War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I have always admired your perspicacity, mother, but I must confess that you would really be quite extraordinary if you had complete insight into the reasons which govern the Marshal’s behaviour. Supposing, of course, that he has reasons. There is no end to the senseless discussions as to whether he thinks this or that, whether he has been won over by Germany or whether he is playing a double game. But my personal opinion is that he does not think at all.’

  ‘In other words, that he is in his dotage?’

  ‘If you like to put it that way.’

  M. Lardenne raised his hands to his face. ‘Jacques!’ he murmured reproachfully.

  ‘And I would go further still,’ continued the young man. ‘Look at the maudlin comedy that is being played in France today: the visits of the victor of Verdun to the martyr cities: acclamations to order for the “grand old man”, kids presenting him with posies, craftsmen with examples of their craft in wood or copper: idiotic refrains bleated in the schools: tricolour portraits: Frankish battle-axes in shop windows denuded of everything else: the opportune and comforting revival of Péguy and of Corneille*9, the whole sickening display of sentimentality, the maudlin comedy around an old fellow in his second childhood who imagines himself to be the Maid of Orleans – you will pardon me, but I find it grotesque and hypocritical, and I beg your permission to hold aloof.’

  ‘Jacques!’ said M. Lardenne again, genuinely distressed.

  The restaurant was what one calls ‘luxurious’, and the affluence of a clientele which was too well dressed, too showy, too chic, made it appear vulgar; this was accentuated by the cinema décor of shining glass, nickel tubes and parchment-shaded lamps . . . On closer examination, the guests were frankly despicable, even more despicable than the waiters. Only the Germans, soldiers as well as officers, had some dignity. The women seemed all to be more or less demimondaines. The young people, both boys and girls, looked like illustrations in a fashion paper. All the men had the appearance of successful dagos, with their fat, flabby cheeks, their listless and yet rapacious air. For most of them, the end of 1940 had been the dawn of their Golden Age. Now they were living in the midst of it, and every little tart had become a Danaë. If you strayed into one of the eating houses de luxe or into a first-class compartment on one of the main railway lines during the years 1942 and 1943, you could hardly escape the sudden revelation that France deserved to be destroyed. But unfortunately it was not quite as simple as all that: the modest and respectable old ladies wedged against the lavatories of third-class compartments in suburban trains and pressing a bottle of milk against their hearts, precious milk which they had obtained by dint of humble supplications from some millionaire peasant farmer in the Loiret or the Seine-et-Marne, did they not furnish a living proof that France did not deserve to be destroyed?

  Gérard did not like the restaurant. But he had invited Hélène to dinner and the only way of getting a decent meal was to take it in one of these night resorts. One cannot invite anyone to a meal consisting of boiled spinach and dry cheese. The young man disliked the idea of contributing to the prosperity of the black marketeers; on this question, his principles resembled those of Cato. But all the same, when one wanted to give a girl a treat, and besides, if one did not wish to appear a skinflint, one had to forget one’s moral principles for the time being and accept a compromise with the indignities of the epoch. Finally there exist certain organic laws of a fairly intransigent nature concerning the minimum nourishment required to maintain human life. Cato would certainly have died of malnutrition in 1942–1943.

  Hélène was consulting the menu. In a detached and epicurean manner, she announced her choice: precisely the least expensive items on the list of dishes. Gérard laughed: taking the menu card out of her hands, he ordered something more substantial. ‘And a bottle of red Médoc,’ he added to the maître d’hôtel. Hélène protested, alleging that she drank only water, but Gérard insisted. The maître d’hôtel, an old rascal who was not easily taken in, considered the two young people with affectionate contempt, his pencil poised in mid-air. When the Médoc had been definitely ordered, he bowed and said ‘Oui, Monsieur.’ Médoc at 250 francs a bottle decidedly called for deference. ‘And see that it is well chambré,’ added Gérard, in the tones of an old gastronome who is accustomed to having the best. The maître d’hôtel suppressed a smile and bowed once more: ‘But naturally, Monsieur,’ he said and walked away majestically.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  EVERYBODY IN LONDON WAS IN LOVE

  In her novel The Heat of the Day (1949) Elizabeth Bowen describes that peculiar atmosphere in London during the bombing raids of the autumn of 1940, when a new intimacy evolved among the people of the city. While the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’ and the cockney resilience became self-advertising mechanisms of defence, there were more louche, romantic and desperate undercurrents.

