S ince I
had w. +n


had watched a batman---my own batman, and my first---die, with
great red wounds in his back. Icauldn't believe my eyes. I
told one of the men to give him a last cigarette, and he did so,
bending down. The batman was lying on his stomach and took it
in his mbuth feebly. But just as someoné was about to strike
a match he coughed and a spurt of blood filled the cigarette,
making it suell up, and it fell with a plop to the floor. For
years I have carried this memory about with me. Yet when the
War was over my heart was cold to the;r relief.
I was even aware of a slight resentmen t of peace. All the
work had been done now, and it would pass unrec ogni sed. Too
many pe opl e had been involved for there to be anyone available
to give the recognition. There were no fathers or governm ent ts
safe.at home to give thanks, as in the old days. Peace was an
impos sture. It offered no distinctions as to who had the secret
stigma of suffering, who had seen an d who hadn't. All sorts of
Jeunih
pe ople with proud chests would step forward now---like theBrig-
ade which had replaced us as commanders of a priscner-of-war
camp full of SS troops, near Udine in the north of Italy, and
had instituted, with a show of contempt for us, new harsh
measures of discipline, to make the Germans feel who had won the
this
War. And
Brigae had' escaped the War entirely. - That was
the sort of bitter thing that happened.
I spent little time at the headquarters/ and we drove back
slowly. It was a fine'morning and we had just come into the
wide a venue on the"outskirts of Graz which led back to Maria
Trost.
There wasxa large bend in the road, then we cauld se e
the first green hills near the village. But just as we began
to turn this bend I saw two figures S trolling a. long on the right,


both of them dressed in British uniform but clearly not
soldiers. I was suddenly furious. They had no S houl der
markings, no signs of rank, no divisional badges, nor caps.
on They were slouc hing/ like civilians. The uniforms were new.
I told the driver to pull over to the right, and he did so,
br ing ing the car to a sudden skidding halt. It was absolutely
lad
preposterous that only a few weeks after the War ended pe ople
should be S trolling along the streets in our uniform, whi ch had
the mark and stigma on. it. They ha d pr obably picked it up at
an army st tores for a couple of dozen eggs. or a horse or a car
or a huge bag of sugar. It was preposterous that so soon after
the War 1 the uniform should became quite meaningless/and all
distinctions vanish: 4
The car stopped at the kerb quite close to them. They W ere
young, W ith fair hair, and quite clearly not English or Ameri can.
Theywere Austrians perhaps. : They were about the same age as I
was. When they heard the skid of our tyres they at once st topped
and took a step.back, close together. I s hout ted at the.top of
my voice.
"Where did'you get those uniforms?"
They said S omething in Germa n which.I couldn'tbunde rs tand,
and I repeated my question: in an equally loud voice, glaring at
them. Ohe of.the young'men blushed, and his .eyes seemed to grow
strange
sightless in a most straage way. But I went on s hou t: ing. Where
did they ge t those uniforms? They eemertt o b1 umpg together as
they S tood on the pavement. I noticed for the first t ime that
they had rather shy, delica te faces. They cauld ha ve been
stude nts. But I thoug ht - again of the war in Italyf and the
imposture of peace, and I didn't caré. And I also not ic ed tha t


they were looking at me not only with fear but with horror,
their mou ths open slightly, their
almost
exprssions A
identical,
whe reas I expected them to behav e in a surly way,as local
people often did towards the western, democratic armies.
I had never known this look of spell-bound hornor to:be dir-
ected at me before.
There was a brief s.ilence, and my driver tugged my arm
slightly. e I was trembling. "Sir, sir" he was whispering.
I felt he was embarràssed for me f but I was determined not to
be lackadaisical about this, as no doubt he W ould have heen.
"Sir, sir", he aaid, "they say they're Jews. They've
just been released from. concentration camp".
I stared at them and after a long pause said, k
Then I tried to smile at them.: I pu t my hand',out of the
car, though they were standing some.yards away, and said with.
a ridiculous sort of nod, "It's all right, I'didn't know,' I'm
sorry, please go, it's all right". But they went on staring
at me. "Itis all right"; I said, "I didn 't know". Then,
after another silence', I told the driver to move, and he. quick-
iy put the car in gear an d drove away, his head slightly down.
Even as we moved away they continued: to follow me with their
stares, which I. have ne ver forgotten.
Rainat.