No Man's Land (68 page)

I take my temperature day in day out. Despite all the pressures and pitfalls, I realize that I tend to be rather passive and don't feel a genuine yearning to possess the things of this life. Perhaps it's more than simply timidity; it's probably a fundamental, constitutional, somatic predisposition. I am totally convinced I will always be what they call an unhappy man.

*

4 October
. Gori speaks as forcefully as ever in the café. Red-cheeked and apoplectic, he says: ‘If this war did anything, it brought one big change: it replaced long underpants; today, humanity can breathe. We used to wear wool in winter and cotton in summer, tied round the ankle with ribbons… We wore a warrior's underpants… Now things have shortened and the air circulates in spaces that were traditionally thought closed. It implies, in terms of dress, a huge revolution, an ineffable revolution…'

A countryman drinking coffee at the adjacent table whispers in my ear: ‘This gentleman speaks of revolution. Perhaps he is aware of a fresh development?'

‘No, sir, not at all! Mr. Gori is simply talking about short underpants…'

‘Oh! That's what I thought, nothing really new has happened…'

*

5 November
. The newspapers are full of grim news. Half of Europe is collapsing, like a submerged building that's falling apart. Russia, Austria, Germany… My feelings lead me from the side that's collapsing. My reason doesn't!

*

6 November
. Before supper, a long conversation with my father about the new map in Europe and the huge upsurge of socialism. My father, who'd thought for as long as it was possible that Germany was going to win the war, because – in his view – it was best for the onward march of progress, is hugely shaken. Nonetheless, curiously enough, we speak perfectly calmly. Personally, this sudden advance by the poor has made an enormous impact on me: an inextricable mixture of satisfaction and fear.

*

10 November
. Sunday. I meet Mrs. Carme Girbal (Mr. Esteve Casadevall's sister-in-law) on carrer de Cavallers, who is going about her duties. She seems like a little old lady preserved in a glass-case. She is exquisitely dressed. Her pale pink face and pure white hair are like something out of a miniature. Her presence catches me opposite the oranges on her orange trees that gleam in the patches of sun in her bright, perfect, orderly kitchen garden. She speaks with antique grace. She says: ‘I am on my way to a meeting of the Daughters of Mary… I am in such a hurry. We must discuss the triduum of the Purísima… We are still without a preacher… We have never been in such a situation! What a world, Most Holy Virgin! What an undertaking!'

In Germany, everyone is abdicating.

*

13 November
. The war is over. We had become so accustomed to the war it beggars belief. Now war will break out here. People have jumped and danced. Federals have besported themselves. Francophile liberals have contained themselves. Fear of the poor grows by the day. At any rate, such an important, historical event, like the armistice, as seen from a small town seventy kilometers from the French frontier, is of little consequence.

*

30 December
. The daily newspapers. In the course of the war, people read two journalists in particular: ‘Gaziel', Agustí Calvet, who was
La Vanguardia
's Paris correspondent, and Domínguez Rodiño, sent by the same paper, on the suggestion of Don Àngel Guimerà, to Berlin. These two men came to be immensely popular and when they went into a shirt-maker's for made-to-measure shirts they were always on the house. Calvet was a Frenchified man from the Ampurdan, clever, subtle, with the sarcasm of an academician, who wrote magnificent chronicles. When there is a war, the ideal journalist is non-bellicose.

Now the war is over, the writers of ideological articles have re-appeared and the articles by Jaume Brossa in
La Publicitat
are much read. Brossa – from the photos I have seen – is a man with a beard, from the days of Modernism. He has a ‘mug', destined for the police archives. He is an ultra-liberal, that is, an anarchist.

Always sensitive to what Xènius calls ‘the pulse of our times', Gori was talking about this writing today and said: ‘It is a real pity there have to be two kinds of liberals: conservative liberals and anarchist liberals. It demonstrates, nevertheless, that they are separated by a different degree of tension in temperament rather than by ideas. Brossa belongs to the second category. In barbers' shops he is thought to be a difficult author. In fact he is puerile. To everyone's great surprise, he comes out emphatically against the Russian Revolution and against the German Revolution, that is now in full swing. A revolution is but a sudden change of leaders. In Russia, the revolution is far-reaching: the leaders have been totally changed. In Germany the revolution is simply a process that will return to the same starting point – exactly. Every rapid change in personnel implies the establishing of a new conception of the world – implies revolution. The shifting of power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie implies a revolution. The shifting of power from the bourgeoisie to the workers is a revolution. The shifting of power from one bourgeois group to another is not a revolution. In such situations, shades of political freedom are at stake. In the previous case, political freedom will count for little; the establishing of economic equality will be the decisive factor.

‘Brossa's problems have to do with political freedom. He is as radical as you like, but he is a man who stopped at the French Revolution. For him, there can only be freedom with democracy, namely human equality before the law. For socialists, on the contrary, there can only be freedom if there is equality before the bread cupboard, and that cupboard lays down the law. Brossa is, then, an anachronism. In Russia he would be thought a trite sniveler, quick to tears.

