Year Zero (19 page)

Duras was very much on the left, and had a special loathing for the kind of rank-pulling officials she described. They were reactionaries, who, in the words of Dionys Mascolo (“D.”), her lover and comrade in the left-wing resistance, will “be against any resistance movement that isn't directly Gaullist. They'll occupy France. They think they constitute thinking France, the France of authority.”
⁷
They would construct the heroic narrative of “eternal France” to their own advantage.

There is another more harrowing description in Duras's memoir. Her husband, Robert Antelme, also a left-wing resister, had been arrested and deported to Buchenwald. Although she had already taken up with “D.” during the war, Duras still longed to see her husband alive. That is why she had been going back and forth to the repatriation centers and the Gare de l'Est train station, anxious for any news of his survival. When Antelme was found by chance in a German camp by the later president François Mitterrand, he could barely speak, let alone walk. But the longed-for reunion in Paris occurred at last:

Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They'd stopped on the first floor landing. He was looking up.

I can't remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn't want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking. I remember
that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbor's apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.

Then, a short while later, she sees him again, still smiling:

It's from this smile that I suddenly recognize him, but from a great distance, as though I was seeing him at the other end of a tunnel. It's a smile of embarrassment. He's apologizing for being here, reduced to such a wreck. And then the smile fades, and he becomes a stranger again.
⁸

My father was not in Buchenwald. Nor did he have a wife in the Dutch resistance who had taken a lover and would soon divorce him. His return home was far less dramatic. But something in this passage from Duras's memoir hints at the source of his fear of going home too, the fear of being a stranger.

•   •   •

IF HOMECOMING WAS DIFFICULT FOR FRENCH POWS,
this was even more true of Germans or Japanese. Their shoulders bore not just the burden of a national defeat, which would have been hard enough, but they faced the contempt and even hatred of their own people for having been responsible for a calamitous war, for committing unspeakable crimes, for having lorded it over the nation as arrogant warriors, and coming back as abject losers. This was not entirely fair, of course. Other people, including millions of women, had cheered them on their way to war, waving flags, singing patriotic songs, and celebrating their victories, some real, some the fictions of government propaganda. The common soldier in a highly authoritarian state whipped into a frenzy by official hysteria was no more responsible for the consequences than the ordinary civilians who had vociferously cheered him on. In Germany, at least, the Nazis could be blamed for everything. The Japanese,
lacking their own version of the Nazi Party, blamed their catastrophe on “the militarists,” and, by extension, on anyone associated with the armed forces. This was also the view promoted in postwar U.S. propaganda, faithfully echoed in the Japanese press.

As the Japanese essayist Sakaguchi Ango wrote, the kamikaze pilots (
Tokkotai
) “are already black market hoodlums today.”
⁹
This fall from grace, this mass awakening from a national delusion, was blamed squarely on the men who were sent to die for the emperor and had the shameful misfortune of coming back alive. There was a Japanese expression current just after the war,
Tokkotai kuzure
, “degenerate kamikazes”—young men whose morbid idealism had collapsed into a binge of whoring and drinking.

Resentment against Japanese soldiers' throwing their weight around was already there before the defeat in 1945, even though voicing it would have been extremely risky. When people saw the quick shift from wartime violence to criminal behavior in peacetime, the proud image of the Imperial armed forces was tarnished even further. At the end of the war military warehouses were still full of goods, anything from weapons to blankets and clothes, essential items for a destitute population. After large-scale organized looting by senior military officers and their civilian cronies, often gangsters with sinister wartime histories, they were empty. Slowly the goods found their way onto the black market, where they went for prices most people could ill afford.

Bringing back millions of young men, trained to kill for their country, into civilian life is never a smooth process. The shameful odor of defeat only makes it harder. It seems entirely fitting that a radio program that was started in the summer of 1946 to provide information about missing persons should have included a special segment, broadcast twice daily, especially for disoriented veterans, called “Who Am I?”
¹⁰

The demoralized warriors, already emasculated by military failure, faced more blows when they came back to homes that were destroyed, or to marriages gone sour. One of the common themes in German or
Japanese films and books about the immediate postwar period is the rift between returning soldiers and wives who had taken lovers in order to relieve loneliness or simply to survive. The theme is as old as war itself: on his return from Troy, Agamemnon is murdered in his own house by his wife, or her lover, or both, depending on which version of the story you read. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film
The Marriage of Maria Braun
(1979) is one of the finest German examples: Maria's husband, fresh from the horrors of the eastern front, literally finds his wife naked in the arms of a black American soldier. In this case, it is the lover who dies. A much less well-known Japanese example is Ozu
's film
A Hen in the Wind
(1948). Quite uncharacteristically for Ozu, the movie ends in high melodrama, with the jealous husband throwing his wife down the stairs for having had sex with another man in his absence. Limping from her injury, the wife still pleads for his forgiveness. And finally all ends well in a gush of tears.

The story preceding this overwrought finale is wholly typical of the times. The wife, Tokiko, not knowing whether her husband is still alive, tries to feed herself and their little son with the pittance she earns as a seamstress. When the son becomes seriously ill, she has no money to pay for the hospital, and so decides to sell herself for one night to a stranger. When her husband, Shuichi, finally comes back, Tokiko confesses her one lapse into prostitution. Enraged about his wife's infidelity, Shuichi becomes obsessed. But fidelity is not really the main point: it is the defeated soldier's struggle to regain a sense of self-respect that drives his fury. The movie is highly realistic, except that in real life the marriage may not have been saved in a tearful reconciliation.

