No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  Rode’s command got them on their feet again. As they were going round the depression, they could hear a commanding voice behind their backs:

  ‘The carts won’t be coming yet. Whoever’s able, should go back on foot!’

  The moans and cursing the command provoked soon gave way to the sound of boots clattering against the stone ground. To the right someone stepped out of the dark, vertical wall with a pocket torch. Turning to the nearby tent, he shouted:

  ‘Major Farkaš just croaked it.’

  At that a warning voice came back:

  ‘Switch the light off, for god’s sake!’

  When the torch had been turned off, the same voice said:

  ‘Right you are! Then throw him out, so there’ll be space for others.’

  And the bandaging quarters disappeared behind the line of soldiers. Silently each one, lost in his own thoughts, marched on. In fact nobody was thinking any more. A blunt, suffocating feeling prevailed. The soldiers only felt their exhaustion and how much they craved rest. Is there no end to the slog? Where are we pushing towards anyway? Along the path sink-holes came one after another, here and there the edges overgrown with low bushes. Who knows if these were gorge-slits made by the shells or if it was the work of nature. They stumbled across a line of mules. The animals were marching slowly but for all that very sure-footedly. One animal snorted down its nostrils and Demark’s face was spattered by wet saliva. He felt it as a warm, mute greeting and didn’t even bother to wipe it off… From some sink-hole came the smell of coffee with rum. That was hard to take as it aggravated the already unbearable thirst. Everyone was relieved when the intoxicating smell disappeared.

  It was starting to get lighter up ahead and the racket was becoming more discernible with each step taken. Because of the downpour of artillery fire it was hard to make out each and every explosion, but it all pointed towards the fact that they were approaching the fiery belt. Exactly at the moment when everyone started instinctively to crouch down, the head of the line changed direction; and they turned first right and then left, and then began to descend again until, against all expectation, they heard Rode’s voice saying:

  ‘We have arrived?!’

  At that moment they saw an elongated, dark shadow against the face of the hill. It was an ordinary, make-shift shelter, cut at an angle into the hill-face and covered with a short roof, from which wet tarpaulins hung down to the ground. The first ones to get there drew the canvas aside and from under their feet wet hay greeted them. Bed & rest? Yes, bed…

  Their first impressions made them anxious. This can’t be a reliable shelter! But no sooner had they thought that, than they were overcome by another thought: no cannon can be fired at this place! And then finally: high-command must know where they are putting their soldiers.

  ‘Lie down and sleep!’

  Exhausted bodies fell on the rotten hay and soon the shelter was as quiet as if it were empty. And straight after that, day started to shimmer in the East.

  Prežihov Voranc* was born, son of a tenant farmer, in 1893 in the village of Podgora in the Carinthian uplands of Slovenia close to the present-day Austrian border, at the time of his birth deep within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His writing life was framed by the First World War, where he fought on the Italo-Slovenian front line, notably the Isonzo at Doberdò; and by the rise of Slovene nationalism with the post-war collapse of the empire. His writing is marked by a rigorous but rich linguistic intensity, most clearly in his prose depictions of the poverty and class violence of the rural, farming life he was part of, and the effects of this on individual fate. Between the wars he was actively involved in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned on a number of occasions. In 1944 he was arrested and interned in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. His best work was written in the mid to late 1930s, and it was then that his work began to be more widely known. First published in Slovenian in 1941, the novel Doberdob – from which the extract here is taken – is a vivid description of the savagery of war. Voranc died in 1950.

  *Place names are given as they feature in their respective languages – so, for instance, Doberdob and Doberdò are the same place in different languages. How to name a place was after all part of what the war was about. (Ed.)

  *He was born Lovro Kuhar, Prežihov Voranc being the nom de plume he later adopted.

  WYNDHAM LEWIS

  THE ROMANCE OF WAR

  from Blasting and Bombardiering

  ARRIVAL AT ‘THE FRONT’ for us was not unlike arrival at a big Boxing Match, or at a Blackshirt Rally at Olympia. The same sinister expectancy, but more sinister and more electric, the same restless taciturnity of stern-faced persons assembling for a sensational and bloody event, their hearts set on a knock-out. Somebody else’s, of course.

  We arrived at railhead at night and a battle was in progress. For a long time, as we moved slowly forward in our darkened coaches, the sound of guns had been getting louder and nearer. There was no moon or stars – all lights had been turned down for the performance. Only the unseen orchestra thundered away, before an unseen stage. We had to imagine the actors which we knew were there, crouching in their sticky labyrinths.

  From the crowded carriage-windows, at last, sudden bursts of dull light could be discerned, and last of all an authentic flash had been visible, but still far away – angry and red, like a match struck and blown out again immediately.

  We left the train, and finally we reached, I forget how, the fringes of this battle. We reached it unexpectedly. We were collected upon a road, I seem to think. Perhaps we were waiting for lorries to take us to billets – for we of course were not going into action then. We were not for this battle. We had no guns either. They could not be made quickly enough. We were just the personnel of a battery, with no guns, who had come to stand-by, or be parcelled out as reinforcements.

