No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War
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NO MAN’S LAND
PETE AYRTON was born in London in 1943. After studying and briefly teaching philosophy, a period of left-wing tourism in France and Italy led to his learning to read and converse in these languages, and to take part in the intense, opaque discourses of Marxism. A period of work as translator led to a job as editor with Pluto Press and to his founding in 1986 of Serpent’s Tail. Two first world war classics published by Serpent’s Tail, Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We and Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear, are included in No Man’s Land.
NO MAN’S LAND
WRITINGS FROM A WORLD AT WAR
CHOSEN AND INTRODUCED
BY PETE AYRTON
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Pete Ayrton to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Pete Ayrton 2014
For copyright details of the selected writings see Permissions on pp 550–1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2014 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London ECIR OJH
www.serpentstail.com
eISBN 978 1 84765 922 4
This book is dedicated to Susan Sontag, who made sure I never forgot that words have no borders
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction • Pete Ayrton
Henri Barbusse • ‘The Vision’, from Under Fire, translated by Robin Buss
Mulk Raj Anand • ‘Marseille’, from Across the Black Waters
Ernst Jünger • ‘Rajputs’, from War Diary 1914–1918, translated by Martin Chalmers
D. H. Lawrence • ‘The Nightmare’, from Kangaroo
Siegfried Sassoon • ‘Done All That was Expected of It’ and ‘That Necessary Faculty for Trench Warfare’, from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
Vera Brittain • ‘Destiny was Not Willing’ and ‘I Thank You, Sister’, from Testament of Youth
Helen Zenna Smith • ‘Liquid Fire’ and ‘The Beauty of Men Who are Whole’, from Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War
William Baylebridge • ‘The Apocalypse of Pat McCullough: The Sergeant’s Tale’, from An Anzac Muster
Robin Hyde • ‘Dawn’s Angel’, from Passport to Hell
W. N. P. Barbellion • ‘Before the War I was an Interesting Invalid’, from The Journal of a Disappointed Man
Mary Borden • ‘The Square’, ‘The Beach’, ‘Conspiracy’ and ‘In the Operating Room’, from The Forbidden Zone
Emilio Lussu • ‘A Real Hero’, ‘You Should Have Done Nothing’ and ‘The Austrian Officer Lit a Cigarette’, from A Soldier on the Southern Front, translated by Gregory Conti
Carlo Emilio Gadda • ‘The Battle of the Isonzo’, from Journals of War & Prison, translated by Cristina Viti
Prežihov Voranc • ‘At Doberdob’, from Doberdob, translated by Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts
Wyndham Lewis • ‘The Romance of War’ and ‘Political Education under Fire’, from Blasting and Bombardiering
Richard Aldington • ‘Cannon-fodder’ and ‘A Timeless Confusion’, from Death of a Hero
A.T. Fitzroy • ‘Beethoven and Bach’, from Despised and Rejected
William Faulkner • ‘Crevasse’, from These 13
Frederic Manning • ‘Cushy avec Mademoiselle’, from Her Privates We
Stratis Myrivilis • ‘Animals’, ‘Anchorites of Lust’, ‘How Zafiriou Died’, ‘Alimberis Conquers His Fear of Shells’ and ‘Gas’, from Life in the Tomb, translated by Peter Bien
Raymond Escholier • ‘Sheep’, from Mahmadou Fofana, translated by Malcolm Imrie
Robert Musil • ‘The Blackbird’, from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, translated by Peter Wortsman
Liviu Rebreanu • ‘To the Romanian Front’ and ‘We’ll See What You Do There…’, from The Forest of the Hanged, translated by A. V. Wise
