THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN FICTION

MACMILLAN STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY

LITERATURE

Clare Hanson
SHORT STORIES AND SHORT FICTIONS, 1880-1980
David Leon Higdon
SHADOWS OF THE PAST IN CONTEMPORARY BRIT-
ISH FICTION
Holger Klein with John Flower and Eric Hornberger (editors)
THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN FICTION
Harold Orel
THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF REBECCA WEST
Tony Pinkney
WOMEN IN THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT
Lars Ole Saurberg
SECRET AGENTS IN FICTION
Patrick Swinden
THE ENGLISH NOVEL OF HISTORY AND SOCIETY,
1940-80
Eric Warner (editor)
VIRGINIA WOOLF: A CENTENARY PERSPECTIVE
Anne Wright
LITERATURE OF CRISIS, 1910-22

Further titles in preparation

THE SECOND WORLD
WAR IN FICTION

Edited by Holger Klein

with John Flower and Eric Hornberger

M
MACMILLAN
 Selection and editorial matter © Holger Klein,
John Flower and Eric Hornberger 1984
Chapter 1 © Holger Klein 1984
Chapter 2 ©John Flower and Ray Davison 1984
Chapter 3 ©Alan Bance 1984
Chapter 4 © Don Piper 1984
Chapter 5 © Eric Hornberger 1984
Chapter 6 © Harry Guest 1984
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Contents
Preface vii
Notes on the Contributors viii

1 Britain Bolger Klein 1

2 France JohnFlowerand Ray Davison 47
3 Germany Alan Bance 88
4 Soviet Union Don Piper 131
5 United States Eric Bomberger 173
6 Japan: a Perspective Harry Guest 206

Notes 219
Bibliography 232
Name Index 239
Subject Index 247

v
Preface
The literature of the Second W arid War- and especially fiction-
has been largely neglected by critics, if not by readers. This book,
in some ways a successor to The First World War in Fiction, • is the
first major critical contribution on the subject within an interna-
tional framework. The earlier volume presented full analyses of
individual novels. The scale of the Second World War as well as
the mass and diversity of fiction produced during and after the
war years suggested the need for a different approach. Thus this
volume offers fairly detailed survey essays on the fiction of five
principal nations involved in the war, together with a short
contribution on Japan. Given the particular historical, political
and literary situation in each country, uniformity of treatment is
neither possible nor even desirable.
Soon we shall be as far removed in time from the Second World
War as Tolstoy was from Napoleon's Russian campaign when he
wrote War and Peace. No work of comparable stature has as yet
appeared; but there is a vast amount of writing, from ephemeral,
popular stories and thrillers to journalistic narratives and to
works of great scope, seriousness and complexity. The ways in
which literature has recreated the war in the various countries
represent important facets of modern history and contemporary
consciousness. The time has come to take stock of this literature,
to analyse it and to reflect on its implications.

J.F., E.H., H.K.

*ed. by Holger Klein (Macmillan, 1976).

Vll
Notes on the Contributors
Alan Bance is Professor of German at the University of Keele. He
is the author of The German Novel, 1945-1960and Theodor Fontane:
the Major Novels, and has edited Weimar Germany: Writers and
Politics.

Ray Davison is lecturer in modern French literature in the

Department of French and Italian at Exeter University. He has
published work on the impact of Dostoevsky on Albert Camus,
and he has made a number of contributions to the Exeter Tapes
series. He is at present working on an edition of Simone de
Beauvoir's Une .\tlort tr'es douce.

John Flower is Professor of French at the University of Exeter.

He is the author of France Today; Intention and Achievement: an Essay
on the Novels of FranfOis Mauriac; Roger Vailland: the Man and his
Marks; Literature and Politics in Modem France; Literature and the Left
in France. He is also editor of the Journal of European Studies.

Harry Guest is a poet and novelist. He was British Council

Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Yokohama
National University from 1966 to 1972. With his wife Lynn Guest
and Kajima Shozo he produced Post-War Japanese Poetry for
Penguin in 1972 and has recently edited the Japanese section of
the Elek Book of Oriental Verse and also published a new book of his
own poems, entitled Lost and Found. He is currently Head of
Modern Languages at Exeter School and also teaches Japanese at
Exeter University.

Eric Romberger is lecturer in the School of English and Ameri-

can Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He is the
author of Ezra Pound: the Critical Heritage; The Art of the Real: Poetry
in England and America since 1939 and 'How I became a Socialist':
American Writers and the Socialist Party, 1901-1919 (forthcoming).
Vlll
 Notes on the Contributors IX

Holger Klein is Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Lan-

guages and European History at the University of East Anglia.
He is the author of a study of English Renaissance poetry, a
translation into German of Wycherley's The Country Wife, and a
translation and commentary on Shakespeare's Hamlet. He edited
Gerstenberg English Reprints and The First World War in Fiction
(Macmillan, 1976).

Don Piper is Lecturer in the Department of Russian Studies at

the University of Manchester, and author of a study of the Soviet
novelist, Veniamin Kaverin, V.A. Kaverin: a Soviet Writer's Re-
sponse to the Problem of Commitment.
1 Britain
Holger Klein

Having read the "war books" so far published, Tom Harrisson in

December 1941 talked of a "cataract of tripe" 1 which he surveyed,
identifying a few interesting wavelets here and there. In 1943
Granville Hicks found that "some moderately good books have
been written about the war" while stressing that "Literature, as
everyone knows, cannot be expected to flourish in wartime. " 2 The
difficulties of sustained writing in Britain during the war were
great and have been vividly illustrated in Robert Hewison's Under
Siege (1977). In 1941 they prompted a group, including Cyril
Connolly, George Orwell and Stephen Spender to issue a manifes-
to demanding an officially recognised category of "war writers"
who should (in parallel to "war artists" or "war correspondents")
be given "the necessary facilities for writing their books" .3 For
better or worse this plea went unheeded and, taking stock in 1946,
Alec Waugh and Spender ruefully recalled all the unfavourable
conditions. 4
In the same year Vernon Mallinson postulated, rather more
briskly, "Nothing written in England since 1939 gives the sligh-
test indication that this World War, however cataclysmic, has
produced or is likely to produce anything immediately
significant." 5 Surveying The Novel 1945-1950 in 1951, P.H.
Newby made favourable mention of four novelists, particularly
Alex Comfort (for a work actually published in 1944), but joined
earlier voices in noting the absence of any "good English novel" to
"paint the horrors of war" .6 He explained this by the nature of
total war in which (as opposed to the First World War) civilians
suffered as much or more than soldiers, and suggested also that
perhaps "war experience is a handicap in writing about the war
... ". Yet he held out hope, arguing that the "process of gestation"
was still going on. In 1956 John T. Frederick combined both
arguments; with reference to the time-lag with which "some of the
1
2 The Second World War in Fiction

most important novels of the First World War" appeared, he

surmised "major novels of World War II may be just around the
corner, chronologically speaking". 7 They were not, if we trust
Frederick R. Karl as A Reader's Guide (1961). R
And there the matter rests, apparently. Apart from its partial
inclusion in Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig's Women and
Children First (1979) the subject as such has by and large been left
to a couple of German and (peripherally) American theses, 9
discussions of individual authors who (as e.g. Anthony Powell
and Evelyn Waugh) attract attention in a wider literary
framework, finally to reviews following the appearance of new
works and prefaces to occasional reprints.
War drama from, say, J.B. Priestley's Desert Highway to Ian
McEwen's The Imitation Game, is still awaiting intensive treat-
ment. Poetry had not fared much better until Vernon Scannell's
Not Without Glory (1976). Scannell remarks on "the way in which
the Great War has become a powerful myth while the Second
World War, to a succeeding generation, has never been other than
a historical event ... ". 10 Indeed the stream of fresh literature,
particularly fiction, about 1914-18 is astonishing. Among the
factors contributing to this mythic quality Scannell stresses the
inexperienced and unjaundiced attitudes prevailing in 1914, the
relative remoteness of the actual fighting, and the preponderance
as well as the largely static nature of the Western Front, which
facilitated its transformation into a "fixed imaginative
landscape" . 11
On the part of Britain the Second World War was, as A.J.P.
Taylor put it in 1975, "that very rare thing - a just war" Y
Opposing at last the aggressions of the tyrannical and barbarous
National Socialist German state could leave little sense of tragic,
i.e. unnecessary and futile waste such as hangs over the Great
War and informs much of its literature. On the other hand, there
was no "innocence" (Philip Larkin) 13 to be lost. People knew, or
thought they knew, what a war with modern weapons involved
and what comes out of it. Not surprisingly there was no en-
thusiasm, nothing resembling the euphoric war hysteria of
August 1914. Instead, there was resigned resolution. In an exer-
cise of "Mass Observation" carried out before the German attack
on Poland, only 2 per cent of those questioned were glad at the
prospect of war; 34 per cent still agreed that "anything was better
than a war"; 9 per cent had no definite view. A majority, 55 per
 Britain 3

cent , assented directly or indirectly to the proposition that "we

ought to get it over with" . 14
This war proved, overall, anything but static. It was also more
intensely global and much more diversified than the First. With
Fascist Italy and Imperialist Japan as further enemies, no single
"theatre" of war held for very long a position of unique impor-
tance. Furthermore, other arms besides the infantry, and the
other Services besides the Army had an incomparably more active
role than in 1914-18. Finally, while in the Dominions and in
India the war remained (just about) ante or ad portas, large parts of
the Empire were scenes of destructive combat, and in Britain the
population was directly affected by aerial attacks. Civilians have
suffered from war throughout the ages. This time, however, as
Taylor says, "The distinction between Front and Home almost
disappeared under the impact of indiscriminate bombing." These
factors may, at least for a time, have helped to inhibit the growth
of a large literary myth. As time passed, certainly some smaller
myths seem to have arisen.
Mythical or not, and whatever Hicks meant by "flourishing",
was literature has definitely been booming. Harrisson's
"cataract" of forty years ago has become a floodlike river. And the
supply shows no signs of dwindling. A step to the nearest bookstall
is usually enough to procure the latest comics in The War Picture
Library (more than 1600 numbers so far) or in Commando: War
Stories in Pictures (more than 1300 numbers). Halfway between
comic and book one finds Marcus Allgood's D-Day Dawson
( 1977), "The Hero of Battle Picture Library". Indeed as far as
shortish and fairly stereotyped novels are concerned, the tide was
rising in the 1970s. In 1973, Charles Whiting set The Destroyers on
their devastating path, in 1974 Klaus Netzen unleashed The
Killers around John Standish (a combination of Campion, Bond,
and The Man from ORGY) while Leslie McManus launched
Churchill's Vixens; 1976 saw the first of Joe Hunter's books on the
(unpalatable) feats of "Major Harrison" and his Attack Force.
Compared to these, earlier series like those of Biggles and W .E.
Johns's additional ones ( Worrals and King of the Commandos) 15 or
Dennis Wheatley's Gregory Sallust stories (covering his stupend-
ous activities from 1939-45) appear as it were hand-made, fairly
sturdy and homely, though they are as easy to read and as
predictable.
Nor is this recent rash confined to secret agent and commando-
4 The Second World War in Fiction

type stuff. Whereas with John Fuller's Desert Glory ( 1960) Spencer
& Co's "World War II Series" of independent and solid stories
had reached 91 numbers, the 1970s witnessed a proliferation of
specialised one-author series. In 1976 David Williams started
Tank, in 1978 Matthew Holden Squadron, " ... the riveting series of
aerial combat adventures", joining Frederick E. Smith's bulkier
633 Squadron (1956) with its sequels. All these have a long way to
go before nearing The ].E. MacDonnell Sea Adventure Library which
already in 1968 numbered around 80 volumes. Moreover, there
are book versions, assured of mass consumption, made after
television series- notably the three-volume Ashton Saga of John
Finch's Granada production A Family at War: Vol. 1 (Kathleen
Barker) appearing in 1970, Vol. 2 (Jonathan Powell, with some
very effective writing) in 1971, Vol. 3 (Roy Russell) in 1972.
Another example is William Buchanan's Pathfinder Squadron
(1972) after the Toledo series. 16
"Tripe"? - most things mentioned so far would be called that
by many. The term would be unjust to Fuller, and Finch's
wartime panorama deserves a better name. And what shall one
call authors like John Harris or Douglas Reeman who turn out,
nearly year by year (something little known in the literature of the
Great War) self-contained, solid, interesting and on the whole
competently written novels? Hardly "great" in the sense applying
to Dickens or Scott. Pondering "Prospects for the English Novel"
in 1949, V .S. Pritchett claimed that "the gulf between the intellig-
ent novels and the popular pulp has become wider than it has ever
been" .17 Only a thorough history of the novel since 1939 could
help decide on that. Meanwhile Pritchett's term is useful. Leaving
aside "greatness", always best used for the past, one must insist
that there are good and very good novels of the Second World
War. A vast distance lies between D-Day Dawson and The Cruel
Sea; but the "gulf" is filled with works many of which may well be
described as "moderately good" (Hicks) or as "intelligent"
novels. The whole gamut needs to be taken into account. What
"tripe" is read by vast numbers of people cannot be a matter of
indifference. Moreover the excellence of certain works is often best
seen by comparison with thematically or structurally similar
ones. And the strong appeal of the war as a subject in contempor-
ary fiction is noteworthy in itself.
In a literary field so vast (and largely uncharted) as to make one
doubt the possibility of ever reading half the relevant books,
 Britain 5

drastic limitation might seem to commend itself, perhaps by

region (e.g. Europe, the Far East) or by period (e.g. the war years,
the seventies) or by Service (Army, RN, RAF). But such restric-
tions would entail losses in perspective outweighing the advan-
tages. Moreover, the field itself, "war fiction", is by no means
easily definable, and even if it were, discussing it in isolation
would entail grave impoverishment, indeed distortion of the
horizon. There is, indicated by Harrison's term "war books"
(continuing a critical tradition arising from the Great War) much
closely related prose literature, often excellent and representing a
challenge to fiction. In view of these circumstances and the scope
here available, a mainly exploratory and theoretical approach
seems preferable at present. Thus the survey offers an inquiry into
what war fiction may encompass with regard to the Second World
War; a consideration of the general condition of war fiction; a
review of the thematic context followed by a typological review of
war fiction according to a fundamental aspect of structure and, by
way of a sample, a look at a quality-linked aspect; finally, some
reflections arising from factors of chronology.

The narrowest compass of war fiction would be, following Oldsey

(note 9), "Aspects of Com bat", concentrating on the fictional
representation of battle and its effects on men. This, while feas-
ible, would segregate one aspect of the war experience and
preclude many important avenues of investigation. It would also
tend to overlay features of reality: "combat" in this war was not so
clear-cut. Riding on a bus through London, Rowe, the central
character in Graham Greene's TheM inistry of Fear ( 1943) reflects:

Knightsbridge and Sloane Street were not at war, but Chelsea

was, and Battersea was in the front line. It was an odd front line
that twisted like the track of a hurricane and left patches of
peace.

This is just one among many contemporary impressions of what

Taylor later characterised as the near-merging of between Front
and Home - a corollary of total warfare that could only be
sustained as The People's War (Angus Calder, 1969).
john T. Frederick confines himselfto "books offiction that deal
6 The Second World War in Fiction

primarily with the experience of men and women in the armed

services during the war" (see note 7). This would seem to afford
sufficient scope, but the problems of such a formula need to be
explored. Cecil Lewis's Pathfinders ( 1943) e.g. deals "primarily"
with the past lives of a Wellington bomber crew as reflected upon
in turn during a flight to Kiel. Leslie Kark's Red Rain (1945)
proceeds analoguously with a Lancaster and Munich. Both books
have essential affinities with Rex Warner's Why Was I Killed?
(1943), a (non-realist) composite portrait of British society which
remains outside Frederick's terms as the characters (except
perhaps the dead soldier) are not "in the armed services". Yet
such works cannot be dissociated from the subject, however one
defines it.
Considering the receiving end of air warfare, can one really
draw a firm line separating "fighters" on the ground like those
portrayed in William Sansom's "The Wall" (1941) or "Building
Alive" (1946), Henry Green's Caught (1943), Nicholas Monsar-
rat's Heavy Rescue (1947) from those figuring e.g. in Hammond
Innes's Attack Alarm (1941) which aims, "Within the framework
of a thriller" at giving "some idea of the atmosphere of a fighter
station during the Blitz"?
Furthermore, given a war that was partly fought "unconven-
tionally" by spies, agents, small groups of saboteurs and raiders,
often in co-operation with resistance movements in enemy-
occupied territory, a war moreover of ideologies, cutting to some
extent across nationalities, "thrillers" are hard to reject as part of
war fiction. And there is no difference of principle between those
fighting this kind of war at home and those doing it abroad -
between, on the one hand, Nicholas Blake's (Cecil Day Lewis's)
The Smiler with the Knife (1939), Michael Innes's (J.I.M.
Stewart's) The Secret Vanguard (1940), Margery Allingham's
Traitor's Purse (1941), Agatha Christie's Nor M?(1941), Somerset
Maugham's The Hour before the Dawn (1942), Greene's Ministry of
Fear (weaving rings round many "professionals"), Priestley's
Blackout in Gretley (1943) and, on the other hand, books like
Wheatley's V for Vengeance (1942), Walker Taylor's Spylight
(1943), Johns' Gimlet Goes Again (1944), Nevil Shute's Most Secret
(1945), Alistair Maclean's Where Eagles Dare (1967), Leslie
Thomas's (splendid) Ormerod's Landing (1978) and Harris's The
Fox From His Lair (1978); to take two novels with the same
intended assassination victim: between Geoffrey Household's
 Britain 7

(just pre-war) Rogue Male (1939) and Heinz Kunz's The Fiihrer
must die! (1959) or, juxtaposing two novels by the same author,
between Peter Leslie's The Bombers ( 1972) and Killer Corps ( 1971).
An intriguing case in this connection is Duff Cooper's Operation
Heartbreak ( 1950), peculiarly linked to a documented incident. To
divert German attention from the planned Allied invasion of
Sicily (July 1943), Naval Intelligence ingeniously fabricated offi-
cial letters pointing to Greece, and put them on the body of a dead
British officer with a likewise fabricated identity, whose body was
floated off the Spanish coast in April 1943. The German intellig-
ence network functioned well, as expected; the deception came
off. 18 What (clothed in decorous camouflage) Cooper does is to
invent a life-story for the man who posthumously served his
country in this bizarre fashion. He makes no thriller of it nor a
combat story. The dull, disappointing career of Captain Willie
Maryngton is a poignant portrait of an increasingly frustrated
Simple Soul. It is moreover an ambivalent view of military and
clubland Britain before and during the war as well as a (likewise
unhappy) love story. That touches on another direction in which
the subject's delimitation is problematic.
A "love interest" is, quite naturally, frequent in war fiction, and
practically de rigueur in the thriller variety (of late, often juicily
explicit) as well as essential to the type of romance Rachel
Anderson treats under "The Relentless Lava of War" (1974).
There are again many gradations. In many novels love and war
are equally central, e.g. Dan Billany's superb The Trap (1943;
pub!. 1950), Lionel Shapiro's The Sixth of June (1955) and J.L.
Carr's A Season in Sinji (1967); or, from complementary points of
view: Dan Brennan's Never Too Young (1944); the pilot's) and
Sarah Patterson's The Distant Summer (1976; the girl's). In other
novels love is linked to the action but subordinate, as in Antony
Trew's Kleber's Convoy (1974). In still others the war serves as
background, with varying degrees of intensity: from Robert
Grant's A Clutch of Caution (1975), unfolding the doomed love
between a Conscientious Objector and a fighter ace's wife (literal-
ly) beneath the Battle of Britain sky, to the twisted passions Beryl
Bainbridge sets against a less concrete backcloth of war in The
Dressmaker ( 197 4). Structurally viewed, there are besides stories of
continuous co-presence others focussing on love and war in
"blocks". Very sharply sequential is Eric Lambert's hard-bitten
The Veterans (1954); an inverse sequence is found in Morris
8 The Second World War in Fiction

West's The Second Victory (1958), won in the first phase of occupa-
tion in Austria. This romance also illustrates the problem of
deciding at what point the war ends for fiction: the novel opens
with the last killing of a British soldier in those parts and seems to
lead away from the war (as does, definitely, Priestley's Three Men
in New Suits, 1945); yet the war is, very concretely, omnipresent in
the book.
A different block structure occurs in novels where the war
action frames love, very strongly in Richard Mason's The Wind
Cannot Read (1947); Michael Quinn's harrowing participation in
two Burma campaigns encloses the pathetic story of the love
between him and "Miss Wei", the Japanese instructress. Alexan-
der Fullerton's A Wren Called Smith (1957), complicated by a
fictional present frame, demonstrates the deceptiveness of ap-
pearances: despite the brief and gory war action this romp is in
essence a "lonely island" adventure equally feasible with other
circumstances to the key situation. In Monsarrat's Leave Cancelled
(1945) on the contrary, the war as action is only there as past and
threatening future to the consummate moment of love; but it is
vital. So it is in Alexander Baron's There's No Home (1950),
explicitly introduced with the words: "This is net a story of war
but of one of those brief interludes in war when the almost-
forgotten rhythms of normal living are permitted to emerge
again ... ". The scene is Catania, at the beginning exhausted
troops arrive for a rest, at the end they move forward again. Yet
this "interlude" is inseparable from what surrounds it. The war
impinges continually and forcefully, as in the ambulance incident
witnessed by the Sergeant and his love.
With the exception of West's books all these works technically
fit into Frederick's formula. It remains to probe it once more, with
the emphasis not on the active "fighting" of all sorts that could be
subsumed under Greene's "front line", but in a more general
conspectus. Before the Germans conceived the wobbly "Festung
Europa", people in Britain had come to think of themselves as
living in a "Fortress": ever since the "colossal military disaster"
(Churchill, 4 June 1940) 19 in France. Hewison's title Under Siege
recalls this concept. An early, widely disseminated instance of its
use is found in Priestley's BBC-Postscript of 23 June 1940. 20
If one grants the image validity, one may reasonably argue that
other defenders of the garrison must be considered alongside
those in uniform as depicted, say, in Gerald Kersh's (pyrotechnic)
 Britain 9

recreation of training in the Guards, They Die with their Boots Clean
(1942), Alun Lewis's The Last Inspection (1943), Ernest
Raymond's Home Guard novel The Corporal of the Guards (1943),2 1
Howard Clewes's brilliant Dead Ground (1945) or Powell's three
war novels within his long sequence: The Valley of Bones (1964),
The Soldier's Art (1966) and The Military Philosophers (1968). An
Army existence like that of Nick Jenkins involves no fighting, 22
and he personally encounters less danger than Sammy Rice, the
weapons research scientist of Nigel Balchin's The Small Back Room
( 1943). From there one is lead to the factory people in Priestley's
Daylight on Saturday ( 1943) or Monica Dickens's The Fancy ( 1944)
and beyond them to all individuals whom fiction shows experienc-
ing the war. One might begin with Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver
( 1939, 1942) who in the autumn of 1939 felt "they weren't back to
normal, and never would be" and continue with Evelyn Waugh's
blithe cad Seal of Put Out More Flags (1942), L.P. Hartley's
massive egotist Casson in the village struggle around The Boat
( 1949; equally massive), Ursula Bloom's gushing Jenny WREN
(1944), the blighted and twisted existences of Elizabeth Bowen's
The Demon Lover and other Stories who embody a general feeling of
insecurity, strain, abnormality and distortion that she acutely
analysed in her "Author's Postscript" (October 1944), the
staunch back-bencher Merriwell of Raymond's Our Last Member
(1972), Henry Williamson's embittered Phillip Maddison, out of
tune with his countrymen also in the last volumes of A Chronicle of
Ancient Sunlight, 23 Summers, the ex-soldier repatriated to the
fortress with a peg leg and a bruised soul in Henry Green's Back
(1946), 24 to end with Joanna, one of Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender
Means (1963) who is killed when a house collapses through the
explosion of a buried bomb in July 1945- still during the war, but
long after the fortress had been re-inforced, had broken out, had
stormed and liberated what was not so much another "fortress"
("Festung") but, as Joseph Kessel termed it in 1943, "a prison": 25
France, and many other prisons besides.
A renunciation of the wider canvas to which these lines,
indicated both by reality and fiction would lead,isvery difficult to
defend in theoretical terms. It can be upheld in practical terms, of
course. All the more since a good. portion of the picture has
already been analysed by Cadogan and Craig, looking at "the
experience of women and children in the two major wars of the
twentieth century, as presented ... in fiction". They also contri-
10 The Second World War in Fiction

bute a delimiting formula not quite congruent with Frederick's:

Following a suggestion by Bowen they insist on a distinction
between a "wartime" and a "war novel". 26 By "war" novels they
probably mean "combat" novels (like Oldsey) and subsume
everything else under "wartime". Clearly, there exists again a
gliding scale of emphasis shift, as also with yet another, perhaps
more adequate distinction: "wartime" designating fiction set in
the war as environment, "war" designating fiction in which the
war is a major subject. While keeping the wider conspectus in
mind and emphasising its basic unity, it seems indicated here to
complement in some measure the work of Cadogan and Craig by
concentrating on soldiers in fiction about the Second World War.
A second practical advantage of this restriction is that it allows
inquiries particularly dependent on a rough comparability of
materials.
On balance it appears defensible to pass over most British
novels dealing with the war from the enemy side, such as Errol
Brathwaite's An Affair of Men (1961 ), Earl Gray's No Survivors
(1974) and Spencer Dunmore's Ace (1981). This whole area,
interesting and significant in itself, warrants separate discussion.
Nor are other countries lacking in this- Albert Maltz's The Cross
and the Arrow (1944) is an American example, Chapter 3 discusses
Alfred Andersch's Winterspelt (1974) as a German analogue.
On the other hand books like Comfort's The Power House,
Newby's favourite, which depicts the French side 1939-41, or
C.S. Forester's The Good Shepherd(1955), centred on the captain of
an American escort destroyer, are close to the British experience
and therefore directly relevant. The same applies to Pierre Boul-
le's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952; trans!. 1954). Nor could one
do without Brennan's novels about the war in the air (even if he
had not himself served with the RAF until 1943). They are
essential to the subject.
So are the numerous contributions from the Dominions who
stood by Britain in the hour of need- as a popular ANZAC song
good-naturedly put it: "There'll always be an England/While
Australia will be there." 27 It would be feasible and in some ways
desirable to discuss these books in separate groups. However,
these countries' war efforts were closely intertwined with Bri-
tain's; thousands of volunteers served in the British Forces 28
(including thousands from Eire whose official neutrality one finds
as resented in fiction as it was in fact), and in many if not most
 Britain 11

campaigns entire units from the various Forces were involved

jointly. 29 So there is something to be said for discussing the literary
reflections of this situation intermingled with the British. The
only alternative in our present context would be to leave them out
altogether- and that could not be justified.

As it takes its subject matter from a historical event- really a vast

conglomerate of events - it is not surprising that most fiction
dealing with the Second World War is realist. Briefly to character-
ise successful realist fiction we may adopt Harrisson's (incidental)
definition of literature, "the reconstruction and arrangement of
life" as verisimilitude of plot and life-likeness of characters and
environment. Furthermore, as in all fiction, unity and intensity
which, notwithstanding old and new blurring devices ( ars est celare
artem) we recognise, on reflection, as properties not of life, of
reality, but of the aesthetic experience. Unity derives mainly from
"rearrangement". Intensity derives mainly from the language.
Without a use of words apt to evoke whatever impression the
author wants to communicate, the whole falls flat; the touchstone
of literary quality is, ultimately, style. It goes nearly without
saying that a long and continuous tradition in this kind of fiction
has conditioned many readers to accept and appreciate variations
and partial deviations from this set of conventions.
In war fiction, one limit of realism is transgressed by the
speculative projection of what might have happened, if it con-
tradicts the generally known course of history. No buttressing by
possibility and probability or historical scholarship avails in this
case. Kenneth Macksey's Invasion: The German Invasion of England,
July 1940 (1980) has a peculiar air of unreality, fictitiousness
about it. 30 This is brought out even more when one contrasts it e.g.
with Netzen's second Killers volume, called The Winston Churchill
Murder (1974) and Jack Higgins's vastly superior The Eagle has
landed (1975), both thrillers about (imagined) unsuccessful at-
temrts to silence "That Voice", as Vere Hodgson described it on
8 May 1945, "which had steered us from our darkest hours to the
daylight of deliverance." 31
The effect of realism is not eroded in such novels but by others,
straining the conventions in different directions: that of snobbish
whimsicality as exhibited by Curzio Malaparte (esp. in La Pelle,
12 The Second World War in Fiction

1949, transl. The Skin 1952) or in that of Sven Hassell's monoton-

ous Grand Guignol manner (e.g. Monte Cassino, 1969). Of both
traits there is little evidence in British war fiction, while a third
type, veering towards romantic melodrama (beyond West} is
present. TakeJerrard Tickell'sAppointmentwith Venus(1951). The
general situation and mood on "Armorel" (presumably modelled
on Sark) answers well enough the early phase as described in Alan
and Mary Seaton Wood's Islands in Danger (1955), itself subtitled
"The fantastic story of the German occupation of the Channel
Islands 1940-1945". There is no impossibility and perhaps not
overmuch improbability about the idea of commandos taking a
priceless pedigree cow plus calf off the island, linked to the
destruction of the latest German E-boat. Yet the realist potential
of the story, including humour, is drenched and eventually
drowned by soft-soap sentimental eyewash.
Whatever its weaknesses, Tickell's book can serve to point out
the general relationship between war fiction and war-as-history.
The fundamental principle is that fiction does not show the
historical event qua event but qua impact, depicting the collective
experience through the actions and sufferings of individuals. 32
This emerges as clearly, to take weightier examples, from a
comparison of Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (1951) with Donald
Macintyre's The Battle of the Atlantic (1961 ). It likewise becomes
evident from comparing analogues to Finch's A Family at War
such as the early (and very solid) The Corhells at War (1943) by
R.H. Mottram 33 and, on the other hand, Arthur Marwick's The
Home Front: The British and World War II (1976), perhaps flavoured
with a taste of Rayne Minns's Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front
1939-45 (1980).
A corollary principle is also illustrated by these novels: war
fiction has to be highly selective with regard to the war as event.
Williamson devoted five long novels to recreating Britain in the
Great War34- and even that "covered", itself selectively, only the
Western Front and the situation at home. No one else tried
anything near that scale of representation. In the case of the
Second World War such an undertaking becomes even less
feasible. James Aldridge furnishes an example. He showed what
can be done within a limited range in Signed With Their Honour
(1942), a remarkable novel of the (disastrous} Greek campaign.
On the other hand, Of Many Men ( 1946), read as another piece of
 Britain 13

realist fiction, is unconvincing. The war is not effectively depicted

in the series of episodes (from Finland 1939/40 via Norway,
Dunkirk etc. to the Russians' crossing the Oder 1945) which
Wolfe witnesses as an unaccountably present and accepted ob-
server. And while John Quayle, the Gladiator pilot, is a convinc-
ing character in his own right and a suitable reflector for situations
and events in the earlier book, Wolfe is not just "a man in the
shadows" (cover) but a pale, floating shadow himself. The book
acquires interest and importance only if read as showing the
reaction to the war on the part of a (thinly embodied) Communist
mind. By contrast, Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy: Men at Arms
( 1952), Officers and Gentlemen ( 1955) and Unconditional Surrender
( 1961) manages, though renouncing the direct witnessing of most
war action and shaping an unrepresentative outline, to create not
only a coherent and credible (though grotesque) story but in some
ways an image of the war beyond the (quaintly elitist) horizon of
Guy Crouchback, the central character. And even its pedestrian
pendant, Powell's trilogy of war novels within A Dance to the Music
of Time, though it shows no campaigning at all, achieves some-
thing in that direction.
Most war fiction is less ambitious and, far from trying to trace,
by fictional reflection, the war as a whole, operates with more
confined objects. A common scale can be gauged if one relates
Reeman' s The Pride and the Anguish ( 1968), centred on an officer of
a British gunboat based at Singapore, successively with Noel
Barber's Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore (1968), then Paul
Kennedy's Pacific Onslaught: 7th Dec. 1941/lth Feb. 1943 ( 1972),
finally Taylor's or any other History of the Second World War.
Generally, both restrictions of scope and of focus are required for
the depiction of the war qua impact. If the novelist chooses a
"panoramic" method, the restriction of action will be more severe
- a very high point being reached by Len Deighton's Bomber
( 1970), comprehensively re-constructing a single RAF raid over
Germany. If an "existential" method is chosen, the restriction of
focus will be more stringent, often to a single consciousness. A
good example, in Frank Kermode's view "probably the best
English novel to come out of the Second World War" is David
Pi per's Trial by Battle ( 1959) 35 tracing the inner development of a
subaltern as he moves from his Indian garrison to his death in the
Malayan jungle. There are many different modes of balancing the
14 The Second World War in Fiction

two factors. An example of fairly extreme restriction of both

(broadly comparable and arguably as good as Piper's novel} is
Francis Clifford's A Battle is Fought to be Won (1960).
Selectivity, though a prerequisite to unity and intensity, is of
course not the only important criterion. Apart from aspects of
versimilitude and life-likeness as well as style, there always
remains the issue of what one may describe as "W elthaltigkeit":
what, if anything, is being concentrated- what of life and human
substance the author integrates into his chosen frame. This
question can be asked of all fiction, thinking of Joyce's Ulysses as a
most glorious achievement in "concentration". But the direct
relationship of war fiction to specific world events gives the
question a particular slant; the 6 June 1944 is in this respect in a
category different from the 16 June 1904.
"Reconstruction" (even by the historian) involves interpreta-
tion; "rearrangement of life" in fiction is not only ineluctably but
prominently interpretation. It already informs the very choice of
characters and action, and permeates the whole work - whether
or not authorial comment is added. This interpretative character
of fiction (probably more than the laws of libel} accounts for the
fact that in war novels, though a link to historical events is
established and frequently elaborated, historical personages:
famous leaders and commanders tend not to be at the centre but
mostly appear, if at all, as marginal or background figures, often
mere props to realism. A novelist's characters fulfil specific
functions within the overall fabric of his fiction, and the more
central a character's role, the more it needs shaping according to
the meanings the action is given, not to the reality it reflects.
Also imaginary admirals, air marshalls and generals are rare
and usually marginal. There are Brigadiers who play important
roles in fiction and are developed as visualisable people, notably
Waugh's Ritchie-Hook and Robert Henriques's Hatherley-
Cooke in Red Over Green (1956), but also Heathfield and Tal-
leinach in Harris's Swordpoint (1980). But few if any central
characters get beyond the rank of naval captain, group captain or
colonel. Two reasons immediately suggest themselves: firstly, the
necessary malleability of a character as set out above decreases in
inverse ratio to the rising weight not only of documented but also
of logically required official circumstantiality. And secondly,
while such a swift-moving kind of warfare broutiht top ranks often
close to the situation of other soldiers, their function was still to
 Britain 15

plan, organise and command others to fight. A necessary role, but

it sets them apart.
No doubt there is a human problem: "the burden of ultimate
responsibility" or perhaps "the tragedy of high command". War
fiction, while not poor in relevant comments or even short scenes
(often as sympathetic, sometimes condemnatory side-glances)
has not often taken it up. 36 The reason is perhaps that such figures
are difficult to endow with representativeness, a quality essential
-notwithstanding many a hero's pronounced individuality and
uncommonness of circumstances- to the relevance and appeal of
modern fiction. On the other hand it is noticeable that few British
war novels have central characters taken from the vast majority of
"members of the armed services" like able seamen, stokers,
mechanics, gunners, drivers, cooks; even private infantrymen are
not as often the hero as one might expect. And while it is obvious
that captains, tank commanders and pilots had a more directly
"interesting" war, the same does not apply to the infantry, to
paratroopers or marines. The main explanation is perhaps that a
certain measure of responsibility for others, scope for decision-
taking and freedom of movement such as enjoyed by NCOs
(whose share as fictional heroes is much larger in Second than in
First World War fiction) and particularly officers makes widely
relevant fictionalisation easier. It would however appear that the
number of war novels centred on private soldiers has been rising
since the later 1960s.
Interpretation in war fiction can go beyond the extent entailed
in a recreation of actual or representative events. Few novels
entirely lack comment on the war, many reflect on the conditions
obtaining before it started, on contemporary society, the enemy
and the post-war future. Others show a strong interest in analys-
ing aspects of the human condition. Laurie Andrews describes
Tattered Battalion (1957) as "an attempt to portray the reactions of
certain types of men to a certain set of circumstances" (Author's
Note). More frequently this is implied, in Clewes's The Unforgiven
(1947), Charles Morgan's The River Line (1949), D.A. Rayner's
The Enemy Below (1956), William Allister's A Handful of Rice
(1961) or Stephen Ashton's The Pitiless Sky (1979). Usually, it
seems, novels in which this interest dpminates present their
characters in circumstances of far-reachin~ or total isolation.
Thus the spotlight falls naturally on a confined group. A prime
instance is James Clavell's King Rat (1963), which, besides being
16 The Second World War in Fiction

"terrifyingly exiting" (Ian Fleming on the cover) could be called a

study of man as captive animal. Rex Warner's allegorical The
Aerodrome, pre-dating the war but inseparable from it and (over-)
enthusiastically praised both by Harrisson on its appearance
(1941) and much later by Angus Wilson 37 works on the same
principle. It is perhaps most valuable as a study of the Fascist
leader mentality, complementing as it were Priestley's Postscript-
sketch of the Fascist follower (23 June 1940), but necessarily more
impressive on account of the scope and manner afforded by
fiction.
Great scope is not always required for such studies, as one sees
in Laurens van der Post's A Bar of Shadow (1954) which recon-
structs, skilfully disjointed, in Sergeant Hara the mentality of a
Japanese prison tyrant/torturer. There emerges an unforgettable
portrait; it matches closely personality traits of at least one case
presented in Lord Russell's survey. 38 Nor is seclusion the only
method - Deighton's series of chilling vignettes entitled Declara-
tions of War (1973) might be termed studies of man as military
animal.

Like that of the First World War, fiction of the Second World War
is embedded in other prose literature: histories, biographies and
autobiographies detailing not what could be true, but what is true
in the sense that it can be documented as fact or vouched for by
specific persons. This is an immediate, likewise immense context
to our subject, meriting close consideration. In the war, fiction
shares with other literature a general subject as dramatic - or
traumatic, as exciting, in many respects as hair-raising as any-
thing a writer could conceive.
No surprise therefore that in accounts of all kinds expressions
abound that are taken from other high-tension areas of human
experience, especially from the theatre, competitive sports, and
gambling. Stages are set, curtains rise and fall, first or last acts of
dramas are played out; leaders put in appearances, make gestures
and give speeches, they make moves, they take risks, outwit their
opponents, play trump cards; grounds are prepared, ships race to
destinations, planes are downed, guns score hits, strongpoints are
knocked out; units reach start lines, others are handicapped or
trapped, reserves are thrown in, enemies will be hit for six, aces
 Britain 17

come and go; there are good and bad shows, rules get broken,
eventually one side wins and the other loses, is beaten.
The analogies are wider than such arbitrary culling of stock
phrases reveals. Not only do these other genres share the subject
matter and the medium of prose, the mould in which they are cast
basically corresponds to the adventure story, from the brief tale
to the epic. There are not infrequently narrative experiments in
war fiction, such as mixing of forms, shifts of perspective, the
occasional tour de force like Brennan's systematic "you" in Never
Too Young, probably a spin-off from the last pages of Heming-
way's A Farewell to Arms (1929) and best known through Second
Thoughts by Michel Butor (La Modification, 1957, trans!. 1958). In
non-fictional war writings one usually finds a consistent third-
person (omniscient) narrator for histories and biographies, or a
consistent first-person narrator for fixed-perspective histories like
Alan Moorehead's African Trilogy (1944) as well as for memoirs,
reminiscences and autobiographies (often adding something like
omniscience in the form of hindsight enjoyed by the narrating as
opposed to the experiencing "I"). By and large, however, even
stretching the notion of experiments, these two main possibilities
account for the bulk of war fiction as well. Regarding style, war
fiction has famous rivals. And good writing in non-fictional prose
is broadly based.
That does not turn such works into novels. Nor are these
considerations intended to deny differences in rationale, ap-
proach, objectives and methods as well as presentation between
what might comprehensively be called "historical" as opposed to
fictional war writing. That would in principle be absurd. In
practice, the distance is not consistently wide. On the one side of a
"no-man's land" many war novels incorporate textbook-type
summaries, some use procedures recalling the documentary. And
quite a few novels are not only based on personal experience (that
is frequent) but amount to slightly modified autobiographies. On
the other side, a variety of historical writings addressed to a wide
readership either show similarities to fiction by their general cut,
or they employ, for divers reasons, devices of arrangement and
animation well-tried in fiction. 39 Looking at some examples (with
films occasionally serving as analogues to novels) not only brings
some of the related material to mind as interesting and valuable in
itself, but also helps to delineate further the contours of our field.
From earlier arguments we may deduce where to look in
18 The Second World War in Fiction

event-centred accounts: not at histories of the war, of whole

theatres and campaigns, but accounts of specific actions- battles,
operations, raids - or units. And even at that level the scope of
action embraced and the given perspective determine the distance
to analogy with fiction. We find affinities not (despite the title) in
Richard Hough's The Hunting of Force Z (1963) but in Forester's
Hunting the Bismarck (1959) which must in fact count as fictional-
isation; not in Brian Connell's Return of the Tiger (1960) nor C.E.
Lucas Phillips's The Raiders of Arakan (1971) but in W. Stanley
Moss's Ill Met by Moonlight (1950); far less in Michael Calvert's
Chindits book Prisoners of Hope (1952) and The Grey Goose of
Amhem by Leo Heapes (1976) than in K.W. Cooper's The Little
Men (1973) and Louis Hagen's Amhem Lift (1945). An instance of
conversion across the divide highlights one fundamental differ-
ence: Paul Brickhill's The Dam Busters (1951) is a fine and full
account of 617 Squadron, encompassing much more than the title
operation. The Dam Busters film (1954) 40 concentrates on this most
famous exploit and structures the story to lead up to it. This kind
of patterning underlies, too, Smith's novels about 633 Squadron.
Passing to person-centred stories, potentially close to much
fiction, one observes that scope can still sharply. differentiate in
cases where a great number of people are presented in equal or
comparable focus. Examples are John Dominy's Heydekrug book
The Sergeant Escapers (1974) and P.R. Reid's The Latter Days at
Colditz ( 1953), to a lesser extent his famous The Colditz Story
(1952), and Giles Romilly's and Michael Alexander's Hostages at
Colditz (1954). The success both of the Colditz film ( 1954) and the
BBC/U niversal television series ( 1972) rested particularly on the
selection and balancing out of the cast.
A far-reaching similarity to fiction is effected by different
methods and in a smaller format in the collection "Authentic
Stories of the RAF Escaping Society", written and published by
Brickhill as Escape- or Die ( 1952). These are colourful narratives,
told (except the last) in the third person, focussing on the drama of
a single - character, one is tempted to say, but they are actual
persons, each tale is headed by a biographical note into which, as
it were, the bones of fact have been pressed, leaving the narrative
itself freer to recreate the experience. The effect is particularly
striking in contrast to E.C.R. Baker's The Fighter Aces of the RAF
( 1962) which, apart from a few dramatised flashes, gives straight
accounts of article length. The contrast is even stronger between
 Britain 19

the pieces H.E. Bates published as "Flying Officer X" (particu-

larly the title story of How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories, 1943)
and the "authentic" incidents retold by David Masters in So Few
(1941).
An especially relevant half-way house in this connection is
Kessel's Army of Shadows (cf. note 25). He introduces his moving
account with the words: "There is no propaganda in this book and
there is no fiction. No detail has been forced, and none has been
invented." And he continues:

It is not that a novel or a poem is less true, less vivid than an

account of authentic happenings. I rather believe the contrary.
But we are living in the midst of horrors, surrounded by
bloodshed. I have felt neither the right nor the strength to go
beyond the simplicity of the chronicle, the humility of the
document.

Circumstances forced Kessel to fiction-like procedures. In order

to protect the Resistance workers whose terrible struggle he
depicts, he had to invent names, departicularise localities, switch
incidents and people, modify appearance, etc. Above all he had to
recreate life in this vast "prison" through its impact on a few
people- in order to engage his readership. The book has simplici-
ty (so has much modern writing); it may have in spirit the
"humility of the document", and one readily believes its
documentary authenticity; the point is, it is not written as a
document. One honours Kessel's motives in eschewing full as-
similation. Yet even as it stands, the collection is organised as a
sequence, Gerbier is close to functioning as a central conscious-
ness; this world of shadows looks akin to the many special worlds
we enter when reading fiction. The burden of establishing the
character of the book (discussed from a different angle in Chapter
2) falls heavily on the Preface.
Full-size biography, though it has a given focus, tends to stay
remoter from fiction, probably because many real-life structures
are less analogous to those of fictional appeal than incident/event
structures; Brickhill's Bader-book Reach for the Sky (1954) as
opposed to the (easily convertible) biography of Orde Wingate,
Gideon Goes to War by Leonard Mosley (1955) or to R.J. Minney's
Carve Her Name with Pride (1956), the heroic life-story of Violette
Szabo successfully telescoped in Daniel Angel's film (1957). And
20 The Second World War in Fiction

again a centrally important position in the war itself would

necesitate more radical restructuring for fiction, as one sees from
biographies like Moorehead's Montgomery (1958)- to say nothing
of Churchill 41 - as opposed to Vincent Brame's account of "Pat
O'Leary"/Dr. Albert Guerisse's sufferings in The Way Back
( 1957) which is a near-equivalent to a novel.
Some biographies of famous soldiers conspicuously vary the
usual procedure in that genre. Thus in Russell Braddon's Cheshire
VC (1954) the pivotal experience (watching the atom bomb hit
Nagasaki, 9 August 1945) is placed first and thereby dominates
the otherwise sequential presentation. Less successful is R.T.
Bickers's interspersion of "from within" perspectives- logically
closed to the biographer unless it be in the form of diaries etc. An
excellent demonstration of this principle is the fictitious bio-
graphy James Balfour chose as the form of his black-humour
novel The Glory Boy (1961). In Bickers's Ginger Lacey Fighter Pilot
(1962) the "from within" stretches are accompanied by stylistic
variations (notably once more Hemingway's "you"), making
them jar even more. Partial fictionalisation and biographical
portraying are not easily integrated unless special circumstances
obtain, as in the account of Sir Basil Embry's escape (1940),
written down by Anthony Richardson in the third person under
the wrily connotative title Wingless Victory (1950) based on
lengthy sessions with the Air Marshall held nearly ten years after
the Wing Commander's spectacular adventure took place.
Turning from this autobiography written by someone else and
another transitional case, an autobiography written in collabora-
tion: C.F. Rawnesly and Robert Wright, Night Fighter (1957; very
full and good) to straight autobiographical writings, we can
respectfully bypass Montgomery's Memoirs (1958) or Sir Francis
de Guingand's Operation Victory (1947) and Sir John Kennedy's
The Business of War (1957). Competent and vastly interesting,
such works necessarily contribute to the presentation of the war as
event. For "My War" books that depict it in analogy to fiction
through impact, we have to move much further down the hierar-
chy and, usually, away from the headquarters to the sphere of,
say, Cooper and his Little Men or Stephen Bagnall and his part in
The Attack (1947). Most of all, move "inwards" to where we may
expect to share intimately and directly another being's thoughts,
feelings, moods, reactions to events- however overlaid, uncon-
sciously organised and stylised they may have become in retro-
 Britain 21

spect, as Roy Pascal demonstrates. 42 What can only be guesswork

in biography, or rational if empathetic outside assessment (and
irritates if presented otherwise in that genre) comes naturally to
the fore in autobiography; in fiction of course it has long by
convention been accepted and is most highly valued. Most au-
tobiographical accounts by soldiers stick very closely to events
and are widely valued for that; but the "from within" perspective
does represent a significant point of contact with fiction- if the
author permits it.
Probably the most important example of one who does not is
Spike Milligan. You cannot move much lower in rank and further
away from GHQ than to Gunner Milligan. Yet few books can be
more remote from fiction than his ingenious series of reminis-
cences begun with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971 ),
continued with "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?" (1974), Monty: His Part
in My Victory (1976) and Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall
( 1978). 43 Milligan shows impact alright, as we follow him and his
friends in D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, RA, on their accu-
rately charted journey from training to Algeria, onto Tunis, and
up into Italy. Not only, however, is he reconstructing and docu-
menting "Our War", the experiences of a spirited band of
brothers; he also leaves the reader politely outside- by means of
the irrepressible Goon Show humour and by montage. There is an
array of alienation devices like sketches, flashed-in "Milli-News",
"Hitlergrams" etc., climaxing in "Rommel?" where the precious
contemporary snapshots of other volumes (bearing captions
many a Private Eye might envy) are replaced by photographs from
earlier wars. Milligan's Saga is a work of art sui generis. Its
documentary value should not be overlooked, nor the underlying
seriousness: amidst all the clowning there comes across affection
for his fellow-soldiers low and higher, conviction that Britain had
to fight this war, modest pride at having been there, and humble
wonder at having survived. The distance from fiction can perhaps
best be gauged by reference to a likewise humorous work whose
hero, Lt. Ernest Good body (inhabiting a fictional space between
Donald Jack's Bandy and Hasek's Svejk) roughly covers the same
ground: Patrick Ryan's novel Howl Won the War(1963).
Unfortunately Keith Douglas's Alamein to Zem Zem (1943/44;
publ. 1946) remained a (substantial) fragment. He fell in Nor-
mandy ( 1944), and it is impossible to judge in what way he would
finally have rounded it off and revised it. 44 Even so, it forms an
22 The Second World War in Fiction

important and interesting complement to his poetry. Its spirit

corresponds perhaps most often to the last stanza of "Gallantry"

But the bullets cried with laughter,

the shells were overcome with mirth,
plunging their heads in steel and earth -
(the air commented in a whisper) .45

Richard Hillary, who was also killed (on a re-training flight,

1943), was able to complete The Last Enemy (1942), and this book
is truly outstanding. One of its qualities is its likeness to a novel in
the sense that intermeshed with external events (and no work of
fiction has quite matched Hillary's intensity in depicting the
Battle of Britain) there is an inner development which is com-
pleted at the close. The book resembles in this respect John
Brophy's Immortal Sergeant (1942). The course of the inner process
is different, indeed opposed in the two works: Colin Spence, a
sensitive writer, grows (very fast) through hardship and battle,
inspired by his mortal but immortal Sergeant Kelly, into "a man
at last", meaning the kind of hard, tough and experienced fighter
Brophy (and others) felt Britain had not enough of at the time
among those with leadership potential. Richard Hill<;lry, a gifted
but careless and lazy exponent of Britain's jeunesse doree who,
rallying his innate strength, had easily (like so many) turned into
an accomplished fighter pilot, develops through suffering that
cracked, as it were, his shell of insouciant hardness, into a
different kind of man: a writer whose public is "Humanity". As in
Proust, the stage reached at the end is the starting point of the
book one has just put down. There is a "Lost Generation" 46 also of
the Second World War, and Hillary as well as Douglas figure
prominently in it, along with Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis and
others.
Between the positions indicated by Milligan and Hillary there
is a host of interesting, substantial and often well-written volumes
that many readers may turn to in lieu of fiction, others as
complementary equivalents: Books such as Braddon's The Naked
Island (1952) and Ernest Gordon's Miracle on the River Kwai
(1963), both very effectively starting medias in res, followed by
flashbacks; and both, incidentally, revealing (as does Allister's
Handful of Rice) the relative "harmlessness" of prisoners' condi-
tions achieved by downscaling and side-tracking, that makes
 Britain 23

Boulle's Bridge so attractive, the book itself as well as the film

(1957). Or Leonard Cheshire's Bomber Pilot (1943), closing
flushed with the (apparent) breakthrough-success of the
thousand-bomber raid on Cologne (May 1942), and Pierre Clos-
termann's The Big Show (1951), a gripping and perceptive diary,
pithy even in translation. Or The Tartan Pimpernel (1952) by
Donald Caskie, the doughty Minister of the Scots Kirk in Paris,
and Sir Eric Lang's Return to St. Valery (1974). Both recount
special cases but are near enough the natural pattern of escape
stories; freedom/fighting- capture- prison life- escape- clandes-
tine existence- freedom, as exemplified in Richard Pape' s Boldness
be my Friend (1953) 47 or, without epilogue, and thus even more
shaped, George Millar's absorbing Horned Pigeon (1947) and W.B.
Thomas's Dare to be Free (1951). Against the background of this
basic structure one can look across at Bates's Fair Stood the Wind for
France (1944). The novel lacks the prison life phase (as Embry's
account) and the capture itself. Also, it is group-centred, and
introduces both romance and tragedy. So does Morgan's River
Line, a much more complex novel where the tragedy is doubly
internalised and moreover presented on two time levels, the past
interacting with the present. Yet even in Morgan the underlying
pattern is still perceptible. Some works give only half the cycle,
starting with the prison life, e.g. I Walked Alone (1940; publ. 1950)
by the Earl of Cardigan, and Eric Williams's famous The Wooden
Horse ( 1949).
This book reaches another borderline between autobiography
and fiction. Where truth is reconstructed (instead of verisi-
militude being constructed) and presented to the reader in vivid
detail of incident and dialogue, there arises the issue of a credibili-
ty gap. Many war autobiographers show awareness of it. Closter-
mann stresses he has not retouched his diary, Millar the prod-
igious retentiveness of his memory, etc., and generally there is
little reason to demur. Guy Gibson takes a different line in his
attempt to "illustrate", in a zesty personal narrative, conspicu-
ously framed by the account of the Dam Buster mission (16/17
May, 1943) "the growth of Bomber Command" (Foreword and
Dedication). And he pleads: "But I hope that living people who
have served with me will forgive me if I have left them out, or
worse, put words into their mouths which they have never said. A
memory is a short thing, and flak never does it much good." He
wants, in Enemy Coast Ahead (1944; publ. 1946) to adhere to what
24 The Second World War in Fiction

passed, and probably gets very near. Where Gibson had slight
doubts, Michael Nelson - if we are to believe him - had no
qualms, disposing of the problem in quite another spirit:

I have changed some names [not his own] to avoid giVmg

offence. All the events described are based on truth but some-
times I have removed them from their true background and
telescoped them in time, because army life is boring, and this
seemed the only way to make this book readable.

The procedure reminds of Kessel's, but the motivation could not

be more different. Or the result, a vastly amusing book with a hero
who is a literary cousin - on the RASC side - of Ryan's Lt.
Goodbody, however one interprets Nelson's "Author's Note" to
Captain Blossom ( 1973).
Williams is much terser. His "Author's Note" states: "For
various reasons I wrote The Wooden Horse in the third person and
used fictitious names for my real characters." Whatever made
him adopt the third-person autobiography (as distinct from
disguising names, which is easily explained), a well-established
form brought to eminence in English letters this century by Sean
O'Casey, the book is exceptionally unified and intensive. Had
Williams set out to write one of the escape novels of this war, he
could scarcely have done better, and the handling would presum-
ably not have been much different. In general, the donnees of
escape stories place them close to fiction. For a characteristic
difference between the two genres in Second World War litera-
ture an example from another field of experience seems apter.
Andrew Wilson is quite explicit in Flame Thrower (1956):

I believe that my feelings and experiences were not very

different from those of many other young officers ... For this
reason, and because of a feeling of detachment which comes
from describing what happened eleven years ago, I have found
it easier to write in the third person (Author's Note).

The first part of Wilson's statement finds parallels e.g. in Closter-

mann ("change the dates and a few minor details and it is a record
of the daily life of a fighter pilot" - modest, but correct in
principle) and Nelson ("All men who have been in the Services
will find parallels with their own experience in Captain Blossom";
 Britain 25

back cover) and reinforces, from a specific angle, the representa-

tiveness-argument advanced earlier on. The second part helps to
round off our present concern. One may fitly compare Wilson's
account with a (likewise modest) novel, Peter Elstob's Warriors
for the Working Day ( 1960). That also arose from personal experi-
ence, and activity as well as scope are roughly similar (tanks from
before the Normandy invasion to the last phase of the war in the
West). Flame Thrower, the "detached" autobiographical account,
has no other structure than that imposed by the circumstances of
war on the individual, whose course we follow from the passing-
out parade at Sandhurst (Feb. 1943) to the celebration of VE-Day
(8 May 1945) in Oldenburg. "Wilson knew that it was over. It
ended for different people at different times, and for him it had
ended at the end." In Warriors the central theme: the relentless
strain of fighting and the limits of the individual's endurance,
emerges forcefully from the overlapping succession of tank com-
manders: Donovan (already worn out), Brook (the complete
cycle), Sanderstead and Page (in full swing) and Bentley (just
shaping up). Such autonomous patterning is a fundamental
method by which war fiction generates meaning. And it can best
be achieved where the author feels free, beyond reconstructing
reality, to rearrange it.

Novels and stories of the Second World War show a great variety
of structural traits. They can be grouped under certain aspects,
and some of them overlap, others correlate. But there is no one
"formula" particularly promising, nor can the tangled mass of
phenomena be reduced to a neat system. Arguably the most
fundamental aspect of structure is the positioning of the action in
war fiction within the overall action of the war. As such it has an
unlimited fund of examples. While identifying recurrent position-
ings as notional types one can point to especially interesting
realisations and explore some links to other factors.
One type, apparently not too numerous, and clearly a post-war
phenomenon, may be described as frontal and comprehensive
animation of a specific historical event. If the event is "small" in
historical terms, an incident really, this animation can be nearly
continuous while presenting visualisable people and details of
action, as James Leasor does in The Sea Wolves (1978; the Goa
26 The Second World War in Fiction

affair, March 1943). The moment such an event is "larger" and

more complex, choices need to be made. Thus Forester's Hunting
the Bismarck sacrifices nearly everything for an outline of the action
itself. Rapidly moving locations and perspectives, he synoptically
unrolls the entire breathtaking episode from the Bismarck's
leaving Gdynia to her destruction in the Atlantic on 27 May
1941. What he achieves is a skilful but sketchy dramatis-
ation of a page in a textbook, with only fleeting impressions of
people- mainly Admiral Liitjens (over-optimistic) and Captain
Lindemann (more cautious). He does not forget the small people:
there is a Dusty on the Suffolk, a Nobby on the Hood, a Ginger on
the Ark Royal. But they and many others, named and unnamed,
are mere functions in the big chase. As fiction, this remains
rudimentary.
Quite the opposite happens in Ride out the Storm (1973) by
Harris, perhaps the most significant achievement so far within
this type. Harris opts for representative particularisation. Here
again we have a synoptic and chronological reconstruction, this
time of Dunkirk, from 26 May to 2 June 1940. The book may have
been inspired by Cornelius Ryan's D-Day epic The Longest Day
(1959), but the technique developed is different .still. Embedded
in the historical panorama and the activities of the people organis-
ing the operation, about a score of characters come firmly into
view, chosen from all parties, while the stories of about a dozen are
consistently told. Instead of evanescent Dusties we meet real
characters like Sieveright, the ex-scout and ex-clerk (who man-
ages, always dutifully, to pass through the entire campaign
without firing a shot), the upright Gow, lance corporal in the
Guards (who could have walked straight out of Kersh's barracks
and, while death spares him on that occasion, certainly fights with
his "boots clean"), and Private Noble (the shifty commercial
genius who is more influenced by Gow than he cares to admit).
The panorama entails, particularly at first, some heavy-handed
transitions, and Harris needs a lot of coincidence to achieve
contact between his main characters (wildly different in every
respect, even nationality, and clearly of representative value). As
the massive tale gets under way, the machinery creaks less and
less, and as the perimeter contracts, any and every coincidence
becomes credible. The fate of these people, all essentially
"anonymous", unimportant to history, fills the bulk of the book.
Its subject is of decisive importance to the British war experi-
 Britain 27

ence; thus some further considerations are due. Ride out the Storm
appeared late, long after the event and many other books about it.
The breadth of vision, the method, the balance of characters and
attitudes, all aspire to a fictional summa of Dunkirk. The subject is
a most rewarding one for such an undertaking, because it can be
celebratory. For a national epopee, the folly of Greece and Crete,
the shambles of Hong Kong, the shame of Singapore cannot be
balanced by rehearsing the numerous individual acts of heroism
and generous sacrifice. With Dunkirk even the weaknesses of
some and the stupidity of others can be absorbed in the collective
glory.
Literary reaction was not undivided: the same year 1941 saw
the publication of David Rame's ecstatic prose hymn The Sun Shall
Greet Them and of Eric Knight's This Above All whose hero, getting
through, decides to desert (accidental death at home preventing
the issue from developing). A wonderful light is, incidentally,
thrown on the civilisation then at stake by the fact that such a
book was published and moreover proved a great success. 48
Without doubt however, Rame came nearer to catching the
general mood. And he is by no means extreme. Churchill sternly
reminded the House and the country (while offering gratitude for
this "miracle of deliverance" to those who made it possible): "We
must be careful not to assign to this the attributes of a victory.
Wars are not won by evacuations" (4 June 1940). A timely
warning, reactions tended to veer that way; there was much
belabouring of Henry V. Immediately convincing for the Battle of
Britain, the evocation of Agincourt for Dunkirk seems a paradox-
yet not entirely so. In his Postscript of 5 June 1940, Priestley put it
like this:

We have gone sadly wrong like this before; and here and now
we must resolve never, never to do it again. Another such
blunder may not be forgiven us.
But having admitted this much, let's do ourselves the justice
of admitting too that this Dunkirk affair was also very
English ... in the way in which, when apparently all was lost, so
much was gloriously retrieved. Bright honour was almost
"plucked from the moon". 49 What began as a miserable blun-
der, a catalogue of misfortunes and miscalculations, ended as
an epic of gallantry.
28 The Second World War in Fiction

With variations, and often in less glowing terms, this image of

Dunkirk has persisted. It underlies even so deliberately downbeat
and stark a recreation as Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up
( 1955). And it still governs the sober, realistic yet grand and
forceful projection by Harris. That ends as it has to end. The scene
is the Channel. Horndorff, a captured German officer, fails to
comprehend:

'You English are mad', he exploded. 'How can you laugh

when you have just lost a battle?'
Connybeare shrugged, apparently unmoved at the thought
of defeat. 'Long practice', he said, 'We always lose 'em'.
Hatton grinned. 'Everybody expects us to', he added.
Noble had swung the boat on to course again ... 'Except
one', he said. 'The one that counts. The last one'.

