Read Online Dunster by John Mortimer - Free Book Online

library, a long room with a stained-glass window done by some minor pre-Raphaelite, giving it a dim, religious appearance. There were shelves of leather-bound books – ‘Great-grandfather bought them by the yard. They’re on such fascinating subjects as the geology of Tibet’ – and also Cris’s larger, far more interesting, collection. There was an elaborate sound system and a grand piano at which Cris sat and played for a little. He broke the silence after the music arrived at its inevitable conclusion. ‘A war crime is something that’s done by the defeated. The Germans are supposed to have committed all the war crimes. We just liberated people, even if it meant killing large numbers of them to do it.’
    â€˜We’re not suggesting that the Germans didn’t commit war crimes, are we?’ We were talking about history, a period which would seem as remote to my daughter as the Norman Conquest or the Napoleonic Wars, and I didn’t know what surprises our proposed programme might contain.
    â€˜Oh, yes. Of course. They committed them.’ He frowned and moved uncomfortably in his chair. Unusually for Cris, words weren’t coming easily to him. ‘Let me tell you something. We got to a little town when we were fighting our way up Italy. It doesn’t matter where exactly. Anyway. Typical Italian town. Perched on a steep hillside. An old wall round it. Nothing much inside. A square where they had a market once a week. A church. A bar. A few narrow streets. No great paintings in the church. A place of no importance to anyone. Well, when we got there it was empty. Nothing. A ghost town. No sign of life. Flies buzzing over the meat going bad in the butcher’s. Grocer’s empty. Café deserted. And where a church had been, nothing.’
    â€˜Bombed?’
    â€˜Not as respectable as that. No. Some German had been killed. An officer. Not even in the town. Somewhere outside the walls. Anyway, that’s where they found his body. Well, everyone in the village went to church on a saint’s day. Men, women and children. Babies in their mothers’ arms. So when everyone was inside, German soldiers locked the doors. They’d laid the charges the night before, we imagined. Their commanding officer yelled out some sentence of death over a loud hailer. That’s what they heard instead of the Mass. Then the soldiers cleared off and everyone was blown to pieces, old and young – everyone in the village who’d gone there to pray.’
    He shook himself, as though to escape from a memory. ‘A small incident perhaps, but those people didn’t start the war. Probably they had no particular interest in it, except for praying for it to stop. So they went to church and were blown to kingdom come. What the hell can you prove by killing people?’
    I said nothing. War is something of which I have had absolutely no experience.
    â€˜That’s why I want to do this series, in spite of anything Sid Vicious may have to say about it. I want people to understand. Look ...’ He went over to a desk in the corner and came back with a typescript, neatly bound, ‘I’d like to know what you think of it. An outline for a series of six.’
    As I took it, I saw Dunster’s name on the cover and was filled with unreasonable foreboding. I read it in bed. It was clearly set out but contained no surprises. Lidice and My Lai, the French in Algeria, the Germans in Hungary, the Russians in Poland: the tales of horror seemed far away from the warm, fake castle in the flat countryside where the elderly couple, still in love, lay sleeping, I imagined, in each other’s arms. I wondered, now a new war had started, why Cris was so anxious to remember these old atrocities. As I finished reading and switched out the light, I realized there was something missing in that simple account of war crimes. It was the sound of anger and denunciation which I had