Authors: Pete Ayrton
No Man's Land (2 page)
A
N ENTERPRISE LIKE
NO MAN'S LAND
is a collective one. The many people who helped me have been most generous with their knowledge and time. Special thanks to Roger Little, Ruth Bush and Françoise Escholier-Achard who made possible the use of her grandfather's novel, Noel King and Garth Cartwright, Max Décharné, Ursula Owen, Giovanni Lussu for making available the new translation of his father's book, Julian Evans, Tibor Fischer, Sarah Lefanu, Maureen Freely and Professor Erol Koroglu, Edmund Fawcett, Irene Noel-Baker, Mark Thompson, Marija Mitrovic, Jeremy Beale and John Williams. To all those at Serpent's Tail and Profile who have made this book what it is - Peter Dyer, Sue Lamble, Ruthie Petrie, and Valentina Zanca. To my first editor, Peter Carson and then, John Davey, who both mixed support and criticism in the right proportions. To the translators - Peter Bush, Martin Chalmers, Izzy Finkel, Celia Hawkesworth, Malcolm Imrie, Ana Jelnikar, Cristina Viti, and Stephen Watts - who met the tightest of deadlines with a minimum of fuss. To the most helpful people at the London Library. To Helen Francis who found the rights holders and got permission to use the featured extracts. And to Sarah Martin, Carla and Oscar who lived through the roller-coaster of elation and despair as an Armenian author proved less and, then, more elusive to track down.
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INTRODUCTION
I
N COLLECTING MATERIAL FOR
NO MAN'S LAND
, my first priority was to feature writing from as many of the countries that took part as possible. This not from some desire to be exhaustive but because I wanted to convey that the war truly was a
world
war â so there are contributions from writers from twenty countries. The pieces in the book cover the fighting in all the theatres of the war: of course the Western Front, but also the Eastern Front, the Balkan Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and the War at Sea.
They also cover the experiences of the men and women left behind on the home front, of the women on the war front and of the soldiers who returned home never able to forget what they had endured. Because they come from many countries, the pieces reflect very different attitudes to the nation and very different motivations for fighting the war.
For the British, French and Germans who wrote about the war, their attitude was relatively straightforward. Whatever the historical facts, almost all of them felt loyalty to a well-defined nation which they took to be morally superior to other nations and whose war effort they supported. A small minority opposed the war but this was more because they took war of any kind to be evil than from the belief that other nations were morally equal to their own.
For combatants from other countries, the nation-state was more recent and/or more contested and they had a much more fragile commitment to nationhood and empire.
The tensions in the Italian army, for instance, reflected the fact that Italy was united only in 1861 and that the creation of Italian nationalism was a work-in-progress. In Lussu's
A Soldier on the Southern Front
, the officers went into battle with the shout âSavoy!':
Now that I was calm again, I could see all that was going on around me. Officers and men were falling with their arms flung wide and their rifles hurled so far in front of them that it seemed as though a battalion of dead men was advancing. Captain Bravini never stopped shouting: âSavoy!'
A subaltern of the 12th, red in the face, passed near me, clutching his rifle. He was a republican, and disliked the monarchial war-cry that we used in attack. Seeing me, he shouted: âLong live Italy!'
(
A Soldier on the Southern Front
, page 118)
There is no doubt that the scenes of mutinous hatred described by Lussu were fuelled by the soldiers' sense of grievance at being led by an officer class whose loyalty to the Italian nation was, in their eyes, doubtful.
For those fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army, loyalty to empire was weak. In Rebreanu's
The Forest of the Hanged
, Lieutenant Bologa is a brilliant officer whose bravery will be rewarded by a Gold Medal bestowed on him by General Karg, who wants to take him with him on his next campaign to Ardeal in Romania. Apostol is not keen on going.
âVery well, very well,' repeated the general thoughtfully. âThough I don't understand why you should not want to come with us. My division has a holy mission in Ardeal! A great mission. Yes! The enemy has stolen our country's soil. There the Wallachiansâ¦'
Suddenly General Karg stopped short as if a ray of light had entered his brain. He again took a few steps backwards and glued his gaze on Bologa, trying to read his innermost thoughts. For several seconds there reigned a grave-like silence in the room, while outside could be heard the grinding of cart wheels and the noisy chirping of the sparrows in a tree under the office window. Apostol unconsciously closed his eyes to protect himself from the general's scrutiny.
âYou are a Romanian?' the latter jerked out abruptly, his voice almost hoarse.
(
The Forest of the Hanged
, page 100)
Bologa is prepared to fight valiantly but draws a line on going into battle against his kith and kin. Certainly, the effectiveness of the Austro-Hungarian army was undermined by its need to enlist combatants from its ethnic minorities.
The Good Soldier Å vejk has a wry, sardonic attitude to the loyalty demanded by his commanding officers:
âHis Imperial Majesty must be completely off his rocker by this time,' declared Å vejk. âHe was never bright, but this war'll certainly finish him.'
âOf course he's off his rocker,' the soldier from the barracks asserted with conviction. âHe's so gaga he probably doesn't know there's a war on. Perhaps they're ashamed of telling him. If his signature's on the manifesto to his peoples, then it's a fraud. They must have had it printed without his knowledge, because he's not capable of thinking about anything at all.'
âHe's finished,' added Å vejk knowingly. âHe wets himself and they have to feed him like a little baby. Recently a chap at the pub told us that His Imperial Majesty has two wet nurses and is breastfed three times a day.'