This finale is not the easy product of hindsight, but an animation

of the conviction prevailing at the time and shaped in war
literature again and again.
Returning to the aspect of positioning, Rame's and Trevor's
Dunkirk books are examples of a second and more frequent type:
oblique and limited dramatisation of a specific event. In The Sun
Shall Greet Them the evacuation is recreated from the perspective
of Brandon, a middle-aged gentleman whose anxiety for Britain
drives him to volunteer for the small boats. 50 In The Big Pick-Up
Dunkirk is experienced by a group of soldiers around the stout
Corporal Binns. Harris uses this oblique method too, but the
multiplicity of individual fates and perspectives amounts, aided
by the general framework of observations, to a full panorama. On
the other hand, his Swordpoint (Monte Cassino; miles better than
Williams's Tank 2, Fortress Eagle, 1977) and his Take or Destroy
(1976; El Alamein) clearly demonstrate this type, as well as
George Greenfield's Desert Episode (1946; also Alamein) and
Reeman's The Pride and the Anguish and Strike from the Sea (1978;
again Malaya/Singapore). More openly in the form of animated
history is Leasor's Green Beach (1975), concentrating on the radar
expert vital for one Object (out of 16) of Operation Jubilee, the
Dieppe Raid (August 1942), while David Walker's Operation
Amsterdam ( 197 4) is as fully fictionalised a "true story" as Sea
Wolves.
These examples are tied to their particular historic occasions.
 Britain 29

Where this link is relaxed, a third type emerges: stories merely

tacked on to such events. Rarely like Cooper's Operation
Heartbreak, usually as thrilling adventures such as Maclean's The
Guns of Navarone (1957; tailend of the Greek campaign), Gordon
Lands borough's Patrol to Benghazi ( 1959; tenuous assertion of a
link to Alamein), Leslie's Killer Corps (marginally connected with
the Allied landings in North Africa, Nov. 1942), Smith's original
633 Squadron (based on attempts to bomb the heavy water plant at
Rjukan in Norway, 1943) or Harris's The Fox from his Lair (spy
chase ending on D-Day and D+1 in Normandy), though this
book verges on the second type, a real impression of the Invasion
being conveyed.
With further loosening of the link we get as a fourth type:
adventure stories pure and simple, set in some phase and location
of the war, like Maclean's Force 10 from Navarone (1968; a weakish
sequel), Whiting's second Destroyers volume, Operation Stalag
(1974; lurid) or Max Catto's excellent Murphy's War (1969). This
type of story is most frequent in the form of sea adventures, cf.
besides Catto, Fullerton's The Waiting Game (1974; the Arctic),
Reeman's Go in and sink! (1973; the Mediterranean), or Brian
Callison's gripping A Flock of Ships (1970; South Atlantic) as well
as lesser successors like his Trapp's War (1974; around Malta),
also many of MacDonnel's books. Why the sea? Thousands of
ships were ploughing the waters, many of them independently.
And seafaring matter has an age-old appeal to island
populations. 51 Furthermore, a ship's company is an ordered and
secluded unit of which a concrete impression can be quickly
conveyed. And, as The Waiting Game, even more Go in and sink!
illustrate, a ship's voyage (half or full turn) has a given, very
satisfactory overall structure. Reviewing the Dam Busters film,
Lodge (note 40) proposes the medieval Quest as an underlying
pattern. Dunmore's Bomb Run (1971) offers a better example, but
even with ships, for which more pertinent fiction exists, the
analogy is at best tenuous, if stimulating.
Reeman's Go in and sink! and Dunmore's Bomb Run represent
transitions to a quite numerous fifth type in which a certain area of
war experience is condensed into an imaginary episode, con-
structed and told in such a way as to represent that experience's
essential features. This is what Brophy aimed at with his desert
action in Immortal Sergeant; another example is Fred Majdalany's
Patrol, a very successful novel (1953; the 1973 edn claims 1 million
30 The Second World War in Fiction

copies sold). The same features characterise Andrews's The Patrol

(1956; Burma) and his Tattered Battalion as well as Clifford's A
Battle is Fought to be Won, Ronald Adams's two fighter station
novels, Readiness at Dawn (1941) and We Rende<;vous at Ten (1942),
Bates's "How Sleep the Brave"; Dunmore's Final Approach has
some affinities to this type. Here again, the sea seems particularly
rich: from Monsarrat's HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour
(1947) to Forester's intense Good Shepherd, Rayner's The Enemy
Below and of course Maclean's HMS Ulysses (1955) which far
exceeds an imaginative reshaping of PQ 17 (June/July 1942). Its
masterly concentration of the Arctic convoy experience is even
more striking when compared to "intelligent" successors like
Trew's Kleber's Convoy.
In one sense, Clewes's Dead Ground also belongs to the 'quintes-
sential episode' type. However, the brilliantly modulated incident
in the mine-begirt, sleepy East Coast town is only the basis for a
near-allegorical, ideological parable. There rages a multiple bat-
tle of wills, the most important being that between the military
and establishment mind as represented by the Adjutant, against
on the one hand, obstinate individualism represented by Thwaite,
the superannuated, baulked old sea-captain, and on the other
hand against the creative, humanitarian and revolutionary artis-
tic soul as represented by Private Elwes and expounded, in his
defence, by the company commander. The establishment "wins"
after a fashion: Thwaite sails into the minefield, Elwes lands in the
glasshouse. The spiritual and moral victory is theirs, the future
being vested in Elwes. The whole is no pamphlet, but a wry and
sober story, enacted rather than told; a rare achievement of
fiction. The affinity to socio-philosophical and political analyses
like Lewis's Pathfinders, Kark's Red Rain and Warner's Why Was I
Killed? is more immediately obvious in Captain Smith and Company
(1943) by Robert Henriques. There a sparsely adumbrated com-
mando raid to Norway serves as focal point for a retrospect on
some lives, representative of Britain with its values and problems.
This work is multi-generic, the interspersed poetry continues the
argument on a different level; an experiment possibly inspired by
David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937). These novels, a small group
necessarily, involuntarily remind of Saint-Exupery's Flight to
Arras (Pilote de guerre, 1942); but they are all group-centred,
fictionalised, and (except in Clewes) show less concrete integra-
 Britain 31

tion of action and speculative thought. This type seems largely

confined to the war years.
A seventh type of positioning is very frequent: here a small
group, or an individual within a group, is followed through a
longer stretch of time, often whole campaigns. The characters are
not shown in the moment of crisis only, into which may be drawn
(as in much drama, especially by Racine and Ibsen) what led to it,
but pass through a sequence of experiences and often change
under their impact. Simultaneously a considerable portion of the
war becomes visible from the particular perspective chosen. As
opposed to the "adventure story" and "quintessential episode"
types there is no firm and relatively isolated group and no closed
action, complete within itself. Instead, the central characters
directly participate in a larger movement of action within which
they are; strictly speaking, dispensable (a contact point with types
one and two). Reeman's A Prayer for the Ship (1958) and Brophy's
morale-boosting commando plus society romance Spearhead
( 1943) are transitional examples, Aldridge's Signed with their
Honour a central one. His (weaker) partisan action on Crete, The
Sea Eagle (1944) and Thomas Keneally's story of war with the
Yugoslav partisans, A Season in Purgatory ( 1976) belong here, as
opposed to Maclean's Force 10; so does Fuller's Desert Glory as
opposed to Greenfield's Deurt Episode let alone Landsborough's
Patrol to Benghazi.
This large and strong type (for which the sea seems to furnish
fewer examples) is particularly suitable for following various
others, subordinate aspects which suggest closer comparisons and
instructive contrasts. The quality of Piper's Trial by Battle is
brought out even more when seen alongside an intelligent novel
like Andrews's Of Lesser Renown (1958; Burma). Thematic and
other similarities connect Trevor's Squadron Airborne (1955) and
Brennan's more sophisticated The Sky Remembers (1977). And
both contain apt pointers to reasons why Holden's (Squadron) Sons
of the Morning is less "riveting" than advertised. This sequence of
aerial combat and ground interludes from May 1940 to the first
defence of London against the Blitz remains unimpressive be-
cause it lacks a central organising principle. Also, the few constant
figures- mainly Perowne and Joe Caton- gain little proftle and
are moreover swamped by a continuous flux of other pilots. This
comparison reinforces the reality-versus-artefact argument: los-
32 The Second World War in Fiction

ses in the Battle of Britain and indeed the entire air war were
horrendous (the statistical average reveals Clostermann's 462
missions as another "miracle"). The coming and going in Hol-
den's book thus corresponds to the tragic world of fact, but its
straight transposition into fiction proves self-defeating.
A strong contrast (with important general consequences) sepa-
rates large numbers of novels within this type when one looks at
the distribution of action in the sense of fighting. Many novels
show iterative or on-going battle action, especially Trevor's
Squadron Airborne and Elstob's Warriors, also Ronald Kemp's No
Time To Die (1954; tanks), John Watson's bomber tragedy Johnny
Kinsman (1955) as well as, more pointedly patterned towards a
climax, MacDonnell's (harmless) Gimme the Boats! (1953), Ful-
ler's (jubilant) Desert Glory, Ashton's The Pitiless Sky and Guthrie
Wilson's Brave Company (1951; using the "flying start" technique
of Remarque's ALL Quiet on the Western Front and Frederic Man-
ning's Her Privates We, 1929). In other novels, long periods of
preparation or different concerns end in violent action, thus
Baron's famous From the City, from the Plough (1948), Lambert's
The Veterans, Henriques's Red Over Green, Shapiro's The Sixth of
June and David Holbrook's F{esh Wounds (1966); occasionally they
continue long beyond it, as Kemp's book, or Billany's penetrating
The Trap (closely based on his life)Y A further structural trait,
more difficult to determine, is the centrality of focus: either on the
group, as in Andrews, Baron, Elstob and Wilson, or on a principal
character, as in Billany, Brennan, Holbrook, Kemp and Piper.
Often of course the two are balanced.
Very strong focusing on a single character ob\ains in an eighth
type in which the individual's position is, while superficially tied
up with the war, paramount and essentially independent - or
develops away from it. In one sense, Catto's Murphy belongs here
in that he overshoots the war, extending it when everyone stops
relieved, to persecute his vendetta against a German U -boat up
the Congo. A clearer example is Carr's A Season in Sinji whose
protagonist, Flanders, conducts - partly with and for his friend
Wakerly - an unremitting feud against Turton, an officer and
rival. Bill Cooper, The Third Man at Bere:cna Bridge by Geoff Parnell
(1973) fights, beside the official war, his lonely underdog's battle
against society for a kind of life. One might say the same about
Bracken in John Chancellor's (less well-written) Mario's War
(first publ. 1971 as The Train with Misty Windows), but what this
 Britain 33

accidental deserter adds in sexual stamina he lacks in convincing

cause, such as animates, on quite a different level both conceptu-
ally and in execution, the deserters Clive Briggs of Knight's This
Above All and Oliver Knight in P.H. Newby's The Retreat (1953).
In the latter (another "atypical" Dunkirk reaction) the chaos of
war is intensively paralleled in the chaos of private existenceY
Oliver Knight is eventually, completing the story of A Step to
Silence, retrieved from chaos and despair. No such inner recupera-
tion is possible in Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy ( 1951). In
one way, the novel impresses as a powerful Burma novel of type
seven. What it centrally shows is the disintegration of one man,
Captain Tony Kent. He starts out like many dean-shaven young
officers. But his movement is inexorably away from his world, in
which he was a fairly privileged, comfortably married man of
average qualities. Under the impact of war he multiply transgres-
ses the rules and taboos of his class and profession -drunk but
coldly deflowering a tipsy Eurasian nurse, warmly seducing his
batman, neglecting his duties in battle, giving (after he has
watched some of his men being horribly butchered by their
Japanese captors to make him talk) the enemy the desired infor-
mation, thus saving his own life, finally murdering a soldier who
divines his homosexual relationship. By Baxter's arrangement of
the plot and cut of the other characters, Kent could get away with
all this- if he were able to live with his self as he now knows it. Yet
he can neither forget nor change but lingers on, dying a spiritual
death during physical convalescence. The war is shown as a
school of egoism, and there is horrifying violence all round. With
the murder of his potential blackmailer, however, Kent has
transgressed not just against class and profession, but humanity.
While the juxtaposition of this private crime and the gigantic
collective crime remains for the reader to ponder, Kent cannot go
back, but jumps out of a high window, the war, the world
altogether. He does not ask for mercy. Yet who would withhold
compassion? As in the "philosophical" novel type, the constituent
criterion here is more one of coittent than of form.
By a different criterion, Parnell's Third Man at Berezna Bridge
and Chancellor's Mario's War also belong to a ninth type, neces-
sarily dating after 1945: novels whose action spans the entire war
period, or nearly so. This is also the case e.g. in Ryan's How I Won
the War and Nelson's Captain Blossom, likewise stories concentrat-
ing heavily on an individual but moving along with the war, not
34 The Second World War in Fiction

divorced from or away from it. There is no attempt in these books

at depicting the war as such; instead they describe "The War of
X" as fictional, in Ryan's and Nelson's case also formal, equival-
ents of the survivor's autobiography. It seems noteworthy that
implied rebellion and bland humour should be their respective
keynotes, and that they date long after the war. All three traits are
found in Balfour's The Glory Boy- really a (pre-If public school
boys') group portrait, with more telescoping to balance the
widened focus, conceptually blending protest and humour in
sub-acid to savage satire. Given a writer of the calibre evinced in
the Greek campaign book, the disjointed episodes in Aldridge's
Of Many Men could have grown to memorable full-length pieces.
The result might have been a composite history of the Second
World War in fiction of nearly Balzacian dimensions, and pre-
sumably better overall than Harris's and Reeman's collections
that seem to be heading that way. In 1946 however, Aldridge was
after something else- a rapid purview.
In The Cruel Sea Monsarrat works in the opposite way. The
book, a "true story" (Before the Curtain) in the sense of truth
Kessel assigns to fiction, concentrates on one continuous battle,
that against the U -boats to protect Britain's lifeline, the North
Atlantic convoys. It also forms a prime example of the campaign
type novel; but it exceeds it in scope. This battle is recreated stage
by stage from November 1939 until May 1945, from the begin-
nings to the moment when the enemy submarines, preying mons-
ters of the deep, so long only felt as an oppressive, omnipresent
threat, experienced in their destructive manifestations, hunted as
blips, audible shadows, and glimpsed on rare occasions in the
form of torn and charred remains, at long last surface to surrender
and are shepherded to harbour where their teeth are drawn.
Building on Monsarrat's own experience and earlier sketches 54 the
novel presents this enormous battle through the experiences of
two successive escort corvettes; it achieves coherence and density
by focusing, within the larger framework, on two characters,
Captain Ericson and Lt. Lockhart, with many more crew mem-
bers firmly delineated. Quite apart from its other qualities, The
Cruel Sea exemplifies in rare clarity how war fiction aiming at
representativeness can successfully operate on a large scale.
Monsarrat restricts himself to one particular front, a constant
portion of the periphery, as it were, achieving concreteness there
while conveying the overall movement of the war only by inter-
 Britain 35

mittent and indirect reflection. Shapiro's The Sixth of June, cover-

ing the stretch from 1 941 to 1 944, has the potential of showing
more from a near-centre perspective: that of a junior American
staff officer. But nothing much comes of this because Shapiro's
different concern: illustrating the contact and clash of two cul-
tures (American and British) as personified mainly in the triangle
Brad Parker - Valerie Russell -The Hon. John Wynter (com-
mando officer). Mere existence, however, as a soldier placed like
Parker (London - Algiers - again London) through these years
yields some relevant impressions.
The same may be said of the much larger canvas formed by
Powell's war novels. Especially The Valley of Bones with its
depiction of Army life in the raw at company and battalion level is
intensely executed. The overall note of ironic detachment (Nick
starts his war with a concrete embodiment of the theatre
metaphor) increases steadily; and as he moves to staff jobs in the
following two novels, narrative density lessens. Furthermore,
dramatic tension is progressively diverted to issues of no great
import, though this image of British society at war is still held
back, by its very subject matter aS it were, from the parochial,
vulgar and dull irrelevancy prevailing in the next volume of
Powell's roman fleuve, Temporary Kings (1973). The basic analogies
to Waugh are remarkable: comparable main social setting, cor-
respondingly wide scope, the three-volume format, even the
phasing (to 1940, then to 1941, lastly the remaining years until
1945). There is detachment in Waugh too, though of a less grey
and grim kind. And of course, Powell's hero experiences no
fighting action at all. Both sequences are palpably imbued with a
spirit of disgust nursed by the less palatable aspects of war society
as well as by the war's aftermath and the Cold War (something
not usual in our field); thus they include in their large social
conspectus figures foreshadowing all degrees of defection from
Burgess to Blunt.
The contrasts are equally remarkable, from the central figures
(Nick Jenkins is a sounding board rather than a character) to the
polish of language. Rather than pursuing this comparison, some
traits of Waugh's work may be used to round off our present
concerns. In principle, the balance of wider panorama and central
focus does enable Waugh to reflect the general movement of
events; and his solution of keeping Guy Crouchback mainly in
Britain but also getting him to various fronts abroad could have
36 The Second World War in Fiction

enhanced this quality. Yet in fact it does little of the kind. The
patterning is extremely strong and autonomous: these rare forays
occur towards the end of each volume. Moreover, they underscore
the meaning Waugh wants to generate: futility. Selection of
incident was obviously necessary. The choice of the Dakarfailure
(September 1940) in Men at Arms, followed by the catastrophe of
Crete (May 1941) is extreme but defensible. These military
fiascos are however not balanced by anything in Unconditional
Surrender but are on the contrary continued by the miscarried
"show piece" attack in Yugoslavia (imaginary; summer 1944) in
which Ritchie-Hook is killed. Unconditional Surrender stretches
further, as to Britain's early military muddles and incompetence
are added moral duplicity and powerlessness to influence any-
thing, made concrete by the example of the Balkans and mir-
rored on the personal level in Guy's frustrated attempt to help the
Kanyis.
Novelists as well as dramatists place emphases by what they
show. Waugh cleverly makes Guy himself reflect on the disap-
pointing nature of his share in the fighting; 55 but that does not
relativise it. Dakar, Crete and the Croatian forest are the only
such scenes the reader witnesses, and the arrangement is, after all,
the author's. Sword of Honour is deliberately unrepresentative of
the war as event. So is Guy as a character, so are the "Halber-
diers" and "Hookforce" as units. Again this is reflected on in the
novel itself, 56 and it is likewise the author's choice. In determining
his central figure and the world in which he principally moves
Waugh renounced wide representativeness from the start. His
choices could not result in anything but a tragic Quixotiade
combined with a concave mirror image of the war. Guy's world is
not far from that evoked in the Dedication to Put Out More Flags
and already diagnosed as dead by Ford Madox Ford in Parade's
End (1924-8). 57 K.ilbannock's pointer must be expanded in one
respect: Guy's world is not primarily defined by class as such but
by attitudes, values, and ways. The main story in Sword of Honour
is that world's interaction with the world at large and the forces
now dominating it - an interaction concluding with defeat on
terms of "Unconditional Surrender". Amidst this defeat, indeed
throughout the three novels and the war, Guy achieves one
solitary act of lasting validity: accepting Virginia's child by
Trimmer as his son.
The "concavity" of the war image has endless funny effects.
And their pervasive superimposition on the bleak and tragic tenor
 Britain 37

is a stroke of genius. Waugh impishly puts his best skills to the

creation of absurd characters (besides the immortal Hook and
Apthorpe there is a whole gallery of minor ones) and of comic
scenes (e.g. the interview with "Chatty" Corner and Trimmer's
raid). They make the work sparkle, render it eminently readable.
Sword of Honour is not an adequate fictional representation of the
war, but nor are other books on this scale, and the theoretical
indications are that none can be. One may disagree with Waugh's
general outlook, analysis and reaction to the times, yet be struck
by the justness of numerous observations, the penetration of many
social pointers, as well as delight in the effective writing. There is
no need to share (though one should perceive) a great clown's
melancholy in order to enjoy, and benefit from, his performance.
Sword of Honour remains the most substantial exponent of its type
so far, and generally among the best books in the field.

Value judgments, with which this essay has not been sparing, are
subjective; comprehensive analyses including style, which might
vindicate such judgments, cannot figure in a survey, only indica-
tions. One aspect of quality, not specifically mentioned among the
criteria since it lacks general application, is sufficiently frequent to
warrant discussion.
In most fiction of the Second as of the First World War soldiers
are not only pitted against the enemy. Usually there are addition-
al "enemies" or, put more abstractly, resistance factors. The mud
of theW estern Front is the most famous example, in a wider sense
the climate and weather - heat, cold, rain, snow, wind - and
conditions generally- dirt, lack of sleep, fatigue, hunger, thirst. A
different kind is pressure from immediate superiors (like staff
sergeant MacAllcane in Holbrook's Flesh Wounds); far more often
this sort of "enemy" is higher up and further away. There is
resentment against the rear and particularly the staffs also in
Second World War fiction (see Aldridge's I Wish He Would Not
Die, 1957, Ashton's The Pitiless Sky, Balfour's The Glory Boy,
Harris's Swordpoint, Majdalany's Patrol, Maclean's HMS Ulysses,
Reeman's The Pride and the Anguish; but cf. also Quinn's sober
reflections in Mason 58 and Harris's "Author's Note" to
Swordpoint); it may be somewhat less than in fiction of the Great
War, and certainly the resentment against those at home is rarer-
38 The Second World War in Fiction

a corollary of total war. Thirdly, such resistance may be internal:

most of all fear and, as numerous British war novels present it
(including at first Baxter) the "fear of being afraid". Lastly there
are hostile environments, much more frequently important in
fiction of this war than the First; the Desert, the Jungle, the Arctic.
The Air appears mostly as a liberating and exhilarating element
to pilots (rear gunners feel differently), allowing fulfilment of the
Daedalian dream. Sometimes however, this element does become
inimical (e.g. the cumulonimbus episode in The Pitiless Sky). The
Sea, on the other hand, is usually a terrible enemy; Monsarrat
goes further:" ... the only villain [is] the cruel sea itself".
Such additional resistance factors may be called concomitant,
as they arise directly and naturally from the subject matter. Some
concrete impression of them seems demanded, especially in realist
war fiction. Only when their depiction reaches as it were excess
level, when these factors assume large proportions and important
functions in a novel, a distinct kind of quality emerges, as in
Greenfield's Desert Episode, Baxter's Look Down in Mercy, Andrews'
The Patrol, Gerard Bell's Side Show ( 1953), Bates' ''How Sleep the
Brave", Dunmore's Final Approach, Catto's Murphy's War, Calli-
son's A Flock of Ships and The Cruel Sea of Monsarrat, and other
works.
There is another type of additional resistance factors not
necessarily given with the subject and unexpected. One may call
them spontaneous. They are usually vested in specific figures or
states of mind. This can be a question of special plot elements such
as Redman captaining against the German Hans with whom he
has personal ties, in Kleber's Convoy by Trew, or an interest like the
rabbit breeding in Dickens's The Fancy. More impressive is some-
thing like the uneasy co-existence in George Krause, Forester's
Good Shepherd, of the man as captain desperate to do his job well
and the man as product of a God-fearing Bible education. This
leads (within an enthralling battle against the enemy and the sea)
to continual juxtapositions like this:

'Steady on course two-six-seven, sir'.

'Very well'.
Wait for it. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength.
'Sonar reports indications confused'.
'Very well'.
 Britain 39

Another example is Kate in Henriques's Red Over Green. She is a

gratefully registered exception to the grey-eyed, graceful and
pliant or dark-haired graceful and pliant women that abound in
war fiction. She is more, however: partly due to her speech
mannerisms (mainly "one" for "I") she is one of the women in
this fiction that one remembers. Most of all she is a force (as
opposed to an important character like Shapiro's Valerie)
dominating the book (as Powell's violent Pamela might have been
in a smaller, less complex framework). Similarly Hollin Piper's
Trial by Battle is not only an unusual figure, one of the exceptions
to the procession of tall, firm, cultured but energetic, personable
officers. He is an embodiment of practically all things Alan Mart
has been educated to dislike and despise but to which he has to
adapt. In the final, horrific encounter (comparable to Piggy's with
The Lord of the Flies) Holl, the distorted black corpse atop the
wrecked carrier is an embodiment of War. In Clifford's A Battle is
Fought to be Won the shadowy and mostly silent figure of the
Subedar, Nay Dun, fulfils the role of father/king/god for young
Tony Gilling, the willing but inexperienced Lt. (or "Knight", cf.
Motto). During the nightmarish retreat in Burma, Gilling fights
two battles; besides the one against the enemy that for the esteem
of Nay Dun. It is the latter battle that he wins, though he will
never know it. Applying this criterion, one might perhaps view
Guy Crouchback's outdated and impracticable ideals as such a
factor. There are good war novels operating without either high-
level concomitant or spontaneous additional resistance.
Nevertheless, in trying to establish why a particular book does
strike as good, a look for this is often rewarding.

Some specific developments through time have been considered

where this seemed called for, but in the main our treatment was
systematic rather than chronwogical. One main justification for
this is the constancy of historical perception. It has been recog-
nised that mistakes were made, chances missed, that necessity
enforced problematic steps, that also on the Allied side atrocities
were committed. Moreover, this proved again no "war to end
war"; if anything, the danger left behind was greater, while
Britain's influence was smaller after 1945 than after 1918. But
granted all this, the basic necessity and justness of fighting this
40 The Second World War in Fiction

war has not been, and is unlikely to be, widely in dispute. One
finds broad agreement between a minimal formula like that of
Cecil Day Lewis, 1943: "Defend the bad against the worse" 59 and
a maximal one like Taylor's of 1975: "As the war proceeded, the
anti-German coalition came to stand for the simple cause of
humanity."
Systematic treatment is also indicated since there are no funda-
mental changes of outlook in war fiction either. Nor has it
developed in many major respects (as far as a limited reading
shows). The general constancy of reaction may be demonstrated
in various ways. One is a look across at historical studies where
they overlap. The pictures drawn by John Ellis in the chapter
"Attitudes" of The Sharp End of War ( 1980) 60 is based more on
testimonies, reminiscences and documents than on fiction, but
corresponds roughly to that arising from our material. Stolid
pertinacity and realistic scepticism prevail over enthusiasm for
the war and faith in grand war aims. The dictators are viewed
with contempt, the superiority of the British over all kinds of
Herrenvolk is undoubted. One finds hatred and disgust concerning
Hitler's Germany and the atrocities it committed, as well as those
of the Japanese. On the other hand, hatred of the enemy soldiers is
rare except in the sense that they represent a threat to one's
friends' and one's own life, and must consequently be eliminated.
Most soldiers were afraid, but somehow battled on. Bloodthirst
was rare (save in the immediate heat of fighting), so were feelings
of heroism. Staffs were unloved, the need for discipline basically
accepted. Group cohesion was high, comradeship very strong.
The dead have not been forgotten. There remained a certain pride
at having stood through the worst. One might perhaps go further:
Miles Tripp (a witness Ellis does not use) sought out his old
companions after the war and states: "Nearly all the crew looked
back on the days of operational flying, without qualification, as
good times." 61 That is what Corporal Hadfield in Wilson's Brave
Company prophesies to his men; but in the novel the idea is
undercut by death overtaking him and most of the squad. In
general, fiction seems more emphatic in differentiating the image
of the enemy - less with the Italians and the Japanese (but cf.
Allister and Mason) than with the Germans of whom one meets
many others besides the sadistic Nazi and the puffed Junker. And
fiction seems to pay more attention to the criticism of British
society before and during the war as well as to the contemplation
 Britain 41

of "What are we fighting for?" (though Carr's Flanders ridicules

this) linked to brief visions of the future, many of which are not
incompatible with Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn (1941). Two
fundamental aspects stand out most clearly of all. The one is a
mostly likeable image of the British soldier. There is no lack of
narrow-minded, stupid, nasty, selfish and mad or weak individu-
als; but on the whole, there emerges a great deal of common
decency and kindliness, of loyalty, fortitude and good-
humouredness. Secondly, there is no advocacy or glorification of
War as such; on the contrary, it appears in this fiction as loathly
and terrible, something mankind should not be subjected to.
Two specific aspects may further illustrate the overall constan-
cy. One is quality. Harrisson simply wrote too early, quality
rarely mushrooms. He may moreover just have missed Knight's
This Above All. However, critics who could not see anything really
weighty and significant in war fiction by 1946 and 1956 would
have been unlikely to have seen it by 1966 or 1976. The issue
remains one of outlook and standards, and models from which
they are derived. A completely different aspect is social orienta-
tion. This was a People's war, agreed. Now the People/people at
the time were overwhelmingly working and lowest lower middle
class in a traditional sense. Yet war novels asserting this majori-
ty's outlook (as opposed to including characters from it) have so
far been a small minority. Notable examples are spread over the
decades: Parnell's Third Man (1973: cf. also his A Day is 26 Hours,
1974), Catto's Murphy's War (1969), Carr's A Season in Sinji
(1967), Watson's Johnny Kinsman (1955), Monsarrat's Heavy
Rescue (1947) and Billany's The Trap {1943; publ. 1950). For this
scarcity there are socio-historical reasons, no doubt; but beyond
them a different kind of phenomenon may be at work, one
connected with mood. With more examples to hand, a chronologi-
cal approach could investigate this further and possibly reveal a
gradual change.
The most constant feature of Britil$h fiction about the Second
World War is in any case the great diversity of attitudes and
reactions. This is not the paradox it sounds. There was variety
from the beginning (as opposed to fiction during the Great War),
and this has persisted. Knight's Clive Brigga will not fight again
( 1941), Pelham, the doctor in Keneally' s Seasou in Purgatory ( 1976)
turns pacifist, we are told he would later become an Aldermaston
marcher. The more frequent change was the other way round:
42 The Second World War in Fiction

pacifists renouncing their creed in the face of the Nazi menace,

e.g. young Hubert of Mottram's The Corbells at War (1943), the
noble Lionel Fallaize of Tickell's Appointment with Venus (1951)
and Paul Grimmer in Holbrook's Flesh Wounds (1966). For Paul
this became easier with the German attack on Russia (June 1941),
and in that reaction he is more usual than Waugh's Guy to whom
the Russian connection signified the demise of his crusading
ideals. One extreme example may help to drive home this vital
point of diversity. Towards the end of Comfort's Power House the
reader follows the stream-of-consciousness of Claus, an old slave
labourer. A brief extract must suffice:

Your natural kindness is canalised to swell the massacre. You

set out to save your fatherland and find yourself butchering
Jews. You set out to save the Jews and find yourself butchering
civilians in crowded cities. There is only one responsibility- to
the individual who lies under your own feet. To the weak, your
fellow.
The weak do a great deal - every woman who hides a
deserter, every clerk who doesn't scrutinize a pass, every
worker who bungles a fuse saves some body's life for a while.

This aggressive refus, this militant pacifism is not a result of

Dunkirk shock as some may have experienced it. Neither is it the
result of disillusionment at Britain's decline or of despair engen-
dered by the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Of all
unlikely years, this was published in 1944. That very fact could
again be used against its tenor, but that is beside the present
point.
Having re-emphasised the uses of a mainly systematic and
synchronous approach one must add that eventually it will have
to be complemented by a chronological one. Towards this, some
impressions may be sketched. At the technical level, the form of a
fictional frame present enclosing a past, so promisingly employed
by the "philosophical" type (except Clewes) but also by Mor-
gan's River Line (1949) does not seem to have been used for much
substantial later war fiction; exceptions are Vander Post's Bar of
Shadow and Dunmore's Final Approach (spanning much more than
this war). By contrast, the use of alternating own-side/enemy-side
perspective (hardly known in Great War fiction) has significantly
developed. Not a device to be expected during the war itself, it
seems to have been used in America (Heym's The Crusaders,
 Britain 43

Shaw's The Young Lions) sooner than in Britain. Rayner (The

Enemy Below, 1956) and Forester (Hunting the Bismarck, 1959) are
early examples, followed by MacDonnell's Hunter-Killer (1968),
Deighton's Bomber (1970}, Dunmore's Bomb Run (1971}, Harris's
Ride Out the Storm (1973) and Trew's Kleber's Convoy (1974),
mostly important examples. This method, clearly indicated for
panoramic presentation, has more than technical import: events
and people involved in them are perceived in quite a different
light. Hardy's poem "The Twain" is an instructive analogue.
Rather than fatalism, however, a greatly enhanced appreciation
of the exigencies in which people find themselves at "the sharp
end of war" can be generated in this way, helping to increase the
desire for non-Clausewitz diplomacy.
Turning to morally problematic issues of the war as waged by
Britain, Comfort's novel contains seminal points for a fictional
exploration of two. In both it runs counter to prevailing opinion in
its own period. The first is the question of instigating and aiding
violent (as opposed to obstructive) resistance in occupied France,
as e.g. Walker Taylor's Spylight (1943) exultantly praises it. This
question does not seem to have been taken up as yet, unless it be
subliminally in Thomas's Ormerod's Landing (1978). Secondly the
strategic bombing of Germany. This question is complicated by
the Blitz and the V1/V2 offensive (and one remembers Guernica,
Warsaw, Rotterdam). Complicated also by the horrendous
human sacrifice of air crews. No doubt the terrible "cost-effect"
equation was not made lightly. And there was widespread convic-
tion that it was right- one reads this not only in Cheshire's and
Gibson's accounts (1943; 1944, publ. 1946) but also in Lewis's
Pathfinders ( 1943). As became even clearer after the war, the
equation was not correct, though A.J.P. Taylor perhaps over-
states the case against it. 62 And this issue has been taken up in at
least one major work, not surprisingly long after the war: Deigh-
ton's Bomber (1970). This is a remarkable book in many respects
(especially social perception). The aspect relevant here is central
to it and built on proven possibility: a pathfinder mishap not
dissimilar to one mentioned by Gibson. 63 To explore in fiction is
not necessarily to condemn, as Baxter's title and book show. It is
to create awareness of an individual or collective human problem
-one way in which war fiction can enrich and deepen retrospec-
tive perception of the war, thereby making a valid contribution to
present-day and future consciousness.
Chronology may also lead to other considerations. Late person-
44 The Second World War in Fiction

al memories of the Great War kept appearing into the seventies.

In this respect, no end is yet in sight for the Second World War.
Nevertheless, one may surmise that the majority of works based
on some form of participation in the events have already appeared
(with perceptible "bulges" in the 1950s and 1970s). And their
tenor in human terms is apt to evoke respect, admiration and
affection for those generations. Assuming that the bulk of future
publications will, apart from historical writings, within a decade
or so consist of fiction by people younger than the war genera-
tions, there are two tendencies of a possibly alarming nature. The
one is the apparent pandering to instincts of brutality, indeed
sadism, in recent series like Hunter's Attack Force, Netzen's Killers
and Whiting's Destroyers. The other is the provision of a vicarious
experience of strong physical 'action' in publications like the War
Picture Library, Holden's Squadron, Williams's Tank etc. One could
argue that this may not be much more harmful than the provision
of vicarious sharing in the glamorous lives of the rich and famous,
and that the instincts they cater for are equally ineradicable. 64 Yet
a certain unease arises at the prospect of more fiction (to say
nothing of comics) failing to stress the sordidness, horror and
inhumanity of war - something that comes across powerfully in
the vast majority of war fiction as a basic "message" conveyed
independently of the solid conviction that this particular war had
to be waged and of presenting some specific figures to whom, as
individuals, the war offered occasions for acts of courage, mag-
nanimity and even self-fulfilment. Bell's Side Show epitomises the
co-existence of these aspects as it has so far dominated. His Major
Hogan is a case of personal salvation through command in battle.
Yet he can reflect:

And that's what you looked like when you were dead - when
you died the noble death on the field of battle; a ridiculous,
oafish, bloody and dusty mess, sprawled in the dirt like a
discarded rag doll in the gutter of a slum street; small and
physically repellent and stinking, like a rabbit crushed by a
lorry on a country road, like the rubbish thrown out from the
back of a vast butcher's shop. And that's all you were, really.
Rubbish- in a vast butcher's shop; the sweepings of war. And
you looked like that, no matter how important you were.

One balance, war fiction has not blurred this fundamental one
among war's many faces, and newer tendencies in that direction
 Britain 45

seem fairly contained. Moreover, recent publications of First

World War fiction encourage one to expect many substantial
novels yet about the Second World War.
More generally still, the fact that this war as a period should
exert such a strong pull in Britain must provoke reflection. Among
the speculative reasons for this attraction are widespread disap-
pointment with the post-war decades, the renewed experience of
economic failure and social strife, this time accompanied by a
staggeringly rapid fall from world power. And one may surmise
that there exists a broadly based nostalgia, not so much perhaps
for the days of Empire themselves as for the days when people in
Britain, though reeling under the realisation of just how much had
been done amiss, though ferociously besieged and in deadly
jeopardy, did pull together. Few would pretend that the nation
was metamorphosed overnight into a host of selfless angels. The
high-society satire e.g. of Waugh's Put Out More Flags (and later
Hartley's Boat) as well as the sober portrait of the workforce at
Canning Kyle's in Monica Dicken's Fancy (1944) are sharp
reminders of some persisting realities. But a great move towards
serving the common weal seems undeniable. It is most effectively
(because unemphatically and indirectly) conveyed e.g. in Henry
Green's Loving (1945), set on an English-owned estate in Eire.
Raunce, the sneaking butler, is easily one of the most unprepos-
sessing characters in modern fiction. And the whole intricate web
of weird meanness and petty intrigue seems far from the war, let
alone from heroism. Yet "Raunce's Complaint", as becomes
gradually clear, is precisely his skulking in safety. His unease, his
ridiculous ailments stem from that. He knows what awaits him at
home, yet in the end he goes. There is multiple irony in the close:
"The next day Raunce and Edith left without a word of warning.
Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after."
There are fairly good grounds to suspect a nostalgic feeling for the
sense of national purpose and united effort that did seem to augur
well for any future and at any rate, transformed weakness into
temporary strength, made Dunkirk possible and enabled the
country to withstand Hitler's Blitz.
The early war poster "Your Courage Your Cheerfulness Your
Resolution WILL BRING US VICTORY" was inept, indeed
could sound provocative at a time (1940) when, as Holbrook's
Grimmer reminds his girl friend, there were still one million
unemployed (Flesh Wounds). But there was courage, there was
resolution, and even some cheerfulness- a particularly instructive
46 The Second World War in Fiction

contemporary witness is an outsider like Ernie Pyle. 65 These

qualities did not bring victory in the sense that Britain won 'the
last battle' but in the sense that Priestley's "common folk"
(Postscripts, Preface) stuck to their guns- real and dummy ones-
in the face of awful odds and of further disastrous defeats after
Dunkirk, until help was at hand. Until the aggressors overreached
themselves, aligning with Britain such powerful economic and
military potential as would eventually crush them. There is no
myth about that: nostalgia for this period can also be based on the
fact that Britain did fulfil a historic mission of universal import.
If there exists such nostalgia in any of these senses or in still
others, it could be made productive. And a chronological review
points to the beginnings: in the war years themselves and those
immediately following there appeared literature (war fiction
prominently included) full of constructive impulses, blending
social awareness, a sense of responsibility and need for reforms,
general good-will and the assertion of communal identity. The
warnings contained in this literature are equally strong. As an
example encapsulating the mood even before the greatest
emergencies, a letter in Mrs. Miniver (1942 edn) dated 25 Sep-
tember 1939 may serve to summarise both aspects:

I wonder whether it's too much to hope that afterwards, when

all the horrors are over, we shall be able to conjure up again the
feelings of these first few weeks, and somehow rebuild our
peace-time world so as to preserve everything of war which is
worth preserving .... So write all the letters you can, Susan,
please ... and keep all the ones you get, and put down some-
where, too, everything you see or hear which will help later on
to recapture the spirit of this tragic, marvellous, and eye-
opening time: so that, having recaptured it, we can use it for
better ends. We may not, of course, ever get the chance: but if
we do, and once more fail to act upon it, I feel pretty sure we
shan't be given another one.
2 France
John Flower and Ray Davison

In May 1940 the German army broke through the eastern de-
fences of France near Sedan and moved rapidly westwards to
capture Amiens and Arras: within a month it advanced to Paris,
entering the capital on 14 June. On 17 June Philippe Petain
called for a ceasefire, on 25 June the armistice between the two
countries was signed and Petain replaced Paul Reynaud as head
of the national administration. For France the war- what became
known as the "drole de guerre", the phoney war - was officially
over, but within approximately one month what was to prove
perhaps the most deeply humiliating and internally divisive
episode in French history had begun. 1
Despite sharing the ultimate victory of the allied forces France
had, twenty-five years earlier, been brutally ravaged by war.
Massive expanses of the countryside had been laid waste and the
male population decimated. The strident jingoism of some writers
and intellectuals like Barres or Benjamin and of much of the
national press during the immediate pre-war period and the first
year or so of fighting was gradually replaced by grim accounts of
the truth and by an increasing number of openly anti-war state-
ments. Most of the novels published during the 1916-18 period
were of this kind, with Barbusse's Le Feu (1916) and Dorgeles's
Les Croix de bois (1919 but written 1916) being perhaps the best
known and most influential. And in the following two decades
French novels which, like Giono's LeGrand Troupeau (1934), dealt
wholly or in part with the war continued, like most (though not
all) works throughout Europe, to be written in similar vein. But
during this same period a new threat to t:uropean if not world
peace began to appear in the form of Fascism. In France many
writers and intellectuals responded not only by participating in
international pacifist groups but also by producing works in
which Fascist activities were openly discredited and attacked-
47
48 The Second World War in Fiction

Nizan's Le Cheval de Troie (1934), Aragon's Les Cloches de Bale

(1934), Malraux's Le Temps du mepris (1935) or Cassou's Les
Massacres de Paris (1936) to name but four. Yet Fascism was not
without its admirers and practitioners in France, a fact which had
already been witnessed by the growth in the late 1920s of ligues like
Le Faisceau or Jeunesses Patriotes, by the activities of journals and
newspapers like the Action Fran;aise, Gringoire and later Je suis
partout, and by the various works of writers like Brasillach,
Chateaubriant and Drieu Ia Rochelle - even though their at-
titudes spring essentially from different origins. Furthermore, as
Pascal Ory has shown, Germany was, by the early 1930s, already
preparing the way for its expansionist policy by encouraging a
number of cultural links with France which included lavishly paid
lecture tours of Germany and highly remunerative translations of
French works. 2 Just as the Soviet Union exerted considerable
fascination for many on the political left - those who became
fellow travellers- so too did Hitler's Germany seduce others. The
accounts which both Drieu and Brasillach give of their visits to
Nuremberg illustrate this well, while the personal appeal of the
Fuhrer himself is summed up by the much more mystical
Chateaubriant: "If with one hand Hitler salutes the people in that
way which has become so well-known, with his other he faithfully
clasps the hand of God." 3 By 1939 and the outbreak of war
therefore there was in France, an important if relatively small
body of support for Germany, and not only for her cultural but for
her social and political values as well. Invasion this time was to
amount to more than physical subjugation.
That the Germans expected their attack on the Maginot line to
meet with such little resistance is inconceivable. The capitulation
of the French army resulted, as is well known, in the massive flight
(exode) of a terrified and impotent civilian population towards the
south. It is impossible to estimate the total number of people
involved, but figures of up to ten million have been claimed and
the biblical overtones of exode are apt; this was indeed the flight of
a nation. Harrassed by German troops and even attacked from
the air, people took with them what they could: motor vehicles,
petrol, bicycles and even prams were at a premium; rivalries and
antagonisms between local residents and the migrating hordes
developed; families were separated; the rout was complete. In the
circumstances it is not surprising therefore that the armistice
should have been accepted, as it was, with such enthusiasm by a
 France 49

large percentage of the population for many of whom, it should

not be forgotten, memories of 1914-18 were also still vivid and
painful. Some of course interpreted Petain's action as an astute
way of buying time thus enabling France to regather her forces for
counterattack. But some, less ready to capitulate on any terms, set
out for North Africa or London and began from an early date to
organise the Free French. Some went to Switzerland or, like
Bernanos, to South America.
Although in these early months the idea of resistance as a
positive response to the German presence was not being widely
canvassed, the division between those who accepted and collabo-
rated and those who came increasingly to reject the new state of
affairs here had its roots. De Gaulle, already involved in dip-
lomatic duties between France and Britain, established himself in
London and by late 1940 was recognised by the British govern-
ment as leader of the Free French. As a counter to Petain and the
armistice, he appealed in three broadcasts on 18, 19 and 22 June
for a concerted, collective effort by his countrymen in the name of
honour, discipline and the spirit of resistance: "The flame of
Resistance must and will not be extinguished." Regular broad-
casts followed but developments were inevitably slow. With the
return of prisoners of war, with the realisation during the early
months of the occupation that German soldiers were not behaving
in the barbaric way they had expected, the number of people
ready to obey such authoritarian commands was relatively few.
Indeed, as Beynon John has pointed out, de Gaulle's expectations
at this time were somewhat unreal. 4 Some months would pass
before the resistance movement emerged as what Malraux in a de
Gaulle-like phrase called "a mobilisation of French energy" .5
With the first killings of German soldiers and the beginnings of
reprisals in the winter of 1940-41, however, tpe situation began to
change. Two other factors were also particularly important. First
was the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The
French Communist Party (PCF), outlawed since 1939 on account
of its support for the Nazi-Soviet pact, could now reverse its
position of non-involvement with a clear conscience and re-
emerged to play a vital co-ordinating role in a national struggle
against the oppressor. Indeed so much did Communists come to
dominate resistance activities that at the Liberation in 1944 the
efforts of many others were sometimes overlooked - a fact which
was politically much to the Party's advantage. The second was
so The Second World War in Fiction

the invasion by the Germans of the southern zone in November

1942 in response to allied landings in North Africa. Petain's
refusal at this juncture to leave France and lead a national revival
from Algeria was seen by those not already so persuaded to be
final evidence for his complete acceptance of Nazi policies. The
enemy was no longer merely the occupying German forces but all
those who supported Petain, the Vichy government and its openly
collaborationist policies. The division between "the two Frances-
one heroic, the other treacherous" 6 here has its roots. Such a
picture is obviously both simplistic and dangerous. So too is one
which considers these few years, during which private and per-
sonal issues were inextricably linked with political and collective
ones, to be a neat, self-contained period in the history of France.
Pierre Seghers warns against this in the Introduction to his
anthology of Resistance poetry: "For me and for plenty of others
the ashes are still- and will always remain- hot, whether they are
those of people in my family or of murdered friends .... This
history is still very much alive, red with blood that spurts out at
your face. " 7
The reverberations of this period were many and what we
attempt in this chapter is to show how they were reflected in the
fictional works written contemporaneously and in those produced
later.

Although in the southern zone writers and intellectuals continued

for some time to enjoy relative freedom, the German
presence in the north had its effect almost at once. Supplies of
paper (reduced by 1943 to one tenth of the amount available in
1938), ink and print were strictly controlled. Censorship too was
imposed in various ways; in July 1940 the Propaganda-Abteilung8
was established to keep a careful watch over the press, radio,
cinema and publishing houses, and in October 1940 "Ia liste
Otto" was issued. This, so called after the German cultural
ambassador Otto Abetz, contained the names of about 700 Jewish
writers and of Germans (including Mann, Zweig and Remarque)
whose works expressed open hostility to the Third Reich. There
was also some attempt to limit translations of English works and
to encourage those of German novels instead. But by the summer
of 1941, novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Agatha Christie, Kipl-
 France 51

ing, Mazo de la Roche and even Jack London (Smoke and Shorty as
La Fievre de l'or) and John Steinbeck (In Dubious Battle as En un
combat douteux) had appeared and even by 1942, when the situation
had very considerably worsened, with all manuscripts having to
be officially checked by the authorities, works of fiction still came
~rom the presses in some quantity. During the first week of
February 1942 for example over forty titles (including those of
translations) were published and during the second week of April,
sixty. The picture which is often conveyed of a highly restrictive
German presence is one which probably needs to be modified
therefore. Similarly the questions not just of censorship but of
activities of a number of major publishers like Grasset, Denoel,
Gallimard, Albin Michel, and Plon might also be examined to a
greater degree than they have been so far, and with some profit. 9
Grasset for example willingly acceded to the German cultural
policy, Denoel (publisher of Celine and Rebatet as well as of some
left-wing authors) accepted the investment of German capital.
Yet Gallimard, who continued to publish the work of Drieu la
Rochelle, was singled out by the Vichy government as early as
1940 for having been at least in part responsible for the decadence
which, it was claimed, characterised the Third Republic: "French
literature from 1909 to 1939 has been controlled by a corrupt team
headed by that arch-criminal, Gallimard ... Gide and Corydon,
Breton, the peddlar of ectoplasm; Aragon, the archbishop of Ce
Soir; N a ville, the anarchist banker; Eluard, that rotten fruit; Peret
the slanderer; and all those other monomaniacs, drug-addicts and
habitues of clinics- that's what the Gallimard team is. Destroyer
of the intellect, the young of France spit you out, Gallimard." 10
Issues and developments of this kind have either been neglected
by or omitted altogether from general accounts and surveys of
French literature written during and dealing with the 1940-4
period. Instead it has become almost traditional to focus attention
on events and attitudes as they developed after 1940-41 and on
writing which reflected and encouraged resistance: the poetry of
Aragon, Eluard, Seghers and Cassou for example, plays like
Sartre's Les Mouches or Anouilh's Antigone, the short stories and
nouvelles published from 1942 onwards (the first, Vercors' Le
Silence de La mer appeared in February) by the clandestine Editions
de Minuit. Although almost entirely ignored by literary histories
of this period, there was quite a body of prose fiction published
between 1940 and 1942 which took the events of the invasion as its
52 The Second World War in Fiction

subject. Many of these novels are near-documentary in character,

at best thinly disguised reminiscences or journalistic accounts of
personal experience and, as with the earliest novels of the First
World War, it is arguable that having been written so close to
events it was virtually impossible to be otherwise. Their pattern
tends to be predictably the same- incredulity that France (and
the Maginot line in particular) should be so vulnerable, growing
awareness and acceptance of the reality of the situation, an
account of the invasion and exode, and a recognition that the
nation has deserved its fate usually tempered in the closing pages
by a statement of belief in the ultimate re-emergence of a new,
spiritually purer and victorious France. In most of these works
there is little that can have given the German authorities very
much concern; moreover to allow their publication could be
interpreted as an indication of the new administration's tolerant
attitude. Some were temporarily withdrawn and only allowed to
reappear in censored form, notably Noel's La Guerre des avant-postes
(1940) and Dorgeles's Retour au front (1940). But the cuts made in
these were more, it seems, for reasons of the factual information
which they contained than for others of propaganda or subver-
sion. Otherwise novels appeared quite regularly in this period
dealing with various aspects of the fighting on ground, sea or in
the air, according to the authors' personal experience- Dartey's
Apres la Nuit (1940), Chamson's Quatre mois. Camet d'un officierde
liaison (1940), Roques' LeSangdenosfautes(1941), Megret's]acques
(1941), Baroncelli's 26 Hommes (1941), Balbaud's Cette Drole de
Guerre (1941), Jamet's Camet de diroute (1942), Masson's Ligne
Maginot, bastion inutile (1942) to name but a few. Not all were
published in France. Balbaud's very. pro-British work, for exam-
ple, was produced by Oxford University Press; Victor Pozner's
Deuil en 24 heures (1942) by Brentano in New York. In both cases
publication abroad was advisable not so much because of any
specifically anti-German statements which they contained but
because of their open criticism both of Petain's collaborationist
policy together with his anti-British attitude, and of the sheer
inefficiency of the French authorities in 1940. In terms of struc-
ture, style and treatment of their subject, however, neither is
unusual. They also share with the others a reluctance to dwell on
the brutality and violence of war which we find in Barbusse's Le
Feu and other novels of the First World War. Descriptions of
military activities, of ruined buildings or of medical provisions are
 France 53

often muted and distanced as though impersonally observed, and

the thoughts and attitudes of the ordinary soldiers who were
directly involved in the fighting are rarely recorded. Deuil en 24
heures does, however, achieve rather more than most.
Pozner's novel describes events from the invasion to the armis-
tice, concentrating on a number of carefully defined individuals,
each offering a representative point of view: in particular Caillol, a
lorry driver, and his immediate superior officer Cardin, a colonel,
are contrasted one with the other. Caillol is casual, brave and
generous; Carvin is officious, at times supercilious and blindly
acccepts government propaganda which he reformulates in
cliches: "obliged by circumstances to abandon Paris. But we have
not given up the struggle".
Pozner directs much criticism at the incompetence and self-
centredness of those "in command". Carvin's immediate respon-
sibility is to ensure that certain papers relating to military sup-
plies do not fall into German hands, and on arrival in Toulouse he
instructs Caillol and his fellow soldiers to burn them. Only then
do they discover that many of the papers are of no military value
whatsoever, often relating to the nineteenth century or to the
1914-18 war. Incompetence and unreadiness are evident else-
where as well. Unfinished tanks are sent to attempt to stem the
German advance; retreating soldiers are issued with rifles which
prove to be virtually unusable since they have been assembled
from incompatible pieces. By the end of the novel Pozner's
authorial comments are also more in evidence. The general chaos
of the exode and the almost total breakdown in military discipline
are clearly stated: "From one minute to another, the town gradu-
ally filled up with soldiers. They prowled around food shops ready
to beg or to steal as they felt like it. None of them saluted the
officers." Like many others the novel closes with a token state-
ment of hope and of conviction that France will one day re-emerge
victorious; it also offers through Carvin the standard excuse
offered by the authorities that the Third Republic is to be blamed
for the present circumstances: "The Germans were working ...
while we listened to a Minister for Leisure." But Pozner's position
is rather different. While he may share this view to some extent,
the real point he is making is that the present authorities have
shown themselves to be incompetent, spineless and concerned
only for their own safety. Real hope for the future lies with Caillol
and his colleagues.
54 The Second World War in Fiction

The kind of criticism made by Pozner and others was not

shared, however, by all. One writer, Jacques Benoist-Mechin in
La Moisson de 40 ( 1941), a novel based on his own personal
experience, describes the concerted attempt by thousands of
prisoners to join with their German captors in an effort to save an
important harvest. The suggestion that a common interest be-
tween the two sides exists is explicit and the book expresses
unambiguous support for Petain and his policies. And Benoist-
Mechin was not unusual in his attitude. The belief that Petain's
action might ensure that France would be spared the kind of
damage and suffering caused by the 1914-18 war was also
expressed - and in some cases forcefully - by a number of
prominent writers and intellectuals. Some, like Montherlant or
Mohrt, went further, seeing the invasion as an opportunity for
France to find a positive and virile alternative to an effete,
decadent society, what Montherlant described in Le Solstice de juin
(1941) as "twenty years of not giving a damn and feebleness".
Many of these people were subsequently accused of collaboration,
and in some cases- that of Brasillach for example- were tried and
executed once the war had finished. For others the consequences
were less severe though the scorn and viciousness with which
people like Jouhandeau or Montherlant were attacked after the
Liberation were no less extreme.
Montherlant had already made his attitude to war clear in his
early novel Le Songe (1922). Now in a variety of texts- most of
them collected together as Le Solstice de juin- he showed himself to
be a supporter of, if not a spokesman for, the Vichy government.
But his position was to some degree idiosyncratic. Aloofness and
isolation were vital to him and he claimed, in a way that was not so
very different from Sartre's, that the very abnormality of present
circumstances could in fact be beneficial to the creative artist.
(One of the interesting statistical facts to emerge from this period
is that, according to sales and library records, more books were
being read than before.) 11 Mohrt, whose later novel Le Ripit
(1945) with its triple focus of sex, religion and war, reminds us of
Drieu's La Comtdie de Charleroi or parts of Gilles, regarded Ger-
many in a different way again; for him (like Drieu) Germany
brought the chance of spiritual and physical rejuvenation. Al-
though he produced no novel early in the war, his essay Les
Intellectuels devant Ia difaite de 1870, 71 (1942) unequivocally illus-
trates this view. In an analysis of nineteenth-century French
 France 55

writers, Mohrt highlights strengths and weaknesses which he

considers equally relevant to an understanding of pre-war
France. Hugo and Michelet are directly attacked for their encour-
agement of democratic trends; and About for his inability after
1871 "to recognise his mistakes and to come round to political
good sense". Renan and Veuillot, however, are praised for their
willingness to abandon the principles of 1789, while finally
Gobineau, whose aristocratic spirit and belief in hierarchy and
inequality make him "one of the last real representatives of that
cosmopolitan spirit which spread through France at the time of a
'French Europe'", is offered as a model of political and moral
good sense. Never afraid to draw the parallels between 1871 and
1940, Mohrt was clearly yet another who believed that defeat was
the inevitable consequence of the French way of life under the
Third Republic.
Similar views were expressed by some novelists albeit in a
rather more muted form, an appeal being made instead for a
recognition of and return to the values of an older, rural, religious
and conservative France. Two writers who belong to this category
are Rene Benjamin with Le Printemps tragique (1940) and Pierre
Benoit. In 1915 Benjamin's novel Gaspard depicted war as an
adventure and as such was a contribution to the attempt to keep a
nationalist spirit alive at a time when it was considered important
to do so. Le Printemps tragique is equally nationalistic in tone and
message though it is not, as Benjamin's critics would claim, a
book which positively advocates collaboration. Rather it is a novel
expressing regret at what has been lost.
The novel takes the form of an account by the narrator who has
(significantly) left Paris to recuperate from illness in the Loire
valley. There he stays with a farming family (the Courvalain)
whose son has already joined the army and is fighting in Belgium.
(He is later reported killed.) Through his contact with the local
doctor the narrator/author meets two people whose values gradu-
ally emerge as being those of which he approves. The first isLe
Meunier, an eccentric, eighty year old aristocratic figure, who in a
moment of passion marries a young local peasant girl. He believes
he has discovered in her a primitive force which he can harness in
the last years of his life, but exhausts himself sexually and dies,
symbolically, on the day the Germans enter Paris. His wife is
subsequently seen to offer hospitality to German officers and
unquestionably meets with Benjamin's disapproval. Although in
56 The Second World War in Fiction

a sense Le Meunier has been misguided and has failed, his

analysis of the present situation is similar to the one offered by the
Vichy government: "for some time now the French have given up
their principles, their laws and their beliefs and have continued to
go backwards, ill and moribund, in spite of various demagogues
who spoke day and night in order to put them to sleep and make
them believe in health".
The second character is Fiamma, the doctor's wife, who is also
a passionate, forceful and strikingly independent figure. Her
castigation of pre-war society and of the present attitudes of the
French is violent. A visit which she and the narrator pay to Tours
(Chapter VI, "La Debacle") prompts a long outburst against
what she too considers to have been years of decadence.

'-Did you know Tours twenty years ago?' she asked. 'I was a
little girl, but I can remember it well. We were already
decadent .... As things got rapidly worse around 1930 you'd see
people taking it easy in cars as if they were at home. What a
state of affairs. In 1938 they went about in bathing costumes.
They only had to see a cafe and they'd stop and drink them-
selves sick. A book shop and they'd buy some filthy book - a
new one came out every day .... Tours was like any other town
with its cinemas and its people who were spoiled, ill-mannered,
worthless .... People simply didn't have any standards.'

By the end of the novel refugees are pouring through the Loire
valley; one, a young Parisian girl, spends several days with the
Courvalain family. Benjamin presents her as a typical product of
modern society: "She was dolled up just like all of them from the
big towns- artificially pretty, too thin and completely out of place
in the naturalness of her new situation." She in turn is followed by
a group of retreating soldiers who, in spite of the efforts of one
officer, are ill-organised and without guidance. In the final chap-
ter (where Pozner criticises French authorities) Benjamin re-
affirms what he regards as true values: "France must respect its
peasants!"; "a warrior spirit and a willingness to start again is
essential!"; "If she wants to go on living, France must turn to
spiritual values again."
Such statements as these from one whose admiration for Petain
bordered on worship- see, for example, his two essays Le M arechal
et son peuple ( 1941) and Le Grand Hom me seul ( 1943) - are not
 France 57

surprising. One of the interesting features of Le Printemps tragiqueis

that it offers them without resorting to a form of allegory. No less
than Pozner or Balbaud, Benjamin takes and describes contem-
poraneous events for his basic material. Pierre Benoit, whose
position and sympathies were similar, does not. In novels like
Lunegarde (1942) and Seigneur, j'ai tout vu (1943) both of which
basically advocate a restoration of the kinds of values which we
find in Benjamin's work, Benoit turns to earlier periods: 1939-30
for the former, 1920 for the latter. Their substance therefore is
clearly different. Allusions to Germany are few. Lunegarde him-
self, "this solitary old man", may invite comparison with Petain,
and Aude in the second novel ("I'd rather leave than share our
home with a foreigner") may suggest positive response to the
Occupation, but such features are not sufficiently emphasised for
the novels to be considered as statements of a preferred political
position.
In some ways similar to the works of these writers (and for
which his political sympathies were on occasions also subsequent-
ly questioned) are those of Marcel Ayme. Published by Gal-
limard, it seems they were either sufficiently enigmatic or too
urbane and witty to fall foul of the censors. His novel La Vouivre
(1943) is the story of the destructive effect which the appearance
of the legendary serpent-woman with her priceless ruby has on a
rural community in the Franche-Comte. For most of the time La
Vouivre reads like a novel by Giono or Bosco, but the implications
are serious, as different members of the local population either
suffer violent death or fail to resist - or even comprehend - the
significance of what is happening to them. Only in the closing
pages, when it is clear that there is no limit to the serpent-
woman's violence, does it begin to emerge that the novel may be
rather more than a piece of dark rural fantasy.
In his short stories, however, and in Le Passe-muraille (1943) in
particular, Ayme's positioh and intentions, while not overtly
political, are much clearer. Here allusion and allegory are tem-
pered by pointed satire. In the title story, for example, that of a
man who, when he takes the wrong medicine, loses his ability to
walk through walls and is finally trapped inside one, Ayme clearly
aims at those who readily make the most of present circums-
tances. In "Le Proverbe" the infallibility of authority is ques-
tioned, in "Le Percepteur d'epouses" the gullibility of bourgeois
society is ridiculed and in "La Carte" the need for measurable
58 The Second World War in Fiction

productivity and usefulness. (Those who fail to meet required

standards officially die for a certain number of days each month-
Jews more than most!) Finally in what is perhaps the best known,
"En attendant", Ayme depicts a queue of fourteen people. Each
in turn is described or expresses a point of view- a young woman
whose husband has been taken to Germany, a prostitute, a Jew, a
child who has lost his family's bread coupons, for example. While
an awareness of contemporary circumstances is indubitably
vital for the full implications of these stories to be seen,
Ayme's point is clear. His is a call not so much for a restoration of
past standards any more than it is one for an open attack on the
occupying forces. Instead it is for a reassessment by his country-
men of their own values and priorities since a future will, ultimate-
ly, have to be faced: "When the Germans have gone, there will be
some accounts to settle" ("En attendant", Le Passe-muraille,
p. 257).
Ayme was right of course, but such statements can hardly have
given the German authorities particular cause for alarm in 1943.
Indeed it is fair to say that during the first two and even three
years of invasion and occupation there is no evidence that either
the German presence or the Vichy government was directly
challenged by anything contained in imaginative literature. At
the most charges of incompetence and lack of foresight were
levelled against the last governments of the Third Republic -
hardly something to give the Germans cause for anxiety. Encour-
agement and appeals for national revival were also too vague and
incidental to be of much influence and, as we have seen, most of
the novels of this period either offered a near factual account of the
events of 1940 or, where they indulged in any form of political
statement, reflected what a large percentage of the population felt.

It was not long before circumstances began to change. The war

was over. France had emerged defeated and occupied, and what
calls for resistance there were came in the early months from
abroad. But this was only a beginning; increasing repression, the
inauguration of the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the persecu-
tion of Jews and Communists, and the viciousness of reprisals in
response to the growing incidence of resistance activities all
served to make people begin to realise what a Nazi regime could
mean. Again it is important to remember that the picture of the
 France 59

years up to the Liberation can, retrospectively, be distorted.

There were still many ordinary people who were not unduly (if at
all) disturbed by the occupying forces; there were others· who
clearly continued to believe that France had to be purged of her
past sins or that the political future of Europe (and of France
within Europe) could lie only in some kind of federal system with
Germany as a guiding power. But there were others who refused
to accept Nazi domination, and it was from these that what is
generally recognised as the truly representative literature of
France during this period came.
Given the circumstances it is not surprising that this writing,
inspired by the spirit of resistance, should differ from literature
which dealt with the war in England, America or Germany. One
reason for this was, as Sartre pertinently remarked in "Paris sous
l'Occupation", that there was no clearly defined, separate enemy
to be fired at as in a conventional war: "The idea of an enemy is
only really clear if the enemy is separated from us by a wall of
fire."
As a result, while some resistance writing like the story
"F.T.P." in Edith Thomas' Contes d'Auxois contains accounts of
armed attacks, the emphasis generally is far more on covert
activities and on "spiritual" resistance. Proclamations of patriot-
ism to be found throughout the literature of other nations during
the war tend to be replaced by a wider appeal to duty and to a
need above all to preserve human dignity in the face of what
Bernanos called the forces of paganism. For the French the war-
or the fight against the occupying forces - is not a matter for the
military alone but for the nation as a whole. Nazism is not a target
to be shot at but a disease to be treated with clinical efficiency.
Gabriel Marcel in his preface to Camille Mayran's Larmes et
lumure a Oradour (1952) captures the idea perfectly when he
writes: "to be effective- spiritually effective that is- revolt must
not be based on hate - it must be like the attitude of a doctor
struggling against leprosy".
As the Nazi grip tightened it became increasingly difficult and
indeed highly dangerous to write in a way in which words,
effectively, were to be weapons. Paradoxically, the very artificiali-
ty of the situation created (as again Sartre and Jean Starobinsky
have remarked) an impression at least of a kind of freedom.
Starobinsky in 1943 remarked that "time is out of joint" and saw
in such circumstances an opportunity for national revitalization.
60 The Second World War in Fiction

Within weeks of the armistice a number of intellectuals and

writers began to voice their own resistance in what was to become
an ever-increasing wave of pamphlets and reviews. In the north
these were often roneocopied on poor-quality paper and distri-
buted by hand; clandestinity was essential. In the south, at least
before November 1942, conditions allowed for a more normal
production. Many of the publications were inevitably short-lived:
L 'Arc, Pantagruel, En Captiviti, Resistance. Others continued until
and sometimes beyond the Liberation, their message clearly
indicated by their title - Defense de la France, L 'Universiti libre,
Liberation in the north; Combat, Temps nouveau, Franc-Tireur in the
south. At first "literary resistance" found expression in poetry,
and a number of reviews in the unoccupied zone quickly estab-
lished themselves as important outlets: Rene Tavernier's Conflu-
ences, Pierre Seghers' Poisie and Max-Pol Fouchet's Fontaine in
Algeria. The advantages of poetry over prose were several: it used
less print and paper, it could be memorised and transmitted orally
and above all by its normally dense qualities it could carry
meaning which, not being instantly obvious to the German or
Vichy authorities, was symbolically resistant.
This new conception of writing was developed in particular by
the group of writers and intellectuals associated with the Front
National pour Ia Liberte et l'Independance de Ia France. (There
was also vigorous support for the spirit of resistance given by a
number of writers already in self-imposed exile- Bernanos and
Supervielle in South America or Beguin in Switzerland for exam-
ple.) Established in 1941, this association evolved largely due to
the efforts of Jacques Decour, former editor of Commune, who also
had a scheme for a specifically literary group, the Comite Nation-
al d'Ecrivains. On Aragon's advice he contacted Jean Paulhan
and together with Jacques Debu-Bridel, Guehenno and others
planned a newspaper to be called Les Lettres Franfaises. Decour
was arrested in February 1942 (and shot in May) and the paper's
first appearance was delayed until September. Its message re-
mained unchanged however: "LES LETTRES FRANQAISES
will be our weapon and by its publication we, as writers, mean to
play our full part in the struggle to the death in which the French
nation is engaged in order to be free from her oppressors."
During the next two years the paper - largely the work of
Claude Morgan- welcomed contributions from, amongst others,
Eluard, Aragon, Sartre and Mauriac. In J\.pril1944, in the second
 France 61

of two articles, Sartre crystallised the essence of resistance litera-

ture: "to write is to claim freedom for all men". But like other
resistance papers, Les Lettres Franfaises was first and foremost a
call to action and not, despite the publication of several poems, a
literary journal. Aware of this, several people associated with the
paper hoped to provide an opportunity for writers to express their
feelings through literary works. At first it was thought that
another clandestine paper, La Pensee Libre, would meet this aim,
but, discovered by theN azis, it was suppressed before such plans
could be realised. As a direct result, however, the Editions de
Minuit were born.
The story of this dangerous and difficult enterprise has been
told by various people and notably by Debu-Bridel. 12 Between
1942 and the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, forty-three
manuscripts actually written in France were received. A few were
passed to the Swiss publisher Les Trois Collines, some remained
unprinted and others appeared after the Liberation. Even so
thirty-four texts - short stories, poems, essays, recollections and
extracts from private diaries- were published in the small format,
high-quality volumes of which the first, Vercors' Le Silence de La mer
(originally intended for La Pensee Libre) became the most celeb-
rated and almost a symbol of the whole enterprise.
Unquestionably the most noticeable quality of the prose fiction
to appear under the Editions de Minuit imprint is that of detach-
ment and dignity. Konrad Bieber considers this to be a reaction
against the overt patriotism of some of the early writing of the
1914-18 war, 13 but just as much it results from a nice awareness
on the part of the authors of the current climate. Through 1942
and into 1943 the oppressive measures of the occupying forces and
the capitulation of the Vichy administration gave every indication
that France would eventually be totally overcome. The tempta-
tion to acknowledge this as inevitable was strong and for many
irresistible, but Vercors and others thought differently. They saw
the need to take stock of themselves and of their situation, to be
seen to do so and thereby to act as an example to others. This tone
is perfectly set by Le Silence de La mer. Like many of his fellow
resistance writers Vercors had a fundamental belief in humanity
which he saw threatened not simply by the policies of the occupy-
ing forces (though these were bad enough) but by Nazism as a
faith which shaped a person's being and attitude to others. Quite
deliberately therefore he gives the German in his story a name
62 The Second World War in Fiction

which is both vaguely aristocratic and French - von Ebrennac.

