The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

The day finally departed. I fell into a dead sleep. Shouts and curses awoke me. Beams of electric torches criss-crossed the night. Just as we had been warned, Ukrainians and Germans were hunting for women. Tania said, Quick, cover me with the blanket and lie on top of me; pretend I am a bundle. Around us, soldiers were wading among the sleepers, looking them over, rejecting some, hauling away others. Then they were gone.

  Peace, disturbed only by sighs, laments and moans had barely settled on us when we heard a new and improbable noise: the loudspeaker the Germans had used to give orders during the day was now filling the square with familiar Wehrmacht songs. Some soldier had brought a gramophone and was playing background music for a field brothel. But fornication apparently did not preclude other amusements. Soon, a sound like very loud static was interfering with the ninth or tenth rendition of ‘Lili Marlene’. It was a machine-gun. Cries of wounded replied. Perhaps a soldier thought it disorderly for prisoners to scurry about in the night. The way to end any such unauthorized activity was to aim the fire directly above the heads of people quietly squatting or lying on the ground: anyone who stood up would be mowed down, which was good for discipline. Alas, not everybody could crouch or sit or, better yet, lie face down. The wounded were begging for help, disembodied voices called for doctors to make themselves known, and doctors who were brave enough to respond became new moving targets.

  That night, in turn, departed. It was followed by yet another sparkling and cloudless day. Autumn is the sweetest season in Poland, redolent of harvest smells and promise, a time to pick mushrooms in the moist shade of giant trees. But neither the morning hour nor the season brought with it hope. The loudspeaker began braying lengthy instructions about going to the right and going to the left, forming in groups of fifty, forming in groups of one hundred, leaders responsible for order, picking up trash, sitting, standing and waiting. Since we were thought incapable of comprehending, Ukrainians with their dogs and whips came again into our midst to help us form satisfactory columns. By noon, Tania and I were marching in step in the rear of such a column. The Central Station was before us, oddly unmarked by the fighting. I was very afraid: our destination was about to be revealed.

  I could not tell whether Tania was as afraid as I. We had eaten the rest of our bread and chocolate as soon as the sun rose. Unlike most of our neighbours, Tania did not need the help of the Ukrainians to fathom the meaning of the loudspeaker, and the moment it was clear that we were leaving, she had become very busy. Long before the Ukrainians began charging the crowd and one had to stand in ranks at rigid attention, over my tearful protests she had used our remaining water to wash our faces and hands. She brushed the dust off her clothes and mine and straightened them. Then she combed my hair and, with great concentration, peering into the pocket mirror, combed her own hair and put on lipstick, studied the result, and made little corrections. I was astonished to see how she had transformed herself. The stooped-over, soot-smeared old woman of the march from the Old Town had vanished. Instead, when we entered the station, I was holding the hand of a dignified and self-confident young matron. Unlike the day before, she was not hanging back, trying to lose us in the crowd; she pushed her way to the outside row and, holding my hand very tight, to my horror, led me away from the column so that we were standing, completely exposed, in the space on the platform between the rest of the people and the train. Despite my panic, I began to understand that Tania was putting on a very special show. Her clear blue eyes surveyed the scene before her; it was as if she could barely contain her impatience and indignation. I thought that if she had had an umbrella she would be tapping the platform with it. And, indeed, what a tableau was there to contemplate! Two long trains of cargo and passenger cars, one on each side of the platform, group after group of Poles in the column being pushed and beaten by the Ukrainians, then shoved toward the trains, old people falling on the platform, some slipping off the platform on to the tracks as they tried to hoist themselves into the freight cars, suitcases judged too large by the Ukrainians torn open and their contents scattered on the ground, howling dogs pulling on their leashes, Ukrainians yelling in their mixture of broken Polish and German, people weeping and sometimes embracing each other.

