Peace Shall Destroy Many (7 page)

Her “yes” echoed his remembrance. He had been picking stones last Tuesday and at supper, before they milked, the news had come. It had been in the air all day, but they had heard reports that evening as supper grew cold: “The time of waiting is over; the invasion of France is taking place before my eyes here on the Normandy coast. The War is at last crossing the English Channel to the Germans. As I speak…” The reporter spoke almost calmly, for behind the thin film of his voice blared the sounds of war, the whining, the roars, the explosions, the splashing, the staccatos, the drones, and sometimes, far away, a scream. There was no need for dramatic speech. Occasionally, when the sounds drowned all, the reporter could say nothing. It seemed beyond comprehension to sit at supper in a log farmhouse in Canada and listen while men, at that very moment, tore each other for reasons none really knew; to listen while a landing craft exploded, and the voice of the announcer choked, “—out of the sky—parts of bodies falling—masses of water…” Then the report had been cut abruptly and he had gone out, his mind clogged, the white faces of the family staring soundlessly after him. She had listened
too. A whole world listening to men killing themselves savagely.

A marvellous invention, radio.

They were almost there, and he stopped the
team by the scarred poplar. “We’ll walk from here: can’t drive farther.” As he slid over the wheel she said quickly,

“You’ve been here before.”

“Yes.” Star nuzzled him like a question as he tied the halter shank about the ribbed tree, and he murmured, rubbing the grey forehead, “Home soon, we’ll be home soon.” He wondered as he stood there if Joseph would have talked as he did about non-resistance, before the invasion. Undoubtedly.

“Listen!” She was at Duster’s head. “The frogs!” The night was full of them, like the stars in the narrow rift above them in the trees.

“Come,” he said, and led the way down what was now only a footpath, her quick steps padding behind him. The tangle grew flush to the valley rim and he stood aside at the last turn under the jack-pine. “You go ahead. Just four steps around this bush. No more.”

Her narrow face looked up at him, grin roguish, but then she stepped by, her paces exaggerated, tolling her unbelief. “One—two—three—fo—” He was directly behind her as she gasped.

It was best by moonlight. For miles the trees hemmed like walls, only the narrow road over the rock-rumped earth and the wriggling path of the sky above. Then, as if wiped by a cosmic hand, the brush was gone, the ground plunged away to the valley floor, the sky stretched beyond seeing, and the earth spread hugely below. Beyond a line of trees, like shrubbery in the depth, lay the immense wanness of the muddy river,
emerging from nowhere
under the thin north-west moon to enfold an island prickly with spruce and fade to the north-east in the half-light as if it had never been. Across the Wapiti, rising ever-rising hills of the Cree Reservation were sketched against the stars. Though at their very feet, all was unreal as a misty picture.

“It’s unbelievable.”

They had been standing he did not know how long. Her voice was awed. A breeze stirred the poplars and the branches of the pine like an organ.

“Fifteen years—and never saw it.”

“What?” he said, not understanding.

“Oh, I’ve seen the valley—from the road down Poplar Creek and below at the ford. Never here, under the moon.”

To live three miles away for fifteen years and not to see this! It was incomprehensible to them both.

“Anyway,” she said, “you never know what you’ve missed.” The river below them, a vista opened in their minds: what else had they missed and were they missing at this moment?

Abruptly she said, “Where are the frogs?”

“Probably the old gravel-pit they used for the cut-line—just back a bit through the trees.”

“Let’s go there.”

“There’s nothing to see, really.”

“We can hear them, close.”

“Okay. It’s best along the edge.” He led to the east, walking along the fringe of the valley. The brush flexed, tense to push them off. “Watch,” he said, holding bac
k a branch, and she came close to him, breathing quickly, holding her long skirt narrow about her. Her brown hair shadowed the happiness
on her face. “We better go through the bush—it’s scratchy, but we can’t fall two hundred feet.” The branch swished back over her head. “It thins soon.”

She laughed behind him in the trees. “What would you say to Dad and Mom if I got pushed into the valley?”

“I guess then we better stay away from it.” Her banter at his shyness made him forget it.

Then the bush faded to scrawny trees and they could walk side by side. He could think of nothing except the beauty of the evening and the wonder of her presence. The world was alight with it. There was even enough breeze to chasten the mosquitoes. Abruptly they encountered a truck-road, once used, now brush-grown like the ancient rocks. Its ruts sloped into the earth, and soon they emerged in the abandoned pit, shallow but huge, a gnarled pine pointing over the rim here and there, the gravel gouged beneath their feet. Walking carefully, he led her over a small ridge in the pit, and before them gleamed a flat level of water. The only sound was their breathing, the wind-sigh, and the frogs.

After a moment, he said, “If you throw a stone into the water, they’ll stop right away.”

“Huh-uh,” her voice doubted him.

“Sure. Watch!” and before her “Oh, don’t!” could deter, he stooped and in the motion flipped a fist-sized stone into the inlet at their feet. Only a deep croak near them ceased; the rest went on as though no sound had splashed on the night.

“Can’t even depend on the frogs, eh?” she laughed past him, peering at the half-hidden pool. “But you spoiled the nicest one. Such a lovely bass. He sounded like the one in the quartet in church with Reverend Goertzen in April.”

He laughed. “But they should all have stopped—”

“Please don’t again,” her voice was quick. “We want to hear them.”

“Yes.” He hunkered down on the gravel, the mention of the visiting minister busying his mind. She sat down farther, her white dress pale against the grey rocks, clasping her knees, eyes intent on the rippled water. She echoed his thoughts.

“Do you think Joseph was right about what he said?”

He had not thought clearly all evening, but now he was awake as if he would never again need sleep. Struggling, he voiced the one point he recalled having pondered.

“If he speaks from history, I guess he’s right when he says non-resistance is possible only for a small group. But what does that say? Does what has happened in the world show us what a Christian should do? Or does the Bible?”

“But if you agree, you have to go the next step. If only the minority can say, ‘It is against our conscience to fight because we must love enemies as well as friends,’ and the majority must say, ‘We must fight to protect pacifists so that they may have the right to think as they do,’ then the majority, the non-believers, die so that the minority, the believers, may live. Who, then, is the martyr for the faith?”

As she spoke, his remembrance of the talk by the rippled lake grew, to his discomfort. There was, somewhe
re, a great deal wrong with what she and Joseph said. He had always heard it explained from another angle.

“Look, do you think a soldier thinks of all this when he comes round a corner and there’s a German? He doesn’t think. He either shoots on the spot or he’s dead. That’s all. War isn’t one country against another. It’s only, and always will be, one man killing one or more other men.”

“But the principle still holds, doesn’t it? In Germany no
one can say, ‘I refuse to join the Army’ They either join or are shot, which ends their earthly usefulness as witnesses to Christianity. If Allied soldiers did not stop the German advance, we could not live to hold our belief in Canada because Hitler would soon control us too. As the Russians are doing to the Mennonites that still remain there. One reason our parents fled to Canada—why our fathers left Holland and Prussia—was to be protected from serving in war, wasn’t it? What will you and I do, now that we, in our turn, have no country to fly to for protection?”

He had a feeling that he was discovering some new planet. “Look,” he fumbled, not knowing what to counter, but her passion relieved him.

“Oh, I’m not—really, I couldn’t accuse anyone. So many did die in Russia. Of the thousands who streamed to Moscow with us, only a few hundred left for freedom. That our families escaped is only God’s mercy and we can be eternally thankful. But the world is only so big; there comes a time when you must make a stand.” Her voice-timbre deepened as he remembered his mother’s words about “overcoming.” “I don’t know—now. It seemed so cle
ar when Cornie and then Sam went to CO cam
p. But Joseph keeps questioning: can a Christian cast off responsibility by mere refusal—by mere avoidance? And I wanted to ask you. You’re always so sure of yourself.”

Her trust ground chagrin into his inadequacy. He was certain of only one thing. “Annamarie, can’t the teachings of Christ lead us? He doesn’t ask something reasonable—as the
right
to return a blow—but He expects holiness, a denial of all force. It was not reasonable for Menno Simons to give up a fat priesthood to become a hounded minister.”