  THEY HAD MET one another, at first not very often, throughout that heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had any season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London, the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of street made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phantasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London’s organic power – somewhere here was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, forced for itself new channels.

  The very soil of the city at this time seemed to generate more strength: in parks the outsize dahlias, velvet and wine, and the trees on which each vein in each yellow leaf stretched out perfect against the sun blazoned out the idea of the finest hour. Parks suddenly closed because of time-bombs – drifts of leaves in the empty deck chairs, birds afloat on the dazzlingly silent lakes – presented, between the railings which still girt them, mirages of repose. All this was beheld each morning more light-headedly: sleeplessness disembodied the lookers-on.

  In reality there were no holidays; few were free however light-headedly to wander. The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality. You dared not envisage sleep. Apathetic, the injured and dying in the hospitals watched light change on walls which might fall tonight. Those rendered homeless sat where they had been sent; or, worse, with the obstinacy of animals retraced their steps to look for what was no longer there. Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as all that. Absent from the routine which had been life, they stamped upon that routine their absence – not knowing who the dead were you could not know which might be the staircase somebody for the first time was not mounting this morning, or at which street corner the newsvendor missed a face, or which trains and buses in the homegoing rush were this evening lighter by at least one passenger.

  These unknown dead reproached those left living not by their own death, which might any night be shared, but by their unknownness, which could not be mended now. Who had the right to mourn them, not having cared that t
hey had lived? So, among the crowds still eating, drinking, working, travelling, halting, there began to be an instinctive movement to break down indifference while there was still time. The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts. Strangers saying ‘Good night, good luck’, to each other at street corners, as the sky first blanched then faded with evening, each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown.

  That autumn of 1940 was to appear, by two autumns later, apocryphal, more far away than peace. No planetary round was to bring again that particular conjunction of life and death; that particular psychic London was to be gone for ever; more bombs would fall, but not on the same city. War moved from the horizon to the map. And it was now, when you no longer saw, heard, smelled war, that a deadening acclimatization to it began to set in. The first generation of ruins, cleaned up, shored up, began to weather – in daylight they took their places as a norm of the scene; the dangerless nights of September two years later blotted them out. It was from this new insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial. Reverses, losses, deadlocks now almost unnoticed bred one another; every day the news hammered one more nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel. Faith came down to a slogan, desperately reworded to catch the eye, requiring to be pasted each time more strikingly on to hoardings and bases of monuments . . . No, no virtue was to be found in the outward order of theirs: happy those who could draw from some inner source.

  For Stella, her early knowing of Robert was associated with the icelike tinkle of broken glass being swept up among the crisping leaves, and with the charred freshness of every morning. She could recapture that 1940 autumn only in sensations; thoughts, if there had been any, could not be found again. She remembered the lightness, after her son had left, of loving no particular person now left in London – till one morning she woke to discover that lightness gone. That was the morning when, in the instant before opening her eyes, she saw Robert’s face with a despairing hallucinatory clearness. When she did open her eyes, it had been to stare round her room in sunshine certain that he was dead. Something final had happened, in any case. That autumn, she was living in lodgings in a house in a square: raising the sash of her bedroom window – which, glassless since two or three nights ago, ran up with a phantom absence of weight – she leaned out and called to the square’s gardener, impassively at work just inside the railings with rake and barrow. Had he, had the old man, any idea where the bombs had fallen last night? He said, some said Kilburn, some King’s Cross. She shouted, ‘Then, not Westminster?’ but he shrugged his shoulders, once again turned his back. The sun stood so high over the opposite roof-line that Stella looked at her watch – yes, the sun was right; she had overslept. So far, nothing had happened to anybody she knew, or even to anyone she knew knew – today, however, tingled all over from some shock which could be the breaking down of immunity. The nonexistence of her window, the churchyard hush of the square, the grit which had drifted on to her dressing-table all became ominous for the first time. More than once she reached for the telephone which was out of order. Trying to dress in haste in the blinding sunshine, she threw away any time she had gained by standing still while something inside her head, never quite a thought, made felt a sort of imprisoned humming. Could this nervousness be really nothing more than fatigue?

