On Art and War and Terror

ALE X DANCHEV ‘The imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.’ That is the credo and manifesto of this book. The words are Seamus Heaney’s. ‘Whatever is given,’ he writes in his own idiom, ‘can always be reimagined, however four-square/Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time/It happens to be.’ The essays collected here seek to investigate these claims. They put the imagination to work, in the service of historical, political and ethical inquiry. Employing its second sight, they pigg y-back on its moral benefits. The nobility of poetry, says Wallace Stevens, is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. This is a book about violence of both kinds. It traffics in war poetry, war photography, war films, war stories, war diaries and the like, but also in war itself: in blood – blood like a carwash, as Christopher Logue’s Homer has it – and therefore in political legitimacy, moral authority, civility, depravity, terror, torture, honour and conscience; not to speak of strange things like active passivity and senseless kindness. The violence within is illuminating. The violence without is unrelenting. We need all the protection we can get.

O N A RT AND W AR AND T ERROR

O N A RT AND W AR AND T ERROR

Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of a number of widely acclaimed biographies, of Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Oliver Franks, Basil Liddell Hart and Georges Braque, and co-editor of the bestselling War Diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke.

ALE X DANCHEV

ISBN 978 0 7486 3915 1

www.euppublishing.com Jacket image: Gold Beach by Simon Norfolk. Reproduced with permission, Simon Norfolk/ nbpictures. Jacket design: www.paulsmithdesign.com

Edinburgh

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF

O N A RT AND W AR AND T ERROR ALE X DANCHEV

On Art and War and Terror

By the same author Very Special Relationship (Brassey’s, 1986) Establishing the Anglo-American Alliance (Brassey’s, 1990) International Perspectives on the Falklands Conflict (ed.) (Macmillan, 1992) The Franks Report: The Falkland Islands Review (ed.) (Pimlico, 1992) Oliver Franks (Clarendon, 1993) International Perspectives on the Gulf Conflict (ed.) (Macmillan, 1994) Fin de Siècle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (ed.) (I. B. Tauris, 1995) International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict (ed.) (Macmillan, 1996) On Specialness (Macmillan, 1998) Alchemist of War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998) War Diaries: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (ed.) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001) The Iraq War and Democratic Politics (ed.) (Routledge, 2005) Georges Braque (Hamish Hamilton, 2005) Picasso Furioso (Dilecta, 2008)

ON ART AND WAR AND TERROR 2 Alex Danchev

Edinburgh University Press

Figure 8: Man with a Guitar, 1914 (oil on canvas) Figure 11: The Black Fish, 1942 (oil on canvas) Both by Braque, Georges (1882–1963) Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

© Alex Danchev, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3915 1 (hardback)

The right of Alex Danchev to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

For D

Contents

List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts

1

1.

The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the BaaderMeinhof Group

2. The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

8 33

Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life

58

Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War

76

The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation

100

All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War

125

The Secret Life, or, The Soldier’s Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War

146

Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib

172

It’s All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror

197

Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror

218

Index

237

Figures

Figure 1

Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi (1965) (Gerhard Richter). (page 12)

Figure 2

Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 1, 2 and 3, from 18 October 1977 (1988). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)/Scala, Florence. Oil on canvas, each 44 ⫻ 40¼ in (112 ⫻ 102 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, gift of Philip Johnson, and acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (all by exchange); Enid A. Haupt Fund; Nina and Gordon Bunschaft Bequest Fund; and gift of Emily Rauh Pulitzer (Digital images 2008. MoMA, New York/Scala, Florence) Gudrun Ensslin. (page 17)

Figure 3

Gerhard Richter, Dead, from 18 October 1977 (1988). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)/Scala, Florence. Oil on canvas, 24½ ⫻ 28¾ in (62 ⫻ 73 cm), 24½ ⫻ 24½ in (62 ⫻ 62 cm) and 13¾ ⫻ 15½ in (35 ⫻ 40 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, gift of Philip Johnson, and acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (all by exchange); Enid A. Haupt Fund; Nina and Gordon Bunschaft Bequest Fund; and gift of Emily Rauh Pulitzer (Digital images 2008. MoMA, New York/Scala, Florence) Ulrike Meinhof. (page 20)

Figure 4

Don McCullin, Shell-shocked US Marine, Huy, Vietnam, 1968 (NB Pictures). (page 35)

Figure 5

Goya, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (c. 1812) (The Trustees of the British Museum, London). (page 37)

Figure 6

Don McCullin, The back, according to Don McCullin. US Marines dragging a wounded comrade to safety, The Citadel, Hue, 1968 (NB Pictures). (page 41)

figures Figure 7

Simon Norfolk, Bratunac Stadium, Bosnia, 2005 (NB Pictures). (page 42)

Figure 8

Georges Braque (1882–1963), Man with a Guitar (The Guitar Player), 1914 (oil on canvas) (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France/Lauros/ Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Artist’s permission cleared through DACS, London, 2008). (page 60)

Figure 9

Tony Blair playing the guitar (1995) (Andrew Dunsmore/Rex Features). (page 73)

Figure 10 Bassano, Basil Liddell Hart (1927) (National Portrait Gallery, London). (page 78) Figure 11

Georges Braque (1882–1963), The Black Fish, 1942 (oil on canvas) (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Artist’s permission cleared through DACS, London, 2008). (page 110)

Figure 12 Felix Man, Evelyn Waugh (c. 1943). (Estate of Felix H. Man/National Portrait Gallery, London). (page 128) Figure 13 Howard Coster, General Sir Alan Brooke (1945) (National Portrait Gallery, London). (page 151) Figure 14

Private Lynndie England and ‘Gus’, Abu Ghraib, 24 October 2003 (PA Photos/AP). (page 175)

Figure 15 Sergeant Michael Smith with Marco (the black dog), Sergeant Santos Cardona with Duco (the tan dog), tormenting a detainee; Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick watching, Abu Ghraib, 12 December 2003 (PA Photos/ AP). (page 184) Figure 16 ‘Gilligan’ (Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh), Abu Ghraib, 5 November 2003. This picture was taken by Specialist Sabrina Harman; the original photograph was taken by Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, glimpsed here with camera (PA Photos/AP). (page 205) Figure 17

Staff Sergeant Chad Touchett (centre) and soldiers from A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, relax in one of Saddam’s palaces, Baghdad, 7 April 2003 (PA Photos/AP). (page 228) ix

Acknowledgements

This book is a collection of published and unpublished work. Chapters 1 and 2 have not been published previously. Chapter 3 began life as an Inaugural Lecture at the University of Nottingham; an extract appeared in The Independent, and a truncated version in the Journal for Cultural Research. Earlier versions of chapter 4 appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies and in my Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998; Phoenix, 1999). Earlier versions of chapter 5 appeared in Alternatives and in my Georges Braque: A Life (Hamish Hamilton, 2005; Penguin, 2007). An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared in Diplomatic History. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as the introduction to Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001; Phoenix, 2002), edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman. Earlier versions of chapter 8 appeared in Alternatives and in Intelligence and Human Rights in the Era of Global Terrorism (Praeger, 2007), edited by Steve Tsang. Chapter 9 has not been published in this form; elements of it appeared in International Affairs and the Times Literary Supplement. Chapter 10 has not been published whole; elements of it appeared in 11 September 2001 (Cass, 2003), edited by Bülent Gokay and R. B. J. Walker, and in International Affairs. I am grateful to Laura Graham for her assistance in the assemblage of the book. The work she did in sourcing the images and inputting elements of the text was invaluable. Her juggling of these demands with those of her graduate studies, various other employments and volunteerings, to say nothing of a life of her own, augurs well for a future at once successful and sane. For intellectual and moral support in realising this project, which is in a certain sense an on-going project, I am grateful to Roland Bleiker and Debbie Lisle, and also to Neil Cox, Christopher Hill, John Horton, Bruce Hunter, Andrew Linklater, Adelheid Scholten, Ion Trewin, Rob Walker, and my colleagues in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. And x

acknowledgements to Nicola Ramsey, of Edinburgh University Press, who brought it to fruition. I should like to acknowledge the generosity of Gerhard Richter in permitting his work to be reproduced here; and to acknowledge also the award of a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary, London, a stimulating environment in which to put the finishing touches to this manuscript and to think about the next one.

xi

Our being is cemented together by qualities which are diseased. Ambition, jealousy, envy, vengeance, superstition and despair lodge in us with such a natural right of possession that we recognize the likeness of them even in the animals too – not excluding so unnatural a vice as cruelty; for in the midst of compassion we feel deep down some bitter-sweet pricking of malicious pleasure at seeing others suffer . . . If anyone were to remove the seeds of such qualities in Man he would destroy the basic properties of our lives. So, too, in all polities there are duties which are necessary, yet not merely abject but vicious as well: the vices hold their rank there and are used to stitch and bind us together, just as positions are used to preserve our health. If vicious deeds should become excusable insofar as we have need of them, necessity effacing their true qualities, we must leave that role to be played by citizens who are more vigorous and less timorous, those prepared to sacrifice their honour and their consciences, as men of yore once sacrificed their lives: for the well-being of their country. Men like me are too weak for that: we accept roles which are easier and less dangerous. The public interest requires men to betray, to tell lies and to massacre; let us assign that commission to such as are more obedient and more pliant. Michel de Montaigne*

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty to credit marvels. Seamus Heaney†

* Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech, ‘On the useful and the honourable’, in The Complete Essays (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 892. † Seamus Heaney, ‘Fosterling’, in Opened Ground (London: Faber, 1998), p. 357.

Introduction Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’ The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it. Seamus Heaney1

‘The imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.’ That will do, I think, as credo and manifesto for this book. The words are Seamus Heaney’s. ‘Whatever is given,’ he writes in his own idiom, ‘can always be reimagined, however four-square, / Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time / It happens to be.’2 The words come from ruminations on what he calls the redress of poetry: the notion that poetry – art – can function as a kind of moral spirit level, an agent of equilibration, ‘an upright, resistant, and self-bracing entity within the general flux and flex’.3 That is an inspiring notion. Walt Whitman proclaimed something similar: Of these States the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns, 1

on art and war and terror Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad, He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less, He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key, He is the equalizer of his age and land, He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking, ... For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals, For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders, The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.4

In the pages that follow, ‘the poet’ is expansively interpreted, to include the writer, the painter, the photographer and the film-maker. For the writer Francis Ponge, it was the painter Georges Braque who fulfilled the equilibrating function. The fi rst picture that I saw of his, that I truly frequented, was in the studio then occupied by Jean Paulhan, 9 rue Campagne-Première [in Paris], a papier collé of 1912 or 1913, representing vaguely (vaguely is not the word) a violin. On the big wall of the studio, this modestly-proportioned picture was next to one other painting, much more grandiose in scale, in ‘subject’, in ambition: one of de Chirico’s big ‘metaphysical landscapes’. Which of them had the grandeur, I leave to your imagination. 5

That was in 1923. Half a century later, Ponge recalled how that picture had continued to haunt him. He was enchanted by its ‘poverty’, its deliberate lack of means, the voluntary simplicity of its situation. In 1945, nearly twenty years after he fi rst made its acquaintance, it became his familiar in his own home. Paulhan loaned it to him while he worked at the fi rst of his literary explorations of the artist: ‘Braque the Reconciler’, the beginning of a wonderfully idiosyncratic series, one of which was translated into English by Samuel Beckett. Ponge’s claim for painting as reconciliation is very like Heaney’s claim for poetry as redress, not least in its ethical foundation. In a heartfelt éloge, Ponge testifies precisely that Braque has been good for him.6 The essays gathered here seek to investigate these claims. They put the imagination to work in the service of historical, political and ethical inquiry. Employing its second sight, they piggy-back on its moral benefits. The nobility of poetry, says Wallace Stevens, ‘is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without’.7 This is a book about violence of both kinds. It traffics in war poetry, war photography, war films, war stories, war diaries and the like, but also in war itself: in blood – ‘blood like a carwash’, as Christopher 2

introduction: out of the marvellous Logue’s Homer has it – and, therefore, in political legitimacy, moral authority, civility, depravity, honour and conscience; not to speak of strange things such as active passivity and senseless kindness. The violence within is illuminating. The violence without is unrelenting. We need all the protection we can get. The poets are not the only champions of the imagination. ‘In my utopia,’ proposed the philosopher Richard Rorty, ‘human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.’ This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had not previously attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves.8

These essays offer themselves as miniature models of description and redescription. They prize what Henry James called the soreness of confusion. They excoriate binary thinking: us and them; black and white; good and evil; civilisation and barbarism. They are much concerned with the bloody consequences of categorical certainty, lexical promiscuity, political rapacity and personal vanity – the kind that fuses ignorance and arrogance, self-regard and self-deception. With Geoffrey Hill, ‘I have learned one thing: not to look down / so much upon the damned.’9 The essays take seriously the idea of the artist as moralist – an unfashionable idea – or ‘moral witness’, in Avishai Margalit’s phrase, with a moral purpose and a sober hope.10 Hope for what? Hope that there is, or will be, an audience of sentient spectators, viewers, readers, absorbed in the work: a community, a moral community, for whom it stands up and who will stand up for it. Art is the highest form of hope, as the painter Gerhard Richter has fi nely said.11 The essays also take seriously the cautionary spirit of W. H. Auden: 3

on art and war and terror The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the state . . . have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbours start talking: There’s many a beast then in a populous city, And many a civil monster.12

Armed with art, in other words, we are more alert and less deceived. ‘A photograph can’t coerce,’ wrote Susan Sontag in homage to Don McCullin’s acts of witness. ‘It won’t do the moral work for us. But it can start us on the way.’13 These essays are dedicated to the proposition that art matters, ethically and politically, affectively and intellectually. Poetry makes something happen after all. Not only does it make us feel – or feel differently – it makes us think, and think again. We go beyond ourselves, in Gadamer’s phrase, by penetrating deeper into the work: ‘That “something can be held in our hesitant stay” – this is what art has always been and still is today.’14 In sum, art articulates a vision of the world that is insightful and consequential; and the vision and the insight can be analysed. Seamus Heaney makes bold to affirm that ‘within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.’ The practical and the poetic. Expressed in different ways, some such tension or altercation goes back as far as Plato. ‘Between ourselves my friends and for ourselves’, wrote another poet, ‘I shall judge this long quarrel between tradition and invention / Between Order and Adventure.’15 My purpose here is not to judge, nor even to reconcile, but to mingle the two realms fruitfully; to act as smuggler, interpreter and facilitator across the frontier; to promote a sort of intersubjective understanding; to translate (to bring over, as translators say, suggestively) from one domain to another. According to J. M. Coetzee, storytelling is another, an other mode of thinking. According to Carl Becker, a professor is one who thinks otherwise – one who is, perhaps, other-wise. The essays that make up this book are an experiment in thinking otherwise, in being other-wise. They mix and match art and war without shame. Auden’s Caliban speaks of ‘the academic fields to be guarded with umbrella and 4

introduction: out of the marvellous learned periodical against the trespass of any unqualified stranger not a whit less jealously than the game-preserve is protected from the poacher by the unamiable shot-gun’.16 These essays are careless of trespass. They harness the imagination and the reimagination. They profess poetry, tamed by research. They proceed from the conviction that the imagination has the longer reach, as Nadine Gordimer has it in another variant of the old opposition: ‘When testimony has been filed, out of date, poetry continues to carry the experience from which the narrative has fallen away.’ What is lasting, said Hölderlin, the poets provide.17 ‘One foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts’, reflects Marguerite Yourcenar, ‘or, more accurately and without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul’.18 Several of the essays here have a biographical thrust. They embrace body and soul. In similar terms, Theodor Adorno wrote severely to his friend and comrade Walter Benjamin that his exposé of Baudelaire (the miniature model of the fabled Arcades Project) served to transport into ‘a realm where history and magic oscillate’. Coming from Adorno, however, this was not a compliment. It was a reproof of ideological and methodological shortcomings. ‘If one wanted to put it rather drastically’, he continued, ‘one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched. Only theory could break this spell – your own resolute and salutarily speculative theory.’19 As between sympathetic magic and speculative theory, I side with Marguerite Yourcenar. These essays are not a spelling out, but an inviting in. Poetry outbids prescription. ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’20 Have a care, gentle reader. Beware the madness of art. Beware the hospitality of war. In the hospitality of war We left them their dead as a gift To remember us by. 21

Notes 1. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber, 1995), p. 203, quoting from ‘Lightenings’, Opened Ground, p. 364.

5

on art and war and terror 2. Heaney, Redress, pp. xv, 200, quoting ‘The Settle Bed’, in Opened Ground, pp. 345–6. 3. Heaney, Redress, p. 15. 4. Walt Whitman, ‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’, in Leaves of Grass (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1998), pp. 269–70. 5. Francis Ponge, ‘Braque ou un méditatif à l’œuvre’ [1971], in Alex Danchev, Georges Braque (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 157. 6. Francis Ponge, ‘Braque le réconciliateur’ [1946] and ‘Feuillet votif’ [1964], in Danchev, Braque, pp. 157–8. Cf. Ponge, trans. Beckett, ‘Braque or modern art as event and pleasure’, Transition, 49 (1949), pp. 43–7. 7. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ [1942], in The Necessary Angel (London: Faber, 1984), p. 36. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi. Cf. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 224. 9. Geoffrey Hill, ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, in King Log (London: Deutsch, 1968), p. 13. 10. See Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 5, and ‘A Moral Witness to the “Intricate Machine”’, New York Review of Books, 6 December 2007. 11. Gerhard Richter, trans. David Britt, The Daily Practice of Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), p. 100. 12. Introduction to Poems of Freedom [1938], in Edward Mendelson (ed.), The English Auden (London: Faber, 1986), pp. 371–2, quoting from Othello. 13. Susan Sontag, ‘Witnessing’, in Don McCullin (London: Cape, 2003), p. 17. 14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. Nicholas Walker, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ [1974], in The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 53, quoting from Hölderlin’s ‘Bread and Wine’. 15. Apollinaire, trans. Robert Chandler, ‘The Pretty Redhead’, in Stephen Romer (ed.), 20th-Century French Poems (London: Faber, 2002), p. 22. 16. W. H. Auden, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ [1942–4], in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1991), p. 427. 17. Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 42; Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Michael Hamburger, ‘Remembrance’, in Selected Poems and Fragments (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 253. 18. Marguerite Yourcenar, trans. Grace Frick, ‘Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian’, in Memoirs of Hadrian [1951] (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 275. 6

introduction: out of the marvellous 19. Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November 1938, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, trans. Nicholas Walker, The Complete Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 282–3. See Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill’, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 929–45. 20. Henry James, ‘The Middle Years’ [1893], in The Author of Beltraffio (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), p. 105. 21. Archilochus. See ch. 10, n. 35.

7

1

The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group

Crime fi lls the world, so absolutely that we could go insane out of sheer despair. (Not only in systems based on torture, and in concentration camps: in civilized countries, too, it is a constant reality; the difference is merely quantitative. Every day, people are maltreated, raped, beaten, humiliated, tormented and murdered – cruel, inhuman, inconceivable.) Our horror, which we feel every time we succumb or are forced to succumb to the perception of atrocity (for the sake of our own survival, we protect ourselves with ignorance and by looking away), our horror feeds not only on the fear that it might affect ourselves but on the certainty that the same murderous cruelty operates and lies ready to act within every one of us. I just wanted to put it on record that I perceive our only hope – or our one great hope – as residing in art. Gerhard Richter1 I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. ‘We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, that come into God’s head,’ Kafka said. This reminded me at fi rst of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. ‘Oh no’, said Kafka, ‘Our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.’ ‘Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, plenty of hope, an infi nite amount of hope – but not for us.’ Max Brod 2

Perhaps the only great art yet made of terror and counter-terror in the contemporary world is a cycle of fifteen paintings by the leading German artist Gerhard Richter, completed in 1988, and collectively entitled 18 October 1977.3 The date has a malign significance. That morning, in the high security wing of Stammheim Prison, Stuttgart, guards discovered the leaders of the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof group, dead or dying in their 8

the artist and the terrorist cells. Andreas Baader had been shot in the head, Gudrun Ensslin hanged. They were already dead. Jan-Carl Raspe, also shot in the head, was still alive; he was rushed to hospital but died soon afterwards. Irmgard Möller alone survived her wounds. Ulrike Meinhof had been found hanging from a window grating in her cell the year before. Holger Meins died from starvation in a hunger strike to protest prison conditions in 1974. The existential struggle for control over his body, the syndicated photograph of him on his death bed and his last recorded words lent him the air of a martyr cloaked in the mantle of a soixante-huitard, an impression only reinforced by the authentic argot: Either pig or man, either survival at any price or fight to the death, either problem or solution. There’s nothing in between. Of course, I don’t know what it’s like when you die or when they kill you. Ah well, so that was it. I was on the right side anyway – everybody has to die anyway. Only one question is how one lived, and that’s clear enough: fighting pigs as a man for the liberation of mankind: a revolutionary battle with all one’s love for life, despising death.4

Meins and the others had revolutionary aspirations. Their methods were more prosaic. The Baader-Meinhof group were terrorists (homegrown). They caused convulsions in the body politic, and continuing tremors to this day. In 2006, Meinhof’s daughter, Bettina Röhl, failed in her attempt to sue the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for describing her as a ‘terrorist’s daughter’: Germany’s highest appeal court ruled against her, on the ground that it was a factual report and not an insult. In 2007, when a former member of the group came up for parole after serving the minimum term of twenty-four years, such was the media frenzy that she was released two days early in order to avoid the pack of ravening reporters: in itself an inflammatory concession.5 In 2008, Udi Edel’s film, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, served only to renew the controversy. The fi lm was described acidly by Bettina Röhl as ‘the worst-case scenario – it would not be possible to top its hero worship’.6 Normalisation is difficult. The brand may have sunk from a vanguard movement to a fashion statement (‘PradaMeinhof’) – truly the ‘polit-kitsch’ discerned by Richter’s friend and fellow-traveller Benjamin Buchloh – but for the older generation Baader-Meinhof still touches a raw nerve.7 Whatever the verdict of criminal justice, history has not yet had its due. There is no getting away from their crimes. They were tried for hijacking, kidnapping and murder. For many good Germans they 9

on art and war and terror were a shameful excrescence. For others, including Gerhard Richter, their youth, their idealism, their sheer implacability aroused a certain sympathy, or pity, however much their actions were to be deplored. ‘I was impressed by the terrorists’ energy, their uncompromising determination, and their absolute bravery’, the artist recorded boldly on the unveiling of his work, ‘but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the state for its harsh response. That is what states are like; and I had known other, more ruthless ones.’8 Richter knew more than most. He was born in Dresden in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power. The arc of his life describes the torment of the century.9 His mother was a cultured and purposeful woman, with a passion for music and the classics of German literature. Gerhard was the apple of her eye. With his father, however, there was always a certain distance. Horst Richter was congenitally overmatched. Affable and ineffectual, he was a schoolteacher, a staunch Protestant, and, like most civil servants, a member of the National Socialist Party. Soon enough, Gerhard was pressed heedless into the Hitler Youth, and the family was caught in the toils of the ‘war of annihilation’, as Hitler called it, on the Eastern Front. Young Gerhard was captivated by it all. Trenches were dug outside the house – fortuitously, they had moved to a village outside the city – American bombers dropped propaganda leaflets, Soviet fighters flew overhead hunting for German army trucks. ‘There were weapons and cannons and guns and cigarettes; it was fantastic.’ He watched the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and listened to his grandmother and aunt tell their survivors’ tales of the firestorm and the carnage. Later he explored the ruins. Later still he painted exact pictures of military aircraft and ambiguous aerial cityscapes. ‘I am a specialist in airplanes’, he remarked wryly. In later life Richter’s favourite author was his contemporary, Thomas Bernhard (1931–89), another specialist in airplanes, who scrambled in the ruins of Salzburg much as Richter did in Dresden. Bernhard’s memoir of that formative experience must have spoken powerfully to the painter of ruination and mutilation: The whole square below the cathedral was strewn with fragments of masonry, and the people who had come running like us from all quarters gazed in amazement at this unparalleled and unquestionably fascinating picture, which to me seemed monstrously beautiful and not in the least frightening. Suddenly confronted with the absolute savagery of war, yet at the same time fascinated by the monstrous sight before my eyes, I stood for several minutes silently contemplating the 10

the artist and the terrorist scene of destruction presented by the square with its brutally mutilated cathedral – a scene created only a short while before, which had still not quite come to rest and was so overwhelming that I was unable to take it in.10

Richter’s father disappeared for the duration. Mobilised in 1939, he served on both the Eastern and the Western Front before being captured by the Americans. He did not return home until 1946. He was not permitted to resume his teaching post, nor, it seems, his family life. ‘He shared most fathers’ fate at the time,’ Richter remembered. ‘Nobody wanted them.’ Horst Richter remained in some sense a prisoner of war. He never found his place in civil society. Eventually he committed suicide. Much later, Richter’s mother let him know that his revenant father was not his real father, after all, a small biographical bombshell dropped in an academic footnote, fifty years after the fact.11 There were other losses. Richter’s flamboyant uncle Rudi waltzed off to war and was killed within days. His aunt Marianne, committed to a mental institution from the age of eighteen and forcibly sterilised in 1938, fell victim to the ‘euthanasia programme’ so efficiently administered by the Nazi doctors. Subsequently, it transpired that Richter’s father-in-law was himself a Nazi doctor, indeed a senior officer in the SS, personally implicated in that same programme.12 Over the years Richter compiled his own family album, the trademark ‘photo-paintings’, of these phantom presences in his life.13 After the war he trained as a mural artist in the service of the state, under the vigilant apparatchiks of the German Democratic Republic, a state as airless as it was ruthless.14 Increasingly disaffected, he slipped over to the West in 1961, just before the Berlin Wall went up. This long apprenticeship in the red-brown spectrum of totalitarianism served to inoculate him against ideologies and belief systems of all sorts. Richter was in every sense an unbeliever: such was his public persona, and also his private conviction. Unbelieving, however, did not mean unfeeling. The Baader-Meinhof group were nothing if not conductors of strong feelings. Their deaths in custody – the manner of the dying and the spectacle of the dead – unleashed a torrent of complex emotion and prejudiced opinion, for it was not immediately clear by whose hand they had perished. The supposition is suicide, such is the weight of circumstantial evidence;15 the suspicion, never quite laid to rest, is the sullen myrmidons of the state. Germany has some 11

on art and war and terror

Figure 1 Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi (1965).

12

the artist and the terrorist experience of state repression. The burn marks of the past are as visible as the burn marks on Ulrike Meinhof’s neck in three spectral images Richter called, simply, Dead. Altogether, the images have an uncanny affect. Richter’s cycle stands in succession to David’s Death of Marat (1793), Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814) and Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Like all great art, it continues to mutate. The mystery of the meaning of the October cycle is still unresolved, not least, perhaps, for its creator. ‘What have I painted?’ Richter asked himself in December 1988, when he was done. By his reckoning: Three times Baader, shot. Three times Ensslin, hanged. Three times the dead Meinhof after they cut her down. Once the dead Meins. Three times Ensslin, neutral (almost like pop stars). Then a big, unspecific burial – a cell dominated by a bookcase – a silent, grey record player – a youthful portrait of Meinhof, sentimental in a bourgeois way – twice the arrest of Meins, forced to surrender to the clenched power of the state. All the pictures are dull, grey, mostly very blurred, diffuse. Their presence is the horror and the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion.16

They are history paintings but also memory paintings. They come into play ‘at this blind spot where “being unable to forget” and “not wanting to remember” cross paths’.17 Richter could not help but remember: ‘I had kept a number of photographs for years, under the heading of unfinished business.’18 Collecting, reflecting, archiving: this was his normal modus operandi. Embedded in his Atlas – a scrapbook or sourcebook of photographs, postcards, drawings, clippings, diagrams and plans from his bottomless bottom drawer – there are two batches of photographs of the Holocaust, some of them blurred.19 The first batch he assembled in 1967, the second in 1997. On the latter occasion he had been commissioned to make a work for the newly restored Reichstag in Berlin. He seriously considered using a selection of those images in a columnar construction he designed for the towering atrium, making a kind of spinal memorial – the very backbone of the building – a parliament of hopes and bones.20 One can only speculate on what the reaction might have been. In the end he decided against. The Holocaust was ‘unpaintable’. But he seems to have wondered every so often whether he could find a way.21 The unmasterable past is very much on his artistic mind. So, too, the intransigent present. Despite repeated protestations that he is not interested in politics, in ‘questions of political content or historical truth’, Richter is in fact a deeply political painter. 22 Like his work, 13

on art and war and terror however, he is hard to enlist. ‘If I’m thinking of political painting in our time’, he told an uncomprehending Benjamin Buchloh, ‘I’d rather have Barnett Newman. He painted some magnificent pictures.’ ‘So it is said’, retorted Buchloh. ‘But magnificent in what way?’ ‘I can’t describe it now’, replied Richter, ‘what gets to me in them – I believe they’re among the most important paintings of all.’23 He has continued to respond characteristically to the world of affairs. War Cut (2004), for example, is a kind of abstract serial of the Iraq War, complete with contemporary reportage. It consists of 216 ‘excerpts’ or ‘blinks’ from one of his abstract paintings, photographed in extreme close-up by the artist, juxtaposed with reports from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 20 and 21 March 2003, as the war was launched.24 In 2006, the Atlas disclosed a new intimation: a newspaper clipping, roughly framed in white paper, and three colour printouts of the Twin Towers ablaze. This sequence appears alongside some abstract collages; it is labelled, anonymously, ‘Stripes and WTC [World Trade Center]’.25 These are not random placements. Nothing arrives in the Atlas by chance. Richter is meticulous in his dispositions, and an obsessive arranger and re-arranger of the facts of his life and work. Unconventionally, he started his own catalogue raisonné, in 1962, once he had found his feet in the West. He was thirty and 1962 was year zero. He cancelled his past and set about creating the real Gerhard Richter. No catalogue raisonné in modern times has been more actively managed by its living subject. Yet he is no mere self-publicist. He is an artist of Proustian premeditation. Other artists have dared to think of the toppling of the towers as a spectacle, a ready-made, or a subject for their own work; few have voiced the thought, and fewer still have acted on it. Richter is different. For a specialist in airplanes, WTC is his madeleine. Surprisingly enough, 9/11 is paintable. For Richter, the paintable and the unpaintable are shifting sands: not a question of taboos or proscriptions, given or handed down; rather an exercise of individual artistic conscience. Such an exercise might well traverse issues of taste, or discretion, and also issues of scale, but in the end paintability is a matter of judgement – for Richter, judgements about his own capacity, the snare of inanity and the scent of hope.26 In the case of the Baader-Meinhof paintings, he set to work some ten years after the events of that traumatic ‘German autumn’ of 1977, commemorated by Fassbinder, Schlöndorff and their collaborators on film. Ten years was a decent interval, or a necessary period 14

the artist and the terrorist of maturation: ‘it’s hard to say how it came about that late in 1987 my interest revived, and so I got hold of some more photographs and had the idea of painting the subject’.27 It may have been hard to say – Richter’s self-explanation tends towards the elliptical – but the revival of interest coincided exactly with the famous German Historikerstreit: a quarrel, not to say a battle royal, among German historians about the proper interpretation of the German past – specifically, the National Socialist past.28 At issue were fundamental questions about how that history could be understood (and communicated); how the Holocaust, in particular, could be ‘dealt with’, morally, historically and psychologically; how an ethical but usable past could be reconstructed from the wreckage. This was a very public quarrel, engaging many of the country’s leading intellectuals. Richter cannot but have been aware that it was going on. For all that he likes to play up the proverbial stupid painter (‘most artists are afflicted with more than common stupidity’), he comes dangerously close to being an intellectual himself, as his writing and reading and talking amply demonstrate. It was precisely in this period that he asserted, publicly and emphatically, that ‘There is lyric poetry after Auschwitz.’29 Moreover, some of these issues were his issues. The daily practice of painting is the remembrance of things past. If painting is remembering, these paintings seem to re-enact that painful process. The October cycle is among other things a cycle of memory: tenebrous memory made manifest. History does not repeat itself, said Mark Twain, but it rhymes. The historical connections were there to be made. In 1977, in a feverish political climate, as parallel plots spun out of control, the industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer was kidnapped and executed by the terrorists. Ten years later, the Hanns-Martin Schleyer Foundation sponsored a symposium in Berlin which addressed itself to the question: ‘To Whom Does German History Belong?’ That question was in part a generational question, as the Baader-Meinhof group proclaimed in word and deed. ‘This is the Auschwitz generation’, announced Gudrun Ensslin, ‘and there’s no argument with them!’30 Richter would have read of these things in the course of his exhaustive preparatory research. For the artist, the problem of trying to come to terms with the terrorist (and the counter-terrorist) was in some ways analogous to the problem confronted by the warring historians. It might be called the problem of the perpetrator. It touches on myriad repressions and suppressions, societal and personal. As Richter put it to Jan Thorn Prikker: 15

on art and war and terror If people wanted to see these people [the RAF] hanged as criminals, that’s only a part of it: there’s something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists . . . So this terrorism is inside all of us, that’s what generates the rage and fear, and that’s what I don’t want, any more than I want the policeman inside myself – there’s never just one side to us. We’re always both: the state and the terrorist.31

The problem of the perpetrator is at heart a moral issue. It bears on responsibility – and guilt – and it demands an effort of empathy. The terrorist is not of our tribe; neither is the policeman. But that comforting thought is pursued by another, discomforting as it may be, that goes to the heart of Gerhard Richter’s project. These people, so alien to us, are human, all too human. They are not like us. They are us. For Richter, famously, painting is a moral act. The October cycle is a moral tale – at once metaphysical quest and police procedural. As so often, the creative process began with the photographs he had collected. Each of the paintings in the cycle has a photographic model.32 The photographs in question are, for the most part, police photographs – scene-of-crime photographs – taken in the course of investigations into the deaths of those featured (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and Holger Meins), and published in glossy magazines: Der Spiegel and Stern. Two of them are originally film stills. Extraordinarily, a German television crew had filmed the arrest of Baader and Meins in Frankfurt on 1 June 1972. The shootout between the terrorists and the police left Baader wounded and Meins forced to surrender (and strip) under the guns of the menacing armoured vehicles – ‘the clenched power of the state’. All this was broadcast on the evening news, while individual images found their way into the press. Similarly, if less dramatically, the ‘big, unspecific burial’, the funeral of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe at the Stuttgart Waldfriedhof on 27 October 1977, was also filmed by a television crew (not to mention numerous police photographers). The provenance of the photographs is highly appropriate. Nowhere is this more subtly observed than in Richter’s three snaps of the living, breathing Ensslin, which seem to communicate so much, so naturally of the person who is but one frame away from extinction. In keeping with the overall tenor of the work, this sequence, one of several mini-series within the cycle, is not quite what it seems. ‘Three times Ensslin neutral (almost like pop stars)’, recorded Richter, yet these pictures are entitled Confrontation 1, 2 and 3. They are easier to read than some of the others – less blurred – but the message of the 16

the artist and the terrorist

Figure 2 Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 1, 2 and 3, from 18 October 1977 (1988).

17

on art and war and terror image is ambiguous. They have a lighter emotional tone, an improvised quality, a feeling almost of complicity with the viewer – with us. Ensslin turns this way and that for our inspection, performing perhaps, as Richter seems to be suggesting, or play-acting, as if in a photo-booth; or being put through her paces in a line-up. In fact, she refused to be photographed when taken into custody. The photographs from which Richter worked were shot through a peephole in a flower picture on the wall of the interrogation room. As it turns out, therefore, Ensslin has been photographed refusing to be photographed. The artist’s stolen images are a representation of a battle of wills – a confrontation – and a revelation of subterfuge. Perpetrators come in different guises, as Gerhard Richter knows only too well, including photographers . . . and painters. Richter’s reflections on the RAF are unusually personal: ‘Knowledge of the people, knowing the people, was basic to the pictures.’ He studied the literature; he sifted and re-sifted the photographs. He got to know them, as it were, photographically. As his knowledge deepened, so he became more involved. ‘I was touched by them’, he told one interviewer, ‘And the feelings built up, because I had not satisfactorily dealt with their existence’, and their non-existence. 33 Richter has written of the October cycle as a form of leave-taking. Perhaps it is also a kind of mourning. Factually: these specific persons are dead; as a general statement, death is leave-taking. And then ideologically: a leave-taking from a specific doctrine of salvation and beyond that, from the illusion that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by this conventional expedient of violent struggle (this kind of revolutionary thought and action is futile and passé). And then the work bears a strong sense of leave-taking for me personally. It ends the work I began in the 1960s (paintings from blackand-white photographs), with a compressed summation that precludes any possible continuation. And so it is a leave-taking from thoughts and feelings of my own, on a very basic level . . . Of course, personal circumstances play a part in all this. On the one hand, they cannot be seen in isolation from the generalized ‘leave-taking’ mentioned above; on the other, they have to be disregarded, because it is all too easy and too misleading to use them to explain things away in psychological terms.34

Death is indeed the dominant motif. Asked which pictures remained unpainted, Richter responded: The ones that weren’t paintable were the ones I did paint. The dead. To start with, I wanted more to paint the whole business, the world as it then was, the living reality – I was thinking in terms of something big 18

the artist and the terrorist and comprehensive. But then it all evolved quite differently, in the direction of death. 35

He painted them dead or alive. The October cycle is the ultimate wanted poster.36 Death as a subject had preoccupied him for some time. One commentator has gone so far as to suggest that death is for Richter a criterion of what to paint. It may also have to do with the nature of his sources – the cherished photographs – with ‘that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’.37 The motif is often repeated. ‘Three times the dead Meinhof after they cut her down’; Meinhof, too, has her mini-series. In these iconic images she appears to fade away before our very eyes, shrinking and blurring a little more with each repetition. Ironically, she was brought back to life (or death) sixteen years later, in 2004, by Marlene Dumas, who painted the same image, from the same shock photo. Richter’s Meinhof is evanescent. Dumas’s Meinhof is ghastly – blacker, starker, harsher – a tight close-up, mouth agape, the burn mark a choker. This shrieking reprise is titled Stern (star), a play on the name of the magazine in which she originally appeared and her celebrity status variously construed.38 It is also, inescapably, a homage to Gerhard Richter. The October cycle is already a source text. It has inspired a short story from Don DeLillo, another series of unnerving encounters, in the first instance with the works themselves.39 Among artists, redoing Richter has become a minor industry. Making work of his work is now an art of its own.40 There is an element of justice in this, which might be called poetic. Richter has made a career of romping through the canon of Western art, making free with images of all kinds. It is only fitting that the great appropriator is himself appropriated. Elsewhere, Baader lies dead on the floor of his cell. Ensslin hangs from a window grating, the scene befogged, the torso smudged, the legs dangling in ghostly suspension. A still life sits in lonely eminence: the silent, grey record player – a true memento mori – where the gun is hidden. There’s One in Every Crowd by Eric Clapton is on the turntable. A cell dominated by a bookcase is void of human presence, save for a cadaverous overcoat. The night of 18 October 1977 is closing in. Exactly sixty years before, on 18 October 1917, Franz Kafka wrote in his notebook: ‘Dread of night. Dread of not-night.’41 Gerhard Richter is an admirer of Kafka, and he expresses himself in like fashion. The deathworks of the deathnight are painted dread: 19

on art and war and terror

Figure 3 Gerhard Richter, Dead, from 18 October 1977 (1988).

20

the artist and the terrorist dark, cloudy, frozen. And yet they dwell in hope, like the artist. His paintings have an extraordinary reflective quality. As we peer at them (into them) we glimpse something of ourselves. Richter himself has proposed that these paintings ‘are also to do with us, our hopes and failures, our death’.42 The cell is a transit camp, says Gerhard Storck suggestively.43 In the antechamber of death we weigh our emotions. How are we to feel? What are we to make of these scene-of-crime images, these absent presences, these ex-people? The paintings are beautiful. Their surfaces are beautiful, but it is not a surface beauty. It is a wounded beauty – like the ruined Dresden – for Richter, almost a contradiction in terms.44 The wound is depicted on the body, as in Kafka’s penal colony. Richter’s penal colony is harrowing indeed, but the work is not didactic. ‘The pictures are not partisan,’ as he puts it. ‘They are hard to enlist, to make use of. Grief is not tied to any “cause”. Nor is compassion.’ Asked about the object of his compassion, he replied: ‘The death the terrorists had to suffer. They probably did kill themselves, which for me makes it almost more terrible. Compassion also for the failure; the fact that an illusion of being able to change the world has failed.’45 Like Guernica, the paintings express both sorrow and horror. Unlike Guernica, they have a deadpan affective atmosphere.46 No one screams. The October cycle has a stillness, a pathos and an essential privacy foreign to Picasso. Richter eschews exclamation. He offers abbreviations of worldcontent, in Hermann Broch’s phrase, and, possibly, variations on the Old Masters: About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position . . . They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.47

The big, unspecific burial, Beerdigung, is less a burying than a coffining. It is the coffins that stand out from the crowd, the coffins and the small cross on the skyline. Richter is also an expert in coffins. One of the earliest entries in his self-selected catalogue raisonné is a photo-painting called Coffin Bearers (1962), a marvellously expressive work with more than a touch of Manet about it.48 21

on art and war and terror A Manet hangs in Richter’s studio. His dead Baader is supposed to owe something to Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864), his dead Meinhof to David’s dead Marat, his burial to Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849–50). Richter for his part rejects the idea of direct quotation, but he has half of art history in his head, as he says, and it is nothing if not eclectic: ‘Art has always been basically about agony, desperation and helplessness (I am thinking of crucifi xion narratives, from the Middle Ages to Grünewald; but also of Renaissance portraits, Mondrian, Rembrandt, Donatello and Pollock).’ Seamus Heaney has written of another painter: ‘As he makes his mark, the Rubens that he forgets he knows is as important as the river he knows he is remembering.’49 The memory banks of agony, desperation and helplessness are constantly being replenished. Buried and unburied, the body count is mounting. Richter’s coffins look like the tops of the columns of Peter Eisneman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, seen from above. That memorial was commissioned in 1999, after much agonising, and unveiled in 2005. ‘And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.’50 One painting in the cycle breathes life: a portrait of Meinhof as a young girl, full-face and wholesome, as if from an earlier age of innocence. Richter called it ‘sentimental in a bourgeois way’ and titled it, quaintly, Youth Portrait (Jugendbildnis).51 This portrait, also, is not quite what it seems. Its photographic model (most likely a publicity photograph) dates from around 1970, when the subject was thirty-six, already married and divorced, with a reputation as a writer and activist, to say nothing of twin ‘terrorist’s daughters’. One would not know it from the painting, but Ulrike Meinhof was almost Richter’s age – or would have been, had she lived. She, too, was an Easterner, and an intellectual. The artist and the terrorist met on common ground. In the photograph she looks unblemished, almost airbrushed, but resolute; her mouth is set as firm as her gaze; her eyes are wide open; she coolly meets the camera’s stare. In the painting she is younger, gentler, blurrier; the lips are softer and so is the look. A hint of vulnerability has crept in around the eyes. This intriguing ‘youth portrait’ is something akin to a ‘face’ (tronie) in the tradition Vermeer would have understood, where the artist’s goal is not portraiture as such, but a study of character and expression. The young woman lacks only a pearl earring. Dead or alive, the Baader-Meinhof paintings have never been easy to take in. They are stylistically troublesome. The October cycle inaugurates and instantiates Richter’s late work. Late style, ‘the style 22

the artist and the terrorist of old age’, is a tricky proposition. Gerhard Richter came early into lateness; but the style of old age is not always a product of years. It is the reaching of a new level of expression, a kind of ‘abstractism’.52 The result is a set of radical finalities, a densely populated ethical universe, a conscious summation. Such is the cycle. All of this makes for demanding viewing. Adorno’s analysis of the late work ‘refusing to reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled’ speaks eloquently to these paintings. Richter’s images are unreconciled. They do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.53 The paintings are not transparent; neither is his purpose. They refuse that, and so does he. They are continually reformulating the question of what attitude it would be appropriate to adopt towards them. They seem to insist that there is more to see than we can see at present, and that we are not yet equipped to see it.54 We need the right eyes, as Rilke remarked of Cézanne. Politically, they continue to disturb. In the era of a ‘global war on terror’ they have acquired a new resonance. The terrorist haunts our imagination. The suicide bomber is also one of us. Knowing no restraint, his superiority is evident, just as Conrad predicted. Suicide itself – the last act of rebellion, according to Meinhof – is an essentially contested concept. ‘The struggle goes on,’ as Ensslin said. ‘Even if they have taken the guns out of our hands, we are still left with our bodies. These we will now use as our ultimate weapon.’55 In 2003 the Pentagon re-classified hangings (attempted suicides) by detainees at Guantánamo Bay as ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’. The first attempts to succeed, in 2006, were described by the commander of the camp as ‘an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us’, and by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State as ‘a good PR move’.56 The life and death of the detainee has become one of the defining issues of the age. What is the fate of our implacable foe? What we wish for her, what we see in her, what we concede to her – Richter found the women more interesting than the men – these are some of the more pressing questions posed by the work. To all outward appearances the Baader-Meinhof group were well looked after. In Stammheim they enjoyed every comfort. They had free range within the wing and more or less free association by day; they had lawyers, with whom they were in regular contact; Baader for one had hundreds of books in his cell, as Richter’s spooky painting shows. Stammheim was not Abu Ghraib; and yet, after the images of Abu Ghraib, the images of Stammheim, blacked out and blurred, grey-within-grey, 23

on art and war and terror accumulate another layer of meaning, or memory, or involuntary association. The guiding principle of the penal colony returns with a vengeance: guilt is never to be doubted. Corporal instruction and corporal indignity feature large. Humiliation is the watchword, hopelessness the aim.57 The noose is a common appurtenance. In the annals of Baader-Meinhof this is an old story. Richter seems to have been remarkably prescient. Blacked out, indeed, applies with special force to a little known second cycle, a kind of corollary of the first, Stammheim (1995), twenty-three abstract paintings on pages torn from a book by Pieter H. Bakker Schut, Stammheim: The Case Against the RAF (1986). Stammheim has been exhibited only rarely. In this work the text is visible but for the most part illegible under the smeared and scraped paint. At Richter’s hands, by accident or design, the case against is a smear.58 Other works gather in the penumbra of the October cycle. Richter has spoken of a particular state of mind necessary to carry through the project.59 This appears to mean a combination of the meditative and the melancholic, chased by an underlying sense of emptiness – a recurrent feeling. Bringing the work to completion was emotionally exhausting. Like the terrorists themselves, the artist had to find a way out. It was provided by one of the women. He began over-painting a rejected version of Ensslin, Hanged, in white, like a shroud. ‘I started to cover it, but against my wish or intention, it worked accidentally, and so I left it that way.’ The painting was retitled Blanket.60 It does not hide everything: a vestige of the original remains. If Blanket is a chance addendum, it is surely no accident that Richter went on to paint a coda: three huge diptychs entitled (in order of composition) January, December and November, as if leading inexorably back to October.61 These moody and magnificent works, abstract paintings as powerful as any in Richter’s œuvre, seem to belong naturally (and affectively) with the cycle, though they have almost never been shown together. Richter painted the diptychs in just four months. At the end of that creative burst, he took up his camera and turned it on himself. Each day for six days he took a single self-portrait in his studio.62 The photographs are murky, multiple exposure. The space is like a cage or a cell. The artist is a creature penned in solitary confi nement. He is hunched, half-naked in the gloom; he bends, he squats, he crouches; he is a prisoner of his own studio. The works he made are at once timely and timeless, like Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20). The full title of that scabrous cycle of 24

the artist and the terrorist etchings is ‘Fatal consequences of the bloody war against Bonaparte in Spain. And other emphatic caprices.’ Richter’s cycle of paintings treats of similar consequences and caprices. In a different idiom, they are every bit as unsparing. They might have been called Disasters of War on Terror. They are also untimely, not to say scandalous. In the land of prosperity, conformity and guilt, terror is a toxic subject. Now the toxicity has spread. Any attempt at understanding the terrorist, let alone sympathising, was hazardous enough in Germany in 1988. (In this context as in others, the figure of ‘the sympathiser’ is at once politicised and compromised, as Richter well understood.63) After 9/11 it has become infinitely more perilous. 18 October 1977 was exhibited for the fi rst time, without fanfare, in Krefeld in 1989. The opening was the day of Thomas Bernhard’s funeral, as Richter duly noted. The artist had hoped to avoid any unseemly spectacle: ‘The relatives and friends of these people are still alive. I neither wanted to hurt them, nor did I want an opening with people standing around chatting and drinking wine.’64 He was to be disappointed. Drink may have been in short supply, but polemic and partisanship overflowed. The controversy was ferocious. In many quarters the cycle was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. But ‘virtuoso oil paintings on the subject of Stammheim’ were not to everyone’s taste, especially not from Gerhard Richter, an artist conspicuous by his absence on the barricades. In the battle of pig and man, Richter was widely assumed to be on the side of the pigs. Coming from him, therefore, this was too little, too blurred, and too late. ‘The quality most evident in Richter’s treatment of these still disturbing images’, one critic wrote venomously, ‘is a dark and totally staged pathos.’65 Inasmuch as a certain sympathy for the terrorists as human beings might be discerned, it was provoking and perplexing in almost equal measure. For the unreconstructed of all persuasions, this was painting as an immoral act. After Krefeld, the cycle travelled to Frankfurt, London, Rotterdam, St Louis, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles and Boston, before coming to rest in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art on a tenyear loan from the artist. Richter had indicated that he would not sell it piecemeal, nor to a private collector. He wanted it to be seen freely, and seen whole, in a museum collection. For several years its final destination remained open. It was generally assumed that 18 October 1977 belonged in Germany, just as Guernica belonged in Spain. Richter himself tended to share that assumption. The 25

on art and war and terror director of the Frankfurt museum, Jean-Christophe Amman, publicly expressed his wish to acquire it. However, no firm offer was forthcoming. Frankfurt lacked the funds, and also the means to raise them. The RAF had been active in that city; the so-called second generation were responsible for the murder of the head of the Dresdener Bank, an important patron of the museum, which withdrew its support when the cycle was accepted as a loan. Eventually in 1995 the issue was resolved with the announcement that it had been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for an undisclosed sum, reputed to be $3 million. The announcement caused widespread consternation on both sides of the Atlantic. Amman protested that transfer to the United States would render the paintings ‘ineffective’, a view with which many Europeans were only too ready to concur. Certain American commentators proceeded to give colour to their fears by criticising both the purchase and the artist for his martyrology.66 Richter for his part was prepared to think of the United States in general and MoMA in particular as a suitable environment for his work, precisely because the Atlantic crossing would serve to remove it from the febrile domestic political debate. 18 October 1977 was art, not current affairs. What mattered to Gerhard Richter was what matters to all great artists: whether the work will hold up, against the competition, sub specie aeternitatis.67 At MoMA it would find a good home and a fitting context. If it held up there, it would hold up anywhere. Richter’s condition of sale was that MoMA should respect the existing arrangement with Frankfurt, and this was readily agreed. In 2000–1, as soon as it decently could, the museum devoted a special exhibition to its prize acquisition. The response was overwhelming. The sculptor Richard Serra justified the purchase and the project: ‘I don’t think there’s an American painter alive who could tackle this subject matter and get this much feeling into it in this dispassionate way,’ he told the critic Michael Kimmelman as they studied the work. He compared the dead Baader, Man Shot Down, to late Goya, and then to late Rembrandt. ‘These paintings aren’t like late Rembrandts exactly, but they’re disturbing in a way the Rembrandts are. There’s a despair in them. And both the Richters and the Rembrandts are about people recognizing their own solitude through the paintings, which is what we respond to in them.’68 And so they dwell in the heart of the wounded city, in the very temple of modernity, in New York. They have a forensic specificity, 26

the artist and the terrorist and a boundless, borderless reach. In more ways than one, they reconnect. Four years on from the hullabaloo of the opening, Richter reflected: What counts is the world of the mind, and of art, in which we grow up. Over the decades, this remains our home and our world. We know the names of those artists and musicians and poets, philosophers and scientists; we know their work and their lives. To us, they – and not the politicians and rulers – are the history of humankind; the others are barely names to us, and the associations that they arouse, if any, are horrific ones: for rulers can make their mark only through atrocities. No greater contrast is conceivable than that between Kafka and Kaiser Wilhelm II.69

The dead do not return alone. Art returns, as Paul Celan said.

Notes 1. Notes, 17 March 1986, in Gerhard Richter, trans. David Britt, The Daily Practice of Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), p. 125. 2. ‘Der Dichter Franz Kafka’ [1921], quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’ [1934], trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, vol. II, part 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 798. Kafka lived from 1883 to 1924. 3. The works may be viewed on: www.baader-meinhof.com. They are sumptuously reproduced in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: MoMA, 2000), and Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: MoMA, 2002); and less sumptuously but more accessibly in idem, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: MoMA, 2003). 4. Stefan Aust, trans. Anthea Bell, The Baader-Meinhof Group [1985] (London: Bodley Head, 2008), pp. 262–3. The deathbed image is reproduced, from Richter’s notebook, in October 18, p. 96. 5. This was Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who has kept her silence. Another case is pending: Christian Klar, who has shown some remorse. Reintegration is also difficult, as Astrid Proll testifies. The Independent, 18 February 2007. Proll was once Baader’s getaway driver; she served a fouryear sentence. She has since worked as a picture editor at the The Independent in London and as a photography lecturer in Berlin. 6. Bettina Röhl blog, quoted in The Guardian, 25 September 2008. Cf. Neal Ascherson, ‘A terror campaign of love and hate’, Observer, 28 September 2008. 7. Benjamin Buchloh, ‘A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977’, October 48 (1989), p. 100. 27

on art and war and terror 8. Notes for a press conference [on the cycle], November–December 1988, Daily Practice, p. 173. 9. For a potted biography of the early life see Doubt and Belief, pp. 32–63; for a full-scale retrospective, Forty Years; for the authorised version, Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler (Köln: DuMont, 2002). 10. Thomas Bernhard, trans. David McLintock, Gathering Evidence (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 90 (his emphases). Bernhard’s autobiography fi rst appeared in German in five separate volumes over the period 1975–82. When 18 October 1977 was fi rst exhibited Richter was tickled to discover one aficionado who saw in the paintings the world of Thomas Bernhard. Interview with Michael Shapiro, 11 June 1991, unpublished transcript, St Louis Art Museum. I am grateful to Valerie Rudy-Valli for access to the curatorial files on its Richters, and for a copy of the interview transcript. Cf. Geoff Dyer, ‘Reflections on Sebald, Bombs and Bernhard’, Pretext 9 (2004), pp. 91–7. 11. See Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning’, October 75 (1996), p. 75. Acknowledged by the artist in Michael Kimmelman, ‘Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms’, The New York Times Magazine, 27 January 2002. 12. This is the burden of the ‘family drama’ by Jürgen Schreiber, Ein Maler aus Deutschland (München: Pendo, 2005). 13. See Stefan Gronert, Gerhard Richter: Portraits (Ostfi ldern: Cantz, 2006), no. 40, Uncle Rudi and no. 61, Aunt Marianne (both 1965), both celebrated paintings, Aunt Marianne especially so after it was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for £2.1 million in 2006. That painting (which is also a self-portrait, aged four months) has returned in a way to its origins: it is now on long-term loan to Dresden. A companion work from the same year, Horst and His Dog, not included in the collected portraits, appeared in the mammoth MoMA retrospective, Forty Years, p. 122. Cf. Paul B. Jaskot, ‘Gerhard Richter and Adolf Eichmann’, Oxford Art Journal, 28 (2005), pp. 457–78. 14. See Jeanne Anne Nugent, ‘Overcoming Ideology: Gerhard Richter in Dresden, the early years’, in From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), pp. 79–94. 15. This is the conclusion of Aust, Baader-Meinhof, the most exhaustive and persuasive account thus far. Richter relied heavily on it in his own preparatory research. 16. Notes, 7 December 1988, Daily Practice, p. 175. By this reckoning there appear to be a total of nineteen. Evidently there was some culling or over-painting. According to Richter, an early version of Baader, shot, ‘went wrong’ and had to be destroyed. At least one over-painted canvas remains as a pendant to the cycle: see below. Cf. Doubt and Belief, pp. 236 and 270, n. 3. 28

the artist and the terrorist 17. Gerhard Storck, ‘Untitled (Mixed Feelings)’, in Gerhard Richter: 18 Oktober 1977 (Montreal: Museum of Fine Arts, 1990), p. 7. 18. Conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, p. 183. 19. Gerhard Richter, Atlas (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), nos 16–20, ‘Photos from Books’ (1967) and 635–46, ‘Holocaust’ (1997). 20. His ideas for the design can be traced in the Atlas, nos 648–55, ‘Reichstag’ (1997–8). It became a giant abstract of the German flag. 21. On the paintable and the unpaintable, see the interview with Robert Storr, Doubt and Belief, pp. 164–5; and the conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, pp. 183–4. 22. Notes for a press conference, Daily Practice, p. 174. Such protestations recur throughout. 23. Notes, 1 October 1989; interview with Buchloh (1986), Daily Practice, pp. 177, 158. The abstract expressionist Newman was an anarchist, a real one, as Richter would have known. See ‘The True Revolution is Anarchist!’, his foreword to Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1968) in his Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley, CA University of California Press, 1992), pp. 44–52. Richter himself is popularly supposed to be, if not on the right, then certainly not on the left. In his case, perhaps, the conventional polarities are not very illuminating. 24. Gerhard Richter, War Cut (Köln: König, 2004). Cf. Atlas, nos 697– 736, ‘Layout for the Book War Cut’ (2004). The original work was Abstract Painting 648–2 (1987). Walter Benjamin conceived of hints or ‘blinks’ – ‘thought fragments’ as Hannah Arendt says – for The Arcades Project. 25. Atlas, no. 744, ‘Stripes and WTC’ (2006). The original clipping was pinned up on the wall behind his desk for several years before it found its way into the Atlas. 26. Cf. Siri Hustvedt, ‘Gerhard Richter: Why Paint?’, in Mysteries of the Rectangle (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), p. 158; interview with Marian Goodman, 6 September 2006. Richter himself speaks the language of capacity, inanity and hope. 27. Conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, p. 183. 28. See, for example, Gordon Craig, ‘The War of the German Historians’, New York Review of Books, 15 January 1987; Geoff Eley, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past’, Past and Present 121 (1988), pp. 171–208; and in slightly longer perspective Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 29. Interview with Buchloh (1986); notes, 12 March 1988, Daily Practice, pp. 148, 173. Richter reads widely in philosophy and literature. 30. Quoted in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, p. 44. 31. Conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, pp. 185–6. The formulation about the state and the terrorist echoes a famous passage in 29

on art and war and terror

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

Conrad: ‘The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality – counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game – so do you propagandists.’ The Secret Agent [1907] (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2004), p. 52. ‘A note on Richter’s photographic models for October 18, 1977’, in October 18, p. 149. They are reproduced in that work, from the artist’s notebooks or from the original magazine features. Many of them also appear among the images collected by Astrid Proll, Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run (Zürich: Scalo, 1998). To add a further layer of replication, 100 ‘Baader-Meinhof Photographs’ in the Atlas (nos 470–9) are, strictly speaking, photographs of reproductions, many of them so blurred as to be almost illegible. Mysteriously, they are dated 1989, that is, after the paintings. Conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, p. 190; Sarah Kent, ‘Richter Scale’, Time Out, 30 August–6 September 1989. Notes, 1 October 1989, Daily Practice, p. 178. The delphic remarks on ‘personal circumstances’ are difficult to interpret. Not long after this, Richter’s relationship with Isa Genzken came to an end, and he embarked on a new relationship with Sabine Moritz. The relationship with Genzken (a fellow artist who once made a work called Master Gerhard) was by all accounts a tempestuous one. Was their leave-taking already in train? Another interpretation of personal circumstances is offered below. Conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, p. 186. Cf. interview with Schütz (1990), Daily Practice, p. 209. Richter would have been familiar with the ubiquitous wanted poster for the Baader-Meinhof gang, headlined ‘Anarchist Violent Criminals’, reproduced in Doubt and Belief, p. 186. Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida [1980] (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 9. Death as criterion is Jürgen Harten’s suggestion. ‘The Romantic Intent for Abstraction’, Gerhard Richter (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1986), p. 21. Marlene Dumas, Stern (2004), at www.frithstreetgallery.com/dumas_ secondcoming.html Don DeLillo, ‘Baader-Meinhof’, New Yorker, 1 April 2002. See, for example, Louise Lawlor, Nude (2002–3), a study of Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966), itself an allusion to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). This is ‘appropriation art’. Third Notebook, 18 October 1917, in Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991), p. 13. Kent, ‘Richter Scale’. Storck, ‘Untitled’, p. 10. 30

the artist and the terrorist 44. ‘Agony, desperation and helplessness cannot be represented except aesthetically, because their source is the wounding of beauty (Perfection).’ Notes, 27 January 1983, Daily Practice, p. 102. Cf. Hustvedt, ‘Gerhard Richter’, p. 158. 45. Conversation with Prikker, Daily Practice, pp. 203–4. 46. Michael Fried’s phrase, in Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 118, apropos Burial at Ornans (1849–50). 47. W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ [1938], in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1991), p. 179. 48. Coffin Bearers is currently no. 5 in the catalogue raisonné. It is reproduced in Forty Years, p. 109. The photographic model is in the Atlas, no. 9, ‘Newspaper and Album Photos’ (1962–8). 49. Notes, 27 January 1983, Daily Practice, p. 102; Seamus Heaney, ‘Green Man’, Modern Painters 3 (2000), p. 70. For his rejection of quotation, and history painting, see the interviews with Prikker and Jonas Storsve, Daily Practice, pp. 199 and 227. ‘I’m not really very interested in history painting’, he says to Storsve, ‘and I don’t know much about it.’ These claims should be treated with caution. Cf. David Green, ‘From History Painting to the History of Painting and Back Again: Reflections on the work of Gerhard Richter’, in David Green and Peter Seddon (eds), History Painting Reassessed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 31–49. 50. W. G. Sebald, trans. Michael Hulse, The Emigrants [1993] (London: Harvill, 1997), p. 23. 51. I am grateful to Adelheid Scholten for discussion of the title. Robert Storr offers another reading of this painting in Doubt and Belief, p. 244. 52. See Hermann Broch’s magisterial essay, ‘The Style of the Mythical Age’ [1947], in Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (New York: New York Review, 2005), pp. 103–21. 53. This is Adorno’s formulation. See Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, ‘Late Style in Beethoven’ [1937] and ‘Alienated Masterpiece’ [1959], in Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 564–7 and 569–82. These meditations are the starting point for Edward Said’s posthumously published reflections, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). 54. These propositions borrow from Stefan Germer, ‘Unbidden Memories’, in 18 Oktober, pp. 4–6; and Gregg M. Horowitz, ‘The Tomb of Art and the Organon of Life: What Gerhard Richter Saw’, in Sustaining Loss (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 133–69. 55. Meinhof quoted in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, p. 347; Ensslin quoted in Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children [1977] (London: Pickwick, 1989), p. 264. 56. The New York Times, 11 June 2006; The Guardian, 12 June 2006. 31

on art and war and terror 57. See Alex Danchev, ‘“Like a Dog!” Humiliation and Shame in the War on Terror’, Alternatives 31 (2006), pp. 259–83. 58. Gerhard Richter, Stammheim (London: Anthony d’Offay, 1995), a limited edition in facsimile, the paintings reproduced actual size. One page is illustrated in colour in October 18, p. 140. The over-painted book is Stammheim: Der Prozeß gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion (Kiel: Neuer Malik, 1986). 59. These insights into Richter’s emotional or psychological state derive in particular from two lengthy interviews he gave to Michael Shapiro on 11 June and 19 November 1991. They may offer an alternative explanation of his ‘personal circumstances’. Cf. Michael Shapiro, ‘I ask myself, what does it mean?’, St Louis Museum of Art Bulletin 2 (1992), pp. 8–28. 60. Blanket (1988), reproduced in Forty Years, p. 224. 61. January, December, November (1989), reproduced in Forty Years, pp. 226–31. 62. Six Photos, 2–7 May 1989 (1991), reproduced in Portraits, no. 73. 63. See Doubt and Belief, p. 141. For Richter’s expression of ‘a certain sympathy for these people’, see, for example, his interview with Schütz, Daily Practice, p. 208. 64. Gregorio Magnani, ‘Gerhard Richter: for me it is absolutely necessary that the Baader-Meinhof is a subject for art’, Flash Art 146 (1989), p. 97. 65. Die Tageszeitung, 18 March 1989; Sophie Schwartz, ‘Gerhard Richter: Galerie Haus Esters, Krefeld’, Contemporanea 3 (1989), p. 99. 66. On the theme of martyr-portraits and the past, cf. Lisa Saltzman, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Stations of the Cross’, Oxford Art Journal 28 (2005), pp. 25–44. 67. See Daily Practice, pp. 195, 203; Doubt and Belief, pp. 203–4, 264–5. 68. Michael Kimmelman, Portraits (New York: Modern Library, 1998), pp. 61–2. 69. Notes, 30 December 1992, Daily Practice, p. 251.

