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Saturday, January 28, 2006
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Metaphors
How the metaphors of a particular age (and in these times, this always has to be how the age reflects the particular mode of capitalism that’s dominant at the moment…) are constrained/shaped/informed by the technologies of that age: for example…watching Koyanisqaatsi, I’m struck by the plethora of ‘production line’ and ‘sausage machine’ images that Reggio uses to emphasise how we’re dehumanised, habituated and impersonalised in so much of our everyday lives. (He also implies, through those rapidly-moving cloudscapes and slowmo shots of collapsing tenements and office buildings, that all of these – these modes of being, these solid, unimpeachable structures – are all merely tentative: when this film was made, I think it was the spectre of nuclear annihilation that shadowed all of the banal, destructive activity on the screen; now it’s more likely to be global economic collapse or some megavirus.) Anyway, the point is that we live – to some extent – locked into the ways of being/working/thinking that dominate our current culture/economic model. Having lived through a few of these modes now, I can see how provisional they are, and yet how difficult they are to step outside of: the current game invariably appears to be the only game that’s feasible and realistic if you are to earn your living and be in the world. What would the metaphors be now?
Saturday 21st – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941
Ivan sees that there’s something hard in the bargee’s look, a narrowing of the eyes coupled with a change in the rhythm of his breathing. Ivan half turns and looks at Michael, who’s standing at the top of the slope, set against the sky, and feels something like complicity with the bargee, although he doesn’t know why. This complicity makes him feel guilty.
The lock’s full. “Ready, boys!” the bargee says, and Ivan and Michael do the necessary thing with the second set of gates, straining against the weight of water to lever the wood and metal into the ‘open’ position. Weed, scum and oil are displaced on the surface of the water.
The bargee guns the engine, and the usual unaccountably large and acrid clouds of grey-blue smoke guff out of the narrowboat’s exhaust pipe. Above the noise of the engine and the judder of the hull, he shouts, “I’ll be coming back through here next Monday. If you’re lucky I’ll bring you something back.”
After the boat has passed out of sight and they’ve finished savouring their oranges, Ivan wishes that he’d asked the man where he was bound for.
[…]
The bargee is true to his word. The following Monday, under a flat, drizzly grey sky that lasts all day, he gives Ivan three fat, high quality Russian pencils (triangular cross section, so they won’t roll) and a pad of thick, cream-coloured paper. Michael also receives a gift: a tattered, folding map of northern Europe with a cloth cover, all worn away where the horizontal and vertical folds meet. On the map, the sea is a pale, washed-out blue, and the land a mixture of muddy brown and over-bright grass green. Despite the battered nature of Michael’s map, Ivan covets it, especially as it is imbued with the well-travelled mystery and experience of the bargee. [something of a father substitute??]
In the summer weeks that follow, Ivan and Michael spend more and more time down by the canal locks, opening the gates and running errands – for food and beer – for the boatmen. In return, they receive – as they had hoped and calculated – a series of [emoluments] from the men: a tin of sticky sweets dusted with sugary flour; a tinny little compass in a small cardboard box; a technical manual about boat engine maintenance that’s distorted with damp and oil stains; a painted wooden cube an inch on a side full of gramophone needles that sounds like some exotic percussion instrument when you shake it.
Ivan is always on the lookout for the bargee who gave them the oranges: he feels like the two of them established a special relationship of some kind, and he always feels privileged over Michael when they’re dealing with this boatman: Michael seems to recognise this too; normally he is the front-runner when they approach the boatmen, but he always hangs back, and is quieter, when the orange bargee is in the lock. They never talk about this, even though they’re both aware of it.
[…]
…at some stage, the bargee gives him the little package of rolled up, folded papers, saying, “This is for you, not your black friend.”
Sneaking it home, not knowing why he feels guilty about having it, but sensing that it’s right to feel guilty…
Pictures on smooth, thin paper. The men wearing false moustaches, the women wearing stockings and not much else apart from their standard look of innocent surprise. Their round lips saying ‘Ooh’. The shiny paper fixed into the old folds.
