'Where Are We Going?' International Relations and the Voice from Below*1

CHRISTOPHER HILL

Introduction

They tell us that the Pharoahs built the pyramids. Well, the Pharoahs didn’t lift their little fingers. The pyramids were built by thousands of anonymous slaves . . . and it’s the same thing for the Second World War. There were masses of books on the subject. But what was the war like for those who lived it, who fought? I want to hear their stories.2 Writing about international relations is in part a history of writing about the people. The subject sprang from a desire to prevent the horrors of the Great War once again being visited upon the masses and since then some of its main themes have been international cooperation, decolonisation, poverty and development, and more recently issues of gender. All these subjects have been founded in a normative commitment to help what Studs Terkel called ‘so-called ordinary people’.3 Thus people who are not professionally involved in international relations, as diplomats, politicians, soldiers, journalists, lawyers or academics, have figured in the literature and in the canon of concerns which has driven it along. It could hardly be otherwise in an age which has seen the creation of a single international system, the explosion of the world’s population, the spread of democratic ideas, the systematic slaughter of millions and the invention of weapons of mass destruction. In accounts of these great events, however, the people have almost always appeared as objects, not subjects. On occasions, where a revolution is at hand or a democracy feels itself constrained in its foreign policy by the need to achieve domestic consensus the people are seen as an irresistible mass. But even here they are reified and depersonalised. For the most part intellectuals speak for the people, even

* I am grateful to Alan Knight for comments on a draft of this article and to Mick Cox for encouraging me to write it. 1 This article draws in part on the Introduction to Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity: the War Diaries of a French Peasant, 1939–45, edited by Rémy Cazals and Christopher Hill, translated by Christopher Hill (London: Brasseys, 1996), pp. ix–xxi. The French original is: Les carnets de guerre de Gustave Folcher, paysan languedocien 1939–45 (Paris: Maspero, 1981). 2 Interview with Studs Terkel in Vanity Fair, cited on the back of the French Edition (Chacun sa guerre, Paris, Editions La Découverte, 1986) of his The Good War, New York, Pantheon Books/Random House, 1984. This collection of 47 interviews with various participants in the war is invaluable, but the selection is random and the accounts retrospective. 3 This description is the main theme of Terkel’s ten books. Other common terms range from‘the common/simple people’, ‘the man/woman in the street’ and ‘the public’ to the more pejorative ‘the great unwashed’ and the more political ‘the working class/the workers’. Terms and nuances naturally vary between languages and cultures. 107 108 Christopher Hill when they are trying to give a voice to those whose needs have been ignored.4 Although these commentaries are generally well-meaning, they are by definition delivered de haut en bas and it is always difficult to know if the views and needs imputed to ordinary people bear any relation to those actually expressed in the kitchens, bars, trenches, fields, factories, and bus queues of the world.5 In international relations in particular not only is it extremely difficult for us to assess the authenticity of such accounts and prescriptions, it has proved virtually impossible for the objects of the system to speak for themselves.6 The great poetry and prose of the First World War was largely written by men who while they might have served in the ranks (and officers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves were in just as much peril as any Private) were accustomed to expressing their feelings through the written word.7 The millions who were not writers or intellectuals, whose deaths are marked only by such monuments as the Ossuaire at Verdun containing more than 150,000 unidentified men, went silently to their fates. Some great events have produced their exceptional witnesses, such as Primo Levi of the Holocaust, Antonio Gramsci of fascism, Alexander Solzhenytsin of Stalin’s purges and Nelson Mandela of apartheid. The humanity and strength of these individuals in coming through the most extreme tests that can be imposed on a human being means that they can speak with authority for millions as well as for themselves.8 But most people do not have such qualities, and their individual tragedies go unchronicled, whether of peasant, soldier, Jew, gypsy, bomb victim or refugee. What is more, although this century has seen mass suffering on an enormous scale, the lives of many millions have been more routine, if still hard, than those which rightly fill us with horror. To adapt Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, it is the banality of suffering that most strikes one in contemplating the history of this century. That is why the diary of Anne Frank had such a world-wide impact. The record of the normal, unspectacular life of a young girl, gradually turning into the darkest nightmare, was something millions could identify with, and its success exposed a hunger for authentic, personal accounts of something that the finest historical work could not hope fully to understand (in the verstehen sense). This was also the reason why the authenticity of the Frank diary was so contested; many

