Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  “Okay.”

  “We are poorly fed and poorly dressed compared to them, and more harshly disciplined. Our officers have the right, indeed the duty, to shoot any combatant who falters under fire, without trial or delay — an excellent provision, though no civilized country would have the nerve to adopt such a law. The war leader is essentially the man with a license to kill beyond the reach of law. We are freer in battle than the enemy, more enthusiastic, first because we are defending the motherland, second, because we rely upon ourselves rather than upon technique. And so technique, which we do not neglect, becomes a part of man unleashed, rather than the controller of a motorized soldiery … If one day this relation is reversed, we are doomed …

  “My guess is that the enemy deliberately put off the conquest of this position, here, when he could quite easily have taken it. He wanted to choose his moment, ensure his dominance over a hinterland, seize a great and serviceable port and not an isolated city, requiring to be fed, however little … It was a sensible decision but the moment has passed, never to return. In strategy as in life, lost opportunities are lost for good. The single factor of action with an overwhelming probability of disobedience is time, which is an admirable factor of inaction …”

  “That sounds a bit confused.”

  “Not at all, not to me … Inaction is never total, in that it stores up the givens for action … We are experts at the war of inaction, allowing opportunities and forces to ripen, rather than throwing them away … Another of the enemy’s disadvantages: its integrity. Their men march all of a piece, like clockwork. If one division breaks up, two rational units emerge to cancel each other out. We, by contrast, never lose sight of our instinctive cohesion even in the depths of incoherence … We are the richer in internal contradictions. Our men are prone to fury, to panic, to flight, to turning in on themselves, and then the cowards become the bravest fighters on earth. We possess limitless resignation, steeped in limitless strength. I doubt whether the average German can ever feel completely resigned to this war, which only brings him intolerable privations likely to terminate in a stupid death. We don’t tend to ask ourselves such questions, we believe in neither comfort nor death, the individual or …”

  The old officer’s voice tailed off in mid-sentence. Daria pretended not to notice.

  “Because we retain a primitive belief in ourselves, because our ideas are the reflection of ourselves, an obscure, communal we, advancing toward consciousness … There’s nowhere that ideas, even unsustainable ones, are more alive than here. Over and above our contradictions, we have an ultimate unity which harmonizes the feeling for death, murder, and pillage — indispensable to war — with our love of a peaceful world and of mankind; with our slavish submissiveness and our revolutionary sense of justice … We redress error through terror …”

  “Are you a Party member, Comrade Captain?”

  “A sympathizer. A professional. I am drawn to war as an art. Pure thought, dialectics, mathematics, surgery, patriotism, the rampage of the unconscious, paranoia … Do you follow?

  “One last point. In this service we are the eyes, the ears, the antennae, the calculating machine and the imagination of the army. We decipher the undecipherable, almost without fail. In cases of serious misjudgment do not expect leniency. Now get yourself into uniform, I’m busy.”

  Daria’s initial job was writing analyses of prisoners’ letters. Half a dozen people combed through the packets that were brought in from the front line, revealing, in the form of soiled bits of paper, the very substance of sacrificed lives. Photographs: a beaming young woman at a garden gate, a baby, a gentleman with a walrus mustache beside a sad, stout lady; a basset hound with human eyes; naked Fraüleins; a village high street … Sublieutenant Effros gathered the whole team around his desk to apply a magnifying glass to some tiny, wildly salacious snapshots found in the notebook of Hauptman Lazarus Meister. “The dirty dog!” hooted Effros. Ostentatiously he dropped the pictures into an envelope marked “For the Captain’s Attention”; the others felt sure that he would contrive to keep a few back … Daria took a closer look at Hauptman Meister’s book. Apart from addresses, there were quotations from Schopenhauer and the Führer. She read: “ ‘In defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting to defend the work of the Lord’ (Mein Kampf, page 72).” In the margin was scrawled “Jewesses.” Didn’t he know that the Lord was a child of Israel, born to a woman of Israel? “What happened to that swine,” Daria demanded, “is he dead?” She must have been assuming he was, because it was a surprise to be told, “No, it’s from a POW camp.” A certain sadness mingled with her disgust, but she found herself glad to know the fellow was alive.

