All Night Long

How did I get to a somewhat hackneyed Erskine Caldwell novel about Russian partisans in World War Two?  Via H-War, of course!  The H-lists started in the dawn of the Internet age, listservs on various topics where academics (mostly historians) might ask questions of one another, get teaching and research ideas, advertise conferences and journal articles, and so on.  I signed up for H-War a billion years ago, and then it seemed to vanish, only to start populating my inbox again a couple of years ago.

Anyway, a couple of months ago someone had a thread on novels about unconventional warfare, and the works cited sounded interesting so I sought some of them out.  (Side benefit of doing a deep-ish literary dive:  you don't have to buy it if you have access to Widener Library, and you might end up with a first edition that was last checked out in 1973 or something like that, which is pretty cool.)

Caldwell is best known as a chronicler of the down-and-out Depression-era South, but he spent time as a correspondent in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and wrote several books about and inspired by the experience.  All Night Long:  A Novel of Guerilla Warfare in Russia (1942:  Duell, Sloan and Pearce) is exactly what it says:  a fictionalized account of partisan efforts in Russia, against the invading German army during the Second World War.  Set against the story of husband and wife Sergei and Natasha, All Night Long is essentially a litany of death and destruction, both sides determined to subdue or repel the other by any means necessary.  Over the course of the book, Sergei makes his way to the partisans, with whom he fights fearlessly, causing great destruction to the local German forces.  Natasha was to meet him at the partisan camp, but gets delayed, and Sergei must make hard choices when the time comes to rescue her.

It is hard to imagine a world like this one, where one act by a villager could lead to the devastation of an entire town, but Caldwell does his best to make you understand.  In one scene, Sergei and his comrade Fyodor come upon a village that was destroyed, along with its entire population, in retaliation for an act of sabotage.  Pages 159-166 are an extended description of the burned village, complete with the expected charred remains and "blackened chimneys jutting like weather-stained tombstones from the scarred earth" but somehow made more horrifically human with the "stiff and swollen carcasses of horses and cows," the charred remains of beds, tables, and chairs, the wrecked and burned tanks and trucks, and a large tank simply standing on end down one street.  The scene reads almost like a movie script, so vivid are details like "the sign, which once proclaimed the existence of a headquarters unit, lay beside a staff car which still contained the black fire-shrunken bodies of four Germans who had not been able to escape a final assault by the guerillas."  The citizens who lived here were all executed and the trench holding their bodies is filled with snowmelt, blood, and the "floating swollen grey bodies of field mice."  Just out of town, Sergei and Fyodor come upon the nude body of a young girl, terribly abused, lying in a wheat field.  (159-66)  I don't think Caldwell was really piling on here.  Could Sherman have imagined this hell?

Written in 1942, All Night Long unabashedly takes the side of our then-friends the Russians.  Every Russian character is noble and sacrificing, lean and windburned, strong and dedicated, the very embodiment of the propaganda posters as a friend suggested recently.  The Germans are either ignorant youth or raping, pillaging, murdering Nazis.  I don't necessarily disagree with this characterization.  The Nazis considered Russians sub-humans, barely a step above Jews and other degenerates, and Nazi depredations over the course of their ultimately disastrous campaign in the East are well-documented.

But, but.  Also well-documented is the fury unleashed on German citizens as Soviet soldiers made their way into that country in 1945.  You can say the Germans deserved it, and you can say that the Russians were not innocent of their own crimes committed in the name of war.  You'd both be right.  Neither side would win any humanitarian awards.

Still, in his zeal to make his point, or perhaps to prove authenticity, Caldwell lays it on a bit thick.  There is the incredibly awkward use of transliterated Russian words like Nemetski (German) or Tovarish (comrade).  Everyone sits around saying  things like "There's nobody more cruel than a Nemetski."  (I don't have the page reference for this one, but you could find a similar reference on just about every other page.)  And the characters are straight out of Central Casting:  Sergei Mikhailovich Korokov is "a tractor driver from the Lenin Collective Farm" (57) and Natasha his young and spirited wife, with golden blond hair cascading like a waterfall.  Sergei's comrade Fyodor lost his wife and daughter in a ghastly attack by the Germans so is hell-bent on revenge, and of course there is young Vladimir, who wants nothing more than to fight with the partisans.  (You know that ends up.)  A lot of potatoes and cabbage soup are cooked.

