Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 91 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
Theatre of War
Author’s preface
After three hundred years, could civil war again divide the United Kingdom? Given rising unemployment and industrial stagnation, an ever more entrenched class system and a weak monarchy detaching itself from all but its ceremonial roles, is it possible to visualize the huge antagonisms between the extreme left and right resolving themselves in open civil conflict? I take it for granted that despite its unhappy experience in South East Asia the intervention of the United States to defend its military and economic investments would be even more certain than it was in Vietnam. I also assume that the television coverage would be uninterrupted and all-pervasive, and have therefore cast it in the form of a TV documentary, of the type made popular by World in Action.
Part One
LONDON UNDER SIEGE
STREET BATTLE
Inner London, a back street in Lambeth, where confused street-fighting is taking place. Tank engine noise forms a continuous background to heavy machine-gun fire and intercom chatter. Twenty soldiers, five American and the rest British, move from door to door, firing at the other end of the street, where Big Ben is visible above the shabby rooftops. Helicopter gunships circle overhead. A tank stops by a house and soldiers dart in. A moment later a woman emerges, followed by three exhausted children and an old man carrying his bedroll. They run past with stunned faces. Bodies lie everywhere. Two negro GIs drag away a dead enemy soldier with shoulder-length hair. Stitched to his camouflage jacket is a Union Jack. The picture freezes, and the camera zooms in on the Union Jack until it fills the screen, soaked in the soldier’s blood.
WORLD IN ACTION TITLES
Superimposed over the bloody Union Jack: ‘Civil War’
Commentator
One street battle is over, but the civil war goes on. After four years no solution is in sight. American casualties total 30,000 dead, a hundred thousand missing and wounded. A million British civilians have died. Despite mounting criticism at home America pours more and more troops into what is now the European Vietnam. But the fighting continues. This week the Liberation Front launched a major offensive against a dozen cities. Here in Lambeth a suicide squad fights its way to within 800 yards of the House of Parliament. How long can the British government survive? Will peace ever come? World in Action is here to find out.
STREET BATTLE
The fighting is over, and the government forces are mopping up. They flush frightened civilians from the basements and herd them away past the bodies of enemy soldiers. At the junction with the main road in the background a British Airways advertisement hoarding is riddled with bullet holes. A sullen-faced young English woman is frisked roughly by British troops while others tear the Union Jacks from dead enemy soldiers. The tank drags away a tangle of bodies lashed together by their wrists. In a jeep loaded with looted cameras, radios and record players pop music blares from the intercom.
CUT TO NIGHT-TIME SOHO
Background of garish lights, pintable arcades, strip clubs. GIs spill out of cars and move into a bar.
Commentator
GIs relax during a weekend of R & R. Two days ago they were fighting off a Liberation Front offensive in the suburbs of Manchester. As the United Nations talks of settlement and both sides in the civil war plan new offensives, what do the ordinary GIs think of the prospects for peace?
1st US soldier (reclining in bar)
It’s a very ticklish situation over here. It’s hard to analyse and get a complete grasp of the whole story, because from my position at least you can’t get a glimpse of the whole subject. You know, you don’t know what motivates these people. Peace seems to be very far off, at least to me it does.
Commentator
Tell me, do you think it’s all worth it?
2nd US soldier
It’s hard to say. I think we’re just, as I see it, we’re fooling around. That’s about all. I do think we should be here.
Commentator
What’s the alternative to fooling around?
3rd US soldier
Well, they call it a civil war. If it’s a war, it should be that. They push us, we push them, it’s a kind of stalemate as I see it right now. I think we should show them who’s boss. Because what I’ve seen of the gooks over here, they’re going to fight, fight – you know? – and just keep on fighting.
2nd US soldier
If you’re fighting a war, fight it like a war, with all the mass of power we have. Power in reserve, air power, land power, and power from the sea. We’ve got battleships offshore can pound this place to absolutely nothing.
Commentator
Tough talk from the GIs as they relax, but in the bright light of day, as London picks up the pieces after the latest NLF offensive, what exactly is the present military position? Can either side win this war? In New York today President Reagan was asked what kind of settlement he would hope to resolve. The President replied: ‘I don’t think we can talk about settlement of the war at this point. I think we can talk about our willingness to accept a coalition or fusion government. At least it could very well be talked about in the open before we begin to talk about negotiations.’ President Reagan spent the day in New York City where he addressed a luncheon audience and denied that the war is indefensible, a view strongly challenged by Congressional leaders of both parties. But how accurate is the picture which the American public at large has of the civil war?
