Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

Everything had been consumed by the war and kept within its fury. The very landscape replayed the fighting: strong winds rushed out at dusk from the yawning, sulfurous sky, driving a vanguard of dark, rolling, leaden clouds, urging us to duck, to charge, to strike back, tearing off chests and foreheads as they beat ahead, while the steaming earth with equal power sucked up the knees and splayed hands and faces of the fallen — the mouths with their eternally unborn screams, the white teeth and gums that yearned for the moist, cool, crumbly loam — and inhaled their warm breath. The vast, melancholy flatland was drunk on the spilled blood, the orange rim of the sky showed the bright pain of wounds sawed into by the toothy lines of distant woods, and the pale-blue opal mists offered cooling, soothing, forgetting.

The beauty of the war, then, was not the same abstract beauty we might admire in a work of art, our eyes delighting in the decorative tumult, the abundance and variety of twisted and tangled movement, the display of strength, the immediacy and intensity of all expression and, finally, in the explosive contrast between life at its most unrestrained and its solemn stilling in death. The endless dazzle of colorful effects, from the glowing purity of the flags to the matting of all color in the sooty gray of gun smoke, from the dazzling brightness of explosions to the tender nuances of decomposition, did not tempt us to transmit our regard for the painterly object onto its cause. I say: we carried the war inside us, the tumult of destruction and annihilation, the addictive obliviousness it contained, the triumphant feeling of victory, of invulnerability as well as the dark terror of mutilation, the biting fear of sudden flight, the dull cutting torment of defeat — all its delight and all its deep despair lived in us in its original form, and needed no awakening or aiding.

Nor did we need to be fueled by the thought of the just war. For us every war was just. The spear from the Iliad, whose point smashes through the helmet of the fleeing warrior, running through the skull and coming out at the other end so that his teeth fall out of his mouth and he collapses, clattering in his armor — that was just, not because it produced gruesome beauty and certainly not because it was undertaken in the name of a just cause , but because what happened, happened , and without much in the way of reason, explanation, or rectification.

Because what were the flags other than symbols of the honor of the cause for which they waved and for which they were torn by the hail of bullets? The mere sight of them was enough — even apart from the battle, as in a signal book — to be carried away by their pathos and to know to which ones victory would attach itself. We did not choose sides based on which party was more in the right — it was, after all, a prerequisite of battle that they all believed they had right on their side — but by the persuasive ability of a particular banner, which we read as an expression of a given nation’s essence, signaling great clarity and passion, or else inadequacy and false entitlement. We had seen with people that it wasn’t always a question of who was right, so it didn’t necessarily matter which side in the war was right, or even which was proved right. Instead, our sympathy was involuntarily drawn to the more nobly fashioned character, so that the fairness of a cause — if we had inquired — would have derived more from the fullness of the life that produced it and by which it was represented. It bothered us to keep butting up against the lawyerly evidence that the Germans constantly produced in support of their cause, as if the readiness to die on its behalf wasn’t convincing enough.

The war, which had very much started as our own but was soon completely remade into “the Germans’ war,” had been presented to us as Siegfried’s battle with the dragon. The image of dragon-slaying was convincing and left nothing to speculation. We were amazed that people felt it necessary to explain to us exactly how Siegfried felt challenged by the dragon in order to attack it with just cause. This cause struck us simply as part of his heroic nature. After all, the beauty of the dragon-slaying lay in the boldness of his attack. And even if Siegfried, as we believed, had always harbored the idea of killing a dragon, that made him even more of a hero. Nothing changed the immediacy with which the event itself happened.

But now, called upon to admire the war’s mechanics and engineers, we found ourselves faced with the unreasonable demand to view Siegfried as a master planner who calculated every sword stroke — indeed, the very core of his courage and fiery zeal! — with a slide-rule. Naturally that didn’t prevent what happened from happening, but it did remove us by the distance of a peep-box, and the marionette-like impression made the event into a mechanized performance, which may have not have lost any of its power to fascinate — in fact, in some respects it gained a new measure of attraction, but it did lose the immediacy of our participation. Siegfried had become a subordinate. We marveled greatly at this remotely steered springtime hero and took his side, but we no longer identified ourselves with him so unconditionally. So we watched the intellects that held him so completely by the threads and gave them our most careful attention, but not our love.

What differentiated them at first glance from the termite-men under their command were their faces, so different from the physiognomies produced in the high-pressure chamber of primal biogenetic experience. Their faces were very much their own: robust, easy to read, everyday types such as you meet in offices, even at universities, and in all kinds of higher bourgeois professions. Nor did they stand in striking contrast to the uniform; on the contrary, they managed to make their dress as bourgeois as themselves. To be sure, their features seemed more drastic, more sharply chiseled than those of their civilian counterparts, and they were doubtlessly more important. The sheer patience and constant willpower demanded by these highly determined careers, as well as the limitations they imposed, where objectives were specific, unambiguous, and easily grasped, gave them something solid, at times even monumental.

This stamp of personality, so conspicuously noticeable, set them a world apart from the anonymous swarm of their troops, whose first and obvious trait was the complete loss of individuality — in fact, their specific qualities of strike power and operational ability were derived from an aggregate renunciation of personality. This suggested an unspoken mutual relationship. It was as if all the individual elements of the uniformed men had been relinquished to the collective cause, either voluntarily or else by artificial coaxing, and had taken sanctuary in a single leader’s personality, with the men offering their empty shells like molds to be filled with one will. Thus the commanders derived their impressive greatness from the sheer authority to command, and not the other way around: their greatness had not led them to command.

While that shed some light on their less-than-convincing greatness, it did not explain the mutual relationship between leaders and the led. There had to be something more that bound the leaders to their troops and made them mutually dependent — some higher principle, something we did not feel could be sufficiently caused or justified by functionality alone.

We looked for it in the idea of sacrifice.

Nothing had made such an impression on us as the German soldiers’ willingness to make sacrifices: they set forth in jubilation and did not spare themselves the most dreadful hardships and deprivations. We saw from the pictures how they discarded even the most basic conditions of their humanity, in order to seek the thickest barrage — as it was plain to see — where the casualties were greatest. The thought of the Fatherland alone was not enough to effect such a renunciation of self. For that people died in simpler, less complete ways — though in no fewer numbers — as the enemy showed and ultimately our own as well. So there had to be some deeper sense at work — the same that had fashioned a termite-people into an instrument of war, and kept it functioning in this interplay of commanders and commanded. And this was what we sought to find, with a patience born of passion.