"I don't understand why the Nemetskies are like this," Fyodor insisted.  "Why must they always be killing our women?  Do they do this to their own women?"  He paused and looked off across the field.  "Only degenerates would come to our country and do such things.  You would expect it of savages, or of wild animals, but human beings don't rape and murder unless they're insane or -"
 "Or Nemetskies," Sergei broke in.
 "Or Nemetskies," Fyodor nodded.  (165)

Or Russians in Berlin.

The Rest is Silence

James R. Benn's The Rest is Silence (A Billy Boyle World War II Mystery) (2014, Soho Crime) had several major strikes against it.

First, it came as an offering from the Soho Crime Club.  While I love the idea of the Crime Club, I don't like reading series out of order, and since what they send you are their latest publications, you get a lot of that.  Also, several of the Club's books haven't been great, so I have a growing pile of ones I haven't even started or got a few pages into and put down.  More on that next time.

I also generally dislike the appearance of Famous Real People in the story.  That's not to say that a realistic or even non-fiction backdrop to a story isn't a good thing.  You can learn something anywhere, right?  And if your learning comes from the background or setting to a novel, well, that is better than nothing.  But the lapsed historian in me balks at the putting-of-words-into-mouths that is necessary when FRP are introduced into the plot.

And the whole British country house setting for one plot thread in Benn's story felt a little too Downton Abbey, right down to loyal retainers with complicated pasts and an acerbically entertaining matriarch.

Finally, Yanks in WW2, how cliched can you get?  Our Hero Capt. Billy Boyle, a peacetime cop straight outta Southie, is no exception.

So why did this particular story, out of all the barely-started books piled next to the tub and my bed, stick, to the point where I found myself toting it along to the gym and ballet class, just to keep up with the story?

I am a bit of an Anglophile, so there's that.  And we've got tea, and country houses, and atmospheric coastline, and colorful locals, so if you are too, there's the whole package.

But wait, there's more.  The plot development is terrific:  meandering, but not slow, and it has more coves and inlets than the Devon coastline in which the story is set.  The twists built on one another in such a natural fashion that it (almost) never felt forced.  When I found myself at the end wondering what had happened to the body that started it all, but able to reconstruct the whole tale, I realized I was in the presence of some very careful planning.

Our Hero, the aforementioned Boyle (hard to take seriously if you are a fan of Brooklyn Nine Nine), is a Captain in the US Army, working for an intelligence branch of SHAEF.  His job, as detailed in eight previous novels, is to investigate crimes that might have an impact on the US' activities in the European theater during the Second World War.  I've read the first in this series, and enjoyed it more or less, but apparently quite a lot has happened to Our Hero, as is regularly alluded to by cryptic references to difficult times in North Africa and German POW camps.  (This is why I don't like reading series out of order, dammit, I don't like to not know!)

A body has washed up on a beach in Devon, where, as it happens, the Allies are engaged in top secret (well, as secret as anything involving thousands of soldiers and ships and air support can be) activities preparing for the invasion of Fortress Europe.  It is late April, 1944.  Boyle and his sidekick Kaz (a war-damaged but still urbane and lethal Polish count) are asked to find out where the body came from, because if, as feared, it is a German spy, then the entire Normandy (oops - nobody is supposed to know that) landing is potentially compromised.  While in the area, they stay with an old pal of Kaz' from Oxford, David Martindale, as his family's country estate, Ashcroft.

Upon arrival at Ashcroft, the plot veers into British country house murder territory.  No one is dead yet, but you can tell by the strained conversation, heavy drinking, and dagger-like glances that someone will be, soon.  Do I even have to mention that inheritance is at stake?  Needless to say, Billy and Kaz get drawn into these dramas, as well, not particularly reluctantly.

In yet another Brit mystery cliche, a possible illegitimate son turns up as a long-lost heir to Ashcroft, and somehow manages to knit the two plot skeins together.  This is made plausible by that historical backdrop:  the Allies really did practice their Normandy landings here, with grave consequences that you can read about at the end (or skip ahead and read the Author's Note on pp. 324-325 - it won't ruin the plot).  US Army staff really did billet all around the countryside, and famous people like Mrs. Mallowan really did give up their houses for the war effort.  And the ghastly tragedy that puts the story on fast-forward really did take place and is deeply sobering to contemplate.  There is a not-particularly-subtle subplot on the personal cost of war - physical, psychological, social - which is always interesting to consider with respect to this Good War and all of our other apparently not-so-good ones.  Some of the characters get through, others don't, and the one cliche we are spared is that of fighting for the greater good, to keep the world safe for democracy, etc.  Boyle can hide his wounds, but others cannot, and at times it feels as if only the momentum of the war - the next action must turn the tide, or the next, or the next - keeps them from sinking.

Speaking of Mrs. M, I won't say more other than to say that this was the most forced scene in the story, and if I hadn't been so deep into the plot by that point, I'd have tossed that book across the room.  Same with Ike (who, to be fair, is Billy's uncle, and so appears in many of these books) and Yogi Berra, no kidding.  But again - look it up!  The past ain't what it used to be, if you know what I mean.  (187-188)

The story is told in first-person, from Billy's perspective, and while he claims to just be a kid from Southie, he's obviously no idiot.  A Wahlberger would play him in the movie, of course.  Billy Boyle is one series I might go back to, to fill in the gaps.  But he's going to have to wait his turn because there are a lot of other books in the pile.

A Man Without Breath

Please don't take this the wrong way but sometimes I just really love a good story about Nazis.  Philip Kerr always delivers with point-blank perfect period detail, carefully researched and presented without a lot of hand-wringing.  A Man Without Breath (2013; Penguin paperback 2014) is a great addition to his convoluted Everyman's history of the Third Reich and its aftermath.  Kerr, and his reluctant hero Berlin cop Bernie Gunther lost their way a bit in some of these - A Quiet Flame, for example, and If The Dead Rise Not - but are back on their breathtakingly ghastly track now.

I use the word breathtaking not because it fits with the title, which is really only sort of explained on the last page, and not particularly satisfactorily, but because it is hard sometimes to feel shocked by stories from the European theater of the Second World War at this point.  We've seen it all, the agonizing photographic record of the Holocaust, the physical destruction of France and Germany and England and pretty much anywhere anywhere in Europe where the war was actually fought, and of course the increasing realism of fictional and film treatments of the War.  But two points.

First, we Americans don't really know much about the Eastern Front, other than that German soldiers really didn't want to go there.  What did they fear?  Read this book.  Even without any battle scenes, in fact, this is all set well behind German lines, the desolation and deprivation of the German-Russian conflict is sobering.  This too was a race war for the Germans at least, and the Russians responded with similar brutality.

Second and related, war is hell, yes, I know, but do we really know?  While reading this book, I heard this story about ISIS' use of sexual violence.  The piece didn't really work that well as a panel discussion because because the host kept trying to get the guests to talk about the apparent disconnect between a state for God and sexual violence - like it was somehow distinct from other violence, and maybe shouldn't be happening because ISIS is waging some kind of holy war, however perverted?  The panelists weren't biting, essentially saying God or no, there is no excuse.  During the Second World War, the Russians in particular were known for sexual violence, and references to that are casually strewn throughout this story.  We don't really consider that in America, when we think of the Second World War, do we?  That our allies for the last several years of the war were feared more by German women than anyone else, committing what some historians estimate to be up to 2 million rapes during the mid-1940s.  This figure is disputed by the Russians, and there may be some merit to the Russian argument that Germans are trying to become the victim here.  And the truth is that all of the occupying forces - British, French, and yes, Americans - perpetrated brutal crimes against German women in this period.  Look, the point here is that our Good War was not so good for everyone else.

But I digress, sort of.  Some of Kerr's Gunther stories are hard to follow because they jump back and forth in time, but this one stays in chronological order, ripped from the history books, of the Russian massacre of Polish army officers at Katyn Wood in 1940.  Our Hero is sent to Smolensk, near Katyn, in 1943, to investigate some human remains found in the area.  Why, you might be forgiven for asking, do the Germans care about a few bones in wood at this point in the death factory of their Eastern war? They are eager to show the world that they are not the only ones committing horrific crimes - see, the Russians kill thousands in cold blood, too!  We only kill the sub-humans, not fine upstanding men like other army officers!  Gunther is working for a unit of the Wehrmacht called the War Crimes Bureau; their job is to investigate war crimes perpetrated both by Germans and against Germans.  It is presented as an oasis of sensibility in this crazy Nazi world - few of the judges are Party members, for example, although of course there are no Jews.  "By state law the Wehrmacht was not supposed to be interested in politics" notes Kerr (35) and so it is a kind of haven for people like Bernie, who love Germany but hate what the Nazis have done to it, and who are trying to find a way to survive.

Bernie gets out to Poland, realizes pretty quickly that something seriously bad happened in Katyn (although references to Babi Yar and other atrocities make one wonder why anyone thinks this is any worse than everything else that is going on), and while he hopes to avoid going back, ends up leading spinmeister Josef Goebbels' plan to use the Katyn massacre for propaganda purposes.

Of course, there are a few random murders along the way, and while they are actually the crimes that Gunther must solve (and risk his neck doing so) they are completely overshadowed by the unfolding details of the massacre.  As is the noir-ishness of Kerr's style.  This is the least hard-boiled of all his books, perhaps because when the reality is so cold and dark, why would you pile on the atmospherics?*  The ending of the fictional story is a even little incredible, with that old trope of the dramatic last-minute courtroom appearance of an unexpected witness who reveals the truth.  Would that the nonfiction events surrounding these killings had been resolved as nicely but by 1943, even the Germans, though some won't admit it, the really bad parts of this war for them are just getting started.

I keep talking about the carefully researched detail, but you have to read this to believe it, and then challenge yourself by looking it up.  Think that the reference to the Grischino Massacre has just a little too much blood to be real (114)?  Look it up, it was, and is as bad as described.  In fact, go ahead, search for World War Two Massacres and even if you know a lot you will be left without breath for a minute as you take it in.  That's the thing about the Eastern Front; no novelist can concoct anything more gruesome in his or her imagination, than the Germans and the Russians did to each other in reality.

Kerr has used as his source Alfred de Zayas' The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (1979, University of Nebraska Press).  It doesn't take a lot of digging to understand that while Kerr may have lifted much of his source material from this monumental work (readily credited in his Author's Note), de Zayas is indeed The Source for this topic.  The point is, all of the framework of this novel is real, and many of the higher-ups are, too.  The Author's Note briefly describes the fate of several critical characters and places and events.  Kerr is artful at cloaking his crime fiction in an all-too-criminal reality - you can't tell where the one ends and the other begins.

Another piece of Kerr's oeuvre that I really like is his ability to tease apart the strands of German-ness.  I know that I've said BEFORE that it is sometimes a little too easy to have Our Hero be so precisely anti-Nazi-but-pro-Germany, but in A Man Without Breath Kerr makes the good point that by 1943, post-Stalingrad, many Germans, even those in the High Command, are privately doubting the future of the Third Reich.  Nicely complementing this is Kerr's portrayal of Junkers, the landed Prussian elite with their vons and their zus, their antipathy toward Hitler and general ambivalence about Nazis, as well as their insular society and disdain for everyone outside of it.  Their involvement in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler at Wolfsschanze is well-known.  Less famous are the many other attempts on The Leader's life, mostly by vons, in the year and a half leading up to that debacle.  But you know, Kerr gets them all straight, right down the correct insignia, and you can look all this stuff up if you want to.  You won't be disappointed.

