The whole thing is so utterly insane that it just sickens me. Eileen and I have decided that if war does come the best thing will be to just stay alive and thus add to the number of sane people.
--George Orwell, September 29, 1938
Willi Heinrich served four years as a combat infantryman in the German army during WWII. He tramped over 8000 miles of Russian territory: to the suburbs of Moscow, and back again. Over the course of his service in it, his division lost 12 times its original strength. He was severely wounded on five separate occasions.
Such a man might be expected to have a better idea than most of how a nation should properly memorialize its war dead. Heinrich has an idea, all right. It may not be what you think.
Heinrich is best known in this country, if he's known at all, as the author of Cross Of Iron, a novel adapted by two ex-Marines, director Sam Peckinpah and screenwriter Walter Kelley, into what Orson Welles pronounced the greatest anti-war film ever made.
Cross of Iron is a hard read. It is 1943, and the German army is preparing to lose the Taman peninsula. The officers and men of the German Army who people the book know that the war is lost to them; most of them lose their lives so that a Prussian aristocrat may secure an Iron Cross before swiftly returning to safer climes.
Heinrich's following novel, variously titled in English Crack Of Doom and The Savage Mountain (in the titles, at least, Heinrich has been consistently disserved by his translators), is an even harder read. It is now December 1944, and Russian forces are poised to sweep the Germans out of Czechoslovakia. Most of the novel's principals, male and female, are last seen hanging upside down, dying slowly and in inconceivable agony, gutted by Czech partisans. The only character with the remotest chance at something approaching a future is a German soldier who on the final page deserts.
Which brings us to Heinrich's next novel, rendered into English as The Crumbling Fortress. All of the principals in this novel are deserters. There are two Swiss who, in violation of Swiss law, crossed the border in 1941 to enlist in the German army, in order to fight Communists. There is a Russian who deserted his nation's army to fight with the Germans. There is a Frenchman and his wife; he had fought for France and been captured and imprisoned in a POW camp, but was sprung early by a relative in the collaborationist government and appointed mayor of a village. And there are two German Jews, who bobbed adrift through Europe as Europe either tried to kill them, or turned away.
It is August 1944 and the Americans have landed at Toulon. These seven people have retreated to an abandoned village in the French Alps, built at the lip of a hollow mountain that is crumbling away, hoping that the contending German and American forces, the war, will pass them by.
This book is about living, not dying. It as if, after exorcising his war service in the unrelieved carnage of his two previous novels, Heinrich could no longer bring himself to kill people, even fictionally. There is even a long passage in which a soldier finds himself, to his ultimate satisfaction, unable to kill a lizard. The only character to die in this book is a man dying anyway from TB, and he is killed in unconsciousness:
Had he been ready he would have fired into the air. What happened was like a chain reaction, and between the alarm bell ringing in his head to the reflex movement of his hands, the instinctive thumb pressure on the safety catch and the automatic grip on the trigger-guard, less time elapsed than his reason required to cancel out the short-circuit action of his limbs. He simply fired on the spur of the moment as he had done for three long years; in that time he had acquired the habit of firing a fraction of a second before his brain began to function.
Most of this book is description, interior processing, and talk. Especially talk. It is Heinrich getting it all out. Early on in the novel, before one of the Swiss men has admitted to the others, or even to himself, that he fought for Germany from choice, even against the wishes of his own nation, he protests that "as soldiers we only did our duty." To which the old German Jew replies:
"I don't doubt it. But just think what we might have avoided in this century without soldiers who only did their duty."
This man, Knopf, had volunteered to fight for Germany in WWI; he spent WWII evading the efforts of his own country to kill him, and his daughter, Anna. The French mayor, Vieale, had volunteered to fight for France in the same conflict. Vieale, asked if he would have volunteered for this second war, into which he was impressed, responds:
"No, Monsieur, certainly not. I remembered the first war only too well. But with young people it's a bit different. Why should they be any more sensible than I was thirty years ago?"
