The Face of War

The Nazi papers had one solid value: Whatever they were against, you could be for.

There was certainly fear in that feeling, and courage. It made you walk carefully and listen hard and it lifted the heart.

How can I explain that you feel safe at this war, knowing that the people around you are good people?

But this war was a total madness: one criminal lunatic and his followers wanted what they could never get, domination over their time, and they grabbed for it; other grabbers joined them; and the world slid into a six-year-long dream of hell. The sense of the insanity and wickedness of this war grew in me until, for purposes of mental hygiene, I gave up trying to think or judge, and turned myself into a walking tape recorder with eyes. The way people stay half sane in war, I imagine, is to suspend a large part of their reasoning minds, lose most of their sensitivity, laugh when they get the smallest chance, and go a bit, but increasingly, crazy.

Ahead of us a staff car painted dead-white—the camouflage color here—blinked its lights twice, turned a corner and suddenly sped along a narrow road past an open snow-covered field.

Here, as everywhere else, I heard the same story about the Russian infantry column. The Russians attacked en masse in line, and the hidden and dispersed Finns mowed them down with machine-gun fire. And here, as everywhere else, I heard soldiers and officers express regret that other men should have to die stupidly and wastefully like slaughtered animals.

As always, one is astounded by the age of the pilots; they ought to be going to college dances, you feel, or cheering at football games

The army has the sound and comforting gaiety of good troops.

It was an important lesson for me because I decided I had learned the same thing over and over for long enough; political reality and political morality have nothing to do with each other.

I realized finally how unwise it was to be ‘prematurely anti-Fascist.’

‘The moral top of the world, where the light never quite goes out.’ England was that, during the war.

Nazi doctrine extolled ‘frightfulness’ as a weapon, as a means to the end of victory. The human race is still sickened by the poison of that doctrine, by crimes committed everywhere and answered with other crimes. We have before us the memory and the lesson: let us not imagine that anyone can use frightfulness in a good cause.

There is only one clear universal thought and that is: finish it. Win the war and get it over with. There’s been enough; there’s been too much. The thing to do is win now soon, as fast as possible.

There is a point where you feel yourself so small and helpless in such an enormous insane nightmare of a world, that you cease to give a hoot about anything and you renounce care and start laughing.

Twelve parachutist prisoners, the crack troops of the Germans, stand in a courtyard guarded by the Canadians who captured them. They are all young and they wear the campaign medals of the Crimea, as well as the medal of Italy. These were the men who held Cassino all winter. You talk to them without any special feeling, and suddenly like a shock it occurs to you that they really look evil; the sadism which their General Kesselring ordered them to practice in Italy as they retreat shows now in their mouths and their eyes.

Meantime you could sit on the sand with a book and a drink of sweet Italian rum and watch two British destroyers shelling Rimini, just up the coast; see German shells landing on the front three kilometers away; follow a pilot in a slowly sinking parachute, after his plane had been shot down; hear a few German shells whistle overhead to land two hundred yards farther down; and you were getting a fine sunburn and life seemed an excellent invention.

She did not seem a particularly inspiring woman and she seemed unusually nervous (which, in perilous places, is always unpleasant, because the proper manner under such circumstances is a real or assumed calm).

War is lonely and individual work; it is hard to realize how small it can get. Finally it can boil down to ten unshaven gaunt-looking young men, from anywhere in America, stationed on a vital road with German tanks coming in.

Rare-looking types wandered around the street; there is the greatest possible variety in the faces and uniforms of the Russian soldiery. There were blonds and Mongols and fierce-looking characters with nineteenth-century mustaches and children of about sixteen, and it felt like a vast encampment of a nomad people, where everyone is eating around campfires, singing, playing cards and getting ready to roll into blankets and sleep

We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever.

An Italian asked me whether I believed that nations really wanted to live, and I said, ‘Of course,’ and then we both began to wonder. It will cost a great deal to live; it will mean great sacrifices.

We big overfed white people will never know what they feel.

Humanity is one. Each of us is responsible for his personal actions and his actions towards the rest of humanity. All we can do is hold back our own brand from the fire—pull it back—do not add to the flame.’

I date from an older America and I remember with longing the day when a President said to the American people, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ That wasn’t any form of propaganda, it was truth, and is just as valid now if only we knew it. I wish I could ask George Orwell’s opinion, but it seems to me that propaganda is a sign of fear. We ought to give the Communists a world-wide monopoly of propaganda and let them founder in it; not us.

As citizens, I think we all have an exhausting duty to know what our governments are up to, and it is cowardice or laziness to ask: what can I do about it anyway? Every squeak counts, if only in self-respect.

The boastful American line is that ‘we’ won the Cold War, presumably by bankrupting the Soviet Union in the arms race. This is odd, considering that the US bankrupted itself with a national debt that climbed every year of the Cold War, tripling during the Reagan presidency, in direct relation to military spending. The Soviet debt, now inherited by Russia, is sixty billion dollars. The US debt was 3,599 billion dollars in 1991, and rising.

But Britons were brainwashed so long that a majority believed their minor nuclear arsenal gave them protection, as well as standing in the world. This Cold War folly lingers on.

Nobody won the Cold War.