The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  Kim is logical when he is analysing the situation with the detachment commissars, but when he is walking along alone and reasoning with himself things become mysterious and magical again, and life seems full of miracles. Our heads are still full of magic and miracles, thinks Kim. Sometimes he feels he is walking amid a world of symbols, like his namesake, little Kim in the middle of India, in that book of Kipling’s which he had so often reread as a boy.

  ‘Kim . . . Kim . . . Who is Kim . . .?’

  Why is he walking over the mountains that night, getting ready for a battle, with power over life and death, after that gloomy childhood of his as a rich man’s son, and his shy adolescence? At times he feels at the mercy of crazy swings of mood, as if he’s acting hysterically, but no, his thoughts are logical, he can analyse everything with perfect clarity. And yet, he’s not serene. His parents were serene, those parents from the great middle class which created their own riches. The proletariat is serene for it knows what it wants, so are the peasants who are now doing sentry duty over their own villages. The Soviets are serene, they have made their minds up about everything and are now fighting with both passion and method, not because war is a fine thing but because it is necessary. The Bolsheviks! The Soviet Union is perhaps already a serene country, perhaps there is no more poverty there. Will Kim ever be serene? One day perhaps, we will all achieve serenity and will not understand so much because we will have understood everything.

  Here men still have troubled eyes and haggard faces. Kim has become fond of these men, though. That little boy in Dritto’s detachment, for instance. What’s his name? With that rage eating up his freckly face, even when he laughs . . . He’s said to be the brother of a prostitute. Why is he fighting? He doesn’t know it’s so that he should no longer be the brother of a prostitute. And those Calabrian brothers-in-law. They’re fighting so as not to be despised folk from the south any more, poor immigrants, looked down on as foreigners in their own country. And that carabiniere is fighting so that he won’t feel a carabiniere any more, always spying on his fellow man. Then there’s Cousin, the good, gigantic, ruthless Cousin . . . They say he’s out for revenge on a woman who betrayed him . . . We all have a secret wound which we are fighting to avenge. Even Ferriera? Yes, perhaps even Ferriera; the frustration of not being able to get the world to go as he wants it. Not Red Wolf, though. Because everything that Red Wolf wants is possible. He must be made to want the right thing, that is political work, commissar’s work. And learn that what he wants is right; that too is political work, commissar’s work.

  Perhaps, one day, thinks Kim, I won’t understand these things any more. I’ll be serene, and understand men in a completely different way, a juster way, perhaps. Why perhaps? Well, I shan’t say ‘perhaps’ any more then, there won’t be any more ‘perhaps’ in me. And I’ll have Dritto shot. Now I’m too linked to them and all their twists. To Dritto too. I know that Dritto must suffer a lot for always being determined to behave badly. Nothing in the world hurts so much as behaving badly. One day as a child I shut myself up for two days in my room without eating. I suffered terribly but would not open the door and they had to come and fetch me by ladder through the window. I longed to be consoled and understood. Dritto is doing the same. But he knows we’ll shoot him. He wants to be shot. That longing gets hold of men sometimes. And Pelle, what is Pelle doing at this moment?

  Kim walks on through a larch wood and thinks of Pelle down in the town going round on curfew patrol with the death’s head badge on his cap. Pelle must be alone, alone with his anonymous mistaken hatred, alone with his betrayal gnawing at him and making him behave worse than ever to justify it. He’ll shoot at the cats in the black-out, even, from rage, and the shots will wake the bourgeoisie nearby, and make them start up in their beds.

  Kim thinks of the column of Germans and Fascists who are perhaps at that moment advancing up the valley, towards the dawn which will bring death pouring down on their heads from the crests of the mountains. It is the column of lost gestures. One of the soldiers, waking up at a jolt of the truck is now thinking ‘I love you, Kate.’ In six or seven hours he’ll be dead, we’ll have killed him; even if he hadn’t thought ‘I love you, Kate,’ it would have been the same; everything that he does or thinks is lost, cancelled from history.