  More loss had not seemed possible after that fall of France. On through the rest of that summer in which she had not rallied from that psychological blow, and forward into this autumn of the attack on London, she had been the onlooker with nothing more to lose – out of feeling as one can be out of breath. She had had the sensation of being on furlough from her own life. Throughout these September raids she had been awed, exhilarated, cast at the very most into a sort of abstract of compassion – only what had been very small indeed, a torn scrap of finery, for instance, could draw tears. To be at work built her up, and when not at work she was being gay in company whose mood was at the pitch of her own – society became lovable; it had the temperament of the stayers-on in London. The existence, surrounded by one another, of these people she nightly saw was fluid, easy, holding inside itself a sort of ideality of pleasure. These were campers in rooms of draughty dismantled houses or corners of fled-from flats – it could be established, roughly, that the wicked had stayed and the good had gone. This was the new society of one kind of wealth, resilience, living how it liked – people whom the climate of danger suited, who began, even, all to look a little alike, as they might in the sun, snows, and altitude of the same sports station, or browning along the same beach in the south of France. The very temper of pleasures lay in their chanciness, in the canvas-like impermanence of their settings, in their being off-time – to and fro between bars and grills, clubs and each other’s places moved the little shoal through the noisy nights. Faces came and went. There was a diffused gallantry in the atmosphere, an unmarriedness: it came to be rumoured about the country, among the self-banished, the uneasy, the put-upon and the safe, that everybody in London was in love – which was true, if not in the sense the country meant. There was plenty of everything in London – attention, drink, time, taxis, most of all space.

  Into that intimate and loose little society of the garrison Stella and Robert both gravitated, and having done so could hardly fail to meet. They for the first time found themselves face to face in a bar or club – afterwards they could never remember which. Both were in their element, to which to have met instantaneously added more. It was a characteristic of that life in the moment and for the moment’s sake that one knew people well without knowing much about them: vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past; life-stories were shed as so much superfluous weight – this for different reasons suited both her and him. (Information, that he had before the war lived, worked abroad, in a branch of his father’s or a friend of his father’s business accumulated gradually, later on.) At the first glance they saw in each other’s faces a flash of promise, a background of mystery. While his eyes, in which mirror-refracted lighting intensified a curious blue, followed the one white lock slowly back from her forehead, she found herself not so much beginning to study as in the middle of studying this person – communicative, excitable – from whom she only turned away to wave good-bye to the friend who had brought her across the room.

  That gesture of good-bye, so perfunctory, was a finalness not to appear till later. It comprehended the room and everybody, everything in it which had up to now counted as her life: it was an unconscious announcement of the departure she was about to take – a first and last wave, across widening water, from a liner. Remembered, her fleeting sketch of a gesture came to look prophetic; for ever she was to see, photographed as though it had been someone else’s, her hand up. The bracelet slipping down and sleeve falling back, against a dissolving background of lights and faces, were vestiges, and the last, of her solidity. She returned to Robert – both having caught a breath, they fixed their eyes expectantly on each other’s lips. Both waited, both spoke at once, unheard.

  Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire – nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated by the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.

  It was the demolition of an entire moment: he and she stood at attention till the glissade stopped. What they had both been saying, or
been on the point of saying, neither of them ever now were to know. Most first words have the nature of being trifling; theirs from having been lost began to have the significance of a lost clue. What they next said, what they said instead, they forgot: there are questions which if not asked at the start are not asked later; so those they never did ask. The top had been knocked off their first meeting – perhaps later they exonerated themselves a little because of that. Nothing but the rising exhilaration of kindred spirits was, after all, to immortalize for them those first hours: and even forward into the time when meetings came to count for too much to be any more left to chance, they were still liking each other for their alikeness’ sake. Into their attraction to one another entered their joy in attraction, in everything that was flattering and uncertain. There existed between them the complicity of brother and sister twins, counterpart flowerings of a temperament identical at least with regard to love. That unprecedented autumn, in which in everything round them feeling stood at full tide, made the movement of their own hearts imperceptible: in their first weeks of knowing each other they did not know how much might be the time, how much themselves. The extraordinary battle in the sky transfixed them; they might have stayed for ever on the eve of being in love.

  Alistair MacLean

  FIRE ON THE WATER

  Alistair MacLean’s novel HMS Ulysses (1955) tells the story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk, carrying supplies for the Russian allies. It is a voyage through bitter cold and storm, with the ships in permanent danger of being attacked by German U-boats lying in wait somewhere in the icy waters of the Arctic.