An Ermine in Czernopol

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The beauty of the war, then, was not the same abstract beauty we might admire in a work of art, our eyes delighting in the decorative tumult, the abundance and variety of twisted and tangled movement, the display of strength, the immediacy and intensity of all expression and, finally, in the explosive contrast between life at its most unrestrained and its solemn stilling in death. The endless dazzle of colorful effects, from the glowing purity of the flags to the matting of all color in the sooty gray of gun smoke, from the dazzling brightness of explosions to the tender nuances of decomposition, did not tempt us to transmit our regard for the painterly object onto its cause. I say: we carried the war inside us, the tumult of destruction and annihilation, the addictive obliviousness it contained, the triumphant feeling of victory, of invulnerability as well as the dark terror of mutilation, the biting fear of sudden flight, the dull cutting torment of defeat—all its delight and all its deep despair lived in us in its original form, and needed no awakening or aiding.

  Nor did we need to be fueled by the thought of the just war. For us every war was just. The spear from the Iliad, whose point smashes through the helmet of the fleeing warrior, running through the skull and coming out at the other end so that his teeth fall out of his mouth and he collapses, clattering in his armor—that was just, not because it produced gruesome beauty and certainly not because it was undertaken in the name of a just cause, but because what happened, happened, and without much in the way of reason, explanation, or rectification.

  Because what were the flags other than symbols of the honor of the cause for which they waved and for which they were torn by the hail of bullets? The mere sight of them was enough—even apart from the battle, as in a signal book—to be carried away by their pathos and to know to which ones victory would attach itself. We did not choose sides based on which party was more in the right—it was, after all, a prerequisite of battle that they all believed they had right on their side—but by the persuasive ability of a particular banner, which we read as an expression of a given nation’s essence, signaling great clarity and passion, or else inadequacy and false entitlement. We had seen with people that it wasn’t always a question of who was right, so it didn’t necessarily matter which side in the war was right, or even which was proved right. Instead, our sympathy was involuntarily drawn to the more nobly fashioned character, so that the fairness of a cause—if we had inquired—would have derived more from the fullness of the life that produced it and by which it was represented. It bothered us to keep butting up against the lawyerly evidence that the Germans constantly produced in support of their cause, as if the readiness to die on its behalf wasn’t convincing enough.

  The war, which had very much started as our own but was soon completely remade into “the Germans’ war,” had been presented to us as Siegfried’s battle with the dragon. The image of dragon-slaying was convincing and left nothing to speculation. We were amazed that people felt it necessary to explain to us exactly how Siegfried felt challenged by the dragon in order to attack it with just cause. This cause struck us simply as part of his heroic nature. After all, the beauty of the dragon-slaying lay in the boldness of his attack. And even if Siegfried, as we believed, had always harbored the idea of killing a dragon, that made him even more of a hero. Nothing changed the immediacy with which the event itself happened.

  But now, called upon to admire the war’s mechanics and engineers, we found ourselves faced with the unreasonable demand to view Siegfried as a master planner who calculated every sword stroke—indeed, the very core of his courage and fiery zeal!—with a slide-rule. Naturally that didn’t prevent what happened from happening, but it did remove us by the distance of a peep-box, and the marionette-like impression made the event into a mechanized performance, which may have not have lost any of its power to fascinate—in fact, in some respects it gained a new measure of attraction, but it did lose the immediacy of our participation. Siegfried had become a subordinate. We marveled greatly at this remotely steered springtime hero and took his side, but we no longer identified ourselves with him so unconditionally. So we watched the intellects that held him so completely by the threads and gave them our most careful attention, but not our love.

  What differentiated them at first glance from the termite-men under their command were their faces, so different from the physiognomies produced in the high-pressure chamber of primal biogenetic experience. Their faces were very much their own: robust, easy to read, everyday types such as you meet in offices, even at universities, and in all kinds of higher bourgeois professions. Nor did they stand in striking contrast to the uniform; on the contrary, they managed to make their dress as bourgeois as themselves. To be sure, their features seemed more drastic, more sharply chiseled than those of their civilian counterparts, and they were doubtlessly more important. The sheer patience and constant willpower demanded by these highly determined careers, as well as the limitations they imposed, where objectives were specific, unambiguous, and easily grasped, gave them something solid, at times even monumental.

  This stamp of personality, so conspicuously noticeable, set them a world apart from the anonymous swarm of their troops, whose first and obvious trait was the complete loss of individuality—in fact, their specific qualities of strike power and operational ability were derived from an aggregate renunciation of personality. This suggested an unspoken mutual relationship. It was as if all the individual elements of the uniformed men had been relinquished to the collective cause, either voluntarily or else by artificial coaxing, and had taken sanctuary in a single leader’s personality, with the men offering their empty shells like molds to be filled with one will. Thus the commanders derived their impressive greatness from the sheer authority to command, and not the other way around: their greatness had not led them to command.

  While that shed some light on their less-than-convincing greatness, it did not explain the mutual relationship between leaders and the led. There had to be something more that bound the leaders to their troops and made them mutually dependent—some higher principle, something we did not feel could be sufficiently caused or justified by functionality alone.

