No Man's Land (2 page)

A
N ENTERPRISE LIKE
NO MAN'S LAND
is a collective one. The many people who helped me have been most generous with their knowledge and time. Special thanks to Roger Little, Ruth Bush and Françoise Escholier-Achard who made possible the use of her grandfather's novel, Noel King and Garth Cartwright, Max Décharné, Ursula Owen, Giovanni Lussu for making available the new translation of his father's book, Julian Evans, Tibor Fischer, Sarah Lefanu, Maureen Freely and Professor Erol Koroglu, Edmund Fawcett, Irene Noel-Baker, Mark Thompson, Marija Mitrovic, Jeremy Beale and John Williams. To all those at Serpent's Tail and Profile who have made this book what it is - Peter Dyer, Sue Lamble, Ruthie Petrie, and Valentina Zanca. To my first editor, Peter Carson and then, John Davey, who both mixed support and criticism in the right proportions. To the translators - Peter Bush, Martin Chalmers, Izzy Finkel, Celia Hawkesworth, Malcolm Imrie, Ana Jelnikar, Cristina Viti, and Stephen Watts - who met the tightest of deadlines with a minimum of fuss. To the most helpful people at the London Library. To Helen Francis who found the rights holders and got permission to use the featured extracts. And to Sarah Martin, Carla and Oscar who lived through the roller-coaster of elation and despair as an Armenian author proved less and, then, more elusive to track down.

 

INTRODUCTION

I
N COLLECTING MATERIAL FOR
NO MAN'S LAND
, my first priority was to feature writing from as many of the countries that took part as possible. This not from some desire to be exhaustive but because I wanted to convey that the war truly was a
world
war – so there are contributions from writers from twenty countries. The pieces in the book cover the fighting in all the theatres of the war: of course the Western Front, but also the Eastern Front, the Balkan Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and the War at Sea.

They also cover the experiences of the men and women left behind on the home front, of the women on the war front and of the soldiers who returned home never able to forget what they had endured. Because they come from many countries, the pieces reflect very different attitudes to the nation and very different motivations for fighting the war.

For the British, French and Germans who wrote about the war, their attitude was relatively straightforward. Whatever the historical facts, almost all of them felt loyalty to a well-defined nation which they took to be morally superior to other nations and whose war effort they supported. A small minority opposed the war but this was more because they took war of any kind to be evil than from the belief that other nations were morally equal to their own.

For combatants from other countries, the nation-state was more recent and/or more contested and they had a much more fragile commitment to nationhood and empire.

The tensions in the Italian army, for instance, reflected the fact that Italy was united only in 1861 and that the creation of Italian nationalism was a work-in-progress. In Lussu's
A Soldier on the Southern Front
, the officers went into battle with the shout ‘Savoy!':

There is no doubt that the scenes of mutinous hatred described by Lussu were fuelled by the soldiers' sense of grievance at being led by an officer class whose loyalty to the Italian nation was, in their eyes, doubtful.

For those fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army, loyalty to empire was weak. In Rebreanu's
The Forest of the Hanged
, Lieutenant Bologa is a brilliant officer whose bravery will be rewarded by a Gold Medal bestowed on him by General Karg, who wants to take him with him on his next campaign to Ardeal in Romania. Apostol is not keen on going.

Bologa is prepared to fight valiantly but draws a line on going into battle against his kith and kin. Certainly, the effectiveness of the Austro-Hungarian army was undermined by its need to enlist combatants from its ethnic minorities.

The Good Soldier Å vejk has a wry, sardonic attitude to the loyalty demanded by his commanding officers:

If the patriotism of Europeans fighting varied greatly, for many of the Indians and Africans enlisted in the imperial armies it was nonexistent. For some, the links were primarily monetary – they went to fight in the hope that they would come back from the wars with financial rewards and even a pension; for others there was the hope that the imperial nations would recognize the contribution made to the war effort by the soldiers from the colonies and implement political and economic reforms. As Mulk Raj Anand writes in
Across the Black Waters
:

It was the same for many of the African soldiers – they were rewarded poorly and their expectations of a better life when they returned home after the war were not fulfilled. In
Mahmadou Fofana
, Raymond Escholier writes that the silver ring given by Samba Kamara's brother was

Whatever a soldier's relationship to the army he was fighting in, the war marked a crucial period in his life – for many millions it also marked his death. Of the soldiers who survived the war and are written about in
No Man's Land
, some returned reduced by injury, others never were reconciled to the horrors they had witnessed and how the war had made them unfit for the return to civilian life. The ambulance-driver narrator in Helen Zenna Smith's
Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War
finds contemplation of the return unbearable:

For some on the home front, what happened during the war was confirmation that society had to change – that other ways of organizing it were possible. Those who saw this were a minority that had to make their voice heard:

As the war went on, the minority grew and was joined by the many disillusioned soldiers who returned home determined to make sure the suffering they had endured would not be in vain. So, the post-war period was in many of the countries involved in the war a period of revolutionary fervour and/or democratic reform.

Any selection of writing on the First World War has certain criteria. To give
No Man's Land
as international a perspective as possible, translations were undertaken of works that had previously not been translated. The selection was limited to works written before 1945; this, like most criteria, is arbitrary, but I felt that the experience of the Second World War gave writers a very different perspective from which to assess the First and so marked a valid cut-off point. And priority was given to fiction and to a lesser extent memoirs – though it is clear that the boundary between them is fluid – much of the fiction about the war is autobiographical. No poetry was selected since the war poetry has already been well represented in many excellent anthologies and was relatively well known.
*

No Man's Land
begins with the declaration of war being declared in Henri Barbusse's
Under Fire
:

At the end is the narrator of Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front
: