"My Little War" by Louis Paul Boon
An Excerpt from Boon's World War II Novel.
My Little War was originally published in Flemish in 1947, and by John O’Brien’s Dalkey Archive Press in 2010, translated by Paul Vincent, following the publication of Chapel Road and Summer in Termuren. There is one other Boon book that was translated into English, Minuet, which would be amazing to reissue, but doesn’t seem to be in the cards. (It is available for under $20 through Amazon.) And maybe someday, more of Boon’s work will be made available—fingers crossed!
The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life’s work with My Little War, an extraordinary novel of World War II. Frustrated with the dainty, straightforward, neatly chronological narratives that dominated fiction in his country, Boon started including overheard conversations, newspaper articles, manifestos, and other sights and noises of daily life in his writing. Happily foul-mouthed and dirty-minded, eager to wade into the mud, Boon was resolutely unliterary while pursuing the most literary of goals: a new kind of writing, and a more honest way of looking at the world.
Enjoy the excerpt below, and for an introduction to Boon’s forthcoming Dalkey Essential, Chapel Road, please check out my, well, introduction.
My Little War
You write your Little War.
You’d rather write a different book—grander, deeper, more beautiful. You’d say “these are the curses and prayers of the little man in the face of the big war, these are the songs, this is THE BIBLE OF THE WAR.” And then the next day you’d like nothing better than to smash your pen to pieces—an exhilarating feeling—but then the day after that you’d have to go buy a new one—because you’ve just got to write, it’s a natural urge. One man curses till he blows a fuse, another bangs his head against brick walls.
You write your Little War.
The Book about the War
A little writer writes his little war but what great writer will rise up now and present us with his Book About the Great War—with capital letters? But “present” is far too proper a word for such a book. Sling it in our faces, hurl it at our dismayed consciences would be nearer the truth.
Perhaps you’ll do it, you who’ve lost all your worldly goods, as they say, but who as a human being have lost much more, having been evacuated like so much livestock and deported like a criminal, bombed and machine-gunned and toyed with like an empty can being kicked around by a bunch of kids, who’ve died a hundred times over, mutilated gagged and teeth knocked out with a wrench, so that, sitting there like Job with his boils, you . . . No, sitting there like little Frans Wauters, whose job it was to deliver letters to foreign laborers in Kassel in Germany and who during an air raid took cover down a drain and who when he came out could no longer see Kassel . . . If they’d slid a chair under my trembling legs as I sat there I could have surveyed all-that-had-once-been-Kassel . . . And so sitting there on that chair and looking at what-had-once-been-the-world, you’d be able to write the book that we might not have found the courage to read, or about which we might say: I don’t understand it . . . because we’re used to reading words stuck together with lifeless characters and are only able to appreciate something when, as they say, it has rhythm, but no meaning. Because you’d write words born of sweat and mud and dying horses in an upturned wagon and blocks of houses torn apart by the blast, and blood. With those words you’d construct sentences like twisted rails that start out perfectly normal but soon twist up into the air, as if the bombed trains were straining to take off into the sky but when the rails ended crashed back to earth. You’d make sentences like arms extended in pity but faltering halfway because pity’s not appropriate here . . . because if our hands don’t kill we’ll be killed ourselves, our books will be burned and our paintings condemned as degenerate and our finest thoughts regarded as the thoughts of madmen, and all that’s left will be the thoughts of sadists and medieval heretic-burners, And your bloody words, strung together into painfully contorted sentences, will form pages like fields strewn with mines and churned up by tanks, like the silent and still faintly smoldering cities of Warsaw Coventry Hamburg Kharkov Rotterdam and the whole of Russia which they tried to make us believe was inhabited entirely by sluts who ate their own children and men who ran around with knives between their clenched teeth.
Oh your book would be a book of concentrated tears and bloodlust and schweinerei, the stuff that doesn’t belong in any book because people nowadays turn up their noses when even the slightest little f—k defaces the page, but in Your Book that sort of thing will stand as a flaming testimony to the beast that’s conquered the human spirit. Your book, which you only wrote to escape your mute pain and blind fear and so as not to go mad, your book will be the mirror the abyss the hell that later generations will come to look at—perhaps after paying ten cents’ admission, like at the museum, since there’ll still be profiteers around then too—so as . . . oh, so as to what? To start all over again perhaps. To say of your book, as they murder and rape and spread their lies, that it’s the most enormous lie ever written. To excommunicate you from the holy church and put you on the list of banned books and throw you on a new bonfire and whoop round it like Red Indians. Because I, a little writer, have little enemies who sling mud, but you, great writer, will have great enemies who will desecrate your memory even unto the seventh generation.
Where are the days when you struggled to pay off the mortgage on your house, sometimes making a little headway as a day laborer and sometimes scrambling backwards, having to join the unemployment line. And one morning your wife says: feel, there’s something moving. And then on cue the policeman’s there with your draft papers—and so your wife will just have to pay off the house by herself, and she sends you packages and writes letters, for instance one day: I can’t feel anything moving now, do you think something’s wrong? And then the next: oh thank god, it’s turned round again!
