War Stories Read online

  In the kitchen my heart was pounding, my hands were shaking. I brought out the coffee. He was sitting at the table, he had placed his boater on the sofa where my sister-in-law Odile sleeps when she stays with us. It was a hot day but I did not dare open the window for fear we might be seen from the building next door. I said: ‘You may take off your jacket if you’d like.’ He thanked me, he hung his jacket on the back of his chair.

  We drank our coffee sitting across from each other at the table. I could not bring myself to look at him. Like me he did not want to speak of Benjamin or the front, which would naturally remind us of him. To relieve our embarrassment he recounted his younger days in America with his brother Charles, who had stayed behind there, and also his friendship with Little Louis, who had been a boxer and now owned a bar where he staged Seltzer-bottle fights with his customers. I looked up just then and saw his smile, it was childlike and comforting, this smile truly did change him wonderfully.

  Next he asked me if he could smoke a cigarette. I went to fetch him a saucer for an ashtray. He smoked a Gauloise bleue. He was silent now. We could hear children playing outside. After only a few puffs he put out his cigarette in the saucer. Then he stood up and said in a gentle voice: ‘It was a ridiculous idea. But we can lie to him, you know, pretend we did. Maybe it will give him some peace of mind out in the trenches.’

  I did not answer. Still I could not look him in the face. He took up his boater from the sofa. He said: ‘Leave a message for me with Little Louis, Rue Amelot, if you wish to speak with me before I go back.’ He went towards the door. I stood up as well, I was there before him to keep him from leaving. After a moment, when I looked him finally straight in the eye, he pressed me against his shoulder, his hand was in my hair, we stood like that without a word. And then I pulled away from him, I went back into the dining room. Before he had arrived I had tried to prepare the bedroom, by this I mean to remove whatever might remind us of Benjamin, but I had given up this idea and did not wish to go with him into that room or the children’s bedroom.

  Without turning around, I took off my dress by the sofa and everything else as well. As I did this he kissed the back of my neck.

  That evening he took me to a restaurant on Place de la Nation. He smiled at me across the table and I felt that nothing was quite real, that I was not truly myself. He told me of a prank he had played with Little Louis on a stingy customer, I was not listening carefully to what he said, too busy looking at him, but I laughed to see him laughing. He told me: ‘You should laugh more often, Elodie. The Inuit, the people we call Eskimos, they say when a woman laughs a man should count the teeth she shows, for he will take the same number of seals on his next hunt.’ I laughed again, but not for long enough for him to count on more than five or six in the bag. He told me: ‘No matter, we’ll order something else, I never did like seal.’

  Walking me home in the darkness of the Rue de Sergent-Bauchat, he slipped an arm around my shoulders. Our steps echoed in an empty world. No suffering anywhere, no tears, no mourning, no one anywhere or any thought for tomorrow. On the front step of my building his large hands were holding mine, his boater was tipped back on his head, he told me: ‘If you asked me to come up it would make me happy.’

  He came up.

  The following afternoon I went to his place, on the Rue Daval, a room beneath the eaves. His workshop was down in the courtyard.

  The day after that, Thursday, he came back to my flat for lunch. He brought red roses, a cherry tart, his trusting smile. We ate our meal naked, after making love. And we made love all afternoon. He was taking the train in the morning. He had told the truth to the woman he had lived with before the war, and she had left him, taking all her belongings I pretended not to see the day before. He said: ‘These things always work out in the end.’ Time . . . I do not know if I loved him, if he loved me, outside of the laughable interlude I have described to you. Today I remember the last time I saw Kléber. He was on the landing just about to go downstairs. I stood at my door. He tipped his boater, he smiled, his voice was so low it was almost a murmur, he said: ‘When you think of me, show him many seals. You’ll bring me luck.’

  I believe you understand what followed, at least what Benjamin made of those three days, since you asked me in the car, in the pouring rain, if I was the reason they quarrelled. They quarrelled because we are people, not things, and no one, not even the war, can change that.

