The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [199]
The Commandant sent his interpreter to inquire while he took Major Gordon into the shed he called his mess, and gave him a drink. Presently the man returned. “All correct, sir. The Kanyis never left Begoy. They got into some kind of trouble there and were jugged.”
“May I go with the interpreter and ask about it?”
“By all means, old man. But aren’t you making rather heavy weather of it? What do two more or less matter?”
Major Gordon went into the compound with the interpreter. Some of the Jews recognized him and crowded round with complaints and petitions. All he could learn about the Kanyis was that they had been taken off the truck by the partisan police just as it was about to start.
He had one more day in Bari before his flight home. He spent it revisiting the offices where he had begun his work of liberation. But this time he received little sympathy. “We don’t really want to bother the Jugs any more. They really cooperated very well about the whole business. Besides the war’s over now in that part. There’s no particular point in moving people out. We’re busy at the moment moving people in.” This man was in fact at that moment busy despatching royalist officers to certain execution.
The Jewish office showed no interest when they understood that he had not come to sell them illicit arms. “We must first set up the State,” they said. “Then it will be a refuge for all. First things first.”
So Major Gordon returned to England unsatisfied and he might never have heard any more of the matter, had he not a cousin in the newly reopened Ministry at Belgrade. Months later he heard from him: “I’ve been to a lot of trouble and made myself quite unpopular in getting information about the couple you’re interested in. The Jugs are very close but at last I got matey with the head of the police who wants us to return some refugees we’ve got in our zone in Austria. He dug out the file for me. Both were condemned by a Peoples’ Court and executed. The man had committed sabotage on the electric light plant. The woman had been a spy for a “foreign power.” Apparently she was the mistress of a foreign agent who frequented her house while the husband was busy destroying the dynamo. A lot of foreign propaganda publications were found in her house and produced as evidence. What very unsavoury friends you seem to have.”
It so happened that this letter arrived on the day when the Allies were celebrating the end of the war in Asia. Major Gordon was back with his regiment. He did not feel inclined to go out that evening and join in the rejoicing. The mess was empty save for the misanthropic second-in-command and the chaplain (although of Highland origin the regiment was full of Glasgow Irish and had a Benedictine monk attached to them).
The second-in-command spoke as he had spoken most evenings since the General Election. . . . “I don’t know what they mean by ‘Victory.’ We start the bloody war for Poland. Well that’s ceased to exist. We fight it in Burma and Egypt—and you can bet your boots we shall give them up in a few months to the very fellows who’ve been against us. We spent millions knocking Germany down and now we shall spend millions building it up again. . . .”
“Don’t you think, perhaps, people feel better than they did in 1938?” said the chaplain.
“No,” said the second-in-command.
“They haven’t got rid of that unhealthy sense of guilt they had?”
“No,” said Major Gordon. “I never had it before. Now I have.”
And he told the story of the Kanyis. “Those are the real horrors of war—not just people having their legs blown off,” he concluded. “How do you explain that, padre?”
There was no immediate answer until the second-in-command said: “You did all you could. A darn sight more than most people would have done.”
“That’s your answer,” said the chaplain. “You mustn’t judge actions by their apparent success. Everything you did was good in itself.”
“A fat lot of good it did the Kanyis.”
“No. But don’t you think it just possible that they did you good? No suffering need ever be wasted. It is just as much part of