  We looked for it in the idea of sacrifice.

  Nothing had made such an impression on us as the German soldiers’ willingness to make sacrifices: they set forth in jubilation and did not spare themselves the most dreadful hardships and deprivations. We saw from the pictures how they discarded even the most basic conditions of their humanity, in order to seek the thickest barrage—as it was plain to see—where the casualties were greatest. The thought of the Fatherland alone was not enough to effect such a renunciation of self. For that people died in simpler, less complete ways—though in no fewer numbers—as the enemy showed and ultimately our own as well. So there had to be some deeper sense at work—the same that had fashioned a termite-people into an instrument of war, and kept it functioning in this interplay of commanders and commanded. And this was what we sought to find, with a patience born of passion.

  The faces of the generals and field marshals did not yield this information easily. Because when I said earlier that their greatness was not entirely convincing, what I meant was that they lacked the integrity that could have made them believable as stewards of pure principle. The lines in their cast-metal faces were etched as if by acid, but then immediately wiped away. Just as in a landscape following a flood, the furrows were deeper and the flat surfaces raised and bloated, all covered by a suspicious sheen; we saw the effects of a sudden deluge of satisfaction that had broken its everyday constraints but immediately trickled away, scattering ponds of unguarded complacency and settling in the rills of toughness and shrewdness that had finally paid off.

  We could imagine them as theatrical directors, but not as the high priests of a sacrificial ceremony at the altar of the highest human values, despite the fact that the immensity of the hecatombs they had to manage lent them a macabre solemnity. But even if a terrible seriousness covered their mundane, petit bourgeois feature
s, like the shadow of a scaffold, the bare emptiness of their faces deprived them of any grandeur.

  In other words: we easily believed their determination to sacrifice their sons en masse, but not the holy passion that would have lent true greatness.

  Two German field marshals they said we should particularly admire were Hindenburg and Ludendorff. We always confused one with the other, and as a result they fused into a pair of twins we called “Hindendorff and Co.” or “the brothers Ludenburg.” They reminded us of the uncle and nephew who made deliveries to our house and whom we could never tell apart, the owners of the large grocery store and slaughterhouse Dobrowolski & Dobrowolski, who were constantly roiled in petty jealousies and yet despite all discord were united in business. Just like the grocers, Hindendorff and Ludenburg shared the same profession, and their irksome but indissoluble partnership had made them scarcely distinguishable from each other. And just as we were never sure whether Uncle August Dobrowolski or Nephew Stefan was behind the wheel of the delivery truck that rolled through the garden gate once a week, always equipped with new, brightly colored advertisements for household items, imports, sausages, and smoked meats from Dobrowolski & Dobrowolski, or which of them was the larger one with the bell scraper and which was the pink-fleshed baldheaded one, we never succeeded in differentiating the paternal, iron sternness of the Generalfeldmarschall, his well-known patriarchal face troubled with the monumental pathos stemming from the harvest of lives and his eyes ringed dark with worry, from the scornful, overly competent expression in the small, budlike mouth of his chief of staff.

  We observed them in profile, with stomachs protruding and knees angled forward, holding a field marshal’s baton or a cigar that emitted a fine fuse of smoke, greeting the parading battalions or departing trains encrusted with troops, weapons, oak leaves, lady Samaritans serving coffee, mothers and brides, and wagons where we could make out the load capacity 6 horses or 42 men, and over that: Berlin–Paris, or Leipzig–St. Petersburg, which we involuntarily completed with the words and back.

  Or else the men themselves, the commanders of the army, boarding a special train, seated en face, their faces pressed into a stiff, double-chinned dignity, casually saluting, hands in tight nappa-leather gloves raised to the covered spiked helmet, and then presenting a staff officer frozen at attention two miserly leather fingers to be shaken in absolute obedience.

  That was the pose we found most revealing, as the two men descended from the train, their short legs carefully searching for the next step, dressed in the opulently red-brocaded breeches that were gathered below the knees in bulbous leather gaiters that reminded us of the parchment wrap used for serving fried chicken legs, staring pompously ahead, necks rigid, past the troops standing at attention.

  We found them colossal in a strangely buoyant, cloudy way. Their cigar-smoker stomachs didn’t seem to pull them down but to propel them forward. The sight of them always brought to mind the happy silly couplet from “The Aviators’ March”: In der Luft, in der Luft fliegt der Paprika / auf zum Himmel, Himmel, Himmel, hipp hurra!—because we always expected them to suddenly float off the train step and soar over the train cars, into the cheery shrapnel-clouds of the blue sky, while the befuddled staff officers held tightly onto their helmets and gaped at them with open mouths like fairgoers surprised to see the balloon lady carried off by a gust of wind while clutching her colorful inflated cluster. Perhaps then the strained satisfaction would finally break loose and spread roguishly across their faces, merry and optimistic like the happy end of some droll fairy tale. Because as it was, when they stepped out of the train, harnessed by an iron sense of duty, shackled to the earth, they displayed a bombastic sullenness: their swollen and corseted bulges tugged against their moorings like captive hot-air balloons that make their anchor lines work all the harder the closer they come to the ground—up to the last stretch, which is accomplished through what might be called a mutual understanding about weightiness, so that the landing occurs with an impressive sense of ceremony. The caption of this particular picture reinforced this idea: Their Excellencies were greeted by an escort.