Like Barres's Fn!deric Asmus in Colette Baudoche (1909), von
Ebrennac is both intellectually and emotionally in sympathy with
France and French culture; he regrets his country's behaviour
and is at odds with his fellow Germans. Moreover his feelings for
the narrator's niece (and hers for him) are clear. But for all his
qualities he believes in the eventual collapse of France and must be
resisted. She forces herself to remain silent in his presence there-
fore until he finally leaves at which point her only word is "adieu"
-the acknowledgement of his presence which he has sought for so
long, but also a final and absolute rejection. Throughout the story
the French couple are passive, but there is strength in their
passivity and in particular in the young girl who on more than one
occasion is an inspiration for and example to her uncle.
This presentation of individual Germans as decent human
beings we find as well in Edith Thomas' "Le Tilleul" ( Contes
d'Auxois) where a young German soldierisopenly anti-Nazi: "We
have been beaten" said Hans. "We have been beaten since 30
January 1933." A character in Pierre Bast's Haute Fourche makes
the same point in a different way: "In any case, I don't detest the
Germans. It's not very intelligent to say that." This third example
is in fact quite significant since, written relatively late in
the war (probably in late 1943 or 1944), it suggests that although
in reality the possibility of there being a "civilised German" had
for most people disappeared, a sense of balance was still consi-
dered important. When, in these stories, the Nazi presence is
openly attacked, the result is usually caricature though it never
reaches the extremes of the kind to be found, for example, in the
post-Liberation Les Lettres Franfaises. In Thomas' "L'Arresta-
tion" or in Aveline's Le Temps mort the interrogation scenes
(Chapters 2 and 11) are typical and, in the second case, acknow-
ledged as such: "the closely cropped hair, steel-rimmed glasses
and white flabby double-chin, the jacket which was too tight to
hold in all that fat, the chubby hands, folded on his stomach- the
perfect caricature of the learned professor. The judge's attitude
towards him was servile". But while descriptions of Nazis may be
relatively few, their presence and influence are acknowledged in
other, indirect ways. In "Les Moules et le professeur" (Contes
d'Auxois) they can afford to offer higher wages for a femme de
menage; in Les Amants d'Avignon compartments on trains are re-
served for them while the French travel in crowded and uncom-
 France 63

fortable conditions. In the same story the capture of a resistance

worker is recorded as a matter of fact: "There had been a struggle
... there was blood on the walls. They took him away in a Gestapo
car which was waiting down below. There's nothing odd about
it."
As much if not more scorn and hostility are reserved for
collaborators- in "La Releve" or"Veillee" (Contes d'Auxois), Le
Temps mort and in particular Vercors' Marche a l'itoile. But where-
as anti-Nazi feeling appears to be absolute and uniform, attitudes
towards collaborators can be coloured by political sympathies.
Like the other Minuit writers, for example, Elsa Triolet sees true
patriotism as being exemplified by the actions of ordinary people,
but for her it is particularly the strength of those who share her
Communist faith: "After the war we shall have to take account of
them, we shan't be able to govern the country without the
martyrs' party" ("le parti des fusilles"). But beyond the political
dimension of patriotism and a sense of duty these writers all
underline the dignity and the spirit of France. It is not by chance,
for example, that in "F.T.P." (Contes d'Auxois) resistance mes-
sages are carried inside a copy of the Chanson de Roland. 14 But this
kind of national heroism is not to be expressed by any ostentatious
display of courage. The self-denying attitude of the niece in Le
Silence de La mer is repeated in more extreme circumstances by
Cetine in Le Temps mort just "one of the hundreds of women who
are never seen who are in prison, theatened with all kinds of things
and who go on singing". The emphasis on the supportive role and
strength of women is factually accurate in the context of a
diminishing male population. Whether in the apparently insig-
nificant queuing episode in "Les Moules et le professeur", or in
the parts played by Anne in "L'Arrestation" (Contesd'Auxois) or
by Juliette Noel in Les Amants d'Avignon, the message remains the
same.
From Moscow the Russian novelist and critic Ilya Ehrenburg
(whose own novel The Fall of Paris [1941] gives an interesting and
graphic account of life .in the capital during the 1930s) accused
French writers of not being sufficiently angry in their attitude to
the Occupation. It is likely, howevet, that a moreviolentr.eaction
could have been seen as the predictable and perh:tps hysterical
outcry of a minority group. What is striking about most of this
resistance writing - and to a large extent this is true of the poetry
as well- is not just the absence of violent content but the casual,
64 The Second World War in Fiction

everyday and at times almost muted quality of the style. All of the
Minuit stories contain enough detail to be "real" for the reader:
the circumstances of Juliette Noel's life, the interior of the house in
Le Silence de la mer, the settings of the various tales in Contes
d'Auxois. Dialogue too plays a dominant role in the narrative of
most of them; private reflection (Le Temps mort and Le Silence de la
mer) is effective and both syntax and the use of image are kept at a
simple level. In Le Temps mort, for example, Aveline's sentences
are usually short with etas the principal conjunction; in Le Silence
de lamer Vercors manages to create an impression of repetition, of
suspension and thereby both of suffering and expectancy. One
important consequence of this is that certain images, references or
allusions are thrown into significant relief- the opacity and pale
quality of the narrator's niece in Le Silence de lamer or the value of
the peasant and the countryside in Les Amants d'Avignon, "V eillee"
or "Les Evades" ( Contes d'Auxois).
As with any writing which aims essentially to encourage people
to become aware of the plight of others and to break out of what
Vercors in Le Songe calls "this filthy isolation", the danger of
authorial intrusion to interpret attitudes and events for us or to
direct our attention is considerable. Perhaps aware of this, Av-
eline and V ercors, by the very fact that they resort to a first person
narrative, create a perspective within which little or no ambiguity
is permitted. But almost inevitably some intrusion occurs. When
Charles, who has been tortured by the Gestapo, appears before
Celine in Le Temps mort, Aveline underlines her (and therefore
our) admiration for him: "And he appeared to be bigger and
stronger than ever." This is less a commentary than an emphasis,
a technique to which all the authors resort at some stage. Elsa
Triolet, however, whose Communist sympathies can, as we have
already noted, influence her writing, and Edith Thomas are more
willing to ensure that certain points are made. The latter's Contes
d'Auxois illustrate this both in the development from one story to
another as well as in specific instances. From the opening "Les
Moules et le professeur" with its emphasis on resignation but
dawning awareness of the need to respond positively (Monsieur
Pocelet, we should note, works on Virgil's Aeneid) through ac-
counts of resistance, collaboration and increasing atrocities,
Thomas guides us to the final story in which revenge is beginning
to be exacted. And in addition to this conscious structural pattern,
we also find that she openly intervenes in a variety of ways: she
 France 65

interprets characters' thoughts for us, ensures that the signifi-

cance of the French countryside is not lost and, most obviously of
all, resorts in the final "F.T.P." to a presentation of her six
characters in the inflated language of a roll of honour. Louis is one
of them: "And here we have Louis, the leather worker, who is here
so that he can be with the workers and peasants of the USSR who
are free now and know what they are fighting for and why they are
dying for it."
In Part Four of Pierre Courtade's last novel, La Place rouge
(1961), the main character Simon Bordes arrives in occupied
Paris from the southern zone. His luggage is searched and the
police discover various books including Malraux's La Lutte avec
l'ange (never, of course, completed). One officer remarks: "Be-
tween you and me, I wonder why books are forbidden. Do you
know anyone who has changed his mind because of a book? That's
not what makes people change their mind." The question is a nice
one and Courtade who himself participated in and wrote a novel,
Elseneur ( 1949) and short stories, Les Circonstances (1954) about the
Resistance, never found a satisfactory answer to it. Nor indeed, in
spite of the debate which the issue has aroused generally, has
anyone else. Yet in the context of the period 1940-44 there can be
no doubt that writing did play its part in promoting a certain
attitude, that words were in a sense weapons. The message which
Jean Cassou neatly summarises as "carry on and you will be
saved" 15 was heard by many. For the writers, too, participation in
the struggle in this way gave them a sense of dignity which was
otherwise threatened. Andre Chamson's reaction was one shared
by many: "Being a writer was what saved me and allowed me not
to despair." 16

With the Liberation and restoration of national security, the

writer's choice to use the war as subject matter for his work
becomes much more complex and is related to wide-ranging
considerations about meaning and intention. Of course it would
be wrong to claim that the: Resistance writer's immediate objec-
tive of freedom necessarily restricts his work to its historical
context and thereby limits i\8 value to a contribution to the war
effort and to the records of war. However, the post-Liberation
writer is not subject to the pressures of war nor is he using his work
66 The Second World War in Fiction

against an occupying enemy. The Resistance writer created

against a background of uncertainty and danger; whatever hope
or encouragement his work expressed, he could not know for
certain how the war would end, whether France would regain its
sovereignty nor even if he would live to see victory. The security
and relief provided by the Liberation alters the context of the
writer's work and the potential meanings of his choices: he is
writing about the war because he finds it a suitable subject matter
for his purposes, he is not fighting the war. The post-Liberation
writer can, if he so chooses, forget about the war entirely, for it is
suddenly part of history and if he does decide to write about it, he
can do so without fear. In other words, post-Liberation literature
about the war is necessarily rooted in preoccupations and inter-
ests which transcend the Resistance writer's aim of ridding
France of her enemies. As Sartre had already recognised in his
article in Les Lettres Franfaises, the literature of Resistance is part of
Resistance, but post-Liberation literature of war is much more
obviously part of literature. 17
If the literature of Resistance is unified in a general sense by the
fight for freedom, it is not at all easy to detect and claim a common
aim among post-Liberation writers in their treatment of the war.
To be sure, many works are commemorative or written to ensure
that certain events are not forgotten - acts of heroism and
self-sacrifice, acts of barbarism, experiences of disorientation and
fear. 18 Many are concerned in one way or another with the piecing
together and description of an event found overwhelming and
confusing, in an endeavour to use literary structures to reassert
coherence and direction to life. The war may appear as an
extreme situation, precipitating, against a background of death
and danger, moral problems and conflicts which are always part
of existence but may not be posed with the same intensity and in
such stark relief in times of peace. In turn the war may stimulate
the literary imagination to present it as something of a nightmare,
particularly in terms of the concentration camps and images of
suffering to which it exposed people, or as a basic metaphor of the
human condition, a vehicle for the exploration of existence and
the articulation of a metaphysic. The dramatic, the tragic, the
melodramatic and the comic are aU possible responses to war, for
it does not in itself call forth any particular response. With certain
writers the war presents an opportunity to analyse difficult ques-
tions about the relationship between lived experience and literary
 France 67

narrations of them and associated debates about the fictional

aspects of history and the historical aspects of fiction. 19 Does an
event that has occurred necessarily mean that it is realistic when
committed to words? Does actual experience of an event grant a
privileged position and insight when it comes to writing about it?
What do we mean by an event, or a fact? Such theoretical
problems, nowadays fairly fashionable, are posed both conscious-
ly and unconsciously in many works and confront the reader with
complicated issues when it comes to the description and classifica-
tion of post-Liberation literature of war: memoires, souvenirs,
souvenirs romances, carnets de route, carnets devol, journal,
roman, recit, temoignage, chronique, histoire, all such descrip-
tions tend to come under pressure as a result of the war and of the
literature to which it gives rise.
Variety of approach, intention and technique combine to pro-
duce a very diverse literature of war, particularly between 1945
and 1950, and it is largely biographically based. If we add to this
variety the fact that participation in the war is not a precondition
of writing about it or that any writer can, if he so decides, turn to
the war as the material for his work and that in a sense the war is
never over, problems of classification become even more obscure.
An author like Patrick Modiano is a useful example. Modiano was
born in 1947 and grew up in the shadow of the war. His first
published novels: La Place de l'etoile (1968}, La Rondedenuit(1969)
and Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972}, evoke the atmosphere of
Occupation and Resistance. La Ronde de nuit in particular presents
a somewhat gripping account of the activities of a young man who
works simultaneously for the French Gestapo and a Resistance
group, Les Chevaliers de l'Ombre. The work is set in Paris and it
contains an account of the exode and a description of the Resis-
tance activities of a group of ex-war prisoners against the Ger-
mans, collaborators and black-market speculators. The writing
reflects the doubts, muddled values and confused aspirations of
the protagonist as he lives his double life and divided loyalties. As
the novel progresses, one senses that the historical setting is a
pretext for the analysis of the dilemma of youth in post-war
society.
For Modiano, who did not witness the war, thewarevidentiy is
not over, and it is worth noting that the author's interest in the
war was sufficient to make him contribute to Louis Malle's
Lacombe Lucien. Modiano's use of the war, his recreation of the
68 The Second World War in Fiction

Occupation and Resistance from the supposedly non-privileged

viewpoint of the outsider raise a biographical paradox which
really haunts all literature but seems especially to haunt literature
of the war: it does not appear to be necessary to have lived through
the war to write about it convincingly, nor does the fact of
participation automatically guarantee an effective literary trans-
position. This is an obvious point but one which is easily over-
looked in discussions about literary realism. Maurice Rieuneau in
his book Guerre et revolution dans le romanfranrais 1919-1939 (1974)
notes that between 1915 and 1930, 304 books were published
directly inspired by the war and written mostly by active or
passive participants using "le vecu" (lived experience) or the "fait
d'histoire" (historical episode) as a departure point. Neverthe-
less, he is the first to admit (p. 212) that Jules Romains' Verdun is
an outstanding work, although the author is not writing a
"temoignage" and was not a privileged observer of the events
narrated. As a further point, one might also retain the view of
George Steiner who feels that the greatest novel to appear in
France in the immediate post-war period is Rebatet's Les Deux
Etmdards (1950). Rebatet lived through the war and indeed was
fortunate not to share Brasillach's fate, but for all his involvement
with the period, Les Deux Etendards is set in the pre-war period
1920-27 and the experience of war is not evident even in a
transposed way. :1D The war cannot thus be said to be a privileged
nor even necessary subject for the post-war writer. It is simply a
possible subject among others, capable of use for a wide variety of
purposes. 21

1945 witnessed the publication of Joseph Kessel's L 'Armee des

ombres and Romain Gary's L 'Education europeenne. Both writers had
been active in the Resistance, and Kessel had flown with the RAF.
In fact Kessel's book had been published in English as early as
1944 but not until France looked safe did the work appear in
French. Although in severai respects these are very much Resis-
tance works, the authors' preoccupations are beginning to widen,
particularly in the case of Gary.
Both writers may be seen as examples of individuals who,
whatever their dislike of war, find it stimulating and respond to its
dramas and emotions and get a sense of enhanced existence from
participation in it.
 France 69

Kessel was already known in 1945 for his literary work on the
First World War, 22 based on his experience and knowledge of the
heroism of its fighter pilots of whom he was one. He is forty years
old by the time of the second war. In a tersely worded Preface to
L 'Annie des ombres, he claims emphatically that his work has "the
simplicity of the chronicle and the humility of the document".
The work is neither fiction, nor propaganda, he states, but a
collection of authentic episodes and experiences, put together in a
rather haphazard way. His aim is to give a true and accurate
picture of "the national hero", the Resistance fighter, not the
professional soldier but the ordinary people of France opposed to
Petain and actively involved in the restoration of national
sovereignty. 23 What follows the preface is a rather episodic
picaresque narrative evoking the Resistance activity of Gerbier
and a number of fellow resisters. The work begins one year after
the armistice with Petain described as "a disgusting old man"
("un vieillard immonde"), Resistance as "the sap of freedom"
and England as "the only centre of hope and human warmth".
Sometimes events are narrated in the third person, sometimes
through Gerbier's notes. Gerbier is used to string together a
multitude of Resistance experiences, stripped to their bare essen-
tials. Gerbier's activities take him to a prison camp originally
meant for German prisoners of the French, to Gibraltar, to
London and elsewhere. Beset by fears of capture, of torture and of
reprisals; having to kill without much idea in the first place of how
to do it (for we are not dealing with a professional soldier);
uncertain as to who can be trusted and preoccupied with what to
do about unmasked "mouchards" (informers) and former helpers
now known to the Germans, Gerbier's life is made to reflect the
great abundance of situations, anecdotes, emotional and moral
contradictions thrown up by the war and occupation. Kessel is
attracted to action, has an eye for conflicting emotions, and likes
swift and simple narrative. He also is given to a rather romanti-
cised view of the energy and individual resourcefulness which war
experiences can generate.
The really paradoxical feature of L 'A nnee des ombres, however, is
its strange lack of power to convince, despite the interest of many
individual elements. When Gerbier is finally captured and is
awaiting execution, he meditates a la. Malraux on death. How-
ever, a miraculous escape, just as he is about to be shot, is
engineered by other resisters. One of these is a woman called
70 The Second World War in Fiction

Mathilde, who later has to be killed by her associates after she falls
vulnerable to Nazi threats to harm her daughter. The leader of the
group, Saint-Luc, figures in the text in idealised terms, always
maintaining a saint-like serenity and belief in the cause. Elements
such as these may all well have been true, but presented as they
are in a concentration of episodes to show as many sides as
possible of the experience of Resistance, much of their effect is lost.
A certain sentimentality also weakens the text. Kessel, writing too
close to events and under the influence of considerable emotion, is
a good example of the way authentic experience of war does not
necessarily produce convincing literature on the subject. Real
events are not in themselves realistic - this is a question of the
aesthetic of realism.
Both Maurice Druon's La Derniere Brigade (1946) with its
glorification of a few model soldiers during the fall of Fr~nce, and
Romain Gary's Education europeenne, are comparable to L 'Annee des
ombres in their effects on the reader. The Ia tter work traces through
an abundance of episodes the lives of a group of Polish resistance
fighters in the forests near Wilno at the time of the battle of
Stalingrad. As with Kessel, the narrative is episodic, but rich in
incident and full of emotion generated by deprivation, insecurity,
sudden death and moral conflict. In addition Gary's work is
overlaid with preoccupations about suffering and violence. The
protagonist Janek is a highly charged idealist and a great lover of
Chopin. He is simultaneously moved by the courage, heroism and
camaraderie of his associates and confused by the necessity of
violence. He finds it hard to accept that men are capable both of
Resistance and Nazism and that war intensifies love and friend-
ship at the same time as cold, hunger and brutality. A further
interesting dimension of the work is provided by the c;:haracter
Dobrenski who is composing a book on their experiences, entitled
Les Environs de Stalingrad whose subject will be the discovery of
solidarity in war. Despite its readability, Gary's work, like Kes-
sel's, is marred by a degree of sentimentality and rhetoric- Janek,
for example, is rendered almost unconscious by emotion when
listening to Chopin, so responsive to beauty has the ugliness of
war rendered him. 24 Thirty-five years later and distant from the
events, Gary wrote a more impressive work, Les Cerfs-volants,
dealing with the Occupation (discussed in a later section).
Michel Mahrt's Le Ripit 25 (1945) shows us another author who
finds in war stimulation, at least if one is to judge by the
 France 71

protagonist of his book, Lucien Coggan. The work is presented as

a novel and describes Lucien's experiences during the "drole de
guerre". A former law student now mobilised, Lucien has to leave
his native Brittany and go to Saint-Damiens in the Alps where he
becomes "chef de la section d'eclaireurs skieurs". The novel is
structured through the twin perspectives of third-person narra-
tive and Lucien's diary of events. Lucien awaits the possibility of
war with a degree of anxiety but it also offers adventure, a new
world of strong sensations, excitement and a sense of existence
enhanced by the risk of death. Amid references to Stendhal,
Lucien expresses the wish to escape from the "mediocre" (which
could mean the Third Republic, Republicanism, the bourgeoisie
or just peacetime existence) and explore the epic and mythical
dimensions of war. War excites him sexually as well, and elements
of Malraux, Standhal and Drieu La Rochelle combine in a
bastardised form in Lucien to give a picture of war and action as
superior to the comforts of secure, peaceful life. Other sections of
Le Repit describe phases of the soldiers' lives, their daily man-
oeuvres and duties, Lucien's sense of solidarity with his men and
doubts about his capacity to lead them. The frustration of the
soldier, desirous of action, but feeling isolated from the centres of
activity is another significant theme. Lucien feels the war will also
destroy liberal capitalism and generate great reforms (he had
supported the Popular Front) but it is really individual fulfilment
that rests uppermost in his mind. War is life intensified in terms of
adventure, dream, sex and beauty. Sadly, the novel ends with the
defeat of France, a defeat which Lucien would have found un-
thinkable, bringing as it does to an abrupt end the wishful
thinking of his youth.
A rather different picture of war emerges from works like Roger
Nimier, Les Epees (1948), Le Hussard bleu (1950), Georges Mag-
nane, Ou l'herbe ne pousse plus (1952), an account of the Oradour
massacre, and Robert Merle, WeekendaZuydcoote(1949). Solitude,
desperation and disorientation are generated by a world of viol-
ence and destruction where human values seem remote. Merle's
work takes place during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Maillat, a
former English teacher and now a sergeant, tries to secure passage
on a British ship. He succeeds but the ship is damaged by an
enemy attack and Maillat has to stay. The narrative pace is slow
and gives rise to a feeling of purposelessness and distraction in a
world characterised by unreality and nightmare (for a discussion
72 The Second World War in Fiction

of similar themes in German literature see Chapter 3). In the

course of his weekend wanderings, Maillat discovers a young girl
being raped by two Frenchmen who have lost all sense of humani-
ty in the outbreak of war. Maillat fights and kills both of them but
then suddenly finds himself violently making love to the girl. Both
Maillat and the girl have become infected by violence: he feels he
has raped her and that she has enjoyed it. They cannot escape the
dehumanising effects of war. The novel ends with both dying in an
air attack as they struggle but fail to make some sense of their
contact with each other, other than through violence. Their
failure points to the death of hope and the destruction of the
normal life of France. War, for Merle, is loss of meaning mingled
with fascination at the ugliness and brutality of death.
Action in the air is the central concern of two writers, both
fighter pilots working with the RAF, Algerian-born Jules Roy and
Pierre Clostermann, perhaps the most distinguished French pilot
of the war. 26 Roy is best known for La Vallee heureuse (1946) and
Retour de l'enfer (1951), the former an autobiographically based
"recit" of Roy's bombing missions in the Ruhr valley, the latter a
series of "souvenirs romances" of other continental missions of
the author. Neither work has the descriptive power and pace of
Clostermann's Le Grand cirque (1948) or the later Feux du ciel
(1951). Both writers possess the skill to use their experiences and
to recreate them in a convincing and exciting manner. Closter-
mann's work poses more explicitly the question of whether such
works can be classified as fiction. Clostermann, for example,
describes LeGrand cirque (see also Chapter 1) as the "recollections
of a fighter pilot in the RAF" and claims it to be a "reportage". He
asks the reader not to look for a literary work yet admits that the
"reportage" is selective and structured to maximise its readabili-
ty. His intentions are both documentary and commemorative
although the information was collected in the first place so that, in
the event of his death, his parents would have some record of his
experiences in action and of the beauty and glory of life in the
airforce. Le Grand cirque comes complete with photographs and
various appendices on a number of operations and on the organ-
isation of the RAF and the LUFTWAFFE. However, by skilful
choice, concentration and presentation of episode, descriptions of
atmosphere, use of dialogue and interior monologue and a varied
prose style, Clostermann's diary, "reportage" becomes, in many
respects, indistinguishable from a novel. Certainly, he captures
 France 73

the drama and colour of aerial combat, the suspense of the hours
between missions, the joys of safe returns and the camaraderie of
the units after the solitude of the missions and he can sometimes
match both Malraux and Saint-Exupery27 in the art of creating
contemplative moments.
Many similar qualities are evident in the later Feux du cielwhich
the author describes as a collection of "recits" telling the story of a
number of fighter pilots' experiences. It had been Clostermann's
aim to write a history of the war in the air, but having researched
the subject thoroughly, he could not bear to bury the energy,
greatness and passion of fighter pilots beneath a mass of historical
detail. Feux du ciel is not "autobiographical" in the sense that the
author recreates campaigns he did not fight, using various docu-
ments, but the descriptive and narrative powers of LeGrand cirque
are very much in evidence once again. Clostermann finds in war a
source of emotion and idealism, but his intoxication with the life of
the pilot, the whole organisation of missions, his fascination with
the technicalities of planes etc. do not make him forget that war is
waste of life and suffering. With Clostermann "reportage"
achieves the status of an authentic art form. 211

In his novel about post-Liberation France, Les Justes causes ( 1954},

Jean-Louis Curtis describes one of his hero's reactions to the
discovery of concentration camps. Thibault Fontanes observes:
"Huge posters on the walls of the town revealed to us the existence
of certain places of rest and repose called Buchenwald, Dachau,
Auschwitz ... with photographs attached. We collapsed in horror
at the sight of them. Here was something so scandalous that no
intelligent person could assimilate it. Consequently, we are going
to rid our minds of it. You can build a religion on a single crucified
prophet, not on several million people burnt to death in slavery.
We shall go on dancing and looking for nice beaches on the map
for our holidays. Yet the topography of the camps will henceforth
add a new dimension to our picture of life: the dimension of fear.
And guilt in varying degree will for ever cling to us."
Curtis, through Fontanes, indirectly lays down a challenge to
the writers who wish to describe their experiences in concentra-
tion camps. The monstrous inhumanity of such experiences will
not be assimilated; the camps are a world apart, a universe of their
74 The Second World War in Fiction

own, unintelligible and incommunicable to those who did not

suffer in them. Jean Cayrol had voiced similar ideas in "D'Un
U nivers concentrationnaire" (Esprit, 1949), an article in which
the author claims that the camps produced a race of outsiders, a
people apart, and he points out the difficulties confronting the
writer who attempts description of the camps. In Lazare parmi nous
( 1950) Cayrol uses Lazarus to symbolise this race of resurrected
and isolated dead.
In the main, one feels that the literature of the camps does suffer
from what Curtis said it would: an inability to communicate such
experiences. The principal works in question are: David Rousset,
L'Univers concentrationnaire (1946), Les fours de notre mort (1947);
Robert Antelme, L'Espece humaine (1947); Pierre Daix, La Demiere
forteresse ( 1950); Louis Martin-Chauffier, L 'Homme et la bite
(1947); Paul Tillard, Le Pain des temps des maudits (1965); Pierre
Gascar, Le Temps des morts (1953), Les Femmes (1965);]. Semprun,
Le Grand voyage ( 1973).
In a variety of ways, all the authors concerned express the
pressing need which they felt to tell of their experiences and
describe the problems they had in finding appropriate techniques
of representation and description to capture the atmosphere and
reality of the camps without appearing to be culpable of morbidity
or sensationalism.
David Rousset's L'Univers concentrationnaireis relatively short in
comparison to much of the literature of the camps, and perhaps
because of this or its very compactness makes a greater impact
than many such works. Rousset dwells on the fundamental
features of camp life in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Much atten-
tion is paid to aspects of organisation and to its multi-national
antagonisms, to its creation of its own particular norms of ration-
ality and social behaviour. Kafka and Jarry are cited as artists
who have come close to anticipating the nightmare and unreality
of camp life. In both this work and the later Les ]ours de notre mort,
Rousset rejects fiction. In the preface to Les ]ours de notre mort, he
says that although he is using novelistic techniques, invention has
no part to play in his work. Details, events, characters are all
authentic and no fiction is needed in a world such as the camps
where everyday experience is already beyond imagination. Pierre
Daix does describe La Demiere forteresse as a novel, but the work
bears many similarities to that of Rousset; thus the distinction
between fact and fiction is once again difficult to grasp. Both
works can be compared to Antelme's L 'Espece humainedescribed as
 France 75

"un recit" about the Gandersheim "Kommando" of Buchen-

wald, and there is no greater technical difference between this
work and many novels. Martin-Chauffier uses "souvenirs ro-
mances" to tell the story in L'Homme et La bite of his arrest in
Collonges for being a suspected Soviet spy, his imprisonment in
Fort-Montluc and Compiegne and eventual transfer to Neuen-
gamme and Belsen, but the whole work reads like a novel. The
literature of the camps throws into sharp focus questions about
fiction and fact. Many of the above-quoted writers "reject" the
label of fiction because they are using lived experience. They seem
to forget, however, that writing about the camps does not require
personal experience as a precondition; nor does personal experi-
ence guarantee success in writing about them. Although Robert
Merle's La Mort est mon metier, an imaginary autobiography of
Rudolf Hoss, the camp commander of Auschwitz, has no great
claims to distinction, it does at least show that biographical base
in the camps is not a necessary element in their recreation.
(William Styron's Sophie's Choice [1979] is another example.) It is
also interesting to note that such debates which in the past gave
rise to the term "faction" have been given new life by the award of
the Booker prize to Keneally's Schindler's Ark in 1982, a non-
biographical recreation of camp life.
The literature of the camps contains a multitude of themes but
the principal question posed is the nature of man. The reader is
provided with a vast panorama of human beings under great
stress and deprivation caused by other men who subject them to
torture and degradation. But, as Antelme, Martin-Chauffier and
many others point out, in their oppression and in their oppressors,
they did not discover, at the extreme limit of their suffering,
solitude and absurdity or despair but "an ultimate feeling of
belonging to the human race" (Antelme) or "the sense that the
human race is one" (Martin-Chauffier). Certainly, it can be said
that French literature of the concentration camps has given us
new and extensive images of human brutality and of man's
resilience under pressure, and the war has created a new dimen-
sion to the literary image of man.

The description of the impact of defeat and occupation on the

people of France, the antagonisms and divisions of loyalty to
which they gave rise in everybody's life, the question of collabora-
76 The Second World War in Fiction

tion with Vichy and the Germans, and the role of black-market
profiteering offer a wide canvas to the writer wishing to create a
picture of French society under threat and oppression. Whether
such a picture is created through the perspective of a single
individual's reaction either in fiction or "souvenirs romances", or
through a multicolour of perspectives in a village, or town or the
capital, the works under consideration possess an identity in their
emphasis on social considerations and the disruption of every-
body's existence. There is a multitude of relevant texts. Em-
manuel d' As tier wrote two volumes of "souvenirs romances",
describing his individual reactions and observations during the
war: De la Chute a la Liberation de Paris and Sept Fois, Sept ]ours
(1947). Certainly not "memoires" but not quite fiction in the
usual sense, d'Astier's work provides us with descriptions of the
exode, attacks on the too easily defeated military establishment
and aspects of Resistance, described as "the most precious man-
ifestation of life." D' As tier travels through Paris, Lyon, Clermont
and Marseille evoking "a sedentary France" which is slowly
finding itself confronted by "a France which has started to move
again".
His comments on the Liberation underline his disappointment
at the phoenix-like capacity of the ruling class - "the mountain
gave birth to a mouse: we were present at a mediocre rebirth".
Jewish depute Pierre Bloch in Mes ]ours heureux (1947) uses a
similar hybrid genre to describe his war years, some of which were
spent in prison and some with de Gaulle in London. More
obviously fictional are Alexandre Arnoux's Helene et les guerres
(1945), Michel Bataille's rather puzzling Patrick (1947)- about a
father reconstructing the history of his son, killed in action during
the war- Pierre Daix's Classe de 42 (1951) and perhaps Bois-
deffre's Les Fins demieres (1952), a fictional transposition of Pe-
tain's trial of the Liberation period.
Arnoux's work is of particular relevance since its protagonist is
an ex-fighter in the great war. When the Second World War is
declared, Savrit, the hero, is reminded of the first and longs for the
same intensification of existence that he found then. His experi-
ences of the first war were set against his love affair with the
beautiful Helene who died in 1939. Savrit finds the war lacking in
the mythical beauty of 1914-18, but in the reign of a resisting
France and during the celebrations of the Liberation he finds the
resurrection of his ideals, in great contrast to d' As tier's mouse.
 France 77

Despite the interest of such works and many more besides it is

perhaps in Jean-Louis Curtis's Les Farets de la nuit (1947) that we
find the best portrait of France under occupation. The author
gained the Prix Goncourt for his book and it followed in the wake
of another Goncourt prize winner writing on the same subject-
Jean-Louis Bory's Man Village a l'heure allemande (1945). Curtis's
novel is far superior to Bory's but both have their interest.
Man Village a l'heure allemande begins on 24 April 1941. The
village in question is an imaginary one, Jumainville (an amalgam
of Germain and Jumelle perhaps?), described as nothing more
and nothing less than any other French village, and Bory uses it as
a microcosm of France, anticipating Curtis's use of Saint-Clar
and Camus's use of Oran. Bory's technique is to avoid external
narrative and to present events through a multiplicity of first-
person perspectives to present a panorama of personages giving
different views of events, a technique used in a more sophisticated
form and with many modifications by Sartre in Les Chemins de la
Liberti. This approach enables Bory to capture well the atmos-
phere of fear and suspicion and the zones of non-communication
between the inhabitants of Jumainville. The author extends his
use of the relative point of view to allowing the village itself to
address the reader and express its alarm at the presence of the
Germans and its fear of losing its French identity. In addition the
dog of the schoolmaster Tattignie is allowed to express its
thoughts (the Germans after the abandonment of Korrektion
were referred to as "animals who speak"). The arrival of the
Germans transforms a pre-existent network of social relations and
antagonisms constituting normal village and French life. The
village gossip Mademoiselle V rin turns to informing; the village
flirt Denise Vechard fornicates in collaboration; the mayor Mor-
ize is anti-German but fears reprisals against him if he does not
co-operate; I' Abbe Varemes, pro- Inquisition and pro-German,
dislikes the early soft approach of the Germans, symbolised by
von Scheer and Bachmann. Anticipating Camus' attack on the
church in La Peste and his character Paneloux, Varemes de-
nounces resistance and calls for the village to be purified of
clandestine activity and for full co-operation with the "defenders
of order"; the collaborating village baker Lecheur finds himself
and his business under threat from Resistance but the resister in
question is a former enemy settling old scores, the poacher Leon;
the Boudet family occupies a central place: the father, a farmer,
78 The Second World War in Fiction

finds collaboration with Bachmann profitable, and his son Au-

guste speculates with the black market. The daughter Elisa is
pro-de Gaulle as is her Resistance boyfriend Pierre. The family is
split by violent quarrels. A Resistance network forms in the village
and Tattignie the schoolteacher joins it. He is eventually shot by
Auguste Boudet who begins working for the Germans in a bitter
spirit of revenge against his sister and the resisters who set fire to
his secret store of black-market petrol.
The general atmosphere of suspicion and latent hostility be-
tween individuals grows into scenes of violence and open struggle
as the war develops, and the novel degenerates as a result of this:
events become over-dramatised and actions exaggerated particu-
larly in the section during which Juine lives out an assignment in
terms of a Buffalo Bill adventure romance. Bory's work rarely
goes beyond social description of the village to probe more
searching questions, but it is interesting both for its techniques of
representation and portraiture of the French under occupation.
Curtis's Les Forets de Ia nuit~ explores the occupation through
the imaginary town of Saint-Clar, situated at the extreme end of
the occupied zone. Passive collaboration is widespread and do-
minant but the English-hating Madame Costellot is quick to
fraternise, as are many of the women in the town. Saint-Clar
receives a Vichy merit award eventually for its good behaviour
and cooperation.
Into this imaginary structure, Curtis, using conventional third-
person narrative, projects his experiences of France under Occu-
pation. The author is at pains to point out in his preface that the
work is a novel, not a document or piece of sociology, that he has
deliberately kept Resistance activity and heroism in soft focus to
allow for a certain unity of tone in the presentation of the tableau
of Occupation. Curtis's characters present, like Bory's, a panora-
ma of perspectives on events, but social description tends con-
stantly to give rise to more general preoccupations in a story
which is much more exciting to read than many war books. A
variety of themes is explored by Curtis: Francis Balansum is the
young idealistic resister. We see him at work helping people to
cross the line (the work begins in November 1942 just before the
zoning system is abolished), wanting to be more active and finally
being tortured without giving in, shot and mutilated by the group
under Merkel, a viciously sadistic collaborator working in the
French Gestapo. Francis is the son of a relatively poor aristocrat,
 France 79

Count Balansum, who is pro-Petain and anti-Stalin but he is

presented sympathetically and is so proud of his son's work that
he switches allegiance to de Gaulle. In contrast to Francis is his
former schoolfriend Philippe Arregui, an ambiguously presented
character, ruthless but likeable for his quick wits and energy.
Arregui operates the black market but eventually joins with
Merkel. Arregui is a rather Nietzschean individual; he has no time
for Francis's social conscience. Francis has a sister Helene who
shares initially her brother's idealism. She is in Paris, separated
from her fiance Jean de Lavencourt who has fought for Spanish
Republicanism and is now believed to be in the RAF. Francis uses
Arregui to deliver a message about Lavencourt to his sister.
Arregui is quick to sense beneath the idealistic postures of Helene
a lonely and frustrated virgin: he speedily seduces and abandons
her but not before she breaks off her engagement. Lavencourt's
death is soon reported: the young idealist was killed on a mission
but his plane was not shot down, he crashed it deliberately.
Arregui, working under Merkel, soon finds himself instructed to
clean up the resisters of Saint-Clar whose operations under
Francis have been uncovered to the Germans by Madame Costel-
lot. Arregui does try to a limited extent to protect Francis but he
fails, and in a rather weak section of the text Francis is shot.
With the death of the idealists, Francis and Lavencourt, and
with Helene's posture of idealism punctured, Curtis begins to
turn his attention to a central concern of the novel - the way in
which the Resistance movement became infiltrated after Staling-
rad by political opportunists, thus leading to a prostitution of the
rare and elevated ideals which originally inspired it. The slippery
character Darricade who has played a two-way game slowly
emerges as the hero of Resistance and consolidates his political
power. Quite the most bitter outburst against the Darricades of
France and the hypocrisy and iniquities of the Epuration (the
post-Liberation purges) spring from Curtis's pen in the closing
pages of the text. For Curtis, the genuine idealists and heroes have
been few, and many are dead like Francis and Lavencourt; the
self-styled heroes and opportunists of the Liberation represent a
return to the self-interest and mediocrity of the past, not a new
dawn for France. Through the apolitical but perceptive son of
Madame Costellot, Jacques (now the lover of Helene), Curtis
expresses deep contempt for the intrigues and duplicities of
political life, a theme pursued in Les Justes causes ( 1954). Even the
80 The Second World War in Fiction

amoral but attractive Arregui doesn't survive the war: as the

German defeat draws near, he joins the army to protect himself
but in a gesture of defiant self-affirmation, he skies across enemy
lines and is shot.
Curtis's tableau of the Occupation is impressive and informa-
tive, but in the final analysis the novel transcends its social
descriptions to explore the general themes of youthful idealism,
cynicism, opportunism and hypocrisy, thus displacing the Occu-
pation to a secondary dimension of the narrative.
To be read in conjunction with Les Forets de la nuit is Gary's Les
Cerfs-volants (1980). Written 35 years after Educationeuropienne, the
work not only testifies to the lasting impact of war on Gary but to
the durability of the subject as a fictional base. Dedicated to
"Memory", Les Cerfs-volants is a largely biographically inspired
novel telling of the war-time experiences in occupied France of
Ludovic Fleury, the narrator and of his uncle Ambroise, a famous
kite-maker of Clery where the main action of the novel takes place.
The image of the kite is used by Gary to symbolise the heroism
and idealism of Resistance, and the novel generally traces the
development of Ludovic from his inability to believe that Fascism
can gain popular support, his sense of unreality at the outbreak of
war, to his eventual commitment. The novel also traces his
emotional involvement with Lila Bronicki, daughter of an expat-
riate Polish aristocrat living in France. Lila is a collaborator but
Ludovic's love for her survives and he rescues her from the
recriminations of the Epuration, thus transcending hate and con-
tempt and pointing to a humanism which enhances Germans,
collaborators and resisters alike. The novel presents a wide
variety of themes, the inadequacy of pacifism, the collapse of
France, human duplicity and heroism, barbarism and love, suf-
fering and the possibility of establishing a humanism capable of
transcending the double face of human nature. Distanced from
events, Gary is able to create in Les Cerfs-volants a work of greater
power and insight than his earlier Education europeenne. The time
lapse also gives rise to a far more wide-ranging approach as the
events of war assume a variety of symbolic dimensions in the mind
of the author.
Worthy of mention also under this heading is Louis Guilloux's
long work Le Jeu de patience (Prix Renaudot 1949) _:X> This is a vast
fragmented chronicle, written from four principal perspectives,
one of which is the Occupation. The town is Saint-Brieuc and the
 France 81

narrator is trying to recreate the history of his birthplace from

World War One onwards. Various events disrupt the chronicler,
including the arrival of the Germans in the town in 1940. The
narrator begins to chronicle the Occupation and piece together
events. Slowly Le feu de patience poses essential questions about
historical reconstructions and whether history has any meaning
or direction. As in Butor, narrative reconstruction salvages events
from oblivion and gives a direction to the human adventure in
time. Saint-Brieuc becomes a focus for the contradictions and
overlaps of experience. Both in the importance accorded to the
war as one of the privileged viewpoints of the chronicle and in
terms of the questions posed by the author about narrative,
history and meaning, Le feu de patience is one of the most interesting
books about war and Occupation.

For the writer of comic fiction, the subject of war with all its
gravity, drama and emotion, offers a particular challenge. It is
worth recalling that Malraux, with the gambling mythomaniac
Clappique of La Condition humaine, and Celine, with Bardamu in
Le Voyage au bout de la nuit, are both capable of finding, amid the
sufferings and torments of war, sources of humour. Nor can it be
said that Sartre and to a lesser extent Camus are insensitive to the
comic aspects of individuals and situations in war. However it is
to Jean Dutourd (Au Bon Beurre, 1952; Les Taxis de la Marne, 1956),
Marcel Ayme (Le Chemin des ecoliers, 1946; Uranus, 1949) and the
more "popular" Antoine Blondin (L 'Europe buissonniere, 1949; Les
Enjants du bon Dieu, 1952; L 'Humeur vagabonde, 1955) that we owe
the most humorous representations of war, although such
humour is admittedly very sard{)nic and full of satirical intention.
Dutourd's Au Bon Beurre is perhaps the funniest and most biting
representation of France under the Occupation. The novel starts
in 1940 at the time of the exode and describes the lives of Charles
Hubert and Julie Poissonard and their two children as the family
amass a fortune from black-market and collaborationist trading
in their "cremerie" business. Strongly pro-Vichy and convinced
that all resisters should be shot, the Poissonards betray Leon
Lecuyer, a neighbour's son who has escaped from German im-
prisonment, is active in the Resistance and is trying to assassinate
Laval. By 1943 and with a lot of money in the bank, the Pois-
82 The Second World War in Fiction

sonards slowly realise that the war might go against the Germans
and they switch allegiances. Having helped a young German
soldier for money, they strategically betray him to give themselves
a respectable Resistance identity and emerge safely from the
Epuration. By 1948 they are worth 47 million francs and marry off
their daughter to a Resistance hero, now a depute but at one time
a member of the Vichy cabinet. The young Leon is politically
educated during the war by a noble CP member, Alphonse, who is
later on executed. Leon does not join the Party, becomes a
university teacher and has the privilege of instructing Pois-
sonard's son. Poissonard organises Leon's demotion when he
discovers that his son's marks are not very good.
In the preface of the book, Dutourd tells us that he felt that he
had to write the work, and in the style in which it is written. He
appears to mean by this that the bitterness and rancour that he
felt at the successful treachery and opportunism of the Pois-
sonards of France ("Ia canaille" -the rabble- as he calls them)
presented a particular challenge to his comic art. An oblique
comment on the fragile assumptions which frequently underlie
approaches to war literature is provided by Dutourd when he
denies that he had been a "cremier" as many critics had
assumed ... !
Au Bon Beurre contains many memorable scenes: Leon's escape
from prison and encounter with a Hamburg transvestite soldier,
the Poissonards' visit to Petain bearing ducks' eggs and other
gifts; the extremely sarcastic attack on and pastiche of Rene
Benjamin who writes a newspaper article celebrating the visit; the
exchanges between the Poissonards, the anti-German Madame
Lecuyer and the pro-Nazi collaborator M. Lebugle. As well as its
humour, Au Bon Beurre is immensely rich in detail about the
French under Occupation in the same way that Les Taxis de La
Marne provides much information about the Liberation and
immediate post-war years.
Ayme's Le Chemin des ecoliers is best read in conjunction with
Pierre Daix's Classe 42 (2 vols, 1951) which traces the impact of
war and the lessons derived from it on a group of mainly young
people of various persuasions. Le Chemin des ecoliers shows the
younger generation quick to seize the opportunities provided by
the black market in war and showing the way forward to their
seniors, represented by two personages reminiscent of Flaubert's
Homais and Bournisien: M. Michaud and M. Lolivier.
 France 83

Michaud and Lolivier manage a rented accommodation agen-

cy, "Ia Societe de gerance des fortunes immobilieres de Paris".
The business has become less profitable because of the war,
particularly after the exode. Michaud is strongly opposed to the
black market but his partner feels they are part of it despite
themselves. Both men are concerned with their families. Lolivier
has a son Tony who gives his father cause for concern when he
burns out the eyes of a chicken that he has plucked alive. Michaud
has two children, Antoine, active in the black market, and Yvette,
unfaithful to her husband away fighting the war. Molinier, a
friend of Yvette's husband, provides added humour as a pro-
German, anti-Jewish, Communist, Cubist, poet, and freemason
collaborator (he has a particular dislike for Jews who own Cubist
paintings).
Eventually, Lolivier's growing sense of his own hypocrisy
during the war leads to many quarrels with Michaud. He tells his
partner that they are merely posturers of Resistance and that their
real concerns are not with humanity and values or freedom of
others but with their own comfort and feelings. Finally both men
abandon their postures of commitment and accept that the war is
not their concern and has not changed them: they are still the
self-satisfied, self-interested bourgeois of pre-war days. Much of
the change is guided by the activities of their children.
Michaud commits adultery with a cabaret girl whom he has
met in a bar, a centre of black-market activities, where he has gone
in order to protect his son. With Lolivier helping, he quickly
amasses a fortune through the black market. Lolivier's son uses
the same market to sell off as meat the carved-up body of a girl he
has killed with the assistance of an Arab. The work ends happily.
Ayme's clear-sighted and sometimes sardonic assessment of his
fellow countrymen was already apparent in the work he produced
during the Occupation. Here, he completely defeats any image
the French may have had of themselves as a nation of resisters. He
continues along the same vitriolic lines in Uranus, where he
denounces the inequities of the Epuration and post-Liberation
France, as Curtis does in Les Justes causes. 31

When all is said and done it is principally to Sartre, Camus and, to

a lesser extent, Simone de Beauvoir that the reader must turn to
84 The Second World War in Fiction

find the literary masterpieces inspired by the war. The literary

qualities of La Peste need no underlining, nor the range and depth
of Sartre's Les Chemins de La Liberti (1945-9), and few war works
can match the interest of Simone de Beauvoir's complex novel
about responsibility and freedom, Le Sang des autres (1945), despite
its evident limitations as a novel. Such works are too well known
to require much comment here; but they do give rise to a number
of important questions about the nature of war literature and the
significance of war in the lives of these artists.
We can only speculate as to how Camus's and Sartre's thought
would have developed if there had been no war but it certainly
seems that the impact of war on their ideas is vital. In addition, so
apposite and suitable is war as a vehicle for their philosophies and
notions of existence that it could be argued they would have had to
invent it, if it had not occurred!
Sartre was mobilised in October 1939. Quickly taken prisoner,
he spent nine months in a German prison. In Avec Sartre au Stalag
12D (1980), Father Marius Perrin records his impressions of
Sartre at the time and of his play Bariona which, under the
pressure of events in Europe, begins the process whereby the
rather negative conclusions of La Nausie are transformed into the
positive concepts of engagement embodied in Les Mouches and Les
Mains sales with their emphasis on action and social change. This
evolution is also the principal theme of Les Chemins de La Liberti. The
civil war in Spain, the Munich crisis, the exode and the "drole de
guerre" are used by Sartre to articulate his notions of contingen-
cy, freedom and responsibility. Mathieu, the disenchanted
philosophy teacher of the thirties, and Brunet, the over-confident
CP member, are brought under the impact of war to a re-
examination of their lives and attitudes.
The war attracted Sartre because it provided extreme circums-
tances capable of illustrating in stark relief his basic philosophical
ideas. He uses it as a vehicle for the articulation of his metaphysic:
the war is existence made clear, the lifting of the veil of "mauvaise
foi", the discovery of contingency and "historicite" (cf. Situations
III). In a sense it is questionable whether the work can be
described as a "war novel" since the subject matter of war is
simply a contingent "historical" event used as a pretext for
exploring issues which far transcend the war. It is really, in the
hands of Sartre, an extremely apt metaphor of our condition.
In the course of Le Sursis, Mathieu reflects on the war. He would
 France 85

like to know what it is and where it is. Sartre used the occasion to
echo ideas developed in Situations I and La Nausie about history as
a structure of consciousness, the impossibility of objective de-
scription, the philosophical relevance of the notion of relativity to
the novel. In a sense, his remarks anticipate the Robbe-Grillet of
Dans le labyrintke and lead us to Guilloux's Le feu de patience. The
upshot of Sartre's analysis is to make our very notion of an event a
structure of consciousness and thus to make a literary structure a
secondary symbolic organisation. There is no pre-existent reality,
event or experience to which the literary artefact gives "order";
thus the history of the war is in itself a "fictional" creation of
consciousness. Ideas such as this converge in a variety of ways in
Les Chemins de Ia Iiberti and give the work great complexity and
interest, but with the result that the war as subject matter seems
slightly dwarfed.
Such observations are perhaps even more applicable to La
Peste. The experience of war had possibly a greater impact on
Camus than on Sartre. The already fragile individualism and
hedonism of his early work is transformed by deeper reflections
promoted by the war into the (perhaps equally fragile) humanism
of La Peste. However, the war, Occupation and Resistance are but
one dimension of La Peste and all such matters are transposed
through the basic choice of the plague symbol. The war may well
have been for Camus a metaphor of existence but he chooses a
different metaphor to express its many possible dimensions.
Camus was probably more conscious than most artists of the
possibility of getting bogged down in particulars and history, and
of the dangers of using immediate events as a subject matter for
art. Like Sartre, Camus is also conscious of the extreme complexi-
ty of the nature of the relationship between fiction and history.
Calling his work a "chronique" he uses a retrospectively revealed
narrator and the edited diaries of Tarrou to pose the problem of
reconstruction and transposition of events into narrative. La Peste
poses in an acute form the question of what a war book actually is:
it can certainly be read without necessarily thinking ofthe war, or
even war, and as time goes by the historical context will fade away
more and more. For this reason it is perhaps best to describe La
Peste as a work inspired by war rather than a war book.
Simone de Beauvoir's Le Sang des autres (1945), completed
before the end of the war and originally destined for Les Editions
de Minuit, 32 eventually appeared with Gallimard. Here Beauvoir
86 The Second World War in Fiction

uses the Resistance movement as a set of general perspectives

through which to explore in detail the question of freedom and
responsibility. The problem of action in the Resistance is analysed
but there is no description of action as such, rather the work
abstracts from Resistance action a multitude of conflicts and
paradoxes which confront the protagonist, Blomwart. There is
also only the briefest evocation of the Occupation when Helene
realises that collaboration is impossible because it implies accep-
tance of anti-Semitism.
As with Sartre and Camus, Beauvoir's preoccupations in Le
Sang des autres far transcend the question of war. It does end on a
spirited defence of freedom by Blomart and is thus a "Resistance
work", but the freedom envisaged goes beyond the question of
occupation and national sovereignty. Much the same could be
said of Vailland's Drole de jeu (1945) where the Resistance move-
ment is used as a base for the writer's exploration of private
notions unrelated to war, although largely rooted in the author's
personal experience of Resistance. 33
The works of greater depth and interest, like the best war books
of the past, pay more attention to art than to fact, and subordinate
recreation of the war to exploration of the human condition. This
is ultimately true even of those works of Resistance primarily
intended as a call to action: Le Silence de La mer and other Editions
de Minuit texts possess the power to transcend their historical
moment. War in itself is a contingent event, a neutral backcloth
and vehicle, capable of articulation in a wide variety of ways.
Although much information on the war can be gleaned from
them, the war is not so much the text of the best works as their
pretext.

English Translations of Works Mentioned

Ayme, Marcel, Le Chemin des icoliers/The Transient Hour, trans. by Eric Sutton
(London, 1948).
--,La Vouivre/The Fable and the Flesh, trans. by Eric Sutton (London, 1949).
- - , Uranus/Fanfare in Blimont, trans. by Norman Denny (London, 1950).
Beauvoir, Simone de, Le Sang des autres/The Blood of Others, trans. by Yvonne
Moyse and Roger Senhouse (London, 1948).
Bory, Jean Louis, Mon Village al'heureallemande/French Village, trans. by D.P. and
P.J. Waley (London, 1948).
Camus, Albert, La Peste/The Plague, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (London, 1948).
 France 87

Clostermann, Pierre Henri, Le Grand Cirque/The Big Show, trans. by Oliver

Berthoud (London, 1951).
- - , Feux du ciel/Flames in the Sky, trans. by Oliver Berthoud (London, 1954).
Curtis, jean Louis, Les Forits de la nuit/The Forests of the Night, trans. by Nora
Wydenbruck (London, 1951).
- - , Les Justes Causes/The Side of the Angels, trans. by Humphrey Hare (New
York, 1954).
Dutourd, Jean, Au Bon Beurre/The Milky Way, trans. by .Robin Chancellor
(London, 1955).
Gary, Romain, Education europeenne/Forest of Anger, trans. by Viola Gerard Garvin
(London, 1944).
Kessel, joseph Elie, L'Armie des ombres/Army of Shadows, trans. by Haakon
Chevalier (London, 1944).
Merle, Robert, Weekend ii Zuydcoote/Weekend at Zuydcoote, trans. by K. Rebillon-
Lambley (London, 1950).
- - , La Mort est mon mitier/Death is my Trade, trans. by Alan Ross (London,
1954).
Modiano, Patrick, La Ronde de nuit/Night Rounds, trans. by Patricia Wolf (New
York, 1972).
- - , Les Boulevards de ceinture/Ring Roads, trans. by Caroline Hillier (London,
1974).
Nimier, Roger, Le Hussard bleu/The Blue Hussar, trans. by john Russell and
Anthony Rhodes (London, 1952).
Pozner, Vladimir, Deuil en 24 heures/The Edge of the Sword, trans. by Haakon
Chevalier (London, 1943).
Rousset, David, L'Univers concentrationnaire/A World Apart, trans. by Yvonne
Moyse and Roger Senhouse (London, 1951).
Roy, Jules, La Vallee heureuse/The Happ,-, Valley, trans. by Edward Owen Marsh
(London, 1952).
- - , Retour de l'enfer/Retum from Hell, trans. by Mervyn Savill (London, 1954).
Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, Pilote de guerre/Flight to Arras, trans. by Stuart Gilbert
(New York, 1942).
Sartre, jean-Paul, Les Chemins de la liberti/The Roads to Freedom. 1: L'Age de la
raison/The Age of Reason, trans. by Eric Sutton (London, 1947); II LeSursis/The
Reprieve, trans. by Eric Sutton (London, 1947); III La Mort dans l'Ame/Iron in
the Soul, trans. by Gerard Hopkins (London, 1950).
Vailland, Roger. Drole de jeu/Playing with Fire, trans. by Gerard Hopkins (Lon-
don, 1948).
Vercors (jean Bruller), Le Silence de la mer/Put out the Light, trans. by Cyril
Connolly (London, 1944).
- - , Marche al'itoile/Guiding Star, trans. by Eric Sutton (London, 1946).
3 Germany
AlanBance
Germany was responsible for the outbreak of the Second World
War in a sense that is not paralleled by her part in the events
which led to the Great War, a European conflagration fuelled by
national suspicions and ambitions on all sides. Even if one accepts
that it was primarily German militarism and aggression which
launched the First World War, that role in no way compares with
Germany's agency in creating the Second, the inevitable fulfil-
ment of Hitler's ideology. This fact colours German fiction deal-
ing with the war, and the response of readers, native or foreign, to
the German war books. While the fiction of other nations de-
scribes a reaction, embodied most clearly perhaps in the French
Resistance literature, German writing has the task of coming to
terms with the results of an action initiated by Germans and,
while almost universally reviled abroad, at least in its early stages
undoubtedly accepted if not welcomed by most of their fellow-
countrymen. It is true that, in "Sorcerer's Apprentice" style,
operations almost immediately escaped from the control of the
war's instigators, and gradually they, too, took on the role of
victims of a catastrophe so vast as to be almost beyond human
imagining. But, while these later developments may cloud the
issue, especially in a German popular view of the war, they do not
permit German writers to disown their nation's responsibility.
The shape of "their" war, as seen from a German vantage
point, can be outlined as follows: after it became clear that this
time, in contrast to the settling of the Czech and Austrian
"questions", Hitler was not going to get his way by negotiation,
i.e. intimidation, he decided to give his new Wehrmacht some
useful active-service experience by invading Poland. Following
the declaration of war on Germany by the European democracies
and the fall of Poland, a period of "phoney war" in the West was
succeeded by the rapid collapse of France in 1940. The end of
88
 Germany 89

hostilities was blocked only by the minor obstacle of Britain,

which the Luftwaffe and the U -boats could be trusted to deal with.
As the air war over the Channel petered out in a stalemate,
however, Hitler postponed an invasion of England, a hopeless
prospect without German air and sea supremacy, and turned
towards the East in the summer of 1941. Now at last Germany
faced the real enemy, Bolshevism, which was to be ruthlessly
destroyed in order to clear Russian land for German colonisation.
The "war of annihilation" began as a campaign of lightning
victories achieved by inflicting total tactical surprise upon a
cumbersome Soviet command. With the onset of autumn and
winter, however, it was clear that the Russians were as yet by no
means defeated (despite official announcements to that effect
from Berlin), and the German campaign ground to a halt just
outside Moscow. In the Russian winter counter-offensive that
followed, German losses were appalling (88 977 dead, 23 319
missing). The German summer offensive of 1942 brought only the
certainty that the costly and brutal Russian campaign could hope
for no quick end, and the suspicion that, with an immense
hinterland to fall back upon, the Soviet forces simply could not be
defeated. Any lingering German hopes were dashed by the most
significant single event of the war, the siege and fall of Stalingrad
and the total destruction of Paulus's 6th Army early in 1943. From
then on, the end was rarely in doubt. While the population at
home endured the inconceivable horrors of day and night Allied
blanket bombing, the German forces were driven on to the
defensive both on the Eastern and the Western Front, pushed
back towards the homeland by the Russians, and unable to beat
off a nervously awaited Anglo-American invasion in Normandy in
1944. After the failure of the much-vaunted "wonder weapons",
the V-ls and V-2s, one last desperate attempt to turn the tide of
events in the West, the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes just
before Christmas 1944, simply precipitated the end in May 1945;
the total capitulation of Germany and its division into zones of
occupation.
The history of German Second WorM War fiction begins for
our purposes after the Nazi period itself. With the exception of
trivial war stories written to a formula and intended to prepare
adolescents for their military call-up (sample titles are Mit Stu/cas
und Pan;:;ern nach Frankreich and Achtung- ich werfe!) the years from
1939 to 1945 produced very little fiction dealing with the war. Any
90 The Second World War in Fiction

demand for combat literature seems to have been amply supplied

by novels produced at the end of the Weimar Republic, dealing
with the First World War and incorporating militaristic attitudes
welcome to the National Socialist regime: Werner Beumelburg,
Die Gruppe Bosemuller (1930), Edwin Erich Dwinger, Die Armee
hinterStacheldraht (1929), Josef Magnus Wehner, Sieben vor Verdun
( 1930), and Hans Zoberlein, Der Glauhe an Deutschland ( 1931).
With very few exceptions, such as Hans Womer with his war
novel Flugschuler Ungenat (1941), novelists writing during the war
years remained faithful to the favourite pre-war themes of Nation-
al Socialist literature, such as peasant life and historical per-
sonalities. The possible explanations for the dearth of war fiction
are various. Those with first-hand experience of Second World
War combat were otherwise engaged between 1939 and 1943,
when the tide of war turned; and thereafter few Germans would
presumably have had the stomach for novels glorifying a war they
were not winning. Realism, the hallmark of the novel form, was
not only dangerous politically, but officially discouraged. The
preference for the lyric and dramatic genres in the Third Reich
has to do with traditional German esteem for these "higher"
forms, deemed suitable vehicles, therefore, for the aspirations of
the new Germany. In 1942 a leading Nazi Literal, Gerhard
Schumann, typically rejects the novel as too analytical a genre for
war writing. While prose fiction "casts its flickering light on
events", the lyric is "the fire itself', the flame of myth, irrational-
ism and purification of the race through war. The novel could not
compete.
Any outline of the phases of war book production after 1945 can
only be a rough one. The desire of Germans to learn about the war
from fiction was not quickly satisfied: it was only by the end of the
forties that war novels began to appear in any numbers. Not
surprisingly, in view of the ruthless suppression of opposition
under the National Socialists, the earliest novels were expressions
of pent-up wrath and condemnation of the regime and the war,
books like Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad (1945}, written in exile in
Moscow, and Walter Kolbenhoff's Von unserem Fleisch und Blut
(1947), a novel about a fanatical young "Werwolf" whose Nazi
indoctrination leads him to continue the war long after defeat has
become inevitable: this, too, written not on German soil but in the
American re-education camps, Forts Ruston and Kearney. The
indictment of war and inhumanity continued with, for example,
 Germany 91

Hans Erich Nossack's powerful collection of stories Interview mit

dem Tode ( 1948), including the famous description of the destruc-
tion of Hamburg by Allied bombing in 1943, "Der Untergang";
Heinrich Boll's Der Zug war punktlich ( 1949), concerning a soldier
travelling towards the Eastern Front and the certainty of death, or
his Wo warst du, Adam? (1951), a series of loosely related scenes
epitomising the pathos and irony of war for Boll's largely passive
subjects; and Alfred Andersch's Die Kirschen der Freiheit (1952), an
account of the author's decision to desert to the Allies in Italy
towards the end of the war.
The political circumstances of Germany in the Cold War era
account for the short life-span of this phase, the period of freedom
to explore and experiment with the new democratic concepts
proudly bestowed upon Germany by the Western Allies, and to
attempt a brutally honest confrontation with the immediate past.
Quite early on, with the freezing of relations between eastern and
western power blocs, any literature taking up a critical (i.e.
independent and thoughtful) stance towards the Allies was sus-
pected of pro-Communist leanings; so, for instance, the American
military government in April1947 banned the liberal-progressive
journal Der Ruf for its "nihilistic" standpoint (the response was
the formation by Hans Werner Richter in the autumn of 1947 of
the Gruppe 47, which was to become the biggest single influence
in post-war literature). There were many factors at work in West
Germany to encourage a suppression of recent memories; the
formation of a stabilised Federal Republic constructed out of the
Western Zones of Occupation; the need to assimilate enormous
numbers of refugees from the East; the Berlin blockade; the
emerging "economic miracle"; the debate about, and eventual
( 1955) adoption of re-armament as a result of the outbreak of the
Korean War in 1950- all required the assumption of a premature-
ly achieved "normality" and conspired to muffle the voices of the
small group of writers genuinely concerned to come to terms with
the past. The 1950s were a period when politics was pushed into
the background and ideologies were suspect. The self-evident
virtues of the free-market economy were equated with the right to
withdraw into the private sphere, be it the nuclear family or one's
own self-sufficient conscience, now free of discomfort as the past
became sanitised through the operation of "the whole catalogue of
[German] incorrigibility", as Ralph Giordano's hero calls it in the
brilliant new novel Die Bertinis (1982): "Hitler was solely respon-
92 The Second World War in Fiction

sible", "there were good 'sides to the regime (the Autobahn) as

well as bad", "it was the British in the Boer War who invented
concentration camps", and the neatly self-contradictory asser-
tions that (a) "we didn't know what was going on" and (b) "there
was nothing we could do about it if we did know" .1
The reflection of all this in war literature was not so much
books attempting to justify militarism (such attitudes being con-
fined, so far as serious literature was concerned, to extreme
right-wingers like Erich Edwin Dwinger in Wenn Die Damme
brechen [1950], an account of the onslaught of the invading
Russian forces on East Prussia), but a trend towards, on the one
hand, the "tough", value-free novel limiting itselfto depicting the
horrors of war a la Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front),
without explicit political or ideological comment or content (Gert
Ledig's Die Stalinorgel [1955], or Reinhart Stalmann's Staub
[1951], are examples); and, on the other hand, a more private,
evP.n existentialist view of war, as a-political and a-historical as
the philosophy of the free play of market forces itself. 2 Examples of
the latter type of novel (reminiscent of the writings of Saint-
Exupery) are Gerd Gaiser's Die sterbende ]agd (1953), about a
"dying squadron" of fighter pilots whose independent pride in
their elitist branch of the profession of arms is overshadowed
elegiacally by knowledge that they are hopelessly outnumbered
and the war is being lost; or Herbert Zand 's Let~te Ausfahrt ( 1953),
presenting the situation of a cut-off and surrounded fictional city
in the east of Germany as symbolic of the human condition in
general; or the much-acclaimed Nichts in Sicht by J ens Rehn
(1954), the story of a German submariner and an American
pilot in extremis, drifting and dying in a rubber dinghy in mid-
Atlantic.
The number of significant war novels gradually declined after
1955, although the popular, adventure-story kind of war book
still thrived. 3 The Gruppe 47, whose members had been young
men during the war and had for the most part served in the
German forces, lost coherence and influence in the sixties. Impor-
tant war novels continued sporadically to appear, such as Sieg-
fried Lenz's Stadtgesprach ( 1963), set in occupied Norway, or Boll's
Entfernung von der Truppe (1964: it contains a "recherche du temps
perdu" by an ex-soldier, now a grandfather, of the wartime period
and especially an episode where he went absent without leave), or
Alexander Kluge's Stalingrad-book, Schlachtbeschreibung (first
 Germany 93

published 1964, but in a revised version as Der Untergang der 6.