[…]
Friday, January 20, 2006
Friday 20th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941
“Hello boys,” says the bargee, brightly. “Thank you for your assistance.” (This last in a gentrified, stiffened tone, like a posh actor in a film. Ivan wonders if Michael has ever seen a film: he senses that Michael’s family are so impoverished – just look at Michael’s clothes, and at his almost comically worn out shoes – that they don’t have money to spend on such frivolous luxuries. Ivan stows away this little barb of potential superiority: it could be offset against his pathetic inferiority in the gambling arena.)
The two boys beam up at the bargee, who looks at them, twists his mouth into a smile, and reaches down below the tiller and comes up with two oranges – rare, exotic fruit. The boys’ eyes widen, and the bargee says “Catch!”, motioning as if to throw the fruit into the far distance. The boys back away up the slope, and the two oranges do fly through the air, describing successive slow, high arcs, backed by the white sky. Michael catches his cleanly, but Ivan fumbles his, and has to chase it down towards the water’s edge as it bounce-rolls over the grass. He just manages to catch up with it on the tow-path, where he stills it and pushes it down against the dirt and dust.
The bargee says “Well done, son – that’s come a long way, that orange: wouldn’t want to see it drown in this mucky old canal, would we?”
Ivan shakes his head obediently. He stares at the man’s soot-begrimed face and at the stubble that’s poking through the surface layer of dirt, and he notices that this combination gives the bargee’s face a metallic look – all sheen and reflection. Despite Ivan’s fear and wariness, a smile is bubbling up through face, reciprocating the grin that the bargee is wearing. The skin around the man’s eyes is crinkled with good humour, and his teeth look very white against his skin as he smiles.
The lock is nearly filled.
From further up the slope, Michael shouts, “Hey, mister, have you got anything else?”
Up close, Ivan sees the bargee’s smile harden and the skin around his eyes grow rigid.
“Oh yes,” he says, quietly, “I’ve got lots of stuff – but not for the likes of you; not for the asking.”
Ivan, confused, feels his own smile fade. The bargee is looking at Michael strangely, as if he’s calculating something.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Wednesday 11th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941 (another token effort - not been too well)
Depending on the cargoes that he’s been hauling recently, the bargee’s pockets will harbour coaldust/peppercorns/peanuts, and he’ll smell carbony/spicy/nutty – or a combination of all of these disparate cargoes. The bargee represents a world that’s inaccessible to people like Ivan and his family: a world where dirty people crowd into bars and dirty eating houses, where people shout and fight in the street, and where there’s danger, unpredictability and irresponsibility. Michael is closer to this world, living as he does on the fringes of the [ghetto area], and it shows in his cunning and street smartness, in his inventive way with words, in his knowing, pitying looks whenever Ivan hazards an opinion about ‘grown up’ matters. The men who work the canals are all threateningly strong and confident and clever, with strong fingers and eyes that can see past what you’re saying and straight into what you’re thinking. Whenever they wink and make their jokes to the boys as they pass through the locks, Ivan always gets the sense that Michael is understanding much more of what the men are saying; in contrast, this banter always makes Ivan feel humiliated and stupid. He’s somehow afraid that one of the men will grab his scrawny arm with their hard, strong hands and shake him – maybe even slap him around the face – and there won’t be anything he can do about it: if he tells papa about it, papa will assume that he deserved his punishment and give him another bash for his cheekiness.
Ivan opens his eyes. “Potatoes,” he says.
Michael says, “Coal. It’ll be coal. Three shillings. Or do you want to make it five?”
“Three is all right, thank you.”
They both look downriver.
The barge comes into view, unfurling smoke and covered in oil and greasy-looking baked-on muck. As soon as he sees the state the barge is in, Ivan knows that Michael is right. Coal.
Michael’s eyes are set in a little tight rictus of grinning wrinkles. Smug.
“So,” he says, “how many shillings is that now?”
“About a hundred,” says Ivan, downcast.
“No need to pay me straight away,” says Michael, like he always does.