  With great suddenness – as we stood, very impressed as newcomers in the midst of this pandemonium – in a neighbouring field a battery of large howitzers began firing. After this particular picture I can remember nothing at all. It is so distinct everything in its neighbourhood is obliterated. I can only remember that in the air full of violent sound, very suddenly there was a flash near at hand, followed by further flashes, and I could see the gunners moving about as they loaded again. They appeared to be 11-inch guns – very big. Out of their throats had sprung a dramatic flame, they had roared, they had moved back. You could see them, lighted from their mouths, as they hurled into the air their great projectile, and sank back as they did it. In the middle of the monotonous percussion, which had never slackened for a moment, the tom-toming of interminable artillery, for miles round, going on in the darkness, it was as if someone had exclaimed in your ear, or something you had supposed inanimate had come to life, when the battery whose presence we had not suspected went into action.

  So we plunged immediately into the romance of battle. But all henceforth was romance. All this culminated of course in the scenery of the battlefields, like desolate lunar panoramas. That matched the first glimpses of the Pacific, as seen by the earliest circumnavigators.

  Need I say that there is nothing so romantic as war? If you are ‘a romantic’, you have not lived if you have not been present at a battle, of that I can assure you.

  I am very sorry to have to say this. Only a care for truth compels me to avow it. I am not a romantic – though I perfectly understand romance. And I do not like war. It is under compulsion that I stress the exceedingly romantic character of all the scenes I am about to describe.

  If your mind is of a romantic cast, there is nothing for it, I am afraid. The likelihood that you will get your head blown off cannot weigh with you for a moment. You must not miss a war, if one is going! You cannot afford to miss that experience.

  It is commonly remarked that ‘there is no romance in modern war.’ That is absurd, I am sorry to have to say.

  It has frequently been contended that Agincourt, or even Waterloo with its ‘thin red line’ and i
ts Old Guard of Napoleonic veterans, was ‘spectacular’: whereas modern war is ‘drab and unromantic’. Alas! that is nonsense. To say that is entirely to misunderstand the nature of romance. It is like saying that love can only be romantic when a figure as socially-eminent and beautiful as Helen of Troy is involved. That, of course, has nothing to do with it whatever! It is most unfortunate: but men are indifferent to physical beauty or obvious physical splendour, where their emotions are romantically stimulated. Yes, romance is the enemy of beauty. That hag, War, carries it every time over Helen of Troy.

  The truth is, of course, that it is not what you see, at all, that makes an event romantic to you, but what you feel. And in war, as you might expect, you feel with considerable intensity.

  The misunderstanding goes even deeper than that, however. Knights in armour, with plumes and lances, are not, even in the visual sense, the most romantic subject-matter for a romantic painter.

  You only have to think a moment: the dark night, with the fearful flashing of a monstrous cannonade – all the things that do not come into the picture, which are not seen, in other words, but which are suggested in its darkest shadows – what could be more technically ‘romantic’ than that, if it is romance that we must talk about?

  But even if the pictorial subject-matter were insignificant, it would still be the same thing.

  Romance is partly what you see but it is much more what you feel. I mean that you are the romance, far more than the romantic object. By definition, romance is always inside and not outside. It is, as we say, subjective. It is the material of magic. It partakes of the action of a drug.

  Place a man upon the highest passes of the Andes, and what he sees is always what he feels. But when on joue sa vie, it is not so much the grandeur of the spectacle of destruction, or the chivalrous splendour of the appointments, as the agitation in the mental field within, of the organism marked down to be destroyed, that is impressive. It is that that produces ‘the light that never was on land or sea’, which we describe as ‘romance’. Anything upon which that coloration falls is at once transfigured. And the source of light is within your own belly.

  *

  Of course it would be impossible to overstate the contribution of the guns to these great romantic effects. Even in such an essentially romantic context as war, they are startlingly ‘romantic’ accessories, and help to heighten the effect.

  It is they who provide the orchestral accompaniment. It is they who plough up the ground till it looks literally ‘like nothing on earth’. It is they who transform a smart little modern township, inside an hour, into a romantic ruin, worthy of the great Robert himself, or of Claude Lorrain. They are likewise the purveyors of ‘shell-shock’, that most dramatic of ailments. And lastly, they give the most romantic and spectacular wounds of all – a bullet-wound, even a dum-dum, is child’s-play to a wound inflicted by a shell-splinter.

  I have slept soundly through scores of full-dress bombardments. It is very few people who don’t, in a war of positions, where bombardments are almost continuous. Through a long artillery preparation for an Attack – a hoped-for ‘breakthrough’, with the enemy retaliating at full blast – in the very thick of the hubbub, with things whizzing and roaring all round – I have slept for hours together as peacefully as if I were in a London garden suburb.

  Rapidly one ceases to notice this orchestra. But although one forgets about it, one would miss it if it were not there. These are the kettledrums of death that you are hearing. And you would soon know the difference if they stopped.