  I, on the other hand, am walking through a larch wood and every step I take is history. I think ‘I love you, Adriana’ and that is history, will have great consequences. I’ll behave tomorrow in battle like a man who has thought tonight ‘I love you, Adriana.’ Perhaps I may not accomplish great deeds but history is made up of little anonymous gestures; I may die tomorrow even before that German, but everything I do before dying and my death too will be little parts of history, and all the thoughts I’m having now will influence my history tomorrow, tomorrow’s history of the human race.

  Now, instead of escaping into fantasy as I did when I was a child I could be making a mental study of the details of the attack, the dispositions of weapons and squads. But I am too fond of thinking about those men, studying them, making discoveries about them. What will they do ‘afterwards’ for instance? Will they recognize in post-war Italy something made by them? Will they understand what system will have to be used then in order to continue our struggle, the long and constantly changing struggle to better humanity? Red Wolf will understand, I think; I wonder how he’ll manage to put his understanding into practice, how will he use that adventurous, ingenious spirit of his when there are no more daring deeds or escapes to be made? They should all be like Red Wolf. We should all be like Red Wolf. There’ll be some, on the other hand, whose anonymous resentment will continue, who will become individualists again, and thus sterile; they’ll fall into crime, the great outlet for dumb resentments; they’ll forget that history once walked by their side, breathed through their clenched teeth. The ex-Fascists will say: ‘Oh, the partisans! I told you so! I realized it at once!’ And they won’t have realized anything, either before or after.

  One day Kim will be serene. Everything is clear with him now. Dritto, Pin, the Calabrian brothers-in-law. He knows how to behave towards each of them, without fear or pity. Sometimes when he is walking at night the mists of souls seem to condense around him like the mists in the air; but he is a man who analyses; ‘a, b, c,’ he’ll say to the commissars; he’s a Bolshevik, a man who dominates situations. ‘I love you, Adriana.’

  The valley is full of mist, and Kim is walking along a slope which is as stony as a lakeside. The larches appear out of the mist like mooring-poles. Kim . . . Kim . . . Who is Kim? He feels like the hero of that novel read in his childhood; the half-English half-Indian boy who travels across India with the old Red Lama looking for the river of purification.

  Two hours ago he was talking to that liar Dritto, to the prostitute’s brother, and now he is reaching Baleno’s detachment, the best in the brigade. There is a squad of Russians with Baleno, ex-prisoners who had escaped from the fortification works on the border.

  ‘Who goes there?’

  It’s the sentry; a Russian.

  Kim gives his name.

  ‘Bring news, Commissar?’

  It’s Aleksjéi, the son of a moujik, an engineering student.

  ‘Tomorrow there will be a battle, Aleksjéi.’

  ‘Battle? Hundred Fascists kaput?’

  ‘I don’t know how many kaput, Aleksjéi. I don’t even know how many alive.’

  ‘Sale e tabacchi, Commissar.’

  Sale e tabacchi, is the Italian phrase which has made most impression on Aleksjéi, he repeats it all the time, like a refrain, a talisman.

  ‘Sale e tabacchi, Aleksjéi.’

  Tomorrow there will be a big battle. Kim is serene. ‘A, b, c,’ he’ll say. Again and again he thinks: ‘I love you, Adriana.’ That, and that alone, is history.

  Joseph Heller

  THEY WERE TRYING TO KILL ME

  Drawing on his experiences as a bombardier during the Second World War, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 i
s one of the most famous novels of the century. In his memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, published in 1998, Heller writes for the first time about the people and events he was eventually to translate into the memorable characters of Catch-22.

  REMARKABLY, THROUGH ALL his unlucky series of mishaps the pilot Ritter remained imperviously phlegmatic, demonstrating no symptoms of fear or growing nervousness, even blushing with a chuckle and a smile whenever I gagged around about him as a jinx, and it was on these qualities of his, his patient genius for building and fixing things and these recurring close calls in aerial combat, only on these, that I fashioned the character of Orr in Catch-22. (I don’t know if he’s aware of that. I don’t know if he’s even read the book, for I’ve never been in touch with him or almost any of the others.)

