John Bryson - The Personality of War

Published by John N. Bryson
First published 2013
John N. Bryson
The Personality of War

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ISBN: 978-1-922219-24-4 (ePub)

Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy

Rehearsals for the Death of Taipei was published in The National Times in 1980, This Perilous Winter in St Moritz in 1982 in that journal.

Dresden and The End of All Wars appeared in The Age, Melbourne, during 1986.

Cover: We, Us, Them by John Brack, Copyright 1983, Oil on Canvas, National Gallery of Victoria.

FOR THE INCINERATION of a hundred and forty thousand souls, if all went right, for the destruction of a graceful city, of its old walls and obedient gardens, they flew east. He was the navigator. They were flying in at fifteen thousand feet, in the left lane of the crowded sky, which made the heading and beam angles easy, and in the last wave of bombers but one. It was a black night, true to the forecast. He wondered, because the point of his pencil on the chart lay over the farmlets west of the river Elbe, what endless thunder they made in the winter valleys down there. His father had once fished some small stream between here and the Polish border. He remembered the clear and exuberant book, the glossy pebbles.

The horizon ahead was aglow, a false dawn, where Dresden unerringly was.

He must have been, at the time he was thinking of, six or seven. His father had driven them in along a ribbony road through a close wood and the moon was up. When they saw the mist of light over the hills, his mother thought it a pleasing aura of welcome. It was not the large city he had expected. The first of it was the province of apartment houses with dormer windows and of darkened corner stores, where the only person he could recall in the street was a woman in a fox wrap who was winding her dachshund away by the leash from something distasteful in the gutter. But buildings were so much brighter towards the centre of town that it seemed they were then journeying back into an earlier part of the evening. The windows of jewellers and haberdashers were lit. The coffee houses and restaurants were busy, and waiters carried trays at head height on fingertips. Upright taxi cabs stood at the curbside. They passed a playhouse where the evacuating crowd had brought the gaiety of the musical with them out onto the footpath under an awning ribbed with light-bulbs, and stood smiling beside the open doors of limousines and carriages, receding then like glazed figures on a carousel, and the revolving corner negligently disclosed the vulgar stage-door, a press of admirers, and a portly man with a velvet collar, holding flowers. They turned off at a marble street-corner lion which was also the emblem of the hotel. He found, in the foyer, a night-thrush in an airy cage, a comfortable concierge whose up-turning palm disclosed a harlequin sweet when he chose correctly from two pump fists, and a tiled floor which incited hopscotch and where he jumped from one to another naming the squares, a triumphant step at a time, for the countries of Europe he had passed over to get there.

He spends the greater part of summers, now, fishing an alpine lake, which is where I met him, a tall, bony-faced and courteous old man who can still cast to a far fish without fussing the water, and who likes to talk late by the fireside. Of the bombardment of the city, all he would offer was this: by the time they were online over Dresden, it was as if the raid had already so violated the foundations of the mortal world that the city was falling to the eternal fires beneath. It seemed to me that he was not then minimising his own part in this, but had to exercise some care in the choice of recollections he could deal with. Then, he said, they turned west, and flew out into the lengthening night.

The government of the Republic of China, in Taiwan,
is the legitimate government of all China. We look to the
great leap back. The day will come.
President Chiang.

Air-raid sirens climbed high into their registers to reach over the messy noises of the city, and there didnt seem to have been any precise point at which, pure and harmonic, they began, merely a time when everyone noticed them together, and the sidewalk population of Taipei stood, for the moment, still.

Everyone knew this was a rehearsal, the one alert of the year, a practice-run for another day altogether. The days on which it might fall were listed in each of the sixteen city newspapers and broadcast from all the radio stations. Everyone knew there were no specks at high altitudes, no mean lines of vapour, nothing was up there right now, but it was impossible not to look at the sky.

Yesterday, storms had brought impenetrable formations of rain, scurrying flash-floods, and detonations of lightning so close over city buildings that unnerved Europeans had left their hotel rooms for the corridors. Today there were thunderheads again to the north. Air in the streets was blurry and humid. Shop banners, above the sidewalks, hung limp and damp. Taiwan is divided by the Tropic of Cancer, and this was midsummer, a Tuesday, ten minutes after ten in the morning. The temperate was already thirty, Celsius.

Motor traffic along the roads and the boulevards was slowing. Everyday velocity on roadways here recalls, more than anything else, a traffic jam at 70 km an hour, and all those vehicles began to pull to the kerbsides. There wasnt enough space for a quarter of them. They built up in layers like logs on a sawmillers river. In narrow lanes, cars and half-tonners stopped midstream. Everywhere, motorcycles bumped over kerbstones and mounted the footpaths. And something now made the cry of the sirens louder. The motors of two hundred thousand trucks, buses, sedans, taxis, motorcycles and scooters were being turned off.

The alert was a minute through. Soldiers with machine guns and automatic armalites formed squares, back to back, guarding the centre ground at intersections. Warders, civilians with yellow shoulder tags, held out arms as stiff as signposts toward entrances to bunkers and basements. Brisk police in white helmets lined the curbs. Ready their handguns in glossy holsters, and ready their whistles in hand. But they had no need of them, it was as if the sirens, rampant and howling, had appropriated all the real authority there was, and the only feasible response was obedience. The footpaths were so tight with bodies that shoppers behind glass doors of departmental stores, and clerks from offices, and workers from one-machine factories, could not flow on to them. On the footpaths, panicky children were lifted clear of the ground, paper parasols and straw hats and woven baskets and trays of street-food were hoisted to head height. Then everyone was moving, and with this came a sound heard in Taipei at no other time. It was the sound of a people walking.