A rmee in 1969). The theme of war also loomed large in the
epoch-making novels, Gunter Grass's Die Blechtrommel ( 1959; see
especially the chapters "The Polish Post Office", "The Ant
Trail" and "Inspection of concrete") and Siegfried Lenz's
Deutschstunde (1968; a vastly inflated "punishment essay" on the
very German theme of "the joys of duty", written purportedly by
a young man in a reform institution, attempting almost total
recall of his wartime years as the son of an over-conscientious
country policeman in northernmost Schleswig-Holstein ). But it
was precisely these great achievements in the field of Ver-
gangenheitsbewiiltigung, or coming to terms with the past, which
demonstrated a need to break out from the limitations of preoccu-
pation with the war itself and to conceive startling new ways to do
justice to the totality of the years from 1933 to 1945.
In the 1960s, in any case, prompted by the Eichmann trial of
1961, new forms of the documentary theatre were emerging which
shifted the emphasis of Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung from the novel to
the stage. Investigating the war and war guilt in a wider context,
a world-wide perspective in some cases, were plays like Rolf
Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter (1963), on the failure of Pope Pius
XII to intervene on behalf of the Jews in the Third Reich, or his
So/daten ( 1967), accusing Churchill of responsibility, firstly for the
inhuman reprisals againt German cities like Hamburg and Dres-
den carried out by saturation bombing, and secondly for the
murder of the Polish General Sikorski. Peter Weiss's Die Ermitt-
lung (1965) was based on the records of the Frankfurt Auschwitz
trial of 1963-64. These playwrights, along with others such as
Heinar Kipphardt (In derSache]. Robert Oppenheimer, 1964) began
to break down what they saw as the myth of the unique war guilt
of Germany- still quarantined in her moral isolation ward- by
scrutinising the record of the supposed representatives of democ-
racy or of humane values (theW estern democracies, the Papacy,
Churchill).
With the extreme political events of 1967 and after- student
riots and the radicalisation of the German political scene - the
spell of the past might seem to have been broken at last; and
indeed the new generation of German writers (Peter Handke,
Wolf W ondratschek) intended to "wipe the slate clean" and
cleanse the language itself of the old preoccupations. Present-day
political issues now dominated almost exclusively. Even so, the
94 The Second World War in Fiction

early seventies unexpectedly saw the publication of two important

war books, Lothar-Giinther Buchheim's submarine-novel Das
Boot (1973), and Alfred Andersch's Winterspelt (1974), both curi-
ously belated products. Andersch takes up on a larger scale the
themes of his earlier Die Kirschen der Freiheit (a German officer just
before the Battle of the Bulge makes a half-hearted attempt to
capitulate to the Americans with all his troops intact), while
Buchheim, who had put to sea thirty years earlier with U-boats as
an official war correspondent, now writes up his experiences in
the form of a gripping work of fiction which launched a new,
hardly novel but very interesting West German controversy over
the suspected glamourising of the Second World War, and in
particular the creation of a hero-figure in the shape of the attrac-
tive young submarine captain. The 1970s also saw the re-
publication of a number of earlier war books, and a gradual
increase in West German receptivity to the subject of the war
years, as evidenced by the massive viewing figures and positive
audience response when the American TV series Holocaust (on the
deportation and extermination of the Jews) was screened at the
end of the decade.
This was also a time of intensified research by historians into
such topics as the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the atrocities of
the Eastern Front, reported in Christian Streit's Keine Kameraden,
dealing with the Army's involvement in and responsibility for the
maltreatment and death of millions of Russian POWs; Klaus-
Jiirgen Muller's Das Heer und Hitler, on the relationship between
the upper echelons of the military and the National Socialist
regime; Manfred Messerschmidt's study of political indoctrina-
tion in the Army, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat; and above all Die
Truppe der Weltanschauungskrise, by Helmut Krausnick and Hans-
Heinrich Wilhelm, which in 1981 caused a new sensation (duly
recorded in Der Spiegel in April 1981) by breaking down the
convenient distinction between the Wehrmacht and the activities of
SS or SD units in Russia, a distinction which had maintained
intact the myth of the Army's "purity" .4
On the fictional front, the latest phase of interest in the war has
been reflected particularly in chronicles of family life, like Walter
Kempowski's Tadelloser & Wolff (1971), Horst Bienek's Zeitohne
Glocken (1979), and Ralph Giordano's Die Bertinis (1982). Run-
ning parallel to this recent fiction is a never-ending stream of
 Germany 95

reminiscences and eye-witness accounts, such as, in 1982, the new

volumes Meine Schulzeit im Dritten Reich, memoirs of their school-
days under Hitler and in the war by German writers, edited by
Marcel Reich-Ranicki; and Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Deutsche
Feldpostbriefe 1939-1945, a collection of letters to and from the
front line, edited by Ortwin Buchbender and Reinhold Sterz. The
recent literary activity generated by the Second World War,
however critical, bears witness to something of a "nostalgia
wave" about the period in Germany (compare Fassbinder's films,
The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen), and is crowned in a
strangely appropriate way by the publication in 1982 of a
museum-piece war novel, Heinrich Boll's Das Vermiichtnis, set on
the Atlantic coast of France and on the Eastern Front in 1943. It
was written in 1948, but mislaid and re-discovered upon the
transfer of certain Boll papers back to Cologne from across the
Atlantic.
This outline of the history of German Second World War
literature is necessarily schematic where books do not lend them-
selves to unambiguous classification, where authors who pro-
duced early war books hardly change their attitudes to the war in
later ones, and where themes and problems persist through three
decades. Another way of looking at the phases of war literature is
in terms of generations of writers, 5 rather than of the dates at
which their novels happened to appear. By this reckoning, of
authors writing in the first twenty years after the war, the three
main groups are, firstly, the so-called "Lost Generation", those
who grew up under Fascism and were called up to fight in a
senseless war for which they felt no responsibility, but which
robbed them of their best years: secondly, the generation before
them, those born between 1900 and 1914, who had more oppor-
tunity to form a mature political outlook in the pre-Nazi years
and, in contrast to the "deadbeat" and s«eptical attitudes of the
"Lost Generation", fought, however desperate their situation, to
maintain some kind of moral toehold: and finally, those born
around the turn of the century or earlier, the generation of the
First World War (e.g. Remarque, Junger, Plievier, Dwinger,
Hartung). The latter tend to respond to the Second World War in
broader, less personal terms, and on the whole are in possession of
an intact world-view. Most did not see active service in 1939- 45,
though there are notable exceptions sucp as Ernst Jiinger.
96 The Second World War in Fiction

While such divisions into phases or generations are interesting,

I do not propose to make them the basis of the observations that
follow, although it will be useful to refer back to them from time to
time. There is enough consistency in the questions raised by
German war literature between 1945 and the present to justify an
approach along thematic rather than purely chronological lines.
This approach also permits the occasional glance at works which
are not primarily "war books" (e.g. Siegfried Lenz's Deutsch-
stunde) but concern themselves centrally with the issues of the
war. Moreover, the exploration of themes is a way of side-
stepping the question raised in the preceding sentence: what is a
war book? The first chapter of this book has examined the
considerable problems of definition. I shall take a broad view of
the question and look beyond the front-line or combat novel, on
the one hand, and beyond purely fictional forms, on the other, to
include diaries and memoirs where these possess literary qualities
and seem to throw light on central themes. To limit the scope of
interest to books dealing only with combat would not do justice to
the German experience of the war, which found its victims and its
heroes both on and off the battlefield. But a line must be drawn
somewhere, and this means the exclusion from the category of war
books works (in some cases the most outstanding that were
produced in the period} into which the war-theme enters, some-
times even centrally, but which in the final analysis are not
books "about" the war. In this category must be placed Grass's
Die Blechtrommel (1959); Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947)-
possibly the most penetrating analysis of the connection between
the German psyche and the origins of the Second World War;
Hermann Kasack's surrealistic novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom
(1947), which begins very much in the reality of a civilian
population living an underground existence after the destruction
of their city (eventually, however, the hero, Lindhoff, discovers
that he is the only living soul in a city of the dead); Walter Jens'
Nein, die Welt der Angeklagten (1950), a Kafka-esque, anti-utopian
projection forward into the post-war years of the paranoia of the
Nazis as it rose to new heights during the war; Ernst von
Salomon's Der Fragebogen (1951), containing enormously ex-
tended answers and excursus in response to one of those naive
Allied de-nazification questionnaires post-war Germans were
obliged to complete when applying for key posts; Alfred An-
dersch' s Die Rote ( 1960), the attempted flight from life in the
 Germany 97

Bundesrepublik to Venice by a young German woman who is then

embroiled in events which lay some of the ghosts of the Second
World War; Heinrich Boll's Billardum halb.(.elm (1959), in which
the war period forms a climax to a survey of the life of three
generations of a family in this century; and many more.
The majority of German war books can be seen to offer re-
sponses to questions which are not generally operily stated. (Boll
is different from most o.ther war writers in his willingness to ask
the simple questions: "My God, how many times have I asked
myself how colossal the power must be that makes millions of
people, completely without volition, despite cowardice and fear,
trundle towards death as we are doing tonight", says the narrator
of Das Vermiichtnis.) There is a quest for innocence; a tendency to
look for ways to express the concept of heroism despite all the
difficulties the notions holds in our age and in such a war; and a
desire to find alternative identities, to evade the wholesale con-
demnation- of the German soldier along with his odious political
masters, in whom, it must be said, he had not been so loath to
place his trust when the war started - which poured in upon
Germany from all sides after the war. The war novel seeks
redemptive means of meeting the problem of war guilt without,
on the one hand, giving way to total despair or nihilism, or, on the
other, offering an outright exoneration of Germany in action in
the Second World War. Simplified assumptions of collective guilt,
such as those entertained by some representatives of the Allies in
the early days of the occupation, were not found particularly
useful by a nation which had to go on living with itself, and
intended to do so with as much dignity as it could muster
(especially since dignity had been an early and long-term victim
of the bullying regime of which the Allies had just relieved it).
The war novel had a part to play in rehabilitating some vestiges of
German self-respect. It is a perfectly understandable function
which, perhaps rightly, has been held in some suspicion by
Germans themselves, as falling in all to easily with precocious
Cold War "normalisation" and offering a politically dangerous
exoneration (Entlastung) of genuine war guilt, Fascism, or militar-
ism. The outsider looking in can perhaps afford to be more
detached and tolerant.
I propose to group my remarks under a few broad headings
which, while not entirely discrete or free of overlap, offer a
convenient way of accommodating some of the complexities of the
98 The Second W odd War in Fiction

subject: the social, political and literary aspects of the Second

World War in German fiction.

The state of mind of the average soldier or, for that matter, civilian
living through the war is commonly reflected in war literature as a
sense of unreality. Again and again there are expressions of
incredulity at the grotesque forms that "normality" has taken on,
and a corresponding mistrust of surface appearances. Gunther
Weisenborn in his prison diary Memorial (1948) offers the least
confused statement of this dichotomy. (Typically, Second World
War prison literature, by its very nature, does make issues more
clear-cut than they appeared to the average citizen or Landser
[ordinary soldier] not classed as official opponents of the regime.)
It was in the subterranean prisons of the Gestapo, among the
"captive army of freedom", and not in the "sunlit, rabid everyday
world" of the Nazi Reich, that "the beauty of human greatness"
was to be found. It is a commonplace experience of the time that
everything sane and decent has gone underground, making way
for a perversion of normality brazenly parading ~s the real thing.
The title of Hugo Hartung's novel on the fall of Breslau, Der
Himmel war unten (1951), concisely expresses the central idea of a
"Himmelfahrt nach unten", an "ascension into the depths",
summarised at the end of Book I of the novel as "the Hell above
has been traversed. Heaven is beneath the earth". The same novel
provides an example, duplicated time and again in war literature,
of the violence done by this war to familiar reality, in this case the
description of well-known city streets which have now, amazing-
ly, become a battlefield: "Ronnig is wide awake and yet he thinks
he's dreaming. This was the route he took every day in peacetime;
there was his tram-stop. Peter sometimes used to hide behind that
big tree. On that bench on the left Lisa would wait for him
countless times with the children." In his "Der Untergang",
Hans Erich Nossack asks in the course of the description of the
survivors of the terrible bombing of Hamburg in July 1943:

What did those affected expect [from their hosts in the country
villages where they sought refuge]? ... We expected that
somebody would call out to us: 'Wake up! It's only a bad
dream!.'
 Germany 99

At "the still heart of the cyclone", in the Fuhrer-bunker in

Berlin, Felix Hartlaub (Jm Sperrkreis, 1955, originally published as
Von unten gesehen, 1950, a war diary by a writer who disappeared in
the final battle for Berlin) was noting the discrepancy between the
demonically efficient military machine, and the reality "out
there": "As long as the papers are in order- but the reality they
relate to is taking place on another planet." In Hermann Lenz's
autobiographical novel Neue Zeit (1975), the narrator, Eugen, is
provided with a "dream-time", turn-of-the-century Vienna, to
which to escape from the realities of war. Such a fantasy world is
only a positive counterpart, however, to the "dream-time" the
Germans as a nation have allowed themselves to live through
under Hitler as they sleepwalk towards disaster, for the most part
firmly convinced that they are fully awake, hard-headed and
practical. To quote from the same novel (Neue Zeit): "Your
daughter Margarethe, though, she knows how you've got to be in
this life: solid and down-to-earth. Not living in some dream
hiding-place, even if this hiding-place is something like Old
Vienna with the Emperor Franz Joseph." She knows that "the
quality of the sun and the Spring had stayed the same even under
Hitler" - a common delusion of unchanged normality which leads
to the German difficulty, recorded in so many war books, in
accepting as the reality, and not a bad dream, the rude awakening
brought by the war. A traditional German propensity to separate
inner from outer life is apparent here, and it is remarked upon in
much war fiction, as it is for example in Franz Fiihmann's story
"Das Gottesgericht", "The Divine Judgment" (essentially a
modern story of hubris by an East German writer, set in occupied
Greece, and published in the collection Die Elite) where the
comment is supplied by the thoughts of the Greek cook, Agamem-
non, about his masters:

... how strange all these German soldiers were, so tough and
yet so dreamy at the same time: tough in the day-time, when
they shouted 'Hey, you, Greek, come here!' and dreamy when
they were sitting around at night, when the moon was shining,
listening to the sounds of the sea, and singing.

It is in Heinrich Boll's war books that the delusion of normality

is most fully realised and exploited. When one of his wartime
characters shows a sense of the unreality of the "real" events
100 The Second World War in Fiction

happening around him, he does so as a demonstration of faith by

Boll in a higher reality, or of his character's need for such a faith.
In Wo worst du, Adam?, the doomed Jewish girl, Ilona, "seemed to
know that it was better not to live very long and not to build one's
life upon a love which was only real for a few moments at a time,
whereas there existed another, eternal love". The nihilistic vac-
uum experienced by Boll's soldier in Das Vermachtnis can only
properly be filled by a similar belief (though Boll is far from
condemning his narrator for not developing such a faith). One of
the most complete accounts of the sense of unreality in wartime in
Boll's works is "Aufenthalt in X", from the collection of stories
Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa. A soldier finds himself in a strange
town, alienated from his own inauthentic role, spending the night
with a strange girl:

This life, I thought, is not my life. I have to play this life and I'm
playing it badly .... Somewhere in this perfect silence was the
war .... I was completely alone in this town, these people did
not belong to me.

The narrator claims to have often "walked along the edge of

reality"; and in another story in the same collection, "Die Es-
senholer", surrealism takes us completely beyond the limits of a
normality which is unworthy of the name: "so-called reality was
inflated by the dark and shadowy laws of another reality which
made mock of it". Later fiction consistently maintains the theme,
so that in Andersch's Winterspelt (1974) Major Dincklage is
reassured by an army psychiatrist(!) that the powerful sense of
unreality which not infrequently comes over him as the war
progresses is a "nice little neurosis" which is a sign of health in
these times, when the dangerous people are those who find
everything quite normal. Siegfried Lenz still fights to gain ground
for a different sense of reality in post-war Germany in Deutsch-
stunde (1968). Both the hero-narrator Siggi and his father, the
dour policeman Jepsen, can be diagnosed as "abnormal" at the
end of the novel; but whereas the father's warped sense of "duty"
is easily concealed behind a policeman's uniform and survives
unscathed from the Nazi period (where it did untold harm) into
the present, Siggi's exaggerated version of a humane sense of
duty, which finds its expression in a compulsion to oppose
destruction (even where "normal" people would see no threat of
 Germany 101

it) is the one which is officially labelled by the psychologist

Mackenroth as an illness. 6 And in a recent novel by Horst Bienek,
Zeit ohne Glocken ( 1979), an average law-abiding citizen, Valeska,
is shaken and confused when she realises the full implications of
the race laws the Nazis have introduced (the possibility of a
death-sentence for a female associating with an "Ost-Arbeiter'', a
foreign worker from Eastern Europe employed as forced labour):
"She had always thought she knew what reality was .... Perhaps
the only reliable reality was death." (And yet the Nuremberg race
laws had been in operation for some years before the war.)? So
bizarre was the period 1933 - 45 that German authors trust very
largely to their basic senses, of smell, sight, touch, hearing, taste,
as touchstones of reality and the most reliable means of gaining
access to a past which no amount of documentation seems to make
credible. The recurrence of these sense-impressions in Deutsch-
stunde, in Boll's Billard um halbzehn, in Zeit ohne Glocken or Walter
Kempowski's Tadelloser & Wolff may be welcome to the nostalgia-
industry, but is not merely a product of it. It is in relation to the
theme of unreality that the various prison diaries of the Second
World War (Weisenborn's Memorial, Luise Rinser's Gefiingnis-
tagebuch, 1946) establish their credentials as war books, for their
authors were fighting in isolation, "in the front line", to uphold
their own sense of normality against the worst effects of a to-
talitarian government in wartime to subvert reality, with the aid
of all the plausible rhetoric about "betraying the nation in its hour
of need". One is reminded of the use made by the psychopathic
Roland Freisler, President of the "People's Court" which tried the
conspirators of the 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, of the full
power, panoply and spurious legitimacy of the Nazi State to
destroy the resistance and the dignity of its isolated show-trial
victims.

A problem with which the Germans were faced, as their oppo-

nents were not, was a sense of the futility of the war. It is probable
that in the initial successful phase the bulk of the German
population did not feel that Hitler's war was pointless. But very
few of the war books choose to reflect this early near-euphoria.
Two diaries of the Eastern Front form notable exceptions: Jochen
Klepper's Uberwindung, 1952 (Klepper was married to a con-
102 The Second World War in Fiction

verted Jewish lady, was eventually forced to leave the army on

those grounds, and later in the war committed suicide with his
wife and daughter); and Curt Hohoff's Woina Woina (1952).
Hohoff's unusual honesty about what he saw- and to an extent he
enthusiastically participated in them- as the expansive "Alexan-
drian" dreams of the Germans, by which they were sustained
through the early trials of the Russian adventure, only serves to
heighten the effects of the disaster at Stalingrad: "the reversal
from the highest expectations to the degradation of a merciless
abandonment even to death broke the back of German army
morale". Strictly speaking, of course, the war was literally a
pointless exercise from the very beginning, irrespective of the
outcome, for German war aims in the traditional sense were
barely defined and by nature indefinable, apart from glorification
of war itself as an expression of the national will and vigour. In so
far as war aims received a definition at all, it was one which
included asssumptions either criminal beyond the point of most
ordinary Germans' tolerance (wholesale genocide against Jews
and Slav "subhumans") or incredible in scale (world domination
on behalf of the "Aryan" race). But the futility of war was, all too
humanly, not as easy to perceive in victory as in defeat, when the
disastrous results of Hitler's increasingly megalomaniac leader-
ship began to manifest themselves. In Plievier's trilogy Moskau,
Stalingrad, Berlin, written in a highly critical spirit, the sense of
futility present from the beginning comes to the fore, especially in
his Berlin volume (1954) as the message of enormous, tragically
wasted effort is now literally brought home to tpe Germans and
delivered in high explosives on their doorstep in the capital.
Plievier thereby exploits the perhaps largely unthinking assump-
tion, among the bulk of the population, of German intentionality
as having lent some sort of point- however criminal- to the war in
Eastern Europe. It puts a cruel edge to his satire in a passage in
Berlin (insistently repeating a cliche defensive phrase often heard
in post-war Germany, "Das haben wir nicht gewollt!" 8 - "That
isn't what we wanted!"):

That was not what the Berliners wanted, to see their houses
turned into blazing heaps of charcoal, the slates from the roofs
shooting through the streets like flocks of birds.

By implication, the Berliners did want (or did not object to) a
similar work of destruction in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
 German_y 103

Most war books are not as ideologically or politically clear-cut

in their response to the war's futility as Plievier's, but tend to look
for some meaning within or despite the senselessness. Hugo
Hartung falls back upon a native Silesian mysticism to suggest
that German bombs dropped upon a German city (Breslau)9 in
April 1945 represent a kind of retribution: "as in the Bible, fire
falls from Heaven". Hartung is not alone among German writers
in seeing the outcome of the war as a Divine Judgment, which at
least makes a kind of sense out of some part of the destruction.
Another attitude is that of Heinrich Gerlach, one of the tough and
cynical school of war-book authors which is especially well rep-
resented in the 1950s. He is drawn to the most sickening aspects of
battle, but he also exemplifies a not uncommon way out of the
futility-trap. In Die verratene Armee ( 1957) 10, Stalingrad is a "mira-
cle without a meaning", a miracle of sheer endurance. However
senseless strategically and morally, the unbelievably tenacious
defence fought in bitter conditions by sick and starving German
troops wa~ impressive enough to lend an intrinsic meaning to
events on the individual level - one which is underlined by the
grudging respect for his ragged, emaciated, dysentery-ridden foe
which the narrator attributes to the ordinary Soviet soldier.
Sometimes the senselessness of war brings out by negation the
human values it denies, as in Dieter Meichsner's Weipt Du,
warum? (1952), where the futility of a particularly pointless act of
resistance against units of the American occupation in May 1945
by German soldiers holding out in the Bavarian Alps is contrasted
with a delicate love idyll and the beauty of the mountains. By
contrast, Hans Helmut Kirst's trilogy, 08/15 (1954-5), finds a
popular-novel, detective-story way of bringing order into chaos,
for while the hero, Gunner Asch, is as cynical about the war, the
army and comradeship as any other character of the period ("he
had spent five and a half years in the muck with some of the
soldiers around him. In the muck. And what did it mean? Just
that - muck!"), in volume three he is given his own successful
private vendetta to carry out against two war criminals, whose
greatest crime, in his view, was to betray their own comrades. For
others, like the character Plaas, quoting Ernst Junger in Salo-
mon's Der Fragebogen, there is "an immanent justice" in war, so
that the crimes committed against the Jews will also be committed
against the Germans ("we shall be dragged off and killed"), thus
restoring sense to a senseless universe. Of course, this prophecy
was not carried out to the letter, but it is a subtle contribution to
104 The Second World War in Fiction

the common German mode of thinking that enough Germans were

"dragged off", i.e. displaced and deported, or killed by enemy
action, starvation or disease, for their sufferings to constitute the
working of an 'immanent justice' and relieve the Allies of the
burden of putting the German nation on trial. This latter, inciden-
tally, was a self-imposed Allied obligation which few, if any,
Germans were happy about, and many regarded, together with
the re-education programme, as having deprived the nation of a
chance to put its own house in order and thereby, at least, do
something actively to overcome the sense of futility with which the
war had left it, and which the war books reflect.
Gerd Gaiser (Die sterbende ]agd, 1953) adds a new twist to the
futility theme. For his hero, Vehlgast, the peace is senseless and
does not justify the enormous effort of the war. But Gaiser is quite
content to allow war an intrinsic value, "the fun of the thing for its
own sake", incommensurate with any cause for which it might be
fought, and grant his fighter pilots the nobility of a warrior caste
taking a pride in their prowess; though in doing so, and in his
hero's dismissive attitude to peace, he rather shockingly blurs
some basic distinctions between good and bad causes. Boll, at the
other extreme, has a transcendental religious faith which allows
him to derive a sardonic satisfaction from the manifest pointless-
ness of war, most clearly perceptible to a truly naive eye like that
of the peasant woman in Wo warst du, Adam?, whose own husband
has been dragged off into the army, when there is a mountain of
work to be done at home: "Probably war was all about men doing
nothing and going off to other countries for the purpose, so that
nobody would see them at it ... ". Boll presents the horrors of war
(of which combat is the least) and of Nazi terror in sentences
which contain a repetitive, insistent rhythm and a minimum of
comment: such senseless cruelty as he relates of the concentration
camp in Wo warst du, Adam? takes him right off the end of his
language register. By contrast, he restores meaning to the uni-
verse by talking of the simple peacetime values, such as Gaiser's
hero despises, in words that are normally almost bereft of mean-
ing, like "schon" (beautiful, nice), but now regain an inexpressi-
ble burden of content. Ilona, about to be shot by the Camp
Commandant, recalls her days as a school music teacher, when
her pupils "sang words which they didn't understand but which
were beautiful. Life appeared beautiful to her ... ".
The distrust of language characterises particularly the "Lost
 Germany 105

Generation" writers like Boll and Wolfgang Borchert, and it is out

of a similar suspicion of too easy a way of injecting meaning into
the futility of war that most war writers reject the traditional
German Bildungsroman (novel of education) option of personal
development converting experience, however negative, into the
positive value of spiritual growth. Apart from East German
literature, where the growth of political awareness through waris
an almost invariable theme, 11 there are few parallels to the
formulation by Ronnig, the hero of Hartung's Der Himmel war
unten, of the learning advantage he has gained from his war
experiences ("something like an inner usefulness"). The formula-
tion may be rare, but the content of the lesson he has learned
("Since I shot my grand piano to pieces along with a few other
things I thought necessary to sustain life, I've been looking for
new ways to 'realize my existence'"), turns out however not to be
very different from the conclusions drawn by Borchert, who died
in 1947 at the age of 26 from the ravages of imprisonment, war
service and the post-war famine. He had only two years to finish
his slim oeuvre of short stories and the famous Heimkehrer (return-
ing soldier) play Draupen vor der Tur; and he above all was the
impatient prophet of the "Zero Hour" (Nullpunkt), of the fresh
start without encumbrances from the past: "We don't need poets
with good grammar. We haven't got the patience for grammar.
We need the ones ... who call a tree a tree and a woman a woman,
and say yes and say no: loud and clear and three times over and
without subjunctives" ("Das ist unser 'Manifest"). There has
been a controve~y over the last decade or so as to the legitimacy of
the term Nullpunkt, denoting what for many years after the war
was popularly regarded as a complete break with the past in 1945.
No doubt the notion was essentially a fiction: it is hardly possible
for a nation, part of whose self-definition lies in the memory of a
collective past, to discard the past completely. But the illusion of a
Stunde Null (Zero Hour) was one that was beneficial to the mental
health of the "Lost Generation" after the war; a subjective
conviction conveyed, with full consciousness of its subjectivity, by
Hans Erich Nossack in his story "Klonz", whose opening para-
graphs urge the necessity of piecing the world together again
from all its constituent elements. Merciful amnesia is not actually
obtainable, but many post-war authors of war fiction like to
assume it: "We no longer have a past" (Nossack in "Der Unter-
gang"). On the negative side, this means that writers refused to
106 The Second World War in Fiction

contaminate their war experiences by any reference to a now

tainted cultural heritage: "Can you still hear Holderlin? Do you
recognise him, drunk with blood, in fancy dress and arm in arm
with Baldur von Schirach?" (Borchert). On the positive side,
rejection of the past was the premise on which to build the future.
Borchert's "we live in huts of wood and hope" is the typical
zeugma of the German Heimkehrer. The closer the war writer can
get to a value-free representation of his experiences, the greater
his contribution to a fresh start.

In the light of what has already been said about the sense of the
war's unreality and futility, and many writers' reservations about
earlier cultural canons, it is interesting to see what becomes of the
concept of heroism in German war literature. Plievier puts the
problem in a nutshell in the last pages of Stalingrad:

And this was accepted: all moral and ethical qualities are
inevitably vitiated, and must inevitably achieve the opposite of
what is intended, when their possessor carrie(! out orders and
obeys a law which is not the law, but an article from the charter
of a conspiracy.

Heroism is a clear case of the good quality turning to the bad when
employed or exploited in an evil cause. The climate of intellectual
opinion in Germany since the Second World War has made the
heroic ideal highly suspect, and for the reasons that Plievier neatly
formulates. A glance at a recent British contribution to the debate
about the heroic in realist fiction shows up a difference in at-
titudes. Andrew Rutherford argues against the fashionable view
that realism and the heroic are incompatible, and that to show
war as it really is, with all its chaos and brutality, is to rule out the
possibility of heroism. 12 Rutherford, on the contrary, believes that,
since history records many well-attested cases of heroism, realism
has the option, if not actually the obligation, to include the heroic
in its repertoire. In Germany, this reasonable statement would be
controversial and would call down upon its author's head some
dark political suspicions. Witness the discussion surrounding the
"heroism" of Buchheim's submarine novel, Das Boot (1973),
which was heated enough to produce a volume of commentary
 Germany 107

and collected controversial opinions put together by Michael

Salewski, an academic and a reserve officer in the Federal Repub-
lic's navy (Von der Wirklichkeit des Krieges, dtv, Munich 1976).
What the Buchheim controversy shows is the continuing sensitivi-
ty of the issue of (particularly) Second World War heroism in
West Germany today, and that any German war novel (like any
Russian one) is inevitably received as a political statement.
Non-Germans can achieve some feel for the atmosphere in Ger-
many by comparing the impact of the Vietnam War in the USA.
Like the Second World War from a German point of view, for
most liberal Americans Vietnam was a conflict mistakenly under-
taken, ineptly fought, futile, wasteful and (to some minds worst of
all) lost. There may be American voices dissenting from part of
this view, but certainly Vietnam has made thinking about
heroism a little more complicated than it was for Americans after
the Second World War. The heroic ethos has been forced on to the
defensive, as it is in James Webb's Vietnam novel, Fields of Fire.
In West Germany after the 1939-45 conflict the same effect
emerged, but greatly magnified, in proportion to the scale of
the reversal of values that took place abruptly in 1945. Before the
war, Karl von Ossietzky concisely summed up the German
ethos (not confined to Nazi ideologists): "Nowhere is love of
peace so thoughtlessly equated with cowardice." 13 After the
war, by the same token and by the operation of the kind of
polarization for which German intellectual history is famous, any
sympathy towards the heroic ethos was automatically assumed to
be militaristic. (It is interesting that the leader writer of Die Zeit,
in the issue of 21 May 1982, reacted to the Falklands crisis with
the fear that the atmosphere of "heroism" prevailing in Britain at
the time might infect his fellow Bundesburger and promote a new
militarism.) After 1945, as Salewski says, only two Second World
War images of the heroic were acceptable in West German public
life: that of the "small man" who could be assumed to possess no
overview of events or ability to analyse them, and was therefore
exonerated from political guilt (the majority of war novels do
indeed present the so-called Obergefreitenperspektive, or "corporal's
point of view", thus avoiding political reflections); and the "big
man" in the higher ranks of the General Staff who could see what
was happening, and had the courage to resist (Beck, Stauffenberg,
Rommel): the latter type, however, is rarely a subject for serious
literature (apart from some works appearing very soon after the
108 The Second World War in Fiction

end ofthewar: seep.123), though Hans HellmutKirst'sDieNacht

der Generate ( 1962) comes to mind as a popular novel featuring the
20 July as a focus.
The vigilance which has been thought necessary in West
Germany since the war is epitomised by an article by Giinter
Grass in 1970, 14 "What are our soldiers reading?", against the
exposure of the Bundeswehr to extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi
propaganda, which he claimed had been infiltrating the army
libraries. (In 1965, Grass himself founded five libraries for the
Bundeswehr and one for the "Alternative Work-Camp for Con-
scientious Objectors" in Heidelberg, and Uwe Johnson compiled
a model list of titles suitable for Bundeswehr bookshelves.) Grass
quotes a riposte, to liberal criticism like his own, from a spokes-
man for right-wing factions: "Do you say I am preaching war?
Not war, but courage, which eradicates rot."
The heroic is, however, inseparable from the subject of war, so
that the problem of German writers, sometimes perhaps an
unconscious one, has been to find ways of presenting heroism by
which they do not expose themselves to suspicion. Sometimes
heroic themes creep into books whose political credentials are
impeccable, like Plievier's. In Moskau (1952), written back in
Germany after Stalingrad, though preceding the latter in the
chronology of the trilogy, he describes a group of ex-Lufthansa
pilots who, very much like the submarine captain in Buchheim's
Das Boot, represent one acceptable face of heroism in Second
World War books; the non-conformist, totally unmilitary in
bearing, who keeps his own council but, once pressed (however
reluctantly} into service, does his "job" extremely well. Plievier
ironises his presentation of these veterans, who are twice the age of
the average Luftwaffe pilot, but he encourages the average reader
to admiration by the tone adopted: "The fantastic thing is- they
can fly, they possess unique flying skills, and for that they can be
excused everything else." In the same volume, there is an un-
spoken but telling contrast between the position of the German
soldier left with no choice but to fight on in Russia ("here we stand
and must go on and cannot ... lower our arms; we have fallen in,
and we must march ... "; note the Lutheran echo in "here we
stand") and the ignominious panic in Moscow which leads to an
undignified scramble of the pampered Soviet intellectuals (like
Ilya Ehren burg) to escape from the threatened city. Later in the
novel, the attractive figure of the tank commander, Vilshofen,
 Germany 109

stands for German heroism in misery and defeat when he is

described as "ein sterbender Elch" (a dying elk), with a sugges-
tion of Victorian heroic images of "the stag at bay". What above
all creates something like a heroic atmosphere in Plievier's trilogy
is the monumental, epic scale of events, and of the novels (some
1200 closely printed pages altogether). This very monumentality
appears to show Plievier in thrall to the spirit of his times, in direct
contrast to Boll's conscious opposition to them through the
brevity, understatement and indirectness of his evocation of war.
To quote an attitude represented by the time-serving intellectual
Dr. Wittstock, in Plievier's Berlin, "evil is no longer evil when it is
committed on the grand scale". In the trilogy as a whole, a similar
conversion of quantity into quality takes place in the transforma-
tion of the vast scale of intrinsically senseless events into a
meaningful, even - by suggestion- heroic phenomenon simply
because of the grandness of scale, almost that of a latter-day
Nibelungen tragedy.
In other works on a less pretentious scale, devices permitting an
heroic aura without militarism include the presentation of com-
batants as men who "play hard and fight hard", a clean, manly
image: see for example the wild Christmas celebrations in Har-
tung's Der Himmel war unten, the heroic drinking orgy in the
notorious brothel scene at the beginning of Das Boot, and many
other war time excesses which serve the dual purpose of expres-
sing a proper, although perhaps subconscious, desperation at the
prospect of entering battle burdened with a guilty conscience, and
at the same time the larger-than-life, Valhalla behaviour of the
warrior-hero consuming his life with an intensity that dwarfs the
pale virtues of peacetime. Many a "cynical" novel overtly rejects
heroics, as Wolfgang Ott does through his mouthpiece Heyne in a
long monologue in H aie und lcleine Fische ( 1956), only to claim,
through the same mouthpiece, that there is a contemporary
heroism consisting in facing, alone and without solace, the pros-
pect of death in a senseless cause - "What is courage without
loneliness?" 15 Asch in Kirst's 08/15 is the typical tough anti-hero
hero. His primary fictional role is to fight the army and defeat its
hierarchy. At the beginning of volume two, for example, he
establishes his status as a wily front-line veteran by scoring a
moral victory over the arrogant new commanding officer and his
peacetime, rear-echelon notion of discipline. But Asch always
knows what to do in a tight spot, always puts the safety of his men
110 The Second World War in Fiction

before his own, and is a father-figure to his troops. The fact that he
occasionally reveals his humanity by giving way to a little fear
only enhances Asch's true heroism. As far as the ·fair sex are
concerned, he is more solicitously gallant than any officer and
gentleman. Curiously, such heroes seem to spring up fully armed;
for what Kirst does not show us is the stage when Asch is first
bloodied in battle, any more than we are shown the related figure
of the submarine commander in Das Boot acquiring his heroic
presence. Would that in some way diminish the mythical status of
these hero-figures? The apotheosis of the heroic anti-hero is seen
in the episode which concludes volume two of 08/15. In his
address at the funeral of his friend Vierbein and others, Asch
demonstrates how heroes - who are very sparing with words, as
against deeds- ought to talk when they break their silence. There
is, first of all, the stress on the voluntary attendance of many
comrades at Vierbein's funeral, a striking contrast in this com-
mand-ridden military system. The funeral address is the true
climax of the whole trilogy; claiming total simplicity and rejecting
histrionics, it proposes a rhetoric of anti-rhetoric:

"It can well be said that these men died bravely. But none
of us knows exactly what courage is. It can be the silence
before death, the acceptance of what is called fate. I never heard
any of these men cry out, I never saw them cry- the war was
too loud ... " Asch was silent and so were the soldiers around
him. Their faces were expressionless. Nobody wept. And the
sky stared down grey and indifferent upon them all.

In its way the scene is as dramatic a set-piece as any to be found in

traditional heroic literature. Heinrich Boll presumably well
knows the seductive power of such unofficial heroism, and for that
reason he scrupulously avoids the direct, orthodox presentation of
combat and manly comradeship, and concentrates on the isolated
individual trying to shake off the grip of war. (If he uses the word
"hero", it is only with profound irony, as in Der Zug war piinktlich:
" ... then the [troop] train starts moving, lighter by a few heroes,
and a few heroes the richer"). Only in the East German novels can
heroism still wear its official face, and then only with a special
meaning: "to live for the poor, mortally wounded Germany of
tomorrow, that is heroic, that takes courage" (Dieter Noll, Die
A benteuer des W emer Holt, vol. 1, 1960).
 Germany 111

In a latter-day war novel like Andersch's Winterspelt, conven-

tional heroism is broken down into an account of courage as a
physiological reaction of the peripheral nervous system, or coun-
tered with a moral alternative, the courage to declare oneself
lacking in physical valour. Such a cool and detached attitude
belongs, however, very much to a later decade. Fiction closer in
time to the war felt constrained to make allowance for isolated acts
of heroism. One of the most striking examples is to be found in
Hans Werner Richter's Sie jielen aus Gottes Hand (1951), and it
serves at the same time to remind us that in this war the
distinction between front-line and civilian life is often blurred. The
Polish patriot Hanka has to suffer in isolation the pain and
ignominy of being thought a collaborator by her fellow-
countrymen, while actually working for the Resistance by elicit-
ing intelligence information from her German "lover", for the
sake of which she is, at the same time, deceiving her Polish fiance,
Stanislaus; and, to make matters morally more confusing, she is
attracted to her German informant, despite herself. Her situation
requires a kind of courage for which there is no recognition; and
there is no chance to share the burden with comrades. It is also a
type of heroism which lies safely beyond the suspicion surround-
ing the heroic in post-war Germany.

Although, in a tight spot, membership of a group, or merely

sharing danger with one other fellow-sufferer, is often comforting
at a basic animal level in Second World War fiction, comradeship
is not the straightforward boon that it was in, say, Erich Maria
Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Many of the "tough"
war novels reject the notion (like Ledig's Die Stalinorgel) as
outmoded cant to delude the soldier about his situation in this
war, where in the last cynical analysis the survival of the individu-
al is all that counts. Besides, Kameradschaft is one of those words
the Nazis have exploited and polluted, as Max Walter Schulz,
another East German war novelist, makes brilliantly (but almost
untranslateably) clear in his "novel of development", Wir sind
nicht Staub im Wind ( 1962: the novel is significantly subtitled, as a
rebuff to theW est German "Lost Generation" concept, "novel of
a generation that was not lost"):
112 The Second World War in Fiction

The old lure of brothers under the same cap, the invitation to go
through hell and high water together, the proposition to join an
alliance of boozing and brawling, of living and dying with a
whoopee and a wotcher and a get stuffed, the credo of all
troopers under the Swastika.

For Alfred Andersch, in Die Kirschen der Freiheit, the much-

vaunted comradeship simply meant never being able to achieve
privacy, and Boll in Der Zug war punktlich makes his hero Andreas
say that "when you're alone you're not so lonely any more". At
best, comradeship in Second World War fiction has to do, not
with facing the enemy, but with solidarity against the military
machine, "the prison-house of the military collective" (as An-
dersch points out in an excursus on the subject in Winterspelt).
One of the few war books in which comradeship is present as a
pure and undiluted value is Peter Bamm's Die unsichtbare Flagge
(1952) and that, significantly, does not concern a combat unit but
a team of army medics totally free of ideological pressures and
serving not under the Swastika but under the banner of humanity
(the "invisible flag" of the title). Otherwise, there is usually an
ambivalence about comradely membership of a combat group, as
there is about the concept of heroism, and for not dissimilar
ideological reasons (exceptions are to be found, especially in the
more popular kind of war novel, like Willi Heinrich's Das geduldige
Fleisch [1955] where comradeship is the chief redeeming feature of
his soldiers' depera te war).
A certain kind of German fiction about this war often takes a
grim delight in breaking down such conventional "values", by
way of revenge upon Nazi distortions of them. Stalingrad, as an
appropriate symbolic climax to the war, provided a ready-made
vehicle for this nihilistic tendency. In the Kessel, the doomed
pocket from which no breakout is possible, the war ethos col-
lapses in upon itself. As if on a macabre version of the Admirable
Crichton's desert island, distinctions of class and rank are gradu-
ally broken down. After the better-connected high-ranking offic-
ers have had themselves flown out, all ranks are in the same dire
straits, and the promotions, decorations and commendations
regularly telegrammed through with due pomposity from the
Fuhrer-headquarters become a grimly ironic part of this "desert-
island syndrome" in most of the Stalingrad-novels (very explicitly
in Chapter 15 of Gerlach's DieverrateneArmee) along with the King
 Germany 113

Solomon's Mines theme of loot acquired by German soldiers which

becomes worthless as the prospect of escape rapidly fades and the
only goods worth having are food and fuel, not to be purchased at
any price. Stalingrad (or Russia) is one of the two symbolic poles
of German recall of the Second World War, the diametrical
opposite being Paris (or France). It is striking how often this
juxtaposition is made, and how much of the German fate it
encompasses. The occupation of Paris is the rightful prize that
had been withheld in the First World War, despite the millions of
German casualties. The easy fall of France in 1940 offers the most
dangerous kind of realised wish-fulfilment, the making good of all
the injustices Germany has suffered since 1918, especially the
Versailles settlement, and a temporarily almost unchallengeable
vindication of the policies of the Third Reich. Paris is the First
World War re-run as it ought to have been, and within a relatively
civilised framework far short of the total war which Goebbels was
to declare in his famous Sportpalast speech of 1943, and which
was to some extent the product of Stalingrad as well as of Allied
bombing. Paris and Stalingrad are images of success and failure,
belief in Hitler's construct and the revelation of its total artificiali-
ty. Paris is within the compass of the old European conflicts:
Stalingrad is the culmination of something new, peculiarly Hit-
lerian and insane; the first modern attempt to carry out in practice
Germany's ancient mission to colonise the East, and the first
avowed campaign of genocide. Its outcome is not only the end of
the old Prussian officer caste (where Paris by contrast was the last
of their finest hours), but even of a whole line of development in
European philosophies of vitalism and the "life-force" associated
with Bergson, Klages, Lawrence (D.H. and T.E.), Nietzsche,
Georges Sorel, the Futurists. Gerlach puts it well: "Stalingrad ...
has become more than a geographical concept ... " ... "This
drink [French cognac] in this place [Stalingrad] and at this time
symbolized, quite consciously for everybody, an almost 4000
kilometre long path right across Europe, a dubious path, dubious
because of the end to which it had led."
One is tempted to ask: was it dubious only because of that?
However, the insight Gerlach is reporting is not necessarily his
own, but attributed to a group of Prussian-style officers, for whom
it is a shattering one. It ought not to have required a military
debacle of Stalingrad proportions to produce such an insight, but
Gerlach's implication that it does is compatible with the historical
114 The Second World War in Fiction

facts. (The events of 20 July 1944 would never have happened if

Hitler had not been losing the war.) The ruthless abandonment of
Paulus's 6th Army at Stalingrad- necessitated largely by Goer-
ing's crazy undertaking to supply the Army from the air- was the
beginning of the end of another, very important established value,
a German military tradition based not only on solid achievements
but on absolute trust in the loyalty of the German military to its
oath of allegiance. This is too large a subject, with too long a
history, to expand upon here, but the Prussian concept of duty
had already given rise to two classical dramatic works some
century and a half before Stalingrad, Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm
and Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. Without
some awareness of the power of this tradition, hallowed by such
names as Kant and Schiller (Siegfried Lenz's Deutschstunde exp-
lores the theme) it is hard to grasp an aspect of the Second World
War with no clear parallel in other Western nations' awareness,
but central to that of the Germans. A spokesman in Plievier's
Berlin formulates the essence of the problem:

But he knew only too well what a terrible, binding power this
solemnly-given word could have, and that even in the best it
was capable of repressing deeper insight, all sense of responsi-
bility, even one's own nagging conscience.

Even since the war, feelings have been known to run high over this
issue, the classical statement being Hans Egon Holthusen's attack
in fa und Nein (Munich 1954) on Alfred Andersch's Die Kirschen
der Freiheit (especially on the chapter entitled "Eid", the oath)
under the heading "Reflections of a deserter" . 16 Few foreigners
will understand the heat of this debate about whether Andersch's
action in deserting to the Allies in Italy was the right course, or the
right course pursued for the wrong reasons (which is Holthusen's
argument). Andersch was still worrying away at the question, but
with much more detachment, in Winterspelt, where he makes the
Americans reject as treason Major Dincklage's offer to surrender
to them intact with all the troops under his command ("We don't
want anything to do with a traitor")- so that even the Western
democratic enemy reinforces German preconditioning to accep-
tance of the almost sacrosanct concept of loyalty. It is not an
inconceivable outcome (to a very unlikely situation), although
perhaps an implausible one; but the whole Problematik Andersch
 Germany 115

is grappling with illustrates the sensitivity of the loyalty issue in

Germany, demonstrated in the (to outsiders) surprisingly hostile
response by their fellow-countrymen to certain returning German
exiles after the war. Although, even one day after the capitulation,
there were very few Germans prepared to declare themselves
Nazis, Thomas Mann's reception in many quarters was less that
of a representative of the better Germany than that of a traitor,
because of his anti-Nazi publicistic activities in exile. Willy
Brandt, returning from hiding in Norway, bore the stigma of
treason against his fellow Germans, and the epithet "the emigre",
for the greater part of his subsequent political career.
It must be said that most of the war books seem reluctant to
destroy the positive image of the Wehrmacht as the repository of
uprightness and loyalty. Certainly, some of the war novels place
the Prussian officer caste under attack, as Plievier does in Moskau,
or more virulently in Stalingrad (written during his war-time
Moscow exile), particularly in a set-piece tirade by the hero
Vilshofen against Prussian attitudes. Alexander Kluge's
Schlachtbeschreibung, too, maintains a consistent campaign against
the officer class, but Gerlach (Die verratene Armee), while sporadi-
cally critical, does not offer a thoroughgoing analysis of the
Prussian military code. Occasionally, as for example when he
devotes a page or so to one General's struggle with the oath-
question in the last days of Stalingrad, he reveals considerable
understanding for this mentality. In another case, a captain begs
for food from the lower ranks on behalf of his General (not
himself); tears of gratitude well up in his eyes at the response, and
the other ranks bite their lips (Chapter 15). Such a scene suggests
a reluctance to relinquish lingering attitudes of respect for the
Wehrmacht. The war books generally do not show the army in-
volved to any great extent in the atrocities committed by the
Germans in Eastern Europe, from which, as historical research is
beginning to show, it appears that the Wehrmacht itself cannot be
exonerated. Gerlach suggests, for example, that the army scarcely
heeded the infamous Kommissarbefehl of 1941 (the order to shoot
captured political Commissars on the spot). Hohoff in Woina
W oina makes the customary distinction between the actions of
Wehrmacht and SS or SD forces, but is honest about the shooting of
Russian prisoners of war by the Wehrmacht: Jochen Klepper in
Uberwindung maintains that "the army acts correctly wherever it
preserves its freedom [from the State]". To concentrate on what is
116 The Second World War in Fiction

left of the reassuringly independent tradition of the Weknnackt is

obviously therapeutic, and identification with the tradition can,
in extreme cases, offer almost complete detachment from implica-
tion in the black side of the war, which is safely left to Hitler and
his SS minions. Ernst Junger, in the first part of his war diary,
Straklungen I (published already in 1942 as Garten und StrafJen, but
revised for later editions), takes refuge from the pain the Nazi
regime obviously caused him (see e.g. the entry for 1 July 1942) in
his pride of lineage as a member of the Prussian officer caste whose
achievements run in an unbroken sequence from 1814 through to
1870, 1914 and 1940! Gottfried Benn joined the W eknnackt as a
medical officer as early as 1935 to escape from the Nazi vice
without having to emigrate, for, as he says, 'the army is the
aristocratic form of emigration' (Doppelleben, 1961)_17 He claims
that until the spring of 1938, when Keitel became supreme
commander, four out of five officers were openly anti-Hitler.

Benn and Jiinger were particularly "aristocratic" representatives

of the older generation of writers: but with that generation in
general is associated a kind of cultural rearguard offering a
conservative sanctuary "inside the whale" (the Nazi edifice). It
leads at times to a schizophren.ic separating out- reminiscent of
the 'vulgar idealism' of the Wilhelmine period- of a 'good' native
cultural tradition, and "bad" imported influences. So in
Straklungen II, for example, Jiinger links the progressive de-
culturation of inter-war Berlin, and the de-humanizing of the
Nazis, with creeping materialism and modernity in general,
derived of course from America: "America is conquering the sites
of the ancient culture- I mean that America which became more
evident from year to year in modem Berlin." Gottfried Benn in his
wartime letters expresses his disgust at the opportunity created
by the war for America to be the final arbiter in settling a
European peace - "But the USA! Jews and jobbers, what a deal
that will produce!." 18 (In the same volume of letters, Benn reports
that there is a new wartime enthusiasm for Rilke}. Germans of
the older generation (Benn, Hartung, Hohoff, Weisenborn,
Junger) create for themselves a reassuring sense of continuity
through cultural references in the midst of war. What is disturb-
 Germany 117

ing in this, for the younger generation, IS the assumption of

European, and indeed especially German cultural superiority; 19
and that in itself, although grotesque at such a historical juncture,
would not be so dangerous were it not that, in the Cold War
climate that sets in so rapidly in the post-war years, the German
claim to be a bastion of culture, particularly against Bolshevism
(note, for example, Benn' s reference to the Russians in 1941 as
"this scum of humanity"), 20 which had enjoyed a great deal of
popular credence as a justification for Hitler's Russian invasion,
gains a renewed respectability and diverts attention from the ugly
truth of the recent campaign in the East. Peter Weiss's narrator in
Die Asthetik des Widerstands (vol. II, 1978) reminds us of the
pre-war European bourgeois fear of red Russia, greater than their
fear of Fascism, which lends even the Nazis' struggle with the
Soviets some kind of spurious crusader value (at the end of
Plievier's Moskau, Vilshofen comes to the conclusion that the
Germans do have a mission in Russia, but one which has been
ruined, "in practice", by the SS and SD). A whole complex of
thinking - the cultural citadel, a German heritage preserved
intact within Nazi Germany, the cultured Prussian officer con-
trasted with the vulgar US invaders, the bulwark against Bolshev-
ism, Meinecke's notorious counsel to the Germans in 1946, after
their disastrous failure, to read Goethe to each other21 - was
deeply suspect to younger writers. As Herbert Zand puts it in
Let.<;.te Ausfahrt, in wartime "the Magic Flute was silent, Mozart
had received the Iron Cross Class I and died of it, Tamino was a
fighter pilot gone missing". A character in one of Nossack's
stories, a writer, declares that music in wartime is just "whoring"
(i.e. selling cheap distraction). Cultural pretensions after 1945
tended to be regarded as deeply undemocratic: intellectuals like
Junger were suspect for having contributed to the false "normali-
ty" of the Third Reich (in Chapter 15 of Bienek's Zeit ohne Glocken
ail interesting intertextuality is set up when Junger's Garten und
Strapen is mentioned, and appears to play a role of this kind). In
Adorno's famous dictum, "to write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric"; 22 and any attempt to draw sustenance from earlier
literary tradition was open to misconstruction in the Cold War
and political restoration periods of the 1940s and 1950s. Hence a
good deal of the deliberately un-literary, undemonstrative, de-
clarative style of the younger generation of war writers.
118 The Second World War in Fiction

Almost the only neutral territory left for a German writer

hoping to salvage something positive out of the national catas-
trophe lay in the themes of wartime love relationships- produc-
tive in war literature at any level, from the most popular to the
most belletristic - and the medical profession. Both themes
embody a humanity that transcends politics or the moral prob-
lems of war. However, 'love and war' are discussed in Chapter 1,
and I do not intend to dwell on the subject of separation, fidelity
and alienation between the sexes in wartime, because its treat-
ment is little different in the German war books than in those of
other countries. (A particularly saccharine exploitation of the
"love in wartime" theme is to be found in Remarque's exile war
novel, Zeit zu Ieben und Zeit zu sterhen, 1954.) The role of medics is
worth a brief comment, however, since it does fulfil a requirement
that is particularly evident in the German books; a positive,
humanistic diversion from the moral disorder and the inhumanity
of the fighting war. Peter Bamm's Die unsichthare Flagge has
already been mentioned, but the function of medics is no different,
even if there is a difference in the quality of the presentation of the
theme, in Heinz Konsalik's Der Arzt von Stalingrad (1956), which
deals with the efforts of a heroic doctor attempting to minister to
the needs of the captured troops at Stalingrad. In Bamm's book,
German medical personnel and captive Russian doctors work
together to tend the wounded of both sides at Sebastopol. Many
other authors focus on the medical profession: Kluge, Plievier,
Hartung, Nossack, and Zand all make more or less extensive use
of the theme. The central redemptive metaphor of hospitals in
wartime is that, although largely futile (like the war itself) in their
effects in comparison to the amount of destruction of human life
that is going on around them, they are unreflectively and unques-
tioningly humane. It is a cruel paradox that they often heal
soldiers only in order that they may be sent back into the fighting.
But at least the medics are not identified with the system in which
they operate: they simply make the best of a very bad job, and
hence they can serve as a centre for respect within the general
madness, like the voice of the war book's narrator himself, and so
reinforce his own humane and anti-war message without any need
of rhetoric. In a world where values have been reversed - so that
heroism can be a negative when it serves an unworthy cause, and
"what was right was wrong and what was wrong was right"
(Herbert Zand) 23 - they are restored by the straightforward
 Germany 119

categorical imperative, an unproblematical version of the sol-

dier's unquestioning devotion to duty; a part of the war experi-
ence, but insulated within it.
Various other means that are essayed by writers to redeem
something from the moral wreckage of war are more problemati-
cal and likely to backfire. One such means is present, at least by
suggestion, even in some of the most thoroughgoing dissenters
from war and militarism. It lies in a search for the origins of the
present disaster in the mists of time, thereby suggesting a general
diffusion of guilt or responsibility. As usual the popular writer
puts it most unashamedly. In Johannes Mario Simmel's Mich
wundert, daft ich so friihlich bin (1949)- the novel concerns a group of
people trapped in a cellar after an air raid in Vienna, and the
attempt of the token fanatical Nazi type to find a drastic and
dangerous way out- the Nazi is described as "the stupid victim of
a chain of events going back so far that one loses sight of them".
Jiinger in Strahlungen III traces the present troubles back as far as
the French Revolution and even the Renaissance; Alexander
Kluge suggests a similar panoramic view in his chapter "Re-
kapitulation" in Schlachtbeschreibung, or the historical information
provided in the chapter quaintly entitled "Wishes ... are some-
thing very simple around the year 1200." Plievier's Moskau begins
with an historical document from the year 1537, and offers
reminders of earlier invasions ef Russia (sometimes by even worse
barbarians than Hitler), as does Stalingrad, along with a reference
to seventeenth-century hostilities between Russians and Germans
on German territory. A soldier in Gerlach's novel declares that
"we have the ballast of centuries to shake off". Plievier makes the
unilluminating vulgar-Marxist equation of capitalism and Fas-
cism, or sees the Second World War as a crisis of Europe ("Quo
vadis, Europa": Berlin, Part 5). Others make the war an outcome
of base human nature in general: Simmel, again, in Aile Menschen
werden Briider (1967): "I was no hero, never wanted to be one, this
war wasn't my war .... And like the millions ... who [were] ... too
young, too stupid, too gullible, too lazy or too cowardly to prevent
this Adolf Hitler from coming to power - like these millions, I
didn't have much luck": or, in Mich wundert, daft ich so friihlich bin,
the wife whose husband has been called up to fight refuses to think
about the rights and wrongs of the war, for she knows "that the
workers of all countries, the poor and underprivileged had been
condemned since the beginning of time to fight for others and die
120 The Second World War in Fiction

for others" (a very seductive argument, this; and one has to

remember that Simmel's novels run to enormous editions, since
he enjoys by far the biggest sales- 55 million to date- of any living
German author). In particular, the tough kind of novel that is
attracted towards describing the horrors of war in detail also
attributes the lowest motives to mankind ("everyone kills if they
get the chance") 24 and thus makes any search for ultimate respon-
sibility almost otiose. There are many insidious suggestions, too,
that the war represents the workings of fate, or that it is a natural
disaster, an Act of God like a landslide, essentially beyond the
control of human agency. Demonizations of Hitler carry a related
implication: for example, the hypnotic effect of the Fuhrer, even at
the end of the war, on the Wehrmacht officers Krebs, Boldt and
Loringhoven in Plievier's Berlin, Part II.

Not many novels offer a clear analysis of the German political

situation during the war, and this lack of direction stands in
contrast, particularly, to the Communist books, such as Anna
Seghers' Die Toten bleiben jung, or Schulz's Wir sind nicht Staub im
Wind. It seems that one must know clearly what one is for, in order
to be able to analyse what one is against. The political vagueness
of most war books is realistic, since war is not conducive to clear
thinking, but it also reflects the vulnerability of Western liberal
society with its pluralism and drift25 (the symptomatic title is that
of Rudolf Kramer-Badoni's satirical novel In der groften Dnft, 1949,
which is a picaresque account of an anti-hero buffeted about by all
the winds that blow in Germany from the 1930s to the 1940s) and
its ideological vacuum which invited Hitler to step in in the first
place. The perspective of many narrators is a-political and li-
mited. Peter Bamm, who pre-empts serious discussion of the
Hitler phenomenon by referring to the dictator invariably as "der
primitive Mann", projects an a-political image of the army as
being, for the most part, equally remote from the resistance
movement of 20 July as from allegiance to Nazism. According to
him, "whole armies" evaded the Hitler salute, which was im-
posed on the Wehrmacht after 20 July 1944, by making sure that a
mug or mess tin was carried in the right hand at all times. For an
analysis of the appeal of Nazism one does not look to the war
books, which deal mainly with effect rather than cause, but to
books that consider the war within a broad political context and
 Germany 121

time-span. (Anna Seghers in the first volume of Die Toten bleiben

jung offers a good analysis of the German nationalist mentality;
Peter Weiss in the second volume of Die Asthetik des Widerstands
deals with the reasons for the German working-class underreac-
tion to Hitlerism.) The treatment of Nazi figures in the war novels
is usually stereotyped and sketchy, and there are in fact surpris-
ingly few committed Nazis- except in the East German books, of
course, where they tend to be caricatured (one thinks of Herbert
Ott's Die Liige [1956] and its stereotype Nazi torturer having his
way with the beautiful blonde Russian partisan girl). The carica-
ture Nazi is not absent from West German books, either: there is
the deadly concentration camp commandant Filskeit, fanatical,
neurotic, fastidious and a lover of music, in Boll's Wo warst du,
Adam?. Other-rank Nazis are often brutal and stupid: Nazi offic-
ers are rare and distinct types, usually bad soldiers; but there is
also a class of decent idealisti~ officers deluded and misled by
Nazism, like Wedelmann in 08/15, or (a much worse case)
Hinrichsen in the third volume of the trilogy, who is described as
"not bad but stupid", "not a Nazi but a National Socialist". (The
scarcity of Nazi attitudes among the officer class hardly squares
with the historical facts. A recent study of representative first-line,
"first-wave" conscription formations deployed on the Eastern
Front shows that one third of the officers in the sample belonged to
the Nazi Party, and that Party ideology had very heavily infil-
trated army thinking, especially influencing attitudes to the
Russians.} 26 One has to look to later books about the war period,
like Bienek's Zeit ohne Glocken, for a more subtle analysis of the
effects of Nazism among the ordinary wartime population, and to
Andersch's Winterspelt for a moderation of the now stereotype
interpretation of Nazism as perverted Kleinburgertum (the petty
bourgeois outlook). It is only in the more recent books, too, that
one finds more than a passing reference to the fate of the Jews,
with the obvious exception of the concentration camp literature,
such as Ernst Wiechert's Der Totenwald (1946), Bruno Apitz'
Nackt unter Wolfen (1958) and E.M. Remarque's Der Funke Leben
(1952). The majority of war novels imply at most only a hazy
half-knowledge on the part of the fighting troops of the atrocities
being carried out in the name of Germany. The emphasis tends to
shift from "why we're fighting" to "how well we fight". (Heyne,
the hero of Ott's novel of the war at sea, Haie und kleine Fische, is
convinced that the German High Command is ignorant of the
122 The Second W odd War in Fiction

concentration camps. Little is done to disabuse the reader of this

mistaken notion.) In Kirst's novel, written primarily in the
picaresque mode, the detailed description, in volume two, of the
execution of two Russians by German military police breaks into
the light-hearted narrative as a shock for the reader. The trivial
tone is resumed immediately afterwards. The basic historical fact
of German aggression (the Second World War as a German
responsibility) is often masked by presenting a situation, like the
last stages of the U -boat war or the fate of Gaiser's hopelessly
outnumbered fighter pilots, which can be called "the adventure
against unfair odds", creates the possibility of an appealing
gallantry within defeat, and allows a certain amount of self-pity. 27
This scenario is played out anew in Buchheim's Das Boot, but it is
to his credit that in one respect he does not shrink from political
reality, but in a central episode shows how in a position of
authority even the most humane character, the young submarine
commander known as "the Old Man", is led by the a-moral
ground-rules of Nazi warfare into committing a war crime (paral-
lel to a historical case for which the Allies executed a submarine
captain after the war), the attempted destruction of a neutral
passenger ship. He fails only by a fortunate accid~nt.
Attitudes towards the enemy are also fairly stereotype. In
accordance with the implicit "bulwark-against-Bolshevism" as-
sumption about the war on the Eastern Front, the Russians en
masse are often seen as a menacing, almost animal, primitive
Asiatic horde, and the individual soldier as an ignorant, confused
peasant, though also a tough and worthy opponent. The British
do not make a very prominent appearance, though there is some
attempt in Gaiser's Die sterbende Jagd and especially in Wolfgang
Ott to break down the irritating British assumption of moral
superiority by describing acts of war by the British which fall
below the chivalrous standards observed by their German coun-
terparts. The Americans emerge generally as facile and juvenile,
cautious fighters who "became victors without being heroes"
simply by virtue of their crushing material superiority. Stefan
Heym is in a special position to criticize the hollowness at the
centre of the Americans' "crusade" in Europe. The Crusaders was
written in America and appeared only later ( 1950) in the author's
own translation as Der bittere Lorbeer, unique as a sustained
representation of the war by a German author as seen through
American eyes. 28 (Andersch, however, also assumes an American
 Germany 123

point of view on occasion in Winterspelt.) Elsewhere, there is some

criticism of the Allies for demanding the unconditional surrender
of Germany, which undermined any attempt at resistance within
the country itself.
Not that resistance occurs very frequently as a theme in the
war novels: where it does it is of a minimal, passive kind. The hero
of Hermann Lenz's Neue Zeit is deliberately unmilitary and never
fires his rifle once in his five years of combat (in fact, almost all the
deaths of Germans in the novel occur through action by their own
side, and one has the impression of the Second World War-quite
rightly- as an "own goal" of massive proportions). The events of
July 20 are mentioned in passing in a number of books, but not
shown to have many reverberations. (There are however, some
works based on the officers' plot, such as Hans Bernd Gisevius,
Bis zum bitteren Ende and Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen
Hitler, both 1946.) Jiinger records the severe measures visited
upon even the most casual dissenter, and thus disarms outside
criticism of the German failure to resist. Plievier (Berlin) rather
unconvincingly records the "Romantik" of a Berlin woman offer-
ing shelter to fugitives. One of the few attempts at a "resistance
novel" is Hans Fallada's last book, Jeder stirbt fiir sich allein (1946),
whose plot is closely related to the activities of the ill-starred
Munich resistance group, the "White Rose". There are a number
of ways in which it is an unsatisfactory book, whose moral is that
when it comes to resistance, what counts is the state of mind
together with the translation of the thought into the deed- but not
the effectiveness of the action. There is a distinction to be made
here between brave defiance and purposeful resistance. The best
resistance-writing, not unexpectedly, stems from Communist
authors. In both Anna Seghers' Das siebte Kreuz (1942), probably
her best-known novel, and in the most famous GDR war novel,
Dieter Noll's Werner Holt, the young hero is educated to the point
of resistance. In the latter novel another soldier, Wiese ("the real
hero among us") is shot for attacking an SS guard who has
"finished off" an exhausted concentration camp inmate. This
positive act of resistance is an outbreak of spontaneous humanity
which promises - something very important as the foundation of
the Socialist utopia - that there is good material present among
the German victims of Fascism (compare the inspiring subject
matter of the famous and very powerful East German concentra-
tion-camp novel, Apitz' Nackt unter Wolfen}. But of course, politi-
124 The Second World War in Fiction

cally speaking, common sense and decency are not enough in the
GDR literature. There is a contrast here to Ernst von Salomon's
attempted rehabilitation of his fellow-Germans in Der Fragebogen
through the medium of a stalwart Berlin charlady, Frau Imming,
a one-woman resistance group who simply ignores the Nazis'
nonsense and goes her own way regardless. Salomon tells us,
somewhat unconvincingly, that "some eighty percent of the
German population belonged to the 'Obergruppe Imming"'. (If
many did- whatever the percentage- it was certainly only after
1943.) The ultimate proof of a fully-developed resistance mentali-
ty, some of the novels suggest, would be an ability to identify one's
own interests with those of the "enemy", so that the use of the
pronoun "wir" (we) would acquire a different meaning. Various
degrees of this kind of identification are in fact achieved in some
novels. 29
What more than anything else in the war literature comes
between the average German and a full understanding of the past
is the insidious and self-pitying suggestion of the betrayal of the
ordinary German soldier by a system in which he has naively
placed his faith. The paradigmatic title of Gerlach's novel, "The
Betrayed Army" (cf. Michael Horbach, Die verratenen Sohne, "The
Betrayed Sons", 1957), refers to Stalingrad; but Stalingrad was
only the finale of the Germans' betrayal all along. The most brazen
instance of the argument is in Gaiser's Die sterbende Jagd, where the
German warrior is compared to "a man, some Walthari or
Parzival, who sets out to defy death itself if necessary in order to
defend his adored one, but discovers she is a whore who has taken
up with a black whoremonger, with whom she sleeps. Now the
man is in a bad way. What shall we do with him?". Kirst puts the
"betrayal" to rights at the end of his trilogy by employing the
wonderfully efficient German military machine, so far misused, to
a "good" purpose at last, to bring a Nazi opportunist to justice.