"Somebody should have told them," threw in Anna.
"Some tried to. But when you shout against the wind no one hears you."
Knopf notes that in Germany, though there the nation lost tens of thousands of men, no one remembers the WWI battle of Verdun. The mayor's wife replies that it is certainly remembered in France.
Knopf nodded. "For the French Verdun is something like a national shrine, but in the wrong sense, it seems to me. Instead of pointing a warning the military achievement is glorified. But that is not the way to speak for those who paved the road to Verdun with their bones. When we sing the national anthem in a military cemetery it is, of course, a very moving event, but it distorts the true nature of the matter. We should rig up giant loudspeakers and relay recordings of the screams of the wounded and dying and then no one would ever forget that cemetery[.]"
"We ought not to play anthems over their graves or make solemn speeches in remembrance of them. A people which is proud of its war dead has learned nothing from the war. This is only my personal opinion, but as long as we have no stronger feelings than a bad conscience about our dead when we talk of them, then there will always be other wars. It all began with falsehood and it will one day finish with falsehood: that is what I mean by inevitability. Lies breed death, death breeds lies and so it goes on. By distorting the meaning of our existence we have legitimized mass murder."
After this novel, Heinrich turned away from the war. He began writing novels about post-war Germany, describing a land where returning foot-soldiers were thrown onto the scrap-heap, and those who in even the smallest way resisted the Nazis were shunned, while war criminals and weak-willed collaborators and enablers smoothly moved to seize again the levers of power, with the tacit or express approval of the victorious occupiers. He wrote as a man awake amongst a people sunk into a state of collective amnesia.
Today, in Afghanistan, German soldiers festoon their vehicles with Nazi emblems, mount skulls on the hoods of their patrol vehicles, press their weapons to the temples of Afghan boys, laughingly enacting "mock executions," and photograph a comrade extending his erect penis towards the opened jaw of a human skull.
In La Debacle, Emile Zola chronicles combatants caught in one of the countless wars fought over those bits of dirt known as Alsace and Lorraine in the 1100-plus years between the death of Charlemagne and the close of World War II. Here, in that conflict known as the Franco-Prussian War, a soldier lies pinned down in a cabbage field by artillery fire. The soldier, Maurice, watches with something like awe the stretcher-bearers:
tranquilly risking their lives under fire, trying to get to the men who had been hit. They moved forward on hands and knees, taking advantage of ditches, hedges or any other available cover[.] Then, as soon as they found anyone lying on the ground, their difficult task began[.] Some lay on their faces, in a pool of blood, at the point of death; others had their mouths full of mud, as though they had been biting the ground; others lay in huddled heaps, arms and legs twisted, chests almost crushed. Then, with the utmost care, the stretcher-bearers would disentangle those who were still breathing, straighten out their limbs, and, raising their heads, do their best to clean them up . . . .
[G]etting them back was the real difficulty: those who were able to walk they had only to support, but all the others had to be carried, either holding them in their arms like children, or holding them on their backs, with their arms round their necks[.]
Maurice was watching one of them, a thin, puny lad, staggering under the weight of a heavy sergeant with both legs broken, for all the world like an ant carrying a grain of wheat too big for it, when suddenly a shell exploded, and he saw him lurch forward and disappear from sight. When the smoke cleared away, the sergeant could be seen lying on his back, while the stretcher-bearer was huddled up with his side ripped open. Whereupon another stretcher-bearer appeared, another busy ant, and having first turned his mate over and discovered that he was dead, proceeded to hoist the wounded sergeant on his back and carry him off.
As his own "side's" artillery rolls into the cabbage field, and then begins firing incessantly--though "there was not a Prussian in sight, only puffs of smoke, rising in the air and floating for a moment in the sunlight"--Maurice:
looking over his shoulder, [] was surprised to see, in a remote valley protected by steep hills, a peasant at work in the fields, patiently walking behind his plough, which was drawn by a big white horse. Why waste time? Just because there was a battle on, the corn wouldn't stop growing, people still had to live.