Jaroslav Hašek • ‘Švejk Goes to the War’ and ‘From Hatvan towards the Galician Frontier’, from The Good Soldier Švejk, translated by Cecil Parrott
Miroslav Krleža • ‘Hut 5B’, from The Croatian God Mars, translated by Celia Hawkesworth
Miloš Crnjanski • ‘My Good Galician Forests’, from Diary about Čarnojević, translated by Celia Hawkesworth
Viktor Shklovsky • ‘The Democratic Principle of Discussion’, from A Sentimental Journey, translated by Richard Sheldon
Gabriel Chevallier • ‘I Was Afraid’, from Fear, translated by Malcolm Imrie
Jules Romains • ‘Jerphanion Writes to His Wife’, from The Prelude to Verdun, translated by Warre B. Wells
Jean Giono • ‘Julia Remembers’, ‘The Salt of the Earth’, ‘News from Joseph’ and ‘Joseph’s Left Hand’, from To the Slaughterhouse, translated by Norman Glass
Louis-Ferdinand Céline • ‘In Ten Thousand Years, This War will be Utterly Forgotten’, from Journey to the End of the Night, translated by Ralph Manheim
Isaac Babel • ‘Papa Marescot’s Family’, from On the Field of Honour, translated by Peter Constantine
Dalton Trumbo • ‘A Date with the Shell’, from Johnny Got His Gun
Willa Cather • ‘Manger, Aimer, Payer’, from One of Ours
Irene Rathbone • ‘Who Dies if England Lives?’, from We That Were Young
Rose Macaulay • ‘Evening at Violette’, from Non-Combatants and Others
Josep Pla • ‘Veritable Equine Items of Dentistry’, from The Grey Notebook, translated by Peter Bush
A. P. Herbert • ‘One of the Bravest Men I Ever Knew’, from The Secret Battle
Vahan Totovents • ‘Infidels and Curs’, from Scenes from an Armenian Childhood, translated by Mischa Kudian
Ömer Seyfettin • ‘Why Didn’t He Get Rich?’, translated by Izzy Finkel
James Hanley • ‘I Surrender, Camerade’, from The German Prisoner
Theodor Plievier • ‘Mutiny!’, from The Kaiser’s Coolies, translated by Martin Chalmers
Arnold Zweig • ‘Snow’, from The Case of Sergeant Grischa, translated by Eric Sutton
Edlef Köppen • ‘Cavalry Charge’, from Military Communiqué, translated by Martin Chalmers
Joseph Roth • ‘My Son is Dead!’, from The Radetzky March, translated by Michael Hofmann
John Galsworthy • ‘The Gibbet’, from Forsytes, Pendyces and Others
Erich Maria Remarque • ‘Sweet Dreams Though the Guns are Booming’, ‘The Dead Man’s Room’ and ‘He Fell in October’, from All Quiet on the Western Front, translated by Brian Murdoch
Permissions
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AN ENTERPRISE LIKE NO MAN’S LAND is a collective one. The many people who helped me have been most generous with their knowledge and time. Special thanks to Roger Little, Ruth Bush and Françoise Escholier-Achard who made possible the use of her grandfather’s novel, Noel King and Garth Cartwright, Max Décharné, Ursula Owen, Giovanni Lussu for making available the new translation of his father’s book, Julian Evans, Tibor Fischer, Sarah Lefanu, Maureen Freely and Professor Erol Koroglu, Edmund Fawcett, Irene Noel-Baker, Mark Thompson, Marija Mitrovic, Jeremy Beale and John Williams. To all those at Serpent’s Tail and Profile who have made this book what it is - Peter Dyer, Sue Lamble, Ruthie Petrie, and Vale
ntina Zanca. To my first editor, Peter Carson and then, John Davey, who both mixed support and criticism in the right proportions. To the translators - Peter Bush, Martin Chalmers, Izzy Finkel, Celia Hawkesworth, Malcolm Imrie, Ana Jelnikar, Cristina Viti, and Stephen Watts - who met the tightest of deadlines with a minimum of fuss. To the most helpful people at the London Library. To Helen Francis who found the rights holders and got permission to use the featured extracts. And to Sarah Martin, Carla and Oscar who lived through the roller-coaster of elation and despair as an Armenian author proved less and, then, more elusive to track down.