4 An example is Cynthia Enloe’s influential book about the women in the margins of the male activities which dominate the history of international relations, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989). 5 This was what motivated Tom Harrisson to set up Mass Observation in 1937, simply to record what people were saying privately. The method did, of course, raise issues of propriety as well as of scientific method. See Tom Harrisson, Living through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976), pp. 11–15. 6 Some of the few, lone voices which have been heard, from as far back as the Napoleonic wars, are included in Lawrence Freedman (ed.), War (Oxford: OUP, 1994). 7 The most famous of these writers are British—Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas—but the German Erich Remarque made just as big an impact in the long run with All Quiet on the Western Front. This echoed Stephen Crane’s novel about the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, and anticipated Joseph Heller’s post-1945 classic of the private soldier’s war Catch-22, as well as the various revisionist films that have been made about the Vietnam War. 8 Their most relevant works in this context are Primo Levi, If This Were a Man (London: Abacus, 1987), Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison (London: Quartet, 1979), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (London: Gollancz, 1963) and Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Abacus, 1995). International Relations and the voice from below 109 could not bring themselves to believe that something so powerful was not the product of art or artifice.9 How are we to cope with this dilemma, of the silent millions who have not spoken for themselves, and for whom any attempt to extrapolate is itself a form of dis- tortion? The traditional response of the political scientist is to study ‘public opinion’. This is not the place to go into the difficulties of this concept, which has spawned a huge literature, but the aggregating nature of the approach generally used is the mirror image of the attempt to get close to individuals.10 Too often, indeed, the concept is used as an excuse by policy-makers and commentators for not enquiring more closely into the consequences of a given action at the grass-roots or into the complexities of popular perspectives on it. The use of opinion polling as an instrument for deciphering democracy and (in the Clinton–Blair era) even for government, is a version of the tyranny of majoritarianism against which some strains of political philosophy have long warned. It is fundamentally Fordist in its assumptions. A more recent and more promising response is the work which has been flourishing over the last two decades on oral history. The effort to recover the testi- monies of ordinary people in their thousands is now well under way, with projects like the British Library’s ‘National Life Story Collection’ archive and a postgraduate course specialising in oral history at the University of Essex.11 This is a natural accompaniment to the upsurge of interest in social history and itself a reaction to the exclusively elite versions of history which the traditional concentration on high politics used to produce. There is now a great deal of work being done on subjects ranging from village life during the English civil war to the histories of football, dance and the shop floor.12 The popular presence in international relations, however, remains difficult to track, not least because of the unavailability of source materials. Historians of war have been interested in ‘bottom-up’ accounts since John Keegan’s path-breaking The Face of Battle in 1976.13 Military historians can interview ex-combatants retro- spectively, and the survivors of the holocaust can be asked to commit what they can bear to recall to the records of special archives like that of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. But as every historian knows, the most reliable record

9 See Tony Kushner, ‘“I Want to go on Living after my Death”: the Memory of Anne Frank’, in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds.), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 3–25. 10 For various other problems associated with the study of individuals in International Relations, see Michel Girard (ed.), Les individus dans la politique internationale (Paris: Economica), 1994. 11 Paul Thompson has been the leading figure both at Essex University and in the profession as a whole in getting oral history established. See his The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 2nd edition, (Oxford: OUP, 1988). The course in question is an MA in Social History with oral history as a compulsory component. I am grateful to Carole Parsonage for advice on oral history. 12 In this movement the journals Past and Present and History Workshop have been particularly influential. 13 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Cape, 1976). Richard Cobb was perhaps a more significant pioneer of bottom-up history, even if he did not work much on war. One of his last books, however, dealt with the theme of occupation in France and Germany. In it he stated: ‘I make no apology for relying heavily on literary sources, on works of imagination, on my own explorations into necessarily tentative and groping interpretations—for history at this very often private, intimate level is not easily documented’ . . . See French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944 (Hanover and London: University of New England Press for Brandeis University, 1983), p. xxi. 110 Christopher Hill is that of a contemporary witness, and the chaos of invasion, attack and flight makes it very difficult to write things down.14 Despite the problems some accounts have survived, usually through post hoc reconstructions, as with George Coppard’s With a Machine-Gun to Cambrai, and scholars are increasingly discovering even the miraculous survival of diaries kept in the midst of war.15 The aim of the present article is to draw attention to these accounts, by particular reference to one such that the author has translated from the French, and to show that the subject of International Relations no less than the historian or general reader has much to gain from placing the perspective of the pawn alongside those of the knights, kings and queens. If the history of factory-workers, racial minorities, women, children and the dispossessed is now rightly to be written, then that of the ordinary soldier, the cannon-fodder of centuries, should also be tackled, not least in his own words wherever that might be possible. This will have the additional advantage of helping to bring the study of war and society, which inevitably tends to deal in very broad brush-strokes, into a much closer and more human focus. At present there is a great deal of talk about the importance of redirecting International Relations away from the study of elites and governments and towards the people whose destinies they help to shape; but there are few signs of many practical things being done to advance that cause.16

Gustave Folcher’s war

Gustave Folcher was a peasant from Aigues-Vives near Nîmes in Languedoc, born in 1909. He left school at thirteen and saw himself as barely literate. His only experience of life outside his ‘pays’ had been military service in Marseille. When war broke out in September 1939 he was immediately conscripted into the French army for service in the North, a region he found to be half France and half a foreign country. Bored with the endless card-games of his mates, he began to write in a small notebook, and recorded the main events of the Phoney War period and the battle for France in May-June 1940. He was subsequently captured and dispatched to a village near Magdeburg in Saxony to work on a labour farm. Here he stayed from August 1940 until his liberation by Allied troops in April 1945 and his return

