War and the Holocaust books —III

Memories of the killing fields
By Ashok Chopra

A man does not see much looking down the barrel of a gun. So how does one arrive at the ‘truth’ about the war? Perspectives are blinkers. Memory deceives. And there can be as many truths about a given battle, after it. Therefore, all that a writer can do is to describe segments of a war, provide a "feel" of the the total situation and leave the rest to our imaginations of disaster to figure out. Martha Gellhorn does this in The Face of War — first published in 1959 and constantly updated because "the history of the world, is in many ways, the history of war," — which is today considered as one of the great classics of contemporary war literature.

Before one goes into this book a bit further, one must ask as to what is that drives a woman to record her vision of the war and what makes her visions so memorable? Clearly the force that moved Martha came from within: The need to report and the need to remember. The reporting instincts operated as war happened for example, in Spain (1936-38), in Finland (1939), in China (1941), World War-II (1939-45), in Java (1946), in Vietnam (1966), and in Central America (1983-88) because there have been several wars in "this thin belt of suffering," that is "so far from God and so close to the United States."

Gellhorn has raised the more fundamental questions of life and death that every soldier or participant comes face to face in the action of the war. What is the whirl and muddle of war? What is courage? When required to act, what happens? Does the winner or loser take all? What will it mean to win the war and lose the peace? War is not a continuous action. There are long lulls in the battlefield )a constantly shifting arena) when the soldier remembers. And it is these remembrances of things past that Gellhorn weaves into her stories with a mixture of fact and imagination to make them memorable.

The experiences recounted are mainly of youngmen in impossible situations — the uncertainties of life and death, the close comradeship in arms, the meaning and exhilaration of fear. Of course, the narrative questions are constantly asked — What happened there? What happened then? But much more important are the philosophical underpinnings that are the basis of all good literature? Why is there a deliberate method in the madness of war?

Quoting Tolstoy Gellhorn asks, Why are governments a collection of men who do violence to the rest of us?"

On the individual level (because war compels every individual to figure out the questions) the queries are subjective: Who was I then? What happened to me? How did I become what I am? With Gellhorn,the whole definition of the meaning of courage changes all together. Courage is no longer the challenge of facing the enemy or the hostile environment or of just keeping the chin up: Courage is truth, the ability to come to terms with your own self. Courage to the war veterans meant coming to terms with their memories!

The volume which spans 40 years of war reporting has been divided into two sections: The main arenas of the wars reported and the reflections that come with the passage of time. To stress what war means to the individual at that moment of time descriptions are offered, in some ways reminiscent of Hemmingway’s A farewell to Arms and for Whom the Bell Tolls (Gellhorn was married to Hemmingway for a while) with the same terseness and simplicity of language close to the bone.

In all these stories — almost every second passage is memorable — there is no plot, no climax, no happy endings. It is just narrative, plain unvarnished, without heroics, and true. It is what Gellhorn saw in the ‘heat of the battle’ and understood the mind of men in war, as nearly as memory preserved it and put down as a picture of war without comment. What Gellhorn is saying between the lines is that war is so hideous that it does not require comment. It only requires an honest description of what it is because the reality is much more fantastic (or horrendous) than the wildest imagination.

Gellhorn who is anti-war and in some ways anti-west, believes that the real man of war is one who is close to the action on the front but at some distance from its values. He is a man who does not give a damn about medals, who "by nature or circumstances of life is an outsider, who can be a witness as well as a soldier. War likes a man without medals." Gellhorn who has seen too much of war, of senseless death and mayhem has defined what may be called the aesthetics of modern war literature. It is a plain way of telling, that let the emotions and drama to emerge from the descriptions of the events themselves.

In the final analysis, it is the quality of writing that has made this book a classic of modern war. It is terse, close to the bone and very clod because this is what gives the grief, as it were, a background against which the horrors of war stand out in greater relief. This is certainly a marvellous collection of the best there is of war writing.

Another book which I consider one the best from the war bookshelf is Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man. It is the memoir of a young officer who was tortured and brutalised as a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, Burma and Thailand during World War-II. When the Japanese gaslers discovered several tiny radio receivers some British prisoners had made in order to listen to the BBC, a group of drunken Japanese sergeants beat each of the suspected radio-makers to turn with axe-handlers, fists and boots. Lomax watched while other British prisoners were beaten to an inch of their lives — two died — until his turn came.

