Jozef Mackiewicz writes history on the warp of human experiences, she is the heroine of the book. I can not explain otherwise, why sometimes the excellent composition of the novel is torn apart, bursts, as it were, by the publicity of evidence, quotations, numbers, why suddenly in the middle of an excellent narrative flow of maps, why the documentation of daily orders, letters, telephonograms, witnesses and reports? The thing is extremely interesting, how this dry, matter-of-fact authenticity adds tension to the book instead of interrupting it, how it raises the reader's interest to some higher level, even more greedy for all these facts. It is in this almost "anti-fiction" gimmick that Jozef Mackiewicz's racial, unerring artistry is most vividly revealed. ...
Separately, one would have to write about Mackiewicz's language - not about the virtues of prose, stylistically excellent shortcuts, singing phrases, but about its veristic, cruel soldier vocabulary, the bluntness of curses and vulgarity. ... In this particular language one can discover the most diverse elements - and cabalistic incantation of fate, and its provocation, and deliberate blasphemy as a compensation for subconscious religiosity, and self-defense against fear and psychological shock, and escape from weakness, and telling oneself to be manly, and an attempt to cope with the horror of life through brutality of expression .... All this and something else besides, something else mysterious, not yet resolved by psychological inquiry - all this makes up the soldier's language, which Mackiewicz renders, noting with musical fidelity his cadences. ...
With the book by Jozef Mackiewicz I am deeply concerned, moved, from the heart I thank him.
(Marian Hemar, "Left Free," Polish Weekly (London) 1966 No. 3)
The bawdy language of soldiering is older than Homer. It was the first form of war propaganda. Enemy armies would warm up before battle with exchanges of insults. Not from nations, but from families. ... Why tell us simpletons that only generals knelt defilingly ("not all"), and soldiers sang "O my rosemary" neatly? ...
Gen. Kukiel dismissively and seemingly in passing mentions that the Borderlands were called "the diaspora up to Tiflis or Vladivostok." From the context of Left Free, which is the subject of Gen. Kukiel's sulking, it seems to follow that if these "Borderlands" had not then become Bolshevik, neither would Poland have become so after a quarter of a century....
(Barbara Toporska, "Several polemical remarks" 1966, Metaphysics on a scooter, Kontra, 2012)
Printed by Kontra Publishing House, London 1981.
Format 215 x 135 mm, 458 pages.
Book in very good condition.
