War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘This war is no easy walk.’ She exhaled a column of smoke. ‘We gotta dig deeper.’

  What’s on your mind?

  ‘The deadline’s soon, day after tomorrow. January fifteen. I want to cover this war, I don’t want a press release.’ I’m with you so far.

  ‘Here’s the thing then, honey. Tomorrow we break the pool. Go off on our own. You and I have to find the war. We’re not gonna find it in the damn hotel room. And we’re not gonna find it with Cap’n Crunch hovering over our shoulders.’

  Lying awake in the hotel room. Tomorrow, the real war would begin for me. The UN deadline was almost up. I wondered if Bush would really do it. Was he really crazy enough to start bombing Iraq? It was going to be such a disaster. Saddam had mined all the oilfields; everyone was saying it was going to be a huge ecological mess, that the clouds of smoke rising from the burning oilfields in Kuwait could trigger a planet-wide climate shift, perhaps a new ice age. This was all biblical stuff, end-of-the-world stuff. Leaders today had too much power. Back in the days of, say, Napoleon, power-drunk leaders could only mess up things for a decade or so, and then the grass would grow back over all the bodies, the battlefields would become cornfields, and everyone would forget what all the fighting was about in the first place. Today, people like Bush and Saddam Hussein had the power to wreck things forever, to destroy the world, to screw up oceans and wipe out species.

  The thought of danger was starting to become real to me. I had gone through life, as most noncombatants do, feeling as if great personal, physical harm happened to other people. But that bleeding soldier with the missing finger made me feel otherwise. People could bleed here. People could die. We could get hit by one of those Scud missiles, die from a poison gas attack, get hit by friendly fire. This was no longer a game, or just a job, or some ridiculous National Now! story on big vegetables. If I broke the pool with Sojourner tomorrow, it was all for real. And it was real enough to get my ass killed. A Nikki Giovanni poem was running through my mind: ‘We kill for UN & NATO & USA and everywhere for all alphabet but BLACK. Can we learn to kill WHITE for BLACK? Learn to kill, niggers.’

  That night I had a dream. No, it wasn’t really a dream. It was an image that floated into my mind before I fell completely asleep. It applied too literally to my situation to be a dream. I was thinking about Ascending and Descending, a lithograph by M.C. Escher. It was a picture of monks trudging eternal loops in a monastery. Twenty-six monks walk up and walk down forty-five stairs only to find themselves back where they started, prisoners and participants in one of Escher’s optical illusions. Were they going up or going down? Down or up? I guess the point was that these truth seekers had found a path but lost their goal.

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  Isaac Babel was born in Odessa in 1894, the son of a Jewish tradesman. At the age of twenty-one he went to St Petersburg, where he had to avoid the Tsarist police because he lacked the residence certificate required of all Jews. Maxim Gorky was the first to encourage Babel by printing two of his stories in his magazine. During the First World War, Babel fought with the Tsarist army and in 1917 went over to the Bolsheviks.

  In 1923 he returned to literature with a number of short stories printed in periodicals. An instant literary success, these formed the nucleus of the Odessa Stories, a group of vivid sketches of Russian Jewish life, and Red Cavalry (1926), written out of his experiences with Budyonny’s cavalry in the Polish campaign of 1920. Other stories, scenarios and plays followed. Unable to respond to the demands of political conformism that were being made on him, however, Babel was arrested suddenly in 1939. He died, possibly in 1941.

  Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics and has been a teacher of history and politics. Her books include Union Street (1982), which has been filmed as Stanley and Iris; Blow Your House Down (1984); Liza’s England (1986), formerly The Century’s Daughter; The Man Who Wasn’t There (1989); Another World (1998); and her acclaimed Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration (1991), which was filmed in 1997, The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize.

  Louis Begley lives in New York City. He is the author of two novels, Wartime Lies and About Schmidt. Wartime Lies won the Pen Hemingway Foundation Award and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize.

  Louis de Bernières is the author of The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (1990), Señor Viva and the Coca Lord (1991), The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994). He lives in London.

