Читать книгу War Primer - Bertolt Brecht - Страница 6

Like one who dreams the road ahead is steep

I know the way Fate has prescribed for us

That narrow way towards a precipice.

Just follow. I can find it in my sleep.

‘What’s that you’re making, brothers?’ ‘Iron waggons.’

‘And what about those great steel plates you’re lifting?’

‘They’re for the guns that blast the iron to pieces.’

‘And what’s it all for, brothers?’ ‘It’s our living.’

Women are bathing on the Spanish coast.

They climb up from the seashore to the cliffs

And often find black oil on arm and breast:

The only traces left of sunken ships.

The conqueror, General Juan Yagüe, kneels before his throne-chair at an open-air mass in Barcelona’s Plaza de Catalunya. In background is the Hotel Colon, whose tower is seen again in the picture below, at lower right. Behind Yagüe are Generals Martín Alonso, Barrón, Vega. Yagüe and Solchaga moved off to chase Loyalists to the border.

The bells are pealing and the guns saluting.

Now thank we God who told us to enlist

And gave us rifles to be used for shooting.

The mob is vulgar. God is a Fascist.

Suppose you hear someone proclaim that he

Invaded and destroyed a mighty state

In eighteen days, ask what became of me:

For I was there, and lasted only eight.

Great fires are blazing in the Arctic regions

In lonely fjords the clamour’s at its height.

‘Say, fishermen: who launched those deadly legions?’

‘Our great Protector, protected by the night.’

Eight thousand strong we lie in the Skagerrak.

Packed into cattleboats we crossed the sea.

Fisherman, when fish have filled your net

Remember us, and let just one swim free.

German assault troops, here emerging from beneath railroad cars to attack the Albert Canal line, were young, tough and disciplined. In all, there were 240 divisions of them. But despite the world’s idea that the conquest was merely by planes and tanks, it actually depended on the old-fashioned tactic of a superior mass of firepower at the decisive point.

Before you join the great assault I see

You peer around to spot the enemy.

Was that the French? Or your own sergeant who

Was lurking there to keep his eye on you?

Unblock the streets to clear the invader’s way!

This city’s dead, there’s nothing left to loot.

There’s never been such order in Roubaix.

Now order reigns. Its reign is absolute.

May he die like a dog. That’s my last wish.

He was the archenemy. Believe me, I speak true.

And I am free to speak: where I am now

Only the Loire and one lone cricket know.

Spring has come to Paris. Here we see one of its most typical signs – fishing along the quays of the Seine has begun in earnest. This year there are more fishermen than ever – a direct sign of the food shortage.

Here in the heart of Paris you can see us

Trying to outwit a sneaky little fish

From which we hope to make a meagre dish –

Victims of Hitler and of our own leaders.

The Germans were ‘kind’ to this Frenchman. They blindfolded him before he was shot.

And so we put him up against a wall:

A mother’s son, a man like we had been

And shot him dead. And then to show you all

What came of him, we photographed the scene.

Lion Feuchtwanger (facing camera) behind the barbed wire in the brickyard concentration camp. This hitherto unpublished picture was smuggled out of France by Mr. Feuchtwanger.

It’s true he was their enemy’s enemy

Yet one thing they could not forgive: that he

Was enemy to his own government.

Lock up the rebel. Throw away the key.

The people hate them more than a foreign foe.

Shitting themselves, they balance on the fence

And fear Germany less than they fear the French.

Be ruled by Germans? Yes. Ruled by the people? No.

Gang law is something I can understand.

With man-eaters I’ve excellent relations.

I’ve had the killers feeding from my hand.

I am the man to save civilization.

It’s we who fly above your city, woman

Now trembling for your children. From up here

We’ve fixed our sights on you and them as targets.

If you ask why, the answer is: from fear.

The City TodayDuring the blitz the City of London was reduced to a ruin. This view was taken from St Paul’s.

Here’s how I look. Some men betrayed their duty

And flew a course that differed from the map.

Hoping to act as fence, I was the booty.

Let’s call my fate a technical mishap.

Liverpool harbour, England’s second biggest, is well known to be the target of many German aerial bombardments and took many direct hits. This photograph gives a clear picture of the harbour – the smoke at the top shows that it has just been visited by German bombers.

I am a city still, but soon I shan’t be –

Where generations used to live and die

Before those deadly birds flew in to haunt me:

One thousand years to build. A fortnight to destroy.

The ‘flying sharks’: that was the name we boasted.

Along the crowded coastlines we went flying

With sharks’ teeth painted on our fighter-bombers

All of us sure for once that we weren’t lying.

‘Bombs Away!’ shouts the observer as he celebrates a successful drop.

You’re looking at a bastard, and a poor one!

‘I laugh at news of other men’s distress.

A corset salesman formerly, from Nürnberg

A dealer now in death and wretchedness.’

There was a time of underneath and over

When mankind was master of the air. And so

While some were flying high, the rest took cover

Which didn’t stop them dying down below.

New Source of Income

Thanks to the bombing, London’s poor have found a new source of income. Children gather round the exits of underground stations which serve as air-raid shelters. They have reserved places in the shelters and hire them out, with bedding, when there is an alert. Our picture shows a group of youngsters with mattresses and blankets carried in prams.

