3
Ties that Bind: Farms and Fields
The densely inhabited metropolis or capital became a potent catalyst for armed resistance, but so did the traditional farm holding or farmstead. It was a vital way of life, an institution that went far back in memory and time. It linked men to historical traditions and to one another. Those who lived on a farm were united by ties to past and present in a rich living texture, and these ties became a presence of great importance during the war. They were concrete and visceral, they evoked familiar aspects of life and the surrounding landscape. Different countries had varied rural traditions and ties to the countryside, villages, and peasantry, but they all proved to be remarkably strong. Writers evoked them repeatedly in calls for defense.
An excellent example of the strength of these traditions can be found in a work by Andre Malraux. He was a French intellectual with almost no peasant or agricultural origins; he had traveled widely, flirted with Marxism, and suddenly found a justification for defense not in an abstract idea or ideology but an epiphany while staying at a peasant farm. Malraux was surprised at his own strong emotion. He recorded the experience both in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, written during the early war years, and his later Anti-Memoires.
Malraux was called up after the German invasion of France. Captain of a tank crew, he raced toward the attacking Germans. After several days of mishaps and frustrations, exhausted, the tank stopped at a small farm so the crew could get a few hours of sleep.
When he woke the next morning, Captain Malraux saw the farm with fresh eyes:
I can hear in this picturesque profusion, the hum of the centuries buried almost as deep as last night’s darkness: these barns bursting with grain and straw, these barns with their beams hidden by husks, full of harrows, canes, poles, wooden carts; barns which consist only of grain, wood, straw, and leather (everything in metal had been requisitioned). Surrounded by the dead fires of refugees and soldiers, these are the barns of the Gothic Age; our tanks at the end of the road are filling up with water, monsters kneeling at the wells of the Bible! O life, how old you are!28
He walked past the door of the barn, left open by the family in their flight, and saw a looted room, old tools, carts, empty ovens, washing, and linen. Malraux felt suddenly in the presence of an unaccountable gift: “All this might never have been, might never have been as it is. How these individual shapes harmonize with the earth!” Two old peasants were sitting outdoors on a bench and spoke to him in resignation, tank turrets in the background gleaming with dew. This prompted a reflection: “I now know the meaning of the ancient myths about the living snatched from the dead. I can scarcely remember what fear is like; what I carry within me is the discovery of a simple, sacred secret. Thus, perhaps, did God look on the first man.”
The epiphany is presented as it occurred. The effectiveness of the scene depends on the contrast with the chaotic hurried tank fighting that preceded it; in a sudden, unexpected revelation all doubts are resolved. The purpose of the chaotic military actions of the previous days is made clear: to preserve the lives of the elderly farming couple seated before him, the lives of the other villagers who fled. It could be a scene from the New Testament with Malraux as one of the Magi. Many echoes from the past are crystallized in the description of the setting of the small farm. Malraux suddenly becomes aware there are no barriers between what happened long ago and what is occurring in the present.
The rural past was a powerful unifying force in the history of many countries that mounted powerful defensive movements during World War II. With Malraux it had a bookish aspect. Other writers who were more closely rooted in rural conditions had similar experiences. These might be more subtle and less rhetorical, even occasions for humor. For example, a novel by Pentti Haanpaa, War in the Wilds (1942), describes a line of Finnish tanks coming on several homesteads destroyed by invading Russians. They reach a village. Their reaction is as intense as that of Malraux, but there are differences.
The farms and groups of houses filled them with stupefaction. There were colorful walls, windows that sparkled, a village complete and intact, in the middle of the gleaming snows of March. Look, over there, a dark mound of manure emerged from the snow, a real pile of manure just like at home. So here, too, they were confident that next summer the wheat would ripple in the wind . . . It was worth more than the most patriotic speeches or military marches. These people did not want just to fight. They wanted to live.29
Together with humor the passage contains familiarity and deep feeling. Many of the soldiers were themselves farmers. This made their reactions especially powerful.
The novel by Haanpaa also presents a darker side of armed defense. When the column of tanks passes many destroyed farmsteads, the narrator reflects: “The rest of the world would learn with stupor that here one had forgotten arithmetic. The healthy man acts and does not hesitate when there is fire in his house.” The spirit of the Finns in the defensive Winter War was unique. They were willing to accept extremely high casualties, and took pride in their accomplishment against superior numbers: pride that they could disregard the “arithmetic” of their own small numbers.30
One of the finest novelists of World War II, Vasil Bykov, was Belorussian; he developed the theme of attachment to a small farmstead in several short novels. In Sign of Misfortune a farm is associated with the historical past, as in Malraux’s narration, and with the New Testament. In this powerful work the associations are entirely tragic. An elderly peasant couple has terrible luck: their farm is chosen as billet for a German motorized battalion. The collaborationist Belorussian Polizei—a few still wear Red Army uniforms with insignia torn off—choose their farm, and the couple is unable to resist. They hope the Germans will eventually move on without inflicting too much damage. The farm is on “a god-forsaken hill” once called Golgotha. The name remained “precisely defining the grim reality of that patch of earth, so unsuitable for raising bread, and consecrated by tears, toil, and a years-long peasant cavalry.”31
The German soldiers force the old couple to live in a small boilerhouse behind the farm, treating them like servants. They beat the spirited wife, Stefanida, and bray with laughter as they throw apple cores at the husband, Petroc. The soldiers shoot their cow in the head, and chop it up with an ax. They fire indiscriminately at hens, and kill a local boy. The couple tries to hide their last pig in a badger hole but it escapes and disappears. The local collaborationist Polizei turns out to be as bad as the Germans, motivated by envy they slowly strip the farm of anything of value. Ultimately it is destroyed in a conflagration. In Bykov’s novel there is no propaganda or sentimentality. The Golgotha theme is handled skillfully, associated with lethal struggles of resistance and collaboration that leave no way out.