  Heinrich Boll was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of postwar German writers. In 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine, The Clown, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and Group Portrait with Lady. He is also famous as a writer of short stories. Böll served for several years as president of the International PEN and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in July 1985.

  Martin Booth is a poet, novelist and critic. His novels include Black Chameleon, The Jade Pavilion, Hiroshima Joe, Dreaming of Samarkand and, most recently, The Industry of Souls, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.

  Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner, and was educated at Downe House School in Kent. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and her family home in County Cork.

  Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee’s, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All the Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelbourne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965), and her last book, Eva Trout (1969).

  She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949 and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. In 1965 she was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

  William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

  His novels include A Good Man in Africa (1981), An Ice-Cream War (1982), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990), The Blue Afternoon (1993) and Armadillo (1998). Eight of his screenplays have been filmed, including A Good Man in Africa, based on his first novel. William Boyd lives in London.

  Kay Boyle (1903–1992) was a novelist, short-story writer and poet. Born in Minnesota, her expatriate years in France before her return to the United States in 1941 provided her with much of the material for her fiction. Her novels include Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933), Primer for Combat (1942), A Frenchman Must Die (1946), Generation Without Farewell (1960) and The Underground Woman (1974).

  John Home Burns was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1916. He was educated at Harvard and for five years worked as an English
teacher in Connecticut. In 1942 he was drafted, and spent the war as an intelligence officer in North Africa and Italy, reading prisoner-of-war mail.

  After the war he returned to America and to teaching for a year. In 1947 his first novel, The Gallery – loosely based on the author’s wartime experience in Naples – was published to great critical acclaim. The success of The Gallery immediately established John Home Burns’s reputation, and he abandoned teaching to become a full-time writer. He wrote two other novels, Lucifer with a Book (1949) and A Cry of Freedom (1951). In 1949 he left America and settled in Italy, where he died in 1953 at the age of thirty-seven. At the time of his death he was working on a novel based on the life of St Francis of Assisi.

  Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was an essayist and a journalist, and among his best-known works of fiction are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. He died in 1985.

  Philip Caputo served with the Marines in Vietnam. After mustering out in 1967, he went on to a prize-winning career as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, covering the war in Beirut and the fall of Saigon. In 1975 he was wounded in Beirut and, during his convalescence, completed the manuscript for A Rumor of War, his acclaimed Vietnam memoir. In 1977 he left the Tribune to devote himself to writing full-time. His novels are Horn of Africa, DelCorso’s Gallery, Indian Country and Equation for Evil. He is also the author of a collection of novellas, Exiles, and a second volume of memoir, Means of Escape.

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, born in 1894, was one of the most controversial French writers of the century. Journey to the End of the Night, first published in 1932, became an instant bestseller and was followed by a string of other books, all based on the experience of his own life, written in the vernacular of his day and with a frankness of description that is still remarkable today.

  His descriptions of war and poverty would seem to come from a man on the Left, but he was to turn to the Right after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936. He became a rabid anti-Semite and a supporter of the German occupation of France. He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1945 and escaped to Denmark where he lived under police guard until 1951. Pardoned in 1952 he returned to Paris where he died in 1961.

  Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough College he began work as a porter at Sotheby’s. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby’s youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times, before announcing his departure in a telegram: ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’

  This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and the British Film Institute’s On the Black Hill. On publication The Songlines went straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and stayed in the top ten for nine months. His novel, Utz, was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989.

  Jean-Louis Curtis was born in 1917 at Orthez in the Basses-Pyrenees. He was educated at a local college and the Sorbonne in Paris. Afterwards he spent a considerable time in England, where he made a particular study of the works of Huxley.

  As Professor of English at Bayonne he wrote his first novel Alceste Pas Perdu (1943), followed by Les Jeunes Hommes (1945) which was awarded the Prix Cazes.