Far older than their bombers is the hunger

That they’ve unleashed on us. And to survive

We have to earn the cash to buy provisions

So, for survival, gamble with our lives.

A cloud of smoke told us that they were here.

They were the sons of fire, not of the light.

They came from where? They came out of the darkness.

Where did they go? Into eternal night.

Searchlight display

We reproduce a picture from Associated Press, Berlin, showing a German fighter plane caught in English searchlights.

What you see here, caught in your night defences

These steel and glass cocoons for killing people

With tons of bombs, are just the consequences

For all, and not the causes of the evil.

British Bombers over Berlin

In late summer 1940 the RAF mounted several raids on Hamburg, Bremen and other major German towns of industrial and military importance. The British bombed Berlin for the first time on 10/11 September. The picture shows a house in Berlin after a British raid.

Stop searching, woman: you will never find them

But, woman, don’t accept that Fate is to blame.

Those murky forces, woman, that torment you

Have each of them a face, address and name.

You see me here, eating a simple stew

Me, slave to no desire, except for one:

World conquest. That is all I want. From you

I have but one request: give me your sons.

Suffer the old women to come unto me

That they may glimpse, before their graves close o’er them

The man their sons obeyed so faithfully

As long as he had graves left open for them.

On 10 December Hitler gave one of his big speeches in an arms factory near Berlin. Our picture shows the chancellor and supreme commander of the armed forces on the podium, to his left the leader of the Labour Front, Dr Robert Ley, and Propaganda Minister Dr Goebbels.

Promising Socialism, there he stands.

Listen: a New Age will be proclaimed.

Behind him, see the work of your own hands:

Great cannon, silent. And at you they’re aimed.

The saddler I, who helped the Junker scum

To get back in their seat. I’d no excuse

But let them buy me for a princely sum

From paupers’ savings. And escaped the noose.

I am the butcher-clown in this concern.

The Iron Hermann, every time a winner

A Reich Marshal, policeman and thief in turn:

Give me your hand. But, first, best count your fingers.

I am ‘the doctor’, I doctor what gets printed.

It may be your world, but I have my say.

So what? Its history gets reinvented.

Even my club foot seems a fake today.

‘Joseph, I’m told you’re saying it’s a fact

I loot things.’ – ‘Hermann, looting’s not for you.

Who’d grudge you what you want? They’d have more tact.

And if I said it, who’d believe it’s true?’

O swan song! ‘Never seek to question me!’

O pilgrims’ choir! O fiery magic trick!

Song of the Rhine gold on an empty belly!

That’s what I’d call the Bayreuth Republic.

Here’s this stone horse outside the Chancellery

Who gazes glumly at the gloomy future.

‘What’s wrong then, horse?’ ‘My Leader had me try

His eight-year treatment, and I feel no better.’

German Churches on Wheels.The Catholic Church has 38.

Berlin, Wednesday.

According to reports from Catholic circles, the Catholic Church now has 38 churches on wheels. These consist of little altars mounted on motor vehicles so that mass can be offered to isolated and inaccessible villages. A further dozen of these mobile churches are on order, to reach – among others – remote army barracks. In general, the padre himself drives his own mobile church.

A happy headline: God is on the move!

Hitler pushed on, and God could not keep up.

Well, such is war, let’s hope God doesn’t lose

Should he too find his oil’s about to stop.

Ten countries lie prostrate beneath my tread

My own among them. And the bloody trace

Left by my boot has turned the country red

From Mülheim an der Ruhr to Kirkenaes.

O brothers, see the distant Caucasus.

A Swabian peasant’s son, I lie below

Killed when a Russian peasant fired on us.

I met defeat in Swabia years ago.

‘What brought you two to North Cape?’ – ‘A command.’

‘Don’t you feel cold?’ ‘Chilled to the bone are we.’

‘When will you two go home?’ ‘When this snow ends.’

‘And how long will it snow?’ ‘Eternally’.

But when we sighted the red walls of Moscow

People appeared from farm and factory

And they repelled us in the name of every people

Even the people back in Germany.

Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, 61 and a Prussian, helped conquer Poland, Paris and the North Caucasus.

Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, 57, Bavarian brewer’s son, commanded air corps in Spain, Poland, Lowlands, France, Battle of Britain.

Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, 66, planned and carried through famous break at Sedan, now has headquarters there.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 50, is slashing, hard-hitting commander of the German Afrika Corps in Battle of Egypt.

General Heinz Guderian, 56, a Prussian, had brilliant tank successes in Poland and France, commanded Panzer division from a plane.

Field Marshal Siegmund List, 62, steely Bavarian master of mobility, knifed through Poland and France.

Here are six murderers. Now don’t turn away

And don’t just nod and murmur ‘That’s the truth.’

Showing them up has cost us to this day

Fifty great cities and most of our youth.

Look at the helmets of the vanquished! Yet

Surely the moment when we came undone

Was not when they were smitten from our heads

But when we first agreed to put them on.