  Also surveying the scene, with an air of contempt that matched Tania’s indignation, was a fat middle-aged Wehrmacht captain, standing alone a few metres from us, in the middle of the platform. I realized that Tania was including him in her outraged stare and that her show seemed particularly directed at him. All at once, I felt her pulling me behind her again. With a few rapid strides she reached the officer. Addressing him in her haughtiest tone, she asked if he would be kind enough to tell her where these awful trains were going. The answer made my legs tremble: Auschwitz. Completely wrong destination, replied Tania. To find herself with all these disreputable-looking people, being shouted at by drunk and disorderly soldiers, and all this in front of a train going to a place she had never heard of, was intolerable. She was a doctor’s wife from R., about two hours from Warsaw; she had come to Warsaw to buy dresses and have her son’s eyes examined; of course, everything she bought had been lost in this dreadful confusion. We had nothing to do with whatever was going on here. Would he, as an officer, impose some order and help us find a train to R.? We had spent almost all our money, but she thought she had enough for a second-class compartment. The captain burst out laughing. My dear lady, he said to Tania, not even my wife orders me about quite this way. Could Tania assure him her husband would be glad to have her return? And where had she learned such literary turns of expression? After he had an answer to these basic questions he would see about this wretched train business. Tania blushed. Should I tell you the truth, even though you won’t like it? Naturally, replied the captain. I think my husband doesn’t mind my being sometimes hot tempered. I learned German in school and probably I managed to improve it by reading, especially everything by Thomas Mann I can find in the original – not much in R., but quite a lot in Warsaw. It’s a good way for a provincial housewife to keep occupied. I know Mann’s work is forbidden in the Reich, but that is the truth. I am not a party member, merely a railroad specialist, announced the captain still laughing. I am glad you have chosen a great stylist. Shall I get someone to carry your suitcases while we look for transportation to R.?

  The captain was a man of the world. He did not feel compelled to introduce himself and gave no sign of being discouraged or startled by our lack of luggage. Having handed Tania into a first-class compartment of a train waiting at a distant platform, he clicked his heels. Tania was not to worry. He was signing a pass to R.; it was not necessary to buy tickets; the German reservist in charge of this military train would see to it that she was not disturbed.

  The train remained in the station for some hours after he left us. Slowly, it filled up with soldiers; noisy groups of officers were in the compartments on both sides of ours. Meanwhile, Tania’s excitement left her and with it her boldness: her face turned haggard, it was the face of the night before. She could not stop shivering or talking about our being doomed because the train had not left. She was sure the captain would mention the amusing little shrew from R. with an interest in Mann to some officer whose understanding extended beyond railway trains, and they would immediately send the Gestapo to get us. Once again, she had gone too far with her lies; we would pay for it. But no one came. The officers who glanced at us curiously as they passed in the corridor continued on their way. A whistle blew, the train started, and soon the elderly reservist came to tell us that the next stop would be G., more than halfway to R.

  Italo Calvino

  WHY ARE THE MEN FIGHTING?

  Italo Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947), draws on the author’s own experience in the Italian partisan war against the Germans. In the following extract, Ferriera and Kim, the commander and the commissar of the partisan brigade, discuss the motivation of their men and why they have decided to fight.

  It is an intriguing meditation on both th
e making of moral judgements and the historical importance of the actions of men fighting in a war – because, as Calvino writes in his introduction, ‘for many of my contemporaries it had been solely a question of luck which determined what side they should fight on’.

  KIM AND FERRIERA are walking along the dark mountainside towards another encampment.

  ‘Surely you see now it was a mistake, Kim?’ says Ferriera.

  Kim shakes his head. ‘No, it’s not a mistake,’ he says.

  ‘But it is,’ says the commander, ‘it was a mistaken idea of yours to make up a detachment entirely of men who can’t be trusted, with a commander who can be trusted even less. You see what happens. If we’d divided them up among the good ones it might have kept them on the right lines.’

  Kim continues to chew his moustache. ‘For my part,’ he says, ‘this is the detachment I’m most pleased with.’

