by Pete Ayrton
Any selection of writing on the First World War has certain criteria. To give No Man’s Land as international a perspective as possible, translations were undertaken of works that had previously not been translated. The selection was limited to works written before 1945; this, like most criteria, is arbitrary, but I felt that the experience of the Second World War gave writers a very different perspective from which to assess the First and so marked a valid cut-off point. And priority was given to fiction and to a lesser extent memoirs – though it is clear that the boundary between them is fluid – much of the fiction about the war is autobiographical. No poetry was selected since the war poetry has already been well represented in many excellent anthologies and was relatively well known.*
No Man’s Land begins with the declaration of war being declared in Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire:
‘It’s the French revolution all over again.’
‘Crowned heads beware!’ murmurs another.
And a third man adds:
‘Perhaps it is the war to end all wars.’
There is a pause, then a few brows shake, still pale from the wan tragedy of a night of perspiring insomnia.
‘An end to war! Can that be? An end to war! The world’s affliction is incurable.’
At the end is the narrator of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front:
But perhaps all these thoughts of mine are just melancholy and confusion, which will be blown away like dust when I am standing underneath the poplars once again, and listening to the rustle of their leaves. It cannot have vanished entirely, that tenderness that troubles our blood, the uncertainty, the worry, all the things to come, the thousand faces of the future, the music of dreams and books, the rustling and the idea of women. All this cannot have collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels.
The trees here glow bright and gold, the rowan berries are red against the leaves, white country roads run on towards the horizon, and the canteens are all buzzing like beehives with rumours of peace.
(All Quiet on the Western Front, page 200)
In between, there is the carnage and destruction of the four years of a war that determined the history of the 20th century. The war changed all aspects of people’s lives – it changed the relations between the classes, between the sexes and between races in Europe and beyond. It led to the growth of the evils that spread through Europe in the following decades: fascism, communism, anti-Semitism, and genocide. And it redrew geographical boundaries giving the victors the spoils of victory and amputating the territories of the defeated. This geographical settling of scores was fundamentally unstable – it rewarded the more powerful, it showed that might is right. And its creation of ethnic minorities all over Europe led to many of the major conflicts of the last hundred years, including, of course, the Second World War.
Editing this book has been an up-and-down journey that required much reading that chronicled the relentless brutality of mankind, but it also provided many occasions of wondrous surprise that showed the power of human beings to express solidarity and kindness in conditions of great adversity. It also enabled me to discover authors who realized they were writing on the cusp of an epochal moment in which change – in its social, political and artistic forms – was possible and who fully embraced the moment. Carlo Emilio Gadda and Mary Borden were the contemporaries of Stravinsky and Webern, Klee and Leger, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe – but that is another story.
One hundred years after the beginning of the war, the celebration of the anniversary, a building block of our national identity, is contested terrain. If this anthology helps to remind us that the war was truly international, then it will have achieved its aim. I hope that reading the anthology is as rewarding an experience as it was for me to compile it.
*Where the selected piece of writing has no title I have given it one as a guide to what it is about. Other titles are provided by the authors. Some writers from the period use ellipses to indicate a pause or a change of place or tone: they do not indicate omissions (Ed.).
HENRI BARBUSSE
THE VISION
from Under Fire
translated by Robin Buss
THE DENT DU MIDI, the Aiguille Verte and Mont Blanc stare down at the bloodless faces emerging from under the blankets lined up along the gallery of the sanatorium.
On the first floor of the palatial hospital, this terrace with its balcony of carved wood supported by a veranda is isolated in space and overhangs the world.
The fine wool blankets – red, green, havana brown or white – with emaciated faces emerging from under them, and radiant eyes, are still. Silence reigns over the chaises longues. Someone coughs. Then nothing more is heard but the turning of the pages of a book at long, regular intervals; or a murmured request and hushed reply from a bed to the one beside it; or sometimes on the balustrade, the flapping like a fan of a venturesome crow, a fugitive from the flocks that make rosaries of black pearls in the transparent void.
Silence reigns. In any case, those people, rich and independent, who have come here from all parts of the earth, struck down by the same misfortune, have lost the habit of speech. They have turned in on themselves and think about their lives and deaths.
A maid appears in the gallery. She walks softly; she is dressed in white. She is bringing newspapers which she hands around.
‘That’s it,’ says the first one to unfold his paper. ‘War has been declared.’
Expected though it was, the news causes a kind of astonishment because those who hear it sense its extreme importance.
These men are cultured and intelligent, their minds deepened by suffering and reflection, detached from things and almost from life, as distant from the rest of the human species as if they already belonged to posterity, looking far ahead towards the incomprehensible land of the living and the mad.
‘Austria is committing a crime,’ the Austrian says.
‘France must win,’ says the Englishman.
‘I hope that Germany will be defeated,’ says the German.
They settle back under the blankets, on their pillows, facing the mountain peaks and the sky. But despite the purity of space, the silence is filled with the news that they have just received.
‘War!’
