War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  But I remember even then thinking and fearing that we’d come to a day when we too, we rich rich rich Americans, would pay for this mortal sin of waste. We’ve always thought that there was no end to our plenty, that the horn would never dry up. Already I seem to hear the menacing rumblings, like a long-starved stomach. But in Naples in August 1944, we were on the crest of the wave. We? We were Americans, from the best little old country on God’s green earth. And if you don’t believe me, mister, I’ll knock your teeth in . . .

  And I remember well our first facing of the problem that we couldn’t live in Naples as though there were a wall between us and the Neapolitans. There were American clubs and American movies, but only a blind man can carry his life around with him quite that much. Perhaps in Washington the generals had their doubts about the perfect probity of the American way of life and wished to make sure that overseas we wouldn’t come in contact with any other. Consequently we were flooded with American movies and with Coca-Cola to distract our wandering attention and to ensure that we shouldn’t fall into dangerous furren ways of thinking. But some of us wondered none the less.

  The main leak, I remember, was in sex. It just isn’t possible to take millions of American men and shut them off from love for years on end – no, not with a thousand other American distractions. Sooner or later every man’s thoughts start centring around his middle. The cold and scientific solution would have been to have brothels attached to all our armies overseas, as other nations of the world have always done. But the American people wouldn’t have stood for that. I mean the American people back home. Too many purity lobbies from old ladies who have nothing else to do but form pressure groups to guard other people’s morals. And there were few women in our army as compared to our own percentage. There were WACs, to be sure, but in such a tiny ratio to us. And with the nurses we couldn’t go out because they were officers. Thus our perfect chastity was theoretically assured. From the hygienic point of view there were pro stations on every corner of Naples. This was a nice paradox in that every interesting alley was off limits. The army took the point of view: you absolutely must not. But if by chance you do . . . Finally they had a restriction on marrying overseas.

  Then we started casting our eyes on the Neapolitan girls.

  – These Gook wimmin, the mess sergeant said. It’s so easy with em. You just walk down Via Roma an some signorina does all the rest.

  – But, the corporal said, dreamy in his shorts, I don’t wanna hafta pay for it. I just wanna little girl all my own to love.

  – There’s something very nice about Italian women, the Pfc with spectacles said. No funny ideas about fur coats and higher income brackets and silk stockings, like American girls. And they don’t feel they have to discuss books with you that they haven’t read . . . not that women shouldn’t be emancipated . . . to a certain degree, as companion to man and as his helpmate . . . But the Neapolitan women are so down to earth. First they cook you a spaghetti dinner . . . Then . . .

  I remember that we GIs were used to women in a different tradition. American women, with their emancipation, had imposed their own standards on us. In America most Nice Girls Would . . . if you knew them well enough. Nearly all college girls Would, and waitresses too, if they thought there was a reasonable chance of your eventually getting spliced. And as for the separate career women of America, with their apartments – well, they’d abrogated to themselves all the freedom of single men. A Career Girl would keep you, or you kept her, depending on the financial status of one or both. And in America there were lots of rich middle-aged ladies who liked their young chauffeurs or gardeners, but didn’t dare marry them for fear of what Cousin Hattie would say.

  But to us GIs the girls of southern Italy fell into two tight classes only. That’s where we got stymied. There were the girls of Via Roma, whom the Neapolitans, mincing no words, called puttane. These girls asked fixed prices in either lire or PX rations. They satisfied for a while as long as we had money, but their fee was steep for a GI unless he were a big operator in the black market. And then too something in a man’s vanity craves something other than a girl who’s shacking with Tom, Dick, and Harry. American men are so sentimental that they refuse to have a whore for their girl – if they can help it. That’s the schizophrenia of our civilization, with its sharp distinction between the Good Girl and the Bad Girl.

  Consequently after a few tries, with the fear of VD always suspended over our heads, we began to look at the Good Women of Naples. And here entered the problem of the GI Italian bride. I remember that Italian girls began to look sweet to us early. Perhaps because their virginity was put on such a pedestal. There were few of us who didn’t have access to some Neapolitan home, where we were welcomed, once our entrée was definite and our purposes above-board. We usually got in through a Neapolitan brother. Then we discovered that there were girls in the family, carefully kept and cherished as novices in a nunnery. It was obvious that these girls were interested in us . . . if we proposed marriage to them.

  – I don’t get a minute alone with Rosetta, the corporal said. They treat me swell at her casa, but Mamma doesn’t trust Rosetta out her sight for one minnit. An after midnight Papa’s always remindin me what time it is . . . as if I didn’t have a wrist watch.