NEWSREEL
Medley of clips – Civilians running as GIs and British government troops move across a tenement courtyard, firing at a roof-top sniper; helicopters circling a fortified Wembley Stadium; street execution near Piccadilly Circus of three NLF soldiers in plain clothes, hands wired, as a crowd outside a sandbagged cinema looks on; corpses of children laid out in a village hail; gun-battle outside a Top-Rank Bingo hall; crowd at Bellevue, Manchester, fun-fair backing off a roundabout to reveal a body pumped up and down by a wooden unicorn to the Wurlitzer music; lines of strip clubs in Oxford, entrances guarded by Military Police barring civilians; pound-notes over-printed ‘One Dollar’; tanks ringing Parliament Square; shops loaded with consumer goods; a huge bonfire of Union Jacks; elderly refugees camping on the canted decks of a multi-storey car park in Dover, guarded by uncertain-looking GIs straight off a troop-carrier; government troops demolishing a rebel earth bunker lined with carefully framed portraits of George VI during World War II, visiting munitions factories and bombed-out East Enders.
Commentator
As each day passes, life in the government-held areas becomes less and less tolerable. London is a city under siege. Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham are the last remaining strongholds of government support, defended by massive American forces. The countryside belongs to the NLF. The continuous infiltration of the London suburbs by guerilla battalions mingling with the local population has brought the front line to everyone’s doorstep. Bomb outrages, kidnappings, street battles with snipers, the assassination of local political leaders – these are part of day-today life. In the five years of its exile in Riyadh, uneasy guests of the Saudi royal house, the monarchy has lost all credibility, unwilling to commit its waning prestige to either side in the civil war. Meanwhile, in the London over which the Queen once reigned, the black market flourishes. Millions of dollars’ worth of American goods pour into the capital, propping up a juke-box economy of pirate TV networks, thousands of bars and brothels. In many towns and suburbs the main unit of currency is the illegal NLF pound sterling. The governmentbacked British dollar is despised. Anything can be bought, but nothing has any value. More and more young people slip away to join the Liberation Front. Doctors, engineers, trained mechanics desert to the enemy forces. They leave behind a population that consists mainly of the old middle class and an army of bartenders, croupiers and call-girls. London is now a gigantic Las Vegas, the largest light-bulb in the world, ready to blow out in a hail of rebel machine-gun fire.
COMMENTATOR IN GROSVENOR SQUARE
American Embassy in background, surrounded by tanks. GIs and British troops patrol. Muted gunfire near distance, but civilians go about their ordinary lives without concern.
Commentator
As both sides mount major offensives, I’m standing in Grosvenor Square, the old Eisenhowerplatz of World War II, once again the headquarters of the American and British government forces. This time they are fighting, not the superbly equipped German Wehrmacht with its panzer divisions, but a British peasant army. None the less, can the government forces and their American allies win? Will the war ever end?
INTERVIEW WITH BRITISH SUPREME COMMANDER
A sometime heir to the English throne, the 36-year-old commander of the government forces is an aggressive, media-wise opportunist with pearl-handled revolver, black flying suit and white silk scarf. He is shown parading in a succession of military uniforms, firing a sub-machine-gun at a rifle range, inspecting a dispirited platoon of government troops, boarding his roof-top helicopter which he flies himself to inspect the attacks breaking out all over the city (though the viewer is unsure whether he is about to make a discreet bunk), and generally trying to boost the morale of his entourage. His line is confident but embittered; he knows he has lost his throne by his involvement with the puppet regime. He hates the NLF, but the Americans more. His hero is Rommel, but his style is James Bond.
British Commander
As Commander of the British loyalist forces, my job is to win the war and unify the country again. The enemy is increasingly fighting out of desperation. Our intelligence tells us that he is running out of men, out of steam and out of material. He simply doesn’t have the economic potential to maintain a war. The people in Europe and the United States who criticize the war don’t really know what’s going on. Quite elvidently the people of this country don’t want anything to do with the people up north, or with the communist way of life.