A few of those lying there break the silence, repeating the word under their breath and considering that this is perhaps the greatest event of modem times, perhaps of all time. And the annunciation even casts a kind of confused and murky veil over the clear landscape before their eyes.
The calm expanses of the valley dotted with villages pink as roses and soft pastures, the splendid outlines of the mountains, the black lace of the pine trees and the white lace of the eternal snows, are filled with the bustling of mankind.
Multitudes teem in clearly defined masses. On the fields attacks sweep forward, wave after wave, then come to a standstill; houses are gutted like men and towns like houses; villages appear in crumpled white as though they had fallen on to the earth from the sky; frightful loads of dead and wounded men alter the shape of the plains.
You can see every country where the borders are eaten away with massacres constantly tearing new soldiers from its heart, full of strength, full of blood; your gaze follows these living tributaries for the river of the dead.
North, south and west, battles rage, on all sides, in the distance. You can turn this way or that; there is not a single horizon on which there is no war.
One of the pale men watching rises on his elbow, counting and reckoning the present and future combatants: thirty million soldiers. Another man stammers, his eyes full of slaughter:
‘Two armies engaged in battle are one great army committing suicide.’
‘They shouldn’t have done it,’ says the deep, hollow voice of the first man in the row.
But another man says:
‘It’s the French Revolution all over again.’
‘Crowned heads beware!’ murmurs another.
&
nbsp; And a third man adds:
‘Perhaps it is the war to end wars.’
There is a pause, then a few brows shake, still pale from the wan tragedy of a night of perspiring insomnia.
‘An end to war! Can that be? An end to war! The world’s affliction is incurable.’
Someone coughs. Then the immense calm of meadows under the sun where bright cattle softly shine and black woods and green fields and blue horizons submerge the vision, quelling the glow of the fire that is consuming and breaking the old world. An infinite silence covers the murmur of the hatred and suffering of the dark teeming of the world. The speakers slip back, one by one, into themselves, preoccupied with the mystery of their lungs and the health of their bodies.
But when evening is about to fall across the valley, a storm breaks over the massif of Mont Blanc.
No one is allowed out on this dangerous evening when one can feel the last waves of wind break under the vast veranda, right beneath this port where they have taken refuge.
These men, severely smitten, eaten away by an inner wound, stare at the confusion of the elements. They watch the thunder break over the mountain, lifting up the clouds on the horizon like a sea, each clap of the storm throwing out at once into the dusk a column of fire and a column of cloud. They turn their ashen, hollow-cheeked faces to follow the eagles circling in the sky that watch the earth from on high through rings of mist.
‘Stop the war!’ they are saying. ‘Stop the storms!’
But the watchers on the threshold of the world, free of partisan passion, free of prejudices, blindness and the shackles of tradition, also have a vague sense of the simplicity of things and of gaping possibilities…
The one at the end of the row exclaims:
‘You can see things, down there, things rearing up!’
‘Yes… They’re like living things.’
‘Sort of plants…’
‘Sort of men.’
Now, in the sinister light of the storm beneath black dishevelled clouds, dragged and spread across the earth like wicked angels, they seem to see a great livid white plain extend before them. In their vision, figures rise up out of the plain, which is composed of mud and water, and clutch at the surface of the ground, blinded and crushed with mire, like survivors from some monstrous shipwreck. These men seem to them to be soldiers. The plain is vast, riven by long parallel canals and pitted with waterholes, and the shipwrecked men trying to extract themselves from it are a great multitude… But the thirty million slaves who have been thrown on top of one another by crime and error into this war of mud raise human faces in which the glimmer of an idea is forming. The future is in the hands of these slaves and one can see that the old world will be changed by the alliance that will one day be formed between those whose number and whose suffering is without end.
Henri Barbusse was born near Paris in 1873. He enlisted in the French army in 1914 and served for 17 months until, suffering from a lung condition, dysentery and exhaustion, he was invalided out of the front lines and reassigned to a desk job. Although he was a supporter of the war in 1914, Barbusse’s months on the front were spent in mud, in filth, amongst the dead and with the constant terror of artillery bombardment; they completely changed his attitude to the war: ‘Only on a battlefield like this, can one have a precise idea of the horror of these great massacres.’ And these experiences shaped Under Fire, the great war classic first published in 1916. It was an instant success; it sold 200,000 copies in its first year of publication and in 1917 won the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honour. Barbusse knew that the book would convey a first-hand experience of the war. But he also hoped that from the carnage would come change.
In 1918, Barbusse moved to Moscow, where he married a Russian woman and joined the Soviet Communist Party. A lifelong communist, Barbusse was involved in the setting up of the World Committee Against War and Fascism in 1933 and, with Romain Rolland, he was active in the attempts to create a proletarian literature influenced by socialist realism. Barbusse never criticized Stalinism and died in Moscow in 1935. This extract is the beginning of Under Fire.
MULK RAJ ANAND
MARSEILLE
from Across the Black Waters
‘WE HAVE REACHED Marsels!’
‘Hip Hip Hurrah!’