The barge moves slowly towards them along the [‘single-lane’] stretch of the canal between the locks, labouring, as if it were climbing an incline. As it comes closer, Ivan can see that the bargee’s face is blackened with coal dust, just his white eyes and pink lips providing contrast. There’s something of Ivan’s golliwog in this appearance.
The barge is fully in the lock now. The bargee cuts the power and, seeing the boys, nods to them and gestures towards the lock gates, just as they hoped he would. They run down the slope and combine their strength to push the open gates closed before running to the other pair of gates and opening the sluices. The bargee grins at them and says something, but the sound is lost in the tumble and froth of the sluicing water. He waves them over to him, and they approach, respectfully.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Monday 9th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941
Up in the woods, Ivan scrapes the point of a stick through the dirt at his feet, banking up the fine earth into little ramparts, and dragging rhythmic figures of eight into dynamic existence. This rhythm and aimless repetition makes him think of last summer, when he’d play these sort of games with his new friend Michael: they’d make drawings in the earth with sticks, or gather stems of long grass which they’d arrange into repeating patterns on the bare edges of harvested fields; alternatively they’d build things out of mud and waste wood down by the canal, or dig out trench systems for Ivan’s lead soldiers before bombarding their miniature battlefield with small stones and missiles made of canal-water-wetted mud.
In his memory, that summer consisted of a long, long string of sunny days, but in actuality the time he spent with Michael only amounted to a few weeks – primarily the long summer vacation from school. But they’d compressed a whole friendship into that space: shy first meetings, intense enjoyment, consolidation, over-familiarity, boredom, irritation, falling out, reconciliation and – finally – Michael’s departure with his family for the west.
They’d met by the canal. Ivan had been sitting in the long grass with one of Marta’s guiltily borrowed books - Eva Learns to Ride or somesuch classic of girls’ literature – when the glint of sunlight on metal had drawn his attention to the towpath. And there was Michael: thin and weedy, dark-skinned and frizzy-haired, in his blue and white hooped shirt and his long cotton shorts, squinting as the sunlight flashed on the bent metal frames of his cheap glasses. Michael was looking up at the sky, his face almost horizontal. When he heard Ivan whispering his way through the long grass and lowered his gaze, Ivan could that here was an intelligent boy of strong character: someone stronger than himself, someone whom he would have to look up to and take note of.
“Watcha,” said Michael.
“Hello,” said Ivan.
And that was that.
[…]
The two of them are lying back on the grass slope above the canal locks. Ivan picks at his teeth with a splintered matchstick, probing for fibrous debris from his lunchtime apple. Every now and then he holds the tip of his toothpick up to the light and looks at the sliver of sunlit fruit waste before licking it off and eating it.
Michael starts whistling through his teeth: Ivan doesn’t like the way the air scrapes across the sharp edges of tooth enamel – that scratchy, tuneless sound is purposeless and irritating, and incapable of sustaining a proper tune. When papa whistles along to his gramophone recordings he blows his cheeks in and out and forms the notes with clarity and precision, and shifts his body and arms so as to create the best possible [body shape] for sound production; his whistling is serious and musical, whereas Michael’s is childish, designed to annoy and [to invite the request to justify it/stop it]. Ivan doesn’t say anything, though – he doesn’t want to alienate his new friend. Sometimes, though, he wishes that Marta were with them. She’s always good at starting something off or thinking up some new game from scratch, whereas the two boys are often full of lassitude and indirection.
Michael starts and sits up. A second later, Ivan smells what Michael has caught a sniff of: the rich whiff of oily-burning barge fuel. As soon as he smells the smell he can hear the steady putter of the barge engine, and see the haze of blue smoke beyond the embankment, furling out of the barge’s chimney and rolling along the grass.
Michael says, “Let’s have a bet on what it’s carrying. Three shillings.” Michael usually wins these bets, but Ivan doesn’t want to refuse and look like a sissy girl.
“All right. Three shillings. You’re on.”