Commentator
You don’t feel, General, that you and the Americans are forcing a form of government on the people of this country?
British Commander
No, we’re not forcing anything on them. The United States feels that this is a good place to stop communist aggression, and if the government forces do win, and I know they will, we’ll have, firstly, a good ally, and we’ll have stopped communist aggression from taking over the United Kingdom and eventually France and everywhere else.
(Points to map showing blacked-out areas of British Isles.)
Our forces are now moving forward into a series of major confrontations with the other side, so I think you can look forward to when that map will be white again. Then I know the Americans will be glad to leave for home.
COMMENTATOR BACK IN GROSVENOR SQUARE
Maps in hand, he addresses camera.
Commentator
Meanwhile, however, the British Commander is reported to be asking the US President for yet more troops. How many soldiers will be needed to hold the line against the NLF? Despite the General’s easy optimism it isn’t his map which most people look at, but this one issued by the NLF.
(Lifts other map. Black areas encircle major cities, all the countryside.)
It’s this one they consult if they want to visit their relatives in the country or move to another town. It’s this one they use if they want to defect to the NLF.
EXPLOSION BURSTS ACROSS SQUARE
Camera wobbles, swings wildly. Panic, people running. Commentator ducks, then starts talking in confused way.
Commentator
There’s been a – it looks, it looks as if a sniper. What seems to be happening is that a – CROWD FORMING A ROUGH CIRCLE AROUND A JEEP GIs push people back, and look down at the body of an American officer in the front seat, blood pouring from wound. Pop music blares from the intercom radio a few inches from his face.
Radio Announcer
We have a list of the latest curfew regulations. In the inner capital the curfew bell is midnight to 6 a.m. for Kensington, Knightsbridge and Battersea and from 10 to 7 a.m. for the 3rd Air Cay, and support units in – GI REACHES OVER AND SWITCHES OFF RADIO Commentator Five minutes ago a senior American officer was assassinated as he sat in his jeep outside the American officers’ club here in Grosvenor Square. An NLF killer in civilian clothes stepped through the lunch-time crowd and fired a single shot, then disappeared back into the crowd. The officer, Colonel Wilson J. Tucker, a military adviser in the ‘hearts and minds’ mission, widely suspected of being a cover for a CIA murder squad, died within a few seconds. All that’s known about the killer is that he was ‘young’, probably in his early twenties, a safe enough assumption at a time when most of the young men and women here have long since left to join the Liberation Front, at a time when to be young automatically invites the attentions of the military police and the hostility of the old and middle-aged who provide the last support for the puppet regime. As one visiting Canadian journalist put it to me CANADIAN JOURNALIST IN HOTEL BAR Canadian Journalist All the NLF have to do to win this war is wait ten years. By then everyone on the government side will be either dead or in a wheelchair.
SHOTS OF YOUNG PEOPLE AT CAMP SITE
Police hustling them about. Older people watching as girls and young men have their hair shaved.
Commentator
Certainly one of the most striking divisions in British life is the now unbridgeable gulf between the young and the old. Even if the peace talks start and a settlement is finally reached, will it be possible for them to live together in one society? A legacy of resentment, intolerance and sexual jealousy has been fed by years of violence and open war. At a time when the twin pillars of life in the government areas are the strip club and the US dollar, does Britain any longer possess the political and social institutions to make possible a real society?
Canadian journalist
I don’t see Parliament now as a functioning entity in any way. It’s a rump of older Members of Parliament and extreme right-wingers, a blow-hole for all kinds of unpleasant fascist gas. As a legislature it’s non-existent. Let’s face the facts, the British government is a puppet regime, and it means to keep it that way. The economy has a real balance of payments surplus for the first time in thirty years, thanks to American war-spending and the GI dollar. Baby, nobody on this side says ‘Yank, go home’. They’re more likely to offer you their sister – or their mother. Their sister’s on the other side.
Commentator
Patriotism takes many forms. Is it significant, though, that the flag of the Liberation Front is the Union Jack, long-standing symbol of the union of Britain’s major provincial areas – a symbol now hated and feared by the government supporters? To what extent can the government itself provide any prospects for unity?