Letters submitted to the newspapers show how deep the problems of repatriation were. The celebrated novelist Shiga Naoya published a letter in the
Asahi
newspaper on December 16, 1945, in which he suggested that the government had a duty to reeducate former kamikaze pilots. How could young men, taught how to commit suicide for the glory of the nation, possibly be equipped to rebuild their lives in the cynical, dog-eat-dog
world of 1945? The only way to prevent them from sinking into despair and being called degenerates was for the state to initiate a special education program. A letter in response agreed, but pointed out that Japanese society itself was badly in need of reeducation. One letter writer, a man who had been trained to be a suicide pilot himself, stated that the wartime training and spirit of the
Tokkotai
were precisely what was needed in the degenerate culture of postwar Japan.

One of the most poignant letters to the
Asahi
was by another ex-soldier, published on December 13:

Fellow veterans! Now we are free. We returned from the dark and cruel military life, from the bloody fields of battle. But awaiting us back home were the sharp eyes of civilians filled with loathing of the militarists, and we found our home towns destroyed by the fires of war . . . The bloody battles are over, but life's real battle has only just begun . . .
¹¹

In fact, he writes, his youthful illusions had already been dashed by life in the army, with its selfish and bullying officer corps whose pompous preening about loyalty to the nation and other high-flown ideals was shown to be utterly vapid. The common soldier was reduced to a machine. And now, he writes, “the veteran soldier has become synonymous with the bad guy . . .”

“What are the true feelings of the people towards us veterans?” asks another writer on the same day. “People think a soldier is the same thing as a militarist. Of course, the militarists should take responsibility for our defeat in war. But the ordinary soldier was not like that. He was just a patriot fighting for his country. Do you really believe that we cast away our young lives to fight on the battle fields or in the Pacific just for our own profit or desire? I would really like people to show more warmth towards us veterans.”
¹²

Such sentiments would surely resonate with American veterans of the Vietnam War. But even the victors in a war that was almost universally
regarded as just had problems readjusting to civilian life when they came back home. William “Bill” Mauldin was the most popular cartoonist in the U.S. Army. His irreverent drawings in the
Stars and Stripes
of Willy and Joe, two GIs coping with army life on the European front, made him a hero among the GIs, or “dogfaces.” Willy and Joe talk like regular soldiers, and think like them too. What they thought was often not flattering to superior officers, which earned Mauldin a dressing down from General Patton, who threatened to have his “ass thrown in jail.” In June 1945, Willy was on the cover of
Time
magazine, looking tired, unshaven, disheveled, a cigarette dangling from the left corner of his mouth, far from the heroic image of the warrior.

Back Home
(1947) is Mauldin's account in words and cartoons of Willy and Joe's homecoming. The troubles they face, shown in Mauldin's drawings, and the attitudes they convey are softer versions of some of the sentiments expressed by veterans in the letters to the editor of Japanese newspapers. The resentment of the upper ranks, for example: Willy and Joe in loose-fitting civilian suits are standing at a hotel desk waiting to be checked in as a sullen-looking porter in an outfit of striped trousers, cap, epaulettes, and gold buttons is carrying their suitcases. Joe: “Major Wilson, back in uniform, I see.”

Willy and Joe's ill feeling does not burn quite as fiercely as the hatred felt by Japanese soldiers toward the officers who sent tens of thousands on suicide missions, or killed them to consume their flesh when food ran out under enemy fire in New Guinea or the Philippines. But Mauldin's point that a bad soldier mostly does damage to himself while “a bad officer can cause a considerable amount of misery among his subordinates” would have rung equally true.
¹³

Closing the gulf between military and civilian life was a painful process, for battlefield heroes as much, if not more, as it was for men of no great fighting distinction. To wives and girlfriends, the returned soldiers did not always seem heroic enough. In one cartoon, Willy is shown dressed in a scruffy business suit, rather awkwardly carrying the wartime baby he had never seen before. His wife, in dressy hat and gloves, remarks: “I was
hoping you'd wear your soldier suit, so I could be proud of you.” In Mauldin's words: “Mrs Willie, who had been in college when Willie met her, had shared with her feminine classmates a worship of fancy uniforms during the early and glamorous stages of the war. She had always felt a little disappointed in Willie because he hadn't become an officer with a riding crop and pink trousers.” He didn't even have medals. So, Mauldin continues, not only “was she deprived of the pleasure of strutting with his medals, but she suddenly realized that she had never seen him in civvies before, and he did look a little baggy and undistinguished.”
¹⁴

It is not surprising that some veterans, disillusioned or unequipped for civilian life, or traumatized by battlefield brutality, would commit violent acts. This happens after all wars. But in the first year after World War II these acts were given exaggerated attention in the press. Willy's wife is shown reading a newspaper, headlined “Veteran Kicks Aunt,” while a dejected Willie sits in his armchair nursing a glass of whiskey. The caption reads, “There is a small item on page 17 about a triple ax murder. No veterans involved.”
¹⁵
Mauldin points out the sad fact that such lurid headlines “gave added impetus to the rumor that always appears in every country after a war—that the returning soldiers are trained in killing and assault and are potential menaces to society.”