Ivan closes his eyes and tries to picture the barge and its cargo. There’ll be a bargee at the tiller, a big fella in a sleeveless leather jerkin, a dirty shirt and an oil-blackened leather cap, and with skin that’s burned deep red-brown by the summer’s sun and the months of exposure to all weathers.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
More Big Fat Lies
Managed to find my writing boots again today. I need the discipline of the 'posting deadline'.
Saturday 7th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941
Ivan is feeling confused. He often feels like this these days, and feels the urge to be by himself; to run and run through the words until he feels that his heart and his breathing can’t keep up with the manic, uncontrolled motion of his body; to run until his eyes are dry and he feels the urge the laugh his head off for no reason. He’s so [unconsciously] fit, though, that when he stops running and sits down it only takes a minute or two before he has his breath again and his heart rate falls back to normal.
Sitting in the sunlit woods, with the shafts of light flickering between the illuminated planes of leaves and branches, he listens to his own breathing stilling and settling, and feels the sweat trickling down his chest and – suddenly cooler – over the smooth skin of his flat belly.
He doesn’t understand Mama and Papa any more: they’re supposed to love each other, but they don’t even talk to each other – not like people should talk to each other: even when they do speak, they use strange tones of voice that Ivan can’t understand, and they don’t let the other one finish before they put in their reply. Ivan doesn’t know why, but these strained, staccato exchanges make his neck and head ache, and his fingers tingle: he has to get out of the room – out of the house – and shout, or run.
This morning, in the brightly-lit breakfast room, Papa was dwelling over his newspaper, his breakfast finished but for his interminable cups of coffee, and Mama was mopping at the corners of her mouth with a napkin and scowling at Papa under her eyebrows. Ivan tried to avoid looking at either of them, concentrating instead on his pancakes with cold meats and jam. Papa has a deep, grumbling way of clearing his throat and coughing, which he usually follows up with sniff and sigh. It’s a habit that Ivan sometimes notices and sometimes doesn’t: it’s only really noticeable when he’s in a bad mood. Mama seems to notice it all the time, and each time papa repeats the habitual cycle she breathes out heavily through her nose , and sometimes makes a little ‘tutting’ sound with her tongue and teeth. When they get locked into this pattern of phlegmy coughing, sighing, heavy breathing and tutting, Ivan can sense the tension rising, and starts planning the rapid completion of his breakfast and his exit from the room.
Mostly, Mama and Papa don’t explicitly discuss their antipathies. Sometimes, like today, they will sublimate their enmity into what appears to be an abstract discussion, but which it’s clear – even to Ivan – is actually a mutually destructive exchange of slights and insults.
“Hah,” says Papa, jerking the newspaper for emphasis.
No response.
“Hah,” he says again.
“What is it?” says Mama, wearily and disinterestedly.
Papa looks at Mama over his glasses, patronising and disapproving, and says, “There’s something in the paper about the refugees. It’s interesting.”
Mama knows that what will follow will cast the refugees from the west in a bad light, and that Papa’s criticism is really aimed at her: her western roots – her family came to [the Baltic state] when she was a young girl – tar her with the same derogatory brush as the urban vagabonds who are heading east in growing numbers from the cities in which they are finding themselves increasingly unwelcome. Somehow, her husband manages to conflate her family history with the unrest that the refugee influx has been causing in their destination states and cities; somehow he implies that she and her family are partially responsible for all of this, and that her family are on a par with the poor, dirty, unskilled workers and their families who are flocking across the open borders and into the well-ordered and well-integrated communities of their ethnic brethren in the east.
Ivan has noticed the westerners’ numbers growing in the town: it’s hard to avoid their very visible presence. There were always plenty of people in the streets between the Old Town and the [railway marshalling yards/river?], where broken windows stayed glassless, and where drying clothes flapped on improvised lines strung between the balconies overhanging the shadowed, narrow streets. There were always whiskered old men in ragged, outdated suits, and old women with headscarves and hollowed cheeks, and there were always the bitter-faced young men without jobs, standing on the street corners in groups, with their palmed cigarettes and their identikit jackets and cloth caps. And there were always the young women talking to their peers, with their latest child hoisted on their hip. And there were always the multiple flocks of older children, some shoed, some not, racing after the buses and trams and pulling faces at the (supposedly wealthy) passengers who turned their faces away or studied the stained plaster facades of the building frontages above the childrens’ heads. [thought – perhaps this is the environment that Ivan’s canal side friend comes from??]