  At this Ferriera nearly loses his calm; he raises his ice-cold eyes and rubs his forehead. ‘But Kim, when will you realize that this is a fighting brigade, not an experimental laboratory? I can understand your getting a scientific satisfaction from watching the reactions of these men, all arranged as you wanted them, proletariat in one part, peasants in another, then “sub-proletariat”, as you call it . . . The political work you ought to be doing, it seems to me, is mixing them all up together and giving class-consciousness to those who haven’t got it, so as to achieve this blessed unit we hear so much about . . . Apart from the military value, of course . . .’

  Kim, who has difficulty in expressing himself, shakes his head.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘Nonsense. The men all fight with the same sort of urge in them . . . well, not quite the same, . . . each has an urge of his own . . . but they’re all fighting in unison now, each as much as the other. Then there’s Dritto, there’s Pelle . . . You don’t understand what it costs them . . . Well, they too have the same urge . . . Any little thing is enough to save or lose them . . . That’s what political work is . . . to give them a sense . . .’

  When Kim talks to the men and analyses the situation for them, he is absolutely clear and dialectical. But when he is talking like this just for one other person to hear him, it makes one’s head spin. Ferriera sees things more simply. ‘All right, let’s give them this sense, let’s organize them the way I say.’

  Kim breathes through his moustache. ‘This isn’t an army, you see, they aren’t soldiers to whom one can say: this is your duty. You can’t talk about duty here, you can’t talk about ideals like country, liberty, communism. The men don’t want to hear about ideals, anyone can have those, they have ideals on the other side too. You see what happens when that extremist cook begins his sermonizing? They shout at him and knock him about. They don’t need ideals, myths, or to shout “Long live . . .” They fight and die without shouting anything.’

  ‘Why do they fight, then?’ asks Ferriera. He knows why he does, everything is perfectly clear to him.

  ‘Well,’ says Kim, ‘at this moment the various detachments are climbing silently up towards their positions. Tomorrow many of them will be wounded or dead. They know that. What drives them to lead this life, what makes them fight? Well, first, the peasants who live in these mountains, it’s easier for them. The Germans burn their villages, take away their cattle. Theirs is a basic human war, one to defend their own country, for the peasants really have a country. So they join up with us, young and old, with their old shot-guns and corduroy hunting-jackets; whole villages of them; they’re with us as we’re defending their country. And defending their country becomes a serious ideal for them, transcends them, as an end in itself; they sacrifice even their homes, even their cattle, to go on fighting. Then there are other peasants for whom “country” remains something selfish; their cattle, their home, their crops. And to keep all that they become spies, Fascists . . . there are whole villages which are our enemies. Then there are the workers. The workers have a background of their own, of wages and strikes, work and struggle elbow to elbow. They’re a class, the workers are. They know there’s something better in life and they fight for that something better. They have a “country” too, a “country” still to be conquered, and they’re fighting here to conquer it. Down in the town there are factories which will be theirs; they can already see the red writing on the factory walls and the banners flying on the factory chimneys. But there’s no sentimentality in them. They understand reality and how to change it. Then there is an intellectual or a student or two, very few of them though, here and there, with ideas in their heads that are often vague or twisted. Their “country” consists of words, or at the most of some books. But as they fight they find that those words of theirs no longer have any meaning, and they make new discoveries about men’s struggles, and they just fight on without asking themselves questions, until they find new words and rediscover the old ones, changed now, with unsuspected meanings. Who else is there? Foreign prisoners, who’ve escaped from concentration camps and joined us; they’re fighting for a real proper country, a distant country which they want to get back to and which is theirs just because it is distant. But, after all, can’t you see that this is only a struggle between symbols? that to kill a German, a man must think not of that German but of another German, with a substitution technique which is enough to turn his brain? that everything and everybody must become a Chinese shadow-play, a myth?’

  Ferriera strokes his blond beard; he doesn’t see any of these things.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ he says.