14 There is always a tension between history and memory, and it is important that the interaction is analysed. An interesting recent study in this context , also emanating from the Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, is in Jean-Marie-Guillon and Pierre Laborie (eds.), Mémoire et Histoire: la Résistance (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1995). 15 George Coppard, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai (London: HMSO for the Imperial War Museum, 1968). For a recent discovery, of the correspondence between an imprisoned Italian Christian partisan and his wife, see Willy Jervis and Lucilla Rochat, Un filo tenace: lettere e memorie (Rome: Nuova Italia, 1998). 16 See, for example, James N. Rosenau, ‘Citizenship in a Changing Global Order’, in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds), Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 272–294. Rosenau considers (p. 283) that ‘where people once complied habitually and automatically with the directives of authorities, today they are much more inclined to assess the performance of the authorities before attaching legitimacy to and complying with directives’. Such generalizations are stimulating; but they should always be read in conjunction with case-histories like that of Gustave Folcher, who like generations of the powerless before him understood very well that his own government was not necessarily on his side, and how even the Nazi regime could be defied in small ways so as to enlarge his sense of individual space. International Relations and the voice from below 111 home the following month. He was never to leave Languedoc again, working as a postman in his home village and cultivating his patch of vines. He retired in 1970 and died in 1993. Rémy Cazals is an historian working at the Université de Toulouse Le Mirail. Together with colleagues from the Fédération Audoise des Œuvres Laiques (FAOL) he has done invaluable work on the oral history of the Great War, with special reference to the unpublished diaries of the soldiers of the Midi.17 In the course of this work he came across the unpublished diaries of Gustave Folcher, written up in ten exercise books during his five years of captivity. They are a unique and remarkable record even for a war which has produced more literature than any other. In publishing the diaries M. Cazals allowed Folcher to speak in his own voice, with the occasional repetition and grammatical awkwardness wholly over-shadowed by a natural simplicity and grace of style. Folcher’s ‘carnets’ gradually draw in even the most uninformed reader. For the student of international relations they have some particular attractions. In the limited space available here I hope to show that this work, and others like it are far more useful than the footnote to a footnote which they might seem to be at first sight. I shall look at four aspects of international relations which are illuminated by Folcher’s account: the experience of war and grand strategy; the use of prisoners of war on a mass scale for enforced labour; the political and international consciousness of those suddenly catapulted into great events; the role of historical memory in relation to patriotism and nationalism. These are naturally major themes of history and social science which no one person’s story can redefine. The point is, rather, that in the nature of things social science, and especially International Relations, deals in generalisations which all too easily become abstract and remote from the lives of actual people. We need the necessary corrective of understanding what international confrontations mean to those involved at ground level and we should have the humility to listen to their own voices now they are at last beginning to find outlets.

The experience of war and grand strategy

Over the centuries millions of ordinary men have had little choice but to go to war in the service of their feudal lord, their religious leader, their state, their empire. Only in the twentieth century, through a combination of improved education and awareness, the availability of writing materials, and the subsequent interest of historians, have their voices begun to be heard, albeit posthumously on too many occasions. The same is true for the countless civilian victims of war. This is why the testimony of people like Gustave Folcher is so precious. Whatever the justice of the particular cause—and the Allied cause between 1939–45 was more just than most—the meaning of war for the average, powerless participant is easy to infer and almost impossible to know. Even the recollections of private soldiers soon become glossed by the passing

17 For examples of the FAOL’s work on 1914–18, see Les Carnets de guerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier 1914–1918 (Paris: Maspero, 1978, new edition 1997) and Années Cruelles 1914–1918 (Villelongue d’Aude: Atelier du Gué, 1983), both edited by Rémy Cazals. To safeguard and study the many examples of notebooks and exercise books filled by ex-combatants, the FAOL set up a research group on ‘La Mémoire de 1914–1918 en Languedoc’. 112 Christopher Hill of time, the creation of official mythologies and the natural emotions of pride and relief at having survived. Only records from the time have great value, and those created out of the normally inarticulate and low-ranking mass are rare indeed. Accounts like that which Rémy Cazals discovered represent what one French reviewer of the book referred to as ‘these millions of anonymous Gustave Folchers . . . soldiers in the shadows, overlooked by glory but the foundations of that scrap of liberty which is left to us’.18 These millions are the men and women who actually suffer the agonies which all wars inflict, and their perspective of war is too often omitted from the histories of grand strategy, and even the detailed accounts of particular campaigns, which dominate the literature of war. This is not to say that the courage and suffering of the ordinary soldier is overlooked; reactions to the Great War ensured that ‘the pity of war’ has become a permanent part of our emotional vocabulary. Rather, it is to stress the continued comparative rareness with which the voice of the ordinary soldier himself is heard, let alone in the form of a continuous narrative over the period of an entire conflict. The role of the (un)common man and woman in war and peace is finally coming to the fore. Folcher was a man of his parish, his pays. Like millions of others he was catapulted onto the grand stage whether he liked it or not. Unlike most others he found the resources to tell us what it felt like. He makes plain, for example, the disorganisation and senselessness of much of the French war effort in 1939–40. This we already know about from the contemporary work of Marc Bloch and from subsequent scholarship, but the sheer futility, demoralisation and lack of prepared- ness of Folcher’s time in the 12th Zouaves (a North African regiment by origin) is still striking.19 The troops were subjected to endless marches and counter-marches, with no sense of purpose from the officer corps above them. When the German attack finally came, Folcher and his colleagues were completely exposed by the lack of air cover and were forced into further bewildering changes of direction before their inevitable defeat. Hence the diary’s constant refrain: ‘where are we going?’, which refers as much to the period of ‘freedom’ under French army command as to the later forced movements as a prisoner of the Germans. It is clear that French preparations for a war with Germany in 1939–40 were little short of a shambles in which the ordinary soldier was cast completely adrift. The plain, unheroic description of the ever-more hopeless and abandoned condition of Folcher’s regiment in June 1940 is a fine piece of writing which conveys fear, courage and fatalism in equal measures. For those caught up in it, but particularly men in uniform, war means not only the possibility of death and mutilation; most fundamentally, it means the complete annihilation of personal choice, what John Keegan described as ‘their sense of littleness, almost of nothingness, of their abandonment in a physical wilderness, dominated by vast impersonal forces, from which even such normalities as the passage of time had been eliminated’.20 This is something of which most people living comfortable, free lives today have no conception.21 Both Folcher and Barthas (Cazals’ Great War soldier) make clear that