  In a nearby tent just across a railroad ditch in disuse was the tent of a friend, Francis Yohannon, and it was from him that I nine years later derived the unconventional name for the heretical Yossarian. The rest of Yossarian is the incarnation of a wish. In Yohannon’s tent also lived the pilot Joe Chrenko, a pilot I was especially friendly with, who later, in several skimpy ways, served as the basis for the character Hungry Joe in Catch-22. In that tent with them was a pet dog Yohannon had purchased in Rome, a lovable, tawny cocker spaniel he bought while others were purchasing and smuggling back contraband Italian pistols, Berettas. In my novel I turned the dog into a cat to protect its identity.

  Except for the insertion into the novel of a radio gunner who is mortally wounded, the incidents I actually experienced in my plane on this second mission to Avignon were very much like those I related in fictional form. A co-pilot panicked and I thought I was doomed. By that time I had learned through experience that this war was perilous and that they were trying to kill me. The earlier cluster of missions I had flown to Ferrara when first overseas had assumed in my memory the character of a fantasy nightmare from which I had luckily escaped without harm in my trusting innocence, like an ingenuous kid in a Grimm fairy tale. And I also knew from the serious tone in the briefing room and from an earlier mission to Avignon that this target was a dangerous one.

  All four squadrons in the group were involved, flying into southern France in a single large bunch, then separating near the city to simultaneously attack three separate targets that were several miles apart. My plane was in the last of the three elements turning in, and as we neared our IP, the initial point from which we would begin our bomb run, I looked off into the distance to see what was taking place with the other formations. The instant I looked, I glimpsed far off amid black bursts of flak a plane in formation with an orange glow of fire on its wing. And the instant I spied the fire, I saw the wing break off and the plane nose over and fall straight down, like a boulder – rotating slowly with its remaining wing, but straight down. There was no possibility of parachutes. Then we made the turn toward our target and we were in it ourselves.

  The very first bursts of flak aimed at us were at an accurate height, and that was a deadly sign. We could hear the explosions. I have since read of the tactic developed by the Germans of sending a monitor plane out to fly alongside our bombers and radio our exact altitude and speed to the anti-aircraft batteries below, and it’s possible they were doing it that day. Soberly and tensely, I did what I had to – we all did. When I observed the bomb-bay doors of the lead bombardier opening, I opened mine; when I saw his bombs begin to go, I toggled away mine; when the indicator on my dial registered that all our bombs were away, I announced on the intercom that our bombs were away. When a gunner in the rear looking down into the bomb-bay announced that the bomb-bay was clear, I flipped the switch that closed the doors. And then our whole formation of six planes wrenched away upward at full throttle into a steep and twisting climb. And then the bottom of the plane just seemed to drop out: we were falling, and I found myself pinned helplessly to the top of the bombardier’s compartment, with my flak helmet squeezed against the ceiling. What I did not know (it was reconstructed for me later) was that one of the two men at the controls, the co-pilot, gripped by the sudden fear that our plane was about to stall, seized the controls to push them forward and plunged us into a sharp descent, a dive, that brought us back down into the level of the flak.

  I had no power to move, not even a finger. And I believed with all my heart and quaking soul that my life was ending and that we were going down, like the plane on fire I had witnessed plummeting only a few minutes before. I had no time for anything but terror. And then just as suddenly – I think I would have screamed had I been able to – we levelled out and began to climb away again from the flak bursts, and now I was flattened against the floor, trying frantically to grasp something to hold on to when there was nothing. And in another few seconds we were clear and edging back into formation with the rest of the planes. But as I regained balance and my ability to move, I heard in the ears of my headphones the most unnatural and sinister of sounds: silence, dead silence. And I was petrified again. Then I recognized, dangling loosely before me, the jack to my headset. It had torn free from the outlet. When I plugged myself back in, a shrill bedlam of voices was clamouring in my ears, with a wail over all the rest repeating on the intercom that the bombardier wasn’t answering. ‘The bombardier doesn’t answer!’ ‘I’m the bombardier,’ I broke in immediately. ‘And I’m all right.’ ‘Then go back and help him, help the gunner. He’s hurt.’

