The Bitter Taste of Victory (35 page)

Gellhorn and West do not seem to have met in Nuremberg. If they had done they might have had much to say to each other on the subject of the treachery and weakness both of men and of the Germans. They could even have compared their experiences of the same man, H. G. Wells, though Gellhorn always denied Wells’s claim that she had had an affair with him. Later in life, Gellhorn would become fascinated by Rebecca West, aware of a kinship in their lives that was perhaps not evident at the time. Now, however, Gellhorn like West was engaged in an act of private literary retribution.

Immediately after the tribunal finished, Gellhorn wrote an article for
Collier’s
reporting on the events. It was supportive of the trial’s accomplishments but also insistent that the blame could not be laid simply at the door of these twenty-one men. Describing the charge of ‘crimes against peace’, Gellhorn reminded her readers that war itself is the ultimate crime against peace: ‘War is the silver bombers, with the young men in them, who never wanted to kill anyone, flying in the morning sun over Germany and not coming back. War is the sinking ship and the sailors drowning in a flaming sea on the way to Murmansk . . . War is casualty lists and bombed ruins and refugees, frightened and homeless and tired to death on the roads. War is everything you remember from those long ugly years. And its heritage is what we have now, this maimed and tormented world which we must somehow restore.’

Before Gellhorn could attempt any restoration in her own life, she had to write out the long, ugly years.
Point of No Return
is a catalogue of the horrors of war: the young men who never wanted to kill anyone; the frightened, homeless and tired; the maimed and tormented world left behind.
²⁶

Gellhorn later described this as a novel that she had written to rid herself of Dachau: ‘to exorcise what I could not live with’. She had been brought up in ‘a good tough school whose basic instruction is: Get on with it. Somehow.’ Writing was her way to do so. The novel is an account of two soldiers, John Dawson Smithers, a lieutenant colonel with the 20
^th
Infantry Division, and his driver Jacob Levy, a secular Jew who appears to onlookers to be simply an ordinary, exceptionally good-looking American. At the start of the novel they are at the border of Germany. After weeks of dangerous misery in the Hürtgen Forest their unit is sent for rest and recuperation in Luxembourg city, where both men immediately go in search of sex. Smithers finds an American Red Cross worker called Dorothy Brock, with whom he has a casual fling; Levy finds a local waitress called Kathe, ‘young and short and not painted’, with whom he falls in love – though they communicate with only the few French words that Levy has learnt from a dictionary and she calls him ‘
Jawn
’ because in a moment of panic he introduces himself as John Dawson Smithers, denying his own Jewishness.
²⁷

Smithers’s affair is largely unsatisfactory: Dotty succumbs too easily, concerned merely with doing her duty by another sex-starved hero. Levy’s is much happier, though Kathe is a virgin and terrified of sex. In their first encounter she keeps her petticoat tightly on in bed; in their next she encourages him to penetrate her and is disgusted and physically hurt by the experience; gradually she grows to tolerate sex and to love the intimacy that it brings. Both affairs are curtailed when the men are sent back to the front. Levy proposes marriage to Kathe in a letter he posts to Dorothy Brock and spends much of his time engaged in imaginary dialogues with the version of Kathe he has created in his mind. But when the war ends he visits Dachau, almost by accident, and is destroyed by what he witnesses. Leaving the camp, he sees a group of German women laughing on a street corner. Outraged by their
complacency in the face of their complicity in the atrocities, he drives his jeep into them, killing the Germans and smashing his own formerly beautiful face. In hospital, Levy refuses to pretend that he did not mean to harm them. He believes that he must sacrifice his own happiness in order to confront the world with its guilt at failing to see what was going on in Germany.
²⁸