  – Ah, I keep to Via Roma, the mess sergeant said. Ya can’t lay a finger on the others.

  – But north of Rome, said the Pfc with the spectacles, a girl once she’s engaged will do anything to satisfy her fiancé . . . short of the real McCoy. I don’t get these fine distinctions in tribal ethics.

  – These Ginso girls, the sergeant major said, never forget that they’re women. That’s their strongest and weakest point. They know how to get in ya hair and under ya skin with wantin em till ya have ta slide that gold ring on their finger.

  – Onelia told me quite frankly, the corporal said, that she was interested in a passport to the States as my wife . . . I liked that honesty in her. I guess she likes me too.

  – Us GIs is so hot, the mess sergeant said, that once we leave Italy, these signorinas will never be satisfied with the Eytie men . . . never again . . .

  I remember that we Americans brought heartbreak to Neapolitan girls in many instances. There were Negroes who told their shack-jobs that they weren’t really black, just stained that way for camouflage and night fighting. There were mess sergeants who told nice Neapolitan girls that they owned chains of restaurants back in the States. I’ve often wondered at the face of some of those girls of good faith, arriving in the States to discover they’d live in one cabbage-smelling room over the stairs.

  There were, I remember, American GIs and officers who most cruelly betrayed and seduced Neapolitan girls, concealing from them and their families that back in the States they’d a wife and kids. These girls weren’t in the position of an American girl, who knows the language and can make her own investigations. For the heartless deceit of such as these I sometimes felt shame that I was an American because the life of a pure woman is like a mirror, and can be smashed but once.

  But I also remember instances of love and good faith on both sides. GIs and officers met Neapolitan girls, fell in love with them, and married them. I see no reason why such marriages shouldn’t be happy and lasting, once the girls have learned English and made the not easy adjustment to American wifehood.

  I remember Lydia, the gay shy mouse who sang in the chorus of the Teatro Reale di San Carlo. She was courted and won by our medic. I remember their wedding at Sorrento and their honeymoon at Taormina in Sicilia. Unless the world falls apart, I think that little Lydia and her capitano medico will be as happy in their lives together as human beings ever are outside of fairy tales.

  I remember Laura, to whom a GI killed at Cassino made two presents. He gave her a baby and a white spirochete. When I see flowers lying crushed in a muddy street, I think of Laura.

  I remember plump and smiling Emilia, who thought she’d married an MP. The MP disappeared forever after the wedding, and Em
ilia just sat in the kitchen night after night and wept so bitterly that her heart would have broken if it hadn’t already been in tiny pieces. Her mother kept cursing her and asking where were all those allotment checks from America? And her brother yelled that he’d put a razor into the first americano he met on a dark night.

  And I remember Wanda, stately and blonde, who used to sit by the stove and feel the life stirring within her. We all said she was too big to be having just one. And sure enough she came out with twins whom she christened Mario and Maria. They were brilliant gay babies, the way Italian children know how to be. Wanda hoped they’d grow up strong in St. Louis. She got me to point out that city for her on the map of America.

  I remember that in Naples in August, 1944, for all the red tape and the army regulations and the blood tests and the warning talks by chaplains, there was still a great deal of human love. And this rejoiced me. For all the ruin and economic asphyxiation we’d brought the Neapolitans, we also in some cases gave them a new hope. They’d been like Jews standing against a wall and waiting to be shot for something they’d never done. And I began to think that perhaps something good might emerge or be salvaged from the abattoir of the world. Though in the main all national decency and sense of duty might be dead, I saw much individual goodness and loveliness that reassured me in my agony. I saw it in some Neapolitans. I saw it in some Americans. And I wondered if perhaps the world must eventually be governed by individuality consecrated and unselfish, rather than by any collectivism of the propagandists, the students, and the politicians. In Naples in August, 1944, I drowned in mass ideologies, but was fished out by separate thinking and will. I remember watching the mad hordes in the street of Naples and wondering what it all meant. But there was a certain unity in the bay, in the August moon over Vesuvius. Then humanity fell away from me like the rind of an orange, and I was something much more and much less than myself . . .

  Wolfgang Koeppen

  A SERVANT OF DEATH

  Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel A Death in Rome (1954) describes the reunion of a German family in Rome a few years after the end of the Second World War, and forms a scathing attack on the postwar Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder. The following extract portrays the black sheep of the family, Gottlieb Judejahn, a former SS General. Unreconstructed and unrepentant, he is angered by the hypocrisy of his family who have become ‘respectable people once more’.

