“I gave up going to church years ago,” Audrey said. “For religious reasons, of course.”
“That’s funny, Miss Quail; so did I,” the brigadier said, his eyes beginning to cloud with a hungry desert look.
The colonel ceased to listen while the brigadier and Audrey set about discussing the daring originality of not going to church in an age when nobody else did.
“And what were the German priests saying? Some of them were saying that it was a holy war and others were not so sure, but all of them were saying that it was a sin for a man to drink too much wine or to make love to a pretty girl if he was not married to her.
“Well, when a man is in a battle and a priest comes to comfort him before he is killed he wants to be told other things than that it is a sin to drink too much wine or for him to make love to a pretty girl if he is not married to her. A man who is going to be killed in battle needs to drink too much wine and to make love to pretty girls. What is more, all through the ages the good soldier and the brave fighter has not been the man who was good at saying his prayers in churches but rather he has been the man who was good at drinking wine and making love to pretty girls. But what he wants to know before he is killed in the snow is why those who are good at saying their prayers in churches want him to try to kill other men who are good at drinking wine and making love to pretty girls. He wants to know who is right and who is wrong and why he must suffer and make other men suffer these so terrible sore things.
“Please do not be misunderstanding me. The soldier who fights and drinks too much wine and makes love to pretty girls is an unhappy man, and he likes Jesus Christ and all that He has said but he often is not liking very much those who say that they speak in His Name.” He looked appealingly at both the nuns, but especially did he look at his sister, who was staring at him with damp misery. “Please not to be hurt by what I have just said. Please to be understanding that the young men who fight your wars for you and then are forgotten are not wicked. They are wanting to hear a voice, that is all; but they are wanting to hear a voice which they can understand and not big cold words which sound grandly in cathedrals. They are still wanting to hear it, before it is too late and before their sons have got to go and be wounded and die at night on the open plains.”
-Herr Buchardt, brother of a religious sister, Austrian in the German army, former Russian POW from Vespers in Vienna.
You might ask, Why spend two precious blog posts and a couple of hours of your time on a minor mid-20th century out-of-print novel?
Good question, quick answer: Aside from the “bookworm” angle, remember that I’m interested in history as a key to understanding human experience – even in the present. Catholicism is an historical faith, and so much of the current tensions within Catholicism are really about history: What happened, why and what does it have to do with the present. For me, fiction is an excellent way to expand my understanding of the Catholic experience over time, answering questions and exploding myths – myths which are often used to justify actions in the present.
So with Vespers in Vienna – I’m going to share some interesting passages with you in a moment, but in case you don’t want to wade through all of that, just know: this novel makes clear that raising questions about the Church’s voice during times of war is nothing new. You’re not being all iconoclastic and groundbreaking when you do so today. Even a middlebrow mid-century novel gives evidence of that.
And your declaration that you’re all spiritual but not religious…is not so original, either, as that first passage makes clear!
So on to the novel. As I said in the first part, Marshall writes sharply about the fog of war itself, the miasma of post-war politics and the incompetence of all sorts of bureaucracy. He doesn’t do so from a distance, either – he served in the Great War and lost a leg in it. He rejoined during World War II, serving in a number of capacities, including the Displaced Persons Division in Austria – where most of this novel takes place.
I imagine the main character, Nicobar, is a stand-in for Marshall himself: Deeply cynical about war – whose interests are served by wars and who pays the price, no matter what side. He also has a missing limb, in this case an arm, not a leg.
As I said, the central conflict concerns the repatriation of individuals to Soviet territory. The question raised right off the bat is – the Russians were our allies – but are they now? Really? What have we done?
This time the brigadier spoke for a greater length of time on the telephone and the colonel had time to reflect that he knew exactiy what the brigadier was going to tell him about subversive activities. The brigadier was going to say that, as His Majesty’s Government had backed Stalin and Tito and the Warsaw government, every act or opinion contrary to the new totalitarianism at present in practice in these countries partook of the nature of subversive activity if not of treason and treachery. The colonel remembered what the brigadier had said in Rome when the news of Labour’s victory in the British elections had first been announced: “Don’t worry. Hooky, old boy, somebody’s got to make a nonsense of things and it had better be those chaps than us.” He also remembered what Lieutenant Gatlock had said about Ramsay MacDonald in September 1924, when Labour had got in for the first time: “Of course the man’s a cad, Hooky; he’s a Socialist, isn’t he?” And now the brigadier was more Marxist than his new masters, perhaps because he was surprised that they had allowed him to go on hanging on to the upper branches of the tree. The colonel found himself hoping that Mr. Ernest Bevin saw a little more clearly from the windows of the Foreign Office than his subordinates from the ground.
“Now look here, Hooky; it’s quite simple really,” the brigadier continued when he had finished his telephone conversation. “All you’ve got to remember is this: all activities prejudicial to the Soviets and the new Poles and the Jugs have got to be stamped out. And of course the Austrians themselves have got to be watched: we can’t risk any recrudescence of that Nazi business. Indeed I have it from the highest level that H.M.G. would be most annoyed if the Austrians started any funny business of that sort.” The brigadier brought his revolving eyes to a standstill and succeeded in looking simultaneously both fleetingly wise and permanently threatening. “And if I were you, Hooky, I’d keep my eyes on the Displaced Persons who are up to all sorts of nefarious dodges, so they tell me.”