Farms had different features in different parts of the world, yet were consistently associated with defense. One of the finest works about resistance to German occupation was a play set in the context of a farm, Kai Munk’s Niels Ebbesen (1942). Kai Munk, murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, was one of the most talented Danish writers of his generation. Before the war he was known for his play Ordet (1932), made into a film by the director Carl Dreyer. A clergyman, Kai Munk was by no means a pacifist; he advocated active resistance to the Germans.32
Niels Ebbesen was the name of the owner of a farm not far from the Danish-German border. The first act presents the farm in its physical setting: a meadow, women washing clothes, a man digging with a spade. A ditch is being cleaned and a swamp drained, people tend to everyday chores. The play is about the change of heart in a man who tries at first to cooperate with the Germans. Nominally set in an earlier century the play is dedicated “To Our Young Soldiers of April Ninth,” the date of the German invasion of Denmark in 1940.33
Niels Ebbesen is aware of his own vulnerability and weakness. One of the most eloquent speeches at the beginning of the play is an argument against resistance. “Listen, there are my children playing down by the river; and there are my men cutting the first grain . . . War means that I and my tenants will get our arms and legs cut off, and that we shall never again follow the plough or wield the scythe.”34 The traditional farmstead was completely defenseless. Exposed and easily destroyed, it could become hostage or handed over to others. It provided as many reasons against resistance as for it.
But as Niels Ebbesen sees how one concession leads to another, he is made to wallow in his own shame. There is no end to the process of abasement. Gradually he is forced to change his mind. The play is modern despite its historical setting. The problem of military occupation is given a concrete context and made timeless, the plight of Niels becomes like that of others under German domination.
As in Hillary’s The Enemy Within but with a very different setting, Niels Ebbesen ends with a conversion: a tortured, difficult conversion, and a call to arms. In Kai Munk’s play the conversion takes place on a farm, what is to be defended is a countryside filled with similar farms. The setting acquires increasing importance as the decision for full-fledged, armed defense becomes crystallized; typical farm implements, the organization of field workers, the maintenance and cultivation of land, all become part of the decision. Niels vows at the end never to return to his home, plough, and children until freedom is won. “Free we must be, if we are to live.”
In different parts of occupied Europe, farms and crops took different forms as the landscape changed. In Yannis Ritsos’s long poem Our Lady of the Vineyards, written in occupied Athens and published in 1945, he described a setting of vineyards. It is a resistance poem. Although Ritsos was a communist this did not prevent him from invoking the Madonna and, further, identifying the Madonna with armed soldiers:
The olive tree reads to itself
The petrified gospel
And in the vineyards anger boils wine for the great
Chalice of the struggle.
. . . The Holy Gate thunders:
“The forty days of bitterness and fasting are over,
No more memorials for the dead, the Madonna is armed.”35
The vineyard is generalized, the Madonna becomes the guardian of all vineyards. The Greek landscape, rural life, and folk religion are fused in a call for rebellion.
In his wartime poems Ritsos was particularly skillful in evoking the specific Greek landscape with its traditions. His epic poem Romiossini (1943), later set to music by the composer Mikis Theodorakis, is a tour de force of nature evoked in its many forms, all of them sympathizing with the local, clandestine resistance movement, hostile to the invaders. The natural landscape has its own will, supporting the region’s long-time inhabitants and tillers of the soil.36
In all of the areas of combat, attachment to productive land and small farms was a potent motivating force. It proved true in Eastern and Western Europe, and also in Asia. Invading armies often disregarded farmers, thinking they presented no danger, but frequently they were surprised by the “embattled farmers” when they were given arms. In a Japanese novel about the invasion of China, a Japanese soldier could not understand the peculiar, unmilitary behavior of Chinese soldiers fighting against his unit. They were barefooted, many had no uniforms, fled the disciplined Japanese but then regrouped and unexpectedly came at the Japanese again. “‘They must be farmers from this region,’ Miki said to Takeo . . . ‘Since they are defending their own lands, they must be stronger than soldiers.’”37
Farm and countryside evoked a history even older than that of the city. They were intimately associated with religion, myth, and history, their symbols evoking the most deeply held popular values.