32

2

The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility

When I open my wallet to show my papers pay money or check the time of a train I look at your face. ... The flower in the heart’s wallet, the force of what lives us outliving the mountain. And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. John Berger1

War photography is the new war poetry. ‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’2 The passing-bells are plangent still. They are rung now by the photojournalist. Don McCullin is Wilfred Owen incarnate – Owen, who carried photographs of the dead in his wallet – the foot soldier photographer, the combat veteran who had his own demons to deal with, the haunted witness, attending the roll-call in his darkroom. ‘It was like All Quiet on the Western Front. Men marching through the mist. Men I’d seen killed came up out of the mist of war to join me.’3 The photograph is a prophesy in reverse, as Roland Barthes divined.4 Men-at-arms are shot and shot again, shot in black-and-white. The classic war photographs (photographs of the classic wars) are all in black-and-white. The dead and the wounded bleed black blood; the young bleed into the old; the poison bleeds out, eventually.5 In the meantime the bodies pile up. Contortionists, they practise composition. We goggle at them and try not to look. You know how it is, you want to look and you don’t want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a kid looking at war 33

on art and war and terror photographs in Life, the ones that showed dead people or a lot of dead people lying close together in a field or a street, often touching, seeming to hold each other. Even when the picture was sharp and clearly defi ned, something wasn’t clear at all, something repressed that monitored the images and withheld their essential information. It may have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn’t have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at fi rst porn, all the porn in the world. I could have looked until my lamps went out and I still wouldn’t have accepted the connection between a detached leg and the rest of a body, or the poses and positions that always happened (one day I’d hear it called ‘response-to-impact’), bodies wrenched too fast and violently into unbelievable contortion. Or the total impersonality of group death, making them lie anywhere and anyway it left them, hanging over barbed wire or thrown promiscuously on top of other dead, or up into the trees like terminal acrobats, Look what I can do.6

Like André Kertész, the great master of composition (and no mean war photographer), Don McCullin is partially colour-blind.7 He and his confrères conjure with shadows. The darkroom is a memory place and a site of judgement. In the darkroom it is all day shades of grey.8 The visual lexicon of war is as well-learned, and as searing, as the verbal one. The strategy is the original shock and awe, with an active conscience. Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address spoke of ‘the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every heart and hearthstone . . . when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature’. The concerned photographer bids to be a better angel. Exemplary practitioners like Philip Jones Griffiths, James Nachtwey, Simon Norfolk and Gilles Peress are documentarists who refuse to be confined by that designation. If art is anamnesis, they are artists too. They have a point of view: they are against forgetting. ‘A photograph is not an opinion,’ Susan Sontag concluded. ‘Or is it?’ It may be a mission. These photographers are moralists at heart. Ethically, they raise the game. The classic war photographers have all been portrait photographers in extremis. They sought the whites of the eyes, and tried to fathom what they found there. The original war poets did something very similar. Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother of the ‘very strange look’ he had seen on the faces of soldiers at Étaples in 1917: an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England . . . It was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, without expression, like a dead rabbit’s. It will never be 34

the face

Figure 4 Don McCullin, Shell-shocked US Marine, Huy, Vietnam, 1968.

painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.9

There have been many attempts to describe that look. Richard Wollheim served in the sequel to Owen’s war. He remembered young officers he had trained with and then lost sight of, who reappeared in France or Germany, suddenly materializing in a sun-drenched field that stank of dead cows or in a small mud-filled copse where all the branches had been broken by shellfi re. By the time I saw them, they had already survived their fi rst patrol, or their fi rst battle. They had a look of greyness around the eyes. They had received, and passed on, orders to kill, and it would never be the same.

John Le Carré, wise in the ways of the world, logged ‘that peculiar loneliness that comes from knowing and seeing a lot that you can’t do much about’.10 The look is the look of those who have seen too much. What have they seen? They cannot say. The problem of the communicability or incommunicability of suffering is nested in atrocity of all sorts, and irreducibly in war. ‘Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the 35

on art and war and terror battlefield had grown silent – not richer but poorer in communicable experience?’11 Walter Benjamin’s observation of the First World War could apply to any war. The photographer is normally said to take a portrait. Portraits from the battlefield are not so much taken as frozen, as if wrung from the very soul of the subject. The look was seized, not by an actor, but by the camera. Once it had been captured on film – once it had been exposed – it could be seen, that is to say, apprehended, as if for the fi rst time. ‘Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual reality’, Janet Malcolm has observed, ‘but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act.’12 Such is the revelatory property of photography. It has been well encapsulated by John Szarkowski in a reflection on the influential American photographer Gary Winogrand, whose speciality is not the battle but the banal. Winogrand, says Szarkowski, ‘discovered that the best of his pictures were not illustrations of what he had known, but were new knowledge’.13 So it is with the battlefield portraits. They are not merely illustrations of what was already known. They are new knowledge. What do they disclose? More than their mute subjects. ‘The living do not give up their secrets with the candour of the dead.’14 These portraits lay claim to being the most immediate communication of incommunicable experience that we have. They are nameless and numberless; they are also naked, or denuded. Sartre speaks of the nudity of the face on film.15 These men are all face. Their eyes all have the same look. David Douglas Duncan, whose coverage of the Korean War for Life magazine was acclaimed by Edward Steichen as ‘the highest tide that combat photography has achieved’, calls it the Thousand Yard Stare.16 Perhaps in the end that is the most evocative description. David Douglas Duncan’s formula is at the same time homely and profound. It is set out in his memoirs like a creed: Be close – Be fast – Be lucky Easy Always remember Be humane Never close-ups of the dead War is in the eyes17

The eyes make the face. The face is the face of battle. The look is the look of the unsurpassable. ‘When I go from hence’, wrote Tagore, ‘let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is 36

the face

Figure 5 Goya, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (c. 1812).

unsurpassable.’18 The unsurpassable eludes definition. Whether or not it will ever be painted, the look (or rather the condition) has been classified, variously, as shell shock, battle fatigue, war neurosis and post-traumatic stress disorder; and it does have a certain artistic pedigree. Around 1812, the world’s greatest war artist made a small portrait of the Duke of Wellington, in red chalk over graphite.19 Arthur Wellesley’s war was not quite that of the common-or-garden grunt, but the artist caught something soldier-like in his expression, something to do with the monotony and melancholy of war, and the humanity and vulnerability of the warrior: the servitude and grandeur of arms.20 Le grand diable de milord anglais is harrowed. The skin is drawn, the mouth is weak, the eyes are wide and dead. They are fi xed, oblivious, on the far distance. His Grace has the Thousand Yard Stare. The artist was Goya, who knew more than enough of men and war. The mottos of his Disasters of War (1810–20) are legendary: ‘One cannot look at this.’ ‘I saw it.’ ‘This is the truth.’ Every war photographer has Goya on his shoulder.21 Don McCullin made these mottos his own. In his autobiography he recalls coming on a father and two sons lying in a pool of their own blood in a stone house in Cyprus during the conflict of the 1960s. He is riveted by the scene, 37

on art and war and terror as much for the tableau as the tragedy. McCullin is an ethical professional. Still riveted when the rest of the family return, he is suddenly conscious of trespassing with his camera. But the survivors are content for him to do what he has to do. When I realised I had been given the go-ahead to photograph, I started composing my pictures in a very serious and dignified way. It was the fi rst time that I had pictured something of this immense significance and I felt as if I had a canvas in front of me and I was, stroke by stroke, applying the composition to a story I was telling myself. I was, I realized later, trying to photograph in a way that Goya painted or did his war sketches. 22

The faces may not look at us directly, but they address us unmistakably. The address is at once stoic and urgent. Eduardo Galeano has written of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of famine in the Sahel – another battlefield in another war – These photos watch you. These people fi x their gaze on you. They seem more dead than alive, exotic phantoms flowering in a desert of thorns that isn’t of this world or of this time. But they look at you and silently they address you. My world is your world too, they say; my time is also your time. 23

The shell-shocked and the starving have something to tell us, after all. They communicate through the photographs. (The photographer is a medium, James Nachtwey has said, through which images are channelled.24) The first thing they register is: we are here. ‘They are and suffer’, wrote Auden, ‘that is all they do.’25 But that is not all they do. Their very presence attests to their ordeal. Every photograph is a certificate of presence, as Barthes pointed out. If the face is a mask of fatalism, there is also a submerged strength, a quotidian determination. Indomitability overrules passivity. Neither shell-shock nor starvation extinguishes human dignity. The faces in the photographs endure. What is more, they instruct. They tell us about themselves, and they tell us about us – who we are, and who we may become; what we are, and what we are capable of. In the hands of a McCullin or a Salgado, the camera pricks the conscience. Photographs may be documents, photographs may be indictments. ‘To bring human pain into depiction was a mighty deed,’ remarked John Updike of Disasters of War.26 Goya’s inheritors perform a similar feat. Their photographs are a shocking reminder of the human beings stacked up in the meat markets and the mortuaries, in the body counts and 38

the face the news bulletins. This is the signature of the master photographer: ‘It allows his subjects to be themselves and more than themselves at once.’27 In other words, these faces help us to recognise others, and, in the process, ourselves. Photographs may also be instruments of the imagination, tools for morals. Here is an answer to Susan Sontag’s final question about photography, on which she brooded for so long: ‘A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all “human”.) But what are we to do with this knowledge – if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?’ What are we to do? We are to work out, like body-builders, muscling the moral imagination; we are to build the best selves for ourselves that we can.28 The look is blank, then, but also revealing. The face tells true. Telling, however, is not the only work it is doing. It is also asking. The face asks something – demands something – something more than pity. For the survivors of the unsurpassable, pity will not suffice. The pre-eminent philosopher of the face-as-demand is Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, ‘the face is a fundamental event’. As that oracular announcement might suggest, what Levinas calls ‘the face’ is not to be understood literally, or even metaphorically, but poetically. Strictly speaking, it is a rhetorical figure. Thus, in one characteristic formulation, ‘the face is a hand in search of recompense, an open hand. That is, it needs something. It is going to ask you for something.’29 It has been suggested that the face in Salgado’s photographs, for example, raises the unspoken questions: ‘How can this be?’ or more transgressively, ‘Are we allowed to view what is being exposed?’30 Levinas insists on going further. For him, the face is a demand – a demand, not a question – which calls for an ethical response. From these premises he develops a number of suggestive ideas. In considering the face, he weighs its resources. ‘There are these two strange things in the face: its extreme frailty – the fact of being without means – and, on the other hand, there is authority. It is as if God spoke through the face.’ At the same time he weighs our response. ‘I think that the beginning of language is in the face. In a certain way, in its silence, it calls you. Your reaction to the face is a response. Not just a response, but a responsibility.’31 We are hostage to the other, Levinas liked to say, in his figurative fashion: ‘The tie with the other is knotted only as responsibility. To say “Here I am”.’32 39

on art and war and terror These brilliant excogitations leave open a crucial question. Throughout a long philosophical lifetime, Levinas was often pressed to explain precisely what he meant by the face, in his rather abstruse usage. He would demur, he would discourse, he would divagate; but he provided no defi nitive answer.33 Towards the end, however, he furnished an illustration of extraordinary imaginative power, a vignette that made a deep impression on him, and became almost a key to his thought. The illustration came from a monumental novel, Life and Fate, a kind of Second World War and Peace, by Vasily Grossman (1905-64). In Levinas’s recounting: In Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate the story is of families, wives, and parents of political detainees travelling to the Lubyanka in Moscow for the latest news. A line is formed at the counter, a line where one can see only the backs of others. A woman awaits her turn: ‘[She] had never thought that the human back could be so expressive, and could convey states of mind in such a penetrating way. Persons approaching the counter had a particular way of craning their neck and their back, their raised shoulders with shoulder blades tense like springs, which seemed to cry, sob, and scream.’34

‘The face, then, is not the colour of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the ruddiness of the cheek.’ The face may be a face – a human face – but it may also be another part of the body, perhaps even a body part. In Life and Fate, as Levinas saw it, the face is the back, or the nape of the neck. ‘Grossman isn’t saying that the nape is the face,’ he explained in one interview, ‘but that all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from it.’ In his own work Levinas underlined the moral of the story: ‘The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other.’35 Following this example, it becomes possible to see the face as Levinas saw it in a variety of war photographs not usually treated as portraits from the battlefield or, indeed, as photographs of war. Don McCullin himself saw the back, à la Grossman, as US Marines, hunched under fire, haul a wounded comrade to safety, in the battle for Hue, in Vietnam. He also saw the feet, or rather the boots, of bodies heaped in a British Army Land Rover in Cyprus, the boots all at rakish angles, clustered together as if for a group photograph – the naked and disarmed mortality plain on the soles of the feet. These are action photographs, to be sure, but also thinking, feeling photographs. ‘Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it 40

the face

Figure 6 Don McCullin, The back, according to Don McCullin. US Marines dragging a wounded comrade to safety, The Citadel, Hue, 1968.

frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.’36 The contemporary practitioners with the most Levinasian vision are Simon Norfolk and Gilles Peress. Norfolk now identifies himself as a landscape photographer, a tradition going back to Roger Fenton in the Crimea. Each in his own way conducts a kind of autopsy. Peress traces the bones, the most reliable witnesses to atrocity.37 Norfolk fi xes the scars, using an old-fashioned wood and brass field camera of the kind familiar to war photographers of the nineteenth century, with tripod, magnifying glass to focus and blanket over the head. Stupendous images form slowly on outsize negative plates. They contain few people but many remains. Simon Norfolk is the portraitist of the disappeared. He follows the wars, and the massacres, inspecting the ground and the guilty secrets sown there.38 At fi rst sight, some of his scenes look almost arcadian. (Simon Norfolk has Claude Lorrain on his shoulder.) Others pit beauty against incongruity. In these depopulated landscapes, the face abounds. There is the face of the skeleton on the white sheet over grave number 327, Abu Ghraib Cemetery, Iraq. These are the remains of Shalal Moussa Al-Zubeidi, from Amarra, jailed in June 1993 for Islamic political 41

on art and war and terror

Figure 7 Simon Norfolk, Bratunac Stadium, Bosnia, 2005.

activity. Al-Zubeidi was killed a few months later; his body was buried in a secret part of the cemetery in a numbered grave. Ten years on, his relatives came to dig up the bones and move them to the family plot in Najaf. Then there is the face in the empty noose hanging from a tree at Rishkar Camp, Afghanistan, an Al Qaeda ‘facility’, in the terminology of the war on terror. The noose was used for punishment beatings; it is supposedly the one from which the Taliban hanged the US-sponsored opposition leader, Abdul Haq. And there is the face in the gibbet-like basketball hoop in Bratunac Stadium, Bosnia, where Médecins sans Frontières once saw 700 prisoners, and a UNHCR team in a nearby hotel reported hearing gunshots all night from the direction of the stadium.39 These haunting images, ‘chronotopia’ as the photographer calls them, are meditations on the ethics of response and responsibility.40 They are Simon Norfolk’s way of saying ‘Here I am.’ Life and Fate was for Levinas much more than an illustration. It was both a confirmation and a revelation, for the nature of its individual encounters, and above all for the message at its moral centre 42

the face – its ethics. The life and fate of the book was a tormented one.41 After working on it for the better part of ten years, Grossman submitted the manuscript to the Soviet authorities in 1960, against the advice of his closest friends. What he had written was in many ways heretical, but this was at the height of the Krushchev ‘thaw’ and he clearly believed that the novel was publishable. Grossman had few illusions about the Communist system, but in this he was sadly mistaken. The book itself was arrested, as the author said; the KGB raided his apartment and confiscated not only the manuscript but also the carbon paper and the typewriter ribbons. No other work, except for The Gulag Archipelago, was ever considered so dangerous. Undaunted, Grossman continued to petition for his work to be published: ‘There is no sense or truth in my present position’, he wrote to Krushchev, ‘in my physical freedom while the book to which I dedicated my life is in prison. For I wrote it, and I have not repudiated it and am not repudiating it . . . I ask for freedom for my book.’42 He received no reply. In the fullness of time he was summoned to an audience with the chief ideologue of the Central Committee, the notorious Mikhail Suslov, who coolly informed him that the book could not be published for another 200 years. For Grossman, this was devastating (regardless of the implicit endorsement of the novel’s significance). ‘They strangled me in a dark corner,’ he said. He was, however, not completely bereft. He had taken the precaution of making two clandestine copies of the manuscript, but they had disappeared. At length one of them was found and microfilmed, with the help of the most eminent microfilmers in all Russia, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, and smuggled out to the West by the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich. It was eventually published, in French, in Switzerland in 1980, then in English in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1985, and finally in Russian, in the last days of the USSR, in 1988 – too late for Vasily Grossman. While this history of suppression and persecution may have boosted its reputation among the cognoscenti, Life and Fate remains an under-recognised masterpiece, and Grossman an underestimated author. Thanks largely to the historian Antony Beevor, his remarkable achievement as a war correspondent and witness of ‘the wolfhound century’ has latterly gained or regained some currency.43 That phrase was a favourite of his, borrowed from Osip Mandelstam, and highly appropriate: The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders, But I am no wolf by blood. 43

on art and war and terror ‘But this time was his own time’, Grossman added autobiographically: ‘he lived in it and would be bound to it even after his death.’44 As a correspondent in uniform for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, he lived more of the war of annihilation on the Eastern Front than most. He witnessed the battle of Stalingrad – not so much a battle as an epic siege-offensive – and then joined the first Red Army units to liberate the Ukraine, his homeland, in 1943. He heard about Babi Yar, outside Kiev, where 100,000 Jews were slaughtered by an SS Special Commando and two police battalions, conveniently stationed on the lip of a ravine, in September 1941. In Berdichev, his birthplace, he learned the gruesome details of the death of his mother and other relatives, in a mass execution at around the same time; he learned, too, that their Ukrainian neighbours had collaborated with a will in the round-up. Twenty years later, after his own death, an envelope was found among his papers. In it were two letters he had written to his dead mother, in 1950 and 1961, together with two photographs. One photograph was truly the flower in the heart’s wallet: it shows him with his mother when he was still a child. The other photograph is from another man’s wallet. Taken by Grossman from a dead SS officer, it shows hundreds of dead women and girls, naked, in a large pit. Grossman’s mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, perished in a pit. ‘I have tried, dozens, or maybe hundreds of times, to imagine how you died, how you walked to meet your death,’ he wrote to her in the earlier letter. ‘I tried to imagine the person who killed you. He was the last person to see you.’45 What he tried to imagine was her face – her look. To his everlasting sorrow, he failed. We who come after him strain to catch it in her passport photograph.46 She is small, it seems, dwarfed by the number plate over her head, like a convict or a detainee. She is slightly blurred and a little off-centre, as if not long for this frame but overdue for another – a painting by Gerhard Richter, perhaps. Her head is heavy; the face is worn; the eyes are black and dull. Passport holder 35116 has seen enough already. Grossman was a moralist in Red Army clothing. He knew ‘the usual smell of the front line – a cross between a morgue and a blacksmith’s’. In a deathly Stalingrad he noted nature like a poet in the trenches: ‘Sunset over a square. A terrifying and strange beauty: the light pink sky is looking through thousands and thousands of empty windows and roofs. A huge poster painted in vulgar colours: “The radiant way”.’47 His mouthpiece in Life and Fate is IkonnikovMorzh, a former Tolstoyan, who witnessed the massacre at Berdichev 44

the face (unnamed in the novel) and now finds himself in a German concentration camp, together with other Russian soldiers and commissars, and a stray Italian priest. Ikonnikov, ‘a strange man who could have been any age at all’, is at the same time an oddity and a recognisable character. He slept in the worst place in the whole hut: by the main door, where there was a freezing draught and where the huge latrine-pail or parasha had once stood. The other Russians referred to him as ‘the old parachutist’. They looked on him as a holy fool and treated him with a mixture of disgust and pity. He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons. He never once caught a cold, even though he would go to bed without taking off his rain-soaked clothes. And surely only the voice of a madman could be so clear and ringing.48

It is the holy fool who voices the ethics of Life and Fate. The Russian prisoners are set to do some hard labour in the marshland not far from the camp. It is construction work; and soon enough it becomes clear that what they are constructing is a gas chamber. For Ikonnikov this realisation triggers a crisis of conscience posed as an agonising dilemma – to carry on working, and helping, or to refuse, and condemn himself to death? One day, in his torment, he reaches out and grasps the bare foot of the priest, sitting on the second tier of bunks in their hut, and in scrambled French, German and Italian asks this anguished question: ‘Que dois-je fais, mio padre? Nous travaillons dans una Vernichtungslager.’ [‘What am I to do, father? We are working in an extermination camp.’]49 The question hangs in the air of the twentieth century. Fifty years before, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz had given his answer: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ That answer in its chilling simplicity tickles the ear of any exterminator. ‘All of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,’ as Conrad took care to remind us.50 All of Europe contributes to Ikonnikov’s life and death and utterance, and to his salvation. For he is resolute, it turns out, despite his anguish. He has seen what the century has to offer. He has seen the great hunger. He has seen the purges and the terror. He has seen the killing squads. He has seen the face in the pit. He has poured the concrete for the gas chamber. His spirit has rebelled. ‘It’s wrong to make out that only the people in power are guilty’, he tells the assembled company in the hut, ‘and that you yourself are only an innocent slave. I’m helping to build an extermination camp; I’m responsible before the people who 45

on art and war and terror are to be gassed. But I’m free. I can say “No!” What power can stop me if I have the strength not to be afraid of extinction? I will say “No!” Je dirai non, mio padre, je dirai non!’51 Ikonnikov is taken away for interrogation, never to return, but his eloquence is not stilled by his disappearance. Like Kurtz, he leaves a kind of testament. In keeping with Conrad’s voracious irony, Kurtz has been writing a report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, ‘for its future guidance’. 52 Ikonnikov has been writing for himself, and possibly for his bunkmate and ideological foil Mostovskoy, an Old Bolshevik, for his edification, and ours. ‘Ikonnikov’s scribblings’ are reproduced in full in the novel, where they take up nearly a whole chapter. 53 In them beats the ethical heart of the work. Ikonnikov does not believe in Good. He believes in human kindness. Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding a Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner, not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good . . . Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, fi lling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.

The holy fool has lost his faith. Or rather he has lost one faith and found another. For Ikonnikov the battle of good and evil is a delusion, and God is of no avail. There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.

He clings instead to what is human in human beings, to the human qualities that persist ‘even on the edge of the grave, even at the door of the gas chamber’. 46

the face My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.

The ethic adumbrated here, and embodied in Life and Fate, has a long reach. It had a tremendous impact on Emmanuel Levinas, and on another influential inquirer into the human potential for moral life in our time, Tzvetan Todorov. Todorov has become the leading exponent of Grossman’s ideas and importance in the age of the gulag and the Vernichtungslager.54 If there is lyric poetry after Auschwitz, there is also senseless kindness. Grossman felt a duty to speak on behalf of the dead, ‘on behalf of those who lie in the earth’, as he put it. There are few who have discharged that onerous task with such a powerful combination of gravity and veracity. Primo Levi (a fellow chemist) is one, perhaps, if in fact he would have accepted that speaking for the dead was where his duty lay. The life and fate of his first book, If This Is a Man, was not entirely dissimilar to Grossman’s. When Levi took it to the prestigious Italian publisher Einaudi in 1946 it was rejected out of hand by the publisher’s reader (Natalia Ginzburg, herself a member of a prominent Jewish family from Turin, near-neighbours of the author). The book emerged inconspicuously, from a small press, the following year. Few copies were printed; many of them were remaindered. Many more were lost in a great flood. Einaudi recanted, eventually, in 1958. An English translation appeared in 1960, the US edition entitled Survival in Auschwitz, which captures the subject but misses the point, as Tony Judt has remarked. Sales were meagre. Apparently Levi’s brand of testimony was not to the public taste. In fact, Primo Levi did not become Primo Levi until the success of The Periodic Table (fi rst published in English in 1984) some twenty years later. Even then the translation was in every sense incomplete. Only after his death in 1987 did he begin to gain recognition in France. There and elsewhere, full realisation of the importance of his fi rst book had to await the appearance of his last, The Drowned and the Saved (fi rst published in English in 1988). When asked about the rejection of If This Is a Man, Levi ascribed it laconically to ‘an inattentive reader’. 47

on art and war and terror He would surely have appreciated the irony that The Drowned and the Saved would be published posthumously. Primo Levi was a survivor. His guilt was greater. If Grossman was strangled, Levi was drowned, slowly, over many years. Survival is a life sentence. His own reflection is definitive: I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.55

‘Those who saw the Gorgon’: is this the look, at its most abject? Levi is referring to the so-called Muselmänner (‘Muslims’), the nonmen, ‘who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.’ They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen. 56

On the face of the Muselmann the ‘Thousand Yard Stare’ has turned to stone. The ethics to be extracted from Primo Levi’s writing have some affinity with the ethics of Life and Fate. They have been appositely labelled ‘ordinary virtues’.57 Their ordinariness consists in such unheroic acts as caring, and, indeed, looking: seeing and being seen, recognising and being recognised, the fundamental demand articulated in the title of Levi’s book, If This Is a Man. Ordinariness is a good match for senselessness, one might say, and ordinary virtues consort well with senseless kindness. In both cases they begin at home; they are essentially individual, private, and small-scale – petty, thoughtless and unwitnessed, in Ikonnikov’s idiom. Ethically, Levi and Grossman are in the same key.58 Artistically, there is a certain dissonance. The literary quality of Levi’s writing 48

the face is concealed in a scientist’s report. The tone is cool. The distinction of his work lies in its precision and concision, to borrow his own words, and its scrupulous restraint: ‘Death begins with the shoes . . .’ Grossman blows hot by comparison; but for compelling immediacy, coupled with moral clarity, he has no peer. His article, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, a sober but stomach-turning reconstruction based on interviews with local Polish peasants and about forty survivors, published in the journal Znamya in November 1944 and later used in evidence at the Nuremberg trials, was the first in any language about a Nazi death camp. A year before, he had published a detailed fictionalised account of the events leading up to the massacre of several hundred Jews in an unnamed town resembling Berdichev, followed by a non-fiction article plainly titled ‘The Killing of Jews in Berdichev’, together with a litany for the dead, ‘Ukraine without Jews’.59 Of course, Grossman had a consuming personal interest in these events and these deaths. There seems little doubt that his sense of duty was in part filial – towards his mother – fed by a sense of guilt about his failure, not only to imagine her, but to save her. She was his model of human kindness. ‘I cried over your letters because you are in them,’ he wrote to her on the twentieth anniversary of her death, ‘with your kindness, your purity, your bitter, bitter life, your fairness, your generosity, your love for me, your care for people, your wonderful mind.’ Her example, moreover, taught him an important lesson: moral muscle-building is an arduous process, never complete, never finished. Making the best selves for ourselves that we can is not a project for the faint-hearted. The lesson is written into the conclusion of Life and Fate, in terms reminiscent of Primo Levi: Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn’t be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man. ‘Well then, we’ll see,’ he said to himself. ‘Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother . . .’60

Senseless kindness may be rooted in personal experience, but it is something more than a mother fi xation. Insofar as the idea is derived from any authority, it is derived from Chekhov. Life and Fate is a surprisingly Chekhovian work, despite its Tolstoyan scale and structure. As its English translator Robert Chandler has pointed out, many individual chapters of the novel are like Chekhov short stories. Much of it can be read as a series of miniatures; Grossman himself 49

on art and war and terror thought that Chekhov’s stories can be read as a single epic. In the matter of moral muscle-building, Chekhov’s wonderful letter to his older brother Nikolai offers a template that might well have appealed to the author of Life and Fate. ‘Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions’, he admonished. 1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others . . . 2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone . . . 3. They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts. 4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fi re . . . 5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion . . . 6. They have not shallow vanity . . . 7. If they have talent they respect it . . . 8. They develop aesthetic feeling in themselves . . . And so on. This is what cultured people are like. In order to be cultured and not to stand below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read The Pickwick Papers and learn a monologue from Faust. What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will.61

One of the characters in Life and Fate offers a paean of praise to Chekhov as cultured person: He said – and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that fi rst and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! . . . He said that fi rst of all we are human beings – and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers . . . Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere. That’s democracy, the still unrealized democracy of the Russian people.62

Chekhov was Grossman’s hero, and the debt is clear. Yet there were surely other sources of inspiration available to him. No less an authority than Shakespeare, for example. The History of King Lear, written four centuries ago, is a catalogue of torture and abuse and arrogance and weasel words of self-exculpation which would do credit to the chief architects of the war on terror. In the interests of that war the US Secretary of Defense personally authorised and monitored the ‘special interrogation plan’ for certain high-value detainees. He held the leash, as it were, while the dogs of war did their work. He and his co-adjutors also procured the carefully 50

the face drafted legal extenuations. In King Lear, the ruler-perpetrators go even further: they conduct the interrogation themselves. The Duke of Cornwall and his wife Regan, the king’s daughter, suspend all customary relations and operate something very like a latter-day state of exception. Though they are guests in his house, they authorise the seizure of the Earl of Gloucester as a traitor. ‘Pinion him like a thief’, commands Cornwall; ‘bring him before us.’ Though we may not pass upon his life Without the form of justice, yet our power Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men May blame but not control.63

‘What is at once horrible and familiar about this declaration’, writes Stephen Greenblatt, ‘is its nauseating blend of legalism, sadism, and public relations, as if Cornwall were already thinking about how he will excuse the fact that there were certain regrettable excesses in his otherwise legal treatment of the prisoner.’64 The regrettable excesses are truly horrific. Gloucester is interrogated, taunted and tortured. To Regan’s insistent questioning about why he has sent the king to Dover, he replies: ‘Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes.’ Without further ado, Cornwall puts out one of Gloucester’s eyes. As the pitiless Regan urges him to finish the job (‘One side will mock another; t’other, too’), one of Cornwall’s servants intervenes: ‘Hold your hand, my lord./ I have served you ever since I was a child, / But better service have I never done you / Than now to bid you hold.’ Cornwall and Regan are astounded; the well-ordered world has been turned upside down. Master and servant draw their swords and fight. Regan snatches up another sword and rushes the upstart, running him through from behind. The dying servant, addressing himself now to Gloucester, signals his new allegiance: ‘O, I am slain, my lord! Yet have you one eye left / To see some mischief on him.’ Cornwall, mortally wounded, ripostes: ‘Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly!’ The blind Gloucester is driven out of his own house with Regan’s cruel words to hound him: ‘Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover.’ The harm is done. The scene is over; and yet not quite over. There follows an exchange between two other servants. First, they offer some reflections on the action they have just witnessed. On Cornwall: ‘I’ll never care what wickedness I do / If this man come to good.’ On Regan: ‘If she live long / And in the end meet the old course of death / 51

on art and war and terror Women will all turn monsters.’ Then they turn practical. Gloucester needs a guide: ‘Let’s follow the old Earl and get the bedlam / To lead him where he would. His roguish madness / Allows itself to anything.’ And some salve: ‘Go thou. I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs / To apply to his bleeding face. Now heaven help him!’ Throughout this high drama, small acts of senseless kindness punctuate the mayhem. The first servant’s selfless intervention in the blinding is quixotic indeed, and gets him killed. The two other servants, if not exactly wise fools, are notably wiser than their masters; morally, they see more clearly. ‘They too have no large political agenda or ambition’, as Stephen Greenblatt observes, ‘but, like their slain fellow, they express a fundamentally ethical attitude to authority.’65 Practically, too, they demonstrate what is human in human beings. They do not do Good; they do everyday human kindness. In a world where kindness is not only senseless but treasonous, they practise Ikonnikov’s ethics. Flax and whites of eggs are the very definition of petty kindness reduced to its constituent properties – kindness expressed almost as organic elements – kindness to warm the heart of any chemist. One of the Earl’s old tenants is glad to be his guide. ‘O my good lord / I have been your tenant and your father’s tenant / This fourscore . . .’ Gloucester cuts him short, anxious not to expose him to danger: ‘Away, get thee away, good friend, be gone. / Thy comforts can do me no good at all; / Thee they may hurt.’ But the eyeless face in its extreme precariousness demands a different response, and the senseless old man has recognised it. ‘Alack, sir’, he responds, ‘you cannot see your way.’ In a celebrated essay on ‘the avoidance of love’ in King Lear, Stanley Cavell has argued that ‘the isolation and avoidance of eyes is what the obsessive sight imagery of the play underlines’.66 Avoiding the eyes of another is excruciatingly imagined. Yet even at the edge of the grave there is hope. Not everyone turns away. When the photographer Gary Winogrand was asked a stock question about his photographs, ‘What is this supposed to mean?’, he would give a standard answer. The answer was felt by some to be an evasion. On the contrary, it was a short lesson in the ethics of response, and responsibility. ‘The photograph is not my problem,’ he would say, ‘it’s yours.’67

Notes 1. John Berger, And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 5. 52

the face 2. Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ [1917], in Collected Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), p. 44. 3. Quoted in The Eye of War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), p. 225. 4. See Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 87. 5. Simon Norfolk is alive to this notion in his book on Bosnia, Bleed (Manchester: Dewi Lewis, 2005). 6. Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Pan, 1978), p. 23 (his emphasis). 7. For a selection of Kertész’s photographs from the Eastern Front in the First World War, see André Kertész: The Early Years (New York: Norton, 2005). One of the best, ‘Red Hussar Going to War’ (1919), is analysed by John Berger in Another Way of Telling (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 102–3. 8. I borrow from Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red (London: Faber, 2003), in homage. 9. Letter of 31 December 1917, Collected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 521. 10. Richard Wollheim, Germs (London: Waywiser, 2004), p. 90; John Le Carré, obituary of the Reverend Vivian Green (a model for his fictional hero George Smiley), The Guardian, 5 March 2005. 11. Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn, ‘The Storyteller’ [1936], Selected Writings, vol. III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 143–4. One dissenter from the general thesis of incommunicability is Primo Levi, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), ch. 4. 12. Janet Malcolm, ‘Burdock’, New York Review of Books, 14 August 2008. 13. John Szarkowski, ‘The Work of Gary Winogrand’, Winogrand: Figments From The Real World (New York: MoMA, 1988), p. 40. Szarkowski’s formulation has its origins in a remark of Winogrand’s: ‘The photograph isn’t what was photographed. It’s something else. It’s a new fact.’ Quoted in David Travis, At the Edge of the Light (Boston, MA: Godine, 2003), p. 91. 14. Lord Acton, ‘The Study of History’, Lectures on Modern History (London: Fontana, 1960), p. 18. 15. Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Robin Buss, ‘Theatre and Cinema’ [1973], Modern Times (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 200. Emmanuel Levinas, too, speaks of the nudity of the face in this context, ‘the nudity of pure exposure’, in ‘Peace and Proximity’ [1984], trans. Peter Atterton and Simon Critchley, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 167. 16. See, for example, his portrait of Captain Ike Fenton, US Marines, Naktong Perimeter, Korea (1950), in David Douglas Duncan, Photo 53

on art and war and terror

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

Nomad (New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 174–5. A selection of his work can be viewed at: www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/online/ddd/gallery/ war. Photo Nomad, p. 151. Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 88, a favourite passage of Wilfred Owen’s. Cf. Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 267. Cf. Robert Hughes, Goya (London: Harvill, 2003), pp. 278–9. Hughes also makes stylistic comparisons between The Second of May, 1808 (1808–14) and The Third of May, 1808 (1814) and war photographs (pp. 311–16). Alfred de Vigny, trans. Roger Gard, Servitude and Grandeur of Arms [1835] (London: Penguin, 1996). ‘Not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths’, said Henri Cartier-Bresson, in tribute to his Magnum comrade. Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 47. Cf. his brief reflection on composing or contriving a kind of real life still life (p. 102), a reference to one of his most famous images, ‘A dead North Vietnamese soldier and his plundered belongings’ (1968). See Alex Danchev, ‘War Stories’, Journal of Military History 69 (2005), p. 215. Eduardo Galeano, trans. Mark Fried, ‘Salgado’, in Sebastião Salgado, Sahel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 133. See the woman of Tanut, Mali (1985), or the child in the refugee camp of Wad Sherifay, Sudan (1985), in An Uncertain Grace (New York: Aperture, 1990), p. 70. Interview in Christian Frei’s documentary, War Photographer (2001). W. H. Auden, ‘In Time of War’ [1939], The English Auden (London: Faber, 1977), p. 258. John Updike, Due Considerations (London: Hamilton, 2008). David Levi Strauss, ‘Epiphany of the Other’, Between the Eyes (New York: Aperture, 2003), p. 42, on Salgado. Susan Sontag, ‘Photography: A Little Summa’ [2003], At The Same Time (London: Hamilton, 2007), p. 127. Cf. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 80. Tamra Wright et al., trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, ‘The Paradox of Mortality: an interview with Emmanuel Levinas’ [1986], The Provocation of Levinas (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 168–9. Orville Schell, ‘Sahel: Man in Distress’, Sahel, p. x; Levi Strauss, ‘The Documentary Debate’, Between the Eyes, p. 7. ‘Paradox of Mortality’, p. 169. Provocation, p. 97. He can be observed wrestling with it throughout Emmanuel Levinas, 54

the face

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, Entre Nous (London: Continuum, 2006), a collection of essays and interviews. ‘Peace and Proximity’, p. 167. This is Levinas’s translation from the Russian original, which he seems to have read in 1983–4. Cf. Vassily Grossman, trans. Robert Chandler, Life and Fate (New York: NYRB, 2006), p. 683. The same chapter (part 3, ch. 23) contains at least three encounters with the face – the human face – in which the look of the other is vividly evoked: for example, ‘the glance of a Chekist’ (p. 685). Grossman himself was interrogated in the Lubyanka in 1938. ‘The Other, Utopia, and Justice’ [1998], Entre Nous, p. 201; ‘Peace and Proximity’, p. 167. Cf. Marilyn Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004). Camera Lucida, p. 38 (his emphasis). The images referred to here, captioned simply ‘The Citadel, Hue’ (1968) and ‘Cyprus’ (1964), are reproduced in McCullin, pp. 118 and 96–7. See, for example, Gilles Peress and Eric Stover, The Graves (New York: Scalo, 1998). A selection of Peress’s work can be viewed on the Magnum Agency website at: www.magnumphotos.com. See, for example, Simon Norfolk, For Most Of It I have No Words and Afghanistan (Manchester: Dewi Lewis, 1998 and 2002), and ‘Military Landscapes’, Granta 96 (2006), pp. 95–132. A selection of Norfolk’s work can be viewed on his website at: www.simonnorfolk.com. The images of the skeleton and the basketball hoop are at: www. simonnorfolk.com, under ‘Scenes from a Liberated Iraq’ and ‘Bosnia’, respectively; the noose is reproduced in Afghanistan, n.p. ‘Chronotope’ is Mikhail Bakhtin’s coinage, a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously, displaying the ‘layeredness’ of time and disinterring the shards of the past. See Norfolk, ‘Chronotopia’, in Afghanistan. Its story is well told in Robert Chandler’s new introduction to the work, ‘Speaking for Those Who Lie in the Earth’, Life and Fate, pp. vii–xxvi. Quoted in Alice Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity (Philadelphia: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 115. Beevor’s Stalingrad (1998) is expertly thickened with Life and Fate, and also with material from Grossman’s original notes and papers; he subsequently edited and translated a collection of these, A Writer at War (London: Harvill, 2005), with Luba Vinogradova. See Life and Fate, p. 267. Writer at War, p. 260. She is immortalised in Life and Fate as Anna Shtrum. Reproduced in Writer at War, p. xii. Writer at War, pp. xv, 126. The Radiant Way (1940) was a fi lm by Aleksandrov. 55

on art and war and terror 48. Life and Fate, pp. 26–7. 49. Life and Fate, p. 304. 50. See Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1902] (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2002), pp. 154–5. 51. Life and Fate, pp. 304–5. Ikonnikov summarises what he has seen on pp. 406–7. 52. Heart of Darkness, p. 155. The ISSSC is a fiction, though possibly an allusion to the International Association for the Exploring and Civilizing of Africa, of which King Leopold II of Belgium was president. 53. Life and Fate, pp. 404–10 (part 2, ch. 15). 54. Grossman is fundamental to his reflections on moral life in the camps, and is presented as an exemplary figure in his own right in the fin-desiècle ‘lessons from the twentieth century’. See Tzvetan Todorov, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack, Facing the Extreme (New York: Holt, 1996), especially pp. 112–18; trans. David Bellos, Hope and Memory (London: Atlantic, 2003), pp. 48–73. 55. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 83–4. 56. Primo Levi, trans. Stuart Woolf, If This Is a Man (London: Sphere, 1987), p. 96. The figure of the Muselmann is discussed in Giorgio Agamben, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone, 2002), who also picks up the remark about the Gorgon. See especially pp. 53–4. In classical mythology, there were three Gorgons: Medusa, Stheno and Euryale. Their glance turned their victims to stone. For this reason, the face of the Gorgon was ‘prohibited’, as Agamben says; it was a non-face or ‘anti-face’. The terminology here is borrowed from Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque au visage (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 57. In Facing the Extreme Todorov proposes three categories of ordinary virtues: dignity (or self-respect); caring (or concern); and the life of the mind. In Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Robert Gordon offers a further elaboration, deriving thirteen (a rather arbitrary number) from Levi’s œuvre. The list is fascinating but diverse. It includes looking, memory, play, perspective, rhetorical constraint, common sense and friendship. Gordon’s treatment is indebted to ‘the affi rmation of ordinary life’ in Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1992). 58. Levi’s refusal of the stark opposition of good and evil fi nds expression in ‘The Grey Zone’, the chapter he considered the most important in The Drowned and the Saved. 59. ‘The Killing of Jews in Berdichev’ and ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ are published in extenso in Writer at War, pp. 256–9 and 281–306. 60. Writer at War, p. 261; Life and Fate, p. 841. 61. Anton to Nikolai Chekhov, March 1886, in Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov (London: Granta, 2003), pp. 98–100. 56

the face 62. Life and Fate, p. 283. 63. The History of King Lear (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2001), scene 14, lines 22–5. Subsequent citations come from the end of this scene and the beginning of the next. On the architects of the war on terror, see Alex Danchev, ‘“Like a Dog!” Humiliation and Shame in the War on Terror’, Alternatives 31 (2006), pp. 259–83. 64. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Uses of Power’, New York Review of Books, 12 April 2007. I follow Greenblatt’s analysis of the ethics on display. He makes the contemporary resonance more explicit in ‘An Exchange on Shakespeare and Power’, New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007. Cf. Richard Strier, ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds), The Historical Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 104–33. 65. Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare’. 66. Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’ [1969], in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 46. 67. Travis, At the Edge of the Light, p. 92.

57

3

Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life

Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. Fernando Pessoa1 At fi fty, everyone has the face he deserves. George Orwell 2

The Guitar Player by Georges Braque is one of the masterpieces of modern art. Painted in the spring of 1914, a few months before the good soldier Braque went off to win the Croix de Guerre on the Western Front, it is at once a summation and a recapitulation of the revolution called Cubism. The motor of that revolution was the creative partnership between Georges Braque, a Frenchman, and Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard, one of the key international relationships of the twentieth century. Roped together like mountaineers, in Braque’s classic image, they entered into an intense collaboration – at times a veritable cohabitation – legislating the future, vandalising the past, completely subverting Western ways of seeing. An entire tradition of visual representation was overthrown, as if a hand grenade had been tossed into the placid world of the reclining nude, the wedding feast and the woman reading a letter. Everything was shattered, discomposed, only to be remade anew, askew, backto-front, inside-out, all-round. Space itself was reconceived and reconstructed. Instead of receding tidily into the background, as prescribed by traditional perspective, the forms in Cubist paintings advance towards the spectator. Landscapes become landslips. Still life pushes forward, begging to be touched, or sampled, or played. We see into things, round things, through things, without prejudice; we see the component parts of things; we see things become things. Looking at Cubist paintings is a question of immersion, a little like diving, or caving. ‘We start from the surface’, John Berger has proposed, ‘we follow a sequence of forms which leads into the picture, 58

provenance and then suddenly we arrive back at the surface again and deposit our newly acquired knowledge upon it, before making another foray’.3 This takes time. Part of the discovery of these pictures is that time seems to pass within the frame. The Guitar Player is the grin, long after the cat has vanished. There is a there there, though of course the knowledge is open to dispute. In the flesh, so to speak, the thereness is corroborated by the lifelikeness of the surface texture. Much is imitation – Braque was the master of the makeover, specialising in mock wood – but the matter on the canvas is the very stuff of life as he saw it. The Guitar Player is not an oil painting but an oil and sawdust painting. One of Braque’s trade secrets was the mixing of all manner of things with the paint: sand; sawdust; ash; iron filings; pipe tobacco; coffee grounds. Georges Braque was in every sense well-earthed.4 As for the man himself, he is dressed in his best bib and tucker, with a wing collar and a rather fetching spotted bow tie. He is sitting in a high-backed armchair. The arms are those fat arms of comfortable clubland chairs which end in whorls, like a Swiss roll. The guitar is in his lap, but he does not appear to be playing it. In front of him is a small wooden table. On the table is a wine glass. There is a suggestion that the glass is half-full – or half-empty – but that may be only a trick of the light, or rather the superimposed planes. No doubt others will have different experiences. It is not unlike having an eye test. According to Proust, the original artist must proceed as oculists do. The paintings are a course of treatment, he writes, not always agreeable. ‘When it is over, the practitioner says, “Now look.” And then the world (which was not created once but as many times as there have been original artists) strikes us as entirely different from the old world yet perfectly clear.’5 Prime ministers and presidents may prattle all the long day, but it is given to artists, not politicians, to make a new world order. As the philosopher Merleau-Ponty magnificently puts it: If no painting comes to be the painting, if no work is ever absolutely completed and done with, still each creation changes, alters, enlightens, deepens, confi rms, exalts, re-creates, or creates in advance all the others. If creations are not a possession, it is not only that, like all things, they pass away; it is also that they have almost all their life still before them.6

The life of The Guitar Player, the life that it led once it left Braque’s studio and set out on its own, is a tumultuous life, a life of 59

on art and war and terror

Figure 8 Georges Braque, Man with a Guitar (The Guitar Player) (1914).

