War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  The novelists’ techniques evolved as the wars themselves become different, and to some extent the literary style was affected by the military circumstances. Many English novelists of the Great War were acting as auxiliary reporters: ‘Look,’ they were saying, ‘no one really told you before what it was like’ – and their ambitions were essentially journalistic. Those who went artistically further found what they could do constrained by the static nature of trench warfare. It is not surprising that, not only surveying an unprecedented human holocaust but watching it from the hole in the ground for months on end, these men produced such introspective books.

  The Second World War brought, superficially, a completely different set of problems and responses. The combatants were unillusioned from the start. They knew how gruesome war would be, they knew that they had been dropped into it by inept politicians, but in place of the innocent patriotism of their fathers they had a proper moral cause to fight for; or at the very least, they were defending their homes. This was an inter-continental war fought in the jungle, the desert, by sea and by air. There was much less problem here about getting word home of what was going on; the difficulty was more that there was so much happening on so many different fronts that many voices and their stories were in danger of going unheard. To novelists, however, this multiplicity was an advantage, and made this the easiest war to write about. In the 1950s Alistair MacLean chose the Atlantic Convoys, in the 1960s John Fowles the German occupation of a Greek island; as late as 1995 Robert Harris found secret dramas at Bletchley. The growth of air war, of radar and the improvement of communications made this, frankly, more exciting than the trenches; and all novelists from Allied countries could approach the subject with a certain moral ease denied to Heinrich Boll or Shusaku Endo.

  Writing from Vietnam became different again. Like the First World War, this proved a difficult experience to digest, and it was some time before American film-makers, in particular, were able to approach the subject. The amount of information had increased and so had access to it, particularly by television camera; but the combat was contained, peculiar and morally doubtful: drafted young civilians fighting a guerrilla war from helicopter gunships with napalm in a country they had never heard of . . . this was not Normandy or Iwo Jima. American writers eventually seemed to agree a strategy to deal with it, and it seems to have been by recourse to what you might call a rock’n’roll style. When you read American accounts of Vietnam, it is very hard not to hear in them the tones of Haight Ashbury, of Jerry Rubin and the Yippies and the entire fusion of high and popular culture that was taking place in America at the time. The results are both shocking and poignant. It was as though Wyoming and Georgia, so reluctantly transplanted to the undergrowth of Vietnam, decided on its return that from now on it would speak its own demotic; that if Washington had sent them there, from now on Washington would hear about it in their way, in their language. The literary craft of Larry Heinemann and Philip Caputo is far subtler than that, of course; but there is something insistently democratic in the way these people wrote which is analogous to the low-key yet haunting inscriptions of the Vietnam Memorial itself.

  What will come from Bosnia or Kosovo? The rhetoric of American commanders has become infected by the language of Nintendo. When General Norman Schwarzkopf declared of the Iraqi army in 1991 that he was going to ‘cut it off, then kill it’, he may have been making a reference to Hannibal’s action at Cannae, but his private soldiers ignorantly used the language of the video game, while the Nato commanders in the Kosovo conflict seemed to believe that war could actually be waged as at a games console, safe from harm, with only the enemy targets open to damage. It is possible to envisage on the ground in bombed Belgrade or mutilated Kosovo the dramatically complex circumstances that might give rise to fiction in due course, but you feel it would be certain to come from those countries and not from the ranks of the arm’s length Nato air forces. Perhaps that is unfair. The story of a troubled pilot who has inadvertently bombed the refugees he is meant to help, attacked the liberation army who are his allies or destroyed the embassy of a non-engaged enemy country is not without potential.

  As I write these words at the end of May 1999, it is completely impossible to predict what will happen in the Balkans. There could be a belated Nato ground invasion in the summer; bombing alone might eventually cause Milosevic to surrender; there could be a diplomatic compromise; the fighting could disastrously spill over into neighbouring countries. All these possible outcomes have their expert backers in the press and the sheer unknowability of it all suggests another reason why war has attracted novelists.

