No Man's Land

by Pete Ayrton

  ‘Another, please!’ ordered the District Commissioner. At last, he removed his pince-nez. He remembered that the notification of his death was still lying on the carpet in the office, and he got up and returned to his residence. Dr Skovronnek followed him. Herr von Trotta appeared unaware of it. But nor was he at all surprised when, without knocking, Skovronnek opened the office door, walked in, and stopped. ‘This is the letter!’ said the District Commissioner.

  The old Herr von Trotta did not sleep that night or on many of the following nights. His head continued to tremble and shake, even when it was resting on pillows. Sometimes the District Commissioner would have dreams of his son. Lieutenant Trotta would stand in front of his father, with his officer’s cap filled with water, and say: ‘Drink, Father, you’re thirsty!’The dream recurred more and more frequently. And eventually the District Commissioner learned to summon his son every night, and some nights Carl Joseph came to him more than once. In consequence, Herr von Trotta began to long for night and bedtime, the day made him impatient. And when spring came, and the days grew longer, the District Commissioner would darken his room in the mornings and evenings, and so seek to prolong the nights artificially.

  His head would not stop shaking. And he himself and everyone else gradually became used to the continual shaking.

  The war seemed not to concern Herr von Trotta very much. He would only pick up a newspaper in order to conceal his trembling head behind it. There was never any discussion of victories and defeats between himself and Dr Skovronnek. Usually they just played chess, and in complete silence. But sometimes one would say to the other: ‘Do you remember the game we played two years ago? You were just as careless then as you are now.’ It was as though they were talking about events that had transpired decades before.

  A long time had passed since the news of the death, the seasons had relieved one another in accordance with the old and immutable laws of nature, though mankind barely felt them under the red veil of war, and, of all men the District Commissioner felt them perhaps the least. His head was still trembling like a large, though light fruit on the end of a thin stem. Lieutenant Trotta had long since rotted away, or been eaten by the ravens who circled that day over the deadly railway embankment, but old Herr von Trotta continued to feel as though he’d learned of his death only yesterday. And he kept the letter from Major Zoglauer, now also deceased, in his inside pocket; every day he read it and it retained its terrible freshness and novelty, just like a funeral mound that is kept and tended by grieving hands. What did Herr von Trotta care about the hundred thousand dead who had since followed his son? What did he care about the hasty and confused decisions taken by the people above him, that were issued on a weekly basis? And what did he care about the end of the world, which he could now see approaching with even greater clarity than once the prophetic Chojnicki could? His son was dead. His job was over. His world had ended.

  Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in the Galician town of Brody, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He died in Paris in 1939. In 1914, Roth went to Vienna to study philosophy and in 1916 he volunteered to fight in the Imperial Army on the Eastern Front. The war and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were key events in Roth’s life and the major themes of his writing. His best-known work is The Radetzky March, from which this extract is taken. In his fiction and journalism, Roth deals with the major events of his time – the migration of millions of displaced persons, the rise of National Socialism and the dangers of appeasement. ‘It must be understood – let me say loud and clear – the European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination…’ The Radetzky March is very much a book that announces the end of empire. At the end of the book, Lieutenant Trotta dies, his father dies and the Emperor dies. Dr Skovronnek is still alive but without a chess partner:

  It occurred to him that it was afternoon, the hour for their chess game was approaching. Now he didn’t have a partner any more; nevertheless, he decided to go to the café. As they left the cemetery, the burgomaster invited him to ride in his carriage. Dr Skovronnek climbed in.

  ‘I would have liked to say in my address,’ said the burgomaster, ‘that Herr von Trotta couldn’t have outlived the Emperor. Don’t you agree, doctor?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Dr Skovronnek, ‘I don’t think either of them could outlive Austria.’

  No one does ‘elegiac’ like Roth.

  JOHN GALSWORTHY

  THE GIBBET

  from Forsytes, Pendyces and Others

  ICAN’T DESCRIBE THE STREET I turned into then – it was like no street I have ever been in, so long, so narrow, so regular, yet somehow so unsubstantial that one had sometimes a feeling that walking at the grey houses on either side one would pass through them. I must have gone miles down it without meeting even the shadow of a human being, when just as it was growing dusk I saw a young man come silently out as I supposed of a door, though none was opened. I can describe neither his dress nor figure. Like the street, he looked unsubstantial, and left on me an impression as of hunger. Yes, the expression on his shadowy face haunted me; it was so like that of a starving man before whom someone has set a meal down, then snatched it away. And now out of every house on either side young men like him started forth in that mysterious manner, all with that hungry look on their almost invisible faces. They seemed to gaze at me as I passed as if they were looking for someone, till, peering at one of them, I said:

  ‘What do you want – whom do you want?’