60

provenance vicissitudes, by no means over yet. It is in its fashion an exemplary life – a cautionary tale, perhaps, though there is rather little evidence of that – threading its way through the century. It treats of the politics of provenance, a murky area. It treats also of the politics of possession, the politics of property, as one might say, especially premium cultural property: the acquisitive urge of the covetous; the lies and silences of the state; and the international politics of plunder. A Braque was not always a Braque. The market in esteem is a difficult one to crack. For those weaned on The Mona Lisa, Cubism was a cheap trick, much reviled. By 1914, however, the aficionados knew that Braque was a marque of distinction. By 1940 anyone who was anyone had a small Braque, though the national collections were remarkably slow to catch on. By the end of the twentieth century a small Braque was all that most individuals (even most institutions) could afford. Big Braques changed hands but rarely, and then for several million dollars. The Guitar Player is a sizeable work, 130 cm high by 73 cm wide. There is a lot at stake in that oil and sawdust. The provenance of a work of art is, in the first instance, a summary life story, an outline biography. In theory, the most authoritative provenance, a kind of official biography, will be found in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, a classification of the entire œuvre. Here Braque has been ill-served. His catalogue raisonné is incomplete. More than that, it is inadequate. The provenance it gives for The Guitar Player is summary indeed: Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris First Kahnweiler Sale, 13–14 June 1921, Hôtel Drouot, Paris ?Alphonse Kann Collection, Paris André Lefèvre Collection, Paris Musée national d’art moderne, Paris7

This provenance serves to conceal more than it reveals. It tells us that the painting went straight to Braque’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the pre-eminent merchant of modern art in this period. Kahnweiler was a Francophile based in Paris. He was also a German national. When war broke out he was compelled to leave the country, his stock was sequestered and he became the target of some ugly talk about Kubism (spelled with a K) as ‘Kraut art’, at best a deviant tendency, at worst a conspiracy to undermine French civilisation, in league with Wagner, Nietzsche and sundry other supermen of depravity. After the war, the sequestered stock was put into liquidation. Hundreds of paintings, including 135 Braques, were auctioned 61

on art and war and terror in four lots, the Cubist sale of the century. Most of these works went at knock-down prices, based on the artificially low estimates of an ‘expert’ retained by the state for the purpose. In effect, they were officially discounted. So aggrieved was Braque at this treatment that he attended the sale, collared the expert and did to him what he had done to the prices. Braque was a boxer too. The rest of the story is soon told. The provenance speculates, but does not confirm, that the painting entered the collection of Alphonse Kann, an Austrian, naturalised British, who lived in sybaritic style in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris, playing the art market with considerable skill as he dallied with his silky friends. It then found its way into the hands of André Lefèvre, a significant figure, with a taste for the progressive; and from there into the national collection. No dates or details of transactions are vouchsafed. In 1982 a centenary exhibition of Braque’s work was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Guitar Player was one of the stars of the show. The provenance in the exhibition catalogue was an improvement on the catalogue raisonné: Galerie Kahnweiler First Kahnweiler Sale, 13–14 June 1921, Hôtel Drouot, Paris (2,820 FF to M. Grassat) Galerie Simon, Paris Alphonse Kann Collection, Paris (6,900 FF in 1924) André Lefèvre Collection, Paris Second Lefèvre Sale, 25 November 1965 Contemporary Art Establishment, Zürich Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris, 19818

This provenance fills in a number of gaps, provides some further clues and begs more questions. The buyer at the Kahnweiler sale is listed as a certain Monsieur Grassat, who turns out to be a front for the syndicate comprising Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Gustav Kahnweiler, his brother, and Alfred Flechtheim, a Berlin dealer associate. Still in exile, Kahnweiler was doing his best to buy back his own stock. For a modest 2,820 French francs, he succeeded in repossessing The Guitar Player. The Galerie Simon was the reassuringly French name under which he traded on his return to Paris. It was he who sold the painting to Alphonse Kann, in 1924, recouping a little something for his pains. Documentary precision then gives out. There is still no indication of how André Lefèvre acquired the painting. We know 62

provenance that it was exhibited in 1933, in Basle, lent by Kann. We know that it was not exhibited again until 1948, in Fribourg, lent by Lefèvre. Kann died in 1948. Lefèvre died in 1963. Most of the Lefèvre collection was sold at auction two years later. The Guitar Player was bought by the Contemporary Art Establishment, Zürich, alias Heinz Berggruen, a collector renowned for his discrimination, his perseverance, his cosmopolitanism and his enlightened attitude towards long-term lending for public exhibition. In 1976 the painting entered the Centre Pompidou, on loan, for permanent display. In 1981 it was acquired for the nation, at a price of 9 million FF, with the aid of a grant from the state and assistance from a private foundation. The outline biography of The Guitar Player is being filled in, although blank spots remain: in particular the mystery of its passage from Kann to Lefèvre. And there is a sting in this tale. A more complete provenance, as far as can be ascertained: Galerie Kahnweiler First Kahnweiler Sale, 13–14 June 1921, Hôtel Drouot, Paris (2,280 FF to ‘M. Grassat’) Galerie Simon (formerly Kahnweiler), Paris Alphonse Kann Collection, Paris (6,900 FF in 1924) Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), November 1940 Gustav Rochlitz, Paris, 9 February 1942 ?Paul Pétridès, Paris ?Marcel Fleischmann, Zürich André Lefèvre Collection, Paris Second Lefèvre Sale, 25 November 1965 Contemporary Art Establishment, Zürich (Heinz Berggruen Collection) Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris (9 million FF in 1981) Restitution claim lodged by the heirs of Alphonse Kann, 1997

As so often, the blank spot is a troubling one. In the spring of 1940, as the Germans advanced on Paris, Alphonse Kann fled to London, leaving a collection of some 1,200 artworks in his mansion in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They were duly confiscated as ‘abandoned property’ by the ERR, the task force headed by Alfred Rosenberg, founder of the Combat League for German Culture, whose mission it was to ‘safeguard’ cultural property for the good of the Reich, not to mention the greed of the Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, who wolfed down old masters like oysters. The ERR made an inventory 63

on art and war and terror of the spoils: The Guitar Player became KA 1062.9 Ominously, it was also stamped HG. Goering did not covet the painting for itself. According to the strict tenets of Nazi aesthetics, Braque’s art was degenerate – in Rosenberg’s parlance, ‘syphilitic, infantile and mestizo’ – and in any event the Reichsmarschall had no taste for it. He did, however, have a use for it: as barter for the works he really wanted. In the twisted economy of aggrandisement that ran rampant under Hitler’s imperium, Braques were swaps. As an Aryan, albeit a degenerate, Braque himself was in a much stronger position. Even so he remained subject to the vagaries and rapacities of the Nazi regime, at the same time a dictatorship and an organised competition. (‘I prefer the English system to the German,’ he remarked in his laconic way to the philosopher Jean Grenier. ‘In England, no more unemployed, nothing but rentiers; in Germany, nothing but soldiers.’10) His own collection was deposited in a bank near Bordeaux, where it was discovered during the pillaging of his dealer’s. In September 1941 it came to the notice of Goering’s personal art adviser, Walter Andreas Hofer. Hofer apprised his master: Braque is an Aryan and lives in Paris as a painter. His collection is in Bordeaux, put into security by the Devisenschutzkommando [Currency Control Unit], must therefore be unblocked. I negotiated with him personally about his Cranach Portrait of a Girl, and held out to him the prospect of an early release of his collection if he were ready to sell his Cranach!!! He is reserving the picture for me, which he intended never to sell, and will notify me of his decision on my next visit to Paris. His other pictures are of no interest to us.11

Clearly Braque was temporising. He may have been successful as no further dealings with Hofer have come to light. Goering is said to have acquired for himself fifty-two Cranachs by the end of the war, but Portrait of a Girl does not appear to have been among them. To satisfy their master’s craving, the ERR made arrangements with a network of dealers across Europe, who were happy enough to play the role of secret agent and travelling salesman for the insatiable HG and his confederates. The most assiduous looter-collaborator was Gustav Rochlitz, who organised a series of official ‘exchanges’ of degenerate art for something more suitable, receiving no fewer than eighty-two confiscated paintings from the ERR’s hoard. In one such transaction, Rochlitz exchanged a sixteenth-century Adoration of the Magi for The Guitar Player and seven other modern paintings, including works by Matisse and Picasso. The slippery Rochlitz 64

provenance was interrogated by the Allies at the end of the war. He claimed that he sold The Guitar Player to Paul Pétridès, a Paris dealer of similar bent, also implicated in the illicit trade in ‘Jewish goods’. Pétridès for his part had nothing to say. Meanwhile André Lefèvre’s records have come to light, but they are extremely reticent. Against The Guitar Player is the cryptic notation, ‘Fleischmann, Zürich’, indicating that Lefèvre bought the painting from the Zürich dealer Marcel Fleischmann, another figure deeply compromised by his trade in Jewish goods. The sale by Fleischmann has since been confi rmed.12 The Guitar Player, it seems, was fenced. Fast forward fifty years. The Guitar Player is still on display at the Centre Pompidou. The published provenance is still mute on its wartime depredations. Ostensibly nothing has changed. As if to make a foray into the picture, however, à la Berger, beneath the surface the art world is all aflutter. The vexed question of restitution is in the air. This owes something to the end of the Cold War, stimulating and facilitating redress of many kinds, personal and international; widespread acceptance of the very idea of compensation, variously defined; increasing awareness of inter-generational justice, as both possible and desirable; and a spate of sleuthing books, of which the most consequential is perhaps The Lost Museum by Hector Feliciano, first published in France in 1995. In 1997 a careful reader of that book, Francis Warin, a grand-nephew, spearheaded a claim by the heirs of Alphonse Kann for the restitution of The Guitar Player from the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, that is, from the Centre Pompidou. The global ripple potential of restitution is enough to give the authorities palpitations. It is not so long since the French feared that the Italians might reclaim works taken in the Napoleonic Wars. Russian anxieties about claims made by descendants of the collectors Shchukin and Morosov (whose collections were nationalised in the Russian Revolution) threatened to cancel a major exhibition, ‘From Russia’, at the Royal Academy in London in 2008. The dispute was resolved by the accelerated enactment of protection from seizure legislation. The very idea of restitution presents a formidable moral and legal tangle over time. The legal issues surrounding The Guitar Player are predictably complex. Commercial transactions with the German occupiers were declared null and void by the Allies. This seems unexceptionable. It would certainly apply to the exchange with Rochlitz. Whether 65

on art and war and terror it serves to invalidate subsequent transactions is apparently less clear-cut. Evidently it could apply to the onward sale to Pétridès (if Rochlitz is to be believed), and again to Fleischmann. Yet, if Lefèvre made his purchase in good faith, and it was not contested within five years, Swiss law stipulates that ownership is final and incontestable. Whether Swiss law is the relevant law is another question, but on the face of it the same goes for the purchase by Berggruen. Whatever may be said about the others, neither Lefèvre nor Berggruen can be dismissed as a fly-by-night. André Lefèvre in his day was one of the most respected collectors in Europe. Heinz Berggruen probably was the most the respected collector in Europe. Born in the same year as the painting, and also a fugitive from the Nazis, he returned to Berlin, his birthplace, after sixty years of exile, to give the bulk of his collection to a reunified Germany. He died in 2007, his passion for Braque undiminished, his reputation unbesmirched. Not to be outdone, the next purchaser makes a somewhat similar argument. France bought the painting in good faith, the President of the Centre Pompidou was inclined to say, and for a tidy sum; France is therefore entitled to some consideration. Legalities aside, the argument goes further. Emphasising the capital importance of The Guitar Player to ‘the artistic heritage of the twentieth century’, the same high official asserted an exalted public interest in the painting remaining accessible ‘to all who wish to know and love the art of our century’, as he put it in 1998.13 It was not always so. In 1921, at the Kahnweiler sales, the state had a right of pre-emption. No one stirred. The benighted functionaries sat on their hands. Official purchases were negligible. The Guitar Player came and went, along with all the rest of the Braques, some of them for a derisory 200 FF. In art as in international relations, pre-emption is a ticklish business. The authorities have been dilatory, and in the matter of restitution perhaps remiss. France has paid dearly for this dilatoriness, and may yet pay more. The heirs of Alphonse Kann have been successful in other restitution claims, including a lithograph by Cézanne and a Cubist landscape by Albert Gleizes, a second-rank painting by a second-rank painter, valued at a paltry $1 million. As for The Guitar Player, it held up, in spite of all, as Braque always hoped it would. In 2005, after mediation conducted by Maître Jean Veil, an agreement was reached between the French Prime Minister and ‘the claimants’, such that the painting would remain in the national collection, and the claimants would receive compensation. The official announcement of this agreement was exiguous in the extreme; it did 66

provenance not disclose anything so vulgar as a precise figure. A close study of the proceedings of the Assemblée Nationale reveals a payment of 27 million euros over the period 2006–8: a substantial sum.14 Braque used to take his paintings out into the fields, to see how they would hold up against nature. In the event it was human nature they had to worry about, but as the poet Pierre Reverdy once remarked, Braque’s canvases are not afraid of anything. The life story of The Guitar Player is a long journey, from hostility through indifference to veneration: from dispensable to indispensable. The painting is sometimes known as Man with a Guitar. This natty dresser is a remarkable personage. He takes everything that the twentieth century has to throw at him, unblinking and unblemished, serenely more himself. The provenance may be tainted, but the man is not. There are many kinds of gain in this tangled tale. Almost alone, the man with a guitar gains moral stature. Put differently, The Guitar Player has an arc: a narrative arc; a dramatic arc; a mythic arc. The arc of a life is something more than a figure of speech. It is a concept. The concept has been debated by some of the finest philosophers of the age, from Anthony Appiah to the Sopranos, for the art of the arc is a matter of moment.15 The modern politician runs on his mythic arc. In the United States, the archetypical arc is log cabin to White House, a quasi-knightly quest involving dragon-slaying and suchlike – or the latter-day equivalent – hero work of a character-building kind, demonstrating grace under pressure, coming through fire, brave and wise, ‘tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage’, as John F. Kennedy proclaimed in his inaugural address.16 Presidential candidates ransack their own biographies for electoral appeal. JFK and George Bush senior were self-professed profiles in courage. They knew something, they contrived to say, about paying any price, bearing any burden, meeting any hardship, supporting any friend, opposing any foe. The mythic underpinned the hyperbolic. Their successors found new dragons to slay.17 Remember Howard Dean. Howard Dean had trouble with his mythic arc. So, too, did John Kerry, who took over from him as the Democratic standardbearer in the 2004 Presidential election. John Kerry’s biography was ripe for ransack, perhaps overripe. This second JFK had the makings of a great story. He was a genuine jock – he had played hockey, lacrosse and soccer at Yale; he had windsurfed from Cape Cod to Nantucket. These were the wrong sports in the wrong places at the wrong time, but in a country where 100 million people watch 67

on art and war and terror the Super Bowl he could hold his own in an interview with Sports Illustrated. Better still, he was a genuine war hero, and also a genuine peace protestor. He had fought and thought. Yet he failed to cohere. His mythic arc was muddled. Kerry lacked clarity. ‘Responsibility to take over one’s own biography’, says Habermas, ‘means to get clear about who one wants to be.’18 If Kerry was clear, it was not apparent. He may have been worthy, as some allowed, but he was always suspect. In one debate he was asked by a reporter – from the New York Times, no less – ‘Real quick – is God on America’s side?’ A fatuous question, of course, but a cunning way of smuggling in a kind of loyalty test: inviting any equivocator to brand himself a latte liberal, a hanging offence in certain states, and by extension effete, compromised, un-American. It was a question that Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush could have swatted away with ease. It was a question for which Barack Obama would have prepared in advance. It was not a question to which John Kerry had a convincing answer. Bill Clinton had an answer for everything – or so it appeared. The literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells of an encounter at a White House reception in 1995, in the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton recalled being made to learn Macbeth at school. ‘Don’t you think it’s a play about someone compelled to do the morally disastrous?’ asked Greenblatt. ‘No’, said Clinton, ‘it’s a play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.’ This insight, captured in such a magnificent phrase, completely dazzled Greenblatt, especially when Clinton proceeded to quote reams of Macbeth by heart. Some time later, watching the TV news, he heard Clinton praise the late King Hussein of Jordan as a man ‘whose immense ambition had an ethically adequate object’. The phrase was an adjustable one, a monkey-wrench in the charmer’s toolkit. ‘It suddenly occurred to me,’ says Greenblatt, ‘that although the phrase was marvellous, it was also somehow off. No one with immense ambition has an ethically adequate object. I realized that Clinton had chosen the right vocation after all.’19 Bill Clinton’s story was self-realisation. His tragedy was self-indulgence. His arc was more priapic than mythic, perhaps, and in the end it is hard to avoid a feeling of bathos. Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas. Hope to soap in one generation: the arc crashed, the talent squandered. George W. Bush’s mythic arc was stumblebum saved. His quest was much-trumpeted but mysterious, unless it was the very act of office-holding – more acceptable than whisky-drinking, less onerous than oil-prospecting – the exercise of power in the interest of . . . the 68

provenance exercise of power. One might almost say it kept him out of mischief, if the collateral damage were not so great. Purpose is the missing link in the life and times of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most vivid account of this petulant pilgrim’s progress derives from an interview given in 2004 by Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a scabrous wit to rival Jonathan Swift. The interview in question was conducted at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, which is to say over breakfast, consisting of Thompson’s usual requirements of orange juice, coffee, smouldering hash pipe, Dunhill cigarettes, half-pint tumbler of Chivas Regal on ice, and a small black bowl full of cocaine. Thus fuelled, he began to reminisce: I remember Bush as a kind of butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn’t handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn’t pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub, then I noticed him . . . I had to have him taken away . . . I have a friend who was with George W. Bush at Yale. Bush branded him with a red-hot coat hanger . . . Some fraternity thing. He still has the scar . . . It’s just incredible to me that Bush ever got into Yale. Well, actually, it isn’t. Some are enrolled at birth, practically. He was one. There will be others. He was an average farm hand.

While he takes a swig of Chivas on the side, Thompson is asked what he thinks of Bush today. He gets to his feet, reaches gamely for a bookshelf, retrieves a large volume entitled Black’s Law Dictionary, and begins to read: ‘Imbecility: a more or less advanced feebleness of the intellectual faculties.’ Are you with me so far? ‘That weakness of the mind which, without depriving the person entirely of his reason, leaves only the faculty of conceiving the most common and ordinary ideas. It varies in degree from merely excessive folly to an almost vacuity of mind.’ That’s our boy . . . ‘Derangement: manifested by delusions, incapacity to reason, or by uncontrollable impulses.’ Shit, yes. ‘In law, such a want of intelligence as prevents a man from comprehending the nature and consequences of his acts’ . . . ‘Dipsomania . . . Pyromania . . .’ George knows all about those . . . ‘Mania Fanatica: a form of insanity characterised by a morbid state of religious feeling . . .’ Need I go on?20

‘I almost felt sorry for Bush,’ added Thompson, ‘until I heard someone call him “Mr President”, and then I felt ashamed. Every 69

on art and war and terror nation in the world despises us, except for a handful of corrupt Brits, like that simpering little whore Tony Blair.’ In office, Bush was a lame duck from the start, vacant but curiously resonant. His presidency bears a striking resemblance to the classic pattern of service life as Evelyn Waugh described it: ‘the vacuum, the spasm, the precipitation, and with it all the peculiar, impersonal, barely human geniality’.21 For someone with so little to recommend him, he was tolerated, even lauded, by a lot of people for a long time. How did he do it? Setting to one side the element of contingency – it might have been difficult not to get re-elected after 9/11 – ‘our boy’ mastered the same trick as Ronald Reagan before him, speech acts in a similar register (call it ‘aw shucks’, or ‘just folks’). An American commentator has put it exactly: he didn’t seem phoney.22 The emphasis here is on the seeming. Alan Bennett is a peerless authority on the subject. Musing on his own play, The Madness of George III, Bennett writes: Monarchy is a performance, and part of the King’s illness consists in his growing inability to sustain that performance. When the King is on the road to recovery Chancellor Thurlow discovers him reading King Lear and congratulates him on seeming more himself. ‘Yes’, says the King, ‘I have always been myself but now I seem myself. I have remembered how to seem.’23

Politics, too, is a performance. War is organised violence; diplomacy is organised performance, seeming consummate in concert. The consummate performer on the international political scene of recent years is Tony Blair. Blair is famously ‘a pretty straight sort of guy’: he said so himself. As Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s speech acts signalled ‘I am right’. (‘They are weak, the Europeans. Weak.’) Tony Blair’s signalled ‘I am good’. Being good meant blazing sincerity and breast-beating annunciation. There was no ‘aw shucks’ about Tony, no ‘buddy buddy’, which may be why he looked so ill at ease in the company of his folksy friend George. The rhetorical keynote was honest belief – frank-seeming, as Alan Bennett remarked: ‘That Tony Blair . . . will often say “I honestly believe” rather than just “I believe” says all that needs to be said. “To be honest” another of his frank-seeming phrases.’ Time magazine’s correspondent at the Hutton Inquiry made a similar observation: ‘In two and a half hours of apparently frank testimony – always thoughtful and reasoned, passionate when passion was called for – Blair gave a masterful performance.’24 70

provenance The performance never stopped. Peter Kilfoyle, an Old Labour dissident from Liverpool, once took Blair to a football match. He turned up in a dark suit and a polo sweater. ‘Tony, what the hell . . .?’ exclaimed Kilfoyle, ‘you look like an Apache dancer!’ Blair telephoned Peter Mandelson to ask what he thought. He needed reassurance about how to play the part. 25 On another occasion, the fi lm director Robert Altman found himself at a private dinner party with the Blairs during the making of Gosford Park. Cherie left early, but Tony stayed on. Everyone was smoking pot – not Blair, of course, but he was sitting opposite Altman, who was puffi ng away contentedly. The Prime Minister gave every sign of enjoying himself: ‘I thought he was pretty cool,’ Altman recalled.26 He wanted to like Blair, but came to realise he had made a mistake. He took the ‘cool’ for openness; in fact, it was a pose. Posing is what Robert Altman called bad acting. Posing is seeming gone wrong. To seem, as it were promiscuously, will not suffice. The seeming should be congruent with the self. ‘To thine own self be true,’ enjoins Polonius, in another of those plays. That is no easy task, even supposing a single self rather than an assortment, a real self rather than a construction. But there is a word for it. The word is inscribed in the provenance. For the provenance serves a purpose beyond the reconstruction of the life story. The purpose is authentication: a traditional need, and it may be a timeless one, especially in this pixellated age. It is now increasingly common for major artists to have an ‘authentication board’ or artist’s committee to give an official imprimatur; though even this is open to challenge, ultimately in the courts. The Warhol Authentication Board and the Pollock Authentication Board, for example, are embroiled in disputes all the time. For the rest, the provenance is a kind of pedigree. The pedigree attests that the work is genuine, that it is what it seems, that a Braque is indeed a Braque, and not an imitation. In a word, the provenance is a proof of authenticity. In art and life, and even in politics, authenticity is the Holy Grail. ‘Inauthentic politicians win office, even the presidency’, Elizabeth Drew has noted, ‘but they rarely hold up as leaders for long, or in history.’ Not as long as The Guitar Player, it is tempting to add. The reverse applies. Harry Truman was not much esteemed in his own day, but his stock has soared since. ‘He became retroactively popular because he was true to himself’, as Drew says: ‘he didn’t pretend to be anyone other than the former (failed) haberdasher and machine 71

on art and war and terror pol who had run tough Senate hearings on war profiteering.’27 Asked what he did on his first day at home after losing the Presidential election of 1952 to the wide grin and war record of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman replied: ‘I took the suitcases up to the attic.’ Voicing authenticity is a prime need but a rare accomplishment. The suitcase remark was a favourite of Oliver Franks, then the British Ambassador in Washington, and a moral philosopher to boot, one of the very few who thought Truman a great President at the time. Franks’s own motto was esse quam videre – roughly, ‘to be rather than to seem to be’.28 Tony Blair marched on, victorious, through three General Elections. The morning after the third, in 2005, he performed humility: ‘I have listened and I have learned.’ There was a third term – an unprecedented feat – but the sedulously promoted self-image was shot. Iraq saw to that. Sexing-up skewered frank-seeming. ‘We look in vain for this man’s convictions, beyond a negative version of Ecclesiastes with victory the prize for the strong,’ in Edward Pearce’s blood-curdling exegesis. ‘Blair is about power shallowly perceived and public show shimmeringly done, right down to the dreadful sincerity.’29 He was re-elected, in spite of himself. The war and its degrading aftermath sealed a kind of transmigration. Blair flipped into Bliar. The watchword came in many forms. A new image gained currency, subtly subversive, imprinted in the photographer Rankin’s eerie portraits of Blair as Billy Bob Thornton in a Coen brothers’ film noir, and abetted by a heart scarce: a frame of fallibility, at root moral. Ominously, Newsweek used the Rankin portraits as the backdrop to a cover feature on ‘The Twilight of Tony Blair’.30 The word was out. The Prime Minister was crooked timber – evasive, deceptive, manipulative. His much-vaunted integrity was interred without obsequies. Honest belief was undone. The damage was irreparable. Honest belief is akin to good faith. Good faith is the spirit of the mind, which prefers sincerity to deception, knowledge to illusion, laughter to solemnity.31 Tony Blair failed these tests. ‘If he isn’t decent, trust-me Tony’, asked Salman Rushdie of his last hurrah, ‘then who is he?’32 Authenticity is an enigma. Blair riffed on being authentic as he riffed on the guitar. As he took care to remind us, Tony Blair is another guitar player. History beckons impatiently. In 2008, a postretirement portrait was at last unveiled: a startling life-likeness, by Jonathan Yeo, with a kind of attribute – a nagging, curling, curdling poppy, blood-red against bleak grey. 72

provenance

Figure 9 Tony Blair playing the guitar (1995).

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place33

It will surely not be long before another portrait is painted. Something kinder, perhaps, The Guitar Player by Sir Damien Hirst, as it may be; a return to easel painting after the fly-blown carcasses of his youth. Meanwhile, that high-rolling project, the authenticity project, has come to grief. Superseded, Blair is at work on his memoirs. Does he turn to Sartre in the still small hours and recognise himself in that mirror? It’s true. I’m not authentic. With everything that I feel, before actually feeling it I know that I’m feeling it. And then, bound up as I am with defi ning and thinking it, I no longer more than half-feel it. My greatest passions are mere nervous impulses. The rest of the time I feel hurriedly, then elaborate in words, press a little here, force a little there, and lo and behold an exemplary feeling has been constructed, good enough to put in any bound volume. 34

Tony Blair does exemplary feeling. The bound volumes of Blair memoirs are still to come. One thing is certain: there will be apologetics galore. The authenticity project is already lost. The posterity project is in deep trouble. 73

on art and war and terror

Notes 1. Fernando Pessoa, trans. Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 309. 2. Orwell notebook, 17 April 1949, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), vol. IV, p. 579. 3. John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’ [1969], in The White Bird (London: Hogarth, 1998), p. 179. 4. For the man and the work, I draw on my Georges Braque (London: Penguin, 2007). 5. Antoine Compagnon, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ‘Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), vol. II, p. 241. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Carleton Dallery, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 190. 7. Nicole Worms de Romilly, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre de Georges Braque (Paris: Maeght, 1982), vol. VII, p. 288. 8. Nadine Pouillon, Braque (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1982), p. 56. 9. ERR Card File, OMGUS Property Division Miscellaneous Records, RG 260, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. 10. Grenier diary, 23 February 1943, in Jean Grenier, Sous l’Occupation (Paris: Paulhan, 1997), p. 318. 11. Hofer to Goering, 26 September 1941, OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit, Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 2, 15 September 1945, copy in Douglas Cooper Papers, 42A/3, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 12. Philippe Dagen, ‘L’énigme du “Joueur de guitare” de Georges Braque’, Le Monde, 27 January 1998. 13. Jean-Jacques Aillagon, ‘Le tableau doit demeurer accessible au regard de tous’, Le Monde, 27 January 1998. 14. Rapport de M. Nicolas Perruchot sur le projet de la loi de fi nances pour 2007, no. 3363, annex 8, at: http://www-assemblee-nationale.fr/12/ budget/plf2007/b3363-a8.asp. Cf. Isabelle le Masne de Chermont and Laurence Sigal-Klagsbald, Looking for Owners (Paris: RMN, 2008), p. 55. 15. Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 16. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961, Public Papers (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 1. 17. I borrow from Maureen Dowd, ‘Dudgeons and Dragons’, The New York Times, 18 December 2003. 18. Jürgen Habermas, trans. T. McCarthy, The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), vol. II, p. 99. 74

provenance 19. Interview in The Guardian Review, 26 February 2005. 20. Interview in The Independent on Sunday, 31 October 2004. 21. Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (London: Everyman, 1994), p. 273. 22. Elizabeth Drew, ‘Primary Colors’, New York Review of Books, 11 March 2004. 23. Alan Bennett, ‘Madness: The Movie’, London Review of Books, 9 February 1995. 24. Bennett diary, 29 May 2003, in Alan Bennett, Untold Stories (London: Faber, 2005), p. 331; Jeff Chu, ‘Winning the Battle, Losing the War’, Time, 8 September 2003. 25. David Remnick, ‘The Real Mr Blair’, The Observer, 1 May 2005. 26. Interview in The Guardian Weekend, 1 May 2004. 27. Drew, ‘Primary Colors’. 28. See Alex Danchev, Oliver Franks (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 142ff. 29. Edward Pearce, letter to London Review of Books, 8 May 2003. 30. Newsweek, 29 September 2003. 31. I follow André Comte-Sponville, trans. C. Temerson, A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues (London: Heinemann, 2002), p. 210. 32. Salman Rushdie, ‘If he isn’t decent, trust-me Tony, then who is he?’, The Independent, 8 April 2005. 33. John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915). 34. Sartre diary, 28 November 1939, in Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare, War Diaries (London: Verso, 1984), p. 61.

75

4

Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War

Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. Joseph Conrad1

In November 1914, after hardly more than a month of training with the Cambridge University OTC, Officer Cadet Basil Hart, aged nineteen, delivered himself of a rather alarming ‘Credo’: 1. I believe (i) in the supremacy of the aristocracy of race (and birth) (ii) in the supremacy of the individual. 2. In compulsory military service because it is the only possible life for a man and brings out all the fi nest qualities of manhood. 3. I have acquired rather a contempt for mere thinkers and men of books who have not come to a full realization of what true manhood means. Military service if intelligently conducted develops and requires the fi nest mental, moral and physical qualities. 4. I exalt the great general into the highest position in the roll of great men and consider it requires higher mental qualities than any other line of life. 5. I consider that the Slavs, by which I indicate a greater Russia, will rule both Europe and Asia and will have world domination, being the fi nest and most virile civilization and having the fi nest qualities of all races, and that the day of conquest and expansion is not yet over. 6. Socialism and its forms are an impossibility unless human nature radically alters. 76

broomstick horrors 7. There should be compulsory military service in order that all men may have the chance, which otherwise they would probably avoid, of developing true manhood. 8. . . . I certainly believe that absolute peace is detrimental to true manhood, but 20th century war is too frightful. If you could have war without its explosive horrors it would be a good thing. I worship brilliance and brilliance seems to fi nd its truest and fullest expression in the art of generalship . . . If the war ends by Easter [1915] it will be a great thing for the virility and manhood of Europe. If it continues until Xmas 1915 it will be a disaster. 2

Officer Cadet Hart was the keenest of soldiers, as he later remarked, and also the most conventional. Truth be told, his credo is alarming only to the modern reader. To the well-bred Edwardian male, not to speak of the well-bred Edwardian female, such sentiments were commonplace. What calls attention to this particular specimen of worshipful manhood is not that he professed these beliefs but that he so proclaimed them – and preserved the proclamation – and that the proclaimant was destined to become the most celebrated military writer of his day, ‘the Clausewitz of the twentieth century’, ‘the captain who teaches generals’, B. H. Liddell Hart. Some of the beliefs he recanted or repented, sooner or later. The most thorough-going recantation concerned the manly virtues of compulsory military service. The most spectacular repentance concerned the moral attributes of generalship. During the war, as he observed, ‘any Regular who was not a dolt or a bigot could pass as a Napoleon’. After the war, after an interval, ‘the great general’ receded steadily into the past. As for the average general, his high appreciation of the qualities of that gentleman did not survive extensive personal acquaintance with the brotherhood to which he belonged. ‘Oh for a stethoscope’, says Canetti, ‘a fi ne stethoscope to identify the generals in their wombs!’ Yet complete disillusionment was a long time coming. ‘When one remembers that there are about 200 serving British generals, and about 2,000 living British generals, and at least 20,000 generals in the world’, Liddell Hart reflected in 1932, ‘the position does not appear much of an eminence.’3 His views on war and the pity of war naturally evolved over time; though there are some significant constants. In the 1914–18 war, they are at first sight remarkable only for their shallowness and the triteness of their expression. But that is too easy a dismissal. Here was no Hawkeye, sturdy and intrepid and self-contained. Young 77

on art and war and terror

Figure 10 Bassano, Basil Liddell Hart (1927).

Basil, like young Winston, was a jealous warrior. He wanted to play the lion too. He was out to prove himself to himself, and to others. He was almost desperate for glory, or for something that would count as such. As for the alternative, he left clear instructions for his parents: 78

broomstick horrors In the event of my death on active service: It is my wish that you do not wear mourning & that if at any time flowers are used, that they shall be white roses. If you desire to put up any memorial whatsoever, it is my express wish that it take the form of an endowed cot at a hospital, preferably military. I do not wish you to regard my death as an occasion for grief, but one for thanksgiving, for no man could desire a nobler end than to die for his country & for the cause of civilisation. A short life which fi nishes nobly is surely far better than to drag out an ignominious existence. My one hope is that I shall be reunited to you in the next life. Finally, to misquote Dickens, ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, or ever should have done.’

The quotation or misquotation was apt: these were Sydney Carton’s thoughts on the scaffold, in A Tale of Two Cities. Liddell Hart did not want to die – he seems in fact to have had a callow confidence in his own survival, in spite of what he wrote – but he did hanker after that peculiar relationship between man and man in war, axiomatic in the trenches on the Western Front, a relationship christened with macabre tenderness by one of the missing of the Somme, a regular soldier from France, as ‘the comradeship of the scaffold’.4 For Liddell Hart, therefore, the Great War was a complex weave of what he wanted to experience, what (he felt) he ought to experience, what he actually experienced, what he thought he experienced and what he admitted he experienced – ‘not a record of what happened but a kaleidoscope of hypothetical contingencies which might have arisen’ – to say nothing of what he could remember and what he could forget, and the tangled inhibitions of the telling and the re-telling. ‘La guerre, mon vieux, c’est notre jeunesse, ensevelie et secrète.’5 Ultimately, what really matters is not what happened to him in a vulnerable outpost of the Ypres Salient or a dark wood on the Somme, intriguing though that is, but what he made his experience into. ‘Remember’, admonishes Joseph Brodsky: ‘the past won’t fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future.’ Basil Hart had a future, of this he was thoroughly convinced: the war had to live up to it. Why else would he take such pains to register his front-line impressions in a pocket notebook, or keep reminding his long-suffering parents to preserve his every letter home? The drive towards self-creation and self-realisation was exceptionally strong, and transparent, recorded in his spidery hand. If it is true that no unexamined life is worth living, then surely Liddell Hart lived well. And yet, he might have lived better. His enquiries of himself were zealous, at times almost obsessive, but 79

on art and war and terror neither as remorseless nor as scrupulous as his enquiries of others. In short, he examined other people’s assumptions more closely than he did his own. Perhaps this is not unusual. What is unusual is his passion for the factual and his aptitude for the figurative, the one precociously grown, the other still latent or unlearned. Mixed with heavy didactic purpose and what Virginia Woolf called word-coining power – in Liddell Hart’s case an extraordinary power, unequalled in his field in recent times – this formidable and paradoxical combination was to make him a maestro among modern military writers. But first he had to find his voice; or, more melodramatically, himself. Nominally, Basil Hart had to become B. H. Liddell Hart. That was by no means an insignificant passage, and yet, even so, merely preparative. Essentially, Liddell Hart had to become ‘Liddell Hart’. In 1914 he had scarcely begun. There was always something of the spindling innocent in the later incarnation, but the metamorphosis of the credulous neophyte into the clamorous iconoclast was a wonder to behold. John Buchan used to argue, sensitively, that ‘the military profession gives its members a new artificial personality, so that only at rare intervals does the real man emerge from the ritualism of long tradition’.6 Basil Hart’s war, his fi rst and last war, is in every sense a search for ‘the real man’, in France and Flanders in 1915–16, and at Stroud and Cambridge in 1917–18: heroically, on the Somme, and bathetically, on the Severn. Liddell Hart went to this war three times, a persistence of which he was achingly conscious: ‘On going to the front for a third time, I desire to say that in any notice or memorial, the fact of my going a third time be emphasized.’7 These stints in and around the old front line varied considerably in danger but not in duration. In fact, a curious pattern emerges. Each one was very short, and abruptly curtailed; and in every case a certain vagueness or ambiguity surrounds the curtailment. The first stint was for about three weeks, from late September to mid-October 1915, in a quiet sector just north of the Somme, at Morlancourt, near Albert. The second was for a few beleaguered days in mid-November 1915, very much in the thick of things, in the water-logged lines of the Ypres Salient. The third was again for about three weeks, from late June to mid-July 1916, for the opening phase of the Big Push on the Somme, in the Fricourt sector, aiming first for Crucifi x Trench and then Bazentin, through the much-mythologised Mametz Wood. That was enough, but that was all. Unlike his friend Guy Chapman, Liddell Hart was never a true grognard.8 80

broomstick horrors The Somme in 1915 was a gentle introduction to war. For most of the year it was still possible to drill a battalion of men in full view of the German lines without a shot being fi red to interrupt the manoeuvre. As Liddell Hart marvelled repeatedly, ‘one can hardly believe that there is a war on’. This was all the more marvellous because there was indeed a war on just up the road, where the opening stages of the Battle of Loos (what the Germans more accurately call the Graveyard of Loos) coincided almost exactly with his arrival at Morlancourt; but that costly affray barely disturbed the tranquillity of No. 6 Entrenching Battalion, his temporary billet. ‘Magniloquent news of the battle up north at Loos was published several times,’ remembered Chapman, serving nearby. ‘We had not yet learned to discount all these communications.’9 This prelapsarian period came to a sudden end when, out of the blue, Liddell Hart was stricken by sickness and high fever. What caused the condition is not entirely clear. His own accounts vary, but the most suggestive runs: ‘the only apparent cause was that the previous day in search of adventure near our trenches I had got into contact with the gases of an exploding shell.’ Whether the ‘adventure’ was anything more than an advanced variation of Red Indians in the garden, or merely a relief from the boredom of the diurnal round, no one knows. ‘How will they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don’t know whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch’s and Corneille’s heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches?’10 The grown-up Liddell Hart always retained something of the small boy’s notion of doing good, and the unblooded twenty-year-old with his camp-bed and his cigars was still not so far removed from that small-boy self. On the other hand, his most mundane account or annotation reads, simply, ‘ptomaine [food] poisoning’.11 Whatever the cause, the condition was immediately alarming. He was carted off on a stretcher to the nearest field ambulance, and then to the casualty clearing station at Corbie. ‘Next day I felt better, and my temperature was down, so I wanted to go back to the battalion – which merely convinced the doctors that I must be ill, so I was sent off, still on a stretcher, to the base hospital at Rouen. There the same thing happened, and I had trouble persuading the doctors to let me off being put on a hospital ship for England’ – a kind of Catch-22 in reverse. He remained in hospital for about a fortnight, scheming his release. He wanted to escape not only the doctors but also the entrenchers, and if at all possible rejoin a battalion of his 81

on art and war and terror own regiment, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI). More than anything, he wanted to see action. Eventually he got his chance. When out on afternoon leave, I slipped down to the base headquarters at Rouen and induced a friendly staff officer to post me to a battalion of the regiment stationed in the Ypres Salient that, after suffering heavy losses, was very short of officers. In retrospect it seems a strange choice and desire on my part – as Ypres was notoriously the worst sector of the front – but many of us at that time of inexperience had a similar desire to test ourselves by experience of the worst.12

He took the train for Ypres that same night and joined the battalion (6th KOYLI) near Poperinghe. When half of them were sent forward, in support, Liddell Hart went too, as second in command of a company. His most fervent wish was about to be granted. The Salient was a nightmarish place. The enemy was various. By the time Liddell Hart got there, in November, the front-line trenches were so deeply filled with water that it lapped over the top of his rubber thigh-boots. Unspeakable things floated and bloated in the water. Many of the black-joke communication trenches were flooded to the brim. Everything that was not submerged was covered in the infamous, glutinous Flanders mud – mud thick enough to drown a man on a dark night, if he was lucky or unlucky enough not to be caught in a flare and a lace of flame, or swept by fi re in the beaten zone, or snagged or sniped or strafed or shelled or shocked beyond endurance at what the grateful rats were eating. The Salient was a fit place to play the lion. Liddell Hart was given an under-strength half-company (about fifty men) and ordered to hold a 300-yard stretch of unprotected trench line abandoned three months earlier after heavy German bombardment – levelled by le bon dieu Boche – and inundated by the autumn rains. The position was reliably reported to be a death trap. Shelling had recommenced; something else would surely follow. During the night Liddell Hart kept the men busy bailing out and digging in, and learned that the enemy were clearing away the barbed wire in front of their trenches in preparation for the expected assault. He confided his thoughts to a trusty notebook. Here he was, alone in the Ypres Salient, unconnected by telephone with any other officer: ‘If the line ahead of me (which is the front line) some 500 yards ahead breaks, as it is very weak, I have to hold on at all costs and to die on the spot but never to retire. In this event I have 82

broomstick horrors to block the two main communication trenches such as they are and hold fugitives, if necessary, back by using my revolver, and to divert all, except the badly wounded, into the second line.’ His predicament was immortalised by Stendhal: We must admit that our hero was very little of a hero at this juncture. However, fear came to him only as a secondary emotion, he was principally shocked by the noise, which hurt his ears . . . ‘Ah! So I am under fi re at last,’ he said to himself. ‘I have seen the fi ring!’ he repeated with a sense of satisfaction. ‘Now I am a real soldier.’13

Liddell Hart was a real soldier. What is more, he had his own show. In self-conception, it was not a small one. ‘In other words’, he continued, ‘I have to act as a rallying point, and I hold my hands to a good degree the destinies of England in the event of the line being broken. While a rather overaweing thought it is an inspiring one.’ Luckily, it did not come to this. The following day the shelling continued unabated but the attack failed to materialize. It was decided that no one should be asked to hold such a beastly bit of line for more than twenty-four hours, and Liddell Hart and his men were withdrawn that night.14 ‘Had to do a “die at your post rather than retire” stunt,’ he scribbled to his parents when out of the line. ‘What about a parcel.’ The casualties from this stunt were ‘hellish’. Liddell Hart himself was not one of them, it transpires, though his casualty status was not immediately apparent, to him or to anyone else. His diary records the closest shave: ‘One shell has just burst two minutes ago over our dug-out and a piece of shell has just come through the door and fallen within a few inches of me. It was red hot, and a narrow escape.’ He told his parents that ‘the sandbags which formed the sides of the door were riddled with pieces of shell, but only dirt hit me. The shock however shook me up a good bit and burst blood vessels in my nose, causing frequent nose bleeding for twenty-four hours.’ Later on he wrote of being ‘semi-concussed’; later still, ‘concussed’, tout court, by sandbags from the dug-out, brought down on top of him by the force of the explosion. Whether this was embellishment or explanation is a moot point. Nevertheless he seems to have kept going for those twenty-four hours. The next night, however, the grogginess and the bleeding and the vomiting so much got the better of him that he was once again stretchered out of the war. From the casualty clearing station at Hazebrouck he was despatched by train to the Duchess of Westminster’s Hospital at Le Touquet, and from there by hospital 83

on art and war and terror ship across the Channel to the promised land of clean sheets, long sleeps and square meals. This time he made no protest.15 Liddell Hart was safe and, apparently, sound. In some fashion he had grown up. Certainly he had learned things about himself: disquieting things. ‘During this first visit to France I found that I did not mind bullets at all, but disliked shells exceedingly.’ He had a searing memory of being shelled while lying helpless on a stretcher, sick with fear. Fear of death from the air, in various forms, gnawed at him for most of his life. During the war, paradoxically, it was more easily containable. Being shelled, after all, was the infantryman’s lot. Later on, if not shells, it was bombs, or even for a while, aircraft themselves – an obsession that developed in the late 1920s ‘from numerous narrow shaves by low-diving aircraft on manoeuvres, and the memory of seeing earlier crashes, that an aeroplane would crash on top of me’ – an ironical predicament for the passionate advocate of airpower.16 Even more disturbing was to be alone, he discovered, especially in the dark: ‘To be alone was the rarest of wartime experiences; so rare, indeed, that when it happened it produced an acute sense of unease.’ He identified very closely with a striking passage in Sidney Rogerson’s artless evocation of the embers of the Somme, Twelve Days (1933), to which he contributed a soberly responsive foreword. ‘Throughout the war this was my worst nightmare’, wrote Rogerson: ‘to be alone, and lost and in danger. Worse than all the anticipation of battle, all the fear of mine, raid, or capture was this dread of being struck down somewhere where there was no one to fi nd me, and where I should lie till I rotted back slowly into the mud. I had seen those to whom it had happened.’17 Liddell Hart would revisit these fears sooner than he knew. In February 1916, after a period of convalescent leave, he was posted to 3rd KOYLI, the draft-fi nding unit for the regular battalions, then stationed at Hull. The adjutant there held that young officers who had served at the front needed taking down a peg or two so that they would not ‘play the veteran’. Liddell Hart was sent to what the subalterns called the penal settlement of Aldbrough, nearby, where a detachment was stationed to guard the coast road. Fifty years later he could still recall the ‘long and lone walk every night to visit each of the posts along the road, which was closed to traffic. Pitch-darkness and current spy scares made the round rather eerie.’18 More spectacularly, a few nights after he arrived, he had his first taste of a Zeppelin raid. This, too, he remembered vividly: ‘As 84

broomstick horrors there was no defence, the two airships hovered low over the city, and one could see the gleam of light each time a trapdoor opened to drop a bomb.’ H. G. Wells’s nightmare ‘fantasia of possibility’ had come true. ‘No place is safe – no place is at peace. There is no place where a woman and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air fleets passing overhead – dripping death – dripping death!’ The ‘moral effect’ (that is to say, the psychological impact) of this primitive terror bombing on the civilian population – and not only the civilian population – made an indelible impression on Liddell Hart. ‘Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals?’ he asked with a rhetorical flourish in Paris, or The Future of War (1925). ‘Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter wintry sky – the exposure must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from two or three Zeppelins.’ A decade later he was already worried about the threat of more devastating raids. To one staunch optimist he wrote: ‘with regard to possible bombing attacks on this country, you say “you cannot frighten English people that way, you will only infuriate them”. I wish I could pin my confidence to such a belief, but the impression left by being stationed at Hull during a sequence of Zeppelin raids . . . leaves me with a doubt.’19 In due course he went before the Hull medical board, notorious for its draconian pronouncements on any conceivable reluctance, and was immediately asked whether he wished to return to France. A prompt yes passed him fit. He set off from Charing Cross on the same train, from the same platform, as the previous year. After a short interval at the vast base camp at Étaples, in June 1916 he was sent to 9th KOYLI (21st Division), billeted at Buire, on the Ancre, just north of his previous location, and roughly five miles behind the front line of the Fricourt sector. Here he took over as second in command of D Company, and with mounting anticipation joined in preparations for the day, Z day, that everyone knew was coming. Z day – the first day of the Battle of the Somme – was originally scheduled for 29 June but eventually postponed for forty-eight hours, until 1 July, on account of the weather. Most of the battalion had gone up the line to take their allotted place in the division’s assault front, midway between Fricourt and La Boisselle, singing ‘Pack 85

on art and war and terror Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag’ as they went. Liddell Hart remained at Buire. It was generally believed that the attack would be a cakewalk. In his capacity as second in command, Liddell Hart was one the nucleus of officers held in immediate reserve, together with an assorted group of cooks and bottle-washers, ready to carry on in the unimaginable event that others were knocked out. This precaution almost certainly saved his life. On 1 July the fi rst wave went over the top at 7.30 a.m. Others followed in quick succession. By 1.30 p.m., half of the officers of the regiment were dead, including the four company commanders and the hapless CO, annihilated by a whizz-bang on the parapet of his own trench. Three died of wounds soon after, eight were wounded but survived until the next time, and one alone was left untouched. Only five officers succeeded in reaching the German front line, roughly 350 yards away. Two of these did not live to tell the tale. A third was shipped home a few days later, unable to continue his war. In all, Liddell Hart’s battalion lost some 450 men (out of about 800) in the three days 1–3 July, most of them in the fi rst hour of the fi rst day. Early in the afternoon of the first day the call went out for five officers in reserve to report themselves to Brigade HQ at Méaulte, about three miles down the road. Liddell Hart, Lancelot Spicer, his opposite number in C Company, and three others buckled on their kit and set off, Spicer taking charge. So began an anabasis almost worthy of the wide-eyed Fabrizio at Waterloo. The little group started walking and running along the road, but it was a warm day and they were suitably grateful when an old horse ambulance, pressed into service to ferry the wounded from the battle field, gave them a lift on its way back. They reported first to a staff captain in Méaulte, who told them some of the story and sent them on to the brigadier himself, now established in advanced headquarters in the old front-line trenches, who told them the rest. What remained of the battalion was on the aptly-named Sunken Road between Fricourt and Contalmaison, behind and roughly parallel with the old German front line, with forward elements in Crucifi x Trench, which ran across and beyond it. Spicer and his band were to get forward as fast as they could, relieve the officers, rally the men, and, as soon as the reserve brigade arrived, reorganise the battalion in South Sausage Support, a trench line still behind the original German front but not as far behind as the Sunken Road. The orders were easier to give than to receive. These positions – if they could be found – were at least three-quarters of a mile away, perhaps 86

broomstick horrors more, across the debatable land between the lines, in the teeth of the enemy’s guns, which continued to function as efficiently as ever. Snipers, apparently, were everywhere. The five were hot and tired and scared, and they had hardly begun. They waited out an extra-heavy barrage, and then they were off again, over the lonely top, pell-mell into the void. The disorientation of no man’s land was complete. On all sides lay a blasted waste. Animal and mineral congealed, nauseously. The air moaned. The flesh cringed. The crack and thump and whoop and crash of shot and shell was terrifying. The clamour of the wounded was agonising. Treading on your own men was excruciating. Ignoring them was worse. Between dodging the living and dodging the dead, maintaining a sense of direction was almost impossible. Not surprisingly, they lost their way. After wandering high and low across the field of battle, and narrowly escaping the attentions of several well-placed snipers, they eventually discovered the makeshift battalion HQ in a large dug-out just off the Sunken Road, and tumbled in, ‘somewhat jaded’, according to the laconic Spicer. It was somewhere between 9.00 and 11.00 p.m. At around midnight, in the absence of anyone more senior, Spicer himself assumed temporary command of the remnants of the battalion from the courageous young subaltern who had carried them that far, despite a wound to his jaw. It had taken the relief party some nine hours to effect a relief. War and the intervals of war . . . After two desperate days and nights under the grinding conversation of the guns, 9th KOYLI were withdrawn late on 3 July. Liddell Hart had been lucky. He had survived the fi rst day of the Battle of the Somme virtually unscathed. After a week of rest they shipped out once more, for a renewed offensive against the German second line. The assault was to be delivered by another brigade, newly arrived, with 9th KOYLI and its two sister battalions in support. Their primary objective was Bazentin-le-Petit Wood and the village beyond. The way led through the charnel-house of Mametz Wood – ‘the putrescent forest, and the dead, putrid too’ – where Liddell Hart (now commanding C Company) was warned off, prophetically, by a Shakespearian gravedigger. He composed his own goodbye on 15 July, but prudently delayed posting it. C Company formed the immediate brigade reserve. The following day, 16 July, as the fighting continued and became increasingly confused, they were ordered to occupy an old German trench just 87

on art and war and terror behind Bazetin-le-Petit Wood, to fill a gap that had arisen after two companies from another battalion had evidently missed their way. Liddell Hart and his men cowered through Mametz Wood under murderous harassing fi re, shells splintering the trees as they inched by. The company commander sustained a minor wound: I got a puncture in my hand, but after getting the wound bandaged, I carried on, as only one other officer [Beattie] was left. Moreover, he was so inexperienced and jumpy that the NCOs who were commanding the platoons came to me, together, to complain that he was upsetting the men. Shortly afterward he came to show me an almost invisible prick in his skin, so I seized the chance of sending him back for medical treatment, with a note asking that he should not be returned as I could manage better without his assistance. 20

Finally they found the designated trench, took cover, and clenched tight, the targets of some gruesome gunnery practice, for the next twenty-four hours. For Liddell Hart it was a repeat predicament – again helpless, again bereft, this time by his own doing. What happened next, and the meaning of what happened next, remains intensely obscure, in spite of the fact that Liddell Hart himself essayed or assayed the story on at least four occasions, two of them soon after and two them long after the event – and all in some measure commingled – to say nothing of the ant-like activity in between: the habitual self-analyses, the indefatigable enquiries, the serial histories, these last religiously mute on his own experience, yet by no means autobiographically silent. There is, indeed, a superabundance of Liddell Hart. Corroborative testimony, however, is sadly lacking. The battalion war diary is no help, though that is only to be expected. The war diary is a fragmented and untrustworthy document, kept erratically and as like as not laggardly, for the good reason that for the war diarist, unlike other diarists, diary keeping may prove fatal, and for the less good reason that there is usually something to hide. War diaries are in fact official diaries – ‘washroom prattle and adjutants’ gossip’ (Hans Delbrück) – by analogy with official histories. Adept in excoriation of the latter, Liddell Hart might well have appreciated how fitting was his fate to be written out of the former. More unexpectedly, private correspondence is no help. Spicer’s résumés for his parents indicate the fate of most of his fellows, including ‘poor old Gordon’ (who had a breakdown after his experiences on 1 July); but there is no mention of poor old Hart. Simply put, on the evening of 16 July 1916, Liddell Hart disappeared into Mametz Wood. For a brief but crowded moment he, too, 88

broomstick horrors was one of the missing of the Somme. Magically, on the morning of 18 July 1916, he reappeared. Between disappearance and reappearance is a blank slate on which he alone has written. Faute de mieux, therefore, Liddell Hart is his own best witness. Of his various accounts, the fullest near-contemporary one is contained in his unpublished ‘Impressions of the Great British Offensive on the Somme’, a short book or long booklet by ‘a company commander who saw three and a half weeks of it’, mostly a familiar exaltation of the already over-exalted, the typescript dated 8 September 1916. It runs as follows: That night [17–18 July] at midnight we were relieved, and I sent my company back by platoons, when as we were passing down the [disused] railway through Mametz Wood, now stronger and more pungent than ever with the miasma of death and decay, the Germans started bombarding the wood and our gun positions near it with thousands of a new sort of shell. At fi rst, as these shells came over like whizz-bangs and fell to the ground around us without exploding, and there was no noise and no flash, we thought they were ordinary shells which had failed to explode and we were congratulating ourselves on our lucky escapes, when suddenly the air was full of the fumes of gas, and we realised that the Germans had just started to use a new invention, a highly poisonous gas shell, which killed a lot of our gunners and others. My personal interest in the offensive ceased from now on. 21

On which enigmatic note it ends. And now no view of him whether he makes a sally, no possibility of informed action nor certain knowing whether he gives or turns to stand. No longer light of day on the quick and the dead but blindfold beating the air and tentative step by step deployment of the shades; grope in extended line of platoon through nether glooms concentrically, trapes phantom flares, warily circumambulate malignant miraged obstacles, walk confidently into hard junk. Solid things dissolve and vapours ape substantiality. You know the bough hangs low, by your bruised lips and the smart to your cheek bone. When the shivered rowan fell you couldn’t hear the fall of it. Barrage with counter-barrage shockt deprive all sounds of their identity, what dark convulsed cacophony conditions each disparity and the trembling woods are vortex for the storm; through which their bodies grope their mazy charnel-ways – 89

on art and war and terror seek to distinguish men from walking trees and branchy moving like a Birnam copse. You sensed him near you just now, but that’s more like a nettle to the touch; & on your left Joe Donkin walked, where only weeds stir to the night gusts if you feel with your hand. All curbs for fog-walkers, stumble stones and things set up for the blind, jutments you meet suddenly, dark hidden ills, lurkers who pounce, what takes you unawares, things thrust from behind or upward, low purlins for high chambers, blocks and hard-edged clobber to litter dark entries, what rides the air as broom-stick horrors fly – clout you suddenly, come on you softly, search to the liver, like Garlon’s truncheon that struck invisible. 22

In the matter of Liddell Hart and Mametz Wood, history will not avail us. The evidence gives out. Poetry has the longer reach. David Jones’s re-imagination furnishes some clues, and some pointed questions. What became of the fog-walker in the wood? What ills assailed him? What took him unawares? What broom-stick horrors flew? The new horror was phosgene, ‘more deadly although less painful than the chlorine gas fi rst used in war the year before’, as Liddell Hart put it in his memoirs, published in 1965. There, after a long intermission, he continued his narrative: I was coughing violently but stayed on the spot to warn and direct the platoons that were following, and then hurried on to catch the leading platoon at the rallying point, and lead them all back to the battalion bivouac [near Méaulte]. When morning came I went to the nearest field ambulance to get my earlier [hand] wound freshly dressed – feeling rather bad but still unaware how bad. There they insisted on examining my chest, and immediately put me on a stretcher. 23

What they diagnosed may be inferred from the ‘Notes for Autobiography (of Basil Henry Liddell Hart) written in 1920’, an early presumption on posterity, in which it is confidently reported that, by morning on 18 July, ‘I had developed bronchitis and my heart was dilated.’24 Once stretchered, there followed a reprise of 1915: swift passage via Corbie to the Duchess of Westminster’s at Le Touquet, and so, after a short stay, to London. What can be deduced from all this? In the small hours of 18 July 1916, Liddell Hart, already shocked, was shelled, panicked and gassed, probably in that order, in a dark wood. He did not know exactly what had hit him in that incomprehensible place, but he did 90

broomstick horrors know that it was having an effect. He was coughing violently. He had that merciless taste at the back of his nose and throat. His chest must have felt as if it were being compressed by an iron band that was gradually getting tighter.25 Was he lost, besides, in the mazy charnelways? He may well have been, at least for some of the time, especially if he strayed from the railway (which would have served to guide his platoons, but also the German gunners). Was he alone, alone with the lurkers? More likely, he was alone with his shadow – his human shadow – his soldier servant, one of the nameless and faceless of this war, and of all wars. Officers, more than most mortals, were almost never totally alone – which is not to deny that they themselves may have felt it. Not totally alone, perhaps, but alone enough, among the decaying dead, with a fine prospect of joining them; and no remains. This was the sum of Sidney Rogerson’s worst fears. Was it also Liddell Hart’s? It seems that it was. His lurkers pounced in Mametz Wood. How did he acquit himself? Did he give or turn to stand? What did it cost him? In the inimitable argot of the Field Service Post Card, was Liddell Hart quite well? Outwardly, he did not give: so he says. There is more to be said than that, however, and it is greatly to his credit that he himself made several attempts over the years to say it. ‘You remark that you “saw the men of England go bravely into battle”’ he replied to a correspondent in 1935. ‘So did many of us, but we also know, if we are honest with ourselves, that men were not always like they are pictured in heroic poems; that it is hard to keep up morale when men are tired, hungry and sick; that it is worst of all when they cannot ease the strain by having someone to fight against; and that there are more than a few occasions when even “the men of England” suffered from panic like normal human beings, especially when suffering from shock and surprise and shaken by some intangible danger. True history and “patriotic history” have little in common.’ Once weaned off ‘Really Great British Generals’, Liddell Hart became a notable cosmopolitan – ‘A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country but his own’ – as some of his countrymen undoubtedly came to feel. He would ransack the official blasphemies and stigmatise as ‘patriotic’ or ‘parochial’ the spineless chauvinism and peevish involution he too often encountered there.26 His sympathetic discussion of ‘the men of England’ had a strong personal undertone – self-confessedly, he was one of them – but it was couched overall in terms of the collectivity. Four years later, in 1939, on the eve of 91

on art and war and terror another war, one of his ‘reflections’ offered a personal statement of a more unfettered kind: How easy it would be on the facts to represent oneself in a heroic light. For it is a fact that I bombarded my parents into giving their permission, as officially required, to me joining up in 1914; it is a fact that in 1915 I refused the offer of a staff job, which would have carried promotion, in order to seize the fi rst chance of going out to France; it is a fact that when in hospital in Rouen that autumn I resisted being sent back to hospital in England and, instead, contrived to secure a transfer to the hottest part of the front, the Ypres Salient; it is a fact that the following year I again refused the chance of staying on home service; it is a fact that in Bazentin in the Somme Offensive I remained in the front line two days, until we were relieved, after having had an adequate excuse for going back – in a puncture which at any rate was not so slight as the wound which my second in command got and for which I sent him back; it is a fact that my service at the front was only ended by gassing (from a surprise burst of the new phosgene gas-shells onto the track through Mametz Wood) sufficiently serious for me to receive the maximum wound award, and that the effects I suffered were largely due to the efforts made in warning my other platoons when I should have let myself be carried down. All that sounds quite noble. But it is not all the facts – as I am aware of them. It does not record the extent to which they were due to a fear of being afraid, nor the extent to which I yielded to fear. 27

What are we to make of this ironic recapitulation, trumped by a cryptic confession (if that is what it is)? To all outward appearances the performance remains unchanged. The fog-walker is in the wood. Still he turns to stand – repeatedly. But now the essential truthfulness of the performance has been called into question. Inwardly, he gives: so he also says. There is a mismatch between visage and viscera. The performance is revealed to be just that – a performance – not truthfulness, certainly not whole truthfulness, merely a threadbare vraisemblance. That remarkable second paragraph cuts close to something vitally important for Liddell Hart, particularly in the personally catastrophic period immediately before and after the outbreak of the Second World War. Having come through the first, he knew that he was not physically brave. After the Somme – even on the Somme – Liddell Hart lacked intestinal fortitude. In and out of Mametz Wood, the liver had been searched, painfully, and found wanting. Officially, he was 50 per cent disabled from gas poisoning, prone to breathlessness and palpitation, underweight and overgrown, and fit only for ‘Light Duty in an Office’. For Basil Hart the real war 92

broomstick horrors was over – or about to begin. The only offices on the Western Front were at the Western Rear, and he was too junior to be a château general. He was undismayed, as yet. Unofficially, he made a rapid recovery. Before the month was out he was in correspondence with the KOYLI depot about his transfer, not forgetting his rank and seniority, and with the officers of his battalion about the much-mocked ‘Beattie’s blighty’. In the future, some of his behaviour might well be characterised as neurotic or hysterical, or in more clinical language neurasthenic; but there is scant evidence of any deep-seated war neurosis, as the term is usually understood. Liddell Hart’s case was more akin to that of another famous veteran, and later a close collaborator, Robert Graves. For a short period after the war that sly self-advertiser found a temporary billet in Islip, near Oxford. ‘The villagers called me “The Captain”; otherwise I had a few reminders of the war, except my yearly visit to the standing medical board. The board continued for some years to recommend me for a disability pension. My particular disability was neurasthenia; the train journey and the first-class army railway-warrant filled out with my rank and regiment usually produced reminiscential neurasthenia by the time I reached the board.’28 Perhaps the imputation is unfair. The two writer-captains had a lot in common, including practised self-advertisement, but slyness was never one of Liddell Hart’s strong suits. It would be presumptuous to say that he was undamaged, given his general disposition and his on-going obsessions and anxieties. Many of his fibrillations and tribulations could be interpreted as a classic case of ‘soldier’s heart’. According to expert opinion, this is ‘a condition of instability and abnormal irritability of the nervous and circulatory systems, of unknown cause’ – and, it is now clear, an element of social construction. ‘It is neither fatigue per se, nor infection, nor nervous strain, nor psychoneurosis; it is a state of ill-health which may attend or follow each of these conditions or indeed others too, or even possibly stand alone.’ However constructed, for some individuals (the constitutionally inadequate, as they were known) soldier’s heart was not only an incontrovertible reality but a more or less chronic condition.29 One of them was Liddell Hart. ‘Constitutionally inadequate’, in fact, describes him almost perfectly. He grew up that way, and his adventures on the Somme significantly exacerbated the problem. But psychologically he was never seriously at risk. He did not have a breakdown, as many did. Or rather, he had a similar sort of breakdown to the protesting Siegfried 93

on art and war and terror Sassoon – ‘I haven’t broken down, I’ve only broken out’ – except that in Liddell Hart’s case the breakout was not contemporaneous with the war but long after it. He did not feel alienated, as many did. Or rather, he felt a similar sort of alienation to the despairing Wilfred Owen – ‘all a poet can do today is warn, that is why the true poets must be truthful’ – except that in Liddell Hart’s case again the syndrome was much delayed, and the despair transferred from the fi rst war to the second.30 The parallels are not fortuitous. Liddell Hart was a war poet of a kind, not because he wrote in verse, but because he, too, spent his life chiselling and transmuting war as he knew it into war as we know it, with less sublimity, certainly, but hardly less passion, and in his day, greater réclame; and also because he too, half-knowingly, embraced a contradiction, as fundamental to his life as it was fruitful for his art. Like the others, the mature Liddell Hart was profoundly humane. He abhorred war. He abhorred its irrationality, its contagion, its waste: ‘It is not the horrors of war that will deter any virile young man from welcoming it, but the plain truth that, instead of a gallant adventure, he is setting out on a farcical futility,’ he recorded in 1934, twenty years after his ‘Credo’. In some crevice of his consciousness was always the fog-walker in the wood. ‘I am haunted by the struggle against the poison gas,’ wrote André Malraux. ‘Is this because I pinned down the events of the Vistula long ago, or because . . . that crazed, bloodless struggle may seem a premonition?’31 Liddell Hart was prone to premonition. Yet in the final analysis, stubbornly weighting the scales, there was a small grain of the mature being which never ceased entirely its juvenile exaltation; which never completely surrendered the notion that, in spite of the Salient, in spite of the Somme, in spite of all, war could be an uplifting experience. The same notion is impregnated in the lines of Owen and Sassoon. It is not sweet to die for your country. It is bitter. But it can be noble. ‘There are many wonderful things, and nothing is more wonderful than man.’32 Like a true war poet, Liddell Hart was given his voice by something he hated – rhapsodically. In this sense, but belatedly, Liddell Hart found himself on the Somme. Yet his confession, like all confessions, was materially incomplete. ‘Every confession has an ulterior motive’, says Valéry: ‘fame, scandal, an excuse, or propaganda.’33 As he had written, Liddell Hart was afraid of being afraid – and of yielding to fear. Like Vigny’s captain, he was reluctant to admit that he was also afraid of being thought to be afraid.34 94

broomstick horrors Liddell Hart knew well enough that ‘the only currency of unchallengeable value which circulates in an army is a reputation for courage’.35 Publicly and privately he did what he could to devalue it. In his historical writings, the principal vehicle for that effort was the reputation of General Sir John Monash (1861–1935), commander of the Australian Corps on the Western Front in 1918. In the well-bred circles of the British Army, Monash had a good deal to live down. Not only was he Australian, and Jewish, and highly accomplished; he was not by profession a soldier but a civil engineer. Such a profile was quite sufficient to cater for most of the common prejudices, but that was not all. There was, as Liddell Hart delicately put it, ‘another cause’. If a man’s courage is his capital (in Lord Moran’s famous metaphor), and he is always spending, Monash’s account was alleged to be overdrawn. He was thought to lack the he-man stuff. As one of Liddell Hart’s correspondents informed him, Monash ‘had the moral courage to get rid of an officer who did not like bullets while he himself I really believe hated them just as much. He was, as you know, a Jew and I have only met one Jew who was physically brave.’36 For Liddell Hart, ‘Monash had probably the greatest capacity for command in modern war among all who held command’ in the First World War. He promoted this view sedulously and successfully throughout the inter-war period, most conspicuously through the inspired medium of Lloyd George’s war memoirs, a six-volume blockbuster, during the composition of which the canny Welsh wizard made sure to pump ‘the world’s great military historian’ very thoroughly for his opinions on strategy and command, keeping him on a retainer for the purpose. The military historian himself was strikingly free of militarily prejudices – except for the obstinate marble-mindedness of the high command – and he did not subscribe to any of those contaminating Monash. Liddell Hart was generally unprejudiced, and usually magnanimous. He was prepared to warrant the popular allegation of Monash’s relative deficit in physical courage, but his central concern was, painter-like, to recast the conventional figuration. Thus, Monash was by no means a born leader of tradition, delighting in danger. But if he was not seen much in the front trenches, he covered this deficiency of personal observation by an uncanny mastery of what was reported and by a masterly organization of his intelligence, so that he saw more exactly through these compound lenses than anybody else with their own eyes. Moreover, he had the rarer type of courage – moral courage.37 95

on art and war and terror Here was the nub of the matter. Liddell Hart believed – more exactly, he was obliged to believe – that physical courage was an overrated quality as compared with moral courage. Contrary to ancient military wisdom, time spent on reconnaissance is often wasted, Monash liked to say, ‘by the incompetent commander during which he hopes that some plan will suggest itself to his muddy brain’. To be well forward might conform to the insufferable ideal – as T. E. Lawrence told Liddell Hart, physical courage is the essential demand of the typical British officer – but it might not axiomatically be best.38 Well forward, as Liddell Hart understood, lurkers lay in wait. He set out his case in a deeply-felt letter to General Sir Edmund Ironside, a marble-minded antagonist, by way of rebutting the latter’s prejudicial account of Monash’s supposed deficiencies. Suggestively, it begins with Monash and ends with himself: In criticism of Monash you maintained that no-one who was a physical coward could be a good tactician, or have the necessary strength of character for leadership. On both counts I disagree. The fi rst I have discussed with innumerable fighting soldiers, and have found a general consensus of opinion that a man could rarely be a good tactician unless he had a fair degree of fear in his composition . . . I agree that for leadership of troops in the field it is necessary to be able to hide one’s own fears, but that is a different thing from not having them. I can even add some evidence from my personal experience: I know myself well enough to be quite aware that I am rather below, than above, the average in physical courage; yet, when I left one battalion, the men took the somewhat unusual step of subscribing among themselves to give me, as a parting token, a cigarette case inscribed to the effect that they would follow me ‘to hell’; and one of my COs reported on me to the same effect. So you may grant that I have at any rate some reason to know that the ability of winning men’s confidence in one’s leadership does not depend on being physically brave!39