  As serious fiction has moved further from plot and incident, the reader’s hunger for books that impose an artistic and comforting pattern on the random events of life is less often satisfied. War can still deal with big events, while violent accidents or sudden reversals are considered melodramatic in ordinary fiction. Only in a war novel can you respectably kill off your main character with a stray sniper’s bullet, yet such deaths are in some way emblematic, in extreme form, of the inexplicable randomness of life events as we experience them from day to day in peace. A parent who has lost a child in a car accident may find greater affinity with the narrative emergencies of people in a wartime novel than in one that deals with a married woman’s failed love affair or a sensitive young man’s sexual awakening.

  It still seems to me strange, when I come to think of it, that there are not more war books.

  The bulk of the hard work that has gone into this anthology has been done by my co-editor Jörg Hensgen; his reading, researching, editing and organising have been prodigious. While I am happy to accept the blame for any shortcomings, the credit for any strengths this book may have is more likely to be his. I confess that occasionally during our collaboration I salved my guilt at the inequity of our contributions by reflecting that I was the first male member of my family for more than 100 years who, when confronted by a German of the same generation, had at least not tried to kill him.

  Sebastian Faulks

  May 1999

  THE VINTAGE BOOK

  OF WAR STORIES

  edited by

  Sebastian Faulks

  and

  Jörg Hensgen

  Bruce Chatwin

  VOLUNTEERS

  When the First World War broke out in August 1914, both the volunteers who marched through the streets of Paris, London and Berlin, and the crowds who cheered them believed that the war would be over by Christmas. The ‘Spirit of 1914’ was still powerful four months later when the war reached the small Welsh village of Rhulen, as described here by Bruce Chatwin in his novel On the Black Hill (1982).

  THEN THE WAR came.

  For years, the tradesmen in Rhulen had said there was going to be war with Germany, though nobody knew what war would mean. There had been no real war since Waterloo, and everyone agreed that with railways and modern guns this war would either be very terrible, or over very quickly.

  On the 7th of August 1914, Amos Jones and his sons were scything thistles when a man called over the hedge that the Germans had marched into Belgium, and rejected England’s ultimatum. A recruiting office, he said, had opened in the Town Hall. About twenty local lads had joined.

  ‘More fool them,’ Amos shrugged, and glared downhill into Herefordshire.

  All three went on with their scything, but the boys looked very jittery when they came in for supper.

  Mary had been pickling beetroot, and her apron was streaked with purple stains.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re far too young to fight. Besides, it’ll probably be over by Christmas.’

  Winter came, and there was no end to the war. Mr Gomer Davies started preaching patriotic sermons and, one Friday, sent word to The Vision, bidding them to a lantern lecture, at five o’clock, in the Congregation Hall.

  The sky was deepening from crimson to gunmetal. Two limousines were parked in the lane; and a crowd of farm boys, all in their Sunday best, we
re chatting to the chauffeurs or peering through the windows at the fur rugs and leather upholstery. The boys had never seen such automobiles at close quarters. In a nearby shed, an electric generator was purring.

  Mr Gomer Davies stood in the vestibule, welcoming all comers with a handshake and muddy smile. The war, he said, was a Crusade for Christ.

  Inside the Hall, a coke stove was burning and the windows had misted up. A line of electric bulbs spread a film of yellow light over the planked and varnished walls. There were plenty of Union Jacks strung up, and a picture of Lord Kitchener.

  The magic lantern stood in the middle of the aisle. A white sheet had been tacked up to serve as a screen; and a khaki-clad Major, one arm in a sling, was confiding his box of glass slides to the lady projectionist.

  Veiled in cigar smoke, the principal speaker, Colonel Bickerton, had already taken his seat on the stage and was having a jaw with a Boer War veteran. He extended his game leg to the audience. A silk hat sat on the green baize tablecloth, beside a water-carafe and a tumbler.

  Various ministers of God – all of whom had sunk their differences in a blaze of patriotism – went up to pay their respects to the squire, and show concern for his comfort.