  He gave me no answer, and by now it was so dark that I could not see his face at all – none of their faces, and only had the feeling of being hungrily watched as I went along, it seemed for ever, without getting to any turning out of that interminable street. At last in desperation I doubled in my tracks and began walking back in the direction whence I had come. A lamplighter must have been following me, for now every lamp was lighted, giving a faint glittering greenish glare, as might lumps of phosphorescent matter hung up in the dark. The hungry phantomlike young men had vanished, and I was wondering where they could have gone when I saw – some distance ahead – a sort of greyish whirlpool stretching across the street, under one of those lamps that flickered like a marsh light. A noise was coming from that swirl or whatever it was, for it seemed to be raised above the ground – a ghostly sound, swishing as of feet amongst dry leaves, deepened by the gruntings of some deep sense satisfied. I crept forward till I made out that it was really formed of human figures whirling slowly round and round the lamp in what seemed to be a dance. And suddenly I stood still in horror. Every other figure of those dancers was a skeleton, and between every two skeletons danced a young girl in white, so that the whole swirling ring was formed alternately of skeletons and these grey-white girls. They took no notice of me, and I crept a little nearer still. Yes! these skeletons were the young men I had seen starting out of the houses as I passed, with the look of queer and awful hunger on their faces that now seemed to grin. The girls who danced between them had wan, pitiful beauty, and their eyes were turned to the skeletons whose long hands grasped theirs, as though begging them to return to flesh. Not one noticed me, so deeply were they all absorbed in their mystic dance. Then I saw what they were dancing round. Above their heads, below the greenish lamp, a dark thing was dangling. It swung and turned there like a joint of meat roasting before a fire – the fully dressed body of an elderly man. The green lamplight glinted on his grey hair, and on his bloated features when the face came athwart the light. It swung slowly from left to right, and the dancers as slowly whirled from right to left, always meeting that revolving face, as though to enjoy the sight of it. What did it mean – what were they doing? these sad shapes rustling round the obscene thing suspended there! What strange and awful rite was I watching by the ghostly phosphorescence of that lamp? If those hungry skeletons and wan-grey girls haunted and amazed me, much more haunting and gruesome was that dead face up there with the impress still on
it of bloated life; how it gripped and horrified me, with its dead fishy eyes and its neck thick-rolled with flabby flesh, turning and turning on its invisible spit to the sound of feet swishing in dead leaves, and those grunting sighs. What was this ghostly revenge on the gibbeted figure which yet had a look of cold and fattened power? Who was it they had caught and swung up there, like some dead crow, to sway in the winds of heaven? What awful crime towards these skeleton dancers and pale maidens could this elderly man be expiating?

  And I remembered with a shudder how those young men had looked at me as I passed, and suddenly it came to me:I was watching the execution of MY generation. There it swung, gibbeted by the youths and maidens whom, through its evil courses, it had murdered. And seized with panic I ran forward up the street straight through the fabric of my dream, that swayed and rustled to left and right of me.

  John Galsworthy was born in Surrey in 1867. Trained as a barrister, Galsworthy travelled in the 1890s for his family shipping firm and met Joseph Conrad, whose close friend he became. Conrad encouraged him to write. In 1906, Galsworthy published The Man of Property, the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, his best-known work which chronicles the suffocating morality of an upper-middle-class family. During the war, Galsworthy worked as a hospital orderly in northern France. This powerful story is a homage to the generation of men who died in the war. It is taken from his short story collection Forsytes, Pendyces and Others, which was published posthumously in 1935. Throughout his life Galsworthy campaigned for prison reform, women’s rights, animal welfare and the abolition of censorship. In 1932, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died six weeks later in London.

  ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

  SWEET DREAMS THOUGH THE GUNS ARE BOOMING

  from All Quiet on the Western Front

  translated by Brian Murdoch

  WHEN ROLL CALL IS OVER Kat says to me, ‘How do you fancy roast goose?’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ I reply.

  We climb on to a munitions convoy. The ride costs us two cigarettes. Kat has taken careful note of the place. The shed belongs to the headquarters of some regiment. I decide that I will fetch the goose, and I get instructions on how to do it. The shed is behind the wall, and only barred with a wooden peg.

  Kat cradles his hands for me, I put my foot in and scramble up over the wall. Meanwhile Kat keeps a look-out.

  I wait for a few moments to let my eyes get used to the dark, then pick out where the shed is. I creep towards it very quietly, grope for the peg, take it out and open the door.

  I can make out two white shapes. Two geese. That’s a nuisance; if you grab one, the other one will make a racket. So it’ll have to be both of them – it should work, if I’m quick.

  I make a jump for them. I get one of them straight away, then a couple of seconds later the other one. I bang their heads against the wall like a madman, trying to stun them. But I obviously don’t use enough force. The beasts hiss and beat out all round them with their wings and their feet. I fight on grimly, but my God, geese are strong! They tug at me and I stumble this way and that. In the dark these white things have become terrifying, my arms have sprouted wings and I’m almost afraid that I’ll take off into the skies, just as if I had a couple of observation balloons in my hands.

  And then the noise starts; one of them has got some air into his throat and sounds off like an alarm clock. Before I can do anything about it I hear noises coming towards me from outside, something shoves me and I’m lying on the ground listening to angry growling. A dog. I look to one side, and he makes for my throat. I lie still at once and pull my chin down into my collar.