  I did not get pregnant. Flying in the face of everything, Benjamin was stubbornly jealous, or he became that way. He must have pushed Kléber to the limit and so heard truths that were unbearable. And once again, time did its work. Benjamin’s questions in his letters, after he learned he had gained nothing in lending me to his friend, were like a hail of bullets: how and where I had undressed, had it upset me to be possessed by another, how many times during those three days, in what position, and above all, aching, throbbing, that obsession with finding out if I’d shared his pleasure. Yes, I had shared it, from the first time to the last. I can certainly tell you: that had never happened to me before. My mason? I had naïvely imagined I felt the woman’s share of it, less than what one finds stroking oneself in bed. Benjamin? To please him, I would pretend.

  The hour is late, the gentleman who was with you will come for this letter. I think I have told you everything. I never saw Benjamin again, I never saw Kléber again, and in 1917 I found out by chance, which makes such a bad job of things, that he was not ever going to come home either. Now I work, I raise my children as best I can. The two oldest, Frédéric and Martine, help me as much as they are able. I am twenty-eight years old, I wish only to forget. I trust in what he said, the man of my interlude: the only master of us all is time.

  Adieu, mademoiselle.

  Elodie Gordes.

  Isaac Babel

  TREASON

  Arguably the most important result of the First World War was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. One of the most vivid descriptions of the events that followed the Revolution can be found in Isaac Babel’s collection of short stories, Red Cavalry (1926). A bespectacled Jewish intellectual, the author participated as a war correspondent in the Red Army campaign in Poland in 1920 where he joined a regiment of Cossacks – former Tsarist troops and the feared enemy of the Eastern European Jews, but now part of the Red Army.

  Although he is passionately on the side of the Revolution, Babel gives a devastating account of the barbarism of war. ‘Treason’, however, is one of his lighter stories, and although originally written as a propaganda piece on Red Army morale, today it reads more like a parody.

  COMRADE INVESTIGATOR BURDENKO. To your question I reply that my Party number is 2400, issued to Nikita Balmashov by the Krasnodar Party Committee. My life before 1914 I explain as domestic: I did arable farming with my parents and transferred from arable farming into the ranks of the Imperialists to defend Citizen Poincaré*5 and the butcher of the German Revolution, Ebert-Noske*6 – they, one must suppose, were asleep and as they slept dreamed of a way to lend assistance to my native settlement of St Ivan in the Kuban district. And so the rope uncoiled until the time when Comrade Lenin together with Comrade Trotsky redirected my brutal bayonet and pointed it towards a given set of intestines and a new piece of belly fat that suited it better. Ever since that day, I bear the number 2400 on the butt of my sharp-eyed bayonet, and it is rather embarrassing and all too ridiculous for me to hear now from you, Comrade Investigator Burdenko, this unseemly cock and bull story about the unknown N— Hospital. I don’t give a shit about that hospital, and almost never fired at it or attacked it – it could not have happened. Being wounded, we all three of us, namely the soldier Golovitsyn, the soldier Kustov and I, had a fever in our bones, and did not attack, but only wept, standing in hospital dressing-gowns in the square amidst the free population, Jews by nationality. And regarding the three panes of glass which we damaged with an officer’s revolver, I tell you on my honour that the panes were not serving their appointed purpose, being i
n the storeroom where they were not needed. Even Dr Yaveyn, seeing this bitter shooting of ours, merely made mockery with various smiles, standing at the window of his hospital, which can also be confirmed by the above-mentioned free Jews of the town of Kozin. Concerning Dr Yaveyn I can also, Comrade Investigator, submit the material evidence that he made fun of us when the three of us wounded men, namely the soldier Golovitsyn, the soldier Kustov and I, originally presented ourselves for treatment, and with his very first words he announced to us, all too coarsely: ‘You fighting men will each of you go and take a bath in the bathroom and drop your weapons and your clothes this minute; I’m afraid there’ll be an infection from them, they’re going straight into my storeroom . . .’ Whereupon, beholding in front of him a beast, and not a man, soldier Kustov stuck out his broken leg and questioned how there could be any infection in a sharp Kuban sabre, except for the enemies of our revolution, and was also interested to find out more about the storeroom, whether there was really a Party soldier there in charge of the stuff or, on the contrary, one of the non-Party masses. Then Dr Yaveyn evidently realized that we were perfectly able to understand treason. He turned his back and, without another word, sent us off to the ward, and again with various smiles, where we went hobbling on various legs, waving our crippled arms and holding on to one another, as the three of us are countrymen from the St Ivan settlement, namely Comrade Golovitsyn, Comrade Kustov and I, we are countrymen with the same fate and whoever’s got a broken leg holds his comrade by the arm, and whoever doesn’t have an arm leans on his comrade’s shoulder. In accordance with the order that had been issued, we went into the ward, where we expected to see cultural-education work and devotion to the cause, but what did we see as we entered the ward? We saw Red Army men, all of them infantry, sitting on the made beds playing draughts, and with them tall nurses, completely smooth, standing by the windows and doling out sympathy. At the sight of this, we stopped as though we had been struck by thunder.