  Back at her own desk beside the stove, she read the letters written by a peasant woman to her husband from Württemburg. “My dearest Albrecht …” The children were in good health, two cows had calved, Hermann was sending some cloth from Paris, the Polish prisoners were better workers than the French but one of them had just been thrown into jail, likely to be executed for sleeping with the widow G: “what a trollop, can you imagine, when she was questioned in public she said a man was a man, they gave her a good flogging, but we send her milk and preserves all the same …” Nothing of interest here. A man is a man. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life …” Daria stared at the yellowed ceiling. In a bundle of unsent letters from First Sergeant Wilhelm-Hans Guterman, she found a story which she was able to summarize by collating extracts and rounding them out with notes.

  The story haunted her for days … Garrisoned in a small Ukrainian town, Sergeant Guterman met a flaxen-haired girl in the marketplace, “just like our girls at home,” named Svetlana, Clara. She was “strong and quiet,” again “just like our girls” and they probably took strolls around the ponds together. “A handsome people, the Ukrainians,” he mused, “very similar to our Teutonic ancestors …” When Svetlana fell pregnant, Guterman “hatched a plan” to send her to his family in Thuringia as a work volunteer, but she suddenly refused to leave the country and he expected to be moved on with his division to some new destination at any minute, for the inscrutable purposes of strategy. He promised Svetlana he’d come back for her “after the war”; he got a friend, whose strong suit was mathematics, to compute his chances of surviving, mutilated or whole, in captivity or otherwise, assuming the war lasted for eighteen months from such-and-such a date … Guterman was popular with the locals, since he performed all sorts of small favors for them. This was how matters stood when a band of partisans ambushed a supply train, to the spitting fury of the commander. Guterman indirectly conveyed his relief at being passed over for the reprisals detachment. (Not a bad sort, this boy, Daria thought; Klim in Germany would behave the same way … ) “Twelve arrests in the Little Woods quarter,” noted Guterman. Svetlana was scared, “she looked so adorable with those great frightened eyes in the moonlight, my God, why must they …” Piecing together the rambling chitchat of the letters, Daria glimpsed Svetlana’s arrest and the terrible time that began for the sergeant, not daring to speak up to anyone, haunted by those great frightened eyes … His letters to his sister turned into a journal that would never be mailed. “She’s at the Grange, guarded by the special detachment …” He manages to smuggle some biscuits through to her. First Lieutenant F summons him for questioning on the subject of this girl — a partisan’s niece, convicted of having run missions to the forest. “You’re aware, Guterman, that you could have got yourself into very serious trouble indeed? You have a good record. I’ll simply note the facts on a file card. The girl will be hanged.” Guterman cried over her in dry lines, not daring to reveal himself on paper, ignorant of any but stock phrases from popular novels. Out of prudence, perhaps, he went so far as to justify martial law, whilst pleading to the Captain on behalf of a misguided creature “who bears in her womb a future soldier of the Great Reich” (a clever touch, that!). But the captain, good fellow, retorted: “In the first place, who’s to say it won’t be a girl, or maybe two? Second, there�
�s been no official pronouncement as yet on the legal status of minors in this category. And lastly, I’ll only mention it to the chief if I find him in a good mood, otherwise it’ll just be another black mark against you …” And one against himself too, for sure. The garrison commander was not in a good mood: the partisans were wreaking havoc on the railway. Guterman polished his uniform buttons and shined his boots in preparation for the parade of October 18, to be held on the town square in front of the small blue-domed white church. From his place in the rank he saw the scaffold made ready for seven hostages and criminals. He could still hope, there were more than twenty prisoners — oh, let her be spared! He is in the front row, thirty yards from the scaffold, hearing the sobbing murmur of the people, a chatter of prayer and malediction. He recognized Svetlana, she’d lost weight, her eyes seemed to be searching for him, he felt a trembling rising in his muscles, discipline kept him rigid, he fastened his gaze on the blue onion over the church while a mechanical voice in his head repeated “My God my God my God …” Then the mass shudder of the crowd broke over him and he saw Svetlana’s body dangling, oddly twisted, next to the long frame of an old man with his tongue hanging out.

  Daria suggested to Captain Potapov that this narrative, revised by a writer (for it was poorly expressed, marred by clumsy attempts to dissemble), could usefully be published. “I’ve read few that are so moving,” she said. Her superior listened, doodling stars onto his blotter.