The everyday nature of the business of war, where everyone knows what each side is doing to the other, is the most chilling aspect of all of this.  The Germans are tense, because this is post-Stalingrad and everyone knows what happened to Napoleon when he tried to conquer Russia.  The tide has turned against Germany, and all everyone in this place can hope for is to get out before the Russian counter-offensive comes in the summer.  Civilians, too, especially those who may have aided the Germans (which is pretty much everyone in one way or another) can't really decide who is worse - the conquering Germans with their race-hatred of anyone not German or the Russians with their paranoid shoot-first-and-don't-ask-questions approach to national loyalty.  Worked at the hospital for wounded German soldiers?  Ran a brothel?  You are S.O.L. when the Russians and their dreaded NKVD come back to town.

I'll offer an extended quote that I think demonstrates both Kerr's and his subjects command of the details of mass killing.  Bernie has been assigned to show a particularly odious character around the massacre site, one Paul Blobel.  Read the book or look him up, you'll find the same story:  Blobel was not only in charge of the massacre at Babi Yar, but became something of an expert on killing, and then destroying the evidence of these massacres afterwards.  He's brought to Katyn to advise on the public health aspects of mass exhumations.  Yeah, the Nazis thought of everything.  Anyway, Bernie describes the mass graves here to him.
  "'It's as you can see,' I said.  'All of the victims so far have been shot in exactly the same way.  And I do mean exctly - to within a few centimeters, from very close range, and at the same protrusion at the base of the skull.  Nearly all of the exit wounds are between the nose and the hairline.  Undoubtedly, the NKVD men who carried out this particular special action had done this many times before.  Indeed, they'd done it so many times that they had even perfected where and how the bodies would fall into the grave.  In fact, you can say with absolute certitude that on one was allowed to just fall in like a dead dog.  There are maybe twelve layers of bodies in this grave.  The heads of those in each row seem to be resing on the feet of the men below, and there was nothing about this that was not subject to thought and planning.  When all of the men were dead, or at least shot, tons of sand were bulldozed on top, which helped to compress the bodies into one large mummified cake.  Even the decomposition process appears to have been perfected by the NKVD.  The fluids leaking from the bodies seem to have formed a kind of airtight seal around the cake.  Finally, birch trees were replanted on top of the grave.  It's really very methodical . . . .'"
  Blobel is impressed.  "'I used to be an architect and I've seen foundation works that weren't made as well as this grave.'"  (284)

So, yes.  Nazi, NKVD, who was worse?  As an unlucky holder of evidence against the Russians (who is himself Russian) says, "Hitler is just a minor demon in hell, but Stalin is the devil himself."  (190) Guess it all depends on your perspective.


*But he doesn't lose it all, and this little jewel raised a smile:  "Tanya was the kind of blonde who could have stopped a whole division of cavalry with one flash of her underwear."  (298)

Mayhem

Was it worth the hype?  Yes, but it took a little longer than I expected to get there. 

J. Robert Janes' Mayhem (Soho Press, 1992) is the first in a series featuring the unlikely combination of a Gestapo agent and a member of the French Sûreté, in occupied Paris, 1942.  Why must they work together?  Well, as Kohler (Gestapo) points out in his interview with the haughty countess (yes, a cliché, but well, it wouldn't feel right without them!), "Crime doesn't stop just because there's a war."  (120)  In other words, the Nazis are not stupid, mon ami.  They know that they must retain elements of the French security apparati, if they want to maintain any sort of calm in the land they know rule.  Most of the men (for they are really all men of course) who work for the Sûreté are all too happy to collaborate, being already anti-semites, power-mad, or just plain jerks.  St-Cyr, one of Our Heroes (Kohler being the other) is not one of these.  He tries to walk a very fine line between doing the job he's been trained for, and obviously loves - being a detective - and collaborating with the enemy who have deprived him of decent meals, good tobacco for his pipe, and his wife's affections.  At one point he is targeted by the Resistance, and his German colleagues must help extricate him from a death sentence - which they do with their usual casual brutality.