  ‘No, it’s not like that,’ Kim goes on, ‘I know that too. It’s not like that. Because there’s something else, common to all of them: an inner frenzy. Take Dritto’s detachment; petty thieves, carabinieri, ex-soldiers, black marketeers, down-and-outs; men on the fringes of society, who got along somehow despite all the chaos around them, with nothing to defend and nothing to lose; either that, or they’re defective physically, or they have fixations, or they’re fanatics. No revolutionary idea can ever appear in them, tied as they are to the millstones grinding them. Or if it does it will be born twisted, the product of rage and humiliation, like that cook’s extremism. Why do they fight, then? They have no “country”, either real or invented. And yet you know there’s courage, there’s a frenzy in them too. It comes from the squalor of their streets, the filth of their homes, the obscenities they’ve known ever since childhood, the strain of having to be bad. And any little thing, a false step, a momentary impulse, is enough to send them over to the other side, to the Black Brigade, like Pelle, there to shoot with the same frenzy, the same hatred, against either side, it doesn’t matter which.’

  Ferriera mutters into his beard: ‘So you think the spirit of our men . . . and the Black Brigade’s . . . the same thing?’

  ‘The same thing, the same thing . . . but, if you see what I mean . . .’ Kim has stopped, with a finger pointing as if he were keeping the place in a book. ‘The same thing but the other way round. Because here we’re in the right, there they’re in the wrong. Here we’re achieving something, there they’re just reinforcing their chains. That age-old resentment which weighs down on Dritto’s men, on all of us, including you and me, and which finds expression in shooting and killing enemies, the Fascists have that too: it forces them to kill with the same hope of purification and of release. But then there is also the question of history. The fact is that on our side nothing is lost, not a single gesture, not a shot, though each may be the same as theirs – d’you see what I mean? – they will all serve if not to free us then to free our children, to create a world that is serene, without resentment, a world in which no one has to be bad. The others are on the side of lost gestures, of useless resentment, which are lost and useless even if they should win, because they are not making positive history, they are not helping to free themselves but to repeat and perpetuate resentment and hatred, until in another twenty or a hundred or a thousand years it will begin all over again, the struggle between us and them; and we shall both be fighting
with the same anonymous hatred in our eyes, though always, perhaps without knowing it, we shall be fighting for redemption, they to remain slaves. That is the real meaning of the struggle now, the real, absolute meaning, beyond the various official meanings. An elementary, anonymous urge to free us from all our humiliations; the worker from his exploitation, the peasant from his ignorance, the petty bourgeois from his inhibitions, the outcast from his corruption. This is what I believe our political work is, to use human misery against itself, for our own redemption, as the Fascists use misery to perpetuate misery and man fighting man.’

  Only the blue of Ferriera’s eyes and the yellow glimmer of his beard can be seen in the dark. He shakes his head. He does not feel this resentment; he is precise as a mechanic and practical as a mountain-peasant; for him the struggle is a precise machine of which he knows the workings and purpose.

  ‘It seems impossible,’ he says, ‘it seems impossible that with all that balls in your head you can still be a good commissar and talk clearly to the men.’

  Kim is not displeased at Ferriera not understanding him; men like Ferriera must be talked to in exact terms; ‘a, b, c,’ one must say, things are either definite or they’re ‘balls’, for them there are no ambiguous or dark areas. But Kim does not reason that way because he believes himself to be superior to Ferriera; no, his aim is to be able to think like Ferriera, to see no other reality but Ferriera’s, nothing else matters.

  ‘Well, I’ll say good-bye.’ They have reached a parting in the path. Now Ferriera will go on to Gamba’s detachment and Kim to Baleno’s. They have to separate in order to be able to inspect every detachment that night, before the battle.

  Nothing else matters. Kim walks on alone, the slim Sten-gun hanging from his shoulder like a broken walking-stick. Nothing else matters. The tree trunks in the dark take on strange human shapes. Man carries his childhood fears with him for his whole life long. ‘Perhaps,’ thinks Kim, ‘I’d be frightened, if I wasn’t brigade commissar. Not to be frightened any more, that’s the final aim of man.’