INTRODUCTION
IN COLLECTING MATERIAL FOR NO MAN’S LAND, my first priority was to feature writing from as many of the countries that took part as possible. This not from some desire to be exhaustive but because I wanted to convey that the war truly was a world war – so there are contributions from writers from twenty countries. The pieces in the book cover the fighting in all the theatres of the war: of course the Western Front, but also the Eastern Front, the Balkan Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and the War at Sea.
They also cover the experiences of the men and women left behind on the home front, of the women on the war front and of the soldiers who returned home never able to forget what they had endured. Because they come from many countries, the pieces reflect very different attitudes to the nation and very different motivations for fighting the war.
For the British, French and Germans who wrote about the war, their attitude was relatively straightforward. Whatever the historical facts, almost all of them felt loyalty to a well-defined nation which they took to be morally superior to other nations and whose war effort they supported. A small minority opposed the war but this was more because they took war of any kind to be evil than from the belief that other nations were morally equal to their own.
For combatants from other countries, the nation-state was more recent and/or more contested and they had a much more fragile commitment to nationhood and empire.
The tensions in the Italian army, for instance, reflected the fact that Italy was united only in 1861 and that the creation of Italian nationalism was a work-in-progress. In Lussu’s A Soldier on the Southern Front, the officers went into battle with the shout ‘Savoy!’:
Now that I was calm again, I could see all that was going on around me. Officers and men were falling with their arms flung wide and their rifles hurled so far in front of them that it seemed as though a battalion of dead men was advancing. Captain Bravini never stopped shouting: ‘Savoy!’
A subaltern of the 12th, red in the face, passed near me, clutching his rifle. He was a republican, and disliked the monarchial war-cry that we used in attack. Seeing me, he shouted: ‘Long live Italy!’
(A Soldier on the Southern Front, page 118)
There is no doubt that the scenes of mutinous hatred described by Lussu were fuelled by the soldiers’ sense of grievance at being led by an officer class whose loyalty to the Italian nation was, in their eyes, doubtful.
For those fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army, loyalty to empire was weak. In Rebreanu’s The Forest of the Hanged, Lieutenant Bologa is a brilliant officer whose bravery will be rewarded by a Gold Medal bestowed on him by General Karg, who wants to take him with him on his next campaign to Ardeal in Romania. Apostol is not keen on going.
‘Very well, very well,’ repeated the general thoughtfully. ‘Though I don’t understand why you should not want to come with us. My division has a holy mission in Ardeal! A great mission. Yes! The enemy has stolen our country’s soil. There the Wallachians…’
Suddenly General Karg stopped short as if a ray of light had entered his brain. He again took a few steps backwards and glued his gaze on Bologa, trying to read his innermost thoughts. For several seconds there reigned a grave-like silence in the room, while outside could be heard the grinding of cart wheels and the noisy chirping of the sparrows in a tree under the office window. Apostol unconsciously closed his eyes to protect himself from the general’s scrutiny.
‘You are a Romanian?’ the latter jerked out abruptly, his voice almost hoarse.
(The Forest of the Hanged, page 100)
Bologa is prepared to fight valiantly but draws a line on going into battle against his kith and kin. Certainly, the effectiveness of the Austro-Hungarian army was undermined by its need to enlist combatants from its ethnic minorities.
The Good Soldier Švejk has a wry, sardonic attitude to the loyalty demanded by his commanding officers:
‘His Imperial Majesty must be completely off his rocker by this time,’ declared Švejk. ‘He was never bright, but this war’ll certainly finish him.’
‘Of course he’s off his rocker,’ the soldier from the barracks asserted with conviction. ‘He’s so gaga he probably doesn’t know there’s a war on. Perhaps they’re ashamed of telling him. If his signature’s on the manifesto to his peoples, then it’s a fraud. They must have had it printed without his knowledge, because he’s not capable of thinking about anything at all.’