So you see, it goes back and forth, back and forth.  One minute you can comfortably hate the all Germans, but the next, one of them shows a surprising sensititivity to the terrible jurt they've caused to all of France.  For every stereotypical screaming scarred SS General in his gleaming boots with his perfect Aryan henchmen, there's a Gestapo chief who worked with St-Cyr in Austria before the war, and who obviously saved him from certain arrest as the Germans entered the City of Light.  The Germans, although the victors (so far), are also riven by their own divisions- the Wehrmacht was in charge of security in France, but was then replaced by the Gestapo, and what exactly the SS get up to, nobody really wants to know too much.  So the Wehrmacht hate the Gestaop and the Gestapo don't trust the SS and everyone fears Berlin.  This is their weakness, and its exploitation is a central element to the plot. 

To emphasize this sense of never quite knowing who you can trust or even really what is going on (I had to read the bit on the different meetings with Sûreté, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht chiefs three times before I confirmed who was who), Janes employs a tricky narrative device of switching perspective constantly during any scene.  At the start of the book, it is downright confusing if you are not paying close attention.  Here's a short example, just at the start, when the first body is found on a road in Fontainebleau Forest:

"The Bavarian nudged the corpse with the toe of his right show but didn't look up.  'So, what about it, Louis?'
The accent  was harsh, gutteral, the French quite passable because Hermann, being Hermann and stubborn, had seen to it that he spoke the language.  One found out so much more that way.  It facilitated things - all things.  Gestapo things.  Especially girls. [okay, this is obviously Kohler thinking]
St-Cyr chose not to answer immediately.  ["chose" to me indicates that this is St-Cyr]  A last leaf fell through the hush to crash into some boulders with its load of frost and scrape its way to patient rest.
Hermann took no interest in the leaf, in the beauty of its death, the curled edges, the ring of encrusting frost, not even the fact that the leaf was from a plane tree and that such trees were a rarity in this part of the Fontainebleau Forest. 
Always it was blitzkrieg, blitzkrieg.  December, 1942, the Occupation.  Now the whole of France, as of last month. [I like Kohler for this, he's a little tired of the gung-ho Nazis, pleasures of Paris notwithstanding]
'We shall have to see won't we' he said at last.  [you may think that is Kohler, because we've been listening to his inner dialogue briefly here, but it is St-Cyr!]
Accustomed to such delays [Kohler again], the Bavarian sucked on a tooth and snorted, 'It's one less Frenchman for us to worry about.'
Must he be so blatant? [St-Cyr again!] 'We've no evidence he was involved with the Resistance, Inspector.  Perhaps . . . " (9-10)

So, you get a little sense.  This kind of perspective shifting happens throughout the story, and delays one's settling in.  Yet while confusing, I think it achieves a nicely unsettling tone that captures the essence of the time.  We all know the Germans are in charge right now, and disobedience can exact a disastrous price. But the French, collaborators aside, are determined to undermine that dominance in ways large and small. 

And I have to point out that being French, they are not immune to a good meal or glass of wine. 

"'A family business,' said St-Cyr dreamily.  'The salt pork with lentils to your liking?'
'Too much,' sighed the Bavarian.  'That sausage and red cabbage . . . '
'And the paté, the bread, the green salad, and the leek-and-potato soup.  If one strained credulity, Hermann, it's almost as it was before the war.'
The coq-au-vin had been superb."  (100-104)

This meal also includes a Pouilly-Fumé of "truly remarkable vintage that [St-Cyr] had always found to his taste, a gunflint wine, though not of a gun or flints . . . " (100-104).  Hermann can barely stay awake for his dessert of "Chantilly cream with baked pears and chocolate sauce with almonds." (104)  Almost as it was before the war, bien sur. 

Janes' writing has a few annoying tics - references to Kohler as The Bavarian feel forced after about one (is he a dessert?), and the French characters' constant use of the pronoun me, as in "me, I think," grates.  This last may be done to make it all sound more French, (eh, moi, je pense que les Nazis . . . ).  Mais alors, as St-Cyr is often saying to split the hair . . . the fine atmospherics, intricate plotting that really didn't give anything away, and intriguing joint protagonists, well, me, I can put up with the tics for another book in this series, I think.