And on the strangeness of wartime alliances:
Colonel Nicobar suddenly realized that both Reverend Mother Auxilia and Schwester Kasimira must have wanted Germany to win the war. As Austrians, they must have wanted Germany to win. As Christians, they must have wanted Germany to win, because for them Stalin must have been so obviously anti-Christ and communism a very real bogey, in spite of the optimism of British Broadcasting Corporation announcers. Perhaps Pope Pius the Twelfth himself had been wanting Germany to win. Perhaps His Holiness still wished that Germany had won. It must be difficult for a Latin mind, even when illumined by the Holy Ghost, to accept hordes of non-practising Presbyterian Highlanders, copulating G.I.’s and predatory Russians as more adequately defending Christian civilization than the millions of Catholics who had fought against them. And yet, Russia and jingoism apart, the colonel was convinced that this was indeed the case, although he didn’t know quite how to explain it to Reverend Mother Auxilia and Schwester Kasimira, without hurting their feelings or seeming to claim too much for Britain and America. There was a clean wind blowing in both these countries which was blowing in no other, certainly not in Italy and in Spain. Perhaps, though, as a Catholic padre had once suggested to him, the Italians would have been even more ignoble if they had been Methodists. And probably the Pope hadn’t taken sides at all, sorrowing only over the new rent in Christ’s garment. The Japanese, though. The Pope couldn’t possibly have wanted the Japs to win. Faced by the charity of three of his ex-enemies talking his own language between themselves in order that he should understand every word they said, the colonel did not know what to think.
Now, on what the Colonel perceives as the Church’s silence, in a conversation with the Mother Superior:
“Take this last war then he said. “For the second time in less than twenty-five years Christian has fought against Christian, Catholic against Catholic. And what have the cardinals and the archbishops and the bishops had to say about it? Has one single significant utterance come from their lips? Has any one of them uttered a clear statement that sinful men could understand and be guided by? Has any German archbishop told the Ger- mans that it was a crime to launch flying bombs and rockets against the city of London? Has any Italian bishop spoken a fearless thing? Has any English arch- bishop or bishop dared to condemn the area-bombing of Berlin and the burning alive of German babies with phosphorus bombs? Has the Holy Father ever spoken one clear unambiguous truth that could be understood of the people, by the harlot in her doorway as well as by the pontiff in his palace? Has any cardinal cried out the clean, true, cool gospel of Christ that even men in their taverns respect?
“Oh, I know, there have been pronouncements, condemnations of sin in general terms, but tired, bewildered and unhappy men want more than that. They want to be guided, instructed, given an ideal. At present neither the victors nor the vanquished know what to believe in: science tells them one thing and religion tells them another and in their bewilderment they abandon metaphysical conjecture and turn to the material; the victors bury their heads in their old philosophy of a good time and trains with restaurant cars and the vanquished have no time to worry about a philosophy at all because all their energies are used up in the struggle to exist. No cardinal or archbishop comes along to dispel their doubts and uncertainties and to prove to them that religion is not the phoney nonsense they honestly believe it to be. For you must not make the mistake of imagining. Reverend Mother, that all worldlings are in bad faith and insincere. Many of them, I think, are as sincere in their unbelief as you and Schwester Kasimira are in your faith: they are only too willing to be converted to official Christianity but first of all the representatives of official Christianity have got to prove to them that the Church of Christ stands for social justice, honesty, kindness to the weak and that its interpretation of the word is not, as the common man honestly believes it is, solely in terms of alcohol and sex. That is what you require to prove to the world, Reverend Mother, before men will come willingly to the wedding feast and to do so I rather think that you will require tongues more eloquent and minds more alert than those belonging to the country bumpkins Holy Mother Church continues to consecrate as bishops. For- give me if I have hurt your feelings, but you asked me to speak plainly, and please believe that I am as anxious as you for the world to hear some glad new thing.”
Now, believe me – and if know Marshall at all, you know this – the objections don’t win out at the end. They are taken seriously, of course, but the Mother Superior holds her own:
“In other words, my dear colonel, I am trying to suggest to you that there can be a connection between the rocket bomb harnessed to atomic energy and the private nihilism that there is to-day in most men’s hearts and that the only way to prevent our cities crumbling for the last time and men and women all over the world dying in a putrid swelling of blackened bodies is for us to turn again and love God with all our heart. So perhaps it is not so foolish as you think for us to pray, although perhaps you have an alternative philo- sophy to offer?”
And finally, this, as moving an expression of God’s grace, inexplicably shared with the world through the gestures of weak, limited creatures:
The colonel did not really understand very much of the mass, but he understood the meaning of the priest’s blessing at the end all right. Not only to the nuns did that blessing go, but to the city and to the world as well, to the homeless on the cold highways, to babes in their cots and to old men on their deathbeds, to Audrey and Twingo doing a rhumba in the Kinsky, and to Stalin in the Kremlin. Then the enchantment vanished from the sanctuary and the priest came in again in his glossy black cassock and knelt down to make his thanksgiving with his collar sticking up too high at the back.
Crafts & Vintage