18 Nord Matin, 2 October 1981. 19 Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 20 Keegan, The Face of Battle, p. 322. 21 As Primo Levi asks: ‘You who live safe/In your warm houses/You who find, returning in the evening/Hot food and friendly faces:/Consider if this is a man/Who works in the mud/Who does not know peace/Who fights for a scrap of bread/ Who dies for a yes or a no..’ Primo Levi, If This is a Man (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 17. International Relations and the voice from below 113 private soldiers, even when they believe in the cause, often only manage to cope by drugging themselves with alcohol. They also worried rather less about defeat, whether particular or national, than about the survival of themselves and their friends. Loyalty was to the platoon (as to the pays before that). This does not mean that they were not brave—in fact the contrary—simply that they were not buoyed by the big project, the aims for which the war was being fought. This was partly the consequence of human parochialism, usually underestimated by those attracted by heroic narratives, and partly the consequence of a deep cynicism about the motives and competence of those responsible for their fate. This in itself may be mostly a comment on the rotten condition of the French Third Republic (a democracy, what is more, since 1875), but my guess is that it has much wider application.22 The fog of war and the incompetence of the high command are, of course, some- what less evident to soldiers on the winning side. One of the most striking passages in Folcher’s diary refers to the first few days after his capture, when German troops swept into the ruined towns of the Champagne region, some of them taking photographs and some in charabancs: . . . the soldiers, those close to us anyway, didn’t seem tired. Comfortably seated in deep armchairs they made war almost as tourists, while we, on foot all the time, had wandered for thousands of kilometres over all the roads of the north and east.23 The diary contains various other themes of interest in relation to war which can only be telegraphed here. One such is the prevalence of refugees, whose plight Folcher observes closely and always empathises with. This was as true of the Germans fleeing before the Russian advance in 1945, as of the displaced Poles and Russians going in the opposite direction, and naturally his own compatriots retreating before the German advance in 1940. He remembers the refugees taken in by his own village during the Great War, and realises looking back that more could have been done to make them welcome. Mobile wars actually create more refugees, and more civil desperation, than does a static conflict like the Western Front between 1915–18. The chances of survival as a soldier are correspondingly better in a war like that of 1939–45. Nonetheless, at the level of the combat soldier, of whatever rank, war is always hell. As Folcher’s platoon struggled to fight on in the last days before the surrender they came under relentless attack: I saw a horrible spectacle that I will never forget in all my life . . . Sergeant Denjean, who had been a real mate of mine since the beginning of the war, really well-liked by the whole platoon, was uttering terrible cries, lying on his stomach losing blood from his side. To the side of him, in a sea of blood, a man that I identified immediately as Toulouse, had had his head severed. Poor Toulouse! As if his father had not had enough of it in the other war, where he had had his left arm and right leg amputated, a major disability and now waiting with his daughter-in-law for the return of his son, he having married scarcely a few days before the declaration of war.24

22 For a general analysis which supports this view, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 23 Folcher, Marching to Captivity, p. 128. 24 Ibid. p. 113. 114 Christopher Hill

The poignancy of this account, which in one way adds nothing to what we already know about combat, lies in its matter of factness and in what it tells us about wars fought with conscripts, who pay a terrible price, sometimes spanning the generations, for life-choices they have not made and for the failures of military and political professionals.

Franco-German encounters

To an anglophone reader, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Folcher diary is what it tells us about Franco-German encounters and about the mass use of French prisoners of war as forced labourers between 1940–45. Both these dimensions are too little understood in the Anglo-Saxon world. There have, of course, been fine books written by scholars such as Michael Howard or Alistair Horne on the war of 1870, or Richard Cobb on the two World Wars, which have succeeded in reaching out beyond the narrow world of academic scholarship.25 But these are exceptions. In general even the reading public has little sense of how important France and Germany have been to each other over the last two centuries, (and how Britain, by implication, has been more distant from both), let alone how extensively their peoples have interacted, through the experiences of occupation (three German, one French), transportation and (more recently and benignly) twin-towning and other arrangements of cultural exchange.26 Gustave Folcher’s diaries illuminate this interconnection in various ways. The British, the Americans, the Russians and the Italians all figure as part of the backcloth to Folcher’s war, but essentially his story is of a Frenchman’s encounter with Germany: with the irresistible power, efficiency and professionalism of 1940, with the confident, victorious population of the years 1940–3; with the strange ways of a German peasantry which did not drink with its meals and was not tempted to hunt much of the abundant local game; with the faltering, bomb-wracked population of 1944–45, anxious for help from their French prisoners against the oncoming slav hordes, with their likely thirst for revenge; and always with the ‘Boche’, responsible for so many cruelties but sometimes distinguished from the average German. The way in which Germany has deeply affected the lives of every French family, even obscure people from small villages in the far-off South, is brought home vividly by Folcher’s tale, just as to a lesser degree we get a sense of the geo-political vulnerability of Germany, even at the height of its power, to the movement of peoples and armed forces from the West, once France managed to attract and to mobilise its allies. In 1941, Folcher’s ‘kommando’ in the village of Schorstedt seemed remote, another life away from the Midi or from the pocket of free France which remained ‘outre-Manche’. By late 1944, however, with news of the fall of Rome, of the Allied landings in Normandy, and of Russian advances from the east, together