  ‘Your war’s over, lads,’ I exclaim to the wounded men.

  ‘That’s right, it is,’ the wounded men reply, moving their draughts that are made of bread.

  ‘It’s a bit soon,’ I says to the wounded men, ‘it’s a bit soon for you soldiers to have finished with the war when the enemy is moving about softly-softly fifteen versts from the town and when one reads in the Red Trooper newspaper that our international position is just horrible and the horizon is filled with clouds.’ But my words bounced off the heroic soldiers like sheep droppings off a regimental drum, and instead of a proper conversation what happened was that the sisters of mercy led us over to our beds and again began to go on and on about giving up our arms, as though we’d already been beaten! They caused Kustov no end of agitation on that account, and he began picking at his wound, which was situated on his left shoulder, above the valiant heart of a fighting man and proletarian. Seeing this, the nurses quietened down a bit, but they quietened down only for a very short time, and then started once more to engage in the jeering that is common to the non-Party masses and began to send those who were willing to haul the clothes off us as we slept or made us play theatrical roles for cultural-educational work dressed in women’s clothes, which is not seemly.

  Unmerciful sisters. Several times they tried using sleeping powder to get our clothes, so we began to take turns at sleeping, keeping one eye open, and even went to the toilet on lesser business in full uniform with revolvers. And when we had suffered like this for a week and a day we began to ramble in our speech, had visions and, finally, waking up on the accursed morning of 4 August, saw that we were lying in numbered overalls like penal convicts, without our weapons and without the clothes that had been woven by our mothers, those weak old women in the Kuban . . . And the sun, we saw, was shining gloriously, and the trench soldiers, among whom we three Red cavalrymen had suffered so much, were making fools of us, and with them the unmerciful sisters, having slipped us sleeping powder the night before, were now shaking their young breasts at us and bringing us cocoa in dishes, and milk in the cocoa enough to drown in! At the sight of this merry carousal the soldiers thumped their crutches horribly loud and pinched our sides as though we were prostitutes, saying that Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army had finished its war, too. But no, curly-headed comrades who feed your very marvellous bellies so that at night you sound like machine-guns, it has not finished its war, and all it was was that, having asked to leave the room like it was for necessary business, the three of us went outside into the yard and from the yard we rushed all in a fever and with black gaping wounds to Citizen Boyderman, the chairman of the district revolutionary committee, without whom, Comrade Investigator Burdenko, this misunderstanding about the shooting most possibly would never have existed, i.e. without that chairman who made us completely lose our wits. And although we can give no firm material evidence against Citizen Boyderman, the thing is that when we looked in on the chairman we directed our attention upon a citizen of elderly years in a sheepskin coat, a Jew by nationality, who was sitting at a table, a table so piled with papers that it is not a pretty sight to see . . . He casts his eyes now this way, now that, and it’s plain to see that he can’t make head nor tail of those papers, those papers are a misery to him, all the more so when I tell you that unknown but honoured soldiers go in threateningly to see Citizen Boyderman and ask him for rations, and if it’s not them it’s local Party workers reporting on counter-revolution in the surrounding villages, and then immediately rank and file workers from the Centre appear, wanting to get married in the district revolutionary committee in the very shortest time and without delay . . . So we too with raised voices explained the incident of treason at the hospital, but Citizen Boyderman only stared at us, and cast his eyes now this way, now that, and stroked our shoulders, which is not authority and is unworthy of authority, issued no resolution of any kind, but merely announced: ‘Comrade soldiers, if you love Soviet authority, then leave these premises,’ to which we were unable to agree, i.e. to leave the premises, but demanded to see his identity card, on the non-production of which we lost consciousness. And, being without consciousness, we came out on to the square in front of the hospital, where we disarmed the militia in the person of one cavalryman and with tears in our eyes violated three poor-quality panes of glass in the above-mentioned storeroom. In the face of this inadmissible fact, Dr Yaveyn made faces and mocking grimaces, and this at the moment when Comrade Kustov was about to die of his illness within four days!