This is a novel about war. Gellhorn fused her own war experiences with those of both Hemingway and Gavin. She had no familiarity with life with the infantry and drew, though she would deny it, on the world of Hemingway’s exploits as reported in
Collier’s
. She also drew on Gavin’s tales of life in the Hürtgen Forest and had written to him in January asking for details. He replied describing that ‘sonofabitch’ place with its precipitous hills, dark dense woods, unexpected mountain torrents and mine fields as a ‘yawning man-eating chasm’ and suggesting that it was best discussed in bed. The hills, woods and torrents all went into the novel, as did the army slang that she had heard when living with the 82nd Airborne Division. But in her account the forest is transformed into a kind of testing experience that changes them all in ways they are unable to recognise at the time. Smithers is presented as unique in refusing ‘to give in to the forest’ as he drives the soldiers relentlessly on. But at night he lies sleepless in the dark, as cold as his men, and stops acting: ‘In the night he could mourn his Battalion which he loved. That men had to die in any action was known, and nothing to grieve over. But a man had the right to die for some purpose; the value of death was measured in miles. Whose fault is it, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers asked himself, and hoped it was the fault of the forest.’ Gellhorn was not with Gavin during his time at Hürtgen. Imaginatively recreating it now, she was asking how it had changed him, at the same time as she asked how her own war experiences had changed her.
²⁹

It is also a novel about men. In May, Gellhorn had told Eleanor Roosevelt that she had found herself ‘launched on writing about men as if I were one’. Her editor at Scribner’s had read part of it and informed her that he would not have guessed that it was by a woman. She later said that she had written the novel as a man, ‘being a man all the time
in my mind’. She found herself dreaming Jacob Levy’s dreams rather than her own. The ability to empathise with men, in war and in sex, was a gift from Gavin. Indeed, she wrote to Gavin to test her ideas about sex as well as war. Would he, she asked, be prepared to take the virginity of an innocent but compliant girl if he liked her and saw that she did not know what she was offering? Gavin replied that if she was as nice as Gellhorn described perhaps he would just take her in his arms, but that you would have to like her a lot to do this ‘because if a trooper really wants it, and if he was in Hürtgen he wants it almost more than life’s breath tomorrow or the assurance of it, then he will take it. And virginity has in itself a charm.’ None the less he could imagine occasions where he would hold back and he gave his verdict on her description of ‘reasonable male procedure’ as ‘OK’.
³⁰

Gavin’s teachings in male sexuality went into the character of Jacob Levy but Gavin himself is most vividly present in the novel as Smithers. Younger than Gavin, Smithers is only a lieutenant colonel, but like Gavin he is already a hero, looked up to by the men whose welfare he cares about as much as his own. Smithers like Gavin finds that he has been able to transcend class through war – able to bed a much better class of girl than he could even have fantasised about before. He is terrified that after the war his life will become ordinary and lonely again: ‘I’ve had everything, he thought, I am somebody now. I can’t, I can’t [go back] . . . in the end, he belonged nowhere.’
³¹

Smithers’s lover Dorothy Brock is glamorous, courageous and businesslike when it comes to sex. She disappoints Smithers by undressing methodically and getting into bed in their first encounter: ‘with Dotty, you had the idea that the line formed on the right’. She does not allow herself emotion and only once breaks down when she confides to Smithers that she cannot bear the possibility of loss: ‘my father’s too old; I haven’t got a brother, nor a husband, nor a fiancé, nor a man I’m in love with . . . All I want is not to have anything.’ If Brock is a self-portrait of Gellhorn then it is a harsh one. Brock has far less interiority than other characters in the book. She cannot afford to look inside herself because if she does she will break down again; instead she rushes around in order to avoid confronting her own fears. This is Gellhorn as
her harsher critics might have seen her: haughty, entitled, too aware of her own good looks to be vulnerable. The sex between Smithers and Dorothy is never passionate. It is as though Gellhorn cannot allow sex to be the good and beautiful act it once was with Gavin because she cannot afford the regret this might entail; instead she takes refuge in rewriting their relationship through a callous lens. She transposes the post-Dachau version of herself onto the relationship with Gavin, dooming it in retrospect, suggesting that she was always world-weary and never innocent or hopeful.
³²

If Gellhorn’s own more fragile interiority is present in the book then it is in the character of Levy, not in his sexual relationship but in his experience at Dachau. Before he visits the camp, Levy does not understand why the US is in the war in the first place, or why the Jews did not ‘clear out of this stinking Europe long ago?’ At Dachau, he wanders through the little village with sharp-roofed houses, with ‘the krauts all leaning over their front gates and gossiping together in the sun’, and assumes that the place cannot be that bad. But entering the gates, he is confronted immediately with the stench of decay. He sees the bald, lice-covered inmates walking slowly and aimlessly, their eyes looking ahead ‘too big, black and empty’, and is paralysed with fear.