The sepoys were shouting excitedly on deck.
Lalu got up from where he sat watching a game of cards and went to see Marseilles.
The sun was on its downward stride on the western horizon as the convoy ships went steaming up towards the coast of France, with their cargo of the first Divisions of Indian troops who had been brought to fight in Europe, a cargo stranger than any they had carried before. The cold afternoon, stirred by a chill breeze from the stormy gulf, lay quivering on the town, which sheltered beneath a few steep rocks.
‘Is the war taking place there then?’ a sepoy asked.
No one answered him, as most of the sepoys did not know where the war was. In fact they had not known where they were going until it was announced in the orders of the day that a message had been intercepted through the ‘telephone without wires’ on the ship, that the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Lord Kitchener, who had once been Commander-in-Chief in Hindustan, had told the House of Lords that two Divisions of the Indian Army were on their way to France. The Lords had clapped their hands, it was said, and had sent their greetings to all brave ranks of the Indian Army. The King-Emperor, too, had sent them a message, reminding them of the personal ties which bound him and his consort, Mary, to the Indians since he had visited India for the Delhi Durbar, congratulating them on their personal devotion to his throne, and assuring them how their one-voiced demand to be foremost in the conflict had touched his heart… The sepoys had been excited by these messages, the edge of their curiosity sharpened by the first authentic news which they had received of their destination. And the lives of the N. C. O.s had become unbearable answering questions, ‘Where is France?’ ‘Is that England?’ ‘Where is the enemy?’ ‘How many miles is it from here?’… Now one of them was asking, ‘Is the war there?’
Lalu felt, however, as if the naive questioner had taken the words out of his own mouth. For the rim of the sky was full of bloody contours, as if the souls of the war dead were going through the agony of being burned in their journey from hell to heaven. The battle might be raging there, though it was foolish to think so, because surely there would have been a sound of guns if the front was so near.
Lest someone should be looking at him and prying into his thoughts he began to walk away towards the prow of the ship.
‘So we have come across the black waters safely,’ he said to himself apprehensively, as if he really expected some calamity, the legendary fate of all those who went beyond the seas, to befall him at any moment. Truly, the black, or rather blue, water seemed uncanny, spreading for thousands of miles. It seemed as if God had spat upon the universe and the spittle had become the sea. The white flecks of the foam on the swell, where wave met wave, seemed like the froth churned out of God’s angry mouth. The swish of the air as the ships tore their way across the rough sea seemed like the fury of the Almighty at the sin which the white men had committed in building their powerful engines of the Iron Age, which transported huge cities of wood and steel across vast spaces, where it was difficult to tell in which direction lay the north, the south, the east or the west.
If his father had been alive and present, he would certainly have prophesied disaster for all those who had crossed the black waters, and he would have regarded this war to which they were going as a curse laid upon the Sahibs for trying to defy nature.
‘But why am I turning superstitious and thinking such thoughts?’ he rebuked himself. He had always defied his father and preened himself on his schooling, and he did not realize that he had inherited many of his father’s qualities, not only the enduring ones such as his short, lithe wiry frame, his love of the land, his generosity, his stubborn pride, and his humour, but also his fai
th and his naivete.
A few sea-gulls were coming out to meet them, and more seemed to be seated on the hills above the bay, but on closer view these proved to be houses.
It was thrilling to be going out on this adventure, he felt, ‘like the pride of the beggar who suddenly finds wealth.’ The smoke from the funnels of the convoy ships before, behind, and on both sides, was talking to the sky. The sea spoke the language of his soul, restless and confused while the wind went bursting with joy in the sun. And the ship was urging him forward into the unknown. He was going to Vilayat after all, England, the glamorous land of his dreams, where the Sahibs came from, where people wore coats and pantaloons and led active, fashionable lives – even, so it was said, the peasants and the poor Sahibs. He wondered what was his destiny.
The rocking of the boat unsteadied his steps a little and there was a strange disturbance inside him which kept welling up and choking him as if he had eaten a frog. He had prided himself on resisting sickness, when almost all the other sepoys had rolled about in their vomit, and hoped he was not going to make a fool of himself now at the end of the journey. Perhaps he had been smoking too many cigarettes, which the Government was distributing free. Or, perhaps, it was the fear of the Unknown, now that they were getting to their destination. But he had slept badly the previous night and had dreamt a weird dream about Nandpur, in which his mother was crying over the body of his dead father, and his brother, Dayal Singh, was rebuking him for running away when they most needed him. Only to him the village seemed far from here now…
‘Oh Lalu! Son of a sea-cow! Let us go and get ready,’ called young Subah, son of Subedar Major Arbel Singh, his round red face flushed as if he had got the direct commission which his father had been negotiating for him all the way, as the boy had been self-importantly telling everyone.
‘You go, I am coming,’ said Lalu evasively, to shake him off, and stood with the hordes of sepoys who leaned on the railings, watching the little tugs which had come out and were pushing and pulling the steamer from where it had slackened over the placid waters of the bay towards the wharves.