‘Rather below, than above, the average in physical courage’. Was confession becoming addictive? Ironside was the old pretender; militarily, he would be king. There was no obvious need to say as much to him. Unless, of course, the venial sin was only a device to introduce the clinching cigarette case – a brilliant stroke – and win the argument, the victory sealed with a jubilant exclamation mark. If that is how things were, then the victory, like many victories, had a certain hollowness to it. The personal experience he recounted so conclusively to Ironside was a piece of Liddell Hartian selffashioning, perhaps a necessary piece, invoked again in his memoirs. 96

broomstick horrors It all happened as he said; but not as he implied. ‘Historical facts are, in essence, psychological facts,’ said the French historian Marc Bloch. ‘They therefore fi nd their antecedents in other psychological facts.’40 The facts of the famous cigarette case are very psychological. That parting token did not come from his old comrades on the Somme, but from the bookkeepers and counter clerks who made up the 4th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Volunteer Regiment, puffi ng verdantly to and fro, up hill and down dale, biffing imaginary Boche into the Severn. Some of these citizen-soldiers surely would follow him to hell, as inscribed, or for preference to a beery smoker in central Stroud. To be precise, the wording of the inscription was the brainchild of the men from the Merry and Bright Section.41 The case itself was buried in his bottom drawer. Liddell Hart was undeniably hot for truth. He also had a talent for fugue. ‘It is a mistake to talk and think of people as either black or white,’ he reflected later. ‘But it is also a mistake to think of them as grey. They are black and white.’ Who under the green tree had awareness of his disremembering, and deep-bowelled damage; for whom the green tree bore scarlet memorial, and herb and arborage waste?42

Notes 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 112–13. 2. ‘Credo’, 28 November 1914, in Alex Danchev, Alchemist of War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), pp. 43–4 (emphases in original). 3. Liddell Hart [LH], ‘A Poet in the Trenches’, Daily Telegraph, 19 September 1930; thought, 7 August 1932, in Alchemist, p. 45. C. S. Forester, The General (1936), an imaginative tour de force, was ‘vetted’ by LH in proof and is strikingly LH-like in outlook – an influence or consonance already present, for they had not yet met, and LH’s comments were mostly confi ned to technicalities. 4. LH to his parents, 9 September 1915, in Alchemist, p. 45; Commandant Henches, in Guy Chapman, A Kind of Survivor (London: Gollancz, 1975), p. 66. 5. T. H. Thomas, review of LH’s The Real War (1930), in Alchemist, p. 46; Jacques Meyer, in Chapman, Survivor, p. 76. 6. John Buchan, Memory Hold-The-Door (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), p. 172. 97

on art and war and terror 7. LH to his parents, 27 May 1916, in Alchemist, p. 47. 8. Cf. Guy Chapman, A Passionate Prodigality [1933] (London: Buchan & Enright, 1985). 9. LH to his parents, 29 September and 6 October 1915, in Alchemist, p. 47; Chapman, Prodigality, p. 48. 10. LH, ‘Notes for Autobiography’ (1920), p. 5; Henri Barbusse, trans. W. Fitzwater Wray, Under Fire [1917] (London: Dent, 1926), p. 256. 11. Adrian Liddell Hart [ALH, his son], ‘The Real War Recalled’ (1980), in Alchemist, p. 48. ‘Intestinal poisoning due to gas shell’, in a contemporary notebook. 12. LH, ‘Forced to Think’, in George A. Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness (London: Cassell, 1968), p. 101. 13. Stendhal, trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw, The Charterhouse of Parma [1839] (London: Penguin, 1958), pp. 57–9 (Fabrizio at Waterloo). 14. Diary, 13–14 November 1915; LH to his parents, 17 and 18 November 1915, in Alchemist, pp. 49–50; ‘Forced to Think’, p. 102. His Memoirs do not mention this episode. 15. Diary, 15 November 1915; LH to his parents, 17 and 18 November 1915, in Alchemist, p. 50; Memoirs, pp. 15–16. ‘Shell Shock and gastritus’ in a contemporary notebook. 16. ‘Autobiography’, in Alchemist, p. 50. 17. ‘Foreword’ to Sidney Rogerson, Twelve Days (London: Barker, 1933), p. xii. The same passage is quoted, some thirty years later, in Memoirs, p. 17. 18. ‘Forced to Think’, p. 103. 19. Memoirs, p. 18; H. G. Wells, The War in the Air [1908] (London: Odhams, n.d.), pp. 167, 296; LH, Paris, or the Future of War (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), pp. 45–6; LH to Castlerosse, 22 March 1935, in Alchemist, pp. 51–2. ‘Moral’ used to be a more common form than ‘morale’. 20. ‘Forced to Think’, p. 110. 21. ‘Impressions’, in Alchemist, p. 59. 22. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber, 1937), pp. 179–80. 23. Memoirs, pp. 25–6. 24. ‘Autobiography’, in Alchemist, p. 61. 25. Cf. two other fog-walkers, one real (on the Somme) and one imagined (on the Vistula): Lord Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (London: Constable, 1945), pp. 136–9; André Malraux, trans. A. W. Fielding, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg [1941] (London: Lehmann, 1952), pp. 184–6. 26. LH to Castlerosse, 23 April 1935, and Edmonds, 6 November 1934, in Alchemist, p. 62; George Canning, ‘New Morality’ [1798], in Henry Morley (ed.), Parodies and Other Burlesque Pieces (London: Routledge, 1890), p. 328. 98

broomstick horrors 27. LH, ‘Reflection’, 23 April 1939, in Alchemist, pp. 62–3. 28. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That [1929] (London: Penguin 1960), p. 257. 29. Paul Dudley White, Heart Disease (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 514; Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s Heart’, in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (eds), Behind the Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 197–226. 30. Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (New York: Doubleday, 1936), p. 14; Wilfred Owen, draft preface [1918], in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto, 1990), p. 192. 31. LH, Thoughts on War (London: Faber, 1944), p. 38; Malraux, Lazarus, p. 93. 32. Sophocles, Antigone (1. 333). The reference is to Owen’s ‘old Lie’ (originally Horace’s old truth), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: it is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. 33. Paul Valéry, trans. Martin Turnell, Masters and Friends (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 197. 34. See Alfred de Vigny, trans. Roger Gard, Servitude and Grandeur of Arms [1835] (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 100–1. 35. John Keegan, ‘Regimental Ideology’, in Geoffrey Best and Andrew Wheatcroft (eds), War, Economy and the Military Mind (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 16. 36. LH, Through the Fog of War (London: Faber, 1938), p. 150; Jackson to LH, 4 0ctober 1935, in Alchemist, p. 66. 37. LH, Fog, p. 150. 38. Correspondence with Jackson, 1935; LH diary, 31 October 1933, in T. E. Lawrence to his Biographers (London: Cape 1963), p. 189. Conventionally, ‘time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted’. 39. LH to Ironside, 25 March 1937, in Alchemist, pp. 67–8. 40. Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire [1949] (Paris: Colin, 1974), pp. 57–8. 41. ‘Gloucester Volunteer Regiment’, Gloucestershire Echo, 29 October 1917. Cf. ‘With the Colours’, Stroud News and Gloucester Courier, 27 July 1917. 42. LH, reflection, 4 July 1936, in Alchemist, p. 68; Jones, Parenthesis, p. 162.

99

5

The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation

Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future. Georges Braque1 To become for someone else an example of the dedicated life, being secretly invoked, pictured, and placed by a stranger in a sanctum of his thoughts, so as to serve him as a witness, a judge, a father, a hallowed mentor. Paul Valéry2

The Second World War crept up on Europe, with almost Braquian slowness, during the winter of 1939–40. This was the drôle de guerre – the Phoney War – war declared but not yet battle joined. Seasoned Parisians carried their gas masks with soldierly resignation and expected the worst. They were not disappointed. At the declaration, in September 1939, Braque was at his second home in Varengeville, near Dieppe in Normandy, coaching Joan Miró in poker-work and life. Miró took refuge there throughout the Phoney War, renting a house in the village and seeking his own version of renewal. Down the lane was the great Georges Braque. The newcomer went to call on him regularly. Miró’s working notes offer glimpses of what passed between them: The preparation of the series of large canvases for Daphnis and Chloe is very unsatisfactory; if you press on the back of them with your fi nger the preparatory coat comes off. Use a solvent to remove that preparation and then give the canvas a coat of white lead or casein, the preparation Braque and Balthus use . . . Using the lost wax process – which Braque taught me – I could make some designs that could later be made in gold, like the primitive Mexicans used to . . . I could start out by taking red-hot irons and applying them to the wood the way Braque and Mariette did . . .3

In spite of the times, Miró profited in both creation and reflection. Encouraged by Braque, he began an experimental series of works 100

the strategy of still-life on paper, Constellations, in which he played with surface texture, natural phenomena, Biblical allusion, and contemporary reference – the second in the series is called The Escape Ladder (1940) – producing some of his strongest images.4 Propinquity paid dividends. Miró was inspired by Braque’s example: ‘Look to Braque,’ he reminded himself, ‘as a model for everything that is skill, serenity, and reflection.’5 After a few months in Varengeville he was already talking about attaining ‘a high degree of poetry’ from the contemplative life he was leading. Twenty years later, when he spoke of his working methods, he sounded exactly like his hallowed mentor: ‘I work like a gardener or a wine-grower. Things come slowly. I didn’t find my vocabulary of forms, for example, all of a sudden. It developed almost in spite of me.’6 Braque may have appeared serene, but he was not. Earlier that year, the magazine Cahiers d’Art published the responses to one of its periodic surveys, on the influence of events in the outside world on the creative artist – politically, a delicate matter. Creative artists of every colouration were asking themselves the same question. ‘Oh heavens, yes, I am well aware in what sense I could say with Valéry that “events do not interest me”,’ mused André Gide in his journal. ‘None of the things I cherish spiritually is dependent on this war, to be sure; but the future of France, our future, is at stake. Everything that still concerns our thought may disappear, sink into the past, cease to have for the men of tomorrow anything but an archaic meaning. Other problems, unsuspected yesterday, may trouble those to come, who will not even understand our reason for existing . . .’7 Braque could have said the same. He was more unsettled by the gathering storm than might have been supposed. His response to Cahiers d’Art constituted perhaps the most important unmediated written evidence he was ever persuaded to give: Contemporary events influence the painter, that goes without saying, but to what extent and in what form they mingle in his work, that cannot be determined. In any case, the artist should not be expected to deliver a rounded verdict on the future of civilization. His role is not to prophesy. For all that, he still belongs to his time, even if he refuses to acknowledge certain a priori facts concerning either external events or the inner life. Ideas only ever enter his work as a driving force. They bear only a very indirect relationship to the expression of quality, and may disappear when the painter looks at his canvas. Quality itself is innate, and we can see it persist, standing the test of time. In art, it is fate of a kind that leads to valid decisions. For the rest, everything that does not assert itself 101

on art and war and terror irresistibly, irrefutably, engaging one’s whole being beyond all discussion, can only promise failure and destruction. Whether the end result conveys serenity or anxiety is something we cannot know. Do we need to repeat, here, [his maxim] that we are concerned with establishing not an anecdotal fact but a pictorial fact? The artist is always under threat . . . One cannot separate him from other men. He lives on the same level as everyone else. His role is much too serious for what he wishes to contribute to be called ‘escapism’ or ‘happy holidays’ [terms used in the inquiry]. I have never thought for one moment that art is an illusion. Whatever is viable in the creative process develops involuntarily. We do not give enough credit to the dark forces that drive us, that many – in their optimistic approach to the universe – seek to ignore, but that must be controlled, advancing slowly and continually rediscovering before us the mystery we are striving to repel. Changes of régime necessarily affect the life of the painter since, like everyone else, he lives through his age. But his work depends too much on the past for him to accommodate to the changes of the hour with a clear conscience. Who said: ‘We have to live out our previous life’? Fulfilment requires physical time; if it takes ten years to conceive and execute a canvas, how is the painter supposed to stay abreast of events? A painting is not a snapshot. Once again, this does not mean that the painter is not influenced, concerned and more by history; he can suffer without being militant. Only let us distinguish, categorically, between art and current affairs.8

Braque had been troubled by the march of events for some time. According to his own precept, he suffered without being militant: ‘The militant is a man behind a mask.’9 Guernicas were not his style. What mattered was staunchness: whether the work (and the worker) would hold. In this as in other matters he stood four-square with Paul Celan. The poet of the death fugue and the painter of the dustbin shared an unexpected sense of humour. ‘What a game!’ said Celan, of the poet-life and his own struggle. ‘What a joke!’ said Braque, of the famous northern light and his carefully-designed south-facing studios.10 Both men loved puns. ‘Something is rotten in the state of D-mark,’ quipped Celan, in a manner reminiscent of the cryptograms in Braque’s papiers collés.11 Both appropriated Apollinaire to their own concerns. Both felt a spiritual affinity with Hölderlin: But it is the sea That takes and gives remembrance, And love no less keeps eyes attentively fi xed, But what is lasting the poets provide.12 102

the strategy of still-life Celan’s characterisation of poetry as ‘a message in a bottle’ might well have appealed to Braque, for the element and the method of delivery, for the undertow of the work in motion, making towards the unknown; above all for the idea of art as a realm not subject to prediction or legislation, the bedrock faith of both practitioners. Celan also subscribed to slowness. His apothegm, ‘poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself’, could have come straight out of Braque’s notebook. His statement of purpose, ‘to sketch out reality for myself’, is pure Braque. So too his predicament, ‘stricken by and seeking reality’, and his immersive calling: ‘With art you go into your very selfmost straits. And set yourself free.’13 Both eschewed direct social comment and were criticised for it. Celan considered Brecht’s hammer-blow agitprop too ‘explicit’. Braque felt similarly about Picasso’s Communist capers and the famous dove of peace. Braque was not so much grower as remueur, turning the bottles over the years as the wine slowly ages. Impregnation could not be rushed or forced; hence the sharp distinction between art and ‘current affairs’. ‘I call “journalism” everything that will be less interesting tomorrow than today,’ wrote Gide. ‘How many great artists win their cases only on appeal!’14 There, too, Braque and Celan stand together. Yet both dwelt in the world, and on it. Braque did not go in for history painting. He had no wish to tell stories.15 His drum and trumpet played in private, quietly. There is no scream in Braque, no ecstatic ululation. There is the murmur of moral scruple. Ecstasy is easy: talent will see you through. Constancy is the lonelier furrow. ‘One is so alone in life that from time to time one feels the need to make something people like,’ he confided once to Louis Clayeux. His dealer, alert to the appetites of the dollar millionaires hungrily fingering their chequebooks, played on that all too human feeling.16 The chequebook Braque was a sore temptation – one more sumptuous still life for the wellappointed drawing room. ‘In art the temptation to please too easily is ever-present’, John Berger has observed: ‘it comes with mastery.’ This called for constant vigilance and self-scrutiny. Braque’s testamentary emphasis came from the heart: ‘It is very important for an artist to combat routine.’17 In his own fashion he was attentive to the times. Apart from the utterances in his notebook (‘the democracies have replaced pomp with luxury’), he did not make statements.18 He offered quiverings and intimations.19 Skulls began to appear in his still lifes in 1937. By the time of the Munich Agreement (September 1938), in which 103

on art and war and terror Britain and France accommodated to the changes of the hour by conniving at the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, he was at work on a series of Vanitas – still life as memento mori – culminating in a macabre Death’s Head (1943), at once mask and ghost. In the same period a skull invaded other compositions, doubling as a palette (a duality he relished), and floating eerily in space as if obeying a different law of gravity. Skulls are otherwise absent from his œuvre, but Braque made no concession to coincidence. Ever reluctant to explain, he claimed that his interest was purely technical: ‘I was fascinated by the tactile quality of the rosary and the formal problems of mass and composition posed by the skull.’20 He kept one in his studio in Varengeville, among his familiars. Skulls were like musical instruments; they came alive to the touch. Braque remembered a disturbing encounter with a mummy forty years earlier in the museum of his home town, Le Havre. ‘No external event, no matter how overwhelming its scope, engenders a work of art unless it becomes an inward occasion,’ as Leo Steinberg has said; and great artists have long memories.21 It is difficult to believe that he did not also remember a subsequent disturbance in no man’s land, in 1915, when he was shelled and trepanned and temporarily blinded. Georges Braque had a richer store of memento mori than most of humankind. The intimations intensified. In 1939, a beached boat hoisted a tricolour. With war imminent, Braque wavered. In August 1939 he and his wife, Marcelle, seriously considered making a dash for Geneva, and neutrality, before the borders closed. They were loath to go alone, and asked another couple to join them.22 Braque was careful not to reveal the identity of this couple, but it was almost certainly the sculptor Henri Laurens and his wife, Marthe, their closest friends. In the event nothing came of it. The idea was dropped and never resurrected. It may not have found favour with Laurens; Braque may have thought better of it; the drôlerie of the war in its initial stages may have encouraged them to stay put: it is impossible to be sure. Only one thing seems certain. Braque remained profoundly unsettled. For the first time since 1917, the end of his long convalescence from the trenches, he stopped painting. ‘Before the war . . . I’d started quite a few canvases’, he wrote to his dealer Paul Rosenberg in October 1939, ‘but the turbulence that’s arisen put a stop to all that. I haven’t gone back to painting and for about a month now I’ve been making sculptures, which I am greatly enjoying. It’s athletic work because I’ve got to bring stones up from 104

the strategy of still-life the beach that sometimes weigh more than 20 kilos.’23 Pleasure leached away with the winter rains. He was dogged by influenza. For the next few months he toiled at not painting. Phoney War made phoney work. His faithful studio assistant Mariette Lachaud watched over him in distress: ‘He was so shocked by the disaster that was looming . . . His sensitive soul couldn’t bear what he had already lived through personally during the First World War. It’s that above all that traumatized him for over a year.’24 On 10 May 1940 the weather turned vicious. The German armies overran Luxembourg, slashed through the Ardennes, cuffed the British, French and Belgian forces into the pocket of Dunkirk, abandoned them to their fate, overwhelmed General Gamelin, imposed an armistice on Marshal Pétain, occupied Paris, and staged a victory parade for the Führer on the Champs-Élysées. Hitler had achieved in seven weeks what the Germans had dreamt of for seventy years. The French counted 124,000 dead, a further 200,000 wounded, a field force shattered and a people humiliated. Rarely has a major power been so cruelly exposed. Luxury curdled into ignominy. Three days before the Panzers rolled, normal leave was restored for the French army. Of the cyclone that was about to hit them, the general staff had fewer intimations than Georges Braque. Tactically and psychologically, they were absolutely unready. So deeply were they committed to a cut-price cat-fight on someone else’s territory that they had nothing to offer when lightning war exploded in their faces. At one stage in the debacle the invaders took 10,000 prisoners in a day, for the loss of one officer and forty men. Churchill dignified it as the Battle of France. For the Germans it was a walkover. For the French it was not so much a military defeat as a national catastrophe. France had been eviscerated. In Paris, as the Panzers bore down, Matisse bumped into Picasso: ‘Where are you going like that?’ asked Picasso. ‘To my tailor,’ replied Matisse. The other was astounded. ‘What, don’t you know that the front is completely broken through, the army’s turning somersaults, it’s a stampede, the Germans are approaching Soissons, tomorrow they might be in Paris?’ ‘But, our generals’, Matisse enquired, ‘what are they doing?’ Picasso looked at him seriously. ‘Our generals – are the École des Beaux-Arts.’ Competence was not to be expected in that quarter.25 Open war restored Braque’s equilibrium. Methodically he cleaned his brushes and made his dispositions. Paul Rosenberg had decamped to a rented chateau on the outskirts of Bordeaux, poised to ship out 105

on art and war and terror if the moment came. Braque and Marcelle visited him there in late May. They brought with them what little gold they possessed, and the canvases from Varengeville. These were left in the strong-rooms of the National Bank for Commerce and Industry in Libourne, a few kilometres away, where Rosenberg had already deposited fourteen Braques, twenty-one Matisses and thirty-three Picassos, together with a choice selection from his fabulous inventory. Mariette meanwhile had been left in the house in Paris with her mother Amélie, the Braques’ cook. As German forces closed on the capital her friends tried to persuade her to leave. She refused. Amélie for her part would not be separated from her daughter, so they both stayed. Mariette was afraid, but she was the guardian of the studio; Hitler himself could not have induced her to abandon her post. She had instructions from Braque to destroy all his paintings if the Germans came. She refused that too. Instead she set about undoing the canvases from their stretchers – 120 of them. Her work done, she occupied her time in defiantly watering a row of newly-planted fir trees in the garden. Asked by their neighbour, a sceptical Communist, ‘who are you doing this for?’, she replied heroically, ‘for my pleasure.’26 She was certain that le maître would be back, if not for her, then for the paintings. She was right. Braque returned a few days later. He was surprised to find his canvases rolled up and ready to go. He wept, but he did not linger. They packed the canvases, the fi ne linen and the silver in the car and set off together for Pacy, near Evreux, north-west of Paris, where Braque’s elderly mother was staying with his sister Henriette. Braque gave Henriette money – a lot of money – and drove on to Varengeville to regroup. From there the four of them, Braque, Marcelle, Mariette and Amélie, headed south to La Valade in the Limousin, where Mariette’s family came from, and where her aunt still lived. The Lachauds had invited the Braques to stay, for as long as they wished or felt the need. In the wreckage of international agreements, a domestic alliance held fast. Their journey was disorderly. Bridges were blown; the roads were chaotic and uncertain. Those who had the means, and many who did not, were on the move, trailing west and south, out of Paris, out of the path of the German juggernaut, a combination of forced migration and mass flight known to the French as the Exodus. In between arrests as a suspicious alien, Arthur Koestler logged the loss of hope. ‘The onslaught on the railway stations. The disappearance of the buses and taxis from the streets. The melting away of the town, 106

the strategy of still-life as if infected with consumption. The tommy-guns of the “fl ics” [police] at the street corners. The peculiar glance of the people in the Underground, with the dim candles of fear lit behind their eyeballs. The parachutist scare. The Fifth Column psychosis.’27 In certain cases the loss of hope was irreparable. After the Blitzkrieg, Braque’s friend Carl Einstein took his own life. The Braques and the Lachauds and their precious cargo were safely established in La Valade by the end of May. ‘Morale is good,’ reported the old soldier. 28 For about three weeks the barnhouse became their southern headquarters. They lived higgledy-piggledy with everyone else, sleeping on straw, Braque presiding calmly at the huge table like a minister. The local residents cordially approved of their distinguished visitor. He seemed unruffled by all the turbulence, pleased to be among these good people, curious about their lives, observant, unaffected, impeccable. He displayed a keen interest in their jars of pickled snails and mushrooms, and fed a hearty appetite. He was obviously a fine man.29 But he could not stay there for ever. They buried the canvases, stashed goods and chattels in the roof, and moved on. In Barbezieux, not far away, they teamed up with the Derains. The caravan rolled on to Gaujac, south of Toulouse, where they stayed with André Derain’s cousin, within sight of the Pyrenees. Their odyssey seemed to be tending in that direction. Braque and Derain would have been familiar with the Mediterranean end of the border, near Port Bou, from their youthful sojourns in Céret and Collioure; but they would also have heard that the crossing was dangerous and the reception on the other side at best unpredictable. Other questions pressed in. If the art was degenerate, according to the Nazis, what of the artist under that dispensation? How should he live? Where should he go? Braque had not given up the idea of returning to his house and his studio in the capital if conditions allowed.30 Could he exist unmolested in Occupied Paris? Could he paint? Could he sit it out, in splendid isolation, as Matisse did in Nice, or Bonnard in nearby Le Cannet, above the fray, out of reach? Could he leave France, if it came to it? Could he bolt? Bolting, now, was almost inconceivable. Braque visited Bordeaux again from La Valade in June. He was still conducting business with the bank; he may have made some more deposits. If he discussed emigration with Paul Rosenberg, it was only to rule it out for the foreseeable future.31 In July 1940, after a month of watching and waiting, he decided to take his chances in Paris. The caravan divided. 107

on art and war and terror The Derains remained for the time being in Gaujac. The Braques and the Lachauds made their way back, a car full of apprehension, to a city under siege. Luck was with them. The house opposite had been commandeered as German officers’ quarters. The Braque house was empty and virtually unscathed. The Germans had entered the studio and stolen his accordion, but nothing else had been disturbed. In the garden a row of fir trees had taken. Braque dug in for the duration. Deep in his selfmost straits he found new resources. His battle pieces were still lifes and his landscapes interiors. ‘One can’t be painting apples while heads are rolling,’ declared Jean Fautrier. There were precedents – Cézanne had painted apples during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – but the strategy of still life was too indirect an approach for some.32 For others it made all the difference. Braque’s greatest tribune – his Diderot – Jean Paulhan was now the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, an eminence of considerable delicacy. The Occupation tested Paulhan’s considerable savoir faire to the limit. ‘I love the poetry that admits defeat and the politics that offers its resignation,’ he scribbled to himself, half-seriously. ‘I am too modest to commit suicide, too proud to live.’ In spite of it all, he was committed to a cause: ‘I am committed, partly by shyness, basically by love of my native land.’33 His commitment was serpentine, his tradecraft sublime. By day he accommodated imperturbably to the exigencies of the moment: the suspension of a ‘free’ NRF and the imposition of a new editor, the doubly dangerous Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, a literate fascist, bent on shaking up this collection of ‘Jews, pederasts, timid surrealists and agents of free-masonry’.34 By night he roneoed for the Resistance, a one-man commissioning agency and clearing house. Jean Paulhan had presence. In every circle in which he moved he became a kind of plenipotentiary. He was an antidote to demoralisation. It was perhaps for this reason above all that a young fi rebrand by the name of Claude Roy made an appointment to see him in the little office to which he had been relegated at the NRF. Claude Roy was a socialist, an intellectual and a patriot – not necessarily in that order – and an eager anti-fascist. He had come as if on a pilgrimage to seek Paulhan’s advice, and possibly to crave his indulgence. Paulhan sat him down and made him welcome, discoursing capaciously in his cultivated way, dodging and weaving, joking and provoking. ‘Defeat is certain. One cannot make war with excessive regard for humanity. Some had no wish to fight for the King of England. Others had no wish to fight for the Committee of Ironworks. 108

the strategy of still-life In fact no one wished to fight for anyone.’ Roy interjected feebly and in vain. Paulhan was reaching his peroration. ‘Who knows which is worse? To be convinced that one is right, or (too quickly) that one is wrong? Victory and defeat whisper the same thing: what is done, is well done.’35 Roy’s head was spinning. Naively, as he remembers, he asked what he should do. Without a word, Paulhan steered him gently towards a painting on the wall – a Braque, of course – The Kitchen Table. The two men looked at it in silence. After a while Paulhan spoke again, of a lemon whose yellow was exactly what it wanted. Roy took his leave. That evening he received a characteristic note from Paulhan. It read: ‘I can scarcely see how we can avoid a long war. All the same, one would wish it short. I feel one should set aside a few acres, a small corner where the air is free, where no one lies (even with the very best of intentions). I don’t ask for a big corner, by any means.’36 The strategy of still life was a strategy of preservation – selfpreservation, to be sure, but in an ideal sense – freely, in solidarity, against the grain. Georges Braque fortified that small corner of the heart. Later in the war, Paulhan took the poet Francis Ponge on his fi rst visit to Braque’s studio. Ponge was transported. Most of the time was spent in wordless communion. On their way out, at Paulhan’s behest, Braque opened the door to the living room. Ponge immediately recognised a painting he had never seen before, as he put it, a plate of fish beside an iron stove: ‘I was seized by an irrepressible sob . . . a sort of spasm between the pharynx and the œsophagous’. His eyes filled with tears. ‘No doubt a certain nervous disorder had something to do with it: we were all still rather under-nourished at that time. But painting has hardly ever affected me like that.’37 Ponge thought Paulhan less affected by the glimpse of the fish; Braque had already given him one of his own. ‘The fish prompts me to ponder your personal blend of extreme violence and serenity. I have it near me; we are inseparable,’ Paulhan wrote to him beguilingly. ‘You remember the words of Vasari: “Mindful of the most important thing, this painter left to others the play of fancy, whims, novel ideas. In his paintings you will find neither houses nor trees nor factories. You will search in vain for some kindness in the art, to which his genius would make no concession.”’38 Braque’s studio turned aquarium throughout the war. Paulhan noticed two little fish in bronze, swimmingly contentedly on the 109

on art and war and terror

Figure 11 Georges Braque, The Black Fish (1942).

floor near the stove, apparently in their element: ‘See what I sculpted from water,’ said Braque.39 On canvas, the striking thing about these creatures was their colour. They were black – black as the market and the years.40 For those with the right eyes, they were invested with meaning. On one of their earliest appearances they were accompanied by a nondescript vegetable that might have been a spring onion or a leek. In French slang, ‘a leek’ is someone, in particular someone official, who keeps an eye on things (or people). Perhaps the fish were under surveillance. In spirit, however, they were free. As Francis Ponge dreamed of dinner, so ‘the heavy black fish dream of the open sea’, in the lullaby of liberation written during these years by Louis Aragon.41 Goya’s golden bream defied war and tyranny in Napoleon’s time; Braque’s black fish did something similar in Hitler’s. Stoic black fish knew where they stood. Braque’s old friend Pierre Reverdy knew too: Do you demand of the painter that he display on this plate, on this white tablecloth, fish cooked just so? Well these fish are black, inedible. Already you are bristling with disgust, anger perhaps, because fish of such a beautiful black are not to be found in nature, but only in the privileged human species. But did no-one ever tell you that Braque’s canvases trailed like fishing nets over the sea floor? . . . And that for me those black fish are a strong and stirring image that I could not have invented or demonstrated for myself, and that the wholly unpredictable rapports that I fi nd in the picture between the dish, the table, the wall panelling 110

the strategy of still-life and the apples contrive to make a new living being of such towering free will, such determination and authority, that it overwhelms my senses and delights my soul! Black fish that were still not at rock bottom filled my dreams. Black fish confronted with their apples for evermore, beyond the vicissitudes of time, in infi nity.42

Reverdy’s talk of rapports was an acute perception. ‘The object is everything,’ Braque used to say. But this was just the beginning of wisdom, to be inculcated, appreciated and transcended. Let us forget things, he counselled later, and consider only rapports, a proposition very close to Mallarmé’s aspiration ‘to paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces’.43 Braque illustrated this proposition with a variety of examples: ‘It is not the boxers that are interesting, but the fight they engage in.’ Indeed, he so far forgot himself as to offer something by way of elucidation. He did not paint things, he explained, he painted space, and then furnished it. ‘People are extraordinary! They say to me: “You have painted this tobacco jar and this bowl.” And what is there between the two? That is more important.’ The same thought was piquantly expressed in his notebook: ‘Some would die of thirst between a carafe of water and a cup of coffee.’44 In due course he arrived at a stronger formulation. ‘Objects! For me, they don’t exist! What counts is rapports. They are infinite.’ In more measured terms, ‘objects don’t exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them, and between them and myself.’ And us, the spectators: ‘between the thing presented and the thing seen’, in Braque’s words.45 The changing emphasis was quickened by the pared down pleasures of war. Often in his Cubist work, the still life resembled a landscape. The war fish were different. Their blackness was a revelation, stunning still in 1946–7, when they stole the show at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and were offered by the artist to the nation, through the good offices of Jean Cassou, founding director of the Musée national d’art moderne and courageous résistant, a man always welcome in Georges Braque’s studio. The show was entitled ‘Black is a Colour’, a clever presentation, but in truth black was more of a condition than a colour. The mute fish testified to that condition. Apples, like hostages, bore witness. Still life may be silent, but the silence in Braque is loud. The black fish offered an image of resilience in adversity. They were not alone. One of Braque’s portraits lived in the memory for the same reason. It was a portrait of his stove – ‘that God-stove with its black belly crammed full of fi re, that warmed us with its 111

on art and war and terror embers during the Occupation, when we were frozen to the marrow with cold.’ When he was reminded of it in these terms after the war, Braque smiled his spiritual smile, like the inventor of fi re itself: ‘It was a God,’ he replied.46 The painter had his own rapport with the pot-bellied beast. First learn your stovepipe, Cézanne had advised. Braque was fascinated by the ash it produced. He added some to his paint, to give it more body. To be so authentically well-earthed must have pleased him enormously. The subtle art of salvage went further than the found object. ‘Start with ash, the humblest thing, the most useless,’ he would repeat, ‘and bring that to light and life.’47 It was not all black. Francis Ponge was sustained for most of the Second World War by The Banjo, also known as Mandolin and Score (1941). Wherever he laid his head during the Occupation – Ponge was another active résistant – he pinned up a small illustration of that painting, torn out of a cheap picture book, ‘a little like my flag, or my reasons for living (and struggling)’. It was the colours he remembered, and their application, ‘very bold but properly arranged in all their variety, with an especially violent mauve’. Reduced, creased and foxed, the Braque held, and the writer with it. It furnished Ponge’s small corner: ‘That’s why I could live. Happily. That’s the society (of friends) for which I fought . . . In sight of that, during my rare moments of leisure, guided by the Latin alphabet and the roots of our French words, I wrote.’48 Tattered reproductions apart, the only way to see new Braques in the period 1940–3 was to secure a visit to the artist’s studio. Old Braques were hardly more visible. One or two strays were sold at auction, at modest prices. The right customer might just be able to find something suitable in the inner recesses of the Galerie Simon (formerly Kahnweiler). Braque was represented in the Fauvist exhibition at the Galerie de France in 1942, and in the hastily assembled opening exhibition of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Salon des Tuileries the same year. That was all. The Galerie Rosenberg was defunct. ‘The Jew Paul Rosenberg’, as he was known to his persecutors, had sailed for New York. Unfortunately, the precautions he had taken before his departure were not equal to the depredations of the New Order. As a Jew, under Nazi law, he was declared stateless. His possessions could be expropriated with impunity. That was the fate of the works in the bank, 100 more in the chateau, and the remainder in Paris, some 400 in all: a vast haul. The Nazis specialised in corruptions large and small, public and private. The opportunities they offered were legion. The aristocracy 112

the strategy of still-life of French artists were invited to go on a guided (or misguided) tour of Germany, to see for themselves how seriously Hitler and his henchmen were taking their artistic responsibilities, to repair FrancoGerman cultural relations, to generate some propaganda – similar tours were laid on for actors and writers – and to compromise, if not suborn, the tourists. A variety of sweeteners were put before them if they accepted, from the release of French prisoners to the promise of more fuel. The organisers were the German Ambassador, Otto Abetz, whose wife had been friendly with Derain before the war, and the Führer’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker, whose wife had modelled for Derain before the war. Breker himself had spent many years in Paris and knew most of the artists personally. ‘They asked me what I thought of Breker,’ Braque told Grenier. ‘I said: “I think that’s amazing.” You understand: they ask you that with guns in their pockets!’49 The caravan divided for the second time. Derain duly went to Germany, as did other veterans of the avant-garde, including Othon Friesz, Kees Van Dongen and Maurice Vlaminck. On their return, stooge-like, several pronounced themselves favourably impressed.50 Braque was not invited. His only recorded comment on the subject was a conciliatory one, tinged with relief: ‘Fortunately my painting didn’t please; I wasn’t invited; otherwise, perhaps I would have gone, on account of the promised releases [of prisoners].’51 He may well have felt relieved. Nevertheless his comment concealed more than it revealed. It was made to Fernand Mourlot, the printer, whose prime concern was to exonerate Derain from the charge of collaboration. In the circumstances Braque was not about to disavow his old friend. He was a moraliste; he was not a moraliser. Like Tarrou, Camus’ spokesman in The Plague, he distanced himself from the thirst for épuration, a ‘purge’ of the guilty. ‘Other men will make history . . . I clearly cannot judge those others. There is a quality which is lacking in me to make a reasonable murderer.’52 But the tie had been broken, and Braque and Derain were never again as thick as thieves. His relationships with the others went the same way.53 Braque sometimes happened on Van Dongen in Deauville after the war but not a word was exchanged between them. He had no more truck with Friesz, busy excluding work from the Salon des Tuileries according to the German whispers in his compliant ear. Vlaminck was beyond the pale after a poisonous tirade against Picasso and the past, complete with racial overtones (‘this Catalan, with the look of a monk and the eyes of an inquisitor’), trumpeted in the periodical Comœdia in June 113

on art and war and terror 1942. ‘Cubism! Perversity of spirit, inadequacy, amoralism, as far from painting as pederasty is from love.’54 In fact Braque’s painting pleased an influential and surprisingly vocal constituency, given the official promulgations. Comœdia also carried an extraordinary tribute from Drieu La Rochelle, the newlyinstalled stable-cleaner of the NRF: Ah yes, Monsieur, you stand in front of a Braque and you say to yourself: ‘What is that?’ You can see only a mass of green porridge? . . . Well, from the moment you concede that Braque depicts nothing on his canvas – nothing you have been expecting – that is to say neither a human figure, nor a landscape, but that he uses colours as a musician cherishes sounds, perhaps in due course you will perceive that Braque is a great architect, a great composer, that he builds and harmonizes unlike any of your safe painters, that he is so much more fond of severity and order, science and reason, than such and such a fabricator of nudes, that buttock-dauber you admire in the confectioners of the Champs-Élysées. Come on, Monsieur, make an effort, hurry up and admire Braque before you go, and before he goes. Otherwise posterity will mock you, as it mocks your esteemed grandfather who became indignant in front of a Degas or a Renoir. That makes me think that it would be good to prepare an exhibition on Braque or on another of those ‘Cubists’ of yesterday. That would be a small consolation for the exile of the canvases of the Louvre.55

More surprising still, this wish was granted. There was a small Braque exhibition at the Galerie de France in May–June 1943 (twelve paintings from 1908–10). And in another of the long cycles of the artist’s life, the centre of attention at the 1943 Salon d’Automne was the room devoted to Georges Braque, where twenty-six paintings and nine sculptures were on show for the first time, memento mori, kitchen tables, black fish and all, together with some startling new interiors: a concertina table-top in reverse perspective; a levitating jug; and funnelling up through open windows, smoke-signal clouds, a memory of childhood. In occupied Paris the contents of the Braque room caused a suppressed sensation. For French citizens, Braque embodied what French painting could be. For French painters, Braque embodied what painting could be.56 Jean Bazaine, a combative intellectual partisan of the avant-garde (and an ardent anti-fascist), fulfilled Drieu La Rochelle’s best hopes and published an admiring profile. Braque emerged in his own words as a mixture of seer and under-labourer: ‘I am among my canvases like a gardener among his trees: I trim, I prune, I train 114

the strategy of still-life . . . I’ve finally found my climate.’ There was an encomium from Paulhan, replete with the sayings of the master: I’ve always liked to look at rubbish dumps. Events take place in them, just like in a painting. Bodies change their nature. They lose their way, their taste. (A painting should also be distasteful.) One day, I saw this amazing thing: a cyclist stopped in front of a rubbish bin. He pulled out an umbrella handle. The handle was all that remained of the umbrella. He pushed it onto his pump, forcing it a little. That made a pump handle. Painting is just that. It is objects removed from their usual function. 57

This was a captivating way to put painting into words. As for the works themselves, their gravity and their humanity were an inspiration. The younger generation – Louttre Bissière, Jean Deyrolle, Nicolas de Staël and many others – needed no instruction from Jean Paulhan. Their patron was Braque, naturally.58 Paulhan was famously exact; and the exact terms of his verdict, that Braque’s painting was at once acute and nourishing, were loaded with meaning for a public starved of everything from sausages to self-respect.59 But the adulation was not confi ned to the resistant. Collaborationist critics fell over themselves to praise his work. André Fraigneau was ‘enraptured’ by the almost funerary colours of the recent still lifes; Braque, he wrote, was ‘the Chardin of the ashes’.60 Nazi functionaries with cultural pretensions beat a worshipful path to his door. Escorted by Paulhan, the odious Gerhard Heller swooned: ‘He speaks to us and listens to us with great patience and gentleness. He says to me: “Don’t call me ‘Maître’, or ‘Monsieur Braque’, but quite simply ‘Braque’, and I shall call you ‘Heller’!”’61 A more substantial figure, the aesthete Ernst Jünger, went first to see the paintings – ‘for me, they represent the moment when we emerge from nihilism and gather within us the material for new creations’ – and then the painter, whose presentation intrigued him: Braque, who detests having the model or the object in front of him, always paints from memory, and it is that which gives his paintings the most profound reality, that of a dream. In that sense, he related how he had recently put a lobster in one of his paintings, without knowing how many legs that animal had. Later, at table, when he could check, he realized that he had given it exactly the right number – he posited a relationship between this fact and Aristotle’s conception, according to which each species has its own characteristic number.62

A reaction was only to be expected. Jean Cocteau, who had publicly saluted Breker, privately condescended to Braque, ‘with 115

on art and war and terror his perfect taste of a poor milliner’. Cocteau hesitated to go any further.63 The notorious Lucien Rebatet, a foaming anti-semite, had no such inhibitions. Rebatet detected a plot to promote the ‘decadent ornamentation’ he saw on the walls of the Salon. Disappointingly, he could not find a Jewish conspiracy, however hard he tried: This murky business is conducted by Aryans, Aryans deeply ashamed of their foreskin and baptism, but Aryans nonetheless . . . The Jews would have been too cunning to go and hunt out, among M. Gallimard’s penpushers . . . a ceremonious simpleton amidst all the blunders and nonsenses of the inter-war period, the wretched Jean Paulhan, who analyzes the subconscious of that old fox, that crafty schemer, Georges Braque.64

It was the everyday corruptions that were the hardest to resist. The old fox’s technique was unfailing politeness. One winter evening a couple of German officers marched into the glacial studio. ‘How can a great painter like you work in the cold!’ was their cocksure refrain. ‘We will provide you with two lorry-loads of coal.’ ‘No, thank you’, replied Braque, with a finesse much toasted among his friends, ‘for if I accepted, I should no longer be able to speak well of you.’65 More exclusive offers met the same response: Braque also refused a commission to make an emblem for the Vichy government. Other invitations he accepted. In March 1944 he attended a star-studded reading of Picasso’s surrealist farce, Desire Caught by the Tail, in the apartment of Michel and Louise Leiris – among the readers Simone de Beauvoir, Dora Maar, Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Queneau, with Albert Camus as stage hand – a nest of free-thinkers whose very assembly was a conscious act of intellectual resistance. The same month he attended another discreet gathering, at the parish church of St Roch: a funeral mass for Max Jacob, who perished in the transit camp at Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, before Treblinka or Auschwitz could claim him. He had been arrested a few days earlier. A direct appeal to Gerhard Heller to intercede, from the wife of another detainee, had been perfunctorily dismissed: ‘Max Jacob is a Jew, madame, these people, they’re vermin.’66 Those without compunction did not like to be refused. It is still not known precisely who in the artistic community was courted by the Nazis and their satraps. (Or who needed no courting: Gertrude Stein foolishly volunteered to translate Pétain’s speeches; Le Corbusier tried to interest his government in some building projects; Albert Gleizes spoke favourably of the Nazi ‘revolution’.67) According to Breker, Derain and Maillol received lucrative commissions from Berlin. 116

the strategy of still-life Derain’s loyal sidekick Papazoff claimed that the great man received many seductive offers – a castle at his disposal if he would paint the family Ribbentrop – and that he declined.68 Whatever the truth of such claims, it seems that ‘Maître Derain’, as General Stulpnagel called him, was not immune to a little fawning from the well-bred German general staff. Braque had the opposite failing: he was not biddable. In Jean Hélion’s cool estimation, ‘he is a patriot, even a jingoist, but too sensible to have gone in for being servile and licking the boots of the Nazis, like Derain in his senility’.69 The rejectionist stance of no commissions and no concessions cannot have gone unnoticed. Georges Braque’s presence on the artists’ tour of the Fatherland would have been a major propaganda coup for the Germans. It was not his painting that deterred them – Vlaminck’s painting was equally unacceptable, in theory, but examples of it could be seen in gallery windows all over Paris – it was his disposition. Braque’s friend Laurens was not invited either; his opinions were well-known.70 Henri Laurens was a man of principle. The dealer Kahnweiler remembered him fondly as a modest anarchist, one of the very few people to turn down the Légion d’ honneur (‘Oh no, that would make Marthon [Marthe] laugh too much.’).71 His fellow sculptor Lobo, who had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, found refuge in the Laurens’s home throughout the war – courageous hospitality. Anti-fascists, they felt, had to make common cause.72 Living under the Occupation was a stern test of moral fibre. Braque was more fibrous than many. His posture is perhaps best encapsulated in Jean Grenier’s expression active passivity. ‘True wisdom is not of a rational order, nor yet in membership of a faith, it lies in a willingness to be, an “active passivity” that is rooted in living sensation, feeling, palpitation.’ It was echoed in Braque’s reflection on fatalism: ‘Contrary to belief, fatalism is not a passive state.’73 If these formulations suggest a family resemblance to the quietism of the Tao Te Ching, it was not an accidental one. Grenier was Camus’ teacher; he spent an ethical lifetime working on the problem of moral choice and the limits of commitment. Like Braque, he was steeped in the old Chinese. The Taoist requirement to practise a certain measure of ascetism was no more of a burden to him than it was to the painter. Principled non-engagement had a strong appeal for both of them: Therefore the sage is square-edged but does not scrape, Has corners but does not jab, Extends himself but not at the expense of others, Shines but does not dazzle.74 117

on art and war and terror Braque shone but did not dazzle. Georges Braque in being, in Paris, was already important, as a kind of existential reassurance and symbol of hope. ‘He who does not lose his station,’ says Lao Tzu, ‘will endure.’ Braque endured. Like Grenier, and like Camus after him, he was a believer in absolute truths who acknowledged human frailties. ‘Now I accept being what I am, I have learned modesty. All I say is that on this earth there are pestilencies and there are victims - and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.’75 He said as much about this war as he did about the previous one. His war story: at the time of the abortive raid on Dieppe, in August 1942, he was in Varengeville. Planes flew over the house; there was a prolonged bombardment; in the village a German battery was put out of action by British commandos, who were rewarded by the proprietor of the Hôtel de la Terrasse with the pick of his cellar. Wisely the commandos did not loiter, but invited the hotelier to come back with them. In the evening Braque went out see what had happened. He found a discarded parachute and made off with some of it. Stopped by the Germans, he said he was a painter, short of materials; they let him go. The parachute silk made several fi ne cravats.76 Other stories went stubbornly untold. A fleeting reference in one of Braque’s letters to Paulhan indicates that the Germans felt it necessary to have a number of conversations with him on the subject of ‘Jewish goods’ in his possession (possibly an allusion to Carl Einstein’s papers). The goods remained in his possession.77 For the rest, he meditated on fate: ‘To explore fate is to discover oneself.’78 At the Liberation, in August 1944, he was exultant. Braque held. In the historical reckoning, however, one indignity has been visited upon him. John Richardson has proposed that he lurched so far to the right in the period between the wars as to become an adherent of the ultra-nationalist Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire), a body whose programme and ethos lead some commentators to describe it as fascist or quasi-fascist.79 Founded in 1927, the Croix de Feu began as an old comrades’ association, originally restricted to holders of the Croix de Guerre. In the early 1930s, under the sway of Colonel François de La Rocque, it became more of a social movement and a political force. It was dissolved into the Parti Social Français (PSF) in 1936. These organisations addressed themselves to ‘the true France’. Their god was Order. They were virulently anti-communist (‘muscovite and cosmopolite slime’).80 They had their share of thugs, but their appeal extended far beyond the lunatic fringe. The Croix de 118

the strategy of still-life Feu/PSF attracted more supporters than any other party of the day, boasting as many as 1.2 million members. There is no evidence that Braque was one of them. His name does not figure in their membership lists, nor in their propaganda literature, nor in their leaders’ correspondence. Neither is there any indication in the file kept on Braque as he advanced through the grades of the Légion d’ honneur, a file in which questions of that sort are routinely asked and answered.81 No doubt the records are incomplete; and in the nature of the case, there must be some whose allegiance was never recorded in the fi rst place. But Georges Braque was not an island, however much he might have wished it. Especially during the Occupation, his allegiance was a matter of moment. His sympathies were under scrutiny as never before. Politics are porous. If the Croix de Feu or its successors had had the slightest inkling that he was in their camp they would surely have tried to make use of it, and their opponents would have done the same. There was not a squeak from any corner. Against the weight of negative evidence, it seems there is only Douglas Cooper’s table talk.82 The case for scepticism is clear enough. It is powerfully reinforced by a certain intrinsic implausibility. Leaving aside the whole tenor of his human relations – his proven concern for victims like Carl Einstein, the well-documented sympathies of his closest friends – when it came to associations or organisations, Braque’s temperament rebelled. Movements of any stripe, political, social, or cultural, were not for him. To his dying day he defended his own revolutionary practice, and his partnership with Picasso, but always fought shy of Cubism as a denomination. The ‘ism’ was too doctrinaire, too programmatic, too collective. Ideas were there to be effaced. Systems were the enemies of creation. Associations were for followers. Georges Braque followed no one, he insisted, except perhaps Cézanne. Braque le solitaire was not a joiner. When others joined him, it was time to move on. ‘Never adhere’ was his watchword. Only oysters adhere, as Paul Valéry once remarked.83 The Chardin of the ashes walked by himself.

Notes 1. Cahier de Georges Braque (Paris: Maeght, 1994), p. 90. 2. Paul Valéry, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Analects (London: RKP, 1970), p. 227. 3. Joan Miró, trans. Paul Auster and Patricia Mathews, ‘Working Notes, 1941–42’, in Margit Rowell (ed.), Selected Writings and Interviews 119

on art and war and terror

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

(London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), pp. 181, 195. Mariette Lachaud was Braque’s studio assistant and ministering angel. For the reinforcement of Braque’s good opinion see Miró to Pierre Matisse, 4 February 1940, Selected Writings, p. 168. Selected Writings, p. 181; interview with Jacques Dupin, 28 March 2001. Miró to Pierre Matisse, 12 January 1940, in Selected Writings, p. 168; Je Travaille comme un jardinière (Paris: XX Siècle, 1963), pp. 22–3. Gide journal, 10 April 1943, in André Gide, trans. Justin O’Brien, Journals 1889–1949 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 714. Braque, ‘Réponse à l’enquête sur l’influence des événements environnants’, Cahiers d’Art 1–4 (1939), pp. 65–6; reproduced (in French) in Jean Leymarie, Braque: Les Ateliers (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1995), pp. 158–60. Cahier, p. 110. Celan to Hans Bender, 18 November 1954, in John Felstiner, Paul Celan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 77; Jean Bazaine, ‘Braque: Un enrichissement de l’espace’, in Le temps de la peinture (Paris: Belfond, 1990), p. 69. Celan to Margul-Sperber, 8 February 1962, in Felstiner, Celan, p. 191. Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Michael Hamburger, ‘Remembrance’, in Selected Poems and Fragments (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 253. ‘Speech on the occasion of receiving the literature prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’ (1958), and ‘The Meridian: speech on the occasion of the award of the Georg Büchner prize’ (1960), in John Felstiner (trans.), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 396 and 411. Gide, 1921 detached pages, in Journals, p. 345. Grenier diary, 30 June 1945, in Jean Grenier, Carnets (Paris: Paulhan, 1991), p. 19. Couturier diary, n.d. [1952], in Marie-Alain Couturier, Se Garder Libre (Paris: Cerf, 1962), p. 148; John Richardson, ‘Braque’s Late Greatness’, in Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters (London: Cape, 2001), pp. 243–4. John Berger, ‘Giorgio Morandi’, in The Shape of a Pocket (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 142; Dora Vallier, ‘Braque, la peinture et nous’, in L’Intérieur de l’art (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 50. Cahier, p. 76. Cf. Celan (following Büchner), ‘The Meridian’, in Selected Poems, pp. 409–10. John Richardson, ‘Braque discusses his art’, Réalités 93 (1958), p. 26; Georges Braque (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), pp. 23–4. For Richardson they are a tribute to Marcelle’s piety. 120

the strategy of still-life 21. Georges Limbour, ‘Georges Braque à Varengeville’, in Dans le secret des ateliers (Paris: L’élocoquent, 1986), p. 27, and ‘Georges Braque: découvertes et tradition’, L’Œil 33 (1957), p. 29; Leo Steinberg, ‘The Skulls of Picasso’, in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 121. The mummy in question is illustrated in Neil Cox, ‘La Mort posthume’, Art History 23 (2000), p. 418. 22. Braque to Paul Rosenberg, 22 August 1939, Rosenberg Collection, MA3500, Pierrepont Morgan Library, New York (hereafter PML). There is no further reference to the subject in the extant correspondence. The next letter in the collection in the archive, dated 6 October 1939, is incomplete; though there are no obvious signs that the correspondence has been weeded, in the nature of things one cannot be sure. No other written evidence has emerged, to my knowledge. 23. Braque to Rosenberg, 6 October 1939, PML. 24. Mariette quoted in Sabina Santovetti, Les Sculptures et les plats gravées du peintre Georges Braque, unpublished Mémoire de Maîtrise, University of Paris IV, n.d., p. 90. In fact, he did some painting in April–May 1940, just before the eruption. Braque to Rosenberg, 13 April and 4 May 1940, PML. 25. André Verdet, ‘Picasso et ses environs’, in Entretiens, notes et écrits sur la peinture (Paris: Galilée, 1978), p. 152. This conversation is re-imagined in Peter Everett, Matisse’s War (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 50–1. 26. Tape-recorded recollections of Mariette Lachaud, privately held (hereafter Mariette tapes). 27. Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 606. 28. Braque to Rosenberg, 28 May 1940, PML. 29. Interviews with Blanche Lachaud and Odette Constanty, 30 November 2001; Mariette tapes. 30. Braque to Rosenberg, 28 May 1940, PML; interview with Geneviève Taillade (Derain’s niece, and a member of the party), 15 January 2001. 31. Out of touch in New York, Rosenberg wrote to his secretary in Paris in 1941 wondering whether Braque and Picasso could have their work transferred to the US, and whether they themselves intended to come and join him. Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum (New York: Basic, 1997), p. 74. 32. Brigitte Hedel-Samson, ‘Les révoltes de Fautrier’, in Jean Fautrier (Paris: RMN, 1996), p. 24; Jean Bazaine, Couleurs et mots (Paris: Cherche-Midi, 1997), p. 31. 33. Jean Paulhan, La Vie est pleine de choses redoutables (Paris: Paulhan, 1989), p. 306, elided with his ‘guerrier-appliqué’ (‘ginger warrior’), quoted in Claude Roy, Somme Tout (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), vol. I, 121

on art and war and terror

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

p. 301. Paulhan’s idiosyncratic masterwork on Braque is Braque le patron (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). Douglas Johnson, ‘Too much Gide’, London Review of Books, 15 November 2001. Roy, Somme Tout, p. 302. Roy, Somme Tout, p. 303. Francis Ponge, ‘Feuillet votif’ and ‘Braque ou un méditatif à l’œuvre’, in L’Atelier contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp. 246–7 and 300. Paulhan to Braque, n.d., in André Berne-Joffroy, Jean Paulhan à travers ses peintres (Paris: RMN, 1974), pp. 73–4. The painter was Michelangelo. See Giorgio Vasari, trans. Gaston de Vere, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (London: Everyman, 1996), vol. II, p. 696. Paulhan, Patron, p. 60. In France the period of the German Occupation, 1940–4, is known as les années noirs – literally, the black years. Louis Aragon, ‘Les poissons noirs’, in Le Nouveau crève-cœur (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 57. Pierre Reverdy, ‘Une aventure méthodique’, in Note éternelle du present (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), pp. 92–4. Patrick Heron, ‘Braque at the zenith’, in Painter as Critic (London: Tate, 1998), p. 123; Braque, Cahier, p. 122; Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, n.d. [1864], in Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862– 1874 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 137. Pierre Cabanne, ‘Braque se retourne sur son passé’, Arts, July 1960; Paul Guth, ‘Visite à Georges Braque’, Le Figaro littèraire, 13 May 1950; Braque, Cahier, p. 59. Guth, ‘Visite’; Georges Braque, ‘The Power of Mystery’, Observer, 1 December 1957; Braque dialogue with Reverdy, 10 February 1950, in Derrière le miroir 144–6 (1964), p. 75. Guth, ‘Visite’. Stanislas Fumet, Georges Braque (Paris: Maeght, 1965), p. 14. Ponge, ‘Feuillet’ and ‘Méditatif’, in L’Atelier, pp. 246 and 296–7 (his emphasis). Grenier diary, 23 February 1943, in Sous l’Occupation, p. 317. See Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac, ‘Le voyage en Allemagne’, in André Derain (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1994), pp. 79–83. Arno Breker tells a different story, Paris, Hitler et moi (Paris: Cité, 1970). Fernand Mourlot, Souvenirs et portraits d’artistes (Paris: Mourlot, 1973), p. 100. Braque to Paulhan, n.d. [1951], Archives Jean Paulhan, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), Paris; Albert Camus, trans. Robin Buss, The Plague (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 195. Mariette tapes; interviews with Jean Leymarie and Geneviève Taillade, 22 December 2000 and 15 January 2001. 122

the strategy of still-life 54. Maurice de Vlaminck, Portraits avant décès (Paris: Flammarion, 1943), p. 184. Originally ‘Opinions libres sur la peinture’, Comœdia, 6 June 1942. 55. Drieu La Rochelle, ‘La peinture et les siens’, Comœdia, 23 August 1941. 56. The clandestine but widely-circulated periodical L’Art français (‘the organ of the committees of painters, sculptors and engravers of the Front National in the struggle for the independence of France’) applauded the return of ‘faithfulness to the spirit of honest research and audacity’ for which French art was famous, interpreting that as a manifestation of resistance. ‘A propos du salon’, L’Art français 4 (1943), p. 2. Jean Bazaine declared that Braque had come once again ‘to give us the true measure of French art’. ‘Braque au salon d’automne’, Comœdia, 5 June 1943. 57. Bazaine, ‘Braque au salon’; Jean Paulhan, ‘Georges Braque dans ses propos’, Comœdia, 18 September 1943. 58. Interviews with Laure Latapie and Louttre Bissière, 15 March 2001; Françoise Gilot, 4 September 2001; Françoise de Staël, 30 January 2001; Jean Deyrolle in Jean Grenier, Entretiens avec dix-sept peintres non-figuratifs (Paris: Folle Avoine, 1990), p. 65; Mariette tapes. 59. Paulhan, ‘Braque’, Comœdia, 31 October 1942. Cf. Patron, p. 127. 60. Mary-Margaret Goggin, Picasso and his Art during the German Occupation 1940–1944, unpublished PhD thesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1966), p. 22. 61. Gerhard Heller, Un Allemand à Paris (Paris: Seuil, 1981), p. 120. 62. Jünger diary, 30 September and 4 October 1943, in Ernst Jünger, trans. (from the German) Frédéric de Towarnicki and Henri Plard, Second Journal Parisien (Paris: Bourgois, 1995), pp. 171, 173–4. 63. Cocteau diary, 25 June 1942, in Journal 1942–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 167. 64. Lucien Rebatet, ‘Révolutionnaires d’arrière-garde’, Je Suis Partout, 29 October 1943. Gallimard was the publisher of the NRF. 65. Letter from Laure Latapie Bissière, 19 May 2001. 66. Youki Desnos, Confi dences de Youki (Paris: Fayard, 1957), pp. 217–18. The author herself was the petitioner, on behalf of Jacob and her husband Robert. 67. Gleizes’s politics, deeply confused and deeply unattractive, are sympathetically analysed in Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 210–12. 68. Breker to Cone, 25 June 1984, in Michèle C. Cone, Artists under Vichy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 168; Georges Papazoff, Derain (Paris: SNEV, 1960), pp. 50–1. 69. Hélion diary, 25 May 1948, in Jean Hélion, Journal d’un peintre (Paris: Maeght, 1992), vol. I, p. 132. Hélion was obsessed with 123

on art and war and terror

70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

differentiating himself from Braque, and is not always to be relied upon. He also thought that in 1938 Braque admired Mussolini, which is hardly likely. Mady Menier-Fourniau, L’Œuvre Sculpté d’Henri Laurens, unpublished PhD thesis (Paris: University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1966), vol. I, p. 32; interview with Claude Laurens, 4 January 2001. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler/Francis Crémieux, Mes galeries et mes peintres (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 133. Mady Menier, ‘Un sculpteur devant la critique’, in Université de SaintÉtienne, Art et ideologies (Saint-Étienne: CIEREC, 1978), p. 97; Lobo, ‘Quisiera decir algo . . .’ [‘There’s something I’d like to say . . .’], Le Point XXXIII (1946), pp. 47–8. Jean Grenier, La Dernière page (Paris: Ramsay, 1988); Braque, Cahier, p. 117. One of Camus’ characters remarks on ‘the dreadful word “fatalism”’: ‘Well, he would not shrink from this term, but only if he was allowed to add the adjective “active”.’ The Plague, p. 175. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 65. Tao Te Ching, p. 38; Camus, The Plague, p. 195. Louis Latapie, Patafioles, unpublished memoirs, p. 68; Mariette tapes. Braque to Paulhan, n.d. [1951], IMEC. Additionally, just before the war broke out, he lent his name to a committee formed to support artists persecuted by the Nazis. Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 21, 329. Braque, Cahier, p. 124. See John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (London: Cape, 1999), p. 182. Coming from such an authority, the suggestion has naturally been given credence in the art-historical literature, for example, Theodore Reff, ‘The reaction against Fauvism’, in Lynn Zelevansky (ed.), Picasso and Braque: a symposium (New York: MoMA, 1992), pp. 33 and 42, note 70. Manifesto of the Croix de Feu (1929), reproduced in Jacques Nobécourt, Le Colonel de La Rocque (Paris: Fayard, 1996), pp. 1127–9. Braque was promoted Officier in 1946, Commandeur in 1951, and Grand Officier in 1960 (on the personal initiative of André Malraux, Minister of Cultural Affairs). By the time of his fi nal elevation, the paperwork required the Prime Minister or his representative to attest to ‘the comportment’ of the candidate during the war of 1939–5, as consistent with appointment to the Légion d’honneur. Conversations with John Richardson. Braque, Cahier, p. 96; Jean-François Lyotard, trans. Robert Harvey, Signed Malraux (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1999), p. 48. Cf. Vallier, ‘Braque’, p. 44.