  During 1944–5 he joined the Pyrenean Corps Franc, and as a member of the Army he later fought in Alsace and Germany and spent some time in Württemberg and in the Palatinate with the occupation forces. Siegfried was the result of this experience, published in 1946. The Forests of the Night was first published in France in 1947. His other novels include Les justes causes (1954), La parade (1960), Un jeune couple (1967) and L’étage noble (1978).

  Shusaku Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923. He graduated in French Literature from Keio University, then studied for several years in Lyons on a scholarship from the French government.

  Widely regarded as the leading writer in Japan, he has won a series of outstanding literary awards and his work has been translated into seventeen languages. His books include The Samurai, The Sea and the Poison and Stained Glass Elegies.

  Christopher John Farley has worked as a journalist for the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and USA Today. He is a staff writer for Time magazine where he reports on national affairs and popular culture. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1966, he was raised in upstate New York. My Favourite War is his first novel.

  John Fowles is the author of The Collector (1963), The Aristos (1964), The Magus (1966), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985). He lives in Dorset.

  A.D. Gristwood was born in Catford, south London in 1893. He volunteered in the summer of 1915 and served as Rifleman 302064, 2/5th London Rifle Brigade in France, where he was wounded twice. Encouraged by H.G. Wells, he wrote The Somme which was published in 1927. He died in 1933 as a result of his war injuries.

  Robert Harris was a reporter on the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight programmes before becoming Political Editor of the Observer in 1987, and then a columnist on the Sunday Times. His five non-fiction books include Selling Hitler (1986), an account of the forging of Hitler’s diaries. His first novel, Fatherland (1992), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize, and was followed by Enigma (1995) and Archangel (1998).

  Larry Heinemann was born in 1944 in Chicago, where he now lives with his wife and two children. In 1966 he was inducted into the army and served a tour of duty with the 25th Division in Vietnam as a combat infantryman. He is the author of two novels, Close Quarters (1977) and Paco’s Story (1986).

  Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War, afterwards attending the colleges of New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fulbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in advertising. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961.

  Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, was published in 1974, and was followed by Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984) and Closing Time (1994). His memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, was published in 1998.

  Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.

  In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish war, then two years later resigned from journalism to devote himself to fiction and settled in Paris.

  Hemingway’s first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time, but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, which established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books: Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing, and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and described his experience in the bestseller, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway died in 1961.

  Sebastien Japrisot was born in Marseilles and was already a published writer at the age of seventeen. He received early recognition as a crime novelist, and is now one of France’s most popular writers. His novels have all been made into motion pictures, and he has himself written several scree
nplays.

  In Great Britain he built up a reputation with his crime stories, among them The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun and The 10.30 from Marseilles. Japrisot won the Prix Interallié with A Very Long Engagement.

  James Jones was born in Robinson, Illinois, in 1922. He joined the army in 1939, rose to the rank of sergeant, and won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He was discharged from the army in 1944 and went on to study at the University of New York.

  His first novel, From Here to Eternity, was published in 1951 and became an instant bestseller. His other novels include Some Came Running (1957), The Pistol (1959), The Thin Red Line (1962), Go to the Widow Maker (1967), The Merry Month of May (1971) and A Touch of Danger (1973). James Jones died in 1977.

  Christopher J. Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. For a good deal of his life, he was a broadcasting producer. He worked for UNESCO in Indonesia, and has travelled extensively in Asia.

  Koch has been a full-time writer since 1972. He is the author of five novels – The Boys in the Island, Across the Sea Wall, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Doubleman and Highways to a War – and one collection of essays, Crossing the Gap. The screenplay of The Year of Living Dangerously, co-written by Koch, was nominated for an Academy Award. He now lives in Sydney.

  Wolfgang Koeppen was born in 1906 in Greifswald on the Baltic Coast. He had a career as a writer and journalist in Berlin before the Second World War, but his reputation is based essentially on the trilogy of novels he published shortly after it: Pigeons in the Grass (1951), The Hothouse (1953) and Death in Rome (1954). These books remain unequalled in postwar German fiction for their combination of stylistic innovation and trenchant political criticism. Subsequently, Koeppen has published travel books and a short memoir of his childhood, but no further fiction. He lives in Munich.