  In his short Red life Comrade Kustov was agitated about treason beyond all bounds, that treason that is winking at us from the window, there it goes, mocking at the coarse proletariat, but the proletariat, comrades, knows itself that it’s coarse, this causes us pain, it burns our souls and tears with fire the prisons of our bodies and the gaols of our hateful ribs . . .

  Treason, I tell you, Comrade Investigator Burdenko, is laughing at us from the window, treason is up and about in our house with its boots off, treason has thrown its boots over its shoulder so as not to make the floorboards creak in the house it is burgling . . .

  Laurie Lee

  THANK GOD FOR THE WAR

  The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) was the politically most significant conflict between the two world wars, second in importance only to the Russian Revolution. It drew volunteers from all over the world who joined the Republican army to defend democracy against the Fascist troops of General Franco.

  It is strange, however, that so little fiction has come out of the Spanish Civil War. With the notable exception of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the best-known works on the war are memoirs, such as George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or, from a Spanish perspective, Arturo Barea’s trilogy, The Forging of a Rebel.

  Laurie Lee too published his reminiscences in the form of a memoir, A Moment of War (1991), although in recent years attention has been brought to the fictional character of his writing. The following extract recounts what life was like in the International Brigade – and how t
he war had some rather unexpected liberating effects.

  ON A BLEAK naked hill above the town, Figueras Castle stood like a white acropolis – a picturesque assemblage of towers and turrets, walled in by great slabs of stone. The approach road was suitably stark and forbidding, but once I’d passed inside the huge nail-studded doors, I got an impression of almost monastic calm. Indeed the Castle, clamped down on these rocks many centuries ago as a show of force commanding Spain’s northern frontiers, appeared now as something a touch over-theatrical, and rather lacking any original ferocity.

  But this was the ‘Barracks’, the place to which I had been delivered, the collecting point for volunteers entering Spain from the north. My escort, warmer and more cheerful now after several more stops on the road for anis and coñac, seemed in a natural hurry to get rid of me, and pushed me inside a glass-fronted box-office just inside the gate.

  ‘We brought you another one!’ he shouted to anyone who might be listening. ‘He’s English, I think – or Dutch.’ With that, he threw my bags across the floor, slapped me on the back, gave me a heavy-lidded wink and left.

  An official, bowed at his tiny desk, looked at me with a kind of puff-eyed indifference. Then he sniffed, asked me my name and my next of kin, and wrote down my answers in a child’s exercise book. As he wrote he followed the motions of the pen with his tongue, breathing hard and sniffing rhythmically as he did so. Finally, he asked for my passport and threw it into a drawer, in which I saw a number of others of different colours.

  ‘We’ll take care of that for you,’ he said. ‘Would you like some prophylactics?’

  Not knowing what these were, I nevertheless said yes, and he handed me a bagful which I stowed away in my pocket. Next he gave me a new hundred peseta note, a forage-cap with a tassel, and said, ‘You are now in the Republican Army.’ He considered me dimly for a moment, then suddenly shot to his feet, raised his fist and saluted.