The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  He didn’t know how long he’d stood in the hall with the postcard, but when he returned, his mother was sitting there crying. She held her trembling head propped on one hand, the other hand lay motionless in her lap, as if it didn’t even belong to her, flat, worn and forlorn . . .

  He walked over to her, lifted her head, and tried to look her in the eyes, but he gave up immediately. His mother’s face was distorted, foreign, a face he’d never seen before, a face that frightened him, to which he had no access, could claim none . . .

  He sat down in silence, sipped his coffee, and pulled out a cigarette, but let it drop suddenly and stared straight ahead.

  Then a voice came from behind the propped hand. ‘You should eat something . . .’

  ‘You mustn’t be upset.’

  He poured coffee, added milk and dropped in two sugar cubes. Then he lit his cigarette, took the postcard from his pocket, and read in a low voice, ‘You are to report to the Bismarck barracks in Adenbrück at 7 a.m. on 4 July for eight weeks of military training.’

  ‘For goodness sake,’ he said loudly, ‘be reasonable, Mother, it’s only eight weeks.’

  She nodded.

  ‘It was bound to happen, I knew I’d be called up for eight weeks of training.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, ‘eight weeks.’

  They both knew they were lying, they were lying without knowing why. They couldn’t know, but they lied and they knew it. They knew he wasn’t leaving for just eight weeks.

  She said again, ‘You should eat something.’

  He took a slice of bread, buttered it, added sausage and started chewing, very slowly and without appetite.

  ‘Give me the card,’ said his mother.

  He gave it to her.

  There was a strange look on her face. She was very calm. She examined the card carefully, reading through it quietly.

  ‘What is today?’ she asked as she laid the card on the table.

  ‘Thursday,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘the date.’

  ‘The third,’ he said.

  Only then did he realize the point of her question. That meant he had to leave that very day, he had to be 180 miles to the north by seven the next morning, in the barracks of a strange city . . .

  He put down the half-finished slice of bread; there was no point in pretending to be hungry. His mother covered her face with her hand again and began crying harder, a strange, soundless weeping . . .

  He went into his room and packed his briefcase. He stuffed a shirt inside, a pair of underpants and socks, writing paper, then he cleared out the drawer and threw everything in it into the stove without looking through it. He tore a sheet from a notebook, folded it, set it on fire and held it under the pile of paper. At first there was only thick, white smoke; slowly the fire ate its way through until it burst crackling and hissing out the stove top, a slender, strong flame surrounded by black fumes. As he rummaged through all the drawers and compartments again he caught himself thinking. Get going, just get away quick. Away from his mother, from the only human being he could say loved him.

  He heard her taking the tray back to the kitchen; he crossed the hall, knocked hurriedly on the frosted glass pane, and called in to her: ‘I’m going to the train station, I’ll be right back.’

  She didn’t answer right away. He waited, and he could feel the small, white postcard in the pocket of his trousers. Then his mother called out, ‘OK. Come back soon. Goodbye . . .’

  ‘Goodbye,’ he called, then stood quietly for a moment before he walked out . . .

  When he came home it was twelve-thirty, and the meal was ready. His mother carried dishes, cutlery and plates into the living room . . .

  Recalling this now, that first tormented afternoon seemed to him worse than the entire war. He stayed home another six hours. His mother kept trying to force things on him she thought he’d need: soft bath towels in particular, packages of food, cigarettes, soap. And the whole time she was crying. For his part he smoked, arranged his books; the table had to be set again, bread, butter, jam had to be carried into the living room, and coffee had to be brewed.

  Then, after coffee, when the sun had already passed behind the building and an agreeable twilight reigned in the front of the house, he suddenly went into his room, put his briefcase under his arm, and stepped out into the hall . . .

  ‘What is it?’ asked his mother, ‘do you have to . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have to go,’ even though his train didn’t leave for another five hours.