Stylistically and structurally, German war books are not particu-

larly avant-garde or experimental. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon
reader, Germans had not been spoilt by successive generations of
writers striving constantly to renew "the shock of recognition".
There was no need for German writers to deal with war in terms of
what Lionel Trilling calls "adversary culture", modernistic writ-
 Germany 125

ing attempting to make over the techniques of war description

and create novel sensations for jaded palates. Every German
living through the period between 1939 and 1945 had in some
sense been "at the front", and required no more than a suitably
straightforward processing of his own experiences in conventional
fictional terms. Germany had been relatively cut off from the
development of literary culture elsewhere, and the first generation
of post-war novels was not, and did not "need" to be, much in
advance of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. I twas only at
the beginning of the 1960s that novelists started to become
self-conscious about literary techniques.
The earliest foreign influences on the returning prisoners-of-
war who were to be the next generation of German writers were
American. Names like Steinbeck, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and
Sherwood Anderson were mentioned, 30 representatives of a real-
ist, not an avant-garde school. Hemingway's name recurs fre-
quently in these early years, and his writing serves as the obvious
model for Hans Werner Richter's Die Geschlagenen (1949), set in
the battlefield of Monte Cassino and the prisoner-of-war camps in
America, where Nazi elements continue to terrorise left-wing
soldiers. The battle scenes are handled in a manner prescriptive
for many a German war novel: a series of independent episodes;
no overall interpretation by the narrator to link them meaningful-
ly together; details which are given no particular emphasis and
remain discrete entities, like the recurrent paratactic sentences;
repetition for emphasis; understatement. Many war novels are
similarly episodic, loosely constructed, based on isolated inci-
dents together with character sketches and briefly developed
relationships. (Ledig's Die Stalinorgel is an example). The struc-
ture itself expresses the mood of the time, the desire to maintain a
"camera-eye" impartiality and a sense of the opaqueness of the
war as a totality. No connection is suggested where there was none
in fact. As in Boll's Wo warstdu, Adam?, thedissolvingofthe closed
form of the novel in favour of a fragmented form corresponds to
the fractured reality of war.
Stylistically, war novels offer everything from extremely blunt
realism - so determined to indict war by sheer cold-blooded
presentation of its horrors (see the opening pages of Die
Stalinorgel) that the reader has a sense of something having died in
the author, to match the brutal death around him - to long-
established expressionist and surrealist resources of the German
126 The Second World War in Fiction

language. Gaiser is one author who works within this tradition to

stretch language to its limits, sometimes with very successful
results, as in his description of a pilot bailing out and temporarily
losing his visual orientation (chapter 23). The same author,
though, goes far towards a metaphysic of war, a glorifying of the
symbiosis of man and machine, or in other words a kind of poisie
brute, to be found also (despite his anti-war intentions} in
Plievier's various descriptions of the impressive performance of
the German war machine, and his conjuring up of the vast scale of
operations; as well as quite consciously in Ernst Jiinger (in the
Allied bombers over occupied Paris he sees an aesthetic combina-
tion of "conscious, disciplined order" and "the release of elemen-
tal forces": Strahlungen II); and in Herbert Zand's vivid account of
massed Flak firing in unison, as an image of battle becoming an
independent organism; or Buchheim's infinite care for the details
of the superb underwater machine that is man and technology
working together with almost unimaginable precision in Das Boot,
which also gives us some of the most compelling impressions of the
life and moods of the sea itself. Both of these aspects clearly helped
to inspire the internationally popular film based on the novel.
At two representative extremes, stylistically, are Wolfgang
Borchert, with his wonderfully inventive language, creating the
sensation of an attempt to revive feelings brutalised and blunted
by the war; and Ernst Wiechert, in Der Totenwald, with the
language of an "inner emigre", poetic in the most cloying sense,
looking down upon the squalor of a concentration camp from the
heights of Mozart and Goethe.
War literature does not offer much in the way of clean-cut
"fictionality". That is to say, war books do not often work
towards an obvious point, open to paraphrase as a discursive
statement. In West German war writing, Boll comes closest to
creating this kind of literature (Der Zug war piinktlich), but other-
wise one has to look to East German works like Stephan Hermlin's
powerful story Der Leutnant Yorck von Wartenhurg (written 1945,
published 1954}, similar in theme to a story by Ambrose Bierce,
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", and concerning the
youngest of the July 20 conspirators, who while awaiting his
execution finds refuge in a vision which he takes to be the reality.
He dreams he has escaped, fled to Russia, and is returning to
Germany upon the news of a popular uprising against the Nazis.
Then he is jolted back to reality and his execution. Another GDR
 Germany 127

writer, Franz Fiihmann, in the collection of short stories Die Elite,

shapes his war tales to a fine political analysis, as in "Konig
Qdipus", for example, a re-enactment of the Oedipus legend in
modern (occupied) Greece under the direction of a German
classics professor, now an Army officer, who is led, by a progres-
sively-developing analysis of the Oedipus story for the benefit of
two eager young students-in-arms, to the insight that not only are
the Germans' physical and intellectual crimes not to be disting-
uished one from another as contributory causes of the German
"tragedy", but that he as an intellectual is the guiltiest of all: he
shoots himself through the eyes.
In the 1960s there began to emerge works which incorporated
the newly-fashionable institution of the unreliable narrator.
Giinter Grass, with Die Blechtrommel and Kat<; und Maus, stands
godfather to this development. In the latter Novelle, wartime
events among a group of teenagers in Danzig remain opaque
because of the constitutional unreliability of the narrator, Pilenz.
Siegfried Lenz adopts a similar technique in Stadtgespriich ( 1963),
reconstructing through another such unreliable participant-
narrator the events surrounding the deaths of hostages taken in
occupied Norway. Boll is infected with the same uncertainty-
principle in Entjernung von der Truppe ( 1964), asking for the reader's
co-operation in filling in the narrative outlines he provides, and
"changing his narrative levels" [sic] in a display of typical
self-conscious 1960s writing conveying the threnodic point, con-
sistently made in other works of Boll, that the past cannot be
satisfactorily recaptured or reliably reconstituted. Alfred An-
dersch in Winterspelt writes similar carefully opaque fiction, blend-
ing documentary elements with invention, in a book written very
much against the pattern of the popular war novel: as, in a
different way, is Dieter Kiihn's compilation with the ironic title
Luftkrieg als Abenteuer (The Air War as Adventure, 1975), a
protest, constructed by juxtaposing cheap fictional accounts with
comment and documentary materials, against the popularising
and glorifying of the war in the air. Something similar is attemp-
ted on a much grander scale by Alexander Kluge in his Schlachtbes-
chreibung (revised version 1969), subtitled "The organisational
structure of a disaster". He is interested in exploiting the gap
between fiction and history in order to show that in an event like
Stalingrad "reality is not realistic" ,31 and he creates a basic
uncertainty by presenting a mass of partial and fragmented
128 The Second World War in Fiction

documentary evidence. He supplies both pictures and eye-witness

interviews, but in neither case does the evidence serve the purpose
of convincing us that we are faced with established truth or sheer
undeniable factuality, in the sense that a newspaper uses these
aids in order to persuade us that we are confronted with "facts".
Instead of offering verification, Kluge's non-fictional material
stresses the fictionality of the work and of the "facts". He juxtap-
oses, for example, diagrams of 1930s futuristic projections of "how
a metropolis will look in 50 years time" with far less credible
documentary photographs of the weird underground life lived by
the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad (as it was a kind of Futurism which
took them there, this seems a reasonable juxtaposition) and with
army manuals describing improvised survival methods in sub-
arctic conditions, including some figurative drawings of gre-
nadiers wearing absurd bonnets made of newspaper as protection
from the cold. The wheel has come full circle. If the early
war books were looking for fictional means to present the facts of
war, Kluge is attempting to use facts to expose the fiction, the
absurdity, the unbelievability, and therefore the terror, of an
event like Stalingrad.

English Translations of Works Mentioned

Andersch, Alfred, Die Rote/The Red-Head, trans. by Michael Bullock (London,
1961).
Apitz, Bruno, Nackt unter Wolfen/Naked Among the Wolves, trans. by Edith
Anderson (Berlin, 1960).
Bamm, Peter [Kurt Emmrich], Die unsichtbare Flagge/The Invisible Flag, trans. by
Frank Hermann (London, 1956).
Bauer, Josef Martin, So weit die Fiisse tragen/As Far as my Feet will carry Me, trans.
by Lawrence Wilson (London, 1957).
Boll, Heinrich, Wo warst du, Adam?/Adam, Where art Thou?, trans. by Mervyn
Savill (London, 1955); reissued as Pray for the Dawn (London, 1959).
- - , Der Zug war piinktlich/The Train was on Time, trans. by Richard Graves
(London, 1956).
- - , Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa/Traveller, if you come to Spa, trans. by Mervyn
Savill (London, 1956).
- - , Billard um halbzehn/Billiards at Half-past Nine, trans. by Patrick Bowles
(London, 1961).
Borchert, Wolfgang, Draussen vor der Tiir/The Man Outside: The Prose Works, trans.
by David Porter (London, 1952).
Gaiser, Gerd, Die sterbende ]agd/The Last Squadron, trans. by Paul Findlay
(London, 1956).
Gerlach, Heinrich, Die verratene Armee/The Forsaken Army, trans. by Richard
Graves (London, 1958).
 Germany 129

Gisevius, Hans Bernd, Bis zum bitteren Ende/To the Bitter End, trans. by Richard
and Clara Wins tone (London, 1948).
Grass, Gunter, Die Blechtrommel/The Tin Drum, trans. by Ralph Manheim
(London, 1962).
--,Katz und Maus/Cat and Mouse, trans. by Ralph Manheim (London, 1963).
Gregor, Manfred, Die Briicke/The Bridge, trans. by RobertS. Rosen. (London,
1962).
Heinrich, Willi, Das geduldige Fleisch/The Willing Flesh, trans. by Richard and
Clara Winstone (London, 1956).
Hochhuth, Rolf, Der Stellvertreter/The Representative, trans. by Robert David
MacDonald (London, 1963).
--,So/daten/Soldiers, trans. by Robert David MacDonald (London, 1968).
Horbach, Michael, Die ve"atenen Sohne/The Great Betrayal, trans. by Robert Kee
(London, 1958); also as The Betrayed (New York, 1959).
Kipphardt, Heinar, In der Sache]. Robert Oppenheimer/In the Matter of]. Robert
Oppenheimer, trans. by Ruth Spiers (London, 1967).
Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 08/15/Zero-Eight-Fifteen, trans. by Robert Kee (London,
1955); also as The Revolt of Gunner Asch (London, 1965).
- - , 08/15, vol. 2/ Gunner Asch goes to War, trans. by Robert Kee (London, 1956).
- - , 08/15 vol. 3/The Return of Gunner Asch, trans. by Robert Kee (London,
1957).
- - , Die Nacht der Generate/The Night of the Generals, trans. by J. Maxwell
Brownjohn (London, 1963).
Kluge, Alexander, Schlachtbeschreibung/The Battle, trans. by Leila Vennewitz
(New York, 1967).
Lenz, Siegfried, Stadtgespriich/The Survivor, trans. by Michael Bullock (New York,
1965).
- - , Deutschstunde/The German Lesson, trans. by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
(London, 1977) .
Mann, Thomas, Doktor Faustus/Doctor Faustus, trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter
(London, 1949).
Meichsner, Dieter, Weisst du, warum?/Vain Glory, trans. by Charlotte and A.L.
Lloyd (London, 1953).
Ott, Wolfgang, Haie und kleine Fische/Sharks and Little Fish, trans. by Oliver
Coburn (London, 1957).
Plievier, Theodor, Stalingrad/Stalingrad: The Death of an Army, trans. by H.
Langmead Robinson (London, 1948).
- - , Mo.rkau/Moscow, trans. by Stuart Hood (London, 1953).
- - , Berlin/Berlin, trans. by Louis Hagen and Vivian Milroy (London, 1956);
also as Berlin: Rape of a City (London, 1962).
Remarque, Erich Maria, Der Funke Leben/The Spark of Life, trans. by James Stern
(London and New York, 1952).
- - , Zeit zu Leben und Zeit zu sterben/A Time to Love and a Time to Die, trans. by
Denver Lindley (London, 1954).
Richter, Hans Werner, Die Geschlagenen/The Odds Against Us, trans. by Robert
Kee (London, 1950); also as Beyond Defeat (New York, 1950).
- - , Sie fielen aus Gottes Hand/They Fell from God's Hand, trans. by Geoffrey
Sainsbury (New York, 1956).
Seghers, Anna [Netty Radvany (Reiling)], Das siebte Kreuz/The Seventh Cross,
trans. James A. Galston (London, 1943).
130 The Second W odd War in Fiction

--,Die Totm bleiben jung/The Dead stay Young, (London and Boston, 1950).
Weiss, Peter, Die Ermittlung/The Investigation, trans. by Alexander Gross
(London, 1%6); American edn trans. by John Swan and Ulu Grossbard
(New York, 1966).
Wiechert, Ernst, Der Totenwald/The Forest of the Dead, trans. by Ursula Stechow
(London, 1947).
Zand, Herbert, Letzte Ausfahrt/Last Sortie: The Story of the Cauldron, trans. by
C.M. Woodhouse (London, 1955).
4 Soviet Union
Don Piper

The magnitude of the war in Russia and the social and political
impact it had upon the country are reflected in a diverse and
voluminous literature. More than a thousand members of the
Union of Writers, a quarter of whom lost their lives, went to the
front in various capacities. Indeed, a bibliography of the prose
and poetry written about the war during the decade 1941-51
would probably be longer than this chapter. A second wave of
novels and memoirs followed Khrushchev's attack upon Stalin's
reputation in 1956. Writers like Bykov, Bondarev and others
persistently return to the theme in the seventies.
Consequently, any review of this literature must be both
thematic and selective. Only those periods to which hindsight
gives a certain thematic homogeneity can be discussed. For this
reason I have chosen to concentrate upon the literature of the
forties, to touch briefly on the "orthodox" post-war Stalinist
novels and close with a review of the writings of the Khrushchev
period during which Grossman wrote Life and Fate (1960), a work
which may well become the "definitive" war novel of the 1960s
and 1970s.
The persistence of the war as a major theme in literature over
four decades attests the chronic physical and mental trauma
which it caused in Russia. On conservative estimates the country
lost fifteen million servicemen and five million civilians. Three
million Ostarbeiter were transported to Germany as slave labour.
Three million prisoners-of-war perished in captivity. Russian
land was blackened by the scorched-earth policy adopted by both
sides and the people suffered the real implications of the Nazis'
Untermensch theories. Yet, despite these losses, Pasternak re-
marked that, compared with the thirties, "the war came as a
breath of fresh air, an omen of deliverance, a purifying storm" . 1
Superficially, the statement bewilders. Nevertheless, al-
131
132 The Second World War in Fiction

though the cost of deliverance was high, the war did constitute a
respite from crippling internecine strife. Enforced collectivisation
had claimed about three and a half million lives; in the resultant
famine of 1932-33 about six million peasants died. During the
purges of 1935-38 about twelve million Russians had been
dispatched to the camps. The country was bleeding from self-
inflicted wounds which were immediately exposed by the out-
break of war. The Soviet Union was disunited and unprepared.
Half the officer corps had been shot or imprisoned in 1937 -38; in
the upper echelons of the services 65 per cent of staff had been
removed. The Russian armies, badly led by inexperienced offic-
ers, ignorant of mobile warfare and fearful of personal initiative,
were routed. In those territories annexed after the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 the Germans were welcomed as
liberators. The Ukraine, which had borne the brunt of collectiv-
isation, initially displayed little antipathy towards them. Eighty
thousand Osttruppen served in the German forces and the number
of "Hiwis", the indigenous "odd-job" men of the German army,
reached half a million by the spring of 1943. SS detachments
included Estonian, Cossack and White-Russian units. Eighty per
cent of the very first Ostarbeiter were volunteers, while Vlasov's
Russian Liberation Army, recruited from ill-treated Ostarbeiter
and prisoners-of-war, numbered between 800000 and a million
men. Even after Stalin's order of 28 July 1942 which established
Military Tribunals empowered to impose the death penalty for
cowardice and which, by equating surrender and retreat with
treason, effectively disinherited Russian prisoners-of-war, sixty
one thousand troops nevertheless deserted in the second half of
the year.
In brief, the divisiveness of Stalin's internal policies and the
collapse of his foreign policy, his disregard of numerous warnings
of the invasion and the inane orders which forbad strategic
withdrawals and ensured encirclement of entire armies exposed
the limitations of his arbitrary regime. Had Germany been less
committed to dogmatic racism, it would have recognised in
Vlasov's trenchant anti-Stalinism the voice of widespread discon-
tent.
Yet Pasternak'!! comment is substantially correct. A combina-
tion of Russian nous and German stupidity eventually effected a
rare unity in the country. Political dog-fighting largely ceased and
the atmosphere of suspicion lifted. Always inherent in Stalin's
doctrine of "socialism in one country", patriotism, boosted by his
 Soviet Union 133

speech of 6 November 1941 in praise of such national heroes as

Alexander Nevsky and Kutuzov, now became Russia's staple
diet. The work of historians like Wipper and Snegirev and
numerous historical plays and novels emphasised historical con-
tinuity rather than ideological disjuncture and suggested a com-
mon identity between the old and new Russia. Guards regiments
were introduced into the army, the prestige of the officer was
enhanced, parity between the political commissar and the milit-
ary commander was abolished in favour of the latter and profes-
sional soldiers like Zhukov and Rokossovsky replaced such politi-
cal figureheads as Voroshilov and Budenny. Indeed, Stalin's
restoration of the Synod and his reception of the Metropolitan in
September 1943 typified the wartime ascendancy which practical
patriotism enjoyed over ideology.
German policy also fostered national unity. Convinced of
victory by the winter of 1941, naively identifying the Russian
people with Bolshevism, their political planning restricted to the
dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the colonisation of its people
and the extermination of Jews and Party members, the Germans
were grotesquely ill-equipped to exploit the fissures in Soviet
society. The appointment of such fanatical Nazis as Koch in the
Ukraine and Lohse in "Ostland", the abominable treatment of
Russian prisoners-of-war, the castration of the education system,
de-industrialisation and the perpetuation, until too late, of the
collective-farm system exhibited such crass fanaticism that they
alienated the very strata of society upon which successful colon-
isation depended. Hitler's boast that Leningrad would be starved
into submission, statements that German requisitioning of food
would necessitate the death of millions and reports of the brutal
recruitment and treatment of the Ostarheiter provided the Soviet
authorities with fertile propaganda and swelled the ranks of the
partisans. The belief that Russia's land existed for German
exploitation and that its people constituted a German work-force
was a profound political weakness which propagandists like
Ehrenburg eagerly exploited and the Russian people bitterly felt.
The situation precluded a "third choice" and people opted for
patriotism.

Pre-war soviet literature had reflected the nation's insularity. The

Party's paramount influence in every sphere of Russian life
134 The Second World War in Fiction

enabled it to suppress all means of international comparison.

Thus, as reflected in Soviet culture, the 1930s constituted an
unparalleled economic, social and military achievement. The
"excesses" of the decade were explained as the consequences of
such progress. "One can't make an omelette without breaking
eggs" and "Fell a forest and the chips fly" were the stock
apologetics of the period. Socialist realism, the official doctrine in
the arts since 1934, was an equally closed system. Its principal
feature was partiinosf, its Party spirit, an ideological component
which neutered the element of realism. The latter was equated
with the clear presentation of a message, namely the illustration of
Soviet industrial and agricultural success. Following the procla-
mation in 1936 of the victory of socialism and the inception of a
classless society, the "no-conflict" novel emerged. Such drama as
literature could muster was provided by earnest disagreements
between well-meaning technologists about industrial innovations
or by survivors of dying species like kulaks and misguided intellec-
tuals. Described as "reality varnished" after Stalin's death,
socialist realism plotted the historically inevitable progress of a
society wisely led by the Party. Gentile in its treatment of sexual
matters, lacking depth in characterisation, muting human grief, it
spawned a multitude of flat novels barely distinguishable from
each other.
The war exposed the invalidity of the myths. The Party's
mistaken foreign policy and the defeat of its "invincible" Red
Army destroyed all claims to infallibility. It now became impossi-
ble to conceal unpalatable truths from millions of bemused Red
Army men and a population bombed and blasted throughout
European Russia. Soviet society had ceased to be hermetically
closed.
Consequently the distinguishing feature of war literature is its
realism, understood now as a unvarnished representation of the
pain and courage of the Russian people and as a willingness to
question matters hitherto considered taboo. The poet Aleksey
Surkov, declared in 1942 that the troops were quick to detect "the
jingle of hypocrisy in metallic words" and that "only the language
of truth, honest and simple" was acceptable. 2 Ideological
generalities now give way to a preoccupation with facts, with the
immediate and present. There is a revival of poetry, whose
graphic vividness, be it that of lnber and Berggol'ts in Leningrad,
or of Surkov, Gudzenko and Mezhirov at the front, also character-
 Soviet Union 135

ises the best prose. Scarcely describable as "fiction", the work of

Nekrasov, Bek and Simonov is rooted in their experience of war.
Thus there is little to distinguish People with a Clean Conscience
(1946), the autobiography of the partisan leader Vershigora, from
Nekrasov's "novel" In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946), save that it
is the latter which is less discursive and more factual. Even after
the war when "fictional" accounts of events reappeared, it is the
enormity and grandeur of the non-fictional elements which im-
press. In Ketlinskaya's Under Siege (1947), Chakovsky's It Hap-
pened in Leningrad ( 1948) and Chukovsky's Baltic Skies ( 1954) the
description of life in besieged Leningrad transcends the doings of
characters reverting to the stereotypes of socialist realism. Simi-
larly in more romantic works like Grossman's The People are
Immortal ( 1942) and Gorbatov' s The Warrior Aleksey Kulikov ( 1942)
and The Undefeated ( 1943) the authentic emotional response which
the author makes to the course of the war rivets the attention far
more than the larger-than-life characters.
Russian war literature emerges as a chronicle of people's
spontaneous and varied responses to a cruel period of history. The
poet Boris Slutsky compared War and Peace, the most popular
book of the times, to a mirror in which the country again
recognised itself. Wartime literature possesses the physical, three-
dimensional quality of Tolstoy's art, the same sturdy patriotism
and variety of human emotion. It remains, however, a kaleidos-
cope of responses, in which preoccupation with present events
precluded broader, more philosophical perspectives. Only in the
1960s in Life and Fate does Grossman set the social vigour and
camaraderie which this literature embodies in an historical
context.

Greater freedom from Party controls and a less rigorous censor-

ship created a confidence and assertiveness which sharply dif-
ferentiate wartime from pre-war literature. Oblique criticism of
the effects of Party policy upon national unity reflected deeply felt
reservations. In The Old Teacher (1942) Grossman identifies col-
lectivisation as a cardinal factor in the animosities arising in a
Ukrainian town under German occupation. Gorbatov's The Unde-
feated stresses the difficulties of organising resistance in a listless,
demoralised Ukraine. The narrator of Aleksey Tolstoy's Tales of
136 The Second World War in Fiction

Ivan Sudarev (1942) is the son of a kulak who, refusing to join a

collective farm, "sold his cow, boarded up his hut and went off to
the Far East" .3 This ironic presentation of a kulak's deportation is
followed by Ivan's remark that he, a kulak's son, must now defend
his country. In Grossman's For a Righteous Cause (1952) Commis-
sar Krymov shelters in a peasant's house during the retreat to
Moscow. The peasant gloats over the Red Army's defeat. He has
memories of 1930 when peasants drank all their vodka, slaugh-
tered their animals and died. In 1943 Dovzhenko voiced the
disapprobation latent in many such passages. His scenario for a
film entitled The Ukraine Ablaze, first published only in 1966, is a
lament for a divided country. Its climax is a fight to the death
between the loyalist Zaporozhets and Zabroda, once deported to
Siberia by Zaporozhets as a kulak and now in charge of the Polizei:
"They talked of the kulaks, of deportations, of sufferings on alien
soil, of famine, deaths and acts of treachery. They abused and
taunted each other with Siberia and the nation's misery, ... and
with Hitler and German pogroms and the burnings and hangings
and slavery." 4 The hatred is venomous and tears the Ukraine
apart.
Writers also touched upon the politically dangerous theme of
the purges. From 1939 onwards batches of men were released
from the camps. Amongst them were the future Marshals Rokos-
sovsky and Meretskov, General Gorbatov and S.V. Rudnev, later
to become Commissar in Kovpak's White-Russian partisan forces
and Vershigora's immediate superior. In his remarkably out-
spoken autobiography Vershigora recalls the following incident.
A certain partisan sergeant called Karpenko, who had received a
ten-year sentence and been released, took such exception to
Rudnev's political pep-talks that he threatened his life, justifying
his indiscipline on the grounds that his experiences as a prisoner
had shattered his nerves. A reconciliation took place only after
Karpenko had learned of Rudnev's own arrest in 1937. Twenty
months later, his Party card was returned to him with the words:
"There's been a mistake." 5 Piqued and angry, Rudnev left the
army. When war broke out, he volunteered, but was rejected!
Hence his appearance amongst the partisans. Simonov's Days and
Nights (1944) lacked a chapter when it first appeared. Published
in 1966, the chapter contains criticism of the social debilitation
caused by wave after wave of arrests. One of the most appealing
characters in Nekrasov's In the Trenches of Stalingrad is the eigh-
 Soviet Union 137

teen-year-old orderly, Valega, whose biography is curtly sum-

marised: "All I know is that his father and mother are dead. He
has a married sister somewhere whom he scarcely knows at all. He
was put on trial. He won't say for what. Did time. Did not
complete his sentence. Released and volunteered for the army." 6
The passage implies the death of Valega's parents during collec-
tivisation, the dispersal of the surviving members of the family
and his own arrest as a result of Stalin's decree of April 1935
extending all penalties to children of twelve and over.
Comments of this kind underline the insularity of a society
which literally and figuratively disarmed itself. In Ehrenburg's
The Storm ( 1947) pre-war society is presented as a closed, fearful
world unaware of the threat posed by the German occupation of
Western Europe. Informed opinion between 1939 and June 1941
was generally pro-German. Remarks like "They smashed the
French beautifully" and "They knocked them out like artists" are
not untypical. Ehrenburg deplores "the crude manners, the
arrests, the soullessness of the bureaucrats" .7 His strictures are
echoed by many another writer. The meaningless jargon of the
politicians, the social stratification created by the Party hierar-
chy, the primitive level of Soviet culture are subjected to wide-
spread criticism. The insidious effects of enervating propaganda
and political callousness resulted in a diminished sense of social
identity and national purpose. Vershigora mentions the disaffec-
tion of a partisan who feels that his life has been planned "on the
abacuses of the State Planning Department". Dovzhenko attri-
butes these bitterly critical words to a German officer: "Do you
know, they don't study history? Amazing! Their diet for twenty-
five years has consisted of negative slogans. They reject God,
property, the family, friendship. All that remai~ of nationality is
a derogatory adjective. They have no eternal truths. That's why
they breed so many traitors." Reproached with lack of patriotism,
deserting soldiers reply that they do not understand the
concept. At school they were taught class warfare. Dovzhenko's
thesis is that the suppression of nationalism and the social an-
tagonisms created in the thirties had led to the country's destabil-
ization.
The feeling that the Party was out of step with the national
mood intensified after the outbreak of war. Fadeyev's novel The
Young Guard (1945), based upon the organisation of an urban
guerrilla movement by the young people of Krasnodon, sharply
138 The Second Wo1ld War in Fiction

censured the Party's unreadiness for war. The chiefs of police and
the Party bosses are the fin:t to flee the German advance. So many
vehicles are requisitioned for their flight that the town is left
without transport. Dovzhenko describes this common theme in
angrier terms. As "nonentities who understand nothing of the
national tragedy" depart in half-empty lorries whose load of
secret documents precludes their picking up refugees or wounded,
a trooper remarks: "What's going on? Tell me, why are we so
vile?" In Fadeyev's novel those Party members detailed to
organise resistance are out of touch with the young, are ignorant
of urban warfare and misguided in their judgment of people. The
Party's alienation from the people is always attributed to its
bureaucratic attitudes. Party-boss Stepan Yatsenko, in The Unde-
feated concludes that his heart is "stained with ink" 8 when he finds
that his appointees have collaborated with the Germans. Dov-
zhenko describes a typical chairman of a typical provincial town.
He is so lost in a maze of "secret papers, secret doings and secret
instructions", so locked into a bureaucracy where such sinister
nonsense is important that it allows him "to keep his own
provincial obtuseness and his profoundly callous attitude to
human beings equally secret".
The Party's conduct of the war itself was criticised. Doubts
were expressed about three broad and often overlapping areas of
policy- the status of Russian prisoners-of-war, Russian military
strategy during 1941-42 and excessive political coercion and
surveillance in the armed forces.
Like the Japanese, Russian prisoners-of-war were regarded as
traitors. Even troops who broke out of encirclement were dis-
armed and interrogated by Special Department or Smersh agents.
With desertion so common, all escaped prisoners were similarly
questioned and, at best, sent to the penal battalions. Dmitry
Medvedev, an NKVD officer who commanded a partisan unit in
the Bryansk area, reflects this orthodox attitude. In his novel Stout
Hearts (1948) escaped prisoners-of-war are undisciplined and
drunken. One has to be shot. In the novels of Gorbatov the
standpoint is only slightly less stringent.
Most writers were more lenient. A peasant woman in Was-
silewska's The Rainbow (1942}, after seeing the condition of Rus-
sian prisoners-of-war marched through her village, advises her
son to choose death before captivity, while Aleksey Tolstoy
transforms seven shamed and dispirited ex-prisoners into an
 Soviet Union 139

efficient partisan unit in his story, Seven Dirty Faces (1942).

Sholokhov's School of Hatred (1942) is a harrowing account of the
conditions in which half a million prisoners died during the first
six months of the war. Sleeping in piles under the open sky to keep
warm, many frozen to the ground, they would fight over the
occasional horse-meat thrown to them deliberately to provoke
disorders and necessitate shootings. The hero of the story,
Gerasimov, escapes and, despite initial suspicions on their part,
joins the partisans. Sholokhov's more famous work Fate of a Man
(1957) is much less honest. Andrey Sokolov's escape in the
company of a captured Nazi and his rapturous reception have
been rightly condemned by Solzhenitsyn as cheap and shameful. 9
Indeed, the safest sanctuary for escaped prisoners-of-war appears
to have been the partisan army of Kovpak and Rudnev. Here the
Party line was flouted. Vershigora reports that ex-prisoners were
welcomed because their experience of captivity ensured that they
would "never surrender a second time". He is also scathing about
the Smersh interrogators. Sometimes when these "exceptionally
demanding people" were themselves captured they proved to be
"cowards and traitors". Conduct in captivity rather than the fact
of captivity, he concludes, "should determine our attitude to
people". It was generally felt that the Party's undiscriminating
attitude was impractical and unjust. People should not be
"categorized" as traitors.
Nor could the war be won by edict. Von Manstein identified the
main defect in Russian strategy in 1941-42 as the policy of
fighting for "every inch of ground, with the result that the
Germans were able to achieve large-scale encirclement" .10 This
tactic of defending established lines is criticised by Saburov, the
hero of Simonov's Days and N-ights. Surveying the miles of useless
trenches between the Don and Volga in 1942 he realises that "our
ideas are out of date: we retreat and take up position, whereas the
Germans are round us in a trice and are there before we are" .11
This inflexibility becomes the theme of Bek's novel, The Vol-
okolamsk Highway, which describes the activities of a battalion
commanded by the Cossack Baurdzhan in the fighting along a key
road to Moscow in 1941. The battalion belongs to the 8th Guards
Division under the command of the celebrated Major-General
Panfilov. The first two volumes, published in 1944, illustrate the
difficulties Russian officers had in welding their demoralised
forces together. Even when discipline is re-established, officers
140 The Second World War in Fiction

must be taught to conserve manpower, to "read" a tactical

situation and use initiative. Panfilov emerges as an astute tacti-
cian, determined to introduce some mental and physical mobility
into the rigidity of Russian military practice, a man ready to
ignore orders and countenance tactical retreats if the situation
demands such. The 1944 publication ends when Baurdzhan has
successfully accomplished such a withdrawal. The continuation
of the novel in 1960 presents the repurcussions of Panfilov's
unorthodoxy. At one point Baurdzhan is relieved of his command
and Panfilov is reprimanded and humiliated.
Indeed, a few writers, weighing the death-toll exacted by the
mistaken strategy of 1941-42and Russia's overall military unpre-
paredness, raised basic questions about the Party's competence.
Two superb stories by Kazakevich verge upon dissidence.
Star (1946) is set in the forests of the Western Ukraine, a terrain
whose timelessness intimates the transient nature of human
existence and whose people are indifferent to the blessings of a
Russian liberation. A platoon of scouts, code-named Star, is sent
on a mission from which it does not return. The sub-plot concerns
an investigation by a Captain Es'kin of a complaint by a surly
peasant woman that the scouts have failed to return her horse.
Travkin, the platoon commander, unaware that one of his men
has traded the horse, denies the charges. Eventually Es'kin
arrives to confront Travkin:

'Comrade Captain, mightn't it be better if you just went to

them and interrogated them there?'
'Where are they?'
'Behind enemy lines.'
The investigator scrutinized Katya with cold, humourless
eyes.

The story is untendentious, yet creates an overwhelming atmos-

phere of menace. The men are threatened by the terrain, the local
population, the enemy and their own side.
Two Men on the Steppe (1948) is more explicit. An officer,
Ogarkov, is court-martialled and sentenced to death for failing to
deliver a message. The Russians, however, are forced to withdraw
and he is left in the charge of Dzhurabaev, his ultra-conscientious
guard who insists on marching him back through occupied
territory to Russian lines. Dzhurabaev is killed, but Ogarkov
 Soviet Union 141

returns and is pardoned. The story's impact lay in descriptions

like this:

Towards evening, when the sun was at their backs, Ogarkov

would see Dzhurabaev's shadow beside him. He soon began to
feel a deep antipathy, almost hatred for that shadow. Not for
Dzhurabaev, but for his shadow. He felt no hostility towards
Dzhurabaev himself - the man was doing his duty. But his
shadow ... which never failed to keep pace, which seemed to be
fixed, attached to him, reduced Ogarkov to a state of impotent
exasperation and he tried to ignore it completelyY

The passage conveys the sense of being constantly stalked, the

realization that the menace is of inhuman, not human, dimen-
sions, the despairing recognition that this impersonal force will
never falter and a consequent awareness of a permanent impo-
tence and injustice.
Nekrasov's In the Trenches of Stalingradappears to be an unsensa-
tional, diaristic account of a soldier's experience at Stalingrad. It
is, however, a mine-field of innuendo. Terse references to disasters
like Kharkov and laconic calculations of losses belie a cold anger.
Artless conversations disguise their irony:

'But, nevertheless, he's got will-power .. .'

'Who has? .. .'
'Stalin, of course. Managing to contain two retreats on this
scale.'

Or they raise vital questions:

'You knew there would be a war?'

'Maybe.'
'No "maybes", you knew.'

The leading character, the semi-autobiographical Kerzhent-

sev, shows a bitterness and scepticism uncharacteristic of war-
time literature. The work itself ends in anti-climax, even bathos.
On 19 November the Russian counter-attack begins, and Ker-
zhentsev's battalion is ordered at gun-point to capture some
water-towers heavily defended by German machine-guns. Twen-
ty-six men, half the "battalion", are killed. One of the dead,
142 The Second World War in Fiction

Karnaukhov, had two portraits in his dug-out- one of Stalin, the

other of Jack London. Kerzhentsev takes the picture of London as
a keepsake. Stalin's picture is not reclaimed. Finally, after a stay
in hospital, Kerzhentsev returns to find his men still trying to take
the same objective and talks to Chumak, a former criminal: "Just
think of it .:.. some two hundred lousy metres-We've been through
the whole of White Russia, the Ukraine, the Donbass, the Kal-
muck steppes, and now we can't take two hundred metres. And
Chumak asks me - why not?" The novel ends not with a
celebration of victory, but with a squalid episode in which men are
killed so that absurd orders from above may be fulfilled.
Chumak asks whose is the responsibility for the Russian deba-
cle. Dovzhenko provides an answer in his scenario. It too involves
a picture of Stalin. Zaporozhets takes it down: "Good-bye,
comrade. You and I did not expect that such things would happen
in our country, but they have. And the cost in life has been
immense .... What will become of our people? Will they survive or
vanish without trace? ... We are all gall .... Comrade, you said
that the people were immortal. Our immortality weighs heavily
upon us."
Someone was responsible for the social disharmony, the milit-
ary improvidence and the inept strategy that caused such slaugh-
ter. Later, in 1958 Mezhirov, an ex-soldier, summarized the
theme in three lines of verse: "Under-shoot. Over-shoot. Under-
shoot. I The artillery shells its own men ... I They are felling no
forest, but still the chips fly" .13

Such dissidence was not widespread. In general, criticism of the

Party was intended to be constructive, not destructive. Almost all
writers regarded the relationship between Party and people as a
partnership towards which Stalin had made the first gesture in his
broadcast of 3 July 1941 which began: "Comrades! Citizens!
Brothers and sisters! Warriors of our army and fleet! My friends, I
turn to you." Simonov's description of Saburov's reaction
typifies the response of the majority of Russians. The warmth of
the address, the gurgle of water being poured into a glass, the long
pauses, the controlled anguish persuaded Saburov that "what-
ever mig~t happen, he, Saburov, was with him to the end" _14
The austere figure suddenly became human and was largely
 Soviet Union 143

exonerated from blame for Russia's woes. He became a symbol of

national unity and the frequent, apparently sycophantic invoca-
tions of his name were then sincere. His voice prompted Vera
Inber to remark that "he knows everything and will never be a
hypocrite". 15 The poet lsakovsky "prostrated himself" before him
in honour of "the purity and truth which your life embodies". 16
The poet Antokol'sky deified him, inviting him to rise in Marsh-
al's uniform "So that seas again be blue I And fields again be
green." 17 The authenticity of many such sentiments is attested by
Aliger. Zoya Kosmodem'yanskaya, the partisan-heroine of her
poem "Zoya" (1942), died with the words "Stalin is on guard"
on her lips. Republishing her poem after Stalin's death she wrote
that, although Zoya's attitude now seems dated, then "there were
no such differences between us". 18
The general view was that the thirties had passed into history
and that the people in alliance with a c:eansed Party would jointly
face the common enemy. Berggol'ts believed that "the bitter years
of persecutions and evil" were over. 19 The poet Kurosheva shared
the current optimism: "There can be no return to old deeds and
thoughts:/ All has been cremated in a monstrous conflagration." 20
Vershigora described his life as a partisan as "a time of truth and
beauty" which would straighten the back of many a "bureaucrat,
red-tape merchant, informer and pusillanimous editor". A new
spirit was in the air and attitudes to the Party changed. When
membership meant instant death if one fell into enemy hands,
joining the Party became an act of patriotism. It was, as Ketlins-
kaya remarked in Under Siege, equivalent to "going to the front,
into the line of fire". 21 The idealism of 1918 revived. Sel'vinsky
composed his "Ballad of Leninism" (1942), lnber invoked the
popular name of Kirov in "He is Ours" (1942) and Tikhonov
wrote one of the war's finest martial poems, "Kirov is with Us"
(1941). In response, the ideological criteria determining Party
membership became so relaxed that two of V crshigora's wayward
partisans - Karpenko, who had been sentenced to penal labour in
the thirties, and Mudry, an escaped prisoner-of-war and former
speculator, were enrolled in the Party's ranks by partisan com-
missars. Inber, Vershigora and Slutsky became members in 1942.
Other criteria now prevailed. In The Young Guard, for instance,
young Radek Yurkin's request to join the Komsomol is speedily
granted. He is asked to outline the obligations of membership:
144 The Second World War in Fiction

'The task of a member is to kill the German-Fascist invaders

until none of them is left ... '
'Well then,' said Turkenich, 'in my opinion the lad's grasp of
politics is perfect.' 22

The tacit agreement between Party and people resulted in the

efflorescence of a literature which Aleksey Tolstoy described in
1942 as being "genuinely national". 23 The desire for truth, how-
ever, which now distinguishes this literature cannot be wholly
explained by the relaxation of Party censorship and discipline
which attended the concordat. It was also dictated by the quality
of experience which writers derived from the war and which
Semyon Gudzenko, himself a soldier, elucidates in his poem, "My
Generation" (1945). 24 The brutality of the poem's refrain -
"There is no need to pity us, for we would pity none" - is
deceptive. Despite its horror, war intensifies the commonplace
experiences of joy and suffering: the intensity of feeling is such that
one lives on an ultimate level of three-dimensional reality. A truer
insight into life and people emerges. Pity demeans the dead who
had that knowledge. Surkov writes in similar vein. The de-
meanour of the troops has become "more captious and abrupt",
for the true worth of "deeds, people and things, caught in the
shimmering light of battle, shines out visibly". The measure of
literature became its approximation to the realities of the front
and its distance from the cant of the past decade.

Hence there was no attempt to disguise German superiority and

Russian weakness during the humiliating pre-Stalingrad months.
Officers in Grossman's The People are Immortal talk freely of the
Germans' Han, discipline and brilliant deployment of tanks and
airborne troops. German military prowess was held in awe.
Gershenzpn, an interpreter killed in 1942, relates that during the
battles around Vyazma two figures came out of the darkness
towards him. He bellowed: "Hande hoch!" and approached.
They were Russians: "I bawled them out: do Red-Army men
really raise their hands when they hear a word of German?" 25
Baurdzhan in Bek's novel describes the arrogance of the German
advance "without reconnaissance, without patrols ... , all their
amenities with them, in lorries, confident of routing the Russkies
 Soviet Union 145

as soon as they met them". He needed a victory, be it only in a

skirmish, to prove to his men that German were not "scaly,
long-tailed monsters or fire-breathing dragons, but men". 26
Simonov's Saburov recovers from panic in battle on the Moscow
front, rallies a few men and makes a stand. His men wonder at the
dead Germans, "men they had killed ... and whom it was in fact
possible to kill". Similar consternation characterised the retreat
to Stalingrad. Grossman's For a Righteous Cause (1952) describes
the excitement which the prospect of withdrawal from the bat-
tlefield generates. It is reflected in "the animated eyes" of the
lightly wounded troops escaping "the hell of the trenches" and in
"the busy bustle of people preparing to leave along the road to the
East". 27 A character in Nekrasov's novel remarked: "Only a
miracle can save us. Otherwise they will crush us. With their
organisation and tanks." In terms of materiel the miracle was
performed in the Urals: in terms of morale the crucial factors were
German atrocities, Russian patriotism and the immense shame
felt by the retreating armies.
Grossman captures the magnitude of the catastrophe on the
Bryansk front in October 1941:

I have never seen or imagined a flight of this scale. A Biblical

Exodus! Vehicles moving in eight lanes abreast. The hysterical
wail of dozens of lorries simultaneously extricating themselves
from the mud. Enormous flocks of sheep and herds of cattle are
driven across the fields; further back, columns of horse-drawn
transport wagons and thousands of carts covered with brightly-
coloured canvas, plywood and tin, all carrying refugees from
the Ukraine, squeak and creak their way along the roads; and
still further in the distance are crowds of pedestrians with sacks,
bundles and cases. It is not a river or a flood, but the slow
movement of an ocean current, hundreds of metres wide to
right and left. From under the canopies raised over the carts
gaze children, dark-haired and fair, Jewish elders with Biblical
beards, peasant women in shawls, Ukrainian old-timers in
their caps, black-haired Jewish girls and women .... And what
peace there is in their eyes, their grief is philosophical, what a
sense of fate, of a universal catastrophe!
In the evening the sun appears from behind tiers of blue,
black and grey clouds. The shafts of light are broad, enormous,
stretching from heaven to earth as they do inDore's paintings of
146 The Second World War in Fiction

dread Biblical scenes of the descent of austere heavenly hosts.

Amidst these yellow beams of light the movement of the old
men, of the women with babes in their arms, of the flocks of
sheep and soldiers seems so majestic and tragic that at times I
really feel that we have been transported back to the era of
Biblical catastrophes. 28

The transmigrations which followed the retreating troops and

the reception they had from those who remained in the villages
were humiliating. Slutsky recalls that in 1941 he could not eat
because neither he nor the army "had earned our rations". 29 The
prose of Nekrasov and Sholokhov and the poetry of Simonov and
Surkov detail countless scenes o{ gaunt, silent women standing
outside their houses and sullenly watching the bitter, shamed and
equally silent soldiers march past. The anger of the troops was
exacerbated by their realisation of the fate to which they were
abandoning the civilians. German conduct had initially provoked
horrified astonishment. In August 1941 Sholokhov was bewil-
dered by the "senseless, aimless" destruction. 30 Blank incredulity
characterises Svetlov's poem, "The Italian" (1943). A Russian
soldier who had so often dreamt of warm Italy's. gondolas looks,
uncomprehending, at the body of an Italian he has killed. What
on earth made him come. to die in a Russian winter? "The blue
skies of Italy" are glazed in the open eyes of a corpse freezing on
the plains. 31 Interrogations of German prisoners-of-war increased
amazement. Prisoners had no knowledge of Hitler's works and
little of German classical literature and music. The reasons they
gave for the invasion- booty and living space- seemed fatuous in
the context of such carnage.
This sense of bewilderment, however, soon gave way to hatred.
The plight of Russian territories liberated in December 1941
decisively altered attitudes. Apart from hangings, rape and re-
quisitions, the Germans had desecrated Tolstoy's home at Yas-
naya Polyana, destroyed churches in N ovgorod, looted
Tchaikovsky's house at Klin. The first evidence was discovered of
the extermination of the Jews and of the starvation of Russian
prisoners. The cumulative impact of such scenes throughout the
war is difficult to over-exaggerate. The Red Army marched
through its own razed villages and towns, unearthed pits contain-
ing the bodies of its own countrymen, witnessed the devastation of
its fields and the malnutrition and famine of its own people and
 Soz:iet Union 147

eventually stood aghast at Mauthausen, Maidanek and Au-

schwitz. The Germans appeared to be unthinking instruments of
a cruel machine bent only on destruction. Indeed Grossman is the
only Russian writer who tentatively explores the philosophy of
Fascism. In For a Righteous Cause Peter Bach's disgust with
Nazism is slowly eroded by public opinion, the omnipresence and
omnipotence of the Party and the prodigious achievement of the
German army. Having reached the Volga, he questions the
self-pride which his spiritual opposition to the regime has given
him and senses the ecstasy of power: "Suddenly out of the dirt and
the smoke, this foreign sky and immense alien land which lay
vanquished became physically palpable to him and in that instant
his entire being felt the grim power wielded by that cause of which
he was a part." The exercise of brute force has its delights: "All
that power which slumbered in Beyond Good and Evil ... , in Fichte,
was today physically marching across the plains."
Most writers, however, were more concerned with the effects
than with the psychological nuances of Nazism. The realisation
that they were being treated as "sub-humans" led to an ironic
reversal of the popular images associated with East and West.
The Germans were compared to the hordes of Genghis Khan and
Russia became the bastion of civilisation. In 1941 Lebedev-
Kumach, launching the concept of a Holy War in a poem of that
name, called upon Russia to destroy "the accursed horde" and
"the dark power" of Fascism. 32 The conflict was less ideological
than Biblical, a clash between Darkness and Light. Pasternak
adapted Biblical imagery to the battle of Stalingrad in his poem
"Revivified Fresco" (1944). For Berggol'ts the war was a "hal-
lowed, righteous battle" .33 The poet Prokof'ev saw it as a fight
against "evil and darkness" 34 waged on Russian soil which Tvar-
dovsky described as "hallowed and pure" .35 In his story, The
Meeting (1942/3), Tikhonov compared besieged Leningrad to
Troy, while the siege itself was associated with Hell: "It is as if
ancient things had crawled forth - I Foes, blockade and
darkness." 36
Written in July 1941, Surkov's A Soldier's Oath expressed a
loathing of the Germans which soon became endemic: "The blood
of defiled and murdered mothers, wives and sisters, the blood of
slain children has coagulated and become in my heart a clot of
immeasurable hatred." The incantatory quality of Surkov's prose
reflected the quasi-religious terms in which the war was popularly
148 The Second World War in Fiction

viewed. Whereas little animosity was displayed against Italians

and Rumanians, Russian detestation of the Germans was unabat-
ing. Quoting from captured documents, diaries and letters and
also irom SS publications, Ehrenburg conducted a masterly
campaign of mockery and vituperation against the master-race in
the press. The spleen of his article, Kill! (24 July 1942), retains its
power todayY Literature itself became saturated with hatred.
Aliger defined it as "unerring gun-fire" .38 A character in Under
Siege is possessed by it: hatred is "a living creature which stirred in
her breast and made her body shake from head to toe". Was-
silewska's The Rainbow, an unrelieved catalogue of German at-
rocities, nevertheless conveys the popular spirit of brooding
malevolence. The Germans patrol a village at night:

It was as bright as day. The moon's light gushed and

blinded, spilling the lustre of silver glance over the entire area.
The columns of light blazed: they had never seen such light
before. In the moonlight the snow, azure snow, scintillated and
its blueness was alien to them. And the snow ground beneath
their feet: the frost was of an intensity they had never known
and never suspected. Not a soul anywhere: only peasant shacks
watching the road and the pupils of their frozen windows
resembled human eyes. 39

The demand for vengeance was equally unrelenting. The Old

Testament code of an eye for an eye, wrote Iober, offered inade-
quate compensation for the horror of Leningrad's blockade.
Germany would pay "in hundreds" for each Russian death. 40
Revenge, declared Antokol'sky, is "sweeter than a lovers' meet-
ing", it is "incorruptible and inflexible". Tvardovsky sought
"death for death! Blood for blood! Grief for grief!" Surkov de-
scribes a mundane scene of 1941 and draws the inevitable conclu-
sion: "In the wind the poplar shivers, chilled and dying. I The
windows are opened wide. The dark peasant home is empty. I A
mother weeps over the body of her dead son. I An orphan wanders
off aimlessly, at random. I Our burier, the raven, grey from hot
ashes, I Drops into the black night from the charred gates ... I
Our people will pay this bloody account I With fire, steel and
inordinate revenge."
These attitudes were a defence-mechanism against unwar-
ranted aggression and barbarous inhumanity. The Germans,
 Soviet Union 149

wrote Sobolev in One Wish ( 1942), "possess neither human heart

nor human mind. A steel axe feels nothing when it shatters living
tissue and cuts short human life" .41 The story is about an or-
phaned boy who has seen his father, the president of a collective
farm, tied to two German tanks and torn apart. In The Science of
Hatred Russian prisoners-of-war are crushed for sport by German
tanks. In The Rainbow a pregnant partisan is stripped and made to
run naked in the snow. She gives birth in a barn under the eyes of
jeering troops and is then bayoneted and thrown into an ice-hole
with her dead child. The theme of Antokol'sky's "The Undis-
patched Letter" (1944) is a German slave-market where five
hundred Ukrainian girls and five hundred Russian youths are
sold like goods and chattels in a circus. Sel'vinsky's "I Saw It"
(1942) records his impressions when seven thousand bodies were
unearthed at Bagerovo: "They lie, they sit, they crawl up towards
the parapet. I Each has his own gesture, I wondrously personal! I
Winter has frozen in the corpse I the man's feeling at his death. I
And so the bodies rave, threaten, hate ... I This deathly silence
wrangles like a meeting." 42 By the time Grossman described with
clinical fury the obscenity of Treblinka the "fictional" horrors of
The Rainbow had long been a feature of Russian life. The threat
people felt was the physical extinction of Russia. When Dov-
zhenko's native village was razed, he felt "that it was not my
village which was perishing, but the entire nation". His own
sufferings epitomised the nation's agony throughout the long war:

I too burned in that fire then, I too perished together with the
people, the animals and the plants. I blazed like a tree, like a
church, I swayed on the gallows and dispersed into the dust and
smoke of catastrophic explosions. . . . from my muscle and
shattered bones they made soap in mid-twentieth-century
Western Europe. My skin was used for book-bindings and
lamp-shades: my skin also lay along the paths of war, filthy,
trampled and flattened by the heavy tanks of humanity's last
war. 43

The ferocity of the struggle in Russia necessitated total commit-

ment. There were no vacillations or qualms of conscience about
killing. In The Divisional Commander ( 1944) Berezko compares the
aesthetic pleasure which his hero has in observing the execution of
his battle-plan to that of a composer hearing a performance of his
150 The Second World War in Fiction

symphony. The odd reference to the German proletariat emphas-

ises by its rarity the absence of a sense of international brother-
hood. Writers identified with their country's struggle for life and
discovered their birthright not in the First World War but in the
Napoleonic War. Vershigora found the works of Remarque and
Hemingway irrelevant, while Yury Krymov in his Letters from the
Front (1944) noted that "Remarque's All Quit.t on the Western Front
is totally at variance with my impressions. War and Peace is much
closer. " 44
For Russian writers the Great Patriotic War was a just war
which demanded not only an excoriation of the invader, but also a
homage to the suffering and endurance of the people, a commem-
oration of the dead and a celebration of victory.

As the army marched through burned villages m 1943,

Kazakevich, numbed by the condition of peasants living in
dug-outs like "troglodytes", observed that their grief was
matched by "an endurance to which there really is no limit". 45
Simple fortitude becomes a major literary theme. In her poem
"To a German Woman" (1942) Aliger embodies in her own
sorrow the plight of many Russian women. She has lost both
husband and child, but is still eager to struggle on. Kataev's
novel, Son of the Regiment (1944), provided the customary biog-
raphy of the many children who figure in the literature of the
times. The boy's father was killed at the front. His mother was
shot. Others in the family die of hunger. He fends for himself until
he attaches himself to a military or partisan unit. Writers spon-
taneously attempt to generalise personal grief. When Taras in The
Undefeated goes to find food, he joins a phalanx of peasants with
wheelbarrows which "squeaking and clattering rolled over the
stones and dragged the exhausted, sweaty, dust-blackened people
behind them". Antokol'sky's Son (1943), written on the death of
his own boy, is informed with the humanity of Russian family life,
while his son's delight in woodwork and stamps, the excitements
of his first drink and first love, the "manly" letters he writes home
from basic training do not differentiate his brief life from that of
millions. In poems like "The Mother" (1942) Surkov "freezes" a
commonplace event and gives it the universality of a Dutch
painting: "A camp-fire's smoke. A heap of damp greatcoats. I The
 Soviet Union 151

comfortless life of a soldier. I A woman, come from 'over there', I

Mourns her dead daughter. I Her voice is more muffled than the
forest's murmer. I It rustles like withered grass. I Her still, sad
words I Scorch our souls with pain." Grief's anodyne is the
consciousness of its universality and of the general will to endure
and overcome.
The stoicism of front-line literature is most strikingly expressed
in attitudes to death. Vershigora jovially relates that in 1941 he
rose within ten days from platoon to battalion commander.
Nekrasov strikes a sour note as Kerzhentsev prepares for another
costly attack in Stalingrad. If there are eighty men in his "battal-
ion", then the regiment has about 240 in all. Add about one
hundred signals, scouts etc. "But how many are fit? Not more
than a third'." Elsewhere the mood is almost always fatalistic.
Fear becomes so habitual that Sel'vinsky in his poem, "Fear"
(1942), likens it to a minor physical ailment. It is "the chronic
catarrh of the front-line trooper". Surkov expiains the syndrome.
Asleep, the soldiers dream of "mutilated bodies on the black
mutilated earth". They awaken with but one thought- to remain
alive until nightfall. They fall asleep with a prayer to survive until
morning. They dream ... We scamper "over the phases of the day
I Like hamsters over a wheel", Surkov wrote in an untitled poem
of 1943. "We swilled down the icy vodka I and with my knife I
picked the foreign blood out from my finger-nails", declared
Gudzenko in "Before the Attack" (1942). Indifference to spilling
German blood was matched by the cool fatalism with which they
shed their own. Sometimes this coolness verges upon indifference
as it does in a scene described by Surkov in 1943. The snow is
spattered with a "bloody dew", sleek dogs, gorged on human
flesh, roam the battle-field beneath a black cloud of carrion-
crows, while the troops nonchalantly march past chatting about
personal matters. Often the fatalism is moving. Surkov's "To
Outsiders" (1942) announced: "We bloody soldiers are candi-
dates for death, I We stand in fate's queue for our tum." For a
Righteous Cause portrays the stand made by Rodimtsev's 13th
Guards Division at Stalingrad. A battalion advances into the
German lines and the men, awaiting the inevitable counter-attack
and certain of their own death, talk to each other in the past tense:
"'I was a widower and never had kids,' said Rezchikov ... 'Oh,
mate, I used to love vodka, I supped it like a bitch does milk and,
as for women, they never did me any wrong'."
152 The Second World War in Fiction

The epitome of Russian nerve, however, was Leningrad. Dur-

ing the siege, at its worst in the savage winter of 1941-42, between
eight hundred thousand and a million Russians died from bomb-
ing, shelling and starvation. Without electricity, fuel and water,
daily rations down to one hundred and fifty grammes per person,
Leningrad became a ghost city. Chukovsky likened it to a sub-
merged town in which the gait of its starving citizens was so slow
"that they seemed to be moving through dense water". 46 Chakovs-
ky's description is similar: "It was if I was reading some fantastic
novel about the earth's last days, about life's extinction as a result
of some cosmic cooling process and cities standing devoid of life
and covered in snow." 47 Berggol'ts saw it as a necropolis whose
inanimate features had also become unreal: "Everything in the
city was dead or, better, seemed transported to 'another world'
where everything ... is different: the same, but soulless. " 48 Lost in
"eternal night and frozen stars, I eternal moonlit snow and ice" ,49
paralysed by bitter frosts, Leningrad resembled a vast sar-
cophagus.
According to Ketlinskaya, people, exhausted by hunger and
cold, died "quietly, soundlessly like candles burning out". In such
conditions death had its attractions even for Ber-ggol'ts, her mood
of still submissiveness being followed by a desire "to melt into
those huge drifts, into the purple-bricked, hoar-frosted
warehouses, into the lowering slate sky". At first women took
their dead to cemeteries, but, as famine became chronic, the dead
were left lying in the snow or in their apartments. Economy of
effort and of emotion became the law of survival. In "The
Blockade" ( 1943) the poet Shishova explained: "We shall not
even nod in greeting, I saying good-bye we shall not wave a
hand." 50 Crossing to unoccupied territory Inberwas struck by the
rapid speech and deep breathing of people there. In Leningrad,
where the trite expression "gnawed by hunger" became a reality
as muscular dis trophy crippled thousands, speech was so soft that
the breath released was barely visible even in winter. Only the
most pressing need dictated activity. Gazing fixedly ahead, their
faces swathed in bands against the wind, people would go for
water to the ice-holes in the Neva or pull a sledge with a body to
the cemetery, no longer stopping when others fell exhausted or
dead. Few were strong enough to make coffins and the coffin-
maker would demand payment in bread. In her "Leningrad
Poem" ( 1942) Berggol'ts relates a harrowing incident when,
 Soviet Union 153

having collected her bread-ration, she met a neighbour whose

daughter had died. More concerned with the needs of the living,
Berggol'ts refused her friend's request for bread for a coffin: "As if
on the world's edge I alone, in the fog, savagely quarrelling, I two
women walked side by side, I two mothers, two women of
Leningrad. I And, like a mad woman, I she long entreated me,
hi tterly, timidly.''
A scene from Under Siege incapsulates the city's plight. A
soldier, Kocharyan, has lost his wife in the bombing and returns
in search of his son, Stasik, who is in a children's home. The
streets are deserted: a solitary lorry passes by carrying corpses. At
his ruined home he helps two weak girls extricate a beam for
firewood. He learns from a neighbour of Stasik's whereabouts and
of the cemetery where his wife was taken. Against his neighbour's
advice he sets out for the cemetery and begins to overtake people
harnessed to sledges on which appear to be the swaddled bodies of
children. They are in fact adults whom emaciation has shrunk.
Bodies line the road to the cemetery and inside they lie in huge
piles. He abandons his search for his wife and goes to the
children's home, bursting into tears when he is asked if he is the
child's father. A nurse puts him up for the night and only in the
morning does he find the bodies of her father and mother carefully
laid out on the kitchen table: "I thought you wouldn't have stayed
if ... ". He is accustomed to death, but its casualness in a
civilian context seems sacrilegious and arouses in him an anger
and hatred deeper and more bitter than he had known at the front.
However, the most impressive feature of Leningrad life was the
will to endure. An awareness of the imminence of death seemed to
purify the spirit and rebaptize the five senses. Platitudes, wrote
Shishova, like "Thank you", "My dear" and "Have a good
journey" were spoken with a "special intonation" which restored
"the lost but original meaning of words". The heroine of
Chakovsky's novel remarks upon this lucidity: "One sees through
to the depths of language. Everything has become as clear as
crystal, like the ice on Ladoga." In a city which consumed
everything - dogs, cats, birds, glue and belts -the rye bread
brought across Ladoga became an object of reverence. lnber
described it as "sacred" bread, "whiter than snow" .51
The city rallied. The young succoured the sick and cleaned the
flats. Some factories still functioned. Tikhonov's A Winter's Night
(1942) is set in one such factory which resembles "a cave of
154 The Second World War in Fiction

stalactites. The dark sky showed through the shell-holes: a

satin surface of ice covered the vaults and walls." A worker
collapses and dies with the words, "My soul's ablaze." 52 Berg-
gol'ts' "Leningrad Poem" illustrates just how "the spirit, holding
fast, overcame the body's treacherous impotence." Ketlinskaya
referred to the prevalent "feeling of freedom and independence
from the body" resulting in an almost religious love of the city:
"This is our city. It cannot be taken by storm, nor by intimida-
tion. Nor by famine. We shall stand firm. We shall endure."
Chakovsky defines its eerie spiritual power: "The city seems
empty. After dusk one doesn't see any people and one never sees
troops. But the city cannot be taken. It is as if its defenders were
invisible. Touch it and it will kill."
Broadcasting on 20 September 1942 Berggol'ts claimed that an
umbilical cord united Leningrad and Stalingrad. The resistance
and self-sacrifice of each were spontaneous. Each exhibited a
spirit which inspired and unified the nation.
In Nekrasov's novel two soldiers at Stalingrad disguss the
land's fertility. There is a warmth in their voices: "Tolstoy called
it the latent heat of patriotism. It could well be that this was the
miracle . . . which would prove more powerful than German
organisation and tanks with black crosses." Patriotism was the
decisive factor in this battle described by Grossman as an elemen-
tal conflict between two states "locked in a life-and-death struggle
waged with a mathematical, pedantic exactitude for a storey of a
house, for a cross-roads". On New Year's day 1943 he listened to a
record of one of Beethoven's Irish Drinking Songs:
Milady Death, we beg you,
Tarry outside the door.
The words and the naive genius of Beethoven's music rang
out with indescribable power. This was perhaps for me one of
the greatest experiences of the war, for at war a man knows
many passionate, joyful or bitter feelings, he knows hatred and
anguish, grief and fear, love and pity and vengeance. But
sadness is a rare visitor. Yet in those words, in that music of a
heart's lament, in that condescending, ironic request:
Milady Death, we beg you,
Tarry outside the door,
there was an inexpressible strength, a sadness that was
noble .... The soldiers listened to it as solemnly as they would a
 Soviet Union 155

church service, men who had spent three months face to face
with death in that ruined, maimed building which had not
yielded to Fascists. 53

Likened by Simonov to an unbroken series of "cairns

haphazardly raised over houses which had gone underground", 54
Stalingrad was to engender the same legend of indomitable
courage as Leningrad did. Like the people of Leningrad, the
troops felt isolated and left to their own devices. Isolation fostered
independence and cameraderie. Life was reduced to basics and
the formalities of military custom were largely abandoned. Rank
became less important. According to Grossman, who was present
throughout the battle, there existed "a brotherhood and equality
amongst all the men at Stalingrad - from trooper to general". 55
Russian morale is nowhere better illustrated than in the closing
pages of For a Righteous Cause which describe the destruction of one
of Rodimtsev's battalions. All differences between regular, con-
script and penal troops suspended, communications with divi-
sional headquarters severed, conversing in the past tense, the men
die doggedly unyielding and serene. His comrades dead, the
peasant Vavilov climbs out of his shell-hole with a grenade:
"Submachine-guns ... avidly rattled their fire at him ... , and
when he disappeared from view, it was as if he had not collapsed
like a clod of dead, bloody flesh, but had melted into the dusty,
milky-yellow mist which eddied and gleamed in the rays of the
morning sun."
The tension created by the ordeal of the two cities was im-
mense. There was a palpable excitement in the air and an
awareness of the nation's historical destiny. Berggol'ts felt that
she was living on a different plane of experience: "And time shall
be no more .... I know exactly how this happens .... Time
stopped, it contracted and became a single point of radiating light
within me. Time and being were one. And the barriers between
art and life, between past, present and future joyfully collapsed."
She talks of a new psychic dimension which enabled her to enjoy
"all of life simultaneously, all its poetry and all its tragedy". In
"The Third Zone", a poem of 1942, she heard a stringed instru-
ment at the front and wrote: "Life will simply incandesce and
cease abruptly, like a string full of song." "Your Journey" (1945)
describes a happiness which was "untender, stern and sleepless".
Although it may at times "have ruin in attendance," it neverthe-
156 The Second World War in Fiction

less transports one to "peaks so solitary, tender and bare/ that the
gods would envy them". Tikhonov's The Apple Tree (1942) is
about a dejected Leningrad artist who, returning home after an
air-raid, sees an apple tree covered in frost and caught in moon-
light: "The tree burned with a cold, wondrous light: like a white
fire it cast snow-white flames which never for an instant ceased to
blaze and gambol." Comforted by this symbol of Leningrad, he
dismisses thoughts of leaving his "astounding world of beauty,
heroism, toil and majesty".
Many factors contributed to this ecstatic, quasi-mystical mood.
Aliger's "Your Victory" (1944-69) recalls the gentleness and
fellowship of people at war. Everything was shared and "we
became more expansive, simpler, younger", for "our love was
more tender and our comrades more dear". V ershigora compared
the moral integrity of his partisans to that of Leningrad. As
Gudzenko declared in his "Ballad on Friendship" (1942-3) that
"we nursed our friendship as jealously as infantrymen guard a
metre of blood-stained earth", so Chakovsky observed that
everyone in Leningrad possessed an emergency supply of cour-
age, rarely used in extremis to save self, but ready to expend itself
for others' sake.
However, the principal element in the euphoria was a deep
pride in a common achievement. In "A Second Conversion with
my Neighbour" (1944) Berggol'ts reminds her friend that "we
whom life's humdrum cares intoxicated/took nameless
heights/which are not mapped". Bek's Baurdzhan opined that
Russians had never spoken of themselves so eloquently as on the
battlefield. Sel'vinsky's "Letter" (1943) elevates this national
pride into a sense of historical mission. Time lengthens in war: an
hour in battle becomes eternity. Under such constant pressure a
soldier adapts to timelessness. Self dissolves: a philosophical,
eternal perspective obtains. Consciousness becomes selfless and
one's being is "warmed by a secret flame". One is absorbed into
history whose "battle-pitted, yet intimate face" one goes out to
meet "as if it were the sole point of life". The troops, wrote Surkov
in "Keys to the Heart" (1942}, knew that they were "standing in
the draught of great events,/Believing to the end in their star".
Vishnevsky provided a more prosaic interpretation of the same
patriotism. Neither Hoover nor Lady Astor could now deny that
Russia had set the world an example and had emerged as one of
the world's spiritual leaders.
 Soviet Union 157

After Stalingrad the patriotism inherent in all Soviet wartime

literature becomes more buoyant and confident. Tvardovsky's
"Vasily Tyorkin" (1941-45) is a nice blend of that realism and
improbability characteristic of folklore. Tyorkin's pithy aphor-
isms and his musical talents, the aplomb with which he pees on
the battle-field and bags an enemy plane with a rifle, his fondness
for drink and physical strength, the modesty of his demeanour
and derring-do in battle secured instant popularity and spawned
many lesser Tyorkins.
Kozhevnikov's Stories of the War Years (1941-5) celebrate the
versatility of the ordinary soldier. These cock-sure tales reflect the
:tuthor's conviction, even in the darkest days, that the phlegm,
inventiveness and courage of the Russian character would ulti-
mately triumph. Kozhevnikov delights in eccentric characters
and colourful situations. Russian troops advance under a drained
lake's cracking ice; a sniper diets on vitamin pills and carrots; a
fanatical mechanic is genuinely hurt to discover that a tank
commander, whose tank he has lovingly repaired, has died in
hospital.
This vein of unpretentious patriotism continues in such post-
war works as Polevoy's novel, A Real Man (1946), his stories, We
are Soviet Citizens (1948), and Panova's Travelling Companions
( 1946). Polevoy' s stories are based on actual events and his novel
is the biography of the Russian counterpart of Douglas Bader-
Aleksey Mares'ev who, despite the loss of both legs below the
knee, resumed his career as a fighter-pilot. The matter-of-fact
manner in which the pilot's crawl to the safety of a Russian village
is described precludes any romanticism and relates exceptional
heroism to a common fund of Russian valour. Panova's novel is
set in a hospital-train. The personnel ranges from a representative
of the Leningrad intelligentsia to the social flotsam and jetsam
who service the train. Few have common interests, but the
exacting daily routine of nursing, amputations and operations
welds this motley assemblage into an efficient, proud unit.
Startlingly different is Leonov's The Capture of Velikoshumsk
( 1944), a Gogolian, romantic commemoration of Russian pro-
wess, loosely based on the fighting at Zhitomir in the winter of
1943. Written with all Leonov's verbal virtuosity and rhetoric, its
characters in the heroic mould, the novel pays homage to a
veteran tank, No. 203, whose exploits are so awesome that
158 The Second World War in Fiction

mechanics doff their caps when it arrives for repairs. The tank
becomes a personality in its own right, wreaks havoc behind
enemy lines and finally dies a martyr's death in a literal blaze of
glory.
The poetic counterpart of Leonov's patriotic celebration of
victory is Prokof'ev's famous "Russia" (1944) in which the coun-
try's diversity- its trees, plains, its wheat and industrial produce,
its heterogeneous people and monolithic Party - is synthesised
and given a timeless pedigree by the evocative use of the imagery,
vocabulary and metres of Russian folklore, song and epic. Indeed,
a deep love of the land and countryside is common to all writers.
The landscape constitutes a permanence and a continuity of life of
which the troops crave to become a part again. The flora and
fauna of the countryside awaken a longing for peace and a
nostalgia for home and family. The men identify with the eternal
urge of plant and animal to survive and live. In Surkov's "A Battle
in the Forests near Polotsk" (1944) morning breaks, the battle
quietens and the soldiers realise "that the woodpecker is at work
like a sprightly carpenter ... ; I that a canvas of blue shows
through the branches; I that the road to the next battle is shorter; I
that life is immortal and in its name I we shall still serve our
country".
Tyorkin also claimed that he fought "not for fame, but for life
on this earth''. 56 As the war drew to its close, it was viewed less as a
struggle for national survival than as a victory of humanity and
civilisation over barbarism, a victory to which Russia had made
the greatest contribution. Although no open animosity is dis-
played towards the allies in the literature of 1941-6, their failure
to open a second front until 1944 indubitably rankled. Vishnevs-
ky's belief that the allies would fight to "the last drop of the
Russian soldier's blood" and that their intention was "to put
Germany in its coffin and Russia in hospital" 57 was confined to his
diaries and expressed a rancour which Stalin was to exploit after
the war. Published literature, however, limited its exasperation to
occasional references to the comparatively minuscule scale of the
fighting in North Africa and to Stalin's remark that the partisans
would have to serve as a second front. Nevertheless, there was a
proud consciousness that Russia had borne the brunt of the war
and had been mankind's principal standard-bearer. In January
1942 lnber noted: "The USSR is being called the Saviour of
Mankind and indeed it is so." Sel'vinsky's poem, "To Russia"
(1942), argued that the defeat of Russia would rob the world of
 Soviet Union 159

hope, for Russia had become "Humanity". Indeed, Leonov's

claim in his novel of 1944 that the Russian victory "had opened
our eyes wide in astonishment at ourselves and at the world"
indentifies the two main trends in Russian literature at the end of
the war. 58 The first is a strong sense of national identity and unity
based upon a rediscovery and love of the ordinary people of
Russia. The second is a heightened awareness of Russia's interna-
tional prestige and standing, a feeling that the country did uphold
common human values against barbarism and that, after its own
pre-war dark age, it was again ready to make a contribution to the
comity of nations.