Levy is led around by a doctor who tells him the same stories that Gellhorn was told at Dachau; tales of experiments conducted on humans, of bodies piled onto trains, related by a man who has learnt to observe everything with frightening dispassion and who lives merely because it is a habit. Leaving the camp, Levy feels he has no other life and no other knowledge: ‘he knew that he could not live anywhere now because in his mind, slyly, there was nothing but horror’. He is struck most of all by the scale of his own willful ignorance. ‘I never knew; I thought those goddam krauts had to fight like we did and I thought these weasling kraut civilians were sort of stupid and pretty yellow besides.’ He is angry with himself for denying his own Jewishness; for fighting in the war without identifying himself with Hitler’s victims. And he is furious with the Germans who have taken the gold of the dead Jews’ fillings and have looked on while thousands of their countrymen died. Seeing the group of fat, pink laughing women in the
middle of the street he feels himself slipping. It is hard to breathe; he holds his fist on the horn and presses his foot until the accelerator hits the floor.
³³

Gellhorn never belittles Levy’s pointless act of retribution. His protest may amount to very little in the end, but she is clear that it is the only thing he could have done at the time. She too had failed to protest about the concentration camps during the war; she too had failed to notice the plight of the Jews until she saw their corpses piled up before her. It is as though this is what she should have done, if only she had had a jeep at her disposal. Indeed, her own life had changed almost as radically as his; she lost hope as he did, and resented that she, unlike him, remained physically intact at the end of it. Instead what Gellhorn does belittle is Levy’s relationship with Kathe.

Just before going to Nuremberg, Gellhorn wrote to her friend Campbell Beckett that she no longer knew what love was, or ‘where sex starts and ends, and love (for me always an operation done with the biggest fanciest mirrors in the world) comes true and is not my own invention, invention of need and loneliness and the terrible boredom of looking after oneself’. Her investment in illusion with Hemingway had ‘paid off so shabbily’ that she was now frightened and doubtful. When she had first used the mirrors metaphor in the letter to Gavin the previous year she had still hoped that the illusion might hold. Now she could no longer believe it and she portrayed Levy as inventing Kathe. This kind of innocent happiness is only possible when you do not speak the same language and when you do not even know each other’s actual name. Similarly, Smithers is happiest when he invents an image of Dorothy in her absence, a ‘dark girl who knew what this war was like and would never be a stranger’, and he will inevitably be disappointed when they meet again.
³⁴

Unlike West, Gellhorn was no longer furious with men. Instead she presented love as a casualty of peace. It is not the fault of any of the characters in the book that the illusion of love cannot hold. It is the fault of the maimed and tormented world and of the Germans who have created it. ‘You sat there and watched them and felt inside yourself such outrage that it choked you,’ Gellhorn wrote in her Nuremberg
article, describing the act of watching the Nazi defendants in court. The Germans in her novel are either passive in defeat, their skin ‘grey and thick’ and their faces without curiosity, deludedly suicidal in their resistance (‘these goddam krauts had decided dying was a good idea and meant to take as many Americans with them as possible’) or unpleasantly unperturbed in their pockets of prosperity, like the laughing civilians whom Levy kills. Together, they have destroyed the world. What is more, the Americans have collaborated by allowing themselves to be spiritually as well as physically maimed by war. ‘This is the most disappointing peace I ever saw,’ Private First Class Bert Hammer observes within minutes of the declaration of victory.
³⁵

For Gellhorn as for Hannah Arendt, guilt was collective in the sense that it was endemic. Outside Nuremberg, no one could be acquitted; unlike the Nazis who were hanged that October, most people had to live with their shame. In one city in Germany, justice of a kind had been done as best as it could be. But despite that small and hopeful enclave of legal retribution, the world remained maimed and tormented and could never be the same again.