I lose what I write. As if my memory were a black hole, information vanishes after the work is done. I am left with floating wisps of disconnected knowledge and snapshots of recall. They say that nothing is lost; everything stays in the memory, but I do not believe it. I feel crippled by this inability to hold on to learned facts and am eaten with envy for people who have organised, timeproof memories.
With Jacob Levy, it was willed forgetting. I wanted him to relieve me of the memory of Dachau. I counted on my proven defect, my black hole memory. If I gave Dachau to Jacob Levy, I would lose it. In 1937, I was told about Dachau by Germans of the 11th International Brigade, Germans who were fighting fascism in Spain since they could not at home. Dachau was not the worst concentration camp; it had the distinction of being the first. It was established in 1933, as soon as Hitler came to power; a pilot project, you might say.
Our official war aims in the Second World War were the Four Freedoms, laudable intentions, but governments’ words are only words; wait for the deeds. I doubt that the fighting men were much moved by the Four Freedoms; they had simpler aims, such as getting rid of the enemy and getting home, alive. I was fixed on my private war aim: Dachau, symbol of the horror of Nazi doctrine and practice, the reason the war had to be won. I wanted to see Dachau opened and finished forever. By bumming lifts across Germany, as the Allied troops advanced, I got to Dachau a week after American soldiers discovered the prison camp at the end of the village street. It was a special justice to hear the news of Germany’s defeat in the Dachau infirmary.
Having re-read this novel, I marvel at my boldness in writing it. It would have been logical to write a war story based on men in the noble, eccentric, multinational British Eighth Army and on action I had followed for months: the Italian campaign. I knew little about the American Army and nothing about an American infantry battalion because I was denied the right to hang about and listen and watch such a unit, due to the rules of the U.S. Public Relations Officers in London, overlords of the American press.
These officers permitted only one correspondent from a magazine to report in combat zones. As I had taken second place on my magazine, I was forbidden to work where the war was being fought. This was absurd and intolerable; I went AWOL. From D-Day until the war ended, I was on the run from those London desk officers who had threatened to deport me to the U.S. if I again disobeyed their orders as I had by smuggling myself to the Normandy invasion. It was no trouble to move about on my own, but safer to stay away from American positions where I might be noticed. In Nijmegen, at the end of the disastrous Arnhem action, an M.P. of the 82nd Airborne division picked me up, convinced I was a spy because I had no papers to account for myself and was not wearing proper uniform. He took me to the commanding General who laughed and said that if I was fool enough to be there he had not seen me. I fled anyway, after a few days, when a friend sent word that I better hide, the London P.R. office knew where I was. This is the long-winded reason why I had no experience of an American infantry battalion.
But Jacob Levy needed an infantry battalion and needed it in terrain I had only seen for a week during the Battle of the Bulge. So I made it up, for him; Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ battalion, the Colonel and the men in the battalion, their daily life, their combat, and Dotty and Kathe and their lives as well. They all had to come into being because of Jacob Levy, the first invention. I could not now write a sensible paragraph about Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ battalion. Nothing remains; none of my understanding of the time and place and people, none of my small gleaned technical knowledge of the war. Nothing except Dachau, which remains intact.
Clearly, Dachau was Jacob Levy’s point of no return; he could never go back to being the simple unthinking young man he was before. He was blasted into a knowledge of evil that he had not known existed in the human species; and so was I. I realise that Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, Arbeit Macht Frei, and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed. I remember what I felt: frantic, insane fear. I had to get away from Germany at once, no matter how; I could not breathe the air or endure the faces of Germans around me. Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.
More than forty years on, I know that my fear of Dachau was justified. If men could do that there, men could do it again anywhere, when sanctioned by the State. And they have. Various adaptations of Dachau thrive in some ninety countries now. It has been a splendidly successful model: the State declares that crimeless people, any people, are enemies of the State. Then the State locks them up, starves them, tortures them or “disappears” them, the language of our time. The Nazi formula for war has also been copied, in the needless wars, large and small, that have raged every year since 1945. Schrechlichkeit, frightfulness. Standard operational procedure nowadays; no rules; anything goes. I see Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ battalion as the last fortunate soldiers.
Long before I finished the book, I told Max Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, its name, Point of No Return, and he objected. It was too bleak, too despairing, people would not read a novel with that grim title. If anyone had suggested editing my work, I would have refused with fury. But I caved in on what was fundamental to this book, its name. It must have been a failure of nerve, struggling too long in uncharted country, confidence leaked away. Giving up my true title did not alter the writing or the shape of the story; it simply spoiled the book for me.
When I finished the last chapter, in a rural motel in Florida, I leafed through a Gideon Bible, the only thing at hand for leafing through, and came on “the wine of astonishment” and its surrounding psalm. “Thou hast made the earth to tremble, thou hast broken it; heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh. Thou hast shewed thy people hard things; thou hast made us drink the wine of astonishment.”
For my novel, The Wine of Astonishment is a ludicrously wrong title. Hitler, not God, had made the earth to tremble. I would have done better to call the book Jacob Levy since I had no other ideas. And I had no other ideas because the only right title was Point of No Return. After typing out The Wine of Astonishment wearily, and sending the manuscript to New York, I took no further interest in the book. I did not feel it was mine with this makeshift title. I cannot remember anything about its publication, apart from being puffed up (still puffed up now that I think of it) by a letter from Infantry, the journal of the U.S. Infantry School, asking for the date and location of my first homemade engagement in the forest, as they had no record of it.
In 1949, a year after my book appeared, J. P. Marquand published his much-acclaimed novel about a New England banker, entitled Point of No Return. The moral is: never lose your nerve. Since then, I have come across three novels by widely different writers called The Wine of Astonishment. The title, so wrong for me, is not even unique. Through the years, “point of no return” has slipped into commonplace, trivial usage. To me, the words stand as they did when I first heard them; an instruction to men at war, a statement of finality.
My novel has been out of print longer than most Americans have been alive. In this new re-issue, I am reclaiming my original, true title, Point of No Return, and thus reclaiming the book for myself.
Martha Gellhorn
Kilgwrrwg, Wales
December 1988
About the Author
Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1908. She dropped out of Bryn Mawr to pursue a career in journalism. Gellhorn spent time living in Paris; documented the Great Depression for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration; traveled with her future husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War; and journeyed to Western Europe to cover World War II. Her reporting career was distinguished and lengthy, as she also covered the Vietnam War and conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Pa
nama. An author of both fiction and nonfiction, her works include the memoir Travels with Myself and Another and the novels Point of No Return, What Mad Pursuit, and The Trouble I’ve Seen. She died in 1998.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1948 by Martha Gellhorn
Afterword Copyright © 1989 by Martha Gellhorn
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4099-0
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Point of No Return Page 27