When the “Fox of the Desert,” German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (left) drank this premature toast, his Afrika Korps was still “unbeatable.”

Here’s to the Fatherland with all its Junkers!

The German sabre, plus its dividends!

The German People, armed and in its bunkers!

The great Misleader – Cheers! – of foes and friends!

But in his recent flight across Libya, Rommel left behind many of his battered forces. From Allied attack this German vainly dived for cover.

O thrill of marching bands and banners flying!

Teutonic myth of swastika-crusaders dying!

Till all objectives were reduced to one:

To find yourself some cover. There was none.

Our masters fight to have you, lovely creature

They race to seize you in their headlong course.

Each feels most fit to bleed you white in future –

Most justified in taking you by force.

Statesmen at work: Chairman Sol Bloom of the House Foreign Affairs Committee debates with isolationist Holden Tinkham. Behind them: Hamilton Fish.

Behold us here, antagonists. See how

Each angry look is like a poisoned dagger.

A world of difference lies between us now.

The quarrel is: whose share’s to be the bigger.

Here’s what we sent, we people of Spokane

With a brassière to help support our Congress

In gratitude for their devoted service.

They asked for it. They’ll know just what we mean.

Jane Wyman shows her medals, adorning an ‘R A F. blue’ dress designed by a Hollywood patriot who says girls ‘should go military in a feminine way.’ These are reproductions of old war medals and were not pinned on Jane for anything she did.

A breast curves through her military cut

Her parts are hung with old war decorations:

It’s Hollywood v. Hitler. Here we’ve got

Semen for blood, and pus for perspiration.

O voice of sorrow from the double choir

Of gunmen and the victims of the gun!

The Son of Heaven needed Singapore

And no one but yourself needed your son.

An American and the Jap he killed. Pfc Wally Wakeman says: “I was walking down the trail when I saw two fellow talking. They grinned and I grinned. One pulled a gun. I pulled mine. I killed him. It was just like in the movies.”

We saw each other – it happened very fast –

I smiled, and both of them smiled back at me.

And so at first we stood and smiled, all three.

One pulled his gun. And then I shot him dead.

So you may have what you’ve been pining for

This sexy carrot might bring satisfaction.

A pinup for your tent on distant shores!

They say such pictures rouse the dead to action!

Woman of Thailand (Siam) peers out of a crude bomb shelter in Sichiengmai at American bomber from French Indo-China come to bomb border hovels.

Hoping to keep concealed throughout the fighting

While would-be rulers wrestled in the air

The frightened people looked for holes to hide in

And watched their masters battling from down there.

Back from the battlefront near Buna in New Guinea comes a blinded Australian infantryman helped by a kindly Papuan native. Both men are barefoot.

And when the bitter fight grew less intense

The man who helped me back was kind to me

And in his silence I began to sense

No understanding, but some sympathy.

Alas, poor Yorick of the burnt-out tank!

Upon an axle-shaft your head is set.

Your death by fire was for the Domei Bank

To whom your parents still remain in debt.

In school we learned of an Avenger who

Would punish all injustice here on earth.

We went to kill, and met with Death. Now you

Must punish those whose orders sent us forth.

Best take your enemy’s little lost brother

Out of the battle line that you’ve defended.

That he and your son live to tell each other

Just how it was that wars like this were ended.

German bombs await use under olive trees.

Workers polishing torpedo cylinders.

O olive tree, spreading your kindly leaves

To screen my brother’s killers from the sun

You’re like those women stooping, heads in scarves

To shape torpedoes for the common man.

An American soldier stands over a dying Jap who he has just been forced to shoot. The Jap had been hiding in the landing barge, shooting at US troops.

And with their blood they were to colour red

A shore that neither owned. I hear it said

That they were forced to kill each other. True.

My only question is: who forced them to?

REFUGEES WITHOUT REFUGE: This Jewish mother and child were picked out of the sea, along with 180 others who sought refuge in Palestine. But 200 were drowned when the Salvator smashed on the rocky coast of Turkey. And the Salvator wasn’t the first. The Patria exploded with 1771 aboard. The Penttcho foundered on an isle off Italy with 500. The Pacific was forced to sail from Palestine with 1062 and the Milos with 710. Then there is the Odyssey of the 500 Jews on a ship for four months, shunted from port to port. They come from all over Europe, packed like cattle in unseaworthy vessels. Where can they go, these 7,000,000 European Jews? Palestine’s quota is 12,000 a year. The freighters and cattleboats carry a new kind of cargo—a new kind of human bootleg. Last year 26,000 were smuggled into Palestine. But what of the 7,000,000? The baby can play with his foot—for he’s home in his mother’s arms. He doesn’t know his father was drowned in the Sea of Marmora. Only his mother knows the double-death of drowning in sight of shore.

And many of us drowned just off the beaches.

The long night passed, the sky began to clear.

If they but knew, we said, they’d come and seek us.

That they did know, we still were unaware.

Alas, our overlords have fallen out.

Over our country, waterless and blighted

Three foreign armies now are in dispute.

Only against us are all three united.

“Restoring the normal flow of life”—AMG officers sell American flour to Italian civilians.

We bring you flour, and a refurbished king!