  HE WENT DOWN. He went down the Spanish Steps, climbed down into picturesque Italy, into the idling population that was sitting on the steps, lying, reading, studying, chatting, quarrelling or embracing one another. A boy offered Judejahn some maize, yellow roasted kernels of maize. He held out a paper cornet to the foreigner, to the barbarian from the north, said ‘cento lire’ in a wheedling voice, and Judejahn knocked the bag out of his hand. The maize scattered over the steps, and Judejahn trod it underfoot. He hadn’t meant it. It was clumsiness. He felt like giving the boy a thrashing.

  He crossed the square and reached the Via Condotti, panting. The pavement was narrow. People squeezed together in the busy shopping street, squeezed in front of the shop windows, squeezed past each other. Judejahn jostled and was jostled back. He didn’t understand. He was surprised that no one made way for him, that no one got out of his road. He was surprised to find himself being jostled.

  He looked for the cross street, looked for it on the map – but was he really looking? His years on the fringe of the desert seemed to him like time spent under anaesthetic, he had felt no pain, but now he felt sick, he felt fever and pain, felt the cuts that had pruned his life to a stump, felt the cuts that severed this stump from the wide flourishing of his power. What was he? A shadow of his former self. Should he rise from the dead, or remain a spook in the desert, a ghost in the Fatherland’s colour magazines? Judejahn was not afraid to keep the world at bay. What did it want with him, anyway? Let it come, let it come in all its softness and venality, all its dirty, buzzard lusts, concealed under the mask of respectability. The world should be glad there were fellows like himself. Judejahn wasn’t afraid of the rope. He was afraid of living. He feared the absence of commands in which he was expected to live. He had issued any number: the higher he’d been promoted, the more he’d issued, and the responsibility had never bothered him; he merely said, ‘That’s on my say-so,’ or ‘I’m in command here,’ but that had been a phrase, an intoxicating phrase, because in reality he had only ever followed orders himself. Judejahn had been mighty. He had tasted power, but in order to enjoy it, he required it to be limited, he required the Führer as an embodiment and visible god of power, the commander who was his excuse before the Creator, man and the Devil: I only did what I was told, I only obeyed orders. Did he have a conscience then? No, he was just afraid. He was afraid it might be discovered that he was little Gottlieb going around in boots too big for him. Judejahn heard a voice, not the voice of God nor the voice of conscience, it was the thin, hungry, self-improving voice of his father, the primary schoolteacher, whispering to him: You’re a fool, you didn’t do your homework, you’re a bad pupil, a zero, an inflated zero. And so it was as well that he had stayed in the shadow of a greater being, stayed a satellite, the shining satellite of the most powerful celestial body, and even now he didn’t realize that this sun from whom he had borrowed light and the licence to kill had himself been nothing but a cheat, another bad pupil, another little Gottlieb who happened to be the Devil’s chosen tool, a magical zero, a chimera of the people, a bubble that ultimately burst.

  Judejahn felt a sudden craving to fill his belly. Even in his Freikorps days he had had bouts of gluttony, and shovelled ladles of peas from the field-kitchen down his throat. Now, at the corner of the street he was looking for, he scented food. A cheap eating-place had various dishes on display in its windows, and Judejahn went inside and ordered fried liver, which he had seen in the window under a little sign, ‘Fritto scelto’. And so now Judejahn ordered the liver by asking for ‘fritto scelto’, but that means ‘fried food on request’, and so, at a loss what to do, they brought him a plate of sea-creatures fried in oil and batter. He gulped them down; they tasted like fried earthworms to him, and he felt nauseated. He felt his heavy body turning into worms, he felt his guts squirming with putrescence, and in order to fight off his disintegration, and in spite of his nausea, he polished off everything on the plate. Then he drank a quarter-litre of wine, this too, standing up, and then he was able to go on