There had always been poverty and want in that part of the city, and the demographics had always been dominated by the Slavic population, but, since the refugees had started to arrive from the west, the population density, the levels of overcrowding and the inter-communal resentments had all risen. Many of the refugees had come east seeking extended family members: family traditions dictated that relatives in need should not be turned away if they were shelterless, and thus the tenements and multiple occupancy houses that let off the narrow lanes filled up and up.
[Family loyalties were strained by overcrowding and unfamiliarity, and the resentment of the non-Slavic denizens of the city grew, fuelled by a rise in crime and by their perception that the newcomers (and their extended families) were receiving a greater proportion of the political and economic attention than they deserved.]
Papa says – paraphrasing the newspaper article he’s skimming, “The Police [Prefecture?] has issued a warning to the eastern church authorities after it was announced that the incidence of crime has risen by nearly thirty percent in the previous six months. Thirty percent . What do you make of that, dear?”
Mama shrugs. Ivan cuts another big slice off his last pancake and crams it into his mouth, forcing it in alongside the residue of the previous chunk that he’s still chewing.
“Anything?” insists Papa.
Mama breathes out heavily through her nose, sits back, and takes off her glasses. “There are more poor people, aren’t there?” she says. “It’s just common sense that where there are more poor people there will be more crime. It’s got nothing to do with where they come from, or what colour their skin is.”
“Mm. You think so?”
“I do.”
“Mm.”
Papa goes on: “ ‘In the latest incidence of criminality, police and militia units were called to a tenement address in [Empire Street], where a serious disturbance had been reported. It emerged that the trouble started when some western refugees had tried to improvise the [traditional/ritual] slaughter of a bull to celebrate the usually peaceful and civilised festival of [??]. Other local residents complained about the live bull being tethered in the tenement yard and hoisted on ropes above the street for the slaughter, and were subjected to abuse and to threats of violence by the refugees. It is understood that much [celebratory] liquor [specific, emblematic type?] had been imbibed by the refugee celebrants. Some of the more headstrong local residents returned to the scene armed with wooden stakes and other improvised weapons, and a violent set-to ensued. Police later indicated that the fighting was rapidly quelled, and that fifteen refugees and four residents had been arrested. The slaughtered bull was confiscated, and was driven to Police headquarters on an open truck’.”
Papa stops reading and looks up at Mama.
“Well?” she says, “what do want me to say?”
“Nothing, dear, nothing. Only what you think.”
“This is pointless: you have already made up your own mind about what you think. So there’s no point in my saying anything.”
Papa is silent. Ivan can hear the last of the pancake being chewed down to slushy pulp between his teeth, and he’s – thankfully – nearly ready to leave the table.
Papa says, “You can’t think that this kind of thing is acceptable in a modern country like ours? To be butchering animals on the streets – ”
“It did not say ‘butchering’. It said ‘slaughtering’.”
“You’re quite aware how these ritual slaughters are conducted. Come on – ”
“ ‘slaughtered’, it said, not ‘butchered’. You’re only using that word to make it sound worse than it is.”
“You’re splitting hairs. The point is, I – ”
“May I get down, please?” says Ivan, and his father looks at him with annoyance, then gives a curt nod.
“ – I find it difficult to have sympathy for people who abuse the hospitality of the country in which they are guests, and which has provided them with shelter and support, with no hope of recompense. If they would accommodate themselves more completely to our way of life, there would be less trouble.”
Annoyed though she is, Ivan’s mother won’t be drawn any further. She puts her glasses back on and leaves the room. Papa smiles to himself and goes on reading his paper.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Pods
I think I'm going to stop posting my daily novel draft on here: I'm paranoid about it being stolen and published by some feckless literary shark criminal hybrid life form. I'll put other things up on here, though - little podlets of content, like I used to do back in '05.