INTERVIEW WITH BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
A former Labour Prime Minister recalled to office, to lead the all-party coalition, he sits uneasily inside a sandbagged Downing Street, literally ducking every time a shot is heard. He is surrounded by armed guards, but looks shifty and dispirited. All too clearly he is at the Americans’ mercy, and has no ideas for bringing the war to an end.
Commentator
Could I ask you first, Prime Minister, are you hopeful at the moment at the outlook for peace?
Prime Minister
Well, it depends very much on what the other side wants to do. The latest offensives – attacks against the ordinary people of this country don’t suggest that they’re particularly sincere in their talk about wanting a settlement.
Commentator
Do you envisage that the departure of the American troops will create problems? If one travels around London one sees that a large part of the local economy is geared to serving the GI. When the GI is gone, won’t there be problems for those people who presently are Prime Minister Well, this contains the same problem shared by all those countries that have had large American forces on their soil Germany, Japan, Vietnam. I think it will be a good thing because we shall be back to normal and a lot of people will have to look for a living within their means. They’ll have to give up a lot of windfall benefits which come from the war and create social problems. We’ve now got in this country a class of people created by the war, and I think it’s a good thing that this will stop.
Commentator
Childhood for most of the children in London has been a strange life with the American dollar, hasn’t it? The American dollar has been the way they passed their childhood. When that in the form of the GI goes, are they not going to have a lot of problems?
Prime Minister
I’m sure they will. They’ll be economic problems mainly. I think we’re all going to have to find ourselves, so to speak, a painful process whether it’s an individual or a nation. I think there’s going to be a period of readjustment, possibly of turbulence, but they must go through the process. Perhaps if they’d gone through it twenty years ago there wouldn’t be a war now.
GENERAL VIEWS OF PEOPLE HANGING AROUND ENTRANCES TO AMERICAN BASES
Commentator Can the British people find themselves? Can they go through the painful process of reestablishing themselves as a single nation? With 70 per cent of the economy tied to the war, with the revenues from North Sea oil long since sold off to the Germans and Japanese, will ordinary people be able to make the adjustments necessary to living with the other side? In short, do they want the war to end at all? World in Action visited a village in the front line to see how the bulk of the population is facing up to the reality of the war.
GENERAL PICTURE OF SMALL TOWN IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
Barbed wire, road blocks, troops and armoured cars. Gunfire in the distance.
Commentator
Here at Cookham, only twenty miles or so from the centre of London, the ‘windfall benefits’ of the war are more likely to be a sniper’s bullet or a barrage of enemy mortar shells. This is one of the so-called pacified villages. By day the British and American forces occupy the bunkers and pillboxes. In the evening they withdraw with the local administrators to a fortified enclave near the American base at Windsor. At night the Liberation Front moves in. At this moment their advance positions are no more than two hundred yards away, their sentries watching us through binoculars. None of these villagers will talk to us. All are assumed to be Liberation Front sympathizers, but in fact they are professional neutrals, living on the edge of a giant razor that could cut them down at any moment. They farm the fields, work in the garages and shops, and wait for the Americans to leave. Strangest of all here, there is no one between the ages of four and forty.
TANK APPEARS, FOLLOWED BY BRITISH AND AMERICAN SOLDIERS
Commentator A special task force arrives, part of a self-styled Pacification Probe that will advance ten miles into country recently occupied by the Liberation Front. One tank, ten GIs of the First Cavalry Division, and thirty British soldiers are under the command of Captain Arjay Robinson. World in Action is going with them to see what happens.
CAPTAIN ROBINSON BRIEFING HIS UNIT IN THE VILLAGE HALL The GIs, heavily armed with flak jackets and radio-equipped helmets, sit at the front, the British troops with two elderly officers at the back.
Captain Robinson
The primary mission of Alpha Company is to conduct a reconnaissance and pacification. Circles indicate supply caches within the area, also known parking areas, primarily wheeled vehicles and larger trucks. There are also some small yellow dots, these indicate known positions where we have seen tanks. There are tanks in the area definitely. As I see it right now we’re going to have two companies controlling the fire base. We’ll play it real loose, play it by ear pretty much as to where we’re going and the times that we’ll go. We’re going down there and kill the enemy where we find him and come back.