  It’s a bull mastiff. After an eternity it draws its head back and sits down beside me. But whenever I try to move, it growls. I think for a moment. The only thing I can do is try and get hold of my service revolver. At all events I have to get out of here before anyone comes. Inch by inch I move my hand along.

  I feel as if this is all going on for hours. Every time I make a slight movement there is a threatening growl; I lie still and try again. The minute I get hold of my gun, my hand starts to tremble. I press down against the ground and think it out: pull the gun out, shoot before he can get at me, and get the hell out as quickly as possible.

  I take a deep breath and calm myself. Then I hold my breath, jerk up the revolver, there is a shot and the mastiff lurches aside, howling, I make it to the door of the shed and tumble over one of the geese, which was flapping out of the way.

  I make a grab while I’m still running, hurl it with a great swing over the wall and start to scramble up myself. I’m not quite over the wall when the mastiff, which has come to itself again, is there and jumping up at me. I drop down quickly. Ten paces away from me stands Kat with the goose in his arms. As soon as he sees me, we run for it.

  At last we can get our breath back. The goose is dead, Kat saw to that in a moment. We want to roast it straight away, before anyone realizes what has happened. I fetch pots and some wood from the huts, and we crawl into a small, deserted shed that we know about and which is useful for things like this. We put up a thick covering to block the only window hole. There is a makeshift cooker there – an iron plate lying across some bricks. We light a fire.

  Kat plucks and draws the goose. We put the feathers carefully to one side. We want to use them to stuff two small pillows, with the motto ‘Sweet Dreams though the Guns are Booming’ on them.

  The barrage from the front can be heard as a dull humming all around our hideout. Firelight flickers on our faces, shadows dance on the walls. Airmen drop bombs. At one point we hear muffled screaming. One of the huts must have been hit.

  Aircraft roar. The ratatat of the machine-guns gets louder. But our light can’t be seen from anywhere outside.

  And so we sit facing one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby battledress, roasting a goose in the middle of the night. We don’t talk much, but we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death. We are sitting right at the edge of all that, in danger but secure, goose fat runs over our fingers, our hearts are close to one another, and time and place merge into one – the brightnesses and shadows of our emotions come and go in the flickering light of a gentle fire. What does he know about me? What do I know about him? Before the war we wouldn’t have had a single thought in common – and now here we are, sitting with a goose roasting in front of us, aware of our existence and so close to each other that we can’t even talk about it.

  It takes a long time to roast a goose, even when it is young, and there is plenty of fat. And so we take turns. One does the basting, while the other gets a bit of sleep. Gradually there is a wonderful smell all around us.

  The noises from outside all merge into one another, become a dream which disappears from the waking memory. Half asleep, I watch Kat as he lifts and lowers the basting spoon. I love him; his shoulders, his angular, slightly stooped frame – and then I see woods and stars behind him, and a kindly voice says words to me that bring me peace, me, an ordinary soldier with his big boots and his webbing, and his pack, who is making his tiny way under the sky’s great vault along the road that lies before him, who forgets things quickly and who isn’t even depressed much any more, but who just goes onwards under the great night sky.

  A little soldier and a kindly voice, and if anyone were to caress him, he probably wouldn’t understand the gesture any more, that soldier with the big boots and a heart that has been buried alive, a soldier who marches because he is wearing marching boots and who has forgotten everything except marching. Aren’t those things flowers, over there on the horizon, in a landscape that is so calm and quiet that the soldier could weep? Are those not images that he has not exactly lost, because he never had them to lose, confusing images, but nevertheless of things that can no longer be his? Are those not his twenty years of life?

  Is my face wet, a
nd where am I? Kat is standing in front of me, his gigantic distorted shadow falls across me like home. He says something softly, smiles and goes back to the fire.

  Then he says, ‘It’s ready.’

  ‘OK, Kat.’

  I shake myself. The golden-brown roast is glowing in the middle of the room. We get out our folding forks and pocket-knives and carve ourselves off a leg each. We eat it with army-issue bread that we dip into the gravy. We eat slowly and enjoy it to the full.

  ‘Like it, Kat?’

  ‘Great. How about you?’

  ‘Great, Kat.’

  We are brothers, pressing one another to take the best pieces. When we have finished I smoke a cigarette and Kat has a cigar. There is a lot left over.

  ‘Kat, how about us taking a bit over to Kropp and Tjaden?’

  ‘Right,’ he says. We cut off a chunk and wrap it up carefully in newspaper. We were planning to take the rest back to our billets, but Kat laughs and just says, ‘Tjaden.’

  I agree that we’ll have to take it all. So we make our way to the hen-run prison to wake up the pair of them. Before we go we pack away the feathers.

  Kropp and Tjaden think we are a mirage. Then they get stuck in. Tjaden is gnawing away, holding a wing with both hands as if he were playing a mouth organ. He slurps the gravy out of the pot and smacks his lips. ‘I’ll never forget you for this.’