If you're here...hello Deb! Got your card. I say we will meet up this year. I'm projecting a date at you mentally: can you see what it is yet?
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Tuesday 3rd: Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941
It was a bold and surprising plan, and it worked magnificently. Paris had fallen by the middle of June, and France’s allies had – ostensibly – made their respective peaces with the Empire. Another period of retrenchment and treaty-making had ensued, and the expansionist, anti-Slav rhetoric of the more colourful Imperial politicians had moderated (or at least quietened). For a while, it had looked as if things would settle down.
In time, however, it became apparent that the war(s) – and particularly the armed nationalisms and population movements that they had spawned – had developed an independent dynamic that could not be stilled by formal treaty-making.
Traditionally, the Empire had been ruled indirectly, a model that depended on economic hegemony rather than gunboat diplomacy. In this respect, the Empire had inherited much from the old Polish-Lithuanian polity (with which much of the eastern Empire was no co-extensive): in the early 1930s, when the world economy had convulsed in crisis after crisis, and even the Imperial [economy] had stumbled badly, the Empire had reduced its overseas commitments of manpower and investment, leaving even some of the most significant overseas possessions/clients to be administered/ruled by local [clients]/representatives – politicians, businesspeople, old Imperial hands who had gone native. The theory – widely held by politicians of all stripes – was that the bonds and habits of hundreds of years would hold fast even without the presence of the metropole’s direct representatives. And this theory held true for a number of years, until the newly unified Slav nationalism – freed from constraint by the easing of Imperial thought policing through cultural dominance – coalesced around widely-articulated principles of self-governance, native language administration, and more equable distribution of land (the large ‘factory estates’ of absentee Imperial landlords were a particularly popular rallying point in this emergent nationalism).
As this nationalism spread, consolidated, and radicalised, it generated border disputes and ethnically-centred reactions, where politics, economics and cultural identity blended into a combustible mixture that swirled, diffused, and re-condensed. On the Imperial periphery, where the Slavic influence was strongest – and where, in many places, revivified ethnic identities straddled more recent political/administrative borders – peoples started agitating for reincorporation into their alleged ‘parent’ state, fuelled by the post-slump economic uncertainties and by the breakdown of the old (and reliably robust) Imperial trading patterns. Anxiety and unemployment spread. Farms and factories laid off thousands of workers, creating sporadic crises and pools of unrest.
The pan-Slavic nationalist movement (PSN) emerged into this messy world of fear and doubt with caricature models of certainty and simplicity: unity was the only answer – confederations of ethnically homogenous states that shared the same racial, political and cultural backgrounds; the old Imperial [hegemony] had been an artificial imposition – now that its client states were freed from the Imperial economic yoke, their peoples were no longer bound to the loyalties and habits of the old [capitalistic] regimes; they should look eastwards for their economic models – towards peasant simplicity and honesty, towards collectivism, towards fair shares for all, and towards the ancient values of mutual support and the extended family; ethnic solidarity, and a belief in some ‘pure strain’ of blood that had emanated from the eastern side of the mountains, underpinned all these notions.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Sunday 1st: Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941
On the tram, rattling through the dusk, Lise rests her hand on his, but in a dutiful rather than an affectionate manner: her palm is tense, only the barest amount of skin actually touching his. Her nails look dark in the tram’s dim interior light, and she keeps her face averted, so that he can only see her hair, the curve of her cheek, and her right eyelashes against the backdrop of the grime-shrouded window. He can feel her stiffness. Although he wants to say something that will re-establish a mood of relaxation and jocularity, he doesn’t know how to. He tries forming the words inside his head, but they feel brittle and pathetic, and he has no confidence in his ability to speak them to her. So they journey into town in this irritated, resentful, hypersensitive silence.
[…]
When Lise’s father had arrived at the architect’s office where Thomas worked, that fine summer morning in ’37, Thomas had known immediately that Lise was dead: there was something about the apologetic way that the old man was holding his hat in front of him, and the way that his eyes flickered from side to side; Thomas saw this across the pale blue, cool, sun-suffused room, and he knew. No.
