Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [100]
It was a place of disaster. And yet, the most extraordinary thing about this place of blood was that in it a death surprised us. It was a place of hope, rather than tragedy. Let me quote what I wrote at the time:
The unexpectedness of seeing people with only half a face and others rescued from burning tanks, has now passed. Occasionally someone comes in whose mutilation is a shade more gruesome, and we hold our breath when we turn to him, for fear our face might give away our shocked repulsion. We can now reflect at leisure that this is how Marsyas looked when Apollo had finished with him; or how unstable the balance of human beauty is, when the absence of a lower jaw will completely unhinge it.
The reason for this callousness is that mutilation is no longer an irrevocable tragedy. Those who come here know, in general, that they will leave in the end as, approximately, human beings. It may – it will, in fact – take them months or even years. The process of completing them, a delicate living sculpture, will take dozens of operations and they will pass through stages when they will look absurd and ridiculous, which may even be worse than looking horrific. But they have hope. What faces them is no longer an eternity shut away in some home, but human life. They lie in saline baths because they have no skin, and joke with one another because they know they will get some. They walk round the ward with faces striped like zebras and pedicles dangling like sausages from their cheeks.
It is only in a hospital such as this that one begins to realize the meaning of Hope.
And not only hope for the body. As the end of the war, and certain victory, drew nearer, hope for the future was in the air. Here are two news items from the bulletin I published for the Military Wing.
I used to be in agricultural work, but my feet are gone, and I can’t do it any longer. Mr Pitts asked me what I wanted to do and I said, having been a motor-mechanic in the Army, how about it? So I’m going to a training school in Bristol … to polish up my i.c. engines, 45/ a week if I live at home, and I’m not forced to stick to the job … I think this plan for setting disabled soldiers on the road is pretty good.
And again: ‘The ABCA Discussion on Friday will be opened by Sgt. Owen RA of Hut 9 who will give his idea of ‘‘How I’d set about rebuilding’’.’ And Sgt Owen, a foreman bricklayer and once TUC delegate for his union, wondered whether ‘any other men in Building have any ideas to bring forward’. The end of the war was near, there would be a General Election (some wards actually asked for the voting forms before they had been distributed) and things would be different. Who did not share this belief in 1944 and 1945, even if the first of our worries after the end of the war was naturally when we would get demobilized?
It was mine too. Pointless as my military service was, while the war lasted it was both normal and necessary. I had no complaints. Once the war was over, as far as I could see, every day in the army was a day wasted. As the summer of 1945 turned to autumn and then to winter, I was approaching the end of my sixth year in uniform, but the army showed no sign of wishing to get rid of me. On the contrary. Early in 1946, to my utter astonishment, it proposed to send me, attached to, of all things, an airborne unit, to, of all places, Palestine. The army seemed to think being sent to fight Jews or Arabs was a compensation for not being sent to fight Germans.
This, finally, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Communist Jews were, of course, anti-Zionists on principle. And yet, whatever my sympathies, antipathies and loyalties, the situation of a Jewish soldier dropped into the middle of a tripartite dispute between Jews, Arabs and the British was filled with too many complications for me. So, for the first time I pulled strings. I telephoned Donald Beves, the Tutor at King’s, saying I wanted to get out of the army to take up my 1939 research studentship. He wrote the necessary letters, saying