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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Stefan Heym: The whole scene was immersed in the silence of absolute death
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Stefan Heym
From The Crusaders (1948)
“If I had been your wife,” she went on, “I would not have let you go to war…”
“How could you have stopped me?” He smiled at her bravado.
“I don’t know. Perhaps I would have put something into your food to give you ulcers. Women are too weak. They do not hold on to their men, not strongly enough – if it were otherwise, there would be no wars, because not enough men would be able to go…”
***
“An acute neurosis, or a psychosis, Lieutenant, is not considered a legitimate way out. The illness eliminates a man as a useful member of society – in this case, as a soldier who can be shot at. I am under the same discipline as my colleague who sews up the shrapnel hole in a man’s body. After our patient, Thorpe, was wounded in North Africa, he was patched up again so he could be exposed again to the same thing.”
“Kind of vicious circle?” Yate’s conception of medicine had been different. To aide, to heal a sick or wounded man, was as much a human obligation as what he had set out to do. It was all tied up in one: Thorpe’s reaching out for him in Normandy, when the madness was encroaching on the boy; his own need to see him healed; his own fears; the fear of the “Fascism” that had wrought the destruction in Thorpe’s mind; and the war itself.
“Sure it’s a vicious circle,” said Philipsohn. “It’s war.”
…
“…I’ll tell you, Lieutenant – the more I see of the war and what it does to people, the less I know about the border line between the sane and the insane. That goes for the men who do the fighting and for the others. Have you ever dreamed of killing somebody? You don’t need to dream it any more – you can do it! Ever dreamed of stealing, whoring? What do you want to dream it for? Do it! Now take Thorpe. He’s had this fear – and he’s been having it in this fantastic war atmosphere, in which the most insane dream becomes reality!”
***
The mass migrations from west to east, from east to west, the destruction of home and town, the creation of a new type of man – the barracks man, who had no home and who existed only to be worked and mulcted – were the real guarantees of a new time. They were the guarantees of ultimate National-Socialist victory, regardless of the issue of battle. And the Allies, the fools, were helping this new world on its way, by their invasion that turned Europe into a battlefield, by their mass bombings that daily destroyed more roots and daily decreased the strata of permanence.
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What affected the men were the trenches which, grass-overgrown, still scarred the land. True enough, they had been flattened, and their sharp edges were gone; but almost thirty years had not been able to wipe them from the face of the earth, to remove the scars of hundreds of thousands of men bled to death, in a carnage which proved nothing.
***
“I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve been thinking it, too. The God-damned lousy war, there’s no end to it, and what for? Look at those trenches from 1916 – for what did those guys die? And twenty or thirty years from now, will other armies march over this ground again? That’s what you’ve been thinking.”
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