by Victor Serge
“ … We directed a concentrated barrage on a small infantry tank whose motor had conked out forty yards away. It was a pitiful box of cardboard and steel with three men inside, one of them waving a dirty white rag. The sublieutenant was beside himself because we’d had a terrible attack of jitters as we were pulling back, one of those uncontrollable panics that comes over even the best soldiers now and then, like an electric shock to the nerves. G was yelling, ‘Ha, so they surrender do they, the dirty dogs, the cowardly curs!’ He wouldn’t listen to me, he looked completely out of his mind; normally, he’s a decent fellow, a flower gardener by trade. He ordered us to fire and we watched the tin can burn, the magazine blow up, I watched a blond twenty-year-old burning, half out of the turret. I told myself: Look at what you’re doing, you must look without blinking, you’re not allowed to close your eyes. I watched the flames leap to his blond hair, I watched his face twist like a paper mask tossed onto a bonfire. And I said to myself, When I’ve been killed, I want my pure Brigitte to meet this youth — because he will live again — and to love him for love of me …
“ … I was thinking that there’s no natural law for mankind, whose natural law is human law. The tiger and the termite obey their natures; we must be true to ours, which is divine, that is to say a thinking, merciful nature …
“ … The bodies of hanged men were dangling from telegraph poles, there were more swinging from the porch of the church. There were too many, they no longer frightened anyone. Fear results from a surprise inflicted on the imagination. Once the surprise has worn off, a hanged man seems perfectly simple, getting hanged becomes quite natural, you realize it’s only a few painful moments and that there are worse ways to die. We were talking about a rabbi. ‘He was lucky to swing so soon,’ says M, who is not personally cruel but accepts that others should be, so as to surmount their instinctive cowardice and face up to responsibility. The average man, in his view, has gone soft, domesticated by an ailing civilization, and will benefit from being trained to cruelty. (M does not consider himself an average man; he regards himself, so he told me, as a normal Aryan.) I questioned this, playfully, just to rile him a little — evoking the Aryans of India, who profess detachment from material things and nonviolence even toward animals. M broke out laughing: ‘If that’s what they teach you at the university, then the universities are overdue for disinfection, and the professors of Aryanism belong in Buchenwald, cleaning the latrines.’ That was mostly to annoy me back, I think, for then he was patient, explaining how the decadence of the Aryan races, weakened by Semitic infiltration, was the root cause of all historical calamities. The Aryan renaissance began with the Party. The more I talk with him, the more I have the impression of a dialogue with a systematic psychopath, and yet I have a humiliating compulsion to converse with him. Of the dozen men who constitute my circle of hell, he’s the only one who talks; I don’t know whether he thinks or merely repeats a series of memorized formulas. I am obsessed by the awful possibility of our souls being imprinted with a whole system of notions designed to prevent us from becoming conscious, smothering thought beneath ersatz thought.
“ … There were more children than adults, probably as a result of earlier waves of deportation. The little girls were carrying their dolls, pitiful dolls. In the pathos of their silence and the pathos of their wailing lamentation these Jews exhibited two contradictory characteristics. I remained very calm, I wanted only to understand the victims. To understand means to identify. To understand rather than surrender to suffering, which amounts to no more than a carnal, emotional communion. I sought a communion of the spirit. At first, the silence seemed to me to be nobler than the wailing. Women tearing at their hair, old men chanting their prayers and pulling their white beards … I observed that the blows of rifle butts did not interrupt the rhythm of their lamentation. I understood that this was the rhythm of a lamentation echoing down through the centuries; that it is a community’s song of consent. I saw myself: a calm, rigid onlooker, like a disciplined lunatic. They were being herded into the boxcars. M assures me they will be destroyed in the most painless way possible, with cyanide gas, and recalls the Gospel’s injunction to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then he moves on to eugenics and human selection, look how stunted, sniveling, anemic, and infirm they are, how weepy the old men, how ugly the women! At this point F and W broke in, talking about the beautiful girls in Serbia and Holland … I’ll never forget the asphyxiated howls that came from inside the boxcars … The troops were in a good mood because a ration of brandy had been distributed. Many men felt that it was necessary to evacuate the populations of these little towns to make room for the folks from our bombed-out cities.
“ … Brigitte, I only have tonight to write you the truth of my soul. I know I am hurting you, but I have no one else in the world with whom to share the bitterness of a cup I must drink to the dregs. And since you are my wife in spirit, you must find the courage to drink this cup with me, even if your reason is shaken, as mine often is. The single absolute duty of those alive today is to drain the bitter cup to the last drop, overcoming our shaking limbs and minds, perhaps in order to be able to say afterward: Everything is accomplished. Here I am.