  no more than a few paces, and there was the German hotel where his in-laws were staying. Cars bearing ‘D’ licence plates stood in tidy ranks outside the hotel. Judejahn saw the emblems of German recovery, the sleek metal of the German economic miracle. He was impressed. He was attracted. Should he go inside, click his heels together and rap out, ‘At your service!’? They would receive him with open arms. Would they? But there was also something that repelled him about these shiny cars. Recovery, life going on, going on fatly and prosperously after total war, total battle and total defeat, it was betrayal, betrayal of the Führer’s plans and his vision for the future, it was disgraceful collaboration with the archenemy in the West, who needed German blood and German troops to ward off its former Eastern allies and sharers in the stolen victory. What to do? Already the lights were going on in the hotel. One window after another was lit up, and behind one of them Eva would be sitting and waiting. Her letters, with their obscure turns of phrase that spoke of the disappointment that awaited him, the degeneracy and the shame, allowed him no hope of finding Adolf his son there. Was it worth going home? The desert was still open to him. The net of the German bourgeoisie had not yet been thrown over the old warrior. Hesitant, uncertain, he strode in through the door, came into the wood-panelled lobby, and there he saw German men, his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, was among them, he had hardly changed at all, and the German men stood facing one another in the German fashion; they were holding glasses in their hands, not mugs of German barley brew, but glasses of Italian swill, but then he Judejahn dran
k swill like that himself and God knows what else besides, no blame attached to that away from home. And these men, they were strong and stout, he could hear that, they were singing ‘A Fortress Sure’, and then he felt himself being observed, not by the singers, he felt himself being observed from the doorway, it was a serious, a seeking, an imploring, a desperate look that was levelled at him.

  He retreated, with his angular skull between his hunched shoulders – retreat or tactical withdrawal, the way a patrol between the lines in no man’s land retreats or withdraws when they feel they’ve been spotted; no shots are fired, no flares light the night sky, fate hangs in the balance, but they withdraw, creep back through barbed wire and vegetation, back to their own position, and conclude for the moment that the enemy position is impregnable. And the murderer too, the hunted criminal, presses back into the shadows, the jungle, the city, when he senses the bloodhounds are near by, when he knows he’s in the policeman’s field of vision. Likewise the sinner flees the eye of the Lord. But what of the godless man who doesn’t know himself to be a sinner, where does he turn? Straight past God, and into the desert! Judejahn didn’t know who was watching him. He saw no spies. There was only a priest in the lobby – Rome was crawling with religious brethren – standing strangely transfixed and staring like Judejahn through the glazed double door at the animated company sitting at the table, drinking and talking. It was a German Stammtisch, a table established in the German way but transported provisionally to a southern latitude; and, objectively speaking, there was only the wood and glass of the double door to separate Judejahn and his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, but he had remained seated: whether he was holding forth here or in front of the town council at home, he had remained seated, whereas Judejahn had strode boldly on, boldly and blindly on with the watchword that God is dead. He had gone further than the burghers in the hall, but it was they who had made it possible for him to go so far. They had underwritten his wanderings with their lives. They had invoked blood, they had summoned him, exhorted him, the world will be won by the sword, they had made speeches, there was no death to compare with death in battle, they had given him his first uniform, and had cowered before the new uniform he had made for himself, they had praised his every action, they had held him up as an example to their children, they had summoned the ‘Reich’ into being, and endured death and injury and the smoke from burning bodies all for the sake of Germany. But they themselves had remained seated at their table in the old German beer hall, German slogans on their garrulous tongues, Nietzsche clichés in their brains, and even the Führer’s words and the Rosenberg myth had only been exhilarating clichés for them, while for Judejahn they had been a call to arms: he had set out, little Gottlieb wanted to change the world, well well, so he was a revolutionary, and yet he detested revolutionaries and had them flogged and hanged. He was stupid, a dim little Gottlieb, worshipping punishment, little Gottlieb afraid of a beating and desiring to beat, powerless little Gottlieb, who had gone on a pilgrimage to power, and when he had reached it and had seen it face to face, what had he seen? Death. Power was Death. Death was the true Almighty. Judejahn had accepted it, he wasn’t frightened, even little Gottlieb had guessed that there was only this one power, the power of death, and only one exercise of power, which was killing. There is no resurrection. Judejahn had served Death. He had fed plentiful Death. That set him apart from the burghers, the Italian holiday-makers, the battlefield tourists; they had nothing, they had nothing except that nothing, they sat fatly in the midst of nothing, they got ahead in nothing, until finally they perished in nothing and became part of it, as they always had been. But he, Judejahn, he had his Death and he clung to it, only the priest might try to steal it from him. But Judejahn wasn’t about to be robbed. Priests might be murdered. Who was the fellow in the black frock? A pimply face, a haggard youth seething with lust under the womanish robes. The priest too was looking at the assembly in the lobby, and he too seemed to be repulsed by it. But he was no ally for Judejahn. Judejahn was equally revolted by the priest and the burghers. He recognized that the burghers’ position was impregnable for today. But time was in Judejahn’s favour, and so he would return to the desert, drill recruits for Death, and one day, when battlefields were more than tourist attractions, then Judejahn would be on the march again.