124

6

All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War

A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse –indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history . . . The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts. Aristotle1

Once upon a time, we used to read novels – Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy – to find out about the way we live now, in Trollope’s phrase, or, rather, the way we lived then, and what it means to us now. We tend not to do that any more. We read history instead. Seeking to understand how it really was – that peculiar combination of pedantry and knight-errantry suggestive of the scholarly pursuit – we privilege the fact over the fancy, the documentary over the imaginary, the history over the poetry. We show and tell the truth – telling and retelling and retailing while there is some profit in it, as one might say. Perhaps, following Bakan, we need to make a distinction between literal truth and some deeper or higher truth: ‘There is an old tradition, going back at least to Plato, that there can be a truth in madness, dreaming, poetry, or prophecy, which is higher than literal truth. A metaphor or a fiction might open a door that cannot be opened by approaches that are too weighed down by duty to literal truth.’2 Yet, in our reading and our writing, ‘fiction’ is professionally proscribed. For the scholar, the serious scholar, poetry is at best an indulgence, at worst an excrescence: better the mortification than the ruination of the plump academic flesh. Art barely registers as a source on life. This restrictive practice seems misconceived. The artist transforms 125

on art and war and terror us into epicures, as Charles Mauron said. Without poetry, history is only a subsistence diet. Its enrichment is an adventure and also a pleasure: truly an education. No more compelling instance presents itself than the complex figure of war, its elucidation and its interpretation. Weaned on the war poets, and tutored by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, Jay Winter and others, we have begun to grasp this for the first great cataclysm of the twentieth century, but hardly yet for the second.3 Apart from the relatively brief elapse of time, the received wisdom is that the ingredients are lacking – where are the Owens and Sassoons of the Second World War, runs the refrain – silenced allegedly by the enormity of events. No poetry after Auschwitz, as Adorno is popularly supposed to have said. ‘To write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ – contrary to George Steiner’s influential misreading, the very opposite of an interdiction – ‘literature must resist this verdict.’4 In the matter of general truths, moreover, history has had mixed results. The Second World War has a habit of outwitting or overfacing historians. Paul Fussell’s attempt at a sequel to The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (1989) ends in a tacit admission of defeat: The Great War brought forth the stark, depressing Journey’s End; the Second . . . the tuneful South Pacific. The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophical analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted . . . America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-defi ne the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity . . . What time seems to have shown our later selves is that perhaps there was less coherent meaning in the events of wartime than we had hoped. Deprived of a satisfying fi nal focus by both the enormousness of the war and the unmanageable copiousness of its verbal and visual residue, all the revisitor of this imagery can do, turning now this way, now that, is to indicate a few components of the scene.5

More recently, Niall Ferguson’s attempt at a sequel to his tightlyplotted history of 1914–18, The Pity of War (1999), turned into The War of the World (2006) – a great title but an empty vessel – a book of parts, curiously disarticulated. Niall Ferguson is not one to admit defeat, but it appears that the book he originally planned somehow escaped his grasp, mutating Frankenstein-fashion into a 126

all this happened fifty-year ‘war of the world’, c. 1903–53, less a global war than an agglomeration, and a factitious one at that. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ferguson, too, was confounded by the enormousness of the Second World War, and that the satisfying final focus eluded him, just as it eluded Paul Fussell. Perhaps only Gerhard Weinberg in A World at Arms (first published in 1994) has succeeded in imposing his will on this gargantuan confl ict, sufficient to craft an integral whole, a history that is unchallengeably global and unmistakably his. The epicures of the Second World War are a lonely few. A feast awaits. The Promethean intellectual project of the Second World War is now to embrace poetry, broadly conceived, including transgressive hybrids such as Alan Ross or W. G. Sebald, perhaps the most profound recent meditators on the long half-life of that war, whose books are listed as Memoir/Travel/Poetry or Fiction/Travel/ History.6 ‘All this happened, more or less,’ writes Kurt Vonnegut, alarmingly, at the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five. ‘The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.’7 What remains to be done is to try to comprehend the percipience of the pretty much, the magic of the more or less. Here is an hors d’œuvre: a novel or novel sequence by a British author – a very British author – Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961),8 subsequently known as the Sword of Honour trilogy (strictly, a recension of the original three volumes) by Evelyn Waugh.9 Waugh was a seasoned anthropologist of the military cultures and sub-cultures he described. He was also an expert vivisectionist. His war was a serial demonstration of what the British dignified as the indirect approach and the Americans dismissed as periphery pecking.10 Overage, overweight and overweening, Waugh was determined to do his duty. As an officer on intermittent active service in the Royal Marines and the Commandos, he took part in the expedition to Dakar in 1940, the raid on Bardia and the battle of Crete in 1941 and the military mission to the partisans in Yugoslavia in 1944–5, a cumulative experience at once rich and ignominious. ‘We grow backwards in wartime,’ he mused glumly from his farmhouse hideout in 1944. ‘First it was public school life in the Marines, then prep. school at COHQ, now nursery – with picnics postponed for rain, everyone with his nose pressed to the window, time dragging, occasional treats of sweets – literally of sweets – when we get a sortie.’11 He distilled this experience into a book of brilliant boldness: ‘unquestionably the fi nest novel to have come out of the war,’ in 127

on art and war and terror

Figure 12 Felix Man, Evelyn Waugh (c. 1943).

the contemporary verdict of the grand panjandrum of critics, Cyril Connolly, and still a contender.12 Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) was a Roman Catholic romantic, an unabashed snob, a ferocious satirist, a comic moralist and a pristine stylist. ‘Is he good, trying to be wicked?’ Chips Channon asked 128

all this happened himself, ‘Or just wicked trying to be nice?’13 Sword of Honour is characteristically acerbic, tender, perspicuous, humane, unsettling. As V. S. Pritchett pointed out at the time, it required a nerve to treat the war as a sordid social jamboree of smart and semi-smart sets, who are mainly engaged in self-inflation and in climbing up the ladder, to present it as a collection of bankrupt sideshows. But Mr Waugh has more nerve than any English writer now living, and large portions of the last war were exactly as he describes them.14

The period expression is exactly right: Evelyn Waugh had a nerve. ‘They are saying, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” I ask, how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?’15 The slaughters are by no means absent from Sword of Honour – there is withering comment on public indifference to ‘those trains of locked vans still rolling East and West from Poland and the Baltic, that were to roll on year after year bearing their innocent loads to ghastly unknown destinations’ – but they take place off the page. For Waugh’s happy warriors, fiasco and folly are the order of the day. The play of chance and probability to which Clausewitz drew attention is addled, anarchically, as if the recension had been done by the Marx Brothers: Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters, that bizarre product of total war which later was to proliferate through five acres of valuable London property, engrossing the simple high staff officers of all the Services with experts, charlatans, plain lunatics and every unemployed member of the British Communist Party – HOO HQ, at this stage in its history, occupied three flats in a supposedly luxurious modern block. Guy, reporting there, found a Major of about his own age, with the DSO, MC and slight stammer. The interview lasted a bare five minutes. ‘Crouchback, Crouchback, Crouchback, Crouchback,’ he said, turning over a sheaf of papers on his table. ‘Sergeant, what do we know of Mr. Crouchback?’ The Sergeant was female and matronly. ‘Ritchie-Hook fi le,’ she said. ‘General Whale had it last.’ ‘Go and get it, there’s a good girl.’ ‘I daren’t.’ ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I remember all about it now. You’ve been wished on us with your former Brigadier for “special duties”. What are your “special duties”?’ ‘I don’t know, sir.’ ‘Nor does anyone. You’ve come whistling down from a very high level. Do you know all about Commandos?’ 129

on art and war and terror ‘Not much.’ ‘You shouldn’t know anything. They’re supposed to be a secret, though from the security reports we’ve got from Mugg, they’ve made themselves pretty conspicuous there. I’ve had a letter from someone whose signature I can’t read, complaining in strong terms that they’ve been shooting his deer with tommy-guns. Don’t see how they get near enough. Remarkably fi ne stalking if true. Anyway that’s where you’re going – temporary attachment for training purposes X Commando, Isle of Mugg. All right?’ ‘Very good, sir.’ ‘Sergeant Trenchard here will make out your travel warrant. Have you got a batman with you?’ ‘At the moment’, said Guy, ‘I have a service car, a three-ton lorry, an RASC [Royal Army Service Corps] driver, a Halberdier servant and a full Colonel.’ ‘Ah,’ said the Major, who was fast founding the HOO HQ tradition of being surprised at nothing. ‘You ought to be all right, then. Report to Colonel Blackhouse at Mugg.’ ‘Tommy Blackhouse?’ ‘Friend of yours?’ ‘Yes. He married my wife.’ ‘Did he? Did he? I thought he was a bachelor.’ ‘He is, now.’ ‘Yes, I thought so. I was at the Staff College with him. Good chap; got some good chaps in his Commando too. Glad he’s a friend of yours.’16

And so it goes. The chaotic vies with the psychotic. Sword of Honour licensed the captivating lunacy of Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1968).17 The Second World War was no longer sacrosanct. The bad Waugh threw the good war into confusion. But Waugh’s was a contradictory effrontery. If he anticipated Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, he also recalled Rudyard Kipling in his essential sympathy with the soldier.18 Men at Arms, the first volume of the trilogy, paints a remarkably sympathetic picture of the regimental family that is the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, fi rst raised by the Earl of Essex for service in the Low Countries in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; earning the sobriquet of ‘The Applejacks’ because after the Battle of Malplaquet a detachment of the Corps under Halberdier Sergeant Major Breen were bivouacked in an orchard when they were surprised by a party of French marauders whom they drove away by pelting them with apples. Waugh’s treatment of what John Keegan has called regimental ideology is a miniature masterpiece of social history: 130

all this happened The normal relationship in the Halberdiers between platoon commander and sergeant was that of child and nannie. The sergeant should keep his officer out of mischief. The officer’s job was to sign things, to take the blame and quite simply to walk ahead and get shot fi rst. And, as an officer, he should have a certain intangibility belonging, as in old-fashioned households, to the further side of the baize doors. All this was disordered in the relationship of Guy and Sergeant Soames. Soames reverenced officers in a more modern way, as men who had been sharp and got ahead; moreover he distinguished between regulars and temporaries. He regarded Guy as a nannie might some child, not of ‘the family’, but of inferior and suspicious origin, suddenly, by a whim of the mistress of the house, dumped, as a guest of indefi nite duration, in her nursery.19

Waugh’s books are, among other things, very funny.20 Sword of Honour is no exception. The names and characterisations are a delight. Guy Crouchback is the soft-shelled hero. His hard-faced brother-in-law is Arthur Box-Bender. An intelligence officer prone to absurd conspiracy theories is revealed as Grace-GroundlingMarchpole (‘each junction of which represented a provident marriage in the age of landed property’), his names suggestively subversive of his notions. There is a comfortless night porter called Job. There is Major Hound – ‘Fido’ to his friends – and Major Cattermole, ‘tall, stooping, emaciated, totally unsoldierly, a Zurbarán ascetic with a joyous smile’, previously J. Cattermole of All Souls, author of An Examination of Certain Redundancies in Empirical Concepts. Above all, there is Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook: the great Halberdier enfant terrible of the First World War; the youngest company commander in the history of the Corps; the slowest to be promoted; often wounded, often decorated, recommended for the Victoria Cross, twice court martialled for disobedience to orders in the field, twice acquitted in recognition of the brilliant success of his independent actions; a legendary wielder of the entrenching tool; where lesser men collected helmets Ritchie-Hook once came back from a raid across noman’s-land with the dripping head of a German sentry in either hand.21

Inspired principally by Brigadier St. Clair Morford – ‘who looks like something escaped from Sing-Sing and talks like a boy in the Fourth Form at school: teeth like a stoat, ears like a faun, eyes alight like a child playing pirates’ – with a dash of Carton de Wiart and Walter Cowan, the maniacal Ritchie-Hook is a wonderful black comic creation, decapitating all and sundry, cavorting madly on the live-fi ring range, or – a scene surreally worthy of Catch-22 131

on art and war and terror or M.A.S.H. – calling bingo in the officers’ mess.22 His philosophy of war finds its ultimate expression in the Brigade Training Programme: The Training Programme followed no textbook. Tactics as interpreted by Brigadier Ritchie-Hook consisted of the art of biffi ng. Defence was studied cursorily and only as the period of reorganization between two bloody assaults. The Attack and the Element of Surprise were all. Long raw misty days were passed in the surrounding country with maps and binoculars. Sometimes they stood on the beach and biffed imaginary defenders into the hills; sometimes they biffed imaginary invaders from the hills into the sea. They invested downland hamlets and savagely biffed imaginary hostile inhabitants. Sometimes they merely collided with imaginary rivals for the use of the main road and biffed them out of the way. 23

It is surely not completely fanciful to discern some affi nity between Ritchie-Hook and Winston Churchill. Churchill’s characteristic itch to do something, to make the enemy bleed and burn, as he said, everywhere and all the time, was very Ritchie-Hook. Temperamentally, Churchill was a plunger, as General George C. Marshall put it in an unguarded moment.24 Rhetorically, too, Ritchie-Hook’s biffi ng was uncannily reminiscent of Churchill’s fighting, in their finest hour: We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. 25

The family resemblance was no doubt deliberate. Sword of Honour is peppered with Churchillian appropriations and misappropriations, half-concealed and for the most part deflationary. Thanks to the radio, the Prime Minister’s individual parole leached into the language and consciousness of his people. In another celebrated wartime novel sequence, by Anthony Powell, the narrator overhears a staff officer at Divisional Headquarters giving dictation: The voice, like so many other dictating or admonitory voices of even that early period of the war, had assumed the timbre and inflexions of the Churchill broadcast, slurred consonants, rhythmical stresses and prolations. These accents, in certain circumstances, were to be found imitated as low as battalion level . . . If we won the war, there could be no doubt that these rich, distinctive tones would be echoed for a generation at least. 26 132

all this happened Waugh’s reflections on the broadcasts and the broadcaster were more piercing. They point explicitly to another consonance with Kipling – a prophetic engagement with ‘decline and fall’ (the title of his first novel, published in 1928). Waugh was a declinist avant la lettre. Sword of Honour might be construed as his Recessional. ‘Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire’: On the day that Mr Churchill became Prime Minister, Apthorpe was promoted Captain . . . There was less interest in the change of Prime Ministers. Politics were considered an unsoldierly topic among the Halberdiers. There had been some rejoicing and dispute at Mr Hore-Belisha’s fall in the winter. Since then Guy had not heard a politician’s name mentioned. Some of Mr Churchill’s broadcasts had been played on the mess wireless-set. Guy had found them painfully boastful and they had, most of them, been immediately followed by the news of some disaster, as though in retribution from the God of Kipling’s Recessional. Guy knew of Mr Churchill only as a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press lords and of Lloyd George. He was asked: ‘Uncle, what sort of fellow is this Winston Churchill?’ ‘Like Hore-Belisha except that for some reason his hats are thought to be funny.’ ‘Well, I suppose they had to make someone carry the can after the balls-up in Norway.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘He can’t be much worse than the other fellow?’ ‘Better, if anything.’ Here Major Erskine leant across the table. ‘Churchill is about the only man who may save us from losing this war,’ he said. It was the fi rst time that Guy had heard a Halberdier suggest that any result, other than complete victory, was possible. They had had a lecture, it is true, from an officer lately returned from Norway, who had spoken frankly about the incompetent loading of ships, the disconcerting effect of dive-bombing, the activities of organized traitors and such matters. He had even hinted at the inferior fighting qualities of British troops. But he had made little impression. Halberdiers always assumed that ‘the Staff’ and ‘the Q [Quartermaster] side’ were useless, that all other regiments were scarcely worthy of the name of soldier, that foreigners let one down. Naturally things were going badly in the absence of the Halberdiers. No one thought of losing the war. 27 133

on art and war and terror In his own fashion this was a balanced assessment. Churchill’s death in 1965 occasioned something more vitriolic: For the past fortnight my drive has been worn into pot-holes by telegraph boys bearing extravagant offers from newspapers to describe Sir Winston’s obsequies. I have of course refused. He is not a man for whom I ever had esteem. Always in the wrong, always surrounded by crooks, a most unsuccessful father – simply a ‘Radio Personality’ who outlived his prime. ‘Rallied the nation’ indeed! I was a serving soldier in 1940. How we despised his orations.28

Not everyone subscribed to the magic, mythic genius of ‘Mr. Churchill in 1940’, an image cultivated by Churchill himself and sedulously propagated by tame eulogists like Isaiah Berlin: ‘The Prime Minister was able to impose his will on his countrymen, and enjoy a Periclean reign, precisely because he appeared to them larger and nobler than life and lifted them to an abnormal height in a moment of crisis.’29 Fuller and Liddell Hart, to name but two of the sharpest military minds of the age, were in exact accord with Waugh. For Fuller, Pericles was the greatest mountebank since Nero: ‘Like Nero he is an expert in turning somersaults in the arena; in short a highly popular clown, who in the press has been transformed into a supreme artist. Nero, however, had the better of him in that he committed suicide when comparatively young: that, at least, was a decent act.’ Liddell Hart recorded simply: ‘Churchill is an upas tree – everything beneath him dies.’30 It would be interesting to know how many others felt the same – if the encrusted blood, toil, tears and sweat allowed them to say. The year 1940 is the high-water mark of the home front, and still the defining moment of British national identity. Churchill is its totem. He is worshipped, idolatrously, or invoked, apostrophically, in two manifestations: as talker of the big talk, that is to say as moraliser and chauvinist-in-chief (‘some chicken!’);31 and as fighter of the good fight or, in more prejudicial language, biffer of the good biff. He met his moment; but he lived a long time between the echo and the dream of battles. Like Vigny, he suffered from the disease of military ardour.32 It is that depravity, together with his caddishness, that less happy warriors (or the more discriminating) found so difficult to stomach. Waugh for his part was not at all unhappy at the outset. Sword of Honour opens with this famous declaration: ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the 134

all this happened Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.’ Once ensconced in the Halberdiers, Guy examines Army Training Memorandum No. 31 (April 1940), a catechism of 143 questions on the war, of which the fi rst and fundamental is What are we fighting for? He answers for himself: England had declared war to defend the independence of Poland. Now that country had quite disappeared and the two strongest states in the world guaranteed her extinction. Now General Paget was at Lillehammer and it was announced that all was going well. Guy knew things were going badly. They had no well-informed friends, here in Penkirk, they had access to no intelligence fi les, but the smell of failure had been borne to them from Norway on the east wind.

Nevertheless he is optimistic. He was a good loser, but he did not believe his country would lose this war; each apparent defeat seemed strangely to sustain it. There was in romance great virtue in unequal odds. There were in morals two requisites for a lawful war, a just cause and the chance of victory. The cause was now, past all question, just. The enemy was exorbitant. His actions in Austria and Bohemia had been defensible. There was even a shadow of plausibility in his quarrel with Poland. But now, however victorious, he was an outlaw. And the more victorious he was the more he drew to himself the enmity of the world and the punishment of God.33

In the beginning, it was what the war on terror always wanted to be: a crusade.34 By late 1941, however, it had all turned sour. ‘The hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’35 What went wrong? First of all, Waugh himself was involved in one military disaster after another, starting with the abortive expedition to Dakar in September 1940 and ending with the scrambled evacuation from Crete in May 1941 (‘never in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many,’ someone scrawled on one of the troopships).36 Waugh returned from Dakar with head unbloody but bowed, as he put it, but still willing. ‘During the time when we expected to be sent into an operation which could only be disastrous, I realised how much you have changed me’, he wrote to his wife, ‘because I could no longer look at death with indifference. I wanted to live & was pleased when we ran away. This is a bad state of affairs 135

on art and war and terror for a marine, but I believe most of the marines felt the same. Perhaps that is a bad thing for the country. I don’t know. I know that one goes into a war for reasons of honour & soon fi nds oneself called on to do very dishonourable things. I do not like the R. M. [Royal Marine] Brigades part in this war and I do not like the war, but I want to be back in Europe fighting Germans.’37 Crete affected him more profoundly, even traumatically. He was a member of the Commando force deployed, late in a losing battle, to stiffen the British garrison and organise the retreat. The force was commanded by Colonel Robert Laycock, ‘that every man in arms should wish to be,’ to whom Officers and Gentlemen is profusely dedicated and pre-emptively disclaimed: He will recognize this story as pure fiction: that is to say of experience totally transformed. No real character is portrayed; various offices and appointments are mentioned without reference to any person who at any time held them. No unit, formation, command, organization, ship or club, no incident, civil or military, is identifiable with the realities of those exhilarating days when he led and I lamely followed.

There lamely follows a finely wrought and thinly fictionalised account of the ensuing debacle as Waugh witnessed it, in his guise as Laycock’s intelligence officer. Battle, as such, was not Waugh’s primary concern – ‘the thing about battle is that it is no different at all from manoeuvres with Col. Lushington on Bagshot Heath: just as confused and purposeless’ – but his rendition of the fi nal stages of the Battle of Crete is as convincing an account of grace and disgrace under pressure as any in the literature of this war. ‘Other books about the war have gone straight for the conventional – the battle,’ noted V. S. Pritchett. ‘[Waugh], too, can negligently turn out a battle, but his interest is, fundamentally, the moralist’s. His eye is trained on the flat detail of human folly, vanity and hypocrisy; and although he can rightly be called a wounded Romantic, he is a most patient and accurate observer.’38 Waugh was deeply wounded. Personally and professionally, he seems to have acquitted himself creditably, in fact, with conspicuous bravery, throughout the operation; but his flukish escape, and the rout that preceded it, left him in a stew of alienation, disillusionment and, it has been plausibly suggested, self-loathing.39 Waugh considered that all he held dear had been disgraced – his comrades; his country; not least, his class. ‘The English are a very base people,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper some months later. ‘I did not know this, 136

all this happened living as I did. Now I know them through and through and they disgust me.’40 Political disgrace swiftly followed. For Waugh, acceptance of the Soviet Union as an ally was insupportable (treacherous Godless Communists). ‘As Guy, in the late autumn of 1941, rejoins his regiment he believes that the just cause of going to war has been forfeited in the Russian alliance. Personal honour alone remains.’ The cause was not redeemed by the arrival of the Americans to organise ‘the final dismemberment of Christendom.’ Their representative in Sword of Honour is Lieutenant Padfield, ‘the Loot’, a sinisterly ubiquitous and morally dubious figure at once predatory and parasitic, who finds his niche as factotum to the loathsome Major Ludovic, an arriviste aesthete with blood on his hands from Crete and money in his pocket from a phenomenally successful fi rst novel, The Death Wish. Everyone knew Lieutenant Padfield; even Guy who knew so few people. He was a portent of the Grand Alliance. London was full of American soldiers, tall, slouching, friendly, woefully homesick young men who seemed always in search of somewhere to sit down. In the summer they had filled the parks and sat on the pavements round the once august mansions which had been assigned to them. For their comfort there swarmed out of the slums and across the bridges multitudes of drab, ill-favoured adolescent girls and their aunts and mothers, never before seen in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia. These they passionately and publicly embraced, in the blackout and at high noon, and rewarded with chewing gum, razor blades, and other rare trade-goods from their PX stores. Lieutenant Padfield was a horse of a different colour; not precisely, for his face, too, was the colour of putty; he too slouched; he, too, was a sedentary by habit. But he was not all homesick; when not in a chair he must have been in rapid motion, for he was ubiquitous. He was twentyfive years old and in England for the fi rst time. He had been one in the advanced party of the American army and there was no corner of the still intricate social world where he was not familiar.41

Waugh was not a man for the strange semaphore of the special relationship.42 His subject was Vigny’s: the servitude and grandeur of arms, and the splintering of that social world. For Waugh, as for Vigny, there remained honour – ‘active decency’ in Vigny’s formulation, ‘compassion’ in Waugh’s – amid the universal shipwreck of beliefs.43 The moral aphorism at the heart of the Sword of Honour trilogy is the remonstrance offered by Crouchback père to his disillusioned son: ‘Quantitative judgements don’t apply.’ The remonstrance is theologically derived (fierce in all his beliefs, Waugh was a fierce 137

on art and war and terror Catholic), but politically and personally applied. The fi rst surrender in Unconditional Surrender is that of Italy. ‘What a mistake the Lateran Treaty was,’ Guy exclaims to his father when he hears the news. ‘How much better it would have been if the Popes had sat it out and then emerged saying: “What was all that? Risorgimento? Garibaldi? Cavour? The House of Savoy? Mussolini? Just some hooligans from out of town causing a disturbance . . .” That’s what the Pope ought to be saying today.’ Old Mr Crouchback scolds him for talking nonsense, and afterwards writes him an exegetical letter: The Mystical Body doesn’t strike attitudes or stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice. It is ready to forgive at the fi rst hint of compunction. When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died at peace as a result of it? How many children may have been brought up in the faith who might have lived in ignorance. Quantitative judgements don’t apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face”.’44

This aphorism is recalled again and again in the narrative that follows. It acquires a gathering moral force for Guy himself; in a neat juxtaposition it is expressly if enigmatically linked to the machinations of great power politics: Guy brooded about the antithesis between the acceptance of sacrifice and the will to win. It seemed to have personal relevance, as yet undefi ned, to his own condition. He re-read the letter from his father which he carried always in his pocket-book. “The Mystical Body doesn’t strike attitudes or stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice . . . Quantitative judgements don’t apply.” There was a congress at Teheran at the time [1943] entirely occupied with quantitative judgements.45

In due course Guy finds himself part of the British Mission to the Anti-Fascist Forces of National Liberation (Adriatic). The denouement of the work takes place in proto-Tito Yugoslavia. Given the context, and the nudge, it may be that the aphorism can be read as an anathema on the callous quantification of the so-called percentages agreement, that naughty document, parcelling out a prostrate Europe; and, by extension, on the crushing arithmetic of realpolitik. How many divisions has the Pope – the measure of Stalin’s scorn – was a poignant question for Guy Crouchback and his author. Among the displeased partisans and displaced persons in the small compass of his jurisdiction, Guy is moved to intervene on behalf of a group of Jewish refugees. His kindness toward one couple 138

all this happened in particular, the Kanyis, leads directly to their arraignment before a People’s Court. (‘You may be sure justice was done.’) Before they part, Guy has a momentous exchange with Madame Kanyi. She asks him this: Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians – not very many perhaps – who felt this. Were there none in England?

‘God forgive me,’ answers Guy. ‘I was one of them.’46 Human solidarity is a hard thing. Richard Rorty’s philosophical road to it has already been highlighted in the introduction to this book. His advocacy of fictional description and ‘redescription’ is perhaps the most compelling recent articulation of what might be called the moral benefits of the artistic imagination.47 Martha Nussbaum proposes something very similar, and appeals to some of the same magi, in the credo that introduces her luminous readings in philosophy and literature: In pursuit of human self-understanding and of a society in which humanity can realize itself more fully . . . the imagination and the terms of the literary artist are indispensable guides: as [Henry] James suggests, angels of and in the fallen world, alert in perception and sympathy, lucidly bewildered, surprised by the intelligence of love.48

These are philosophers’ answers to the intransigent question of why exactly we should pay attention to fiction. Given ‘the longstanding quarrel between poetry and philosophy’, it is only to be expected that some of the profoundest responses come from that quarter. The philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch (a gamekeeper turned poacher) observed that ‘good art is . . . anamnesis, “memory” of what we did not know we knew’.49 For the Second World War, Paul Celan’s amazing ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), the hypnotic poem written immediately after Auschwitz, is a conscious enactment of precisely that function: He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland 139

on art and war and terror he shouts scrape your strings darker you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky you’ll then have a grave in the clouds where you won’t lie too cramped Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true a man lives in the house of your goldenes Haar Margarete he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland50

In Aristotelian terms, one might say that poetry thickens history. Imaginatively ‘thick history’, by analogy with ethically ‘thick concepts’, bravely acknowledges the frailties of the fact, on the one hand, and judiciously embraces the possibilities of the fancy, on the other.51 This is not so much a matter of poetic license as of poetic faith. Embracing imaginative literature is in every sense an act of faith: a willing suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge suggested, and also ‘an act of interpretive credence’, in George Barker’s words, a welcoming assent.52 But it is more than that. It is a grave necessity. History is filigree, and full of holes. Historical reconstruction is provisional, speculative, contingent: Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. 53

The historian’s truth is not enough. Facts are fugitive, and much punished. The literal has its limits. Antony Beevor’s garlanded Stalingrad (1998), an object lesson in thick history, opens with the challenging assertion of the poet Tyuchev that ‘Russia cannot be understood with the mind’.54 The implacable Tyuchev was surely right (and the Russians an interesting case of a people claiming poetry, as well as history, for themselves). Beevor’s account of that epic siegeoffensive is deftly thickened with the work of Vasily Grossman: not only Life and Fate, but also his eye-witness notes and papers. What Grossman gives to Stalingrad, and hence to Stalingrad, is something very like ‘a new vocabulary of experience’, in Iris Murdoch’s phrase; that is to say, redescription made real – made unforgettable.55 Monsieur and comrade, The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. 140

all this happened And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the soldier dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.56

Notes 1. The Poetics, 9, I45ib. 2. D. Bakan, ‘Narrative Research and Hurt and Harm’, in Ruthellen Josselson (ed.), Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives (London: Sage, 1996), p. x. 3. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London: Bodley Head, 1990); Jay Winter, Site of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The international, cross-cultural project of which Winter is general editor and moving spirit, ‘Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare’, is a bold attempt to embrace ‘the colonization of military history by cultural historians, and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social and cultural history, to the benefit of both’. This pioneering work is anchored in what used to be called the European War of 1914–18. It will surely be influential in the study of the Global War of 1941–5. 4. Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Francis McDonagh, ‘Commitment’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1975), p. 312. Cf. George Steiner, ‘Silence and the Poet’ [1966], in Language and Silence (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 75. In fact, there is no dearth. See Desmond Graham (ed.), Poetry of the Second World War (London: Pimlico, 1998), an exemplary international anthology of everyone from Anna Akhmatova to Zoltan Zelk. 5. Paul Fussell, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 268, 296. 6. See, for example, Alan Ross, Winter Sea (London: Harvill, 1997); and W. G. Sebald, trans. Michael Hulse, The Emigrants (London: Harvill, 1996). The hybrid has an interesting Second World War pedigree in Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcoln [1941] (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993); latterly revisited with some notoriety in Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (London: Picador, 2005). Cf. Brian Hall, ‘Rebecca West’s War’, New Yorker, 15 April 1996. 7. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 1. 8. In the United States, perhaps less contentiously but more prosaically, The End of the Battle. 141

on art and war and terror 9. A recension (Waugh’s word) is a critical revision of a text, in this case to shape the three books into one: see preface to fi rst edition of 1964. Cf. David Wykes, ‘Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Volgograd’, Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 7 (1977), pp. 82–99. 10. See Alex Danchev, ‘Britain: The Indirect Strategy’, in David Reynolds et al. (eds), Allies at War (New York: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 1–26; and ‘Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach’, Journal of Military History 63 (1999), pp. 313–38. 11. Waugh to Laura (his wife), 5 November 1944, in Mark Amory (ed.), The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (London: Phoenix, 1995), p. 192. His wartime diary is in Michael Davie (ed.), The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Phoenix, 1995), pp. 439–620. See also John St John, To the War with Waugh (London: Cooper, 1974). 12. Connolly review, The Sunday Times, 29 October 1961, collected in Martin Stannard (ed.), Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 430. A magnanimous verdict, given that Connolly and his work are satirised mercilessly in the book. 13. Channon diary, 16 December 1934, in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Chips (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 28. 14. Pritchett review, New Statesman, 27 October 1961, in Critical Heritage, p. 425. 15. Waugh diary, All Saints [1 November] 1939, in Diaries, pp. 448–9 16. The Sword of Honour Trilogy (London: Everyman, 1994), pp. 118, 272–3. All quotations from this edition. Officers and Gentlemen was originally called Happy Warriors. 17. Catch-22 was published at almost exactly the same time as Unconditional Surrender, but it too was a long time in the making and Heller had been reading Waugh intensively for at least ten years. A version of Waugh’s short story, ‘Compassion’, which adumbrated several of the themes in Sword of Honour, and was later cannibalised for it, fi rst appeared in The Atlantic in 1949: see Ann Pasternak Slater (ed.), The Complete Short Stories (London: Everyman, 1998), pp. 419–40. Heller’s other prime source of inspiration is said to be LouisFerdinand Celine, trans. Ralph Manheim, Journey to the End of the Night (London: Calder, 1988), originally published as Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932). 18. Kipling’s pervasive cultural presence is an interesting phenomenon in itself. It is not often remarked that the former US Marine Eugene B. Sledge’s harrowing memoir, With the Old Breed (1981), purveyed by Fussell as a revelation of senseless savagery, has an epigraph from Kipling, c. 1915, and, in spite of all, an almost Kiplingesque conclusion. Cf. Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 160–4, 173–4. 19. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 44, 162–3. Cf. John Keegan, ‘Regimental 142

all this happened

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Ideology’, in Geoffrey Best and Andrew Wheatcroft (eds), War, Economy and the Military Mind (London: Croom Helm, 1976), pp. 3–18. The sheer joyousness of this fun, and its high seriousness, is acutely analysed in David Lodge, ‘Waugh’s Comic Waste Land’, New York Review of Books, 15 July 1999. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 151, 633, 637, 60–1. Waugh diary, 18 January 1940, in Diaries, p. 461; Sword of Honour, pp. 130–1, 132. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 131–2. Pogue notes, 28 September 1956, in Larry I. Bland (ed.), George C. Marshall: Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue (Lexington, VA: Virginia Military Institute, 1991), p. 580. Speech to House of Commons, 4 June 1940, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1983), vol. VI, p. 468. On the affi nity between Churchill and Ritchie-Hook in the realm of grand strategy see Alex Danchev, ‘Biffi ng: The Saga of the Second Front’, in idem, On Specialness (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 29–45. Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (London: Heinemann, 1964), p. 250, the seventh of the twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75). The other wartime volumes are The Soldier’s Art (1966) and The Military Philosophers (1968). Rudyard Kipling, ‘Recessional’ [1897], in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber, 1963), p. 140; Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 165–7. The same poem gives colour to an unforgiving portrait of Churchill in James Gould Cozzens’s novel, Guard of Honour (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), p. 394. Waugh to Ann Fleming, 27 January 1965, in Letters, p. 630. Waugh had the misfortune to serve with Churchill’s son, Randolph, in Yugoslavia: ‘Randolph dined with the Lampsons the other evening & Lampson sent a pompous & jaggering cable to Winston “Your son is at my house. He has the light of battle in his eye.” Unhappily the cypher group got it wrong & it arrived “light of BOTTLE”. All too true.’ Waugh to Laura, 2 June 1941, ibid., p. 153. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Winston Churchill in 1940’, in Personal Impressions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 15–16, originally a review essay of the second volume of Churchill’s war memoirs, Their Finest Hour (1949). Fuller to Liddell Hart, 7 June 1949, in Danchev, On Specialness, p. 154; Liddell Hart jotting (1951), in Alex Danchev, Alchemist of War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 102. The upas is a fabulous Javanese tree that poisons everything for miles around. See also Liddell Hart, ‘The Military Strategist’, in Churchill: Four Faces and the Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 155–202. ‘When I warned them [the French government] that Britain would fight 143

on art and war and terror

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! Some neck.’ Speech to Canadian Parliament, 30 December 1941, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1986), vol. VII, p. 34. See Alfred de Vigny, trans. Roger Gard, Servitude and Grandeur of Arms (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 5, 45. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 10, 164–5. The theme of B. W. Wilson, ‘Sword of Honour: The Last Crusade’, English 23 (1974), pp. 87–93. Waugh, Sword of Honour, p. 485 (a reprise of 468), the terms of the lament heavily redolent of the Cold War (or Cold Waugh). Waugh, ‘Memorandum on LAYFORCE’, in Diaries, p. 495. Waugh to Laura and to Henry Yorke, 28 September and 13 November 1940, in Letters, pp. 141, 145. Waugh’s battalion did not land; they did not run away. Waugh to Laura, 2 June 1941, in Letters, p. 153; Pritchett review, in Critical Heritage, p. 425. See Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (London: Murray, 1991), pp. 194–5, 222–3; Angus Calder, ‘Mr. Wu and the Colonials’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill (London: Pimlico, 1997), pp. 129–46. Quoted in Beevor, Crete, p. 222. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 485, 498, 709. ‘The Loot’ was based on ‘The Sergeant’, Stuart Preston, an American art historian ‘much lionized in London towards the end of the war’. Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford (London: Hamilton, 1975), pp. 82–3. Ludovic was a fictional creation, originally called Connolly – cruel and unusual punishment even by Waugh’s standards, as Wykes says – for Cyril Connolly already appears in the novel as the repellent Everard Spruce. See Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One [1948] (London: Penguin, 2000). Cf. Danchev, On Specialness, pp. 153–65. Vigny, Servitude and Grandeur, especially. pp. 159–64; Waugh, ‘Compassion’. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 488–91 (my emphasis). After a long series of political accommodations, the Lateran Treaty (1929) established Vatican City as an independent state. Waugh, Sword of Honour, p. 600 (his emphasis). There follows a sly joke about summitry and the Big Three: ‘At the end of the fi rst week of that December [1943], History records, Mr Winston Churchill introduced Mr Roosevelt to the Sphinx. Fortified by the assurances of their military advisers that the Germans would surrender that winter, the two puissant old gentlemen circumambulated the colossus and silently watched the shadows of evening obliterate its famous features.’ 144

all this happened 46. Waugh, Sword of Honour, pp. 702, 705. 47. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi. 48. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature’, in Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 53. Nussbaum is referring to the preface to The Golden Bowl. James writes there of ‘revision’, the re-imagining of the language and form of the text, a notion and an activity that might well have appealed to Rorty. 49. Iris Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee’, in Peter Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and Mystics (London: Allen Lane, 1997), p. 12. 50. Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 33. Cf. Michael Hamburger’s translation, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 60–3. 51. On thick concepts see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985). 52. Coleridge and Barker quoted in K. K. Ruthven, Critical Assumptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 178–9, from which I have borrowed here. 53. Robert Graves, ‘The Persian Version’, in Poems Selected by Himself (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 162. 54. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York: Viking, 1998), p. xiii. A similar point is registered in Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. xvi–xix. 55. Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’, in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 295. 56. From Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 407–8.

145

7

The Secret Life, or, The Soldier’s Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War

In war, keep your own counsel, preferably in a notebook. General Sir Ian Hamilton1 Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens. Walter Benjamin 2

For diarists as for other deviants, the fundamental question is the question of motive. Why? The natural supplementary is the question of audience. Who? To keep a diary is to posit a reader. Whether they recognise it or not, all diarists, especially dedicated diarists, hope to be read one day – read and understood – though not necessarily by anyone they already know or can identify.3 Some diarists, perhaps, write for themselves – their future selves – a wager on survival.4 Some may not know exactly what impels them. Some may be a little coy. ‘I sometimes wonder why I keep a diary at all,’ the Parliamentary socialite ‘Chips’ Channon recorded self-indulgently. ‘Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or to dazzle my descendants?’ Several volumes later he could feel that ‘some day they may see the light of day and perhaps shock or divert posterity a little’. 5 Channon kept a diary almost continuously for nearly forty years. His companionable contemporary, Harold Nicolson, performed a similar feat. When the idea of publication was fi rst mooted – a version edited by his son Nigel – the venerable Nicolson was asked the ‘why’ question by Nigel and his brother Ben. He replied, ‘Oh, because I thought I would.’ ‘Come’, they said, ‘that’s not good enough. You didn’t write for publication?’ ‘Never.’ ‘You never re-read it yourself?’ ‘Very, very rarely, when I wanted to check a name or date.’ ‘Then why did you take such trouble?’ ‘Because I thought one day it might amuse you and Ben.’ And that was all they could get out of him. Six months later, lunching alone with him at Sissinghurst, Nigel repeated 146

the secret life the question. Nicolson responded that the diary had become a habit. ‘Like brushing your teeth?’ ‘Exactly.’6 At some level, perhaps, motivation is always imponderable. Channon and Nicolson invoke in their different registers a selection of the most persuasive and evasive answers to these intransigent questions; or, if not answers exactly, then reflections on that solitary practice, ‘a whole little secret life over and above the other’, as JeanPaul Sartre said of his own war diaries.7 The secret life is a sustaining one, it seems, never more so than when in mortal danger. Is this the explanation for that curious phenomenon, the military diarist? Soldiers have more urgent business to attend to, one would think, to say nothing of the sensitive nature of that business, with its thicket of regulations, prohibitions and suppressions. If careless talk costs lives, even soliloquies might be subject to multiple inhibitions. Yet soldiers are serial scribblers, undeterred by the rigours of combat, the toils of incarceration, or the exorbitant demands of national security.8 Not only are they dedicated diarists, for the most part ‘sane, low-toned, and natural’, as T. E. Lawrence said of A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War.9 Even more remarkable, they are premeditated diarists. No sooner does a war start, than there is a soldierly stampede to the stationer’s. The future Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke began his celebrated diaries barely four weeks after the declaration of what became the Second World War. Addressed directly to his wife, the opening entry is a kind of counter to the war, a declaration of devotion, and a manifesto for military diarists everywhere: Dedicated to Benita Blanche Brooke Begun 28 September 1939 This book is not intended to be a diary of events, although it may contain references to my daily life. It is intended to be a record of my thoughts and impressions such as I would have discussed them with you had we been together. After living the last ten years with you and never being parted for more than a few weeks at a time, I should feel quite lost without an occasional opportunity to talk with you although such a talk must necessarily be confi ned to writing: I therefore procured this book in Salisbury on purpose for such conversations with you. It was originally part of Smith’s stock of books on the Queen Mary, but having failed to sell was reduced from 60/- to 15/-! The thoughts I express may contradict themselves as I wish to give full scope to free expression and do not care if I am forced to change my mind by events. 147

on art and war and terror ON NO ACCOUNT MUST THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK BE PUBLISHED.10

According to the novelist Pat Barker, Lieutenant Billy Prior did something similar in the First World War. Billy Prior’s diary is a fiction. Its author is a figment of Pat Barker’s imagination. As a character, he courts anachronism – he is too knowing, too playful, too protean, too post-modern. As a diarist, however, he has the knack of acute observation, provokingly expressed. A fiction it may be, but also a type of truth. As Salman Rushdie puts it in his novel The Enchantress of Florence: ‘A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of truth.’ Saturday, 7 September [1918] Posted to the 2nd Manchesters. We leave tomorrow [for the front]. It’s evening now, and everybody’s scribbling away, telling people the news, or as much of the news as we’re allowed to tell them. I look up and down the dormitory and there’s hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen scratching. It’s like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two would-be poets in this hut alone. Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it’s a way of claiming immunity. First-person narrators can’t die, so long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we’re safe. Ha bloody fucking ha.11

Claiming immunity is an interesting idea. The diary as talisman: the problem of safekeeping reversed. His diary kept Billy Prior safe for a little while longer, as the author had always known it would. He died a few weeks later, with Wilfred Owen, in the Battle of the Sambre, the last major offensive of the war, mown down in a hail of fire on the banks of the canal. In his own diary of that day, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army on the Western Front, recorded characteristically: ‘The weather has been very favourable – a fog in the valley until 8 am. This enabled our troops to get across the Canal de Sambre without being seen.’12 There are lesser forms of immunity. Many diaries, including military diaries, are kept consciously or unconsciously for a purpose, a purpose perhaps best described as apologetic. General Sir Ian Hamilton decided in 1915, quite deliberately (and presciently) to keep a Gallipoli diary for such a purpose, remarking with unusual candour that ‘the tendency of every diary is towards self-justification and complaint’.13 Even if it was not begun with that in mind, Alanbrooke’s diary, ostensibly intended for his wife alone, gradually 148

the secret life took on a patina of apologia as the war went on – a dimension the diarist may have half-concealed from himself. Alanbrooke’s professed purpose was an immediate record of his thoughts and feelings – his free expression. In other words, he set out to write ‘hot’, as the diplomatist and diarist Oliver Harvey put it, on considering the merits of publishing his own diary after it was all over: Its whole value, if it has a value, lies in its ‘hotness’, in the immediate impression and atmosphere. I am the first to recognize how many of the fi rst reactions and impressions and judgements were proved wrong and would be admitted wrong by myself now, but that is not the point. This is how we saw things at the time . . . The more light that can be shed on the circumstances in which impressions were formed, decisions and actions taken, the better.14

The Goncourt brothers said much same, in their own inimitable fashion, in the preface to their famous Journal (a work with which the cultivated Francophile Oliver Harvey would certainly have been familiar): What we have tried to do, then, is to bring our contemporaries to life for posterity in a speaking likeness, by means of the vivid stenography of a conversation, the physiological spontaneity of a gesture, those little signs of emotion that reveal a personality, those imponderabilia that render the intensity of existence, and, last of all, a touch of that fever which is the mark of the heady life of Paris. And if, in our constant endeavour to be true to life in the recording of every still-warm recollection, hastily set down on paper and not always re-read, our syntax is sometimes happy-go-lucky and not all our words have passports, that is because we have invariably chosen those phrases and expressions which least blunted and academized the sharpness of our sensations and the independence of our ideas.15

No modern military diary is hotter than Alanbrooke’s – less blunted and academised – and none has generated more heat, nor been as consequential for the history of its time. No field marshal, it is tempting to say, has exacted so much of himself, unstintingly, unashamedly, in his own crabbed hand. Why did he do it, and to what effect? He wrote initially out of love and loneliness. Typically, he had made provision for both, as the dedicatory note in the fi rst of the bargain books clearly states. In his case, apparently, the answer to the ‘who’ question is plain enough. The diaries were expressly written for his second wife, Benita. They were married in 1929, 149

on art and war and terror when he was forty-six, four years after his first wife had died, tragically, as a result of an automobile accident in which Alanbrooke was at the wheel – a period shrouded in grief. Benita brought life. They had two small children, Kathleen and Victor (Pooks and Ti in the diary), who joined two older ones, Tom and Rosemary, from his first marriage. He loved Benita with a passion: a Gascon-Edwardian passion, a compound of his upbringing and education in Pau in the French Pyrenees and his training and formation at ‘The Shop’ (the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich) and in the Royal Regiment of Artillery. Come September 1939, he wrote to his inamorata as he went to war (a military tradition in itself, but no less heartfelt for all that), to command one of the three corps which made up the scratch British Expeditionary Force despatched to the over-familiar fields of France and Flanders when peace expired for a second time. Construed as a love letter in the guise of a journal, delivered personally but sporadically at Hitler’s pleasure, the diary was a form of communion, an exigent outpouring, a beacon to Benita. The communion was at once remote and intense. In the early years it is that combination which feeds the more sustained passages, exciting it, and giving it a distinct character: part entreaty, part release. Alanbrooke’s unimpeachable reputation was founded on ‘two qualities not readily interfusable’, as Melville has it, ‘prudence and rigour’.16 As Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) he could be prudent and rigorous all the long day – and it might seem, waltzing with Winston, all the long night – but not for ever. In the still small hour of duty to his diary, strong emotions welled up and spilled improvidently across the page: frustration; depression; betrayal; doubt. Keeping the diary may have begun as ‘just a little daily intimate talk’ with his truly beloved, a function of enforced separation, but it evolved, as diaries do, into something more instinctual.17 It became a necessary therapy, even an offertory, for the diarist (no churchgoer) is prone to thanksgiving, and, in extremis, prayer: I pray God that the decisions we arrived at may be correct, and that they may bear fruit.

Reflecting on that entry after the war, the conclusion to a journey to the Western Desert to remake the command in August 1942, he wrote: one may be apt to overlook those ghastly moments of doubt which at times crowded in on me. Moments when one wondered whether one had weighed up situations correctly, arrived at the right conclusion, and 150

the secret life

Figure 13

Howard Coster, General Sir Alan Brooke (1945).