‘He’s finished,’ added Švejk knowingly. ‘He wets himself and they have to feed him like a little baby. Recently a chap at the pub told us that His Imperial Majesty has two wet nurses and is breastfed three times a day.’
‘If only it was all over,’ sighed the soldier from the barracks, ‘and they knocked us out, so that Austria at last had peace!’
And both continued with the conversation until Švejk condemned Austria forever with the words: ‘A monarchy as idiotic as this ought not to exist at all…’
(The Good Soldier Švejk, page 208)
If the patriotism of Europeans fighting varied greatly, for many of the Indians and Africans enlisted in the imperial armies it was nonexistent. For some, the links were primarily monetary – they went to fight in the hope that they would come back from the wars with financial rewards and even a pension; for others there was the hope that the imperial nations would recognize the contribution made to the war effort by the soldiers from the colonies and implement political and economic reforms. As Mulk Raj Anand writes in Across the Black Waters:
And once now in a while in a district arrived a hero, a man who had earned both a pension and a medal attached to it. And soon he became a legend and people came to see him, the wonder, especially as he had left an arm, a leg or an eye behind, and used a miraculous wooden substitute…
Information about rewards was, therefore, the chief preoccupation of the sepoys, talking about it their main consolation in exile, the inspiration of it what spurred them on to battle. How happy would be the dear ones at home if only a ready sum could help to pay even a tenth part of the moneylenders’ interest and towards the repair of the roof which had been washed out by the last monsoon before the drought!
(Across the Black Waters, page 169)
It was the same for many of the African soldiers – they were rewarded poorly and their expectations of a better life when they returned home after the war were not fulfilled. In Mahmadou Fofana, Raymond Escholier writes that the silver ring given by Samba Kamara’s brother was
…all that would be left to the dead man of the village he had so much hoped to see again.
I must admit that to my sadness was added remorse. I felt the revolt that had found no place in the simple, docile soul of Samba Kamara. What gives us whites the right to remove a black man from the peace of his field to involve him in our quarrels, in our hatreds.
Yes, I know how the story goes: ‘We are tearing these people from Barbary, we are letting them enjoy the fruits of civilisation. When the crunch comes, they must payback their debt: we share the same course.’
(Mahmadou Fofana, page 90)
Whatever a soldier’s relationship to the army he was fighting in, the war marked a crucial period in his life – for many millions it also marked his death. Of the soldiers who survived the war and are written about in No Man’s Land, some returned reduced by injury, others never were reconciled to the horrors they had witnessed and how the war h
ad made them unfit for the return to civilian life. The ambulance-driver narrator in Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War finds contemplation of the return unbearable:
Home, home… and I do not care.
I do not care. I am flat. Old. I am twenty-one and as old as the hills. Emotion-dry. The war has drained me dry of feeling. Something has gone from me that will never return. I do not want to go home.
I am suddenly aware that I cannot bear Mother’s prattle-prattle of committees and recruiting-meetings and the war-baby of Jessie, the new maid; nor can I watch my gentle father gloating over the horrors I have seen, pumping me for good stories to retail at his club to-morrow. I cannot go home to watch a procession of maimed men in my dainty, rose-walled bedroom. It is no place for a company of broken men on parade…
(Not So Quiet, page 169)
For some on the home front, what happened during the war was confirmation that society had to change – that other ways of organizing it were possible. Those who saw this were a minority that had to make their voice heard:
We’re few; that doesn’t matter. We shall be pilloried; that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we shall have striven against what our brains and our hearts recognised as evil – Oh, not only evil, but stupid and petty and beastly – and we shall have done our bit towards bringing nearer the day when militarism will be supplanted by industry, and we may hope to have an international system of legislation that’ll knock out the possibility of disputes having to be settled by barbarous and unintelligent means of bloodshed.
(Despised and Rejected, page 241)
As the war went on, the minority grew and was joined by the many disillusioned soldiers who returned home determined to make sure the suffering they had endured would not be in vain. So, the post-war period was in many of the countries involved in the war a period of revolutionary fervour and/or democratic reform.