  He put his case down and embraced his mother with a despairing tenderness. As she placed her arms around him, she felt the postcard in his hip pocket and pulled it out. She was suddenly calm, and her sobs ceased as well. The postcard in her hand looked entirely harmless; the only human thing about it was the major’s scrawl, and even this could have been written by a machine, by a major’s mechanical pen . . . The only menacing thing about it was the gleaming rectangular sticker, standing out in bright red with a thick, black R inside, a small scrap of paper of the kind pasted on letters daily, whole rolls of them, in every post office. But now beneath the R he discovered a number; it was his number, the only thing that distinguished this card from all others, the number 846, and now he knew that everything was in its place, that nothing could happen, that in some post office or other this number stood beside a column bearing his name. It was his number and he couldn’t flee from it; he had to race toward this bold-faced R. He couldn’t run away . . .

  He was registration number 846, nothing else, and this small, white postcard, this trivial piece of cardboard of the lowest, cheapest quality, which even when printed cost at most three marks per thousand and was delivered post-free to his house, meant nothing but a major’s scribble, a secretary who reached into a card file, and yet another scribble as a postal official entered it in his ledger . . .

  His mother was totally calm when he left. She pushed the postcard back into his pocket, kissed him, and said softly, ‘God bless you.’

  He went out. His train didn’t leave till midnight, and it was barely seven. He knew his mother was watching him, and he turned to wave from time to time as he walked toward the tram.

  He was at the station five hours before departure. He strolled from counter to counter a few times, studied the timetables again. Everything was normal. People were returning from or leaving for vacations; most were laughing. They were happy, tanned, and carefree. It was warm and beautiful, vacation weather . . .

  He walked out again, got on a tram that could have taken him home, jumped off on the way and went back to the station. He checked the train-station clock and discovered that only twenty minutes had passed. He wandered among the crowd again for a while, smoking, then got on another streetcar at random, jumped off again and rode back to the station, as if he knew that he would be spending eight years in train stations. It drew him like a magnet . . .

  He went into the waiting room, drank a beer, wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and suddenly recalled the girl at the bookshop he’d walked home a few times. He looked up her number in his notebook, rushed to a pay phone, inserted a coin, and dialled, but when a voice answered on the other end, he couldn’t utter a word and hung up. He put in another coin and redialled. Again he heard an unfamiliar voice say hello and a name, and he gathered up all his courage and stammered out, ‘May I speak to Fräulein Wegmann? This is Herr Schnitzler . . .’

  ‘One moment, please,’ said the voice, and through the receiver he heard a baby whimpering, dance music and a man cursing, a door slamming shut. Sweat beaded his forehead. Then he heard her voice. She said, ‘Yes?’ and he stammered, ‘It’s me . . . Hans . . . can I see you again, I have to go away . . . to the army . . . today . . .’

  He could tell she was surprised, and she said, ‘Yes . . . but when . . . where . . .?’

  ‘At the train station,’ he said, ‘right away . . . at the gate . . .’

  She came quickly, a delicate, pe
tite blonde with a round, very red mouth and a pretty nose. She greeted him with a smile. ‘Now this is a surprise.’

  ‘What would you like, what shall we do?’

  ‘How much time do we have?’

  ‘Till twelve.’

  ‘Let’s go to the cinema,’ she said.

  They went to a cinema near the train station, a small, dirty theatre at the back of a courtyard, and when they were sitting together in the dark, he suddenly knew that he had to take her hand and hold it tight for as long as the film lasted. The air was warm, there was a stale odour, and most of the seats were empty. It bothered him somehow that she let him take her hand so matter-of-factly, but he held it firmly, almost desperately, for two hours, and when they came out of the theatre it was dark at last, and raining . . .

  As he turned into the park with her, he put his briefcase under his right arm and drew her to him with his left. Once more she yielded. He felt the warmth of her small, fragrant body, inhaled the smell of her wet hair, and kissed her, on the throat, the cheeks, and he was startled as he brushed her soft mouth with his lips . . .