  ‘No, I’m quite comfortable, thank you.’ The Colonel enunciated every syllable to perfection. ‘Thank you for looking after me so well. Pretty good turnout, I see. Most encouraging, what?’

  The hall was full. Lads with fresh, weatherbeaten faces crammed the benches or elbowed forward to get a better look at the Bickertons’ daughter, Miss Isobel – a brunette with moist red lips and moist hazel eyes, who sat below the platform, composed and smiling, in a silver fox-fur cape. From her dainty hat there spurted a grey-pink glycerined ostrich plume. At her elbow crouched a young man with carroty hair and mouth agape.

  It was Jim the Rock.

  The Joneses took their seats on a bench at the back. Mary could feel her husband, tense and angry beside her. She was afraid he was going to make a scene.

  The vicar of Rhulen opened the session by proposing a vote of thanks to Mr Gomer Davies for the use of the Hall, and electricity.

  Rumbles of ‘Hear! Hear!’ sounded round the room. He went on to sketch the origins of the war.

  Few of the hill-farmers understood why the murder of an Archduke in the Balkans should have triggered off the invasion of Belgium; but when the vicar spoke of the ‘peril to our beloved Empire’ people began to sit up.

  ‘There can be no rest,’ he raised his voice, ‘until this cancer has been ripped out of European society. The Germans will squeal like every bully when cornered. But there must be no compromise, no shaking hands with the devil. It is useless to moralize with an alligator. Kill it!’

  The audience clapped and the clergyman sat down.

  Next in turn was the Major, who had been wounded, he said, at Mons. He began with a joke about ‘making the Rhine whine’ – whereupon the Colonel perked up and said, ‘Never cared for Rhine wines myself. Too fruity, what?’

  The Major then lifted his swagger stick.

  ‘Lights!’ he called, and the lights went off.

  One by one, a sequence of blurred images flashed across the screen – of Tommies in camp, Tommies on parade, Tommies on the cross-Channel ferry; Tommies in a French café; Tommies in trenches; Tommies fixing bayonets, and Tommies ‘going over the top’. Some of the slides were so fuzzy it was hard to tell which was the shadow of Miss Isobel’s plume, and which were shell-bursts.

  The last slide showed an absurd goggle-eyed visage with crows’ wings on its upper lip and a whole golden eagle on its helmet.

  ‘That,’ said the Major, ‘is your enemy – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.’

  There were shouts of ‘String ’im up’ and ‘Shoot ’im to bloody bits!’ – and the Major, also, sat down.

  Colonel Bickerton then eased himself to his feet and apologized for the indisposition of his wife.

  His own son, he said, was fighting in Flanders. And after the stirring scenes they’d just witnessed, he hoped there’d be few shirkers in the district.

  ‘When this war is over,’ he said, ‘there will be two classes of persons in this country. There will be those who were qualified to join the Armed Forces and refrained from doing so . . .’

  ‘Shame!’ shrilled a woman in a blue hat.

  ‘I’m the Number One!’ a young man shouted and stuck up his hand.

  But the Colonel raised his cufflinks to the crowd, and the crowd fell silent:

  ‘. . . .and there will be those who were so qualified and came forward to do their duty to their King, their country . . . and their womenfolk . . .’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ Again the hands arose with fluid grace and, again, the crowd fell silent:

  ‘The last-mentioned class, I need not add, will be the aristocracy of this country – indeed, the only true aristocracy of this country – who, in the evening of their days, will have the consolation of knowing that they have done what England expects of every man: namely, to do his duty . . .’

  ‘What about Wales?’ A sing-song voice sounded to the right of Miss Bickerton; but Jim was drowned in the general hullabaloo.

  Volunteers rushed forward to press their names on the Major. There were shouts of ‘Hip! Hip! Hurrah!’ Other voices broke into song, ‘For they are jolly good fellows . . .’ The woman in the blue hat slapped her son over the face, shrieking, ‘Oh, yes, you will!’ – and a look of childlike serenity had descended on the Colonel.