  And once on firm ground, these balloons, which were the color of pea-sausage, churned and billowed with a mistrustful glance at the honor guard, to keep themselves at a safe distance, possibly afraid that the saw-teeth of helmet spikes and bayonets might tear open their envelopes. A platoon commander marched behind them with drawn saber, as if on guard to make sure no one had the mischievous idea of uncorking their excellencies’ shoes from the leather spats so all their hot air would come hissing out.

  We had to be careful not to allow the comical aspect of such impressions to distract us from the very serious side of these German field marshals. Their pomposity, which was both amplified by what was funny about their puffiness, and at the same time defused by the dozily comfortable, feather-bed-and-pillow quality of their well-padded, ponderous, and broad-hipped figures, was downright misleading.

  Because we merely had to imagine this honor guard barking three hurrahs and then starting up one of their foot-stomping, manically clipped songs—songs that subtly drew us into their grinding rhythm, stirring us in a bad way—and right away all the horrors of this war were present once again: the swarms of iron termites awakened and jolted into action, the highly explosive larvae crawling toward us out of their trenches in the cratered fields, dangerously primed and ready for detonation at any minute, while in the background, streams of columns flowed in to fill the underground reservoir.

  Then the scenery quickly darkened; the cheerful white fluffs in the sky gave way to a stormy, leaden gray that loomed overhead and threatened catastrophe—gathering towers of darkness, magically lit from beyond the black depths of the horizon, gaping wide open in the mythical drama of some primal hour. Like dark-purple cloud gods, the brothers Ludenburg climbed out of the hissing iron caterpillars of their special trains and descended to the waiting hosts, charged with an elemental voltage, their legs rooted in the Leiden jars of their spats, their hands strictly insulated in their nappa-leather gloves, as if the slightest contact with the earth might set off shocks that could destroy the world. The spikes on their helmets spewed secret codes to the lightning bolts that lay ready and waiting. Iron hailstones crackled inside their dagger scabbards. The bags under their eyes were heavy with a menacing gloom. We now knew why they were always sniffing at their mustaches with such disgust, as if they—one crimped, broad, and brushy and the other short and bristly—carried some repulsive odor: they sensed the acrid uncertainty of their existence.

  And their officers were the angels that proclaimed their will to the divisions: the triple “Hurrah!” of the troops was like a trumpet blast, a signal that the larvae-men would pour over the earth by the hundred thousand, that the lightning bolts would smite the ground, thunder would roll, missiles would come raining down … This was no longer merely a struggle to overcome a foe: it was a mythical event, a violent impregnation: blinding impacts would light up for a fraction of a second, while the mole-crickets prepared the earth, sinking their teeth into it, devouring it, exploding it and themselves in giant fountains, churning it and plowing it and finally fertilizing it with their own remains in the name of the deity who had called down the iron rain.

  So even in this war we found a new kind of beauty, eerie and cruel and exhausting—a different possibility of beauty, which caused us anguish, which seemed to be constructed of a more solid reality, and which positioned itself behind every other image of beauty, shining through, dissolving, distorting, and making them cruel with satire.

  Later, when those images no longer carried the same weight and force, but—as with everything experienced early in life—were removed and reflected many times over, suspended, as it were, one of us made the pronouncement that everything undergoes the same transformation as our perception of the war, as if Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander had been repainted stroke by stroke by Breughel the younger, known as “Hell” Breughel—who would have also depi
cted the humor in the horror, which was always present and intensified by the dreadful surroundings.

  In this way we finally stumbled onto the secret we had sought so urgently and persistently without achieving anything more than a vague intuition. I’m talking about the physical principle that kept the whole mechanism running, the interaction between the beingless larvae and their grand leaders—as well as its metaphysical sense. And we found it in the tension between chaos and order in that mythically monstrous picture of battle. In an instant it became clear to us that the nearly—but not quite—perfect uniformity of the advancing columns, dissolving chaotically in the clash of the fronts, reformed itself after the battle in a far more perfect form: as the utterly precise, utterly indistinguishable rows of crosses in the heroes’ cemeteries, where the lines spread out into a broad perspective, moving in its spare monotony, cut at right angles and chopped in blocks, so that an absolute order was finally achieved.

  And so the highly explosive iron larvae, the unreleased fire butterflies, for whom the intensity of life was compressed into the fraction of a moment before bursting into flame, and who had caused us to realize, in the strangest way, what it meant for them to light into the enemy, were granted one last metamorphosis toward perfection.

  With that the sacrifice acquired its valid symbolism—along with its meaning. Little Hans Kitchenmaster died so as to rise again, purified, in perfect orderliness. Even his dearth and deprivation found its apotheosis in the divine acres where the crosses sprouted like seeds at measured angles.