  WYNDHAM LEWIS

  POLITICAL EDUCATION UNDER FIRE

  from Blasting and Bombardiering

  IDON’T THINK ARTISTS are any more important than bricklayers or stockbrokers. But I dislike the ‘hearty’ artist (who pretends he isn’t one but a stockbroker) more than the little aesthete. I felt less inclined to immolate myself in defence of Mayfair and the ‘stately homes of Old England’, the more I pondered over it. I was only concerned at the idea of deserting my companions in misfortune.

  When I had first attested, I was talking to Ford Madox Hueffer about Gaudier’s death. I’d said it was too bad. Why should Gaudier die, and a ‘Bloomsbury’ live? I meant that fate ought to have seen to it that that didn’t happen.

  It was absurd. It was absurd, Ford agreed. But there it was, he seemed to think. He seemed to think fate was absurd. I am not sure he did not think Gaudier was absurd.

  The ‘Bloomsburies’ were all doing war-work of ‘national importance’, down in some downy English county, under the wings of powerful pacifist friends; pruning trees, planting gooseberry bushes, and haymaking, doubtless in large sunbonnets. One at least of them, I will not name him, was disgustingly robust. All were of military age. All would have looked well in uniform.

  One of course ‘exempted’ himself, and made history by his witty handling of the tribunals. That was Lytton Strachey. He went round to the tribunal with an air-cushion, which, upon arrival, he blew up, and sat down on, amid the scandalized silence of the queue of palpitating petitioners. His spidery stature was reared up bravely, but his dank beard drooped, when his name was called; and he made his famous retort. ‘What,’ sternly asked one of the judges, ‘would you do Mr. Strachey, if you discovered a German preparing to outrage your sister?’ and Strachey without hesitation replied: ‘I – would – place – myself – between – them!’

  But the ‘Bloomsburies’ all exempted themselves, in one way or another. Yet they had money and we hadn’t; ultimately it was to keep them fat and prosperous – or thin and prosperous, which is even worse – that other people were to risk their skins. Then there were the tales of how a certain famous artist, of military age and militant bearing, would sit in the Café Royal and addressing an admiring group back from the Front, would exclaim: ‘We are the civilization for which you are fighting!’

  But Ford Madox Hueffer looked at me with his watery-wise old elephant eyes – a little too crystal-gazing and claptrap, but he knew his stuff – and instructed me upon the very temporary nature of this hysteria. I was too credulous! I believe that he tipped me the wink. He was imparting to me I believe a counsel of commonsense.

  ‘When this War’s over,’ he said, ‘nobody is going to worry, six months afterwards, what you did or didn’t do in the course of it. One month after it’s ended, it will be forgotten. Everybody will want to forget it – it will be bad form to mention it. Within a year disbanded “heroes” will be selling matches in the gutter. No one likes the ex-soldier – if you’ve lost a leg, more fool you!’

  ‘Do you think that?’ I said, for he almost made my leg feel sorry for itself.

  ‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘It’s always been the same. After all wars that’s what’s happened.’

  This worldly forecast was verified to the letter. There is no better propaganda against war, I think, than to broadcast such information as this (though that was not Ford’s intention: he was very keen on the War). The callousness of men and women, once the fit of hysteria is over, has to be seen to be believed – if you are prone to give humanity the benefit of the doubt, and expect some ‘decency’ where you won’t find it. They regard as positive enemies those whom a war has left broken and penniless. The ‘saviours’ and ‘heroes’ get short shrift, upon the Peace Front. No prisoners are taken there! Why, in such a ‘patriot’ country as France, men have, since the War, been promoted to the highest offices of State, who had been convicted of treason and ‘traffic with the enemy’. Sir Roger Casement would be an O. B. E. if not a Knight of the Garter, had he not been of a romantic and suicidal turn and got himself shot.

  It has been my firm intention to talk no politics in this book. I will not refer to what went on in my own mind as a result of these experiences, more than an indication, just here and there. I have spoken nowhere of the men, while I was in France. It is impossible to say anything about that. If one is not to talk politics, one has to keep one’s mouth shut. All the fancy-dress nonsense of ‘officers
’ and ‘men’, under the snobbish English system, is a subject distinct from war, and yet very much involved with it.

  As an officer it was my unwelcome task to read great numbers of private letters. Naturally the officers would among themselves discuss with smiles the burning endearments, or the secrets of his poor little domestic economy, revealed by his letters, of this man or that. These rough and halting communings, of the most private sort, were passing through our hands every day. Yet most of the censors were, as literary artists, of not a very different clay to those who had to submit to this humiliating censorship.

  My own thoughts I kept strictly to myself. I preserved my anonymity, in the sense in which I have already explained that principle. When I am dressed up in a military uniform I look like other people, though at other times I very easily depart from the canon, I find. One or two of my mess-mates sniffed at me suspiciously. But on the whole I was a masterpiece of conformity. – I am physically very robust. It is easy for me to go to sleep. And conformity is of course a sleep.

  I started the war a different man to what I ended it. More than anything, it was a political education. I am slow to learn, but quick to understand. As day by day I sidestepped and dodged the missiles that were hurled at me, and watched other people doing so, I became a politician. I was not then the accomplished politician I am to-day. But the seeds were there.