Cambridge Tales 5: ‘East of the Rhine’ (Concluded)

One afternoon in the last week of November, there was a soft knock on the door of my room. Before me stood an elegantly thin woman in her late twenties, wearing an extremely expensive-looking bleu nuit cashmere coat with a silk scarf and holding a flat, shiny black handbag. Her eyes had a sparkle, but her black hair and brows, and the pallor of her face, gave her an unmistakably serious, even strained expression.

‘Gerald? I am Azita…a friend of Eric Smith.’

I ushered her silently in, but she said she had only a few minutes. Without taking her coat off, she sat down.

‘Eric thought highly of you – he told me about the conversations you had. So I am sure he would want you to know what has happened to him.’

‘Ye-s… Where is he?’

‘As I think you know, he went with the British contingent to Bosnia. He got on extremely well with the Serbian commanders and soldiers, and even learned a lot of Serbian – he was very quick at languages. So he was drawn into a bit of intelligence work…reconnaissance and so forth.’

She fiddled with her fingers on her lap.

‘Then the Serbs took over Srebrenica. Eric heard rumours of what happened there, but he did not believe them… He was stationed far away from it, you see, but he had met officers who he knew were in that area, so after the NATO bombing he managed to visit villages around Srebrenica… He found people were digging up mass graves – from executions – and concealing the bodies elsewhere. He saw things – corpses blindfolded and with their hands tied, soaked in blood, mutilated and dismembered, sometimes with their throats cut, even young boys murdered – things that no-one should ever have to see, and when the local people discovered he was British, they told him horrific stories… It was not just war atrocities, he said, but genocide… I don’t know. He couldn’t stand it, and went back to Vitez…where he had a nervous breakdown.’

‘I see…’

‘Eric’s parents contacted me when he was sent home, and I managed to visit him. He was, how do you say, catatonic, weeping all the time, and drinking a lot, of course.’

‘But why on earth did he go back to Bosnia?’

She looked down for a second, tensed her lips, and when she looked up I saw her bright eyes glint. She sat upright and drew in her stomach.

‘It was shame, Gerald. He told me that he felt such personal shame. He had thought the world of those soldiers, he admired them so much…and he simply could not understand how the same men could do such terrible things. “They are not soldiers…they are not soldiers”, he kept repeating. And he felt so ashamed of having admired and trusted them – and even other soldiers, in the past – that he said he had to “expiate” it before the Bosniaks, Srebrenica’s Muslims who had been murdered. I…I am a Muslim myself. In September he drew out a lot of his savings, he managed to bluff and bribe his way – you can imagine – to a village just north of Srebrenica, and he worked there with a lot of investigators exhuming the victims and giving them proper burials.’

I was speechless and felt sick. Azita sat and stared at me.

‘Wha- Where is he now?’

‘They have a lot of alcohol there, and I believe he sank lower and lower. He basically became a gravedigger. Then at the end of October, in an evening’s drinking, he was killed with a spade by someone who said he had insulted Serbia’s honour.’

She looked at her watch.

‘I must go, I’m afraid. Look, this is where he is buried.’

She took out a wallet from inside her coat and showed me a coloured photograph. In the foreground, blurred, were a number of white stelae, evidently gravestones in a formal cemetery. But set back from them against a fence and overhung by a small tree in what looked like an orchard, was a slightly narrow English-style tombstone, brought into focus. It bore Eric’s name, his dates, and a strange epitaph in capitals: DEFEANCE.

‘It was put up by the Bosniaks,’ the beautiful woman said. ‘The British Army informed Eric’s parents.’

‘But what does this word mean?’

‘I don’t know. The locals buried him and I think they must have got confused. “Defence”? “Defiance”? It seems to be both. Presumably they heard Eric say it – repeat it.’

‘Oh, in Eric’s case I’m sure it was “Defiance”… As in Henry the Fifth: “Scorn and Defiance!” He was a great admirer of Churchill and he himself defied all conventional thinking, of course.’

‘Yes… I must go. I will try to write to you. I still have this.’

She opened her handbag, to my astonishment took out Eric’s folded claret tie, then carefully put it back.

I accompanied her to the front door. She turned, smiled cursorily but sincerely, and almost ran up the drive. I could see what looked like a black limousine waiting for her.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.