“ … I can’t tell you all of it, it’s impossible to tell it all, even more to see it all and to understand it all. We are moving through the banality of chaos and I can only recall minor, episodic things, poor simple things that sometimes enlighten me. I am a man without grandeur, a humble man unable to take in big events … But don’t doubt me, Brigitte, I am a very good soldier who fulfills his duty at every moment, conscientiously, as if I had no conscience. They’re going to put me up for another decoration, which would mean a few days’ special leave to see you, and then they’ll make me a noncommissioned officer. I’m not especially eager, having no wish for personal responsibility, but do I have the right to abandon it to others? If I’m chosen, I will obey. My body and my will obey, my spirit remains free and refuses. What more can I do? If it weren’t for you, I would consent to be shot. Through you, I perceive a living world for whose sake the survivors must live. They alone will know, will reflect unceasingly upon what must never happen again, upon that which must be excised from mankind. I live in remorse and apprehension because I dread betraying our people’s cause in my thoughts, but I also fear to betray the universal principle of which our people is just one moment, one face. Maybe that’s the truly unpardonable war: between a people and its universal homeland …
“ … Was it necessary to unleash hell on earth, did we have to do what we are doing? I have no right to stand apart from anyone, not from the Jews and not from M, who desires the death of the Jews; I’ve no right to consider myself superior to anyone. The only thing I’m certain of is that this crime is the crime of all men. We were the victims of tremendous historical injustices, but every country can say the same, and we’ve inflicted injustices on others — it goes around and around. Were we really so stifled by the Treaty of Versailles? I don’t know anymore. I do know that the world is far more stifled today, and we’re the ones who beckoned to the avalanches and told them: Fall! If the unparalleled energy we devoted in central Europe to a reenactment of the conquests of Sargon and Ramses had been used to build a new, just, dignified nation at the service of the Universal, what an ideal victory we should have won! All the wrongs would be put to rights on a higher plane than that of borders, and what border would not dissolve before the mere presence of a superior humanity?
“ … Now the whole world is against us and we are alone. I wonder whether the Seer, in whom so many of the disheartened believed so as to escape from their small despairs, may not be mad. However many gallons of blood we shed, our own or that of others — for human blood is a single substance — we’ll never reach New York, or Tobolsk, or San Francisco, or Baghdad, and that being so we will never gain victory, or peace, or pride (for those who feel compensated by pride), or forgiveness. Our pitiable armies are on the run, our pitiable dead remain as sole occupier
s of the conquered lands, sole fraternizers with the dead of other peoples. The Seer should have foreseen it, the Seer was blind! The murder and destruction we have dealt out are turning around to devour us. We should never have followed the Seer! We should have kept our reason, but had we any other choice? I could have let myself be sent to Dachau — I thought about it. Can I be more useful there? I asked myself. Now I see that I might have been more upright, more faithful there. But how could I have known then what I know now? There are plenty of sleepwalkers in our ranks, but almost all of them are beginning to feel, deep down in their hearts, however confusedly, something of what I write here. We are prisoners, all of us. We condemn ourselves …
“ … The death of another man is my own death. A man who kills may not know it, but in reality he is killing himself. The frenzy of certain warriors — even more that of the exterminators, whose baseness places them a thousand million leagues below the warriors — is a suicidal frenzy …
“ … But is it still permissible to believe in mankind? If our side alone were to blame, it would fill me with relief, it would help me to regain my trust. But I’ve seen too much to believe that … Is it all the fault of the system? Systems are such heavy chains that they exonerate the infinitesimal individual, the thinking reed, the trampled reed. What would Pascal or Spinoza have done in Dachau? Or at the front, under a helmet? The reed stops thinking, becomes malleable matter, identifies with its chains. The system is the work of men, after all, men who are made by it as much as they were makers of it. And not all of them are deranged, clearly; most aspire simply to live off it in peace, killing with the calculated, businesslike temperance of their mentors. I am wrestling with these problems, but, I am and I do not consent! Since I said these salutary words to myself, weak as I am, groping in darkness, I felt I was at the dawn of deliverance. And you’ll know that if I fall, the end will have been the lighter for it. Proof exists that a man need not necessarily consent to what he does. Obey and disobey. Submit to earthly solidarity — or to the crushing weight of the chain — while salvaging something more essential. If I woke up the men who are lying asleep around me in this derelict schoolroom and asked each one (even the incredibly brutal elite soldiers, prey to regressive neuroses): What do you wish for the most? they would all answer: The end! Some would unconsciously be including their own end in that of the nightmare. Of course, one out of three would turn me in, and I’d be shot before the day was out. A curse on the blind Seer, a curse on ourselves!