25 Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, (London: Hart-Davis, 1961), Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris:: the Siege and the Commune, 1870–1871, (London: Macmillan, 1965), and Richard Cobb, French and Germans, Germans and French, see note 13 above. 26 See J. E. Farquharson and S. C. Holt, Europe from Below: An Assessment of Franco-German Popular Contacts (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975). International Relations and the voice from below 115 with the tangible evidence of the relentless heavy bombing of railways junctions like that at nearby Stendal, it was evident that in fact Schorstedt was only 70 miles from Berlin, 90 from Hamburg, and right in the path of the two arms of the Russian and Anglo-American pincer. Suddenly Germany was no longer a continent entire unto itself, but the rapidly shrinking corn-stack in the middle of a harvested field. The continental connection has tied the fates of the French and German peoples together over centuries. The diary also makes plain the extent of the cultural connection, despite the many differences which struck Gustave Folcher. The loss of freedom was the defining spect of his five years as a POW in the German countryside. He also missed the sun, vines and cuisine of the South. But otherwise he was able to do the work to which he was accustomed—that of a peasant working the land. Both France and Germany, certainly in the 1940s, still had an extensive agriculture predominated by peasants working small-holdings and largely living off their own produce. This was something that had not existed in England since the Enclosure movement, and in the Anglo-Saxon New World with its huge distances and ranch sizes, it had barely existed at all. In continental Europe, by contrast, peasant culture has been one of the elements which has eventually come to underpin the European Community, and the sense of a shared European civilisation.27 It would be wrong, however, to anticipate the sense of a common European identity which even today is only patchy. It was the Nazis who attempted to hurry on history in this respect through their imperial Reich. It is revealing that Folcher and most of his colleagues rejected the offer of freedom as civilians inside Germany which was made to them in 1943, in return for renouncing the status of prisoner of war—and for continuing to provide directed labour. The prisoners rightly suspected Nazi motives, and for them freedom meant the right to return to France. Their longing for their own environment is perhaps better conveyed by the French word ‘nostalgie’ than by the English ‘homesickness’. Gustave Folcher was a man who, like so many of his contemporaries, had not been used to travel. To be trans- planted from the Midi to the winters of north-east France, and worse, as Prisoner 90969 to the flat, dour country of Saxony, was therefore a shock and a deprivation of a high order. Gustave Folcher was of a sufficiently robust disposition to be able to survive the trauma, and indeed his natural curiosity about new places and ways of life meant in some ways that he was able to put the experience to some advantage— as, ultimately, the writing of the notebooks was to prove. But the yearning for home and for the South, with its close local communities and seasons marked by the cultivation of the vine, never left him. From the time of his call-up, Gustave Folcher searched out men from Aigues- Vives, friends from nearby villages, or virtually anyone with some connection, whether by family or business, with the village. With his friends, or the friends of friends, he made up a group where they could talk of home, and in their own language (Occitan, the language of the Languedoc region, has been in modern times mostly a spoken language). At the same time a kind of fear crept in: what would the village be like on his return? ‘How am I going to find Aigues-Vives when I will not

27 Although Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie says that in the modern period, even in Languedoc, a good many workers on the land were ceasing to be peasants in the sense of ‘the traditional characteristics of multi-crop self sufficiency’. See his monumental Les Paysans de Languedoc, Paris, SEVPEN, 1966, p. 10 (my translation). Folcher fits the trend; he had his own plot but earned a living also by working for a big local estate. Nonetheless, his life revolved around small-scale cultivation. 116 Christopher Hill even recognise a quarter of the population?’ There is, therefore, a good deal in the diaries to interest the psychologist of captivity, as well as being a salutary corrective to the tendency of International Relations scholars to assume that their own broad horizons are shared by the majority. By contrast, even under modern conditions very large numbers of people are firmly rooted in their own community, or at the widest their county, region, département, land or provincia, and are happy to be so—even if they now take occasional holidays in far-flung places, or note with interest events on the far side of the world.28 One product of Folcher’s longing for home is that, paradoxically, we learn almost as much from the book about Languedoc as we do about the northern zones of France and Germany where he spent the war. He writes realistically about the hard countryside of the ‘garrigues’, and he is continually observing changing landscapes and contrasting farming techniques. It is fascinating, from the viewpoint of understanding nationhood, to see how Folcher notes the huge differences in husbandry between north and south, even within France, while taking for granted the things which still bound all Frenchmen together, centring around the pleasures of the table—an understanding of wine, the necessity for ‘un grand plat de salade’, good coffee. Symbolically, the first thing that Folcher does once in Belgium en route for home is to have his first glass of wine for five years—‘il tombe bien bas’. Folcher’s experience as a POW working on a German farm needs putting in a wider context. He was with other Frenchmen, and some Poles. He had been able to volunteer for farm work when, after arrival in Germany, a ‘modern slave-market’ had been held. Others had been taken off to work in mines and factories, many of them in conditions of danger, both from the work itself and, increasingly, from Allied bombing. The sheer scale of this use of a defeated enemy’s army as a free labour force (increasingly necessary as German men disappeared into the void of the Russian front) is not widely appreciated. In 1940 around 1,800,000 French prisoners were taken by Germany. After escapes over the next two months, 1,600,000 were transferred to work in Germany, of whom nearly one million stayed for the duration of the war, nearly five years in total.29 The numbers are unprecedented in the history of warfare. The use of prisoners for labour was arguably in breach of the Geneva Convention, although it would hardly have been practicable to keep these numbers in POW camps, and the men were probably better off working, semi-assimilated into German society, than they would have been in strict captivity.30 Something of what has become known as the ‘Stockholm syndrome’, i.e. a degree of sympathy between captors and captives, could not help but develop when men were living close to German families—even if they were sleeping on barn floors and eating inferior food to that of the locals. In the Folcher diary this came to a remarkable climax when the German population, finally demoralised by the dis- integration of the Reichswehr, sought protection from the French prisoners against