151

on art and war and terror taken suitable action. This little short prayer of 2 lines was not just a figure of speech, it was a very real, deep felt and agonized prayer written at a moment of considerable mental and physical exhaustion at the end of 3 most memorable weeks!18

Keeping the diary afforded some consolation, possibly, a measure of protection against ‘the melancholies, the morosities and the sadnesses of war’.19 Written daily, or nightly, the very process of ‘reckoning up the day’s business’, as Ian Hamilton said, may be a comfort in itself.20 It serves to order one’s thoughts (perhaps to re-order them). Diarykeeping is a discipline, a self-discipline, very often learned from an early age. Like many diarists, Alanbrooke had been trained to write, notwithstanding the embarrassment of his spelling and the incontinence of his script. (‘As regards the diaries’, he wrote to Arthur Bryant in 1956 when the first edited version was being prepared, ‘I am quite ready for the inside to be photographed provided you selected a page that was not too badly written, fair english [sic], and no spelling mistakes! I may well be asking for the impossible!’21) Punctilious in adoration from an early age, for nearly twenty years he wrote religiously to his valetudinarian mother, Alice – his father, Sir Victor Brooke, 3rd Baronet of Colebrooke, County Fermanagh, Ulster, died when he was seven – who from her pedestal showered him with uncovenanted maternal blessings. Read in retrospect, his letters to her become rehearsals for a later production.22 The Great War hardly dented his output. From 18th Division (Ivor Maxse) on the Somme, on the second day of the big push, 2 July 1916: We have been busy at it since yesterday morning. At last our preliminary bombardment, which had been going on for several days, came to an end, and our infantry attacked at 7.30 am. It has been a continual war of guns for close on a week, both night and day, each gun with its special task and lines allotted to it throughout the period; slowly pounding away at the German trenches, some of them systemically hammering a way through the back wire entanglements, others pounding trenches to pieces, bombarding villages to demoralize supports, keeping up barrage on roads to prevent the supplies, ammunition etc being brought up, whilst our counter batteries took on the German batteries. After an intense bombardment of 65 minutes, our infantry left their trenches and attacked the German trenches. We had a very careful timetable of lifts worked out, by which the artillery lifted off each system of trenches just before the infantry arrived there, and moved on in advance of the infantry the whole time. 152

the secret life The attack of our Division was a great success, and we took exactly what we intended to take. We advanced about 1500 yards on a 2000 yard front. Our casualties were pretty heavy, but not yet as heavy as they might have been, and up to the present we have taken 600 prisoners in this Division, and the whole countryside is covered with dead Germans. 23

Whether Alice in her invalid bed fully appreciated this proud account of the first creeping barrage is a moot point, but she did preserve all of her youngest son’s letters. Loosely bound for family and posterity, they made something very like a diary.24 ‘Little mother’ hung on until 1920. By then her son was well married for the fi rst time. For Alanbrooke there was always an audience, doting and devoted, in a safe place. He may have needed that: needed to adore as much as be adored; needed a ‘you’. Conventionally repressed yet sentimentally advanced, at both ends of his career he was in some ways an isolate, ‘not quite one of the herd’, arrestingly insecure in youth – ‘having learned French before English, and having spent the fi rst sixteen years of my life in France, I was in continual apprehension lest I should look like a Frenchman, speak as a Frenchman, and possibly earn the name of “Froggie”’ – seemingly impregnable in maturity. 25 When he inherited the mantle of CIGS from his friend and confessor Field Marshal Sir John Dill, as 1941 drew to its ignominious end, he was ‘temporarily staggered’, not to say daunted, as his diary and notes movingly disclose. Except perhaps for Dill himself, no one would have known. By then the carapace was full-grown. As CIGS he appeared absolutely formidable. His overpowering presence has been brilliantly captured by the novelist Anthony Powell, whose narrator observes ‘the hurricanelike imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb. Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity, suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me.’ This was the CIGS. His quite remarkable and palpable extension of personality, in its effect with others, I had noticed not long before, out in the open. Coming down Sackville Street, I had all at once been made aware of something that required attention on the far pavement and saw him pounding along. I saluted at admittedly longish range. The salute was returned. Turning my head to watch his progress, I then had proof of being 153

on art and war and terror not alone in acting as a kind of receiving-station for such rays – which had, morally speaking, been observable, on his appointment to the top post, down as low as platoon commander. On this Sackville Street occasion, an officer a hundred yards or more ahead, had his nose glued to the window of a bookshop. As the CIGS passed (whom he might well have missed in his concentration on the contents of the window), the officer suddenly swivelled a complete about-turn, saluting too. No doubt he had seen the reflection in the plate glass. All the same, in its own particular genre, the incident gave the outward appearance of exceptional magnetic impact. That some such impact existed, was confi rmed by this closer conjunction in the great hall. Vavassor, momentarily overawed – there could be no doubt of it – came to attention and saluted with much more empressement than usual. Having no cap, I merely came to attention. The CIGS glanced for a split second, as if summarizing all the facts of one’s life. ‘Good morning.’26

‘In his demanding and abrupt efficiency’, offered The Economist appreciatively, ‘he knew when to scold, when to encourage, when to protect. Men admired, feared, and liked him: in that order, perhaps. He became, in peculiar, the conscience of the Army: a dark, incisive, round-shouldered, Irish eagle, the reluctant chairman of a council of war, frustrating, in selfless but far from patient service, those talents that could not otherwise but have forced him into the company of the great captains.’27 Existentially reassuring, as Powell suggested, the CIGS presented a forbidding face to the world. His nickname in the War Cabinet Offices was an appropriate one: Colonel Shrapnel.28 In debate his characteristic rejoinder was a bleak negative – ‘I flatly disagree’ – accompanied by the snapping of a pencil. Alanbrooke had mettle. It was for this very quality that he had been selected by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who invited him to Chequers, dined him royally, interrogated him pitilessly, passed him the chalice and tenderly wished him luck – a modus operandi with which he was to become excessively familiar over the next few years. Churchill had scrambled into supremacy in May 1940. For some eighteen months he had been on short commons, unable to satisfy his craving. Finally, after wide inspection, he thought he had found his man. ‘When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes – stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!’29 What Churchill craved was disputation. Disputation is what he got: more, much more than he bargained for. That is the tale told by the Alanbrooke diaries – one might almost 154

the secret life say enacted in the Alanbrooke diaries – a tale of schism and selfcontrol in the secret heart of the machine. Churchill knew the Brookes of yesteryear – ‘the friends of my early military life’.30 How well he ever knew the one with whom he was yoked in harness for the greater part of the Second World War is a matter for speculation and scepticism. His doctor, Sir Charles Wilson (Lord Moran), observed acutely that he was slow to recognise the merits of anyone who was not congenial to him: His judgements of men when he had to size up those around him – and it was a task he found not at all to his taste – were seldom impersonal. Efficiency in itself did not appear to influence his likes or dislikes. Beatty not Jellicoe, Mountbatten not Wavell, that was his form. Lloyd George, F. E. [Smith], Max Beaverbrook and Lord Cherwell, these men were his cronies, in their different ways all, mark you, men of violent thought; all men with a flamboyant streak . . . He would have been for the King, a Cavalier, disliking Puritans. Paget, Winant, Reith, he could make nothing of them, and the bloodless austerity of Stafford Cripps repelled him.31

Was Alanbrooke in the other camp? He was Puritan enough: Churchill himself is said to have identified another Stafford Cripps. Beyond question, flamboyance was anathema to the CIGS: ‘A meeting with Slim prior to his departure for India. I rubbed into him my dislike for “prima donna generals” and “film star generals”, I hope he will take it to heart.’32 Alanbrooke disapproved of cronyism; Beaverbrook, in particular, he abhorred. At his fi rst Alice in Wonderland weekend at Chequers, he remembered: Beaverbrook was present; after dinner he sat at the writing table, pouring himself out one strong whisky after another, and I was revolted by his having monkey-like hands as they stretched out to grab ice cubes out of the bowl. The more I saw of him throughout the war, the more I disliked and mistrusted him. An evil genius who exercised the very worst influence on Winston.33

Alanbrooke’s form was counterpoise: Bevin not Macmillan, Cunningham not Pound, Wilson not Alexander, Wavell, of course, not Mountbatten – the Buddha rather than the principal boy. Dill first, last and always. With Winant, the American Ambassador to London, he discovered real fellow-feeling. Moran was on hand to witness their encounter: Winant holds men, but that is as far as they get. He has wrestled with the world and has hidden, like Brooke, behind a curtain of his own making. It appeared to lift a little when the two men came together. 155

on art and war and terror There was Winant talking eagerly about [Grey’s] Fallodon Papers and Brooke – a new Brooke to me – hardly able to wait his turn as he thought of some lines from The Prelude. When Winant had done, how his words cascaded!34

Alanbrooke’s curtain was a mask of command. High rank, he believed, carried a heavy obligation: the lacerations must not show. His performance of public impregnability was precisely that: a performance, for others, just as Churchill performed the indomitable chauvinist-in-chief, complete with gesture and growl, and more props. Apart from Dill (excommunicated to Washington), who knew at fi rst hand the purgatory of a Chief of Staff, Alanbrooke’s only outlet was his diary, as he is at pains to convey.35 Ever since the publication of Sir Arthur Bryant’s The Turn of the Tide (1957) and Triumph in the West (1959), artful confections of the diaries and Alanbrooke’s autobiographical notes, sieved and selected by ‘the Tacitus of our time’, this is the accepted answer to the why question: a kind of psychological safety-valve – the diary as diatribe.36 It is also the plea entered in mitigation, by Alanbrooke and by his apologists, for its worst excesses: that is to say, for its shocking candour about Winston, the greatest Englishman, deep in his black dog dotage; about Ike, the château general, and then lo and behold, the château President; and, not least, about Colonel Shrapnel himself, the charnel house of his criticism, and his mental state.37 Doubtless the diaries are an inviting target for such an explanation. The entry for 6 July 1944, for example, an entry heavily (and silently) censored by Bryant, records one late-night, late-war passage of arms: At 10 pm we had a frightful meeting with Winston which lasted till 2 am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped. I began by having a bad row with him. He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster, and apparently Eisenhower had said he was over cautious. I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for 5 minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them. He said he never did such a thing. I then reminded him that during two whole Monday Cabinets in front of a large gathering of Ministers, he had torn Alexander to shreds for his lack of imagination and leadership 156

the secret life in continually attacking at Cassino. He was furious with me, but I hope it may do some good in the future. He then put forward a series of puerile proposals, such as raising a Home Guard in Egypt to provide a force to deal with the disturbances in the Middle East. It was not till after midnight that we got onto the subject we had come to discuss, the war in the Far East! Here we came up against all the old arguments that we have had put up by him over and over again. Attlee [Deputy Prime Minister], Eden [Foreign Secretary] and Lyttelton [Minister of Production] were there, fortunately they were at last siding with us [the Chiefs of Staff] against him. This infuriated him more than ever and he became ruder and ruder. Fortunately he fi nished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him concerning the future of India! We withdrew under cover of this smokescreen just on 2 am, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!!38

Despite its absolutist phraseology, the flavour of this entry is not untypical of the diary of that period, excepting only that it omits Alanbrooke’s intermittent speculation that the Prime Minister, surely, could not go on like this – that Winston might not make it after all.39 The unspeakable corollary of this unspoken thought was that a swift death would be a several blessing, to his memory, to his coadjutants and to the conduct of the war: that the war might be better run without him. Happily or otherwise, Churchill recovered, or was repaired for a while, and so too was the professional relationship. Alanbrooke ruefully recanted. The old man of war was mightier than he thought. But the diarist had wished him dead, and something had dissolved in the process. Alanbrooke was brought to such a pitch of aggravation by the cumulation of the war. After the alarums and the excursions of 1942 and 1943 he was exhausted, as he frequently remarked. His diary fairly palpitates with exasperation at obtuse politicians, obstructive Americans, obstreperous Russians, obmutescent Chinese – to say nothing of the enemy – and, in a class of his own, Winston. The relationship between those intimate adversaries changed over time. Churchill appointed Alanbrooke, in effect, as his minister-counsellor.40 Taking the measure of the situation, Alanbrooke appointed himself Churchill’s nanny, just as he appointed himself Montgomery’s guardian. Uniquely, in each case, he was accepted in that role by both of these infantile tyrants, for his acumen, but above all for his rectitude. After two tempestuous years of it, however, Alanbrooke was sick of nannying. What sickened him was not so much that the spoiled 157

on art and war and terror child never learned grand strategy – Churchill’s visionary vagabondage remained forever a mystery to the earthbound Alanbrooke – but rather that, far from growing up, as nanny had naively hoped, he appeared to regress, temperamentally, the longer the war went on. For Alanbrooke, this was at bottom a moral issue. By the winter of 1943–4, fuelled by medicine and alcohol, Churchill’s moral degradation was such that he seemed no longer to be master of himself. Here the two men parted company. Self-mastery was Alanbrooke’s cardinal precept. It is no coincidence that the strongest language in his diaries (invariably censored by Bryant) relates to Churchill’s laxity.41 The military diarist, too, can be a moral witness. To read the diary as a diatribe, a rage against the puerile and the pot-valiant, is very natural, but it is reductive. Alanbrooke’s diary served a larger purpose. It was not merely an instrument of aggravation. Like André Gide’s journal, to which it bears a passing resemblance, it had a more fundamental purpose. As Sartre perceived: ‘his diary is essentially a tool for recovering possession of himself’: a means of self-mastery and survival, a mode of moral life.42 Like Gide, too, Alanbrooke furnishes only a ‘mutilated me’, a diary of telegrams and anger, the war of the outer world.43 His children, especially the children of his fi rst marriage, are mostly absent; even his wife, the ritual ‘you’, the witness of that life, becomes almost unmentionable, to be invoked only in the hushed tones of holy worship. Was Alanbrooke forbidding to his family too? In this war diary their place is usurped by mewling ministers, the palimpsest of plans and the high-wire act of Churchill’s travelling circus. In the final analysis, both Churchill and Alanbrooke were disposed to underrate each other, Moran thought, on account of their own limitations. In council they were an indispensable complement and foil; but it was a carefully bounded cohabitation, a marriage of convenience for the duration of the war. The doctor once asked Churchill, ‘“Don’t you think Brooke is pretty good at his job?” There was a rather long pause. “He has a flair for the business,” he grunted. That was all he would concede.’44 In his own notebooks the writer Elias Canetti points to a distinction between illuminating and ordering minds.45 That was the PM and the CIGS. Intellectually and affectively, they were out of phase. Certainly Churchill’s war memoirs, that enigmatic touchstone of his feelings, are eloquently silent on the subject of his relationship with the Brooke who really counted. An elaborate footnote in volume II contains an extraordinary excursus on ‘his two gallant brothers’, Victor and Ronnie, and incidentally 158

the secret life on himself, gallant too. At which point chivalry gives out. The youngest of this gallant brood elicits no such admiration. On the contrary, Alanbrooke himself is something of a footnote throughout the next four volumes. He appears, if at all, as a stock character in a melodrama with one name above the title, bearing disappointments ‘with soldierly dignity’ and rendering services ‘of the highest order’. His unexampled achievement is reduced to long service and good conduct, and is despatched in a paragraph. He is not favoured with oratory or eulogy (unlike Admiral Pound, the parrot asleep on his perch). He is merely part of the retinue. It is evident that the pious motto of the work, ‘in victory, magnanimity’, did not extend to Churchill’s most intimate adversary, the CIGS and chairman of the Chief of Staff committee.46 Churchill’s memoirs appeared at regular intervals between the years 1948 and 1954. Alanbrooke read them carefully, and marked them well. He noted that Churchill put too much emphasis on the failure of the 1st Armoured Division in the Western Desert in 1941–2, rather than on the failure of the Commander-in-Chief, Auchinleck, to select his senior staff officers well. He corrected the account of their inaugural altercation, on the telephone, adrift in France, in June 1940. He revisited his own crushing disappointment when, in August 1943, the Prime Minister summarily withdrew the proposal he had made on three occasions before, that Alanbrooke himself should have Supreme Command of Operation Overlord, and offered it instead to the Americans, for their gratification, and in cool anticipation of their preponderance. Churchill’s exculpatory account of that inglorious episode was indeed as summary as the action itself, and it is clear that Alanbrooke was deeply wounded by it. ‘Not for one moment did he realize what this meant to me. He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance! The only reference to my feelings in his official history . . . is that I “bore the great disappointment with soldierly dignity”.’ 47 The involuntary deprivation hurt all the more, as Churchill well knew, because the CIGS had nobly foregone the offer of the Middle East Command a year earlier, feeling (rightly) that a substitute nanny for the Prime Minister would be hard to find.48 In the interim the bells had tolled a famous victory. Did he ever practise signing ‘Alanbrooke of Alamein’ on his blotter, as did Montgomery of that ilk? It would have made a pretty handle. His self-possession was sorely tried. Keen as it was – keener than we think – disappointment was not 159

on art and war and terror the vital spark. Alanbrooke’s basic objection to Winston and his works centred on deprivation of a different sort. This was the highly combustible matter of recognition. It had been smouldering for some time. A diary entry in September 1944 contains one outburst: We had another meeting with Winston at 12 noon. He was again in a most unpleasant mood. Produced the most ridiculous arguments to prove that operations could be speeded up so as to leave us an option till December before having to withdraw any forces from Europe! He knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. I fi nd it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that ¾ of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other ¼ have no conception what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and time again. And with it all no recognition hardly at all for those who help him except the occasional crumb intended to prevent the dog from straying too far from the table. Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.49

An entry in January 1945 is less agitated and more specific: We had a fairly full COS [Chiefs of Staff meeting] which completed our record week for the maximum number of items handled in one week since war started!!! It is a strange thing what a vast part the COS takes in the running of the war and how little it is known or its function appreciated. The average man in the street has never heard of it. Any limelight for it could not fail to slightly diminish the PM’s halo! This may perhaps account for the fact that he has never yet given it the slightest word of credit in public!50

Diary entries, ‘those vessels of discontent, are notoriously fickle’, one authority has wisely said, ‘subject to the torque of mutable feeling’.51 How different it might have been if Churchill had delivered a more generous testament. As it was, to paraphrase Balfour’s celebrated remark about his earlier memoirs, Winston wrote an enormous book about himself and called it The Second World War. The impact of that unscrupulously egocentric enterprise on his former CIGS was profound. ‘Winston’s book hardened Alan’s heart considerably’, reflected Cynthia Brookeborough (wife of his nephew 160

the secret life Basil), a shrewd and sympathetic witness, after putting the question to Alanbrooke himself, ‘I think for their egoism and lack of praise for underlings or more, perhaps – his equals. Alan thought Winston very jealous towards equals.’ He meant, above all, the much-neglected Dill, without honour in his own country, despite Alanbrooke’s petition on his behalf (‘I shall never be able to forgive Winston for his attitude towards Dill’); but also, more surprisingly, the muchgarlanded Montgomery; and, of course, the surviving Chiefs of Staff, Cunningham, Portal, and, naturally, the diarist himself.52 The torque, therefore, had been applied by Churchill. With appropriately tragedic irony for one whose whole life was triumph and tragedy, he was the agent of his own nemesis. The weight of post-war commentary, much of it instinctively Churchillian, is that Winston was shocked and distressed by the publication of Alanbrooke’s diaries, even as emasculated by Bryant. He may well have been.53 Winston was wronged, the Churchillians impute, and his turncoat table-thumper was the culprit.54 It is less often remarked that Alanbrooke was baffled and pained by the publication of Churchill’s memoirs. In fact, his feelings mirrored his reaction to their face-to-face encounters, writ large in the midnight hours. His response was the same: he glared back. Publication of the diaries was a continuation of disputation by other means. It was a courageous step, though the courage was only half-conscious. It added new meaning to the recovery of self-possession: it was in effect a recovery of history – his story – the diary as deposition. Churchill might well have known what was coming; and perhaps he did. Moran was with him when he heard for the fi rst time that Alanbrooke was going into print: ‘Winston looked up quickly. “Is it a violent attack on me?”’55 A more subtle, not to say insidious, variant on the wronged Churchill was the injured Alanbrooke. ‘The more I read The Turn of the Tide’, Lord Ismay wrote to his master a month after the book’s publication, ‘the more certain I am that Bryant has done Brookie an injury almost as grievous as Henry Wilson’s widow did to her husband.’56 The reference was to a previous CIGS (assassinated by the IRA), whose posthumously published diaries, edited and mediated in two reminiscent volumes, exposed the diarist as foolishly misguided and, worse still, actively disloyal.57 Ismay peddled the line of self-injury assiduously, and there is a perceptible strain of it in contemporary reviews.58 In the overheated atmosphere of the time, both variants were damaging.59 When the book came out, 161

on art and war and terror Alanbrooke sought to mollify Churchill by sending him a copy personally inscribed, ‘To Winston from Brookie’, With unbounded admiration, profound respect, and deep affection built up in our 5 years close association during the war. Some of the extracts from my diaries in this book may contain criticisms, and references to differences between us. I hope you will remember that these were written at the end of long and exhausting days, often in the small hours of the morning, and refer to momentary daily impressions. These casual day to day impressions bear no relation to the true feelings of deep-rooted friendship and admiration which bound me so closely to you throughout the war. I look upon the privilege of having served you in the war as the greatest honour destiny has bestowed on me.

Churchill’s reply was muted but unmistakable: ‘Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. On the whole I think I am against publishing day to day diaries written under the stress of events so soon afterwards. However, I read it with great interest, and I am very much obliged to you for what you say in your inscription.’ His darling Clementine was less restrained: ‘Alanbrooke’, she exclaimed, ‘wants to have it both ways.’60 Two years later, in 1959, Bryant returned to the fray with the effusive apologetics prefacing Triumph in the West: Some have questioned whether a diary so frank and revealing as Lord Alanbrooke’s should have been published in the lifetime of its author. It was certainly not intended to be, for after his retirement he persistently refused to write his war memoirs or to allow any book to be written until after his death. Had others preserved the same silence the public would have had to wait many more years before his diaries saw the light of day or his part in the war became known. But during the fi rst post-war decade a succession of widely read memoirs by American war leaders and Service chiefs appeared, presenting a very different view to Brooke’s of the events which had brought about victory and reflecting on the judgements and competence both of himself and of the British commanders who served under him. During this period the six volumes of Sir Winston Churchill’s Second World War also appeared, giving in great, though not always complete, detail Sir Winston’s version of the events in which he and Alanbrooke were so intimately and, after 1941, inseparably associated. The latter’s viewpoint and the extremely important story of what he sought to achieve, and how, were thus in danger of being obscured or forgotten.61

This was a rearguard action, plainly enough, and not entirely successful. Bryant had been warned. P. J. Grigg, the downright former 162

the secret life Secretary of State for War, read The Turn of the Tide in manuscript: ‘I don’t suppose Winston or his toadies will like it very much but I hope that you will not make any major excisions or allow Norman Brooke [the Cabinet Secretary] to frighten you with the Official Secrets Act, official etiquette and so forth.’ Grigg was wise in the ways of the velvet throttle. The Cabinet’s Secretary’s considered response was an admonition exquisite alike in sentience and syntax: ‘I could have wished that the book was not to be published in Sir Winston Churchill’s lifetime. And I cannot refrain from asking what steps are to be taken to prepare him for the kind of publicity which (if I am not mistaken) it will receive.’62 The question was left hanging in the air, although not for long. Innocent or over-confident, neither Alanbrooke nor Bryant was prepared for the furore prompted by the lurid serialisation in The Sunday Times early in 1957.63 Bryant, the arch butterer and shameless flatterer, should have known better.64 Alanbrooke, a surprisingly simple man, was no doubt too passive for too long. For better or worse, he had placed himself in Bryant’s hands. It was Bryant’s book; that was the fiction or rationalisation, and Alanbrooke, at once proud and infirm, ceded precedence to the professional author. Despite an undercurrent of nervy anticipation both men failed to comprehend what they had done.65 By defacing a legend they had transgressed a norm. The legend, moreover, was still warm. Churchill’s people were perplexed, and his friends were unforgiving. Alanbrooke may always have been beyond the Prime Ministerial pale. Now there was no way back. Recognition did not evade him altogether, however. After the war, in time-honoured fashion, he was created fi rst a Baron (under Churchill’s dispensation) and then, in tacit acknowledgement of a certain parsimony, a Viscount (under Attlee’s); and in the Birthday Honours List of 1946, His Majesty was pleased to confer upon him the Order of Merit. This last, royal and select, was especially gratifying. Elevation to the peerage, on the other hand, was not an unalloyed pleasure. ‘We finished our COS with a private meeting discussing future of COS, our own successors and probable dates of our departures . . . We then discussed the cost of becoming a Baron. Apparently I can’t get out of it under £200 which appals me.’66 He was ennobled but impoverished. The first Lord Alanbrooke had few means. His gratuity was a miserly £311 (Haig’s was £100,000); his half-pay – a Field Marshal never retires – ‘inconsiderable’. In the privacy of his diary, he coveted the Governor-Generalship of 163

on art and war and terror Canada, a position not merely dignified but remunerated, and was bitterly disappointed (once again) when it went instead to the effortless Alexander, at the behest of the King – so Churchill said. Correct to the end, Alanbrooke sported his stiff upper lip: ‘Alexander came to lunch and I had a chance of asking him afterwards how he liked the idea of the Canadian Governorship. He was delighted with the thought of it and well he might be.’67 After a brief struggle he sold his house and moved into the converted gardener’s cottage. ‘ I am looking for some means of making money as I am broke (and forced to sell off bird books),’ he wrote piteously to his confidante Cynthia Brookeborough in January 1946. ‘I hope to find something in the line of a directorship which will help me along.’68 Apart from the precious bird books – a forty-five-volume set, realising around £3,000 – he did have one under-capitalised asset: the Alanbrooke diaries.69 How far he was aware of this, and how soon, it is difficult to be sure. Bryant spelt it out for him towards the beginning of their association, in 1954, when they were discussing the division of the spoils: One thing to bear in mind is that if the book [The Turn of the Tide] should prove a success on this major scale [some £60,000] – and Billy Collins [the publisher] feels that it well might – it would create a tremendous amount of interest in the rest of your Diary and Notes and so increase their potential capital value, for in this volume we should only be using a very small proportion of the whole.70

There were cues to be picked up well before that, however, not only from the cold war of memoirs which broke out almost immediately open hostilities were concluded, but even as the hot war was being waged. As early as April 1944, for example, Alanbrooke’s incorrigible charge, Montgomery, mentioned the existence of his own secret diary in an interview with the American journalist John Gunther. When Gunther remarked that it would surely be an essential source for historians, Montgomery asked whether it would, therefore, be worth money one day. Gunther suggested a figure of at least $100,000. Once this had been converted into pounds sterling for him, Montgomery is supposed to have grinned and said: ‘Well, I guess I won’t die in the poor house after all.’71 The pecuniary answer to the why question is perhaps too easily overlooked, even among the monks of war. Brother Brooke, for his part, monkish in many ways, was happy to quit the monastery as often as he decently could. In 1953 he wrote: 164

the secret life Throughout my life I have always held it as essential to cultivate some engrossing interest besides one’s profession, to which one could turn for refreshment and rest whenever the exigencies of one’s work admitted. In war the value of such a habit becomes more evident than ever. I sometimes doubt whether I should have retained my sanity through those long years of the last world war had I not had an interest capable of temporarily absorbing my thoughts, and of obliterating the war, even if only for short spells when circumstances permitted.72

In other words, unlike the monomaniac Montgomery, Alanbrooke had a hinterland. His diary is a dossier of that too. Alanbrooke’s hinterland was populated with birds. He continued: In ornithology and in nature generally I had formed just such an interest, and I cannot describe its value better than by quoting the words which Viscount Grey [the former Foreign Secretary] had written in connection with the First World War in his Fallodon Papers: ‘In those dark days I found some support in the steady progress unchanged of the beauty of the seasons. Every year, as spring came back unfailing and unfaltering, the leaves came out with the same tender green, the birds sang, the flowers came up and opened, and I felt that a great power of Nature for beauty was not affected by the War. It was like a great sanctuary into which we could go and fi nd refuge for a time from even the greatest trouble of the world, fi nding there not enervating ease, but something which gave optimism, confidence and security. The progress of the seasons unchecked, the continuance of the beauty of Nature, was a manifestation of something great and splendid which not all the crimes and follies and misfortunes of mankind can abolish or destroy.’73

This passage became something of a mantra for him immediately he was introduced to it by the sympathetic Winant ten years earlier.74 Alanbrooke was one of the pioneers of wildlife photography, whose fine appreciation and sheer determination made admiring experts gape.75 Throughout the war his search for bird books was unremitting – according to his diary, he seems to have been foiled on VE Day itself. His Director of Military Operations, Sir John Kennedy (another initiate), remembered being asked to remain behind at the end of a long and difficult meeting at the War Office in 1943. When everyone had gone, the CIGS shut the door, opened a drawer in his desk and took out a book. ‘He handed it to me, and asked, “Have you read this? It is most remarkable.” I looked at it. Its title was The Truth About the Cuckoo.’76 The quest for the birds themselves were similarly ceaseless. At 68, 165

on art and war and terror he stood for many hours knee-deep in water in the Camargue to film flamingos. At 74, he climbed a tall pylon hide on an expedition to the Coto Doñana to glimpse the Spanish Imperial Eagle. ‘What form of mysterious pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to stare every dandelion in the face, to start at every coloured mote passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of having come empty-handed – without what? A gun? A wand?’ Alanbrooke, strategist and ornithologist, would have understood the rapturous rhetoric of Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and lepidopterist, only too well.77 ‘Viscount Alanbrooke, I am quite sure, would prefer to be remembered as an ornithologist than as a soldier’: Raymond Fletcher’s verdict may have been a mischievous one, yet he may not have been far wrong.78 Nabokov declared that his pleasures were ‘the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting’.79 Alanbrooke in his fashion shared Nabokov’s dualism, and his intensity, but not his twofold pleasure. His only real fulfilment was his recreation – his re-creation, as he said. In truth, he was an unhappy warrior. That was his merit. It is what separated him from Churchill, ultimately, and from so many of his peers. Alanbrooke was always a little foreign to his fellows in arms. He did not suffer from the disease of military ardour. Nor do his diaries. That is their distinction. ‘Let victory belong to those who made war without liking it.’80

Notes 1. General Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary (London: Arnold, 1920), p. vi. 2. Walter Benjamin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ‘One-Way Street’ [1928], in Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), vol. I, p. 458. 3. This is the conclusion of Sarah Gristwood, Recording Angels (London: Harrap, 1988), and Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own (London: Pan, 1985), among others. It is partially disputed by Richard J. Aldrich, in his survey of diaries of the Second World War: ‘Introduction’, Witness to War (London: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 3–5. 4. An idea suggested by the philosopher Avishai Margalit, apropos Victor Klemperer’s diary of the Nazi period: The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 157. See Klemperer, trans. Martin Chalmers, I Will Bear Witness (New York: Random House, 1998).

166

the secret life 5. Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Chips (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), p. 7. 6. Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson (London: Collins, 1966), pp. 13–14. In fact, as his son points out, Nicolson himself prepared one section of the diary for publication as early as 1941, but nothing came of this. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare, War Diaries (London: Verso, 1984), p. xi. 8. For selections of war diaries of every sort, see, for example, Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), Witness to War and The Faraway War (London: Doubleday, 2005); Irene and Alan Taylor (eds), The Secret Annexe (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004). 9. Lawrence to F. V. Morley, 29 July 1929, in Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale (London: Viking, 1997), p. xv. 10. See Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds), War Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001). All subsequent Alanbrooke citations from this edition, unless indicated. A similar dedication and a similar injunction against publication preface the second diary, begun 12 April 1940. Thereafter each book simply records his wife’s name and address, for safekeeping. 11. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (London: Viking, 1995), p. 115. Cf. 29 August 1918, on the purchase of the diary (p. 107). 12. Haig diary, 4 November 1918, in Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (eds), Douglas Haig (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 484. 13. Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, p. vii. 14. John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (London: Collins, 1978), pp. 11–12. 15. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, trans. Robert Baldick, Pages from the Goncourt Journal [1962] (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), pp. xxxi–xxxii (emphases in the original). 16. Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 335. In Churchill’s euphonious parallel, wisdom and vigour. Churchill to Margesson, 17. November 1941, in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1235. 17. And, from July 1940, there was less separation – at any rate less distance – as he took over successively Southern Command, Home Command and then the whole show. 18. Dedication in second diary, begun 12 April 1940; diary and notes, 24 August 1942. Cf. notes to 16 November 1941. 19. Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Robin Buss, Modern Times (London: Penguin, 2000), p. xxv. 20. Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, p. vi. 21. Alanbrooke to Bryant, 18 October 1956, War Diaries, p. xxvii. 22. During the Second World War, in addition to the diary, he wrote 167

on art and war and terror

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

a daily letter to his wife. See David Fraser, Alanbrooke (London: Collins, 1982), p. 34. Alanbrooke to his mother, 2 July 1916, War Diaries, pp. xiii–xiv. It seems he kept a diary too, at least for part of the time; the rest may have been lost. The extant portion, 1915, includes action around Neuve Chapelle and Festubert. It is briefer and more factual – less hot – than its Second World War successor. Notes on early life, War Diaries, p. xiv. Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers (London: Fontana, 1971), pp. 57–8. ‘Statesman and Soldier’, The Economist, 23 February 1957. ‘The conscience of the Army’ was borrowed later by Fraser, Alanbrooke, pp. 271ff. Alex Danchev (ed.), Establishing the Anglo-American Alliance (London: Brassey’s, 1990), p. 13. Nye note, War Diaries, p. xvi. For the inspection, see Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols (London: Cassell, 1948– 54), vol. II, pp. 233–4; Alanbrooke diary, 17 July 1940. Churchill’s Boswellian Private Secretary confi rms that he had Alanbrooke in mind as ‘an alternative CIGS’ well before he made the offer on 16 November 1941. Colville diary, 28 September 1941, in John Colville, The Fringes of Power (London: Sceptre, 1986 and 1987), vol. I, p. 530. Churchill, Second World War, vol. II, p. 233. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (London: Constable, 1966), pp. 718–19. Alanbrooke diary, 9 August 1945. Slim, commander of the ‘forgotten’ 14th Army, was by no means the prime suspect for prima donna behaviour. He was taking command of Allied Land Forces, Southeast Asia. Notes to 17 August 1940. These asperities have hitherto gone unnamed or unpublished. Cf. Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide (London: Collins, 1957), pp. 36–37, where the anonymously repulsive and greasy can now be identified as Pile and Hore-Belisha, respectively (diary, 14 July 1942 and 24 February 1943). Moran diary, 16 November 1943, in Moran, Winston Churchill, pp. 125–6. Cf. notes to 19 November 1943. The Ambassador’s account of his tenure is also curtained. J. G. Winant, A Letter from Grosvenor Square (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947). See, for example, diary and notes, 15 September 1940, 29 July 1941, 29 October 1942. The uninhibited exchanges with Dill are only patchily preserved, but see Alanbrooke to Dill, 30 March 1944: ‘I have just about reached the end of my tether. . .’ Extracted in Arthur Bryant, Triumph in the West (London: Collins, 1959), pp. 170–1. Bryant, Triumph, pp. 36–42; ‘The Tacitus of our Time’, The Tatler, 20 February 1957. 168

the secret life 37. See, for example, Alanbrooke to Bryant, 19 February 1955; and the ‘Preludes’ to Bryant’s volumes. 38. Diary, 6 July 1944. Cf. Bryant, Triumph, pp. 229–30. Alanbrooke’s account is corroborated by other participants. See Cunningham diary, in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 844; Eden diary, in Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), pp. 461–2. 39. See, for example, 28 March, 8 and 9 September 1944. 40. See 16 November 1941. 41. See, for example, 20 December 1944 and 12 April 1945. 42. Sartre diary, 3 December 1939, in his War Diaries, p. 90. ‘Recover possession of oneself’ is Gide’s expression. See André Gide, trans. Justin O’Brien, Journals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). 43. Gide journal, 26 January 1939, in Journals, p. 637. ‘Personal relations are the most important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger’ (E. M. Forster) 44. Moran, Winston Churchill, pp. 712ff. 45. Elias Canetti, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, The Human Province (New York: Seabury, 1978), p. 200. Canetti offers Heraclites and Aristotle as ‘extreme cases’. 46. Churchill, Second World War, vol. II, p. 234; vol. V, p. 76. Cf. his ‘true comrade’ Pound: vol. I, p. 321; vol. V, pp. 145–6. For the parrot-like Pound, see diary, 3 February 1942. 47. Notes to 14 June 1940 and 15 August 1943. Cf. Churchill, Second World War, vol. II, p. 171 and vol. V, p. 76. 48. Diary and notes, 6 August 1942; Churchill, Second World War, vol. IV, p. 413. 49. Diary, 10 September 1944, duly censored in Bryant, Triumph, pp. 270–1. An illustration perhaps of Colville’s observation that Alanbrooke was ‘at once spellbound and exasperated’ by Churchill (Colville diaries, biographical notes). Cf. notes to 24 September 1942, 9 November 1942, 7 May 1944. 50. Diary, 20 January 1945, excised by Bryant. 51. Cynthia Ozick, ‘The Buried Life’, The New Yorker, 2 October 2000. 52. Lady Brookeborough to Marian Long, July 1954; notes to 12 October and 5 November 1944; diary, 8 May 1945. 53. The fullest fi rst-hand account is in Moran, Winston Churchill, pp. 716–17; echoed in John Colville, Footprints in Time (Salisbury: Russell, 1984), p. 188. 54. Churchill’s official biography contributes to this vein of commentary a notably partisan attack on the diaries and a gracenote on the wronged Winston, ‘generous as usual’. Martin Gilbert, Never Despair: Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1232–3. 55. Moran, Winston Churchill, p. 716. 169

on art and war and terror 56. Ismay to Churchill, 5 March 1957, in Gilbert, Never Despair, p. 1232. Part of a veritable flood. See also Ismay to Alanbrooke and Bryant, 14 and 29 March 1957; and The Memoirs of Lord Ismay (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 317–18. 57. Major General Sir C. E. Callwell, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson (London: Cassell, 1927). Alanbrooke was, of course, familiar with the Wilson example. See diary, 10 July 1941. 58. See, for example, ‘At Churchill’s Right Hand’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 March 1957; Michael Howard, ‘Bryant or Alanbrooke?’ New Statesman, 7 November 1959; Alastair Buchan, ‘The Over-sell’, Encounter 78 (1960), pp. 86–8. 59. Looking back, Michael Howard noted that The Turn of the Tide appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Suez debacle, amid a bitter debate about national decline, and ‘winning the war but losing the peace’. Mediterranean Strategy, pp. vi–vii. Cf. Alastair Buchan’s sardonic suggestion that interest in the diaries in particular and the Second World War in general was a ‘sublimated form of anti-Americanism’. ‘The Over-sell’, p. 86. 60. Inscription and reply in Gilbert, Never Despair, pp. 1232–3; Clementine in Moran, Winston Churchill, p. 717. 61. Bryant, Triumph, pp. 25–6. Alanbrooke died in 1963. 62. Grigg and Brook to Bryant, 16 and 18 September 1956; Bryant, epilogue to Fraser, Alanbrooke, p. 558. 63. Serialisation began on 3 February 1957. There was a book launch at the Dorchester two days later. A fi rst impression of 75,000 copies sold out within the month – a prelude to further vast sales in Britain and in the United States. 64. See Andrew Roberts, ‘Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur Bryant’, in his Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), pp. 287–322. 65. There was an interesting contemporary parallel. Major General Sir John Kennedy, Alanbrooke’s former Director of Military Operations, was about to publish his own memoirs, also diary-based, edited by Brigadier Bernard Fergusson (Lord Ballantrae). The book is brave and suave, but their correspondence betrays acute nervousness about giving public offence to ‘the greatest Englishman’. The Business of War (London: Hutchinson, 1957), preface and epilogue; Kennedy Papers, box 6, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London. 66. Diary, 23 August 1945; diary and notes, 10 April 1946. 67. Diary, 4, 16 and 17 July 1945; Bryant, Triumph, pp. 536–7; Fraser, Alanbrooke, p. 514. The instructive contrast with Haig is not confi ned to fi nances. It would include Haig’s specialities of political and especially monarchical intrigue – Alanbrooke was not above the 170

the secret life

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

former (see 15 September 1942), but eschewed the latter absolutely (see 1–2 March 1944) – to say nothing of the vexed question of diary doctoring, another charge levelled at Haig, of which Alanbrooke was almost completely innocent. See ‘Note on the Text’, War Diaries, pp. xxxi–xxxiv. Alanbrooke to Lady Brookeborough, 16 January 1946. On the purchase and sale of the bird books (a matter of no small consequence to him) see diary and notes, 22 June 1943 and 11 April 1946. Bryant to Alanbrooke, 24 December 1954. Sunday Chronicle, 16 April 1944; Introductory Note to Montgomery Papers, Imperial War Museum, London. Forword to David Armitage Bannerman, The Birds of the British Isles (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1953), p. xiii. Alanbrooke, quoting from ‘Recreation’, in Fallodon Papers (London: Constable, 1928), p. 85. Notes to 25 May 1941, 19 November 1943. David Bannerman, unpublished autobiography, pp. 132 ff., Bannerman Papers, Natural History Museum, Tring; Eric Hosking, ‘Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke’, Bird Notes 30 (1963), pp. 247–8. Diary, 8 May 1945; Kennedy, Business of War, pp. 290–1. From Look at the Harlequins!, in Brian Boyd, ‘Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera’, in Nabokov’s Butterflies (London: Allen Lane, 2000), p. 16. Raymond Fletcher, ‘Books and People’, Tribune, 6 November 1959. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, in Boyd, ‘Nabokov’, p. 1. André Malraux, in Sartre, Modern Times, p. 293.

171

8

Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib

‘What are you after? Do you think you’ll bring this fi ne case of yours to a speedier end by wrangling with us, your warders, over papers and warrants? We are humble subordinates who can scarcely fi nd our way through a legal document and have nothing to do with your case except to stand guard over you for ten hours a day and draw our pay for it. That’s all we are, but we’re quite capable of grasping the fact that the high authorities we serve, before they would order such an arrest as this must be quite well informed about the reasons for the arrest and the person of the prisoner. There can be no mistake about that. Our officials, so far as I know them, and I know only the lowest grades among them, never go hunting for crime in the populace, but, as the Law decrees, are drawn towards the guilty and must then send out us warders. That is the Law. How could there be a mistake in that?’ ‘I don’t know this Law,’ said K. ‘All the worse for you,’ replied the warder. Franz Kafka1

The ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) is nothing if not Kafkaesque. The very idea, a never-ending, all-encompassing, worldwide sweep, seems to pay a kind of tribute to Kafka and his demons. ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’2 The arbitrary nature of the proceedings of The Trial (1925) corresponds eerily to the proceedings of the GWOT. ‘I forgot to ask you first what sort of acquittal you want. There are three possibilities, that is, definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, and indefi nite postponement.’3 Anonymous functionaries (warders, whippers, door-keepers, assessors) shield the prominents from direct contamination: hand-soiling in high office is inconceivable. Joseph K. never sees the judge or locates the high court. He is allowed an advocate, but the advocate is also part of the system. ‘So the Advocate’s methods . . . amounted to this: that the client finally forgot the whole world and lived only in hope 172

like a dog of toiling along this false path until the end of his case should come in sight. The client ceased to be a client and became the Advocate’s dog.’4 Rendition and subjection are spookishly prefigured. The queasy combination of bureaucracy and depravity, a total envelopment at once sinister and grotesque, foreshadows policy and practice at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and numberless other ‘facilities’ in nameless other places, whose common denominator is the camp. ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule,’ as Giorgio Agamben has observed. ‘In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the social order.’5 Amnesty’s ‘gulag of our times’ comes to resemble Kafka’s penal colony, where the guiding principle is devastatingly simple: guilt is never to be doubted.6 In the penal colony the prisoner is not told the sentence that has been passed on him, or even if he has been sentenced at all. He learns it corporally, on his person. The commandment he is supposed to have disobeyed is inscribed on his body, in needlepoint, by an ingenious apparatus called the Harrow.7 Corporal instruction, and corporal indignity, feature large in the catalogue of torture and abuse perpetrated by the ‘alliance of values’, in Tony Blair’s parlance, now copiously documented.8 Kafkaesque, however, embraces something more intimate still. Beyond menace, Kafka’s great subject is humiliation. In its infi nite and exquisite variety, humiliation is instinct in his life and work. The damage is explored with agonistic lucidity. ‘Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’, the melancholy litany of the Convention against Torture (CAT), Kafka knew inside out. In Kafka’s world, humiliation takes canine form. The dog marks the degradation; thus, the bizarre fate of the Advocate’s client. Becoming a dog is a process of voluntary or involuntary self-abasement. Kafka had an obsessive interest in small animals, and in shrinking himself to be like them. He understood the terror of standing upright, as he put it to his muse Felice Bauer, a terror shared by the abused of Abu Ghraib. ‘The exact information you want about me, dearest F., I cannot give you,’ he wrote to her on another occasion. ‘I can give it to you, if at all, only when running along behind you in the Tiergarten, you always on the point of vanishing altogether, and I on the point of prostrating myself; only when thus humiliated, more deeply than any dog, am I able to do it.’9 This 173

on art and war and terror image of humiliation haunts his fiction. ‘In the Penal Colony’ opens with an unforgettable portrait of the condemned man in chains, held like a lead by his guard, as if to anticipate the grinning Lynndie England and the cringing detainee, leashed and naked, known to the night shift as ‘Gus’. ‘In any case, the condemned man looked so much like a submissive dog that one might have thought he could be left to run free on the surrounding hills and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin.’10 The collateral descendants of Kafka’s warders and whippers seem to mimic his obsessions. From the interrogation log of Detainee 063, aka Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called twentieth hijacker, at Guantánamo: 11 December 2002 Detainee was reminded that no one loved, cared or remembered him. He was reminded that he was less than human and that animals had more freedom and love than he does. He was taken outside to see a family of banana rats. The banana rats were moving around freely, playing, eating, showing concern for one another. Detainee was compared to the family of banana rats and reinforced that they had more love, freedom, and concern than he had. Detainee began to cry during this comparison. 20 December 2002 Detainee offered water – refused. Corpsman changed ankle bandages to prevent chafi ng. Interrogator began by reminding the detainee about the lessons in respect and how the detainee had disrespected the interrogators. Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong and know to protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated.11

The interrogation log is remarkably detailed – shamelessly detailed – but it does not make quite clear that the detainee was chained throughout, or that during the latter session he was forced to perform this series of ‘dog tricks’ while being led round the interrogation room on a leash. These were by no means the most offensive or invasive techniques employed by the interrogators, as an official inquiry has revealed. Among other ploys, the detainee was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, to wear women’s underclothes and to undergo repeated strip searches (allegedly cavity searches) as part of the interrogation.12 The detail, moreover, obscures the regime. Detainee 063 was held in isolation for some six months. During that time he was regularly interrogated for eighteen 174

like a dog

Figure 14 Private Lynndie England and ‘Gus’, Abu Ghraib, 24 October 2003.

to twenty hours a day, starting at midnight, kept awake by dripping water on his head or loud playing of Christina Aguilera music – ‘sleep adjustment’ combined with prolonged sleep deprivation.13 After an episode of bradycardia (slow heartbeat) during the most intensive period of interrogation, his condition gave sufficient cause for concern for him to be hospitalised for observation. Meanwhile, other concerns were raised, sometimes from unlikely quarters. FBI agents serving at Guantánamo went so far as to complain about ‘highly aggressive interrogation techniques’, noting that al-Qahtani exhibited behaviour ‘consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end)’.14 All of the techniques employed in the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani were found to be legally permissible and officially authorised under the current dispensation. Partly for this reason, multiple inquiries into interrogation practices and detainee abuse have been reluctant to return findings couched explicitly in the language of the 175

on art and war and terror CAT. The CAT may be the fi rst casualty of the GWOT. For the forces of good, ‘torture’ is as difficult a word as ‘genocide’. Following the bland evasions of the Administration – that as a matter of policy detainees are treated ‘humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949’ – inquirers have also been reluctant straightforwardly to acknowledge ‘inhumane’ treatment.15 The most forthright to date is Major General Antonio Taguba, who was tasked to investigate the conduct of the Military Police at Abu Ghraib, and who found that ‘numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were infl icted on several detainees’.16 Seymour Hersh believes that Taguba, a FilipinoAmerican, was offended by what he saw. The ‘extremely graphic photographic evidence’ to which he refers in his report, it is now known, far exceeds the sample disclosed in 2004 – dogs, hoods, electrodes and all – amounting to well over one thousand images and nearly one hundred video files of suspected detainee abuse.17 Taguba went further: ‘This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated’, he declared, confronting the weasel arguments offered by tame apologists: that the abuse was confined to rogue elements (‘a few bad apples’), that it was not so heinous a crime (‘Animal House on the night shift’), and that the purpose was not to cause harm but to extract information (the lawyerly exculpation of ‘specific intent’).18 The Taguba Report will have none of this. Taguba was first ignored and then sidelined: his career was effectively over. He retired in 2007, still in the same rank, professional to the end.19 Others have been more circumspect or less searching. Their struggle is played out in the parsing of their reports. Allegations of abuse at Guantánamo were investigated by Brigadier General John Furlow and Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt. In the matter of Detainee 063, they concluded that ‘the creative, aggressive, and persistent interrogation . . . resulted in the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment’, a formulation twice repeated. There follows an awkwardly worded concession – ‘this treatment did not rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment’ – and then a recommendation that the Guantánamo Commander ‘should be held accountable for failing to supervise the interrogation . . . and should be admonished for that failure’.20 Carefully circumscribed as it may be, the call for accountability is startling. No action has more severely compromised the United States in its prosecution of the war on terror than its inaction when 176

like a dog faced with irrefutable evidence of American wrongdoing (evidence gathered by its own internal inquiries): the conspicuous failure to trace responsibility to its source and hold commanders and policymakers to account. The lack of accountability confi rms the culture of impunity. Minimisation aggravates provocation, as surely as coverup compounds scandal. Humiliation demands expiation. The strongholds of certainty, inviolability and ‘inherent power’ – the nexus of the Office of the Vice-President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Office of Legal Counsel – are above such considerations. The occupants of these Offices brazenly add insult to injury, that is to say, heap humiliation on humiliation. ‘Issues of senior official accountability’ are passed like an unwanted parcel from inquiry to inquiry, and never addressed.21 In most cases the very nature of the inquiry, administrative investigations commissioned by army commanders in the field, directs the focus down the chain of command rather than up, and caps the seniority of scrutiny at the rank of the investigating officer.22 Salami-sliced remits and tightly-drawn terms of reference serve to delimit and defang, a strategy familiar from the serial inquiries into intelligence and weapons of mass destruction. 23 Investigation after investigation pleads exhaustion (at Abu Ghraib, for example, one on Military Police, followed by another on Military Intelligence); chronic redundancy prevails. Some reports are parasitic on other reports. The Schmidt Report borrows from the Church Report; the Church Report is patterned on the Schlesinger Report; the Schlesinger Report synthesises previous reports. Duplication and repetition contrive to blur the outline and blunt the impact. For the practised hand, of course, different tactics are also available. Findings can be rejected, or disputed, or ignored. Both the conclusion and the recommendation of the Schmidt Report were summarily rejected by the officer who commissioned it.24 In a classic demonstration of the art, he argued that, because the Guantánamo Commander had little experience of detainees before he took charge, he should not be held accountable for every aspect of prison operations. In the camp, everything is possible. Al-Qhatani and his cohorts found themselves in an ethical, political and legal limbo. Agamben calls this bare life. Bare life is a fathomless existence of domination, degradation and dehumanisation. ‘In the detainee at Guantánamo, bare life reaches its maximum indeterminancy’, he writes, a process exemplified in the deliberately indeterminate designation of its subjects as nameless ‘detainees’.25 Once introduced, torture is more readily accepted than admitted. 177

on art and war and terror Normalisation is easy and insidious. Detainee 063 was a special case, but the techniques employed against him soon passed into general use. The Special Interrogation Plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani was approved in advance by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, for a ‘high-value’ detainee who had resisted the standard techniques for months on end, and who was believed to possess ‘actionable intelligence’ – the interrogator’s holy grail – which might prevent further attacks on the United States.26 The strategy was to establish and maintain total control, an objective straight out of Army Field Manual 34-52, Intelligence Interrogation (1992), the fundamentals of military doctrine. At least one official inquiry has suggested that the precepts set down in the widely used (but significantly revised) 1987 version of the manual may have been open to abuse by the untrained: The interrogator should appear to be the one who controls all aspects of the interrogation to include the lighting, heating, and configuration of the interrogation room, as well as the food, shelter, and clothing given to the source. The interrogator must always be in control, he must act quickly and fi rmly. However, everything that he says and does must be within the limits of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, as well as the standards of conduct outlined in the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice]. 27

The techniques embodied in the Special Interrogation Plan were applied to that end. Each had its rationale, expressed in the elementary psychology of FM 34-52. They centred on ‘Pride and Ego Down’ and ‘Futility’.28 However, they also contained an additional element: ‘Increasing Anxiety by Use of Aversions’, specifically, bringing a military working dog (MWD) into the interrogation room and ordering it to growl, bark and bare its teeth at the detainee. The dog, like the detainee, was on a lead. The teeth were for show – this time – but the threat was for real. The image of humiliation appeared before him, large as life, unmuzzled. It was illicit, but easily justified (‘exploiting individual phobias’). Crude notions about Arab fear of dogs and Muslim sense of shame mark the limits of cultural understanding. The war on terror is a war of mutual incomprehension, a war of tribes, with something of the primitive about it. As the captors strip the captives of their dignity, insult their mothers and profane their religious books, so the captives mock the captors in terms the latter cannot begin to comprehend – women with men’s haircuts, men without beards. ‘In the American army I could not see a real man,’ said an Afghan returned to his homeland, no longer an 178

like a dog enemy combatant, after three years in Guantánamo. ‘And they talk rudely about homosexuals, which is very shameful to us.’29 The dog-shaped descent from subject to abject was designed to intensify the shame, sapping the will to resist. That was the hope or expectation. In the nature of the case, it is almost impossible to determine the success of the Special Interrogation Plan, even in its own terms. According to the official inquiries, Mohammed al-Qahtani’s resistance was eventually broken and he provided valuable intelligence.30 He is said to have confirmed more than twenty detainees as ‘UBL bodyguards’ who received terrorist training at Al Farooq, ‘an Al Qaeda facility’, and were active fighters against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. He is also said to have provided detailed information on meetings with the well-guarded Usama bin Laden himself, and on ‘the dirty bomber’, Jose Padilla, ‘the shoe bomber’, Richard Reid, and ‘the terror suspect’, Adnan El Shukrijumah, alias Jaafaral the Pilot, one of the FBI’s most wanted.31 How valuable was this intelligence, given the time elapsing, the over-inflating, the self-justifying, the scaremongering and the marginal status of most of those identified, including disaffected ex-cons like Padilla and Reid?32 The vexed question of value is a difficult one to answer. The starting-point is important. ‘At the time, we didn’t even understand what Al Qaeda was,’ admitted a Military Intelligence officer familiar with the practices at Guantánamo. ‘We thought the detainees were all masterminds. It wasn’t the case. Most of them were just dirt farmers in Afghanistan.’33 John Walker Lindh, ‘the American Taliban’, was at Al Farooq; it was in fact a training camp for the Al Ansar group, of which he was a member. Lindh was a foot soldier and a novice. Now they had him, however, the Administration had high hopes of making an example of him. Al Qaeda and conspiracy to mass murder topped the charge sheet. When he was captured, in December 2001, he was stripped, gagged, strapped to a board and exhibited on the evening news. After that he was kept from time to time in a pitch-dark steel shipping container. The commanding officer at Mazar-i-Sharif, where he was being held, told his interrogator that ‘the Secretary of Defense’s counsel had authorized him to “take the gloves off” and ask whatever he wanted.’ The elaborately constructed case collapsed, for want of evidence and understanding. Quite apart from the public exhibition and the private coercion, it transpired that the interrogator, who was new to the job, had consistently replaced the word ‘Ansar’ with ‘Qaeda’ in his report.34 One 179

on art and war and terror expert who interviewed Lindh at length came to believe that the root of the problem lay in the sheer depth of ignorance of US officials, at all levels. ‘They were like babies. They didn’t know enough about Islam or Afghanistan. It was totally alien to them.’35 For those who know nothing, anything is of value. The al-Qahtani case has an alternative narrative. According to senior Pentagon officials, some of his most interesting confessions were not extracted under the interrogation plan, nor were they attributable to the use of any particular technique. They came more freely, or more unexpectedly, when he was presented with evidence that others were talking, especially Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the alleged mastermind of 9/11.36 Whatever the value of the intelligence, on this account ‘the take’ was cumulative, unpredictable, almost adventitious. The correlation between information and humiliation was moot. The techniques approved for al-Qahtani embroidered on a long list of ‘aggressive interrogation techniques’, otherwise known as ‘counter-resistance strategies’, requested for use at Guantánamo by its commander in October 2002. The request addressed a deceptively simple problem: ‘The current guidelines for interrogation procedures at GTMO limit the ability of interrogators to counter advanced resistance.’ In other words, the swelling population of the penal colony had produced a frustrating paucity of actionable intelligence. High-value or low-value, they yielded embarrassingly little – even supposing that the system was capable of distinguishing between them. More creativity was required. The new man at Guantánamo was Major General Geoffrey Miller. His mantra, ‘the rapid exploitation of detainees’, entailed the functional integration of detention operations, interrogation operations and collection management.37 On this model, the ‘Gitmo’ model, Military Police work hand-in-hand with Military Intelligence. The detention force ‘sets the conditions’ for successful interrogations. Setting the conditions means softening up. Rapid exploitation means coercive interrogation, con brio. The request from Guantánamo was a request for more latitude. If the war on terror has a theme, it is the Lindh syndrome – or rather the 9/11 syndrome – the itch to ‘take the gloves off’ in order to achieve results against such a despicable and fanatical foe. In Cofer Black’s pithy testimony, ‘there was “before” 9/11 and “after” 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.’38 On this analysis, the ground rules are as outmoded as the Geneva Conventions. ‘Good manners are 180

like a dog timeless, spaceless, classless’, writes Christine Brooke-Rose: ‘simply the ability to imagine the other. As an intelligence officer learns to do, if efficiently backed and not corrupted, experiencing a whole war from the enemy point of view.’39 Good manners were conspicuous by their absence at Abu Ghraib. The new normal is improvised, disorderly, contingent. Bare life is precarious and often vicious. Exploitation not imagination is the watchword. The other remains incorrigibly other: not like us. Breaking the barbarians was not a job for the squeamish. The list of aggressive interrogation techniques was divided into three categories. Category I were the most commonplace and the least aggressive (direct questioning, standard rewards and deceptions, yelling, but not in the ear). Category II became the benchmark: 1. The use of stress positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours. 2. The use of falsified documents or reports. 3. Use of the isolation facility for up to 30 days. [With certain conditions attached.] 4. Interrogating the detainee in an environment other than the standard interrogation booth. 5. Deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. 6. The detainee may also have a hood placed over his head during transportation and questioning. The hood should not restrict breathing in any way and the detainee should be under direct observation when hooded. 7. The use of 20-hour interrogations. 8. Removal of all comfort items (including religious items). 9. Switching the detainee from hot rations to MREs [Meals Ready to Eat]. 10. Removal of clothing. 11. Forced grooming (shaving of facial hair etc.). 12. Using detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress. Category III went a little further. 1. The use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family. 2. Exposure to cold weather or water (with appropriate medical monitoring). 181

on art and war and terror 3. Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation. 4. Use of mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing.40 Donald Rumsfeld was the man for latitude: he approved the request. On legal advice, the list was trimmed at the edges – Category III techniques were disallowed, except for the fourth – but Rumsfeld could not resist annotating the memorandum of approval with a scribbled addendum: ‘However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?’41 In the bureaucratic politics of torture, this addendum is close to perfection. One of the very few vocal opponents of these measures in high office, Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the US Navy, focused immediately on Rumsfeld’s mischief-making intervention. Mora understood well enough that it could be construed as a jest, a throwaway line. He also feared, however, that it could become an argument for the defence in any prosecution of terror suspects; and furthermore that it could be read as an encouragement to exceed the limits officially prescribed by the Secretary of Defense himself. Mora’s was not an aberrant interpretation. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had a similar reaction when he saw the addendum. ‘It said, “Carte blanche, guys”,’ Wilkerson interpreted for the investigative reporter Jane Mayer. ‘That’s what started them down the slope. You’ll have My Lais then. Once you pull this thread, the whole fabric unravels.’42 The techniques approved for Guantánamo migrated to other camps in other countries. Migration bred corruption. In Iraq, in August 2003, under intense pressure from Washington for actionable intelligence on the remarkably persistent insurgent deadbeats and former regime remnants, a familiar cry went up. From coalition headquarters a Military Intelligence officer sent an email to his colleagues in the community: The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks.

