An Ermine in Czernopol (15 page)

When we compared these young Germans to our own soldiers—and also to our enemies—who were really nothing more than simple soldiers, flushed peasant boys or nondescript faces in a disguise that they wore not without a degree of smugness along with the crude but understandable satisfaction that rowdiness had been made legitimate—we realized the distance that separated our German allies from the other warriors. But that only made the secret of their otherness more enigmatic than ever.

Herr Tarangolian, whom we once asked for an explanation of the German military prowess, offered the view that an attack wave of so many dumb faces had to render their enemies equally dumb. He then tried to placate us by noting that this martial superiority did not ultimately lead to the desired success that it had so reliably promised at the start—which was for us neither a comfort nor an explanation. What was truly horrifying about the exploding termite-men could not be dispelled with a joke, no matter how much it reflected the horror, and the fact that they were only bested by tremendous sacrifice and ultimately through starvation only further convinced us that the Germans were not people like everybody else.

We were particularly persuaded by the pictures of those great Germans who were said to personify the military genius of our brother nation. These stubble-headed commanders, so exaggerated, in a closefisted way, bending over maps at the general staff headquarters or surveying the death-ridden terrain through field glasses from a protected shelter, instead of riding into battle at the head of their troops, leading the colors, had so little in common with our naïve concept of heroism that it took elaborate explanations before we were prepared to understand what was truly admirable about their achievement. But the insect-like machine of the German troops did make enough of an impression on us that we began to have a vague sense of what we were supposed to understand: that this war
to purify the soul
combined the highly concrete use of force with the highly abstract use of steering, planning, and projection. And if our perception struggled against the idea of giving the planners priority over the actual fighters—who although they may have rated little more than cannon fodder at least had the stigmata of the sacrificial death in their favor—we nevertheless viewed the German generals with different eyes from then on.

In other words: it was they who would change our perception of
war as beautiful
.

I'm not saying that we had thought of war to that point with the aesthetic sensibilities of a battlefield painter. We had been born into the war and to some extent were spawned by it; it was in our nerves, our nature, our blood. It lay in the world that surrounded us, a world distressed and distorted, not yet fully revived following the tumult of annihilation, a world that had been blinded and now had to grope its way back onto its old course, its former trajectory, which had been lost, broken, interrupted for a deafening period and now had to be rediscovered like a drunk finds his way back home after a night of excess. But these old paths still contained the same old ruts, the same insanity: lurking in plans for new life was a lust for new power, new hopes were laced with greed, the newborn generation stilled itself with the essence of the old sin, and the buildings that grew out of the rubble already housed their own ruins.

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.

The faces of the generals and field marshals did not yield this information easily. Because when I said earlier that their greatness was not entirely convincing, what I meant was that they lacked the integrity that could have made them believable as stewards of pure principle. The lines in their cast-metal faces were etched as if by acid, but then immediately wiped away. Just as in a landscape following a flood, the furrows were deeper and the flat surfaces raised and bloated, all covered by a suspicious sheen; we saw the effects of a sudden deluge of satisfaction that had broken its everyday constraints but immediately trickled away, scattering ponds of unguarded complacency and settling in the rills of toughness and shrewdness that had finally paid off.

We could imagine them as theatrical directors, but not as the high priests of a sacrificial ceremony at the altar of the highest human values, despite the fact that the immensity of the hecatombs they had to manage lent them a macabre solemnity. But even if a terrible seriousness covered their mundane, petit bourgeois features, like the shadow of a scaffold, the bare emptiness of their faces deprived them of any grandeur.

In other words: we easily believed their determination to sacrifice their sons en masse, but not the holy passion that would have lent true greatness.

Two German field marshals they said we should particularly admire were Hindenburg and Ludendorff. We always confused one with the other, and as a result they fused into a pair of twins we called “Hindendorff and Co.” or “the brothers Ludenburg.” They reminded us of the uncle and nephew who made deliveries to our house and whom we could never tell apart, the owners of the large grocery store and slaughterhouse Dobrowolski & Dobrowolski, who were constantly roiled in petty jealousies and yet despite all discord were united in business. Just like the grocers, Hindendorff and Ludenburg shared the same profession, and their irksome but indissoluble partnership had made them scarcely distinguishable from each other. And just as we were never sure whether Uncle August Dobrowolski or Nephew Stefan was behind the wheel of the delivery truck that rolled through the garden gate once a week, always equipped with new, brightly colored advertisements for household items, imports, sausages, and smoked meats from Dobrowolski & Dobrowolski, or which of them was the larger one with the bell scraper and which was the pink-fleshed baldheaded one, we never succeeded in differentiating the paternal, iron sternness of the
Generalfeldmarschall
, his well-known patriarchal face troubled with the monumental pathos stemming from the harvest of lives and his eyes ringed dark with worry, from the scornful, overly competent expression in the small, budlike mouth of his chief of staff.