These ambitions were to be frustrated. During the Cold War the

Party resumed its ascendancy. The awesome power of the state
ended the wartime partnership between Party and people and
stifled democratic aspirations "akin to those entertained by young
officers returning to Russia after the campaign abroad in 1815" .59
The transformation of patriotism into rabid nationalism and a
propaganda campaign to "reconstruct" the country obviated
discussion of the Party's pre-war and wartime miscalculations
and silenced demobilised soldiers who had sampled higher stan-
dards of life in Eastern Europe and an intelligentsia dangerously
preoccupied with "truth". The claustrophobic normalcy of the
1930s returned. Chauvinistic obscurantists like Aleksandrov and
Lysenko dominated the arts and sciences. The Leningrad Case of
1949-50 and the "Doctors' Plot" of 1952-53 reflected renewed
political in-fighting and initiated fresh waves of arrests. An
"anti-cosmopolitan" campaign of a distinctly anti-Semitic
character was launched to eradicate western cultural influences
and neuter the culture of the minority peoples of the Soviet Union.
In his novel Quiet ( 1964) Bondarev describes the reactions of a
demobilised soldier as follows: "There had been four years of lull
... the defence had been stubborn .... Now forces which Sergei
could not resist were surrounding him ... ". 60
By 1949 a series of Party decrees inspired by Zhdanov in 1946
had uprooted "cosmopolitanism" in Soviet theatre, literature and
cinema with devastating effects upon war literature. The post-war
works of N ekrasov, Kazakevich and V ershigora were part of the
"stubborn defence" which nursed the spirit of front-line litera-
ture. Grossman's For a Righteous Cause was a remarkable anomaly
in 1952.
160 The Second World War in Fiction

Such works, however, became unpalatable. To appease Stalin's

wrath at the political implications of his Two Men on the Steppe
Kazakevich wrote the dishonest Spring on the Oder ( 1949).
Kataev's For the Power of the Soviets! (1949), an inventive story of
underground resistance in Odessa, was deemed to lack a proper
assessment of the Party's role. A second version appeared in 1951
involving both Stalin and Khrushchev in the action. Fadeyev's
Young Guard was also considered unworthy of such a pillar of the
literary establishment. Consequently in the re-written version of
1951 the ineffective Party of 1945 appears as the mentor of the
Young Guard. After a savage attack by Bubennov, Grossman
undertook to re-write his novel.
Orthodox post-war literature therefore is indeed "fiction" in
the pejorative sense of "deceit, dissimulation, pretence" (OED).
In works like Il'enkov's The Main Road (1949), Kazakevich's
Spring on the Oder, Bubennov's The Silver Birch (Part 1, 1947; Part 2,
1950), Biryukov's The Seagull (1950) and Popovkin's The Rubanyuk
Family ( 1951) the Party's military omniscience eliminates all
dramatic tension, and history is accommodated to the current
Party "image". In Kazakevich's novel Nazi provocateurs rather
than Russians commit atrocities on German soil, Berlin falls with
minimal losses and the officer who repatriates Russian prisoners-
of-war is "proud and happy" in his "historic role" .61 Bubennov's
immense work illustrates the degeneration of the war novel. It
opens with an excellent account of the ferocity of the German
attack at Rzhev in 1941. At the end of Part I, however, the hero's
regiment, having broken out of encirclement in the most unlikely
fashion and untroubled by Smersh investigators, is inspired by
Stalin's November speech to stand firm against the foe. Part II
demonstrates the Party's preparedness for war, reflected in its
far-sighted organisation of a superb partisan movement, and the
strategic genius of Stalin who.master-minds the Russian counter-
offensive.
This distortion of history also necessitated the deflation of the
war hero. Writers were encouraged to enhance the role of the
civilian population. The result was a spate of long, tedious novels
like Panfyorov's Battle for Peace (1947), Pavlenko's Happiness
(1947}, Azhaev's Far from Moscow (1948), Babayevsky's Cavalierof
the Golden Star (1948) and Medynsky's Mar'ya (1950). Often
contrasting the fickle instability, albeit temporary, of the demobil-
ised soldier with the enduring ideological rectitude of the civilian,
 Soviet Union 161

these effete and tendentious novels totally fail to convey the

magnitude of the civilian war effort.
In short, "orthodox" war literature became an instrument of
Party propaganda and the war itself a retrospective extension of
the Cold War. Writers lambasted the West, interpreted Fascism
as the creature of American capitalism, wallowed in a self-
glorifying nationalism akin to Nazism and deified Stalin. Like
their pre-war equivalents, the novels are based on the "no-
conflict'" concept of a society so sagely organised that disagree-
ments may arise only between the good and the excellent, and are
populated by smug, self-righteous people of astonishing sexless-
ness. Resembling literary dinosaurs in their massive, uncoordi-
nated bulk and minuscule intellectual content, works like those of
Panfyorov and Babayevsky were soon to become by-words of
sycophancy and pretentiousness.

Once the principle of Stalin's infallibility was challenged, the

artificial life of the "orthodox" novel ended. Khrushchev's "secret
speech" of 1956 demolished Stalin's military and political author-
ity and generated numerous articles and memoirs critical of his
military competence.
Literature inevitably followed suit. Even such apparently un-
contentious works as Bondarev's Last Salvoes (1959), Sokolov's
The Invasion (1963) and Anan'ev's The Tanks Move in Diamond
Formation (1963) put much more emphasis on the people's con-
tribution to the war than on the Party's. Elsewhere the perspec-
tive changes. A new "humanism" appears; experience of war is
particularised rather than generalised and the country's political
problems come to the fore. Indeed, those objections to Party
policy earlier raised by N ekrasov, Dovzhenko and Kazakevich
were bound to revive. Once that fear of national extinction which
had produced the thematic homogeneity of wartime literature
had disappeared, political issues, formerly considered of secon-
dary importance, but very much alive two decades later, had to
re-emerge. The resultant concentration on "secondary" issues,
often criticised as "unhistorical", was the inescapable outcome of
the anaesthetisation of wartime tensions.
Hatred of the Germans, however, remains a constant theme. If
Kuznetsov's Bahi Yar (1966), a documentary novel about life in
162 The Second World War in Fiction

occupied Kiev, is the most detailed account of the effects of

German atrocities, then perhaps Bogomolov's classic story, Ivan
(1958), is the most incisive. Ivan is an eleven-year-old boy
employed as a scout. His father and young sister have been killed
and his mother is missing. He has fought with the partisans and
been in a death-camp. This "pre-history" is never described. His
conduct attests its effect. He is inordinately proud and peremp-
tory. Icy self-control follows childish misbehaviour. He collects
knives and takes vodka with his meals. His spiritual sustenance is
hatred and his exploits have given him the authority of a senior
officer. The soldiers' attitude to him is a mixture of awe, tender-
ness and guilt. Eventually he is sent to a military school but
absconds. After the war it is revealed that, caught watching a
railway line in the winter of 1943, his fingers and toes gangrened,
insolent under questioning, he was shot.
Other writers introduce motifs new to war literature. Okudzha-
va's Good Health, Scholar (1961) and Nekrasov's Second Night
( 1962) were censured for "anachronistic" pacifism. In each the
presentation of war is restricted to the view-point of a raw recruit.
The schoolboy still longs for his home, falls adolescently in love
and is preoccupied with the state of his boots and his loss of a
spoon. Okudzhava's disregard of broader national and military
perspectives and his more explicit attitude towards sex were
clearly designed to shock, while the personalisation of war accen-
tuates the impact and consequences of an excessive death-toll:
"Schoolboys crawling along the trenches, dying of wounds, re-
turning home without arms and legs .... A young girl as a
sergeant-major .... What has happened?" 62 In Nekrasov's story
Len'ka Bogorad is taken by Captain Orlik on his second day at the
front to locate the position of enemy mine-fields and to capture a
German for interrogation. The plan goes wrong and Len'ka has to
strangle the German. Later Orlik ostentatiously displays the
man's belongings and Len'ka feels disgust and shame. The
narrowing of perspective magnifies the scale of an isolated event.
War appears vile.
Greater attention is also paid to the personal reasons which
determined the behaviour of the civilian population under Ger-
man rule. In Nilin's Through the Cemetery (1962) the once clearly
defined concept of loyalty blurs as Nilin, like Dovzhenko, explores
the social fissures in the countryside. Sazon lvanych, whose
brother was sent to Siberia, is witheringly critical of the regime:
 Soviet Union 163

patriotism alone moves him to help the partisans. They in turn

rely upon the services of a mechanic who has lost two sons in their
ranks. His wife therefore does not welcome their arrival, fearing
for her third son who is a Christian and is appalled by the reprisals
which the exploits of the partisans provoke against the villages.
Eva, the widow of a partisan, was expelled from the Party in the
thirties. She aids the partisans, but finds German society conge-
nial and has German lovers.
The change of emphasis, however, is most tangible in the
presentation of the relationship between Party and people. Rus-
sian policy from 1937 to 1942 is now savaged. If "orthodox"
literature interpreted the Russo-German agreement as a gambit
whereby Stalin gained time to prepare for the war he foresaw,
post-Stalin writings insist that his inane faith in its inviolable
legitimacy cost millions of lives. Thus his failure to respond to the
imminence of invasion is comprehensively portrayed in such
works as Smirnov's In Search of the Heroes of the Brest Fortress ( 1957),
Kaverin's Seven Unclean Couples (1961), Yarmagaev's When We
Matured (1962), Vorob'ev's Killed at Moscow (1963), Baklanov's
July 1941 (1965) and Rozen's The Last Two Weeks (1965). Bak-
lanov's novel incapsulates most of the obloquy. Russia continues
its grain supplies to Germany despite the obvious concentration of
German forces at the frontier. Reports by commanders are ig-
nored and insistent warnings lead to dismissal and arrest for
provocation and panic. The old frontier defences have been
dismantled, although fortification of the new frontier is incom-
plete. Russia's humiliation is reflected in her communique of 14
July which dismissed rumours of war as provocation. As the
Germans were uninterested in denying the rumours, the Russians
act "on their behalf" .63 Rozen's novel explores the pre-war atmos-
phere of terror which aggravated the effects of Stalin's misjudg-
ments. Gleb Zimin is recalled from his trade delegation in Berlin
to investigate Russian complaints of faults in an imported Ger-
man turbine. Stalin declares the complaint "provocation" and
Gleb is involved in an NKVD investigation designed to cast the
anti-Nazi manager of the German firm and his Russian counter-
part as provocateurs and fellow-conspirators.
There is scarcely a novel which does not touch upon the
devastating repercussions of the military purges. A common
figure is the officer arrested in 1937 and released between 1939
and 1941. Serpilin, the hero of Simonov's massive trilogy: The
164 The Second World War in Fiction

Living and the Dead ( 1959), People are not Bom Soldiers ( 1964) and The
Last Summer (1 970), was arrested in 1937 because of the suspicion
aroused by his study of German military strategy and theory.
Objective assessments of Germany's military strength and inten-
tions similarly led to the arrest on charges of treasonable connec-
tions with German Intelligence of General Balashov in Zlobin's
Missing (1964). Indeed the many casual references which the
heroine of Rzhevskaya's From Home to the Front (1965) makes to the
sackings and arrests of her friends' relatives illustrate the virul-
ence of the social cancer.
The loyalty of these "politically suspect elements" during the
war highlights the tragedy and waste of the many gifted officers of
the Tukhachevsky school who perished in the camps. In People are
not Born Soldiers Simonov claims that a review of 225 regimental
commanders after the Finnish War revealed that none had at-
tended the Frunze Academy and only twenty-five had been to a
military college. Baklanov's July 1941 and Simonov's Panteleyev
(1961) detail the incompetence and pusillanimity of prematurely
promoted and inexperienced officers who "fear reporting failure
more than failure itself, fear responsibility for losses more than
actual losses". 64
The psychological consequences of the 1930s were no less
debilitating than the loss of qualified personnel. Shalayev of the
Special Section in Baklanov's novel explains the Russian debacle
as the result of that treasonable conspiracy whose eradication in
1937 had been too lenient! This might appear to be an author's
flight of fancy, were it not for the abundant evidence of endemic
suspicion furnished by these novels. In Solzhenitsyn's "Incident
at Krechetovka Junction" (1963) circumstantial evidence per-
suades the good-natured Kotov to surrender an old actor to the
Special Department. Simonov's The Living and the Dead is a caustic
iiidictment of political lunacy in 1941. 150 men, the remains of
Serpilin's division, accompanied by stragglers, break out of encir-
clement, weapons and standard intact. They are isolated, dis-
armed and sent to the rear for questioning. A jam at a bridge
bisects the column and those stranded are mown down unarmed
by encircling German troops. The novel itself hinges on the fate of
Sintsov whose Party documents are taken by a friend, when he is
left for dead. He recovers consciousness, but, returning to Russian
lines, is taken for a spy and then for a coward who has buried his
documents. Party officials shun him and requests for re-entry are
refused.
 Soviet Union 165

The Party's harsh treatment of Russian prisoners-of-war also

re-emerges. Two works by Pilyar, All This Took Place (1955) and
People Remain People (1966), and Zlobin's Missing are based on
their authors' experiences in German camps. Pilyar himself was
sentenced to hard labour in the Urals after his release. The books
pay tribute to those Russians who did not succumb to the
blandishments of the Vlasov forces. As so many of them were
victims of the military ineptitude of a Soviet government which
disowned them, it is astonishing not that so many joined Vlasov,
but that so few did. Treated by the Germans as sub-humans,
placed in penal battalions on escape, despised by the troops who
freed them, were these millions of loyal Russians, Zlobin asks,
"cowards or traitors?" 65 Indeed, a few writers broached the
subject of Vlasov's army. In Kalinin's Bleak Fields ( 1958) the hero
joins Vlasov's forces only to acquire arms and then desert. He
fights with the Russians in Budapest, yet returns to his village in
1957, the implication being that he spent a decade in the Kolyma
prison camp. Save for a brief comment in Bondarev's Hot Snow
(1969) that there may have been political reasons for Vlasov's
apostasy, Russian defections are mainly ascribed to German
coercion rather than to a change in political allegiance. Writers
generally confine their criticism to the Party's dogmatic and
undiscriminating approach to all Russian prisoners-of-war.
As for the heavy toll which the war exacted in injury and life,
anger replaces the stoicism of the forties. Odintsov's The Break-
through ( 1966) describes the activities of a penal unit which is used
as cannon-fodder. Simonov's People are not Born Soldiers under-
scores the waste of manpower involved in the ill-conceived count-
er-offensive of 1942 culminating in the slaughter at Kharkov
where the average lieutenant's "life-span" before death or injury
was nine days. Bondarev's The Battalions Request Fire-Cover ( 1957)
is perhaps the most terse presentation of this common theme. Two
battalions establish a beach-head across the Dnieper. Its mainte-
nance requires artillery support which, although agreed, fails to
materialise. Only thirty-six men survive. Although Iverzev, the
divisional commander, is a careerist, willing to sacrifice men for
the sake of success, his is not the ultimate responsibility. An
"omniscient higher power" 66 had decreed a change of plan and the
battalions were to be used to create a diversion. The story leaves
an impression of remarkable courage and its ruthless exploitation.
Such abundant criticism, however, does not imply that Party
members are ipso facto inhuman. Many of the stories' heroes are
166 The Second World War in Fiction

members. Rather, the conflict is between popular patriotism and

this "higher power" which, akin to fate, moulds events into
arbitrary patterns and whose sole aim seems to be self-assertion
and self-perpetuation. In Baklanov's The Dead Are Not Shamed
( 1961) a depleted artillery division is suddenly ordered into
battle. Unable to take up position, it is overrun and encircled. The
men die bravely. Only one officer, Ishchuk, who deserts his men,
escapes. He is interrogated by a team which includes Elyutin, a
Smersh captain, whose function is to expose and investigate milit-
ary incompetence. lshchuk naturally wishes to conceal his cowar-
dice. A coincidence of interests arises which shifts blame for the
slaughter to the dead and Ishchuk finds himself relating "not
what had taken place ... but what he thought Elyutin wanted to
hear him say" .67
Most writers had served in the war and were aware of the
optimism which then obtained. Between the two periods, how-
ever, lay eight years of Stalinism. A country, inspired by the belief
that the 1930s were over, returned to that dark age. This experi-
ence of hope frustrated now leads to a fundamental reappraisal of
the war's significance and much bleaker conclusions. Elyutin
belongs to a species of character which now becomes a constant,
and the shadows which followed Kazakevich's Ogarkov across
the plains acquire substance.
Simonov's Levashov (1961) presents a classic conflict between
two antithetical social types. The first, Levashov, is thrust into
prominence by the war. Although a patriot, he is true to the
international ideals of the Party. He is a gregarious, popular and
practical man who is tired of purely political activity and craves
action at the front. Bastryukov is a man of the 1930s. He is a
cowardly bureaucrat, a cynical careerist and a rabid nationalist.
His closed world seems to be on the point of collapse in 1941-42,
but, a master of political nuance and the timely denunciation, he
intends to build a military career by employing the same arts.
These two types represent major trends in Soviet society and are
found in variations in the works of Adamovich, Baklanov, Kron,
Bondarev, Bykov and others.
Kron's The House and the Ship (1964) establishes the parameters
of the conflict. Gorbunov is the commander of a submarine who
believes that his crew should be self-reliant and inwardly moti-
vated. His men should never require a Tribunal to stiffen their
resolve. The interdependence of a collective unit differentiates it
 Soviet Union 167

from a "rabble" whose short-lived unity depends upon an exter-

nally imposed system of principles. Chance alone saves Gorbunov
from the intrigues of his adversary, Selyanin, a Party functionary
whose life of duplicity is determined by the attitude - "When
authority puts a question ... try to guess just what it is they want
to hear you say". Selyanin believes that the country's salvation
has been its habituation to cynical, but unquestioning obedience.
Russia endured because "at the outbreak of war it was held
together, like an enormous barrel, by the iron hoops of the State
machine" .68
Bykov subtly develops the theme in five trenchant and drama-
tic stories- The Third Flare (1962), A Page from the Front ( 1963), The
Dead Feel No Pain (1966), Kruglyansky Bridge (1966) and Sotnikov
(1970). In all these tales, save the first, the characters who are
morally wrong survive and the humanists are worsted. In A Page
from the Front the cynical Blishchinsky returns to Russian lines,
while Shcherbak dies covering his retreat. Sotnikov is hanged:
Rybak deserts. In The Dead Feel No Pain Vasil'evich is hounded
and abandoned by Sakhno, the president of a Tribunal who
eventually collaborates. Twenty years later Vasil'evich meets a
prosperous legal adviser who in looks and manner resembles
Sakhno. He is unable to prove, however, that the man is in fact
Sakhno. Kruglyansky bridge is a partisan target. To avoid
reprisals, Maskalov and Tolkach try to destroy it without civilian
aid. They fail and Maskalov dies. Later, Britvin's unprincipled
exploitation of an idealistic local boy works. The bridge is blown
and the boy killed. In disgust, Tolkach shoots and wounds
Britvin. Judgment awaits the arrival of the commissar.
The outlook for Tolkach is not hopeful. If honour is the lot of the
decent, power belongs to the unscrupulous. Such is the spirit of
the times, the lesson of total war. Blishchinsky has grasped this
harsh truth. Patriotism and heroism are "childish prattle". His
aim is survival in order to "fasten like a tick on the new post-war
life" and "preach what he does not believe in" .69 Sakhno's role is
to unmask non-existent treason. The troops hate him as much as
the Germans. The orders he issues lack sense and humanity, but
their very absurdity emphasises hjs unquestioned authority. In-
deed, the orders of both sides deny man's humanity. Vasil'evich
captures a German whose kindness and musical skills appeal to
the Russians. Yet when the latter are captured and Sakhno
deserts, the German is instructed to shoot Vasil'evich and does so.
168 The Second World War in Fiction

Tolkach becomes aware of "the perfidy of blind circumstance"

which resulted in the death of Maskalov, the "best" of the
partisans. But there is a logic in fate's caprice. It emerges when
Britvin mocks Maskalov's humanism. This war is not about
morality and the innocent are pawns: "What relevance has
innocence? We are at war! Do the Germans worry who's guilty?
They just kill. Fear's the secret of their success." 70 The humanist is
caught in cross-fire. A boy is killed, but the bridge is blown. The
best must die. A boy's idealism will be exploited; Maskalov's
conscience will lead to his death. They are trapped between two
warring forces which are basically similar. Total war teaches the
art of survival through ruthless exploitation. Sakhno changes
sides and indeed is interchangeable.
Nor are "tactical" compromises possible. To save his life,
Rybak serves the Germans. His conversion is naturally insincere.
His reasoning resembles Britvin's who despises an idealistic
partisan hanged for refusing to acknowledge the Fuhrer's authori-
ty. A mere lie would have saved his life. Sotnikov warns Rybak
that the German "machine" will brook no such gambits. Rybak
will serve it or be ground to dust. The choice, once made, is
irrevocable and his destiny depends on which side wins. But
Sotnikov's sole "human" gesture of independence from the mur-
derous system is to kick the log from under him on the gallows.
The two sides become almost synonymous. Mezhirov describes
the peace which came in 1945: "The same chill no-man's land, I
The artillery blasted its own troops, I The sappers crawled back
from their recce." 71 A demobilised soldier in Nekrasov's Home
Town ( 1954), confronted by the effrontery of evil in post-war
Russia, experiences the same sensation of incomprehension and
limpness as he did when wounded: "One had a hand and now it's
finished. It hangs like a whip. " 72 Bondarev's Quiet identifies the
menace which stalked society in 1949: "It was like a nightmare ...
the shadows of German helmets appearing on the parapet, Ger-
mans bursting into the dug-out." 73 A character in Pervomaisky's
Wild Honey (1963) reels from the fanaticism of a commissar. He is
a ten-year-old again, lost in a storm, unnerved by "a natural force,
unwilling and unable to consider his plight because of its blind,
inherent power". 74 The opposing forces are not dissimilar. Both
are elementary and elemental.
Grossman's gaunt Life and Fate (1960), which the KGB confis-
cated and Mikhail Suslov, chief Politburo "ideologist", declared
 Soviet Union 169

unfit for publication for two or three hundred years, elucidates the
innuendoes and lays bare the allusions. Grossman compares the
death-camps, social oppression, Caesarism and fanatical
nationalism obtaining in both countries and concludes that the
two systems of "national socialism" are congeneric. Stalingrad
constituted a short-lived challenge to both dictatorships. Grekov,
the commander of a doomed observation post behind enemy lines,
embodies all that was best in the Stalingrad spirit -independence
from and contempt for the Party, a rough humanism and demo-
cratic camaraderie, a fatalism based on a readiness to die for the
compatriots he loves and a desperate, tired longing for freedom.
In the context of the novel's values his death overshadows the
destinies of the other main characters. Shtrum, a nuclear physi-
cist, withstands attacks upon his work and refuses to recant until
Stalin, alerted by Western interest in nuclear fission, personally
offers him every amenity and Shtrum is reabsorbed into the
system. Krymov, a coelacanthine Party official, both exhilarated
and shocked by the spirit of Stalingrad, is, as he must be, arrested.
Novikov, the commander of a tank corps, delays his advance by
eight minutes in order to save lives. His commissar, a former
Party boss, is awed by his decision but, nevertheless, denounces
him and helps his own career. All lack the courage and indepen-
dence of Grekov, and their fate seems pre-ordained, for Gross-
man's thesis is that once the Russian counter-offensive of
November 19th 1942 had succeeded, the Party re-asserted its
authority and pursued its own special goals. The war ceased to be
a patriotic battle for freedom. In reality it became a fight for the
extension of totalitarianism. The novel plots the erosion of pat-
riotism and liberty, as a chauvinistic, anti-Semitic nationalism is
deliberately grafted onto the cynical predatoriness of the 1930s. A
German camp-commandant addresses a captured Bolshevik:
"But should you win, then we shall perish to live in your victory.
It's rather paradoxical: in losing the war we shall win it, we shall
live on in a different form, but it will be the same thing in
essence". 75

The works of Grossman, Bykov and Baklanov are of a higher

quality than most wartime prose. Only Nekrasov's novel and
Kazakevich's Star could compare. Yet, as war fiction per se, they
170 The Second World War in Fiction

are less convincing. The frequently made criticism that their

writings are unhistorical and anachronistic is unfair, but true.
Their fiction does lack the qualities which inform wartime litera-
ture. Fear of national extinction and the belief that Russia
had outlived the dark days of the thirties give the literature of the
war years a momentum and tension reflected in its stoical fatal-
ism, its euphoria and sense of national mission. If fear provided
the initial impetus, it had, by the close of the war, been replaced
by an immense, but by no means insular, patriotic pride engen-
dered by an awareness that Russia had repulsed a threat to
humanity and civilisation. The nation felt that it had put the
1930s behind it and had proved itself worthy of a place amongst its
peers. By the 1960s both the fears and the hopes of the forties had
simply been overtaken by time. The "thrust" of the later litera-
ture had to be different.
The prose of the post-Stalin period also lacks the peculiar
"context" which wartime fiction enjoyed. The poetry of the
forties enhances the prose. The verse of Berggol'ts, Surkov,
Gudzenko, Sel'vinsky, lnber and others is so vividly graphic and
immediate, so dramatic and emotive, that it becomes the norm or
touchstone which establishes the authenticity ~f war literature
proper. Wartime prose is inevitably judged by its proximity to the
qualities embodied in this verse and its survival today is
strangely dependent upon poetry.
The literature of the 1960s is totally independent of these
criteria. Twenty years later not only is the element of fear absent,
but the hope which sustained writers in the 1940s had been
frustrated by eight grim years of post-war Stalinism. Later war
fiction, therefore, emerges as a development of a minor branch of
wartime literature; it is an extension of that criticism of the Party,
oblique in published literature and trenchant in such unpublished
works as Dovzhenko's, which had always been an important, but
secondary feature in works of the forties. The focus now switches
from the struggle with Germany to internal conflicts. The novels
become more analytical and insular, and writers concentrate on
the causes of the debacle of 1941-42 and the reasons why wartime
hopes and aspirations were frustrated. At the risk of over-
simplification, a different conflict generally emerges - that be-
tween people and Party. Some writers probe the purely "techni-
cal" aspects of the Party's errors and trace the effects of its
misguided policies in the 1930s upon the country's military
 Soviet Union 171

capacity. Others explore the moral and ethical implications of

these misjudgments, while a few examine the cruel irony whereby
that patriotism, which had been the crucial factor in Russian
resistance, was exploited to perpetuate a totalitarianism little
different from that practised by the invaders. An impression is
created less of a nation united against a common foe than of one
divided against itself. War literature in the 1960s becomes an
integral part of that literature of protest which generally charac-
terises the post-Stalin period. Its theme is not hope, but hope
frustrated.
The impact of the war upon Russia was immense. Its wounds
still fester and its achievements still inspire. Over half a century
after the Napoleonic War Tolstoy wrote War and Peace. Although
the national awakening of 1812 was also followed by a period of
reaction and suppression, by the 1860s Tolstoy could both recap-
ture the patriotic fervour of 1812 and appreciate the historic
importance and endurance of that fermentation of ideas which the
war inspired. By the turn of this century it may well be thought
that the Great Patriotic War played a similar catalytic role in
Russian affairs and that the pessimistic, but always challenging
and outspoken literature of the 1960s was in fact a re-affirmation
of the wartime spirit of independence.

English Translations of Works Mentioned

Azhaev, Vasilii N., Far from Moscow, trans. by R. Prokofieva (Moscow, 1950).
Babaevsky, Semyon P., Cavalier of the Golden Star, trans. by Ruth Kisch (London,
1956).
Bogomolov, Vladimir 0., Ivan, trans. by B. Isaacs in Flare: Tht Third Flart ...
(Moscow, 1964).
Bondarev, Yuri V., Silence, trans. Elizaveta Fen (London, 1965).
--,The Hot Snow, trans. by R. Daglish (Moscow, 1976).
Bubennov, Mikhail S., Tht Whitt Birch, trans. by L. Stoklitsky (Moscow, 1949).
Bykov, Viktor V., Sotnikov, trans. as The Ordeal by G. Clough (London, 1972).
- - , The Third Flare, trans. R. Daglish in Flare ...
Dovzhenko, Aleksandr P., The Poet as Film-Maker: Selected Writings. Ed. trans. by
M. Carynnyk (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1973).
Ehrenburg, Ilya G., Russia at War, with an Introduction by J.B. Priestley, trans.
by Gerard Shelley (London, 1943).
--,The Storm, trans. by E. Hartley and T. Shebunina (London, 1949).
Gorbatov, Boris L., The Undefeated, trans. as Taras's Family by E. Donnelly
(London, 1944).
Grossman, Vasilii, The People Immortal: A Novel (London, 1943).
172 The Second World War in Fiction

- - , The Years of War, 1941-1945, trans. by E. Donnelly and R. Prokofieva

(Moscow, 1946).
- - , With the Red Army in Poland and Byelorussia: First Byelorussian Front, june-july
1944, trans. by H. Altschuler (London, 1945).
lnber, Vera M., Leningrad Diary, trans. by S. Wolff and R. Grieve (London,
1971).
Kazakevich, Emanuil G., Spring on the Oder, trans. by R. Daglish (Moscow,
1951).
Kuznetsov, Aleksandr V., Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel, trans. by J. Guralsky
(London, 1969).
Medvedev, Dmitri N., Stout Hearts, trans. by D. Svirsky (Moscow, 1961).
Nekrasov, Viktor P., In the Trenches of Stalingrad, trans. as Frontline Stalingradby D.
Floyd (London, 1962).
Panova, Vera F., Travelling Companions, trans. by E. Manning and E. Bud berg as
The Train (London, 1948).
Pavlenko, PetrA., Happiness, etc., trans. by J. Fineberg (Moscow, 1950).
Pilyar, Yuri E., !tAll Really Happened, trans. by P. Ludwich (London, 1961).
Polevoy, Boris N., A Story about a Real Man, trans. by J. Fineberg (Moscow,
1949).
--,Weare Soviet People (Moscow, 1949).
Sholokhov, Mikhail A., Hate: Down South (Moscow, 1942).
- - , One Man's Destiny and Other Stories, trans. by H.C. Stevens (London, 1967).
Simonov, Konstantin M., Days and Nights, trans. by J. Barnes (New York, 1945).
- - , The Living and the Dead, trans. as Victims and Heroes by R. Ainzstein
(London, 1963).
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 1., "The Incident at Krechetovka Station" in Great
Russian Short Stories (New York and London, 1969).
Tolstoy, Aleksey N., My Country: Articles and Stories of the Great Patriotic War of the
Souiet Union, trans. by D.L. Fromberg (London, 1943).
Vershigora, Petro P., Men With a Clear Conscience, trans. by M. Parker (Moscow,
1949).
Wassilewska, Wanda L., Rainbow: A Novel, trans. by E. Bone (London, 1943).
5 United States
Eric Bomberger

The United States was the last of the major combatants to enter
the war, and, except perhaps for the British, experienced the
greatest diversity of combat. In effect, the US armed forces fought
a half-dozen different wars, on two oceans as well as in five
theatres, from the South Pacific to North Africa. The shape of
American war literature was imposed by the variousness of war
itself. There are American novels set in the Pacific (by Norman
Mailer, James Jones, Thomas Heggen), in Italy (Harry Brown,
John Horne Burns, John Hersey), in France and Germany (Glen
Sire, Stefan Heym, Irwin Shaw), and in England (Hersey, etc.).
There are war novels wholly set in America (J.G. Cozzens), and
some which do not involve any Americans at all: John Steinbeck's
The Moon is Down, about German-occupied Norway; Hersey's The
Wall, which describes the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto;
Godfrey Blunden's The Time of the Assassins, set in German-
occupied Russia; and Albert Maltz's The Cross and the Arrow,
about German civilian workers in 1942. There are novels of the
Marine Corps (Leon Uris's Battle Cry), Navy (Heggen's Mr.
Roberts), Air Force (Hersey's The War Lover, Heller's Catch-22),
and of course, the infantry. There are novels about virtually every
kind of military unit; there are pure combat novels (Harry
Brown's A Walk in the Sun), and novels concerned with military
administration of newly-occupied territory (Hersey's A Bell for
Adano). At least two novels end with concentration camp scenes.
There is, in other words, no typical novel of the war.
Americans were actively engaged in the war for less than four
years. This was long enough for a small body of war novels to be
published during the war, but conditions did not permit an active
literary life by soldiers. Journalism was a more characteristic
product of the war, and many distinguished writers served as war
correspondents: Steinbeck for the New York Herald Tribune, Hem-
173
174 The Second World War in Fiction

mingway for Colliers, Dos Passos for Life. Professional journalists

like Ernie Pyle, who covered the war for Scripps-Howard, Vin-
cent Sheean, who wrote for Red Book, and John Gunther, who
went overseas as a broadcaster for the Blue Network, were joined
by younger journalists and writers: Richard Tregaskis was sent to
Guadalcanal by the International News Service, John Hersey was
a Time-Life correspondent, Ira Wolfert wrote for the North
American Newspaper Alliance. (Wolfert's Battle for the Solomons
won the Pulitzer prize for journalism in 1943.) Steinbeck and
Hersey were authors of early war novels, but combatant-writing
generally did not begin to appear in significant quantities until the
late 1940s. The high water mark was reached in 1948, when major
novels appeared by Mailer, Heym, Cozzens and Shaw. War
novels have continued to appear with some regularity ever since.
The cultural context for these novels is not the home front
during the war, but the tensions of American culture during the
Cold War, the McCarthy witch-hunts, and the 1950s. In an
interview in 1948, Norman Mailer explained that he did not
initially regard The Naked and the Dead as an anti-war book, but it
became one as he responded to the mood of America after he
returned home:
every time I turned on the radio and looked in the newspapers,
there was this growing hysteria, this talk of going to war again,
and it made me start looking for the trend of what was
happening.'
An unexpected consequence of this was to diminish the presence
of the specific causes of war, and to see it as a phenomenon which
was caused by man's nature: evil and fallen man's innate propen-
sity for aggression and violence seemed responsible for the woes of
mankind. There was an inclination in the early 1940s to regard
war as a phenomenon transcending history which could only be
understood in psychological and ethical terms. Nazism was re-
garded by most Americans as an unmitigated evil. (Fascism, on
the other hand, was not without its devotees on the right and the
liberal left.) But the growing influence of Freud's social thought in
the 1940s assisted the inclination to empty the war of its political
content. The "think:ng classes" by and large seem to have
accepted the war as a crusade. To understand the American war
experience, it is necessary to understand how little this attitude
was shared by the man in the street and by the enlisted men in the
 United States 175

armed forces. In the literature of the war only a small minority of

characters regard the war with enthusiasm. By the late 1940s the
enemy had changed, but the fixation upon the "enemy" remained
a helpful way to understand the popular mind.
The clearest expression of the way the war was seen by Ameri-
can writers is the prevalence of stark oppositions between charac-
ters who endorse a humane and liberal viewpoint and those who
either love war and killing, or whose temperament is repressive,
conservative and fascistic. The latter are likely to be in positions of
authority in the American military; the former to be junior officers
-captains and lieutenants- torn between necessity and humane
sentiment, or enlisted men like Ackerman in The Young Lions
( 1948) and Prewitt in From Here to Eternity ( 1951), bursting with
individualism and conscience. In Hersey's The War Lover ( 1959)
the dichotomy is suggested by the conflict between Boman and
Buzz Marrow; in Martin Abzug's Spearhead (1946) in the conflict
between Hollis and Knupfer; in Heggen's Mr. Roberts (1946)
between Lieutenant Roberts and Captain Morton; in Alfred
Coppell's Order of Battle ( 1969) between Devereux, who reads the
Oxford Book of English Verse, and Porta, who loves to kill; in The
Naked and the Dead ( 1948) between Hearn and Cummings, and
Valsen and Croft. James Gould Cozzens reverses the liberal bias
of the war novel in Guard of Honor (1948), but finds the same
structure of polar opposition congenial to his purposes: the sym-
bol of order (Colonel "Judge" Ross) is emphatically opposed to
that of political and racial disorder (Lieutenant Edsell). In com-
paratively few American novels does the Fascist enemy actually
turn out to be a cunning, brutal, wily Nazi: Pettinger in Heym's
The Crusaders ( 1948) is opposed to Lieutenant Yates; Lieutenant
Raeder in Glen Sire's The Deathmakers (1960) is opposed to
Captain Brandon; and Lieutenant Hardenburg and Sergeant
Diestl in Shaw's The Young Lions are carefully opposed to the
liberal intellectual Michael Whitacre and the New York Jew
Noah Ackerman. (The "enemy" first showed his face in The Young
Lions in an army training camp in the American south: the
southern racists, bigots and anti-Semites who made up the major-
ity of Whitacre's and Ackerman's company.) These patterns are
insistent; authorial loyalties are involved. Such elaborate
dichotomization is less typical of the interwar years, when this
patterning appealed mainly to authors of proletarian novels, than
of the harsher political climate which followed the war and the
176 The Second World War in Fiction

opposed categories (East/West, democracy/dictatorship) which

characterised Cold War thought. The very structures of the
American war novel bear the stamp of the mental climate in
which they were written.
There is a paradoxical point here about literary history. The
generation of American writers who served in the Great War left
an important legacy. Dos Passos's early novels, especially Three
Soldiers (1921), Cummings's The Enormous Room (1922) and
Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), to say nothing of the
minor classics of the 1930s, Company K by "William March"
(1933) and Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935), established
the war novel as an important contemporary genre. To some
extent these books influenced attitudes towards the army and
patriotism. It would be hard not to conclude, after a reading of the
American fiction of the Great War, that the army was a vicious,
repressive and totalitarian microcosm of American society, that
war was dehumanizing, and that heroism and patriotism were
things which serious people could no longer believe in. (Such
attitudes were far more likely to be found among American
intellectuals, and the liberal middle-class, from which class the
writers were drawn, than elsewhere in American culture.) It is
striking, however, that even among the war generation there was
little interest in war literature. The great European novels and
poems of the First World War seem to have left no trace on
American writers. Fitzgerald is in this something of an exception.
Shane Leslie introduced him to Scribner's Sons in 1918 as an
American prose Rupert Brooke. 2 The comparison is not wholly
frivolous: Fitzgerald took the title of This Side of Paradise from a
Brooke poem. Perhaps because he did not manage to get overseas
in 1918, Fitzgerald was one of the few American writers who
remained actively interested in war writing. He did a screenplay
in 1937 for Erich Maria Remarque's Three Comrades. Those who
grew up in the interwar years in Europe may have lived with the
shadow of the Great War- Christopher Isherwood is an interest-
ing example- but their American contemporaries, the writers of
Second World War novels, do not seem to have much familiarity
with Remarque, Sassoon, Owen and the others. American
isolationism had an important cultural dimension. If anything,
American writers seem to have been influenced more by movies
about the Great War than by its European literature. 3
The specific image of the war on the Western Front, whether
 United States 177

derived from films or war literature, with its rituals, elaborate

patterns and precise structures, remained in most people's minds
as the shape of war. War meant knowing with some precision that
the enemy was in trenches which closely mirrored our own. Like
ourselves, they had to live underground, and follow the same daily
rituals of stand-to at dawn and dusk. When they attacked, they
had to go over the top and pass through nearly identical patterns
of barbed wire, and face our machine guns; and the same applied
to ourselves. The characteristic flavour of despair in war literature
seems to have faded; what survived was a formal pattern of
combat, with its own etiquette, vocabulary and mythology.•
Despite the overwhelmingly anti-heroic nature of the war
literature of the 1920s and 1930s, writers continually felt the need
to debunk the fantasies of heroism which have for so long cast an
aura around militarism. Novelists of modern warfare, certainly
since Stendhal, have found something decidely useful in romantic
dreams of heroism. The conjunction of dream and reality makes
available the traditional forms of irony. There is a long passage in
The Naked and the Dead in which Wyman, Toglio and Goldstein
haul a heavy anti-tank gun through the jungle. One layer of irony
is revealed when we learn that the effort has gone for nothing:
there never had been any chance of a Japanese counter-attack.
Mailer enhances the irony by contrasting the foul-smelling and
exhausting work (no other writer on war has so devastatingly
caught the depths of physical tiredness) with Wyman's vague
dreams of military glory: "He dreamed of himself charging across
a field in the face of many machine guns; but in the dream there
was no stitch in his side from running too far while bearing too
much weight." Journalists, no less than novelists, felt in them-
selves lingering traces of romantic expectation about going into
combat. "This generation", wrote the liberal journalist Ralph
Ingersoll,

has been brought up on the novels and the histories of the last
war which told of weeks in the trenches under continuous fire,
of 36-hour barrages and 'going over the top,' of mass charges to
cut your way through wire while enemy bullets burned around
you. Maybe it was like that all the time ..... Nothing could be
more violent than the most violent moments, but these mo-
ments were spaced out. Between them there were long spells of
waiting, walking, and waiting. 5
178 The Second World War in Fiction

War, in other words, had its boring moments. Harry Brown,

writing in A Walk in the Sun (1944) of the Italian campaign, said
that "the soldier waits for food, for clothing, for a letter, for a
battle to begin. And often the food is never served, the clothing is
never issued, the letter never arrives and the battle never begins".
Even though every war was mostly like this, the fact was soon
forgotten. It is almost more important to study the ways war is
forgotten than to study the ways it has been remembered.
Memories of the Great War hover above the war literature of
1939-45, through a selective and distorted memory, even to the
point of nostalgia. The Great War seemed somehow coherent and
organized by comparison to the jungle warfare in the Pacific, or the
fighting on the deserts of North Africa. Irwin Shaw suggests such
a nostalgia in The Young Lions when a German Sergeant, Christ-
ian Diestl, compares the irregular and fluid fighting in the desert,
in a landscape which lacked definition, to the Western Front in
the Great War:

The slaughter was horrible in the trenches, but everything was

organized. You got your food regularly, you had a feeling that
matters were arranged in some comprehensible order, the
dangers came through recognizable channels.

The jungle warfare of the Pacific seemed to American writers

particularly terrifying because it lacked clear demarcations and
sides. Hence Mailer's description of the initial landing and ad-
vance on Anopopei in The Naked and the Dead:

There was no front line for several days at least. Little groups of
men filtered through the jungle, fought minor skirmishes with
still smaller groups, and then moved on again. Cumulatively
there was a motion forward, but each individual unit moved in
no particular direction at any given time. They were like a nest
of ants wrestling and tugging at a handful of breadcrumbs in a
field of grass.

Peter Bowman, in his verse novel Beach Red, emphasised the same
point:

In front of you is a fringe of matted vegetation, and the push

slows down. There is no precision here, no formation of steadily
 United States 179

advancing men. Just an unhealthy mixture of friend and foe

stirred vigorously in seething cauldron.

At one point on Guadalcanal Richard Tregaskis heard mortar

shells burst in the direction of the Tenaru river front. Someone
wondered if they were theirs or ours.

'I don't know,' said Col. Gates, taking a puff from his long
cigarette holder. 'That's the trouble with this war', he said with
a smile. 'You never know.'
'In the last war we used to know where the enemy was .. .' 6

Newsreels of the first part of the war suggested a new pattern of

rapid movement, the Blitzkrieg, and were especially particularly
effective in presenting the devastating impact of air power. But
the newsreel paled in comparison to the feature film as a medium
of propaganda and information. 7 Novelists who served in the war
and who generally had to wait until the war ended before they
could begin work, found themselves struggling against the Hol-
lywood version of the war. It was so pervasive, and in the eyes of
returning veterans, so dishonest, that "the movies" became
synonymous with the falsification of war. "Instead of trying to
show the distressing complexity and puzzling diffusion of war",
wrote James Jones,

they pulled everything down to the level of good guy against

bad guy. Instead of showing the terrifying impersonality of
modern war, they invariably pulled it down to one-on-one
situation, a man-against-man, like a tennis match. At best they
made it like a football game. And modern war was not men
against machine. It it was industry against industry. And we
had the best machines. 8

Jones felt that the nature of popular entertainment, with its tidy
and reassuring structures, was at the heart of its dishonesty. "If
this were a movie", Sergeant Bell mused in The Thin Red Line
(1962),

this would be the end of the show, and something would be

decided. In a movie or a novel they would dramatise and build
to the climax of the attack. When the attack came in the film or
180 The Second World War in Fiction

novel, it would decide something. It would have a semblance of

meaning and a semblance of an emotion. And immediately
after it would be over. The audience would go home and think
about the semblance of the meaning and feel the semblance of
the emotion. Even if the hero got killed, it would still make
sense. Art, Bell decided, creative art- was shit ...
Here there was no semblance of meaning. And the emotions
were so many and so mixed up that they were indecipherable,
could not be untangled. Nothing had been decided, nobody had
learned anything. But most important of all, nothing had
ended. Even if they had captured this whole ridge nothing
would have ended. Because tomorrow, or the day after, or the
day after that, they would be called upon to do the same thing
again - maybe under even worse circumstances. The concept
was so overpowering, so numbing, that it shook Bell. Island
after island, hill after hill, beachhead after beachhead, year
after year. It staggered him.

The sensitive soldier-novelist might perceive the profound

incomprehensibility and disorder of modern warfare, but the
demands of art, and of contemporary readers, do not allow the
fallacy of imitative form: even though Jones saw the meaningless-
ness of war, his war novel cannot be without structure or meaning.
In a more complex fashion the novelist (no less, it must be said,
than the Hollywood film maker) imposes coherence, meaning and
structure.
Contempt for Hollywood, for its artificial tidiness, often sur-
faces in war novels. British films made a substantial impact in the
early phase of the war, and gave a measure of the ways in which
life was seen to imitate (bad) art. Sailing on an American mer-
chant marine vessel entering a combat zone in the South Pacific,
Ira Wolfert complained that the crew were "so damned casual"
that "you'd think they were a bunch of limeys in some movie with
Leslie Howard" .9 John Gunther, on board a British destroyer in
the Mediterranean in July 1943, was mightily impressed by the
calm in which the captain responded to unidentified aircraft: " ...
for a few minutes the scene was remarkably like Noel Coward's
[1942] movie 'In Which We Serve"'. 10 A soldier in Peter Bow-
man's Beach Red overhears Japanese soldiers singing: "What do
the Japs think this is- Gilbert and Sullivan?" (There were other
 United States 181

ways in which life imitated art: a character in John Horne Burns's

The Gallery ( 1948) noted the G Is who "deliberately tried to look
like Bill Mauldin cartoons".
War movies provided the war novelist with good examples of
hollow, cliched, insincere speeches, and stagey gestures. In Oc-
tober 1942, John Hersey noted that a Marine captain was show-
ing excessive caution. The soldier's vigilance seemed "just a little
exaggerated, like something out of an unconvincing movie" .11 In
Joe David Brown's Kings Go Forth (1956), Major Blaine shakes
his men's hands before a dangerous mission. "'Good killing,
men,' he said. Major Blaine had seen too many movies." An
American platoon leader in Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun gets
"that old Lost Patrol feeling". Memories were still fresh enough
during the war to recall John Ford's 1934 film starring Victor
McLaglen about an isolated British patrol under Arab attack.
Reassuring his men ("We'll get through") only makes the
American officer feel like a "damned fool": "This wasn't the
movies." When Minetta in The Naked and the Dead attempts to fake
madness to avoid being returned to his platoon after a minor
injury, the movies show him how: "He began to tremble and
allowed some spittle to form on his lips. That'll work. He had a
picture of a madman he had once seen in a movie who had foamed
at the mouth." Michael Whitacre in The Young Lions parodies the
wartime spy fever on the West Coast:

Perhaps this aged gardener in his ragged clothes was really a

full commander in the Japanese Navy, cleverly awaiting the
arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro harbor before
showing his hand. Michael grinned. The movies, he thought,
there is no escape for the modern mind from their onslaught.

Movies powerfully reinforced romantic attitudes to war. Stu-

dents of literature are apt to exaggerate the impact of anti-war
novels and memoirs of the Great War, and ignore the way
Hollywood between the wars contributed to the popular associa-
tions of war with personal courage, and heroism with patriotism.
The isolated anti-war films represent an honourable exception to
the general tendency.
The reality of war, and of the US Army, did not encourage
romantic fantasies of heroism, but contemporary observers often
182 The Second World War in Fiction

wrote as though such expectations survived intact. "In the imagi-

nation of every soldier who expects to fight", according to Ralph
Ingersoll,

the word 'battle' grows until he expects the real thing to call for
continuous heroism, unbelievable fortitude and a superman's
skill at arms. He is just a little surprised then, when he finds that
so much of a battle is no more strenuous than the maneuvers
he's been on ... 12

If many die in battle, even more unheroically survive. Dr. Karan-

dash, the tragic Ukrainian intellectual in Godfrey Blunden's The
Time of the Assassins (1952), records in his notebook that "the truth
about war is that it is never quite Homeric; that humanity
survives. Though the villages are empty, and many dead are to be
counted in the ruins, there is life in the country". "Never quite
Homeric": a nice understatement for the war in Russia, and
scarcely less appropriate for the war in the Pacific, where nothing
survived of chivalric codes of conduct. Few writers have been as
systematically devoted to the discrediting of romantic concep-
tions of war as James Jones. Consider, for example, his descrip-
tion of a soldier under mortar attack in The Thin Red Line:

Slowly he stopped weeping and his eyes cleared, but as the

other emotions, the sorrow, the shame, the selfhatred seeped
out of him under the pressure of self-preservation, the fourth
component, terror, seeped in to replace them until he was only a
vessel completely filled with cowardice, fear and gutlessness.
And that was the way he lay. This was war? There was no
superior test of strength here, no superb swordsmanship, no
bellowing Viking heroism, no expert marksmanship. This was
only numbers. He was being killed for numbers.

This would have been better prose if Jones had not simply named
the emotions but tried to show them in the sequence of events, in
consciousness itself. Jones's point is that the conditions of modern
war do not permit exercises in heroism. The war as a whole never
seems to have become an heroic or uplifting cause for American
G Is. Popular wisdom decades after the war concludes that it was a
Good Thing, that the defeat of Hitler redeems the war as a whole.
But the war novels suggest no such conviction. "I just don't know
 United States 183

whether our soldiers think much about causes", remarked Major

Victor Joppolo in John Hersey's A Bel/for Adano (1944): "That's
one thing that worries me about this war." Liberals like Hersey
and Ralph Ingersoll were bothered by a lack of serious commit-
ment both in the army and on the home front (where Ingersoll
pointed to "the thousand daily evidences of our lack of determina-
tion"). Lieutenant Roberts in Thomas Heggen's novel, who has a
long record as a "frustrated anti-fascist", is the only one on board
the USS Reluctant to be actively concerned about the war: '"I feel
left out', he said to Doc. 'I wanted in that war, Doc. I wanted in it
like hell'." Doc's reply comes closer to what seems the common
view: "I see it as a war of unrelieved necessity - nothing more.
Any ideology attaching is only incidental. Not to say accidental."
Martin Abzug reverses these attitudes in Spearhead, in which a
humane and liberal captain regards the war as " ... nothing more
or less than an unpleasant job that has to be done", while his
German-born lieutenant, who hates Nazis, is perceived to be a
dangerous fanatic. The reversal of attitudes, in which liberals are
portrayed as both believing and not believing in the war, adds to
the confusion and moral ambiguity of the war as portrayed in war
novels. Warfare in the desert or jungle heightened uncertainty
over where the enemy was. The failure to believe in the war as a
cause left a blankness at the heart of the American involvement in
the war, and, of course, in war novels.
In the missing place of public values and purpose, which
Archibald MacLeish and the Office of Facts and Figures gamely
tried to instil in the nation, James Jones's soldiers fought only for
personal respect, for each other, and for survival. Fife, so often the
voice of Jones's thoughts in The Thin Red Line,

could not believe he was fighting this war for God. And he did
not believe he was fighting it for freedom, or democracy, or the
dignity of the human race. When he analyzed it .... he could
find only one reason why he was here, and that was because he
would be ashamed for people to think he was a coward,
embarrassed to be put in jail.

In Whistle (1978), the third volume of Jones's war trilogy, Private

Landers is asked to give a talk on the soldier's responsibilities to
draftees at this hometown Elks Club:
184 The Second World War in Fiction

the soldier's first responsibility is to stay alive ... I can't in

honesty tell you that you will be fighting for freedom, and God,
and your country- as all these other gentlemen have told you.
In combat you don't think about any of that. But I can assure
you that you will be fighting for your life. I think that's a good
thing to remember. I think that's a good thing to fight for.

"Responsibility", during the war, was a code-word used in a

vociferous attack on the politics of American intellectuals and
writers. Archibald MacLeish's polemic in 1940, The lrresponsibles,
and Van Wyck Brooks's lectures on contemporary letters deli-
vered at Columbia University in 1940 and 1941, suggests the
flavour of the attack on intellectuals, modernism, and avant-
garde cultural attitudes. Many old scores were being settledY
Private Landers in Whistle was an "irresponsible" in MacLeish's
phrase, who remained quite indifferent to the ideals and "inher-
ited culture of the West". None of the draftees came over to thank
Landers for his speech. The tough and realistic 1st/Sergeant Mart
Winch, in an impulsive address at an outdoor political rally in San
Francisco, shows that he, too, is an "irresponsible": " ... I'm
more like a Jap first sergeant or a German first sergeant than I am
like these civilian sons of bitches."
James Gould Cozzens, who would certainly have been among
the "responsibles", assumes in Guard of Honor that the ideals and
high principles of the army were little more than a necessary
fiction, useful to preserve the outward seemliness of military
affairs, but which had nothing to do with people's behaviour and
beliefs. Cozzens gives a further conclusion to "Judge" Ross: the
war aims of the average man "was to get out as soon as possible
and go home":

Though the level of intelligence in the average man might be

justly considered low, in very few of them would it be so low that
they accepted notions that they fought, an embattled band of
brothers, for noble 'principles'. They would howl at the idea;
just as, in general, they despised and detested all their officers;
hated the rules and regulations and disobeyed as many as they
could; and from morning to night never stopped cursing the
Army, scheming to get out of it, and hotly bitching about the
slightest inconvenience, let alone hardship.
 United States 185

Cozzens's nihilism is even bleaker than Joseph Heller's. The

change of sensibility between Guard of Honor and Catch-22 is
clearest in Heller's open recognition of the meaninglessness of the
"official" purposes of the Air Force and the war. For Cozzens that
kind of truth is best repressed in the name of military discipline,
and of the public values of duty, honour and country, no matter
how little one may privately believe in them. The commanding
officer at an Air Force base may have been a drunk and a suicide,
but a guard of honour, and all that it implies, is provided for the
funeral. It is a matter of taste which of these nihilisms is preferred.
The official mind in the Pentagon recognized that morale in the
armed forces was not well. The Assistant Secretary for Air noted
that there was "very little idealism" in the armed forces. The
general attitude towards the war was to regard it "as a job to be
done and there is not much willingness to discuss what we are
fighting for". John Morton Blum has pointed out that in 1942 only
one American in ten could name even one provision of the
Atlantic Charter, and a majority had no "clear idea what the war
is all about". By 1945 only a minority remained openly puzzled by
the war. America had not been bombed, except at Pearl Harbor,
nor had it experienced invasion or military occupation. As Blum
interestingly notes, alone among the great powers America was
"fighting this war on imagination alone" .1• At certain deeper
levels of national life, the war remained remote and irrelevant.
War novelists showed a good understanding of the limits to the
American participation in the war. Few Americans, and few
novelists, exercised themselves over the question of war aims. It
was simply there, and needed no further explanation. An unusual
exception is Stefan Heym's The Crusaders. (Heym's work is also
discussed in Chapter 3.) As much a political thriller as a war
novel, Heym dramatizes the issue of war aims through conflicting
attitudes towards a propaganda leaflet. Captain Yates believes
the only credible appeal to German soldiers lay in " ... corned beef
hash, Nescafe and the beauties of the Geneva Convention". His
chief interrogator of POWs, the German-born Private Bing,
appreciated the need to appeal to higher principles and ideals.
Bing's leaflet works, but his struggle to define American ideals,
even on so limited a scale, reveals a cynicism and naivete which
Heym takes to be characteristically American. Captain Yates,
with frequent prodding from Private Bing, comes to suspect that
186 The Second World War in Fiction

his superior officer, Major Willoughby, is actively pursuing his

private financial advantage in the reconstruction of a steel cartel
after the war. Willoughby's deal with the von Rentelen steel
interests, which had been actively mobilized in support of the
Nazi war effort, typified the cynical and corrupt capacity of the
American military administration to line its own pockets at the
expense of the postwar hopes of the German people. Here is
another case in which the powers of selective forgetting need
correction. The common assumption takes the victorious Yanks
to have been generous, perhaps a little innocently so, but moti-
vated by idealistic and humanitarian concerns. But American
war novels suggest, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, that the military
administrations were "irresponsible and corrupt" . 15 Hersey's A
Bell for Adano, John Horne Burns's The Gallery, and Heym's novel
contradict some of the basic assumptions of American character
and motivation. There are in all three novels "good" characters
moved by decency and integrity; but the overwhelming impres-
sion is of cynicism and self-seeking. The symbolic resolution of the
issue in The Crusaders, in which the von Rentelen family estate was
turned over to the survivors of the Paula concentration camp is
not persuasive. But Heym's novel, written by a German anti-
fascist emigrant who attended the University of Chicago and
served in the psychological warfare branch of the US Army (and
subsequently returned to live in East Germany), assumes that the
enemy is not only on the other side, but that evil exists within the
American Army and within American values.
This was not the self-image which most Americans had of
themselves, or why they were in the war. John Hersey asked a
group of young Marines on Guadalcanal in October 1942 why
they were fighting. After a long, uneasy pause, one Marine
remarked, "'Jesus, what I'd give for a piece of blueberry pie.'"
Another preferred mince pies, a third apple: pie was a potent
symbol of home. Other men had other symbols, but the meaning
was clear. They were fighting "to get the goddam thing over and
get home": "Home is where the good things are- the generosity,
the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie." 16 Peter
Bowman assembles a different catalogue with a similar intention:

Here's what really matters to him: a paved street lined

with familiar trees and a grassy lawn and a car
and a girl and a hamburger joint and a crowd
coming out of a movie and a hot bath and
 United States 187

a gay necktie and the labor of a trolley going

uphill and a glossy pond and peanuts behind third base.
(Beach, Reel)

Normality defined itself in comfortable ways. The one class of

characters in American war novels to be uncomfortable with
apple pie and hamburger joints as symbols of American values
were the intellectuals and liberals. There is a surprisingly large
number of them: Milton Norton in Battle Cry (1953), Tyler
Williams in The Steel Cocoon (1958), Jim Edsell in Guard of Honor,
Terence Reardon in Wolf Pack (1960), Doug Roberts in Mr.
Roberts, Hollis in Spearhead, Michael Whitacre and Noah Acker-
man in The Young Lions, and Robert Hearn in The Naked and the
Dead. Very few survive the war with their liberalism intact.
Norton, Roberts, Ackerman and Hearn die in the war; many of
the others lose their liberalism in collision with reality; Edsell, the
radical in Cozzens's novel, is shown to be a liar and a loud-
mouthed troublemaker. One might write the history of post-war
liberalism through their fates.
Mailer's Lieutenant Hearn is the most fully-realized portrayal
of a liberal in the American war novel, and will repay closer
attention. Hearn does not simply embody a series of abstract
propositions or political opinions. His liberalism is uneasy, and is
without the destructive confidence of Lieutenant Edsell in Guard
of Honor. Mailer roots Hearn's politics in his childhood rebellion
against the philistine prosperity of his father. Marked by "guilt of
birth", Hearn's rebellion extends to the Army, and to the
privileges of the officer class. He has earned his commission the
hard way, through Officer Candidate's School; but, as Mailer
indicates, it has not been easy for Hearn to sustain his anger at the
injustices of society, especially when he was himself the direct
beneficiary of injustice. A partial explanation of Hearn's outburst
at Lt. Col. Conn's "labial interpretation of history" (the near-
universal belief among Republicans and Southerners that
Roosevelt had a black mistress. In fact, she was white.) was his
fear that he did not really care if such ignorant racism was openly
displayed in Headquarters Company, or whether rations were
unfairly distributed between officers and men. Mailer emphasizes
the conflict between Hearn's objective interests (a larger meat
ration, avoiding conflict with a superior officer) and his sentimen-
tal inclinations. When he is asked to leave the John Reed Society
at Harvard, Hearn is reminded that "You're independent of
188 The Second World War in Fiction

economic considerations, and so you're without fear, without

proper understanding." This emphasis on the economic
paradoxes of middle-class liberalism is unsubtle; it is also neces-
sary for the understanding of the basically frail and, in Mailer's
view, undependable nature of liberalism itself. It is a nice touch on
Mailer's part that those with the requisite "economic considera-
tions" such as Martinez, Gallagher and Valsen were hardly
liberals: there is nothing like Marxist orthodoxy in Mailer's
criticism of liberalism.
Hearn's conversations with General Cummings are rightly felt
to contain the heart of the book's politics. Cummings sees in
Hearn a proper adversary and an educated man; he alone in
Headquarters Company is capable of understanding the political
and philosophical implications of the general's thought. Their
relationship is objectively unequal, and something central to
Cummings's personality is revealed in the evident pleasure he
takes in baiting Hearn, and then slapping him down. The strong
undercurrents of sexual tension between Cummings and Hearn
have often been noted. Cummings would like to see the aloof,
Harvard-educated liberal humiliated, to see him "afraid, filled
with shame if only for an instant". His relationship to Hearn is a
long, aggressive prelude to buggery. Hearn on the other hand
knew, while attacking Lt. Col. Conn, that Cummings would
intervene to save him. The general is more a father-figure,
someone against whom he can safely rebel, than a real object of
fear. There is another aspect of Cummings which attracts Hearn:
he is a man who exercises power, whose will, at its deepest level,
seeks the domination of others. Cummings's Faustian urge for
power touches upon a similar impulse within Hearn; the "pecul-
iar magnetism" of power attracts him, and dissolves the clear
political difference between the two men:

There were times when the demarcation between their minds

was blurred for him. . . . Divorced of all the environmental
trappings, all the confusing and misleading attitudes he had
absorbed, he was basically like Cummings .... They were both
the same, and it had produced first the intimacy, the attraction
they had felt toward each other, and then the hatred.

When Hearn is sent off on a dangerous patrol by Cummings, he

discovers that the experience of leading men was deeply satisfy-
ing. He recognizes in himself that he was, in the desire to lead,
 United States 189

"just another Croft" (the sergeant who was the previous leader of
the Intelligence and Reconaissance platoon). The recognition
that he was like Cummings and Croft humanizes Hearn, saves
him from liberal priggishness. But it does not save him from
sentimentality, a far more serious failing in Mailer's eyes. Hearn
struggles to reconcile his liberal instinct to be a nice guy (qualified
by the "casual truth" which Hearn grants that he cared for others
only in the abstract) with the objective reality (again!) that he
must dominate his new platoon, and its highly competent and
vicious sergeant, or lose control of the patrol altogether. The
separation of Hearn and Cummings deprives The Naked and the
Dead of some of its political energy. Croft is too instictive and
inarticulate to engage in a dialogue with Hearn; all he can do is
kill him. Hearn was isolated in Headquarters Company, and even
more so on the patrol. His overtures are rebuffed by the men,
contemptuous of officers trying to buddie up with them, and he is
deceived by Croft. The odds have been stacked against Hearn,
and his sentimental liberalism, but not with contempt. The
political alternatives present elsewhere in Mailer's book leave
room mainly for qualified pessimism. Cummings's vision of a
totalitarian future (" ... the only morality of the future is a power
morality ... ") is not answered by liberalism: for reasons of temp-
erament and force majeure, Hearn must "crawfish" before authori-
ty. Ironically, it is the anonymous American soldiers on Anopopei
who successfully resist Cummings's will. When the difficult
wheeling manoeuvre to face the Toyaku line was completed, the
offensive stalled. The soldiers settled down in their positions,
attended to improving their creature comforts; inertia, not politi-
cal principle, resisting the Faustian will:

... apparently without cause [the general thought], or at least

through causes too intangible for him to discover, he had lost
his sensitive control. No matter how he molded them now the
men always collapsed into a sodden resistent mass like dish-
rags, too soft, too wet to hold any shape which might be given
them.