"Then I went down with a blow that shook every bone and which relaxed a sensation of scorching liquid pain which seared my entire body. Sudden blows stuck me all over. I felt myself plunging downwards into an abyss with tremendous flashes of solid light which burned and agonised. I could identify the periodic stamping of boots on the back of my head, crunching my face into the gravel; the crack of bones snapping; my teeth breaking, and my own involuntary attempts to respond to deep vicious kicks and to regain an upright position, only to be thrown to the ground once more."

And when he felt damage to his hips and pelvis, he raised his hands to protect himself. "This seemed to focus the clubs on my arms and hands. I remember the actual blow that broke my wrists. It fell right across it, which the terrible pain of delicate bones being crushed."

Lomax says that the doctor examined and counted 900-axe handle strokes to his body. But this was just round one. Round two was interrogation by the Kempitai, imperial Japan’s Gestapo. Lomax was interrogated through an interpreter about radio sets and a map he had drawn to use if he escaped. The interrogations lasted 18 hours and he developed a particular hatred for the interpreter, whose voice would torment him for years later. "Lomax, you will tell us why you made the map. You will tell us why you made a map of the Railway Lomax, were you in contact with the Chinese?"

The questioning continued for days. "Each question from the NCO by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow... to my chest and stomach. It is so much worse when you see it coming like that, from above, when it is slow and deliberate. I used my split arms to try and protect my body, and the branch smashed on to them again and again. The interpreter was at my shoulder. "Lomax, will you tell us. Then it will stop."

It stopped when the water torture began. The NCO forced a hosepipe into Lomax’s mouth and nostrils. "Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginable choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon." Lomax does not remember how long the torture lasted because he passed out.

Lomax returned home after the war a shattered man. He married his pre-war fiancee and took up various jobs in Africa and Britain. The marriage did not last, presumably because the nightmare of memories haunted him all the time. Quite naturally, Lomax hated the Japanese and would not speak to any Japanese man or woman, until much later, when rather unexpectedly, he was strangely redeemed by his own act of mercy.

And this is the other half of this outstanding story. An article appeared in the Japan Times of August 15,1989 about Nagase Takashi, an interpreter who had acted as the go-between Lomax and his torturers. The article described his ill-health and how he suffered "flashbacks of Japanese military police torturing a POW who was accused of possessing a map of the railway... one of their methods was to pour large amounts of water down his throat." Nagase had atoned for his guilt by keeping allied groups trying to locate graves along the railway line across the river Kwai bridge.

For Lomax, Nagase was the man who symbolised all he had suffered in the war against Japan. "I felt triumphant that I had found him, and that Iknew his identity while he was unaware of my continued existence. I had been haunted by what he described for half a century, but so, it now seemed, had one of my tormentors... He too had nightmares, flashbacks, terrible feelings of loss...(But) my moment of vengeful glory and triumph was already complicated by other feelings. This strange man was obviously drawn on in his work by my own cries of pain and fear." (Nagase had visited Kanchanaburi, the POW camp, over 60 times since 1963 and laying wreaths at the Allied Cemetery. Guilt invariably takes you back to the scene of the crime.)

Reluctantly, Lomax contacted him. And then we have the author’s account of the confrontation between the former torturer and his victim. It’s a beautiful account, because memory has a style, a plain way of telling that leaves the emotions and drama to emerge from the events themselves. There is no plot. No climax. It is narrative, plain and true. It is a picture of war without comment.

A question that arises here is: what is it that drives a man who has been tortured and brutalised as a prisoner of war, then emotionally handicapped and silenced as a veteran, to record his memories of violence, senseless murder and the grotesque selection procedures that sent some to work and others to the torture chambers? Clearly, the force that moves him comes from within: his memory and his imagination are engaged in a private, urgent transaction to get over the trauma through the mere act of telling it all. "It is impossible for others to help you to come to terms with the past, if for you the past is a pile of wounded memories and the future is just a nursery of revenge," as Lomax says in his wonderful memoir.

(Concluded)