  “Moving? War is not moving. Human testimonies, if authentic, are more apt to be demoralizing … Let our unionized pencil pushers do their own writing, they know their business. I shall want those papers for the psychology department. You must focus your attention on information with some practical use. Have you made a note of the movements of this Gutman, dates, unit numbers, and so forth?”

  “Yes, Comrade Captain.”

  “That’s what we need.”

  There was a touch of pained reprimand in his tone, as though he had been about to say: What are you so bothered by? One atom of cruelty in the bloody nebula we inhabit? It doesn’t mean a thing, nothing counts now except pitiless efficiency, get that into your head and start being a tiny cog in the machine … At least, that was how Daria took it.

  * * *

  The shelter with its log ceiling provided a deceptive impression of security … You scrambled down an embankment and entered an underground passageway, at the end of which the command post opened out like a roomy cave, lit by oil lamps. It had bunks, telephones, a stove; the pungent scents of leather, tinned food, and urine hung in a dank chill of cellars. The liaison officer, Ivanchuk, sat permanently glued to the receiver: his dimpled, rosy cheeks were a welcome sight. He was just in from Siberia, and still radiated the plenitude of life. Everyone who met him must have said to himself: “If you only knew what you were in for …”

  Colonel Fontov, by contrast, was a greenish individual with a visionary glare, ravaged face, too-long neck, and jutting, prickly beard; he usually leaned on a thick wooden stick and seemed not to have slept for weeks; he stared at you with the eyes of a nocturnal bird capable of strange divinations. That night he was there only for some raids that had been put off by a shower of torpedoes and a blizzard of snow. His glance frequently alighted, with pleasure, on Daria. A woman in the midst of all this, a real woman, recalling to mind the lost world out there; it was better than a big glass of alcohol in the belly, for it sharpened the faculties. As heavy crashes shook the earth around them, Fontov rose from his table and paced up and down, smoking (he limped without his stick; his beard poked irascibly sideways). “Everything all right?” he asked the telephonist. “Yes, Comrade Colonel.” “Check on post 4.” The younger man was trying not to look rattled while bits of earth sprinkled down from the quivering ceiling, like the sly patter of hail: it was thoroughly unnerving.

  Fontov sent some lieutenants up to reconnoiter what was happening outside. It’s best to keep the men busy under bombardment, especially the younger combatants. So they won’t have time to think, so they’ll only follow orders. “Quite a hailstorm,” said the colonel to Daria. (If he addressed her, it was as an excuse to look at her without embarrassment.) “Can’t think why the sons of bitches are squandering so much ammunition, they’d be insane to attack in this sector … But insane is what they are, sometimes.” A troubling thought shifted his gaze, and Daria was forgotten: of course, there was always the possibility of treachery. A soldier strides over pack ice, sure of himself and of the awesome cold; but the ice is cracked, the trap powdered with new-fallen snow, the somber waters beneath suck you into their bubbling vortex, goodbye to the man, the darkness carries away what they call a drowned man … The shelling having tapered off, the Colonel assembled his officers for going out. Daria volunteered to go along. “No,” he said, “it’s not advisable, that hail can fall again at any moment …” He was a man without nerves, who spoke in a penetrating voice, managed never to lose his temper, and mastered himself with unanswerable firmness. Daria was amazed that the human animal could be brought so firmly to heel. She saw that he had been worn down to the last fiber — the last, steely fiber that held him together. The only puzzle, thought Daria, is whether he will be wounded again before his nerves break down, or whether he will crack up before his next wound … In the first case, he will be decorated and nominated for promotion; in the second, he could wind up in front of a firing squad — for raving in the middle of a division chiefs of staff meeting, or declaiming a speech during the launch of an attack, or howling at the moon all alone in the snow!

  Daria could not know that Colonel Fontov had already been through those stages; that he kept his crises in check by smoking, that he no longer expected anything either for or from himself, and that he adored a callous man-made deity which may be no realer than other gods but which you have to believe in to impose perfect discipline on soldiers, whether on the production line or the line of fire: the god Labor, brother of Death since its ultimate effect is to destroy the laborer. The machine invisibly devours the mechanic’s very substance, which is time. Production, you say? Production feeds and prepares war, which is a destruction of production and of man. Expanded production of the means of production is expanded destruction of human substance; the production of consumer goods has as its object maintaining the workforce in a fit state for labor, that is for wearing itself out, and this is the ring that closes the chain of pan-destruction … Idle for a few minutes (it was never more than four), he had spoken again to Daria. “I’m more of an economist myself. Political economy is worse than war …”

