Daria could not know that Colonel Fontov had already been through those stages; that he kept his crises in check by smoking, that he no longer expected anything either for or from himself, and that he adored a callous man-made deity which may be no realer than other gods but which you have to believe in to impose perfect discipline on soldiers, whether on the production line or the line of fire: the god Labor, brother of Death since its ultimate effect is to destroy the laborer. The machine invisibly devours the mechanic’s very substance, which is time. Production, you say? Production feeds and prepares war, which is a destruction of production and of man. Expanded production of the means of production is expanded destruction of human substance; the production of consumer goods has as its object maintaining the workforce in a fit state for labor, that is for wearing itself out, and this is the ring that closes the chain of pan-destruction… Idle for a few minutes (it was never more than four), he had spoken again to Daria. “I’m more of an economist myself. Political economy is worse than war…”
If he had begun to speechify — but before whom? — he would have said: “Our beautiful language, forged by serfs and by sages, employs the same word to denote two concepts: will and freedom… One word for an absolute antinomy, of a nature to delight the philosophers, who are for the most part mystifiers. What we mean by the will only acts to suppress freedom; what we mean by freedom is nothing but an illusory flight from the will… The living writhe between these two poles of incomprehensibility. I admire the determinists who think they’ve understood. I’d like to show them a bit of introspection five minutes before the signal to attack! The soldier obeys: neither will nor freedom, is that clear? The leader needs no more, and the leader himself obeys. It’s all anybody needs! The soldier is trapped between several formidable fears: fear of being killed while obeying orders, fear of being executed for disobeying them, fear of being a coward or appearing to be one, fear of despising himself, and many other fears all churning in his belly, causing him to piss and shit abundantly. What we mean by courage is decanted through this physio-psychological process which answers to profound natural causes: wounds to an emptied bowel are much less dangerous than wounds to a full one… Savages have magic formulas. In war, we are savages furnished with technical know-how. My magic formula comes down to this: work! Labor operates a practical synthesis of obscure imperatives, more potential than actual, more imaginary than reaclass="underline" will, liberty, necessity, finality. Labor destroys men, objects, and time, but it is a destruction which provides itself with aspects of creation. That may be the last myth. In war it’s clear and even yields an instant gain in accord with brute instinct. I work to destroy the enemy, a breed of men which must be destroyed so that our own breed may be able work in peace… I work to defend four kilometers of threatened road, whose loss would translate into twenty thousand deaths inside the city within a week… So, to work! Since the work consists of killing, it is only natural that we shall eventually be killed ourselves… To work!” Earlier, Fontov had exchanged only a few elliptical remarks with Daria while he was soaking his feet in a bucket of warm water; but Daria reconstituted what he would have said if he had expressed himself at leisure; which he never did, lacking leisure but also disdaining words, and out of prudence. The worker must be prudent and fear nothing so much as expressing truth or sincerity.
This night’s mission was to obtain information by capturing enemy troops — but not men out on patrol, who don’t carry anything on them. Battalion commanders would send raiding parties out into the enemy lines or against advanced outposts. Vosskov designated six men and a lieutenant. He seemed to know them personally, to be assessing the fortitude and destiny of each man as he considered him. Daria wished she could see into their souls. They were an ordinary bunch, with ordinary names. The inevitable Ivanov plus a Sidorov, to refine the banality, both unremarkable, stumpy, and gray-skinned; a Tziulik from the Ukraine whose name made the others laugh and who indeed had a tiny head on the body of an extremely wiry Punchinello; a moon-faced Tartar oozing deceptive sweetness named Maymedov-Oglu; Dzilichvili, a wiry Caucasian highlander; and Leifert, who was of German ancestry. Finally there was Lieutenant Patkin, who sported black tufts of eyebrows over a snub nose, and resembled the kind of small-time hood that prowls around marketplaces — clever brutes with a knack for counterfeiting and bootlegging, slipping home a blade under cover of a brawl, hopping over fences and bamboozling the girls with fine-sounding words (not one of which they mean). “Quite the charming rogue,” whispered Daria into Major Vosskov’s ear. “You’ve got it. He started off as a child of the road and the wastelands, spent two years in a penal colony, recently graduated as a cadre, with several commendations… He’s both astute and extremely brave. After the war, I can see him making a first-rate gangster…” Patkin was memorizing the map of the operation. Here the ice is cracked; but over here, right in the middle of the impassable section — as they believe it to be — the ice has resealed itself, the planks are laid, you can wriggle across one behind the other. There are forty yards between the two machine-gun nests on the opposite bank. Their trenches are damaged, and badly guarded ever since they pulverized ours; we’ve ostensibly moved our earthworks a little farther back… This is where their shelters begin… “Only shoot as a last resort, bring two or three prisoners back, whatever the cost. Whatever the cost,” repeated Patkin, frowning as he measured this authorization to sacrifice his companions if need be. “It’ll be done, Comrade Commander.” He spoke the words unemphatically, in an unwilling, almost bitter voice.
The six men waiting in the shelter formed an obscure mass, huddled within its silence. How many would return? They were a broad sample of the people of the Union. Each had turned over his documents — penciled letters and few personal belongings; the commander was now arranging these in little piles on the table, like the possessions of the dead. What a gap is left inside a man, when he has to part with his letter from home! They were trying on the white shrouds, lowering hoods over eyes, experimentally… Anonymous, faceless; dim white phantoms equipped with light weapons and a square of chocolate (chocolate is a treat even for those who court death, but it must not be eaten straightaway, however annoying it can be to die before eating it…). A tram driver from Rostov-on-Don — Rostov, that had been burned to the ground; a tractor mechanic from the country outside Voronezh — the bombed, the ransacked Voronezh; a schoolteacher from Chernikov — occupied, ransomed Chernikov, inhabited by the hanged; a cattle farmer from the steppes of the lower Volga — a Muslim or perhaps a Buddhist, and the war was almost there; a young wine grower from the green and russet hills of Kakhetia — its hamlets emptied of young men; a printer from Moscow — wounded, famished, blacked-out Moscow… What will they achieve tonight, what will become of them, these peaceful men who believe in the future? Six, seven men counting the lieutenant, twenty-five bereavements suspended in their wake, en route to the torture of cold, darkness, fire, murder, and unknowable death…
They know it all, Daria thought, they are plunging tranquilly into an abyss, they are monstrously aware. If their souls could explode, broadcasting their lamentation to the world, all wars would end, how simple it would be! Simply impossible. The Ukrainian, Tziulik, asked the commissar for a glass of vodka. “Wiseass! You know how to exploit the situation,” said the commissar. “Pass the bottle around to the others, schoolteacher.” “If I don’t come back, you’ll be sure to write to my wife?” “I promise, but you’ll be writing to her yourself, lucky bastard.” The voices of these men were fraternal. The commissar put on a satisfied expression. “As for me, if one of these days I don’t make it back from the middle of nowhere, there won’t be anyone writing to anybody… I don’t have anyone left. A bird in the air with no nest!” Tziulik clapped him heartily on the back. “You’re a lucky bastard too.” Move! Daria was seeing men moving out for the first time in her life. She realized that such sorties had been taking place for years now, a hundred, a thousand times a day or night, along thousands of miles of battlefronts, on both sides of the lines, for the others are like us — the same dread, the same obedience. A hundred thousand times already these men had moved out never to return, but always they were replaced by fresh men sprung from the depths of the earth and the wombs of women, from the depths of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, from the depths of rotting cadavers and of love. Pure madness.