The central drama of General Cummings's existence was the

sheer exertion of power, the struggle of the will against the mass.
His temporary defeat before the Toyaku line has a biological
basis: however imperiously the will asserts itself, there is always
that other, "intangible" limitation in man's nature which con-
190 The Second World War in Fiction

strains his reach. As much as Hearn's liberalism was an act of will,

qualified by objective interests and his "guilt of birth", Cum-
mings's Faustian vision of a world responsive to the will of an
individual arrives at its own limits. Hearn and Cummings repres-
ent opposite positions politically, but come to resemble each other
in ways by now characteristic of the American novel of the war.
Opposites lose their distinctness; clarity of definition fades; the
grey fog of history looks more and more impenetrable.
In Battle Cry a trouble-maker is, after much provocation,
beaten up by L.Q., Danny, Ski, Norton and the rest of the guys-
but he refuses to rat on them to the drill instructor. Danny would
rather flunk his radio test than leave his pals behind: "Just that
you make a buddy -and, well, I think it's more important we stick
together than we make it alone." Buddies look after each other
when they fall ill, and when they are betrayed by women: " ... a
smile and the voice of a buddy meant something that none but us
could understand". The feeling that soldiers learn to have for each
other is a glowing, precious thing which flies in the face of the
demoralized and cynical routine of army life. The platoon or
company, the crew of a bomber or a submarine, are natural
communities, dependent upon each other for survival. If the
characteristic malaise of twentieth-century life is anomie and
alienation, it is no wonder that, in J. Glenn Gray's phrase, the
feeling soldiers have of caring and depending upon each other
constitutes an important part of the "enduring appeal" of battle. 17
"If one died," writes Alfred Cappel in Order of Battle, "the
chances were that all would die, and so each became very precious
to the others. Together they were more than the sum of their
individualities. They were a team, a unit. Only war could do that
to a group of men." For those who did not experience combat, the
feeling of mutual dependence and solidarity was rare and to be
savoured for its uniqueness. "The fresh breeze blew on the faces of
the crew", writes Heggen of the USS Reluctant after liberty on
Elysium:

They felt good in the same way ... that any group with the
bright bond of communal achievement feels good. The crew
was a unit at last, and the common artery of participation ran
through and bound together such distant and diverse charac-
ters as Costello and Wiley and Ringgold and Schlemmer. They
stood along the rail in little groups; but those were accidental
 United States 191

groups with interchangeable membership, and not the tight,

jealous cliques of old.

The feeling of mutual dependence is seen with greatest clarity

when danger threatens. Peter Bowman writes in Beach Red:

You walked through the jungle and Lindstrom and

Egan and Whitney were in front of you and you were
behind them, and between you there was connecting tissue.
It was not because of any similarity you may have
had in thought or behaviour or habit or belief, but
because you had groped for it and found it and
it had drawn you close. One of you fell and another
picked him up and carried him in the simple compulsion
of linked survival, and that is the parallel
transcending tribe and race in the utter need of existence.

William M. Hardy in Wolf Pack, apopularadventurenovelabout

submarine warfare in the Pacific, assumes that for the crew
survival was a collective instinct: "The boat must survive, and, if
it did, then every man aboard had the right to expect that he
would survive also." The crew of a B-17 had an identical sense of
mutual dependence. "All ten of us were linked to the ship," writes
John Hersey in The War Lover, "and to each other by those
life-keeping hose lines, and we were like an unborn litter of young
in the belly of our common mother. Never before had I -nor since
have I - had such a feeling of being part of a brood in a plane."
The "common artery of participation" (Heggen), "connecting
tissue" (Bowman), "instinct" (Hardy), and the feeling of being in
the belly of "our common mother" (Hersey), suggest a solidarity
which transcends other kinds of shared purpose, and which is
firmly rooted in a naturalistic perspective.
Mailer suggests the naturalistic lineage of The Naked and the
Dead in similes emphasising the insignificance of human effort:
... they ground the guns forward blindly, a line of ants dragging
their burden back to their hole.
They had the isolation, the insignificance of insects traversing
an endless beach.
Their minds scurried about inside their bodies like rodents in a
maze ...
192 The Second World War in Fiction

Mailer was more deeply influenced by naturalism than any of the

other writers of the war; at a certain fundamental level naturalism
pervaded the common culture. Mailer found in the biological
pessimism of Jack London political overtones which made sense
in 1946-7; others may have seen in the example of the Joad family
in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939) a more optimistic way of
understanding the communal instinct.
Where the American novels of the Great War powerfully
asserted the rights of the individual against the state, embodied in
the army, and against the threatening claims of society (and in
this were very American), by the 1940s Romantic individualism
did not make sense on Anopopei or elsewhere. The gesture of a
Frederic Henry, declaring a "separate peace" between himself
and history, is not possible in the conditions of the Second World
War. Maggio, Prewitt's friend in From Here to Eternity (1951),
declared his own separate peace in the war between himself and
the army- and received a dishonourable discharge. At one point
in Jones's The Thin Red Line, Fife and Storm analyse the prospects
for evacuation:

It was easy to see, when you looked at it from one point of view,
that all prisoners were not locked up behind bars in a stone
quadrangle. Your government could just as easily imprison you
on, say, a jungled island in the South Seas until you had done to
its satisfaction what your government had sent you there to do.
And when one considered it - as all the wounded had - this
matter of evacuation might well be actually and in fact a life and
death matter.

There was no convenient Switzerland for Americans fighting in

the Pacific, nor the chance to play snooker with Count Greffi
before escaping by rowboat at midnight. Hemingway in For Whom
the Bell Tolls suggests a more complex understanding of the
conflict of loyalties. Robert Jordan, unlike soldiers in most Ameri-
can war novels, had a cause to fight for: " ... you fought that
summer and that autumn [1936] for all the poor in the world,
against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the
new world you had been educated into". 18 The "things" he
believes in, as the war goes on, become meaningless; his faith in
"the new world" does not remain innocent or even hopeful.
(Jordan has seen too much at Gaylord's Hotel, seen too many lies
 United States 193

and too much deception; he has even come to enjoy the machinery
of deceit for its own sake.) Yet the cause, the Republic and the
Spanish people, is strong enough to sustain his loyalty. However
drastically the cause has been corrupted, defeating Fascism is
important enough for Jordan to accept his own death. His loyalty
is to an idea, a metaphysical hope, for which he is willing to
sacrifice himself and everyone in El Sardo's and Pablo's band.
Romantic gestures and political commitments like Robert Jor-
dan's have little place in the mechanized and collective war in
American novels.
The fate of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a miner's son from Harlan
County, Kentucky, hero of James Jones's From Here to Eternity, is a
case in point. Prewitt enlisted in the army to escape the coalmines.
(Harlan County was the scene of a desperate conflict in the early
1930s between miners and coal operators: the name was
synonymous on the American left for repression and violence
against workers.) He thinks of himself as a thirty-year man who
loves the army, and what he believes it stands for, with passionate
conviction. He has a lonely, courageous integrity, a belief in
ethical imperatives and the honourableness of institutions, which
older and wiser heads among the noncoms try to bring down to
earth. One old soldier tells him that a man can no longer do what
he wants to do:

'Maybe back in the old days, back in the time of the pioneers,
a man could do what he wanted to do, in peace. But he had the
woods then, he could go off in the woods and live alone. He
could live well off the woods. And if they followed him there for
this or that, he could just move on. There was always more
woods on up ahead. But a man cant do that now. He's got to
play ball with them.'

Prewitt is an heir of the frontiersman and piOneer, with the

integrity of someone for whom "words meant what they said" . 19
He believes in the the letter of Army Regulations, and hopes that
by avoiding any infringement in the law, he cannot be impelled to
violate his own code of integrity:

' ... I don't think they got the right to order me what to do
outside of duty hours.'
'It aint a question of right or wrong [replied Chief Choate],
194 The Second World War in Fiction

its a question of fack. But there is awys been a question if there is

any outside duty hours for a soljer, whether the soljer has the
right to be a man.'

Prewitt would like, in some vaguely-understood way, to change

the world. He seems a "Kid Galahad" to his friend Angelo
Maggio. The company commander wants Prewitt to box in the
regimental tournament. Prewitt, who has killed a man in the ring,
does not want to box again. The choice confronting him is stark
enough: he can either go out for the boxing team, or else refuse and
receive "The Treatment", a systematic and brutal Army coer-
cion, ending as he saw with "company punishment for inefficien-
cy plus extra duty plus restrictions plus, eventually, the Stock-
ade". In a rueful moment of introspection Prewitt grants that he
had suffered "from an overdeveloped sense of justice". Pride, even
more than a belief in justice, has shaped Prewitt's character: "I
can take everything they can all of them hand out, and come back
for more .. .''
What sustains Prewitt through his ordeal is the comradeship of
men he respects: Maggio, Jack Molloy, and, from a distance,
1st/Sgt. Warden. Each in a different way breaks through the shell
of self-protective pride which Prewitt has erected about himself,
and touches him as a man. In Jones's world such allegiances form
isolated moments in a military system dominated by fear and
violence. Brigadier Slater develops this theme in a discussion with
Captain Holmes. In the past, he argues, the fear of authority was
only the negative part of a moral code emphasising Honour,
Patriotism and Service. Now the world has changed, the positive
code has been destroyed by "the machine": "In the Civil War
they could still believe they fought for 'Honor.' Not any more. In
the Civil War the machine won its first inevitable major victory
over the individual. 'Honor' died.'' Prewitt, like Guy Crouchback
in Waugh's Men at Anns ( 1952), felt the "sickening suspicion ...
that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause
were quite irrelevant to the issue."
After hearing a song ("The Truckdriver's Blues") Prewitt
lapses into reverie on the human condition:

he saw himself and Chief Choate, and Pop Karelson, and

Clark, and Anderson, and Warden, each struggling with a
different medium, each man's path running by its own secret
 United States 195

route from the same source to the same inevitable end. And
each man knowing as the long line moved as skirmishers
through the night woodsey jungle down the hill that all the
others were there with him, each hearing the faint rustlings and
straining to communicate, each wanting to reach out and share,
each wanting to be known, but each unable, as Clark's whining
nasal was unable, to make it known that he was there, and so
each forced to face alone whatever it was up ahead, in the
unmapped alien enemy's land, in the darkness.

The whole of Jones is in this passage. Men must live their lives in
an inner isolation. While hoping to make contact with other men,
they must face the prospect that their efforts will fail. At one
moment in From Here to Eternity, when Prewitt plays taps at
Schofield barracks, there is a revelation of "sympathy and under-
standing":

The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle.
They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness,
an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph
of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a
woman once had told him. They hovered like halos over the
heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all
grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and
understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see
us, dont close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this
sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of
the ruck, not of battle heroes.

As the notes reverberate across the quadrangle, men come to the

porches "to listen in the darkness, feeling the sudden choking
kinship bred of fear that supersedes all personal tastes":

They stood in the darkness of the porches, listening, feeling

suddenly very near the man beside them, who also was a
soldier, who also must die. Then as silent as they had come,
they filed back inside with lowered eyes, suddenly ashamed of
their own emotion, and of seeing a man's naked soul.

A few such beautiful moments in From Here to Eternity intimate

the yearning for community, and its frustration. The stark choice
196 The Second World War in Fiction

before Prewitt, whether to box or go to the Stockade, is no longer

available when, in Jones's The Thin Red Line, the company lands
on Guadalcanal late in 1942. Corporal Fife experiences " ... a
terror both of unimportance, his unimportance, and of powerless-
ness: his powerlessness. He had no control or sayso in any of it".
Sergeant Bell comes to the same realisation. "Free individuals?"
he wonders:

Ha! Somewhere between the time the first Marines had landed
here and this battle now today, American warfare had changed
from individualist warfare to collectivist .... But free individu-
als? What a fucking myth? Numbers of free individuals, maybe;
collections of free individuals.

Confronted by the prospect of their own death, Jones shows the

soldiers appreciatively agreeing with S/Sgt. Skinny Culn, the
company's folk philosopher: "Whatever they say, I'm not a cog
in a machine." Jones's point, and the naturalistic perspective,
contradicts this hopefulness. The more reflective men, like Fife
and Bell, grasp the "total isolation and helplessness" of their
situation. Their nightmares are of total entrapment. The au-
tonomous individual of Western humanist cultures reaches its
nadir in Jones's The Thin Red Line. This kind of exhausting battle
turns men into unfeeling, unthinking automatons. The soldiers
become indifferent to their tiredness, and this itself was an
essential tool for survival:

Exhaustion, hunger, thirst, dirt, the fatigue of perpetual fear,

weakness from lack of water, bruises, danger had all taken their
toll of him until somewhere within the last few minutes- Bell
did not know exactly when- he had ceased to feel human.

Even fear was dulled by this emotional apathy. Bell no longer

cared about anything. But Jones emphasises that this did not
impair Bell's ability to function as a soldier. There is, as Jones sees
it, a biological basis to this emotional closure:

Their systems pumped full of adrenaline to constrict the

peripheral blood vessels, elevate the blood pressure, make the
heart beat more rapidly, and aid coagulation, they were about
 United States 197

as near to automatons without courage or cowardice as flesh

and blood can get. Numbly, they did the necessary.2<1

(Orwell's splendid 1940 polemic, "Inside the Whale", concludes

with the advice that one must "Give yourself over to the world-
process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it;
simply accept it, endure it, record it." Other contemporary
sources might be cited to similar effect: the war, whether for
civilians or soldiers, was too immense an experience to be endured
with anything other than the wise passivity of quietism. 21 ) During
combat, sympathy and concern for others narrowed: " ... while
B's middle platoon shot and were shot, fought and sobbed thirty
yards away beyond the ledge, Gaff's group talked". (Auden in
"Musee des Beaux Arts", written in December 1938, has made
this point in a different context.) Combat numbness could, with
experience, be recognised and even anticipated. Private Doll
welcomes the return of numbness: "It left his mind clear, and
cool, suffused with a grinning bloodthirstiness. It spread all
through him, making a solid impenetrable layer between himself
and the choking fear which would not allow him to swallow as he
hugged the ground." After being relieved, the "universal numb-
ness" took two or three days to go away. This kind of collective
experience brought the company together; at the same time the
personnel of the company changed. Some of the younger officers
had been killed; the original noncoms of C-for-Charlie were dead;
promotions and the arrival of replacements changed the old
company pecking order. Fife was promoted to sergeant, Bell
received a battlefield commission. "It was a totally different
organisation, with a different feel altogether now.'' The inevitable
tragedy of change was taking place.
Despite the many alterations in C-for-Charlie, the idea of the
company remained fixed in the minds of those who, in Whistle,
have been sent to convalesce in Army hospitals in America. Their
names have changed (1st/Sgt. Welsh is now Mart Winch, Witt is
Bobby Prell, Mess/Sgt. Storm is now John Strange) but their
group loyalty is still intense. It is the strongest thing they have left.
Landers and Winch are the only ones to understand that they are
alone with themselves, and their debilitating wounds; they must
learn to live with their isolation. Prell, whose legs had virtually
been smashed by a Japanese machine-gun, had no other life or
identity to turn to. "Without the old company, Prelldidnotreally
198 The Second World War in Fiction

feel he belonged anywhere." They each fail to make contact with

their old civilian selves. Strange's wife has fallen in love with
another man; Landers cannot get along with his family; Winch
feels nothing but contempt for his unfaithful wife. They are
together in a hospital in Luxor (i.e., Memphis), Tennessee, and
form a closely-knit group:

'It's not so much that we think a lot of Prell. It's like we were
investors. And each of us invested his tiny bit of capital in all the
others. When we lose one of us, we all lose a little of our capital.
And we none of us really had that much to invest, you see.'
'"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls,"' Curran quoted.
'John Donne, sure,' Landers grinned wolfishly. 'But that's
shit. And that's what it is with us. That's abstract. And it's
poetry. That's all of humanity. We're not all of humanity. And
we don't give a shit about all of humanity. We probably don't
give much of a shit about each other, really. It's just that that's
all the capital we have.'

The allusion to Donne enables the real point of the comparison to

surface: Jones is thinking of Hemingway's use of the passage from
Donne as epigraph (and title) of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Jones
opposes the personal ethic of Robert Jordan with a tragic, intense-
ly-felt group loyalty. As news reaches them of changes in the
company, each reacts differently. Sergeant Winch is a supreme
realist who knows that no matter how important he once was in
the company, he now must be forgotten. He has no lingering
hopes of reconstructing the past. Strange regards the news from
the South Pacific as a calamity. He had a secret hope " ... that
some day when the war was over they would all of them get
together again somewhere". In the middle of a drunken party,
Prell has an apparition. The -members of his old platoon appear
before him, like the sequence in Lewis Milestone's 1930 film
adaptation of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front: "Slowly,
each hollow-eyed face turned back to smile wistfully, sadly, before
it moved on and faded."
Each in turn were inevitably drawn into their own private lives.
Prell, the rebel and individualist, is awarded the Medal of Honor
and tours the country selling war bonds. This is an unexpected
fate for Prewitt-Witt-Prell, and a sad one. Strange is assigned to a
new company, but feels no loyalty to anyone about him. Despite
 United States 199

his physical decline, Winch is assigned to a new posting. His

attempts to help Prell and Landers are rebuffed and misunder-
stood. His emotional decline ends in collapse and insanity. Lan-
ders cannot face life in the army or outside it, and kills himself in
an accident with a car. On his way back to combat in Europe,
Strange, like Jack London's Martin Eden, commits suicide by
jumping off his ship. Whistle portrays the disintegration of the
collective loyalties which held these men together. Their solidari-
ty has faded, but there is nothing to put in its place. Strange now
suffers " ... from feeling naked and alone and orphaned with a
severity he'd never experienced before". At the heart of their
tragedy, as Jones sees it, is the inevitable disintegration of the
feelings which these men had for each other.
As group solidarity takes on a new meaning in war novels, the
perceived role of individual soldiers diminished. It was part of the
accepted wisdom, in Jones's words, that an infantryman "was
about as note-worthy and important as a single mosquito in an
airplane-launched DDT spray campaign ... ".22 Guerilla warfare
on Leyte in the Philippines was described by Ira Wolfert in
similar terms: "We are a tick in their [the Japanese] hide. All the
building we do, all the work ... is just to build ourselves up to a
tick in their hide. Then the minute they feel the itch of us, they
reach with their two fingers and squash." 23 The scale of war
intimidated ordinary soldiers, and produced a cynicism well-
expressed by Red Valsen in The Naked and the Dead: "No one's
gonna ask you what to do .... They just send you out to get your
ass blown off. ... Don't kid yourself ... a man's no more important
than a goddam cow." This is a theme preoccupying General
Cummings, who notes in his journals:

in battle, men are closer to machines than humans .... We are

not so discrete from the machine any longer .... A machine is
worth so many men; the Navy has judged it even more finely
than we.

The tendency of wartime journalism, and the Hollywood war

movie, was to emphasise the individual's role in the war, and to
stress that G Is were ordinary Americans with values recognisably
emerging from American culture. Journalists tried to humanise
the face of war. 24 Soldiers in their reports were not mosquitoes or
ticks caught up in an experience that defied understanding: they
200 The Second World War in Fiction

were hometown boys, athletes with sweethearts, whose image of

home was a compound of soda shops, tinkering with the jalopy,
and blueberry pie. In the first part of the war- through 1943-
novelists were competing for a contemporary audience with
journalists, and it is true that some of the interest of the early war
novels is more documentary and journalistic than anything else.
The frequent use of details from journalism in this chapter, side by
side with the fiction, has tried to emphasise their affinity. Some of
the finest prose of the war is to be found in the wartime journalism
of Pyle, Gunther, Tregaskis and Hersey.
It is hard not to feel that the American novel of the Second
World War has passed into an almost total neglect. Mailer is still
read with attentiveness, but Jones, so powerful a presence in the
1950s, scarcely exists for students of the contemporary novel; and
there are few others. Two writers of undoubted promise died
young (Thomas Heggen and John Home Bums), others have
become, or more precisely remained, hacks. It is perhaps too easy
to exaggerate the importance of academic opinion in the current
neglect of the war novel. But the shift in critical enthusiasm away
from realism has helped to relegate the war novel to its present
cul-de-sac. Having lost its topical interest, and belonging in
literary technique to an unselfconscious realism, one might as well
be exploring the popular fiction of the civil war for all the currency
this literature possesses today. And yet many of these books are
interesting, and some are capable of gripping a reader. A few can
shock and move. With the exception of Leon Uris, no war novelist
filled me with contempt. Even Battle Cry, with its cult of the
Marine Corps, and comic thinness of characterisation, has its
moments of vivid interest. Uris's description of the pursuit of the
Japanese through the Tarawa atoll is, perhaps, the finest thing he
has ever written.
There is a claim, however, which this literature taken as a
whole makes on us. The war killed so many millions of people that
the sheer numbers mean nothing, cannot be held in the mind no
matter how easily they roll off the tongue. New terms such as
"genocide" and "holocaust" have entered our vocabulary, but
the reality of individual death, to say nothing of forty million
dead, leaks out of western culture. Philippe Aries has argued that
death has been progressively alienated from our lives. People die
in hospital, or nursing home, and not with their families; unlike
any earlier period in history, it is possible in our society to grow
 United States 201

into middle age and beyond without seeing a dead person or

having any close relatives die. Overt displays of mourning are
likely to make others uncomfortable. Aries suggests that there is a
powerful tendency in western culture towards "the almost total
suppression of everything reminding us of death". 25 Aries does not
analyse popular entertainment, however. If he had done so, a
puzzling contradiction would have emerged. As we very well
know, the representation of death, along with violence and crime,
is overwhelmingly present, but the physical reality of death is
studiously avoided. The old Hollywood conventions apply with
virtually unabated strength. Physical wounds are generally taste-
ful and people do not make an excessive fuss over their pain. No
screaming or tears, and for the most part no gore or smashed
limbs.
War writing is not without its own version of these conventions,
as may be seen in Richard Tregaskis's account of the aftermath of
the battle of Tenaru in Guadalcanal Diary. "I watched our men
standing in a shooting-gallery line, thumping bullets into the piles
of Jap carcasses. The edge of the water grew brown and muddy.
Some said the blood of the J ap carcasses was staining the ocean. " 26
The "Jap" was a wily and dangerous opponent. Among the dead
there may have been wounded men, or those only pretending to be
dead. American soldiers had died in the Pacific when Japanese
suicidally rose to stab or shoot one last enemy. It was a symbol of
the mental and cultural gap separating the adversaries. So the
dead must be re-butchered. The erect posture of the soldiers
suggests to Tregaskis a shooting-gallery, with its kewpie-doll
prizes and fairground atmosphere. The dead have been trans-
formed into "carcasses", the Japanese into "Japs", re-butchery
into a shooting-gallery: each transformation subtly alters the
human meaning of the scene. Tregaskis indicates that a later
count of the dead revealed 871 Japanese corpses, enough for their
blood to turn the edges of the river "brown and muddy". The
scale of human death is transforming nature, although Tregaskis
withdraws from such a conclusion. It was not he who saw the
ocean stained by Japanese blood, but unnamed others.
The battle of Tenaru was over, and the American perimeter
around Henderson Field on Guadalcanal was secured. A day later
Tregaskis revisited the scene. By then the bodies on the spit were
"puffed and glossy, like shiny sausages"; one soldier's chest had
expanded and been peeled back "like the leaf of an artichoke";
202 The Second World War in Fiction

another, wearing tortoise-shell glasses, lay on his back "with his

chest a mass of ground meat". The truth about violent death is
forced upon us, but domesticated in simile. Tregaskis's descrip-
tion of the Tenaru battlefield is easily among the most powerful
passages in Guadalcanal Diary. Only Norman Mailer's description
of Japanese dead on Anopopei in TheNaked and the Dead com pares
with it in impact. Mailer's prose is as heavily figurative as
Tregaskis's, and in part serves a similar function. The head of the
driver of a Japanese half-track, crushed, lay sodden as if "it were a
beanbag". Another corpse lay with its intestines bulging out "like
the congested petals of a sea flower"; a body has swollen "like a
doll whose stuffing had broken forth". Japanese entrenchments,
heavily bombed by the Americans, had partly caved in "like a
sand hole on the beach after the children have deserted it and
people tread over its edges". Beanbags, flowers, dolls, children
playing on the beach: the over-whelming incongruity of the
comparisons is, even more than in Tregaskis, calculated and
daring. Mailer allows the resonances of violent death to mingle
with a whole series of emotions introduced through simile and
metaphor which pertain to peace, life, normality. He has attemp-
ted to go beyond this in re-humanising the "car<;asses": the men
in Sergeant Croft's platoon see Japanese dead who "lay very far
from repose, their bodies frozen in the midst of an intense
contortion"; another's "hands in their death throe had encircled
the wound. He looked as if he were calling attention to it". The
gestures remain, after death, as reminders of life unwillingly lost.
When seen in narrative context (the platoon had been heavily
drinking, and on Red Valsen's suggestion went to the site of a
recent battle to look for souvenirs), with the brutally unsentimen-
tal comments of the platoon, the full force of Mailer's prose is
abundantly clear. The tensions created by domesticating the
corpses, and then restoring their human and emotional reality,
touched the men in the platoon differently, and in ways which the
reader can expect if not share. The effect is sombre and complex,
and suggests layers of meaning not to be found in superficially
similar passages in Guadalcanal Diary. Only writing of this quality
can make the ultimate meaning of war accessible to our under-
standing.
Of all the many images of war in American war novels, it is not
descriptions of the dead which haunt the memory, but of transfor-
mation, the passage out of life, in which war reveals its true face.
 United States 203

The central character in Glen Sire's The Deathmakers, a tank

commander, recalls early in the novel something he saw during
the Battle of the Bulge:
In the right-hand lane of the road stretching in toward
Bastogne, and for as he could see, there were the six-by-sixes,
loaded with the orderly rows of sitting men, living men, whose
bodies breathed, and who were warm with life and dreams.
And in the left-hand lane, the other column of trucks, coming
back out of Bastogne, and for as far as he could see - coming
away from the great machine of the war, in their six-by-sixes,
were the cadavers of men who, only a few hours before had been
in column going up. And now, as they returned the dignity was
gone out of them. They were piled high in the trucks like
cordwood- no, not like cordwood; more like garbage. Tum-
bled, pushed, jammed, crammed, contorted; arms, legs, faces,
hands jutting out the sides of the trucks- yes, like garbage, he
thought, remembering. The orderliness was gone, the sitting
side by side. It was a crowd of death, and the dead need no
comfort.

Mechanisation has indeed taken command. There were small

hints of this process embedded in the linguistic quirk of weapons
being endowed with their own voice:

machines guns cry out, 'Da-da-dat! Da-da-dat!'

The Garand exclaims 'Kapow!' and the 4.2 mortar adds 'Palot!'
while the bazooka terminates the discussion with an
irrefutable 'Phoosh!' (Beach Ret!)

The same idea, of weapons speaking to each other, occurred to

Tregaskis: "It was 11.40, and we were working our way down the
beach at the fringe of the jungle, when there came a sudden
splattering of sharp rifle reports .... Deeper-toned rifles took up
the chorus, machine guns joined in, and the shower of sound
became like a rainstorm. " 27 The trucks roll to and fro from the
battle, carrying soldiers and returning with disorderly "garbage";
guns speak out, seemingly with a volition of their own: war is
carried on increasingly without the need for further intervention
by soldiers. There is a bleak comedy in warfare taken over by
weapons, and perhaps also a preview of a battlefield mainly
204 The Second World War in Fiction

consisting of computers, weapons-systems and electronic count-

er-measures. The transformation of the soldier from central im-
portance in war to an adjunct of diminishing interest hints at a
host of other reversals and transformations which now character-
ise modem warfare. The writer who grasped the ironic pos-
sibilities of such fluid meaning was Joseph Heller. Catch-22 ( 1%1)
caught the temper of the 1960s, at a time when the other novels of
the war had begun to fade from memory (and when the cycle of
adaptations of major novels for the cinema had been completed).
None of the meanings of normality or sanity survives in Yos-
sarian's world. He alone is the one who cares, who is outraged at
the moral wilderness which constitutes the Air Force on Pianosa.
There is no shred here of purpose, group loyalty or idealism.
Every value comes under Heller's skeptical scrutiny:

'The hot dog, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mom's apple pie.

That's what everyone's fighting for. But who's fighting for the
decent folk? Who's fighting for more votes for the decent folk?
There's no patriotism, that's what it is. And no matriotism,
either.'
The warrant officer on Yossarian's left was unimpressed.
'Who gives a shit?' he asked tiredly, and turning over on his side
to go to sleep. 28

The verbal energy, and Heller's openness to nonsense while in

search of fresh meaning, suddenly run up against a discourse
from a different novel. The warrant officer is closer to Sergeant
Croft's world than Yossarian's. Heller gaily allows his considera-
ble verbal gifts free rein, and is not afraid to negotiate the distance
from tragedy to black comedy in successive paragraphs. He
adores the snappy one-liner, the stand-up comedian's wisecrack,
the pun and verbal misunderstanding. Heller is the first novelist
to show the influence of the Marx Brothers. He seems also to have
realised that there was a new audience to write for, a college-
educated readership able to appreciate literary allusions of an
accessible sort: the Chaplain finds himself echoing Shylock; ex-
Pfc Wintergreen makes a nice joke with T.S. Eliot's name; and
there is an allusion to "Raskolnikov's dream".
At a deeper level, Heller's humour is serious, indeed even
political. It is firmly based upon the perception (so widely to be
observed in American war novels) that the old clarity between
 United States 205

enemy and friend, them and us, was no longer meaningful in the
conditions of modern warfare. Catch-22 submerges its bitterness
in humour and irony, but its meaning is not to be mistaken: the
old claims of patriotism and loyalty have, for the Catch-22 genera-
tion, lost their power, have indeed become an obscene charade.
The novel bids a plague on both sides. Indeed, in Heller's world
causes are immediately recognisable as deceits and frauds. We see
nothing of the Nazis in the novel, but "our" side was as blandly
bureaucratic, as inhumane, as uncaring, as we know "they" were.
The politics of the novel are from the Cold War, but belong more
to an undercurrent of suspicion which gained ground in the 1950s
that the rival states were far more akin to each other, were being
reciprocally deformed by their conflict, than the proclaimed
official ideologies would suggest. Heller tapped a subterannean
current of feeling on the American left, which was looking for a
way to escape the Cold War dichotomies. He gave brilliant comic
expression to a minority, fugitive sentiment, and helped persuade
a generation that they agreed. The novel ends- shades of Huck
Finn - with flight and escape, a psychologically accurate and
sympathetic response to the dilemmas it poses. The irony of
ironies is that, unnoticed by the millions of young readers of
Catch-22, anxiety was growing in the Pentagon and the State
Department in Washington over the deterioration of the position
in South Vietnam. A few soldiers and politicians were beginning
to wonder in 1961 whether it might be necessary to send American
advisers to bolster up the Saigon regime. 29 As one nightmare
began to lift, another swiftly loomed upon the horizon.
6 Japan: a Perspective
Harry Guest
Party government in Japan came to a violent end when members
of an extremist organisation assassinated the Prime Minister on
15 May 1932. This was only one of a series of bloorly events during
the 1920s and 1930s as fanatical patriots sought to turn the clock
back and rid Japan of all contaminating influences that had been
introduced from the West during the previous eighty years.
National pride had been offended by the White Australia Policy
as well as new American immigration laws which were specifical-
ly aimed to curb Japanese economic expansion. The London
Naval Treaty in 1930, too, helped to reinforce the sense of
deliberate international persecution.
Japan had been hard hit by the Depression. Agricultural
communities suffered most and young army officers, who were
recruited largely from farming stock, increasingly believed that it
was the alliance between big business and party politicians that
was responsible for the immense discrepancies in wealth.
Communism was tainted because it offered a non-Japanese
solution. The Japanese Communist Party, secretly inaugurated in
Hiroshima in July 1922, was outlawed eleven months later, and
leftists were persecuted both under "democratic" and "military"
rule. Several hundred left-wing sympathisers are estimated to
have been liquidated during the 1930s and 1940s. In Runaway
Horses- the second volume of the tetralogy which, with a con-
sciously melodramatic gesture, he completed at dawn some eight
hours before his gory suicide in 1970 - Mishima Yukio 1 gives
details of a right-wing brotherhood who are intending, in 1933, to
purge Japan of its capitalists in the hope that the people will see
the errors of their ways, turn to the emperor again and get rid of
any debilitating Western influences. Young members of this
secret society are arrested before they ~re able to assassinate
various key industrialists. While in the police cells they hear the
206
 japan: a Perspective 207

screams of young Communists being beaten up and, when a

right-wing prisoner asks why he and his friends are not being
treated similarly, the policeman tells him that he and his col-
leagues sympathise with the aims of the brotherhood- the leftists
are foreign-influenced whereas the right-wing society is patriotic
in its desire to break the law.
Outbreaks of violence from extremist organisations gave in-
creasing power to the military who could always use the threat of
insubordination as blackmail. The professional politicians found
it impossible to curb the influence of the army and, by the
mid-1930s, Japan was virtually run by a military government.
Japanese expansion had begun of course with the annexation of
Korea in 191 0; but in 1932 the invasion of Manchuria heralded a
war with China which flared intermittently after Japan left the
League of Nations in 1933 until, in 1937, war was formally
declared and the horrifying massacres in Nanking and elsewhere
indicated to the world that Japan had openly embarked on a
policy of forcible colonisation of the Asian mainland- using, with
increasing frequency, the argument that they were liberating Asia
from the Western colonial powers. Cinematic fiction was tailor-
made for the expanding market. In 1940, China Night- the story of
a love-affair between a Japanese naval officer and a Chinese
orphan- was given three separate endings: for Chinese distribu-
tion they were happily wed; for the Southeast Asian market he
saves her from suicide; for home audiences the girl kills herself.
In 1940 all former political parties were dissolved and the
Tripartite Pact of Mutual Assistance was signed with Germany
and Italy. Japan advanced further and further southwards on the
Asian mainland and, in the summer of 1941, forced the French to
allow Japanese forces to occupy the whole of Indochina. In
December that year came the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Intellectuals and creative artists (among whom was the great
director Ozu Yasujiro) were conscripted as a matter of deliberate
policy and sent to the battlefield- not only so that they should not
be regarded as special cases but in order to encourage them to
collect facts of Japanese heroism for distribution at home. Hino
Ashihei's three volumes of war diaries Troops Among Barley, Troops
on Bare Earth, Troops Among Flowers published in 1938 and 1939
were immediate best-sellers. They got across the authentic
flavour of the Chinese War while at the same time enlivening the
reader at home with the sense of Japanese bravery and Japan's
208 The Second World War in Fiction

divinely inspired mission to free the Asian mainland from the yoke
of the West. One of the anecdotes Hino recounts is of a villager he
knew whose horse was commandeered for the army - a theme
expanded in Yamamoto Kajiro's film The Horse (1941) on which
Kurosawa Akira worked as assistant director. The pathos of this
film in which a colt reared by a young girl is taken for the army did
not find favour with the authorities: all sacrifices were to be made
gladly, indeed were not to be counted as sacrifices at all.
In 1938 Ishikawa Tatsuzo brought out his novel Living Soldier
which criticised the war. It was immediately banned and became
something of a test case as thereafter authors were actively
encouraged to produce pro-war literature. A new school of writing
emerged, "novels that followed the colours" like Ozaki Shiro's
Late Autumn Wind ( 1939), Hayashi Fusao's Shanghai Battle-Line or
Kishida Kunio's 50 Days with the Army (both 1940). Moreover,
watch committees. were set up in every town and village to
monitor reading habits- members of these committees were to be
branded as criminals after 1945.
Censorship under the military regime became extremely strict.
Everything from magazines to school textbooks had to be submit-
ted to the most rigorous vetting before publication was allowed.
As early as 1937, the film industry was given the most specific
instructions as to what was expected. First and foremost, military
matters were not to be treated lightly. However, realistic horror in
battle was to be avoided as having a bad effect on morale.
Individualism as portrayed and praised in European or American
films was to be shunned. The Japanese family spirit and the sense
of duty and sacrifice were to be stressed. Puritanism prevailed in
sexual matters and any evidence of "loose" morality was labelled
decadent. Romantic love was a Western invention and ipso facto
undesirable. Fanatical "Japaneseness" went so far as to ban
foreign words from the language, an experiment in turning back
thf' linguistic clock that Goebbels was attempting to perform in
Germany. Neologisms were coined to replace words such as
"baseball" borrowed from English, and their use was made
obligatory.
In 1937, the first year of the "official" Chinese War, a novella
by Kafii, then in his late fifties, found disfavour with the au-
thorities. It may in fact be his masterpiece, A Strange Tale from East
of the River. With a kind of dreamy squalor he imagines a writer
very like himself "stuck" as it were with a story he is engaged on
 Japan: a Perspective 209

and seeking to find creative release by wandering in a sleazy

half-world of cheap brothels beyond the River Sumida, Tokyo's
traditional northeastern boundary. The narrator forms a half-
hearted relationship with a prostitute and, anonymous both from
a desire to cast off his social role and to avoid suspicion from the
police, he pretends to be poor- indeed, to her, he goes so far as to
claim he is a peddler of dubious books and thus to identify himself
with a world where crime and fallen women form an alliance
against strait-laced society.
Not only the twilit morality of the area of Tokyo described in
the most sensuous detail but the fact the "hero" is engaged in the
translation of French literature meant that it was an undesirable
text for those supposedly stirring and heroic times. After it KafU
published nothing until after the war. However, in 1942 he wrote
The Decoration, set mainly in the slatternly dressing-room of a
theatre where the girl dancers sprawl and smoke and gossip
between performances. An old man earns a pittance bringing food
to the girls and, talking to a young actor in a fake soldier's
uniform, he boasts of his own military glories- in 1904, during the
Russo-Japanese War, of special significance being the first occa-
sion in modern history when an Oriental nation defeated a
Western power. The following day he is persuaded to bring along
the medal he won. The girls are thrilled, make him put on a
stage-uniform and get him photographed. When the picture is
developed it is seen that the medal was sewn on the right pocket,
not the left. So the photographer reverses the negative "to make
things seem in order". In this shabby, believable setting Kafu
takes us to the heart of ostentatious militarism and shows the
hollowness, the ultimate pathos and, by photographic sleight-of-
hand, the way even apparent evidence is suspect.
Civilian life was unimportant to the authorities. It was the
expansion during the first years after Pearl Harbor that was
acclaimed and regarded as being the true subject of heroic fiction.
By February 1942, because Siam after a token resistance of
twenty-four hours had allowed Japanese troops through her
territory, Japan controlled the whole of Malaya as far as Singa-
pore. Burma and the Philippines were taken in May. In the same
year Yamamoto more than made amends for his gently defeatist
The Horse with an immense epic The War at Sea from Hawai to
Malaya. So brilliant were the effects that the US Occupation
forces assumed it was a documentary, though in fact the entire
210 The Second World War in Fiction

film was shot in the studio. The war heroes were the embodiment
of Japanese fighting spirit- something no effete Westerner could
either understand or withstand. To keep this spirit going martial
songs were written and circulated - songs that are still sung in
upstairs rooms above certain cafes in Tokyo today when veterans
foregather.
The "Spirit of Yamato" was extolled- Yamato being the name
of the province ruled by the legendary first emperor of Japan in
660 B.C. and a name that has become synonymous with all the
most desirable qualities in Japanese tradition. Contemporary
Japanese were conscious of being a superior race, but flowers of
such splendour must be shown to have strong roots. More and
more the authorities encouraged historical or pseudo-historical
fiction that would prove how native to Japan are such virtues as
self-sacrifice, stoicism and abiding love of the fatherland.
Yoshikawa Eiji- significantly a member in his student years of an
extremist patriotic movement- has been called the inventor of
pre-20th century Japan and certainly his highly-coloured, care-
fully tailored novels demonstrated to his contemporaries exactly
what they had imagined Japan's heroic past to have been. It was
expedient to re-interpret, or rather to traduce, three epochs in
particular. The 12th century civil war that raged between the
major clans not only brought about the rise of the samurai with
their code of loyalty and asceticism. The conflict also had as a
direct result the establishment of the Shogunate - a system
whereby the all-powerful samurai government controlled and
protected the imperial throne. This could now be seen as the
historical precedent for the current situation - a Fascist govern-
ment running Japan "in accordance with the wishes of the Divine
Emperor". The Tokugawa era (1603-1868) was a period during
which Japan, uncontaminated by the West, saw the common
people gaining sufficient status to be themselves loyal retainers of
the emperor. In this age the "aristocratic" arts of poetry and
theatre became more available as traditional themes and legends
were moulded into Kabuki plays or Bunraku puppet-dramas -
both genres aimed at the emerging town-dweller class. The Meiji
Restoration (1868-1912) was a time when Japan took from the
West what was to prove useful to her while never abandoning the
true national qualities of frugality and obedience to the emperor.
Tomita Tsuneo pleased the authorities with his novel Sugata
Sanshiro (1943). The period is the 1880s and the martial art of
 Japan: a Perspective 211

ju-jitsu has become lifeless and set uncreatively in its ways. A new
version, called _judo, based on meditation, asceticism and utter
dedication, has found a new devotee in the eponymous hero.
Kurosawa read it and made it into his first feature film.
As an antidote to the slapdash propaganda of Yoshikawa's
immensely successful historical novels, Tanizaki Junichiro,
Japan's greatest contemporary writer, embarked on a version in
modern Japanese of Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji. It should
perhaps be said that this rich and densely lyrical work which has
been hailed with much justification as a genuine harbinger of
Proustian techniques and is in any case one of the earliest
examples in the world of what can be classified as a "novel" is far
more remote from 20th-century Japanese than, say, Chaucer is
from modern English. (The work has been superbly translated in
our own time both by Arthur Waley and by Edward Seidens-
ticker.)
Tanizaki worked, officially, at this self-imposed task from 1939
to 1941. Then, frustrated by the restrictions and totally out of
sympathy with the regime and its hysterical praise of war, he
withdrew from the strident lies around him to study, in The
Makioka Sisters, pre-war Japanese society with deep affection,
lyrical irony, and a sense of a lovely epoch gone for ever. Compari-
sons are possible both with the plays· of Chekhov and with
Thomas Mann's Buddenhrooks, yet, in its oblique narrative, it is
uniquely a Japanese work. The work was serialised (as is often the
case with Japanese fiction) and he was forced to discontinue its
publication on the grounds that it was incompatible with wartime
discipline. It did not appear in its entirety until the war was over.
In his speech accepting the Imperial Prize for literature in 1949 he
himself said he reached out across the gulf of war in an attempt to
re-create a beautiful world that had vanished. "I tried to limit
myself to what was attractive, but I was unable to withdraw
completely from the enveloping storm. This was the necessary
fate of a novel born of war and peace."
The Makioka family- once important merchants in Osaka-
has declined in its fortunes. There is no son to carry on the name
and so the husbands of the two eldest daughters take on the
surname of Makioka - not, in fact, an uncommon Japanese
practice. Through over-caution the fortunes of the family gradu-
ally ebb still further and much of the book is a threnody for the lost
splendours of civilised life in Osaka - the traditional commercial
212 The Second World War in Fiction

centre of Japan since the 1600s and possessing a reputation for

ease and gentleness compared with the brasher, more ruthless
atmosphere of Edo later to become Tokyo, capital of the east.
The plot centres on the two youngest sisters. Yukiko is at 30 still
unmarried and the family find a succession of suitors whom, one
by one, she passively refuses. Although at the end of this long
novel preparations are at last well under way for Yukiko's wed-
ding, the reader feels it not unlikely she will still find a way to
evade the final commitment. If Yukiko can be said to represent
the Japanese girl of the past, doomed, probably, to a quietly sterile
life, Takeo, the youngest sister, is a rootless, pleasure-seeking
example of the modern Japanese woman. Equally self-centred,
though in a more active fashion, she has an illegitimate child and
ends up as the wife of a barman- it is emphasised that the bar will
cater especially for foreigners. The sisters are contrasted, but
Tanizaki's mind works in a complex way. For example, all
Yukiko's suitors are found for her whereas Takeo goes out and
gets her own men. Takeo also actually earns a living- ironically
by making traditional Japanese dolls - whereas Yukiko never
does anything. Tanizaki stresses his sense of change and loss as
the eldest sister is forced to move her family to Tokyo where they
have no friends, no identity, no reputation. It is the beginning of
the Pacific War. Rice rationing has been imposed and, because of
the austerity edicts, they are unable to have new kimonos for
Yukiko's apparently imminent wedding. In early days the
Makioka family know some White Russian emigres who refu~e to
refer to Petrograd by its post-revolutionary name. Later some
Germans they meet return to Berlin and chatty letters are re-
ceived mentioning the Hitlerjugend. The last letter they receive is
dated 1941. An ago has come very grimly to an end.
By any standards, The Makioka Sisters is a great novel. The
three-dimensional characterisation, the humour and the narra-
tive control make it more than an enjoyable experience for the
non-Japanese reader. But its special quality for the Japanese lies
in its evocation of a society in flux - traditional ceremonies
lovingly described and seen as vanishing as a world descends into
war. In the last pages, the family go and view the last of the
cherry-blossom in Kyoto and, as they drink cold sake from
lacquer cups, realise poignantly that, beCi\USe of their worries,
they have not taken in any of the beauty they have seen. Tanizaki,
like many authors of his generation, had begun by being frenzied-
 Japan: a Perspective 213

ly "Western" in his enthusiasms. By the time he wrote Some Prefer

Nettles in 1928 he had come, at the age of 42, to concentrate on the
perfection of a purely Japanese style.
Kawabata Yasunari, on the other hand, has always been
regarded as a "traditionalist". Indeed, his Nobel Prize in 1968
was to celebrate "a uniquely Japanese achievement". His novels
are allusive, even cryptic. The prose he uses has echoes of haiku,
and the oblique dialogue between two characters often resembles
the exchange of poems between the heroes and heroines of earlier
Jap"-nese romances. Snow Country, written and published inter-
mittently between 1935 and 1947, is regarded oy many as his most
typical and successful work.
A man of independent means called Shimamura visits a small
spa on the west coast - the "snow country" where for several
months each year the countryside is blanketed with impassable
snow. He has a wife and family whom we never encounter and his
dilettante passion fixes itself on Western ballet which he has never
seen, has no intention of ever going to and knows about merely
from books on the subject. Kawabata specifically relates the odd
charm of this kind of knowledge to a love-affair with a woman one
has never seen. Shimamura lives at one remove from his hobby-
as he remains at one remove from all human feelings. He has an
affair, off and on, with an amateur geisha who ekes out a living as
an "entertainer" at the spa, drinking too much and going rapidly
to seed. She loves him but he is incapable of responding and, at the
end of this short novel, we glimpse the shabby future in store for
her when her physical charms have gone. There is another,
younger, girl, first seen by her reflection in the train window-
much play is made of the way Shimamura tends to find life in
mirrors or in panes of glass, at one remove each time from the
"real thing". At the climax of the novel the first woman plunges
into a burning building to rescue the second girl while Shi rr~nmitra
stands passively by. She emerges with the girl in her arm::. but the
book ends without our knowing whether she is alive or dead. All
that is definite is that Shimamura will drift on, atrophied, of no
use to the geisha or indeed anyone. Whereas both Kah1's novella
and Tanizaki's saga of Osaka life were linked in detail to the
outside world, Snow Country hangs, as it were, anywhere in time.
The seasons are as delicately and correctly described as in any
haiku but the events of the novel are not connected with history.
The atmosphere under the military government was not condu-
214 The Second World War in Fiction

cive to good writing. Certain themes were actually given out to

authors to work on - for example, to write a book that would
encourage students to volunteer for the armed forces. Only,
perhaps, a fatalistic Oriental turn of mind could have interpreted
Tamba Fumio's 1939 novel The Regiment That Will Not Return as a
call to arms. It is hardly surprising that the few major works of
literature produced during the war years were not in fact pub-
lished until after the war was over. The paranoia and narrow-
mindedness of the authorities is shown by the fact that such an
innocuous novel as First Journey by the popular woman writer
Hayashi Fumiko was banned in 1941 because it did not encourage
the war effort.
The experiences of Japan's two greatest film-directors are of
relevance here. Mizoguchi made four important films during the
period 1939-45. Two of them were set in the M..eiji era and
concerned Kabuki actors and Bunraku puppeteers respectively.
These were acceptable because they only celebrated purely
Japanese achievements though neither The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemum nor Woman of Osaka was overtly patriotic. In 1942
he was ordered to make his version of the hardy Japanese
perennial The Tale of the Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin who, in 1703,
avenged their master's death and then all took their own lives. In
1944, having thus placated the authorities, he was able to make a
highly personal film The Life of an Artist set in the Tokugawa
period.
Although later films of Mizoguchi's like Ugetsu Monogatarihave
won well-deserved acclaim in the West as examples of Japanese
cinema at its best, it is perhaps in the work of Ozu that the spirit of
Japanese art is most perfectly conveyed. Quiet, eschewing drama-
tic effects, he is usually content to set his camera low and just
observe people- because it is after all on the floor, on the tatami
mats of the traditional Japanese house, that ordinary domestic life
takes place. When he was allowed to return from China in 1939 he
wrote a filmscript: a man is about to leave for the front and he and
his wife discuss what to have at the customary final meal together.
They choose the most simple, the most Japanese- green tea over
rice, the title of the piece. The censors rejected it out of hand as
"lacking seriousness" and the film was never made, though Ozu
used the title alone for a much later film. In 1943, his There was a
Father told a tale more acceptable to the vetting powers- a boy is
drafted after marrying the daughter of his father's best friend. The
 Japan: a Perspective 215

father dies and the son returns to carry on the family name -
though it is surprising that this rather downbeat film found any
more favour than the script he was forced to abandon.
Ozu was in any case re-drafted to make propaganda films. By a
curious chance he found himself in Singapore in charge of confis-
cated American material. He was able, quite illegally, to show
himself such works as Stagecoach, Fantasia and Citizen Kane, none of
which of course had been seen in Japan at that time.
Kurosawa was forced to make a sequel to Sugata Sanshiro- a
blatant piece of propaganda. The hero proves that a subtle
exponent of judo will always beat a hulking white boxer. This
poor film was presumably a sop to the authorities so that he could
make Those Who Step on the Tiger's Tail, his own version of the Noh
drama Ataka. It is on the surface impeccably feudal - the fleeing
Yoshitsune, the charismatic real-life hero of the twelfth-centry
chronicles, is pretending to be a mere porter. When he and his
group of loyal retainers reach the Ataka checkpoint on their route
north, the lord in charge of the barrier smells a rat and delays the
party. Yoshitsune's servant strikes his master so as to prove he
cannot possibly be who the lord suspects. Although seeing
through the deception, the lord is so moved by this incredible act
of devotion that he lets them pass. Thus far, the classic story is as it
is known to every Japanese schoolchild. However, Kurosawa
introduces a comic part, another porter, who acts as a foil rather
like the Common Man in A Man for All Seasons, adding a sarcastic
note that criticises the values offered. The film was accepted by
the military government but, by an ironic twist of history, the
Occupation censors banned it because it evoked Japan's feudal
past. It was not shown until 1952.
The tide began turning against Japan in 1943. At Guadalcanal
the Americans began their highly successful island-hopping
strategy. The British regained Burma. The Asian nationalists
who had welcomed the Japanese as liberators were now co-
operating with the Allies to expel them. In late 1944 Russia finally
declared war on Japan and by 1945 the Americans were in control
of I wo Jima and Okinawa and using them as bases for a series of
devastating air attacks on the Japanese mainland. On 6 August
1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
As Japan sued for peace, the eqtperor's voice was heard for the
first time on the radio when he announced to a stunned nation
that he was not a god. The Second World War was over, and as
216 The Second World War in Fiction

has been ruefully expressed more than once, "democracy was

imposed on Japan". MacArthur legalised the existence of the
Communist party, forbade Japan ever again to arm herself (al-
though, by a verbal quibble, she was allowed in 1952 to begin
building up her Self-Defence Forces) and set about laying the
foundations for a stable and peace-loving society.
The Japanese are an adaptable people. However, fanatical
devotion to emperor and fatherland had called upon all Japanese
to kill themselves rather than surrender. There had been regular
classes in every school and university on the correct technique for
committing ritual suicide. The fact relatively few chose death
rather than accept defeat says much for the flexibility of the
Japanese character. Even so, the phrase "we who wrongfully
survived" is a common one in the literature of the post-war years.
Dislocation and bewilderment soon gave way to the activities of
rebuilding. Of war guilt there seems to have been hardly a trace.
The Japanese have an amazing- and possibly enviable- capacity
for forgetting, ignoring or bypassing what is unpleasant or incon-
venient. Furthermore, Japanese art is traditionally oblique. The
language itself resists direct statement. Ambiguities abound. The
major works of Japanese literature have always impressed by
their subtlety. An interior awareness is especially prized. Given
this heritage it is not surprising that no major writer since 1945
has treated the war at all. Tanizaki dealt with sexual predica-
ments and the problems of aging in The Key and Diary of a Mad Old
Man (1956 and 1962). Kawabata explored tensions between past
and present in an increasingly narcissistic way until his suicide in
1972. Mishima's tetralogy The Sea of Fertility attempts to give a
panoramic view of Japanese life over the last century but the four
novels are so deliberately "poetic" and anyway written to express
a bizarre theory of reincarnation that one cannot, except inciden-
tally, see the passing of actual history. His earlier novel Forbidden
Colours ( 1949) gives a picture of life under the Occupation. One of
Kafu 's last works is a story published in 1948, The Scavengers, in
which he describes with bitterness the privations brought on by
defeat. Two women have been scouring the countryside round
Tokyo for food. The older dies, overcome by the heat. Her
companion robs her corpse of the rice she has been carrying and,
once over the brow of the hill, sells it at a profit to another
scavenger.
 Japan: a Perspective 217

Gomikawa J unpei's Condition of Man ( 1950) caters to popular

taste but is nonetheless an effective anti-war novel. Noma
Hiroshi's Vacuum Zone (1951) is a savagely realistic account of
brutality in the Japanese army that has been hailed as Japan's
From Here To Eternity. Yoshida Mitsuri wrote his Last Hours of the
Battleship Yamato shortly after the ship was sunk in 1943 but did
not publish it until1952. The fate of this particular battleship with
its proud name Yamato or Old Japan was naturally of geat
significance. The hero of Takeyama Michio's Harp of Burma
(1955) is a private in the Japanese army who, technically a
deserter, becomes a Buddhist monk and devotes his life to burying
the unknown corpses of Japanese soldiers in the jungle. This was
made into a moving film by Ichikawa Kon in 1956. Fires on the
Plain by Oka Shohei (1958) was also made into a film by this
director though he altered the ending by having the hero shot.
The novel shows Japanese troops in the Philippines reduced to
cannibalism, and its impact was considerable in that the horrors
of war are described in exceptional physical detail. lbuse Masuji's
Black Rain (1964) is about the dropping of the atomic bomb.
The post-war years have showed on the whole the same avid
desire to absorb and master foreign artistic trends that marked the
first decades after the Meiji Restoration. However, it is important
to remember that Japanese itself is linguistically isolated. Even
the borrowed ideographs are different in use and sound from
Chinese. Any foreign word is written in a special script that stands
out as ~n alien shape on the printed page. The Japanese are proud
of their uniqueness and of their homogeneity and never really
believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that foreigners can
master their language or appreciate their art. This in-turning is of
extreme psychological interest and explains many of the attitudes
present in their fiction.
In recent years the government has sanctioned the publication
of textbooks for use in schools which greatly underplay the
atrocities committed by Japan. This has caused vociferous and
understandable protests from China, Korea and Taiwan. But the
Japanese are not a nation of breast-beaters and they seem content
to look ahead to a future of increasing technological victories
rather than back upon a bloodstained and ultimately futile cam-
paign of military conquest. It is interesting that, as a legacy of
those years, the average reader, cinema-goer or television-viewer
218 The Second World War in Fiction

still prefers two-dimensional and inaccurate accounts of Old

Japan when dignity and stoicism went hand in hand with loyalty
and good taste- and there were no foreigners.

English Translations of Works Mentioned

Kawabata, Yasunari, Snow Country, trans. by Edward G. Seidensticker. (New

York, 1955).
Mishima, Yukio. (Kimitake Hiraoka), Forbidden Colours, trans. by Alfred H.
Marks (London, 1968).
- - , The Sea of Fertility (Tetralogy): I Spring Snow, trans. by Michael Gallagher
(London 1972); II Runaway Horses, trans. by Michael Gallagher (London,
1973); III The Temple of Dawn, trans. by Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa
Seigle (London, 1974); The Decayofthe Angel, trans. by Edward G. Seidenstick-
er (London, 1975).
Nagai, Kafu (Sokichi Nagai), A Strange Tale from East of the River, trans. by
Edward G. Seidensticker in Kafu the Scribbler (Stanford, 1965); also sep.
(Tokyo, 1972).
Oka, Shohei, Fires on the Plain, trans. by Ivan Ira Morris (Rutland, Vermont,
1960).
Takeyama, Michio, The Harp of Burma, trans. by Howard Hibbett (Rutland,
Vermont, 1958).
Tanizaki, Junichiro. Some Prefer Nettles, trans. by Edward G. Seidensticker. New
York 1955.
- - , TheM akioka Sisters, trans by Edward G. Seidensticker· (New York, 1957).
--,The Key, trans. by Howard Hibbett (London, 1961).
--,Diary of a Mad Old Man, trans. by Howard Hibbett. (New York, 1965).
 Note s
Chapter 1 Britain

1. "War Books", Hori~on 4, no. 24 (Dec. 1941) 416-37.

2. "Literature in this Global War", College English 4, no. 8 (May 1943) 453-9.
For the maxim of 'Inter arma silent Musae' cf. also Remenyi, note 48.
3. "Why not War Writers?: a Manifesto" , Hori~on 4, no.22 (Oct. 1941)
236-39.
4. "Have English Writers Marked Time?: a Conspectus of Prose and Poetry
during Six Years of War", Th; Saturday Review of Literature, 5 Jan. 1946,
pp. 2-5,31.
5. "English Literature in Wartime", Revue des Langues Vivantes11 (1946) 82-5.
6. TheNovel1 945-1950(L ondon, 1951) pp.12-17.
7. "Fiction of the Second World War", College English 17, no.4 (Jan. 1956)
197-204.
8. A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (London, 1961, rev. edn
1972); esp. pp. 6, 15f. Cf. also e.g. Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: The
English and American Novel from the Twenties to our Time (London, 1964) p. 262f.
9. Esp. B.S. Oldsey, "Aspects of Combat in the Novel, 1900-1950" , Ph.D.
Thesis, Pennsylvan ia State University, 1955, (Ann Arbor:
University Microfilms) . Also H. Bennemann , "Der II. Weltkrieg im engli-
schen Roman", WZKMUL 12 (1963) 533-7, an Abstract; it proved
impossible to obtain the full text of this Leipzig Thesis. Bennemann lists
earlier English and German contributio ns.
10. Not Without Glory (London, 1976), "Introducti on", pp. 7-22; quotations
pp.21,20.
11. For this see Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modem Memory (New York,
1975; repr. 1977).
12. The Second World War: An Illustrated History (London, 1975; repr. Har-
mondswort h 1976) p. 21.
13. "MCMXIV " in The Whitsun Weddings, 1"964.
14. War Begins at Home, ed. and arr. by Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge
(London, 1940) p. 35.
15. For an intensive portrait of a youngster at war one might well look at Italo
Calvino, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (II Sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947; trans!.
1956).
16. The popularity of the subject is also shown by books recounting the
production of big war films, e.g. Leonard Mosley's Battle of Britain (1969)
and lain Johnstone's The Amhem Report ( 1977). Finally, there is the amazing
number of reprints.

219
 220 The Second World War in Fiction

17. The New York Times Book Review, 17 Apr. 1949, pp.1, 21f.
18. Cf. Mark Arnold-Forste r, The World at War (London, 1973, repr. 1976)
p.138.
19. Quoted from: Sir Winston Churchill, Great War Speeches (London, 1957,
repr. 1966) pp. 21; cf. p. 24.
20. Postscripts (London, 1940) pp. 14f.
21. To be compared with the hilarious BBC television series (1958 and later)
and Norman Longmate's The Real Dad's Army: the Story of The Home Guard
(London, 1974).
22. Cf. James Tucker, The Novels of A11tho11y Powell (London, 1976) pp. 174.
23. Esp. "TheGaleofthe World(1969).
24. Its style, together with that of Co11cludi71g, was interestingly analysed by John
Russell in Style i11 Modem Fictio11 (Baltimore & London, 1978) pp. 158-88.
25. L'Armee des ombres; written in French (1943) by Kessell (who also served in
the RAF); publ. first in English trans!., 1944, then in French, 1945.
Quotations from the Cresset Press edn. (London, 1944, repr. 1945) p. 90.
26. Wome11 a11d Children First (London, 1979) p. 194.
27. Quoted from: The So11gs a11d Ballads of World War II, t"d. Martin Page
(London, 1973, repr. 1975) p. 120f.
28. Symptomatic for this is not only e.g. the crew in Lewis's Pathfi11ders but also
Gibson's crew on the Dam Buster Mission, Cf. E11emy Coast Ahead (London,
1946) p.19f.
29. A specific instance is brought out concisely in Martin Walker's article about
El Alamein, "The Last Stand of the Old Empire", Guardia11, 23 Oct. 1982,
p.17 .
.30. Stronger even than forward projections such as Arthur Wise, Who Killed
E11och Powell? ( 1972) and Sir John Hackett et al., The Third World War (1978).
31. Few Eggs a11d No Ora11ges: A Diary ... (London, 1976) p. 473.
32. Cf. besides The First World War.i11 Ficti071, ed. H.M. Klein (London 1976,
repr. 1979) p. 9 my "Fiction of the First World War and the Problems of
Fiction" in: Proceedi11gs of the /Xth Co11gress of the ICLA, ed. Z. Konstantinov ic
et al., vol.4 (lnnsbruck, 1982) pp. 109-14.
33. His Spa11ish Farm Trilogy (1924-46) is one of the best Great War novels.
34. How Dear is Life (1954), A Fox u11der my Cloak (1955), The Goldm Virgi11
(1957), Love a11d the Loveless (1958) and A Test to Destructio11 (1960).
35. Originally publ. as by "Peter Towry"; Kermode's Preface dates from 1965,
repr. 1970.
36. There is one well-known example in First World War fiction: Forester's The
Gmeral (1936).
37. Introduction to the Bodley Head edn, London, 1966.
38. Cf. The K11ights of Bushido: A Short History of ]apa11ese War Crimes (London,
1968, repr. 1964) pp. 179-81. A parallel to Vander Post's John Lawrence is
found in Barber, Si11ister Twilight (London, 1958, repr. 1972) p. 276.
39. Tim Carew's The Fall of Ho11g Ko11g (London, 1960, repr. 1963) is a
conspicuous example. His motive is anger, cf. notably p. 234.
40. One of several television screenings was interestingly reviewed by David
Lodge: "Dam and Blast", Lo11do11 Review of Books 4, no. 19 (21 Oct. 1982)
p.18.
41. Even from the perspective of a Personal Assistant as recorded, after C.R.
 Notes 221

Thompson, in Gerald Pawle's 1"he War and Colonel Warden (London, 1963,
repr. 1965).
42. Design and Truth in Autobiography (London, 1960).
43. The delightful threat of a fifth and final volume, made at th(' end of Mussolini,
looks like a parting joke.
44. He did revise to some extent, cf. Desmond Graham's OUP edn. (London,
1979) as opposed to the Faber edn. 1966 and the first (London: Editions
Poetry, 1946). There remain aspects and details one feels he would not have
left alone.
45. Quoted from: The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-1945, ed. Brian Gardner
(London, 1966, repr. 1968) p. 106f.
46. Cf. Reginald Pound, The Lost Generation (London, 1964). Not to be confused
with the term as applied to American expatriate circles in Paris during the
twenties.
47. Followed by a jump into Cold War thrillers with Arm Me, Audacity in 1954-
partly exploiting the earlier book.
48. Even in the States; Joseph Remenyi puts it on a par with Ibanez, Barbusse,
Remarque and Steinbeck (The Moon is Down, 1942), though this is doubtful
praise, as he berates all four for having failed to "reach the core of the
problem", cf. the (problematic) article "Psychology of War Literature",
Sewanee Review 52 (1944) 137-47.
49. The source here may emphasise the unhappy haphazardness: Hotspur, I
Henry IV, 1.3.202.
50. Like e.g. Mr. Miniver in the Mrs. Miniver film (MGM, 1942). It shares
nearly nothing with the book. Its propaganda effect was enormous.
51. This must have contributed to the success of Erskine Childers's The Riddle of
the Sands (1903), a pre-Great War spy story, still popular today. Cf. Claude
Cockburn, Bestseller(London, 1972) pp. 75-82.
52. How closely the experiences of 'Michael Carr' parallel those of Billany we
may never know. The author, another of this war's 'Lost Generation', died
mysteriously late in 1943 in or near Mantua.
53. Cf. in more detail E.C. Bufkin, P.H. Newby (Boston, 1975) pp. 66-79.
54. Cf. in particular H.M. Corvette (1942), re-publ. in Three Co171t:ttes (London,
1945, repr. 1972).
55. Unconditional Su"mder(London, 1961, repr. Harmondsworth, 1964) p.168f.
56. Officers and Gentlemen (London, 1955, repr. Harmondsworth, 1964) p.101.
57. Malcolm Bradbury first gave me the idea of connecting both works in a
conversation held in 1975. I don't know how he would have developed it. A
recent, interesting analysis of the trilogy is found in Andrew Rutherford, The
Literature Of War (London, 1978) pp. 113-34.
58. The Wind Cannot Read (London 1947, repr. 1948) p. 59f.
59. From "Where are the War Poets?" (1943); quoted in Hewison, Under Siege:
Literary Life in London, 1939-1945 (London, 1977) p. 183.
60. Subtitled "The Fighting Man in World War II" (London 1980, repr. 1982);
cf. ch. 8, pp. 314-37.
61. The Eighth Passenger (London, 1969, repr. 1971) p. 180.
62. For a balanced view cf. e.g. Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1979).
63. Cf. Enemy Coast Ahead (note 28) p. 204f.
64. Cf. Sir Herbert Read's theses about the counter-productive impact of
222 The Second World War in Fiction

painting the horrors of the Great War: "The Failure of War Books" in: A
Coat of Many Colours (London, 1945, rev. edn, 1957) pp. 72-6; for a
confirmation e.g. Philip Toynbee's Introduction to The Distant Drum: Reflec-
tions on the Spanish Civil War (London, 1976).
65. His reports (for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers) from Dec. 1940 to March
1941 were pubI. in book form as in England (New York, 1941). There are of
course plenty of British testimonies. For 'cheerfulness' see e.g. Donald
Forbes, Two Small Ships (London, 1957, repr. 1959) p. 133.