  If he had begun to speechify — but before whom? — he would have said: “Our beautiful language, forged by serfs and by sages, employs the same word to denote two concepts: will and freedom … One word for an absolute antinomy, of a nature to delight the philosophers, who are for the most part mystifiers. What we mean by the will only acts to suppress freedom; what we mean by freedom is nothing but an illusory flight from the will … The living writhe between these two poles of incomprehensibility. I admire the determinists who think they’ve understood. I’d like to show them a bit of introspection five minutes before the signal to attack! The soldier obeys: neither will nor freedom, is that clear? The leader needs no more, and the leader himself obeys. It’s all anybody needs! The soldier is trapped between several formidable fears: fear of being killed while obeying orders, fear of being executed for disobeying them, fear of being a coward or appearing to be one, fear of despising himself, and many other fears all churning in his belly, causing him to piss and shit abundantly. What we mean by courage is decanted through this physio-psychological process which answers to profound natural causes: wounds to an emptied bowel are much less dangerous than wounds to a full one … Savages have magic formulas. In war, we are savages furnished with technical know-how. My magic formula comes down to this: work! Labor operates a practical synthesis of obscure imperatives, more potential than actual, more imaginary than real: will, liberty, necessity, finality. Labor destr
oys men, objects, and time, but it is a destruction which provides itself with aspects of creation. That may be the last myth. In war it’s clear and even yields an instant gain in accord with brute instinct. I work to destroy the enemy, a breed of men which must be destroyed so that our own breed may be able work in peace … I work to defend four kilometers of threatened road, whose loss would translate into twenty thousand deaths inside the city within a week … So, to work! Since the work consists of killing, it is only natural that we shall eventually be killed ourselves … To work!” Earlier, Fontov had exchanged only a few elliptical remarks with Daria while he was soaking his feet in a bucket of warm water; but Daria reconstituted what he would have said if he had expressed himself at leisure; which he never did, lacking leisure but also disdaining words, and out of prudence. The worker must be prudent and fear nothing so much as expressing truth or sincerity.

  This night’s mission was to obtain information by capturing enemy troops — but not men out on patrol, who don’t carry anything on them. Battalion commanders would send raiding parties out into the enemy lines or against advanced outposts. Vosskov designated six men and a lieutenant. He seemed to know them personally, to be assessing the fortitude and destiny of each man as he considered him. Daria wished she could see into their souls. They were an ordinary bunch, with ordinary names. The inevitable Ivanov plus a Sidorov, to refine the banality, both unremarkable, stumpy, and gray-skinned; a Tziulik from the Ukraine whose name made the others laugh and who indeed had a tiny head on the body of an extremely wiry Punchinello; a moon-faced Tartar oozing deceptive sweetness named Maymedov-Oglu; Dzilichvili, a wiry Caucasian highlander; and Leifert, who was of German ancestry. Finally there was Lieutenant Patkin, who sported black tufts of eyebrows over a snub nose, and resembled the kind of small-time hood that prowls around marketplaces — clever brutes with a knack for counterfeiting and bootlegging, slipping home a blade under cover of a brawl, hopping over fences and bamboozling the girls with fine-sounding words (not one of which they mean). “Quite the charming rogue,” whispered Daria into Major Vosskov’s ear. “You’ve got it. He started off as a child of the road and the wastelands, spent two years in a penal colony, recently graduated as a cadre, with several commendations … He’s both astute and extremely brave. After the war, I can see him making a first-rate gangster …” Patkin was memorizing the map of the operation. Here the ice is cracked; but over here, right in the middle of the impassable section — as they believe it to be — the ice has resealed itself, the planks are laid, you can wriggle across one behind the other. There are forty yards between the two machine-gun nests on the opposite bank. Their trenches are damaged, and badly guarded ever since they pulverized ours; we’ve ostensibly moved our earthworks a little farther back … This is where their shelters begin … “Only shoot as a last resort, bring two or three prisoners back, whatever the cost. Whatever the cost,” repeated Patkin, frowning as he measured this authorization to sacrifice his companions if need be. “It’ll be done, Comrade Commander.” He spoke the words unemphatically, in an unwilling, almost bitter voice.