âIf only it was all over,' sighed the soldier from the barracks, âand they knocked us out, so that Austria at last had peace!'
And both continued with the conversation until Å vejk condemned Austria forever with the words: âA monarchy as idiotic as this ought not to exist at allâ¦'
(
The Good Soldier Å vejk
, page 208)
If the patriotism of Europeans fighting varied greatly, for many of the Indians and Africans enlisted in the imperial armies it was nonexistent. For some, the links were primarily monetary â they went to fight in the hope that they would come back from the wars with financial rewards and even a pension; for others there was the hope that the imperial nations would recognize the contribution made to the war effort by the soldiers from the colonies and implement political and economic reforms. As Mulk Raj Anand writes in
Across the Black Waters
:
And once now in a while in a district arrived a hero, a man who had earned both a pension and a medal attached to it. And soon he became a legend and people came to see him, the wonder, especially as he had left an arm, a leg or an eye behind, and used a miraculous wooden substituteâ¦
Information about rewards was, therefore, the chief preoccupation of the sepoys, talking about it their main consolation in exile, the inspiration of it what spurred them on to battle. How happy would be the dear ones at home if only a ready sum could help to pay even a tenth part of the moneylenders' interest and towards the repair of the roof which had been washed out by the last monsoon before the drought!
(
Across the Black Waters
, page 169)
It was the same for many of the African soldiers â they were rewarded poorly and their expectations of a better life when they returned home after the war were not fulfilled. In
Mahmadou Fofana
, Raymond Escholier writes that the silver ring given by Samba Kamara's brother was
â¦all that would be left to the dead man of the village he had so much hoped to see again.
I must admit that to my sadness was added remorse. I felt the revolt that had found no place in the simple, docile soul of Samba Kamara. What gives us whites the right to remove a black man from the peace of his field to involve him in our quarrels, in our hatreds.
Yes, I know how the story goes: âWe are tearing these people from Barbary, we are letting them enjoy the fruits of civilisation. When the crunch comes, they must payback their debt: we share the same course.'
(
Mahmadou Fofana
, page 90)
Whatever a soldier's relationship to the army he was fighting in, the war marked a crucial period in his life â for many millions it also marked his death. Of the soldiers who survived the war and are written about in
No Man's Land
, some returned reduced by injury, others never were reconciled to the horrors they had witnessed and how the war had made them unfit for the return to civilian life. The ambulance-driver narrator in Helen Zenna Smith's
Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War
finds contemplation of the return unbearable:
Home, home⦠and I do not care.
I do not care. I am flat. Old. I am twenty-one and as old as the hills. Emotion-dry. The war has drained me dry of feeling. Something has gone from me that will never return. I do not want to go home.
I am suddenly aware that I cannot bear Mother's prattle-prattle of committees and recruiting-meetings and the war-baby of Jessie, the new maid; nor can I watch my gentle father gloating over the horrors I have seen, pumping me for good stories to retail at his club to-morrow. I cannot go home to watch a procession of maimed men in my dainty, rose-walled bedroom. It is no place for a company of broken men on paradeâ¦
(
Not So Quiet
, page 169)
For some on the home front, what happened during the war was confirmation that society had to change â that other ways of organizing it were possible. Those who saw this were a minority that had to make their voice heard:
We're few; that doesn't matter. We shall be pilloried; that doesn't matter. All that matters is that we shall have striven against what our brains and our hearts recognised as evil â Oh, not only evil, but stupid and petty and beastly â and we shall have done our bit towards bringing nearer the day when militarism will be supplanted by industry, and we may hope to have an international system of legislation that'll knock out the possibility of disputes having to be settled by barbarous and unintelligent means of bloodshed.
(
Despised and Rejected
, page 241)
As the war went on, the minority grew and was joined by the many disillusioned soldiers who returned home determined to make sure the suffering they had endured would not be in vain. So, the post-war period was in many of the countries involved in the war a period of revolutionary fervour and/or democratic reform.
Any selection of writing on the First World War has certain criteria. To give
No Man's Land
as international a perspective as possible, translations were undertaken of works that had previously not been translated. The selection was limited to works written before 1945; this, like most criteria, is arbitrary, but I felt that the experience of the Second World War gave writers a very different perspective from which to assess the First and so marked a valid cut-off point. And priority was given to fiction and to a lesser extent memoirs â though it is clear that the boundary between them is fluid â much of the fiction about the war is autobiographical. No poetry was selected since the war poetry has already been well represented in many excellent anthologies and was relatively well known.
*
No Man's Land
begins with the declaration of war being declared in Henri Barbusse's
Under Fire
:
âIt's the French revolution all over again.'
âCrowned heads beware!' murmurs another.
And a third man adds:
âPerhaps it is the war to end all wars.'
There is a pause, then a few brows shake, still pale from the wan tragedy of a night of perspiring insomnia.
âAn end to war! Can that be? An end to war! The world's affliction is incurable.'
At the end is the narrator of Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front
:
But perhaps all these thoughts of mine are just melancholy and confusion, which will be blown away like dust when I am standing underneath the poplars once again, and listening to the rustle of their leaves. It cannot have vanished entirely, that tenderness that troubles our blood, the uncertainty, the worry, all the things to come, the thousand faces of the future, the music of dreams and books, the rustling and the idea of women. All this cannot have collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels.
The trees here glow bright and gold, the rowan berries are red against the leaves, white country roads run on towards the horizon, and the canteens are all buzzing like beehives with rumours of peace.
(
All Quiet on the Western Front
, page 200)