The email betrayed some desperation. There was an appeal for ‘input’ on effective interrogation techniques, and an urgent request for a ‘wish list’ of personal favourites.43 Soon afterwards, the go-getting Geoffrey Miller appeared with a team of specialists, on what was 182

like a dog quaintly termed an assistance visit. Assistance was sorely needed. Even the terrorists knew about the parlous state of intelligence in Iraq. Collection was haphazard, analysis disconnected; documentation was practically non-existent; detention and interrogation operations were ramshackle and ineffectual; the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein himself, was still at large; a full-scale insurgency was building. Back in Guantánamo – by way of adding to the bizarrerie – interrogators would gather outside Mohammed al-Qahtani’s cell, in a kind of barber-shop chorus, and serenade him with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Time Is on My Side’. The joke (if it was a joke) was on them. The interrogator works against the clock. Time is the torturer’s best defence: actionable intelligence is acutely time-sensitive. Waiting for the barbarians to talk might take forever. For the embattled Coalition Provisional Authority, bunkered down in Baghdad, any solution could come not a moment too soon. Geoffrey Miller was sent to Iraq for a purpose. His report was a technocrat’s blueprint. ‘The team used JTF-GTMO operational procedures and interrogation authorities as baselines.’44 Iraq was to be Gitmoised. Wherever Miller went, the dog was sure to follow. His message to Military Intelligence was unequivocal: ‘You have to treat the prisoners like dogs,’ he informed a meeting. ‘If you treat them or if they believe that they’re any different than dogs, you have effectively lost control of your interrogation from the very start. So they have to earn everything they get. And it works.’45 Military working dogs arrived at Abu Ghraib in November 2003. In the overcrowded Hard Site, where MI holds (detainees considered to be of military intelligence value) were penned higgledy-piggledy with miscellaneous criminals and various unknowns, ‘dog tricks’ and ‘dog piles’ of naked detainees were already part of the curriculum. ‘They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog and if we didn’t do that, they start hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy.’46 The Military Police were setting conditions with a will. The MWD were immediately put to use, menacing and even biting detainees, sometimes for interrogation, sometimes for sport. Two Army dog-handlers had a competition to see who could make a detainee urinate or defecate on himself, if sufficiently terrorised by Marco and Duco, dogs with better names than detainees. Other soldiers came to watch, and soon ‘doggy dances’ were all the rage.47 These antics appear to have been regarded as just that by almost everyone who participated in them, or witnessed them, or heard about them: a sizeable constituency. Far from being concealed, 183

on art and war and terror

Figure 15 Sergeant Michael Smith with Marco (the black dog), Sergeant Santos Cardona with Duco (the tan dog), tormenting a detainee; Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick watching, Abu Ghraib, 12 December 2003.

they were a commonplace of prison conversation.48 In fact, they were as disgraceful as they were unremarkable. Like the routine sexual humiliation, like the pervasive nakedness, the use or abuse of dogs was an accepted practice – all in a day’s work – filmed by the perpetrators themselves. Abu Ghraib was the nadir of normalisation. Many of the perpetrators were members of the 320th Military Police Battalion, reservists, under-trained and overwhelmed – ordinary men indeed.49 They received every encouragement. Emboldened by the permissive atmosphere, egged on by Military Intelligence, they knew no bounds. There were interrogators who revelled in the use of dogs, not only to set the conditions, but also to ‘fear up’ detainees during the interrogation itself. Some of them were civilian contractors, who appeared to enjoy a special licence; some were regular soldiers, members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, who should have known better. The Fay–Jones Report found that, over the period July 2003 to February 2004, no fewer than twenty-seven Military Intelligence personnel ‘requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited Military Police 184

like a dog personnel to abuse detainees and/or participated in detainee abuse and/or violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws and regulations during intelligence operations at Abu Ghraib.’50 These were common-or-garden crimes. Some thought they were overrated; certainly they were overmatched. There was another caste at the prison, the untouchables of Other Government Agency (OGA), threadbare cover for the CIA, with their gangster tactics and their ‘ghost detainees’. OGA were a pernicious influence at Abu Ghraib; Fay-Jones speaks with distaste of their ‘unhealthy mystique’. Their modus operandi are cloaked in mystery, but CIA sources attest to a shortlist of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, introduced in March 2002, going far beyond the pussyfooting categorising of the Department of Defense: 1. Attention Grab. The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him. 2. Attention Slap. An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear. 3. Belly Slap. A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage. 4. Long Time Standing. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions. 5. Cold Cell. The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water. 6. Water-Boarding. The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.51 The application of these techniques at Abu Ghraib in November 2003 resulted in an OGA ‘death in custody’, later ruled a homicide, caused by ‘blunt force injuries to the torso complicated by compromised respiration’.52 This was Detainee 28, Manadel al-Jamadi, identified by the CIA as a high-value target for his involvement in a number of bombing atrocities in Baghdad; al-Jamadi was alleged to have supplied the explosives. Detainee 28 had no time to talk: he died 185

on art and war and terror in a shower room within an hour of arrival. Disposal of the body is always a delicate business. In this instance it was placed in a bodybag, packed in ice and left in the showers overnight. The following morning it was removed, on a stretcher, as if to hospital. During the night it was discovered by two of the Military Police, who took the opportunity to photograph each other, thumbs-up, with the mutilated corpse.53 So immortalised, Manadel al-Jamadi assumed a new alias: the Ice Man. In the prison his fate was well-known, as was the disposal of the body. There were few secrets at Abu Ghraib. Colonel Thomas Pappas, commander of the Military Intelligence Brigade, was reported as saying, ‘Well, if I go down, I’m not going down alone. The guys from Langley are going with me.’54 In such a climate, it may be that torture and abuse were massively over-determined, even if they were not directly ordered, solicited, encouraged, condoned, or simply ignored. Yet, even in these circumstances, degradation was not inevitable. Even at the height of the abuse, the maintenance of professional integrity was possible at Abu Ghraib. It was demonstrated in exemplary fashion by the response of three US Navy dog teams, led by Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, who respectfully refused to indulge in any abuse and steadfastly resisted all pressure to conform: a story told in Chapter 9. In a rare commendation, Taguba reports succinctly that Kimbro ‘knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI personnel at Abu Ghraib’.55 Like the abuse, the pressure was systemic. It started at the top and trickled all the way down: behind the dog is the dog-handler; behind the dog-handler is the commander; behind the commander is the policy-maker. The Military Police set the conditions; the Secretary of Defense set the tone. The dauntless Donald Rumsfeld bears a heavy responsibility for the chamber of horrors that is Abu Ghraib, a symbol for the moral failings of this factitious war. Some part of that responsibility is the troubling issue of ‘pressure’.56 Pressure from policy-makers for actionable intelligence is uncomfortably reminiscent of pressure for usable intelligence in the campaign of persuasion that preceded the invasion of Iraq. With the passage of time the demand for proof was overtaken by the demand for results. It is almost as if the mythical WMD mutated into the all too real MWD as the emblem of the war effort. The effect is corrosive. For the intelligence community the risks are clear. They go to the heart of the relationship between intelligence and policy. Politicisation is a disease that can take many forms. 186

like a dog The tensions caused by these frustrated desires do not end there. FBI complaints about interrogation practices at Guantánamo were not entirely altruistic. As the Schmidt Report explains, the different organisations involved had different priorities: ‘Law enforcement agencies were primarily interested in interviews that would produce voluntary confessions . . . admissible in US Federal District Courts. Conversely, DoD [Department of Defense] interrogators were interested in actionable intelligence and thus had greater latitude on the techniques used during interrogations.’ The Administration recognised well enough that ‘Increasing Anxiety by Use of Aversions’, that is to say, the use of dogs, could have a significant impact on the admissibility of evidence in court. They did not care. The problem was finessed under the state of exception; admissibility, they were advised, was a ‘lesser issue’ for military commissions.57 In fact, it was fundamental. Five years on, in May 2008, the Pentagon announced that it was dismissing charges against al-Qahtani, apparently because the evidence was tainted by inhumane treatment. The military approach prevailed. It is after all the GWOT and not the GLOT. War–war is better than law–law. George W. Bush was the self-declared war president. The destination of choice is not the court but the camp. The arena is the interrogation room. This is the paradigm of the new normal. The interrogation is the fundamental engagement of the war on terror. The bare life of the detainee has come to define the Western way in warfare. Interrogation is apt to be adversarial. Polite interrogation may not be a complete contradiction in terms, but it is evidently a rarity. Coercive interrogation is the thing. The singular history of the GWOT is the search for creative forms of coercion: methods permissible and effectual. The emphasis on ‘creativity’ is on the face of it surprising. Yet there is something theatrical, choreographed, about an interrogation – corded and recorded, as one might say – like a late work by Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, perhaps, or Eh, Joe, with its night terror and mocking questions: ‘Anyone living love you now, Joe? . . . Anyone living sorry for you now?’58 This is not so far from Mohammed al-Qahtani and the banana rats of Guantánamo Bay, the gruesome world of the Special Interrogation Plan, ‘Pride and Ego Down’ and ‘Futility’. In the end interrogation is a matter of question and answer. ‘The Socratic method intensified’, noted Lichtenberg – ‘I mean torture.’59 Creative forms of coercion found expression in standing and beating and water-boarding. The Ice Man is not an isolated case. Nearly 187

on art and war and terror 100 detainees have died in the hands of US officials in the GWOT. According to the US military’s own classification, thirty-four of these cases are suspected or confi rmed homicides; Human Rights First has identified a further eleven in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh detention conditions. Eight people in US custody have been tortured to death. The steepest sentence given to anyone involved in a torture-related death is five months in prison. Only twelve detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any US official. Lynndie England, left holding the leash, was sentenced to three years in a military prison and paroled after serving 521 days.60 In 2005 US military personnel in Iraq were issued with cue cards, ‘talking points’, such as: ‘We are a values-based, peoplefocused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’ In 2007 a new deck of playing cards, replacing the ‘most wanted’, underlined a message of cultural sensitivity and heritage preservation: ‘Ancient Iraqi heritage is part of your heritage. It is believed that Jonah of the Bible is buried here’; ‘Protecting archaeological sites helps preserve them for future generations.’61 2007, however, was four years too late. In every sense, the damage had already been done. For the values-based, moral ruination is a particular hardship. The effort to reconcile the excusable and the inexcusable has failed, as it was bound to fail. Actionable intelligence remains elusive. Tactically, a lucky break may serve to capture a fugitive or secure a hostage.62 Strategically, the picture is cloudy – blurred by known unknowns and unknown unknowns – but it is not evident that the coalition is winning the war of intelligence, in Baghdad or Basra, or for that matter in London or Leeds.63 Barbaric terrorists seem to have the knack of strategic surprise. Arguments about ‘efficacy’ are in any event too narrowly drawn. The larger truth is that the war of humiliation is already lost. Humiliation breaks people. It makes them talk. This may or may not produce good intelligence, but it surely widens the circle of shame. The fact that such things could take place among us is a humiliation we must henceforth face. Meanwhile, we must at least refuse to justify such methods, even on the score of efficacy. The moment they are justified, even indirectly, there are no more rules or values; all causes are equally good, and war without aims or laws sanctions the triumph of nihilism.

So wrote Albert Camus in the preface to his ‘Algerian Reports’ in 1958. 188

like a dog And what is that efficacy whereby we manage to justify everything that is most unjustifiable in our adversary? Consequently, the chief argument of those who decide to accept the use of torture must be met head on. Torture has perhaps saved some, at the expense of honour, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it aroused fi fty new terrorists who, operating in some other way and in another place, will cause the death of even more innocent people. Even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy, such a flouting of honour serves no purpose but to degrade our country in her own eyes and abroad.64

Contemplating the wretched client-turned-dog, Kafka remarks, ‘it was humiliating even to the onlooker’.65 Antonio Taguba was not merely offended by what he saw of Abu Ghraib: he was humiliated. So is the United States. So are we all. As the French have discovered, the experience is seared in the culture. Shame is enduring. In the Muslim world the story of the shame will be told, Scheherazade-like, for years to come. In the United States and its satrapies awareness will sink in, slowly, painfully, like dripping water on the Western conscience. Shame is Kafka’s strongest gesture, Walter Benjamin once said.66 Joseph K. meets his end at the hands of two frock-coated warders, who lead him away, ceremoniously undress him, lay him out like a sacrifice and produce a double-edged butcher’s knife for the purpose, passing it between them suggestively, as if hoping that K. himself will take it up and do the decent thing. He could not completely rise to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks; the responsibility for this last failure of his lay with him who had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed. His glance fell on the top storey of the house adjoining the quarry. With a fl icker as of a light going up, the casements of a window there suddenly flew open; a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or were they all there? Was help at hand? Were there some arguments in his favour that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning against 189

on art and war and terror cheek, immediately before his face, watching the fi nal act. ‘Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.67

Notes 1. Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Trial [1925], in The Collected Novels of Franz Kafka (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 12–13. 2. The Trial, p. 9. The celebrated opening sentence. 3. The Trial, p. 117. 4. The Trial, p. 147. 5. In Agamben’s recent work the measures passed in the United States in the wake of 9/11 are explicitly used to illustrate these propositions. Giorgio Agamben, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 168–9; trans. Kevin Athill, State of Exception (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 3–4. See also the sympathetic discussion in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 60 ff. 6. The gulag analogy was made by Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, in a speech at the Foreign Press Association introducing a damning report on the United States, ‘Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power’ (2005): ‘Guantánamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.’ The speech is available at: http://t2web.amnesty.r3h.net/library/ print/ENGPOL100142005 (accessed 5 July 2005). It was widely reported, and bitterly resented in Washington. 7. Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ‘In the Penal Settlement’ [1919], in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 169–99. 8. On the ‘alliance of values’ in this context, see Alex Danchev, ‘Tony Blair’s Vietnam’, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 189–203. 9. Kafka to Felice, 25 March 1914 and 3 March 1915, in Franz Kafka, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth, Letters to Felice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 507 and 574. 10. ‘Penal Settlement’, p. 169. Perhaps self-servingly, both Lynndie England and Charles Graner, who passed her the leash, are at pains to emphasise the docility of the detainee. See ‘The Abu Ghraib Files’ on Salon. com, incorporating new documentary evidence from the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigations in 2004–5 at: http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/ (accessed 24 March 2006). 190

like a dog 11. Adam Zagorin and Michael Duffy, ‘Inside the Interrogation of Detainee 063’, Time, 20 June 2005. The full interrogation log for the period 23 November 2002 to 11 January 2003 is at: http://www.time. com/time/2006/log/log.pdf (accessed 3 April 2006). 12. ‘AR 15–6 Investigation into FBI Allegations of Detainee Abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Detention Facility’ (hereafter Schmidt Report), 1 April 2005 (amended 9 June 2005), at: http://www.humanrightsfi rst.org (accessed 24 March 2006). 13. Interrogators’ professional taste in music is best described as eclectic. Al-Qahtani was also treated to ‘Enter Sandman’ by the heavy-metal band Metallica (said to have reduced him to tears because he thought he was hearing the sound of Satan). The rap artist Eminem is another favourite (Slim Shady, Interscope, 1999). Christina Aguilera for her part turns out to be peculiarly appropriate: ‘I won’t let you break me, think what you want / To all my dreamers out there I’m with you / All my underdogs I feel you / Lift your head high and stay strong keep pushin’ on’ (Stripped, RCA, 2002). 14. Quoted in ‘Detainee 063’. As the Schmidt Report recounts, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the FBI began an internal investigation to determine whether its agents had observed ‘aggressive treatment’ of detainees at Guantánamo during the period September 2001 to July 2004. Four hundred and ninety-three agents were contacted by email. Four hundred and thirty-four responded; twenty-six of these stated that they had. The allegations were disclosed in December 2004 as a result of releases under the Freedom of Information Act. Typically, it was the disclosure rather than the allegations (or the activities themselves) that prompted the inquiry. 15. George Bush, ‘Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees’, 7 February 2002, in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 134–5. The Third Geneva Convention flatly prohibits ‘any form of coercion’ of POWs in interrogation – the most protective standard of treatment found in international law. 16. ‘AR 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade’ (hereafter Taguba Report), March 2004, Torture Papers, pp. 405–556. 17. Conversation with Seymour Hersh, 20 October 2005; ‘Abu Ghraib Files’. Hersh was instrumental in the Taguba Report being made public – like most of the others, it was intended to be an internal inquiry – and the fi rst to underline its severity. See Chain of Command (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 22 ff. 18. ‘It was a kind of “Animal House” on the night shift,’ a remark by the former Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, chairman of the socalled Independent Panel on DoD detention operations, was made at the news conference on the release of their report. The Guardian, 25 191

on art and war and terror

19. 20.

21.

22.

August 2004. ‘Specific intent’ is one of the most egregious arguments in the notorious ‘torture memo’ from the Assistant Attorney General, Jay S. Bybee, to Alberto R. Gonzales, then Counsel to the President, 1 August 2002, ‘Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 USC §§ 2340-2340A’, Torture Papers, pp. 172–217, especially 174–5, a memo written ‘as an immunity, a blank check’, as one insider has said. Jane Mayer, ‘A Deadly Interrogation’, The New Yorker, 14 November 2005. The torture memo was silently rescinded and replaced by the Office of Legal Counsel in December 2004, shortly before Gonzales’ confi rmation hearings as Attorney General. The replacement memo has been described as ‘the minimum possible retraction’ by David Luban, ‘Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb’, in Karen J. Greenberg (ed.), The Torture Debate in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 59–62 and 72. It is at: http:// www.usdoj.gov/dagmemo.pdf (accessed 3 April 2006). Seymour Hersh, ‘The General’s Report’, The New Yorker, 25 June 2007. Schmidt Report, p. 20, noting ‘inconsistency’ in the Commander’s evidence. These issues are explored with commendable frankness in Schmidt’s interview with staff of the Army Inspector General, Lieutenant General Stanley Green, for yet another inquiry. Notwithstanding Schmidt’s testimony, Green apparently exonerates Miller. The Green Report is as yet unpublished; it has been leaked to Salon.com, at: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/14/ rummy/index_np.html (accessed 18 April 2006), together with the interview transcript (hereafter Schmidt interview). The report on DoD interrogation operations by the Naval Inspector General, Vice Admiral Albert Church, states that such issues were addressed by the Independent Panel. In fact, they were specifically excluded from its terms of reference: ‘Issues of personal accountability will be resolved through established military justice and administrative procedures, although any information you may develop will be welcome.’ Secretary of Defense memo, 12 May 2004, Torture Papers, pp. 961–2. Only the Executive Summary of the Church Report has been made public, at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news (accessed 24 March 2006); the Schlesinger Report is in Torture Papers, pp. 908–75. These are the ‘AR 15-6’ investigations, governed by ‘Procedure for Investigating Officers and Boards of Officers’, 30 September 1996, at: http://www.usma.edu/EO/regspubs/r15_6.pdf (accessed 24 March 2006). In two contentious cases, the investigating officer himself advised the need for a more senior appointment: Furlow begat Schmidt, Fay begat Jones. See ‘AR 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Prison and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade’ (hereafter Fay– Jones Report), August 2004, Torture Papers, pp. 987–1131. On the 192

like a dog

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

problematic nature of the investigations in general, see Human Rights First, ‘Command’s Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in US Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan’, February 2006, at: http://www.humanrightsfi rst.org (accessed 24 March 2006). See Alex Danchev, ‘The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and the Iraq War’, Intelligence and National Security 19 (2004), pp. 436-66. Mark Danner makes a similar point about the torture inquiries, Torture and Truth (London: Granta, 2004), p. 40. This was General Bantz Craddock, formerly Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 4. The Green Report is said to document Rumsfeld’s personal interest in the progress of the interrogation; the direct involvement of ‘SecDef’ and his associates (notably the Under Secretary for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone) was confi rmed by Schmidt. See Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin, ‘What Rumsfeld Knew’, at: http://www.salon.com/news/ feature/2006/04/14/rummy/index_np.html (accessed 15 April 2006). See Fay–Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 1030. The 1987 version of FM 34–52 is available at: http://www.globalsecurity.org; the 1992 version at: http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-52.pdf (accessed 3 April 2006). The UCMJ applies to US Forces on active duty, at all times and in all places. Article 93 addresses ‘Cruelty, Oppression or Maltreatment’. The techniques and the rationales are summarised and evaluated in the ‘Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism’, 6 April 2003, Torture Papers, pp. 340–59. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, a poet, who has written an account of his incarceration, The Broken Chains (forthcoming). The Guardian, 3 April 2006. Moazzam Begg’s account of a similar experience, Enemy Combatant (London: Free Press, 2006), is very wise on mutual incomprehension. Though Schmidt, for one, had his doubts: ‘The stuff that he gave us, I don’t know that all of it was very factual.’ Schmidt interview. Church Report, p. 10; Schmidt Report, p. 20; JTF-GTMO, ‘Information from Guantánamo Detainees’, 4 March 2005, at: http://www.jtfgtmo. southcom.mil/; Heather MacDonald, ‘How to Interrogate Terrorists’, Torture Debate, p. 92. ‘Person of the Week: Jose Padilla’, Time, 14 June 2002. The Padilla case has been scrupulously examined by HRF, at: http://www. humanrightsfi rst.org/us_law/inthecourts/supreme_court_padilla.htm (accessed 3 April 2006). Those variously identified as ‘UBL bodyguards’ would make a small army. Anonymous MI officer, in Jane Mayer, ‘The Experiment’, The New Yorker, 11 and 18 July 2005. 193

on art and war and terror 34. Hersh, Chain of Command, p. 4; Jane Mayer, ‘Lost in the Jihad’, The New Yorker, 10 March 2003. 35. Rohan Gunaratna, in Mayer, ‘Lost in the Jihad’. 36. ‘Detainee 063’. One of the claims made for the intelligence obtained from the interrogation of detainees is that The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004), would have been impossible to compile without it; and that, by extension, it forms the basis for our understanding of that event, and the wider phenomenon of Al Qaeda. This seems at once exaggerated and misleading – better understanding surely calls for patient detective work of a rather unassuming kind – though it is true that the Commission’s reconstruction of the plot itself is underpinned in part by ‘intelligence reports on interrogations’, notably the loquacious KSM. See, for example, notes to ch. 7, pp. 525–6. 37. The precepts are set out in his ‘Assessment of DoD Counterterrorism Interrogation and Detention Operations in Iraq’ (hereafter Miller Report), September 2003, Torture Papers, pp. 451–9. 38. Statement of Cofer Black, Joint Investigation into September 11, 26 September 2002, at: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_ hr/092602black.html (accessed 6 April 2006). 39. Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End Of (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), p. 26. 40. JTF-J2 memo, ‘Request for approval of Counter-Resistance Strategies’, 11 October 2002, Torture Papers, pp. 227–8. 41. General Counsel memo, ‘Counter-Resistance Techniques’, 27 November 2002 (approved 2 December 2002), Torture Papers, p. 236. 42. Jane Mayer, ‘The Memo’, The New Yorker, 27 February 2006. The reference is to a killing spree by US Army soldiers in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, in 1968, during a search-and-destroy mission in a Vietcong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville’. The story was broken by the young Seymour Hersh. 43. Danner, Torture and Truth, p. 33. The author of the email was Captain William Ponce. Colonel Steven Boltz was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence at coalition headquarters in Baghdad. Ironically, he had been brought up on intelligence shortcomings in Vietnam, emphasised to him by his father. The plaintive call for effective interrogation techniques echoes the JIC’s ‘last call’ for any scraps of intelligence on WMD, for the famous British government dossier of September 2002. 44. Miller Report, Torture Papers, p. 451. 45. Colonel Janis Karpinski, ex-Commander of the 800th MP Brigade in Iraq, interviewed on ‘Frontline’, 5 August 2005, at: http://www.pbs. org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/karpinski.html (accessed 12 April 2006). Karpinski is bitter. She was reduced in rank and professionally disgraced – scapegoated she says. One Woman’s Army (New York: Hyperion, 2005). 194

like a dog 46. Detainee statement to CID, on the night of 20 January 2004, ‘Abu Ghraib Files’, ch. 6. 47. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 1086; ‘Abu Ghraib Files’, ch. 8. Sergeant Michael Smith and Sergeant Santos Cardona were eventually brought to trial (separately) in 2006. Smith came fi rst; he was found guilty on most counts, but given a light sentence of six months. The proceedings were followed in detail by HRF, in an illuminating blog, at: http://www.humanrightsfi rst.org/blog/index.htm (accessed 24 March 2006). 48. Fay–Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 1088. 49. Christopher Browning’s classic study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), asks why so many of those men became killers. There is no comparison in the enormity of the crimes; but there is a similar need to explore situation and motivation, conformity and resistance. At Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, of course, there were ordinary women too. See ch. 9. 50. Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, p. 989. 51. Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, ‘CIA’s Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described’, 18 November 2005, at: http://www.abcnews. go.com/WNT/print?id=1322866 (accessed 5 April 2006). 52. ‘Abu Ghraib Files’, ch. 5. The story is told, anonymised, in the Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1056–8; and more fully in Mayer, ‘Deadly Interrogation’. The homicide ruling was made by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. 53. This was Corporal Charles Graner, one of the ringleaders in the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, and Specialist Sabrina Harman. The images are in the ‘Abu Ghraib Files’, ch. 5. See ch. 9. 54. Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, AR 15-6 investigation interview with Taguba, p. 133, at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/ a53.pdf (accessed 24 March 2006). Jordan himself was one of those chiefly responsible for the lethal anarchy at Abu Ghraib; criminal charges were eventually brought against him in April 2006. His testimony is demonstrably misleading and self-serving, as Taguba pointed out, but this particular exchange has the ring of truth. Cf. Taguba Report, Torture Papers, p. 440; Fay–Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1047–9. 55. Taguba Report, Torture Papers, p. 444. 56. In various interviews, Karpinski has emphasised the acute sense of pressure from above and its disturbing consequences. The issue is aired more fully in the torture inquiries than in the WMD inquiries, though searching analysis is still lacking. See, for example, Church Report, p. 11; Fay-Jones Report, Torture Papers, pp. 1046, 1049, 1107; Schlesinger Report, Torture Papers, p. 940. 57. Schmidt Report, p. 13; Working Group Report, Torture Papers, 195

on art and war and terror

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

p. 357. Sleep deprivation, ‘physical training’, and face or stomach slap were thought to pose similar problems. Samuel Beckett, Eh, Joe [1966], in I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (New York: Grove, 1976), p. 584. The ‘creative’ potential of the interrogation is perhaps better suggested in the French, le procès-verbal. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, The Waste Books (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), p. 204 (from Notebook K, 1793–6). HRF, ‘Command’s Responsibility’, p. 1. Eliot Weinberger, ‘What I heard about Iraq in 2005’, London Review of Books, 5 January 2006; The Observer, 2 December 2007. As appears to be the case with the rescue operation to free the British and Canadian peace activists, Norman Kember, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, in Baghdad in March 2006. At least one former US Army interrogator has admitted that, despite the use of dogs and other techniques, ‘I never got intelligence.’ Anthony Lagouranis, ‘The Slippery Slope that Leads to Torture’, International Herald Tribune, 1 March 2006. ‘The unknown’ is Donald Rumsfeld’s contribution to Western thought, Pieces of Intelligence (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 2. Albert Camus, trans. Justin O’Brien, ‘Preface to Algerian Reports’ [1958], Resistance, Rebellion and Death (London: Hamilton, 1961), p. 83. The argument has since been confi rmed by the most authoritative investigation of the subject yet undertaken: Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). The Trial, p. 147. Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn, ‘Franz Kafka’ [1934], in Michael W. Jennings et al. (eds), Selected Writings, vol. II, part 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 808. See also Elias Canetti, trans. Christopher Middleton, Kafka’s Other Trial [1969], in Letters to Felice, pp. 64–6. The Trial, p. 172.

196

9

It’s All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror

Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators . . . seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squanderingbeaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity . . . Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the over-populated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art: (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and fi lm as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity. Manny Farber1

Has the cinema finally found its voice on the global war on terror? Has 9/11 had time to sink in? What kind of movies are GWOT movies – termite art or white elephant art? The classic war books of the First World War appeared in spate some ten years after the armistice. Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, both came out in 1929 (and Lewis Milestone’s film of the latter in 1930). Well-pondered work of any kind does not issue in an instant; ten years is a decent interval; and that war had a plangent and definitive end, unlike the factitious GWOT. The interval may vary, of course, and also the question of decency – a question central to the strategies of warmaker and film-maker alike, then and now. William Wyler’s humane but tasteful feature film of American soldiers damaged by the Second World War, The Best Years of Our Lives, won him the Oscar for best director of 1946. That same year, John Huston’s unsettling 197

on art and war and terror documentary on a kindred theme, Let There Be Light, focusing on the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from various forms of ‘war neurosis’, was suppressed by the very body which had commissioned it: the US Army. Let There Be Light did not go on general release until 1980. The ethical and political temper of the times can change, making possible or thinkable what was previously impossible or unthinkable – part of the fascination of the present conjuncture. The war on terror, however, raises in acute form the problems of show and tell. What images to show? What stories to tell? What idiom to employ – feature film or documentary, the dramatic or the analytic? It is a moot point, and the distinction can blur. A rare masterpiece echoes down the decades: The Battle of Algiers (1966), by Gillo Pontecorvo, a feature film that looks like a documentary, made after the Algerian War of 1954–62 and rediscovered after the Iraq War of 2003, as a perplexed Pentagon began belatedly to wonder what an insurgency might mean.2 There are other cases that cut close to the bone of means and ends and national self-image – ‘values’, as one might say. Two such films, on the theme of resistance and collaboration in Occupied France, appeared in 1969: Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), by Marcel Ophüls, and L’Armée des ombres (The Army of the Shadows), by Jean-Pierre Melville. Both these directors were ungovernable auteurs. For them, ten years was the blink of an eye; they pondered their subject for a quarter of century. They learned their craft. Their comparative advantage was artistic maturity; their code was authenticity. So armed, they could treat the taboo. Melville was a real-life résistant, a fabulist and a moralist. His meditation on moral obligations in modern war is as searching as any on film. His treatment of torture is unforgettable. By a strange twist of fate, this film had its first run in the United States (and on DVD) in 2006. Not surprisingly, it speaks afresh to the present generation. In a culture of paranoia, the original auteur is a kind of Herodotus. The Army of the Shadows becomes The Histories in a different genre. Its epigones look shallow by comparison. Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford in high-minded mode, has been tartly described as Ibsen with helicopters. A mélange of the well-meaning and the self-regarding, it stars Tom Cruise as a Zelig-like Senator on the make, a man with a plan to win in Afghanistan (‘Do you want to win the war on terror – the quintessential question of our time’); Meryl Streep as a reporter complicit in 198

it’s all fucked up the selling of the Iraq war, fussing and fidgeting with her part, her pen and her professional ethics; and the same Robert Redford, as a professor who spends his days giving homilies to grateful students, two of whom are inspired to enlist, meeting their predictable end at the hands of the Taliban, in a risible insert redolent of a cheap video game. In the absence of plot, the film founders irretrievably on its excruciating combination of worthiness and wordiness, until finally the stars talk themselves to a standstill. Cross-cutting between conversations passes for action. Disillusion is rife. The moral, drawn or rather overdrawn for us by Streep, is a line from The Who: ‘Won’t get fooled again’. The title, it transpires, is a muddled reference to the popular characterisation of (British) soldiers and their superiors in the First World War: Ludendorff: ‘The English soldiers fight like lions.’ Hoffman: ‘True. But don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.’3

Gavin Hood’s Rendition also suffers from stilted conversation, but it has the compensation of more action: more cinema, less logorrhoea. Rendition – ‘extraordinary rendition’ in the jargon – is another of the linguistic barbarities of the GWOT. The term describes (or obscures) the practice whereby a suspected terrorist, in this case an innocent Egyptian-American chemical engineer, is effectively abducted by the CIA and shipped to a secret location or a third country, to be interrogated, and tortured, with impunity. This is what Dick Cheney is pleased to call the dark side of the war on terror. It is now well documented. One of the incidental pleasures of that documentation is the part played by some indefatigable plane-spotters. Plane-spotters the world over will be delighted to glimpse in Rendition a familiar jet with the registration number AIC 379. AIC is an anagram, no doubt; 379 is a registration of some notoriety. A Gulfstream V executive jet N379P, also known as the Guantánamo Bay Express, has the distinction of being the plane most often identified with known cases of extraordinary rendition. For this plane alone Amnesty International has a record of some 600 landings and take-offs during the period 2001–5. A detailed breakdown reveals that over 100 of these went through British airports. Luton was the most popular stopover, it seems, but the CIA and its sub-contractors also availed themselves of the facilities at Belfast, Biggin Hill, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Brize Norton, Edinburgh, Farnborough, Gatwick, Glasgow, Heathrow, Inverness, Luechars, Mildenhall, Northolt, Preswick, Stansted and Wick. The most 199

on art and war and terror favoured international destinations were Amman, Cairo, Frankfurt, Larnaca, Oporto, Prague, Shannon and Tashkent.4 This story has not hitherto appealed to Hollywood. Here the whole operation is laid bare, right down to the hooding, the water-boarding and the electrocuting, in the presence of a tenderfoot American agent (Jake Gyllenhaal, suitably anguished). The villain of the piece is none other Meryl Streep, alias Cruella de Vil, the CIA authoriser-in-chief. So diabolical is she, the audience almost hiss. Her political masters are conspicuous by their absence. As exposé, Rendition is efficiently done. It is somewhat formulaic, as to character and plot; it tends to cordon off the issue of accountability; but it shows and tells something patently reprehensible. Given its provenance, and its popularity, it is, in its fashion, a breakthrough film. On Channel 4 (and on DVD), it was immediately surpassed by Britz, a two-part tale of Sohail and Nasima, brother and sister from Bradford, one of whom becomes a MI5 desk officer, the other a suicide bomber – both home-grown, as if to corroborate Conrad: ‘The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.’5 Bold in conception and execution alike, played with absolute conviction by its young leads (Riz Ahmed and Manjinder Virk), Britz has the courage to make the elementary points, as Milosz said of Camus, and also to tackle the big questions. What to do, as a Muslim (and a Brit)? ‘We’re fucked whatever we do and you don’t understand because you’re not Muslim.’ Peter Kosminsky’s compelling work challenges us to understand and even to sympathise with the course chosen by Sohail and by Nasima, in full knowledge of the tragic outcome. Charlie Wilson’s War, by contrast, adopts the indirect approach. Charlie Wilson’s War is a Mike Nichols film. ‘Mike Nichols is an unquestioned figure in our culture,’ writes David Thomson in his peerless Biographical Dictionary of Film, ‘a smart man, a funny man, a proven success in cabaret, on records, as a stage director, and as a deliverer of talking-point movies – movies that are smart, funny, “adult”, “on the pulse”, and “of their moment”.’6 Charlie Wilson’s War is just that – a talking-point movie. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a Democratic Congressman from Texas. His war is the war of national liberation fought by the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the loathsome occupiers – the last loathsome occupiers – the Soviets. This is the Cold War, as the characters keep reminding each other, implausibly, as if to tell us what it’s all about, and fake some ideological fervour. Fakery, in fact, is the film’s undoing. Charlie Wilson’s War seems to want to be a politically savvy screwball comedy – a 200

it’s all fucked up film about the 1980s, by means of the 1940s, to gladden the heart of everyone weary of the war on terror – His Girl Friday meets The West Wing. Howard Hawks could have carried it off, perhaps, but not Mike Nichols. The result is a proxy movie about a proxy war. Charlie Wilson’s reflections strain to speak to the current discontents. ‘These things happened,’ he opines, Catch-22-like, in the concluding titles. ‘They were glorious and they changed the world . . . and then we fucked up the endgame.’ Charlie Wilson’s war is offered as a kind of parable of the war in Iraq – and Afghanistan – but all this rings hollow. A weakness for the wisecrack, and for the filmic nudge and wink, coarsens the wit and undercuts the wisdom. The problem of tone finds expression in some jarring transitions, of which the most egregious is the dissolve from the debris of a helicopter raining down on a village in Afghanistan to the high heels and pert derrière of Congressman Wilson’s administrative assistant sashaying along the corridors of power in Washington. Some of the wisecracking is worthwhile, as it should be, coming from the creator of The West Wing himself, Aaron Sorkin. ‘She doesn’t like me,’ whispers the spectacular Texan socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), of the aforesaid assistant: ‘She’s a liberal.’ ‘I’m a liberal,’ protests Wilson. ‘Not where it counts,’ says she, knowingly, patting his bottom. But the principles are under-written, and the principals are under-powered. In the Cary Grant role, Tom Hanks is never more than Tom Hanks. Julia Roberts is not a patch on Carole Lombard. Philip Seymour Hoffman, on the other hand, makes a marvellous Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who becomes Wilson’s alter ego and conscience. The best of Charlie Wilson’s War is another old movie: the odd couple. ‘You ain’t James Bond,’ observes Charlie. ‘You ain’t Thomas Jefferson,’ ripostes Gust. There is a Hollywood movie, set in the United States in 2004, that succeeds triumphantly (but scrupulously) in probing the meaning of the war on terror and its consequences, for those engaged in it and for those left behind: for all Americans, and for America itself. In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Paul Haggis, ‘inspired by actual events’, is a remarkable achievement. It centres on the disappearance, in fact the murder, of Mike Deerfield, a young infantry soldier recently returned from Iraq, and the investigation of that crime, or conundrum, by his father Hank (Tommy Lee Jones), himself a soldier – more precisely, a former military policeman. Hank’s unofficial inquiry is by turns hampered, tempered, aided 201

on art and war and terror and abetted by the official investigation of a local detective, Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a single mother with a small boy called David, who wants nothing more than a sling and a stone, after Hank tells him a bedtime story of David and Goliath: ‘And Saul and the men of Israel were gathered together, and pitched by the valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the Philistines.’7 In the Valley of Elah is a state-of-the-nation movie – and perhaps an anti-philistine movie, a sling-shot against the goliaths – told as a whodunit. As it unfolds, it reveals a profound understanding of men and war, loyalty and duty, civility and depravity, corruption and deception, psychological damage and post-traumatic stress disorder. Mike Deerfield’s mobile phone yields a series of images – also corrupt – fragments of insights into the torment of Iraq for those who serve, and the torment they visit on the nameless and faceless ‘hajis’ they encounter. Mike is to all intents and purposes a good soldier: a patriot with a conscience. Among his buddies in the section, his nickname is ‘Doc’. This is a puzzle for his father, and remains a puzzle, until it is revealed that Mike has the trick of sticking his finger into the open wound of Iraqi prisoners and asking if it hurts. ‘They shouldn’t send heroes to places like Iraq,’ one of the section tells Hank. ‘It’s all fucked up.’ War neurosis is a recurrent condition. Mike is murdered by his buddies, after a night on the town, back home in New Mexico. They cut him into pieces, expertly, and set fi re to them, before going for a chicken dinner. The hospitality of war is brought home with a vengeance. In this morass, Hank Deerfield is the repository of integrity, the moral centre of the action and the film. Continuously present, subject to remorseless, almost microscopic inspection by the camera, Tommy Lee Jones seems not so much to act as to inhabit the part. For Hank, rectitude is a way of life. Like other veterans, he has seen too much: it is etched on his face. His watchful eyes belie the thousand-yard stare, but he has a stillness akin to battle-weariness and a soldierly ability to abide. He carries heavy emotional baggage.8 He does not speak unless he has something to say; he boxes his motel bed, shines his shoes, worries about the crease in his trousers, addresses the topless barmaid with military punctiliousness as ‘Ma’am’. He lives in the castle of his skin. On screen, Tommy Lee Jones contrives somehow to communicate from within, from the bottomless well of the interior. As if by osmosis, we absorb his deep distress, his forlorn hope and his irreducible humanity. It is one of the great performances in modern American cinema. 202

it’s all fucked up Hank’s symbolic action has to do with the American flag. At the beginning of the film, at the start of his odyssey, he notices that the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole of the local high school is upside down. He stops and rectifies it, giving a Salvadorean school employee a swift lesson in civics and citizenship and the rules of the game: flying the flag upside down is an international signal of distress, he tells the man, a sign that you are in serious trouble. At the end of the film, when he returns home, he finds that his son had sent from Iraq a battle-worn Stars and Stripes, together with a group photograph of the section, smiling their souvenir smiles. Early the following morning he drives to the high school and hoists the tatterdemalion emblem, taping the rope to the pole for good measure. The camera pulls back. The flag is upside down. In the Valley of Elah is a brave movie. Not surprisingly, it is by no means universally popular. It is even more unsparing than The Deer Hunter (1978), with which it has some affinities, etymological and other. ‘The Deer Hunter is not politically correct,’ David Thomson concludes, ‘but it is one of the few American movies that understand the state of outrage and mistake within American hope. It is a picture to put beside Bonnie and Clyde, King Kong, and Birth of a Nation, monuments worthy of some shame and much exhilaration.’9 In the Valley of Elah, too, is an autopsy of American hope. If the cinema is the medium of the signature emotion, the verdict on Iraq is already in. There is enough shame to go around, as witness Battle for Haditha, by Nick Broomfield, and Redacted, by Brian de Palma. In the Valley of Elah sticks its finger into something else. ‘There will be Deer Hunters and Platoons to expedite the remorse and thicken the grief,’ as one commentator has remarked.10 The family tragedy of the Deerfields points in a different direction, at once quieter and sadder. Vietnam caused outrage. Iraq caused pain. All these movies are weakened by the white elephant tendency. They strive to make a statement; they do have ambitions towards gilt culture. For all its bravery, and its integrity, In the Valley of Elah is a textbook case of white elephant art, with its all-over pattern, its frieze of continuities and its prizeworthy creativity. As Manny Farber foretold, however, termite art may triumph in the end. The termite tendency comes into its own in Errol Morris’s remorseless investigation of Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure (2008), the most significant cinematic treatment of the war on terror yet to appear. Not the least extraordinary aspect of this extraordinary film is that it is, as its director likes to say, a film about photographs. 203

on art and war and terror ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret,’ observed the photographer Diane Arbus. ‘The more it tells you the less you know.’11 That is roughly Errol Morris’s position on the photographs of Abu Ghraib – the photographs of stress positions, human pyramids, doggy dances, simulated sex, mock electrocution, contortion, defecation, degradation and death; the photographs of hooding, leashing, chaining, threatening, tormenting, pummelling and humiliating; the photographs of standing, watching, posing, grinning, co-operating and orchestrating; the photographs that show the perpetrators, thumbsup, enjoying their work; the photographs that became screensavers on their personal computers. Those photographs. The most potent photographs in international politics. If the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, in Milan Kundera’s words, the struggle for control over the photographs of Abu Ghraib is the struggle of revelation against suppression. That phase is now over. The struggle against suppression has been won. To all intents and purposes, the photographs are in the public domain. It is true that there are some we have not yet seen, but in essence the contents of this extraordinary archive have been disgorged, or downloaded, on to the computers of the world. The fi rst tranche was exhibited at the International Center for Photography in New York later in 2004, appropriately titled ‘Inconvenient Evidence’. Many more are arrayed, chapter by chapter, in ‘The Abu Ghraib Files’ on Salon.com.12 Even now they are seeping into the mainstream media: Standard Operating Procedure incorporates a large number of the photographs as well as some less familiar video footage; Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008, and Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, widely shown on HBO in the United States in 2007, draw on the same bank of images.13 In historical terms, the archive is a treasure trove. Never before have such practices been recorded in such detail. Three of the night shift on Tier 1A of the Hard Site had digital cameras; usually they worked together, a little like a fi lm crew. The framing is rough and ready, but the coverage is impressive. The video footage is more fragmentary, or perhaps less routine. It looks sinister and repellent, as if a cut-price Pasolini were making a schlock-horror Salò. In his uncompromising official report on the conduct of the Military Police in the prison, Major General Antonio Taguba makes reference to the discovery of ‘extremely graphic photographic evidence’.14 Here it is. Licence was the operative condition of Tier 1A. Abu Ghraib returns 204

it’s all fucked up

Figure 16 ‘Gilligan’ (Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh), Abu Ghraib, 5 November 2003. This picture was taken by Specialist Sabrina Harman; the original photograph was taken by Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, glimpsed here with camera.

us to the old question: who will guard the guards themselves? The camera adds a new twist: who will photograph the photographers themselves? Surprisingly enough, the amateur photographers of Abu Ghraib photographed each other often. ‘Isn’t the task of the photographer – descendant of the augurs and haruspices – to reveal guilt and point out the guilty in his pictures?’ asked Walter Benjamin.15 For Errol Morris, the most powerful photograph was taken by Sabrina Harman with Charles Graner’s camera rather than her own: It is a picture of Ivan Frederick looking at the most infamous photograph of the Iraq War – the picture of the hooded man [on the box] – displayed on the screen of his own camera with the hooded man standing in the distance. I try to imagine what he is thinking, what he sees. What the image means to him? It has existed as an image for only a couple of seconds. It is being seen for the fi rst time by one person – before it has been transmitted and retransmitted around the world hundreds of millions of times and is seen by perhaps a billion people.16

The images are guilt-ridden. Guilt is inscribed in their very composition. Still it is hard to pin down. Part of the awful fascination of the photographs is that they are not furtive. Indeed, they are almost 205

on art and war and terror triumphal. The Hard Site was notorious throughout Abu Ghraib. The practices of the night shift were no secret, and neither were the images, which were passed round like candy or pornography by the swaggering Graner. Something similar seems to happen with the guilt. Fugitive, it is passed from photograph to photograph, camera to camera, computer to computer, person to person. It is not so much revealed, all at once, tout à coup, like a conjuring trick, but peeled, layer by layer, print by print, image by time-dated image, from the memory. The evidence is at once graphic and cryptic, and not merely inconvenient but incomplete. Historical terms, however, are unavailable to us. In the nature of the case, dispassion is difficult, and for many, especially in the East, impossible. The archive of Abu Ghraib is an incendiary one. Amateur photographs are more powerful than any improvised explosive device. They function as a kind of cultural cluster bomb. Their fate is foreordained: replication and mobilisation. Already ‘Gilligan’ (Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh), the hooded man on the box, has become a global emblem, and the very name ‘Abu Ghraib’ a metonym, a form of moral and political shorthand, and a source of shame. Like ‘Munich’, it is both lesson and curse. Like ‘Guernica’, it is both symbol and event. It is also testimony to the power of images in international affairs. Without the painting, Guernica would not be where it is today. Without the photographs, it has been said, there would be no Abu Ghraib. Three prisoners were beaten to death at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, where the Military Intelligence officer in charge of interrogations was commended for her good work, before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. Torture and abuse at Bagram went unrecorded, it appears, not to say unremarked. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib was carefully documented by the Military Police themselves. Why? What are we to make of these disturbing images? What do they tell us? What do we know of the soldier-photographers? What do we know of Abu Ghraib? How are we to understand what happened there? The struggle for meaning is the second phase. This is the struggle of explanation against incomprehension (or denial). ‘As a specific type of entity’, writes Jacques Rancière, ‘images are the object of a twofold question: the question of their origin (and consequently their truth content) and the question of their end or purpose, the uses they are put to and the effects they result in.’17 The meaning of these images is not yet settled, though their effects are unpalatably plain, however difficult they are in some quarters to acknowledge. They 206

it’s all fucked up represent different things to different people, as it may be, but they represent one thing above all: the crushing loss of moral authority suffered by the United States and its accomplices in the disastrous enterprise known as the global war on terror. First among accomplices, of course, is the United Kingdom, always willing to turn a blind eye to black sites, extraordinary rendition, ‘undue exuberance’, or worse; obedient enough to procure for the cousins suitable candidates for coercive interrogation; practised in the art of plausible denial; and, according to the latest evidence from the High Court, quite prepared to lend a helping hand.18 Recent legal proceedings are not reassuring about the stringency with which the security and intelligence agencies have observed their resolution not to ‘participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or inhumane or degrading treatment’. In the case of Binyam Mohamed, for example, an officer from MI5 has been questioned about alleged war crimes, including torture. So concerned was he about self-incrimination that he declined at first to answer any questions from High Court judges, even in private. Their judgment concluded: ‘The relationship of the United Kingdom government to the United States authorities . . . was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.’19 Diminishment is hard to bear. In pursuit of that relationship, in the toils of the war on terror, the United Kingdom too has been diminished. Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure is a film about the mute agents of that process – the photographs. It is a documentary that looks like a feature film. Morris calls it a non-fiction horror movie, a formulation which echoes Truman Capote’s celebrated ‘non-fiction novel’, In Cold Blood (1966).20 Philip Gourevitch’s companion volume is not exactly a book of the film, but a product of that intense collaboration.21 Given its subject, it is a necessary book. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with his ‘stories from Rwanda’, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (1998), may be a little disappointed. Gourevitch’s métier is reportage, in particular the beautifully observed vignette, rich in moral implications.22 Here, it as though he has not been able to make himself heard above the clamour of his collaborator. Rather desperately, the blurb invokes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (1879), and Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song (1979), none of them appropriate comparators. Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) might be nearer the mark. Hydrue Joyner, the NCO in charge of the day shift, remembered his fi rst encounter with the mysterious 207

on art and war and terror OGA (Other Government Agency) at Abu Ghraib. OGA was usually understood as a cover for the CIA, but it also denoted the so-called ghost detainees. Joyner was nonplussed, as he explained in an interview with Morris: When I fi rst got there, and they fi rst told me about OGA, I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t add these people to the actual count? Like if I have fifty detainees, but I have these five OGAs, I don’t really have fifty-five detainees, I only have fifty?’ They say, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, what about the five souls that are in those cells?’ ‘They’re not there.’ ‘Well yes they are, because I can see them.’ ‘Yeah, you can see them, but they’re not there.’ ‘All right man, hey, whatever works for you, whatever makes you sleep at night, OK.’ And that’s how we ran it, because that’s what we were told. 23

Inescapably, perhaps, the whole project is dominated by Morris’s interviews, Morris’s conceptions and Morris’s missionary zeal. He brings to it an unusual mix of intellectual voracity and professional idiosyncrasy. Morris is deeply interested in photographs, war photographs in particular, as his erudite, compulsive, slightly manic blogs in the The New York Times amply attest. 24 He is also interested in perpetrators, of every kind and condition.25 Standard Operating Procedure neatly combines both subjects. It might have been called The Bad Apples; the photographer-perpetrators, ‘the bad apples’, are in a certain sense the stars of the film and also the focus of its moral concern. It is partly constructed (and reconstructed) from the photographs themselves, but much of the screen time is spent on interviews with five of the seven bad apples of the night shift: Megan Ambuhl; Javal Davis; Lynndie England (who held the leash or tie-down strap); Sabrina Harman (who smiled and gave the thumbs-up); and Jeremy Sivits. Of these, Harman was the habitual photographer. Regrettably, Morris was not permitted to interview the other two, Ivan Frederick, the senior NCO, or Charles Graner, the ringleader, as both men were still serving custodial sentences (eight and ten years, respectively) for conspiracy, dereliction of duty, assault, indecent acts and maltreatment; however, he did have the benefit of their interviews with the US Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, interviews conducted following their convictions, under guarantee of immunity from prosecution for further self-incrimination. Out of this raw material Morris has fashioned, not a great film, but an important document: a foundational text on the foot-soldiers of the war on terror, the frenzy of Iraq, the inferno of Abu Ghraib, the culture of impunity, the shifting of responsibility, the mentality 208

it’s all fucked up of the weak, the wishful and the overwhelmed; the solipsism of the small-time torturer; the protestations and evasions; the walling off and the blotting out. In that grey zone, the quality of the witness testimony in Standard Operating Procedure is unsurpassed. ‘It wasn’t worth it,’ reflects Harman, finally, meaning it wasn’t worth her while joining up. ‘We didn’t kill ’em,’ offers England blankly. Not a shred of remorse, not even a propitiatory word learned at a lawyer’s elbow. Some regrets: England regrets falling for Graner (who promptly moved on to Ambuhl); Harman regrets the smile, and the thumbs-up and the wasted years; Sivits regrets the loss of his good name; Ambuhl laments the lack of closure. The bad apples may not be rotten through and through, but they make hard cases. Testimony is Morris’s forte. He is a seasoned documentary filmmaker. His œuvre, this film in particular, serves to demonstrate Rancière’s contention that ‘documentary film, film devoted to the “real”, is . . . capable of greater fictional invention than “fiction” film, readily devoted to a certain stereotype of actions and characters.’26 His last film was The Fog of War (2003), the story of the former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, as told by Robert McNamara, in a kind of monologue with Morris. His interview technique is eccentric. He asks a question (off-camera), and lets his subjects talk (on-camera). This takes time. For Standard Operating Procedure he interviewed Janis Karpinski, the embittered former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq, for seventeen hours over two days. Morris’s interviews are tests of character and fortitude. They resemble a polite form of interrogation. One of the many inter-textual ironies of the film is that Morris may be a better interrogator than the interrogators themselves. He is seldom directive; his opening question is less a question than an invitation (‘I don’t know where to start . . .’), and his follow-up questions are often questions of detail. As W. J. T. Mitchell has remarked, his method is nothing if not forensic.27 This may owe something to his parallel career as a private investigator. As a director, one might say, he is a first-class investigator. He himself has suggested that ‘the central ingredient is persistence’. That is an understatement: Morris is obsessive. His investigations are relentless but unobtrusive. He does not feature in his own films: he is never seen and rarely heard. His documentary style is the polar opposite of Michael Moore’s. The results may appear to lack bite, accepting too readily the interviewee’s point of view; or context, concentrating too narrowly on the individual or 209

on art and war and terror the sub-division.28 Morris argues that he has no interest in indicting or exonerating. His aim, he says, is to capture moral complexity. He makes a compelling argument – his blogs fi zz with argument – but he has been criticised for being too soft on his subjects, McNamara included, and he cheerfully admits to liking practically everyone. Murderers, torturers, abusers: he likes them all. Perhaps they sense it. In any event they seem to speak more freely. They also appear more naturally. In Standard Operating Procedure, the interviewees address themselves to Morris and at the same time to us – looking straight at the camera – thanks to an invention known as the ‘Interrotron’, dreamed up by Morris himself to achieve precisely this disarming effect. Based on the teleprompter, the Interrotron is a two-way connection which allows the interviewee to look into the interviewer’s eyes, projected in front of the camera. Watching the film, we are unaware of it. The effect is subliminal; it gives the illusion of transparency. The interviewees seem not so removed, not so celluloid; more approachable, more human. More like us. For Morris, the moral complexity of Abu Ghraib begins with some basic propositions about the ambiguous nature of the photographs – that they reveal and they conceal; that they are at the same time an exposé and a cover-up. They expose wrong-doing – crimes – by incriminating those who took them and those who solicited them or appeared in them. In other words, they serve to localise and to limit. They cover up the wider issues: command responsibility; political chicanery. Morris has articulated a strong version of this argument in an interview: The soldiers got blamed because they took pictures of things that embarrassed the US Army and the Administration. They were punished for being photographers. The crime is photography. I don’t see it as a crime. Under another set of circumstances, Sabrina Harman would have gotten the Pulitzer Prize. What did she give us? She gave us evidence of a murder that we would not have otherwise. 29

This begins to sound a little reductive, though it encapsulates a persistent difficulty of response to Abu Ghraib. As Susan Sontag realised immediately, ‘the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken’. Sontag also noted a tendency on the part of the Administration to indulge in a mendacious form of displacement activity – ‘the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves’ – and now we have it on good authority that when Donald Rumsfeld was fi rst 210

it’s all fucked up apprised of the matter, his response was to say: ‘I didn’t know you were allowed to bring cameras into a prison!’30 Morris’s admiring reference to Sabrina Harman and the Pulitzer Prize is indicative of the privileged position she comes to occupy in the project. For both Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Harman is the star turn of Standard Operating Procedure. Clearly, each of them has a soft spot for her. Gourevitch describes her as ‘the blithe spirit’ of the unit; Morris regards her as fundamentally ‘a good person’.31 She is certainly a good witness. Morris’s pertinacity has elicited not only the reflections she is prepared to offer on the ticklish subject of the thumbs-up and the thinking behind the photographing, after the fact, but also the letters she wrote at the time to the woman she called her wife. These letters are excerpted in the film and printed in the book.32 In an earlier war they would surely have been censored, or destroyed. Personal and confessional, seemingly unfeigned and surprisingly uninhibited, they constitute something very rare in this maelstrom of mediation: an authentic confusion of chatter and horror, a mess of mixed feelings, out of the mouth of a participant-observer: Oct 20, 03 10.40 pm Kelly, Okay, I don’t like that anymore. At fi rst it was funny but these people are going too far. I ended your letter last night because it was time to wake the MI [Military Intelligence] prisoners and ‘mess with them’ but it went too far even I can’t handle whats going on. I cant get it out my head. I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with my asp [stick] to fi nd ‘the taxicab driver’ handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ. At fi rst I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started ‘poking’ at his dick. Again I thought, ok that’s funny then it hit me, that’s a form of molestation. You can’t do that. I took more pictures now to ‘record’ what is going on . . . Not many people know this shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove that the US is not what they think. But I don’t know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist. Kelly, its awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong. Sabrina33

Letters like this appear to lend some credence to Harman’s claim to have started taking photographs as a diversion, for sport, and 211

on art and war and terror sometimes as a duty, for reasons she only dimly understood, when instructed to do so by Frederick or Graner; and slowly to have come to a clearer realisation of her own situation and that of the detainees, prompting her to photograph even more assiduously, now as ‘proof’ of the appalling reality they faced. According to this rationale or rationalisation, therefore, the motivation changed over time, and with it the product. In the beginning it was almost unwitting – snapping and smiling as reflex actions – photography as escapism. The photographs were little more than trinkets, or trophies; pornographic, perhaps, but the pornography was incidental to what was in essence a recreational activity, and possibly a psychological release. In the end it was more premeditated – recording and documenting for a purpose, albeit a rather cloudy purpose – photography as activism. The photographs were evidence, or insurance; the pornography no longer incidental but central, not to the ostensible raison d’être of intelligence-gathering (humiliating and interrogating), but to the ulterior motive of exposing and vindicating. Morris, especially, buys heavily into this account, endowing Harman with a certain ethical sensibility, and characterising her later actions as resistance or ‘civil disobedience’. Harman is unquestionably an interesting study, but her status as a soldier-photographer of conscience is by no means secure. There is the awkward fact that the later, sentient Sabrina continued to act very like the earlier, insensate Sabrina, complete with smile, thumb and camera, in the thick of the worst abuse, and to take exactly the same sort of photographs, on demand.34 There is also the question of what precisely she understood her ‘proof’ to demonstrate. Proof that the story she tells is truthful, she says, and proof that she was lied to (over the murder). But the story, like the truthfulness, is essentially self-serving. Proof for Harman was proof of a kind of helplessness; proof that unspeakable things went on in the interrogation rooms and the showers; proof that they could not cope, without resort to the practices that she only ever managed to call ‘kind of odd’; proof of ‘what they were making him do’, as Graner slyly said. It was covering proof.35 The exercise of professional judgement, not to mention moral scruple, was possible at Abu Ghraib, even on Tier 1A. Three US Navy dog teams, led by Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, adamantly refused to indulge in any abuse and successfully resisted ‘significant pressure’ to do so. The official version of this story is rather circumspect, but the outline is clear enough. Recalled to the Hard 212

it’s all fucked up Site one night, after a fruitless search for explosives, Kimbro and his dog came upon three civilians, evidently interrogators, screaming and yelling at a detainee squatting in a corner of a cell. Agitated, the dog began to bark and lunge; the dog handler struggled to regain control. One of the civilians told the detainee that if he did not cooperate, the interrogator would let the dog handler set the dog on him. That was not at all what William Kimbro had in mind. Dog and dog handler promptly departed. They were called back, but they did not return. According to the Fay-Jones Report: Following this 24 November 2003 incident the three Navy dog teams concluded that some interrogators might attempt to misuse Navy dogs to support their interrogations. For all subsequent requests they inquired what the specific purpose of the dog was and when told ‘for interrogation’ they explained that Navy dogs were not intended for interrogations and the request would not be fulfilled. Over the next few weeks, the Navy dog teams received about eight similar calls, none of which were fulfi lled. In the later part of December 2003, Col. Pappas summoned MA1 Kimbro and wanted to know what the Navy dogs’s [sic] capabilities were. MA1 Kimbro explained Navy dog capabilities and provided the Navy Dog Use SOP [Standard Operating Procedure]. Col. Pappas never asked if they could be used in interrogations and following that meeting the Navy dog teams received no additional requests to support interrogations.36

Plainly the dog teams were in a stronger position than the bad apples. They were a team in fact as well as name, a specialist unit, highly trained and highly disciplined. They were well led. Kimbro himself was an exemplary figure. They were Navy, not Army; they were in it, not of it. Finally, they had the very thing that the ordinary men and women of the 372nd Military Police Company lacked: a Standard Operating Procedure. In the unequal encounter between the Colonel and the Master-at-Arms, conveyed in the attenuated fashion of the official report, the Navy Dog Use SOP takes on almost talismanic significance. William Kimbro is a far cry from Vassily Grossman’s Ikkonikov, but he too said no. ‘Je dirai non, mio padre, je dirai non!’ Errol Morris could surely have made something of that intriguing episode. Standard Operating Procedure testifies to the want of Standard Operating Procedure. On Tier 1A they made up the rules as they went along. Morris may be too indulgent towards Harman and the others – ‘my bad apples’, he calls them, affectionately – but the film is also an indictment of the conditions in which they found 213

on art and war and terror themselves. The lethal anarchy and ruinous licence which prevailed at Abu Ghraib were not the responsibility of the salesmen and desk clerks who had the misfortune to serve there. ‘Lynndie England knew what Donald Rumsfeld was thinking’, as someone aptly says. The culture of impunity reached to the very top. Antonio Taguba, whose original inquiry paved the way for all the others, drew his own conclusions. Ostracised by his peers, disowned by his superiors, he has lost none of his integrity. In the preface to a recent report on the medical evidence of torture by US personnel, he does not mince his words: After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.37

Notes 1. Manny Farber, ‘White Elephant Art and Termite Art’ [1962], in Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), pp. 134–44, and at: http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/mannyfarber-termiteart.html. 2. See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace [1977] (New York: New York Review Books, 2006). 3. The characterisation was popularised by Alan Clark, The Donkeys [1961] (London: Pimlico, 1991). Attributed by Clark to Falkenhayn, the source of the remark remains elusive. See Ion Trewin, Alan Clark (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009). 4. See Alex Danchev, ‘Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8 (2006), pp. 587–601. 5. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent [1907] (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2004), p. 52. 6. David Thomson, ‘Mike Nichols’, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (London: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 634. 7. 1 Samuel 17. 8. Cf. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Penguin, 1991). 9. Thomson, ‘Michael Cimino’, Biographical Dictionary, p. 158. 10. Jeremy Harding, ‘Short Cuts’, London Review of Books, 29 November 2007. 11. Sandra S. Phillips, ‘The Question of Belief’, in Diane Arbus Revelations (London: Cape, 2003), p. 58. A statement from 1971. 214

it’s all fucked up 12. See: http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/; and http://www. salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/, amounting to 279 photographs and nineteen videos, incorporating documentary evidence from the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, from their investigations of 2004–5. 13. Taxi to the Dark Side and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib are both available on DVD. On the issues raised by the film, and the intentions of the director, there is a thoughtful interview with Alex Gibney in Filmmaker Magazine (Winter 2008), at: http://www.fi lmmakermagazine.com/ winter2008/taxi.php; and with Rory Kennedy (niece of Senator Edward Kennedy) on the HBO website, at: http://www.hbo.com/docs/ programs/ghostsofabughraib/interview.html. 14. Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade (Taguba Report), March 2004, in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 416. See Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 22ff.; Alex Danchev, ‘“Like a Dog!” Humiliation and Shame in the War on Terror’, Alternatives 31 (2006), pp. 259–83. 15. Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ [1931], in Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. II, part 2, p. 527. 16. Errol Morris, ‘The Most Curious Thing’, The New York Times, 19 May 2008. One of his famous blogs, at: http://morris.blogs.nytimes. com. 17. Jacques Rancière, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics [2000] (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 20. This is what he calls ‘the ethical regime of images’. 18. Alex Danchev, ‘Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8 (2006), pp. 587–601; and ‘Tony Blair’s Vietnam: The Iraq War and the “special relationship” in historical perspective’, Review of International Studies 33 (2007), pp. 189–203. 19. At the behest of the Home Secretary, the case was passed to the Attorney General, to investigate possible ‘criminal wrongdoing’. The Guardian, 22 August and 31 October 2008. 20. Alex Gibney for his part speaks of ‘authored non-fiction’ rather than documentary fi lm. 21. Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (London: Picador, 2008). 22. See, for example, a piece on the Congo, ‘Forsaken’, The New Yorker, 25 September 2000, with its quietly devastating conclusion. 23. Morris, ‘Curious Thing’ (emphasis in the original). 24. See, for example, ‘Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up’, ‘Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?’ and ‘Photography as a 215

on art and war and terror

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

Weapon’, The New York Times, 15 August 2007, 25 September 2007 and 13 August 2008. The fi lm that made his name is The Thin Blue Line (1988), about a murder and a case of mistaken identity – a case which Morris solved, in effect, by interviewing the murderer. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 38. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Fog of Abu Ghraib: Errol Morris and the “bad apples”’, Harper’s (May 2008), and the interview, ‘Questions for Errol Morris’, at: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002873. This is the burden of the criticism made by professional historians, especially in the US. See, for example, ‘Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: A Roundtable Critique’, in Passport (April 2005), pp. 5–11. A somewhat similar critique of SOP is rejected by Ian Buruma in ‘Ghosts’, New York Review of Books, 26 June 2008. From an interview at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, in ‘The Great Interrogator’, GQ Magazine on-line, at: http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_6768&pageNum=13. See also the Q&A on the SOP website, at: http://www.sonyclassics.com/standardoperatingprocedure/site.html. The allusion is to the photographs of the mutilated body of Manadel al-Jamadi, ‘the Ice Man’, with Graner and Harman taking turns to pose, thumbs-up, beside him. The Ice Man was an OGA ‘death in custody’, later ruled a homicide, caused by ‘blunt force injuries to the torso complicated by compromised respiration’. In plain language he was murdered by the CIA. His corpse was packed with ice in a body-bag and concealed in the showers, where it was found by the happy snappers of the Military Police, before being spirited out of the prison. His fate was well-known in Abu Ghraib. See ch. 8. Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, The New York Times, 23 May 2004; Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld (London: Verso, 2007), p. 194, quoting an official who was present. Gourevitch, SOP, p. 111; Morris, ‘Curious Thing’, a blog devoted to her photographs and her motives. The letters also feature prominently in a trailer article, ‘Exposure’, The New Yorker, 24 March 2008, focusing on Harman. Gourevitch, SOP, pp. 110–11. ‘Both sides of me’, meaning military and civilian, tough and not tough. Gourevitch’s assessment of Harman follows, on pp. 111–14. It is evident from her letters that Harman was not only photographing but also videoing the abuse. She claims to fake her smile. Morris in his characteristic way has tried to investigate the smile, with the aid of an expert in facial expression. See his exchange with Paul Ekman in ‘Curious Thing’. Cf. Gourevitch, SOP, pp. 148, 153, 197, 200–1. Investigation of Intelligence Activities at Abu Ghraib (Fay–Jones 216

it’s all fucked up Report), August 2004, in Torture Papers, pp. 1085–6. See also Taguba Report, ibid., p. 444. Cf. Danchev, ‘Like a Dog!’. 37. Physicians for Human Rights, Broken Laws, Broken Lives, June 2008, at: http://brokenlives.info/. On what became of Taguba, see Seymour Hersh, ‘The General’s Report’, The New Yorker, 25 June 2007.