  She had put her arms tightly and nervously around him; his briefcase slipped from his grasp, and as he kissed her he suddenly realized he was trying to make out the trees and bushes on both sides of the path. He saw the damp, silvery path, gleaming in the rain, the dripping bushes and black tree trunks, and the sky, where thick clouds were racing eastward . . .

  They walked up and down the path a few times. They kissed, and at certain moments he thought he felt a tenderness toward her, something like pity, perhaps love as well, he didn’t know. He delayed their return to the lighted streets until it was so quiet around the train station that he thought it must be time . . .

  He showed his postcard at the barrier, had them punch her platform ticket, and was glad to see the train already standing in the empty hall, steaming and ready. He kissed her again and got on. As he leaned out to wave, he was afraid she would cry, but she smiled at him, waved for a long time, energetically, and he sensed his own relief that she wasn’t crying . . .

  Kay Boyle

  DEFEAT

  First published in 1941, Kay Boyle’s miniature short story attempts to evoke the initial shock caused by the defeat of France in June 1940: a shock which was to become a national trauma.

  TOWARDS THE END of June that year and through July, there was a sort of uncertain pause, an undetermined suspension that might properly be called neither an armistice nor a peace, and it lasted until the men began coming back from where they were. They came at intervals, trickling down from the north in twos or threes, or even one by one, some of them prisoners who had escaped and others merely a part of that individual retreat in which the sole destination was home. They had exchanged their uniforms for something else as they came along – corduroys, or workmen’s blue, or whatever people might have given them in secret to get away in – bearded, singularly and shabbily outfitted men getting down from a bus or off a train without so much as a knapsack in their hands and all with the same bewildered, scarcely discrepant story to tell. Once they had reached the precincts of familiarity, they stood there a moment where the vehicle had left them, maybe trying to button the jacket that didn’t fit them or set the neck or shoulders right, like men who have been waiting in a courtroom and have finally heard their names called and stand up to take the oath and mount the witness stand. You could see them getting the words ready – revising the very quality of truth – and the look in their eyes, and then someone coming out of the post office or crossing the station square in the heat would recognize them and go toward them with a hand out, and the testimony would begin.

  They had found their way back from different places, by different means, some on bicycle, some by bus, some over the mountains on foot, coming home to the Alpes-Maritimes from Rennes, or from Clermont-Ferrand, or from Lyons, or from any part of France, and looking as incongruous to modern defeat as survivors of the Confederate Army might have looked, transplanted to this year and place (with their spurs still on and their soft-brimmed, dust-whitened hats), limping wanly back, half dazed and not yet having managed to get the story of what happened straight. Only, this time, they were the men of that tragically unarmed and undirected force which had been the French Army once but was no longer, returning to what orators might call reconstruction but which they knew could never be the same.

  Wherever they came from, they had identical evidence to give: that the German ranks had advanced bareheaded, in short-sleeved summer shirts – young blond-haired men with their arms linked, row on row, and their trousers immaculately creased, having slept all night in hotel beds and their stomachs full, advancing singing and falling singing before the puny coughing of the French machine-guns. That is, the first line of them might fall, and part of the second, possibly, but never more, for just then the French ammunition would suddenly expire and the bright-haired blond demi-gods would march on singing across their dead. Then would follow all the glittering display: the rust-proof tanks and guns, the chromium electric kitchens, the crematoriums. Legends or truth, the stories became indistinguishable in the mouths of the Frenchmen who returned – that the Germans were dressed as if for tennis that summer, with nothing but a tune to carry in their heads, while the French crawled out from under lorries where they’d slept maybe for every night for a week, going to meet them like crippled, encumbered miners emerging from the pit of a warfare fifty years interred with thirty-five kilos of kit and a change of shoes and a tin helmet left over from 1914 breaking them in two as they met the brilliantly nickelled Nazi dawn. They said their superiors were the first to run; they said their ammunition had been sabotaged; they said the ambulances had been transformed into accommodations for the officers’ lady friends; they said Nous avons été vendus or On nous a vendu over and over, until you could have made a popular song of it – the words and the music of defeat. After their testimony was given, some of them added (not the young but those who had fought before) in grave, part embittered, part vainglorious voices, ‘I’m ashamed to be a Frenchman’ or ‘I’m ashamed of being French today’, and then gravely took their places with the others.