  He continued, in thrilling tones: ‘Now when Lord Kitchener says he needs you, he means YOU. For each one of you brave young fellows is unique and indispensable. A few moments ago, I heard a voice on my left calling, “What about Wales?”’

  Suddenly, you could hear a pin drop.

  ‘Believe you me, that cry, “What about Wales?” is a cry that goes straight to my heart. For in my veins Welsh blood and English blood course in equal quantities. And that . . . that is why my daughter and I have brought two automobiles here with us this evening. Those of you who wish to enlist in our beloved Herefordshire Regiment may drive with me . . . But those of you, loyal Welshmen, who would prefer to join that other, most gallant regiment, the South Wales Borderers, may go with my daughter and Major Llewellyn-Smythe to Brecon . . .’

  This was how Jim the Rock went to war – for the sake of leaving home, and for a lady with moist red lips and moist hazel-coloured eyes.

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  COULD I BE THE LAST COWARD ON EARTH?

  The narrator of Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) too has volunteered to join the army after seeing soldiers and military bands parading through the streets of Paris. But his feelings of patriotism soon give way to the realization that he has made a big mistake: ‘The music had stopped . . . I was about to clear out. Too late! They’d quietly shut the gate behind us civilians. We were caught like rats.’

  WHEN YOU’RE IN, you’re in. They put us on horseback, and after we’d been on horseback for two months, they put us back on our feet. Maybe because of the expense. Anyway, one morning the colonel was looking for his horse, his orderly had made off with it, nobody knew where to, probably some quiet spot that bullets couldn’t get to as easily as the middle of the road. Because that was exactly where the colonel and I had finally stationed ourselves, with me holding his orderly book while he wrote out his orders.

  Down the road, away in the distance, as far as we could see, there were two black dots, plunk in the middle like us, but they were two Germans and they’d been busy shooting for the last fifteen or twenty minutes.

  Maybe our colonel knew why they were shooting, maybe the Germans knew, but I, so help me, hadn’t the vaguest idea. As far back as I could search my memory, I hadn’t done a thing to the Germans, I’d always been polite and friendly with them. I knew the Germans pretty well, I’d even gone to school in their country when I was little, near Hanover. I’d spoken their language. A bunch of loud-mouthed little halfwits, that’s what they we
re, with pale, furtive eyes like wolves; we’d go out to the woods together after school to feel the girls up, or we’d fire pop-guns or pistols you could buy for four marks. And we drank sugary beer together. But from that to shooting at us right in the middle of the road, without so much as a word of introduction, was a long way, a very long way. If you asked me, they were going too far.

  This war, in fact, made no sense at all. It couldn’t go on.

  Had something weird got into these people? Something I didn’t feel at all? I suppose I hadn’t noticed it . . .

  Anyway, my feelings toward them hadn’t changed. In spite of everything. I’d have liked to understand their brutality, but what I wanted still more, enormously, with all my heart, was to get out of there, because suddenly the whole business looked to me like a great big mistake.

  ‘In a mess like this,’ I said to myself, ‘there’s nothing to be done, all you can do is clear out . . .’

  Over our heads, two millimetres, maybe one millimetre from our temples, those long searching lines of steel, that bullets make when they’re out to kill you, were whistling through the hot summer air.

  I’d never felt so useless as I did amidst all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery.

  I was only twenty at the time. Deserted farms in the distance, empty wide-open churches, as if the peasants had gone out for the day to attend a fair at the other end of the district, leaving everything they owned with us for safe-keeping, their countryside, their carts with the shafts in the air, their fields, their barn yards, the roads, the trees, even the cows, a chained dog, the works. Leaving us free to do as we pleased while they were gone. Nice of them, in a way. ‘Still,’ I said to myself, ‘if they hadn’t gone somewhere else, if there were still somebody here, I’m sure we wouldn’t be behaving so badly! So disgustingly! We wouldn’t dare in front of them!’ But there wasn’t a soul to watch us! Nobody but us, like newlyweds that get down to the dirty business when all the people have gone home.