28 Of course ‘nation’ should be added to this list where a national minority feels discriminated against within its own state—as with Scotland in the UK. 29 Yves Durand, Prisonniers de guerre dans les Stalags, les Oflag et les Kommandso, 1939–1945 (Paris: Hachette, 1987), pp. 1–2, 293, 312. M. Durand is the leading scholarly expert on this question. 30 The Geneva Convention of 1929 on the Treatment of Prisoners of War was ambiguous and incomplete on this question. The breaches were of the conditions laid down for POW work, not of the principle that they (at least the private soldiers) could be used. See Leon Friedman (ed.), The Law of War: A Documentary History Volume I. (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 500–502. International Relations and the voice from below 117 the depradations of Poles and Soviet citizens seeking revenge. The Germans clearly saw the French as on the right side of the line in the divide between civilisation and barbarism, and the French, laconically and with the authorisation of the onrushing Allied commanders, obliged. The mass use of French labour means that most ‘anciens combattants’ from the Second World War thus spent a long period of time inside German society, observing Nazism at close hand. It also meant that France was deprived of its own labour force, which is one reason why there was such a poor response to ‘la Relève’, the joint German-Vichy attempt to recruit skilled workers from inside France (precisely those who had been exempt from military service) to help the German war effort, by the disingenuous promise to exchange them for actual POWs.31 The prisoners came from all classes and regions of France, and from the main working age cohort of 20 to 40. The consequence of the uniquely close-up view of Nazism afforded to the prisoners was paradoxical. As Yves Durand has said: it is not contradictory to note that from their life as captives, the French prisoners of war often derived a better patriotic feeling as well as better knowledge of the Germans.32 Towards the end of his diaries Folcher finally felt free to expatiate on the theme of Nazi Germany. The stranger’s eye gives a cutting edge to the judgements, curiously reinforced by the small scale of the savagery in comparison to what we now know about the organised murder of millions. Folcher notes how the Germans discriminated between their prisoners, with the French treated best and the Poles the worst. His account of the arbitrary hanging of a Pole for a crime he had not com- mitted, and of the way in which his friends were forced to watch (and even in the case of one traumatised fifteen year old, to cut the body down), is the more shocking in its contrast to the tedious but relatively secure nature of life as a French prisoner. It is highly relevant to the inquiry into the responsibility of individual Germans for Nazism, brought back into sharp focus recently by Daniel Goldhagen.33 Folcher depicts people with the universal capacity for human decency which Nelson Mandela observed even in his most brutal captors, but at the same time he is without any illusions about the degree to which most Germans went with the grain of Nazism, and did not question its inherent savagery. Gustave Folcher was struck by the indoctrination of children into Nazism from an early age, with a fanaticism that he could not imagine occurring in inefficient, argumentative France, and by the adoration of Hitler, their ‘famous painter’. He noted the lies of official propaganda, and how ordinary Germans suffered, whether through losing their sons on the Russian front or losing their homes before the Allied advance. But his steady tone does not sentimentalise their plight. In his view the Nazi mentality had trickled down to everyday life, with the local population accustomed to playing the master, enjoying their power over the prisoners, meting out kicks and blows to the Slavs, and rejoicing in the power of the German military machine.

31 H. R. Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France 1942–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 1–18. 32 Ibid., Yves Durand, Prisonniers de guerre, p. 15 (my translation). 33 Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1996). 118 Christopher Hill

Political consciousness

An account like Gustave Folcher’s raises two questions in relation to the political consciousness of the private soldier: how aware are most soldiers of the great issues for which they are nominally fighting, and how far does combat and imprisonment raise that level of awareness? The questions can only be answered suggestively here, given the fact that the diary begins on the day war breaks out and that conscription is in itself a form of consciousness-raising, regardless of the impact of battle and captivity. Folcher was not unaware of the general context of events in 1939, and we shall see below how he had a sharp awareness of the Great War and its impact on his father’s generation. Nonetheless there is nothing in his account to suggest any sense of an ability or even a will to participate in the politics of the great decisions being made which would decide his fate and those of millions of his countrymen. The leitmotif of the diary in this respect is very much one of fatalism—or realism, as it should perhaps be termed, given the difficulty that even organised public opinion had in influencing foreign policy. In this respect we may hazard the view that Folcher was typical of his peers; the man or woman in the street (field) was (and is) by no means ignorant of or uninterested in the major lines of international affairs. But they assume that they have little choice but to accept the outcomes coming down from on high. Folcher starts by describing how, in the summer of 1939, ‘we had faith in our politicians who, once again, would know how to avoid disaster’.34 The next six years were to see Folcher losing faith in his politicians, even if he never became radicalised. Indeed it would have been surprising had the experience of shambolic defeat and humiliating, endless imprisonment not led to some disillusion- ment. Even service in a victorious army can have a profound effect on men’s subsequent political attitudes.35 There is interesting work waiting to be done on the impact of conscription, even in times of peace, on subsequent attitudes towards both international relations and domestic politics. It is often assumed that time in uniform produces political conservatism, but this is little more than a prejudice which needs examination. Folcher’s disillusion, almost certainly shared by many of his compatriots, was grounded in the evident inability of the French High Command to give their troops even a fighting chance in 1940, and in the way the Vichy Government seemed to be abandoning the million and a half prisoners held by the Germans. Being a soldier makes one focused on survival, and captivity leads to an obsession with release. Both mean that what one’s government does or does not do is a matter of the highest importance. In the French case the governments of the Third Republic were instantly discredited by defeat, with the contrast between the ordinary soldiers’ steadfastness and the reliability of officialdom deftly sketched in: ‘while with my own eyes I could see the tanks coming down to Sedan, the Paris radio was

