A. I do.
Q. How can you say such a thing, how do you mean it?
A. I think you are surprised because you confuse faith and morality. They have nothing to do with each other.
The morality of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks is abhorrent. That has nothing to do with the fact that their faith was strong enough to make them great warriors. The best fighters in the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway testifies, were the Moors. Those skinny brown men, who looked so insignificant and whose behavior was so abominable, were always chosen, if available, to be the shock troops, as when they relieved the Alcazar. They fought with the bravery traditional of the Mohammedan warrior from the Ottoman Turks to the Afghans. Their morals were criminal. They butchered, looted, raped with neither compunction nor discrimination.
I have seen them walking down a village street laden with sewing machines, women’s clothing, surgical instruments, and chicken feed to set up shop in a Cathedral underneath the image of the Saviour whose head they had hacked off. Decent folk on Franco’s side were appalled, but Franco could not do without them. They had a faith that only the Catholic Requetés on the one hand and the Communists on the other could equal, and when they went into battle the Moors sang. I have heard them and reflected that good and evil have nothing to do with faith which moves mountains and wins wars. Are we today in the United States going into battle singing? We are not even going into battle, although we admit it is ours.
Q. Do you mean to say the Moors fought for the Mohammedan faith in Spain?
A. I do not. I mean to say that they fought because they believe the profession of a man is to fight, and in fighting they are upheld in spirit by their belief in Allah, and their faith in his promises.
Q. What do the Russians fight for? They have no Allah and believe in no hereafter.
A. I am not sure that either of those statements is correct. The images of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx blend in the primitive Soviet Russian mind together with dim memories of Orthodox ritual to make up a kind of ikon of Communism. In some minds it may be only the figure of Father Lenin, now mummified, deified, or at least sanctified, in his glass coffin on the Red Square, but in all save the minds of the intellectualized leaders there is some personification of the faith. As for belief in a hereafter, I have sometimes wondered if even the highest leaders of the Party are always as sure as their Bezbozhnik Society, the Society of the Godless, professes to be.
The Bezbozhniks’ battle against God would be meaningless unless they thought, however subconsciously, that there must be something there to fight. Twice I have seen Stalin stand at the graveside of a lifetime comrade, once at the burial of Frunze and once at Kirov’s, and each time as the final words were spoken and the earth fell and the bells of the Kremlin tolled, I scrutinized his face for a sign of his thoughts and under the spell of the moment I always thought I could see the flicker of a question across his gloomy face. As a matter of fact I suppose he was absorbed in thinking how to finish the ceremony as quickly as possible in order to get back to his office and ensure that a good Stalin man succeeded the dead.