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at all erase the stink of the dead.’
    That, sir, was Roper – QMS Roper – in the spearhead of the invasions of cleaners-up after the German surrender. The letter, and the three letters that followed (he was just talking the anguish out on the paper), spoke of vomiting and a mad fear that the near-corpses would suddenly topple their fully dead brothers from the pile and come to lap up half-digested protein. They also told of nightmares of a sort we all had, all those of us who’d entered the death-camps and stood paralysed, our mouths in
rictu
but whether for retching or out of sheer incredulity the mouths themselves could not at first tell. We had to gape; it was the only possible oral response to what we saw and smelt. We didn’t want to believe, since belief that a civilised nation had been capable of all this must overturn everything we’d ever taken for granted about civilisation, progress, the elevating power of artistic, scientific, philosophical achievement (who could deny that the Germans were a great race?). For my part, I went in as sole sergeant-interpreter with a small Russo-American group (I have deliberately forgotten where the death-camp was) and found, what I should have known, that words, whether Russian or Anglo-American, were otiose.
    Strangely, my own nightmares featured Roper more than myself,perhaps because Roper had written those letters. I could see him very clearly as I read them – pale, fattish, bespectacled (with those steel-rimmed respirator-spectacles that made the wearer look like an idiot child), a shaggy straw nape under the eaves of the steel helmet. In my dreams he did my moaning for me, vomiting up such dream-objects as the flywheels of clocks, black-letter books, wriggling snakes, and he sobbed very idiomatic German, full of words like
Staunen
(astonishment) and
Sittlichkeit
(morality) and
Schicksal
(destiny). His own nightmares were of the forced evening walk (a lovely sunset, the birds’ last song) through groves of corpses, along with burrowing into hedges of blue flesh and (this was fairly common with all of us) actual necrophagy or corpse-eating. And then dreaming Roper allowed himself to appear as a sort of British Christ, John Bull Jesus crucified on his own Union Jack. The crucifixion was either punishment or expiation or identification – he couldn’t tell which. He’d done very little reading outside of physics and chemistry and very simple poetry.
    But guilt was in his letters. These crimes had been committed by members of the human race, no different from himself. ‘We should never have let this happen,’ he wrote. ‘We’re all responsible.’ I wrote back: ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid. The Germans are responsible and only the Germans. Admittedly, a lot of them won’t have that because a lot of them won’t believe what’s been done in their name. They’ll have to be shown, all of them. You can start off with the German women.’ That’s what I’d been doing. In a way, with their deep belly-consciousness or whatever the hell it is, the German women were already lining up to be punished. They didn’t think it was that, of course; they thought they were just on the chocolate-buying game like the women of any conquered country. But the deep processes of genetics were calling out for exogamy, fertilisation by foreign bodies, and the deeper moral processes were shrieking for punishment. Wait, though: aren’t those aspects of the same thing? Isn’t the angry punitive seed more potent than the good gentle stuff thatdribbles out in the pink-sheeted marriage-bed? Isn’t miscegenation a means of destroying ethnic identity and thus getting rid of national guilt? For my part, I didn’t then ask such questions of the stocky women of Bremen. I got stuck into them, not sparing the rod. At the same time, showing my teeth and manhood, I was dimly aware that their menfolk, dead