‘As far as I am concerned, Brossa's position is extremely powerful and irrefutable. How is it possible to establish economic equality without an iron dictatorship? At this point socialists equivocate and deceive people. Why don't they come out and say they are going to establish a dictatorship, and then we will immediately be enlightened?

‘Besides, Brossa's position is human. He experienced the great era of the bourgeoisie, of expansion, of a door open to human pretensions. He is terrified by the destruction of commerce, the origin of economic unequality, or the destruction of everything that makes life comfortable. He thinks life isn't worth living if you have to spend your day queueing outside the bakery. I quite agree. The mere thought horrifies me.'

‘The man who has money and does business,' says Coromina in the café, ‘is like the individual who is sweating from every pore and stands next to the fireplace…'

‘That was before, in the heyday of the rentiers,' retorts Frigola. ‘Those of us who now live on our income receive less and less and one reduction follows another. The process of capital evaporation is very swift. I have calculated that if you want to maintain the rate of return on your accumulated capital, you must add by half the income you earn every three months.'

Not a day passes when I don't think about the room in the farmhouse attics that faces the rising sun and the south. When can I go and live there? I often wonder. But at the same time I am ashamed and horrified to see that I am only just twenty-one and am already such a pathetic coward and conservative.

Josep Pla
(1897–1981) is one of the finest Catalan writers of the last century.
The Grey Notebook
, a diary that apparently covers the years 1918 and 1919, records events from earlier on when he was at school in Girona as well as life in the family home and cafés in Llofriu and Palafrugell on the Costa Brava. It is a witty portrait of his times which shows a man who was equally at ease with local fishermen and farmers in Calella de Palafrugell as with the writers and intellectuals such as Eugeni d'Ors (Xènius) he met at the Athenaeum in Barcelona. Catalan industry boomed during the First World War thanks to Spain's neutrality, and Pla focuses ironically on the gold teeth and water closets it brought to those who prospered and lamented the war's end. After completing his law degree he found work as a foreign correspondent and worked throughout Europe in the 1920s. In 1924, he faced a military trial for an article he wrote criticizing dictator Primo de Rivera. In the 1930s, he was a journalist in Madrid, where his articles described political life in the Second Republic while he consorted with Adi Enberg, a Norwegian woman who spied for the Fascists.
The Grey Notebook
shows him as a liberal who was not in favour of the power of the Catholic Church and as a student who experienced poverty and hated the sons of the rich who filled the university but weren't interested in learning. It is the creation of a supreme storyteller.

A. P. HERBERT

ONE OF THE BRAVEST MEN I EVER KNEW

from
The Secret Battle

T
HAT EVENING I SAT IN C COMPANY MESS
for an hour and talked with them about the trial. They were very sad and upset at this thing happening in the regiment, but they were reasonable and generous, not like those D Company pups, Wallace and the other. For they were older men, and had nearly all been out a long time. Only one of them annoyed me, a fellow in the thirties, making a good income in the City, who had only joined up just before he had to under the Derby scheme, and had been out a month. This fellow was very strong on ‘the honour of the regiment'; and seemed to think it desirable for that ‘honour' that Harry should be shot. Though how the honour of the regiment would be thereby advanced, or what right he had to speak for it, I could not discover.

But the others were sensible, balanced men, and as perplexed and troubled as I. I had been thinking over a thing that Harry had said in his talk with me – ‘If I did have the wind-up I've never had cold feet.' It is a pity one cannot avoid these horrible terms, but one cannot. I take it that ‘wind-up' – whatever the origin of that extraordinary expression may be – signifies simply ‘fear.' ‘Cold feet' also signifies fear, but, as I understand it, has an added implication in it of
base yielding
to that fear. I told them about this distinction of Harry's, and asked them what they thought.

‘That's it,' said Smith, ‘that's just the damned shame of the whole thing. There are lots of men who are simply terrified the whole time they're out, but just go on sticking it by sheer guts – will-power, or whatever you like – that's having the wind-up, and you can't prevent it. It just depends how
you
're made. I suppose there really are some people who don't feel fear at all – that fellow Drake, for example – though I'm not sure that there are many. Anyhow, if there are any they don't deserve much credit though they do get the V. C.'s. Then there are the people who feel fear like the rest of us and don't make any effort to resist it, don't join up or come out, and when they have to, go back after three months with a blighty one, and get a job, and stay there.'

‘And when they are here wangle out of all the dirty jobs,' put in Foster.

‘Well, they're the people with “cold feet” if you like,'Smith went on, ‘and as you say, Penrose has never been like that. Fellows like him keep on coming out time after time, getting worse wind-up every time, but simply kicking themselves out until they come out once too often, and stop one, or break up suddenly like Penrose, and—'

‘And the question is – ought any man like that to be shot?' asked Foster.

‘Ought any one who
volunteers
to fight for his country be shot?' said another.

‘Damn it, yes,' said Constable; he was a square, hard-looking old boy, a promoted N. C. O., and a very useful officer. ‘You must have some sort of standard – or where would the army be?'

‘I don't know,' said Foster, ‘look at the Australians – they don't have a death-penalty, and I reckon they're as good as us.'