The bass of the frog near them had begun. Her face was still intent on the water as she said, “I wonder if we understand all Christ taught. We’ve got it sewed up into such neat dry packages. There is a sure-fire traditional way of acting for almost every situation you can imagine. But in some ways—in some situations—Menno Simons helps little. It was fine to say, ‘We can have nothing to do with war’ when—remember how Joseph put it?—wars were skirmishes on the next quarter and the k
ing who led his troops to a day’s victory won. Then it was possible—”

That had been Joseph’s trend and Thom pushed in now, as he could not at the lake, “What difference does it make at whose command you kill: a king who hollers as he leads you, or a general who sits behind and tells you by radio? You’re killing both times.”

“The result is the same, yes, but the circumstances are more involved. The whole world is now in it. We can’t avoid it. Father raises pigs because the price is high: some men charged up the Normandy beaches last Tuesday with our bacon in their stomachs. Pete Bl
ock can stay home because Mr. Block’s farm is big enough
to be called an essential industry. Sam works in one now too. He wrote last week he was being shifted to Ontario to work in a boot factory. Alternative service is necessary to winning the War. Wars can only be won with some fighting, so we divide the job: I supply you with bacon to eat and boots to wear and you go kill the Germans—for the good of both of us.”

Thom shuddered. After a moment, she went on. “Only, we have the better part. We don’t take any risks—and grow rich besides.”

He arose slowly and, using his entire body in a flare of viciousness that spurted and died, flung a stone against the
pool. But it did not splash. It skipped beautifully in its flatness, dropping gently with a final plop into a far gleam of water. His shoulder ached. A few frogs ceased, the rest croaked on. You’d have to throw a lot of stones, he thought idly, and even then they soon start again. Must these things be thought of? There was always the bush between them and the world. With the invasion, the War might soon be over. Perhaps his call would never come. He knew that tomorrow, when he remembered, these thoughts would rankle like poison: having once seen the problem, he could never forget it. That was what made thought so frightening.

He said: “So you believe with Joseph that if you have a war anyway, you are not acting as a Christian just because you refuse to go and do the killing?” Articulated, shared by other human beings, the thoughts he himself had skirted reared as crassest heresy. His conscience balked.

“I think that’s true.” She paused, sad.

A verse arose in his mind with startling clarity: “But Jesus Christ said, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. For if you love them which love you, what reward have you? Do not eve
n the publicans so?’ ”

“Yes, He said that,” she returned, and silence lengthened between them. Four hundred years before, that verse had been the guiding star of their fathers, but somehow, through the centuries, they had worked it into an impasse. He wondered, thinking of Wapiti’s isolation, whether now they could even be termed as loving their friends.

“We should go,” she murmured.

“Yes.”

They both looked at the pool and heard the frogs again, without thought, and then she rose and they returned as they had come, feet unsteady on the round rocks. “Let’s just look at the river,” he said, and pushed ahead through the tangle until they emerged on the lookout. She stood beside him, smoothing back her simply coiled hair. The clean curve of the moon hung naked at its height in the north. The long river lay dully silver, holding the island as in its arms. The wind flickered the poplars and murmured to the pine; there was no cry of a bird to nag. He knew that in this moment behind the hedges of France men lay silent under the shriek of shells, lurking; here, peace—as when only two people, and God, were on earth. But to stay here.

They looked at each other. He could not have touched her if he had thought of it. Then they, too, had to leave and he led the way back to the horses and buggy, and the
glances that had met and the sound of their footsteps on the trail were a covenant between them.

A
CHURCH MEETING
, abruptly called on
Sunday for the immediate Monday night, was beginning.

In the warmth of the June evening, they were singing the opening hymn, voices about Thom swelling harmony, craggy faces intense. The women’s voices across the aisle lifted high the melody. The hymn strong in his chest, Thom, as always when in church, was raised beyond the waver of his doubt into confident wo
rship. Only at such moments could he lose what appeared to him then to be his petty personal problems. Singing