Chapter 2 France

1. Useful accounts of the Resistance include: H. Amroux, La Grande Histoire des

Fran;ais sous /'Occupation (Paris, 1976-79); R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy
France (London, 1978); H. Michel, Les Courants de pensee de la Resistance, 2nd
ed (Paris, 1958); Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (Lon-
don, 1972).
2. Les Collaborateurs, 1940-1945 (Paris, 1976).
3. La Gerbedesforces (Paris, 1937) p. 318.
4. "Vichy France, 1940-1944: The Literary Image", French Literature and its
Background (London, 1970).
5. Antimimoires, voll (Paris, 1967) p. 118.
6. G. Bree and G. Bernaure, eds., Defeat and Beyond: An Anthology of French
Wartime Writing, 1940-1945, (New York, 1970) p.6.
7. La Resistance et ses poltes, I France 1940-1944 (Verviers, 1978) p. 295.
8. See E. Dunan, "La Propaganda-Abteilung de France", and "Sur Ia propa-
gande allemande", Revue d'Histoire de la deuxinne guerre mondiale, Oct. 1951
and Oct. 1966.
9. A limited amount of work has been carried out in this field: notably P.-M.
Dioudonnat, L 'Argent Na;:i ala conquete de la presse fran;aise (Paris, 1981). See
also H. Michel, Paris allemande (Paris, 1981) and L 'Affaire Grassel, documents
(Paris, 1949).
10. Paul Riche, a spokesman for Vichy, 18 Oct. 1940. Quoted in Seghers, voi.I,
p. 75.
11. See H. Boterf, La Vieparisiennesous /'occupation, 2 vols (Paris, 1974 and 1975).
12. Les Editions de M inuit. H istorique et Bibliographie (Paris, 1954).
13. L 'Allemagne vue par les ecrivains de la Resistance (Geneva, 1954).
14. The Roland and Alain Chartier's Le Quadrilogue invectif (clandestinely re-
printed) became particularly popular during this period as statements of
national greatness. The Roland served as a rather more European than
French symbol in Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent (1939).
15. Quoted by J. O'Brien in "Clandestine French Literature during the Occu-
pation", Modem Language journal, Nov. 1946.
16. Fragmentsd'unliberveritatis(1941-1942), (Paris,1946) p.9.
17. The question of the evolution and development of the concept of "litterature
engagee", prior to Sartre' s Qu'est-ce que la Littirature? ( 1947) is a complex one.
Some interesting thoughts on iu pre-war definition are contained in D.
Schalk's The Spectrum of Political Engagement (Princeton, 1979).
18. Ibid., p. 5.
 Notes 223

19. The same kind of approach is found in Kluge's Schlachtbtschr~ibung- see

below Chapter 3, p. 127 f.
20. It is of course very likely that Rebatet's ideas about the inter-war years as
outlined in Les Decombres became much firmer in his mind as a result of the
war and that this is reflected in Les Deux Etendards.
21. Readers are referred to Chester W. Obuchowski's .Wars on Trial (~adrid,
1978) Chs. 3-5 and to Beynon John's article (note 4).
22. Cf. Rieuneau, op. cit.
23. Kessel's rejection of fiction in favour of authentic lived situations is discussed
with reference to the English version in Chapter 1, p. 19.
24. Such a reaction does not appear to be typical, however. A more likely
response is to be found in Malraux's L'Espoir(Part III, ch. 4) where Manuel
rejects music because it is so beautiful.
25. Ibid., p. 10.
26. Cf. Obuchowski, op. cit., Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion of these two
authors.
27. It is, of course, Saint-Exupery's Pilot~ d~ gu~rrt (1942) which exercises an
important influence in this area. Though it stresses on dignity and French
honour, the work was attacked by the Right wing for being subversive and
was suppressed temporarily but it emerges from the war as both a work of
commitment and a great literary work.
28. David Lodge in his Modes of Modern Writing (London, 1977) raises the
question in a very informative way in connection with Orwell's work,
notably "A Hanging", often assumed to be a "reportage" but falsely,
according to Lodge.
29. For more detailed analysis of this text refer to Obuchowski, op. cit., and
Paulette Roy, Jean-Louis Curtis, Romancier (Paris, 1971).
30. Cf. Mary Green, Louis Guilloux: An Artisan of Language (York, South Caro-
lina, 1980).
31. Quite apart from their satirical intentions on a social level, it is possible to
see in the works of Dutourd and Ayme a literary satire at work. Both authors
appear to be parodying the literature of Resistance and War. Perhaps this is
more evident in Ayme for a series of footnotes to Le Chemin des icoliers,
narrating the episodic and unlikely lives of passing characters, appear to
offer an ironic comment on the narrative development of such works as
Kessel's L 'Armie des ombres and Gary's Education europienne. The use of
coincidence in Dutourd's work points to a similar intention. There is no
space to develop the argument here but it is certainly worth further
attention.
32. Cf. Claude Francis, F ernande Gontier, Les Ecrits de Simone de Beau voir, (Paris,
1979) p.128f.
33. Cf. J.E. Flower, Roger Vail/and: the Man and his Masks (London, 1975) ch. II.

Chapter 3 Germany

1. This -catalogue is familiar not only in fiction but also from historical
accounts, e.g. that of Michael Salewski in Von der Wirklichkeit des Krieges
(Munich, 1976) p. 61, discussing the German failure to confront the past in
224 The Second World War in Fiction

the immediate post-war decades. His outline can be paraphrased thus:

"Business was good, criticism rare. Historians had little to say, since the
relevant historical evidence was still in Allied hands. Wartime propaganda
continued to prevail after the war and was accepted as gospel. Hitler was tu
blame for everything, and his strategic mistakes had cost Germany the war.
The German soldier was the best in the world, the 'unconditional surrender'
terms of the Allies had only served to unite the Germans against them, and
so on. Despite the evidence of destruction all around them, the war-
generation thought themselves in possession of the historical truth. !'lot until
much later, at the end of the 60s, did doubts begin to arise."
2. Cf. Jochen Pfeifer, Der deutsche Kriegsroman 1945-1960 (Konigstein/Ts,
1981) p.38ff.
3. Examples are Willi Heinrich's Das geduldige Fleisch (1955); Manfred Gre-
gor's Die Briicke (1958); Willi Berthold's Kriegsgericht (1959}, or Brigade
Dirlewanger ( 1961 ) .
4. In this connection, I am greatly indebted to Mr Orner Bartov, of St.
Antony's College Oxford, for allowing me access to a recent unpublished
paper, "The Barbarisation of Warfare- German Officers and Men on the
Eastern Front, 1941-1945".
5. This approach is suggested by Jochen Pfeifer, op. cit., p. 198.
6. See Dietrich Peinert, "Siegfried Lenz, Deutschstunde, eine Einfiihrung", Der
Schriftsteller Siegfried Len£:, ed. Colin Russ (Hamburg, 1973) p. 176.
7. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews oft heir citizenship and forbade
marriage with 'Germans'.
8. Compare the words of the female teacher in Horst Bienek's Zeit ohne Glocken:
"Wir haben den Krieg nicht gewollt ... ";"We didn't want the war, but they
had us hemmed in on all sides."
9. The Russians are employing these captured German war materials against
their manufacturers. The irony of self-inflicted injury is brought out also by
Hermann Lenz (see p. 123, above), as well as in the outcome of Boll's Wo
warst du, Adam?, where the hero, Feinhals, making his way home shortly
before the end of hostilities, is killed by a German shell just as he reaches his
parents' house.
10. The history of Gerlach's book earned it a certain notoriety when the novel
first appeared. A 600-page draft was produced in Russian captivity in
1944/45, but confiscated. Gerlach was assisted by a hypnotist in his attempts
to reconstruct the novel from memory after his return to Germany in 1950,
and the more sensational press seized upon the story of his 'total amnesia'
and of a novel supposedly 'written under hypnosis'. See "Nachwort", Die
VerrateneArmee, Heyne edition (Munich, 1978) p. 310.
11. The best-known East German war-fiction includes Franz Fiihmann's novel-
la Kameraden, 1955 (included in the collection Die Elite, Zurich, 1970);
Herbert Ott's Die Liige (1956); Horst Beseler's lm Garten dtr Konigin, Karl
Mundstock's Bis £:Um ltt.?:ten Mann, Erwin Strittmatter's Der Wundtrtaterand
Harry Thiirk's Die Stunde der toten Augen (all 1957); Mundstock's Sonne in dtr
Mittemacht (1959); Dieter Noll, Die Abenteuer des Wemer Holt, (1960); and
Max Walter Schulz, Wir sind nicht Staub im Wind, vol.1, (1962). In other
genres, there is also J.R. Becher's war drama of 1941, initially cmitled
Schlacht um Moskau, later Winterschlacht, and Fiihmann 's epic poem Die Fahrt
nach Stalingrad ( 1953).
 Notes 225

12. Andrew Rutherford, "Realism and the Heroic: Some Reflections on War
Novels", Tire Yearbook of English Studies, Special Number section of vol. 12
(1982) pp.194-207.
13. Quoted in David Luschnat, Schnjtsteller und Kneg (Baden-Baden, 1947)
p. 17.
14. Gunter Grass, "Was lesen unsere Soldaten?", Freiheit und Recht ("Die
Stimme der Widerstandskampfer fiir ein freies Europa"}, Jahrgang 16
(1970) Nr 4, p. 14f.
15. The need for a "clean" hero-figure was met by a best-selling tale of ultimate
courage in isolation, televised in six parts and repeatedly shown on West
German television: Josef Martin Bauer's compelling escape-novel, So weit die
Fu~e tragen (1955), based on the real-life adventures of a German officer. The
hero, Forell, escapes from POW slave-labour in the Siberian lead-mines and
makes his way with enormous stamina and resourcefulness across the
tundra and back to Germany. The book is a typical 1950s product, in that
the stress is on the restoration of German pride; there is little reference to the
recent wartime past, and a general assumption of the blamelessness of
German POWs. "Why does he [a certain Dechant] always want toes-
cape?", one POW asks another: "Well, if he's here through no fault of his
own!" is the reply, to which the first counters: "We all are". This novel, too,
like Kirst's 08/15 (seep. 110, above), can be seen as an anti-rhetorical and
politically neutral restatement of certain pre-war and wartime values of
strenuousness, self-discipline and personal redemption.
16. See also Hans Geulen, "Alfred Andersch. Probleme der dargestellten
Erfahrung des 'deutschen Irrtums"', Gegenwartsliteratur und Drittes Reich, ed.
Hans Wagener (Stuttgart, 1977) pp.204-21.
17. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden, 1961) p. 94.
18. Briefe an F. W. Oelt:e, vol. I, 1932-45, ed. Harald Steinhagen and Jiirgen
SchrOder, Frankf. a. M. 1979 (first published Wiesbaden and Munich, 1977)
p.265.
19. They could not fail to be reminded, after all, of the heady cultural discourse
that represented an onslaught of Geist on political and social reality in the
pre-Nazi Weimar Republic, and sought to legitimize anti-democratic think-
ing by reference to the German tradition. See Martin Swales, "In defence of
Weimar", Weimar Germany: Writers and Politics, ed. A. Bance (Edinburgh,
1982) p. 7.
20. Briefe a" F. W. Oeh;e, vol. 1, p. 292. In the same letter (16 Nov. 1941) Benn
enthuses over Platen's sonnets.
21. See Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism (London, 1972) p. 25.
22. Adorno, "Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft", Prismen (Frankfurt a.M. 1955),
trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber as Prisms (London, 1967) p. 34.
23. The "rev«"rsal of values" or "world turned upside down" is of course no
abstract notion but a matter of daily experience in the Third Reich where,
for example, firemen start fires (the burning of the synagogues). Ray
Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 shows how this particularly striking Nazi inver-
sion of normality has entered the vocabulary of the popular imagination
outside Germany.
24. These are in fact approximately the words of Oberleutnant Kreysler in
Chapter 39 of Gaiser's Die sterbende Jagd.
25. In the East German literature, authors are ideologically bound to present
226 The Second World War in Fiction

the opposite view and stress, like the title and the insistent main theme of
Max Walter Schulz's novel, that "we are not like dust on the wind".
26. I refer to the as yet unpublished research of Mr. Orner Bartov. See Note 4,
above.
27. It is at this point, among others, that serious literature runs parallel to the
cheap war stories of the West German Groschenheft or Landserheft series, an
analysis of which was not possible within the scope of this essay. The
incidents described in these magazines frequently achieve a happy ending
by presenting gallant, often successful, minor German actions and overlook-
ing the awkward truth that the war as a whole is being lost. Other features
are that officers become superman/father-figures; the enemy is heavily
stereotyped (the Maquis are furtive, cowardly fighters; the Russians subhu-
man primitives); war is "fate", a natural catastrophe; what is condemned is
the loss of the war, rather than war itself, and bad leadership at the top is to
blame, etc. See Erhard W eidl, "Krieg im Groschenheft", Basis (J ahrbuch
fiir deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur) Bd. 4/73, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost
Hermand, pp. 38-47; also Heinz Briidigam, Der Schoft ist fruchtbar noch
(Frankfurt am Main, 1965); and Walter Nutz, "Der Krieg als Abenteuer
und ldylle. Landser-Hefte und triviale Kriegsromane", Gegenwartsliteratur
und Drittes Reich, ed. Hans Wagener, pp. 265-83.
28. Dr. Peter Hutchinson, of Selwyn College, Cambridge, has kindly supplied
me with the transcript of an interesting interview he held with Heyrn
recently in East Germany. The author claims that it was only due to the
caution of his then American publishers (who were convinced that, on the
experience of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a :war novel could not
succeed until ten years after the war) that The Crusaders did not appear before
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions
(both 1948), to "take the cream of the trade"!
29. In e.g. Andersch's Winterspelt, and especially in Giordano's Die BertiniJ·,
where, despite suffering all the horrors of Allied bombing, the
Italian-Jewish-German Hamburg family identify so absolutely with the
"enemy" that they have difficulty in regaining - as they must - a German
identity at the end of the war. Cf. also Gunter Kunert's remark, very close to
the Bertinis' attitude, that "I knew the bombing was not directed at me, but
at the 'others'. It was the just punishment that these people had undoubted-
ly deserved"; "Die Tortur", Meine Schulzeit im Dritten Reich, ed. Marcel
Reich-Ranicki (Cologne, 1982) p. 198.
30. See "Als der Krieg zu Ende war": Literarisch-politische Publi.tistik 1945-1950
(Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller-Museum
Marbach a. N.), ed. Bernhard Zeller (Munich, 1973) p. 86 ff.
31. Cf. Marijke Visch, "Zur Funktion von Dokumenten im historischen
Roman. Eine exemplarische Untersuchung anhand von Alexander Kluges
Schlachtbeschreibung, Neophilologus 64, no. 4 (Oct. 1980) pp. 564-82.

Chapter 4 Soviet Union

1. B. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. M. Hayward and M. Harari (London,

1958) p. 450.
 Notes 227

2. A. Surkov, Stikhotvoreniya, 1925-45, Sobranie sochinenii, Tom I (Moscow,

1965) p. 374. All subsequent quotations from Surkov refer to the poems and
prose in this publication.
3. A. Tolstoy, Polnoesobraniesochinenii, Tom 14 (Moscow, 1950) p.8.
4. A. Dovzhenko, Ukraina v ogne in Literatumoe nasledstvo, Tom 78, Kniga pervaya
(Moscow, 1966) p. 199. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quota-
tions from Dovzhenko refer to this work.
5. P. Vershigora, Lyudi s chistoi sovest'yu (Moscow, 1948) p. 1Q5. All subsequent
quotations from Vershigora refer to this work.
6. V. Nekrasov, V okopakh Stalingrada (Moscow, 1948) p. 20. Unless otherwise
indicated, all subsequent quotations from Nckrasov refer to this publication.
7. I. Ehrenburg, Burya in Sobranie sochinenii, Tom 5 (Moscow, 1965) pp. 145-9.
8. B. Gorbatov, Nepokorennye in lzbrannoe (Moscow, 1947) p.360. All subse-
quent quotations from Gorbatov refer to this work.
9. A. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag gulag, Chasf I (Paris, 1973) p. 250.
10. Erich von Manstein, "The Development of the Red Army" in B. Liddell-
Hart, ed., The Red Army (New York, 1956) p. 141.
11. K. Simonov, Dni i nochi in Sobranie sochinmii v shesti tomakh, Tom II (Moscow,
1967) p. 55.
12. E. Kazakevich, Zvezda and Dvoe v stepi in Sochinmiya v dvukh tomakh, Tom I I
(Moscow, 1963) pp. 75, 110.
13. A. Mezhirov, Untitled poem in Russkaya sovetskaya poeziya. Sobranie stikhov,
Tom II (Moscow, 1977) p. 500.
14. K. Simonov, "Iz biografii Saburova" in Literatumoenasledstvo, Tom78, Kniga
pervaya (Moscow, 1966) p. 74. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent
quotations from Simonov refer to this work.
15. V. Inber, Leningrad Diary. Trans. S. Wolff and R. Grieve (London, 1971)
p. 117. All subsequent quotations from Inber's prose refer to this publica-
tion.
16. M. Isakovsky, Izbrannyestikhotvoreniya (Moscow, 1947) pp. 7-8.
17. P. Antokol'sky [zbrannoe (Moscow, 1946) p. 180. All subsequent quotations
from Antokol'sky refer to this publication.
18. M. Aliger, Stikhotvormiya ipoemy vdvukh tomakh, Tom I (Moscow, 1970) p. 148.
19. 0. Berggol'ts, Untitled poem in Sobraniesochinmii, Tom II (Leningrad, 1973)
p. 7.
20. A. Kurosheva, Untitled poem in: Russkaya sovetskaya poeziya, Tom II, p. 112.
21. V. Ketlinskaya, Vosade (Leningrad, 1960) p. 528. All subsequent quotations
from Ketlinskaya refer to this publication.
22. A. Fadeyev, Molodaya gvardiya (Moscow, 1946) p. 347.
23. A. Tolstoy, "Razgnevannaya Rossiya" in Polnoe sobranie sochinmii, Tom 14,
p.265.
24. S. Gudzenko, Stikhi (Moscow, 1961) p. 134. All subsequent quotations from
Gudzenko refer to this publication.
25. M. Gershenzon, "God na voine" in Literatumoe nasledstvo, Tom 78, Kniga
vtoraya, p. 88.
26. A. Bek, Volokolamskoe shosse, Sobranie sochinmii v chetyrekh tomakh, Tom II
(Moscow, 1975) pp.18, 115.
27. V. Grossman, Zapravoedelo, Novyi mir, no. 8 (1952) p. 113. Unless otherwise
indicated, all subsequent quotations from Grossman refer to the publication
·of the novel in Novyi mir, nos 7-10 (1952).
228 The Second World War in Fiction

28. V. Grossman, "lz zapisnykh knizhek voennykh let, 1941 -2" in Literatumot
ntuledstvo, Tom 78, Kniga vtDraya, p. 159.
29. B. Slutsky, V balal'ont vy~doravlivayushchikh in Pamyaf (Moscow, 1969) p. 35.
30. M. Sholokhov, "Pervye frontovye ocherki" in Liuratumot nuledstvo, Tom 78,
Kniga pnvaya, p. 40.
31. M. Svetlov, Sobranie sochinmii, Tom I (Moscow, 1974) p. 440.
32. V. Lebedev-Kumach, "Svyashchennaya voina in Russkaya sovetskaya /Jot~iya,
Tom, 1, p. 342.
33. 0. Berggol'ts, "Stikhi o vooruzhennom narode", Sobranit sochinmii, Tom II,
p.32.
34. A. Prokof'ev, Untitled poem in Rossiya. Poemyistikhi(Moscow, 1971) p. 120.
35. A. Tvardovsky, "Zemlyaki", Sobranie sochinenii, Tom II (Moscow, 1959)
p. 104. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations from Tvar-
dovsky refer to the poems in this publication.
36. N. Tikhonov, "Leninskoe znamya", Stikhi i pro~a (Moscow, 1945) p. 22.
37. I. Ehrenburg, Voina. Aprel'1942-Mart 1943 (Moscow, 1943) p. 22.
38. M. Aliger, "Zoya" in Stikhotvormiya i poemy v dvukh tomakh, Tom I, p. 188. All
subsequent quotations from Aliger refer to the poems in this publication.
39. W. Wassilewska, Raduga (Moscow, 1947) p. 39.
40. V. lnber, "Pulkovskii meridian", hbrannye proi~vtdmiya, Tom I (Moscow,
1958) p. 368.
41. L. Sobolev, Morskaya dusha. Rasska~y (Moscow, 1943) p. 373.
42. I. Sel'vinsky, hbrannyt proi~vtdmiya (Leningrad, 1972) p. 206. All subse-
quC'nt quotations from Sel'vinsky refer to the poems in this publication.
43. A. Dovzhenko, l~brannot (Moscow, 1957) p. 440.
44. Yu. Krymov, Pis'masfronta, Znamya, no. 3 (1944) p.120.
45. "Voennyi put' E.G. Kazakevicha" in Liuratumot nuledstvo, Tom 78, Kniga
vtoraya, p. 449.
46. N. Chukovsky, Baltiiskot ntbo, Znamya, no. 7 (1954) p. 56.
47. A. Chakovsky, Eto bylo v Leningradt (Moscow, 1949) p.46. All subsequent
quotations from Chakovsky refer to this publication.
48. 0. Berggol'ts, Dnevnyt ~vt~dy (1959) in Sobranit sochinmii, Tom Ill, p. 309. All
subsequent quotations from Berggol't!!' prose refer to this publication.
49. 0. Berggol'ts, "Leningradskaya poema" in Sobranie sochinmii, Tom 11, p. 65.
All subsequent quotations from Berggol'ts' poetry refer to this publication.
50. Z. Shishova, "Blokada", Znamya, no. 2-3 ( 1943). All subsequent quotations
from Shishova refer to this publication.
51. V. lnber, "Pulkovskii meridian'\ p. 383.
52. N. Tikhonov, Stikhi i pro~a, pp. 238, 240. All subsequent quotations from
Tikhonov refer to this publication.
53. V. Grossman, Gody voiny (Moscow, 1946) pp. 304, 268.
54. K. Simonov, Drli i nochi, p. 145.
55. V. Grossman, Gody veiny, p. 257.
56. A. Tvardovsky, "Vasily Tyorkin" in: Sobranit sochi,ii, Tom 11, p. 221.
57. V. Vishnevsky, Entry of 6 October 1941, Sobraniesochinmii, Tom Ill (Mos-
cow, 1956) p. 155. Entry of 17 March 1943, Sobranit sochin,ii, Tom IV
(Moscow, 1958) p. 127.
58. L. Leonov, V~yatit Vtlikoshumska, Sobranit sochin,ii, Tom VIII (Moscow,
1962) p. 9.
 Notes 229

59. A. Nekrich, Otreshis' ot stra/cha (London, 1979) p. 22.

60. Yu. Bondarev, Tishina, hhrannyeproizvedeniya, Tom I (Moscow, 1977) p. 417.
61. E. Kazakevich, Vesna na Odert in Sochineniya t• dvulch toma/ch, Tom II, p. 478.
62. B. Okudzhava, Proza i poeziya (Frankfurt Main. 1968) p. 69.
63. G. Baklanov,lyul' 1941 goda, Novyimir, no. 2 (1965) p.9.
64. K. Simonov, Panteleev, Sohranie sochinenii v shesti toma/ch, Tom IV, p. 509.
65. S. Zlobin, Propavshie hez vesti, Tom I (Moscow, 1964) p. 395.
66. Yu. Bondarev, Batal'ony prosyat ognya, hbrannye proizvedeni_va, Tom I, p. 161.
67. G. Baklanov, Mertvye sramu ne imut, Znamya, no. 6 (196\) p. 58.
68. A. Kron, Dom i /corahl', Zvezda, no. 9 (1964) pp. 18, 20.
69. V. Bykov, Frontovaya stranitsa, 0/ctyahr, no 9 ( 1963) pp. 90, 103.
70. V. Bykov, Kruglyans/cii most, Novyi mir, no. 3 ( 1969) pp. 32, 41.
71. A. Mezhirov, Untitled poem in: Pod/cova (Moscow, 1967) p.3.
72. V. Nekrasov, V rodnom gorode, Novyi mir, no. 11 (1954) p. 162.
73. Yu. Bondarev, Tishina, p.417.
74. L. Pervomaisky, Di/cii med, 0/ctyahr, no. 2 ( 1963) p. 25.
75. V. Grossman, Zhizn' i sud'ha (Lausanne 1980) p. 271.

Chapter 5 U ni.ted States

1. Louise Levita, "The Nalcedare Fanatics and the Dead Don't Care", New York
Star Magazine, 22 Aug. 1948, p. 3. Quoted by Robert Solotaroff, Down
Mailer's Way (Urbana, 1974) p. 18n.
2. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(London, 1981) p. 86.
3. Malcolm Cowley in The Literary Situation (New York, 1955) p. 41, writes: "In
the novels of the Second War I can find very few signs that their [American]
authors have been reading French, German, or even English books."
4. Of all the extensive literature on writing on the Great War Paul Fussell's The
Great War and Modem Memory (New York, 1975) stands out for its sensitivity
and insight.
5. Captain Ralph Ingersoll, The Battle is the Pay-0/f(Washington, 1943) p. 154.
6. Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York, 1943) p. 132. This feeling
appears to have been widespread during the war, and after. The Welsh
writer Alun Lewis wrote to his parents on 2 February 1944 from India:

... although the Army is supposed to have everything it requires, I'm

jiggered if I can equip my boys with the odd things they need. They give us
bicycles and pumps and lamps, but no connections and bulbs. And so on.
So what? We learn code after code, cipher after cipher: inevitably a new
replaces the old. I think I'd prefer the 1914 type of war; it was more
methodical than this one- and it ended before this one has really begun-
for me.

(Alun Lewis, In the Green Tree (London, 1948] p.59.) In the preface to a
powerful memoir ofthe Vietnam war, Philip Caputo regretted the absence of
clear, decisive battles in Vietnam:
230 Tire Stcond World War in Fiction

Writing about this kind of warfare is not a simple task. Repeatedly, I have
found myself wishing that I had been the veteran of a conventional war,
with dramatic campaigns and historic battles for subject matter instead of
a monotonous succession of ambushes and fire-fights. But there were no
Normandies or Gettys burgs for us, no epic clashes that decided the fate~ of
armies or nations.

(Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War [1977; London, 1978] p. xii.)

7. See Roger Manvell, Films and the Second World War (London, 1974) and
Richard R. Lingeman, Don't You Know There's a WarOn?TheAmericanHome
Front, 1941-1945(NewYork, 1971)ch.6.
8. JamesJones, WWII(NewYork, 1975) p.150.
9. Ira Wolfert, Battle for the Solomons (Boston, 1943) p. 7.
10. John Gunther, D Day (New York, 1944) pp. 69-70.
11. John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (London, 1943) p. 43.
12. Ingersoll, The Battle is the Pay-Off, p. 156.
13. This debate is abundantly represented in Jack Salzman, ed., The Survival
Years: A Collection of American Writing of the 1940s (New York, 1969)
pp. 173-216.
14. John Morton Blum, V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During
World War II (New York, 1976) pp. 67-8,46, 16.
15. Cowley, The Literary Situation, p. 27.
16. Hersey, Into the Valley, pp. 51-2.
17. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Mm in Battle, with an Introduction
by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1973) pp. 46-60. This is a major theme in
novels of the Vietnam war. A character in one such novel, Lt. Hodges,
recovering from shrapnel wounds in a hospital on Okinawa, and thinks of his
old platoon:

He missed the people in the bush, more than he had ever missed any group
of people in his life. There was a purity in those relationships that could
not be matched anywhere else .... There was a common goal, and a
mutual enemy.

And, of course, Lt. Hodges turns down the chance to remain on Okinawa as
Special Services Recreation Officer in order to return to what remains of his
platoon. (James Webb, Fields of Fire [1978; London, 1981] p. 318.)

18. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940; Harmondsworth, 1955)
p.227.
19. John Dos Passos, USA (Harmondsworth, 1966) p. 353. This comment was
made apropos John Reed.
20. On this theme see Gray, The Warriors, pp. 60-9.
21. George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and
Ian Angus (London, 1968) 1, p. 526.
22. Jones, WW II, p. 62.
23. Ira WoUert, Amm'ea Guerrilla in the Philippines (New York, 1945) p. 166f.
24. See the discussion of wartime journalism in Blum, V was for Victory, ch. 2.
 Notes 231

25. Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the
Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (London, 1976) p. 100.
26. Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, pp. 146-7.
27. Tregaskis, ibid., p. 69.
28. Milo Minderbender in Catch-22, who brings the true spirit of capitalist
entrepreneurship to the conduct of war, is anticipated in detail by Corporal
Soeft in Hans Hellmut Kirst's Gunner Asch Goes to War, ·trans. Robert Kee
(London, 1956). Soeft is a type who would have been very much at home
with the American Army in Naples (as described by John Horne Burns in
The Gallery).
29. See The Pentagon Papers, as published by The New York Times(New York, 1971).
In 1961 President Kennedy ordered 400 Special Forces soldiers and 100
other advisers to South Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs estimated that 40,000 US
servicemen would be needed to "clean up the Vietcong threat". By 1967 the
"optimum force" requested by General Westmoreland had reached 671 616.

Chapter 6 Japan: a Perspective

1. In Japan as in Hungary the surname is placed first, the given name second.
Select Bibliography
This bibliography is confined to material of direct relevance to the
subject of the volume. Details of historical works or of critical
studies of individual authors are to be found in the footnotes.

Abbe, Derek van, "Clio in the Underworld", German Life and

Letters, 16 (1962) pp. 128-35.
Aichinger, Peter, The American Soldiers in Fiction, 1880-1963 (Iowa
State University Press, Ames, 1975).
Albright, W.P., "War and Fraternity: A Study of Some Recent
American War Novels", New Mexico Quarterly, 21 (Winter
1952) pp. 461-74.
Aldridge, John, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the
Writers of Two Wars (Vision, London, 1957).
- - , Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis
(Books for Libraries, New York, 1972; 1st pub. 1966).
Anderson, Rachel, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of
Love (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1974).
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232
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Name Index
Abetz, Otto, 50 Balfour, James, 20, 34,37
Abzug, Martin, 175,183 Balzac, Henri de, 34
Adamovich, Georgy V., 166 Bamm, Peter, 112, 118, 120, 128
Adams, Ronald, 30 Barber, Noel, 13, 220n.38
Aldridge, James, 12, 31, 34,37 Barbusse, Henri, 47, 52,221n.48
Aleksandrov, Georgy F., 159 Barker, Kathleen, 4
Alexander, Michael, 18 Baron, Alexander, 8, 32
Aliger, Margarita 1., 143,148,150,156 Baroncelli, Jean de, 52
Allgood, Marcus, 3 Barres, Maurice, 62
Allingham, Margery, 6 Bataille, Michel, 76
Allister, William, 15, 22, 40 Bates,H.E., 19,23,38
Anan'ev, Anatoloy A., 161 Bauer, Josef Martin, 128, 225n.15
Andersch, Alfred, 10, 91, 94,96-7,100, Baxter, Walter, 33, 38,43
111, 112, 114-15, 121' 122-3, 127, 128, Beauvoir, Simone de, 83,84, 85-6
226n.29 Becher,Johannes R., 224n.11
Anderson, Rachel, 7 Beck, Ludwig, 107
Anderson, Sherwood, 125 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 154
Andrews, Laurie, 15, 30, 31, 32,38 Bek, Aleksandr A., 135,139,144-5,156
Angel, Daniel, 19 Bell, Gerard, 38, 44
Anouilh,Jean, 51 Benjamin, Rene, 47, 55-7,82
Antelme, Robert, 74-5 Benn,Gottfried, 116, 117,225n.18,20
Antokol'sky, Pavel G., 143,148,149,150 Benoist-Mechin, Jacques, 54
Apitz, Bruno, 121,123,128 Benoit, Pierre, 55,57
Aragon, Louis, 48, 51, 60 Berezko, Georgy S., 149
Arendt, Hannah, 230n.17 Berggol'ts,Olga, 134,143,147,152,154,
Aries, Philippe, 200-1 155-6,170
Arnoux, Alexandre, 76 Bergson, Henri, 113
Ashton,Stephen,15,32,37 Bernanos, Georges, 49, 59,60
Astier, Emmanuel d', 76 Beumelburg, Werner, 90
Astor, Viscountess Nancy Witcher, 156 Bickers, R.I., 20
Auden, W.H., 197 Bieber, Konrad, 61
Aveline, Claude, 62, 64 Bienek, Horst, 94,101,117,121, 224n.8
Ayme, Marcel, 57-8, 81, 82-3, 86, 223n.31 Bierce, Ambrose, 126
Azhaev, VasiliiN., 160,171 Billany, Dan, 7, 32,41
Biryukov, Nikolai Z., 160
Babayevsky,SemyonP., 160-1,171 Blake, Nicholas, see Cecil Day Lewis
Bader, Douglas, 19,157 Bloch, Pierre, 76
Bagnall, Stephen, 20 Blondin, Antoine, 81
Bainbridge, Beryl, 7 Bloom, Ursula, 9
Baker, E.C.R., 18 Blum, John Morton, 185
Baklanov, Grigory Y., 163, 164, 166,169 Blunden, Godfrey, 173, 182
Balbaud, Rene, 57 Blunt, Anthony, 35
Balchin, Nigel, 9 Bogomolov, VladimirO., 162,171

239
240 Name Index

Boisdcffre, Pierre de, 76 Cayroi,Jean, 74

Boll, Heinrich, 91, 92, 95, 97,99-100,101, Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 63, 64, 81
104,105,109, ItO, 112,121,125,126, Chakovsky, Aleksandr B., 135,152, 153,
127,128, 224n.9 154,156
Bondarev, Yuri V., 131,159,161,165, 166, Chamson, Andre, 52, 65
168,171 Chancellor, John, 32,33
Borchert, Wolfgang, 105,106,126,128 Chartier, Alain, 222n.14
Bory, Jean-Louis, 77-8, 86 Chateaubriand, Alphonse de, 48
Bosco, Henri, 57 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 211
Bast, Pierre, 62 Chekhov, Anton P., 211
Boulle, Pierre, I 0, 23 Cheshire, Leonard, 20, 23, 43
Bowen, Elizabeth, 9, 10 Childers, Erskine, 221n.51
Bowman, Peter, 178-9,180,186,191,203 Chopin, Frederic, 70
Bradbury, Ray, 225n.23 Christie, Agatha, 6, 50
Braddon, Russell, 20, 22 Chukovsky, Nikolai K., 135,152
Brandt, Willy, 115 Churchill, Sir Winston S., 8, II, 20, 27, 93,
Brassillach, Robert, 48, 54, 68 220-1n.41
Brathwaite, Errol, 10 Clausewitz, Karl von, 43
Brennan, Dan, 7, 10, 17,31,32 Claveii,James, 15-16
Breton, Andre, 51 Clew..s, Howard, 9, 15, 30,42
Brickhill, Paul, 18, 19 Clifford, Francis, 14, 30,39
Brome, Vincent, 20 Clostermann, Pierre, 23, 24,32, 72-3, 87
Brooke, Rupert, 176 Cobb, Humphrey, 176
Brooks, VanWyck, 184 Comfort, Alex, 10, 42, 43
Brophy,John,22, 29,31 Connell, Brian, 18
Brown, Harry, 173,178,181 Connolly, Cyril, 1, 87
Brown, Joe David, 181 Cooper, Alfred Duff, 7, 29
Bruller, Jean, ue Vercors Cooper, K.W., 18,20
Bubennov, Mikhail S., 160 Coppell, Alfred, 175,190
Buchanan, William, 4 Courtade, Pierre, 65
Buchbender, Ortwin, 95 Coward, Noel, 180
Buchheim, Lothar-Giinther, 94, 106-7, Cowley, Malcolm, 186, 229n.3
108,109,110,122,126 Cozzens,JamesGould, 173,174,175,
Budenny, Semyon M., 133 184-5,187
Burgess,Guy,35 Craig, Patricia, 2, 9
Bums, John Home, 173, 181, 186, 200, Cummings,E.E., 176
231n.28 Curtis, Jean-Louis, 73, 77,78-80,83,87
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 50
Butor, Michel, 17,81 Daix, Pierre, 74-5,76,82
Bykov, ViktorV., 131,166,167,169,171 Daney, Leo, 52
Debu-Bridd, Jacques, 60,61
Cadogan, Mary, 2, 9 Decour, Jacques, 60
Calder, Angus, 5 Deighton, Len, 13, 16,43
Callison, Brian, 29, 38 De Ia Roche, Mazo, 50
Calvert, Michael, 18 Dickens, Charles, 4
Calvina, ltalo,219n.15 Dickens, Monica, 9, 38, 45
Camus, Albert, 77, 81,83,85, 86 Dominy,John, 18
Caputo, Philip, 229-30n.6 Donne, John, 198
Cardigan, Earl of, Chandos S.C.B. Bruce, Dore, Gustave, 145
Marquess of Ailes bury, 23 Dorgeles, Roland, 47, 52
Can,J.L. 7,32, 41 Dos Passos, John, 174, 176
Caskie, Donald, 23 Douglas, Keith, 21-2, 221 n.44
Cassou,Jean, 48, 51,65 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr P., 136, 137,138,
Catto, Max, 29, 32, 38,41 142,149,161,162,170,171
 Name Index 241

Drdser, Theodore, 125 Goring, Hermann, 114

Drieu IaRochelle, Pierre, 48, 51, 54,71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 117,126
Druon, Maurice, 70 Gogol, Nikolai V ., 157
Dunmore, Spencer, 10, 29, 30, 38, 42,43 Golding, William, 39
Dutourd, Jean, 81-2, 87, 223n.31 Gomikawa, J unpei, 217
Dwinger, Edwin Erich, 90, 92, 95 Gorbatov, Aleksandr V ., 136
Gorbatov, Boris L., 135, 138
Ehrenburg, IlyaG.,63,108,133,137,171 Gordon, Ernest, 22
Eichmann, Adolf, 93 Grant, Robert, 7
Eliot, T.S., 204 Grass,Giinter,93,96, !OK, 127,129
Ellis, John, 40 Gray, Earl, 10
Elstob, Peter, 25,32 Gray,J. GJ .. nn, 190
Eluard, Paul, 51, 60 Green, Henry, 6, 9, 45
Embry, Sir Basil, 20 Greene, Graham, 5, 6, 8, 222n.14
Greenfield, George, 28, 31,38
Fadeyev,AieksandrA.,137-K,I43-4,160 Gregor, Manfred, 129, 224n.3
Fallada, Hans, 123 Grossman, Vasilii S., 131, 135,136, 144,
Fassbinder, RainerW .. rn.. r, 95 145,147,149,154,155,159,160,168-9,
Fichte, Johann Gottli .. b, 147 171-2
Finch, John, 12 Gudzenko, Semyon P., 134, 144, 151, 156,
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 176 170
Flaubert, Gustave, 82 Guehenno, J.-an, 60
Fleming, Ian,3, 16 Guerisse, Dr Albert, 20
Forbes, Donald, 222n.65 Guilloux, Louis, 80-1, 85
Ford, Ford Madox, 36 Guingand, Sir Francis de, 20
Ford,John,181 Gunther,John,174, 180,200
Forester,C.S.,10,18,26,30,38,43,
220n.36 Hackett, Sir John, 220n.30
Fouchet, Max-Pol, 60 Hagen, Louis, 18,129
Franz Joseph, Emperor, 99 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider, 112-13
Frederick, John T ., 1, 5, 6, 8, 10 Handke, Peter, 93
Freisler, Roland, 101 Hardy, Thomas,43
Freud, Sigmund, 174 Hardy, William M., 187,191
Fiihmann, Franz, 99, 127, 224n.11 Harris, John, 6, 14,26-7,28, 29, 34, 37,43
Fuller, John, 4, 31,32 Harrisson, Tom, 1, 3, 5, 11, 16, 41, 219n.14
Fullerton, Alexander, 8, 29 Hartlaub, Felix, 99
Fussell, Paul, 219n.11, 229n.4 Hartley, L.P., 9, 45
Hartung, Hugo, 95, 98,103,105, 109, 111\,
Gaiser, Gerd, 92,104,122, 124,128, 118
225n.24 Hasek, J aroslav, 21
Gary, Romain, 68, 70, 80, 87, 223n.31 Hassel, Sven, 12
Gascar, Pierre, 74 Hayashi, Fusao, 208
Gaulle, Charles de, 49, 76, 78, 79 Hayashi, Kumiko, 214
Genghis Khan, 147 H.-apes, L.-o, 18
Gerlach, Heinrich, 103,112,115,119,124, Heggen, Thomas, 173,175,183,187,
128,224n.10 190-1,200
Gershenzon, Evgeny M., 144 Heinrich, Willi, 112, 129,224n.3
Gibson, Guy, 23-4,43, 220n.28 Heller,Joseph,173,185,104-5,231n.28
Gide, Andre, 51 Hemingway,Ernest,17,20,125,150,173,
Giono, Jean, 47, 57 176,192-3,198
Giordano, Ralph, 91-2,94, 226n.29 Henriques, Robert,14,30,39
Gisevius, Hans Bernd, 123, 129 Hermlin, Stephen, 126
Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur de, 55 Hersey, John, 173,174,175,181,183,191,
Goebbels, Joseph, 113, 208 200
242 Name Index

Hewison, Robert, 1, 8 Kafka, Franz, 74,96

Heym,Stdan,42,122,173 ,175,185-6, Kafu, 208-9,213, 216, 218
226n.28 Kalinin, Mikhail!., 165
Hicks, Granville, I, 3, 4 Kant, Immanuel, 114
Higgins, Jack, II Kark, Leslie, 6, 30
Hillary, Richard, 22 Karl, Frederick R., 2
Hi no, Ashihei, 207-8 Kasack, Hermann, 96
Hitl~r, Adolf, 7, 40, 45, 48,88ff, 136,146, Kataev, Valentin P., 150,160
168,182,212, 224n.l Kaverin, Veniamin A. (Zilberg), 163
Hochhuth, Rolf, 93,129 Kawabata, Yasunari, 213,216,218
Hodgson, Vere, 11 Kazakevich, Emanuil G., 140-1,150,159,
Hohoff, Curt, 102,115,116 160,161,166,169,172
Holbrook, David, 32, 37, 42,45 Kee, Robert, 129, 231n.28
Holden, Matthew, 31,32,44 Keitel, Wilhelm, 116
Hiilderlin, Friedrich, 106 Kemp, Ronald, 32
Holthusen, Hans Egan, 114 Kempowski, Walter, 94,101
Hoover, Herbert, 156 Keneally, Thomas, 31, 41,75
Harbach, Michael, 124, 129 Kennedy,John F., 231n.29
Hoss, Rudolf, 75 Kennedy, Paul M.,13
Hough, Richard, 2, 18 Kennedy, Sir John, 20
Household, Geoffrey, 6 Kermode, Frank, 13, 220n.35
Howard,Leslie,180 Kersh, Gerald, 8-9,26
Hugo, Victor, 55 Kessel, Joseph, 9, 19, 24, 34, 68-70, 87,
Hunter, Joe, 3, 44 220n.25
Ketlinskaya, Vera K.,135, 143, 152
Keyes, Sidney, 22
lbaiiez, Blasco Vincente, 221 n.48 Khrushchev,NikitaS.,13 1,160,161
Ibsen, Henrik, 31 Kipling, Rudyard, SO-l
Ibuse, Masuji, 217 Kipphardt, Heinar, 93,129
Ichikawa, Kon, 217 Kirov, Sergei M., 143
Il'enkov, Vasilii P., 160 Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 103, 108,109-10,
Inber, VeraM.,134,143,152,158 ,170, 121,122,124,129, 224n.28, 225n.15,
172 231n.28
Ingersoll, Ralph,177,182, 183 Kishida, Kunia, 208
Innes, Hammond, 6 Klages, Dietrich, 113
Innes, Michael, see J.l.M. Stewart Kleist, Heinrich von, 114
Isakovsky, Mikhail V.,143 Klepper,Jochen,lOl-2,1 15
Isherwood, Christopher, 176 Kluge,Alexander, 92-3,115,118,119,
Ishikawa, Tatsuzo, 208
127,128,129
Knight, Eric, 27, 33,41
Jack, Donald, 21 Koch, Erich,133
Jamet, Claude, 52 Kolbenhoff, Walter, 90
Jarry, Alfred, 74 Konsalik, Heinz, 118
Jens, Walter, 96 Kovpak, Sidor A., 136, 139
John,S.Beynon,6,49 Kozhevnikov, Vadim M.,157
Johns, W.E., 3 Kramer-Badoni, Rudolf, 120
Johnson, Uwe, 108 Krausnick, Helmut, 94
Jones, David, 30 Kron, Aleksandr A., 166-7
Jones,James,173,175,17 9-80,182, Krymov, Yuri (Yuri S. Beklemisher), 150
183-4, 192, 193-8, 200, 217 Kiihn, Dieter, 127
Jouhandeau, Marcel, 54 Kunert, Gunter, 226n.29
Joyce,James,14 Kunz, Heinz, 6-7
Jiinger,Ernst,95,103,116 ,117,119,123, Kurosawa, Akira, 208,211,215
126 Kurosheva, Aleksandra I., 143
 Name Index 243

Kutuzov, Prince Mikhaill.,133 March, William,176

Kuznetsov,AleksandrV.,161-2,172 Mares'ev, Aleksey P., 157
Martin-Chauffier, Louis, 74-5
Lambert, Eric, 7, 32 Marwick, Arthur,12
Landsborough, Gordon, 29,31 Mason, Richard, 8, 40
Lang, Sir Eric, 23 Masson, Claude-Armand, 52
Larkin, Philip, 2 Masters,David,19
Laval, Pierre, 81 Maugham, W. Somerset, 6
Lawrence,D.H.,113 Mauldin, Bill, 181
Lawrence, T.E., 113 Mauriac, Fran~is, 60
Leasor, James, 25,28 Mayran, Camille, 59
Lebedev-Kumach, Vasilii 1., 147 Medvedev,DmitriN.,138,172
Ledig, Gert, 92, 125 Medynsky, Grigory, 160
Lenz, Hermann, 99,123,224n.9 Megret, Christian, 52
Lenz, Siegfried, 92, 93, 96,100,114, 129 Meichsner,Dieter,103,129
Leonov, Leonid M.,157-8 Meinecke, Friedrich, 117
Leslie, Peter, 7, 29 Meretskov,KirillA.,136
Leslie, Shane, 176 Merle, Robert, 71-2, 75,87
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 114 Messerschmidt, Manfred, 94
Lewis, Alun, 9, 22, 229n.6 Mezhirov, Aleksandr P., 134, 142
Lewis, Cecil, 6, 30, 43, 220n.28 Michelet, Jules, 55
Lewis, Cecil Day, 6, 40 Milestone, Lewis, 198
Lindemann, Ernst, 26 Millar, George, 23
Lodge, David, 29, 220n.40, 223n.28 Milligan, Spike, 21, 22
London, jack, 51,142,192,199 Minney,R.J.,19
Lohse, Heinrich, 133 Minns, Rayne, 12
LucasPhillips,C.,18 Mishima, Yukio,206,216,218
Liitjens, Gunther, 26 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 214
Lysenko, Trofim D., 159 Modiano, Patrick, 67,87
Mohrt, Michel, 54-5,70-1
MacArthur, Douglas, 216 Molotov, Vyacheslav M.,132
McCarthy,Joseph, 174 Monsarrat, Nicholas, 4, 6, 8, 12, 30, 34, 38,
MacDonnell, J .E., 4, 32, 43 41
McEwen, Ian, 2 Montherlant, Henry de, 54
Macintyre, Donald, 12 Montgomery, Sir Bernard, 20
Macksey, Kenneth, 11 Moorehead, Alan, 17, 20
McLaglen, Victor,181 Morgan, Charles, 15, 23, 42
Maclean, Alistair, 6, 29, 30, 31, 37 Morgan, Claude, 60
MacLeish, Archibald, 183, 184 Mosley,Leonard,19,219n.16
McManus, Leslie, 3 Moss, W. Stanley, 18
Magnane, Georges, 71 Mottram, R.H., 12,42
Mailer,Norman,173-5,177-8,181, Mozart, WolfgangAmadeus,117,126
187-92,199,200,202,226n.28 Muller, Klaus-Jurgen, 94
Majdalany, Fred, 37, 39 Mundstock, Karl, 224n.11
Malaparte, Curzio, 11 Murasaki, Shikibu, 211
Malle, Louis,67
Mallinson, Vernon, 1 Nagai, su Kafu
Malraux, Andre, 48-9,65,69, 71, 73, 81, Naville, Pierre, 51
223n.24 Nekrasov, Viktor P.,135-7, 141-2,145-6,
Maltz,Albert,10,173 151,154,159,161-2,168-9,172
Mann, Thomas, 50, 96, 115, 129,211 Nelson, Michael, 24,33-4
Maiming, Frederic, 32 Netzen, Klaus, 3, 11, 44
Manstein, Erich von, 139, 227n.10 Nevsky, Prince Aleksandr, 133
Marcel, Gabriel, 59 Newby, P.H., 1, 10,33
244 Name Index

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 113,147 Priestley, J.B., 2, 6, 8, 9, 16, 27, 46, 171

Nilin, Pavel F., 162-3 Pritchett, V .S., 4
Nimier, Roger, 71,87 Prokof'ev,.Aleksandr A., 147,158
Nizan, Paul, 48 Proust, Marcel, 22, 211
Noel, Andre, 52 Pyle, Ernie, 46, 174, 200, 222n.65
Noel, Juliette, 62,63-4
Noll, Dieter, 110, 123, 224n.11
Noma, Hiroshi, 217 Racine, Jean, 31
Nossack,HansErich,91,98,105,117,1 18 Rame, David, 27, 28
Rawnesley, C. F., 20
O'Casey, Sean, 24 Raymond, Ernest, 9
Odintsov, Arnold (Arnold B. Oder), 165 Rayner,D.A.,15,30,43
Oka, Shohei, 217 Read, Sir Herbert, 221-2n.64
Okudzhava, Bulat S., 162 Rebatet, Lucien, 68, 223n.20
Reeman, Douglas, 4, 13, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37
"O'Leary, Pat", see Guerisse
Rehn, Jens, 92
0Jdsey,B.S.,5,10
Orwell, George,1, 41,197, 223n.28 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 95, 226n.59
Ory, Pascal, 48 Reid, P.R., 18
Remarque, Erich Maria 32 50 92 95
Ott, Herbert, 121, 224n.ll
111,118,121,125,129,15o.176.'19s,
Ott, Wolfgang, 109,121,122,129
221 n.48, 226n.28
Ossietzky,Carlvon,107
Renan, Ernest, 55
Ckwen,WiHred,176
Reynaud, Paul, 47
Ozaki, Shiro, 208
Ozu, Yasujiro, 207,214-15 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 132
Richardson, Anthony, 20
Richter, Hans Werner, 111, 125
Panfyorov, Fyodor I., 160-1
Rieuneau, Maurice, 68
Panova, Vera F., 157,172
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 116
Pape, Richard, 23, 221n.47
Parnell, Geoff, 32, 33,41 Rinser, Luise, 101
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 85
Pascal, Roy, 21
Rodimtsev, Aleksandr I., 151, 155
Pasternak, Boris L., 131,132,147
Rokossovsky, Konstantin K., 133,136
Patterson, Sarah, 7
Romains, Jules, 68
Paulhan, Jean, 60
Romilly, Giles, 18
Paulus, Friedrich, 89, 114
Rommel, Erwin, 107
Pavlenko, PetrA., 160
Pawle, Gerald, 220-1n.41 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 187
Roques, Rene, 52
Petain, Philippe, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57, 69,
Rousset, David, 74,87
76,79,82
Pervomaisky, Leonid S., 168 Roy, Jules, 72, 87
Rozen,AieksandrG.,163
Petain, Philippe, 47, 49,50, 54, 57, 69, 76,
Rudnev, Semyon V., 136,139
79,82
Pilyar, Yuri E., 165, 172 Russell of Li"erpool, Lord Edward
Frederick Langley, 16
Piper,David,13,14,31,39
Plagemann, Bentz, 187 Russeii,Roy,4
Platen, August von, 225n.20 Rutherford, Andrew. 106, 221n.57
Plievier, Theodor, 90, 95, 102, 103, 106, Ryan, Cornelius, 26
108-9,114,115,117,118,119,120,123 , Ryan, Patrick, 21, 24,33-4
Rzhevskaya, Elena M., 164
126,129
Polevoy, Boris N., 157, 172
Pope Pius XII, 93 Saint-Exu~ry, Antoine de, 30, 73, 87, 92,
Popovkin, Aleksandr I., 160 223n.27
Powell, Anthony, 2, 9, 13, 35,39 Salewski, Michael, 107, 224n.1
Powell, Jonathan, 4 Salomon; Ernst von, 96,103, 124
Pozner, Victor,52-3,54, 57 Sansom, William, 6
 Name Index 245

Sartre,Jean-Paul, 51, 54, 59, 60, 61, 66,77, Supervielle, Jules, 60

81,83-5,86, 87, 222n.17 Surkov,AiekseyA., 134,144,146,147,148,
Sassoon, Siegfried, 176 150-1,156,158,170
Scannell, Vernon, 2 Svetlov, Mikhail A., 146
Schiller, Friedrich von, 114 Szabo, Violette, 19
Schirach, Baldur von, 106
Schlabrendorff, Fabian von, 123 Takeyama, Michio, 217-18
Schulz, Max Walter, 111,120, 224n.11, Tamba, Fumio, 214
226n.25 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 211-13,216,218
Schumann, Gerhard, 90 Tavernier, Rene, 60
Scott, Sir Walter, 4 Taylor, A.J.P., 2, 3, 5, 13,40, 43
Seaton, Mary, 12 Taylor, Walker,6,43
Seghers,Anna, 120,121,123,129 Tchaikovsky, Petr 1., 146
Seghers, Pierre, 50, 60 Thomas, Edith, 59, 62, 63,64-5
Seidensticker, Edward, 211,218 Thomas, Leslie, 6, 43
Sel'vinsky, llyaL., 143,149,151,156,158, Thomas, W.B.,23
170 Thompson, C.R., 220-1n.41
Semprun, Jorge, 74 Thiirk, Harry, 224n.11
Shakespeare, William, 27, 204, 222n.49 Tickell, Jerrard, 12,42
Shapiro, Lionel, 7, 32, 35,39 Tikhonov, Nikolay S., 153-4,156
Shaw, Irwin, 43, 173-5,178,181, 226n.28 Tillard, Paul, 74
Sheean, Vincent, 174 Tolstoy, A1eksey N., 135-6,138-9, 144,
Shishova, Zinaida K., 152,153 172
Sholokhov, Mikhail A., 139,146,172 Tolstoy,CountLevN.,vii, 135,146,150,
Shute, Nevil, 6 154, 171
Sikorski, Wladislaw, 93 Tomita, Tsuneo, 210
Simmel, Johannes Mario, 119-20 Toynbee, Philip, 222n.64
Simonov, Konstantin M., 135, 136,139, Tregaskis, Richard, 174, 179, 200, 201-2
1~146,1~1~-~16~166,172 Trevor, Elleston,28,31,32
Sire, Glen, 173,175,203 Trew,Anthony, 7,30,38,43
Slutsky, Boris, 135,143,146 Trilling, Lionel, 124
Smirnov,SergeiS., 163 Triolet, Elsa, 63, 64
Smith, Frederick E., 4, 18, 29 Tripp, Miles, 40
Snegirev, Vladimir L., 133 Tukhachevsky, Mikhail N., 164
Sobolev, Leonid S., 149 Tvardovsky,AieksandrP., 147,148,157,
Sokolov, Vasilii M., 161 158
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 1., 139, 164, 172 Twain, Mark, 205
Sorel, Georges, 113
Spark, Muriel, 9 Uris, Leon, 173,187,190,200
Spender, Stephen, 1
Stalin, Joseph, 79, 131ff. V ailland, Roger, 86, 87
Stalman, Reinhart, 92 Vander Post, Laurens, 16, 42, 220n.38
Starobinsky,Jean,59 Vercors (Jean Bruller), 51,61-2,63, 64,87
Stauffenberg, Claus Count Schenk von, 107 Vershigora, Petro P., 135,136,137,139,
Steinbeck, John, 51,125,173,174,192, 143,150,151,156,159,172
221n.48 Veuillot, Louis, 55
Steiner, George, 68 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 64
Stendhal, 71 Vishnevsky, VsevolodV., 156,158
Sterz, Reinhold, 95 Vlasov,AndreiA., 132,165
Stewart, j.I.M., 6 Vorob'ev, Evgenii Z., 163
Streit, Christian, 94 Voroshilov, Klimemy E., 133
Strittmacher, Erwin, 224n. 11
Strother, Jan, 9, 46,221 n.SO Waley,Arthur,211
Styron, William, 75 Walker, David,28
246 Name Index

Wamer,Rex,6,16, 30 Wingate, Orde, 19

Wassilewska, WandaL.,138,148 ,149,172 Wipper, Roben M., 133
Watson, John, 32, 41 Wise, Arthur, 220n.30
Waugh, Alec, 1 Wolfen, Ira,174
Waugh,Evelyn,2, 9,13,35-7,45,194 Wondratschek, Wolf, 93
Webb,Jannes,107,2 30 Wood,Alan,12
Weisenborn, Gunther, 98, 101, 116 Womer, Hans, 90
Weiss,Peter,93,117 ,121 Wright, Robert, 20
Wehner, Josef Magnus, 90
West, Morris, 7-8,12
Westnnorland, Williann C., 231n.29 Yannannoto, Kajiro, 208, 209-10
Wheatley, Dennis, 3, 6 Yarnnagaev, Ennel'yan, 163
Whiting, Charles, 3, 29,44 Yoshida, Mitsuri, 217 •
Wiechert, Emst,121,126,130 Yoshikawa, Eiji, 210
Wilhelnn, Hans-Heinrich, 94
Williannt, David, 4, 28, 44 Zand, Herbert, 92, 117, 118, 126, 130
Willianns, Eric, 23-4 Zhdanov,AndreiA .,159
Williannson, Henry, 9,12 Zhukov,Georgi K.,133
Wilson, Andrew, 23-4 Zlobin, Stephen P ., 164, 165
Wilson,Angus,16 ZOberlein, Hans, 90
Wilson, Guthrie, 32, 40 Zweig, Stefan, 50
Subject Index
Alamein, El, 21, 28, 29, 220n.29 Comics, 3, 44
Algeria, 35, SO, 60 Communism, Communists, 13, 35, 48, 49,
American Civil War, 194 59,63,64,65,83,91, 117,120,122,
Amiens,47 123-4, 13tff., 206-7,216, 224n. 11,
Ardennes, ue Bulge, Battle of the 225-6n.25
Arnhem,18 Compiegne, 75
Arras, 30, 47 Concentration Camps, 73-5,92, 104,
Atom Bomb, 42, 217; set Hiroshima, 121-2,123,173
Nagasaki Crete, 27,31, 36
Auschwitz, 73, 74, 75,93,117,147
Dachau, 73
Bagerovo, 149 Dakar,36
Bastogne, 203 Danzig, see Gdansk
Belsen, 75 D-Day, see Normandy, invasion of
Benghazi, 29,31 Dieppe,28
Berlin,89,91,116,124,160,163,212 Dnieperriver,165
Breslau, see Wroclaw Donriver,139
Britain, Battle of, 7, 22, 27, 31-2, 43, 89 Don bass region, 142
Bryanskfront,138, 145 Dresden,93
Buchenwald, 73, 74, 75, 130 Dunkirk, 13,26-8, 33, 42, 45, 46,71; see
Budapest, 165 Saint-Valery
Bulge, Battle of the, 89, 94, 203; see
Bastogne Eire,10,45
Bunna, 8, 18, 30, 31, 33, 39,209, 215; see Escape stories, 18, 20,23-4, 22Sn.15
Kwai Exode/Exodlu (French), 48, 52, 53, 67, 76,
81, 84; (Russian),145-6
Capitalism, 71, 161
Cassino, Monte, 12, 28, 125 Falklands War, 107
Catania,8 Fascism, Fascists,3,16,80, 95, 97,117,
Censorship, 50-1,52,208,214, 215; 119,123,144,147,174,186,210
wartime publishing in France, 51, 57, 61, Films (Hollywood), 94,176-7,179-80,
85,86 198-9, 201, 204, 219n.16, 230n.7;
Channel, English, 28,.89 (British),18, 19, 180; (French), 67;
Channel Islands, 12; see Sark (German), 126; (Japanese), 207ff.;
China, 207,208,214,217 (Russian),136
Clennont-Ferrand, 76 Finland, 13, 164
Clery,SO First World War,1,2,3,4,5,37-8,39,47,
Colditz, 18 49, 54, 76, 81, 88, 95,113,150,176-7,
Cold War,35, 91, 97,117,159,161,174, 221n.46; literature about, 2, 4, 12, 15, 16,
176,205, 221n.47 17,30,32,36,37,41,42,44,45,47,52,
Collaboration,S4,63, 76, 77ff.,132,136, 53,54,55,61,68,69,71,90,92,111,125,
138,165,167,268 150,176-7,178,181,192,198,220n.33,
Collonges, 75 34, 36, 221n.48
Cologne,23 Fort-Monluc, 75

247
248 Subject Index

Gdansk,127 161, 162; absence in Japanese war

Gibraltar,69 movies,208
Gdynia,26 Lyon, 76
Goa,25-6
Great War, su First World War Maginot Line, 48, 52
Greece, 7,12,27,29,34 Maidanek,147
Guadalcanal,174,1 79,186,201-2,215 Malaya, 13, 28, 209
Guemica,43 Malta,29
Manchuria, 207
Hamburg, 91, 93,98 Maquis, su Resistance
Hatred of the enemy: rare in British Marxism,119,188 ;suCommunism,
writing, 40; Russian hatred reserved for Socialism
the Germans, 148, 149,161 Marseilles, 76
Heroism, 27, 45, 47, 63, 66,70, 80, 97, Mauthausen, 147
106-11,118,156,15 9,167,176,177, Militarism: absence in British writing, 41;
181,182,195,207,2 09-10,221n.57, German,88,97,107 ;Japanese,209;
225n.12,23 militarism debunked, 177
Heydekrug POW camp, 18 Moscow,63,89,90, 108,115,136,139,1 45
Hiroshima, 206, 215 Munich,6,84, 123
Home Guard, 9, 220n.21
Hong Kong, 27, 220n.39 Nagasaki, 20
Nanking, 207
India, 3, 13, 229n.6 Naturalism,192,19 6
Indo-China, 207 Nazism, Nazis, 2, 40, 42, 50, 59,61,62, 70,
ltaly,3,21,114,173 ,178,2J1n.28; SN 82,8811.,131,133,1 39, 147,155,160,
Sicily 161,163,169,174,1 75,183,184,205
Iwojima,215 Neuengamme, 75
Nevariver,152
Jews,42,58,59,83, 93,94,100,102,103 , Normandy, invasion of, 14, 21, 25, 26, 28,
116,117,133,145-6 ,224n.7,226n.29; 89,158
seldom portrayed in German war NorthAfrica,17,29 ,49,50,89,158,173 ,
writing, 121-2; extermination of, 94, 178; su Alamein, Algeria, Benghazi,
133, 146; anti-Semitism, 83, 86, 159,169, Dakar
175, 225n.23 Norway,13,29,30, 92,115,127,173
Nostalgia (British), 45-6; (German) 95;
Kharkov,141,165 (American),178-8 0
K.iel,6 Novgorod,146
Kiev,162 Nuremberg, racial laws and post-war
Klin,146 trials, 48, 101, 224n.7
Kolyrna,165
Korea, 217; Korean War, 91 Oderriver,13
Krasnodon, 137 Odessa,160
Kwai river (POW camp), 10,22-3 Officers (British), 14-15, 39; (German),
Ky6to,212 112,113,115-16,12 0,121, 226n.27;
resentment of rear staffs by front-line
Ladoga lake, 153 troops,37
Leningrad, 133, 134, 147, 148,152-3, 156, Okinawa,215,230n .17
212 Oldenburg, 25
Leyte, su Philippines Oradour massacre, 59, 71
Liberalism, liberals, 91, 107, 120, 183, Oran,77
187-90 Osaka,211
London,5,31,35,49 ,69,76,142
"LostGeneration", 22, 95,131,221n.46, 52 Pacifism,41-2,47, 80,84,107,162
Love interest, 7-8,39,11H; "astonishing Paris,23,47,53,55 ,61,76,79,113,126
sexlessness" of Russian socialist realism, Partisans, su Resistance
 Subject Index 249

Pearlflarbor, 185,207,209 Stalingrad, 70, 79, 89, 92,102,103,112-13,

Philippines, 199,209,217 114,118,119,124,127,128,141,144,
Poland, 2, 88,93 145,147,151,154,155-6,157,169
Polotsk, 158 Switzerland, 49, 60
Prisoners-of-war, 10, 15-16,22-3,69,!14,
90,94,98, 115,125,132,133,136, Taiwan, 217
138-9,143,146,149,160,165, 185; Sle TarawaAtoll,200
escape stories Television, 4, 225n.15
Thailand, 209
Realism, 11-12,31-2,38,67,70,106,125, Thrillers, 3,6, 7, 11, 44,185, 226n.27
134, 157,200,201,217;officially Tokyo,209,210,212,216
discouraged in Nazi Germany, 90; Toulouse, 53
socialist realism, 134, 135; realism in Tours, 56
japanese war movies, 208 Treblinka, 75,149
Resistance,6, 19, 43, 49, 59ff.,63-6,67-8, Troy, 48, 147
69-70,77-8,80-1' 82, 83, 86, 111' 124, Tunis,21
135, 138, 160; Resistance periodicals
(French), 60-2,66, 74; sparsely treated Ukraine, 132,133,135,136,140,142,145
in German war writing, 123-4; Maquis, Urals, 145, 165
226n.27; Partisans (Crete, Yugoslavia),
31,36; (Soviet Union), 135,136,137, Venice,97
138,139,143,149,150,156,160,162, Versailles, treaty of, 113
163, 167, 168 Vichy regime,50,51,54, 56, 58,60,61, 76,
Rotterdam, 43 81,82
Rzhev, 160 Vienna, 99, 119
Vietnam, 107,205,229-30n.6,231n.29
Saigon,205 Vilno(Wilna), 70
Saint-Brieuc, 80-1 Volga river, 139,147
Saint-Damiens, 71 Vyazma, 144
Saint-Valery, 23
Sandhurst, 25 Warsaw,43, 173
Sebastopol, 118 Weimar Republic, 90, 107,225n.19
Sedan,47 Wroclaw, 98, 103
Siam, see Thailand
Sicily, 7 Yasnaya Polyana, 146
Singapore,13,27,28,209,215 Yugoslavia, 31,36
Socialism, 123, 132, 134
Spain, 7;SpanishCivil War, 79,84,192-3, Zhitomir, 157
198, 222n.64