And meanwhile you’re getting one franc’s pay a day and someone steals the butter and the officers are reeling around drunk and war breaks out—just when you’re stuck there on the Albert Canal and they’re right there staring at you, the gray bastards—and you’re left to pick up the pieces. Your child must be starting to walk about now, but you don’t know for sure. You don’t even know if your wife has any taxes to pay, yes or no—and besides THE BOMBS ARE FALLING maybe she’s already dead back there
BOOM
that was close!
And to think that that huge mob of people stationed there on the Albert Canal were all still clinging to the crazy notion that these were just some especially elaborate maneuvers.
The Goldfish
I knew Van den Abeele was lying there with his shoulder torn open, but I still didn’t look, I turned to the lieutenant of the 9th, who was standing there on the little cobbled road, arms open wide, railing at them: saligauds, boches! As if they could hear him on the other side of the Albert Canal. There was plenty of other noise anyway. Right next to us someone was emptying the belt of his machine gun, he was sitting on a chair he’d brought from the dairy and who knows maybe it all just looked like the national shooting range to him. Except for the dive-bombers, that is. And except that we were dying of thirst. Bah, said the radio operator, it’s all down to fate, if it’s your turn to die, you die. What’s-his-name replied that more people were dying here in one goddamn hour than over the course of ten years back in his village. Whereupon the radio operator shrugged his shoulders and started explaining to me that it was OUR FATE, no one died in your village because it was their fate to come and die here. And What’s-his-name was about to reply when those fucking Stukas came screaming and rat-tat-tatting down on us again, it was unbearable. The two from the field hospital cursed and said that they couldn’t be in every damn place at once. I’m bleeding myself, said the fattest of the two. No, it was unbearable, especially with those senseless orders. Get some more ammunition, said the lieutenant and there was no more ammunition to get, it had blown sky high half an hour ago. And try to bring me back a loaf of bread, Louis, he said. Yes, he’d joined us as a simple corporal out of basic training and every year when we had to go back to camp for more drilling he was a little higher in rank and he looked down on us a little more arrogantly, but when he was in trouble he’d still say Louis in that old friendly way. A loaf of bread, as though he didn’t know that the field kitchen had gone the way of the ammunition. But we went anyway, if we could get away from that dike for a bit we couldn’t hear them over there shouting VORWÄRTS so loud. I looked at What’s-his-name to ask if he was coming too and at that very moment the radio operator passed the long-awaited message to the lieutenant: every man for himself. We started smashing everything up with axes like lunatics, the machine-gunner made matchwood of his chair, and we tried to retreat along the cobbled road but it was already under fire. Bryske, who counted to 3 and then ran across as fast as he could, fell head over heels on the other side. So we had to go straight through the dairy and What’s-his-name smashed the window open with the butt of his rifle, and there was a glass bowl behind it that rolled over. We crawled through the window in order to bash the front door in, but all of a sudden What’s-his-name stopped and started biting his fingernails. I saw him pick up the bowl that had gotten caught between the window frame and the curtains; he filled it with water and carefully put it back in its place. And because I was waiting for him, he gave me an infuriated look, as if I’d done something wrong, heaven knows what. A bit further on we had to throw ourselves flat on our faces since that bunch from the other side had now crossed the Canal, and I didn’t really have the nerve to look back, because it was an inferno now. And in our ditch What’s-his-name said: imagine you lived in that dairy, and got back after you’d had to run away, wouldn’t you be glad to see that your goldfish were still alive? Well? . . . Why did you make that awful face at me?
And I had to laugh. It wasn’t me making that awful face, I said, it was you.
Actually, I made those goldfish up, that’s what stories are for. But this isn’t made up: What’s-his-name had to crawl through a gap in the hedge with his pistol over his shoulder, and he got caught. We shouted at him to cut the leather strap but he didn’t hear us, he just stood there in the line of fire and shit himself.
Whereas What’s-his-name, on the other hand—oh, a different What’s-his-name of course—stood astride our ditch and emptied one magazine after another—he was completely berserk.
And me? Oh, I sat gnawing on my fingernails, observing everything and trying to keep my thoughts from running off to the insane asylum. Do you suppose they’re already dropping bombs BACK THERE? I wondered—oh god, goddamn don’t let them die, let them see me 1 more time—WHAT’S THE USE OF HAVING A KID AND THEN DYING BEFORE YOU EVER GET TO SEE IT?
Prosper tells a story: a guy had one eye blown out and when he was taken to the military doctor’s shelter, the doctor was just getting ready to leave—we had to drive him back into the shelter at bayonet-point to make him treat that eye first.
By the roadside: two stretcher-bearers with arms spread wide and an overturned stretcher with its 4 arms spread wide and its dying occupant lying next to it, BOMBED A SECOND TIME.
And two soldiers who’d made a run for it on the Albert Canal were picked up by gendarmes who’d also run for it and were brought before a court-martial on a church square chaired by a general who shouted the whole time and wore slippers—and suddenly the German planes were there and the general leaped into a car in his slippers and drove off shouting THEY WOULD BE COURT-MARTIALED LATER.
And speaking of the general, my wife told me a while later that a whole bunch of those old men with red bands round their caps had driven past our house, that they were all too worn out to fight anymore but had big beautiful dogs with them and young girls of around sixteen or so.
My Little War by Louis Paul Boon & Paul Vincent is available from Bookshop.org and better bookstores everywhere.
Fuck yes! Thanks for the turn on.