  It was our top gunner who was wounded, and his station was in the front section of the plane just behind the pilot’s flight deck. But so deeply, over time, have the passages in the novel entrenched themselves in me that I am tempted even now to think of the wounded man as the radio gunner in the rear. Our gunner was right there on the floor in front of me when I moved back through the crawlway from my bombardier’s compartment, and so was the large oval wound in his thigh where a piece of flak – a small one, judging from the entrance site on the inside – had blasted all the way through. I saw the open flesh with shock. I had no choice but to do what I had to do next. Overcoming a tremendous wave of nausea and revulsion that was close to paralysing, I delicately touched the torn and bleeding leg, and after the first touch, I was able to proceed with composure.

  Although there was a lot of blood puddling about, I could tell from my Boy Scout days – I had earned a merit badge in first aid – that no artery was punctured and thus there was no need for a tourniquet. I followed the obvious procedure. With supplies from the first-aid kit, I heavily salted the whole open wound with sulphanilamide powder. I opened and applied a sterile compress, maybe two – enough to close and to cover everything injured. Then I bandaged him carefully. I did the same with the small hole on the inside of his thigh. When he exclaimed that his leg was starting to hurt him, I gave him a shot of morphine – I may have given him two if the first didn’t serve quickly enough to soothe us both. When he said he was starting to feel cold, I told him we would soon be back on the field and he was going to be all right. Truthfully, I hadn’t the slightest idea where we were, for my attention had been totally concentrated on him.

  With a wounded man on board, we were given priority in landing. The flight surgeon and his medical assistants and an ambulance were waiting to the side at the end of the runway. They took him off my hands. I might have seemed a hero and been treated as something of a small hero for a short while, but I didn’t feel like one. They were trying to kill me, and I wanted to go home. That they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation. They were trying to kill me.

  I was frightened on every mission after that one, even the certified milk runs. It could have been about then that I began crossing my fingers each time we took off and saying in silence a little prayer. It was my private ritual.

  Michael Ondaatje

  THE LAST MEDIEVAL WAR

  The following extract, taken from Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992), describes that peculiar war fought against the retreating German troops in Italy, and shows the perspective
of a young Sikh sapper with the Eighth Army, who in the middle of war and destruction is fascinated by the achievements of Western civilization.

  Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film of Ondaatje’s novel amplified the themes of internationalism in the book and made memorable pictures of the scene described here, particularly when the sapper repeats the trick for a Canadian nurse.

  THE LAST MEDIEVAL war was fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944. Fortress towns on great promontories which had been battled over since the eighth century had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them. Around the outcrops of rocks were the traffic of stretchers, butchered vineyards, where, if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sansepolcro, Anghiari. And then the coast.

  Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Americans and Indians and Australians and Canadians advanced north, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously considered the pouring of hot oil from battlements.

  Medieval scholars were pulled out of Oxford colleges and flown into Umbria. Their average age was sixty. They were billeted with troops, and in meetings with strategic command they kept forgetting the invention of the airplane. They spoke of towns in terms of the art in them. At Monterchi there was the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, located in the chapel next to the town graveyard. When the thirteenth-century castle was finally taken during the spring rains, troops were billeted under the high dome of the church and slept by the stone pulpit where Hercules slays the Hydra. There was only bad water. Many died of typhoid and other fevers. Looking up with service binoculars in the Gothic church at Arezzo soldiers would come upon their contemporary faces in the Piero della Francesca frescoes. The Queen of Sheba conversing with King Solomon. Nearby a twig from the Tree of Good and Evil inserted into the mouth of the dead Adam. Years later this queen would realize that the bridge over the Siloam was made from the wood of this sacred tree.