34 Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity, p. 3. The comment is not sarcastic. It refers to the ‘saving of the peace at Munich’. Many citizens in France and Britain were dismayed when this turned out not to be the case in September 1939. See Christopher Hill, Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy: the British Experience, September 1938–June 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 108. 35 See Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics in the Second World War (London: Cape, 1975), for a discussion of how service in the armed forces led millions in Britain to look for some kind of reward in the form of a Labour victory after the war. International Relations and the voice from below 119 announcing that the enemy had been largely contained in Belgium, beyond our frontiers.’ 36 After the armistice the Vichy Government collaborated with Hitler without getting much in return. The scheme to exchange prisoners for workers became, as Folcher noted, increasingly unequal, and the prisoners who did get released seemed to be ‘rich kids’ and sportsmen: ‘bringing back heads of families, country people, what’s the good of that? France may be dying of hunger but it has more need of sportsmen, going to the cinema . . .’. Thus the Pétain-Laval government lost all the prisoners’ support, which it had enjoyed at the start.37 Another interesting aspect of Folcher’s awakening political consciousness is the near-pacifist tone in parts of his diary. Gustave Folcher is no strident political animal, but there is a touch of bitterness in his invitation to the enthusiasts of military parades to see what war is really like, in his description of an officer berating tired troops for marching too slowly, after the officer himself had arrived in a car, and in his final description of Avignon on the journey back, where some officers had commandeered a carriage while many private soldiers could not get on the train. He also possessed the generosity of spirit to feel for the German civilians as they suffered in their turn, under the terrible bombing of 1944–45. In his acknowledge- ment that the columns of frightened refugees were the mirror-image of those he had seen in eastern France back in 1940, Folcher hints at the ultimate futility of war while not letting go of his conviction that this particular war was being fought against evil. His descriptions of the nightmarish destruction of the railway station at Stendal, and of the crash of a Flying Fortress near Schorstedt, his village, are remarkably even-handed, suffused with a sense of both sadness and horror. The scream of Allied bombs falling on Germany brought back the fear that he had felt during the battle for France, and his picture of life in a disintegrating Germany is all the more valuable for coming from a foreigner who was not so hostile to his individual captors as to see everything through a triumphalist lens. After the publication of the diaries he received a letter of praise from a Danish schoolteacher, and in replying he reaffirmed that he hoped they would go some small way towards improving understanding between peoples, especially over the futility of war. There is nothing strange about this despite Folcher’s evident hostility to Nazi propaganda as a prisoner and his belief in the justice of the Allied cause. It might be regarded as simplistic or even as evidence of cognitive dissonance by IR professionals, but it has in fact its own logic: the implication is that Britain and France should never have allowed things to develop to the point where Hitler was able to impose a war on the people of Europe only two decades after the end of the supposed war to end wars. It suggests that ‘ordinary people’ may have in fact perfectly reasonable general understandings of international relations. They rely on their politicians not for values, or ‘education’ in complexities, but for the ability to translate their values and broad interests into achievement.

36 Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity,p.60. 37 Ibid., pp. 186–87. 120 Christopher Hill

Remembering the past

There is now a good deal of excellent literature on how foreign policy decision- makers are affected by their perceptions of history and their personal memories.38 The philosophical problems which arise when one confronts the problem of how history might be experienced or ‘used’ have also begun to be tackled. The question of how mere citizens remember the past and build it into their political understanding has not, however, yet been given the attention it deserves, certainly in the subject of International Relations.39 This is where, again, the Folcher diary provides some pointers. The first part of the diary, before captivity, contains a number of poignant encounters with the past. The ‘last war’, as Folcher terms it, is present everywhere, in the cemeteries that the soldiers go to visit, on the Meuse or the Moselle, and in the commandant’s pep talk, holding up the example of their fathers. They wander through the same regions in the same mud: ‘Truly, and forgive me if I keep on about it’ writes Folcher, ‘but it is only in these areas of the east that one can see it like this. I have heard people tell, especially those of the 1914 campaign, stories of the bogs, but really they have to be seen to be believed’.40 In headlong retreat, in 1940, after some hard fighting, the 12th Zouaves pass by Verdun and scan it for traces of their fathers’ war, the trenches and dug-outs, while an officer, ‘who was in the last one’, tells them about Douaumont and Vaux.41 Everyone listens, no-one says a word. There are new graves next to those ‘who have been sleeping there for 20 years’. After the experience of a visit to the acres of white crosses in the American cemetery at Thiaucourt Folcher notes with typical understatement that ‘ce n’est pas encourageant pour nous’.42 In the retreat from Verdun Folcher and the men of the 12th Zouaves passed down the ‘voie sacrée’ which had funnelled hundreds of thousands towards the inferno of 1916. At other times they were near to another name redolent of past defeats, Sedan. Any soldier fighting in France in the twentieth century would have had a sense of déjà vu given the number of historic battlefields in the northern and eastern regions—from Malplaquet and Waterloo to Ypres and Verdun.43 Whether this encouraged a sense of glorious destiny, a Folcher-like pessimism or mere indifference depended on personality. It was, however, difficult to be unaware of the historically contested nature of the terrain and unaffected by the sense of confusion, even waste, which attaches to zones that change hands regularly. Gustave Folcher, for example, talked of meeting refugees from Alsace who did not speak French, and whom he