[…]
4. [Mechelen?] In the morning, waking up in his first billet on this enemy soil with a muzzy, alcohol-induced headache, Mechelen draws back the gauzy curtains and looks down onto the neat grass and flower gardens of the hotel’s (rear) grounds. The sun is well up in the sky, but it’s early yet, and the only sounds come from the kitchens, where plates clack and oven doors slam. The summer morning air is bright with light, [slightly misty and luminous]. [Full of radiance and hope].
He takes his breakfast down on the rear terrace, where the smell of creamy roses overlays the bitter smell of his coffee. The residual hotel staff bring him sausage, bread, cheese and purple-black jam whose flavour he can’t quite place; the label is in Cyrillic script, and he’s none the wiser after subvocalising the words phonetically. The jam is delicious, though – sweet and pip-filled, and smooth against the crusty fresh bread and cool butter. It’s a morning to savour: to savour the solitude and quiet; to savour the flavours and smells in the air; to savour the sense of success and imminent victory.
He’s known other mornings like this, when, for a short while, he felt as if he was at the still centre of something huge and powerful; he remembers the Polish-Lithuanian campaign starting in the mist and light rains of September, sheltering with his troops under dripping tarpaulins, and seeing the wet, wind-shivered countryside from under the constrained, dark perspective of his metal helmet: glimpses of the brown-uniformed enemy melting away into the trees or behind farm buildings; the rain sheening the blue-grey metal of artillery pieces as their crews set them up; the fountains of earth and flame as the woods, buildings and enemy troops were blasted into splinters and fragments; the invigorating sound of aeroplane engines approaching when the weather cleared; and the whistle and concussion of the bombs above and through the succession of small towns that fell to them so rapidly.
He remembers how quickly they had all realised that the campaign was going to be over in weeks – days, maybe – and how their confidence and belief – in themselves, in their leadership, in their equipment and organisation – had developed in exponential leaps with the rapidly accumulating series of victories. The humiliating mass surrenders of their opponents, and the obvious inferiority of their tanks, artillery, air force and light weapons, had also contributed to the already well-developed sense of national/racial superiority embedded in their collective psyche.
It was all over by the end of September. The cessation of fighting coincided with a drier spell of mild weather, and he remembers sightseeing in one of the newly-surrendered cities, [strutting] through the white-stoned streets in his best pale grey-blue dress uniform, enjoying the sensation of being one of the powerful [how this status was indicated by people’s behaviour, and perhaps how it seemed a little embarrassing and bogus at first…but you got used to it.] The local people seemed to disappear into the shadows of doorways, or blend into the stonework: all you seemed to register were the buildings themselves (with their [distinctive building styles] and baroque carved wooden embellishments) and your fellow countrymen; only the other men in uniform seemed to exude any sense of dynamism and life – the locals just wanted to fade away to invisibility. [emblematic image/vignette??]
[That had been a different kind of a campaign, of course, when he was still part of the regular fighting formations, before the ad hoc units of Order Police and Security Police had been consolidated into the Special Commandos. Before he’d been wounded in France, hospitalised, and subsequently reassigned – to his chagrin – to rear echelon duties.]
The French campaign had started so promisingly for him. The early spring of 1940 had been such a beautiful one, and everything had seemed to have been held in suspension after the victory in Poland-Lithuania the previous autumn. There had been a frenzy of diplomacy and political manoeuvring, of course, but most people – including many of the rank and file in the armed forces – had thought that the threat of war in the west was just a bogeyman being created by politicians and the press, and that nothing substantial was going to happen. Most people thought that a diplomatic accommodation would be reached, and that the Imperial forces could re-equip and refocus on the true enemy in the east, with a further campaign there, beyond the old borders of Poland-Lithuania in a couple of years.
It was thus something of a sobering surprise when the mobilisation orders came through in April, and the attack plans had indicated a multiply-pronged attack in the west along a broad front from the Channel in the north to the Alps in the south.
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