  Jean-Louis Curtis

  THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

  So painful were events in occupied France from 1940 to 1944 that it has taken more than 50 years of denial for the complex truth to surface. While historians avoided the era, two novels published in the late 1940s, A Bon Beurre by Jean Dutourd and The Forests of the Night by Jean-Louis Curtis, gave early and fair accounts of the many shades of opinion and degrees of co-operation with the enemy.

  In the first extract, Curtis struggles to dramatise a popular pro-German, anti-Allied point of view, and the characters are little more than mouthpieces for one opinion or another. In the second extract, however, he is able to make moral and comic capital out of the daily details of collaboration.

  JACQUES SMILED. ‘NEVERTHELESS, you must admit that we are quite comfortable, you and I, and you, too, Mother, in the middle of this leprosy. We haven’t much difficulty in resigning ourselves to the inevitable.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean, either of you,’ Mme Costellot protested with energy. ‘Leprosy? What leprosy? You’re really priceless. I don’t feel in the least leprous, I assure you. My conscience is clear. Of course, if you are referring to the general deterioration of morals and to twentieth-century materialism, I agree with you. But only with reservations, with one very important reservation. The world is mad, we know that, and the part of the world infested by the Anglo-Saxons is particularly odious and particularly rotten, and what has rotted it is precisely the influence of the worst enemies of Christianity – the Jews. That part of the world should be shown on the map with the inscription Hic sunt and the Latin names for jackals and hyenas: I don’t know Latin. But France, in my opinion, France, if I am not mistaken, if I am not deluding myself, is not as rotten as that today: or is she? We have raised ourselves up again since 1940, or haven’t we? France toda
y is the cleanest place on the earth. At least, we have a leader who is clean.’

  The clasped hands, the old, puffy face, the high-pitched voice immediately expressed veneration and respectful emotion.

  ‘Most certainly you are right, Marguerite. How right you are to remind me of the things that can sustain our hope and feed our courage. The Marshal*7. . . A gift of God, a providential blessing to our unhappy country . . . As long as we have this man at the wheel of our ancient ship, this honest, upright man at the wheel of the ancient ship that is almost wrecked . . .’

  ‘Shouldn’t we sing Maréchal, vous voilà?’ Jacques suggested briskly.

  ‘Mock as much as you like!’ cried Mme Costellot. ‘That’s easy. But stop to think for a moment where you would be at the present hour if the Marshal had not been here in 1940. And even if the Marshal were not here now. You might well find yourself in Hamburg or in Kiel, exposed to Anglo-American bombing. You know it, of course, but you don’t want to admit it. I cannot understand your cynicism, your irony, your scorn . . . If one did not know you, one might sometimes take you for a Communist or . . . a Gaullist! But as you jeer at them too and despise them just as bitterly, one asks oneself what you really think and feel, what your guts are made of . . . Perhaps you consider yourself above the parties? Withdrawn into an ivory tower? That’s all very fine, my boy. The only objection is that one has to make one’s choice: nowadays one has to be on one side or the other. It is no longer a moral problem – although my choice, and I hope M. Lardenne’s as well, is primarily dictated by moral considerations. It is above all a question of personal safety, of life and death, or very nearly. I talk realism to you. I am not afraid of words. So, my lad, you are clever enough to recognize which is the good side, the safe side, the side not only of the just but – let us be realistic, even cynical – the side of the astute. It is the side of the Marshal. The Marshal chose his side at Montoire*8and has done so more and more clearly and openly ever since Montoire, and he has good reasons for it, you can be sure.’