38 See for example, R. E. Neustadt and E. R. May, Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision- Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), and Yaacov Y. L. Vertzberger, The World in their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), ch. 6. 39 One area where this is not true is that of voting studies, where the work of Goldthorpe, Butler and Stokes etc. pioneered the analysis of how far class and family traditions, or particular events, determined voting behaviour. See David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain Today: the Evolution of Electoral Choice, (2nd edn) (London: Macmillan, 1974). 40 Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity,p.33. 41 Two of the forts where the great battle of Verdun was fought in 1916. 42 Gustave Folcher, Les carnets de guerre, p. 51. 43 An excellent synthesis of these different sites can be found in Richard Holmes, War Walks: from Agincourt to Normandy (London: BBC Books, 1996). International Relations and the voice from below 121

(subsequently) believed to have been ‘Germans at heart’.44 Yet this was the region which had set France and Germany at odds since 1870. It is difficult to believe that ordinary citizens like Folcher ultimately minded one way or the other about the fate of Alsace-Lorraine, so long as its citizens were not subject to tyranny and French security was guaranteed (but there’s the rub . . .) 45 The portentousness of governments and the nationalism of the press does not necessarily reflect what those who have to fight really want—that is, mainly peace and survival, albeit not at absolutely any price, and maximum competence if peace fails.

Conclusion

Humour, in the form of the Good Soldier Schweik, Joseph Heller’s Yossarian and TV’s MASH has built on the anti-war literature of the 1920s to provide some alternative view of war from that recounted in the official histories. Gustave Folcher’s story, like those of the other private soldiers gradually coming to the fore, is not funny—but it is authentic, and precious for its very lack of the normal literary qualities. It does not fit stereotypes, being both patriotic and sceptical, anti-Nazi and pacifist, critical of the German people and sympathetic to their circumstances. Since Folcher himself is unsentimental in tone it is particularly important not to roman- ticise his account, but it is difficult not to feel on reading the diary that it speaks for the underestimated anonymous citizen, perpetually patronised and manipulated by elites, both political and intellectual, but in some sense possessing a finer understanding of the important things in life than his or her nominal superiors. Gustave Folcher is one grain of sand in the movement of history. But so, ultimately, are many of the great figures that purported to shape destiny, only to be put into perspective by historical studies and theories of causation. Individually, he and the other ‘gars’ of his platoon could do little to affect the outcome of the battle for France, and once captured, although some escaped en route to Germany (and perhaps joined the Resistance in France) they were literally prevented from having any further role in the war. Nonetheless, as Cynthia Enloe has pointed out, the consequence of assuming that ‘margins stay marginal, the silent stay voiceless, and ladders are never turned upside down . . . is that many orthodox analysts of international politics are caught by surprise’.46 At the extremes this means revolutions; more usually events like referenda on Maastricht which do not go the way they were supposed to; in war, it is not unreasonable to suppose that if whole armies of Gustave Folchers are disillusioned with their officers and the idea of another war,

44 Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity, pp. 10–11 and pp. 274–75. The reference is subsequent because it refers to M. Folcher’s recollection when interviewed by Rémy Cazals. 45 Indeed, as William Kidd points out, the celebrations of the return of the region to France in 1918 were muted by the disproportionate cost associated with the triumph. Moreover as its menfolk were most likely to have fought for Kaiser Wilhelm, the subsequent war memorials had to be far more ambiguous than the ‘morts pour la France’ customary elsewhere. See William Kidd, ‘Memory and Memorials in Lorraine, 1908–1988’, in Evans and Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, pp. 145–46: see footnote 9 above. 46 Cynthia Enloe, ‘Margins, silences and bottom rungs: how to overcome the underestimation of power in the study of international relations’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth, Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 189. 122 Christopher Hill then they will show less stomach for the fight than might otherwise have been the case. The Second World War at least turned out increasingly clearly to have been worth fighting. The evil of World War I was that millions were forced into the abattoir despite their increasingly evident despair and disillusion. International Relations is not just about war. But it started with war, and war inflicts a large part of the suffering observable in the world. It should not be neglected just because the Cold War has ended or a democratic peace has been established in western Europe. Equally, individuals are not simply passive victims of impersonal forces. They are always agents of some kind and in some context, and deserve attention for their views and their actions as well as their pain. Nonetheless, decision-makers and scholars alike have been too quick to assume that they know what ‘the people’ want or believe, and we should find ways of listening to the authentic voices of individuals where we can—not least Frantz Fanon’s ‘damnés de la terre’. Fear and desperation make people often simply cry out for war to stop, witness the letter from Class V13, Ivan Goran School, Zenika, Bosnia: ‘We wait for peace, like Anne Frank fifty years before . . .’ 47. They will certainly be closer to the realities on the ground than the legions of outside commentators. For that reason it is important not to stereotype whole peoples, whether Serbs or Northern Irish, and to find ways of listening to the people outside the political parties which purport to represent them. The challenge for academic International Relations is to open up channels for the vox populi in difficult circumstances like those of war or revolution without falling back on romantic idealism. Using this new kind of historical documentation to access popular (and transnational) experiences is one way in which it might be done.

47 Cited in Tony Kushner, ‘I want to go on living after my death’, p. 4. No source given. See footnote 9 above.