The second paragraph of Er nestHemingway’s short story, “A Way You’llNever Be,” describes a cluster of deadAustrian soldiers encountered duringWorld War I: “They lay alone or in clumpsin the high grass of the field and along theroad, their pockets out, and over them wereflies and around each body or group ofbodies were the scattered papers.”That’s the whole paragraph, 37 wordsof telegraphic description. Yet the detail— the f lies, the papers and especially“their pockets out” — captures the scene.
Somebody has already looted thosepockets. Hemingway was also a warreporter with an unerring eye.
Later in the story Hemingway writes ofthe “guns hidden under screens of mulberryleaves to the left of the road,” visible “bythe heat-waves in the air above the leaveswhere the sun hit the metal.” With almostadjective-free economy, he has placed youthere, in the carnage of a century ago, wherethe hot weather, indifferent to corpse offriend or foe, has “swollen them all alikeregardless of nationality.”Around the dead are “stick bombs,helmet s, r if les, int renching tools,ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, theirshells scattered about, medical kits, gasmasks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat,tripodded machine gun in a nest of emptyshells, full belts protruding from the boxes,the water-cooling can empty and on itsside, the breech block gone, the crew in oddpositions, and around them, in the grass,more of the typical papers.”Show, don’t tell, goes the old writer’smaxim.
The papers — in this case prayer books,smutty postcards, and “letters, letters,letters” — stopped me. “There was alwaysmuch paper about the dead,” Hemingwaywrites, “and the debris of this attack wasno exception.” My late uncle, Capt. BertCohen of the Dental Unit of the Sixth SouthAfrican Armored Division, 19th FieldAmbulance, had said the same of the deadhe encountered as he fought his way up theItalian peninsula in World War II.
I guess there won’t be any letters in thenext war, just cell phones in the dust, thesand or the mud, their batteries dying.
Bert told me more than once of a columnof Nazi dead he found on a bend in thePenaro River, north of Modena, on April24, 1945. From his words and war diary, Iwrote this description:“Intestines of gutted animals balloonedfrom their carcasses. A squad of SouthAfrican infantry marched through theruins, bringing a bullet of mercy to animalsthat still agonized. One dead Germanin particular caught Bert’s eye: a blond,square-jawed young man with a longstraight nose, hair flecked with blood andsmoke, legs twisted grotesquely, abdomenripped open, coils of gut spilling througha ragged gash into the dust, sightless blueeyes gazing at infinity. Beside the corpselay scattered letters from the soldier’smother in Hamburg. She wrote about DerAngriff, the Allied bombardment of thecity that killed more than 42,000 people.
Uncertain what to do, Bert returned theletters to the dead man’s pocket.”Until his death last year at the age of95, my uncle remained haunted by thatsingle dead German and his letters. Hedwelt on them as if he, a Jew from SouthAfrica, might somehow have brought thishandsome young man, Hitler’s modelAryan, back to life; and he wondered if heshould have kept the letters to return themto a bereaved mother in Hamburg. He was alink in a circle that never closed.
I’ve been thinking of young livesinterrupted, of the papers fluttering fromthe Twin Towers toward my BrooklynHeights apartment 14 years ago, of theyoung Parisian who did not go to theBataclan on Nov. 13 because his wifewas pregnant and a dead friend who did,of the ways luck can run out. As a warcorrespondent I always thought you did notneed good luck. You needed the absence ofbad luck.
Perhaps if Bert had returned the lettershe would have made a friend in Hamburgand seen something of the rebirth of thathandsome city.
It seems, as we grow older, that we arehaunted less by what we have done than bywhat we failed to do, whether through lackof courage, or inattention, or insufficientreadiness to cast caution to the winds. Theimpossible love abandoned, the gestureunmade, the heedless voyage untaken, theparting that should not have been — thesechimera always beckon.
What’s done is done but the undone isanother matter.
David Bromwich, in The New YorkReview of Books, drew my attention tothe Hemingway short story and wrote ofthe author’s “method of description thatbecomes a record of repressed emotion.”There are too many words today, toomuch emotion, and too few letters. Truthis more often the fruit of diligence thanrevelation, of discipline than inebriation, ofdiscarding than accumulation.
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ROGER COHEN>
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