217

10

Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror

barbarian 1. Etymologically. A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker’s. 1549 Compl. Scot. Xiii. 106 Euere nation reputes vthers nations to be barbarians, quhen there tua natours and complexions ar contrar til votheris [i.e. each other]. 1611 BIBLE I Cor. xiv. 11, I shall be vnto him that speaketh, a Barbarian, and he that speaketh shal be a Barbarian vnto me. 1827 HARE Guesses (1859) 325 A barbarian is a person who does not talk as we talk, or dress as we dress, or eat as we eat; in short, who is so audacious as not to follow our practice in all the trivialities of manners. 1862 Macm. Mag. Nov. 58 Ovid . . . laments that in his exile at Tomi he, the polished citizen, is a barbarian to all his neighbours. 2. Historically. a. One not a Greek. b. One living outside the pale of the Roman empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them. c. One outside the pale of Christian civilization. d. With the Italians of Renaissance: One of a nation outside Italy ... 3. A rude, wild, uncivilized person . . . b. Sometimes distinguished from savage (perh. with a glance at 2) . . . c. Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners. Oxford English Dictionary 1

All wars are wars of words. In times past, it was code-words. The operational code-words of the Second World War were themselves a source of top secret tension among the Anglo-Saxons, and are now an integral part of the public memory of that conflict (BARBAROSSA, OVERLORD, MARKET GARDEN). Characteristically, Winston Churchill took a personal interest in them. ‘I have crossed out on the attached paper many unsuitable names,’ he minuted to his longsuffering chief staff officer in 1943: 218

waiting for the barbarians Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code-words which imply a boastful and overconfident sentiment, such as TRIUMPHANT, or, conversely, which are calculated to invest the plan with an air of despondency, such as WOEBETIDE, MASSACRE, JUMBLE, TROUBLE, FIDGET, FLIMSY, PATHETIC, and JAUNDICE. They ought not to be names of a frivolous character, such as BUNNYHUG, BILLINGSGATE, APERETIF, and BALLYHOO. They should not be ordinary words often used in other connections, such as FLOOD, SMOOTH, SUDDEN, SUPREME, FULLFORCE, and FULLSPEED. Names of living people – ministers or commanders – should be avoided; e.g. BRACKEN. After all, the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called BUNNYHUG or BALLYHOO. Proper names are good in this field. The heroes of antiquity, figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the constellations and stars, famous racehorses, names of British and American war heroes, could be used, provided they fall within the rules above. There are no doubt many other themes that could be suggested. Care should be taken in all this process. An efficient and successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters. 2

In the global war on terror this wisdom has gone unheeded. The overall designation of the military response to the 9/11 attacks is Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, swiftly changed from INFINITE JUSTICE after it was pointed out that that form of words is usually reserved for a deity, and might give offence, especially to Muslims – by which time the damage was done. ENDURING FREEDOM is not quite TRIUMPHANT, perhaps, but it clearly fails the Churchill test. At the same moment, cultural sensitivities were sorely tried by George W. Bush’s loose use of the word ‘crusade’, as a kind of descriptor of the war on terror: ‘a Holy war of error’, in Sami Al-Haj’s phrase.3 The oppressive connotations of the Crusades seem to have escaped the White House, but the President’s choice of words provoked a chorus of objection from European capitals and a rebuke from the Grand Mufti of the Mosque in Marseille, who considered the term most unfortunate: ‘It recalled the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world’ by Christian knights.4 The military operation that duly followed, to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein, was code-named COBRA II, as a sequel to the 219

on art and war and terror Second World War, where the original Operation COBRA was the break-out from the Normandy beaches following the Allied landings in 1944.5 The historical promise, therefore, was liberation. The historical irony was that the liberated of 1944 were none other than the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of 2003 – the only begetters of that mutant strain, ‘freedom fries’ – the French. Code-words now assume less importance than catchwords – ‘Islamofascism’, for example, a self-serving abuse of language, history and intelligence; or even ‘Islamophobia’, a term proscribed by the Home Office in 2008, in a phrasebook for the terror warrior, on the grounds that it is unhelpful in the battle for hearts and minds: ‘can be misunderstood as a slur on Islam and perceived as singling out Muslims (even though it indicates we are positively addressing their concerns)’.6 The catchphrase ‘axis of evil’ touches on the same territory.7 Beyond catchwords, moreover, are new words or acronyms, beginning with the unlovely GWOT. The jewel in the Orwellian crown is Person under Control (PUC), an expression originating in Afghanistan to replace Prisoner of War (POW) after the President decided that the Geneva Conventions, or at any rate POW status, did not apply there; and then carried over conveniently to Iraq. PUC neatly dehumanises, signifying less a person than an unperson, less human dignity than ‘bare life’, to borrow the expression used by Giorgio Agamben for the fathomless existence of the detainee.8 (‘Detainee’: an old word given a new spin in the GWOT.) PUC is pronounced puck, as in ‘fuck a puck’ (administer a beating). An inquiry conducted by Human Rights Watch, based on the first-hand testimony of serving soldiers, found that the PUCs held at Forward Operating Base Mercury, near Fallujah, were ‘fucked’, routinely, by anyone who pleased. They were also ‘smoked’, under the specific direction of Military Intelligence. ‘Smoking’ refers to forced physical exertion, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness, accompanied by food, water and sleep deprivation. Smoking was fundamental to the interrogation system at the base. As one soldier put it: ‘The [Military Intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to co-operate.’ In short, they were tortured, almost daily, over an eight-month period from September 2003 to April 2004.9 Meanwhile a second front had been opened in this particular war of words. The original National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), a document famous for its espousal of preemptive military action, had an even more striking theme: ‘the non220

waiting for the barbarians negotiable demands of human dignity’. Subsequent iterations tended to modify that categorical imperative: the tone became less insistent, and there was more talk of ‘process’ and ‘aspirations’. There were fewer hostages to fortune.10 Nevertheless, ‘dignity’ remains the watchword of the war on terror. Oratorically, its only rival is ‘values’. The war on terror always aspired to be more than a war – if not a crusade, then at least a cause. Causes and crusades are projects with a moral purpose, even a mission. Put differently, the war on terror wants to be a ‘good’ war. There is a continuing temptation to parse its campaigns to fulfil (or wish-fulfil) that purpose. Five years after the invasion, in 2008, the US Co-ordinator with Iraq could be found speculating that, ‘in many ways Iraq may be seen to be the good war, the success story, with all reservations and cautions that are appropriate. And Afghanistan the much more threatening, bad picture.’11 Good wars are few and far between. It is doubtless no accident that the template is the Second World War. George W. Bush and his handlers often invoked Winston Churchill as an example of a politician who was punished in the polls but rewarded by history for rejecting the temptation of conciliation. (After Hitler, ‘appeasement’ has become the great bogey word of Anglo-American war and peace-making. In the aftermath of 9/11, anything smacking of the appeasement of Saddam Hussein was to be avoided at all costs, though leading figures in the Bush Administration had tried it complaisantly enough in the past.)12 In one of the more implausible characterisations or identifications of his career, Bush asserted that Churchill ‘knew what he believed, and he really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me’.13 It is perhaps a pardonable exaggeration to say that the war on terror is a struggle of good guys against bad, Texans against turpitude, or it is nothing. The goodness, however, has been spoiled. The non-negotiable demands of human dignity have been found to be negotiable after all. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay will go down in history as sufficient proof of that. The moral high ground is surprisingly difficult terrain to occupy. The struggle continues, nevertheless, verbally impervious. A mission requires missionaries; and the war on terror found a ready zealot in Tony Blair, the preacher on a tank, aider and abettor of the President until he quit the scene in 2007, damaged beyond repair. No European leader of his generation has spoken so unblushingly of good and evil. At an unaccustomed meeting with academic experts on Iraq, in November 2002, he responded to their sober prognoses by saying, ‘But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?’ – less a question 221

on art and war and terror than a staring-eyed statement of belief.14 ‘For all their faults,’ he admonished a gathering of British ambassadors in January 2003, two months before the opening salvoes of the war, ‘the US are a force for good; they have liberal and democratic traditions of which any nation can be proud.’15 A force for good was quintessential Blair, and something of a Blairite mantra. Britain too was a force for good, naturally, as was the British Army. This was goodness militant. Tony was a true believer in the mission of the moment. If blazing sincerity was essential to his self-image, or self-construction, a dash of missionary zeal was all part of the service. ‘I feel a most urgent sense of mission about today’s world,’ he told the Congress in July 2003, deftly yoking Churchill and Shakespeare. ‘September 11th was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue. Iraq, another act; and many further struggles will be set upon this stage before it’s over.’16 In a trilogy of set-piece speeches on foreign policy in the early months of 2006, Blair set out to restate the core message. ‘This is not a clash between civilizations,’ he declared. ‘It is a clash about civilization.’ It was a struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘violence’, ‘progress’ and ‘reaction’, modernism and medievalism, light and dark, good and evil, us and them.17 In this binary world, we are traduced and they are exonerated. ‘Examine the propaganda poured into the minds of Arabs and Muslims,’ he urged. ‘Every abuse at Abu Ghraib is exposed in detail; of course it is unacceptable but it is as if the only absence of due process in that part of the world is in prisons run by the Americans.’18 There was no glimmer of recognition here or elsewhere in these hyper-articulate apologetics that Abu Ghraib was not an aberration but a standard operating procedure; no acknowledgement of the immense damage done to the moral authority of the Anglo-American crusaders, the shame felt throughout the Muslim world, the humiliation visited on the United States, on the much-trumpeted alliance of values, on us. Consciously or unconsciously, the President himself plagiarised his faithful friend in his Address to the Nation on 11 September 2006, the fifth anniversary of 9/11. ‘The war against this enemy is more than a military confl ict,’ he averred. ‘It is the decisive ideological struggle of the twenty-fi rst century, and the calling of our generation.’ (A coded reference to ‘the greatest generation’, perhaps, in a smuggled Second World War analogy.) ‘The struggle has been called a clash of civilizations,’ Bush went on. ‘In truth it is a struggle for civilization.’19 Where civilisation is conjured up, barbarism is rarely far behind. 222

waiting for the barbarians The rhetoric of the war on terror, replete with ‘barbaric acts’ and ‘revolting terrorist barbarity’, is a sermon (or a harangue) on the fusion of terrorism and barbarism. The President’s Address to the Nation began: ‘Five years ago, this date – September the 11th – was seared into America’s memory. Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequalled in our history.’ Such rhetoric was by no means confined to Presidents and Prime Ministers. Michael Ignatieff, for example, could be found excoriating ‘the barbarians who kidnapped Daniel Pearl’, and drawing a clinical distinction between ‘warriors’ on the one hand and ‘barbarians’ on the other: ‘A warrior kills his enemy as efficiently as possible. A barbarian seeks to infl ict suffering.’20 Government ministers joined in with a will. One of Tony Blair’s loyal placemen, John Reid, began wondering aloud if the time had come to revisit the fusty old Geneva Conventions. ‘Much has been achieved under current frameworks,’ puffed the Secretary of State for Defence. ‘But warfare continues to evolve, and, in its moral dimensions, we have now to cope with a deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism by our opponents.’21 Barbaric terrorism is not cricket. The need to rewrite the ground rules, to take the gloves off, in order to achieve results against a bestial and fanatical foe seems to ape the casuists of the Office of Legal Counsel. This sort of talk has a long history. ‘As the terrorists grew more brutalized, their moral degradation was reflected in the characteristics of the Mau Mau oath,’ explained the Secretary of State for the Colonies during a small war on terror in Kenya, fifty years ago: This developed sexual and sadistic aberrations which . . . included murder and cannibalism . . . What is clear . . . is that the taking of the oaths had such a tremendous effect on the Kikuyu mind as to turn quite intelligent young Africans into entirely different human beings, into sub-human creatures without hope and with death as their only deliverance.22

‘It does not sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such as theirs,’ wrote Montaigne in a celebrated essay, ‘On the Cannibals’ (1580): ‘what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrong-doings, we should be so blind to our own.’23 Degradation, like humiliation, is shared. Torture has a curiously reversible property. A detainee, hooded like the Ku-Klux Klan, is threatened with electrocution: America electrocutes itself.24 As Walt Whitman knew, the damage is indivisible: Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. 25 223

on art and war and terror The images of Abu Ghraib offer a graphic reminder that any blackand-white, us-and-them distinction between civilisation and barbarism is based on shifting sands. ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,’ observed Walter Benjamin, as if offering a commentary on the migration and routinisation of coercive interrogation. ‘And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.’26 Civilisation is a slippery concept. ‘Ah yes’, says the magistrate in a novel by the keen-eyed J. M. Coetzee, as new facilities are erected and new regimes devised, ‘time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.’27 The first police to use electric torture were the Americans (circa 1908), the British (1912) and the French (1931). The Dutch pioneered the technique of water-choking with a linen napkin or chiffon; the Americans and British pioneered the use of beating with high-pressure water; the British alone pioneered the combination of handcuffs and freezing baths. In short, we are the innovators in this crowded field.28 The torturers are us. The good war itself has given rise to a thesis about ‘the barbarisation of warfare’, not among the sub-human creatures beyond the pale, but the self-styled master race. The barbarisation thesis was introduced (one might almost say popularised) by the historian Omer Bartov, some twenty years ago, in an influential study of the Eastern Front in the Second World War. 29 Focusing on the German side of the Nazi–Soviet war, Bartov demonstrated beyond doubt that the conventional wisdom was wrong – criminal behaviour was not confined to the security forces (the SS, the security police, the regular police, local militia and the like); it was endemic in the German Army, whose officers and soldiers committed war crimes and atrocities without number, and apparently without compunction. Bartov sought an explanation for this behaviour in a mixture of predisposition, indoctrination and a sort of experiential saturation: a compound of conditions and conditioning, nature and nurture, on the Eastern Front. What the barbarisation thesis proposed was a progressive degeneration over time, such that savagery became almost instinctive and atrocity routine. The revelation of ‘barbarisation’ shocked and shamed, and still reverberates. It is disputed, of course, with a passion. It raises the issue of specificity, or rather elasticity, as Richard Overy has put it in an examination of the thesis in context.30 First of all, to focus on one side is to invite the criticism of understating or downplaying the 224

waiting for the barbarians interactive nature of the experience. The Nazi–Soviet war became a competition in barbarism, almost an auction, as each side learned from the other. The barbarising process is a reciprocal process. Moreover, this was not a war of one front. The war on the Eastern Front was barbarous indeed; but so was the war in the South Pacific, and there too the barbarism was a kind of mutual escalation, as a glance at the harrowing memoir of US Marine Eugene B. Sledge will confi rm.31 Other theatres and other wars in this era lay claim to the same dubious title. Niall Ferguson has advanced the plausible idea of ‘essentially contested places’ in Central and Eastern Europe (Vilna/ Wilna/Vilne/Vilnius), where living space turns into killing space all too easily. Not content with that, he has devoted a whole book to the notion of ‘history’s age of hatred’, a uniquely bloody twentieth century, a dubious notion but a popular belief.32 If it is barbarism everywhere, how stands the barbarisation thesis? Does it hold for the Germans on the Eastern Front? Only them? Only there? How far can it stretch? In truth, barbarism is a perennial temptation. (‘Why is standing limited to four hours?’) Warriors are not always sticklers for propriety. They have other things on their mind. Traditionally, however, their behaviour is governed, if not by fiat, then by custom, mores, norms, codes, what you will, to say nothing of imponderable things like scruples or squeamishness, and apparently far-fetched but strangely compelling considerations such as self-abnegation and self-esteem.33 Contrary to appearances, war is not a free-for-all, but rather a complex sphere of activity thick with all kinds of inhibitions and prohibitions, variously derived. As far back as anyone can remember, the conduct of warfare has had its own rituals, its own forms of courtesy, or charity, its own protocols and politesse; perhaps even its own civilising process, to borrow the master concept of that infinitely suggestive sociologist Norbert Elias.34 And yet, there is a certain tension between making war and making nice. Thus, the ancient Archilochus: In the hospitality of war We left them their dead as a gift To remember us by. 35

Archilochus is mischievous, but deep. Total war is not social work, as the moderns might say. Battle is body parts and blood. The epic treatments of the subject in the Western canon have all been seen as pitiless documents of man’s inhumanity to man, and as timeless 225

on art and war and terror witness testimony: Homer’s Iliad, Goya’s Disasters of War, Picasso’s Guernica. ‘All day permanent red,’ in Christopher Logue’s happy phrase. War Music, Logue’s free translation, gives the Iliad its ultimate update. ‘Blood? Blood like a carwash.’ In Logue’s Homer the barbarisation of warfare slips and slides and elides Trojan war, Napoleonic war and Nazi-Soviet war, in a single spurting re-imagining: Drop into it. Noise so clamorous it sucks. You rush your pressed-flower hackles out To the perimeter. And here it comes: That unpremeditated joy as you – The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip Happy in danger in a dangerous place Yourself another self you found at Troy – Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum! Oh wonderful, most wonderful, and then again more wonderful A bond no word or lack of words can break, Love above love! And here they come again the noble Greeks, Ido, a spear in one a banner in his other hand Your life at every instant up for – Gone. And, candidly, who gives a toss? Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips. King Richard calling for another horse (his fifth). King Marshal Ney shattering his sabre on a cannon ball. King Ivan Kursk, 22.30 hrs, July 4th to 14th ’43, 7000 tanks engaged, ‘. . . he clambered up and pushed a stable-bolt Into that Tiger-tank’s red-hot-machine-gun’s mouth And bent the bastard up. Wowee!’ Where would we be if he had lost? Achilles? Let him sulk. 36

The barbarians, like the poor, are always with us. The war on terror has returned us to the condition mapped by Joseph Conrad a century ago (‘The horror! The horror!’). Conrad surely knew something of the life of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, barricaded in the Green Zone, under siege from the savage, ‘an inconceivable life of stress, of power, of endeavour, of unbelief . . . the strong life of white men, which rolls on irresistible and hard on 226

waiting for the barbarians the edge of outer darkness’.37 Conrad’s writing has an hallucinatory proleptic power. Mr Kurtz in the heart of darkness is in his own way a kind of avatar. ‘Like Kurtz’, George Packer has observed, ‘those who begin as humanitarians have a way of ending up as barbarians.’38 As Conrad’s narrator relates, Kurtz’s report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs begins with the argument that ‘“[we] must necessarily appear to them in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might as of a deity”. By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded, &c., &c.’ Before he knows it, the narrator is carried away: From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’.39

A power for good sounds strangely familiar, as does the soaring rhetoric (‘success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider’) and the magnificent peroration. ‘That is why I say this struggle is one about values. Our values are our guide. They represent humanity’s progress throughout the ages. At each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again.’40 As for practical hints, the ignorance of the masters of the war on terror was matched only by their hubris. They searched high and low to confi rm their prejudices. An academic acquaintance of the editor of the literary magazine Granta, a Middle East specialist, was asked by an intelligence agency in Washington if he would care to write a paper which would answer their question, ‘Why Arabs Lie’.41 Concerning the barbarians, the truly unknown unknown is how little we know about them. God-given rulers have neither the time nor the inclination to learn. The temporary proconsul Paul Bremer had two weeks to prepare to take charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003. His ignorance of the country and the culture was complete. In civilised circles, this is not unusual. A generation ago, the 227

on art and war and terror

Figure 17 Staff Sergeant Chad Touchett (centre) and soldiers from A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, relax in one of Saddam’s palaces, Baghdad, 7 April 2003.

heart of darkness was Vietnam. In Daniel Ellsberg’s apt reflection: ‘There has never been an official of Deputy Assistant Secretary rank or higher (including myself) who could have passed in office a mid-term exam in modern Vietnamese history.’42 His successors did no better in Iraq. When a reporter visited Bremer in his Baghdad lair, he found the bookshelves almost empty: ‘Rudolph Guiliani’s Leadership stood on one shelf, and a book about the management of financial crises on the other, near a box of raisin bran.’43 Some years later, there were signs of movement. In 2007 and 2008, General David Petraeus and those around him began to speak of ‘the cultural terrain’; ‘cultural appreciation’ manuals were issued to American and British forces, explaining that ‘Western policy in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington has led to a feeling among many Arabs that the US in cohort with a number of European governments is pursuing a hidden agenda under the guise of the “global war on terror”.’ This was not the message laid down in 2003 and 2004. For want of moral authority or cultural guidance, atavism takes over. ‘You have to understand the Arab mind,’ explained an infantry company commander. ‘The only thing they understand is force – force, pride, and saving face’ – a dictum straight out of The 228

waiting for the barbarians Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai, the guru of choice for neoconservative commentators and military officers alike.44 Crude as it may be, ‘the Arab mind’ was a marvellously convenient construct. It served to anonymise and agglomerate; it made strange what it purported to explain. Stripped of the pseudo-science, it was but a short step from ‘the only thing they understand’ to some further specifications, as ugly as they were contemptuous. Who were ‘they’? They were Greekoid scum; they were Muscovite and cosmopolite slime; they were Shitboy, Gus, Taxi Driver, Gilligan, the Iranian, the Ice Man: the inmates of Abu Ghraib, as christened by their captors. Understanding the Untermensch is an exacting task, but a moral imperative and a practical necessity. It will not be easy. In 2005, an unusually frank assessment by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a senior British officer serving with the coalition forces in Baghdad, found that the US Army’s ‘cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism’. The Director of the School of Advanced Military Studies told the Washington Post that the Brigadier was ‘an insufferable British snob’; shortly afterwards he conceded that his remark had been made in the heat of the moment.45 More seriously, when one of America’s most distinguished public intellectuals, Freeman Dyson, wrote in the New York Review of Books that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them – even terrorists, even suicide bombers – ‘dignity’ was instantly mobilised against him. ‘Any attempt to dignify the terrorists is despicable,’ he was reprimanded. He was urged to retract and apologise. Staunchly, he refused, but took the opportunity to add the conclusive argument that ‘our lack of respect for our enemies has made it harder for us to deal with them effectively’.46 The point is well made in the British Army’s official report into cases of deliberate abuse and unlawful killing in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 (a report published four years after the fact): ‘Respect for others means respect for all others – and that includes people who may be your enemies.’47 The exotic Immensity for their part understood the situation only too well. In the debris of Fallujah an Iraqi teenager came up to the leader of a US Army patrol. Gesturing to a pile of rubbish that filled a space where a building had been before the place was pulverised, he asked in a loud voice, ‘Why don’t you Americans clean up the garbage?’ Sighing, the weary patrol leader replied, ‘Why don’t you clean it up yourselves?’ The boy responded, theatrically, ‘Oh, because we’re not like you Americans. We are savage and primitive people.’48 If that loaded exchange was in the first instance an exchange about 229

on art and war and terror civilisation and barbarism – about stereotypes – it was also an exchange about manners. Codes of manners are fundamental to the civilising process. Norbert Elias took the long view. For him, modern peoples might be regarded as ‘late barbarians’. So we are. But Mr Kurtz dies hard. Good wars and good manners do not necessarily consort well together. None the less, one of the most original military thinkers of the twentieth century was tempted into the same territory: Basil Liddell Hart. Liddell Hart’s thinking is encapsulated in a work of brilliant concision entitled The Revolution in Warfare (1946), a book born out of the experience of the Second World War, which he regarded not as a good war but as a catastrophe. Liddell Hart was not a philosopher; ‘all his knowledge applies itself’, as his friend T. E. Lawrence observed.49 He produced a primer on the civilising process in war, a foundation in anti-barbarisation. The Revolution in Warfare concluded with a passionate appeal for military civility: Manners are apt to be regarded as surface polish. That is a superficial view. They arise from inward control. A fresh realization of their importance is needed in the world today, and their revival might prove the salvation of civilization – as happened after the devastating civil and religious wars of the seventeenth century, and again after the French Revolutionary earthquake. For only manners in the deeper sense – of mutual restraint for mutual security – can control the risk that outbursts of temper over political and social issues may lead to mutual destruction in the atomic age. 50

Civility and self-restraint may not be the fi rst qualities associated with modern warfare, yet barbarization is not preordained. The exercise of professional judgement, not to mention moral scruple, is possible even in the most difficult circumstances, as demonstrated by Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro and the US Navy dog teams in the inferno of Abu Ghraib. Ordinary men do unspeakable things in war, but not all of them. William J. Kimbro is an ordinary man. He is also some kind of hero. War is a realm of chance and contingency. Anything can happen, as Seamus Heaney has memorably said: Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. 51

Given its rhetorical construction, it is richly ironic that the war on terror has become a war of waiting – waiting for the barbarians – on both sides. We wait for them to come; to commit another outrage. 230

waiting for the barbarians They wait for us to go; to put an end to the anarchy we have created. A sort of symmetry obtains. Here, too, reciprocity rules. The hospitality of war is generously returned. For the august Benevolence, a pattern emerges; or a sense of déjà vu. Like a tale from the Thousand and One Nights, the same places recur: Kabul; Kandahar; Basra; Mesopotamia. The same Arabs revolt. The same battles are fought on the same ground, ‘habitually modelled’, says Saint-Loup in The Remembrance of Things Past, ‘on earlier battles which constitute, if I can put it like this, the past, the library holdings, the learning, the etymology, the aristocracy of the battles that are to come.’52 If battles reproduce themselves, as Proust suggests, so do barbarians. In the European imagination, waiting for the barbarians has become a habit. The long war has a long pedigree. Culturally speaking, we have waited several hundred years, at least since Montaigne and Shakespeare. There is always waiting. And perhaps, in spite of all, there is a certain longing. As the poets have taught us, barbarians have their uses: Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.53

‘Those people’ are also a distraction. The mode of thinking, or unthinking, which accompanies their recruitment leads to fateful consequences, and all too often mass casualties. In September 2002, on the first anniversary of 9/11, the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz issued a prescient warning to his fellow countrymen (and others): At a time when the grand opposition of civilization and barbarism is becoming again a common coin of both cultural and political discussion, and all sorts of public figures are trying to tell us where the boundary between them lies and what it consists in, it will be well to keep in mind the dubiousness of the whole Ariel and Caliban procedure.54

As La Bruyère remarked succinctly, long ago, ‘All foreigners are not Barbarians, nor all our Compatriots civilized.’55 231

on art and war and terror Failure to heed Clifford Geertz’s warning had been foreseen twenty years earlier, by the novelist J. M. Coetzee, in a prophetic work with an historic title: Waiting for the Barbarians. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless; it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not his then his son’s or his unborn grandson’s) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal dominion, while his comrades below cheer and fi re their muskets in the air.56

It was not the globe but the towers that toppled, and the madness was virulent indeed.

Notes 1. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), vol. I, p. 945. 2. Churchill to Ismay, 8 August 1943, in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1948–54), vol. V, p. 583. See Alex Danchev, On Specialness (London: Macmillan, 1998), ch. 3. If these examples appear fanciful, it is well to recall the proposed Operation ARMPIT – a thrust through Istria towards Vienna – a code-name Churchill surely would have changed had the plan been approved, as Warren Kimball has remarked. 3. Andrew Buncombe, ‘Prisoner 345’, Independent Magazine, 11 June 2007. Sami Al-Haj is a Sudanese journalist detained without charge in Guantánamo Bay since December 2001. 4. Christian Science Monitor, 19 September 2001. 5. See Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II (New York: Pantheon, 2006). 6. The Guardian, 4 February 2008. 232

waiting for the barbarians 7. Cf. Tony Judt, ‘The “Problem of Evil” in Postwar Europe’, New York Review of Books, 14 February 2008. 8. Giorgio Agamben, trans. Kevin Athill, State of Exception (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 4. 9. Human Rights Watch, ‘Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division’, September 2005, at: http://www.hrw.org (accessed 24 March 2006); excerpted in ‘Torture in Iraq’, New York Review of Books, 3 November 2005. 10. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002 et seq.), at: http://www.whitehouse.gov (accessed 17 July 2006). 11. David Satterfield interviewed in Timesonline, 24 January 2008, at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk (accessed 5 February 2008). 12. See Alex Danchev, ‘The Anschluss’, Review of International Studies 20 (1994), pp. 112–17. 13. Jon Meacham, ‘D-Day’s Real Lessons’, Newsweek, 31 May 2004. For many Americans, the founding text is Studs Terkel’s oral history, ‘The Good War’ (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 14. As remembered by George Joffe. See Jonathan Steele, Defeat (London: Tauris, 2008). 15. Speech at Foreign Office Conference, 7 January 2003, at: http:// www.number10.gov.uk (accessed 29 May 2007). See Alex Danchev, ‘Tony Blair’s Vietnam’, Review of International Studies 33 (2007), pp. 189–203. 16. Speech to Congress, 18 July 2003. 17. Foreign Policy Speech I, Foreign Policy Centre, London, 21 March 2006. The message resurfaced in Blair’s article, ‘A Battle for Global Values’, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007), at http://www.foreignaffairs.org (accessed 29 May 2007). The article repeated the line about civilisation and the argument about propaganda, but dropped the reference to Abu Ghraib. The second speech in the series, on the theme of ‘global alliance for global values’, was delivered to the Australian Parliament on 27 March 2006; the third, on ‘progressive pre-emption’, at Georgetown University, Washington DC, on 26 May 2006. The thesis of ‘the clash of civilisations’ derived from Samuel Huntington’s 1997 bestseller of that name. 18. In one sense, of course, he was right: ‘absence of due process’ also featured at facilities run by the British, as for example Camp Breadbasket, near Basra, where officers and men of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were charged with ‘Ali Baba hunting’, ‘beasting’, sexually humiliating and snapping Iraqis. See Alex Danchev, ‘Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8 (2006), pp. 587–601. 19. President’s Address to the Nation, 11 September 2006, at: http:// 233

on art and war and terror

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

www.whitehouse.gov (accessed 29 May 2007). Bush went on invoke Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In an earlier variation he had also refused the clash of civilisations, declaring it instead ‘a clash of political visions’. Speech at Air Force Graduation Ceremony, US Air Force Academy, 2 June 2004, a speech laying heavy emphasis on the Second World War analogy. Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Torture Wars’, New Republic, 22 April 2002. John Reid, Secretary of State for Defence, ‘20th Century Rules, 21st Century Conflict’, speech at RUSI, London, 3 April 2006, at: http:// www.mod.uk (accessed 29 May 2007). Reid felt the need to publish a clarification, emphasising that he was not in favour of ‘legal exceptionalism’. The Guardian, 5 April 2006. Alan Lennox-Boyd, statement to the House of Commons, quoted in David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged (London: Phoenix, 2006), pp. 280–1. Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech, ‘On the Cannibals’, in The Complete Essays (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 235. Such ‘reversibility’ was a favourite trope of Jean Baudrillard. On torture, see in particular Baudrillard, trans. Chris Turner, ‘Pornography of War’, Cultural Politics 1 (2005), pp. 23–6; and more generally, The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, in Leaves of Grass [1891] (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1998), p. 48. Walter Benjamin, trans. Harry Zohn, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 248. The theses were completed in 1940 and fi rst published (in German) in 1950. In Benjamin’s Selected Writings, the authoritative text, the same translator has substituted ‘culture’ for ‘civilisation’ (vol. IV, p. 392). J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians [1980] (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 86. As demonstrated by Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front 1941–1945 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). Richard Overy, ‘The Second World War: a Barbarous Confl ict?’, in George Kassimeris (ed.), The Barbarisation of Warfare (London: Hurst, 2006), pp. 39–57. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Niall Ferguson, The War of the World (London: Penguin, 2006). ‘The abnegation of the warrior’ is an idea developed with melancholy subtlety in Alfred de Vigny, trans. Roger Gard, Servitude and Grandeur of Arms [1835] (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 14ff. Norbert Elias writes tellingly of ‘a kernel of self-esteem which prevents the 234

waiting for the barbarians

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

senseless torturing of enemies and allows identification with one’s enemy in the last instance as another human being’ in ‘The Breakdown of Civilization’, in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds), The Norbert Elias Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 114. Norbert Elias, trans. Edmund Jephcott, The Civilizing Process [1939] (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). These words are inscribed on Cy Twombly’s sculpture, Epitaph (1992). An image of the work can be seen at: http://www.nga.gov/ exhibitions/2001/twombly/twombly11.htm (accessed 29 May 2007). Archilochus survives only in fragments; this seems to be a rendition (a beautiful one) of fragment 7. See Douglas E. Gerber (ed. and trans.), Greek Iambic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Loeb, 1999), pp. 84–5. Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red (London: Faber, 2003), pp. 29–31; extracted in the New York Review of Books, 15 May 2003. Joseph Conrad, ‘Karain: A Memory’ [1895], Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2002), p. 45. George Packer, ‘Fighting Faiths’, The New Yorker, 10 and 17 July 2006. ‘Heart of Darkness’ [1902], in Heart of Darkness, p. 155. The ISSSC is a fiction, though possibly a reference to the International Association for the Exploration and Civilizing of Africa, of which King Leopold II of Belgium was President. Tony Blair, Speech to the Economic Club, Chicago, 24 April 1999 (the famous ‘Doctrine of the International Community’); ‘Battle for Global Values’, pp. 6–7. Ian Jack, ‘Introduction’, Granta 84 (2003), p. 7. Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 28. George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate (London: Faber, 2006), p. 189. Contrast L. Paul Bremer, with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). Eliot Weinberger, ‘What I heard about Iraq’, London Review of Books, 3 February 2005, quoting Captain Todd Brown, 4th Infantry Division, parroting Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind [1973] (New York: Hatherleigh, 2002). Of course, not everyone should be tarred with this brush. ‘Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy,’ Colonel H. R. McMaster told the soldiers in his 3rd Army Cavalry Regiment. But not everyone was so clear or explicit. On tactical and cultural learning, see George Packer, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’, The New Yorker, 10 April 2006. Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, ‘Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations’, Military Review 6 (2005), p. 3; The Guardian, 12 January 2006. On the other hand, the Chief of Staff 235

on art and war and terror

46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

ordered a copy of Aylwin-Foster’s critique to be sent to every general in the US Army. Freeman Dyson, ‘Religion from the Outside’, New York Review of Books, 22 June 2006 and subsequent correspondence. The Aitken Report, 25 January 2008, para. 42. The other Core Values are selfless commitment, courage, discipline, integrity and loyalty. See para. 41. Rory Stewart, ‘Degrees of Not Knowing’, London Review of Books, 31 March 2005, quoting from Jon Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 2005). Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 29 June 1933, in Alex Danchev, Alchemist of War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 258. B. H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (London: Faber, 1946), p. 93. Cf. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Pimlico, 1994), pp. 391–2. Liddell Hart disseminated his ideas in a clutch of little magazines, for example, ‘Manners Mould Mankind’, World Review, January and February 1946, pp. 57–63 and 46–53. Seamus Heaney, ‘Anything can Happen’, in District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), p. 13. Marcel Proust, trans. Mark Treharne, The Guermantes Way [1920–1] (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 108. C. P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ [1904], in Collected Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 15. Clifford Geertz, ‘The Last Humanist’, New York Review of Books, 26 September 2002. The reference is to The Tempest. One of the principal sources for Shakespeare’s play was Montaigne’s essay ‘On the Cannibals’. See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). La Bruyère in Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 547. Coetzee, Barbarians, p. 146.

236

Index

Entries in bold indicate illustrations; ‘dir’ indicates ‘directed by’ Abu Ghraib, 175, 183–6, 184, 222 Harman, Sabrina and her photos, 205, 208, 210, 211–12 Jamadi, Manadel al-, death under interrogation, 185–6 Joyner, Hydrue, on CIA, 207–8 Kimbro, William, refusal to participate in torture, 186, 212–13, 230 Other Government Agency (OGA), 186, 208 photographs (of torture and abuse), 203– 12 in Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, dir), 203–4, 207–11, 213 active passivity, 3, 117–18 in Braque’s fish paintings, 109–11 and Braque’s response to war events, 101–2 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 23 Al Qaeda, 179–80 Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, diary of, 147, 148–66, 151 Alice (mother), letters to, 152–3 Baron, appointment to, 163–4 Benita (second wife), 147, 149–50 birds, interest in, 165–6 Churchill, relationship with, 156–62 CIGS, as, 153–63 description of Alanbrooke, 154 publication of diaries, 161–3 the Somme, final push, 152–3 Triumph in the West, 162 Turn of the Tide, The, 161, 162 writing, reason for, 149–52, 156–8 ‘the Arab mind’, 228–9 Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (Goya), 37 artist as moralist, 3, 16, 139 Atlas (Richter), 13, 14 Auden, W. H., 3–5 authenticity, 71–3 Baader, Andreas, 9, 13, 16, 19, 26 Baader-Meinhof Group, 8–27

Baader-Meinhof Komplex, Der (Edel), 9 Bagram Air Force base, 206 Banjo, The (Mandolin and Score) (Braque), 112 barbarism, 218–32 barbarisation thesis, 224–5 ‘bare life’, 177 civilisation, as opposed to, 222–4 definition of, 218 in Kenya, 223 and 9/11, 223 Barker, Pat, 148 Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo, dir), 198 Bazaine, Jean, 114 Beaverbrook, Lord, 155 Beerdigung (Richter), 21–2 Beevor, Antony Stalingrad, 140 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 224 Berger, John, 58–9 Berggruen, Heinz, 63, 66 Bernhard, Thomas, 10–11, 25 Best Years of Our lives, The (Wyler, dir), 197 Black Fish, The (Braque), 110–11, 110 Blair, Tony, and GWOT, 70–1, 72–3, 73, 221–2 Blanket (Richter), 24 Braque, Georges, 2, 100–19 Banjo, The (Mandolin and Score), 112 Black Fish, The, 110–11 Cahiers d’Art, response to their survey, 101–2 and the Croix de Feu, 118–19 Death’s Head, 104 exhibitions, 112, 114 fish paintings/sculpture, 109–11 Guitar Player, The (Man with a Guitar), 59–67, 60 Kitchen Table, The, 109 Lachaud, Mariette (studio assistant), 105, 106 and Miró, Joan, 100–1

237

on art and war and terror Braque, Georges (cont.) Nazi acquisition of work, 63–5, 112–13, 116 Rochelle, Drieu La, on, 114 Rosenberg, Paul (dealer), 104, 105–6, 112 Salon d’Automne and praise for work, 114–16 skulls, use of in his work, 104 still life, 109–12 stove portrait, 111–12 work, comments on his own, 111 Bratunac Stadium, Bosnia (Norfolk), 42 Bremer, Paul, 227–8 Britz (Kosminsky, dir), 200 Bryant, Sir Arthur, 156 Triumph in the West, 162 The Turn of the Tide, 161 Bush, George, W., 67, 68, 90, 219, 221 Camus, Albert, 188–9 CAT (Convention against Torture), 173 catchwords, 220 Celan, Paul, 102–3 ‘Todesfuge’, 139–40 Chagrin et le pitié, Le (Sorrow and the Pity, The) (Ophüls, dir), 198 Channon, ‘Chips’, 146 Charlie Wilson’s War (Nichols, dir), 200–1 Chekov, Anton, 49–50 Churchill, Winston, 132, 134, 221 in Alanbrooke diaries, 154–5, 156–8 Alanbrooke, relationship with, 158–62 on codewords, 218–19 in fiction, 133 Second World War, The 160, 162 CIA, 185–6, 208 Cimino (Michael, dir) Deerhunter, The, 203 civilisation, 223 barbarism, as opposed to, 224 in warfare, 230 Clinton, Bill, 68 Cocteau, Jean, 115–16 codewords, 218–20 Coetzee, J. M., 4, 224 Waiting for the Barbarians, 232 Comoedia, 113–14 Confrontation 1, 2 and 3 (Richter), 16, 17, 18 concentration camps, 42–7, 49 Conrad, Joseph, 76, 226–7 Heart of Darkness, 45–6 Cranach Portrait of a Girl, 64 Croix de Feu, 118–19 Cubism, 58, 61

Dead (Richter), 13, 20 Death’s Head (Braque), 104 December (Richter), 24 Deerhunter, The (Cimino) 203 Derain, André, 107–8, 113, 117 diarists, military, 147–66 Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, 147, 148–66 fictional, 148 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 149 Haig, Field Marshal Sir Douglas, 148 Hamilton, General Sir Ian, 148, 152 Harvey Oliver, 149 diary-keeping, 146–7, 148 dignity, 221 in names, 220 Disasters of War (Goya), 24–5, 37, 38 Drew, Elizabeth, 71–2 Dumas, Marlene Stern, 19 Duncan, David Douglas, 36 Edel, Udi Baader-Meinhof Komplex, Der 9 Beerdigung, 21–2 Confrontation 1, 2 and 3, 16, 17, 18 Dead, 13, 20 exhibitions, 25 Hanged, 24 Man Shot Down, 26 MoMA, acquisition by, 26 Youth Portrait (Jugendbildnis), 22 18 October 1977 (Richter), 8, 13, 15–27 Eisneman, Peter Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 22 Ensslin, Gudrun, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24 ERR, 63–4 face, the, 33–52 Thousand Yard Stare, 36–7, 48 in war photography, 34–42 Fay-Jones Report, 184–5, 213 Ferguson, Niall, 225 War of the World, The, 126–7 films, war, 197–214 Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo, dir), 198 Best Years of Our lives, The (Wyler, dir), 197 Britz (Kosminsky), 200 Chagrin et le pitié, Le (Sorrow and the Pity, The) (Ophüls, dir), 198 Charlie Wilson’s War (Nichols, dir), 200–1 Deerhunter, The (Cimino, dir), 203

238

index dilemma of what to depict, 198 In the Valley of Elah (Haggis), 201–3 L’Armée des ombres (Army of the Shadows, The) (Melville, dir), 198 Let There Be Light (Huston, dir), 197–8 Lions for Lambs (Redford, dir), 198–9 Rendition (Hood, dir), 199–200 Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, dir), 203–4, 207 Fleischmann, Marcel, 65 France, German occupation of, 105, 106–7 Braque’s experience of, 100–19 Furlew, Brigadier General John, 176 Fussell, Paul Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, 126 Galeano, Eduardo, 38 Gide, André, 101, 103 Global War on Terror (GWOT), 23, 172, 178–9, 187, 220, 228 governments, detrimental effect on, 207 rendition, 199 see also Abu Ghraib; films; Guantánamo Bay; interrogation; torture Goering, Hermann, 63–4 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 149 Gordimer, Nadine, 5 Gourevitch, Philip, 207 Goya, Francisco Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 37 Disasters of War, 24–5, 37, 38 Graves, Robert, 93 Grenier, Jean, 117 Grossman, Vasily, 44, 140–1 death of mother, 44 ‘Hell of Treblinka, The’, 49 ‘Killing of the Jews in Berdichev’, 49 Life and Fate, 40, 42–7, 49–50 ‘Ukraine without the Jews’, 49 Guantánamo Bay, 23 abuse, accountability for, 176–7 abuse, investigation into, 176 ‘bare life’, 177 rendition, 199–200 torture of Al-Qahtani, 174–5, 176, 178, 179 Guitar Player, The (Man with a Guitar) (Braque), 59–67, 60 provenance of, 61–5 restitution to the Kann family, complexities of 65–7 GWOT see Global War on Terror Haggis, Paul (dir) In the Valley of Elah, 201–3

Haig, Field Marshal Sir Douglas, 148 Hamilton, General Sir Ian, 148, 152 Hanged (Richter), 24 Harman, Sabrina, 205, 208, 210, 211–12 Harvey, Oliver, 149 Heaney, Seamus, 1, 4, 230 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 45–6 ‘Hell of Treblinka, The’ (Grossman), 49 Heller, Gerhard, 115, 116 Historikerstreit, 15 Hofer, Walter Andreas, 64 Hood, Gavin (dir) Rendition, 199–200 Human Rights Watch, 220 humiliation, 230 of detainees being tortured, 188–9 of viewers of torture, 189 see also interrogation; torture Huston, John (dir) Let There Be Light, 197–8 If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz) (Levi), 47–9 In the Valley of Elah (Haggis, dir), 201–3 interrogation, 182–3, 188 categories of, 181–2 ‘counter-resistance strategies’, 180 detainees, death of, 185–6, 188 detainees, punishment for death of, 188 dogs, use of, 178, 183–4 Fay-Jones Report, 184–5, 213 in film, 203–4, 207 and Global War on Terror, 186 improper, pressure to take part in, 186 intelligence gained, value of, 179–80 Intelligence Interrogation, 178 Jamadi, Manadel al-, death of, 185–6 Kimbro, William, J., refusal to participate in torture, 186, 212–13, 230 9/11, after, 180–1 priorities of different interrogation agencies, 187 PUC (Person Under Control), 220 Schmidt Report, 177, 187 Special Interrogation Plan, 178 techniques, 174–5, 179–80, 183–4, 185–6 Iraq war, 72, 221 culture, understanding the Arab mind, 228–30 War Cut (Richter), 14 Ironside, General Sir Edmund, 96 Jacob, Max, 116 Jamadi, Manadel al-, torture and death of, 185–6

239

on art and war and terror January (Richter), 24 Jews, 116 art, confiscation of Rosenberg’s collection, 112 Babi Yar, 44 concentration camps, 42–7 Grossman, Vasily, 44 ‘Hell of Treblinka, The’ (Grossman), 49 ‘Killing of the Jews in Berdichev’ (Grossman), 49 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Eisneman), 22 ‘Ukraine without the Jews’ (Grossman), 49 Jünger, Ernst, 115 Kafka, Franz, Trial, The, 172–4, 189–90 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 61–2 Kann, Alphonse, 62 Guitar Player, The, restitution of by heirs, 65–7 ‘Killing of Jews in Berdichev, The’ (Grossman), 49 Kerry, John, 67–8 Kimbro, William J., 186, 212–13, 230 kindness in King Lear, 52 senseless, 33–52, 46, 49–50 King Lear (Shakespeare), 50–2 Kitchen Table, The (Braque), 109 Kosminsky, Peter (dir) Britz, 200 ‘Kubism’, 61 L’Armée des ombres (Army of the Shadows, The) (Melville, dir), 198 Lachaud, Mariette, 105, 106 Laurens, Henri, 117 Lefèvre, André, 62, 63, 65, 66 Levi, Primo Drowned and the Saved, The, 47–8 If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz), 47–9 Levinas, Emmanuel, 39–40, 42, 47 Liddell Hart, Basil, 76–97, 78 on Churchill, 134 cigarette case, 96–7 courage, 95–6 ‘Credo’, 76–7 fear, 92, 94 on the front line, 80 funeral request to parents, 78–9 gas-poisoning, 90–1, 92 illness and hospitalisation, 81–2, 83–4 ‘Impressions of the Great British Offensive on the Somme’, 89

in Mametz Wood (Somme), 80, 88–91 on military service and war, 76–7, 94 on Monash, General Sir John, 95, 96 Paris, or the Future of War, 85 Revolution in Warfare, The, 230 ‘soldier’s heart’, suffering from, 93 at the Somme, 80, 81, 85–91 3rd KOYLI, posting to, 84 at Ypres Salient, 80, 82 Zeppelin raids at Hull, 85 Life and Fate (Grossman), 40, 42–7, 49–50 Lindh, John Walker, 179–80 Lions for Lambs (Redford, dir), 198–9 literature, wartime, 125–41 Liddell Hart, Basil, 78–97 Stalingrad (Beevor), 140 Sword of Honour (Waugh), 127–39 ‘Todesfuge’ (Celan), 139–40 War of the World, The (Ferguson), 126–7 Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War’ (Fussell), 126 Logue, Christopher, 2–3 War Music, 226 Malcolm, Janet, 36 Man With a Guitar (Guitar Player, The) (Braque), 60 Man Shot Down (Richter), 26 McCullin, Don, 33–4, 37–8 Shell-shocked US Marine, 35 US Marines Dragging a Wounded Comrade to Safety, 40, 41 Meinhof, Ulrike, 9, 13 Dumas’ painting of, 19 in Dead (Richter), 19, 20 in Youth Portrait (Jungenbildnis) (Richter), 22 Meins, Holger, 9, 13, 16 Melville, Jean-Pierre L’Armée des ombres (Army of the Shadows, The), 198 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Eisneman), 22 memory painting, 13, 15, 139 Men at Arms (Waugh), 130–1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 59 military working dogs (MWD), 178, 183–4 Miller, Geoffrey, 182–3 Miró, Joan, 100–1 Constellations, 101 Möller, Irmgard, 9 Monash, General Sir John, 95–6 Morris, Errol (dir) interviews with interrogators, 207–10

240

index Standard Operating Procedure, 203–4, 207 movies, see films Musée national d’art moderne, 111, 112 MWD (military working dogs), 178, 183–4 Nachtwey, James, 38 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 220–1 Nazis and art, acquisition of, 112–13 and artists, courting of, 116–17 Nichols, Mike (dir) Charlie Wilson’s War, 200–1 Nicolson, Harold, 146–7 9/11, 14, 219, 222, 223 Norfolk, Simon, 41 Bratunac Stadium, Bosnia, 42 Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), 108, 114 November (Richter), 24 Nussbaum, Martha, 139 October cycle see 18 October 1977 Officers and Gentlemen (Waugh), 136 OGA (Other Government Agency), 183, 208 Ophüls, Marcel Chagrin et le pitié, Le (Sorrow and the Pity, The) (Ophüls, dir), 198 Owen, Wilfred, 33, 34–5 Paris, or the Future of War (Liddell Hart), 85 Parti Social Français (PSF), 118–19 Paulhan, Jean, 108–9, 115 Peress, Gilles, 41 Pétridès, Paul, 65, 66 photographers, war Duncan, David Douglas, 36 McCullin, Don, 35, 37–8, 40, 41 Norfolk, Simon, 41, 42 Peress, Gilles, 41 Salgado, Sebastião, 38, 39 Winogrand, Gary, 36 photographs Richter’s use of in his work, 13–15, 16–25 torture, 205, 208, 210, 211–12 photography, war, 33–52 communication through, 38 the face as depicted in, 39–42 shell-shock, 34–8 Thousand Yard Stare, 36–7, 48, 202 Picasso, Pablo, 58 poet, interpretation of, 1, 2, 3–4 poetry Celan, Paul, 102–3

Owen, Wilfred, 33, 34–5 Ponge, Francis, 2, 109, 112 as redress, 1 versus history, 125–6, 139–41 Ponge, Francis, 2, 109, 112 Pontecorvo, Gillo (dir) Battle of Algiers, The, 198 Portrait of a Girl (Cranach), 64 Powell, Anthony, 132, 153–4 Proust, Marcel, 59 provenance, 58–73 and The Guitar Player (Braque), 61–5 as proof of authenticity, 71–3 Qahtani, Mohammed al-, torture of, 174– 5, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183 charges dismissed, 187 RAF (Red Army Faction) see BaaderMeinhof Group Raspe, Jan-Carl, 9, 16 Rebatat, Lucien, 116 Redford, Robert (dir) Lions for Lambs, 198–9 Rendition (Hood, dir), 199–200 Reverdy, Pierre, 110–11 Revolution in Warfare, The (Liddell Hart), 230 Richter, Gerhard, 3, 8–27 Atlas, 13, 14 Beerdigung (October cycle), 21–2 Blanket, 24 catalogue raisonné, 14, 21–2 Confrontation 1, 2 and 3 (October cycle), 16, 17, 18 Dead (October cycle), 13, 20 December, 24 diptychs, 24 early life and family, 7, 10–12 18 October 1977 (also known as the October cycle), 8, 13, 15–27 Hanged (October cycle), 24 January, 24 Man Shot Down (October cycle), 26 November, 24 photographic collections, 13, 16 politics, 13–14 Richter, Horst (father), 10, 11 Rudi (uncle), 11, 12 self-portraits (photos), 24 Stammheim, 24 Uncle Rudi, 12 War Cut, 14 Youth Portrait (Jugenbildnis) (October cycle), 22 Rochelle, Drieu La, 114 Rochlitz, Gustav, 64–5

241

on art and war and terror at Bagram Air Force base, 206 ‘bare life’, 177 Convention against Torture, 173, 176 deaths by, 185–6, 188 dogs, treating prisoners like, 174, 175, 183 dogs, use of, 178, 183–4, 184, 185–6 in Guantánamo Bay, 174–5, 176, 179, 180, 183 in films, 198, 200 investigations of, 176-7 Jamadi, Manadel al-, death of, 185–6 in King Lear, 51 of Lindh, John Walker, 179–80 photographs of, 204 PUC (Person Under Control), 220 rendition, 199 ‘smoking’, 220 techniques, development of, 224 United Kingdom and, 207 waterboarding, 185 Truman, Harry, 71 2 Twin Towers, 14

Rogerson, Sidney, 84 Röhl, Bettina, 9 Rorty, Richard, 3, 139 Rosenberg, Paul, 104, 105–6, 112 Roy, Claude, 108–9 Rumsfeld, Donald, 178, 182, 186, 210–11 Salgado, Sebastião, 38 concept of the face in his work, 39 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin, 15 Schmidt, Lieutenant General Randall, 176 Schmidt Report, 177, 187 Second World War, The (Churchill), 160, 162 seeming, 70–1 Shakespeare, William King Lear, 50–2 Shell-shocked US Marine (McCullin), 35 Somme, the, 81, 85–8, 152 3 Sontag, Susan, 4, 210–11 Special Interrogation Plan, 178 Stalingrad (Beevor), 140 Stammheim (Richter), 24 Stammheim prison, 23–4 Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, dir), 203–4, 207 Steichen, Edward, 36 Stern (Dumas), 19 Stevens, Wallace, 2 Survival in Auschwitz (If This is a Man) (Levi) Sword of Honour trilogy (Waugh), 127–39 Szarkowski, John, 36

Unconditional Surrender (Waugh), 138 unpaintable, the, 13, 14, 18–19 Updike, John, 38 US Marines dragging a wounded soldier to safety (McCullin), 40, 42

Taguba, Major General Antonio, 176, 186, 189, 204, 214 terrorists 23, 25 Baader-Meinhof Group, 8–27 barbarism of, 223 ‘bare life’, 177 dignifying, 229 in film, 200 photographs of, 16–18, 204–6 torture of, 174–5, 176 see also Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay; interrogation Thompson, Hunter, 69–70 Thousand Yard Stare, 26–7, 48, 202 ‘Todesfuge’ (Celan), 139–40 Todorov, Tzvetan, 47 torture at Abu Ghraib, 175, 176, 185–6, 184, 204

values in art, 3–4 Kimbro, William J., 186 and moral ruination, 188 in National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 220–1 Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), 232 War Cut (Richter), 14 War Music (Logue), 226 Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Fussell), 126 War of the World, The (Ferguson), 126–7 Waugh, Evelyn Churchill, views on, 132, 134 military participation, 127, 135–6 Sword of Honour trilogy, 127–39 Whitman, Walt, 1–2, 223 Winogrand, Gary, 36, 52 Wollheim, Richard, 35 Wyler, William (dir) Best Years of Our Lives, The, 197 Youth Portrait (Jugenbildnis) (Richter), 22

242