Later in the day, after the pointless deaths of thousands, Maurice, now himself a stretcher-bearer, bearing the body of his wounded friend, pauses at a stream, where:
he was amazed to see, on his right, at the bottom of a remote valley protected by steep hills, the same peasant that he had noticed earlier in the morning, still driving his plough, drawn by the big white horse. What was the point of wasting a day? The corn wouldn't stop growing or people living, just because there happened to be a battle.
The poet Lew Welch, in considering the right reaction to this world, inscribed these lines:
(1) Freak out.
(2) Come back.
(3) Bandage the wounded and feed however many you can.
(4) Never cheat.
And this sounds right. It is our duty to tend to the wounded; and when one us falls, another should come forward to take our place. And it is important to keep the food coming, what dementia may come. But also, it seems to me, it should be made explicit that among that "food" is information. It is incumbent upon those of us to know to share that knowledge. "Somebody should have told them," indeed. It is up to us, to do that.
In the comments to the first of what is projected to be three Memorial Day-themed diaries (this is the second), LithiumCola observed:
It's not like these words you quote, from people who have seen the face of war, are a secret. These words, and many others, have been published. People can read them. It doesn't need to be a discovery.
And yet it is. Generation after generation. So many people think they want a war, think they have to have a war. They learn better, and write about it, in texts that we in later generations can read and understand, if we want to.
History may be an open wound but it is also an open book, or enough of one. It's not a secret. It just takes a little open-heartedness.
In a diary posted here two years ago, a diary attended by crickets, the Kossack tiggers thotful spot described a way in which we could open our hearts. She noted that the left could learn a thing or two from such righty outfits as Operation Rescue; we could, as an example, "stage an 'Operation Rescue' in front of every military recruitment office in the country[.]" And indeed, in my view, there should be no military recruitment office anywhere in this country bereft of an accompanying collective of calm, non-confrontational, heart-open counter-recruiters.
But where people can really be "told" is in the schools. Our schools are at present infested with uniforms. Here locally, my brother fought like twelve bastards to counter invading waves of police officers instructing students as young as five years old on the fine points of how to rat out their parents, and cooperate in every way on every occasion with every directive, suggestion, or whim of anyone packing a badge and a gun. He eventually succeeded in forcing the school district to allow access to himself and other members of the ACLU to counter these brainwashing sessions with reasoned explications of such niceties as the Fourth Amendment--which, even to high-school seniors, came as something of a shock. ("What, you mean, I don't have to let a police officer search my house, just because he asks?")
Something similar needs to be done, all and everywhere, in every school in this land, to counter military-recruitment efforts, and the wrong-headed and all-pervasive curricular scrubbing of "the face of war." It's long past time the wheels started coming off the caissons. There has not been a just or justifiable war fought by my country in my lifetime, and I'm 52 years old. It's all been wasteful, needless butchery. I'm tired of watching people get methodically processed into the sausage-grinder because they haven't been told that.
Orwell:
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac.
The truth is that any real advance, let alone any genuinely revolutionary change, can only begin when the mass of the people definitely refuse [] war and thus make it clear to their rulers that a war policy is not practicable. So long as they show themselves willing to fight "in defence of democracy," or "against Fascism," or for any other flyblown slogan, the same trick will be played upon them again and again[.]
Playing, as Willi Heinrich might suggest, "recordings of the screams of the wounded and dying" in civics class might be a bit much, but "people who have seen the face of war" can certainly describe that face to those young people who are currently exposed but to a lying mask.
My father saw the face of war. He also heard it, smelled it, touched it, tasted it, and swallowed it. That face was the face of his friend, blown off his head and splattered onto my father's face. Anybody who wants to see something of what that is like, and what it would do to any normal human being, can watch The Fisher King. I'll be writing about that next.