“ … We have been defeated. Even the fanatics can’t help but see it. Someone was saying that we should hold up to the whole world our refusal to capitulate by committing mass suicide. I managed not to ask the question that was on the tip of my tongue: Have the whole people commit suicide? The Race? (For that matter, didn’t we begin the suicide? Not only ours, but Europe’s?) A single word can become deadly dangerous. I’ve learned of a secret order for the immediate execution of suspects. Too little, too late, according to M. He feels that the elimination of two million Germans during the early days of the regime would have made the regime more exemplary, more homogeneous, and might even have avoided a war by scaring the daylights out of international Jewry … I pointed out that a lot more than two million Germans have died as it is. He was so caught up by his reasoning that he stared at me pensively through those stony blue eyes without losing his temper. He then produced a theory — I believe that disaster stimulates his brain. The trick, he said, would be to select death itself, a selection that would be the apotheosis of eugenics …
“ … Brigitte, my pure Brigitte, you must prepare your heart for a new love, since life must be continued and it seems that I, like so many others, am destined to fail in that duty. See how guilty we are, how we have failed to honor a supreme commandment, a rule so exalted that it defies formulation. My premonition is that I shall not return. I read the truth of my fate a long time ago, as one reads an equation, advancing toward the Russian flamethrowers through a wood full of frantic animals. All of us in the condemned armies are men who will never recover anything, never resume what was once dear to us. Prepare yourself, I am ready. Be calm, be strong, and forgive me. By forgiving me, you will be forgiving millions of others … Our people will survive like a desperately wounded man, maimed in his very soul; but we will not find forgiveness, since we have lost and history forgives only the strong. We, the dead and the survivors, will be the unforgiven people, we who revealed in their blackest depths the frailty and blindness of human energy. I envision this future without bitterness, because only then, having touched the bottom of the abyss, shall we be able to rise again toward an integral consciousness, in a century … And if that day should ever come to pass, blessed be defeat!”
The handwriting was regular, rank upon rank of firm, slanting downstrokes. Brigitte knew that to understand, she had to penetrate beyond the words. This time, with the light of the great white fires in the sky still glowing inside her, she thought, dry-eyed, that she had truly understood. She decided to forget His name. “The soul of the millions was in him and he was nothing but that soul. All the names are his, and almost all the faces …” She burned his photographs. She wept at burning them, repeating his name all the while. Abruptly her eyes dried and her wish was granted: she no longer knew the name.
“Brigitte, are you crying?” inquired Frau Hoffberger through the door.
Brigitte opened the door, laughing and disheveled.
“Not at all, just look at me!”
“Here’s some herb tea, my girl, it’ll do you good.”
Brigitte accepted the tepid infusion, yellow as urine, maybe poisoned, who could tell? Frau Hoffberger is a kind soul, but does she know her own poisons? The hands of kindness are steeped in poison. She opened the window and flung the tisane into the poisonous smoke of the night. Then she returned the cup to her neighbor: “Thank you so much, you are kind … Have you had some yourself?” “Yes, I drink one every night before bed …” Brigitte’s pupils dilated with a strange suspicion. “Is there something wrong, my dear?” “No, nothing, sleep well …”
Arms folded behind her head, Brigitte lay peacefully waiting for the sun to come up, though now and then a tremor went through her body and she let it, for it was the trembling of the universe.
* * *
Next morning, the street looked the same as always. This encouraged a feeling of immutable normality, despite the rumors. People said that fifteen thousand had perished in the industrial suburbs, which were now cordoned off by the police. So much heat had swept the city in wave upon wave that the air remained acrid. Under the low clouds fires were struggling upward, spawning clouds of their own from rising black columns … The bishop toured the periphery of destruction, places that had emerged relatively unscathed but where many people had gone insane. Herr Blasch, the Party’s right-hand man, performed a solemn walkabout through the streets under his control (nothing had happened there). He was wearing a combat uniform, an Iron Cross, several other important insignia, a silver swastika, a thick brown leather belt, a peaked cap as tall as a general’s, and a skull badge … Stiff necked, all black and silver, vigilant yet benevolent, conversing with women, inquiring after the children’s health as he walked by, finding plausible explanations for everything. The underground factories, he could report, had escaped destruction thanks to the foresight of our strategic engineers … Other damage was more apparent than real, forty killer bombers had been shot down, the enemy airmen would be court-martialed — but the verdict was in no doubt — for having violated every law of warfare … Herr Blasch added that this was nothing — less than nothing I assure you — compared to the punishment London had been taking for weeks, London where our automatic rockets, our Secret Weapon of Vengeance Number One, were razing entire neighborhoods so thoroughly that any rescue or clearance efforts were a waste of time … Oh yes, it was raining over London all right, raining meteors night and day, and volcanoes were spouting, eruption upon eruption! And this was only a modest beginning:
the second and third Secret Weapons were lined up ready to obliterate whole chunks of England, the soil would be laid waste for years, not a blade of grass would grow back. “Then they will surrender. The Führer knows what he’s doing. They played right into his hands when he let them disembark in France, you wait and see. Let cowards and cretins doubt him, they’ll pay the price!” Herr Blasch’s jet-and-silver uniform was cut from the cloth of confidence itself. The population received an extra ration of foodstuffs that made an excellent impression in the districts which had been spared.
That night, that morning of the time of origins, marked for Brigitte the border between reality and a peaceful, now unimaginable world, which may never have been real at all.